Children's Day Anniversaries

It's Children's Day! (in Korea.) Time for pictures in the park.

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the day I first arrived in Korea for my mission. (Still can't believe it's been that long.) It's also the fourth anniversary of the day I learned I was pregnant with Andy, which means Andy is the same age that Kate was when we found out we were expecting him. I've been feeling rather sentimental about this.



Kate says, "Do bunny ears on me, Mom!"



Awwww!




Andy gets some help across the stepping stones.



Running to the playground.




We went down to Chung Ki Wa in Lakewood for lunch, and I got some really yummy kimchi jjigae. I brought home the leftovers--judging from past experience, it should be even better the next day!



Andy has developed his own rice-and-kim technique. His concentration is very cute.



We all like kim! I brought four packages and it all got eaten. Yum.

In honor of the occasion, my BYU roommate Trish posted this picture of me opening my mission call:



I was on the phone with my parents in Ohio while opening it. I remember that when it first came I called home and Mom wasn't there, so I had to wait. Oh the torment. Mom talks about how she remembers me reading through it and saying "KOREA??!" It certainly was a life-changing experience. I'm glad to be able to commemorate these occasions, and lucky that my family will indulge my penchant for pictures and Korean food!

Korea calling

After I got home from my mission in '93 I wrote letters, in Korean, to a few friends and companions. This is a card that I kept tucked into my dictionary, where I made a list of words that I found myself looking up frequently. After Doug and I got married, went and taught in Chonan for nine months, and then went to Newfoundland, the list continued. (I can kind of tell what was happening when by looking at it--moving from words like "graduation" to words like "Canada" and "dialect.") I wrote to Kim Ji Won, who'd been a student in one of my classes; to Mr. Ha from Doug's kendo class, who owned a restaurant and made wonderful soon tubu jjigae (we spent a memorable New Year's Eve with his family); to Lee Soo Mi in Suncheon; and to Kim Son Mi in Nonsan. Somewhere along the way I stopped writing.

I've thought about my neglected correspondents every once in a while. Wondered if there were any poor sad letters wending their way to Newfoundland and then getting rejected and sent back. This year I finally made a card for the Lunar New Year, and planned to see how many of those friends I could get back in touch with.

I still might never have sent them, as February approached and they remained under my desk. But after we had the Korean lady randomly show up at church and I was just stumbling all over myself, I was seized with a sense of urgency. I pulled out my White Field Korean book and went over some grammar forms. I watched videos on youtube. Then, that Friday, I had planned to make keema matar (not Korean, it's Indian) for lunch, and realized we didn't have any garlic. Immediately I had an idea. I would borrow some garlic from our Korean neighbors. It was like a sign.

On the Tip of my Tongue

I've had Korea on the brain a lot the past few months. (More than usual, that is.) Since I made the banner and background for the Daejeon mission blog, I've been following the blog and sometimes looking up the names of new missionaries that Sister Perriton posts about. This is how I found Sister Rebecca O'Bryan's blog. She's a brand-new (greenie) missionary serving in Gwangju, which was also my greenie area. (Missionaries can't use the internet, but her sister is posting her weekly emails to the blog.) I always enjoy reading about people's experiences in Korea, but there was something about finding a missionary blog, especially somebody in a place where I'd served, that was a special treat. My mind was spinning for days with things I wanted to tell her. I was finishing up Mom's calendar and didn't want to get distracted from that, but once that was finished I sat down and wrote a snail-mail letter and babbled a bit about Korea and Gwangju and being a missionary. (I just got it off in the mail last Tuesday, so I expect it'll be a while before I hear back.)

People sometimes ask me if I've managed to keep my Korean. It's been over sixteen years since my mission, and twelve years since Doug and I taught English in Chonan. I like to think that I've kept it up pretty well. I often construct Korean sentences in my head, just for the heck of it (in the shower or whatever), or walk around the house singing a Korean hymn or children's song. I have quite a few books in Korean that I'll pull out and practice reading every once in a while, though not regularly. (It's been a while since I've done that. I gave up on Harry Potter after I realized the translation wasn't very good.) But when the opportunity comes up to actually have a conversation with someone in Korean, then it's all too obvious that it just doesn't come out as well as it used to.

Two weeks ago, Doug went out on a Saturday afternoon to get his hair cut. He went to a place nearby run by some nice Korean ladies. Later he told me that he'd talked to a lady there who was a social worker in Korea and had come over to improve her English. She asked him if he went to church, and he just said he was Christian, since they changed the name of the church in Korean a while back and he couldn't remember what it was. So the next day she showed up at church. We're not sure how she ended up there, since she never actually asked Doug where he went to church. After Sacrament Meeting a friend told me that there was a Korean lady there. Someone else was already talking to her, so I went over to help.

Her name was 지현 (Ji Hyun), from Seoul. She told me she'd picked Zelia for an English name. We talked just a little--I told her about where I'd been in Korea, and she told me my pronunciation was good (yes, I can say Daejeon, Gwangju, and Suncheon properly! Yay!). Then she asked what the topic of the day's talks had been. Well, the topic was revelation and I could not for the life of me remember the word for revelation in Korean. Which was really embarrassing because it was definitely something I should have known. I was pretty sure it started with 계 and just kept running through 계 words. (계획? No, that's plan. 계단? No, that's stairs....)

Then I asked her if she had a Book of Mormon and she said, "This is a Mormon church? I did not know that!" Oops. I answered a few questions in a mixture of Korean and English, but I only got to talk to her for a few minutes because she said she had an appointment. After she left we managed to track down a Korean Book of Mormon. We didn't see her the next week.

I was feeling kind of agitated about this for a while, and kept wondering if there was something I was supposed to do differently. With all the Korean-related stuff I've had going on recently, of course I can't help but wonder if there's a reason.

There is a Korean branch that meets in Auburn. A couple that was in our ward is attending there now. I'd love to go and do some Korean schmoozing in a no-pressure setting.

This week I've discovered the blogs of three sister missionaries serving in Busan mission: Sister Rose Hadden, Sister Alyssa Linford, and Sister Rachel Ogilvie. Sister Hadden and Sister Linford were companions at the Misisonary Training Center, and Sister Ogilvie was in the next group after them. I particularly enjoyed Sister Hadden's blog. She has a way of capturing everything that just brings it all back. I've enjoyed reading through it and remembering so many little things, and especially the sweet Korean sisters that I served with. Sister Ogilvie's blog was a lot of fun, too.

I also discovered that the current mission president in Busan is Ken Jenning's father. I just got a kick out of that.

I am determined to get back to Korea, somehow. I have no idea when or how this might take place, or for how long, or even who all it would involve. (It occurred to me recently that Kate probably wouldn't appreciate Korea very much right now.) In the meantime, I feel a need to get myself back up to speed (as much as I can, anyway) on speaking fluency. Last night I watched some Let's Speak Korean videos on youtube (these are actually pretty good--they use some nice colloquial forms), and went to bed with Korean in my head. 앞으로 더 열심히 공부 해야돼요.

skinning the mission blog

I served as a missionary in Korea in 92-93, pre-digital era. We didn't have cellphones or digital cameras. A lot of things have changed since then.

There's now a Korea Daejeon Mission blog, kept by the current mission president's wife (Sister Perriton), where she posts pictures from conferences and comings and goings, and other events.

(The country switched to a different Romanization system, which means that the Taejon mission is now the Daejeon mission. I'm still not really used to this.)

I was looking at the blog recently and saw that she was using a background from The Cutest Blog on the Block. Nice, but pretty generic. So I wrote and asked if I could make a custom background and banner. I spent a day or so fiddling around and came up with something that seemed to me both appropriately Korean and mission-y. I sent it to Sister Perriton with instructions, and she was able to get everything installed properly. (I had to look up some information about working with the widget layout, which is what led to me redoing my own blog with widgets.)

Here's the full view. What you actually see will vary depending on your screen size and resolution.



Sister Perriton posted about her new background, and even dug up an old picture of me from the mission files. Whoa.

The words down the sides are from Doctrine & Covenants 4:6: "Remember faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, diligence." We used to recite all of section 4 at zone conferences. It's different now.

In 2005 they changed the name of the church in Korean. I, being rather out of the loop, did not find out about this till some time later. Just a few months ago I heard that they had re-translated the Book of Mormon. So when I was working on this I double-checked and discovered that yes, they re-translated the D&C too.

Talk about things changing.

Looking at the pictures of the missionaries on the blog makes me feel a bit nostalgic and homesick. I hope they're appreciating every minute. It goes by faster than you think.

15 년후

Or, "How did my scanner get so dusty?"

August 18th is the day I got home from my mission. I was thinking about this a few weeks ago, and it occurred to me that it was, in fact, fifteen years since I got home. I'm still not sure how fifteen years could possibly have elapsed since then, but after double-checking the math, I had to admit that this was actually the case. It doesn't feel like fifteen years.

We celebrated the occasion by going out to lunch. I also dug out a few pictures that I thought I'd share.



This is my last companion, Sister Kim Su Kyung, and me (err... I. "This is I." Nominative case. Yep.) at a zone activity. She was a sweetheart. We haven't kept in touch but I think of her every once in a while. My hair was a lot lighter back then! I was also frequently sunburned.

I was serving in Sunchon and GwangYang, way down south, as my last area. I recall it was raining, the morning that I left, which seemed appropriate as I was feeling very emotional and kept randomly bursting into tears. (Maybe not quite bursting, but a lot of welling up.)



There was a group of us going home at the same time, including two other sisters, Lee Su Jin and Kim Sang Kyung. Here we are in front of the Seoul temple. Sister Kim had been my companion for a couple of months, in Taejon. It was nice to get to spend some more time with her before going home. (Yes, I had companions named Kim Sang Kyung and Kim Su Kyung. Two different people.) I didn't ever serve with Lee Su Jin but I met her parents, later, when I was doing my summer internship at a publishing company in Seoul. As soon as I saw her father, I thought, "He looks just like Lee Su Jin!"



And here I am with my family at the airport, after a very long flight. (This was back when Barb was still shorter than me. Ha.) I was only home for nine days and then went out to BYU for the start of fall semester. I had kind of a hard time with the transition, just figuring out where I was and what I was supposed to be doing with myself. I felt like I'd been through such an amazing experience, and changed so much, but it was all inside, and there were things that were important to me that I couldn't explain to anyone else. I was so glad that I got to go back with Doug, later, and share some of that with him. Hopefully some day we'll be able to take Kate (and Baby Boy).



This was lunch today--kimchi jjigae. Our heat wave broke and it was cool and rainy. Just seemed like a jjigae day. (Doug had bulgogi.) Kate was a bit squirmy and kept trying to climb up the back of the seat, but she enjoyed the food and ate a lot.

Yesterday in church we heard from a young man (our stake president's son) who just got back from serving in Korea a few weeks ago (Pusan--though I think they're romanizing it as Busan now, which bugs me). I got to talk to him briefly afterwards. One thing that I really miss is singing hymns in Korean. There are a few hymns that we sing where I have to restrain myself from breaking into Korean on the chorus. It's amazing that I still remember so many of them.

One of these days I'll get around to scrapping my mission pictures. Maybe I'll use one of those photo-scanning services and do it all digitally. A big coffee-table book or something.