Kudos to Hyunmo Kim of HJ Freaks, the cross-dressing Korean bassist the Meg Whitman campaign made into a star this week by accidentally leaving a letter off their tweet of their endorsement by the San Diego Sheriff’s Association, sending their followers instead to his youtube where he rocks his bass in pink lingerie. Fate, we love you.

Banksy’s Simpson credits have made a bit of a splash because he’s an art sensation, but watching it I understood he meant to dramatize the role inexpensive North Korean animation labor plays in the creation of much of what we see in animated film and television today, including, possibly, the Simpsons. The subcontracting of the creation of the animation cells for American programs to French companies—who are allowed to contract labor in North Korea, unlike the Americans—is the subject of Guy Delisle’s groundbreaking graphic travelogue, Pyongyang. There’s very little information on how many American shows and films are made this way as a result. Typically this labor is used to create the time-consuming cells in between the major still moments. According to Pyongyang, the major cells for those moments are done by more expensive Western labor and are sent to North Korea with a Western supervisor (Delisle’s job, for example, during the trip he dramatizes in his book).

The animators there then also use their talents to make their own shows, such as this North Korean animated television show for children, (“subtitled” by someone with a subversive, anti-North Korean, misogynistic sense of humor).  Watching it, you can get a little of a sense via reverse-engineering for what shows might be involved.

• Kim Jong Il is not so busy with the Euna Lee and Laura Ling controversy that he doesn’t have time to, uh, give notes to the performers of Eugene Onegin.
• Also, North Korea has a cafepress store. This may be complicated by the recently tightened UN Sanctions.
• I am spending a lot of time thinking about the Tomb of Dangun.
• Sngmoo Lee is releasing his film with Jang Dong-Kun and Kate Bosworth, The Warrior’s Way, and while I feel like it borrows too much from The Lone Wolf and Cub, I’m warming up to it. (Via AngryAsianMan)
• The Long Road Home is a newly published account of a man who began as a lieutenant colonel in the North Korean Army, and then, after accusations of treason, ended up in Camp No. 14, one of North Korea’s most terrifying gulags. Where he survived for 6 years, working 2400 feet underground, before escaping to the United States.

For today’s post, some out-takes from a day of teaching. First up, from a discussion in my graphic novel class of Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang, a North Korean animated children’s show, made over into a satire by the addition of “subtitles”.

Guy Delisle was in North Korea working on animated children’s cartoons, just, for the record.

From Fiction 1, “My Immortal”, the most famous of the Harry Potter fan fiction. I can’t tell right now if it’s ‘just’ genius or pure genius or if I’m tired and punchy. In it, a goth girl vampire witch enrolls at Hogwarts and begins biting her fellow classmates. The author, when left to her own devices, speaks incessantly in LOLcat, and the chapters decline in spelling quality after she falls out with a friend who was spell-checking for her. When they make up, the quality returns.

This is, if it’s invented, a brilliant novelistic detail. If not, it’s just plain poignant.

There’s a debate among fans about whether it is what it appears to be or a brilliant satire. I can’t decide. Either way, this vampire witch goth girl turns their world upside down and the results make for hilarious reading. Apparently most of it was read aloud on campus here pretty recently.

Here’s chapter 1, of My Immortal, after the break. Note that AN means “author’s note”, and MCR is My Chemical Romance:

• AN: Special fangz (get it, coz Im goffik) 2 my gf (ew not in that way) raven, bloodytearz666 4 helpin me wif da story and spelling. U rok! Justin ur da luv of my deprzzing life u rok 2! MCR ROX!
• XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXHi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don’t know who she is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to Gerard Way but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie. I’m a vampire but my teeth are straight and white. I have pale white skin. I’m also a witch, and I go to a magic school called Hogwarts in England where I’m in the seventh year (I’m seventeen). I’m a goth (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly black. I love Hot Topic and I buy all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a black corset with matching lace around it and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow. I was walking outside Hogwarts. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. A lot of preps stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.“Hey Ebony!” shouted a voice. I looked up. It was…. Draco Malfoy!“What’s up Draco?” I asked.“Nothing.” he said shyly.

  But then, I heard my friends call me and I had to go away.

Coming soon, a post on Harry Potter as our new common text.

Find other writers, I tell them. Find readers. Go to readings, buy the books, the magazines. Write and send your work out. Be where people can find you.

A few days later, I am in Maine at the house my family has rented at Goose Rocks Beach, and my brother-in-law and I read our horoscope online. Both of us face different challenges that are, nonetheless, similar in our lives structurally. Both of us are Leos.

Put yourself in the way of your fate, the horoscope reads.

It’s not the same astrologer, I’m sure of that, but I experience a short chill. I remember how so often what I am teaching my students, I am also in need of reminding myself about, as if in order to talk to myself I need to first tell 15-100 people and then let a few days go by. But all the same, whatever you think of horoscopes, finding your advice to someone else in your own horoscope is more or less one definition of the uncanny.

No one would say I’m hiding.

The narrative from the evening at the AAWW with Guernica picks up with how no one can believe Jin Young Sohn is only 19. As he begins reading he says, “I think I’m the youngest person here.” Light laughter. He reads a beautiful excerpt from a longer piece inspired by his grandmother, about taking care of her as a little boy, making her rice, in place of going to pre-school, as both his parents worked and couldn’t take him. Elaine H. Kim reads a story about two straight men in a gay bar in Seoul. Cathy Chung reads her excerpt, from her novel-in-progress. The entire editorial staff of Guernica attends, some of my Amherst students, some of my former students from Wesleyan, people I went to grad school with, and my agent’s assistant, and then people I don’t know. The very handsome and incredibly nice men of the Dari Project are there, for example, and they say hi afterwards, and one of them buys my first novel and has me sign it, which I always enjoy.

When the party closes at 9, I head downtown to Sweet and Vicious with my friend Meakin Armstrong, who tapped me as guest editor to begin with, and Cathy Chung, and friends of hers from MacDowell, where she made everyone read my novel while she was there.

I am trying to catch up to my friend Laura, who’s out with Wendy Lee, who also read that night downtown at McNally Robinson, from her debut novel, Happy Family, a novel I happily blurbed that is, as I put it, about some of the actual taboos of this culture. I still like it. Wendy gamely offered to come up but it’s her night and I said we’d come down and find her. We find her in the dark back beer garden there with her editor, a very nice man who thanks me profusely. My friend Laura is with a woman who tells me how much she loved my book, when she was an editor at a paperback imprint of a large publishing house and one of the bidders. She also tells me it makes her night to meet me, and all of this is a pretty incredible thing to hear from a stranger. We leave and go to eat at Public, where I have the most beautifully made scallops and talk to Wendy’s lovely boyfriend, and Laura, an old friend from when I trained as a yoga teacher.

I wake up in New York on Thursday morning in Laura’s apartment on 14th St. and 6th Avenue. The night before, someone said it looked like the apartment in La Boheme, and it does, except with Mac computers and me. My friend Laura’s room-mate, who I’ve not yet met, emerges from her bedroom to go to work, and she’s very nice, we have an awkward cordial moment and then she leaves. Laura comes out. We talk about Facebook and global warming. As we do, I briefly have a vision of an enormous wave of water behind her, sweeping down from the Bronx, out of the Iowa floodplains, and then she says, I’m glad you came, and I say, Yes, me too, and then she leaves and I stay to take a shower, before getting on a train back to Wesleyan, to finish the conference.

The themes of my teaching there this week via the consultations I have with students directly are women’s invisibility, invisible narrators who are characters and are supposed to be in there and yet are not, and missing narration–events that collect and the reader cannot feel why they are with each other. The students seem mostly to think, unconsciously, that if they are a woman they should not quite be there, and this is troubling. One student tells me he thinks first person is too common and third person sets his work apart, even though I think third person keeps his story too constricted and thus confusing and frustrating.

The course meanwhile is full of some of the warhorses of creative writing classes: start on top of your story, and nowhere else, for example. But the theme I decided on for the week was excitement. I’d been at a friend’s dinner party and we were talking about what we read that we liked. Her friend and literary agent there said of something he’d just read, It ended where you thought it would. It was okay but I wasn’t transported. As I headed to Wesleyan, it seemed to me like a signal to follow into the week’s class.

——————————–

I leave Wesleyan to drive to Rhode Island for the Ocean State Writers Conference after a quick dinner with Kit Reed, my friend and mentrix, and her husband Joe Reed. They are skeptical of my chances of getting there. It’s clearer to them than to me that I’m tired, and sure enough, I make ridiculous mistakes while driving, and a trip that should take an hour and a half takes almost three. I feel like a bag of other people’s ideas and language, after the constant pace of readings and consultations, and it’s almost like being drunk. This moment is what most writers fear when they teach, but I know that the brief suppression of my own thoughts doesn’t last, and what happens next is usually a great deal of writing, as if in response to the suppression of it. Last year I wrote most of a new story the week after Wesleyan, in two days. For now, though, I just want to go to bed.

I get to my dorm at URI with the help of my friend Amity Gaige, who’s also there, and she helps me get settled. When I ask for an internet connection at the front desk, she says, What are you going to do? Blog? And raises her left eyebrow authoritatively. I feel vaguely ashamed even though my sole desire is to check email, to see if, as a friend says, anyone loves me today. Instead, I lose track of my car and wander the campus for an hour in the dark, looking for it, as it has my toothbrush in it, before finding it in the fourth of the three directions I search. I sleep the night in a cement-walled room that feels like a hospital, and the next morning get up and teach 63 students about how to figure out plots for stories and novels from the scenes you write that come to you and you don’t know what they are. Then I go to some panels, I have lunch. I go to my room and do yoga and then give a reading with Peter Covino and the other faculty of the conference. I talk about what I’m thinking about, which is how I knew Peter when he and I used to be poets together in the East Village of New York, and read in dark gay bars on stages.

Go to open mikes and read at them, I tell the audience, by way of summary. And then I read my excerpt.

I leave after the reading to go to Maine, and stop at a hilariously huge Italian restaurant off the highway called The Chateau. When I leave, I still don’t know why the name is French. It’s the only French thing about it. I drive for hours and get to Maine before 1AM, fall asleep and wake up to the singing of my nieces and nephews down in the kitchen.

Part of it being your fate, of course, is that you cannot know it until you are in possession of it. Here in Maine, surrounded by pancake mornings and beers at the beach and margaritas at night, I don’t know if I’ve managed to be in the way of my fate and I won’t know. And if the message for me from me is about excitement, then perhaps that’s covered by how I go to Greece next, next week. All I really can think of to sum up the aftermath of the week of writers and writers conferences came to me from a former student, who wrote to me after being rejected this year from all the MFA programs she applied to. This shocked me, because I thought she was a shoe-in. She had the single greatest reaction to being rejected, perhaps ever, in the history of writing:

The Iowa letter said something about having over 800 apps for 25 spots. I can’t even imagine. The numbers are baffling… I’m probably overemotional and tired on this Friday evening, but I also weirdly feel buoyed by the rejections, like it confirms for me how important writing is, whether or not I have an mfa.

Thank you to everyone I met this week at Wesleyan and URI. Good luck to us all. And if you are a fan of my friend Paul Yoon, go check out his story at StorySouth, and if you like his, vote for him. He’s a contestant in their Million Writers 2008 contest.

So that this confusion never, ever happens again, here is a guide to these incredible-looking men who are appearing with increasing frequency on our tv and movie screens here in America.

1. Rain

Rain is arguably the most high-profile, internationally.

Think of him as being a Korean Justin Timberlake, maybe, but mixed with a Korean Jake Gyllenhal. You can check out his Donnie-Darko-esque turn in the as yet untranslated I’m A Cyborg. The below still from that was one of last year’s most popular image headers on this blog.

He’s shown an extraordinary range as a performer, able to dance around in angel wings in a Korean rap video, or appear in art-house Korean indie films. He’s most famous to US audiences for his dance battles with Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report. He is an incredible dancer. In this clip, note the Dance Dance Revolution sudden-death round.

2. Karl Yune

Karl Yune, it should be said, looks nothing like Rain. Karl is the younger Korean American brother of another, earlier Korean American celeb, Rick Yune. Karl is familiar to most of you as an Abercrombie model.

That’s what I’m talking about. As you can see, Rain is more puckish, and more changeable. Rain has so many different looks, it’s a little shocking. That doesn’t really excuse what happened.

3. Rick Yune

Rick Yune, Karl’s older brother, is also a stunningly good-looking man. They look even less alike, though, than Karl Yune and Rain.

Rick is familiar to us from his roles as Johnny Tran in The Fast and the Furious, and as Zao, in the James Bond film Die Another Day.

4. Joon Park Hyung

Joon Park Hyung from the now defunct Korean boy band g.o.d. is in Speed Racer and it’s worth pointing out, he is not Rain, also. In fact, here is a photo of the two of them together, which was actually one of my favorite header images from 2007. All of the men here except the Yune brothers have appeared in my blog header, as I like to think here at Koreanish we’re a little ahead of the curve on these important, world-changing issues. This shot was taken right after Joon was signed to the film:

That’s the gang sign for “Hot Korean Actors Headed To America.” Rain is on the left. Joon is on the right. Joon is on the rise, and is signed up for the new Dragonball Z film.

4. Daniel Henney

Coming up is Daniel Henney. Daniel is in the new X-Men film featuring Wolverine’s origins, as someone called Agent Zero.

Daniel is, quite simply, stunning to look at, and once the X-Men film is out, People Magazine will likely want to tap him for their Most Beautiful issue.

6. Dennis Oh

The next one we should all be looking for is Dennis Oh, who is sometimes confused for Daniel, though, this is perhaps because they are both half Korean, half white soap star heartbreakers. The “they all look the same” thing extends to us half-breeds, it’s worth noting. They are also set in competition against each other–some even asking, which one is hotter?–which is again, only happening because they’re both half white. No one asks that question about Rain and Karl, for example. Anyway, check out Dennis Oh, the future crush object of America and the world, hot in his own right:

I’m thinking of this because I’m a little high on Bluebottle coffee, French press, and whole grain hot cereal from Boulettes down at the Ferry building, and a live sighting of Laura Albert, the woman who is/was JT Leroy, who was at the next table. She was in my line of sight, and we gave each other a look of, “don’t I know you?” and then I remembered who she was, and then also remembered how a former agent of mine once told me JT Leroy was reading my book as a possible film project (this was 5 years ago) for Gus Van Sant. We never heard anything because that’s how film stuff is and also, when my agent told me that, I had a sinking feeling, because I didn’t think Leroy would like the novel for a film as everything Leroy seemed to do involved helping Leroy and not other writers in getting to Gus Van Sant. Also, I think it would be better as a 4-part TV series for Showtime. But in the meantime, Gus, if you’re self-googling, I would love it. Just in case she never passed it along.

That was also, it should be said, the second time I got close to Mr. Van Sant in that way. In an age almost past remembering, when I was in this documentary, the film-maker, Marc Huestis, told me he’d passed my reel along to Gus or that he wanted to–I don’t remember. It may be he and I aren’t meant to work together or perhaps that we just have to meet right.

In any case, it was strange to be here less than 24 hours and feel like I was in a movie about my life complete with themes and mildly uncanny coincidences.

I’m writing this from within the Loyola Villages apartment the USF people have put us up in for the Emerging Writers Festival, where I’m rooming with Sarah Gambito and Maggie Zurawski, with Alex Lemon around the corner. The reading went well. Sarah Gambito read first, and was amazing. She read new poems. I then read from St. Spencer of the Lost, which seems to me increasingly to be my homage to Escape To Witch Mountain, the mu dang of Korea, video games and the idea of Joan of Arc. In 20 minutes, we appear on a panel on how to turn yourself into writers, and then tonight, Maggie, Alex and Katherine Noel read. And then we’re turned loose in the Castro to drink and feast. Tomorrow I go to bounce my niece Lucy on my knee out in San Mateo and listen to her experiment with Stmaking the sounds that become language, and I will make howling vowel sounds to help her shape them. And read Anna Karenina at the beach.

I don’t know, I said. I just do.

I didn’t tell him the white kids asked me the same question.

Most of my childhood I felt like a shade, something in and out of perception. People would say things about Asian people in front of me that they would never say in front of someone more visibly Asian, and people would say things about white people in front of me that people would never say in front of people more visibly white. I vanished, it felt like. Or my appearance changed. White people thought my eyes were brown and my hair brown. Blacks and Asians thought I had green eyes and red hair. Why would you go to Korea to visit relatives, asked one co-worker of mine, at a bookstore in San Francisco, some years ago.

Because. . .and then I paused in my answer. Because I’m half Korean.

His eyes shot open. No way, he said.

I accepted it then, as I did as a child, in the way children do, that this was what I was, something that changed in the light around people and that I couldn’t control or predict. Most people, I think, when they meet other people, are confident that they give the appearance of belonging to this or that ethnic group, they feel confident that there is a home somewhere and a family that looks like them. This was not me, though. My mother was blonde, my father’s hair, shoe-polish black. Except for one red hair. Which he would pull out.

My eyes are hazel, half green and half brown. My hair, brown and red.

I soon realized I could give a different answer every time, to the question people always asked me: What are you. It hurt at first, as a child. Why was it no one knew what I was? And why did they seem suspicious, or even resentful? But soon it became a mark of distinction, to be like this. I have been mistaken as Mexican by Mexicans, African American by African Americans, I have been asked by strangers if I am Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, Argentinean, Hawaiian. What was I indeed. If no one knew, what could I be?

What could I not be?

An excerpt from my essay, “Kitsune”, in Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer, and in stores now.

korean artistes and sleep around

This week’s new Google Search header image for this week comes from the film No Regret, a Korean independent film released last year, a love story between a young orphaned college student, who supports himself as a male escort, and a wealthy young man who falls in love with him, and decides to come out, ending his engagement with a young woman his family wants him to marry.

It doesn’t really work out the way they think it will.

The film’s making its way through festivals right now, and I’m excited to get a chance to see it soon.

This is the very first gay feature film made in Korea, a landmark, and it set box office records for independent film in Korea.