Tonight at cooking class the teacher told me I look like some American movie star (although she couldn’t remember who). As it currently stands, my bangs are too long, I wear really gross t-shirts and jeans all day, and I’m always sort of shiny. I look like an Asian Ramona Quimby. Koreans, however, seem to equate that with “famous” – a few days ago, someone compared me to Jessica Alba, even though I smelled like garlic. I’m not going to lie; I like this. It makes me feel good, even though I’m starting to suspect that maybe all they read is Us Weekly and so only see stars buying groceries and sipping lattes.
Tomorrow is my big zine lesson. The only one I could find online that was remotely appropriate was WRFL’s RiFLe, and even so, I had to cross out a lot of places where there were pictures of hats that said “beer” or jokes about crystal meth. As far as the kids are concerned, this is because of copyright violations, and not because I want to protect their precious and adorable ears. I also printed out a few pages of a Flipside from 1986 and removed an ad for the Butthole Surfers. The camp instructor I’m working with is, of course, from Louisville; she went to Sacred Heart, lived in Springhurst, knew Kim Kidd, went to EKU GSP… I keep expecting Wilson to pop out from behind a bush or something. This is getting ludicrous. Anyway, she totally understood the zine idea, which is good, because I tried to explain it to one of the other teachers in The Program and it was kind of hard, i.e., I’m worried that if college graduates don’t understand maybe kids who don’t even speak English as their first language won’t either. I also feel like a little bit of a fraud for doing this; I’ve never written for a zine (although I did submit to the Lexington Project), although I think this was mostly because it wasn’t like Danville had any. I read them a little bit in high school, mostly if I was at the BRYCC House and they were laying around. But I guess it’s never too late. And I can’t wait to see how these kids express themselves – Christina (my CI) said that her class is pretty creative, but as I understand it, creativity isn’t something that’s really emphasized in Korean schools, so. We’ll see.
We also had Korean kids come to tae kwon do today to do some demonstrations. Several of the Program teachers are fluent in Korean (nyah), and one of them somehow got roped into translation duty, so she’s always forced to translate lines like, “He says that this workout isn’t hard at all” and “Our roundhouse kicks and side kicks suck, so he’s going to have his kids show us what to do.” In this context, “kids” are “ten year olds,” or “eerie robot machines.” They all looked about seven, they all kicked and punched with the cold determination of Robocop, and most of them were black belts. The ones who weren’t were red/black, and it was only because they were too young to have a black belt, so they basically lost out on a technicality. One of them came to watch me today in line and stood still, looking at me punching the air with a mixture of pity and wonder.
