Category Archives: Personal History

A Mom and Pop Store, and Then Some

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generations_retailI knew how to count from 1 to 10 in English. I could recite the alphabet. And that was about it.

Ronald Reagan was starting his first term as president when I immigrated from South Korea with my mother and two older sisters. We came to reunite with my father, who had set up an Asian gift shop in Manasquan, N.J., and there I was, 10 years old and fresh off the plane, standing behind the bank of showcases in the middle of our store, waiting to serve customers.

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An essay on the realities of retail that I wrote for the Times.

Books on a Shelf

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Book on a Shelf

The contract copies of the book (comp copies that are designated in the contract) arrived yesterday, and this morning, I slid them into the top shelf of my bookcase and took this shot, and I was reminded of one of my favorite jobs growing up.

The year before I left for college, I worked at the Barnes & Noble in Shrewsbury, NJ, which, like so many stores nowadays, isn’t there anymore.  Each associate was given a section to take care of, and I ended up with scifi/fantasy, which was great because at that time, I read a lot of it.  I hadn’t discovered Philip K. Dick yet, but I was quite fond of folks like Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s series), Isaac Asimov (Foundation series), and Stephen R. Donaldson (Mordant’s Need series).  Not only did I have to keep the shelves in order, I also had to keep tabs on what was selling out and had the freedom to display the books however I chose.  If there was a title I liked,  I faced the cover out, to catch the eyes of the potential customer.

So here’s what I hope, now that I’m standing on the other side — that there’s a book associate out there who likes my book enough to give it the cover treatment.

Backstory

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The good folks at Backstory have posted my, you guessed it, back story.  How did Everything Asian become a book?  Like this.

Back in 1981, when I was ten years old, my life had become a foreign-language film without subtitles. Everywhere I went, people spoke English, which was a problem because all I knew was Korean. My mother, my two sisters, and I had made the trek from Seoul, South Korea to reunite with my father in New Jersey, and once we got our bearings, it was time to get to work.

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Rumble in the Plains

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Rumble in the PlainsFour years ago, my girlfriend and I were living in The Hills, in one among the thousands of identical townhouses in Bedminster, N.J. To give you an idea of how cookie-cutter this development is, the recent remake of The Stepford Wives was shot there.

We told people that we were moving half an hour northwest to rural Washington for practical reasons — it’s a seller’s market, I can telecommute, cheaper housing — but in actuality, it was because we wanted to nudge our relationship to the next level. Back then, I was living with Dawn in her house, which was fine with me and OK with her — until it wasn’t OK with her. One of her biggest pet peeves was that she didn’t know how to introduce me to new people. “Boyfriend” sounded like we were a pair of teenagers going steady, and “partner” was no better option, as if we were a same-sex couple or about to embark on a business venture. So who was I, exactly, if not a husband?

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An article I wrote for the December 2008 issue of KoreAm Journal.

Not Just a Place for Food, but for Bonding

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Generations
I’VE been pushing the cart for 28 years now. It started in 1981, when grocery shopping was a family affair: father, mother, two older sisters and me.

My father had been living in the States for a number of years by himself, trying to establish a business and a home, so trips to the supermarket were old hat to him. But for the rest of us newcomers, it was quite the opposite. In Seoul, I was used to small corner shops and the outdoor farmers’ market, where earthy bok choy and sea-fresh squid were sold on the street, so to walk into a brightly lighted warehouse in Ocean, N.J., offering an unending variety of goods was at once exciting and daunting. [read more]

An essay I wrote for the New York Times, about grocery shopping with my family.

Whirlwind

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Originally published in The Nervous Breakdown

Fourteen years ago, I started an online magazine.  Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal now, since anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can create an online presence, but back in March of 1994, it wasn’t so easy.  Because Netscape Navigator wasn’t even at 1.0 — it was in beta.  And Internet Explorer didn’t exist.  Email ran on mainframes and VAX machines, and Gopher was the protocol of choice when it came to delivery of information in a menu-like interface.

Anyway, I had to come up with a name for the magazine, and I chose Whirlwind.  I’m trying to remember why I picked that name, but honestly, I can’t recall, though I would like to say now that I regret choosing it.  I mean it’s not a terrible name, but couldn’t I pick something cooler, like Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head?  I mean I was in college, for God’s sake.  It’s just sad.

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