Shambles

I was just about to write a blog about Super Junior, and how they began my twisted journey along the path of Korean pop culture that eventually led me to Seoul. Until I sat down at my computer and heard someone singing outside. By my open window, I could hear someone singing an opera. I think that it was a person singing, because they would start and sing a few bars, and then stop again. I ran down the steps to the courtyard outside, hoping I could find them. When I went out, it was silent.

"Hello," I sang into the night. "Hello. I heard you singing. Your voice tore through the air, and also tore my heart." I was quiet, and listened. No one responded.

Now, I came back and decided to write down things that I've thought of lately, but haven't written down.

First, another open letter:

Dear 100,000 dissolute looking smokers at KU,

Today I passed you in the cold morning. No longer did you look tough, rustling quietly in the cold. Instead, as you shivered, you looked like tiny moths, fluttering toward the all-too-brief flame of your lighters. Your hands trembled as you drew your shaky cigarettes towards your lips.

Your breath and smoke froze suspended in a white sheet around you. Walking through that ethereal haze, I saw you huddled together like old mystics, and I had my own moment of clairvoyance. I closed my eyes and saw you, loves, your bodies still twitching like moths, and your festered, blackened tongues lolling from your lips.

Friends, you and I are both lovers of beautiful things. Sometimes I sit in my room and light a stick of incense. I watch as the smoke rises in whorling eddies toward my ceiling. Imagine you step now from your dreamlike haze and come with me, to light incense, or candles, or anything else.

-Renee*

... Sometimes I think about meeting Super Junior. (This would have made more sense to my un-K-pop-initiated readers if I had written the blog I originally intended to.)
When I first started listening to them in 2008, even in my most unrealistic day dreams, I couldn't help but imagining meeting them with awkward blushes and stammers. Now, I don't really have crushes on them any more, but sometimes I can't help but wanting to meet them to become their friends. Celebrity is interesting that way, isn't it? Because it gives us a false sense of intimacy with people, so that part of me feels like I know Super Junior, even though I don't and probably never will. Part of me feels like we are already friends, even though we aren't, and probably never will be (I'm holding on to those probablies--I'm at least in the same city now, so there's no telling what could happen :)I think that the nature of celebrity is that they are mostly faces that people can project whatever they like upon. So basically people can project intimacy or friendship or whatever they want on the celebrity, and feel connected because of what they created that person to be in their minds. Then companies can use the celebrity to sell things like Kyo Chon chicken, and people put the projections they have of the celebrity on the product they are buying (i.e, "Kyo Chon chicken wants to be my friend.")

Anyway, when you read the following dialogues between myself and Siwon (my favorite SuJu member), you will probably notice a lot more of Renee than Siwon:


I especially want to meet Choi Siwon. I would say, "Siwon, you fufilled one of my dreams when you went with the U.N to Africa. When you were at the orphanage, did you see the sun reflected off of the children's faces? I live for that moment, when I am with children, and we clasp hands and spin together in the sun. When we stop spinning, and the world slowly comes back into place, I see the light catch and glow on the tiny hairs of their face, and it's the most beautiful thing in the world. Siwon, when the children laughed, did their heads tilt back? Did their teeth glint like diamonds? Siwon, when you held the children, did you smell their hair? Isn't that a nice smell, the smell of baby-oil and coconut lotion? Siwon, when you held hands with the children, what did their palms feel like? Did you trace the labyrinthine paths of lines on their palms with your finger? I've done that before too."

Sometimes I imagine that Siwon tells me about the girl he is in love with. He tells me how he feels reverent when he approaches her, as if she were made of glass. "I cannot believe her frailty," he says. "Her eyelids are like butterfly wings."

These conversations never last long, because then I start to tell Siwon about when Danny and I met, and I get lost in my memories of last summer. In my mind, I am spinning with children in the sun, and when I stop, there is Danny, spinning with me.

*OK, so this letter sounds insufferably preachy in some ways. I actually don't think that informed adults should be told whether or not they can smoke. It's their decision. But I like some of the language of this so much, that I'll share it, despite the things I dislike.