BAISHAN

Around the time of my last post, I became a campaign manager for a young man running for a local election in my hometown. I'd been following his campaign since January and started getting involved at the beginning of June following my graduation ceremony. That was also around the time I'd received a handful of tough rejections from job opportunities. My priority for 2018 had been to be involved in the Tennessee midterms. Originally, I hoped to be a good journalist, reporting the news while maintaining proper distance. Deep down inside, though, I wanted to do more. I wanted to register people to vote. I wanted to meet candidates and talk to constituents. I wanted to listen and to be heard. 

The internal conflict I've had this year is rooted in my education as a journalist. For the past five years, I've been drilled in the mentality of objective and unbiased behavior. Participating in a campaign is a no no. At least that's I thought. As I spoke with more mentors and colleagues,...

Recently, I've talked to a plumber and a barber. They lean on different sides of the aisle, but they both want education reform. Their visions to improve the quality of education in Tennessee include a wide expansion of trade schools and skill based curriculum. We know that the rate of teenagers employed has fallen significantly since the Cold War. This means that more eighteen-year-olds are entering college with no work experience, no resume, no references. They've never written a cover letter. They've never been on the clock. Summer employment for high school students is a very important stage of educating our youth so that they can prepare for life after school. 

What if a plumber was able to take on an apprentice for a few months? Better yet, what if there was a trades class in all of our high schools that invited a plumber over to teach something. This might spark an interest or even allow students the opportunity to build up some hours. If our sixteen-year-olds are getti...

What I've learned most in my time canvassing is that my community is more diverse than I gave it credit for which is both inspiring and thought provoking. I am realizing that I don't like telling people who to vote for at all. In fact, I started knocking on doors as an independent journalist rather than a Democrat. This has annoyed the base that I campaign for, but as a volunteer, I feel that my duty is not to tell people who to vote for but rather to tell people to vote and that there is a vote happening. To be clear, I grew up in a moderately conservative household, swung left quite in college, and I am now trying to find a centered equilibrium. Ideally, I will find a political biorhythm that is consistent, honest and fair

Listening, I believe, will bring about this. We as a nation are not listening. Our ears are blocked. Channels of communication have been severed. My senator introduced an amendment that would limit the executive branch's ability to create new tariffs without congres...

So I'm knocking on doors in a street not too far from the hill I live on trying to spread the word of the left to my red, red neighbors. As I was about to knock on a door, Mike tells me to hold up. He's with a painter who was working on the house across the street and the two of them are taking a smoke break. I didn't realize this at the time, but I was about to knock on Mike's door. It didn't seem like it to me at the time because he was covering for his wife, who works from home. Actually, he was covering for me. 

"Man, you don't want to bother her. She'll get pissed if you ring that bell while she's working." I introduced myself and explained what I was doing. He looked me in the face and told me he's already decided that he is going to vote red. Now, listen. I signed up to campaign as a Democrat, but I am actually registered Republican. Truth is, I don't believe in party loyalty. As a matter of fact, my training as a journalist has made me very open to listening to people...

The reality of post-grad unemployment is that if you don't stay busy every single day, you are likely to take the kind of shortcuts that only hurt you. I don't like lying: I've had lazy days. There was a good long period of confusion between my graduation day and my commencement ceremony. The time I spent gadding around, I realized, made me feel incredibly weak in terms of my mental health and my overall motivation. I guess I was used to having assignments lined up or some production task waiting to be completed. 

As the reality of the world settles in, I have been a lot more optimistic about the variety of what I can do as opposed to the lack of task. It boils down to volunteering, tutoring and studying. First of all, I set goals for myself. I want to post something on this blog everyday. It doesn't matter what or how bad it is or if anyone even reads it. I am going to go to the gym 3-5 times a week (aiming for 5). I am going to practice being an editor by teaching and helping peo...

The struggle I have had lately is trying to understand the line between publishing an opinion and publishing the truth. They may not be mutually exclusive, but it makes me question my intentions when it comes to publicizing my thoughts and reporting the stories of others. I'd like to think that I am innocently unbiased and always fair, but that might not be true. My main hesitation as of late has been the fear of digital permanency. I am a liar if I say I've never been wrong in my writing or line of thought. Despite that, what is a writer who doesn't write? Feeling silenced vexes my heart and hinders my mind. I write to free my voice, not to hold it back. All systems of amplification have transmitters and receivers. If the two have a weak connection, all that comes through is noise. Lately, I have been a good receiver but a bad transmitter. I've had many great conversations that I have now bottled up in me. I want to share them. Regardless of whether I am employed or unemployed, I know...

You got Konglish. You got Chinglish. But I bet y’all have never heard of Kochinglish. Well, that’s how I talk with North Korean defectors. I’ve had to use it because I started teaching English to a couple of students. We use the weirdest dialect in the world.

Hold up, let me backtrack a bit. I’ve made a couple of posts since, but my documented journey last left off with me eating KBBQ with my coworker who is a 탈북자, a defector (get used to the Korean spelling). He and I are of the same clan, the 백 family. I call him 형님 (hyung-nim), big brother. He calls me Mr. Paik, but more like Meesta Baek. You might think we cannot communicate, but he and I have had very in depth conversations. We’ve talked about work and politics, movies and music, dating and marriage, Capitalism and Communism. We’ve made jokes and played with toy guns. His English vocabulary is aggressively hilarious. I think his time in the DPRK taught him many different uses of the following words, “fuck, you, Yankee, bastard.” He...

Which country am I describing? One that has threatened the world with nuclear arms. One with an arguably crazy leader who is a fat cat obsessed with coal. One with a love-hate relationship with China. One that publicly executes its own people. Which country is it?

This week, two American deaths have made the news and fed into our nation's swelling fear. My heart goes out to the families and friends of Otto Warmbier and Philando Castile. These men both died in the past year and have both suffered the ugliest injustice of the world. Their killers walk as their fates remain irreversible. 

Defector literature describes one of the most horrific forms of public execution. During a North Korean public execution, the military rounds up everyone in the area to watch the traumatizing event. Officers stuff rocks in the prisoner's mouth, breaking their teeth and preventing them from using their last breaths to denounce the government. They tie ropes acros...

You grow up your entire life thinking, no, knowing that North Koreans are some of the poorest, most malnourished, most evil bad guys in the world. Now imagine this: Friday night after work, a North Korean refugee takes me out to eat 삼겹살 with 소맥, K-BBQ with beer and soju. He doesn’t let me pay because I am younger, even after I insist. He says, “this is Korean culture.” I take out $20 and respond, “this is American culture,” to which he grabs my money, shoves it back in my hand with an additional $200 and says “you are in Korea.”

It wasn’t just him who gave me money. People I’m not even related to, people I had never met before, gave me cash for no reason. I genuinely tried to reject it, but it doesn’t work that way in Korea. As a young Korean American, I get free food and drinks. I get discounts I don’t ask for. I am absolutely not trying to gloat. I’m really not. I’m trying to explain a cultural phenomena that has helped Koreans support each other economically. 

Technically, I’m an unpa...

My Korean is trash. I grew up in Tennessee, and my high school didn't exactly offer Korean as a foreign language. In fact, I spent a long time suppressing my own heritage. I brought Lunchables to school even though my mom wanted to pack me bulgogi (which I love). I was almost proud of the fact that I couldn't speak Korean. My English is quite good, but is it worth not knowing my native tongue? Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like as a genuine bilingual. So many doors would open. Last year, I finally started to learn Korean. I was 21. Any advantage of prepubescent vocal development has long gone. I sound American. Yet here I am, in Seoul. I can't understand my co-workers. They can barely understand me. Normally, my aunt and uncle act as my safety net, but they left this morning to America until August. I'm in Korea for another five weeks through July, during which I gotta survive on my own.

On the plane from JFK to Incheon, I acted like I could speak fluently. When the stew...