Why Are You My Clarity?

It was mid-September 2017, and I didn’t expect anything the afternoon I turned on the TV to, I think it was Episode 11, of Hospital Ship. I knew at the time that it was Ha Ji Won’s (HJW) first new drama in about 2 years; since she’s my favourite K-actress, I had a vague interest in watching it. I had absolutely no idea who the actor playing the male lead, Kang Ming Hyuk (KMH) was, although I had heard of CNBlue (he’s the drummer, and I am NOT THAT OLD).

While it may seem from social media that I am an avid pursuer of K-dramas, most of the TV in the house has for a long while featured animated characters, usually talking animals or vehicles, and annoyingly positive messages about helpfulness and being kind to others – I’m sure I’ve complained about it enough of late. I’m lucky if I can keep my eyes open after the kids are asleep and I’ve finished putting the kitchen to rights to catch an episode and a half of Queer Eye, so you can imagine that committing 2 hours a week over four months or so to a drama is well-nigh impossible.

So there I was, thinking to myself that I would just watch Hospital Ship whenever I was ironing or it happened to be showing when I had a moment or two to spare, never mind if I ended up catching only about 20% of it. There have been precious few K-dramas, in the years that I have watched them, which have captured my attention, much less my heart, and in the past few years, I have been forced to be more selective than usual. 20% is still better than nothing.

Hospital Ship turned out to be only the second drama, after Secret Garden (funnily enough, another HJW drama, the viewing of which was instrumental to my finally working up the courage to leave private practice), to totally capture both my attention and heart. I was hooked from that first episode I watched: I caught up on all the episodes I’d missed as soon as I could, revived my Soompi forums account so I could join in discussions about it as the latest episodes aired. I followed live recaps (that’s when people, some with a knowledge of the Korean language, watch the drama as it airs on Korean television (sometimes illegally) and provide text updates about what’s going on) on Wednesdays and Thursdays, then streamed the week’s episodes once they were subbed in English (definitely illegally) a few days later. Jon tells people that he had to take his dirty laundry with him on his business trips during that period, and get his laundry done at the hotel he was staying at. (He was only sort of joking. Who ask you travel so much?)

I didn’t realise it then, and it sounds awfully lame and juvenile to say it (still, it must be said, because it is a crucial part of the background to all this), but on the day I caught up on all the Hospital Ship episodes I’d missed before Episode 11, I started falling in love with the pairing of HJW and KMH. HJW kicked ass as Eun Jae, of course, but there was, to me, an undoubtable, undefinable something about her and KMH’s Hyeon. I missed watching and commenting on Hyeon and Eun Jae’s first kiss when it aired; when I got round to watching the episode (14), I thought the kiss was Absolutely Beautiful. The behind the scenes (BTS) takes of the scene, when they were released, gave me such feels that I had to tell myself not to be pervy and rewatch the video more than once. Those in the Soompi Hospital Ship thread had by then moved on to discussing Why there was a kiss so early in the drama. Most were in favour of the (rather far-fetched) theory that the producers and scriptwriter were testing waters because the pairing had generally not been very well-received (K-drama land can be a cruel, cruel place), and they wanted to see if the audience would be receptive to Hyeon and Eun Jae’s romance*.

*For the record, I disagree with this theory. I think the kiss was written in so early for no other reason than that it just was. Also, due to some new advertising rules (though I’m not certain about this), each episode of a K-drama on the free-to-air channels in Korea is now half-an-hour long. Each week, four episodes are shown, two episodes per night, so nothing about the format really changes.

And just like that, I was on my way to being on the MinWon ship, despite what netizens were saying about the age gap (HJW is older than KMH by exactly 13 years), KMH’s relative lack of acting skills (not for want of trying and diligence though, I’ll give him that) and, above all, despite feeling that I was really Too Old For This S**t. I mean, come on, check out the definition of shipping here. Really? I had also been on and off the Hyun Bin-HJW ship post Secret Garden, and while I didn’t care either way after a while because there wasn’t anything much to link them together after that drama, and I hadn’t found the kiss everyone was so enamoured by (the one set to You Are My Spring in the last episode) anything to shout about, I had done my fair share of following a Tieba thread in MANDARIN, no less, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to dive into the world of shipping again (read: Too Old For This S**t).

***

Looking back, all this rather bizarre behaviour (if I do say so myself) could have been due to the fact that I was entering drafting hell when I fortuitously tuned in to Hospital Ship that Saturday. By the time the drama ended, I was deep in its depths.

I’ve always thought that having been in private practice, even though it was only  for two years, had given me an extremely high threshold for nonsense. Telling myself that it could be worse, I could still be subject to billing targets and have to do BD, has over the years helped me get through many a Super Sian moment at work. I’d also like to think that I am a fairly optimistic and undemanding person when it comes to my job. Let me have the flexibility to be there for my family, go to the gym at lunch, and I will be happy doing almost anything, sai kang included, that you ask me to do.  

But this particular bunch of clients left me completely and utterly defeated. The kind of defeat that came from attending a meeting where I had to force myself not to cry, and be civil and grown-up and mature even though Andrew had HFMD (again, at the time) and I’d kept Daniel home from childcare in case he infected his class. And I’d begged my also very tired mother to come and look after them for a couple of hours so I could attend the said meeting – whereat I soon realised that no one had bothered to give a single ounce of consideration as to whether the (much-needed) overhaul of the lengthy documents they requested a legal review of, which overhaul I had done for them, should be adopted. It’s not appropriate for me to say here why they didn’t do so, but a suitable euphemism would be “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”**

**That being said, I feel like I need to say that this is not, by any stretch, an accurate representation of the attitude of public servants. A good majority of the people I have worked with these past 5 years care about they are doing, and value legal input they have asked for, to the benefit of their cases and projects. Unfortunately, as 1 Corinthians 5:6 says, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump.”

That was just one incident in a string of incidents that eventually led to my disillusionment with The System (being vague on purpose). I have as of now more or less learnt to live with it (part of that process involved me bursting into tears during a HTHT with my boss, how embarrassing), but it was in retrospect clear to me that Hospital Ship came into my life at a point in time when I really needed it. It kept me sane, being as it was a reminder that there are, after all, things in life as predictably comforting as there being a new K-drama every time one ends. Things like God, love, and that God’s faithfulness means he knows exactly what each of us needs to clear any emotional blockages we may have, no matter if we feel that whatever that is is “awfully lame and juvenile”. Yes, I also just used the phrase “emotional blockage”. For “…God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:27)

I guess I just happen to respond to K-dramas starring HJW.

***

Hospital Ship ended in early November 2017, at which point I was still somewhat in denial that I was shipping HJW with KMH, and that perhaps what I had seen onscreen was them, not Hyeon and Eun Jae, falling for each other in real life (this is not a totally far-fetched thought to have – as I have said, KMH is not a very good actor, but he was excellent in all the Hospital Ship romantic scenes).

I had rooted for Hyeon and Eun Jae throughout the drama (as if there was ever any doubt they were going to end up together!!!), but I figured that they were just going to be my OTP (One True Pair) for as long as the drama was on air, and I was going to have to get over them after it ended. As much as some of the commenters on the Soompi Hospital Ship thread seemed inclined to ship HJW with KMH, we were by and large a bit doubtful about the ship ever sailing given their real life age gap. But one of them, with some encouragement, ended up starting a Soompi #0628couple thread for them, and I joined in wholeheartedly because she was such a sweet and earnest person, and most of the other people who joined the thread were pretty nice to talk to. Jon takes the car once a week, and I remember climbing to the upper deck of the bus, totally worn out and rather depressed, slumping in a seat near the stairs and posting long, emo posts in the thread on the way home. I was also spurred by various clues which I shall not detail in this post because if you are a shipper, you will already know what they are and perhaps have them all laid out somewhere in chronological order (I’m not saying whether I have one of those chronologies. Ha ha ha), and if you aren’t a shipper, you wouldn’t care. AND if you are a good friend in real life, I would have forced some on you for analysis, whether you liked it or not.

Shortly after the special episodes of Hospital Ship (those are episodes where they interview the cast about their favourite scenes, and show some more BTS cuts), I got to talking to V, one of the shippers from the Soompi threads, first on Instagram DM and eventually on WhatsApp. Despite our being in different time zones (the my afternoon is your wee hours of the morning kind) and our 12-year age gap (less than HJW and KMH! But Jon has not let me hear the end of it), she put up with my long, rambly messages when I was confused about what I was feeling, and was the first person I told when I finally emerged from the fog and realised that I was well and truly on the MinWon ship and I wasn’t getting off anytime soon, even if, like so many other K-drama ships, we were eventually going to be left with a dearth of clues and be made to rewatch BTS cuts and shipper-made videos on YouTube.

I had fallen in love with them, and was fairly certain, then, that I had witnessed them falling in love for real.

***

“Falling in love” is a feeling I never thought I would forget, but eventually and inevitably did. After all, the last time I had that feeling was 11 years ago. That’s not to say that I’ve fallen out of love over the years – if anything, I’m certain I love Jon more than I did when we first started dating. Still, there is something very special about the feelings in those initial stages of getting to know a boyfriend/ girlfriend/ potential spouse (if you were infected by the I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Not Even a Hint bugs, you should know that you must date with the intention of marriage or NOT AT ALL), and while those feelings can’t and shouldn’t last – I can’t imagine living in such tormented rapture – there is something about their ephremality that sharpens their poignancy, and they are not any less wonderful for it. Back in early 2007, I think those feelings lasted about two weeks, tops. I distinctly remember journaling about it at the time, asking myself how long they would last, recognising that they couldn’t last forever, indeed I didn’t want them to, and at the same time determined to enjoy them while they were there. 

I remember when exactly it was that I started having the feelings I just described: Jon and I were sitting at arms’ length (really!) on a bench at the top of the hill near what I must now refer to as “my parents’ house”. I was wearing a brown jersey dress with sequins on the neckline that I had bought from the now defunct Flowers in the Attic at The Heeren (I assure you the dress looked nicer than my description), and I think Jon was wearing his Guiness T-shirt (which he still has!) and jeans. It was all very sweet and lovely and innocently passionate and so proper, quite unlike my experiences in other relationships.***

***The moral of that story is listen to your mother, time will prove that she knows best about these things. Although maybe some of those things are best experienced first-hand. 

It was nice to feel like I was “falling in love” again, to be reminded of how new it made the world feel. As Eun Jae said, the sky was bluer, the trees and grass greener – it was like living in brilliant, saturated technicolour, the beauty of even the most mundane things enhanced manifold.^

^I am aware that days with no rain and no cloud cover in Singapore can also lead to this effect.

Sometime in December, when HJW was on her Manhunt promotion tour, she gave an interview to a Hong Kong magazine. She was asked about the feelings she drew on when she acted out the different love scenes in Manhunt and Hospital Ship (at least, I that’s what I understood from the Chinese translation of the Korean). She replied that she still did not understand love fully (对爱还是一知半解 was the Chinese translation), but rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb watermelon. I cannot remember exactly what it was she said about the feelings she drew on, for I was flummoxed by the first part of her answer. If I believed she had finally fallen in love for real, how could she say she did not understand love fully?

I couldn’t sleep properly the night the translation of that interview was posted on an Instagram fan account, thinking about it.

When I woke up the next morning, though, I realised that you can

look at love from both sides, now

from up and down, and still somehow

it’s love’s illusions [you’ll recall]

[you] really don’t know love, at all

I played the song a few times while I was, surprise surprise, ironing that morning – it was the morning of Jon’s brother’s church wedding, and later in the day, when we were in our car, parked on a hill (near our house this time), the boys fast asleep in the backseat, I was telling Jon about these things and my feeling flummoxed and all the time thinking how much lamer can I get but surprisingly, he just said yes, he agreed, we will never fully understand love. Not in our time on earth, anyway.

He asked if I remembered that when we were talking about whether to try for the baby that was Daniel, he’d told me to consider whether I really wanted to have children, because if I didn’t, then if anything happened to him because of the tumour, I could remarry more easily. I told him, truthfully, that I didn’t remember that at all; the only thing I remembered about that discussion was that I had really wanted to have a child because if he really died, then I would at least have a child to 做纪念, be a remembrance.

Love is, fundamentally, merely a series of choices. We cannot know what choices we will have to make before we have to make them, and will thus never fully understand love. Each choice we make brings us a new understanding of love; when we choose the people we want to spend the rest of our lives with, we are pledging that the choices we will make for them in the years to come will be choices that bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things, that we may be part of the many who have gone before us who have demonstrated that love never fails.

We then talked a bit about how the tumour had affected our lives. It’s something we don’t actually talk about very much, whether to each other or to other people; for me, one of the reasons is that given how everything turned out, I don’t think that we could necessarily be said to have endured a lot of hardship and I don’t like feeling that I am playing the C-word card. Not that people generally mean to do so, you know, but I have always said that Life Must Go On, and have tried my best to live that way. It’s not that it wasn’t horrible at the time – and I now have a morbid fear of medical check-ups, both mine and Jon’s, so much so that he has stopped telling me when his are until after they happen, otherwise I’d worry about it non-stop in the days leading up to it – but we were very, very blessed. I have not forgotten the kindnesses of the people around us, and all the coincidences that could only have been arranged by God.

We agreed that the discovery of the tumour, and what followed, had actually taken away something from each of us; later, he lost more of himself to work, and I lost more of myself to Motherhood. To avoid making this just another trite statement about “losing oneself”, I thought about what that really meant, and for the purposes of this post, I would define “losing oneself” as the state a person is in when they have yet to accept that whatever their loss, great or small, there has been a gain. Maybe the gain is less than the loss, maybe it’s greater, but it’s still a gain, a step towards maturity, and as a Christian, I would say sanctification.

Jon lost the youthful entitlement to take his health for granted, which entitlement had enabled him to whole-heartedly follow wherever the ambition that drives young men in their careers leads them without much of a second thought. I lost sleep, the figure I had before I had children, the ability to go for my favourite instructors’ classes at the gym after work, the freedom to work late and work weekends. It doesn’t sound like much, I know, and in fact it seems instinctive that those sorts of things are to be the first to go, when push comes to shove. Our lives, the foundations of our selves, are made up of the most facile things. Yet how intensely we yearn for them when we must give them up, how hard it is to accept that we had to.

Almost exactly five years after Jon’s first surgery, a K-drama led us to the realisation and acceptance that we had, in fact, gained a deeper understanding of love; a great, great gain, worth far more than the loss that brought it about, no matter if it was only a poor, meagre glimpse at the unfathomable depths of God’s love.  

***

My sailing on the MinWon ship was not always smooth. As V says, we got a lot more hints than many other ships, and I agree with that. For me, the rough parts were when I was emotionally involved in fan wars between shippers and a subset of KMH’s fans. A couple of days last year, I had to literally sit on my hands to keep from keyboard warrior-ing (I wonder how many people who are reading this secretly do it, though. It’s way too easy. Haha). I know, you’re thinking that I was probably about twice as old as the perpetrators of said fan wars, but V and I decided that there were a key few who were likely to be around my age. I just didn’t understand how anyone could be so petty, they made me so angry with their comments and actions. At the time I am writing this, there is one particularly tenacious girl who is still at it. The number of usernames she has come up with across social media platforms is quite something, despite moderators having banned her from the Soompi #0628couple thread a couple of times. She doesn’t seem to realise that her way of expressing herself gives her away immediately (she is clearly not a native English speaker).

We came to refer to that subset of KMH fans as the “Oppa-Is-Mine”, or OIM for short; V came up with it and the name is self-explanatory. HJW has her own version of such fans, of course, the “Eonni-Is-Mine” (EIM), who are somewhat similar to the OIM but are motivated by different things (as they are usually also straight females). Witnessing the fan wars, which were mostly between the OIM and MinWon shippers, was enough to give me an additional reason to want to stop at two children. If I have one more I risk it being a girl, and if she ever exhibits behaviour like the OIM and doesn’t show signs of growing out of it by the time she’s finishing secondary school, I know for sure I would not be able to deal. I’d be like (imagine Daniel and Andrew, their voices in perfect, eerily similarly pitched whininess): Why? Whhhyyy? Whhhhhhyyyyyyyy?^^

^^Which is not the way to deal with anything, that sort of thing especially. You would do a better job, I’m sure.

The good that came of my being on the ship has nevertheless far outweighed those rough moments, as evidenced by the section before this. Also –

I stopped killing myself trying to sub-2 at last year’s GEWR, and am strangely enough not sure, yet, that I want to give it a shot this year. ME! Who, just over a year ago, was hung-up and obsessed AF (pardon the French) about achieving this particular goal post children.

Clearance of the emotional blockage I referred to earlier meant that I finally had the emotional capacity to read and appreciate Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility, probably the first proper piece of literature I had read in a while. Potboilers and detective mysteries don’t count, you know that. Reading books that you know will really get to you isn’t a walk in the park.  

I finally took a break from Jon AND the kids, the first in more than three years, when I went to Manila by myself to watch the last of CNBlue’s Between Us concerts. The delightful feeling of irresponsibility when I went to the airport by myself at 2am to catch a 4am flight, leaving my children sleeping and blissfully unaware of my departure, is one I will cherish for a long while.

I agreed to go to Jakarta for a weekend with just Jon for his colleague’s wedding, when no number of impassioned pleas on his part had hitherto done anything to make me agree to take a short trip with him.  

Jakarta, December 2017

I made a number of Internet friends and met up with two of them in Bangkok when we all went for KMH’s fan meeting (it was in Korean with Thai translation, I was soooooo bored), and I still message V with astonishing regularity. Sometimes I am amazed by how many things we find to talk rubbish about. I was even complicit in Jon’s #YOLO and agreed to spend way too much money (because we booked everything so last minute) on our 2017 year-end family holiday to Taiwan.

And I also made one real-life friend at work, someone from another division, whose friendship has been a real blessing and was a source of brightness during an unusually dark period at work.^^^

^^^My being affected by Jonghyun’s suicide deserves a mention here, too. I wouldn’t have thought much of it if I hadn’t at the time been so into the K-scene. It was such a terrible waste of talent – I would have liked to have heard him sing Breathe ten years later. He struck me as a fragile soul who may have been better off writing and producing, away from the limelight. And yet he probably wouldn’t have lived his life any other way, and there wasn’t any other choice he was willing to make at the very end. It made me think about my take on suicide, as a Christian; to be honest, I don’t think I will ever have an answer that satisfies everyone, but I hope and pray that God had mercy on Jonghyun, on HJW’s brother, on Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, and all the other people, known only to their families and loved ones, who despaired of finding purpose in life, or saw no meaning in it any longer, and so decided to remove themselves from it.

***

As I am running out of steam (like that how to quit job and write full-time?), in this last section, I will proceed to paraphrase a bunch of people.  

I have no idea what the rest of 2018 will bring for the MinWon ship. Will we get an announcement of anything on 28 June? Does it really matter? My feelings about it have inevitably settled into a sort of demystification of an existing reality, much like my own real life love – I have readily accepted the beloved object in all its common reality, and simultaneously retained its sublime status. It is a love that is not painted with false colours any longer, as I have summoned the strength – or rather God has given me the strength – to translate the sublime vision into everyday practice (Slavoj Žižek, circa. 2004)#.

#I didn’t read Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, but it appears that Luca Guadagnino did, and quoted what I paraphrased in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Call Me By Your Name. I am acting yige cool only.

这一生志愿只要平凡快乐, 谁说这样不伟大呢? To wish, only, to lead an ordinary, happy life – who is to judge that as not being noble? (Mayday, circa. 2008, translation mine) 

But if HJW and KMH do one day announce their marriage, you know who will be unashamedly proclaiming it from the rooftops (ok, the modern day equivalent). Whatever OIM may (and will) say about their age-gap, whatever the EIM will have to say about KMH being a callow “idol”, the years have shown me that it is exceedingly difficult to find someone you truly love, that is, someone whom you would be more than willing to make the right choices for, someone you would keep on choosing for the rest of your life. If it was more than a fleeting fancy, if it really is true love, what right do any fans have to make such judgments? 

I know I said earlier I wouldn’t bore you with the clues we got (or I think we got), but it feels fitting to now leave you with one of them, because I know you are kaypoh like that, and perhaps like all highly delulu (that's shipper-speak for "delusional", by the way) persons, I need to share my delulu with others. Based on an informal straw poll of maybe the four friends whom I made to have a look at this, those who saw a blue and black dress have a better chance of seeing the reflection in the wine glass. 

Picture credits: On the left, @nainay1023, from @hajiwon1023

 On the right, @leejungshin91