Tao of K-drama: Wait a Bit

In order to write The Tao of K-drama, I thought I should pay close attention to the Tao Te Ching. I got really hung up in the process. The five English translations I read emphasized the concept "Do nothing." According to the translations, successful people do nothing and things turn out well. I found this incomprehensible both because there was lots of doing in the Tao, and because it's literally impossible to "do nothing," right? To explain, "do nothing," people would start to talk about "go with the flow," which is not at all the same thing. 

Furthermore, it was clear to me that nothing about modern South Korea, including what is shown in its popular television, involves people doing nothing. They are always doing something. Now, it was nobody's fault but my own that I had linked K-drama with the Tao, but I was really committed to that proposition. To salvage that, and to link the busy-ness of K-drama with the "do nothing" of the Tao, I came up with this saying:

Heart of the Tao

"Do nothing" means "Wait a bit and see what comes along, while cheerfully doing your chores and cleaning all the neglected corners of your house."

My friend, the poet Michael Lally, liked it so much he suggested I make a tee shirt, which he proudly wears. Thank you, Michael!

But about the time the tee shirts arrived, I got a whole new perspective. I came across Roger Ames and David Hall's Dao Je Jing: "Making This Life Significant" A Philosophical Translation. They make the point that the correct translation is "do nothing coercive" and the common "do nothing" is simply an  unfortunate translation. This makes total sense to me -- suddenly the text is entirely coherent and I feel that I have been offered a real direction for living a good life -- do nothing coercive. AND it totally works for the message of K-drama, which made me so very happy!!!

I did have a new problem -- if "do nothing" is out the window, what do I do with my saying? The rest of it is rather perfect, as anybody who has seen even a little K-drama can tell you. Might I rephrase it???? 

And I might add, this is an excellent prescription for people with burnout! I'm going to try it myself!

Tao of K-drama: Where were you?

In the show, Because This Is My First Life, Yoon Ji-ho, the K-drama-writing heroine, needs to reset her relationship with Nam Se-hee, the man she loves -- she needs him to open up his "Room 19," And so she goes away for a few months. He develops the idea that she has gone to Mongolia and he suffers with longing for her. She reappears, ready to woo him on a new basis. He is shocked to see her suddenly and demands to know where she has been. 

"Insadong," she says.

"Insadong????" he replies. 

If I hadn't been to Seoul, I wouldn't have understood the shock of this. Insadong is a lively neighborhood near the historic center of the city, largely frequented by tourists. He would never have gone there, but it was literally a stone's throw away. It is NOT Mongolia. 

The actors play the scene brilliantly and I laugh out loud every time I see it. 

I once read The Tenth Month by Laura Z. Hobson, a novel about Theodora Gray, a woman who gets pregnant from an affair and decides to keep the baby. Because it is a decision unthinkable at that time, she plots to protect the baby from the stain of illegitimacy. She moves from the East Side of New York City to the West Side and after its birth "adopts" her own child. My mother Maggie Brown had the same predicament and moved from Jersey City, NJ, to Newark, eventually settling in Orange, where I grew up. 

In each case the woman -- Yoon Ji-ho, Theodora Gray, Maggie Brown -- was empowered by a reset of the situation. Yoon Ji-ho's thoughtful exploration of her own situation, and her clever solution, is heartwarming. At the same time, by showing her self-awareness and intellectualism, the show illuminates the writing of K-drama itself. It confirmed my hypothesis that the writers of these shows are literate and psychologically-minded, often with a very good sense of humor. 

The ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi proposed that people have the agency to put new patterns on the world. By her reset, Yoon Ji-ho and Nam Se-hee are freed to define their own terms for love and marriage. "It's OK to make it your way," she tells us in a voiceover at the end. 

And that is lovely message as we stand at the threshold of 2025. 

Tao of K-drama: How DO you handle the truth?

I love K-drama because it teaches me so many things about the life. On November 30th, I posted the revelation of truth in the K-drama She Would Never Know.  Then, on Sunday, December 1st, I read the  Sunday Opinion section of the NY Times, which had a number of pieces on the challenge of facing the truth. At the heart of that problem is Jack Nicholson's famous line in A Few Good Men, "You don't want the truth -- you can't handle the truth." 

The cover story of the Times' section is Sarah Wildman's magnificent, "If my dying daughter could face her mortality, why couldn't we?" Wildman describes the long journey of the family as her daughter died of an incurable cancer. Doctors kept talking of "hope" to the exclusion of time and space to talk about that other thing -- dying -- which shouldn't be but does get conflated with "no hope." It reminded me of the conversation I had with a friend who worked in palliative care. I told her doctors had said there were no more treatments for my nephew's leukemia. She said, "You know that means he's dying, don't you?" I would have to say I didn't know that, and I didn't want to know that -- but it put us in the bind that Wildman is describing, with the dying child left alone with the truth because we don't know how to handle it. 

Nathaniel Rich's "A place that looks death in the face, and keeps living," was almost a counterpoint to Wildman's story of bewilderment and isolation. Rich talked about New Orleans and climate change, arguing that everyone in the city knew that the city might be swallowed by sea. They weren't in denial about this, but rather in active conversation, planning and action. He wrote, "New Orleans has a striking competitive advantage. It knows that every hurricane season poses an existential threat." 

He continues:

I've never met a New Orleanian who feels safe from climate change. Living here, rather, engenders hurricane expertise -- and hurricane fatalism. Yo become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences.

The essay arrives at the conclusion that finite lives -- whether of a person or a city -- are not worthless. Learning to live with acceptance of limits -- taking joy in what we have, rather than thinking it has to last forever -- is the great challenge. 

The truth is hard all the time. Even small truths -- we have to floss, eat green leafy vegetables and exercise are truths that many of us (me included) fall flat in accepting. In a way these are stand-ins for the bigger trrouble-makers -- the knowledge that it's all finite. How can it be that this beautiful, wonderful world and the lives we live here won't go on forever? 

Despite our wish to hide or dissemble or steer away the truth, it will come to us. And when that happens we need our communities to hold us close, to talk with us about answers, to go through it together. 

Tao of K-drama: She comes to know

The K-drama, known in English as She Would Never Know, is, of course, about women coming to know. The name in Koran is 선배, 그 립스틱 바르지 마요, which literally means Senior, Don't Put on That Lipstick. The translation is a bit awkward. "Senior" in this context does not mean last year of high school or elderly person -- the word is "seonbae," a title for someone who is ahead of one in school and/or work. It is a term of respect. The command here is uttered by the junior -- hoobae -- to his seonbae, a woman having an affair with a man who, unbeknownst to her, is about to marry someone else. She puts on bright red lipstick to go meet him in the stairwell. The hoobae hates the color on her, and hates what is about to happen when she finds out the truth. 

The show doesn't stop at one of these -- a wife doesn't know her husband is quiet and unexpressive because he is repressing his same-sex desire, and their child doesn't know divorce is looming; a woman doesn't know she can survive without the man of her dreams; a mother doesn't know her daughter was aware of the husband's infidelity, nor does the mother know she can survive the growth in her uterus because she's afraid to find out. All of these secrets will come out in time, and people will weather the storms they create. 

This being K-drama, people come into relationship, and by the time we reach the end, a much larger group is helping to manage the trauma and recovery. One recapper said that this was predictable K-drama and not that interesting. I thought he must have missed the careful way in which the show allowed people to get closer to the truth and closer to other people so they could manage the truth. Because that is the secret of the truth -- things are hidden because they will be hard to digest, they are frightening, they force us to go against the established order. 

This is perhaps clearest in the case of the husband who has to face "who he really is" -- that is, accepting his same-sex attraction. In one scene he goes to tell his parents he wants to divorce his wife. His father surges to his feet and smacks him hard in the face and then does it again and again. "You will not get a divorce," the parents shout. Imaging if he were there on his knees saying, "I am getting a divorce and marrying another man." His wife, who knows the violence of the in-laws, tells him that she will stay by his side until he can accept himself -- that she loves him as he is. He later says that that was the first time anyone had said that to him and it was freeing. 

Which brings us back to the red lipstick -- it is not her color. This show takes place in a cosmetics company and she was working on the color cosmetics team. So wrong color is a big no no. The hoobae wipes it off her lips. By the end, when she wants to win his love (back), she puts on an excellent color. Perhaps the deeper allusion is to the Police song, Roxanne -- "You don't have to put on the red light" -- or to the source of that song. No need for the red light -- you are OK just the way you are. 

Main Street: What bothering a friend reminded me of

My friend Dr. Reggie Shareef lives in Roanoke, VA, and I met him while studying the urban renewal program there. He has looked at that process from the economic perspective and this has given him unique -- even dazzling -- insights. I was bothering him about pulling his pieces together into a book. He said no, he is retired (and maybe tired?) and didn't want to do that. 

This reminded me of Zora Neale Hurston getting to know Cudjo Lewis, a man who arrived in the Americas on the last slave ship. She sat with him and ate watermelon and listened to his extraordinary story. This encounter was published in Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo. Alice Walker wrote the profound introduction, in which she says:

Here is the medicine:

That though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going. It may be true, and often is, that every person we hold dear is taken from us. Still. From moment to moment, we watch our beans and our watermelons grow. We plant. We hoe. We harvest. We share with neighbors. If a young anthropologist appears with two hams and gives us one, we look forward to enjoying it.

I was imagining the young anthropologist with two hams who might wander by Dr. Shareef's house and listen intently to his wisdom! Maybe collect the papers into a book? 

Tao of K-drama: Inclusion and Salvation in The Good Doctor

The Good Doctor is a 2013 K-drama about Park Shi-on, a young man with autism who aspires to become a pediatric surgeon. There is widespread resistance to his entering residency in pediatric surgery. He is denied a license by the Korean medical board and ridiculed by many. His problems are exacerbated by his impulsive actions and inability to conform to the requirements of the team. At the same time, a chaebol is engineering a hostile takeover of the hospital to make a for-profit children's hospital. As the story unfolds, it is the inclusion of Park Shi-on that shifts relationships inside the hospital and allows hospital leaders to stave off the takeover. The parallels to our own time are obvious.

In the final episode, Park Shi-on is awarded a medical license. The head of the medical board comes to the hospital to deliver the certificate in person. He says that this is because Park Shi-on's case has shifted the board's approach to inclusion of people with disabilities. Park Shi-on then speaks. He says that he is different and tried to overcome his differences, but couldn't. At that point, it was many people reaching out to him -- from the children on the pediatric surgery ward to the medical director of the hospital -- who enabled him to succeed. 

While Park Shi-on is learning and growing, he inspires others to dare to include. Two other romances prosper because of this. This "love across boundaries" felt very familiar to me, as my parents crossed the divide of race and in my first marriage we crossed the divide of religion. The many little scenes rang true: getting taken aside for a "talking to," the hurtful gossip, the loving defiance. 

But most important in the ultimate outcome of the struggles as that people who opened their hearts to Park Shi-on also began to the work of the hospital in a new light -- less technical and robotic, and more ineffable and loving. People talked about healing medicine that they can't see. Over and over, we realize that this healing medicine is inclusion.

I sometimes think that "inclusion" is the most radical word of our times. It is a word with no boundaries -- that is the working of inclusion we see in The Good Doctor. The show doesn't have all the bells and whistles of K-dramas made now and the soundtrack is so syrupy your feet stick to the floor. The story is so strong and so well acted that it rises above all that, to be moving, fun and instructive. 

Main Street: Out in "Nature"

I went out to dinner last night at Lighthorse, a restaurant in Jersey City. It is a restaurant that is decorated with photos and paintings of the city. I find these photos enchanting -- it's like an "urban appreciation" course. So great! 

Most of my friends know that I get annoyed when people extoll the virtues of being "out in nature," by which they mean "not in the city." This anti-urban bias contributes to a lot of our problems, including suburbanization and sprawl. But that might not be what annoys me most. I just don't think that the "nature/not nature" dichotomy is true. I reason it this way --

We build our homes in myriad ways, among them, cities -- for ten thousand years people all around the world have been building cities, likely arriving at this form of community life without knowing that others were doing it too. To my way of thinking, cities are the equivalent of beaver dams or bee hives -- they are somehow in our DNA as a way to live. 

There is another, equally important way to think about this -- whatever we mean by "nature" is no longer in its "natural" state, but all touched by the hands of people. The forests of North American, for example, were managed by Native people when Europeans arrived, and this is true of other places as well. That is why Australians are looking to the Aborigines for advice about wildfire. The difference, then, between what we call "nature" and what is "not-nature" is not all that great. 

And then there is the third way to think about this, which is that city-as-not-nature misses the "nature" of the city. And that is what the "urban appreciation" course at Lighthorse offers with its photos of homes and businesses, its historic aerial photos of the port, and its images of play and celebration. As someone who grew up across from an Olmsted Brothers park -- Orange Park in Orange, NJ -- I had a hard time appreciating cities. I was lucky to get expert teaching from Michel Cantal-Dupart. He would literally stand me in a spot and direct my eyes so that I could learn to see. Spending a lot of time in Paris helped, too, I have to add.

Finally, it's important to include the city because it's all one world. We're all cousins, as my colleague Dr. Margaux Simmons teaches us.