Ferberization

Being Like Seriously Fucking Cute

For the last three nights the baby has been going to sleep at 9PM as a result of trying out the dreaded Ferber Method, which had been recommended to me months before Harry was even born by a friend living in China.

We had tried the method one or two times before without much dedication, and with all of the confidence for success on my side of the equation—Koreans, apparently, do not typically try this approach, and according to A. some of them are still co-sleeping with their kids after five years. But Harry was a little sick last week, barfing up almost whatever we gave him (but acting utterly nonchalant, as though spewing all over yourself and everyone around you was no different than burping), and growing even worse than usual in his sleeping habits.

The boy was quite a dictator, forcing us for months to play with him for hours, late into the night, often to eleven or twelve, even though he was exhausted and in no mood to do anything. He would require us to help him walk about the house to examine random objects, which would bore him after less than a minute. Then, after getting drunk on goat milk and falling asleep, he would scream for us two or three times a night, requiring further filler-uppers from an exhausted A., who would usually be sleeping alongside him.

It was an uncomfortable but not unbearable arrangement until Harry got sick and decided to go back to his old ways, that is, of sleeping for less than two hours at a time, all the time. At that point I decided enough was enough. For all our squeamishness about the boy’s deafening shrieking—I was wearing earplugs for most of the day, every day—we had to try a new approach. And so, after he got better, and after screaming at one another for an hour or so in what was easily our worst fight ever, A. and I ultimately decided to give it a try. Although she didn’t want to torture the wee lad, she admitted that she was tired of hauling him around on her back for an hour or two every night, waiting for him to pass out.

And so. He screamed for forty minutes the first night, and woke up two or three times, screaming for about thirty minutes each time. But we were firm, and eventually he passed out. All of us were exhausted the next day, and absolutely nothing comes close to the despair one feels in allowing one’s child to cry on and on, but on the second night the amount of screaming decreased drastically, never exceeding thirty minutes and usually terminating after just fifteen. We gained more confidence after we realized that the technique was working. And now on this third night he has gone to sleep after a mere fifteen minutes of blind animal rage. I have high hopes for tonight, because his behavior during the day has changed so drastically I considered the possibility that someone had switched him with a similarly beautiful child of mixed descent at daycare—one with far better manners. Pre-Ferber Harry and Post-Ferber Harry are almost unrecognizable in the way they approach the world.

I always complained about him here, and to anyone who would listen, and I’m sure a lot of people thought that I just didn’t have what it took to deal with babies, that I didn’t want to have one, or that my annoyance, my fury, my sadness, was due to anything except the personality of the baby himself. But seriously, guys, he is so much better now. Before he was unable to go for thirty minutes without shrieking violently at you to entertain him. Now he sits very contentedly, or writhes about on the floor, and I even caught him pulling himself up to a standing position with the help of the couch, an action that is somewhat advanced for his age (one week short of eight months). He seems so much happier, smiling and laughing far more often, and his baby babble has been growing slightly more complex. His attention span has increased. He even runs a little bit when I hold his hands to help him walk. He has become ten times easier to be with. He is fun. A pleasure. I do not feel so completely drained and exhausted after I have spent three hours alone with him. Even his screams are not so loud anymore. He barely protested while he was being dressed to go outside this afternoon—and he usually acts as though he is being taken out to be shot.

Mitt Romney is declaring victory in Florida, and I want to declare a far greater victory here—we’ve passed over the hump, it’s smooth sailing from now until I draw my last breath, and the universe ends.

A. and I know when the boy is going to sleep, which is the same thing as saying that we have something resembling our old lives back.

The Kid

I’ve been reading through the archives of one of my favorite guilty pleasure blogs, Expat Hell, which is written by a foreigner who is married to a Korean woman in Seoul. They have no children, and the guy generally has nothing good to say about them, ever.

Envy: A certain contingent of Koreans look at my situation [not having children] through envious eyes. Usually they are people who have recently had kids and are suffering sleepless nights with lots of baby crying and diaper changing. It was cute and neat and fun and cool for the first few weeks, but now they’re exhausted and stressing out realizing that a baby isn’t like a product you buy at the department store; you can’t return it when you get tired of it.

This jives, this dovetails, somewhat with my Weltanschauung or Babyanschauung or Kinderanschauung from that brief burst of freedom which came in my life before my soon-to-be wife and I accidentally conceived a child together. I was horrified for the first few hours after the revelation-via-pregnancy-test and believed that my life had ended. But my then-girlfriend had decided that if she ever got pregnant she would have the baby, while I had decided a long time ago that if I ever accidentally got a girl pregnant I would stick with her, and we were (and are still) in love, so, thinking What the hell?, we did it.

On that first day of my new life I transformed myself. As I said, at first I was horrified, but even within that horror there was this kernel of excitement and bliss, the suspicion that this was not really so bad, this could be interesting—and gradually that feeling grew over the following days and months. I was nervous about the late nights and the diaper-changing and the screaming, which is what I suspect most childless people focus on when they think about having babies, but I also believed that the baby would turn me into something new and something better—not into the dreary, sleepy, enslaved, depressed, weary, exhausted, bored, dull, fading, pointless, worthless, useless fathers we see wandering through the dim kitchens in our nightmares, but someone who has invested more of himself into the world, someone who has more interest in the things around him, someone who sees more than what he did before.

In that post, Expat Hell writes about a married Korean couple he knows that goes on all kinds of vacations and has tons of cash lying around because they don’t have any children. All the power to them. For a brief time I lived a life that was possibly similar to theirs—I traveled, I explored, I had an incredible time, but honestly at the end of it all I found myself wondering—this is it? This is really the most desirable thing? To have the freedom and the money to travel by yourself through exotic countries? It may sound ridiculous to you, but it does get old after awhile, and one desires something deeper. The four month-old baby we have now is that depth. A purpose to existence, a certain biological truth.

Ah, how terrible, how horrifying! Expat Hell is so wrong when he writes that the first few weeks are the easiest or the best—I think parents all over the world would be unanimous in saying that the first two or three months of raising a child test one’s tolerance to the limits, and our baby was a screamer who needed to be fed every two hours (day and night) from the very first moment of his life. My wife did, and still does, most of the work, but even when I took over to give her a break I found myself feeling exhausted almost immediately.

We were lucky. He seems to be a healthy, smart, good-looking kid. Over the months he has matured into something beautiful and wonderful; changing diapers is almost effortless compared to holding his bottle for him while he screams at you as he tries to fight off his exhaustion at nine or ten in the evening, but even in the worst of it, even in those moments that would horrify and disgust the author of Expat Hell, the love and the beauty of our existence together survives, and grows stronger. As a result I’ve come to know a happiness that I never knew while wandering the wilds and ruins of Turkey and Cambodia. I can stand his shrieks. It used to feel as if someone were twisting a knife in my stomach when my son exploded; now the knife has become a mosquito sting.

The hours whirl by. I can see the hands of the clocks blurring before my eyes, as I take care of him—but I love to do so. I prefer it to whatever I loved to do before.

I don’t know what else to say except that I do not envy childless people for their childlessness; the thought never even occurred to me, until now.

Your Baby Is Cold

The cold baby in question.

So as you may have gathered from the last post, my parents just spent two weeks with us here in Busan. This visit marked the debut of our baby into the world beyond the confines of our one-room apartment in Haeundae; Harry had gone outside a few times before, but usually for just a few panic-stricken hours of starlight or moonlight, during which time everyone involved in these excursions was chewing their nails down to the quick in anticipation of the impending Supernova Of Harry, when our beautiful adorable son would instantly transform himself into a shrieking, vomiting, shitstorm, usually inside two hours of leaving the apartment.

With our parents it was different. Harry had safely reached a hundred days of age, and this meant that we could take him outside without disobeying the injunctions of Korean culture, which state that an infant will expire upon contact with the outside air if he leaves the warm filial aromas of the nest before he reaches exactly one hundred days of age. If he should leave the apartment so much as a single second before this vital anniversary, the baby will collapse into the wind like a handful of ash, because Korean physics and metaphysics are often one and the same thing.

And now of course with my parents we had two more very capable people to help us take care of this kid; two more pairs of arms and legs to carry him, move him around, change his diaper, and make his milk, whenever circumstances prevented his mother and father from doing so. Their company enabled us to escape the dull boundaries of our one-room pretty much every day, for the whole day, for two weeks, and as I think all three of us had been going a little stir-crazy over the preceding months, locked as we were within the prison of the apartment, and the greater prison of Busan itself, their visit was a welcome respite from the sturm und drang of postpartum existence.

These voyages into the great abyss of Busan forced us into some odd encounters with just a few of the millions of unfortunate people who are forced to live in this place.

Foreigners of any stripe are odd and different by definition wherever you go across the world; even back in my sometime-hometown of Seal Harbor, Maine, a very stark difference can be seen between the millionaires who occupy one side of the town for several weeks in the summer and the cotton-haired retirees, tractor-driving hillbillies, and white-collar middle-classers who inhabit the other side full-time. Koreans and white people in Korea are no exception whatever to this rule that People Are Different; and one of the most obvious differences between them is how either group usually treats babies.

Entertaining my slavemaster at dinner.

For white people, I think it’s safe to say that babies are not just an annoyance, but a massive stroke of misfortune, a ready example of divine wrath. In North America babies are a near-unbearable pain in the ass for white parents, relatives, and strangers; anyone who likes babies is suspected of being a bit kooky, and most of the people who are unlucky enough to be afflicted with babies have basically thrown their lives, their careers, their wallets, their bodies, their souls, and their minds, down the gullet of their little wailing monster. They get and expect nothing except suffering in return for their sacrifice. I’m sure people will disagree with me here, but regardless, this opinion is true.

For Koreans, and perhaps also Asians at large, babies are a blessing, a gift, and a miracle. If you see a baby, your first reaction is to exclaim one of two things: “It’s cute!” or “It’s beautiful!” Then you must proceed to gaze into the baby’s eyes while also grinning ear-to-ear, as your own eyes shine with glee; you feel free to touch anyone’s baby as much as you like, and you may even ask the parents to hold the baby for a few moments.

To you, babies are delightful and amazing. Their screams make you laugh. You will stop in your tracks and stare with glee if you see a baby anywhere, even if you are standing at the middle of a crosswalk with traffic roaring straight at you from four directions. If you have a relative with a baby, you will frequently volunteer your rare free time to help take care of the baby in question, and you will never complain about doing so. These opinions are also true, because babies are essentially the greatest gifts and the most horrifying afflictions the gods could ever bestow upon a human being; double-edged swords that gore us and, often enough, rub us just the right way.

However, if you are a Korean who is at least thirty years of age, and you see a baby, you will also feel an inexplicable compulsion overwhelm all rational thought. An uncontrollable urge surges within you. If it is sunny outside, you will tell any parents you see that their baby is getting too much sun; if there is so much as a slight breeze on a blisteringly-hot day, you will tell the child’s parents that Their Baby Is Cold.

We received this latter comment several times a day from complete strangers for two straight weeks. “Ajumma,” people would say, addressing my wife, who despises that appellation, “Your Baby Is Cold.” Then they would walk off and leave everyone fuming. The baby could have been bundled up in a spacesuit and they still would have said it. Ajumma. Your baby is cold. Actually sometimes they would stop to give us this highly-useful and desperately-needed advice, but for the most part these encounters were more akin to drive-by shootings: they would snarl out the Korean at us, ajumma, agi choopda, without missing a single beat to the footsteps, breezing past as if they’d said nothing at all.

What a cutie. This ain't no ajumma. This is an agasshi.

Since these people are our elders we are usually forced to smile, bow, genuflect, lick their shoes, and thank them for their rampant idiocy, but after our hundredth yourbabyiscold I told my wife that I would start replying by saying, in Korean, with the proper polite conjugation, and the stab of a frigid smile thrown in for free, the following: “Your heart is cold.”

She laughed and then told me very seriously not to say that, since we’ll soon be living in a smaller city where people actually know each other. Actions have consequences. And as it is unlikely that any of these people are going to learn anything from my free lessons in basic etiquette—i.e., it is probably impolite to criticize strangers on the street, which they should already know, since they are so old and so wise—I may just have to stiffen my upper lip. After all, it’s not like these people have any idea of what they’re doing. It’s an uncontrollable urge. It’s an unconscious reflex. And it doesn’t just happen with babies. Indeed, in exploring Busan, one is forced to conclude that the people who made this place did so while sleepwalking.

Unwanted pediatric advice is not unique to Korea, nor is public staring—the attention I got in Eastern Turkey was far worse than anything in this country. But people still do stare, especially when I’m together with my wife, and especially when we’re together with our baby; older men in particular have a habit of stopping to do the full-on neck-crane as we pass them. Usually it is an uncomfortable experience. While we were attending to a sputtering Harry at the entrance to the spectacular Taejongdae Cliffs, more or less in the parking lot, which I thought deserted, I turned around from the milk-making and the wailing and saw that a lone Korean man dressed in an orange hiking outfit had stopped not five feet away to watch us. He said nothing. He did not acknowledge me. His expression was rather blank. He really just wanted to have himself a good stare. It’s a national pastime here; it should be a sport. But something about the lonesomeness of the place made this singular figure rather eerie. Who knows, after all, how many North Korean sleeper cells there really are?, etc., etc.

But after a few tense moments this peculiar figure stepped forward with a smile, looked down at Harry, who was by then struggling over his milk, and said, in profound Korean: “The baby is hungry.” After a very resonant pause, he glowed a bit in the sun, and then added: “Eat well”, before vanishing into the mist. I am not kidding. I could never make up something so amazing as that encounter.

Baby Auschwitz

In his ready-for-battle sleep taekwondo combat pose.

Wherein Ian compares raising an infant to life in a concentration camp.

I write these words with one hand—but don’t worry, it’s my right hand! The other is holding a bottle for the bundle of love propped up on my satyr’s legs, a child in a retrospective mood that often comes over him when he’s given the chance to chug a nice fat 160 milliliters of goatmilk down his little baby gullet, which more often than not returns the favor by forcing out frequent irruptions of warm half-curdled goatcream back onto his most cherubic cheeks. Sometimes it even oozes down my back and splashes the beautiful crimson dyes of the carpet I bought from a very talkative Belgian woman in the Turkish city of Selcuk.

I will never forget how she took the money, kissed it, pressed it to her forehead, and then placed it on the floor—or something to that effect, honestly I cannot remember the particulars—because it was the first sale of the day, and only by partaking in a local superstition like this can you hope that the money will grow before the sun sinks down beneath the bleached marble ruins that attracted me to those mountains, forests, and olive groves, in the first place.

A bare-floor loving people, every Korean I have met despises this carpet with the most savage intensity, and is often reduced to the state of a spitting, snarling wolverine at the sight of an object which covers the featureless wooden floor. They conspire against it. Eyes flashing, their lips mumble plots involuntarily. They want to donate it to the subways and place it at the bottom of the escalators on rainy days. But I won’t give in. They’ll never get my Turkish carpet, no matter how dirty it gets, no matter how many times I have to scrub off the baby cream, no, not this carpet, no, no, no.

But now, after much labor, I have put the baby back to sleep. It is the greatest struggle of my life to do so. From the moment he wakes it is the sole object of all my endeavors, and requires spending several hours a day pacing the apartment with the baby propped up on my back, frequent lengthy milk guzzling sessions, diaper replacement, and sometimes as many as two hours of relentless play, during which time I must distend my feeble imagination to the utmost in order to entertain a person whose thoughts at the moment seem to be limited to “hungry”, “tired”, “bored”, “uncomfortable”, “this is fun”, “I need to burp or fart”, and “my diaper is full”. This person cannot move anywhere on his own. His dependence is absolute. He is a human larva. And if you make one false move—it’s all over.

My preconceptions of this reality largely govern it; I was not at my bravest when I first learned that my future wife-to-be was pregnant; but the truth is that he is not such a difficult baby and, actually, often rather pleasant. Nonetheless he devours time like a singularity. I’ll hear him moving in his enormous bed, I’ll check on him, and then by the time I get him back to sleep (after several false starts that require as many trips pacing the room with a hot, sweaty, and increasingly heavy bag of flesh in your arms) the clock will somehow show that two hours of sweet, precious freedom, have vanished into the child’s temporal maw forever.

How many words, how many pages, might have been written in that time…how many cities, adventures, whole nations!, might have sprung up from my fingers, running over the keyboard like a whole marathon’s worth of joggers! Instead the great, the stupendous Ian gives his time to burping a baby, that his wife may catch a break.

Coincidentally, I just happen to be devouring an excellent book, The Aquariums of Pyongyang, which is not really about aquariums at all (sorry aquariumophiles), but actually the experience of a North Korean child who spent much of his youth in a concentration camp. I cannot help but compare his situation to my own. They are not so dissimilar (actually they are completely different), but the experience of spending hours of your day unable to make the slightest sound—creeping on tiptoe, terrified of opening the fridge (which of course creaks like an ungreased grannie whenever you touch it), of putting ear-shattering ice in your coffee, of moving, of thinking—this, I imagine, is not so different from life in a concentration camp, at least one where the guards are babies with kalashnikovs slung over their backs—and the odd thing about it is that you actually find yourself making incredible amounts of noise even as you struggle to minimize your presence as much as possible. You would think I was blind drunk, swinging around this place like an ape, stumbling over everything like a madman, knocking over every table, chair, fan, like a billowing hurricane.

But the baby sleeps, I relax, and think to myself, thank god, this is so nice, this is so pleasant, nothing could be better than the brief opportunity to be an irresponsible adult again, let’s celebrate with a nice sip of coffee, let’s get drunk, let’s shoot some cocaine, let’s go whoring, let’s shout racist epithets at random people—and then my clumsy butterfingers stumble against it, the nice wavy celadon coffee cup, the ceramic creaks against the hardwood floor (beloved of all Koreans from Dangun Wanggeom on down), and my terrified vision shoots over to the baby instantly—where, right on time, he stirs, sucks on his pacifier with the exact same kissing squeaks as the baby from The Simpsons, and then in the greatest moment of suspense and strain, spits the pacifier out.

My plans collapse. It’s all over. I’m finished. I had two, three minutes to myself. But now the rest of the morning must go to soothing the baby’s urges, a fresh wave of goatmilk, burps, feces, vomit, and peekaboo, while my mind, so desperate to sprint over the elysian fields of intellectual endeavor, must wither at the sight of his adorable smile, and his warm, green-black-blue-gray eyes.

Superficiality

Okay, so I’m willing to admit that the baby’s pretty cute, but the difference between me and everyone else on Earth is that I don’t want to dwell on it too much. I would say, now, to those who wonder just what my wife and I do when we’re alone together—those who seek to illuminate the mysterious darknesses of the world—I would answer that a great majority of our conversations go like this:

Wife: [So-and-so] says Harry is [physically attractive].
Me: Heh.

I once caused a whole conversation (among my in-laws!) to grind to a halt when I declared, in Korean, that all Koreans talk about is people’s faces. And I think those few outsiders who have even bothered to notice Korea would likewise agree that the usual Western love of the superficial has been taken to unusual extremes here, where really every problem is one that can be solved with the aide of plastic surgery. If your eyes are too small, if your nose is too flat—if you look too Korean—you can always get that creepy eye and nose surgery to make yourself look more white. Then there are the pictures you have to send with your resumes, on top of that…

But when I told my wife it was kind of disturbing how so many Koreans are so desperate to change from being Korean to white, she herself also seemed embarrassed, disturbed, and chagrined; clearly she had never thought of it that way; these noses and eyes were features that some Koreans are born with, they don’t belong to white people exclusively; white people just happen to possess them more often than Koreans…

Still, I can’t help thinking how obvious it is that the standard of beauty here is to look as white as possible. And that brings me back to my kid. I hesitate to constantly compliment his appearance because I know that standards of beauty are relative, and that before Korea’s contact with the West, the only beautiful people you found in paintings here were ones with very small, thin eyes. The idea of beauty is, again, obviously, to me at least, totally subjective and relative, which is one reason I’m kind of bothered by this endless slew of compliments directed toward my son.

It’s natural for people to compliment a cute baby. But I’m afraid the complimenting is not going to stop, ever.

The anecdotes I can throw your way are so odd, and so peculiar: Koreans believe that pregnant women should only look at good things during their pregnancy, and that, of course, means no homeless people, and no horror movies. At the same time a pregnant woman should also direct her attention to the beautiful, to help make her unborn child more beautiful, which is why my wife revealed to me yesterday that one of her pregnant friends was looking at pictures of my son, essentially for good luck. This is called taegyo (태교).

My brother-in-law just joked that we should pay him some money for photographing Harry because it’s a foregone conclusion now that the boy is going to be a model—no, you say, looking back at his photo, is he really that pretty?—who knows, maybe not, he certainly looks ugly enough when he’s shrieking for attention.

All of this gets to me because I know that the compliments aren’t going to end as long as we stay here. Koreans are a rather outspoken people, they say what they think, which means that if you come to this country, and you’re fat, or handsome, or ugly, people will constantly tell you that you’re fat, or handsome, or ugly, or whatever, and they won’t expect you to be offended or disturbed because it’s the norm here—if you’re ugly, and you live in Korea, you should be used to it by now.

To contrast, discussing people’s appearances so blatantly is really not something that polite people do in America, at least in the northeast—maybe we talk about clothes, or something ridiculous and strange, like breast implants, and that’s pretty much it. Only a rude, boorish, superficial, and unintelligent person would obsess over physical appearances, but that’s not the way it is in Korea. Either it’s a different culture, or everyone (and I’m serious, every single person) is an idiot here. You should see how they primp themselves in the (rather ubiquitous) public mirrors: so blatantly, in a way that would get them ridiculed endlessly back in America, for being narcissists.

My wife has also joked that she performed plastic surgery on our son when he was in her womb: this may seem really creepy here but it was pretty funny when she said it.

Anyway, I’m disturbed, piqued, bothered, worried, because Koreans think the boy looks good (for now at least), and so long as they do, they’re going to tell him—which means it’s going to go to his head. I think it’s safe to say that constantly telling someone he is handsome through the course of his most formative years is a guaranteed way of making him an idiot.

This is obviously the reason I am so luminous now: maybe I was a cute baby, but I only got uglier as I grew older, and my teenage years were essentially a continuous humiliation of the human spirit, where I was confronted with the most monstrous beast whenever I looked in the mirror, unable, on top of that, to escape my inborn idiocy, laziness, awkwardness, and slovenliness. If I started to look better at all in college, it was because I finally found a place that allowed me to be myself; in high school I felt the most horrific pressure to conform, while in college it was the opposite, and if you acted like anyone else you were a poser. In High School it was so painful for me, and I still have the fiercest resentment directed toward that period, and I sometimes feel like my former classmates are still laughing at me for being such a loser. But college changed at least some of that.

What does this senseless, gratuitously self-indulgent ramble say? That intelligence is best (even though we’re all basically the same), that superficiality is worst, that to gain intelligence, you must lack superficiality, and to lack superficiality, you must leave Korea, and go to America, where people probably won’t obsess over your son’s appearance so much, but you’ll have to live through an economic collapse if you go there, and that will totally suck, so what can you do except sell your baby to the diaper companies (like Mason Moon) and ride the wave of cash like a bellyboarding slob?

This is what we can hope for—that the baby will be cute enough to whore out to photographers for exorbitant amounts of cash, then turn ugly as a teenager so people stop complimenting him (my wife and I were both pretty unattractive youths), and then grow up a nice smart philosopher, with two parents still benefiting from the absurd superficialities of his babyhood.

On Babies And The Utilization Of Time

I should not be writing this. The last time I had time to write was a little over twelve hours ago, and like a fool I squandered every sweet, luscious, nectar-soaked second of that time on two paragraphs typed into my journal. And then the baby woke up.

Before I thought that having a child would help me focus my free time, and that I would become more of a diligent worker. Somehow I rationalized my way out of my fears and declared that when there is a living drain in your life, into which time and energy and breastmilk and powdered goatmilk swirl just like a tornado’s eye, somehow you still have a few raveled skeins of tattered black cloud left to you—and you can cling to those, and make up for all the hours you lost giving someone milk, changing someone’s diaper, getting someone to burp, trying to calm someone down, trying to put someone to sleep, placing the pacifier in someone’s mouth and keeping it there, wiping up someone’s endless cascades of milk vomit, calming someone down again, getting someone to burp again, putting someone down, picking someone up, wiping someone’s warm viscous puke off of your shoulders and your back—perhaps you can make up for the twelve hours you lost while doing all those things to someone, and give the few hours left to the work you yourself were born for.

The trouble is that those few hours of freedom are scattered into five minute packages which are themselves—what? I am too tired to think of a verb to continue this metaphor. I will put it more plainly: the breaks come and go so quickly, and you’re so worn out in general, that you can’t take advantage of them. You are the baby’s slave. It’s not true that your life totally changes when you have a baby, because I’m still me, I still have the same urges, there is a monster inside me that cannot stop thinking of spaceships, skyscrapers, jihadis in black cloaks galloping over golden deserts, it’s just that now I’ve been locked up!, shackled to a chain gang!, singin’ folk songs while I slam the rails into place!, and I don’t got no time for no jihadis! the train’s huffin’ and puffin’ right behind me, steam’s a screamin’, black smoke’s a churnin’ up into the blood red sky!

And the baby is starting to wake up again.

Milk

When the two screened windows are closed our apartment starts to smell overwhelmingly of milk. They were closed when I woke up this morning because Kim Eun Ok was freezing all last night after a fever and two separate trips to the hospital left her in a precarious state the previous day. It’s all thanks to this: the boy has been less than professional about sucking her left breast, he merely nibbles on it and then dozes off for a few minutes, during which time nothing will rouse him, not even an icecube to the foot, and if you so much as caress her beautiful motherly breast with a single see-through pantherspot-patterned veil, you engorge it with milk instantly, and firm it up until it’s painfully rock solid, and the white nourishment starts to drip out of her nipple as if it’s being fed into an IV tube. She told me she felt like she was giving birth again yesterday, she was in such pain from this.

Speaking of IVs, at the hospital on her second trip, during which she was interviewed on the subject of her spectacular but painful breasts by a very nervous male intern, she convinced a nurse that she herself was a nurse, and was allowed to carry her IV pouch home, with the long clear tube still hooked into her wrist.

She revived after popping some painkillers at the hospital, but little Harry would not be consoled: though he cooperated with me during the two hours she was out, and downed two bottles of powdered goatmilk like he was drinking for money in a Nepalese tavern, he would start writhing on his back the moment I put him down, and after Kim Eun Ok returned home in a state of semi-triumph (delighted over the intern’s nervousness: always forgetting how American men are reduced to slack-jawed yokels when they see her) he was positively beside himself, and could not be consoled. He was not my son but some rigid, rubbery, crimson larval-like creature so enraged it could barely draw enough air down into his lungs to shriek. But upon being placed in her arms the beast subsided and the rudimentary human being returned.

Supposedly he has begun to look at things. I have yet to witness this. In the morning he woke up a few times without bawling for his mother, and then fell asleep again. This in itself is a triumph of self-improvement.

For two weeks our house was taken care of by a woman we’d hired at a discount rate through the government: with a servant and a mother in a very small living space, there was little for a man to do, but she did such a good job cooking and cleaning and giving my wife a break that after she left I began to fear for the comfort of our household. At the same time I felt totally useless around the both of them. Chauvenism also goes both ways: men in Korea do not usually care for children in Korea, but it’s partly because the women don’t want them to, and think them incapable of doing so. But last night I took care of Harry and cleaned up the entire apartment and cooked a college dinner (spaghetti from the pot!), which made me feel a bit more like a member of my own house, though when I failed to sooth him out of one of his tantrums I myself was reduced to a sour mood, thinking my presence useless and pointless, wondering if my son would grow up to despise me.

Conversing With The Baby

There’s so much here that’ll seem familiar to parents and anyone who’s spent a lot of time around babies; but for most of us, and for me two weeks ago, these experiences are wholly strange and exotic.

Take wiping another person’s ass. In most cases I think this would horrify both parties involved, but as it stands now, the process is only occasionally uncomfortable for the owner of the ass in question—a young boy who kicks his legs so hard as this is happening that you have no choice except to hold both of them together by the ankles high up in the air, so you can clean off every last pasty speck of curry-colored shit from his ass crack, all the while fearing that he is not yet finished, that more gas and shit lingers inside his intestines, and that in a moment all of it will jet forth in a brownish fountain and spray hordes of shrieking, innocent bystanders, with an endless flood of spewing, tumbling, oceanic, shit.

Tolstoy wrote that there is no condition to which a man cannot become accustomed (here I have won the “Imitate Ian” Contest); and before this baby popped out of my wife’s swollen abdomen I feared only his screaming, his shit, and the possibility that the radiation from Japan had ripped through one too many of his double helices. In the case of all of these fears thus far, none have been as frightening as I had supposed, but naturally there are other issues that have arisen.

What, for instance, should I say to him during the few hours a day we spend together, when he is alternately gorging himself on impossible amounts of powdered goatmilk, writhing about like a snake on my legs and staring in any direction other than my unpleasantly hirsute face, or kicking his own legs and pumping his own arms because he is trying to expel whatever is inside him?

I am not one of those people who talks down to children, unless they really ask for it, and the same goes for adults (I hope)—only when a person purposefully acts idiotic does he or she deserve to be addressed as an idiot. Otherwise they are innocent until proven guilty. This is actually one of the secrets of hanging around young kids: don’t be a hypocrite.

So despite its benefits, babytalk is pretty much out of the question. Much of our time together has actually been spent in relative silence because I’ve had no idea what to say to him, and this definitely isn’t good because my wife doesn’t speak English to him all the time and, really, except for her and me, everyone else has been babbling to him endlessly in Korean (asking, for instance, if he is cold, when he starts to hiccup). And one can only talk about how pretty his eyes are so often.

Although I talk people’s heads off about all kinds of stupid things they don’t give a damn about, I still don’t really like one-sided conversations, and what else could a conversation between us be, at this point, when the boy’s verbal language is almost nonexistent? But my wife told me I should just talk to him, and there’s actually all kinds of things on my mind that I think about when we’re together—I just keep them to myself, because I assume that he isn’t interested (a phenomena one must get used to if one is to embark on a study of books rather than football games).

And although after trying and failing to read three of his most popular books, I have concluded that Umberto Eco is overrated Borges-lite, saying in hundreds or thousands of watered-down pages what Borges can say in five focused gems of the brightest luminousity, I still remember how he said once that he only started writing books after his own children grew up, and he had no one to tell any stories to. It was his explanation for becoming a novelist so late in life. And so, because my wife is not so gaga over all the weird ideas I imbibed while sponging up my private pantheon of assorted thinkers and luminaries, I’ve decided to break the damn, release the river!, and dump all I’ve got into his unbelievably cute skull, whenever we’re together, and whenever I haven’t yet managed to put him back to sleep.

The Screams Of Little Rabelais

So the dreaded moment has come—the newborn baby has arrived at our house and is sleeping in his enormous Korean bed/crib/inflatable tub/potential fortress, which is large enough for two adults to lie in side-by-side. It even came with two bent poles that we can set up as a tent for hanging those ringing chandeliers you always see dangling over the blurry visions of babies in films or, more importantly, for mosquito netting, but we haven’t set them up yet.

Baby's Luxury Suite, Baby Included.

I want to say that most men are afraid of screaming babies, because I know damn well that I am. Nothing stresses me out like the sight of our poor son flushed to the color of blood, flexing every muscle in his face in a contortion of agony, jerking his legs and arms up and down like they’ve been loaded with springs. And I’ve had to take four breaks from writing these paragraphs because the boy has an unbelievable metabolism and a very healthy, glass-shattering shriek, downing about fifty milliliters of milk every half hour or so, and shitting his diapers full of curry-colored orange cake every other half hour. Already the science of poopology fascinates me, as well as the science of child-rearing.

I’ve been handling him almost totally alone for the last five hours, and I am, as they say, “getting the hang of it”, at least for the moment. Wailing babies are terrifying, but the satisfaction of calming him down successfully, changing his diaper, swaddling him, getting him his milk, and then throwing some Pavlovian psychology into the mix—I play Guns N’ Roses when he’s relaxing, a band I haven’t listened to since I was my son’s age, when the song Sweet Child O’ Mine apparently soothed me during my own fits of Rabelaisian gluttony—the satisfaction of all of this does indeed outweigh the frustration, exhaustion, and terror. Those emotions certainly exist, and all of them are really stressing both my wife and I out, but this is a great learning experience, and we are adapting as quickly as the Borg.

And I’ve had no choice but to adapt. Part of me believed that having a child would force my mind and body into a state of endless languishing torpor, where I would grow as hopelessly obese as an American and lose interest in anything except staring at a television during my rare moments of freedom from wage slavery and child care. Not so. Not yet, anyway. That exemplary destiny of fat twilight and dumb purgatory may still await me if this boy really truly burns me out, but for now I think I am making progress, facing my fear of hysterical infants, and overcoming it.

And in India mafiosos glutted with vengeance exclaim how their enemies sleep with the elephants.

‘Twas not always so. Harry has been home for about three days now, and yesterday morning when I had some time to myself in a state of semi-exhaustion on the long train ride to Sasang, my thoughts flew to the Buddha, who abandoned his first child after naming him something like “Shackle” or “Burden” or other; Leo Tolstoy, who only took an interest in his fifteen or twenty children after they were infants, leaving them with his wife and servants until then; and Don Delillo, one of those famous unread authors writing in a style that is so plain it is practically tasteless, put together a good short story awhile back for the New Yorker that involved two exhausted parents stumbling around in a dark kitchen as their twin babies howled through the passing months. Loss of life and liberty. Formless hopelessness.

Only when I had a little more energy a few hours later did I consider the idea that I had to just not freak out when the baby cries. There’s the rub, recommended by my wife, who is far calmer under this immensest of pressures. God what things I could accomplish if I too could remain calm in the face of a caterwauling infant, if that sound could be my Pavlovian trigger for meditative bliss. A thousand drill sergeants spitting all kinds of filth in my face would put me to sleep like a lullaby. Novels would literally write themselves. Wings would sprout from my back. Rainbows would guide me to pots of leprechaun-guarded gold—so long as little Francois Rabelais was ready to blow a gasket.

He’s starting to writhe like a cocooned caterpillar again—I must away!

With the Midnight Grandparents.