Rumination + Illustration = Illumination

Wondering Wandering Woman.

My friend Jenny and I were roaming in Seoul a year or seven back, and came across the kind of store I adore, full of crappy old 70s toys and 60s lunchboxes and the like. (I live in hope that I’ll stumble upon a shoebox full of mint condition vintage Viewmaster Reels on sale for next to nothing). Everywhere we looked, we saw Wonder Woman. Jenny bought a postcard of her and, when she got home to Hong Kong, sent me a scan of it with a request for words about the Super Hero(ine). I said sure.

But, the thing is, though, I was just never that into Wonder Woman, as portrayed by Linda Something. I hadn’t been in Canada long when I first saw the show. I was still all British and that. It was just Saturday morning time filler. I didn’t see the appeal of satin knickers and big hair with my European eyes. I didn’t feel in any way emPOWered by her. My brothers got her, though. Oh, yes. They most certainly did. Or wished they had.

It was around this time that I witnessed my Dad and brothers oohing and aaahing over the Coppertone suntan lotion girl in TV ads, admiring her glow and utter lack of body hair. Given that I was just in the process of getting some myself, I felt rotten, unsightly, ungainly. I slumped out of the fake-wood-paneled basement / TV room, with its fake English pub, and went up to my bedroom to disappear into a favourite childhood book and pretend nothing was happening anywhere in the house or the whole wide real world.

It’s a strange thing to have male relatives admiring other females. On the one hand you feel jealous and insecure because you know you are none of the things they’re enjoying, but then again you really don’t want them looking at you that way anyway. I suppose a young girl with a strong sense of self and/or a strong feminine role model can either roll her eyes and ignore the male reactions, or take it as a guideline as to what other boys might want to see and leave it at that.

The effect it had on me, I suspect, was to make me defiant about not giving men what I think they want, what I’ve been told by TV, magazines, etc, that they desire. To this day, I own next to no makeup, take little trouble with my hair, and basically make minimal effort towards appearing ‘pretty’ or ‘desirable’. This stance was particularly difficult to maintain in Korea where appearance is all, copious use of hand mirrors is seen as essential rather than as vain, and where, if you don’t make an effort, your ‘looking tired’ or ‘looking sick’ will be pointed out to you with no effort to spare your feelings. As if you are not somehow capable of looking in a mirror and making your own judgments and decisions.

Carter! That’s her name. Lynda Carter. Was she supposed to represent the 70s ideal of womanhood, the post-feminist pre-shoulder-pad-80s woman who is strong and purposeful and busy, yet also sexy and stunning, her guiding force being to help others with no thought for herself? And isn’t that still what women are encouraged to be?

There is still pressure on women to have a perfect personal life and be all things to all intimates, then go out and make the world a better place, or at least help out the nearest and dearest, all while looking fabulous. Most certainly this is so in South Korea. In response to personal questions from my students one time I talked about the many places I’ve been to and the things that I’ve done, single-handedly: getting from delivering mail to collecting a PhD in law inside of ten years, changing discriminatory laws, editing and writing influential books, going around the world a couple of times. They interrupted to ask whether I’m married. Do they really think I could’ve done all I’ve done if I was also married with kids? Do they really believe that you don’t have to choose, to some extent? Maybe I’m wrong about that. Some women do seem to ‘have it all’.

But, come to think of it, did Wonder Woman have a family?

All the women I admire, and am lucky to have in my life, spend their time improving the world, simply by virtue of their presence in it. Some have families, some don’t, some have had to make difficult choices, some never had a choice in terms of marriage and so on because they’ve never met their Superman. But all are strong and fabulous and don’t need skintight hot pants or a golden lasso to prove a damn thing to anybody. You can flash me that Coppertone tan if you like but I’ll just think of melanomas and then be on my way, if it’s all the same to you. There’s no hand mirror in my pocket. I’d rather look out at the world.

[Lomo/photo taken at the Miss USA / Teen USA Vermont pageant, the Radisson Hotel, Burlington, Vermont, November 2003].

After some leaf-crunching walks in Crystal Palace Park with Barnaby Pickles, a few evenings in front of a roaring fire, a few baked potatoes in their jackets, and more than a few Whiskey Macs down the hatch, at last I feel I’ve begun to truly experience my first British autumn in 9 years.

Gyeongju was fabulous yesterday, perfectly Halloweenish. No ghost cat this time, though.

Gyeongju is home to the tumuli tombs of the Silla kings, some as old as mid-1st century. The most famous is the Flying Horse Tomb, as a birchbark saddle mudflap with such a horse painted on it was found inside, in amazing condition. But I am haunted by the largest and the only tumulus - one of dozens in Gyeongju - to have trees growing out of it. Unbelievable, Tim Burton trees. Just what is it that allows the mood, the magic, the majesty, exuded by these ancient living things, which I feel looking at them no matter the season or the weather, this feeling of entranced and humbled awe they gift me, to seep into the pictures? It’s not even how they look at the time, but only how they seem to me. The very first image I posted on this blog back on 1 August is a Poladroided Lomo of two of those trees. I got another 100 or so images last night. I thought it might be a Lomo thing, this strange alchemy - the LC-A can be like that - but it works with any camera, this capturing of the numinous from and around these marvelous trees.

As mentioned, it’s not only Gyeongju’s trees I’ve been haunted by. In 2005 I stumbled across a guest house next to the main tumuli park called Sa Rang Chae, a set of little traditional houses with sleeping mats on the heated floors. It was a windy night, with a little snow, and one of the handmade-paper screen doors blew open and woke me. After falling back into a fretful sleep I was awoken again by a sensation: the feeling of paws moving on the bed to my right, then across my chest, then off the bed to my left. When I turned on the light there was no cat there. But after spending much of my childhood sharing my bed with a cat called Tinkerbell, I know what I felt.

That otherworldly, othertimely, smoky-smelling, misty-raining feeling you sometimes get in Autumn? Is like lifeblood to me. During two years in northern Thailand it’s the thing I missed most; it came perhaps just one day each year. Korea, on the other hand, has a long and glorious Autumn. It’s slow in coming this year, but I can smell it’s on the way.

Yesterday I read one of the saddest sentences I think was ever written, in an (excellent) Paris Review interview with Michel Houellebecq:

‘He has no pictures of himself as a child.’