“I think it would be the understatement of the week to say I have a complicated relationship with my mom. Most sons would say, I love my mom, I'd die for her - I'd die for her, sure, but I don’t think I’ll ever be good friends with my mom. It’s the same with her. She says, ‘I don’t like who you are, I'd take a bullet for you but I don’t like the music you listen to, I don’t like your art.’ She tells me all the time, ‘You're a genius, you're so good at drawing. I'm so proud of what you can accomplish, but I don’t like what you draw these days.’ I just tell her that I'm just being honest, I'm trying to express myself.”
“Why do you love her?”
“I love her because she sacrifices. She just does. I know everyone says that, but my mom, I just remember her peeling, for hours - garlic. That stuff is murder on your hands. She would spend hours watching grainy Korean TV shows that she bootlegged off of someone who bootlegged it off of a Korean channel, and she would just sit there watching VCR tapes that she watched over and over - this is before Netflix, or the internet, trying to get some semblance of Korea back into her Portuguese life. Her fingers would be raw, and the house would smell horrible, and we would not appreciate it. We would complain that the house was messy and smelly from all the prep but three days later, she gives us the best kimchi we've ever had, and we go, oooohh, that makes sense. But while it’s happening you just hate it. It’s a perfect microcosm of who she is. Living with her, you’re like, this is the worst experience I've ever had, but then at the end of it you’re like, yeah i'm in college, maybe that’s why she did that… makes sense.”
“What do think is the ideal that she wants for you?”
“She’d probably like it if I wore beige, pleated pants, and nice dress shoes. I'm completely serious here.”
“So it has to do with clothes?”
“It’s about outward appearance. A belt - that’s a big plus - a shirt tucked in. No tatoos whatsoever, cause i have tattoos. Um, better skin. The most boring haircut in the world - Korean, you know, kind of grown out but weird on the side, maybe a bowl cut? I think she wants a boring son.
“You don’t think she wants you to be an artist?”
“I think she would want me to be an artist but - she says it all the time, ‘I’m so proud that you all are artists. I always wanted to be an artist. And to think i have three kids who are artists.’ She likes it but she would have me be an artist for like a church magazine.”
“No way…”
“No, cause it’s safe. I don’t know. Speaking from my heart, I think she wants something stable, very Christian.”
“She wouldn’t want you to be a world famous artist?”
“Her, no. Dad wants me to be. He said just the other day, ‘Paul, I wanted you to be the next Picasso.’ He saved all my drawings as a kid. I just say to him, ‘Dad, have you heard of tumblr? I am literally one of millions of artists.’ But my mom doesn’t want that. She just wants stability for her kids. She wants me to do whatever I want the way she wants it done. She always wants me to walk the safe path. I'm kind of the rebellious one of the family. It sucks cause I get into a lot of trouble with my parents. She probably wants me to date someone boring - someone who is too busy taking care of orphans to see me.”
“What do you think they think of as success?”
“I think i'm successful, but only for me. Personally, I do what I want to do, and for me that’s success. I have very little regrets, if any at all. But with mom and dad, my success is their success if they can talk about it, and other people make this noise - woooah. So many times they talk about how I teach in China and work with the church. I’m not even proud of those things. I podcast once a week. I’m proud of that. I maintain my humor, I build who I am personally, I work on weird art - I make it as weird and honest as possible. But they don't care about that.”
“Do you think they want you be happy?”
“Yes, I’m sure they want me to be happy. But they can’t grasp that what makes me happy might be completely antithetical to what they believe. They think I'm wasting my time. But I'm super happy. They're like, ‘No, how could you be? This is not how we think.’ sometimes it bothers me. Mom and dad threw away all their savings putting me through college. It’s crazy - logically, economically, evolutionarily, it doesn't make sense. I'm sure my parents pushed me towards college and to do well and graduate, and i'll be eternally grateful, but in a weird way, it feels, to me, that they put me through college to not have the awkward shame of one of their kids not going to college. I'm not saying that's true but that’s what I feel.”
“Why did you feel like that?”
“I think I feel like that because I would tell them, ‘I'm not happy doing this.' Not just cause it’s hard, but I don’t think it’s a good fit for me, but they said do it no matter what.”
“Isn’t that true of a lot of life? Lots of times you’re just doing what you have to do? If you could have, what would you have done differently?”
“In retrospect I’m really glad I went to college. But I probably would have picked up a trade or an apprenticeship - those are coming back in style - getting traction. I would have travelled, might have been a bum for a while. Which I kind of am now. I'm not sure what i would have done, it's hard to look back on possible pasts, but I am glad I was pushed to go to college, get through and graduate, but I just got the feeling that all of it was for our family's honor.”
“Did they ever tell you they loved you? Did you feel like they loved you?”
“Yes, I know they love me, but they grew up in the post Korean War era, where words were cheap. Rice in the mouth was the most valuable thing. They grew up in a practical, tactile, evidence based culture where words were cheap. And we grew up in Europe, surrounded by American families. I was expecting a lot - seeing other families, seeing things in movies, but I had post Korean war parents. It’s not about feelings, words - food on the table is enough. Good grades, those are enough. A roof over your head, that's enough. In my heart, I’d see my friends - their dads playing baseball, they talk to them, they joke. I never had that. With mom, she's a pillow with very sharp edges. Sometimes she would hug you, and I’d say ‘Yes, she's hugging me back!' but most of the time - she's a Korean pillow, you know, stuffed with straw, very hard, and a few splinters sticking out. You go to it for comfort, rest, to think for a while, but if you squeeze too hard, you're gonna get a few splinters. Thats mom.”
“Are you like your mom?”
“We’re the same. I love her, I don’t really like her, she loves me, she doesn’t really like me. She has a twisted sense of humor. So me, yeah, I've gotten all her weird habits. I look like her. I talk a lot. I’m overly critical of others and myself. I expect so much out of people. I read Steve Job's biography and thought, he's making perfect sense! Everything that I am is really her - even down to my physicality - even my hands. When I talk about my mom I'm talking about myself.”