change the pear vol. 31 8 Jul 2025

hello. we're about midway through winter over in the southern hemisphere (god willing) and the flu knocked me and hana for six towards the end of june, which i'm still slowly recovering from. things in general have felt very slow here for a while now. i'm trying to have patience with that.

on repeat

an album for the car: bruce springsteen’s born to run.

an album for writing: KAYE’s conscious control (thank you zoë for the rec!!)

i’ve been feeling a little stuck music-wise lately and would love to hear new recommendations from people if you’ve been spinning anything you love lately!

last seen

as previously mentioned, i was Not Well at the end of june, resulting in me desperately needing to watch a crime procedural. a british crime procedural, for my sins, because nobody does depressing copaganda quite like the brits. hana and i watched dept q starring matthew goode as the extremely divorced detective inspector carl morck (me: is it a coincidence that it sounds like KARL MARX??? arenike: i… think so?). seriously, i think carl is the most divorced character i’ve ever come across. every single person he interacts with, he’s somehow divorced from: his actual ex-wife, his therapist, his lodger martin, his boss moira, his partner hardy (side-note: i SCREAMED when hardy said “that’s my partner” to a doctor and she replied “i didn’t know you were gay!” thank you dept q for making the joke about detective partnerships that nobody else is willing to make), his junior dc rose, and his new sidekick akram. stunning work. what a miserable man who is terrible at feelings! give me nine episodes of it please and thank you.

the actual crime that is being solved is a cold case: the disappearance of prosecutor merrit lingard. i found it pretty easy to solve, but annoyingly not only because it was fairly obvious from the clues we were given, but because of the choices made by the writers/directors/producers. for example, rose goes to the island where merrit grew up and wants to see the mother of merrit’s teenage boyfriend, who died after police were trying to arrest him for brutally beating and permanently disabling merrit’s brother, william (look, we can’t even get into the whole thing, just go with me). rose turns up at the caravan home of mrs jennings only to find oh whoops, she’s at church. seeing as we had visual footage of one of merrit’s kidnappers being an old woman who is delighting in torturing her, it was pretty obvious why we weren’t shown mrs jennings on camera. there was a twist that i didn’t see coming, but after it was revealed i just… didn’t believe in its credibility lol.

in general, the extended scenes of merrit being tortured inside a hyperbaric chamber that’s slowly increasing in pressure were gratuitous and not enjoyable. at first, i wanted them not to even show merrit was alive, in order to increase the suspense (and i do think that a later reveal of that fact would have been more dramatic, and cut down on the same repetitive torture scenes) but i do get that they wanted to tell a story about merrit as well as the detectives trying to solve the case. still, i enjoyed watching my new favourite divorcé and his merry men and will probably be tuning in for the next season.

currently watching

after we wrapped up dept q, i immediately made hana start watching line of duty with me, because she’s never seen it. we’ve just started season two and god, it is so GOOD. i feel alive. i love my best friends ds arnott, dc fleming and superintendent hastings!!! they’re here to do one thing and one thing only: catch bent coppers. more thoughts to come as we go through the seasons—i love season one, but it’s seasons 2 and 3 that are really the standouts for me. lindsay denton here we go!

reading

recently, i picked up elisa shua dusapin’s novella the pachinko parlour (tr. aneesa abbas higgins) and i can’t lie, i was expecting a 3 star piece of literary fiction that was well-written but ultimately a bit empty. for the first 50 pages, that was definitely the vibe. but by the time i finished the book, i was crying so hard i gave myself a headache. i lay in bed next to hana, gasping out sobs; every time i stopped crying i’d remember something that happened and start crying again.

our narrator, claire, is a young woman from switzerland visiting her zainichi grandparents in tokyo. zainichis are koreans who have been living in japan for generations, exiled from their homeland because of colonialism, war, and the ongoing occupation of south korea (for more on zainichis, see this article by derek ford). claire speaks japanese, but has lost her korean language ability; she communicates with her grandparents in broken english and korean. we slowly find out that this visit has a special purpose—claire and her boyfriend mathieu were meant to accompany her grandparents to korea, their first return since they left over fifty years prior. mathieu couldn’t come in the end, so claire takes on organising the trip. but her grandparents seem strangely reluctant, unwilling to make plans or discuss their travel. her grandfather is still working in the family pachinko parlour, even though he’s over ninety (japan has no pension scheme); her grandmother can’t leave the house on her own without getting lost and confused. their relationship with claire is strained, distant despite their close proximity and shared meals. you get the sense that neither party is being fully honest with the other. we learn that on previous visits, mathieu developed a connection with claire’s grandmother. while she never speaks japanese to claire, she was able to talk to mathieu in the language, telling him things that claire never knew about her time living under japanese occupation in korea.

amongst all this, claire develops a relationship with ten-year-old mieko, who she is employed to teach french over the school holidays. mieko’s mother is a french teacher and wants mieko to study abroad in switzerland, insisting that claire call her ‘henriette’. their domestic set-up is incredibly weird: they live on the top floor of a hotel, with mieko’s room in the old pool, and they regularly eat western food, to acclimatise mieko for when she moves. instead of really teaching mieko any french, claire takes her on a series of bizarre outings: to disneyland tokyo, to the zoo, to heidi’s village. mieko is awkward around claire, and their interactions are always somewhat stilted, yet they manage to grow into a strange co-dependence.

the scene that began my weeping session was one where claire returns home on her birthday. she’s sure that her grandparents have forgotten, so she’s made plans to have dinner with mieko and her mother (mieko invited her upon learning it was claire’s birthday). when she walks into the kitchen, she discovers that her grandparents have made her long-life noodles, set up her grandmother’s little playmobil figures so they’re all clapping, all to celebrate her birthday. her grandfather is even wearing a party hat.

‘You should’ve let me know …’ I mutter, caught off guard.

They gaze blankly at me. I mumble something about not being able to stay, that I have to go out, I’m going to be late, regretting every word as soon as I utter it.

‘But you’ve been out all day,’ my grandmother says. ‘You’ve only just got home.’

I try and explain: Mieko and Henriette’s invitation, I’d have said no, if only I’d known. She cuts me off. I hadn’t told them my plans either. I never tell them anything. She’s even bought a chocolate cake. And as if to emphasise the point, she goes into the kitchen and comes back with a cake, iced and decorated with the number thirty.

claire’s relationship with mieko parallels her relationship with her grandparents: there’s so much mieko doesn’t understand about claire’s unhappiness, her feeling of displacement at being part of the diaspora, complicated by her grandparents’ position as exiles from korea and second-class citizens in japan. similarly, there is so much claire doesn’t know about her grandparents: it’s mathieu who tells her that her great-grandmother cut her tongue so she couldn’t speak japanese, because speaking korean was illegal under japanese occupation. yet the difference comes because mieko asks. she asks to see the pachinko parlour, she asks to meet claire’s grandmother, she asks about what claire’s father does. we know that claire’s grandmother communicates with mathieu in japanese and not claire. but did claire ever ask?

stories about asian grandparents always get me, because of my own grandmother. i recognise so much from my own relationship to her and my mum’s relationship to her in this book. the gulf of communication between you and your grandparents; how they love you so much but don’t know how to express that in ways you can understand. gestures like a surprise birthday cake, or watching all the disney films with you in a language they can’t speak, just to be close to you—those are the words they communicate with. and within the parameters of that language, one that is so bound up with duty and sacrifice, it’s hard to communicate that love back, to people who have known you since you were born. how can you even come close to doing for them what they have done for you?

another scene that made me cry is one between claire and her grandfather. they are finally on their way to the port town where they can take the ferry over to korea. there is still a reluctance in claire’s grandparents to take this trip; it’s clear to us that they are, in some ways, doing it for her, because this is something they know is important to her.

This trip might not work out the way I imagine, he says. I’d like to tell him that I’m not imagining anything, but he continues, punctuating his speech with lengthy pauses.

‘When Korea was divided, we were still nationals of a unified Korea. It was called Choson. At separation, the Japanese government gave us permission to keep our Korean identity, but we had to choose between North and South. Many people chose the North, because of their family or because they considered the North more in line with our country’s traditions. There was no way of knowing how things would turn out. Your grandmother and I chose the South because we were from Seoul. That was the only reason. We knew nothing about any of the rest of it. Political questions meant nothing to us, the Cold War, Russia, the United States. Koreans who live in Japan have never known North and South Korea. We are all people of Choson. People from a country that no longer exists.’

He pauses. Then adds, ‘We do still have our language.’

I’m sorry I’ve forgotten how to speak it, I say in Japanese. If my mother hadn’t left to go abroad, if I’d been born somewhere other than Switzerland … He stops me. Asks me not to criticise my mother’s choices. He and my grandmother fled Korea so she could be born in a country free of war. He has always hated the Shiny. My mother grew up. She wanted to leave and she left. Their only desire was for her to live her life according to her own choices.

He looks at me affectionately. And now, here I am, he says. I feel myself blushing.

in the end, claire gets on the boat alone. her grandparents tried, for her, but they can’t go the full distance. she has to do it alone; try to unite the complex parts of herself into one whole.

this book takes the classic diaspora feeling of “you left your country and now i can’t connect with you on the level that i might have been able to had i also grown up in the same environment as you” and makes it more complex and knotty because of the way that koreans were forced to come to japan, leaving behind a country that no longer exists. no wonder claire’s grandparents feel a reluctance to go back to korea—what is there left for them there? they have been away too long. but, of course, there is then the flip side of “well, we wanted you/your parent to have a good life and do what you want and to do that we had to leave and remain here in a place we hate and is eternally foreign to us”. there’s no resentment over such a huge loss, such a division from culture and home—they did it for love, for duty. their only desire was for claire’s mother to live her life according to her choices. sacrifice is the eternal theme of asianness, convince me otherwise!

reading this book reminded me of a time, not long before my grandma died, when i asked her if i could interview her about her early life in china, before she left for taiwan, before she came to the us and met my grandfather. she said, yes, yes, but finish exams first. we can talk later. i never ended up speaking to her about it. it’s an eternal regret i have, that i could have known her better, understood her more. there’s a whole chunk of history—my history—that i’ll never know, that i can only grasp in the broadest strokes. when i spoke to my mother about it, she said, “oh, pawpaw wouldn’t have said much anyway. she never wanted to talk about it”. reading claire’s story made me feel more at ease with believing that. sometimes we can’t express things in words. sometimes people leave things buried; because the rage and loss and alienation and loneliness that those memories bring up are tied so tightly to love, duty, devotion and sacrifice. maybe my grandma wouldn’t have been able to tell me what it was like, leaving china behind, having children in a place so foreign and hostile. i still wish i’d asked her, though.

miscellaneous

bob vvylan at glastonbury. doenjang jjigae. watching in the soop with hana. the king parrots that have taken up residence in the tree across the road to snack on the fallen nuts. possums getting silly with it. BTS reuniting at long last. our huge haul from the secondhand book fair. talking to elete on a long morning walk. seeing a little egret in lyneham wetlands. hana buying two little ceramic mushrooms. lighting a candle in the holder saskia got for me. g&ts for sofia's birthday. ash learning the word "easily!" hana and i's matching hope on the stage t-shirts. amy baking us crumble. going for filipino food with ping and hana and ordering exclusively meat dishes. watching an ateez concert with zoë. frosty morning runs. this insane eric adams video. this poem by joshua clover. this poem by david scott.

thank you for reading. i love you. see you soon.