Cafe Sunbike (Jeju-si)
Review by Rachel Brooks, ETA 2014-2016 City: Jeju-si Restaurant Name: Cafe Sunbike (카페 썬바이크) Foods Served: coffee, smoothies, sandwiches, burritos, and more Restaurant Address: 제주특별자치도 제주시 연북로 527 1층 Cafe Sunbike Directions: A short walk from Jungang Girls’ High School, the cafe is catty-corner from the CGV movie theater. Cost: around 5,000 – 12,000 won for a beverage and food item After hearing positive things about Cafe Sunbike from word-of-mouth, I had been itching to visit and finally went with a friend last semester. A cafe that doubles as a bike shop, Cafe Sunbike quickly became one of my favorite coffee shops. The menu boasts an impressive selection of beverages and food items, and you can check out bicycle parts while you wait for your order. With a sporty, youthful vibe, Cafe Sunbike’s beverages are surprisingly affordable considering you get to keep the water bottle that contains certain beverages, including the smoothies, frappes, and smoothies. For a mere 500 won extra, you can upgrade other beverages, like the coffee selection, to include the water bottle keepsake. The establishment has your typical coffee and tea choices as well as ades, pongdang lattes, smoothies, and frappes. Quench your thirst with a blue lemonade, apple mango, green grape, or grapefruit ade for 5,000 won, and strawberry, mango, and blueberry smoothies are available for 5,500 won each. For 6,000 won, choose from strawberry, blueberry, or mango pongdang lattes, which combine fruit, ice, and milk. My friend’s strawberry smoothie was milk-based, so the taste was delightfully creamy and reminiscent of strawberry milk in slushie form. Frappes cost between 5,500 to 5,800 won, and the flavor options are chocolate, green tea, cookies and cream, and vanilla. I was pleasantly surprised by rich, tiny chocolate chunks in my chocolate frappe. Both my friend and I were impressed with the high quality tastes and textures. If your sweet tooth is especially large, the massive strawberry or chocolate banana “triple tower” beverages feature a mix of yogurt smoothie, fruit, and lots of chocolate. Food options range from sweet to savory. Depending on your mood, you can top your honey bread with caramel, blueberry, strawberry, or garlic flavors. After much deliberation, my friend and I ordered the blueberry honey bread to share and were ecstatic when it arrived with generous helpings of whipped cream and blueberry topping. Other food includes bulgogi, ham and egg, or maple ciabatta as well as sausage, chicken, or bulgogi burritos for between 4,000 and 5,000 won. A short walk from a Megabox theater, the cafe is spacious and clean. It employs a friendly staff, and an English translation of everything on the menu is readily available. While my friend and I visit in the evenings after school, Cafe Sunbike opens at 8am, so it’s the perfect place to stop by for anything from a boost of caffeine in the morning to a sweet treat after work.
How I Learned to Be Confident in Korea
I learned how to be confident in Korea, holding my head high, high heels announcing my presence, steps echoing in a still-quiet subway station. I learned how to be confident in Korea starting with lip tint – for the moisturizer, then lipstick – it was a gift, now BB cushions, oil cleanser, concealer, and double lash mascara. I learned how to be confident in Korea hearing unearned affirmations praise for physical traits previously disregarded an anthem now follows in my wake: Small face Small face Small face Your face is SO small! I learned when confidence fails me in Korea, when despite heat and oil, my hair stretches her frizz high and wide rebelling at the worst time, on a morning missing mascara. When the office is quiet, save for a hello or two, critical eyes pass over my hair, face, body and say nothing. Yet in crucial moments, a warrior emerges sword lifted high against stereotypes, gender roles and fat-shaming rhetoric – relics of my code of honor. False confidence shed and armor donned, I catch battles at every turn, from bus to lunchroom, in sight-seeing and church-going but I in my righteous fight am far outnumbered. The warrior retreats. So I slip back into my new confidence, and on a day when I’m dressed up nice, I slide open the office door and announce my presence, counting down the seconds until the first compliment confirming that I am indeed Beautiful. Monica Heilman is a 2014-2016 ETA at Yeongdo Girls’ High School in Busan. She previously taught at Gimhae Jeil High School in Gimhae, Gyeongsangnam-do.
No Longer Silent: The Adopted Diaspora’s Return to Korea
No Longer Silent: The Adopted Diaspora’s Return to Korea By Catherine Ceniza Choy South Korea plays a central role in the history of international and transracial adoption. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the phenomenon has spanned six decades and involved over 200,000 Korean children adopted by families in Western nations. Given its long duration, Korean adoptees comprise multiple generations. They are older as well as younger adults. They have founded organizations in the diaspora to provide resources specifically for adoptees. And they have paved the way for what has become a more common experience of returning to Korea to tour the motherland, to attempt to reunite with birth families, and to live on a long-term basis. In a January 2015 New York Times Magazine article entitled “Why a Generation of Adoptees Is Returning to South Korea,” writer Maggie Jones highlights Laura Klunder’s visit to Seoul in the summer of 2010 when she was 26 years old. Klunder joined more than 500 other Korean adoptees from around the world for an annual event known as the Gathering. At this event, Klunder heard fellow adoptee Kim Stoker give a lecture about “belonging” in South Korea. Jones writes: Raised in Colorado and Virginia, Stoker has lived in South Korea for 15 years and has the maternal presence of someone who has held the hands of many 20-something adoptees during their first months in Seoul. Living there is the most meaningful thing she has done in her life, she says. “We didn’t have a choice about what happened to us,” she told me, referring to adoptees being taken from their country. “So to come back, to live on your own terms. . . .” she said. “I do really feel like these are my kin.” By the end of Stoker’s talk, Klunder felt, as she put it, “invited to come back.” And before leaving South Korea that week, she decided that she would return to live there. In the twenty-first century, the impact of several hundred returning Korean adoptees on their homeland is profound. Klunder’s individual journey is part of a collective experience inspired and forged by other Korean adult adoptees who have returned to Korea seeking belonging in their country of origin. Korean adoptee leadership and participation in organizations such as G.O.A.’L (Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link) and spaces like the guesthouse KoRoot enable and facilitate this experience. What happens when the adopted Korean diaspora returns to the homeland beyond a temporary visit? How does this phenomenon change the sending nation? Among the hundreds of adoptees who have returned are writers and visual artists. What might artistic production by and about Korean international adoptees who have returned to live in Korea say about the history and contemporary state of international adoption? These are some of the preliminary questions that undergird what I hope will be a chapter of a new book project tentatively titled “No Longer Silent: Asian International Adoption and Cultural Production.” “No Longer Silent” is inspired by the presence of Korean adoptees in my Asian American Studies classes in the United States and Korea, and the research I conducted for my book Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America that was published by NYU Press in 2013. In Global Families, I argue that we must pay attention to the voices and experiences of Asian adoptees in order to understand the complexity of international adoption. Yet, unlike social workers and adoptive parents, adoptees’ voices and perspectives are noticeably absent in most archives about international adoption. As several generations of Korean adoptees in Western nations have come of age, cultural expression comprises one productive site for the documentation and dissemination of their experiences. Since the 1990s, the emergence of a sizable body of artistic work by and about Asian adoptees has challenged the representation of Asian international adoption as a “quiet migration.” Global Families’ final chapter, “To Make Their Own Stories Historical,” features close readings of the documentary films, First Person Plural and In The Matter of Cha Jung Hee, written and directed by filmmaker and Korean adoptee Deann Borshay Liem. I chose to focus on Deann Borshay Liem’s films in the book for a very specific reason. My archival methodology primarily mined the records of the non-governmental organization, the International Social Service-United States of America (ISS-USA) Branch, a pioneering social service organization that facilitated international adoptions, but advocated for a different approach to the handling of these adoptions in contrast to the more well-known work of Oregon farmer and adoption advocate Harry Holt. Because the ISS-USA arranged Borshay Liem’s adoption, and because her films analyze the prominent role that organizational records played in her life history as a Korean adoptee in the United States, First Person Plural and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee offer a direct and provocative link between ISS-USA organizational records and one of its adoptees speaking back as an adult. Such links are difficult to find as adoption case records typically do not provide longer, continuous accounts of the adoption after placement. However, Deann Borshay Liem’s films are only a few examples of adoptee cultural production. While they document a history of Korean international adoption, they do not represent the diversity and dynamics of adoptee experience. My hope is that “No Longer Silent” will illuminate a larger, multivocal conversation about adoption through close readings of artistic work by and about adoptees, and oral interviews with other filmmakers, visual artists, performance artists, and writers. An illuminating example of such artistic expression is Jane Jeong Trenka’s 2009 memoir Fugitive Visions. Fugitive Visions defies simple categorization. It is at once a personal memoir upon her sixth return visit to Korea; a poetic ethnography of the collective experiences of returning adoptees who chose to live in Korea on a long-term basis; and a call for recognition of the racism and physical and psychological violence experienced by Korean adoptees in Korea as well as abroad. In Fugitive Visions, Jeong Trenka bears witness to returning Korean adoptees’ unique homesickness, one that