Tag: Eva

2024 in Review: Nonstop Nonsense

Posted on by Elise
We all had matching flight suits, which led to some real confusion for the people of Carbondale, Illinois after we landed at a tiny airport and deplaned with giant speakers and a deejay from the Norwegian woods, playing harmonica.

It was the year of brat summer, calling things weird, and being very mindful/very demure. The Dodgers won the World Series. TikTok faces an imminent ban. Kamala Harris enjoyed a flawless campaign rollout after Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate, not that it made any difference in the election outcome. US election results marked the full realization of the cultural shift toward woman-hating, with a electoral college AND popular vote win returning Donald J Trump to office. So here we are. An entire movement based on sneering at other people and whipping up reactive resentment will soon be in charge, again. The manosphere is no longer the extremist counterculture, it is culture. What are men are capable of when the rules don’t apply to them and their actions have no consequences? We’re going to see how that works on a global scale, as the US is but one of the modern democracies turning toward plutocratic wannabe authoritarians.

And I have never felt so demoralized about traditional journalism. Institutions are losing audiences and trust, newspaper owners kiss up to Trump, and the structural problem persists: paying for the work of deep and accurate reporting is only increasingly expensive, while creating a sprawling alternative information ecosystem from influencers is cheaper, and can demonstrably shift opinions.

As we make the turn to 2025, I feel dread about the macro forces globally and confusion about what I’m supposed to do, individually. 2024 was a year marked by upheavals in politics, culture, and technology, which led me to turn toward the personal. On that front, this past year was chock full of gifts. We got a puppy. The girls are growing up strong and sassy and finding their specialties. Luna’s playing soccer seriously enough to join a club team, Isa is now dancing in the company, and Eva has become a working actor and premiered in her first regular cast member role in a show on BratTV. I love watching them blossom and delight in the magic that moves through them. For me, so many stretches of 2024 felt like I was on perma-vacation — I cosplayed as a gentlelady of leisure and went so many places and experienced so many things, thanks to generous friends who hosted us or invited us to unforgettable locales for sun, skiing, speaking and general mischief. I fell down the lucky tree and hit every branch.

Best gift: A Little Free Library for my front yard, gifted by Rob, assembled and installed by Justin, painted by me and Eva. Runner up: The kitty izakaya.

Favorite Film(s): Challengers, Anora

Favorite TED Talks: Amy Kurzweil on how she connected with her past, and Gaya Herrington on why poverty and pollution persist when the world’s getting richer.

Firsts: Solar eclipse. Acupuncture. Capybaras in real life. Getting paid as a screenwriter. Giving a TED talk. Eating water buffalo brain and spine. Ziplining over Mexican jungles. Indian Wells tennis tournament. Getting my book translated into a different language (Polish edition came out). Reselling clothes online. Snake River float trip. Meeting two-week-old puppies. Officiating a wedding.

Disappointments: The 2024 presidential election. A slow year for Reasonable Volume. Getting non-refundable tickets to Paris and canceling. Getting creamed by a speeding cyclist, while we were on foot. Spilling iced tea on the same laptop that I already spilled iced tea on last year. The collapse of the journalism industry. Saltburn.

New cities: Bozeman and Big Sky, Montana. Kathmandu and Bhaktapur, Nepal. Sedona, Arizona.

Most Absurd Incident: We caught the most majestic solar eclipse from a clear spot in the path of totality, after being flown to Carbondale, Illinois in a private plane charter. But then locals confused our group for a cult because we were all wearing matching flight suits.

Interviews That Will Stay With Me: Tressie McMillan Cottom. Glynnic MacNichol. Emily Amick on civic involvement as true self care. Lyn Slater about how expansive and fulfilling growing older is. Meaghan Keane on the bias against single people and how to reframe it.

Favorite Podcast Episodes I Went On: Vibe Check, Normal Gossip, Apple News in Conversation

Yassss!

Favorite Selfie(s): MONICA LEWINSKY!

Nerdiest Accomplishment: A tween (who isn’t my own) judging me as a “cool mom.”

Hu Hideaway Guests: Steve Boyle. Jean Lee. Jake Adelstein. Mari, briefly. Justin. Patrick and Carlos. Matt and Bryan.

Purchases and practices that fed me:

  • Just Ice Tea Peach Oolong
  • The cultural writing of The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert
  • This no chocolate chocolate chip cookie recipe
  • Hosting friends in my guest house, aka, “The Hu Hideaway”

And in no particular order, this year I…

Officiated a wedding!
Dislocated my shoulder (again, so this is the third time now)
Slept the best sleep of my life, at a resort in Santa Barbara
Caught food in my mouth at Benihana on the first try
Organized a community coat drive and collected 400 coats, thank y’all for donating!
Started hosting a new podcast, Forever35
Wrote my screenplay treatment and outline
Spoke on a panel with Donna Karan in the front row, just casually taking it all in
Endured birds flying into my house on two (2!) separate occasions, triggering me to freak out and call for friends to come over and chase them back outside
Spent countless hours on set, set-sitting for my working actor daughter
Spent countless hours on the sidelines, soccer-momming Luna
Spoke in San Francisco, Michigan, Hawaii, Boston, Nepal, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, and LA (a few times)
Saw so much live comedy: Morgan Jay. Ali Wong. Sheng Wang. Morgan Jay 2x more. The funny people who opened for them, whose names I don’t recall.
Appeared on 17 podcasts (including three of them I host)
Read 35 books (not counting kid ones), reviewed two of them and recommended a third
Attended one wedding and one bat mitzvah: Vallejo (Matt and Bryan) and San Francisco (Franny’s Bat Mitzvah)
Ran 94.2 miles (a five year low) but played a lot of tennis
Wrote 23 newsletter dispatches
Reunited with my brother and parents in Taipei to celebrate the holidays
Flew 88,799 miles to 25 cities, seven countries and spent 106 days away from home

PREVIOUS YEARS IN REVIEW

2023 | 2022|2021|2020 |2019 | 2018 | 2017 |  2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010|2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004

Capybara IRL

Moon Festivals

Posted on by Elise

There are so many Chinese-Americans in Los Angeles that this weekend, there were COMPETING Moon Festivals on the east side of town, over there in communities like Monterrey Park and Arcadia, where a ton of Taiwanese folks live. I only know this because Eva has joined a Chinese Children’s Chorus and had to perform at two of these festivals, back to back.

While it’s about 14 degrees hotter on that side of LA, the boba teas and other Taiwanese street foods are also about 14 times better. So I left Eva with her choir teacher and went off exploring the street food vendors. I got the moon cakes, natch, plus dim sum standards of xiao long bao and char siu bao because, low hanging fruit.

But then I wandered into the world of vegan meat pies (which are cooked on a griddle and flattened, so, the Chinese equivalent of quesadillas), and the crazier milk tea creations, like “dirty milk tea” (not sure what makes it dirty), the Hokkaido Taro slush (Eva tried this and liked it) and the big mystery item that I was too full to consume was KOREAN-TAIWANESE FUSION NOODLES. I felt seen.

 

 

Bus vs Minivan

Posted on by Elise

“You were out of town and we almost lost our father. And then we’d be stuck forever with just you, mom.” [grimaces]

—Eva, 6, about Matty losing the minivan door to a Santa Monica city bus, and somehow not getting hurt by the chin of his chinny chin chin

I was on a shoot in Albuquerque at the time and since Stiles never calls me, really, ever, I picked up the phone and said, “Are you okay?” and immediately he goes, “NO! I just got hit by a bus!”

It’s been a crazy and difficult week. If I wasn’t so committed to an upcoming Future You episode on longevity which requires me to adopt healthy lifestyle habits, I’d be drinking myself to sleep tonight.

Foreign And Domestic

Posted on by Elise
Last August. One last time between the window panes of our 35th floor high-rise, in Seoul.

I often get asked about how the girls are adjusting to living in the US, and whether they miss Korea. The answer is, they just hit the ground running/gliding. Already veterans of international travel, the girls don’t seem to need adjustment to new time zones or contexts like we grownups do. They didn’t experience the international move as major transition, but rather, as just one of the many new things in their young lives. For them, I don’t know whether a new country is internalized that much differently than a new school.

Isa (the three year old) misses her old teachers and said to me this week, “I will go back and say hi to Miss Hailey” as if it did not require a 12-hour flight to the other side of the world.

Eva, the eldest, is imprinted with some internationalism: She can hear the difference between Chinese, Korean and, of course, English. Today she said she needed “two green monies” because she experienced having currency that wasn’t all green. When we talk about what day of the week it is, she will note, “It’s Sunday afternoon here which means it’s Monday in Korea.”

Luna’s Korea references are all superficial: She sleeps with Kakao character pillows (Ryan the Lion and Apeach the peach) and her Pororo characters, Poby and Krong-Krong. But she and I have maintained the tradition in which only Koreans cut our hair.

A Few Choice Chats

Posted on by Elise

Earlier this month I traveled to Boston to guest-host our WBUR/NPR co-produced program, Here & Now, and also filled-in on two episodes of my friend Sam’s podcast, It’s Been a Minute. Some highlights, ICYMI:

American Motherhood is Messed Up, a conversation with author Amy Westervelt (who I met at JAWS in Oregon in October) about how capitalism and America’s Puritan roots shaped a motherhood culture that’s bad for our society’s men, women and children.

Steven Yeun on identity (and so much more). Actor Steven Yeun is a big deal in America for his stint on the Walking Dead, but he actually found that experience confining and explained why. He also opened up about the journey he’s taken regarding his identity as an Asian-American and how he learned to feel comfortable in his own skin. I learned a lot!

The Weekly Wrap. Every Friday on Sam’s show, a panel of guests comes in to riff on the week that was. My daughter Eva introduced the show (which was so awesome) and our guests — Peter Hamby of Snapchat and Soumya Karlamangla of the LA Times. We had so much fun and covered a lot of ground, from sausages to tough electoral fights to k-pop.

“Sad Story”

Posted on by Elise

Last week at dinner when it was daughter Eva’s turn to share highlights and lowlights of her day,  she was nearing the finish line and then suddenly stops and goes, “OH I FORGOT. There’s a really sad story.”

“What is it?” I said, in a wide-eyed over-exaggerated childlike way, to mirror her dramatic setup.

Then she unloaded with this crazy story she learned from her kindergarten teacher at school.

“One day, there was a bad guy. And he took a plane, and he CRASHED it into a building. And it died so many people. And even people on the ground were died too, because of the building crashing. It’s really, really sad.” [Eva makes face pouty here.]

Upon realizing what she was telling us, Matt and I looked at each other and he responded by saying something like, “Yes that was really really sad. And those people shouldn’t have died.” (I’m not sure Eva realized this was an actual event that happened until that point, in which her dad brought his personal memory of 9/11 into the conversation and made that connection for her, whether we should have or not.)

Then I go, “The guy who crashed the plane into the building died, too.”

And immediately Eva comes back with, “But he WANTED to die. He flew that plane knowing he was going to die.”

A week later I am still stunned to hear the 9/11 story recounted to me by my five-year-old as a distant story, and not something real that she experienced in her lifetime. And also stunned that she processed all of this and they talked about it at school but I guess you’re not supposed to shelter small people from news … but still, yikes. I keepl turning over this whole scene in my head, and the adorable way she said, “And it died so many people.” Because I don’t even know if she has ever used the verb “kill” before. Sigh.

Mental Flexibility of Children

Posted on by Elise

Eva, 5, and Isa, 2, have matching shoes. They are somewhat-translucent, magenta Mary Janes with a single strawberry on each strap. The other day I was helping Isa slide into hers and she pointed out Eva’s pair, which were much bigger, explaining the smaller ones were hers because she was two and “jie jie” (older sister) was five. “But when I’m five and jie jie is two I will have the big ones,” she said.

I love that concept — that you can grow or shrink — that you can grow older and younger.

We tell Eva that she should eat healthy food so she can grow taller and taller. The conclusion she’s drawn is if you eat unhealthy food, changes happen in reverse. So, one time she told me that if I wanted to be a baby again, I could simply eat a lot of french fries.

Yesterday, A Behind-The-Scenes Memoriam

Posted on by Elise
Melbourne street art, shot by Edward H Blake

The lead parent of our children is off in America so I have been really getting my momming on over the past few days. (Y’all know how that usually goes for me. VERY laissez faire.) Being in charge of my two children and a baby while also working from home was already going to be daunting in it of itself, but the despot Kim Jong Un decided to throw in an extra challenge! He invited President Trump to meet face-to-face, and Trump accepted, in an announcement that came down at 9am yesterday morning. A bona fide news bomb.

This is what I remember: I thankfully awakened slowly rather than suddenly because somehow there were no screaming fits or random sibling throw-downs to break up at the break of dawn. Since November 2016 I have avoided news inputs until I am fully awake and ready to take in whatever inevitably shocking alert is on my phone. Yesterday was distinct in that news hadn’t actually broken at 7:30am when I woke up. News ABOUT news was filling my inbox because POTUS DJT had popped his head in the White House Briefing Room (a room he’s never been seen in) and said there was a “major announcement” coming in 90 minutes. The countdown began.

Our helper Yani served breakfast and braided hair. I made sure the girls got on their buses. Baby Luna slept through all the way until 8:30am when both older girls were off for school. I hate having to feed her and read at the same time a furious feed-and-read situation followed in order to finish both in time for the announcement. By then, we knew that the news had to do with North Korea, and that the South Korean envoys who had just met with KJU on Monday went to Washington an invitation from Kim to Trump, to meet. This would be unprecedented and incredible on many, many levels. The craziest thing was that, at the 9am/7pm EST announcement, we learned Trump just accepted this invite immediately! It breaks with decades of U.S. practice but this is Trump and really, are there norms anymore?

From a windowless, carpeted room that serves as a perfect home “studio,” got on live with our program All Things Considered right after the announcement, at 9:30am Korea time. But my kindergartner Eva’s monthly school assembly was at 10am! I am her only parent in the country right now. She expected me to be there and I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I rushed to her school by cab, stayed through to her performance (last because they’re the oldest) and then made sure she saw that I was there and had to go, then ran to hail another cab to take me home, making it with four minutes to spare before my next live conversation with All Things Considered, at 11am. That could have really gone the other way for me so, thank you God.

Later I delivered a stroller to a friend who needed to borrow it, ate lunch on base with some USGOV guys who joked around about this rather stunning news with me (I’m leaving the jokes out of this blog post), and because I don’t like to cancel appointments at the last minute, I took a cab all the way to my pedicure place only to realize that because I jumped into the cab while conducting a phone interview*, I forgot to bring any forms of payment! We had to turn around and return to my home, get my wallet, drive back to pedicure place only for me to realize, by then, that I didn’t have time for the appointment because there were many more live conversations to have and the web post to write-through. At some point I needed to sit down and speed read and correspond with more people, which is what those of us in the biz call “reporting.” In the evening when the girls had to be bathed and put down for bed, I was on Morning Edition twice. In between the two hits, Eva, who is starting to read, read to me (this felt interminable because I was on deadline) and we completed the True/False questions in the back because she loves True/False. Then I recall putting a Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood on for them in lieu of any more books.

I got the girls tucked in and put down for bed and then got my ass to a friend’s Pyeongchang Paralympics Opening Ceremony Watch Party, because YES THAT WAS YESTERDAY, too.

Behind the scenes, twenty minutes before the Up First podcast taping.

Here are the conversations, as they appeared in the course of this string of events:

All Things Considered after the feed-and-read with Luna (no link because it was replaced with the next one)
All Things Considered in the nick-of-time after making it back from Eva’s assembly
Morning Edition/Up First podcast after my failed pedicure attempt but got a giant cookie for Isa (she loves cookies)
Morning Edition after the True/False questions
All Things Considered after being awakened this morning with a 6:30am call to talk again. My voice is noticeably lower here because I’d just woken up. Sorry.

Not included in this post: All the stress eating and Starbucks green iced teas. By the end of the day there were just plastic Starbucks drink vessels strewn all over my desk.

*It was John, a friend/source of mine who is a China historian and North Korea watcher based here in Seoul. We spend half of our phone calls just mercilessly making fun of each other. A running gag is we our phone conversations by performing the phone greetings in Chinese, Korean and Japanese obnoxiously: (Roboseyo? Roboseyo! // Wei? Wei? // Moshi Moshi!? Moshi Mosh.)