Yesterday I learned via text that my friend Jeannie died. She was killed by the most swift-moving cancer that I’ve ever heard of — “cancer of unknown primary”. I struggle to even write about her in the past tense because she was one of the most vibrant and alive people I’ll have the pleasure of knowing. She attacked life with a constant smile and a joyful can-do spirit befitting a woman who had FOUR kids in quick succession and showed up for all of them — dropoffs, signups, hosting the birthday parties, planning the vacations. She also somehow had no issue taking on more kids, as she helped drive carpool or even look after mine(!) We were not worthy!
Being too much with Jeannie, at my birthday a couple years ago.
We became friends through our now tween daughters, who attended preschool together when they were three have continued to go to school together ever since. As fellow loudass, no BS Texas girls in LA, we shared a cultural shorthand and mutual friends from our college years.
Community-oriented, she was always in-the-know, asked the direct questions, and proved a reliable source of hot tea. She gave of herself, constantly. She volunteered for the local YMCA, participating with her whole family in its various programming and events, and sharing with hot mess moms like me what I needed to know about sports or summer camps.
I’ll remember her on the sidelines of a schoolwide 5K, holding up fun posters to cheer on her husband while surrounded by three of her kids and two of mine, cheering and bouncing up and down in a show of support for us runners. I’ll remember how she gifted me with her talent — the meticulous work of lash extensions — in her backyard, the week before my book tour, to send me off feeling pretty. I’ll remember how our tweens were fighting and she texted me going, “Even if our girls are beefing, you and I will always be cool.” I’ll remember her in the season of our lives when she was pregnant all the time but never ever seemed tired, only energized by growing and giving life.
It is breathtaking to process that someone who was so young, so vivacious, so generous with her one wild and precious life … is no longer alive. Her spirit lives on in her children, and her memory is a blessing to all of us. My hope is to remember and honor her by living my days more like Jeannie, with moxie and appreciation for all the love that is in it, as we truly don’t know how many days we have left. The cancer came so fast. She left us so soon. Hug your loved ones. Hug them tight.
The girls — Luna, Eva and Isa — on the beach with Yani, June 2022.
There is a real tedium and grinding labor to parenting small children. It involves hassles like bottle washing, endless loads of laundry, or contorting your body to pick up the crayon that fell underneath the plane seat in front of you, again and again and again. For the past seven years, most of that labor has been borne by Yani, our caretaker, cook, cleaner, pet sitter, gardener, travel companion, and friend.
Born and raised in East Java, Indonesia, on lush farmland that grows bananas, papayas and other fruit, Yani moved abroad when she was 18 to take on more lucrative work than she could find near home. She worked as a domestic helper in Singapore, then returned to Indonesia briefly to await another placement, which led her to Taichung, Taiwan, caring for my grandparents. My grandma taught her to speak Mandarin and to make all kinds of Northern Chinese dishes and dumplings from scratch.
She ended her stint in Taiwan after a few years to return to Indonesia, where she got married and eventually had a baby, in 2015. That year, I gave birth to Isabel, in Seoul, and, given my unpredictable travel schedule as a foreign correspondent, needed additional help at home. We filed papers to sponsor Yani’s visa and boom, one day she arrived at Incheon, dazed and confused from a long flight, moved in with us in our 35th floor apartment, and instantly charged with the most tedious tasks of caring for a newborn, save for nursing, which only I could do. Luna arrived less than two years later. Yani has nurtured Luna since before she was born.
Yani and Luna in the kitchen in Seoul, summer 2018. My memories of Luna during that time were always of her plopped on a counter.
As we transitioned from a family of four, to a family of five, traveled constantly across the Asia region and beyond, hosted numerous guests and gatherings, marked birthdays, holidays, lost tooths, and other passages, grieved variouscat goodbyes and welcomed new kittens, managed the international move to Los Angeles, two house moves since coming back, a COVID crisis, lockdown and the logistical hassles of divorcing amid a pandemic, Yani has stayed the steady presence.
She makes all the lunches, mops all the floors, cooks all the dinners, puts away all the groceries, waters all the plants, changes the litter, makes all the beds, and always knows where all the loveys are. She is the night time sitter when we all go on vacations, unpacks my suitcases every time I return from a trip, makes all the scallion pancakes from scratch.
She embodied so many different and significant roles, during the years I really built my career towards greater flexibility, and during crucial developmental time for the girls. It is no stretch to say my career, my children’s perspectives, and my life as i know it would not be possible with Yani. No one asks me “How do you do it all” because the answer is simple: Because I have Yani.
All dressed up and nowhere to go. Dressed up for dinner in lockdown, April 2020.
Thanks to my stint at NPR a few Thanksgivings ago, while I was nursing Luna, Yani was granted a business visa to come with me to the states, and it had five years on it, so she could come again when we moved here as a family. She has encountered so many places and people that she would never have otherwise, something she appreciates, as she likes to explore and expand her horizons. Quick to pick up languages, now she speaks Indonesian, and Mandarin, and English. But being with us has meant being away from her own family — namely her daughter Intan, who is seven, the same age as Isa. Yani’s visa is up next month, so Friday she goes home. My sadness that she’s leaving our family is streaked with a happiness she will reunite with her own.
No one carves up the leftover Thanksgiving turkey like Yani! Thanksgiving 2017, in Washington, DC.
My loved ones all worry for me, saying things like, “You are going to need to be on lithium” without “ayi,” which means auntie. I have stayed up late at night, wondering, how will we cope without her? Luna was so overwhelmed at our last Thanksgiving, knowing it would be Yani’s last, that while sharing our gratitude for Yani, Luna crawled under the dinner table and silently sniffed her stuffed bunny lovey.
The only option is to take it one day at a time. Though I will say, we’re so blessed to have had her for this long. The youngest is now five years old and can fend for herself in ways that were impossible just a year ago. And we’re beyond privileged to have had Yani at all.
Yani has braided so much hair over the past 7 years. Glamping, summer 2021.
Ever since that time A Cup of Jo published the photo of me eating a cheeseburger while giving birth to Isa, I’ve been asked by folks about giving birth without pain meds.
Look, I don’t think any woman should feel pressured to give birth a certain way. You do you — a feminist birth is more important than an unmedicated, vaginal one. If you are interested, however, and want to prepare, I spoke with the New York Times’ Parenting section briefly for its guide to unmedicated birth.
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.
“We’re just trying to get it done. You’re exhausted all the time. When people are like, ‘Are you going to be so sad when it’s over?,’ You’re like, ‘All I can concentrate on right now is the glass of wine that’s going to happen in about eight hours.’” –Matthew Rhys
What is it like in the maelstrom of the most unpredictable and chaotic global stories as it intersects with the most unpredictable and chaotic American presidencies? It’s what you expect: Sometimes thrilling, frequently exhausting, feels important. Last month, throngs of us covered history — the first summit between the US and North Korean leaders — and President Trump subsequently declared world peace. So I think my work out here is done.
Okay, so North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is the same as it was before, and maybe even expanding. But after three-plus years on the peninsula, it IS time to go home — we repatriate to the US this weekend.
Look, we had three takes to get a mic dropping photo but catching a shot of the mic as it’s falling in *just the right place* was a bridge too far. We tried. Credit: Jun Michael Park
After flying west to wind up in East Asia, which became the titular blog and sendoff song (song still holds up), now I’ll fly east to the West coast, specifically Los Angeles — a place full of Asians! LA boasts the largest concentration of Koreans outside of Korea, so this soft re-entry point means my next pore-vacuuming facial will only be a short drive away.
Broadly the plan is to develop a new beat, continue to host my video adventures and fill-in host our radio programs from DC or Culver City (we have some deal to say Culver City and not LA). Ideally I want to guinea pig expressions of NPR on non-radio platforms — live events, smart speakers, you know, whatever we can experiment with, without breaking.
And A Partridge In A Pear Tree
Not twelve hours after I landed in Seoul to open NPR’s first ever Korea/Japan bureau in 2015, the US Ambassador to South Korea was knifed in the face by a North Korean sympathizer. My internet wasn’t even set up, so I started by filing spots by phone.
The pace never slowed down. Over these past three years, I birthed the bureau, two humans and our video series Elise Tries, a labor of love and experimentation. All the while, North Korea news was relentless.
I covered 27 missile tests, three nuclear tests, one land mine explosion, a plan to bracket Guam, threats to “totally destroy” North Korea,this year’s rapid rapprochement, a unified Winter Olympics, an interKorean summit at Panmunjom, a historic US-North Korea summit and a partridge in a pear tree.
Doing some KJU play-by-play with assistant Se Eun…
Outside the Koreas, I shuttled back-and-forth to Japan 35 times, filed from nine Asian countries, one US territory and twice from Hawaii. Covered three presidential trips to Asia, the G7, the aforementioned Olympics, a few ASEANs, the now-defunct S&ED in Beijing, followed the 17-week candlelight revolution which brought down the South Korean president, the changeover to a liberal Korean leader, the ups-and-downs of Japan’s Prime Minister and peeled back a host of social issues and curiosities. The curiouser of the curiosities became grist for our bootstrapped Elise Tries vids, which somehow got seven million Facebook views in its first season and just won a Gracie Award.
The youngest, Luna, is walking and talking now, but her infanthood’s memorialized forever. Isa came here in my belly and now stands on street corners hailing her own cabs. Our oldest, Eva, arrived here as a goofy two-year-old and will leave a month shy of her sixth birthday — literate, and missing her bottom front teeth.
“Luna Tries” at eight weeks, getting a K-beauty facial
Eva somehow got into a badass Mandarin immersion kindergarten in Venice, and being fluent in a second language is something I’ve wanted to give her since she was born.
With Special Thanks…
Expat life is the kind of free-form existence that suits my Aquarian tendencies. And it’s a rare privilege these days to get to work overseas with the support of a large, well-funded news organization. But in addition to being a itinerant foreign correspondent, I’m also a partner and mom, and my spouse is ready to move on. A fairly woke feminist, he left his full time journalism job to join me on this adventure abroad. Women do this for men all the time, so neither he nor I think he deserves applause, but in the context of East Asia’s highly-gendered societies, Matty becoming a trailing spouse and the lead parent was radical. He — and our all around helper/housekeeper/nanny Yani — are the heroes of this Asia stint.
At Matty’s first PTA meeting at Eva’s international preschool, the PTA president learned he’d just left his job as a Wall Street Journal reporter.
“She said, oh, you’re a reporter, you can probably take good notes,” he recalled. And that is how he became PTA secretary for the 2016-2017 school year. He downgraded to room parent the next year, because while still lead-parenting, he filed prolifically for the Los Angeles Times.
We both covered the summit spectacle to end all summit spectacles, in Singapore. The whole fam had to go because news rules our lives. We came full circle from last August, when the Party of Five went to Guam because Kim Jong Un threatened the territory and Trump responded with threats of “fire and fury.”
Now “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea,” if the President of the United States can be believed [clears throat].
Peace in the Far East. What better way to leave this beat?
Just like that, she’s one. Luna’s sisters, Eva and Isa, helped her blow out her birthday candle. But Luna took charge of the doljabi ceremony, which went differently than Isa’s. (The tradition is that on your first birthday you choose an item from a “destiny platter” representing a future career or life.) Isa went straight for the microphone and held on tight. Luna touched the soccer ball, and then something else, but dropped them quickly before choosing a wad of Korean money and really committing to it.
All our babies were smiley, but Luna is probably the smiliest. She’s also the picture of serenity. She’s surrounded by a sustained level of chaos in the form of her sisters at all times, but she just goes on, stuffing strawberries in her face, trying to share them, padding around on all fours, trying out new toys by putting them in her mouth, all completely unaffected by whatever screaming fits or tantrums are going on her around her. These days Luna enjoys trying to walk by cruising around, holding onto furniture, chasing our cat Caesar, and feeding herself — she has always been interested in feeding herself while her middle sister Isa still loves it when other people feed her. People have different preferences.
What I’ll remember: The feeling of newborn Luna’s wispy hair tickling my chin when she nuzzled on my chest to sleep. Her tiny Gremlin noises in those first weeks. Her dive-bombing a boob for a snack. Her simultaneous hiccup + fart situation that went on until she was about three months old. Her star turn in the most popular of the Elise Tries videos.
This is the first time since October 2014 that I have not been pregnant with, or nursing, a child. I feel a new freedom and a sentimental melancholy at once. I’m adjusting to being “just me” again and so grateful for what my body has produced, ceaselessly, for three-and-a-half years. So much production of one thing or another! I probably should take vitamins.
So overjoyed she chose a wad of cash instead of a pencil or microphone, which would represent her good-for-nothing parents’ professions
To mark Valentine’s Day, I dug into my Evernote (where I obsessively save links of interest) and found all the reads I’d tagged with “love.” For this Mother’s Day, I dove back in and cobbled together memorable links on motherhood, a topic that teaches, inspires and challenges me every moment. While I never grew up imagining my wedding/getting married, I always knew instinctively I’d be a mom.
As I write this, I’m surrounded by the singing, stomp-running and occasional screaming of three girls under the age of five, all who call me momma. My love for them is the deepest deep, and becoming a mom made me love my own mother — and need her — even more than I always had. When I was nursing eldest daughter Eva that first week of her life, my mom would stand over me with a bowl of soup and actually feed me as I was feeding my own baby, since my hands weren’t free. To my mom, my 30 year-old body was still her responsibility to nourish, just as I was doing for Eva. I recall so vividly a magical symmetry in the three of us together in those early days of Eva’s life.
Not all of us have kids, but we all have moms, so these links are for everyone.
“The Chinese word for good derives from two characters—one that symbolizes woman and the other, child. To cultivate life, a child needs their mother, women need each other, and society—the standards of our ancestors.”
