Tag Archives: expat life

Happy Chuseok!

Today is Chuseok, or Korean Thanksgiving, one of the most important holidays in Korea when people travel across the country to their hometowns (or to the place where the eldest family member lives) and get together to share food, spend quality time with each other, and offer thanks to their ancestors.

Ever since we started living in Seoul, this time of the year has meant two things for us – one, a short getaway to a nearby destination, and two, the arrival of a fancy gift pack at our doorstep from my husband’s workplace containing mega-sized, perfectly shaped apples and pears! In Korea, if you’re visiting family during this season, showing up at a relative’s place with a gift appreciating your host’s hospitality is considered good manners. For Korean companies, offering gifts to their employees during Chuseok is a way of recognizing their hard work and also to boost morale.

But why fruits? I remember being very curious about the significance of a fruit gift set when we received our first one and found out that it reflects the traditional meaning of Chuseok, which is to celebrate the harvest season. As the holiday falls in autumn, newly harvested apples and pears serve as popular presents. Also, both these fruits (along with several other items like persimmons, chestnuts, jujube, meat, steamed rice, soup, dried fish etc) are placed on the memorial service table that is set in order to honour the ancestors in a ceremony called ‘Charye‘.

The above sketch is of my husband carefully unwrapping his Chuseok gift from work few days back. It came in a very secure package marked ‘fragile’ all over it. Inside was a bottle of Sauvignion blanc and a bottle of Chardonnay, well, big morale boosters considering how this year has been faring! The fruit basket arrived a few days later.

With no where to travel to, I can’t think of a better way of spending our five-days holiday during a raging pandemic, than being at home and clinking our glasses to making it thus far.

Draw your mess

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wardrobe 1

Am I the only person who hasn’t put away their warm clothes yet? We’re halfway through August and now I am thinking how far can fall/winter be anyway? I may need that trench coat or the down jacket sooner than later. All that effort put in sorting, folding, stacking, and arranging would go to waste. This here is the train of thought that got my wardrobe looking like above.

I have been meaning to organize it for a while now but every month I end up carrying forward this task to the following month. Spending longer hours at home during this ongoing pandemic hasn’t exactly increased my productivity at housework. If at all, I’ve been slacking off.

It ain’t a pretty sight, I admit. Finding a somewhat coordinated outfit in this closet requires equal amounts of luck and patience. Meanwhile, belts have gone missing. Socks are hiding themselves in corners and crevices. Scarves have never become more elusive. A wardrobe as cluttered and disheveled as this should stick in one’s craw but if you’re an artist, this scene can also get you all excited! And you find yourself picking up a sketchbook, some colour pencils, and drawing the mess instead of tidying it up. Well, there’s always tomorrow.

Longest monsoon

Happy Birthday Singapore

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On the occasion of Singapore’s 55th birthday, which is today, I am fondly remembering the trip I took early this year to the tropical city-state and the sketches I made in the few days I was there.

To give you a bit of background, before moving to Korea in 2017, I and my husband spent seven years in Singapore and have some lasting memories of that place. Needless to stay I still have a hankering for my old home once in a while. So when the opportunity arrived for a short visit, I couldn’t refuse. I called all my friends to check their availability, applied for visa and dug out my old city transit card that I had kept as a souvenir.

This was one trip that wasn’t going to need any planning!

Starbucks at Raffles City Mall

One of the best places to meet someone in the city is at the Starbucks inside Raffles City Mall. It’s the first thing you see as you climb up the escalator from City Hall subway station. The mall air-conditioning shields you from the heat and humidity and the constant stream of people makes it an unparalleled people-watching spot.

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While waiting for a dear friend, I made a quick sketch of some coffee drinkers, including this woman with a beige scarf draped around her body with pictures of bugs on it!

Singapore National Library

After lunch at Sin Swee Kee chicken rice restaurant on Seah Street opposite Raffles Hotel, we popped into Straits Commercial, like old times to peruse art supplies. Not only does the place have a superb collection of art materials, it is also the most likely place to bump into local artist friends, which I did! After swapped stories and checking out each others’ sketchbooks we crossed the street and walked over to the Singapore National Library.

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The library’s handsome collection of books on literary and creative arts had drawn me to its shelves more times than I can remember. Getting myself a library card was the first thing I did after settling in Singapore. While sketching this scene of people reading and snoozing on the library sofa, a little schoolgirl came over to watch me draw. Soon her friends joined me on the sofa. They seemed amused at the sight of an adult playing with colour pencils and crayons!

Tiong Bahru Bakery

For tea and cakes, I hopped into a cab with my husband and headed to our favourite cafe in Singapore- Tiong Bahru Bakery. I have sketched here so many times over the years that the bakery’s manager, Christine knows me well and was over the moon to see me walk through the doors once again with a sketchbook in hand! She got us a seat with good light, just like before. We ordered tea, coffee and a Kouign-Amann, just like before. I started sketching. There were moments when it felt like we hadn’t left Singapore at all.

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TBB

Before leaving Christine brought us a complimentary pineapple tart that had been newly introduced to the menu. I drew it for her as a way to say thank you and the sketch went up on the community board.

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TBB community board

After leaving the cafe we walked around the Tiong Bahru neighbourhood, past our favourite Art Deco buildings. Some new cafes and boutiques had sprouted while some old ones had bitten the dust. Tiong Bahru Market was still there, abuzz with activity.

Newton Hawker Center

I wanted to spend the evening at Newton which used to be our old neighbourhood and later have dinner at Newton Hawker Center. It is a food haven for Southeast Asian cuisines. Seated on these very wooden benches surrounded by food stalls, we had gorged on Bak Chor Mee, Thai pepper chicken, Aloo parathas, Curry laksa, and Nasi Goreng on countless occasions.

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Upon returning, my first impulse was to get a taste of everything! But I didn’t act on that. Perhaps the heat was taking a toll on my good senses. I let a glass of sweet refreshing lime juice help me settle down. The evening crowd was arriving and the tables around us were getting snapped up.

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The heat was also melting my crayons and they became soft and mushy, really pliable which helped me work faster than usual. By the time I finished sketching, I had worked up an appetite. I got myself a steaming bowl of handmade meatball noodles, rejoiced every bite of it and left the place completely satiated.

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Throughout this trip I realized how much I wanted to remember everything I was doing before I left Singapore again for good. So I did them well, however small or insignificant, something was, I paid attention. I really engaged. There was this excitement of revisiting the familiar – friends, food, sights, sounds and smells – but then there was also this new, unfamiliar urge of holding on to them as long as I could.

Before going back to the hotel, we walked past our old apartment building. It looked exactly the same. Apartment 03-02 was brightly lit and someone was watching TV in the living room. The building caretaker recognized us and said that incidentally, a Korean family had moved in right after we move out and left for Korea!

Hello again!

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I have been away from the blog for a long time, so long that it makes coming back a little difficult. For the past few days and weeks, I have been mulling over what I could say to make my return feel less jarring.

For a while I toyed with the idea of making a comic which would in succinct panels illustrate why I was away. Or maybe a chronological account of what I was up to all this while would best demystify my unexplained absence. But I realized to produce anything of quality befitting the dramatic re-entry I was imagining in my head would take time.

And the last thing I want is to spend more time away from blogging. I have missed telling stories. And I have missed hearing from those who read my stories. If not for that one reader who in her comment on my Instagram page nudged me to start writing again, I would still be standing at the threshold, hesitating.

For the lack of a clever way of expounding my year-long absence from blogging, I will state the facts as plainly as possible.

Last year, in the month of May, I suffered a shoulder injury which took a physical and psychological toll on my body. What started as a nagging pain in my left shoulder that I thought would disappear on its own in few days only got intense and agonizing with time. The following weeks were spent undergoing physical therapy, taking muscle relaxants and pain medications and receiving half a dozen injections but they brought little relief.

The doctor advised me to rest my shoulder and back completely. My deteriorating condition made it difficult for me to sit upright for long. Very soon I was unable to write, draw, cook, clean or simply hold a book up to read. It required Herculean effort to lift a bottle of water to drink. I couldn’t tie my hair or dry myself with a towel after taking a shower. The pain remained unabated. My left arm hung limply from the shoulder and the medication caused such drowsiness and nausea that I spent days in bed, sleeping or in the toilet, throwing up.

self portrait covid

Eventually I got referred to a shoulder surgeon at one of the biggest hospitals in Seoul. MRI revealed frayed shoulder tendons and a rare congenital condition (found in a small population) that had caused the inflammation, and hence the pain.

The treatment? More medication, continued physical therapy, and plenty of rest.

I was told that in the next six months to a year (possibly more) I should regain some of the strength and flexibility back in my shoulder. “Really, that long?”, I remember asking my doctor incredulously. For me, coming to terms with this long recovery period was most challenging. It meant depending on others for simple tasks; it meant not being able to do things I loved doing; it meant being in pain for longer than I had expected. Other than a flu here and a sore throat there which took most a week to heal, I had been blessed with good health. The complacency that comes with that sort of thing is a deterrent to you ability in handling stress and ambiguity. Lesson learnt.

The biceps is one of the most exercised muscles in the body, my doctor had explained in halting English. He backed that up by picking up the pen lying on his desk. “There, I just used my biceps”, he said. That’s why healing is slow. So slow, I realized, that it takes a long time to sense any sort of improvement.

But it’s there. It’s happenning. I know because I opened a jar of olives today and it didn’t hurt.

It took me a year to be able to do that. I have still a long way to go in terms of recovery and I don’t know if wishing to get back the shoulder I had is unrealistic but in the process of dealing with this crisis, I have made few good changes and adjustments in my life. And if they stick, why, I should still have gained a lot!

For now, I am happy to be back here with the renewed desire to share my stories again and drawings, of course. The above sketch is a current self portrait of a first time mask-wearer with improved shoulder strength.

A Vignettist