I Love My Stupid Life

Chapter 1 

Little Albert

I know this book should probably start off with rough beginnings because everyone loves a tale of overcoming adversity, especially when it’s from an immigrant. But truth be told, my parents settled in to New Zealand just fine when they moved here from South Korea in 1993.

My father comes from a financially stable family and my mum’s parents were incredibly wealthy – my grandfather was a highly regarded doctor in Korean medicine. He even made his own ginseng elixir, which sold like hotcakes in the town where he lived, Songtan.This meant that my parents could get on the property ladder within their first year of moving here and they’ve steadily scaled up to where they are now on Auckland’s North Shore – an area generally for the upper middle class and even the very rich if your house is by a beach.

I was born on 4 April 1997 in a little suburb called Milford, an area known for its flat roads, which makes it popular with the elderly as it means they can go for quaint strolls. Crime and violence doesn’t happen in Milford, don’t you know.

In my family there’s me, Mum, Dad and my older sister, Rachel. My mum has always stressed the importance of being close to your siblings. When my sister got invited to her school friends’ birthday parties, it was imperative that she took me along, which is probably why socialising comes so naturally to me now – I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember.

My parents never argued about money, there was never any suggestion of infidelity and we were happy in our three-bedroom, single-storey house in the suburbs.Growing up, I was surrounded with positivity but, like all families, we had our problems – as we should! Families aren’t supposed to be a fairytale and if they are, trust me, someone is hiding something.

My dad was and still is a banker; he has been at the same bank for over 20 years. Early on, my mum worked for a publication called Korea Post, which featured local news and events within the Korean community. But with her abrasive personality, she quickly learned that working for herself was a much wiser career path. In all honesty, she would’ve been forced to step down if she didn’t do it herself because I can’t imagine her taking orders from anyone. When I was around three years old, Mum started working for herself as a maths tutor, and still does to this day. And trust me, she was the breadwinner of the family: she’s a savvy business woman and she knew that the Korean tiger mums would want to send their kids somewhere after school because 9am to 3pm is not nearly enough education for parents who want to send their children to Ivy League schools. She also has a Master’s degree in mathematics from Kyung Hee University, a school that had a strong reputation back in her day, so she had the credentials to back it up. Her business boomed and our house was always filled with older kids, from intermediate students to high-schoolers. It was like I had tons of older siblings and they all adored the shit out of me.

Word got out about my mum and how her students would get the top marks in their schools. It reached a point when she would have to turn people away because she didn’t have the capacity to teach someone from scratch; now she was only dealing with the elites. Although I was young, I vividly remember other mothers crying to my mum, basically pleading with her to teach their children – but she wouldn’t bat an eyelid. She had no weakness for tears; they were not something that made her go soft. The same went for me – tantrums and tears got me nothing but a spanking on the arse. If I wanted something, I wrote Mum a letter detailing why I wanted it and what benefits it would have for me and my life.

In the early 2000s, there were lots of Korean parents sending their children off to New Zealand for high school because that was the easy route. The Korean education system is absolutely cooked and highly competitive. If you look at the stats on suicide rates, they shoot up dramatically during the final high school exams and that’s no coincidence. Unlike New Zealand, where every year is treated like the new year it is, Korea’s education system is structured so that each year from intermediate to the final year of high school leads to one exam that goes for almost 12 hours. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a kid, and the competition to get into a university is fucking fierce.

There are over 200 universities in Korea and that’s not including the community colleges, but if it’s not in Seoul, nobody wants to go– so there’s really only around 40 universities (for a population of 51 million) that are considered worthy. The requirements to get into these universities are ruthless, unless you’ve studied overseas. If you come from an English-speaking education system, you are seen as more advanced so you are basically a shoo-in. Therefore, parents shoot their kids off to the States, Australia and New Zealand – to our house.

Mum usually drew the line at housing kids, but there was one family that we had to take in as a favour, since my grandma knew them quite well. It was only temporary – for a few months while the parents sorted things back home and settled in here – so it wasn’t a big deal. Soon, seven of us were living in our three-bedroom, two-bathroom house. There were three new kids: Jun, Kai and Lisa. Jun was the oldest at thirteen, then came Kai who was eleven, and their little baby sister Lisa, who was nine. I was around five, and I saw the boys as fully grown adults. They became like my older siblings. I was excited, especially because I didn’t have a brother of my own. Rachel finally had a sister to play with, too, and she and Lisa would draw together while Jun, Kai and I would goto the playground and scooter around our neighbourhood.

My dad came home from work every day by 6.30pm and we’d always have dinner as a family, at the table. Eating in front of the TV was out of the question – I didn’t even know it was a thing until I was older and would stay over at my white friends’ houses for dinner. Mum always cooked Korean food, and not particularly well because she worked late every night and was always pressed for time, but Dad was never one to complain.

On Fridays, we’d meet Dad at his office in the CBD and go to a restaurant called KangChon; it was a weekly ritual. This place served Korean–Chinese fusion food, and the best way I can explain this cuisine is that it’s your classic Chinese takeaways, like sweet and sour pork, buttoned down on the variations of spices and definitely pulled back on the oil. Two of the most popular dishes are jjajangmyeon and jjamppong –both noodle dishes, but very different. Jjajangmyeon features a sauce made from black beans so it has a dark, chocolatey brown colour. But considering the amount of black beans that goes into this sauce, it doesn’t taste beany at all – the flavour is more like caramelised onions, very mild with the tiniest hint of sweetness. This thick-as-fuck gravy is poured all over bouncy wheat noodles. Give a kid who can barely use chopsticks a bowl of jjajangmyeon and you’re asking for a messy affair.

I was always much more into the jjamppong, though. These noodles feature a bright red broth that makes you salivate just looking at the bowl. It’s loaded with chopped vegetables and seafood, making it much more of an adult dish, and I always watched Mum eat this in awe as her lips went purple and her forehead started to show beads of sweat. Jjamppong became a dish of maturity in my eyes and I don’t know if it was me wanting to grow up fast or what, but I started ordering it at the age of five. Mum didn’t try to stop me – she says I always had strange taste as a kid. Apparently, my favourite ice cream was mint chocolate chip and I’d be so upset if she accidentally got me the more ‘kid-friendly’ Goody Goody Gum Drops instead after requesting ‘the green one’. Dark chocolate was the only sort I would consume and Mum found this quite fascinating. It was no surprise to her that I wanted the jjamppong.

Mum loved me for being a bit different, and always said ‘You’re just not like the other kids.’ According to her, I always thought in a way that went beyond my years, to the point that she’d often have to take a moment to process what I had just said – it was much too profound to have come from a kid in kindergarten. It was undeniable that I was her favourite, while Dad favoured Rachel. My sister is very intelligent but also a little obtuse. Her naivety makes her the worst at reading the room, just like my father, and this frustrates both Mum and me to no end. But Dad understood the way Rachel’s brain worked. And despite our differences, my sister has always been my best friend. We tell each other everything.

Growing up, the biggest difference between Rachel and me was that Rachel had passions and hobbies. Her dream job seemed to change every week and at one stage, her ambition was to be a teacher, vet, psychologist, journalist, lawyer and president – all at the same time. She wasn’t all talk, though; she actually could’ve been all those things if she really wanted to. Rachel is incredibly smart – one of the smartest people I know.

Because we went to the same school, teachers always compared us.They’d tell me that she was the smartest, brightest student they had ever taught whereas I was one of the rudest and lacked any ambition. They were wrong about me being rude. I was just a little bit cheeky, that’s all. But when it came to lacking ambition, they were on the money.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do but I knew I didn’t want to study hard to get there. I hated studying, and my mum struggled with this because according to her, she had never met someone who’s as fast a learner as me. She’d always follow that up with ‘And I’m not just saying that because you’re my son!’ I was good at art but I didn’t like it enough to ever do anything with it. I liked to sing and dance but I wasn’t good enough to make a career out of that, either. My favourite thing to do was. . . well . . . nothing. An ideal day for me consisted of endless snacks and watching the Disney Channel, especially That’s So Raven. It was my favourite show and my dad would claim that nobody had a better sense of humour than African Americans. A bit of a generalisation, but also true. He showed me The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Delirious with Eddie Murphy. Nothing beat a day of laughing at the TV screen while shoving Pocky in my face and if I could make a living off of it, I would. Reader, I did.

All of this is not to say that I wasn’t good in school. Are you forgetting who my mum is? Auckland’s finest maths tutor wasn’t going to have her child flunk out. I might not have been as good as Rachel, but not many people were. I was still a high achiever – not top of the class, but above average at all times. Unlike my teachers, my parents never compared me and my sister. Our differences are what they love about us and therefore, I never bothered to compete with her. Rachel was book smart, I was street smart – and I was happy about that.

When I was really young, like primary-school young, I was really social and made friends effortlessly. But confidence comes in waves, and it sure wasn’t a linear trajectory to get to where I am today. All in all though, I would say that I am just a slightly bigger version of my little self, including some of the finer details – like my obsession with anything in Ziploc plastic bags.