What's in a name?

Lately, I've been contemplating my name.

When I was a kid, I got made fun of. I got lots of Shoe jokes. There was a brand of shoes at the local mall called Connie and it was perfect fodder for a whole onslaught of Shoe jokes. Some kids got creative and thought up variations on that, like Connie Sock or Connie Boot or Connie whatever. After awhile I didn't care. I tried to use it to my advantage. When I ran for Junior Class President in high school, my friend designed a campaign tag that was shaped like a shoe and said "Connie for Prez" on it or something. They were super cute (I think they were designed to look like Converse shoes, which were in at the time and incidentally in right now) and I won that election.

I thought things would only get better when I got married and had the opportunity to change my name to something easier to spell, know how to pronounce, or not make fun of. But the other thing I used to get called when I was a kid was Connie Chung. As in the the first major Asian American news anchor who is married to Maury Povich. Little did I know that I would marry into a name that was so similar to this one. In fact, after two years I'm still not used to it. When I hear people call me Connie Chun I often think they are mocking me. In fact, I gave the guy who changed my oil the other day a dirty look when he said, "Connie Chun? Your car is ready." And when I hear them call me "Mrs. Chun" I often look around for Paul's mom.

Well, when we got our marriage certificate I remember the moment when I fiilled out the form and wrote that I intended to change my surname. Paul looked at me sympathetically and asked, "Are you sure? You don't have to." I responded that I wanted to, and that I wanted our names to symbolically reflect that we were becoming one family and I wanted our kids to have the same last name as both of us. At the time, I worked in a school where there were a lot kids whose moms had decided to keep their maiden names and I guess the traditionalist in me wanted it to be different than the kids whose last names were different from their mom's or who had hyphenated last names. But I also felt bound by a sort of duty or desire to partake in this rite of passage of for a married woman to change her name, though I later discovered what a pain it was (and still is) to fulfill this process. After this process, the feminist in me has often been bitter that this is still an understood social norm in our society for the woman to go through all that trouble and confusion. I mean, why can't we just decide based on which name sounds better for both people? I think Paul Sheu is pretty good.

So our solution was for me to keep my maiden name as my "artist name" as Paul calls it, and to use my legal last name (now Chun) for other circumstances, which was nice when we moved to a new place and people didn't get confused that we were married, and they know us lovingly as "the Chuns." I think that's kind of fun. It means to me that we are our own household and family, a concept that we spent a lot of time contemplating during our engagement. And I also get to write "Paul and Connie Chun" on things like address labels, Christmas cards, bills and such. That's kind of fun too, I suppose.

Well, now that I am in school again and most of my professors know my last name to be Chun, since that's what I put on my application and that's what they have on their roll. But the guitar faculty all know me by my "artist name" and it sort of feels like I have two identities. Part of it makes me feel special, a little bit like having an alter ego or being a superhero. But on the other hand, it is just plain confusing. So sometimes I resort to putting my full legal name down on papers, and in my email too, and for people not familiar with either name sometimes they get the vowels and syllables mixed up so that it becomes "Connie Shun Choo" or something stupid like that. And you would be surprised at the amount of people that pronounce a name like Chun to be "chooon." Because "fun" and "run" aren't good enough examples of a short U sound? Add on the mixed up consonants I become Connie Chu Shooon. I mean, come on people!

I thought seriously about hyphenating recently, and going through all the trouble of changing my name to something that would help people understand that it is a married name and to just simplify things and just use both all the time. This was because I recently got a teaching job in which the administration put "Shu-Chun" down as my last name. They apparently assumed that it was hyphenated (though they didn't spell it all correctly, but I'm used to that), though I never indicated anything of the sort. But then hyphenating wouldn't really help with the pronunciation, though it might aid in the confusion of knowing which name to use. However, one syllable Asian last names don't really sound that good hyphenated. I think that more than one Asian sounding last name for one person may be too much for the American general public at large. Paul told me he was sorry that he's not a Kennedy. Ooh, I thought to myself. Now there's a name I would have been ecstatic about. But alas, I shall remain Connie Chu Shun for the rest of my life.

Enter 2009

Every New Year's, Paul and I take a little day retreat to recount everything that happened in the closing year and set a list of prayer requests/resolutions for the coming year. This year we decided to check out the Griffith Observatory and take a little hike in the surrounding hills in the balmy and perfect 70 degree weather.

Aiko dreams of being a movie star as she overlooks the smoggy view of the Hollywood sign.

We found a bench and sat down to have some water and apples after our not-very-strenuous hike. Here we took out my journal and jotted down all the things that happened this year. Some highlights:

• Fasting meat for 40 days and subsequently having to go on a diet
• Gaining a job extension, losing a job
• Saying our goodbyes to San Diego after a short year in paradise
  
• Starting my DMA
• Settling into a new church
• Seeing Paul's dad again after two years
• Releasing my first CD
• Paul joining/managing an adult baseball league
• Moving two times in one year
• Going to France at the last minute with my sister
  
• Waiting and waiting and waiting on God
• Enjoying whirlwind trips to New York
• Discovering that we like LA- who would have thought?
  

It's been a year full of changes and looking back now, full of blessing. We took a minute to watch the sunset over the hills and said goodbye to 2008.

Looking forward, I have a few hopes for 2009.

Practicing every day this year. Yep, that's right. 365 days of guitar. No two week breaks after a concert. No taking holidays off. Making it a part of the rhythm of my lifestyle. Seeing if it can become as second nature as eating or brushing my teeth and discovering what comes out of that. Which makes me think that I need one of these babies:

It's a travel guitar that my former teacher endorses called the SoloEtte. The wire edges come apart and they zip up into a portable bag. It has the feel of a normal guitar so you can keep your hand muscles in shape even while you're on vacation. It even has a headphone jack so you can hear yourself practice on the thing while you're traveling. I have never cared enough about playing that I thought I would need one of these. But I think its time to up the anti. Alas, this baby retails for a whopping $850 and I don't have any vacations planned right now. Oh well.

Taking better care of my body. I don't know why I've been feeling the signs of aging lately (being tired without fail at 11pm, seeing a few wrinkles around the eyes, feeling like its harder than ever to get back into shape), but I've been reminded of how much I should cherish my health and take care of my body- not only because these are the last few years of my 20's, but also because if we have kids in a few years, I know that my body will never be the same again. So I'm going to try to do more jogging, yoga at home, and get back into lap swimming, something I did briefly in college and learned to love at one point. USC has a gorgeous heated pool and a jacuzzi that I should take advantage of while I can. This also includes taking better care of my skin and cutting back on things like beer and fried food for sure. (Not so easy considering who I'm married to.)

Learning to live with little and seeing how God multiplies it. Right now we are doing our best to live more frugally. We've thought about some ways to save money during this season of unemployment, and have wondered why we can't make that a normal part of our lifestyle even after a job comes a long. God is really showing us that He can make so much out of so little. And life is all the richer for it.

Case in point: Korean BBQ at home! When you have all-you-can-eat BBQ in K-town here, it's about $17 per person, which is pretty cheap for the amount of food you get, but still runs a little over $40 after tax and tip. So instead, for our first dinner of the year we grabbed some thinly sliced sirloin from the Korean market (disturbingly cheap at about $2.50 a package) and all the coordinating veggies (green leaf lettuce, sesame leaves, thinly sliced scallions with red pepper flakes, and a Korean herb called ssuk) and whipped out the tabletop grill we got as a wedding present. So instead of $40, we managed to spent less than $10 with the stellar prices at the Korean market. Add an $11 bottle of champagne from Costco, and we were pretty happy.

The new year brings many unresolved challenges, but much excitement for what God has in store. As I've learned to say in Korean, seh-heh bock man-ee bahd-euh-seh-yo! Happy New Year!

holiday 2008

A Christmas song

This week I played at our church Newsong LA for the first time. I've always liked the song "O Holy Night" and spent part of the week working on an arrangement for service. I also discovered I can capture video on my computer. I've had the computer for two years and had no idea. We took this video in front of our Christmas tree and if you look closely, you'll see a certain reindeer running around. Well, hope you like it.

Merry Christmas!

Commitment

“The drama nerd comes out in me when I’m in a theater,” he explained now, as the actors rehearsed. “When I saw ‘All My Sons,’ I was changed — permanently changed — by that experience. It was like a miracle to me. But that deep kind of love comes at a price: for me, acting is torturous, and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great — well, that’s absolutely torturous.”

- Philip Seymour Hoffman, New York Times, 12/19/08

The hardest part about acting, according to Philip Seymour Hoffman, is the very pursuit of it. When I read this quote, something struck a chord in me about the ease of falling in love with an art form, that love igniting the drive to pursue it, and the torture of knowing that the ideal of the beauty in this art is so intangible and at times feels so completely unreachable that the wanting of it only brings oneself to a torturous state of pursuit because of its beauty and fragility. It's easier to want than to do, and the doing at times feels as though it hinges on the brink of destroying the beautiful from too much effort or too much pining.

I've often wondered what I can do to make my commitment to my own art form less torturous in its own right. Why is music not as natural as a part of my daily doing, my daily being, like breathing? Instead, it is often this monstrous thing that looms ever before me, its beauty slipping further from my grasp with each day that I don't purposely pursue it. It often feels like an insatiable burden that I've only brought upon myself, an insurmountable duty that I've chosen. What is it in the human spirit that allows to reach for the things that are completely intangible, much akin to a longing for a Creator that we can't see?

I think it has something to do with a much needed commitment to believe that the intangible beauty that first captured my heart at the age of five is a inseparable part of my life now that I've chosen it. Even in its torture, it is somehow a part of me that is inescapable as long as I keep making this decision to want it. I hope for the day that music will become as natural as living is. Like breathing.

Artists can learn a lot from athletes. I saw Michael Phelps on TV the other day. He talked about how there was one year in which he did not miss a single workout. Such was his determination that not 1 day out of 365 was taken off. Could I ever be that committed?

I guess we'll have to wait and see in 2009.

A new kind of bliss.

I'm discovering more and more that LA offers a lot of the things that makes me love cities. And despite the traffic, smog, and unabashed superficiality, there is one thing that I now love which was never even in my vocabulary before I moved here.

The Korean Spa.

Now, I like anything with the word spa in it. I think I get this from my sister. Nail spa. Foot spa. Spa Day. Day Spa. Massage Spa. A sigh of relief calms my body with the utterance of this magical three letter word. Given the fact that money is tight and there is no way I'm going to one of those expensive spas in West LA to get my R & R, I decided to save up to treat myself to a less expensive post-semester stress-busting reward before I started studying for my last exam. Considering that I've been having upper back pain all semester and could use a little beauty treatment, I decided to investigate the phenomenon of Korean spas that exist in our neck of the woods here next to LA's expansive Koreatown.

So after checking out some of the reviews online, I picked Natura spa because it was reportedly clean, modern, and not as expensive as some of the others. I made an appointment for a scrub and massage, which was about half the cost that nice spas in LA would charge for one of these services. The fee included access to the jacuzzis and saunas at the place, so I went early to take advantage of the amenities.

Well, I read online that these spas are pretty "old world" in the sense that they observe a lot of the traditional bathhouse protocol that you find in Korea. And reportedly from my husband, visiting a spa in Korea is a pretty shocking experience. In fact, it was the only experience that made him feel that he was in a foreign country when he visited Korea a few years ago for the first time since he was like 3. The reason being that everyone is NAKED! Of course, men and women are separated. But the shock of seeing even members of your own gender completely in the buff is well, shocking. Especially when many of them are twice your age and often your grandma's generation.

I found Natura to be a world away from the busy street of Wilshire Ave. Hidden underneath a Korean mini-mall on the basement floor, I was greeted at the front desk by two ladies who weren't sure if I was Korean or not and offered me half-apologetic smiles and confused looks. I said loudly, "Hello!" not even bothering to say the formal Korean greeting because if I said it correctly, they would only assume that I was Korean and proceed to talk to me in Korean. So I tried to make it clear that I was 100% Americana.

A nice lady proceeded to give me a tour of the premises, showing me my fancy key access gym locker, set of white towels and terrycloth robe, the cucumber and citrus-infused drinking water, and complimentary toiletries. It was a very nice changing area and was impeccably clean. She also pointed me to the sauna area, stressing to shower before and after entering the pools, the sleeping room, composed of an elevated floor with tatami mats and comforters with a flat-screen TV on the wall, the restaurant, which sold overpriced Korean food, and the lounge, which had sofa chairs with wooden ottomans and Korean magazines. I liked what I saw. I quickly changed and put on my terrycloth robe, making my way into the sauna to take a shower.

Well, opening the door to the sauna was a bit like entering the Twilight Zone. I was prepared to enter with my robe on, thinking I would discreetly take it off and find a little corner to shower where nobody would see me, since the showers and the tubs were all in one large room with no walls whatsoever. But a sign on the door said, "FOR SANITARY REASON, PLEASE DO NOT BRING ROBES INTO THE BATH AREA." Huh? I guess I had no choice but to enter in the stark, carrying my little towel, and to remain in the stark until I would leave 3 hours later!

So, I entered the world of nakedness, and pretty soon I got used to it. None of the other ladies were looking at me, and I avoided making direct eye contact with anyone so that I could try to blend in as part of the bathhouse scenery. After a few minutes, I found this Naked World With Complete Strangers to be somehow liberating. I was no longer concerned about the extra tummy rolls that I gained this past week when I went on a baking frenzy and Paul and I had Korean BBQ and fried chicken in the same day. I wasn't concerned about anything. I was comfortable in my own skin. Quite literally. And apparently, everyone else was too.

I tried a comfortably hot jacuzzi first that was supposedly infused with tea, called a Mugworts Bath (which reminded me of something from Harry Potter, and I spent most of the time in it wondering why they called it that). It felt heavenly and the sweet smell of the tea or herbs was intoxicating. After a little bit, I investigated the other options around- an extremely hot, scalding jacuzzi, an ice cold plunge pool, a steam room that smelled beautifully of Chinese herbs or something, a sauna room with Korean TV blaring (I didn't like this one), and two funny rooms called the Jade Stone Room and the Yellow Clay Room. The Jade Stone Room looked like some sort of cave where you might find Gollum. It looked creepy at first, but I went in and sat on a leathery coushin I found on the floor. It wasn't until some other ladies entered that I learned these coushins were pillows for your head. The others proceeded to lie down, rest their heads on them, and take naps. I found this strange at first, but quickly followed suit, and took my nap next to some other naked ladies on the floor. After a little while, I wandered into the Yellow Clay Room, where people were doing the same thing. This room was made of yellow clay reportedly imported from Korea. It had an earthy smell and even had bags of clay hanging from the ceiling. I think its supposed to be good for your skin to be around such earthiness.

The time came for my appointment for my scurb and massage. I waited near the massaging area for my number to be called. The massage area was a strange sight as there were no walls and about a dozen massage tables were grouped together in a corner. I'll spare you the gritty details, but forget having a towel to modestly cover the areas not being massaged. The lady who called me up promptly took my towel from me, pulled me by the arm like an auntie might pull you to the dinner table, and cheerfully gestured for me to lie face down on the massage table. She then began throwing buckets of hot water all over me. I yelped a little at first, and then decided to just forget about any reluctance and just enjoy the treatment. The lady proceeded to scrub every single inch of my body with this little scrubby mitt, and the results were immediate. Layers of dead skin started falling off me (which Koreans call dae) that she cleared out by throwing more hot water all over me. I spent a little time wondering if they use the same scrubby mitt for everyone or not, but then just shrugged it off as I was scrubbed into oblivion. This little lady was sparing no inch and was no joke. She scrubbed with superhuman strength and spent a particular amount of time on my right armpit and left thigh. I wondered if she tells her grandkids about what she does all day.

After several layers of my epidermis had been rinsed away with hot water, she then proceeded to lather oil all over my body, gave me some facial cleanser, and then told me to "take shower." I obeyed and rinsed off the oil and facial cleanser, and then game back to the table for part deux of the experience. Hot towels were put on me and she began to massage. But apparently the Korean version of massaging is more like using a punching bag- me being the punching bag. She literally got up onto the table and hit me with the back of her elbows and fists. I've come to like very strong pressure in massages, but I just found it funny at first. I almost let out a giggle, but she hit the air out of me at the same time so it came out more like the sound of an endangered small animal. I let her work out some of the knots in my upper back using this method and began to get used to the treatment. After she had let out her agression on my back, a silky substance was poured all over me. I opened my eyes and peeked at my arm to discover that it was milk! She also gave me an ice cold cucumber face mask and then proceeded to shampoo and condition my hair, along with a very intense scalp massage. Wow, what treatment! I felt like a queen and when it was finally all over, I was instructed to shower yet again for about the 10th time that day, and then went into the locker room to change. I noticed that my skin had a new glow to it and I went into a state of happy relaxation for the rest of the day. I was a new woman.

Take it from me, the Korean spa treatment deserves a try. Now that I think about it, I am probably not making this sound very appealing. Pay someone to scrub you with what feels like steel wool and punch you for an hour? And not let you have your clothes? Well, there must be something in the water. I am definitely going back. But not with anyone I know.

Holiday Sale!

Yes, I said the magic word- SALE! Here's an idea for holiday shopping- all CDs are 25% off at www.conniesheu.com. From now until Dec. 24th, enter the coupon code HOLIDAY at checkout and receive 25% off your order. A great way to pass along the gift of music to someone in your life and support an independent artist.

Sorry if you're tired of me plugging myself. I've gotta get the word out somehow...