Christmas Memories from Korea

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Despite recent (and ongoing) changes to the Mormon missionary program, the majority of those charged with traveling the world and evangelizing on behalf of the LDS Church are (and will likely remain for a good while yet) young white men from supportive Mormon families in the western United States. Being young, usually not very worldly-wise, usually not very experienced in dealing with foreign cultures or differing sensibilities, and usually carrying around with them expectations shaped by growing up in a family- and tradition-centered church, the Christmas holidays can be a rough time. Twenty-five years ago I was one of them, going through my second Christmas as a Mormon missionary in South Korea. My second Christmas in the country was better than my first. Why? Well, let me explain.

South Korea has more Christians than any other East Asian nation, but that still doesn't make Christmas a major event there, or at least it didn't back in 1988 and 1989. Some stores would put up decorations, and some families would have trees, but overwhelmingly the feeling was that of a borrowed holiday, something that was being embraced (when it was) for reasons that, however deeply felt, weren't at all organic. (Though Christmas is actually a national holiday in South Korea, unlike any other Asian country.) Mormon wards and branches would, like other Christian churches, make mention of the day in talks and songs, but there was little, if any, real cultural spirit behind the celebrations, at least none that I--a 19 and 20-year-old pretentious-and-never-particularly-comfortable white kid from an overdose-on-Christmas upper-middle class family in the western United States (let me tell you about the time Dad brought home an 18ft. pine for our Christmas tree...)--could discern. And I wasn't alone in feeling that way, which at least partially explains the way we American missionaries would go out of our way to create some kind of connection to the holiday (and here I'm speaking overwhelmingly of the elders; the sister missionaries, far more than us males, seemed to be able to integrate into the rhythms of Korean life, perhaps simply because they were such a minority, whereas amongst the male missionaries, Americans dominated). Unfortunately, at least on the basis of my first Christian in the country, those attempts at connection can seem a bit desperate, and sometimes (especially in retrospect) downright humiliating.

In December 1988, my first Christmas in the country, that connection was seemingly furnished for us from above. The mission--like the country--was feeling pretty good, I suppose. The Seoul Olympics had been a great success (or at least the Koreans thought so). The country was a year into the presidency of Roh Tae Woo (노태우), and while there were protests aplenty (and would continue to be throughout my time there), the scandals of his presidency hadn't happened yet. (For that matter, neither had the Tiananmen Massacre next door.) Back in those days--at least in our mission--we missionaries had to buy Books of Mormon to sell or give away in our proselyting, and the costs of a Korean mission being pretty high anyway, there was always a grumbling about money, and a great deal of rejoicing when news of some new generous subsidy being bestowed from the mission office, which happened, it must be said, not infrequently. It was in the midst of this that the news came forth: the Korea Seoul West Mission was going to throw a huge mission-wide American-style Christmas party, at none other location than the 63 Building (육삼 빌딩), which was then the tallest building outside of North America. (As you can see, it kind of dominated Seoul's skyline back then.)

It was a strange couple of days, rest assured. Missionaries gathered from all over; we crashed at each others' apartments, and those elders and sisters who had been around for a while made plans for a mostly unsupervised day in Seoul, while we newbies (I'd only been in the country for a few months by then) listened in, intimidated and scandalized and envious. The party took place in the banquet room, where we were fed not just fine Korean fare, but oysters, fresh roast beef, salmon, and lobster. Missionaries wandered throughout the building, up to the observatory deck, trading war stories and jokes and (no doubt) outright lies. There was a talent show which got completely out of hand, with different groups of elders and sisters competing with each other to win prizes (a competition which got fierce enough that when one group of sisters, decked out in black ninja outfits, took to the stage to perform a rather impressive choreographed dance to some K-Pop hit of the day, another group of American elders rushed on to the stage and promptly broke out in all sorts of--in retrospect, rather pathetic--break dance moves, thus disrupting their act), all of which came to a rousing end with U2's "Desire" blasting over the loudspeakers. (That was the choice of the American zone leader who'd somehow ended up in charge.) Truly, it was a bit crazy. I mean, there was an ice sculpture of the Korean Temple, for heaven's sake. I have no idea how much the whole thing cost (the long-time financial secretary to the mission was released soon afterward and, though I was later companions with him, I never learned much about how the whole thing was pulled off), but it was a small touch of Reagan's bull-market America, right there in Korea. I've often shared stories of this party with other missionaries, and when I think about how outrageous it all was, even I have a hard time believing it happened. Thank goodness I had my camera and, thus, hard evidence.

A week after than party I was transferred to Ansan (안산)--or "Banwol" as some of the older locals who had been shaped by the Japanese occupation more than four decades earlier still referred to it. Today Ansan is part of the greater Seoul megapolis, but a quarter-century ago it was coastal town whose connection to the big city was a single (admittedly busy) train route. There was a small Mormon branch there, which met in an upstairs office space, where we'd huddle around a single coal stove for protection from the cold winds coming off the sea that would pass through the thin walls and windows with ease. It was, for me, a lonely and dispiriting place to spend the holiday, made worse, I suppose, by my constant berating of myself for feeling that way. There was a genuine attempt to bring some Christmas spirit into our shared drab space that holiday, with a Christmas Eve social during which a group of Primary-aged children sang some songs and a short nativity was acted out. (Unfortunately, we American elders decided to contribute a skit to the evening's entertainment which, while well-received, was characterized by some especially immature and, in retrospect, highly insensitive antics on our part. At least we didn’t get arrested, though.) But all those attempts, both by myself and by others, didn't change my put-upon mood. All through the holiday, I found myself defiantly listening to my homemade cassette tape recording of the Osmond Christmas album (the original double album, the one with the solo number by Merrill which never made it on to either of the album's cd releases) over and over again. The song I most associate with that Christmas, though, was a ridiculously maudlin cover of Wham's "Last Christmas" by Lee Sun Hee (이선희), which I seemed to hear everywhere and which brought me to the brink of tears almost every time. (In the decades since, it has apparently become a bit of a seasonal K-Pop staple, though usually lacking of the aching earnestness of the 80s version.)



Christmas in 1989 was different, perhaps because I'd matured, and got some of the self-pity and self-aggrandizement (yes, those two emotions can go together) out of my system, or perhaps because the odd go-for-broke sentiment that characterized so much of my first year or so in the mission seemed to have dissipated. I still wasn't at peace with missionary work (that actually wouldn't come until many years after I came home), but I'd been assigned to a large ward in Suwon (수원), where I ended up spending the final year of my mission, something I am profoundly grateful for. There was a feeling of genuine community in that ward, or at least I could feel that the community was there, and draw some strength from that, outsider though I was.

The mission had another Christmas party, though this one was far less extravagant. Talent shows and silliness abounded, as always, but I think this time around there was less pretension, less of a "what can we get away with this time" sensibility, and more honest fun. A bunch of us got together, ostensibly to do a scene from The Pirates of Penzance, but actually singing Ray Stevens's "The Pirate Song," and it was a blast (given my general shamelessness I was chosen to play lead, and, unfortunately, I was still a rather immature and insensitive performer: I went out on that stage, and I was flaming.) Christmas Eve itself was spent at the home of generous, older American Mormon, a man who was a veritable Santa Claus/Father Confessor to lonely and struggling missionaries far from home, on Osan Air Base, Songtan Station, which was near Suwon. I spent much of the evening attempting to explain, in whatever level of ridiculous detail my broken Korean allowed, the plot and significance of "Miracle on 34th Street" (the original, being shown that night on the Armed Forces Korean Network!) to the lone Korean member of our party. The snow fell heavily that night as we took a late bus back to our apartment, and a reflective, simple song "또다시 크리스마스" ("Again Christmas"), from the second (and last, and not as good) album by the 80s K-Pop masters Deul Guk Hwa (들국화) was playing from an intercom outside a store near the bus stop. The brassy, yet humble tune and lyrics ("어디에나 소리 없이 사랑은 내리네"--"Love is falling everywhere without a sound") fit my mood perfectly.



My favorite memory from that holiday season, 1989, was traveling with a large number of young people from our ward far outside out proselyting area--outside our mission boundaries, in fact, though I suspect no one remembered to inform the mission leadership, thank goodness--to climb Mt. Soyo (소요산), north of the city of Seoul. It was a huge event, planned for weeks and involving close to 30 people. It was bitterly cold day, enough to make one want to bail on the 4am start time, but in the end it was a trip filled with camaraderie and good humor. We packed in our meals and had a glorious cookout in near-freezing temperatures. We explored Buddhist shrines and talked about religion and nature and fate. We challenged each other--missionaries and Korean members alike--to rock climbing contests and snow ball fights. We missionaries swapped stories, sure, but I thought there was a little more openness, a little more receptivity, in what I heard--at least, I hope there was more of than in what came out of my mouth. We made it all the way to peak, and--as was (and I hope still is) typical of the Korean people--we sang songs and gave each one of ourselves a little bit of alone time. I had my Walkman with me, and a tape that I'd picked up at a music shop somewhere in Suwon, a tape which I still have today: a Korean production (hopefully legally obtained, but quite possibly not) of George Winston's December. I can remember sitting near the top of the mountain, listening to his rendition of "Jesus, Jesus Rest Your Head" three or four times over. (Obviously, much of my pretension remained, but still: it was a wonderful moment, one which impressed upon me a sense of quiet majesty and grace and simplicity which I found beautiful. However much growing and maturing my mind and soul still needed and still had awaiting them in the months to come, that Christmas moment was one worth treasuring.)

I've not saved my missionary journal, not any of the letters I sent or received from my 22 months in South Korea. That's a loss, I recognize, especially when it comes to writing down memories like these: there's so much that I need to reconstruct, so many disconnected pieces of evidence--a photograph here, an odd note there--that's it hard to avoid accepting that I might have all sorts of essentials wrong, or might be including the accidental inventions of two decades' worth of oral story-telling in my account. But then honestly, just how distant is anyone's memory from myth? I'd love to return to South Korea someday, and travel back to Ansan, and Suwon, and Mr. Soyo, and Osan Air Base, and see if there was anything I remembered, anything I could connect with. Maybe there would be; I'd love to believe that all the good things--the language, the friendships, the positive lessons--would come flooding back. But maybe they wouldn't. And in which case...well, isn't that what invented memorializations like holidays (like everything we manufacture and make our own, again and again, out of our own subjective acts of cultural retrieval and interpretation) are for? So that we can reconnect with ourselves, set apart and see those moments of foolishness and joy and despair and grace for what they are. I had many such moments in Korea. Some, clearly, were better than others. But still, this Christmas, I'm grateful for them all.

What Tiananmen Meant to Me, Twenty-Five Years Ago

In the summer of 1989, I was living in Seoul, South Korea--on Yeouido (여의도) island, in fact, just a few miles from the 63 Building. (I strongly doubt any foreign missionaries could afford apartments there today.) The heavy rains of the summer had come early that year, or at least that was my memory. I was just about halfway through the 22 months I was spending in the country as a church missionary, and by that time I probably had learned about as much Korean as I ever did master, unfortunately. It was enough to be able to follow in a very general way the information I caught on the occasional television news program which I'd watch while eating at a restaurant or visiting a friend's apartment, but I still kept an eye out for English-language newspapers and magazines, and would grab a copy whenever I could. And then came a day in June, perhaps a week or so after the event in question, when I managed to find this copy of Time.

The June 4th Tiananmen Square Massacre--the violent crushing, via the armed force of the People's Liberation Army, of the massive, disorganized, dizzying popular demonstrations which had been taking place in Beijing's central Tiananmen Square since April--had managed to pass me by entirely. I later learned that just about everyone in Seoul had been talking about the tragedy, and I saw more than enough news coverage of it through various Western sources. But on the South Korean news programs, there was nothing--the order had come down from the government not to discuss the massacre, as it was feared that it would remind people too much of the Gwangju Uprising, when hundreds of Koreans were slaughtered by the South Korean army when they took control of the city of Gwangju during a period of martial law. (South Korea in 1989 was technically on its way to becoming a genuinely free, mostly liberal, multi-party democracy, but its president at the time, Roh Tae-woo (노태우) had still been hand-picked by a former military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan (전두환), who himself had ordered the Gwangju slaughter in 1980, and many political and social restrictions were still in place--all of which were unmentioned in the media and constantly protested in the streets, leading one local American I knew to refer to South Korea, riffing on one of the nation's traditional names, as "the land of morning calm and evening riot.") So an unknown number of violent deaths--probably numbering in the thousands, though no official numbers have ever been released--out of the more than a million Chinese students, Beijing locals, and others who participated in those demonstrations went essentially, officially, undocumented in the country right next door.

When I returned to America and went back to BYU in 1990, I wanted to understand the culture and people that I'd been sent to preach to, and I began to study Asian politics and philosophy. While I never became anything like an authority on Chinese politics, in those years while I was completing my undergraduate degree and then getting my MA, it was impossible to go to a conference, to gather together with other students, or to meet with faculty in my area, and not have the events of the year before, or of two or three or four years before, come up at some point or another. We were all former East Asian church missionaries, or people who'd spent time doing business or teaching English in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, and elsewhere, or both--and all of us had, at the time, desperately scavenged for news coming out of the PRC. (This was pre-internet, folks.) As students in the years to come, we went to hear from dissidents and troublemakers that our professors knew and managed to bring to campus, as well as apologists for the regime (I can remember one time when, in a gathering at a small campus theater, some representative of PRC government, perhaps someone from the consulate nearest to Utah, answered questions about the causes behind the demonstrations, leading one Chinese student at BYU to bravely shout out "You are a liar!"--after which all his friends quickly hustled him out of the theater, before he could be identified, have his student visa stripped from him, and suffer the consequences). Nothing seemed more important to me, back then, then contributing to the debate about how to help bring democracy to China, and punishing those in power. The mostly forgotten argument over giving China special trading privileges with the U.S. seemed massively important to me then. When it looked like China was going to be successful in landing its bid for the 2000 Summer Olympics, it seemed like a terrible scandal. And so forth, and so on.

Well, they eventually did get their Olympics in 2008--and 25 years on, the word from China is that most young people are pretty unfamiliar with the protests and the enormous bravery shown by thousands of people who engaged in hunger strikes, marches, and life-threatening civil disobedience, so as to be heard by their government. And I'm still no expert about China--indeed, given the huge changes globalization has wrought over the past quarter-century, I'd have to say I know less about China's people, culture, language, aspirations, and politics today than I did back then. (The fact that I ended up doing almost nothing with East Asia during my graduate school years--this article is about the only evidence of the passions that I carried with me from my BYU years--may have contributed to that as well, of course.) I may have a chance to visit China this coming year, speaking at a conference in Nanjing; it'd be my first visit back to East Asia since my Hong Kong trip four years ago, and dearly hope it works out. No fears about visiting China? None at all. Whatever the many good and important things that we hoped for and wrote about back then which haven't worked out, so many other unexpected good things, good things that many students and friends of mine who have visited and lived in China over the past 25 years have testified of, actually have worked out. China is, in so many ways, clearly a better place to live today than it was a generation ago. This hasn't made China into a democracy, by any means--the tyrannical practices of the controlling party, their human rights abuses, their suppression of dissent, their control of the media, their corrupt and exploitive dealings with corporate powers, is all still there. But this nation of billions of people has changed and continues to change in ways that no one could ever predict--so much so that the sort of tightly employed state violence which it wielded in downtown Beijing back in 1989 is probably pretty much inconceivable today, by the Chinese themselves and the millions who do business with them. And that is, most certainly, the best good thing of all.

K-Pop, 20 Years Ago

I had an interesting experience last week--something prompted me to pull out from storage all my old Korean music, which consists of tape cassettes I bought 20+ years ago when I was a missionary in South Korea. I had a lot more at one point; when I first arrived in the field, one experienced elder (that's what we guys called each other, as missionaries: "Elder Last-Name") told me that of the two best ways to learn the language, the easiest was to buy and listen to a bunch of popular music, and I took him at his word. (His other recommendation was to get a girlfriend, but he may have been joking about that one. I never found out, anyway.)

When I was there, from 1988 until 1990, South Korea was going through the process of shaking off the remains of the quasi-military dictatorship which had finally come to an end with the elections in 1987, and were both really feeling their freedom, as well as assessing the sort of culture and public realm that had emerged during the previous 10 years of nearly constant protest and struggle over the military's control. I didn't really know any of that at the time, but I slowly picked up some of it during my two years there, especially as I tried to figure out (because I'm obsessive that way) what the young Koreans I was teaching English to or trying to talk with at church were listening to in their spare time. Like all countries which have been, at one point or another, in the shadow of the United States, young South Koreans often listened to and liked American or just Western artists in general (I remember Wham! being particularly popular; perhaps their tour of China just a few years earlier had something to do with that), but they also had local artists they liked who had absorbed Western rock, pop, and folk, and done something original with it, and it was that stuff I was interested in. Through trying to decipher the lyrics, I got a sense of an often frustrated, often experimental, often bitter and defiant bunch of songwriters and musicians, who nonetheless also had a sentimental, even maudlin streak that would put John Denver to shame. Listening to it now, I also hear echoes of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Byrds, Badfinger, and bunch of other power-pop and 60s-rock influences, which I suppose isn't unsurprisingly. A good chunk of it holds up damn well, and maybe that is.

A year or two after I left Korean popular music, or "K-Pop", apparently went through a revolution that completely re-made how the local industry worked, and now K-Pop is huge throughout East Asia, as well as frequently rather cutting edge. But I was listening to a bunch of guys banging around with guitars and 70s synthesizers in studios and garages, and so that's the stuff that stays with me. And amazingly, at least some of the stuff I bought and didn't throw away has stuck around as well.

The album above is the 1985 self-titled first album by 들국화, pronounced "Deul Gook Hwa", which is a native flower (a wild chrysanthemum). Their ripping off of the Let it Be album for their cover wasn't coincidental; I can't the number of times Koreans my age would introduce these guys to me as the "Korean Beatles", and I'm informed enough now to recognize how thoroughly they strove to imitate the Fab Four in their harmonies and range. They had one other album after this one, then the four of them split apart, but their impact was apparently huge. Their lead singer, 전인권 ("Jeon In Gwon") was a charismatic wild man, who wrote one of their anthems, "March", but the real talent in the band was probably lead guitarist 조덕환 ("Jo Deok Hwan"), who put songs like "Blessings", "Train Around the World", and, my personal favorite, "Until the Morning Breaks" on the album. (He's still making music on his own today, which might be interesting to check out if I actually had the time or money to do so.)

And then there's their overwrought and overproduced but enormous hit, "It's Only My World"--which actually don't remember liking that much, though I was able to grasp that it was capturing that put-upon, existential, I'm-sorry-but-I-also-have-no-regrets feeling so many South Koreans seemed to carry around with them in those days (I have no idea if they still do, though I'd be great to travel back there someday and find out). To continue with the Beatles comparisons, that song became a sort of "Yesterday"--overplayed but essential to the Korean pop psyche, or at least apparently so, considering how many Korean artists have recorded versions of it--see here, here), here, and here. Here's the original band doing the song themselves, from 1988; unfortunately it's a terrible performance, and it's after Deok Hwan had left the group (so no lead guitar), but it's the best I could find:



I have their second album too--a nice love song, "Please", and a whimsical Christmas song as well, but overall not as captivating as their first. On the basis of the reviews I can find online, scouring hundreds of K-Pop sites I never imagined existed before last week, it seems I'm not wrong.

Another, very different Korean group whose cassette I kept in playable condition over the years 봄여름가을겨울, "Spring Summer Autumn Winter", which really turn out, in retrospect, to be a kind of Steely Dan-type outfit; a few key guys recording in the studio, bringing in all sorts of session musicians to help them achieve whatever sound they were looking for. They're apparently still together and recording, involved in all sorts of multi-media projects around East Asia, making soundtracks and videos and more. Some of their songs off their first, self-titled album still rock: "Always Happy People", "Just Going Down the Street", or "Everyone Changes", which actually has some wonderful orchestration on it, worthy of Donald Fagen.

I suppose I could put up more, but that's a good start. Feel free to go forth and explore, if you're interested. In the meantime, I ought to see how many of these old tapes of mine I can find available somewhere in Korea on cd.

Happy 추석 (Chu'seok)!

As this year's harvest festival (call it Sukkot, call it what you will) comes to close, let me post a tribute to my favorite variation upon it: Chu'seok, the Korean Thanksgiving. Readers of this blog are well aware of my affection for holidays. They're important, they're fun, they're excellent building blocks for family and community traditions...and most especially, they provide the opportunity for some wonderful meals. Chu'seok is no different. I seek out Korean food because I fell in love with it while serving my church mission there; we go overboard on Chu'seok because it's the one day a year I'll probably be able to get all my family to eat it with me. We don't prepare the full, traditional meal, with song pyun (rice cakes) and the like; I'm not that enamored with every detail of the holiday. But we do make bulkogi (Korean barbecue beef), though we lack all the tools and ingredients to do in right. There are, of course, a lot of bulkogi recipes out there (like this one). But this is one that has served us well, as we've lived in places far distant from any Korean restaurants whatsoever (Wichita is slightly better on that score than many places we've lived...but only slightly). So, in honor of the holiday today, I'm documenting every step for you. Enjoy!


Assemble (note that this was for a double serving: 2 Asian pears, 6 garlic gloves, 4 carrots, 6 mushrooms, 3 small onions, 6 green onions, 8 tablespoons of soy sauce, 5 tablespoons of sugar, 2.5 pounds of thinly sliced beef (ribeye steak works best), and 4 tablespoons peanut oil. Plus, of course, your kimchee.


Peal and cut the pears into small chunks.


Do the same with the garlic gloves, slicing them thinly.


Place the pear chunks and garlic slices in a blender. Add the soy sauce, and 2 tablespoons of the peanut oil. Blend into a marinade.


Cut up the carrots, mushrooms, onions and green onions into thin, small strips.


Do the same with the meat. If you can't obtain meat cut this size (no more than 1/4-inch thick is my recommendation; usually the meat prepared for a milanesa will be the right size), then buy some ribeye, leave it in your freezer for an hour, and cut it yourself, against the grain.


Combine all the ingredients, plus the sugar; allow to stand, refrigerated, in a covered container for at least an hour, preferably up to 24 hours.


Fry it up! If you're lucky, you have the right sort of grill to cook the meat and its accoutrements properly. In Korea, and in the better Korean restaurants in America, this will be a small grill, either flat or curved like an upside-down bowl, which can cook the meat at your table. But if you don't have anything like that--and we don't--then use a wok, or some other frying pan. Use the remainder of the peanut oil to prepare the pan, and get it smoking hot before cooking. You want the vegetables to still be somewhat firm, so don't overcook.


Serve with rice, some spicy pepper paste if you're lucky enough to have some, kimchee, and lettuce leaves, in which you wrap up the bulkogi and sides before shoving it rudely and deliciously into your mouth. Oh, and plenty of water--because if done right, this is one hot dish.

My Mission, Twenty Years On

I don't think I've ever used this blog to talk about my own personal faith life and the places and conclusions it has lead me to. When I've talked about Mormonism--and I have a few times--it's been in connection with or in response to some political or philosophical or theological issue or candidate. I think I've only written once before about anything having to do with my own experience as a believing Mormon, and that came as part of a remembrance of someone I first go to know as a missionary for the Mormon church. Generally hen I want to talk about that sort of thing, I have the wonderful Times and Seasons blog at my disposal.

Well, I'm continuing to that, but having just written the aforementioned remembrance post for this blog, I thought I might as well link here to a couple of much more personal posts that I've written about my experience as a Mormon missionary. Twenty years ago today I began my mission, so this is as good a time to reflect upon it as any, I suppose. The first is titled "Making Peace with Missionary Work" and it's kind of the story of my mission and it's impact upon me and my beliefs, written with the understanding of such which I have today; the second is "Last Night in Suwon" and is an essay about my time in South Korea (though also more than that) which I wrote eighteen years ago, just a few months after my mission ended. So, a couple of different perspectives there. I can't imagine there are many readers of this blog who aren't already T&S readers who will be much interested in either, but still--there they are. Have at them, if you dare.

Blasts from the Past

In more ways than one.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from an old college roommate, someone I haven't seen or spoken to in fifteen or so years. He said he'd stumbled across my site, that I looked good, that he hoped we could talk sometime. Then he mentioned some news--that Scott Swaner had died from pancreatic cancer. Scott was a brilliant, cool, charismatic person, someone who I often crossed paths with in years long since gone by. His death was a tragedy and a great loss to all those who knew him well...

...which, to be honest, doesn't entirely include me. And after I read my old roommate's e-mail, I wondered about that; I wondered about it more and more. Mostly, I wondered about the news itself. You see, Scott died nearly a year and a half ago, and I had known that. I can't remember how I knew it; just that some time ago--months? a year? more?--somebody who knew me or knew Scott or knew something about who all he and I hung out with back at BYU in the early 1990s, when we were all in our twenties and finally getting a start on adult life, passed the news along. And I was, I presume, momentarily shocked--damn, I probably thought, he was only a year older than me--and then I filed the news away. And forgot about it. But this time I didn't. Partly it's because my former roommate (Jeff Bohn is his name; why do I keep calling him "the roommate"?) sent me a link to an incredible, heart-rending blog which Scott kept during the short months between being diagnosed with terminal cancer in the spring of 2006, and his death in December of that year. What an odd, in some ways simply fascinating, in other ways simply disturbing thing, to read someone else documenting their own demise. But partly, I think it's also because the time was right. The news--this time around, anyway--caught me at a moment in time, a moment when I'm remembering, or trying to remember, other moments long past.

Scott Swaner was my AP. Only my fellow Mormons will get that reference, so let me explain. Those young Mormons who serve full-time proselyting missions for the church get sent all around the world, and experience a wide variety of forms of mission life. However, it's an absolute rule that every missionary gets assigned a companion (you're supposed to keep eyes on each other and inspire one another to obedience and faithfulness at all times, though it doesn't always work out that way), and every companionship is assigned to a district, and every district is a part of a zone, and every zone has appointed missionary leaders who report to the mission president, and every mission president assigns a couple of older, more experienced missionaries to be his "assistants to the president," or "APs," to help keep track of all the foregoing. Scott served in the same mission I did--Korea Seoul West (specifically, the western part of South Korea, from Seoul to Inchon and quite a ways down the coast). He was a little more than a year ahead of me in the mission field. I was never in the same district or zone as he was; I knew him almost solely as one of the APs, as a distant, busy, confident and unflappable character, as someone who would show up at missionary training meetings and switch from Korean to English and back again with perfect aplomb. I was, frankly, a mess for much of my two years in South Korea, full of doubts and questions and unresolved grudges and sins and fears, and the way Scott radiated humor, confidence and self-possession, was simply beautiful to me. There's a man I want to get to know, thought little-19-year-old-me.

And later, when the mission was over, when I resumed my college education as a sophomore at BYU in 1990, I did. We kept bumping into each other, showing up at the same places as the same time. We never had classes together--he was into comparative literature, I was into journalism, then political science, then philosophy, then all three--but we'd crash the same parties, nod at each other at the same movies, attend meetings for the same campus events and activities. Through Scott, I discovered and found my way into a network of people that seemed to me to be far more aware than any group of people I'd ever known. (Which means--I can say now in retrospect--that I was experiencing part of what the modern liberal university is supposed to make possible, right?) Suddenly I was involved with an underground campus newspaper, the doomed-but-fun-while-it-lasted Student Review; I was hanging out with rabble-rousers of all sorts and ages over at the Honors Building; I was going to jazz shows in Salt Lake City and ska concerts up at Snowbird (a ski resort) and a cappella jams all over the place. Some of these connections I made entirely on my own, but many came through people like Scott and those who followed in his wake. BYU may be a pretty big school, as far as undergraduate institutions go, but the number of folks I'm talking about was pretty small (at least in comparison to the teeming thousands who camped out overnight to get season football tickets). A lot of us ended up rooming together at various spots around Provo, UT, or at least spent so much time at each other's apartments that we might as well have been roommates. There was one ramshackle old place we called The Amityville House: Scott was there, and Bob and Rick Ahlander, and Dave Boyce and maybe Dave Jenkins too: a lot of people that I used to consider great friends and whom I haven't heard from or spoken with in a very, very long time.

It's weird when you look back on it, one's early college years. (Even us Mormons at BYU could find ways to make it weird, and did.) I suppose I could critique the whole thing (and have before), but now I'm just reminiscing about the strangeness of being entrusted with the expectation of suddenly growing up with relatively little real social preparation beforehand. Some, of course, had done a lot (or a little) of that preparatory growing up in high school or during their freshman year or at their jobs or on their missions, but most of us 21 or 22 or 23-year-old virgins were more than a little stymied at the prospect of--at last!--some truly unsupervised and unstructured Saturday nights. What did we do with our weekends, once our papers were done? We explored; we got busy; we went driving; we went bowling; we made rash and oh-so-serious proclamations; we dorked around. What do I remember? Scott introducing me to O'Douls. Scott and various pals protesting the Gulf War late one night in January 1991, holding up signs in front of The Palace (a dance hall), me lurking in the background and writing up the whole thing for the official campus newspaper (the one I would later be fired from for lying about my continuing ties to the aforementioned underground campus paper). Scott taking charge on a Halloween night, when a bunch of us were visiting Chicago together, making sure we all ended up at a truly hip club. Scott and Jeff and I wandering around apartment complexes back in Provo, randomly knocking on doors, pretending to be doing a study for some campus program, in reality just trying to meet girls. (Anyone remotely familiar with the social scene around Provo, or indeed any socially conservative Christian milieu, will know that the male of the species in such environments will do just about any damn fool thing as part of his quest for love, marriage, and sex--preferably in that order, of course--and we certainly weren't exceptions.) I can't say Scott and I ever became close friends through all this; more like, he was the ever-reluctant-yet-ultimately-willing ringleader, and I was a reliable member of his gang (a gang which he denied existed, but was all that apparent just the same). And at that age, if you're one of those geeks for whom social near-catastrophes seem to be practically a weekly occurrence, who wouldn't want a ringleader to follow?

A lot of this I'm bemused by now; some of it I'm proud of, and more than a little of it I'm pretty embarrassed by. (See here and here for more on all that.) But anyway you look at it, soon--assuming you have no more problems than the average white middle-class twentysomething male--the maturing, whether early or late, whether easily or through hard lessons you wish you'd never had to learn, happens: you get your bearings, you start to figure out what works and what doesn't, and then you're in your junior or senior year and trying to add up all that's come before. I can remember attending Scott's wedding reception, a lavish affair up in Salt Lake. And a few months later I was over at their house for some party or other, and things weren't quite right. (The fact that his wife appeared to be flirting with me was a bit of give away.) And then things were breaking apart: I could see that what I understood to be Scott's confidence was also, at the same time, a kind of stylized obliviousness; the latter didn't eclipse the former, but they weren't entirely distinguishable either. Things get complicated; you and your friends realize you're not entirely a project of your own making, that you have facets which will probably always both complement and contradict in part all that you think you are or hope to do. Your delayed rumspringa comes to an end. You start making choices, which means there are things you don't do, paths you don't take. Of course it's not that tidy; nothing ever is. I doubt hardly anyone can truly take one moment in their life and see it as the dividing point separating all that came before and all that came afterward. I certainly can't, and I shouldn't pretend that Scott embodied anything like that for me--for heaven's sake, we were so young then. Nonetheless, it's a tempting reconstruction: one semester it seemed as though the time was still all before you as you make choices about the roads you'll take; then it's another semester, and you've survived one controversy or catastrophe after another, and you look around and realize that you've been making choices all along, and you're a good ways down one road already--so far, in fact, that you can't even see any longer those people who you were once sure you'd be walking down some road with forever. That day came, and realized I hadn't seen Scott in months.

I'm lucky; I know I am. I've been able to stay in touch with a few old friends here and there--sometimes I've even been able to find one (or been found by one) which I'd lost, and make up for lost time. But you can't do that with everyone. The last time I spoke to Scott was a phone call, back in the summer of 1993. I was on an internship in Washington, DC, and was planning on getting married in August. I was going to go on to get an MA in International Studies, and was thinking about journalism or academia as a career; by that time...was he already at Cornell by then? Or still at BYU? I don't remember where I called to track him down; I just felt a need to hear his warm, intelligent, always slightly ironic tone of voice again. He'd left Mormonism behind, or was leaving it at any rate, and was burrowing deeper and deeper in the culture and language he'd fallen in love with while we were on our missions. (He ended up getting a Ph.D. in Korean from Harvard University, and obtained a position teaching Asian literature and poetry at the University of Washington, where by all accounts be was much loved by his students and colleagues.) We talked about mission times, goofball times, people that even by then were retreating far back into our pasts and whom we tried to help each other remember. And then we hung up, and that was probably the last time I thought much about Scott for nearly a decade and a half.

What to say, in the end? He was smart, he was funny, he was fearless, he was kind, he lived life as he saw it to the fullest, he was a born leader, he strove, for better or worse, to be entirely his own man. He taught me a hell of a lot, he gave me something to aspire to, something to follow, at a time when I suppose I really needed it. Then we were out of touch--and who knows? Perhaps we could have been better, closer, more equal friends if I or he had reached out then; certainly it was only after I'd escaped graduated from BYU that I really started to get some balance and perspective in my life, and started doing some arguably interesting things. But that's not how it worked out. Not much of a eulogy, is it? Those who knew him better--like Dave Jenkins, who'd been his friend since high school--can do much better than I. I just find myself thinking that I'm now older than he ever got to be, and that I'm twice as old as the young man who fascinated and inspired me nearly twenty years ago in South Korea. We're all mortal, and even our pasts are dying, with all our moments passing away every day. Thank God for the people we get to meet, the people who do us some good, and perhaps allow us to do some good in return, along the way.
















Scott H. Swaner, January 6, 1968-December 20, 2006. Requiescat in pace.

And, of course, cue the soundtrack (one of Scott's favorites--or at least, a favorite of the Scott that I knew, way back then):