"I read your book." | Sung J. Woo

I’m at the bar from television’s Cheers, sitting catty-corner from Norm’s usual spot.  The door slams open, and Josh Charles, the actor who plays Will Gardner on The Good Wife, rushes in.

There’s a table to the right of me, and there are two men sitting hunched over.  I’m not sure what they look like because all I see are the backs of their heads, but I know they are writers.  They are scribbling furiously on legal pads.

Josh Charles starts berating them.  “You think this is work?  This is nothing!”  He slams his hands on the table.  “You should both go out there and break rocks, that’s what you should do!”  He’s screaming at them, but these men don’t seem to hear him, because they just keep on writing.

The door slams open again, and an Asian woman enters the bar.  She’s laughing.  She’s the daughter of Kimora Lee Simmons, the lady who was married to Russell Simmons a few years back.  Except this daughter looks exactly like Kimora herself.

Still laughing, she runs over to Josh Charles, who takes her in his arms, giddy himself.  He turns to me and says, “You know, I’m half Asian.  Look at me a certain way, you see it.”

And sure enough, Charles leans back in his chair, and the lights above paint his face at such an angle that I see it, too: his hair darkens, his eyes narrow, he’s Asian.  And something else: he’s turned almost black and white, like an old photograph.

* * *

I don’t usually write about my dreams, but this was very vivid and incredibly strange.  I hadn’t seen The Good Wife in a couple of weeks, so why was Josh Charles on my mind?  (Who’s an awesome actor, by the way — sorry for dragging you into this.)  And truth be told, I don’t even know what Kimora Lee Simmons looks like.  (Or her “daughter” — which wasn’t even a question, by the way.  I knew it was her daughter, however impossible it seems now.)  The Cheers setting makes sense, as I watched the Ted Danson bit on CBS Sunday Morning a few days ago, and they played footage from the show.

But the rest of the stuff is pure crazy dream logic, which is as entertaining as it is baffling.

Johnny Angel of Suyung

2:30pm

It feels as if Johnny has died about thirty times in the last week.  Lying on his side with his eyes half open, I lift up the covers to see that he’s still breathing.  And he is, so he’s still here.  Johnny’s our cat, and he’s dying from renal failure.  Tomorrow morning, he’ll be gone for sure, because our vet will drive over here to our home to put him down.  It’s a decision that makes me sick and grateful at the same time.

But for now, Johnny’s alive.  His process of dying has been a gradual lowering of location, from the high perch of the table to the middle of the armchair and now on the floor, with towels and heating pads to keep him warm.

Today is a good day, because last night, we watched Super Bowl 2011.  Instead of seeing it downstairs in the living room like my wife and I normally would, we cheered on the Cheese Heads upstairs so we could be nearer our cat.  This involved a bunch of high-tech trickery, converting the unencrypted cable signal through Ethernet and streaming the feed wirelessly to my netbook and out to my widescreen computer monitor.  Johnny wouldn’t have been completely alone had we decided to stay downstairs, as we have another cat, one who is not exactly healthy, either, but at least one who isn’t dying.  Her name is Kyra, and they’re both Siamese, if you please.

I don’t think the football game, as exciting as it was, is the reason why Johnny’s looking better today.  It’s because for the first time in a long time, he slept in our bed, and for a good hour last night, we slept together.  He hasn’t been able to walk for about a week, and all of his movements are limited, and yet last night, he found a way to crawl up next to me and stretch his uncertain limbs over my chest.

2:46pm

Johnny is my first cat, my first pet, one I didn’t live with until well into my twenties.  (This is actually a fairly serious secret I just revealed, because now you could probably break into my online bank with the answer to one of my security questions.)  When I met Johnny, he was two years old, and he’d been a stud cat for a cattery, meaning he was smooth and sweet with the ladies.  He has one of the most relaxed personalities of any cat I know, of any creatures I know, animal or human.  This is probably why he and I get along so well, because no matter how crappy things are going, Johnny is always just hanging out.  If he were human, he’d be the guy buying the extra rounds at the bar, the one who may have plenty of problems of his own but is blissfully oblivious to every one of them.

For a while, our household had numerical gender equality: my wife Dawn, her daughter Jessica, and Kyra versus myself, Johnny, and Larry, our German shepherd dog.  Jessica left for England in 2004, Larry passed away in 2005, and we got a new girl dog, Ginny, in 2006.  So tomorrow, I’ll literally be the last man standing in a household of three females.  Outnumbered!  I wish Johnny weren’t going, but it is time.  He’s done more than enough at this point, having survived two weeks of our absence in January, when we traveled to the Middle East and Europe, and when I left two weekends ago to see my college friend before he becomes a father (his wife is due in a week or so).  An impending birth, an impending death.  Never have I been more aware of the cyclical nature of life.

Seeing Johnny’s decline, I can’t help but to think of my own.  What’s going to happen to me?  Will I also lose the use of my legs, will my bladder empty without fair warning, will I become a living skeleton who watches his life slowly but surely ebb away?  We all hope that our end will be painless and swift, but we can’t all be so lucky.

5pm

I’ve been checking on Johnny on the hour throughout the day, replacing the piece of tissue underneath his lips because he’s been drooling more heavily.  At 3pm, he seemed tired but fine.  At 4pm, his breathing became more shallow, but he still recognized me and seemed like he might pull through to see tomorrow.  At 5pm, he was gone.  He took himself out.  We told ourselves, convinced ourselves, that putting him down would be our final act of kindness toward our boy cat, but it turns out that he’s the one who gifted us by giving up his life all on his own.

I wish I had been there with him as he exhaled his last breath, but I wasn’t there, because I had to be at work, in front of the computer, as my cat lie dying.  Not that it would’ve made any difference, because he was going whether or not I was present.  Still, it hurts that I missed his passing, and I know I’ll always regret it.

9:20pm

Dawn came back from work at seven, and we flooded the house with our collective tears.  My eyes actually hurt from all the crying.  Johnny’s where we left him, and I can almost make myself believe that he’s sleeping, that he’ll wake and tip his head up and look at me with those blue eyes of his.  But he’s gone.  As someone who has a tough time believing in the afterlife, I can’t say that he’s up there or slipped into another dimension or what have you, but I do know what this cat has meant to me for the fifteen years I knew him.  He was a good boy.  He was my friend.  He was my first bromance.  And I’ll miss him for the rest of my life.

There’s someone on the Internet that I must thank, and that’s Tanya (http://www.felinecrf.org/).  We relied on her extensive website of feline chronic renal failure information, and because of her hard work, Johnny was able to get the best possible care.  On her site, Tanya has the following quote that I think aptly closes out this post.

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

• an essay I wrote about Johnny in KoreAm Magazine a few years back.

1. If Tony Soprano is alive, and for better or worse we know his mortality will always be in question (I vote for “better” myself), he might have opened up Friday’s edition of the Ledger and read a story about a South Korean author.

*

2. That’s me with my Troy Polamalu impression.  The photo was taken in Long Branch, by the piers, for a story with a rather long title:

South Korean man draws on his experience of immigrating to Jersey as basis for award-winning book and his coming to terms with his cultural differences

It’s strange to read about yourself on paper.  Mostly, what I feel is a sense of dissociation, that the person the reporter is talking about is not me.  Yet there I am, sharing the name and the visage with this character, and possessing a personal history not unlike my own.  Yes, this is my story, but in order to create the most compelling drama, stresses have been placed on certain facets of my life while other parts were minimized or not mentioned.

In addition, as a writer, what I feel is powerlessness.  I’m used to being the one in control of the written word, but in this case, I’m standing on the other side of the glass, looking in.

*

3. It finally happened, as I knew it would at some point — you can now buy a copy of my book in hardcover for a penny from Amazon!  Of course shipping cost is about 400 times that amount, but hey, it’s nonetheless a genuine bargain.

On October 25, I went back to my old high school, which of course meant I traveled back in time.  I hadn’t set foot in the building in almost twenty years, and I’d forgotten that the auditorium was right by the entrance.   What did feel familiar were the lockers, rows and rows of lockers, banks of them painted in red and blue and orange.

Every year, Ocean Township High School recognizes academic achievement at the Spartan Scholar ceremony, and this year, they were kind enough to invite me as a guest speaker.  Appearing below are some pictures and the speech I delivered.  The latter portion of the speech includes my “Backstory” piece.

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The good folks at The Nervous Breakdown are currently featuring me on their home page and in the Fiction section for the following:

• my self-interview (which was a rather odd but good experience)
• an excerpt of what used to be the second chapter of Everything Asian

Sunday night, I was sitting at our dining room table, half watching the football game between the Manning brothers and wholly reading James Dickey’s Deliverance.  It was about ten o’clock, and the moon was out, and there was enough light from the kitchen window to cast a shadow on something odd on the floor.

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An essay I wrote for The Nervous Breakdown.

After a Complaint Box essay, the good folks at the Times follow up with various reader reactions.  As of now, there are 151 comments from the readers on the web, and I think these two might be my favorite:

1. Better loud and occupied than silent and empty or worse yet, visited only by cranky Sung J Woo.

2. I’m dismayed see you lead off with yet another hackneyed stereotype of librarians: “…and the occasional shush — delivered with an index finger crossing the lips of a bespectacled, cardigan-wearing librarian.” Get with it, Mr. Woo. I’m a librarian, and I shop at Express.

Way to put me and my best Andy Rooney impression in my place!  I love it.  As a writer, it’s a rare gift to see so many direct opinions from readers.  Thank you to all who have contributed — keep them coming!

The Lost ‘Library Voice’

The library of my youth, in Ocean Township, N.J., was a tomb of peace, where the only sounds were shuffles, whispers and the occasional shush — delivered with an index finger crossing the lips of a bespectacled, cardigan-wearing librarian.

These days, at my local branch in Washington Township, N.J., I have to play an MP3 file in a loop — a sound bite of a hair dryer blasting between my ears — because without the white noise, I would not be able to think straight.

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A “Complaint Box” essay I wrote for the Times.