On Friday, I gave myself the task of not looking at any code on the weekend. Unfortunately, by Saturday afternoon, I had already failed to achieve this. That said, I finally made some more progress on the work I'm doing for the Scala Package Index that will let users stay logged in whenever a new deployment of the index is pushed.

Pachinko

Last night, I started watching Pachinko to make some use of the free subscription I have to Apple TV+. Pachinko is based on a novel of the same name. The premise about Koreans in Japan during the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula was intriguing to me, especially since I know so little about Korean history. All the dialogue in the series is in Korean or Japanese. I find that I need subtitles to understand the Korean spoken in the series since most of it is heavily accented by Japanese (a stylistically accurate choice, since the Korean spoken by Koreans in Japan has vastly diverged from modern Korean).

I'm finding the production quality to be very high, so far, which makes sense when you have a 1 trillion dollar company bankrolling most of the work behind the scenes. I happy to see actor Youn Yuh-jung make an appearance in the series as well. I enjoyed her work in Minari. Her interactions with her grandson, Solomon Baek – who left to go study in America – reminded me of my own connections (or lack thereof) to my family in Korea.

Korea

When people find out that I wasn't born in Vancouver, but immigrated here when I was 6, they're often surprised. I don't really understand why, but I myself feel like there isn't much difference between a person who was born here and someone who started living here when they were very young. My memories of my early childhood in Korea are very muddled. There are things that I remember for sure, like playing on the playground in the middle of our apartment block or going to a sports day at local elementary school. One especially vivid memory I have is going grocery shopping to an underground market. There was a lady that would always give me a cup of rice drink (식혜). I don't remember the address, but Google Streetview was particularly useful in helping me scope out places that I remember. Below is a photo of the aforementioned underground market:

Something that I wonder about is how accurate my recollection of these events are. People tend to misremember or even completely fabricate events in their childhood as they get older. The thought of me looking back on things that might have never even happened is interesting and a little disconcerting.

We left Korea after my biological mom died in 2002. I've wanted to ask more about the reasons why we chose to move to Canada, or whether it was planned before or after her death. It would also be nice to just know a bit more about my mom, like what kind of person she was, but I don't think it's something my family wants to revisit. The last time I visited Korea was in 2010, and I just spent most of the time shuttling around to see various relatives whom I've forgotten. It would also be the last time I would see my paternal grandparents alive. I guess I was lucky to see them alive, I don't think it's an uncommon experience for first or second generation immigrant children to not see their grandparents at all.

After a few years of on-and-off contact, my maternal grandmother (my biological mother's mother) calls me more often. I feel bad for not being the one to initiate contact, but I guess it was a bit difficult when I didn't know her phone number for a very long time. She's 91, and lucky enough that she still has her mobility, health, and a sound mind. There's a lot I want to ask her about, like how she lived through the Second World War and Korean War. It would be interesting to hear about her perspective of watching the country go from a third-world nation to a very advanced economy.

Next Week

Gail is back from vacation! It was weird running into her yesterday in the lab, but she was there to pick up her new machine. She's upgrading from a MacBook Pro with the butterfly switches from hell to one of the M1 MacBook Pros. I upgraded late last year, and I honestly think it's one of the best laptops I've ever used. I don't carry a power brick with me anywhere, and it's nice to know that it can handle any tasks I throw at it; whether it's browsing Twitter or compiling 12GB projects on three separate IntelliJ instances at once.

I think it's time for a new user study, so I'll probably send out a call on Slack for folks who are interested next week.

Anyway, I'll stop shilling Apple and leave the newsletter here.