The New York Times. Growing up in South Korea, I nurtured a fantasy of picking it up in my pajamas and reading it everyday. In Korea, the Times were a big deal – when they reported a story about the country, the report itself became news. So it is today. The New York Times has been a mirror that Koreans have used to see themselves and examine how they are perceived by the world.
About two decades ago, I fulfilled the first step of my humble NYT dream after moving to the US. As a poor graduate student with equally poor English, I had to spend a lot of time going through page after page in the department reading room when I had a chance. Do you remember the first day when an ad appeared on Page One or colored pictures showed up? So I’d fulfilled the part of its daily reading, but, with my budget, not yet the part of getting it delivered on my doorstep. Still, it brought me tremendous pleasure and pride. I would read the international section first, then pause for the day, picking it back up during my lunch break or in the evening to finish. When I couldn’t, I suffered.
In my doctoral dissertation, I should have credited the Times since the first project that I did as a graduate student was coding articles from the Times and the Post. That experience gave me an idea for the dissertation about nine years later. So here it is now. “I thank The New York Times for my Ph.D. degree.”
Now I teach political science in a university and the Times is a major source of teaching. Controversies over global warming, elections, the coup in Turkey, racial tensions in the South, the Koch brothers and on and on. I use the graphs and opinion pieces and the students love them. After all, it is The New York Times. How can they not?
You see, I have fulfilled my (American) dream. I bought a house and finished the upstairs attic on my own. I have The New York Times delivered to my house and, yes, I pick it up in my pajamas, more or less.
There is just one really tiny problem.
When it rains or the sprinkler is on, sometimes the paper gets wet. Often it is double bagged; but not always. When thrown on the pavement, the bag cracks and gives in to the torrent of water. After years of frustration, I called The New York Times and asked the paper to be put under a small bin right beneath the mailbox. I had finally found a solution.
Like most solutions in our life it worked only for so long. For unknown reasons, the paper finds its way back to the ground as if gravity had played a trick. No matter what I or the managers from New York say, no matter how many times I call, gravity or the delivery grew rules the early morning.
About three weeks ago, I called again and had a long conversation with a nice and very helpful manager who explained what he would do to make sure my wish would be met. And yet, gravity won again. And it occurred to me that it may have something to do with my name. Maybe it is my foreign name that gave the sense of entitlement to ignore my small but sincere wish. And then I began to worry. Maybe I have to simply accept the reality of living the life of an immigrant. Maybe if I push too much, they will pull me back down as in the United Airlines flight.
I may be wrong. Maybe I am overly sensitive to so unimportant a matter as the intricacies of my newspaper delivery. But, this is today’s worry of a legal immigrant with a respectable job. Now imagine how worrisome all the hardworking immigrants with legal issues may feel. Can you? I just can’t. But that is not the country that I dreamed of through The New York Times back in South (not North!) Korea.
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