Checking out makes you lose your edge
My daddy issues, embodiment, Hamnet, art as escape hatch
Read time: 11 minutes 33 seconds
Note: This piece is 0% AI written. AI was, however, used to research and fact-check.
Staying in a wailing body is excruciating
Now, I need somebody to know / Somebody to heal / Somebody to have / Just to know how it feels / It’s easy to say but it’s never the same / I guess I kinda liked the way you helped me escape — Lewis Capaldi, “Someone You Loved” (2019)
My parents are fighting. Again.
The aroma of homemade Korean food wafts. Piping hot white rice, simmering kimchi stew with a touch of dashida (beef-based monosodium glutamate), and seven different bahnchan (side dishes). But they sit on the table, cold and forlorn.
Their blowups are always during dinner. It’s a testament to the addictive quality of Korean food that I still eat with them. I beeline to my room upon my mom’s urging. My room shares a wall with the kitchen, so it’s no escape at all.
I realized my spoon was still in my hand, thin and cheap. As my dad’s accusations got uglier and more cutting I found myself slowly bending it. It felt good to channel my fury into something, to have the power to at least change this. Maybe this is why the boys at school fight so much.
Lying in my twin bed, I look about to distract myself. 90s K-pop CDs — that I’m too embarrassed to talk about at school — are stacked near my Discman. Jonathan Taylor Thomas grins at me, crouched, chin in hand, from my $7 Walgreens poster. A collage made up of my friends’ studio pictures sits on my dresser.
I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here and live with them, like the grownups on Friends.
The intensity of Dad’s explosions varies; today it’s at medium. Doesn’t matter, even a slight raise of his voice is enough to send my heartbeat quaking up into my ears.
This happens so often that even from inside my room, I can see what is happening. He’s had three Jim Beam on the rocks and is man-screaming. As searing as the sound is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the content it carries.
He tells my mom she’s a worthless slob. And worse.
Always a man of action, he leaps over to the fridge. The throwing begins. Down goes a dried-up block of Costco cheddar cheese, dozens of packets of McDonald’s ketchup and Taco Bell Mild hot sauce, a near-empty jar of Classen’s dill pickles with the green lid. Those Americana commingle with a glass tub of kimchi, a container of doenjang (soybean paste) with spots of fuzzy mold, and bright red, garlicky ohjingeojeot (salted, fermented raw squid side dish).
Shards of ceramics and glass pierce soft piles of foodstuffs. I don’t have to look at my mom to know she is part bored with this rerun, bereft that this is her life, fully dissociated. She’ll have to get on her hands and knees to clean up his bullshit later.
I’d later realize that stone-faced does not mean unwounded.
I stare hard at my faded 101 Dalmations comforter, as if it’s an illuminated manuscript holding ancient wisdom on how to stop him. The puppies smile back at me blankly.
Gas poured, match struck, let it drop. My body is ablaze, to a degree no child should have to endure.
The booms have died down. He’s finally worn himself out.
Shaking, raw hands, cut with cheap metal. Did you know you can feel terror, fury, relief, and love all at once?
Ten minutes pass, and what remains is silence mixed with softly sizzling grief.
Staying in a wailing body is excruciating. I reach for my latest library book, The Baby-Sitters Club: Mary Anne Saves the Day, to go where I always want to be. Anywhere but here.
Exquisite Work happens when you’re in your body
The majority of artists started telling stories because we didn’t have the easiest childhood. — Chloe Zhao, Oscar-winning director of Nomadland and Hamnet, New York Times’ The Interview
One of my favorite Buddhist parables goes like this:
A man is traveling and comes to a wide, dangerous river. On his side there is fear and danger; on the other safety and peace. Sans bridge or ferry, he gathers grass, branches, and leaves for a makeshift raft. He manages to cross the river safely.
Once there, he appreciates how helpful the raft has been, and considers keeping it. Maybe carrying it on his back as he continues on.
The Buddha then asks: what’s wiser — carry the raft, or to leave it behind now that it has served its purpose? You know the answer: he should leave it by the shore and move on.
The Buddha says his teachings (the Dharma) are like that raft. The lessons are meant to help you “cross over” from suffering to liberation. Don’t cling to them once their purpose has been fulfilled.
What helped you survive then won’t help you thrive now.
Part of what makes you so creative is your imagination. Imagination is a skill; if you lived in your head a lot as a kid, it’s beautifully honed. You got good at leaving your body and physical reality for a safe place in your mind. It felt good up there.
However, imagination can also be used to survive. It got some of us through the hard stuff, protected us. But if you’re reading this, you’re likely safe now. The people and things that hurt you then don’t anymore. But are you still carrying a bunch of rafts on your back?
You make a living being creative. In other words, you’re a doula for the good ideas that visit you. They float and kick and squeak like unborn babes, “I want to exist! Give me a life that pops with color, texture, soundscape, beauty, depth, value!”
Exquisite Work happens when you’re in your body when you’re present and embodied.
In contrast, knowledge and being knowledgeable are at a major flashpoint. LLMs obviously know more than us, game over. They can also instantly spit out many of the pieces / assets / artifacts that we creatives have trained hard to create.
(for more on this, check out last month’s piece below)
But there’s good news: we have a totally unfair advantage over AI in many areas. One arena is our human senses. The classic 5: sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste. Importantly, you can’t fully tap into them when dissociated.
What happens when you exquisitely pair imagination with embodied presence? The film Hamnet.
Hamnet slowly but surely slotted into my top 5 films ever. It reduced the theater into hopeless sobs with its ravaging yet eerie flavor of sadness. I felt as if I’d fallen down a deep well, containing the grief of every parent who has ever lost a child.
It is an Exquisite Work on every level: direction, cinematography, screenplay, acting, set, locations, concept, costumes… every goddamn thing.
How did the movie achieve so much acclaim? Why is it so exquisite? Because embodiment was the real director of the film.
After watching a few Chloe Zhao interviews, you get the distinct sense that she is hardly an earthling — only half of her resides on this planet. The other half is slow dancing with the divine.
Per her quote above, she had a rough childhood and thus frequently escaped into her mind and the unseen worlds. To become the director that she is, she had to learn to buckle down, stay in her body.1
“Be here now.” — Ram Dass (and infinite others before him)
On a movie set, the director is God. This one ever so gently forced everyone to be embodied. She and Jessie Buckley — who won the 2026 Best Actress Oscar for her role of Agnes — early on started exchanging dream journal entries. They dove down into velvet-black subconscious and reemerged to share their loot. Many of these visions slithered their way into the acting and art direction of Hamnet.
Perhaps most notably, a Jungian dreamworker and hypnotist was given one job: get every actor to swim in their subconscious like this — the space that is intimately tied to presence and embodiment.
Zhao also asked the whole cast and crew to participate in her on-set dance parties. Why? To shake off any lingering emotional charge after intense scenes. Here is the viral video of everyone undulating to Rihanna’s “We Found Love” (2011). The final scene, almost indescribable in its power, demanded a real banger.
Hamnet is superb because every actor is aware of and inhabiting their body, as well as tapping into their collectively heightened senses.
Watch Hamnet if you want to do your very best work, to be a channel for the divine, let the spirit shoot up from your tailbone and way up to your first, second, and third eye.
Watch it to see what others do not. Then proceed to get every good idea out of your body so you can die, poured-out and empty.
It’s a deeply feminine film with verve — as in the feminine energy of yin. That doesn’t mean it’s gendered or just for women. Men have plenty of yin, women have much yang.
I know 3 men who were moved by it:
My husband
His best friend
Wesley Morris, host of the New York Times’ “Cannonball” video column. Morris declared that he spent most of the film skeptical and actively disliking it. Then, during the final (epic) scene, he broke down in sobs. Whilst recounting this to his culture desk colleague, Morris starts tearing up again. He cried, “God, fuck this movie! Ugh, FUCK this movie!!”
Hamnet, like all Exquisite Work, makes you feel.
It asks kindly at first, dripping in beauty and light.
Then, it flies in your face with gentle brute force. That force is — as Jessie Buckley articulated during her acceptance speech at the Oscars — the “beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.”
In the final minutes and with that motherly love, it presents you with a raft so you can paddle over to safe harbor. She hopes you won’t forget her.
This film shattered me so pretty then rearranged my intestines. It made me reckon with every parent’s inconceivable nightmare: “My baby is dead and gone.”
Be here now
My dad has a new office. There’s a cute little mint microwave resting atop a mini fridge and freezer. The office came with a couple of large curved desks, tables, and truly horrible fluorescent lighting.
At age 71, he is starting a new career as a general contractor — his long held dream. He tried retirement for 2 years and got bored out of his mind. Decided to study for the very difficult California contractors B License exam. Did dozens of practice tests. Went to prep class. Kept study material next to the toilet.
A couple weeks ago, he called me in an urgent manner all too familiar. My nervous system pole-vaulted up, activating an ancient feeling that makes me want to run away and never come back.
He needed invoice templates to use with future clients. So, I made him one. Took three hours out of my week to do it, made it to spec. Turns out the form won’t open on his computer, which runs Windows… 10? How is that even possible? Didn’t I use Windows 7 as a small child?
Suddenly, his voice rises fast. I hear myself tell him that the docs do in fact work, I checked. “No! They don’t!” he insisted with his signature cruel tone.
“Okay, okay, I’ll do it over,” I blurted out placatingly.
“Okay appa says thank you,” he hurriedly said, before hanging up the phone. Why the fuck does he say it in the third person? Why can’t he just say HE is sorry, acknowledge HE shouldn’t yell, and thank me for my time?
Will I spend my entire life waiting for this man’s constipated apologies?
I then remember my body and take some deep breaths. Though this advice is totally infuriating, it works.
I feel my feet heavy on the floor, the weight of my hips, legs, thighs, knees, shins, pressing down into it. The floor that then presses into planet Earth.
With an eye on my breath, I tried to imagine how frustrating it must be for him, to be incapable of making essential documents that lead to contracts, that then lead to getting paid.
He humbled himself and asked his daughter for help, but they just don’t work. Why is nothing ever easy? Why can’t he catch a break?
At the green age of 23, Dad immigrated to the U.S. from Seoul. At the airport, his father looked him dead in the eye. “You’re going to America. Build a big, successful business. Work for yourself.”
Grandpa died in 2020, before my dad could complete the assignment. So here he is at retirement age, staring down the barrel at his third and final shot at making his dad proud. He’s still trying, pushing himself, striving for excellence. So I too will keep trying.
For better or worse, I am my father’s daughter. Dad is a lot like his late mother, who was equal parts charismatic and lacerating. Grandma Koh inherited her DNA bag of tricks from other colorful characters.
The intergenerational trauma just keeps going up and back, on and on and on. But regardless of how bad it gets with family, bloodlines are impossible to cut cleanly.
So what else is there to do but crush it at escapism? Fly far, far away to fun places via friends, books, music, TV, and movies (and later, unrequited love).
Yet time does heal all wounds. My dad has become a teddy bear in his old age. He’s actually apologized to me twice (!) in the past 10 years — unthinkable for an embattled Boomer Asian immigrant man. He doesn’t throw things anymore (I pray). Still yells, though. Life is not a children’s book.
Since talk therapy is not an option for him, here are some ways he tamed his demons and practiced embodiment:
Diving for abalone and sea urchins in Mendocino
Spearfishing on kayaks he found on Craigslist
Caring for cacti and succulents with his green thumb
Going to car auctions and scoping out good 3rd Generation Toyota 4Runners
I’ve never been more proud and inspired by my dad. This former painting contractor now general contractor exhibits deep appreciation and care of craft.
He’s still working to keep his promise to his father.
He’s still trying to make up for everything he did to us.
I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on myriad somatic therapies. Every dollar a desperate attempt to stop floating away into the ether. Checking out fucks with my flourishing. Be here now.
Maybe, all this time, Dad’s been trying to teach me something: to do great things in this world, you have to be here.
Many thanks to Rik van den Berge, sondra, and Vincent Tam for helping me see what I couldn’t.
For example, she is studying to be a death doula in her spare time, when she’s not actively directing an Oscar-winning or nominated film — no big deal.
I love your writing and I love you. Moving. <3
Thank you. But I'm a little scared to watch Hamnet now. What are the rest of your top 5 movies?