Blog – Eugene Eric Kim

Memory and Truth(iness)

Published March 30, 2024March 30, 2024 by Eugene Eric Kim

My friend, Yangsze Choo, recently came out with her third book, The Fox Wife. It’s a murder mystery set in early 20th century northern China, and it’s got some mystical elements as well. It’s entertaining and immersive, and it’s been racking up awards.

Last month, she gave a talk in San Francisco about the book, and someone in the audience asked about her writing process. She explained that there are two kinds of writers: Those who outline, and those who just write. She is apparently one of the latter.

I am astounded by folks who write novel-length works this way. Her revelation reminded me of something I read 30 years ago about Victor Hugo and his thousand page plus classic, Les Misérables. Victor Hugo was normally a consummate reviser, except for when he wrote Les Misérables. He was so passionate about the political statement he was making, he ended up writing the massive tome cover-to-cover over the course of 20 years. This feat seemed so extraordinary to me that I’ve remembered it clearly for three decades and have thought about it many times.

Too bad I remembered this incorrectly.

Yangsze’s talk and my (what-I-thought-was-correct) memory of what Victor Hugo had done had inspired me to blog about a tension I often see in my work between planning and “going with the flow.” Under normal circumstances, I might have just mentioned the connection and let my thoughts flow from there without doing any additional work. However, I’m generally anal about sourcing, and I’ve also found writing difficult recently, so I decided to see if I could find my original source.

First, I searched the Internet. Nothing, not even a different source repeating the claim. I thought for a moment about where I could have read this. It was definitely in high school, and I didn’t have access to exotic sources back in the day, so it had to be something relatively accessible. Then I pounded my forehead. Of course! It was in the foreword of my copy of Les Misérables!

Fortunately, I still have my original tattered copy on my bookshelf, so I picked it up and started re-reading the foreword, which was written by Lee Fahnestock, one of the translators. According to Fahnestock, Hugo started writing this novel in 1845, then stopped after three years, only to pick it up again a dozen years later.

In 1860 he finally returned to Les Misérables, the book he had never expected to complete, and wrote through to the end. Then, in a move quite uncharacteristic of this writer who preferred to move forward rather than revise, he went back to insert many sections that brought the book into line with his liberalized views and perspectives gained offshore.

I’m not sure if I mis-remembered or mis-read this. Most likely the latter.

I’m realizing that I’m quite fond of reading the front-matter in books. Maybe it’s because, upon actually completing the book, writers understand more clearly what they want to say. Maybe it’s because I start many more books than I actually finish. In any case, I recently started reading Marc Hamer’s, How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature, who writes in his Prologue:

I wonder about truth and what it is as I chase it around and play with it. Recollections rarely come in chronological order. Memory wanders in the darkness, and the harder I try to remember, the more it seems to dissolve in front of me and take a different direction. As soon as I start to examine a story with anything more intense than a sidelong glance, it shifts in reaction to the scrutiny, reconstructs itself and then changes again, like looking into a kaleidoscope: the colours are identical, their patterns slightly different every time, their detail constantly changes yet the picture remains true to itself

400 Species Observed on iNaturalist

Published March 30, 2024March 29, 2024 by Eugene Eric Kim

For most of my life, whenever I went on a walk, I would feel a pang of regret about not being able to identify trees or plants. Today, I passed 400 species observed on iNaturalist, 402 to be exact. I find this miraculous given how nature-blind I was up until four years ago. The silver lining of the pandemic was that I ended up learning a lot about birds and native plants, and I am deeply grateful for that.

My 400th species was the Northern Rough-winged Swallow. I saw a bunch of them in a tree by the parking lot at San Joaquin Marsh Wildlife Sanctuary, a glorious treasure that’s hidden in plain sight in Irvine, California.

I knew that they were swallows from their flight pattern, but I had never seen a flock of swallows just chilling out in a tree before. I’m used to Tree and Cliff Swallows, both of which tend to flutter about constantly and frenetically. I used Merlin to identify the exact species, which iNaturalist later confirmed. Then I just stood there with my Dad, watching them in wonder, before finally walking into the marsh to continue congregating with some other feathered friends.

Many thanks to Travis Kriplean, who helped catalyze my deep dive into the world around me by sharing his own journey so generously and comprehensively. I started my iNaturalist account in the Fall of 2000 with Travis’s encouragement and also with great skepticism, as I didn’t quite understand how iNaturalist worked, and the interface felt… challenging. I was dipping my toes into a mushrooming curriculum that Travis had developed, and I thought I would use iNaturalist to document my findings. I didn’t realize the giant nature-related U-turn I was about to take thanks to a run-in with a big, beautiful, brown bird.

I also have to give a lot of credit to Dario Taraborelli, who unwittingly primed me for all of this. I met Dario 15 years ago through Wikimedia, but I had no idea how much of a birder he was until I started following him on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter. (He, like me, is now mostly on Instagram.) He often posted glorious photos of birds, a stark and welcome contrast to the rest of my feed back in the day. He also sang the praises of iNaturalist, so much so that I knew about them well before I attempted to use the app.

Strangely enough, I don’t think this deep dive into nature would have been possible without iNaturalist and social media in general (and Instagram in particular). It still boggles my mind that iNaturalist’s interface manages to facilitate any kind of community, but it’s how I met Marisol Villareal, whose encouragement and engagement on Instagram helped me feel like I was a card-carrying member of a state-wide fan club, even though I’m still largely clueless. It’s how my friends, Jon and Linzy, met Rudy Wallen, an unassuming and generous nature savant, who also happens to live on our side of town. For all of the terrible that social media has wrought onto all of us, this is a great example of what social media can do when it works.

The Birds Are Watching

Published February 23, 2024February 23, 2024 by Eugene Eric Kim

Up until a few years ago, I never noticed birds on my balcony. When I first started consciously paying attention to the birds at the start of the pandemic, I would occasionally hear a Dark-eyed Junco serenading me, but I never saw it unless I went onto my balcony and looked.

Then one day, I noticed a House Finch feeding on some chickweed growing in a pot with the dried up remnants of a neglected houseplant I had killed many years earlier. If a pot of weeds could attract birds, I wondered what native plants might do. A few weeks later, I populated my balcony with native plants and also put out a bird feeder.

Now the birds come every morning, even when I forget or can’t feed them. But when I do put out seeds, I am always amused and amazed by how quickly the birds come. They are obviously watching and listening.

The Dark-eyed Juncos are the first to arrive, followed by House Finches. Later in the morning, the doves arrive, eventually followed by the crows. I know most of the smaller birds are hanging out in nearby trees, although I wish I knew exactly where the juncos come from. The bigger birds are far less conspicuous.

After I put out my bird seed, I sometimes like to turn the tables on the birds, peering out into the neighboring landscape to see if I can spot them. The other morning, I decided to bring my camera with me to document some of my larger winged friends watching me from afar.

Pruning Downward Branches

Published February 9, 2024February 10, 2024 by Eugene Eric Kim

I recently dipped my toes into the world of bonsai. It all started last spring with Sammy the Squirrel, my frenemy and garden nemesis, who planted a Coast Live Oak acorn in a potted mint plant that I was going to give away. I have no room to plant a full-sized oak tree, but I couldn’t bear to kill it, so I decided to re-pot it with the intention of raising it as a bonsai. I didn’t know this at the time, but this essentially means keeping the tree alive and thriving for the first few years of its life until it’s ready to start shaping into a miniature tree. In the meantime, I wanted to start developing my skills so that when my little oak tree was ready, I had some idea of what to do with it.

I decided to join the East Bay Bonsai Society, which is a wonderful community of bonsai enthusiasts and an amazing resource for beginners like me. At the first meeting, I met another beginner who had started a little rosemary bonsai. “Ingenious,” I exclaimed! Rosemary is a woody herb that’s plentiful and hardy, and it seemed like the perfect practice vehicle. It just so happened that I had a spare pot of rosemary that I had grown from a cutting, so I decided to convert that into a bonsai.

I brought my plant to the East Bay Bonsai Society’s annual re-potting party. Folks there were incredibly generous, and they walked me through the necessary steps to fit my rosemary into a tiny bonsai pot. Part of the process consisted of doing some initial pruning so that the rosemary could focus its attention on regenerating its roots rather than on supporting excess foliage. One of the members, Ian, offered some basic rules of thumb to guide me through the process.

One of those guidelines was to trim branches that were growing downward. Those branches were shielded from the light, and they likely were going to grow weak and die anyway. I found a stem that had a branch growing up and a branch growing down, and I said, “So do you think I should trim this downward branch?”

Ian paused. “Maybe,” he said. “But, you could also trim the upward branch, which would expose the downward branch to light and cause the branch to curve upward again. That might give you an interesting shape in the future. It’s up to you!”

Ian didn’t realize it, but he had cemented my faith in him as a teacher. As a beginner, I found the idea of pruning even a small herb overwhelming. I had no idea what I was doing, and no vision for what I wanted it to eventually be. I needed guidance, but I didn’t want to blindly follow a set of rules without understanding their intent. I didn’t want to know what to do, I wanted to know how to think about it. Ian provided that for me and then some. He offered a rule, then gave me permission to break it and explained when I might want to do that.

I chose to prune the upward branch. I want to see what happens for myself, and the cost of “failure” is small right now. Maybe the downward branch won’t turn into anything interesting. Maybe it will end up dying anyway. Maybe I’ll end up pruning downward branches 99 times out of 100. It doesn’t matter. I won’t learn unless I try.