Newest Resident at Bobster’s House

We got a kitten last week. About a month old, I think. Adorable. Drop by the house sometime, and see for yourself.

She’s a little girl, a tabby-calico mongrel with half a raccoon mask and a tiny toothbrush mustache. I’m calling her “Kwenchana Obama.”

The first part is a Korean word that means “It’s alright,” and walking through the cold to get her back to the apartment as she shivered inside my coat, I kept murmuring this while trying to calm her plaintive mee-yos – if you give the word a rising inflection, of course, it becomes a yes/no question, as in “Are you okay?” and that’s what Kyehyun kept saying once we got her home. Kyehyun, she’s never had a cat, or any pet before this. Her job at her office is slow right now so she’s been spending a lot of time on websites reading up on cats. A lot of what she’s coming up with makes me think Koreans have some different notions about the critters than the ones I was raised with

The last part of her name I chose because I thought she should have a strong American-sounding surname. Bi-cultural household, you know. Most people outside of the States don’t really understand that Obama is not a very common name in North America, haha.

She’s very mellow, fell asleep on my lap just a few hours after arriving home. Likes company, and doesn’t like to be alone, apparently. The first night she was meowing loudly at 3 AM and I checked to see if she had water and food – turns out this is just something she does, and it means “I want to play – pay attention to me!”

So far, she seems very mentally sound for a Korean cat. Curled up on my lap and went to sleep within 2 hours after arrival in the place – this was after she’d spent the first hour poking her nose in every corner of every room. Cats are different from people, of course. A human can walk into any space, look around and feel confident they know what and where everything is. For cats, things are not entirely real until they’ve brushed their whiskers against them and marked out every square centimeter of a place with their paws.

When my private students came over the next day, I fully expected her to dive under a bed or couch and hide for the duration, but instead she was a complete pest and I needed to include her as a topic in free conversation. She was a complete pest and wanted her tummy rubbed by everyone, then began to chew on my students’ toes. She treats everyone like we’re great big honorary cats.

Most cats I’ve seen in Korea have been feral, and won’t let you get close to them – you probably don’t want to, either, because they are not cuddly and are probably diseased. If Koreans have cats as pets they must be keeping them indoors, which is what we’re doing with Kwenchana.

A lot of Koreans are afraid of cats. I have a student, an adult woman and a teacher of children, and we meet for an hour a week of conversation and sometimes grammar at a café downtown that has two three cats in residence. She’s a brave woman – even though she loves the atmosphere of the place, her eyes are always darting around in anxiety over whether a cat will come near us.

“Eun-hee,” I tell her, “You are much bigger than they are.”

Some of my friends have cats and often they were inherited from other expatriates who lived in Korea for a year or two and then went home or to some other country. That’s sad, but I can understand it, sort of. I never felt it was responsible to get a pet during the years I lived here and planned to leave at some point – and the last few years, the apartment we lived in was just too small – but I can also see that the stress of living abroad and far from home is something that can be ameliorated somewhat by sharing your life with an animal companion.

A friend sent me a website for a biz called catsense.com, so we can buy stuff for her over the internet, and apparently they deliver, too – I hate the idea of carrying big sacks of litter up the 4 flights of stairs to our apt every few weeks. I think we’ll get a covered litter box and a small-size scratching post. She’s tiny, but she’s already poking tiny holes in the furniture.

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