ABSTRACT
My mother’s family wavered over what to do. Her grandfather, the patriarch, declared that they needed to protect their ancestral land, an impressive gated compound that included a main house, a house for the in-laws, one for the servants, as well as a strawberry patch, a paddock for pigs and a creek nearby for water. This estate upon a hill was so large, my mother said, you could see it when you got off the train at the station across town. One of my mother’s aunts – not a direct aunt, but in the Korean meaning of aunt, a female relation many times removed – was a widow with two small children who decided to take her chances in the south. By then, both the United States and the Soviet Union had begun fortifying their respective sides of the 38th parallel, and it was becoming increasingly dangerous to cross. But like the Syrians of today, people still went, driven by whatever makes people uproot themselves to risk a life elsewhere. My mother was ordered to accompany the aunt to help with the children. She didn’t exactly understand what she was doing, but in the Korean way, didn’t question. Her mother packed them some rice balls for lunch and sent them off in the fall of 1945. That I am here and not living in North Korea is testament to the journey’s success. But even though it sounded like the stuff of movies – crossing a heavily fortified military zone to escape an oppressive regime – my mother never talked about that time in Korea and in fact, often became upset if it was ever brought up, say, for a class project. After years of persistent inquiries, I finally pieced together the story. She and her aunt and the children took a train to a checkpoint where they met smugglers, who took them over mountainous terrain in the middle of the night to evade the soldiers. She was walking and running over the 38th parallel in the dark, over rough terrain full of soldiers with guns, barbed wire and bandits – while carrying a toddler on her back. My mother eventually ended up in Seoul with nothing but a few gold rings sewn into her clothes. The smugglers had taken all their money and made them abandon their bags. Not really understanding what was happening, she never even said goodbye to her mother. For most divided Korean families, the fate of their loved ones in the North has been forever blocked by the “bamboo curtain” that is the D.P.R.K., the most secretive regime in the world. When my siblings and I were growing up in rural Minnesota, oblivious to this history, our mother’s obsessions and apocalyptic thinking was
something to roll our eyes at: She wouldn’t leave the house without taking 10 minutes to stare at the stove to make sure it was off, even if we hadn’t cooked all day. It drove me to the edge of impatience when the simplest decisions – which apple had fewer spots? – would leave her paralyzed in a supermarket aisle. In college, one of us kids not returning her call in a timely fashion would result in her not only frantically calling our roommates, but also sometimes the parents of our roommates. My mother, and my father, adhered religiously to binary certainties that they created: Get into Harvard, and everything will be all right. Wear your seatbelt, and everything will be all right. They would not have torn a tag off a mattress for fear of prosecution. The first time I saw a car change lanes without signaling, I waited for the inevitable fiery crash. Now that my mother is in her 80s, that the terrible things in her mind have not come to pass have not reassured her at all. Her compulsions and hair-trigger panics appear to outsiders to be the eccentricity of the elderly, but they are basically what I grew up with, unabated. The other day, I left her Minneapolis condo in the early a.m. to catch a flight. The shuttle van arrived in a torrential rainstorm, and the driver was nice enough to throw a T-shirt on his head and run out into the downpour to help me with my bags. I had to jump over a raging mini-river by the curb into the van, that’s how hard it was raining. We were pulling out when we heard, over the sounds of the rain, what sounded like a rock hitting the window. It was my mother, having run after the van, and she was frantically knocking on the window. I opened the door to see her soaked, hair streaming. She seemed agitated, but all she said was “Call me the minute you get home.” I didn’t call her the minute I returned home. My son, who had missed me, wanted me to take him to the farmers’ market, so I did. When we returned, I called, and my mother, still somewhat frantic, said she’d been praying for me all this time. When I asked her to explain, she said she was worried about the masked man she’d seen take me away in the strange looking car – the standard blue airport shuttle van. It was so odd to contemplate that the same things I had seen – the familiar, punctual van, the driver running into the rain – had prompted in me feelings of good will and a desire to generously tip while to my mother it was a potential kidnapping. Now that I am older and understand the history better, layered by these reprises playing all over the globe, I have come to see the actual logic in
her reactions. Her inability to make decisions makes perfect sense when you consider that in the world she grew up in, the “wrong” decision could be fatal. But also the “right” decision – accompanying her aunt – ended with her never seeing her mother again. A lifetime after the dash across the 38th parallel, now living in a snug condo in Minneapolis, my mother still hardly sleeps at night; she sees a counselor for debilitating anxiety. She’s astoundingly healthy – her cardiologist says she has the heart of a 60-year-old – but with every twinge, she’s always sure this is “it.” She craves company, but is scared to go out. It’s a confounding way to live, but now I’m realizing she may not be able to change – the scars that were inflicted on her psyche when she was 14, instead of getting smaller with time have only grown with her. As our past and present American attitudes toward immigration have shown, countries and their people have differing ways they receive their fellow humans in need. Children, we tell ourselves, are resilient. What we don’t think about is that one’s worldview becomes formed in this period, and early experiences, even if not understood, maybe especially if not fully understood, become part of the things carried into adulthood, that haunt a person, every day.
