Without You, There Is No Us (5 page)

When I found Beth in the cafeteria and told her that I would stick with Class 1, she reminded me that it would be a lot more work, but it did not seem like work, in that moment, to be their teacher. It felt more like choosing one child over another, and I have often wondered how my experience would have differed had I not walked into the wrong room. Because Class 1 was in fact a special group, the smartest, which in that world meant, among other things, that they followed orders very well. And it was that very quality, which seemed more particular to Class 1 than Class 4, that would bother me the most in the months to come.

After my conversation with Beth, I saw the same boys staring intently at me from the lunch line. So I smiled and nodded, signaling to them that yes, I would indeed be their teacher. And the beaming smiles I received in return made that first day of teaching unforgettable. These young men were in many ways like children, with all their vulnerability and innocence intact, hanging on to my every move as though it would determine their destinies. Later I would wonder if it was decided in that moment that I would fall in love with them. We need to feel needed. We love the ones who want us.

4

I
AM
FROM
SOUTHERN
STOCK
.
FOR
GENERATIONS
,
MY
FATHER
’
S
Gwangsan clan of Kim settled in Chungcheong-do, the only province among the peninsula’s eight that is partly landlocked. People there are known for being mellow in temperament and kind in spirit, although such a reputation might be exaggerated by their countrymen, who feel sorry for them for missing out on the sea. I spent most of my childhood there, in a very big house surrounded by hills. I remember looking up at the sky for a rush of blue, which might have been a premonition of my later life on the isle of Manhattan.

According to my grandfather, who often sat me and my brother and sister down to review the superiority of our lineage, the Gwangsan clan was known for producing the leading Confucian scholars in Korea. We were the noblest of all Korean families, he said, and certainly the most dignified of the hundreds of different Kim clans. We were not warriors like the Kimhae clan, or blinded by earthly ambition and titles like the Andong clan. We preferred thinking to fighting and had often served as teachers to kings
.
The most eminent of my ancestors were the father and son scholars, Kim Jang-saeng (Sagye) and Kim Jip (Shindokjae), from the sixteenth century—both enshrined among Korea’s eighteen sages
.
Today, whenever I visit Seoul and pass the ancient imperial palace that housed our kings for centuries, I remember my grandfather’s smug grin and the inevitable mantra of how without our great-great-great-grandfathers, Korea would be without its guiding philosophy.

Years later, I traveled to the beautiful, temple-strewn Gyeongsang province, in the southeastern corner of the country, where I was stopped on the street by a very old man costumed in a traditional linen robe and hat, made with horsetail hair and bamboo. The area was famous for its orthodox traditions. Unlike the rest of the country, where the eldest sons of family clans performed ancestor worship rites for their dead parents on lunar New Year’s Day,
Chuseok
(Harvest Day), and the death anniversaries, families there conducted the rites on all sorts of special memorial days even for ancestors many generations removed. It was said that no mothers wanted their daughters to be married off to the men from that region since daughters-in-law worked year round, cooking, cleaning, and washing, never mind being perpetually pressured to produce a male heir. Hearing me speak English with my companion, the old man asked where I was from. I told him, in Korean, that I was born in Seoul but lived in New York, and that my people were originally from Chungcheong province. At this, he nodded approval and asked, “So where is your bonjuk?” meaning where did my clan originate. When I told him Gwangsan Kim, his face brightened. He nodded again, looking very thoughtful, and said, “Why, you are from a very noble family! Most noble, I might add. Yours is the
second
noblest family in all of Korea!” When I asked him who was the first, he exclaimed, as if he could not believe I did not already know, “Of course, my family of Poongsan Yoo!” Then he began telling me about an ancestor of his, who in the sixteenth century had saved Korea from a Japanese attack. “Without my great-great-great-grandfather, our country would not exist!” he said proudly.

My father still attends biannual, regional Gwangsan Kim meetings, which take place in a Korean restaurant near where he now lives, in Fort Lee, New Jersey. About twenty members sit around the Korean meals of
kimchi chigae
and
gamjatang
and discuss the greatest achievements of our ancestors, who are buried in Yunsan borough in Nonsan City of Chungcheong province, including my grandparents. Unable to tend to their graves the way a good Confucian son should, my father is plagued with guilt. One year I traveled to South Korea in his place, although the gravesite was hard to get to without a car. The train took about two hours, and after that I had to take a bus to Yunsan. Everyone within a ten-mile radius was Gwangsan Kim, according to the bus driver, who asked me, “Who’s the caretaker of your plot?” I told him, and he nodded in recognition. It was a rural area, and everyone either knew one another or was related. He helped me find a taxi, which took me to a particular turn in the road shown on a map hand drawn by a relative. There was no sign, but I got out of the taxi and trekked along the path, endless burial mounds unfolding before me, tiny hills that had held the bones of my ancestors for hundreds of years, each one with a stone tablet as a marker. There they were, the people who made me, whose unions had led me to stand there in that time—the history of me.

Except that the letters on each tablet were in Chinese, as Koreans still relied on written Chinese for matters relating to death. Throughout history, China was always the big brother to neighboring Korea, this tiny kingdom unfortunately located adjacent to the massive empire, and in some ways, that tradition seemed to have held up. Anyone following North Korea would tell you that it is China that really holds the power.

Since mandatory instruction in Chinese did not begin until the seventh grade, which was when I emigrated, all I knew of Chinese was my name. Every gravestone featured the character “Kim,” followed by individual names, which I could not read. The Gwangsan clan of Kims were all gathered there, and had I not been a woman—according to Korean custom, a woman is buried with her husband’s family—and had we stayed in Korea, I too would have ended up there, along with my father. (As for unmarried women, I have no idea where they are buried. For a very long time, in Korea, no one talked about them.)

For thousands of years, scarcely anyone left. Korea was the hermit kingdom, with its spiritual basis in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shamanism, until 1910, when it was annexed by Japan and colonized for thirty-five years thereafter, followed by the Korean War in 1950. Having been born and raised under these brutal colonizers, my paternal grandfather spoke fluent Japanese. Shortly before his death, in the mid-1980s, he came to stay with my family in Queens, where he befriended a young Japanese woman, a missionary from the Unification Church. When my father confronted him about his sudden interest in the cult, my grandfather answered that he didn’t care about the Moonies, he only enjoyed the chance to speak Japanese with his new friend. Like others from his generation, he suffered from a sort of Stockholm syndrome and missed the language of his oppressors. Koreans’ love–hate relationship with Japan carries on to this day, compounded by their relationship with the superpowers who took over where Japan left off: the United States and the Soviet Union, who together liberated Korea only to carve it up as a proxy for the Cold War.

Today, South Koreans are largely mixed in their attitude toward the United States, which keeps almost thirty thousand troops stationed smack in the middle of the capital, occupying prime real estate.
*1
Many of them resent the presence of these foreign protectors, more than sixty years after the armistice, and yet they readily acknowledge that it is their alliance with the United States that has helped South Korea become a democracy as well as a first-world nation. If South Korea is indebted to the United States for its prosperity, North Korea has been largely indebted to China for its survival since the fall of the Soviet Union. Although both China and the Soviet Union had a hand in the division of Korea, North Koreans do not speak of that; they blame only the United States and Japan. Alliances can be hard to break. History is a record of many such irrationalities.

On that visit to my ancestors’ graves, it occurred to me that tradition is not well suited for globalization. Traditions are about holding on to the past, whereas I belong in a new world, and in my new world of America, one reinvents oneself constantly, which is a certain kind of privilege. It was in 1983, following decades of military dictatorship in the South, that my parents finally left the old country. They were the first generation of Gwangsan Kim to turn their back on all that was in front of me in those burial mounds, and here I was, years later, the descendant who had crossed the ocean to return, unable to identify my grandparents’ gravestones until the caretaker came and led me to them.

MY
MOTHER
’
S
SIDE
is more humble, at least according to her. I don’t know how true that is, as my mother deferred to my father on almost everything, including the degree of nobility in their backgrounds. Although her Yoon clan had originated from the ancient region of Papyeong in Gyeonggi province, she was born and raised in Seoul, as were her parents. The Pap-yeong Yoons were known for their queens. Often the bride of the future king was selected from faded noble families who lacked ambition, since those holding power in the court tried to guard against anyone who might usurp their power. Her preoccupation, however, was with more recent family history.

As my mother tells it, June 25, 1950, was a quiet Sunday. She was just four years old, although she remembers it all as if it happened yesterday. That was the day when North Korean bombs first fell over the southern capital of Seoul. That day marked the end of a childhood that never really had the chance to begin.

So it goes like this, our conversation.

The bombs were coming, and we ran,
my mother says. She is not sure if she heard them, but she knew they were coming because everyone in the neighborhood was fleeing.

Where were you going?
I ask.

Her reaction then is always the same—incredulous at being asked something so obvious.

To the south, of course! Anywhere, so long as it was toward the south. We knew that if we stayed there, we would die. At least that was what my mother said when she was packing.

Her father is away on a business trip to Busan at the southernmost tip of the country. This is unusual. He is an administrator at the local community center—not a job that requires business travel. But the family is lucky that he was sent south, not north, for work. An overnight trip north, a couple of hours away, and some families are separated forever. The war announcements must be airing on the radio because almost no one has a telephone or TV. The mood is urgent, panicked even, and my mother remembers a sudden cold breeze sweeping across the living room, even though it was summer and humid. The neighbors have begun fleeing, carrying their possessions on their backs, checking in to see what Mrs. Yoon is up to, why she has not left yet.

“
Palgengis
(the Red) are coming!” they scream. “There’s war!” These people have lived through the Japanese rule. They are accustomed to catastrophe.

My grandmother must make the decision alone. The children must be fed and dressed, and the youngest one will have to be carried. My mother is a quiet child, but she is even quieter than usual; she can tell something big is about to happen. My grandmother tells the children to start packing. They all gather their things frantically.

Five children in total, but not really.

What do you mean, five children, but not really?

My mother would pause here. She might be in the midst of cutting up daikon or roasting seaweed for my lunch box. She might be getting ready for a night out with my father, standing before a dressing mirror in her green silk wrap dress and matching leather gloves. I can still see her reflection in the mirror, her hair blow-dried into a windswept Farrah Fawcett do, not a trace of the war-fleeing child visible. She modeled once, in the sixties, for a Japanese photographer who spotted her in a restaurant in Seoul because of her striking resemblance to a Japanese movie star. This resemblance inspired a Korean TV producer to pursue her for months and cast her in a weekly soap opera, but the week before filming she took off on a seaside outing with my father and never showed up. She was not irresponsible by nature, but she wasn’t sure what a model or an actress did because in postwar Korea, TV and magazines were still new and mysterious. At the moment, her beauty seems even more exaggerated as she pauses and gazes into a distance. My mother is still young. Just barely in her thirties, the wound still raw.

What do you mean, not really five?

You see
… 
there were nine originally.
Four died in infancy. Babies didn’t always live back then.

This part always mystifies me. I am a child, and death is something someone invented somewhere. I am lost as to where those other babies went.

My mother sighs over the deaths she did not witness. She is the lucky one. She came last—the youngest of the nine. She survived and grew into a beautiful woman, a wife, a mother. Four others never made it. As a mother, saying these things aloud scares her, and she pulls me toward her and squeezes me very hard as though she is afraid of losing me too. I don’t like this moment. I don’t like the fear in her eyes, but I keep on asking so that it will distract her and she will finish telling the story, although this story has no ending. A loop that does not complete a circle. A gap that will never be filled.

All she recalls is the sudden chaos, her mother and her siblings in a great hurry. Her eldest brother takes charge. He is only seventeen, but with his father missing, he is the man of the house, telling his mother to get some rice balls ready for their train journey. It is decided that they will first go to Suwon, nineteen miles outside of Seoul, where they have a relative, and from there, they will make their way to Busan, where her father is. She is soon picked up, in the arms of her eldest brother. The other three children follow, each with a parcel of things on his or her back. My grandmother gazes at the house one last time, afraid she might never set eyes on it again. It will be three years before she does, but she does not know that as she reluctantly turns away to begin the long walk to the train that will take them to safety.

You see, it was all farmland up there in the hills, a good hour walk to Seoul Station.