This January marks the 10th anniversary of my grandmother’s death. She is buried on a hill in a cemetery on Staten Island, a place I’m sure that would have been as foreign to her as the moon to you or me, but it is the place where her youngest son lives.##M:[more]## When you are the Korean mother of a son, all you really need is to be close to him, and if you are closer to him in death than you were in life, then that is fate, so be it.
It was always a source of deep pain and though she would not admit it, some shame as well, that she had to live with her daughter, my mother, rather than her son as she should have in the Korean tradition. There were issues of the in-law variety with her son’s wife, which can be pretty common no matter what the culture, but is especially pronounced in Korean tradition, which dictates that the eldest son is responsible for taking care of the parents in their old age.
My grandmother suffered the particular tragedy of having not one but two sons predecease her. The first to die was the second in the line of the five children she bore, the brother immediately above my mother, my mother’s favorite, the brother she adored. He died when he was just 18 years old from pleurisy, a disease of the lungs most probably caused by a virus or an infection of some sort such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. Had he lived in today’s world with the best of modern medicine he might have survived, but medical care in the 1940s was expensive and compared to now, fairly primitive. His passing took a chunk of my grandmother’s heart that never recovered. She never spoke of him again, and as child growing up, there was not a single picture to show me what my uncle looked like.
The other son my grandmother lost was her oldest. He had immigrated to America in his 50s and found the transition horribly difficult, not knowing how to speak English, not knowing how to drive a car, not being able to get a job of any sort. Always a smoker, he smoked even more to relieve the stress and frustration, and that probably accelerated the lung cancer that was seeping through his lungs. My mother collapsed with grief at his funeral and fearing even worse for my grandmother, kept her at home. Since his death was preceded by a long hospital stay, I am haunted by the knowledge that my grandmother never had the chance to say goodbye to her firstborn.
When I think of my grandmother’s life and mine, I can’t think of the lives of two women born in the same century being more different. I had the privilege of receiving an Ivy League education. My grandmother was born in 1909, a time when Korea was still governed by Japanese rule as well as archaic and feudalistic ideas about a woman’s place in society. Her father believed that education was wasted on a girl, and so she was not sent to school. Instead, she was kept at home and taught proper womanly skills like cooking and sewing.
I can picture her sitting on the floor of my kitchen in California pickling cabbage in brine and sprinkling bright red pepper flakes to make kimchee. I remember her sewing small, fine stitches to fix my huge down comforter, a blanket that I kept long after its usefulness was done because I had her handiwork to keep her close in my heart. Her husband treated her no better than her father did. She was married to him at a time when Korean society looked the other way when men had external affairs and smoked and drank themselves to death.
Nobody in my family can tell me exactly what killed him, but the story goes that he stayed out late one night, climbed a hill, sat underneath a pine tree and died right there at the tender age of 50, leaving my grandmother behind to raise five children on her own. She was feisty. She was a survivor, a refugee during the Korean War, keeping her frightened children safe and fed while escaping from the approaching North Korean soldiers.
She wanted so desperately to be able to read, something I’ve always taken for granted. I remember coming in late one night to say goodnight and she was sitting up in bed, so small underneath the blankets, with my father’s borrowed reading glasses perched halfway down her nose. She was mouthing words aloud from the Korean bible she had borrowed from church, her pencil moving along with the characters. “Good job, Halmany,” I praised, impressed that she had picked up so much just by working for a few weeks with my brother, who spent time tutoring her at night after finishing his own homework.
Glowing from the compliment, she looked up and smiled, pride shining from her eyes. “Read some more, grandma,” I said, climbing into bed with her and pulling the blankets up over both of us, and taking the book in hand to read along. It was only then that I realized, as her pencil skimmed over the characters once again, that she wasn’t actually reading, that she still couldn’t read. She was reciting the words from memory.
My grandmother was my touchstone to my childhood. She lived with us in Korea, helping my mother with her two small children when my dad left for America to go to graduate school. When we left Korea in 1964 to rejoin him and we felt the sting of his discipline, we would beg, “send us home to Halmany”. Right from the start, Halmany, grandmother, in Korean, represented home. She rejoined our family once again 10 years later, coming to live with us in New Jersey in 1974.
I would come home from college, crank up Blondie on the stereo, and dance wildly about, shaking off the stress of reading period and finals. She would watch, amused and almost disbelieving, most likely about my energy and lack of inhibition. “Dance, Halmany, dance,” I would exhort, my arms waving about in time to the disco beat, and she would gamefully raise up her elbows and try to imitate me. “That’s right, grandma, dance!” I would spin and take her hands and twirl her with John Travolta-like moves. I loved her spirit, that she was willing to jump in and dance with her crazed disco machine of a granddaughter.
She was tiny, about 75 pounds in the later years of her life, almost five pounds less than that at the end. At five-foot-two, I felt like I towered above her. I used to joke that the women of my family gained an inch every generation, so she barely hit five feet.
Katie was five years old when she died. I think Halmany would have been astounded that she would have to look up to see into the eyes of her five-foot-seven granddaughter. Molly would go running up to her room in my parents’ house, shouting where’s great-grandma? For months after that cold January day she died, my tiny two-year-old would still run upstairs looking for her, hands raised in bewilderment at seeing her empty room and made-up bed, asking quietly this time, where’s great-grandma?
We buried her on a cold and angry day, when it seemed that her spirit was roiling at the idea that she was taken from this earth at the age of 86, even when she had outlived not one but two sons. She wanted to be buried next to her oldest son, but just as her wishes were frustrated in life, so they were in death. There was no room next to her son’s grave.
And so she lies on that lonely hill in Staten Island. She was always so cold. I wonder if she is still so cold, and if she misses the bustle of the streets she knew in Korea. I wonder if she is happier now, reunited with her sons in heaven. I wonder if she knows that she still lives on, in my memory and in my heart, and I wonder if she knows that every time I pick up a book I think of her and know that I am a better person today because of her love and support.
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