The first time I saw my dad cry, I was 8 years old. I don’t remember much from that night besides stumbling out of bed in the dark and my older brother attempting to distract me with Pokémon cards in the emergency room. I knew that my grandma had been in an accident, but I didn’t understand the gravity that awaited my family.
I certainly didn’t understand how this event would change the course of her life, or the rest of ours.
I remember walking into the vestibule of the hospital, unsure of how to help. I hugged his legs and listened to his breath as we let the moment pass together.
My grandma, along with my relationship with my culture as a Korean American, has been on my mind a lot recently. Perhaps it’s the impending doom of graduation, or maybe it’s the realization that the more time passes, the less I can remember about her — either way, I feel a sense of urgency to uncover more about her before time runs out altogether.
Chuseok, often referred to as the Korean Thanksgiving, takes place in early October this year, and I saw its steadily approaching date as an opportunity to explore my roots.
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Chuseok translates to “autumn evening” and occurs in the eighth month of the lunar year when the moon is full and the harvest is bountiful. The holiday can be traced back to the Silla kingdom, founded circa 57 BCE, where weaving competitions emerged to celebrate the mysterious waxing and waning moon. Today, Koreans participate in Chuseok by eating half-moon-shaped rice cakes called songpyeon and setting up memorials known as charye to honor their ancestors.
I remember very little about my dad’s mom from when I was a child. Although she didn’t die until I was 16, she was in a car accident eight years prior, where she suffered significant damage to her body and brain.
I will always value the moments that we had in those years after her accident, but I can’t help feeling as though I only ever caught glimpses of the person that she was beneath the surface.
When I try to recall her before the accident, I feel the soft hands of a woman who helped me brush my teeth before bed. I remember the faint smell of soap and the stretched-out cotton of matching pajamas. I see her backyard, an unfenced section of forest where deer roamed free, and where I pressed my nose up to the window, holding my breath until their ears would arch up and they darted back into an envelope of trees.
My grandpa had an article written about him in 2019 that detailed his lifelong struggles and missions, but I have no record of my grandma’s story or where she fell into this, so I decided to dedicate this Chuseok to learning more about her.
When I called my dad to ask him a few questions about his mom, I was admittedly a bit nervous. My dad is not a man who fears emotions, but he is someone who is consistently level-headed, always trying to hold steady and strong for the rest of my family.
However, once we got into the groove of the conversation, it flowed easily. I wondered if it was nice to just talk about her outside of the sadness of her death.
I learned that my grandma is from Gimpo, a small city in Gyeonggi Province near the border of North Korea. She met my grandpa when she was a nursing student at Seoul National University, one-third of the illustrious SKY universities, an acronym for the three most prestigious schools in South Korea. It’s not lost on my dad or me that it was almost unheard of for a woman to attend a university as exclusive as this in the 1950s.
After immigrating to the United States in 1964, my grandma worked as a nurse for her entire career — insisting on finishing her final year of work before retirement, even after her accident. My dad chuckled as he explained the slightly made-up job that the hospital had given her in response to her stubbornness.
“She was fiercely independent,” my dad said with a smile. “She never took a backseat in conversations where Korean men thought it was a ‘men only’ conversation. She always felt she belonged in the room.”
Reinvention was also a huge part of my grandma’s life. She was constantly trying to improve herself by taking night classes at a community college when my dad and uncle were children, or reading up on the stock market to make informed investments.
“I remember getting a call last year from our financial adviser saying she had the most successful portfolio amongst all of his educated, investment-bro clients,” my dad joked, and I couldn’t resist joining him in laughing at the marvel of this woman.
When I reflect on everything my grandma accomplished in her 81 years, I think back to the nicknames my brother and I called my dad’s parents when we were young: “Fix it” grandpa and “Fix it” grandma. My grandpa was an electrician with thick calluses on his hands from a life that knew no rest. Nothing was so broken that he couldn’t fix it.
In retrospect, I can see that my grandma was just as deserving of her title as he was. She had the resilience to conquer obstacles that could break most people in seconds, and I’m proud to celebrate her for Chuseok.
Hailey is a senior in Business.
