Blank Pages in the Family Book

For the past few years, each year has been my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday. It’s not that she’s been fibbing, trying to stave off the reality of the passing years. Her age was destroyed by war. It’s something she would like to have, but she will never get it back.

She can’t be held responsible for the loss. Those meant to keep it – parents, nation, government – failed her.

Halmoni (as we call her, “grandma” in Korean) grew up during the Great Depression, in Kaesong, a small city that is now near the border of North and South Korea. As a schoolgirl, she lived through Japanese occupation; as a teenager, the Korean War. She survived, but the others – parents, nation, government – did not. And so, the record of her birth was lost.

I see the semblance of Halmoni’s face peeking out of mine in a recent photo from a friend’s birthday. In the photo, I’m wearing a purple hanbok, a traditional Korean dress. I hold up a cupcake with a candied violet – “It matches my dress!” – and my happy eyes have arched into tilted crescent moons.

When I first saw this photo, I stopped wearing eyeliner. I am proud that my face testifies to my Korean blood, and I don’t want to paint it over.

Halmoni and my mom in Minnesota, ten years after the end of the Korean War. Photograph courtesy of Amelia Buzzard.

This was not always the case. I think back to second grade when Mrs. Stettenbenz announced in her commanding contralto that we were going to do a research project. First, we each would choose one of our ancestral countries to investigate. We would then take a field trip to the library, write facts down, and present them to the class.

I knew I was half Korean and half German-Scandinavian-etc. mutt. I was tanned-looking, with delicate bone structure and pin-straight hair. In the summer, I helped my mom fill crinkly sheets of seaweed with beef and pickled radish, then roll them up in sesame-slicked mats. Our fridge always held at least one glass jar of fermented kimchi wrapped in layers of grocery bags to stanch the fishy, fizzly smell. Plastic training chopsticks kept company with the forks in our cutlery drawer.

“What is your country, Amelia?” Mrs. Stettenbenz asked.

I beamed.

“Switzerland!”

I am the third generation in North America, and of those three generations, each has denied Korea in its own way.

First, there’s me, clinging to my teaspoon of Swiss blood.

Second, there’s my mom. In grad school in England, someone asked her where she was from. When she said, “Canada,” they asked if she lived in an igloo. White people see she isn’t white. But she doesn’t see herself primarily through the lens of her ethnic identity. Like many Asian Americans, she calls herself a banana – yellow on the outside, white on the inside. She pronounces her last name like the English speaker she is – “choy” instead of “cheh.”

Third, there’s Halmoni. They were folding up old clothes for storage when my mom asked Halmoni what was special to her about being Korean. Halmoni said her memories of Korea were so bad that after moving to North America she tried her best to forget everything. What is special to her about being Korean is that she is no longer Korean. She says this in English that even after all these years still falls from her mouth in sticks and ovals, Hangul-shaped.

나는 한국인이 아니다

(“I am not Korean” in Hangul, the Korean alphabet.)

Now that I’m grown up and starting a family of my own, these denials irk me. I want to break through them to the truth.

January is cold and wet in Vancouver, always drizzling. I stand in Halmoni’s kitchen, seven months pregnant, and pour myself a tenth cup of jujube-sweetened tea.

“What was it like growing up in Korea?” I ask, trying to sound casual, like I haven’t been wondering for years.

She laughs and waves at the air, pushing the words away.

“I ate too much sugar. It was considered high-class to eat sugar, so my parents gave me a lot. That’s why I have health problems now.”

She pads out of the kitchen in the slippers she keeps in a basket by the front door.

I think about somewhere once, when I was small, when I woke and slid off the satin bedspread in the room where I was napping. The room was white and empty with no toys. In my boredom I crawled around the perimeter testing everything with my tongue.

Pebbly eggshell walls. Lick. Fuzzy antimacassar. Lick. UFO-shaped drawer-pull on a maple chiffonier. Lick.

I spotted a softly beveled rectangle on the wall, so smooth and cool and gray and just at the level of my mouth. I pressed my tongue against the tiny holes.

WHAM!

I fell back like a shoe-squished bug.

Halmoni’s answer, so softly delivered, is clear: Don’t lick the outlet. Korea is off-limits. I daren’t ask any more. But the more I learn about her country, the more I learn to listen to her silences.

Halmoni’s first silence is about her own past.

In Korea, family roots run deep and wide. For centuries, individual families have kept genealogical books called jokbo, writing in the names of babies as they are born, passing the heavy tomes to their eldest sons. These names are then sent to dedicated committee offices, which carefully document bon-guan or clan lineages with hundreds of thousands of new members every few decades. In a small country, once kinship ties are broadened to a clan level it’s easy to make the leap to national brotherhood. In Korea, every street vendor is an ajumma, an auntie. Every male friend is a girl’s oppa, her big brother. The very language forces Koreans to acknowledge their national brotherhood.

The same wars that destroyed Halmoni’s birth certificate severed her connection to the national system of familial identity. Even before the war, her father was gone. After the war, what family remained was broken beyond repair. Her mother died. Her only brother disappeared, likely kidnapped by the North Korean government. When she and her sisters fled south, they left behind the grandparents she had lived with her whole life. With each loss, Halmoni became more untethered from Korea. In the end, she was a Western individualist not so much by choice as by fate. What else can you be when you are all alone?

Halmoni’s second silence is a silence she couldn’t break, even if she wanted to. This silence is her husband’s, and he took it to the grave.

We know very little of Grandaddy Choi’s past. He grew up in North Korea with his mother and four younger sisters. One Sunday near the beginning of the war, his family was walking back from church in their choir robes when they passed the train station. Crowds wrestled for spots in the cars. Nung Won Choi’s mother shoved one of his little sisters’ hands into his and pushed them into the fray. She hoped, in doing so, that she could save at least two of her children. Nung Won and his sister rode to the South on the roof of a train car, half-frozen in the falling snow. They never saw their mother again.

After the border shut, slicing the country in two, hopes of reunion slowly died. The last news Nung Won got of his family in the North was a report from a friend who had seen his mother’s corpse. Fenced out by barbed wire, Nung Won had no choice but to move on.

The Choi family’s trauma is not unique. It’s something that affects the entire extended family that is the Korean nation. In his memoir Eat a Peach, Korean-American chef and author David Chang describes a “characteristic sorrow and bitterness that Koreans seem to possess wherever they are in the world.” The Korean word for this is han.

It’s hard to capture the term in English. Again, between me and my Korean identity lies a perpetual lacuna. I am forced to interpret as both heir and imposter. Halmoni passed down Korean food names to her children, but she kept the rest of the language to herself. Without a tongue of my own, I turn to “real” Koreans to name the ghost that haunts my family’s past.

Dr. Michael D. Shin, a specialist in early modern Korean history at Cambridge University, defines han as “the complex of emotions that result from the traumatic loss of collective identity … a constant feeling of being less than whole.” I look at a map of Korea and see the jagged line dividing North from South. I see lost jokbo lineages and fragmented families, their members missing, dead, divided, fled. I see Halmoni and Grandaddy Choi. “Less than whole” may be the understatement of the century.

The other half of han expresses the way Koreans processed this deep loss. Theologian Suh Nam-dong, writing in the aftermath of the war, describes how rage combined with honor in the Korean psyche to produce ambition. For him, han is visceral, “a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong.” More tellingly, han is located deep inside the body. It hides.

After the war, Grandaddy Choi came to America. His face in the grainy photos is sandstone smooth and stoic. He earned his PhD and MD in Minnesota, researched cancer, taught at the University of Manitoba, and had four kids. He would set Puccini on the turntable at night and blast opera so loudly his kids couldn’t sleep. He would smoke and drink alone (I imagine him with the smoke hanging on the air in black-and-white). And his han would burn.

I imagine han as a kind of demon. You can run to America to try to escape your han, but it will catch up to you. You can bury it in your bowels, in the darkness, in the night, but eventually it will out.

Grandaddy Choi was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in his fifties. They took out his voice box. The last year or two of his life, his throat was so constricted that he struggled to eat and drink. Not wanting to burden his family with the details of his illness, he grew thinner and thinner. By the time he went to the hospital, he was too frail for surgery. He died within a week.

I picture him on his deathbed, his face like Jesus’ in Diego Velázquez’s Christ Crucified – bowed head, marble-pale skin, and tightly sealed lips, his hair falling in a curtain over one cheek, shuttering his expression.

I sometimes wonder whether Grandaddy Choi’s decision to keep quiet about the severity of his illness was just the last, short episode in a lifelong quest to protect his family from his han. I wonder whether Halmoni’s evasions of my questions are how she carries on her husband’s legacy.

They did not factor in the curiosity of the innocent, the allure an electric outlet holds for a toddler’s tongue. The third generation has exactly the right proportion of distance to proximity to wonder and to probe. We are far enough from a true experience of han that all we feel is that lingering sense of being “less than whole.” Ironically, my grandparents’ very attempt to protect the future from the past has left us with a family history that mirrors the divided Korea – broken, incomplete. It leaves me aching to fill in the gaps.

The omissions are so extensive that sometimes I don’t know if I understand anything at all. I trace the facts with my finger, seeking patterns. When so many possible stories exist simultaneously, we can, as my grandparents did, select the few we think worth telling to those who sit there listening. These stories, pregnant with omissions, burn and itch and will not go away.

Whatever their motivations, together, my grandparents have discontinued the family jokbo by refusing to record it. The facts they did pass down are rendered significant by the empty space in the narrative, the obvious absence of facts withheld, the birth certificates lost. Because I am under no illusions that I have the complete story, the blank pages in our genealogy move into the foreground, becoming salient as type.

What they tell me now is: The past was painful. We lost everything. But the future is good. Now, we have you. Let us spare you sorrow and bequeath you only beauty.

The next time I talked to Halmoni, I didn’t ask about the Japanese occupation, her family, or the war. Instead, I asked her about Grandaddy Choi’s favorite foods.

She listed three dishes: nangmyeon (cold noodles), mandugeok (dumpling soup) and bindae-tteok (mung bean pancakes) with Northern style kimchi.

“It’s not like Southern kimchi,” she added. “Not so spicy. It has a fresher taste.”

I picture Halmoni at her house in the afternoon sun, watering her plants. Aloe vera, ferns, translucent orchids. I always imagine her exquisitely small in the spacious rooms with their cool, white walls, and the scent of something sizzling just around the corner. Halmoni is like her flowers, like North Korean cooking. Her whole life she has been straining the past into the present, doing her best to remove the bitterness that might cause us to choke, so she can serve us only sweetness. It is fresh and light and lovely.

For the first time, I take a good look at the table set before me. I see thin slivers of cucumber and chewy strands of noodles draped over each other. I see palm-sized saucers with puddles of soy sauce in their centers. In each dish, I see what’s there, but also what is not.

I no longer feel the need to fill the empty space. I am happy to receive the hanbok without the han. I am glad that the moment I resemble my halmoni most is when I smile.