With great sadness I must inform you that Shinyung died of breast cancer on August 10th.
Almost seventeen years ago, my sister told me to never contact her again. In those seventeen years, so much has happened (or not happened). We have not attended each other’s weddings, she has never met my children, and she never got to know my husband Jeff. We have not celebrated any holidays together. My family of origin has never gotten together as a group in those years.
When my sister estranged me, I did not believe she meant what she said. How does one discard a family member? Could it be so simple to treat a sister like the day’s trash?
Before then, we had been in a cloud of conflict. We had tried living together, but that ended with a shroud of misunderstandings and upset feelings. We seemed to lack the language to talk about it. I did not even understand the issues surrounding the conflict(s). When I asked her to explain why she was upset with me, she raised a series of issues that I did not really understand. For example, she mentioned that I did not like her boyfriends, which I did not believe was true. I named one of her ex-boyfriends that I had liked, and she countered that I could not have liked that particular individual because I had called him a “boy.” I did not recall calling him a boy, and even if I had, was it possible that it was said in a jocular moment since he was younger than my sister?
Our nuclear family members were the only ones in the U.S. since 1979, with all our relatives in South Korea. As an immigrant family, we were told by our parents that we only had each other and that we had to take care of each other. In our family of five, our parents lived out a different culture, whereas our older brother, who arrived in the US when he was 11, seemed more “Korean” than myself or my younger sister. My sister and I seemed more or less aligned, having arrived in the US at ages 6 and 8, respectively, or so I thought.
This one decision by my sister to cut me off reframed my entire existence. Everything changed at that moment. Suddenly, I was alone in the world. I felt like I had no ally anywhere. Someone who had been a mainstay of my life had suddenly discarded me. This reality had been unfathomable. It’s as if I had been tethered to earth by a sole string, and I was suddenly let go.
Initially, after the cut-off, I cried every day. For seven years. I could not understand what was happening. Was I really such a terrible person? What had I done that was so terrible? Yes, we had been having conflicts, but could these conflicts not be resolved through conversation? I could not understand that someone in my family would rather be rid of me and pretend me dead, rather than talk through whatever the problems might be. Could I be that unreasonable, impenetrable, and uncompromising that she should choose a dead end over any hope of resolution? Or was I so oblivious to my own behavior that I had done terrible things without understanding their impact on others?
The inability to make sense of it was the worst. I could not find a coherent explanation for what happened. Yes, I am sure I was difficult at times, and I am sure I said mean or stupid things. But the punishment felt so draconian. I felt trapped in a Kafka tale of psychological torture, powerless to make any changes, deprived of words that could have led to any repair, understanding, or insights, and denied the opportunity to seek forgiveness for wrongs I may have committed.
The punishment felt particularly drastic given the lifetime of experiences we had already shared. By this point, we were both in our mid-thirties. And I thought we had more or less a decent relationship. We had traveled together and we had spent time in each other’s social circles. Even if we were mired in conflict or tension, didn’t all of our prior positive experiences together count for something? Was I not worthy of some grace, even if I had committed some atrocity that I did not measure appropriately? And how about allowing for some human foibles, to be given the latitude to grow and change after mistakes?
Even happy or neutral moments stood unprotected. I could not scroll past a “Siblings Day” post on Facebook without bawling. Other people talking about their siblings put me on edge. Questions about my family from people I did not know well-generated anxiety.
A few years into the estrangement, I sat at a Frozen sing-along between my husband and my four-year-old with his enormous bin of butter-drenched popcorn as my two-year-old wiggled restlessly on my lap. On the enormous screen, the younger sister Anna protects her older sister Elsa from Hans’ sword, playing out “her act of true love,” and saves their kingdom forever. As Anna started to thaw, tears gushed out of my eyes, even as I sat very still to avoid calling attention to myself, and my mind flailed wildly, wondering what happened, how did we fail so terribly, why couldn’t we find our way to a happy ending?
Over the years, I’ve negotiated this dilemma over and over again in my head. First, I struggled with the guilt that I had possibly been such a terrible sister. Maybe I was unaware of my own defects, and I was not deserving of such relationships. My marriage to my husband felt precarious as well as all other relationships. If your sister can suddenly abandon you, why not anyone else? It set me off on an existential crisis, and nothing my husband or friends said budged me from my train of thought. I felt unworthy, defective, and hopeless.
The days when my husband Jeff and I got into arguments amplified the sense of hopelessness. Those were my most desolate days. I was convinced I was faulty. Something was wrong with me, and I had been blind to my own flaws. The minor arguments would snowball into a crisis and I was sure that Jeff would leave me too and take the children. I wondered where I would go, what I would do, and how could I live without them? Could I work in an orphanage in another country, where I could be around children to ease my pain?
At some point, I resolved to find a way to be content as a sub-family with my parents. I told myself I did not need her, even though I very much did. In the language of Bowenian theory, we were an enmeshed family, as many Asian families are. I lauded my sister’s successes, believing they reflected well on me. I was also very proud of her writing and talked about it often as if it rubbed off on me. I too had wanted to be a writer but could not as my parents very much wanted a lawyer or a doctor in the family. My second best choice was to glow in the spotlight of another writer.
I remember being so dependent on her whenever we got together with my parents. I have a very thin direct relationship with my parents. I do not know how to talk to them and feel awkward with them alone. I often found ways to include my sister in whatever gathering we did. Suddenly, I had to navigate the relationship alone. But I felt determined to form a family without her.
When I talked with my mother, however, she often brought up my sister. She would tell me what was going on in her life or about the conversation she last had with her. I begged my mother not to talk to me about my sister because it made me cry each time.
“Mom, please don’t talk about her with me.”
My mother would say, “I’m just talking to you about what’s happening in my life.”
She would act nonchalantly as if nothing had happened, even though she had witnessed me break down in tears several times over the years.
Other times, my mother would casually mention when my sister was visiting San Diego, where my parents and I live. She would summon me for dinner as if nothing was amiss. One time, my parents even parked their car in front of my house while my sister was visiting in order to shop at a nearby farmer’s market. One of the most difficult situations arose when my father told my family to show up for his 80th birthday, even though my sister and I had not spoken to each other in over 15 years. I refused to put my children and husband through such an awkward situation, and my mother said, “All you have to do is talk to her husband.” They had ignored my situation for so long, but when it came time for their need, they wanted to just shove me into a scene.
Over the years, I had begged my mother to help us, to find a way to get past the impasse. She was the only person who could help us in a situation where we seemed unable to help ourselves. She said, “How could I possibly help you? You’re grown-ups. You created this fight by yourselves.”
If I cajoled further, she would say, “What do you expect me to do? All siblings grow up and go in different directions. You now have your own families. You just aren’t going to be as close as you used to be.”
She said such sentences as if they were natural, inevitable.
Whenever she said this, I protested. With tears, with a barrage of words, with rebuke. You know that’s not how it is. That’s not what happened. I offered up evidence of other families who vacation together, celebrate the holidays together and don’t give up on each other.
She responded that life is inherently lonely and that we all ultimately die alone.
I’ve learned not to bring her up. To pretend all is well. I sit by in silence when my parents talk about her in front of me, trips they’ve taken with her, meals they’ve shared. I’ve sat by their side, with my eyes averted, my head slightly bowed, my breath stilled, as they answer her calls, doing what I can to avoid bringing attention to myself.
I find my mother’s failure — or refusal — to understand incomprehensible. I have tried to convey the depth of my sense of calamity. I have sobbed in front of her. I’ve talked to her about how I can no longer trust people, how I can’t rely on anyone else to stay by my side when my own sister abandoned me. I’ve told her how I’m persistently angry, how I cannot shake this feeling of betrayal.
She seems to lack the ability to absorb my words. She stares at me with disbelief.
“You have everything you need,” she says. “You have two well-behaved children, a good husband, and a large house. Why harp on this one problem?”
One week, we took my parents on a trip to Sedona, a destination my mom longed to visit. After a day of sightseeing and dinner, we sat around the table under the glow of a dangling lamp. As we chatted, my mom started talking about the time she went out for dinner with my sister.
I stopped her and said, “Please don’t talk to me about her. I don’t want to talk about her.”
She said, “I’m just telling you about when we last saw her.”
“Mom, I can’t talk about her. She threw me away. Who throws people away like that?”
Then, my mother said, “What, you think you’re so great? You think you have no foibles? All of you have defects.”
I could not believe what she had said. How did the conversation shift so suddenly from wanting to avoid talking about my sister to my personal defects?
“What, what defects do I have? Tell me what defects I have.”
By this point, I was glaring at her, flaring through my nostrils. Tears were flowing out of my eyes, and I could see Jeff trying to figure out whether to intervene.
“You are too strong to understand other people’s weaknesses. That’s your problem.”
At this point, I got up and left the table. I receded into my room as Jeff followed me. The pain of what she said suddenly set in, like a burn from the tip of a poker just removed from the logs. For years, I had been set up as the “strong one”, the one who could intervene and make things right, while my sister had often been positioned as the “frail” one who constantly needed my help. “She’s not as strong as you,” my mother would say to cajole me to help her whenever she deemed necessary.
Her refusal to understand feels like a betrayal. Throughout our childhood, my mother used me as a conduit to exercise power over my sister. Often, I became my mother’s mouthpiece, telling my sister to do what my mother wanted. For example, for years, my mother saved money to give to my sister. She put it in my account and made it my job to convince my sister to allow me to transfer it to her. Other innocuous — or seemingly innocuous — acts included my mother wanting to drive her home whenever she visited, and it became my job to drive her. My sister did the same through me. When she was choosing where to go to college and she was facing resistance from my parents, they both called me, separately, to try to convince the other party. I remember being on the phone, from my own college, cajoling my parents to let her go to her college of choice. I did not notice this pattern until my therapist brought it up.
For my mother to feign disinterest was disingenuous and painful for me. My relationship with my sister has fallen apart while hers is intact, even as I did her dirty bidding.
A few years ago, I decided to stop hoping for reconciliation. My hope or lack thereof has no impact on her behavior. But I realized that I too can choose. I too can choose estrangement over hope or attempted connection. I too can choose to pretend she is dead. I would normally never encourage such cut-offs, as I have experienced how painful they can be, but given the amount of time that has passed and the significant life events that have occurred in the meantime, it seemed unrealistic to hope for a resuscitation of the relationship. I was living an existential riddle. How long do I breathe into a one-sided relationship?
Recently, I read a book called Radical Remission, which talks about the need to cleanse ourselves emotionally while going through cancer. It suggests that such practices may help us with our overall well-being, especially when facing a health crisis. It made me think about how it may be good to try to cleanse myself emotionally and psychologically. Maybe try to make sense of things that did not make sense before and rid myself of mental clutter. Writing has always given me a sense of clarity and release, and addressing this topic is one way I’m trying to help myself.
The estrangement from my sister has been the single most painful experience of my life. Mainly because it cut into not only primal relationships but also because it decimated my self-identity. I always thought I was a good family member. Not perfect, and not always in harmony with what others expected of me, but a person with integrity and good intentions. And a good team member. The estrangement made me question so much of my perceptions.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that much of our estrangement can be understood better and more fairly when viewed not solely as a one-on-one relationship, but within the context of our immigration, cultural transition, and social discourses. When I put it in the context of everything we have gone through as a family.
In the beginning, I assumed I was the culprit. If someone has to cut you off to protect themselves, what an awful person you must be. How unreasonable I must have been that they could not reason with me or talk me into some shift. As more years passed, though, I realized that I was filled with shame at my role as the older sister. My parents always put the onus on me to take care of my younger sister. After I graduated from law school, my mother told me to get a condo that my sister and I can both live in. At the time, I remember agreeing without too much thought, but now I look back, I consider it such a strange idea. We were both grown-ups (in our 20s), and why did I have to pay for my sister’s shelter? Why couldn’t she pay her own rent? When I invited my sister to come live with me in San Francisco, this idea had already been embedded in me. When she showed up, she did not offer to pay any rent, even though I had a hefty mortgage as a new home buyer. When I eventually asked her to pay, that caused a huge blow-up.
For my mother, however, it must have seemed perfectly natural. I was the older sister. In her own family, one of her affluent sisters takes care of another younger sister and provides for her financially as needed. The role of age and sibling hierarchy is a norm my mom grew up with, but in our family, as soon as we came to the US in the late 70s, we more or less abandoned it. I remember my mom telling my sister to call me “older sister” and she adamantly refused.
This pattern of our family relationship also caused me to take the blame for the estrangement, even though my sister is the one who initiated it. And maybe it also contributed to her blaming me for whatever problems existed in the relationship. In my training as a marriage and family therapist, we talked about how problems exist between people, not in any one person. The problem is relational.
My mother also blamed me for the estrangement. She faulted my “strength” for not being soft toward others with weaknesses. But that cannot be true. The positioning of a dichotomy between “strength” and “weakness” is a fallacy. None of us are pure strength or weakness. We all share both, and we relate to others through different spectrums depending on the context. The branding of us as embodying one trait or another did tremendous harm.
Our family dynamic from my childhood also set the stage for the problem. I was an unhappy middle child, and I had to find a way to stand out. I am crying in many photos as a child. I remember in particular my 8th birthday when I thought my parents just did not love me as much as they did their other children. There I was in front of a cake lit with candles, and my face speckled with drops of tears. And another of me looking downcast with a Burger King crown on my head in front of the Twin Towers. My brother always got a lot of attention as the eldest son, and my sister — as the cutest in the family. I had a bowl haircut and eventually a sullen scowl. Things started to change for me, however, when I started getting good grades in school. Suddenly, I was receiving a lot of attention as the smart one. My strategy, whether intentional or not, was one I carried throughout my childhood and into law school.
When I was fourteen, my father resigned from his corporate job and my parents opened a small business. They joined countless other immigrants working grueling hours. The children were left alone not only to fend for ourselves but also to run a household. We had to make dinner, do the dishes, wash the laundry, and do whatever my parents could not do during the 12–14 hour days they were at the store. At 14, I was the natural to do the housework as I had been helping my mother until then as the oldest daughter, but suddenly I was also the head of the household. With that came a certain amount of power to delegate responsibilities to my sister. In a sense, I stepped into a parental role with my sister as the child. Understandably, this caused problems, but at the time, I did not know how to articulate it. I just knew we had to cook dinner and get the laundry done.
After I moved from New York to California for work, my sister accused me of hogging all the attention whenever I came home or brought expensive presents for my parents, but I never thought of them as comparative attention-seeking strategies, at least not overtly. I just thought I was making up for some of our hardships over the years. I was riddled with guilt for the long hours my parents worked, and throughout high school and college, I vowed to make things easier for them once I started making my own money. I had absorbed the lessons of a filial child, as I had watched my father helping his own parents financially.
When our parents worked relentless hours, I harbored a dream of having a cohesive family. I grew up longing for a family that had time for each other and knew how to talk to each other. I dreamt of a better version of ourselves, according to the American dream. Ones who knew how to love each other with open expression, who showed concern for each other, and who enjoyed spending time with each other. I think I waited for all of my teenage years and adulthood for this hope to come to fruition.
Instead, when my parents finally retired from their dry cleaning business and took a weekend trip out to San Francisco, all they could do was sleep from their fatigue and fret about their expenditures. They were anxious all the time as if they were still being hounded by customers who needed their clothes 30 minutes ago, and they rushed me through whatever outing I had scheduled for us.
This dream, however, like toxic positivity, backfired. I had my own notions about what we needed to do in order to have a “better” family, including having some financial stability. I wanted all of us to contribute to making this vision work, but it probably felt like pressure to my sister. Looking back, I can see how that was also my way of asking for my needs. I wanted someone to shoulder the burden of these parental duties with me, but I often felt alone. None of us knew how to ask for our needs. We were a desperate bunch, endlessly anxious and stressed. And this dream for a different family was solely mine.
One of my sister’s rebukes to me was that I was often trying to help her, but not in the ways she wanted. The funny thing is I don’t remember her ever helping me, or offering to help. She just assumed I was there to help her.
I recognize now that my sister just cutting me off without trusting the ability to talk or negotiate our way through the relationship is a position of powerlessness. If you have the means to talk through a problem, why would you cut someone off? I don’t believe I was overbearing. Or maybe I was. But we were not in a traditional power imbalance relationship, like parent-child or teacher-student. She had all the power to initiate changes.
I wonder about this powerlessness. We are descendants of war. I see this powerless in my mother as well. When an insurmountable event like war upsets your life, maybe you concede to it. Korea has also been unique in its practice of abandoning its children, and I wonder about its relation to the sense of powerlessness, especially as experienced by women. Estrangement is the practice of a zero-sum game. We abandon others to save ourselves. How frail we must be to drop others so easily. How precariously we must be living through life. Danger is everywhere, and rather than having the confidence and skills to manage and resolve differences, we withdraw into ourselves like vulnerable hatchlings.
Ironically, the estrangement completely upset the power dynamic. Suddenly, my sister held all the power, and I was left trapped, muzzled in an endless prison. This usurpation of power was like a clumsy toddler grabbing a glass of milk. Terribly messy. For my mother, who insidiously triangulates to access whatever limited power she can, and my sister, who plowed through with gorilla paws — they are both impoverished and deprived of expressions of assertion.
On the other hand, if it’s not about power, maybe it just means you don’t give a shit. For a relationship not worth maintaining, abandonment is as easy as slipping off a pair of stinky socks. My sister’s ability to estrange me makes me consider whether she ever valued our relationship as I did. I embraced her wholly in my life. I generally introduced her to all of my friends and tended to include her in a lot of my outings. When I went on trips, I often invited her. If I could not invite her, I always bought her a souvenir, even if I did not for myself. As a family, we often doted on my sister, and my parents often bought her cute trinkets even if they bought me something more “grown up.” I remember getting upset with them that they treated us so differently, and I recognize that they were treating us according to sibling roles in Korean culture. But I followed their lead. Now I wonder if my idea of our relationship was just an idea, a projection on my part. An aspiration. I wanted a relationship with my sister; apparently, she did not want one with me.
Her inability to articulate why she wanted the estrangement makes me wonder if just being around me felt bad for her. Maybe it was nothing I said or did, but everything about what I embodied was off-putting to her. Perhaps I became an externalization of what she rejected of our family or could not receive. If your parents are always comparing you to your sibling, you would learn to hate them over time. I wonder if that is how it felt for her.
Now that I have had seventeen years away from her, I am settling into the idea that maybe it benefitted us to have had some separation. Our relationship wasn’t healthy, for either of us, and it obviously did not serve her. We both learned to live our lives separately from each other, and maybe it was a reprieve for her. As painful as it was for me, I am glad that she had the opportunity to live life apart from me.
My life with Jeff has been my saving grace. Jeff and I have a wonderful relationship, even though we still argue at times, and I am grateful for our two beautiful children. The other day, I decided to sort through my old photos. As I was deciding which photos to discard, I realized that I cared very little for my life before I met Jeff and created our family. I threw away photos of my sister and let others of my family of origin also fall into the trash. I don’t have many happy memories, just a lot of longing for a different kind of family. I have that in my own family now, and there is no need to pine for another.
I have no hope of reconciling with my sister. But writing about this experience after so many years helped bring some perspective. I no longer feel such shame or guilt about the estrangement. I also recognize that while I may have done some things to contribute to her anger, I was not solely responsible for all the problems. Many of the problems were rooted in our family dynamics structured by our cultural expectations and patterns. Some of them were exacerbated by the harsh conditions of our immigration experience and cultural transition.
I hope others reading about this experience benefit somehow, by perhaps gaining some insight into their own relationships or considering another perspective. Too many conflicts are understood solely as individualized relationships without the unique cultural and immigration context. My situation cannot be understood without it.
Our family fell apart, but yours doesn’t have to. And know that as immigrants, we have complicated — and yet oftentimes unnamed — challenges working on us. We are slogging through undefined and conflicting lattices, each of us trying to make our way. We need to be kind to ourselves and to each other.
Yesterday, I learned that my third line of treatment has failed. It only worked for about 3-4 months, and during the last two months, the cancer must have been growing. The drug (Trodelvy), which was just approved for breast cancer last year, held tremendous promise, and I hoped to be one of the small percentage of people to ride it to remission. Now I'm left wondering what is left. How many lines of treatment do I have left? Maybe a few more? Maybe a handful? And of those, which will work? And for how long?
As with the first and second failures, I feel panicked for my family, for my children who may grow up without me. I do the math in my head. If the doctor who gave me my original average prognosis is right, my children will be 15 and 13 by then. I am grateful they will be older, not in the throes of toddler years or even younger. But I'm greedy.
I don't want to leave my family. I don't want to exit early. I want to see my children go through the awkward teenage years and experience unnecessary drama over short-lived romance. I want to help them decorate their graduation caps. I want to help Skye when the messy period arrives. I want to advise them with college choices and majors. I want to know what they look like when they're adults. I don't want sensitive Tyler to withdraw even more into himself. I don't want them to face the world with this punch in the guts. I want to grow older with Jeff and help him if he gets Alzheimers.
I feel trapped in an incomprehensible maze. Why is this happening? What is this? How do I make sense of this? And then I realize that I'm asking the wrong questions. Somehow, we have convinced ourselves that mortality and sickness are exceptions to the rule. But they are all around us. I am surrounded by sick people these days, at the hospital, on Facebook, in the stories I hear. I am hyper-aware of death.
In my mind, I determine to accept my fate. Somehow it feels like that will be easier than hoping for an unusual exception to the average. I have stage 4 triple negative breast cancer, the most aggressive breast cancer. When I asked for my prognosis, my oncologist told me, "Three years on average, maybe five. We're not talking about a decade." I've already lived a year and a half since I was told the prognosis.
Maybe this is how it goes. Treading water until something big comes unexpectedly. I've spent the past year and a half just trying to function daily, swimming out from the drowning sensation of chemo. On the good days, I've met with friends, cooked for the family, and traveled. All I want to do these days is hang out with the kids and feed them.
I have a lot to do. I still have not made my children's baby books. Or Jeff’s and my wedding book, although we have the most stunning photos. I want to make a book of my children's artwork from pre-school on so that they have something to remember when they finally throw out the over-stuffed bin of all the art work I painstakingly laminated. I think about buying presents for their future birthdays for when I'm not here. I am writing a blog for the kids so I can communicate with them from the past.
I wish I could take time back and go back to when they were 2 and 4. I would hug them over and over again. Do whatever I could to stretch out the days, instead of lamenting having to hang out and feeling so impatient for my own career. I miss the days when they were infants and I could sit with them in my arms as they nourished themselves.
The good thing is I still can. I sit next to them when they do their homework. Lurk like someone who has nothing better to do. I bring them snacks and cut them fruit. I bring them cups of juice even though I used to restrict their sugar intake. As my nurse told me when she found me crying in the ER when the cancer returned, "You're still here. You're still here."
For most of my life, I have carried my mother’s unhappiness, sloshing in an aged brown vat atop a rolled towel on my head, the way old ladies do in the countryside in Korea. It was always threatening to topple or overflow, contaminating me, no matter how carefully I maneuvered to find the right balance. It cramped my neck, bogged me down, and caused aches and pains in unexpected places.
When I was younger, my mother used to creep down the stairs to my room after my dad had gone to sleep. She would enter without knocking and start talking until I put my book down and scooted over on my bed to make room for her. Under the beam of my gooseneck lamp, she would wedge herself in with her knees tucked under my comforter and enumerate the various ways my father had failed her. She would follow with a litany of complaints of the wrongs she suffered at the hands of his relatives, the visceral anger growing with each recollection. She would pine for a different life, one where she could sip coffee in a cafe like everyone else, where she could travel, where she would matter.
In my head, I have reels of painful moments of her adulthood, like the time she called weeping that my father refused to take her to the doctor after accidentally slamming the car door on her hand, as I, a 19-year-old girl half-way across the continent in a cinder-blocked dorm room, stood clutching the phone. Or the nights she woke up wailing from the pain of crushing migraines, and I raged at my father and brother to take her to the ER, even as they stood mute and unresponsive. Or the days my mother suffered from shingles while taking care of my brother’s young children, and all my father did was remind her that they were running low on kimchi.
Over the years, I became the holder of her complaints and longings, even as I begged her to free me from the role. I did not want to see my dad through her eyes and despise him as a result. “I am the child of both of you,” I said. But she tells me she has no one else to tell, and all our family stories must stay within the family. Besides, who else would listen to her sorrows?
So, when she secretly withdrew $50 and $20s from our family dry cleaning business on days she felt particularly bad, I helped her deposit the money in a bank account. When I worked as a paralegal with an overtime dinner budget, I skipped my own dinners to pick up some Nathan’s hot dog nuggets for her at the LIRR train station, the bag warm on my lap as I rode home. When I started making some money as an attorney, I gifted her with a cashmere coat from Neiman Marcus, a Louis Vuitton purse, and many pieces of jewelry, even though she told me later that the stones were too small for a woman of her age.
Conjuring happiness for my mom has been my preoccupation du jour. During the right season in San Francisco, I used to cab over to Whole Foods during my lunch hour to buy pounds of fresh black mission figs, her favorite fruit. The cashier’s eyes would pop open.
“What are you making? Are you having a party?”
“No, I’m feeding my mother,” I would say.
I would pack them in neat rows in plastic containers purchased ahead of time, one layer with the stems facing up, the next layer fitted like puzzle pieces with stems facing down. I would ship them overnight to New York and pray that they would not over-ripen or bruise before she could bite into them.
Like a safety net underneath a trapeze artist, I have actively sought ways to cushion her from any possible mishaps. When she complained of back pains, I arranged for her to see a chiropractor. When she felt trapped by the inequities of her marriage, I encouraged her to divorce. When she ached from loneliness, I begged her to attend church, with offers to drive her myself or set up a car service. I have invited my Korean-American friends to dinner along with their parents so that my parents could meet some other Korean immigrants and find a sense of community and reprieve from their isolation. I spent much of my teenage years organizing and re-organizing her underwear drawer, cleaning every inch of the house, doing the laundry, and making dinner to alleviate any additional load she may have to carry.
If I ran a travel agency and mapped out all the trips we organized to satisfy her longing to travel, I could have earned a hefty commission. When I first started working, I sent my parents on a group trip to Europe. Later, after I got married, my husband and I took them along on most family vacations, including several trips to Hawaii, to Sedona, Palm Springs, Catalina Islands, Vancouver, and on a Disney Cruise to Alaska. A few years ago, I organized a trip for my mom to meet up with her sisters and their husbands in Honolulu, and most recently, shortly before the pandemic, my family and my parents traveled throughout South Korea and toured Jeju Island on a private minibus with our generous aunts and uncles.
Over the years, I played the role of her advocate, her defender, her protector, and her cruise director. None of my efforts has made a difference. Her incessant complaining never ceased, and happiness seems as elusive as ever. She walks with her shoulders slumped, her eyes downcast, and sighs are never far from her breath. She is ever ready to lash out at my father, like a caged animal. But when I offer to take her out for an afternoon, she refuses, claiming he would be lonely if she left him alone. She insists she has all that she needs, even though she has filled my head with complaints of all that she lacks.
In many respects, our family’s immigration journey has been a failure. After more than four decades in this country, my parents live as outsiders. They have no community. They do not attend church, are not affiliated with any organization, and have not one friend we could invite to their funeral. They spend most of their time in isolation, with no one other than each other. Their days are droll, dictated by my father’s penny-pinching anxiety and my mother’s begrudging passivity. Their time is spent bickering, preparing and cleaning up after three meals a day, and watching shows about other Koreans who never left Korea.
The rest of our family is no model of immigrant success. Among the three children, we have no doctors or astronauts in the family, nary a PhD. None of us are Fulbright scholars or even Ivy League graduates. Not all of us even have good credit scores or own homes. During dinners growing up, we children were held captive to our father’s incessant re-telling of how he escaped a life on the farm by walking miles down the mountain to attend school, eventually graduating from Seoul National University and becoming a regional director of a Korean conglomerate. Against the oppressive backdrop of those stories of resilience, we children now only see failure reflected in my parents’ eyes when we dare to look. And my mother does not hesitate to tell us we are defective children.
“There is something wrong with each of you,” she says.
She looks at my face and sees only the wrinkles. She scrutinizes me for weight gain and then tells me to eat more. She sees my purse and openly wonders why I carry such a cheap accessory. She sees my children and wonders why I don’t dress them better, even though they have been picking out their own clothes for half a decade. There is always room for improvement: more eye cream; less and more food consumption; more conspicuous accessorizing for me and the children.
Apart from these superficial markers of success, however, we have failed in the most basic ways. If I were to draw a string from each member of the family to the other, most of the connections would be broken. My sister estranged me over fifteen years ago, with no explanation, and my brother and I keep up a superficial conversation. My sister and brother never talk, and my parents receive perfunctory calls a few times a year from them and the two grandchildren on the East Coast. The last time we all got together as a family was more than fifteen years ago, and there is no one to take the role of leadership to steer us as a group. We have failed to find a way to get along, to find the language or the courage to bridge our differences, or to build a common framework to give meaning to our experiences.
Like a child dreaming of Santa, I have for most of my life yearned for a better version of our family. I long for a family that vacations together, laughs at each other’s jokes, gathers for holidays. I want us to be one of those families that dines out, chatting easily across the centerpiece. Who knows how to be tender with each other, knows how to listen and show care. Somehow, nurturing these skills with my husband and my own children is not enough. I long to reach back into my family’s past and restore us as we could have been, before immigrant became our defining identity, before we fell out of our community, before we ricocheted in uncharted directions.
I have begged my mother to help us be that kind of a family. I have cried and asked her to somehow help me to restore my estranged relationship with my sister. I have lamented our failure to be a cohesive family, and I have cajoled her to take on some of the responsibility of bringing us together, instead of passively responding only when I initiate. But my pleas have gone unheard, and my mother shoos me away, as if I were a whiny toddler asking for a piece of candy.
“What do you expect me to do?” she says.
So, when I learned last fall that my breast cancer had metastasized all over my body, eating through my bones and creating innumerable lesions on my lungs and liver, and my oncologist told me that my type of cancer has a median prognosis of three years, I emerged from my weekend with puffy red eyes and a vow to live my best life yet. And I wondered how to bring my 78-year-old mother along.
My father and my siblings seemed beyond reach, but I entertained fantasies of creating a normal life for my mom, particularly in a neighborhood with more Koreans where she can talk and be understood. Taking her to church, helping her make a friend or two, and relocating her to an environment where she could move about the world without debilitating dependence on my father. I had ideas of helping her learn how to use an ATM, setting up a garden for her to grow her perilla leaves and Korean peppers, and creating occasions for joy and levity, like slurping jajangmyun together, watching K-dramas as a family, and celebrating the holidays. And given my life expectancy, this felt like my final chance to inject some happiness into our lives.
The week following my diagnosis, my husband and I decided to move back up to the Bay Area to work with an oncologist renowned in triple negative breast cancer research. I asked my parents if they would move with us and help us. And more importantly, were they up to the task of being happy? Would they be willing to leave their unhappiness behind?
My mom lowered her gaze and stared at her fingers. She was quiet for so long that I wondered if she heard me.
Finally, she said, “I can try.”
My dad sat with no reaction, no eye contact.
“Mom, we’re asking you to come with us to help us with the kids. We have to have a happy environment for the kids. Do you think you can do that?”
“I’ll try, but it’s not easy,” she said again.
“What is making you so unhappy? Are you unhappy we stayed in America? Do you wish we had gone back?”
She stayed silent.
“I think we’re doing ok here. I’m glad we stayed. So many terrible things could have happened, but none of them did. We’re all alive, we have food, we have homes, what’s so terrible?”
She seemed to be listening as she kept her gaze low and repeated, “I’ll try my best.”
A few weeks later, while I lay in a hospital in Pasadena after having titanium rods nailed into my femurs, Jeff drove the kids and my parents up to our new rental in Los Altos. After a few days of unpacking, Jeff drove back down to Pasadena to take me to our new house, leaving our children in the care of my parents.
As we passed the Grapevine, my cell phone rang with our 10-year old daughter in tears.
“Halmoni said I can’t call you. She said I have to leave you alone, and I have to be strong! Why can’t I call you?”
Shortly after, our son called us to tell us Halmoni was threatening to go back to San Diego. When I talked to my mother, I was shocked to learn that she was seriously considering returning to San Diego as I lay in the car with my legs propped by pillows to prevent a clot, still hours away from home.
“Children not easy,” she said in English.
When we stopped for our next 30-minute interval to exercise my legs, I burst into tears. Our reliance on them seemed misplaced, foolish.
This incident marked the beginning of a series of events that made me realize that perhaps I was too late, that my hopes for a restored family had been misplaced all along.
For the next six weeks, as we attempted to live with each other in a 2000 square feet house, I could feel the framework of my values grate against my mom’s by the way my teeth started grinding every time she jumped off the couch to prepare my dad’s meals. As she cooked, heated up his soup, laid out his utensils, scooped his rice, and called him over to eat, even as she muttered under her breath, I wondered about this self-imposed prison of hers.
One evening, I watched her screaming at him when he asked to eat something from the pot on the stove.
“Why don’t you eat what I set out for you! Isn’t what you have enough?”
As she ranted and snarled at him, she stomped over to the stove, grabbed a trivet and the pot and stomped back to the table. She set the trivet, then the pot in front of him, turned the handle away from him, opened the lid, and put the spoon in the pot as she continued to seethe, her promise of happiness in front of our children long forgotten.
While my dad spent most of his time napping on the couch under a blanket or sitting on a chair by the sunniest window in the house, my mother cleaned our house endlessly, even as I asked her to stop and to relax. She reported to me regularly about the food stock in the fridge, giving me updates like when she moved the kimchi into a smaller jar, even when I told her she could do what she wanted, and reminding me of all the food yet to be eaten as I lay in bed nauseous after a chemo treatment. When we offered to set up the television with Korean programming, she declined, explaining that she did not need it, even though we often found her hunched over Netflix on her iPad.
The pandemic seemed to conspire against us as the Korean churches in the area were still closed for services. When I encouraged my mom to call them to see when they may open for in-person services, she said, “Why do you want us to go to church so much?”
And yet, in her next breath, my mother complained that there were not enough Koreans in the area.
“I thought you said there were more Koreans here,” she said.
When we took short day trips on the weekends to see the beautiful coastline or the redwoods, my parents often fell asleep in the car. When I found a jajangmyun place in Sunnyvale, my mother complained that we were driving too far just for jajangmyun. When I invited them to go see the local holiday parade, they refused because it was too cold out. When the children’s school held an outdoor carnival, they came by for a few minutes and returned home as soon as the sun set.
During a week when I was feeling better, we drove around Los Altos Hills, where we hoped to buy a house with a large enough lot to build an in-law unit for my parents. When I pointed out the lack of commercial areas within walking distance, I asked her if she could enjoy living there. She nodded compliantly and said she could live anywhere. Yet, weeks later, when I goaded her to share what she hoped for her future, she told us that she and my Dad would probably move back to Flushing where she could walk to stores and shop as they wished. I cried, realizing that once they moved back to New York, I may never see them again given my condition. I wondered if they even considered the possibility and if it mattered. And I felt this age-old sense of rejection that what I had offered was just not good enough.
When I asked her why she did not want to live in Los Altos Hills with us, she said that my husband is a foreigner and she could not be comfortable around him. I was baffled to hear her explanation as she and my father had been the ones who moved us to a foreign country 43 years ago and later decided to stay. I have been married to Jeff for almost 15 years. If Jeff is a foreigner, are my children also foreigners to her? Were we ever a family? Were they always uncomfortable with us, even when we took them to Hawaii or on the Disney Cruise? I reflected back on those trips and the countless meals we have had with them, when they made little effort to make conversation with my husband and the children.
I thought of all the times Jeff drove over to their house to help set up their TV, fix their iPads or laptops, and move their furniture around. He had driven them to the DMV when they needed to take their driving tests because I could not. He had patiently bitten his tongue when I asked my parents to join us vacation after vacation, and he had driven us all from one touristy spot to another, helping them get in and out of the car, tending to their needs. I have felt pangs of guilt whenever he did the bulk of the driving or paid for dinner with my parents while my parents rarely offered. He had treated my parents better than my own siblings had, and yet he was relegated to the status of a “foreigner”.
The final straw, however, came unexpectedly. I talked to my mother about my prognosis, partly to help her better understand my situation in order to prepare her and partly to counter her incessant urges to eat more.
“Mom, this cancer won’t be cured by eating more. Most people die from this cancer. In maybe three years. I may die before you,” I said.
With her eyes downcast, my mom said, “Well, at least you have the hope of a miracle.”
She said it almost in a whisper, as if she were making a confession to a priest who could absorb her lament.
Whenever I had previously tried to explain the seriousness of my condition, my mother had brushed it aside. “Miracles happen,” she said.
But she had never before spoken about it in relative terms, comparing my situation to hers, even though she had no situation that I knew of, other than old age I would now pay a sizable fortune to reach.
At that moment, I felt cursed by this role I was playing as my mother’s keeper. Even as I am dying from cancer, must I be consoling my mother for her old age? For the life she has already lived? Must I be the one to reassure her of the choices she made or could not make, even as I seek solace for my own fate?
It felt like a cage I helped build. Over the years, I had done her bidding. Intervened during her arguments with my dad, taking her side as she watched me say the words she could not speak. Stepped in when she claimed helplessness. Endlessly cajoled my sister when my mom claimed inability to persuade. Harshly criticized my brother on her behalf. Over the years, I had perpetuated this role, me as the doer and she, the helpless. Me, an extension of her, ever ready to fulfill her needs or wants.
And now at a time when I needed a mother, she was nowhere to be found. In a time when I wanted to be comforted, to be on the receiving end of sympathy, she was incapable. I sought inspiration, a defense against the looming despair, but she had none to give.
In truth, I wished for a better life for her so that she could be a better mother for me. A mother who cannot take care of herself, steeped in her own despair, has little reserve for her child. She could never show up for me as I needed her to. Just as she could not speak English or drive me to band practices when I was in middle school, she is absent from my current life with my friends, my husband, and my children. When she comes to my children’s birthday parties, she hides in the shadows, smiling in performance, mute. I remember the loneliness of crying in a cavernous dressing room, as I tried on wedding dresses alone in a fancy shop in the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco.
I, who grew up in a different culture, part of a different generation, cannot understand her constraints. I do not know how it feels to be raised in a servant class, trained to elevate and serve the men in her family. I do not know how it feels to live on the outskirts of a society with no hope of belonging. I do not know how it feels to hang all hope of survival on a man probably beset with autism, devoid of empathy or care.
It is painful to watch someone you love live a suboptimal life, when the solutions seem obvious, the potential within reach. When she cried, my heart felt like someone was plunging into my chest with an oversized hand and squeezing it until I could no longer breathe. When she told me the regrets of her life, I felt like pulling my hair out in clumps and shaking them loose until they fell like dead leaves from a rotting tree. When she complained yet again about the same social slight from forty years ago, I clenched my teeth and held myself still to let the words pass through me without violence.
Over the years, I watched my mother become buried deeper in her isolation, as she refused to grab my extended arm over and over again. I watched the effects of this isolation creep over her, the dependence on television, the awkward off-comments during conversations, the lack of synchronicity with others. I watched her become more and more like my Asperger’s father, the only person regularly in her life, as their world shrank to the size of their bank account and the contents of their fridge. I wondered about learned helplessness and how we forget how to help ourselves when the world does not respond, and I wondered if blaming others rather than making changes is one of its symptoms. And I can see the slow mental decline as she ages. I tried to save my mother, but she did not want to be saved, at least not by me. I was always but a pained perpetual bystander.
Unexpectedly, cancer entered my life and permitted me to do something I could not do alone. It allowed me to center myself. Perhaps because I no longer have the strength or the energy to take care of others as I was able to before. Or perhaps because I am now dependent on others to survive, given my recent surgery, cancer-eaten bones, and crippling fatigue from the chemo. Without voicing my needs, I may become lost, forgotten.
But most notably, my mother is suddenly no longer worse off than I am. I am no longer the one living a better life, with my happy marriage, many friendships, meaningful work, and a future. While I still have my relationships, my career has been halted and my life possibly curtailed, my children to be left behind to fend against life without me. My time now feels more limited than hers as she may well live into her 90s. We are finally on equal footing. I have been relieved of my guilt, and for once, I do not have to apologize for my life.
Cancer forced me to take stock of my life. I need not be my mother’s keeper. I can give myself this time to enjoy the few remaining years of my life outside the shadow of her unhappiness. I can no longer afford to carry the vat of my mother’s unhappiness on my head.
This is not the ending I planned for our story. I envisioned us reaching a stasis, a plateau where we could look back on our lives together with some hard-bitten appreciation. A coming together, instead of this failure. I thought I had the power to infuse her with our happiness, but I am retreating in fear of contamination.
This outcome is a repudiation of all that I have been raised to value. I was raised to be a good daughter, a hyo-nyo. I spent most of my life bending toward my parents’ way of living, speaking Korean with them, following the Confucian hierarchy, and adopting their norms. I was the heir apparent of our traditional Korean family, assuming the role of taking care of my parents as they aged, even though I am not a first-born son. It happened not by any group intent or design, but by implicit understanding that I have always played the part of the responsible child.
In our family, we follow an unspoken rule of who is supposed to take care of whom. I have always played the role of the caregiver. It was delegated to me as the eldest daughter. I recognize a shadow of the sidekick in myself, one raised to be a member of the servant class, in my mother’s image. This unspoken rule was an injustice that I recognized even as a child. I remember screaming as an eight-year-old to my sister and brother that I was not their servant. When I was accepted to Georgetown Law, I asked my mother why I had to be the one to be sacrificed to become a lawyer when my brother and sister were free to live as they wished. At the same time, I found meaning in helping, particularly in times of crisis, just as I did in receiving good grades and earning my parents’ approval.
I have failed my mother, but she has also failed me. She was unable to see the world through the eyes of her child, so eager to help, so yearning to please. As a child raised as an outsider in this country, I desperately wanted to belong somewhere. If I could not fit in as an American, I needed a family where I belonged. I wanted to be right in some context. But no matter where I went, I walked in dissonance, even in my own family. No one aligned with the other in our family of five. I have spent most of my life working to find a way out of this dissonance.
There is no satisfaction in this reprieve. Every deed feels like a betrayal: this new stance; my writing; dining out without them. I am that climbing partner in Touching the Void, who cuts the rope attached to his injured partner to save himself in a storm. All I can do is walk on, thwarted, relieved, disappointed. Yet, I refuse to be shrouded in secrecy and shame. These values have never served our family.
In Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir Wave, she describes how she rushed past her adjacent parents’ hotel room to save her husband and children as the tsunami loomed. She could not afford to save her parents in that moment because she had to save her own family. While my cancer is not a tsunami, I feel the crushing urgency of the situation. I am trapped in an hourglass, and each grain of sand feels precious, like a lump of my own flesh. Like Joy in Inside Out, I now find myself putting all my effort to fill each bubble of experience with meaning, happiness, togetherness. I want to saturate my children with happiness to overwhelm the sadness that will eventually befall us. They need enough of a quota to last them when I am gone.
For me as well, I have to center my own happiness. I cannot afford to continue to play the role of the sidekick. I, who always bought souvenirs for others but never for myself, am now surrounding myself with flowers and plants, trinkets, and new colorful outfits to fill my senses. I call on friends who make the effort, but do not bother with those who seemingly do not. When I shop, I look for snacks not only for my children, but also for me. For the first time in years, I agreed to a birthday party for me.
This outcome means giving up my story of redemption. No happy ending for our immigration story, where all that we lost through our displacement was meant to be replaced by something even better. But I recognize that this has been my story, and perhaps never my parents’. I am finally giving myself permission to disconnect my trajectory from my parents’ decisions: their decision to relocate to a new country; to give up their middle-class life to flip burgers and remove stains from other people’s party dresses; to withdraw into isolation and depression rather than celebrating all that we still have.
As in cell division, we need a balance of push and pull to manage our growth, to resist abnormal development. Like my cancer that has metastasized uncontrollably, we as a family sprouted in irregular directions, overgrown weeds with no pruning or support. Year after year, we lived without extended family or community, largely forgotten by our relatives in Korea and unseen by those around us. Alone in this country, we lived as an orphan family, feral, under-socialized.
Our journey as immigrants is a metastasis, an uncontrollable growth. We have exceeded the boundaries of our origins. The ways of the past no longer apply, even as we lack guidance for our future. We longed not for this outcome, but I lack the power to control it. In this space, we roam freely, without guidance but with latitude to create.
This writing is my call for community. For our generation to find a continuum in each other. Maybe some of you will find yourselves and your families in this telling, and you can relate. Maybe some of you will find it in your hearts to tell me I did the best I could, that I have not forsaken my mother. Maybe others of you will have stories to share. Maybe in your stories, I will find some forgiveness for myself as well as deeper understanding. And maybe in each other’s stories, we can decipher some meaning, discover new values, and forge paths for our futures, however long or short they may be.
[Spoiler Alert]
Years ago, my Korean-American friend Bonnie told me she hates reading stories about Korean-Americans. "They're so depressing. They're always about loss. What are we supposed to do with all that sadness?"
It's almost as if writer/director Lee Issac Chung were eavesdropping on our conversation when he made Minari, as if he came along years later to answer that question for us.
In Minari, Jacob relocates his family from from LA's Korean community to rural Arkansas where he sets out to grow Korean produce on the side while he and his wife Monica work as chicken sexers during the day. It is, as they find out, where other Koreans have landed to escape the Korean church. They are exiled not only from Korea, but from the Korean-American community as well. They are outliers among outliers.
Jacob's move is not only a reverse gold rush, but a repudiation of the idea of luck itself, as he derides the water dowser. It was the pursuit of better fortune that landed the couple as chicken sexers for the past decade. This move to Arkansas is simultaneously more inspired, more cynical, and more defiant. For Jacob, the church and the community of others offer no possibilities. All we have are our own dogged determination and arduous labor - and our ability to reason, Jacob teaches his son.
A pivotal, foreshadowing occurs near the beginning when Jacob, with a smokestack ominously blowing in the background, explains to his son David that all male chicks are killed. The males are useless, he tells him. We have to make ourselves useful.
His is what Erving Goffman calls a spoiled identity. Such identities are deemed less worthy than the identities of others. Jacob (and by extension David) bear not one facet of spoiled identity, but three: immigrant-Asian-male. As emasculated Asian males, they are the most vulnerable. Even though Jacob is married, his wife is on the verge of leaving him. He spends his time looking at butts of baby chicks. His only son is a "pretty boy" with a damaged heart and a broken penis. Jacob's desperate need to prove himself is decoupled from his family's chances of survival. It is not as much a response to America, his community, or his family, but to his internalized view of himself. His current position in the social order is a drastic fall from the privileged status as the eldest Korean son.
His desperation to de-spoil his identity is not understood by his family, where he still presides as the dominant member who disciplines the children, makes financial decisions, and determines their place on earth. The only way to maximize his chance of success is to protect himself from the judging gaze of others. Nothing can happen to us here, he tells his wife. No one is around. Shielded from the outside world, he need only rely on his own effort, without the complicating factors of society. Alone, he has a chance of prevailing, of finding a way to prove himself worthy.
Throughout the film, Lee Issac Chung questions the idea of utility. What does it mean to be useful? Growing up, we were guided by this principle. As green card holders, we in our family were acutely aware of our status as guests in this country, and as visible minorities, we lived at the mercy of the dominant communities who found us useful to keep around - or at least not useless enough to reject. Utility framed our understanding of our present, past, and future. It provided the raison d'etra for our immigration life; not to put our utmost human effort toward our future was to make a mockery of the painful decision to uproot our family. Achieving success would provide the redemption to validate our relocation.
To not be useful was to fail each other when we had only each other to turn to, when the needs were so dire. In our family, we traded in needs; more effort by one meant the other could expend less. When our mother lost pound after pound and suffered from painful hemorrhoids from running our dry cleaning business, I picked up extra chores at home, cleaning, doing the laundry, cooking dinner, and picking up groceries. As teenagers, we helped out at the store on the weekends to try to reduce their workload. I was not the only Korean-American kid who vowed to get a good enough job to pay off my parents' mortgage. Being useful - in the service of each others' needs - became our only language of love.
Chung litters the film with plenty of examples to help us explore this concept of utility. A grandmother who comes to take care of the kids, but spends her time gambling and watching wrestling. A neighbor who spends his weekends dragging a wooden cross for miles. A trailer house that may not be secure enough to provide shelter during a tornado. A dowser who offers the dubious service of finding a water source with a stick. Expensive Korean hanyak that has no curative connection to little David's heart murmur. A living made as an experienced and efficient chicken sexer.
On the other side of the coin of utility is the question of value. What gives us value as human beings? What happens when we do not have the ability to be useful, like little David whose body does not even allow him to run? Or when the outcome does not match the intent, like the grandmother who only seeks to help when she burns the trash? What do we do when our utility depends on the performance of others who may fail us, like the Korean produce buyer who breaks the contract? Does our utility dictate our value?
In college, I sat around with my Korean-American friends in a musty cafe pondering these questions with a cold coffee mug in my hand. Did Korean parents believe in unconditional love? Is there such a thing, or is all love conditional? These questions masked the internal personal questions we did not voice, like did we somehow fail to achieve all that we could have? Were we not useful enough, and therefore, not as lovable? We had been so steeped in the language of utility that once freed of our home environment, we wondered what else existed beyond it. We spoke without betraying any emotions, except for an occasional set of glistening eyes, as if we were speaking solely about philosophical matters that do not bear on our sense of self-worth or well-being.
I never had satisfying answers to these questions until I watched Minari. It felt as if Lee Issac Chung had been sitting next to me in my college conversations, beset with the same questions, the same quandary. As the children grab the grandmother's hand to bring her back home and the couple reach for each other during the fire, I suddenly understood. During our moments of failures, we are forced to be seen. Stripped of our ambition, aspirations, bravado, and our array of defensive masks, we appear in our nakedness. When we fail, our humanity becomes manifest.
Like my friend Bonnie, I too felt trapped in the sorrows of our immigration stories. They felt like dead ends, suffocating emotions, with limited hope for reprieve. But in Chung's story, it is the very suffering that saves the family. When the crops are destroyed and Jacob's human effort laid to waste, they are suddenly exposed in their desperation, freed from the hamster wheel of Jacob's determination. This is where they meet each other.
Growing up, I watched my father after he plunged from his role as a managing director of a Korean conglomerate to a dry cleaner, spot checking stains on other peoples’ three-piece suits and sequined party dresses. He never fully recovered from the sadness of losing his status. It had been his unabashed boast to escape a destitute childhood on a farm in the remote mountains of Sancheong. Having to revert to manual labor after reaching Seoul National University felt like an undoing, a negation of all that he had worked toward. Yet, it was also in this space where we came to understand the depth of his dreams, the expanse of his tenacity, and the human capacity to reach around painful adversity. It is also here that we came to appreciate the fragility of our lives, the uncertainty of the future, and the possibilities that await any of us. Previously, I always assumed we had missed out on a life that should have been, but now I wonder if we lived differently, more intensely, more humanly.
In the movie, minari is planted outside the perimeter of the area the parents consider safe. The older sister cautions little David not to go so far. But holding the grandmother's hand, he ventures further. Here, they find a creek and a snake. And it is here where minari thrive. It is delicious, nutritious, and medicinal, the grandmother promises. It is a resilient plant that grows with minimal effort.
It is as if Chung is quietly comforting us. You will be ok. You can put down your exhaustion. Know your people will multiply. Trust that you too will reap the bounties of this Eden, if you allow yourself to traverse past the boundaries of your fears. The seeds have already been planted.
Ironically, this film about immigrants grants me permission to transcend my own immigrant identity. I can imagine the director saying, You can put down the burdens of your immigration. Do not be defined by it any longer. You no longer need to prove yourself worthy.
I have been waiting all these years to hear these messages.
