Member-only story
Mother Land
People long for clear narratives, but reality isn’t like that
For people who know my mother, they know she is an amazing trailblazer who established a center for Korean immigrants — and is also a somewhat difficult woman. The two probably go hand in hand, like where the fresh water of a river meets the saline of the sea, impossible to separate out which is which, the currents and proportions are always shifting.
With the end of World War II in 1945, the Korea she was living in was liberated as a colony of Japan. Though Korea was naturally supposed to become “free and independent,” the U.S.partitioned Korea at the 38th parallel and itself occupied theSouth. My mother was fourteen and living in what was nominally North Korea, and a few months later fled to the south. But not of her own choice: she was sent by her mother to accompany a widowed aunt. After trekking across a mountain, in the middle of the night, they dashed across the heavily fortified border, each with a baby on their backs, and somehow managed not to get shot.
A refugee in Seoul, my mother had barely gotten her bearings as a freshman at the prestigious Ewha College when she, like the rest of the city, heard the noise of the guns and tanks descending from the North, and the Korean War began. She would never graduate from Ewha.
