The haunting of my family
I know now that a ghost haunted my family’s dinner table.
Growing up, my mom prepared sumptuous Korean meals
and in response, my siblings and I told her daily that the
meal was masisseoyo (맛있어요). But otherwise, silence
ruled our meals as if an invisible dinner guest bound our tongues.
Or perhaps instead the silence provided for a vacuum that the
ghost filled. Perhaps it was a bit of both. As a result, I have only
bits and scraps of the life stories of my parents and family. This
silence is apparently not uncommon in many immigrant Korean
families as Grace Cho writes in Haunting the Korean Diaspora:
The second [Korean] generation, however,
having grown up in the United States with neither their
parents’ storytelling nor a public discourse about the
Korean War, told a collective oral history in which they
felt affected by some inarticulate presence that had left
its imprint on what seemed to be their normal everyday
lives. One man said that because of his parents’
refusal to talk about their life experiences, their past
acted on his present. “For me,” he said, “it is not the
past. It carries forward into my life. It carries forward
into my sisters’ lives... as a hole.” This experience of
the children of Korean War survivors—having been
haunted by silences that take the form of an “unhappy
wind,” “a hole,” or some other intangible or invisible
force – reflects the notion that an unresolved trauma in
unconsciously passed from one generation to the next.
But now, I am beginning to understand this ghost as a sort of
han (한), a Korean word that is most commonly understood
as collective transgenerational emotion and experience of
unresolved trauma and oppression.
[For more on this story by Do Jun Lee, go to http://www.yesmagazine.org/pea...ted-streets-20180518]
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