Rebuilding an Identity with Grief and Scraps

A few years ago, my mom mentioned that she wished we could be together for Chuseok, an important Korean celebration in the fall. It was September, and the kids had just started a new school year. I asked her to tell me about it, and she said it was a holiday where families took time off work to be together. They ate rice cakes, and children bowed to their elders and dressed in traditional hanbok to celebrate the fall harvest.

I peppered her with more questions, and soon I could tell she was overwhelmed and flustered by the amount of information I was asking for. I knew she wished I just understood, like a Korean daughter should, and yet I had no past experience to look back on.

It’s strange to rely on Google and DNA apps to understand who I am and who my ancestors are. When my mom doesn’t know how to describe something, I ask the Internet. It’s how I learned what I was supposed to do for my mom’s hwangap — her 60th birthday celebration. It’s how I found out that most of the Korean words I know are lullabies, phrases about passing gas, or ways to cuss someone out. It’s how I found maps to show my kids where their halmoni is from and how I found more Korean books and resources to learn things I feel I should already know.

And eventually, it’s how I learned to start celebrating Chuseok and what this holiday likely meant to my family in generations past.

Last year I drove to the nearest Korean grocery store on a cold October day. I was the only one in the store, aside from the store clerk. I went up and down the aisles, studying each of the products. I found songpyeon and other rice cakes and stared at the packaging, wondering how I was supposed to defrost the one that felt hard as rocks, and I spent five minutes trying to decide which kind of gochugaru I needed for making kimchi.

At the checkout, I placed the big bag of gochugaru, the containers of gochujang and doenjang, rice cakes, frozen pajeon, Kongnamul, shrimp crackers, and my favorite Nongshim honey crackers on the counter but the clerk still spoke to me in English. He looked at the songpyeon and explained that it needed to be steamed from frozen, while the others could be set out to thaw. I decided to say thank you in English even though I knew how to in Korean.

I called my mom on the way home to tell her what I’d found, while chomping through an entire pack of injeolmi, the way I used to as a kid. We talked about how we would plan a belated celebration and mark the holiday together, like Korean families do, when our calendars and school schedules would allow.

I felt a surge of anger that we still had days on our calendar like Columbus Day to honor a man who didn’t actually discover anything that wasn’t already discovered, while some Americans like us find it nearly impossible to carry on the traditions and celebrations of our heritage.

My mom mentioned that she wanted to set up the table in a certain way, like she’d seen in one of the K-dramas she liked to watch. It hit me that she didn’t celebrate Chuseok when she was growing up because she couldn’t. Because of the war, her family didn’t have enough money for a feast of traditional foods, and there was barely any family left to reconnect and reunite.

My mom was born in the aftermath of a 35-year Japanese colonization, with remnants of that oppression everywhere. And though the occupation officially ended before she was born, the ripple effects could still be felt.

She was 5 years old when the Korean War began and 8 years old when it ended. For almost the first decade of her life, both her home and her family were in a constant cycle of disaster, restoration, survival, and trauma.

Her earliest memories were made in the shadow of war: leaving on foot for a safer city in the south that took days to get to, bringing food to her dad in a dirt bunker, seeing dead bodies on the streets, and not having enough food to eat. So while she knew about the holidays, she had very few memories of celebrating any of them.

Only now, as a halmoni herself living in Arkansas, nine hours away from her daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, was she trying to piece it all back together with the help of K-dramas and Korean social media outlets.

After hanging up, I cried the rest of the way home, realizing my mom was rebuilding her own Koreanness, piecing the lost things back together bit by bit. These celebrations had been stripped from her during post-war times, and in her lonely immigration, the U.S. took whatever shadow remained of these traditions even further away. If she wanted to mark these celebrations, she didn’t always have the language or the grocery stores to find what she needed, let alone the energy after eking out a living in a world where she didn’t fully belong. For the first time, I realized she felt like all she had to pass on to my sister and me was scraps.

But those scraps — the same ones I often questioned or was embarrassed by — the ones that seemed easily tossed aside, are everything now.

Tasha’s book Tell Me the Dream Again comes out on May 9, 2023. You can keep up with her through her website, or follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

Adapted from Tell Me the Dream Again: Reflections on Family, Ethnicity, and the Sacred Work of Belonging by Tasha Jun. Copyright © 2023. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries.  All rights reserved.