On behalf of Yeji Jung
I didn’t grow up with my grandparents—I was born in Seoul, but my family moved from Korea to the U.S. before I was two years old, so I grew up away from much of my extended family. About a year and a half ago, I started learning in small snatches parts of my family history from talking to my parents (the first prompt was an assignment for my first Asian American studies course in which I interviewed my parents about why they’d moved to the U.S.).
At one point I realized that despite not growing up with them, I was still incredibly fortunate to have all four of my grandparents (by blood) still alive. I still had time, and the chance to get to know them better. So, I decided to do a thesis, applied for funding, and over the summer went to Virginia and then Seoul to visit my two pairs of grandparents.
Those trips, each a week and a half to two weeks long, were loaded and complex and charged in many ways. I’m all the more grateful I got to go on them because of it. But here, I’ll focus on one aspect of the trips: my paternal grandmother.
Early on in my trip to Seoul, I sat her down in front of a camera and audio recorder and asked her to tell me her life story. After that, as I spent time with her throughout the trip, we found different moments to keep talking and opening up. What I think I learned about her, although I am still working through it all, was that she feels like she had very little agency in her life, and for good reason, almost all of which was related to her gender. She grew up in a really rural part of Korea, but instead of going to school like her brothers did, she raised her younger siblings. She married a young man from her village, my grandfather, and suffered pretty deeply because of him. She ended up alone in the city of Seoul trying to raise two children at a time when single motherhood in Korea was incredibly stigmatized.
As someone who was blessed with a pretty idyllic and stable childhood, I didn’t realize that I had this proximity to deeply gendered inequity. My grandmother has a brother who went to medical school, became a doctor, and is now living a plush life, so it wasn’t that her family didn’t have access to such resources, but that she was denied access because of her gender.
So as I learned these things about my grandmother’s life, and recognized that there was really nothing I could do about what had already happened in her life, I started and am still trying to work through what I do with it all. I am working through questions of her agency, freedom, satisfaction, happiness. I am thinking about how she situates herself in the domestic realm she is confined to—in part because of her poor health, which was the result of decades of difficult labor that took its toll on her body.
One thing I think about is her garden, on the roof of her building. She showed it to me the first day I got to Korea. Across the small rooftop were pots and pots of different plants, from lettuce and squash and green onions to perilla and jujubes. She obviously took great pride in her cultivation, and named each plant to me, making sure I got a good look at each one with the videocamera I was holding. She finds a lot of beauty in these plants, and joy in tending to them. I don’t think it “balances out” the hardships she’s gone through and continues to go through, but I think I’m looking for a different framework I can use to situate her resilience, her discontent, her joy, and relate these things to myself and my position that is so starkly different from hers.
