Past Is Prologue

Disowning My (Korean) Mother’s Unhappiness

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 café 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 halfway…