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Volume IV, No. 1/November 2001
In the Rice Fields and Kimchi Jars
By Lisa Kim
I have always heard these stories in fragments; small snippets would make their way to the dining room table at holidays, or into lectures on the lessons of life. However, the stories would only vaguely stick; I had trouble listening, but I also had trouble remembering. The context of my parents’ lives was always so foreign to me. Theirs is a story of mystery as parts of the past are forgotten, lost in memory and difficult to retrieve in order to answer the questions of the present – like those of a daughter seeking to understand her parents better in order to understand her identity better. Traveling to Korea helped me understand where they came from. Learning more about Korea’s history and how my parents were shaped by this history is a process I am only just beginning.
May 31, 1928, in Kangjin and December 20, 1933, in Haenam were the dates and places my father and mother were born respectively; both towns are in the southern tip of South Korea. Growing up, they learned Japanese and studied the history of Japan, which still occupied the country as it would until the end of World War II. Neither of my parents was really aware that Korea was forcibly occupied. It was not until my father had just started college that he had his first Korean textbook and Korean teacher. It was not until he was moving abroad to America in 1960 that he learned any of Korea’s history in order to pass an exam to leave the country.
During the war, to protect themselves, both of my parents learned communist songs and learned how to draw the North Korean flag. A communist member of my mother’s family taught her. A teaching colleague, who taught art and was hired to make drawings of the North Korean flag in exchange for rice during the war, instructed my father. My mother’s relative was shot in front of his wife after the war ended. The sprawling yellow-green rice fields that rippled in the breeze when I was there were the same fields where people hid. My father hid in fields like these. He hid from both communist forces and democratic forces. He grew to fear both; he did not know who to trust. It was not so easy to tell and drawing North Korean flags did not make his identity clear either. Korean history is complicated, and being Korean was not so straightforward.
In 1950, when the Korean War started, my mother was in the ninth grade. She tells the story of how a terrible storm saved her father’s life. He was a target for North Korean invaders because he was a prominent figure in their village as a representative and businessman. He was caught, dragged away and beaten. He was next in line to be shot when a terrible storm arrived with rain, lightning and thunder so severe it forced the soldiers and my grandfather indoors for the night. After that night, they let him go. He returned home, much to the surprise and relief of my mother and her family.
My father was a young teacher when he almost committed suicide. It was right after he was summoned by the North Korean police. He and a fellow teacher were caught celebrating the U.N. forces’ arrival in their town, Youngkwang. However, because the troops were only in the town for the night, passing through to another area to fight, the neighbors reported them after the troops left. My father was interrogated and threatened but was released with only a strong warning. He was terrified of being summoned again to be beaten and killed, so he planned to go to the pharmacy and get drugs to overdose. But he was afraid that if he actually tried to purchase the drugs, the pharmacist might suspect him of planning to kill someone else and report him to the communist police. So he waited, instead.
In Korea, giant, black pottery jars are used for making kimchi and storing rice. Until I saw them for myself on my first trip to Korea a few years ago, like most things my parents would try to describe, these pots were hard for me to imagine. At the beginning of the war, my mother’s father sometimes hid from North Korean invaders in these giant jars. He had to move around, sometimes climbing into a jar at home, sometimes into a neighbor’s jar in the village. My mother’s family had to be very careful of the communist neighbors who would have revealed which lid to open.
My parents’ stories are not the most gruesome war stories; they were fortunate for that. Korea’s troubled history – dominated for centuries by China, several decades by Japan, and the years of internal conflict that followed – has a part in shaping who they are. They have been in America for nearly forty years now, over half their lives. There are many "American" aspects about them, but they will always be Korean. Experiences they have stored away in their lives emerge in storytelling – sometimes when I ask and sometimes when they need to tell. Like the story of the black jars, objects can be transformed by their contexts. Giant, black pottery jars store rice and make kimchi in everyday life but hide fathers during war and, in a process of translating stories across the ocean to where we are now, they have become the vessels that hold those stories. I lift their lids and listen.
Lisa Kim works in external relations at WGBH, Boston.
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