thoughts on kohyang 고향 (june, 2008)

i went to visit my halaboji & halmoni (grandpa & grandma)'s kohyang (hometown) with my parents and brothers this past week.
the trip was truly amazing for 2 significant meanings. one is to spend time with my family. all together for the first time in so many years since my brothers and I moved out long time ago and 2 of my brothers are now salarymen in Japan and hardly get any holidays. the last time I remember we managed to meet all together was at my cousin’s wedding last year, but for about 5 hours since my brothers had to go back to work right after the reception.
so, I was really excited about spending time with my parents and brothers for 3 days! It seemed almost impossible when my parents and I began planning the trip, but my salarymen brothers fortunately got days off from work and joined us in this amazing trip from Tokyo and Osaka.

the other was to visit my grandparents’ hometown.
since my grandpa had passed away before I was born (and even before my parents got married), my memory with 1st generation Zainichi Koreans is always associated with my grandma. I lived with her for about 15 years, but I was too young to understand why she was who she was. instead, my internalized racism against my own people made me see her as an old-fashioned uneducated Korean woman who I wished should have no connections with me.

it was not until I went to college and joined the Korean student organization when I learned about the history of Zainichi Koreans.
I learned how Koreans (were forced to) move to Japan during the colonial period and some of them ended up staying in Japan for one reason or another.

as for my grandma, right after the Korean peninsula was liberated from the Japanese rule, she started to devote herself in working for Chongryun (organization supported by DPRK), believing that the reunification will come any time soon. meanwhile, she also worked day and night to raise 6 children plus 1 niece who had lost her parents during the war.

although she never really talked about the hardship she had to go through verbally (partly because we did not have an universal language to communicate), I could still tell that she went through the tremendous difficulties by seeing her hands and her bent back.

since she was an active member of Chongryun and her first son was also working for the organization, she never had a chance to go back to her hometown, which was in a divided South. her parents (my great grandparents) also came to Japan during the colonial rule and lived in Kyoto (which I just found out about a week ago from my mom). Plus her brothers died in the Korean War. There seemed to be almost no reasons for her to go back to Korea. but I believed she wanted to go visit where she came from at least once before she died. who wouldn’t??? so, I decided. To bring her soul back. Back to where she was supposed to be. home coming after 50+ years. march 2004, 2 months after her death.
I wanted to send off her soul peacefully, so I didn’t tell anyone in my family and relatives that I was going. However, due to my limited knowledge of Korean and time there, I only managed to go to her hometown, but couldn’t identify the exact place she was from.

4 years later, I am in Seoul studying Korean. for 3 years in the states, where I found the pleasure in reading, writing, and thinking in English. I felt liberated in expressing myself in English, which de-colonized me from the way of thinking that the Japanese language had pressed on me.

my primary purpose of coming to Korea was to understand my halmoni deeper and thus feel closer to her through learning the language and culture that cultivated her. despite my expectation, the longer I lived in Seoul and the more I learned the kind of Korean taught in language schools, the farther I felt from my halmoni because she had probably never been to Seoul and she never spoke the Seoul dialect. My plan seemed to fail. I even regretted coming to Seoul. I thought I wasted the past 6 months.

Here comes the week of the family reunification and the visit to halaboji & halmoni’s kohyang. wow…what wonderful 3 days! my shitty level 3 Korean helped me communicate with relatives without having to ask for my parents’ help, which totally blew off my regret!
most importantly I was so happy that I was finally able to complete the unfinished business from 2004. it felt like that my halmoni actually brought me there, so I could feel free now. I could almost hear her saying “kweng cha na (it’s alright).”