SUPER MAMA

That's my super mama with my niece Mirie. After less than 2 weeks of having an open cavity surgery, she is smiling. My mom has always been strong and cheerful despite the ups and downs in her life. Even as she entered the hospital for the procedure, she said, "Today is a good day. They will remove something bad". She manages to turn the bad into good.

I have to admit seeing her struggle for three weeks was difficult. Her robust appetite was suppressed due to the procedure, but eventually, by the time I left she had regained her appetite and was strong enough to make her own meals. Even the doctors and nurses were impressed by her recovery rate only a month after her surgery.

This was my mom after 2.5 weeks of surgery, she jumped out of her bed and proclaimed she will make her favorite zucchini pancakes. Those zucchinis were fresh from my brother's garden, and she couldn't let them go bad. Growing up in Korea, those were our rainy day snacks. She makes them thin and crispy around the edges, so yummy. I asked her to rest more, but she was insistent. She made 8 pancakes. Needless to say, we didn't get to finish eating them.

I spent 2 weeks with my parents, and while helping my mom, I decluttered and redecorated their place. Purging is not fun and super time consuming, but it's therapeutic, and it's interesting to see what we choose to keep. Ever since Marie Kondo's, "Does this spark Joy?" philosophy, I've been making an effort to purge. I was trying to do the same with mom, but whenever I tried to discard anything, she would stop me and exclaim, that's "akkawa!". It means it's precious even if it doesn't spark joy, so don't you dare trash it!

The photos definitely sparked both of our joy. My storytelling mom had many stories for each photo. "I lived very comfortably as a child in Japan. My parents were really well off, and I was very pretty when I was young darn it!" My mom was born in Japan, Hokkaido. She often talked about the immense amount of snow that enveloped her hometown. I experienced this myself when I started visiting Niseko from HK 3 years go. Even with my fertile imagination, I could not have dreamed up the incredible amount of snow that waltzes down incessantly from the sky. It's strange how life circles back. Who would have thought I would be a regular to my mom's home prefecture after immigrating to the US at a young age. Not only do I get the privilege of visiting my mom's home prefecture, but I currently work for a real estate company based in Niseko.

But grandmother wanted a new life for her and her kids in motherland so she packed up and left Japan for Busan, which was her hometown and raised 3 kids as a single mom. They struggled, but made ends meet, and somehow they survived the civil war. My mom became a nurse and met my father through an introduction, sort of an arranged marriage.

After their marriage, my dad left a few years later to work abroad in Saudi Arabi and Vietnam. It wasn't uncommon in Korea at that time to be working abroad to earn a better wage if you could speak English. My dad is a self-made man. He said he burned the midnight oil studying English and memorizing the words from the dictionary. Even though he was born of "yangban" (aristocratic) lineage, Korea was ravaged by the Japanese occupation and the civil war during his prime years. Everyone was just trying to survive. My grandmother had to fight to keep her youngest son who was a newborn while evacuating during the Korean civil war. Everyone told her to leave him to die because he's too weak to survive the long journey. He's still alive and well to this day, and I see him when I visit Korea.

My mother became a single mom in post-war Korea. She recounts how difficult it was. She would have to carry my brother in the Korean style fabric baby Bjorn called "bojagi", and bring me to the market a few times a week. She didn't have any help with the baby and toddler and my sister had to be sent off to my grandma's house because my mom could not manage 3 kids alone. To this day she laments sending my sister away, but she said at that time, she did not have a choice.

The family finally came together in the US. That was the first time we all lived under the same roof. My mom worked knitting sweaters from home, as many other Korean moms did back then. There were a handful of Korean families in a town just across the George Washington bridge called Palisades Park. Now, it's called the Korea town of NJ. The main street consists of shops owned predominantly by Korean owners

After my dad's stint with the Korean construction company ended, we settled down in NJ, and my dad owned his business instead of seeking a job as an electrical engineer. He owned a bike shop that kept us afloat. My mom owned a flower booth at a flea market. Our special dinner outing was to JFK or Charlie Brown's for special occasions. My sister who is older by 8 years got married, and my brother and I attended college, and I went onto graduate school at Columbia University, pursuing my passion for architecture. Through my mom and dad's sweat and tears, we have achieved the American dream. My siblings and I are professionals working jobs that we enjoy, and live a much higher standard of living. My mom is always expressing her gratitude for America. There's no other place as good as this place, she reminds me regularly.