Sitting by the Trail

An Excerpt from Rituals of Separation: A South Korean Memoir of Identity and Belonging

by Elizabeth Rice

My childhood house is gone. It was bulldozed and replaced with a nondescript apartment building. Two of our other Seoul homes will fall to the wrecking ball this year. This is the way of life when you come from a city that changes so fast people say it has “liquid architecture.” Sometimes it feels like I had a liquid childhood. So how did it feel so steadfast and rooted, so unwavering?

I feel a lump settle in my throat as I read Myongju’s email. I picture the warm floor of my parents’ bedroom. I remember the comfort of slipping under Mom’s thick ibul blanket after school, the way the fabric of the rainbow-colored silk of the yo mattress moved easily against the rice-paper covered surface. I see the long view of western Seoul from our yard above the valley road and the tangle of one-story homes and businesses that stretched out for miles into the horizon. As if it was just yesterday, I see the single persimmon tree outside the living room window and the two tall gingkos that stood like sentinels guarding our Nissan station wagon. And now it’s all gone.

What did they do with the gingko trees when they took down our house? Is the persimmon tree that gave us such soft, orange fruit year after year now in a heap of concrete and dust somewhere outside the city? Is the thick rice paper of our floors crumpled there, too? And where is Ajumoni today?

But there is too much loss in this image. Too much heartbreak. I don’t want to dwell on what is gone. But sometimes it seems to be all I can do. Maybe I carry some measure of han, the collective ache and unresolved resentment Koreans are said to carry from enduring centuries of hardship. Or maybe I’m just longing to go home, to talk to Ajumoni, to pluck a persimmon from our tree.

Myong-ju’s mother was in her thirties when she came to work for us. Recently widowed, she desperately needed employment so she could keep her three young children. One day Ajumoni told me the story of her husband’s death. She used her shirtsleeves to wipe away falling tears, as if in wiping them away she could reverse his death. Maum is the Korean word for heart. But the word, like so much about Korea, is untranslatable into English. Maum is the deepest place of the soul, part mind, part spirit center.

“Maumi apayo.” Ajumoni said as she patted her hand to her chest. My heart hurts.

She didn’t hide her sorrow from me in the same way she didn’t suppress her infectious laughter when it came. By the age of six, when she came into my life, I had lived five of my six years in South Korea. I was accustomed to Ajumoni’s open lament and easy amusement. I was familiar with her way of expressing pain and loss and I knew it was different from the way my grandparents expressed theirs. They kept their sorrows private. Their conflicts were hidden behind closed doors. I held and balanced each way inside of me. I was a little American girl with a Korean heart, at home in a country of open tears.

I never imagined that years would pass when I wouldn’t see Ajumoni. I never imagined a day would come I wouldn’t walk the hillsides of Yonhi-dong or pass the centuries old city gates that defined the limits of my universe. For sixteen years the air of Korea filled my lungs and the ways of that land settled into my heart.

When my family left Korea, I carried my love for Ajumoni with me. I carried the morning mist that materialized in the pine forests of Saddleback Mountain, and the chatter of the blue and white kkachi, the magpie who called to me each morning from the tree outside my bedroom window. I carried the expat community who helped raise me, aunts, uncles, and cousins by circumstance, so-called “foreigners” who called Korea home. I carried my international school friends, the only people in the world who shared my particular identity. I carried the story of my parents, humble people of humor and great life spirit who not only chose to leave behind lives of privilege, but ended up walking arm in arm with Koreans fighting for human rights and democracy. People who answered a calling to be missionaries and then challenged the idea of what being a missionary was all about. I carried the story of eight men hung for no reason and the tragedy of one country split in two.

In my twenties, I began to dream about Korea. I walked through open markets of knockoff Nikes, nylon backpacks, and stacks of dried fish. Men pulled carts of nappa cabbages and thick taffy along city roads. Middle-aged ladies in starched yellow uniforms peddled yogurt carts through my old neighborhood like carry-on luggage. The night was beginning to feel more real than the day. I was five again, skipping past mounds of spent yontan charcoal briquettes. Our house appeared around the corner as if my family never left Korea. Mom was there, and Ajumoni too, laughing as she added sesame oil to a simmering stew. I was carrying my longing for Korea like a chigae, a frame of heavy stones. Instead of sticks of firewood, I carried a childhood. Each stone was a memory I couldn’t put down. Maumi apayo.

I began to count up the number of years I had lived in the U.S. and measure them against the number of years I had lived in Korea. I felt reassured when I calculated the greater balance was spent in Korea. But the balance was shifting. Could I keep or lose the Korean part of me through simple mathematics? Could the most fundamental part of me slip away over time? Was all of me still there if a part of me was hidden behind light hair, green-blue eyes, and native English ability?

I knew identity wasn’t like this. I knew that deep inside of me was a person, anchored and fixed, formed by family, genetics, learned rituals, and environment. I also knew that when people looked at me they saw the obvious, because this is what we all do. We categorize others by their appearance to make sense of the world. We categorize others to make sense of ourselves. “Where are you from?” people ask again and again.

I’m a miguksaram in Korea. An American. In Costa Rica, I learned to say “soy gringa.” When I lived in Zambia I was a muzungu, the general term used for white person, which literally means, maybe too fittingly in my case, “someone who roams around aimlessly.” But I carry a person inside of me. My outside doesn’t tell my full story of belonging. My face and passport only tell a part of my internal truth. They misrepresent the story.

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