Motherland
For as long as I have known my mother, I have never really known my mother.
First, there was the language barrier. Not the English–Korean language barrier, but a far more complicated one. A red, palpitating, slobbery one we seemed destined for. As a young mother, I imagine she couldn’t understand, not really, what my babbles meant. What a certain pitch of cry tried to tell her. Did I want milk? Or Appa to hold me instead? Did I want my pink blankie, or did I have to shit right then and there?
In the same way, I couldn’t understand why she’d become frustrated if I didn’t latch. Or the tired look in her eyes when she picked me up from my crib. I didn’t understand that frantic lip-biting she always did, tapping my mobile to start its revolution above my soft little head. I never knew, not really, what her sighs ever meant. Only that she seemed prone to them, constantly.
Later, even when I learned the words to tell her that I had, in fact, wanted Appa, or that I was hungry, or had to peepee, we still struggled to communicate or get to know each other very well. For one thing, she worked two grueling jobs that kept her away from home often. She would go constantly, but it never actually felt like she was going anywhere she truly wanted to go. This taught me how something can be both seemingly endless, and a dead end. She sighed all the time because of this and slept at strange hours of the day, keeping us even further apart.
On the rare nights she didn’t have to work, she usually went out. She and Dad would leave my older brother and me home alone, telling us to keep the door locked and call 911 if there was an emergency. I remember the way my entire body seemed to seize while she was gone. I couldn’t breathe until I heard the sound of keys on the other side of the door. I thought, almost always, that she might never come back. That she’d die in a terrible accident or, worse, simply disappear.
I would perform strange rituals and repeat things in my head that would secure her homecoming. Some of my earliest memories are of nothing but this one ritual I had. I’d clench onto this one specific nightgown my mother had and pray for her return. I could so often clutch onto and fall asleep with it because she was so rarely home at night wearing it. Truthfully, that silk brown nightgown covered with white irises was mine. I knew the way it fell, the placement of the petals near the collar and breastbone.
So no, I couldn’t say I knew my mother very well, but not for a lack of trying. I wondered about her all the time.
Where do you go, Mommy?
Why do you keep leaving me?
Will you come back home?
Why do you scream in your sleep?
Why do you sigh all the time?
But I should clarify something. Mine was not an absent mother. Or, God, I don’t know. Maybe she was. She both was and wasn’t. She was present in the sense that she was incredible at mothering. She was there for every knee scrape, broken bone, upset tummy. She cooked the best meals and fed you herself, motioning her mouth at the same time to open — aaaahhhhh. She took us to and from school every day, read us bedtime stories when she could, and despite whatever heaviness she was harboring, found it in her to love me and my brother more than anything else in the world.
At the same time, she was hardly present because her mind — no, her soul — would often be elsewhere. She’d be with us physically but if you’d look into her eyes, she felt so far away.
If I asked her during the times she’d be braiding my hair something as simple as what day it was, she’d become startled and come out of a trance. Huh? was her first answer to everything until she snapped out of wherever she was. She rarely told us what was truly on her mind, and talking was just so difficult. She was a flighty, fearful, and timid woman. She kept her cards clenched close to her chest the same way I clenched her nightgown.
I didn’t know the things that kept her up at night. Why she always went away. I never knew why I’d seen the big black luggage in her bedroom once, and why it was gone the next day as if I’d imagined it. I didn’t know when her birthday was, what her favorite color was, or the things that made her laugh. I did not know, even, her real name. Only that I called her Mom.
Here’s a regret I have: I stopped trying to get to know her early on. Earlier than I care to admit. The day she showed me weakness—the day I recognized it—I gave up. I was in the first grade.
It was a parent-teacher conference, and my teacher had just rattled off about my academic performance and struggling grades, particularly with arithmetic. Mom nodded her head along to all this, which pleased me enough. Until it didn’t.
Something like: “Do you have any questions or concerns regarding your daughter’s academic performance, particularly with arithmetic?”
My mother looked dumbfounded. Slack-jawed and looked to me for saving. She responded with something like: “Sorry… I don’t … er… I no understand…” These were words that were more like sounds, and they fell out of my mother’s tiny mouth because she sensed they had to.
The teacher stared at us from across the table. I knew then that she saw my mother and me as equals. I was in first grade, and thirty-years-old. I became so big, and my mother so small. My whole world felt off axis. I can’t tell you what that realization did to me. The realization that I had known more about something than the person who made me. Consciousness had bursted open in my mind like a crushed berry. Its juices spread everywhere, spread down and out of my entire body. If you had looked at me, I looked like Christ, crying blood. That’s how terribly sacrilegious it all felt to me.
“Jung-Un, what is she saying?” Mom asked me in Korean. “Help me understand.”
She just looked so scared. Afraid she’d say the wrong thing, or appear stupid, or disappoint me. She looked around the room, desperate for salvation. She sighed, fucking again, and just shook her head. I don’t remember how it ended, but it was probably that my teacher had recognized what was going on and was merciful enough to just end the conference early.
I was quiet the entire way back home. So was she, but not because of the conference. But because she just always was. In the back seat, I kept grappling with the anvil of a realization: The person who brought me into this world, feared. She relied on me. She knew little.
She got me something like McDonald’s on the way home for being such a good girl and student. “I got lucky with a smart and good daughter,” she had said to me. I stuffed my mouth with the saddest Happy Meal in the world, and used it as an excuse not to respond. I don’t know if we’ve ever had a genuine conversation again after that day.
Things only got more difficult and we grew even further apart once I realized this new power dynamic. I was the adult in so many things. I had the job of translating nearly everything and understanding the world around her, for her. In exchange, she had the job of keeping me alive and putting a roof over my head and clothes on my back and a childhood she never dreamt of. (I wonder, even now, who fared better in this exchange.)
It was easy for me to manipulate situations, make things out to be worse or better than they actually were. Sometimes I’d translate something to be better than it actually was for her own good, eating the gravity of situations alone. Other times, I’d blow things out of proportion to punish her. It was a terrible thing I did, and something that was just borne into me.
It’s the most ironic thing in the world. My mom came to America with — I cannot even be certain whether or not she came with a dream — but at the very least, a blank slate. Depending on how you look at a blank slate, it could either be everything or nothing she came with. Truthfully, it was closer on the “nothing” side of things. She arrived with some clothing, a few personal effects, and a small fail-safe amount of cash from her mother. It stayed this way until she’d finally have some things of her own in America. She’d make them, earn them, and covet them. The only two things in the world that were hers and of her in the first few years of her arrival, were her children.
Imagine then, her shock and heartbreak when my brother and I became, quicker than she could control or assimilate herself, more American than anything else. It betrayed her Korean body, her Korean blood, her Korean tongue, that we were born here and would be American first. The first breath we’d take in Southern California. The first hands we’d feel, an American stranger’s. We were given American names at birth, a misstep I think even my mother didn’t realize she was making at the time. Alfred. Michelle. The L’s in our names she can hardly pronounce.
It’s all just tragic and ironic, isn’t it? She’d created and given birth to humans that would be hers forever, but could hardly relate to. I don’t know how it came to be, all the missteps we took, that now I can just look at her and have no idea who she is or what she ever means.
I’m surprised at the idea that she should have her own thoughts. That she watches movies that make her laugh, eats foods that make her shit. It is hard to believe we used to be the same cells. That, before I ever knew a lick of English, it was her I drank to grow strong and eventually learn a language beyond her. It’s hard to believe, when we sit around on the phone hardly saying a word to each other, that she gave me my tongue. That she made my mouth and fed me the precise hue of my lips over nine, ten, unbearable months.
When we’re together, I find myself staring and wondering sometimes, just how exactly she moves through the world. How I am outside of her, and taller than her, with wider hips. How I am a body she made and all at the same time, is not hers. How and why she has birthed a human she can barely talk to. How hilarious and unfunny it is that, yes, I graduated from one of the top schools in the country just like she dreamed for me, but in a major in something she will never fully understand: English.
Growing up, I never stopped to think just how much I was isolating her just by being me and living my life. It’s only, of course, when I see how much it’s riddled into the fabric of our lives that I realize now. It’s in the way I must use Google Translate to speak to her sometimes. The brevity and frustration in nearly every conversation. Strange pointing and errs and umms to arrive at point that doesn’t even matter by the time we get to it.
Sometimes I can’t help but laugh at my own inability to understand her — and my even bigger inability to understand myself, and why I’ve done this to my own mother.
Maybe it’s a matter of, If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.
You see, this expression is an exact example of something I might say to her, and that she would not know.
I don’t think I ever really started to understand her, or got to know her a little better, until just a couple of months ago. I am 28 now.
In April 2024, I traveled to Korea with my mom and Chad. I’d gone with her before, back in 2013 when her father passed away, but I was seventeen then and unable to fully understand or appreciate what that trip was.
Days leading up to this recent trip, I wanted to do much better. I wanted to be fully present, and just appreciate every moment. This would be an incredibly special trip where I’d meet my mom’s side of the family as an adult, and where Chad would get to experience this with me as well as a first-time visitor. I wanted to be intentional about my time with my mom, her family, and Chad. I wanted, simply, to get to know her better.
It started at the airport.
I watched closely as she stood in the TSA line and walked through the large metal detector. I wondered, in the moments she stood under the detector, what was truly inside this woman. What she was made of. I had hoped secretly that the alarm might start blaring. That a TSA agent would tackle her to the ground and announce she was a dangerous, explosive woman. I think it would have made me proud of her. To know she had something in her spirit that would make people brace themselves. Nothing happened, of course. Instead, she looked a little bit scared of the whole thing, and I had to come to terms again with the fact that maybe all my mother was made of was fear.
In the airport security scanner, she raised her hands above her head and her shirt lifted slightly, exposing her pale underbelly. I looked away before I could help it, strangely ashamed at the sight of her skin. I felt a sense that it was not something for me to witness, even if I’d lived in it. Was created in it.
Thirty-five thousand feet in the air, I wondered why that was. Why, before the trip had even really started, I wanted to put a wedge between her and I already. I spent thirteen hours suspended in the air with her, where this feeling only grew. I was sat in between Chad on my left and my mom on my right, and noticed I’d only lean my head against his shoulder, watch a movie with him.
Why am I doing this?
I didn’t have an answer.
I felt such a heavy guilt in my chest that I kept on trying to convince myself was just the cabin pressure.
During bouts of sleepiness, I’d take my seatbelt off and lie flat across the row of seats, placing my head on top of Chad’s lap and my feet on top of hers. Every time I would do this, she would place the airline blanket over my legs to ensure they were warm, and then rest her hands over my ankles. I could feel the trepidation in them, and her unwillingness to make any sudden movements so that it might not upset the moment. I sensed, in just how still she was, that she was scared to even touch me because I might revoke the opportunity had I noticed. So many times, I’d want to flip over and switch positions. I wanted to show her that this wasn’t the case. I kept wanting to rest my head in her lap like I used to as a little girl, whenever my tummy ached or whenever she’d clean the wax out of my ears, but I never gained the courage to do so throughout the entire 13 and a half hour flight. Instead, I wondered if this fear we had of each other was mutual. And where it had even sprung from.
When we inched closer to landing, she told me that she had cried tears of overwhelming joy and anxiety when the plane touched the ground last year when she visited Korea by herself. I had no idea how to feel about that, except very sad.
It was my aunt (my mom’s sister) who picked us up. I had no idea what to expect, having not remembered her from my trip more than 10 years ago. When we arrived at my aunt’s home where we’d be staying, she had a small dinner already prepared for us. It felt so much like something my mom would do had her sister visited us, and I could begin to piece together the smallest inkling of the childhood they’d grown up in. While Chad and I slugged behind life, jetlagged and greasy, I noted the way my mom immediately jumped into action in the kitchen. She started helping my aunt slice veggies and called her “unnie,” which I felt I should have left the room for.
I had the sudden compulsion to snap a photo; it might mean something to me to remember the way they stood next to each other.
My aunt (left) and mom (right) preparing a late-night meal upon our arrival.
When I look at this photo, I see them as young girls. They talked amongst themselves, giggling at practically nothing. Things like, where my aunt kept her mugs, the average airline food, the size of her rice cooker. I watched silently all the while as they just felt their way around each other again. I sat as far and as inconsequential as possible, wanting to give them the space to chop lettuce and laugh together.
It was in these initial interactions that I’d noticed though, despite how physically smaller my aunt was compared to my mom, my aunt exhumed a much larger presence. Fuck. I started to worry that maybe my mom just was a smaller personality. That that shy, quiet, timid woman was not just how she was in America, but how she was in the place where she grew up. In such a small amount of time already, I began to sense that I was so much more like my aunt than I was my own mother. My aunt was not a very scared person. She was outgoing, but keen. She was whip-smart, and witty. She cracked jokes and had a hard exterior. She even had a deeper-set voice, like me. I felt I understood my aunt better in a half-hour than I did my mom in 28 years.
I ate fast and went to bed, unsure of anything at all.
In the morning, my mother called me to come downstairs and join the family for breakfast. It was early, and we weren’t fully recovered from our jetlag yet. My mom’s voice was frazzled, jittery, and nervous, which put me on edge almost immediately. I became defensive and hardened, annoyed at how frantic she just always seemed regardless of the time, place, country.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said when we got off the phone. “She’s always freaking out about something. It’s barely 8 AM.”
Chad laughed, knowing how I tend to get very upset by frantic energy.
“Relax,” he said. “She’s just excited. Think about how excited she must be before you get angry with her, and then angry with yourself for being so cold.”
He was right. I didn’t know why her excited energy upset me so much. Apart from not being much of a morning person, I resolved it was likely because I just wasn’t used to seeing this side of her. For years, I’d seen my mother live with such plateau’ed emotions, and instead of embracing this newfound joy of hers, I felt isolated and intimidated by a version of her I so rarely saw growing up. Nonetheless, I took a deep breath in efforts to lower my blood pressure, and joined the family for breakfast.
We went downstairs. It was then that my mom greeted us at the door in her pajamas.
What the fuck? I thought.
It felt like someone had smacked me in the chest with a metal serving tray. It was the fact that she was so plainly dressed in un-matching pajamas with her hair down that I came to realize, after all this time just living my life, going to work, filling the gas in my car, buying groceries, paying the water bill, cooking chicken, that my mother and I no longer lived together. We hadn’t in years actually. I hadn’t seen my mom in the morning in more than a decade. I could have fallen to the ground and cried in the foyer. Instead, we all had a cup of coffee and a slice of bread with cheese and corn baked into it.
With my aunt, the three of us — Chad, Mom, and me — went to visit my grandmother. My grandmother has recently fallen ill to dementia and lives in an assisted living facility. I don’t know much about my mom’s relationship with her mother. In fact, I don’t know anything about it at all. But there had to be something to say about the fact that my mom was the only one in her entire family who lives in America. Right?
I tried my best to control my uneasiness. Beside the fact that old, sick people kind of freak me out, I understood the gravity of the moment and wanted the focus to be solely on my mom and grandma’s reunion. I stood near the back wall, cowering, even, behind Chad. They wheeled my grandmother in and all I could do was hold my breath and hope I wouldn’t learn anything I didn’t necessarily want to know. Would my grandmother let something slip she wasn’t supposed to? Would I bear witness to a tearful, fraught, dramatic interaction I wasn’t equipped to handle?
Here she came…
She did not remember me, or my mom. But they talked on and on about nothing at all. My grandma would forget things we’d just said to her. My mom would repeat herself over and over, so patiently and other times with a sad frustration. They said things that constantly seemed to miss each other. There was hardly any understanding to be had in the room. Watching them communicate like this, it resembled so much the way me and own mother communicate.
What? Huh? Say that again? I don’t know…
If it wasn’t for the fact that my grandma kept crying and holding onto our hands so tightly, you wouldn’t have ever known we belonged to each other. It was in this gesture, this unconditional holding of our hands even though she had no idea who we were, that I understood, so clearly, the love a mother has for her daughter. It is beyond all memory, or sense, or cognition. It is in the simple way wrinkled hands fold over yours and the way eyes will shed tears without your consent. And even though you don’t know who this person in front of you is, you know who this person in front of you is.
I think I learned how to talk to my mother better without so many words in the time we all held just each other’s hands and wiped the tears from my grandma’s eyes.
My mom (left) and aunt (right) with their mom (bottom).
At some point in all this, my grandma asked (for the tenth time) who my mother was. My aunt told her (for the tenth time), “This is your daughter.” She repeated this while pointing and making the motion of a pregnant belly. Finally, my grandma understood.
“If she’s my daughter, why doesn’t she live here?” she asked. “Why has she come from America?”
My mom fell silent, and I wanted to run out of the building. Truthfully, I have never known the answer myself. I’ve never asked, or been told, or we just never talked about my mom’s choice (or lack thereof) to come to America. Before I could make an excuse to leave, my aunt interjected and said (with a little less patience for it all since she’s around my grandmother much more), “Because you sent her away, duh!”
I laughed it off with them, but I could have fallen right through the floor. Out of what? Shame? Sorrow? Wanting to give them privacy? I wasn’t sure…
Sent her away. Sent her away. Sent her away.
The words floated around me like crows. I tried looking at my aunt to gauge the truth of this statement. She was smiling and so effortlessly suave, and I couldn’t tell if she said this in jest just to say something since my grandmother wouldn’t remember anyway. I wondered, Maybe she’s just making that up? Maybe she’s joking? I could not tell from looking at her eyes.
I don’t know if this is actually true, if my mother was really sent away to America, but I held onto the statement either way. Secretly, I had hoped it meant there was something rebellious and bold about my mom that could get her sent away. Or something fiercely independent and freedom-seeking that she would leave everything behind.
I never asked for clarification. I don’t think I could stand to know the truth if I’m being honest.
I kept learning more and more about my mother as time went on throughout the trip. Some things, I could have guessed about her, like the fact that she was afraid to try new foods, or the fact that she would scream when a garden bug landed on her. Other things, I never would have been able to guess or even dare to ask.
For instance, I’d overheard in a conversation with my aunt that she had wanted to be an actress as a child. (My mom is chronically shy, an actress would be the furthest thing I’d assume she’d ever want to be.) I learned she played guitar for a moment, but that she admitted she was never any good at it and thus gave it up. I presumed, but then learned, that my mother had grown up very poor, sharing a tiny bedroom with her sister all her life until she moved (was sent?) away. I learned that her first date with my dad was at the Korean Independence Museum, where relics of violence and colonialism and eventual liberation felt par for the course for their marriage.
In a conversation she had underneath her breath with my aunt in the front seat of the car, I learned she never wanted to get married again, but that she only wanted a companion. Someone to share experiences with. When my aunt asked about what kind of experiences, my mother simply said, “Just someone to go and eat dinner with. Things like that.”
She did not know, unless she turned around and looked into my eyes, how badly that statement made me want to jump out of the moving car and quite literally die.
Every opportunity I had, I would watch the way my mother would stare out the window of the car. How she felt both at home, and like a tourist in her own country. She didn’t recognize any of the buildings, and had forgotten all the names of the streets.
“How do you not recognize where we are?” I said when I asked her to tell me about where she grew up.
“It all looks so different. I’ve lived in the states longer than I ever lived here,” she told me. We both did the math, and what it all equaled up to was the simple fact that my mother didn’t feel like she belonged anywhere. All I’d wanted in that moment was to let her know that she belonged to me. Instead, I said nothing at all, ashamed at how unable I was to say the important things.
At random times, I snuck pictures of her, just being. It was the strangest thing to me to see her outside of work clothes. Walk around a museum. Buy food from a vendor. In these moments, I was able to see her just as a woman, person, human. It wasn’t that I didn’t see her this way before, but that… I just didn’t know I could bear witness to it.
A photo I took of my mom walking around the entrance of the Korean Independence Museum.
This picture stuns me. It’s nothing more than the backside of my mother walking down a paved path, looking at a nearby building and wondering, “What’s that?”
But when I look at it, I can’t help but recognize myself in it. She looks so much like a young teenage girl. She looks, at a glance, just like me. In these silent moments, and when I look back at this photo, I give myself the grace to understand and accept that perhaps we are not the heart-on-your-sleeve, bear-all truth, openly communicative and expressive BFF mother-daughter duo. That maybe, even though we know very little of each other, we know everything about each other. We are each other.
How could it have ever been that I felt I had no idea who she was?
I think back to that day at the student-teacher conference. All the years I spent observing her fall short of the English language and American ways. I was so sure of her ignorance. Of her fear and inability to do anything. Of her desire to flee and hide.
I was so wrong.
Perhaps the most important thing I learned about her on this trip was the inarguable fact that my mother did the hardest thing in the world. She braved a life in a country she didn’t know with a man she knew even less. She brought up children who hardly talked to her, and worked tiring jobs and had no family here. Whether she was sent away, or not sent away, nothing can persuade me from knowing, she is the bravest, most courageous, fearless woman.
My mother also remains, despite not having to be, despite how harsh this life and world has been to her, the kindest woman I’ve ever met. That is not something I say as her daughter. It is something I’ve heard my friends say about her. Something I’ve heard people who’ve met her only once say about her. She is world-defyingly kind.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that I came from her. That I am of her. Her warmth, her sweetness, her kindness, they’re all things I could never come close to having had I lived her life. Ironically, I have lived an even better life than she could have imagined, and I’m still not the kind of person she is. She is better than me, smarter than me, more loving than me. I’m so very proud of her.
If I asked her what makes her this way—how and why is she so kind—I think I know what she would say.
There is a feeling so piercing in me, that she would simply say, “Because of my children.”
Despite not wanting children myself, I can’t help but imagine the conversations I might have with my would-be daughter. I would want, more than anything, for her to know where and who she came from. That she got her nose from her father. That she got her eyes from me. And I would look into her, mine, my mother’s eyes, and tell her, You got your fearlessness from Grandma. She made you extraordinary.
When I think of the way I used to (and admittedly, sometimes still) feel so inconvenienced by her presence, I feel sick and ashamed of myself. How I could ever consider her an intrusion when I lived in and ripped through her body is a feeling so shameful, I can barely stand myself. This is something I’m still working on.
The truth is, maybe I have never truly forgiven her for showing me her sadness. For the times I had to navigate her life. For all the times she’s fled, or wanted to. For that parent-teacher conference.
As I’ve gotten older, and upon my return from our trip, I realized I had not ever stopped to think that maybe she resents the fact that she doesn’t know me very well either. Or all the trillion and one things she had to do for me. Or that parent-teacher conference.
I don’t know. There are many things I don’t know.
What I do know is that we love each other beyond words, and are working towards bettering our relationship. And that’s enough for me.
What does it mean to know your mother? Is it knowing all the things that make her laugh, tick, cry? Knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt her favorite color, what she wanted to be when she was a child, her dreams of the future? Is it being able to talk to her freely?
Or is the knowing in the things you do not know, and hold sacred either way? Maybe it’s just appreciating her presence, the fact that she might not be able to tell you everything, but loves you no matter what?
Hmm.
I grew up resenting our communication barrier. It always felt like a third person in the room with us. Of course, it still saddens me that we can’t have a conversation that lasts hours, leaving nothing up for translation. But I know that we still have something special. We have the ability to call and say nothing at all. We know how grateful we are to each other. That we are still here. That, even if we might not have much to say, we will always answer the phone. This is something, without a single doubt, I know whole-heartedly.
