For context: Jim was my mother’s second husband, not my father.
I have always wanted to write about the intergenerational trauma because my long history with therapy has taught me that it didn’t start with me. At the same time, I can’t fully put all the weight on my mother because it didn’t start with her either. But, and here is a big BUT … we all make choices on how to handle our trauma. I’ll just leave that there.
To honor my ancestors and have a better understanding of how it began for my mother and me, I have to share pieces of my mother’s history. There is no other way to do it.
The woman who birthed me agreed to share her story after some of my urgent pleadings of if you don’t share your history, it will die with you. Somewhere in all of this, I also hoped to learn more about who she was before the trauma sucked her in. I still had questions about navigating the challenges of our relationship. At first, I asked her if I could send her a recorder and she could talk into it whenever she wanted.
“No,” she said. “Why do I need to talk to a machine when I can talk to you?” You mean so you have an audience.
And that was that. We both knew the rules. She was the keeper of her story, and I, if I wanted access, would need to tell it in language grand enough to suit her memory. It was like threading a needle with one eye closed, while the thread frayed in my fingers.
Something was drawing me to this, so I listened to that. Eventually, my life shifted so that I found myself living at her house in an effort to help her as she was aging. So, there we were, sitting at her kitchen table getting ready for interview #1.
“What are you going to do with this?” she asked.
“I’m going to record it so I can listen while I write,” I respond, pulling my lips into a smile.
Suddenly, the chair felt too small as my knees brushed against the underside of the table. I shifted, trying to find a comfortable posture, hoping to show my attentiveness while protecting myself.
My phone sits between us, the recording app open, its red button waiting like a confessional light. I look up at her, the woman I referred to as Omma. She adjusted in her chair, smoothing her shirt, her gaze sweeping the fullness of the kitchen as if camera lights were getting ready to turn on.
“Ok…” I started.
“It was a biiiiig boat. It looked like a turtle,” she started.
“Omma, can we …”
“It looked like a turtle!” she said again, flinging her arms out wide. “You know it’s in a museum in Korea. He was so well known because he was very smart.”
“Who…?”
“His father worked in the palace with the king,” she continues, her eyes gleaming. “You know …” she looks at me, boring a hole through my soul. “You know what that means for me … and you?”
“I …”
“This means there are two different Lee families, and they cannot marry each other. They were a different Lee than ours. My mother is Yi Jeonju. Yi is the family name, the king’s name,” she says, lifting her chin, fluttering her nonexistent eyelashes.
“My great-grandfather,” she starts, then pauses, letting the words drip. “My great-grandfather is Admiral Yi Sun sin. He is your great-great-grandfather, Nancy! All the Koreans know him,” her eyes widen, landing on me as she holds a gaze.
“Two years ago, Jim asked me to go to Korea with him. He looooved Korea,” she said, fingers twirling her hair, “so I went with him. I make him pay for everything.”
“Mom …”
She gives me a glance, eyes narrowing. My throat tightens as the corner of her mouth curves into a half-smile.
“You know, Jim was a Korean War veteran. They invited him, so we went. The first thing they did was take us to the 38th parallel, right in the middle of North and South Korea. You saw it on the news, right? When Kim Jung Un and Trump sat together. That is the 38th parallel. That table is half north and half south.”
Did she forget that we went there as a family? My hearing is suspended until she drops something on the glass, the thud jolting me back.
“The Governor invited all the veterans to a restaurant. I think it was about 30 people,” she says, smiling. “Yes, 30 people for lunch at a restaurant,” her eyes dance. “When I look around, I am the only Korean! So, he sat next to me,” she smiles, shoulders rolling back as she recalls the moment her presence demanded to be seen.
Her eyes drift up to the ceiling, the lines around her eyes soften, and, for a moment, she is no longer at the kitchen table. She’s back in a restaurant in Korea with a room filled with brass buttons and polished shoes, her small frame lost in a sea of older, broad-shouldered American veterans, and the Governor. And it isn’t just any Governor, but the Governor who noticed her and sat next to her.
Her voice drops, “He greeted me and I shook his hand. I said, “I’m Sung Il Kopf. He looked at me funny and then asked me, ‘What is your Korean name?’ I said, ‘Yi Sung Il,’” she finishes, speaking each word of her name slowly and deliberately.
“Then, you know what?” her eyes widen again as she glances back at me, “He asked me, ‘Which Yi family?’ He knows because everyone knows!”
I shift in my chair, the cushion making a crunching noise.
She freezes, her eyes widening in disbelief, as if the interruption scattered her carefully arranged feathers. And just like that, her composure snaps back into place, tighter than before.
“They always ask you. You remember that, Nancy. You are from the Yi family. So, I said to him,” she shakes her head, “the … the … Governor! I tell him my mother is from the Yi Jeonju clan and my father is Yi Ahsan. Oh! He stood up and bowed to me. I said, waaaah,” her spine straightens as she tugs on her blouse, smoothing any wrinkles away as the memory dresses her like a fancy ballgown. “And when he sat back down, he said to me, ‘There was a time I would not be able to be in the same room as you.’”
Her smile spreads slowly.
What I learn later from hours of research is that her grandmother was of the Jeonju Yi clan, a noble Korean family, and their bon-gwan (본관) is in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province. A bon-gwan is what distinguishes clans that share the same patronymic names. It marks a lineage by tracing it to the geographic origin of the clan’s first male ancestor, essentially naming the ancestral home from which the family began.
As patronymic names carry weight in Korea, even to this day, this becomes an important thread of history to my mother. This was a prominent family during the Silla Dynasty, and just knowing this seems to boost my mother’s confidence, reminding her that she was somebody.
“Do you think the younger people in Korea will understand and want to know about the history of the boat?” I ask.
“No, but it’s in the museum, Nancy!”
“Right. Omma, even if the history might not be relevant, I think it’s good to tell your story.”
She turns to my husband, who has been quietly sitting at the table, absorbing all of the energy between us. “Now she wants to know my story.”
She turns back to me, pausing for a moment. “My story was sad. I don’t like to talk about it.” Her voice shifts as she wiggles in her seat.
The anger shows up swift and sudden, like a match struck in the dark. “I had enough with the Japanese! I’m telling you, I had enough1 I had enough. I had … enough,” her eyes turned downward. Her eyes wince, creating a ripple effect through her features as her lips press shut.
“So many people gave me a hard time. Even my family. I was going to commit suicide.” Her eyes still pointed down, blinking quickly. “Before I went to school, I was Sung Il. No Japanese name. Then, my father said I was smart. I was only five years old. He put me in school.”
“Omma,” I say quietly. “What year was this?”
She looks confused.
“What year were you born?”
“1930. Why are you asking me this? You know this.”
“I thought it might help you remember.”
“Ayyyy, Nancy,” she sighs. “My birthday is March 11 by the old calendar. The new calendar is April something … maybe 10 or 11. My parents followed the old calendar.” She lowers her head, scratching her scalp as if to summon up the correct answer. “I don’t remember,” she says, looking at me like a child would look at their mother for an answer.
And, in that moment, it dawned on me that even her birthday was caught between calendars, just as she had been caught between different worlds all her life.
REFLECTION
말하지 않아도 안다 — Even without speaking, I know. (Korean proverb)
In that pause, watching her try to remember the date of her birth, I felt the collision of two truths. She was the woman who birthed me, and she was also a woman who lived entire seasons of her life beyond my reach. Even when she held me at arm’s length, I began to understand her not only through the stories she told, but through the silences she kept.
She wasn’t the villain of my life story. She was a woman shaped by displacement, secrecy, and survival, and grappling with my love for her meant learning to see her humanity that existed alongside the generational trauma.
엄마, 지금은 괜찮으시길 바라요. Mom, I hope you’re okay now.