Elizabeth Kim describes her mother as a headstrong young
woman, whose first big transgression was leaving home to work in a noodle stall.
I couldn’t help but feel bad for this woman; all she wanted was her independence,
and moving to the city to work shouldn’t have angered anyone. But when she got
pregnant by an American serviceman, then her troubles really began. Unmarried
pregnancy was a major embarrassment to her family, and she became a pariah in
her community. Kim’s recollections are of happy times with her mother, until
the day her mother was murdered for disgracing the family. It wasn’t a stoning
by a mob, but more calculated; her father and her brother wanted her to sell
the child into servitude, and when she refused, they hanged her. Then they
tortured the child and got rid of her.
The next part of the book is more disturbing than the first,
because it lasts longer. She gets adopted by an American couple, and her life
improves physically, but stinks emotionally. Her parents have heads full of
ideas of what they expect to get from their new daughter, and they’re awful to
her, blaming her for the most mundane things. It’s not even clear why her
parents adopt her, since there were plenty of white children to adopt in 1950’s
USA. Maybe it had to do with their fundamentalist Christian views? Was it their
way of “civilizing a savage” and bringing the heathen to Jesus? Did they think
they were doing the Lord’s work by taking in a half-Korean child?
In some ways the treatment her mother got in Korea mirrors
what she received in the USA. Women didn’t really have any rights in the USA
either, and as a teen, she marries a deacon from their church. It’s not clear
why. Maybe she’s pressured by her parents? Maybe she just wants to escape her
home? Whatever the reason, her husband
turns out to be an abusive man, having sex with other women and forcing her to
watch, beating her (even while pregnant) and making her life impossible. Her
life doesn’t get much better after divorcing him. She does, however, land a job
at a newspaper, and her boss and his wife become surrogate parents.
While I sympathize with the author, I don’t approve of a lot
of the things she does. First off, she implies a feeling of nihilism to her
daughter, and while it may be the reason her daughter grows up independent and
self-reliant, I’m not sure it’s worth the risk to a child. Secondly, she raises
her daughter in a house that’s geographically isolated, in an effort to
recreate the home where she once lived with her mother. The isolation of the
home puts them in danger on several occasions.
Honor killings have been in the news a lot lately, but we
hear about the ones in the Middle East, not South Korea. I’ve heard of honor
killings happening in Sicily, usually because of a disapproved marriage, or a
daughter’s mistake that shames the family. They didn’t have honor killings In
Ireland, but unwed pregnant teenagers got a raw deal; their parents left them
at the Magdalene Convents and forgot about them.
Like most Asian
countries, South Korea doesn’t have a good record on women’s rights, but what
makes it even more shocking is the way her family committed the murder. The
events in the USA afterward aren’t much better, but you have to wonder how much
has really changed? Today’s news is full of stories about women being thrown
out of pools over their bathing suits, or girls being sent home because their
clothing distracts the boys.
When you treat the woman as a temptress, you open
the floodgates to abuse.
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