Day 1
He woke on the day he died. It was a Thursday. For weeks, he had shimmered in the space between. Here, memory mixed with magic, brushes and breaths from a world past and beyond. He needed to call Chuck. But his broken phone could not speed dial the dead. It was time to take yobo out for dinner. They would dress well and order sandwiches for the grandkids, with good prime rib. It was almost time. He was not ready – caught in a failing submarine – sinking, down, sinking.
For moments, there was reprieve. Booky’s silly face. His mother and a warm breeze. Too swiftly the landscape would change. Pain was the length of ligaments, those final fastenings to a mortal skin. But he had lived through it all once. And now, he was free.
He drifted up to the ceiling while his caretaker was out of the room. From the farmost corner, he surveyed his resting place. The fake purple flowers were a cheap imitation of home, piled alongside doctor’s orders on the oversized vanity. The room was still hung with gold paper spirals, strung up from his 93rd birthday. He looked back at his departed form, a first glance in the mirror in the past four months. His beard was terrible, whiskers only permissible by circumstance. Bruises meant your time was coming, he remembered this from the elders of his hometown; and light patches marbled his forearms and hands. And he was thin. It accented his face – etched with a lifetime, momentarily softened in relief. He was satisfied to see that he looked peaceful. Let them find him asleep.
Shirley would be there soon, expecting to deliver his prescriptions and some soft tofu, not a last goodbye. But he would be back. This evening, he had somewhere to be.
He decided to sweep through the hallway and make a proper exit through the front door. His comrades were seated for dinner, vestiges of jello on their plates. They had been amusing company these past two months. He even had a girlfriend Kate, her hair wisped into a tight silver knot, who gifted him a card and a kiss on the head on his birthday. He wished them a grateful good riddance and swept outside.
He had never felt this light, thrummed with a beatitude like never before. Surrounded by lavender mountains and the receding hour, he drifted over the rooftops, and moved up toward the sky.
A note
My grandfather recently passed away. I’ve learned that in a Korean Buddhist tradition, the 49th day is significant – the last of the window before a soul passes from this life into the beyond. It gave me comfort to find some way of remembering – a stake in absence of knowing tradition and ritual, an anchor on the calendar as the following days began to accelerate and bleed. Yet on the 49th day, this would give way to a feeling of catastrophe, of absolute loss – cosmic and complete.
My imagining is that throughout the 49 days before moving onward, my grandfather found his way back to places and memories perhaps long buried, turning sites of provenance into sites of healing. I am in the process of re-fashioning some of the events in the essay included below, into the form above. My hope is that through writing the 49 days, we may trace the events and currents of my grandfather’s (inner and outer) life. Most days since his passing, I still feel like I don’t have the words. To honor a tremendous life – a person who is of you and part of you – feels imperfect, and impossible. Yet I’ve realized it’s these chances of remembering that are ungiven – a mark that we were loved, that we were here.
One of seven brothers and the son of the mayor: he is born in Ulsan, South Korea into Japanese colonial occupation. At age twelve, they celebrate him for admission to a prestigious high school in Tokyo. He arrives as one of two foreign students; the other is the son of a Thai king. A Korean, accepted by Shinjokoko High School. It’s unprecedented; for Koreans are despised by the Japanese. Perhaps it is to be expected then: he is demeaned. As WWII closes and bombs drop on Tokyo, the eldest of the Park brothers sounds the alarm. He returns to spend his teenage years back in Korea, fistfighting Japanese soldiers in the streets. It’s a small pride if you can steal their weapon, a victory of defiance in the bid for this country. This is the first moment he pinpoints, when articulating han as a feeling – of resentment and anger and regret, calcified into one.
Picked up off the street while selling odeng, he is enlisted in the Korean War. As families come to bribe war officers on behalf of their sons, he pushes down early bitterness as no one comes in his name. Having picked up a bit of English, he navigates the ranks to become the commander of KATUSA, the Korean Army branch augmenting the United States. Age 21, not knowing how to use a gun, he’s sent up to battle pushing the North Korean Army back. It is a future source of guilt: he survives, one of few. As the war closes, with his university burned to the ground, he turns to the US for the next chapter. He procures sponsorship and a visa through a US army major friend. He bums a box of Johnny Walker off a tall, nice Ethiopian officer gentleman, flip it on the black markets for a break. After a year of train rides and persistence for a passport, the issuing department gives in, and he proceeds to pack a trunk with books and his favorite violin. He finds passage on the President Wilson, bottom level of the ship. From Korea to Tokyo to Honolulu to SF: he stays below the water for two full weeks. But he bunks with lots of Filipinos, and the food is full and tasty.
Landing in San Francisco, he begins working the fields alongside fellow laborers from Mexico, picking peaches and grapes at 105 degrees. 4:30 AM wakeup, get breakfast and a lunch bag and load up on the truck. You’re lucky to pick peaches, for a bit of shadow from the heat. But pick the wrong shadow, and you’ll be in with the bees. Saving up at 90 cents an hour, he applies for university. Harvard responds with an acceptance letter and financial paperwork – confounded, he fills out fake information that is declined. The University of Michigan requests no financial statements, and so it is to the Midwest that he makes his way.
Journeying on the Greyhound, he chooses between white and black bathrooms in Albuquerque; and gets bounced between the front and back of the bus. After three days without stretching, he can’t walk or feel his feet. Arriving in Ann Arbor, his mind starts to take inventory: shelter. Food. Clothing. He starts to solve for a plan, need by need. He takes lodging on Oswego Street, bartering with two old ladies to live in and shovel snow. His room is the patio with plastic vinyl stapled up for walls – cold like hell. He finds a job dishwashing in exchange for three square meals. He takes the graveyard shift at the hospital, cranking the service elevator to descend into the basement morgue. At night he studies, alongside the patients that he labeled and brought down during the day. These are the stories that surface, when asked a decade ago, and now. When asked why these are the stories that he remembers, he answers with a word: “pain.”
Yet it is in the Midwest where he meets my grandmother, and where they welcome their first son. It is in Chicago where he gets his first job after graduation. It is in New York where he becomes temporarily stateless, trading his Korean passport for US citizenship and a job sponsored overseas. This opens over a decade of good life, some of their fondest years, working as an expatriate manager in Yokohama, Japan. Yet today, he wishes to die in Ulsan, in the place where he was born. Like animals returning, he says, it’s a natural thing. It’s a foregone yearning; there is no way he can.
Moving back to the State in the 70’s, he navigates work with Boeing and Hughes Aircraft, the CIA, and an opened-and-closed gyro restaurant on the side. In aerospace, as one of few Asian employees, a department manager finally informs him that he is severely underpaid. These years form the bulk of his Social Security check today. As he moves into his winter and begin painstakingly paying for care, he grips harder at his pride. No help. No charity. He insists on reimbursing us for groceries. Yet finance remains one of his demons. An insecurity, a regret. In a capitalist country, he says, there is a beautiful retirement and a terrible retirement. It is his SSI payment that is not enough to live beautifully, as the only Asian couple in this senior living building. It is his SSI payment that disqualifies him from the government-subsidized community centers in Chinatown, some of the sole places with an Asian American elder community. There is a gap between the line and the ceiling.
Having raised their children, celebrated graduations and marriages and grandchildren on the way: to Korea, they decide to retire, in a house out in the country. It is a season of Buddhism and temple visits for my grandmother; and of matching vests with the Contax camera club for my grandfather. But one day, they both return from Korea. When I ask my mother, she says she doesn’t know why. But wherever they are, she says, they’re never happy.
And so the moves grow shorter, slower, less willful. Between our house and their own apartment nearby, my sister and I are the beneficiaries of homecooked meals and rides after school. Until the day comes that they can’t make it up the stairs anymore, and move into a spot on the ground floor. Until the day comes that my mother finalizes her divorce and moves to Nevada, and moves my grandparents in with her. Until the day comes that no one can stand each other, and they move to a subsidized apartment on their own. Until the day comes when they can no longer get up when they fall, and my mother convinces them to pay the $3000 a month to move into assisted living. It’s a narrow one bedroom, with a looming price tag for the day we need to pay for more care. Some days, my grandfather says he ought to jump out the window rather than pay this much money for a submarine.
The days move slowly. There are hours spent sitting by the window in his chair. “Music,” he tells me, “the only thing that calms my emotions.” He alternates his favorites on repeat. One day, it is Jang Sa-ik’s latest hit: a song of yearning for home, a place where the wild rose only grows. The Tennessee Waltz surfaces – a big hit in his college town in Korea, an ode to Patti Page before the war. Recurringly, it is Andrea Bocelli and Helene Fischer: “Time to Say Goodbye.”
He tells me the prominent song each time I come to visit, but begin to falter with the names. Patti Pat. Something Fischer. “I’m on the last page, of my life,” he says. “I just want to know what I’m writing in this chapter.” He returns to this refrain, but the words similarly begin to morph and slip away.
How do you live a story as it’s still being written? 67 years after leaving Korea: what do we leave behind? As I capture as best I can, woven into these words is my hope for uncovering a reply.
