I don’t remember my mother ever having the cold or flu. She must’ve had her share, especially in the sharp New York winter. She remains healthy in my memory because she never took a day off, never took a nap, never complained. Not even when the needle flew off the Singer and disappeared into her finger. Between the waitressing years in New York, Mom sewed for the giant garment industry that Latino and Asian immigrants pinned their hopes on in the 70s and 80s. The heaps of cut fabric she brought home in the metal shopping cart they literally called homework. It enabled her to raise her kids and stay involved in my early schooling. Umma did everything fast. She would feed polyester rectangles through the machine and recruit me and my little brother to flip them into shirt collars. At two cents a piece, time was the enemy. She ate a lot of dust.
The older I grow, the smaller I feel in the shadow of my mother’s sacrificial silence. I grew up exasperated with Mom, but her threshold of patience in marriage and motherhood was a lot higher than mine. None of that invisible female deal for me, not in the culture of rights I breathed, not with the nature that still begs tempering.
How dare I draw myself up to Umma’s small frame in these comfortable shoes that cost more than what she ever spent on her own tired feet? It wasn’t just the waitressing that her legs ached from. She stood hours in the kitchen over the side dishes every traditional meal required. I don’t cook Korean. It’s misogynistic. Digging up this picture of Mom, I was surprised at the poor quality of the photo. It had stuck in my mind as a beautiful shot, one of my favorite of hers, but it was her radiance that had lodged itself in my memory even as she slaved away in a hole of an apartment with no ventilation.
And then my grandmothers had it even harder. No appliances to keep up with the laundry for a family of eight. My mother’s father passed away when Mom was three, leaving Grandma to flee on foot with six children when the communist North invaded Seoul three years later. Umma became the youngest in the family when her brother, three years old, died en route from the pneumonia they could not treat in the winter flight. They buried him on the road and this and the rest my grandmother endured with silent heartache and grace. If unassuming, unreserved sacrifice is the measure of greatness, surely greatness diminishes with each generation. Or is it just me? I am probably the weakest link in my line. No, I don’t believe all women before me were above reproach, and I know of many among Mom’s generation who even abandoned their own. I’m talking of the times and culture. Though I may shoulder my hearty share of struggles, my days aren’t heavy with the desperation I sensed in Mom when I was a child. The small matter of war aside, she and the women before her faced resistance in just procuring the basics. Korea was poorer then, and immigrant life tougher than what I have enjoyed in the country that shut no door on me as I was growing up. Living required more fortitude for those without roots in American soil. There are things I do better than Umma did. Like many of us, I determined to be a different parent. But my savvy turns out to be simply a matter of knowledge and opportunity— from the education my mother paid for with her very self. I had set out to do better, but I now see that every success of mine is the dream she chased.
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