One Thousand Chestnut Trees

CHAPTER FOUR History

Cardboard boxes and canvases slid across the back of the rented station wagon as the car’s wide hips swung around the corners of Route 9. Driving up the Interstate earlier, my spirits felt progressively lighter the farther from New York I sped; Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, Holyoke, Northampton, Greenfield, and finally Exit 3 to Starksboro. The names of the towns on these green-and-white signs were tattooed in my memory; their familiar sing-song syllables, like nursery rhymes, prompting the mixed emotions of childhood, with its maddening dreads and comforts. The landscape growing steeper and wilder, I floored the accelerator up the final hill, impatient to arrive.

The next morning, sitting at the dining-room window, I gazed out at the high clouds and pine branches tossing in the March wind, drinking coffee from my preferred blue-willow cup and saucer. I smiled at the sight of my mother, weeding as usual, at the edge of the window frame. She would never run out of weeds in Vermont. For years, she had tried to grow tiger lilies, her favourites, by the front steps, but they always died. Resigned to the cantankerousness of the Vermont soil, my mother discovered an unusual answer. She made a garden out of the weeds themselves: cultivating the prettiest, and uprooting the nastier-looking ones. Growing up, I had found this practice – as well as making monster bonsai out of scots pines – rather embarrassing, but now thought it quite inventive. Looking at the scots pine-bonsai next to her, now much taller, I thought of Hong-do.

After quite a lot of thinking and worrying, I had moved out of New York and bought a one-way ticket to Seoul. It sounds a bit melodramatic, but the open-ended ticket had more to do with ignorance of how long the trip would take than with a desire to stay forever. It almost felt as if I were going to Korea against my will. Although no one was forcing me to go, thoughts of going to Seoul kept returning insistently during quiet moments, creating a pressure impossible to ignore.

Despite being unhappy about giving up my studio, it felt likely that if I didn’t go now, I might easily resist it later. The paintings I’d been working on were terrible anyway – a series of self-conscious fauve fire-escapes. They were leading nowhere at all, and a break could only help. The exact purpose of this trip was fuzzy, but its vagueness seemed appropriate. While it had seemed so small at the time, my uncle’s visit had opened up something unaccountably big. Clearly, going to Korea would be the most direct way of finding out what the nature of this something might be. Hong-do sent a brief note welcoming my visit.

My mother had been very surprised when told of my plan over the phone, but also seemed pleased. Being reserved, it was sometimes quite difficult to tell when she approved of things. I’d decided to try and learn some Korean, but unfortunately, my mother would be away on a recital tour for most of that short interval, so I was unable to learn from, and practise on, her. Instead, I brought with me a Linguaphone Korean language course purchased in the city: one of those instruct-yourself kits, complete with cassettes and a couple of bewildering booklets designed to simplify and decode the cryptic Hangul characters.

Nearly blue with frustration, I sat in my old bedroom with the headphones on, and tried again and again to halt the tape in the spot where the frail thread of comprehensible sound became a locomotive of complete gibberish. I studied the Korean alphabet chart and tried to think in ideograms rather than in individual letters. The concentration required was strenuous in the extreme; like trying to cut something by first melting down a knife, recasting it into a pair of scissors and waiting for the metal to cool each time you needed to cut with it; the scissors turning back into a knife as soon as the immediate task was complete.

‘Annyong haseyo. Annyong-i kyeseyo …’ I repeated over and over. Hangul required six syllables simply to say ‘goodbye’. King Sejong, inventor of the Korean language, promised that it would take only a day or two for his subjects to learn it, but he must have been flattering his countrymen. The difficulty of following Hangul on the earphones was hallucinatory. As the grammatical and conceptual differences between English and Hangul widened further, my metaphorical scissors shrank. It was like trying to penetrate a concrete wall with a safety pin. It filled me with indignation and disbelief. For the first time, I began to get a measure of the formidable barrier my mother had overcome.

Those few weeks were spent painting during the day, cooking for my father, and leafing through Western books about Korea in the evenings. Besides needing to know some facts, I craved a tangible definition of Koreanness. The books’ indexes yielded such dry characteristics as a) the sanctity of hierarchical Confucian family and social relationships; b) ancestor-worship; c) advanced scholarship and artistic achievement; d) self-reliance; e) self-sacrifice; f) pacifism; g) harmony with nature. Although not unhelpful, the words failed to construct a convincing picture. It was like trying to understand the soul of a missing person from police forensic reports and identikit features.

Reading the encyclopaedia, I grew embarrassed by my ignorance. Even the most pedestrian of facts had passed me by.

I learned that Korea – ‘The Hermit Kingdom’ – was one of the oldest, most insular nations on earth, autonomous, racially, linguistically and culturally distinct for 5,000 years. Legend held that Koreans were descended from a semi-divine bear king, Tan-gun, in 2333BC. Science dated Korea’s origins to the Palaeolithic Age, identifying Koreans, rather unpoetically, I thought, as Tungusic Mongoloids, a Mongolian sub-species taller and fairer than other Asiatic races, though not through Caucasian influence, and unrelated to the Ainu-descended Japanese.

I studied these bald, creaky facts as if for an exam, stopping frequently to make cups of tea. It was not that the exercise was exactly boring, but it was painful, like doing years of ignored accounts. I grilled my father for any intelligence he might be hiding, but his knowledge was fairly sketchy too. He had left art school to serve as a draughtsman in the navy in World War II, but hadn’t left Maryland. They heard little on the boats; minimalist wire reports, crude newsreel propaganda, leaflets – that was all. My mother had told him odd family stories over the years, but they were mostly the same ones I had heard. Teeth gritted, I persevered with the history books.

Korea had been the last Far Eastern country to open her gates to the West in the 19th century, and only then under severe foreign trading pressure. Its xenophobia developed over the centuries by devastating foreign invasions; multiple regicides; organized mass rape; mass torturings; massacres and cultural repression. These and other deeds of shocking opportunism had been performed enthusiastically by the Japanese, with occasional cameos by Mongols and Manchus. During periods of peace, Korea had been a vital cultural channel between Japan and China, bringing Buddhism, art forms, and technologies to developing Japan, some two thousand years younger than Korea.

When Christianity was brought to Korea in the 18th century by the French, it was a catastrophe. Unprecedented division and slaughter ensued, creating the chaos that neighbouring Russia, China, and above all Imperial Japan, were to exploit to their advantage in the 19th century.

Japan ordered the assassination of the Korean Queen Min in 1895, and had annexed the country by 1910, turning it, like Manchuria, into a puppet state, brutally suppressing its language and culture for nearly four decades. When the deposed and humiliated King Kojong refused to grant further concessions, Japan allegedly ordered his fatal poisoning in 1919, provoking the pacifist March 1st Independence Uprising in which the Japanese massacred thousands of unarmed Koreans.

During World War II, Japan forced two hundred thousand Korean women into sexual slavery for the Japanese Army along with thousands of Dutch, Malaysians, and Chinese women; they reduced millions of educated Koreans into menial labourers, confiscated wealth and property, and imprisoned or executed all dissidents. Only Japan’s defeat in World War II briefly restored Korea’s freedom.

Then came more familiar tragedies: 1945: Korea partitioned without its people’s consent on the 38th parallel – an arbitrary North-South division designated by Russia and the Allies at Yalta to facilitate the withdrawal of Japanese troops; North under Communist aegis; South Capitalist. Five years later came the Korean War: one of the most savage in recorded history. Seventy-four thousand UN fatalities, thirty-five thousand American fatalities, and a staggering three million Korean dead. It accorded no glorious victory, only a bitter forty-four-year ceasefire. UN Forces under American command managed to protect the South from Communist takeover, but had virtually decimated the country through bombing.

As a direct result of the three-year war, Korea was left geographically and ideologically divided against the wishes of its own people, impoverished, and razed to the ground.

Freakish result of the war: thirty-five years later South Korea had become one of the richest capitalist economies in the world, while the communist North stood isolated, starving, and virtually brainwashed under the bizarre leadership of Kim Il-sung; the planet’s last Stalinist dictator.

After reading this catalogue of woe, I was almost winded by the scale of it.

I remembered a conversation my mother and I had once had about the war.

‘It was our fault,’ she said ruefully, ‘for not developing an effective army when we could see the Japanese arming themselves to the teeth. We were arrogant, not wanting to adopt Western industrialism and militarism. We believed that we could stick our heads in the sand while other countries joined the race. We were romantic, unrealistic … All we wanted to do was to read our books, farm the land, and watch the sunset,’ she said.

‘We were not interested enough in worldly power. And we were punished for it. So now we are interested in money and troops. Probably too interested.’

I was more upset about her tolerant attitude towards the Japanese invasions than I was about watching sunsets.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Well, tell me!’

‘Don’t raise your voice. You still twine. You’re too old to twine.’

‘WHINE, not twine.’

‘Don’t talk back like that …’

‘Oh, please go on.’

‘Well, you must know this … For centuries Korea always regarded Japan as an … unruly younger brother, to be tolerated, in the Confucian way, rather than to be treated as an enemy. Aggression against a neighbour was considered shameful to Koreans … modesty and pacifism are important national ideals. We would do anything to avoid a conflict with our brothers; Japan knew this very well, and simply chose to take advantage of it,’ she said.

I kept silent, well out of my depth.

‘Don’t think that the West was ignorant of what Japan was up to,’ my mother went on. ‘On the contrary! Until Pearl Harbor, the United States and Great Britain actually encouraged Japan’s expansionist policy as a check against Communist Russia! When Syngman Rhee – the Korean President – appealed to the League of Nations in the thirties to put a stop to the Japanese, did the West help us? Absolutely not. They appeased the Japanese,’ she said with a sudden burst of animation. ‘We always felt that the West was more of an enemy than the Japanese, who were at least fellow orientals.’

‘But it wasn’t the West who kept invading Korea; it was Japan. Don’t you resent what the Japanese did at all?’ I asked, incredulous.

She looked at me in surprise, and spoke slowly again, weighing her words.

‘Calm down … Well, as a nation Japan was always … competitive and a bit immature; big-headed. Blinded by visions of power and empire. Their sense of humanity got lost … Japan was not alone in this way of thinking, you know. Think of revolutionary Russia, of Nazi Germany, of China and Tibet, there are too many to single out.’

‘But Ma, they were uniquely cruel to Koreans! Inhuman. Surely you don’t defend them,’

‘They are still our brothers. Human. All human beings are capable of evil, especially in times of war. Human nature is weak,’ she said.

I was faintly scandalized by her forgiveness of a people who had systematically raped her country, stamped out her language – even forced her to change her name to Japanese. To top it off, they claimed creepy racial superiority, and denied the Nanking Massacre and the existence of the ‘Comfort Women’ until confronted with the disgust of other nations. Yet my mother had never spoken maliciously of the Japanese, not in my presence, at least, and she refused to speak ill of them now. Although her patently worthy, Christian stance was admirable, I was irked that my mother had never shown anger about it, and refused to acknowledge the damage to her country, even when the Japanese would express no remorse, nor make formal reparations for their war crimes. If she had ever felt strong emotions, she never admitted them.

‘War is war,’ she said simply. ‘Bad things happen.’

But I began to wonder. I wondered at my mother’s silence all these years. It was full of unanswered questions. Apart from this single conversation, she had barely mentioned the events I was now reading about. Had they seemed irrelevant to her new life, been a source of discomfort? Perhaps she had been sparing herself the hurt of my habitual indifference. It was true, I had shut out her stories as a child.

My mother and father had talked of going to Korea one day, but my mother quietly resisted it. Dad and I didn’t question her decision to stay away from Korea. Perhaps she dreaded the immense changes she might discover, both in herself and in the war-battered country she had fled. She had returned only once since then, after her parents’ deaths. She had not seen them again, nor been able to say goodbye before they died. This was so sad to me that I’d never dared ask her about it.

I had often wondered why she was so self-contained in her feelings. Reading about the country’s traumas now, I began to understand her a little more. It was only in her playing that my mother expressed deep emotion. Through the violin she could enjoy a safe, dignified release, externalized, separate from herself. Music seemed to liberate and to structure her feelings. Perhaps she feared that if she ever started grieving her losses, she might be unable to stop. Maybe time and distance had frozen them, as a kindness, deep inside her.

I looked out of the dining-room window quite exhausted from reading. The horizon returned my stare with peaceful blankness. There was no doubting that New England, with its stone walls, woods, and red barns, was an utterly different world. The Yankee landscape had its own past to digest. Murdered colonial settlers lay beneath the foundations of the ruined mill behind our house. The summer camp nearby, Camp Winnepesaukee, had a quaint Native American name, but no Native Americans remained in the county. Ghosts of unknown soldiers, Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain boys, were said to haunt the overgrown woods nearby. A Mississippi-born Vietnam veteran turned motel-owner had shot himself in the head on our road in 1974. I felt little connection to any of it.

America had been fortunate to avoid wars at home this century; its recent history seemed to contain mostly the weird, scattershot tragedies of unlucky motorists and airline passengers, assassins, terrorists, and lone maniacs. Apart from conveniently invisible Vietnam veterans, America’s sufferings were unusually noisy and individualistic; celebrated in internationally-televised courtroom battles and sumptuous spreads of marital woe in Life magazine and Paris Match.

Korea’s annexation, wars, and partitioning had been blows to the roots of its nationhood, withstood in a global silence. Its obscurity, aristocratic disdain for trade and militarism, and deliberate aloofness from the West ensured that no one cared about its traumas. Korea was too old and complicated to be understood by a world that worshipped Youth and Caucasian notions of glamour. What did it matter if Korea had been the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual centre of the Orient in the eleventh century, advancing painting, ceramics, medicine, Buddhism, and cartography, producing books in movable type in 1234 – two centuries before the Gutenberg Bible – or that pilgrims, monks, poets, scholars, courtiers, painters, goldsmiths and ceramicists had come to learn at her feet. Again, in eighteenth century Choson, Korea’s level of civilisation was unsurpassed in the Far East. But twentieth-century Korea was war-scarred and rebuilt; its back still turned somewhat defensively against the encroaching West, whose condescension Korea felt keenly.

When my mother returned from her concert tour a few days later, violin-case in one hand, suitcase in the other, I welcomed her differently. Maybe I imagined it, but her face looked more complete to me, and slightly harder, too.

As she walked up the flagstone path and handed her suitcase to my father, it occurred to me for the first time that she must have been carrying cases when she first arrived in America. There had been a moment just as specific as this one. Had she walked down a gangplank? What would she have brought with her? Had anything survived from those days? I tried to imagine her as she was then, but could only picture her in a snapshot from the late 1950s, when she was a music student in New York. How different she looked then, her face round and babyish, hair bobbed and permed; barely recognizable. She had long ago lost the open vulnerability of that sheltered girl from Seoul. I remembered a photograph of her even further back, in the forties, before leaving Korea. She was standing on the wide bank of the River Han in a brown overcoat, a tiny figure against a vast blue sky. It was taken at such a distance that you could barely make out her face. Over time the colours have bleached out, the image gradually disappearing in its frame.

Looking at my parents’ backs as they climbed the front steps, I realized how incomplete my knowledge was of them both. Perhaps I would always see them through the keyhole of childhood, reduced and truncated by my own self-interest, their limbs moving predictably in and out of the light; Mother’s hand stirring a soup-pot, tuning her violin, Dad’s shoulders hunched over a canvas, shovelling snow, studying the sports results in the newspaper. The keyhole was dark during years of absence; boarding-school, summers, and university. Periodically I sought clues in the enigmatic black-and-white tableau of their wedding photograph – the disapproved-of wedding that neither set of parents had attended on racial objections – but their young, exultant faces revealed nothing but youth and exultation, their mobile eyes frozen in the recording of the moment.

There was a land-locked familiarity about my parents; I had been content to stick to the limited territory I knew, to ignore their pasts, and avoid the entire ocean of their inner lives. Perhaps this was how it was meant to be between parents and children, our lives unequal parallel lines, never meeting. But it no longer felt quite right.

That night my mother regained control of the kitchen with an assured clatter, and as usual, prepared us a fine quasi-Eastern, quasi-Western supper; homemade mandu-guk (dumpling soup) with Chinese leaf, and Irish beef stew – kimchi optional – accompanied by rice and potatoes. Despite decades of inculcation, Dad still preferred potatoes to rice, and my mother rice to potatoes. I ate both.

I told my mother about the books I’d read. She listened carefully, and said little. She carried on eating quietly. She gave me a penetrating, measured look, neither warm nor hostile, which said, ‘We’ll see how long this interest lasts.’

After supper when my father went upstairs to watch the news, my mother made some ginseng tea and we sat down together a bit edgily, as always. Like many daughters and mothers, we had had fearsome disagreements over the years, but ours were magnified by a cultural gulf.

My mother had been a distant and rather puzzling figure, as unpredictable and all-powerful as the weather. Often abroad on concert tours, her absences and bad moods affected me like rain. Early on, I had been raised mostly by nannies. Feeling excluded by my father and me, my mother was often perfectionistic when she returned home, and I shrank from the force of her criticisms. Yet when she was happy, it was as if the sun had broken through at last, transforming everything, bestowing a warmth – that only she could bring – to cold corners of my being. Her kindness was never cloying or phoney, but vital.

We disagreed over petty things – her convent strictness over manners, clothes, curfews, and boy-girl etiquette – but more fundamentally, we did not speak the same language. I could not understand her mother tongue. Even when she spoke in English, the meaning of her words was pure Korean. I did not understand what she meant by ‘respect’: to me, it meant politeness; to her, it meant filial piety – children revering their parents. How did one revere? I thought it unfair to be expected to behave in ways I had never seen practised. America did not tend to produce reverent teenagers; why should I be the first?

Yet inadvertently – and sometimes knowingly – my behaviour hurt her deeply. She had worshipped her own mother, yielding at times I would not even consider, while I was fresh and moody, continuously breaking the code of obedience upon which her very childhood, and generations of Confucian childhoods, had been unquestioningly founded.