Day 607, March 1, 2022

Sam-il 

March 1st marks the Korean independence movement under colonial rule from Japan. My grandfather’s brother disappeared at the hands of the colonizers and his father rode all over the countryside on a bicycle looking for his son. When his father finally returned home, he fell ill and died. My grandfather then left home and joined a resistance movement in Shanghai, China, where he also went to college. 

I wonder about the order of things, how stories become compressed with the retelling. In a story, one thing follows the other like a recipe or the song tracks on an lp. But in lived experience, maybe it was something else, maybe there were years interspersed there. How long must one ride a bicycle before one becomes so ill that one dies? Were there terrible sores? Or, was the loss so great, that the parent could not continue on. And for the other son who remained, how long did it take to decide to leave home? 

My grandfather was surprisingly brave. He spoke Korean, Chinese, German, and English. He lived in a time of war where each decade seemed to bring with it tragedy and suffering, and change. It is hard to imagine what it must have taken to emerge from all those years intact, or relatively intact. My aunt once complained to me, that the reason my grandfather lived such a long blessed life was because he was always happy-go-lucky, and it was always his wives who had to manage the households, worry about the bills, stress about raising the children. They were the ones who caught diseases and died young. My grandfather lived to a hundred and four, and maybe she was right, he did seem to always enjoy life. He golfed almost every day, relished the shuttle diplomacy of finding wives for his sons, showed off dancing in the traditional style with the ladies, and always loved drinking the good scotch. He possessed a resilience that mirrored his home country, the one what weathered an entire generation of war, subjugation, division, poverty, despots, and emerged gleaming, if not without its simmering victims of inequity, the wives… all the victims of capitalism, who witness all the change and progress, but still taste the dust in their mouths.

I never really thought of my grandfather as lucky, but he was lucky. He found love multiple times in his life. He lived for decades in multiple countries. He survived. He has a little patch of garden named after him in the suburban Boston assisted living facility where he lived his final days. And in Korea, his bust greets visitors where he was an admiral in a naval shipyard. 

And still, I wonder how young he was when he decided to leave home, when his brother was lost and his father dead. How old he must have been when he decided to join a resistance based in another country and became an exile. I never asked if he ever needed to fight anyone, that seems like a stupid question. He survived. 

My wife was raised as a Quaker and I asked her what Quakers would do if another country invaded their country? How does one choose not to fight? Then, would one flee? Or would one stand in front of tanks with nothing but one’s empty hands? 

Either prospect seems so frightening to my lucky self, who never had to bear arms against another human being, who never had to make the choice to leave the country of my birth, who never really faced hunger, or loss of home, or any of those things that made my grandfather so resilient. I am a lucky man. 

My grandfather before being cast in bronze.