I grew up in Michigan and Kansas, eating Korean food every day.  When I was very young, my family didn’t have a lot of money so eating out was a rare luxury.  My mother spent the vast majority of her time cooking for our family, making everything from scratch, back when grocery stores didn’t have huge prepared food sections.  At every meal, we would have rice, several different kinds of kimchi—which my mother had made herself—and other homemade banchan, as well as a soup or a fish, meat, or noodle dish to round things out.  As anyone who is familiar with Korean cuisine knows, the Korean dinner table is a jigsaw puzzle of small plates and bowls of differing sizes all competing for space with your own rice bowl.  There is no place mat to delineate your own territory, reserved for your own plate, your own water glass, and your own utensils.

If cuisines could have a political philosophy, I think Korean meals would be a form of egalitarianism.  All the banchan are shared equally, everyone’s chopsticks reaching for the same kimchi or bean sprouts or red pepper paste.  If there’s a stew, it’s placed in something like a stone crock in the middle of the table, and everyone spoons out some for herself.  People will sometimes share the same teacup or soju glass, always pouring for others, never for yourself.  There is no hierarchy among the meals either; what’s good for dinner is equally good for breakfast or lunch.  This goes beyond just having last night’s cold pizza for breakfast.  The summer after I graduated from college, I lived with my father’s youngest sister and her family in Seoul.  One of our favorite meals, whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner, was to have fresh, warm rice, lots of kimchi and banchan, and LOTS of red pepper paste.  My two cousins and I would dump our bowls of rice into my uncle’s mixing bowl.  He would add kimchi, banchan, sesame oil, and red pepper paste, and mix it all together.  Once everything was a uniform bright red, we would all dig in, shoving huge spoonfuls of bibimbap into our mouths from the same mixing bowl.

Two clichés summarize my attitudes to Korean food.  The first is “Familiarity breeds contempt.”  Growing up in Kansas usually means that the spiciest thing your neighbors eat is barbeque sauce and their smelliest food is anchovy pizza.  Our house smelled of not only the pungent spice of kimchi but also the acrid bitterness of tea made from real ginseng, the earthy tang of fermented soybeans, and the smoky sweetness of grilled dried squid.  Kansas, where the exact center of the continental United States is located, is also the center of meat-and potatoes country.  When my school friends came over to my house, they’d look warily at the jars of kimchi and the rice cooker sitting on our kitchen counter and politely avert their eyes, not wanting to embarrass me by staring.  And I’d avert my eyes too.  It wasn’t that I was embarrassed of the way that my house smelled; it’s just that, for me, exotic food was the fish fillet sandwich from McDonald’s.  Honestly, I was quite blown away by McDonald’s tartar sauce, its cool blandness, and the muted taste of the fish and the bun.  Once American friends got a taste for Korean food at our house, they often wondered why our family wasn’t hugely overweight if we ate such large, delicious meals every day.  To me, though, all that variety was repetitive and boring.

The second cliché that represents my attitude to Korean food is “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”  When I went off to college and had to live off of college dining food, I found myself going through withdrawal.  Like an addict suffering through detox, I would feverishly roam the campus dining halls looking for anything that would give me my spice fix.  Back in the pre-Sriracha era, I craved anything that was spicy and fermented, but really couldn’t find anything.  My father, a doctor, used to carry around a travel-size bottle of Tobasco Sauce in his pocket when he went to work so that he could spice up the Midwestern food at the hospital cafeteria whenever he wanted.  I used to think that was silly, but then I started doing that at college.  When it was time for me to go home during winter breaks or spring breaks, I would plan out all our family meals ahead of time with my mother, requesting kimchi jjigae for my first night home, ddukboki for my second night home, and on and on.  For lunch, I wanted kimbap constantly, always with the same egg, spinach, pickled radish, and cucumber combination inside that my mother had made while I was growing up.  I vowed, à la Scarlett O’Hara, as God is my witness, I’ll never be without kimchi again.

As can only happen in America, when I grew up, I fell in love with and married a man whose spice tolerance, on a scale of 0 to 10, is -1.  He grew up in Ohio, with food that was quite reminiscent of Kansas.  While we were dating, he bravely tried kimchi a couple times but then decided I had to accept his gastrointestinal tract for what it was.  The humble kimbap and a few of the other milder dishes were the perfect cultural bridge for us because they offer a lot of variety—full of different flavors, textures, and even colors—but is not in the least bit spicy.  We could share the kimbap and I could have all the spicy banchan and he could have the not spicy banchan.

A fascinating thing has been happening to kimbap lately.  Even though it is a simple, unpretentious dish, mainly invented for picnics and quick lunches, the lowly kimbap has been getting a makeover.  I’ve seen kimbap with tuna fish inside.  I’ve seen kimbap with a hot dog inside—the Korean version of pigs-in-a-blanket.  I’ve seen kimbap with kimchi inside.  The let’s-try-something-different attitude has swept Korean cuisine as with so many other national cuisines, coming up with some wonderful creations, like kimchi pizza, hamburgers with ramen noodle buns, bulgogi wraps, kimchi Bloody Marys, and even, finally, cheese bap (bibimbap with a dollop of melted cheese, in case the name wasn’t obvious enough).

I am old enough to remember that one of the most loaded words when talk turned to diversity and culture was “assimilation,” conjuring up images of the puce color that resulted when you smooshed all the different colors of Play Doh together, or the total erasure of individuality like with the cyborg conglomerate from the “Star Trek” series.  Recently, however, the word “assimilation” has had a renaissance, especially when trying to understand and mitigate the violence of extreme Muslims.  Many people have claimed that the way to un-alienate alienated Muslims is to have them assimilate into the Western societies in which they live, or, by implication, become more Westernized.  Sometimes, it seems to me that the discussion is framed more like a choice: us or them.

I’ve just been reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir Infidel.  She writes so eloquently about the brutal cruelty of her childhood and the violence that was perpetrated on her and other women in the name of Islam.  She describes with grace and passion her journey as she begins to question some of the fundamental beliefs of Islam, some of the sayings in the Quran, and her ultimate realization that she can no longer abide by the tenets of Islam.  I admire her moral and intellectual courage to question as she does, to decide for herself what her religious beliefs will or won’t be.  I became a little anxious, however, when I read, “Dutch society was churning with discussion over how best to integrate Muslims, and Muslims in Holland also seemed largely aware now that they needed to choose between Western values and the old ways.”  This dichotomy, Western or Islam, seemed to me to be extreme itself.

I volunteer at a non-profit agency that works with refugees who have been resettled in Ohio.  These refugees come from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.  They have fled their home countries because of ethnic cleansing or religious persecution.  I work with the school-aged kids, tutoring them in an after-school program.  Many of these kids are Muslim, and their religion is a very important part of the heritage they are trying to keep alive in the face of threatened cultural erasure.  These kids and their extended families that have fled with them are engaged in a delicately balanced, tightly nuanced dance of figuring out who they are, how much to stay that way and what is up for revision.  In other words, they are immigrants, facing all the same heart-wrenching questions of identity that all immigrants face.  Yet, because they are also Muslims, they sometimes face an extra stigma.  And to ask them to assimilate to Western ideals, implying that we know better than they what they should be, seems to me to say that they have escaped religious persecution only to be rescued by religious persecution.

For this reason, I am deeply suspicious of the word “assimilation”.  That’s why I cleave to that term popularized by physics and reimagined by gastronomy, “fusion,” since it can be used for food, for music, and for cultural or ethnic identity as well.  My children, for example, are partly Korean from me.  Their father’s forebears came from various western European countries, from Norway to Italy, with a stop off in the British Isles.  But really, our children and so many of their generation are a whole new entity—full of surprising, unexpected combinations that you’d never consider until they were actually in front of you and then you see how much sense it really makes.  Yet my children cannot not be Korean, even if they wanted to.  To ask them to choose to be either Korean—because some white people are incredibly violent and murderous—or Caucasian—because some Koreans are incredibly violent and murderous—seems nonsensical.  In the same way, people can’t excise out the part of them that is Muslim or Catholic or Buddhist or Jewish, even if they’ve decided they don’t believe anymore.  Global data show that Muslims will outnumber all other religious groups by the next century.  How will the West feel about the word “assimilation” if it is asked of them?

Fusion cuisine succeeds and fails because people try, not because they deny.  How can we encourage questioning, evolution, give and take for all groups?  My husband may be violently opposed to spicy peppers but I will never deny my need for them and he would never deny my need for them.  Can we take the same approach to religious disagreements? And in the meantime, why not combine Persian food with Chinese rice wine, Chinese desserts with French wines, French hors d’oeurvres with American whiskey, and American meat and potatoes with Korean soju?

The first time I ever had a persimmon was when I was living in France.  We had been in France for about six months and didn’t really know very many French people yet.   Our children, four- and five-years-old at the time, were enrolled in a French school, and that was our saving grace.  It’s wonderful how having young children gives you entry into a community.  Once our children started being invited to their classmates’ birthday parties, their parents started inviting us over for dinner.  Having dinner in a French household is a wonderful gustatory journey.  The first time we went, while our children played with their children, our hosts invited us out onto their sun-drenched back patio, where we nibbled appetizers and drank aperitifs.

Our first introduction to French hospitality was also my first introduction to the persimmon.  Our appetizers were lovely toothpicks on which were speared a small chunk of persimmon, then a morsel of prosciutto, then a small chunk of cucumber.  This might remind you of the well-known appetizer of melon and prosciutto found in many restaurants, but the persimmon is much more luscious than any melon.  It is so sweet that you would swear it had been marinated in sugar.  It also has an intoxicating color, more passionate than a cantaloupe but less extravagant than a blood orange.  The combination of the impossibly sweet persimmon with the salty earthiness of the prosciutto and the cool impartiality of the cucumber was the culinary equivalent of a wonderful novel—unstoppable momentum towards an emotional denouement, and then a well-controlled ending.

When I look back at my first taste of persimmon, I’m surprised that it took so long.  For one thing, persimmons are very popular in Asia.  My parents really enjoy eating persimmons.  You can find persimmons in drinks, in desserts, as dried fruit.  They’re pretty ubiquitous in the fall.  Yet I had never tried one until I was a grown-up living in France.

I did try to recreate that wonderful appetizer when my family returned to the States.  I assembled my chunks of cucumber, prosciutto, and persimmon on toothpicks and passed them around as an hors d’oeuvre at a dinner party we were hosting.  They were a huge flop.  The persimmons felt and tasted like hard, dried, chalky orange glue.  It was really embarrassing.

I imagine this is a paler version of the embarrassment Li-Young Lee talks of in his poem “Persimmon,” when his sixth-grade teacher makes him stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between “persimmon” and “precision,” on the day she has brought persimmons, which she calls a “Chinese apple”, to class and cuts them up so that all the students can taste a morsel but which Lee already knows the children will not like because the persimmons are not yet ripe.  Since my failed attempt to recreate the appetizer, I have been wary of this fruit, convinced I could not unlock its sweetness.  But every autumn, when persimmons are in season, I would glance at them in grocery stores, jealous of the people who confidently bought them, wondering what secret they knew that I didn’t.

Finally, this year, I decided to give myself another chance and bought some persimmons.  I made sure the persimmons were soft and ripe, to avoid that dried glue taste.  When I got them home, I wanted to try one immediately, so I peeled one.  And it pretty much turned to a slick, juicy mess in my hands.  Still edible, and deliciously sweet, but very messy.  And not at all like the persimmon I had in France.

To figure out what I was doing wrong, I turned to an expert—my mother.  And she gave me my persimmon lesson:

There are two types of persimmons.  One kind has the shape of a miniature pumpkin that’s been flattened from the top and the bottom, which is the kind I’d just bought.  She told me that you must buy these in the fall when they are still firm, like an apple (which Li-Young Lee’s teacher knew and I obviously hadn’t).   The soft and squishy ones are overripe.  My mother likes to cut the persimmon into four quarter wedges.  She slices away the thin white filament that runs vertically through the core of the fruit because it can cause constipation if you eat it.  Then she peels the skin away and eats the fruit.  So simple, once you know.

The other kind of persimmon is shaped like a really fat teardrop.  You can also buy these in the fall, but they are much too bitter to be eaten then.  These persimmons are like stubborn misanthropes.  They like to be left alone for a long time.  In Korea, people used to leave them in a shed (these days an unheated garage can serve the same purpose) and ignore them all winter long.  Then, in the spring, as the weather begins to warm, it’s as if the persimmon come out of hibernation and begin to ripen.  Over the course of the spring, you must peel back just the tiniest sliver of skin and lick the exposed flesh to see if the fruit has fully ripened.  If it still hasn’t fully sweetened, then it needs to sit a little longer by itself until it is ready.

Once the slow strip-tease of the persimmon’s skin finally reveals that the fruit is ready is when you must practice strict self-control and abstinence.  Do not eat the persimmon.  Instead, put the persimmon in the freezer and force yourself to forget about them again.  You don’t need to slice them, you don’t even need to wrap them; just put them whole, original, into suspended animation in the freezer and ignore them.

Five to six months later, in the stifling, brutal heat of summer, take one of the persimmons out of the freezer and cut off the top.  With a spoon, gently scoop out the slightly-thawed but still refreshingly chilly fruit and put in your mouth.  Savor, linger.  Better than ice cream.

Then, start all over again in autumn.  One persimmon for instant gratification.  Another persimmon for delayed gratification.  I wish I had known this all those years ago and saved myself the embarrassment of serving the wrong persimmon.

Like Li-Young Lee’s difficulty distinguishing between “persimmon” and “precision” because English is not his first language, I couldn’t distinguish between the two varieties of persimmon and didn’t know how to eat them correctly because I am not fluent in Korean culture.  Being born in one culture but growing up in another often feels like a constant struggle for an elusive bilingual and bi-cultural competency that will ultimately, in theory, make us feel like we belong.

I have recently begun volunteering with a non-profit agency that works with refugees from various Asian countries who have been settled in the Cleveland area.  This agency offers medical services, legal advice, and many other support services to these refugees.  I’m helping out with a newspaper begun by two Nepali-speaking Bhutanese cousins who grew up in a refugee camp in Nepal.  They wanted to improve communication and cohesiveness within their community here in the United States, so they began this newspaper.  I’m also volunteering in the afterschool tutoring program for refugee kids of all grade levels, helping them with their homework.

My first day in the afterschool program, I walked into a classroom filled with second- and third-graders, all speaking in several different languages, including English.  I worked with two little girls, both from Thailand.  The older girl, a third-grader, spoke Thai as her first language while the younger girl, a second-grader, spoke Burmese as her first language.  But they both spoke English very well.  And the first thing they asked me when I sat down to work with them was what languages I spoke.  It was just accepted as fact by all the school kids in that classroom that people speak multiple languages.  So I explained to them that I speak some French and a teensy weensy bit of Korean.  We compared how to say different words in different languages, and we laughed at how funny they sounded, words like “book” or “pencil” or “heart”.

When I was growing up, my siblings, my parents, and I would sometimes make puns using Korean words that sounded close to English words.  There is an expression in Korean that means, “That’s driving me crazy!” or “That’s crazy!” that sounds like “mi chi geh neh”.  When you say it quickly, it sounds a little bit like “Michigan”.  So we used to joke about going to Detroit, mi chi geh neh, and then cackle hysterically.  Now I have a family of my own, and I once tried to explain this joke to my children, why it’s so funny.  But, as everyone knows, once you start explaining why a joke, a pun, or ANYTHING is funny, it immediately becomes completely flat and completely unfunny.

But my children and I had our own language jokes.  When we were living in France, my kids went to a French school and would often tell me about what they were learning in school.  One day, they came home and sang a song they had learned that day.  It was called “Voici que l’ange Gabriel” (Here is the angel Gabriel) but I thought they sang “Voici le linge de Gabriel” (Here is Gabriel’s laundry).  I was confused why an archangel would have laundry—and why a song would be written about it—so I asked my kids, which confirmed their opinion that my French was mediocre at best. In spite of the fact that they felt so sorry for me (or maybe because of it), they only laughed for a few minutes before teaching me the real words to the song.

This past summer, I taught at the summer school run by the non-profit agency for refugee kids.  The school was for all grades, and I taught reading and writing poetry to high school students.  Again, there was a mixture of languages in the classroom: Karen, Arabic, Afghani, Somali, as well as English.  When working on their assignments, the students often conferred amongst themselves in their own languages.  Even though I had no clue what they were saying, whether they were discussing their work, their plans for the weekend, or their thoughts about my teaching creds, I was not bothered.  I was comfortable with not understanding the languages around me because I was (obviously) used to it.  And it seemed the ultimate in power politics and condescension to make them speak so that I would be able to understand everything they said.  Who was I to take their language away?  We just laughed and learned together and assumed that every language was equally valid.

Of course, laughter and language have been powerful partners for as long as people could communicate and laugh.  We use language to laugh at ourselves but also to laugh at the foolishness of others.  François Rabelais, an early 16^th-century humanist, monk, scholar, and physician, wrote one of the first French satires to laugh at the sophistry and hypocrisy of the clergy and the nobility.  We are all familiar with the broad satire of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the precise piercings of Jane Austen’s novels.  The targets of the satirical language in all these works are people or institutions that deserve mockery, either because of cruelty and inequality, selfishness, hypocrisy, or just plain muleheadedness.  And the laughter separates those on the “inside,” who do the laughing, from those on the “outside,” who are laughed at.

Sometimes, I get confused by the intended target of some satirists.  The most recent case was the infamous “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”  The  (supposed) intended target was the owner of the Washington Redskins, trying to defuse the controversy over the name of the team by setting up a foundation supporting Native Americans.  But then why mock Asians and Asian-sounding names?  Are Asians inherently laughable?  Or was the assumption that Asians are always outsiders and so safe targets for laughter?  Stephen Colbert is a wonderfully incisive satirist, and I admire his show.  But gratuitous mockery, laughing at and making outsiders of an entire race when you mean to poke fun at someone who puts commercial value over racial sensitivity, seems too easy and rather hypocritical.

I learned a new word while listening to a segment on NPR a while ago.  They were airing a story about people who gather information from people’s cell phones about their locations, how long they’re there, where they go next.  These companies analyze this data for retailers to see where people stop and browse and what they pass over.  The NPR interviewer asked the researcher how they protect the privacy of the cell phone owners.  The researcher responded that they don’t have the names or any identifying information about the cell phone owner, that the data is “anonymized” so that individuals could not be identified.

I’d never heard that word before: “anonymize”, which means “to make anonymous” or “to carry out in such a way that anonymity is maintained.”   This is such an interesting concept because the value of anonymity depends upon the reasons for identification.  Lately, of course, there has been so much talk about privacy, the invasion of privacy, protecting our privacy, the ability and the right to keep to ourselves what we want to keep to ourselves.  Maybe we, as individuals who value our individuality, are offended by being reduced to data points that help corporations and government agencies to either profit even more from us or monitor us as if we were wayward teenage rebels about to misbehave.  The information flow is unbalanced; the researchers, corporations, and agencies doing the monitoring want to maintain their anonymity while we are data-mined for every nuance of our likes, dislikes, intentions, needs, and spending habits.

Unwarranted curiosity about ourselves is easily deemed offensive when the perpetrator is an unknown, faceless corporation or agency.  But what about when the unbridled curiosity comes from a real person, eager to seek information about you—just because?   What if you just want to live, to go about searching for meaning and purpose for yourself as most people do, and are brought up short by someone else’s need to “place” you?

I was having lunch with two friends, both Asian women, a while ago when our conversation turned to questions that were difficult to answer.  The trickiest question is “Where are you from?”  When I was growing up in Kansas and people asked me that question, I’d respond, “Wichita,” because that was the truth.  That’s where I lived, that’s where my family lived.  But the questioner would often become irritated and shake his head, as if I were being purposefully obtuse or unbelievably dumb, and ask where I was from.    And then comment how good my English was, how I didn’t even have an accent.

These interrogations are based on two equally tiresome assumptions.  One is that, because I am “ethnic”, I must be a recent immigrant.  Of course, there have been Asians in the United States for years.  According to the Office of the Historian of the State Department, Chinese immigrants first arrived in the US in the 1850s to work in gold mines, factories, and farms.  And, according to the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, Korean immigrants first arrived as farm laborers in Honolulu in 1903.  According to the Library of Congress, the first Japanese laborers were brought illegally to Honolulu in 1868 by the then Hawaiian consul general.  However, beginning in the 1880s, many more Japanese immigrants followed legally.  Filipino immigrants to the US also were quite numerous by the 1890s, after the Phillipines became a US territory, according to Asian-Nation.org.

The second assumption behind the question of my origin is that my personal history is not mine to keep but should be surrendered on demand.  And that by knowing exactly which country and race my eyes and bone structure originated from somehow equalled knowing me.

Curiosity is a wonderful trait, as we all know.  But we’ve all been on the receiving end of questions that cross the line into invasive probing.  Like the time when I called a clothing company to order something from their catalog (back in the days before online ordering), and the order-taker on the other end of the line asked me, “Oh, what’s it like to be an Asian from Kansas?”  These various attempts to figure out who I am, ironically, just make me feel more anonymous, as if I am nothing more than bits of information for others to digest.

The stories we have to tell are, to me, like loaves of challah bread: twisty and circuitous, benefitting from taking the time to rise to the occasion and then to settle into a comfortable place, after having first been kneaded and massaged.  And, like breaking bread, telling one’s stories are best when shared with friends we’ve taken the time to court and cultivate, people who appreciate the trust implicit in the act of storytelling and the beauty of slow revelations.

You’ve got to take pity on the poor apple.  For such a small fruit, it must carry the burden of so much symbolic and cultural baggage, from religion to fairy tales to patriotic slogans.  For example, the apple is usually the fruit of choice when depicting the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, the juicy temptation the serpent offers to Eve, who in turn offers it to Adam, thereby establishing the basic fallen human condition for all eternity, according to the Bible.  On a much smaller scale, Sleeping Beauty’s evil stepmother tricks her into eating a poisoned apple, causing Sleeping Beauty basically to fall into a coma.  But, in a schizophrenic turn of imagery, apples can also represent health, love, and a feeling of belonging.  Want to instill a sense of patriotism?  Just say something is as “American as mom and apple pie” and I immediately conjure up a picture of a large family picnic on a Kansas farm with a fresh-baked apple pie cooling on the windowsill.  And who hasn’t heard the motto, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”?

It’s a good thing there are so many different varieties of apples to shoulder the responsibility of representing so much.  I often think about which apple varieties would be most appropriate for which scenario.  I wonder if the Tree of Knowledge might have had crab apples for its fruit because they are exquisitely small and delicate-looking but so sour that, if you bite into it, your face contracts into a grimace of contorted puckering.  And Sleeping Beauty’s stepmother would have fed her Fujis or Braeburns, apples with such luscious sweetness that the taste of any poison would be masked.  The best apples for apple pies is, of course, always the subject of much debate, but I laugh a little because apple pie is such an appropriate dessert for a country of immigrants: one can use a mix-and-match approach with the apples, combining some Granny Smiths with some Galas or Golden Delicious or any other apple at hand.

In Korean, the word for apple is “sa gwa.”  But the word “sa gwa” has a couple different definitions: it can also mean “apology.”  This kind of multiplicity of the meaning of one word happens in every language.  Just look at the word “treat”: it can mean a little something-something you give yourself when you’re having a rough day; it can mean paying for your friend’s dinner at a restaurant; or it can mean tending to an injury or disease.  I’ve been hearing a lot of apologies in the news recently.  Target apologized for the breach in security of its credit card database.  The Patriot-News newspaper apologized for an editorial dismissively belittling the Gettysburg Address when first delivered by President Lincoln.  So many celebrities have apologized for unwise comments spoken during unguarded moments.  Some of these apologies are sincere and some aren’t.

I know that my teenage years were egocentric ones.  Though my self-absorption may have been somewhat typical of teenagers, that doesn’t make it any less painfully embarrassing when I look back at my younger self and see how little I appreciated what my parents did for me, how hard they worked to give me so many opportunities.  I’m so grateful that they are still here so that I can show them I’ve finally matured enough to recognize how grateful I should be.  And to apologize for not realizing this sooner.

There is a very interesting expression in Korean that is (roughly) pronounced (I apologize for the bad transliteration, since Korean uses a different writing system): chal mo tay yo.  The meaning of this expression changes depending on where you put the stress.  If you put the stress on the first word and say CHAL mo tay yo, you are explaining that you really can’t do something well, that you are not skilled or talented enough to sing well or cook well or draw well.  If you put the stress on the second word and say chal MO tay yo, you are saying that you have made a mistake and you apologize.  To my parents, I say chal MO tay yo.

Some things are easier to apologize for than others.   Apologizing for history seems to be particularly difficult, for some reason.  It took the United States almost 150 years to acknowledge its terrible legacy of slavery; the United States senate finally offered an official apology for slavery, in 2009.  Some apologies, even once given, are so painful that the guilty want to retract it and deny it was ever even necessary.  I’ve been thinking about this recently as I watch the Japanese government’s struggle with its terrible legacy of sexually enslaving women during World War II.  Given the euphemism of “comfort women,” these were often teenage girls or young adult women, kidnapped from their families in Korea, brought to Japanese soldiers fighting in China or other parts of Asia, and forced to “comfort” these soldiers repeatedly, under brutal conditions, with no consideration for their health or well-being, and then tossed away, ridden with awful diseases, injuries, and self-loathing.  Very few Japanese thought these women deserved any kind of “treat”ing.

In 1993, the then-Chief Cabinet Secretary of the Japanese government, Yohei Kono, issued a formal apology for Japan’s forcible abduction and sexual enslavement of Korean women during World War II.  In what has come to be known as the Kono Statement, Secretary Kono admits to the Japanese military’s knowledge of and active participation in forcing “comfort women” to service Japanese men at “comfort stations.”  The statement reads, in part:  “Undeniably, this was an act, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, that severely injured the honor and dignity of many women. The Government of Japan would like to take this opportunity once again to extend its sincere apologies and remorse to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.”  Unfortunately, the Japanese government has tried many times, as recently as last week, to retract, diminish, or revise the apology and, thus, revise its guilt.

Think how much forgiveness there would be in this world if apologizing were as easy as changing the emphasis of our words or offering a bushel of apples.

The National World War II Museum’s web site opens with a frightening statement: “Approximately every two minutes a memory of World War II—its sights and sounds, its terrors and triumphs—disappears.  Yielding to the inalterable process of aging, the men and women who fought and won the great conflict are now in their 80s and 90s.  They are dying quickly—at the rate of 550 a day.”  The museum is in a race against time to record as many stories from these veterans as possible.  Their mission is to keep these experiences alive and real, to make history books flesh and blood.

The passage of time is also having a huge impact on another, very special, group of people from the same war: Holocaust survivors.  On December 6, 2013, The Wall Street Journal published an article about the rapidly dwindling numbers of men and women who experienced first-hand the horrors of the Holocaust and lived to tell their stories.   For example, of the 50,000 inmates in Bergen-Belsen at liberation, only about 2,000 survivors remain, according to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial and Museum.  Like with World War II veterans, there are several museums around the world racing to preserve as much of this history in survivors’ own words as possible.

What these museums show us, of course, is that history is not just dates and statistics, or the famous generals and politicians.  The impact of these museums comes from seeing a doll or reading a diary or hearing a voice, that there was a single living soul connected to that object.  It’s really about the cumulative effect of millions of individual, personal, private lives.

What grieves me about this race against time is how many stories are being lost.  I mean more than the heart-wrenching stories of bombings and starvation and heroism and cruelty.  These stories are, of course, vitally important.  But I also want to hear stories about going to the store to buy your first party dress; or what barbershops smelled like back then; or what wintertime felt like; or how the taste of carrots has changed over the decades.  I think about how many family stories—small, insignificant, interesting-only-to-the-speaker-and-listener type of family stories—will never be told or heard.

I started to think about small, quiet family stories because of an off-hand comment my father made a little while ago.  My 80-year-old father doesn’t see the need to buy any more clothes for himself.  He hasn’t bought anything for a few years now.  Even though his clothes are far from raggedy, his wardrobe is more along the lines of a comfortable habit than up-to-date trends.  My father has never been a fashion icon but for a lot of his adult life he’s had the means to buy himself new clothes whenever he felt he needed to.  But now my father felt, whether rightly or wrongly, that he had reached an age when he no longer needed to.

My mother asked me to get some warm clothes for my father this past Christmas.  I got my father a thermal shirt and a fleece vest.  I wasn’t there when my father opened the box (a week before Christmas) because we live in different states.  But he tried on the clothes and loved them.  When he Face Timed me to say thanks, he said, “These clothes are so fancy, I’m too embarrassed to wear them!”

I laughed because I thought what an odd comment that was.  I was about to tell him that the shirt and vest really weren’t that fancy when he asked, “Do you remember saying that the first time you got new clothes?”

When I was very young, I was very sickly.  So sickly, in fact, that my parents were afraid I might not live.  Because of this fear, my parents always dressed me in old, worn, patched, ugly clothes.  Their motivation was not based on the thought that I wasn’t worth buying new clothes for.  They were actually trying to protect me.  When I was a small child in Korea, people thought that if you dressed sickly children in nice clothes, Death would come and snatch that child away.  As it prowled the towns and countryside looking for feeble, dying souls, if Death saw a pretty but weak child, it would covet that child and take it.  But if that child were dressed in old, ugly clothes, Death wouldn’t be attracted and, instead, would overlook him or her.

When my parents finally determined that I was strong enough that Death couldn’t take me, my father bought me brand new clothes.  When he gave me my new clothes, my father told me this past Christmastime, the first thing I said was, “These clothes are so fancy!  I’m so embarrassed!  I don’t know how to wear new clothes!”  I have no memory of this, and my father laughed as he recounted this story.

What struck me, though, was how my father saw a parallel in our family story, how his new clothes to me when I was a very young child mirrored his new clothes from me now that I am a middle-aged woman and he is a grandfather.  The continuity of that connection, the survival and reincarnation of that memory, which in turn reinforces our lineage, are what make family stories so indispensable.

Another family story concerns a huge absence in terms of national cultural history.  Several years ago, I was reading a book on the history of Korean culture and customs.  My parents were visiting me, and my father asked me if he could borrow that book when I finished.  I was a little surprised because I assumed that since he had grown up in Korea, he already knew everything in the book.   But he told me that since he grew up under the Japanese occupation of Korea between World War 1 and World War 2, he didn’t learn much about his own country’s history.  The Japanese repressed as much of the Korean culture and identity as they could.  And because Korean history could not be taught in schools, my father always felt a big rupture in his connection to Korea’s history and past.

Interestingly enough, a very similar sentiment was expressed to me very recently by a man of Persian Jewish descent.  He currently lives in Ohio but grew up in Iran.  He has written a memoir about his childhood and about being Jewish in a conservative Muslim country, and I am currently editing the second edition of his memoir.  In his memoir, Isaac Yomtovian describes what it was like in the 1950s, when he learned for the first time about the Holocaust .  He had no idea anything like this had occurred, even though—or maybe because—Iran had close ties with Germany.  Most of his Jewish community in Tehran had no access to information from or connection with the “outside world” because of the repressive hold the conservative Muslim clergy had on education and information.

For my father and Isaac—and for me—these museums, and their collections or stories, are less about a promise never to forget and more about filling a gap in our identities.

Last fall, we took our son to college.  My husband, my son, and I got up early that morning, showered, had a quick breakfast, loaded up the car, and drove to Oberlin.  There were so many things I wanted to tell my son, so many words of wisdom I felt compelled to impart, but I kept most of them at bay because I knew he wouldn’t appreciate them right then and there.  Instead, we filled the time and space during the drive by watching the sky, making predictions about whether the rain would let up or not, how we would be able to move in if it started to pour, what his roommate would be like and if he had already settled in.  We talked about the traffic we were encountering on the way, we talked about whether two high-school buddies who were also going to be freshmen at Oberlin had started on their drives yet and what time they would arrive, and we laid out a schedule for the rest of the day.

At the end of the summer, we received notification from Oberlin that dorms would open at 9am on move-in day, so we wouldn’t be able to pick up keys before then.  We arrived at our son’s dorm at 8:20am.  We were not the first family to have arrived either.  Fortunately, the people in charge were ready for the obsessive compulsive parents of incoming freshmen and (keeping a wary eye on the changeable sky) handed out keys to all the early birds so we could keep on our schedule.  We were able to unload the car and move everything into our son’s room during a break in the rain.

That day, like so many move-in days around the country, was devoted solely to unpacking, organizing the dorm room, rearranging the furniture, making the bed, rearranging the furniture again, putting clothes away, setting up his laptop, rearranging the furniture once more, going to Walmart for all the stuff he didn’t bring from home, reorganizing his things, meeting the other people on his floor, going to opening talks, receptions, picnics, going back to Walmart, and rearranging the furniture for the last time.  In other words, there was absolutely no time for any final words of advice.

The next day was similar, though filled with different activities.  We had to go to orientation meetings for students and parents, open a bank account, fill out some more paperwork, squeeze in a lunch, meet professors, figure out where the mailboxes were.  The weather, like the day before, was tremendously hot and humid.  And really, I had forgotten all about the wonderful bits I was going to share with my son because all I could think about was how much I wanted to sit in a cold pool with a large ice coffee.  I dragged myself to a final session for parents while the students attended a different orientation session.

The parents’ session was about “Letting Go.”  I secretly snorted to myself because I thought myself an expert on letting go.  After all, I had already sent my daughter off to college and I had survived that pretty well.  My daughter and I still have a very close relationship; we chat regularly via lots of different technological marvels: text, Face Time, Snap Chat.  She knows how grateful I am when she calls me “just cuz,” so she makes sure to do it often.  I considered not going to this parent session because, in my hubris, I thought I didn’t need it.  There was nothing new the college administrators could tell me about letting go.  But, then I thought, it couldn’t hurt.  I don’t want my son skipping his college classes, so what am I going to say if he asks me how my meeting was?

So I went.  And the faculty member who spoke was the head of the counseling center on campus.  He talked about how maybe parents are full of last-minute advice they feel they need to give their children.  About how maybe parents are worried they didn’t teach their children well enough how to be: organized/proactive/disciplined/social/responsible/resilient/etc.  About how parents might be contrasting their children’s point in life—starting an exciting new phase, where the potential of the future is shining before them—with their own point in life—where perhaps the realities of adult life can be very different from what we imagined when we were 18.

And I thought to myself, how could he be talking so specifically about me?  How did he know about all the last-minute advice I wanted to give my son?  I wanted to tell him to be proactive—you can’t wait for someone to come and drop an opportunity into your lap.  Opportunities come only when you go search for them.  I wanted to tell him to persevere and advocate for himself.  Just because some rulebook somewhere says this is the rule doesn’t mean that it’s the rule.  If you make a good case for yourself, like why you really should be in a particular class or how much you could really help out on a research assignment, maybe someone will give you a chance.  And if the first person doesn’t, go on to the second person.  And I really wanted to tell him that these heady first days will be gone in the blink of an eye, that college will be over in the turn of the head.  So be prepared for what comes after and the only way to be prepared is to think ahead, start planning now, know what you need to know.

I was thinking a lot about whether, as a parent, I had prepared him well enough to face the world.  But part of me was also thinking about whether I had prepared myself well enough for what I faced.  Who am I now that I don’t have kids at home anymore?  Who am I if I no longer monitor if my kids are sleeping enough, if they are eating the right foods in the right amounts, if they’re safe, if they’re happy and well-adjusted, if they’re doing all the assignments they’re supposed to be doing—or if I’m only worrying about these things remotely now?

Being mostly a stay-at-home mom has been so wonderful for me.  But now I have to figure out what I am because being an empty-nester is more about a lack than about something positive.  In the weeks and months before we took our son to college, people would ask me, “So, what are you going to do with all your time without kids at home?”  as if every second of every waking minute was devoted solely to my kids.  In response, I’d just joke, “Oh, sit in bed all day eating bon-bons and watching Oprah.”  In reality, I can only follow my own advice: search out opportunities because they won’t search me out; advocate for myself; be resilient and persevere.

I recently returned from visiting my parents in Seattle.  No husband, no kids, no siblings with nephews and nieces accompanied me this time.  I had undiluted time with my parents, and we engaged in a nice give-and-take in our choice of activities.  I recommended something one day, they recommended something else the next.  It was really enjoyable because there were no expectations for exciting or “meaningful” activities intended to “create memories.”  Our decisions were very simple, like which route to take on our daily walk or which movie to see or whether to go out for dinner or not.

One of my mother’s requests was for me to help her shop for a new laptop.  My 79-year-old mother has recently become an Apple groupie.  She has an iPhone and an iPad.  And she really wanted a MacBook with retina display.  She had gone online and done a lot of research about exactly which MacBook she wanted, how much memory, the size of the screen, whether to get a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air.  One of the biggest concerns she had was whether or not she would be able to get a Korean-character keyboard programmed in so she could respond in Korean to all her emails from her friends.  Which, of course, is definitely possible and very easy.

So, when my mother felt she had done enough research and had a few remaining questions that could only be answered by a real person, we went to the Apple store.  When we arrived, we found someone to help us, a young man who looked to be in his mid-twenties, with a mop of dark brown hair and speaking very rapidly.  My mother pulled out her list of questions and my anxiety level immediately went up.

Both my parents speak English with a heavy Korean accent.  When I was growing up, my father’s English was better than my mother’s because he was out in the working world.  My mother took some classes at the local college and got her license as a real estate agent, but her real job was raising her children.  Sometimes, teachers at school would have a hard time understanding her.  Many of my friends’ mothers did, as well.

Once, when I was in high school, the parent in charge of the PTA called our house and I picked up the phone.  She wanted to relay some information for my mom about upcoming activities the PTA was planning.  She asked me if it would be better for her to tell me what was coming up and then I could explain it to my mother, just assuming that my mother didn’t speak English because of her heavy accent.  I didn’t bother telling this woman that it wasn’t as if I spoke Korean and could explain any better than she could what my mom needed to know.  I just said okay and listened to the news, told my mom exactly what I had been told, and that was that.  But my childhood is littered with moments when people looked at my mother blankly, assumed she didn’t speak or understand English because of her accent, and turned to me to “translate” for her, pretty much treating my mother as if she were invisible.

I used to try to remedy the situation by correcting my parents’ English.  If they said, “After for a while,” I’d say, “No, it’s either ‘After a while’ or ‘For a while.’”  Or if they said, “Oh, what a heck,” I’d say, “No, it’s what the heck.”  But these corrections never took.

So, when we were in the Apple store, being shown the laptops by this young guy who spoke rapid-fire English that even I had trouble following, I was mentally leaning forward and standing on my tiptoes, ready to jump in when the time came.  But with every question my mother asked, this young man not only understood exactly what she said but answered her with exactly what she wanted to know.   I relaxed a little and looked around the store and saw so many different kinds of people and heard so many different languages that I had to smile.  When I turned back to my mother’s conversation, she was even joking around with the salesman.

Looking at this twenty-something man and my 79-year-old mother made me think of a family vacation I took with my husband and children to Italy.  We had somehow found a playground, complete with swings and slides and seesaws, and my husband was playing with our children.  It was a quiet, peaceful Sunday, and we were the only people there.  I was sitting on a bench, watching.  Very close to my bench was a monument of some sort.  There are so many monuments, statues, and plaques all over Europe that to read every one you come across can be overwhelming.  So I was sitting on this bench, vaguely aware of this monument and mentally making a note to check it out when we were ready to go.

An Italian man sat down on the bench next to me.  He looked like he was in his seventies; he wore a neatly pressed suit and an old but clean hat.  And he just started talking.  He had a very soft voice, but he spoke and spoke and spoke.  Once in a while, he would point to the monument next to us while he spoke.  Of course, he spoke in Italian.  Which I didn’t understand.  I had enough Italian under my belt to get, maybe, one in twenty words.  I picked up enough to understand he was talking about World War 2.  I desperately wanted to know what stories he was passing on to me; I wanted to be able to honor his gift by mentally recording his words and writing them down later.  But all I could do was listen quietly and watch him.  And when he finished speaking, he got up and left.  The monument was dedicated to the men of that small town who had died in the war.  To this day, I wish I could have been a more responsible listener.

When we got back to my parents’ house with my mother’s new laptop, she spent the entire afternoon fiddling around with her new toy.  She was so excited and happy exploring what the laptop could do and so engrossed by it that she didn’t want to cook dinner.  We decided to go out for pizza that night.  While we ate, my dad started telling me a story.  In the middle of which, he said, “And after for a while…”