We start out early in the morning, just as K has for the thirty years since his mother died. In the beginning, he and his father and brother needed to leave early because the day-long trip required multiple bus rides and a good deal of hiking; we left our warm apartment just after breakfast to avoid traffic and to preserve the rest of the day for other pursuits. Instead of taking a bus, we hop in the car armed with snacks and audio CDs for the kids. K stops briefly outside the Coffee Bean so I can run in to get coffee while he configures the trip on the GPS system.
We leave our neighborhood and pass through the tangle of hakwons in Daechi-dong, temporarily quiet on this Sunday morning. Each building announces its contents through signs: math hakwons, English hakwons, SAT prep hakwons, doctor’s offices, pharmacies, and cafes. It seems an appropriate backdrop to our quiet front-seat conversation. As the kids listen to their audio CDs K and I quietly discuss ways to tone down W’s schedule. We feel that he has too much work and not enough time to play. We worry he may have ADD. Bombarded architecturally and socially by pressures to enroll him in math, piano, and art — by the notion that kids should be taught to be perfect at everything — we have started to lose whatever sense we once had of what is an appropriate, balanced life for a 7-year-old. As we head away from the jungle of concrete buildings and towards the highway and the Han River we fight to reclaim a sense of certainty about our roles as parents.
K’s father usually comes with us on these trips, used to being the leader and guide, as he was in the beginning. Without the GPS and away from the gridded streets of Gangnam we’d often get lost in the tangle of new highways and satellite cities which seemed to sprout, overnight, from farm fields. K’s father would offer running commentary on the places beyond the window panes: That is where so-and-so lives, that is where we used to have an apartment, this is the place where my friend had his factory, that is where your daddy went to school. He doesn’t talk about the war or the dead, who outnumber the living, but even so, he has much to say. Despite the silences and his willingness to let the past fade into the past, each journey reminds us how embedded he is in this place, in his networks of friends and acquaintances, in his knowledge of how to get things done, and in his visceral understanding of the lay of the land.
This, after all, is one of the main reasons we moved here — so that the kids could get to know their grandparents in the place in which they are fleshed out, functional people with rich lives, not rendered silly or dumb by difficulties of language and culture. If the kids want to decide he’s annoying or embarrassing later, it’ll just be because of his personality.
Leaving Seoul is like moving back in time. Past Olympic Stadium, the landscape grows greener and sparser. We see farms and farmers. Apartment complexes have begun to sprout like weeds out here, too, in the past few years, but they overlook fields rather than more apartments. We make this trip perhaps a half-dozen times a year, and each time it is different. The physical landscape mirrors the psychological one; the journey to the gravesite inevitably triggers memories of the past, though those memories are different for each of us. When K’s father is with us they retrace the old routes, arguing over events in the past, trying to figure out the points of divergence.
“Why haven’t you gotten your American citizenship?” K’s father wants to know. He sent his teenage sons to the U.S. all those years ago in order to protect them; at what cost to himself, none of us can know. By returning, we have thrown the standard narrative of immigration back in his face, which both terrifies and delights him. His happiness at having family around after so long is punctuated by anger that we won’t let him protect us the way he knows how. And he has taught himself to be suspicious of happiness anyhow — it never lasts.
He tries to offer K business advice although he doesn’t quite understand what this whole software thing is all about. Where’s the product that they make? K holds the steering wheel tight in his hands, fuming over still being treated like an 18-year-old after all these years.
As we approach the satellite city of Namyangju we begin discussing our plans to move. K is still not sure he will be able to leave his business — having one’s own small company grants a great deal of freedom but an even greater deal of uncertainty. If he cannot leave, should the kids and I go to Shanghai without him? No, we agree. We will not separate. We have seen what happens to these kirogi families; there are so many in Korea right now. The mom and kids go abroad to escape the education system and leave the father behind. K has many kirogi friends who call him, lonely, to go drinking all the time.
We exit and weave through Namyangju, which has become a poorer-looking version of Seoul. We stop to buy flowers from a local greenhouse off the side of the road and, later, to buy chocolate and soda to give as offerings from a small, run-down convenience store. Arriving at the foot of the mountain we enter the bumpy dirt road, winding through farms. The kids roll down the windows and inhale; the air is much cleaner here, and we haven’t had much clean air this spring because of Yellow Dust and construction. The kids are delighted to see the cows, though they want to roll up the windows because of the smell. Scruffy, dirty dogs wander in the lanes. We must find a place to pull over so cars going in the opposite direction can pass; there isn’t enough room in the road.
K puts the car in second gear to begin the slow ascent to the graves. “This is where grandpa taught me to drive a stick shift,” he tells the kids. We drive past a short, bowlegged farmer carrying a shovel. With his brown, leathery face and his baggy, colorless clothes, he looks like a figure from an old painting or photograph, a pre-modern artifact.
The first graves we see, close to the entrance, are the newest ones, each plot rather small, the trees only saplings. The rows remind me of the apartment buildings we’ve left. As we keep driving we’re going back in time, counting down. We finally arrive at section 13. The kids get out, a little dazed, and relieve themselves in the bushes. They are immediately interested in finding rocks. We hike down to the proper grave and note that the grass has not yet begun to grow again — it is still well-trimmed from our fall trip. Spring comes later to the mountain. We bow and greet the occupants of the grave solemnly, and then K and W walk on top of the mound to pat the dirt down with their feet to help it maintain its shape and keep it solid. Moss grows on one side and K scrapes this off with his shoe. M sits on the gravestone, looking at the surrounding farmland with his binoculars. “Is that the pond where Grandpa almost drowned?” he asks. “It is,” K smiles, “Want to go and check it out?” So we all walk gingerly down the mountain towards the pond. The boys are unsettled by the bugs and unfamiliar birdcalls and hoots of owls.
We pass many graves along the way to the pond. Some are overgrown, the shape of the mound barely visible. Some are so well kept they look almost artificial. A few other families have come and are singing hymns or planting flowers. A group of men stand around their friend’s tomb and drink soju, talking loudly. W is starting to learn Chinese characters, so enjoys pointing out the ones he knows with his fingers. “Look at this one, Daddy!” “See all the names? This person had many children and grandchildren.” K clucks at the mound, overgrown and weedy. “So many descendants and no one has taken care of his grave.”
After reaching the pond the boys throw in rocks and branches, then take turns running at each other. I ask K what he says to his mom when he stands at the grave. He says, “Not much. It’s been a long time.” What would she understand of our lives, is what I imagine he’s thinking. Our five years here have not been enough to bridge the cultural, generational, and educational differences between K and his father. It must be hard to have even an imaginary conversation with someone who only knew him as a boy. But next year he will be the age at which she died, and I think it weighs heavily on his consciousness.
Returning to the grave we pour some Chilsung cider at the head of the mound, then place a small piece of Ghana chocolate in the same place. This is what M has been waiting for — he’s excited to eat the rest of the bar. I divide up the pieces as the boys wait with their mouths open like baby birds. When we come next time, we’ll have more work — weeding, trimming, and shaping the bushes. We’ll come with our bag of tools, including scythe, clippers, and gloves. W will help carry the trimmings in a large pile near the parking lot. Remembering the dead is an active process here in Korea, requiring a lot of physical labor and holidays earmarked for trips to family gravesites. We have come a week in advance of Arbor Day/Hansik Day because we know that on the actual day, this place will be crowded and the traffic will be heavy.
I have been accompanying K on these journeys for the past ten years, observing him, thinking that all this effort — the journey outside the city to the quiet of the mountainside, the shaping and trimming and maintenance of the mound, the greetings, and the offerings — channel the emotion of the visit into something active and physical, which is appropriate to someone of his personality.
But it occurs to me that for someone like him who has left his family behind, these trips to the grave must be one of the few constants in his returns. His father and stepmother have moved several times since then. Seoul itself looks completely different, and K’s social position and responsibilities have changed, but the graveyard looks much the way it must have been thirty years ago. The act of returning here, of going back in time and remembering, forces him to measure the distances in time, culture, and understanding, not just between his current and former self or between the 42-year-old ailing mother and his 41-year-old self but also between him and his father. It allows him to search for the points of divergence in their relationship and to take stock of what went wrong. When we come here with our boys, full of plans for their future, smooth chubby hands confidently placed in K’s rough ones, I wonder if it is not so much the loss of his mother that he mourns, but the loss of his father.