Fly on the Wall

Index
I love being like a fly on the wall. My aunt, my mother, and I are sharing a room at my cousin’s house at Seoul. Each morning when we wake up, they start talking and sometimes continue for hours. They speak of their youth, family, and life under Japanese occupation. I am transported into another time, another world—the world of my mother's childhood.

As they speak of their mother, I feel the tenderness. Tears well up in their eyes. I have heard some things I never knew about my grandmother, Lady Park. She was the wife of a wealthy village lord. My grandfather, Master Park, owned all the land. The village economy was the farming of his land or working for his estate.

Lady Park had six daughters, and my mother was the last one. After Lady Park gave birth to my mother, her mother-in-law started to put pressure on Master Park to look for a second wife. After one year of her incessant speaking, Master Park finally buckled under to his mother’s need for an heir. Lady Park started to prepare for another wife for her husband. She started to make her husband’s wedding garment.

My aunt and mother spoke of the pain and agony their mother must have gone through. Lady Park began to write. At a time when most men could not read, she wrote poems and essays which eventually filled two volumes. My aunt and mother never saw them.

My aunt and mother spoke of how fortunate their mother was to have borne a son two years after the birth of my mother. As the oldest boy, he would inherit half of my grandfather’s estate. The younger sons, children of the second wife, would share the other half.

The second wife was a frightened young seventeen year old. Her parents had given her in marriage to Master Park in exchange for a plot of farm land. She felt so betrayed that she never visited her family again. When she came into this large household, she would embrace a young toddler, my aunt at age two. She would love this girl. This was an outlet and comfort to her as she tried to fit into this large house. She remained in the background until my grandmother passed away prematurely eleven years later. Then she became the new Lady Park. Yet she would go through life watching her own children struggle academically in a home where education was so highly esteemed and where the first Lady Park’s children excelled.

I will see my uncle in a few days. He is the one for whom my grandfather had waited so long. He is the one who took away the life-long reproach of my grandmother. He was the apple of his parents’ eyes, the prince of the village.