May 6, 2004
My Family Women
(in Five Thousand Years of Diaspora)
by Inhui Lee
I come from a long line of women whose desperate desire to write their life story was never materialized. My mother, her mother and her mother's mother, the women in the neighborhood where I grew up. . . I call them my family women.
When I was a little girl, often I heard my family women say, "If I tell you my story, three months, day and night, plus ten more days would not be enough."; again, they would say with a deep sigh, "if I tell you my story, three volumes (of novel), plus one more book wouldn't do it." They had so much to say. But how will their stories be told? My family women have perished. Their stories were buried with them. No wonder some of them come back as ghosts.1 These women simply couldn't die, because their stories, full of sadness, anger, anguish, and injustice must be told.
Literacy was denied to my family women for thousands of years. My family women are dispossessed and marginalized in their own country. In One Hundred Major Events in the Korean History, according to Korean feminist historian, En Bong Park, about three thousand years ago, when Korean society moved from an egalitarian collective tribal way of life to private ownership of land, classism and sexism were instilled in the Korean peninsula (28). Thus the miserable lot of women of all classes, and that of the lower class in particular, was carved in. The wretched and inhuman treatment of poor women grew worse with time.
Cut off from the very source of power -- literacy -- my family women have lived in diaspora in their own land. What I mean is that my family women have never enjoyed a fair treatment as lawful citizens of their country. They were/are pushed down to the gutters of society, left with their bleeding wounds to die after they were/are exhausted by laboring for their nation building. The nation-state of Korea had/ has no interest in the welfare of these women. My family women were/ are never given a chance to voice their concerns that could be reflected in socio-political policies. The Korean history that I was taught to be proud of is also that of a very sad and oppressive herstory. In this sense, yes, my family women have been in diasopora for more than five thousand years because they are born with no country to claim as their own. If I must rely on the history, it is only three thousand years of my family women's diaspora, but in my memory, there was not one shining moment for my family women while I was taught to be proud of our ancient history of five thousand years. That's why I claim five thousand years of diaspora for my family women, instead of three thousand years. I justify my logic by using feminist thought, that is to say, that though women are the majority in numbers, the way we are treated in general we are stuck in the position of an oppressed minority.
Therefore, it is inevitable that I claim, as Ana Castillo does in her Massacre of The Dreamers: Essays On Xicanisma, I am one of the "countryless women" who are "in effect represented by no country" (24). Most African American women I know don't feel they have a country; most Native Indian women, either. Poor Asian Pacific Island women. Poor Latina women. Mixed blood women. Lesbian women. Global migrant women workers. Poor immigrant women. Poor white women in their trailers (am I stereotyping them?) Welfare mothers. We have no county to represent us, therefore no country to claim, nor be proud of. We are all women in diaspora.
. . .
My mother can't read or write Korean. Born into a peasant family, literacy was denied to her, to her mother, to her mother's mother. . . It is the women of my generation, born and raised in the ruins of the Korean War, who are enjoying the privilege of literacy and reaping its fantastic rewards, such as becoming teachers and professors. After suffering from brutal colonization by Imperial Japan and the devastation of the Korean War, perhaps, the patriarchs of Korea were so defeated that they couldn't stop women from literacy. I was lucky to go to elementary school. No public education for elementary school existed, so my family had to pay tuition for my elementary school. Schooling was unthinkable for most women in my mother's generation, let alone college education. Until the end of the feudal Yi Dynasty, only a very few women from noble families were allowed to learn reading and writing in Chinese and Korean. The Yi Dynasty invited the Japanese military to suppress the Donghak Rebellion (1894), which was a popular people's movement initiated by peasant farmers who opposed the foreign, imperial powers of Japan, England, France, Russia and the USA. The farmers based their rebellion on the teaching of Donghak, Study of the East (against the source of western powers, Study of the West, Seohak). According to the teaching of Donghak, all people are as noble as gods, and men and women are born equal. They demanded "self-reliance" of Chosun, the Kingdom of Yi Dynasty, and "equal treatment of all people." The Donghak revolutionaries were radical, because they demanded the government to allow widowed women to remarry, which was unthinkable at the time. However, the ancient regime of Yi Dynasty, by inviting the imperial invaders of Japan to suppress the popular people's movement, hastened its own demise, because Japan, after killing off thousands of rebellious peasants and their leaders, removed the last royal family of the Yi Dynasty from its throne. Thus began the brutal colonization of Korea by Japan. Even after Japan was finally outsted from Korea at the end of the World War Two, the ghost of the rigid Confucian doctrine in which sexism was justified thrived on and on like a leech on the sweet flesh of women.
When I think about the suffering of my foremothers who were used as Comfort Women for the Armed Forces of Imperial Japan during the Second World War, I feel enraged by the arrogant, power-monger ruling class of Korea that brought in the cruel Imperial invaders of Japan, who are just like any other imperial invaders, as described by Ann McClintock in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality In the Colonial Conquest:
filthy, ravenous, unhealthy and evil-smelling as they most likely were, scavenging along the edges of their known world and beaching the fatal shores of their 'new' worlds, their limbs pocked with abscess and ulcers, their minds infested by fantasies of unknown. . . their massacres, and rapes, their atrocious rituals of militarized masculinity sprang not only from the economic lust for spices, silver and gold but also from the implacable rage of paranoia. (28)
In the hands of this kind of imperial invaders, my mothers suffered as sex slaves, my fathers as forced laborers.
In her novel, Comfort Woman, Nora Okja Keller contextualizes the "atrocious ritual of militarized masculinity" that the imperial invaders of Japan practiced on the Korean Comfort Women:
They [Japanese soldiers] came to us in fear as well as lust, lining up against our stalls to spend their scrip and themselves on our bodies. Some would spread our legs, pinch our vaginas, checking for discoloration, open sores, pus, disease&emdash;which meant, for them, not death but demotion in rank. . . When the fist-sized eruptions swelled the women shut and spread other body part, climbing toward lips and eyes, the officers took the women out of the camp. . . the commending officer strode, his light automatic rifle swinging like a walking stick, toward to sick house. . . One of the women, named Harudo, her wide, hopeful face distorted by blisters, and another woman -- not infected but grossly pregnant -- staggered against the doorframe. Before they could voice a question, he shot them, then he opened fire, spreading the hut with a spray of random bullets. (147)
During the Japanese occupation, some middle class Korean women were allowed to enter public schools, mainly to produce teachers to teach Korean children Japanese and its supposedly superior cultural heritage. These women became teachers for a public school system in which Imperial Japan pushed its educational policies, such as Japanization of Koreans through mandatory prayer for the Japanese Emperor and, by teaching Japanese, only. The mother language, Korean, was banned. In Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha revisits the site of that particular moment of history:
Mother, you are eighteen. It is 1940. You have just graduated from a teacher's college. You are going to your first teaching post. . . Japan had already occupied Korea and is attempting the occupation of China. Even in the small village the signs of their presence is felt by the Japanese language that is being spoken. The Japanese flag is hanging at the entry of the office, and below it, the educational message of the Meiji emperor framed in purple cloth. It is read at special functions by the principal of the school to all the students.The teachers speak in Japanese to each other. You are Korean. All the teachers are Korean. You are assigned to teach the first grade. Fifty children to your class. They must speak their name in Korean as well as how they should be called in Japanese. You speak to them in Korean since they are too young to speak Japanese. ( 48-49)
By the time I entered elementary school in the late 1950s, we Koreans were again taught Korean and spoke Korean freely. I loved writing my sweet mother tongue in my notebook neatly along the line, which always scored five circles in red ink by my teachers, an equivalent of A, or excellent. Most of the time I was happily absorbed in the joy of reading and writing my mothertongue, Mogookeo, in the Korean alphabet, Hangul.
I was living with my maternal grandmother, Yebbi, in a working class neighborhood in Jinju, a good size town in the South Gyeongsang Province. In fact, working class was almost too luxurious a word, for there was hardly any work for the poor. Yebbi was single and an old woman, so both the young and old women in the neighborhood felt comfortable visiting with her. In the household where there was a man, a woman had to be very careful when she visited, because it was a woman's responsibility not to be seen by the man in the house, in case she might arouse a man by her presence. It is such an irony to see how a sexist Confucian morality of the ruling class trickled down to the ghettos of the poor. Young-sook Kim Harvey sums up Korean women's position, regardless of their class:
By the time of puberty hopefully, she will have accepted the following set of propositions:
. Women are inferior to men.
. Women must expect and acquiesce to the preferential treatment accorded males.
. Women are subject to constraints in movements.
. Women must maintain proper social distance from men in their household, and practice social avoidance with unrelated men.
. Women must conceal emotions which are incompatible with their roles.
. Women must cultivate covert strategies for goal realization.
. Women must accept the idea of being married out to strange households where their reception is uncertain.
. Women who are valued by men and the society are those who uphold cultural values by their conformity and commitment to their female role, and therein lies the traditionally most reliable social security for women. ( 265)
Because Yebbi's life experience reflected all of the above, no wonder she would say, "In-a, I wish you were a boy. I could die in peace. Aigo -- who is gonna take care of your Omma. Poor Sangddal. . . I can't close my eyes when I die because Sangddal has no son, tze, tze, tze. . ." Listening to Yebbi's repeated lamentation, however, I had no wish to be a boy. For me a woman seemed a creature of fascination. Her skin soft, her body round, many secret spots in her body, containing a whole mystery of the birth of a baby and the sobbing female ghost. My only wish was that life was easier on my grandma and my interest was how to make it easy on women. Women like Yebbi and Sangddal, to my eyes, suffered unnecessarily because of the world that was damn too cruel and unjust.
. . .
Woman. A slave to her father, her brothers, her husband, and to her sons. When poor, a whore, sold to be a sex slave to Imperial soldiers of Japan during the Second World War, then to Japanese tourists during the 1960s -1970s, and to the troops of the USA and the UN ever since the Korean War.
An animal in human form. Deceiving. Cheating even a blind man. In a folk tale, "The Story of Simchong," the supreme Korean womanhood is depicted as a young virgin who volunteered to be sold for a maiden sacrifice to cure her father's blindness. A Buddhist priest offers his prayer as a cure for blindness for an enormous amount of money. In order to secure the necessary funds, Simchong offered her maiden body to be sacrificed to the Dragon God of the Yellow Sea for a smooth sailing by Chinese merchant mariners.
As in every culture, if there is a good virgin or a virtuous married woman, there is also a bad, old single woman. In the story, when Simchong's father receives the money from Chinese merchant marines, an old single women in the neighborhood seduces him and takes away his money. Thus the model of a bad Korean women, old and poor, deceiving even a blind man, was created.
Worse, to erase the very existence of a woman, there is another folk tale in which a woman is depicted as the lowest creature even among animals -- a fox with three tails.3 In the story, a man travels in the dark, and gets lost -- of course. Then he sees a light in a house. He is welcomed by a young beautiful woman, then fed and entertained. When he wakes up in the morning, the house and the woman are gone. Also gone are his valuables. Then suddenly the woman appears again. This time he looks at her carefully. He had been cautioned about the three-tailed fox that changed forms, from woman to fox, then fox to woman. Sure enough under her long skirt, there are three tails. Therefore, a woman becomes the very root cause of man's ruin. Why a man, whether he is Adam in the Bible, or a traveler in a Korean tale, possesses no subjectivity of his own is never questioned. How funny.
I learned from an early age on to despise women, especially my family women, who were illiterate, (therefore I presumed) ignorant, helpless, toiling for others, wasting their lives by sacrificing themselves until nothing was left of them -- only to ashes, out of which sad ghosts emerged, sobbing to let you know that they once existed even if they lived as slaves, or as filial daughters who offered their bodies to save their no-good-son-of-a-gun fathers, or who were sold as sex slaves. When I listened to their stories full of anguish, anger and sadness, instead of feeling sympathy, I repeated my pledge, "damned if I will live like them. No marriage for me. Never." Not me. Away, away, far away from the lot of my family women I would go. I dreamed about living a life that would be completely different. Not a slave. Not a ghost. Not a victim. I would be in full charge of my life.
Between cooking three hot meals a day for their immediate and extended family members, preparing Napa cabbage for gimchee by soaking in salt, making sure the cabbage were not too salty or too soaked, peeling garlic, boiling anchovy jutt to make juice for gimchee, doing laundry for the whole family with their bare hands, my family women had few excuses to get away from it all -- to fetch water from the village well, or to go to the market place for grocery shopping. On the way to the well, or to the market, my family women would stop by to see Yebbi because they couldn't go on any longer with their hearts bursting with anger, frustration and sadness. They were about to explode. Once married, a Korean woman was forced to be separated from her family and friends. She lived among enemies. The worst, sadly, were women in the new family: her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law watched her every move and criticized. These women were isolated, scared and felt alienated, so they looked for someone outside of their families to talk to, even for a few minutes. Yebbi was there, with her trademark long bamboo pipe, to listen. Packing tobacco in her pipe, Yebbi would say, "Tobacco is widow's best friend." My family women laughed together. I was lying down on my belly (no desk) and doing my homework, all the while listening to their conversations. As little as I was sexism became fully internalized. When I heard my family women's plight, I was laughing inside, "who wants to read your story? Besides, you don't know how to write."
"Who told you anybody wants to hear from you? You ain't nothing but a black woman."-- Hattie Gossett --
So when my family women came back to me, just when I thought I was at a safe distance from them, geographically (because I now live in the USA), I was caught by surprise as if woken by a sobbing female ghost in the middle of the night. Indeed, I must have been possessed by guishin, otherwise, how on earth could I have entered the university to study Creative Writing after I had abandoned any hope of writing more than twenty years ago? My sudden urgency to write about my family women who once were the object of my scornful laughter led me to Creative Writing and Women Studies.
. . .
In 1995, after I was separated from my live-in partner, with no place to go, I checked into a women's shelter. I had to find a way to making a living fast. I entered the City College of San Francisco to learn how to run a flower shop. I had no talent, or interest in business, so I got bored very quickly. In time, I discovered a class titled, "Women and Literature," taught by Mary LaMattery. Our textbook was The Norton Anthology of Literature By Women: The Tradition In English. I was swept away by the simple fact that there were so many women who wrote, from Julian of Norwich, Anne Finch -- Countess of Winchilsea, Mary Woolstonecraft, Linda Brendt (Harriet A. Jacobs), Meridel Le Sueur, Muriel Rukeyser, Toni Cade Bambara, Grace Paley, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko. . . Just carrying the thick book, just reading all those women's names, my heart was pounding. Imagine, studying literature -- my childhood dream! I realized that it was not too late to get back to my early dream. I started taking other courses required to transfer to the Creative Writing Department of San Francisco State University because my instructor Mary, who ignited a fire in me for studying literature, also had attended. Although I doubted my capacity for writing, especially in English, nevertheless, the idea of studying literature and acquiring new skills for writing gave me the necessary push to continue with Creative Writing.
One day, my instructor for Creative Writing 403 at San Francisco State University gave me a question that I could not avoid: "What Do You Want To Write About?"
May, 1998
So -- What the Hell I Want to Write About?
In the opening of the semester, you asked how I ended up here at CW 403. A proper and fun question. I remember telling you that I was caught by first-love-like fever, or something. . .
Now you are asking me what I want to write about ( if I want to write at all). A great and proper question for ending the semester. For years, I've kept saying, I wanna write, I wanna write. . . like a mantra.
So here I am.
Then. . .
Come to think of it what the hell do I want to write about&emdash;really?
For years, I thought I would just be happy to be a muse in the traditional role of woman, by inspiring a male artist; but no man ever wrote about me and those women around me in South Korea. Upon this realization I grabbed the pen quickly like a peasant guerilla grabbing a weapon, on a mission of ambush. I must write about myself and those women around me.
In my short, short story, "Dog-Wine" I tried to deliver the voice of an old Korean woman who is caught by the primal dilemma of survival. She is so alone against the dark world of the Feudal-Confucian-Capitalist patriarchy of South Korea. In this system, a woman faces hardship that is almost inhuman, especially if she is old, with no son. There is no social security for the poor old people in my homeland, because the national budget is spent basically on the military. No social security; no student loans.
My heroine is, in reality, my step-mother. She served my father and her sons (my half-brothers) like a slave, and worked very hard for his farm for over twenty years. Because there was no cash from the farming business, she had to raise dogs for dog-wine. Dog-wine is a folk medicine that is made from dogmeat for the cure of Tuberculoses. So my step-mother, a dog lover, had to raise dogs to sell to a dog slaughter house. Imagine that.
One time my step-mother demanded a piece of property from my father, because she had no security in the case of my father's death. She successfully managed to obtain a piece of property legally. This infuriated my father and my half-brothers. She was subjected to physical and verbal abuse by these men. In the end she was forced to leave.
For some time I didn't know where she was. That's why I employed magical realism in this story: my heroine raises mixed blood dogs (we call them "shitdogs" in Korea) to sell them to dog slaughterhouse. Do meat, Korean folks believe, has a healing ingredient for Tuberculosis. So many people get sick with TB because they work to death in factories, but going to a sanitarium requires fortune. These sick people consume dog-meat, believing in its healing power. Yes, Korean people do eat dogmeat. My heroine, who loves dogs, must raise them to sell, knowing fully they will be slaughtered. That was the only thing she could do to survive. In the story, dogs understand her devastating life situation and they follow the path to a truck that will take them to the slaughterhouse. A very smart and loyal dog, Bully, the chief-in-command among dogs, carries out the mission of taking dogs to the truck from the slaughterhouse.
I want to save my heroine. . And that's why this is truly a very sad story in real life. My heart aches for her loneliness and her doggedness for her survival. She must live, can't die. I won't let her. Right at this very moment I hear her trudging alone in the darkness of this dark world. A woman like her exists mostly in the Third World, sometimes in Third World like conditions in the First World. Poor single mothers, poor immigrant women, poor Native Indian women, Latina and Black women, poor Asian and Pacific Island women, poor white women in the USA. These women face the same hostile reality of colonizing powers by patriarchy, sexism, classism, and racism. The bottom line is I love her. I want to do something for her. At least I can give her a better life through fiction, if not in reality.
Afterwords
In reality
When I could not find where my step-mother was, because my father and my step-brothers refused to tell me what happened to her, or about her whereabouts, I called National Police Head Quarters in Seoul and asked to locate her by supplying information with her name and her last known address. But I was told that the police could not help me, because she was not my blood relation. I consulted with my friend Gajei. Then she spread the words. Ironically it was through the Korean Internal Revenue Services that my step-mother was located. One of Gajei's girlfriends had a boyfriend who worked for IRS. He punched in the information on my step-mother. There she was with two addresses. One is her birth place, the other her current residence. I immediately contacted my step-mother by mail. She called me. We have been in touch ever since. That was the time when I was writing "Dog-Wine," in 1998. While I was writing the story, I kept thinking about my step-mother. When I called her, she was not living with my father any longer.
Later my step-mother told me what had happened: over the piece of property that my step-mother acquired, my father and half-brothers abused her verbally; also the brothers beat the dogs, so the dogs would attack my step-mother. Because she could not think of leaving her husband&emdash;my father&emdash;she endured physical and verbal abuse by these men for years. When she finally realized that my father was not her ally, she left. My step-mother had to be hospitalized for more than a year to recover from physical, emotional exhaustion that she had endured for years.
She now lives alone in peace with a few cats; still suffers from post-trauma. But she reports that her health is improving, which she thinks because of multi-Vitamin that I send to her.