Tag Archives: Korea

In which Lumpy and Stupid Try Not to Disgrace the Family Name

When it comes to my parents, the only thing we’ve ever been able to count on for sure, is that we should expect the unexpected.

“Kids, we’re moving to Dallas!”

“We’re moving to Korea.”

“We’re moving to Florida.”

“We’re moving to Pennsylvania.”

“Tell your teachers this is your last week of school. We’re moving to Virginia next week.”

“Thanks for picking us up at the airport, but we’re going to drive to Tennessee now. See you at the end of the week.” (At 11 pm).

“Surprise! We decided to come home a few days early!” (At 3 am the next day).

“We’ve decided to move to Korea.”

“We’re moving to California.”

“We changed our minds, we’re not going to stay for dinner. What? A two and a half hour drive is no big deal. We got to see you for a whole fifteen minutes!”

One might assume that after a lifetime of dealing with this kind of erratic behavior, one would give up trying to figure out their next move. Perhaps if one weren’t so lumpy and stupid, one would have given up trying, years ago. But every morning of the week we spent in Korea, my sister and I conferred with our parents in a vain attempt to definitively pin down the particulars of the schedule for the day. Every day my parents would say one thing and then casually drop bombshells left and right as the day wore on.

On Wednesday, we knew we would be attending the annual Founder’s Day Festival at the university (in honor of my grandfather), and that my father would be giving some sort of speech.

My grandfather

That morning my dad said, “Oh, by the way, they’re giving me an honorary degree today. They want you girls to go up on stage and help me with my cap and gown.”

“Ummm, Dad, is that really a good idea? We don’t speak Korean. We’ll have no idea what to do. We’re going to make complete fools of ourselves. We wouldn’t want to embarrass you in front of all those peop-”

“Nah. It’ll be fine. I’m sure they’ll tell you what to do.”

We begged our mom to intercede on our behalf…to explain that we were Lumpy and Stupid and could not be trusted to perform in such a public venue on such an important occasion. Not only did she refuse to help us, she craftily seated herself waaaaaaaay in the back of the auditorium, so as to escape notice herself.

It was not terrible.

My sister was not introduced, as she had been all week long, as a “good eater who as a little girl could eat an entire chicken all by herself, and especially loved the greasy skin which she’d rip off with her bare hands.”

When they introduced me, the lame joke I had once made, that after watching a few Korean dramas, I was now fluent enough in Korean to be the next university president, was not repeated as my mother insisted on doing over and over to my horror and everlasting shame to people, who never once cracked a smile at its retelling, and instead politely nodded their heads as they struggled not to betray their shocked disapproval at the rapacious, grasping, (lumpy and stupid) daughter who had made such an audacious claim.

We did not trip on the stairs on our way to the stage.

We bowed awkwardly, and maybe only looked a little bit like boobs as we did so.

We fumbled with the zipper for only a few seconds.

We placed the cap on our dad’s head more or less the right way.

We hugged our dad when we were ordered to in a stage whisper.

 

We looked only as stiff and awkward as we usually do, AND there was no food stuck between my teeth when we posed for photos.

My mom did not escape with impunity. They managed to hunt her down…

I exacted my revenge by taking photos of the takedown:

Cake-cutting:

The Founder’s Day Festival:

Noodle-Eating Contest

After the ceremony, we celebrated our small victory with dinner:

And just a little more revenge:

Lumpy and Stupid Visit the Country, Part 2

I remember once long ago asking my father what part of Korea he was from. He told me and then added, “There’s absolutely no reason why you would have ever heard of it.” On Tuesday we drove two and a half hours south of Seoul to Yesan-gun in South Chungcheong Province to visit my father’s last living sibling. As we were driving there I looked it up on wikipedia and found that in 2009, it earned the designation of a “‘slow city,’ one in which traditional cultures and communities are preserved.” Its most famous native son is the resistance fighter Yoon Bong-Gil. In 1932 during the Japanese Occupation, he carried out a bombing in Shanghai which killed a Japanese general and a Chancellor. Left seriously wounded were an army commander, the Japanese Consul-General, and a special envoy. As we got closer, the view out the window was mostly muddy rice paddies and greenhouses. In the midst of this agricultural landscape, it was quite a startling sight to see the monolithic memorial in Yoon Bong-Gil’s honor decorated with what looked like a million Korean flags.

We pulled into a narrow alley and came to a stop here:

This is a newer house that was built in the place of the old hanok, where my father lived as a child. It is now occupied by the widow of one of his older brothers, the second woman to the left:

My father’s brother (furthest to the right) and his wife (furthest to the left) drove the short distance from their own house to meet us there.

I was delighted when my aunt brought out an ancient-looking photo album. We have very few photos of my father, and none of him as a child. I had never seen this photo before:

My dad is on the far left.

My dad is not in this photo, but pictured are a lot of my aunts and uncles. My grandmother is in the center, fifth from the left.

Here’s one of just my grandmother. My dad has always said I look like her:

What do you think?

We admired the garden and the cats in the courtyard before heading to lunch. The calico’s name is “Nabi,” or Butterfly – a generic cat name in Korea. I wish I knew what the other kitty’s name is…My mom says it was probably also Nabi!

The county’s other claim to fame is Sudeoksa, a Buddhist temple, which has been designated a National Treasure. We drove there for lunch along with busloads of tourists who had the same idea:

A pama (perm) and a bright colored jacket – the official uniform for tourism.

We took a few photos:

and then went to my uncle’s house:

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a picture of the whole house, which is perched on supports with the entryway on the second floor.

This is the view from the front entrance:

Inside the house we were thrilled to find:

25 day old poodle puppies!

and a sweet Yorkie.

Both dogs immediately took to my dad, who has always been a dog-lover. Now I’m thinking it’s genetic…

After letting the mother poodle finish up his yogurt…

…my uncle kept hand feeding her and the Yorkie something else. He would crunch something in his own mouth and then spit it into his own hand to feed both of the dogs in turn. I was dying to know what it was. Later my dad told me it was candy.

After hugs and farewells, we headed back to Seoul with a stop for dinner:

…where this:

became this:

Lumpy and Stupid Visit the Country, Part I

On Monday we drove two hours to the north of Seoul to visit the graves of my mother’s parents and brother. On Tuesday we drove two and a half hours to the south of Seoul to visit my father’s last living sibling – a brother who is three years older than he is.

En route we stopped at a rest area, where I couldn’t resist snapping photos like a hayseed visiting the big city for the first time.

Hmmm…Which side to pick?

WRONG SIDE!

Squatter

The right side was equipped with this device, as many of the public restrooms are:

In the land of perfect people, with a push of a button, unpleasant bathroom noises can be masked with the pleasing sound of flowing water.

Here’s a good idea:

Massage chairs for weary travelers.

No Popeye’s Fried Chicken or Sbarros in this rest area:

Mmm…onion donuts!

We tried these cunning little walnut cakes, a specialty of the region:

Alas, like most Korean desserts, they were filled with sweet red bean paste.

More on Lumpy and Stupid’s visit to the country tomorrow.

Lumpy and Stupid

Mr. Lee used to be my parents’ driver when they lived in Korea. He has since become the editor of a monthly publication put out by the university. With his degree in Korean literature, it’s a position he’s well suited for. But then again, he could probably do any job well. While we’ve been here, he’s resumed his former role as my parents’ driver and my mother’s perfect child/best friend/right-hand man. While my sister and I stumble and bumble around like a couple of useless, non-Korean-speaking oafs, he magically smooths the way for us. When we go to restaurants he orders all of her favorite foods and a pair of the wooden chopsticks she prefers to use over the metal ones that are usually given. He leaps out of his seat and rushes over to open my mother’s door and discretely, solicitously helps her out of her own seat. He knows exactly what my mother wants before she even knows it herself.

The last time we visited my parents when they were still living in Korea, my mother was so sick, she spent most of her days in bed. I remember visiting her at her apartment one day and when she opened her door, she noticed a row of those large water bottles that are used in office water coolers lined up in the hallway. My parents had a water cooler in their apartment and they always used the excellent water from my grandfather’s mountain that would periodically be brought back to Seoul.

“Oh my goodness,” she murmured, “I just mentioned this morning that I was going to need more water soon, and he must have gone right away and brought it back while I was sleeping.”

So…just because my mother mentioned in passing that she was eventually going to run out of water, Mr. Lee immediately got into the car and drove FOUR hours to get her water so she wouldn’t have to worry about running out.

In short, Mr. Lee is an effortlessly perfect human being. We have yet to find a single fault in him, though believe me, my Harpy sister and I have tried.

Another woman, a former student of my dad’s who is now a professor at the university, has been meeting us whenever we’ve had occasion to go there. She too is effortlessly perfect. She is slim, elegant, and beautiful. She is perfectly dressed, perfectly coiffed, perfectly gracious. She speaks in beautiful modulated tones. She welcomes us with sliced fruit, coffee, and tea. She insists on pulling a tiny rickety stool out of another office to perch upon, while the rest of us sprawl like enormous beached whales on the comfy armchairs in my dad’s former office. (It’s been left vacant, with his name still on the door)!

After a day or two of being driven around and hosted by the perfect Mr. Lee and the perfect Dr. Yoo, my sister jokingly said to my mother, “I bet you’re sad that your daughters are lumpy and stupid and not perfect like Mr. Lee and Dr. Yoo.”

“Ah well,” she replied as we walked along…without even cracking a smile, “Come on, Lumpy. Come on, Stupid. Let’s go have dinner.”

Next: Lumpy and Stupid visit the country.

Visiting the Gravesite

On Monday we drove two hours north of Seoul to visit the graves of my maternal grandparents and uncle. There we met up with my mother’s brother and his wife, as well as some others, who accompanied them.

The Korean tradition is for graves to be sited on mountainsides. My grandfather’s church bought this mountain for their burial ground. The last time we visited the gravesite, my mother was so ill we thought it would be the last time she would be able to make the trip up the mountain. On that day, (was it six or seven years ago?), we ran into someone she recognized from her father’s church who was there tending to the graves. To our surprise and dismay she called to him and pointed out the spot she had picked, not too far from her parents, where she wanted to be buried. We were all desperately sad that day. It was one of the most painful days of my life.

It was a somber occasion this time, but I could tell it meant the world to my mother to be able to visit her parents’ and beloved brother’s graves again. It meant the world to us that we could be there with her. I think back to the last time we were there, and I realize that life is so unpredictable. It sucker punches you; it showers you with unexpected blessings. All you can do is roll with it. Kind of like this trip, actually. Every morning my sister and I naively ask what the plan for the day is. My parents tell us what we’ll be doing – and it never, never goes as they said it would…We’re rolling with it.

The last time we were here, my dad pointed out where our names are carved into the stone marker between my grandparents’ two graves. This time my mom was able to point them out to us herself:

With her cane, she pointed out my oldest sister’s name, my second sister’s name directly under hers, and mine below theirs.

“Hmmm, she said. “I guess they didn’t put Teddy’s name on it.” (That’s our brother).

She looked puzzled as she continued to read the names of all of my grandparents’ children and their children inscribed upon the stone.

“Oh, there it is!” she said as she pointed out our brother’s name and laughed. “They put it higher on the stone, because he’s a boy.”

Yep.

We headed down the mountain to visit my uncle’s grave. One of the kind gentlemen in our party did his best to sweep aside the slippery dry pine needles so my mom wouldn’t fall.

That’s my uncle and aunt to the left, and my parents to the right.

After laying the flowers we had brought and saying a prayer, we drove on a short distance to my grandfather’s mountain. He bought this property, located fairly near the DMZ, shortly after the Korean War. After the war, it had been completely denuded of all trees. He spent the rest of his life replanting trees on that mountain like a Korean Johnny Appleseed. My mother remembers being taken there often with her siblings to help him plant trees. After he founded a university, it became a tradition for his students to plant trees there as well. I remember hearing as a child long ago, that someone who had been camping on the property, accidentally burned down a huge swathe of trees. For my grandfather it was years of his life and effort going up in flames. He was absolutely devastated.

Today the mountain is being used as a retreat center for the students who attend my grandfather’s university, located in the middle of Seoul. Two hours away from the city, they come to a mountain lush with trees and vegetation. We drove along rough, narrow roads lined with birch saplings that have been recently planted by students and stopped to admire the view. We could hear nothing but the sound of birds singing in the trees.

We drove on to find lunch at a “mushroom shabu shabu restaurant” out in the middle of nowhere.

We stopped to say hello to these dogs that were being kept in the courtyard…

If only I could bring home one of these Korean style doghouses!

Most of the clientele were army soldiers stationed near the DMZ. I looked at all the identical black boots that had been taken off and left by the dining room, (the custom in Korea), and wondered how they would figure out whose were whose after lunch.

Aftermath of the soldiers’ meal.

Mushroom shabu shabu:

After all the mushrooms and vegetables are finished, and you think it’s very possible that you might explode from eating too much, noodles are added to the broth to finish off the meal.

You manage to finish the noodles and are surprised and relieved to discover that although your stomach is grossly distended, it is still intact.

And then they bring a huge bowl of rice to the table and add it to the little broth there is left. They continue to stir it until it acquires the consistency of delicious Korean risotto…

…which you can’t NOT eat, obviously.

After all of this, I thought for sure my mother would want to drive the two hours back to the city and collapse in a heap until the next morning. As is so often the case, I was wrong.

As we came to a stop here:

…my sister and I gave each other a wary look. That morning when we had asked my parents what the day’s itinerary would be, we were told we would visit the gravesite and return to the city, period. My parents wanted to stop at this nursery:

where they were selling dandelions in flats alongside other less identifiable plants:

They wanted these to buy some seeds to plant a little of Korea in their own backyard in America:

Now, surely, the day was done.

Nope.

We stopped one more time at a store called Hanaro. It’s kind of like Walmart. And kind of not:

Kimchi pots.

My mom’s mission was to buy dried anchovies and seaweed. There are entire aisles devoted to nothing but dried anchovies and seaweed.

“Uh, mom, there’s a little place not too far from where you live in Virginia called H Mart where you can buy all of these things…” my sister said.

“They’re cheaper here,” she replied serenely.

Last night my sister and I wandered around the Lotte Department store Duty Free section and witnessed a shopping frenzy like we had never seen before. Bargain-hunters, the vast majority of them Chinese, had brought gigantic suitcases to the store and were stuffing them full of fancy Korean cosmetics they had stood in long lines waiting to buy. My mom’s entire suitcase is going to be crammed full of dried fish and seaweed.

Done?

Nope.

Dinner:

We’re rolling with it.

 

Weekend Snapshots 23

Saturday

We are staying at the beautiful Westin Chosun Seoul, which happens to be in my mother’s childhood neighborhood. From our window, we can see City Hall, the building in the foreground. My mom’s family used to live in a traditional Korean style house (hanok), right across the street.

We can see City Hall from our hotel window…

The old house is long gone. City Hall and a few of the historical sites which survived bombings are the only buildings that are left from my mother’s childhood.

My father recalls catching a ride on a fishing boat and sailing to Inchon right after the Korean War. From there he hiked to the top of Namsan (South) Mountain to survey the city. He remembers seeing nothing but ashes and the stone walls and chimneys that didn’t get burned down the ground by the bombings.

It’s hard to imagine that scene now, when you see the bustling city:

The Westin Chosun is adjacent to the Hwangudan, or Altar, built in 1897 by Emperor Gojung (1852-1919). The American bombers deliberately made an effort to spare this and other historical sites. Seoul is full of these spots where the old and new are squeezed together:

We saw a group of schoolchildren cleaning the pagoda:

The Deoksugung Palace is right down the street:

The throne
The ceiling

Check out the cell phones…

We found a little restaurant across from the hotel. No menu, just this:

A delicious, steaming cauldron full of spicy kimchi jigae.

Right next door to the hotel is the Lotte Department Store. The Food Court is spectacular:

But where’s the potato salad?

How about fried squid on a stick instead?

Sunday

Mother’s Day with my mama:

It was nice to see my dad behind the pulpit again…He was the minister of this university church for a few years:

At night we went to the Jogyesa Temple which is decorated for Buddha’s birthday with thousands of colorful lanterns:

At the entrance to the temple:

My Parents’ Journey

Grandfather's Journey

The first time I read Grandfather’s Journey out loud to my children, I kept having to stop to recompose myself. My children were entirely used to this kind of nonsense. It would happen every. single. time I read them Eileen Spinelli’s Sophie’s Masterpiece, at many points throughout the years it took us to read through the entire Harry Potter series, every Christmas when I would read them Max Lucado’s The Crippled Lamb…When I would pause to gulp back a sob that threatened to escape, they would glance up at my face and then look back at the page I was in the middle of trying to read, politely ignoring the tears dropping on their little heads, waiting patiently for me to resume.

T and her cousins

I felt a keen pang of recognition as I read Allen Say’s story, the Caldecott Medal winner in 1994. In spare language and restrained watercolors, Say recounts the story of his grandfather, who immigrated from Japan to America and then back again to Japan. It reminded me of my own parents’ story:  their love for two different countries, and their irreconcilable longing for both. Say’s book ends with these words:

“The funny thing is, the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other.”

My mother told me once long ago that the minute she stepped off the plane in San Francisco for the first time in 1963, she felt at home in a way she never had in Korea. America suited her. As a woman, she relished her newfound freedom. She felt like she could finally be herself: an irrepressible charmer, who would easily chat up strangers everywhere she went…a woman who, instead of demurely tittering behind a hand covering her mouth, would toss her head back and give a full-throated chortle that would carry for miles…a Drama Queen, who could always command an audience. She discovered her true self in this country, and she was proud to become a naturalized American.

It never occurred to us that our parents would ever leave their adopted country, which they both embraced with a frank and almost corny patriotism. After many years, however, when they had lived longer in America than they had in Korea, they were reluctantly drawn back to the country of their birth by an overwhelming sense of duty and filial piety to help run a university that my grandfather had founded. When they would come back to visit their children at Christmas they would tell us that they couldn’t wait to get back to their own house in Virginia, the clean air, and us, of course. Every year they would declare that they would stay in Korea for just one more year. We believed them for the first few years, but these conversations were repeated every Christmas for more than a decade.

My mother finally returned to America when she was diagnosed with primary amyloidosis and was given 18 months to live. My sister found a clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and convinced her to come for treatment. After multiple rounds of punishing chemotherapy it became clear that the treatment would kill her faster than her disease. My mother was kicked out of the clinical trial. To our utter dismay, as soon as she could manage to drag herself to the airport, she returned to Korea.

That summer my family and I went to Korea for a month. We were terrified that we would lose our mother at any minute and we wanted to make the most of the time we had left. We acted upon the premise that this summer might be our last one together…We took a long and grueling trip to the countryside to visit our maternal family’s burial grounds, assuming that it would be the last time my mother would ever be able to visit her parents’ and brother’s graves:

My dad showed my brother and me where our own names were engraved on our grandparents’ markers:

My mother recognized someone from my grandfather’s church, who was there tending the graves that day. She took the opportunity to point out to him the spot she had picked, not far from her parents’ graves, where she wanted to be buried.

My mother was spending most of her days in bed, but one day she insisted on taking us to the center of bustling Seoul to buy my daughter a traditional Korean dress. I remember nervously holding my breath as she made her way across busy city streets at a painfully slow crawl, not bothering to look left or right. My daughter has never been one to tolerate itchy clothing, and she was never shy about letting her displeasure be known if we tried to force her into anything that looked remotely uncomfortable. I was so worried that she would complain about having to try on the dress and ruin an experience that meant so much to my mother and had cost her so much energy. I could have wept for joy when she beamed with delight at the sight of herself in the extremely itchy Korean dress my mother bought for her.

I will always cherish the memory of my mother’s smile as she watched my daughter twirl this way and that, admiring herself in the mirror. Later that day when my mother had collapsed in bed, my sister and I dressed my daughter up in the hanbok again. We taught her how to bow in the traditional Korean way so that we could videotape it to show my mother later:

I noticed a change in my mother that summer. She was sick and weak, and yet she somehow seemed more powerful in Korea. One day we were on the campus of  the university when we noticed a young man skulking against a wall smoking a cigarette. She imperiously demanded that he leave the premises and that he take his offending cigarettes with him. He did so, repeatedly bowing apologetically as he hurried to obey my mother’s orders. Speeding cars hurtling along the streets of Seoul would come to a screeching halt as she would step into the street, staring straight ahead. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, she would hold up her wrinkled hand, commanding the drivers to stop for the several centuries it would take her to shuffle across the street. She knew all the best restaurants and their proprietors. She knew the best stalls at the marketplace and would chat amiably with the women who sat on their haunches serving up whatever mysterious roots or vegetables they were selling that day. One afternoon she called to tell me that she had picked out a bracelet for my daughter and that she wanted me to come with her to the jewelry shop across the street from her apartment. I watched awe-struck as she bargained with a woman, who helplessly caved in the face of her calm insistence that the price she would pay for the bracelet would be a ludicrously tiny fraction of the price listed on the tag. She was comfortable. She was home.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the chemotherapy that almost killed my mother, saved her life in the end. She is still in remission. About six years ago, my parents finally returned to their house in Virginia. The first months were terrible. My parents happened to arrive in the middle of a particularly harsh winter. The long flight had exhausted my mother, and it was taking much longer than usual for her to recover from jet lag. She knew she would never be able to make the arduous journey across the ocean again, and she was profoundly sad to have left behind her life in Korea forever.

“But mom,” I said to her, “Remember you once told me you felt more like yourself here in America?”

“That was before…I’ve been away from here for too long,” she replied sadly, “It’s not the same.”

That spring my mother desperately waited for the cherry blossoms to bloom on the tree in her yard. Cherry trees were blooming all around DC and in my parents’ neighborhood, but the tight buds on the tree in their own yard stubbornly refused to open. My sister and I anxiously conferred with each other about the status of those blooms every day. My mother’s very survival seemed to depend on that tree finally coming back to life again. As I wrote in my Cherry Blossoms post a few years ago, if my sister and I could have opened each blossom by hand, I swear we would have. Of course the tree eventually did break into bloom. It was the most riotously joyful display I’d ever seen on any tree anywhere. With their appearance, my mother’s spirits began to recover.

The cherry trees are blooming again now…I’ve always loved cherry blossoms, but they mean so much more to me now. Even after the bitterest of winters, they faithfully return every year, blessing us with their impossible, miraculous, ravishing blossoms.

My dad is turning 80 this year. For his birthday, my sister told him she would take him anywhere in the world he wanted to go. He’s a history buff, and has never been to Europe. We assumed he would want to go to a place like Rome or London. He wants to go back to Korea. In a few weeks I will go with my sister and parents back to a place they never thought they would see again. I think we will go back to visit the graves of our grandparents. We will leave Seoul to go to the country to visit my father’s surviving brothers. I imagine it will be for the last time, but who knows?

Life can be so precarious, so unpredictable, and sometimes…so wonderful.

Dog

Did I freak you out with the title of this post? 

Remember: this week’s Stories from Easter Island are all about the foods my dad didn’t eat. But let’s face it. It is a notorious fact that Korean people have been known to eat dog meat. When we were together over the holidays, my dad explained to us the background behind this practice…

In the old days, nobody ate much meat. People would eat it maybe just once or twice a year. Farmers, after a season of hard physical labor, would need to eat some meat to recover their strength. But because they were unaccustomed to eating meat, they would get sick as soon as they ate it. It would give them terrible stomach aches. The one kind of meat that wouldn’t have that effect was dog meat. Apparently, dog meat is very easy to digest and never causes stomach upset.

Seeing our long faces, he continued his story…

You know, whenever I would go back to visit Korea, people would always want to take me out to restaurants and treat me to the best foods. They were always trying to offer me dog meat. I didn’t want to be rude to them, but I always declined. I had to explain that my children had made me promise not to eat it.

He imitated us in a high-pitched voice that made us laugh, “Dad! Promise us, you won’t eat dog meat when you’re in Korea!”

Even though I didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings, I couldn’t lie to my own children, so I never ate it.

And that’s the last installment of this week’s Stories from Easter Island. I hope you’ve enjoyed sitting in the basement with me, and that you have a wonderful, wonderful weekend!

Snake

When my father was eleven years old, his entire family was struck down by typhoid fever. Only his mother did not get sick, having developed immunity after surviving her own bout with the disease as a child. By the end of those terrible two weeks, my father’s father was dead. He left behind a widow with ten young children and a farm to run. This disastrous change in the family’s fortunes unleashed a whole chain of calamities. But this is the story of triumph over death in the midst of tragedy, and it came thanks to two venomous snakes. Here’s another installment of Stories from Easter Island, as told to me by my dad, whom we call (with great affection!) The Easter Island Head…

My second oldest brother was thirteen or fourteen when our father got sick with typhoid fever. He tried to help around the farm, but he overexerted himself and hurt his side. He was completely incapacitated for months. He got so sick, we thought he would die. We lived in the country, and there were no doctors in the vicinity.

It was monsoon season, which is when snakes come out of hiding. There were men who would catch venomous snakes to sell for medicinal purposes. These snake catchers would keep them in boxes that they would carry around on their shoulders. One of those snake catchers heard that my brother was sick, so he visited our home. He told my mother that he could heal my brother with two snakes.

He had an earthen jar with a small opening at the top. These jars were used for boiling herbs or for storing food.

He put one of the snakes in the jar with some water and then he wrapped the jar with a straw rope from the bottom to the top. He plastered mud over the rope so the jar wouldn’t heat up too quickly, and then he lit a fire under it. He slowly, slowly heated up the jar, using just a few sticks of wood at a time. The fire burned for two days. The only time he ever left the fire was to use the bathroom. For two days he ate every meal sitting on his haunches, tending the fire.

At first the water felt warm and good to the snake. But as the water heated up, the snake started to feel uncomfortable and got angry. It started to strike at the walls of the jar, releasing all of its venom into the water.

On the second day, it started to smell like boiled chicken. After two days, the snake had mostly disintegrated. The head and bones were all that remained. The man dumped everything into a hemp cloth to filter out the liquid. He squeezed the cloth so that only the bones and some meat remained. The liquid made up a bowlful of soup.

There was a layer of fatty grease on top of the liquid. I remember that he used hanji, Korean handmade paper, to soak up the grease. He did that two or three times to get all the fat out. He said that if my brother drank any of the fat, he would get diarrhea and become even more sick.

Before he would give him the soup, he very carefully checked his mouth for any sores or open wounds to make sure he would not get poisoned. When he was absolutely sure there were no wounds, he let my brother drink the soup. My brother said it tasted good.

After a one day break, he did the same thing again with the second snake and served another bowlful of soup to my brother. After two doses of snake soup, he fully recovered. Two or three years later, the snake catcher returned and told our mother that it was time for my brother to have one more bowl of snake soup so that he could maintain his good health throughout his life. He was exceptionally healthy, even into adulthood, and it was thought that it was because of the snake soup.

Pomegranate

Stories from Easter Island, continued

My dad’s fantasies have always been of the horticultural variety. How I wish I could win the lottery and make his lifelong dream of owning a walnut orchard or a cactus farm come true! Having crammed exotic plants into every corner of his own tiny suburban yard, he has begun speculating about the possibilities my yard has to offer. In a recent conversation we had, he mused about the feasibility of moving my house toward the back of the property so that my front yard could be transformed into a fruit orchard.

He’s been fascinated by fruit for as long as I can remember. You know that exotic fruit ghetto in the grocery store? That neglected little corner with strange, lumpy things no one ever buys and wouldn’t even know how to eat if they did? That’s always been my dad’s favorite part of the grocery store. He was always bringing home unusual fruits to try. You’d often find a napkin with seeds culled from these fruits, drying on our kitchen windowsill to be planted whenever he deemed the conditions to be favorable.

Over the winter holidays this year, we ate a lot of pomegranate. The only time my kids and husband and I ever eat this fruit is when we’re with my parents. It’s one of those fruits that I’ve always liked, but not enough to actually buy. For one thing, they’re a royal pain to cut open, though you can avoid some of the squirting and staining issues if you open the fruit in a large bowl of water. Over the Christmas break, my mother did all the hard work for us. Every night after dinner, she would pass around a bowl of the gorgeous, translucent seeds and a teaspoon with which to scoop them out.

One evening, as my dad helped himself to a few of the seeds, he told us this story…

“We had a pomegranate bush when I was growing up. It’s not a plant that’s native to Korea, so it was quite unusual to see one. We were the only ones who had one for miles around. But, I never once got to taste a pomegranate until I was an adult.”

“Every year, there would be only a few fruits, and as soon as they were ripe, our mother would take them to give to women in our village who wanted to have a baby, but were having trouble. They’re supposed to help with fertility. They would be so happy to get the fruit!”

“Gosh, Dad!” I said, feeling sad about his childhood of deprivation, “You didn’t get to eat the sparrows and you didn’t get to eat the pomegranates!”

“Our mother was soft-hearted like that. When my dad was still alive, we didn’t have much, but we were doing OK, so she was always trying to help other people…”

Dad’s mother and four brothers who survived to adulthood

I’ve always wanted to plant a pomegranate…not so much for the fruit, as for the brilliant, flamboyant blossoms that precede it. This spring I’m going to get a couple plants at one of my favorite local nurseries: one for the notional orchard in my front yard, and one that I’m sure my dad will be able to squeeze into his own yard somewhere.