Mourning a Loss

Loss


Not long ago, I lost my parents — once again.

I always resolve, and I always fail. Because I know this hurt and ache… have always been nothing but my own delusion. So this time, once more, I resolve to cut it off myself, for real.




If only they hadn't been there from the start, maybe.
If only we had stayed dirt-poor like before, maybe.

With assets of a deposit of 10 million won, monthly rent of 800,000, plus 200,000 in management fees, plus living expenses,
and a salary of 65 million won a year, at the age of forty I'm now classified as a basic livelihood recipient.
Someone once said wealth and ability are not the same thing. I think it's not a small salary, nothing close to a big-corp employee's, but maybe a bit more than my ordinary(?) peers — but life away from home is still not easy. Whether it's a leaky barrel or what, after 10 or 20 years I'm still in monthly rent.





My parents own two apartments. They had said they'd give me one of the smaller ones to live in once I got married. Then one day I got a call saying they had liquidated both and signed a contract for a villa worth about 1.4 billion won. And along with it came a litany of how it was all debt and how hard life was.
The reason they hurried so much, contracting a 1.4 billion-won villa as quickly as ordering on Coupang, with no proper prior research… probably had as its trigger the fact that, while moving from Seoul to Suwon recently, I had cautiously confided that 10 years of monthly-rent living had gone nowhere.

About a year ago, my parents confessed they were going camping all over the country every weekend. I had visited their 48-pyeong house after a long while; seeing expensive equipment scattered around — a massage chair, a large camping stove, etc. — I joked that the house looked smaller. That's when, for the first time in their second year of camping life, they admitted to their son that they were going camping. The bittersweet part: they immediately folded up the stove and moved it to the storage room.
Without my even asking, they said it was a reward to themselves for the hardship of their younger days. They said the stove had a heater of sorts but it was cold, so to take the electric blanket from home outside they were buying an additional portable battery; they had looked it up — 800,000 won would do — and started the death-rattle in front of me. A little earlier, I had said that my younger sibling, in the middle of trying to get re-employed, had thankfully been classified as a basic-livelihood recipient and had recently received that 500,000-won subsidy, and that I had used that money to come down for a long-overdue visit. The conversation that came out of that turned into how they themselves were having a hard time these days, and how there were too many camping items they needed to buy. The way they explained things they didn't even need to explain felt like something out of a drama, and I remember my heart sinking.

My mother grew up without a father from a young age. Her own mother, I heard, cursed every day. And kept smoking, all the time. On top of that, the family was so poor that grandmother had to send mother to live as a dependent with relatives. In effect, the siblings were scattered, living separately. They were all poor. An aunt much older in age served, in effect, as her mother.
How could the thoughts and attitudes of children who grow up with everything in a wealthy household be the same as those who grow up without anything in a poor one… My mother's attachment to money was strong. When they were young, my father hated her for it, intensely. And from the moment he could no longer earn more than her, he would always shout in a resentful voice, "Because of you, this house has come to this…" Like any household, there were daily fights at home. About once a week something got thrown and broken.

When I was young, my parents were never home. How could it have been only me… I'm probably about the first generation of "latchkey" kids of dual-income parents. Every day I ate ramen. And from around the time my mother first stabilized her income, I remember designating a sundae-gukbap shop in the market and going there to take my meals.

My mother does not know whether I was in the humanities or science track in high school. She doesn't know whether I took the SAT in person or by interview, or what major I went into. She doesn't know when I graduated, or how. She doesn't know where I went for the army. I went to the training center alone, and there were no visits. She didn't know where I got my first job, or how much I made. Even so, back then, I didn't mind any of it. "Money in the pocket is money in the purse," as they say — surely family is more than even Kkanbu! That's how I felt. The only thought I had was that poverty was a sin.




But these days, I've come to think — ah, I was too arrogant.
I came to realize that the reason my mother worked herself to the bone was the obsession with poverty she had since childhood, and the thirst to show off — defiantly — to those who had lived better than her at the time, those who had looked down on her.

When she was poor, she couldn't pay attention because she was poor;
now that she has money, she shuts off attention because she's afraid of having it taken away.

At first I denied it. Then one day, eight years ago, I heard them suddenly say they were going to put up the house I was living in for sale, that they hoped I would come down and live; I came down and even found a job. But before any place to move into had been decided, and without it being a case of moving into mother's house either, I was suddenly informed they had to sell that house and buy an apartment whose price was likely to rise further.

And four years ago, while living in a small apartment, I witnessed the bathroom tiles bursting due to faulty construction. As a stopgap, I taped over the wall. The wall was left alone for over a year, but the moment I vacated the place, they fixed it right away for the next tenant paying 600,000 or 700,000 a month. The amount was 500,000 won. As always, income was mumbled vaguely, and expenses were articulated clearly.




Father?
Father's father was not affectionate to him. Among his seven brothers there was an uncle who hadn't yet married or who had run away from home, but he was out of the picture. When grandfather died, he donated his property to a temple. And he was buried on the very land that was to become temple property. After he passed, while the body was being prepared for burial, I once heard a person from the temple say beside us that grandfather would attain rebirth in the Pure Land. From early on, the brothers had grumbled that they might one day have to enter the temple themselves once the generation changed, and they were uniformly worked up about the property having been donated to the temple instead of inherited. For reference, I understand what was donated was about one mountain — or just a bit more. And the area is now incorporated into Sejong City.

Even so, the brotherhood among the siblings is not particularly good either. While discussing inheritance of grandfather's land, the topic of a family burial plot for relatives came up; what came out was only resentment toward grandfather, while at the same time they cornered someone who has no family, who can't even think about a funeral because he hasn't been able to marry yet, and just complained, "these days kids don't even hold ancestral rites." My uncle, after saving money very painstakingly, brought up the family burial-plot idea, but no one responded or backed him up. Instead all he got was the unfair scolding of, why haven't you gotten married yet?

Things being as they were, my grandfather, from when his cancer made it hard for him to move until just before he died, lived above the entrance of the old house in a converted space — a place reachable only by stairs so narrow and steep that even healthy people had a hard time, a place that, before and after grandfather's care, had only been used as a storage room. Childishly, when I was young, I asked, "Grandfather, why do you live here?" — but none of the seven brothers answered me.




Mother grew up without parents.
Father had parents, but they betrayed their children's expectations without a word, for the sake of their own rebirth in the Pure Land — and he was the third son, who carried out a kind of un-revenge in revenge.


Around the time I heard the camping-equipment story, while riding in father's new car, he once said this: "Hey now, your friend is heartless too — when she's living so well herself, if her son-in-law is having that hard a time she should help out a little, instead of speaking ill of him in front of others, right?" But mother, watching my expression, poked oblivious father in the ribs.
For the record, I only learned about the new car six months later, by inevitably running into it.





Mother gets hit by father from time to time. Back when we were that poor, there were countless times they fought about getting divorced — even putting their seal on the documents. Yet though the situation stayed the same, at some point the talk of divorce stopped. Once I asked: how come you don't bring up divorce these days? She said she had been told this at a fortune-teller's: "You really don't fit, you're standing back to back with each other. But because of that, you can stand back-to-back leaning on each other…" Wow. A great line. But the real reason, I learned later.
One day my younger sibling came home crying. They were extremely worked up, saying they might kill themselves or kill father. When I heard the whole story: as on any other day, mother and father had been fighting; my sibling, hearing mother's scream, opened the master-bedroom door, and was instead slapped across the face by father, with "who asked you to butt in?" For reference, my parents are 1958-born, married young, so they are still relatively young. And at the time my sibling was thirty-five years old.
This time, my sibling, crying, asked her why she would put up with being hit like this; both crying, my sibling heard the reason: getting divorced would mean dividing the assets in half, which couldn't be done. In that instant, an "ah—" went through my head.






For mother, money was —
the money she earned and saved, while being hit by her husband, while bearing the weight of his debts run up here and there, while working day and night with utter intensity, herself a person without parents,
this money
was the reason it was acceptable for her to keep being hit even past sixty.
It was the reason it was acceptable for her thirty-five-year-old daughter to live being slapped,
and it could be the reason not to take an interest in where, what, or how her over-forty son lives.




A mother who grew up without parents and
a father who grew up with indifferent parents —
in their twenties, their first mistake they aborted,
and the son who survived even their second-mistake-that-they-could-have-aborted
was, when young, sent off to the grandfather's house — the very grandfather who had been indifferent to father — and lived there with no friends, no education.
I didn't know it then, but the food being hard to swallow, the loneliness — by my parents' side or by grandfather's side — was probably one and the same.




An outsider,
this outsider's life that has continued unchanged since I was born —
time passes and it doesn't seem to become medicine.





Yes. This is venting.
To the indifference of parents who, having grown up without parents, finally became well-off past seventy,
the son who has lived as an outsider all his life up to forty
is childishly resenting them.

Plainly — I am resenting.
I'm already sick of being treated as an outsider in society — squeezed for whatever's needed and tossed aside — for someone with no connections, no money lineage;
and on top of that, never thinking my family, too, would do the same to me,
resenting them is, I think, the right thing.


Saying "money in the pocket is money in the purse,"
pretending I wasn't hungry even when I was,
pretending it was fine when compared to others,
pretending I was unfazed when I had less than others —
my affection
is what I'm resenting, for collapsing so listlessly.



I lived comforting myself that my parents' ceaseless labor was, after all, sacrifice for the sake of family and for me, and that their indifference to me was simply because of poverty — that things would be all right once their circumstances improved. But after witnessing again and again that that ruthless labor was not for family, but a flailing struggle to save themselves from poverty alone… and after the way they liquidated all their assets in a hurry, the moment I confessed my hardship for the first time… the meager, cannot-amount-to-much pity, affection, and respect I had for my parents — the kind that may seem trivial to them — has just turned into an inexpressible loss and resentment.






Then came my birthday.
A KakaoTalk message arrived, like the kind one sends to a vendor for a holiday greeting.
Rather than "how did you receive it, how useful is it," what arrived was the act of giving — a delivery like a volunteer-work proof shot. In heat over 32 degrees, two or three ice packs in a thin bubble-wrapped foil package… meat that arrived smelling rancid.