Usually you must have some on your birthday and after giving birth. Now, I crave Gimchee, just not always able to get it.Īlthough it was a typical dish, the seaweed soup was very important. Did I tell you I didn’t even like Gimchee when I was young? That obviously changed now. Obviously, as a child, I often preferred something different. Not sure how much people’s eating habits have changed in Korea these days with westernization, but when I was young, we still had rice, soup and side dishes three meals ago. All you need is good 미역 (seaweed) and meat broth – and there is plenty of stale seaweed that will make you believe seaweed soup is not good, so beware. It’s not fancy and easily made so we used to eat it often. I vaguely remember meeting one of them and I always wondered why I had great uncles when my great grandmother didn’t have any sons. Thankfully, they were nice people and exceptionally smart, taking after my great grandfather. In the end, they were the inheritors of the family legacy, whatever was left of it. So common that an exorbitant amount of money was spent in bringing back these uncles from the North when the border was nearly closed. I suppose in modern times this type of practice would be possibly unthinkable? Boys at any cost? But that was quite common in the olden times. And well, that’s where inheritance (if there had been any left after the war) would have gone as well.Īnd both my grandmother and my mother’s generation all knew of this as they were well acquainted with who my mother called her “uncles”.
Essentially, these sons sort of became the sons of my great grandmother, on paper, of course. Then what happens when there are no sons by the first wife? You adopt the sons of the other wife to be the sons of the first wife. Of course, my grandmother knew all about it as she sometimes fetched him home from various concubines’ houses. He spent a lot of time with his second wife/concubine and had children with her. Obviously, there would be tons of women following him? And in those days, it was a common practice to have a concubine or two. I’m told he was rich, tall, handsome, and an incredible singer. But my great grandfather was never content with the marriage. My great grandmother did have three children by her husband, including the last child, a boy, who’d died. As often it was with arranged marriages, their marriage was… shall I say, the typical marriage of a rich man? Perhaps it’s because the choice was taken away from him, or perhaps he was just a rich man of his time. I’ve written about my great grandmother, who was a bit of a child bride. I sometimes wonder if my mother would have broken the cycle of mother-in-law abuse if one of her children had been born as a man and had gotten married. Of course, that would never have worked in Korea since women had absolutely no rights then, even a working woman. I can’t count in my two hands how many times my mother packed her bags and grabbed us from school, with the intention of never coming back. I think she was worried about me experiencing so many difficulties she’d faced as a married woman. In contrast to what most people would think, my mother was not happy when I got married.
Still, my grandmother wasn’t a very kind woman and, at least for the first few years they lived with us, my paternal grandfather was a soft influence on her. My mother was a highly educated woman from a good family and she was also as much of a bread earner as my father was, especially since most of his salary went to supporting his family of origin and my mother’s salary went to pay for supporting our family. Thankfully, my paternal grandmother couldn’t treat my mother too badly. Perhaps they don’t know how else to behave, since that’s all they learned. Perhaps they are taking revenge for the time they were miserable as a daughter-in-law. But instead of not repeating the mistake, they equally mistreat their own daughter-in-laws. You’d think they’d swear to be nice to their own daughter-in-laws after experiencing mistreatment from their mother-in-law. It’s strange how so many Korean mother-in-laws are nasty to their daughter-in-laws. He apparently loved my mother and through his influence softened his wife’s sharpness toward my mom. But he was apparently still relatively a gentleman when he was drunk. According to my mother, my grandfather was a kind and gentle man, although he had a bit of a weakness for alcohol. and stopped living with our family, my paternal grandparents moved in. After my maternal grandmother and her daughters moved to the U.S. My childhood memory starts when I was maybe three or four years old.
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