“I’m the fourth of six sisters.”
People are always surprised when I tell them this. These days, having a household full of girls sounds fun and even enviable; but in my mother’s generation, having all daughters and no sons was almost a sin.
My mother later learned the chance of giving birth to six daughters is 1 in 320,000. She told me, with a tinge of bitterness, that “it’s not something just anyone can do.”
Although my mother’s family wasn’t wealthy, she had the rare privilege of receiving a college education thanks to her parents, who had an extraordinary passion for educating their children. My maternal grandfather raised my mother with a great deal of self-esteem; she grew up believing she could accomplish anything with hard work and determination. Even in child bearing, she showed resilience as she gave birth to three daughters; but when she gave birth to me, the fourth, my mother finally broke down before the value system of the culture and the times.
It made me sad to hear that my mother cried after giving birth to me. It felt deeply unfair that I let my parents down simply by being born. It wasn’t my fault. To young people these days, all of this may sound like a tale from the Goryeo Dynasty since the view of sons and daughters has since been completely reversed. In her later years, my mother got to fly and travel all over the world thanks to her daughters, and she got to hold her head high, gaining the envy of women who had sons.
My father was born in Yonggang-gun, a suburb of Pyongyang, and he grew up wealthy in the sense that he could afford to ride a bicycle to elementary school (this was rare at the time). He came to Seoul to study his first year of middle school. Around the time he was ready to go to college, Korea was divided. He became a penniless student overnight and lost contact with a lot of his relatives in the north. It was partly because he didn’t have family in the south that he wanted to have many children. Mom said he was happy to welcome daughters, one after another. I know this is true from the special love my father showed while raising us.
His steady love helped sustain us as we experienced challenges and turmoil due to his occupation as a politician. Our father was a part of the party that opposed the dictators in power and their corrupt administration.
After the May 16 military coup, my older sisters witnessed in horror when soldiers stormed into our house and ransacked it. Soon, Korean CIA agents monitored our front door and tapped our home phone. They even opened and inspected some of our letters.
My father was taken several times by the Central Intelligence Agency where he was interrogated and beaten. When Chun Doo-hwan came in with a coup, the KCIA once again arrested my dad, imprisoned him, and tortured him for 52 days. We later learned that he was stripped and made to kneel during interrogation, where three military police officers took turns trampling his kneeling knees. They beat him until several rods were broken.
Because of this abuse, my father suffered a stroke shortly after he was released. What he endured under the military regime for 30 years left a terrible trauma. Even many years later, upon waking up from a major operation, the first words he said were, “Is this the Central Intelligence Agency?”
Children shouldn’t witness such horrors, but we grew up accepting them as the norm, and it forced us to mature fast. According to my eldest sister, my father was imprisoned in Mapo Prison for a time during dictator Park Chung-hee’s regime. We had no knowledge of his whereabouts. After his release, he fled and hid himself in a temple in the country for 3 months. Our mother would leave us children to bring him clothes and food. During this time, my oldest sister, who was only in the sixth grade of elementary school, made up her mind: ‘I have to protect my younger sisters’.
Despite this tough environment, we grew up relatively happy and normal, and that was thanks to our father, who was a romantic at heart. Sometimes I wonder how such a man ended up in politics. In his youth, my father was a literary man who loved music very much. As soon as my eldest sister learned to speak, he taught her songs and poetry. By only three years old, she often memorized and recited poems by Sowol, and father delighted in taking my sister around to boast to his friends. He became busier as the rest of us were born, but he always remained our romance teacher. (*the word romance to Koreans has slightly different connotation than it does here in US)
My father was also an open-minded person with ideas that were unimaginable for his day. When my parents moved out of a rental home and became the first-time home owners of a small hanok (Korean style house) in Samseon-dong, Seongbuk-gu (location in Seoul), my father engraved their names side by side on the nameplate. That was in 1956, and I suspect it was the first in the history of Korean nameplates to have the names of the husband and wife equally engraved and hung. At the time, only the name of the male head of family was typically displayed.
In spite of his busy schedule, father made sure to take us on trips to the mountains and fields from time to time. He personally bought mini skirts for his daughters during a time they were subject to police crackdowns, and when we entered college, he took us on a “pilgrimage” of pubs, starting with Pojangmacha (Pocha) and making their rounds. In those days, many families enforced a curfew for their daughters, but with six girls in our family, we never had one. It was because my father believed in showing unconditional trust in his children.
Interestingly, even without a curfew, we girls did not stay out late. Everyone enjoyed being home so much that they called us homebodies. Maybe it’s because all six of us were just having too much fun together at home. Sure, there were quarrels, but they were small and rare, with only a few incidents that could be called ‘fights’. Throughout the years, mother remained proudest of our strong relationships with one another and the way we got along. I occasionally imagine what it would be like if I had an older brother or younger brother, but my conclusion is always the same. I firmly believe part of why we get along so well is because we are all women.
The unbreakable friendship between us sisters clearly did not stem from having a favorable environment. If anything, it deepened because my parents were always busy and we had to depend on and take care of each other. We had more hand-me-downs than new clothes and had to share everything. We became a stronger team as we went through the winds of political turmoil around us and, together, shared the responsibility to care for our aging mother.
If our family had a lot of wealth, would we have had an ugly fight over money like many do? One thing is clear. The friendship between us sisters is one which no amount of money can buy.
The two oldest sisters are now in their 70s and the youngest is in her late fifties. The little women of Jegi-dong became aunts and grandmothers over the course of time. After a long while, we have reached a place of security. As with any family, there were many hardships for us, but we overcame them by helping each other, both in material and heart. In doing so, I learned anew the simple truth that in being united, we become invincible.
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