Girl Uprooted: A Memoir, page 1
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Two
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Three
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Four
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Acknowledgements
References
Copyright
Introduction
When people ask me where I am from, my response is qualified with, “I’m Korean, but...” I can’t really get away with, “I’m Korean, full stop,” because of my funny international accent, so I usually go with the short answer: “...but I moved around a lot.”
The conversation either stops there—with a blank stare—or leads to the next question: “Oh, where have you lived?”
There are a few variations to this, but sometimes I might challenge them to remember the sequence of countries I have lived in. “Okay, you ready?” I say, then reel off, “Born in Korea, then moved to the US, Korea, Malaysia, the US”—I’ve usually lost them by this point—“Korea, France, then the UK and Norway. Got it?”
“Wow, how many languages do you speak? What’s your favorite country? You must have friends all over the world!”
I smile weakly because I don’t really know what to say, or where to start. The truth is, my entire life was upended every three years. With one flight, everything changed: not only my house, school and friends, but the food, the language, the culture, the climate, the color of people’s skins. Everything. And with each move, I had to relearn the “right” way to think and talk and eat and dress and study and play. My mom would praise me for how well I adapted and how easily I made friends in each country—as if I had a choice.
Fitting in was a survival skill. To paraphrase Darwin, it’s not the most intellectual or the strongest that survive, but the ones best able to adapt and adjust to a changing environment. And change it did. It was only a matter of time before the constant shapeshifting caught up with me.
After attending university in the UK, I returned to Korea in 2013 at the age of twenty-two. Korea was supposed to be my home—well, I was born there, I looked Korean, I spoke Korean, all my extended family lived there—but I didn’t feel Korean. No, Korea couldn’t be my home. But then, where was?
It hit me only then that I was no longer the daughter of a diplomat, an identity I was born with and one that had shaped my whole life. In fact, moving countries every few years had been the only way of life I knew; it was just the way it was. Now, I no longer had a diplomatic passport and needed a visa to live in any other country. But as much as I rejected Korea, and felt rejected by it, I didn’t seem to belong anywhere else.
And rather than having friends all over the world, I felt like I didn’t have friends anywhere in the world. After repeating the cycle of making friends then saying goodbye one too many times, it simply became too painful to invest in friendships.
The only meaningful constants in my life were my mom, dad and brother (and our Yorkshire Terrier). But aside from a generational gap, I felt a language barrier—maybe it wasn’t so much a barrier as an awkwardness—and an insurmountable cultural gap with my parents, especially my dad, who had been born and raised in Korea in a very different time. It would only be as an adult that I would start to understand the vast differences in our education, upbringing and values.
Today, at thirty-two years old, I have been living in London for nine years, by far the longest continuous period I have lived anywhere; yet it is no easier now to answer the question, “Where are you from?”
And although I am bilingual in English and Korean, I am not a native speaker of either. In English, I say things like “toe thumb” (instead of big toe), which is how you say it in Korean, and my Korean is slipping away with every year I live “abroad.” I don’t know if this explains why, for so many years, I didn’t feel like I had the words to express myself, but now, through writing, I have come to be at home with my in-betweenness.
This is my story of being uprooted many times over and finding a sense of identity, belonging and home.
Part One
*
The Ambassador’s Daughter
*
2010–2013
Chapter 1
Oslo, Norway, 2010 (age 19)
It wasn’t difficult to spot my parents among a pool of Norwegians as I wheeled my suitcase out of Rygge, Oslo’s low-cost airport. It was my first time visiting from Oxford University, where I’d recently started studying, and my backpack was heavy with books for my course. As I gave my mom a hug and my dad an awkward smile, a small Filipino man rushed over to relieve me of my luggage. With a warm smile, Dodong introduced himself as our driver and opened the doors to the shiny black Hyundai Equus, the official state car of Korea, parked outside. The license plate was marked CD for Corps Diplomatique. My dad gave up his seat so I could sit in the back with my mom.
“Residence, Sir?” Dodong asked.
A nod.
“Yes, Sir.” And off we went.
Out the window, the highway gave way to central Oslo, which seemed remarkably tranquil for a capital city, certainly without any of the hustle and bustle of Seoul. Everyone looked like models—tall, blond and beautiful.
“I bet we look like penguins to them,” I said.
“Hah, waddling around with our short little legs.” My mom and I often made self-deprecating jokes like this.
Outside the house, we waited for the wrought iron gates to open. They were painted with the red-and-blue yin-yang symbol from the South Korean flag. Past the gates, an actual flag waved up high from a white post. We were being watched by a CCTV camera. I’d had many, many homes over the years but none called the “Official Residence of the Ambassador of the Republic of Korea” as the golden plaque outside read.
Through the gates, we drove up a short, steep incline to a modern two-story house with floor-to-ceiling windows. As I stepped into the double-height foyer lit by a chandelier, a middle-aged woman in an apron jumped out to greet me. It was our chef. I bowed respectfully and said, “Annyoung-haseyo.” She too bowed and greeted me in the honorific form even though I was half her age.
“Lena, you’re here!” Our cleaner was the only familiar face in Norway apart from my parents. She used to help a few times a week at our previous posting in Paris and had been happy to relocate when my dad was reassigned. She was Joseonjok, an ethnic Korean born and raised in China, so she spoke Korean fluently, though she said some words differently. She’d been a primary school teacher back in China but had emigrated to France, leaving behind her daughter for better wages.
“It’s good to see you here, Ajumma,” I said, and squeezed her tight. She insisted we call her ajumma, a term which used to be commonly adopted for married or middle-aged women—I called my mom’s friends ajumma growing up—but was falling out of fashion. She called me by name as a sign of familiarity but spoke to me in the polite form as a show of respect.
Afraid of missing out, our Yorkshire Terrier, Jjanga, came out barking and wagging her tail. (Her name is pronounced with a harsh J sound that is difficult to pronounce for Westerners, though she would not have deigned to respond to anything mispronounced like “Jenga.”) Jjanga seemed nicely settled into her new Scandinavian life after my parents had driven her twenty hours from France, through Belgium, Germany and Denmark, as well as taking a ferry to Sweden, to avoid the strict quarantine rules in Norway. Jjanga was family, though. We got her when I was six and this was already her fifth international move.
Dodong delivered my bags to what would be my room. I followed him up the bright red carpeted staircase and quickly unpacked my things—there wasn’t a huge amount anyway.
Back downstairs, my dad popped open a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, his favorite champagne, and mine too. “Welcome to my humble abode,” he said. He loved using expressions like this, ones that he’d picked up on TV and studiously looked up. As I gazed around the marble walls, the celadon vases and the miniature flags of Korea and Norway crisscrossed against each other, my dad eagerly explained that the house had been built in the late sixties by a famous architect and that the original owner had been a playboy before it somehow ended up in the hands of the Korean government. Indeed, the basement bar looked more appropriate for a frat party than for foreign dignitaries. Now, the house was marked with the distinct and eclectic tastes of our various predecessors. My mom, too, would leave behind her imprint when the budget was replenished, allowing her to order new curtains and furniture.
This would be my new home, for the time being, as was the way.
*
Besides these luxuries afforded to the ambassador, my parents would enjoy many other perks. They would make annual trips to Reykjavik for the Icelandic National Day celebrations. They would visit Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean where road signs warn of polar bears and you are not permitted to leave the settlement without a gun. They would see the fjords and the northern lights and meet the nomadic, reindeer-herding Sami. They would attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony each year. My mom would even get to take a photo with Denzel Washington, her all-time favorite actor, at the first ceremony. (Unfortunately, there were no Hollywood actors present the year I tagged along. The European Union won that year, and I only got to see how tiny Angela Merkel is in person.)
I suppose this is the kind of thing people imagine about the diplomatic lifestyle, but my dad had been some twenty-five years in the diplomatic service before he became an ambassador. Unlike in some other countries where senior diplomats can be political appointees, Korean ambassadors are all career diplomats. My dad had to work his way up the pecking order, from Second Secretary, First Secretary, Counselor, Minister-Counselor to Minister and only then, Ambassador.
***
In 1987, a few years before I was born, my dad, then a junior diplomat, was sent to Rwanda. His mission was to open the South Korean embassy as part of the government’s efforts to be admitted to the United Nations. The Cold War was on and Kim Il-sung, the founding father of North Korea, was busy advancing the communist cause in Africa with money and weapons. South Korea felt it had to establish a counter-presence. (South Korea had, in fact, opened the first embassy back in 1972 but closed it three years later, miffed that the Rwandan government remained friendly with North Korea.)
Although hardship posts are a rite of passage for diplomats, my mom says my dad’s face blanched upon hearing their next destination. Not only was Rwanda one of the poorest countries in Africa but it also had a high prevalence of HIV, though it wasn’t understood at the time how the disease spread. After all, this was in the late eighties when the AIDS epidemic was just entering public awareness in the US. My parents would belatedly receive an apology from the resourcing department responsible for their assignment to Rwanda—if only they’d known about the baby. My brother was just a few months old.
Based on the albums my mom put together—now fading photos glued on flimsy paper—their life back then looks idyllic. They live in a spacious five-bed, two-story house, which is protected by a reed gate. The rooms are painted in a pinkish tone you might find in a grimy motel, but there is a chandelier in the dining room and an incongruous pair of banana leaf chairs in the sitting room. Beyond bananas, pineapples and papayas, which were plentiful year-round, food was scarce, so they planted fruits and vegetables, including strawberries and cabbages, in their garden. Lacking in provisions, my mom looked forward to the goodies her mother sent her from Korea via diplomatic pouches every two weeks.
There are photos of my mom, dad and brother all wearing matching clothes made from the same tropical print, which my mom sewed herself. She also acted as their barber, draping a towel around my dad and brother in turns and improvising with a pair of scissors on the balcony. They owned a television but could only play videotapes on it. Rwanda was one of the few countries at the time without a television network, which my mom tells me somewhat boastfully now.
My parents employed four Rwandan helpers—a cleaner, a driver, a babysitter and a gardener-cum-night guard—who mostly commuted barefoot to save money on shoes. My mom once took my brother and his babysitter Clotilde, whom my brother called Canna, to a function held at a fancy hotel. Canna pulled my mom aside and, pointing to a door that kept opening and closing, asked, “What’s in that small room?” She had never seen an elevator before.
My parents and brother went on road trips within Rwanda and to neighboring Burundi and Uganda, often driving on treacherous dirt roads. There are photos of them sticking their heads out the sunroof of their Mercedes, with wildlife in the background. My mom says coolly that impalas, zebras and baboons were so common they scarcely bothered stopping for them.
One time they went to visit the Maasai village in Kenya where the local tribe wore ornate beaded jewelry and had enormous ear piercings. As pastoralists, they wielded wooden sticks and lived in circular huts plastered with cow dung: cracked, but sturdy. My parents were fascinated by their customs and politely asked to take photos with them. For the Maasai, my brother was as much of a spectacle. They were used to seeing Westerners but very few Asians. They huddled around my brother, wanting to stroke his silky black hair and soft skin, a heartwarming moment of mutual intrigue.
Unfortunately, the situation was about to turn dark in Rwanda. In October 1990, the rebels invaded the country from their base in neighboring Uganda to overthrow the president. The rebels were mostly Tutsi refugees who had been the wealthier and dominant minority in Rwanda until the country became a Hutu-dominated state following independence from Belgium in 1962. After the invasion, a dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed. For expats, dinner parties became sleepovers. My brother, of course, managed to fall and gash his eyebrow one evening after curfew. My parents had to mount the Korean flag on their car before driving him to the emergency room as if for a state visit.
Then came rumblings of an attack in Kigali, the capital city. On the day of the attack, my mom was warned by a friend who she played tennis with and whose husband was a senior official in the French military. She relayed the message to my dad, who had his own intelligence from the American embassy and dismissed the rumors. “That’s nonsense,” he said. Sure enough, there was an attack that night: a reminder to never underestimate a woman’s intelligence.
Next door to my parents lived a Tutsi bigwig, and shots were fired, or misfired, at their house. To use a Korean idiom, it was a shrimp getting hurt in a whale fight. My parents crawled and hid in the corridor, away from the windows, to dodge the bullets. “Tuck your butt in!” my mom shouted. Unlike my toddler brother, my dad was unwieldy on all fours. When the gunshots became louder, they crept to the bathroom, which was in a more secluded part of the house. After putting up mattresses against the window, they took cover until the morning. Windows were shattered overnight. My brother whined that he wanted to play, but in the playroom his toys were mixed with shards of glass.
By the time the gunfight broke out, two of my dad’s colleagues had left the country and he became the chargé d’affaires. While diplomats and other expats were offered flights out of the country, the local population, of course, had no such privilege to flee. My mom, now five months pregnant with me, took safety in Kenya with my brother, who was three then, and called her mother for advice. Thinking back to the time when families were separated during the Korean War, my grandma warned my mom not to get separated from her husband: “No matter what, don’t come back until your family is together.” So, my mom waited in Kenya to be reunited with my dad and they returned to Korea together in December 1990. I was born four months later.
My dad is not a natural storyteller but this was a well-worn tale he knew how to tell with the right amount of drama and anticipation. “Bang! Bang! Bang!” Eyes wide, he would mimic the gunshots and impersonate my mom’s shouts as dinner party guests glanced over at her in amazement. What I realized recently, though, is that my dad wasn’t telling this story purely for entertainment. By recalling this incident, I think he was also reminding himself of how far he’d come.
I forget sometimes that my dad had a very different upbringing to mine, and that the Korea he grew up in was unrecognizable from the one I would experience. He was born in 1957, only a few years after the Korean War, when they say the country was as poor as Ghana. Following the war, Korea was a major recipient of foreign aid, notably from the UN World Food Programme (WFP), the humanitarian organization I’d always associated with efforts to combat famine in regions like Africa and the Middle East. But it wasn’t just food assistance the country needed. The UN Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA) was established to help with everything from housing and health to industry and irrigation—the rebuilding of an entire nation. However, within a generation, Korea transitioned from being a recipient to a donor country. Now rice bags stamped with the Korean flag are delivered to vulnerable people around the world, and South Korea has a seat at the “rich countries’ club,” the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
