Women in my family

By Jang Cheol-ho

The women in my family are independent and invincible. When my mother met my father, she was 22 years old and had her own hair salon. My father was an officer in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) stationed in her hometown. After discharge, my father could not find a job. They moved, with my sister and me, to my grandparents’ house in a farm village.

My grandparents were very disappointed. The whole family sacrificed to send my father to college. My grandmother in particular even hated my mother. One day, my mother left the house without saying goodbye. At the time, I was 7 years old and I even forgot about my own mother. We did not hear anything from her for three years. My father was depressed and sometimes overdrank.

She returned with some money to live together. My father got a job at his friend’s company in Seoul. We moved to Seoul and bought a house with her money plus a debt. She opened a restaurant to pay the debt. At first, she considered opening a hair salon, but the trends in Seoul were different from her hometown. About three years later, my parents could pay off the debt. My father became a public official.

When I was 26 years old, my father died suddenly. Six months after his death, my mother built a new house after destroying the old house. She sold the new house and moved to another old house. Then she built a three-story house. We lived on the third story and rented the first and second stories. My sister entered a commercial high school and got a job at a bank right after graduation. I found employment after college. My mother studied and passed the middle and high school certification examinations within two years.

My sister graduated from an evening university while working day. During the so-called IMF crisis that hit South Korea in the late 1990s, her bank was closed down but she was recruited as a college graduate by a state-owned financial enterprise.

When my wife graduated high school, her family faced hard times. She worked at a factory for three years and saved money. She studied and could enroll in a university where she studied on a scholarship. She became a math teacher.

Her father was a bank employee and he started a business, but it failed. He wasted time drinking. Her mother worked hard at construction sites and restaurants to provide for the family. Her sister got married to the son of a small fire protection company. She realized that if she got a professional engineer license in fire protection, their business would go well. The pass rate for the exam was 3 percent, but she passed. She let her other sister know this license was promising. The other sister also became a professional engineer.

In the old days, when things did not go as expected, some Korean men could not get out of despair, and would spend time drinking. However Korean mothers would do anything for their families. The women in my family have been more indomitable will than normal Korean women.

Ji-woo, the youngest niece, would surprise me. When she was 5 years old, I was about to help her put on her shoes. She got angry “Uncle, did you think a 5-year-old girl could not put shoes on by herself?" I bust out laughing, “You are a member of this family.”

The writer is an engineer. Contact him at [email protected].