How I Transformed Family Obligation to Personal Abundance
Part 1: The Pain of Separation
My brother and I grew up helping my parents in their various convenience store and food businesses.
Even before we were old enough to help, the store* was a part of us.
*My family calls whatever business we’re currently working “the store” (가게 in Korean) even if it’s actually a deli or other food franchise
I think because of the way the Korean word translates. And also because my parents’ first business, a 7–11, was a (convenience) store.
I just found out that one of the roots of the word “store” means “RENEW.” Very fitting, and I’ll be using “store” from here on out in this essay.
Throughout my adult life, I’ve had this pattern of moving far away and doing my own thing, and then coming back home to live with my parents and help with the family business for awhile, before moving away again.
My relationship with the store has been one of violence, racism, overwork, fatigue, stress- and recently, homecoming, abundance, and integration.
The first business my parents owned was a 7–11 in Washington DC. When my mom was pregnant with me, she was held up at gunpoint while working the night shift there.
She wasn’t physically harmed and she called the police after the thief left.
When the policeman came to write the report, he wanted to make sure she was OK. He asked if there was anyone she could call.
My mother told him that she didn’t want to call her husband because she didn’t want to disturb his sleep.
The policeman was incredulous. My mother finished the rest of her shift as if nothing had happened.
Perhaps as a baby in her womb, I absorbed the terror that she wanted to protect my father from.
My parents immigrated to the US shortly after being married in Korea. They came alone with less than $200 and no support.
When my older brother Reggie was 2 years old, they sent him to Korea to stay with my grandmother. My mother had been taking care of him completely by herself, while working. She took him with her to the store.
A family friend helped out sometimes, but this was untenable. My grandmother in Korea offered to take care of Reggie, and he lived with her for 2 years.
While he was in Korea, he had trouble digesting food. He was used to drinking my mother’s milk, and cow’s milk- and in Korea he was fed rice milk.
He cried so much on the plane ride over, that the person who accompanied him (while my parents worked) gave him whiskey to quiet him.
He says he doesn’t remember this time away from our parents. But my mother has shared that every time she thinks of him, she feels great sadness and guilt over that separation.
Once, just after returning home from a visit to see her son and mother in Korea, my mom was driving to work and a tape started playing in the car.
She heard my father’s voice singing along with the family “friend” who had helped take care of my brother.
They were laughing and speaking playfully and informally with each other between songs, in a way they would never have spoken in front of my mother.
Speaking informally like that indicates a level of familiarity that would have been considered highly inappropriate in Korean culture given the context of their relationship.
My mom was furious. She goes away to Korea (which was a much more expensive and grueling trip back then) to visit their son, who she’s heartbroken to leave there, while her husband is fooling around with this lady- who my mother treated like a younger sister?!
She was also pregnant with me. She confronted my father and told him there was nothing she could do about Reggie, but she was not going to have another child with him.
She obviously didn’t go through with this threat of abortion. And I don’t know how they ended up moving past that incident. But it would come up again 20 years later (which is when I heard the story).
After graduating from college in the spring of 2000, I planned to move to Korea, which I’d only visited once when I was 8 years old.
I’d always felt deeply connected to my ancestry, in a way I didn’t really understand, having been born in the US and having no Korean friends after childhood.
My brother and cousins didn’t seem to share the same level of loyalty or attachment I felt for Korea.
But, the older I got, the more important it felt to learn more about my ancestry. I was also feeling closer to my parents and wanted to improve my fluency in Korean so that we could communicate more deeply.
But, most of all, I wanted to fall in love!
I felt like I was the only one who hadn’t experienced being in love, and I wondered if it had something to do with racism.
In high school, I felt that the boys I liked didn’t really see me because I was ‘different.’ I thought that if the right boy would just give me a chance, then I’d be the perfect girlfriend.
But in college, when I received more attention from guys, I kept them at arm’s length. I noticed that none of the guys I ended up dating were Asian.
I wondered if racism had made me believe, subconsciously, that Asian people were undesirable. Maybe I couldn’t love anyone because I didn’t love myself.
This thought made me sick. I hoped if I moved to Korea and was surrounded by people who looked like me, that I might heal this inner hate.
I decided to go to Korea in the Fall, so I could spend one last summer at home with my parents- helping them with a new store they had just bought.
They had bought a convenience store in a rural town, along with the property, close to relatives on my mom’s side of the family.
After running several business in Washington DC at premium locations (Union Station, The Old Post Office) where they had to pay high, constantly increasing rents to cut-throat landlords, this new store felt like a quaint, charming venture.
I imagined working happily alongside my parents, with frequent visits to my grandparents, who lived within walking distance of the store.
I envisioned enjoying this idyllic time together before everything changed… Before I got married and lived in a house of my own and had a professional career.
Yea… as you probably already know or can guess, that’s not how things happened.
The store was not small and quaint but a large and thriving business with a lot of moving parts, including a gas station, laundromat, deli and grocery.
The store was open from 6 am to 9 pm, 7 days a week — much better than being open 24/7 like previous convenience stores we had, but still quite a lot of hours to manage. It was a constant challenge to make sure we were properly staffed.
We had a few solid, dependable employees, but many were irresponsible and/or in difficult situations which prevented them from showing up to their shifts.
The store was in a poor and struggling town (the poorest county in Maryland) with little opportunity for growth.
As a young girl, I loved that town because so many of my cousins lived there. During summer vacation, I would stay at my cousins’ houses. We’d bike to the playground and our grandparents’ house, stopping by different shops and visiting my uncles along the way.
One uncle owned the grocery store, another uncle the liquor store, another the video shop.
It was a strange town for these Korean families to have settled down. I’m sure they dealt with racism, but I thought they were so lucky. Because they had each other.
When my parents bought this store, they were looking forward to spending more time with our relatives. We were all excited to be closer to my mom’s side of the family.
But living in close proximity revealed more dysfunction. Instead of greater intimacy, rifts developed.
My mom discovered that her parents weren’t being taken care of as well as she’d hoped by her brothers and in-laws (4 of her 7 brothers lived in this town).
So, my mother ended up cooking extra dinners and visiting her parents after long days at work, filled with frustration and heartache, instead of the joyful times she had anticipated with the whole family.
The petty behavior I witnessed among some of my relatives at this time left me feeling disillusioned and protective of my parents.
I felt sadness and nostalgia for all the birthday parties and summers I’d spent as a child, feeling such pride and love for my extended family.
My parents tried to take weekends off, but they were constantly stressed about people not showing up to work, or something malfunctioning.
Every time the phone rang, we would worry that it was another employee calling sick, or letting us know a freezer had broken down, or that they were quitting. Often, they wouldn’t even call.
Instead, we’d hear from the cashier, “Mr. Lee, sorry to bother you, but there’s no one in the deli right now.”
When I’d decided to spend my summer with my parents, I thought I’d just be an extra helping hand at the store. But once I started working there, I couldn’t imagine how my parents had been doing it without me.
My father took every Wednesday off to golf.
My mother understood he needed a break, and was glad he was taking care of himself. But, she also resented it. She wasn’t taking any extra days off!
And neither was I. (In addition to the long hours I worked during the week, I ended up going in nearly every weekend to cover shifts).
My mom resented it, because he would often come home late from these golf days and be tired the next day.
And it always seemed like the biggest catastrophes would happen on Wednesdays.
With so much always going on with the business, she didn’t understand how he could just take off in the middle of the week, as if without a care in the world.
No matter how much was going on, he never offered to skip his golfing day.
I sometimes wondered how he didn’t feel guilt- or compassion- seeing his wife and daughter work so hard, while he took an extra vacation day for himself every week.
One day, after my mom and I had just come home from work, she got a phone call. She was in the kitchen and I was in the living room, and I remember immediately knowing something was very wrong.
A man was calling to let her know that my father was having an affair with his wife. Apparently, this behavior was not new for his wife, and he had resigned himself to her ways.
But, he was finally motivated to call my mother because that morning, my father’s car keys had been seen by this man’s kids.
This was too much for him.
Shortly after we found out about the affair, I broke my right arm. It was Fall, and I would have been leaving for Korea soon.
Even though the broken arm didn’t stop me from working (I still took orders and fried potato logs and chicken with my left hand), it still made a good excuse to postpone my trip to Korea.
My mother was ashamed, and didn’t want anyone to know what had happened. So we all worked together pretending like all was well, while my parents slept in separate rooms, my father lost weight and my mom cried through the night.
At first I hated my dad for his transgression, but soon after I felt compassion for him. I knew that relationships were complex and that both of my parents were unhappy. My father wasn’t trying to hurt my mother.
At first, my mom said she wanted to end the relationship, but eventually decided against divorce. She didn’t want to do that to “us” (Reggie and me).
I was sad for both of them. I tried to heal their relationship. Of course, I couldn’t and it wasn’t my place to do so. But, before I woke up to that, I spent a lot of time and energy feeling frustrated, conflicted, angry and helpless.
I eventually left for Korea in the winter of 2000, with a heavy heart. I was worried about my mom, who was still depressed from the whole affair.
Looking back, I find it so ironic that my main motivation for moving to Korea was to learn how to love.
Click here to read my series on alchemizing racism through art.
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