A Revolution in Three Generations

I was told I was a revolutionary.

And I didn’t believe it.

Then I remembered a little piece of proof why it might be true. Because despite my mom’s abuse, my mom’s father, my grandfather, was politically exiled because he was in South Korea, in the capital of South Korea. He went to university, had very strong beliefs about socialism, and he took part in some demos and he got blacklisted from Seoul, so he couldn’t find a job. So the only job he could take was in a coal mine, which was very dangerous and it was very frustrating for someone who was university educated in the 1950s. My mom grew up seeing the reality of trying to change the world and just the poverty and him drinking and being violent and cheating on my grandmother. The man he became, the struggles he had living based on the beliefs he had, was a brutal lesson to grow up with. But he also believed. He believed that women should be equal, which was very different from the way women were raised in Korea. Back when it was normal for the women to eat last at the dinner table, he insisted that my mom and all the women eat together with the men. My mom grew up with a father that was continuously bankrupt, they were always on the edges of society, always disenfranchised, always pushed to the borders because of this legacy of what my grandfather believed and what he stood for.

She grew up very cynical, but she still held on to a belief because she showed me the world, she showed me about traveling, and she taught me about Che Guevara, she taught me about all the revolutions in Korea and all the traditions, all the important things. The thing about Che Guevara that she taught me was that you have to do what’s right, even when it’s really hard, no matter what, you have to do what’s right. Her and my dad really led me to Latin America because they showed me from a young age, they sparked that passion in me. They brought me here when I was young. This is the place I continuously go to because I see so much that needs to be changed, and I see so much suffering at the hands of the United States. Because of the culture too, I resonate with it. Now it makes sense because when I hear someone say, I am a revolution, the voice in me that was silencing me was my mom’s voice. But I realized that it’s still true despite her cynicism, there is a small seed of hope in me that I could make a difference. And when she’s cynical, it just means that she’s lived through something that I never saw, and she wanted me to see the real pain of trying to change the world. But also when I was being actually brave, it was like she was shutting me down saying this is not enough to change the world. “It’s not enough” it’s like she’s saying, “you’re just soft, you just grew up in Canada, and you think people are going to listen, but people are not going to listen, this is not going to change anything.“ But I keep fighting her, and I keep fighting and I returned to the belief and I said, “you don’t know until you try.” I talk about how excited I am that I’ve written something important and that I’ve impacted people and it is a big deal. And I wrote these stories and I made an impact in Latin America, and it’s beginning, it’s really starting to happen, I can feel like I can do this. She said, you can’t change people, you can’t change me. I said, you don’t get to say what’s true or not, you don’t get to say what is possible or not, because you haven’t tried it, and you don’t do it. And I have to accept that even though the cynicism hurt me, she has in her own life, tried to find other ways to become free way before her time.

Because of what my grandfather legacy left in her was this burden of this reality of dealing with, what do you do after you’ve challenged the government after you had beliefs? How do you survive it now? It’s the reality of surviving that aftermath. She taught me about financial independence, first of all, because you need financial independence to be free from capitalism in order for you to be free. Then she also taught me about traveling and exploring other people and cultures. So those are the two things. She also taught me about tradition and ironically, staying close to your roots and holding on to what is really Korean, even though that’s the society that rejected her.

And now I see how she grew up in very capitalist South Korea, coming from a poor family, not fitting in with this very, very competitive capitalist society with all the other girls. She’s this daughter of a communist coal miner, and she arrives to the city from a small town and has to fit in and make friends in a hyper-capitalist and superficial society. But deep inside, she knows she believes something else. And that’s what I realized is the legacy she left in me that she’s kind of passed the baton to.

Now I realize that’s what the legacy is. And it is like a movie and it is cinematic like the stories I live and write and it was very hard, but it’s real. And now I can’t deny that it’s not real because that’s exactly what happened, over three generations of my family.

The world is going to hurt you anyways. It’s going to give you generational trauma anyways. You’re going to pass on your failures to your children anyways. Wouldn’t you rather have trauma in the pursuit of changing the world?