How do to the right thing

I was raised to be powerless, and to be proud of my powerlessness. She knew exactly what she was doing to me when I was beautiful yet obedient to anyone and everyone. Many times I tried to escape with the wrong man and came back to her out of desperation, and she wouldn’t heal, only find the strings on the leash to tighten. I would be in dangerous situations and laugh as if I enjoyed it. I didn’t want help. I wanted someone to listen to me as I came to the wrong conclusion out loud, about who was good and who was bad, trying to solve a problem not with facts, facts I didn’t have and couldn’t afford. I couldn’t afford anything true, only false things. I was so scared of admitting I was powerless. I would brag that I knew the answer. Knowing made me feel less powerless, but it was temporary, because it was only an illusion of knowing.

I remember sitting in the car with my mom at 13 years old because I spent $20 on clothes and she screamed at me that I will never learn the value of money. I didn’t know what had value in this world. That i was broken because i didnt know the difference between what i needed and what i wanted. So much of my discipline traces back to that moment. And still now, I dont know if i work and save and plan and self-control out of shame that i am not enough, or out of a determination to have my own life as far away as i possibly get from her. But in a final, and bittersweet way, I allow those things to be the same. I am ashamed of her. I am ashamed of my mother. I am scared all the time because I don’t know who is good or bad. I still don’t understand anything. But I know who is bad, right now, and that truth is a kind of abundance. I couldn’t buy my way of understanding no matter how much money I made.

Was it hard to be the only clever daughter of a man who went to university, the only university in the whole country, and who was later blacklisted by the right-wing government from finding a job, because he participated in one socialist demonstration as a teenager? Who was forced to the coal mines and became a cheating, wife-beating alcoholic who kept all his history books in an illiterate town? He tried so hard to imagine himself as a hero of the people, when really it was all an accident, he would rather have the job in the city. Instead he was given a losing battle he never asked for. Why was he being judged? What was right or wrong? He thought he knew, but it was so much easier to know when he was handsome and charming and smart and celebrated. 

She took me to Cuba and Venezuela, she showed me what paradise communism was. She told me to look beyond the news and the propaganda, see the people lined up to receive bread, how the blacks and light-skinned hispanics lived as equals. She made me draw her portraits of Che Guevara, photos she kept in her bedroom instead of photos of her own husband. She said one must do the right thing, no matter what, no matter the cost. She was right and I was the cost.

When I try to be myself, she is so afraid of the world knowing anything true and kind and idealistic. I feel the weight of war and a country almost mended, collapsing under the cold war.

My father lived in a house next to the Kings Palace in the center of Seoul. His father was always away, an economic journalist obsessed with tracking the movement of money and power, and his stepmother was a greedy and jealous woman. She packed lunch for all her own children but not him, who had to eat whatever his teachers gave him when they felt sorry for him. He may have been one of the few people in that whole desperate country that knew that money didn’t buy love. Not that he knows what love is, he just knows that money can’t buy it. All he could give me was a question: what was right? Questions that keep me up all night with anxiety. When I am afraid and confused, all I can do is be more confused and hope I don’t collapse into a false knowing.