by Ellen Oh
Aw, my grandpa is a romantic. I could imagine the scene all in my head. I’ve seen photos of my grandpa when he was younger. He wasn’t a handsome model type, but he was really cute, with a smile that made him more attractive than any movie star. Okay, so I might be biased. However, my grandma is straight-up beautiful, now and then. They must have made such a cute couple.
“It was there that she asked me whether I would be willing to move to America. I was surprised. I’d never thought of it, but I wasn’t opposed. I asked her why, and she told me that she had made a promise to herself during the war that she would one day live in America. She would not marry anyone who wouldn’t agree to move there. So of course I said yes. And that’s why we moved here right after our wedding.”
This is all news to me. I don’t know why I’ve never thought to ask my grandparents about their lives before. I’m learning so much about them.
“Can you talk about what it was like moving from South Korea to America?”
Grandpa shifts deeper into his chair as if to get comfortable. “Well, we came as graduate students. I applied to Emory University business school and Grandma applied to Georgia Tech for a master’s degree in mechanical engineering.”
My mouth falls open in shock. “Mechanical engineering? Grandma? But she’s a real estate agent!”
“That wasn’t her dream job,” Grandpa explains. “In college, your grandmother was a physics major who dreamed of one day working on spaceships.”
“Whoa, Grandma! That’s so awesome!”
I wish Grandma was here. I would give her the biggest hug.
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
Grandpa spreads his hands. “You have to understand, Grandma is a very proud woman. A very smart woman. She had a really hard time working at Ford when she graduated.”
“She worked at Ford?” I’ve surpassed shock now; my mind is officially blown. I just can’t believe this news.
“Your grandma was the only woman in her section and also the only Asian in her entire department,” Grandpa said. “They didn’t want her there, and they showed it every day. They made her life hell on earth, and every day Grandma came home and cried. Finally, I couldn’t stand it, and I told her to quit. At the time, I was still working at part-time jobs while trying to complete my PhD in business management. The racism was hard, but there were a lot of nice people I saw every day who made life bearable. But your grandma had nobody. Not one person at the Ford plant would even smile at her. It was a terrible place for her. It’s why we moved to New York.”
“Poor Grandma.” My heart hurts to think of my pretty grandma suffering. “I really need to record her side of the story too,” I think out loud.
“You absolutely should!” Grandpa agrees. “And you should also ask her about her war story. It is very different from mine.”
“How?”
“That’s her story to tell. You must ask her, so you can record it. Promise me.”
“Yes, Grandpa. I definitely will!” I had made up my mind that recording both of my grandparents’ stories was an important project not just for school, but for me and my family.
“SO, GRANDPA, HOW DID YOU end up in New York and then Maryland?”
Clearing his throat, Grandpa asks me for a cup of barley tea. “Junie, please pour me some boricha if you want me to keep talking.”
Grandma brews a large pot of barley tea every day and leaves it on the stovetop. It is still hot, so I pour it into two mugs. I put a few ice cubes in mine, because I don’t like to burn my mouth. It smells earthy but in a good way, with a hint of sweet nuttiness. I bring over the mugs and watch as Grandpa sips his hot tea and says, “Ah, delicious. Now, where was I?”
“New York?”
“Right! Our friends told us that it would be better for us to move to New York to be around more Asians. Back then, there weren’t many in Atlanta. So, we packed everything up and drove to New York. We decided it was a great time to sightsee. This is such a beautiful country. But even that was hard. It was 1971, and your uncle was four years old. We would drive around and see beautiful landscapes, and then at night we would struggle to find a motel that would take us.”
“What do you mean, take you?”
“We were foreigners who spoke English with an accent,” Grandpa said. “Many nights we would drive up to a motel with a vacancy sign, only to be told at the front desk that there were no vacancies. Some nights we had to sleep in the car at a visitor’s center parking lot off the highway. At least we’d have a bathroom to use and water to drink. Several times we walked into little diners or restaurants that would not seat us. Or if they did, the waitresses would ignore us and finally we would be forced to leave hungry.”
My blood is boiling. I can’t even imagine how difficult it must have been for them.
“We had a hard time.” Grandpa smiles ruefully. “We were on the road for five days, and only one night could we get a motel room.”
“That’s horrible!”
“Yes, racism was really bad back then. But we finally arrived in New York City and we were able to stay with friends until we found a small apartment in Queens. We opened up a small jewelry store with the money we had saved from our jobs. We both learned to make jewelry, and we imported some Korean products, like vases and jewelry boxes.”
Korean vases are beautiful and very different looking. My mom has a few that my grandparents gave her, and she cherishes them. And I have a jewelry box that Grandma bought me a few years ago. It’s black with a mother-of-pearl design of flowers and butterflies. The only thing I keep in it is the gold baby ring that most Korean kids get at their one-year birthday. It is my greatest treasure.
“I didn’t know you owned a store!” I say. “Are mom’s vases from back then?”
“No,” he says as he takes a sip of his hot boricha. “We’d only had it for a year when there was a robbery and we lost everything. Grandma was pregnant with your mom and we had no insurance. It was a really difficult time. Our landlord was a terrible person who kicked us out immediately without giving us a chance to recover. I think he took advantage of us because we spoke broken English.”
I’m so mad I explode. “But you both speak English really well! And you and Grandma are bilingual!”
“Grandma’s trilingual,” Grandpa says with a grin. “She speaks Japanese also.”
“Yeah, trilingual!” I sputter. “All they can speak is one stupid language.” I stop and cross my arms. I’m aware of the fact that I only speak one language too. “I’m sorry, Grandpa, please go on.”
“I understand how you feel, Junie,” Grandpa says. “It must be hard to hear this.”
I nod and chew on my nails. I know it must have been harder to live through it.
“We had to borrow money from friends in order to feed our children. At the time I had to work three different jobs, and your grandmother started working a few weeks after having the baby. Trying to find a job was a struggle for both of us. Many times, they told us they didn’t hire Chinese or Japanese. They didn’t even know what Korean was. They didn’t care what kind of Asian we were; they just hated all of us.”
The sad thing is that what my grandpa is telling me doesn’t surprise me at all. It makes me angry and upset, but I know all these stories are true. Not just because it’s my grandpa and I believe him. I’m not surprised because this is America.
“What kind of jobs did you work?” I ask.
“I could only get part-time employment like delivery service or janitor. Manual labor jobs that didn’t care that I spoke broken English. And the only place that would hire Grandma was a Japanese restaurant and bar. Your uncle was six and had to stay at our friend’s house until late at night. And Grandma took your mom with her to the bar and left her sleeping in the basement. Sometimes she’d go check on her during a break, and your mom would have been crying for a long time. They would never allow this to happen nowadays, but we did what we had to do to survive. Your grandma cried a lot during that time.”
“Did you and Grandma think you’d made a mistake coming to America?”
Grandpa made that hand gesture again. Opening them palm-side up as if to say not sure.
“It’s hard to say. There were definitely moments where I wondered if we shouldn’t have come. But as difficult as it was for us in America, there were friends and family who were suffering in Korea also. At that time, South Korea had another brutal dictator as president who claimed rule under martial law.”
“Martial law? What’s that?”
“It means that normal laws don’t apply, because the government has called in the military to enforce their law over all its citizens. It’s a terrible power. So many South Koreans died protesting. We don’t know what would have happened if we’d stayed there.”
“But you wouldn’t have dealt with racism, at least.” I feel a little bitter at this, as if it is their fault for coming here and making me suffer from racism also.
“Then you wouldn’t have been born,” Grandpa says. “Or you would have been born, but to another father.”
I am struck by this statement. He’s right. Everything would have been different. My mom wouldn’t have met my dad. I can’t imagine, and wouldn’t want, anyone else as my father. But still. I would never have had to deal with Tobias either.
“How did you deal with all of it?”
“All of what?”
“The racism.” I wipe the tears away from my eyes. “How come it didn’t get to you? Weren’t you depressed? Didn’t it make you want to just run away and never have to deal with it?”
Grandpa gets up and comes over to hug me. The video is still running on his empty chair, but I can’t be bothered to turn it off. I let myself cry in my grandfather’s arms as he gently pats my back. When I’m finally cried out, he gets up to give me a box of tissues and waits as I blow my nose.
“I’m sorry, Grandpa.”
“No, Junie, never apologize for showing your feelings. That is not something my generation of Koreans is good at doing, but it is a beautiful thing to see how Americans can be so open and honest about how they feel.”
“Are you talking about that Chama thing?”
Grandpa smiles and nods. “We Koreans have learned to hold in so much suffering. But we also have the ability to love deeply. This country has been so difficult and yet I love it very much. I still believe in the American dream. Your grandmother and I came with very little money, and now we are comfortable in our old age. This country has been very hard on us, and yet it has been very good to us also. For every terrible racist we have had to deal with, there have been many more wonderful people who have helped us and cared for us. That is why I never regret moving here. I don’t know if we would have been better off in Korea, but I do not doubt that I gave my children a chance at a better life during a very turbulent time in our own country, and I am grateful for that opportunity.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t feel like they want us here.” I heave a shuddering breath. “It makes me want to run away. I’m so tired of it.”
It’s quiet in the room, and then Grandpa sits back in his armchair with a sigh.
“I understand, Junie. It is easier to run away and pretend that racism doesn’t exist. But some people can never do that,” he says. “In this country, Black people must face racism every single moment of their lives.”
“Racism is hard for me, too, Grandpa!”
“I know it is,” he says. “And yet you know it is not the same. For them, racism kills.”
I feel ashamed of myself. Of course it’s not the same. It’s why Black Lives Matter has become such an important movement. Because there are Black people being killed just for being Black. I hang my head.
“When we were in Atlanta,” Grandpa continues, “we had to put your uncle Paul in a preschool while we worked and went to school. Even though segregation was supposed to have ended, the preschools were all white or all Black. The only one that would accept him was a Black preschool. I’ll never forget how warm and kind they were to us. How they accepted Paul and he made so many good friends.”
“Uncle Paul went to an all-Black preschool?”
“Yes, and he loved it. Even though the other Koreans didn’t approve. They even formed their own Korean-only preschool and urged us to bring Paul there, but he didn’t want to go. He loved his school and he loved his friends.”
“They formed a preschool just so Uncle Paul wouldn’t go to a Black one? That’s terrible!”
“Ah no, it’s more complicated than that! They formed one so that immigrant Koreans could work together and form their own community where it didn’t matter that their English was bad,” he explained. “It was for very good reasons, and if it had been open when we were first looking for a preschool, we would have sent Paul there. And I’m sure it would have been great. What they didn’t understand was why we let Paul stay in the Black preschool. Paul stayed there because he was happy, and he was learning. That’s all that mattered to us.”
“Asians can be racist also,” I say.
“Yes,” he agrees. “They see how the people in power treat them, and they don’t want to be treated like that.”
This is a lecture, and usually I hate being lectured, but this is also part of Grandpa’s story.
Grandpa reaches over and pats my hand. “Junie, my point is, no matter how difficult racism is for you, it is much worse for the Black community. When you get tired, think of how tired they must be. When you are angry, think of how angry they must be also.”
I’m nodding. This is why Patrice is fighting so hard for change.
“It feels impossible to fight back,” I say in a discouraged voice. I can feel my depression affecting my mood, telling me I can’t do anything. I can’t help anyone else when I can’t even help myself.
“That’s because the hateful voices are the loudest ones. They are afraid of how the world is changing. You must remember that we have the ability to change people’s hearts. Running away or doing nothing never changes anything. Staying and fighting racism by educating people is not easy. Many times they don’t listen. Many times they won’t change. But we continue to talk to them, to teach them, and one day their hearts might open.”
Something clicks in my mind and I see that Patrice is very similar to my grandfather. She wants to start conversations, make people think and learn. Grandpa is the same. I need to be more like the both of them. But how can I? I’m not brave or strong.
“Junie, there are many different ways to fight. And it is up to you to find out your way. For example, your mama is the type of fighter who likes to go to protests and make speeches and argue with people. She is very solution-oriented and has no problem challenging authority. It’s why she’s such a good lawyer. On the other hand, your father does not like confrontation. His activism is more about writing letters to politicians and helping fundraise for specific programs he cares about. One way is not better than the other; we need all types of people if we are going to fight for a better world. The only wrong thing is to not do anything at all.”
I understand now. I need to find my way, whatever that might be. I need to be brave and a good friend.
“Grandpa, I’m going to try to be more like you. I’ll try to be brave.”
“You are already brave, my child,” Grandpa says to me. “I believe in you. Will you believe in yourself?”
I nod.
He smiles at me. “Good girl.”
He gives me a second to compose myself and then he asks, “Are we done with the video thing?”
“Nope, Grandpa, I’m going to record all your stories! So what do you want to talk about next?”
He rubs his hands together and raises his eyebrows at me. “Did I ever tell you about when I ate my first slice of apple pie and ice cream?”
I continue to record my grandfather as I listen to all his stories, and I am suddenly so grateful that Mrs. Medina assigned this project. Hearing my grandfath
er’s stories directly from him makes me feel so much closer to him than ever before.
AT SCHOOL, THE DIVERSITY PROJECT is moving along. Patrice, Amy, and Hena finalized scripts, and we’ve been interviewing students every day at lunch. Ms. Simon allows us to use her classroom to record. I’ve been filming them all and then at night I’ve been uploading them on my father’s big-screen computer. It’s been a lot of fun playing with the editing equipment and music. I’m starting to think that this is something I might want to do for a career.
We’ve also formed a club with Ms. Simon as our teacher sponsor. Which is great because we can meet once a week during lunch in her classroom. Lila is the best graphic artist in our group, so she created a cool graphic with the words Diverse Voices, which is our official club name. Patrice and Amy made photocopies and plastered them all over the school. Even though it is a club for students of color to meet and talk about prejudices they deal with, we are open to everyone who wants to come and learn. Our first meeting is Wednesday at lunch, and we even got a stipend so we can have snacks. Patrice is especially excited.
For the meeting, I drew a poster for Diverse Voices with little chibi cartoon versions of all six of us. When I showed it to my friends, they all loved them, especially Amy, who is an uber fan of all things manga. I’m posting it up on the bulletin board near the front entrance when I see Esther Song staring at me.
“Hey,” I call out to her. “Want to come to our first meeting?”
“Ew, no,” she replies with a sneer.
I don’t let her response get to me, and instead I just say, “We’re going to have lots of different snacks! I’m going to bring some chocolate Peppero sticks and Yakult drinks.”
For a second I swear I can see some interest, but then she turns away.
Friday, I get picked up by Grandma and Grandpa as usual, and I record Grandpa’s stories. I ask Grandma if she’ll let me film her, and she shakes her head.