My mother-in-law s thoughts on Thanksgiving in Incheon, Korea

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1 Page 1 of 6 HooJung Jones From: Date: Subject: <Koreavetnews@aol.com> October :59 PM MY MOTHER-IN-LAW'S THOUGHTS ON THANKSGIVING IN INCHEON, KOREA The Korean War Veteran Internet Journal October 4, 2012 My mother-in-law s thoughts on Thanksgiving in Incheon, Korea I am so very proud of my mother-in-law and she has just spent the Korean Thanksgiving Day (Chuseok) in a hospital in Incheon, with her daughter, my wife, Mak-ye, beside her. Mak-ye's mother had a severe stroke five years ago at this very time of the year and we got Mak-ye on a flight to Korea within 24 hours. The attending doctors advised that she could not possibly survive the severity of the stroke. Yet with prayer, and the Lord s intervention, that good lady still lives. She is bedridden, for one side is paralyzed and she sometimes knows transient pain that requires injections. But she is in a very good geriatric hospital. She has been there now for two full years. My wife, Mak-ye, has a bed next to hers and stays with her around the clock, seven days a week. Mak-ye s mother, in the Gunsan general hospital, a few months after her massive stroke. Whenever Mak-ye flies over to be with her, her mother s health at once begins to improve. With her daughter s good care, and with special supplemental foods carried from Canada to Korea, she begins putting on weight almost immediately. She relaxes and she knows happiness.

2 Page 2 of 6 I telephone her every week when Mak-ye is with her. It used to be more often but Mak-ye ordered me to conserve the telephone account. I call and I speak with Mak-ye s mother, though she understands very little English and my few words of Korean must be more confusing than helpful. Each time I call I sing her a song. The words are in English but I think she can tell that the voice she hears is respectful, with love and appreciation, and wishes to comfort her and stand by her. I am told that she listens very attentively and does not want to give back the telephone. She is a very brave, very stalwart Korean lady. In her small village in the southern part of South Korea, she was the most beautiful young woman in the region. She has confided how in earlier years she sent the men packing who came trying to win her. Mak-ye with her mother in her room at the home of her oldest son, Yongsan, before being admitted to the geriatric hospital. She worked on the farms and she worked at the seashore harvesting crustaceans and seaweeds from the mud flats. She worked from before sunrise until after it had set. I do not know how she got through the war. I think she stayed close to where she was born and this has never come to light. I know that she worked very, very hard each hour and each day. Later there was some kind of rift in her family and for many years she raised two of her children alone, while four of them stayed with their father, far away. She saved her money resolutely, her very few won, and she acquired some land and she planted and harvested sweet potatoes and radishes and other crops. Yet she also worked in the fields of others for a pittance of pay, and at the seashore sometimes, processing shrimp and other catches for the fishermen. It was essentially two families, for my wife, Mak-ye and her brother never knew they had a father until one day they were united with him at his home in the city, when he was sick. When he died Kim Yu Gum sold some of her property and paid for her husband s remains to be taken to his family s cemetery far to the south. She has paid for its care through the years.

3 Page 3 of 6 Her two sons and two daughters who live in Korea are very busy and do not visit her as often as they would like to, so one wonders what she thinks of on those days and in those weeks when none of them are there. Mak-ye and her mother at the geriatric hospital this past April. She probably thinks of how lucky she is that they live freely, and knows in her heart that she has always worked very hard and honestly, and I am sure she rejoices that her youngest daughter, my wife, cares for her and loves her so very much. Mak-ye stays with her for two months at a time and once she stayed for more than four months, and while she is with her, her mother flourishes. We have her photographs in the rooms in our home in Canada and we both have her in

4 Page 4 of 6 our hearts. Before she had the terrible stroke, which she survived and which the doctors called a miracle, and I totally agree was indeed a Miracle, Mak-ye used to visit her at her small apartment in Gunsan. Her mother would wake not long after midnight, ready herself for the day, catch a bus in the darkness and ride two hours to the farm where she was working. She would work from sunrise until sunset, very hard work and she would get home in the dark of evening and often fall asleep eating her meal. It was heartbreaking that she worked so hard but it seemed it was something that she wanted to do. Even though she earned a pittance for her hard work, she felt a need to keep adding to her savings, and to be self sufficient in her daily life so she would not live on the largesse of anyone else. Photo of Mak-ye and her mother hangs above our wedding photo on wall of one of the rooms of our home in Canada. She probably was light years ahead of the women s liberation movement in the Americas, fiercely independent, doing hard work in the country and the culture that she grew up in, but never buckling under to anyone else and never, never lamenting that others had great wealth but that her very hard work brought in so little. If you look in her eyes you will know that she makes a quick assessment, and if you win her approval you will know it. It is not something that you can do willingly, for you either qualify for it or you don t. She has no time for charlatans or those who proffer false friendship, though she is sorry for them. So I sing to her when I can and when I am in Korea I take a taxi or the subway down to Incheon and I see her for a very short while. I see all of the many older people who live now in that hospital and if I visit at the time that my wife, Mak-ye is there, I rejoice to see her, too. I can see how she cares for her mother so very well, and takes her on the rounds of the entire hospital every day, that she may visit among the others and know their company and their approval, though it is mostly a matter of them winning approval from her. One of the ladies living in the hospital whose bed is close to the beds of Mak-ye and her

5 Page 5 of 6 mother is more than one hundred years old, and Mak-ye talks to her often. So on this Thanksgiving Day in Canada I know that Mak-ye s mother is being treated very well, and she is enjoying the food supplements and the puddings that Mak-ye carried to Korea with her about 140 pounds in all, half again as much as Mak-ye weighs herself and that the two are together, and for that I rejoice and give thanks and know the splendour of genuine wonder. And no matter what the lot of Kim Yu-Gum may be, she knows that she lives in Paradise. She sees beyond the walls of the hospital, and she sees the beautiful flowers and the colourful fruits in the stalls when Mak-ye takes her for walks. While Mak-ye is there her days are full and sometimes she awakes and is looking at her daughter, waiting for her to wake, too.

6 Page 6 of 6 Mak-ye with her mother at the geriatric hospital during an earlier visit, saying good-bye, prior to returning to Canada. When she is alone later in that hospital Kim Yu-Gum will still know that she lives in Paradise, for she can see the whole sweep of our Lord s great showcase. She can see the gorgeous green rolling land she nurtured so painstakingly by hand, and the goat that she petted and fed and kept to provide milk for her family. She sees the lovely flowers that grow wild throughout Korea and the twinkling ocean that gives up its flora and tiny crustaceans when it lowers its water for rest. She sees the gorgeous blue skies that bring happiness with their pleasant colour and their abundant rains to nourish all life. Even when she sees or remembers the snows of the coldest Korean winters she can picture the warm indoors that she kept heated and stocked with food and made so pleasant to live in. She sees in the hearts of the people around her there and in those of the many, many she has met, and she knows the goodness that is there, as well as the cruelness and avarice that have been the sorry afflictions of many. She knows they cannot help those things but must do better to fight them off and set them aside and not be taken down by them so that the world may be good and pure. She rejoices for the World of Our Lord and for all those around her at the hospital in Incheon, and she rejoices for all of us, too.