One Thousand Chestnut Trees. Mira Stout

Korea’s level of civilisation was unsurpassed in the Far East. But twentieth-century Korea was war-scarred and rebuilt; its back still turned somewhat defensively against the encroaching West, whose condescension Korea felt keenly.

      

      When my mother returned from her concert tour a few days later, violin-case in one hand, suitcase in the other, I welcomed her differently. Maybe I imagined it, but her face looked more complete to me, and slightly harder, too.

      As she walked up the flagstone path and handed her suitcase to my father, it occurred to me for the first time that she must have been carrying cases when she first arrived in America. There had been a moment just as specific as this one. Had she walked down a gangplank? What would she have brought with her? Had anything survived from those days? I tried to imagine her as she was then, but could only picture her in a snapshot from the late 1950s, when she was a music student in New York. How different she looked then, her face round and babyish, hair bobbed and permed; barely recognizable. She had long ago lost the open vulnerability of that sheltered girl from Seoul. I remembered a photograph of her even further back, in the forties, before leaving Korea. She was standing on the wide bank of the River Han in a brown overcoat, a tiny figure against a vast blue sky. It was taken at such a distance that you could barely make out her face. Over time the colours have bleached out, the image gradually disappearing in its frame.

      Looking at my parents’ backs as they climbed the front steps, I realized how incomplete my knowledge was of them both. Perhaps I would always see them through the keyhole of childhood, reduced and truncated by my own self-interest, their limbs moving predictably in and out of the light; Mother’s hand stirring a soup-pot, tuning her violin, Dad’s shoulders hunched over a canvas, shovelling snow, studying the sports results in the newspaper. The keyhole was dark during years of absence; boarding-school, summers, and university. Periodically I sought clues in the enigmatic black-and-white tableau of their wedding photograph – the disapproved-of wedding that neither set of parents had attended on racial objections – but their young, exultant faces revealed nothing but youth and exultation, their mobile eyes frozen in the recording of the moment.

      There was a land-locked familiarity about my parents; I had been content to stick to the limited territory I knew, to ignore their pasts, and avoid the entire ocean of their inner lives. Perhaps this was how it was meant to be between parents and children, our lives unequal parallel lines, never meeting. But it no longer felt quite right.

      

      That night my mother regained control of the kitchen with an assured clatter, and as usual, prepared us a fine quasi-Eastern, quasi-Western supper; homemade mandu-guk (dumpling soup) with Chinese leaf, and Irish beef stew – kimchi optional – accompanied by rice and potatoes. Despite decades of inculcation, Dad still preferred potatoes to rice, and my mother rice to potatoes. I ate both.

      I told my mother about the books I’d read. She listened carefully, and said little. She carried on eating quietly. She gave me a penetrating, measured look, neither warm nor hostile, which said, ‘We’ll see how long this interest lasts.’

      After supper when my father went upstairs to watch the news, my mother made some ginseng tea and we sat down together a bit edgily, as always. Like many daughters and mothers, we had had fearsome disagreements over the years, but ours were magnified by a cultural gulf.

      My mother had been a distant and rather puzzling figure, as unpredictable and all-powerful as the weather. Often abroad on concert tours, her absences and bad moods affected me like rain. Early on, I had been raised mostly by nannies. Feeling excluded by my father and me, my mother was often perfectionistic when she returned home, and I shrank from the force of her criticisms. Yet when she was happy, it was as if the sun had broken through at last, transforming everything, bestowing a warmth – that only she could bring – to cold corners of my being. Her kindness was never cloying or phoney, but vital.

      We disagreed over petty things – her convent strictness over manners, clothes, curfews, and boy-girl etiquette – but more fundamentally, we did not speak the same language. I could not understand her mother tongue. Even when she spoke in English, the meaning of her words was pure Korean. I did not understand what she meant by ‘respect’: to me, it meant politeness; to her, it meant filial piety – children revering their parents. How did one revere? I thought it unfair to be expected to behave in ways I had never seen practised. America did not tend to produce reverent teenagers; why should I be the first?

      Yet inadvertently – and sometimes knowingly – my behaviour hurt her deeply. She had worshipped her own mother, yielding at times I would not even consider, while I was fresh and moody, continuously breaking the code of obedience upon which her very childhood, and generations of Confucian childhoods, had been unquestioningly founded.

      But compared to my boarding-school friends, I was fairly virtuous. Like a good Korean child, I was flirtatious but chaste, worked hard at school; competent at sports and the arts, sceptical but conscientious. Got into trouble only once: suspended for smoking a cigarette in the girls’ lavatory. My mother’s rage was frightening: when I got home, she locked me out of the house until dark. To her, I was a barbarian, needing urgent curbing.

      Although we got along in a crippled sort of way, with the advent of teenage hormones, communication became untenable. Trivially, I scorned the square clothes she bought me and told her so, while she would upset me by dismissing F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath as a colossal waste of time. She disapproved of my acting in school plays,

      ‘Vulgar,’ she pronounced.

      More distressing, when I tried to confide tremulous worries to my mother, she would respond with an authoritarian maxim or reproval which I would angrily reject, thinking that she didn’t care. Tears were ignored, along with achievements.

      ‘Mothers are not friends, they are mothers,’ she would say in defence of her sternness. We would make up, and row again. The turmoil was painful for us both. It was like having a diseased tooth; a dormant infection that flared up regularly, only worse. Beneath the irritable surface symptoms lay profound guilt and despair; a sense that I should have prevented it somehow, should have been stronger. It provided the first disturbing and confounding proof that two people could be biologically close, and yet be as strangers. My father and I got on easily, which may have aggravated things. But for all that, I loved my mother fiercely. Although I could not express it to her, I found her strength and principles quite awesome. I longed to please her above anyone else.

      

      Sitting at the dining-room table, acute frustrations between us had relaxed with time.

      ‘Get a pen,’ my mother instructed gently. Then she got out a battered old address book, and opened it. The writing was mostly in Korean. Thanks to the Linguaphone booklet, I recognised the odd vowel. The pages were yellowed and flaking at the edges. She squinted at the page, and smiled with rare spontaneity. It reminded me of the way she had looked ten years ago, when I spied on her speaking Korean with Hong-do.

      ‘You must go and see my cousin and his family; he was once my tutor. This is his name and address. And of course, your aunt, Myung-hi, and our eldest brother, your uncle Jin-ho, if he is still alive.’

      This last comment chilled me. Didn’t she know if her brother was still alive? Why didn’t she know?

      ‘It’s complicated. I can’t really say,’ she said. ‘My older brother has not been well, and since my parents’ death, I lost touch with other relatives.’

      I was shocked by her refusal to talk about it, or even to think about it. This mention of my other uncle brought a heavy sadness to my mother’s face that I did not understand then, but later would.

      She moved on to discussing another relation. I listened, bemused, and grew cautiously excited about these names and places. It was like mapping the first inches of the unknown iceberg of my mother’s past.

      Although she was silent, one could sense the importance she attached to bequeathing these family details. After twenty-seven years I was still not wholly ready to receive these names, delivered in her difficult handwriting, in Korean. But somehow,