Korea and My Grandfather

I recently read an article, and it got me thinking. Here’s the link if you’re interested in where this all started:


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=157396344

I also, a little less recently, visited South Korea for the first time. I didn’t think about it much during my stay, but that trip was the first time anyone in my family has been to Korea since my grandfather was in the war there in the 50’s. Presumably, my trip was only the second time anyone in my immediate family has ever been to Korea.

Obviously, Seoul is a very different place now from when my grandfather drove ambulances during the war. Obviously, he wasn’t there as a tourist. I remember when my grandmother died, and as we were going through all the many, many things in her house, we found a trunk of souvenirs my grandfather had brought back from that tour – I want to say there was a jacket, but I could be remembering that part incorrectly. Mostly, I remember the silk scarves printed with famous Korean scenes on them. They seemed paralyzed into the creases and folds the years they had spent buried in that truck, with no one looking at them, had put them in. I was eleven when I saw them, and even then I realized how little I knew about the places my grandparents had seen on the trips their kids, my dad and aunt and uncles, hadn’t gone on and therefore couldn’t tell me about. I wanted to know about the Korea he had seen.

I also remember a photograph of my grandfather positioned in the front seat of one of those ambulances, knees drawn up because he was very tall, wearing his uniform. It was a beautiful picture, and I remember looking at the trees in the background behind the ambulance, visible through the windows of the drivers’ cockpit.

Thinking back on what I saw of Korea myself, I can imagine that photograph superimposed over the scenes I witnessed. Even in the city there are patches that seem quite rural, and there are such trees there even now. Did he visit the Secret Garden while he was there? I did – but I don’t know how much our experiences overlap, even sixty years apart, if they do at all. A soldier then and a teacher now, sharing even a little of the same experience. That I, eleven years after being eleven and looking at those old trifles in a chest, would go there myself. I wouldn’t have thought it. I would have liked to talk to him about it, to share.

So even though he wasn’t buried on Korean soil, his gravestone has the mark of his war – like all the gravestones in that cemetery do, a cemetery for veterans. I had never thought much of the fact my grandfather was a veteran. Because I hadn’t needed to. He died when I was eight, and his war experience was far removed by both time and space from when I was part of his experience, singing songs in a rocking chair, not thinking about death. But, now, having been there and having a better understanding of the nature of that war and the nature of war in general, I wish he and I could have talked about it – for him to see it then and me to see it now, and across all those years between our times and between the last time I saw him and now, he is still an intrinsic part of my experience – an experience I am only partly alone in.

In the article I link to above, families talk about going to a certain cemetery in Korea because their family members had died in the war. Mostly, these families are Chinese. In a way, I understand that sentiment – a connection to someone gone and far away, someone you still love and wish you knew more about, and their intrinsic connection to a place far away. So my Korea is just that, also my grandfather’s. My visit there was more than just a weekend – it was a red thread around a finger sixty years old, to always remember and to never forget.