My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [82]
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, I’ll give you an example.” Jung says he was watching Korean TV recently and saw a show about Korean housewives of approximately the same age as Kay undergoing therapy for what you might translate as “hyperadvancement syndrome.”
“These were women who grew up when Korea was barely even the Third World—it was almost the Fourth World,” he says. “I mean, we’re talking outhouses, drinking out of streams, livestock in the yard.” Since the 1960s, however, South Korea had developed from one of the poorest countries in the world into what many call the most technologically advanced nation in history, with its futuristic communications infrastructure and world-dominating tech firms like Samsung. Jung, who has just come back from visiting Seoul, says the country makes the United States look old and backward (“We’re ten years behind”), and those women experiencing “hyper-advancement syndrome” had, like all Koreans, seen their world change about as much as humanly possible in one lifetime. They were suffering from future shock.
Gab’s father is a good example. The rural village he comes from, called Dogae, was home to his ancestors for sixty generations, according to family lore. When Mongol hordes invaded Korea in the thirteenth century, Edward’s relatives were there. And when the Japanese first started marauding Korea three hundred years later, they were still there. And when the Russians and the Americans divvied up Korea after World War II, things were still more or less the same. But this last generation had been different. It had cut the cord. And when Edward left, he didn’t just wind up in a neighboring village or Seoul—he went to the other side of the world.
In Kay’s case, her background was more cosmopolitan; her parents were successful merchants from North Korea who imported goods from Manchuria. Their estate was supposedly so big that it had eight gates leading up the driveway. Even as Korea endured famine and foreign occupation (Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and held on to to it until the end of World War II), Kay’s siblings went to school in a chauffeured car, had a radio in their house and enjoyed other luxuries. However, when North Korea turned Communist in 1948, the family lost everything. Kay’s father, targeted for his fortune and his anti-Communist political activity, was arrested and sentenced to the gulag. His family won his freedom only by ransoming their estate and cashing in on a personal connection to the uncle of the future North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, then fled to South Korea, where Kay was born.
Kay’s parents were educated; her siblings attended high school (a privilege reserved for the elite) and even college, but the family’s reduced circumstances in the south forced her to earn money instead. Blessed with that powerful voice, she joined a singing troupe that performed at weddings and baptisms, and while still a teenager she met Edward, who was serving in the South Korean navy.
Edward had also been affected by Korea’s tumult, but if dramatic ups and downs shaped Kay’s childhood, displacement shaped his. During World War II Edward’s parents went to Japan, where his father became a laborer in a tin mine and eventually died of lung poisoning. An only child, Edward was dealt another blow when, upon returning to Korea, his mother married a petty tyrant who made home life unbearable. As soon as he was eligible, Edward joined the navy and headed abroad. When he met Kay (she was working as a receptionist at a YMCA in Seoul) he was on shore leave, and immediately after their wedding he went back to sea, setting a pattern for the rest of their marriage.
Kay was left to live in the household of the tyrannical stepfather Edward couldn’t stand, serving her in-laws (as per Korean tradition) as a virtual slave. Their house, a former Japanese hospital that had been converted into a general store, was haunted by the stepfather, a cripple who began drinking every