Yes, I gripe about living with my mom all the time. And who can blame
me? I’m twenty-four, I have a decent enough income to be living
independently, and I’m not particularly fond of having my mail opened
for me when I get home. Yes, this is the joy of living with a Korean
parent.
Still, I do love my mom. I can’t even begin to elaborate on all the work
and effort she has made into giving me the opportunity to be the person
I am, and the person I want to be. It wasn’t easy, but my mom did it
anyways. My mom left a really bad situation in Stockton, where both my
sister and I were born, and came to Marin where we lived with her
brother and his family. Though she had a College degree from years back,
she hadn’t put it to use as she had been helping run a Quik Stop, and
times were tough when we first got to Marin.
After two years of bouncing around San Anselmo, we ended up renting a
place in Roundtree in Marinwood, where my mom lived for sixteen years
all the way up until last month. It wasn’t easy for my mom, an immigrant
who felt insecure about her ability to speak English, to live in this
environment where we were possibly the only Korean household, and in a
community full of many affluent families. She constantly reminded me
that the reason why we lived there was because of the good reputation
the Dixie School District had, and to this day stresses the value of
education. For the first few years that we were in this place, she
worked as a temp, taking all different kinds of jobs to build up her
resume while doing her best to take on the enormous responsibilities of
being a single Korean mother of two American kids.
Or at least I felt like I was an average American kid. I guess growing
up in this environment really made me confused about the way people
perceived me as well. People asked me if I was Chinese or Japanese. I
really had no idea how to respond. I mean all I had really known was
Stockton, a city in California that had a street dedicated solely to
fast food, one of which was McDonald’s boasting about how it had served
more than one million. Yet, I was smart enough to know that saying I was
from Stockton wouldn’t be a good enough answer. It was a dilemma. I grew
up with Sesame Street, not Hagwons (A cram school for kids that parents
in Korea send their children to). I begrudgingly told them that I was
Korean, after explaining that there were more than two countries in
Asia, despite having been born and raised American.
Being an American kid meant a lot of things. One of them was learning to
love your McDonald’s. I think I was in third grade when I was brave
enough to venture outside of Happy Meals and into Extra Value Meals – it
was a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. While I loved (and still love) the
burger, the rage at that time was the Bacon Double Cheeseburger – two
meats, two cheeses and bacon. I guess consuming one of these was a sign
that you weren’t a kid that ate Happy Meals and played with toys, you
were a big boy that ate big boy food and did big boy things like emulate
Michael Jordan and Deion Sanders.
Not so surprisingly, my mom was not taken with the idea of bringing her
kids to McDonald’s very often. I can’t tell you if it was for financial
reasons or because she didn’t want me to become a fatty (sorry if this
is the case Mom) but asking my mom for a burger usually resulted in my
mom’s, whose full name is Young Shin Kim, sly suggestion that we instead
go to “Kim-Donald’s.”
If you’ve ever seen Eddie Murphy’s Raw, you’ll know what I’m talking
about. When my mom made burgers, they were definitely not McDonald’s
burgers. They had green onions in them and tasted like Meat Loaf. And
there were no fries either. So when I naively asked my mom to make a
Bacon Double Cheeseburger, she came back with something other than what
I had in mind.
What I got what two pieces of bread, a stack of bacon and a slice of
cheese. No beef, no nothing else. I really think this was the pinnacle
of feeling like an outsider in my own country. My mom doesn’t even know
what a Bacon Double Cheeseburger is? I was upset and in a state of
disbelief. I couldn’t believe how detached my mom was from mainstream
American society, and I was upset to have been born into an immigrant
household.
Of course, since this day, many years and life experiences have passed
by. I was too young to realize what had really just happened. That
burger was more than a stack of bacon. It was a message from my mom that
went something like this:
“Son, I don’t know what you asked me to make you. But just like everything else you’ve seen me do, I am going to try my best at doing it. I didn’t know how to recover from a divorce, but I did my best and now our lives are better. I didn’t know how to make a living by myself, but I did my best to learn how and now I can. I didn’t know if I could raise two kids by myself, but I’m doing my best to make sure you two have the best lives possible. And I didn’t know if I could make it as a female immigrant from Korea living in the United States, but I did it. I know it took tens times as much hard work as it could have taken someone else, but I did it.” “So look at this burger. It was made from bacon, cheese and lettuce. These ingredients were bought with income that I was able to make because I worked hard and never gave up. Let this burger be a guide for your life. You might feel like you’ve been fooled and tricked by other people, or that you can’t survive on your own, or that you can’t handle huge responsibilities, or you might even feel like you’re an outsider. But I promise you, son, that if you do your best, everything will work out.” Everything has worked out. You were right, Mom. I always talk about how
I have the best life in the world, and I know why now.
I love you, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day. If you make me another one of those
burgers, I definitely wouldn’t reject it now.
