The trickiest job was rolling weather strips. Long, narrow pieces of spongy material, with film-protected adhesive on one side, would arrive at the house, and it was Mother’s job to roll the strips up two at a time and put them in a small plastic wrapper. Mother held each weather strip lightly between her left thumb and index finger, as if to simply keep it in place, and rolled with the right hand. Pulling and rolling the weather strips, she often cut her finger on the paper film on the adhesive side. She wore two layers of work gloves, but her finger always bled anyway. The material took up a lot of space, the work produced a great deal of debris, and the fumes from the sponge and adhesive gave her a headache, but the pay was the best among all the odd jobs. Mother kept taking on more, and worked longer hours.
Father would often come home from work to find Mother still rolling weather strips. Jiyoung and Eunyoung, in elementary school at the time, sat in the living room with their mother, variously doing homework, goofing around, and helping her, and their baby brother enjoyed himself ripping up pieces of sponge and wrapping plastic. On days when she had too much work, the family would push the pile of weather strips aside and have dinner next to it.
One day, Father came home from the office later than usual to find his young children still rolling around in weather strips, and complained for the first time: “Do you really have to leave this smelly, dusty stuff around the children?”
Her busy hands and shoulders suddenly stopped. She crawled around, putting away the wrapped weather strips in boxes, and Father knelt down next to her to sweep sponge and pieces of paper into a large plastic bag.
“I wish I could give you an easier life. I’m sorry,” he said and let out a heavy sigh. A huge shadow seemed to balloon over him and fade away.
Mother lifted and stacked boxes bigger than herself in the living room, and swept the floor next to Father.
“You’re not giving me a hard life, Daddy,” she said. “We’re working hard together to make it. So stop feeling sorry for yourself as if our home is your responsibility alone. No one is asking you to, and, frankly, you’re not doing it on your own,” Mother retorted coldly, but she quit the weather strip job right away. The van driver who delivered the weather strips was sorry to hear it—she was the best and the fastest worker.
“It’s just as well,” said the van driver. “Your talents are too good to waste on weather strips. You should get into arts and crafts. I think you’ll be good at it.”
She waved him off saying she was too old to learn new things. She was thirty-five at the time. The van driver’s words seemed to have made an impression on Mother, who left young Eunyoung in charge of the even younger Jiyoung, and the youngest in the care of his grandmother, and enrolled on a course. It wasn’t arts and crafts, but hairdressing. She didn’t even bother with licenses. “You don’t need a license to cut hair,” she said. As soon as she picked up a few simple skills, how to cut and perm hair, she started making cheap house calls for children and the elderly around the neighborhood.
Word spread. Mother was indeed talented, and had natural business savvy she was oblivious to. After their perms, old ladies got a simple makeover using Mother’s eyeliner and lipstick, and she threw in a quick trim for the younger sibling or the mother after cutting a child’s hair. She found out what product they used at the neighborhood hair salon, and used something slightly more expensive on purpose.
She would read the label on the bottle to the old ladies, pointing to each word in the copy. “See here? New. Irritation-free. Formula. With. Ginseng. Extract. I’ve never had a single piece of ginseng in my life, but I’m treating your hair with it!”
Mother saved every last bit of cash she made and didn’t pay any tax on it. The neighborhood hair salon lady did try to pull out a chunk of her hair for stealing her customers, but Mother was a local with a well-cultivated reputation—the customers took her side. The customer base was eventually divided up organically, and the salon and Mother were able to keep their businesses going without getting in each other’s way.
Oh Misook, Kim Jiyoung’s mother, is the fourth of five children, two boys, two girls, and a boy, in that order. All five grew up and left home. Her family grew rice and did well for generations, but the world was changing. Traditionally an agricultural society, Korea was industrializing fast, and her family couldn’t get by on crops alone. Her father sent his children to the cities like most parents from rural areas did in those days. But he didn’t have the means to support all five of them through school or training that would lead to their respective career choices. In the city, rent and living costs were expensive, and tuition was even more difficult to afford.
Oh Misook finished elementary school and helped out around the house and in the paddies. She moved to Seoul the year she turned fifteen. Her sister, two years older than her, was working at a textile factory on Cheonggyecheon. Oh Misook got a job at the same factory and moved into a chicken coop dormitory the two sisters shared with two other girls. The factory girls were all about the same age, level of education, family background, and so on. The young laborers worked without adequate sleep, rest or food, thinking that was what working entailed for everyone. The heat from the textile machines was enough to drive a person insane, and rolling up their uniform skirts, which were short to begin with, didn’t help—sweat dripped from their elbows and down their thighs. Many had respiratory problems from the plumes of dust that sometimes obscured their vision. The unbelievably meager wages from working day and night, popping caffeine pills, and turning jaundiced went toward sending male siblings to school. This was a time when people believed it was up to the sons to bring honor and prosperity to the family, and that the family’s wealth and happiness hinged upon male success. The daughters gladly supported the male siblings.4
Oh Misook’s eldest brother attended medical school at a national university outside of Seoul and worked at the university hospital at his alma mater for the rest of his career, and the second eldest brother was police chief by the time he retired. Oh Misook was proud of her upstanding, hardworking, smart elder brothers and found supporting them rewarding. When her older brothers, the ones she was so proud of she would often brag about them to her friends at the factory, began to earn a living, they put the youngest boy through school. He attended a teacher training college in Seoul thanks to their support, and the eldest was praised for being the responsible first-born son who brought honor to the family through his own success and provided for his family. Oh Misook and her sister realized only then that their turn would not come; their loving family would not be giving them the chance and support to make something of themselves. The two sisters belatedly enrolled in the company-affiliated school. They worked days and studied nights to earn their middle-school diploma. Oh Misook studied for her high-school certificate on her own and received her diploma the same year her younger brother became a high-school teacher.
When Kim Jiyoung was in elementary school, her mother was reading a one-line comment her homeroom teacher had made on her journal assignment and said, “I wanted to be a teacher, too.”
Jiyoung burst into laughter. She found the idea outrageous because she’d thought until then that mothers could only be mothers.
“It’s true. In elementary, I got the best grades out of all five of us. I was better than your eldest uncle.”