KOREA: EXOTIC OBJECTS

By the end of 1997, my mother, Jeannie, had been battling inflammatory breast cancer for three years, and I was pregnant with my first child. For those reasons my mother and step-father, Chris decided to spend Christmas with my husband and me in Southern California. They flew from Washington DC to San Diego, and then back again two weeks later. That would be the last time my mother traveled. 

I was eight months pregnant with my son John, and Mom would touch my stomach when he kicked to feel his rump and limbs through my skin, the only contact that grandmother and grandson would ever have. "I can't wait to hold him," she'd say with her eyes filling with tears. That Christmas, when it came to the subject of my mother’s fading health, I lived in a world of willful obliviousness, and Mom, who never talked about dying, was happy to discuss the past, determined to live there. We talked about our traveling adventures to remind us that change was better than permanence, and if you continuously move forward, you'd go on forever.  

                                                          Kwangju, South Korea (1971)

 

                                                   

The first time either one of us crossed the ocean, we flew to Kwangju, South Korea. It was in 1971, during the Vietnam War. I was one and a half years old and Mom was twenty-six. 

My father was stationed at the US Air Force base in Kwangju and was waiting for us to arrive. Mom and I were not welcomed guests by the US military. The base did not provide housing and accommodations for dependents, and there was no commissary. Apparently, a top General at the base told my mother not to come, but Mom, pointing out that Korea was still considered a tourist destination, was not about to sit at home in the United States while her husband saw the Orient by himself.

On the first leg of our flight, Mom, dressed in a navy-blue suit and dark stockings, and I in a pink bonnet and coat, flew from Los Angeles to Tokyo. There, Mom struggled through customs and immigration as she carried me and our bags, and then had to find her way to the Hilton Hotel where the porter smiled at us and called me “baby-san”. The next morning we had gotten dressed and grinned at each other like two adventurers, then went back to the airport. We flew to Seoul where we spent the weekend at the Chosun Hotel, considered luxury class and international. Our hotel window looked out onto a busy corner of constant honking where we could see men and women in native costumes riding bicycles or pushing carts through the loud and busy streets. Mom was in awe, what she described as a moment of pure joy and elation.

We then took a short flight from Seoul to Kwangju, Mom’s excitement turning into apprehension as we flew over mountains and endless rows of rice paddies. We touched down into the provincial city for a year’s stay and with only forty-four pounds of luggage. 

In the airport in Kwangju, Mom and I were the main attraction. As my father got our luggage, we found ourselves surrounded by inquisitive onlookers in rubber shoes. They gathered around us to whisper and stare at our Western faces and blue eyes, and laugh delicately, covering their mouths with their hands. One wrinkled old woman reached into her long skirts and brought out a stick of chewing gum.With a broad toothless smile, she offered it to me like one would offer a small piece of food to a stray kitten, and my mother smiled back and let me accept the gum. We had transformed into exotic objects of curiosity. 

“That’s how it all started,” Mom had said to me that Christmas in California, meaning our travel adventures. And we longed to go back, both of us, to be the exotic objects again. 

                                                                                                                                        - Jennifer Artley