The Memoir: The Lesser of Two Evils

Blame the Artist, they all do anyways.

There are ordinary things about my own life I cannot verify. My origin. My mother. My hometown. The kind of basic truths most people can retrieve from their families with a phone call.

I am estranged from what’s left of mine, as I detailed in Bourdainism and Paris: Shamelessly Blocking My Entire Family on Social Media, Happy Holidays, and if I’m to be of utmost honesty, I would hesitate to believe anything they say. When answers change depending on what is convenient, the floor shifts, and the truth becomes a lifeline that is hard to find. I suppose that in retrospect, this is where my obsessive documentation began. And where the most important goal of my healing journey was set: the ability to validate and stay fully in my own experience, irrespective of the noise.

I’ve been feeling stuck. Not in the traditional sense of writer’s block. Rather, I placed so much weight on this memoir, of all the workstreams I’d spun up, that like training for anything, I kept finding myself shifting the goalpost: When I’m further along in my healing journey. When I can sit through the traumatic events of the past with no emotional dysregulation. When I’ve integrated, metabolized, processed (what does that even mean, really?).

Then, and only then, I will be ready to speak.

So I fell back into reading. Long before I reached the state of corporate apathy and burnout I have found myself in now, I used to devour a book a day. Entering someone else’s inner world was both an escape and a survival practice: the forging of an empath who had to acutely tune into her abusive family members’ needs, gauging the temperature of a room at any point in time.

And as I read, I found that the messiest poets moved me most. The unhinged. The unedited. The unfiltered. What a waste it would be, I thought, if I waited until perfection arrived. Because that is the actual trade. Every day I wait is another day I spend polishing this for the eyes that will eventually scan it, and the more I write toward those eyes, the less of my own precious and intimate and vulnerable magic survives the edit. It would not be tainted by the telling. It would be tainted by the waiting. And it would not be me.

So. Since the last time I wrote to you, in the prologue, I think the next piece that makes sense is my very first memory of my family together, and the first memory I worked on in EMDR: my free fall.

But before the free fall, you have to understand who we all were.

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I’ve spent a lot of time trying to recall who my mother was, from the little truths I could gather out of my own lived experience.

To my father’s side of the family, the side I ultimately ended up with after they divorced, she was every curse word in the book. Home wrecker. Slut. A woman passing on a curse she never cared to stop, because her own mother had cheated on her abusive father, abandoned her children, and wrecked another family on the way out. A gorgeous vixen and a manic artist. A man-eating, toxic wreck of a being.

What I have always found interesting, as I have grown older and turned this over, is the misogynistic hypocrisy of the recanting. Not my father, not his mother, not anyone else in that family could see that in their abuse of me, in their brainwashing of me, they were actively forging me into the very woman they described.

But that is something I’ll have to show you as this book unfolds, in the most organic of ways.

My father was ten years her junior and hard at work. From my recollection, he was rarely available and always traveling. I know that he set up a store for my mother to run, with his business partner, where they sold American goods and art from Disney. My mother was an artist and a painter, and it would make sense that she had her way with people. I was frequently left between my grandparents and my uncles, largely on my father’s side, though sometimes with my mother’s grandfather. We’ll get more into that.

My grandmother has made sure that I remember my mother as a cold-hearted woman who never held me and never breastfed me.

I can actually confirm the cold part to be true, because aside from the day with the flowers I outlined in Found on Facebook: A Letter to a Mother I Barely Knew, I have exactly one memory of her.

I was three, maybe four. I was watching TV with my mother and my grandmother, and I repeated what the comedian on screen said. The word was ba-bo. In Korean: idiot.

My mother was so outraged that she shook me until I threw up, and then she started slapping me. My grandmother begged her to stop. That I was just a child. That I was largely nonverbal as it was, and was only repeating something from the television.

She got up and went to the refrigerator, where the bamboo sticks were kept.

Back in the nineties, and in Korea especially, corporal punishment was acceptable, even in schools. And there, I remember my first lashings, until my arms and legs turned red and bled.

And right here, if my father, my grandmother, and anyone else on that side of the family were to read this, and as I suspect, they will read this, they would feel quite pleased. It would be the proof they wanted all along. The validation that they were indeed the saviors. The good ones. The lesser of two evils, at the very least.

And oh, would they be oh so wrong.