A Place of My Own

This one's a bit of a sad read, but it explains why Korea is so dear to me. This is going into the book...

Growing up with a father in the military had its pros and cons. A definite con was the inability to acquire life long friends due to the fact that we were constantly moving. Our family was forced to move every four years and get stationed at a different military base. A definite pro was the ability to see many places. Among the entire time my father was employed by the United States Army, we were forced to uproot our family to five cities in three states and one country other than the United States. These locations included Atlanta, GA, Frankfurt, Germany, Killeen, TX, Honolulu, HI, Houston, TX, and El Paso, TX respectively.

Being an “army brat” meant that I was never really given the chance to form strong relationships with my family. All six of my father’s siblings were also working in different branches of the military, which meant that no one was residing in the same location for a long period of time. I have never in my life lived next to a family member, other than presently living next to my husband’s family (which I consider to be my own now). Drifting from place to place made it hard for me to find a place that I could call my own.

Despite living in all of these areas, the one place that has made the most impact in my life is a little town in South Korea called Dong Du Chon. This was the place that my father met my mother years before I was born. She left her family to travel around the world and ultimately retire in the United States. This was the place that we constantly found ourselves going to when we needed a vacation. We used to visit Dong Du Chon every summer for several years during my elementary school days. Since I spent a good 10 out of the 52 weeks in a year visiting family there, it helped fill the void of not having family members present year around.

Dong Du Chon is about an hour train ride away from Seoul, South Korea. It is a major foreigner town that houses a United States Army base called Camp Casey. After Korea was split into it’s north and south sides, my family migrated from the north to the south into this little town and established a residence there. It is a small-condensed town that acquires most of its income on entertaining the foreigners.

When I was a little girl, my mother, brother, and I used to take a taxi from the Incheon airport to my grandmother’s house. The drive was a good hour away and when we finally reached our destination, my brother and I would argue over who would enter the house first. The first person to enter the house would be immediately snatched by grandmother and held onto for what seemed like hours. My grandmother would hold us tight and cry because she was so happy to see us again.

In the mornings we would wake up to music being played in the street by men pushing around carts with toiletries and other miscellaneous objects that you could purchase for a small fee. If we needed to purchase any food, we would walk down the street to a little food shop. Right next to the food shop was a little restaurant that sold chapaghetti (a black noodle dish), and right next to the little restaurant was my Aunt and Uncle’s video shop. Up the street on the other side of my grandmother’s house was a beauty salon that my mother once owned and operated before she moved away with my father. Kids ran around and played on the street that my grandmother lived on because cars seldom drove there.

Every year we looked forward to visiting my family in Korea. When my father retired from the military, he left our family to seek out a life of his own. It left my mother, brother, and I constantly struggling to make ends meet. That inevitably left us with no money to visit Korea anymore. As the years passed, many things changed. I constantly yearned to visit my family. My grandmother would call often crying so much because she missed us. That made my mother avoid her calls. I was left with constant reoccurring dreams of me, as a little girl with pigtails, riding a tricycle down the street where my grandmother lived. I would ride my tricycle from the food store to my grandmother’s house. My grandmother was always eagerly awaiting my arrival.

I was given the opportunity to visit my family in Korea sixteen years after our last visit. I went there with my mother and my then 2-year-old son about a year and a half ago. A lot changes in 16 years. The street that my grandmother lived on was widened to allow an easier passage for cars. Her house, which actually encompassed 5 separate living areas that could be accessed through the outside, was torn apart and condensed to two living areas. One of the living areas housed my uncle who owned the video shop and his three daughters, while the other was rented out. He closed his video shop and his wife left him to live with another man in another city in Korea. My grandmother was moved to a nursing home and diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This little area that had once felt so warm and comfortable with lots of love, was reduced to an abandoned home with family members broken apart. The street was empty and free of kids running around and having a good time.

I’m not sure if I can ever integrate my past views with what it has become in the present. With all that has changed, I still remember the little street that I went to visit every year as a child. I remember the love I felt and the cohesion that existed between my family and me. I will always remember my grandmother crying tears of joy, and my brother and I walking down the street in the rain to my uncle’s video shop to rent a movie.