The Biggest Lesson My Great Grandmother Taught Me
Your ancestors went through unimaginable things just so you could be alive today.
When my great grandmother, Myung Sun, was 15 years old in South Korea, she was set up in an arranged marriage with an adult man she did not know. At the time, it was customary for teenage girls to accept these arrangements without question, whether or not they liked their husbands-to-be. Maybe a through line of curiosity runs in the family (if so, it certainly got to me!), but teenage Myung Sun decided that she needed to at least see what her husband looked like before tying the knot.
That’s my great grandmother, Myung Sun, on the right. My grandfather Chung Bin is pictured as a child to the far left. This photograph was taken almost nine decades ago!
The week before the wedding, she decided to sneak a look at the man she was supposed to marry. Apparently, love is not blind, because she quickly decided that she would not be spending the rest of her life with this stranger.
Backing out of the marriage at this point would be unacceptable, so she decided she would need to take matters into her own hands - so she fled Korea for Japan that same week, all by herself, at fifteen years old. She hid on a boat after climbing over Hallasan Volcanic Mountain on Jeju Island, the tallest point in all of South Korea.
Now I’m not even going to pretend to know what that experience must have been like for Myung Sun. Most people get queasy thinking about heights, public speaking, asking for a raise, or meeting a new group of people. But leaving the only place and only people you’ve ever known, rejecting societal norms, and betting that you can create a better life for yourself even when that picture is unclear? Well, my great grandmother ate those fears for breakfast, even at age fifteen.
“A lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is.”
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Fortunately for me and the rest of my family, Myung Sun built an amazing life for herself in Japan. After leaving her home town of Jeju Island, and settling in a Korean community in Osaka, Japan, she eventually met a handsome Korean man and later had my grandfather, Chung Bin.
Since she came to Japan with nothing, she had to work in a zipper factory, putting in harder hours in a day than most of us desk-bound-jockeys do in a month.
If Myung Sun hadn’t taken the risk of leaving everything she had behind, none of my family would be here, in America, with more opportunities than most people throughout human history could even dream of. And she did all of this while Korea was under Japanese imperial rule, and with her family in another country.
A photo of my grandparents in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco - decades before I moved here!
Eventually, Myung Sun, my great grandfather, and my grandfather moved back to South Korea. Another time, I will tell the story of my grandfather and grandmother, Chung Bin, and Sung Jin Kim, who left South Korea at age forty, so that my dad and his brothers could grow up in the United States. But for now, I am choosing to remember the sacrifices of my great grandmother, Myung Sun. And the next time I catch myself complaining about doing something I don’t want to do, I’ll hopefully take a step back and appreciate how much work went into getting me here - a hundred years before I was even born.
Hallasan Mountain on Jeju Island
Here’s the thing - if we are fortunate enough to be alive right now, we have thousands of ancestors that went through countless struggles in order to create a better life for themselves and future generations of our families. We need to remember that anything we accomplish is not just because of the decades we put into school, work, family life, fitness, etc. In fact, it is because of centuries and millennia of work that our ancestors put in. So even though it might sound extreme, your A+ in calculus, promotion at work, or new PR in the gym is the result of billions of decisions and sacrifices before the thought of you was even present.
So should this lesson humble you and make you grateful? Absolutely. But it should also give you the confidence to pursue your own dreams - not the ones cast upon you by other people or society. The fact that you are even here is proof enough that miracles exist. It’s your job to appreciate that, and to start making your own miracles happen as well. After all, it’s exactly what your ancestors would have wanted.
Until Next Time,
Noah Kim
Hayes Valley, San Francisco, USA