THE SEOUL TIMES

July 7, 2082

THE FAMILY

Or: How My Mothers Loved

BY DANTE JINYOUNG SHON

When The Seoul Times offered me a chance to write a piece to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the legalization of same- marriage in Korea, I was not thinking of this piece at all. Even though I was aware of the reason why I was approached, I was thinking of writing a piece more on the political spectrum that had developed since. I also had to mention that I had declined their similar offer for the 20th anniversary of the legalization, for at that time I believed I was ill-equipped to write on the subject I more often than not doubted and criticized in my own work. However, last year life happened to me in ways that I felt there’s no better time to accept the offer and write on the singular reason I was offered this chance: my mothers.

My mothers, for those not in the know, were Seungwan Shon and Joohyun Bae. Both of them are deceased. Seungwan was Wendy, the singer who performed at the opening ceremony of the 2030 Winter Olympic in Gangwon, then-South Korea, the home country of both my mothers. Years later, she performed at the closing ceremony of the 2038 Summer Olympic in Vancouver, making her the first person to sing for two countries and under two nationalities in the history of the Games. My birth mother Joohyun, also known as Irene, used to be in the same music act with Seungwan, but she retired earlier, lived relatively far from the spotlight, became active in the literary scene of the Korean diaspora, and by 2042 had followed Seungwan to live in Canada.

Seungwan was “Mom” and Joohyun was “Eomma.” Eomma had me when she was in her early forties, Mom in her late thirties. Both of them spoke Korean with me at home, but Mom often switched to English, especially when Eomma wasn’t around. Like many immigrants, my mothers embraced life in their adopted country with caution, Eomma even more so than Mom, who had spent some of her formative years in Minnesota and Toronto before she started her singing career in Korea. By the time Eomma settled in Canada, we had been a family who lived in a farmhouse in Meaford, ON. Non-traditional, but a family still. Mom had already had her Canadian citizenship back then, Eomma following about six years later, just a few months before her fiftieth birthday.

In a few, rare ocassions where they were photographed with me in public, it was almost always snapped with cameras that risked infringing our privacy by people who came across us as we were out and about, mostly in Greater Toronto. The only public material they made with me in it was a short singing video on Mom’s Youtube channel where she covered her former labelmate and senior Yoona Lim’s To You, a birthday gift for Yoona. In the video, which was shot at home, I was almost a year old, strapped to Eomma’s front, sleeping in her arms while she patted my back gently and Mom sang. It was dubbed “the video that broke Korea,” which I guess because it was their only authorized statement of going public with their relationship, even though the shot neither showed their faces or mine.

My mothers did their best to make sure I had a normal childhood. Even though I was homeschooled for most, they enrolled me in as many neighborhood activities as I could. I also suspect that they, perhaps, tried to compensate for the overabundance of ovaries in my life by signing me up in tons of sport groups. I did soccer, baseball, hockey, golf, and taekwondo, the last being the one I disliked the most if only because I always ended being roughened up due to my small stature.

Eomma regularly brought Mom’s home baked goods to my practice, and to my embarrassment many of my peers were mesmerized by her. One time, a sparring partner kicked me a little too hard on the ribs, and Eomma was ready to jump over the fence to have A Word with my coach. The sparring partner apologized profusely to “our dearest Mrs Shon, most graceful and beautiful.” I used the chance to tell her I wanted to quit taekwondo. Eomma readily agreed. “Well, I guess that’s one less testosterone-injecting session for you, then,” Mom commented. At a glance, Eomma was the strict mother and Mom was the fun mother, although that wasn’t always the case.

Like many immigrant children, as a teen I found that connecting with and nurturing your root was the rage. I was proud of being a Canadian of Korean descent. Of Mom, who had navigated a dramatic change of career direction—from teen pop to serious pop, from singing in Korean to singing in English and, a few times, French—and managed to remain afloat. Of Eomma, who seemed to remain unfazed in the face of adversaries caused by the turnaround from flashy idolhood to near anonymity. I wasn’t, however, proud of the way they sheltered me from knowing who they were in Korea.

-.-.-

Just like my mothers, Korea had undergone gradual changes—for the better. Last year marked the 15th anniversary of the Korean reunification, but back in my mothers’ active years as idols, it was of two feuding sovereign states. Politically, South was America’s underling, North that of Russia and China. Socioeconomically, only South Korea could let performers like my mothers have a career as idols. In their 20’s and 30’s, they were part of the group Red Velvet, whose music traverses between loud, experimental pop and silky, old-school RnB.

As idols, they signed a contract with an overarching agency which at once was a record label, a talent management, and a media overlord. They had fans and stans, a term used to refer to militant fans, who planned their finance around what merch of the band they could buy, what concerts or fan-meetings they could attend, who they would send gifts to, and who they would wage war for on social media. They also had haters and antis. Mom was always a critics’ darling, but in the first half of Red Velvet’s métier, haters and antis gave her quite a hard time. On the other hand, Eomma turned overnight from Korea’s sweetheart to a pariah after quitting the group at the height of their popularity. Many took offense of her exit and thought of it as a betrayal and cowardice.

Mom stayed in Red Velvet for some good fifteen years, although the group never technically disbanded. Eomma cited personal matters as her reason for quitting. Eomma never explicitly admitted it, not even to her closest friends, but everyone with eyes could see that her reason was Mom. It couldn’t not be Mom.

A year after Eomma’s exit from the group, Mom’s practically all over the place. She was an evening radio DJ, a regular MC for any special shows that featured a foreign act who’s currently touring Korea, and, after her Academy Award nomination for the original soundtrack of Christopher Nolan’s movie Antarctica, a globally known singer. It was as if she took Eomma’s exit as a personal blow and poured herself into work to help forget the pain. In a sense, her ache dulled into a phantom pain, and they managed to remain cordial to one another even in the most turbulent period of their relationship.

Long story short, Mom then had a chance to work Stateside, which would require her to leave Korea for some time. She didn’t want it because of—duh—Eomma. Leaving Korea meant not seeing Eomma. Eomma then took matters into her own hand and delivered another blow, this time in person, and practically forced Mom to choose the road often taken that spelled CAREER without, again, telling Mom why. That’s two below-the-belt hits in a row, and Mom was so livid that she confronted Eomma about it. “It was the only time I yelled at her,” Mom told me. Afterward, insert some reunion, some heart-to-heart revelation, and a mutual agreement to be honest with each other here, and the rest was history.

I didn’t discover all these past trajectories of theirs until I was in the ninth grade, and even that wasn’t planned at all. What I, and most people, don’t know was that their dynamic also took its toll on Eomma’s familial relationship, which remained strained until her parents’ passing. I’m not sure if it’s because Eomma’s family didn’t approve of Mom, or if it’s the clash between the idealized Confucian values of family and the newer ones, or if it’s simply latent homophobia. What I do know is that Eomma rarely, if ever, spoke about her family.

Hence imagine my surprise when one fateful day I was approached by a woman who looked like Eomma, only older and sadder, just as I exited the gate of my high school. She introduced herself as Sohee Bae, Eomma’s older sister, and that’s when my adolescent angst began. “Child, you really look like Joohyun,” she told me, tearful and awed at the same time, sitting across me in a café near school. I’d heard similar assessments so often, although I did know since early on that Eomma was my birth mother and that Mom adopted me long before they officially registered themselves in a marriage. I’d always been a Shon since I was two years old, and it was the first time I heard the assessment from someone who was related to Eomma.

Canada was, up to that day, all Shon-colored. As I’ve mentioned, I prized and kept my root. I did it through my grandparents, Jinyoung and Yoonsil Shon. Through Grandpa’s two brothers, one a dissident that had to flee the country for his involvement in the anti-dictatorship Gwangju Uprising and another a grumpy bore whose only daughter was also an idol like my mothers. Through Mom’s elder sister, Seunghee Shon, whom I still miss dearly to this day, who was times and again Mom’s confidante, guardian figure, and role model, and whose passing changed all of us. Through my great-grandfather, Shimin Jang, who always poked fun at Grandpa Shon by saying, “Nothing good’s ever comin’ from a Shon boy. Last time I met one, he stole my princess.” The only Bae I knew was Eomma.

“We’ve tried for years,” Sohee told me. “Regrets—yes, yes, we’ve had a lot. About the way we treated Joohyun and—uh—” (I was thinking she would say ‘your other mother’) “—Shon Seungwan. Our parents—they weren’t ready to accept it back then. I wasn’t either, and I will forever regret my lack of supports when Joohyun needed me the most. We tried to reach out. To see you. To apologize, too. But Joohyun blocked us left, right, and center.”

Sohee’s explanation made me so angry, angrier than I’d ever been, at Eomma. I’d always thought that she wasn’t too keen on bringing up her family since they were long gone. Here I was thinking it was her way of coping with the loss, and it turned out it wasn’t that. The Baes made a mistake, a grave one, but their remorse was real and they tried to make amends. Sixteen years old me believed that Eomma had denied me my direct link to Korea, and I lost a big link to my cultural roots because of that. At that time, I wanted the snobbery that came from the ability to say I had relatives in Korea. I didn’t want to merely be a son of prodigal immigrants.

Now I must mention here that anger wasn’t a familiar emotion my family often dealt with. Being truly angry means letting your emotions overcome you. Mom was a conflict-avoidant to a tee, to the point that she didn’t mind appearing as a pushover among her friends so long everyone would hug and sang kumbaya at the end of the day. Her mantra before reacting in anger to anything was always “Is my anger justified in this situation?” I used to be so baffled by her temperament, especially after knowing that the number of people she’d ever gotten angry at could be counted with one hand, with Eomma notably being one of them. Meanwhile, sure, Eomma was often irritated by small things—a sudden traffic jam when she picked me from school, my refusing to take a nap, Mom’s frequent teasing—but she was never truly angry. Whenever she had to deal with an upset person, she would just acknowledge their being upset and left the room, both giving them an out and dumping the responsibility to initiate the reconciliation with her on them.

That day, after listening to Sohee’s side and receiving her contact detail in case I wanted to keep in touch with her, I went straight home, burst through the front door (it took some good twenty minutes to walk from the gate of the property to the front door), and thundered at Eomma. I remember Aunt Seunghee was visiting that day, and she was chatting with my mothers in the kitchen. I remember how quickly their welcoming expression morphed into one of shock and worry as I spat out vitriols at Eomma. Both Mom and Aunt Seunghee were aghast at what I’d done. Eomma’s face went hard and cold, but just like always she said nothing and merely left the kitchen.

I remember wanting to go after Eomma because I wasn’t finished. It wasn’t finished until I heard her side of the story. I remember that Mom put herself in my way and tried to pacify me. “Sweetheart,” she said, “you’re angry, I get it. Let’s calm down first, please? Why don’t we sit down? I’ll talk to Eomma, okay? We’ll all talk about it.”

I remember not being in control of what I said next: “What do you know? You must be so ing happy Eomma chose you over her own family! Over her own ing culture! Why should I listen to you? You’re not my real mom!”

Aunt Seunghee went pale. Mom went even paler. The moment I realized what I’d said, I immediately wanted to grovel and kiss Mom’s feet to beg for her forgiveness. But I never got the chance because, to my surprise, Eomma came back running—literally—to the kitchen before I could take one step toward Mom. Mind you, growth s