What My Grandmother’s Eyes Have Seen

Around the time I was in seventh grade, I started performing makeshift eye surgery on my grandmother.

When I’m sitting at my desk in New York, writing, I often reach for a bottle of eyedrops called Refresh Plus. It’s a brand an optometrist recommended after I had LASIK surgery to correct my severe astigmatism. I lean back in my chair, tilt my head, and draw open my lids with my fingers: Drip, blink, drip, blink. I have to repeat this ritual every day, until my post-surgery dryness fades.

My procedure took place in a luxurious multi-story clinic in Busan, South Korea, shortly after I turned twenty-three. By then, I could no longer romanticize the smearing of every light source into floating, overlapped spheres, liken it to the bokeh effect on a digital camera. I lay in a frigid room with sliding glass doors for the half-hour procedure, struggling to blink, my anesthetized eyelids held open by metal pincers. Two nurses urged me to focus on my doctor’s laser, the beam in the center of the frame, and not the many other colorful lasers criss-crossing above my cornea. He shot a green ray through the center of my pupils—left, then right—slicing clean the layers that blurred my vision. Floors below, in the waiting room, guests sank into plush leather seats, sipped free cups of cold brew, and listened to Mozart streaming from the ether of the chandeliered ceiling.

It was with my grandmother that I had my first experience with ‘eye surgery.’ Halmu has been a mother to me all my life, and I am writing a book inspired by her story, the Korean history she has lived through. Sometimes, though, I feel overwhelmed by my inability to see all that she has seen. A year after I got LASIK surgery, I visited Halmu in her rural town of Haman. One afternoon, we drove past roads where she, as a ten-year-old girl, had become a wartime refugee—in 1945, these asphalt roads had been dirt paths, jagged with stones that cut at her straw shoes. In historical archives, I’d found photographs only proximate to these paths: Halmu’s hometown train station crowded with refugees, stranded women in ragged white hanbok, barefoot, clutching their infants.

On our drive, I was stunned to see for myself the very roads my Halmu had walked. I pulled out my iPhone, but no matter how far I zoomed in, how many filters I tried, I could see nothing more than a well-paved highway, threading so many rice paddies to neon-green exit signs. I started to wonder if I could ever give language to my grandmother’s memories across the generations between us. I began to doubt whether I could make my words bring to life all that she has seen, when I have never seen these things with my own eyes.

I call her every day, when it’s afternoon in New York and dusk in South Korea. Recently, while we chatted via FaceTime, I asked Halmu what it was like to grow up in South Korea before the Korean War, during the thirty-year period of Japanese occupation. She told me, My mother only had one eye. When she was around six years old, her mother contracted a cataract in her left eye. She and my grandmother went to the nearest doctor, but, as Halmu told me, Koreans back then didn’t have proper medical equipment—the Japanese controlled the supply. The doctor’s ‘office’ was a straw-roofed shack. He was young and so confident, we didn’t know if he was even trained in ophthalmology. The young doctor botched the surgery badly enough to have to take out my great-grandmother’s left eye out altogether and fill her socket with a fake eye. My mother didn’t even get pain medication. Just glasses, to protect her droopy eyelid. She squinted for the rest of her life.

We drove past roads where my grandmother, as a ten-year-old girl, had become a wartime refugee.

I have only seen two black and white photographs of my great-grandmother—all that remain since the US Army burned down her town and one of her sons set all that was left on fire, after her death, in a fit of drunken grief. One of these photographs shows a woman standing with her hands folded, wearing a white hanbok, her hair parted straight down the middle. Her mouth is parted slightly, as though in surprise, and she squints so much through circular wire glasses it’s as though she’s just barely spotting the camera lens. I remember the aunties in the soju shop next door describing the cloth my mother held to her face, Halmu told me once. They said it was drenched red, she’d bled enough to fill a wash basin. She called her left eye a dog eye. I didn’t know if she meant fake (개), or that they’d put in a dog’s (개) eye. I never knew. I couldn’t tell.

As a kid, the closest I got to bleeding eyes was a made-up ghost story I’d heard at school. When I was eleven, I attended Dongshin Elementary, a public school in Busan, fifty-nine years after the end of Japanese colonization. Among the shapely pine trees on the right side of the school stood a stone sculpture of a seated mother holding a baby in her lap. The milk-white of the stone stood out against the faded grey-green of the school building. As with most sculptures, the woman’s pupils weren’t carved, but there was something eerie about her oval eyes—they looked almost too hollow. Friends whispered to me a school legend about the sculpture: When the tower clock struck twelve, blood would trickle from her eyes, dripping just enough to soak the dirt in the raised garden. Long ago, they said, a student had returned late at night to fetch something he’d left behind and seen red blood spurt from the stone. From that day forward, I tried hard to avert my eyes every time I passed the periphery of the stone mother, keeping my pace even as my heartbeat crescendoed to a thrum.

After that one year in Korea, I spent the rest of my childhood in the US; my grandmother took care of me in place of my own mother, who remained in Busan to work. Around the time I was in seventh grade, I started performing makeshift eye surgery on my grandmother. She had begun rubbing her eyes often, bothered by the prickling of wayward lashes. The tiny eyelashes that normally line the lower lid had begun growing in the inner corners of her eye, irritating the sclera. I decided to take the matter into my own hands: I would climb into Halmu’s lap, wrap my legs around her waist, and, with a clean pair of Tweezerman tweezers, pluck the pink corners of her deep black eyes.

It was with my grandmother that I had my first experience with ‘eye surgery.’

I remember the two of us moving from bed to sofa to dining room chair to get the sharpest lighting as possible: I was afraid of accidentally pinching that pink flesh with the metal tips, Halmu flinching in pain, crimson blood streaming out from pink, more red than the red lines on the white surface of her eyes. Halmu would say it didn’t hurt at all, except for when I missed.

Most of these wayward lashes were black, but thinner than thread and damp from the natural moisture in her eye; they were hard to see. The two of us giggled over the half-black, half-white lashes I found, how she was aging even there. Afterward, I would run cold water from the bathroom sink over small towel and tap it over Halmu’s eyes and cheeks to reduce the irritation. We repeated this “operation” every month or so when the lashes grew back, as if it were no different from clipping fingernails. Together we counted every plucked eyelash. Shiwonhada, Halmu would say, hugging me. So refreshing. I was ecstatic to see the relief in her wet black eyes, her open smile as she gazed at me.

Eventually, after I entered boarding school and Halmu moved back to Haman, she went to a real optometrist. The doctor recommended she get double eyelid surgery, a stock procedure in the country’s now-famous cosmetic industry. Although the doctor couldn’t stop Halmu’s lashes from growing, she claimed an extra layer of eyelid would buffer the irritation. Halmu had some relief for a year post-surgery, but then the prickling came back. A scam, she said, bristling. We call that a doctor? I’d said, appalled. I resumed plucking her eyelashes in my yearly visits to South Korea from New York.

Through the many months we lived apart, I worried about the itchiness and frequent dryness in her eyes. In time, as Halmu is wont to do, she found an herbal remedy: She bought rare saltwater made from salt cooked nine times, sealed in thick bamboo fired over pinewood. Halmu poured the liquid into small plastic bottles she found at the neighborhood market, and dripped three to four droplets in her eyes. The saltwater stung her, but ameliorated the pricking sensation.

During my last visit to Halmu’s home in the countryside, I tried the saltwater in my own eyes. The ferocious burn made me squeeze my lids closed, but when I opened them, seething, everything appeared crisper—even for my newly perfect 20/20 vision. Halmu and I decided to pluck anyway, me climbing into her lap as she tilted her permed head back. I was surprised to see fewer lashes on her sclera than I had found as a child—the saltwater, or age, had slowed the growth. I kissed Halmu’s eyelids gently shut, and caressed her soft cheeks.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by my inability to see all that she has seen.

I recently searched online for an image of the white stone sculpture at my old Korean elementary school. I found a close-up, and even in the photograph, you can see the creamy milk color of the stone. The mother’s hair is parted exactly like my great-grandmother’s was in the black and white photograph we treasure, and she, too, is wearing a plain hanbok. Beneath the sculpture is a plaque that reads: Even when my eyes are closed, I see mother’s face. Even when I block my ears, I hear mother’s words.

Maybe this is why I fixate on my grandmother’s face when we have our video calls—because even if I often feel as though I cannot fully understand her memories, because I cannot see what she has seen as clearly as I would like to, I can look at her face, as closely as I can, and find solace in it. It’s what I’ve done all my life, through all the years of climbing into her lap and cradling her head to pluck her wayward lashes. When I’m struggling to give words to what my grandmother saw in her past, I ask Halmu to tilt her smartphone so I can see her slender mouth and chin, her whole face.

I take screenshots as we talk, more screenshots than notes: Halmu stroking her chin like a philosopher as she worries for my future, Halmu swinging her arms in dance moves she’s been doing for exercise. I make a full-screen collage of these pictures, a cyberspace where our faces, frozen in rectangular frames, spiral and stretch into polygonal distortions, kaleidoscoping with every swerve and scroll of my mouse. And before we hang up, I always tell her 보고싶어, I miss you in Korean but, more literally, I want to see you.

We’re seeing each other now, she says.