For My Father, Every Time Is Wartime

A part of me, the part trained to put my father first, thought I should allow him into my home, regardless of his threats.

East Virginia Boulevard in Jamestown, New York was one of those streets where every house was outlined in Christmas lights from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. Ours, too, after our car windows were soaped with chink and ching chong. That was the reason my father agreed to buy Christmas lights. My older brother probably climbed a ladder to attach the lights to the roof. Soon our house looked like all the other small houses on the street.

Of the dozen houses I lived in growing up, I remember that house best. My father said we weren’t Christians, but we had a Christmas tree, an artificial blue-green one with skinny branches, red and green metallic ornaments, and tinsel. It could have belonged to anyone’s family. In Jamestown we had snow from Halloween to Easter, in the valley the town sat in that was cloudy for much of the year, but somehow the lights outside and inside the house filled me with an optimism that felt like a lifeline. Even then, especially then, I was hopeful.

I was nine years old, then ten. We lived on the crest of a hill. My mother started gardening, cacti to begin with—her first was a bunny-ear cactus in a shallow terracotta pot from Hills Department Store—and then ivy. My brother won our first goldish at a fair, and eventually we had three goldfish living in a round tank in our house, although in time my father would insist we free them in a pond.

In this house, we began to accumulate things. Things began to be important. I remember wishing I had a bicycle. Though we had a Christmas tree with red and green ornaments and tinsel, we didn’t have any presents. My friends got presents: toys and bikes and clothes. They showed off the clothes on the first day of school after vacation. My brothers and I didn’t have those things.

So many people have stories like this; many people managed with this and less. My father constantly reminded us of this: Someone always has less. He would inspect the shirt I was wearing and say I should send it to my aunt in North Korea because her children had less. My mother gave him one of her own to send. This is how it was.

*

This time, where I’m living now, today—this is the time that often feels like a memory, lopped off at the knee. I tell myself not to think about how we’ve arrived here. There was no war, but there was a war. There was no death, but there was a death. There was that life, and now.

My father has moved my mother to Korea. In photos, her eyes are so close to closed my friend Deb says she’s sleeping, but I know she’s not. I swipe to show Deb the whole series on my phone. My mother reclines far back in a hospital bed. I wonder about the strength of her muscles, the possibility of bed sores. Is she too weak to sit up?

In other photos, my father sits on a cot in a corner with his hands covering his ears. I suspect he’s covering his ears because he can’t stand the sound of my mother’s voice. But I don’t know for sure. In another photo, his hands are covering his eyes.

My cousin is the one who visits them when she can, when she has time amid her busy life in Seoul. She’s taken a photo of my mother’s new clothes. I don’t see the pants or the shirts I sent for her. Instead, my mother is wearing a black and white checkered dress. I know it doesn’t matter that she used to say patterned clothes made her dizzy. Or that the small size of her eyes means her face must be swollen from antibiotics or steroids or dehydration. I’m supposed to feel grateful to see her at all. But I want to fume, throw things at the wall. I want to shout that she looks like a shell of herself.

News is my father wants to move again. I wish he would return my mother to the States. But I know I can’t hope for that; I have no right. This message has been loud and clear: I have no right to be by my mother’s side during the last years of her life.

In my dreams, my mother tells me to remember my father’s story. “Everything is a crisis to him,” she says. “Imagine believing that every moment is wartime.” She means the Korean War, which separated my father from his parents when he was fourteen years old and began his struggle for survival.

In my dreams, she’s on her feet. I say, “Mama, how can you walk?” She says, “You think your mother wouldn’t be able to handle something like this?”

In my dreams, my mother tells me to remember my father’s story. “Everything is a crisis,” she says. “Imagine believing that every moment is wartime.” 

But in the last dream, she appears smaller than her five-foot-five-inch frame. Instead, she is under five feet tall and shrinking. She smiles at me in the background, shakes her head.

“What’s the use?” she says. “Your father will never change.”

*

My father sends me a card, and in it, he has written in Korean: Come visit. I’ve thrown everything you did to me into the river. It’s over.

He is referring to a gray day in December, many months ago; a day when a quiet storm engulfed the roads in minutes. I remember wondering if my father would give up as the driving conditions deteriorated, or if he’d crash the car. I worried for a second about that latter scenario, felt sorry for him. Nearly five decades of being his daughter had conditioned me to put him first.

My earliest memory of him is his face, earnest, his hand holding up a hard-boiled egg for me to eat. I didn’t want it. I shook my head, I wailed. He shoved it in my mouth, and I choked and had to be rushed to the hospital so they could remove part of the egg from my throat. I remember feeling sorry for my father as he explained that he’d only wanted me to know how delicious an egg could be. (Memory is strange. Maybe he didn’t shove it in my mouth. Maybe he goaded me for hours until I put it in my mouth myself. Maybe he said, as he was prone to say in later years, that he only wanted what was best for me, and why didn’t I trust him? Prove you trust me, he would say.)

That stormy December day, my older brother called from Richmond and told me, “Lock all the doors. Don’t let him in. He’s out of control. I told him about the storm, he’s not listening.”

His wife, a psychiatrist, joined us on our call. “Your father doesn’t sound like he’s in his right mind. Call the police.”

My younger brother was with me that day; he’d brought his wife and children to my house to visit my mother, who had suffered a massive stroke ten months earlier. He is also a psychiatrist, and he talked with our sister-in-law and agreed that we should call the police if my father made it to my driveway. My brothers and I had conspired against our father earlier that week. He had gone to South Korea to explore job opportunities, and we had moved my mother from the nursing home where he’d put her in Virginia to my house in New York before he returned. We’d agreed that he should not be allowed to take our bedridden mother to South Korea—not now, while she faded in and out of dementia. Not now, while she needed the emotional support of her children and grandchildren. If my father took her to the other side of the world, she’d rarely see us again.

My father’s plan to take our mother to South Korea had been hatched years before her stroke. She had refused to go then, but in her current state, she couldn’t go against him. She and my father had lived in the United States for over forty years, and had only visited South Korea a handful of times in those years. For my mother, being close to her children and ten grandchildren, her sister in Virginia and her brothers in Rhode Island, was the priority.

My father’s plan to take our mother to South Korea had been hatched years before her stroke. In her current state, she couldn’t go against him.

At my house, my younger brother and I braced ourselves for our father’s rage. It was familiar to us—when we were younger, he’d broken chairs, coffee tables, been physically abusive to my mother and verbally abusive to all of us. But back then, he’d made the violence out to be something done reluctantly, rashly, out of his love and despair. This time, we knew, it was vengeance: He had threatened to kill us.

A part of me, the part trained to put my father first, thought I should put aside my fears and allow him into my home, regardless of his threats. That part of me believed that what mattered most were his feelings, his well-being—he was the center of our family. But everything else in me, even without my brothers’ and sister-in-law’s expert assessment of my father’s mental state, told me my mother and I were in danger.

My husband didn’t understand my fear. “What can your father really do?” he asked. “He’s an old man.”

“He could have a gun like he says he does,” I said.

“Your father?” he said. “A gun?”

I wished I could be as confident. I wondered if I was overreacting. The calls from my brother and his wife kept coming throughout the day—my father was calling them as he neared us. My younger brother was able to reach him by phone, and he told me our father sounded bitter; determined. To me, that seemed unlike the spontaneous bursts of violence I’d experienced when younger. This time, it felt like he had a plan.

Finally, I called the police and told them I wanted to prevent any potential injuries. I said my father was old and frail and unstable. I told them about the gun he said he had. Though they sounded annoyed, they sent a squad car over.

My father arrived in the late afternoon, accompanied by an acquaintance. He didn’t come inside. The state trooper who’d been sent knocked on my door, and I told him what my brothers and sister-in-law had said. I told him to send a psychiatric evaluation team to assess my father’s mental state. Budget cuts had eliminated all the mental health professionals who could provide that service, he said to me. “All I can do is tell your father and the man with him to leave.”

There were times when I used to look back on my childhood and wonder why I didn’t call the police when my father hurt my mother. In that moment, with this strange man in uniform, I realized why. I felt like I was going to shatter into a thousand pieces due to the enormity of what I was doing. I was risking my father being mistreated by the police—putting him at the mercy of a potentially racist man in uniform and a system that had proven itself to be prejudiced.

But my father had hurt my mother, was threatening her again. Why was his life more important than hers? Why was his discomfort more important than my life? Wasn’t I allowed to defend myself? And did it matter if he didn’t have a gun, if he wasn’t really going to hurt us? He said he had one; he said he would kill us.

The police officer told me they had searched his car and had not found a gun. My father drove away, and I’ll never know what might have happened if I hadn’t called the police before he arrived. But I do know this: No one died that day.

*

My mother has large, broad hands. I mention them because she was always proud of their strength. Her mother taught her to use them for healing—creating poultices, teas, and soups. My mother grew up to become a physician and worked in clinics throughout South Korea.

In Jamestown, as my father’s medical practice grew, my mother used her hands to make our clothes, expand her gardening, make wine, decoupage, refurbish furniture, play tennis and golf. She also loved music, and could play piano, violin, flute, alto saxophone, the Korean drum. She was my father’s compass and his conscience, and as my brothers and I left for college, she took on the role of office manager for his practice. She was always using her hands, and the stroke and accompanying dementia left her in constant distress at their sudden emptiness. She seemed to have lost her will to live.

Why was his life more important than hers? Why was his discomfort more important than my life? 

During the two months she lived with me, she despaired that my father had found a new wife and thrown her away. On other days, she was convinced he was fatally hurt and waiting for her to rescue him. I tried to get him to talk to her on the phone, but he refused to take my calls. He said she was lost to him, as were his children. He said he had no family. Erasure was a favorite strategy of my father’s. It was this last pronouncement that finally convinced me I should not keep her with me, where he couldn’t see her.

I moved my mother to my older brother’s house in Virginia, two hours from my father’s residence, in hopes that he would be able to visit her. He brought her roses on her birthday. He made us believe that he had given up on taking her to South Korea. He fooled us for a few weeks.

And then, one day, he took her.

Despite everything, I am sure she feels some comfort still being in his life. Un-erased. What more does one deserve at the end of a life? Why couldn’t she have her husband and her children nearby, too?

Though my father said he forgives me, relatives who visit him and my mother in Seoul tell me he rants about me. This feels true to who I know him to be, truer than his words in the card. In my dreams these days, my mother says, “Stay far away. He will never change. Do you understand? Every moment is wartime for him.”