Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim Read Free Book Online Page B

brother and sister down to review the superiority of our lineage, the Gwangsan clan was known for producing the leading Confucian scholars in Korea. We were the noblest of all Korean families, he said, and certainly the most dignified of the hundreds of different Kim clans. We were not warriors like the Kimhae clan, or blinded by earthly ambition and titles like the Andong clan. We preferred thinking to fighting and had often served as teachers to kings . The most eminent of my ancestors were the father and son scholars, Kim Jang-saeng (Sagye) and Kim Jip (Shindokjae), from the sixteenth century—both enshrined among Korea’s eighteen sages . Today, whenever I visit Seoul and pass the ancient imperial palace that housed our kings for centuries, I remember my grandfather’s smug grin and the inevitable mantra of how without our great-great-great-grandfathers, Korea would be without its guiding philosophy.
    Years later, I traveled to the beautiful, temple-strewn Gyeongsang province, in the southeastern corner of the country, where I was stopped on the street by a very old man costumed in a traditional linen robe and hat, made with horsetail hair and bamboo. The area was famous for its orthodox traditions. Unlike the rest of the country, where the eldest sons of family clans performed ancestor worship rites for their dead parents on lunar New Year’s Day, Chuseok (Harvest Day), and the death anniversaries, families there conducted the rites on all sorts of special memorial days even for ancestors many generations removed. It was said that no mothers wanted their daughters to be married off to the men from that region since daughters-in-law worked year round, cooking, cleaning, and washing, never mind being perpetually pressured to produce a male heir. Hearing me speak English with my companion, the old man asked where I was from. I told him, in Korean, that I was born in Seoul but lived in New York, and that my people were originally from Chungcheong province. At this, he nodded approval and asked, “So where is your bonjuk?” meaning where did my clan originate. When I told him Gwangsan Kim, his face brightened. He nodded again, looking very thoughtful, and said, “Why, you are from a very noble family! Most noble, I might add. Yours is the second noblest family in all of Korea!” When I asked him who was the first, he exclaimed, as if he could not believe I did not already know, “Of course, my family of Poongsan Yoo!” Then he began telling me about an ancestor of his, who in the sixteenth century had saved Korea from a Japanese attack. “Without my great-great-great-grandfather, our country would not exist!” he said proudly.
    My father still attends biannual, regional Gwangsan Kim meetings, which take place in a Korean restaurant near where he now lives, in Fort Lee, New Jersey. About twenty members sit around the Korean meals of kimchi chigae and gamjatang and discuss the greatest achievements of our ancestors, who are buried in Yunsan borough in Nonsan City of Chungcheong province, including my grandparents. Unable to tend to their graves the way a good Confucian son should, my father is plagued with guilt. One year I traveled to South Korea in his place, although the gravesite was hard to get to without a car. The train took about two hours, and after that I had to take a bus to Yunsan. Everyone within a ten-mile radius was Gwangsan Kim, according to the bus driver, who asked me, “Who’s the caretaker of your plot?” I told him, and he nodded in recognition. It was a rural area, and everyone either knew one another or was related. He helped me find a taxi, which took me to a particular turn in the road shown on a map hand drawn by a relative. There was no sign, but I got out of the taxi and trekked along the path, endless burial mounds unfolding before me, tiny hills that had held the bones of my ancestors for hundreds of years, each one with a stone tablet as a marker. There they were, the people who made