korea - Wordful

Deep Lessons Learned In Korea, Part 2

I’m back home now after a rather jolting week in Korea. While the the full impact of the visit hasn’t yet settled in, I have some meaningful impressions worth sharing.

Family Will Be Family

If my previous post was any indication of anxiety and speculation, this post reflects pragmatism and sobriety. In other words, meeting long-lost family in another part of the world for the first time is not that big a deal.

I sat down for an hour and a half with two of my cousins Ko, Se-Shil and Ko, Seon-Gyu at the hotel lobby cafe, and we got to know each other a bit. They were attentive and offered to fill-in for me any missing details of our family.

The Ko family is pretty normal, I learned. We share many of the same aspirations and dysfunctions as everyone else. My grandfather was a bank president, later an artist, fathered seven children and taught himself English. He and my grandmother had a fiery, turbulent relationship, and a couple of our uncles are quasi-destitute.

As far as me being the legendary first-born son of the Ko family, [Read more...]

Deep Lessons Learned In Korea

This isn’t your average Wordful post.

In fact, I’m writing this from a hotel room in Seoul, South Korea, which is quite a change in pace from the warm family life I lead in Hawai‘i.

The reason I’m here now is to take a few days to myself to discover the country of my mother and the ancestors from her side of the family.

Unfortunately, though, the odds of success are against me: I don’t speak Korean and my relatives are–how shall I say–very distant. I’ve never met them or spoken to them until about 3 months ago to make arrangements for this visit.

In fact, my uncle just informed me he can’t make it to see me in Seoul, so I will just be meeting a couple of cousins. [Read more...]