Eggs, Korean Style

What Binds Everything Together

I was a little slow to recognize it, the foundational ingredient.

Probably true, with the cast still on my right arm and me just about plotzing from boredom, that it’s easier than ever to make me cry.  But I’ve just sobbed my way through a 16-episode K-drama and was choked up all through another, and then finally I saw what infuses almost every show the Koreans make, whether it’s a soap opera or a supernatural fantasy or even a comedy.  There is a national anguish they never forget.

Not centuries of time, not rebirth after rebirth—nothing heals this.  Characters carry throughout eternity the burden of every sort of suffering that comes from separating parents from their children.

A few years ago the North Koreans allowed another of the rare reunions that let a small number of family members, having been separated by then for more than 65 years, meet for a total of maybe eleven hours spread over three days.  You can look up the news articles about it.  I shouldn’t attempt to paraphrase such soul-grief.

But a few years before that, I was having with my son one of those metaphysical sorts of discussions that have no useful purpose, and I started crying at the thought of maybe being reincarnated but not being able to find him in the next life, and rationalist that he is, he said if I were reincarnated I wouldn’t remember having been his mother and wouldn’t be able to miss him.

I think all of Korea would disagree.