User:Zuhui/✍️/Bean Sprout Soup and Dignity

I keep thinking about one of the last conversations I had with my mother over dinner before I left Seoul. She has never been very expressive of her emotions, nor does she talks much. It’s always been kind of difficult to know what’s on her mind or how she feels. Being her daughter I’ve accepted this as simply part of her personality - stoic, resilient, someone who quietly accepts the reality as it is and keeps her thoughts close.
During that dinner, however, she shared something that happened when she was a teenager. Now I come to think of it, this incident must have had a big impact on the person she became.

For some context, she was born in the mid-60s and she spent her youth in the turbulent 80s, a time when Korea was still recovering from the colonization and war, trying to rebuild a sense of normalcy. But the country soon fell under a dictatorship which lasted over decades, and the residue of it still affects our lives today.

The teacher

When my mother was 13, a young teacher, probably in her mid to late 20s, was newly assigned to her school. She remembers the teacher as a beautiful, passionate, and intellectual young woman, and they quickly bonded over their shared love of books. Not long after, the teacher started a small book club which my mother immediately joined.

She and four other students from the club met weekly to read authors like George Orwell, Hermann Hesse, Erich Fromm, Lao Tzu’s commentaries and so on. My mother told me how proud she was to be part of the club, describing it as a kind of secret society, a privilege to be in the teacher’s circle, who she had grown to admire.

Then about a year later, the teacher suddenly disappeared without a word. She just stopped coming to school. There was no explanation, no goodbye -just her sudden absence. A couple of weeks after her disappearance, a group of men showed up, asking questions about her: how she had behaved, what kind of things she said, whether she had been involved in any “abnormal" activities, or if she displayed any “suspicious” behaviour.

After these men discovered that the teacher ran a book club at school, my mother and the other club members were called in for questioning one by one. She said It was more like an interrogation than questioning, and it went on for days. Each morning, she would arrive at school, only to be summoned shortly after to a small office space to meet with these men. The same thing happened to four other students in the book club.

I asked what the hell the other teachers and the school committee were even doing. How could they just stand by and let 14 year old girls, be pulled out alone from their classrooms, go through these interrogations? These kids were their students who needed protection, and the adults should have stepped in to put a stop to this. But it was the opposite. She watched as the ‘mighty’ school principal offering up the small office space in the corner for the men to do their work, even asking if he could provide any further assistance, she could sense how far this hierarchy stretched beyond the school.

In the interrogation, these men were clearly looking for something specific. They asked my mother what books the teacher had shared, what kinds of discussions had taken place, and whether there was anything subversive in their conversations. At first, my mother didn’t know what to say. To her, it was just a simple book club -a place to talk about the books they read together, share small snacks, and chat. Only thing she could think of during the questioning was that her teacher must be in serious trouble, or worse, in grave danger to have pissed off these men in power.

Then came the questions that made her stomach churn: “Was there any anti-government content in your discussions? Did the teacher ever say anything that made her sound like an enemy of the current regime?” My mother, just 14 at the time, was terrified and confused. She had no idea what it even meant to “sound like an enemy of the regime”. She replied with an honest “I don’t know,” but the men kept pressing. They didn’t care how frightened this 14 year old kid was, they were just determined to extract whatever information they were fishing for. The longer it went on, the more afraid she became. She just wanted it to end. Eventually, desperate to escape this whole situation, she uttered the word “maybe.” That one word seemed to satisfy the men. They had found what they were looking for. After a short while, they left.