The Secrets of Our Mothers

Personal Essay by Miró Justad

A daughter explores her Korean heritage through memories of her mother, finding meaning in silences, grief, and the weight of untold stories.

By

Miró Justad

— Miró Justad

I wonder what it would mean to uncover the secrets of my mother and lay them out on the table under a warm light on a cold spring evening. For this reckoning, I desire solitude. When the stories come to life and their iridescent words soar across the oak table so quickly, I can scarcely claim their meaning. I need to hear nothing but the passage of cars whirring back and forth outside, spacecrafts embarking on their own risky endeavors.

In an attempt to contend with my ancestors, I dig through spectral bins of archives that elude me just as I grab hold; my youth was filled with dark hints in passing and the eerie suppression of silence with noise. I inherited a whole choir of whispers passed down from mother to daughter, to mother to daughter. Even the history of the war still carries a peculiar non-ending in our collective minds; a veil not only dividing a country into two ghastly halves, but also suffusing countless people with the necessary survival technique of not examining the past. Instead, we tend to our hidden wounds by sharing richly spiced soup made originally for, and by, peasants to align with fiery spirits and to assuage homesickness.

My therapist told me that we spend the second half of our lives decoding what we intrinsically accepted from our guardians during the first half of our entangled childhoods. I understand this, and also, I want to peacefully convene with the ghosts on this particularly gloomy night in a straightforward fashion—defying the cyclical nature of healing. It is the final full moon of spring after all, and they are calling it the Flower Moon. Korea, as a psychological space for me, conjures up images of peonies, abject terror, and tough grit; a powerful concoction to make one feel uneasy but to never fully understand why. Once I stood with my mother on our chipped red porch in Seattle, steaming from a bath in the sharp cleansing air, and she revealed a secret. Her voice was directed out towards the street and less at me as she told me that her sister overdosed during a full moon, so whenever one rose into the sky, she thought of her. Those few words were the closest we came to discussing her grief.

The unheeded calls of the dead are meant to bloom in their own time, picked up by the hands of a child in a land separated by a long bumpy plane ride from the place which both defines part of their identity, and is also foreign to them. I make tea, something herbal and good for digestion, and lean over my laptop, asking myself these unanswerable questions which live on in my body; a luggage bag of desires which I keep from myself, adding small tokens of unknowing over to the years. Outside, the sky darkens and I walk around my kitchen, turning on more lights. I want science, data, facts, and bullet points to comfort me through this process, but those measurements of truth can only help me scavenge the shallow end of the human experience that comes from reducing the universe into manageable plots of land to be extracted from and observed. I’ll never find a clear record of what I was not told, and yet, I live with the burden of their riddles nonetheless.

When I visited Busan with a friend, we ate at a small seafood restaurant on the second story of a building which looked out at a shoreline disappearing into blackness. We had pan fried fish and pickled side dishes together and took small sips of soju as we clanked our metal chopsticks. The middle-aged Korean woman with a short bob brought out our Kimchi jjigae soup. It was sour and made with a single block of tofu bubbling in the center. I questioned if my mother had ever eaten soup in Busan before she was torn from her home country, but I already knew that, of course, she had. I was enveloped in the aromatics of a woman who I missed more than I could say, and who had also missed someone more than she had been able to express to me.

We had traveled to this region of Korea to visit the town where my friend’s biological mother had given birth to her. We took the train out of Busan and to the industrial yet beautiful town of Ulsan where icy aqua waves swelled and crashed into large black rocks that jutted upwards towards the sun. The hospital where she had been born was long gone, so instead of visiting some address mapped out on our phones, we walked along the coast. Our hair whipping our faces violently and our laughter dying upon the whistling wind brought us closer to the truth than staring at an old concrete building trying to find meaning from its unfamiliar walls.

We do the best that we can with the luggage that is handed to us at birth and learn how to live with stories which aren’t our own, but still inform the flavor of our food and the way we hear a song. The aspirations and unfulfilled longings of my mother are threads of her spirit I had assumed left this earth with her dying breath. And yet, as I grow older, I recognize these parts of her live on in my gut, generating inspiration, love, and grief; I am a palimpsest of her mother and her grandmother and of a country that has always been fighting under the crushing fist of external powers and internal ruptures.

Tonight, writing this is my way of reaching out to that choir of whispers and letting them know I do hear them even if I cannot understand them. I do not have the ability to disrupt the cycle of their silences, but I can start to reconcile—grant them the agency of remaining unknown and also present, and find tenderness in the fact that I am never truly alone—even on this peculiar evening in my home under the moon which grows above the descending clouds.

About Miró

Miró Justad is a Korean American writer, director, photographer, and musician based in Los Angeles. Her writing has been published in numerous independent outlets, and she works on visual projects with musicians. Currently, she is learning about healing bodywork.

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