Our Harabuji

I received word from my father this morning that my grandfather has passed away, one day before his ninety-sixth birthday. He had been in decline for some time, so it was not unexpected. But it is a sad thing for the family.

My digital photo archives do not contain very many pictures of my grandfather, I discovered, going through them today. Most of the time I have had a camera I have lived away from home. (In the few pictures I do have, my grandfather tends to look slightly startled or alarmed!) This picture, actually scanned years ago from one of my dad's albums, is of my grandfather at a very young age, with my grandmother and my dad, just one year old. Through the bottom on the right hand corner, you can just barely see Japanese writing--it was taken during the Japanese occupation of Korea, which I assume has something to do with it.

My grandfather was a very stubborn man, as you can perhaps see even in this early photo from the set of his jaw. But he also knew how to pick his battles, and in most matters was fairly mild and accommodating. When he did pick his battle, though...

I did not really know him well, though he lived with us almost all my life. I learned much more about him from my father's memoir than from living with him. He was born in 1911, can you imagine? When he was born China was still an empire, and there hadn't even been one World War, let alone two. No holocaust, no North and South Korea, no nuclear weapons.

In his youth he nearly died of tuberculosis, and attributed his survival to God. He was a Christian of the Swedenborgian persuasion, converted by missionaries and perhaps with the encouragement of his older sister. As for the details of his biography, I will not go into them here as my father's memoir is far more complete an accurate than I could be.

I will add though that my grandfather's direct descendants number more than thirty, including descendants to the fifth generation (son's son's daughter's daughters, my grandnieces), whom he actually had a chance to meet. I remember one family reunion at which we totaled them all up and tried to make projections about how long it would take to get up to seventy, which was the number of some biblical patriarch's tribe though I forget who--Abraham? Jacob? (I will add that according to the clan I was projected to have only one child, if that.)

My one and only literary portrait of my grandfather appeared in the context of a (true) story about a kitten we had when I was in high-school. It got up into a very tall fir tree next to our house and couldn't get down--for weeks. If I recall correctly, my grandfather's contribution to our (many and varied) efforts to coax the kitten out of the tree was to make one of his smelliest fish soups and bring it out to the base of the tree, where he stirred it and the steaming hot smell rose up and tantalized the loudly meowing kitten. Though I am sorry to report that his attempt was no more successful than any others, the kitten did eventually fall out of the tree and survive with only minor damage. (Surely it used up one of its nine lives.)

When we lived on the farm and had a woodstove as our only heat, my grandfather used to chop wood every summer. He must already have been over seventy(?) but he was good with an axe. Not only did he chop the wood, but he stacked it in beautiful beehive-like patterns to preserve it through the winter. There are pictures of that somewhere, but I don't have them here...

My grandfather was a very scholarly man--he had many many shelves and boxes of books, almost all in Korean so I really don't know much about them. Apparently he was proud of my effort to learn Chinese, and once or twice we managed to talk in a little about Confucius or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms--talk enough to establish at least that we were both familiar with these things, even if we couldn't exchange much information about them. I know no Korean, and his English was fairly limited--the language barrier was pretty severe between us two, which is probably part of why we didn't know each other better. But it makes me happy to know that he approved of my chosen career, despite its impracticality…

This is a rather scattered and unorganized tribute to my Harabuji*, but it is written and posted here with love and respect. This is a picture of him as an old man--taken some years ago--catching a nap on the couch. He had a long and amazing life and I hope he now rests in peace.

*This is the Korean word/term of address for grandfather, and is how we always addressed him and knew him.