Korean mothers

I've been reading Angela's book manuscript and it's funny to read about the way she portrays Koreans mothers because it's such a familiar picture to me. I think there's something to be said for mothers who lived during the Korean war, as mine and Angela's did. In some ways, my mother will always be the little girl who had to struggle to get food and help her family survive because there was nothing. People in this country don't really understand the hardship of war and how that affects one's outlook on life.

My mother and father have a pretty comfortable life, but my mother is always a little bit scared that it's never enough. This part is obviously more about having lived during wartime than being Korean, but I still view it as being a Korean thing. Anyway, some of the things that happen in Angela's book between the protagonist and her mother are like scenes ripped right out of my memory. You just don't realize when you're living your life that it might parallel someone else's so closely.

Anyway, I always had a sort of a buffer zone between me and the rest of American society because my father is American. I didn't come from a purely Korean outlook the way my full Korean cousins did. In a lot of ways I defintiely see the world in terms of what's American and what's Korean, but I didn't have to readjust my thinking in too many ways to realize how I was supposed to be in either world.