Father’s Voice

New York City Lights October 23, 2018

Sunshine Lee's Culture Essay Written in Poetry

I Hear Father’s Voice

Coming to New York, a name comes to my mind. Kim Gwangsam.

It was about 40 years ago.

I met my father’s friend’s son and his wife with my mother and father who came to New York around father's age of 60.

“My husband’s name Gwangsam means '3 lights' in Korean. One of the lights is his wife. Me.” At this word of that bold wife, we all laughed but she kept going on like that and we all leaned toward the quiet son of my father’s friend from Pyungyang University of Education.

After we had lunch together, he showed us his not so extraordinary pediatric clinic that was soon to be opened in New Jersey. We had dinner together again and he lodged us somewhere nearby.

Doing nothing special and wasting two days in such a fancy city as New York with so much to see and visit felt like a waste of my parents’ short stay in the US. It took me four hours by train to get there from Washington DC, and my old parents had come all the way from Korea. I felt sorry to spend less time together as a family since we lived far apart.

We had nothing more to say. Even my father who is usually a good talker had nothing more to say. It was a long and tedious time.

The next day after dropping us off at Broadway next to Columbia University where my brother was a graduate student, Gwangsam suddenly burst into tears with my father’s hands in his hand while saying goodbye. Wiping tears with his fist, he wouldn’t let go of the hands of my father, his own father’s friend whom he was meeting for the first time.

Getting impatient at the prolonged farewell, I motioned with my eyes to suggest that we leave. But my father realized that Gwangsam was dragging on because he was unable to let us go due to the piercing remorse he felt over his own father’s death in Seoul not so long ago. My father was frustrated with my impatience and immaturity, saying, “I guess you really do not understand how he feels.”

My father’s heart was pouring out with sympathy for Gwangsam.

Where was it, I wonder? It must be around here that my father showed his deep sympathy for Gwangsam and felt endless pity for his daughter’s immaturity.

It’s now the end of October, and after about 40 years, I am looking around Broadway near the school with cold hands.

A few years later, my father suddenly passed away in Seoul, and at Baltimore, I realized in my heart how my father and Gwangsam felt then.

It is a scene that I cannot help but remember as time goes by.

The gap between my father’s (he was 31 years older than me) and my mind was that wide.

                Where was it, I wonder
                That my father
                Was worried about
                When his daughter would grow up