Autobiography - Soyeon Jung



I was not that happy with my name, 'Soyeon', in my childhood. Most every single word of Korean names is followed by Chinese characters, which have mutiple meanings. One character, 'So', means innocent and white. 'Yeon' means beautiful girl. I was the first child of my parents, which was probably the reason they made my name the "Serene Chaste Girl." However, the sound of my name put me in mind of the "Stubborn Conventional Modest Girl". 'So' has another meaning in a different Chinese character... "small." I was always small and am still small. I blamed my name for a long time in my unsophisticated childhood.

My father abruptly asked me and my three younger sisters what our pedigree was and who our ancestors were. We had to answer him distinctly like a garrulous skylark, otherwise there were severe purnishments such as standing against the wall while raising your arms for an hour or sitting down on your knees for an hour. Of course we were not allowed to talk while being punished. My youngest sister, who is almost 9 years younger than me, always cried and held my father's arms to save her from the purnishments. She always won and also saved my second younger sister as well with the reason that they were young. However, I was never spared, nor my first younger sister.

The 13th descendant of "Song-Kahng" (an eminent author and a noble senator in Cho-Sun dynasty) with a family's predigree of "Yeon-il": that is me. While Japan colonized our country and destroyed the sovereign powers of Cho-Sun dynasty, the social stratum gradually faded out. Democracy came to Korea; human rights equalized in Korea after the Korean War. I do not know why Koreans still care about their family-tree so much. However, if I say to my friends that I'm the 13th descendant of "Song-Kahng", they can just react "oh yeah.? cool!" or "that's why your father was a poet". That is all I can expect from my father's proud credit to our family. He often used to tell me that only I could be on the list of our predigree. Among his four daughters, I am listed as the son… the oldest. I knew that he felt always sad there was no son who could take over our family's blood.

Son... I wish my first younger sister could be the son for my father. She is always strong and steady-minded, but I am always tender and emotional like a crying baby. Whether he noticed me like that or not, his attitude toward me was always hard and too strict. I never felt comfortable with having meals with my father at the table. He always reproached me with not being able to use chopsticks in the right way, and if I made noise biting my food too much or started eating first before my father started eating, he always reproached me. I had to help my Mom to set up the table, putting spoons and chopsticks in the right way and call my father, like "Dinner is on, please come." I still cannot use chopsticks in the right way. If my father would have tought me how to use them with a gentle mind, I could have learned it. But I was always seized with fear of my father and tried to avoid using chopsticks in front of him.

I had to read 100 fine pieces of literature and write a response of every single book over the summer break and Winter break when I was 10 or 11 years old. I was just an ordinary girl - the same as the girls that played with Barbi dolls. I never had comic books or magazines although they were very popular at the time. I was never able to watch Television if my father was around the house. My younger sisters and I had to be quite because he always read books, studied and wrote his poems. He never told me, "good job" or "well done", even if I got a high score on school tests or got a prize from student competitions. I had to be good at everything that was not my wanting. Rather I was scared of my father's reproaching if I failed. But it did not work with me forever.

When my painting teacher in middle school found out that I was good at painting and drawing and suggested to my mom to consider sending me to art school, my father was really enraged. What he thought of art was just entertainment, which means only low class people do it. Even though he was a poet and a writer, he did not want to look at artworks. Every teacher in my school knew my father because he wrote school's song lyrics. If I did not do well on the tests, I had to talk to every teacher and promise them that I would do better on the next test. I had no opinions. I had to obey whatever my father taught me.

I hated my father. I had no freedom and no voice. I wanted him to disappear from my sights forever. I always thought of my future in relationship to my father. I thought that I will marry a totally different man from my father and I will never let my father in my house. I wanted to have my freedom and wanted to talk to my father in a warm-hearted mind.

I cried until I passed out in front of his portrait at his funeral and I told him that I'm so sorry many times. But he did not answer me or reproach me any more. He passed away from a sudden car accident in 1991 when I was just 20 years old. I thought everything was my fault. Now I know how much he loved me, but I did not know that when I was young. The way he loved me was as a traditional Korean father, but it was too much for me at the time.