Haraboji

My grandfathers visited me last night. They are both long gone from the earthly realm. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t thought of them in a while. I feel a strong connection to my matriarchs, but the patriarchy is more problematic, and I often neglect it.

But the other night when I woke up wheezing, my grandfathers showed up, completely unexpectedly. If the wheezing is mild, I know I can get over it with some breathwork to normalize my breathing. So as I laid there, I invited whatever ancestors could come in this moment to offer guidance. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, pause, pause. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, pause, pause.

Into that state of mild stress, my paternal grandfather, Haraboji, popped into my consciousness. Of course! He was a traditional Korean herbal doctor. He ran a shop and clinic in Seoul, Korea for years. The building still stands, and is now a museum. After our family moved to Hawai’I when I was five years old, he would still send bitter-smelling medicines to us, which I would watch my mother take by the handful and wash down with water. I don’t think I ever saw him again, and I actually have very few memories of him.

But my maternal grandfather, Weh-Haraboji, also popped in. He was also an obvious ancestor designated for this timely appearance. This grandfather was an American-trained MD. He was known for his “good hands” performing surgery. He was dean of Yonsei University Medical School, where my father was educated, and a founder of Severance Hospital, where me and my brothers were born. I feel much closer to this grandfather, because he visited us in Hawai’I, my mother was devoted to him, and he left a very clear, well-documented legacy.

So here I was, with my two grandfathers, healers from two different traditions, meeting in my body.

I realized how asthma, an autoimmune condition, is the manifestation of these two modalities, two sets of life choices, and the trauma and conflict in my own body. I was born in Korea, but raised in the USA. I have lost so much of my indigeneity, and so thoroughly colonized. In my middle age I started to take stock of all that my ancestors, my parents, and I had given up to be successful in America, and launched my journey to reclaim my Korean heritage.

What would I give to be able to apprentice with my Haraboji, and learn indigenous medicine? His eldest son, my father, chose Western medicine instead. My grandfather’s dream was to open a clinic with his son, combining both practices, but it never manifested.

In the face of Covid19, my request to my grandfathers was to guide me in how to process the  conflict and trauma in my lungs and draw it down, deeper into my digestive and excretory systems, where my intestines and bowels were waiting to metabolize this shit. Thanks to daily kimchi, lots of yoga twists and inversions, my guts are strong.

In the presence of my grandfathers, my breathing calmed totally, and I fell back asleep. When I woke up several hours later, it was from a dream, in which my parents visited me. This is what I wrote in my dream journal:

daddy, mommy, and I are in the airport. there’s a special spot in the airport we are supposed to be. I’m not going with them but I am accompanying them here. it’s kind of like a quarantine where you can be for a long time, I sense. I have to take dad there but he is walking very fast ahead of me. he goes down a floor. I am following him and trying to catch up. he seems lost, and I am trying to redirect him. I’m getting worried. there’s a museum of sorts on this level and I see him going in. I’m upset because it might be hard to find him in the maze of the museum. at that moment mom arrives and together we are exasperated and worried about his being lost in the museum in the airport.

I frequently focus on how a dream makes me feel. Like always, when my parents visit me in my sleep, I felt grateful, blessed, and reassured. I remember after 9-11, they came, in a dream, to my bedroom with a plastic grocery bag full of bae—round Korean pears. It was a loving, grounding gesture in a time of intense upheaval.

Once again, I felt blessed to see them. But it was disconcerting to see my father wandering and confused, or maybe he wasn’t confused. Maybe he knew exactly where he was going. He was walking his signature quick, brisk pace that we could never keep up with when he was healthy. Maybe it’s that Mom and I just didn’t want to go with him, and we thought he should be elsewhere. I also felt a vague sense of responsibility, like I was supposed to be looking after him and I lost him.

This is how I feel about my Korean heritage—that I’ve lost my way and am trying to find it back. I wonder if my father also feels that something was lost when he decided to emigrate with his family to the USA from Korea? His former home is now a museum in the most expensive and touristy part of town. He disconnected himself and his children from our ancestral land, and from extended family, culture, and history. He lived under the oppression of white supremacy, the nagging constancy of being othered, and the incessant pressure to prove his worth. How many more times did he see his own father after we left?

All of this is what I carry in my lungs, grieving what I and my parents have lost, what I am unable to pass on to my children and grandchildren, along with anger at the colonizers and the ways I have allowed myself to be colonized.

At the same time, I have so much love and gratitude for all my blessings on this adopted land. My three amazing children. My two mind-blowingly precious and brilliant grandchildren. The hundreds of people from all over the world I have been blessed to meet and learn from. The Iyengar Yoga practice, which has sustained, challenged, nourished, and saved me so many times. Baba Baxter Jones, who teaches me daily what it means to be human and living interdependently.

With all my heart I love my life and all I have gained, at the same time that I deeply grieve all I have lost. How I wish I could regain my fluency in Korean, my first language, and, even at this stage of my life in advanced menopause, gain the ability to read and write fluently in my native tongue. How I wish I could go back and talk story with my few remaining elders on the Korean peninsula. How I wish I could fully understand what happened in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, leading up to our departure in 1968. So much I am trying to understand, because all of these questions, longings, and losses are in my body, roiling, conflicting, inflaming, constricting, binding. I’m fighting myself.

Did Weh-Haraboji ever feel he was betraying his heritage by embracing the medicine of the west? In his success, did he feel colonized, co-opted, exploited, or tokenized? Did he respect my paternal grandfather and the traditions he represented? But even Korean medicine and training came largely from China. So what is tradition, authenticity, true heritage? Does it even exist?

Recently South Korea has been prominent in the news, for having largely slowed and weakened the effect of coronavirus. They’ve been upheld as the exemplars in public health for their strategies of widespread testing, contact tracing, and containment. Maybe part of my grandfather’s legacy is in helping to build a strong medical system that has been able to withstand an unprecedented crisis like Covid19. Maybe, by helping to establish the medical industry, he has played a role in the healing of Koreans in the face of pandemic.

Covid19, or as 45 deemed it, “the Chinese virus,” is attacking the lungs of the world. Hitting us all in the heart chakra. I need to make my lungs strong and supple to withstand the storm in which we are already besieged. I beckon my grandfathers to guide me. I invite my grandfathers to work through it with me, and heal with me. I offer my lungs as the site of renewal, as the hoped-for merging of disparate traditions and cultures, as a juncture of both sides of my family tree, as a meeting place for east and west. Maybe this is the healing center my paternal grandfather had longed for?

What do your lungs represent, carry, and struggle with? What stories, what grief, what love? Can we decolonize our lungs, heal through multiple generations, and grow into stronger, more whole beings through this crisis? The international scope of the epidemic brings us all simultaneously to our knees. How do we support, learn from, and heal each other?

Much love and gratitude to all in this moment.