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This was only our second day together but already we were beginning to feel comfortable with each other. This morning I got my first taste of Soon E's frugal nature. It brought back memories of my father.
My father was always after me to turn out the light when I left a room that no one else was in. He was born in 1904 and I'm sure didn't have electricity growing up. His father, a stern taskmaster nothing like the gentle man my father became, had to work hard in order to put food on the table for his wife, their five sons, and himself. In the 1910 census, he listed the two older boys: 8 and 10 years old respectively, as farm laborers. Pa's sons got a taste of the real world early in life.
Daddy grew up poor. Just as he was beginning to make enough money to save a little each week the Great Depression hit. The bank, where he had managed to deposit almost $500, failed. He lost it all. There was no bailout in the 1930s.
Though he and mother would make a modestly comfortable living later in life, he never got over the trauma of the great depression when people literally went hungry. He never forgave Herbert Hoover, who had the misfortune of being president during the depression, for the wipeout of his savings. Daddy became a Democrat and remained so for the rest of his life and held nothing but disdain for the Republican party. He, unlike me, knew what it was like to go without; wasting anything was unacceptable to him. So I was often on the receiving end of the question, "Did you turn out the light?"
By December of 2008, almost 18 years after she arrived, I had heard Soon E ask that question, or it's related admonishment, "You didn't turn out the light", hundreds of times more than my father ever did. And it turns out that the root of Soon E's extreme frugality pretty much parallels that of my father's.
Soon E's father died when she was five years old. Her mother was left to provide for six children, her mother-in-law, and herself by farming. She typically worked in the fields all day and then sewed and mended by kerosene light most of the night. She often wept in pain. Snacks for Soon E and her three brothers and two sisters were dried squash seed and sometimes roasted grasshoppers.
Soon E dropped out of school in the eighth grade and went to work in a sewing factory to help support her younger brother's middle and high school education. Like my father, during her middle 20s she was able to start saving small amounts of money in the bank. Her crushing "Great Depression" resulted after she married an Amerasian man determined to help descendants of American soldiers emigrate to the U.S. The hopeless plight of Amerasians in Korea eventually took it's toll on her husband. Unable to find work, he descended into alcoholism. Soon E was left to provide for him and their three daughters. She knew what it was like to find meal-time near and have nothing to offer.
I, only the other hand, was privileged to grow up in the U.S. in 40s and 50s when hope sprang eternal for even the son of a lower-middle-class family. There were even periods after my eight years of higher education when I tasted of the good life. While Soon E's arrival found me somewhat "immersed in debt" a phrase she would soon encounter in her English studies and use often to describe our situation, our resources have multiplied significantly since then. But, like my father, Soon E has never been able to erase the "great depression". |
