Hyo

Originally posted in 2011

When I was in my late 20's, I left a lucrative position in the arctic of Alaska to move to Seoul, South Korea.

I had a few reasons for wanting to experience life in Korea, but the main one was that I wanted to be able to share more of my feelings with my parents.

If you and your parents don’t share the same native language, perhaps you understand what it feels like to be able to communicate on everyday things, but to feel hopeless about having your parents understand your thoughts and feelings on more intimate matters.

Well, I had a lot to tell my parents and I strongly felt that learning Korean well enough to fully spell out the ways in which they wronged me was the most important and pressing thing I could do with my life at the time.

Up until that point, I carried a lot of resentment because I felt that my parents put their expectations of me far ahead of encouraging me to figure out what I wanted from my life.

My parents seemed to view me as one of their possessions, a badge that reflected their social standing in the church and among their relatives. If you aren’t familiar with this type of family setting and are curious about it, I recommend that you view The Joy Luck Club. I bet millions of second generation Asian children have found this film to be as cathartic as I do.

When I got to Korea, I checked into a tiny room on the tenth floor of a dormitory. I spent the next six months going back and forth between the dormitory and a local library where I began writing, reading, and speaking Korean.

As I improved my vocabulary and became more fluent, I started writing my thoughts in Korean to send to my parents. I wrote about how disappointed and angry I was with them for having ridiculously high and unfair expectations of me. I told them how hurt I was that what others thought about our family seemed more important to my parents than the pressures and insecurities that my sisters and I felt on a daily basis when we were growing up. I scolded them for using me for their purposes, mainly to satiate their need for bragging rights among their church members and relatives.

I was feeling pretty good about my progress until the day I received my first phone bill. It took me a good hour and a half with a Korean-English dictionary to figure out that bill. I know that this doesn’t sound very exciting, but my struggle to understand that single document marked the beginning of a whole new way of seeing my parents.

Trying to make sense of that phone bill made me think about what my parents must have felt when they received their first phone bill from Bell Canada in 1972. That got me to think about what it was like for my mom to have English-speaking doctors and nurses deliver me while her parents were halfway around the world. And what were my parents feeling when they were asked to sign a stack of documents when they purchased their first home?

Spending that afternoon trying to figure out my phone bill woke me up to some of the struggles that my parents must have experienced as immigrants with children, looking to survive in Canada.

A short while later, I started reading about hyo, the Korean word for a Chinese character that means respect and reverence for one’s parents.

In reading about hyo and spending time with native Korean students staying in my dormitory, I began to see how most Koreans living in Korea view their parents. The best way I can describe the meaning of hyo is that it's a feeling that your parents are your sky.

It doesn’t matter if your sky is sunny or dark and ominous - your sky is still your sky. And the majority of Koreans believe that your sky must be respected at all times.

What if your sky hasn’t earned your respect? This is a question and mindset that I think is more natural to western culture. In old school Korean culture, the feeling of hyo is that your parents don’t need to earn your respect; they deserve your respect just for being your parents.

Hyo is reflected in the feelings that most people from all cultures have when their parents pass on from this world. Regardless of how much anger and bitterness people carry from their upbringings, with few exceptions, human beings experience a great sense of loss and sadness when their parents pass away. These feelings of loss and sadness can overpower feelings of anger that were seemingly impossible to overcome while one’s parents were alive. I see this as almost a form of evidence that it's natural and right for people to honour their parents at all times, regardless of their parents' mistakes and shortcomings.

Hyo takes into account the likelihood that our parents have experienced more pain and suffering than we have as a natural consequence of having lived longer than us. With this likelihood in mind, it makes sense that as much as we need for our parents to understand our most hurtful experiences, our parents probably have an even greater need for us to understand their deepest wounds.

Why have I written about this? Because I believe that the feelings that we carry for our parents and those closest to us have as much impact on our health as what we eat, how much we sleep, and how much we exercise. Learning about hyo was the beginning of a more peaceful season of my life.

Though I'm still not immune to getting frustrated with my parents from time to time, at this point in my life, I'm grateful to say that they do feel like my sky. And because they are my sky, it brings me peace to honour them as well as I am able to.