Father’s Unresolved Grief

When my father was just beginning to establish himself in the marketplace, he would sometimes reveal a strange, unsettling side of himself to our family. He loved to drink, and during those years he would occasionally binge until he lost all sense of himself, wandering across the market grounds in a drunken haze, shouting at the top of his lungs. Neighbors would hurry over to alert us, and I would run out, find him, and guide him home.

Most of what he shouted has faded from memory, but one line remains vivid:
“I am So-and-so!”
He would turn to the people staring at him and cry out, “Don’t you know who I am?”

At the time, I had no idea what he meant. All I felt was the sting of embarrassment under the gaze of strangers.
Now, looking back, I can guess at the sorrow behind those cries. Having lost his father young, drifting alone through the streets of Seoul, growing up without guidance, building a family through relentless hardship—perhaps all of that accumulated grief had nowhere to go. And when he drank, a kind of compensatory fantasy would erupt, pushing him to declare himself someone important, someone worthy of recognition, if only for a moment.

Had his father lived longer, had he been able to study like others and secure a respectable job, he might have lived a modest but steady life. Instead, reality had been nothing but a chain of difficulties. So he didn’t merely drink to forget; he escaped further, into an imagined version of himself—someone accomplished, someone admired.

Once I managed to bring him home, he would call me and my younger sisters into his room, sit us down, and begin his familiar litany. The message was always the same:
“Your father has lived such a bitter, burdened life. You must study hard and grow into fine, admirable people.”
To us, it felt like an endless interrogation—exhausting, suffocating. Wanting to escape the moment, I would promise that we would work hard and become the people he hoped for. Only then would he, worn out from drink, murmur, “Yes, that’s what you must do,” before collapsing into sleep. And we would slip out of the room with a long, quiet sigh of relief.