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.

워낙 흔한 패턴의 글이라 본인 이야기인지 어디서 퍼온 글인지 모르겠지만, 그래도 뻔한 내용 읽으면서 어제 애들한테 잔소리 했던거 후회가 되네. 그리고 우리 아버지는 정말 훌륭한 분이셨구나 싶고, 나는 아버지보다 훨씬 어려움 없이 컸는데, 왜 자식들 한테는 아버지가 나한테 해 주신것 만큼 못하고 있나 싶다.

미국에서 애들 키우면서 느끼는건 한국식 가정교육에 대해 애들의 반감이 매우 크다는거. 애들은 다른 집 부모들하고 비교하고, 그래서 자유롭게 하루종일 놀기만 하는 친구들에 비해 공부하라는 잔소리 듣는 본인의 처지가 불공평 하다고 느끼는듯.

쳇지피티 작성글 티가 .. 미국인을 능가하는 완벽한 영문법, 그러나 작가의 혼이 없어 보이는..

챗 GPT로 쓰느라 수고 했구나. 직접 쓰면 3인칭 1인칭도 틀린 엉망 진창 문법에 My father was rude to me when I was young. So I was sad. 하고 같단한 초딩 문잗들 붙여가면서 쓸것을 ㅉㅉ 영어도 못하는게 한국어 사이트에서 잘난척 하면서 연기하지 마라