Korean Society, Women, Wonder

Reflecting this evening on passings, plans and possible outcomes.

Do our prayers have much meaning, particularly (or especially), when reduced to rote repetition or verbal recitation?

What of ceremony; whether collective or individual?

For an individual, might that not become routine?
Among a crowd, is that not called a demonstration (i.e., vanity)?

Part of my personal "gulag" (used very loosely) is facing the daily challenge of an "intercultural" relationship.

We, of the West (or merely in it) appreciate our parents and love them, but seem to carry a certain "guilt" when we're not able (or even willing) to care for them, particularly in old age.

And then for those of us immersed, enraptured (or merely) somehow captured by the East, we find much that is beautiful as well as much that seems to comfort or assuage that "guilt."

Have we been selfish (about that)?

Further,  when it comes to raising children, it seems, there are also themes of guilt, unresolved, by both the intracultural as well as the intercultural divide.

Who will raise our children when we cannot? Who do we allow, if we do at all, to "help us" when we practically (or by virtue of choice) cannot?  Does the mother (or woman or even "designated person" in this age) become the indispensable, irreplaceable?

And maybe even as Solzhenitsyn [might have] said (in this context): "It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations"?

The "bigger picture," whether culled from faith, hope, religion, the internet or wherever these days may provide us some insight on that.

Here's something from 1995 written (by a Ms. Connie Chung) for a Harvard "bi-annual publication spearheaded by Korean-American undergraduates," that bills (or billed?) itself as Yisei ("second-generation" in Korean).

A (particularly poignant) excerpt:

Korean society, to a large extend [sic], still assumes that "the mother’s first duty is to raise the child, and no one else can substitute for the mother" (Seo Jin Young 139). Thus, even if the number of day-care centers were to increase the mother would still be left feeling guilty. Leaving her child in the care of a substitute, the society tells her, can never equal the quality of her own care. Of course, it may be reasonable to expect that a child growing under the care of strangers or left alone while the mother works may develop problems not faced by "properly mothered" children. However, the widely held notion that the mother alone should be responsible for the well-being of a child’s emotional and educational growth is a prejudiced fallacy indeed. Gong Ji Young, in her novel Go Alone, Like the Horn of a Rhino (based on the well-known tale of a mother who searches for her child kidnapped by a demon) asks, "When the demon took the baby, where was everyone else? The baby’s father? The relatives? How about the society? What was everyone else doing? Why was the woman the only one feeling the pain of eyes gouged out and thorns in her feet? " (Gong Ji Young 231).

Can a mother's unique, special, deep empathy ever be replaced?

Should it?

Why? [must she suffer so?]

Why not? [must I suffer so little?]

Korean mother and child near Seoul; Fall 1945

Because I am small?