Thank You for Your Hard Work

I've watched When Life Gives You Tangerines on Netflix in the past month and it was very moving. As I complete this sentence, I detest the word "moving" in it. Moving how? Moving what? To better phrase it, watching this show is getting bombarded by flashbacks from your own life. There are so many checkpoints in life that are similar between humans that you realize we're all quite generic in the end.

We seldom realize what our parents carry inside themselves at the time. Only with context and time do we understand how big their struggle was.

The series tells the story of 3 generations of a family and how each encounter their own difficulties. There is a poverty discourse throughout the series which can at times get redundant but it nonetheless struck a chord within me. I hadn't watched a K-drama before this series so it's my introduction to the genre. The island where the main character grows up is called Jeju and in their language when translated the series' original name is: "Thank you for your hard work". It is an ode to our parents and their parents and anyone who had an impression on our youth and upbringing. When Life Gives You Tangerines seems like such a silly name when you watch the series; Thank You for Your Hard Work is a better fit.

I'm going to try giving minimal spoilers along the way and this will mostly be a personal post on what I thought of while watching the series.

I grew up in an upper-middle class family. My father was a banker and my mother retired a couple of years after I was born although she did have a stint as a realtor when I was a teen. Both are now retired. I'm fortunate enough that they are alive, healthy and happy.

Both my parents lost one of their parents at an early age and neither came from money. My father lost his father when he wasn't even a teenager and his younger sibling was newly born. My mother lost her mother at around the same age. Both had 2 more siblings. They were both middle siblings. My grandmother on my father's side had to immigrate from another country with what she could fill in her suitcase; fortunately, she had her brothers to look out for her. After she lost her husband to a heart attack she was left with 3 young children. Although her brothers helped her, a person is mostly alone to deal with things because everyone has their own families to look out for.

My grandfather on my mother's side was grief stricken after my grandmother's loss and he wasn't able to care for his children, he was in disbelief at how life had turned out. My mother's older sister had just left home to get married so my mother was left to care for her younger brother. She became a parent from a very young age, even before she had me. She took my uncle to the doctor and talked with his teachers about his progression when she needed to. She sacrificed so much to raise him. She had hopes of pursuing higher education quite like the daughter in the series. She wanted to be a journalist. When she approached her father about the college entrance exams and how she wanted to pursue being a journalist my grandfather replied: "Who's going to take care of your brother?" She was heartbroken but she buried her dreams in her heart and kept on going. She entered the job market and was employed at a reinsurance firm. She's one of the smartest women I've ever known and I can't even start to imagine what she would have accomplished if she was able to pursue higher education.

My father entered the college entrance exams and placed at a good public university. At a young age he went out into the world and never looked back. Afterwards, he became an inspector at a large bank which was a revered but tough job at the time. You would go out to these establishments that the bank owned in order to inspect them. The inspectee would hate you because they viewed you as someone who could potentially cause them financial harm. In one instance, while inspecting a hotel they gave him a cockroach infested room so he took all the toilet paper and wrapped himself like a mummy in order to sleep. At his apartment, he would boil water to take a shower because hot water wasn't available.

They both came from humble means and worked their way toward something greater. They never spared any expense while raising me. They made sure to provide me with the best education that their capability could afford. They even stretched their budget to ensure it. Our parents want to give us the world and sometimes from our narrow point of view we're unable to understand what they are doing.

I have a very good example for this. While I was in high school an event was organized which introduced Canadian universities to prospective students. My father and I went to this event and looked at the universities. University of Toronto and McGill boasted top of the line education and I was so excited that I would be able to study at such a university. When I went home and shared my excitement with my mother she shot me down. She explained that these were really expensive universities for international students and that we could probably not afford them. I was furious. Not furious because we couldn't afford them but furious because my father made me dream that I could attend such a university. I resented how he got as excited as I did at the idea that I may attend one of these universities while he knew that we couldn't afford the tuition. Now I realize, he was dreaming with me, not for me. He had the best of intentions and believed from the heart that maybe he could make it work and maybe he could but it would deal a massive financial blow to them which I don't think is worth the stress and burden I would have caused.

At that time, I couldn't understand how my father still talked about how maybe I could attend. Looking back on it, I realize he wanted it as much as me. Father, I'm sorry for not realizing this at the time.

Going back to my mother. The brother she raised, the one she gave up her dreams for, about 10 years ago, he had a sudden heart attack. One day he woke up called his office and told them he wasn't feeling well and was going to use a sick day. He went back to bed and never woke up. He was in his early 40's. My mother was inconsolable after his passing. She didn't only lose a brother but she lost a child as well. She had trouble breathing, eating even talking. To this day, I feel as though she has never been the same since. A part of how she thought life would progress cracked at that moment and never got repaired. Maybe 6 months to a year after his passing, we adopted a dog. That gradually brought her back but I still see the heartache in her eyes. Loss is difficult, loss of a child is unimaginable.

One day, a couple of years before my uncle passed away. My mother was preparing to go out with her friends and my father told us that he was feeling nauseous. We made fun of him and said that he was a glutton and he probably ate something bad. My mother canceled her plans and we went to the emergency room. They looked at him for a couple of minutes then transferred us into a room with doors which was surprising, I'd never experienced something like that. Then they hooked him up to an EKG machine. I could see the tension forming on the face of the resident doctor, he wouldn't say anything but he was going in and out of the room at a rapid pace.

My father was awake and talking to me, I was asking if he still felt nauseous or not. The doctor asked my mother if they could speak privately. I peered through the sliver where the door hadn't fully shut. My mother was facing towards me and the doctor was talking to her when all of a sudden, like from a movie, she dropped her purse. I knew that something was wrong. The doctor later told us that my father was actively having a heart attack at that moment.

It was a Sunday, no doctors apart from those on call were present. They called everyone on call that day for the surgery and abruptly took my father away. They later told us that his heart had stopped in the elevator and they shocked him back to life. We were standing at the door of the operating room and doctors were running in plain clothes 15 to 30 minutes late to attend the surgery.

I don't know how long it took but they got out of surgery. My father was lying on the stretcher and I hadn't seen him that frail and close to death ever before. Everything hit me all at once and I cried silently in a corner where my mother wouldn't see me because I didn't want to affect her. He looked thin and mortal. I realized that I could have lost him that day.

The resident doctor on call that day was the cardiologist of the hospital. It's funny to realize how fortunate you are looking back at these events. What if that doctor wasn't on call but another was? What if they couldn't resuscitate him back to life?

Maybe this is what I meant by "moving" at the start. Not that the show moved me, but that it moved things inside me I hadn't looked at in a while. The working title for this show was Life because it encapsulates everything that happens in a life. Birth, happiness, rejection, heartache, loss, struggle...

To my parents, my grandparents and anyone who had a hand in my upbringing: Thank you for your hard work.