The Medicine Story: Jungwon Kim & Linda Thai
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Lisa Breschi: [00:00:00] Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are on this beautiful living planet and welcome, welcome to this space. We're really grateful that you're here with us. My name is Lisa Breschi Almond. I'll be your host today.
Today's conversation is entitled War's Long Shadow Part Two, the Medicine of Story. If you didn't get a chance to see part one, you can go back and find it on SAND's Event page. It's not necessary to roll with today's conversation.
But before I introduce Jungwon and Linda, I would like to offer a [00:01:00] land and settler acknowledgement as histories live in our bodies and as we live in the body of earth. I acknowledge all of those who come before me, both known and unknown. I am currently near my hometown of weed in California at the base of Mount Shasta, the ancestral and unseated homelands of the Winnemum Wintu people whose sacred relationship with Mount Shasta is rooted in lifeways and ceremonies, languages and responsibilities that have been carried across generations.
This mountain is not a backdrop to human activity. It's a relative, it's a teacher, a being with its own consciousness, rhythms, entanglements. May this be a practice for us, an acknowledgement, a continuous retuning towards land, [00:02:00] historical and relational accountability, emotional sobriety, and intergenerational reverence, which is a perfect segue for today.
And so without further ado, let me introduce our honored presenters j Jungwon Kim. We have the great fortune. Hi Jungwon. Jungwon is an writer, cultural worker. She's a communications leader and organizational strategy consultant, and a journalist who's dedicated. Her professional life to human rights and environmental advocacy and Jungwon came to Sand and us because Maurizio and Zaya were on a pilgrimage and crossed paths.
And I love how this kind of magic happens because then not only have you done the [00:03:00] sand, the another, the community conversation with Linda, but we're also a part of the Eternal songs talks. So we've been doing a lot of weaving together and it's wonderful. And also Linda Thai, who is a trauma therapist. An educator who specializes in brain and body-based modalities.
Linda has worked with thousands of people all over the world and for promoting mindfulness and recovering with trauma, attending grief as a means of self-care and so much more. So happy to be in any space, but I, it makes me excited to just be here with the both of you, so much that you bring and truly medicine.
Yeah. And without any f without further ado, I'm gonna go in the background and leave this beautiful setting for you both. [00:04:00] Thank you. Thank you for being with us.
Linda Thai: Thank you. Thank you,
Lisa Breschi: Linda.
Linda Thai: And thank you, Jungwon. In the tradition of storytelling, we sit in circle, and so as I look at you all today, I imagine myself sitting in circle with you all.
And in this way, I share my story from my place in the circle. The Alaska native elders here, the land where I live, the Dene Athabascan Peoples of the Middle Tanana Valley have taught me. You do not ever stand in the middle of the circle when you share your story. You always have your seat in the circle as you share.
And so it is a gift [00:05:00] to be here in circle with you. And in the tradition of storytelling, of story sharing, of song to song sharing, I share from this place of genderlessness, this place of humility, this place of simply inhabiting my experiences. And there is this tradition and this custom that I have learned from Song Weavers.
At the end of each song. Yeah, we share the medicine that has come to us because every song, every story contains a spirit, every song, every story contains medicine. And so in the. In the sharing of my story, yes, it's medicine for me. And yes, in my place, in the circle it's also the offering. The offering.
And [00:06:00] the this the ways in which spirit then moves through each of us is going to be different. And so in our q and a time in our community sharing time, I invite us to share what has moved through you. And in this way, we're expressing gratitude to the spirit of the stories. Yeah. And in this way, we stay in this place where we are honoring the medicine of the story, the spirit of the story.
And in this way we stay embodied together. That can be a challenge for many of us. 'cause we wanna offer thoughts and opinions and Yeah. And to stay in this place where we are listening from a different life.
And so I pause and I [00:07:00] land and I ground in circle with you all. I was born in Vietnam, I was raised in Australia. I live these days in Alaska and I'm redefining what it means to be Vietnamese. And I'm redefining what it means to be Australian and I'm redefining what it means to be American. I'm also a former child refugee and part of the Vietnamese bought people diaspora from 1975.
To 1995 roundabouts, and I'm gonna share stories with you, stories, my stories, my people stories. And yet I'm aware that it's one story amongst 800,000 stories that made it to the west.
In 1973, the US troops withdrew from Vietnam, and in 1975, April, Vietnam fell [00:08:00] to the communists. One year later, my parents had an arranged marriage in a village in the south of Vietnam, as is the custom of my peoples. And nine months later, February, 1977, I was born in a hose down concrete pig style midwifed into the world by my ancestors, as is the customs of my peoples.
And my father is in and out of hiding because he is wanted by the communists and he's in and out of hiding for the first few years of my life. This is because he was the manager of his aunt's gas station, which made him in cahoots with a commun, with, sorry, with the capitalist and petroleum products at the time was a very scarce resource and therefore was wanting to be appropriated by the Communist Party.
And at the time there was much forced asset forced asset redi redistribution. [00:09:00] There were disappearances, public denunciations, and public executions, people being disappeared, sent indefinitely into the communist reeducation camps. And so that was the backdrop of my coming into this world in 1979.
My dad turns up and he says to my mother, we are leaving. We have to leave Vietnam. And there is no future for us in this country.
There was a lot of disagreement in my family at the time because I'm the firstborn child of a firstborn child, and I'm two years old and my mother is six months pregnant with my little sister.
At the time, we thought through all of our options and our options were, if we stayed, there was no future for us. If my dad left on his own, there would be no [00:10:00] future for my mother and I because we would be marked as someone whose, you know, capitalist father. Husband had left, was a traitor, had betrayed the country, and there would be no future within Vietnam for my mother and I.
And so it was decided that we would leave because our fates were intertwined. And so in April of 1979, yeah, we. We fled to a harbor town. We stayed there for a month. We lived under the cover of darkness, and we waited for our boat to be built. And at the time, all the people who knew how to build ocean boats had already left.
And so a river boat was being built. And this was part of the reason why 30 to 50% of us who fled Vietnam died in the South China Sea because we only knew how to build boats that were river boats that were being sent out into open ocean.[00:11:00]
But we didn't know this at the time because we were river people of the Mekong Delta. We weren't ocean people. And so we're stashing petroleum products in the middle of the night, a quarter at a time, a half quarter at a time, so that we could gather enough gasoline to be able to make a journey across the open oceans.
And then one day in the middle of the night, we got the message, we're leaving. We're leaving. It's time to go. And so we left
on an ocean, on a river boat out in open ocean, overcrowded 140 people. And after a few days out at sea, we were met by pirates who had ocean fearing vessels that were made for this open ocean. And there was pillaging and plundering and looting and raping pirates who were hungry for gold and jewelry and money.[00:12:00]
And when they were done, they disabled our boats, motors, and destroyed all of the engines, except they destroyed all the engines and destroyed all the lights except for one light. And we were left floating out at open ocean,
held by the currents and our prayers. We had no motor to power the way. And a storm surge starts pushing us towards shore, like pushing us towards shore, right? And we can see land coming, and yet it is pounding down with rain and the sky is dark, and shore is so close, and our little boat hits a sandbar and our boat then starts heaving and breaking apart, pivoted on this sandbar.
And my mother sits me on my dad's shoulders and ties me down with a shirt on his shoulders. [00:13:00] And he jumps into the ocean and starts swimming towards the idea of the possibility of the hope of, and mom is seven months pregnant and she is standing there and the boat is rocking and heaving, and there are young men in the water with life bullies.
And they're saying to her, yay, go on. Yay. She doesn't know how to swim. So she holds on to her. Her big belly jumps towards the blackness of the ocean, towards these voices.
They find each other on shore. Later on that night
and that night, my dad buries my mother and I into the sand up to our necks to keep it's worn. And the next day, the young men swim back out to the boat to salvage what they could.[00:14:00]
And then we just start walking because there was no other option. And as we walk, we see people, and these people are just pointing away. And they're pointing away. And so we had no other option except to go in the direction that these people were pointing in. And so we walk. And eventually we come into the arms of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the International Red Cross, and we make our way to Bidong Island where a refugee was camp was set up on that island and Bidong Island at one point was the most densely populated place on earth for humans because that is where the currents and our prayers took us.
While we were in the refugee camp [00:15:00] where we lived for six months, my dad is out chopping firewood and a tree falls on his head and he becomes a mess. He's pooping and peeing and laughing and crying and the mess Frontier boat doctors Without Borders boat that was offshore from us. They, there was a medic that came and said, Hey we need to take your dad.
We need to take your husband. We need to get him on the boat. We need to operate. We will see what we can do for him. But if we do nothing, he will surely die. And my mother in that moment, right? The man to whom she's the good man to whom she's had an arranged marriage is dying, and she's just given birth to my little sister.
She was[00:16:00]
97 pounds, full term pregnant. So 45, less than 45 kilos, full term pregnant. So she's holding my newborn sister. And she takes the advice because that is the only option that she has. And so dad gets operated on. And when we attend our interview with the Australian immigration officials who lived in the refugee camps at the time with immigration officials from all over the world, the story is that Dad turned up with his head bandaged up like Frankenstein.
And my little sister newborn was just so dang cute that the Australian immigration officials looked at us and said, stamp, stamp to our paperwork, welcome to Australia.
And so from there, we were sent to another part of the refugee camp because once your paperwork gets processed, you get sent to different areas where you get to learn a little bit [00:17:00] about the customs of the place that you're moving to. And we were being sponsored out to Australia under a pilot rural resettlement scheme.
Where the Catholic church had was receiving funding in order to help resettle Vietnamese refugees all around Australia. And there was this little town called humid of 7,000 people and one set of traffic lights so small that the Catholic church got together with the Anglican church and their community said, we will help.
And they helped her. Oh, feeling come up.
I helped her resettle myself and three other Vietnamese families in 1979 rural New South Wales.
And we received the kindness [00:18:00] of people.
As I pause and land into this moment with you all,
I'm so struck by the kindness of your listening
that tethers me into a kindness that runs its way through our common humanity that is so forgotten about, overlooked, unseen,
not applauded. Not [00:19:00] recognized and yet, so palpably present as I reflect upon my family's stories and my own stories,
the people of Tume helped my family to get settled in this strange new land where people watered the grass and mowed the grass and fertilized the grass and watered the grass and mowed the grass, but you couldn't eat the grass and they didn't feed it to their animals, and they didn't use it to make art or craft.
We couldn't figure it out. We just figured that this grasp was just so special.[00:20:00]
They helped my dad and the other dads to get jobs at the local lumber mill. My mother was enrolled into the local technical college, took classes in learning how to sew, and when my mother experienced traumatic homesickness de depression and had to be hospitalized, they also took care of myself and my little sister.
While dad continued to go to work,
they helped my family to get settled. They helped us to learn English
really well-meaning people advise my parents to give my sister and I Anglo-Saxon names because it would make allies easier, because it would make it easier for other people, for Anglo Australians to pronounce our names. They were right, and it's a [00:21:00] grief that I've only begun to recognize in recent years.
After two years of living in this little country town, my family decided that in order for there to be more of a future for the children, it was time to find community and time to find where our Vietnamese diaspora community were. And so with sad hearts, my family bid a farewell to some of the kindest people that we ever knew.
And went on a road trip in 1981 in a orange, sunny datson with a roadmap in another language, passed many traffic lights into the big city of Melbourne. It was here that, [00:22:00] that that we settled into a new routine. Yeah. We settled into a new routine. My dad and mom with the help of the diaspora community, got jobs in factories and my mother would work morning shift 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM and my dad would work afternoon shift 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM and he would get as much overtime as he could.
And I was entrusted with
bathing my little sister and I feeding us breakfast with the food that was left on the kitchen counter, putting that food into the. Sorry. Putting the leftover dishes into the kitchen sink, walking her to kindergarten, and then walking myself to primary school, to elementary school. I'm six, [00:23:00] she's four. And that was normal back then for all the families that I knew.
And there weren't any laws Against that back there. Back then, yeah. Within this milieu, my Vietnamese disappeared very quickly and my parents' English didn't progress beyond rudimentary English. And by the time there were Vietnamese language schools, I am 10 and my little sister is eight. And we are best friends every single Sunday afternoon for Vietnamese language school, because by this point in time, we couldn't make friends with the other Vietnamese kids because we couldn't speak in Vietnamese
with them.
I remember the Vietnamese language teachers just shaking their heads,
just shaking their heads at us. And yet I still sought to find the origin story that would help me to make sense of [00:24:00] myself and my life because my parents couldn't speak about Vietnam, share their stories, share our stories, because it was just overlaid and with too much traumatic homesickness and traumatic grief.
And I made that mean that I couldn't ask them about who we are or where we come from. And yet that yearning was always there for me. And so despite the fact that,
that my parents' mental health declined over the years as did mine because I couldn't weather the burden of. Of being the generation that had to be the interface between my parents and this new society. I still sought to fi to find, to forge, to seek that origin store. And so when I went to college, I enrolled in modern Vietnamese language and modern Vietnamese [00:25:00] history.
And in the Vietnamese department there were Alo Saxon professors and Vietnamese professors. And they knew why I did not know. And they knew why I wanted to know. And they didn't need to ask why, because they knew, one, I didn't have the words for it. And two, it would land on a huge amount of shame.
And so I'm ever so grateful for their kindness kindnesses and the ways in which they expressed.
There are so many small stories I could share with you.
And the one story as I land in this moment with you that emerges
is a story [00:26:00] that emerged for me in early 2022, and I titled it, you Lost a War. We Lost Our Country
because I finally understood what it meant to lose one's country. Because you see, as a child, I would ha, I would experience this really strange thing where Anglo Australians like random strangers. Would kneel down to my eye height level and do this thing, right? And they would look at me straight in the eyes and say, my child, I'm so sorry you lost your country, your peoples, you lost your country.
And I'm a child between the ages of six and 10. And as I look back, that's a really screwed up thing to say to a kid. And [00:27:00] I didn't have the context for that back there. Back then, these faces and voices strained with an empathy that I didn't understand. And yet, after all these years, I still remember it alongside the inappropriateness of those comments.
And yet in 19, sorry, in 2022, at the age of 45, I read a blog that contained a video interview. For the first time ever, I felt it in my body what it means to lose one's country. And the blog author was a South Vietnamese man and his wife, who during the rapid southbound sweep of the communists, they made it onto one of the South Vietnamese naval vessels that was stationed off of the coast of Vietnam.
These gargantuan naval vessels that were burgeoning, that were overloaded with as many Vietnamese refuge seekers as possible. [00:28:00] And then a few days later, April 30th, 1975, the South Vietnamese president declared surrender. And when this was announced over the loudspeaker by over the radio and then by loudspeaker over this particular naval vessel, well over 10,000 Vietnamese fell silent.
It was over. The war was over.
Shortly thereafter, this vessel that was on route to Guam headed into Filipino waters in order to refuel, in accordance with international maritime law. Because South Vietnam no longer existed as a sovereign nation, the South Vietnamese flag needed to be lowered.[00:29:00]
And there was a very quiet moment where it was decided that the US flag would be raised instead. And the silence broke into a solemnity as the entire ship sang the South Vietnamese national anthem as an act of collective mourning watching.
Watching their flag be lowered because their country no longer exists As a sovereign nation, can you imagine singing your country's national anthem as you watch your flag be lowered because your country no longer exists as a sovereign nation, you lost a war. We lost our country.[00:30:00]
I was oblivious to what this meant until this point in time, and then my heart strained with empathy for my parents. 43 years later, I finally got it. Then I realized I didn't know the national anthem of my homeland for this country that no longer exists. The, my Amer, my Vietnamese American friends grew up, who you know here in the US the United States, took anyone who was connected to the South Vietnamese military.
And so they grew up over here singing the South Vietnamese national anthem. The diaspora in Australia was much different. I didn't know it. I never heard it. And so I got onto [00:31:00] YouTube. I found the blaring military version with blaring brass and drums and the rally to unite for patriotic love of land and people.
I found the choral version with elegantly dressed young Vietnamese singers and an eloquently dressed orchestra. As the camera panned the audience, I saw the faces of the older generation, a distant pain just beneath the surface of far away stairs, while mouthing the words to a long lost country. And I knew that pain.
I'd seen it my entire life on my parents' faces, and through my tears for the loss of a lot, for the loss of a homeland I never had. I resolved to one day learn the national anthem to a country that no longer exists and to sing it to my parents,[00:32:00]
and as life would have it, a week after my discovery of the South Vietnamese anthem, my dad video messaged me and I took a big, deep breath and I said, Hey. Do you know the South Vietnam, the Vietnamese national anthem? And he smiled at me really big like that wondrous smile of, wow, my girl is actually Vietnamese.
After all. I actually was, I did something right? Somewhere along the way, despite losing her, you, the grief over the price of freedom, losing her not being able to give my culture, and yet she's 45. And I was like, I got all of that in that big grin from my dad. He started singing and then learned that those song[00:33:00]
and then there was a big sigh. It's been over 60 years since I last sung Gong my child. Can you help your father with the words? I happened to have the lyrics handy because I was trying to learn the words of the song, and so I read the first few words of each line, and then dad would sing the rest of the line.[00:34:00]
We went back and forth and tears were knocking at my door. It was my first ever duet with my dad.
Dad started spontaneously sharing joy filled memories from his childhood, the late 1950s in the far south of Vietnam before the partition of north and South Vietnam. And before the arrival of U of US troops, I played the YouTube version the YouTube recording, sorry, of the national anthem. And I sung it together with dad.
And there was something about the music that made it real. And on his face, I saw the glimmers of a lost homeland and the pain of a once carefree boy [00:35:00] whose heart I've spent my entire lifetime wanting to break into.
If this is the only duet I ever get to sing with you, dad, it's more than enough.
[00:36:00] I hand over now my sister Wan.
Jungwon Kim: Thank you so much for sharing. I just am reminded of the practice of sharing, and how both the person who's speaking and the person who's listening benefits so much. For me as a listener, there were so many points of resonance and tenderness and like aha moments of insight.
And I know that when we tell our stories, when I have told my stories in a circle [00:37:00] where people just listen. I feel in the cartoons when you know someone is. Running around or the, I don't know, the roadrunner, the rabbit, whatever and then they have to jump out a window. But down below there's a crowd of people with a blanket and everyone's holding a little part of the blanket.
And so there's a place to land. And because there are so many people holding the blanket, it doesn't matter how big the impact is, there are enough people to support it. And I think in telling stories that are really still loaded, there's still a live electrical current, a heartbreak in them.
Just knowing that people are listening and that you all are just holding a little piece of that safety blanket is comforting. It's it's really supportive. And I hope you felt that, Linda, as you were [00:38:00] sharing your story. So what I think is really interesting about my ongoing conversation with Linda is that we are located at different points along the spectrum of generational war trauma and also approaches the healing.
And whereas Linda is a direct survivor of the US War in Vietnam I'm the children of survivors and so the grief that I have been exploring recently has been more ambiguous in nature and I've been feeling around in the dark for something that I've always sensed was there but did not.
I understand or have a name for or have a clear picture of at all. So just to set [00:39:00] a little bit of historical context both of my parents were born in Korea under Japanese occupation. My mother was born in the very, very north of Korea, on the border of China, I think right on the chin. Ju is right on the Y River.
So if you look over the river, you could actually see China. And my father was born in Jin, just about an hour and a half outside of Seoul. And they were born in Korea before it was divided by the United States and the Soviet Union. And. I think when they were fairly young children, they would've been, I think three years old.
Japan surrendered and the occupation ended. And a lot of historians will put the beginning of the Korean War at 1950. That's the official start, but that five years [00:40:00] between 45 and 50 were actually a period of great chaos. Lots of kind of gorilla armies. Were fighting Christian groups. Were trying to reunify the country.
Communist groups. Were also trying to reunify the country. And the United States and the Soviet Union were already enforcing that division and kind of carving it up in the Korean War. 5 million people died, were killed in three years. And. Over half of those were civilians. So they put the number of Koreans killed somewhere between three to 4 million people.
And I think one of the things that has really struck me lately is the, not just the nature of brutality, but that it was a fratricidal war caused by external forces. [00:41:00] One out of 10 people were killed in Korea and not a single family survived unscathed. Everybody lost somebody or got separated or experienced starvation or tremendous hardship.
So when we talk about generational war trauma, we're talking about something that is really ubiquitous in the community. And yet something that isn't described or named frequently by the generation that survived it. So all I knew growing up is that my mom's family decided to flee south. They didn't really like what was happening in the north and decided that they wanted to go south.
They chose a side. They made it down to Pusan just before the border closed. And I take note that they left on the earlier side, so they were able to bring their things. They still have lots of photos. I know what my mom looked like as a [00:42:00] child because they had time to pack. It was still.
Pretty wild. They, my, they walked on foot, they had to hide. There were lots and lots of gorilla armies, as I mentioned. So it was a heroin journey, but they at least got to bring some things from their former life. My father's family was not so lucky. And these are the stories that I've been delving into lately to try to make sense of things.
Also because my father is of sound mind and still available to tell me those stories. The warfront passed over his village three times when I was growing up. My siblings and I heard plenty of stories about the war. Plenty. To the point where we would groan and say, oh, not this one again, about the holes in your shoes and the frostbite when you walk to school, or, catching crickets and grasshoppers to.[00:43:00]
Get protein and survive. Every story kind of had a lesson embedded in it and they were basically narratives of triumph and survival. And I think now reflecting back, I feel a lot of tenderness from my dad. 'cause I realize that, he was trying to give us tools that he thought would help us survive, in the world and to teach us resilience.
More recently really just beginning last year as I really am becoming acutely aware of my father's age, he's 82. And feeling a lot of heartbreak over losing my mom's stories to Alzheimer's.
So I've been sitting down and interviewing my dad and and it's been quite shocking to hear some of the stories [00:44:00] retold because this time I'm curious. So when he goes into that rote mode of and then we got separated and then, I sang a song and a soldier found, and this is how we were reunited.
I have so many questions, right? Wait, what happened? How, what, where did you go? And what has been so interesting is that in telling these stories, I'm getting so much more detail and he's getting emotional for the first time. This is a man who never cried. He was so stoic when he told the story of how he starved.
The man was like 117 pounds up until he was probably like 50 something. Now he's maybe 1 25 and he thinks he's, too heavy. But for the first time, he started telling me parts of the stories that I didn't know before. And I'll just share one that I think was [00:45:00] it was so interesting.
The story itself is interesting because it just shows the ups and downs of war and the twists of destiny and fate, but also because this was a story that caused him to cry when he told it. And I was just really stunned. And it was a story of when they had to evacuate. Spo a co, a communist army brigade from the north had come and occupied their home in Seoul.
They didn't have anywhere to go. And they told my grandfather, you can stay here in the back room of the house. He was actually very kind to the family and, said we need to take over this house as a kind of headquarters. And then I think at a certain point, for some reason they had to flee.
So they went to the train station where many people from the area were being evacuated. The train cars were [00:46:00] packed and they jumped onto the top of the train car in February. In Korea, it's Korea is so cold, it's just unbelievably cold. And in February it's just brutal. So there's my grandfather, my grandmother, who's tiny very tiny woman.
And I. Their youngest two sons. The third oldest had been sent to relative stay with relatives on the farm. There were two older siblings that I didn't know about until recently. I'll get into that later. But anyway, so there's two little boys and my grandparents on the train. And then my grandfather says, oh no, I forgot to unlock the woodshed.
And the reason he had to unlock the woodshed was because the communist army brigade had fled as the UN troops were reclaiming the area. And he had a disabled cousin [00:47:00] and an aunt who were going to stay in the house and just try to tough it out. And he said, they'll die if I don't unlock the wood.
She, so he jumps off the train and, he said, we'll meet in Pegu at the office of the company that I work for. So they had a place where they knew they were. If the train is gone, I'll get on the next train jumps off. Can you imagine my grandmother, who you know, never went to school past the sixth grade?
Her two little boys freezing in February, and then the train takes off, okay, this is the story I never heard growing up about them clinging to the top of this train. And then the train stops somewhere between Seoul and their destination. The train separates some of the cars separate and stay, and then the other part of the train leaves.
So my father and his older brother and his mom are now stuck in a [00:48:00] town called Suan. They don't know anyone. They only have some rice balls that my grandma had thrown together in a sack that she carried that were rock solid frozen. My dad and his brother had frostbite on their hands. Sitting on the train platform, and this is where like I as a mother myself can just, I could just feel the panic.
What am I gonna do? I am here in this town. There's all these people, I don't know anyone. And a woman approaches my grandmother and says, you look like you don't have anywhere to go. And she said, yes, I am supposed to be on this other train. But we ended up here and I don't have anywhere to go and I don't know anyone.
I don't even know where we are. And so the woman took them in for I think a month, and this is where [00:49:00] my father started, took a week when he told me the story. He said they actually, with a needle and thread and some ink, they made these little tattoos on their arm. On their arms. My grandmother and this woman who swear their sisterhood, neither of them had sisters.
And they made these little tattoos saying, we're sisters forever after living together under these intense conditions. And then they leave and they go to another town and a farmer takes them in. And it's the same thing, just the kindness of a stranger. The farmer takes them in for a couple of months, and my grandmother helps deliver his wife's baby.
They stay for a few months. And again, this is when my father begins to cry, when he [00:50:00] starts talking about the farmer and how the farmer took him to the shrine, to guin, to pray for the return of his father to be reunited. And I just, paused and said, dad, I'm just, I just am so curious.
I've never seen you cry before. You've told us all these stories and why are you crying now?
And he was really deeply emotional. And it was just, I felt so much tenderness for him because he didn't even really know. He said, I'm not sure. I'm not sure why I'm crying. But if not for these strangers, we would not have survived.[00:51:00]
And I think part of it.
Is a kind of survivor's guilt, that they did survive. And later in that long conversation, I learned about two other siblings that he had who did not survive. Mind you, he is 82 and I'm in my mid fifties and I'm just learning about an aunt and an uncle. For the first time, I always thought he had three older brothers.
I knew their names. They all had the same part of the first name and then a different suffix. I knew their kids, I had visited one of them in Korea when I went for the first time. So when he started riding out the family tree, it was just this surreal moment where I said, wait, who are these two people?
I don't know these names. And then [00:52:00] another story came out that I hadn't heard before, and it was a story of his eldest brother and his only sister who were organizers for the Communist Party. They were leftists, they were organizing in their village on a national campaign for the reunification of Korea after, for the decolonization of Korea, after it had been divided, and they were hunted down by the South Korean military police.
One was put in prison in a notorious facility in Central South Korea for political prisoners. And my aunt was interrogated and eventually made it back home, but died from her torture wounds. All of this, by the way, was done with the [00:53:00] pass approval of the United States government. So when I found out about this uncle, I began to do some research and I found that he was actually executed in a city or then town called Deja in South Central Korea.
And not only was he executed for his leftist ideologies and affiliations, it was a mass execution of 7,000,
most of whom were civilians. He himself, I really insist on calling him a civilian because he was not in the military. He was a. Who had this ideological hope that Korea would reunify [00:54:00] according to a certain political ideology. But he was not in a gorilla army, he was a civilian. And so I began to do some research and I traveled to Korea to find this place and met some incredible elders, women who have been taking care of these souls for seven, for 75 years.
They've been taking care of these souls and giving them access to offerings every year.
And as they've been exhuming, what they call in Korea, the longest grave in the world they've been finding the shoes and the clothing of women and children as well.
And the thing that really got me when I visited the place and I saw this, big, it's like a big [00:55:00] scar on the side of a mountain. It's about a kilometer long. And I thought about the stories that I came across in my research about how they carted out, everybody who was in the prison, they carted out all of the civilians who were suspected of being sympathizers.
They just lined them up and, shot them line after line and then pushed them into this death grave. And I realized at that moment that my uncle was 26, 3 years older than my oldest daughter. Just, he was just a young person, like so young.
So I've really been, I think going through this excavation and feeling into [00:56:00] these stories that are terrible and
it's helping me make sense of the silence that I grew up with. It's helping me make sense of that kind of rigid way in which my father shared stories of the war, because there are times when I look at some of the materials or I speak to some of the families. Who lost someone in that massacre. And it's just like a, the sound of the howl of the universe.
It's so big and it's so terrible that I now feel this deep [00:57:00] sense of
just tenderness or
how stoic, how tough my parents are, how tough my father is.
He's so tough that he can only cry at the parts of the story. That
because for him to even open the lid a tiny bit onto the other stuff, I think it's just too much.
So this is all very new to me. It's only in December of last year that I traveled to that place [00:58:00] and I'm still metabolizing these stories. I'm still feeling this
this desire to know them as a way of getting closer to my father and loving him in a better way than I have yet there is a sense of. Awkwardness. I feel sometimes that I'm not sure,
I'm not sure how to relate to the stories, do they belong to me? But then what does it matter if they belong to me because they're in me, they're a part of me. It's like they were there before they were told. And this has been [00:59:00] my own journey of turning toward story as a kind of
a, effort that I can make on behalf of my father or with my father. Yeah, I'll stop there for now
and invite Linda back into our Linda's been in the circle, but I'll turn towards you in the circle.
Linda Thai: Thank you to the spirit of your stories, which is part of the greatest spirit of stories and so much medicine came to me in the hearing of your [01:00:00] stories, the awareness of the ways in which
I've tried to get close to my own parents. Yet there's the wall of stories I can't get past and yet,
and yet there are pieces of brick within that wall that if I just allow myself to to not try to get over the wall or past the wall or through the wall, but just be with the stories, the wall of stories, the stories that aren't said as well as the ones that are said that's our way of getting closer to our parents.
Thank [01:01:00] you.
Lisa Breschi: Thank you. Thank you Linda and Wan for this amazing container of medicine that you created today. Along with the spirits of the stories, I feel we were all nourished and deeply fed.
You can sense that too when we all don't wanna leave the circle and so may this nourishment really live through us and continue to feed others. We are living in a time as we all have acknowledged where this nourishment is deeply needed. We. We felt this. So really a deep bow to you both in gratitude for sharing these stories, your hearts and your deep wisdom.
I have so much love and gratitude for both of you. Thank you much.
Jungwon Kim: Thank you for inviting us to [01:02:00] share and I really wanna thank everybody who's stayed in this circle for such a long time, holding a piece of the blanket. Yeah, and I think feeling our stories, yes, it is an act of resistance and it definitely doesn't come naturally to me either.
I may have had some coaching from Linda on, getting out of my left brain where I just keep going back because it's, feels a little safer there. I make sense of things, gonna create a little analysis and a structure, but it's been just a really nourishing experience to venture into this other realm.
And I really hear some of your voices with, to feel all of your presence. And to feel supported and heard and
Linda Thai: seen.
Jungwon Kim: Not solutionizing, but just being held. So thank you for that and just so much gratitude. [01:03:00]
Lisa Breschi: Yes. Thank you.
Linda Thai: And what about, sorry, and what medicine that you receive from today that may be ongoing.
Yeah, with whatever medicine you receive. And I'm gonna share the words of late Congressman John Lewis with whatever medicine you receive. You must get in the way and find a way to make a way out of No way.
Lisa Breschi: Yeah.
Linda Thai: Yeah.
Lisa Breschi: So thank you to all of you who showed up today. Thank you for feeding and being in this space. And as we all look for that way, I wanna also thank the san team. Thank you Carlos and Alexis for creating the tech container, allowing us to experience this medicine and and ending too for [01:04:00] beautiful stories that inspire.
For those of you that haven't seen the Eternal song, it is now the film, it is now available online. The eternal song.org. And you can go and make a donation and $0 also works to be with the story. And I wanna say Jungwon and Linda were part of a the week of release and the talks that kind of really also tried to help us digest this.
So we are all part and enwrapped in a bigger story and more and more stories. So let's keep sharing and feeling this medicine and we're in a time where we all need a lot of this medicine. So thank you again. Thank you so much. Blessings to everyone for being here. Thank you.
[01:05:00]
