Birthday

Whenever the monsoon season begins in my country, I sense the coming of my birthday. And whenever I think of my birthday, I think of my mother, who had me in her late twenties. It had poured on the day she gave birth to me, she once told me. A cool, murky day to be a mother.

Following her words, I often imagined the day she came home from the hospital: for some reason, she is alone in her small apartment, wearing a pair of burgundy pajamas. In Korea, young mothers were instructed to sweat after childbirth; in America, she said, they did the opposite — they took cold showers and ate hamburgers.

It is mealtime, and so she sits at the dinner table. The menu is non-negotiable: seaweed soup. Eating miyeok-guk — the dark, earthy seaweed soup — is a long-standing tradition in Korea. Believe it or not, the custom dates back to the Goryeo Dynasty, where people saw that whales ate seaweed after giving birth to aid the recovery.

Slowly, my mother raises her spoon and dips it into the steamy bowl of miyeok. Each sip radiates heat from her throat to her temples. Halfway through the meal, her pajamas are darkened with damp, sweat stamps around her neckline. But her face bears no expression. She simply continues the task of eating, sweating, and enduring each passing moment.

Enduring. I cannot help noticing. She is enduring it all.

In this solitary state, her only comfort is the relentless rain outside. The sky is pale and grey, but it offers a cool breeze through the open window. Soon the rain will cease, and great summer heat will come. But at least for now, on this rainy day in mid July, my mother is content with whatever breeze she can have. All day long, she stares out the window from her apartment, all alone, in her sweats and solemnity.

Even before I contemplated this image, I never really liked my birthday. And the seaweed soup my mother served me always tasted something deeper than that of the ocean — a quiet sorrow that invited me to join its company. A soup of pain, I thought. A soup of endurance.