Stuck In The Past

The sunlight trickles in between the traditional hanok rooftops, through the branches of the dying apple tree, down onto the cracked cement of the yard.

I remember playing with my younger brother here with the water hose. I remember sitting down on the steps, stroking the dogs, and feeding them. I remember the smell of Grandma’s home-made Doenjang jjigae from the kitchen and her loud voice calling to us to eat lunch.

That was ten years ago.

Together with my grandmother on the rooftop, I look over the neighboring rooftops that were once grandiose, now replaced with rusty steel plates—pinned down by old tires to stop them from flying away from the wind. Below, the water hose is worn down, one to two drops sadly limp onto the yellow-stained floor.

My grandmother is not in the kitchen; instead, my mother is cooking with the ingredients we bought earlier from our town market, not from the farmer’s market my grandmother used to go to every day.

She repeats the same thing over and over for the tenth time to me on the rooftop. She talks about a white telephone she bought several decades ago and how expensive it was back then—something which has probably lost all of its value by now. She says that today we can even call overseas, something that wasn’t possible in her younger years; and she sighs, saying she can’t believe how things are today.

It hits me then that maybe the world around her is changing too fast, the high-speed internet, fast chain shops, globalized connections, cement buildings. All her past days and old joys have been buried right in front of her by the merciless pace of our world, with no explanation nor mediator. Her neighbors slowly moved out; friends she knew her whole life left one by one. In a way, she is left alone and stuck in her memories while the world around her changes.

Maybe it’s not the stereotype of old people being grumpy and conservative. Maybe it’s that we aren’t open enough to understand their losses, their reminiscing. It’s not anyone’s fault to speak slowly, to become forgetful when aging; especially when it’s something that comes naturally. Maybe we fail to recognize that this past was most of our grandparents’ reality, where they met their friends, made most of their memories, and met their partners. Don’t we all have our nostalgia of our childhood and high school years? And how can we tell them to let go of it if in a way the future generation, we, have failed to create new memories for them to find joy in?

It hurts so much seeing my grandma hold onto the past, clutching onto her old, dying dog while reminiscing on its youth, saying “let’s live long together, alright?” It hurts to see the denial of the decay and aging, to still see her believe that she’s as healthy and capable as her younger years. I feel sad that she hasn’t had a consistent person next to her preparing her for the parting, someone to support her through the aging process. Her husband passed away before her son got married; her son moved overseas for work a few years later together with his children; we weren’t there to give her the options of creating and maintaining connections to the current world.

And I feel sorry that I haven’t been able to get to know her better, spend more time with her, share my stories and the intriguing new technologies and ideas of this world. Because maybe that might have ultimately allowed her to not feel so alienated from this fast-paced world; she would have had a mediator between her past and the present; she would have had someone to explain these things slowly to her. She wouldn’t have been lost as to only seek comfort in her past and thus only remember her past self.

I wish I was there for her before she lost her appetite, together with her weight. I wish I was there for her before she lost her capacity to remember what I just told her. I wish I was there before she became incapable of cooking the Doenjang jjigae my brother and I loved. I wish I was there with her before she turned so bitter towards the world.

I wish I was there to create new memories--memories that may have helped her from being stuck in the past.