Cause & Effect Essay

 Divided Country

    Old generations say that young generations complain so much even though they can have everything what they want. I grew up hearing these words since I was young.  From their perspectives, the lives of young people seem so comfortable because many in the older generations suffered terribly from the Korean War. When my mother was five years old, the Korean War broke out. This clash was between communism and capitalism. Before the war, Korea was already being divided into the North and South based on their political lines. However, the Korean people couldn’t imagine that they would fight each other. The Soviet Union and China were behind North Korea and the U.S. was behind South Korea. The war lasted for three years and it left unforgettable deep pain on my mother’s family.

First of all, my grandfather’s business collapsed. He was a successful businessman who ran a furniture factory which was the biggest one in his hometown. Before the war, he built furniture for new schools after liberation from Japanese colonialism in 1945. However, the Korean war broke out in 1950, so all the plans were canceled. Therefore, he couldn’t get paid at all for jobs he already completed. After the war, he started a furniture business again. However, he couldn’t make money because everyone was poor, so no one could afford to buy furniture. Moreover, he ended up getting cancer and never recuperated. Thus, my mother’s family went from being wealthy to impoverished. 

        Furthermore, my grandparents lost their first son during the war. He was a handsome young man in his twenties who was very talented in every way and was my grandfather’s favorite. He was also talented in music and played the violin. When the North Korean army came to his hometown, they found him hiding in his neighborhood and kidnapped him for consolation performances of the North Korean army. After a while, some people who were kidnapped with my grandparents’ first son went back to their hometown. They said that while they were moving with the North Korean army, they were attacked by the U.S. army and most of them died including my grandparents’ son. My mother’s family was distressed to hear that and realized that there was no one standing on only one side in this war, but it was just a tragedy.   

        After the war, my mother had to be an independent child at the age of eight. She had six siblings and my grandparents were not able to take care all of them. Thus, my mother voluntarily entered an orphanage to ease the burden on her family. After one year, she came back home because the food was like garbage and she was sick a lot in the orphanage. Even though she could live with her parents, the situation didn’t get better. She picked up the wood and junk in the morning because even a single abandoned can on the street could be a household item for her house. She also sold one old book a day to buy sleeping pills to ease pain of her father who suffered from cancer. In addition, she loved school but couldn’t attend school often. Instead, she had to help her mother sell vegetables at the street market where it took three hours to walk from her house. Due to this reason, going to school became her lifelong dream until she went to college in her middle age. 

        To be honest, I couldn’t understand my elder family members whenever they criticized young generations and compared to their suffering from the war because it sounded unrealistic and felt like a story from a novel. However, when I heard from my mother about her childhood for the first time, because of my homework, I realized all the devastation during the Korean War that she and her family experienced. While listening her story, I felt really sorry for this young girl and ashamed that I didn’t ask about my family history before. She said that she had never told this story in detail to anyone. She cried like a child, and I also wiped away my tears. Finally, I was able to understand my mother better since I started to see vulnerable sides of older generations behind their strong sides.