My family moved to 신설동 (Sinseol-dong, Seoul, Korea) the day after my 100th-day-from-birth-day. My extended family lived in a typical Korean traditional house with an inner courtyard.

There were my paternal grandpa, step-grandma, my parents, my younger brother, my sister and a live-in maid. The house sat not too far from the Dongdae Mun (East Gate). My father had a fabric wholesale business in the Dongdae Mun market. I don’t remember too many things from this house as I was very young. Some of the memories seem clear, but I sometimes think these memories might be from the stories I was told by my mother rather than my actual memories.

This house brought many wonderful memories. Both of my siblings were born in this house, I mean literally, in my parents’ bedroom. I went to a kindergarten on a street car. My father brought home a “magical picture box, aka. TV” and my neighbors came to see what this wonderful gadget was, although the broadcast was only in English from AFKN (Armed Forces Korean Network). When I visualize my old memories, it plays in my mind just like an old movie reel. My earliest memories from this house are almost all happy ones. However, I know the reality was probably very different for my parents and grandparents. The Korean War ended in 1953. We moved into the house in 1960, barely 7 years since the war ended. My grandparents and my parents lived through the war and they were getting things back to normal when they moved to this house, I imagine.

The fabric wholesale business was going well. One of the stories I repeatedly heard; on my first birthday (돌), my father wanted to hurry back home to join the celebration with the guests he had invited. That day, he was doing so much business he could not come home when he wanted to. He normally sat on top of piles of fabric at his store. As the materials are sold, the height of the pile gets lower and lower. This day, the sale was so frantic he could hardly keep up with the sales, and he was sitting at the street level at the end of the day, and couldn’t be sure that his ledger recorded all the sales.

My family became very close with a neighbor next door. So close that we put a door off our living room wall to go back and forth. What a crazy idea it now seems. The friendship lasted for many years. The next door neighbor had a daughter who was a couple of years older than I. Her mother “forced” me to call her 장모님 (mother-in-law) as a joke at first. Then it stuck. I was so young and didn’t know what mother-in-law meant. All got a kick out of it.

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