During a pivotal scene in Pachinko, the sprawling and multigenerational account of a Korean family, Sunja, the main female protagonist, assiduously endeavors to remove blood from the shirt of Hansu, her eventual paramour. Sunja is an impoverished village girl, unable to afford the modern amenities of that period — the early part of the twentieth century. Therefore, she washes Hansu’s clothing the natural way, using rocks and water to dull the stain. As Sunja dutifully soaked, scrubbed, and wrung the shirt until it was pristinely clean, I enlisted the memories illuminating my incipient years — when my family washed our clothing the same way as Sunja — to inform my formulation of this personal essay.
My family’s washing machine, situated in the Utility Room of our house in the early 1980s, often struggled to accommodate my family’s needs. Five of us lived in the home, a single-story bungalow located three blocks north of the East Colfax thoroughfare, a section known for its proximity to a thriving criminal element. Three of the five people living in the home were young children. And unlike today’s youngsters, my two sisters and I spent a lot of time outside during the fall, spring, and summer, jostling with the other neighborhood kids. We combined these extracurricular activities with the obligation to attend school, where we regularly participated in gym class. Our clothes always needed a good scrubbing.
Our poor mother.
Momma washed our clothes by hand because our washing machine was anachronistic and slow. Every other Sunday afternoon, she was bent over the family bathtub, tussling and scrubbing clothing, beads of sweat sliding down the sides of her face. She washed our undergarments and school clothes with hot, warm, and cold water until her hands were raw.
When I was old enough, momma sat me down next to her and taught me.
As the time to hand-wash my first batch of clothing approached, I was excited because I was young, eager for more responsibility. And I wanted to help my mother, a woman who routinely awed me with her grit and formidable stamina. After a few minutes of scrubbing my t-shirts and undergarments, my fingers pruned and my forearms became strained, the sweat pooling on my forehead and bleeding through my shirt. The last time I could recall exerting a comparable amount of effort was the previous month, when I emptied my energy stores running the six-hundred-yard dash during gym class.
When I heard my mother’s footsteps approaching, I let the clothing drop into the bath water, and turned to face her. “Mommy,” I said. I extended my desiccated fingers in her direction. “Washing clothes this way is not easy.”
As she gauged my frustration, my mother grabbed my hands as she got down on her knees. “Oh my dear, Eze,” she said. “You look like you need to take a break. Do you want me to finish washing the rest of these clothes?”
My face suddenly became flushed, revealing a profound shame. I attempted to turn my face from her, but she gently grabbed my chin and guided my head movement until our eyes met. “No,” I said. “I want to keep on going. I can do it.”
“Ok my dear,” said my mom as she rubbed my pruned fingers. “And you are doing so well. Look at the water.”
I did as my mother told me.
So much dirt had been seeping from the clothing, causing the bath water to turn cloudy and brown. I recoiled at the sight of the turbid liquid, as I’d had no conception of how my body could so thoroughly defile clothing before then. “Oh wow!” I exclaimed.
“You see that,” said momma. “Now you know what your mother has to deal with. That is why you have to be nice to me.”
I whipped my head around and gaped at mother. What are you talking about?! I am always nice to you. My mother smiled at my reaction, precipitating my understanding of the moment. She was exhibiting subtle sarcasm, a character trait that I had not been accustomed to her expressing. As the lightbulb became brighter, illuminating my grasp of the situation, I smiled too. This woman loved me so much. Right then, I made a promise. After I became an adult and got a job, I would buy my mother the best washing machine in the world.
Apart from the fact that Sunja birthed the son of a reputed gangster, Mom and Sunja are very similar. Like Sunja, who grew up in Korea before immigrating to Japan, Mom spent her formative years in a colonized country — Nigeria subsisted under British rule until 1960. Moreover, like Sunja, my mother, after growing up poor in Aba, Nigeria, immigrated to a foreign country (United States) as a youth — age 22. Mom birthed my sister and I before she turned twenty-five years old. Sunja, after birthing the absentee gangster’s son as a teenager, conceived a second son with her betrothed, an associate church pastor named Isak. During his formative years, my deceased father studied to become a Catholic priest in Umuduruoha, Nigeria, his ancestral home. He gave up his pursuit of the priesthood shortly before meeting my mother.
Mom and Sunja entered adulthood as poor immigrants with children, attached to husbands who earned penurious wages. Their adopted countries were suspicious of them, thus limiting their opportunities to obtain work that matched their potential. Nevertheless, they persisted, employing ingenuity and grit to secure stable jobs. Sunja expanded her talent for making Kimchi, a Korean delicacy, to engender a viable existence for her two sons. My mother is skilled at cooking Fufu, Akara balls, and Egusi soup, Nigerian staples. When entertaining friends and relatives, preferably members of the Nigerian diaspora, Mom would prepare Fufu and Egusi soup for them to eat, reminding the visitors of life in the village. Cooking also became a transferable skill for Mom, enabling her to secure jobs at Aramark and Continental Airlines. Mom worked her way up at United Airlines, becoming a supervisor, a job that yielded a salary that was nearly twice the amount of my father’s, a finance graduate — my father, a veteran of the Nigerian Civil War, was consistently undervalued by his American employers.
Sunja and my mom raised children who are smart, determined, and resilient, character traits that provided a strong foundation for success. My two sisters and I have obtained advanced degrees, precipitating our inclusion into the upper-middle caste of society. Sunja’s two sons, Noa and Mozasu, were also able to ascend the societal ladder, albeit through less traditional means. Noa and I experienced mental illnesses, conditions that temporarily stunted our paths. We endured temporary estrangement from our families, but our mothers never abandoned us. Unfortunately, for Sunja, a mother’s pure and unfiltered love could not dissuade Noa, abjectly ashamed of his lineage, from suddenly ending his life.
Pachinko utilizes flashbacks to explain the narrative, allowing the viewer to get to know Sunja as an elderly woman. During an evening when my mother, also an elder, and I watched Sunja care for her sister-in-law, Kyunghee, Momma smiled. As Kyunghee lay dying, I recollected my mother’s explicit request. She aspires to expire in her own home, surrounded by trusted members of her family.
“You want to know something, momma?” I said, turning to her.
“What my dear?” she said. Momma situated an icepack on her shoulder and winced, the pain radiating down the length of her arm. There was a cold compress draped across the front of her knee too. Mom is seventy years old, and the ailments that accompany her advancing age seem to multiply with each passing day.
“I’m watching this show and I’m thinking that Asian culture is similar to Nigerian culture in a lot of ways,” I said.
“I think that you are right about that,” said Momma. “Asians and Nigerians, we share an approach to life that is different from many Americans.”
“It’s kind of surprising. Koreans and Nigerians live in different parts of the world. Still, our views on family, duty, and education intersect. It is so very interesting. We should be able to get along much better than we do.”
“It’s the race thing,” said Momma. “We probably don’t get along because of that.”
“Yeah, that is a shame.”
“We also value grandchildren. Grandchildren are very important to Nigerians.” Her hands were upturned, cupping at the thin air as she stared at me with imploring eyes. “When are you going to give me grandchildren? I want to hold one.”
I sighed and said, “I know momma. I know. I’m working on it.”
Silently, I lamented over Momma’s current predicament, as she is the only one of her Nigerian compatriots without a grandchild. And since I am forty-six years old, single, and living with my mother, the prospect of a grandchild in the immediate future is unlikely. However, as I prepared for bed, I recalled my childhood promise. Momma has been complaining about our current washing machine, an infernal contraption that incessantly leaks water. Perhaps it is time for me to get her a wonderful new washer-dryer.