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When the Clever Girls asked me to write about the best gift I've ever given, I knew immediately what I wanted to write about...A gift I gave to my mother about ten years ago.
In Korean culture, when a person turns sixty, the family celebrates with a big celebration called a hwan gap. Sixty years is an important celebration because the person has completed an entire cycle of the lunar calendar, and because in the old days, not many people made it to 60. The party is like no other, and involves a feast, every living member of the family, and a bowing ceremony in which the children prostrate themselves on the floor in front of the parents, as a sign of respect and gratitude.
According to my mother, the traditional gift for the children to give the parent is jewelry. I'm not sure if that is actually true, or if it is one of those made up traditions my mom likes to pull on us from time to time because she likes jewelry. I picked out a piece of jewelry that I thought she would like, but that didn't seem to quite capture the importance of the occasion, or celebrate how much my mom means to me. In fact, I don't even remember what I gave her.
What I do remember is the months I spent making what I thought was her real gift: a hand-made scrapbook of her life. I purloined one of her old photo albums on a visit to Ohio at Christmas, and set out to work on her life story in pictures.
You might think making a scrapbook means just assembling pictures into a photo album, but to me it was an artform and near-obsession. I carefully laid out and designed each and every page, adding text and descriptions to each page, and my own designs made out of paper cut-outs. I decided on a cherry blossom theme for her early life in Korea. I made cherry blossoms using tiny hearts punched out of pink paper and carefully glued together hundreds of these, place a small circle in the center. I think it took me about 3 weeks just to punch out all the paper and assemble it. My husband thought I had lost my ever-loving mind as I sat for hours on end gluing these little pieces of paper together. After I finished the paper-punching mania, I cut out branches and glued them on various pages showing her life in Korea, her 11 brothers and sisters, and the time when she and my dad were dating.
After that section was complete, I highlighted her life in America with the birth of her three children, family trips, her work, the time she was selected to be Mother of the Year by the local newspaper, and the ten-pound bag of rice she won at a Korean Karaoke contest. You know, all the major life events.
We traveled to Korea for my mother's hwan gap, so that all of her surviving brothers and sisters could attend, as well as my zillion or so cousins. I was a little nervous about presenting this to her, since this didn't seem like a terribly "Korean" thing to do. I didn't know if the aunties and uncles would approve. But when the big day rolled around, she loved it. At first she looked puzzled, wondering why on earth I had given her a book of all things (she's not a big reader). Then she opened it, and the tears flowed.
During the party, after the bowing and kow-towing, eating, massive drinking, and generally merriment subsided (and before the big family Karaoke showdown), I saw my aunts and cousins huddled over the scrapbook, pointing at various pictures of themselves and family members. My younger cousins translated the text from English to Korean for them, and they laughed and cried. One of my male cousins, the eldest son of the eldest brother, asked me to send him a copy of a photo of his parents from the 1950's, both in Korean Army uniforms.
"I don't have such a picture of my mother," he tearfully explained. I was more than happy to oblige.
One of my aunts was looking through the scrapbook with her daughter, turned to her and said, "For my hwan gap, forget the jewelry. Just make me one of these."
I laughed along with the crowd, but in my heart, I knew that this was probably the best gift I could have given to my mom, and our family.
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