The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea

9 When It's All Said and Done ...

240 9 9 9 WHEN IT’S ALL SAID AND DONE . . . It has always baffled me why those most interested in understanding and changing the barbaric domination that characterizes our modernity often—not always—withhold from the very people they are most concerned with the right to complex personhood . . . Complex personhood means that all people . . . remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others. Complex personhood means that people su¬er graciously and selfishly too, get stuck in the symptoms of their troubles, and also transform themselves . . . Complex personhood means that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society’s problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching towards. —Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters This chapter focuses on Mi-yôn’s Mother, on the complicated fabric of her reflections on life—her own, and the life project generally. This chapter’s title includes ellipses at the end because all talk is, as noted in earlier chapters , unfinished—the dialogue and reflection go on—and because the particular circumstances of these women’s South Korean lives have made it so di~cult for anyone to speak definitively. Thus the ellipses follow “when it’s all said and done” to underscore how very hard it has been for many of the women in this book to enjoy a seamless, easy relationship to their life courses; their times and their circumstances have not lent themselves easily to smug reflection. Mi-yôn’s Mother has already figured in five of this book’s chapters. In chapter 2 I revealed a bit of our history together, of how I as a boarder in her home came to know her. In chapter 3, the reader briefly met Mi-yôn’s Mother on yoksim (greed, ambition), highlighting her ambivalence on this construct; she regretted her own lack of yoksim for not having made her way to college, while she criticized the excessive yoksim of those who needlessly sent their children abroad for schooling. In chapter 4, in discussions of South Korea’s contemporary educational gamble, I discussed her son, Miy ôn’s brother, who in summer 2000 was enthusiastically pursuing the precarious cutting edge of South Korea’s then new economy: venture capitalism . In chapter 7 I presented Mi-yôn’s Mother’s birth family in considerable detail in order to consider the play of gender in the narration of the South Korean nation and history. And Mi-yôn’s Mother was featured in chapter 8 on account of her considerable class travels as a young person—namely, her early encounters with the much wealthier branch of her family. This chapter builds on all that the reader has learned about Mi-yôn’s Mother, adding layers of information and reflection to discussions simpli fied in earlier chapters. My relationship with Mi-yôn’s Mother was, as I wrote in summer 2001, just three years shy of two decades including nearly twenty formal interviews from 1993 to 1996. The morass of detail that a relationship of this depth creates is such that there is little about her I can say simply. Noted in my earliest discussion of Mi-yôn’s Mother, in chapter 2, was my dismay at people’s response to my earlier writings from this project that focused on her. Their responses revealed that my presentation had fallen far short of the nuance of her life, and I hoped this book would broaden her portrayal, leaving her less vulnerable to such misreading. This chapter presents my last chance to do so, although there is more to my decision to focus this book’s final ethnographic chapter on Mi-yôn’s Mother than the longevity and intensity of our encounter, or my desire to defend her complexity to my reader. This book’s final ethnographic chapter features Mi-yôn’s Mother because of the way in which her personal narratives, her social mobility stories , speak to its themes. As I came to know these eight women, Mi-yôn’s Mother stood out for her struggling over how to evaluate her life. Quite simply, she is more vexed than the other women, and by “vexed” I mean tortured and confused. From year to year, meeting to meeting, conversation to conversation, and even sometimes sentence...