‘Do you have a family?': midlife with no kids, ageing parents

The Guardian

a day ago

A few years ago, my mom's brother in South Korea announced that he would be getting rid of their parents' graves. My grandparents had been buried separately, and this uncle and his wife were their keepers. They made several annual visits to the burial mounds (endless gridlock) and prepared Buddhist ceremonies at home (endless cooking and cleaning). Now that they were in their mid-60s and their grown children were unlikely to carry on any of these rituals, they wanted out.
They set a date to exhume my grandparents' bodies, cremate their remains and say goodbye again. My mom wasn't happy about this, but she had no real say. She'd surrendered her rights when she moved to the US.
We started early in the morning, at my grandmother's burial mound. My mom, dad, brother and I, plus my uncle and his wife, other uncle, surviving aunt and cousins walked up a terraced hillside in a lush private cemetery. It was cool and sunny. We bowed at the gravestone and made offerings of fruit, dried fish and alcohol. Three diggers did their work, first by machine, then by hand, as they got closer to the constellation of bones. The coffin had long since decomposed.
The workers spoke of the dead in a formal, reverential way, as though my grandmother had passed the day before, not a half century ago. It was comforting, given the absolute weirdness of the event. We all stood around awkwardly, staring into the dirt. We were three generations: dead, old and middle-aged.
The diggers combed the soil with gentle strokes, like archaeologists on reality TV, pulling up a sort of intact skull, suggestions of femur, crumbly archaeological bits wrapped in the tatters of a shroud. My mom cried, but didn't sob. 'I never imagined doing something like this,' she said. The process was at once invasive and abstract. They placed every ivory shard on to a blanket, then into a small wooden box. I had never seen real-life human bones.
It was more depressing at my grandfather's mound, set deep in a public cemetery, wild with weeds and thorns, an hour away. The diggers there were brusque. They tossed bone fragments into the box, making an unnerving plonk. I wanted to remind them that someone once wore those bones.
We loaded the small boxes into a hired hearse – my uncle had made all the right arrangements – and drove in a caravan to a busy crematorium outside Seoul. The facility was half automated and totally impersonal. We crowded around a window to watch my grandparents' remains go into a stainless steel firepit. Then we were bumped to the waiting room – vinyl seats, plastic tables. We kept our coats on and ate rice cakes, waiting for our number to pop up on the digital display.
I hate: 'Do you have a family?'; 'When are you going to start a family?' The asker means children, not ageing parents or a partner or spouse or chosen family or siblings or animals or or or. At my age, any reference to 'family' conjures images of school pickups and paediatric appointments. Am I misleading my listener if I use this term to mean anything else?
My family is still the one I was born into: mother, father and brother, all of them alive and well – the ultimate luck. Many friends have already lost their parents or slipped into sandwich-generation duties, raising their kids while scrambling for elder care. Others of us have traded reproduction for something like filial piety. I can think of quite a few childless friends who have moved to be near a parent or had a parent move in with them. Midlife for them – and for me – is an open-faced sandwich. The defining event of my adulthood will not be birth or adoption, but the deaths of my parents, especially my mom.
When I was a kid, Mom would say, in classically morbid Korean: 'I just hope I live long enough to see you through college.' Once my college years came and went, our expectations shifted, or at least her phrasing did. She now says things like: 'I've lived long enough.' Or: 'I mean, I'd like to live longer, but even if I died today, I couldn't complain.'
Every once in a while, she adds: 'What if you have just one kid? It's not too late. I'll do all the work. I'll raise her for you.'
There's a movement, or voguish tendency, in South Korea called 4B, which emerged online as part of a #MeToo-style feminist resurgence in 2016. It pushed a four-pronged refusal of marriage, reproduction, dating and sex. (The B is for 비 bhee, meaning un- or anti-.) When a rightwing prosecutor named Yoon Suk Yeol rallied men's-rights voters to win the nation's presidency in 2022, the feminist wave seemed decidedly over. But Trump's re-election two years later provoked an American interest in 4B. According to some viral TikToks and newspaper articles, American women were disavowing heterosexual habits. The dust of 4B in Korea swirled temporarily back to life.
I was in Seoul with my parents when I noticed the Korean social media posts quoting US social media posts celebrating dated Korean social media posts. My editor asked me to write a short piece about 4B, which I started to outline at the dining table of our rental in the Itaewon neighbourhood, near the decommissioned US military base. I had arranged a home swap with a friend who is also Korean American and a writer; my age, unmarried, childless. After college, he had moved to Korea where his parents were living half of the time. Then his mom was diagnosed with cancer. He cooked and cared for her until she died. Her framed portrait and denim backpack were set up in a little shrine above his desk, next to animation books, Murakami novels and cartoon figurines.
I glanced at her portrait as my mom explained 4B to my dad. He nodded in appreciation of the Korean wordplay but offered no comment. 'I'm 1.5B,' I said in Korean – no reproduction, meh on marriage. My mom laughed.
When my parents and I started making regular trips to Korea, just before I turned 40, all my Bs became more complicated. We usually went in the fall, my mom and I, and sometimes my dad, thanks to their retirement and my rather unanswerable status as a writer. Previously we'd had neither the time nor the money to travel. Now they were 70ish, and I wanted to spend as much time with them as I could. I was growing obsessed with their statistical nearness to death.
I was also preoccupied with my own midlife vanity: my face, my hairline, whatever eggs remain in my ovaries. The ascendance of 'K-beauty' made me especially self-conscious about my skin, as though I had some obligation, by dint of ethnicity, to maintain an even, dewy complexion. I developed an unflattering habit of using a 3x mirror to zoom in on the age spots, sun spots, emerging wrinkles, scarred-over zits, areas of droop and birthmarks that pocked my face and neck. On one trip to Korea, I paid dearly for a course of 'laser resurfacing'. It's a treatment that burns the ugly stuff off your epidermis and looks and smells like miniature fireworks exploding across your cheeks and forehead. My mom encouraged this indulgence.
'But you don't even wear makeup,' I said.
'Yeah, but you're different,' Mom said. 'You live in New York! You're always meeting people. You have to take care of your looks.'
The spots cleared for a while. I slathered myself in sunscreen and wore a hat with a dangling cape that covered my neck and ears. I bought anti-UV gloves and big plastic sunglasses. I slunk out of hiking dates. There was only so much I could do. The pigmentation was apparently hormonal: a condition called melasma. I paid for a second laser treatment the following year, then a third in southern California. Then microneedling, which is as gory as it sounds, at a medical spa near my parents' house in Washington state.
The American clinics tended to be overdecorated in velvety pinks. The employees wore a lot of makeup and went big with their features – cheeks, eyelashes, nails. Acne scars were blasted, lips and foreheads plumped, jowls yanked up. The women waiting next to me for their appointments looked expensive but not always good. If I continued down this path, I would have to be careful.
After I turned 40 I spent many insomniac hours Googling the ages of random artists, celebrities and writers. I liked it when successful people were older than me, and took special note of childlessness. Oprah (older, childless); Alison Brie (slightly younger, childless); Amy Tan (older, childless, also obsessed with Asian families); Frida Kahlo (dead, childless). I sought out midlife movies (Private Life, Past Lives, The Forty-Year-Old Version, Peppermint Candy, everything Ozu). I listened to 여둘톡 Yeo dool talk (Two women talk together), a Korean chatcast by two fortysomething writers who live and work together in childless, platonic bliss. I avoided reading Sheila Heti's Motherhood until I heard that it doesn't end, as most such books do, in the inevitable act of reproduction. I was satisfied when it turned out to be more about anal sex than vaginal passage.
I became fond of an essay by Rebecca Solnit (older, childless) titled The Mother of All Questions. It begins at a lecture she's giving on Virginia Woolf, which during the Q&A spirals into a discussion of why Woolf did not reproduce – 'a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses', Solnit writes. At another talk, a British man grills Solnit about her own choice to go without.
'Such questions seem to come out of the sense that there are not women, the 51% of the human species who are as diverse in their wants and as mysterious in their desires as the other 49%,' Solnit observes, 'only Woman, who must marry, must breed, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator for the species.'
What I like about Solnit's essay is that it's short, as if to say: 'This is both boring and none of your business.' Here are some of her answers, though, to this mother of all questions: 'The planet is unable to sustain more first-world people'; 'I really wanted to write books'; 'I am very good at birth control.'
Mom had been a stubborn teenager on an unannounced backpacking trip through Korea when her father died, and a twentysomething immigrant in southern California when she lost her mother, the person closest to her in the world. Not having seen them in their final days stuck with her like a punishment – and cemented her distance from home. She stayed in the US, first reluctantly, then why not for ever?
She worked at a factory that produced foam packaging (where she almost lost a finger), a Korean-owned mini-mart, a now defunct chain restaurant called Sambo's and a bank. She enlisted in the US army. She sent money and letters to her younger siblings, whom she still refers to as 'the kids' when telling stories in past tense.
Mom got her master's degree in psychology at night. She made a career in elder care, first as a social worker, then as an inspector and bureaucrat, regulating old-age facilities. At Christmastime, she scheduled my brother and me to play carols on the piano at a local nursing home. It scared me to see the residents wheeled toward us and parked in a half circle around the piano. Some of them had bibs on and could not control their necks. I feared their dependency and boredom. Mom went around and greeted them individually. She treated them like full, fully present human beings.
Now she is the same age as many of the residents her office oversees. 'If I get dementia,' she told me, 'you might have to put me in a nursing home. It's OK – when it gets bad, you don't know where you are.'
My mom had once dreamed of studying Chinese and becoming a foreign service officer, fluent in three languages. In reality, she is fluent in two and speaks to my brother and me in both. When we were in high school, our parents sent us on an Asian birthright-style motherland trip. The programme housed us and dozens of other uneasy diasporic kids in a scruffy hotel that had been built for the Seoul Olympics in 1988. We ate Korean food and learned bits of the Korean alphabet, Hangul, and peninsular history.
I guess the motherland trip worked, because I kept trying to find my way back. I took language classes in high school to improve my standard Korean-American Korean (small vocabulary, sloppy grammar), and applied for money to travel. In Seoul, during college, I studied nongak percussion and translated wall text for the National Museum.
I hoped that the Korean I had spoken exclusively from birth to age three had somehow primed me for fluency. In my 20s and 30s, as my Korean got good, then really good, I met my mother anew. We could talk at length, in her best and native tongue, about art, politics, random stuff I now knew the nouns and verbs for. Hearing aid, anarchist, rezoning, surrealism.
Like many dutiful immigrant kids, I later went to law school – a poor fit. My classmates seemed excited to master a new vocabulary of power that, for me, whipped up feelings of estrangement and irritation. I went home during a break, to inhale the piney Pacific north-west atmosphere and regroup in my parents' care. At lunch one day I told them that I wanted to quit. The law wasn't for me, I said, nor was the life it seemed to imply – a desk job, marriage, kids. I sounded grandiose and also weaselly. Just finish school, they said. My loans already surpassed a hundred thousand dollars and would be impossible to pay back if I didn't continue. I graduated and passed the bar and did good, decent work at a legal services agency in New York City. About five years in, I decided to try out a second career, and gave myself the same number of years to establish myself, or at least survive, as a writer.
Mom was worried, but didn't object loudly. I think she was afraid of driving me away. (A Korean saying: 'There's nothing scarier than one's kids.') I mostly had very good luck in journalism. But in 2018, I was fired from a job in TV, and bet my savings on a reporting trip to Seoul. Trump had just thrown the Koreas into the news, so chances were I'd be able to sell a story or two.
Mom came along. She joked that she would be my research assistant, then actually was, clipping newspaper articles and proofreading my emails. We rented a tiny studio apartment up a series of steep hills in the centre of the city. The shower drain smelled of sewage, and the bed drove plastic springs into our backs at night. It was early summer, hot and sticky.
Mom wrote to a classmate from junior high school, someone she'd never mentioned before. The woman was a journalist and English-to-Korean translator. We arranged to meet at her rather fancy office. Mom wore a grey-green T-shirt dress made of waffle-weave cotton. She looked slim and lovely, younger than her 69 years in the classmate's presence. I had wondered if she would envy this vision of a life she might have had if she'd stayed in Korea. But the journalist talked incessantly, mostly about herself. Mom looked relieved when it was time to go.
We continued travelling together, back to Korea and elsewhere. We went to Mexico City for Mom's 75th birthday. She had aced a Spanish class at a community college and was the holder of some kind of quadruple-diamond-league record on Duolingo for her intense, years-long study via Samsung smartphone. Maybe she would be fluent in three languages after all. The jacarandas were in bloom. We saw all the art that tourists see and ate all the things tourists eat. I filmed Mom squirming and saying 'No! I don't want it!' as I held a forkful of grasshopper tamale to her lips.
We shared a bed and drank stovetop espresso and sauteed unfamiliar vegetables and walked for miles through the city, practising Spanish phrases. Mom knew the genders of things and had excellent textbook grammar. I had the advantage of romance-language instincts and a shamelessness in speaking with strangers.
One day, I got sick and cocooned myself in bed. She brought me cold water and touched her diagnostic hand to my forehead and neck. I was supposed to be the young, vigorous one.
I am trying to work on a book. The book is about my mom and Korean history or the Korean present. It is hard to manage the metabolism of the project: slow and unlimited in words, not fast and short like I am used to in news writing. 'Don't write about me. Write about Korea, about the issues,' Mom has told me multiple times. Dad: 'You seem to write about our family when you run out of topics.' I am embarrassed by memoir and simultaneously drawn to the form. I am always reading books by sons and daughters.
Most of the books daughters write about their moms come out after the mom is dead. I am hoping for a different sequence; an alternate ending. I want to beat time, but feel superstitious about the drafting. Would writing about my mom cut short our trips together? Could it somehow accelerate her demise? The book, whatever it is, would have to be more than good. It would have to answer the question of what I was doing, what I was building, in lieu of a traditional family in middle age. It has to make up for my fatigue and bristly hair and age spots. It has to be as good as a husband and a child.
In the spring of 2023, I went with my partner to Montreal, his former home. I'd arranged to visit a Chinese Canadian scratch DJ and multimedia artist named Eric San AKA Kid Koala, who's about my age. He lives and works in a converted print shop with his wife and collaborator, Corinne Merrell, and their daughters.
San had just released a new album, Creatures of the Late Afternoon, an appropriately midlife title, I thought. Like his earlier work, the tracks mix hip-hop beats with robot voices, rock samples, and the zigzagging play of vinyl – all fingers and hands, no laptops. I asked about one song that stuck out for its romantic, Motown-y quality. It was a tribute to his parents, he said. He had come upon a trove of letters and reel-to-reel tapes they'd exchanged when his dad was studying in North America and his mom was still in Hong Kong. Their story inspired him to compose a transpacific ode, at once a jukebox love song and the balladic offering of a son.
'I wanted to see if I could design shows that would involve other generations, including my parents,' he told me. 'I wanted to work on stuff that could resonate with them.'
Here was a model of what I was hoping to do. But I feared that I was too slow, too lazy, too clumsy with words to make something before my parents were gone. I went to see Kid Koala onstage. There were puppets, dancing and midlife jokes.
The parents in the audience looked about my age.
The day after my grandparents' remains were disinterred, my extended family went to a temple east of Seoul, where a family friend is the head monk. He led a liturgy of prayers and chest-throbbing drone songs. We followed along from rice-paper hymnals and took turns bowing before the Buddha. Afterward, we went out to the gravel parking lot, to say a final prayer and spread the ashes in a little forest.
We carried the two boxes of remains and a giant metal basin of steamed white rice – sticky and cold. The monk instructed Mom and her siblings to pour the ashes into the rice and mix it all together, into glutinous clumps. Better for the birds to carry off, he said.
My mom, her sister, and the brother who'd initiated the disinterment (the other uncle went off to smoke) squatted around the basin and sunk their gloved hands into the pulverulent white and grey. They assumed the exact posture of kimchi making.
Mom couldn't do it. It was too weird, too visceral. The bones, the ash, the rice; food, bodies, birds. She let my uncle and the monk do the rest. I held her shoulders.
'All I could think,' she told me, 'was: 'This is my parents.''
I went home for a few days in January, to my parents' house, south of Seattle. Mom had recently secured a funeral plot for her and my dad in a local cemetery. She wanted me to know about their plans, so she'd sent me the approval notice – mystical email subject line: 'Fwd: Pre Need Letter' – which I'd ignored. I found it impossible to think about their deaths, to consider even the most bureaucratic details, without sobbing. 'I couldn't open the email,' I told her.
'Yeah, I know. I know that's why you didn't bring it up,' she said.
En route from some mundane outing, she and Dad tricked me into a drive around the cemetery.
'It's on the way home,' Dad said. 'Let's just stop by. It's beautiful.' The grounds were enormous and immaculately landscaped, layered in fog and bereft of visitors. There were discrete sections, divided, as best I could tell, by type of remains (body/coffin, ashes/urn) and style of grave marker (tall, flat). There were hundreds of little American flags.
'When it's time, just go to the cemetery office, and they'll help you,' Dad said. 'Everything should be straightforward.' He had told me that he'd wanted to be cremated, but now he was wavering. Mom was, too. I wondered if it had to do with seeing her parents' bones.
I lowered my car window to get some cold air and take pictures of the dark green expanse. More reference photos for the book project, I thought. Mom pointed out a pair of black-tailed deer at the edge of a meadow, stock-still, necks craned in the same direction. I was grateful for the change of subject. We waited to see if the deer would move, to confirm they weren't gaudy statues. We drove away and came back, and waited some more. Finally, one turned its head toward us.
A longer version of this piece appeared in n+1 magazine
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