My Dad is a 10+ Hour Marathon Finisher
Hands down the best day of the year in New York is Marathon Sunday.
It's my little ritual to be at the Central Park finish line at 8pm, well after the race is “done,” to cheer on the final runners with Project Finish. After learning about it on YouTube (watch this cool NYTimes video), I felt viscerally pulled to bundle up, go out and volunteer and I have ever since.
I feel particularly grateful to witness a stranger’s life change and so up close.
I see it on their faces when they cross– pure emotions of relief, pride, and elation as the gold heavy finisher’s medal is draped around their necks.
I see my immigrant Korean dad in each of the 10+ hour marathon finishers
Typically, a lot of the runners finishing after 10 hours are paraplegic, obese, or elderly.
They’re running slowly, some of them barely jogging/walking as they approach the line, and I think– “You made it. 26.2 miles. I would not have judged you for quitting the course. If anything, I would understand.”
When I watch the runners, winded, sweaty, tired, and heavy breathing run past me cheering, I can’t help but notice that my dad is one of them in the way that he didn’t have to raise us how he did but he did. He did it stressed, worried, overworked, and in a country with a very different culture.
When Koreans of my dad’s generation find out that he single-parented us, they’re often impressed and shocked because:
It’s 99.9% more likely for children to be raised by the single mother than father
It’s assumed a divorced Korean man with kids would prioritize remarrying over child rearing
Or become a drunk
Or do both
Or neglect his children in general due to a lack of maternal instincts
Now my dad was not exactly coddled as a kid himself.
At the time when my dad was growing up, South Korea was a poor nation and he attended an elementary school class of 100 kids to 1 teacher ratio. On some days, they would give out small milk buns but only had 30 of them so kids would physically fight each other to get in front and grab 1 before they ran out. Here is my dad on my birthday at school with more than enough Dunkin munchkins to go around.
My grandpa used to beat him and humiliate him in front of his friends, making sure he felt great terror. My uncle talks about how my dad was so afraid of grandpa, he’d open his mouth to talk but words couldn’t come out. Now a lot of the men in my grandpa’s generation hit their kids. It was cultural, Korea was a poor nation and many were veterans of the Korean War so there was a lot of PTSD behavior— not right but it was common.
Last week, I finished reading The Body Keeps The Score to try to understand my own trauma as a child. As I read the book, I also thought about my dad’s trauma and how he compartmentalized it and how hurt people hurt people.
Knowing what my dad experienced with his dad, it would have been expected for him to be disorganized and shut down but my dad is one of the most organized people I know and with the typical immigrant aggression to go out and get what he wants.
I consider how there were potentially easier, alternative routes in child rearing but he pulled himself up by the bootstraps and did the best he could with what he knew, working a full time sales job in NYC and putting food on the table every night.
Now he is not the dad of the year and I hated him growing up but I consider how he could have raised us in Seoul but didn’t, and how doing so would have been easier for him language-wise and culturally.
I consider how he could have put us up for adoption but didn’t, though I begged him to do it because he seemed so disappointed in having daughters instead of sons.
I hear that the expectation of a single Korean dad in that generation isn’t to do what he did. Who I am – my work ethic, noon-chi, communication skills – are because of how he raised me.
Marathon runners who finish are made up of something different. They have a certain grit and determination in their bones and unwavering mental fortitude and I was raised by that… among other not-so-nice things and I’m doing the innerwork.