During dinner today, we had 계란찜, a dish where eggs are beaten, diluted with water, and heated to form a fluffy egg dish. I was mindlessly gulfing down the favorite dish when my mom shared with me a small piece of her childhood, about how eggs meant more than simply eggs when she was a little girl.
"Only the richer families could afford eggs," she had said. "For the rest of us, eggs were too expensive for a child to take as a school lunch."
"There was one day, though, when everyone would bring hard-boiled eggs--field trip days. It was customary to pack boiled eggz and cider for a field trip."
After a long pause, she continued, "Your grandmother never let me go on field trips. She said that the boiled egg and cider were too expensive. I never was allowed to go."
A tinge of sadness betrayed her smile.
"My friend who sat next to me in class always told me I should go. 'Just go on the field trip! I'll share my lunch with you,' she would say. But I never went."
"I wonder what happened to that friend. I wonder what she's doing right now."
My dad has a similar story. Immigrant parents have so much resiliency built into their childhoods.
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