16. Ko Young Chicken Farm

After we moved to Gu Pa Bal, my parents were engaged in real estate business. They bought countryside fields and sold them to the city folks. Father bought a motorcycle as a form of transportation. After the kids went to school, we, I and my parents, had late breakfast together. Then, mother sat down and started her make up. The smells of Pond’s and Coty products remind me of my mother. After her make up, she put on big sunglasses, got on the back seat of the motorcycle, and went to work with father.

 

My parents conversed in Japanese when they discussed the topics they did not want me to listen. I could guess and figure out what they were discussing. Children are lot smarter and wiser than the adults think. 

 

Real estate business did not last long. The business was irregular and sometime the money was held for a while. Father needed something secure and regular. He looked into raising the chicken. He built a warehouse at the backyard and started chicken farm with 300 chicks. They were young chicks just got hatched. Father hired a person who knew how to take care of them. He converted one of the bedrooms into chicks’ home. He stayed with us until the chicks got bigger and moved to the stalls in the warehouse. 

 

Father bought books for poultry farm and farming in Japanese. To save money on chicken feeds, he fed acacia plant leaves and frogs to them. Every afternoon, he and the workers went to the hills behind the house and collected acacia leaves. My brother went and caught frogs. They all became chicken feeds. 

 

Once the chickens started to lay eggs, he took them to the local market. He placed 30 eggs in paper cartons and took them to the market. They recycled these cartons. The store received eggs from different farms. To identify his cartons, a marking had to be placed. Parents came with the name, "Ko Young Chicken Farm." Mother wrote it on the sides of the cartons. “Ko” is our family name and “Young” is the first letter of my mother’s name.

 

Father also had beehives. He collected honey and royal jelly. He weighed each eggs on the scale and put them in three groups, small, medium, and large. There were eggs with two yolks. He put them in “special” category and charged more. Well-dressed women came in cars and bought fresh eggs and royal jelly. Sometime father gave them bags of chicken poop for the house plants. 

 

Father read and studied books on farming and he became good at it. I wonder why he never tried to learn about my disability. Maybe he did not want to recognize and accept that I was disabled. His DNA seems to be in me. Facing challenges, I often just ignore and put it aside instead of facing and resolving it. 

 

Father did not have any friends. He got promoted to the high rank officer positions too soon and too young. In his twenties, he was already a caption and had his own company. Until his retirement as a colonel, he was always the boss. Marines was rather small unit and he did not have any friends from childhood or school since he came from North Korea.

 

The family was his only friends. Fathers would come home drunk and bring snacks for the kids. My father had meals with us and we shared the snacks mother bought. We often had power outages. When the power was out, we could not watch TV. We all got together in the living room and the kids would take turn and sing. Father would drink a can of beer and sometimes we offered a can to bigger kids for a sip.

 

We had one black and white TV. Often, we fought over the channels. They used to show American films and series with the recording of Korean translation. Boys liked westerns and war movies. Women liked melo-dramas and love stories. Adults liked oldies, and young ones liked popular folk songs. But we never had any major issues over the selections. We negotiated and compromised. 

 

We have two TV’s at home now. Everyone has tablets and smart phones. We all go to our rooms and watch our favorite shows alone. I miss those good old days when we all got together in front of the small screen.