I didn’t always notice it when it happened. But over time, I started to recognize the pause that followed when my mother told a story from her past. She would say something about her childhood, or a moment from her early years in Seoul, and then there would be this silence. It wasn’t dramatic or emotional. It just sat there. And I’d sit with it too, not entirely sure if I was supposed to say something or just leave it alone.
One time, she told me about the first winter her family spent in a new apartment. The heater had broken, and there weren’t enough blankets. She and her sisters slept side by side, tightly packed together. The way she told it, it wasn’t a complaint — just a fact. She finished the story without any kind of wrap-up, no final sentence to tie it together. And then she went quiet.
At first, I thought that meant she was done talking. Now I understand it a little differently. That silence isn’t the end of the story. It’s part of it.
My mother was born in the early 1950s, just after the Korean War. She grew up in a time when the country was rebuilding from nothing. Hunger wasn’t a concept — it was a constant. Education was a privilege, not a given. For women especially, life was often dictated by obligation more than choice. Knowing that now, her stories make a different kind of sense. The tone. The sparseness. The way she seems to hand them over with little emotion, as if they aren’t unique but typical of anyone who survived that time.
I didn’t grow up asking my parents many questions about their past. Like a lot of children of immigrants, I picked up the basics through fragments — food, habits, the occasional mention of a relative or event. But the deeper stories, the ones that reveal how someone saw the world, were rarely told. I think there was a quiet agreement between us that the past was too far away, or too complicated to explain. Maybe they assumed I wouldn’t understand. Maybe they were right.
But something shifted for me in my thirties. I started to feel more curious, not in a formal way, but in a quiet way. I found myself wanting to know what my parents had been like before they were parents. Not just what they had done, but what they had hoped for, what they had missed, who they had loved and lost along the way.
So I started listening more closely. I didn’t sit them down with questions or a voice recorder. I just paid attention. Stories would slip out during dinner, or while watching TV, or when they were half-talking to themselves. And once in a while, they would say something that surprised me.
My mother once mentioned her younger sister in passing. I had never heard much about her. She said they had argued the night before her sister was killed in an accident. Something about a scarf. She didn’t go into detail. Just said, “We didn’t talk the next morning.” That was it.
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t silence out of discomfort. It was silence out of respect — like the story had taken up space, and there was nothing to do but sit with it.
These moments kept happening. A detail about a childhood illness. A passing remark about a teacher who was kind. A mention of a friend she lost touch with. I started to see my mother not as a fixed figure in my life, but as someone who had lived many versions of herself before I ever arrived. Each story added another thread to that version.
I used to think that stories were always meant to be shared out loud and responded to. That they needed acknowledgment, or validation, or some kind of moral takeaway. But my mother’s stories didn’t work that way. She didn’t need me to react. She just needed to say them once, sometimes without looking up, and then leave them there.
I’ve come to believe that the silence after a story is a kind of punctuation. Not a period, exactly — more like an em-dash, or a soft return. It’s the moment where you decide whether to ask a follow-up question, or whether to let the story breathe on its own. Often, I let it breathe. Some stories don’t need commentary. They’re already carrying enough.
Over the last year, my mother has told me fewer stories. It’s not that she’s forgotten them. I think it’s more that she’s already told me what she needed to say. Or maybe I’ve learned how to listen without her having to speak.
There are days when we sit in the same room and barely talk. I used to think that meant something was wrong. Now I don’t mind it. Some of the most honest moments between us happen without words.
I still think about those silences. The ones that followed her stories. They weren’t empty. They were full of something I can’t quite name. Not regret. Not sadness. Just the weight of something real.
And I’ve learned to stop filling them.
Story Table 