J. Kim personal essay

Went Shopping With My Dad

Went shopping with my father today. Nothing fancy. We needed a few basics, so we stopped by one of those big discount stores.

We always end up talking about clothes, even if that’s not what we came for.

I usually check for decent brands on sale. Not designer stuff, just things that last — good fit, good fabric. I keep them for years. Some shirts I’ve had since college. They get softer, more familiar. I feel weird throwing them out, even when they’re on their last leg.

My dad’s the total opposite. He heads straight for the multipack tees or whatever’s on the rack — same color, same style, same size. He doesn’t even try them on. Just grabs five or six, no hesitation.

“Don’t you feel weird tossing stuff out so fast?” I asked him today.

He gave this half-shrug, like it didn’t even require thought.
“It’s just stuff. You wear it, and when it’s done, it’s done.”

That line stuck with me.
Because for me, it’s not just stuff.

I look at a jacket and remember when I wore it on my first day at work.
A hoodie reminds me of the road trip with my friends.
A shirt that’s gone thin at the elbows — I wore that on the day I moved into my first apartment.

It’s not like I’m sentimental all the time, but I attach memories to things without meaning to. I hang onto them, patch them, fold them away like I might need to remember something.

Meanwhile, my dad? He travels light. No fuss. No clutter.

There’s something kind of admirable about that.
Like he’s not weighed down by objects, or nostalgia. He doesn’t waste time debating which T-shirt to keep. He just replaces, moves on.

I think we just operate on different rhythms.
He moves through life by function. I move through it by memory.

Neither is better. But today, standing in that aisle — me checking care labels, him tossing shirts into the cart — it hit me how far apart our habits are.

And how quietly those habits say something about who we are.

We didn’t talk much after that. Drove home with the windows cracked, radio low.

But I keep thinking about that shrug.
“It’s just stuff.”

Maybe it is.
Maybe that’s why I keep so much of it around.

J. Kim personal essay

What I Didn’t Hear, But Later Understood

He was born in the early 1950s, in a countryside village where winters were long and electricity arrived late. His earliest memories, I imagine, were of rice fields and the way steam rose from his mother’s morning soup. He didn’t talk much about those days — only that the mountains were close and the neighbors, closer.

He was the first-born of seven children. That role shaped him early — not just in name, but in posture, in restraint. He learned to wait. He learned to give up his share without being asked. Quiet responsibility became second nature. It was the kind of discipline that didn’t draw attention — only respect.

In his twenties, he passed the civil service exam and moved to Seoul for a job at the bank. He started as a teller — meticulous, polite, steady. Seoul in the 1970s was a city in motion, and he moved through it like a man with a plan and no time to waste. His suit was modest. His apartment small. His gestures always measured.

He stayed with the bank his entire life. He rose steadily through the ranks — eventually working at the headquarters, then returning to branch life as a manager. Not the loud kind. He was, as one junior teller once described to me, “the kind of boss who knew every team member’s family situation, but never brought his own into conversation. Always covered someone’s mistake before it became a problem. Always stayed late — but never made you feel bad for leaving on time.”

His colleagues liked him — deeply. They joked around him easily, spoke up during meetings, felt protected under his quiet leadership. He was the one they called when something sensitive needed handling. The flexible one. The dependable one.

But at home, he was different.

He arrived at the dinner table on time, but often silent. He never raised his voice, yet there was a tightness to his approval. We felt his expectations more than his encouragement. He would remind us to turn off lights, to study harder, to keep things in order — but rarely asked us how our day went. My mother sometimes muttered, “He’s warm to everyone but his own family,” not out of anger, but out of knowing.

As a child, I resented that. I didn’t understand how the man who brought pastries for coworkers’ birthdays could forget mine. Or how he could be so generous with strangers, but so measured at home. But with time, I’ve come to see it differently. I think he was lonely in ways he never named. He didn’t know how to relax inside the walls he paid for. He carried so much responsibility that he forgot how to share the weight of it.

Still, his care was present — just structured. He never missed a utility bill. He renewed insurance before it expired. He filed receipts in neat envelopes by month and marked family events on the wall calendar, even if he didn’t say anything about them.

And he never missed work. Even during typhoons. Even when he was sick. Reliability was his way of showing up — and it shaped how I move through the world, whether I like it or not.

After he retired, I visited his old branch. A younger employee recognized my name. “Your father was different,” he said. “Strict when it mattered, but never unfair. He always defended us. We knew we could count on him.”

That’s when I realized something I hadn’t been able to see before: at work, he had space to be who he wanted to be — composed, respected, gently humorous. At home, he was weighed down by things we couldn’t understand, and maybe he didn’t know how to explain. His silence wasn’t distance. It was containment.

Now that I’m older, I find myself doing the same — holding things in, managing without complaint, offering stability without asking for anything back. Sometimes I wonder if I inherited his silence more than his surname.

But I also inherited his steadiness. And perhaps that was his way of loving us: not loudly, not always clearly, but constantly.

He never said he was tired.
But he carried us — and everything else — like a man who couldn’t afford to drop anything.