This my mother Ok Cha. She just celebrated her birthday & I normally wouldn't post about that but I wanted to share how much she's inspired me over the last 2 years in particular.
I based a joke in my newest special Violent Moderate on an incident she shared with my family when by chance, I was going to see Oppenheimer. When I told her what film I was seeing, she told me she was there. In Hiroshima. When the atomic bomb dropped. She never mentioned it. She never wrote a book, made an appearance on The Today Show or used it for social gain or sympathy. She just never brought it up. This woman, as a baby, survived an atomic bomb blast in a cave with her family. Unreal. Since that conversation, I haven't stopped thinking about how different my life could've been or simply not even been at all.
In learning this, I became educated that Koreans were enslaved by the Japanese prior to World War II, thus my mother's family was in Japan. My grandfather's family was subject to forced labor or slavery. Again, my mother never brought it up for attention, social capital or sympathy.
This past year, she came within a hairs breath of losing her husband, my father. I spent 3 1/2 months living with her and driving her to the hospital every day so she could oversee his slow but eventual recovery. Never complained.
My point: she's never been a victim. As a direct victim of her family's forced labor, she's never brought up reparations. She never brought attention to herself so she could be given anything. She simply tackled the adversity of the day or moment and GOT THE F*** on with her life.
It's ironic of me to be posting this (drawing attention to someone who never asked for it) but my point is simple: I find her so inspiring and as much as she may profess how proud she may be of me, I'm so glad I've had this past year or so, to really learn more about my mother and how PROUD I am of her and that I'm her son.
Imagine thinking that telling college kids to not get abortions, be monogamous, and that biological women should only compete against other biological women in sports is “hate speech”? . If that sounds like hate to you, you’re a stupid idiot.