By Sarah Song
On a sunny afternoon in February, after the snow on my neighbors’ roofs started melting, I went for a walk. A snowman standing in the front yard of my neighbor’s redbrick house caught my eye. The snowman, made up of three large snowballs, piled up like a head, body, and legs, was about as tall as the neighbor’s boy. One of its arms made of two branches fell off, and its chin was drooping. One of its black-button eyes was also sagging, pressed by a tilted black cap over its head.
The black hat slanted to one side reminded me of a picture I had seen a long time ago—a black-and-white photograph of my father in his college uniform with a black Mandarin collar jacket and a beret. His black hat in the photo was also tilted like that. His slender face with luminous eyes, straight, prominent nose, and tightly pressed lips under the hat was youthful, however, unlike the wilting snowman.
To me, the memories of my father and my father’s father are condensed into images of hats. My paternal grandfather, who passed away when I was very little, has remained with me as a portrait photo. In the picture, he wore a white traditional hanbok and a black gat, the traditional Korean wide-brimmed hat made from horsehair with a bamboo frame. It is said that Korean men wore a gat since ancient times. It must have started from the practical necessity to provide soft shade on a dazzling, sunny day and to protect the hair from rain, snow, or wind. Since the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897), however, this black gat became a symbol of social status as it was only allowed for scholars who passed the state examination.
Why was my grandfather portrayed in the traditional hanbok and gat? Did he wear them every day? Since he was born when the Joseon Dynasty collapsed at the end of the nineteenth century, did he yearn for his lost country and want to express the loss with his traditional clothes and gat?
My stroll in solitude into a wooded park near my home kept my memory buried and hidden inside for so long, flourishing like floodwaters over a crumpled embankment. Questions arose like swelling waves. Swamped with my busy life, I had never asked my dad these questions when he was around. Sadly, there’s no one who can give me answers anymore. Only the cawing of crows and the sound of snow falling from branches broke the silence in the park.
Besides my father’s college picture, I can’t remember him wearing a hat in my childhood. My father, who worked as a government official for his entire career, always put on a formal suit in dark tones of blue, gray, or brown on top of a white or light blue shirt with a tie. On weekends, he mostly stayed home in pajamas and read a book. He usually read thick books, of which he most loved those written by Russian authors, such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Sometimes he used to tell me children’s stories when I was a little kid. Especially when I was bored or in a bad mood, I’d sit on his lap and listen to him telling me Western stories like The Fables of Aesop, or traditional Korean stories. Sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of the garden with him and listening to him, I enjoyed the fragrance of acacia flowers on sunny spring days or the brightness of the falling stars in the night sky.
He was not interested in anything else except reading. His mind seemed to always be in a different world. I had never seen my dad going out shopping in my childhood. My father’s obsession with hats started after I came to the United States. Since I left Korea with my first child right after celebrating her one hundredth day with family, my parents used to come from Korea like a relief pitcher in a dire situation when I couldn’t hire a new nanny after one abruptly quit.
One summer, when I returned home from work, my father was sitting in the back yard watching my daughter running around. He was in a bright-colored shirt with large patterns and a pale-beige panama hat, which would suit Hawaiian beaches. It was a very strange appearance to me, since I was only familiar with the image of my father in a formal suit. Before my father retired, I left for the United States, and even though he often came after his retirement, he wore a plaid shirt under his old suit. Even if I suggested more comfortable outfits, such as a sports jacket and cotton pants, he used to say, “This is most comfortable for me as I’ve lived like this all my life.”
“Dad! You really have a beach look going on!” I expressed my surprise while greeting him in the back yard, and he said with a mild smile. “Today your mom and I went to a store called Marshalls and bought these. How do I look? Nice, don’t I?”
My parents drove my daughter to a half-day Montessori school in the morning and picked her up after lunch. Most afternoons, they seemed to go to a shopping mall with my daughter. I guess he couldn’t go to a library because of the language barrier. At the shopping mall, they could take a stroll with my daughter in her stroller and spend some time at the small indoor playground. Once, I asked, thinking my dad disliked shopping as I had never seen him go shopping in Korea,
“Aren’t you bored of going to a shopping mall every day?”
“I like American shopping malls. They are so huge with all kinds of stores, and I really enjoy watching people while sitting on a chair at the playground there. I feel like I’m in an exhibition of humankind. You know, in Korea, there aren’t many differences in colors of hair, eyes, and skin, and body sizes or races. At a shopping mall in America, I see all kinds of people.”
He looked so amused, responding to me. I was not quite sure his answer was genuinely true or a disguise to not make me worry.
I guess he developed his shopping habit during this period. Why not? America is a shopper’s paradise, where consumption is considered a virtue, and a person’s well-being and happiness depend fundamentally on material possessions. Its whole society is built on consumerism, encouraging an endless acquisition of goods and services.
Since then, my father started buying hats for different seasons, different styles like fedoras with round or oblong brims and flat caps in various colors whenever he came to America. Sometimes when I went shopping with my parents, my father would stand in front of a small mirror at a place with all kinds of hats, trying this and that, and asking, “Which one is better?” Then, my mom, who I think is the most generous and patient person in this world, would reproach him as if he were a little boy compulsively wanting a new toy, “Stop buying more hats! How many hats do you need?!”
Now I wonder why he wanted to have hats so badly. Fedoras, first introduced to Koreans in the early twentieth century, were once referred to as “hats for the young” in Korea. Did he long for his youth? In my childhood, he used to express his nostalgia for the life of a Joseon scholar, a leisurely life with literature and music, in contrast to laborious, modern life. Did he wish to soothe the nostalgia with a Western-style hat, the next best thing to a gat, the symbol of the Joseon scholar? Asking all these questions now, I’m a fool like those wise after the event.
The last gift I sent to my father was the dark-blue wool flat cap for Chuseok, the Korean Thanksgiving, in 2018. On the morning of Chuseok, however, he was taken to an emergency room due to a stroke. As he became paralyzed, he couldn’t say a word to me when I visited him in October and December of that year. Without a chance to put on the new hat, he passed away after six months of hospitalization at the end of winter the following year. I arrived at his funeral after fourteen hours of flight and touched my cheek to his. It was cold like this winter.
The next day, the bright afternoon sunlight led me to saunter again. The trace of the snowman and the black hat disappeared in my neighbor’s front yard, like life, ephemeral in this world.