A touching and unforgettable tribute to the mothers of Korea’s postwar generation, and the cradle of hardship that shaped a lifetime.

In this raw and heartfelt reflection, Master Woo Myung recalls a childhood of poverty, pain, and the silent, unwavering strength of his mother.
It is a glimpse into the soul of a nation—and the compassion that grows out of adversity.

📺 Watch the video and read along below.

🎬 YOUTUBE VIDEO

📝 ORIGINAL WRITING BY MASTER WOO MYUNG

Cradle

Unable to feed her children,
she clutched her empty stomach and sighed;
she lay awake all night worrying about feeding them.
Such were our mothers.

She did not scold those little urchins,
who wet themselves in the middle of the night
while sleeping in their mother’s arms.
Instead she shivered all night in her damp clothes,
then dried them
while preparing breakfast in the morning.
Such were our mothers.

There was so much work to be done in the fields
that she could not hear her children crying of hunger.
They cried themselves to exhaustion,
but she did not know.
Some fell ill and died, leaving their parents much agony
as they buried their children in the mountains.

As a child, I had cotton clothes to wear;
thus I did not look like a savage.
However this did not prevent my life from being
primitive, as times were very hard.

The country was stripped of itself
after Japanese colonial rule,
and soon after there was war.
It was during this time that I was born.
My family was in dire poverty;
in fact every family was.
Every family had at least six, seven, eight,
or even nine children;
in fact every tenant farming family did.
We would go to gather wood in the mountains
where there were human bones and bullets
scattered everywhere.
Parents went out into the fields
leaving behind their babies at home.
They cried and cried in hunger
and resorted to picking up and eating chicken
droppings and even their own feces.
They became exhausted
and slept on the bare ground in the yard.
Sometimes they tumbled from the room onto the dirt
floors of their houses,
which in the countryside were quite high.
They would tumble down onto the dirt floor
and then would tumble down in to the yard,
but even though they took such hard falls,
they never got hurt.
Perhaps it was Providence.

After having worked all day,
the mother finally returned home to suckle her baby.
The sound of him gulping the milk down was like
the gurgle of water going down a drain.
His eyes filled with happiness,
his face smudged all over with dirt.
His tears finally dried as he fondled his mother’s breasts.

Senility was a disease that many developed with old age.
Many lost their consciousness as they became older.
It was a disease that was caused by frequent starvation.
In fact, there were many who died of it.
There were those who were sick
but were too poor to go to the hospital;
they eventually passed away at home,
staring at the ceiling.
When I was a child,
I had many friends who were pockmarked by disease.

Even my older brothers had come down with smallpox.
We had been too poor
and could do nothing but look to the sky:
they eventually died.
According to the neighbors,
my mother had wailed madly,
beating her fists into the ground.

After my brothers’ departures,
I was born in to the world as the precious son.
In my village,
it was customary to give a child a humble name,
for people believed that the child would then be healthy
and not die.
Thus as a child, my name was ‘Gah-jee,’
short for ‘gang-ah-jee,’ meaning ‘puppy.’
In fact, there were many children named Gah-jee in
my village.
The kids would make fun of my name,
and so growing up, I hated hearing it.

At the age of six,
I began the chore of gathering grass for the cows and
feeding them.
I would feed them,
then come home with a bushel of grass
to make boiled cattle feed.
My sister was not allowed to go to school but I was.
Sometime during when I was in
the lower grades of elementary school,
I was out on the hill behind my school
drawing a picture
when my sister called out to me, “Gah-jee!”
After arriving home, I hit my sister.
In first grade,
my class went on a school field trip to a reservoir;
it was an eight kilometer walk to get there.
Seeing as I had travelled such a long distance,
my mother had come out to the road
to greet me and take me home upon my return.
She had my youngest sibling strapped onto her back,
but still she carried me home.
My mother will turn eighty next year.
To her, I will always be her precious son.
In fact when I was in the third grade
she bought me a little desk.
I was so fond of that desk,
I studied at it whenever I could.
Many things occurred while I was in the third grade:
my older sister got married and left our home;
a few days later after her marriage,
my father visited her and her in-laws.
My father had been working at a train station
up north in Nanam
when a tree fell on him.
He was badly injured but eventually recovered.
However, later on his illness returned
and this led him to his death.
At the time,
my father’s friends held me in their arms
and cried endlessly.
After my father had passed away,
I had to act as the head of the family
from a very young age.
My mother fashioned a wooden A-frame carrier,
or a ‘jee-gae,’ for me to carry on my back.
After school,
I would come home and take that jee-gae with me
to work in the fields
and to gather wood from the mountains;
so diligent was I!

During the three years that followed after his death,
we held memorial ceremonies, or ‘jae-sa,’ for my father:
every first and fifteenth day of the month
we would lament at his memorial altar in our house,
and once a year we would slaughter a pig as an offering.
With ceaseless envy,
I would look upon the other kids
playing out in the schoolyard.
I would take off my shoes and walk barefoot
in the mountains and the fields
lest my shoes become worn.
The marriages of all three of my older sisters
and the jae-sa for my father
left our family in needy circumstances.
Indeed I grew up with much heartache and sorrow.

The poor country folk all went abroad.
Without any footing, they left their homes
and so they faced many hardships.
But now they are the ones
who are the leaders of the world.

🌱 REFLECT AT SANTA CLARA MEDITATION

In the silence of a mother’s sacrifice, we find the depth of human compassion.
May we remember the love that raised us—unspoken, enduring, and true.

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