By NH Choi
A new family photo album, on its first page, shows my wife and me on our wedding, my daughter and son in their childhood and my sonās wife engaged in a board game. The next two pages are devoted to one enlarged family photo taken during a vacation in the Czech Republic in 2019.
Other pages show family gatherings in restaurants, at tourist attractions, on a glamping site and in other places. It has been a septuagenarianās pleasure to get together with the family. It is even more pleasurable now, with the family having been extended to include Sueās husband, and my daughter-in-law.
Among such gatherings, a family vacation was a latecomer for me.
I had no family travel or vacation when I was in school.
My parents, like almost all other parents in such a poor country as South Korea, could not afford to take me and my siblings on a pleasure trip or to a resort for leisure or recreation. Instead, they had to work hard to provide us with food, shelter, clothing, and education.
A family vacation was also the last to think about when I was in school, with teachers telling us to spend every waking hour on our studies. They went so far as to say any other activity was not worth our effort. In other words, there was no room for a family vacation in my early psyche.
Family vacations had been made affordable to quite a few by the time when I started a career as a journalist. Korea had taken the turn for the better and pulled itself out of extreme poverty after the Korean War. By 1989, it had already become a frontrunner among developing countries, the year when overseas travel was liberalized.
I could afford to take my wife and children to a resort in the nation, if not one in a foreign country, for several days in summer. But the problem was that journalism as a career was not amenable to a family vacation.
With reporters technically placed on standby for breaking news events, they had to be prepared to suspend a leave and report to work on short notice.
It was not unusual for me to be summoned to the office on a holiday or during a summer vacation and given an assignment to cover an emergency. My wife still talks about a vacation my family started only to suspend back in the early 1990s.
My editor paged me on the second day of a vacation on a beach on the east coast. We had to pack up and return to Seoul.
I wouldnāt say such interruptions were frequent. Nonetheless, I felt uncomfortable and worried when my family was embarking on a vacation.
In 1995, I had a lucky break. I was fortunate enough to win a family vacation in Hawaii courtesy of Citibank. Each year, it selected a couple of notable business features from domestic dailies to receive awards. Still better, Hawaii was beyond the reach of my editorās pager.
We had fun, watching a Hawaiian dance performance, riding a submersible into the sea, eating the kind of food we rarely had back home and visiting tourist places of renown. My wife and I also spent leisurely hours, watching Sue and Baehoon swimming at the Waikiki beach.
The vacation was not without a regret, though. In retrospect, I find I didnāt make good use of an opportunity to get closer to Sue, who was in middle school, and Baehoon, in elementary school.
To begin with, I didnāt know much about them. I had no idea what they were doing at school, what friends they had, what they were interested in doing, etc., because I didnāt spend much time with them. I used to come home late. I had only Saturdays off when they had to go to school, with a five-day workweek yet to be introduced in Korea.
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