Personal Narrative: Pixar's Up

I hit my forehead on the bottom protruding edge of my dark brown leather couch. Out of all the places to hit my head, I clumsily managed to hit it on a piece of furniture so close to the ground. This unusual accident was only possible because I was lying completely flat on my stomach on the cold hardwood floor, reaching out for a black, unidentifiable object under the couch. I was sprawled out on the floor reaching for random objects for one reason only: to clean.
When I was a Sophomore in High School, my mom forced me to clean the living room and dining room every Sunday afternoon by myself as a weekly chore. This day was no different. Here I was on a warm, sunny day during the beginning of spring stuck inside reaching for items underneath
the living room couch while all the other people in my neighborhood enjoyed the warm breeze whispering through the trees and the birds chirped, “Come out, come out. Enjoy the lovely weather.”
I ignored the deep desire to stop this torturous cleaning to go outside and pulled the random mass of objects from under the couch. There was a small flamingo-colored sock (probably my little sister’s), a mechanical pencil that was without graphite and an eraser, a random crumpled plastic CVS bag, and a small ebony-colored pocket notebook that was the size of a piece of toast. I threw the first three objects into the white plastic trash bag that was hung on my arm, but the last object caught my attention. It was a cheap looking notebook, probably purchased at my local Dollar Store, but it looked worn and used. The sides were bent in and the front pages were crinkled as if someone put all their effort and concentration into putting their thoughts on the little pages. I put the trash bag on the ground next to the couch and took a seat on the ground. I would do anything to get out of cleaning for the day.
I opened the notebook and looked at the first page and discovered that it was filled with Korean words. I knew there were only two people in my house who would write in Korean, my mom and dad. This piqued my interest. While they always read my writing assignments for class or my “creations” that I drafted during my moments of inspiration, they never shared anything they wrote with me. Looking at the elegant curvature of the handwriting and the heavy marks of black ink, I could tell that it was my mom’s words. As a result, my curiosity overcame me and I sat fully comfortable on the couch and delved into the notebook. The first lines in Korean said, “Work was so difficult. I could not handle it, so I cried. I wondered why I had gotten degraded into such a state.”
These lines truly hit my heart as if a hammer hit my chest. I could not fathom as to why my mom would write such a thing. My mother never cried. Even as I sat crying out a river while watching the beginning of Pixar’s Up, my mother, with a playful face, laughed at me for my soft heart and dynamic emotions.
My mother also never displayed her tiredness or anger. As an immigrant from South Korea, my mom had to sacrifice her friends, family, job, and familiarity at the age of forty for a future in the United States. She had difficulty learning the language and culture, but she was always strong, outgoing, responsible, and warm. Yet here, she sounded like any lost, tired, depressed person did. This was not the mother that I knew, or thought I knew. I had to continue reading; I wanted to understand the complex thought processes in my mother’s brain that was trapped behind her smiling face and crescent
eyes.
Her next words caused wells of water to start forming on the outer rims of my eyes. “Why is it that my education has no weight here. I am looked upon with such belittlement surrounded by people who are ruthless, immature, and ignorant” she wrote. “Just because my English is not perfect, just because I have an accent, I am not someone to be stepped on. I am intelligent and mature, but that does not matter here.” By this line, my face was covered in my tears and I was overcome with regret and remorse. I knew that she worked at a nursing home, but I never knew that she was going through emotional difficulty. She never shared with me her struggles, but most importantly, I did not care to listen. I just assumed that she was okay. Never did I think to question how she is doing in her daily life. When she asked me how my school day went after picking me up from cross country, or marching band practice, I never asked her how her day at work was. I could not continue reading the rest of the diary, because my head, my heart, and my whole body ached as if I had caught the terrible flu.
When I was a little, I tended to judge everyone by their outer appearance.
What they look like on the outside and not what they are on the inside. The librarian behind the counter scanning books was always bored and strict. The friend who always smiled and was outgoing never had insecurities or difficulties to deal with. Never did I think that the librarian may have been adventure seeking hiker or that my friend experienced anxiety in every social setting with more than two people. A child’s mental capacity for thinking only took me to analyze the first layer of the person’s character. My mother’s diary changed everything for me. Although I came to realize that people did not have one characteristic as I grew, my mother’s words threw this understanding at me and forced it down my throat. It caused me to experience firsthand how ignorant I was, how uncaring I was of my own family. Here I was, sitting on the comfortable, plush couch complaining about cleaning, when my mother suffered every day at the nursing home cleaning after the
patients.
At this moment, I quickly put the diary back under the couch deep into the dark, dusty corner of the living room. I should have given it to my mother, but I did not want to tell her that I read it, that I saw into her struggles and read her deepest secrets. It may have been because I wanted to keep my mother’s privacy, or because I was ashamed of my shortcomings. I do not know, but what I do know is that on that day, I cleaned the rest of the house, not just the living and dining room, but all the rest of the rooms until the birds stopped chirping outside and the sun set beyond the horizon.