Fiction REINCARNATION, Vol. 2

My Son or Great-Grandson?

<60> My Son or Great-Grandson?

About a year after we got married, Michelle got pregnant. I tried to put off giving birth until I fully adapted to society, but a sperm, which had a strong will to come out into the world, seems to have placed a flag on his mother's womb, laughing at his father's timidity. Jong-bin gets his baby at the age of 36 but I get my bloodline for the first time in 107 years. I wonder the identity of the baby, who will be born biracial between Korean men and American women. That's because he is created by his great-grandfather's soul.

Many congratulated us as Michelle's belly swells and her fetus turns out to be her son. Yu-jin, who thought her family would be cut off after Jong-bin's accident, was most delighted. She told her relatives and acquaintances that her eldest son would be born soon. Is there still a preference for sons in this country?

When I left the Earth, our parents preferred boys. It was the legacy of an agricultural society and the product of a family succession obligation. However, as discrimination against women disappeared in society and the status of wives and mothers rose in the family, young people began to prefer daughters over sons. Nevertheless, old people still seem to think that their children should have sons.

People's obsession with their son seems stronger in the North. In a country that experienced communism, gender equality was established early on, but was North Korea an exception? North Korea's prestigious universities, including Pyongyang University, have similar numbers of male and female students, while professors and employees share similar ratios. As the news spread that Michelle was pregnant, the members of the Joseon Hope Forum first asked if the fetus was a son or daughter. They didn't give a particular response when I said I expected my daughter to come out. But when I said that the fetus had been confirmed as a son, they gave a very loud congratulatory message.

"If the fetus was a daughter, were you going to comfort me?"

"What comfort! If you give birth to a daughter, you contribute to society, and if you have a son, you contribute to the family."

"Giving a son is contributing to the family? These days, daughters take care of their biological parents better."

"It's fun to raise daughters and they take better care of their own family members, but the human world is still a paternal society. Though men and women are said to be equal, daughters have less solidarity with their families than sons. Remember, there were more women than men among North Korean defectors who left their homeland during communist rule? Most of the women married to foreigners settled in their husbands' countries, but most of the men who married a foreign woman return to their home. Since men have a strong homing instinct, people who value family-continuity want sons."

Previously, in South Korea, rural bachelors couldn't find their spouses, so they welcomed ethnic Koreans in China and Southeast Asians as spouses. Among international marriages, foreign women mostly settled in Korea, while Korean women married to foreign men mostly settled in their husbands' homeland. There is no denying that men have a strong back-homing instinct and a sense of duty to inherit the family.

"It is just a legacy of the Confucian tradition of the feudal era. Now, sons do not support their parents or hold ancestral rites. What's good for the family just because I have a son?"

"The son and daughter are equally precious, but people still want their son to shine on the family rather than their daughter."

"Don't you know that young South Koreans have preferred daughters for decades?"

"Even in the North, parents want a pretty and smart daughter. There is also a tendency that sons are closer to their wife's family than their own family. However, North Korean adults still have not overcome the notion that their daughters are a member of their husband's family."