7. For Grandma Kim, Who Has Lived Through The Singularity

(cw: Weird, personal, heavy, and high-context. There’s a point to it, I promise.)

You were born on April 13, 1940 in the Taeryong River Valley at the northern end of Chōsen - that is, Korea as invaded, colonized, and annexed by Imperial Japan. You were the youngest and last of nine children of a landholding family, the Shims, their estate part of Pakcheon County, bounded - as you’ve told me on a few occasions - by the Taeryong river and “a big road”, the finest and most cleverly placed of the five estates that made up the county. You claim that your episodic memory - the scenes that make up your life - is near-perfect, especially of your earlier life; it is from that memory that you paint me impressionistic pictures of a life alien to my own: a courtyard that it took you 15 minutes to walk across in a straight line; rows on rows of fresh cucumbers and tomatoes and grapes that you loved to eat, all fresh off the vine; a servantry that your family treated with humanity, their children raised and educated alongside you. (Put a pin in that humanity, fraught though the underlying social injustice was; there are at least two lessons there.) But even in that absurd wealth relative to your surroundings, you were desperately poor. You had no antibiotics and little complex food; you’d never had kombucha or avocados or even chocolate, all of which you would much later come to adore. You had no internet, obviously, and no computers or smartphones, but no television or landline telephones, either; no radio, no recorded music, few books; precious little electric lighting or powered machinery.

You were 5 years old when your father, a successful practitioner of both the Western pharmacology of the day and traditional Chinese medicine, died along with one of your older brothers of an improperly prepared vaccination. You were 7 years old when your mother made the border crossing into South Korea - it was South Korea, now - three times to find the safest route; neither by mountain nor by river but by sea. You were 8 years old when our family’s basic human decency saved you and most of your family from a firing squad - the local commissar’s wife, once your family’s servant, recognized you in your having been driven out of your estate, and demanded you be spared. He relented. (I’ve played enough Victoria 3 - seen and read up on the yangban’s stubborn uselessness - read enough political theory and economics and history - not to totally fault Kim Il Sung, here. Just almost completely so. Woe to the Korean anarchists, to the forgotten names, to Jeong Yakyong and Shim Yongchol and Shin Chaeho. As in Spain, so too in Korea, but worse.) You were 11 years old when you were caught in the open near Seoul during an Allied bombing run; lucky for you, they deliberately hit the bomb shelter you‘d been running for. You were 18 years old when you were married in haste to Grandpa Kim, though neither of you knew yourselves to be that yet. You settled down and had four children of your own, and started to raise them. You were 33 years old when you decided to come to America after immigration reform in 1965, seeking greater political stability and vastly better education; you showed your children the finest colleges in the country and demanded that they attend. You started a department store, in good time; picked a prize location in New York City in what would become the heart of Koreatown. At first the wonders of material progress - greater in Los Angeles and New York City than anything in Seoul at the time - wowed you, but television quickly changed from a valuable English tutor into a disciplinary struggle. Yet even as you put down roots, the world changed faster and faster - computers and the internet and smartphones all made their way into your store over the years. You kept up, and bent gracefully in each new technological storm.

You are 85 years old now, and still surprisingly healthy. (Perhaps you’ll outlive me.) The world is vastly changed; your life now would be alien to the person you once were. You lived with me for three years, and for that time I did the best I could to make your life pleasant; to cast spell on spell to bring you everyday magic. I could keep no coachman on retainer, but I could call rideshares. I could keep no cleaning staff, but the Roombas I maintained confused and then delighted you; we named them Mr. Vacuum and Ms. Mop and thought of them as spectral servants; machine spirits. I could not regain your lost estate, but the wonders of public parks and art museums with Korean-language audio guides sufficed. From distant shores I summoned you all you needed with the power of 2-day Prime shipping and modern logistics. You speak to your ESL teacher and your old friends from college through the whispering scrying mirror of an iPad that you only mostly understand, and when it fails, you bring it to me to apply my lore and my artifice as best I can to repair it. (A fair trade for your skill with a sewing needle.)

When I think of strange new developments, I always use you as a test case. I checked if you could recognize Impossible Beef - you couldn’t, and that gave me confidence in plant-based fake meats. I think about what being in a Waymo would be like for you - would you be terrified, or would you see the same spectral coachman I do in that empty seat? I fear for you with each new deepfake development and every new algorithmic radicalization pit. Is it your concern for servants of all types I’ve inherited, when we thank Mr. Vacuum for his service; when I tenderly replace the filter? Might the key to AI alignment live in the heart of an 85-year old North Korean grandmother, and her kind regard for all things which give her aid, however powerless they currently seem?

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