A Story from a Korean-American Childhood – Immigrant Ingenuity

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is a person’s resourcefulness. Of course everyone occasionally uses scissors instead of a knife. The same goes for a cellphone light instead of a flashlight. And everyone knows about the all around usefulness of duct tape. These are all easy and obvious! Downright pedestrian, if you will!

Unconventional methods for taking measurements

I’ve written about the unconventional method of measuring using your hand before, specifically for making rice. But here’s a new one that’s quite unique….

I went to a hardware store, so many years ago, with my mom to pick up some bulbs and air filters. When we got to the air filter aisle, I was bowled over by all the different sizes of filters. It simply had not occurred to me to measure the old air filter.

Fortunately, my mom did think to measure the air filter. So I expected her to reach into her purse and pull out a piece of paper with those measurements. But what she pulled out was a neatly folded newspaper page. I thought that she must’ve written it down on the newspaper because that’s just what was handy at a moment’s notice. There was no napkin, but hey, there’s this old newspaper – kind-of situation.

But then she carefully unfolded that newspaper page. That’s when I saw that she had cut it down to the size of the air filter we needed. She didn’t know where we kept the measuring tape so she made a facsimile of the old filter!

Sure enough, we were able to find the exact air filter we needed thanks to her resourcefulness. I consider it immigrant resourcefulness.

People immigrate to foreign lands, whether it’s here to the U.S. or elsewhere, and they usually have scarce resources. So they learn to make do with what they have on hand. Honestly, it’s a creativity that I’ve never had to learn to do. I actually knew exactly where the measurement tape was.

Immigrant Resourcefulness

But then, maybe it’s not that they learned to make do once they got to their new home. Perhaps, it’s a skill that had already been developed in their home country? Maybe it was their home country that didn’t have resources and so they made do with what they could.

Isn’t it most often the case that people immigrate because for better opportunities?

Isn’t there usually a mass exodus in countries that have known war?

In my parents’ case, even though the Korean war was some time ago, they still remembered the hardships they had to endured like it was yesterday. In addition to stories that were specifically about war time, I can’t tell you how many times I heard how they had to make use of every piece of food they had. Or how they had to iron using an actual hot cast iron. And of course, there were stories of walking miles in the snow to school.

That’s just how it was, and is, in less developed nations. They learn to live with less.

Immigrant Irony

But here I am. The daughter of two Korean immigrants. If I need to measure an air filter, or anything for that matter, I whip out one of my handy tape measures (somehow, I have three). Then I turn to my cellphone and open a note taking app to input what those measurements are.

I know that if a smart phone and a measuring tape had been available to my mom when she needed to measure that air filter, she still wouldn’t have. This is fact! I know she still would’ve preferred to just use that page of the newspaper. It was fast and easy. I dare say that it was beautiful in its simplicity.

But here’s the irony. These immigrant parents of mine, worked their butts off so that I could have an easier life. But in doing so, I’ve become reliant on modern conveniences and don’t have that resourcefulness that they did.

Well, hopefully being cognizant of this will make a difference. Perhaps, I won’t take these conveniences so much for granted. I can’t say that’s always the case. But I can say that whenever I have to buy an air filter, I always, always think of my mom and her newspaper measuring ways. 😉

Did your parents ever use unconventional methods of measurement? Have you, yourself, ever used a newspaper as a standard for measure? I’d be shocked! Please do share in the comments, because I have to hear that story!