Expensive wife
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By Chang Soon-hee
It seems true that 50 percent of marriages end up in divorce. A Korean friend of mine in New York told me that her daughter, 45, is in a divorce suit after 25 years of marriage after having two children who are now in high school. The American husband told his wife that he wanted a divorce because she does not contribute at home while he has to work hard. He thinks it’s not fair.
In Korea too, men are beginning to think that having a wife is quite expensive. And raising children, the product and main purpose of a marriage, is even more expensive. Young men are scared of having a wife and it has pushed many youngsters into marrying later resulting in a low birth rate which Korean and Japanese governments are concerned will mean their countries lose national competitiveness.
Actually it’s not a wife’s responsibility but blame should go to the profit seeking enterprises that first supplied all those kitchen appliances: refrigerator, kimchi fermenting machine, microwave ovens, automatic rice cooker, dishwasher, and so on. Then again there’s the food producers who sell a pantry full of canned foods, instant foods, ramen and instant noodles. The simplified cooking appliances and the factory produced foods have pushed women out of their kitchen.
Now it takes less than 15 minutes to prepare a family dinner and men who were reluctant to lift a finger now can easily do kitchen chores. So too do children who make their lunch or a snack without the help of their mother. Women have lost their status as a housewife.
It wasn’t always like that. When I married 54 years ago, I was the most important member of the family holding full control over the kitchen and laundry affairs. I knew the whole family would starve or wear dirty clothes for a month if I got sick or went on strike. Men didn’t know even know how to fire the hearth, not to mention boil rice without burning it or prepare side dishes. Men still don’t know how to make kimchi. They couldn’t place a new holed-briquette properly over the consumed charcoal and adjust the air vent lid which women had carved from a radish.
``Isn’t it time to sharpen your kitchen knives?” My husband timidly offered to help in an effort to hide his pangs of self-conscience. He was afraid of speaking accusatory words in the kitchen and bit his lip when his wife broke the most expensive china he had bought in Copenhagen. Father and children wouldn’t dare complain at the dinner table because any grievance about food would bounce back to his court as: ``earn more money.” Those were the good old days, dinner time was the family’s most pleasant moment and few couples divorced. Not any more due to the automatic and time-saving kitchen appliances and the mass-produced instant foods. The housewife lost her place and the man started to think if she failed to find a job out of the house she was an expensive luxury.
The thought of an expensive wife has actually been around since women’s liberation after the invasion of house appliances in the early 1970s. Housewives have no contest against the types of complaints made by that New York husband but realize that they must recapture the status as the master of the kitchen, and the family. It’s a competition, and there is a way to regain their honorable status; flush those instant foods out of the kitchen and prepare meals with a traditional mom’s flavor full of soul and love.
The writer is a grandmother whose email address is ham1940@gmail.com.