Politics of Death Anxiety, Ethics of Refusing Survival

From day one of my return to Korea after eight years of US stay - actually, starting from the on-flight accident that delayed the return - I've been devastated. Every day was survival, and after five months of dealing with the sense of insecurity, I finally reached the bottom of it all. What follows is AI-generated narration from a moment of clarity that I landed on. I would have made this into an article, simply because I have enough references to make this look "academic enough," but what falls urgent to me right now is to put a temporary closure on the nightmarish sailing that seemed endless. This record serves as a necessary anchor on which my further reflections can stabilize themselves. This writing doesn't "feel" like myself at all but at least it helps pushing through, even when there is no more strength or time left to spare on this topic.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What does it mean to live alongside the elderly without becoming conscripted into their fear of death? Why is old age so often treated as ethical immunity—an unquestionable claim on the lives of others—rather than as a condition that demands its own form of accountability? And why, in so many societies, is refusing to stabilize another’s anxiety interpreted as cruelty rather than as care?

This question did not arise for me abstractly. It emerged through a convergence of experiences that, at first glance, appeared unrelated: teaching elderly students shortly after returning to Korea; researching transgenerational trauma in Korean and Korean diasporic cultural texts; and confronting, with renewed intensity, the gravitational pull of familial obligation shaped by fear of death rather than care for life.

They surfaced through sustained proximity—to aging bodies, to familial obligation, and most persistently, to a mother whose life has been governed by an overwhelming terror of death. This terror is not episodic; it is infrastructural. It organizes time, desire, and relational expectations. Life, under its regime, must be planned exhaustively, recorded meticulously, and preserved symbolically in order to ward off annihilation.

In this economy, happiness is not valued for its vitality but evaluated against a preexisting plan. Deviations are read as threats. Even forms of joy that do not align with the plan are reinterpreted as precursors to disaster. What is at stake is not the child’s well-being but the preservation of a worldview in which death can be managed through control. Endurance, in such a structure, is moralized as love.

In practice, I confront daily insistences on entering unprotected realms in which I have to surrender and expose myself to the peoples and structures that have consistently harassed me and others on different levels. That's the only way, they say. My parents and colleagues are not blind to such histories of harassment but they nevertheless have to push me into such economies because, for them, it's the only "right" way of survival given Korea's already toxic structures. And - importantly - because they have already done it themselves. My "persuasion" that other ways of being are possible can never register because it threatens their worldview. To accept it, they have to accept histories of putting their children's bodies and existences at stake in exchange for their felt sense of safety. Which can never happen. In this economy, love and abuse is so deeply entangled that receiving love without abuse or refusing abuse without refusing love is not possible. And how to love back without toxicity - a form they understand as the only love language? They are quick to diagnose the child with pathology, exploiting the histories of the child's vulnerability to safeguard their sense of righteousness. This is overt in Korea but common across cultures, at least in the US. I've only encountered non-toxic form of adult care and love well into my thirties, which materialized in the form of immediate intervention when my body was at stake against my will. This changed my life completely.

There is cost to endurance. In Korea, endurance is widely moralized as virtue: a measure of character, maturity, and love. Yet what endurance often names in practice is not resilience but prolonged exposure to fear. The dominant affect governing familial obligation is not death itself, but the terror of death—and the incessant attempt to deny it through planning, control, and continuity.

Life organized around appeasing this terror becomes a life lived for fear rather than with finitude. What disappears in this moral economy is the possibility of vitality: of relation that does not require sacrifice as proof.

This distinction—between living with fear and living for it—matters because fear here is not merely personal. It is historically produced, socially distributed, and domestically enforced. War, division, and scarcity have sedimented into everyday ethics, where stability is prized above all else and deviation is framed as irresponsibility. Endurance becomes the currency through which belonging is purchased.

In public discourse, the elderly are framed as those who are “running out of time.” The ethical demand that follows is familiar: we must not burden them, must not disrupt what little stability remains, must allow them to hold onto meaning, dignity, and coherence as death approaches. What remains largely unexamined, however, is the specific form that this “holding on” takes, and how often it manifests not as vulnerability but as insistence—sometimes coercive insistence—on preserving particular self-images, narratives of success, and imagined continuities.

In the Korean context, this insistence is rarely articulated as such. It is embedded instead in familial structures, religious imaginaries, and cultural narratives of sacrifice and endurance. Old age is not simply a life stage but a moral position from which expectations are projected outward: expectations that younger generations will stabilize what feels internally unstable, that they will complete what remains unresolved, that they will embody reassurance against extinction.

This dynamic became impossible for me to ignore while teaching older adults at a civic education institution. The pedagogical aim of these courses was, on the surface, benign: self-reflection, lifelong learning, digital literacy, ethical citizenship. Yet I repeatedly found myself uneasy. Encouraging self-examination, uncertainty, or the relinquishing of fixed self-narratives felt—uncomfortably—like a violation. I began to ask myself why. Why should confronting one’s own limits, contradictions, or unfinished business be experienced as an ethical transgression when directed toward the elderly?

The unease deepened when I recognized the same structure at work in my own family. What I had long understood as individual dynamics—my mother’s insistence on planning, control, and the preservation of a “cultured” familial image through rigid hierarchies and comparison—appeared less idiosyncratic than I had assumed. Returning to Korea made visible how widely shared these affective patterns are: the quiet terror surrounding death, the compulsive need to record, archive, and regulate life as proof against disappearance, and the expectation that children will absorb this anxiety in the name of love.

My parents belong to a generation shaped directly by the afterlives of war, and this historical proximity matters. Their fear of death is not abstract; it is inherited, religiously reinforced, and socially normalized. Catholic eschatology, with its vivid economy of salvation and damnation, does not merely promise meaning after death—it disciplines life through fear of loss and judgment. Thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille remind us that Western religious frameworks do not simply respond to death; they produce a particular terror of it, one that is then mistaken for a universal human condition.

In Korea, this terror has been collectivized. It saturates family structures, educational institutions, and even academic cultures, where precarity and survival logic masquerade as rigor and responsibility. Performance studies, the field to which I belong, is no exception. Many of its institutional actors are themselves suspended in insecurity, clinging to legitimacy through endurance rather than transformation. In this sense, academia mirrors the family: both operate as trauma-bearing systems that mistake repetition for care.

For much of my life, I responded to this environment through flight. As a teenager, I responded to the weight of imposed fear through considering ending my life. I then escaped into a boarding school. Later, I left Korea altogether, pursuing doctoral training in the United States. These moves were often narrated by others as ambition. In retrospect, they were more accurately forms of evasion: attempts to create distance from an atmosphere saturated by death anxiety rather than death itself.

The United States, for all its violences, did not trigger this particular loop. There, I encountered people whose lives were not organized around the same existential panic. Gradually, I learned to interrupt the cycle. Returning to Korea, however, reactivated it almost immediately. This was not a personal failure but a structural one. The fear was everywhere, ambient and inescapable, normalized to the point that refusing it appeared irresponsible, even immoral.

What complicates this refusal is time. My mother’s time is, quite literally, moving forward. Distance offers no resolution; one cannot outpace mortality. The question, then, is not how to escape but how to coexist without being conscripted. How does one remain present without becoming an instrument for stabilizing another’s terror? How does one love without sacrificing one’s own life to maintain someone else’s imagined continuity?

I write this not to indict individual parents or elders, but to name a pattern that is too often shielded by moral language. When the preservation of an elder’s self-image requires the exhaustion of the younger, we are no longer speaking of care. We are speaking of a violence rendered invisible by reverence.

This essay is an attempt to think that violence without aestheticizing it, to situate personal experience within a broader social and theoretical framework, and to ask whether breaking such cycles is not an act of betrayal, but an ethical necessity.

My research on transgenerational trauma clarified how this economy operates affectively. Texts such as Crying in H Mart and Tastes Like War are often read as narratives of grief or identity. What struck me instead was how centrally they revolve around inherited fear—fear that precedes the subject and saturates the domestic sphere. Trauma here is not remembered as an event; it is lived forward as atmosphere. The mother’s body becomes the site where history lodges itself, and the child’s life becomes the terrain upon which unresolved terror is negotiated.

Read through the lens of mourning, Crying in H Mart and Tastes Like War are often understood as narratives of loss, memory, and affective inheritance—stories in which food mediates grief and sustains maternal presence after death. While such readings are not incorrect, they remain insufficient. What is at stake in these texts is not only how daughters mourn their mothers, but how they confront a structure of inheritance that precedes death itself: the transmission of fear, obligation, and survival ethics that organizes life long before loss becomes legible as loss.

This dynamic cannot be adequately theorized through the psychoanalytic framework most familiar to literary and cultural analysis, namely the Freudian or Lacanian paradigm of the Oedipal complex and the Name-of-the-Father. That model centers paternal prohibition, symbolic law, and the subject’s formation through interdiction and entry into the symbolic order. The mother, within this schema, functions primarily as an object to be relinquished so that the subject may assume a position within language and law. Yet the mother–daughter relation staged in Crying in H Mart and Tastes Like War operates at a level that precedes the symbolic order itself, rendering paternal law an inadequate explanatory frame.

In these texts, the maternal does not appear as an object structured by prohibition but as an infrastructural force that organizes life prior to symbolization. The mother’s fear—shaped by war, displacement, illness, and scarcity—does not merely demand remembrance or representation. It governs time, intimacy, ethical responsibility, and the conditions under which living itself becomes permissible. The daughter’s struggle, therefore, is not an Oedipal drama of desire and law, but an existential confrontation with inheritance at the level of life-making: a struggle over whether survival, anxiety, and anticipatory loss must remain the organizing principles of existence.

To read these works merely as affective narratives of mourning risks obscuring this confrontation. Mourning frameworks tend to aestheticize endurance, transforming exhaustion into devotion and ambivalence into tenderness. But what these texts record is not reconciliation with loss, but a form of refusal that takes place before loss can be narrativized: a refusal to metabolize maternal terror as destiny. The daughter’s labor is not to remember the mother properly, but to love her without allowing fear to continue governing the future.

Seen in this light, Crying in H Mart and Tastes Like War articulate a domain of struggle that psychoanalytic models centered on the Name-of-the-Father cannot fully grasp. They reveal a relation in which care and coercion, love and violence, are deeply entangled, operating not through prohibition but through obligation. To insist on reading these works as narratives of mourning is to refuse the ethical confrontation they stage: a confrontation with a maternal inheritance that precedes the symbolic order and demands that daughters either reproduce fear as care or actively interrupt its transmission.

In spiritual terms, one might say that certain lives are structured around unfinished tasks—patterns that repeat until they are confronted. Whether framed as reincarnation, inheritance, or psychic repetition, the logic is similar: what is not metabolized returns. My mother’s life appears governed by such a loop. Her devotion to care, order, and documentation suggests not completion but compulsion—a relentless effort to outrun death by leaving nothing unresolved.

In contrast, my own task has been different. I have always been oriented toward care with ease, not effort. What has been difficult is learning to refuse care that demands my erasure. If my mother’s life has been shaped by the inability to release fear, mine has been shaped by the necessity of breaking that transmission.

In this framework, the child does not inherit loss but obligation: to manage anxiety, to maintain continuity, to reassure the future against collapse. Survival eclipses joy; continuity eclipses desire. What I had long perceived as personal weakness—exhaustion, flight, an intolerance for “good enough” lives—began to appear instead as refusal: a resistance to metabolizing fear as destiny.

Refusal, however, is not cost-free. It takes place not in abstraction but in intimate encounters. Families organized around rigid hierarchies and comparison—often under the guise of being “cultured” or “proper”—the youngest child frequently absorbs the ambient anxiety without possessing the authority to redirect it. Being the youngest, out of three sisters, meant absorbing unarticulated pressure without access to explanation or negotiation. Communication promises resolution but delivers amplification. Over time, expression itself becomes a liability.

This pattern is not exceptional. Many families in Korea display the same structure: outward gentleness paired with internal coercion, harmony masking the impossibility of genuine dialogue. The result is a collective habituation to emotional dissonance—an acceptance of pain as the price of belonging.

What unsettled me most was how closely this familial logic mirrored institutional ones. Academia, particularly in fields already positioned as precarious, often reproduces the same trauma-driven dynamics: the valorization of sacrifice, the normalization of insecurity, the expectation that younger scholars will absorb systemic instability in exchange for symbolic legitimacy. Fear masquerades as rigor. Survival is mistaken for excellence. But because I turned to academia as a refuge where being otherwise should be possible, I hold on to this space and insist my refusal of its governing structure.

It was no coincidence that my return to Korea coincided with teaching older adults. Standing before students whose lives were shaped by the same historical forces that shaped my parents, I found myself caught between empathy and resistance. On one hand, I understood the weight they carried. On the other, I could no longer accept the assumption that proximity to death grants moral exemption from self-examination.

Why should the elderly be shielded from confronting the narratives they impose on others? Why is the preservation of their self-image treated as an ethical imperative? Old age is often framed as vulnerability, but this metaphor obscures the asymmetry of power involved. Unlike children, the elderly possess historical authority, moral leverage, and the capacity to demand recognition. When their fear is externalized onto younger bodies, the result is not care but extraction.

As Kristeva and Bataille suggest, religious and philosophical discourses surrounding death have long aestheticized abjection and sacralized terror, transforming fear into a metaphysical constant rather than a culturally produced condition. When such frameworks are universalized, they foreclose alternative relations to finitude—relations grounded not in denial or control, but in acceptance and transformation.

A society that responds to existential fear through repetition and preservation does not become complicit by accident. It does so because it is already organized through a politics of fear—a structure in which terror functions as a governing force rather than a condition to be transformed. This logic cannot be understood solely through the case of aging or the elderly, even if it is most visible there. What is at stake is a broader social order that mobilizes fear to secure continuity, obedience, and moral legitimacy. Individuals are interpellated into this structure not solely against their will, but through a form of willful participation—one in which they come to share the terror it organizes and to recognize its reproduction as the only available means of partially assuaging that fear. Families, institutions, and cultural norms do not merely inherit anxiety; they are calibrated to reproduce it, rehearsing endurance as virtue and stability as ethical maturity. In such a system, participation is not optional but structural, and care becomes indistinguishable from compliance. To name this is not to moralize individuals, but to insist that fear governs because it has been installed as a social principle—one that requires constant enactment to sustain itself.

What remains under-theorized is the ethical possibility of refusal. To refuse to stabilize another’s fear is not an abdication of love; it is a redefinition of it. Love, in this sense, is not endurance without limit but relation without conscription. Saying “no” to being positioned as a buffer against death anxiety insists that life cannot be reduced to a transitional object.

Distance, however, is not a solution. Physical separation may delay confrontation, but it does not dismantle the structure. The challenge is not how to leave, but how to remain without surrendering one’s life to someone else’s terror—especially when time itself becomes a weapon, when mortality is invoked to silence dissent.

This essay is not a confession, nor a plea for reconciliation. It is an attempt to name a condition widely lived yet rarely articulated: the violence of inherited fear and the necessity of refusing it. Breaking the cycle does not guarantee happiness or success. It offers something more modest and more demanding: the possibility of clarity.

Clarity does not resolve fear; it relocates responsibility. It insists that the labor of care consuming one life to stabilize another does not alleviate terror—it perpetuates it. If there is hope here, it lies not in repair but in recognition: that refusing to carry fear forward may be the most ethical form of love-care available to me now.