It took two pages, three days, and five stops on a wintry train ride for my grandfather to tell my grandmother what was really on his mind: he missed her dearly. He had just left his hometown of Daegu for the capital of Seoul, and was traveling under the weather with a bitter cold.
My grandfather intermittently fills my grandmother in on his declining condition while traveling with his own father, my great-grandfather. (During this time, I learned he was in college attending Seoul National University as an engineering student, and would frequently visit his hometown to visit his family).
He stops to comment at length about the color of the lipstick she had worn a day prior, when he the two parted ways at the train station. Apparently, her cherry-daubed lips had attracted some unwanted attention from his friend who they had run into at the station during their farewell.
He needed to address it, almost immediately in his letter. He was a little sullen she would attract too much attention while he was away.
Makeup clearly wasn't a lost priority for my grandmother, who found bright red lipstick fitting for this train station goodbye. This was the early 1940s. I had looked up the history of red lipstick and found that in 1941, Victory Red became a popular lipstick color women wore as Adolf Hitler famously hated red lipstick and it became a sign of patriotism and fighting fascism. Among the allied countries, red lips were a symbol of optimism and victory as global beauty brands capitalized on the wartime trend.
Halfway across the world, from a rural town on an isolated peninsula, my grandmother tapped into this power. A color that allowed her to express herself in the face of occupation and two impending wars at home and abroad: the color of resilience.
