Sophie Full of Faith 2

We offered her the bottom bunk quite happily but she turned it down.

"I don't want to have it if it's going to be, like, you two practicing the missionary lifestyle," she said. She meant she didn't want to burden us. If she knew what kinds of gamey fantasies we occupied ourselves with, maybe she would have taken the bed.

"So it was like that for years and years and years."

"That's tremendous. I can't imagine what it would feel like to have my sister die in a motorcycle accident. It's like one of those things you would never expect to happen after you've fled communist dictatorship. It's like... I'm free! Then the curtains fall."

We often sat in silence mulling over the intensity of our own stories, delighting over the truth of the world, which we had correctly thought would be grim.

I began, "I wonder how many of our generation actually know of the stories. I didn't know at all; my dad had an older brother who died in the war. I had no idea."

"How did you find out?" she asked ever sensitively.

"My sister said... you know my dad tells her so much more than he ever told me. I hardly know that man, considering. My grandmother had just given birth to the brother; he was only two months old or something. She was separated from Harabuji, with the two oldest daughters and the newborn, and they were running for some reason... then they fell and the boy was dead."

I was aware of the holes in my story but that was all I knew. Better to tell the story incompletely than not to tell it at all. Who cares, why running, why fell, why dead. It just is what I know.

"And then... there was an instance, this time Halmuni was alone and the Japanese soldiers made a whole bunch of Koreans line up on a hill and they were shooting each down, one by one. Mysteriously, one of the Japanese guys paused next to Halmuni, only her, and whispered to her, 'When they start shooting the people closer to you, just roll backwards down the hill' and when they shot the ones on her left dead, she rolled backwards down the hill. Then she ran." I thought for a moment. "Maybe he thought she was pretty."

"You almost never were!" She announced at the end. I stare puzzled. "If that mysterious man didn't give her the secret advice, she would have been shot dead like the others, then your dad would have never been born, and you neither!"

"You're right!" Realization dawned on me and I beamed at her, impressed. "It's true!"

"See, you were looking for a reason to think that God likes you. I think he definitely likes you," she beamed back.

I knew I was smiling childishly, feeling an odd swell of satisfaction in my chest. So, that might be. That well might be, and though it's a child's path to presume one's plain existence connotes significance and favor from up high... I didn't care why running, why fell, why not dead. It was nice just to believe Halmuni's story has at least a little to do with me - why, even to do with God.

Why did we electrify ourselves silly with these war stories? I remember, it made me feel dizzy with adrenaline just visualizing them. Imagining the smell of the meadows, as only a peninsula can smell, with yellow dandelions populating hills that stretch as far as the eyes can see. I was that woman, yes. Wearing grimy mens' tanks and thin flannel pants that flap around the knees. Waiting to be shot dead but instead, upon the instructions of a mysteriously kind but stony officer, hurled myself down hoping chance won't bite me, chance will deem me lovely, and there I survived. I fell flat on my face at the bottom of the hill, scrambled to my feet, and started to run before pausing even to think, "Did I just live?"

Sophie Full of Faith Part 1

I hereby release into the wild some excerpts of an idiot's story.

I felt like every organ in my body had frozen, waiting with both eagerness and trepidation to hear what exactly he meant.

“Like, you know, that time when we went to watch Iron Man, and you came to sit with me instead of with the other guys. You know. That was cool.”

So it wasn’t just my imagination.

It was a surprise to me to hear that my father’s parents, who I for so long had assumed was the antithetical relationship to my maternal divorced grandparents in Pusan, did not fall madly in love in the natural way.

Harabuji was a boxer, my sister retold, A boxer with a reputation. He had lost his rightful fortune to an uncle who wasn’t content with just the cash and intended on enslaving Harabuji as a sharecropper on his property. So he fled and made a living off jabbing his indomitable fists into as many sternums as he could. He was somewhere near Seoul when the Japanese colonized Korea and intended to take every unmarried Korean girl as comfort woman for their solders. Harabuji was passing through a village and on chance met the Halmuni’s parents in a noodle shop who inspired sympathetic eyes for her. She was soft-spoken and frail-looking with a deep gaze. He married her to save her from a life of degrading prostitution to the oppressors.

They had five children, my dad was the youngest of them, and led contented lives. One day my mother, carrying me in her swollen belly, and father decided to go to the city hall to certificate their marriage and discovered that Halmuni is Harabuji’s second wife. They confronted him about it and a couple other unsavory revelations were in store. That forsaken first wife had had a daughter; she was only two years old when he abandoned them both.

“Harabuji is a bad man,” my mother spat as she drilled the notion into us as if it was a military oath, “A bad man, and look at what kind of man he spawned.”

My father ignored the scathing personal remark and added, “I’m not sure if he ever saw them again but apparently the young girl grew up and got married about ten years ago and is living in Pusan.”

I gasped with delight at all the drama. The world, so full of secrets, was holding out on me all the gritty details that finally explained it: we are so screwed up but no one knows if you don’t mention it.

Color Outside the Lines: The Joy of Staging: It's not always glamorous!

Color Outside the Lines: The Joy of Staging: It's not always glamorous!: "I know I said I would post pictures of the office today, but Scott needed my help ... and you know how that goes. You see, Scott's a new rea..."

Oh my gosh.

I've recently been cleaning up a bit myself; my mother's out of the country and I'm just grabbing the opportunity while it's there! And you couldn't begin to guess the trinkets I've found in corners of the house I never even knew existed.

Scott Akdogan is a realtor, not a professional stager, so his take is that "it's not always glamorous!" But from a MILDLY ocd neatfreak, that just looks like a juicy challenged waiting to be cracked. Am I nuts? And about the stench, well that's what gas masks are for.

Yao suggested the last time we hung out before her missionary trip to Pennsylvania that I should set up a business of being paid to live in others' homes for a few days. Believe me, you wouldn't recognize your own room once you get back!

Three Cups of Tea - Mortenson & Relin

Wonderful book. When reading this, I wonder how many feel like they want to drop everything and move to Pakistan. Greg Mortenson built each of these schools in Pakistan with about $12,000 and hired teachers who are paid $1 a day which is a decent wage in their economy. Does that make sense? Doesn't it astound? Many American individuals can easily afford to build a school in Central Asia or Africa without sacrificing their standard of living.

I feel frowny about this. I want to go somewhere.