TABLE
OF CONTENTS
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Caroline's Bio Page
This is a paper I wrote for
my
creative
non-fiction
class.
Maybe this will provide a little
bit of insight into who I am…
Places
I Call Home
“Where is
your hometown? Where are you from?” It’s a question I answer with a laugh and a
slightly thoughtful look but one that I secretly dread.
For many this is a simple question that
requires a single pronoun, perhaps two, but for me where do I begin? To simplify things I usually blurt out “Los Angeles”
which is
where I go to school, but that’s not a satisfying answer.
Los Angeles
is my current residence and perhaps it is home
for now but my life stretches across many more cities and even another
continent. So ask me again and I’ll give you the whole picture. Where is my hometown?
Atlanta,
Georgia
is the first place I remember. It is the
place where I was born, of which I have a couple of sketchy memories of
my
younger self. The place of coloring
books, dim lights during nap times, birthday parties with small
red-headed
twins, ducks with shades of brown and white geese chasing the trail of
bread
crumbs. The place of pink, orange and
green flower garlands, black robes, my father with his PhD diploma in
hand, and
my mother’s proud smile. The place of
Sunday school retreats, trampolines, and sing-along-songs.
The place where I learned that taking colored
paper from the classroom without asking is not okay.
Atlanta was where
I formed a sense of
being. I remember being confused when my
preschool teacher first called me “Caroline.” I
had been called “Eun-young” my entire young life and I
did not even
hear her call out the foreign name until she pointed at me and firmly
said,
“Caroline.” Then I understood that I was Caroline, that the name was
me. One day in the first grade my
parents told my sister and me that we would be moving to a different
place. My father had secured a job as an
assistant professor in Tennessee. A couple of days before we moved I caught the
chicken pox from a fellow student in class. Pock
marked, itchy and red, my life transitioned from Atlanta,
Georgia to Chattanooga, Tennessee.
And
just like that, the city of Chattanooga
became the
second home in my young life. It became
the place of a happy childhood untainted by the worries and burdens
soon to
come. It was the place of piñatas,
pet
rabbits and hamsters, two wheeled bicycles, the place where I fell in
love with
Mrs. Smith, my beautiful second grade teacher, who introduced me to the
wonderful world of books. The place of the
Little House on the Prairie series, Scholastic catalogs, summer days
with swim
meets, jolly slumber parties, and the BBC Narnia movies.
The place where my imagination ran wild
without constraint, the place where I became best friends with a dog
named
“Shelty” who lived next door. The place
of violin lessons, metronomes, concerts and talent shows where the
yellow
spotlight flooded upon me in my poofy polka dotted dress and my
squeaking
instrument in the school auditorium.
Chattanooga
provided me with a carefree
childhood. I loved my family’s pink
painted
house and the neighborhood pool down the lane. I
always rode my bicycle along the streets as fast as I
could without
holding the handlebars and believed it to be a major accomplishment. During summers my skin became ten shades
darker from swim meets and pool parties and in winter, while my skin
normalized
into its original color, I piled on layers and layers of clothes to
play
outside in the snow, rolling snow men, snow women, and little snow
children. My favorite time of the year
was when my father brought out the family Christmas tree from the attic
and we
had our yearly ritual of decorating the tree with Bing Cosby belting
out
“Silver Bells” from the stereo.
Then
suddenly my
world
changed… Unsatisfied with his job in Tennessee, my
father had
an urge to go back to the country he had left 12 years ago. He left one winter day to seek a teaching
position in the country of his own parents but a country that I, his
daughter,
knew nothing about. He came back two
months later, excited with the future prospects of our family. He had gotten a job at a university and that
February, our family of four packed up for a new life.
So Korea
became home for six years and
it was there that I grew from a child to a teenager.
It was the place where I met curious eyes and
questions such as “how do you say yonpil
in English?” It was where fuzzy yellow
baby chicks were sold at the school gate, where daily “national”
morning
exercises were held in the school sports field, where high school
students
lived and died under the weight su’neung—the yearly college exams. The place of school picnics, dance contests,
and senior trips to Kyongju. The
place of uniform skirts, black stockings,
countless multiple choice tests, giggles at Pizza Hut, playing hooky,
and
karaoke nights.
The first
few
years in Korea
were a thoroughly confusing time. While
my classmates ploughed on through science and Korean poetry, I spent
each night
with my father doggedly practicing my Korean letters.
When my teacher asked me a question in class,
I had to rely on my jjak—my seat
buddy—to answer for me. The tradition of
capital punishment terrified me the first year until I became
accustomed to the
slap of the ruler upon tender palms. Despite
the group of classmates that rallied around me in
school—being
from America made
me
automatically cool, although I had to put up with the boys’ relentless
teasing—I cried for weeks at night from loneliness and homesickness for
my life
back in Tennessee. But it was here that I learned that the world
is a much bigger place than I had ever known. In
Korea,
my little world burst and I had to learn to cope with the challenges of
a
foreign language and a foreign culture. But
before long, because I was young, within two years I
conformed and
became Korean. My American identity was
gradually put aside.
Just as I
thought I had found my
place as a Korean teenager, my world shifted yet again.
When I was halfway done with my second year
in high school, my parents decided to send my sister and me back to the
U.S.
to continue our education there. And
that’s how the city of Davis in California
became my
home. It is a place where downtown
streets are named from A to G and 1st to 5th and
the most
popular hangout is the local In-and-Out. It
is the place of sweet chocolate boxes on Valentine’s
Day and naïve
puppy love. The place of spunky, snobby
cheerleaders, Norwegian friends, badminton matches, darkrooms, and
yearbooks. The place where I found God
and sin. The place that has a bicycle
for its city symbol, where the smell of cow manure floated afar on
windy hot
summer days.
In Davis, I had to
partly shed my Korean-ness,
rediscover my American identity and forge a dual one.
It was there I learned to become
Korean-American. It was tough knowing I
wasn’t one or the other but slowly I learned that I could be both and
learned
to love both parts that made up me. Davis was home
for three
years and it was there that I learned responsibility, consequences, and
readied
to become an independent college student.
So
currently my
home is in
Westwood, Los Angeles. It has been for the past three years and will
be for at least another.
All these
places, all these cities,
each of them have a part in my answer to where my hometown is. My childhood, my adolescence, my memories, my
joys, my tears, my heartaches are spread far and wide in all of these
places. To me “hometown” is not really a
single place like most people make it out to be. In
this ever changing world, the old words
“home is where the heart is” rings truer than any other truth. All these places have a special part of my
heart and they are my hometowns. These
are the places that I call home.
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