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My Childhood Has Been Surrounded By Stories

Decent Essays

My childhood has been surrounded by stories, whose casts and settings are as real and fantastical as any fairytale. Masterfully orchestrated, these stories have been brought to life by the people that have survived decades to tell them, people I love dearly but will never truly understand — my grandparents. A South Korean surgeon trapped on a North Korean farm; a razor-sharp loan shark of a mother in Haiti; a sibling-favoring geography teacher in South Korea; a proud doctor in Montreal.

These strange and unknowable people are my ghosts, characters in unvisited places and unknowable times. These timeless moments are the fragments of my history, woven for me in that haphazard place between the real and the imaginary, the past and the present. These stories are the legacy of my grandparents. I am a stranger to their worlds, worlds that survive only in their memories. The people who once inhabited their lives becoming ghosts that inhabit mine.

My grandmothers: one Haitian — Grandmama — and one Korean — Halmoni. Each from a wildly different culture and world and yet so similar to one another — smart, headstrong . . . rude to waiters. My Korean grandfather — Haraboji. Quiet, sweet, burps at the dinner table, and loved at the community gym where he has spent two hours, every day, for the past three years. And my Haitian grandfather — Grandpapa, who died in 2007, joining the rest of the ghosts in an almost-remembered place in my mind.

When I think about my grandparents, I

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