THE HURON EMERY | ISSUE 3: DECEMBER 4 | FEATURE
6,605 miles from home: Navigating life without family ALLISON MI EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Sarah Kim didn’t want her family seeing her cry. So, as she waved back, she stared at the airport floor: shiny, white mondo rubber. But as the opaque double doors were sliding closed behind her, she couldn’t resist one last glance of her family. They were blurry through the tears. But just seeing them — that was more than enough for Sarah. “I’m not ready,” the words spun in her head. The double doors were about to m e e t halfway. “I’m not ready.” Clunk. T h e doors s h u t . Her family was gone. And Sarah, backpacked and surrounded by a sea of suitcases with a one-way ticket to America in hand, had one daunting realization. She was truly on her own. This had not always been the plan. When the Kim family decided to return to Suwon, Korea after five years in Ann Arbor, halfway through Sarah’s eighth grade year, they had every intention of keeping the family together. Their American life, after all, was tidily packed into boxes on a container ship sailing across the Pacific Ocean. However, two weeks after arriving back, Sarah became more realistic. “I actually had to get serious about my education,” Sarah said. “I started to get worried, scared thinking about it.” The five years she spent in America meant five years worth of Korean education out the window. Moreover, while her Korean peers had grown up in an environment preparing them for the eight-hour lifedictating College Scholastic Ability Test, her readiness was close to nothing. “Do I really want to stay here?” she wondered. “Maybe I am better off in America.” Her parents agreed; it was better for her — for her future — to go back. “I liked the idea,” Sarah said. Two weeks later, she was at the airport and the doors closed. “Until I realized I had to live alone.”
“Different” At the start of the second semester of Sarah’s eighth grade year, she was back in Ann Arbor. Except, she was staying on a different street, sleeping in a different house, living with a different family. “Parent or guardian,” the form read. Never once had Sarah thought the tagalong word “guardian” would be applicable to her. The rest of her eighth grade year was “different.” “It was terrible,” Sarah said. “I was like ‘This is not right.’” She FaceTimed her family once a week on Friday n i g h t s and spent most of her time in her bedroom. As welcoming as her guardians were, simply lounging on their living room couch was out of the question. “I just can’t open up to them,” Sarah said. “I can’t just talk to them like I do with my parents because I’m not completely comfortable. So I just needed to stay in my room. The guardians are nice, but that’s when I started to feel really empty, knowing no matter how many great people I have around me, family is just a thing no one can fill in.” Even though Ann Arbor had not changed, through Sarah’s eyes, without her family, the city seemed to have lost its luster. TJ Maxx was one of Sarah’s mom’s many loves. Mother-daughter weekend field trips to the store became part of the agenda. They would splurge on dog toys, cotton candy and piping bags they’d never use. “Many good memories and good feelings start there,” Sarah thought back. But when she returned without her mom, there was no use for dog toys, since her toy poodle Louis was in Korea. The cotton candy looked dull. The baking accessories actually seemed useless. “Wow, I really miss my mom,” was all Sarah could think. Without her mom, TJ Maxx just didn’t feel the same. “It just felt like a store.” 6,605 miles from home At first, at Clague, Sarah could forget that her family was 6,605 miles away. But after classes ended, when she got “home,” it was straight upstairs to her bedroom, no casual banter of “How
was your day?” or “How was that math test?” “Home just didn’t feel like home,” she said. Small things like seeing her friends being dropped to their house made her melancholy. “They were going home, home to their families, and I was going home too but it didn’t feel like the same kind of home,” she said. Through the car window, Sarah saw her friend’s parents lovingly greeting them at the door. “When I saw those moments, it reminded me that I was actually here alone,” Sarah said. “It made me wish I had my parents just pick me up from school or drop me off. Just the small things would do it.” Most people assumed Sarah lived with her parents, that she circled “parent” on field trip permission slips, that whoever drove her “home” were appa and eomma. “Everyone assumed that I was with my parents, which made it harder for me to open up,” she said. “And it was like, ‘Okay, I’ll just go along with it.’” The fact that Sarah could not relate to anyone about this experience and could not ask for advice only made it more difficult. “No one could understand how I was feeling,” she explained. “And I understood that no one could really do anything about it, and that was what made it hard. I had no one to rely on.” She paused, holding back a few tears. “Sometimes I question if it’s even worth it,” she said. “Sometimes I just want to give up.” In a black A-line dress Sarah walked across the stage during her eighth grade graduation ceremony to pick up her paw-stamped diploma, and one thought dominated: “I wish my parents could see me.” But she still kept her chin up high. “I was sad, but that moment was also when I stopped whining about my situation and actually started thinking about my future,” Sarah said. “That’s when I saw there were a lot more opportunities and options here in America. I think my parents were focused on education and I was just interested in having fun, that’s why I was so stubborn about moving here.” After the ceremony, a friend’s mom gave Sarah a bouquet of rose tulips, knowing her parents couldn’t make it. GRAPHICS BY KELLY PARK
“I have many hopes,” Sarah said. “My parents have many hopes for me. No matter how much I miss them, I know I have to get up the next day because life is going on. I have to take care of my future. That’s what’s keeping me going.” No one, of course, could have predicted Sarah’s next chapter. When schools went virtual due to COVID-19 in March, 2020, Sarah didn’t see any reason to stay in Ann Arbor. As soon as school was confirmed to be virtual for the rest of the academic year, she booked the first flight to Korea. “It just made me so happy knowing that I could be with my family for longer than just the three months of summer,” Sarah said. No combination seemed more perfect than asynchronous Google Classroom assignments and a life with her family under the same roof. “My life was great,” she said. “It was really all happy.” When virtual synchronous classes started in Sarah’s sophomore year, however, her sleep schedule flipped. Due to the time difference in Korea, she started school at 10 p.m. and stayed up until 5 a.m., attending physics or orchestra — during which she had to explain to the teacher why she couldn’t play along to Giddens on the violin, since it would wake up the entire apartment building. Sarah never woke up before noon, but early enough to have lunch with her mom. “It was really nice to have lunch with her,” Sarah said, “not just eating by myself in my room.” Sarah’s “lunch” — a breakfast in disguise — consisted of white toast, sunny side-up eggs with ketchup and mom-made coffee — the best coffee, according to Sarah. Afterward, they would go feed the street’s abandoned cat — an orange tabby — whom they named Raemi after the apartment building’s n a m e , Raemian.
“It all felt too good to be true,” she said. “It felt like a dream.” The last days In August, 2021, it was confirmed that Ann Arbor Public Schools would be going back fully in-person. “During that last month, I wasn’t completely happy anymore,” Sarah said. “I was just overwhelmed. Everything I did, I knew it would be a last.” Grocery shopping with appa would be a last. Feeding Raemi after lunch would be a last. Meals with eomma would be a last. “By the last week, it tasted like a different breakfast,” Sarah said. Since Sarah wanted to spend as much time as possible with her family, she booked the plane ticket last minute, arriving in Ann Arbor two days before the first day of school. On that flight, instead of watching in-flight movies, Sarah replayed memories, the memories that would comfort, strengthen and motivate her to persist in the tough — and she would say, right — choice she has made. “Even though it’s really difficult, I know it’s making me a stronger person and more independent,” she said. “I know in the long term I will be grateful for this experience.” Before landing in America, Sarah recalled the 14th floor apartment living room, drowned in sunlight, when she was lounging on the family couch, enjoying freshly cut apples and watermelon with her mom and sister, laughing at her dad as he cursed the politicians on TV, and watching as Louis played with a few too many TJ Maxx toys. And she thought to herself: “This is all I want.”