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By Root 1164 0

and Goodness. I was glad to have had experience living away from home. In the beginning months, much sniffling was heard after lights out, and some simply couldn’t adjust to living among the many different classes and personalities of students and teachers, and went home. Academically I did well at Ewha. I majored in early childhood education, minored in nursing and received special permission to take courses in English literature as a way to improve my language skills. Drawn to anatomy, I studied bones, muscles and organs as if by memorizing their function and interdependence, I would gain clarity to new feelings of ambiguity, along with an increasing sense of dissociation that filled the hours I wasn’t studying.

The stately Ewha campus had spacious lawns, a soaring church and impressive Western-style granite buildings bordered by trees and shrubs. Paulownia, magnolia, dogwood and cherry blossom trees filled the air with flowers and scent in the spring, maples and beeches brought color in autumn, and dozens of varieties of pines and junipers kept winters green. Inside the buildings were many stairs and large classrooms with hard wooden seats. I walked the grounds and knew it was wonderful, that I should be ecstatic—here I was, fulfilling a dream! It’s true that we all felt privileged, because we were Korean, and women, and thoroughly modern. Our skirts went up an inch a year, we wore baggy trousers cinched at the ankle, and many girls bobbed their hair. So much was exciting and new, like hot showers, and yet, though I tried to hide it even from myself, something was wrong with me and I couldn’t say what.

I searched the Bible, looking for the calm it gave my mother. I rediscovered the inspiring beauty of the Psalms, found fascinating stories and marvelous history in the Old Testament, and lessons about the liberation of faith in the New Testament. But, much as my father might have, I saw the Book as a chronicle of a foreign people’s faith and history rather than a map that would lead me to salvation. For a moment I considered that my growing alienation from the Bible meant I was becoming a political isolationist and conservative traditionalist, very much like my father. Then I attributed the religious estrangement to homesickness and academic overstimulation. But I loved learning and losing myself in studying, and while I naturally missed my family and the familiar spaces of home, I was proud and pleased to be an Ewha student. I embraced the lessons exemplified by my mother’s Christian living, and then put the Bible aside when it became clear that I lacked spiritual passion that could sustain belief once I closed its pages. Keeping these agnostic sentiments hidden, I further discounted my worth when it grew obvious that I possessed not a single spark of the religious fervor exhibited by my classmates at daily chapel. I often found myself wishing I were in the library instead. Obligation mustered me to Sunday worship, and I was conscious of envying the few Buddhist and atheist girls’ freedom from church attendance, though those girls were shunned. I did love listening to the renowned Ewha choir. The women’s seamless harmony often brought me to tears, which I attributed to the fierce beauty of the swelling music. But over the months, then years, I doubted that beauty could feel so full of pain and inexplicable longing.

I avoided joining friendship circles, averse to the meanness of gossip, but found diversion with a few friends. My classmates welcomed me when I accompanied them for an afternoon of hiking or swimming in the summer and ice skating or snowball fights in the winter. I declined most sightseeing excursions—too sad to be reminded of places I’d been with Imo, and people like the princess, her strong maid and even that Japanese guard, whose lives were far more restricted and controlled than mine would ever be, and whom I would never see again. It didn’t matter. My reticence about those years and the refinement of my manners were mistaken for aloofness, and such invitations dwindled over time.

Happily, a renewed