Short essays written between chapters, on the table we grew up around, the names we answer to, and everything served in between.
Childhood is supposed to be buffered by time. Mistakes are absorbed gently, responsibility is introduced gradually, and safety is assumed rather than earned. In Who Stole My Pork Belly? adulthood arrives through necessity instead, and some children grow up not because they are ready, but because no one else can carry the weight.
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Money is usually discussed as a tool, a metric, or a marker of success. For children who grow up without it, money becomes something far more intimate. In Who Stole My Pork Belly? financial independence is never ambition or material desire. It is protection.
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Resilience is usually packaged as inspiration, something polished and aspirational. In reality it is far less elegant. In Who Stole My Pork Belly? it emerges not as a virtue chosen freely, but as a condition imposed by circumstance.
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Law is usually explained as prestige, logic, or influence. Beneath those reasons sits a quieter one. For those who grew up without reliable protection, the law is not merely a profession. It is a search for structure in a world that once felt ungoverned.
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Some pressure never announces itself. It lives in unspoken standards and the sense that your life was mapped out before you understood yourself. Finding your own path is not about rejecting your roots. It is about honoring them while still choosing who you become.
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Healing is often mistaken for forgetting, as though peace requires an empty slate. It is quieter than that. Letting go without forgetting means learning to carry what you have lived through without letting it define or control you.
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Pain reshapes us. It interrupts the flow of a life and forces us to meet parts of ourselves we had never noticed. Turning it into purpose is not about pretending everything happens for a reason. It is about deciding what you will do with what happened.
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Legacy is spoken about with pride, but alongside the pride sits a burden that rarely gets named. It surfaces in expectations, in responsibilities, in the quiet pressure to live up to something that existed long before you did.
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Every family has a currency. In some houses it is affection, in others silence. In a Seoul mansion in 1975, it was power, wealth, and the unyielding pedestal of the name Choi. Then the music stopped, and a plane landed at LAX.
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We had escaped the weight of a name in Seoul, but not the necessity of survival. A mother who once lived among maids and chauffeurs was now counting quarters in an LA laundromat. Then, one ordinary evening, a pot on the stove caught fire.
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An American playground is daunting for any child. It is a different order of terrifying when you do not speak the language. While the other kids chattered, I stood on the periphery, trapped behind a wall of silence. Books were how I broke through.
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By high school the terror of not speaking English had faded, replaced by something harder. Too Americanized for the traditionalists, too culturally anchored to blend in at school. I was a ghost shifting between two parallel universes.
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