Category: My Book

My husband and I sometimes wonder what would happen if my cousin, Suk Hyang unni, and my husband’s cousin, Hyo-soon unni, had dinner together at a restaurant. It would be a tough (and entertaining) match because they are both headstrong and always fight to pick up the tab. My husband only has one brother; but…

Part of why hosting means so much to me is it’s one way I am able to give and receive spiritually. One good example of this is with the Potters. The Potters are a volunteer gospel praise group from Korea who tour and sing for different churches. We first met them when they visited our…

Our involvement with Hope Brooklyn occurred, like most events in our life, by what some may call coincidence and what we prefer to name as God’s hand. It started when Drew Hyun, who officiated our son Kevin’s wedding, suddenly called us one day and asked if he could drop by for a cup of tea.…

When we moved to Montclair in 1991, we started attending a church called KUPC. My husband wasn’t a Christian at the time, but a customer of his fish market let him know the church had a Korean school. He thought teaching the kids Korean was important, so that’s how our family’s journey into Christian fellowship…

My daughter Anne once asked me, “When are you truly happy?” Happiness is difficult to define, but time certainly flies when you do what you truly love. In that regard, I am happiest when gardening or painting. Preparing to host is similar—time goes by faster because my heart is in it. My husband had no…

It was still early in the morning when Jae called, asking me to receive a guest who was already on their way from JFK airport. This sudden guest was one of his upper classmates. I had only met him a couple of times before he moved back to LA, where he’d grown up. I opened…

I had lunch with Youngjoo. She is a friend of my younger sister and now teaches piano in college. She was delighted when I invited her to Hampton house on July 4th weekend one summer. She stayed overnight, and we watched the fireworks on the beach. We finally went out for lunch when the pandemic…

Ever since we moved to Brooklyn from our Montclair house, we began inviting our nieces, nephews, and our friends’ children—who affectionately call us uncle and aunt—for dinner, alongside our grown children. We secretly hoped to provide our children with a sense of growing up in an extended family, reminiscent of the olden days when all…

I met my husband, Jae, in March of 1982 in New York. I had been studying in Paris since 1980 as an art student. My sister Aera met someone in New York in 1982, and I flew over to attend her engagement. My other sister, Soonjin, who was living in NY with Dangsun at the…

I married my husband, who was a graduate student at Columbia, in the spring of 1983. Most of our friends were still students and singles at the time. Our wedding gifts mostly consisted of items affordable to college students, such as a $20 electric skillet or a set of forks. We initially moved into my…