Yuhl-Sheem (7)

Our family stopped going to church then too. There was a scandal with our minister at that time. He had convinced our family to donate money to buy a church van. We thought it was a good idea; the church could use the van for the youth group and to pick up the elderly church members. We gave a lot of money. In the end, the minister kept the money for himself. The other congregants didn't seem to know or care. They got mad at us and thought we were lying. One of the men yelled at me and said, "You're a woman! You need to keep quiet and listen to the men! How dare you talk so much?" I yelled right back at him and said, "Yes I am a woman, so what? Women have minds and eyes and also know what is going on." We left that church. It was around the same time that we lost our business. I didn't go to church or go to work for a long time.


All that time I didn't go to church it didn't feel right. It was very uncomfortable. Something was missing. I wanted to hear hymnals being sung; I wanted to sing; I wanted to hear sermons; I wanted to worship. My life felt so different then; I didn't know that it was because I wasn't going to church until much later. As Christians we should go to church. We need to go to worship. That's why we went back to church.


The first few years after the bankruptcy were very hard for me. I didn't feel like I could talk to anybody about it. I had my husband but I didn't want to make him feel bad. I didn't want to bother my family either. My parents and brothers and sister are very close to me but I didn't want to burden them so I kept a lot of my feelings inside of me.


Then, and now, I didn’t really have any friends to talk to either. Korean people make friends at church. They think a lot about money and are always competitive about their kids. I don't really care for that. I admit though, sometimes there are women at church that I want to talk to but almost all of them went to college in Korea. So even if I want to talk to them, I have a complex. I feel like I can't talk to them because I didn't go to college. Because I think about that a lot, I can't make friends. Even my husband knows that. But then I try to think that even though they went to college there are other things that I know that they don't. A lot of the times I look at their kids who run around all the time or do bad things. In the end I try to remind myself that they're not better than me because they went to college. I think so what? I didn't go to college, but there are still lots of things that I know. So what? And I just move on.

Because I couldn’t go to school, this is my biggest dream for my daughters. After we moved back into an apartment I felt so sorry for them. Our apartment was so little and crowded. James and I worried about the well being of our daughters. The room they shared was so little and dark; I didn't want them to be like my plants: cramped and suffocated. My husband and I decided to give our daughters the master bedroom in the apartment so they could have enough room to think and do their homework. So from that day to the day Christen went off to college, the two of them shared the bigger room.