Su Yeon Kim/Memory Chain Essay/Thursday 1-3pm

201500568 Su Yeon Kim

 

This isn't my story but it definitely is one that had a significant impact on my life. It's bizarre how you can live through someone else's experiences as though they were your own. This is a period between the years 2009 and 2010. My brother is four years older than I am and around the time I was about to enter high school, he was about to enter university. Although I'm positive that that my parents didn't consciously treat my brother and I differently, there was undoubtedly always more pressure on my brother than on me. I was the polar opposite of my brother back when we were still living in Fiji, for instance, while my brother was extremely studious, I was far more easy-going and art-driven. This reflected in our grades so my parents naturally began to expect more from my brother. Of course, I was never jealous of him and only had pride and support for him. However, when my brother started applying for universities, it was very typical of my father to pick out very prestigious universities. I did not think this impossible but the chances of being accepted were very slim simply because Fiji is such a small place with limitations. My father put my brother up to the mission of preparing for university as any conventional American student would such as studying for the SATs. Never in my life have I felt the four years gap with my brother the biggest until I saw him prepare for a new life. During semester breaks, my brother and I had always searched for activities to do together just to combat our boredom but this time around he was shut up in his room studying all day. Sundays were always family time when we would cook and simply enjoy each other's company. However, my brother was still cooped up in his room pouring over a SAT book. The times my mom used me as a food deliverer were the only times I would catch glimpses of my brother.

After a whole year of that routine, my father decided to change the course from the States to Korea after acquiring some new information. Thankfully all my brother's hard work did not go to waste as the university my brother was applying to in Korea was only school that accepted SAT scores. Nevertheless, this was a risky gamble as my brother was going all in for one school. It would either be a hit or miss and there definitely wasn't a Plan B. After finishing up the application in early February of 2010, he was finally a free man and I had just started high school. Probably three weeks into the semester, the teacher came into the classroom and told us that there was a cyclone heading towards Fiji so we all had to return home. Fiji being the small country it is, people fell into a panic and the process of getting home was chaotic. Eventually my brother and I had met and made it home but my parents were still caught up with work. So while waiting at home, my brother decided on a spur of the moment to visit the school homepage and found out the acceptance results were out early. With shaking hands he followed the link to check the results and saw that he was accepted, it was an ecstatic moment. Immediately we called our parents and they forgot about work and rushed home to celebrate. To this day, my dad says the happiest day of his life is when my brother was accepted into that university. It changed our family's future for the better and especially mine because after graduating from high school I followed suit and came to Korea. It was my brother who initiated my family's return to Korea.