Paull Shin
[I was reading this which linked to this]
TW: Suicide
An excerpt from an interview with Washington State Senator Paull Shin:
How was your life before and after you were adopted by an American soldier?
Senator Shin: It was a dark age with many trials. In my life, I had to overcome three major trials: survival, education and identity as adoptee and immigrant. For survival, normally when you are born, you have parents, but I had none so I had no choice but to beg for food to stay alive at the train station. When the winter came, I struggled a lot for survival. During that time, when I was seven, I met a friend who was nine years old. He was also a street beggar and his name was Jaewon. In the morning, we separated to beg for food and by nightfall, we would meet at the station and sleep by cuddling each other to avoid from freezing. We became best buddies and dependent on each other to survive. However, one day he said to me, “Hobeom – Senator’s Korean name -, this is too much and I can’t do this anymore and I am going to kill myself.” I said, “Don’t do that, we have to live together for each other. We depend on each other.” One day, I came back to the station from a begging trip and I couldn’t find my friend and started to panic. I ended up finding Jaewon, laying down at the trail. I dashed down there only to discover his dead body. He had thrown himself into the running train and killed himself. I was shocked. I don’t know how long I cried for. All I could say was, “don’t you know that you are the only friend I had.” Korea was under Japanese occupation at the time. When the Japanese police came, they grabbed Jaewon’s body and threw him in the bucket like a piece of trash and took it away. During that moment, I said to Jaewon in my heart, “Jaewon, you are a coward. We should have lived together and you are gone now. I am not going to die and I am going to live for both of us.” Even today, I think of him and miss him. He gave me survival instinct: I am going to live no matter what happens. I feel that he made a substantial contribution for my reason to survive and become what I am today.
After World War 2, the Korean War came. During that time, I tasted a Hershey chocolate for the first time in my life. I had never tasted anything so delicious before in my life. So, everyday, I went after American soldiers. One day, I was picked up by one of the combat soldiers and I became his house boy. I ended up staying there for two and half years. Being alone and looking at American soldiers with abundance of clothes and blessings they had, I often became very lonely. So, one night I was crying alone and when I opened my eyes, an American soldier walked over to me, hugged me tight and said, ”I have three children in America and when they cry, it hurts me inside. I want to know why you are crying.” He became my adopted father. I was 16 then. I arrived in US in 1955 when I was 19. This is how I overcame my first trial, survival.
