When I was [some low numberish] old, I was ripped out of my NYC melting pot community and flung up the eastern seaboard into a Boston suburb. This is how innocence is lost.

I remember waking up to the sound of buzzing, crackling, and stomping on that fateful day. It was early (as it always was in my household), and as I stepped out of my bedroom, I saw that the house was nearly emptied. A few months earlier, I had similarly woken up to a residential transformation. New furnishings adorned all four levels. Beautiful artwork, plants, and matchy matchy furniture.

What a reversal. And equally unexplained.

As I stepped tentatively across the veranda (or what I like to think of retrospectively and almost certainly in an idealized way as the veraaaahhhnda), I felt what must have been shock and disorientation, if I could give word to these feelings now.

The world stopped. Slow-motioned. Then sped up again. Like special effects used in movies. I demanded answers, but none were given. I was shoved into placation. And at the last moment–at a moment that I didn’t realize was the last moment–I was swept and swatted into the car.

It was at that point that I was told we were moving. We had moved before, but I had been younger then. These were at ages when answers didn’t need to be given. I was precocious, prescient, aware. But anyone who wasn’t inside my brain could rightfully be excused for not knowing that.

Honestly, I thought I was the head of the family. In some ways, I sort of was. I will continue to believe that until I die.

The moving van stood before us. It was covered like a tattoo sleeve with graffiti. I balked and wondered where we had found this thing. Embarrassment washed over me, as I wondered what our neighbors must think of this eyesore. What they must think about the family that seemed to make all efforts to isolate themselves from the harmony of the pack.

That’s how we stole away in broad daylight.

At some point along I-95 or I-93 or whatever highway sits between New York and Boston, I started to get excited about the prospect of seeing a foreign land and a new house. Everything was a novelty, including a pit stop at a rest area McDonalds.

Ooh. I pointed and proudly noted that the cheeseburgers in Connecticut were different than the ones in New York. They had mustard.

…but I didn’t like mustard. I asked if the ones in Boston would also have mustard. I didn’t really receive a definitive answer. I intended to answer it myself.

The graffiti truck kept creeping forward along the highway. We communicated with them in broken English via walkie talkie. Given the state of the paint job, we were pulled over multiple times by police. The little Korean family who could barely speak English stood side by side with the thugged-out movers, explaining to the police that we were moving. Actually, as it was my rightful role, I played translator and played to my charms as a well-kept proper-looking English-speaking child. Who knows? I may have even shook the officers’ hands, as I had been known to do in a pinch. I assured the officers that there was no funny business going on with the truck.

“It is the only truck we could get,” I explained apologetically. “I know it looks funny.”

We arrived in our Boston suburb, where the residential streets didn’t have sidewalks and everything felt a bit provincial. We were met by other family members. I noticed the floors in the house were creaky and uneven. I came to understand that this was a New England thing. At some point, I convinced myself that my house was part of the Underground Railroad and was comforted to believe there was some significance to our decidedly unfashionable new home.

My bedroom had one brown plaid wall. I was horrified and begged to have another bedroom. But decisions had been made.

I was sent to get pizza. The man behind the counter looked perplexed by the 10-or-so-year old before him with a wad of 20s. I couldn’t hold the pizzas myself, so my cousins and I each held one side of the large pie box. As we ran down the main street, there was a stumble and a trip. And then a flip. The pepperoni pizza had flipped cheese-side first onto the pavement. We stopped in our tracks.

I had failed in my duties to feed the family. I scraped the pizza off the concrete and reassembled it in the box. I paused, bent on my knees looking at the open box. I assessed that it was hot, the crust was intact, and that perhaps there might be a way for me to convince everyone that this is just what Massachusetts pizza looked like. I surgically removed all the little pebbles and decided that’s what I would do.

Back at the house, this didn’t go over well. But in the hub-bub of boxes being disassembled, carpets being rolled out, and cigarettes and loud Korean banter, it all seemed okay. I don’t remember what we ended up eating that night, but I feel like it might have been Chinese food on the porch. This dismayed me greatly for reasons I no longer recall.

So this was it.

My first day of school was a foreign experience. Not a Korean, Indian, Hispanic, or black kid in the class.

That’s when I realized that I was different. Really different. On the bus ride home, I was given the name “Connie Chung.” The name stuck with me for years. I was explained that dollars were currency, similar to yen…if my thick head could grasp that.

That year, I learned how to beat up on little boys who were my classmates. I also stopped speaking Korean for real-for real. I never spoke to my friends in New York ever again. I wonder if this is how running away became a survival pattern.

I think of the phases of my life in houses. The physical manifestation of an internal sense of “home” has always been important to me. Cultivating a sense of place and well-being though goes beyond the physical. That foundation lies within, and it’s a much harder task to build.

Today, almost 25 years later, I am back in Korea as an adult, dancing around this thing we call roots. Language provides a toolkit for understanding and for meaning. Here I am fighting to draw back up the language I had intentionally tried to forget as a child.