Terra Heatherly-Norton

5/5/15

Journal Entry #5

I am interviewing my roommate’s grandmother for my final project and I thought I’d share a short story from the memoir. Anna grew up in South Korea at age seven her family became extremely poor, by age nine she had to drop out of school. At age ten the Korean War started and at age eleven the beginning of a three-year drought ensued. At age fourteen she attended nigh school and work as a janitor during the day to afford it. One day one of her teachers invited Anna to her house after school. Anna was always starving, her family had very little money and many of their recourses went to helping refuges from the north. She was so hungry she wasn’t able to study.

While the teacher had not mentioned anything about it Anna reflected that she must have known about her starvation for when she got to the teachers house a “huge bowl of beautiful white rice” was sitting on the kitchen counter and it was “surrounded by a sea of fruits and meat.” The teacher fed Anna and told her to run along and complete her studies because there is nothing more important than education. As Anna told me this story we are sitting in a Chinese buffet surrounded by food. She starts to look around and tears up a bit. “I think of her often” she states simply.

Anna came to America around age 30 learned English and became a lunch lady in Ohio. She feels very passionately about feeding children since she was always hungry growing up. “You must eat to study and you must study to eat,” she says, “I love feeding the children, they put food in them and then they can learn.” As I listen to her story I reflect on her comments about my weight, when Katie first introduced me to her grandma a couple weeks earlier she had commented on how skinny I was then gave Katie 20 dollars to take us to McDonalds. It struck me as odd at the time but I now realize Anna doesn’t have the perspective most of western civilization are privileged enough to have, we associate being skinny with being beautiful, but Anna relates it to starvation and poverty.

So when she insists Katie and I get another plate of stir fry before we leave and asks us twelve times if we have enough food, it is coming from such a genuine place of concern that I am thrust into confronting my own privileged upbringing and the alien idea of starvation, a concept I can barely grasp. These types of stories put into perspective the problems that most people today face and how truly trivial they are in the grand scheme of life. The reality of it refreshes my views constantly and puts into perspective what the true meaning of suffering really is.