Chapter One: The First Three Years

Here the story starts with the one that started it all: me, Natalie Haejin Lee, ringleader, eldest, and storyteller.

This is a story of a life – multiple lives, actually, each moment an interwoven fabric of thousands of quivering existences, all with one common factor – we.

I say ‘we’ instead of ‘me’ because though the story started with me, it never was really within my grasp. It was we, and we grew up shaped by my wild imaginings, Emma’s amicable willingness, Jeannie’s stolid spirit, and Taylor’s stubborn heart.

I was born on September 12, 1990. Emma was born on the New Year’s Day of 1991. Jeannie, my younger sister, popped out on the leap day of 1992. Taylor, Emma’s sister, completed us seven months later on November 3, 1992.

But now the dates no longer matter because we have become indefinable even to ourselves. We are four girls wearing matching han-boks silhouetted against a cherry-blossom background. We are four overlapping figures on a moonlit beach.


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By the time Taylor was born and the foursome completed, we were all living in Richmond, Virginia. Aunt Jennifer, Uncle Matthew, Emma and Taylor lived in a house not too far from my home; my home was just down the street from our grandparent’s house.

By the end of 1992, there were four bundles joy now rolling around in the playpen. In actuality, Emma was the only one doing any rolling. I was fully walking, (thank you very much) and Taylor had popped out of the hospital only a month before and was much too delicate to stay in the playpen with three rambunctious almost-toddlers.

Our parents were all busy: Aunt Jennifer taught fourth grade at an elementary school across town; my father was a rocket scientist for NASA; my mother was getting her Masters at the University of Richmond, and Emma and Taylor’s father was a pastor at the small Korean Presbyterian Church down the street, where we all attended service every Sunday. So Halmoni, or grandmother, became our babysitter. Every morning, before our parents left for work, her four lovely granddaughters would be toted to her house and left in her trusting care. Before the age of two, Jeannie fell down the stairs so many times that Halmoni wouldn’t even bother to pick her up after she took her daily tumble. Taylor’s special talents included frequently attempting to pull out all of Emma’s hair, and burping louder than her father. Emma watched so many Sesame Street episodes, she could imitate Big Bird before she could walk. She was even better at it than Halmoni.

Halmoni and Grandpa owned a little convenience store somewhere in downtown Richmond. They would take us there, three car seats in the back of her cranky Nissan, and me strapped in the front seat, which was illegal, but who cared? We would generally cause mayhem once we arrived at the store. Jeannie once ate two consecutive bags of bagels before she was found, and even I was guilty of knocking over a soda stack or two; however, situated right in front of the store, we were cute enough to serve as some sort of marketing ploy.

I remember those Richmond summers with a fondness that probably didn’t exist during the summers themselves. We would play absurd games, pretending we were orphans living off “roots and berries” in the wild, unroamed jungle of our grandparent’s backyard, or secret agents on secret missions.

Our games were a mystical cross between the influence of the television and our own, unbridled minds. Unfortunately, most of our escapades got me into trouble. Generally, I would take the blame for our schemes because, well, they were my idea, unfortunately.

Like the time I told Taylor she was Pocahontas, and induced her to jump from the deck into our bowl-pool, or the time I decided that we were fugitive prisoners of war running through the rampant forest and had to “escape” to the free world beyond by leaving the backyard and running around Grandma’s neighborhood, pretending to shoot anything that moved. That particular episode led to Grandma padlocking the backyard fence.

So all through those first tender years, we would play outside, in our grandparents’ backyard, running through the sprinkler, cooking up some elaborate story, or playing fetch with Sabrina, Police Uncle’s dog.

I believe Police Uncle deserves a bit of explaining at this point.

He was the youngest of four on my mother’s side, the self-proclaimed rebel, the only one not to graduate college, have a stable, boring job as an engineer (like everyone else in my family)—the only non-regular attendee of church, the only one to bring beautiful, blonde women into the family, much to my grandparents’ chagrin. We called him Police Uncle because—well…he was a policeman.

One of my most treasured childhood memories is sitting in my Police Uncle’s lap, maneuvering down the narrow roads of a Richmond neighborhood, childish hands securely on the wheel of his dusty red Jeep, or even better, his police car, “American Pie” crackling through the speakers, a Seven-Eleven slurpie in the cup holder and a Happy Meal in the passenger seat.

Our veneration for Police Uncle was without a doubt a tangible force—my earliest writing journals are filled with him; Emma, Taylor, Jeannie and I argued violently about who would get to sit next to him during summertime dinner, which was a huge and complicated affair. When we heard his police siren blaring down the motionless drive we all immediately ran, fought and kicked to be the first to be thrown in the air, the first to receive the candy that was surely hidden in Police Uncle’s pocket next to the handcuffs—to four bored little girls, Police Uncle was a god.

The first three years of our lives passed in this happy way. We were more than cousins, more than sisters. During those years, we became one, with matching smiles and eyes and the same freckle at the corner of the elbow.