CHARACTER PROFILE:
YESEUL CASTRO

by Alice La

Instagram Bio- “Yeseul Castro of House Slytherclaw, the Unrested, Queen of Flakiness, Khaleesi of Alpacas, Maker of Banana Pancakes, and Mother of Hobbits.”

The metallic taste of blood filled her mouth with an uncomfortable warmth as she shivered in the soft evening light, clenching and unclenching her hands in a haphazard attempt to calm her elevating heartbeat. The cuts on her arms were beginning to sting as she dug her fingernails into her palm, a familiar cold rushing up her spine.

Fear.

Time seemed to stop in that moment as the light glistened off the shears held in her stepmother’s hands. The fingers holding the weapon were soft and dainty, but the vicious resolve with which they clenched the steel made her stomach churn frantically. The girl tore her eyes away from the shears and met her stepmother’s gaze, letting out a soft gasp at the dark eyes that stared back at her. The hatred they held was so deep, so foreign, that they glittered with a savage, inhumane glow. She stumbled as she tried to take a step back, a single thought racing across her mind.

“So this is what a demon looks like.”

--

Emily Yoon was born in Seoul, South Korea on September 24, 1990. As a toddler she grew up amongst friends and family in the small province of Seogyo-dong, the only child in Soonkoo Yoon and Mikyung Park’s three person family. For five years they lived happily in their small apartment, enjoying a quiet lifestyle until their eyes were drawn westward by tales of the American Dream.

“The two of them were both people with a lot of hopes. They had so many things they wanted to do but they married at 24 and 27, an age when they were too young to fully realize what they wanted to do with their lives.” my mom shares.

Having hit a professional wall in their careers as a photographer and makeup artist, Emily’s parents decided that moving to the United States was the only way to ensure a better life and a better future for themselves. They spontaneously moved to the Bronx and sent Emily to attend PS. 200, a nearby elementary school that would become her first exposure to an entirely English curriculum.

“Emily?” my dad asks looking over at me. “I met her when she first came to America. She was really smart. She was incredibly bright for such a young child, but the first thing I really noticed was the birthmark on her face. It’s not really a birthmark- it’s an abnormality called hemangioma, and it grew bigger and bigger as she got older. I thought it was really unfortunate for her to have something like that from such a young age. If she got surgery they could have removed it, and it just shows her parent’s irresponsibility.” 

Soonkoo and Mikyung quickly grew disillusioned by the cultural differences in the starkly African American “ghetto,” deciding instead to move to Hawaii once Emily finished 5th grade. They were still hanging onto the promises of opportunity that had initially drawn them to the country, eager to have their professional ambitions fulfilled.

My mom nods, “Emily was really happy in Korea, but after arriving in America and being immediately put into unfamiliar surroundings while her parents constantly had to work, I remember feeling really bad for her at the time.”

Emily’s middle school years in the Paradise State marked the beginnings of what she recalls as the happiest time in her life. Her mother attended weekly choir practices with all the other young church ladies and consistently brought Emily along so that she could play with the 11 year old choir children. They would race inside and around the brick building late into the night, having sleepovers and little barefoot adventures, giggly evenings where everything was funny and the summer felt endless. 

Smiling wistfully Emily explains that the best part was simply having the luxury to “be like a little child.” 

Having always been a committed bookworm, middle school was an exciting endeavor for Emily. Everything about it attracted her, from learning new things to being able to socialize with her friends. “I still like really like school.” she says with a smile. 

However, as Emily entered her last year of middle school the family was torn apart by an abrupt divorce, leaving Emily in the custody of her mother. At the young age of 13 she followed her mother and moved out of the house. Like many other typical Korean father and daughter relationships Emily had never been very close with her father. It was never uncomfortable being with him, but Emily preferred to stay with her mother. With her mom she could talk about boys and gossip, and conversation flowed naturally as though they were close friends.

Just as Emily was slowly growing accustomed to a life with split parental custody, her relationship with her mother was permanently torn apart after she met someone online. In love with a man she had never met in person she left for Korea to be with him, refusing to take Emily along. “I believe that she didn’t want me with her because she saw me as a burden.”

With no option but to remain in America, Emily fell back into her father’s custody. He soon made plans to get remarried after similarly meeting a woman online, much to Emily’s dismay. “I just thought it was ironic, like first my mom met somebody online, now my dad’s meeting somebody online, and I was like really guys?” With a little sigh, she continues, “Even as a child I don’t think I was the priority for my parents. They always kind of put their happiness before anything. Which I don’t blame them for, people are different.”

Despite the disappointments Emily still stood up a little taller when her new step-mother walked through the door, her excitement at the prospect of having another mother figure outweighing her skepticism. And she did seem like a kind lady, a perfect cookie cutter Jehovah’s Witness type of kind that Emily’s father seemed to like. Her first impression was so perfect, so thorough that there was nothing for Emily to complain about. There was nothing concrete she could put her finger on other than the fact that her new mother was only 15 years older than her and 13 years younger than her father. But first impressions eventually fade, and Emily grew accustomed to her step-mother’s presence in her life. 

Seeming to anticipate some sort of outburst, her step-mother began to call Emily out for every small, trivial wrongdoing. If she answered a little too late, if she spoke a little too loudly, if she didn’t hear something that was said to her, if she looked a bit too angry that day. They were easily excusable and couldn’t concretely be called to attention, but Emily slowly began to notice warning signs around the house. “I don’t necessarily know if I took them as warning signs but now that I think about it she progressively got worse. She didn’t give me a chance to be like a normal teenager. She wanted to nip my rebellion in the bud.”

“She was a psychopath that was good at hiding that she was a psychopath.” my mom adds.

 When just talking wasn’t enough Emily’s step-mother would corner her on the living room sofa, in the kitchen, in her bedroom, and throw her versions of little tantrums. She would begin by pretending to mishear things Emily said, and then slowly start ignoring every action, word, sound she made. After this her step-mother would seclude herself in her own area, not even giving Emily the privilege of being around her. She set up food only for herself, Emily’s father, and her own six year old daughter while Emily remained in her room like an outsider or “red-headed stepchild.” When her stepmother was ready to talk she would sit her down and lecture her for hours and hours, talking on and on about why Emily was wrong, what Emily did wrong, and how she was right. “It was as if she saw the world in a magnified view.”

After their family relocated from Hawaii to Georgia the emotional abuse slowly became more and more physical. School became less of an opportunity to engage with others and more of an opportunity for Emily to leave her house. She transferred schools for all four of her high school years, but still threw herself into her studies as though her life depended on it. Childish dreams were swapped out for basic day by day functions, and everyday Emily just focused on getting out of the house and taking breaks from her family. She was content with the delicate equilibrium school presented in her life, and as long as she got good grades the rest of her family refrained from questioning what she did with her time. 

In the beginning she had tried to make friends, but after transferring to her third school she began to care less and less about maintaining social connections. “I was kind of a floater for most of high school, like a floater slash loner I guess.” The same cafeteria linoleum floors that staged lunchtime fights and bullying circles made Emily feel safe, invisible amongst the thousands of other voices threading the air with jokes and complaints “School was basically my escape from my reality.” she says fondly.

The North Gwinnett High School writing club became an increasingly crucial part of her life, as she fell in love with writing. Every Wednesday and Thursday after school she dutifully sat at her desk and wrote in her journal, free to write whatever she wanted as long as it generally followed the theme her teacher chose for the day. 

Her first story was about an abusive father and a son who was slowly going blind. Despite the fact that the son had a cancerous tumor in his eye the alcoholic father continuously escalated the abuse until he would ultimately meet his demise in a drunk driving accident. In his final moments the father donated his eyes to his son as a last ditch attempt at making peace, offering him a chance that he would never have had if the father miraculously survived. 

The teacher criticized the piece as “an overdramatized cliche,” but for Emily it was a story that still sticks with her to this day. “I liked negative stories. I liked sad stories. I liked tragedies.” she shares. “I liked the fact that perhaps myself or somebody else reading my story could maybe for a few minutes or a few hours live vicariously through my characters and escape their own reality.”

One especially bad day Emily was at home finishing up her homework when her stepmother brought her out of her room. It was one of those days where Emily’s stepmother began beating her up so hard that her own fists were starting to bruise and the sound of the abuse could be heard even in the corner of the room upstairs where Emily’s sister crouched with the door closed. Unsatisfied with the results her stepmother took a pair of scissors and began to scream, waving them menacingly in short, jagged movements. “I was really like wow, this is the end, she’s going to kill me, this is not a good day.”

As she drew closer and closer towards Emily the room began to turn, her legs shaking uncontrollably at the sight in front of her. “This is inhumane, she is not human, she is not a normal person, she is not alive. She’s possessed, she has to be possessed.” she kept repeating to herself, frantically trying to keep the gap between them as consistent as possible.

It had been a couple of years since Emily last attended church, but in that moment, seeing her stepmother’s face, she thought “wow, there has to be a God because there has to be demons in the world.”

Emily’s father called 911 from work as the violent situation escalated in his home. As time seemed to stretch, sirens finally began to sound outside their house, drawing closer and closer. There was a resounding knock, and then constant banging as the police attempted to assess the situation.

“I was so afraid of my step-mother that I just kept my mouth shut. I refused to say anything at the time because I really thought she was going to kill me.” And even though Emily was bloody, even though she had bruises and cuts scattered across her small frame, the police didn’t do anything. They didn’t arrest her, they didn’t stop to record anything, they just took her step-mother’s statement and left. “I think that was a very weird time. I still don’t understand why they would’ve done that, I still don’t understand how she got away with that.”

Emily tears up a bit as she relives the situation, still trying to draw apart the tangible details of the incident. “At the end of the day I remember smelling the blood, I remember seeing and tasting the blood, and I remember evil.”

After sharing her story Emily asks if I’m okay, quickly wiping her eyes as she laughs everything off. I tell her I’m fine, wondering how hard a parent has to hit a child to draw blood.

As abuse of varying scales occurred nightly in the Yoon household, Emily’s father remained a quiet spectator. “He never really took my side, he never really stood up for me. Whenever her abuse was going on he would, he wouldn’t chip in, he wouldn’t hurt me, but he wouldn’t do anything to stop her. He was just kind of on the sidelines watching. He would stop her once he figured it got too bad. Once he saw that ‘Oh wow she might really kill her!’ but that was it.” 

Emily began to fall deeper and deeper into depression at this time, constantly wondering why it was all happening to her, why she had to be the victim. “It was kind of two versions of me that always existed. One version was always like I deserve it, it’s because I behaved really badly, I don’t deserve the help that I want to get, I don’t deserve to receive sympathy or empathy from anybody, I can get through this by myself. And another version of me was like why, why me though. What did I do to deserve such a beating or such mistreatment, I was conflicted between those two.”

Emily initially kept in contact with her mother but was cut off after her step-mother found out what had been going on. Her regular messages with my mother were also abruptly cut short as soon as it was discovered. “I didn’t have a support system. She slowly cut every single one of my family members out of my life. And I realize that now but she was doing it on purpose so that I wouldn’t have anybody to lean on but her.”

“I think if I have one regret about the past it was thatwas that, that I didn’t really ask for help. That I really thought that I was able to take it- take everything on myself. And I’m here, I’m fine now, I can just talk about it without getting too distraught about it but if I do have one wish about the past I think I would’ve gone back if I could and done things a little bit differently.”

“But back then I was a bit brainwashed into thinking that everything was my fault and my situation was because I should’ve behaved better or I should’ve acted differently. I was being constantly told that it was my fault, I was being constantly reprimanded for behaviors that weren’t really in my control. I didn’t think to ask for help because I didn’t think that I deserved it.” 

Emily was finally able to permanently escape the house after turning 18, successfully graduating high school in the same year. She remembers distinctly telling herself that “There’s no way, absolutely no way that I can stay in this house anymore.” as she applied to colleges all across Georgia for potential pathways to freedom. She was only able to receive partial scholarships, and with her father refusing to give her the necessary information to fill out the FAFSA forms her only other option was to take out a loan. She quickly rejected the idea, refusing to have anything that would hold her back.

She scoped the Internet with increasing desperation, researching through the night and into the morning for an apartment, a roommate, a job. She eventually stumbled upon an obscure craigslist ad posted by a military family looking for a housekeeper and nanny. In exchange for helping raise their two year old daughter Ellie, cooking, cleaning, and doing all of the housework Emily would get to stay at their house rent free and receive a monthly allowance.

“I think a lot of the memories I have there, the significant ones at least, are with me spending time with their daughter. She was my main priority. She was the reason I had the job.” Emily says smiling. She can still remember the first time she met her during the second callback for the job. As soon as Emily and Ellie met, the little two year old took her hand, gave her a hug, and brought her upstairs saying “I show you my room! I show you my toys!” Emily instantly fell in love, moved to the point of tears by her pure childlike innocence.

For the next two years Emily grew and learned with the family, working through mistakes and victories as she gained more and more experience. 

One particular evening early on into her housekeeping career Emily was preparing dinner for the family while Ellie remained perched on the kitchen countertop, patiently waiting for the food. The mother came in and greeted Emily, distracting her long enough for Ellie to reach over and touch the stovetop, screaming in pain. Her tears were evidenced by the second degree burn on her small hand, upsetting her mother. In a moment of overwhelming emotion Emily began to cry too, not really knowing what else to do.

Still, Emily says that the family was always very inclusive and kind to her. They constantly had large Ron Weasley-esque family gatherings with all their brothers, sisters, and cousins, making sure to treat her like one of their own. It was never lost on Emily that she was an outsider, however, as she felt uncomfortable every time she was invited to a family outing. “I would feel like I was intruding and at the same time I didn’t want to go because I preferred time to myself.”

In the rare peace and quiet she received Emily enjoyed sleeping until the afternoon, sitting in her room, and not moving from her bed. “I would go online and just read. I’m a super Lord of the Rings nerd and so I would read a lot of Lord of the Rings fanfiction and just spend my entire day on the Internet. Sometimes I would forget to eat constantly coped up in the small little room they gave me. But I thought it was great. I didn’t see myself as like a prisoner or anything. I was just like I can do whatever I want, all the computer I want, I could relax, I didn’t have to be bothered, I loved it.”

By the time it began to near the completion of Emily’s second year with the family she decided that she had spent too much time in a position that had originally only been a temporary escape. After a year and a half she was over her job and beginning to realize that she wanted to do something else with her life. She was ready to go to school, make some actual money, and possibly start a family of her own in the future. “As great of a family they were and as much as I learned, once I hit a wall, like once I’m done with something it also means I’m emotionally done as well. They were a great family but I gave them my notice months in advance.”

Inspired by the military couple to emulate a similar lifestyle Emily decided to enlist in the army and start calling herself by her Korean name, Yeseul, instead. 

Yeseul was really interested in the medical field because Ellie’s mother had been studying to be an ortho doctor. She passed all the tests required to be a medic at the Military Entrance Processing Station on her first try, but was ultimately told that they had not available openings for her. They offered other possible positions, but Yeseul was set on becoming a medic and told them she would come back once they did have an opening. A few days later she was called back under the condition that she swore in that Friday. 

During her time as a combat medic Yeseul was trained to think really fast. Being the first responders in an emergency situation she was taught to cope with extreme battlefield wounds and let the adrenaline take over, thinking about what she was supposed to do instead of what she was doing. She was eventually assigned to a combat support hospital in Texas with lots of different types of medical personnel, working on team building activities and training with her unit for another four years. The unit itself comprised of 10 to 20 kids all in the same supervision, and the unified fear of supervisors, sergeants, and trouble forced them to lean on each other for moral and emotional support. “We only had each other.” Yeseul says with a laugh. “We know what it’s like to struggle together. It was a very interesting, different kind of bond we had. We were all forced to be friends. We were all forced to be close. We were all forced to stick together.” For the first time in her life Yeseul really felt like she actually belonged to a family and she actually belonged to a team. 

During her time with her unit Yesuel found increasingly creative ways to hide from her superiors with her friends, trying to avoid spending all day in the sun to build huge tents only to break them down immediately after. One especially cold winter evening Yeseul woke up in the middle of the night with an urgent bladder emergency. It was protocol at the time for soldiers to travel everywhere in twos, so she realized with dawning dread that she would have to wake someone up to accompany her on her little twilight adventure. Sparked with a moment of selflessness Yeseul quickly decided to take her chances and blearily crouched behind the tent to pee instead.

The military experience as a whole wasn’t really what Yeseul had initially expected. “I thought I was always going to have to be on my toes, I thought I was always going to be doing those ground crawls, I thought I was always going to have to be in the battlefield with cannons going off around me.” Instead, at her first duty station in Texas the most action she got was physical training in her unit. “It was a lot of sitting around and waiting to be told what to do.” she explains. “It was easy money, it was very different from what Hollywood portrays it as. I didn’t have any complaints but at the same time it was like oh wow, it’s easier than I thought it would be. I thought the military was going to take a toll on me but I actually thought it was stress relieving to be in.”

Around Yeseul’s third year in the army she was moved to the Bravo Company within the same support hospital and had her first encounter with her current husband. At first they were just really good friends, and Yeseul provided emotional support as he went through a divorce with his ex wife.

A couple of months after he finalized his divorce with his wife, Yeseul and David finally got together as a couple. There was a short courting period and then they quickly moved to Colorado to get married. “I don’t think there was like an aha moment, I always found it so cool and so interesting when other people talk on TV and interviews like this was the exact moment where I decided I was going to marry this man.” Yeseul confides, referencing the type of love that’s usually portrayed in Hollywood blockbuster romances. “I think the one factor that I really liked about him was that he was a really great father. He had two children from his previous marriage with his ex-wife and they were two and three, they were only toddlers. And I saw how he interacted with them and how he was raising them, and I saw how they interacted with him and it was like night and day from watching how my father was with me. Like oh yah, this is what a father should be like.”

However, although Yeseul loved that David was a good father she was still conflicted at the prospect of marrying someone who already had children. She didn’t want to raise somebody else’s kids, and it would present a huge burden to become a mother at such a young age. “I know how horrible that sounds because having kids is not a sin, having kids is not something to be ashamed of, but at his age you wouldn’t expect a guy to have two children already from a previous marriage.” she explains. 

Yeseul was also still in contact with her father at the time, and she didn’t want to have to tell him that she was planning on marrying someone, especially not someone who already had two kids. Even though Yeseul didn’t think her father had any right to have a say in her life, he was still her father and she was still afraid of what he would say. She didn’t want the excess judgment, and she also wanted to be able to confidently say “I’m not going to turn out to be like my parents, I won’t turn out to be an abusive psychopath.”

Yeseul and David were just 23 and 25 when they got married in the July of 2014, and she concedes that it was something she would never have expected to happen in her lifetime. As a young girl Yeseul had always dreamed of never getting married and remaining a nun for the rest of her life. She had been set on remaining single and enjoying her youth for as long as possible. “But yah, it didn’t turn out like that. I wanted to settle down, I wanted to build a family. I wanted to have that blended family with him. I loved his kids, I fell in love with them the minute I saw them. I have a real weakness to babies and toddlers, and I felt bad for them because their mother wasn’t really in their lives and she wasn’t very stable.”

It’s now been 7 years since Yeseul first started taking care of David’s children, and along the way she’s given birth to her own biological daughter, Gia. 

When Yeseul first realized she was pregnant with her daughter she just began to cry. As she sat on the bathroom toilet holding her positive pregnancy test she felt like everything must simply be a big joke. David had just arrived for his deployment in Afghanistan and the only indication at a possible pregnancy had been her late period. What she had initially brushed off as stress from working forty hours a week and taking care of the kids was now an even bigger problem the size of a small human. She bawled her eyes out in the bathroom.

“I was like, this is not possible, I can’t do this, and I started calling David. I think I gave him about 30 missed calls but he obviously didn’t answer at the time because back when I called him it was like three in the morning his time.” Instead, she sent a photo of the pregnancy test to him and was messaged back a while later. “Is this a joke?” 

“I was dreading it because I didn’t have any plans on getting pregnant any time soon. I wanted to save money, I wanted to progress in my career. I was happy where I was and my career looked promising where I was at, but I knew the baby would be a setback in my professional career.”

Being pregnant while your husband is in another country is never easy, but even with her two children still requiring much of her attention Yeseul successfully managed to balance a job with all her other responsibilities. “It was scary, my anxiety level was always at an all time high, I didn’t know what to expect, but I think that if I wasn’t working full time back then I wouldn’t have been able to cope as well as I did because I was keeping myself busy, I always had my work family to support me and we were primarily all females.”

All of the workers had had children before and naturally because a support system for Yeseul, insisting on helping her and constantly reminding her that she wasn’t alone even without her husband there. Without them Yesuel doesn’t think she could have possibly coped half as well. “I think the hardest part was at nighttime when I was falling asleep by myself, when I started craving stuff, when I was wanting McDonalds french fries at 1 am or like wow, I really wanted a big mac but I couldn’t go get one because my kids were already asleep and I couldn’t wake them up to go fulfill my cravings.”

When Yeseul finally did give birth, seeing her daughter’s face for the first time was nothing less than a surreal experience of her. She was stuck in a fuzzy, hazy feeling that made it hard for her to differentiate whether she was actually dreaming or not. She was stuck in between worlds, her state of mind constantly flitting between events. “When I really saw her face for the first time I was like wow, she’s so ugly.” Yeseul says laughing. 

“And I was like oh, newborns are so ugly but at the same time I was like she’s just so beautiful though. It was just so many mixed emotions and I couldn’t believe I did it. The moment she first opened her eyes and she looked at me she just kept staring at me, and I was like this is ridiculous, this can’t be real, I can’t believe I actually created something like this. It was one of my favorite moments of my life.”

The five person family has been living in Colorado Springs since 2014. The suburb itself is quite big and active, but the rows are lined with houses instead of apartments and the sidewalks are full of friendly neighbors and pets. The terrain has many mountains and hillsides, and the huge population of trees paints a beautiful scene for its inhabitants. 

Prefacing her opinion by saying that it might be offensive, Yeseul shares that “A lot of people make fun of Colorado Springs saying that it’s full of bible thumpers, it’s full of Christians, it’s full of hippies and hipsters, and it really is. It kind of lives up to the stereotypical standard. A lot of them smoke marijuana because it’s recreational and it’s legal. A lot of them always stink of marijuana.” 

Colorado Springs was wonderful in the beginning, but after five years Yeseul and David are more than ready to move on. Yeseul reveals that if it weren’t for her “kiddos” she feels that she would probably really hate her life, simply because it’s so mundane and so consistently boring. 

Everyday she wakes up around seven with Gia at her side. “She sleeps in my bed, which I hate, but it’s like this horrible habit that we haven’t broken yet. So I wake up to her just kind of shaking me, and the very first word isn’t like good morning, isn’t like hi momma, it’s eat. She just goes eat, eat food, and she’ll be like feed me so I just wake up to her being hungry.”

After waking up Yeseul drags the rest of the family out of bed, making sure that everyone is ready for the day and the two older children (Lucca and Nuri) aren’t late for school. After everyone has had their breakfast and Gia and Yeseul are the only ones in the house, they usually take a trip to the park or the local library playgroup. Since Gia isn’t attending daycare Yeseul makes sure to give her as much socialization as possible despite her own introverted nature. 

After some fresh air they return home, eat lunch, and Gia takes her two hour nap for the day. By that time the older kids come home from school and Yeseul drives them to taekwondo practice. Then she hurries to start on food, feeds the whole family, and David returns home from work. “I live for my kids.” Yeseul says with a little laugh. In her opinion, her “kiddos” are the only good thing about being a mom. “Everything else like laundry, cooking, it’s not great.”

Yeseul’s eyes light up as she recalls an incident from earlier today where her husband attempted to feed Gia her dinner. “She was being such a butt, like spitting everything out, just not listening at all, and he was about to spank her, he was about to give her a little pow pow and he looks at her really sternly and she looks at him and out of nowhere she just starts laughing. You can’t be mad at them, no matter what you can’t be angry at them for a long amount of time, you just have to laugh at their innocence and learn from it.” 

Being a mother is always a learning process, and Yeseul shares that she worries her negative past with her stepmother has affected her more than she would’ve liked. Sometimes she’ll see herself disciplining her kids and feel a lot of her step-mother in her actions. Yeseul never hits her children but she worries that when she’s strict she can be too strict. “I’ve been so angry at my son before that- he loves Pokemon, he loves collecting his cards, and I find myself like ripping his cards up in front of him because he has made me so angry at that point. And then I look back and I think, what am I doing? I would never do that, and little things like that, little actions that I do really emulates a lot of the behaviors which my ex-stepmother has exhibited towards me. And I don’t want to do anything like that, I don’t want to be that kind of mother to my kids. I don’t want to be like a figure of fear to them. But sometimes I feel like I am, and that just makes me sad. So that kind of sucks.”

If she were to be reincarnated or receive another chance at life Yeseul wants to stay single for the rest of her life and just enjoy her freedom, being able to do whatever she wants to do. As much as she loves her kids and as much as she loves being a mother, Yeseul concedes that the stress factor of it is so high that it’s definitely detrimental to her emotional and mental health at times. “It’s not the worst thing to be in my situation, to be in love with somebody in David’s situation, but it’s also not the best. So I don’t recommend it to people if they have a choice.”

Yeseul consistently kept in contact with her father even after her marriage but has now ended contact with both her parents. “I don’t talk to my parents. I don’t really keep in contact with them now, I don’t know what they’re doing, I don’t know where they live. I really don’t know anything about them. And that’s my choice.”

Although Yeseul is considering contacting her biological mother again, she maintains that she doesn’t see the possibility of reconciliation with her father anywhere in the near future. “I don’t think I could ever just sit back and watch my child go through what I went through. While I have forgiven both of my parents, my father has never apologized to me for anything, ever- while my mother has consistently apologized to me for everything.” 

When Yeseul’s father visited his parents in Korea he messaged Yeseul, demanding that she cut off all contact with her grandparents and his whole side of the family. At her refusal he began to go rant nonsensically, cursing her out and telling her that all the abuse she endured in the past had been her fault. “He was like, you play the victim card all too well, I don’t know why everybody starts blaming me for it, I don’t know why everybody’s on my tail for it. And I think at that point I was just really done with him.”

My mom shares that “He didn’t want other people’s judgment, he didn’t like that other people were telling him what he should have done. I think half of him acknowledges that what he did was wrong but the other half of him doesn’t think he did anything wrong.”

“If she had been born into a better household she could have had a really successful future, but I really respect how mature she is and how well she grew up despite her circumstances. She has a side to her that’s a lot more resilient than she initially appears.” my dad adds.

When I ask her what it was that kept her going through everything that unfolded in her life Yeseul pauses before answering.

“You know what, I don’t know. Self love? I don’t know. Because honestly my life at that time wasn’t worth continuing. I was in such a deep spiral of depression that I didn’t see my life as worth living but I was also afraid to stop. And I guess the fact that I was too afraid to stop everything in my life was what kept me going. I don’t know if that even counts as self love because it was a pride thing, I don’t know if it was because I told myself I’m not going to give in to the demons, I’m not going to stop living just because this one person in my life is trying to make my life miserable, I’m not sure what it was but I do know for a fact that I was afraid to stop. And I was just telling myself that it will all be over eventually. I’m not going to be in this situation forever. So I’m not sure if it was just a lack of courage or it was a lot of courage, not really sure to this day. I just made it through day by day, I didn’t think of my future, I didn’t think of anything but getting through that minute, that hour, that day. And that’s how I got through it. Know your self worth, love yourself more than anyone else, protect yourself and value yourself no matter what anybody else tells you, no matter what anybody else does or says to break that barrier don’t ever let anyone else let you feel like you are worth less than you are. And there’s always somebody else you can talk to. There’s always somebody else you can lean on, whether it be somebody in your life, a complete stranger, there’s always somebody and there’s always something that can be done.”