Escaping North Korea: Book Review of “The Girl With Seven Names” by Hyeonseo Lee

This book is a must-read! Hyeonseo Lee is a girl who escaped North Korea, crossing the border to China at age 17. She gives a very detailed insight of her upbringing and daily life in North Korea. Her story was utterly chilling. The fact that these events are currently happening right now made it all the more disturbing. I was often left in a state of shock and I couldn’t get my mind off North Korea. For many nights, especially if I was putting down this book before bed, I had nightmares about North Korea.

Our Immigrant Parents: “The Best We Could Do”, by Thi Bui

This illustrated memoir is by Thi Bui, who recounts the story of her parents when they escaped Vietnam in the 1970s during the fall of South Vietnam and migrated to the US. Thi was too young to remember her early years in Vietnam and was brought up primarily in California. In her childhood, she was fearful of her cold and stern father, and resentful of her strict mother. Naturally, as she became an adult, her relationship with her parents grew tense, yet Thi is guilt ridden in the unspoken expectation of caring for her aging parents, and haunted by the thought of disappointing them. This is a common struggle of many immigrant families – the constant feeling that our parents don’t understand us.

When Thi became a mother herself, the immense responsibility she felt for her newborn started to help her relate to how her own mother must have felt with her and her siblings, and it made her want to know her parents more deeply. In an effort to heal her relationship with her parents, she sought to know their story; their childhood in Vietnam, and the life they had before marriage and children. In the midst of their story, Thi sheds perspective on the effects of French colonialism over Vietnam, and the aftermath of WWII that gave rise to the communist North Vietnam. Since their dangerous escape as “boat people”, the life Thi’s parents gave her and her siblings was the best they could do, and understanding that side of her parents was the best she could do.

I recommend this book, a beautiful comic, to anyone raised by immigrant parents that may have suffered a distant relationship with them at one point.

Top 3 Books I Read in 2020

I was never a reader growing up and getting into the habit of reading over the years has been a slow process. I’ve been averaging maybe 2 to 3 books a year. So in 2020, I challenged myself to read 1 book a month, and due to the pandemic lockdown with plenty of time at home, I met my goal! It was also the first time that I read more non-fiction than I did fiction, and I learned more than I expected to. Here are the 3 books I enjoyed and got me reflecting the most. I recommend these if you’re looking for some deep reads.

We Don’t Talk Enough About Grief

If the last book I read (Finding Chika) wasn’t depressing enough, I read two more books that talk about death: Option B, and Tuesdays with Morrie. I started them after Kobe’s passing. I guess I was just in that kind of mood.

I learned from these books that we don’t talk about grief enough as a society. It’s a topic that makes people feel uneasy. At least for me it sometimes does. Mainly because I’m afraid to say the wrong things, and I don’t know how to talk about my own grief without thinking that I’m making a situation awkward. It’s just a difficult conversation to bring up. So I often ignore the elephant in the room, or try to change the subject.

Book Review: Finding Chika

I first heard of this book on CTV’s Pop Life interview. I had just finished watching the news one evening and before I got to closing the TV, I caught a glimpse of the beginning of the interview with Mitch Albom, the author of the book. Before I knew it, I watched the entire interview. Mitch talked about two of his books: “Tuesdays with Morrie”, and “Finding Chika”, the latter being his newest. “Tuesdays with Morrie” is about what Mitch learned about life from his conversations with his old college professor who was dying with ALS. Finding Chika is about what Mitch learned about family when he tried to save a Haitian girl named Chika from his orphanage in Haiti with a brain tumor. From this interview, I knew I wanted to read both of these books. So I went to Indigo and “Finding Chika” was featured at the front of the store. I finished it in 3 days.

Finding Purpose Through Commitment (Part 2)

The world and society we live in today offers us an abundance of choices and options. We can shape our own style any way we want and tailor our lives exactly how we envision to live it. But is that really what we’re doing with our choices? Is having so many choices a good thing? Yes and no.

If we actually choose to commit to something that matters, then yes! How wonderful to be presented with so many option. There are so many different paths available and so many ways to fulfill our purpose. However, it becomes a problem when we don’t know what to choose. When we don’t commit to something, all these choices make us feel lost and forever searching.

Happiness Is On The Other Side…(Part 1)

Finally, a book so worth the read and nothing but true, honest, real-talk. I took notes on the entire book. Here’s part 1:

We live in a society so focused on “finding happiness” and “being positive” that we are constantly surrounded by messages of false hope; messages so misleading that we find ourselves more and more disappointed and insecure the more we search for happiness and purpose.

Social media gives a false image of the “perfect life “, and we, as viewers, unknowingly start to measure our own life to what we see on our newsfeed. Slowly, we start to feel like our life doesn’t quite measure up – that we’re not quite living to our full potential. The perfect job, the perfect relationships, the perfect lifestyle. We’re constantly exposing ourselves to an image of “perfection” that isn’t realistic. And naturally, we start doubting and questioning our own life – everything from our careers to our diet choices. The more we strive to sustain a new lifestyle, the more we disappoint ourselves when we fail. So we look ourselves in the mirror and repeat a mantra that social media has taught us to do every morning: “You’re beautiful“, “Choose to be happy“, “Be positive“. And yet, why do we still feel empty?

The Worst Book Ever

I wanted to get into self-help books and this was so highly regarded as life-changing that I decided to start with this one. Well, turns out I think it’s complete crap and literally the worst book I’ve ever read. I feel like I wasted brain space just knowing about its content. Here I am dumping it back out.

The book explains what it calls the “law of attraction” (I’d capitalize that, but it doesn’t deserve it), and how to use it to maximize the benefits in our lives. It claims that “like attracts like“, so if you think positive thoughts, you’ll attract positive things to you; thinking negative thoughts will attract negative things to you.

Origin – by Dan Brown

This is the 7th book I’ve read of the Robert Langdon series and in each story, I felt like I was reading my precisely own thoughts that I could never put into words. Robert’s thinking on religion and science, life and morals are so accurate with mine. And this book hit the spot with all the right questions: the origin of life.

Where do we come from, and where are we going?

No spoilers here, but I wanted to highlight this excerpt for myself:

Humans of New York

I’m currently in New York as I start writing this post, and I thought how opportune it would be to write about the page  “Humans of New York (HONY)“. HONY is run by a guy named Brandon, who originally started capturing portraits of people on the streets of New York and posted them on his website. After awhile, he started interviewing his models and he included a snippet of his conversation in the captions of the photos. I’ve been following HONY for awhile now, from simply seeing portraits of people without any background, to seeing a glimpse of their thoughts. And I must say, the captions are what gave this page a whole new potential.