The Magnolia Story(16)

We did every part of this renovation together with our bare hands. Chip restored all of the wood floors, all the tile work—everything. I was learning as we went, but I definitely did my part.

That house was gorgeous. Jo did an awesome job helping fix it up, and her ideas were great. There was a moment in the kitchen when I smarted off, though. I don’t even remember what I said, to be honest, but Jo got real mad and started yelling. She was carrying this five-gallon bucket of primer. She slammed it down on the ground to make a point, and it splashed right back up in her face. It was dripping off her eyelashes and her nose.

Whenever something like that happened in my family, we’d all just laugh, you know? So I laughed, even though she was mad at me, and that made her even angrier. She started yelling again with the primer dripping all over, and I just had this moment where I looked at her and everything seemed to be going in slow motion and I thought, I love this woman. She is tough! Oh, this is gonna work.

That was our first real “fight,” and even now we both agree it was our biggest. Chip had smarted off about something, so my blood was already boiling, but when I slammed that bucket down, Chip says I became a ninja—the kind you don’t want to mess with. Yet he still laughed, against his better judgment. We joke about it now, like, “Well, I’m mad, but I’m not primer-in-the-face mad.”

It would take us a few months to get everything in livable condition in that house, even though we were living there full-time. Looking back, I don’t know how we did it, but I guess you have a lot more time and energy before there are kids in the picture. We were newlyweds. We had our whole lives ahead of us. And despite the rough start, we were still riding the excitement of our honeymoon and feeding off of that energy we seemed to have whenever we were together, which was basically all the time.

Chip never said no to any of my ideas. He was 100 percent on board for my various theme rooms. He spoiled me in that way. But it was more than that. Chip supported everything I wanted to do. He even supported my dreams. The two of us would dream together all the time, just lying in bed at night, imagining where we could go in life, talking about things we always wanted to do or see or accomplish.



Until I left home and went to do my internship in New York City, I honestly didn’t know what I wanted to do. At some point in my teen years, I told my father that I wanted to take over his Firestone shop when he retired. I thought that was the right thing to do. I thought it would make him proud, as if I were the son he’d never had who would step into his shoes and carry on the successful business he’d created.

Then I went to Baylor and got interested in broadcast journalism. I loved the storytelling and the editing process, and I managed to get two years’ worth of internships under my belt at our local CBS station, KWTX. Everyone said that if you wanted to make it in TV news you had to go to New York City to do it, so I went out on a limb and applied to the Today show, Good Morning America, and 48 Hours. Those shows didn’t have internship affiliations with Baylor at the time, so it was a long shot to say the least. I just went and did it on my own out of blind, naive ambition, I guess.

I had lived a pretty sheltered life up until then, so when 48 Hours selected me, I was worried my parents might fight it. How could they let their little girl go to the big city by herself? But I was wrong. My protective parents not only supported my ambition, they paid for my apartment for those six months—a good thing, too, because it was fifteen hundred dollars a month for a room in a shared apartment with two other people!

As amazing as it was to live on West 57th Street and to work under a man as esteemed as Dan Rather, I quickly fell out of love with the news business while working that job. My job as an intern was to read the papers to find salacious stories, cold cases, or horrible crime stories to pitch to the senior editors. It was heavy.

While I fell out of love with TV news, I did fall in love with New York City. It was more than just wandering in and out of those lovely boutiques that I mentioned before. I was pretty homesick during those six months, and I especially missed my mother. So it was eye-opening and beautiful to see so many people in that big city who looked like my mom and me. It seemed that everywhere I looked there was a woman walking down the street who reminded me of her. It was so unlike growing up in Kansas and Texas. New York is where I finally began to appreciate all of the different cultures and truly began to fall in love with my Korean heritage.

It’s difficult to put into words, but there was something about that experience that helped me find myself. I would go home every night and write about my experiences—what I’d seen, what I’d done, and sometimes just about whatever I was thinking or feeling. And as I did that, something shifted in me. I started owning who I am, realizing that I was unique and that God had a unique purpose for me. I’d spent my whole life worrying about what people thought about me or whether I was good enough or thinking about what I should be doing instead of really digging down to find out what I wanted to do.

I had always been a religious person. I was brought up in the church, and my parents were very committed to getting the family there every Sunday without fail. So from the age of five to about twenty, religion to me was a matter of “you do this, and you don’t do that, and you do your best to walk the straight line.”

I was good at that. I’m good at following the rules—most of the time. But once I was on my own in New York, my faith became something very personal. It was no longer about what my parents knew or what my pastor knew. I came to think of God as more of a gracious friend who was accompanying me on this journey, a friend who wanted to carry my burdens and speak into my life and shape me into who I really was and who I would become.