The Magnolia Story(31)

Moving was never easy for me, though. This was due in part to my own insecurities, which trace back to my experiences in first or second grade back in Rose Hill, Kansas, when kids started noticing that I didn’t look exactly like they did.

As a small child I had never noticed there was anything different about me. I thought I looked like everybody else. And really, most people don’t look at me and automatically think I’m half-Korean. But in those first couple of years in elementary school, kids started picking on me because of it.

The worst of it came in the lunchroom. I would get served the same broccoli-and-cheese rice that everyone else in the lunch line was served. But a group of boys—especially this one redheaded boy—would start saying things like “Oh, look at the little Asian girl eating rice.” Going to the lunchroom caused me so much anxiety that I asked my mom to start packing me a cold lunch instead. The kids who ate cold lunch gathered in a separate room, where it wound up just being me and a handful of other girls.

I thought I was in the clear then—until my grandmother came to live with us for a while and started attending school events. She looked like a traditional grandmother from South Korea. It was her first time in the United States, she wore no makeup, and all the children seemed to notice how different she looked from the average Kansas grandma. This seemed to give that group of boys more reason to make fun of me.

As a child I didn’t know how to process all this. I just felt the pain of being different, and I felt I had to be something else in order to be accepted.

Luckily, kids grow out of that unfiltered phase, and the torment soon just sort of went away. The rest of my elementary school and middle school years were pretty normal. They were fun. Getting picked on for being different wasn’t an issue I consciously carried with me as I grew. It wasn’t something I worried about. I always made friends, and for years that old fear of walking into the cafeteria stayed buried somewhere deep in my subconscious.

Moving every few years left me feeling like I could never get comfortable, though. Just when I started to settle in somewhere and find my footing, I’d wake up, and it would be time to move again. I learned to just accept it. I trained myself to get used to it. And I suppose that set me up for my life with Chip in a big way. We may not have been making cross-country moves in our marriage, but moving from house to house is still a big change, and we would make a lot of those transitions.

I think the toughest move of all for me as a kid was between Corpus Christi and Round Rock. It happened during my sophomore year of high school. I’d gone to private school most of my life, so I was used to having maybe thirty people in my class. When I moved to Round Rock High School, there were nearly six hundred kids in my class. This came as a complete culture shock to me. We also moved in the middle of the year, and that made it even tougher, especially on the first day.

I had always made friends easily on my first day of school. When you’re the new girl at a private school, everyone’s excited to see a new face. But being the new girl at a large public school in Texas was different. I swear no one even noticed me. I wondered if they even noticed that I was new. For all they knew, I could have been there for years and just blended in.

I walked into the lunchroom on that first day at Round Rock High, and every bad feeling I had felt as a second grader came flooding back. I was literally crippled by it. In my mind I saw myself in a spotlight, a little girl walking into that crowd of people who would surely look at me as different. I was sure they were going to make fun of me.

In reality, I don’t think anyone even noticed me, but I still felt awful. I walked through that cafeteria without making eye contact with anybody, went straight into the bathroom, and hid in a stall. I stayed in there for thirty minutes, right up until I heard the bell ring.

I wound up doing that every day for the rest of the semester, from January through May. I spent lunchtime either hiding in the bathroom or ducking into a quiet corner of the library.

I’m not sure why I was so terrified. Maybe it was just teenage hormones, but I never even gave those kids a chance to ask me to sit with them. I felt their rejection and acted on it before I even gave them a chance.

At some point my mom realized I wasn’t eating lunch. She got mad at me at first. Then she said, “I’m going to pick you up. You have to eat.” Sophomores weren’t allowed to leave campus at lunchtime, so I had to sneak off campus to jump into my mom’s getaway car. Once or twice a week we’d plan it so she’d be there at 11:15 on the dot. I would bolt out and jump over the rope at the edge of the lawn. My mom would have the car door open, waiting for me, and we’d take off. She’d take me to Wendy’s and then secretly drop me back at school before the start of the next period. And each time she’d say, “Jo, listen, we can’t keep doing this. You’ve got to make friends.”

Mom wasn’t enabling my fearful behavior. It was simply her motherly instinct; she wanted her teenage daughter to eat. As a mother now myself, I can’t blame her. And now, looking back, those lunches stand out as some of my favorite times with my mother. We were kind of like lunchtime bandits, stealing away for twenty minutes together to laugh and talk and grab a burger together.

Over the course of the summer, I did make a few friends, and by the start of the next school year it all sort of worked itself out. It took me a good six months of awkwardness to finally find a friend group through gymnastics—and then we up and moved again in the middle of my junior year.