The Magnolia Story(32)

I arrived at my small private school in Waco (in a class of twenty-eight people) on the same day a group of Chinese exchange students were visiting the school. Everyone mistakenly thought I was one of them—a Chinese girl who just happened to dress American and didn’t have an accent. Everyone was kind of intrigued by that. It served as an icebreaker that gained me some friendships from the get-go.

Right after we moved to Waco was when I started working with my dad at the Firestone dealership and started to get involved both at school and at church. It wasn’t until my senior year, though, that I first started to think consciously about what it meant to be half-Korean.

I remember thinking, I’m either white, Korean, or both, but I’ve got to own this. It’s me. I started to see how beautiful my mom’s culture was and how beautiful she was, and there were times when I wanted people to know she was different and she was unique. I didn’t want to be embarrassed about that.

To my surprise, in the fall of my senior year I was actually elected as our high school’s homecoming queen. I remember walking out on the football field to be crowned, thinking about how radically different this feeling was from the rejection I’d felt just two years prior, hiding in bathroom stalls at lunchtime. I was thankful my high school career had ended on a good note. I felt there was redemption in my heart from an old wound that had never truly healed.

A few years later I graduated from Baylor University as a communications major, traveled to New York, and finally got rid of the second-grade chip on my shoulder. After all those years of failing to understand or embrace what an honor it was to be a part of my mother’s amazing culture, I finally believed it was actually a beautiful thing to be unique and to be different.

And this, of course, was right around the time when Mr. Different-and-Unique himself, Chip Gaines, walked into my life.





NINE



CHIPPING IN

As I mentioned earlier, my mom and dad grew up in Archer City, Texas, a town of maybe two thousand people. When compared to Archer City, Waco would have been like the big city where you would come see a movie on the weekend or something.

My parents aren’t ashamed to tell anybody that their whole group of friends in that town were all poor growing up, but my dad was the poorest kid of the bunch. He lived in what would be the equivalent of the projects in that town, and the government paid a portion of the rent for the apartment where he grew up.

His mom, my grandma, was a single mom raising two kids back in the day. In a town where everybody was broke, they were known as the poor family. So to my dad, my mom seemed like a rich girl just because her dad was a rancher and they had a house and some cows.

The two of them started dating in the eighth grade, and their small-town romance never let up. In those days, in that town, just a few folks had gone to college; no one’s mom had gone to college. Nobody even thought about college, and even if they had wanted to go, no one could have afforded it. College wasn’t really an option.

My dad would probably have graduated high school and become a mechanic or something like that. But then he started playing football, and he was good at it. He received a football scholarship to the University of New Mexico, and the whole world opened up to him.

He went off to Albuquerque, and to his small-town mind it was as big of a change as moving to Las Vegas or New York might be to somebody else. I mean, to him it was just the coolest place in the world. He got himself out of Texas for the first time ever and started learning about who he really was. The school was in the Western Athletic Conference (WAC), which played Hawaii, so he got to go to Hawaii. Twice. Before that, he had never even been on a plane!

My mom stayed in Texas and wound up going to a nearby college called Midwestern State. She and Dad carried on a long-distance relationship for two years. Then she transferred to UNM so they could be together—the football star and the cheerleader, the polar opposite of Jo’s parents in many ways.

When my dad stayed on as a fifth-year senior, they got married, and my older sister, Shannon, came along shortly thereafter.

My dad was so excited and motivated by sports and athletics that, after he graduated, he opened a sporting goods store there in Albuquerque, the city where I was born in 1974. My parents tell me that even way back then I had a way of making friends with just about everybody, and I always wanted to do things for others. I was always asking my mom for money to give the homeless people we passed on the streets. And whenever some kid would come knocking on the door, trying to sell something, I’d say yes before he even started his pitch—then go running into the back of the house to get the money.

“Why do you need five dollars, Chip?” my parents would ask.

“Because I already bought this thing. This kid needs the money. Please!”

For some reason, even as a kid, I didn’t qualify people like most folks do. I treated everybody the same. From a young age I understood the true meaning of the golden rule. I literally treated others as I wanted to be treated.

It probably comes as a surprise to no one that I had a certain wild streak as a kid. I had this great friend named Devon who lived directly across the street from me in our cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood. Our driveways sloped down toward the street, and the two of us would ride our Big Wheels down those hills and shoot directly across the road into each other’s driveways, most of the time without looking.

Every other day, someone would have to slam on their brakes and come to a squealing halt to avoid hitting one of us. Then some mom would come knocking on our door and shout at my parents, “He didn’t even look! He just scooted out. I almost hit him!”