Chapter Text
She watched as the casket was closed and lowered into the ground. She didn’t cry. Around her, relatives wailed and bowed their heads, tear-streaked faces silently mourning. But she didn’t cry.
A hand gently caressed her shoulder. She looked up into her dad’s face — lined with sadness, dried tears still glistening. Yet she didn’t cry. She couldn’t.
At ten years old, she didn’t quite understand what it meant to never see her mother again. How was she supposed to? The weight of it was too big for her small mind to carry. She wanted to cry, but the flood of emotions was too much, too vast.
Nothing a quartet spin couldn’t fix.
At least, that’s what her mother used to say. So she didn’t cry. She went home that night, put on her ballet shoes, and drowned herself in the music.
Her dad and she soon realized how difficult it was to navigate the shift from a nuclear family to a single-parent household.
First challenge: How could a Korean man raise a biracial daughter alone? Her curly hair was never properly groomed. God bless his heart, he tried, but he was out of his element.
He moved them closer to her mother’s family so she could stay connected to her Black roots—and so he could get help.
But slowly, she stopped being his bright sunshine. She became a recluse. The only thing lighting up her life was dance.
As any father wanting his daughter’s happiness would do, he enrolled her in every dance class she wanted—jazz, hip-hop, majorette, ballet, acro. Outside dance, she shut herself away in her room with books. No friends. No social life.
Approaching her teens, he hoped she’d find someone—a relative, maybe—to guide her, since he wasn’t enough.
So he remarried. A younger Korean omega woman with a son. Not for love. Not for romance. Just someone to help guide his daughter through adolescence, to fill the mother-shaped hole. Having a son her age was a bonus—a companion for her.
For her, dance was everything. It drowned out the loneliness and isolation she felt.
School was relentless. She’d never minded being alone, but the bullying over her untamed hair stung deeply. Kids called it ugly, said she didn’t have a mom to fix it.
After brutal school days, her driver would pick her up and she’d escape into dance—a world where her hair was fixed by her teacher Miss Rosalee and where her friends accepted her without question.
Her father eventually moved them from New Jersey to New York to be closer to family. Though she missed her dance friends, her life improved. Her hair was styled properly; she felt included. Her African American family showered her with love—she was a piece of her mother they treasured.
Enrolled in a new dance studio focusing on jazz, hip-hop, and majorette, she began to thrive. Her stepmother, Han Sohee, was kind and doting; their bond grew. Her stepson was shy but made efforts to include her.
In just two years after losing her mother, she was happy. Thriving. Her grades improved, and dance remained her heartbeat.
At sixteen, her father uprooted her again, moving back to Korea to be near family.
She didn’t like the idea but gave no argument—just the silent treatment for weeks until her stepmother staged an intervention.
Her dad wanted her to attend a Korean college, so the move was necessary for her final two years of high school to prepare for the entrance exams alongside native peers.
Navigating Korean school was difficult. The language, the culture, the rigorous curriculum—it was a steep climb.
She struggled and, with an impending presentation weighing heavily on her, the school and her father agreed she should stay an extra year to learn at a slower pace.
During that year, she met her first love, Yom Ji-Hu—or so she thought.
The presentation never came. After several specialist visits, she told her father she wanted to focus on school and dance—and to worry about her health only if she started to get sick or after graduation.