Chae, Young Oak | Seoul Adolescence came early for me. My hardworking and dedicated mother now seemed no more than an old-fashioned country woman. The dignity of my stern father now seemed oppressive and authoritarian. There seemed to be no one who tried to understand me anywhere in the world, and no one who could possibly understand me. I would sink deeper and deeper into the wide and deep chasm of my thoughts, then be pulled back into the mundane routines of school, books, teachers, classmates and family, forced to laugh when I felt no laughter inside, speak words that I did not mean, and withholding the extreme form of my drifting soul in the deepest part of myself and hidden from view. In this way I spent my teenage years in turmoil.What is life? Must I live this double life? Without having anything of my own, without knowing who I am, dancing to the drumbeats of others to live a staid and uninspiring life? Must I accept the position I was placed in by my birth, my parents, my environment and fate, studying my textbooks without aim or purpose? "Is there no absolute, is everything relative, and do I live in a world of gray, with survival my sole mission in life?" These questions screamed inside me as I graduated from middle school and entered high school.Despite these conflicts I still had to study, for my mother and father. It would have been excessively cruel for their seventh-born to add even a single sigh in their lives or a wrinkle on their foreheads. Moreover, my pride would not let me abandon the daily tasks of my life, purposeless as they might have seemed, and merely whittle my time away lost in my questions on life. Even though the burden of life was heavy on my back, I could not stand to let others get ahead of me, to let myself fall behind others. My only hope was that there was indeed a meaning to life, and I simply had yet to discover it.Ours was one of the bigger houses in the village. Fruit trees and blossoms always filled the back yard, and my father planted flowers in front of the house. The gentle hill behind the house was filled with pines, oaks, chestnuts and persimmon, with splashes of bush clovers and violet azaleas in the spring. A reservoir the size of a small lake lay behind the hill, and I would often climb over the hill and watch the waves of grass shifting in the wind blowing in from the reservoir. When I lay down in the small bedroom of the house, I could hear the wind rustling through the branches in the middle of the night. The ethereal sound even made me fall in love with the wind.But even these now added to my burden. They were all destined to disappear, to perish. What use were they in my heart? They did nothing to solve the problems of my life. They were useless, trifle things that could not budge this huge rock inside of me."What can I do?", I asked my English teacher who I had felt close to. "Don't think about pointless things like that. Try to think thoughts that suit your age, and try to get along with your friends," he could only say to me. The oblivious answer disappointed me, and I left his house in a hurry.My friend Hye-gyeong came to me one day, saying she had something to tell me. She was one of my closer friends and classmates, and we often talked about our inner thoughts. She and I went to different churches, and sometimes talked about our churches. It was a little after the end of winter vacation in my junior year of high school when Hye-gyeong came to me after school."I've been born again", she said. "Do you know what being born again is?" she asked. "I'm not sure. But let's talk about it later," I told her, wanting to learn more. A few minutes later, we found

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