After our move, I read the set again and again in a continuous loop, my only refuge in this foreign land where I didn’t speak the language and knew no one, where books were comprised of squiggly shapes I couldn’t decipher. When we moved to America a year later, I begged my parents to let me bring it, arguing that I’d need something to keep me company until I learned English. The mystery set I’d gotten for my 10th birthday. Since book space was limited, I had to borrow one book at a time and got to keep only those I got as birthday presents. We had been poor in Korea, living in one small room that barely fit basic necessities, and I was only allowed toys that wouldn’t take up space - small pebbles for Korean jacks, a rope, chalk. The other day at my parents’ house, I found something I’d forgotten about: a six-volume set of Korean translations of classic mysteries by the old masters like Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie, which we’d brought with us from Seoul to Baltimore when I was 11. I’ve always been drawn to mysteries, beginning at a young age when I was still in Korea.
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