15 July 2005

The familiar sting of the alcohol-sterilised air welcomed, or rather, un-welcomed eight-year-old Jihyo as she stepped into the building, tugging the almost bigger than her body, worn down duffle bag along with all her might as the glass doors slid open.

“Miss Park Jihyo?”

She could only nod through her heavy panting at the heavily accented Korean, but she couldn’t really blame the Japanese nurse. After all, she was in Japan. 

The tall lady’s black heels paired with knee-high white socks didn’t make her stature any less towering over Jihyo’s scrawny body, and neither did the smile plastered on her face prevent Jihyo’s brave facade from faltering at all.

 Jihyo isn’t stupid. She knows that she’s only picking up every detail about the woman to find something of comfort, and she knows that she’s really not brave at all, if her own wobbly knees were any indicator. Or her heartbeat going faster than the train she took to get here. Japan really is as advanced as the doctors in Korea had said, Jihyo thinks.

She also knows that it’s perfectly reasonable for a young kid who left her home and is now in a foreign country for a major surgery, where no one around her understands her, not just what she’s speaking, to be absolutely terrified. Yet, her mother always said that she was mature for her age, and Jihyo desperately wanted to stay that way, maybe to avoid the looks of pity people think she can’t see.

The sting, Jihyo had concluded about halfway down the corridor, was definitely worse than back in Korea, but she found that she liked it, the smell comforted her, being the only familiarity in the sea of unreadable characters, and Jihyo swore to learn the language in a month’s span.

She was jolted out of her thoughts when the nurse informed her of their arrival at what was to be her new home, and Jihyo was grateful that she was able to vaguely understand the slur of Korean words. In fact, she probably would have jumped in shock from the sudden announcement if she wasn’t still groggy from having just arrived from a 4am plane ride, or if she wasn’t completely exhausted by something completely different, but Jihyo liked to think that it was the former.