Introduction
3.12.23
Tell us about yourself. Who are you?
My name is Shine (like the sun). My full name is Shine Kyuho Lee. My mother named me Shine to be the light of the world, so I guess the shoes I’ve been given to fill aren’t exactly small. John Kyuho Shine 존 규호 샤인 is what my maternal grandfather would always call me over the phone: John being the baptismal name my paternal grandfather gave me, and Kyuho 규호 (圭浩) being the Korean name my mother gave me — 圭 meaning good fortune and 浩 meaning vast and great. 浩 can refer to the image of great rolling waves surging, which I find interesting given my simultaneous fascination and fear of the ocean. John the Apostle is often called Saint John the Beloved, or "the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23), and his books (John 1-3, Relevation) are filled with images of light, eternal life and mission.
My surname Lee 李 (오얏 리) comes from Gyeongju in North Gyeongsang Province in Eastern South Korea. “오얏” is the old native term for plum, formed by combining 木 목 mu, which means tree, and the character 子 리 li, which makes the sound li. (I guess it’s no surprise that I love plum tea.) It took me years and years of intercontinental travel with (and to) family before I realized that surnames, the names we come from, are just as important as the names we are given.
I am 21 years old. I was born in 2001, the year of the snake (apparently I am supposed to be enigmatic, wise, intuitive and I hate failure), and I represent Generation Z, whether I like it or not. I was born at the turn of the 21st century, in a new age — an age of computers, financialization, the human genome, recessions, environmentalism and terrorism. Incheon International Airport, the main international airport of South Korea, opened in 2001. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was released as the first of the book series' film adaptations in 2001, which I would later watch on my mother’s old portable DVD player on the plane from New York to Incheon in 2010.
I live in Berkeley, California as a college student at the University of California, Berkeley. To be quite honest, California is still just a concept to me. (Though to be fair, all countries are concepts, stuck onto continents constantly in movement deep below our feet.) I have also yet to understand how to read the weather in Fahrenheit, which seems to be important even in a place like California where seasons blend together. I was never much of a sun person, which means that the summer days in California are when I get to build more character.
My Myers-Briggs 16 Personalities Type is an ENFP-T: Extraverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Prospecting, Turbulent, and my astrological sign is Scorpio. Take these things as you wish.
In answering this question, I'm realizing how hard it is to distinguish who I am from what I am. As I write I think of Exodus 3:14 of the Bible, when Moses asks God what he should tell the Israelites when they ask for God's name -- God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.’” What more is there really say to about who I am? At the end of the day, I am who I am.
My biggest fear is falling or being stranded, in water or high up in air.
I like short sentences. But I also yearn for completion.
Nowadays, I’m starting to believe that my purpose in life is to be of service, staying close to suffering in different forms, and to express through creating, both for and with others. One of the things I’ve recently become spiritually awakened by is liberation theology, an idea put forth by Peruvian philosopher and Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, and I’m hoping to find its intersections across different world traditions and in our world history of evolution and conflict.
Where are you from?
Cosmically, more or less the same place everything else on our planet comes from: star stuff. So the question is inherently leading, because in asking one’s origin, beneath the structure of the words we are actually hoping to find each other, or rather, ourselves in each other. Texas, New Jersey, South Korea, Connecticut, California. In reality, these places are able to find meaning only in relation to each other.
I come from people as much as I come from land and place. I come from people I’ve been physically close to in my life, like my mother and father, my older brother, my four grandparents, my teachers, my friends, my peers, strangers in frequent passing, fellow residents of apartments, towns, states and countries. I also come from people I have and will never meet, from prophets to the inventor of the Korean alphabet to Michael Jackson.
What keeps you up at night?
The spin I can put on a basketball to make reverse layups, songs Shazam’d today and hip-hop lyrics I repeat reflexively. Chopin waltzes my mother and father would celebrate when I play, concert halls we set foot in, Charlie Parker and Rachmaninoff.
Email sign-offs that sound better than “sincerely,” the Daniel Kim’s and Michelle Park’s I’ve crossed paths and fell out of touch with, possible first impressions with people I hope to connect (or reconnect) with, intrusive images of angels and goblins on the street, a sudden fear of someone coming up from behind and choking me.
Ingredients that would go well in a wrap for lunch, my brother’s footsteps of young “adult”-hood that I trace inevitably, the record-high declining birth rate of the Korean people, the quiver (or on good days, a lack thereof) in my grandmother’s voice when I call her over the phone as I eat dinner.
Words that fulfill completion in imaginary letters, wrinkles finding their place on my mother and father’s faces, photographs my brother discovered from times of birth and immigration that now feel foreign.
Unrequited love, last words I could have said better, the possibility of hearing sudden news of a North Korean nuclear attack on my home country, trying to look up from my bed and imagining my grandfathers looking back down at me and seeing what I'm doing.
The understanding that tomorrow might never come — the sun and moon and other big balls around us could stop spinning, just because. Or it could be that I stop moving and become very still in my sleep, forgetting how to wake.
Where do you want to be?
By the Han River in Seoul, riding a bicycle by the bridge I would cross each morning to get to school, an international school significantly less than international but further from Korean. In front of the toast stand (now closed) where I got off the bus and my grandfather waited to pick me up each afternoon, walking me home less than 200 meters. On the floor of Palisades Country Day School carpeted by the world map, religiously wearing my red No. 5 shirt instead of the colorful sweater my mother had picked out for me. In the small classrooms and staircases of Holy Family Catholic School (now closed), fitted into a navy uniform and a class size of 20. In winter car rides with my mother to visit my brother in Connecticut and by the Han River in Seoul, playing penalty-kick games and throwing baseballs (catching them sometimes) with my father on Sundays.
Everywhere on this planet, our home, where we come from. I dream of outer space, yet I fear the actual potential to venture into that territory.
In land, place, people, culture and history of unknown, where I will lean into stories of community and legacy while discovering familiarity, however small. From North Korea to Vietnam, from Haiti to the Philippines. As well as in places to revisit and deepen my understanding and relation with, from Texas to South Korea, from New Jersey to Mexico, from Nepal to Japan, from Northern Ireland to Taiwan.
Who do you want to be?
I wish to be someone expressing — experiencing, recording, reflecting, remembering, retelling, revealing, reciting, realizing — both for myself and for others.
I wish to be someone connecting — listening, conversing, healing, bridging, understanding, sowing, enlightening — internal and external.
Sometimes the occupational identifiers of “doctor” or “writer” or “environmentalist” or “musician” appear a little too square for emotions that don’t have right angles. And even more so for words like Korean, American, man, wealth, Christian, young, human. But I suppose that just means I need to re-define these words for myself.