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Su Bin Park
2015. 03. 20.
Freshman Writing
Draft of Literacy Narrative
How my Mother influenced me: Reading and Writing
Tracing back to the first time I began to learn Korean, it was my mother who first came
up in my mind. Thanks to her passion and creativity, I still remember how I learned the
words, began to read, enjoyed reading and started writing. And of course, my mom is
involved in all these steps of learning Korean.
First of all, let me explain how I learned the words. As I mentioned above, my mother
invented a lot of novel ways to teach me Korean. For example, after she knew that I love
jigsaw puzzles, she picked some words that are related to the pictures in puzzles and wrote
each of them on the back of every piece of puzzles. If a birthday cake was drawn in the
puzzle, she wrote ‘birthday’, ‘cake’, ‘party’, ‘congratulate’ on the back of puzzles. And she
would let me read the words out loud. Therefore, while playing puzzles, I could not only
learn how to read the words but also learn the meaning of them by matching the picture and
the words on the back of puzzles together. There was another game which she invented- ‘run
to the words!’. My mom wrote every word on each piece of paper and pinned them on the
wall. If she said one of the words, I ran to the piece of paper which the word she said is
written on. For example, if she says ‘가’, I ran to the piece of paper that ‘가’ is written on.
The one who touches the paper faster was the winner. She deliberately ran slowly for me but I
didn’t know it at that time. That was my one of favorite games because I won every time we
played.
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Thanks to these interesting games, I became the first kid who could read Korean in my
town. However, I had not read any books before then. There is another episode how I began
to read. Tracing back to my childhood, I remember the room that I liked the most which was
full of the smell of books, a beam of light coming in through the window and some flying
dust when I took a book off the shelf. This room gave 5-year-old girl a sense of magnificence
and even solemnity at that time. The feeling whenever I opened the door of that room was
similar to Lucy entering the closet in ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’-countless bubbles of
thoughts appeared and popped in that room. My mother usually asked me to bring some
books from this room and read them before I went to bed, but one day she fell into sleep early
and forgot to read some books for me. I nagged her to wake up but drunken with sleep, she
did not bat an eye. Unavoidably, to relieve the monotony, I entered the room and even looked
around all the books in the high bookshelves which I had not seen before. That was the first
time I read books myself and realized how interesting the books are.
The books that I picked were the ‘Franklin Series’ which is about a young turtle,
Franklin, going through many interesting happenings that most kids can feel sympathy
toward such as being afraid of going into dark places, playing in the mud and being scolded
by mother. This might seem so childish but I laughed and cried while reading the book at that
time. It was like meeting my best friend through books. It was totally a new world! There
were 10 books in this series and I finished all at a sitting. The fact that I read a book by
myself was truly an achievement! After this experience, I started exploring all the books in
the bookshelf and started borrowing books from library. The Franklin Series was the
stepping-stone for me to a wider spectrum of books. I started to find more interesting books
and read those by myself. Sometimes I made a small reading club with my friends at the age
of 5 or 6 and enjoyed reading story-telling books to them. I felt like a teacher in kindergarten
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when all kids were sitting together near me making a circle. Most adults who saw me reading
books to other kids praised me and this made me to read more books.
I started to enjoy reading books after that but writing remained another hardship to
overcome. Writing a diary was the homework that I hated the most in elementary school. I
always asked my mom to give me topics for my diary homework. It took me a lot of time to
write a diary because I didn’t have any interest in writing and kept nagging my mom for a
topic. Instead of telling me the topic directly, she used my competitive spirit and suggested
another game. She said that if I wrote a diary within 30 minutes she would buy me an ice
cream. Also, to make me more concentrate on the work, she measured the time and told me
how many minutes were left in every 10 minutes. Her saying of ‘10 minutes left’ was like a
magic spell. It made me concentrate my entire mind on writing and helped me to think of
countless ideas which I have never thought of before. At first, I usually wrote poems about all
the stuffs near me-traffic light, oranges, clock and so on because poems were usually short
and it was easy to pick a motif. But, as I got used to writing, I began to write all the thoughts
and happenings in that day and wrote some lyrics and songs sometimes. Among the songs
that I made, I thought one of them was really great so I taught it to my younger sister. I also
said that I learned the songs at school because I was too shy to tell that I made them. My
younger sister believed my lie because she was really young at that time-just 5 years old. But
I thought, ‘Since she really believed that the song was made by other professional composers,
the quality of my song is not that bad’. After getting confidence through this experience, I
started enjoying writing and wrote short essays even about trivial happenings.
That was the story of how I learned the words, began to read, enjoyed reading and
started writing with my mother’s help. Reading and writing became inevitable elements of
my life. When I was stumbling under the storm of adolescence, a book was the only one
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which raised me up. When I fought with my mom or thought deeply what a true relationship
is, I tried to find answers from reading books or articles. Also, thanks to my mom, I still write
a diary now especially when I feel frustrated and get some energy by writing.