Challenged My Faith

Interview by Jadyn Kim and Kimberly Espinosa

Can you please introduce yourself?
My name is Jae In Kim. People call me Joseph. You can call me Joe if you want. I live in Koreatown, Los Angeles, with my older sister and two dogs. I go to a school called the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES) where I’m the president of two clubs: the Jazz Affinity Club and the Christian Club. 

What are your thoughts on Koreatown?
It’s a very, very populated urban place. L.A. is known for being a sort of mosh pit of cultures, and I think Koreatown is a result of that combination. You have American food, but then you also have Korean food and supermarkets. Sometimes you even see Asian fusion foods. Koreatown is a pretty good place to live. There are some parts that are not the safest, but there’s a lot of culture everywhere. It’s just not always evident because there aren’t a lot of monuments. 

Do you think the different cultures in Koreatown have influenced your personal life?
The different cultures in Koreatown really affected how I view things since I go to a school in L.A. called the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES), which has white, Black, Asian, and Latinx people from different cultures. We’re all influenced by each other, so we end up being the same kind of people in some way. 

If I hadn’t come to Koreatown, then I probably wouldn’t have known good food from other cultures. And second, I probably might have been racist. It just depends on where and how you live. I believe that both nature and nurture have a very strong influence over who you are.

If quarantine ended tomorrow, what is the first thing that you would do?
If quarantine ended tomorrow, I’d probably have to go back to school. But if I were free for the whole day, then I would probably go over to either church or my friend’s home because I’ve been wanting to visit my friends for a while. Even before the quarantine, I never really got the chance to visit my friends. 

Are you looking forward to going to school in person in the future or do you like it online?
Online school and going to school in person both have their pros and cons. As for going in person, it’s good to see your friends, and there’s a connection since teachers can actually see what you’re doing and interact with you. For teachers, it would be much better than just talking to black screens. But in-person school has its cons as well — one of which is that I would have to be driven to school, and my school is kind of far. I only have my sister left. I don’t want her to drive me to school every day, so that’s definitely one thing that I don’t like about going to school in person. 

But with online school, I could just attend class really quickly and easily, and sometimes I could just relax and listen to the teacher, and I could put my legs up on the bed. But if I were to choose, I would choose online simply because I don’t want my sister to suffer when she’s also in school.

What was your experience and process going back to school?
At the beginning of the second semester in 11th grade, we were still going to school physically, and I thought, “This coronavirus thing was going to last like a week or so, and then we’re just going to go back to school.” I wasn’t even saying goodbye to my friends, and I was saying, “Oh, see you in a week!” I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I was excited because we were having a week off. As time passed, I heard that school wasn’t going to be available until April 1, 2020. Then I started hearing about Zoom. I was asking my friends, “What’s that? What’s Zoom?” and they were telling me it’s a communication platform that the school planned to use for online classes. It seemed like it would be very easy to pass classes or cheat on tests because everything is online and you’re not in class physically — you can just do whatever behind the screen without the teacher knowing. So I was like, “Oh, easy As.”

That was until my mom brought my grandma from the senior home to our home. My mom was listening to the radio, and the radio said, “If you guys have any relatives in the senior home, you should get them before COVID gets to that senior home.” My mom was like, “Oh my, my mom’s there; I should get her before COVID gets there.” So my mom retrieved my grandma. We had this whole hospital bed set up in the living room so that my grandma could just lay there. It was a horrible experience. 

My mom got COVID. I got COVID. My sister got COVID. I saw my mom crying a lot — breaking down emotionally — because my grandma was literally dying in front of us. Her eyes would roll back into her head. There would be saliva building up in her mouth. The living room was basically just a whole contamination zone. My mom was trying to prevent me and my sister from going any further than the couch, but eventually, we went to the living room whenever we wanted. 

My dad ran an acupuncture clinic, and he got COVID from one of his patients who was showing coronavirus symptoms. So here we are — all of us, just sick. My grandma had to be sent to the hospital. She passed away soon after, and her ashes were sent on an airplane to New York to be buried next to my grandpa. As for my parents, my dad went to the ICU first, and then my mom followed. And through it all, it was a horrible experience because I would hear crying every day. But my sister and I were getting support from the community: people were bringing us food, and they were spreading our story on social media. Through it all, I was just trying to keep up with my work online. I guess I stood my ground. I didn’t want to give up on school. 

I didn’t want to stop taking classes. I didn’t want to slack off and stuff, you know? I even tried to do an essay. But I couldn’t because there were too many
things happening at home. So I asked my teacher if she could extend the deadline. My English teacher, vice principal, and I met in a Zoom meeting, and we established that it would be a good idea to tell my teachers to finalize my grades and not give me anymore work. So basically, I ended the semester early. At that time, I didn’t want to give up. I was like, “Oh, but I want to finish the semester in the same way that my peers are finishing the semester.” I just wanted to have a normal life. I just wanted to have a normal education — a normal time learning. I wanted to be a normal person. I wanted to have a normal life. But, you know, things just didn’t work out that way. 

But at the same time, I had to deal with this. I don’t think I would have been able to go in person anyway because my mom was sick in the ICU. I would have had to take Uber, or I would have had to have my sister take me, but she probably wouldn’t have been very willing during that time. So either way, whether we were going to meet physically or online, I might have just been excused from school.

How does your experience with Christianity tie into your experience with the pandemic?
The fact that we have to attend services online isn’t very problematic for me, except that we can’t really meet each other. I can still listen and think about my pastor’s message. But this whole pandemic has just been really challenging for me in terms of my faith, because I’ve lost so much, and when you’ve lost so much, you begin to doubt whether God is even good, or maybe even real. So it’s just what happened in my life personally that really challenged my faith.

What have you been up to these days in quarantine?
Quarantine has really done some things to my family. It has taken away my parents. It has challenged my faith pretty severely. But it has helped me learn to be more responsible since I’m basically living with only my older sister and two dogs. I didn’t know anything about responsibility in terms of taking care of the apartment or things regarding housing. Now, I have to worry about all of that, and sometimes I struggle to even eat because I used to always depend on my mom to cook something. I have to cook something for myself and my sister and wash the dishes a lot more frequently. I’m still trying my best to do well in school and I’ve also been given opportunities to learn new things. 

But other than that, my life right now can be summarized like this: I wake up, brush my teeth, and take my classes. I sit there, take notes, take a test, and sometimes play with my dogs. Then I either start cleaning up around the apartment or start my homework. 

But sometimes, when I’m not feeling very productive, I just lay on my bed. I just stay there and think until I see the sun go down. And I’m like, “Oh shoot, I have homework that I need to do.” And what happens in the night varies because I can either spend it working on homework, by myself, or with friends. I can play games with my pastor and some of his old youth kids, so that’s always fun. But as you can probably tell, it’s not the best lifestyle. It’s full of laziness, I guess.

Could you describe any highlights from the past year?
A really good thing that developed from my time in quarantine was that I got to hang out with my pastor every day. He plays video games with me. But through that, I think I’m able to see how a Christian is supposed to — well, not supposed to — but how a Christian can live his or her life. Whenever I have questions about Christianity, I can just ask my pastor. He’s kind of like a substitute for my dad since my dad was a pastor, and I used to ask my dad everything that I could think of. 

If you could ask anyone from your life, living or dead, for advice on getting through this, who would it be and what would you ask them?
To get through this, I would ask my dad for advice because he was always very influential in my life, especially because he was a pastor, and I would ask
him a lot of questions. We slept in the same room every night, so I would just ask him questions there. His identity as a pastor helped me gain more of a foundation in my Christian faith. So if I had some advice from him, with all this crazy stuff happening with racism and COVID everywhere, then it would be a lot easier for me.

Do you think after all of this is over, you will come out a stronger person?
I think I would become someone who is not as naive because I have learned to regret my past mistakes of taking things for granted. I’ve learned that through
loss and extreme pain. I have learned a lot more about myself while applying to college as well. I’ve become a much stronger person throughout the course of this pandemic.