Connie Shin - The Long Walk

 

It's 1991. [audience laughter] I'm living in Baltimore with my mom and my dad. I'm this cute little kid with blunt bangs, and I don't speak any English. Most days, I get dropped off at daycare or I get left with my grandma, my dad's mom, because my parents, they work full time between a laundromat and this restaurant that my dad just opened. The restaurant was called The Lunchbox. It was a cafeteria in downtown Baltimore, right across the street from the courthouse. 

 

I have vague memories of The Lunchbox. I've seen a lot of photos. There's this one photo of me, and in it, you can see that I'm running between the buffet stations. And right off to the side you see my dad, and he's wearing green sweatpants and he's grinning so big. You can tell from this one photograph that I, as a toddler, am very comfortable and at ease in this space. You can tell from this one photograph that my dad was so proud of his place. 

 

On November 6th, 1991, just a month after I turned three, two of my dad's teenaged employees, along with two other people, robbed The Lunchbox. And in the process of the robbery, one of them killed my dad. [audience aww] My dad's name was Myungjin. He chose to go by Mike when he immigrated to the States when he was 25. And Mike was only 32 years old when he died. After my dad died, nobody talked about him. We never went to the grave, we didn't celebrate birthdays, we didn't note the passing of death anniversaries, because my family and our community acted as if he never existed, I didn't grow up having the words to describe his absence.

 

 It was weird growing up knowing that there was this big thing missing in my life, but not having any language for it. I remember when I was a kid, my friends would eventually ask me, like, "Hey, where is your dad?" I never knew what to say to them. So, most times, I just started to cry. Or, other times, I would get angry at them for even asking such a thing, and I would say, "I don't have a dad." And that felt like a true statement to me, because I didn't have memories of my dad. I wanted to know things, I wish people said, "Wow, you look just like your dad, you smile like your dad, you run like your dad," but nobody ever said anything, so I didn't say anything. And the silence went on for decades. 

 

But then, in March of 2020, completely out of the blue, I received a phone call from the Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office informing me that the man who killed my dad was appealing his sentence, and that somebody in my family could write a victim impact statement and read it at his hearing. Also in 2020, I was turning 32, and it was messing with my head big time. I could not wrap my head around the fact that I was turning the age my dad was when he died. I became fixated on this idea of turning 32, but completely dreading it. I was so obsessed with the number 32 that I had a friend tattoo it on me that year. 

 

Turning 32 just felt so symbolic. I mean, the same year I'm turning this age that my dad was when he died, I might meet the man who killed him. I knew I needed to do something big to acknowledge this birthday. So, in October, on my actual birthday, I decided that I'd walk the entire perimeter of Manhattan in one day, because somebody told me it's actually 32 miles long. I wrote this essay, and I sent it to all my friends and family explaining the significance of this birthday, and I invited people to walk with me. I was floored by people's responses. 

 

My mom immediately went out and bought a pair of Hokas and said she would walk with me. [audience laughter] Some of my mom's siblings, apart from apologizing to me for never talking about my dad. I had friends who didn't live in New York who said, "I'm going to go on a 32-minute walk in honor of you and your dad." I set up this tracker on Google Maps, so that anyone anywhere could see my path throughout the day. I started walking at 07:00 AM from the base of Manhattan from South Ferry Station. As I began to walk along the West Side, various people from my life started to show up. A roommate from grad school came and she walked with me for a few miles. Some cousins on my mom's side of the family came and they brought their three kids and we kicked a soccer ball through Battery Park. 

 

As I continued to just cruise up the West Side Highway, more and more people started to show up. Even this guy that I recently matched with on Hinge came and walked with me for a few miles. [audience laughter] And then, my cousin Andrew showed up. Andrew is the son of my dad's younger brother. He's just a year younger than me, so he was almost two when my dad was killed. My uncle had told his kids that my dad had died in a car crash. And it wasn't until Andrew was in his 20s that he learned how my dad really died. I invited my uncle to do the walk, and I even finally asked him to tell me stories about my dad. 

 

When I told him about the hearing, because I was just curious what he thought about it, all he said in an email was, "Don't say any of this to your grandma, and this guy needs to serve the remainder of his sentence." I wasn't surprised by his response, but it was hard to sit with, because I had started to feel differently that year. In my mind I was thinking, my dad's been dead for nearly three decades, why should this guy remain in prison? There were moments of the walk that felt equally mentally fatiguing. I remember as we were coming down Harlem River Drive and I was thinking to myself, like, “What am I doing? Why did I tell all these people about my dad?” Like, “What am I trying to prove with this walk?” 

 

But even with moments of self-doubt, I couldn't stop walking. One, I'm a pretty competitive person and too many people knew I was doing this walk, so I couldn't quit. [audience laughter] And two, I was trying to make sense of my life through this walk. I had somehow linked in my mind that walking 32 miles would help me process my dad's death, as if every mile I walked would give me a year back where nobody talked about him. Doing this walk was my way of forcing the people in my life to acknowledge that he had existed. And in my mind, turning 32 felt like something that I could share with just my dad. I'd always wanted to do some sort of a legacy project in order to get to know my dad better, but I never knew what questions to ask, I didn't know what medium to use, so I chose to walk. 

 

I walked because I wanted to talk about my dad, I walked because I didn't know how to talk about my dad, and I walked because I had no idea how to write a victim impact statement, like, what do you say about someone that you don't even know? And in the lead-up to the hearing and in writing this statement, it was really important for me to be able to answer two questions, do I hate this person who killed my dad? Can I forgive the person who killed my dad? Is it possible within one's own soul to hate and forgive at the same time? 

 

And during this year, I had begun to learn just a little bit about transformative justice. And I realized that the answer to my dad's violent death is not more violence, that there's this collective responsibility that we all have to practice the things that we want to see change in this world. And this framework of transformative justice aligned with a personal motto of mine, which is to ask myself, what is a life well lived? Like, what did it mean for me, as I was turning 32, to live a life well lived? What did it mean for my dad, who died at 32, to have lived a life well lived? And now, I couldn't help but wonder, what does it mean for this person who killed my dad to also have a life well lived? 

 

The end of the walk, it got very cold, it was very dark. The people who were still walking with me were all falling apart. One person sprained their ankle. We had moleskin for blisters. We're all hobbling towards that last mile. I'm so tired, I'm not even thinking about my dad. And in the end, we actually walked 33.5 miles because of construction. [audience laughter] At about 10:00 PM, we reached the bottom of Manhattan. Some people were there to congratulate us, to celebrate my birthday. And the next morning when I woke up, I remember feeling disappointed. I thought that by doing this big, bold, brave thing, I would know myself better, I would feel closer to my dad, and through that process I would have the words for this victim impact statement. But the walk didn't change anything. But now, I realize that it was the start of me thinking about my life being beyond 32. Like, I've obviously surpassed my dad's age. I've realized that planning a future for myself is its own form of a legacy. Like, I am my dad's legacy. My very aliveness is a testament to that legacy, because every day I get to live the life that he never got to.

 

A couple of months after the walk, December 2020, I did attend the hearing, and it was over Zoom. And there was no amount of walking or talking or thinking that could have prepared me for that experience. Nothing could have prepared me for the experience of being in my own home, logging onto Zoom, and just waiting for his face to appear. Nothing could have prepared me for the experience of hearing his voice and listening to him talk about the events that led him to kill my dad. Nothing could have prepared me for the experience of learning he has a daughter and we are the same age and we have both worked in education. 

 

When his face finally did appear, I didn't know where to look. I remember thinking like, oh, my God, can he see me? When it was my turn, I read my statement directly to his face in his square, and I explained what it was like growing up without a father because of something he did when he was 21, and yet still believing that he should be released from prison. But the judge denied his appeal. But about a year after that, I wrote a second statement, this time to a parole board, and I explained that my feelings had not changed since the hearing, and I was still advocating that he be released from prison, so that he can go home and explore what it is to live a life well lived for him. And just last year, I received an online notification from the state of Maryland letting me know that he was released. I think that all of this, I think that this honors my dad, and that is a legacy that I am very proud of. Thank you.