So Far From the Bamboo Grove

This book was deeply moving and quite incredible. It amazes me that one girls journey, at only the age of 11, could be so intense. They had so many close calls and encounters with death, it's hard to imagine that happening in America or in my own comfortable life. War is such a foreign concept to me, since I have never had to experience it that directly. I am thinking about how notable Ko's consistent survival methods were. Talk about persistence! She sort of reminded me a little of my older sister Elizabeth who is now a surgeon in Dallas. When Yoko put up the signs for her brother Hydeyo in the train station, I was thinking about how she said there were so many other signs up there too, and I started to think about how many other similar stories like Yoko's were out there, stories of survival, of courage and overcoming impossible odds. This thought sort of blows me away to think about- that every person really does have a journey of their own, and I believe everyone's journey is just as interesting and significant as everyone else's, even if yours is not as action packed as Yoko's.

Maybe my own journey is also full of many 'close calls'. For example, my Dad. He went into medicine, not because he loved medicine, but because he was told there was more money in that field than in marine biology, his true passion. This decision began to affect my life when I went to school and my parents forced me to do nursing instead of art, my true passion, since they insisted I'd never find a job as an artist. I failed to get into the nursing school at Iowa, thank heavens!, and now I'm following my passion so the cycle has stopped! That was a close call, not with physical death, but with the death of passion and talent, and what is life without passion or without destiny?  So there are stories that make up every person you meet on a the street and just like the title of Yoko's essay, it takes understanding to see that and to be willing to hear their stories.

      I wish that more information had been given about the essay that Yoko wrote; maybe she could have included portions of it in the book. I was interested to know what she was thinking about when she wrote it.