When I was about six years old, I fell off the swing in the park and skinned my knee.  Whether I was shocked or mesmerized, time stopped for me.  I recall to this day the beauty of the red blood and the way it fixated my attention.  There was no pain.  Only arrest.

Then I heard my mother’s voice and the other mothers too, with whom she’d been gossiping on the park bench.  It was the shrill cry of my name and the fright incised on her face that seemed to start time going again.  Then the pain began.  And I started to cry.

Often, I’ve returned to this moment in my memory.  And its exquisite stillness and quiet, before the pandemonium.  There seems something magical, miraculous about it, as though I managed, unwittingly, to stop time.  There was also something sublime, even religious.  A brief, if accidental, return to Eden.

I was to recall this incident recently while reading Eckhardt Tolle’s The Power of Now.  In which he equates time with pain.  And conversely, eternity with joy.  I experienced this abstract assertion through my very body.  Through the currency of my blood.

We are conditioned to avoid pain, to hide our wounding, physical and otherwise.  Like Holden Caulfield, we wish to be catchers in the rye, standing at the edge of the cliff, stopping our children before they fall.

But it is only through the wound, through pain, that our children learn compassion.  Literally, “to suffer together.”  Though victory, success and recognition are worldly and worthwhile goals, they, without the reminders of our vulnerability, keep us separate and potentially cut off from the rest of humanity.

It is only the pain of the wound, whether a fall or a failure, that reunites us, nourishes us with the balm of human feeling, so we can get up and try again.  It is only through the wound that the darkness of our pride is humbled, making room for grace.  As Rumi so beautifully wrote, the wound is the place where the light enters you.

Students of the Waldorf Steiner schools don’t start reading until the age of seven.  Rather anomalous in an ethos where fast learners are paraded as potential little Einsteins and their slower brethren cause for parental concern, if not chagrin.

It’s never too early to start teaching your children, seems to be the conventional pedagogical wisdom.  “Educational” is the buzzword, the marketer’s seductive lure for parents perusing the aisles of toy stores or surfing children’s TV channels.

The mad rush to ply children with as much knowledge as possible as soon as possible reminds me of roots of the word “precocious.”  Which derives from the Latin prefix “pre” and “coquere,” to cook.  Despite its modern usage, for me the word has always intimated a casserole being pulled out of the oven before it’s fully done.

I experienced this prematurity first-hand.  My mother, who was educated in Korea, supervised my education the only way she knew how:  by force-feeding facts and figures and demanding their memorization.  Even at a young age, my soul rebelled.  The constant input of information felt like a violation of sorts.   An interruption of the natural order of things.

According to Rudolph Steiner, humans develop in seven-year cycles.  His education seeks to observe this natural law.  So the interval before the seventh year is reserved for reciting rhymes, listening to fairly tales and having time and space to play so children can live in the visual realm of the imagination.

There is a cordoning off and protection of this tender mental space, so it can be cultivated before receiving more traditional lessons.  And this cultivation, with its emphasis on rhythm and mythic tales, aims at coaxing or jogging our collective archetypal memory.  A pedagogy that jibes with Plato’s theory of education.  It is no coincidence that Steiner is considered a Neo-Platonist.

True education, according to Plato, is anamnesis.  Or recollection of knowledge already present within one’s soul.  In the Republic, Plato elaborates further on the purpose of education:  to free the soul of the things that turn its sight downward and to reorient it towards the truth.  Like Steiner, Plato endorses a specific curriculum towards seeking our eternal knowledge.  To this end, any compulsory intellectual work was unnecessary as it never remained in the soul.

But how does this education, with its esoteric abstractions and classical origins, relate to our daily lives in the real world, you may ask.  I suppose it depends on whether we believe there’s a soul–and more to the point, are able to define what it is.

For me, the soul is our storehouse of collective memories, myths and deep imaginings–the templates of our earthly reality.  It is our primal waters of creation.  Without which–and our constant connection to and recollection of this knowledge–we would be banished to a barren wasteland, without creativity, hopes and dreams.  From this perspective, it becomes not only a question of our children’s education, but the vitality and progress of our civilization.

Korean was my first language, my mother tongue.  Then we immigrated to the States, and the world suddenly changed:  the food, the sounds, the smells–and the words I heard all around me.

I was four-years-old.  So I was still unselfconsciously osmotic, able to soak things up the way kids can.  Now, as a writer, I can hardly imagine not speaking English.  I revel in its wealth of words, throwing them out gleefully like fistfuls of hundred dollar bills.  I love its idiosyncrasies of spelling and grammar, its constant, open acceptance and assimilation of other cultures’ words, the way it can go starkly, polysyllabically, pompously Latinate, then earthily Germanic and then so inimitably flip.

Like a little black dress, it’s both elegant and practical and will never go out of style.  I even prefer its meat and potatoes sturdiness, its direct, technical staccato, to the softer, lilting melodies of the Romance languages.

So I grew up speaking English and, as if I’d married my soul mate, fall more deeply in love with it as time goes on.  Yet all the while my parents continued to speak to me in Korean.  In fact, they still do.  And I respond to them in English.  This dynamic has been so natural to me that I wasn’t even aware of it–until my other half, who isn’t Korean, commented with fascination on its peculiarity.

I profess an inability to speak Korean.  It’s my canned response to Koreans, to some of my parents’ friends who don’t speak English fluently, and to whom, out of Confucian respect, I feel obliged to adapt.  Though in all honesty, my connection to Korean feels more like an atrophied muscle or a clogged pipeline that needs, respectively, the discipline of regular training and a mellow glass of Cabernet to unclog.

Speaking Korean is like a close friend I haven’t seen in years.  The kind of friend with whom I can within minutes of reuniting feel that same, old, undiminished camaraderie.  As if no time at all had passed.  With a few words, more than twenty years are wiped away, and I am again the four-year-old girl yet to leave her homeland.  It is the language of my mirage-like, distant toddlerhood–and the language of absolute authority, the way parents can seem to a child of four.

Hearing Korean will always possess for me the quality of a parent stentoriously calling a child upstairs by her full name in that particular tone that says “you’re in trouble.”  And my response to it is visceral, instinctive, like a dog responding to a whistle only it can hear.  Korean carries power and resonance–and as its recipient, I am relegated to a position of an eternal child, on the brink of leaving my first home.

Recently, however, my mother asked me for help with a speech she was to give in English.  A big speech in front of important people.  It was a critical moment.  A potential turning of the tables.  A changing of the guards.  An opportunity to wield the expertise I had worked for so many years to attain.   When she called me the next morning to tell me what a success the speech had been, she thanked me profusely–and with great approbation.  And I understood what it meant to be an author:  a writer with authority.

Nearly ten years after she was abducted from her home in Salt Lake City and raped repeatedly during a nine-month captivity, Elizabeth Smart has recently spoken about her trauma.

Perhaps, like most of those who’d heard about her kidnapping and eventual return, I too had wondered why she hadn’t “run for it” when her captor had brought her out in public.  Smart admits now to feeling “so dirty and filthy,” referring to her religious upbringing and a particular schoolteacher who compared sex to chewing gum.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away,” she said.  “Why would it even be worth screaming out?  Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued?  Your life still has no value.”

Though we’ve evolved towards opening conversation and instituting legislation about sexual issues, which had once been considered taboo, the power of shame’s mechanism remains seemingly intransigent.

Generally, shame is differentiated from guilt in that the former is directly about the self, whereas guilt’s focus is on the action or behaviour.  For me, however, the most striking difference is shame’s cascade of effects in the body.  When I am “mortified” or “cringe” at some embarrassing memory, the commotion within is powerful enough to put me in a state of paralysis.  I want to run and hide.  I want to disappear from view.

In fact, the word shame has its origins in the Indo-Germanic root kam/ken meaning to “cover.”  A definition that brings to mind the woven fig leaves that Adam and Eve put over their bodies, upon recognizing their nakedness.

Their subsequent departure from Paradise feels like a mythic correlative of a child’s first glance in the mirror.  When she notices that she has a body separate from the free-flowing Edenic nourishment of her mother’s.  Now, it’s as though there are two pairs of eyes, her own and those of the other looking upon her.

Essentially, there is a relationship of real self and the self as imagined/regarded through the eyes of another.  Healthy shame that doesn’t debilitate provides an inner compass, a set of natural checks and balances for an individual’s behaviour within a community.  It helps maintain a respectful distance from others, while at the same time establishing supportive bonds among them.

However, the separation from Eden can go awry.  Sometimes, the self can hide and thus become isolated from the gaze of the other.  Or conversely, the self can too readily adapt to the other’s gaze, so that it doesn’t have a connection with the true self.  Thus it must compensate with the creation of a false self, a mask, that covers the unformed, vulnerable core.

Shame is most damaging when it is unconscious, which in turn gets passed down from parent to child, and so on, becoming more toxic along the way.  Only when we make it conscious can we understand clearly what shame is, its social function, and the difference between a necessary self-regulating brake and its corrupt offshoot, which only serves to arrest the development of a healthy inner core and a positive self-image.

I was raised by a Tiger Mom.  Before The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom came out, offering the apt epithet, I referred to my mother as a Nazi when I confided to my friends stories of my strict Confucian upbringing, during which I was in constant fear of getting a B+, aka the Asian F, lest I become ostracized from the family.  No exaggeration.

I recall nights before pre-calculus exams, lingering in the bath, contemplating suicide, and vacations enrolled in summer school learning an entire year’s worth of math and science within three months–not to catch up or repeat a grade–but to get ahead so I could join the advanced-track class in the fall.

To this day, I feel a suffocating malaise during the first hot day of the year, as though I will be forced again into the slough of summer despond, sweating in a hot, lugubrious classroom, surrounded by the druggies and the special-ed kids, as I slogged through equations and logarithms.

As I get older and such memories grow dimmer, I have in tandem acquired the habit of putting matters into their rightful context.  Case in point:  my Korean mother was seven-years-old when the Korean War broke out.  Her father, a high-ranking official in the Korean government, escaped the city immediately for fear of being put to death–as the communists eventually did his mother, with a bullet through her head.

My mother’s mother, my grandmother, was then left to her own devices, with three young girls under the age of eight, to fend for herself.  Forced out of their home by the invading communist army, they became refugees, fleeing south towards the safety of the refugee camps.

During my teens, when footage of Ethiopian civil war refugees was ubiquitous in the news, my mother would mutter with a sigh, “When I see those refugees, I think of myself during the war.”  And I could see in her eyes that part of her still remained there, a vulnerable, traumatized seven-year-old fighting for her life.

In this light, my feelings towards what I saw as her implacable, slave-driving pedagogy softened.  And I began to see her side of things when she uttered the mantra of my high school years:  “There’s no war going on, there’s food on the table and a roof over your head; there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to get straight A’s.”  In a way, her logic was infallible.

So how did I turn out?  I managed to get into a prestigious enough university to satisfy my mother, then won a fellowship to a PhD program at an Ivy League institution and went on to earn an MFA in Fiction in one of the country’s best programs.

At some point, I learned to strike the critical balance:  I could deliver the demanded results, but on the condition that I study the topics of my–not my mother’s–choosing.  When I began to find the subjects that really interested me, the straight A’s became a by-product of my enjoyment.

Though I wasn’t a huge fan of high school, I’ve come to love learning.  It thrills me that knowledge grows in a cube of ignorance because I will never be bored.  I love mental challenge, and there lurks within me an unshakeable confidence that no problem is insurmountable.

Would I have turned out this way without being driven by a Tiger Mom?  I will never know.  But one thing I know for sure: my mother pushed me to limits that stretched, challenged and forced me to reach for resources I would never have known I had.  Resources that would otherwise have remained buried under good-enough standards and easy complacence.  And for that, I can only be thankful.