By Katie Schell
I t is difficult to have a sense of belonging when you are different. As a child and young adult, I always felt very different, but then I really was different from all of my peers. You see, my mother was Korean.
There were no other Koreans in Moon Township, Pennsylvania. I actually do not remember any other Asians in my neighborhood or elementary school. Prejudice against Asians was very real in the 1950s and 1960s. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, over 110,000 Japanese-Americans were relocated into twenty-six different internment camps. Although the last camp was closed in 1946, some people never forgot, and racial prejudice against Asians continued for many years. Most children did not mock me for being Korean; most times I was called a Jap or a Chink.
Not all people were hateful but sometimes hate came from the unlikeliest sources . . . a teacher, a priest. It always took me by surprise when it happened. I would expect it from my peers but not from an adult—for some reason, that always shocked me. I recall an incident in which a grade-school teacher backhanded my sister across the face for a minor infraction and shouted, “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” The diamond ring from the teacher’s hand split my sister’s lip and caused blood to gush all over her clothes. She was sent home on the school bus, her lip still oozing blood. When my father learned that she was slapped in the face rather than spanked on her buttocks, he went ballistic. My father, who was a big, loud, and very intimidating man, went to the school and ensured that teacher would never slap my sister again.
Then, when I was twelve, the head priest at my church stopped me in the foyer to chastise me one day. I was standing in a line of girls as we headed to a classroom. Father Domino, who had never spoken to me before, stopped the line, called me out, and rebuked me for wearing culottes to church. I was so embarrassed and ashamed that I had to fight back tears. I was always a very quiet, shy, and withdrawn child. I worked hard to be the good one in the family, so to be reprimanded by someone of such great stature was devastating. Furthermore, our family did not have money for clothing. We usually received items from Goodwill or my mother would sew for us. I had no control over what I could wear. I wore what we had available. The moment left me stunned, since his look of disgust and loathing were unmistakable. I truly did not understand. Later I recall a neighbor telling my mother that Father Domino was very prejudiced. Then I understood.
My father met my mother during the Korean War. He loved her deeply from the moment he met her until the day he died. He went through an incredible ordeal to bring her to the United States. He battled both the United States and Korean government regulations from September of 1952 until January of 1954, when he was finally able to accomplish this enormous task. My father, Frank Crimbchin, was the most hard-working, diligent man I have ever known. He was a first-class machinist and could build or manufacture anything he set his mind to. This was quite remarkable since he did not attend school after the eighth grade. My mother, Ock Soon Lee, grew up as a servant girl in South Korea. Her childhood was one of extreme poverty and severe abuse. When my father met her—or rather, found her—she was a teenage peasant struggling to stay alive during the war. She was abandoned, filthy, and starving, but for some unknown reason, my father saw her and fell in love with her. To this day, I cannot explain it. I used to think he must have confused pity with love, but after fifty-eight years of unbreakable devotion between them, my theory has since dissipated.
My mother was never permitted to attend school in South Korea, so she was unable to read or write even in her native language. Although illiterate, she too was extremely hard working from sunrise to sunset. She gardened, cooked, sewed clothing and raised seven children. Many times she worked alongside my father sanding rust from his car and applying auto body putty. When he repaired the roof or remodeled the house, she helped carry the shingles and supplies.
Between the two of them, there was never any downtime. They worked, therefore we worked. I had one older brother, Donald, who was born in Korea while my father struggled to get my mother out of the country. As their oldest daughter, I was expected to help with the gardening, cooking, canning, and caring for my five younger siblings.
When my father decided to build a huge addition onto the house, we were all expected to pitch in. I remember, as a young girl, ending up with nicked and bleeding shins from carrying heavy cement blocks. We were also expected to assist in cutting down trees on the wooded lot, carrying heavy logs, and splitting the wood. I gardened with my mother, digging the soil, pulling the weeds, harvesting and canning all the fruits and vegetables. Sleeping in late or lying around watching television was simply not permitted. Our family lifestyle of hard work and little play never killed any of us, but it did make us even more different from the neighbors. Other children played outside, rode bikes, went to the neighborhood swimming pool, bowled, scouted and joined Little Leagues. My mother did not drive, and my father was not the kind of man to carpool his children around. There was little money for extracurricular activities and certainly no ability for my parents to coordinate them for seven children.
My father was a good man in many ways. He did a lot for his family, especially if it involved my mother. But unfortunately, my father was also an alcoholic, albeit a functioning one. He never lost a job due to his drinking. But when he drank, he was a mean drunk. He would become loud and boisterous, yelling and cursing. I grew up very much afraid of him. It is not emotionally healthy to grow up fearing a parent. It leaves you emotionally crippled, since parents are supposed to be your protector and your first example of how to love. When that is not healthy, it leaves a child with an imbalanced view of life and expectations. It took many years of counseling and therapy before I was able to feel whole.
My father never laid a hand on my mother but he was known to use a belt, very harshly, on his children. Once he told me that he did not even like kids, and I absolutely know that to be true. I could never understand why he had seven of them. Perhaps it was his Catholic upbringing and the teaching that birth control was a sin. In any event, he certainly did not have the temperament to raise seven children, and we all paid the price.
My mother, whom many would call a saint, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Although she was never formally diagnosed or treated, it was quite evident in retrospect that her coping skills at times were extremely inadequate. She had suffered and witnessed so much horror in South Korea as a child servant and even more so during the war, it would have been impossible for her to not have deep emotional scars. Most times my mother was caring and loving. But when things became stressful with an alcoholic husband, seven unruly children, and lack of cultural assimilation, she had outbursts of anger that we all paid the price for physically.
Growing up with prejudice in the neighborhood and classroom, and discipline to the point of physical abuse at home, I developed a true sense of not belonging anywhere in this world. I felt there was no safe place for me to go. I was unhappy and depressed most of the time, which only grew worse during my teenage years. My parents valued hard work far more than education. College was never discussed or given any consideration. I was seventeen years old when I graduated from high school with no hopes or dreams for my future. My senior year of high school was the most depressing year of my life. Everyone was so excited to be done with school and moving on, whereas I had nowhere to go.
Looking back on my childhood and teenage years, I was quite beautiful and very intelligent but did not realize it. I had absolutely no self-esteem. But I did have a boyfriend. We married within two weeks of graduation, and I was pregnant with my first child before the year was out. Seventeen is far too young to be married and nineteen is far too young to become a mother. Depression would become a part of my daily life.
B y the time I was twenty years old, I was married with two children, a mortgage, and a car payment. I was doing that which was most familiar—raising children. I still carried a huge void in my life stemming from insecurity, depression, and a very weak marriage.
In 1975, we moved to a new neighborhood, and within the first week two different churches, St. Stephens Episcopal Church of Sewickley and Providence Presbyterian Church from Robinson Township, sent representatives to meet us and invite us to their services. Both churches had apparently gotten our names from a real estate list showing that we had recently purchased a home. Amazingly, both church visitors asked me the same questions: “If you were to die tonight, do you think you would you go to heaven or to hell, and why?” Of course I said I thought I would go to heaven since I was a pretty good person and I had not done anything incredibly evil, such as killing someone.
On both occasions, the visitors shared the gospel of salvation with me: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. In order to go to heaven and be in the presence of a holy God, we must not have sin on us. Christ was the sacrifice for our sins. When we accept the gift of his sacrifice, our sins are covered by his blood, we are cleansed before God, and we are saved from eternal damnation.”
Such a simple message, but one that I was very eager to hear and accept. During the next week, I met several new neighbors. When I spoke to them about the people from church who had visited, they told me that they had already become Christians and reconfirmed what I had just learned. Looking back on it now, I know that none of this was a coincidence. God was reaching out to me in an incredible way. Many people would say only needy people turn to religion. Perhaps this is true. I know that I was needy and needed someone or something to fill that awful empty void in my life. After accepting Jesus as my savior from sin, my life changed forever. I began attending Providence Presbyterian Church and immediately opened my home to a weekly neighborhood Bible study led by a young pastor from the church. Over the next ten years, dozens and dozens of women would visit our study and many would be baptized. I knew very little about God and even less about the Bible. But for some reason, God chose to use me with all of my ignorance and foolishness to host the study and share his message with others.
For the first time in my life, I started to read and study the Bible. It was such an incredible time of spiritual growth and miracles in my life. For the first time, I felt like I did belong somewhere. I belonged to Christ. I made many lifelong friends through the church and Bible study. God was using me in a miraculous way through no goodness of my own. I simply opened my home and God did the rest.
Over the next forty years, God was there for all the joyful times as well as the challenges and heartaches I encountered. In 1992, after twenty years of marriage, I found myself going through a divorce. I lost my husband, my home, and my family as I knew it. It was then that God taught me that he is a husband to the husbandless. In Isaiah 54:5 it reads, “Your Maker is your husband,” and I found this to be true. Despite the loneliness and financial struggles, God provided all that I needed. I worked full time and attended Sewickley Valley School of Nursing. I knew I needed to get educated if I was to take care of myself. It was the most difficult time in my life: juggling work and studies and completing all of my assigned clinical sessions at the hospital, while also trying to hold the family together.
Friday, June 9, 1995, was my last day of nursing school, and I was exhausted. Even so, I was excited to have completed school and was ready for graduation day and prepared to embark on a new career in nursing. Tragically, I would not be attending the graduation. In the early morning hours of Sunday, June 11, 1995, my precious nineteen-year-old son, Jason, was killed in an accident. My life would never be the same. It is a loss that I could not have endured without my God. I was broken. Once again it was God’s mercy and grace that carried me through this unbearable loss.
During the three years that I spent rebuilding my life after the divorce, I had had no choice but to put my three children—Thom, Jason and Bethany—on the back burner. My ex-husband had moved out of state with his new wife. I had to relocate from our expensive home in the North Hills to a more affordable townhouse in a rural area. Jason was in his senior year of high school and did not want to move. He ended up living on different friends’ couches until he graduated. After his graduation, he chose not to live with my daughter Bethany and me. Instead he shared a run-down apartment with his older brother, Thom. I was scraping by, as were the kids. Maybe I should not have gone to nursing school. Maybe I should have been more available to my children. Maybe I should not have put them on the back burner. Maybe these things would have saved Jason’s life. I will never know.
Life can be difficult and filled with regrets. Jason was a great kid, full of energy, pranks, and humor. He was a very popular football player at North Allegheny High School with many friends who truly loved him. When he was killed, their grief, like mine, was palpable. On the night he was killed, Jason attended an R.E.M. concert at Star Lake Amphitheater with his friends. He had been drinking a lot while at the concert and got into an argument with his girlfriend. Apparently, he wanted to drive home, but she refused as he was too intoxicated. Even though he was over thirty-five miles from his apartment, he decided to walk home. It was a dark, rainy night. Visibility was very poor. He was struck by a car and killed while crossing the highway. Jason was not carrying any identification on him. When he did not return home from the concert, his brother Thom began searching for him. Later the following day, Thom identified him at the morgue. There are some sorrows that never leave. Although Jason was not perfect, he had accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior when he was a young child. I know Jason loved the Lord, even though he had struggles in this life. My comfort comes from knowing that someday I will see him again. I look forward to that reunion with my precious child.
It has been over twenty years since that awful day. God continues to work in my life and bless me even though I really don’t deserve any of it. Just as he used me when I first became a Christian by bringing so many people to that early Bible study, today God is using me to drill wells in third world countries. Through a small ministry with my mother, Ock Soon Lee, we travel to various venues and share her amazing story of suffering and survival during the Korean War. We donate the honorariums and offerings to an organization that drills wells for people throughout the world who do not have clean water. Thus far we have commissioned twenty wells in countries such as Nigeria, Cambodia, and Laos. My mother, who was once an illiterate peasant living a life of servitude, carried water every day for the people she served. Because of that experience, she feels compelled to help people in the world who do not have clean water. Through a series of remarkable events, I was able to accurately document her life story. After publishing her memoirs, at the ripe old age of eighty, my mother has become a public speaker. At one time, she had no family—no parents, no siblings, no one. Today my mother has seven children, twenty grandchildren, and twelve great-grandchildren. When we all get together for a family reunion and include all the spouses, there are over fifty people in her immediate family. She has been truly blessed.
During those three years after my divorce, I chose not to date anyone, as I was busy focusing on nursing school, work, and being a single mom. Then, in May of 1995, I met and started to date my husband, Bill Schell. Within three weeks of my meeting Bill, Jason would be killed. I know that God in his great mercy brought Bill into my life at that time to help me with my tremendous loss. Bill was a great source of strength and stability for me over the next several years. In October of 1997, we were married and have since celebrated twenty years of happiness together. He is one of the greatest gifts God has ever bestowed upon me. My surviving children, Thom and Bethany, have also been blessed with beautiful children and successful lives. I have five beautiful grandchildren through my two children and three beautiful grandchildren through Bill’s son. God has brought tremendous healing and peace into my life. We serve an amazing God, and to tell my story is to tell of Jesus. I am so blessed to have found a place to belong, in the arms of Jesus.
Katie Schell is the daughter of Frank Crimchin and Ock Soon Lee. Frank was drafted into the U.S. Army in September 1950. He was sent to Korea and assigned to the 76th Engineer Construction Battalion in September of 1951, where he served until September of 1952. It was during this time that Frank met Ock Soon Lee and eventually brought her to the United States as his bride. Katie is a registered nurse who has spent her career serving developmentally disabled adults and children as well as providing case management services to medical surgical patients. She is married to Bill Schell and has two living children, Thom Dunn and Bethany Friel. Katie has one son, Jason, who went to be with the Lord at the young age of 19 years old. Katie has recorded her mother’s incredible story of suffering and survival during the Korean War in a book entitled, Love Beyond Measure: Memoirs of a Korean War Bride . The book is available on Amazon and Kindle.