Jin was different from her sisters from the very beginning.
Min and Hyun were shy children — the kind who hid behind their mother's legs and needed a gentle push before they'd say hello to a stranger. Jin was the opposite. If someone smiled at her, she smiled right back, wide and unguarded. When she was still in her pushchair, she'd reach out her hands to neighbours walking through the apartment complex, and later toddled after them.
She was fearless with people — and careful with everything else. On the playground and stairs, she climbed each step deliberately, with every movement measured. But the moment she locked eyes with a stranger, all that caution vanished. In a family of introverts, she was our cheerful little mutation — the only one who seemed to run on extrovert fuel.
As she grew, a little shyness crept in. But even then, it wasn't the kind where a child turns away and refuses to look. Jin would hide behind my back and peek out, one eye visible, observing curiously. It was playful, not fearful — a game she was running on her own terms.
But she was very late to talk. By the time she turned two, she wasn't forming sentences. She barely used single words. Relatives had opinions. Everyone had opinions. Yet she understood everything — complex instructions, multi-step requests, the lot. She'd hear an unfamiliar word and repeat it back perfectly on the first try. Probiotics. Just like that, and she never repeated the word even though I asked her to.
We weren't worried. She was storing it all up. And just past her second birthday, words she'd been collecting quietly for months came tumbling out.
By the time she was three — Korean age four — we started introducing Hangul and a little piano, the same way we had with her older sisters. But Jin was a free spirit. Structured learning wasn't her thing. She'd engage when she felt like it and wander off when she didn't. So we set up the environment and stepped back, letting her come to it in her own time.
That was the child who landed in New Zealand — curious, social, stubborn in the best possible way. Her new home was a country where the words around her were no longer words; where the faces were unfamiliar and the people, kind as they were, couldn't understand what she was saying.
