I’m traveling the country to honor my dad who didn’t feel safe to do so

My dad’s heart stopped and my heart broke.

I won the lottery when it came to dads. My dad taught me how to ride a bike, how to tie my shoe, how to braid my hair, how to tell a joke and showed me by example when it is better to simply listen rather than speak. My dad taught me everything I needed to know to survive in life.

I was 31 years old when my dad died. My life changed overnight. I soon realized that much of what I worked for was done, in part, because it was fun to share my life with him. Seeing him happy when I experienced a win gave me joy. When he died, I had to figure out who I was without my biggest cheerleader.

My dad became my dad through adoption. He and my mom adopted me from Seoul, South Korea when I was a toddler. My adoptive parents were of Japanese-American descent. My dad was born in the basement of a rental home on Main Street in Seattle. My mom was born in a relatively large house on a farm on Bainbridge Island, an island that is a 30-minute ferry ride from Seattle. They were the age of my peers’ grandparents at the time they adopted me. There was a generation between us.

My mom was in middle-school and my dad a recent high school graduate when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. My dad shared that he heard the news of the bombing while listening to his transistor radio and his heart sank with an immediate fear and the thought, “What is going to happen to us?” He felt physically ill.

His fear was well-placed. Both of my parents were removed from their homes and placed behind barbed wire fences in Japanese Internment Camps during World War II.

Because of my dad’s experience, he knew he wasn’t welcome in much of the United States following World War II. While feelings in many parts of the country shifted towards acceptance of Japanese-Americans as World War II became more distant in time, my dad never felt truly comfortable traveling. The only time in his 78 years of life that he felt that he belonged was for a period of one week. It was during his honeymoon in Hawaii. He said that it was the only place he ever visited where he had the right face and spoke the right language.

I did not realize that I had adopted many of my parents’ beliefs, including the belief that the entire United States was not available to me.

As an adult, I decided to rewrite that outlook by believing I’m welcome everywhere and everything is available to me. To make this belief a reality, I came up with a plan to travel to every state in 2023. And, not only travel to every state but I will also share a meal in each state with a stranger—a woman who is an absolute stranger, or a woman I’ve never met in person or a woman I met at one point in my life but have had very little to no contact with in the past 30+ years.

The women I am meeting are of different races, education levels, economic levels, religious beliefs, political beliefs and range in age from 20s to 60s—with the belief that we can start a conversation, plant a seed of friendship, and find connection with everyone we meet when we look at what we have in common rather than what divides us.

I am about halfway through my project, and I am seeing our country the way I wish my dad could have seen and experienced it.

What warms my heart is that I’ve been seeing signs along the way that he is with me on my journey. He, like me, changed careers at mid-life. His second career—the one that was his natural fit and felt like his purpose—was as a math teacher for the deaf and hearing impaired at what was Seattle Central Community College’s Program for the Deaf. When I was in Nashville, walking down a street, I looked to my right and found myself standing in front of the Tennessee School for the Deaf. In Austin, on a pedicab tour, we peddled past the Texas School For the Deaf. When I was in Arizona, I had an extra day, which allowed me to visit a former high school friend, who I had not seen since our high school graduation day, and I learned that her daughter is hearing impaired.

Every time one of these unexpected reminders of my dad presents itself, I smile and send a thought up to the heavens, “Thank you, Dad, for taking this journey with me. The father-daughter trip of a lifetime.”