I was too preoccupied with The Untamed that I forgot to share a #MakjangMonday story. But here goes! (See comment below!) 😊

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    The last two Makjang Monday stories were a bit intense, so this week’s entry is a lighthearted one. I think.

    My memory of this incident is a little bit blurry, but I think it happened in between my brush with the Moped of Doom and the attempted kidnapping. We lived in an apartment above a hair salon, which also was across from a “cafe” where my dad worked as a bouncer. Because of us, my mom told my dad to never bring his friends from work home. We were too small to understand who those people were, and thought they were so nice. Anyway, I mentioned this because I was always very curious about the “cafe”. The few times we were over at the cafe, for whatever reason, was during the daytime. I remember the changes from the morning to night, when flashing color lights could be seen through the curtains that separated the front area and the back rooms, and a low hum of music and background noises seeped out.

    We lived here for at least a couple of years. My dad’s circle of “friends from work” grew bigger. The whole neighborhood soon knew we were in the process of migrating to the US. This was the year we thought we would be called in for our interviews at the US embassy, and if we passed, my parents planned to literally buy plane tickets and leave as soon as possible. So they had passports made for us and valuables packed.

    One night, we were all out until late. I couldn’t recall why. When we got back home, we saw the door was forced opened and our stuff was scattered everywhere. My parents discovered our passports were missing along with the valuables they packed. I don’t remember what “valuables” they would have at that time since we were definitely not rich, but they were so upset, especially about losing the passports.

    My dad went around and asked his friends to spread the words – that he wasn’t mad and for the thief to please return our passports at least. Days later, we found a plastic bag tucked underneath the doorway with our passports inside. There was also a hand-written letter folded in between the passports. It was written in pencil on pieces of crumbled and stained notebook papers taped together, then folded a few times. My parents cracked up when reading it and turned out, it was a badly written apology letter from the thief. The grammar was atrocious, and the handwriting itself looked like a kid’s scrawls than anything. But in it, the thief apologized so sincerely and politely for the break-in and wished us the best of luck with our move.

    I’m almost certain it was my dad’s gangster friends who found the thief and made him/her returned our passports. Or the thief was afraid of my dad’s connections and returned the stolen items willingly. It was a wild letter tho, and I wished my parents still had it.

    It was another five or six years later when we moved to the US. This process itself is a weird story of red tape, expensive perfumes as bribes, and a vaguely traumatic series of interview questions.

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