But even more, it was the intellectual exercise of using deductive logic to solve the puzzle, my understanding of how the author constructed the pieces deepening with each successive read. In part, it was the familiarity bred by the repetitive reading, the soothing comfort it brings me to hold one of those old volumes even now, decades later.
Regardless of when it originated, my love of mysteries intensified in those formative years of transitioning from Korean to English. I never got bored by the repetition I elaborated on the stories, acting them out, imagining what happened between the scenes, after the ending.ĭid I get this set because I loved mysteries or did I come to love mysteries because I got this set? I can’t remember, exactly - in those days in Korea, price considerations drove my parents’ purchasing decisions more than anything else. After our move, I read the set again and again in a continuous loop, my only refuge in this foreign land where I didn’t speak the language and knew no one, where books were comprised of squiggly shapes I couldn’t decipher. When we moved to America a year later, I begged my parents to let me bring it, arguing that I’d need something to keep me company until I learned English. The mystery set I’d gotten for my 10th birthday. Since book space was limited, I had to borrow one book at a time and got to keep only those I got as birthday presents.
We had been poor in Korea, living in one small room that barely fit basic necessities, and I was only allowed toys that wouldn’t take up space - small pebbles for Korean jacks, a rope, chalk. The other day at my parents’ house, I found something I’d forgotten about: a six-volume set of Korean translations of classic mysteries by the old masters like Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie, which we’d brought with us from Seoul to Baltimore when I was 11. I’ve always been drawn to mysteries, beginning at a young age when I was still in Korea.
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