My name is Isadora Myung Hee Sohn and I am eighteen years old. I was recently ninety-five days in a pediatric burn unit at Tri-State Medical Center, in Albany, New York, being treated for second- and third-degree burns on my legs, complicated by a recurring bacterial infection. The same fire that injured me killed my parents, Hae Kyoung Chung and Tae Mun Sohn, on June 11, 1976, at approximately 3:20 a.m.

            It’s very isolating to recover from a severe burn injury. The pain requires a great deal of attention and inward focus. While your skin tissue rages and dies, you try and put yourself as far away as possible mentally, to take refuge in small, retrievable thoughts. Nursery rhymes are sometimes useful, as are television theme songs and knock-knock jokes.

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Here’s a riddle. A jumbo jet takes off from New York en route to Vancouver with 246 people on board. There’s a massive snowstorm, visibility worsens, passengers pray and panic. The pilot loses control, and the plane ends up doing a nose dive on the border of the United States and Canada. The weather is so bad it takes the rescue helicopters two days to get to the remote crash site in the mountains. When they finally manage to land, amid the snow and the wreckage, they’re confronted with a terrible dilemma. Since the plane crashed exactly on the boundary line separating the two countries, the recovering authorities don’t know whether to bury the survivors in Canada or the United States.

            It took me a while to get it. The trick is knowing where to focus. There’s so much clamor and confusion—the plane, the storm, the panic—that you’re easily thrown off. You end up overlooking what you should have noticed right away.

            The fact is that survivors aren’t buried. They keep walking around. They go through the varied motions of normalcy, trying to forget the screams, the shudder of the fuselage, the sound of crumpling metal. The frozen wait among the dead for rescue.