![]() Jeen and Sunny had once stood side-by-side on stage, mirror images accepting the titles of co-valedictorians. The only question left: Who would she get to pull the trigger? Now Jeen, who had a ruthless knack for self-preservation and had come to the conclusion that Sunny was the reason for her own dismal spiral into adulthood, was beginning to hatch a plan to improve her lot: She would kill her identical twin. Teachers couldn’t tell them apart when Jeen and Sunny were teenagers at Mountain Empire High School, located on the border between California and Mexico in the middle of a hot dusty desert. To help others differentiate them, Jeen wore bangs and her hair short while Sunny wore her hair long. Jeen tended to be more serious, while Sunny often came off as happy-go-lucky.Īs young children, the twins had lived in South Korea with their mother, a woman named Boo Jun Kim. Kim had struggled during her own childhood, which saw its share of trauma. ![]() As a baby in Incheon, South Korea, she had witnessed heavily armed North Korean troops occupy the city. Kim also experienced disruption on an intensely personal scale when her father abandoned the family and ran off with a younger woman, leaving Kim’s mother to raise six children on her own. As Kim’s own marriage fell apart, patterns of family instability seemed to repeat for her young daughters. When Kim relocated her twins from South Korea to Southern California, she floated from job to job, boyfriend to boyfriend, while struggling with a spiraling gambling addiction. Among Korean immigrants to the United States, admitting mental health issues to this day is often stigmatized, seen implicitly as a sign of weakness or being out of control in a culture that prizes strength and self-discipline. Government-sponsored studies in the United States have shown Asian-Americans as the ethnic group least likely to seek such help. Ignoring her problems rather than confronting them, Kim only sunk deeper. There also seemed to be a re-enactment of Kim’s own father’s abandonment in her reckless pursuit of a flashier life.
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