My Why Story
The Poetry of Skin: The Story of Grace Paik
How a child’s memory of loss became a lifelong language of care.
The first memory of my life was the sound of wailings and cries — the ache of family being torn apart. I was four years old when I was sent to Korea without my parents, too young to understand why. I can still see Kimpo Airport — the blur of faces, the echo of announcements, my mother’s voice dissolving into the noise. That sound — that grief — became the beginning of my consciousness.
When I arrived, everything felt strange and foreign. I didn’t know that this place would become home, or that my mother wouldn’t come back for me for years. One morning, I woke up, and she was simply gone. No explanation. No goodbye. Just the absence of her — a hollow that echoed louder than any sound. For weeks, I waited at the door, expecting her to return. But as days turned into months, and months into years, her image faded. I forgot the warmth of her hands, the pitch of her voice, even the smell of her skin.
The Girl in the Yellow Gingham Dress
In that emptiness, there was one thing that tethered me to her — a yellow and white gingham dress my mother had sent from America. It was bright and soft, completely unlike the muted, practical clothes of the world around me. All the other dresses she had mailed were given to my cousins, but this one somehow made its way into my hands. It became my lifeline — the only tangible thread connecting me to her.
They used to cut my hair into a short bowl — not cruelly, just to make me easier to manage. Long hair, they said, was too much work for a child like me. My cousins and friends had hair that swayed when they ran, adorned with ribbons and clips that sparkled in the sun. I watched them from a distance, acutely aware that I didn’t look like them. I felt small, boyish, almost invisible.
But when I slipped into that yellow gingham dress, everything changed. For a moment, I could imagine myself as the girl my mother might have seen in her dreams — the one she might have wanted to protect, to rescue. That dress gave me back my girlness, my softness, my sense of belonging to a mother I had idealized in her absence. I wore it every day until the seams frayed and the color dulled. Even as it faded, it carried me — a fragile prayer sewn into cloth, holding all the hope that love would one day come back for me.
Finding Solace in Nature — and in God
My grandmother didn’t know how to raise small children. We were left mostly to ourselves — hungry, unwashed, quiet. But even in that isolation, I was not entirely alone. On my long walks to school, I found companionship in the small, faithful things of creation.
The hibiscus bloomed each morning without fail — soft yet steadfast, the same flower that would one day become Korea’s national emblem of endurance. The jujubes ripened and fell, sweetening even as they shriveled. The caterpillars disappeared, only to return as wings. These were my quiet witnesses — constant, living metaphors of survival.
It was through them that I began to sense God — not in grand gestures, but in small mercies. In the repetition of sunrise. In the kindness of things that continued to grow, even in forgotten soil. When no one else stayed, He did.
The Return and the Mirror
When my father finally came to take us back to America, I didn’t care how or why. I just wanted to leave. The airport felt enormous — flight attendants with perfect hair and painted lips, people eating from plates instead of bowls. When my mother met me in Chicago, I didn’t recognize her. I loved her immediately, but she was a stranger.
She later told me she could see it right away — the lice in my hair, the infections on my skin, the hollow behind my eyes. She never apologized, though I think she carried the guilt quietly all her life.
Life in America was supposed to be better, but it was just a different kind of hard. I didn’t speak English. I didn’t speak much at all. My skin erupted in severe acne, inflamed and unrelenting. Doctors prescribed antibiotics, and I took them for decades. My body, my face — both became battlegrounds for everything I couldn’t control. I thought beauty was something I had to chase, when in truth, I had already known it at four years old — in the stillness of petals and the presence of God in quiet things.
Full Circle
It took me nearly forty years to understand that what once hurt me had been preparing me. That suffering had always been teaching me tenderness. The hibiscus, the jujube, the caterpillar — they weren’t just memories. They were messages, reminders of how God had been there all along, weaving grace into the smallest details.
The Poetry of Skin began not as a business, but as an act of remembrance — a return to the body I once wanted to escape. Every formula I create is a quiet letter to that little girl in the yellow dress, and to the God who stayed beside her. It is my way of saying: you were never alone, and what was once broken has become beautiful.
Today, I make skincare not to erase the past, but to honor it. To show that beauty is not what hides the scars, but what grows from them — with patience, with purpose, and with grace.
