It started when Nayoung-unni took her outside while babysitting her, laying out on a blanket and showing her the stars and constellations. Then her Uncle Gil showed her Star Wars - the entirety of Star Wars, in the span of a day - and that was that. She wanted to be Princess Leia. She wanted to go to space. She wanted to learn all she could about the planets and the stars and everything. So it was no surprise, really, when she climbed on the computer one day and started trying to look up what she could, sure that she would learn it all and become an expert by the end of the day.
But “space,” of course, was too wide a search term, and “outer space” wasn’t much better. She slumped back in her seat with a huff, already frustrated. Okay then, she would start small. “moon”? …Nope, still too wide, and brought back results of every moon she could imagine. “earth’s moon” was a little better, but as she clicked a page and started reading, she was soon completely lost, swimming in big words she didn’t understand. Reading was hard enough, and this made it impossible. As a last ditch effort, she put in “facts about the moon”, hoping to get a quick and simple list like she sometimes saw about other subjects. To her surprise, the first result was a video. Deciding that would absolutely be better than having to slog through more reading, she clicked it immediately.
“Annyeonghasaeyo!” greeted the unni in the video. “It’s Alice, and today’s topic is my dream location. Yes, we’re talking about the moon, and I’m about to tell you ten cool facts about the orbiting body around our Earth…”
By the end of the video, she was smitten, excited to find someone so fun and relatable and easy to understand. She spent the rest of the afternoon looking through the unni’s other videos, and by the time she reached the one about Star Wars, she was absolutely hooked. She even read through the transcript of the article she had found, as tired as she was of reading by that point. But it was worth it. Clicking back to the YouTube channel, to that first video she found, she hit the button to type a comment. There was a moment of hesitation, where she wondered if she should, if it would even be noticed among the thousands of others. And if it was, would it even be taken seriously? She was getting used to her family noticing her, making sure to take her opinions into consideration, but she still had years of people deciding she wasn’t worth the time. But then the final words from the article came back to her: “Thank you for loving me. Now, please make sure to love yourself.” She nodded to no one, looking determined, and began to slowly type.
alice-unni! i just found your videos today and i love them! you’re so cool~~ i’m only almost 11 but i love space and want to go there someday too! thanks for making these videos so i can learn more!
-seonhwa
p.s. i love star wars too! princess leia is my favorite :3
(Attn: @lunerious)











