Yujeong Hong
She was part of my first real steps into independence.
Yujeong was one of the first people who made Orlando feel less unfamiliar to me.
We met in 2007 while working at a hotel in Orlando. I was about nineteen or twenty, and she was nearly eight years older than me, although I had no idea at first. She looked so young that I honestly assumed we were around the same age. It was only later, after we had gotten to know each other better, that she told me how old she was.
She had recently come to the United States and was building her life in Orlando without family nearby. At the time, she was living with friends, and little by little we developed a friendship that became something more serious, at least from my perspective.
She was one of my first meaningful relationships in the United States and one of the people with whom I discovered much of Orlando. I went to Universal for the first time with her, visited some Disney parks, and shared many of those early experiences that made life in a new country feel exciting.
She also became the first woman I moved in with. Around the age of twenty, I left my family home and shared an apartment with her in Orlando. Looking back, that period represented an important step in my independence, even if I was still young, impulsive, and learning through experience. Like many people at that age, I confused intensity with certainty and made choices that now make me laugh, cringe, or both.
I believed the relationship was serious because she met important members of my family, including my grandmother, my siblings, and some of my cousins. For me, that meant something.
Later, she left the hotel and began working as a waitress at a restaurant. That is where she met someone else, a manager from Seoul, South Korea. Apparently, Orlando was not big enough for my relationship to survive a workplace romance plot twist. Eventually, that connection became the reason our relationship ended.
Even so, Yujeong remains part of an important chapter in my life. She was connected to my early years in Orlando, my first experiences of independence, and a time when I was still figuring out who I was and what I wanted from life.