Hae-Sun Chung grabbed the grape vine and let out a colossal wail as she soared through the air. Hae-Sun and her siblings were enjoying the summer day at a berry cove, playing "Tarzan and Jane" with a few children from the nearby village. Growing up in a poverty-stricken area of South Korea, this was the most fun that the kids could find.

My mother grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. During her younger years her family subsided on a mountainside, traveling down in order to reach the village. When she was about 12, however, she and her family moved to a small village with an estimated population of 400.

Everybody around her was poor. My mother compared it to the Great Depression of the United States - everybody was either incredibly wealthy or incredibly poor. Hae-Sun grew up ignorant to any other lifestyle, so she never complained. She and her siblings would wake up with the rooster at dawn in order to have sufficient time to work on the farm, clean, and make breakfast before walking down the mountainside for grammar school.

My mom completed grammar school, but because her family was so poor, they could not afford to send her to middle school. It didn't matter to her family, anyway. School wasn't important to them. Instead, she stayed at home and worked on the farm, tending to the pigs, cows, chickens, rice, and potatoes.

When Hae-Sun was about fifteen, her older sister fell in love with a soldier enlisted in the United States Army. When they got married, she became a dependant of her new brother-in-law and had the opportunity to move to the United States. "My family was probably relieved that they had two less mouths to feed," she recollects.

They moved to Fort Carson, Colorado. Her sister and brother-in-law worked during the day, so she couldn't stay at home. Public school was now free, so she decided to go back. She attempted to start back where she had left off in 6th grade, but the school system said that she was too old for middle school and threw her right into the middle of her sophomore year of high school.

School wasn't hard for her academically, aside from English which was understandably a challenge. However, school was hard on her self-esteem because kids will be kids; because my mother was different, she was outcasted. Her classmates frequently harassed her and made fun of her name.

Apparently Hae-Sun was just too hard for the American teenagers to pronounce, so her sister suggested that she change her name. Thus, Hae-Sun was dropped and she adopted the name Diane. Why Diane? My mother had become hooked on the show "Wonder Woman" when she moved to the United States. Wonder Woman's secret identity was Diana. Viola! The perfect American-acceptable name was found.

A dependant of an Army soldier, my mother moved around a lot. After living in Colorado , she moved to Hawaii where Asian culture dominated society. "I was in heaven," she recalls about living in an area where she wasn't a minority.

Soon Diane graduated high school and worked as a typist in an office where she fell in love with my father. They decided to get married in a Korean church -- even the service was in Korean, which presented a problem on the wedding day. When the pastor asked my father if he would take my mother as his wife, he couldn't understand and didn't respond. My mother had to elbow him in the side and tell him to say, "I do."

My parents have been for 26 years and have been living a very happy life. I learn more and more about my mom every day. It's almost as if she is like her childhood heroine -- she has a secret identity of her own. Diane, secretly the unwavering Hae-Sun Chung, is my mother and my own Wonder Woman.