Home in Two Worlds

Rainier Country was built between two homes.

I grew up beneath Mount Rainier, the daughter of parents who came to the U.S. in 1975 — my father an aircraft mechanic turned 35-year mail carrier across Seattle, my mother a nurse. Between them, I learned two things early: how to build things with your hands, and how to hold two worlds at once without choosing between them.

That’s what Rainier Country is: an artist’s studio inspired by the everyday beauty of the Pacific Northwest — the rain, the ferries, the small towns — filtered through a family history of craftsmanship and heritage held together, not chosen between.

My parents came to the United States in 1975. My father had spent eight years as an aircraft mechanic before that, and even after he traded the tarmac for a mail route — thirty-five years delivering mail across Seattle, from Columbia City to the U District to Skyway, before retiring out of the Burien station — he never really stopped fixing things. Weekends meant the garage: cars, the lawnmower, whatever had broken that week. He built things because that’s what his hands knew how to do. And he talked to everyone — customers on his route for decades, people he’d run into years later at a grocery store or a gas station, and he’d never hesitate, always the first to say hey.

I never felt like I had to choose between where my parents came from and where I grew up. Both were home. Sunday dinners looked one way. The rest of the week looked another. I didn’t see a contradiction in that — I saw a whole life, lived in two worlds at once.

Every collection starts as a story first. You can read more of them in the journal — including the one about my father’s garage, where a lot of this really began.

Home in two worlds.