The Outcasts
(The story of Stephanie Fast, Written by Stacy
Wiebe)
Stripped of dignity and hope, beaten and malnourished. The
abandoned six-year-old lay on a mound of garbage wanting to die. Then out
of nowhere, a ray of sunshine pierced the black hole that enveloped her. The city of Daejon was just waking up, still trying to forget
the nightmare of the Korean War, when eight year-old Stephanie slipped through
the orphanage gate into the day's first light. Her skinny arms
formed a circle around a bundle of smelly rags.
As the oldest in the orphanage, it was her job to wash all the
diapers. She walked two miles to the river, where she beat the diapers clean
with a wide stick and sloshed them around in the icy water. By mid-afternoon, she was
heading back to the orphanage to hang them up to dry. It was
hard work, but Stephanie didn't mind. Especially not today.
Yesterday, the Swedish nurse, Iris Erickson told her:
"Please help get all of the children ready. The foreigners are coming." On the
way back to the orphanage, a string of kids followed Stephanie, shouting, as
they always did, "Toogee! Toogee!" She didn't look at them, and
walked on, her thoughts focused on all that had to be done at the orphanage.
Stephanie was used to people hassling her on the streets, and
inside she believed that nasty word - Toogee - was really her name, her
true identity. In English it means foreign devil. "I thought I was the
lowest you could get," says Stephanie. "That I was worse than a dog or
pig and that my face was twisted and grotesque."
But it was her curly hair and big, bright eyes that made people
hate her. To the Koreans, she was "a child of foreigners"- a
"devil" fathered by an American G.I. She was a reminder of everything they wanted to forget.
HOPE FOR A FUTURE
The orphanage chimes echoed throughout the compound. "I
hope we didn't forget anything," Stephanie thought. She had spent hours
scrubbing the babies, trying to make them as pretty as she could, even putting
little ribbons in the girls' hair. "One of these babies is going
to America," she said to herself, straining to hear the voices outside the gate.
"And they're going to have a future."
The door squeaked open, and the worker motioned for the American
couple to come in. Already they had been to six orphanages, looking for a
little boy to call their own. They had already chosen a name for him, too:
Stephen.
Fear and amazement gripped Stephanie's entire 30-pound body as
she stared at the couple towering in the doorway. She had seen foreigners
before - American soldiers and Miss Erickson, the blue-eyed nurse who
took her off the streets into the orphanage almost two years ago. But these
people now passing through the gate weren't like any Americans she knew
before. "They were the tallest, roundest and strangest looking people I had
ever seen," recalls Stephanie.
Stephanie watched, fascinated as the huge man picked up a tiny
baby and tucked it under his arm. Then she saw something else she had
never seen in her life: tears trickling down a man's face. As she was trying
to figure out why, Stephanie found herself edging closer to where he was. She
stopped, frozen, when he looked at her with wet eyes.
He crouched in front of her and made noises with his lips she
didn't understand as he spoke quietly to her in English. Her hair was
more white than brown, teeming with lice. She was covered with boils and
jagged scars. She had worms that sometimes crawled out through her ears or her
mouth. Her left eye rolled around lazily in its socket.
Now suddenly the man's massive hand was coming toward her face.
It landed softly on her cheek and covered her like a smooth blanket. He
stroked her, ever so gently. "My heart did a somersault." Stephanie
remembers. "Inside I wanted to say, don't take that hand away, please love me."
Instead, she yanked off the hand and spat on him.
A DARK PAST
Before she came to live at the orphanage, when she was living on
the streets, Stephanie determined that no matter what anyone did to
her body, they would never hurt her on the inside. When some farmers tied
her naked to a tree and let their children jab different parts of her body
with sticks to see how she would respond to the pain, Stephanie learned not
to cry. "You don't let people know that you hurt, because the more you let
them know that you hurt, the more pleasure it seems to give them," she
explains. "By the time I was six I was dead emotionally."
Ever since her mother abandoned her - Stephanie thinks she
remembers her sending her away alone on a train when she was about four - she
had been running from village to village. She slept in caves, or under
bridges and roasted locusts on rice straw or sucked the marrow from the
bones the butchers threw out.
Stephanie wanted to survive, and she kept
hoping that her mommy or her daddy would be waiting somewhere for her. But
many of the Korean villagers wanted to get rid of her. She was an ugly
reminder of an ugly war.
A group of men once tied her to a waterwheel, hoping to drown
her. Her mouth filled with mud and blood as she went round and round, thrashing
and listening to the people laugh. Then, she heard a man's voice,
deep and strong, telling them to stop. The man untied her and said to
her, "Run, little girl, run. These people, they will hurt you." To
this day she wonders if maybe he was an angel.
In the city, Stephanie became skilled at snatching food from the
marketplace. But one time, because she was carrying a little
girl she had found on the street, she was caught. "I remember being
grabbed by a man and pulled back by my hair. And he said, 'It's that dirty Toogee
again'. He recognized me somehow." Stephanie and the little girl were
thrown over a wall into a bombed-out building that was infested with rats.
"I held the little girl and rocked and screamed,"
Stephanie said. "I fainted, probably out of fear. I don't know how long I was out,
but when I woke up, I saw with my six-year-old eyes how the rats had eaten
away at that little girl."
Miraculously, someone rescued Stephanie.
Soon after, Stephanie contracted cholera.
"At seven years of age, I wanted to die," Stephanie
recalls. "I knew what my future was, I hated myself and everything around me, especially
the people. I didn't want to be abused anymore."
That's when, in 1960, Iris Erickson found her laying on a
garbage heap and brought her to live in the orphanage. Two years later, Americans
David and Judy Merwin came to adopt a baby.
HOME
"You're not going to believe this," David Merwin told
his wife Judy on the way home from their visit to the orphanage, "but I have
this feeling that we're supposed to adopt that little girl - the one who spit on
me."
Judy Merwin laughed. She had that same stirring in her heart -
and she felt it was from God. So the next day the Merwins returned to the
orphanage and the little girl became their Stephanie.
Suddenly Stephanie had her own room and her own bed. And
suddenly she had an identity. She was Stephanie Ann Merwin. And she was an American.
Stephanie soon discovered that Americans like people who smile a lot. In a
crowd of friends, she was always the bubbly one. As she grew older, she bleached her hair and talked her mom into
buying her blue contacts, all so she would look more American. "But
inside I didn't feel American or Korean, I was a dirty, ugly Toogee,"
Stephanie admits.
Stephanie's parents only knew the little about her past that the
orphanage told them - just that she was found on the streets and that she
was bi-racial. But the Merwin's were troubled when they returned to
Korea as missionaries after spending a year in the United States.
Stephanie, at 12, always sat in the back of the church with her arms folded, and
refused to speak to Korean people.
She wanted to forget her past at all cost. But her outer facade
of happiness was wearing very thin during her late teens. She began pulling
away from everyone in her life, and whenever she talked about herself, it
was always negative.
"I was full of bitterness and confusion and pain
inside," says Stephanie.
But she didn't want anybody to touch that - not her parents, and
definitely not God.
One day her dad came up to her room, and sat at the end of the
bed. He said, "I want to talk to you once more about Jesus.
"
Stephanie remembered thinking, "Hey, I'm a walking encyclopedia when it comes to
Jesus. I've been going to church most of my life, and I've been baptized. I don't
need that anymore." But Stephanie listened to her dad as he spoke gently to her. He
talked about how when Jesus left heaven for earth, that he was conceived
outside of marriage by a virgin. "He also asked if I'd thought about
where Jesus was born," says Stephanie. "To me, the manger was just
like the Christmas play every year. I didn't realize that it was a dark, dirty cave that
never got cleaned out and that the only thing he had for a bed was a
feeding trough."
Stephanie's dad went on to explain how King Herod wanted to kill
Jesus when he was a child because of what he represented, and how later on
in life even his closest friends rejected him.
Stephanie began to cry as she realized how Jesus had been
abused, and eventually even killed, so that He could identify with her. It
was the first time she cried since she'd been thrown into the building with
the rats. She prayed, opening up her life to God, asking Him to take her past,
to forgive her sins and to make her whole. That day was the beginning of a
healing that's still happening in Stephanie's life.
When she married her husband Darryl right out of high school, he
knew she was adopted, but he didn't have an inkling of what her past
really was. When Stephanie began to have nightmares, Darryl knew that they were
more than just normal dreams. As Stephanie opened up to him, they began to
work through her past, and to pray together for God's help and
healing. Part of that healing has come since Stephanie began sharing her
story publicly. She has a special concern for women, who often
struggle with their sense of identity, and have been in abusive relationships.
Stephanie is a regular speaker for women's groups and has traveled across the
world to tell her story, even to Korea. As she talks about her life, Stephanie still marvels that she
survived those childhood dangers and realizes how fortunate she is to be alive
and doing what she's doing today. "You know, it was amazing, but
every time I was in trouble, there was always someone who rescued me,"
Stephanie recalls. "And each time the person would tell me, 'Little girl, you must
live.' I don't know if they were angels or just people God used, but I do know
that God spared my life. He never gave up on me. And I've learned He
never will."
*Stephanie Fast and her husband Darryl have two sons, Stephen
and Davin.
They live in Oregon in the United States.
We can look to God as our Father.
We can have a personal sense of
His love for us and His interest in us,
for He is concerned about us
as a father is concerned for His children.
"May our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and God
our Father, who loved us and by
His grace gave us eternal encouragement and good
hope, encourage your hearts
and strengthen you."
Thessalonians 2:16-17
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