LIVED THROUGH THIS
The Summer I Went By ‘Hot Stuff’
What I gained and what I lost
The summer after kindergarten, I went by “Hot Stuff.”
I was still “Hyo-Sung” when I woke up on the first morning of day camp to pull my favorite yellow T-shirt over my head. My mother had made sure it was washed the night before even though our portable washing machine had to be pulled out and connected to our kitchen sink, and so doing laundry meant no cooking that night. Even my tired father tolerated a dinner of cold leftovers so my beloved shirt could be washed in time for my first organized activity outside of school in our new country.
I had picked out the T-shirt myself at a Toronto bargain-basement shopping mecca called Honest Ed’s. The store used to dominate the whole city block at Bathurst and Bloor, about 10 blocks from my parents’ 7-Eleven.
I loved that place. Honest Ed’s famously featured a 23,000-bulb lighted billboard with pun-laden signs like “Come on in and get lost!” or “The only thing in the store that’s crooked is the floors!” — the humor of which was vastly underappreciated by its non-English speaking shoppers, who were more drawn in by the “bargain basement” part of the equation. Back then, more than half of the families in Toronto were not even born in Canada, and 100% of them shopped…
