Life at the Center: So much more than one brief lifetime Vol. 135, September 2024

In Celebration of Junghyun (Lina/Gia) Kim (1971 – 2024)
beloved of Master Jonah Chin

I stand in awe of someone who walks their talk, even in the toughest of circumstances. The way Master Jonah Chin conducted the memorial service on August 7, 2024, for his wife Gia left me humbled by both of them. I’m stuck by how elegantly Jonah conducts his wife’s final goodbye ceremony. The two have been so close over the decades that they’ve rarely spent time out of each other’s sight, rarely taken a breath of air that’s not shared. Who has the composure to even try such a thing, let alone do it in a way that by the end we all feel much closer to them both?

Someone like Master Jonah Chin, a dedicated Qigong and sword master who knows that there’s much more to existence than life in a physical body. Someone who comes from a Taoist lineage of scholars going back thousands of years. Someone like Master Jonah Chin, who married a truly remarkable human being named Junghyun Kim, known to us as Lina and later as Gia, herself a 5th generation acupuncturist in the Korean tradition.

“Lina” – as we knew her in the years when she and Master Jonah taught for us in person before the pandemic – filled the space around her with a steady, quiet radiance. I would almost have to say she held something of a Kwan Yin presence: compassionate, merciful, loving. And yet she was sturdy. She conveyed the implacable inner strength of a silent warrior when you saw her next to Jonah in their full-length indigo martial arts jackets. 

We feel so blessed to have had Lina/Gia as a teacher at Still & Moving Center. She was a teacher in every sense of the word. She cared for every one of her students. She taught by example. And the subject matter she taught paled in significance to the life lessons her students learned from her.

Gia always brought a calm, uplifting presence. She instructed with a profound understanding of how the body works. Her studies and mastery included Qigong, Iaido, Kendo and Oriental Medicine. As an acupuncturist, and having devoted over 30 years to learning one of Korea’s oldest Daoist medicinal lineages, she had shared a unique depth of wisdom.

Upon entering the funeral chapel that day, Jonah warmly thanks us for attending and then begins the service by assuring us that he will not be crying. He states that Gia iis present with us, able to hear everything. Jonah holds the service with powerful intentionality. He does not intend to let his emotional energy get the best of him while he is honoring his dear Gia. Today he is here for Gia and for us who knew her.

As the ceremony progresses, we learn more and more about the very private ordeal the two of them have so bravely faced. It’s one thing to have a philosophical stance that we are each an immortal soul, or in some way one with the universe. It’s another thing altogether to battle cancer in your wife’s or your own body for more than a dozen years, and to remain both stoical and deeply caring the whole time about the passing of life.

We as students and patients of Jonah and Gia were stunned to learn the news that she left her body on August 2nd. Few had known she was ill, and very few that she was gravely ill. 

Jonah explains to us how with both of them being healers, they chose early on to address her illness with their traditional Oriental medicine practice. It involved diet, exercise, acupuncture, massage and herbs. Their rigorous Qigong tradition is devoted to increasing vitality and longevity. As a result of this practice, they got more than a decade of her living otherwise healthily.  

And what a life they lived. They conducted an active martial arts dojo in Seattle before moving to Honolulu where we embraced them with open arms at Still & Moving Center.

They loved hiking and training in nature. And lest we leave with too saintly an image of Gia, one of their long-time students tells us at the memorial how Gia enjoyed drinking with Jonah and ‘the boys’, and how she put it away with the best of them!

Jonah shares with us a video of Gia playing the Kumungo, a traditional Korean Daoist instrument. In Korea, Junghyun majored in music and graduated from Seoul National University in Piano and Kumungo, earning First Prize in the nation in 1993. Few of us on island got to hear Gia play, so it is a singular experience to watch and hear this video of her vigorously playing the Kumungo. During this filmed performance, Gia suddenly breaks a string on this long log of an instrument while she is plucking it. What is her audience’s response? They break into applause and laughter at the musician’s formidable strength!

Attendees at Gia’s memorial – such as long-time Still & Moving student Surapee Sartrapai – attest to the healing that Gia and Jonah always did for her. She tells how she once phoned them with back pain, not realizing they were in Korea with family, and the couple cut their trip short and flew home the next day to treat Surapee’s back. Meanwhile, Surapee tells us, she had no idea of the health issue Gia was battling herself.

Another student, Stephen Hill, one of the lead actors in the Magnum PI TV series, describes to us how welcoming and caring Gia was towards him. Not originally from Hawaii, Stephen mentions how living on the island can be lonely. One day when he was practicing the sword alone as a beginner in Kapiolani Park while other more advanced students worked together. Jonah and Gia showed up for the first time for Stephen. As soon as Gia arrived that day, she walked across the field to greet Stephen with warmth and encouragement. That motherly care continued from that time forward. Stephen’s tears flow freely as he talks about Gia from the podium.

Jonah shares with us their decision to finally try chemo-therapy in November of 2023. The first two rounds of drugs had no effect. The third weakened her liver. During the fourth round, Gia’s condition deteriorated rapidly and in the last two months she ended up in the hospital. 

Jonah consulted with his own teacher of traditional Oriental medicine, who advised him how to stop her internal bleeding. Accordingly, Jonah set about to use his needles to contact her de chi energy. Jonah explains to us at the memorial that he had never before truly experienced this de chi energy in all his years of practicing acupuncture. Yet Gia allowed him

to make contact with her de chi energy, which Jonah now tells us at the memorial was one of her final gifts to him. She was always teaching him, until the very end.

The bleeding did stop for about 12 hours, but recommenced.

Faced with Gia’s dire condition, Jonah’s teacher made the improbable pronouncement that the one thing that could help Gia now was a rare remedy that could only be harvested in the wild, and not in the tropics. Jonah, who almost never calls anybody, phoned everyone he knew, all over the country, to locate this remedy. When he finally succeeded in finding it and getting it shipped to Hawaii, FedEx lost it. 

All of us at the memorial are at the edge of our seats listening to Jonah’s efforts to save her life. Jonah relates how he was finally able to retrieve the remedy and Gia took it. 

She revived for a short while, but it did not hold. Dr. Randy Wong explains to us from the microphone, “At a certain point in a patient’s departure, they need their family’s permission to let go.” 

Jonah is so brave in telling this story. All of us in the audience are availing ourselves of the boxes of tissues being passed around.

At this point in his story of caring for Gia, Jonah was finally realizing that she might not make it this time. Jonah and Gia always talked with one another about everything. Jonah asked her to keep trying, but ultimately saw that he needed to release her. His teacher had told him about already seeing an image of Gia in the afterlife looking like a wise sage.

Gia’s brother was there in her hospital room, and more family members were about to arrive to make their final goodbyes to Gia. Jonah had not left her bedside for days to eat, sleep or bathe. Gia encouraged him to go home and shower before they arrived. Figuring their house was only 3 minutes from the hospital, Jonah reluctantly dashed home for a shower. 

Of course, as happens so frequently in these circumstances, while her beloved is gone, Gia passed quietly, quickly. In an act of conscious choice, Gia closed her eyes and said, “I’m going now.” 

At this point in Jonah’s story, I cannot hold back my tears of admiration as well as sadness.

Jonah informs us that his teacher has predicted that Gia will be “with” Jonah for seven days after her passing. The day after her memorial, the day of her cremation, will be the seventh day. Sitting there in the chapel, my heart goes out to Jonah, feeling how difficult that next day will be for him.

At the very end of the service, Jonah invites us, if we wish, to come up and view Gia in the open casket at the front of the room. I go forward to say my goodbye. Sure enough, I see beautiful Gia’s form lying there, and it does have a certain glow, but that body is clearly not Gia herself. She has gracefully slipped out, leaving her form behind.

And I can imagine Gia’s ethereal state now so easily: wearing a long robe of light, appearing both youthful and ancient at once, serenely, timelessly, walking in the company of other sages. Indeed, as Jonah so wisely knows, our existence in this vast cosmos is so much more than one brief lifetime in a body.