Me Ra Koh gave a touching keynote on Friday at RootsTech as she talked through her own personal journey of growth, family and choosing to focus on the shadows that define the light.
Koh is an author and photographer — among many other titles — who captures photos of the innermost feelings and thoughts of a person. She, along with her husband, Brian, call it the “Rising Phoenix Experience.”
“Our focus is to capture people’s resilience,” Koh said.
What she provides for her subjects stems from her own experiences of struggle, hardship and resilience in life.
After experiencing gut-wrenching verbal attacks from her father and ex-boyfriend, along with physical abuse, self-doubt and suicidal thoughts in her early adult years, she hit an all-time low. At that point, she checked herself into a psychiatric institution to get better.
And she wasn’t in the least bit ashamed to say it because it’s an essential part of her story of how she got where she is today.
In an interview after getting offstage, Koh said that while she never knew much about her family history beyond her grandparents, there were stories that described possible mental health issues that ran in her family, and she couldn’t help but wonder if she was predisposed to the same conditions.
“Because I knew some of that, I had to dig that much deeper ... to navigate it for myself,” she said.
Despite the odds, she chose resilience in her own life, time and time again, and she did it by choosing what narrative to focus on. The narrative is that while there was pain in her past, she would choose to focus on happiness — the light that was defined by the shadows.
She focused a lot of her story on her relationship with her father, saying “deep down, I know he has always loved me.”
“It’s so easy to focus on the pain, but this,” she said pointing to a portrait of her and her father laughing, “is true too.”
“I’m not in any way saying that you should put on rose-colored glasses and look over all the parts of your family history that may be disappointing, I’m actually saying the exact opposite,” she said. “Let shadows define the light. I give you permission to embrace the shadows and let the light be that much more accurate for you.”
“I’m not in any way saying that you should put on rose-colored glasses and look over all the parts of your family history that may be disappointing, I’m actually saying the exact opposite,” she said. “Let shadows define the light. I give you permission to embrace the shadows and let the light be that much more accurate for you.”
By putting a light on the complex relationships that are common in families, she asked, “what have you and your family overcome? Do you see what is left from the ashes?”
When pain is not covered but shown amid everything else, it’s something that future generations can look at and see the great resilience from the hard, she said.
The name “Phoenix” she chose to use in her photography experience is meant to portray rebuilding something even better, and it does, not just for her, but for those who have experienced it.
In the audience, Ruth Blair — a genealogist and FamilySearch influencer — connected with Koh’s message on a personal note as she said, “I felt her pain.”
“It meant a lot that she was actually sharing her truth,” Blair said. “Despite everything she’s been through, she was glowing. She is a great example of a phoenix.”
At the end of sharing her story, FamilySearch gave a special surprise gift to Koh. She went from knowing only her family history to her grandparents to her father’s line back more than 1,100 years.
She got emotional as a long scroll filled with her ancestry was unrolled onstage.
“I’m just blown away,” she told Deseret News afterward. “My dad immigrated from North Korea during the Korean War, so so many records were lost, I don’t even know if he has his birth record, and to see that, I was absolutely blown away. I can’t wait to share that with him, I feel like it’s going to be such a gift.”
Even the form of the scroll itself was meaningful to her.
“When my dad was at his worst points, he would say that he was erasing me from the scroll,” she said while laughing, “but I just think it is so redemptive to have this scroll,” she continued and she began to get emotional. ”Regardless of the pain that my dad and I have gone through and the healing, we’re both in the scroll and both a part of that family history forever.”