Many of the people who’ve encountered me leading a hunt or teaching at Gunsite have wondered about how I got into shooting. I’ve heard variations of the question over the years, and I understand why – as a small Asian woman, I don’t fit in with an inaccurate and outdated, but lingering, stereotype.
To me, it all comes down to mindset, as with most things in life.
My mindset has been deeply shaped by my parents’ – and their parents’ – own battles, literally. My mother’s father was a general in China. He was part of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist army and fought both Mao Tse Tung’s communists and the Japanese, trying to save his homeland. He was fighting battles and wars, in one form or another, from 1918 to 1949. Even after being relegated to Taiwan, he never lost his love for his homeland, and I don’t think he ever gave up hope that it could be won back. I never knew him as anything but a warrior.
Reading Vera Koo’s new book, Wisdom and Things, is like having a kind – and more skilled and experienced – friend offer you small bits of advice. Even better, the advice doesn’t come in the form of advising. Instead, it’s there like little gifts for you to find throughout this very digestible collection of short stories, practical observations and musings. They all showcase the author’s thoughtful introspection about what she has learned in her life, and how this nurtures the ever-expanding horizons she sees before her.
Koo opens her new book with a hint: “I have come to realize how deeply your attitude affects your life. It is my believe that life is 20 percent what happens, and 80 percent how we react.” This, from a woman who, among many other major life events, has reached the very top of a profession by competing worldwide with the men who dominate it, and who has also lived through and with unspeakable tragedy.
I’d lost the battle. It was a valiant effort (if squinty eyes and cocked head are valiant), but Mother Nature won; I needed reading glasses. I probably owe legions of students an apology too, because for years, when someone would bemoan a “fuzzy front sight” or show up to shoot with upside-down cheaters perched on nose (yes, really), I’d scoff. “You’re not going to have your shooting glasses on when you have that defensive encounter,” I’d bark…
Now I get it. And in addition to the blurry-front sight issue, I also had trouble seeing screw-heads, reading scope turrets and perhaps most offensive, my practice sessions were getting shorter because of eye fatigue. I needed help.
Enter SSP Eyewear. I almost literally stumbled upon these safety glasses at a recent shooting event. As I was squinting to get a better look, the sympathetic SSP representative pushed a pair toward me. “Try these,” he said … and my world was changed.
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