University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Korean American han: forgotten histories, haunted spaces

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Korean American han: forgotten histories, haunted spaces

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Content KOREAN AMERICAN HAN:
FORGOTTEN HISTORIES, HAUNTED SPACES
by
Lisa Lee
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
LITERATURE & CREATIVE WRITING
December 2020
Copyright 2020 Lisa Lee
ii

For Yuna
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Ploughshares, VIDA, North American Review, Sycamore Review,
Gulf Coast, the Bitch Media podcast, New World Writing, The Tusculum Review, and Reed
Magazine for publishing my work. Special thanks to The Pushcart Prize for selecting my novel
excerpt “Paradise Cove” for the 2016 anthology and to The Center for Fiction for naming me a
2012 NYC Emerging Writers Fellow. Thank you to the following organizations for awarding me
fellowships and community: Inprint-Brown Foundation, Kundiman, Jentel Artist Residency, The
Korea Foundation, the Korean Studies Institute, and the EASC Association for Japan–U.S.
Community Exchange (ACE) Nikaido program.

Thank you to the USC Graduate School and Creative Writing Department for awarding
me so many grants and fellowships in support of my work that I’ve lost count. I would need a
whole separate page to list them all here. Special thanks to the Creative Writing faculty and my
dissertation committee: Viet Thanh Nguyen, Percival Everett, Dana Johnson, Aimee Bender, and
Youngmin Choe. All my gratitude for your mentorship.

Thank you to the University of Houston MFA program, Santa Clara University School of
Law, and my undergraduate institution, U.C. Berkeley, where I was first introduced to academia
and the possibility of a life as a writer.

Thank you to my agent Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit for reading multiple drafts and
helping me turn my novel into reality.

My parents, Hee Joo and Kenneth Lee, and my brother Gene Lee.

My partner Michael Tod Powers and our daughter, Yuna Olivia Lee-Powers, born while
Michael and I were both PhD candidates at USC and to whom I dedicate my work. Yuna will be
five years old when this dissertation is submitted to the USC library.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication       ii

Acknowledgements     . iii

Abstract      ... vi

PART I – Critical Dissertation: Korean American Han: Forgotten Histories,
Haunted Spaces

Introduction     1

Chapter 1: Asian American Lit: What is it? What does it do?   17

Chapter 2: The Bildungsroman: A Narrative of Assimilation    30
Chapter 3: Han      45
Part I: Korean American Han    . 45
Part II: “We are Korean!”   53
Part III: Korean American Han, Diaspora, and Hybridity  .. 65

Part IV: Korean Horror   68

Conclusion     .. 83

Works Cited     85

PART II – Creative Dissertation: Top Girl, a novel

Chapter 1: Marry the Lion Tamer    .. 89

Chapter 2: House Hunting    106

Chapter 3: Conversations with my Dad   147

Chapter 4: Paradise Cove    . 175

Chapter 5: Exposure Exposer Exposed (or Cops and Goblins)  200
v
Chapter 6: Plea Bargain (or Ceremony)    224

Chapter 7    ...272

Chapter 8    ...284

Chapter 9    .. 299

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ABSTRACT

My doctoral work at USC includes a critical and a creative dissertation. In both
dissertations, I explore the conscious and unconscious acts of memory and erasure that constitute
the Asian American subject’s relationship to her transpacific history, both as an individual
subject and as a member of a complex, multi-generational and multiethnic network of
communities.

My creative work coincides with my critical investigation, raising questions that the critical
dissertation explores and further examines. The creative component of my dissertation is a novel,
Top Girl, about a Korean American immigrant family, the Kims, living in the Bay Area of
Northern California. The novel explores the tension between this family’s complex transnational
history and the American longing to be rid of history, to begin from everywhere and nowhere
and thus be free to become anything. In different ways, each member of the Kim family must
confront the difficulty of moving across class borders, of inhabiting separate and overlapping
identities—Korean, Korean American, American—and of living within a patriarchal framework
of gendered expectations. The novel opens with twenty-eight year old Jane Kim confessing that
she’s dropped out of law school, thus throwing into doubt her parents’ long-standing dream that
she would climb the class ladder to become a well-paid professional. As she attempts to keep the
secret from her family, she realizes that other members of her family are facing similar personal
crises of faith, identity, and belonging.

My critical dissertation is titled “Korean American Han: Forgotten Histories, Haunted
Spaces.” In her essay, “Home is Where the Han Is: A Korean Perspective on the Los Angeles
Upheavals,” Elaine Kim defines han as “the sorrow and anger that grow from repeated
experiences of oppression.” The novelist Jay Caspian Kang, writing in the New York Times,
describes han as “a state of hopeless, crippling sadness combined with anger at an unjust world.”
Certainly, Koreans and Korean Americans are not alone in having undergone repeated
experiences of oppression, or in feeling angry in the face of an unjust world. Yet, many Koreans
and Korean Americans believe that han has a specifically Korean character, distinct from other
ways of experiencing sorrow, anger, and apparent powerlessness. I believe the answer may lie in
part in Korea’s own particular history, and in the repressed, unspoken, or otherwise unresolved
traumas that haunt the Korean landscape and the Korean imagination.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Tokyo and Seoul with the support of fellowships from
the Korea Foundation and USC’s Korean Studies Institute and East Asian Studies Center, I
investigate how, among the Korean diaspora in America, Korean American han is derived from
historical and collective traumas, but has transformed into something separate and distinct from
Korean han, and includes the suppression of traumatic memories—of Japanese and American
colonial aggression, for example—as well as the experiences of living as a marginalized and
racialized community in America. Drawing on the work of Elaine Kim, Jay Caspian Kang, Grace
M. Cho, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, and Paul Connerton, among others, I investigate
han as a form of collective memory and, at the same time, of collective forgetting. In Haunting
the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, Cho borrows and adapts
Abraham and Torok’s concept of transgenerational haunting to describe the psychic aftermath,
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both for Koreans and for the American-born children of Korean immigrants, of the Korean war,
noting that “the haunting effect is produced not so much by the original trauma as by the fact of
its being kept hidden. It is precisely within the gap in conscious knowledge about one’s family
history that secrets turn into phantoms” (11).

For Korean Americans and Korean immigrants, the erasure of collective trauma that begins
in the homeland is compounded by the imperatives of American assimilation, and by the often
willful blindness of the American imagination in viewing immigrant communities. When Korean
Americans are described as a “model minority,” for example, the complicated and often violent
history that brought Koreans to America, and the fraught history of Koreans in America, is
obscured. Equally obscured are the circumstances under which the “model minority” myth was
produced in the first place, and the forms of power it has enabled—to point to one minority
group as emblematic of American immigrant success is, to state the obvious, to reify the
“failures” of other minorities. In this way, the histories that produced the impoverished African
American and Latinx neighborhoods of East Los Angeles are obscured as well, and success and
failure become attributes intrinsic to one minority group or another. The newly accepted
narrative creates disappearances, obscuring both the history it replaces and the methods and
circumstances of its own production. The experiences this process casts into the realm of the
unspeakable remain as haunting memories, all the more powerfully present for having been
“forgotten.” The ghosts that haunt us do so not because they have been remembered, but because
they have been made to disappear from memory.
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PART I – Critical Dissertation: Korean American Han: Forgotten Histories,
Haunted Spaces

INTRODUCTION

In the late sixties, after the Immigration Act of 1965 removed restrictions on Asian
immigration, my parents arrived into the U.S. from South Korea. They were young, both in their
mid-twenties, and as they were not yet married they traveled separately—by air and possessing
the requisite paperwork—with members of their respective families. My mother’s family settled
in Southern California. My father’s in the Bay Area, though my father briefly rented a studio in
Los Angeles’ Koreatown, on the same street where I currently live as a graduate student fifty
years later. When he visits me now, he remarks on how much the neighborhood has changed.
“It’s clean,” he says, “and so many young people out eating and shopping.” When my parents
married, they lived first in San Francisco and later in Napa. So, the parents of my novel’s
narrator are also Korean immigrants with California roots who start a family in the San Francisco
Bay Area.
I feel obligated, as a writer, to be faithful to my own experience, to my own family and
my place in it. I feel a responsibility to tell the truth about all this—not the factual truth, or not
always, but at least what Tennessee Williams would have called the poetic truth. But because my
family is Korean American, I feel another, sometimes competing pressure—to be faithful to the
experience of Korean Americans, and of Asian Americans, categories of experience that are
necessarily defined by others. This is in many ways a trickier thing. It’s a job one might, given
the option, have good reasons to turn down. How can I claim to speak for people I haven’t met,
people who may have nothing more in common with me than a shared ethnicity? To set out to be
2
a writer of—a speaker for—Korean American or Asian American experience is to claim
tremendous, perhaps uncomfortable privilege. On the other hand, what would it mean to avoid
this kind of representation? How would it even be possible?
In their introduction to Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, Frank Chin,
Jeffrey Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong locate the source of this pressure in a white-
dominated social structure in which whiteness is unmarked and unnoticed, while race is made the
signal feature of everyone else’s identity:
The minority writer works in a literary environment of which the white writer has no
knowledge or understanding. The white writer can get away with writing for himself,
knowing full well he lives in a world run by people like himself. At some point the
minority writer is asked for whom he is writing, and in answering that question must
decide who he is. (xxxv)

The white writer who writes “for himself” also, without even trying, writes for publishers and
editors and audiences who see themselves as like this author, like these characters. The (until
recently, presumably white) critic or publishing executive who asks of a writer of color, for
whom are you writing? asks because he doesn’t recognize himself in these characters or his life
in these events. He asks with the implication, because it certainly isn’t for me. On the other hand,
the question for whom are you writing is as likely to come from members of the author’s own
minority group. Are you writing for us? these readers say, or for them? Does this represent us?
The first, most important task for me may be to begin to map the complex and often
hidden border between Asian American subjectivity and objectivity. From Fu Manchu to Long
Duk Dong, Asian Americans have long been defined from the outside, by an American
mainstream that views us either as devious and threatening or as comically docile, either as
models of successful assimilation or as irreconcilably alien. Even the phrase “Asian American,”
as Elaine Kim points out in Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and
3
Their Social Context, privileges racial over national allegiances, and collapses an enormous
variety of cultures and ethnicities into a single, sometimes inapt descriptor:
Calling this work a study of “Asian American” literature presents an enormous problem
because, to begin with, the term Asian American is a controversial one. Like its
predecessor, “Oriental,” it was created in the West from the need to make racial
categorizations in a racially divided or, at least, a racially diverse society . . . I would
venture that the vast majority of persons of Chinese, Vietnamese, or Samoan ancestry
would not, if asked, describe themselves as Asian and Pacific Americans but as Chinese,
Vietnamese, or Samoan Americans, or indeed as Chinese, Vietnamese, and Samoans.
(xii)

The last thing Kim says here, that Asian Americans don’t describe themselves as Asian
American, or that we prefer national categories over racial ones, is mostly no longer true, and for
some good reasons. Still, the problem of the term’s origin remains. The term “Asian American”
speaks in two voices: that of an American mainstream that cannot seem to help itself, that cannot
stop categorizing everyone in terms of their racial difference from the always implied and always
assumed white center, and that of Asian Americans themselves, adopting this descriptor as a way
to recognize and respond to our shared if unchosen place in the American imaginary.
Given the pervasive, racializing gaze under which Asian Americans live and write, one
can easily understand the impulse to represent Asian American communities in writing—to
speak for, in response to all this speaking about. This impulse is complicated by the suspicion—
voiced by the editors of Aiiieeeee!, among others—that even Asian Americans speaking for
themselves may, knowingly or not, give voice to myths that have their origins in Anglo racism.
And, it is at just this point that we must ask a paradoxical question: whether it’s possible ever to
speak for other real, living people, no matter how closely we may be tied by shared history and
by the shared experience of American racialization—and whether it’s possible to avoid doing so.
With or without my consent—and this is assuming all possible success and good luck—
my novel will be read, marketed, and analyzed as a work of “Asian American literature.” It will
4
be approached as such by readers and critics who have already formed ideas about what an Asian
is, what an Asian American is, and what Asian American literature can or should be. If the
mother in my novel demands of the narrator—as a young girl—that she practice harder at the
piano, there will surely be white readers who say to themselves, “Oh, those Asians.” Who hear
the voice of this particular mother and think Amy Chua, think Tiger Mother—despite what that
analogy would miss about my own (fictional) mother’s frequent helplessness, her powerlessness,
about her chaotic emotional life. And there will even be Asian American readers, the children of
immigrants, who think, perhaps with the pleasure of recognition, “Just like my mom.” And all of
these are ways of saying exactly what no writer wants said of her work: “Oh yes, I know this
story already.” The power of the racial descriptor precedes us into the work. Instead of people,
we meet types; instead of characters, myths.
One of my strong feelings about good literature is that it should both resist and
complicate received notions about the people it depicts. But the problem with powerful
stereotypes is that even a broken clock is right twice a day, and on those occasions when the
stereotype appears to be confirmed by reality, it tends to command all the attention in the room. I
once knew a waiter, at a chain restaurant, who claimed that black people never tipped well. I
imagined she might receive fifty twenty-percent tips from black patrons in a day without really
noticing, and when the fifty-first left her ten percent she would say to herself (and to anyone else
who would listen): “See? It’s just like I said.” Chin et al. fret eloquently about the power that
racist mythology holds over even Asian American writers, who too often, in their view,
reproduce the very stereotypes that have been imposed on them by white America:
The best self-contempt has its sources seemingly within the minority group itself. The
vehicles of this illusion are education and the publishing establishment. Only five
American-born Chinese have published what can be called serious attempts at literature
 Of these five, Pardee Lowe, Jade Snow Wong, Virginia Lee, and Betty Lee Sung
5
believe the popular stereotypes of Chinese Americans to be true and find Chinese
America repulsive and do not identify with it. (xxviii)

Here, my obligation to confront and challenge stereotypes may sometimes appear to be in
tension with my obligation to tell the truth. In a writing workshop in which I was a student, I
presented a chapter from my unfinished novel. At the very beginning of the chapter, the
narrator’s father is angry with his teenage son, the narrator’s brother, because his grades are
slipping. The son/brother loves tennis above all things, and practices it to the exclusion of
studying. In his rage, the father chops up the boy’s tennis rackets with an axe, an act whose
causes and effects obviously (or so I thought) reach far beyond the moment in which it takes
place, and far beyond high school grades.
“Please,” a fellow student, a white guy, said. “Why does this dad have to be such a
stereotype? He just confirms everything people already think about Asian parents.”
Everything you already think, I wanted to say. But quite possibly this is enough, and of
course he’s not alone. Even if this is one of the most directly autobiographical episodes in my
work, even if my real-life father did in fact do this to my real-life brother, and even if it seems
clear to me that his scary anger in this moment had more to do with his waning power over us—
with his dawning awareness that we would soon be American adults, fluent in ways he would
never be, and that we mostly wouldn’t need him—than with anybody’s idea of tiger parent
harshness and grade-mania, to a certain kind of reader it will always be just that: a cartoonish
depiction of a stereotypical Asian dad.
But what happens if I take that student’s comment to heart? What happens if, in my quite
right-minded desire to avoid reifying racialized tropes, I go back and revise the story so that the
father isn’t angry about grades, but about, say, a drug arrest? And the son/brother doesn’t play
tennis; he plays baseball. And instead of responding with violent, destructive rage, the father
6
expresses his deep frustration in a way more typical of contemporary literature: he gets drunk.
He glowers at the television. Maybe he speaks unkindly to his wife. Now my workshop partner
has nothing much to complain about. I’m confronting my readers with Asian ways of being that
they may not immediately think they’ve seen before. But my father doesn’t drink, and never did.
And my father did sometimes react to his growing powerlessness with violent, destructive rage.
What does it mean for me if, in trying to resist the tide that sweeps my characters away into
popular myth, I start lying about them?
Asked, in an interview with the University Press of New England, about how he responds
to the label “African American writer,” the novelist Percival Everett says, “Of course my
experience as a black man in America influences my art; it influences the way I drive down the
street. But certainly John Updike’s work is influenced by his being white in America, but we
never really discuss that. I think readers, black and white, are sophisticated enough to be engaged
by a range of black experience, informed by economic situation, religion (or lack thereof) or
geography, just as one accepts a range of so-called white experience.”
Catch him on another day, I suspect, and he might not feel so optimistic, or so generous.
Indeed, the novel he’s just been asked about, Erasure, is a fiercely comic, satiric response to
readers so unsophisticated as to demand only one kind of black narrative, one kind of black
voice. In it, Thellonius “Monk” Ellison, a black writer whose densely allusive, philosophical
novels are routinely dismissed by editors as “not black enough,” pseudonymously publishes, as a
prank, a novel called “My Pafology.” To his embarrassment, the prank becomes a best-seller.
The text of “My Pafology” appears in full within the text of Erasure. A representative sample,
chosen almost at random:
Aspireene’s mama be keeping company with some nigger they call Mad Dog, so I
don’t need to be sniffin round her crib. I ain’t gonna have some buck pop a cap in
7
my ass. No suh. Tylenola’s mama be a crazy bitch and she done got herself a nine
and I know she gone pop a cap in me if I shows my face cause I ain’t give her no
money and she been askin fo’ three monfs. (74)

It may be difficult to separate cleanly the layers of ironic mimicry at work here. To say nothing
of the language, there are the names that sound like brand-name medicines (in the same
paragraph, Dexatrina and Rexall), the narrator’s listing of the several mothers of his several
children, his casual but apparently genuine worry that someone might shoot him, and his
admission that he owes at least one of the women three months’ worth of back child support.
Then there’s the language: No suh. Fo’ three monfs. This is a story that has—as Everett has said
of another of his novels—nothing to do with any reality. It isn’t the voice or the story of any
black man that anyone knows; it may be the voice and the story of a white racist’s idea of a black
man.
So where are the readers “sophisticated enough to be engaged by a range of black
experience . . . just as one accepts a range of so-called white experience”? The problem may be
that so-called white experience is not often so called. White experience is generally thought of
simply as experience, with all the breadth and variety that plain word implies. As Everett points
out, John Updike is not often referred to as a “white writer,” and we don’t talk much about how
his whiteness influences his work. Meanwhile, so-called black experience, or Asian experience,
or Latinx experience is always black, Asian, Latinx first and most importantly. Once all the
accumulated weight of the national or racial marker is in place, little room is left for experience
itself.
In Chapter 3 of her book Immigrant Acts, titled “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity:
Asian American Differences,” Lisa Lowe says:
The grouping “Asian American” is not a natural or static category; it is a socially
constructed unity, a situationally specific position, assumed for political reasons. It is
8
“strategic” in Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak’s sense of a “strategic use of a positive
essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest.” (82)

An Asian American may be of Korean, Chinese, Indian, or Cambodian descent, to name just a
few of the many possible national origins. She may be poor or rich, queer or straight or
somewhere in between, she may or may not identify with the gender assigned to her at birth, may
be gender fluid or non-binary, fluent in the language of her country of ethnic origin or not, fluent
in English or not. What all Asian Americans have in common is the experience of having been
racialized within an American imaginary that has its own ideas about what “Asian” means, and
how it modifies “American,” and even this experience is by no means the same for all of us and
at all times. The single banner “Asian American” then, may be a unification accepted in response
to the unification imposed on us by a culture in which the term “American” is tacitly racialized
as white.
But Lowe is quick to point out that, however much the term and the formations it
describes may be politically useful and even necessary, it obscures as much as it brings to light.
Maxine Hong Kingston’s mega-bestseller The Woman Warrior illustrates, for Lowe, the
problematic status of the appointed “voice of a people”:
[Kingston’s] novel/autobiography The Woman Warrior is the target of such criticism
because it was virtually the first “canonized” piece of Asian American literature. In this
sense, a critique of how and why this text became fetishized as the exemplary
representation of Asian American culture is necessary and important. (76)

Frank Chin accuses Kingston of “feminizing” Asian American culture, and at the same time of
making Asian American culture appear hostile to women. Chin and others critique Kingston’s
work as “assimilationist.” One of Lowe’s main preoccupations in this chapter, in fact, is a
critique of what she sees as a false binary between assimilationism and nationalism. But at the
9
root of all these sometimes angry responses to Kingston is the same question: who are you to
speak for all of us?
In fairness to Kingston, we should acknowledge that she most likely did not set out to be
the literary voice of all Asian Americans. Somehow, in Lowe’s analysis, “this text became
fetishized as the exemplary representation of Asian American culture,” as Chinua Achebe’s
“Things Fall Apart,” was once fetishized as the exemplary representation of African culture, or
as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was fetishized as the exemplary
representation—to English-speaking North America—of Central and South American culture.
Drawing from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Lowe points to a hidden
affinity between post-colonial nationalisms and colonially sanctioned essentialisms. In seeking
for itself a singular, often supposedly pre-colonial identity, the former colony or colony in
rebellion may simply regenerate the same kind of narrative structure originally imposed by the
colonial power:
That is, a politics of bourgeois cultural nationalism may be congruent with the divide-
and-conquer logics of colonial domination. Fanon links the practices of the national
bourgeoisie that has “assimilated” colonialist thought and practice with “nativist”
practices that privilege one group or ethnicity over others; for Fanon, nativism and
assimilationism are not opposites—they are similar logics that both enunciate the old
order. (73)

Something similar may be at work in the anointing of Maxine Hong Kingston as the exemplary
Asian American writer, and in some of the reactions against such anointing. If Kingston’s
outsized fame is in part the result of a (white) literary culture that wishes to make “other”
cultures legible through chosen representatives—that wants to imagine, wants us to imagine, that
a single Great Author can tell us everything we need to know about what it is to be Asian
American—it’s also possible that Chin and others are seeking the same legibility, the same kind
of heroic representation, and only wishing for different representatives. If Kingston makes Asian
10
American men look like jerks, then the answer, for some of these critics, is to find another
chosen voice who celebrates Asian American masculinity—not to recognize what is obvious:
that the range of experience called Asian American is far too vast and varied to be contained by
the work of any one author. No one expects John Updike to stand for all of American whiteness.
In their preface to Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography, King-Kok
Cheung and Stan Yogi argue for a more inclusive understanding of both “Asian American” and
“Asian American literature”:
Criteria based on “Asian American Sensibility” are inevitably subjective. They cannot be
applied judiciously, since the various Asian cultural groups (and even members within
the same group) immigrated to North America at different periods. Moving in the
direction pointed out by Elaine Kim in Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the
Writings and Their Social Context, we try to be inclusive rather than exclusive in our
selections. We list works by writers of Asian descent who have made the United States or
Canada their home, regardless of where they were born, when they settled in North
America, and how they interpret their experiences . . . Following the same inclusive
principle we use the term “literature” in a broad sense to encompass autobiography,
informal essays, and popular fiction. In short, we try to enlarge the precincts of Asian
American literature. A narrow definition would stifle rather than inspire at a time when
Asian American writers are still finding their voice, a voice that should be polyphonic.
(v-vi)

The landscape of Asian American life and writing can only be larger and more varied now than it
was in 1974, when Chin et al. defined Asian Americans as “not one people but several—
Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans” (vii), or in 1982, when the
much more aesthetically inclusive Elaine Kim defined Asian American literature as “published
creative writings in English by Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino descent”
(xi). The intervening decades have seen the rapid growth of American communities who trace
their origins to Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and more or
less every other country in the roughly one third of the earth that we call Asia. Almost all of
these Asian American communities have produced extraordinary writers, many (but not enough)
11
of whom have achieved mainstream literary recognition. The project that should consume us
now is the work of making the phrase “Asian American literature” signify at least as much
diversity of experience as is signified by the word “literature,” and at least as much as is
contained in the whole range of Asian American lives and Asian American histories.
If I seem to be arguing against placing any limitations on who or what can be described
by the descriptor “Asian American,” it is perhaps because white writers have been so effective
for so long in placing those limitations. In Chapter one of Asian American Literature, discussing
the long history of representations of Asians by white writers, Kim identifies the hidden function
of the racist caricature:
Anglo-American literature does not tell us about Asians. It tells us about Anglos’
opinions of themselves, in relation to their opinions of Asians. As such it is useful
primarily in that it illustrates how racism impacts on culture. (20)

Kim divides caricatured Asian figures broadly into “good” Asians and “bad” Asians. Good
Asians are loyal, servile, and self-sacrificing, or else comically inept, passive, and in need of
rescue by heroic white protagonists. Bad Asians are devious, manipulative, bent on conquering
the West either by trickery (Fu Manchu) or by simple force of numbers (Wallace Irwin’s Seed of
the Sun, e.g.). All of these representations, Kim argues, are ultimately representations of
whiteness through the reflecting figure of the Asian. The weak, passive Asian victim, waiting to
be rescued, throws into relief the strength and capacity for action of her white rescuer. The cruel,
heartless Asian villain makes clear the warmth and goodness of the white heroes who—because
they love their wives and their mothers and their children—thwart the villain’s dastardly plans.
One gets the sense that this is the way white privilege has always worked in literature, and the
way it often still works. In describing others, the white writer describes himself. Think of 2009’s
Oscar-nominated film The Blind Side, which is blatantly less interested in the formerly homeless
12
black youth at its center than in the endless generosity and resourcefulness of the upper middle-
class white parents who adopt him and shepherd him to a college football scholarship. One of the
first things you notice, reading the numbing catalogue of Kim’s quotations from the white
supremacist literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the extraordinary
repetition of the word stoic. Whether “good” or “bad,” Asians are always stoic, their faces
impassive. They betray no emotion. And here is Scott Shifrel, of the New York Daily News,
reporting from the 2007 trial of a Korean immigrant, Yoon Zapana, who was convicted of
shaking an infant she was baby-sitting—causing severe brain damage—and sentenced to fifteen
years in prison:
This time she showed no emotion. Yun Zapana remained stoic as she was convicted of
first-degree assault for violently shaking a baby eight years ago, when she was a baby-
sitter in Queens.

From another Daily News article, also by Shifrel:

Zapana, who has said she would appeal February’s jury verdict convicting her of
assaulting the baby, had no words of remorse and looked away as the boy’s father spoke.

Yoon Zapana’s son, the journalist Victor Zapana, has written about her recently for The New
Yorker. Toward the end of his essay, he describes playing dominoes with his mother in prison:
Umma [Mom] placed her last tile on the table. She had won. She hooted, scrunched up
her face, and raised her hands to the ceiling.
Her expression at moments like that reminds me of the Umma who comforted me in our
Mott Street apartment, who tried to teach herself English by scribbling down word after
word. It reminds me of the framed photograph of her in my Astoria bedroom. (39)

The difference in description here may speak more eloquently than I can of the need for
racialized American minorities (Victor Zapana is both Korean American, on his mother’s side,
and Peruvian American, on his father’s) to write themselves.
13
For all their blind spots and omissions, Chin et al. offer valuable insight into the
operation of the stereotype both in suppressing Asian American literature and in defining its
form and content:
The stereotype operates most efficiently and economically when the vehicle of the
stereotype, the medium of its perpetuation, and the subject race to be controlled are all
one. When the operation of the stereotype has reached this point, at which the subject
race itself embodies and perpetuates the white supremacist vision of reality, indifference
to the subject race sets in among mass society. The successful operation of the stereotype
results in the neutralization of the subject race as a social, creative, and cultural force.
(xxvii)

Rather than placing “good” and “bad” Asian stereotypes alongside one another, as Kim does,
Chin et al. frame the “good” stereotypes as a new kind of oppressive myth, more refined and
more effective than the crudely malicious racism of the past. They argue that it is precisely
because many of the stereotypes about Asian Americans are supposedly “positive”—we’re
polite, smart, high-achieving, readily assimilable to American economic life if not to American
social life—that these stereotypes have been so effective in silencing “authentic” Asian
American voices. In an interview Chin conducted with the early Chinese American novelist
Virginia Lee, in 1970, Lee said:
“You’ve got to admit that what you call the stereotype does make up for the larger
majority of Chinese-Americans, now I’ve seen that in school. [Virginia Lee is a
schoolteacher]. I think it behooves all minorities, Blacks, Chinese, what not, not to feel so
insulted so fast. It’s almost a reflex action.” (xxix)

This is high-tech, cutting edge racism; invisible to the naked eye, it dissolves readily in the
bloodstreams of its targets. The hundred years in which Asian people and their children and
grandchildren lived in America without producing any literature known outside Asian American
communities attests to the genuine power of these stereotypes to suppress and silence. This may
go some distance toward explaining my genuine anxiety about allowing characters to appear to
embody Asian stereotypes in my own creative work.
14
Solving this problem is likely to be a long process, but it may well begin with a
recognition on the part of Asian American writers and readers that what Cheung and Yogi call an
“Asian American sensibility” is not only subjective; it’s impossible to define. Or, more precisely,
that any definition of such a sensibility will necessarily entail limitations that we must not accept.
In yearning for an “authentic” Asian American voice, Chin et al. are guilty of silencing,
at least within the sphere of their influence, those voices that, for various reasons, they deem
inauthentic. Inauthenticity, for Chin et al., begins with a “sensibility” informed by what could be
termed the white gaze:
Sensibility and the ability to choose differentiate the Asian-American writers in this
collection from the Americanized Chinese writers Lin Yutang and C.Y. Lee . . . unlike
us, they are American by choice. They consciously set out to become American, in the
white sense of the word, and succeeded in becoming “Chinese-American”: in the
stereotypical sense of the good, loyal, obedient, passive, law-abiding, cultured sense of
the word. (x)

All this may well be true enough. On the other hand, no one—no person of color—lives in an
America organized in terms of its racial mythologies without absorbing and in some way
responding to the narratives by which our country knows us. This yearning for a sensibility and a
voice untainted by internalized racial stereotypes bears some resemblance to post-colonial
nationalist yearnings for an “authentic,” pre-colonial identity. There’s no disentangling the
history of the colonizer from that of the colonized, no way out except forward, not back. If the
myths America tells about us have become, in various ways, part of our selves, we must now
make them part of our art—as deliberately and with as much awareness as possible. Asian
American sensibilities—which can mean nothing other than the varied sensibilities of individual
Asian Americans—will always be formed in the fraught interchange between racialized people
and a racist society. It stands to reason, then, that all manifestations of this interchange are
15
equally authentic, and thus equally valid—if not as art, then at least as the material from which
art is made.
In theorizing the political uses to which the term “Asian American” may be put by the
people it describes, Lowe borrows from Spivak the idea of “strategic essentialism”:
The concept of “strategic essentialism” suggests that it is possible to utilize specific
signifiers of racialized ethnic identity, such as “Asian American,” for the purpose of
contesting and disrupting the discourse that excludes Asian Americans, while
simultaneously revealing the internal contradictions and slippages of “Asian American”
so as to insure that such essentialisms will not be reproduced and proliferated by the very
apparatuses we seek to disempower. (82)

While I am convinced of the importance of “revealing internal contradictions and slippages,” I
am not at all convinced that doing so will ensure anything. For all its beauty and all its beautiful
uses, the English language has always also been a means to control; to name something is to
claim the power to define it, and in the history of American racial naming, people have always
expected those definitions to be simple. The trick may be to find a way to speak from—from the
experiences of racialization, discrimination, exclusions both legal and social, as well as from the
experiences of closeness to and distance from immigrant parents, searches for and buildings of
identity—without speaking for.
Years after my father chopped up my brother’s tennis rackets, my brother played tennis
for a Division I team, he turned pro, briefly, went to law school, became a police officer. Later
he became a sniper for the S.W.A.T. team, an organization which is as fraught an object of
American mythology as any racial minority. I don’t know much about him now. We don’t talk. I
know that he used to beat his dog, though he no longer does, so his wife tells my parents who tell
me. I know he keeps loaded guns in his car, in his house, on his body. I know at night before he
goes to sleep he performs a “clean sweep” of his house and his yard, pointing a flashlight and the
barrel of a handgun into all the closets and hallways and dark corners. I know that my brother is
16
on disability retirement, has been since his early forties, his body having long given out under the
strain of police work and, in my opinion, unacknowledged trauma. My mother told me that he
and his wife almost divorced, got counseling, that they sold their house in San Jose and moved to
Thailand for a couple years before settling down in San Diego, where he lives today, a two hour
drive from where I live now in Los Angeles.
I’ve written about this person, but I could never speak for him. I’ve tried. I’ve tried to
write in his voice, from his perspective, and I’ve found the task impossible. And he’s my brother.
We grew up in the same house, with the same parents. I ask myself all the time how it can be that
he came out like that, while I came out like this. I’m never sure what I mean by like that or like
this. I am sure that our shared ethnic and racial identity has nothing to do with the question—
siblings often turn out wildly different from each other; no one says how can that be, when
they’re both white?—and I am sure that of course it does; it has everything to do with it.

17
CHAPTER 1: Asian American Lit: What is it? What does it do?

In Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America, Patricia
Chu argues that Asian American authors have used the European novel form the bildungsroman
as a way of claiming subjectivity for themselves and the Asian American community. She
focuses on the way that authors use the structure of the bildungsroman to resist or trouble the
cultural construction of Asian Americans as simultaneously always foreign and well assimilated
into American culture. In the coda, Chu writes: “When will Asian Americans write as
assimilated subjects, and when we do, what will it mean to write as an Asian American?” (189).
Chu’s book was published twenty years ago, in 2000. Even then, Chu had noticed in recent
Asian American literary texts at least “the prospect of Asian American subjects’ true
interpellation into the nation and a corresponding broadening of the subjects about which one
may write” (189). It was no longer necessary that every Asian American novel be devoted solely
or even primarily to showing that the terms Asian and American were not mutually exclusive. In
the two decades since, Asian American literature has flourished and diversified more than ever
before, and yet Chu’s question—When will we write as assimilated subjects, and what will it
then mean to write as an Asian American—remains relevant.
In the following chapters I will consider how novels of Asian American subject
formation both work within and challenge the assimilationist tendencies of the bildungsroman. I
will show how the often repressed trauma of colonization and war—manifested in Korean
experience in the particular emotional state signified by the Korean word han—presents itself as
an obstacle to American assimilation and at the same time gives rise to a stubborn strain of
dissent in Korean American literature. I will also trace the emergence of a specifically Korean
18
American han, in which the repressed traumas brought over from the homeland find themselves
transfigured and deepened by the racism and structural inequality Korean immigrants and their
descendants face in America.
An “assimilated subject,” according to Patricia Chu, is a person who is absorbed into the
national narrative, who is neither abjected by American culture nor an abjector herself—of her
homeland, ancestral culture, or the Asian feminine—to better establish her own Americanness.
Chu writes:
One of the central ideological tasks accomplished by Asian American literary texts is the
construction of Asian American subjects through the transformation of existing narratives
about American identity. To accomplish these fundamental tasks, Asian American writers
have had to address the dislocations particular to Asian immigration, the average
American’s unawareness of Asian American history and culture, and the deeply
entrenched presumption that Asian Americans are not American. Because these factors
affect Asian Americans both materially and in their cultural production, they have also
entered the literature thematically. (3-4)

It is the nature of writers—whether or not they are writers of color, or conform to gender
or sexual norms—to write about characters on the margins. Writers are often driven to write
from the experience of being an outsider, from feeling like a foreigner in one’s own country.
Even when “the universal” writer writes about the universal—straight, white male writers
writing about straight, white male characters—the subject matter is predominately that of
outcasts, frauds, loners, losers, strivers, men trying to pass in socio-economic groups that they
were not born into, straddling two different worlds.
Asian American writers will continue to write as subjects who are not truly assimilated,
partially because it is the nature of writers to explore the lives of characters on the margins,
however for Asian Americans, and other communities of color, our foreignness is visible, and
because of the way we are viewed it is difficult to shed the sense of being foreign.
19
According to Viet Thanh Nguyen in Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in
Asian America, the idea that Asian Americans cannot become white because we do not look
white depends on the conception of racial difference with an implied reliance on essentialism
(169). Nguyen disagrees with Ronald Takaki’s argument in From Different Shores: Perspectives
on Race and Ethnicity in America regarding the possibilities of minority assimilation, suggesting
that Takaki subordinates ethnicity under race in his claim that racial difference separates the
Irish, as white, from the Chinese and people of African descent, as nonwhite, and that the
successful assimilation of the Irish is based partly on their whiteness (169). Nguyen argues that
“historical evidence demonstrates that in the nineteenth century the Irish did not look white, at
least to other European Americans who had already claimed the mantle of whiteness,” and
suggests that the example of the Irish as a community of difference demonstrates that “race is not
inherently visible through physical characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and eye and
nose shape, but that race is instead something that we learn to see” (170). While it is important
for Asian American scholars and writers to consider how the meanings and perceptions of race is
changing, the cultural training on how we see race has a long history. For Asians in America, this
includes a cultural history of orientalism, the continued derogatory depictions of Asians in
popular culture and our role in television and film as secondary characters, a legislative history
of exclusion, U.S. military history and continued presence in Asian countries, the internment of
Japanese Americans. This history of cultural training has taught us how and what to see, and I
fear that the process of change that Nguyen asks us to imagine as a possibility is not in our
future, nor is it necessarily desirable.
Asians Americans are not yet writing as assimilated subjects. In Southern Cross the Dog
(2013), Bill Cheng, a Chinese American from Queens, imagines African American life in Jim
20
Crow-era Mississippi. Cheng’s novel centers on marginalization and the lives of black men and
women in the South before WWII—a time period in which he was not alive, about people whose
history, race, and ethnicity he does not share. Notably, the reviewers of Cheng’s debut novel
never failed to mention Cheng’s choice of subject in relation to his own background and race,
often highlighted as the most interesting and unusual detail about the novel. Asian Americans
who choose not to write about Asians are still identified as Asian by critics, and presumably
readers as well since critics are also readers, as evidenced by the critics’ attention to the fact that
Bill Cheng is a Chinese American from Queens who has never set foot in Mississippi. Asian
American writers see early on which spaces we can easily move in, and have to decide whether
to push the boundaries of those spaces.
Asian American writers often feel underrepresented in the publishing world. Does an
Asian American writer have to write a certain type of story? A story that she may not feel
qualified to write? Certain tropes predominate: immigration, survival, achievement and
assimilation narratives, including the immigrant romance with a white partner; generational
differences and family conflict, including abjection of the Asian mother, mother-daughter
relationships, the three generations of women narrative, artist-sons engaged in oedipal struggles;
identity and gender politics, including Asian American women as sentimental heroines, brave
immigrant foremothers, and devoted daughters, as well as the Asian American man who can’t
experience strong emotions or love wholeheartedly, and the flawed Asian or Asian American
man who abjects his ancestral culture and Asian women to construct his identity as masculine
and therefore American; the imagined ancestral past, returning to the homeland, war, historical
fiction, and ghosts and haunting.
21
My own novel in progress, Top Girl, is about a Korean American immigrant family, the
Kims, living in the Bay Area of Northern California, and explores the tension between this
family’s complex transnational history and the American longing to be rid of history, to begin
from everywhere and nowhere and thus be free to become anything. In different ways, each
member of the Kim family must confront the difficulty of moving across class borders, of
inhabiting separate and overlapping identities—Korean, Korean American, American—and of
living within a patriarchal framework of gendered expectations. The novel opens with twenty-
eight year old Jane Kim confessing that she’s dropped out of law school, thus throwing into
doubt her parents’ long-standing dream that she would climb the class ladder to become a well-
paid professional. As she attempts to keep the secret from her family, she realizes that other
members of her family are facing similar personal crises of faith, identity, and belonging.
My novel centers on traditional Asian American themes. The story includes an immigrant
family running small businesses, the desire for upward mobility and assimilation, and racialized
subjects that are heavily gendered. The mother-daughter narrative is another common Asian
American trope that’s highlighted in my work, though it is not the only theme.
Many influential Asian American novels, particularly those written by women, involve
narratives about mother-daughter relationships or about histories that play out across three
generations of women. The mother-daughter narrative focuses on conflict between mother and
daughter about differences that are generational and cultural, in which the immigrant mother tries
to impose her will on her Americanized daughter so that she’ll become successful and marry
well. The problem is that what she wants for her daughter doesn’t match up with what the
daughter wants for herself or with American ideals. The mother uses manipulation, guilt, and
verbal and sometimes physical abuse to lead her daughter onto the right path. The daughter sees
22
her mother as her enemy yet feels deeply connected to her. They hurt each other, but in the end,
they declare that they love each other, they forgive, everyone cries, and all is resolved. The three
generations of women narrative involves the above scenario, with the addition of a grandmother,
who either lives in the homeland or in America as a representation of the old world and their
pure ancestral culture, or she is deceased but we visit the narrative of her life in the homeland
through flashbacks.
The trope of mother-daughter and three generations of women narratives are found in The
Woman Warrior, The Year She Left Us, and marginally in Dictée, but it is most firmly
established in The Joy Luck Club. In this novel, there are sixteen linked stories about the lives of
four Chinese immigrant mothers and their four American-born daughters. The book is divided
into four main sections, with two sections focusing on the stories of the mothers and two sections
on the stories of the daughters. In the sections focusing on the mothers, we often flash back to
stories of their younger selves in their native country before the war, and to the relationships they
had with their own mothers in China. Amy Tan’s novel is the most commercially successful text
of the four. With over four million copies sold and translated into seventeen languages, the novel
was adapted into a feature film directed by Wayne Wang, as well as a play, by Susan Kim, which
premiered at the Pan Asian Repertory Theater in New York. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior received wide, critical acclaim—50,000 copies are sold each year in the U.S.
alone, and the book has been canonized by the Modern Language Association. Kingston received
numerous book awards for China Men, the sequel to The Woman Warrior. However, The Joy
Luck Club, because of the popularity of the film, has seeped into American consciousness. Tan’s
book was an important milestone for Asian American literature in 1989. It gave voice to Asian
American women by making Asian American history and culture accessible to the average
23
American who might have previously lacked knowledge, and by humanizing and individualizing
Asian American experience through stories that are intimate and private. However, Tan’s book
about four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco has come to represent Asian
American writing by women of all Asian backgrounds.
The trouble with a well-worn path is that it’s easy, both for readers and for writers. When
you know where you’re going, you may forget to ask where else you might go. In her book
Minor Feelings, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong explains why she has never considered
the form of the novel as a suitable container for her own life on the page. “I couldn’t write
traditional realist narrative fiction,” she says, “because I didn’t care to injection-mold my
thoughts into an anthropological experience where the reader, after reading my novel, would
think, The life of Koreans is so heartbreaking!” (45-6). In this vision of the immigrant family
saga, the “experience” pre-exists both the author and the book. The lived experience of the
protagonist, in which the reader is invited to participate vicariously, is meant to stand in for the
experience of a whole ethnicity, and the success or failure of the author is judged by the authority
with which she is able to substitute her personal experience for that of the collective. The
meaning of this collective experience is pain, trauma, an eventual triumph over the pain and
trauma that signals a reconciliation both with the homeland and with the adopted country. “I
don’t think, therefore I am,” Hong says later in the same essay, “I hurt therefore I am. Therefore,
my books are graded on the pain scale. If it’s 2, maybe it’s not worth telling my story. If it’s 10,
maybe my book will be a bestseller” (49).
My novel was originally focused on a mother-daughter conflict plot, but I was constantly
compared to Amy Tan, both when writers and scholars read my work and even when they
hadn’t, after I had summarized what it was about. If writers and scholars compare me to Amy
24
Tan when they haven’t even read my work, then what will mainstream readers and critics have to
say? The comparison was too limiting, and my response was to work against expectations by
focusing on a brother-sister narrative, a Harold and Kumar-esque buddy comedy, a postmodern
ghost story, and countless other plots that led me down a series of blind alleys for years. I
eventually came back to the mother-daughter conflict, after I had spent so much time trying to
avoid it. How could I avoid it? I have a mother, a living individual both like and irreducibly
unlike the immigrant mothers one finds in novels. My life and personality have been shaped by
hers in countless ways, many of which I’m still not consciously aware of, I’m sure. On the other
hand she has a private, modern life of her own, wishes for herself wholly separate from her
wishes for me. I wanted to write a mother like mine, because I hadn’t seen one in the Asian
American literature I’d read—a real woman who is more than the living embodiment of the past,
more than the poisonous mixture of nostalgia and trauma that one must resist and then forgive.
Anger at one’s immigrant parents—particularly at the controlling mother—is a prevalent
theme in Asian American writing. In the case of male writers, according to Patricia Chu, Asian
women are “used to represent aspects of the authors’ homeland or ancestral culture that are
abjected from the male protagonists, the better to establish their Americanness” (Chu 20). These
texts “implicitly construct Asian American subjectivity as masculine” (20). We can locate this
construction in Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, John Okada’s No-No Boy, Frank
Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman, David Mura’s Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, and
much of Chang-Rae Lee’s work. These authors claim Americanness by “casting themselves as
author-heroes in an implicitly male narrative, one that defines their American character in terms
of authorial integrity, oedipal rebellion, and the founding (or “fathering”) of a literary tradition”
(20). The masculinization of authorship raises questions about the position of women as Asian
25
American subjects and authors. Chu cites Bharati Mukherjee and Edith Maude Eaton, who
published under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, as Asian American women who have “written
back” to authorship as male. In Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Eaton imagines the immigrant romance
from a feminist perspective, reconceives authorship as an expression of filial devotion, and
asserts Asian American female subjectivity. In Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee rewrites the
interracial immigrant romance from the Asian woman’s point of view. The protagonist’s
Americanization is accomplished with the help of a white romantic partner, but she must submit
to his orientalist preconceptions of her. Women “writing back” to male authorial Asian American
subjectivity has been necessary for resisting marginalization by creating sympathetic images of
immigrant women as assimilable. However, the examples above celebrate the virtuous “domestic
woman” and neither author “entirely escapes the genre’s tendency to equate feminist
consciousness and agency with first world women and fatalist or passive positions with third
world women” (Chu 21).
In the Asian American mother-daughter narrative, this dynamic manifests in another way,
with the immigrant mother serving as a cultural anchor seeking to hold her family to the mores
of the old country, or imposing on her American-born children a simplified vision of American
success, one that forecloses the possibilities of freedom and self-discovery they’ve come to see
as their birthright.
When I was a child, my mother asked me more than once if I would switch places with
her—a detail from my real life that I’ve reproduced in the fictional world of my novel. It was
frightening to me at the time. When I was small I wanted to give her what she wanted. She had
given birth to me and raised me in often difficult circumstances, and if she wanted my life I
might have felt I owed it to her. I might have given it to her if I could have, though I would not
26
have wanted hers in return—her constant bafflement, her quest to ingratiate herself with white-
lady neighbors who treated her with patronizing kindness at best and often with open contempt,
her marriage comprised of silence punctuated by occasional bursts of rage, her endless list of
anxieties, from the real and mundane to the existential and ineffable. Like many Korean women
of her generation, even before she turned forty, perhaps by the time she was thirty, she saw
herself as an ajumma, an old woman whose days of novelty and excitement were behind her. It
wasn’t my carefree childhood that she envied. My days were anything but carefree and she knew
it. She envied me my piano and tennis lessons, my long school days, my ever-increasing
knowledge and competence in fields she would never know about. Most of all she envied the
length of time that lay ahead of me, in which anything could happen.
Much later, when I was a grown woman if not yet quite an adult, she left my father and
moved alone to San Francisco, to live rent-free in a legally unrentable basement apartment in
exchange for taking out the building’s trash and sweeping the stairs and sending along the
tenants’ complaints and requests for repairs, along with other mundane tasks. I was already
living in the city at the time, having decided just as I finished law school that I would never be a
lawyer. I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I worked a string of temp jobs while
considering the virtues of an MFA in creative writing. All I knew was that I couldn’t remain on
the path to financial stability my parents had set me on.
Where this story diverges from the trope is in my mother’s reaction. Her long-standing
dream for me was dead. I wasn’t going to become a lawyer married to another lawyer, rich
enough to buy a house she could move into in her old age without being in the way. Instead I
was going to bum around the city for a while before leaving to pursue a degree in something
famously unconnected to any way of making a living. Instead of inducing rage and then despair
27
in my mother, this situation somehow gave her hope. What felt to me like aimlessness and
uncertainty looked to her like freedom, and she wanted some too. She left the house she’d shared
with my father, though she didn’t divorce him, and moved to the city where I lived. She still
worried incessantly about my financial future, but she also wanted to know where I bought my
clothes, and when I told her she went out and bought the same things for herself—in sparklier,
sequined and more jewel-encrusted versions whenever possible. After a lifetime of cooking only
Korean food, she wanted to learn how to shop for and prepare the salad-heavy California cuisine
I “cooked” for myself. She wanted to know whether I thought she should get a boyfriend. I
thought of how she’d asked me, twenty-plus years earlier, if I would switch places with her. It
wasn’t exactly my life that she wanted. She still thought I was making all the wrong choices—
but I had choices, and she wanted that for herself. She wanted to know what it was like to be
single, twenty-eight, and American—to be someone who could become anything.
I wrote a mother-daughter story because I wanted to write about a Korean immigrant
mother like mine—one who could be the protagonist of her own story and not just the antagonist
in mine. But in going back to that story I found I couldn’t avoid the brother-sister story I’d
started telling either. Though until recently I hadn’t spoken to my brother in many years, he
looms large in my memory.
Unless they write science fiction or fantasy or wild, absurdist satire, writers of color are
always accused of having “merely” fictionalized their own biographies. Critics and readers often
have such a hard time seeing an Asian American novel as a work of the imagination, rather than
an anthropological document, that I hesitate to admit the extent to which any of my characters
are drawn from real people. In the end I had to write about a brother like mine for the same
28
reason I had to write about a mother like mine: because I hadn’t seen anyone like him in Asian
American literature thus far.
My brother joined the police force because for years our father had laughed at every other
career plan he’d been able to imagine for himself. Our father didn’t want his children to have to
struggle the way he had. On the other hand, having built his own relative financial security on a
string of small businesses he’d willed into success by working round the clock, he saw
professional men—men who worked in offices and wore suits—as cosseted, effeminate,
ridiculous. When I went to law school my father was thrilled, but when—years earlier—my
brother did the same, he reacted with thinly veiled contempt.
My brother thought being a cop would get him respect, would bring him closer to the
masculine ideal—stoic, silent, in charge—that he’d seen in police procedurals and Steven Seagal
films. He didn’t have the critical tools he would have needed to see how Americans loved the
idea of the heroic cop but hated and pitied actual cops. When he started to figure it out, it ate at
him. In my novel, the narrator’s brother, Kevin, performs a “clean sweep” of his house and yard
every night, pointing a flashlight and a loaded gun into every corner before he can go to sleep.
Another detail drawn directly from my actual life, my actual family. Again, I saw in my own
family a kind of Asian American life that I hadn’t seen represented in the literature—in this case
an answer to the male novelists who envision the Asian immigrant woman as a locus of
unfreedom against which the male protagonist must rebel in order to claim his American-ness,
his manhood, his freedom. Here was my American-born brother, less free than any of us. He
couldn’t even imagine a choice that would be his. He lived his life in pursuit of a mirage—a
shifting ideal of masculinity whose arbiters were our father, who would never grant it to him
29
because the social advantages he himself had given him precluded it, and mainstream (white)
American culture, which would never grant it to him because he would never be white.
In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong recalls meeting a white man at a reading who tells
her proudly that he’s been taking a course on racial sensitivity. Among the things he’s learned so
far: that Asians are “next in line to be white.” In her 1996 article, “Racial Combat as comedy in
Gus Lee’s China Boy,” Christine So describes the condition of being Asian American as “an
eternal moment of potential assimilation” (146). We’ve been “next in line to be white” for a long
time, but we never seem to get there. I keep coming back to Hong’s question, “will there be a
future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity,
imploring you to believe that we are human beings who feel pain?” (49).
The trap works like this: As a novelist, I want to use fiction as a way to tell the truth
about my own experience. Because I am also an Asian American woman, my experience has
certain features in common with those of other Asian American women who have written before
me. Because I and everyone I know are also human individuals, distinct from all others, there are
also aspects of my experience that seem to fly in the face of what readers of all races have come
to regard as “The Asian American Experience.” But even if I write characters and events that
have no precedent in the whole history of Asian American literature, I will not have succeeded in
becoming “simply I, on the page.” Instead, at best, I will have expanded the range of things that
the dubious phrase “the Asian American experience” can mean. To be clear, this is not nothing.
There’s a reason so many people fight so hard for a greater accuracy and diversity of
representation of people who look like themselves in film, television, literature and art. But it
means that true assimilation—the white writer’s freedom to speak for his own irreducible self
first and for the whole of humanity second—will likely always elude us.
30
CHAPTER 2: The Bildungsroman: A Narrative of Assimilation

In Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America, Patricia
Chu argues that Asian American authors have used the European novel form the bildungsroman
as a way of claiming subjectivity for themselves and the Asian American community. She
focuses on the way that authors use the structure of the bildungsroman to resist or trouble the
cultural construction of Asian Americans as simultaneously always foreign and well assimilated
into American culture. In the coda, Chu writes: “When will Asian Americans write as
assimilated subjects, and when we do, what will it mean to write as an Asian American?” (189).
If and when Asian Americans write as assimilated subjects, how will it change what
Asian American literature does and how Asian American writers write? And in particular, will it
mean the end of the narrative of Asian American assimilation? Does an assimilated subject write
about assimilation? If this narrative does decline and disappear, is this a loss, or is it perhaps a
positive shift, since it leaves Asian American writers free to write about other aspects of their
experience?
Building on Chu’s consideration of the bildungsroman as a means of claiming
subjectivity for Asian American writers specifically, and more broadly for writers whose identity
excludes us from what has been considered the American mainstream, I will investigate the
literature of assimilation by first examining the transatlantic history of this European form,
particularly the tradition of the female bildungsroman established in the nineteenth century and
African American mixed-race narratives of passing at the end of the nineteenth century and
during the Harlem Renaissance. I will examine Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and
31
Nella Larsen’s Passing. I will transition into Asian American novels of subject formation,
beginning with the Eaton sisters when Asian American literature entered the canon in the early
1900s. Asian American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries necessarily
transforms the bildungsroman genre because the subject’s relation to the social order is so
different from that of the genre’s original European subjects, however subjects in all
bildungsroman narratives similarly focus on the assimilating subject—the individual who is not
yet absorbed into the national narrative, who is abjected by the culture in which she lives or who
abjects from herself her own history and background to better establish her own sense of
belonging. The bildungsroman constructs novels of subject formation, chronicling the individual
in the process of assimilation.
It may be the nature of modern literature to focus on characters who are unassimilated
outsiders. However, racialization gives rise to a wholly different kind of marginality than is
produced by the class differences that often form the thematic basis of bildungsromane by white
authors. White writers write often on the border of something much more privileged (for
example, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), from the point of view of an outsider of the
most central, elite circle. It’s different to be that kind of outsider than someone who is seen as an
outsider by everyone.
In Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe contests critical and
cultural representations of Asian Americans that emphasize a “vertical” model of identity—those
representations that discuss Asian American identity as primarily a result of cultural
transmissions between first- and second-generation immigrants. According to Lowe, this
characterization of Asian American identity leads to a false opposition between “nationalism”
and “assimilation,” which cannot account for the heterogeneity of the populations that make up
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“Asian America,” nor for the hybridity of the cultural practices that inform any and all versions
of Asian American identity. In Asian American Literature, Elaine Kim begins with early
immigrant writings from the late 1800s and ends with contemporary authors. Kim resists an easy
narrative of assimilation and progress or a simple model of either capitulation or resistance to
stereotypes. Instead, she argues that Asian American literature must be read within its historical,
social, and political contexts in order to be fully understood. In Asian/America: Historical
Crossings of a Racial Frontier, David Palumbo-Liu argues that “[t]he nature of Asian American
social subjectivity now vacillates between whiteness and color…Its function is always to trace a
racial minority’s possibilities for assimilation” (5). Like Viet Thanh Nguyen in Race and
Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America and Mark Chiang in The Cultural Capital
of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University, Palumbo-Liu is
concerned with the effects of the “model minority” discourse on Asian America. Since Asian
Americans are constructed as always on the brink of disappearing into white America—and a
large part of the community, it seems, is invested in that goal—what are the politics of
continuing to represent, maintain, and archive racial difference?
Christine So has argued that in place of traditional narratives of the subject’s successful
socialization, Asian Americans stage “an eternal moment of potential assimilation” (146). It’s
perhaps to be expected that this endless potentiality gives rise to certain forms of anxiety and
ambivalence. In my novel, the shape of Jane’s early life is in large part determined by her
parents’ choice to live and work not in Los Angeles’s Koreatown or one of California’s many
predominantly Asian enclaves, but in Napa, where nearly everyone she meets is white, where the
dominance of whiteness means that whiteness disappears, ceases to function as a marker of
identity, while Jane’s own racial difference is magnified.
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For Jane’s parents, American success meant escaping the confines of the ethnic enclave.
It meant escaping the city, with its racial and cultural and economic fault lines so visible, for the
distant, affluent suburbs, where everyone is so much the same that difference ceases to function
as the organizing principle of daily life. Of course, this only works for you if you too are the
same, which the Kims’ white neighbors rarely miss an opportunity to remind them they are not.
If the bildungsroman is, as Chu argues, a way of claiming subjectivity, then for Jane the
first task is to imagine a way out of the trap of American racialization that doesn’t involve
disappearing into whiteness.
***
Chu envisions the bildungsroman as a tool not only for the assimilation of national
subjects, but for the building of nations—it’s a form that “depicts and privileges certain subjects
as exemplary of the nation” (6) and has been accorded “a place of honor in literary curricula that
are, in turn, used to socialize pupils in approved American values” (11). Lisa Lowe, in
Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, argues that the bildungsroman is:
the primary form for narrating the development of the individual from youthful innocence
to civilized maturity, the telos of which is the reconciliation of the individual with the
social order. The novel of formation has a special status among the works selected for a
canon, for it elicits the reader’s identification with the bildung narrative of ethical
formation, itself a narrative of the individual’s relinquishing of particularity and
difference through identification with an idealized “national” form of subjectivity. (98)

The bildungsroman tells the story of a youth’s formation as she internalizes her society’s values.
The reconciliation between her individual self and the social stratum in which she lives is
achieved upon her learning and accepting the societal value system. The genre’s central theme is
the process of socialization that relies on the historical specificity of the social realities and
cultural values depicted in the narrative. Chu writes that the traditional bildungsroman socializes
readers by inviting them to identify with protagonists as they strive to “become good citizens of
34
their nation,” a task that requires them to relinquish their “particularity and difference” (12). Chu
argues that the Asian American bildungsroman focuses on Asian Americans as assimilating
subjects, and it is a contested site for authors seeking both to “establish their own and their
characters’ Americanness and to create a narrative tradition that depicts and validates the Asian
American experience on its own terms” (12).
Asian American literature does not enter the canon until the early 1900s with the Eaton
sisters, Edith Maude Eaton and Winnifred Eaton, publishing under the pseudonyms Sui Sin Far
and Onoto Watanna, respectively. While the genre is necessarily transformed in Asian American
literature because the subject’s relation to the social order is so different from that of the genre’s
original European subjects, I argue that subjects in the bildungsroman of the long nineteenth
century (from 1789 to 1914) similarly focus on the assimilating subject—the individual who is
not yet absorbed into the national narrative, who is abjected by the culture in which she lives or
abjects her own history and background to better establish a sense of belonging. The
bildungsroman constructs novels of subject formation, chronicling the individual in the process
of assimilation—the important difference in Asian American literature is that the process of
assimilation is always in progress, never complete.
The tradition of the female bildungsroman established in the nineteenth century is
grounded in defining women’s development in terms of romantic success or failure. The
courtship plot (or romance plot) uses marriage-centered plot conventions of the English domestic
novel or novel of education (Chu 131). This tradition is firmly established in Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The protagonists, Elizabeth Bennett and Jane
Eyre, are outsiders living on the margins of upper-class societies. The plot of both novels
involves the assimilation of their outsider status into the social class that they strive to be part of,
35
which illustrates the English genre’s elitism. Chu argues that Elizabeth and Jane’s moral and
social development is represented in terms of their negotiations with various romantic
possibilities (131). In Jane Eyre, Jane and Rochester prove the trueness of their love when each
declines to marry alternative partners who match their own social class. For heroines, romantic
success equates to marriage to a worthy man of integrity and higher social class, which also
conveniently resolves other issues—in Jane’s case, her marriage resolves the issue of her
vocation because she will devote her life to caring for Rochester, who has become physically
disabled.
As described by Chu, the archetypical English heroine is:
a gentleman’s daughter who is economically impoverished but whose innate virtue,
refinement, intelligence, articulateness, and independent spirit mark her as both a lady
and a worthy heroine, a character we can like and take seriously. After a series of
mishaps, her intrinsic but undervalued merits are recognized by a worthy and well-
positioned suitor. Eventually he offers her a socially advantageous match, which proves
what we have always known, that despite outward reverses she is inwardly a lady, a
person whose moral and mental refinement is intrinsic and unchangeable. (132)

Both Elizabeth Bennett and Jane Eyre fit this paradigm. Elizabeth Bennett’s mother is uncouth
but her father is a gentleman. The family fortune is middle-class with a modest but respectable
living arrangement. Since Mr. and Mrs. Bennett have produced five daughters and no sons, the
inheritance will entail to a distant male cousin. This means that the daughters must marry well in
order to save the family name and welfare. Mr. Darcy becomes infatuated with the beautiful and
outspoken Elizabeth, which he confesses while making the mistake of insulting her social status,
asserting that she is beneath him and that her common family would bring shame to his own.
Although Elizabeth has feelings for Mr. Darcy and knows that their union would solve her
family’s problems, she initially refuses his offer and only accepts when he admits his moral
failings and submits to Elizabeth’s judgment. Jane Eyre’s story, while very different from
36
Elizabeth Bennett’s, has a strikingly similar romance plot. Jane is an orphan, born to an aristocrat
father. Upon her father’s death, she is passed on to her aunt who cheats her out of her
inheritance. The aunt sends her to live at an orphanage, where she spends her childhood before
she acquires a job as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with the master of the
house, Mr. Rochester. It turns out that Jane has a wealthy uncle who she never knew about, and
she is poised to inherit his large fortune since he has no heirs. Her fortune conveniently matches
Rochester’s own, but Jane, ruled by a moral compass, decides to divide her fortune equally
between herself and three cousins whom she has just met. In both novels, the female protagonist
represents virtue, refinement, and integrity—it is clear that her social position doesn’t match her
intrinsic value. But it isn’t long before a man of standing recognizes her true value.
The heroine strives to assimilate into the dominant culture and tries to affirm her place in
it. Chu argues that well-positioned marriage rewards her with “privileged class status for having
a sensibility that in these novels she could only have if she already belonged to a privileged
class” (133). For example, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett has an exceptional
understanding of fine moral and social distinctions, though her experience of the world is
limited. Her knowledge has come mostly from reading literature, a symbol of education and
leisure. These Cinderella stories imply that upward mobility through marriage is possible only
for the woman who is already a true lady. She must have intrinsic merit (middle-class birth, at
minimum) in order to become a heroine, to assimilate into the higher social class. For Elizabeth
Bennett and Jane Eyre, the external achievement of arriving into the upper class arises from their
essence. In English romance plots, the protagonist’s dream of becoming a refined woman is
realized through essentialist schema, and her assimilation into high society is achieved through
having been born into a certain degree of privilege, as well as possessing intrinsic superiority.
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The English bildungsroman of the heroine problematizes female attempts to imagine
autonomous striving and heroism in female terms. However, in the nineteenth century, courtship
and marriage was likely hard work—legitimate “work” for a fictional heroine, for whom
romance would be a primary vocation, while marriage would subsume and represent all the other
work she might hope to accomplish.
Assimilation narratives are also prevalent in bildungsromane at the end of the long
nineteenth century with the introduction of African American mixed-race narratives of passing.
These stories illustrate some of the possibilities for African American lives during the Jim Crow
era and the consequence of the enduring legacy of slavery. In James Weldon Johnson’s The
Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Nella Larsen’s Passing, the main characters can pass
as white, but must make a conscious choice to hide their black ancestry to conform to the
dominant culture. These novels depict the inner conflict of African American mixed-race lives:
the impossible task of choosing one’s race, which, during a time of lawful segregation and state-
imposed discrimination, determines the way one is perceived and treated by people of both races.
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, published anonymously in 1912, is the first
first-person novel written by a person of African descent, according to the historical literary
record. The novel chronicles the life of an unnamed light-skinned bi-racial man who discovers
that he is black in grade school when his teacher cruelly makes him and his classmates aware of
the fact. This is when he realizes that his mother is black, which means that he is as well, and
once he recovers from this revelation his one ambition in life becomes to bring integrity and
distinction to his race:
I felt leap within me pride that I was coloured; and I began to form wild dreams of
bringing glory and honour to the Negro race. For days I could talk of nothing else with
my mother except my ambitions to be a great man, a great coloured man, to reflect credit
38
on the race and gain fame for myself. It was not until years after that I formulated a
definite and feasible plan for realizing my dreams. (46)

The narrator leaves his hometown in Connecticut for Georgia, his birthplace, to study at Atlanta
University, an all-black school. His savings are stolen before he’s able to enroll and he finds
himself living in Jacksonville making cigars, before moving to New York where he settles into a
bohemian lifestyle playing ragtime music. He befriends a wealthy white man who takes him as
his private musician on travels through Europe. Up until this point, the narrator had been
crisscrossing the color line, identifying as black when he worked and socialized with the black
community, passing for white in the presence of white company. In Europe, he is deeply moved
by a ragtime musician, and decides to return to the South to educate and immerse himself in
black culture and to compose music informed by a black aesthetic. But when he returns to
Georgia, he witnesses the lynching of a black man, the turning point at which he decides to
return to the North where he will live the remainder of his life passing as a white man:
A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race
that could be so dealt with…I understood that it was not discouragement or fear or search
for a larger field of action and opportunity that was driving me out of the Negro race. I
knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that
could with impunity be treated worse than animals. For certainly the law would restrain
and punish the malicious burning alive of animals. (187-91)

The narrator returns to New York and becomes a real estate investor, marries a white woman
with whom he has children, and enjoys a comfortable middle-class life as a white man. At the
novel’s end, he expresses remorse for choosing ordinary success as a white man, instead of a
man of principle “making history and a race” (211). The ex-colored man’s decision to become
white was not based on ambition for money and success; flight from shame and horrific
persecution is what drove him out of the black race. In the late nineteenth century, he had two
options: be treated worse than an animal or disappear into whiteness.
39
Many of the themes in Ex-Coloured Man, published at the end of the long nineteenth
century, carry over into the climate at the beginning of the twentieth, at the height of the Harlem
Renaissance. Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, published in 1929, is a criticism of the black
bourgeoisie, an insular community of 1920s black America. Clare Kendry, a light-skinned bi-
racial black woman, experiences both racial and sexual oppression when she conceals her racial
identity and her past is discovered by her bigoted white husband. The novel focuses on the life-
long friendship between Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, both bi-racial women, who in
different ways experience the disintegration of marriage and the harmful effects of patriarchy.
Clare chooses to live as a white woman while Irene chooses to live as a black woman. When
they reconnect as adults, their worlds collide in disastrous ways. Clare’s choice to become white
requires that she always carefully conceal her past. When she introduces into her new life a
friend from her past who identifies as black, her chosen identity cannot be reconciled with her
past history.
Both Ex-Coloured Man and Passing work against stereotypes that are said to be shared
by an entire ethnic group, and attempt to render in fiction the sensibility and consciousness of
black characters as possessing individual and distinct identities. These novels illustrate the
socially constructed nature of racial identity, a revolutionary idea in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Novels of passing are necessarily an indictment of American life. People are
driven to conceal their racial background because of American racism and the need for survival.
Those who choose to assimilate into white culture are driven either by the desire for upward
mobility or flight from shame and persecution.
In both Ex-Coloured Man and Passing, there exists an essentialism similar to that found
in the English romance novels Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre in which one’s intrinsic merit
40
as a “true lady” is rewarded with a well-positioned marriage and privileged class status. In Ex-
Coloured Man and Passing, the main characters cannot assimilate unless they already have
privilege—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this often meant light-skinned
privilege and middle-class privilege. Of course, today, the privileged space contains possibilities
for more people who lack the aforementioned types of privilege but possess others. The ex-
colored man had a comfortable upbringing in Connecticut; his mother was a seamstress and his
white father sent monthly checks and bought him a piano. Both Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield
grew up in the black bourgeoisie, a narrow sliver of 1920s black America, and while Irene
chooses to remain in the black middle-class world that is her history and culture, Clare chooses
to break ties from her past so that she can live in the world of the white upper middle-class.
Based on this cross-section of bildungsromane, assimilation into the dominant culture seems
only to be possible for those who already have privilege.
While Asian Americans in literary fiction are not yet writing as assimilated subjects, the
romance plots and novels of passing that I explore above similarly do not focus on the lives of
people who are already assimilated, but rather on those in the process of assimilation. They
preserve, as if in amber, something like Christine So’s “eternal moment of potential
assimilation.” There are, however, important differences among these narratives. In the case of
the ex-colored man, as well as that of Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, assimilation comes with
a price—sorrow, regret, the disintegration of one’s psyche and spirit. In the case of Elizabeth
Bennett and Jane Eyre, upward mobility brings only reward and gain. Indeed, the crossing of
social borders in these novels is envisioned in almost diametrically opposed terms, so that in the
American novel of racial “passing,” assimilation into white society requires the erasure or
negation of what might be seen as one’s “true” self—one’s actual history, one’s actual culture,
41
one’s actual family—whereas in the British marriage plot the heroine’s “true,” aristocratic self,
having long been hidden by unfortunate circumstance, is allowed to come into the light.
Assimilation may only be possible for those with certain kinds of privilege, which depends on
the particular social world in which we live, but it should also be stressed that assimilation is not
desirable for everyone. Particularly in contemporary America, membership in marginalized,
racialized groups has been a source of critical, subversive power as well as of oppression.
The two categories of bildungsromane—novels of formation—discussed above represent
two radically opposed answers to the question of what subject formation means and how it
works. Taken together, they strongly suggest that upward mobility has different rules and
different consequences depending on the identity and social circumstances of the upwardly
mobile person. Still, all these nineteenth and early-twentieth-century novels take it as a given that
upward mobility—rewarded or punished—is the proper subject of the bildungsroman, that
coming into adult power and agency is synonymous with coming into closer alignment with the
dominant culture. In Assimilating Asians, Chu places Asian American literature both within this
tradition and in covert opposition to it:
Because culture—specifically the buildungsroman—is a site for imaginatively
transforming readers and protagonists into national subjects by erasing or
containing their particular differences, Asian American literature reinscribes those
differences in an alternative version of the genre, one in which authorship
signifies not only the capacity to speak but the belief that speech—or literary
representation—is also a claiming of political and social agency. (3)

Erasure of particularity and difference has long been fundamental to the project of assimilation,
even in its more politically engaged, critical forms. The immigrant finds that in order to move
freely in America, she must put aside her bad memories along with old allegiances and enmities.
The American dream is to transcend history. In my novel, Jane’s parents move from San
Francisco to Napa in the 1970s hoping to escape the limits American racialization had placed on
42
their lives, to disappear, in a sense, into whiteness. But even in taking the opposite approach—
adopting Asian American identity as a source of community, solidarity, and political strength—
one makes compromises. One accepts the incurious gaze of the American mainstream, its
insistence on substituting a single category for a vast array of national identities, languages, and
histories, including histories of colonization and conflict. As a writer, it also means that I’m
assumed to be speaking on behalf of people whose lives may have very little to do with mine.
Assimilating Asians was published in the first year of this century. Twenty years later, we
might ask whether claiming “the capacity to speak” is enough. I keep thinking of Cathy Park
Hong’s declaration in Minor Feelings: “I couldn’t write traditional realist narrative fiction
because I didn’t care to injection-mold my thoughts into an anthropological experience where the
reader, after reading my novel, would think, The life of Koreans is so heartbreaking!” (46).
The limitations of Chu’s formulation—speech, or representation, equals agency—become
clear when claiming the capacity to speak means speaking in the modes of the dominant
discourse. For Hong, the pressure to speak in a certain way, to tell a certain kind of story, was so
strong that she felt her only recourse was to avoid “realist narrative fiction” altogether. In
Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe traces the long-standing alliance between realist narrative fiction and
the dominant realist mode in historiography—in which teleologies of progress and development
(similar to the individual progress and development central to the bildungsroman tradition) are
used to legitimate the colonialist and imperialist projects of the nations that sponsor those
histories. Lowe surveys recent Asian American literature in search of narratives that resist this
paradigm. In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Lowe finds a non-linear, non-teleological vision
of history “not as a continuous narrative of progress, maturity, and increasing rationality…but as
a surplus of materiality that exceeds textualization, that renders inoperable the vocabularies and
43
grammars of nineteenth-century, post-Enlightenment narrative…” (111). She notes the use of
gossip, in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, as a mode of communal storytelling that “interrupts
and displaces official representational regimes” (113). In Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, she considers
Chinatown space as “a repository of layers of historical time, layers of functions, purposes, and
spheres of activity,” and thus a disruption of the linear, development-oriented understanding of
time and history characteristic of the modern, capitalist city (123).
Immigrant Acts was published in 1996. The years since—and especially the last decade—
have witnessed a rapid expansion and diversification of the Asian American literary canon. To
Lowe’s list of narratives in opposition to the capitalist/imperialist teleology of the traditional
bildungsroman we might add Meng Jin’s 2020 novel Little Gods, which tells the transnational
story of the fictional Chinese physicist Su Lan from the shifting, often conflicting perspectives of
her husband, her daughter, and the elderly neighbor who helped her to raise her daughter in her
husband’s absence, highlighting the contingent nature of both self and history. We might add
R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries, originally published in 2018, in which a young Korean American
woman’s apparent development into a liberal arts educated member of the creative class is
derailed by grief and guilt and the lure of religious certitude, in which—after she participates in
the bombing of a series of abortion clinics and then disappears—the only one left to piece
together the story of what happened to her is a man whose romantic obsession with her renders
him a profoundly unreliable narrator. We might include Ocean Vuong’s 2019 On Earth We’re
Briefly Gorgeous, in which the trauma of war and displacement produces mental, emotional, and
linguistic ruptures that render the straightforward, teleological narration of this history
impossible.
44
The above list could of course go on for pages. Perhaps the relevant question for us is
what this diversity of form and content means vis-à-vis Chu’s question: “When will Asian
Americans write as assimilated subjects, and when we do, what will it mean to write as an Asian
American?” Or Hong’s: “When will I, on the page simply be I, on the page…?” The problem
with the novel as a way of claiming the right or capacity to speak is that, too often, it leaves us
speaking in the voice of our oppressors, fitting our lives and histories into narrative structures
that merely reinscribe a capitalist and colonialist ideology, in which racial, cultural, historical
pain is both the proof of our humanity and the ground we must transcend in order to become
American.
Translate the phrase “assimilated subject” from academic jargon into plain English and
you’re likely to get something like “simply I, on the page.” And yet to be simply I, to escape the
burden of speaking “for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe that we are human and feel
pain,” cannot mean subtracting ethnic identity and ethnic pain from the narrative. Speaking for
myself, an I not informed by the generations-old trauma of war and colonization and dislocation
that my immigrant parents brought with them to California, or by the daily absurdities and
confusions of growing up Asian in a mostly-white American town, would no longer be I. What
we need is a literature in which collective pain and collective memory manifest in individual
lives in all their irreducible particularity, a sense of history that makes room for “what will not be
ordered, what does not coagulate and cohere” (Lowe, 111). We need to claim not only the right
to speak but the right to remain as illegible as the self in the context of a fractured history often
is. To invent, for the problem of the illegible self, a new way of speaking—or to reclaim old
ways—and to require the listener to learn what for her will be a new way of listening.

45
CHAPTER 3: Han

Part I: Korean American Han
In her essay, “Home is Where the Han Is: A Korean Perspective on the Los Angeles
Upheavals,” Elaine Kim writes about the 1992 L.A. riots, which took place following the
acquittal of police officers on trial regarding the videotaped and widely-covered Rodney King
beating. The riots started in South Central Los Angeles and, over a six-day period, spread out
into other neighborhoods including Koreatown, an area which the police force abandoned,
leaving Korean Americans to defend themselves. About half the $770 million in estimated
material losses incurred during the riots was sustained by the Korean American community.
Though the community suffered profound damage to their means of livelihood, Elaine Kim
focuses on the psychic damage, and asks whether and how it may be possible for Korean
Americans “to ‘become American’ without dying of han” (1). Han is, to use Kim’s translation,
“the sorrow and anger that grow from repeated experiences of oppression” (1). Describing the
horror she felt as she watched the destruction of Koreatown after the Rodney King verdict, Kim
expresses her fear that for Korean Americans, there would be no belonging, that we were “a
people destined to carry our han around with us wherever we went in the world,” that “the
destiny that had spelled centuries of extreme suffering from invasion, colonization, war, and
national division had smuggled itself into the U.S. with our baggage” (2).
The novelist Jay Caspian Kang writes in the New York Times about the 2012 school
shooting at Oikos University in Oakland, California by a former Korean immigrant nursing
student, One Goh. Connecting the Oikos shooting to the Virginia Tech shooting five years earlier
by another Korean American man, Seung-Hui Cho, Kang writes about the events welding the
46
Korean community together, immediately and forcefully, the way that collective trauma brings a
society together, memory taking on a cultural and political significance. Kang also writes about
feeling implicated, as a young Korean man in America, in the actions of these two Korean
American men, and the way in which the Korean American community refused to talk about the
mass murders. One person who was willing to speak to Kang about the school shootings was
Winston Chung, a 38-year old Korean American Bay Area child psychiatrist. Chung’s interest in
One Goh and Seung-Hui Cho came from a lifelong, personal investigation into han and
hwabyung. Kang describes both han and hwabyung as “a state of hopeless, crippling sadness
combined with anger at an unjust world.” Kang continues:
[B]oth suggest entrapment by suppressed emotions. Both words have been a part of the
Korean lexicon for as long as anyone can remember, their roots in the country’s history
of occupation, war and poverty. Perhaps the best way to distinguish between the two
words would be to say that han is the existential condition of immutable sadness, whereas
hwabyung is its physical manifestation. Those afflicted with hwabyung describe a dense
helplessness and despair that always feels on the verge of erupting into acts of self-
destruction. (Kang)

Certainly, Koreans and Korean Americans are not alone in having undergone repeated
experiences of oppression, or in feeling angry in the face of an unjust world. Yet, many Koreans
and Korean Americans believe that han has a specific Korean character, distinct from other ways
of experiencing sorrow, anger, and apparent powerlessness. I do not have evidence to prove that
han is specifically Korean, but I believe the answer may lie in part in Korea’s own particular
history, and in the repressed, unspoken, or otherwise unresolved traumas that haunt the Korean
landscape and the Korean imagination.
Elaine Kim draws a connection between the “destiny” of Korean Americans and the
invisibility of Korean history in America:
Those of us who chafe at being asked whether we are Chinese or Japanese as if there
were no other possibilities or who were angered when news media sought Chinese and
47
Japanese but not Korean American views during sa-i-ku are sensitive to an invisibility
that seems particular to us. To many Americans, Korea is but the gateway to or the bridge
between China and Japan, or a crossroads of major Asian conflicts.
It can certainly be said that although little known or cared about in the Western
world, Korea has been a perennial battleground. (3-4)

If that troubled history has indeed “smuggled itself into the U.S. with our baggage,” it is,
paradoxically, not because Korean Americans have remembered their history but because the
U.S. has forgotten it—or not known it, or not allowed the conditions to exist in which it can be
remembered.
“Not seeing,” as Cho reminds us, “is not done innocently.” National histories and
histories of war and conquest are made visible or invisible—memorialized or forgotten—for
political purposes, whether or not those purposes are known by those who determine what is seen
and what is not. In How Modernity Forgets, Paul Connerton draws an important distinction
between the memorial—as a carrier of social memory—and what he calls the locus, particularly
the city street:
If giving monumental shape to what we remember is to discard the obligation to
remember, that is because memorials permit only some things to be remembered and, by
exclusion, cause others to be forgotten. (29)

The memorial is made deliberately to induce memory; at its origin is a fear of forgetting, coupled
with a fear of remembering—of remembering too much, or remembering the wrong things. Like
the apparatuses of observation Cho speaks of, the memorial sees only what is within the scope of
its seeing, and not only misses other things but causes those things to disappear from memory.
Connerton uses as an example a war memorial depicting a brave soldier on a charging horse,
which ignores or elides the horror of violent death. In contrast to this official memory is the city
street as a locus of memory:
As I know my way around the limbs of my body, as a pianist knows her way around her
piano, as I know my way around my own house, so I know my way around the paths,
48
landmarks and districts of my city. For me no longer to know my way around the limbs
of my own body, perhaps through amputation, or for a pianist no longer to know her way
around her piano, perhaps because of failing eyesight, is tearfully distressing, an aching
catastrophe: as it would be to no longer know my way around my own house, or no
longer to know my way round the paths and landmarks and districts of my city. (32)

The streets of our cities and towns become intrinsic to our experience of ourselves in a way that
is politically charged, and as much social as it is intensely personal. It is in streets and buildings,
Connerton argues, that our memories and our identities, both as individuals and as peoples, are
encoded—and quite separately from any official intention.
In his New York Times article, Jay Caspian Kang writes, “It’s easy to find the Koreans in
major American cities. They’re the ones who don’t print their shop and restaurant signs in
English, so if you’re driving along and see a cluster of signs in the blocky Hangul alphabet,
you’ve found Koreatown. In the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, one of the many
criticisms of the Korean American community was directed at the implicit hostility in posting
signs that can’t be read by others.” What was legible to Korean Americans as a locus of
memory—a place deeply encoded with the history and identity of Koreans in America, with both
private and public histories—was illegible to nearly everyone outside this community. Or legible
only in terms of difference. Seen in this way, it’s possible to imagine LAPD’s turning a blind eye
to the looting and destruction in Koreatown in ’92 as an almost literal blindness—an inability to
see.
Connerton locates a central cause of modernity’s amnesia in the need of capitalism to
hide the labor process that produces its commodities:
This opacity of the labour process has of course been referred to customarily as
reification. Reification is a form of fetishism: fetishism being the transformation of
human capacities into the apparent attributes of ‘things’: technological inventions, laws,
rhetorical conventions, which now appear ‘natural’ and therefore ‘binding’, their
meanings as the precipitates of human creative capacities being no longer properly
understood. (43)
49

And of course it is not only ‘things’ that are fetishized, but people as well. When Korean
Americans are described as a “model minority,” for example, the complicated and often violent
history that brought Koreans to America, and the fraught history of Koreans in America, is
obscured. In Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, in her
chapter titled “The Fantasy of Honorary Whiteness,” Grace Cho claims that the fantasy depends
on a series of erasures of the yanggongju (camptown prostitute or “yankee whore”—a term for
the Korean sex workers whose clients are American GIs) from both the geopolitical narrative of
friendly U.S.-Korea relations and the micropolitical fictions of family life (130). She argues
against the idea set forth by Nancy Foner, Richard Alba, and other scholars that Asians are
successfully assimilated and honorary whites. Denial of grief is the condition for a sociological
narrative about Koreans as honorary whites. Cho writes:
[T]he yanggongju comes to haunt the fantasy of honorary whiteness. She is ghosted by
her own past covered up, as well as by all those yanggongjus left behind and those who
have escaped the camptowns through death. The secret she harbors about herself and
about the historical traumas she embodies is transmitted unconsciously across the
diaspora. Even those deemed to have “made it” in America are still haunted by some
lingering fear from another’s past. (150)

The transgenerational traumas that the yanggongju transmits to her children, coupled with the
new traumas induced by assimilation itself, tarnish honorary whiteness (159).
Equally obscured are the circumstances under which the “model minority” myth was
produced in the first place, and the forms of power it has enabled—to point to one minority
group as emblematic of American immigrant success is, to state the obvious, to reify the
‘failures’ of other minorities. In this way the histories that produced the impoverished African
American and Latinx neighborhoods of East Los Angeles circa 1992 are obscured as well, and
success and failure become attributes intrinsic to one minority group or another. Koreatown
50
found itself, in 1992, in an untenable position—having been made into a symbol tacitly
confirming American racial hierarchy as a naturally occurring phenomenon. Kim writes:
They [Korean immigrants] did not realize that as immigrants of color they would never
attain political voice or visibility, but would instead be used to uphold the inequality and
the racial hierarchy they had no part in creating. (4)

Cho, too, discusses the ways in which American narratives about Korean Americans have
caused aspects of Korean American histories to disappear or to be forgotten:
During the early 1950s, for example, the United States created a media image of itself as
a kind protector to Korea while erasing evidence that the American military routinely
killed civilians. Further bolstering the notion of American generosity and friendly U.S.-
Korea relations was the picture of the happy interracial couple—the Korean war bride
and her American GI husband—newly inserted into the narrative of the normative (white)
American family.
. . . The war bride, as the pioneer of Korean migration to the United States, then
operates as a figure for the disappearance of geopolitical violence into the realm of the
domestic. And what better place to bury a social trauma than in the closely guarded space
of the family? (13-14)

The newly accepted narrative creates disappearances, obscuring both the history it replaces and
the methods and circumstances of its own production. The experiences this process casts into the
realm of the unspeakable remain as haunting memories, all the more powerfully present for
having been ‘forgotten.’ The ghosts that haunt us do so not because they have been remembered,
but because they have been made to disappear from memory.
It is the cumulative, transgenerational, inarticulate pain that constitutes han. When
Korean Americans—including Kang—talk about han, they often describe it as an unfortunate
consequence of particularly Korean personality traits—stoicism, repression, parental coldness.
But I’m beginning to think that this, too, is reification—however much these myths may have
their origin in the real values of Korean immigrants, they serve to obscure the real source of
Korean American grief and rage: the process of social forgetting that causes traumatic histories
to disappear into the narrative of American assimilation.
51
Years ago, I gave a talk about han in Seoul, at a conference for overseas doctoral students
organized by the Korea Foundation. After my talk, several Korean scholars expressed incredulity
that I would even study a topic so passé. “No one talks about han anymore,” they said. The
implication was that the topic was no longer relevant because the feeling itself had ceased to
exist. In Korea, maybe it has. A lot has happened in South Korea in the half-century since my
parents left, and the wealthy, liberal democracy that exists there now may no longer feel so
palpably haunted by the ghosts of the twentieth century.
Nonetheless, I can’t shake the feeling that the phenomenon of han explains something
about my Korean American life in California—about my parents and the way their experiences
have ramified in the lives of their children, about my brother and about myself—that I wouldn’t
otherwise have a name for. It may have something to do with the fact that—to varying degrees—
the generation of Koreans who emigrated in the late sixties and seventies missed those fifty years
of democratization and prosperity, that the Korea they remember is still the Korea of 1970, when
the country had barely begun to emerge from decades of colonization and war. But I think it also
has to do with the experience of living in America—fitting our lives and our histories into a pre-
existing framework in which all specific horrors and injustices are homogenized as the vaguely
defined “adversity” over which one has triumphed by becoming American. This kind of enforced
forgetting is the primary condition of American assimilation. Assimilation means forgetting
whatever traumatic memories cannot be subsumed into the national narrative of progress and
opportunity. It means accepting the flattening gaze of the American mainstream—which in its
zeal for broad categories often conflates the victims of atrocities with their perpetrators. In its
literary form—of which the Asian American bildungsroman stands as a primary example—it
52
means fitting our stories into a narrative frame in which personal progress and national progress
are one and the same, and in which the ultimate source of all personal progress is America itself.

53
Part II: “We are Korean!”
In 1989, a sushi restaurant opened in my hometown of Napa, California. I was twelve
years old. The restaurant was in a strip mall, and the name of the restaurant was Sushi, which
was painted clearly on a sign in large block letters: S U S H I. My father was excited because he
loved sushi. Aside from Korean food, sushi was his favorite food. Before Sushi opened, there
was only one other Asian restaurant in town, a Chinese restaurant called Jade Garden, which my
father didn’t like because he felt that the menu catered to white people and, indeed, when you
entered the restaurant, the tables beneath the giant crystal chandelier were inhabited almost
exclusively by white couples and white families. Every time we went to Sushi we were the only
Asian patrons, but most of the time the restaurant was nearly empty anyway. In 1989, the
culinary arts and high-end cuisine that Napa was becoming known for was located further out
from the main town, and certainly didn’t yet incorporate Asian influence. The types of people
who might have caught on to eating sushi, riding the eighties wave of the new food trend, lived
in places like San Francisco and New York and Los Angeles, not in small towns like Napa, and
they certainly wouldn’t think that a restaurant named Sushi located in a suburban strip mall was
the place to get it.
My family’s first time at Sushi, two Japanese men greeted us: “Irasshaimase!”
The men were excited to see us. They were tall and friendly, their smiling faces lined and
familiar feeling. They wore little white half-aprons and indigo-dyed bandanas tied across their
foreheads. In Japanese, they asked us if we were Japanese.
My parents could understand and speak an elementary level of Japanese, but my father
snapped, in English, “No! We’re Korean!”
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They seated us quickly. Once we were settled at a table, one of the men addressed my
father, speaking politely. “Where do you live? We’re business partners. We own this place. We
have families too. We live in Oakland.”
“Psshh,” my father said. “Oakland. Ha! We live here, in Napa. We’re Korean, not
Japanese.”
It went like this every week for two months. My father snapping at the Japanese men, the
Japanese men ingratiating themselves to my father. With each visit the tension grew. The two
men were the only employees of Sushi. They were the hosts, waiters, and bussers. They prepared
and served the food. After a while, my parents stopped allowing me to order anything because I
barely ate the food on my plate. I didn’t eat raw fish and generally didn’t enjoy Japanese cuisine.
I’d usually order a Teriyaki rice bowl and only eat the rice. I drank everyone’s miso soup. I had
never been allowed to order tempura because it was an appetizer, which we weren’t allowed, and
for some reason my parents had this idea that tempura was only for babies and the elderly. One
of the Japanese men noticed that I was no longer ordering an entrée and asked my parents why.
“Why should she get her own dish? She’s not an adult,” my mother said. “Our son can
order. He’s older and he’s a boy. He has an appetite. We let him choose what he wants. But she’s
just a girl!” my mother said, her plastic chopsticks raised. “She’s only twelve and she doesn’t
even like sushi. Sushi’s expensive. She never finishes anything. Our daughter can just eat off our
plates.”
“You can’t treat her like that, just because she’s a girl!” the man said, eyes wide. He had
taken a step back and was standing completely still. You could’ve put a glass of water on his
head. “Your daughter should have something too!”
“You can’t tell us what to do!” my father shouted. “We said NO!”
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When the waiter brought my parents’ and my brother’s orders, he also brought a large
cone-shaped hand roll that he had noticed me admiring another patron eating at a nearby table.
He leaned over, a big smile on his face, gently pushed the dish toward me.
When my father saw what was happening, his mouth opened but at first there were no
words. I reached for the plate. Before my hands could touch it, my father found his voice.
“She can’t have that!” he shouted. “I said NO!”
The man straightened, lifting the plate up out of my reach.
“You don’t have to pay for it,” he said to my father. “It’s on the house. I can tell that she
wants to try it. Just let me give it to her. It’s not fair that she doesn’t get anything.”
“She’s my daughter. She’s one of us. She doesn’t belong to you. If I say no, then it’s no.
You Japanese are animals. You do horrible things to people. You pretend like you’re nice, like
you’re respectable people, like you have class, but you’re not, you’re animals!”
My father’s voice had begun low and measured, his mouth small and tight, but by the
time he had finished he was shouting, as if there was a piece inside of him that had been knocked
loose.
The man shouted back, but he didn’t look angry as my father did.
“We’re all the same here!” he said, holding the plate tightly to his chest.
My mother tried to calm my father down. She just wanted to eat her sushi. But it was too
late. There was no going back. My father continued, spiraling and shouting, about how the
Japanese can’t be trusted, how they’re two-faced savages. I don’t know who got up first. My
father or my mother, but suddenly we were rushing toward the front door, and when I looked
back I saw that one of them had thrown cash onto the table, across the plates of untouched food.
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My father stopped at the entrance and turned around. He was standing there holding the door
open.
“We are Korean!” my father shouted into the restaurant. “We are Korean!” he repeated.
To be sure that they knew this was our final exit: “We’re never coming back again!”
After the incident at Sushi, I realized that my father had hated Japanese people for as long
as I could remember. If the topic of Japan or people from Japan ever came up, he would go into a
brief but explosive tirade about the bad people of Japan, with no explanation of why or how they
were bad, just that they were, and that I shouldn’t trust them—even Japanese Americans who
didn’t speak Japanese or had never even been to Japan. They’re “pure evil,” he told me.
Whenever these conversations came up, my mother argued with him that he shouldn’t say
such things to his children, that all of that is in the past, and that in America—Japanese,
Koreans—we’re the same, that we’re all Asian.
But my father disagreed: “We’re not the same,” he said.
Unsurprisingly, he wouldn’t buy anything that was Japanese made, which in the eighties
wasn’t exactly easy to do with my father’s interest in owning electronics and cars, which Japan
excelled at designing and manufacturing. Sony, Canon, Casio, Nikon, Yamaha, Toshiba, Honda,
Toyota, Mazda, Subaru, the list goes on. Samsung was good, he said, and the company got extra
points because it was Korean. Despite his hating on Japanese cars, he never bought a Korean
one. “Too cheap,” he said. He had worked hard for his money and he wanted to show off what he
could afford. European luxury cars, especially German. Never thought twice about the
Holocaust.
Before I moved away for college, we watched a special on Japanese internment on PBS. I
hadn’t learned about it in my history classes. My father shook his head as we watched.
57
“Americans,” he said. “They’re terrible.” But I wasn’t sure if his reprobation extended to
empathy and understanding towards the Japanese.
My father’s hatred baffled me. As a child of Korean immigrants growing up in an insular
town where the sight of any people of color, much less another Asian, was a rarity, I felt an
unnameable bond toward other people of color, and even if sometimes the feeling was not
reciprocated—even then, the bond was still there and somehow the other person’s denial of it
only proved how close we were—there was nothing I could do. I don’t know whether this sense
of connection I had, and still have, is something I was born with or something I learned, a kind of
survival. I didn’t understand why my father loathed people who looked so similar to us in the
ways that we looked different, yet he insisted that we had nothing in common, that we were
worlds different.
“Japanese are bad people,” he said. “We’re Korean. We’re different from them. We’re
better.” He continued, describing the particular characteristics of Japanese men and women, all
of it disparaging, all incendiary. Japanese men are savages, who play at being civilized. They’re
also like women: small, weak. The women are sluts.
“Your mother isn’t a slut,” he said, “because she’s a Korean woman. She’s never been
with anyone but me. Japanese women aren’t like that. They’re dirty. They sleep with many,
many men. They have no respect.” He paused and I thought he was done, but he continued,
turning the subject to me. “You’re American, so I don’t know how you’ll turn out, but American
women aren’t like Japanese women. People say there are different kinds of American women.
Hopefully you’ll be more like your mother. Since she’s your mother, I think you’ll learn from
her. Even though you’re American, you’re still Korean,” he said.
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I’ve been told by my father’s family—his siblings, parents, and my father himself—that
he was some kind of natural genius. Learned how to play the piano by watching his sister take
lessons. Taught himself the guitar. Got himself into Yonsei University, before dropping out. Was
a successful small businessman. Scored 155 on an IQ test: “Five points away from genius!” he
exclaimed. But even the smartest people are capable of relying on old, tired stereotypes.
My father never told me anything more specific than the derogatory generalizations he
made about people from Japan. He certainly never mentioned anything about wars or
colonization or anything about our own family history. When I was a child, my neighbor’s
mother asked if my parents were communists, were they from North or South Korea. I didn’t
know the answers to her questions and when I asked my dad, he told me a story about how he
and his family had escaped from North Korea to South Korea when he was a child, but almost as
soon as he spoke, he took back the story, turned silent, and told me to forget what he had said.
When I asked why, he responded but as if I wasn’t there, wondering out loud if he could get in
trouble and be sent back—to South Korea or to North Korea, I have no idea which he was afraid
of having to return to, whether he feared both possibilities. Our conversation took place long
after he had immigrated to America, after having bought his first house. I was five or six years
old—young enough to have no idea where Korea was on a map or even that the country had been
divided, old enough to remember the conversation and wonder about it into adulthood and
middle age.
When I was very young and my father was much younger than he is now, he swore he
would never buy a single Japanese product as long as he lived, even if he couldn’t force my
mother or his children to follow his example. He would not only break this vow, eventually, but
appear to forget all about it. When I was thirty, in need of replacing my car that had been totaled
59
by a commercial truck while I was waiting at a stop light, I asked him what kind of car he
thought I should buy with the insurance money.
“Buy a Japanese car,” he said. “European cars break down and cost a lot to repair. I won’t
buy them anymore. Too expensive. Japanese cars are more affordable and reliable.”
I described earlier how my father lost his temper at a Japanese restaurant. Over nothing,
as far as anyone except maybe my mother could tell. And if my mother knew the things my
father knew, she never revealed this knowledge. Certainly, she never exploded at a waiter—not
about that, anyway. What my father knew he kept to himself. He wasn’t interested in passing
down stories. Many years ago he wanted me to know that Japanese people are bad, that I
shouldn’t trust them. Later I think he felt ashamed of having thought this, and of having said it. I
don’t know how to explain how I know this except to say that I realized one day that I hadn’t
heard him voice a single negative thing about Japan or Japanese people since the eighties and
nineties. There were plenty of opportunities when his usual outbursts could have surfaced, and
would have if his mindset hadn’t changed, which I’m as certain of as the nose on my face. My
father would always be a man who couldn’t contain his anger and disgust. It would always come
out.
In a powerful essay written and published in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles
riots—during which dozens of Korean-owned businesses were looted and destroyed while police
and emergency services did mostly nothing—Elaine Kim asks whether, and how, it may be
possible for Korean Americans “to ‘become American’ without dying of han” (1). Han is, to use
Kim’s translation, “the sorrow and anger that grow from the accumulated experiences of
oppression.” Or, to borrow another translation, this time from the novelist and journalist Jay
Caspian Kang: “a state of hopeless, crippling sadness combined with anger at an unjust world,”
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plus “entrapment by suppressed emotions.” It may be that what’s important here, what gives rise
to and sustains han, is not so much the oppression or injustice as the accumulation—or the
repetition. Describing her dismayed reaction to the targeting of Koreatown and to the city’s non-
response, Kim says, “The destiny (p’aljja) that had spelled centuries of extreme suffering from
invasion, colonization, war, and national division had smuggled itself into the U.S. with our
baggage” (2). Combine that with Kang’s “entrapment by suppressed emotion”—pain not shared,
stories not told—and you have something that looks pretty much like the dark force that
possessed my father at the sushi restaurant.
On August 24, 1945, a Japanese ship carrying several thousand Korean nationals
exploded and sank in calm seas off the coast of Japan. The Koreans on board had been brought
to Japan as forced laborers—slaves—in many cases years earlier. Now, with the war over and
Japan having lost control of its former colony, they were being returned to their home country.
The home to which they were returning, “already divided and occupied by external forces and
soon to be decimated by war,” was not the same as the one they’d left (Cho 169). The longing to
return home may have been in many ways already thwarted for these displaced persons, even
before the explosion. After the explosion, competing narratives attempted—attempt—to explain
and contain the damage: 5,000 people died, or 500; there were no Japanese deaths, or there were
25; there were 3,500 survivors, or 80, or fifteen. Some of these survivors remember seeing
Japanese crewmembers leaving the ship in boats before it sank, suggesting that the explosion
may have been intentional. The Koreans on board had seen too many horrors at the hands of their
captors, and could not now be permitted to return home, to bear witness. This, of course, is at
odds with the official record, which holds that the ship hit an underwater mine. In the 2001
Korean film about the incident, Soul’s Protest, the Japanese sailors clearly plan to blow up the
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ship. In this fictionalized account there are 10,000 passengers, two survivors—one of whom is a
young man who years earlier had been separated from the woman he loved when they were both
conscripted into the Japanese labor camps, and had only just been reunited with her on the ship,
in time to lose her again.
Both the incident itself and the film about it are sometimes referred to as “the Korean
Titanic.” As in that incident, the translation of real-life horror to film horror involves a focusing-
on and amplification of the element of melodrama. In an essay titled “Maps and Legends of Hell:
Notes on Melodrama,” the novelist Charles Baxter locates a reason for melodrama’s persistence
in its ability to approach a malevolence that cannot be explained by reason:
Melodrama, typically, is the scene of the incomprehensible attached to the unforgivable.
It is powered by the force of the demonic, particularly in its capacity and willingness to
hurt. The inability of Western narrative art to get rid of melodrama has something to do
with the clear evidence on the world scene that large numbers of people are willing to
massacre, to kill and hurt, without remorse—those with power to hurt will do it, blindly,
smilingly, unthinkingly. (170-71)

Not only the unforgivable, but the incomprehensible. It’s perfectly rational—perfectly
comprehensible in rationalist terms—that the defeated Japanese government might not have
wanted witnesses to its wartime atrocities. And yet, to be willing to murder, at a stroke, 4,000—
or 10,000—people, is incomprehensible (though things like it happen all the time—and of course
the U.S. had only months earlier perpetrated mass murder orders of magnitude larger in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki). What’s more, it may not have happened. Underlying the horror of this
event is either an act of incomprehensible, unforgivable malevolence, or an accident of
unacceptable scale. The narrative of malevolence, regardless of its factual accuracy, is durable
because it both stands for and contains other malevolent acts stretching back years, decades,
centuries. It allows us to access what we cannot explain.
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I haven’t seen Soul’s Protest. Perhaps because of its North Korean origin, the film
doesn’t appear to be widely available in the U.S. All the factual information above—about the
sinking of the Ukishima Maru and about the film—comes from Grace M. Cho’s brilliant study,
Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Weaving together
autobiographical and fictionalized narrative with traditional sociology, Cho’s book attempts to
map the figure of the yangongju (“yankee whore”—a term for the Korean sex workers whose
clients are American GIs) as a site of hauntedness in the Korean diasporic unconscious. More
generally, Cho is concerned with what happens to trauma, especially though not only collective
trauma, when it is made invisible by conventional modes of observation and narrative
production:
What we can and cannot see is always partly a function of the limitations of our
technologies of seeing in that the empirical reality that scientists observe is never
disarticulated from their apparatuses of observation. Despite these technical limitations,
we should also recognize that not seeing is not done innocently. The dominant model of
seeing creates both invisibility and blindness, and the disavowal of what cannot be
perceived through our usual frameworks of observation generates ghosts as much as it
dismisses them . . . [N]arratives of Western progress play a large part in producing ghosts
through this very process of epistemic violence. (32)

Ghosts, for Cho, occupy the blind spots in accepted narratives. They not only contain but
disseminate trauma across oceans and across generations. Cho borrows and adapts the concept of
transgenerational haunting from Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok:
This experience of the children of Korean war survivors—having been haunted by
silences that take the form of an “unhappy wind,” “a hole,” or some other intangible or
invisible force—reflects the notion that an unresolved trauma is unconsciously passed
from one generation to the next. . . .What is important to note here is that the haunting
effect is produced not so much by the original trauma as by the fact of its being kept
hidden. It is precisely within the gap in conscious knowledge about one’s family history
that secrets turn into phantoms. (11)

My father was born in 1946, after the Japanese had already withdrawn from Korea. Any
atrocities he witnessed personally would have been committed by Americans, or by Koreans.
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Still, the Japanese colonial presence haunts him, passed down, presumably, in stories and
fragments of stories from the generation before his. And because it haunts him, it haunts me. Not
in angry pronouncements about the badness of a people, but in a generalized rage and sorrow
that finds expression in silences, in things left unsaid, and so transcends individual lives,
transcends historical specificity. It is this cumulative, transgenerational, inarticulate pain that
constitutes han.
Speaking of the prevalence of massacres of Korean civilians during the Korean War in
the province in which she was born—Gyeongsang, in what is now South Korea—Cho says:
In this part of the country in particular, there is a phenomenon called honbul, or “ghost
flames,” in which flickering lights rise up from the ground, usually at the site of a
massacre. The folkloric explanation, generated since the Korean war, lies somewhere
between science and the supernatural. In places where buried bodies are heavily
concentrated, the remains have changed the chemical makeup of the earth, causing the
soil to ignite. Through ghost flames, the spirits of the dead release their grief and rage,
their han, into the world. (16)

This grief and rage, distilled to the simplest of symbols—a flame rising up from the ground—is
what is left when the opportunity to speak has been taken away. In America there is no context,
outside of Korean communities, in which this painful history can be made legible. The
consequence is that in seeking to make ourselves legible to America—in seeking to assimilate—
we render our history less legible even to ourselves. In this way the transgenerational pain that
“smuggled itself into the U.S. with our baggage” takes on a new, American form, a Korean
American han that is both contiguous with and distinct from the han our parents and
grandparents brought with them across the Pacific.
My father’s grief and rage in response to Japanese colonial aggression did not begin with
his personal experience, and I suspect these feelings only grew stronger when he found himself
living among people for whom Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean Americans are all
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just Asians. “We are Korean!” my father had shouted. When Korean Americans talk about han,
they often describe it as an unfortunate consequence of particularly Korean personality traits—
stoicism, repression, parental coldness. But I’m beginning to think that this, too, is reification—
however much these myths may have their origin in the real values of Korean immigrants, they
serve to obscure the real source of Korean American grief and rage: the process of social
forgetting that causes traumatic histories to disappear into the narrative of American
assimilation.

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Part III: Korean American Han, Diaspora, and Hybridity

According to Connerton’s theory about city streets and Kim’s description of Koreatown,
Koreatown can be understood as a locus of communal memory. Koreatown is a complex space
that can be read in countless ways illustrating the history of Koreans in Los Angeles. My parents
chose not to live in a Korean community like Koreatown; instead, they settled in a predominantly
white community in Napa, California. In Napa, there is nothing that shares any of Koreatown’s
distinct characteristics. There are no buildings with signs in any language other than English;
there are no businesses, no restaurants or grocery stores, that are patronized by a specific ethnic
group, other than white; and based on my experience growing up there, most of the residents of
Napa had never met a Korean person until they met someone from my family, most people
thought that Korean and Chinese were the same thing, even insisted that I was Chinese even
when I said I was Korean. For my parents, the fact that Korea was invisible to Napa might have
looked, at first, like a blessing. They might have seen the space as a blank slate in which to
inscribe their Americanness. In reality, it’s a slate that resists inscribing. My brother had wished
that he could be white, so that he would be invisible, blend in. He might be taller, better looking,
he had said, and no one would put him down for the physical and social characteristics that
marked him as an Asian guy.
In an essay titled “Is the Ethnic ‘Authentic’ in the Diaspora?” R. Radhakrishnan searches
for the proper relationship between the ethnic and the national identity. In a country where
people of color are seen as outsiders, Radhakrishnan asks, “Is the ‘Indian’ in Indian and the
‘Indian’ in Indian-American the same and therefore interchangeable?” (207). For Radhakrishnan,
they are not. For my brother, the problem lies in the conflict between how American culture
views what it means to be Korean versus my brother’s individual experience of his Koreanness.
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America tells my brother that Koreans are cold, rude, confrontational, untrustworthy, that Korean
men are misogynistic, violent, unassimilable, that Korean women are superficial, vain, high
maintenance, and as he learns the characteristics that supposedly inform the Korean identity, he
doesn’t know whether he’s too Korean or not Korean enough. He has to choose whether to defy
Korean identity or conform to it. As he inhabits a hybrid identity, both Korean and American, he
is forced to confront the myths of people who don’t share his identity. Especially in a white town
like Napa, there are expectations about Asian success that he’s expected to fulfill, giving rise to
all sorts of conflict surrounding his identity. He’s supposed to be good at math. The fact that he
was always failing math confused him. He’s expected to become a doctor or engineer, to marry a
Korean woman. He’s told that he’s not really a man, the way that men of other races are, because
of the myths surrounding his physical characteristics. He’s told that a white woman would never
date him. When my brother was young, he had thought that someone like him should become a
doctor or engineer, but our father mocked him for choosing vocations that were so Asian. Later
he’d choose law enforcement, a profession that called to mind an imposing man with a gun, a
man who has authority, instills fear, is white.
In American culture, hybridity is a complicated dance of searching for ways to choose
affiliations, and of having to be chosen. In my novel, the narrator’s brother Kevin searches for
role models, looking for them in masculine gun-wielding heroes in action films and, in real life,
in tennis coaches who project myths and stereotypes onto Kevin and his family. Mostly, the
ideas have entered Kevin’s consciousness without him knowing it, so he doesn’t see how racism
impacts his life. Steve Stefanki, Kevin’s tennis coach, has been grooming Kevin for a college
tennis scholarship for years. Kevin is his favorite student and Stefanki wishes he had the talent to
turn pro, but doesn’t believe in him.
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“You’re talented but you don’t have natural talent,” said Stefanki. “It’s work for you and
you work harder than anyone I’ve ever seen, but you’re too small to turn pro, you don’t have
enough power or stamina. There just aren’t any Asian guys making a living playing tennis.”
“What about Michael Chang?” Kevin said.
“Nobody respects Chang,” said Stefanki. “He’s a baseline player. Pure effort, little talent.
He lacks integrity, plays mind games. Chang beat Lendl by playing dirty. Those moon balls, the
underhanded serve, the way he kept standing at the service line to make Lendl double fault.
That’s not playing the game.”
In “Hybridity in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory,” Anjali Prabhu discusses three
approaches to understanding hybridity. The first position is an optimistic view—hybridity as a
choice or mode of resistance. The second position allows access to hybridity only to the social
elite. The last position, which Prabhu is most concerned with, acknowledges that there are
choices to be made but recognizes that the discourse of hybridity cannot be separated from the
history of slavery, colonization, and rape (12). My brother has never lived in Korea and has
never experienced direct colonial oppression. He may not even be aware of the history of
colonial oppression in Korea, or elsewhere, a typical American. If han is indeed what eats away
at my brother, how is this possible if han stems from colonial oppression? As a Korean
American, my brother has inherited han, passed down from our parents and passed down from
theirs, transcending oceans and generations. Han is the legacy of colonial oppression; it echoes
for generations far removed from the original oppression and combines with experiences of
living as a racialized body in America. Han is the colonial legacy made personal. It takes root
and grows in the American presence.

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Part IV: Korean Horror

“You know what’s really scary? You want to forget something, totally wipe it off of your
mind, but you never can. It can’t go away, you see, and it follows you around like a ghost.” In
the 2003 South Korean horror film by Kim Jee-woon, A Tale of Two Sisters, the stepmother
shares last words with her stepdaughter, Su-Mi, before raising a statue over her head and
dropping it on Su-Mi’s face. This scene takes place near the end of the film. By this point, we’ve
watched an hour and a half of life at home from the perspective of a confused Su-Mi, a defiant
Su-Mi, who has just returned from the psychiatric hospital with her younger sister, Su-Yeon. Su-
Mi’s anger is directed at her stepmother, who treats the sisters poorly and, before marrying her
father, had been an employee of the household, serving as the live-in nurse for her ailing mother.
Su-Mi is also angry at her father, who left her real mother for this new woman. Disturbing events
unfold. Dead birds with broken necks are found under bed covers, mysterious bruises appear on
Su-Yeon’s arms, an aunt has a seizure in the middle of a dinner party, the stepmother’s face has
been scratched out of family pictures, and a young girl covered in filth and blood materializes
throughout, at times hiding under the kitchen sink, her long dark hair obscuring her face, among
other strange happenings. At the end of the movie, the secret to all of the strangeness is revealed.
The reality is this: since Su-Mi has returned home from the hospital, there is no Su-Yeon and
there is no stepmother. The father’s appearances were real, but Su-Yeon’s and the stepmother’s
were not. Su-Yeon is dead and the stepmother is gone. Su-Mi has repressed the trauma of her
sister’s accidental death, caused in part by her scorned mother’s suicide, and her personality has
split into three, taking on the identities of Su-Yeon, her stepmother, and herself. The unresolved
trauma of her sister’s death, her stepmother’s part in it, as well as her own guilt, has followed Su-
Mi like a ghost throughout the film until she’s faced with the truth, at which point the ghost is
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released.
In South Korean horror, a common trope is the wonhon (vengeful female ghost), often a
young girl or teenager who has died as a result of a betrayal. These films employ the same plot
device: the truth behind the death of the girl is kept secret, creating a ghost that haunts the living
until the secret becomes known. In “Family, Death, and the Wonhon in Four Films of the 1960s,”
Hyangjin Lee identifies the wonhon as a uniquely Korean creation that follows generic
conventions, distinct from not only Western but East Asian horror (23). Citing Moon-im Baek’s
Sorrowful Screaming: A History of the Female Ghost in Korean Films, Lee writes: “The wonhon
is not the personification of a demon, god, or monster; it is a human spirit, typically a young,
innocent woman for whom family conflict and sexual violation are the common causes of an
early death” (23). The Korean wonhon is informed by traditional views about socially acceptable
sexual and familial behavior. These moral strictures binding the female body are very different
from those in Japanese horror films, which are concerned with the unfulfilled sexual desires of
women, where their resentments take the form of a restless erotic fantasy between the dead and
the living (24). Though not always focused on family conflict and sexual violation, the Korean
wonhon is gendered and domestic, and the secrets are intimate, private, inexplicable.
In A Tale of Two Sisters, the ghost that haunts Su-Mi is not a physical manifestation, but
a psychological haunting, existing only in her mind. Her sister’s and mother’s deaths, and her
own psychological ghosts, arise from family conflict, as well as the sexual transgression of her
father’s affair with her mother’s nurse. Park Ki-hyeong’s Whispering Corridors (1998) offers a
social criticism of the Korean school system through the presence of a ghost: a young girl who
had been bullied by school officials commits suicide on the school grounds, an event that takes
place nine years before the film’s present narrative. In White: The Melody of the Curse (2011) by
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Kim Gok and Kim Sun, a pop music girl group called “Pink Dolls” discovers an unreleased
music video tape in their new studio. The girls decide that the song could make them stars, but
once they claim the song, everything goes to hell. Before they know it, each member of the
group is haunted by the ghost of a girl from the forgotten music group. It turns out that the girls
from the previous group had been playing out an unfriendly competition to become the lead girl,
causing one girl to commit suicide by drinking bleach and burning in a fire, after having been
bullied and disfigured. She returns to haunt and kill whoever sings her song. Korean horror
featuring some version of the wonhon are nearly limitless.
In the chapter “Desire in Narrative” from Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema,
Teresa de Lauretis discusses how the word “monster” is etymologically related to the word
“demonstrate,” which shares the same root, and is associated with “showing”: “Classical
mythology of course was populated with monsters, beings awesome to behold, whose power to
capture vision, to lure the gaze, is conveyed in the very etymon of the word ‘monster’” (109).
What makes female monsters monstrous, like Medusa and the Sphinx, is that “their threat is to
man’s vision, and their power consists in their enigma and ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (in [Laura]
Mulvey’s word), their luring of man’s gaze into the ‘dark continent,’ as Freud put it, the enigma
of femininity” (110). The woman’s monstrousness arises from the fact that her appearance
captivates in one way or another—her face, her form, her image, captures the gaze of men. Once
he sees her, with one glimpse even, he is transfixed, entrapped, he can’t look away.
Korean horror, and Korean cinema in general, is dominated by male directors. Each film
discussed in this paper, even those briefly mentioned, was directed by a man. The cliché of the
wonhon is a creation of the male dominated film industry, representing male fear of the
appearance of the woman. The unequal gender power structure in Korean society also gives rise
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to an unconscious summoning of vengeful women returning as ghosts, the wonhon a
manifestation of a patriarchy that views women as the vessels who must carry the burden of
family and preservation of culture, who keep the secrets of family and culture and history so that
men don’t have to bear the burden. The wonhon represents the outsider in familial society, as
symbolized by her appearance: her white dress is a social signature of the chastity of a widow, as
well as functioning as mourning clothes, while her long, black, uncombed hair, in contrast to the
neat hairstyle of a married woman, implies youth, representing defiance of sexual restraint and
control (Lee 24). The wonhon signifies an uncontrollable energy that rejects Confucian
orthodoxy, the manifestation of the wronged woman who will not follow Confucian models of
patriarchal gender inequality (Lee 24; Oh 61).
What ties Korean horror together is han. Hyangjin Lee writes: “The [wonhon’s] lingering
bad memories can be described as han (deep resentments at injustice), but in this case, the human
spirit’s intentions, even after being separated from its body by death, are manifested as hon
[spirit]” (23). While the ghosts in the three films described above arise from the secrets of private
and family trauma, in Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006), we encounter a haunting with roots that
are wider and deeper, stretching into all aspects of a global society. The ghosts in A Tale of Two
Sisters, Whispering Corridors, and White are manifestations of han, the return of the repressed,
the haunting of private histories that have been hidden or ignored. In The Host, instead of
uncovering individual histories that return in the form of ghosts and haunting, we encounter lost
public history, which is manifest in the monster, the Han River, and the Seoul landscape. These
are points of entry, the places in which to recover lost and hidden pieces of cultural narratives.
Whispering Corridors (also known as Ghost School, Horror at Girl’s School, and Ghost
School Horror) is often cited as the film that sparked the resurgence of the Korean horror genre.
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The movie was released in 1998, following the liberalization of censorship after the country’s
end to military dictatorship, and it offers a strong social commentary against the South Korean
education system. Whispering Corridors falls under the sub-genre “high school horror” or
“haunted high school film,” which is exactly what it sounds like: a horror film set in a high
school. The all-girls high school of Whispering Corridors is notoriously competitive, ruled by
authoritarian officials who demand obedience and conformity. Classmates are pitted against each
other and friendships fall apart as teachers compare student achievement. The school officials are
tyrants—they abuse the girls physically and psychologically, the girls are publicly humiliated—
and the school’s only concern is to raise the class average. When the school officials are killed
off one by one, the deaths staged to look like suicides, Eun-young, a former student of the school
returns to investigate. Nine years previously, her best friend Jin-ju, who had been bullied by the
teachers, committed suicide in the art room after a teacher locked her inside. Eun-young
discovers that Jin-ju’s ghost has been taking revenge on the teachers, haunting the school for
nine years since she’s died, that she’s been sitting in the classroom unnoticed all this time,
included in the daily headcounts. Jin-ju’s ghost is visible to the other students and the teachers,
but institutional failures deny Jin-ju of individuality, making her ghost as socially invisible as she
had been when she was alive, as invisible as the current generation of girls in the classroom.
Eun-young confronts her own ethical failure in having allowed her fear of authority to prevent
her from letting Jin-ju out of the art room. She had buried this memory, locked away her guilt,
which represents the secret in the film that gives rise to haunting. When Jin-ju speaks, she says
that all she ever wanted was a friend. Eun-young, her best friend from the past who didn’t free
her from the locked room, says that she’s sorry. Her new best friend, Ji-oh, a member of the
current class, professes her loyalty and friendship to Jin-ju. “We will never forget you,” they say.
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When her life is remembered, the injustice acknowledged, Jin-ju’s ghost is released.
The theme of hyper-competitiveness and authoritarian adult figures who control,
especially young women, is central in White: The Melody of the Curse. The four members of the
girl group “Pink Dolls” have an unhealthy rivalry, encouraged by the group’s ruthless manager
who demands that the girls train endlessly and compete against each other for the number one
song contest. The girls fight for the spot of “the main” (the lead singer), but each time one of
them tries to claim the lead spot by singing the cursed song, something terrible happens: Je-ni is
found hanging by the neck in the recording booth after an overdose of herbal tea; A-rang has a
violent reaction to her cosmetics, leaving her face scarred and swollen; Shin-ji gets swept up by a
high rise camera that catches her by the hair, swings her body above a crowd, and crashes to the
ground, crushing her to death; the last group member, Eun-ju, who by default has successfully
claimed the coveted lead position, rises to fame and wins the number one song competition, but
ultimately dies during a performance on stage—the lights explode and a panicked crowd
tramples her to death, meanwhile her manager is burned to death by a stage flare and her sponsor
is crushed by a fallen stage light.
In White, exposing the secret or betrayal does not release the ghost or end the haunting.
Despite the fact that Eun-ju and her best friend, Soon-ye, uncover the lost story of the girl from
the forgotten music group, despite the discovery that the ghost of that girl is the source of their
present terror, the haunting continues. Whoever sings the ghost’s song will be killed. The curse,
or the haunting, has the potential to continue endlessly, despite the knowing and speaking of the
secret. This serves as the surprise at the film’s conclusion when Soon-ye, who was not a member
of Pink Dolls, sets fire to the original videotape at a karaoke bar, believing that the destruction of
the tape will put an end to the curse. To her horror, the karaoke machine announces: “Song
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chosen: White.” The curse has not been broken. Soon-ye remembers that she had provided vocal
doubling for Je-ni in an early performance when Je-ni couldn’t hit the high notes.
The curse and the continuation of the haunting echoes, of course, the globally successful
Japanese horror film Ringu, in which a videotape serves as the curse in place of White’s cursed
song. Ringu debuted in Japan in 1998, thirteen years before White was released in Korea in 2011.
Korean horror, as with many transnational film cultures, has evolved by experimentation
informed by other national cinemas in order to communicate the shared anxiety and traumatic
experiences of its local communities (Lee 24). We can trace the circulation of certain images that
travel across Asian horror, for example, the female ghost in a white gown with long unruly hair
from Ringu, or the cursed videotape revised as a cursed song in White.
In all three films—A Tale of Two Sisters, Whispering Corridors, and White—there is a
prevalence of suicide, death by fire, and revenge. Im San-soo’s 2010 film The Housemaid, a
remake of Kim Ki-young’s 1960 original film of the same title, ends with the housemaid
committing suicide in an act of revenge—she hangs herself from the foyer chandelier, body on
fire, swinging like a pendulum over three generations of the family that wronged her, who
witness, horrified, the culmination of her righteous rage as the flames engulf her. Korean horror
involves a focusing-on and amplification of the element of melodrama. In Korean Horror
Cinema, Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin claim that melodrama is one of the defining
characteristics of Korean horror, as well as the default narrative mode in Korean cinema,
underpinning the majority of films produced in all genres. Peirse and Martin cite the enduring
legacy of shinpa, originally a Japanese theatrical tradition of the late 1880s, imported to Korea
during the colonial period and a widely dominant cinematic trend by the 1920s, as the source of
the abundance of melodrama in Korean cinema. Shinpa is now regarded as an exaggerated
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subgenre of cinematic melodrama, and connotes “tragic tales of romance and female suffering,
defeatist narratives with inevitably sad endings, designed as quintessential ‘tear jerkers’” (5). The
melodramatic mode is so influential in Korean cinema that its narrative qualities frequently
emerge in horror.
Here we might remember Charles Baxter’s explanation for the persistence of melodrama
in modern narrative—that it makes sense of the otherwise incomprehensible fact “that large
numbers of people are willing to massacre, to kill and hurt, without remorse—those with power
to hurt will do it, blindly, smilingly, unthinkingly (170-71). In the summer of 1950, early in the
Korean War, the South Korean army and police, backed by the U.S. military, massacred
hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians with the intention of keeping possible southern
leftists from reinforcing the northerners (Kim Dong-choon). At least 100,000 people were
executed, according to conservative estimates, and the mass executions were carried out over
mere weeks (The Telegraph). This genocide of South Korean people, by South Korean people,
was largely hidden from history for half a century. In 2005, South Korea established the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission, modeled after the South African group formed in the 1990s to
expose crimes and injustices committed during the apartheid era. Unlike the situation in South
Africa, where the truth commission was formed soon after the collapse of the apartheid
government, South Korea’s commission was not created for over a half a century after the end of
the Korean War. During the post-war decades, the country was ruled by anti-Communist
authoritarian governments that wanted to keep buried the history of violence against people who
had been accused of being Communists (Choe). The victims’ fearful families kept silent.
American military reports were stamped “secret” and filed away in Washington, Communist
accounts dismissed as lies. Only since the 1990s, and South Korea’s democratization, has the
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truth begun to seep out. In 2002, a typhoon uncovered one mass grave, and another was found by
a television news team that broke into a sealed mine (The Telegraph). It wasn’t until President
Roh Moo-hyun was elected in 2003 that the country created the commission in 2005, with the
goal of starting a nationwide investigation to uncover the history of atrocities by each Korea
(Choe).
The victims of the massacres were unarmed civilians and prisoners, peasants, men,
women, and children, accused of being Communist sympathizers or collaborators, all killed
without trial. There are witness accounts of South Korean soldiers, who, instead of hunting
Communist guerillas, executed innocent villagers gathered in fields, who knew nothing about
Communism. The commission has identified 1,222 separate, probable instances of mass killings
during the war. In 2007, investigators began digging at four of 160 sites believed to have been
used for mass burials. Skeletons have been found in great mounds, stacked on top of each other,
bullet holes in the skulls, hands still tied behind backs with rusting steel wire. (The Telegraph).
The horror that finds its expression in films like those discussed in this chapter has its
origin in the incomprehensible violence of these events, and in countless (and often uncounted,
unknown in public record) acts of similarly incomprehensible malevolence throughout the
country’s wartime history. The narrative of malevolence, regardless of its factual accuracy, is
durable because it both stands for and contains other malevolent acts stretching back years,
decades, centuries. It allows us to access what we cannot explain.
The Host is set in 2000 to 2006, fifty years after Japanese colonization and the Korean
War. The film does not directly address this history, but the legacy of the American military and
its continued presence in South Korea haunts the narrative in a generalized rage and sorrow that
finds expression in the monster, the Han River, and the Seoul landscape, transcending individual
77
lives and historical specificity. It is this generalized rage and sorrow, this inarticulate pain that
constitutes han. The monster, the Han River, and the Seoul landscape are points of entry, the
spaces in which to recover lost and hidden pieces of public history and cultural narratives.
In The Host, the secrets are institutional and hierarchical, infecting society without a
trace. The secrets arise from systemic and transnational inequality and corruption. The film
opens in 2000, in the mortuary of the Yongsan Camp for the 8
th
U.S. Army, located in the
Yongsan district of Seoul. Today, the Yongsan Camp is the current headquarters for the U.S.
military in South Korea, had previously served as headquarters for the Imperial Japanese Army
from 1910 to 1945. In the opening scene, a senior doctor speaks with condescension to his
assistant. It should be noted that the elderly doctor is a white American man, while the assistant,
Mr. Kim, is a young Korean man. The American doctor scolds Mr. Kim about the dusty counters
and orders him to pour hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde down the drain. “Every bottle is
coated with layers of dust,” he says. Mr. Kim objects, reminding the American doctor that the
bottles contain toxic chemicals, that pouring them into the sink violates regulations, but the
American doctor cuts him off, repeating his orders. “But if I pour them into the drain, they will
run into the Han River,” Mr. Kim says. The American responds, “That’s right! Let’s just dump
them in the Han River! The Han River is very broad. Let’s try to be broad-minded about this.
Anyway, that’s an order. So. Start pouring.”
The opening scene highlights the enduring legacy of the American military and its
technological involvement in Korea’s affairs. We know from the outset exactly where the film
places blame for the horror to come. The scene immediately following takes place two years later
as two men wade in the Han River with fishing poles. One man sees something strange in the
water, small enough to catch in his coffee cup. They peer inside at something that looks nothing
78
like anything they’ve ever seen. “Is it a mutation?” one man says. The shot pans back,
foregrounding the breadth of the Han River and its direct connection into the city, which looms
in the background. When one of the fishermen pokes his finger in the cup, the creature bites him,
the cup drops, and the creature swims away as the men marvel over its numerous tails.
The Han River flows with the toxic presence of the U.S. Army and corporate disregard,
representing the haunting of American malevolence. The scene with the two fishermen is our
first exposure to the monster, though it is not fully grown and we don’t actually see it. The birth
of the monster represents American malevolence in physical form—the manifestation of the
horrors caused by, and that are the result of, American presence in Korea, signified as a
monstrous amphibious creature born in a polluted river that can swim and live under water and
walk and breathe on land. The first person to see the monster in its full-grown form is the
businessman Mr. Yoon, right before he commits suicide. Four years after the fishermen’s
sighting, in 2006 (the year in which this movie was released), Mr. Yoon, his suit and tie
drenched in the pouring rain, teeters on the railing of the Han River Bridge. As Mr. Yoon peers
down into the dark water, he encounters the malevolence that we have not yet seen:
“Underneath,” he says, “in the water. Something dark in the water.” By now, two of his younger
business colleagues have reached him, trying to convince him to come down. “You really didn’t
see it?” he says. His colleagues see nothing in the water, and as the camera focuses on the dark,
roiling water, we also do not see. “Morons. To the very end,” he says, before jumping in. The
scene ends with a close-up of the river, the film title, The Host, hovering over it. The rain
continues to pour, further obscuring whatever lies beneath.
The businessman on the border between life and death can see the monster in the river
while the rest of us cannot. When the monster emerges for the first time in public, revealing itself
79
in a city park adjacent to the river, the monster’s showing of itself, and our viewing of it,
provokes chaos and trauma throughout the city. Once the monster has captured our gaze, it
begins to wreak havoc on the landscape, tearing through buildings and structures like a wrecking
ball, taking out swaths of people with a flick of its tail, scooping up bodies into its mouth and
swallowing them alive. The Seoul landscape transforms into a space of terror, recalling the scene
of a war zone. Mirroring images of genocide, the monster deposits the bodies of the dead into a
great heap, essentially a mass grave. In one scene, the monster vomits into the sewer a nearly
endless stream of bones and skulls of digested bodies, the pile as big as a mountain.
The desire to be seen and the desire to be heard is illustrated in the film’s main human
character, Gang-du, a depressed and seemingly slow-witted man who, with his father, manages a
snack-bar in the same park where the monster first appears. When Gang-du comes into physical
contact with the monster as he tries to save his young daughter, authorities swoop in, geared in
bio-hazard suits. They zip Gang-du into a body bag and transport him to a hospital where he is
quarantined. A white American doctor scolds him for losing his daughter, asking why he didn’t
turn to local, national, and international resources to save her. Every time Gang-du tries to speak,
the doctor interrupts. Gang-du finally says, in Korean, translated into English by a Korean-
American assistant, “Please don’t cut me off. My words are words too. Why don’t you listen to
my words?” My voice is important too, my language is important too, my story is important too,
Gang-du is saying, verbalizing the rage and sorrow and inarticulate pain for generations of
Korean people. The Americans don’t hear him. They disregard his pleas, concluding that the
virus must have infected his brain.
At the film’s end, a final trauma is inflicted on the Seoul landscape, the blame again
attributed to the U.S., while clearly referencing the Vietnam War. The American military
80
releases onto the city a toxic weapon called Agent Yellow. A robot machine sprays yellow
clouds of smoke onto crowds of people, reminiscent, of course, of the spraying of the chemical
Agent Orange by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War over Vietnamese agricultural land to
destroy bushes, trees, and vegetation with the purpose of depriving the opposition of cover. In
The Host, Agent Yellow is designed to kill the monster, deployed by the U.S. to “fight virus
outbreaks.” But the chemical is released on the landscape next to the river where there’s a
gathering of protestors, and anyone exposed to the smoke has a reaction—they fall to the ground,
blood oozing from their ears and mouths. The act of releasing the chemical is biological terror,
used as a means to justify imperialism.
The Host has earned almost $89.5 million worldwide according to Box Office Mojo, a
website that tracks box office revenue, and the film surpassed the previous records in South
Korea during its opening weekend, becoming the country’s all-time box office leader. The film
was released in Australia, across Asia, the U.S., and Europe. In the U.S., The Host received
critical acclaim and was ranked one of the top films by several film critics. Whispering Corridors
and White were not released outside of South Korea and they each grossed minimal amounts
compared to The Host. A Tale of Two Sisters was the first Korean horror film screened in
American theaters in 2004, but grossed only $72.5 thousand in the U.S., while the 2009
American remake of A Tale of Two Sisters, titled The Uninvited, earned over $41.5 million
worldwide. Of these four films, The Host worked with the biggest budget ($11 million), it
incorporates CGI special effects, and features one of the most popular leading actors in South
Korea, Song Kang-ho, all of which contribute to the movie’s success. Director Bong Joon-ho
would later go on to direct Snowpiercer (2013), produced by Park Chan-wook, one of the most
acclaimed South Korean filmmakers, known for Thirst (2009) and The Vengeance Trilogy
81
(which includes the cult hit Oldboy (2003)). Snowpiercer is Bong’s English-language debut,
premiering first in Seoul, then the U.S. to critical acclaim, a science-fiction action film based on
a French graphic novel, starring Song Kang-ho as well as well-known British and American
actors.
When The Host was released, the film certainly had advantages that the other films did
not, including a bigger budget, special effects, and a beloved leading man. However, the film’s
popularity with an international audience, especially the U.S., can be attributed to its theme of
American presence in international affairs, a public history that American viewers can recognize.
The other Korean horror films discussed in this chapter are more traditional, following narratives
of personal, private histories and secrets that are intimate, familial, gendered, and domestic, and
consistently feature the wonhon, the female ghost who returns to avenge a history that American
viewers likely find inaccessible. The monster in The Host, by contrast, is inhuman and
ungendered, mirroring countless American creature films, and is the explicit result of public
history. Similar to big budget American summer blockbuster action and monster films
(especially from the 1990s, for example Men in Black (1997) and Independence Day (1996)),
The Host incorporates comedy, which also makes the film more accessible.
Paradoxically, though, it’s precisely the inaccessibility of many Korean horror films to
American audiences that may grant them a new relevance to Korean American viewers like me.
In their original, Korean context, films like White, Whispering Corridors, and A Tale of Two
Sisters dramatize the unburying of secrets, with the figure of the wonhon serving to bring about a
catharsis in which that which has been hidden becomes visible. But to American audiences, even
what is revealed in these films remains largely illegible. This illegibility may be precisely the
source of my identification with these films. Transplanted to the American movie house, they
82
become emblematic of the problem that gives rise to the specifically Korean American kind of
han—buried trauma that cannot be brought to light because the public sphere into which it might
erupt has no way to make sense of it.
Korean horror offers a way to access and express han in popular form. In White,
Whispering Corridors, and A Tale of Two Sisters, the wonhon is a manifestation of the woman
who must bear the burden of secrets, of family and preservation of culture. She symbolizes
defiance—of sexual restraint and control—and revenge of injustices perpetrated on women. She
refuses models of patriarchal gender inequality. In The Host, the monster represents a city
haunted by a malevolent American presence, and reenacts the terror caused by American
disregard and military and technological involvement in international affairs. In each of these
films, there is a clear social or cultural criticism—of American interference, the South Korean
education system, authoritarianism, conformity, the moral strictures that bind women sexually
and domestically, competition, ambition, the sexualization of young women. All of this social
commentary offers an outlet for han to be released, to make us remember, to be seen and heard,
transfix and hold us at attention so we cannot look away.

83
CONCLUSION

When the U.C. Berkeley scholars Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee founded the Asian
American Political Alliance in 1968, coining the phrase Asian American in the process, they may
have intended it as an act of defiance, or as a way to establish the ground from which further acts
of defiance might spring. In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong calls the invention of this phrase
“a refusal to apologize for being who they were” (190). It may also have been meant as a way to
unify—to bring together a diverse constellation of transnational histories under a single banner.
It would have been understood that such a unification would come at a cost, but the cost had
already been imposed from outside, by the rest of America. “It’s a funny thing about
racialization in America,” says Hong. “It doesn’t matter that there’s been a long, bloody
territorial dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir or that Laotians have been
systematically genociding the Hmong people since the Vietnam War. Whatever power struggle
your nation had with other Asian nations—most of it the fallout of Western imperialism and the
cold war—is steamrolled flat by Americans who don’t know the difference” (23).
It’s not only differences and conflicts within and between Asian countries that are
steamrolled, but differences in the experience of American life as well. My parents’ Asian
identities are not the same as mine, nor were their working lives and their economic prospects
much like mine. The experience of being read as Asian in America impacted my own brother—
who grew up in the same house I did, at roughly the same time—much differently than it did me.
Between Asian American communities with different national origins and different histories, the
disparities are greater still. As much as the myth of the model minority erases aspects of all of
our experiences, it leaves some of us more thoroughly out in the cold than others.
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Every Asian American writer faces her own version of this same dilemma: her work,
racialized as it is by readers, editors, and critics, shoehorned into the diplomatic role of “speaking
for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe that we are human and feel pain,” serves as a
means of achieving that vital currency—visibility—in a nation that sometimes seems incapable
of seeing except in broad, easily named categories. At the same time, in gaining visibility as a
monolithic racial, ethnic, and literary category, we give up a good deal of our visibility as
distinct, human individuals. In reading mainstream criticism of Asian American novels, it often
feels as though whatever aspects of the work cannot be reduced to cultural anthropology are
simply not read. I’d like to say that it will fall to the Asian American writers of this century to
produce work that goes beyond proving, for the umpteenth time, the obvious fact of our
collective humanity, that allows history to flash forth as unpredictably as it does in the infinitely
varied circumstances of our individual lives. But we’ve always been doing that. The question is
whether this century’s readers will meet us where we are.

85
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PART II – Creative Dissertation: Top Girl, a novel

CHAPTER 1: Marry the Lion Tamer

The last time we went to the circus was one in a series of endings. It was the last time we
crossed the state line into Nevada, that we went to Tahoe together as a family, and our final
camping trip. It was also a marker of beginnings, new worlds hatching like little eggs, some
revealing smoky auras of color and magic, others popping out frightful clowns screaming in
horror, still others containing a little of both. It was my thirteenth birthday. When summer was
over I would begin high school, the territory of alliances and deceit and betrayal, and it was
when I learned that I’d have to carry the weight of people other than my own, though I’d spend a
great amount of energy denying this, trying to unlearn what I already knew, that I did not want to
know and wouldn’t listen to for many more years.
My father never stopped loving Reno and was disappointed when Kevin and I no longer
wanted to cross over. This might have been when he began to realize that he was going to lose
us, though he was the one pushing us to be lost, and I imagine he must have seen that we were
forging ahead into a world that would accept us, a world that he could not access, and as we got
further away from him and closer to American belonging, there must have been a quarrel within
himself—let us go, take us back—that he would have to accept but would never learn.
Before our visits to Reno ended, when we were still drawn to the city’s attractions, one
summer we made our usual stopover on the way home from Tahoe. We checked into Harrah’s or
El Dorado or Silver Legacy, and made our way through the gold-rimmed mirrored casino to the
hotel’s all-you-can-eat buffet, where we ate voraciously. The following night we walked under
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the lights past the water show set to the Ride of the Valkyries, me skipping ahead in rhythm with
the music, Kevin at the water’s edge, his face dark, then light, pulsing with the shadows cast by
the waterworks, while our parents chatted behind us, their tones low, syllables long and bouncy,
the way we knew them to speak in Korean, the conversations tinged with secrecy, though only
because our understanding of the language had become that diminished. Before their
conversation ended, we arrived at the coliseum where the circus was performing. My father
never failed to pay in cash, and the change at the ticket booth was always returned in two-dollar
bills, which Kevin and I would marvel about, holding up the bills to the light and turning them
over carefully in our hands, exclaiming that they looked unreal, too crisp, like Monopoly money.
We picked out a spot in the stadium, settling in with hotdogs and popcorn as if at a baseball
game, and we watched with attention as the curtain opened to the first act, the lion show.
This occasion was memorable for its finality and for the following bizarre suggestion
from my father: “When you get older maybe you can join the circus.”
Kevin, my mother, and I all looked at him. He was looking at me.
He continued. It would mean that I’d never have to live in one place or settle down, he
explained, I’d get to spend my days performing and doing acrobatics, and, best of all, I could
travel and see the world.
“You could marry the lion tamer,” he said, pointing at the lion tamer’s assistant.
Her mouth was red as a jewel, skin bare and pillar-white, and she wore a gold sequined
bikini that winked under the bright lights, paired with a gem-encrusted headdress propped atop
her head.
“You could be her! Doesn’t that look fun?” my father said, pointing, still.
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The lion tamer had wild eyes and no shirt, his tan chest waxed and oiled like that of a
bodybuilder. He moved his head in and out of the lion’s wide open mouth, and with a flourish he
began throwing knives at his female assistant who stood stock-still against a wooden plank. She
smiled, never flinching, and appeared content, but I could feel her terror, the way I thought I
could feel the psychic pain of mannequins at the mall when I looked at them long enough.
“Don’t you think the lion tamer is handsome?” he said.
“No,” I said, incredulous.
My mother proceeded to scold him. “A disgrace,” she might have said. “How would we
explain it to our families?”
The four of us were sitting in a row, Kevin and I in the middle, our parents on the outside,
sandwiching us. My mother leaned in, speaking to my father across the tops of our heads. Her
voice was low, as if she was being hushed.
“How would Jane have children? Would they be in the circus too, traveling from town to
town?”
* * *
The day I quit law school, I felt that I had finally done something right. I kept my one
right thing close, a secret that seeped out of my pores. At first, no one knew that I had dropped
out. I made no announcement, it was the middle of the fall semester, and my decision wouldn’t
become official until the end of spring, after grades were submitted and I’d failed all of my
classes for the second consecutive semester, prompting the university to enter my name as
“withdrawn” from the system.
Still a secret, the decision became irrevocable when I dropped off my case law books at
the Goodwill. They were five pounds each, at least, and very expensive—at over one hundred
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dollars apiece, I could not afford to purchase them all over again—but buy-back wouldn’t open
at the campus bookstore until December, and, though I should have been, I wasn’t thinking about
money. I wanted closure. I felt righteous, as if I had fulfilled a divine or moral law. At last, I was
doing something for me, even if that something was quitting.
Each day I lost a little of that certainty, until winter arrived and I was no longer confident.
The end of my university funding was on the horizon, compounded by the fear that soon my
parents would discover what I had done, as well as the fact that I had no plan in motion and no
replacement income. Defiance was replaced with dread.
It was my roommate Samir who reminded me that I was in need of new direction. He was
in on the secret because it would have been impossible to keep it from him, not to mention what
it would have done to my soul to keep such a thing to myself. I had been able to maintain the
illusion that I was toiling away, staying up nights studying for the impending bar exam, but
Samir caught on within a week. I had only missed class two times in two years, so when he came
home to find me reclined on the couch eating frozen pizza when I would normally be at Torts, he
knew something was up.
Samir broached the subject gently, in the way that I had always thought was indicative of
a software engineer—thoughtful and direct, careful and precise—though he was the only
software engineer I really got to know, and later when I learned that he had actually trained in
electrical engineering, which I imagined must come with a whole different set of representative
traits, I was reminded of how we’re told that we shouldn’t make assumptions about a person
based on race or sexual preference or gender or whatnot (though we know how people are in
practice), and I thought that the same could be said about one’s profession. Samir and I couldn’t
leave the house or turn on a screen without finding ourselves the subjects of other people’s
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assumptions—this was what bonded us—so, I thought, if we could see more in each other than
what others saw, and we were not compelled to dismiss each other or allow our hearts to fill with
contempt, couldn’t I do better if I didn’t bring his job into it?
Samir was a very punctual person, responsible, soft-spoken. We had just finished brunch
at No Name Dim Sum; not a formal title, but the place had no sign and no name, so that’s what
we called it. We walked down Grant, the road long and sloped and lined with storefronts selling
egg custard tarts and red bean buns, woks and steamers, silk robes and paper lanterns, chiming
baoding balls, back scratchers, strings of red firecrackers, and barrels filled to the brim with tea
leaves, ginseng root, and dried mushrooms. Coral plastic shopping bags rustled with apples and
bok choy from the produce stalls bustling on every corner. The neighborhood served the Chinese
community, but included enough tourist-friendly souvenir shops stocked with cheap silk
cheongsam dresses and conical hats to fulfill the expectations of the typical out-of-towner.
“Isn’t your funding from school going to end soon?” Samir asked.
He was right. By then it was January and my university grant would surely be cut off in
May, by which time I would most certainly have failed my entire course schedule for the second
time. That’s what happens when you stop attending classes and never show up for exams. I
withdrew completely. Declined the social life that I had only been marginally part of to begin
with. Thursday nights at The Hut, the Barristers’ Ball (aka Law School Prom), the study groups
for making outlines in preparation for exams, the Superbowl and carwash fundraisers. No thank
you.
“How are you going to make rent when you stop getting those checks from school?”
Samir asked. “Do you have a plan?”
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I didn’t blame Samir for being direct. He had to look after himself. We had been splitting
the rent with no issues for two years.
The morning fog hadn’t yet cleared. The moisture settled on our skin, leaving a light
residue. Up ahead, a small child disappeared into a pocket that was just beginning to lift like cool
smoke. I could barely make out his bundled figure as he turned the corner, his little hand
clutching his grandmother’s hand, a red beanie on his head.
“I’m working it out,” I said to Samir, avoiding his gaze.
In truth, I wasn’t. I didn’t have anything lined up and hadn’t considered seriously any job
or career change that was based in reality. I needed new direction, and I’d have to figure out how
to make ends meet once my university grant ran out. I had been spending my time fantasizing
about possible new careers, alternating with crying, triggered not only from my state of my mind
but also because I had fallen into the habit of eating slices of raw onions like apples, no longer
burdened with social or professional obligations. I wondered what I’d have to do to become a
whale researcher, a documentary filmmaker, a pastry chef. For a day I thought I might enjoy the
quiet and solitude and the time outdoors in the life of a park ranger or forest fire lookout. I even
fantasized about reviving the athletic and musical training of my childhood. I’d pick up where I
had left off and become a concert pianist or a professional tennis player, even though quitting
those pursuits was the only thing I had looked forward to in entering adulthood. Both had chosen
me before I could read. To pursue either again would require time traveling back a decade to
when I was eighteen, the age when I was finally granted agency to quit. I was twenty-eight. I had
already made the choice.
I felt like a failure, but quitting something I had worked for and starting all over again
was both familiar and cathartic, and it wouldn’t be the last time that I’d try to reinvent myself,
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though there would come a day when I would decide that the many years of trial and error, of
apprenticeship, of education and learning and preparation, of working my way up—that it was
time for that stage to finally close. Time for all the years of training, vested with talent and
promise, to transform and finally emerge into the thing it was meant to become. Time to take the
final leap and settle into the life that I had chosen, which would just have to stick.
While I reassured Samir that I was working on a plan, the truth was that I had only come
up with unrealizable ideas, head in the clouds, romanticizing the talents that I had been born with
that had only brought me grief, and wishing for the possibility of lives that allured only because
of their mystery.
At twenty-eight, your life still can go many ways, though it doesn’t feel like it. Still
young enough to meet your potential, too young to be a failure, but if I were to poll a group of
late-twenty somethings about their sense of accomplishment, I believe that many would answer,
if speaking honestly, that failure feels imminent or that it has already arrived.
I felt behind. I needed to catch up. My options had already narrowed and I could sense
that the doors were closing quicker with every passing year, that soon I would no longer have
access, and the possibilities of my different selves, identities, futures, interests, and talents would
disappear one after another. With every decision, another door closes. For women, don’t forget
the ticking clock. Do I want to be a mother? How long do I have? Thirty-eight, forty, forty-three?
How much does it cost to freeze my eggs?
I wasn’t the only person in my family making unexpected choices and keeping secrets.
We all seemed to be purging, shedding our belongings and everything we had worked for, while
moving towards the things that we had denied ourselves or that we had been denied. Here we
were claiming what we wanted. That may have been part of the reason why it was so easy to
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keep my true life concealed. I would learn soon enough that my parents were separating. My
mother would move from the suburbs where we had all lived as a family to the city where I was
then living, into an apartment owned by her friend who would offer her free rent in exchange for
serving as the on-site building manager. At sixty, she was pursuing lost dreams: to make a
fortune as a businesswoman and live the life of a young single woman. She wanted my guidance
to navigate the territory of living in San Francisco.
My father had only recently retired from thirty-five years as a small business owner, and
less than a year later, during the upheaval in selling the house and separating from my mother, he
would realize the opportunity had finally arrived: to pursue his long-lost dream as a long-haul
truck driver. He actually got hired, signed onto someone else’s payroll for the first time in his
life, flew out to Kentucky for truck driver training, and was appointed a black big rig with a
menacing Darth Vader grill. He took me to the South San Francisco company parking lot in his
pick-up truck. When we arrived, he nearly leaped out of the driver’s seat, began running to the
semi-trucks parked neatly in a row. His voice rose a notch, quickened as he pointed at the cab
behind the front seats, explaining that he would nap there between truck stops. “Like camping!”
he said. The following month he began calling me from the road, his voice hoarse from little
sleep and chain-smoking, though it always boomed with pride and excitement about his new job
and new life, still shiny with novelty. I could hear the wind as he drove, pinging against the
microphone of his headset, like paper crumpling. Always, he’d ask me if I was okay with money.
His concern was a symptom of immigrant anxiety and the legacy of war and trauma: the constant
and profound worry of running out of money. He’d always offer to help, even though he was
working again in part because he had been forced into retirement early, a complaint against his
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car repair shop having put him out of business, and because my mother didn’t think that they had
enough to retire.
Korean immigrants often find themselves in the position of lacking the benefit of a 401k
or Roth IRA, a platinum health plan, or various other retirement and insurance plans, stocks and
bonds, trusts and funds, that some families that have been here for generations build and expand
and pass down, in secret, making their efficient and luxurious lifestyles mysterious to people like
us. My parents had been known to white-knuckle the occasional years here and there without
health insurance, would even make it through a long stretch between my father’s early retirement
at fifty-eight and the age of sixty-five, when he and my mother would finally qualify for
government provided healthcare. Korean immigrants may also find that they cannot expect to
depend on their adult children in old age, the way their friends back home in Korea can. To my
parents’ surprise, many of their friends were part of the first generation that did not need
financial help from their children, having accumulated enough wealth to care for themselves
when the country lifted itself from poverty to prosperity in a few exhausting decades. Hard work
had paid off for friends they’d left behind in Korea, but for my parents who had immigrated to
America when they were young, working hard did not equate to stability. Their retirement plan
was investment in California property, a product of my mother’s ambition and resourcefulness
and the main thing that was keeping them economically in the right class bracket. My mother
had her sights set on one last move: a house in San Francisco, which would get her over the
hump that was holding her back from what she believed was a comfortable retirement and
perhaps even a legacy to pass down.
My brother Kevin was the only one of us who seemed unchanged. He still exploded into
rage with little provocation, between long stretches of calm indifference. There were clear signs
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of aggression and paranoia, which we ignored. Kevin beat his dog, hid bullets in every room of
his house, performed a “clean sweep” of his backyard each night before bed, took a gun with him
into the bathroom. Before he married, he had a roommate with whom he often had
disagreements. The last time they argued, Kevin chased his roommate around the apartment with
a loaded gun. He was unhinged.
I had arrived, again, at a familiar place: wanting to start over and feel as though my life
was my own, my choices my own, that I was beholden to no one. I didn’t yet know that, in my
family, this was our common bond.
* * *
Our vacations together were always spent within driving distance of home, at a national
park or another sort of natural setting. This was probably for economic reasons, but also, for my
father at least, it was equally about a sense of belonging—the intimacy with the land and with
nature brought him ever so near to the possibility that he belonged on American soil. The great
outdoors lived up to our expectations more often than not, each season offering a nearly sublime
experience of the natural world, but I would say that every summer when we’d drive past the
Heavenly ski resort, the slopes green and dotted with orange poppies, the lifts empty and
motionless, we’d cross the state line into Nevada, and that was when the four of us fell into
place, the bright lights of the high-rise casino hotels connecting us, confirming that we belonged
to each other.
We looked forward to the circus, the all-you-can-eat buffets, the colors and mirrors, the
pinging sounds, the rolling and shuffling, and we’d tighten close together as we carried our bags
and backpacks through the casino to the hotel elevator. My father probably enjoyed Reno the
most, perhaps too much, as a place like that encouraged him to chain-smoke, drink, overeat, and
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gamble, much to my mother’s chagrin, but, even so, she always welcomed the stopover as it
offered a few days to unwind in an environment of excess, in which she found a certain
relaxation. In Reno, there was no housework or even the expectation to enjoy the outdoors.
My mother was insecure about the immersion into the natural world, an insecurity that I
later understood when I realized that she had passed it down to me, that in fact I had inherited
many of her insecurities and nearly all of her anxieties, or at least the same obsessive-compulsive
ways of dealing with them. By college, I found myself worrying about many of the same things
she found ugly in herself, not to mention all the traits that she had spit out daily, like an
unforgiving tennis ball machine, that were ugly in me. While I might not have understood my
mother as a child, I learned what it was like to be her—exceedingly anxious and high-strung,
prone to fits of rage, easily hurt, highly unreasonable about things that can’t be controlled—when
I found myself becoming more and more like her. It wasn’t surprising, then, when I realized that,
like my mother, I wasn’t entirely comfortable in nature, not the way many Bay Area residents
are, or aspire to be. The older I got, the less time I spent outdoors and the more I forgot what it
felt like to be in the natural world: the water pooling into the soles of my shoes while crossing a
creek, the weight of rocks collected in my pockets, the crunchy sound of sticks snapping under
my feet, the dark violet stain of wild blackberries smeared on my fingertips, the joy of getting
caught in the rain and how it changed everything—the earth to mud, the smell in the air from
foliage to wet rocks, the sky from clear and unassuming to dark and bold. It was as if growing
older meant being more comfortable indoors, within walls of intimacy and privacy, a closed
space where one can sort through memory. I learned what it felt like to be disappointed by a trip
to the beach or the lake, by a camping or ski trip, or after taking a road trip to the Grand Canyon
and standing before the glory of huge red rocks that dip down farther than you can see, the sun
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bleeding through the crevices, jagged like crooked teeth. To be disappointed feels like a failure.
You can’t blame nature, so you must make an admission: the fault lies within yourself. A kind of
defect of the soul, my mother may have considered. I certainly did, about myself, though I later
revised this indictment; perhaps the fault was linked to the burden of carrying our family’s
oppression, like stacks of excess baggage, the weight tangible but our individual histories
unknowable. For my mother, it was likely that she understood her disappointment as a personal
failure, which would have to be reckoned with, along with the effort and time spent on the
excursion. For an immigrant family, lost time and vain effort is familiar and always mourned.
In Reno, my mother didn’t have to worry about any of this. There was only relaxation
and comfort. There were no expectations to meet, disappointments to reconcile. She’d fix up two
plates for herself—one at the salad bar, the other at the seafood buffet—and carry her tray into
the dining room where she’d sink into a plush u-shaped booth. For her second serving she would
grab clean plates, pick out a piece of cheesecake and an assortment of fruit, fill up her glass with
iced tea at the soda fountain. Afterwards, she’d leave all of her dirty dishes at the table. My
mother never got a facial or a massage or a manicure, never visited the spa, which I later thought
was notable when I learned the ceremony of the Korean spa to Korean culture, but her dismissal
of certain kinds of decadence were in alliance with her immigrant philosophy, which she’d never
give up no matter how comfortable she got. The spa, the salon—those were extras that she’d
have to pay for. Instead, she’d take a stroll indoors in the attached shopping mall where she
might pick up a few off-season sweatshirts screen-printed with skis and try on gold bangles at the
gift shop, the bracelets chiming on her wrists and clinking against the glass when she’d lower her
hands onto the display case.
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Kevin and I enjoyed Reno as much as our father at first. It was where we got to see the
latest traveling circus, and our visits there for some reason elicited a slackening of my parents’
philosophy of no waste frugality. At home, there was no going out to the movies, no lunch
money or even bagged lunches, absolutely no eating out, no purchase of clothing that was not on
sale. We were a household of things cut in half to prolong their use: paper towels, napkins, and
sponges were all cut in half. Though Kevin and I didn’t know it then, all that painstaking saving
was done for us: our piano and tennis lessons, SAT prep, tutors, and our future education—all
things that had enormous value, but were anything but fun and felt like needless economy and
senseless work bordering on suffering.
In Reno, miraculously, we were granted a small allowance to purchase a knick-knack or
two—arrowheads for Kevin, a crystal necklace for me. We didn’t know what it was about Reno
that put my parents in such a generous mood, but we knew better than to ask. The glory of all-
you-can-eat buffets, the illicit feeling of walking through glittering casinos, the circus with its
endless magic, and the rare gift of ten dollars each—it was all enough to make us fall in love
with Reno—but our enthusiasm diminished each year as we outgrew the circus and the novelty
of souvenirs, our previous prizes long forgotten in over-stuffed junk drawers, and as Kevin and I
became aware of which side of the lake we were supposed to like based on who we were and
who we wanted to be.
* * *
My father stopped by my apartment on his way to San Jose, where his younger brother
lived, whom he checked in on on occasion since his brother lived alone and was younger than
my father by over ten years.
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“Michael comes to San Francisco once in a while,” my father said. “He gets acupuncture
in Chinatown. For his back.”
“I didn’t know that. Why didn’t you tell me?”
I was sitting at the kitchen table while my father leaned out the screenless window behind
the couch, blowing smoke into the alley between my apartment and the neighboring building.
Cigarette ash floated down four stories, like white confetti.
“Michael doesn’t want to see you. But he wants to know about what you’re doing,” my
father said.
“Why wouldn’t he want to see me?” I said. The last time I had seen my uncle I had been
a teenager and what I remembered most about him was how much he resembled my father—
same head of thick black hair, long nose, tallish stature and thick arms—though noticeably
younger, his skin smooth and cheeks flushed. He had all kinds of talents that never found a place
in the world but his natural gifts were always announcing themselves, hopscotching in and out of
his daily life. He could whistle with great detail and nuance an entire Beethoven sonata. I heard
him once in the other room whistling a piece that I had been practicing on the piano for months.
He had never learned an instrument, but he could hit every note in every register, arpeggios
climbing up and down, with such precision and tension and clarity.
“He’s embarrassed. He thinks you’re so far ahead of him now that you would be ashamed
of him,” my father said. “You’re going to be a lawyer and he’s just a mailman.”
“But I don’t care about that,” I said.
“He should have been an engineer. He would have been good at that, but he didn’t want
to listen to us because we pushed him too hard. You should see his apartment. He lives in a
studio. He makes everything himself, out of batteries and wire and cardboard boxes. There are
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little robots and machines hanging from the ceiling. He takes apart electronics and turns them
into new machines. Ever since your grandparents died, he’s been alone and now he’s old and
doesn’t have anyone to take care of him. He sleeps on karate mats because he has a bad back.”
“It seems like he can take care of himself,” I said. “He’s making machines out of
machines. You make him sound like MacGyver.”
My father put out his cigarette on the windowsill and tucked the butt into a little metal
container that he carried in his pocket. He leaned against the back of the couch while looking out
the window, though there was nothing to see but the brick wall of the neighboring building.
“Don’t you want to have your own family? Have you met anybody at law school that you
like?” he said.
“I don’t think I like lawyers. They’re boring and all they care about is money. It’s a
bunch of young people who are already dead inside.”
“Boring is good sometimes. I know you want to be with someone smart and sharp and
exciting, but it would be better for you to be with someone who’s slow and boring.”
“Why would you say that?” Knowing our history, I’m certain that I asked the question
with a defiant tone, but as was his habit, he didn’t seem to register my having taken offense or
didn’t think it was important, choosing instead to keep going in the direction he had already set
out for.
“You’re a very difficult person and you always have to have your way,” he said. “If you
marry someone a little bit stupid then you’ll always get what you want.”
“Okay,” I said. Even though I didn’t like my father’s explanation, I recognized the
kindness behind the insult, which perhaps could be the summation of many of our interactions.
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“I never got to do what I wanted. My whole life, nobody let me do anything I wanted to
do,” my father said. “It’s different for you and Kevin. You were born here and we always let you
do what you want. That’s good for you. I’m glad you get to choose. You got to go to college,
now you get to go to law school and you’re going to be a lawyer. I never got to do anything like
that. Everybody just told me what to do. Make money and work, work, work. I didn’t want to do
the kind of work I had to do my whole life but everybody told me I had to do it to make money. I
didn’t have a choice. I just want you to get what you want and never have to settle or do
something you don’t like. I never wanted to be stuck working so hard running a store or a
restaurant. I never wanted to do that. I wanted to drive to South America. I wanted to see the
world. I wanted to be a truck driver and see the whole country. But I had a family and your mom
wanted a house and I had to keep making more and more money. I couldn’t ever stop making
money. There’s no end to making money. You have to do it until you die. I’m just glad you can
do something you like. Nobody would let me do what I want.”
My father thought that the circus would free me. He couldn’t see how marrying the lion
tamer or even a stupid man was a trap. He didn’t know that having a career, making my own
living, in a profession that he could never access might be another trap.
I couldn’t see any place free from traps, only big traps and smaller traps. I wouldn’t have
believed you if you had told me then what I know now: there is only one way to be free and that
is to ignore anything anyone ever tells you, especially if it’s about how to live, because whatever
they say will almost certainly be wrong.
Another thing I’ve learned is unhelpfully the opposite of the first: gaining freedom is sometimes
about knowing when to listen. Luckily, I’ve managed to not be defiant all of the time, to listen enough
when listening bears knowledge.
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What I’ve learned is this: the only way to be free is to find a way to understand. To find a way to
live in this world without filling with bitterness. How easy it is to get stuck in a cave of bitterness, not
understanding anyone or anything.
The biggest trap: to become a soul full of resentment and hatred, with no understanding of
anyone around you, not even of yourself.
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CHAPTER 2: House Hunting

My mother appeared at the bottom of the stairs, mink coat swishing at her knee, ankle
boots stomping up the steps. It was before the dotcom boom, and I hadn’t seen a single fur in my
neighborhood the four years I had lived there. Tattoo sleeves and body piercings—that’s how
you knew a person was in a garage band and not homeless. Neighbors were more likely to ask
you for a smoke than say hello or compliment your coat. I once saw a man who, from behind,
looked like he had wandered from the encampment a few blocks over—hair unwashed, torn and
soiled clothing, bare feet—but then he turned around. His youthful face was tattooed with lines,
wrinkles inked on his forehead, sprouting around his eyes and mouth. He was punching buttons
on a Nokia cellphone, a device that had become a common sight.
When we met at the top of the staircase, my mother held up a piece of paper, crumpled
and worn, like an ancient document that had changed hands and been folded and opened
countless times. It was a flier with a picture of a three-story walk-up. For the previous few
months she had been driving in from Napa, attending open houses.
“I saw a house today,” she said. “I hope I win it.”
The coat billowed like an open parachute. When she took it off and handed it to me I saw
that she was so skinny, so narrow, it was like someone had folded her up and ironed her. My
father had warned me that she wasn’t healthy, that she hadn’t been eating. She checked to see if I
had noticed her new figure. I was staring, which probably satisfied her. She looked me up and
down, comparing, silently competing with me. She was winning.
I hung up the coat in the hall closet, wedging it between stacks of moving boxes that I
had never unpacked. My mother’s footsteps pattered past me, disappeared into my bedroom
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where I found her already settled in, curled up in my bed with her eyes closed, blanket pulled up
to her chin, cocooned and moth-like. I watched closely, knowing she couldn’t already be asleep
but wondering still. Like my mother, I could never trust my own judgment, though for me this
defect we shared curiously applied to only insignificant choices and not to big life decisions.
Paralyzed by indecision on day to day details, overly confident about life changing choices that
you can’t take back—perhaps not the best combination.
ABBA was blasting from a set of speakers somewhere outside and a cacophony of voices
sang along, the sounds combining to form a chorus that had no melody, the voices shouting and
out of tune, free and electrified. The streets were clotted with people from the Love Parade
wearing a mix of chaps with leather briefs, cowboy hats, and disco attire, while small gangs
danced in the nude on floats and all over the streets as if the city was one big nightclub. I looked
out onto Folsom from my third story window and watched a pink float glide on by, the stage
swaying with bodies that gyrated and twirled like spinning tops.
I lived near the Civic Center because rent was still affordable, the subway and busses
were near and frequent, and because here things were happening – there were marches and
protests, a homeless shelter, petty crime, the opera, city hall. Life was happening, in more
obvious ways than they happened in Napa, where the public parks were empty and you could
walk through neighborhood after neighborhood and never see a single soul except hired help
cleaning yards. I had never thought of my mother as even having a life, but here she was in San
Francisco, crashing at my place, and it appeared that something was happening to her, though
none of it was anything that I had expected.
I was still watching her when my mother opened her eyes. She peered at me as if she was
looking at me down a long hall into another room, but I was sitting in a chair right in front of her.
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“Do you want some coffee?” I asked.
In the kitchen, I poured my mother a cup from a pot I had pressed shortly before she had
arrived. When she asked for sugar, I had a moment of mild hostess panic when I remembered
that she took sugar and cream with her coffee. I rifled through a cupboard and found a bag of
sugar that had been packed and moved with me twice, and was perhaps last used for baking
cookies back in law school, before I dropped out, for a study group friend’s barbeque potluck.
I hadn’t thought about the flier for the open house since she had first walked in the door,
but I was thinking about it now, seeing that it was still in my mother’s possession. She held up
the piece of paper and waved it like a flag, the photograph of the house moving from side to side.
I took it from her so I could get a closer look. The house was a narrow salmon-colored three-
story walk-up with a short driveway that sloped down to a garage. On either side, the houses
were similarly narrow and stacked, similarly pastel-colored, one painted yellow and the other
pistachio. Bernal Heights Gem, the caption read.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Do you like it? Do you think I could live there? Does it
look too small?”
Her short black hair was a curtain pulled open to the stage of her face: large round eyes,
wide nose, wide mouth. My mother’s emotions were always visible, at times so much so that her
expressions might reflect her feelings with such exaggeration that the result was comical, though
unintentionally. She no longer possessed such control, or lack of control, of her face. Her
expression was one of mild surprise, frozen in a state of near-shock, recalling the speculation
from my father and aunt about a facelift, though I was unfamiliar with this terrain and wondered
if it was just as likely collagen injections or some other kind of treatment that I was always
seeing ads for on my dial-up internet now that I was no longer an early or even mid twenty-
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something, closing in on the dreaded thirty. As far back as I could remember, my mother had
spent so much attention to her face—deep sea creams, vitamin c serums, retinol, facials, laser
treatments, chemical peels, dermatologists—all for a youth that was unattainable. While
watching TV, she’d hold a hand mirror to her face, examining the lines and pressing areas that
had lost its firmness. She had taken to keeping a photograph of herself on her wedding day
perched on the table beside her. Once as we watched a game show together, I caught her staring
at me. “Will you trade with me? Your skin is so young,” she said, hands outstretched, fingers
wagging. I heard a story once about an aging Romanian aristocrat who lured young women into
her house and killed them for their blood which she would apply to her face, an all-natural
miracle moisturizer. She’d smooth the fresh blood over the creases on her face, convinced that it
was an elixir that would return her to the skin of her youth. When the blood supply ran dry, the
face she saw in the mirror reflected her true self—middle-aged, saggy, lined—and she demanded
more blood from young girls. I told my mother that story. She gasped, though not from horror.
“Do you think that works?” she said.
Sometimes my mother’s obsessions exhausted her. She’d sit in a chair with her head
cocked back, a sheet mask pressed to her face. “I don’t care about my face anymore,” she’d say,
her lips moving through the little hole for her mouth.
I examined the picture of the pink Bernal Heights Gem. “Why do you want to move
here?” I asked.
“I hope I win it,” she said. “The open house was packed. I have to win it. Don’t you?”
“Don’t I what?”
“Don’t you think I should have that house?”
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“How are you going to buy it? This flier says it’s over a million dollars. What does dad
think?”
“Maybe I’ll live there alone.” She took a sip of her coffee, set the mug down on the table
and picked it back up again. “Do you think I could? I’ve never been alone before. How do you
do it? Will you help me?” My mother’s eyes bounced, never meeting mine.
“Why would you live here alone? Where’s dad going? Where did you get the money?
Are you selling the house? Does dad even know you’re looking at houses?”
“Don’t tell him,” she said. “I haven’t talked to him about it yet. I don’t know if I want to
live with him anymore. Maybe he should get a girlfriend. Someone younger.”
“What the?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“Do you like living in San Francisco? How do you get around?”
I considered for a moment the information she had just revealed to me and all that she
was leaving out. I watched her take a keen interest in something in her cup.
“I take the Muni,” I said. “Or I walk or ride my bicycle.”
“It must be fun being young and living here. You probably have a lot of boyfriends,” she
said.
The truth was that I hadn’t had a boyfriend in four years and I had never embraced the
dating scene, which pre- Tinder, OKCupid, or what have you, involved getting drunk at bars and
parties and smiling and laughing a lot. I’ve never trusted people who always look like they’re
having a fabulous time. No one believes you, I would say to myself. I couldn’t pretend to be
carefree even while drinking. Of course, this was one of many things I couldn’t talk to my
mother about.
“Maybe I’ll get a boyfriend. Don’t you?” my mother said.
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“Don’t I what?”
“What do you think if I got a boyfriend?”
* * *
“I don’t think you know that your mom’s not normal right now,” my aunt said, fork and
knife poised over her plate. A week earlier my aunt had stopped by for a visit, drove in from her
big lonely house in Palo Alto to meet me for lunch in Hayes Valley. “She’s sick,” she said. “She
doesn’t know what she’s doing. And I think she might have made a mistake.” She paused, lifting
her steak knife glistening with grease. “A big mistake,” she said.
My aunt, tall and straight like a sharpened pencil, wore a powder pink Chanel skirt suit
with black piping. I had seen her coming down the hill on Oak Street, her little pink woolly
figure popping out from behind the wheel of her gray BMW. I’d flagged her down and gotten
inside so I could help her find parking. Every time I saw her, she said it was too bad I was short,
that I should wear heels so I wouldn’t look like one of those Asians. She said it again, even then
as we sat in the car, and I looked down at my torn jeans and ratty sneakers, which I had picked
out purposefully, but, even so, she succeeded in making me feel bad.
I handed her a bottle of a cab that I had bought at the wine shop in the Ferry Building,
next door to the store that sold artisanal axes. The bottle of wine had cleaned me out. I knew I’d
be eating burritos and falafel for the rest of the month, if I ate out at all, but it was the ransom I
had to pay to release my aunt’s goodwill. My aunt squinted at the label, said she usually had
Pinot when she drank reds, and then rummaged for something in her purse. My aunt’s a crazy
bitch too.
She cut her steak into small pieces. I poked at my roasted beets, watched the juice streak
across my plate, forming little ruby puddles.
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“I think your mom’s having an affair,” she said. Her face was heart-shaped, framed by a
brown bob cut, wig-like, and her mouth was very small, like my dad’s. How does she breathe
through it, I thought. She asked if I knew why my mom had been acting strange. Then she
answered her own question.
“I do. At first I thought it was menopause, then maybe a mid-life crisis, then your dad
told me that she’s been seeing a psychiatrist and is taking anti-depressants. Maybe the pills are
making her funny. Have you seen her since she got back from Korea? No? When you see her
you’ll see. She did something to her face, but she’s not admitting anything. And she lost a lot of
weight. She says it’s because of her medication but I think she’s lying. Remember, she was
always chubby, always had trouble trying to be thin. She should have dieted when she was
young, like you – that’s when it matters, not when a woman is sixty. It doesn’t look right to be
that skinny when you’re old. Older people should have some fat. When you’re young, that’s
when you should be as thin as possible. That’s when it looks good. Your mother was never
pretty, you know that, right? She chased your dad because he was handsome. In Korea, he dated
beautiful women. He once dated a famous pop star. They sang duets together. She was trying to
help him get a record contract. He was really handsome, I don’t think you know how handsome.
You can’t tell now because he’s old, but people thought he could be a movie star. My other
brothers, too, they don’t look like other Korean men. You’re lucky you look like our side.”
My aunt was always telling me that my mom was ugly and dumb. My mom told me that
my aunt was ugly and scary.
“You should start paying attention to what she’s doing. Why is she leaving your dad?
What could the reason be? What would she get out of it? Think about it. She’s not normal right
now. Your dad says that ever since he retired and he’s been home all day, she’s been driving him
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crazy. She never calms down. She just screams at him and cries all day about how she wants
more money and how Sanghee stole her son from her.”
“This is nothing new,” I said. “She’s always been like that. It’s all I remember growing
up. Screaming, crying, blaming everyone. It was always about money. She would say to me and
Kevin: I’m in hell. I should kill myself. And then she’d blame us for putting her there. As if we
were supposed to manage her life and make money for her. We were kids. My dad was never
home because he was running the business, so he didn’t see what she was like. You’re right, she
is acting different now, but not the way you describe. That’s my old mom. What’s different is
that now she’s nice to me and she’s careful about what she says. She still gets upset sometimes,
only now instead of saying, Why did you do this to me, she says, Why are you not helping me.”
My aunt shook her head, tsking sharply. “If what you’re saying is true, that means there
was always something wrong with her,” my aunt said. She pointed two fingers at the side of her
head, then tapped it with a knife. “It means she was sick all this time and nobody even knew. She
should have gotten help a long time ago.” My aunt continued, noting how strange it was that my
mom was looking for a place for herself in the city and that I should think hard about why she
was making such a big change.
“I think she wants to be close to me,” I said. “She keeps saying that she wants to spend
time with me.”
“I don’t think so,” my aunt said. “She doesn’t care about you. Your brother is the one she
cares about. He’s her son. It’s something else. There’s another reason.”
I turned away from her then. I looked at a couple in the corner of the restaurant, tourists, I
gathered from their attire, dressed in shorts, t-shirts, and sandals, looking a bit chilled and
unprepared for the San Francisco weather. Maybe it’s true, I thought, maybe my aunt’s right. I
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had thought that my mother’s pointed appearance in my life was her way of trying to fix the
mistakes of the past, but I realized that it was just as likely that she was using me again for a
purpose that I had yet to learn. Her son had turned from her, so perhaps she was coming to me,
her last resort.
“Your mom wants to move to the city because she’s cheating on your dad with someone
who lives here,” my aunt said.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“What else could it be,” she said.
I looked into my aunt’s eyes and nodded as I had learned to. Perhaps it was my aunt who
was using me, planting the seed of infidelity so I would be driven to find out what was really
going on.
She chomped on her steak like she was chewing an old shoe. “I thought you were smart,”
she said, “but you’re being stupid. You’re just like your dad, not wanting to think about money. I
thought you were like your mom, too careful with money. Your mother, she’s always been so
stingy. No class. And you. How can you be training to be a lawyer and know that your mom has
control over all the family finances and watch her have this breakdown and then not do anything
to make sure the money doesn’t disappear? Don’t you care about your future? Do you
understand what’s happening? Your mother is trying to take all the money. She’s selling the
house but she’s not giving half to your dad. She’s going to buy another house with it and live
there alone and divorce your dad. He’ll have nothing. She already got money from her brother
and is making risky investments because she wants more money. It’s gambling. She’s going to
leave your dad with nothing after he worked his whole life. She’s going to make mistakes and
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leave you all with nothing. You, your dad, Kevin. What is wrong with you? Why don’t you
care?”
“It’s not my money,” I said.
There were many things my aunt didn’t know about my mother, and many things she
didn’t know about me. One day I’d learn that there were many things that I never knew about my
aunt. If she knew about the risky life choices I had been making lately, she’d probably start red-
flagging all of my suspicious behavior to some other family member, making another uninvited
house call.
I didn’t tell her, as I hadn’t told anyone in my family, that I had dropped out of law
school and once the registrar’s office caught on, I’d be cut off from my monthly scholarship
stipends. I didn’t tell her that my roommate had quit his software job when his boyfriend dumped
him and now that we were both temporarily free of work, we were using our Muni passes to
finally explore the city we lived in—the hidden paths, the urban hikes, the famed buffalo in the
park—and we were finding that the best way was to discover by foot. We vowed that together
we’d cover the city’s entire seven-by-seven mile square, marveling how we could pick any spot
at any border and walk across for seven miles to reach the other side.
I watched my aunt closely, this hard, smart, and queenly woman, banished from the
family for years but gaining dignity in it. Her greatest flaws were being cold, proud, and
unforgiving. Her strength was that she was a master of cruelty. I had always been told that I took
after her. A compliment and an insult. That’s how compliments and insults work in my family—
they are the same thing sometimes.
* * *
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The leading man was Stan Kwan. He was in his sixties, he was short and bald, and his
teeth were noticeably crooked. He wasn’t what I expected, but he was in very good shape, a life-
long health food nut. Every morning, he ate raw garlic cloves wrapped in bananas and he
commuted the city by bicycle, a bright orange backpack with reflectors hugging his shoulders, a
black helmet on his head.
Stan’s work had something to do with finance—investment banking, real estate,
mortgage brokerage—I was never really sure. What I did know was that he was loaded, because
my mother wouldn’t stop talking about it, though on first encounter, one might mistake him for
any one of the grandpas shopping for produce in Chinatown, clutching in each hand several coral
plastic shopping bags full of leafy greens, oranges, ginseng, and dried mushrooms. Stan’s clothes
were no different – old and ratty, too large and dated, and on his head he wore one of those
floppy tweed hats that old men wear.
Stan was Chinatown, born and raised. His parents had run an electronics repair shop on
Grant and Jackson, next door to the Wok Shop and the bakery famous for its steamed buns and
egg custard tarts, sent him to Berkeley for an MBA, and by middle-age he owned several
buildings in some of the most coveted parts of the city – Presidio Heights, North Beach, Nob
Hill. Within a few years, the neighborhoods, with the exception of Chinatown, would become
nearly indistinguishable—in age, background, income, race, political views, social interests, and
social status of residents—the inflated rent having become affordable only to a tiny cross-section
of Americans with advanced and specialized degrees in service of the tech world. I knew about
Stan’s wealth in real estate because my mother was always reminding me. He had helped my
parents find their first house in Napa sometime in the early ‘70s, before I was born.
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“He’s a workaholic,” my mother said, months later when she started managing one of
Stan’s buildings. “All he does is work. Never married, never had children. He just works. He’s
always on the phone, headset on all day, talking, talking, talking, three conversations at once, I
don’t know how he even remembers who he’s talking to, the way he’s always switching calls,
and all he ever talks about is money this, money that, calling out numbers, making deals.”
Saying someone is a workaholic might be a criticism in some circles, but for a Korean of
my mother’s generation, even overachieving Korean Americans of mine, it is the highest
compliment.
“Look at his face,” she said. “It’s all muscle, from talking nonstop.”
It was true. Stan looked like someone who exercised too much, but in the face. I got to
see him up close when I went with my mother to his office to drop off some paperwork. There he
was, sitting at his desk, fast-talking into his headset while eating an apple. His lower cheeks were
little bulbs of muscle protruding from his face, like radishes about to erupt. His jaw and the area
around his mouth were strong and sinewy, as tight as a gymnast’s ass.
A few days after my aunt’s visit, my mother invited me to lunch. It was the first time I
saw Stan, though from a distance, not up close in all of his muscle-faced glory. It was my
twenty-eighth birthday.
I was sitting at the window of Ichiraku in the Richmond, waiting for my mother’s arrival.
She was forty-five minutes late. I watched the cars drive by, feeling more angry and hurt each
time I thought I saw her. By the time her blue Mercedes finally pulled up across the street I had
relived twenty-eight years of arguments, both spoken and unspoken, as I drank an entire pot of
green tea. The car was from the early-nineties, about a decade old, which my mother would end
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up driving for another fifteen years, choosing in her old age to opt for a sensible electric vehicle.
It was the middle of Bush’s first term, post 9/11, pre social media, e-commerce, and mobile apps.
My mother got out of the driver’s seat and shut the door. To my surprise, a man hopped
out on the passenger side. I watched as my mother walked around the front of the car to meet
him on the sidewalk. He handed her a small shopping bag and jacket, they hugged briefly, and he
walked away, turning the corner at the end of the block. My mother crossed the street,
jaywalking across four lanes, but there wasn’t much traffic on that particular street, and hardly
anywhere in the Richmond, so she barely had to power walk.
Her little hand pulled open the indigo-dyed curtain that separated the waiting room from
the dining area. She paused at the entrance, scanning the wood-paneled room, searching for me
in the faces of patrons seated at the tables and booths. She looked frazzled, holding her bags
askew, wild-eyed and appearing as if she had hurried from somewhere, but then I remembered
that she always looked like that.
I did not raise my hand to beckon her. I did not call out. Instead, I waited for my mother
to find me. She did, of course, recognize me in the following moment, and when the moment I
came, I frowned. A reflex. Even if I wasn’t mad at her, I still would have frowned, though of
course, I was mad at her, as always. There was no end to my being mad at her. I didn’t even
know when it had begun. That particular day, what I thought I was mad about was that she was
late, that there had been a mysterious man in the car with her which may have contributed to her
lateness, that she picked a restaurant all the way out in the Richmond, for which I had to take the
bus, that she insisted on sushi because it was her favorite though she knew I didn’t eat fish, and
all of this on my birthday.
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She was always doing that. Insisting that we eat at the place of her choice even if the
menu didn’t serve vegetarians. She would even tell me what I should order so she wouldn’t have
to choose between two dishes. Once I asked her why this was her practice, in what universe does
this make sense? I don’t remember if I phrased it in more or less accusing terms, but I believe
that either way, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The thing that mattered was the fact of it
being said.
“Because I’m the mother,” she answered. “I have to train you. You have to learn that the
mother comes first. Daughters are last.”
I wanted to be the center of attention, for once, but what I didn’t realize was that I already
had been my entire life. I just couldn’t see it because the kinds of choices my mother made to
prepare me for the world made it difficult to know how much I mattered. All of that critical
attention had made it impossible to discern that I was the boss and always had been.
My mother settled in across from me in a narrow wooden booth. She was nervous,
avoiding eye contact. She looked like a teenager, slouched and withdrawn, mouth slack. I felt
powerful. One thing I had learned in my twenty-eight years is that being mad at someone gives
you power, especially if they don’t know why you’re mad at them. It didn’t matter that the
biggest loser was always me. I’d keep playing the game until there was no one left.
I was trapped. I knew that if I told her why I was angry, I would lose the advantage. She
would inevitably scold me for being a bad daughter, which would cast me into a pit of perpetual
defense with no way out.
“Why are you so mad?” she asked. “Did you see me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you see me park across the street?”
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“Yes.”
“Did you see that man?”
“Yes.”
“That’s Stan. He’s a very nice man. He’s my friend,” she said. “He came with me to look
at houses today. He owns properties all over the city.”
“Huh.”
“Did you see me do something?”
“Do what?”
My mother stirred the broth of her miso soup with a little wooden spoon. She had a way
of furrowing her brow that formed little arrowheads that pointed straight up.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said.
* * *
My mother sat in the rocking chair, hands cradling her coffee cup. The sun shone through
the vinyl blinds, leaving parallel lines across her face. She was wearing a lot of makeup, which I
noticed because she had always been makeup free. Her mouth was outlined in dark purple liner,
but her lips had been left jarringly colorless. I couldn’t tell whether she’d left them that way on
purpose or simply forgotten to fill them in.
My aunt would often cite my mother’s lack of attention to class, her lack of makeup, and
lack of interest in designer clothing and the kind of maintenance that requires frequent trips to
specialty salons and spas as proof of her lower class status, even though these were all signifiers
of a more assimilated Bay Area immigrant, though neither woman knew this. My aunt had been
widowed by a retired white history professor with an Asian fetish. He was a Cornell alumnus and
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came from old money, two facts of which she never failed to remind us. She cared for him in his
old age—he was nearly thirty years older— and when he died, she inherited enough to be
comfortable. Most importantly, she had been willed the big house in Palo Alto, which I was told
had long ago been paid in full. She had very little to occupy her time most days, since her
estranged daughter from her first Korean marriage had become pregnant, unexpectedly, by a
Swedish stockbroker divorcée fifteen years her senior and had run away with him to London. My
aunt dressed liked she was attending a board meeting whenever she left the house—hair coiffed,
makeup set, nails manicured, Chanel skirt-suit pressed, Ferragamo shoes polished—even to drop
off mail at the post office. While my aunt’s hair always stayed the same length, one and a half
inches below her earlobes, my ungroomed mother stretched the time between her visits to the
hair salon as far as she felt she could, her thick hair growing to the middle of her back before a
fresh bob. For many people, this might take years, but for my mother, approximately one. My
mother played tennis nearly every day with middle-class white women at the country club. I
knew this because before moving away to college I was there at the club with her, against my
will, playing tennis either with Kevin or the tennis pros, never with our peers, because with our
training there was nothing social or fun about the game. Tennis was about winning and climbing
higher in our state’s rankings. My mother’s friends looked down on her but tolerated her,
because excluding her would have triggered a sense of guilt that most middle-class white people
are not familiar or comfortable with. The atmosphere was one of elitism with crippling fear of
class slipping, and attention was paid to crucial details, or rather crucial silences, and to the art of
repression and withholding—no talk about money, makeup should look like no makeup, no
flashy clothing or labels, a bohemian and athletic style of dress and grooming, anything that can
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be associated with a high-maintenance woman is not approved. Immense thought and effort is
invested in styling oneself as casual and carefree.
I couldn’t help but stare as my mother rocked back and forth in the rocking chair, her skin
pulled taut from what I imagined was a facejob. When she spoke, everything was still except her
mouth, as if she was wearing a mask.
“I shouldn’t have given Sanghee my things. You should have gotten my jewelry. She’s
not my daughter. You are.”
When Kevin married Sanghee, my mother called while I was studying for exams. You’re
not my daughter anymore, she said. Sanghee is my daughter. She’s nice to me and does what I
say and gives me presents. I don’t get anything from you. You’re a terrible daughter. You don’t
do what you’re supposed to do so you’re not my daughter anymore. When are you going to start
making money? I remembered this as my mother rocked in the chair and talked about the
jewelry, and I also remembered, bitterly, that she had offered her diamond ring to Sanghee and
Kevin when they announced their engagement, though Sanghee had turned it down because she
expected a full carat, at minimum. I had been upset, quietly festering, because the ring had been
promised to me when I was a child. I would try it on when my mother removed it to scrub the
kitchen sink. I’d stare at the diamond on my ring finger, and while the band was far too big, it
promised a future of glamour and romance. I’d sometimes get away with wearing it for hours,
fingers curled under, careful not to let it slide off, until my mother would realize that her ring
was missing. After years had passed following the gift of the diamond ring to Sanghee, which
was rejected, I didn’t want it either, partly because marriage had come to look like a trap, partly
because the ring no longer represented what it had to me as a child: the expectation of getting
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something you’ve been assured is your birthright. No such thing should exist for anyone in this
world.
“I don’t care about that,” I said. “I don’t even wear jewelry.”
“I don’t like Sanghee anymore. She doesn’t care about me. Don’t you?”
“Don’t I what?”
“Don’t you think your sister-in-law is fake? I think she’s been tricking me.” My mother
set her mug down on the coffee table. She leaned in, face jutting out like someone trying to win a
race. “How long will you be in San Francisco? Do you think you’ll stay after you graduate and
get a job here? Will you still be here when I move? If you have time we can do things together
like mother-daughter.”
“I don’t know. I might move next summer,” I said, even though I had decided earlier not
to share my plans with her. That, and the fact that I had quit law school. After spending some
time thinking about my next step, I remembered that the last thing that I had been interested in,
before allowing my family to bully me into law school, before the 2001 recession that got me
laid off from my first job out of college as the night shift proofreader at a magazine on Venetian
masks, the last thing that was no one’s idea but my own, was to study Transpacific Studies at a
PhD program, possibly become a professor. I was getting my materials ready, as we spoke, to
apply to graduate programs all across the country, and I didn’t know where I’d end up or if I’d
even be accepted anywhere. Of course, I was keeping all of this from my mother.
“Where would you go?”
“I don’t know. Someplace else. Away from California.”
“Why would you leave?” she shouted, as if she had driven all through the night to come
see me and I had announced that I had an errand and wouldn’t be back for forty-eight hours.
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“Why don’t you stay here? I thought you’re taking the California bar exam. Don’t you have to?
I’m moving to San Francisco! We can do things together. I need your help settling in. You need
to tell me where things are, how to get around, what I can do here. Don’t you?”
“Don’t I what?”
“I need help. I can’t do it by myself,” she said. “This city is so brave.”
My mother gazed at her hands. As she stretched out her fingers I remembered that she
hated her hands. They were large and big-boned, and had become loose, wrinkled and spotted
like her own mother’s. Often, she would compare against mine and say that she wished we could
trade. “Why did you get all the good things?” she would say.
I’ve never heard of a surgical procedure that shrinks a woman’s hands, but in Korea,
while it’s not exactly common, it wouldn’t be unheard of for a woman or man to consult a plastic
surgeon to lengthen the legs. In fact, it is quite common to go under the knife for a seemingly
limitless list of elective cosmetic surgery, with the focus mostly on the size and shape and
features of the face. For certain people, a visit to the plastic surgeon may seem like any other
appointment in Korea, as easy to schedule as meetings with physicians who are trained to treat
every ailment, the country’s incredible healthcare system making access simple and easy. I once
visited an eye doctor and an ENT, to treat pinkeye and a terrible hacking cough, both in the same
day, without an appointment, on the same city block, with no ID. I even got a vitamin shot in the
butt. My exams were complete and prescriptions filled all under an hour and I paid only a few
dollars for the appointments and prescriptions combined. Cosmetic surgery, of course, costs
much more, though good surgeons in Korea cost a lot less than those in America, or are
comparably priced for the full Korean glamour treatment—recovery at a high-end hotel and spa
with room service and heated floors.
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The procedure for lengthening the legs has always seemed the most horrific. The bones
are broken, the limbs are then stretched—either manually, by nurses and doctors, or by
machine—and finally the legs are allowed to heal, a process that takes up to a year. This
procedure grants a patient no more than two inches in height. For those born with large calves,
one does not necessarily have to live with the unfortunate trait. Calves are shrunken by cutting
the nerves in the muscle, causing the muscle to atrophy. Short legs, muscular calves: just a few
of our Korean afflictions. Don’t get me started on the face.
My mother folded her hands, hiding them in her lap. She looked me in the eyes, her
brows knitted into little arrows.
“What do you mean you’re moving? Where would you go?” she said. “How can you live
like this? How can you live your life like this, not knowing where you’re going? I always have to
know where I’m going to end up. Don’t you?”
“I like it this way,” I said. “Nothing happens the way you plan anyway.” During a cab
ride out to North Beach, the driver said to me, Where did you get your baby confidence? when I
told him how I was going to change my life.
“How can you do whatever you want?” my mother said. “You have so many choices.
You’re still young. It’s because of me, you know, because I raised you, because I’m your
mother!”
“Okay.”
“It must be fun being you. I wish I could be you.” He voice turned soft. She tugged at the
skin on the back of her hand.
* * *
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We decided to head out for dinner. Little Italy, my mother requested, so I suggested the
place on Columbus for those Roman pizzas that come out thin and light, a small round pie
covering the entire surface of a white dinner plate, served by fast-talking Italian men with sing-
song voices, making such a fuss that I’d find myself blushing every time. I elected to drive since
the Muni didn’t reach out that far and the bus took forever. I’d often walk up to North Beach
through Chinatown, pick up an egg custard tart on the way, but my mom seemed tired and a
good daughter would drive or hail a cab.
I was lucky to have a car. It wasn’t reliable and was a pain in the ass because my building
didn’t have parking. This meant that I had to fight for street parking which in a densely
populated and high traffic neighborhood is one of those everyday inconviences that makes you
want to blow your brains out. I had to move the car almost daily to avoid parking tickets for
street sweeping. It came in handy though for grocery shopping, getting out of town, and for
quick trips across the city. I drove a Beetle, a model that I don’t remember the name of but the
color was called clamshell white. Not the new version with the little flower vase on the dash, but
a hand-me-down model from the late-seventies that my father had restored at his auto shop as a
college graduation gift. He had asked me if I wanted the new Beetle, but I had said, “New cars
are obscene.” That was a few years earlier, and by the time I had put a thousand miles on it I
learned that old cars are in need of constant maintenance. Only a young person who has been
given many things she didn’t have to work for would turn down the gift of a new car. That turned
out to be one of my many stupid decisions.
A few minutes into the drive, I was already regretting having volunteered to take my car.
I had forgotten about the clanking sound coming from underneath, near the passenger side. There
was no rhythm to the noise. It sounded like someone was down there playing cymbals, a triangle,
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and a gong at the same time, starting and stopping when you’d least expect it. I had been
ignoring the problem, hoping it would go away, driving only when necessary. That year I had
taken the car in to the shop numerous times for not inexpensive work—new battery and tires,
new brake pads and rotors, new starter. I had never learned to have parts replaced before they
stopped working, which meant that the car broke down frequently, though I’m still not that type
of person even while I am a very responsible person, the type that stocks up on household
products long before running out and pays bills well before they’re due. Like a good Californian,
I have a “go bag” and keep a case of bottled water in the closet, which I replace every 12 months,
in preparation for the impending Big One. My father, a few other fathers, and a woman academic
raised by a Nascar driver are the only people I’ve known who treat car maintenance like tuning
an instrument. My parents never found themselves in the situations I occasionally found myself
in. My first road trip out of college, the car broke down on the Vegas Strip. I caused the biggest
traffic jam that summer, my frustrations and a lot of other people’s trapped in the heat and neon
lights. Once, the alternator gave out while I was driving at night. I was on Hayes, driving slowly,
a stop sign marking the end of each short block. With no warning, the car shut down and
everything turned off—headlights, engine, even the brakes no longer worked. The car went dark
and silent, and I coasted until it stopped moving.
I should have remembered the car trouble. I was due for another breakdown. On our way
home from dinner, my mother was talking about the pink house and how she wanted to plant a
vegetable garden. As she named the different types of tomatoes she could grow, the clanking
under the car got so loud and constant that she stopped talking. “What’s that?” she said, ear
turned forward. Soon the car was shaking, sounding like an orchestra that was all percussion. I
held my breath as I searched the dashboard for any lights or warning signs. The arrow on the
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temperature gauge trembled threateningly in the red danger zone. I must have done something
right to counteract the day’s bad karma with good karma because just then I spotted a car leaving
a parking spot only a few feet ahead of us at the corner of the intersection. I pushed the hazards
button and let the car roll to the side of the road into the spot parallel to the curb. The car
shuddered, then died. I felt overwhelmed with relief, not only that I had magically found a legal
parking spot, but that the car hadn’t broken down on one of the hilly streets that were on either
side of us.
I got out and looked underneath the car. I didn’t know what I was looking for; it just
seemed like something people do. There was a leak. While I knew little about cars, I was certain
that I was looking at coolant, a nearly florescent green fluid that people who don’t take care of
their cars might see dripping from the engine, in some cases steadily, pooling into a bright green
puddle, especially for someone like me who both didn’t take care of her car and owned a very
old car. When I touched the hood with my fingertips, it was so hot that I yanked my hand away. I
dialed the number for road service and described the problem to the guy on the phone: car broke
down, leaking coolant, overheated engine. He diagnosed a busted radiator. Soon, I’d no longer
have health insurance—I’d lose access to the student health plan once the school realized I had
dropped out—and when that happened I already knew that I’d keep my car insurance and go
without health, because in my young person mind I was convinced I needed car coverage more
than health coverage, since my car kept breaking down and the windows periodically smashed in
by people looking for anything valuable. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen a doctor.
When I got back in the car, my mom was on the phone with Mr. Kwan. I could hear his
voice coming from the receiver, reciting the address of an auto shop. She repeated it slowly,
called out the numbers one at a time and spelled out the street name, then waited for his
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confirmation, even though the name of the street was simple and was actually the street that I
lived on. Mr. Kwan’s voice was sharp with annoyance as he called out the address again, loud
and deliberate, as if he was talking to a child, though there was nothing to correct—she had
gotten it right. I wanted to punch him in the face.
My mother pressed a piece of paper into the palm of my hand and held it there with her
thumb to make sure it wouldn’t fall out.
“Stan gave me the name of an auto shop, the best in San Francisco. We have to take the
car here,” she said, still pressing her thumb into my hand.
“I just called a tow truck,” I said. I held up the piece of paper. My mother’s oversized
cursive handwriting covered the entire sheet. I handed it back to her. “This place is too far,” I
said. “The tow truck will just take us to the closest place.”
I couldn’t help but feel pleased about having dismissed her attempt to be helpful. In our
history, my mother had always overstepped in this capacity, oftentimes sabotaging a goal or a
relationship, not only unintentionally but unknowing even after the fact. Early on, I had learned
to block her out so that she couldn’t try to do “helpful” things behind my back that usually ended
up damaging situations more than improving. The problem had become that I couldn’t tell the
difference between my mother’s innocuous presence and her harmful presence. Keeping her out
had become a habit, but here was my mom seemingly trying to fix things.
My mother took the note back and slipped it into her purse.
“Okay,” she said, folding her hands in her lap. “How long do we wait?”
“Probably about an hour. Maybe more,” I said.
“An hour? I can’t wait that long! How do I get home? I need to get to my car! Don’t
you? I have to get up early tomorrow! Can I walk to my car from here?”
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She opened the passenger door and swung out her legs. Her feet stomped on the curb,
making a hollow sound, and she was pushing herself up and out of the car. I thought this save-
yourself mom was gone. I thought she had been replaced with a new mom, who would stick by
my side, by necessity if nothing else.
“MOM! What are you doing?” I said, shouting.
My mother froze. She whipped her feet back inside and yanked the door shut. I felt like I
was in a cave, hollering through a tunnel to my mother at the other end, peering at me from
another cave. My voice rang low and flat, echoing almost.
“We’re miles away from my apartment,” I said, calmer now. “You can’t walk there. You
don’t even know where you’re going.”
We had pulled over just beyond the Eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, along the
beginning of the Panhandle. Cars swooped around the bend, leaving streaks of rear brake lights.
The Bay fog rolled over us like milk.
I wanted to shout at my mother. It felt like my body contained a deep well that had filled
to the brim with grievances, either unsaid or said and unanswered, and if I kept it in any longer,
the whole thing would blast inside of me, shatter outward, and reverberate across the world. I
pushed it all down because I was good at that.
I should let her wander off and get frightened of the street punks in the Haight, stumble
over homeless people sleeping in the Botanical Gardens. I waited for her to scream at me,
something predictable and accusatory. You’ve put me in hell! or I should jump off the bridge!
Something heavy with guilt-making, but so true to herself, or who I thought she was, that it
wouldn’t phase me for a second and the only appropriate response would be to laugh out loud.
For once, my mother surprised me. She did not say a word. I watched her, trying to make sense
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of her silence, and in that moment I felt a power over her that I didn’t know I had. She looked
like a twig someone had stepped on. I thought she would do anything I told her.
She wasn’t blaming me now. I wanted the old mom back. This one was confusing me. I
wanted the old mom so I could tell her she fucked me up. Then I would be satisfied in hating her.
This is someone who used to tell me she got nothing out of being my mother, who called me
selfish when I wouldn’t agree to switch places with her (as if I had the magic to trade identities),
who pushed me in front of a horse when she was afraid it was attacking her, who blamed me
when my dad beat me with a golf club—it was because I was spoiled, who removed the photos
of me from the picture frames and replaced them with photos of her younger self, announcing
that I was fat and ugly, who told me she had a dream that I died from accidental poisoning when
she had meant to poison my sheepdog, who convinced me that she had cancer (though she was
not sick) and that I gave it to her by being mean, who made me run miles with weights on to train
for tennis tournaments, who gave me pep talks backstage at piano competitions by telling me that
I looked fat and ugly, insisted that she was not fat and ugly, and that I better not make any
mistakes, otherwise an entire year of practicing, preparing for this one moment, would go to
waste. This is someone who will demand that you trust her, betray you, then say, “Why do you
think I’m against you?”
I didn’t want my mother to change. I didn’t want her to be nice to me now. It was too
late. I wanted the old mom, the one who had made me who I was. I needed the mom that I could
predict and understand, whose consistent cruelty and chaos-making and inability to relate made
things easy for me: I knew where I stood in relation to my mother and could still keep my
dignity. I needed the old mom. No one else could see me. No one was so penetrating yet
remarkably oblivious. If she was gone, I was afraid I wouldn’t know who I was.
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* * *
The tow truck got stuck a few blocks down—the Love Parade had cut off access—so we
had no choice but to ditch the car. I’d go back and wait for road service the next day. We walked
down to the subway, intending to head over to my place where my mother had parked nearby
and, I thought, would be her last stop before the drive home to Napa. In a day full of surprises,
my mother surprised me again, explaining that she was staying the night in North Beach and
wanted to show me the place where she had been crashing when she came into the city to view
open houses.
“North Beach? We were just there,” I said. “For dinner. Remember?”
“We were?” she said. “I didn’t know.”
I agreed to take her there, but I was unsure of whether she had wanted to keep it a secret
from me before or if she really was just confused. She had always been bad with geography and
with remembering the names of places, people, and things, which was probably why those were
areas in which I had become proficient. Twenty years later I still wouldn’t know whether her
lapses of memory were caused by a language barrier and never feeling at ease in America, or if
she was similarly inefficient in her native language and her home country. The fact that we were
fluent in different languages and cultures and knew just enough of the other was like having the
wrong set of keys to your own house.
We hopped on the Muni and rode underground for a few stops. The subway was packed
with a crowd of sweaty people from the parade, each car filled tight like a full bookcase, though
not as neat. The air conditioner wasn’t working. It felt and smelled like we were inside
someone’s sour mouth. I tried not to laugh at my mom clinging to a pole, sardined between a
man in black leather chaps, chest hair curling and sprouting out from his leather vest, and another
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man with a pink afro wig, wearing a rainbow plaid polyester suit. She was barely noticeable with
her mink coat and face pulled tight. I was pretty sure she didn’t know that there were many
queers squashed into us. She’d probably scream if the guy from the Castro with the bare ass and
penis in a holster walked onto our car.
A bondage group got off the subway, giving my mom and me enough space to be near
without talking directly into each other’s faces. She shared more details about her visits into San
Francisco, explaining that on the weekends when she was in town house hunting, she would stay
the night in an empty studio apartment in a building Mr. Kwan owned.
“I don’t do anything else here,” she said, “because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do
and I don’t have any friends yet. I don’t go out anywhere. Maybe when I move here you can help
me.”
She described the neighborhood with excitement, listing the tourist attractions, and
mentioned but couldn’t remember the names of the incredibly steep and winding streets that
were constantly being photographed, sometimes, she said, with hordes of people climbing off
tour busses and waiting in neat lines for the chance to take a picture. I nodded as she exclaimed
how expensive the rent was, how beautiful and wonderfully high and scenically located the
building was.
“I can’t wait for you to see it,” she said. Her face was instantly animated, despite the
tightness, and the closer we got, her excitement became more palpable, expressions more
exaggerated. “There’s such a beautiful view,” she said, “and a wonderful high high ceiling. It’s
so big. I can’t wait to show it to you.”
Everything about my mother was an expression of her inner life: her face and gestures,
her clothing, her manner of speech, the way she lived in the world. She continued about the
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apartment. She had a lot to say. Her face scrunched up and stretched out, arms lifted for
emphasis. Her eyes were open wide and her voice raised a pitch. Even her mouth was doing
things that would have felt difficult for me, her lips forming the shapes of the vowels that she
spoke, turning into a perfect O, Ah, and Oo. The habits that made us unalike sometimes
produced similar outcomes: I had resting bitch face, for which there were consequences, but my
mother was proof that there were also consequences for going the other way.
The subway climbed up and out of a tunnel as we headed further North, rising from
shadow to light, darkness to pastel Victorians and cool green parks. We passed the quiet
bookstores, ceramics, and noodle shops of Japantown, hopped off at Union Square’s bustling
village of upscale shopping and glittery sidewalks, and walked up through Chinatown into Little
Italy where my mom would finally show me the hide-out she had talked up on the ride over.
The neighborhood crisscrossed with streets that were so close to vertical, the cars parked
in rows facing the curb, at a ninety-degree angle. My mother and I leaned forward, arms
pumping, as we worked our way up an incline. It seemed as if the sidewalk might bonk us on our
foreheads. I could hear my mom panting, and the heels of her shoes barely touched the ground.
“People who live in San Francisco must have the best butts in the world. Don’t you?” she
said.
There was a cold wind blowing, moist with fog. It doesn’t take long for a visitor or new
resident to embrace the city’s climate—the weather that justifies all that fleece and down
counteracts the strenuous cardio that is not optional, the requisite frequent uphill walking. My
mother asked if another day I’d take her to the crooked Lombard Street with the flower garden,
Twin Peaks, Coit Tower, the cable cars, the Ferry Building, the museums, the Palace of Fine
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Arts, dim sum in Chinatown, and she kept going as if she had committed a list to memory,
surprising me that she knew the names of all the landmarks.
“What do people do here?” she asked. “What do you do here?” Still walking up the same
block, it felt like we would never reach the end, though the whole time I could see it—the
intersection ahead so near to the sky, peaked off, it might as well have been a mountaintop. Like
snails, we made our way past Victorians that had the appearance of leaning to one side.
“You’ve been to France. My friend says San Francisco is like Paris. Is it true?” she said.
“Everyone here wears blue jeans. How come all the young people are wearing blue jeans? In
Napa, I don’t know anyone who wears blue jeans. I like yours. Where did you get them?”
After our conversation on the Muni, I expected my mother’s hide-out would be an
amazing lofty apartment overlooking the Bay, the water spread out like a scroll, rolling out from
the pier into the Pacific. She stopped at an ordinary building that was not on a hilltop, as she had
claimed, and she led me to the side gate rather than the main entrance. I peeked through the
windows of the front doors as we passed, noting an ornate common room with Spanish tiles,
large framed mirrors, and a chandelier. We walked down a narrow stairway adjacent to the
dumpster. My mother picked up an empty milk carton and threw it in the recycling bin. She
pressed the lever on top of a gate, releasing us to the backside of the building.
“Careful,” she whispered. “The light went out.”
I began to worry that we were trespassing.
“Why are you whispering?” I said, my voice low.
“Stan gave me the keys. He said I can stay here,” she said, still whispering, “but the
tenants who live here, they don’t know. I don’t want to get him in trouble.”
“But he owns the building.”
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“Yes, but there are rules,” she said.
Behind the building, there was a little strip of dirt and a paved walkway. My mother
stopped at a plain door that had no peephole or doorbell. The door was completely flat—no
panels, molding, or trim—and had the appearance of a storage unit or janitor’s room. In
particular, it did not look like the door of someone’s living quarters. My mother paid this no
mind, intent on rummaging through her purse, in the dark, until she fished out a set of keys that I
didn’t recognize. There were three keys dangling from the ring along with one of those circular
paper tags with a metal rim, a piece of red yarn tied to it. My mother tried the keys on the lock,
one after another until the last one fit. She jiggled the lock a bit. We were in.
We emerged into a renovated basement room with a white tiled floor and walls with fresh
white paint. It looked like a vacant office that was being used to store broken household
appliances and old furniture—a disconnected washing machine, a vacuum cleaner that was
missing a hose, a yellow couch with a dark wine stain. The room had no kitchen, but on the far
end there was a finished storage closet and a full bath with new fixtures. One of those college
dorm-room mini fridges hummed beneath a lopsided desk missing one of its caster wheels. The
room was windowless except for one located next to the front door. It was small and square—
even a child couldn’t fit through it—with frosted glass and a metal grate instead of a screen.
Inside with the door closed behind us, I noticed that the door did not fit properly. It had either
been mistakenly purchased in the wrong size, or a well-fitting door is not a priority for units that
are not designed as living space. There was a huge gap between the bottom of the door and the
tile floor, allowing a sharp draft to sweep in, keeping the room almost frigid. My mother pointed
at a space heater and a row of small circular nightlights that were stuck to the wall.
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“Stan got these for me. He’s a nice man,” she said, pressing the lights on and off, one at a
time with the tips of her fingers, all down the row.
The ceiling was unusually high at the room’s entrance, a peculiar set of barn doors placed
near the top, but in the majority of the room the ceiling was quite low and definitely not vaulted,
as my mother had previously described. She pulled out the seat of the stained couch, converting
it into a bed, grabbed a sleeping bag and a yellow boombox from the closet. When we lived in
Napa, our country house surrounded by trees, mountains in the distance, I used to sleep in the
backyard in that sleeping bag. I’d lie down in the middle of the lawn, zip it up to my chin, and try
to count the stars as my sheepdog’s paws padded all over me.
“Lie down, lie down,” my mother said. “Rest your back.” She unzipped the sleeping bag,
spreading it flat on the pull-out bed. She plugged in the radio, which was tuned in to KOIT 96.5
(light rock, less talk). Elton John filled the room.
“Remember this radio?” she asked. “It’s yours, from high school.”
“I thought I recognized it,” I said. “I can’t believe it still works. Why is it here?”
“I’m here all by myself. I’m lonely!” she said, laughing as if I had asked a stupid
question. “I don’t have anyone to talk to and there’s no TV, so I listen to the radio.”
We were lying down on our backs, looking up at the ceiling, which somehow seemed
even lower than before. An old striped pocket tee that I used to wear was flung over the couch’s
armrest with a pair of flannel pajama pants. My mother pulled the sleeping bag around herself, as
if swaddled in a cocoon.
“Why are you staying here?” I asked.
My mother turned on her side and faced me as I continued looking up at the ceiling. I
could almost feel her breath.
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“You don’t like it?” she asked.
“Mom,” I said. “This is a basement or a cellar or something. I don’t know. Maybe it’s an
office? It’s cold in here and it’s full of old furniture and appliances that nobody wants. That
closet has a bunch of cleaning supplies and old carpeting. It doesn’t seem like anyone is
supposed to live here. It’s kind of depressing.”
“I like it! I thought you’d like it! Don’t you?” she said. “See those doors near the ceiling?
In the front, where the ceiling is high,” she said, pointing. “They open like a barn. This used to
be a drop off point to store wine, before it got shipped to distributors. It’s because the
temperature is right down here. The wineries would send crates of wine here to store temporarily
and they’d drive trucks into the garage above us and drop off the wine through those doors,” she
said, pointing again. “Nobody uses the doors anymore. But they’re part of the history of the
building.”
“Is that why I can hear cars above us?” I said.
My mother loosened the sleeping bag from her shoulders and draped it across my body.
“Here, we can share,” she said. “I can stuff a towel under the door if you want. I did it
before. We can turn on the space heater. I use it when I sleep.”
I should have told her that I liked the basement office janitor storage room. If anyone else
had shown it to me, I would have thought that for free rent, it was a gem. But this was my
mother, and I hadn’t yet managed to see past our own long history and her failures as a mother. I
could see that the world had abused her, but my own pain was far more tangible than hers, and
that’s how I failed as a daughter.
“You always just want me to tell you what you want to hear,” I said.
“What does that mean? Why did you say that?”
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“I could probably live here. But not you.”
“Why not me?”
“Because. It’s sad. You’re almost sixty. You live in a house in the country. I don’t know
any other mothers who are sixty who are trying to leave their lives in the suburbs and move to
the city to live in a storage room even if it’s temporary. Why are you trying to buy a house here?
Can you even afford that million dollar house? Are you selling our house? I don’t care if you are,
but if you’re leaving dad, you have to give him half the money. How will you afford the
mortgage? Why do you want to stay here in this sad room? You don’t have to. You’re talking
about it like you love it so much you’re considering moving in. You’re calling it my apartment,
like you live here.”
I wasn’t telling my mother what she wanted to hear—that she had found a great
apartment, what any person with any bit of class anxiety wants to hear when moving to a new
city—but she got back on top within a few months when she started managing one of Mr.
Kwan’s buildings in exchange for free rent. She had a top-floor two-bedroom flat in Presidio
Heights, all to herself. My apartment is better than yours, she would say more than once,
gleefully.
“If you think I shouldn’t stay here, then where do I stay?” she said.
“You could stay at my apartment once in a while.”
“You never offered! Now you do, but not before. Anyway, I don’t want to. I’m already
here. I want to stay here. I like my apartment and I like this neighborhood. I got used to it.
Maybe next time. Do you want to stay here with me tonight?”
“I should go home,” I said.
“Why? You can stay here. Then I don’t have to be alone,” she said.
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I didn’t have a good reason, since the following day was a Sunday and I had nothing
planned. Lately, every day was a Sunday and would be until I picked up a temp job or figured
out something else to make ends meet when the money ran out. I simply didn’t want to stay the
night with my mom, especially in that basement room sharing a convertible sofa bed with her. I
felt guilty and mad at her at the same time, the way I used to when I was a child and my mother
would sneak into my bed at night, because, she said, it reminded her of a time when she was
younger and I had just come into the world, and of when she was even younger than that and I
didn’t yet exist. She would whisper to me, her voice light and bouncy like a schoolgirl, and she’d
tell me that she wished she could go back—to when I was a baby and she was a young mother—
and back even further—to when she was a child herself, giggling and telling stories under the
covers with her sister in Korea. Before falling asleep, always, she would tell me that my life
seemed more fun than hers—easier and open. Will you switch places with me? she would ask,
begging almost, as if my consent could make everything change.
“I’m supposed to meet my roommate somewhere tonight,” I said. This was a lie, but lies
came easy for me.
“Okay,” she said. “Of course. You have a lot of friends. You always did. You should go
out with your friends.”
My mother explained quietly that the basement room could not be rented legally as living
space—it did not meet the city’s building codes—but could be leased for business purposes as
office space, and as far as she knew Mr. Kwan had used the room only for storage.
“He’s losing money,” she said. “It’s ready to go. Why doesn’t he rent it? I guess he
doesn’t need the money.”
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I closed my eyes. I remembered the voicemail she had left a month earlier while I was in
Tahoe for a wedding. In her message, she said that she was in the city and that she’d like to stop
by and, if I had room, maybe she could stay with me. I could see that the message went on for
much longer, based on the minutes displayed on my phone, but this was one of my mother’s
kooky habits that had always annoyed me. Who habitually leaves ten-minute messages? I didn’t
listen to the whole thing, which was my habit, and at that point when she mentioned staying
over, I had stopped listening. In fact, the second I heard her voice I was already holding my
finger above the delete button. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have her over, or that I wanted her
to be out on the streets. It was that I was so angry with her for so many things and had been for
so long, that any thought of her was completely incoherent in my mind. I wanted her to suffer
and feel rejection as I had.
“The people upstairs pay five thousand dollars a month for a two-bedroom flat,” my
mother said. “Can you believe it? It’s because of the location! How much do you pay?”
“Not that much.”
“What, you won’t tell me?” She folded her hands behind her head. “I love it here,” she
said. “When I’m driving to the city, as I cross the bridge, all my worry and stress just melts
away. It’s so exciting here. Don’t you? You know, your daddy and me, we lived in San
Francisco, before you were born, when we first came to the United States.”
“Yeah, I know. You told me before.” A car started its engine above us, reminding me that
my mother’s room was located beneath the building’s parking garage.
“Your dad was in San Francisco and I was in L.A. with my family. I ran away with him.
He came and got me in his car—he waited outside in his bug, just like you have, while I snuck
out—and we drove to San Francisco and got married.”
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“You eloped?”
“I didn’t want to marry an ugly doctor, like my sisters did. My mom tried to set me up
with one, but I didn’t like him. I told her that I didn’t want to marry him and she didn’t care, she
told me I had to or she would disown me. So I ran away with your dad. He didn’t have any
money but he was so handsome. I wanted to have pretty children. He drove a motorcycle and
played the guitar and sang Elvis Presley songs. I cried the whole way to San Francisco. I was
disobeying my family and I didn’t think that they would talk to me again. They did, but not until
Kevin was born.”
My mother slid closer, brought her face so near that I could see every pore on her face.
She was staring at my skin like it was a new dress that she was checking for defects before
purchasing.
“It’s still like baby skin. So soft.” My mother caressed my cheek tenderly, patted it with
the tips of her fingers. She poked and pulled the skin gently, checking for elasticity. “What do
you use?” she asked. “Maybe I’ll use it too.”
My mother often tells me that my face is so small it’s like a walnut, and demonstrates this
by holding up her hand wadded into a fist. She shakes it for emphasis. For longer than I’ve been
alive, my mother has felt bad about the size of her face. She was never brave enough for face
slimming surgery, an operation that involves shaving down the facial skeleton, the bone of the
cheeks and jawline, to attain the perfect V shape, or what I call the upside-down egg.
“Do you remember when you were little, you said you wanted to be just like me?” she
asked.
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“No, I don’t remember,” I said. This was not a lie. I didn’t remember, though later I
recalled that for a long time I had craved her approval. It had been so long, I could barely
remember the feeling.
It was then, when I could feel my mother’s breath on my face, that she said it.
“I’m leaving everything to Kevin. He’s my son,” she said. “He’s supposed to get
everything.”
She waited a moment for my response. Hearing none, she continued.
“My mother did the same thing—to me and my sisters,” she said.
This shouldn’t have been news to me. Neither her intention about her own will nor the
execution of her late mother’s. My mother had divulged both many times before, mostly when I
had been very young and under different circumstances, when money problems unfurled panic
and blame and regret about her life choices, though it appeared that that’s exactly what was
happening again, or at least the same heightened feelings blossoming from the same general
source: money anxiety. A few years prior, her mother had died, leaving everything to her two
brothers, both surgeons living in Orange County. The bulk of my grandmother’s estate consisted
of a very old house in Seoul and two equally old but smaller houses on the same piece of
property. A popular Korean soap opera had been filmed in the main house during the rise of the
Korean wave, greatly increasing the value of the compound. My mother was one of four sisters,
all of whom had experienced financial lives far shakier than my mother’s, and, like me, they had
been told since birth that, as daughters, they would get nothing.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but somehow I had forgotten everything or thought she
had been lying. If it was all true, surely she wouldn’t follow through. But it was obvious to me
then that it had never been a hoax. There was no reason to be telling me now, except as a
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warning. The shock and pain I felt was almost like I was hearing it for the first time, except that I
wasn’t. She had told me all those other times. Because of my own stupidity, I processed her
pronouncement that day while at the same time I remembered each instance from the past when
she had told me but I had chosen to forget. It was like getting punched in the gut in the same spot
again and again. I stared at my mother blankly. I had learned from my brother and father that
lack of emotion can be the cruelest presence. I wanted power too. My eyes burned into her face,
and in that moment I thought she was ugly beyond description. In no universe could I have any
resemblance to my mother.
“Why would you do that to me?” I said. “Do you know how stupid that is?”
My mother pretended like I hadn’t said anything.
We gazed at the ceiling. I could hear voices muffled above us, car doors slamming shut,
and the hum of an engine, warm and smooth, like the car my father drove.
“Do you want to go to the roof?” my mother asked. “The view is beautiful! Don’t you?”
I looked at her with repulsion, but she continued to ignore me.
“Don’t you?” she said again.
“Don’t I what.”
“It’s so beautiful! There’s so much to see. I love going up there. As soon as I step onto
the roof, all my worry and stress disappears. I don’t have to think about anything! Let me show
you!”
She was so excited that I figured that the real thing was not the same as what was in her
imagination, or what she wanted me to believe and that she knew was not true. My mother once
tried to convince me to take a freebie tote bag she had picked up at a home renovation
convention. I already had too many, but she kept showing it to me, holding up the blank side in
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different poses while making obvious attempts to conceal the other side, which it turned out was
printed with an unironic picture of George W. Bush. If I agreed to accompany her to the roof,
just like the faux vaulted ceilings, there might be nothing to see and I’d have to choose whether
to play into her delusion. I had already seen the view from a friend’s apartment up the hill. Every
time we stood up there, she’d point out the house across the way—the set for MTV’s The Real
World, season 3.
I wanted to say no to my mother’s invitation to share something beautiful with me,
especially after she had made everything ugly by denying me equal status within the family. For
my mother, financial insecurity was what compelled her to exclude me—as the daughter, I was
at the bottom of the rung in the hierarchy of the family—so that she could support her son, who
was at the top and who was supposed to save her. I would understand later that this was the way
that our world worked on a much larger scale.
Something was holding me back from saying no to my mother, even though if you’d held
a gun to my head I would have told you to just shoot. I wanted her to feel disappointed, but more
than anything I wanted her to know what she was doing to me without my having to tell her, and
I wanted it acknowledged.
“What can you see up there?” I asked, undecided, still. I wasn’t giving in, but I wasn’t
completely gone. Still on the fence. That’s where I was, which felt more than justified and I now
know was selfish, but it was the best I could do.
She opened her mouth to speak:
“Everything!” she shouted.
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I looked at her, a little stunned. Reclined on the pull-out couch, eyes focused on the
ceiling, her arms were open wide as if prepared to catch anything. She said it again, repeating
herself.
“Everything!”
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CHAPTER 3: Conversations with my Dad

When my dad got a job as a truck driver, every Saturday he called from the road. Utah,
Wyoming, Iowa, Ohio, New Jersey, upstate New York. I followed his progress on a Google map.
I’d drag and click, zooming in and out, the lakes and mountains and highways blooming and
shrinking. When he called, I always answered, though with my mother I answered approximately
half of the time. A kind of self-protection: my father never wanted anything from me, while my
mother’s needs were all-consuming.
“Are you okay? Do you have enough money?” he’d ask.
“I’m fine,” I would say.
He would tell me what state he was driving through, the distance in relation to where he
had been the previous week, and his exact location on the Rand McNally road atlas of North
America that he kept beside him on the passenger seat in the truck. He didn’t have to tell me,
because I could find his whereabouts on the map that I’d pull up on my laptop. Sometimes I’d
look up the weather forecast for the specific city he happened to be driving through, and,
especially in the winter, I’d worry about driving conditions that he wasn’t accustomed to, having
lived in California for most of his life. In the spring there was rain and hail, in the summer
scorching heat waves, in the fall there were winds, hurricanes, brushfires, and in the winter sleet
and snow and black ice. I’d wonder about the mountains, whether his truck swept along the
edges of cliffs that dropped down to the ocean or the unforgiving earth.
“I’m in the Hudson Valley, delivering pineapples,” he said once. “Did I tell you that my
truck is refrigerated?”
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When my father would ask if I needed money, which he never failed to do, I’d say no,
even when I was very broke, choosing to skip meals rather than accept help. I had my pride. A
twenty-eight year old with immigrant parents doesn’t take financial support from her own
parents, unless it’s against her will, like maybe she’s in a coma. She should be providing for
them, should have been already for years, even if there’s no need, and even if she’s been told that
she’ll inherit nothing because she’s a girl. Lavish presents, labels that signify decadence and
status—this is what a good daughter provides if basic needs have already been met. In the new
Asian America, she should be a money-making machine. Failing that, she should have married a
man who is a money-making machine and she should be a baby-making machine. In this world,
men may argue that women have it better—the logic is almost reasonable—that they, the men,
don’t have the luxury of the second option. But sometimes having a choice is more harmful than
never having one, particularly in this instance, where option number two only leaves a person
powerless, while never having the option means you will always have power, even if your
biggest source of pain in life is that you never had choices.
“I hit a deer today.”
“With your truck?”
“I was on the highway and couldn’t slow down. Too much black ice. I had no choice. I
had to.”
I was neither a money-making machine nor had I married one. My father had steered me
into a lucrative career by summoning up all of his will and imposing it on me. He had been more
determined, possessed more tenacity, and seemed to have more at stake than I did in my own
life, so I resigned myself. He was focused on the long game while I couldn’t even decide what
game I wanted. Not having a career had never been offered as an option, even if I did marry.
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“Don’t ever marry a man because he has money. Don’t ever expect a man to take care of you,”
he said. “If you don’t earn your own money, you’ll be trapped if your husband turns out to be
bad. You have to be able to depend on yourself.” In my thirties, my father asked, his voice tight
as a filled balloon, “Don’t you want to get married and have your own family?”
I had wanted to take Taekwondo as a child, but my father wouldn’t allow it. When we’d
pick up Kevin from his lessons, I’d watch him kick and karate chop emphatically, in unison with
the other kids in the class. Ha! Ya! Ha! Ya! I longed to be a member of the group, wearing a
matching white robe tied with a belt that would be replaced with a new belt in a different color,
signifying my hard work and persistence. You can’t take Taekwondo. You’re a girl! my father
had said. I can’t let you do that. Taekwondo is for boys. It was as if he was being tested on what
makes a good father, and based on all that he knew, fathers don’t let daughters learn how to
inflict violence, the territory of boys. When I pointed out that I had seen a few girls in Kevin’s
class, I no longer was allowed to accompany them to and from the studio. When I persisted, my
father made Kevin quit, which gave Kevin another reason to feel resentment. Why do you always
have to copy me? he said. Why do you always want to do whatever I’m doing? The same person
who wouldn’t let me take Taekwondo lessons also didn’t make me learn how to cook or clean
the house or serve meals to men. My mother of course wasn’t excused from these duties—he
never stopped expecting her to fulfill her role—and much of the time my father demanded that
she look after me the same way that he and Kevin were taken care of, which only filled her with
resentment: when she was a girl, she and her sisters were expected to serve the whole family,
including their mother, and here was her own daughter getting out of it. My father never
prepared a meal or even fixed a plate for himself, but when the house needed cleaning and my
mother wasn’t home, he would do it rather than ask me.
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My father was in that particular male camp of men with no choices. If I could name one
sentiment that represented my father’s true soul, it would be him saying, “I never had any
choices,” which I heard more times than I could count and as far back as I could remember, all
the way up to the day he told me he had signed on as a truck driver: at last, he was finally doing
something he wanted. It was also true that none of us had ever felt like we had choices, even if
our lives were more flexible than his and our choices better than his, though he couldn’t see that.
“Have you ever been to a truck stop?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I never really noticed them.”
“I get to use the showers. They’re pretty nice! It costs around ten dollars but it’s free for
truck drivers because we have rewards cards for filling up on gas. I get a private bathroom and
shower and they’re usually clean. The really nice ones have soaking tubs. I like those little hotel
soaps you gave me and mini shampoo bottles. I’m using them all the time and I carry them in
that shaving bag you got for me. If you have more of the little soaps and shampoos, I can use
them.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I sleep at the truck stops too, when I can. If I can’t find one along my route, I have to
find a safe spot on the side of the road where there’s enough room to pull over. It’s best to find a
place where other truckdrivers are parked for the night too. Have you ever noticed that they’re
usually not alone? Truck stops are more safe. It’s best to have more people around since you’re
sleeping in the truck alone.”
“Is it comfortable?”
“Yes! Remember I showed you the cab behind the front seat? I got a lot of space back
here. There’s plenty of room. It’s like camping!”
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The semi-truck was black and glassy, like a lacquered box—brand new, my dad pointed
out repeatedly—and when he showed it to me in the company lot I kept expecting it to transform
into a giant robot killing machine, because I had no reference for what I was looking at and the
truck was so out of context of our lives. I climbed in to check out the sleeper cab, which he
couldn’t stop talking about. It would have been rude to not go inside. My dad’s excitement about
his truck and the anticipation of showing it to me was surely even greater than when he bought
his first house—truck driving was what he had always wanted, while a house was what he was
told he had to have—even though he had worked so long and hard to buy a house, first pumping
gas as a Shell station attendant, then managing a carwash, owning and a running a convenience
store and then a diner. Stepping inside was like one of those dreams where you find in your own
little house a secret door to an elaborate mansion. The cab behind the driver’s seat was the size
of a small jail cell with a ceiling high enough that a person standing six feet tall could clear it.
There was a full-length bed, a little square window above it, and an overhead storage bin like an
airplane, a mini fridge, a microwave, a fold-down table, recessed lighting and outlets for
charging electronics, even a small flat screen television. I’ve never flown first class, but I’ve seen
pictures of those high-end sleeping cabins that are reserved for very important and very rich
people. Those spaces look a lot like the cab of my dad’s semi-truck and the purpose of both
modes of transport, when regulated, are the same: movement of people and things from one
place to another while trying to maintain some level of comfort and dignity.
When my dad first started calling from the road, we avoided talking about my mom. The
house was on the market and they were unofficially separated. This meant that they
acknowledged their separation and, with my dad on the road so often and my mom spending so
much time in the city, they were barely living together, but the finances were still in my mother’s
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control, much to my aunt’s chagrin, and there were no legal proceedings. My mother had moved
into one of Mr. Kwan’s buildings, a two-bedroom in Presidio Heights where she was working as
the building manager. The apartment was a four-story restored Victorian, painted robin’s egg
blue. It was half a block up from a quiet street with farm-to-table restaurants serving California
cuisine and boutiques stocked with drapey linen clothing and straw hats and vintage Ferragamo,
half a block down from a cluster of the most beautiful houses that were visible to the public
without being invited onto the property. These houses were grand, distinct from one another, but
of the same family, with curved windows, gold-trimmed molding, and intricately carved
balconies. The front yards blossomed with gardens and immaculately landscaped vegetation, and
wide staircases led up to houses that seemed to have several floors placed atop each other all a-
jumble, like a game of Jenga, with multiple peaked roofs and a single spire exclaiming its
presence at the highest point. Up the road was Dianne Feinstein’s house, which did require
granted access. My mother’s neighborhood was a far, far cry from my own place South of
Market with its basement full of rotting trash that no one ever brought up to the curb, the lack of
laundry facilities or a building manager, and the mixture of noise—street traffic, arguing
neighbors, occasional shrieks from someone out of their mind, garage bands with their shouty,
fuzzy music, the laughter and vomiting of people stumbling home from the bars after hours. My
mother’s place was classier than mine, but I was still young and supposedly still in school, thus
my living situation could still pass as slumming it, and, nevertheless, it was definitely better than
what my dad got, which was another job when he was supposed to be retired and no place to call
home except his semi-truck, even if he had been dreaming about it his entire American life.
“My pee is black.”
“What?”
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“It started a couple weeks ago. My pee turned black. I didn’t say anything to you because
I didn’t want you to worry. I told your mom. She said to go to the hospital. So I’m here.”
“Why is it black?”
“I don’t know. I’m at the hospital. They’re doing some tests and I’m going to find out.”
I did a Google search as we spoke: What causes black urine? I was taken to a site that
listed non-dangerous, possibly dangerous, and very dangerous causes.
“When will they know?”
“Soon.”
* * *
Maddie Reed Sorensen’s mother was the one to tell me that my sheepdog Scout was
dead.
“I was on a walk,” Mrs. Sorensen said, weeping on our doorstep, dabbing her eyes with a
handkerchief. “Oh Jane,” she said. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you. I know how much you loved
that dog. You looked so happy with him.” I couldn’t speak, uncomfortable with where the
conversation was going, but more so with Mrs. Sorensen’s sloppy emotions and the ease with
which she cried. In my family, anger was our only uncontained emotion.
My dad drove the short distance to Monticello Drive, the thoroughfare that connected our
neighborhood to town. Mrs. Sorensen had witnessed the accident on her morning walk and had
told the driver that she knew us, the Kims, the owners of the dog they had hit, that she was our
neighbor and that we lived just around the corner.
“They’re waiting for you,” she said to my dad, sniffling, when I had beckoned him to
meet her at the front door, as she had asked. “I told them that I would come tell you. They
wanted to wait for you so they can apologize.”
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My dad saw it first: the big rig parked on the shoulder, the glossy red tractor in front, the
silver semi-trailer attached to it. He inhaled sharply and hopped out of the car, walking
tentatively at first, then quickening his pace as he neared the two men in flannel shirts and jeans
standing over the dead dog. I tried not to look at my dog, but he was impossible to miss with his
fluffy white hair that ruffled in the wind. The two men looked at us, solemnly, heads bowed.
“Hi!” My dad said, smiling. “Are you truck drivers?” He shuffled into the bike lane to get
a better look at the semi-truck, craning his neck for a full view. A car horn blared when his foot
teetered into the road.
The older man stepped forward. “I’m so sorry, sir. We didn’t see the dog. We were
driving under the speed limit, but it’s fifty-five on this road, and at that speed there was no way
to stop. The dog just shot out into the road out of nowhere.” The man had white hair and a
matching white mustache that reminded me of the fathers in my neighborhood who would come
home from the law office and listen to the Grateful Dead and Simon & Garfunkel on the record
player after dinner.
I reached them just as he finished talking. I had been walking very slowly. By then they
had all shaken hands and introduced themselves. My dog was lying on his side right next to the
two men, not on his own accord, obviously, since he was dead. I surmised that he had been
placed there by either one or both of the men. I wanted to be polite and join my father and the
two truck drivers, but being near meant that I’d be closer to my dog, who was dead, and I hadn’t
yet seen anyone that I cared about dead before, only animals of the wild, birds and frogs, which I
always steered clear of, afraid of being so close to death, as if in the presence of something
sacred or divine of which I couldn’t understand the proper reverence. I was in the habit of
keeping far from the kitchen when my mother prepared dinner. Too risky that I’d catch sight of a
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poultry carcass, pink and headless, or a dead fish lying on its side on the cutting board, its round
eye staring at me, open wide and frozen in perpetuity, making me feel accused.
The second man, who was young, swore under his breath when he noticed me. His body
straightened as if attached to a spring. His face contorted into anger.
“You brought your kid?” he said to my father. “Why would you do that?” To my
surprise, his voice was breaking.
The older man held his hand up to his driving partner, continued speaking to my father.
“We’re really sorry, sir. There was nothing we could do.” He reiterated the posted speed limit,
which, he was careful to point out again, was higher than the speed at which they had actually
been traveling, or so he said.
“The speed limit on this road is too high, in my opinion,” he continued, “with these nice
neighborhoods nearby. These are good people, families with children and pets. I’ve heard of that
country club up the road, saw it on TV. Your neighbor, the doctor’s wife, she said the same
thing, said that your neighborhood council is trying to get the speed limit changed.” How the
man knew that Mrs. Sorenson was married to Dr. Sorenson was not explained and neither I nor
my father asked, but it could have just gone over his head.
My father raised his eyes at the younger man, confused by the sorrow in his voice, as was
I, and shifted his attention to the older man whose tone was conciliatory.
“How long have you been truck driving?” my father asked. “Do you like it? How much
do you make? What is it like being a truck driver? I’ve never met a truck driver before. I always
wanted to be a truck driver but my wife and my family wouldn’t let me.”
I don’t remember what the man said in response. I had a habit back then of blocking out
conversations happening around me, even when someone was speaking directly to me. Instead, I
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would listen to the tone and the rhythm, which can tell you a lot, sometimes even more than the
actual words.
The man talked at length, his voice slow and measured, respectful. His language had the
sound and cadence of someone speaking with great restraint: the tones of indirect, unspecific,
and uncontentious chit-chat, when a person does not say what they mean while holding the
message that they actually want to communicate hidden, beneath layers of nuance, the kind that
would take me another decade to decode and that would elude my father forever, never gaining
the social and cultural proficiency to even begin to puncture into the world of understanding.
My father listened attentively while the truck driver spoke. The younger man paced back
and forth, head down, distress radiating. He was very tall, taller than the old man, who was taller
than my father. He glanced at me periodically. Suddenly, he stopped, planting his feet resolutely,
and pointed at my dad. My mother had told me never to point at anyone, so I had a feeling that
what came next might be unseemly.
“How can you be so insensitive?” he shouted. “Why are you asking us about truck
driving while your daughter’s standing there crying about her dead dog? Why’d you even bring
her in the first place? People tell me that I’m insensitive, but I would never do something like
this. Don’t you care about your daughter? She’s just a kid. Look at her! Don’t you care about her
feelings? Her dog is dead—right there!” he exclaimed, pointing, again, first at me, then at my
dead dog, whose fluffy hair kept dancing in the wind. If my mother had been there to see all that
pointing, she would have whispered to me that the man had been raised by goblins under a
bridge. “You’re supposed to protect her from that!” he continued. “Why would you let her see
her dead dog by the side of the road?”
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By this point, I had stolen several glances of my dog and had pieced together that there
were no visible wounds nor any blood on him or around him, which was beginning to make me
suspicious about whether he really was dead. If I touched his head, would his eyes open? If I
rubbed his cotton-soft belly, would he stand up? Everyone else seemed overly confident that my
dog was dead, and here was this young man shouting that my dog was dead, that in fact he had
killed my dog, accidentally, and it appeared that the guilt of this accidental killing was making
him crazy, into a person who couldn’t stop pacing and shouting and pointing.
The man walked back and forth in long, loping strides. Nobody spoke, not even when he
paused. When he stopped, he planted his feet firmly, set far apart. By now the old man had given
up on trying to ease the situation. He had been holding up his hands to his truck partner the
whole time, seeming to believe that he could control reality with his hands and his eyes, like a
magician, trying but failing to interrupt his partner’s dialogue. The young man would not be
repressed.
“I have a kid too,” he said. “She’s just a baby, home with my wife. If my daughter is
lucky enough to get a pet dog when she grows up and that dog gets hit by a car, I would never
bring her with me to pick up her own dead dog, or anybody’s dead dog, for that matter. I can’t
even imagine. Why do you care about truck driving, man? Nobody wants to be a truck driver.
It’s just a job you do because you have to. I only do it for the money. I don’t want to spend so
much time away from my family. I want to be home helping my wife with the baby. I wish I had
done my life differently so that I could get a better job and provide more for my family, spend
more time at home, not be on the road so much. It’s not like I have a lot of choices. This is my
only option, unless I want to make less money, but we need the money. I don’t like this job, man.
I never thought I’d do this for a living. It just happened.”
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The man swept his arm in a semi-circle before himself, gesturing at the landscape around
us. His palm passed over the grand country houses abutting the vineyards and the rolling hills,
over the sun setting beyond the mountains and casting an orange glow on our skin like magic. He
looked like a son of Jesus explaining how everything got there.
“If you can afford to live here,” he said, “why would you want to drive a truck for a
living? Why would you want to leave this? What about being with your family? What are you
talking about, man?”
The old man put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You shouldn’t be saying this.
Mr. Kim is from a different culture. We don’t know anything about their culture.” He turned to
my father. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kim. Chip is still in training. That’s why we’re driving together. We
don’t mean to disrespect you.”
The young man butted in, again. His face could not have been more red.
“I don’t care if he’s from a different culture,” he said. “Basic respect is basic respect. It
doesn’t matter what culture someone is. He’s being so insensitive! Pay attention to your
daughter, man! Look at her!”
My father turned to look at me, and when he did, I saw that they were all looking at me,
all at once. The angry and sensitive young man, already full of regret and pain about the cards he
had been dealt, burning with resentment and a sense of injustice about how much more other
people had, unable to see his own power, power that he owned and that others didn’t, and not
without an expense to people other than his own, power that was his not by having earned it but
simply by being born. The older man who had spent a lifetime driving a truck for a living,
knowing what people thought of that and, by consequence, of him, which was perhaps why he
was so careful not to judge a man of another race. And my dad, who had been called a Chink by
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his neighbor so many times that we finally moved; who had been held up at gunpoint three times
at the convenience store he owned and manned alone for years before he finally hired an
employee to work nights so he could sleep; who had defected from North to South Korea as a
toddler, his infant brother drugged so that his family could escape quietly on their third and final
attempt, led by a guard who they had paid the last of their money; who would learn decades later,
after immigrating to America and giving birth to a new generation, raising them the American
Way, and sending them off to college, that the remainder of the family left behind in the North
had been murdered—every one of them—that they had been killed after the escape that had
changed his life and the lives of his future children, dead all those years, and no one had even
mourned them. How could I expect him to notice me? What pain did I have that wasn’t
inconsequential?
I knew how I looked, a child standing over her dead dog. I didn’t want them to see me. I
turned around and walked back to the car. My dad followed me, picked up the corpse and put it
in the trunk. We drove home in silence.
* * *
My mother had been trying to reach Kevin. When she failed to track him down, she
called me, looking for him.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“School,” I said. “At the law library.” I was actually at home, taking a nap.
“That’s good. Are you studying hard?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to Kevin?”
“Not recently.”
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“You should call him.”
“Okay.”
“Kevin is busy too. And he has a lot of friends, like you.”
“He does?”
“Of course he has lots of friends.”
“Whatever friends you’re thinking of, they’re not his friends anymore.”
“That’s not true.”
“Okay.”
“Remember that time he visited his friends in LA? They went to Disneyland.”
“That was almost ten years ago.”
“He needs a vacation. He has too much stress. He likes the bitch. Maybe he should go to
the bitch.”
“If he visits LA again, I’m sure he will go to the beach.”
“He needs to get some sun. Last time I saw him he looked sick. He looked like he needs
blood. Maybe vitamin D will help.”
“It’s really sunny in California, so if he goes outside I’m sure he’s getting vitamin D.”
“When you talk to him, tell him to call me. But first, make him dinner. Fresh food,
nothing frozen or from a box. With Sanghee away visiting her family, who’s going to cook for
him?”
My father called next, almost immediately after the phone call with my mother ended.
“You’re at school?” my dad asked.
“How did you know?”
“Your mom told me.”
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“I just got off the phone with her not more than five minutes ago. How did you find out
so fast?”
“She texted while you were talking. From her other phone.
“Mom texts? Since when? She has another phone?”
“She cleans a lot now too. Ha ha! Remember our Napa house, how dirty it was all the
time because your mom didn’t like to clean?”
“What other phone?”
“Stan gave it to her. For work. Have you talked to Kevin?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
“You should talk to him.”
When I hung up the phone, I checked my email for the first time that week. There were
over one hundred unread messages, the sight of which induced much anxiety, since I was the
type of person who, before dropping out of law school, had always set aside an hour each
morning to read and respond to emails until my inbox was down to zero. There were multiple
messages from school with ominous subject lines:
Immediate Action Required: Affirmative Enrollment Necessary
Immediate Action Required: Tuition Payment Overdue
Immediate Action Required: Fellowship Renewal Deadline Passed
Immediate Action Required: Withdrawal in Process
I did not open any of the messages. As I continued to skim, I noticed one unusual item in
my inbox, a message from Kevin with the subject line: What’s up?
I had never received an email from Kevin in my life. I didn’t even know his email
address. The message was from a personal account. He had always scoffed at modern
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technology: laptops, smartphones, the internet. For someone who lived in the heart of Silicon
Valley, it was an unusual stance, but he was a cop, not a tech bro or a lawyer or even your
average consumer. Most people I knew spent money on electronics, clothing, travel, yoga and
rock climbing, eating out, nightlife. My brother spent his money on guns, ammunition, and
tactical gear.
I clicked on Kevin’s message. Inside was a photo, attached incompetently, blown up in
the body of the message in such a way that I had to slide the window bar in all directions to view
the entire photograph. It was a picture of his dog, Linus, a pointer-border collie mix, black and
shiny as a seal. Linus was sitting at attention at a park, gazing at a spot slightly above the camera.
There was no message in the email, just the photo. I promptly closed my laptop.
* * *
When my father chopped up Kevin’s tennis rackets with an axe—graphite shooting off
sparks, gut strings curling into tendrils—we watched from the lawn in the backyard. We stood a
great distance from each other. You could’ve drawn a line between us, like a constellation, the
three of us emanating out from my father, who shone the brightest and connected us all. The
sparks seemed like my father’s rage, transferred into physical form, at my brother and his bad
grades, but also at all of us—me, my mom, Kevin, and the world. We were entranced, as if we
were watching a man play a game of charades taking his role a bit too far. I was thirteen, Kevin
sixteen. My parents were forty-three. I know this because my father would ask me how old I was
so that he could recall his own age, exactly thirty years older than myself, and he’d ask me more
often the older we both got, when, to my bewilderment, it became harder for him to keep track of
time passing.
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The chopping of the tennis rackets was not methodical. Rage is chaotic. My father swung
the axe down on Kevin’s collection of rackets, five in total stacked in a jumble. The frenzy
reminded me of a hotdog eating contest, but instead of stuffing and swallowing, it was an
explosion, a release of rage. He raised the axe high above his head and it came crashing down
again and again, cleaving into the chaotic pile, struck with such force it appeared that he wanted
to split through all five rackets at once. He even tried to chop up Kevin’s racket stringer, squatted
right over it with the axe swinging, but the stringer did not crack because the thing was solid
metal. Later, when Kevin would pick up the remains, he’d find the racket stringer rendered
useless, the force from the axe having thrown it out of wack and no longer able to read the
tension accurately. The effort left my father breathless and red in the face, which only made him
more angry. He had little experience with an axe and didn’t have much use for one, since we
lived in a climate where splitting wood is not common practice, the way it is in regions where
one must prepare for harsh winters. In Napa, with winter comes mustard season. The hills and
vineyards and the floors of the valleys are carpeted with canary-colored mustard flowers that you
can wade in knee deep, that blossom in January and bloom until March when winemakers plow
it back into the soil.
The axe had made my mother nervous, even before the tennis racket chopping incident.
My father had only used it twice, one winter years earlier, and I had watched as he happily
brought the axe down, splitting wood on top of a tree stump. He chopped with abandon, with
such glee that he reminded me of a teenager who had snuck out for a joyride in the middle of the
night while everyone’s home sleeping. It was as if he had lost his voice and finally got it back,
and all he could do was break into song, a kind of soulful ballad about pain and loss, the kind
that can only be sung with a power that begins in the depths of your belly and rises up to be
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released from your mouth, the melody belting out loud and clear, sounding across the expanse,
booming and bouncing across the valley. I felt that I had walked in on something I wasn’t
supposed to see, as if he was singing when he thought no one was listening. I was witnessing my
father reveal a part of himself that he had kept hidden, unknowable even to himself. With each
swing of the axe, a little more happiness blossomed, and each time the wood split, joy came
bursting out like war.
There was no glee now as my father chopped the tennis rackets, though I imagine there
was a certain satisfaction and comfort in the release of his rage, which was no more violent than
before. For the three of us watching, what we felt most was terror, and, for my brother especially,
the violence created an incoherent helplessness that bloomed within us, that would take root and
live there, following us everywhere, without our even knowing it. When I try to imagine what it
must have been like for Kevin, I can think only of what it feels like to lose all hope, when the
one thing that gives you a sense of identity and safety is taken from you. I wasn’t sure if I knew
for certain how that felt, but I thought that I had gotten close enough plenty of times.
Kevin was standing near the guest house, where he could keep his distance while
watching the wreckage play out before him. He paced in front of the sliding glass doors, his
features drawn in to the center of his face, arms pinned to his sides, hands wadded up like paper.
Our sheepdog Scout stayed with me, whimpering, head down as I patted him and ran my fingers
along his bangs, which I always kept trim. My mother was shrieking, saliva spewing from her
mouth, and she was crouch-walking, crab-like, toward my father, getting closer, then coming to a
halt, starting and stopping, returning even, retreating backwards. I worried that neighbors would
hear us, though the shouting and violence was cushioned by an acre of property. In the distance I
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could see the mountains that encircled us, that unmoving and dependable brown fringe. I wished
that my dad would do my rackets next.
Kevin stopped, unfurled his hands. He headed straight toward me, arms pumping, heels
kicking off the ground, his pace quickening as he neared. He pushed me hard, hands spread out
flat, palms hitting firmly on my shoulders. The sound was almost hollow, like when you thwack
a big playground ball with a stick. He never stopped, stormed right into the house. I watched him
through the full-length glass as he walked from one end to the other, until he reached his
bedroom, where he disappeared. Kevin was an efficient walker—arms held close to his body, no
meandering, no unnecessary movements. Every motion was calculated and specific, nothing
gratuitous. He had always made fun of me for bumping into things, and took pride in his
vigilance, his coordination. “You’re incompetent,” he would tell me if I stubbed my toe. “You’re
so predictable,” he’d say. Kevin was the type of person who corrected people’s spelling and
grammar. He was overly competent, self-consciously so, even when he thought that no one was
watching. Adjacent to his room was the living room, where the piano was the centerpiece, an
intimidating concert grand, black and shiny with ivory keys. Kevin loathed the piano, but I don’t
know who had stronger convictions: Kevin, who had to listen to me practice every day, or me,
the person putting in the hours practicing.
Our neighbors often assumed, bitterly, that my parents had received help from their
parents, that surely money had been passed down, for my father to afford such suburban
splendor, in our particular neighborhood in our particular coastal town, when what he did for a
living was own and manage a string of small businesses. How could someone who ran a local
diner have a house in the same neighborhood as the town’s reputable doctors and lawyers?
Afford to pay for all those tennis and piano lessons? My father hadn’t even finished college and
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he was an immigrant (weren’t they poor?), while the other fathers had graduate and advanced
professional degrees from elite American schools and had reached a level of pedigree that had
taken at least four sweaty brow generations in America to reach. Turns out you can make just as
much money as your average mediocre small-town doctor or lawyer running a convenience store
or diner or carwash or auto shop. It’s that nobody wants to do it. You have to work from morning
until night, no weekends and no days off—tedious, mind-numbing work. And no respect. A local
diner serves non-organic hormone-packed greasy burgers and fries—animals served here are not
grass-fed or free-range anything—with standard machine-churned, overly-sweet chemical- and
additive-loaded ice cream sundaes. This is not slow food. This is factory, to airplane, to truck, to
freezer, to freezer, to table. There is none of the glamour or aspiration of the high-end farm-to-
table artisanal culinary academy fine dining you can find on the 29 from Napa to Yountville and
St. Helena alongside family estate wineries and rustic farmhouses that provide tours of cellars
and caves full of barrels where you can sip from wine glasses in the crisp, cool dark, swish and
spit into a bucket. My parents had no savings, no retirement plan, no college fund. At home,
frugality was the rule, as if we were living in the great depression: paper towels and napkins and
sponges purchased in bulk and cut in half, the fridge and pantry nearly bare, no gifts, no
celebrations. Lessons and tutors and SAT prep, no matter what the cost, but no toys or going to
the movies or anything extra that didn’t support our economic and social mobility. One of my
favorite movies of the eighties was Coming to America with Eddie Murphy, who plays a rich
African prince looking for love in Queens, New York, where he falls for Lisa McDowell, a
middle-class girl next door. I saw ourselves in the McDowells, whose family owned a local fast
food restaurant called McDowell’s, a successful McDonald’s knockoff, complete with double
golden arches looming above the entrance. The family worked hard at everything—running the
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business, school, social and family relationships. They had a comfortable life and ambition for
more: strivers, like us.
I followed Kevin inside. His room had a door that operated by sliding in and out of the
wall. At least it used to. For the previous year, the door had remained permanently open because
Kevin had broken it during an argument with our mother. Not long after, he broke my bedroom
door during an argument when I locked myself in my room. He had bashed it in with his
shoulder and pushed me until I fell to the floor. Since the damage to the second door happened
too soon after the first, my mother paid a contractor to repair mine before my father came home
so that Kevin wouldn’t get in trouble. “He’s just like his dad,” she had cried to me. “It must be
your fault. You must have done something to make him mad.”
I entered Kevin’s room. There was no door, which of course was his own fault, but our
parents should have had it fixed—for a teenager, not having privacy can feel inhumane. I sat on
his bed as he stuffed clothes into a duffle bag. Kevin ignored me.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m running away,” he said, head down. “I’m going to Steve Stefanki’s.” He looked up
from packing, meeting my eyes. His face was small and heart-shaped, like my dad’s, and he had
worn wire-rimmed glasses with thick lenses since grade school, one of those things, like being
too skinny or too fat, or too short or too tall, you never shake as a grown up, even when glasses
become hip and you’re no longer too anything. Kevin not only had to wear glasses growing up,
but he was small and skinny and had a voice that broke, like a toy that needed new batteries—on
the other side of puberty, but adjusting to the new sounds produced by his vocal chords, or
maybe it was just sensitive lungs and allergies; he’d had severe asthma as a child and a few times
he’d been rushed to the emergency room, once even by helicopter. I, on the other hand, had no
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ailments, had never required special medical attention, started walking at seven months, potty-
trained at eighteen months and had never wet the bed, learned how to read and play the piano at
three years old, won my first piano competition and tennis tournament at eight, all of which our
parents never failed to point out, how I learned everything faster and better than Kevin. At
thirteen, my voice was lower than Kevin’s, though he was a young man three years my senior.
People couldn’t tell the difference between us when we answered the phone. Kevin had a classic
bowl cut until midway through high school when he got himself a flat top, tall and thick and
level as a hedge, the sides and back buzzed down close, modeled after Will Smith of Fresh
Prince fame. “Parents Just Don’t Understand” had become his anthem.
“Don’t tell them anything,” he said, referring to our parents.
I thought about how I was the one who would be there when the shit went down and our
parents found out that Kevin was gone. I had a stomachache from too much dread. Kevin
continued packing.
“Why can’t you just get better grades?” I said.
“I can’t,” he said. “I tried. I’m not like you,” he said, head down.
Kevin never cried, had learned not to, having been shamed by our father into repressing
emotion and weakness, the land of women. The last time I could remember Kevin crying, he’d
been eight, running from our mother chasing him around the garage with a broomstick, shouting
that she was going to kill him. When our mother said to us, “Do you want to die?” I believed that
death might follow. It wasn’t until I was much older when I realized while watching Korean
dramas that “Do you want to die?” doesn’t literally mean that the following action might actually
be murder, at least in most contexts. It was simply a Korean expression, like Americans saying,
“I’m going to kill you.” I met a WASP from New England who told me once that the most
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violent thing his father had ever done was shout at him when he was a boy, “I’m going to tear off
your arm!” which scared him witless, even though he knew his father would never touch him.
The threat had been a response to the boy falling into the backyard pool when he had been
warned repeatedly to stay far clear from the edge.
From the sound of Kevin shrieking, trapped in the garage with our mother chasing him,
he had been just as fearful and gullible as I had been. Our mother had always told us that her role
was to train us to follow her wishes, so that when she got old we would take care of her. I tried to
enter the garage through the laundry room so that I could try to help Kevin, but the door was
locked. I could hear him screaming, running in circles.
“I love you!” Kevin cried at our mother. The terror in his voice paralyzed me. My heart
was pounding so hard and fast that I put my hands to my chest to contain it. I became dizzy. My
vision blurred. I didn’t realize that I was about to pass out. “Why are you mad at me? You’re
scaring me! I’ll do what you say!”
As Kevin finished packing, I was already regretting what I had said about his grades, but
it would be years before I’d realize the depth of my mistake, how I had placed the blame on him,
which was the same thing that was always being done to me. Cruelty was something I had
learned, which I’d have to make the choice to unlearn, as would Kevin. We had learned cruelty
from our parents, who had learned it from theirs. In my family, there was not one person reining
in the terror. It was all of us victimizing each other, victimizers becoming victims, victims
becoming victimizers, blaming each other for our pain, afraid of seeing ourselves in one another,
the way the world blames people who are most powerless when anything bad happens to them.
“I can’t get better grades,” Kevin said. “I tried. It’s the best I can do. I can’t do geometry.
I can’t do calculus. Why do people say that Asians are good at math?”
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“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not good at math either. They say that if you’re good at
music you’re good at math too. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“But you still get A’s,” he said. We both had math tutors, but there’s only so much a tutor
can do when a student has no interest in the subject. Kevin and I had both resorted to cheating. I
was better at it, though, or luckier, perhaps, because I sat next to a friend who was a math whiz
and let me copy off her exams. It wasn’t until later that I realized the irony of an Asian kid
cheating off a popular white girl in math class.
My eyes roamed around Kevin’s room, resting on his prized possessions, from the jar of
marbles on his desk to the bookshelves, where he kept his hardcovers of Doctor Doolittle, an
early edition box set that our English tutor gave him before moving away to find something more
lucrative to do with his PhD.
“Don’t touch my stuff,” Kevin said, watching me. “If you touch anything, I’ll know. Why
do you think everything is yours? Greedy. Dad always said that women are greedy. He’s right.
It’s true.”
“I’m not going to,” I said, even though I was already planning on reading his books and
putting them back exactly as I had found them. In the past, I’d used a ruler to measure the
distance between the spines and the edge of the shelf.
“Everything is so easy for you. It’s because you’re a girl. You get to do whatever you
want.”
I picked at the bedspread, black like the sheets. Kevin was obsessed with black. He
dressed in black from head to toe—even his tennis clothes were black—though his style was not
that of a goth theater kid, but more like Andre Agassi in the early nineties: black shirt, black
shorts, black socks, black sneakers, and black shoelaces, a little bit of neon thrown in.
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Kevin was often getting written up at school for deviating from the dress code, a white
polo shirt and khakis. He attended the only private school in town, while I was enrolled at one of
the two public schools. Because I was a girl, our parents didn’t think that they had to send me to
private school too. They could barely afford to send Kevin, so the justification was easy enough,
though they soon learned that it would have been better to cite financial reasons rather than say
“because Jane is a girl” when the other parents asked. We became a source of gossip for years.
Kevin’s room was covered in wallpaper that our mother had picked out when he had been
in grade school. Half of the room in little blue and green vintage cars and palm trees, the other
half in blue and green pinstripes. Kevin had long since grown out of the design, had possibly
never even liked it, having never been consulted for his opinion, but even so our mother would
not consent to his request to have the walls stripped and painted white. The previous summer, a
middle-aged man with a red beard had popped up around town, selling flags from the back of a
pickup truck. Kevin had bought a black flag emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, a pirate hat
on top of the head and a red eye-patch over a hollow eye socket. The pirate flag was big enough
to cover almost an entire wallpapered wall. The rest of the room was plastered with Spiderman
posters (Black Suit Spidey only), drawn by Stan Lee, who Kevin liked to imagine was Asian,
like us. Maybe underneath that suit, even Spiderman was Asian.
Kevin rearranged some of the clothing in his duffle bag to make room for toiletries.
“Don’t leave me alone with them,” I said.
Kevin looked at me, eyes narrowed.
“Why does it matter?” he said. “They’re nice to you. I can’t believe dad broke all my
rackets. What am I supposed to do now?” he said, his voice tightening. “I wish I was a girl,” he
said. “Everything is easier for you. Mom and dad leave you alone. They’re not always yelling at
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you and telling you what to do, like me. They say that you do everything right, that you’re good
at everything. Dad didn’t break your rackets. How could he do that to me? He’s fucking crazy!”
Kevin’s hands were wadded into balls of paper, his mouth small and pointed. “He thinks you’re
perfect. He’s nice to you. Is it because you get good grades? Because you’re a girl? They leave
you alone but they’re always on me, telling me what to do. Nothing I do is right. Whenever you
ask for something, they give it to you because you’re a girl. Sometimes you ask for things that
you don’t even want, you just ask because I want it, and they won’t give it to me but dad will go
right out and buy it for you.”
There was no room to contradict him. He was so certain of himself, so adept at making
others believe in his victimhood and my role as victimizer, that sometimes even I believed him.
“You’re so stupid,” Kevin said, each word emphasized into separate sentences. He swung
the duffle bag over his shoulder and walked out, exiting the house through a back door, shutting
it quietly. A few minutes later I heard him start his car and drive away.
I couldn’t hear anyone in the house. I wasn’t sure if my parents had come inside, whether
they had seen Kevin leave. If they had, they would have thought that he was just letting off some
steam, and since he was a boy, they wouldn’t have questioned where he was going, just as they
never questioned his choices, nor did they expect a request for permission to do anything or go
anywhere. That was my impression. Kevin apparently felt differently.
I picked up the jar of marbles from Kevin’s desk, letting the weight sink in my hands
before unscrewing the lid. There was a mix of different varieties of marbles inside, a whole swirl
of colors. I liked the transparent ones best, how you could see right through to the center where
there was a whirl of blue, green, orange, and pink, curlicued like pigs’ tails. I held several in one
hand, letting them clink together, the clean sound of glass tapping glass. I put the marbles back in
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the jar, keeping two, held one in each hand and rolled them on my face, up and down the length
of my cheeks. They were smooth and cool and I could feel their energy everywhere—in the soles
of my feet, the pit of my stomach, and tingling in my brain and my bones. I wanted to swallow
them.
* * *
Like clockwork, my father called from the road. It was Saturday afternoon. I could hear
the truck rumbling in the background. My dad’s headset picked up little noises that I couldn’t
identify, translated into static through my end.
“Do you remember?” I asked.
“What?” he responded.
“When Kevin ran away,” I said.
“He never ran away. Why would he run away?”
“Because you wouldn’t let him play tennis anymore.”
“Why are you bringing up something from so long ago?”
“You said you didn’t remember.”
“Everything turned out fine. He started playing again. He got to play tennis in college. I
guess that’s how he got in. His grades didn’t do it.”
--
“You didn’t run away. There was nothing wrong with you. You were always the strong
one. Kevin was always getting sick. You’re stronger than your mom. You’re more like me, like
my side. Kevin is like your mom’s side.”
“Mom is strong. People are always saying she isn’t, but she is.”
--
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“Do you remember that stuff on the news about Korean kids running away because their
parents pushed them too hard?” I asked. “I think it was the eighties, maybe early nineties.”
“Jane.”
“What.”
“It was hard for us. We were just trying to survive.”
“I know.”
“We couldn’t be like your friend’s parents.”
“I know.”
--
“Those news stories were stupid, but they were running away. That part was true.”
--
“There was other stuff on the news, later—the murder-suicides. Do you remember?” I
asked.
“No,” he said.
“About ten years ago, I think, in L.A.,” I said. “Korean fathers were killing their children
and wives, and then themselves. It happened like three times in one week. Completely unrelated.
Do you remember?”
“Why do you want to bring up something from so long ago?”
“Why did all those Korean fathers kill their families and commit suicide?”
“I don’t know. They were having financial trouble.”

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CHAPTER 4: Paradise Cove

The beach house in Bodega Bay was supposed to be our escape, but it was just another
place for us to be uncomfortable together. Every summer we’d spend a week there. My father
drove us in his coral car, a BMW sedan so glossy it was almost invisible: all you could see were
the various reflections of surrounding objects and colors. Every three months my father waxed
the car with his shirt off, white stomach puffing out. For over an hour, his hands moved in little
circles, pressing down on the surface of the car with soft round pads, cloudy swirls and spirals
gradually covering the entirety of the coral finish. In the twenty-five years that my father owned
the car, it never broke down, so attentive was he to the lifespan of parts, wires, and tubing, and
the degradation of the distinct interior workings of the machine. He was proud of the car. It was
the first expensive car he’d ever owned or purchased, brand new from the dealer, unlike our
hand-me-down Vanagon or the little brown Datsun hatchback he brought home after bartering
with a stranger who’d posted a for sale sign in the rear window. The car was one of those
markers of success, and my father’s feeling of accomplishment flowed onto me, stirring in me a
sense of pride of his American success, of the special attention with which he cared for the car,
purchased with his hard-earned money, and of how, by extension, the car belonged to us all—my
parents, Kevin, and me—a symbol of where we stood, our legitimacy.
I was almost thirty when he gave the car away. He didn’t sell it. As far as I knew, Korean
immigrants did not sell possessions. They gave away the things they no longer needed, and even
the things they still had a need for, simply to be generous, to help out someone who had less, to
family or to Koreans in the community, and this was a trait that I had always respected about my
people, this sense that we should help each other, that we were part of a large extended network,
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connected by collective traumas passed down through generations. No one wanted such an old
car, and while I didn’t want to see it go, I didn’t have anywhere to keep it, or the income to
insure or maintain it, since I would soon have to start paying off the debt I had incurred before
dropping out of law school. I was getting by on my scholarship stipends, which hadn’t been cut
off yet, but soon I’d be hit with a double whammy: notices in the mail about student loans
entering payment and no income to meet those payments, much less any others. The day my
father donated the car to charity, I was in my apartment, opening and closing the fridge, making
sandwiches, baking bread, screwing the lids of jars on too tight so I couldn’t open them again
later.
The beach house was another achievement, acquired after two luxury cars and one
regular one, a new house in the hills, and the country club. I was embarrassed about it, and didn’t
mention it to people who didn’t already know.
***
When we first got the house, my father had just sold his diner in Sacramento and was
between businesses. The diner was straight out of Archie Comics with black and white
checkered floors, round counter stools that whirled round like spinning teacups, and little
jukeboxes at every booth that played the classics of the fifties and sixties. Before that, he’d sold a
carwash and a 7-Eleven store, which allowed us to move across town where my parents said our
lives were about to get better. Our previous neighbors had been young families with hardworking
fathers like mine—a fireman, a shoe salesman, a prison guard. Our new neighbors were also
young families, again with fathers that were hardly ever home—mostly local doctors and
lawyers, the occasional small business owner, like the Garafalos, the Italian family down the
block who owned the only flower shop in town. Even before that, my dad was an attendant at a
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Shell station, back when a fill-up was full-service—you’d just sit in your car while someone like
my dad filled up your tank, polished your wheels and squeegeed your windows, took your credit
card and came back with a receipt that you’d sign on a little tray as if at a restaurant. There was
no house then, just a little studio apartment in Koreatown, Los Angeles, followed by another in
San Francisco, and yet another in a part of Napa I had only seen once when my dad took me
without warning on the way home from back-to-back piano and tennis lessons.
“See that?” he’d said, pointing at a two-story run-down apartment building. “I can’t
believe it’s still there! We used to live there. Not you, though. You weren’t born yet. Your mom
and me and Kevin, when he was a baby, so small he wouldn’t remember, and even my sister for
a while. All of us in one room. Your mom and your aunt never stopped fighting.” I mostly was
looking at my dad as he spoke, not at the crummy apartment building, staring at him in disbelief.
This was the first I had heard of a life before our old house.
Soon my dad would take over the town’s diner, a family-friendly burger joint that served
malted milkshakes and classic sundaes like banana split, caramel apple, and hot fudge. There
was also a selection of ice cream pies, chocolate-dipped frozen bananas, and ice cream cookie
clowns dressed with bubble gum drops, whipped cream, and a sugar cone for a hat. The
restaurant was a full-service dine-in with three sections of maroon leather booths and it was also
a walk-in ice cream shop with at least thirty flavors in big tubs lined up in freezers with glass
cases. I must have eaten at least a sundae a day for five years until I left for college. For
approximately ten years after, I lost all interest in ice cream—the thought of it made me gag. The
diner/ice cream shop was called Swensen’s—a Swedish name, which none of us ever thought
about until my cousin’s Swedish husband pointed it out, smirking, as if the fact that we didn’t
know the name’s origin meant that we knew nothing—and at the entrance there was a framed
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vintage-appearing poster in shades of antique brown and eggshell white, with Mr. Swensen and
his white hair and old man silver frame eyeglasses—same as my dad wore—in a brown striped
apron holding a hot fudge sundae, his namesake highlighted underneath in cursive. The only
other ice cream place in town was a Foster’s Freeze that went under when I was in high school.
Like the Garofalos who owned the flower shop, we were the Kims who owned Swensen’s.
Between the old diner and the new diner, my father was noticeably free and by that I
mean he was actually home, and home a lot. He started playing golf again, which he loved for
the wide open spaces, lush lawns, and male fraternizing, particularly when he could get together
with long-time Korean friends, the lot of them free of their wives and chain-smoking in bright
polo shirts that you could spot a mile away. He previously rarely had time for the game even
though our country club’s main attractions were tennis, golf, and swim, with a full service
clubhouse, all of which he paid for for the rest of us to enjoy, if that’s what you’d call it, but
never got to enjoy himself. During this unprecedented period of free time, he brought up the
possibility of truck driving, which caused a week-long parade of arguments between him and my
mother, who had other plans, one of which was to acquire a second house, which would become
the beach house and propelled my mother into a spell of hyper focus—the process of
procurement and, afterwards, of nesting—that allowed my mother to blossom into her truest
form: pure hustle.
At the beginning, we visited on the occasional weekend, stayed for a week during the
summer, and twice we went for Christmas, packing into the car wearing fisherman’s sweaters
and fleece pullovers, until the new diner took over our lives—my dad working daily from
morning until night and my mom on weekdays, while Kevin and I took turns over the weekends
depending on which one of us had to travel for a tennis tournament or piano competition. The
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business closed for a few days over Christmas, but my parents decided that they would rather
stay home and hibernate. A few times we went skiing in Tahoe, but those trips were organized
by my aunt, who’d rent a cabin and pay for our lift tickets, not that she wanted to—she’d remind
us repeatedly of her resentment—but she’d been pressured by her daughter who’d grown up and
was asking why she was kept at arm’s length from her family.
I learned early on that the beach house wasn’t meant to fulfill our own enjoyment and
recreation. It was a service for other people, so as long as they paid for it, much like the
restaurant. The purpose was pure economics, to generate income as a rental and serve as my
parent’s retirement home—since it was both smaller and location more remote than our house in
Napa, it’s value was much lower—and, of course, my parents loved to brag about it. Depending
on the context, the way in which they were winning had a different spin. Compared against
Korean friends at Korean churches across America, they were on top—the top Koreans from
Korea, the top family, the top parents with the top Korean American children—as if our
superiority was in our blood. For my mother’s two doctor brothers and Korean friends who were
American doctors, the response was sputtering frustration that often boiled into rage—how they
had worked tirelessly to get where they were and here was my dad having taken a “shortcut” to
get the same thing. Compared to them, my parents were equals, having shoved their way in. For
Korean friends back home in Korea, my parents were gods. For our white neighbors and all the
families in our small town who looked down on us: my parents were giving them the double
middle finger.
In total, we must have made the trip to Bodega Bay only a handful of times, between
rentals, but my mother would try to reserve a week in the summer, especially when Kevin and I
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were grown and out of the house and telling us that we had to come visit while the house was
free was the only time she could get us together as a family otherwise.
When Kevin and I still lived at home, where the space between the four of us bristled
with stifling silence or noise and violence, we’d pile in the car with our overnight bags and
cooler packed with kimbab and kimchi, and without our knowing it we’d cram that prickly space
in with us, trapping it against each other for hours all the way to Bodega Bay, where it would
settle into the dark corners of the house, simmer and smoke like lifting fog. I sometimes thought
I could see it—our invisible baggage—in the mornings on the beach, drifting between and above
us like low-lying clouds, receding into the ocean only to arrive again, an endless loop.
We always took my dad’s coral BMW. The interior was black leather, conditioned so
frequently with lotions and detailing solutions that the seats were slick and shiny as a seal. I
complained that it was too slippery, and I’d demonstrate this by letting myself fall dramatically
from a sitting position to a tangle of arms and legs on the floormat, though when I grew taller, of
course, there wasn’t enough space for my theatrics.
My father laughed the first few times, ignored me afterwards.
“Put on your seatbelt,” he said.
My father drove, my mother sat in front, and Kevin and I piled in the back. We fought
over the dividing line that separated his half of the back seat from mine. After we spent some
time jabbing our elbows at each other, our mother would tell us to quiet down. She’d point her
finger at me and say, “Don’t talk back to your brother.” Men were always right, they always had
the authority, and she imposed this on me, though living according to that rule was the root of
her unhappiness, even if she never knew it. That, and the tendency to compare herself to
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everyone else, her husband to other husbands, and her children to other children—a measure of
her own success.
Kevin and I put the center console down between us, and with our elbows we fought over
who got the space on top, until we tired and retreated to our respective sides. There was plenty of
room in the back seat for three children, maybe even four, but we both craved the few inches of
elbow room that would make one of us feel like the person who was winning. About a half hour
into the drive, we’d prop up our travel set of Connect-Four on the center console and play for a
while. We’d only last a couple games because Kevin couldn’t stand to lose, and even when he
won he was angry, calling me stupid.
The farther we got from Napa and the closer we got to Bodega Bay, the cooler and
thicker and cleaner the air became. I could tell when we had crossed the border from country
land to beach land when the trees near the road turned to brush, the earth tumbled and flattened
into dirt patched with white sand, and the air grew dense with salt. We could see the ocean from
the car, the sun shimmering in rolls and bobs and long waves that folded within themselves, the
reflections of the surrounding world turning into light and unfurling like a scroll from the
horizon to the water’s edge, where foam melted into sand. Kevin and I would ask for taffy when
we passed the market, but our parents rarely bought it for us. When they did allow it, we were
given one small bag to share between us, which of course we fought over, bickering about who
had dibs on which flavors. I usually ended up with most of the cinnamon taffies even though
they were Kevin’s favorite too. He caved in like that, always giving up what he wanted, because
our parents taught us that men should give up things and women should be given things. I
remembered that later, the unfairness to us both, how one person was granted power and
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authority but forced to sacrifice personal desires, while the other person was made powerless but
granted the right to material things.
On our way through town, we’d drive past downtown, a two-way street with a little
market, a post office, and an antique store with an old wagon wheel set on a lawn of woodchips.
Our house was in a gated community on the beach, and all of the properties were maintained by
an organization to whom the homeowners paid dues. One side of the neighborhood abutted the
water, and the other a rolling 18-hole golf course. Once on every visit, we’d have brunch at the
clubhouse, as if it was a chore, sitting uncomfortably in the wood-paneled dining hall with
exposed beams, barely looking at each other, maintaining the most stilted conversations as the
other diners stared at us, the only nonwhite people in the room. I used to get upset about it, and
I’d sit there, holding my anger inside, though my face would inevitably turn red, fists balled up
like wads of paper, frustrated that our parents kept putting us in this position, the Asian family
getting stared down by a bunch of white people, and that we were supposed to pretend that
everything was normal. My parents and brother, in their discomfort at trying to maintain the
guise of fitting in, would shift their attention to me and tell me that I was acting spoiled. For a
minute, I would relax my hands, lean back, smile, try to act less spoiled. My parents and brother
didn’t smile and their shoulders were hunched, as if it was chilly.
One summer when I was sixteen, we stopped in for Sunday brunch. Our waitress was a
woman in her twenties with frizzy red hair and too much eye makeup. I thought to myself that
she was a townie, though I myself was a townie in Napa, where we lived year-round. She was
new, or I had never noticed her before, or I hadn’t noticed her until that day. Her nametag said
Celeste.
“Can I take your order? Would you like to start with drinks or appetizers?”
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Celeste’s skin was nearly translucent and covered in ginger-colored freckles. She did not
smile at us, though she glanced around the dining hall repeatedly while she stood at our table,
and I noticed that she was smiling at everyone else. She nodded agreeably at a family sitting at
an adjacent table and flashed her teeth at the waitstaff passing by. There was a small gap between
her two front teeth. When she looked at me, or Kevin, or my mother or father, her face turned
hard and she looked annoyed.
“Chink,” I blurted out.
Celeste stared at me. “What?” she said. There was a crease between her eyebrows.
“You heard me. I called you a chink.”
“Jane,” my father said, his voice low.
“Shut up,” Kevin said to me.
“What happened?” my mother said, looking up from her menu, her eyes roving around
the table. Since everyone else was looking at me, she settled her focus on my face, which I
imagine was radiating with smug indignation.
“What did you do?” she said, her eyes boring into mine, her tone sharp.
A white cloth napkin was set on the empty plate in front of me, folded into a floppy
crown. I picked up the napkin and shook it, releasing the inscrutable folds with an elaborate
gesture—three flicks of the wrist, all flourish—and I laid it down in my lap, smoothing out the
creases.
“Origami,” I said.
I looked at Celeste, who was still staring at me. There was a little dot of spit right in the
groove above her upper lip. Her mouth moved, forming words that did not vocalize.
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“Um, okay,” Celeste said, slowly. “I’ll give you a few more minutes.” She turned around
and walked away, fast, arms pumping. I could hear her starched white shirt brushing against her
black half-apron.
I could tell when someone didn’t like me because of my race, which might not seem that
important, but it’s everything, almost. The difference between knowing and not knowing when
something is unjust is almost everything.
***
Back at the house, my father could often be found sitting on the deck in the backyard,
smoking Marlboro Lights and reading a book. He stuck to mass-market paperbacks—one,
sometimes even two, a day—the kinds of books that you would never see on a college reading
list. Stephen King, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Nicholas Sparks. My father was not
educated, at least he would never be considered so in the U.S., having dropped out of Yonsei
University when he was twenty-one because he was conscripted to join the army for a year, then
immigrated to America, and never returned to finish school. Even though Yonsei is perhaps the
most prestigious school in South Korea, requiring the top scores on entrance exams, in America
this does not mean anything, and, as an immigrant in America without money or connections or a
command of the language, there would have been no difference for my father whether he had
graduated or not. Whenever I move to a new city and visit my local convenience store or
greengrocer, if it’s owned and managed by a Korean man, I always wonder what he left behind
in Korea, if he regrets coming to America, if he has a graduate degree from a university in Seoul
where he gained expertise in an area of specialty that remains unacknowledged in our American
systems, and I wonder what it’s like to stand behind the counter selling candy, cigarettes, fruit,
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condiments, and beer all day, every day, the days turning into months and years that fall on you,
slowly and all at once.
I knew that my father felt bad that he didn’t have a college degree. It was one of his
many sources of shame, intensified by a society that confirms that a college degree is the bare
minimum for entrance to the middle class. Before I knew of these kinds of rules, I didn’t see why
it mattered whether or not he had finished college, and I still don’t, in theory, except that now I
understand why it does, in the game of life and survival, especially for people like us. Because
the lack of a degree made him insecure, I tried to convince him to go back to school, but he said
it was too late for him because he was old, he had missed his chance, and such a thing didn’t
matter for him anymore. Whenever he wasn’t working or playing golf or washing his cars, he
had his nose in a book—eyeglasses removed, the pages held inches from his face—English
language only, and only the kinds of books that most people in our world would scoff at, which I
knew because it happened several times before I remembered to not mention what my dad was
reading. I was pretty sure he didn’t know what people thought of his reading material, but I knew
that if he did know, he wouldn’t care. While it made him feel bad that he hadn’t finished college,
he looked down on people with pretensions, who were class striving and status seeking, even
though these things represented what he lacked and was the source of his pain and self-
consciousness, which is exactly why he despised them.
What my father appreciated most about the backyard deck was the privacy it provided.
He loved nothing more than being alone. He could often be found taking a nap in the hammock,
an open book held face-down on his chest, shaded by a big oak tree. It was his favorite spot in
the whole town. The neighbors couldn’t see him and none of us bothered him when he was out
there alone. When he retreated to the hammock, my mother would walk my brother and me
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down to the beach. Kevin and I would bury her in the sand, chase each other into the ice-cold
water, and climb onto giant porous rocks jutting out of the ocean, where we would duck and
shield our faces when the waves came crashing down and splashed all over us. We would wade
back to the shore and lie down on the pebbly sand, sunbathe until we got headaches.
Once during this summer ritual, my mother told me that she wished that Kevin had gotten
some of my luck. I asked her what she meant.
“It’s okay that he’s not handsome,” she said. “He’s not a girl, so it’s okay. It’s important
for girls to be pretty. But I wish he was smart. He’s going to grow up and be a man and he should
be the one who gets to be smart, not you. I wish he was talented. Everything is so easy for you.
But he tries so hard and he’s never the best.”
I didn’t think it was true. That one of us was better. I thought that we were the same, and
that being good at something was a matter of what you believed about yourself, and that what
people thought of you was a matter of what you could make them believe. It was all a game. In
high school I learned that everything was about maintaining a façade. Faking confidence, making
people think that you are special, making it look easy. Kevin couldn’t do that. It was as if he had
a disability, and his disability was not knowing how to lie. Back then, that was the only
difference between us.
***
We all had the sense that this was our last time at the beach house. It was difficult for all
of us to get there and, with each of us coming from different places, living our separate lives,
aligning our schedules to get together even for a weekend was not easy. A rocky inlet of the
Pacific on the coast of Northern California between Sonoma and Marin, Bodega Bay was far
enough away to be inconvenient. A trek for Kevin and Sanghee, who lived in San Jose where
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Kevin was a police officer, and for me in San Francisco where I was supposedly a law student,
training to be the next big social justice trailblazer, or—who knew?—a future politician, or, at
the very least, a hotshot partner at a corporate law firm making big money, no shame in that,
according to the elder Kims. My parents were a bit closer in Napa—still their home base until the
house was sold, the event that would officially mark their separation, which would propel the
beach house to be listed next on the market—but they were sixty now, and got grumpy when
they had to travel by car for more than an hour, as if they had regressed into children who
couldn’t sit still. Inexplicably, my father seemed to thrive on the road so long as his time was
linked to his job, in the capacity of his new role as a truck driver, but something told me that the
joy was derived from solitude and from feeling homeless, like a traveler or a wanderer, with no
obligations tying him down, which was exactly what was lacking on those drives from Napa to
Bodega Bay, from one house to another, where bills and debt piled in equal measure, the family
for whom he was responsible attached at his hip. Between my father’s long stretches of time
away truck driving and my mother’s frequent visits to San Francisco where she was trying to
make a new life for herself, for two people who were supposed to be retired, they seemed to have
far less flexibility in their schedules than Kevin and I did. For these reasons, my parents had been
renting out the house more frequently, favoring long-term renters, and for this one week the
house was between leases. Before putting up the house for rent, my mother had asked me to
come up with headlines for the listing.
“The manager of the club wants me to give him three possible titles and they’ll pick the
one they like best,” she said. “Can you do it for me? You were an English major.”
After some thought, I wrote her a list.
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Already Gone, the title of a country music song that Kevin liked. Paradise Lost, the first
book assigned to me in college and which I managed to read about halfway through. Paradise
Cove, because the first two choices were clearly too depressing, though they represented the
spirit of our family, and because Paradise Lost made me think of Paradise Cove, a beach in
Malibu where Kevin and I had surfed for the first time while visiting cousins in Los Angeles.
Afterwards we hung out on wooden lounge chairs underneath palm trees and thatched umbrellas.
We sipped virgin drinks served in hollowed out pineapples and whole coconuts, imagining that
we were in Hawaii.
Paradise Cove, read the title of the listing above the details about the rental house.
I was not surprised. What choice did they have? Given multiple realities, we fall on
delusion more often than not. America is afflicted with all kinds of unacknowledged maladies
and toxic habits and behavior, one of which is toxic positivity.
Our last visit to the beach house was the last time I saw my brother. I was about to be
unenrolled from my third year of law school, effectively stripped of my academic merit
scholarship. Kevin had been a cop for a few years. By then he was married to Sanghee, who had
been joining us on our summer trips to Bodega Bay ever since they began dating in college.
Through the course of a single dinner Sanghee would ask me if I had gained weight, tell me that
I should stop running because my legs looked too muscular, and wonder aloud why my face and
chest were so flat. Sanghee was fat, her hair permed and dyed an orangey-brown, eyebrows
drawn on, lips outlined, the outside corners of her eyes extended with black liquid liner into little
curlicues, and her clothes were too small and exposed too much. Her preference in footwear
gravitated toward four-inch wedge espadrilles—even in winter, and once she wore a pair when
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we went on a slightly muddy hike—and she shopped at Forever 21, but had a collection of Louis
Vuitton bags.
“Why don’t you have one?” Sanghee asked, showing me her new white purse embossed
with a rainbow LV logo. “Can’t you get someone to buy one for you?”
During these interactions, I kept my mouth shut. At times, Kevin would nudge Sanghee
with his elbow. I wondered if this woman-on-woman bullying was about being Korean, or about
being a woman, or both. Sometimes when I was talking, she would say to Kevin, “Tell your
sister to shut up.”
I had learned, at times catastrophically, that of anyone in the room—a room with my
family, as well as any other room in every other context I had so far encountered—I was the
person who was not allowed to speak. If I dared defend myself or anyone else, have any sort of
opinion, I would be stripped of not only the idea of agency that I made the mistake of thinking I
had, but also the backhanded approval that I could have had if only I’d known my place.
I didn’t share my dating life with either Kevin or Sanghee, or my parents, for that matter.
Since no one knew if I was dating and whether I had prospects, there was no proof of my ability
to attract a mate. Sanghee interpreted my silence as evidence of my failure as a woman, and she
was fond of making pronouncements that I must not be able to find someone who would date
me, that it was either because I wasn’t pretty enough or because I was a high maintenance pain in
the ass.
I’ve never met a Korean woman who wasn’t called both high maintenance and
submissive—at best, at different points in time in her life, at worst, unrelentingly throughout her
life—polar opposites, yet often attributed to the same woman, sometimes even in the exact same
sentence.
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Sanghee would brag about how her younger sister was marrying a doctor. “Why don’t
you get one?” she said. A doctor husband, she meant.
But Sanghee didn’t marry a doctor. She married my brother, a cop.
Sanghee idolized Kevin. “My handsome husband,” she said, often. “He’s so handsome
and smart and he’s such a good husband,” she would say. “I’m so lucky. I don’t even have to
work. He’s such a good provider.”
Sanghee had wanted to be a chiropractor, but Kevin had stopped her from enrolling in the
program that would have earned her a license to practice.
“You won’t be able to handle it,” he said. “It’ll be too hard for you.”
She cooked all of his meals for him, washed and ironed his clothes, kept the house.
While our relationship was not easy, it made me happy to see Sanghee doting on Kevin,
to see him enjoy the attention, because those were the only moments that I saw him smile. He
seemed grateful, even, to be the center of someone’s life, to be the top boy, to hear someone say,
“For the best husband!” as a casserole was plopped before him on the dinner table.
That last time we were all together at the beach house, my father stayed inside mostly and
was more talkative than usual. He spent a lot of time lying down on the couch, resting, even in
the morning. Earlier that summer, his younger brother Michael had suffered a heart attack, the
first of many before poor health would eventually kill him, but my dad was already acting like
Michael was dead. When we arrived at the house, we found a big ruby-colored stain on the
carpet in the living room, the previous renter’s fuck you gift. My mother spent the first hour
trying to scrub it out, spraying it with bleach and lemon. My father stared up at the ceiling,
telling story after story about Michael, as a child in Seoul, how he was taunted by the other kids
because his skin was so white and his hair was red.
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“His hair turned dark when he got older, but he could never get along with anyone. He
always thought people were making fun of him. The other kids thought he must be a war child,
half-American, but he wasn’t! He was one hundred percent Korean, like us!”
Kevin and Sanghee were sitting in chairs directly across from my father, who kept
craning his head and propping up from the position on his back so that he could see me. I was
slightly out of his view, sitting on a pillow on the floor.
“Jane, do you remember when Michael was teaching you how to ride a bike, he was
trying to show you how, and then he fell off his own bike? We laughed for so long.” My father
let himself fall back, reclining completely with his head resting on a pillow.
“Huh,” he sighed. “Michael always knew you were the smart one, Jane,” he said, looking
at no one. “He knew from the start. That’s why he was nicer to Kevin.”
I looked at Kevin. I hoped he hadn’t heard that, but obviously he had. He was sitting right
there.
Kevin stared deeply into his teacup. Sanghee set hers down on the table, too hard. My
mother walked in carrying a tray with a fresh pot of barley tea and placed it on the coffee table.
On her way back to the kitchen, she made a gasping sound that was so abrupt and so loud that I
thought she must have encountered an intruder, right there, in the hallway of our house. The
thought actually crossed my mind that it was a good thing that Kevin was with us because I knew
that he always carried a gun.
“OHMANA!” she screamed.
We jumped up, all at once, to see what the commotion was about. My mother was
hunched over, inspecting the bottom corner of an antique mirror hanging in the hallway. Kevin
and I rushed to her side to see what was wrong.
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“There’s a crack!” she said. “Oh no oh no oh no oh no! What do I do?”
Kevin took a step back. His eyebrows were raised, lips parted.
“Do you see this?” my mother said. “The mirror. It’s cracked.” She was pointing at the
corner of the mirror, where there was a series of small cracks blooming from the original injury.
I had leaned in to look closer, but my mother whipped around so quickly I had to hop out of the
way. She was now pointing her finger at me.
“Did you do it?” she asked.
“Of course not,” I said. “Why are you freaking out?”
She pointed her finger at Kevin.
“Did you do it?” she asked.
Kevin shook his head.
“You’re lying,” she said. “You did it. Somebody did! It must have been you.”
“I didn’t,” Kevin said. “I didn’t do it.”
“It was probably the renters,” I said. “Remember the stain on the carpet?”
“We can’t stay here!” my mother shouted. “How many times do I have to tell you?
Broken glass is bad luck, especially mirrors! We have to leave. We can’t come back again. What
is wrong with these people?”
My mother turned around and gazed at the damaged mirror. The longer she looked at it,
the more it seemed to offend her. I could see her wounded face reflecting back at me, her
expression of worry and sorrow that had become imprinted in my memory further back than I
could remember.
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I returned to the living room where I fell into a chair, feeling tired and numb. Kevin put
his hand on our mother’s back, while talking to her in a low, soft voice. She was taking deep
breaths, interspersed with squelched sobs, and I could smell her sweating from fifteen feet away.
“Maybe you should lie down,” Kevin said. He led her to the master bedroom, hand in her
elbow.
I worried that she would get excited again, remembering that we had discovered the night
before when we had arrived that all of the mattresses had deep indentations, sunken in like cake
molds, with the outlines of bodies larger and heavier than our own, and all night we had slept as
if we were lying in hammocks. My mother had barely commented on them. “I thought you
bought extra firm,” she had said to my father.
***
My father fell asleep on the couch, though it wasn’t even noon yet. Sanghee put a blanket
over him, somehow arranging it so that it was tucked snug under his armpits. Kevin went out to
the back deck and without thinking I followed him there. The sunlight filtered through the mist,
thick with dew that felt so fresh and clean it could’ve been bottled up and sold in a spritzing can.
Kevin stood on the deck, hands on the railing, and he was looking out past the yard towards the
unnaturally green hills of the golf course and the mountains beyond that. He had outgrown the
younger skinny version of himself and no longer wore glasses, had gotten laser vision correction
before enrolling in the police academy. Not tall, though not short, Kevin made up for height by
bulking up. He had put on muscle and fat that he’d never had as a wiry young tennis player,
having turned to police training workouts that included running laps in a weighted vest, obstacle
courses with weights strapped on, lifting with weights at the department gym, and lunchbreaks at
Taco Bell with coworkers, the fleshy lot of them howling and sweaty and doubling over in
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laughter and pain while playing a game of seasoning their own chicken burritos with generous
spritzes of department-issued pepper spray.
Kevin wore a blue baseball cap with an embroidered shield on the front panel above the
bill: San Jose Police Department, it read. I could see the bulge under his denim jacket on his
right hip where a gun was secured in its holster. I could be certain it was there without even
looking. Kevin was never without a gun. There was probably another gun at his ankle, tucked
under his jeans, and a butterfly knife in his pocket. Ready for anything, he used to say. You have
to be ready.
I could tell from his posture and the tension in his shoulders that he was angry. I wished
that he didn’t have to have so much pain, that there was somewhere else he could put it. I felt
that his pain was part of me, that we had always shared it, and if I could only take some of his
pain away, keep it hidden somewhere deep inside myself, then we might both find some relief. I
wanted to be in it together, so we could be on the same side, but he didn’t know that the same
thing that was happening to him was happening to me too, and I didn’t know how to tell him.
I cleared my throat. Kevin finally turned around. I took a step toward him and I wanted to
touch him, but I knew that I couldn’t. I was about to say something meaningless, to kill the
silence, but he beat me to it.
“You’re such a fucking bitch,” he said. His mouth got tiny. I was not surprised at his
anger, I never was anymore, waiting for it, expecting it, and though I was not surprised, I was
afraid. “Did you hear me?” he said. “Why are you just staring at me like that? You’re a fucking
cunt, you fucking vagina.”
“What did I do?” I said.
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“You’re so stupid. You’re such a baby. You always get everything you want. It’s because
you’re a woman,” he said, standing with his feet planted apart. We stood there like statues and all
was quiet except the sound of our voices, as if the universe had stopped and we had been sucked
into a twilight zone where there was no time and nothing existed but the two of us having an
argument that had no beginning and no end.
“You’re just a stupid woman. You don’t know anything,” he said. “Everybody fucking
loves you even though you’re so stupid. Women don’t have to do anything. Nobody expects
anything from you. God, life must be so much easier. I don’t care, though. It doesn’t matter. I
would rather die than be a woman. I feel sorry for you. Women are weak and pathetic. Men have
all the power. We’re stronger than you, not just mentally, but physically. A man can always
overpower a woman. Women are always getting abused by their husbands and they can’t do
anything about it.”
“Yeah, life is easier for women,” I said. I didn’t even know if I was being sarcastic or
agreeable.
“All dad cares about is you. The thing that’s fucked up is you don’t even care about him.
All you care about is yourself. You’re so greedy and selfish. I’m the one who’s a nice person.
You’re a bitch. Why doesn’t anybody know it? You just trick people into liking you because you
act all fake and you know what to say. I never say the right thing and somehow that means that
I’m the asshole while you’re the one everybody loves, but nobody knows the truth! That’s fine.
Nothing matters. It’s all bullshit. It’s all noise. I feel sorry for you because you’re so pathetic.”
Kevin came at me, elbows out, charging like a bull. His face was blank as a napkin,
holding in its empty space both illegibility and extreme clarity: a kind of lack of emotion that is
designed to be focused and aggressive and terrifying. Kevin had learned and practiced this style
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of attack and the face that went with it from watching Steven Seagal movies, which
coincidentally or not was around the time when our father had chopped up Kevin’s tennis rackets
with an axe. Since Steven Seagal’s rise to fame coincided with our formative years when we
were living at home and growing up together, the person that he practiced his Steven Seagal
idolization on was me. Years and years of Kevin charging at me like Steven Seagal—running
with his back completely straight as if he had no spine, just a steel rod welded to his bones, arms
pumping at his sides in precise motion—should have meant that I knew what was coming, but
like a naïve idiot, I proceeded as if I had amnesia. What Kevin wants me to think is that he’s
either going to beat the shit out of me or at the very least give me one swift punch to the gut, but
he won’t actually do either of those things, I’m only supposed to think he is. The second he can
sense my fear, the moment I flinch or raise my hands or take a step back, that’s when he’s won.
Intimidation is his goal. Humiliation gives him power. All he wants is for you to feel afraid.
I ducked, but I was not quick enough and there was nowhere to escape. Kevin pushed me,
hard, his hands flat, thwacking my shoulders, and his blank face was now full of menace, all of
his features contorted into a snarl.
“You stupid bitch! Why are you surprised!” he said, shouting now. “You’re so stupid! I
can’t believe you’re always so surprised!” He pushed me two more times, palms out, smacking
my shoulders, firmly, not with all his force, but hard enough for me to lose my balance. I put my
hands out behind me and grabbed the balcony so that I wouldn’t fall. I didn’t say anything at
first, afraid that he’d become more agitated. But somehow the situation had already escalated,
and I didn’t know how to stop it.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
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“Our mother! You know who I’m talking about. You’re such a fucking idiot. I can’t
believe people think you’re smart when you’re so fucking stupid.”
I righted myself, put my hands up, trying to block him from pushing me again.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “What is wrong with you?”
“Why are you always surprised when she totally loses it! You think everything’s fine,
you think that wasn’t so bad, that was a nice time, but then one little thing goes wrong, and then
she loses it like we’re all about to fucking die! Or when she promises you something and acts
nice to get you to do something she wants, but then she screws you over and then denies that she
ever promised you anything! Why are you so fucking surprised that she’s a fucking bitch!”
“You’re insane,” I said. “You’re talking about yourself.” My voice was firm, but my legs
were shaking.
He pushed me so hard, it was like an open-fisted double punch on each shoulder. I fell
back, my feet kicking up in front of me, and I landed on my butt, slid down the seven wooden
steps leading from the balcony into the backyard. Instinctively, I reached up and tried to grab the
railing, which was a mistake because the wood splintered into my palms and fingers, and later
that night I’d sit in the bathroom for an hour trying unsuccessfully to tweeze out all the little
wooden needles lodged beneath layers of skin. I tumbled onto the lawn, arms and legs splayed
out. Other than my hands and a few nasty bruises on my rear end that would bloom the next day,
visible to no one but me, I wasn’t really hurt. I could have gotten up, but I chose to stay down. I
looked at my hands, which were bleeding. My butt was numb.
“What the fuck,” I said to myself. I looked up at Kevin standing at the top of the stairs.
He didn’t look sorry. He was peering down at me, as if I was much further away than I actually
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was, at the bottom of a very deep well that I had gotten myself stuck in by my own stupidity. He
looked angry, still, and unsatisfied.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shouted. “Who’s the asshole?”
It was like he didn’t even hear me. He was still in that twilight zone, while I had come
back to the universe. His eyes glazed over. He began walking down the stairs, nodding his head
while his boots dropped slower and heavier with each step, his eyes holding me in place, and
when he reached the bottom of the staircase, his feet swished through the grass. He came up right
next to me and got down, taking a knee, and he was so close I could see that the fabric of his
jeans was wearing thin at the knee. I thought that maybe I should get him a new pair of jeans.
“Remember when I asked dad for a sleeping bag and he said no, but then a week later he
bought you a new sleeping bag?” His fingers touched the grass near my elbow.
“Are you serious?” I sat up, trying to appear and sound unafraid. I kept my shoulders
open, but inside everything was gathered close together. “The only sleeping bag I remember ever
having is that gray one he got me when I was ten.” My voice was deep and measured. “I don’t
even have it anymore. Mom was using it when they went camping.”
“Why did he get it for you? You didn’t even want it. I was the one who wanted it. Did
you ask for it just because I did? Or did he get it for you for no reason?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember.” It was true that I didn’t remember, though I
did remember that Kevin had already been given a sleeping bag, he had just wanted a new one,
and I didn’t have one before that. But I could tell that these were all details that he didn’t
remember or weren’t relevant to the argument he had been having with me in his head all of this
time.
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Kevin’s denim jacket was open, the bottom right hem pulled back and held in place with
the inside of his wrist. His fingers rested on the gun holstered at his hip. He was still taking a
knee while his other hand hung at his side, lazily, knuckles grazing blades of grass. I didn’t know
if he was touching the gun absentmindedly, or if he was getting up the nerve.

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CHAPTER 5: Exposure Exposer Exposed (or Cops and Goblins)

One thing about myself that I should mention: my strongest emotion is anger. Always has
been. Unresolved resentment against injustices suffered. In grad school, I’d end up writing a
dissertation about it. A good friend once told me that my unhappiness is caused by the habit of
committing things to memory, that selective memory is the key to happiness. This friend had
never met any other member of my family and was thus unaware that the behavior and
disposition she described was something that the Kims all shared. In my family, events travel
great distances, cross vast expanses of time, cruelty and injustice creating long memories that
nurture resentment, anger and bitterness growing exponentially with the expansion of space and
time.
There’s no room for the future. The future has already happened, waiting for us to move
into it, bringing with us the past. When living in memory, all there is is the past. The past is
happening now.
After our last visit to the beach house when Kevin had pushed me down the stairs, I
didn’t see him again for another three years. My brother might as well have disappeared. During
this absence, I knew where he was and he knew where I was, though we were lost to each other.
Perhaps he felt that I was the one who had disappeared.
Our family fell apart. This is how three years came to pass without seeing Kevin with no
difficulty. Our parents’ separation ended in divorce. The house that we had shared as a family in
Napa was sold. It had appreciated immensely, the way that property in much of California often
does over time, especially in cities taken over by gentrification that inevitably overflows into the
surrounding suburbs and extends to outer destination locations, where the rich shop for vacation
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homes and first home strivers with not quite enough money settle for quaint little towns with the
illusion of pedigree. This brings us to a place such as Napa, a small community that has become
more desirable with the influx of restaurants, shops, yoga studios, and general consumerism that
embrace the themes of importance for the eco and status conscious liberal, the products and
services all highlighted with specific and limited marketing terms—artisanal, local, farm to table,
small batch, hand-crafted, eco-friendly, sustainably-sourced, and green—all of which of course
provide support for the mythology that surrounds a fairly new tradition—in a long history of
vintners, oenology, and the wine industry—of Napa as American Wine Country.
My parents sold the house in Napa, and the beach house immediately following, right
before the market crashed. No tips or foreknowledge or spiritual advisor forecast, just pure luck.
Then came the 2008 financial crisis. California became the ultimate buyer’s market. Houses
were under water, including Kevin’s, my mother reported. The housing market was rife with
foreclosures. My mother took her half and bought a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco
with help from her brother in Newport Beach. My father took his half and bought a bungalow in
Santa Clara, which he rented out while he stayed with his sister in Palo Alto when he wasn’t on
the road truck driving. Kevin remained in San Jose with his wife and dog, started working
overtime so they wouldn’t lose the house. I moved to New York. Accepted an offer of thirty-four
thousand dollars a year to pursue a PhD in Transpacific Studies at a prestigious school that liked
to consider itself in league with the Ivies, though it was not, with free tuition, health and dental,
travel and research expenses, minimal teaching responsibilities, even moving expenses. The
stipend was barely enough money to live in New York City, especially for someone who wanted
to live without roommates for the first time, but one of the most valuable things I had learned
from my immigrant parents was frugal living. I used to be embarrassed by my cheapness, but by
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the time I was halfway through grad school and the other students in my cohort were taking out
loans to cover expenses, I had learned to lean in. The applicant pool was nearly bottomless, my
advisor disclosed after the department had extended me the offer, and what pulled me to the top
was the fact that I had attended law school, though completing the degree would have made me
eligible for an additional university-wide provost fellowship, she said, but—and this part was
alluded to, not explicit—it was the fact of my having attended and failed to finish that made me a
comfortable choice for the program’s director, placing me in an agreeable spot below the
seasoned academic and former lawyer. The director’s partner was a Tony Award-winning
playwright and it was rumored that they summered in the Hamptons in a cottage that the
university had gifted as part of her recruitment. She dressed exclusively in silk and linen. My
advisor told me that the director had liked the relaxed jumper-blazer combo that I had worn for
my campus visit/interview. There was one person on the waitlist in my cohort of four incoming
doctoral students, all of whom accepted their fellowship packages. The waitlisted person, my
advisor also divulged to me in the same meeting in which she sobbed about her dead cat, was a
man several years my senior, a father and former financial advisor who had swiftly lost his job
when the economy crashed, arrived at his campus visit/interview in a business suit and shared an
unsolicited Powerpoint presentation on an obscure queer Chinese Canadian circus performer
from the early twentieth century who traveled from Asia to Canada to America. Too eager, too
serious, too formal, apparently. He wanted and needed the spot too badly, all but begging for a
career change. It was like high school all over again. My PhD stipend paid the rent and my living
expenses, though my ability to afford basic needs required that I rarely socialize and never eat
out. I traveled by subway, sold my car. My law school debt went into deferral, which meant that
interest would not accrue while I was in school, but the burden would remain in the back of my
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mind the seven years I spent earning the degree, and would pop right on top of my eyeballs as I
walked across the stage to receive my diploma. The university’s student health plan was
surprisingly comprehensive, though the on-campus health center would become exposed for
sexual abuse of female students, particularly young women from China and Taiwan who were
unfamiliar with the scope of normal practice of women’s health exams in America. The school
nurse who exposed the assaults by filing several complaints into several different offices of
misconduct would be fired before the scandal broke. The university would be accused of decades
of cover-up and malevolent disregard, resulting in—for the third time in two years—a prompt
announcement that the president in office would be stepping down in light of the latest campus
scandal. It wouldn’t be long before the university would enter the limelight again, exposed for
accepting bribes in exchange for college admission. The university had a twenty billion dollar
endowment and could afford the occasional 200 million settlement payouts for the crimes and
misbehaviors involving various officials. My parents would never say a word when the
controversies arose. They would remain as impressed by the university’s wealth as they had been
when I first told them I’d been accepted.
We wouldn’t come together as a family again until I was about to leave for New York.
I’d see my parents separately, and rarely. Kevin I’d see once at my mom’s apartment while
helping to pare down our family’s combined lifetime of stuff. The four of us together had
become incompatible, each of us too full of need—for something unattainable from each other,
to be free from each other—and regret, creating a toxic combination of love, desire, and pain, the
worst of ourselves bleeding out to burden each other. Our last attempt to come together would
confirm this to be true. If we ever do all join together as a family again, I imagine it will be for
one of our funerals.
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When I moved away, I tried to start over, tried to leave history behind. I thought moving
away was moving on, but nobody tells you that it doesn’t work like that. Water under the bridge.
Forgive and forget. Leave the past in the past. Live and let go. That’s what people say because
the truth is too negative. Nobody wants to admit that history repeats itself, the past never dies,
that in fact it infects the present, that what happened before can never be erased, and there’s no
moving on, unless that means taking the baggage with us and always accounting for it, making
room, checking it in.
Even though I didn’t talk to Kevin after I left, my brain wouldn’t let go, kept bringing
him back against my will. It was always something mundane that would unexpectedly trigger my
memory—mint chip ice cream, green gummy bears, mentos, black shoelaces. Less frequently,
I’d come across a person who looked like him, sometimes a specific version of his young self—a
schoolboy wearing wire-rimmed glasses and sporting a flat-top, tennis racket bag slung over his
shoulder. Sometimes it was something as simple as noticing young children whose features are
so similar there’s no denying that they’re siblings. In these instances, I was reminded with such
suddenness that I had a brother it was almost as if I had forgotten my own history, forgotten and
remembered my own identity. It’s frightening how someone who shares so much of your DNA,
who was part of your daily life for the first half of your existence, who shares your memory and
circumstances and particular pain, can so easily become just sparks of memory.
* * *
Kevin and Sanghee married in their twenties, adopted a puppy soon after buying a house.
The dog was a pointer-border collie mix with a sleek black coat and white markings on his paws
and muzzle. They named him Odie.
“He gets so scared he shits himself,” Kevin said, chest puffed out with pride.
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Kevin would often describe—to me and other relatives, his friends, even co-workers—
how he would beat Odie into submission.
“He tries to run away, but there’s nowhere to hide because I train him in the backyard.
See that part that’s fenced in,” he said, pointing at the kitchen window. Outside, there was a tall
chain link fence enclosing a space the size of a small storage closet. “It’s a cage,” Kevin said.
“The previous owner had a pit bull and kept him in there when they didn’t want him running
loose. That’s where I train Odie, with the fence locked. I teach him commands, I kick him and
yell at him, and the whole time he keeps his head down, nose to the ground. Every time I train
him, he eventually shits himself! He gets so scared he actually shits himself!”
Kevin laughed with his head thrown back, flashing the inside of his mouth, a little pink
cave.
“Odie is submissive, obedient, just like a child. It doesn’t matter what I do. When training
is over, he’s so happy when I’m nice to him. He forgets so easily. He runs around in circles and
wants to play with me, licks my hand. He’s not afraid of me anymore. But he always does
whatever I say. Never disobeys. It’s because of the training. All I have to do is change the tone of
my voice—Odie,” Kevin pronounced the dog’s name softly, in a low register, each syllable
drawn out in warning, “and just like that,” Kevin said, snapping his fingers, “he bounces right
into place, so scared he’s shaking. Odie’s a good dog. I feel sorry for him.”
Kevin ran his fingers down Odie’s head. The dog nuzzled my brother’s hand, licked his
palm. Kevin brought his hands to his lap, folding them, as if in prayer.
“People are so weak. They don’t know how to train their dogs. They just let their dogs
run wild like spoiled children. I feel sorry for dogs whose owners ignore them. People don’t even
care about their dogs. Odie is part of our family. He’s our child.”
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Kevin told me the story many times. He loved repeating it, each time nearly
indistinguishable from the last. When the mood struck, he’d tell the story again, as if he’d
forgotten that he’d told it several times before, as if it were a hilarious anecdote about family
bonding and not a story about beating a defenseless animal.
When he was in the mood to retell the story, I could only listen and watch. I would not
move. I had learned my lesson once before, during an early telling when I had objected and was
met with my brother’s righteous rage, his confidence in his convictions, eclipsing my own
outburst in volume, menace, and terror.
“This is my dog,” he said. “I can do whatever I want with my dog.” Kevin stood up and
took several steps toward me, hands clenched into fists. “Get your own dog and you can treat
him the way you want to. You can’t tell me how to raise my dog.”
Kevin’s house was immaculate. As in most Asian households, shoes were not worn
inside. Odie even wore shoes outdoors which were removed at the front door before entering the
house. His shoes were little blue booties with velcro straps that wrapped around his thin, knobby
ankles. After removing the shoes, his paws were cleaned meticulously with baby wipes before he
set foot past the entryway.
During a visit to Kevin’s house, I found Sanghee crying alone. Kevin had just retold the
story about training Odie, with the usual uncontrollable laughter, during which time neither
Sanghee nor I said a word. Afterwards, we wandered into separate parts of the house. Kevin
played fetch with Odie in the backyard. I walked down the carpeted hallway, thinking that I’d
find a book in the office and settle down to read before dinner. I had thought that Sanghee was in
the kitchen, but as I neared the office, the door of which was open, I could hear her crying
quietly inside. Barely audible, the sound of her crying was low and gentle, her breathing
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staggered but soft, punctuated with sniffling. There was a moment when she lost control, when
the sound of her breathing became ragged and violent and she gasped for air. I stopped in the
hallway before reaching the entrance, peering inside from a vantage point where I could see her,
sitting in a chair, head down, but she couldn’t see me. The noise from Kevin and Odie playing
outside—a tennis ball whacking against the side of the house, Odie bounding back and forth, his
feet soft and muffled on the lawn, toenails clacking on the wood patio—resonated through the
house. Sanghee became quiet again, hardly making a sound, though the energy to mute her
suffering began to seep out into the features of her face, everything scrunched inward. Tears
streamed freely, leaking onto the front of her dress, turning the hot pink fuchsia.
I stood there spying on her for far too long, thinking of all the things I could say to make
her feel better, but I just kept spying like a creep. I wanted to tell her that I could see her, that I
knew what was happening, but too much history and resentment was in the way and I couldn’t
find the kindness in myself. Later, I would justify myself, to myself, by remembering Sanghee’s
favorite joke which she’d announce whenever I came over. The hierarchy of the family members
in the house, she said proudly: One, Kevin. Two, Sanghee. Three, Odie. Four, Jane. Instead of
feeling better, I only felt worse.
Every night before bed, Kevin performed a “clean sweep” of the backyard. He held a
Maglite along the length of his gun, the barrel of which he pointed into the halo of the cylindrical
light. He possessed the stance and precise movements of a military man, as if he was clearing a
building full of armed men holding hostages. While Kevin had learned tactics in high-risk
situations from police training, he claimed that the media provided supplementary training.
Kevin had watched more than the common person’s share of blockbuster movies about the
military, hero cops, and government agents, and subscribed to several firearms and mercenary
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periodicals, unaware of any connotations within them that might be the opposite of inclusive
toward someone like him, nor did he notice any difference between the typical readership and
someone like himself. He peered into every crevice, every obscured corner of the backyard,
shining the light and pointing the gun, appearing very prepared to shoot anything hiding in the
darkness.
Red shotgun shells and handgun bullets were hidden in the corners of every room of
Kevin’s house, another point of pride that Kevin shared frequently with houseguests.
Kevin always took a gun with him into the bathroom. “Don’t want to get caught off guard
while taking a shit,” he said.
The first year that Kevin and Sanghee were living in their new house, they hosted
Thanksgiving dinner, as was expected of them. The two sides of the family were brought
together to celebrate the holidays as well as the joining of our family trees, which was, at least in
our family’s history, a recipe for disaster. Thanksgiving dinner at Kevin’s house did not become
a tradition. Neither family was ever invited over again during the holidays. Kevin reported that
the pressure and expectations to plan for the gathering, prepare the feast, ready the house, and
clean up afterwards had all fallen on Sanghee, with no one offering to help, and she didn’t want
to do it again, which was understandable. What my brother didn’t acknowledge was the fact that
there had always been competitive anxiety and jealousy between our family and Sanghee’s, as
well as our family and each of our extended family’s families, not to mention our family and
every other Korean family we knew. In the context of Sanghee’s family, my appearance in
particular, as the young woman who represented Kevin’s family, was constantly being compared
against Sanghee and Sanghee’s sister—the individual features of my face and body
deconstructed in their individual parts against Sanghee’s and Sanghee’s sister’s—and my skills,
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education, salary, and quality of beaus and social world were compared against Sanghee and her
sister. The focus would eventually turn to a comparison of Kevin’s appearance, achievements,
and qualities against Sanghee’s brother, even though Kevin was fifteen years older. No doubt, all
of this comparing contributed to the conflict that Kevin and Sanghee had to reconcile whenever
there was a family gathering at their house.
The Thanksgiving event at Kevin’s house played out just as one would imagine. There
was a point during the evening when Kevin and I met in the kitchen, by accident, each of us
attempting to escape the shade being thrown at the dining table. Kevin must have been at least
thirty, married already for a few years, the house fairly new to him and to Sanghee, and, thus
they were feeling like they had made it, that they had settled into their adult lives, the proof being
marriage and homeownership, even if underneath that feeling they felt something else that was
unacknowledged: entrapment, uncertainty, unease.
We had not intended to meet in the kitchen. We’d simply carried out separate escape
plans arising from a shared experience. It wasn’t my kitchen, so I had no place there. Kevin,
however, owned the kitchen, the house, and everything inside of it. He opened the fridge and
rummaged inside, emerging with a container of orange juice. He drank it straight from the
carton, stood there with the refrigerator door propped open, the timer beeping rhythmically, and
after one long swig, he put the juice back inside, shut the door, and looked into my eyes, half-
smiling.
“One day, I’ll wake up and I’ll be fifty,” he said, “and I’ll ask myself, ‘Where did my life
go?’”
When Kevin first joined the police department, he often talked about how he didn’t know
whether he could kill someone if it came down to it.
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“I don’t know if I can pull the trigger,” he’d say. “I don’t think I can just kill someone,
even if I have to, even though I know that if I don’t, I’ll be killed instead. If I hesitate, I’m dead.
I have to shoot first, but I don’t know if I can. I won’t know if I have what it takes until it
happens. Maybe I won’t be able to do it and I’ll be dead.”
A year later, Kevin was full of confidence, all uncertainty having vanished.
“I’m ready,” he said, mouth set in a thin line, brow furrowed. “I know I can do it. I’m
ready to kill someone. Just put me there and I’ll do it.” He inflated like a balloon, chest puffed
out, elbows lifted and pointing sideways.
I didn’t know how Kevin had arrived at this new place, from the fear of not knowing
whether he could shoot someone, to the overwhelming need to shoot someone, as if anything
short of that was a disappointment. Perhaps Kevin just wanted to be rid of his fear, like we all do,
though we all have different ways of coping: denial, delusion, transparency, substance abuse,
addiction, exercise, self-care, vanity, work, ambition, money, power. Kevin chose guns. He
would no longer be a victim. He would have the power. He would instill fear in others. He made
a choice and, in that moment, the switch flipped, the way I imagine young men summon the
courage as they charge into battle when fighting for a country—fearful, but willing themselves
into fearlessness, a kind of heartbreaking bravado. I don’t know if Kevin knew what he was
fighting for, but what I saw was someone fighting to be seen as a man.
Before Kevin and Sanghee married and before Kevin joined the police academy, Kevin
rented a two-bedroom apartment with another young Korean man, Eugene, an old friend of
Sanghee’s. Kevin and Eugene met when they signed the lease. It was a convenient arrangement
for both, one that each likely thought would blossom into friendship. Right from the start, they
did not get along.
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“I scared the shit out of him,” Kevin said. “He’s such a woman. I showed him.”
The problem began with Kevin’s gun obsession, which Eugene had been unaware of.
Kevin would often invite another gun enthusiast friend to the apartment, and the two would sit
on the couch with their gun collections laid out on the coffee table. They’d sit there for hours—
cleaning the guns, talking about the guns, comparing the guns—before piling them into duffle
bags and heading to the gun range. At the beginning, Eugene was shocked and uncomfortable,
retreating to his room when the guns came out. Later, he made the mistake of making fun of
Kevin and his friend when he came home to find them in the living room huddled over the guns.
“Oh my god. The guns, again,” Eugene said. “Yeah, Kevin, you’re a big man. You’re so
awesome.”
Eugene laughed, then, Kevin told me later. You can’t laugh at my brother. This was the
consequence: Kevin chased Eugene around the apartment with a loaded gun until Eugene
barricaded himself in his own bedroom. Eugene moved out that same week, but not before
pleading with Sanghee to break up with Kevin.
“He was making fun of me, laughing at me for cleaning my guns,” Kevin said. “So I
shouted, What’d you say? What’d you say? I put the cartridge in and pointed my gun at him,
chased him into his room. He couldn’t get the door closed. I had my shoulder wedged in and was
pointing my gun into his room. You should have seen him, ducking all over the place, trying to
close the door on me. He was nearly on the floor. Ha! All of a sudden, he had nothing to say. He
wasn’t laughing anymore. He kept apologizing. He was screaming, begging me not to shoot him.
I’ve never heard someone say they’re sorry so many times. Never seen someone so scared.”
Kevin laughed with his head thrown back, eyes closed, mouth wide open. “What a fucking
pussy. He’s a woman. He has a vagina.”
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Sometime during my absence, or Kevin’s absence, in the three years between our last trip
to Bodega Bay and when we all got together one last time before I moved away, I stopped by
Kevin’s house to talk to Sanghee. I had been sent by my parents to try to glean information on
Kevin’s whereabouts, when they had discovered that Kevin and Sanghee were having problems
and Kevin was nowhere to be found. During the visit, I somehow ended up reminding Sanghee
of the incident with Eugene.
“There are bullets in there,” Sanghee said, her voice just over my shoulder.
I turned around, surprised. I hadn’t even noticed that she had gotten up from the table.
She was referring to the white vase on the mantel.
“I remember,” I said.
“Kevin used to bring a gun with him into the bathroom,” she said. “He did a clean sweep
of the backyard every night before bed.”
“I remember,” I said. “He held a flashlight up next to his gun.”
“You saw him do it?”
“Once when I spent the night. He showed me. I watched him clear the entire backyard.”
I remembered the seriousness with which he approached the task, the way he’d swivel
and pivot with every shift, every turn, the gun pointed along the glow of the flashlight. His body
was quiet and efficient. It was like watching an athlete practice or a military man execute drills,
performing the rituals with the kind of discipline and focus of a professional in training.
“His boss said that he’s immature, that he’s not a leader,” Sanghee said. “That’s why he
never got promoted.”
“I didn’t know he was trying to get promoted.”
“He thought he might try for captain.”
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“Oh,” I said.
“His boss was wrong. Kevin is a leader. People respect him. They look up to him.”
I watched Sanghee, looking for some gesture that might belie her statement. She was
holding her hamster Bam-bam, the two of us standing in the middle of the living room.
“Remember when you got your friend Eugene to be Kevin’s roommate?” I said. “And
they got in a fight and Kevin chased him around the apartment with a gun?” I paused, waiting for
Sanghee to respond, but she just kept petting her hamster. “Your friend moved out and you never
saw him again.”
I felt cruel, reminding Sanghee of something she may have managed to forget.
Somewhere along the way I had taken on the role of exposer, if not in the physical world, then in
my own mind, smashing down walls of delusion, only vaguely understanding that I also was in
need of exposure.
“What did he say to you?” I asked. “What did he say before he left?” Only after I spoke
did I realize that I could have been talking about either her old friend Eugene or Kevin. I was
referring to Eugene, though I already knew the answer. I was only trying to make her remember.
Leave him, Eugene had said to her, I’m worried about you, I learned when Sanghee had
confessed the story to me all those years ago. She had told me everything then, laughing
nervously through fear and confusion. There wasn’t yet enough bitter history between us, and
she had been with Kevin long enough to have questions, but not long enough to realize she’d
have to live without answers. I was holding the clues within myself, in memory and our family’s
history, but I didn’t know that I knew anything more than anyone else and I didn’t even know
enough to do more than warn her: Leave him, I said, echoing Eugene, a kind of animal instinct. I
did nothing to convince her.
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Sanghee walked away, Bam-bam held delicately in her hands like a baby.
“I’m leaving you,” she said, her bare feet padding on the kitchen linoleum. “Kevin said
I’m leaving.”
* * *
Early in his career in law enforcement, Kevin had an interaction with a deer. The deer
made an impression on him, which then left an impression on me, after having listened to my
brother repeat the same story for over a year.
As the story goes, Kevin was patrolling the 101 near the peninsula, between Palo Alto
and San Francisco, where the highway loops and curves in abrupt angles alongside a mountain.
Where the pavement ends, a cliff drops down to the ocean. Above the road, high up on a peak,
there’s a little stone house, hut-like, with no edges, curved like a mushroom. Straight out of a
fairy tale, it could have been a house for gnomes or a hut that Hansel and Gretel might have
passed in the forest before meeting the witch in the gingerbread house. But it wasn’t from a fairy
tale; the house existed in the real world, a world in which a house could apparently be carved out
of a rock the color of a terracotta pot and someone could actually live in it—the chimney and
driveway, the little garden and mailbox were all proof of this. The stone house sits far above the
highway at the cliff’s edge, and the view from up there, I can only imagine, is the wide open
space of mountains, ocean, and sky.
When Kevin and I were kids, we’d visit our aunt in Palo Alto once or twice a year. My
father’s two brothers also lived in the South Bay, in San Jose—Michael lived alone in a studio
apartment, Gene rented a two-bedroom apartment with his wife and two small children—and
we’d all gather at my aunt’s, since she had a big house in a nice neighborhood with a pool and a
deck to grill Korean barbecue. For me and Kevin, the drive felt incredibly long and tedious. I’d
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load an Esprit tote bag with Sweet Valley High and issues of The Baby-Sitters Club that featured
Claudia Kishi, Go Fish and Old Maid and a mini-set of Connect Four, cassette tapes of Janet
Jackson and Mariah Carey, and my yellow Sony Sports Walkman. Kevin traveled lighter with
his Gameboy and Spiderman comics. Our parents would often take the scenic route along the
ocean, though the drive was longer. Despite this, Kevin and I preferred the detour, partly because
there was less traffic and thus minimal stress radiating from the front seat, and because we loved
seeing that unusual house on the mountain, anticipation setting in as soon as we caught sight of
the sea. We knew how close we were by memory, the length and width of the curves on the road,
the placement and height and leafiness of the trees, and the big, jagged rocks that marked the
geography. Sometimes I would even claim to know exactly where we were by the particular
shape of the mountain passing alongside us and the distance between us and the rising waves of
the ocean. See how that edge is all crusty and porous and resembles the top of a rose-cut
diamond, I’d say, trying to sound both like a geologist and a fine jeweler. Then I’d say
something nonsensical about the ocean and the moon and tidal force that I’d heard on a National
Geographic special, which somehow always tricked Kevin into thinking I was smarter, though I
knew that I had no idea what I was talking about. How do you know things like that, he’d say
before getting quiet.
Right before the final curve below the house, I would look at Kevin, who was always
looking up, just then, his lips parted.
“Who do you think lives there?” he’d say. “Do you think it’s a family? Or someone who
lives alone?”
“I don’t know,” I’d say.
“I think it’s an old person. A grandpa, all by himself.”
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Kevin was patrolling the 101 alone at night when he got a call that a deer had been hit.
He drove to the location, on the same highway, not far from where he had been when he received
the call. When he arrived, he found that the driver of the car that had hit the deer had already left,
though the deer was still there by the side of the road and still alive, though barely. Kevin stood
over the deer that was lying on its side, breathing slow and heavy, unevenly, eyes open. Blood
pooled around the torso, Kevin said, where its belly had been torn open. He touched the deer
with the toe of his boot, nudging it softly—“it,” he called the deer, because he didn’t know if it
was male or female. The deer did not respond to his touch. He knelt beside the deer and ran his
fingers along the length of its neck.
“Like how I pet Odie,” he said, “before he falls asleep.”
The deer opened and closed its wide-set eyes, blinking slowly. Kevin got on the radio and
asked what he should do. The responder told him that if the deer was dying, he should shoot it to
ease its suffering and animal control would come pick it up.
“I didn’t want to shoot him,” Kevin told me. “But I had to. He was dying. They said it
was better to put him out of his misery.”
Kevin touched the deer’s side with his palm, let his hand rise and fall as he felt the deer
breathe. He said he could feel the life draining from the animal’s body, its heart beating slower
every moment. He stood up, aimed his handgun at the deer’s head, and pulled the trigger. The
body bounced and the shot reverberated, sounding across the open landscape like something had
exploded in the sky. Blood pooled around its head.
“I felt so bad,” Kevin said. “He was dying and I had to kill him. He couldn’t stop me. He
couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t even defend himself.”
* * *
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Korean children are told and retell stories about goblins, ghosts, spirits, magical animals,
and shape-shifters, as well as the expected tales about men and women, in which man and
woman, good and bad are opposite poles with nothing between them: the virtuous and selfless
young woman versus the selfish woman who never learns the value of sacrifice; the faithful and
hardworking young man, devoted, first and foremost, to filial piety versus the man who is a lazy
trickster. Folktales operate in stark contrasts: generous and selfish, hard-working and lazy,
beautiful and ugly, rich and poor, young and old, loyal and untrustworthy, good and evil.
Kevin and I valued most the stories about dokkaebi, goblins known for their grouchiness
and mischief. Impatient and ill-tempered, they derive enjoyment from causing minor
inconveniences to humans. Lost shoe? Dokkaebi. Bone broth gone sour? Dokkaebi. The wind
carried your laundry drying on the clothesline down into the stream, to be lost forever?
Dokkaebi.
Dokkaebi are harmless, mostly just a nuisance, and they wouldn’t even be remembered in
the tales of Korean folklore if not for their prized magical clubs. Dokkaebi can grant any wish
with the magic club, and anyone with ownership may also grant wishes, for others and for
oneself. In the stories, a character either finds a magic club, by chance, or is gifted a club by a
lonely dokkaebi as a reward for friendship and loyalty. A sinister character might steal a magic
club from the dokkaebi or from a good citizen who was lucky enough to have gotten one by
legitimate means. To make a wish, the possessor of the club need only pound it on the ground
three times and declare the thing that they desire.
Our mother once told us a dokkaebi story about two brothers who were very different.
Chun was diligent and selfless, Chun’s brother was lazy and greedy. Every morning, Chun
would wake at dawn to cut and gather wood from the forest, which he would then sell in the
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village, sharing his earnings with his parents, brother, and brother’s wife. Despite his work and
sacrifice, he would never, ever complain. At the end of one long day cutting wood and collecting
acorns, Chun becomes lost in the dark and finds shelter in an abandoned house, where he decides
to spend the night until morning. He isn’t inside long before a gang of dokkaebi, fired up with
celebration after a good day causing trouble and disorder, gather into the house, settling in a
circle. Chun climbs into the rafters to hide as he watches the dokkaebi below having a grand time
pounding their clubs—thump, thump, thump—and chanting wishes, calling forth a variety of
delicious and fanciful things to appear: piles of food and drink, and mountains of gold, silver,
and glittering gems. As Chun watches the dokkaebi feast, he becomes hungry. After all, he
worked all day and hasn’t eaten a thing. He decides to eat just one of the acorns that he had
collected for his family, but when he takes a bite it produces a terrible sound:
CRRAAAAAAAACK! The noise is thunderous. Fortunately for Chun, the dokkaebi waste no
time investigating the source of the sound, convinced that the loud cracking noise is the roof
caving in on them. They promptly flee the house, leaving the entire bounty, including the clubs,
behind. Chun gathers together as much of the feast and jewels that he can carry, with the
intention of sharing his good fortune with his family. Chun is not only generous and loyal, he is
smart and opportunistic, though only for the benefit of others: he remembers to take a magic
club, which will allow him to provide for his parents for the rest of their lives. At home, he is
celebrated and honored for his good fortune and the fact that he only desires to share this fortune
with his family. Chun’s brother, seething with suspicion and jealousy, asks Chun how he came to
acquire such wealth. Chun, who is too optimistic and trusting to suspect any ill intentions from
his brother, rattles off in tiny detail, from beginning to end, the story about that day in the forest
that changed everything. Imagining his own future of endless wealth, Chun’s brother
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immediately sets off for the forest. He fills his pockets with acorns, intending to eat them all
himself, and he finds the house and hides in the rafters where he waits for the dokkaebi to make
their grand entrance. It isn’t long before they arrive and sit down in a circle. He is impatient to
scare them away. Filled with anticipation, Chun’s brother takes a bite of an acorn:
CRRRAAAAAAAAACK! To his surprise, the dokkaebi do not run away, for this time they are
not fooled. They peer up into the rafters and chase him down, convinced that he’s the thief who
had scared them away previously. The dokkaebi kick and beat him with their clubs until he
becomes flat, long, and skinny, stretched thin as a carpet. Chun’s brother staggers home empty-
handed. When Chun sees the state of his brother, he simply shakes his head, to which his brother
responds, face wet with regretful tears: “I have learned my lesson.”
Kevin and I each identified with Chun, the virtuous sibling, which would make the other
one of us Chun’s brother, the lazy and spoiled sibling who isn’t even worth naming. I don’t
know why we thought we were Chun when everyone was always telling us that we were bad,
lazy, and selfish, just like Chun’s brother. Every family has a Chun, and there can always be
more than one. But for every family of Chuns, there will always be a Chun’s brother. I wonder if
we don’t sometimes create Chun’s brother out of fear that we’ll be assigned the role first. Who
doesn’t want approval? We all want to be Chun.
* * *
Early on, when he was new to the police department and things were a little easier
between us, Kevin asked me to join him on a ride-along. If you want a day-pass at a gym you’re
required to sign multiple forms and waivers with several pages of smallprint, but at the police
department any civilian can request or be invited on a ride-along and accompany a cop for a day
on the job without signing a single thing.
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My brother was proud of his job and wanted to show me what a typical day was like for
him. I never let on that I wasn’t proud of him, that I had made a habit of never mentioning what
he did for a living, which after some time became never mentioning him at all, because one thing
people can always be counted on to ask about someone they know little about is the person’s line
of work. The overwhelming response before I developed this habit of not mentioning Kevin’s
job, and not mentioning Kevin at all, was shock and disgust, like it was scripted into their DNA.
My social world did not include the type of people who had police officers in their families or
network of friends.
In his first years on the job, Kevin worked the night shift. It was dark when we left the
station in San Jose, the fluorescent lights streaming yellow onto the world, the building a satellite
glowing in orbit. We passed the boss on our way out, the captain of Kevin’s division, a middle-
aged Asian man who was as exceedingly friendly and polite as Kevin’s coworkers had been
when he’d introduced me to everyone in the office, all of the uniformed men smiling and warm
and polite, ribbing each other and even me when I tried to make a joke—You sound just like
Kevin! So sarcastic! Jesus, you’re like twins!—the rooms bustling with energy and
professionalism, all of us either heading in for a shift or heading out for families waiting at
home. Kevin was showing me off as much as he was showing off to me. I played along, fulfilled
my duty as a sister.
In the patrol car, I sat in front in the passenger seat, while the backseat—the cage—was
empty and dark and so immensely gloomy, so exceptionally spare, I could hardly look, couldn’t
help thinking of the inhumanity and the shame stewing in there. As we drove away, Kevin
showed me his new driving skills, flooring the gas with his right foot, braking the adjacent pedal
with his left.
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“It took some practice but if you can master it, it’s a lot more efficient. You don’t lose
time moving your foot from the right to the left,” Kevin said. “But if you can’t get used to it, it’s
just dangerous.” My head pressed back as we sped up dramatically, bounced forward when
Kevin slammed on the brakes. It was not a relaxing way to drive, but nothing about my brother
was relaxing.
We drove like that down every city block, Kevin flooring it all the way up to each
intersection where we’d abruptly halt at the stop signs. It was the most tense and jerky drive I’ve
ever taken. I can only compare it to a roller coaster ride for kids, though one that’s broken—non-
threatening, but all rough and full of stops and starts with no smooth dips and turns. I was thrown
forward and back as Kevin kept talking, unperturbed. He explained his process, how he always
got to work early so that each night before starting his beat he’d have time to stop somewhere
secluded where he could prep the equipment in his cruiser.
Kevin pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse. He turned off the engine,
flipped on the switch of the overhead light. Under the yellow glow, lint and dust particles floated
between us. He began pointing at different spots in the car, leaning over and opening
compartments and secret hatches while announcing what type of firearm was hidden where.
Kevin went on like that, showing me the collection of guns stashed in the patrol car, describing
the specific purpose of each firearm as well as the tactical reasons for their locations. I lost count,
but there seemed to be almost ten guns: one under the driver’s seat, one in the console, one in the
glove box, a shotgun attached to the ceiling, and, still, many others that my brother pointed out in
quick succession. The gun that he prized most was the shotgun, which he explained was a
personal possession and had not been issued by the police department. In fact, the majority of the
firearms in the car came from his own collection.
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“Most cops don’t carry shotguns. People use them for hunting, but I like to have it for
extra protection.”
“What do you mean? You have like nine other guns in here,” I said, shrinking back as I
peered above me at the long barrel of the shotgun attached to the ceiling of the car.
“You have to be close with a shotgun and your aim has to be accurate, but if you want a
man dead, if you shoot him with this, in the right spot, he’s not coming back up. It’s extra
protection,” Kevin said. “The cops at work think I’m crazy. What do you need all those guns for,
they say. They think I’m paranoid, but I don’t care. I’ll be alive, and I’ll be the one laughing
then. Nobody can shoot me if I shoot with this first.”
Kevin removed the shotgun from the ceiling of the patrol car, where it was clamped down
and jerry-rigged in some way that I didn’t understand. There was a moment where the barrel was
pointed at me and I instinctively flinched, hands up to protect my face. Kevin turned off the
headlights and got out of the car. He leaned over, head cocked sideways, grinning at me through
the driver’s side window. He was holding the gun casually in both hands.
“I want to show you something,” he said.
I got out and joined him, zipping up my sweatshirt. I was wearing one of those black
hoodies, the kind that a black teenager has a statistically strong chance of getting shot by the
police for wearing in most parts of the country, but that was ubiquitous among privileged white
kids in San Francisco at the time.
Kevin flipped a switch on the shotgun. A bright light turned on at the top, shining a
straight line that extended out from the barrel, the whole thing glowing like a magical weapon
sent from the future. In the darkness, the light extended longer than a sword, or much longer than
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I imagined a sword could be, and I remembered that when Kevin and I were small, we would
pretend our flashlights were light sabers that could touch the stars in the night sky.
“I had this light installed,” he explained. “Need to see what I’m shooting at.”
Kevin walked into the center of the empty lot, nothing but pavement and gravel and the
faded outlines of parking spots surrounding him. He began moving with swift, fluid movements,
pointing the shotgun into the dark recesses of the parking lot, pivoting with precision and
confidence, as if he had performed the routine a hundred times before. Each time he aimed the
gun at a precise location, he nodded, confirming that what was revealed was exactly what he
meant to uncover: the rust-colored stain on the dumpster; the peeling paint on the sharp edge of a
building; beyond the chain-link fence, a field sprouting with dandelions. The white light shined
everywhere, the glowing circle lighting up every little thing like a stage light. Kevin covered the
whole damn parking lot, holding the light on each spot for an exact number of beats followed
with an approving nod, before sweeping it to the next—hands still, body in motion—gliding in
perfect rhythm and movement, quick and controlled and purposeful. He hunched over, he
ducked, holding the gun close to his body like a talisman, swiveled around, and around again,
boots crunching into the gravel and kicking up off the ground.
It reminded me of when we used to train all day on the tennis courts, the sun beating
down on us, browning and freckling our skin. I’d break for water and watch Kevin practice drill
after drill, his concentration equal in intensity from the beginning to the end of a session, gliding
from side to side and up and down the court, his whole body moving in one fluid motion,
beautiful and precise and graceful, like a dancer.

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CHAPTER 6: Plea Bargain (or Ceremony)

“The gypsy won’t stop calling me,” my mother said.
“Stop calling her a gypsy,” I said.
“I shouldn’t have given that gypsy my phone number,” she said.
My mom and the psychic were on the outs.
I had come bearing gifts. Korean persimmons for collagen, inflammation, and regularity.
Jeju citrus tea for digestion. Red bean buns from the bakery down the block, to satisfy the carbs-
lover in both of us. My mother had recently left her place in Presidio Heights and moved to a
new apartment on California Street, at the edge of Chinatown, in another of Stan Kwan’s
buildings where she would again serve as building manager in exchange for free rent.
By then I was getting ready to move to New York. I had two months before my departure
date, and I’d still need to make living and moving arrangements. I had already told my dad on
the phone, during one of his weekly calls from the road, though I hadn’t yet told my mother,
because this was the type of news that required an in-person conversation. A phone call would
not make it any easier. My mother’s voice sounding directly in my ear when she felt unhappy
about something could be harder to take than the same interaction face to face. I had found that I
could block out portions of dialogue that was too insulting or melodramatic if our interaction
included a variety of shared sensory input—the way her hair curled inward into two C’s on either
side of her face, the scent of lemon verbena in the air, the silk rug squishing under my toes,
which always reminded me of how she had talked down the salesperson at Medici Gallery by
several thousand dollars. No matter how much I might not like what my mother was saying to
me, it seemed only right to let her have her say. The powerless are often the people who shout
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the most, and after a lifetime of never being heard, my mother could shout the loudest, which
more often than not defeated her intended purpose, but I had accepted that she should at least
have the satisfaction of a good spell of ranting.
The day I went to tell her the news, I left work early, a law-adjacent temp job I had
picked up to pay for moving expenses. Even though I was a law school dropout, I was somehow
able to get hired as an Attorney Writer, editing rules of law that are updated quarterly in those
serialized leather-bound books that line the libraries of every law firm in America. I purchased
the red bean buns and persimmons on my walk up Grant Street. The tea I had driven all the way
to San Jose for. My mother’s new place was located at the border of Nob Hill and Chinatown, an
area that probably had a name, and if it didn’t back then, it most certainly does now, likely in the
form of a portmanteau (NobChin?) or something quirky like The Pink Triangle or The Rainbow
Patch. New neighborhood designations continue to pop up everywhere, somehow in a city of
only forty-nine square miles of social, racial, and economic similarity.
My mother lived on an incline so steep and panoramic, Hollywood had been filming car
chase scenes down her street since the sixties. One block up, the sidewalk turned into a staircase
that climbed so high and was so near vertical, you couldn’t see where the block ended. Athletic
types in high-tech spandex, fluorescent running shoes, and the latest electronic devices strapped
to their biceps ran up and down the steps, resembling killing machines. While the street my
mother lived on ascended even higher, the view from her apartment encompassed a large swath
of the city: the skyscrapers of the financial district, Coit Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, and
even the sailboats dotting the bay, the light reflecting off the water and the city’s many
surfaces—the glass and concrete, the shiny hoods of cars, the glittery sidewalks—making our
earthly skin glow.
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Before I even reached my mother’s front door, I could smell the incense wafting from her
apartment, a sweet, woody scent, tinged with musk and powder. Inside, the incense was
overwhelming, to the point where I was beginning to lose track of time. When I noticed the
white pillar candle in the living room set on a glass tray, the little flame flickering by the open
window, I felt like I was in two places at once: the current time and the previous month when I
had last visited my mother.
“They are magic,” she had said, referring to both the incense and candles she had
purchased from the psychic. “They push out negativity. Since I knew you were coming, I lit an
extra candle.”
My mother followed the psychic’s instructions faithfully, burning the incense and candle
for exactly an hour twice a day, every morning and evening at eight, stubbing out the incense
stick and snuffing the candlewick with pinched fingertips—“Never blow out the candle,” my
mother said—precisely at nine a.m. and nine p.m.
“Why?” I had asked.
“Because the gypsy told me to,” she said.
When I told my mother that I was moving away, she listened quietly, taking a bite of the
persimmon that I had brought, which she had pared and sliced into wedges. My mother did not
interrupt. She waited until I was finished talking before asking questions. She had only one.
“Will you come with me to see the gypsy?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. When I saw my mother’s face tighten, I said, “Sorry, but I don’t
want to.”
“I never could say no to my mother,” she said, chewing slowly. “I wasn’t allowed. If she
asked something of me, I had to do it. I had no choice.”
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Apparently, I possessed defiance while she did not. It was a mystery to me whether it was
something we were born with, or without, whether being defiant was something we had learned,
or unlearned, in response to the invisible rules of the world.
I had no answer to this question. All I knew was that I didn’t want to do what my mother
was asking of me, and I knew I didn’t have to, and psychics made me uncomfortable. I had never
gone to see one, despite the fact that my mother had offered to “treat” me many times. My
mother, on the other hand, had made it a regular habit her whole life, consulting psychics
frequently for financial advice and for guidance on decisions, no matter how big or trivial:
whether she should sell her house and move and when, whether the summer or fall was a better
time to invite her sister to visit from Orange County, whether she should go on the trip to Palm
Springs with her tennis team. Occasionally she would visit the psychic out of boredom, purely
for fun. I learned that my mother’s proclivities were not so unusual when it became known to me
that many of my Asian friends’ mothers also consulted psychics, as regular as some women get
their nails done. Once while visiting a Vietnamese friend in Long Beach, I was turned away at
the front door, after having originally been invited, because my friend’s mother had since
consulted a psychic who had advised her not to allow strangers in the house until mercury was
out of retrograde. Even President Park Geun-hye, the first female president of South Korea,
relied on a spiritual advisor, though she was eventually impeached from the Blue House and
sentenced to prison for a variety of criminal activity arising from the relationship and the sinister
influence the “shaman fortuneteller” had over the president.
My mother sensed that I was about to say something. Which is probably why she spoke
first.
“The gypsy said this would happen,” my mother said, her voice low.
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“What?”
“That one of you would disappear. I was afraid that it would be Kevin.”
“Good thing it’s not Kevin,” I said.
“I had a bad dream,” she said. “I dreamt that there was a porcupine stuck in the toilet and
it wouldn’t come out! It was a terrible dream. I used a toilet plunger, but the porcupine wouldn’t
go down or come up. I woke up crying,” she said, her eyes beginning to water. “I went to the
gypsy. You know what she said? She said that something bad is about to happen.”
“So she didn’t actually say that one of use would disappear,” I said.
“She knew,” my mother said. “That’s what the candles are for. She gave them to me to
burn out the bad energy.”
“I don’t think it worked,” I said.
“Why do you have to be so negative?” she said. “You’ve always been like that. I don’t
know why. You know that’s why I had to light two candles today? Why can’t you talk in a more
joyful way?”
When I was a child, a friend’s mother pulled me aside for a private conversation, one of
many times that she did so during those years that I lived in Napa, before I moved away for
college.
“Mothers always deny having a favorite,” she said. “We even deny it to ourselves, but we
all have one.”
I don’t remember what prompted the attention in that particular moment. Perhaps I was
standing apart from her daughter and our friends, a kind of self-isolation arising from the
subjection of both conscious and unconscious aggressions, not surprising or particularly
interesting considering the racial makeup of our insular and unremarkable social world. Perhaps
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my friend’s mother had recently interacted with my mother, which more likely than not would
have involved at least a few instances of my mother lionizing Kevin and insulting me. During
those years, and for many, many years forward, my mother had an obsession with her only son,
and, in particular, a big stake in the outcome of his adult life and career, understandable if one
also understands that her son’s success would have a direct effect on her own life, since in her
cultural understanding, he would take care of her in her old age. Of course, there was a kind of
parallel and contrasting philosophy applied to her daughter, along with an unreasonable sense of
disdain, for her daughter’s success or failure would neither benefit nor disadvantage her, since a
Korean woman’s daughter belongs to the family she marries into, and any caregiving that might
be extended to her birth family, if at all, is granted only to her father, since women are
belongings and the people they belong to are men. I don’t know how much of this is customary
to our culture, how much is generational, and whether some rules apply only within my own
specific family. I’ve witnessed the most generous, self-sacrificing, and nearly devoid of ego
Korean women derided and shamed as spoiled, selfish, high maintenance. It is reflexive. It’s
almost as if claiming our daughters are spoiled is a way to assert status and class, and while one
could say it’s a compliment—“We are lifting our daughters!”—it is, of course, rooted in the
hatred of women, which, it turns out, also has the effect of oppressing men. Korean mothers must
put down their own daughters, must make us know our place, must be sure that we won’t have
too much confidence, must never, ever compliment us, because otherwise a Korean mother is a
bad mother. People who are not Korean do not understand this. I barely do, even still. I am
always forgetting and remembering again—and that is our job, isn’t it, as Korean Americans, to
always remember? The alternative is to spiral, to be lost, to take the wrong side.
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My friend’s mother was divorced, a single mother. She ran for miles and miles nearly
every day, training for this or that marathon, tennis and swimming on her off days, cycling and
yoga on occasion. She was the fittest mom I had ever seen. I don’t know how her joints didn’t
blow at her age. Of course, to have the time for the kind of recreation that molds a body to look
like that, she did not work. The only work she knew was the work of staying in shape. Her
children were latchkey kids, because she was always away from home participating in a sport or
athletic tournament or a race. At home, the pantries were empty. I remember bags of microwave
popcorn, avocadoes and berries, Lipton iced tea mix. Her ex-husband was a retired stockbroker
turned winemaker, though not a particularly successful one, the kind where the business is just
staying afloat, and her brother a pioneer of mountain biking, having established the first
mountain bike company in Marin. Inheritance got her a modest house in a respectable
neighborhood and she lived off of spousal support. Even though the income was barely enough
to keep herself and her two towheaded children in the middle class, and it appeared that they
nearly qualified as food insecure, the point is that she could make the choice to not work, and
while that choice may have made her feel powerless and lonely, and it meant that her dollars
were stretched unreasonably far, she had the rare luxury of being able to spend all of her time on
recreation, and her social class was far above the reality of her cash-flow income. I had always
thought that it was my competitive tennis training that had drawn her attention—she had taken to
cutting out and posting on the fridge articles about me from the local newspaper, she highlighted
my wins from Tennis magazine when they published a feature on rising juniors, and often I’d spy
her at the club standing alone on a neighboring court, watching me drill with my coach, her
mouth open—but I was beginning to realize that there was more to it, some kind of bond forged
by melancholy, unknowable even to ourselves.
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Life has brought me to a place where I live in a world surrounded by a particular kind of
people—bright, often fragile, always woke—their minds pinging with theories of systemic
oppression and intersectionality, with peer-reviewed arguments on gender identity and fluidity. If
I met my friend’s mother today, I wouldn’t give her a second thought, would think of her as
someone not worth my time, but the truth is: she was one of the only adults who treated me like a
person, who respected me. For this reason as well as others that are not interesting, her daughter,
who at the time was a close childhood friend, was far from nice to me. So I prefer to remember
the mother, and not the daughter.
“Your mother is different,” she said. “She wants her favorite to be Kevin, explicitly.”
My friend’s mother was sitting on a patio chair in the backyard, still in her jogging shorts
and running shoes, having just returned from running the backroads along the vineyards. Her
body was long and sinewy and her freckled skin was browned a golden shade of toasted white
bread, the way very light-haired people tan, if they tan at all. Her eyes were closed, face pushed
toward the sun like a houseplant.
“I think we have a lot in common,” she said. She had opened her eyes and was watching
me kindly. Her daughter stood nearby, drinking iced tea and petting a neighbor’s cat that had
leaped onto the potting bench, all while looking on suspiciously.
“We do?”
“We both have mothers who don’t understand us,” she said.
People with much guilt can sense it in others, and there’s a bond that can’t be explained,
the way an immigrant bonds with another immigrant, or the child of an immigrant bonds with
another. Memory is printed in our cells, fires in the synapses of our brains, manifests in the way
that we think and the way that we talk.
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This other mother, who loved her daughter more than her son, could see my mother’s
faults, though she couldn’t understand why my mother felt no shame. She sensed my own guilt,
which is why she confided in me, though I tend to believe that she didn’t know where mine came
from, only because I had no idea myself.
I know now that my culpability stemmed from many different sources. How I fit into our
social world with more ease than my mother, my father, or Kevin. My particular type of
oppression—young, Asian, a woman—that makes certain people want to save me. A long history
of being put down and put in my place, shamed and insulted from every side for any action or
lack thereof, for speaking or for failing to speak, for being too successful or mediocre or a
failure, for any preference and any choice—in short, a person who has been subjected to too
much victimization will feel guilty all the time, both for her compliance and her resistance.
Another source of guilt: my mother’s suffocating need for Kevin, how it gave me space
that Kevin didn’t get.
Last: how I would leave my mother behind.
Guilt is a state of mind. It can’t be proven. Even in a court of law, the work of proving
guilt has terrible consequences. We think that we can have a system that’s fair, assigning guilt
and absolving guilt, equally, with an even hand. If I were practicing criminal law, I think I would
want to defend. What a relief to hear the words announced: Not guilty.
But more likely, since most cases never go to trial, for expediency and compromise, a
plea bargain: Not guilty of the crime in question; guilty of something less terrible. In exchange,
leniency.
I sometimes wonder if we had known what would become of us—four individuals with
nothing to connect us but our joint history and shared genetics—whether we would have
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admitted our culpability in each other’s unhappiness. We spent so much energy stewing in our
own private pain, viewing each other as the offender, the wrongdoer. We thought that our pain
made us different, that it made us special. The mistake we made was not seeing how our
suffering connected us to each other and to the world. If we had known what would happen,
would we have agreed to a lesser charge, taken some of the blame for each other’s unhappiness?
No one wants guilt, but leniency is better than nothing. Better than festering alone in self-pity.
* * *
The house in Napa was sold. Before the new family moved in, while the house was in
escrow, my mother had a party—part going-away, part grieving party about my going away.
Invitations went out on little white notecards engraved with a purple border, addressed to six
Korean women who had immigrated to America in the sixties and seventies, after the
Immigration Act of 1965 removed restrictions on Asian immigration. Some arrived already
married, others met Korean men who had also immigrated. They started families and opened
family businesses, though their chosen work had nothing to do with anything they had dreamed
of doing or had studied for while working toward degrees in Korea, which were often highly
specialized. They became greengrocers and owners of bodegas, bookstores, and dry-cleaning
businesses, which they managed and operated themselves. They were successful business people
and masters of frugality. They bought homes in the Bay Area that over the years rose
exponentially in value. They stayed connected through an extended Korean network, long phone
conversations, Korean church events, and the highways and transportation systems that joined us
all from Berkeley to Oakland, San Jose, Los Altos, Marin, and San Francisco. My family was
flung further out in Napa, decidedly isolated from the community.
On the invitations, my mother wrote in Korean a message that translates to:
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Party for Jane
Saturday, 12:30
Please wear black

I had never heard of a grieving party. I wasn’t sure if it was a Korean thing.
“It’s not like I’m dead,” I said. “What’s the party for?”
“If enough Korean mothers think about you at the same time in the same place, maybe
you will know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“That we are thinking about you.”
On the day of the party, I peeked out the window as six women stepped carefully up the
walkway. I was not surprised that they had somehow timed simultaneous arrival despite the fact
that they had driven separately from different locations. I could see the tops of their heads, gray
dyed black, and the shoulders of their black coats, and as they made their way up to the front
door, there was movement of black slacks and black skirts with black stockings and black shoes.
When I opened the door, six women greeted me, huddled together like a gang—Mrs. Chang,
Mrs. Park, Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Oh, Mrs. Eom, Mrs. Cho. They all spoke at once:
“Ahhh! Jane-ah!”
“Wha-ow. It’s Jane-ah!”
“You got big!”
“You still look so young!”
“Do you diet?”
“Do you remember me?”
Six sets of hands touched me—my head, my hair, my back, shoulders, arms, and hands. I
smiled through the discomfort, though when they removed contact and began taking off their
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black shoes, I was surprised that I felt alone. One by one, the loafers and sensible stacked heels
were lined up neatly in rows on the shoe rack in the little nook off the foyer. I handed over six
pairs of little velvet slippers from an old Korean cabinet that resembled an oversized pirate’s
treasure chest, where my mother tucked away shoes and kept stacks of slippers for guests. When
I handed a pair to Mrs. Park, it was then that I noticed a toddler hiding behind her legs, hands
wrapped around one saggy knee. The girl’s hair moved like water, her shiny bangs blunt-cut
straight across the eyebrows. Her face was sweet and open and reminded me of small animals
and stuffed toys, strawberry season and cotton candy, though even she was dressed in all black.
“My granddaughter, Yeon-ah,” Mrs. Park said.
I was beginning to feel self-conscious in my jeans and flannel shirt, neither of which was
black. Even though I had made the choice to defy my mother’s mourning dress code, I couldn’t
help but feel regretful in the face of all the guests who had followed the rules. For a moment I
worried about whether they thought I was being disrespectful to my mother.
A flurry of hands pushed one member of the group forward.
“Jane, do you know who I am?”
I remembered the woman from my grandfather’s funeral, the way she had popped out
from behind a family crypt, hedges trimmed down to flat-tops, bonsai-like. She had sported an
old lady perm and oversized chunky black glasses, the temples curlicued into thick baroque
scrolls.
“I’m Maggie Cho’s mother,” she had said then and echoed now, two decades later at my
parent’s house, which, very soon, would no longer belong to them. Her current eyewear was
slightly less ostentatious, wire-rimmed eyeglasses with gold temples chain-linked in interlocking
C’s, and she looked as if she had barely aged even half the amount of time that had passed.
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The Bay Area spans far and wide, branching out from the city of San Francisco to the
surrounding counties, extending, officially, from the wine country, the headlands, the parks and
campgrounds in the north, to Silicon Valley in the south, with its strip malls and company
headquarters and massive parking structures and Asian grocery stores, from the East Bay with its
clusters of immigrant suburban communities and mini cities, the little crunchy haven of scholars
and social progress, next door to the Bay’s old refuge of hip-hop, now gentrified by tech
overflow and hipsters and artists, all within easy access to a monster IKEA, to the Peninsula with
its clean and preppy, athletic spirit, and a disinfected tinge as if the entire area has been sanitized
by technology, industry, and the future.
The Bay Area has a population of nearly eight million people, ___ is Asian, ___ is
Korean. In the seventies, the population was ____, ___ was Asian, and ___ was Korean. That
number seems like a lot of people—surely it would have been impossible for one Korean to
personally know the __ other Koreans—but the sense that I have about Koreans in the seventies
is that, back then, there were so few of us, and having recently immigrated to a strange country
with inscrutable customs, overly-salted food, and a complicated language, there was a longing to
form a community. My parents claim that Koreans all knew each other, or had at least heard of
each other through word of mouth, each of us accounted for, connected by the shared history of a
century of war and immigration, our families linked across the Bay and down into Southern
California, strung together throughout the country all the way to the East Coast, beyond the
Pacific and back to the homeland, South Korea, the only Korea acknowledged by Korean
Americans and the diaspora. Over the decades, we multiplied, but at the beginning it was that
first immigrant generation, without the comforts of Koreatowns, extended family, or a sense of
community.
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The early Mr. and Mrs. Changs, the Parks, the Lees, the Ohs, the Eoms, and the Chos of
the Bay Area needed each other to confirm their own existence, to speak the language and
compare winters in California to winters in Seoul, where trees are shaped like umbrellas and it
snows for days on end, where children walk home from school in wool mittens and bonnets,
chomping roasted chestnuts purchased from street vendors. We needed to distinguish ourselves
from the Chinese and Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Filipinos, who we were always being
lumped in with as if our histories didn’t exist, never mind the intercontinental wars, or how
Koreans are loathed throughout Asia, how Asians in the South are loathed as well—it’s arguable
who wins the prize for the most despised—and, of course the loathing is often directed at each
other, amongst those of us who come from those places where people have been the most
historically powerless and victimized. Never mind how Korea as a country takes pride in the
purity of the Korean race and its nearly complete status as a monoracial nation. Maybe some or
all of this has something to do with how the Japanese had tried to wipe out the Korean race, as
well as much of the rest of Asia, or it could have been the comfort women and the resulting
shame and sorrow, or how the Korean language had been outlawed, or any number of massacres,
many of them unmemorialized, erased from memory, some committed by Koreans against
Koreans, or the American military presence that still exists today.
Koreans in America share an allegiance to each other and to our presence as a whole,
whether or not we want to, and even those of us who wish to deny it. We share a sense of loyalty
and obligation, as if we came into the world with the knowledge programmed in our DNA:
responsibility reaches beyond the filial, beyond the nuclear and the extended family,
encompassing an entire network of people who habitually and dependably interchange shame
and grief and pride.
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The Changs, the Parks, the Lees, the Ohs, the Eoms, and the Chos of the Bay Area
always show up when they’re called upon. At weddings and funerals, and even going-away-
grieving parties, these men and women appear after years of absence, the way I know that I will
when they’re dead and buried and I have replaced them as the oldest living generation, when it
has become my duty to represent my family and my race.
“Do you remember me?” Mrs. Cho asked.
“Yes,” I said. I smiled, extended my right hand. Mrs. Cho brushed my hand aside and
hugged me, resting her head on my shoulder.
“I met you when you were born. You were a new baby, so you probably don’t
remember.”
Mrs. Cho was at least four inches shorter than me. I am five foot four. It is not very often
that I meet adults who are much shorter than me, and the experience of looking down on
someone while speaking to them makes me feel both empowered and guilty. The guilt arises
from understanding the other perspective, which makes me wonder if the people I come into
contact with who are taller than me by at least four inches—which is likely around half of the
people I talk to from day to day—feel empowered in relation to my size, without humility, and I
wonder, also, what effect has that had on who I am now.
“Do you know who Maggie Cho is?” Mrs. Cho peered up at me.
“Yes,” I said.
Maggie was more than ten years older than me, yet despite the age gap, my mother and
Mrs. Cho had managed to keep a lively competition going between the two of us, probably when
I was still in the womb.
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Behind Mrs. Cho, there was movement. Mrs. Chang, Mrs. Park, Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Oh, Mrs.
Eom, and the little girl Yeon-ah began moving at once, herding the throng of us inside.
“Everybody knows who Maggie Cho is!”
“For a while, Maggie was almost famous!”
“She probably could have had her own TV show, that’s how almost famous she was.”
“Where is your mother?”
I took the lead, guiding us all to the dining room, where I had last seen my mother at
work at the dining table arranging the dishes of food that she had spent all morning and the
previous day preparing.
“I heard you get good grades,” a voice called out behind me.
“I’m not in school anymore,” I said.
“I thought you were in law school!”
“Jane-ah, you got prettier, did you know?”
“That happens to Korean women. We get prettier with age!”
“You’re very skinny!”
“Ahhhhhh, Jane is a good girl.”
“Yes, she’s a good daughter.”
The dining room table was covered with all of my mother’s specialties and then some.
There was pickled cucumber, three different kinds of kimchi, kimbab, stir-fried squid, grilled
fish with heads attached, bulgogi, kalbi, fried chicken, jajangmyeon, cold buckwheat noodles,
vegetable pancakes, soon tofu stew, seaweed soup, a platter piled high with fresh green lettuce
leaves as large as fans, fried zucchini, several tiny dishes of sauces and pastes, and purple rice
with beans. The toddler was playing Rachmaninoff on the grand piano.
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My mother was still at the dining table, rearranging the dishes, switching their places to
make the spread more visually pleasing, as if stitching together panels of a quilt. The dishes
covered nearly the entire surface of the table—there was barely enough space to set down
plates—which had been handcrafted and custom-made from reclaimed teak by a Japanese
woodworker living in Berkeley. I remembered that my father had not supported the purchase. He
had many things to say about the Japanese—none of it nice—like plenty of Koreans of his
generation did, having grown up during and in the aftermath of Japanese occupation, though,
despite the fact that he and my mother were the same age, my mother felt differently, preferring
to think of Asians in America as connected by invisible thread, as if we owe a duty to one
another, and disavowing the other is disavowing oneself. After some bickering, my mother hired
Takumi without telling my father. The new dining set appeared while he was at work. When he
came home, he stopped and looked at it from a distance. He never spoke of it.
Above the dining table there was a crystal chandelier, my mother’s best-loved possession.
Let me mention: my mother had a fascination with Liberace. In the 80’s and 90’s, when multiple
Liberace documentaries were making the rounds on prime time television, my mother whooped
for joy whenever she found one while flipping through the channels. Her intrigue rubbed off on
me. The more I saw, the more enchanted I became by the world of Liberace. The mansions
loaded with gold and marble, crystal and glass, the piano pool, the statues and sculptures,
Liberace’s tan face against white teeth and jet black hair, the furs and ruffles and sequins, the
way he could play the piano with a ring on every finger, the gold bands glittering with gems so
large that they reached all the way up to his second knuckles, and, of course, the chandeliers. He
was like Dracula, but more glamorous.
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My mother adjusted the dimmer, turning the chandelier lights down to a medium setting.
The crystals glittered softly, and the fractured light made the whole room glow. The platters of
food and the sauces on the table seemed to shift and shimmer, as if their image had been
projected through a prism.
“Mrs. Kim! This is beautiful,” said Mrs. Cho. “I wish Maggie could have been here. You
made that fried chicken that she loves and that’s her favorite kind of kimchi,” she said, pointing
at the little cubes of radishes.
“Mrs. Cho, Maggie really likes to eat,” my mother said. “She always has. I remember
when she was small she was the chubbiest Korean girl. She hasn’t changed at all.”
Mrs. Cho laughed, seemingly unperturbed. “Jane has always been skinny. She never had
a problem with her weight. It must have been all that tennis,” she said, nodding. “Maggie just
started her residency at the children’s hospital at Johns Hopkins. What is Jane doing now?”
Mrs. Cho knew full well that I had dropped out of law school. The party at my mother’s
house was an occasion to see me off to New York, and surely by now my mother’s friends had
been filled in on the details of my departure.
“Maggie is working at the hospital? I thought she was in the hospital. What do you call
it? Re-Hab?”
My mother swapped the gochujang with the soy sauce. The chopped scallions dipped
down and floated back to the surface, like little green ducks. She looked up, one finger pointing
toward the ceiling, as if she had just remembered something important.
“Is Maggie still fat?” she said.
At that moment, I happened to be holding a stack of empty plates, which I was carrying
into the dining room. Upon hearing the conversation, I let a single plate from the bottom of the
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stack drop to the floor. The porcelain shattered on the hardwood, startling everyone, as intended.
My mother and Mrs. Cho immediately dropped to the floor and began picking up the pieces.
“Jane! Be more careful!” my mother said. She held a piece of the broken plate, turning it
over carefully in her hands. “This is the good china,” she said sadly.
“It’s beautiful,” Mrs. Cho said. “Too bad it’s broken.”
Mrs. Cho examined a shard that covered the surface of her palm all the way to the tips of
her fingers. The dish was white, hand-painted with a floral pattern in shades of blue and 24 karat
gold detailing. Dishwasher safe.
“How much did it cost?” she asked.
“It’s a dinner plate,” my mother said, holding up a broken piece. She clicked her tongue,
sounding the sharp tsk-tsk that my people are fond of making. “These are two hundred and thirty
dollars each,” she announced.
“Sorry,” I said, sheepish, because I honestly felt bad about having broken something so
expensive, though I knew that there was no way my mother had paid full price for the dishes. My
mother rarely bought anything that wasn’t more than half off, and finding bargains was one of
her talents that I’d later realize I had inherited, unknowingly.
“These are from England,” my mother said, squatting over the broken plate.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Cho. “I have a set from France.”
“Let’s eat,” I said. “Is everyone ready to eat?”
I helped clean up the mess. Mrs. Chang, Mrs. Park, Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Oh, and Mrs. Eom
disappeared into the kitchen, where they busied themselves preparing barley tea and tidying up,
washing dirty dishes, though we hadn’t even eaten yet. I got out the vacuum and ran it over the
dining room floor, the little fragments of porcelain pinging their way up into the machine’s dust
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canister. My mother called the women into the dining room, her voice high and sing-song, using
the proper form of address to show respect, which I understood partially from the language and
mostly from the cadences, tone, and extra syllables. We gathered around the table, sitting on the
curved-back chairs made by the Japanese man, and, without prompting, each one of us tilted our
heads down, as if in prayer. It was just a moment, not long enough for a proper prayer. No one
said a word. The toddler was still playing Rachmaninoff on the grand piano.
Once we began eating, there was hardly any conversation. Voices murmured in approval
as the food was tasted around the table. Dishes passed hands. My mother spoke.
“Mrs. Chang. It’s wonderful that Helen has married. Is her husband a doctor? Jane still
doesn’t even have a boyfriend. It’s because I spoiled her. It’s my fault. She can’t get along with
anyone. Maybe if she lost weight and got her eyes done, she could get someone to marry her.”
“But Jane is very skinny,” said Mrs. Chang. “Helen is the chubby one. Jane is prettier
than Helen. And she’s a lawyer. Helen only teaches piano.”
“Jane isn’t a lawyer. Remember, I told you. She decided she wants to do a PhD. I don’t
know why. Professors don’t make much. Meanwhile, how is she going to pay off her student
loans for a law degree that she didn’t even finish? Her PhD program is barely even giving her
enough money to live on. I guess people will call her doctor but everyone knows that’s not a real
doctor. If you’re going to be in school for that long, might as well be a real doctor! I don’t know
what she’s doing. She could have at least found someone to marry at law school, then at least
she’d be married to a lawyer. It’s because she won’t get her eyes done. She never listens to me.
Helen listened to you and she looked beautiful at the wedding.”
“No, Mrs. Kim, Jane is better than my daughter.”
“No, Helen is.”
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I excused myself by getting up from the table, quietly, without a word. I went out to the
backyard, settling under the oak tree where I had retreated countless times—the spot had a
viewpoint from which I could see the interior of the house, while no one inside could see me. If I
closed my eyes and breathed deeply, I couldn’t hear the voices of my mother and her friends or
the girl piano-playing prodigy, who was now pounding out a Bach fugue.
It was late afternoon. The sun reflected off the pool, kidney-shaped and impossible for
swimming laps. It would be another few hours before the roof of the house would shade the
setting sun from the surface of the water. I noticed an old wheelbarrow in the yard and wondered
when it had last been moved. My father was the only person in our family who would have used
it, transporting yardwork, and it looked as if he had forgotten about it in the middle of a task. The
wheelbarrow was full of leaves and weeds and dried up soil. He had always enjoyed using
outdoor tools, I imagine because he felt as though the objects connected him to the earth. If I
poked around the backyard, I’d probably find the axe, maybe even a chainsaw. He was the kind
of person who only felt comfortable in wide, open landscape; the fewer people around, the more
he felt at ease. The more rural, the better. My father did not like city slickers. Truck driving took
him through the plains of Kansas and Montana, the rolling hills of Wyoming. I pictured my
father driving through tumbleweeds, his truck sweeping by cattle and cowboys. A shovel leaned
against the wheelbarrow, the blade caked with dirt and the long wooden handle dry and cracking.
My mother saw it as her job to stomp all confidence out of me. If she failed to do that,
she was not a good mother. This philosophy seemed to follow a reverse logic, since a lack of ego
worked against everything she wanted me to achieve. I couldn’t be who she wanted me to be and
at the same time get what she wanted me to get, not to mention what I might want,
independently, for myself.
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I stayed put in the spot under the tree, feeling small, childish, younger than my years. I
couldn’t see any end to my anger at my mother; not only did it feel right, it was satisfying. It
would take time and distance and changes in both of us before my empathy could grow larger
than my anger.
“You can’t just do whatever you want,” she had said, when I graduated from college and
told her I didn’t want to apply to law school.
I imagined my mother dead, her ghost haunting me, offering unwanted advice. I pictured
her in my apartment in San Francisco, hovering in the hallway, ghosting toward me, chanting,
“You can’t just do whatever you want. You can’t just do whatever you want. You can’t just do
whatever you want.” My mouth moved silently as I enacted the dialogue in my mind. My
armpits itched.
I tried to imagine my mother as a nice ghost, visiting me to offer helpful advice and
support. I remained completely still, but I couldn’t conjure a scene that didn’t immediately
become tinged with bad memories.
I crossed the yard to the wheelbarrow, which I pushed halfheartedly with the palms of my
hands. It didn’t budge. I took a step back and gave it a solid kick with the sole of my shoe, hands
up like I was trained in karate, though I wasn’t, causing it to topple off its front wheel and fall to
the side. I looked pointedly at the soil that had spilled all over the ground. Ha! I said under my
breath. I picked up the shovel that had also fallen and threw it as hard as I could. The muscles in
my shoulder stretched, my elbow joints popped. The shovel disappeared into the darkness behind
the trees. I heard it swish and thunk into the brush.
“Fuck everyone!” I said, loud enough to be shouting, though not enough to feel
satisfying. Soft enough that I wouldn’t have to worry that anyone inside could hear me.
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* * *
Maggie Cho’s mother had been eavesdropping on me.
“I saw you,” she said. “I saw you throw that shovel and I heard you say the F word. You
shouldn’t swear.”
I was at the kitchen sink, washing dishes, when Mrs. Cho had snuck up behind me and
tapped my shoulder, her short hair swept back in neat waves punctuating either side of her head.
“You were spying on me?”
“I’m always telling Maggie to stop swearing too.”
“But no one was supposed to hear me.”
“I heard you.”
“I thought I was alone!” I said, raising my voice, only to soften a moment later. “Mrs.
Cho,” I said as I turned off the faucet and removed my mother’s fuchsia rubber gloves, “Let’s go
to the living room. The others are probably wondering where we are.” I placed my hands on her
shoulders, patting gently. Mrs. Cho did not budge.
“This is how it started with Maggie,” she said. “First it was the cussing, then the comedy,
then the drugs.”
“She’s a doctor now. Everything worked out,” I said. “She quit doing stand-up.”
“Why did she think she could do that? A fat Korean girl. A comedian? An actress?” Mrs.
Cho held her hands up, for emphasis, palms facing toward the ceiling.
“Do you think I just started saying bad words, Mrs. Cho?”
“I want you to be a good girl.”
“I’m not a girl.”
“Then what are you? You’re not a boy. Are you a tomboy? Don’t be a tomboy.”
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I turned her around and gave her a shove. Not too hard, but not soft either. Koreans have
been pushed around for over a century, physically and emotionally, always with some level of
violence, which, for some of us, has made us into people who ourselves push, rushing around,
impatient, in a hurry to get things done when there is not in fact any real immediacy, people who
impose our will on others no matter what anyone actually wants, people who may react with
violence at home, hitting, pushing, smashing things, who may use language that is too direct, too
frank, that leaves nothing left unsaid.
This is to say that Mrs. Cho was not startled when I gave her a shove. A push here, a
shove there. It came with the territory. I had learned to be less forceful around non-Koreans, both
in speech and manner, even tried to gauge when a more gentle approach was appropriate with a
younger generation of Koreans and Korean Americans, though obviously I had my moments
where my true Korean self was irrepressible.
We entered the living room, our bare feet sinking into the peach carpet, and sat down on
the peach floral couch. Mrs. Cho’s feet swung like pendulums, a few inches above the ground.
The room was empty. Where was everyone?
“Where is everyone?” I said.
“In your room.”
“What are they doing in my room?”
“Something about the gypsy.”
“You mean the psychic.”
“The psychic gave your mom something to put in your room.”
No doubt candles, I thought. Crystals?
“I don’t want to go in there,” I said. “Let’s stay here.”
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“Okay.”
“What are they doing that for?”
“It’s for you.”
“But I’m not dead.”
“Your mother wants you to find your way back home.”
There was a pot of barley tea on the coffee table, arranged on a tray with teacups and
saucers. It was still fresh and warm from post-lunch, so I poured myself and Mrs. Cho cups of
tea, careful to prepare hers first.
“How’s Maggie?” I asked.
“She’s doing very well, working in Baltimore, living in D.C. She was having a hard time
for a while, but she’s back on track. I hope when she’s done with her residency she’ll come work
in San Francisco at the children’s hospital.” Mrs. Cho smiled, her gold eyeglasses lifting with her
full cheeks. “I just want her to be the best,” she said.
“At what?”
“The best that she can be. At being Maggie.”
I wondered if Mrs. Cho didn’t want Maggie to have confidence, like my mother. You
were too confident, she had said. If you think I was mean to you, that’s why. I just wanted you to
be the best. But I didn’t want to bring my mother into it. If she heard that I had been talking
about her, she might think I was making her look bad.
“Do you want to go with me to the store?” I said.
“Do you need something?”
“We’re out of apples,” I said, pointing at the plate of fruit on the coffee table. There was
still quite a bit of fruit, but I was looking for a reason to get out of the house. I gestured at the
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platter, which contained plentiful slices of oranges, kiwis, and melon, everything carefully peeled
and pared, though there were no more apples. “We should get more,” I said. “My mom doesn’t
like it when we’re out of fuji apples.”
“Okay,” Mrs. Cho said. “Let’s go.” She pushed herself off the couch, jumping onto the
floor with both feet planted in unison, as if landing a flip off a pommel horse.
“You seem athletic. Did you do gymnastics as a child?” I said.
“I was a professional basketball player in Korea,” she said.
“You were?”
“Well not professional professional. Almost professional!” said Mrs. Cho. “I was famous
in Seoul, you know. Women weren’t really allowed to play basketball, but I went to a women’s
college and we had an all girls’ basketball team. We played against other women’s colleges, and
I was the star! I was famous!”
“Interesting,” I said. “I had no idea.”
* * *
As we walked outside, I imagined Maggie Cho’s mother wearing a jersey and mesh
polyester shorts, dribbling a basketball, hopping into the air and shooting with a flick of her
wrist, and, of course, in my imagination the ball traveled clear across the court in a smooth arc,
swished through the hoop, no rim.
I discovered that my car was blocked in the driveway by two other cars that had
haphazardly parked behind me.
“Let’s take mine!” Mrs. Cho said, happily.
She held up a set of keys, triumphantly, pressing a button. The headlights to a silver
Porsche convertible flashed on and off, and the horn squawked briefly, a high-pitched yelp.
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Maggie had bought the car for her mother in the nineties, shortly after she married the chief of
medicine of the hospital in St. Louis where she had previously been a resident. They divorced
within two years, something about his having grown children from a former marriage, how she
couldn’t get comfortable in the family.
We slid in to Mrs. Cho’s car, the black leather smooth and warm to the touch, the
afternoon sun lingering in the air. Mrs. Cho let the engine warm for a minute, tapping the gas
periodically. Though the space was tight, she pulled the car out of the driveway in only two
moves. As we left the neighborhood, she shifted gears so seamlessly, it was as if we were
drifting into a future that had already happened.
Mrs. Cho took tight, quick turns, and once we were on the main road, we were speeding,
accelerating around the curves, tires screeching. The driver’s seat was elevated and pushed close
to the steering wheel, the seat’s back adjusted forward at a seventy-degree angle: an ideal driving
position with a clear view through the windshield. Whoever says Asian women can’t drive has
never been taken for a drive by Maggie Cho’s mother.
“I should have been a race car driver!” she said. “Do you watch NASCAR?” Mrs. Cho
was still speeding, but doing so efficiently and with high-wire competence, coming to a full stop
at stop signs, using her blinker, checking her blind spots.
“I don’t like how the race car drivers are all men,” I said, “and have you noticed that they
all look the same? It’s like they’re brothers, from the same Mormon family. And there’s always
some twenty-year old blonde Barbie doll handing the winner a trophy.”
“Jane, you’re so serious. All you have to do is watch those little cars drive around the
track. They’re so fast! And then they crash. Boom! Pow! Waaaaaaaahhhh—psssshhhh!” she
shouted, taking her hands off the wheel to demonstrate an explosion. “It’s so exciting.”
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We drove with the top down. The wind whipped through our hair and flattened out my
voice as I shouted directions into town. At the store, we picked out several apples, two baguettes,
and soft, rotting cheese. The sun was setting as we drove home, casting a sienna glow over
everything. We took a detour through the tree-lined backroads, pulled over beside a vineyard and
watched the sun disappear behind the mountains. Row upon row of vines sprawled out as far as
we could see.
I put my seat back and gazed at the sky through the open roof. Mrs. Cho reclined her seat,
parallel to mine. The sky was mottled with patches of clouds that I could only tell were moving
when I watched closely. We lay there for a while, in silence, as the sky began to darken and the
temperature began to cool, the dry air becoming even drier as the heat lifted. I giggled to myself
about the sight of us, two Korean ladies—one in her sixties, the other nearly thirty—reclined in a
convertible sports car, at the foot of a vineyard. I could be her daughter, she my mother, the two
of us enjoying the landscape.
“I remember Kevin’s first birthday party, his doljanchi. Do you know about it?” Mrs.
Cho said as she raised her arms, resting her hands behind her head, elbows bent out. “You
wouldn’t remember because you weren’t born yet,” she said.
“I saw pictures of my dol,” I said, recalling my fat round face, nearly a perfect circle, the
way my features disappeared into it. In the photograph, I wore a rainbow-striped hanbok dress
and a black hat embroidered with flowers—a string of pearls looped at the crown—that hugged
my head and covered my ears like a little helmet.
I remembered that as a teenager I had found pictures of Kevin and my dol celebrations in
a bag on the shelf of a closet. I fanned out the photos on the coffee table, asked my father about
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them as he watched the evening news. He picked up one of the photographs, squinted for a
moment before his eyes widened in recognition. He laughed, the picture pressed to his belly.
“I didn’t want you to have a dol,” he said. “Your mother, she thought we had to because
we’re Korean, so we did, for Kevin and for you. Koreans we knew from all over brought food
and presents. But I thought, why would we come all the way to America and have a dol?”
My father saw the ceremony as old-fashioned and superstitious. There were others like
my father, from his generation, who held similar perspectives: a tradition from the past born out
of poverty and oppression was better left in the past, left behind in Korea, if one wanted to
become American. Many years later, my father even thought it strange that families in Korea
were still celebrating first birthdays with the dol.
“Korea is so rich now. The economy is on top,” he said. “All my friends who stayed in
Korea, they have so much money now. My best friend growing up is the richest man I know.
He’s also the handsomest man I know. He looks like a movie star. I could have stayed there and
become his business partner and I’d be rich like him, but then I wouldn’t be American. My
friends in Korea didn’t have much when I came to America and they were all having a hard time
when I was making the most, but now they all have more money than me. I could never make as
much money as they did here in America because I’m not from here. You could, because you
were born here,” he said. “Have you heard of the Korean wave? Everybody likes Korea now.
Even Americans listen to K-pop, watch K-dramas and Korean movies, everybody is eating
Korean food. So why do they still want to have a dol in Korea?”
Years into the Korean wave, there was a dol revival among Korean Americans, those
who were born in or grew up in America, who would continue the tradition of celebrating the
first birthdays of their own children with either a lavish dol party, professionally planned and
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decorated, recalling the pomp of a traditional American wedding, or a DIY dol party, with
homemade food and handmade invitations and party favors. Both versions would reenact the
main elements of the traditional dol—the baby’s colorful hanbok outfit; the abundance of Korean
foods; the birthday table of ddeok rice cake, fruits balanced into pyramids, and the “dol towers”
of handmade pillars decorated with dried beans arranged to display the baby’s zodiac animal sign
and good wishes; and the most important of all: the doljabi fortune telling ritual, though this last
tradition would be performed tongue-in-cheek—no longer with melancholy-tinged hope from the
old world—with references to K-pop and K-drama, without any real expectation that the baby
choosing the stethoscope was a true prediction that she’d become a doctor, or that the
microphone or ice skater figurine meant she was destined to be the next member of Girls’
Generation or the next Yuna Kim.
What will Emerson choose? an invitation might read, a picture of a baby in traditional
dress alongside icons of his possible futures: wealth, long life, artist, abundance, athlete, scholar,
doctor.
Neither modernized dol—posh dol nor DIY dol—would recall my father’s discomfort
from decades back, the new generation performing the inherited ritual without the immigrant’s
desire to let go of the old world or the melancholy that accompanies it. The dol would become
postmodern, decidedly fun and unserious, ironic and absurd, yet the original purpose of the party
would remain the same: to celebrate a life that is distinctly Korean, and to embrace history,
tradition, and culture.
In the photos of my dol, I was perched on what appeared to be a miniature throne: a tiny
chair at a lacquer table set low to the ground, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and folktale figures
carved along the base. On top of the table, there was an elaborate display of whole, uncut fruit
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and rice cake: pyramids of persimmons, peaches, apples, oranges, pears, avocados, and bananas,
with pineapples and melons on either end; in front center, rainbow-striped ddeok and several
other kinds of rice cake—filled with red bean or sesame seeds and honey, dusted with crushed
red, green, and yellow beans, pocked with dried black beans, speckled with black sesame seeds,
food-colored in pastel green, yellow, and pink. Of course, there was cash on display—crisp
twenty-dollar bills fanned out on the table—and a collection of objects for the fortune telling
ritual: a long piece of string, a pencil, a book, a golf ball, a paintbrush, a peach, and a music box.
After my father commented on the photos, I showed them to my mother.
“You chose the peach and ate the whole thing, right there at the table,” she said. “I had to
pry the pit out of your hands because you were trying to eat that too. There was peach juice
dribbling down your face onto your hanbok.”
I should have known better than to ask what choosing the peach meant, but I was a
teenager and I hadn’t yet gained the ability to anticipate what my mother might say—a skill that
would later become necessary for my survival.
“The peach means that you’ll grow up to be fat and poor,” she said, her voice stern, “so
you should go on a diet and start making money now.”
* * *
I’ve learned since that the traditional meaning of the peach is that the child will never go
hungry, that her future will be a life of abundance. I’ve also come to realize that my mother’s
interpretation, at least the narrative she chose to tell me when she recalled my fortune, was a
method of deterrence, of prevention, before the future happened in such a way that I’d become a
lazy person in need of reforming. If I’ve learned anything at all it’s this: cruelty is born from a
desire for power, but it can also come from a place of fear.
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Had I chosen the thread, I would have been destined to live a long life. The pencil and
book: I would become an intellectual. Ball: an athlete. Paintbrush: an artist. Music box: a
musician.
“What did Kevin choose?” I asked Mrs. Cho.
“Kevin picked the money,” Mrs. Cho said. “When he was a baby, he didn’t have a big
appetite, like you did. He had a digestion problem that babies get sometimes. That’s why you
were always the strong one. You never got sick. He was too picky.”
“He took the money? So he was supposed to be rich. Interesting,” I said, knowing that
Kevin had always worried that he’d never make as much money as our father, a not uncommon
insecurity among sons of Korean immigrant men who may have gotten middle-class rich from
becoming American doctors, dentists, pharmacists, software engineers, or more commonly, and
in our father’s case, from owning a small business—the grueling, tedious, unstable, and little-
respected work of running a convenience store, grocery store, restaurant, auto repair shop, shoe
repair shop, laundromat, drycleaner, or gas station.
“We hoped that he would be like Michael Chang,” she said.
“He tried,” I said.
Michael Chang hadn’t been as famous as Agassi, Sampras, or Lendl, but he was the
youngest male player and the first—and still stands alone as the only—Asian man to win a
Grand Slam singles title when he won the French Open in 1989 at age seventeen. Michael Chang
had been Kevin’s hero.
“Maybe he should have picked the peach, like you, to be strong,” said Mrs. Cho.
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“How did you know that? Did you come to my dol?” I said, surprised. I assumed that she
hadn’t. It wouldn’t have been expected for many people to attend or even be invited, especially
outside the family, since I was a girl and not the eldest.
“I did! Maggie was there too. Do you remember? She tried to eat the ddeok before the
ceremony. She still eats too much. She loves biscuits and mochi.”
“I don’t remember,” I said. “I was one.”
“When Kevin was little, he saved a jar full of pennies and gave it to you,” she said. “Do
you remember?”
“He was mad because our parents made him give it to me,” I said. “I didn’t even want it.
I think they were training him to be generous because he was a boy.”
We gazed at the sky. One lone cloud dragged slowly above us, lengthening.
“In Korea, people look up to police officers,” Mrs. Cho said.
“They do?”
“I don’t know if they still do, but they used to, a long time ago,” she said. “Everything is
different now. Korea changed so much. We don’t fit in there anymore.”
“Who?”
“Me, your parents. All of us who came here instead of staying there. We thought it would
be better here. Maggie says that we came here and stayed the same, and back there everyone
changed, modernized.” She paused. “I don’t think that’s true. It’s not fair.”
“Sorry,” I said. I was inclined to agree with Maggie, but I wasn’t going to say so, and it
was probably true that it wasn’t fair, the way that any sentiment generalizing groups of people is
never fair.
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“When Kevin became a cop, he was surprised to learn that people don’t respect cops,” I
said. “He said that he didn’t know. He heard about it somewhere and he was furious, he was so
offended. He had thought that people would respect him. Television shows and movies are
always making cops into heroes. He asked me if I had known what people think of cops and
when I told him that I did he just got more angry. How had I known but not him, he wanted to
know.”
Mrs. Cho was nodding off, eyes fluttering, lips parted. She felt like a sister, rather than a
mother. We talked more freely to each other than I did with my mother and she with Maggie.
The lack of history made it easy for us to communicate in the present, even while remembering
the past. With my mother, we existed as prisoners of the past, our long and fraught history
seeping into our everyday lives and into the future, as if time was made up entirely of things that
had already happened. I couldn’t remember a time when I was not having an argument with my
mother in my head.
My family had inflicted so much abuse on one another, verbal and physical, causing so
much psychic pain that I didn’t know how any of us could function, though it was obvious that
we were failing. Husband to wife, wife to husband, parent to child, child to parent, brother to
sister, sister to brother, aunt to niece, cousin to cousin, grandparent to grandchild. All of us took
out our pain on each other, convinced that everyone else had more money, power, happiness, and
respect, each of us wanting to be the one who possessed the most of all.
My grandfather committed suicide at seventy-five—ingested some combination of pills
and toxic chemicals—when he received word that his entire family in North Korea had been
killed. By then, his five grandchildren were grown, American-born, in college or graduated and
pursuing careers. He had been living in America for more than twenty years, though he could not
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speak English. He had suffered with too much guilt to go on living, knowing that all that time
had passed and he hadn’t even known that the family he had left behind in the North had been
killed, all because of how he had wanted more. If that’s your history, if you’ve survived war after
war, served a sentence working in a concentration camp, crossed a border illegally, and
immigrated again, to a country of excess and laziness and ennui, where people laugh at your
foreignness, your old faded clothes from another era, your tai chi in the park, your cultural and
language illiteracy, doesn’t it make perfect sense that a grandfather might not feel happy and
grateful, might not make us feel safe, as we expect him to, that he could be cruel and resentful
toward his grandchildren, jealous even, with only salty thoughts about how spoiled we are, how
little we know about the cruelty of the world, how we don’t appreciate or even have to know the
sacrifices that were made for our benefit or understand that there exists a world of difference in
being lucky enough to have been born on American soil, that a person can be born with many
benefits or with none, that you don’t have to earn the most important privileges, you’re either
born with power or you’re not, and if you do possess unearned power it’s likely that people
before you suffered so that you wouldn’t have to, lived with a kind of humiliation that you will
never endure, witnessed a lack of humanity that you will never know, that you could never
withstand with hands and feet as soft as yours, with your carpal tunnel and fibromyalgia and
anxiety-induced eczema, all that suffering so that you would never have to know how lucky you
are, and doesn’t it make sense now how a grandfather’s disgust and guilt could overcome his
love?
I felt a tug on my sleeve. Mrs. Cho tapped my arm with the back of her hand, palm up,
opening and closing, opening and closing. I put my hand inside hers and she wrapped her fingers
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around mine. We held hands like that, across the center console, both of us closing our eyes at
the sky.
* * *
By the time we returned home, my mother and her friends had finished whatever
ceremony they had been performing in my bedroom, on directive of my mother’s psychic. My
mother, Mrs. Chang, Mrs. Park, Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Oh, and Mrs. Eom were in the living room,
chatting and drinking from a fresh pot of tea while toddler Yeon-ah sat on the floor flipping
through a mail-order catalogue, legs crossed. Maggie Cho’s mother and I waved hello on our
way to the kitchen to put away the groceries. My mother followed.
“Where did you go?” she demanded, eyes shifting between us.
“Kevin Kim’s mother, we just went to get more apples.” Mrs. Cho said as she held up the
evidence, dangling the plastic bag of apples in front of her.
“You were gone a long time,” my mother said.
“We went for a drive around town,” I said. “I showed Mrs. Cho the scenery. I thought
you like it when I do that.”
“What did you talk about?” my mother asked.
Mrs. Cho and I locked eyes.
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t remember. We pulled over and took a nap.”
My mother washed and pared the apples in silence, slicing them with too much attention.
She took the plate into the living room without a word. When she was gone, Maggie Cho’s
mother looked at me, eyebrows raised. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“I think she was jealous,” Mrs. Cho said.
“Of what?”
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“That we were together, without her,” she said.
“I thought she was being paranoid, like she thought we were talking about her.”
“That too,” Mrs. Cho said.
* * *
The darkness outside crept into the empty spaces between us and the dusty corners of the
house. With the well run dry of comparisons to draw, shade to throw around, and shared
memories to recall, my mother became tired, her face drawn in, and I could sense that she was
repressing the grouch that often appeared when she was low on energy. My mother’s guests were
getting restless, no doubt worrying about the possibility of traffic on the drive home.
Mrs. Chang, Mrs. Park, Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Oh, Mrs. Eom, and Mrs. Cho bustled out of the
house much the same way as they had bustled in, having fulfilled their duty in supporting my
mother. We piled into the entryway—all six women, my mother, me, and Yeon-ah. As the black
shoes were sorted and each pair was put on the feet of the rightful owners, six pairs of velvet
slippers were passed to me, which I placed back into the old Korean chest.
My mother and I hugged each person, including Yeon-ah. My mother handed every
hugging guest a plastic bag filled with leftovers from lunch. This kept her busy. She didn’t notice
when the mothers whispered in my ear while hugging me.
“Don’t forget to call your mom.”
“Be a good girl.”
“Make sure you visit often.”
“Your mom is proud of you.”
“You’re better than my daughter.”
“We’re thinking about you.”
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I stood in the driveway with my mom as she waved goodbye. She looked tired and
relieved. We stayed there, waving intermittently, until the last car was out of sight.
The house became quiet. There was no toddler playing Rachmaninoff on the grand piano.
No longer were there voices speaking at once, the conversations overlapping and weaving into
each other. The house was empty and smelled of incense, which had been left burning in my old
bedroom, following the psychic’s instructions. Sandalwood wafted through the house as my
mother and I cleaned up. The scent would linger for days. We rinsed the dishes and teacups,
stacked them in the dishwasher. My mother wrapped up the leftovers that had not been sent
home with the guests, carefully placing the containers in the fridge.
“How did it go?” I asked, though by it, I wasn’t even sure what I was referring to: the
party itself, the turnout, the rapport with her friends, or whatever it was that they had been doing
in my bedroom. I sat down at the kitchen table as my mother began wiping the countertops.
She rinsed the crumbs from the sponge, squeezed the water out, and placed it in the little
tray next to the sink. She spun around, looking directly at me from across the counter.
“What did you do?” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you do something?
“About what?”
“Kevin. Why didn’t he come?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t even know you invited him.”
“You must have done something.”
“You know I haven’t talked to him in three years.”
“Maybe it’s Sanghee’s fault.”
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“I have no idea.”
My mother opened a cupboard door, angrily moved around jars of spices before
slamming the door shut.
“Why isn’t he here?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s not very happy.”
“Of course he’s happy. Why wouldn’t he be happy? There’s nothing wrong with him.”
“I didn’t say that. I just said he’s not happy.”
“Of course he’s happy,” she repeated. “Why do you have to move so far away?”
“I have to,” I said.
“No you don’t.”
I wished for my mother that she could have the perfect son. I wished that my brother
could have had a different mother. All I wanted was control over my own life. I wanted to be
doing something that was no one’s idea but my own. What I didn’t know then was that what I
longed for was no different from what they wanted—my mother, father, and brother—that
beyond our shared genetic material, wanting more was what we had most in common.
* * *
There was a table in the middle of my bedroom that my mother had brought in for some
purpose unknown to me. Several chairs encircled the table, a dark linen cloth laid out on top. The
incense had burned out, leaving a trail of ash on the wooden holder, and the candles had long
since been snuffed out. I could see no evidence of attempted contact with the supernatural,
though whatever my mother and her friends had been doing in my bedroom was still unclear to
me.
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I had a tendency to look down on anything that called on the spiritual world—the
alignment of stars, the significance of zodiac signs, the power of crystals and making
intentions—but I was only minimally aware that my dismissal was rooted in fear and distrust and
a deeply competitive nature. To believe in magic and destiny and the power of our souls, one
must be open and vulnerable, have trust in the best in people, in the capacity of other souls to
contain courage and intelligence and empathy, which, for someone like me, was nothing short of
ridiculous. The retired hippie artist living in an art deco on a cliffside in Mount Washington and
trained in crisis counseling is the person who will save the day in a mass shooting, not me. Only
now can I acknowledge the selfish parts of my nature—competitive, petty, sarcastic and
contemptuous—which have both protected me and kept at a distance everyone that I love.
I sat down at the table that had been set up in my bedroom, feeling at once superior and
excluded, a particular confluence of emotions that I didn’t yet recognize in myself. I folded my
hands, closed my eyes. For a moment, I tried to meditate, though I had never in my life
succeeded. Who were these people who could successfully empty their minds? I imagined it
must be something like death. Meditation = becoming a nonentity.
My concentration was interrupted by a sound outside my bedroom window. I looked into
the darkness, squinted at the shadowy outlines of trees, the branches nearly touching the
windowpane. There was a rustling sound. I crossed the room quickly to turn off the light switch
and returned to the window, my face an inch from the glass, breath held to keep it from fogging
up.
The rustling sounded again. The bamboo bush shook vigorously, the stalks tall and leafy,
having grown back long ago after my grandfather had died. Whenever he came for a visit, he
would spend days cleaning up our yard, despite my parents’ protests. Raking and weeding,
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mowing the lawns, trimming every bush and tree. There wasn’t a single branch or leaf or weed
that escaped his attention. We kept multiple yard waste bins just for his visits. My grandfather
would not relax. He had to earn his keep. When he wasn’t making himself useful, he was raiding
my aunt’s medicine cabinet for painkillers, she would tell me after he died.
“He was a drug addict,” my aunt said. “Did you know he did drugs during the wartimes?
Opium. A lot of people did.” We never spoke of it again.
When he first discovered the bamboo bush, he called me over, pointing excitedly.
“Bamboo!” he said in Korean, motioning at the wall of bamboo that flourished in a nook
of the backyard. The tall green stalks had been planted in clusters, and long narrow leaves
sprouted beginning as low as my knees continuing all the way up to three feet above my head.
“Someone planted bamboo here. Why would Americans plant bamboo?” My grandfather
proceeded to hack away at the stalks with a long gardening knife, cutting them down to little
pointy stubs.
Now lengthened, lush, and green, the bamboo stalks were nearly effective camouflage for
a small person in what looked like red flannel pajamas. Two hands separated a section of
bamboo, creating an opening. The figure emerged and walked toward me, stopping at the other
side of the window. For a moment I didn’t recognize her. The light of the moon softened her
features and she looked tinier than usual, childlike, emphasized by the red pajamas a size too
large and which I could now see were decorated with Scottie dogs.
It was my mother, appearing young and ethereal, holding a shovel.
* * *
“What are you doing?” I said loudly.
“Can you help me?” she shouted. My mother held up the shovel, for emphasis.
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In the backyard, I approached slowly.
“I’m looking for something,” she said. “I had forgotten about it. Now I can’t find it.”
My mother entered the bamboo again, disappeared to the other side. I followed, like
walking through a waterfall. When I joined her, I saw that there were several holes in the ground,
freshly excavated, which shouldn’t have surprised me since my mom was standing beside me
holding a shovel, but, still, the sight of the holes and the clumps of soil thrown about, in
conjunction with the late hour and the ghostly moonlight, was making me uncomfortable,
spooked, like I had walked into the prelude to the first act of a horror movie.
My mother began to dig, stooped and elbows out, depositing the fresh dirt haphazardly
around us.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“The kimchi,” she said. “I forgot about it.”
My mother had stopped burying kimchi in the yard many years ago, but now that the
house was sold, she suddenly remembered the last jar she’d left in the ground. What would it
taste like after ten years?
Curiosity about the old jar of kimchi made me want to help her. I went around the house
to look for the other shovel that I had thrown into the yard earlier that day, when Maggie Cho’s
mother had spied on me. By the time I came back, my mother had dug up several more holes.
“Are you sure it’s here?” I asked, digging beside her.
“I always buried them here,” she said, brow furrowed. “I put rocks on top, but they’re
gone now.”
We kept digging. I dug at least ten holes inside a ten-foot perimeter. My mother dug
maybe fifteen more. The holes were beginning to merge. My mother was gone, lost in
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concentration, burrowing, lifting and emptying, like a machine. Our shoes were filthy, covered in
dirt and little rocks, and I could already feel blisters beginning to form in the palms of my hands.
My back and my left knee were sore. The longer we kept at it, the less I believed that the jar of
kimchi was even there, and I knew that I should just keep my mouth shut and continue digging,
but it was becoming obvious to me that the task was futile. I could sense that my mother would
not give up.
“It’s not here,” I said, putting the shovel down.
“It’s here. I know it is.”
“Who cares?” I said. “Why do you want it? Just leave it! Everybody just buys kimchi
now. Only white people make it at home.”
“It’s your fault, you know,” my mother said. “You’re the reason why it’s still down there.
I never took it out because you yelled at me for being too Korean.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said, denying her accusation even while remembering how badly I had
shamed her growing up.
“You were always hurting my feelings!” she shouted. “You wanted me to be like your
friends’ mothers, but I’m not like them!”
My throat filled with so much memory and unspoken history it actually hurt. I knew what
she said was true, but I could have said the exact same words to her and my statement would be
equally true.
“You’re so selfish. You don’t care about anyone but yourself. You don’t care about me.
You don’t care about your family. You don’t care about how much we sacrificed for you. Your
brother appreciates us. He tries to understand us. He helps us. He’s soft and gentle and calm. But
you’re just picky and difficult. You’re negative. You’re mean. You have to have everything your
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way. You think you’re better than everyone. You think you’re too good for us. You don’t help
anyone but yourself. All you do is take! When are you going to give back!”
I definitely wasn’t about to pick up the shovel and start helping again, but I felt like I had
to do something. My conscience filled with so much guilt and anger I felt that I could explode.
My mother continued digging, had never even paused while shouting at me.
“I just want to be free of you,” I said.
“You want to be free? Of me? After everything I did for you? I feel like I’ve been your
slave ever since you were born! You’re my daughter! You’re supposed to serve me! My mother
didn’t have to do anything. My sisters and I did all the cooking, all the housework, like we were
serving a queen. That was supposed to be me when I became a mother, but instead I had to treat
you like a queen so you could have a good life. What about me? You wouldn’t have been able to
do anything you’ve done if it wasn’t for me! I don’t get any credit! Everybody always blames the
mother anytime anyone is unhappy, but whenever someone accomplishes anything, everyone
forgets about us!”
My mother kept digging. I wished that I could yell freely, but I had been trained not to.
My anger had nowhere to go but drop into a hole deep inside myself and live with all my other
angers, united into one little ball. I wanted to remind her that I was not included in the family
will, that she had decided to continue the tradition of excluding the daughters, which meant that
Kevin would get everything and I would get nothing, so why should I give her the attention she
wanted if I couldn’t ever rise from the bottom of the totem pole?
The holes in the ground had become one big oval-shaped hole. My mother had long since
rolled up the sleeves of her flannel pajamas. She was sweating profusely, digging in silence as I
argued with her in my head.
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She dug and dug with no results, even as the hole grew broader and deeper. The longer I
stood there watching my mother’s vain effort, I became overwhelmed with guilt.
“It’s the end of my life now,” she said, her breath quick. “Soon I’ll be dead.”
Two topics that Koreans will discuss freely: death and poo. I could be assured that in
most interactions with my mother, either the fact of impending death or the state of her bowel
movements would be discussed at length.
“People live to one hundred,” I said. “Especially Asian women.”
“My generation, we’re starting to die off.”
“Asian women never die,” I said. “We have too much to avenge. We just start to look our
age.”
I picked up the shovel, choosing to avoid the conflict that had flared up moments earlier.
“I don’t think we need to go wider,” I said, standing in the middle of the great shallow
hole. I concentrated on digging in one spot. My mother continued her tactic, which was to skim
the whole area without any specific strategy that I could see.
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” she said. “If we could have switched places, I
could have become anything. My parents wouldn’t let me do anything. I wanted piano lessons
and tennis lessons and dance lessons, but they wanted to spend the money on my brothers so they
could become doctors. I wanted to do something too. I wasn’t even allowed to go swimming! I
started diving in secret—you know those really high diving boards? I did that! I was so brave!
When my dad found out, I got in so much trouble. He was so mean to me. I was his least favorite
daughter. He told me I was ugly. He said I was fat. They made me come to America. I didn’t
want to. I loved Korea. I had friends there. Korea is beautiful, you know? There are mountains
and islands and seasons! There’s snow. Beautiful old architecture. My parents said that I had no
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choice because they were all going to America. My brothers were in med school and we had to
stay together. Then I married your dad. He didn’t make enough money so I wanted to be a
business person. I enrolled in business classes at Napa Valley College. You know what he did?
The first time I didn’t have dinner ready on time because I was studying, he threw my books in
the fireplace and burned them! Textbooks! You know textbooks are expensive! You don’t
remember, but he was mean to me when you were a baby. I went to the hospital. The police took
him away. I took you and Kevin to my brother’s house in Newport Beach for two weeks.”
“Why didn’t you leave him?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” she said. “Nobody would help me. The nurses brought in a
social worker, they wanted me to stay in a shelter, but I didn’t want to. I was afraid of losing you
and Kevin, our house. What about money? I didn’t have any money. I begged my brother to let
us live with him, but his wife said they couldn’t keep us. They said they would only take you, but
I couldn’t leave you there. We couldn’t stay with them forever. I asked my family and my
Korean friends to help me. Nobody would take us. I even said I could be a nanny, a maid, and
they said no. My best friend in Boston said I was lying. Everybody said I had to go back because
he’s my husband and your father, that children can’t be raised without their father. I had to stay
with him no matter how bad it got. Even if he tried to kill me.”
“You’re leaving him now. Why doesn’t anyone care?”
“Because I’m old,” she said.
My mother moved to a corner of our big hole, intent on working her way in.
“My family didn’t like your dad because he was from the North. They said that’s why he
was bad, that I should have listened to them. They said that I made my choice, so I had to live
with it. My side isn’t like his side. My dad was a professor and my brothers are doctors. Your
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dad’s family was poor, but they lie and say they were rich. It’s not true. Your haraboji was a bad
person.”
“Why, because he was poor? Or because he killed himself?”
“He didn’t kill himself!”
“I know it’s true. Gomo told me.”
“Your haraboji was bad. He had affairs. He did drugs. It was the war. There are a lot of
things you don’t know.”
It was my mother who found the kimchi. She struck gold in the far corner of our ten-foot
hole under the jacaranda tree, blooming with purple flowers, sweet little trumpets, that fell and
scattered beneath our feet. We should have known. It was obvious that she would have chosen a
spot like that to bury the jar of kimchi, deep in the cool earth under the shade of a leafy tree.
The blade of my mother’s shovel clanged on the metal lid of the big glass jar. We got
down in the dirt, knees pressing into the damp earth, and we dug it out with our hands, trying to
release the compacted soil that had been holding the jar in place all those years. Once we had
removed most of the dirt from one side, I was able to push it toward my mother so she could pull
it out in one big heave. The jar was gallon-sized, so big that when it came up we had to carry it
together, which we performed solemnly, holding our breath, recognizing the old relic that it was.
In the dark hole where the jar had been tucked away, a roly-poly and a centipede squirmed and
burrowed. We inspected the jar, still holding it, neither of us ready to make the next move.
I couldn’t tell what state the ten-year old kimchi was in. The lid had rusted and the glass
was filmy and caked with dirt, creating an illusion, or not, that the kimchi was no longer white
and red but smoky brown. What happens to vegetables that have fermented much longer than
necessary?
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Together, we put the jar down. My mother squatted, her butt an inch from the ground.
She twisted the lid, the muscles in her arms taut, the tendons in her neck rising like vines. A
suction sound resounded at length as the lid began to give, then—POP!—a little explosion like a
cork from a wine bottle, and a long hiss as if a balloon was releasing its air.
The fragrance that filled the space between us was the familiar scent of my childhood—
cabbage and radish, anchovies, fermented in salt and red chili peppers—our family’s staple that
became a topping on all American cuisine—pizza, hotdogs, hamburgers, pasta, sandwiches,
salad—transforming everything we ate into food that contained more of us.
The old jar of kimchi smelled fine. It didn’t seem like there was anything wrong with it.
My mother and I peered inside, the tops of our heads nearly touching.

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CHAPTER 7

The foyer of my mother’s building appeared larger than its actual size because of the
floor-to-ceiling mirrors that had been affixed to the walls. I’d look at myself in one mirror, only
to see my backside reflected from the mirror opposite, as well as an image of myself looking at
myself into infinity. A common design trick, creating an illusion of a room without borders that
could make a person go either way: serenity or panic.
My mother had beckoned me to her apartment and assigned me the task of consolidating
several storage bins of clothing, yearbooks, and odds and ends that she had held onto over the
years. The responsibility of archiving our family history had fallen on her, as the mother, though
she had never possessed the kind of mind or patience that categorized and organized efficiently,
which we all noted as another item to add to her long list of failures, but was just another one of
those things that boxed her in and that made her crazy. She had passed the duty on to me, as well
as, eventually, that particular brand of crazy feeling. It was now my job to review the contents of
the storage bins, pack away items to be held onto, and donate or throw out whatever remained, a
task which I was to complete before moving away.
We had no family photo albums. The blame of course was directed at my mother, who
believed the photos to be lost. By the time I turned thirty, I had compiled a great many secrets,
more than I would have ever again, and one secret that I have inexplicably kept to this day is
this: on a visit home from law school, I found in the closet of the spare bedroom a shopping bag
stuffed full of family photos, thrown in all a-jumble—photos of Kevin and me as fat-faced
babies, as children playing the piano and violin, as teenagers casually holding trophies at tennis
tournaments, and there were even black and whites from my parents’ young lives in Korea, their
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faces smooth and bright and unrecognizable. I took the bag of photos without telling anyone. My
parents still believe the photos are lost, though they’re still in the same bag on the highest shelf
in my closet, waiting to be archived.
The fact that the photos were never preserved in albums is likely the reason why many
became lost. Before I absconded with the bag of photos, Kevin had taken some, which he lost
track of over the years, the majority of them relinquished to college girlfriends who had squealed
when they saw them. I had also taken a few childhood photos, kept them in a shoebox that
moved with me from apartment to apartment and city to city. Over the years, my small collection
depleted, as friends and lovers would discover them and ask if they could take one. These people
who were once close and dear to me are now gone from my life, changes and differences and
resentments and physical distance having cleaved our bonds, though even if we were still in each
other’s lives, I couldn’t very well ask for the photos back. I can’t help feeling angry, even now,
as though they wanted ownership over my memories, as unreasonable as that seems, or more
likely, in the case of my friends who were white, I suspect that they were fetishizing the Asian
child I used to be. There’s something about photos kept loose in a shoebox rather than preserved
in plastic that makes it seem like they could belong to anyone, that they have no permanence in
family history.
I would like to believe that I had never been so entitled, someone who could demand
from another person a cherished childhood photo that there was only one copy of, no matter how
close we were, but perhaps that’s why I’ve always fallen short of my dreams. In my family, we
learn that we can be as demanding as we want, but only within the boundaries of our family and
we can never lay claim outside of it. This could explain why I felt justified to take, and hide, my
family’s legacy in photos, but have never been able to ask for anything from anyone else.
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It was no surprise that the duty of managing our family’s compiled tangible history had
fallen on my mother, nor was it a surprise that the objects that represented our memories had all
been stuffed haphazardly into plastic storage bins and left for me to make sense of.
My mother met me in the mirrored foyer. A mini chandelier dangled from the ceiling,
near an arched entryway, and there was an estate sale table beneath a row of locked mailboxes.
My mother gestured at a basket on the table, filled with samples of skincare products. A folded
piece of paper had been propped next to it. Free, the sign read.
“The woman on the second floor is a dermatologist,” my mother explained. “She lives in
that big apartment all alone. I think she’s around your age. She makes enough money to pay for
that apartment on her own. You could be like her if you wanted to,” she said.
I took all of the samples but one. My mother laughed.
“Even I only took two!” she said.
I laughed with her, though I did not hesitate, continuing to stuff the stash into my bag.
We took two flights of stairs up to the third floor, where my mother lived alone in a large
two bedroom, just like the dermatologist, though my mother, as the building manager, lived rent-
free, while the dermatologist paid several thousand a month, even with rent control. My mother
envied the young woman for her career and ability to afford the obscene expense of living in San
Francisco—it meant that she had power and freedom and a future that my mother didn’t have.
As we walked up the shared staircase, my mother kept bending over to pick up little
bunches of lint that had accumulated in the corners. It was part of her job to vacuum the common
space every few days, but she rarely did. Instead, with pinched fingertips, she’d gather any
visible bits of hair and lint, wrappers, leaves and pebbles that had been tracked in from outside. It
seemed easier to just run a vacuum, but we all go to great lengths to get out of doing things we
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don’t want to do. I once had a roommate who’d rather run a dust-buster over the sheets than
wash them. My mother loathed cleaning. I had no memory of her cleaning the house when I was
growing up, though I could remember my father vacuuming and scrubbing the bathrooms before
visitors arrived.
The boxes were stacked up along the far wall of the bedroom. There were almost twenty
of them—clear plastic boxes filled with old scratchy wool sweaters and prairie dresses from the
seventies that my mother could never let go of, file folders bulging with paperwork, tennis
trophies from the eighties that belonged to me and Kevin, leather-bound gilt-edged high school
yearbooks, an assortment of trinkets and knick-knacks and stuffed toys. I predicted a long day
ahead of me, at least one or two return visits.
“Kevin said he doesn’t want anything,” my mother said. “He’ll take whatever’s left to the
Goodwill.”
My mother disappeared, returning with a tray of barley tea and a plate of fruit and
crackers. She set the tray on the armoire and sat down on the bed, watching as I threw her dated
clothing into a pile on the opposite side of the room.
“You don’t want to keep any of it?” she said. “Everything comes back in style.”
I looked at the pile for a moment, then crossed the room and grabbed a prairie skirt and a
fisherman sweater and stuffed them into a paper bag.
“You’re right,” I said. “A lot of this is good quality, just out of style.”
There were few things in life that I could acknowledge, out loud, that my mother was
right about, and one of them was that styles, sometimes against all good sense, come back into
fashion. I hadn’t believed her when I was younger, but in time I couldn’t deny the return to
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earlier decades, which at first always seems preposterous until the latest flashback has become so
on-trend history is all but forgotten.
“Liz is having a baby,” my mother said quietly.
“Who’s Liz?”
“Liz Lee, remember? Stan’s business partner. She’s having a baby,” my mother said.
“Can you believe it? She must be forty, at least, but I thought she was in her fifties. I didn’t think
she could have a baby anymore. Everybody says Asian women look half their age but nobody
would say that if they met Liz Lee. She doesn’t care at all what she looks like.”
“Did she get married?”
“No. She’s having Stan’s baby,” she said. “They’re not getting married. They’re not even
dating. They’re business partners. That’s it! She convinced him to have a baby with her. Neither
of them ever married or had children. They just worked worked worked. They’ve been only
business partners all this time. But now she wants a baby and he’s over sixty and doesn’t have
any children so he went along with it. They didn’t even…you know.” My mother tilted her head,
looking at me knowingly. “She got his sperm and a doctor did something with it.”
“IVF?”
“Something like that,” she said. “Did I tell you that Stan is in his sixties?”
“Yes,” I said.
“When he dies Liz will get all of his money and all of those properties that they bought
together as business partners. He owns others, separately, on his own. Those will be hers too.
She didn’t even have to marry him!”
My mother sat on the edge of the bed, sighed in exasperation.
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“It’s because Liz can have a baby. I can’t believe it. I never thought that somebody could
do that. She’s very tricky. She’s so smart. She knows what she’s doing. She knew that Stan is
getting old and doesn’t have anyone to leave his money to. He has no family! Liz and the baby
are going to end up with everything.”
“But she’ll be alone,” I said. “It will be very hard.”
“She can pay someone to help her,” my mother said.
I took the box of clothes and dumped it in the pile across the room. I stood there with the
empty box, rethinking the situation, and put all the clothes back into the box.
“This one is done,” I said, pointing. “Donation box.”
My mother nodded, seemed to be looking right through me. It was startling how little she
cared that all the stuff she had collected over a lifetime and previously couldn’t bear to part with
was getting dumped in one cruel swoop.
“You can have children too, like Liz,” she said. “So can that dermatologist downstairs.
You can make money, just like they can. Don’t you want to have children? I can’t believe you’re
not thinking about it. When I was your age, I was already married and Kevin had just been born.
What about buying a house? It’s time that you start saving money to buy a house. Why are you
moving to New York? Why would you go to grad school? I guess everybody will have to call
you doctor, but you’ll never get paid enough if you become a professor. You could make more
money as a lawyer in California. Why did you break up with that boyfriend who works at
Google? He has a good job, good benefits. He went to MIT. Do you know how hard it is to get
into MIT? He’s not Korean, but at least he’s Chinese. You could get married and buy a house
close to home. When you have children, he can support you while you take time off from work.
You should keep him as a back-up.”
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“I don’t need a back-up,” I said.
“I’m trying to help you. You don’t know it now, but you’re going to regret it.”
“I’m not going to not do something I want to do just because I might regret it later,” I
said. “What people regret is when they didn’t do something they wanted to do because they were
too afraid to try.”
“It’s too risky,” she said. “You could end up alone. He would be a good husband. He has
a dependable job. What about children?”
“What about them?”
“Don’t you want to have a family?”
“Not right now.”
“I was already married and had Kevin when I was your age,” she said.
“You already said that.”
“I didn’t think that I had a choice, she said. “Maybe if I had never had children, I would
have been a businessperson like Stan or Liz. By now I’d own multiple properties in San
Francisco and I’d be so rich. When I lived in San Francisco, before you and Kevin were born,
houses were cheap. I could have bought a house in the Marina, right on the shore, for twenty
thousand dollars. Can you believe it? What if there’s a tsunami, your dad said. Do you know
what that house is worth now? Many millions! If I had bought a house here, I wouldn’t have to
worry for the rest of my life! What if I owned an apartment building? Imagine! Houses in the
city didn’t cost that much back then because nobody wanted to live here. Everybody wanted to
be in the suburbs, especially families. Too much crime in the city, they said. Too many black
people. Too many Mexicans. Too many Chinese. But we’re Asian! I wanted to stay here because
I had a job, I had friends. I was a bank teller at the big Wells Fargo in the financial district and
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your dad was working at a gas station, trying to get enough money to open a convenience store. I
loved having a job, making my own money. I was good at it because I liked being around
money. I could have stayed in San Francisco and kept working. Maybe I would have been
promoted at the bank, or I could have ended up doing what Stan and Liz do, working in finance,
running my own business. But your dad wanted to move to Napa. It’s because everyone thought
we were Chinese! It made him crazy! He wanted a big house, a backyard. He didn’t like to live
somewhere so crowded. He hated the traffic. In Napa, it’s easy to drive around, the roads are
wide, there aren’t a lot of people around. There’s so much space and places to go hiking. You
know your dad loves camping, right? We used to visit national parks when you were small, but
you probably don’t remember. The reason he loves camping and hiking is because he doesn’t
like to be around people! He’s never liked cities, how it’s so cramped with too many people and
too many cars. Everybody lives on top of each other and the buildings are squashed up right next
to each other. It’s because he grew up in Seoul and always dreamed of having a big house with a
big yard. He didn’t care that we didn’t know anyone in Napa, that there weren’t any Koreans
nearby. Now look at San Francisco. Everyone wants to buy something here. There are no
affordable neighborhoods anymore. Everything is too expensive. I wish I could live and work
here and be a businesswoman. I should have done it a long time ago.”
My mother hadn’t yet given up on house hunting, on finding her fortune. She was still
making bids on houses that she couldn’t afford, still getting outbid by young dual income
couples with graduate degrees from prestigious schools that had earned them high paying jobs at
tech companies she had never heard of, made money on products and services that were not
tangible, existing inside a network of code and links and invisible connectors. She wanted to get
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in before the market blew up, get out before it dropped. She would then have a tidy sum and
wouldn’t have to worry about retirement.
My mother’s worst fear was that she’d live to a hundred, with no money and no one to
take care of her. Who was I to think that was unreasonable?
“I could have made money by myself. I didn’t have to get married,” she said. “But I don’t
know what I would have done without children. How could I have a life without you and Kevin?
I was so happy when I became a mom. I thought: Finally, I’m the mom of my own family, I get
to be the one in charge, everyone has to do what I say.”
* * *
My mother’s apartment was railroad-style, the master bedroom at the front end, a picture
window looking out the face of the building onto California Street, and the second bedroom at
the tail end like the last car of a train, with a door that led down a spiral staircase to the basement
laundry room and a narrow alleyway at the rear of the building.
We convened in the second bedroom, which had been converted into a storage room long
before my mother had moved in and which she had been using as a place for her many plants to
grow and thrive. It was a shame, though not for the plants. The room was a city apartment
dweller’s dream, with two walls of windows that let natural light stream in, unobstructed. The
previous renter had been using the room to store a collection of bicycles, thus the bike racks and
shelving units and hooks installed on the walls. For my mother, the room served as a very large
pantry and sunroom for her plants. She stored household essentials purchased from Costco—
toilet paper and paper towels, jugs of olive oil, giants bags of Korean rice, cans of oatmeal, and
economy-sized boxes of high-fiber cereal—all of which was stacked on the shelves behind the
collection of plants. Vines dangled from the ceiling, potted ficuses swayed with large violin-
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shaped leaves, glossy and fan-like, and small branches sprouted everywhere, as if growing from
the building itself. The greenery winked at us, happy and cozy in the warm room, the little hot
house, an apartment jungle.
“Anything you think we should keep, we’ll put it in here, she said. “There’s also a
storage room in the basement that Stan said I can use.”
“Are those tomatoes?” I said, pointing at a pot, plump red cherry tomatoes dangling from
the vines. “When did you get all these plants?”
“I never had a garden before,” she said. “I was always too busy. I had to work at the
restaurant. Your friends’ moms in Napa were always gardening.”
“Can you plant a garden in the backyard down there?” I asked, looking out the window
down the winding staircase, at the bottom of which there appeared to be a narrow yard with soil.
“I can’t use that space,” my mother said. “I already asked Stan. I’m trying to buy a house
in San Francisco, one with a backyard where I can plant all kinds of tomatoes. But every time I
go to an open house, there are so many people lining up to buy it. They make offers over the
asking price, put down thirty percent or more, all cash. How can I compete with that? I’ve bid on
three houses and every time I was outbid. There was one house that I loved. I worried so much
about getting that house, it kept me up at night. I lost seven pounds. I went to church and prayed.
I even went to the psychic because I wanted to win that house so bad. It was on the outskirts of
the city, but still in the city limit. A big pink house with a real backyard, three bedrooms plus a
sunroom, wide streets, quiet, no traffic. Like you’re not even in the city. People were lined up for
that house! Even way out there! I can’t afford anything. Even if I could, these young couples
with their big salaries are better candidates than me. Maybe if I had your dad’s half and if I was
young, like you, and had a good job” she said, sighing, “but I can’t take his money and I’m old.”
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“The plants are nice,” I said. “You did a good job in this room.”
My mother beamed. “Thank you, Jane,” she said.
Even though our history proved otherwise, sometimes it didn’t take much to make her
happy.
“I hope you don’t decide to stay in New York,” my mother said. “You’re going to come
back, right?”
“Of course I’ll come back for visits,” I said.
“But you’re not going to stay there forever. You’ll move back, right?” she said. “I’m
getting old. I can’t travel on an airplane all the time. The flight is so long. I hate to fly. What if
you meet someone and decide to stay there and you have a baby? What will I do?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You won’t want to travel with a baby,” she said. “It’s so cold over there in the winter. I
can’t live somewhere so cold. I’m getting old. Old people don’t like to live in cold places.”
“I’ll visit you,” I said.
“If I get a house that’s big enough, I hope you’ll stay with me.”
“Okay.”
“If I’m still here in this apartment, you can sleep in this room.”
“With the plants?”
“Of course with the plants!” she said. “Don’t you know, plants are good for your health.
They help you get more oxygen. They help you breathe. Do you ever feel like you can’t get
enough air, like everything is closing in on you?”
I stared at her. I was amazed at how the literal could turn so metaphorical.
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“I think you should sleep in this room before you leave for New York,” my mother said,
her hand gesturing across the room stuffed with overgrown plants and household supplies
purchased in bulk. “You can stock up on air, prevent something bad from happening that would
have happened.”
“What would plenty of air now prevent later in New York?” I said.
“Could be anything,” she said. “You never know what’s going to happen. It’s best to be
as prepared as possible. You want to be ready for anything.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I don’t want you to suffocate there,” she said. “I would never be able to sleep again.”

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CHAPTER 8

When I saw Kevin again it was at my mother’s apartment as I was finishing up
organizing our family belongings. My brother had come to haul away what I had set aside for the
Goodwill, which turned out to be almost everything. Thankfully, he had brought his truck and
bungees and a coil of rope to tie everything down. I hadn’t seen him since our last encounter in
Bodega Bay. I was hopeful that time, as well as the annual vacation to Bangkok from which he
had just returned, had mellowed him out.
My mother answered the door. I could hear Kevin removing his boots at the entryway
and the sound of my mother’s voice murmuring softly. Kevin had always been light on his feet,
his soles like silk rugs that muted his footsteps, so it shouldn’t have surprised me when he
suddenly appeared in the bedroom as I was sealing the last of the cardboard boxes, but of course
I was startled.
A pair of wrap-around sunglasses was perched on the crown of his head like a headband
and he was wearing an oversized black t-shirt with a raccoon hanging from a branch. His face
had a slight sheen.
“Lotta stuff,” Kevin said.
“You don’t want to look at any of it?” I asked.
Three years had passed since Bodega Bay. During that time our parents had separated
and now the house where we had all lived together as a family was being sold, but we both were
behaving as if it was no big thing.
“Nah,” he said. “I don’t want to clutter up the garage.”
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“I can’t really take anything,” I said. “I’ll be living in a studio when I move to New York,
and there’s no storage.”
Kevin nodded. We hadn’t spoken about my impending move across the country because
we hadn’t spoken to each other in three years, though I knew that my parents kept Kevin updated
on details about my life the same way they kept me updated on his.
“How are you moving?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“How are you getting your stuff there?”
“I’m taking whatever fits in my car,” I said.
We were thankfully interrupted by our mother beckoning us from the other room, where
we gathered to find a fresh pot of barley tea, Korean melon and apples peeled and sliced into
sleek white wedges, and an assortment of rice cake, all of which had been arranged on platters
and set upon trivets in a neat row on the coffee table. My mother was sitting on a floor pillow,
motioning with her hands, in the style of a game-show host, the signal for us to take seats. I sat in
a side chair, my brother took the couch.
As soon as Kevin was seated, my mother jumped up to fix him a plate and pour a cup of
tea. I helped myself to some cashews from a little bowl, waiting my turn to serve myself the
same refreshments that my brother was about to enjoy.
To my mother’s chagrin, I had always refused to fill the role of caregiver to her husband
and son when she was absent. She had tried many times while raising me to try to teach me how
to cook and clean for them and to serve them, but I could never make sense of the idea that one
gender should serve the other—the roles seemed arbitrary and there was no explanation for why
our assigned responsibilities were not designated the other way around—and my disposition was
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such that I couldn’t accept something that had no reason and that seemed unjust, particularly
when the sense of unfairness fell against me. Had my father stepped in and sided with my
mother, I wouldn’t have gotten away with escaping the role that was expected of me, but he
didn’t. He only held my mother to her fate, and other Korean women who were not me. The
downfall was not only that my mother was alone in her duties, but also that I remained resistant
to cooking and cleaning well into adulthood, to an extent that actually became counterproductive
to living an economical and non-chaotic adult life.
While my father didn’t want me to belittle myself by serving men, and expected me to be
independent and have a lucrative career, he frequently told me that I needed to watch how I talk
to men. He didn’t know that this undermined his desire that I possess equal power and authority.
Always, he’d submit this reminder: You’re going to get yourself in trouble if you don’t watch
how you talk to men.
“Watch it,” my mother said. “Here,” she said, sliding a coaster beneath my teacup.
I took a bite of apple, noticing that it was slippery and tasted of olive oil. I decided not to
ask.
My brother did not meet my eye, which was fine by me. I could see his face darkening,
and the more time that passed, I felt something hard and cold inside me that I had forgotten was
there begin to expand like a balloon.
Kevin wasn’t in the mood for talking. It could have been my mother’s presence in the
room, or the fact that the time that had passed since our last encounter had caused our
unacknowledged tensions to fester within himself, growing and becoming uglier than they had
originally been. I watched him, making myself small and quiet. As I remembered all that had
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gotten us to where we were, I felt myself shrinking into the person that I had thought I had grown
out of, leaning into that little ball I had hidden inside myself.
“Is everything done? The boxes are packed?” my mother asked.
I nodded. We sipped tea.
“Kevin, didn’t Sanghee give you something? To give to Jane? She said that she sent
something with you.” My mother nudged a small shopping bag leaning against the coffee table. I
didn’t know who had put it there—my mother, or Kevin, perhaps shortly after he had arrived.
“Oh yeah,” Kevin said. “I almost forgot. That’s from Sanghee. It’s a going-away
present.”
My mother handed the bag to Kevin, who then passed it to me. Inside was a present
wrapped in a colorful abstract print, tied with a dark velvet bow.
* * *
Kevin moved out to attend college at a public school known for its agriculture and
forestry programs. The location was a small college town—a celebrated research university in a
mini city adjacent to our state capital—which was apparent by the sheer number of eighteen to
twenty-two year olds wearing backpacks and commuting by bicycle on conspicuously-drawn
bike paths. It was also a farming town, obvious upon arrival within the county limits, the
sprawling fields and pastures along the highways confirming the town’s purpose, the stench of
manure all but cementing it.
Kevin had been accepted to this respected university as a men’s singles tennis player. He
would not have been accepted on his grades alone. Entering freshmen had a 4.0 average GPA.
Kevin’s high school grades were abysmal, though one could argue that the reason for this was
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that he had spent the majority of his days on the tennis courts and traveling to tournaments,
rather than at home studying.
When Kevin left for college, he was thrilled and relieved to finally be out of the house.
“Never again,” he said, while packing his bags, “will I ever live with them.” He paused,
his face brightening with realization. “Oh my god! I don’t have to live with them ever again!”
Still, Kevin came home once a month to see me. The drive was about three to four hours
each way. For two days we’d go to the movies, out to eat, mountain-biking. Occasionally we’d
play tennis, but only practice and drills, never a game, because Kevin feared that I would win.
Not long after Kevin moved out, our mother fell ill. Her return from the doctor’s office
was followed by a month of rarely rising from bed, an antique cowbell on the bedside table,
which she clanged during her waking hours to call for my attention to address a variety of needs:
a glass of water, a snack, an extra blanket, a better view of the TV, or just my presence to ease
her loneliness.
Some days she’d tell me that she had a benign tumor in her stomach, on others she’d
announce that she had cancer and that I had given it to her by being a bad daughter. To this day, I
still don’t know what, if anything, had physically ailed her, whether she was afflicted with a
mental illness. I suppose I could ask her now, nearly thirty years later, but we are not the kind of
family that addresses bad feelings from the past, no matter how far we’ve arrived from our
history, no matter how much it has informed who we’ve become. A person can only live with so
much guilt and regret about things that cannot be changed. We don’t meet problems at the root.
We elide, we repress.
The fact that the stories were vastly different—the first, perhaps closer to the truth; the
second, I suspect, a method of asserting power and control that she did not have—wasn’t the
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issue. The problem was that in my American mind, the daughter duties that she spoke of—
cooking, cleaning, and taking care of her—were in fact mother duties, and I could confirm this as
a firsthand witness of the American households in our small town, as well as a seasoned viewer
of sitcoms and movies about American life that aired on our television daily. I didn’t know if my
mother’s understanding of a mother’s role and duty to her daughter—making sure that I knew
my place, above all else, as the lowest rung on the hierarchy of power—was the Korean way or if
Koreans in Korea would have disagreed with her parenting.
I called Kevin one night, when my frustration seemed impossible to contain. On the
phone with Kevin, I didn’t speak specifics. Who we are now begins with who we were then: we
were not the type to relive memory outside of our own minds or talk of incidents or details.
“I’m thinking about taking the GED,” I said. “I could move out a year early. Will it be
hard to get into college with a GED? I could join a traveling circus. Or move to New York and
be a stand-up comic. Do you think they could stop me? How much money would I need to get
out of here?”
The following weekend Kevin came home. I waited in the hall while he said hello to our
mother, who was still in bed. Their voices were muffled, though I could hear hers increase in
volume to the point where I understood the tone was one of accusation.
Kevin met me in the hallway, his brow heavy, mouth tight. His eyes were glazed and
unfocused, as if he had been staring at the sun.
“Come on,” he said, walking briskly.
A Mustang convertible was parked in the driveway. The color was a deep blue, nearly
navy, gleaming, with a white top. The hood was incredibly long and the grill pointed forward,
like a shark.
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“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“My roommate let me borrow it. He owed me a favor. It’s a ’64,” he said. “Supposed to
be a classic. His dad’s some kind of car collector. I heard he has a five-car garage.”
I peeked inside. The interior was white leather, immaculate.
“There are no headrests,” I said.
“Yeah, wouldn’t want to get in an accident in this car,” Kevin said. “Not just because it’s
not mine.”
“Talk about whiplash,” I said, laughing.
“It’ll be fun,” he said. “We could drive to St. Helena and Calistoga, or the Marin
Headlands, or wherever.”
We drove with the top down through the back-road vineyards, passing gangs of cyclists
in indecently-tight spandex on skinny bicycles, our hair dancing in the wind, ghost-like, the
Mustang’s engine humming so loud we had to shout into the space between us, a great expanse
that seemed to reach forever, containing an endless sea of grievances. Our words got lost as we
shouted into that space, carried away into the world outside of our world almost the moment they
left our mouths, before we could hear each other and even ourselves. The snow-capped
mountains encompassed our town like a fringe.
I was fifteen with a learner’s permit and, as expected of a fifteen-year old just learning
how to drive, I was not particularly good at stick shift, though it was the only type of
transmission that my father would allow me to drive. Still, Kevin let me drive for a while, and,
for that stretch of time, as I peered over the steering wheel, hair whipping across my face, the
afternoon sun reflecting off the hood, I had no memories—the past did not exist, there was no
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history, no identity—and all I thought about was the open road in front of us and the new and
particular rhythm of shifting gears.
We picked up deli sandwiches and cherry cider at a farm in Sonoma, where a young man
sold me on “the best salsa on earth,” homemade by his Nana. I bought two jars while Kevin
wasn’t looking, tucked them into his duffle bag before he headed back to his other life at college.
Back on the road, Kevin took the wheel again, and for what felt like miles we were pinching our
noses and holding our breath, cheeks puffed out, as we passed the cow pastures, which never
seemed to end. It was in this fashion, red-faced, eyes nearly popping out, that I pointed with
much commotion at a farm of llamas. The sight of the llamas proved too unexpected for our
minds. We could hold our breath no longer and we burst out laughing, tears streaming down our
faces. The thing is, we had passed by that same band of llamas several times before. It was one
of those experiences that young people, especially, can have again and again as if for the first
time, out of the desire to repeat the particular feeling of shared joy and laughter, of connection
and intimacy.
We drove to San Francisco, headed straight for North Beach, just so we could drive up
and down hills so steep they’re nearly vertical and cars park perpendicular to the curb at a
ninety-degree angle. Waiting our turn at an intersection near the top of an impossibly steep
incline, I began to sweat, looking back nervously as Kevin pulled and released the emergency
break, one foot on the clutch, the other on the gas, to keep us from crashing backwards into the
cars behind us. Speeding down a hill, clear of traffic, free-falling until the very bottom, I felt
similar trepidation, paired with sweet freedom, as if we were being delivered from a wild and
angry sea onto shore.
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As we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, the fog rolled over us like milk, shrouding the
rust-colored pillars that lengthened above us and fading away to mist as we wound down the side
of a mountain, the earth cut with rifts and valleys, blossoming with orange poppies and peeling
bark and branches that grow sideways, leaves flattening out like paper.
We ended up at the Pacific Coast, where the cliffs dropped down to the ocean. We pulled
over at Stinson Beach and ate our sandwiches while sitting on the tops of big rocks jutting out of
the water near the shoreline. We sat there until the tide began to rise and the waves crashed too
high, spraying our faces. We sprawled out in the sand, a safe distance from the surf so the water
couldn’t touch us, and watched the sea break at the shore as it formed a line of foam and then
disappeared, over and over again, into infinity. Our favorite kind of sand was neither wet nor dry,
or both wet and dry: the in-between sand, moist underneath with a hard layer on top that crackled
like the magic shell of a dipped cone. Our heels and toes would break through the surface, as flat
and firm as a sheet of ice, to the soft, cool earth underneath. We rolled up our jeans, grains of
smoky-brown sand sticking to everything—our hair, clothes, elbows, ankles, between our toes.
We stayed there until the sun went down, tried to guess the distance between us and the
horizon, our mouths filled with salty air. We brushed off the sand from our legs and feet before
we got back in the car, hours away from feeling the sunburns on our skin.
* * *
I helped Kevin load the boxes of discarded clothing, linens, and knick-knacks into the
bed of his truck. He would drop off the truckload of our family’s unwanted possessions at the
Goodwill on his way out of the city back to San Jose.
If you dumped it all on the street, I could have traced our family history, lining up our
belongings down every block of the entire neighborhood, in chronological order: Kevin’s blue
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baby blanket worn to shreds; the Peanuts figurines that had been gifted by a family friend,
cherished because our parents did not believe in buying toys; our mother’s suede roller skates
with bright orange rubber wheels that she had picked up for five dollars when the roller rink
went out of business, and she’d wear skating in circles all around our neighborhood, in blue
eyeshadow and permed hair, neighbors staring, until our father intervened, reminding her that
she was a grown woman; my children’s violin, that I had been informed had a fallen bridge when
I attempted to sell it in college, and which I had played until Kevin demanded that I quit—he
wanted the violin, I could have the piano—a conflict that would repeat itself with tennis—he
wanted tennis, I could have the piano—and that I would become well-experienced in, a type of
contention—the one-sided feud, the single-participant contest—that would echo well into adult
life, every choice I made followed with a reminder by a cousin or aunt that Kevin might get
upset because I was doing something that he had wanted to do; stacks of outdated tennis rackets
and tennis shoes with the soles worn down, the toes nearly the whole way through; Kevin and
my combined collection of tennis trophies, piano awards, and piano books that could have been
lined up for blocks and blocks; our father’s old v-neck golf sweaters with the country club
logo—grapes embroidered on the chest—and his leather golf gloves; camping equipment and
gear, an old Coleman lantern, that we used to pack up in the car on our road trips to national
parks, our pop up camping trailer hitched to the back, our father glowing with pride as he’d fold
the camper down into a rectangular box and, later at the campsite, expand like an accordion into
a miniature house, and which he would eventually pass down to his brother with young children
when our own family life had become too full with striving, the luxury of recreational time all
but squeezed out from our lives; a shoebox full of handwritten notes on loose leaf binder paper,
folded into squares and triangles with origami folds, decorated with hearts and lipstick kisses;
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high school yearbooks, leather-bound, gilt-edged; many items of clothing for teenaged girls and
boys of a past era, which, years into the future, would return to fashion—oversized Esprit tote
bags, Billabong t-shirts and tank tops, Gotcha pullovers, Pendleton flannel, tie-dyed t-shirts,
babydoll dresses and long hippie skirts, scuffed-up Doc Martens, Birkenstocks worn through to
the cork, and many pieces of solid black clothing. It was our family’s history in stuff: used-up,
space-encroaching, no longer relevant.
We decided to stop for ice cream in Japantown before going our separate ways. We
hadn’t been there together since we were kids, when our parents would take us anytime we
passed through the city. There was a little restaurant in the main square run by a Chinese family
that served dishes that my parents were familiar with from the Chinese district of Seoul. Not the
kind of food you’d find easily in the Chinatowns of American cities, but Korean-Chinese food,
born in Korea, that Korean mothers cook at home, comfort food that reminds immigrants of
growing up in Korea, the food that school children today might snack on on their way home from
school, along with kimbap and tteokbokki. Noodles in black bean sauce, noodles in spicy broth
with seafood, Korean pancakes, fried pork. There was no Koreatown in the Bay Area. That little
Chinese place in Japantown was the closest our parents could get to the memory of that
particular kind of comfort food.
Kevin and I didn’t care for Korean-Chinese food. Our mother always said that it was
because we hadn’t grown up on it, the same way we hadn’t grown up eating red bean pastries,
porridge, and popsicles.
“You have to have been eating it since you were a baby,” she said. “In America, it’s hard
to find this food.”
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I did not like the taste or texture of sweetened red beans or the thick black bean sauce that
drowned long, slippery noodles. Both red bean sweets and black bean savory dishes were
deceptive in appearance, tricking my mind into connecting what I saw to what I knew: chocolate,
which was familiar and delicious and American. Chocolate is not a Korean tradition, uncommon
even in the candy aisles of Korean supermarkets and inside the pastry cases of Korean bakeries,
which partially explains why every time I’d give it another try, take a hesitant bite to see if I had
finally acquired the elusive Korean taste, I was always, without fail, unpleasantly surprised by
the mismatch between what I saw and what I tasted. Somewhere in between, my mind was
performing an unwanted magic trick, warping the connection between one sense and another.
Kevin and I did love, incontrovertibly, the green tea ice cream that we discovered in
Japantown. It was perfection: subtly sweet, just the right amount of matcha, and it was green.
There was nothing like it. The Swensen’s diner/ice cream shop that our parents owned while we
were in high school served over thirty flavors of ice cream, but none of them were as interesting
or unusual as green tea. It made us daydream about one day living in Japantown.
Before Kevin left San Francisco, we picked up green tea ice cream at the same ice cream
shop we had visited since we were children. They served many flavors, but not once over the
years did we order any flavor other than green tea.
We took our little cups of oversized double scoops outside into the cold city air. The big
square was empty but for a few families with children, city guides and foldout maps in hand. The
big wooden tower with its old arched roof looked over all of Japantown, standing sentinel, as if it
had seen everything we hadn’t seen, archiving in memory, in the knots in the wood grain and the
hinges of its very structure, all that we’d forgotten or ignored, as if it had been there before
anyone had arrived, and would still be standing after we were all gone, remembering everything.
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We moved over to the railing that looked out onto the courtyard below. Children skipped
on the floor of concrete tiles, the ceiling of the mall underground that spanned the entire block. A
young couple stood beside us, speaking Korean and sharing purple sweet potato ice cream out of
a waffle cone shaped like a fish. Kevin and I watched the kids in the courtyard as they jumped in
uncoordinated movements, their arms gesturing wildly, mouths open with laughter and absurd
pronouncements.
“I’m going to hammer your teeth!” a girl shouted at her brother before suddenly flipping
her body upside down, her head hovering mere inches above the ground, then just as quickly
turning right-side up—a no handed cartwheel—with a plastic toy hammer in her hand.
The siblings’ voices sounded in high registers, shouting declarations and commands of
the unselfconscious, tiny people without vanity or loss. They spoke in Korean, occasionally
making exclamations in English.
I wondered if Kevin remembered how we spoke exclusively in Korean when interacting
with each other at that age, how we felt that it was our secret language because none of the other
kids we knew could understand us. English was public, imperative for the social world, the
language we spoke to communicate to outsiders, to be heard and understood, to exchange
information. Korean was private, intimate, domestic, our shared language that bonded us by
blood and by birth, the language we slipped into when we wanted our world to include only the
two of us. This was before our father forbade us to speak Korean, even in private. His fear was
that if we grew up speaking Korean, even alongside English, we would become confused or have
accents, and we would never be accepted as American. Little did he know that no matter how
perfect your English, how lyrical your prose, how American you seem, no matter how loud and
clear you speak, whether you have the right tone, inflection, the right views and perspectives, the
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right opinions, the right amount of confidence inhabiting your identity, the right sense of humor,
there’s nothing you can do from being seen as a perpetual outsider: there will always be people
who can’t hear you or see you, a willful blindness. No amount of money or social status will
make you white.
Another family walked across the square. A little girl wearing a red cape over a romper
leaped into the air, foot kicked out, landing with a dramatic karate chop.
“Hiiiiiiiya!” she shouted.
Her brother waved a poster tube in front of his body, held it with both hands like a sword,
taking the stance of a warrior. I couldn’t tell if he was defending himself or if he was about to
attack.
“That’s an aikido move,” Kevin said, nodding at the boy. “He probably takes aikido.”
I looked at the child again, paying closer attention. He was half-squatting, feet planted far
apart, like a human chair, his upper body stick-straight and pivoting toward his sister. He pointed
the poster tube toward her, as if casting a spell.
“Defense,” I said.
“What?”
“A form of self-defense,” I said. “You used to tell me all the time, when you were taking
aikido in high school. You said that they teach you to defend yourself while protecting your
attacker from injury. Defensive holds, pressure points, throwing people.”
“You remember that?” he said.
“You used to show me the moves every day. How could I forget? You tried to practice on
me!” I said, laughing. “Kept talking about Steven Seagal. Made me watch all those movies with
you. My friends used to make fun of me because I knew so much about Steven Seagal.”
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“I don’t have time for that anymore,” Kevin said. “I have to work. I pick up overtime
when I can. I have a house to take care of. Have to make sure my wife is happy. Who has time
for self-defense?”
* * *
When my friend told me that my unhappiness arises from the habit of committing things
to memory, that selective memory is the key to happiness, she was probably right. The four of us
possessed an unfortunate combination of traits—denial of grief and the inability to forget—
which kept us from ever moving on.
Memory is not all that determines our happiness. For my family, the problem was not just
in the not forgetting; it was not remembering fully enough. If we try to erase our pain, never do
we truly forget. Memory seeps out as haunting, and we re-live the past over and over, as if time
does not exist. This is how Kevin and I came to fetishize our own private pain and suffering.
Unhappiness remains and deepens as we dwell in the wrongs done to us, as we hold on to
resentment. That’s the thing about injustice. We spend too much time thinking about our
victimizers, who never think about us except the ways in which we threaten them, and our pain
begins to define us even when it no longer has anything to do with them. While our victimizers
may forget, we remember and remember, as if we’re only living to remember. That’s how it
becomes so easy to never notice when we become victimizers ourselves.

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CHAPTER 9

It was all over the news by the time we heard what had happened. It could have been
worse. In another four or five years, he would have been the hot topic on the internet, a meme on
Facebook and Twitter, and in a few more he’d have been recorded for all time via hi-res video
making the rounds, shot from different angles by civilians with thousand-dollar touch screen
phones and posted to social media accounts, shared and reshared, tweeted and retweeted, ad
infinitum.
You could say Kevin was lucky. The social media platforms did not yet exist. But the
homeless man, Eddie Yeun, was definitely not lucky, and on top of that there was a witness, or
two—Kevin’s partner and an undergraduate journalism student with a shitty camcorder, though
the college student is the person who changed everything for us, because without him life would
have gone on as usual.
My roommate called out for me from the living room. His tone was urgent. I figured it
was no big deal—something about the dishes or the trash, the usual things roommates bicker
about—and I was busy packing, getting ready to hit the road in less than two weeks, timed with
the arrival of a mutual friend who had signed on to take over my half of the lease.
Samir pointed at the television. I was confused about why he had called me in to watch
the NBC evening news when all that appeared on the screen was a blurry home video. A
newscaster was speaking in the background, innocuous-seeming dialogue that I didn’t pay
attention to at first, but by the time the words sunk in and I had processed what was being said it
felt like I had dropped down into a cave, dark and empty except the light of the television. I
peered at the screen, trying to match the fuzzy scene before me with the information that was
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being reported. My stomach plunged as if I was tumbling down into another cave. I covered my
mouth with my hands to keep everything in. I wouldn’t throw up. I was on a seven year no vomit
streak.
The video was on a loop. One minute of footage that kept restarting and ending at the
same place. The image was blotchy, as if someone had taken a sponge and smudged fresh paint,
and it appeared to have been shot from a distance because a few seconds in the camera lens
zoomed from a parking lot across the street to a grainy close-up of three figures.
There was no way to identify the three people in the video. I couldn’t even distinguish
their gender. It looked like someone had taken an eraser to their faces. Two were standing and
appeared to be dressed similarly in dark, blocky-cut clothing. One stood aside, unmoving,
looking on as the other swung down a stick repeatedly on the third person who lay dormant on
the ground, covering their head and face with their arms, knees pulled up to the chest. The news
anchors narrated the scene, which is how I realized that the stick was in fact a baton and the two
men standing were uniformed police officers. The newscasters spoke in even, deep tones,
consonants sharp, as they described an incident from earlier that day that was now the highlight
of the evening news.
“San Jose police officer Kevin Kim,” the woman said, “caught on film near upscale
shopping district Santana Row in San Jose by a Santa Clara University undergraduate student
who witnessed the brutal beating. The unarmed victim has been identified as Eddie Yeun, a
thirty-two year old homeless man. His condition is unknown at this time.”
The camera shifted to the male newscaster, who described Kevin’s history with the police
department and followed with a message from police chief Juan Martinez. The statement
displayed in quotes while the anchor read aloud: “Officer Kevin Kim has been placed on
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administrative leave while we investigate the circumstances surrounding the event that took
place earlier today in the Forest-Pruneridge district of San Jose. The department is looking out
for the best interests of the city. Administrative leave doesn’t indicate any wrongdoing by
Officer Kim. Officer Kim has worked in law enforcement for the San Jose Police Department for
seven years. He has had no disciplinary actions or any recommendations for counseling on
record in his years in public service. His attendance, performance, and conduct have been
exemplary. Kim is a career street cop who has protected and served the community. He’s a
member of one of the best law enforcement agencies in California.”
The news anchor continued: “Local residents and employees of nearby businesses have
stated that the homeless man, Eddie Yeun, has been a familiar presence in the neighborhood in
recent years.”
“Eddie never caused any trouble,” said a man in a black apron outside a café. “We all
know Eddie by name. At first, we didn’t even know he was homeless. We started giving him free
coffee and pastries whenever he stopped by, and we’d leave a bag of pastries and sandwiches
that we couldn’t sell out for him when we’d close. I don’t know what Eddie could have done to
have deserved getting beaten like that. He was harmless.”
I could hear my phone ringing in the other room.
“Turn it off,” I said to Samir.
* * *
In my room with the door closed, I turned my phone to silent. Samir knocked softly,
asked if I wanted to talk, to which I didn’t respond.
Was I surprised about what my brother had done? That was the thing. I wasn’t surprised.
It made perfect sense and, not only that, I had always imagined something worse. For years I had
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feared a scenario far more horrific and gruesome than what I had just seen on the evening news.
I’d taken to reading, obsessively, about mass shootings and bombings, felt accountable when the
violence was perpetrated by a Korean American man. I read published manifestos when I could
find them. I would try to find out more about the family members of the killers, search for
interviews with or attempts to interview parents and siblings. A sister who talks to a reporter
through a crack in the door. A mother who cries and cries when asked if she had ever noticed any
clues that her son might be capable of a shooting rampage. I wondered what I would do if it was
Kevin who set a bomb at a finish line, who went to campus armed with his entire collection of
guns and shot at everyone in sight, who murdered his neighbors and his wife and then shot
himself in the head? How would I live with the guilt and shame? How would I explain things?
When the violence inside of Kevin finally came tumbling out, his action was much less
extreme than the carnage I feared, but I had imagined an act directed at an anonymous mass, at
humanity, a blind and destructive release of rage. The violence that Kevin actually committed
was specific and intimate. Not only did I feel implicated, I felt as if his rage was directed at all of
us.
Was Eddie Yeun dead? Would everybody know what Kevin had done?
* * *
By the time I returned my mother’s phone call the next day, I had the answers to my
questions. Kevin’s face was on the front page of the morning paper. The reporter had gotten hold
of his portrait from the police academy, yearbook-style and looking shiny and promising in a
pressed uniform. The story included a report on Eddie Yeun, stating that the man was stable, but
in critical condition. When my mother answered the phone, she confirmed what I suspected, that
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everybody we knew knew, shouting, “Everybody knows! Why did he do this?” I couldn’t say a
word through the shouting and sobbing.
I rode my bike to my mother’s apartment, since it was the quickest and easiest way to get
there—no waiting, no parking—and it seemed less likely that I’d run into anyone I knew walking
on the street or riding the Muni. With a helmet and sunglasses on, I could ride by in a flash and
no one would notice me. The air was cool, clammy, and if I closed my eyes I could convince
myself that things were different, that I was on my way to moving across the country with
nothing hanging over my head, holding me back. My legs tingled. I still felt stuck in that cave I
had dropped down into while watching the screen the night before.
At my mom’s, I was greeted with so much incense I could taste wood and musk before I
even opened the door. My mother was standing in the hallway. She picked up the conversation as
if we had never hung up the phone.
“But he’s so nice to homeless people!” she said. “Remember when you were in high
school and we’d come to San Francisco, Kevin always put money in their cups, twenty-dollar
bills when he had them, even when I told him he shouldn’t. Anyone who asked, he’d give them
money no matter what. He’d even buy extra meals at the restaurants, ask the waiter to pack it up,
and he’d hand out the take-out bags to homeless people sitting out front.”
“I remember that,” I said.
“I need to get some rest,” she said. “I didn’t sleep at all last night. I probably lost seven
pounds.”
I couldn’t make my way through because my mother was still standing in the middle of
the hallway.
“The man was Korean,” she said.
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“Have you talked to Kevin?” I asked.
“No. He doesn’t answer his phone. Sanghee, too.”
She finally turned around and walked into the living room. I followed, passing the
kitchen, which is when I noticed my dad sitting at the table. He’d just returned from an
assignment that morning, apparently, had heard the news the previous night and got someone to
take over the delivery.
There were pillar candles scattered everywhere. The counters and tabletops and any
furniture with a flat surface was set with multiple candles. The little flames flickered.
We sat in silence, eating orange slices as we watched our phones which rang
occasionally, on silent.
My mother started crying. She was sitting in a corner of the couch, holding a napkin with
both hands like she was strangling an animal. I looked at my dad who was still at the kitchen
table. He didn’t even look up, just sat there, head down.
I thought my mother would start shouting, blaming me or my dad, but whatever she was
thinking she kept it to herself. My dad never said a word.
* * *
We decided to see for ourselves if Kevin was home. We took my dad’s car. He had one
of those big four-door pick-up trucks that, unless you’re well over six feet tall, you have to hoist
yourself into by grabbing hold of one of the handles at the top of the doorframe. It took over an
hour to get to Kevin’s house in San Jose because no matter what time of day there’s always at
least some traffic whether you take the 101 or the 280. My dad drove with his window
completely down the whole way there, I suspected so that he wouldn’t have to hear my mom
muttering to herself in the front seat.
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Kevin lived across the street from a park in a neighborhood zoned for a highly rated
public school district. The size of the house and its location gave it a family vibe, though
children were not in his plans. Sanghee had always been quiet on the subject and when prodded,
Kevin would butt in: “I got her this house and the dogs.” There was a big deck and gazebo in the
back where Sanghee would often paint. One of the spare bedrooms was her crafting room.
We knocked and rang the doorbell for at least five minutes. Still, nobody came. My
mother tried calling Kevin’s home phone line. She waited for the beep and left a message on the
answering machine hoping that he would hear her announcement that we were waiting at the
front door.
Kevin opened the door in sweatpants and an old t-shirt. His face was devoid of
expression, like a dentist had shot up his face. He turned around and walked away, leaving us
with the door wide open. We followed him into the living room, where it appeared he had slept
the night before. A bed pillow lay at one end of the couch and a large quilt crumpled across the
surface.
“Where’s Sanghee?” my mother asked.
“Gone,” Kevin said.
“What do you mean gone?” she said.
“She left.”
We stood around uncomfortably except for Kevin, who was sitting on the couch. He was
totally calm. Several minutes passed before anyone said anything. It was my dad who finally
broke the silence. It was the first time he spoke that entire day, at least since I had shown up.
“Why did you do that?” he asked Kevin.
“I don’t know what happened. I just snapped.”
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* * *
It turned out that Kevin knew Eddie Yeun. Kevin had befriended Eddie, looked after him
when patrolling the neighborhood.
“I tried to help him,” he said. “He wasn’t gone the way a lot of homeless people look. I
thought I could get him back on his feet.”
Kevin would order a burger and fries from a local diner and deliver the meal around
Bascom and San Carlos, where Kevin would often find Eddie hanging around outside the
Goodwill or the dollar store.
“There aren’t a lot of homeless people around here, so he really stuck out. That and
because he’s an Asian homeless man.”
Kevin and Eddie were around the same size, just under 5’10”. Kevin passed down his old
clothes and shoes. Eddie had dropped out of San Jose State and his mom was in a mental
institution while his dad had moved back to Korea. An only child, no relatives nearby.
“He’s crazy, like his mom,” Kevin said. “He’s supposed to take medication, but he
always forgets to have it filled.”
Kevin would check Eddie into a shelter when it was very cold or rainy or very hot, when
Eddie seemed jumpy or was talking to people who wasn’t there. At the shelter, they’d call his
social worker and keep an eye on him until his medication got filled.
These were all the facts I knew. It’s all Kevin told us.
“I snapped,” Kevin said again.
The rest of the story I had to imagine, based on what I had seen in the video and what I
knew about my brother.
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When Kevin got the call about a disturbance on Winchester, above the mall, Eddie must
have been the last person he expected to find there. From what Kevin had said, it sounded like
Eddie stuck to San Carlos, never wandered past The Villas at Santana Row, where the shiny
shoppers and luxury cars would have served as a kind of border that someone like Eddie
wouldn’t want to cross. When Kevin drove up to the strip mall where the incident had been
reported, he would have been surprised to see Eddie behind the paint store, sunburned and
barefoot. Where are his shoes? Kevin might have thought. The shoes I gave him? If Eddie was
off his meds, perhaps he was talking to someone who wasn’t there, speaking in two different
voices the way my downstairs neighbor does twice a day, at dawn and the middle of the night—
one voice high and pleading, childlike, punctuated with wailing; the other, low and stern.
I don’t know what happened between Kevin and Eddie after Kevin got out of the car and
before the scene on the videotape. All I know is what I could make out in the images, which was
just a blur of violence, the figures barely distinguishable from each other. When had Kevin
reached for the baton? Was it a reflex? How did he hold it? Below the waist, unaware that he’d
end up using it? Or cocked and poised? Was there something Eddie did or said that made Kevin
snap? For as long as I could remember, there had always been something simmering in Kevin
waiting to explode, slumbering inside himself like a terrible secret.
In the video, the first time Kevin hit Eddie, he pulled the baton back with his right hand, a
big looping forehand groundstroke, the kind of flourish we’d been trained against, and struck
Eddie across the side. Kevin swung again, whaling Eddie now with two-handed strokes, bringing
down the baton from over his head and from both sides, onto Eddie’s back and his ribs and his
arms, which were covering his face. Then Kevin started kicking him in the stomach.
308
The video was terrible, not just the horror taking place in it, but the quality. It was shot
from across the street on what I’d guess was a nineties-era handheld camcorder, and you couldn’t
make out any details, just three blobby figures recorded in low light. Even the big blue trashcan
behind the paint store was obscured. I only knew that Kevin was the assailant in the video
because the media had identified him and he had confirmed it.
When I got home from Kevin’s house, the video was still on the news, playing in a loop.
I recorded it on my VCR. Once I knew for certain that it was Kevin on the screen, I thought I
could see the smirk on his face, thought I saw the way he strutted and puffed out his chest, even
though the graininess of the video would have made it impossible to discern. It was the way the
violence was so clearly charged but all detail blurred, as if someone had tried to erase it, that
made me keep needing to watch it. The ghostly quality of the video combined with Kevin’s
actions—the repetitive hitting and kicking, the way the baton and Kevin’s physical form had
become so weaponized—produced an image that was hypnotizing, unreal. I couldn’t get it out of
my head. It was like a horror movie where the scariest moments arise when you can’t see the
actual threat, but you catch a glimpse of something monstrous—a flash, a streak of smoke. I kept
thinking about Rodney King, when a little over ten years earlier in Los Angeles another
bystander had captured another beating by cops with a handheld camcorder from his apartment
balcony. What I saw on the video that had been recorded in San Jose was a faceless figure—a
symbol, myth—that represented those cruel, inhuman, unforgiveable cops. I had to keep
reminding myself that the person on the screen committing the transgression was not them, not a
symbol, that the ghostly figure was my own brother.
I wondered what our father saw when he watched the video. Did he see a symbol, like I
did? Did he see his own son? Did he see himself? Could he access the rage and violence? Was he
309
reminded of the time he had squatted over Kevin’s tennis rackets with an axe, chopped into the
pile of rackets with abandon? Our father had been so full of unknowable rage that I could never
comprehend and still can’t understand all these years later. Kevin had grown into that rage, had
learned to inhabit the space that our father had sheltered in, and there’s a part of me, even now,
that envies them both for what they knew and what they felt that I didn’t, as if they were
members of a secret club that I would never belong to. What is it like to act, to release all that
anger? To open the lid after everything’s been kept down for so long, teeming and growing and
rising?
I could never reach the man who had cleaved into Kevin’s pile of tennis rackets, or the
man who had beaten a homeless man to near death. There are many things I don’t understand,
but I do know that my father must have been faced with an impossible task: how could he
prepare his children for a world that did not accept him, that was encrypted with codes he could
not translate, when his best hope was for his children to unlock the door into the world that he
had been waiting all his life to enter but never would, and once we crossed the threshold to the
other side we would no longer belong to him?
Kevin never walked through that door. He had too many bad memories that he couldn’t
keep down and couldn’t erase, that turned into a rage much like our father’s and I imagine many
other men who nobody wants to acknowledge, both their existence and how we are all
implicated. It’s the anger that kept Kevin from becoming American, though I wonder if it saved
him from disappearing.
I have it too, the rage. But I’ve swallowed it and swallowed it and I keep swallowing it,
and it just stays there, a little ball deep inside of me where all my angers have collected. I can’t
erase them either. I push it all down, keep it hidden, because I got in—into the world that we
310
were all living so miserably to access. If I want to stay here, I have two choices. Either all the
pain must be kept a secret, or I can let it free and share it, quietly—to become a spectacle for
some, but for you and me and anyone else who wants to be with us, a point of connection, an
expansion of our selves, an opening of the world.
I couldn’t make out his face, or any other detail that might have marked him as Kevin
Kim, my brother. He looked like a ghost. It was as if the crappy camcorder had scrubbed away
all the layers of politeness and silence that had formed his personality, leaving this wraith made
of violence and shame, fragile, jagged, wielding the baton against a prone human figure that
looked, in the grainy image on the screen, indistinguishable from himself.
* * *
Before dropping out of law school, I made a number of friends, while never really
committing to one specific group of friends, which I took as one of the signs that I didn’t belong
since it seemed that in order to thrive, in law school and beyond in a career in law, you had to
pick your crew of people and keep it. Law school was so cliquey I could only compare it to high
school. One of my friends was surprisingly at ease with the social structure. He thrived in it. He
wasn’t lost like me. He knew what he wanted.
Tommy Ly was the token of the all-male all-white party crew. A quarter of the members
had arrived from USC’s Fraternity Row. If you want to know what law school is like, imagine an
undergraduate college that has a reputation as a party school. That’s law school, with the age
range shifted a tad higher. Intense partying is offset by equally intense study sessions, hungover
and quietly hitting the books while exceedingly caffeinated or high on Adderall and stressing
about student loan debt. This group of men had appointed themselves the leaders of our law
school’s social world.
311
My friend Tommy Ly was the ringleader. He organized all the parties, all the nights out
at the bars and clubs, which started on Thursday evening after ConLaw and ended Monday
morning when Kreitzberg called roll in CrimLaw. Tommy decided who was invited. He
documented everything on his pocket-sized Canon digital ELPH, and he’d upload hundreds of
pictures the following morning on Shutterfly, which could only be accessed through a shared
link.
Tommy wasn’t who you’d expect would be in charge of this particular group. He was a
former member of a Vietnamese gang and his best friend had been tried for murder, twice. His
friend got off the first time, but was convicted the second, sentenced to forty years in prison.
Tommy had a giant tattoo on his back that you could sometimes catch a glimpse of on the nape
of his neck, the tip of a dragon’s wing peeking out, a flash of green and yellow and blue, when
the collar of his button-down shirt shifted. His family had arrived to the U.S. and settled in the
South Bay as refugees from Vietnam and he wasn’t yet a citizen, all of which he confided to
Sawyer Parker Rhodes from Indiana and not me. Sawyer’s parents were both law professors at
Notre Dame and was the only person I knew in law school who didn’t have roommates. His
living room was full of dark leather furniture and in his office he actually had one of those brass
banker’s lamps with a green glass lampshade and a pull-chain switch. I was both hurt and
insulted that I heard about Tommy’s secret from Sawyer Parker Rhodes, of all people. None of
us—me, the other Asians, the few Latinos and black people from our year—could understand
what was going on with Tommy: why was he the leader of these white frat boys, not only why
did they let him but why did he want to?
The others had gone to private schools, a few drove nice cars, and they had cultivated a
reputation of arrogance. When we were 1L’s they threw a party with an exclusive invite list, the
312
majority of whom were very young women, undergrads from the university’s sororities. Tommy
invited me but I had no idea what I was walking into. I was shocked to find that the house was
mostly full of girls who looked barely legal, dressed for a Pimps & Hoes party. Since Tommy
and his boys were not costumed as pimps, I thought that the girls must have gotten played. I chit-
chatted with a couple of Tommy’s friends. One of them pointed to an eighteen-year old across
the room: Boob job, he said. Look how high her boobs are. I stared at him so long, he
apologized.
To see Tommy with them didn’t make sense. A bunch of preppy white guys and Tommy,
hardly taller than me, his hair spiked with frosted tips, and I was never sure how old he was but
he looked older than the rest of us. He swaggered when he crossed a room and his feelings were
always seeping out, while the other men were so repressed they didn’t know how they felt about
anything when nobody was even looking. Their frequent references to Tommy’s gang status
made it obvious that they had never met a gang member or an ex-gang member before, had never
imagined an Asian man like Tommy. I had cousins in L.A. who had run around with Koreatown
gangs, so Tommy wasn’t news to me, but his presence in law school defied certain odds. Tommy
was confident and cool, and his talent was forming bonds with other men. You got the sense that
his loyalty cut deep, that he would take your secrets to the grave even at the expense of his own
happiness.
We were friends but not romantic. He once drunkenly accused me that I would never date
him, though it wasn’t clear to me what he thought the reason was—his race, his class, or
something else. For his part, he was always chasing white girls, and if I wasn’t quick enough to
confirm that one of them was pretty, he’d snap, “She’s hotter than you.” For his group of male
friends, he was filled with love and loyalty, and he welcomed me into the fold, along with two
313
white girls who were friendly and pretty and incredibly symmetrical in a way that made other
people feel judged.
It became clear that Tommy resented me for the way that he thought I belonged. Asian
Daria, he named me.
“I never met an Asian like you. Nobody can tell when you’re joking.”
Tommy knew that I thought I was better than him, even if I didn’t know it. I didn’t have
to say anything. People can sense when you believe in your own superiority, they know what
motivates voluntary exclusion.
I thought I was better than my own family. I thought I didn’t need them. I believed that I
was special, that quitting law school and moving away was proof, that severing our bond that
none of us had even chosen to begin with and becoming my own person—that’s what I was
missing, that was the thing that would make me happy.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want more. All of the Kims were born into a space
so thick with the urgency, someone should have told us that people like us could never be
satisfied. Turning away from the people we share pain with doesn’t free us. We all believe that
there’s something missing from ourselves that will complete us. We’ll keep believing it, keep
looking, until we can acknowledge that no such thing exists. If there’s nothing in this world that
will make us complete, the next best thing must be connection. I try to hold onto the things that
bring me joy, but happiness isn’t what makes us faithful or decent—it’s pain that connects us,
that binds us to each other. At the cost of our own happiness, our deepest bonds arise from
shared pain.
I read a message once, spray-painted on the exterior wall of a coffee shop in a
neighborhood that was nearly fully gentrified, its businesses covered in graffiti that looked so
314
polished, when I asked around I learned that artists had actually been hired to paint beautiful
graffiti murals all around the neighborhood. On the wall of this particular coffee shop, there was
a pair of gold angel wings, between which you could stand and pose for a photo, which you
could then post on the relevant social media network. There was usually a line of people waiting,
queued on the sidewalk all the way around the corner—not for the pour over coffee and ten
dollar toast—but for a turn to take a photo against the backdrop of the angel-winged wall,
especially during the warm summer months when the sky was clear and the sunlight made
everything glittery and orange-hued. Above the wings was the message that I mentioned before.
The message read: You deserve your beautiful life.
I believe this: there are people who deserve their beautiful lives, but there are people who
don’t, and there are many, many more people in this world who deserve more than what they got.
I know that I don’t deserve my life, but I also know this: I still want more.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Lee, Lisa (author)

Core Title Korean American han: forgotten histories, haunted spaces

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 11/29/2020

Defense Date 08/26/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Asian American fiction,Asian American literature,assimilation,bildungsroman,class,creative writing,gender expectations,Ghosts,Han,haunting,inherited trauma,Korean American fiction,Korean American han,Korean American identity,Korean American literature,Korean American masculinity,Korean American subject formation,Korean diaspora,Korean horror film,OAI-PMH Harvest,Police brutality,toxic masculinity,Violence

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Everett, Percival (committee chair), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee chair), Bender, Aimee (committee member), Choe, Youngmin (committee member), Johnson, Dana (committee member)

Creator Email leelisa@usc.edu,lisalee414@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-402013

Unique identifier UC11667821

Identifier etd-LeeLisa-9165.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-402013 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LeeLisa-9165.pdf

Dmrecord 402013

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Lee, Lisa

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA