“Hyeseung-a,” Umma said once we were outside. “Don’t worry about what anyone thinks. I know who you are.” Instead of patting my heart, she patted hers.
I nodded and slid weakly into the car. She told me she would see me at home. I don’t remember where I drove, whether I went to the movies or what, but I was quieter then. When I was young, Umma used to tell me to give her some of my pain and she would carry it for me, and that day, I felt I had done just that.
In that first real crisis of my life, the person to whom I ran to collect my dispersing identity, to confirm my aliveness, was not myself but my mother. In this sad half-life I’d eked out, whenever there had been the inevitable disappointment such as a bad grade or losing an award, I had not had a ready script to revert to when I needed to substantiate my worth. If there were such a script, it was fragmented, poor, and narrated in the voices of others, including, of course, my mother, who was kind to me that day when I appeared in front of her in complete distress. She told me she knew who I was.
And yet, I wish back then, in the hospital room where someone had died, my mother, my lifeblood, would have told me instead that if the whole world hated me, I could still love myself, that even if she herself hated me, I could persist whole and alive.
Instead, I left, bound tighter than ever to her, having placed my heart—and worth—in her hands.
7.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, I DIDN’T go to school, or the next day, or the next. When I had to show my face on one of the last days of the year, I kept my head down and didn’t speak to anyone. Macy gave me a hug, while Emilia steered clear of me, the poor man’s Grace Cho.
At my locker, I bumped into the Best-Looking Boy in school, Ryan Smiling. For the past seven years, he and I had been in the same homeroom, assigned by alphabetical order by last name. On the football field where he was quarterback and I led the band, we passed each other at halftime, silently acknowledging each other across the caste line. Ryan—broad, blond, and, of course, impossibly good-looking—tried to say something, not about the Superlatives, but about the end of high school. He smiled, and his dimples appeared. He was trying to keep things light, and I replied, “Yeah, this summer will definitely be weird,” because even though I had nothing to give, someone was making an attempt, and that meant something.
Competition season was over in band, and the director gave us a free period. I lay on the floor in the corner with Grace and some of the others. Yearbooks had been distributed, and everyone was busy signing. The Superlatives supplements had been published, too, in a glossy magazine for the entire school.
“Congratulations on ‘Smartest Girl,’ Grace.” A few freshmen came by, starstruck. They glanced at me, thought better, and moved on. I had been their drum major, screamed orders at them on the field for months, given them push-ups, led their sectionals, and now, I had lost their respect.
I was supposed to be signing Grace’s yearbook. We hadn’t spoken in weeks. Consciously or not, over the past four years, I’d curated a persona antithetical to that of Grace, who was cheery and unfailingly feminine—the Model Asian Girl. She and another friend were discussing the Superlatives.
“I think it’s mean to have ‘Thinks She’s Smartest’ and those titles,” Grace said. “We’re the only school who still does that. Stratford got rid of those a while ago.”
“No offense, Grace, but I voted for Hyeseung for ‘Smartest Girl.’ But it’s definitely cool that you won it,” a saxophonist named Anthony (Wesleyan) said.
I focused on the inside cover of her yearbook. Be generic and uninteresting, I cautioned myself. Then no one can go after you. I didn’t care that Grace was trying to be nice to me. I scribbled something, ending insipidly with “Have a great time at Boston College,” and slid the book over the carpet.
Having skipped math classes for months, I finally got a B for the semester in AP Calculus BC, which was fair of Mrs. Willis. But the lower grade dropped me in rank, from nine to eleven—I had not made it into the Top Ten. Mrs. Jerrigan had received a phone call from Umma after the Grace Cho mix-up earlier in the year, and since then, the counselor had attended every band concert and football game, waving in the stands at Umma as if to say, “See? I’m supporting your daughter.” Whenever I passed her in the halls, she was quick to say my name in atonement. Unlike Mrs. Cho, who allegedly had gone to bat for a grade for Grace once (an 89 needed to magically turn into a 90), Umma never called school people. My parents were the type of immigrants who did not expect people to know they were Korean and not Japanese, and generally ignored racism. But this time Umma made an exception and called Mrs. Jerrigan because I told her the counselors wrote recommendations to the colleges. College was real.
Graduation was scheduled for the Saturday before my eighteenth birthday. That week the senior office distributed order forms for invitations—thick card stock embossed with gold lettering and red mustangs. I crumpled up the order form and threw it in my locker. I didn’t plan on going to graduation. I hadn’t accomplished anything and didn’t have anything to celebrate. Even when Umma pointed out I was the only girl in the senior class headed to an Ivy League, I just shrugged. I felt ashamed, and I wanted to die.
In the end though, I stood sullenly in my cap and gown, invisible in the long line poised to enter the stadium on graduation day. It was hot, and the Class of 1996 sweated under our mortarboards.
In front of me at number ten was my old friend Hannah Kohl (Northwestern). She chatted with Emilia (Michigan), who was number nine and successfully maintaining the same level of high since winning her Superlative.
“Pretty cool to be graduating penultimate of the Top Ten,” Hannah said to Emilia, who grasped on to the word “penultimate.” Instead of “nine” or “second to last,” she’d spend the rest of the day chiming into conversations with that sparkly word.
“I guess that makes me valedictorian of everyone else,” I cut in, attempting a joke. But Hannah wasn’t listening, and Emilia snapped forward as the line began to move.
I didn’t want to be here. Graduation wasn’t anything but another day I had to endure for other people. I had learned from Emilia that Umma had appeared at school the week before, searching for me in the hallways with Sarah strapped to her chest. I, of course, was at the movies.
“Mrs. Song! What can I do for you?” I imagined Mrs. Jerrigan exclaiming, ushering her into her office. She had been the one to hand over the graduation invitations to my mother.
I shuffled forward. I might look like everyone else—red cap, red gown—but was I the only one who found this exercise meaningless? Sweating out the MSG I’d ingested during the graduation luncheon at North China, which Umma had insisted on, I reflected on the four years of high school during which I had been officer of countless clubs and societies, had delivered on grades, had not had a drop of alcohol or a lick of sex. Once a month, when it became unbearable and my lower abdomen distended past the point of belief, I’d consume several varieties of laxatives and have a bowel movement so violent it crippled me for days. When the doctor said I needed more fiber, I’d laughed, thinking how fibrous Korean food was. I had no idea he was not the kind of doctor I needed to see.
Inside the stadium, the air-conditioning was so delicious, I groaned. Emilia swung around from her penultimate position and asked what was the matter. I shook my head not to worry, and she swiveled to the front, her stringy red tassel swaying back and forth off the cap with energy.
By the time we were seated, my sweat had evaporated and I was shivering. No surprise, I thought, my bad attitude coursing strong, I’ll probably catch pneumonia this summer. “Smartest Boy” Lawrence Gimball, number sixteen, made a speech about the beginning of the rest of our lives, and I walked across the stage as the band played “Pomp and Circumstance” in a maniacal loop. Warmly articulating my name, Mrs. Jerrigan handed me my diploma.
I hadn’t had time to look into the seats for my parents. I didn’t want to see them anyway. I knew Umma was especially sorry for me. She believed I was sad because I didn’t graduate valedictorian like Grace or wasn’t going to Harvard like Lawrence, but that wasn’t it. I didn’t know what the reason was. I just knew I felt like a failure, but I couldn’t locate anything in my life that could change to make me a winner. So, I tried to focus on the future. I thought, Things are going to be different soon, and I won’t feel this way anymore. I was headed to Princeton, where I’d never have these feelings again. College was going to be the beginning of the rest of my life, like Lawrence said. No more being an outsider in Memorial and my family. No more passing and laughing at jokes I did not understand, or, worse, jokes that were about me. No more mother who alternately held me and pushed me away. No more goddamn heat I had to rail against.
The bifold Xeroxed program listed the seniors’ names and colleges: Vanderbilt, Stanford, Duke, Rice, UC Berkeley. A good portion of the class was headed to the University of Texas or A&M. Had I been white, maybe I would have been fine going to one of the state schools, but I was finished with Texas. I was headed to where intellectuals live and do intellectual things. I was going to discover what the real things are, and that knowledge would bring me happiness and render me visible to myself—past my race, past the complicated history of my family, past everything that clung to me but was not actually me.
After Grace’s speech, the class stood, and the principal invited us to throw our caps. A confetti of mortarboards swirled in the air as applause thundered from the audience.
But I hadn’t thrown mine. Instead, I clutched it as if it were a shield, to protect me and my heart. The ceremony was over, and the graduates scattered in search of their families. Cameras flashed. Everyone carried flowers.
PART IV
THE ENLIGHTENED OF THE WORLD
1.
ABIGAIL MAYFIELD CROSS WAS SITTING on the floor of our dorm room on the phone when I walked in on freshman move-in day. She smiled and waved but didn’t get up, and I saw she’d taken the bottom bunk and also a desk. Appa left to buy a hammer and nails, so I closed the bedroom door and waited with my bags in the common area of our suite.
From my seat on the couch, I looked out the bay windows onto the quad. Students milled about, and I discerned snippets of conversation, about classes, eating clubs, and who knew whom from which school. Over in the entryway opposite, a boy eating a sandwich swung his legs off the stone ledge of his second-floor window until he lost a Birkenstock. Some perky cheerleader types with orange-ribboned ponytails cut efficiently through the circus-like quad on its diagonal. Parents swarmed in every corner, lugged boxes, clothes, books, televisions, moved couches.
The week before, there had been a pre-orientation trip, and I would notice over the next several days freshmen hanging out in their trip squads. Eventually, these random clusters of students dissolved and re-formed into more sensical cliques; their present congealment was out of fear. That, and homesickness for a home I’d never really loved, made me sad. Why was it that we all had to be sorted, siloed into categories? As I had this thought, a girl scampered ahead of her mother and father into an entryway, widening the distance between herself and her parents, who had the door slammed in their faces. As for the gulf between my own mother and me, what had made her happy this difficult summer were the shopping trips to Bed Bath & Beyond to outfit my dorm room. Otherwise, she was alternately stupefied and angry to see my malaise persist when I should have been uncomplicated for college.
The bedroom door opened, and Abigail emerged. She was tall and athletic and her straight hair was pulled into a pony. She placed the phone in its cradle, and we greeted each other. From the letters we’d exchanged over the summer, I knew she was a rower from Connecticut and had gone to boarding school in Massachusetts.
Appa returned from the store with a lot more than a hammer and nails, and we set up my half of the bedroom. Eventually, Abigail’s parents appeared, too, and everyone was cordial and tried to pronounce my name.
When it was time for Appa and me to say goodbye, we stepped out through an arch and into the street. In the midst of the move-in bustle, my father left me with no words of advice, as that was not our relationship. But as he drove off back to the airport, I waved as I had as a child, until he could not possibly see me anymore.
That evening, even from the mezzanine of the auditorium, I could see, glinting under the lights, a silver band on Caleb’s thumb resting on the dais. To the freshman class, the sophomore professed how he had grown up in a conservative family and that last year, his friends at Princeton had given him the courage to come out.
I sank back into my seat. Here was someone who had counted the cost and decided it was too great an expense to mirror his surroundings and disappear. Here was a real human example of what I’d hoped from Princeton.
