I dropped my gaze to the floor. The red and black medallions in the rug blurred as the vision in my head sharpened. I conjured a white room. Inside were a wooden desk and books as well as a window, which didn’t look out onto anything but opened onto more whiteness. The room was suffused with a warm, yeasty smell, and the smell was comfort. Into this room I had entered weak and alone, and alone too I would leave, but strong.
“My dream is to live alone for a while. It sounds silly, but wouldn’t it be lovely to live above a bakery? I want to wake up in the morning to the smell of bread baking. It would be like living in a womb of dough, very safe, very comfortable. I’d like to belong to myself and work at something I know I could contribute to without having to ‘be the best.’ A mistake wouldn’t be a death, but rather a mistake. At night, I’d read or walk. And the only rule would be to do what fulfills me and only me.”
There, I had said it all. The pattern in the rug sharpened again, and I lifted my gaze and stopped: the dean was fighting back tears.
I cleared my throat. “Do you know the poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree,’ Dean Kay?”
“By Yeats. Yes.”
“I want to ‘live alone in the bee-loud glade.’ Just a simple life.”
The clock on the wall ticked the seconds away. In the widening silence, Dean Kay remained wordless. Perhaps she was thinking I wanted to hole up in a convent, baking bread. I leaned toward the photo closest to me on her desk, her grown children sparkling in the sterling silver frame. It struck me they themselves had probably gone to Princeton, too, had loved it, and that my unformed complaints to their mother were a denigration of their happiness.
“I have an idea,” she said, breaking the silence. “How about a compromise? How about leaving Princeton for a year in search of that simple life? And in the meantime, no more escapes to New York at two in the morning?”
Relief, astonishment, and gratitude hit me together in one stupendous wave. “Thank you,” I whispered once I’d caught my breath. This would not be leaving Princeton so I could cash out and check into a La Quinta to kill myself. This would be leaving Princeton so I wouldn’t have to end this life, but rather could search for another. To press pause had never occurred to me.
“The door is open to you. You have opened it because you have agency here.”
“I can leave, I can come back, and the door will stay open,” I repeated.
She nodded.
That afternoon, I emailed my professors and started taking down my side of the dorm room. Two days later, I hugged Abby goodbye in our common room, and I was going to fly back to my parents in Houston, until I could find a place to live simply.
Would I ever return?
I didn’t know.
5.
WHEN I CALLED MY PARENTS after the meeting with Dean Kay, they were confused.
“But you just left for your second year,” Appa said. “Are you sick?” Umma asked. “No, don’t you hear her? She doesn’t like school,” he barked. “What’s there to like or not like? It’s school!” “But you made As,” he said. “What are we going to tell people at church?” “Well, come home before you screw up your GPA if you’re that unhappy,” she said in the end.
The first night home while I was unpacking, Umma came in and sat down on my bed. It was time for us to try to understand each other.
“It’s just one year,” I sighed, careful to keep exasperation from bleeding. Keep it a cold, hard nugget, I pressed myself, trying to confound the emotion, which wanted to rail into an unnatural shape.
“How do you know it’ll be one year? One year can turn into two. Into three. Into never going back!”
I knew my mother. She was nothing if not an excellent catastrophizer, and she loved to argue by way of hypotheticals and slippery slopes. Instantly, I lost patience: the nugget began to stir, grow live, grow hot, a coal upon which a conflagration could be born.
“People are going to think you couldn’t cut it.”
Exactly! “But I couldn’t cut it. I got depressed!”
She produced the letter of congratulations the dean had sent over the summer and waved it in my face. “Are these the grades of a girl who couldn’t cut it?” In that second, my beautiful mother did not look beautiful to me. To her, achievement and mental derangement were inconsistent phenomena, and I didn’t fight back. As it had been when I was younger, it was easier to melt away.
I didn’t go to church with my parents the first Sunday. In not-so-hushed tones over breakfast, they discussed whether they should lie when the inevitable questions arose. I could hear it now. “How is Hyeseung-a doing at Princeton? Still conquering the academic life?” an ajumma would inquire. “She’s home because she’d rather live a simple life smelling bread” certainly wasn’t the right answer. Eventually, they devised something face-saving: “She’s been killing herself over her work and has completely tired herself out, so we told her to come home and rest.” A physical weakness was more excusable than a mental. My parents couldn’t accept what was happening to me—I barely understood it myself—and they were ashamed.
In this time of purgatory, I didn’t leave my bedroom. The nanny kept to the living room, snoozing whenever Sarah slept. Arthur had started tenth grade. After school, he got a snack from the kitchen and headed to his bedroom. From my doorway, I stared at his big feet straying off the edge of his twin and heard him chuckle over something he read. As if the feet and the chuckle were the marriage of sin to laziness, I applied myself harder, the black monkey of existential listlessness crouching in the corner of my bedroom, watching with its red eyes.
Princeton’s famously engaged alumni operated a career board, and I was going to use it to find a job, and the job would earn me money, and the money would give me freedom. While my friends partied, studied, and lived their college lives, I hunkered down on the floor of my childhood room in a makeshift bullpen of newspapers, legal pads, and laptops. I scoured career lists, wrote emails and cover letters, and updated my résumé.
After a couple of weeks, I was offered a job at a nonprofit in Chicago. Chicago! I imagined bakeries, walks along Lake Michigan, art museums, and bookstores. I had gotten off the phone with the head of the nonprofit when Umma popped her head in.
“I’ve had enough,” she said. “If you’re going to take a year off, you’re doing what Appa and I want.”
“Which is what? I am not going to live at home. The whole point of this exercise is to get a job and live alone.”
“In Chicago? You want to live and work in Chicago?”
“Yes, Chicago!”
“There’s nothing for you in Chicago. You only think you want to go to Chicago.” “Chicago” she said with a sneer. “You don’t know what you want. You need to be challenged so you can be grateful for what you have.”
I looked down at the laptop. The cursor blinked in the middle of an email. Was I being ungrateful?
“I have an idea you’re going to like much better,” she said with finality. Suddenly, the agency Dean Kay said I possessed seemed like a joke.
I held Sarah while Umma made an overseas call to a close family friend in Korea. We had known the Nams since the Bellaire days when I was a toddler, but Mr. Nam was now Dr. Nam and an important man, a CEO in Seoul. I bounced Sarah on my knee and heard him agree to give me a job.
When Umma hung up, she said, “There. Now you have a job in Seoul. If you thought I was going to let you fail, you were wrong.” She reached over and took Sarah from me. Umma was pleased with herself because she could get me a job on a moment’s notice and still had powerful friends in Korea even though we were powerless in America.
“Where am I going to live?” The white room above the bakery began to dissolve. “Am I going to have to live with Keun Umma, Keun Appa, and Kang Dae?”
Handing Sarah back to me, she again picked up the phone and made the call to my relatives.
