Once we said goodbye, I hobbled up the stairs, clutching the banister to steady myself. Keun Appa, it turned out, was having tea with a guest in the living room and had not bothered to come down. I went into Keun Umma’s bedroom, where she was cracking nuts and watching a Korean drama. I put my head in her lap and felt her cringe. She did not lay a hand to comfort me.

The next day, I was gone.

I spent my birthday on a flight out of Seoul. Aloft, I peered out the window into an arcadia of whiteness and considered many things. How in my homeland I had not found a small white room where I went in weak and came out strong. The experience of risk and bigness of life I’d initially desired when I left college but could not handle in reality. Sadness over losing my friendship with Jemi and the pain inflicted by men I’d called “oppa,” or “brother,” which I believed I had been complicit in inviting. The strategies work that had been hard and served as a daily reminder of how out of depth I was without school. School. In fact, living in Korea had been the opposite of living alone in the bee-loud glade.

Would I ever return again? I had tried to operate as a Korean in Korea, but attempting to fit into my native country, about which I had an abstract, mythical understanding, had only compromised me. The sexual violence Umma always feared had not occurred in America, but rather in the country that served as her moral compass.

As the plane traversed the sheet of ocean, I slowly oriented toward America with more kindness in my heart. Thanks to my experiences in Korea, there were aspects of America I would never hold cheap again. It was then I realized that during the evening encounter with the stranger with no eyes, what had come out of my mouth was a language I had not spoken in months.

It was in English I had uttered “Help,” and it was this that had saved me.

PART VI

PHILOSOPHY

1.

“HI,” A VOICE SAID.

I looked up from the keyhole of my dorm room on my first day back at Princeton to a boy standing next door. Well-built, he wore a white shirt tight at the biceps. We blushed.

“I’m Francis. Francis Park.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, and introduced myself.

“Are you a resident advisor?”

“No, I’m a sophomore.”

“Me, too, but I don’t recognize you from last year.”

“I was away. I should be a junior.”

Francis Park was visibly impressed. He told me he’d grown up in northern New Jersey, and I assumed he hailed from a town like Fort Lee with a large Korean population. “I’m thinking of majoring in economics,” he said. “Math track.”

I smiled. “Me, too.”

Suddenly, an impressive Korean lady with dark lipstick and an Hermès scarf popped out of his room. She squinted behind her oversized sunglasses and inspected me grandly. Francis and I immediately cut off our flirtation.

“Annyeonghasaeyo, ajumma,” I said, bowing.

But Francis’s mother, unimpressed by my short skirt, just “mmhmm” ’ed me. “Francis, come now. We need to finish your room,” she said, and disappeared inside.

I waved, slid my key into the lock, and rolled my bags into my room. I was back.

The first time Francis invited me over for Korean snacks, I still considered him a potential romantic interest. I’d never entertained a crush on a Korean American boy before, but I figured it would be useful to focus my fledgling Korean American identity on someone real.

“Remind me again why she’s dressed like a Catholic schoolgirl?” I asked. He was really into a new pop star named Britney Spears.

Unable to tear his eyes from the computer screen, Francis shushed me and pushed over some seaweed and microwaved rice. Britney didn’t seem that contrite when she sang, “Oops, I did it again.”

“She’s so hot!” He sighed and clicked play again.

I felt sorry for Francis because a blond chick like Britney would probably never be interested in someone like him, no matter how much time he spent repping at the gym. Even the Korean American guy who loved Korea and had plastered his dorm room with pictures of K-pop stars and Korean models still preferred the white girl to the Korean one right in front of him. I decided then it would be better if I viewed Francis benevolently, as a younger, naive cousin.

Like many second-generation Korean Americans, Francis took Korean as his foreign language, while I opted for French and Mandarin. He loved Korean music and culture, and ran with the Asian Invasion. Francis was my friend, but he was also a symbol. As a friend, Francis was three-dimensional. As a symbol, he incited the egoistic fear that I still felt around Korean Americans, and I held him at arm’s length, in favor of what I thought was my individuality, which needed space. Individuality was something Americans said America was famous for, but not every American was allowed a slice of the individuality pie. Some Americans, like us Asians, weren’t allowed to be special or individual, especially when we clustered together; we had to be happy being flattened.

2.

THE OUTLINE OF THE PHILOSOPHY lecture proceeded down the blackboard in a long accordion: What is a good argument? What is the ideal concept for our intellectual lives? In a crammed auditorium where I attended metaphysics and epistemology lectures, it dawned on me that here was what I had been doing my entire life: separating what was Korean in me from what was American, trying to identify that which could be synthesized from both sides without inconsistencies, and this project had been a philosophical pursuit. Descartes had devoted his life to locating contradictions and striking those that turned out to be false, in order to see if science were possible. But I wanted to know if I in any consistent way were possible. The solution up until then had been to amass achievement visible in both cultures, pursue a workable synthesis of beliefs, and shift my behavior depending on the local culture, while trying not to disappear through it all. America or Korea: both countries claimed me, both rejected me. What, then, was the method by which I should choose and believe?

When the fall reached its prime, the air consistently cool and dry, I was up at three in the morning. After two or three hours of sleep, without the assistance of an alarm or caffeine, I was awake. Tingling with electrical impulses snapping and sparking, I slid from my bed straight into my desk. Without any lead-up or warm-up or any up, I blew through a paper. My thoughts made their way onto the computer screen fluently, the pads of my fingers dancing on the keyboard. The heaping mess of texts beside me I consumed in one mental and visual gulp, the ideas instantaneously comprehensible.

I pressed save. Blowing out of my room, I passed Francis’s, quiet and dark. Outside, the brisk wind slammed against my body, and I leaned down the hill toward the computer lab, the buildings rising up around me. I felt victorious. I am awake and winning at life! I screamed inside. The robots who were asleep and losing, I pitied. Just then, a breeze sideswiped me. The wave took a turn up toward the canopy of trees in a generous swell, shuffling the chattering leaves, made them separate, gave them lift. Gave me lift. I grew jauntier. Lusciously, the breeze surged once more, tapped cold pins through my fleece, and as it died away, I shivered, I am winning.

I no longer thought of myself as a student of economics but of philosophy. It turned out I’d had my fill of economics during the Asian financial crisis. Instead of the story of limited resources, trade, why people paid for what they did—I wanted another story. I wanted, to put it simply, the story of me.

By the spring, those early mornings when I was writing my philosophy papers in a barely coherent frenzy, when I was convinced I was winning at life, were a distant memory. After the holidays, we returned to school—Abby was rested, Francis’s refrigerator restocked—but I hid in my room with the lights off, tracking the flicker of passing feet in the narrow sheath of light under the door and wondering how I could be so depleted after vacation. In Texas, I had counted down the hours and ultimately changed my flight after telling Umma I needed to get back to study, though the spring semester hadn’t even begun. The days in Houston were the same as ever: me colliding with my brother, sheltering my sister, sitting sideline to Umma and Appa’s battles, which never deviated from the script and merely reprised the complaints of yesteryear.

Now I burrowed under the covers as the phantom of sadness drew life out from my legs, tagged weights to my arms and head, entombed my body along the length of my extra-long twin. It is nearing six o’clock and time to get food in the dining hall, I reasoned while trying to wiggle a pinkie finger. Break free from whatever this is, I rallied weakly while trying to wiggle a pinkie toe.

Even if I were to conjure the strength needed to peel myself from bed, dress and walk the x number of yards to the dining hall, how could I muster saying hello to anyone, maintain presence among friends, sustain the conversational volley with banter striking the right trifecta of lightness, intelligence, and humor…?

As though my legs no longer worked, I scooped each up and plunked them off the bed. I crawled into clothes and shoes. The clock rudely blinked the time. I did not think to say to myself in encouragement, There’s only one way to live—one foot in front of the other.

Instead, what I said was, I hate my life I hate my life I hate my life.

Inside the dining hall, I avoided eye contact, grabbed whatever did not disgust me, and plopped myself at an empty table. I sawed my lettuce until my friend Jamie from my philosophy classes appeared, and soon another friend and another. Joining me at the table, they chatted and sawed their lettuces. Jamie had a laughing mask of a face and a rubbery Gumby body, and I heard his voice as if it were a dying echo in a cave. He was holding court, talking politics. Jamie Olson from Mississippi loves politics, I reminded myself. I hate my life I hate my life I hate my life. Jamie lifted a forkful of lettuce. I hate my life I hate my life I hate my life. The black chasm of his mouth yawned open. I hate my life I hate my life I hate my life. The world slowed down. In a desert faraway, clocks and watches were melting. And suddenly, the meaning of words died away and the truth was revealed.

They are robots, and I am a robot, too. The jagged revelation flashed through my brain. I stared, the camera closing in tighter and tighter on the moving lips. How did the lips say those things? Did they mean what they said?

I started instant messaging Francis, even though he was only a wall away. Since I couldn’t bring myself to leave my room, it was an easy way to pretend I still engaged with society.

HBOMB: Are you eating with the Asian Invasion tonight?

FRANCISPKTIGR: Yup. Wanna come?

HBOMB: Nah

FRANCISPKTIGR: haha ok ok

HBOMB: Why do you like them so much?

FRANCISPKTIGR: It’s better than pretending you’re white

HBOMB: gasp, am I a Twinkie?

FRANCISPKTIGR: No