“What are your parents like?” I was insistent.
“I don’t know. You’ve met them. My mom and dad own some businesses. They’re busy.”
“I mean, do they have a good relationship? Were they good to you and your sister?”
“My parents are really different, but yah, I mean, everything’s good. It wasn’t like crazy dysfunctional, if that’s what you mean.”
Crazy dysfunctional. That’s what Francis had said.
3.
WHEN I RETURNED TO CAMPUS for my senior year, Abby, Jamie Olson, and my friends from my original matriculating class were gone; they were now graduates, first-years in the sea of life.
Their absence meant other, new friendships stepped into the void. I saw, over the course of my last year at Princeton, my circle of Asian American friends opening past the singular Francis. Instead of feeling I was giving something up, making a cheaper trade to own these apparently lesser friendships, the widening meant not only comfort and joy in these connections, but also an education: my friends lived different lives, possessed different gifts, and valued different things than I’d assumed. I saw I did not have to choose between Korea and America and that being Korean American could be a distinct third way, different to different people. I was finally breaking free of the stereotyping and fear I’d succumbed to in presuming Asian American sameness.
In many ways, the practice of philosophy had primed me for this and for thinking about the future, specifically the year after college. I knew I wanted to live in New York, which would be the fulfillment of a childhood dream. But a New York life meant a New York job. You would have believed everyone at school was raging to enter either management consulting or investment banking, given the narrow array of careers exhibited at the university fair. I roamed the rows of tables in the gymnasium as if I were in the first pages of a dystopian novel, one opening on a soulless, burned-out plain. Wholly engaged in the life of the mind, seniors spent their last year researching and writing theses, basically mini-dissertations, only to graduate and claw their way into industries where money, not intellectual capital or service, was the ultimate prize. Could you be an ecology major studying finches in Patagonia for the past two years only to entertain a case study question about fracking in your McKinsey interview? I did not know how to negotiate this dissonance. Handing me an empty shopping bag, my roommate, Eve, had said, “Let’s go for the freebies,” and we toured the gym, picking up corporate swag like thumb drives, ballpoint pens, mouse pads from Bain and Company and JP Morgan, and a rubber stress ball from Goldman Sachs.
Instead of a job, I applied to a nonprofit fellowship program. The fellowships paid $25,000 a year, which I understood in vague terms would be a mere pittance to live on in New York City. In the background loomed student loans that would go into repayment after graduation, but again, the eventuality seemed theoretical, and the fellowships were the perfect duration—a year. A year would buy me some time.
Buy time from what? From law school. It was what Umma had been focused on for years. She—and I—only had a tenuous notion of what lawyering meant. It involved reading, writing, and being articulate for a living, didn’t it? I had done mock trials in junior high and high school, but that was fake stuff, and it was easier to picture myself as a law student than a lawyer. The nonprofit fellowship, if I got it, would afford me time to think about what I really wanted to do. Umma would reject anything that didn’t appear directly success-oriented if there weren’t already law school acceptances in my back pocket, so I worked on securing those, too. Alive in her mind like an eternal flame was Appa’s decision to pursue his billionaire dreams in America in lieu of completing a PhD in Korea, and she fretted that I, too, wouldn’t follow the Plan, the specifics of which didn’t matter so long as they were prestigious, difficult, and easily categorizable.
It had been about four years since my first bout of depression at the end of high school, and I could start to draw a line through the subsequent episodes. The fall was always an exhilarating time, animating and productive, and it was the spring when I suffered my lows. I longed for focus, even visual focus, which was elusive given the constant constriction of my pupils, and the warmer months I associated with Texas and the difficulty of being close to my parents.
So, it did not come as a surprise that by the spring semester, I couldn’t get up to go to class. I was drained from having spent the fall studying for the LSATs, applying to fellowships and law school while trying to keep up with my coursework and thesis. Besides fatigue and the more complicated dissolution of my motivation, I also had anxiety, which made it difficult for me to sleep. Before bed, I had gotten to drinking a tumbler or three of vodka which I kept on my nightstand.
One evening when I was already under the covers, Eve came into my room. I didn’t see her much anymore since she was always busy in lab. She had just been published in a leading scientific journal, and a photo of her had run in the alumni magazine and school daily. The two of us were very close and recently had our first fight, something about cleaning the shower, but was really about her success eclipsing mine. Despite that, Eve was my sister, and I could tell her anything.
She stepped over old take-out containers, drafts of personal statements, and law school materials still littering the floor even though my applications had long been sent out. As for the level of Smirnoff, it was low.
She shot me a meaningful look. “What’s going on?”
“I’m tired but I can’t fall asleep.”
She gestured to the vodka. “You shouldn’t need this, Hyeseung.” I was always hearing from people about what I should and should not need, as if I couldn’t ever know on my own. “It’s not healthy,” she added, twisting the red cap back onto the bottle.
“There’s so much work still and I can’t seem to rest… can’t stop my brain enough to sleep.” I couldn’t fall apart now. I had to graduate. The idea never occurred to me that I could finish college with a solid B or C or even D, giving it a mere eighty percent; it only made sense to destroy myself in the process.
I watched Eve think. The light of the lamp caught the final edge of her eyelashes and sat there, unchanging. My heart reached out to her, for trying so hard on my behalf.
“What do you think about going to the infirmary?” she finally proposed.
She sat away from me, on the ottoman. I patted the space next to me on my bed. Eve knew I was particular about people sitting on my bed, but it didn’t matter now; I needed a friend. The infirmary might be a good idea. They let students rest there when they were having trouble, like one girl I knew in the class behind us who’d lived there nearly the entire semester.
“They’ll leave me alone, right?” I asked Eve, needing validation.
“It’ll be safe, and you can rest there and maybe you’ll even get more work done then. You don’t have to see anyone.”
We packed a bag and walked to the infirmary. I told the nurse I needed some time away from the dorms, and she understood what I meant and admitted me.
It wasn’t true I didn’t have to see anyone. The first week, a psychiatrist offered me medications. I swallowed his pills, but I neither slept nor wrote for days afterward. The fatigue intensified and morphed into an all-out dampening of my senses, and the day became one long swim through a dark ocean. When he came by the next time, I informed the doctor I was done with the drugs.
In the following days, the few times I left my bed to attend class, I returned pulverized. The nurses brought my meals on Styrofoam trays while I typed in bed, propped up with pillows like a nineteenth-century invalid in a sanatorium. The closer to the end of the semester, my thesis deadline, and graduation, the more I throttled myself. I was a dried-out twig—even one mild breeze and I might drop to the ground and shatter. I felt as inconsequential as a twig, too, but this was my small life, and I thought I should try to live and stay unbroken.
In the background of this final push was unease about what to do with some news I’d been sitting on for a month: I had been awarded a public policy advocacy fellowship from my first-choice nonprofit, an umbrella organization representing a network of historical community houses in New York City. I’d visited their headquarters in Midtown and liked the people. It was only when I received this offer that I told Umma about my law school acceptances, including the school she valued most—Harvard.
That letter, along with the financial aid award, had arrived in a thick envelope with the famous crimson crest reading “Veritas” stamped on the left corner. Studying the materials, I felt some relief, but also unease that the opening of this door might not necessarily be a good thing. If anything, the acceptance was a justification of previous efforts and, moreover, evidence that hard work must be sustained in order to be recognized. Passing through this door meant more punishing work, more contests that could be won or lost without any regard as to whether I might find joy in the endeavor or even discover who I was. If you asked me, the world was a wilderness you lived in without a map. You saw at any time only a few steps ahead of you and hoped you were moving toward something real when magically, a door, like this one, might open. You entered—the door closed behind you—only to find a whole new wilderness, another terrain to navigate without a map. Back then, I didn’t know the map was yourself, that the throughline of these infinite wildernesses was your identity, which was both constant and fluctuating, and that the doors shutting behind you—many could be opened again.
“Now you see you were always meant for Harvard,” Umma said on the phone.
“But Umma,” I started tentatively. “I’m really enjoying writing my thesis.”
“Naturally. Writing is important for a lawyer.”
“No. I think I like it so much I may have changed my mind.”
“What are you saying, Hyeseung-a?” A sudden pointed urgency entered her voice.
“Writing feels nice. Stressful, but nice. I don’t know if I want to be a lawyer.”
“But you can write all you want once you’re a lawyer,” she said in an effort to horse-trade.
“That’s not the same kind of writing.” Would she never understand anything? I perceived the limitations of having a mother who hadn’t gone to school in America and only had a hypothetical understanding of what people studied in the professional schools she’d made her gold standard.
“Are you telling me you got into Harvard Law School and you aren’t going to go?”
“Why should I if I don’t think I want to be a lawyer?”
“How do you know you don’t want to be a lawyer if you haven’t tried out law school? Maybe you’ll like it!”
