“I don’t need to try it out just to try it out.”
“Then why are you bothering to tell me you got in?”
“I don’t know,” I said lamely. Because Harvard always meant something to you.
“This is illogical, this is crazy.” She reverted to her time-tested strategy of asserting I was out of my mind. The familiar twist in my stomach, the old dynamic: it took such a small piece of tinder for that ancient fire to flare again.
“I think what is crazy is for me to waste my time!”
“So the most famous law school in the country is now a waste of time?”
“Yes, for someone who doesn’t think they want to be a lawyer!”
“What’s the alternative? Do you know what you want to do instead?”
Did I always have to have an answer? “I don’t know” was never acceptable; there always had to be certainty, even if it was about hurtling in the wrong direction.
Umma collected herself. “Just try it. You are so clever, so smart, Hyeseung-a. You are a born lawyer.” She’d changed tack now, and it was time to cajole. The years of mock trial, the research projects on constitutional law cases in AP History, the jurisprudence I’d analyzed in my philosophy papers… but “a born lawyer”? When did she become a caricature of a Korean mom?
“Once you’re there, you’ll see how stimulated you are by everyone else. Everyone so smart and thinking about the same things. You’ll be relieved you didn’t pass this by. A once-in-a-lifetime chance!”
“It feels like the wrong time. I can go later if I change my mind.”
“How do you know there will be another time? Trust me: dreams and opportunities… they pass you by,” she whispered, as if she possessed secret knowledge. “Why not try and see how you like it?” The snake to my Eve.
I sighed. This wasn’t the position I’d wanted to be in to pitch the fellowship.
“You’re a straight-A student. You work hard for four years, take out loans for your education, and the first job you want after graduation pays nothing? I can’t talk to this crazy child, Appa. She wants to be poor when she can be rich!”
John Adams wrote that “my sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” I considered this notion of progress, how generations are built on the backs of the previous: the first work in the fields so that the next can study, so that the following can live a life of leisure playing an instrument at a gilded table. Umma felt she was toiling in the fields and that my role was to study. Any richness of inner life, leisure or philosophy should be secondary and fit into that study and matrix of achievement. I couldn’t help but compare myself to my friends: Eve, who had the entire force of her family behind her as she advanced in the sciences; Abby, whose parents last year had signed as guarantors on her Manhattan apartment; my other friends who didn’t know what they wanted but were going to be similarly supported while they searched, perhaps for years. I knew I could never return to Houston. It would forever be my parents’ home and returning to it would be like choosing my own death. I wasn’t asking for encouragement or money. I was simply asking my parents to get out of my way. It never once felt as if my grades and acceptances created possibilities for me. Instead, it felt like they closed down choices.
I started to tell Umma it was unfair that by virtue of their decision to bring our family to America and raise me piecemeal between two cultures, I was expected to do the impossible: avoid imbibing the amniotic fluid of my adopted country and its conception of happiness. Was I supposed to conduct even my adult life based on my parents’ time-capsule, 1970s, vintage version of Korea that still existed only in the minds of the distant diaspora? I argued my life wasn’t fungible. It had value and I should be able to discover the weight of it, whether it was real or pirate’s gold, but the word “fungible” slowed things down. Her English and my Korean could not sustain a metaphysical level of discussion, and that’s how we never met in the middle.
I was too frustrated to persevere and struck a deal with her. I would put down the $500 deposit to hold my seat at Harvard Law, write a letter to defer matriculation, and accept the fellowship at the nonprofit. In that way, I would buy my temporary freedom.
The last thing she said was, “You’re probably right—it’ll be good for you to relax for a year and then, when you get to law school, you can work all that much harder.”
I left the infirmary to deliver my thesis to the philosophy department by the 4:00 p.m. deadline. Although I still wasn’t sleeping, for the first time that year, some of my anxiety lifted and I joined the graduation parties. Two days after my thesis defense, I graduated with the Class of 2001. My work on the account of knowledge in the early and middle dialogues of Plato won a prize, which, more important, came with prize money—and I used it to pay the broker’s fee and the first and last month’s rent on my Brooklyn apartment. Most of my friends planned to travel over the summer before settling in New York in the fall, including Eve, who would move to the West Side. I couldn’t afford to take time off before my fellowship, but that didn’t bother me; there was New York to discover. When graduation weekend was over, my family and I packed up my dorm room, and we drove to Brooklyn.
4.
ON THE TUESDAY OF THE Perfectly Blue Sky, my roommate, Lucinda, came home in the early afternoon in sneakers a Good Samaritan had given her on the Queensboro Bridge because she had been wearing heels. She’d walked from Midtown, where she worked, into Queens, and then south to Brooklyn, where we lived in a prewar half a block from the park. All around the city, New Yorkers were helping those fleeing Lower Manhattan, handing out water and snacks, sharing cabs with strangers. It was September, and I’d been living in New York for three months.
I was running late that morning, and the trains had shut down before I could make it to the office. I stood in my living room, adjusting the antenna on the white box of a television, and tried to bring into focus the picture on the one channel still airing: a rectangular strip of skyscraper, punctured, bleeding a gray wisp of smoke. Over the singular image of a wound, an anchor’s disembodied voice shook, raw and confused.
When the South Tower went down, my cell phone lit up. It was Umma, asking where I was. She was worried. “Stay inside,” she said before hanging up.
A second later, the phone rang again. It was a New Jersey number I did not recognize.
“Hyeseung?” the voice on the other end asked. “It’s Nate.” Nate was a college friend who was back at Princeton doing his PhD in physics.
“Nate, are you okay?” I was touched he was calling, and it seemed those outside New York understood more about what was happening than I did.
“I’m good, but I’m calling about you.”
“Thanks. I’m fine. I’m home in Park Slope.”
“Be careful. Maybe stay inside,” he said, using the same words as Umma. We said goodbye when another call came in and then another, before the circuits finally jammed and I went in search of a radio. All was speculation and chaos. That night, my boss called, asking me to go into the office the next day. The rest of the team would be out, and she’d be staying home with her family since school had been canceled. I didn’t want to go into Midtown, but as the junior employee, I didn’t have a choice. I stayed up later than usual, chatting in low tones with Lucinda over a bottle of wine before heading to bed, where I slept without dreaming.
The trains were running again by the next morning, but I was the only one on the platform. When the F train trundled into the station, I nodded to the conductor; he was at work and probably didn’t want to be either. When the doors opened, I stepped in and there was no one else in the car. I rode the empty train into Herald Square, which was dreamlike and still. Macy’s was closed as were the pizza and sandwich shops. Only a lone coffee cart stood on the street, and without any cars or pedestrians, I peered unobstructed down Sixth Avenue for miles.
By Friday, almost everyone was back in the office, and I took the train down to the Lower East Side to visit the community houses. At one, I sat with the executive director who had been with the organization for three decades and was known both at city hall and Albany for his work on behalf of homeless families. The community house sat less than two miles away from the World Trade Center.
“Many of our constituents are immigrants living on the northern streets of Chinatown. They’re undocumented. If there’s any government help for businesses and homes affected by the tragedy, they won’t be able to access it,” he said after recounting the events of Tuesday morning.
I asked him to let us know whether there was anything we could help with, and he nodded his thanks. As I got up to leave though, he spoke again.
“I’ve lived in this city all my life, and I haven’t seen anything like this. To think—”
He swallowed and didn’t go on.
That weekend, I traveled to Princeton to attend the memorial service of alumni who had died in the Towers. I also arranged to see Nate.
My memories of Nate from college were hazy. The times he stepped into the spotlight of recollection were at Easter and Christmas, when he helped the university chaplain at mass. Nate was Jesuitical in his existence outside church, too, spending his waking hours in lab in focused scholarship. He seemed so uncomplicated—one foot in front of the other—and I drew close to him in friendship because I already idealized him. Studying abroad since graduation, he’d recently returned to Princeton, his favorite place in all the world. Like God’s, Sunday was Nate’s time of rest, and for a few hours in the afternoon, we walked in the woods near campus, zigzagging around geese and discussing his family in Montana.
“Are you close to them?” I asked.
“Yes, though I don’t get to see them much except for my sister, Meredith. Maybe once a year or every other year—”
