About a week in, the weather started improving, and I received clearance to walk the hospital grounds. I held Nate’s hand and tried to imagine this was a romantic stroll instead of my first reprieve from the Stew. The hour outside was raw, the many days of precipitation having frozen the grass under our feet.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“I’m getting there,” I said. My brain was coming back online. The true test would be when I returned to school.
“But you’re still not sleeping.”
“I just need sleep for energy. I have lots of energy now.”
“Don’t rush out of here, Hyeseung. These problems don’t disappear in a week.”
“I’ll talk to the doctor. But I think the fatigue from the mono is completely gone thanks to the meds, and if I had been depressed, it was because I couldn’t work.” I took my hand, which shook, from his and shoved it in my coat pocket.
When I did end up speaking to the doctor, I tried to show I was cured. Again, I avoided telling her about the electrical storms during which I lost my sense of time and space.
“I need to go back to school,” I declared.
“You’re not taking the Seroquel anymore?”
“It makes me slow. I don’t have anxiety anyway. I just need energy.”
“Are you sleeping?”
“Not much,” I lied.
I imagined McLean felt pressure to stabilize admitted students as quickly as possible, promptly returning them to their elite universities, whose U.S. News & World Report rankings would be tarnished by psychiatric stays. But all the doctor said was, “Let’s give it a few more days.”
My hands were shaking so bad.
4.
SOMEONE VERY SAD ARRIVED. SOMEONE sad and beautiful. She lay in her bed in the room across from mine. Her door was ajar and though it was the bleakest hour of night, all the lights were on. After I’d observed her for a while, she began to remind me of my Virgin Mary statue, or, rather, what it looked like when it had been on my pillow next to me. Her arms straight at the elbows and her body a plank, the lady stared into the ceiling.
No. Now I saw why she reminded me of the statue.
The woman didn’t move.
The statue lady never made it to group therapy, which was dominated by the alpha female of the unit, a woman named Kaitlinn who led the smokers outside between sessions. In an accent betraying her upbringing on the Mystic, Kaitlinn “tawked” with a directness so compelling it made me ashamed to sit in the same room with her. What was someone as strong as her doing playing Sylvia Plath in a place like the Stew?
“We don’t have mental illness in my family. Alcoholism, yes. Mental illness, no,” Kaitlinn said one day in group. And yet, a month ago, she’d fallen on the kitchen floor in the middle of doing the dishes, clapping her sudsy fists against her chest. “I swore up and down in the ER that it was a heart attack.” It had to be physical, she said, or her entire identity would falter. Instead, the doctor told her she’d suffered a panic attack. When Kaitlinn shared her family’s reaction, I began to cry, the feeling of emotional constipation finally letting loose within me. Outside, it rained, and inside the room, tears.
I began to understand two things. First, that what was happening was not existential and up to me, but rather an outcropping of mental illness. And second, that my mother, a nurse, must have had some inkling of what was wrong when she had taken me to see the counselor in high school. Could she have staved this off if she had faced it? And now, years later, Umma was far away, and who was my family but Nate, whom I was destroying.
I held my legs to my chest and rocked myself, trying to mother myself.
A few days later, a new patient came on the ward. When I saw Jean June’s name on the dry-erase board, I immediately knew her real name was Jin Joon and that she was Korean. Even before meeting her I guessed she was exactly like me, and I worried.
Jean June Park, or Park Jin Joon, was small and round and it turned out we didn’t look much alike, but I resented her anyway, while wanting to reach out to her. It was hard when you had two Asian females in the room—you automatically got averaged. Like most of us, she’d been admitted in the middle of the night and hadn’t gotten a chance to pack. At morning check-in she wore her baggy jeans under a hospital gown along with the standard-issue Doc Martens of the ostensibly rebellious.
The morning meeting began. The moderator asked what our goals were for the day. Jean June raised her hand, which meant I raised mine by the Law of Asian Averages, and I wanted to kill her.
“What kind of goal should we have?” Jean June wanted to know.
Actually, it didn’t happen like that. Jean June was timid and withdrawn. I was awake and had more energy than I’d had in half a year, so that night I went looking for her room. As I poked around the hallways, I hummed my excess energy away.
“I’m a sophomore at MIT, but I’m originally from El Paso,” she said.
The two nonwhite girls in the Stew both happened to be Korean American Texans? Or Texan Korean Americans? Either way, it was a mouthful.
I wasn’t surprised MIT brought her here right away. I had read about an in loco parentis case at the university involving a Korean American student named Elizabeth Shin who immolated herself in her dorm room. She’d been from West Orange, New Jersey, not far from my friend Francis Park’s hometown. Elizabeth was a poet at heart. But as an engineer at an engineering school, she was forced to fill her life with numbers, not feelings. The day after a visit from her parents, the fire alarms in Elizabeth’s room in Random Hall went off; she’d lit herself on fire. All that Asian rage directed not at the world who hates you but at yourself. She died, and her parents sued MIT.
That’s why Jean June hadn’t been given time to return to her dorm room and had to wear her jeans and Docs every day in the Stew. She told me her life story. Parents: dry cleaners, no college. Socioeconomic class: middle. Religion: Christian. Problem: she didn’t feel right at MIT. There was this sense there was something else in the world for her. There’d been a party in El Paso when she had gotten into MIT. The whole Korean community had come to wish her well, to say we are counting on you. For the cameras she’d smiled, but not with her eyes. The whole weight of the world was on her shoulders, and she straddled two cultures.
What was a Colossus in Doc Martens to do?
5.
I WAS IN BED AFTER dinner, my arms folded under my head as I stared across the hall. The statue lady had moved from her earlier position and was out of bed and on her knees in child’s pose. Jean June crawled into the room and tried to help the lady up, cooing at her. A nurse came in and shooed Jean June away. “You’re not supposed to be in other patients’ rooms.” Jean June said she was just trying to help, but the nurse scowled. The statue lady didn’t move. “You’ll ruin your knees,” the nurse admonished her.
But I didn’t think the statue lady cared.
In a tiny room in the hospital, I underwent a battery of tests administered by a doctor. I still loved crushing tests, and surprised myself at how fast I could repeat backward the string of numbers she read aloud. Was I a Beautiful Mind? I was mentally high-fiving myself when she asked, like an afterthought, about my depression and suicide plan. I sobered up. Something about the doctor, who was young and white, made me hesitate. I told her I had had mono and couldn’t work when I’d gotten depressed.
Her eyes were on her clipboard.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I have to give you a diagnosis,” she said.
