She turned to me in her gentle way. “Did he not tell you?”
I shook my head.
“He and his fiancée sent out an announcement at Christmas.”
“Is it Ana? A woman named Ana Lee?” The intuitive part of myself was calculating without a calculator. I recalled the emails I had traded with Nate in which he accused me of letting my friend down, the letter she’d sent to the house in which she’d written she felt it best “to absent” herself “given the painful circumstances”—
“I don’t remember her name, but they sent a picture. She’s a Caucasian woman and that sounds like an Asian last name, so I don’t think so.”
I scrolled to a picture on my phone from Ana’s birthday party three years earlier. Lorraine nodded.
I kept repeating myself. “He should have told me. We were together for thirteen years. He should have told me.”
At home, I took off my makeup and washed my face. I caught my reflection in the mirror—I was always surprised by how I looked. Not like myself, but so much like Umma—though over the years my jawline had gone squarer, and even she’d said begrudgingly, “You’re starting to look more like your father.”
Lorraine and I had walked to the subway together after the bar. She put her arm around me and I felt she loved and cared about me, but I couldn’t show the same love and care toward her because I was still shocked. When her uptown train pulled in, she took something from her pocket and pressed it into my hand. “Look at it later,” she said, embracing me. “And take care.” I watched her step into the car, and a moment later the doors closed.
Once I was seated in my train heading downtown to Brooklyn, I pulled the thing from my pocket. It was a silver heart, still warm from our hands. Lorraine had brought forth men-children only, she had the impassive nature of a New York WASP, but she loved art and the ocean, and I thought about what it was for her to take this from her things and give it to me.
In the bathroom, I dried my face. How different we all are, I thought, studying my eyes and nose, which were so Korean in their shape. And yet despite the caste structure, despite the sorting and the differences, we can stretch and touch across the platform between uptown and downtown.
I felt this night was one I would remember for a long time, the night I learned Nate had moved on. The reason I was upset was not because it was any betrayal. Instead, it was because Ana was not that different from me. She loved libraries more than nature, she was a humanist, not a scientist, she curled her hair in the morning and enjoyed shopping for clothes. For a moment, I was angry that Nate had squandered his chance. I wanted him to marry the person I was out of the way for—the right one.
My apartment stood on the line between two neighborhoods: one that was gentrified, called Prospect Heights, on the west, and another that was starting to gentrify called Crown Heights, on the east. Crown Heights was inhabited by Hasidic Jews and Caribbeans, and I supposed it made sense that I was most at ease along the thin black line separating these different populations, and lived where I could not be assigned. Despite not having much money, I had moved to where I was most comfortable, because when I was in Houston, I had fallen again into a deep depression and needed now to come home to calm.
I didn’t paint during those months on Haversham, not yet aware that in art was my redemption. Nor did I have the wherewithal to help Umma. It was my sister, Sarah, nearly seventeen years my junior and on leave from college, who shopped for the family and planned and cooked all the meals. Arthur had also moved back home. I hadn’t gotten along with him for many years. When I watched him, it was as if someone who was totally temperamentally like me had grown up in the same universe but somehow exited with values and behaviors in stark opposition to mine: he was risk-averse instead of a risk-taker, a Christian fundamentalist instead of a lapsed Catholic, someone who could be so kind to an individual and yet closed-minded to a class—I looked down on him.
My brother was in medical school and helped manage Umma’s case. She still worked because Appa’s consultancy, which had been successful for years, was now tanking. Instead of laying off his employees, he took a line of equity on the house. When that was spent, he liquidated his retirement. Our Catholic mother’s dying wish was to make a pilgrimage to Israel, and we pushed Appa to sell the business, but his own dying wish was still to be a billionaire. That was how Umma went through chemo, radiation, and clinical trials while nursing other cancer patients. The unfairness felt colossal. Arthur was training at Umma’s hospital, so they often carpooled together; they were very close. I saw how she managed his anger and how differently she treated him than she did Sarah or me—gingerly and taking his side in any dispute. If I tried to make a point about the differentiation, she reprised the old story: “Of course everyone’s different, so everyone should be treated differently.” I did not go to chemo with her. I stayed at home, ate my sister’s food, and lay in bed. I thought I was selfish, but really I was depressed.
One afternoon, the kind of hot and stormy afternoon famous in Texas, I sat in the living room with a book in my lap. Instead of reading, I peered out the window into the backyard, letting my eyes blur over the foliage and stone garden that Macy had once approvingly critiqued but which had gone neglected over the years. I thought of all the places I’d lived in the past, the houses I’d hoped would provide me with more than mere shelter. Even though the spray of ferns outside was not as thick or exuberant as it once was, it drank in the rain and continued to grow. On the patio, the stone pavement sent up steam.
Umma sat on the couch a little way from me. She mentioned something about Arthur. I must have smirked or been disdainful in some way as I half listened—I don’t even remember—because suddenly, like lit tinder, she was aflame. She was completely emaciated by then at ninety pounds, less than what she’d weighed when she married Appa at twenty-four. Her silhouette was not unlike the Grinch’s, her color similarly green. She screamed, her thin skin stretched across hairless skull, “I don’t know who you are anymore. He’s your brother! He’s your brother! You think you’re so much better than him? Who are you?”
Though she was nothing but jaundiced skin and bones, her vocal cords were unscathed, and the bald woman shrieked, “He’s your brother!” My mother looked like a monster. Who had made her? I met her eyes, gleaming with affront, and heard only, Who are you? Who are you? You don’t belong to me. In that moment, I saw through her flaws to all the things she deserved (love, Israel) and the things she did not (my hatred for her, the cancer). One of us must die.
Wordlessly, I stood up and walked to my childhood bedroom. This was the room I had dreamed about from the apartments, where I had applied to colleges in high school, written résumés the year off from Princeton, and slept the night before my wedding. Sitting on the bed, I calculated without a calculator: I was divorced, I had no one, was not painting and had no career. I had become what Umma had always feared. If I did not belong to her, then who was I?
On the chest of drawers, inside of which were folded stacks of my old high school club T-shirts, stood my medications—my Abilify, my other antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, and a large bottle of Tylenol. Conveniently, there was also a glass of water. I opened all the medications and in easy gulps swallowed every last capsule, three months’ worth in each container. I fell asleep to the sound of rain.
Lorraine gave me the silver heart because she knew all this. The next morning I woke, having dragged myself to the bathroom. As I lay dying, a huge and terrifying monster, backlit by a painfully bright bulb, stared down at me. The murderous ghoul had the voice of my brother. I screamed. “I don’t know who you are! Get away!” I pleaded. And my brother, in the capacity of brother and also doctor, said over and over, “Nuna, it’s me. I’m your brother. I’m your brother.”
I turned off the light in the bathroom and climbed into bed. I rented a two-bedroom apartment between the two Heights, instead of a one-, because I wanted to get back to painting and use the larger bedroom with the picture windows as my studio. But none of that had happened yet. As I waited to heal myself again, the window in the back bedroom was bricked closed as a new building went up next door. I didn’t mind. The bedroom was a perfect cocoon and dark like a womb.
It was after eleven when I went to bed, falling asleep easily. But a few hours later, I woke. I didn’t know where I was at first, it was so dark. Then I spoke to myself: You are in the back bedroom. You are in Brooklyn. You are alone. It was then that I began sobbing. I thought about how, in all the world, perhaps only my parents would understand. In the close, womb-like room, I instinctively reached for my parents. Despite their limitations, religion, social conservatism, and perseverance in their own explosive marriage, when I had told them I was getting divorced, they had been unconditionally supportive of me, though they’d loved Nate as their own. As if it didn’t matter anymore what Umma knew, I’d confided in her that the physical aspect of our relationship had always been weak. Again, she was engulfed in flames. “That is the most important thing you can receive from your husband, and the only thing you cannot get from anyone else,” she said. It was then the hidden truth of my parents’ marriage was unlocked: my mother was in love with my father, and the thing that had always been out of sight from me was their passionate, romantic, and physical love. Through those years when their confrontations made me pray to God to pull them asunder, it was not their Korean culture nor their Catholic faith that kept them in their marriage but, in fact, their love. And so, for the first time in my adult life, when I had nothing of any external consequence because I had spent it all on the chance to live a big, out-of-bounds life and was alone, I felt them step into a position of care and trust they’d never occupied even when I was a child.
The bedside clock read nearly 2:00 a.m. Three rings, and I held on.
Appa answered. “What’s wrong?” he said in Korean urgently.
“Nothing. I just needed to talk,” I said in English. I told him what Lorraine had shared about Nate. In a second, Umma pried the phone from Appa’s grasp.
“I always knew that Ana girl was after something. She spent so much time with you both, and then she probably pursued Nate after you left and inserted herself into his life!” Umma showed her love like that, I thought, half hearing her words. She loved through fierceness, which was either directed at you or toward your enemy. “Hyeseung-a, you are going to be okay, do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” I said. If she had been there with me, she would have wiped my tear-stained face with a cloth, as she had done when I was in the intensive care unit months before in Houston, where she’d seen for the first time what it was for me to be ill. There, so close to my face I could feel her breath on my cheek, she’d whispered, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. Hyeseung, you are my star.” What was that star? I was her star, the legacy of a life barreling swiftly to a conclusion. The prospect of happiness she’d always tried to withhold from me—she now held it forth: choose yourself and no one else, open and close the doors you need to, celebrate the fire that is inside of you.
Appa got back on. “Hyeseung-a,” he started in Korean and English. “Forget about this. You had your time with Nate. Forget that time now and move forward. You and Nate, there were a lot of good things between you, things you made that others could never have, not with your resources and not at your age. Of course two people like you would have that genius. But while you were good to each other in responsibility, you had none of the spirit. We all knew this later, Hyeseung-a.” When his voice broke at the end, I began to cry.
“Someday,” he persisted. “You will find someone with whom you have both those things: responsibility and spirit.”
As I listened to my father, this eccentric independent who time and again had pushed his chips, and those of others, into the middle of life’s betting table and never looked back, I saw hovering before me the union of Umma, who wanted security, and Appa, who wanted freedom. And those two forces at odds inside myself. Finally, my parents asked me whether I could sleep now, and I said yes and hung up the phone.
My mother, who was all things to me, died some months after that late-night conversation, when her illness reached its logical and extreme conclusion. Her death was horrific and destroyed our family in the configuration we knew it. But in some ways the end of her was the beginning of mending, between Arthur and me especially. Once she was gone, I saw how much he had loved her and put her above all others, and how she had been his lodestar. I watched him move in his life with that void, and I realized how he needed her in ways unique to him.
As I started my way in the world again, this time singular and a satellite moving alone in space, a monad, not a dyad, slowly painting again and supporting myself in my new, alone life—I still felt the most comfortable and seen when I was uncategorizable, when I deflected labels and saw myself as made up of many aspects, like a shiny mosaic, visible to some people at one angle and to others at another, when no one but me could calculate my worth.
Whenever I was at a loss in the studio, I cleared the easel and made a self-portrait. There were so many I painted. Me with the bloodred horizon in the background. Me in a small square, defiant. At some point in the course of making the portrait, I looked into the mirror so long I could no longer recognize the genetics, history, culture, and place that made me, me. I was simply lines and shapes, light and darkness—like anyone else. The human categorizations fell away—jawline sneakily square, the eyes the writers of so many books have lazily described as almond-shaped, though they look nothing like the nut; the black hair that once a girl in Texas asked to touch to see how dry and coarse; and for a second, my fundamental self, the thing that didn’t need things and existed already full and whole inside, came into focus. Happiness needs a quest, and in that quest to become visible and matter to others, I had lost appearing and mattering to myself. In my life, I had tried to be a great daughter, a great student, a great wife, an American, a Korean, even a great artist—and through these pursuits, I had always chased an ought, forgetting to revel in what I actually already was.
The lesson of art turned out to be the same as the lesson of love, and my practice taught me to let my representations—my golems—go out into the world and enjoy their own lives. Instead of hiding behind the eye that had been trained to act out of trauma and fear, I could use it to squeeze what I believed was the truth out of myself; then, whatever happened afterward did not matter. In other words, I began to do what Umma had been afraid to with me: to let things have their own lives.
I like to remember that night long ago not as the one when I learned Nate’s news that broke me for a moment, but a night in which much love was shown me. I still own the silver heart Lorraine gave me, which was not supposed to represent hers or even some promise I would find love again, but was rather a symbol and reminder I had a strong heart, too. It was the night in which I had found myself suddenly, midway in the journey of my life, in the dark and alone. When I had reached for my parents’ succor, which I could never quit, they had not let me down. After all the box-checking I had engaged in, when it could be argued that I had failed, they told me they had seen me, and in doing so just wanted me to be happy.
In my mother’s absence, it’s easier to see how much I got from my father beyond his square jawline, after all these years of thinking I was simply Umma. It’s his zest for life, his openness to risk and danger, his passion to pursue a dream and throw everything else out the window that remains. He is my father, so he wishes the best for me: someone with spirit and responsibility. In the end, who knew I would find that person in myself?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Back when I was in art school, one afternoon a week all the students, beginner to advanced, broke from their regular projects to convene around a portrait model. At the breaks, I’d walk the semicircle of easels holding wet paintings, marveling at how each told a different story, even though we were all describing the same subject in the same pose at the same time. By virtue of where we stood in relation to the sitter, the touch of our hand, the materials we chose, our philosophical and stylistic bents—our diverging perspectives were made clear on canvas.
Other people lived through the same events I did in this book—9/11, a college education, my family, and even my marriage—but this memoir describes only my perspective. It is the culmination of my background, my position in space and time, my philosophy, acquired and then shaped. I tried, in my way, to make art of it.
Many tremendous people around me understood this and worked tirelessly to bring to bear the perspective of one Asian female.
First, an enormous thanks to my agent, Albert Lee, and my editor, Hana Park. You are the Korean American Dream Team everyone told me I should never expect, and yet, here we are.
To Priscilla Painton and Mindy Marqués Gonzalez, for championing this book from day one; to Amanda Mulholland, Tyanni Niles, Shannon Hennessey, Jackie Seow, Tzipora Baitch, Jessica Chin, Jane Elias, and Jeff Miller at Simon & Schuster, as well as Jessica Rios, Lily Dolin, Laurie-Maude Chenard, Harry Sherer, and Sam Solomons at UTA for overall excellence; and to everyone who worked behind the scenes—my immense gratitude.
For their generous insights, thanks go to early readers Amy Armijo, Jennifer Del Medico Kenney, Kimberly Elkins, Valerie Hegarty, Kristin Künc, Andrea Somberg, and Rachel Yoder. Thank you to Sofija Stefanovic, Jane Lee (the most sensitive grammarian I know), Diana Goetsch for instructive conversations, Vanessa Wills for a logic consult, and Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren, who ran an early excerpt for Joyland magazine. Thank you to the esteemed authors who supported this book by reading and blurbing. A painter without an MFA in either art or writing, getting read by the likes of you. How lucky I am.
When you are experiencing mental health chaos, the last thing you are doing is making art. To the mental health providers who supported me as I made sense of and managed a challenging illness, thank you for scooting me in the direction of healing. To my friends, for tending to me when I’ve been in chaos, for your thrilling enthusiasm when I’m soaring—my love and appreciation.
I must thank my family, who’ve been my earliest and favorite subject, especially my father, who knew it was important to me to write what I knew.
And finally, to my husband of spirit and responsibility, C., I owe so much.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© JACK SOROKIN
