I lay there enjoying her touch and watched my mother, who was for me the first name of beauty. Many times she’d told me how much she’d moved around in her young life, how many homes she’d lost, and now she lost yet another. She would hold it against Appa for the rest of their lives, I knew. She looked up then, and the light hit the dark coins of her pupils and set them flickering. I had no doubt the houses would be grand, but I didn’t think ours would be one of them. I intuited keenly about bankruptcy. If we were moving to a rich neighborhood, we were getting there by settling on the “wrong side of the tracks,” in an apartment.
She changed tack. “You are going to love your new school. It’s one of the best in the state, and the kids are going to be smarter than in Sugar Land.”
I was skeptical of that, too. There were plenty of smart kids at my school—kids who were quick in class, spoke up for themselves in front of adults, and held their own on the playground. Though I would never have included myself in that group, I brought home good report cards, to which I signed Umma’s name when she was too preoccupied to do it herself. Delivering on grades and awards wasn’t hard when your parents didn’t let you stay at home from school, ever.
On our last day in Sugar Land, I opened my eyes extra wide and prayed the image of our house seared into my mind. Umma, who had shown herself wistful for the future, cried for the past as we pulled out of the driveway in the car that the bank allowed us to keep in the end. When we drove out of the development, the red balloons waved at us in valediction.
PART II
AN EDUCATION
1.
AS BANKRUPTCIES OCCUR WITHOUT REGARD for anyone’s calendar, I entered my new elementary with the academic year underway. That January morning, I was still in the front office as Appa completed enrollment forms when the bell rang. When I walked into Mrs. Howards’s third grade, it was all cheerfulness and quiet industry: evidence of grade-school scholarship papering the walls, and my new classmates hard at work. The room was brighter than my old classroom in Sugar Land on account of the wide windows outside of which gleamed combed soccer fields and a track shaded by pine trees.
Mrs. Howards was warm and had thick, Farrah Fawcett hair and a symmetrical smile. She pronounced my name “Hey Soon,” twanging it up, Texan-style. I did not correct her.
“Hey Soon, come to the football table and read a little for me,” she said.
I followed her to the back of the room to a table shaped like a football. She handed me a book with large type, which surprised me because I had been reading small type for a while now. So much for this being a smart-kids’ school, I thought.
“Just start on the first page,” she prompted.
The room was silent except for the shuffling of papers, and I began in a half-whisper. “In her popular series Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry writes about the wild ponies living on Chincoteague and Assateague Islands in the Chesapeake Bay…”
Marguerite. Chincoteague. Assateague. The passage was testing recognition of the vowel combination -ue, already familiar to me from the word “league.” Easy peasy. If everyone had a fearful immigrant mother, we’d all be reading by age three.
Mrs. Howards cut me off. “That is fine, Hey Soon. You can stop there. You’ll be in the football reading group.” She led me to a desk between two girls. “I’m going to put you between Avery and Hannah.”
The girl on the left, Avery, was clad in stylish, expensive clothes. The girl on the right, Hannah, was tall and proper, wore a clean, button-down shirt, and reminded me of Ramona Quimby’s bookish older sister, Beezus.
So much happened the first morning in Mrs. Howards’s classroom. After she passed back graded work, a boy on the other side of the room threw his head down into his arms, his shoulders quaking as he sobbed. It was as though he had been wounded by a red “85” on his math quiz. He hadn’t failed or, worse, forgotten his homework, which would have indeed been shameful. None of the Sugar Land kids had ever cared much about school. When I had gotten an 85, I had received the news with the same equanimity as when I’d received a 100. I couldn’t look away, engrossed as if I had been watching an exotic animal eat itself.
When Mrs. Howards gently shook the boy and took him, hiccupping, outside into the hallway, Hannah explained to me, “Timothy makes computers in his spare time, and his dad went to MIT. A bad grade in math is a big deal for him.” I nodded as if I understood what she meant.
During Language Arts, when I couldn’t do the assignment because I hadn’t yet learned about accents at my old school, Avery, with the facility of a teacher herself, taught me the lesson.
“The first step is to divide the word into syllables. Say the word ‘homework’ in your head. The stress is on the first syllable, ‘home,’ not ‘work.’ Try another. ‘Information’ has four syllables. Which syllable has the stress on it?” I wanted to mention how there are no specially accented syllables in Korean, but I thought better of it and watched Avery neatly draw the glyph in the right place.
Then, during poetry, while I struggled to conjure more words that rhyme with “pink” besides “sink” and “clink,” Hannah, off the top of her head, divined twenty rhyming with “blue.” She already knew how to draw a Z in cursive and used the word “jalopy” in casual conversation.
My simple rube of a brain exploded. Umma had been right—these kids were smarter. And what was more, they cared. A lot.
“Hey Soon,” Mrs. Howards gestured from the front. “Why don’t you come up and tell the class about yourself?” I rose slowly and walked up to my new teacher, who tapped me on the shoulder.
In the time it had taken Mrs. Howards to cue me, a hundred thoughts bubbled up. Should I introduce myself to the class not as “Hey Soon” but in the right way, as “Heh-seung”? Wouldn’t “Hey Soon” be easier for everyone? Should I tell everyone where I was from? And did that mean Sugar Land or Seoul?
But before I could say anything, a girl with braids and an upturned nose, Tori Mailor, threw up her hand. “Can she speak English?” she asked, addressing Mrs. Howards.
Now it wasn’t Timothy Buckner, but I, who was wounded.
I stood and said nothing, practically proving Tori Mailor’s point, until Mrs. Howards broke the silence. “Hey Soon will be joining the football reading group.”
Tori and the other students nodded with understanding. I knew Hannah and Avery were also in football and that it was the right place to be. Mrs. Howards put her hand on my shoulder again, the sign to return to my desk. Feeling inexplicably ashamed, I returned to my spot between the rich girl and the bookish girl. What kind of girl was I? I had gone up in front of everyone to be seen, had said nothing, and disappeared.
Mrs. Howards directed us to open our Social Studies textbooks, and I did as I was told. But inside, I was turning over what had happened.
Up until that moment, I had lived as an introverted and observant dreamer, shy and silent, an eight-year-old who remembered a stranger’s perfume by the feeling it evoked and not by its scent, who read a book a day and drew for hours, and whose second language had by then eclipsed her native. I had never had reason to speak when I didn’t want to, and now I had been called on to be more than a phantom, to materialize and become visible.
Of course I can speak English, Tori Mailor.
2.
I PLAYED MOST DAYS AFTER school with Hannah Kohl, who was now my best friend. She was a great best friend on account of the playroom on the second floor of her house and her three-story dollhouse furnished with the most lifelike miniature grandfather clock, lamps, and upright piano. The first time I held the girl doll, who, like Hannah, had a sister, mother, and father, and looked like her, I turned its neat form around in my hands and marveled at the voodoo version of my friend.
Her formal mother used big words even with children, and I understood that was how Hannah knew a word like “jalopy.” When we got to her house after school, Mrs. Kohl expected us to wash our hands and then meted out precisely two gingerbread cookies with our milk. If I found Umma at home when I came in from school, it meant Arthur was sick and couldn’t go to day care, or a close patient had died. But most days I used my key to open the door, and the apartment was silent until I turned on the TV. I could eat anything or nothing, and there were no rules. Being told I could only take two cookies made me feel important.
When I invited Hannah to the apartment, I got the sense Mrs. Kohl was trying not to treat me any differently than she did her daughter’s other friends just because I lived in a two-bedroom rental that reeked of kimchi instead of a big house that smelled of leisure. Hannah had never been friends with an “apartment kid” and had been more polite than usual, moving about robotically, which made me yearn to be at her house, where she was relaxed and had better toys.
It was like this after my arrival in Mrs. Howards’s class until the spring, when Avery Stern had a birthday party.
I’d never met anyone like Avery. Not only was she smart, but she was also popular, nice, and rich. She was also Jewish, a word the other Memorial parents uttered in a whisper. Her parents were plastic surgeons and it was rumored they had a second house, which they flew to. Avery had seen real snow and skied a hundred times. Too much a country bumpkin to understand the significance of these facts, I was only generally impressed, which was to say, probably not impressed enough.
We were entering the stage in our childhoods where classroom-wide invitations were no longer automatic. Kindness, once democratic, was now deployed strategically, and the social climbing among the children was something parents implicitly encouraged. I hadn’t expected an invitation since I was Avery’s new friend, but she and I liked each other from the start, and we traded books all the time. “You should be an artist,” she said on beholding my cursive manual. “Your handwriting is better than Mrs. Howards’s.”
The Saturday afternoon of her birthday party, I yanked the pulley strings of my curtains to keep out the Peeping Toms my mother was always so afraid of and changed into my party outfit: a pink collared shirt and a cotton skirt Umma had sewn. She’d come up with the pattern and wore a blue skirt that day from the same. I didn’t mind the simple A-line that went past my knees because my parents meant my clothing to be modest. In the bathroom, I hunched over the sink to brush my teeth and then pushed my hair back in a plastic headband from the drugstore.
Avery’s party was at her house, which I’d never visited, and while it was only a short drive from our apartment complex, it might have been continents. Here, there were no sidewalks, just long, deep lawns leading to silent houses. The expensive hush penetrated us, and we went mute looking for 2 Hale Way, Umma slowing the Cutlass, the ceiling fabric of which had lost its adhesiveness one winter and ballooned down, skimming the top of her head. We came to a line of cars in front of a smaller, strange-looking residence. I’d read enough magazines and books, though, to know it was unique in a fancy, modern way. While Hannah lived in a two-story pink brick box with black shutters, a tidy instantiation of a child’s drawing, Avery’s home was a low, curved structure without any windows onto the street. The azaleas and clipped boxwoods prevalent in Memorial were absent; rather, the landscape was richly ascetic and controlled, a wide band of Italian cypresses wrapping closely around the house as if in protection. Mercedes, Jaguars, and Suburbans idled in the circular drive, so we parked on the street and made our way toward the house. As I joined the phalanx of girls alighting from cars, a headiness rose within me: today was my first party in Memorial.
I waved at Avery, who stood at the door next to a slender woman who was obviously her mother. Umma introduced herself to Dr. Stern, who had the same pinched and elegant face as her daughter. Clad in black and with hair pulled tightly in a low bun, like an aging ballerina, Dr. Stern leaned forward slightly, as if the proximity would help her comprehend my mother better. Before I could say goodbye, I was pulled away by a photographer.
“Say ‘Happy birthday!’ ” he commanded, pointing his camera at Avery and me. The flash went off and blinded us.
I placed my gift, a paperback of Anne of Green Gables, on a table alongside humongous boxes professionally wrapped and decorated with bows, ribbons, and flowers. We didn’t have money for bows-in-a-bag from Walgreens, so Anne was austerely trussed, looking monkish next to the other gifts. But I knew Avery hadn’t read the book and that she would love it. I passed through the low-ceilinged living room to join Hannah and Tori in the garden.
It was a bright day when the heat didn’t make my head ache as it usually did, the sun’s rays catching the trickle of water from the fountain and throwing spectral patches of light into the air. Everyone was excited, especially Avery, who was even nicer than usual. When Dr. Stern called us in, the girls hopped up from patio chairs and passed inside to the dining room, where she’d nestled flower arrangements among a variety of sweets. Tori Mailor said to me, a tiny iced cake in her hand, “You just moved here so you don’t know, but French Bakery makes the best petits fours,” and I tasted my first petit four. Delicate sandwiches with crusts removed and cut into triangles were arranged on tiered platters, and I ate one of every kind. The birthday cake was something really special, a bûche, which Dr. Stern cut into round swirly slices. I sat with Avery, Hannah, and Tori, the girls of the football reading group, but they were also in a program called Gifted and Talented, which I was not. They left in a bus every other Wednesday for another campus where they did enrichment projects—that week they had been making kites—and I wanted to do that, too. Sensing my disappointment, Avery said, “Hyeseung, you’ll definitely get into Gifted next year. You get hundreds on all the tests, and you have the best handwriting in school.”
These are some of the nice things that happened at the party. Years later though, Umma told me she’d waited there parked on Hale Way the entire two hours of the party, engine off to save gas, and that she’d cried. Taking her hands from the steering wheel, she’d pressed them together and prayed. It turned out Avery Stern’s birthday was a dress-up tea party. What she had seen as the girls filed by was each wearing a garden dress more elaborate than the last. Pastel floral print dresses and lace, an excess of Laura Ashley. Some girls had donned sun hats with silk flowers pinned to the sides, and there had even been a fascinator or two, with everyone carrying white purses. A few had been allowed to wear low heels and lipstick. Agnes and Alexandra, the twins, had gone in with white gloves.
Umma recounted, “I read the invitation, but I hadn’t understood it. How was I supposed to know I needed to dress you up like that?” She was thinking how in Sugar Land, the kids’ birthdays had been backyard pool parties or, if the family had money, Chuck E. Cheese. “I had never seen anything like that in my life, and I was scared for you. Then you came out laughing two hours later and said, ‘That was the best party I have ever been to,’ and I had never been so relieved in my life.”
But she revealed none of this that day. When I slipped into the passenger seat, she simply said, “I’m glad you weren’t ashamed of your outfit.”
I looked over at her. There was her profile and thin, shoulder-length hair. My mother was an emotional character, but now she was silent.
As we drove the short distance home, I looked down at my hands resting on my pink skirt, which I was seeing for the first time with the eyes of education, mean with knowledge. Umma was always wanting me to be some version of herself, the same but better, executing the lessons she’d received as a twenty-year-old or a thirty-, except I was eight. That was how we came to be wearing mother-daughter versions of the same outfit, which I’d submitted to without any thought I might have a choice. The magical afterglow of the party dissipated in the car. Even the understanding I’d had of myself during the hours at Avery’s split apart, too, dispersing into the ether while I compelled my identity to return to the one I knew I should be for my mother. It had all been wrong; to have felt equal and included by the other girls had been stupid.
It was not that what my classmates had worn hadn’t registered; it was that they had not made me feel as though I had made a mistake. After all, they knew I was not like them. I was one of the only nonwhite students in a school where most of the Asians across six grades were in ESL. I was the only apartment kid in advanced math, but I was still an “apartment kid,” from the only complex in the neighborhood. Perhaps that meant my peers didn’t expect much from me, but my new friends didn’t make me feel ashamed, which was a credit to them and to the kindness of youth.
