In Language Arts, my favorite class, I wrote my essays with an extravagant amount of self-trust. Writing was akin to smelling. There might be a prompt, or none, but always a scent of something. Like a bloodhound, I followed it under a rock, behind a tree, pursuing it to a conclusion, and the journey was the development of an idea.
The rest of school came easily, too, though I did not think I was particularly intelligent. Many kids were cleverer, and almost everyone had more support at home. If I were smart, it was only because of my memory—I had a prodigious one. This memory was linked both to vision and emotion, and in that linkage lay its power and its limitation. In a group project in science class, our desks pushed up against one another’s, someone might ask about the assigned reading from the night before. “What’s the Golgi apparatus again?” they called out, shuffling between the pages in the chapter. “Intercellular transport,” I said, not looking up from my worksheet. “The definition is in bold in the second paragraph of the chapter, midway through the sentence, directly below the red and blue illustration of mitochondria.” I simply remembered.
Exams were even easier: teachers had feelings and emotions, they had things they cared about—x over y—and the right answer was the right answer to that teacher. It can’t be B or C because the answers are sloppily written, and the teacher values precision. It’s not A because it’s too specific, which makes it indefensible. So, the answer is D. Besides, the teacher thinks that word is elegant. When she used it in class, she did the twirly bit with her hand. If I got anything but a perfect score, it was because I had second-guessed my emotions and deduced incorrectly. What I studied was not the material but the people, and I did very well by relying on the lessons of invisibility I had gleaned over the years.
On awards night at the end of the year, Umma sat with Mr. and Mrs. Jordanowicz. The students were seated in alphabetical order, so Macy was a few rows ahead of me. She had one award, and I hooped and hollered for her as she, half a head taller than most of the teachers, loped across the stage under the hot lights. When it was my turn, the principal took an exaggerated breath while listing my awards, and the parents chuckled. I shook hands with each teacher in whose subject I’d won—Life Science, Language Arts, Social Studies, Music, and French. As was customary, I turned to face the applauding assembly. I looked down at my shoes.
Macy ran over after the ceremony, asking whether I wanted to get pizza to celebrate, but I told her no thanks because I wanted to see what Umma would say.
“Maybe next year you can get the math award, too” was how she started in the car ride back home.
“You always say I’m bad at math, but I’m skipping a grade, in honors, and making straight As.” I looked out the window at the night lights of Memorial. The Baskin-Robbins was bright and bustling with families.
“A ninety-two is barely making an A. I don’t understand why you aren’t at the top of your class. I was math queen when I was your age. Every math problem is a puzzle, like a Rubik’s Cube—there’s a lock, but you’re not stubborn enough to want to find the key. It’s a matter of your personality.”
Occasionally, a teacher remarked how my academic achievements must be due to a dragon lady of a mother. Though Umma was too busy to hover, if she thought I wasn’t reaching my potential in an arena that had come easily to her, she made her disappointment known. And she was right. I hated math. Its logic lay outside the bounds of human relations, and for that reason, I couldn’t see steps ahead as I did in other subjects. But just because she had been a natural in the subject, did that mean I had to be, too? Could I not be a different person from her? I thought of Mariah Hartt, who was popular despite her Koreanness, and the trade I’d made so I could appear in the world. My mother had not grown up in America and would never know. To stay alive, I had oriented my entire life around school, and now she was telling me I was losing. Back then, I didn’t have the words—that even to win at this half-life was to lose.
“If you continuously tell yourself you’re doing fine when you are actually mediocre, then you are becoming an American faster than I thought,” Umma said.
“Also.” She picked up a new thread. “You shouldn’t scream for the kids like that. They don’t like you as much as you like them, and someone needs to open your eyes to that. No one screamed for you when you went up.” She edged the car into our parking space, and the corrugated steel roof slid a shadow over her face like a dark mask.
“The other kids clapped,” I said, my voice thickening in my throat. Hadn’t they? And what about Macy’s parents, who came for her one award and stayed until the end of the assembly, when they might have left after the Js? They were at Domino’s now, eating pizza and celebrating mediocrity. Macy had clapped for me, Mr. and Mrs. Jordanowicz had clapped for me.
Umma opened her door, and the dark mask vanished under the interior light of the car. “Pay attention to how people treat you. Only Umma and Appa really care about you. These Americans will never care about you.” Her footsteps crunched on the gravel outside before going quiet in the night.
In the dark and silent car, I thought about all the mysterious lines my mother always drew. Would I always be so limited? The Peeping Toms outside my room—did they really exist? Missing my mark in school with a 92—was I truly mediocre? Sure, I wasn’t popular, but my classmates—did they not like me?
As for happiness and dreams, Umma maintained these were an American construct and I should accept that I was a Korean in America and live in America operating under Korean propositions, propositions I did not know firsthand. The unfairness took my breath away. I was young and did not know at the time that this was my mother holding me close to herself and staying relevant in a life she could not control or comprehend. The American propositions, after all, were the ones she did not know firsthand.
When I walked in the door, Umma was in the kitchen starting dinner. Appa sat on the floor with his legal pads and Yellow Pages. He didn’t look up or say anything, about the assembly or otherwise. Most likely, he had no idea there had been one. In the glow of the TV, Arthur shoveled from a bowl of cereal.
I carried my awards into my room. I thought about crumpling up my certificates, throwing away my trophies. Instead, I dumped them on my bed. When I was in grade school, I used to receive the perfect attendance award every year, but I never held on to them because they seemed like non-awards; Umma couldn’t afford to take off from work or hire a babysitter so I always had to go to school even when I had a fever. I looked down at the gold-leafed certificates with my name in calligraphy and the principal’s signature at the bottom, the heavy clanging medals around my neck, and suddenly, they seemed like non-awards, too.
6.
WITH APPA DULY CORRALLED BY a demanding job, Umma was able to save an astounding $50,000 in the three years after bankruptcy. Now that they had a down payment, my parents searched for a house. For two years’ worth of Sundays, we drove around Memorial looking for balloons tied to Coldwell Banker signs and houses facing east. And during those two years, I fell asleep every night meditating on the perfect house to get me to somewhere else—to acceptance or at least out of the wrong side of the neighborhood. The summer before my last year of middle school, my family finally left the apartments and moved into a house down the road.
Macy was the first person I had over. Arthur and I had painted my bedroom an Easter yellow, and she deployed her critical eye as if she knew it was now allowed and instructed me to do another pass on the corners.
The white ranch pitched on a green slope had been owned by a retired white couple obsessed with Asia—except it wasn’t any Asia I knew, but an idea of Asia. Bamboo wallpaper covered the interior, and a gold yin-yang pattern stamped the front doors. The focal point of the meticulously landscaped backyard covered over in eucalyptus and Japanese painted ferns was a stone garden and birdbath. The house was on a street named Haversham, and my friends took to calling me “Miss Havisham” after we read Great Expectations in school. I did feel a little like Pip, trying to be better than I really was.
After we moved in, Umma and I organized a yard sale. Coming up the driveway, our neighbors asked us where the new owners were, assuming we were the help. Despite that, the house signified relief to me, and with Haversham, I acquired one of the last things I needed to pass in Memorial: a good address.
PART III
THE SMARTEST GIRL
1.
I SLAMMED THE FIVE-INCH-THICK SAT book shut in the middle of a math section. The timer still had twelve minutes on it, but I was sapped. I’d spent this summer after eighth grade tutoring in the Korean community and preparing for standardized tests. I was bored and decided to go to the movies.
Movies were an effective way to pass the hottest time of day in Houston. The neighborhood Loews was, like all movie theaters, deliciously cold. You could sip a fountain Coke through a straw and hear the rattle of the machine-made ice cubes swimming inside the sweating cup. While I never quite fell asleep, I succumbed to a ratcheting down in consciousness, my mind stepping into a warm bath. In this warm bath, I could shut out the bright world outside, lackadaisically follow a storyline, feel quiet, feel free.
From the movies I learned about the East Coast, a place in America where there were distinct seasons, but also people who were educated and had culture and class. East Coast denizens enjoyed the opera and old libraries, and their lives did not revolve around football. Someday I would move there, away from Texas, where I was obliged to feign enthusiasm for things I didn’t like or understand—like tailgates, like smoked meat. The East Coast capital was New York or Boston, and the first step would be an East Coast college.
But that was years away. This was right now. This was still Houston, and I was fourteen and asking my mother for a ride.
“Why?” she demanded from the floor where she sat ironing Appa’s shirts.
“What do you mean ‘why’?”
“Why do you need to go to the movies right this minute?” An edge entered her voice.
“I don’t know. It’s summer. I did all my math enrichment.”
“We have videos from Phar-Mor.”
“I don’t want to watch an old video from Phar-Mor.”
“I can take you to get new videos. Why does it have to be a movie?”
“I’m not asking for money. I’ll use my tutoring cash.”
She stopped ironing and looked up, her eyes slits. “Who are you going with?” She thought I was meeting someone and didn’t want to tell her, but the truth was, I had opened the Houston Chronicle and read that Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was playing in fifteen minutes. It was a matinee, so I could pay a discounted price instead of the seven dollars it usually cost. I could see there would be getting no popcorn or Coke money out of her.
“I sometimes go alone, you know.”
“Are you sure you aren’t meeting anyone?”
Lately, because I was now a full-fledged teenager, her inquisitions came more frequently, as if she was afraid of me or didn’t know me. She thought I was mixed up with some boys or a gang. The idea was laughable.
I took a breath. “Yes, I’m sure. I’m going alone.”
In the car, Umma proceeded to ice me out. She liked to do that. If she was displeased with something you did, she didn’t say a word; she just wouldn’t look at you, as if you were invisible, as if you were dead. If you tried to materialize again for her, if you said, “Umma, I love you, I’m sorry,” even if you weren’t, she wouldn’t respond until you couldn’t stand it anymore and really wanted to die. You learned love was entirely conditional, and you could vanish—even to your own mother—at any moment.
Instead of dropping me at the entrance, she parked and accompanied me into the mall. I found it hard to seethe with anger properly, thinking how dumb we looked, me walking steps in front of my pissy mother, who obviously belonged to me.
I bought a ticket and passed through the doors into that extra-special level of cold. In my peripheral vision, Umma slinked like a meerkat along the glass walls, her eyes shooting around the inside of the theater in search of the boy. In search of the gang. Let her wait there all one hundred forty minutes if she wants! I raged.
But the narcotic experience—the ice of the Coke rattling in the sweating cup, the warm mental bath—was ruined. I watched Kevin Costner play a surfer version of Robin Hood but never managed to lose myself in the cold vault of the movie theater.
When I got out, Umma wasn’t there with her face pressed up against the glass, but as I swung out the doors of the mall into the evening, I spied her tightly permed clown head in the parked Oldsmobile. She had been waiting for me, and for whomever else she thought I was with.
I got in and slammed the door. I didn’t say a word. Even though she had seen nothing, because there was nothing to see, she thought she had missed the offending party and that I persevered in my wicked lying, and I didn’t understand because I simply never lied to my mother.
In my head I held this conversation:
MOTHER: Stop lying to me.
