I didn’t have the tools then to question the beginnings of my complicated desire for whiteness. In Eugene, I was one of just a few mixed-race kids at my school and most people thought of me as Asian. I felt awkward and undesirable, and no one ever complimented my appearance. In Seoul, most Koreans assumed I was Caucasian, until my mother stood beside me and they could see the half of her fused to me, and I made sense. Suddenly, my “exotic” look was something to be celebrated.

Later in the week this glamorous realization would reach new heights of validation when Eunmi took us all to visit the Korean Folk Village, a living museum south of Seoul. Replicas of old-fashioned thatched-roof houses hugged its dirt roads, along which hundreds of hangari were strewn, red chiles beside them drying on woven mats, actors in traditional clothing here and there impersonating the peasants and royalty of the Joseon dynasty.

That day there happened to be a production of a K-drama period piece shooting. In between takes, the director noticed me and sent over his assistant. My mom nodded politely and took a business card, then erupted into laughter with her sisters.

“What did he say, Umma?”

“He asked me what your talents were.”

Visions of life as a Korean idol flashed before me. My future six-pack gyrating in choreographed unison with four other K-idols in matching designer crop tops, the cartoon bubbles popping into the frame of my talk show appearances, throngs of teenagers congregating around my approaching limousine.

“What did you say?”

“I said you don’t even speak Korean, and we live in America.”

“I could learn Korean! Mom! If I stayed in Korea, I could be famous!”

“You could never be famous here, because you could never be anyone’s doll,” she said. My mother wrapped an arm around me and pulled my body toward her hip. A wedding party slowly passed in colorful traditional garb. The groom wore a maroon gwanbok and a stiff black hat of bamboo and horsehair fitted with thin silk flaps that hung from the sides. His bride was in blue and red, an elaborate silk topcoat over her hanbok with long sleeves that she kept connected in front of her like a muff. Her cheeks were painted with red circles.

“You don’t even like it when Mommy tells you to wear a hat.”

That was Mom, always seeing ten steps ahead. In an instant, she could envision a lifetime of loneliness and regimen, crews of men and women picking at my hair and face, choosing my clothes, instructing me on what to say, how to move, and what to eat. She knew what was best: to take the card and walk away.

Just like that, my hopes of living as a Korean idol were squashed, but for a short time I was pretty in Seoul, maybe even enough to have a shot at minor celebrity. If it wasn’t for my mother, I might have wound up just like the pet alligator at the Chinese restaurant. Caged and gawked at in its luxurious confinement, unceremoniously disposed of as soon as it’s too old to fit in the tank.

* * *

—

MY TIME with all these women and my cousin was like a perfect dream, but the reverie ended when Halmoni passed away. I was fourteen and in school when it happened, so I stayed behind when my mother flew to be with her mother at the hospital. Halmoni died the day my mother arrived, as if she had been waiting for her, waiting to be surrounded by all three of her daughters. In her bedroom she had wrapped the preparations for her funeral in a silk cloth. The outfit she wanted to be cremated in, the framed photograph she wanted displayed on her casket, money for the expenses.

When my mom returned from the funeral, she was devastated. She let out this distinctly Korean wail and kept calling out, “Umma, Umma,” crumpled on the living room floor, her head heaving sobs into my father’s lap as he sat on the couch and wept with her. I was afraid of my mother then, and I watched my parents shyly from afar, the same way I had watched my mother and her mother in Halmoni’s room. I’d never seen my mother’s emotions so unabashedly on display. Never seen her without control, like a child. I couldn’t comprehend then the depth of her sorrow the way I do now. I was not yet on the other side, had not crossed over as she had into the realm of profound loss. I didn’t think about the guilt she might have felt for all the years spent away from her mother, for leaving Korea behind. I didn’t know the comforting words she probably longed for the way I long for them now. I didn’t know then the type of effort it can take to simply move.

Instead I could only think of the last words my grandmother said to me before we returned home to America.

“You used to be such a little chickenshit,” she said. “You never let me wipe your asshole.” Then she let out a loud cackle, spanked me on the butt, and gave me a bony hug goodbye.

4

New York Style

When I found out my mother was sick, I’d been out of college for four years and I was well aware I didn’t have much to show for it. I had a degree in creative writing and film I wasn’t really using. I worked three part-time jobs and played guitar and sang in a rock band called Little Big League that no one had ever heard of. I rented a room for three hundred dollars in North Philly, the same city where my father grew up and from which he eventually fled to Korea when he was around my age.

It was by sheer coincidence I’d wound up in Philadelphia. Like many a kid trapped in a small city, I felt bored and then suffocated. By the time I was in high school, the desire for independence trailing a convoy of insidious hormones had transformed me from a child who couldn’t bear to sleep without her mother into a teenager who couldn’t stand her touch. Every time she picked a ball of lint off my sweater or pressed her hand between my shoulder blades to keep me from slouching or rubbed her fingers on my forehead to ward off wrinkles, it felt like a hot iron puckering against my skin. Somehow, as if overnight, every simple suggestion made me feel like I was overheating, and my resentment and sensitivity grew and grew until they bubbled up and exploded and in an instant, uncontrollably, I’d rip my body away and scream, “Stop touching me!” “Can’t you ever leave me alone?” “Maybe I want wrinkles. Maybe I want reminders that I’ve lived my life.”

College presented itself as a promising opportunity to get as far away from my parents as possible, so I applied almost exclusively to schools on the East Coast. A college counselor thought a small liberal arts school, especially a women’s college, would be a good fit for someone like me—captious and demanding of inordinate attention. We took a college trip and visited several schools. Bryn Mawr’s stone architecture upright against the early signs of East Coast autumn seemed to measure up soundly to the ideal image of what we had always imagined a college experience should be.

It was somewhat of a miracle that I managed to get into college, having just barely graduated from high school. Senior year I had a nervous breakdown that resulted in a lot of truancy and therapy and medication, and my mother convinced all of it was a direct attempt to spite her, but somehow I managed to come out on the other side. Bryn Mawr was good for both of us, and I’d even graduated with honors, the first in my immediate family to obtain a college degree.

I decided to stick around Philadelphia because it was easy and cheap and because I was convinced Little Big League might someday make it. But it had been four years now and the band had neither made it nor shown any real sign of spurning anonymity. A few months back I’d been fired from the Mexican fusion restaurant where I’d waitressed for a little over a year, the longest I’d managed to hold on to a job. I worked there with my boyfriend, Peter, whom I’d originally lured there in a long-game play to woo myself out of the friend zone, where I’d been exiled seemingly in perpetuity, but shortly after I finally won him over, I was fired and he was promoted. When I called my mom for a little sympathy, incredulous that the restaurant would fire such an industrious and charming worker as myself, she replied, “Well, Michelle, anyone can carry a tray.”