Читать книгу The Baddest Bitch in the Room - Sophia Chang - Страница 10
ОглавлениеW e never said “I love you” like the white families. Did my parents love me? Didn’t even think about it. We were family. The love my parents had for my brother and me far preceded our births, before they even met. It accrued with every step they took from childhood that eventually led them from Korea to a foreign land. In that single act, they had left behind the comfort of everything they knew: their families, their language, their culture. All in pursuit of a better life for themselves, but more importantly, for their children to come: Heesok, number one son, golden boy, top of every class, good at every fucking thing; and me, a bullheaded ill-tempered Taurus, fair-to-middling student.
My mother, Tongsook Park, was born in 1932 on May 17, in Kiyang, North Korea, the fourth of nine children. Her father, Jaebok Young, owned Hwashin, the largest department store in their town, so they were “well-to-do,” as my mother calls it. Like most of the other families in the town, hers was a Christian household. Her father was an incredibly generous person who liked to help others. Under the Japanese annexation, many Koreans were very poor and weren’t able to eat three meals a day. Much of the rice they grew was sent to Japan. There was a Mitsubishi factory in her hometown, and people from nearby Jeollado, the poorest town in Korea, would travel over every morning to try to get work as day laborers. My grandfather would go for a walk every morning and, because they lived close to the train station, often encountered young mothers and their babies who had come to Kiyang to find their husbands. He would inevitably bring them home, feed them, and help them find their spouses.
My mother’s mother, Seungyu Park, was a fighter with a keen business mind and knew exactly how to handle people. My mother laughs when she tells me that I am exactly like my grandmother. My grandmother used to get angry with her father because he let her three older sisters marry poor men. Every autumn, she had her sisters come visit for a few weeks and paid them to do some household chores. When they left, she sent them home with big bundles of food. My grandmother had no trouble confronting people and made sure everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing. When she heard that the people working at her brother’s orchard were being lazy, she called them all to her house and read them the riot act. Both my mother and I inherited her sartorial sense. She loved clothes and delighted in going to church every Sunday to show them off. As a mother she had to be very strict because she had so many children, but she was very kind and, like her husband, liked to take care of people.
My mother is no impresario, but she is an unbroken warrior. After the Japanese surrendered at the end of the Second World War in August 1945, the Korean peninsula was divided into North and South at the thirty-eighth parallel, with Russia occupying the former, the United States the latter. Anyone with money in the North wanted to flee the pending Communist rule because they knew that they would be stripped of their wealth and property. My mother said they’d heard that the Russians were raping the women and pillaging the towns as soon as they landed. Luckily, they started in the big cities and hadn’t reached her small town before her father arranged for my mother, then fourteen, and her sixteen-year-old sister, Tongnam, to follow their two older brothers to the South. He paid a hotelier who had been sneaking people out of the North on boats. They dressed down like locals so as not to stand out. They boarded a train and, when they arrived at their station, were elated to be one step closer to freedom and reuniting with their older brothers. The joy would be short-lived.
They had gotten off a stop too early. The police were at the station, on the lookout for people trying to escape the North. Despite their disguises, my mother and her sister were detected immediately and taken to the police station, where they were separated and questioned. Not having anticipated this, they gave conflicting stories. Seeing as the next train was in the morning, they would spend the night at a police-sanctioned hotel and be escorted back to the station.
Serendipitously, a man standing nearby at the police station, not an officer but someone with great authority, overheard the entire exchange. I don’t think he was a man, rather a bodhisattva. This is a being in Buddhism who has reached nirvana but chooses to stay on earth to alleviate the suffering of others. He took pity on my mother and aunt and offered to take them on a tour of the town before delivering them to the hotel the police had checked them into for the night. Miraculously, as they were walking about, the sisters spotted another hotel, branded with the name of the hotelier whom they were supposed to meet to take them across the border! They made a mental note, desperate to get back to it somehow.
My aunt fell very ill overnight, and when the police came to pick the girls up the next morning, they decided to let her rest another day. The sisters saw their opening. The other hotel wasn’t far, but the town was small and they were terrified of being spotted and apprehended again. Happily, they made it there without incident, and the man they were supposed to meet was there. He arranged for someone to sneak them out in the dead of night. At around 1:00 a.m., another man picked them up at the hotel; he didn’t have any lights—no lamp, no flashlight, nothing. And there were no streetlights. My mother and aunt stumbled in the pitch-black night until they got to the beach, where they were handed off to a third man with a boat.
Even the beach was in utter darkness. They saw nothing, heard nothing. The sisters were silently herded onto a small boat with about thirty other people. The boat was probably built to hold a third of that number. No one said a word as they held their breath in fear. The ride lasted only about thirty minutes but felt interminable. The fear of capture was exacerbated by the rough waves; the boat took on so much water that my mother and aunt were sure they were going to die. To this day my mother has a morbid fear of rough waters and airplane turbulence.
When they finally reached the shores of South Korea, there were makeshift huts on the beach directly in front of them. Everyone crowded into the huts and sat on the cold ground, awaiting daybreak. The next morning, huge U.S. Army trucks arrived to transport the refugees to Seoul. Once in Seoul, the sisters took a bus to meet their older brothers, Tongchun and Tongsup, who had rented space in a small, two-family house.
My aunt cried nonstop for days and weeks and months, but my mother didn’t shed one tear. Perhaps watching her sister prompted her to stay strong for both of them. My mother recounted this story to me when I was around ten, in much less detail, in a matter-of-fact manner, as if she were reciting a recipe. I was sitting on the corner of my parents’ bed, not quite facing her. As she continued sharing the details, I felt my body shrinking in anguish, and I bowed my head to look at the pink polyester quilted bedding, fidgeting with a nonexistent loose thread. I watched as the tears, slowly at first, dropped onto the quilt, darkening it with each drop. By the time she was done, I turned to her, tears streaming down my face. She was surprised. She didn’t comfort me and I didn’t expect her to. I asked if she could contact her family. She hadn’t seen or spoken to her parents or her five younger siblings since she’d sneaked out that night. She explained that the government makes it very difficult for them to have any contact.
Five short years after the end of the Second World War, the Korean War broke out between the North and South, each declaring itself the single legitimate government of Korea. During the Korean War, Tongsup joined a makeshift army that fought with the Americans, who were advancing against the North. There, he reconnected with the family. Then the Chinese army intervened on behalf of North Korea and pushed the South Korean army back. There were a number of U.S. ships taking people from the North to the South. By the time my uncle had gathered the family, the last ship was loading. Because they had to get there by foot, my grandmother determined that they wouldn’t make it because of the children, so she sent my uncle ahead without them. When he got back to the South, he was so distraught that he was unable to speak about what had happened for a long time. Later, they heard my grandfather was killed during the Korean War, but they had no way of verifying it. My mother thinks that if any of her brothers and sisters survived, they are currently in labor camps.
When my mother and aunt left that day in 1946, they never imagined that it would be the last time they would see their parents and younger siblings. They expected that their remaining family would follow and be reunited in the South. I couldn’t fathom never seeing my parents and brother again. More painful, still, to imagine is the thought of never seeing my children again and them not seeing each other. My son and daughter are both older now than my mother was when she escaped North Korea. It means that every moment I’ve enjoyed, endured, and engineered with my children over the past few years would never have happened if I had been in the position of my grandparents, who had to send their children away in order to save them. As a parent, even the shitty moments are moments—opportunities to learn from and work through, all while loving your children.
My mother finished high school in Inchon, South Korea, strong in English and German. Like her, my strength was languages, and we both hated math. From there, she attended So-ul dae-hak, or Seoul National University, where she met my father, Bomshik Chang, who was born in Inchon a year before her. His father was the head of the Korean Rice Granary Company. My dad was a smart, highly competitive boy with a healthy ego—all traits he would pass on to me. He liked to make things with his hands, draw, and play harmonica, but mathematics was his true gift and passion. As a teen, the first word he wrote in his notebook with a new pen he had bought was mathematics. Well-known in Inchon for his intelligence, my father earned the nickname “The Razor.” He was named not only for his incredible intellectual capacity, but also for his appearance. He had beautiful high cheekbones and was as sharp a dresser as there ever was. He and my mother made an exceptionally good-looking couple.
The Japanese had annexed Korea in 1910 and continued their occupation until the end of World War II. Koreans were marginalized and forced to learn Japanese. If they were caught speaking Korean in school, they were beaten. The Japanese created schools that were exclusively intended to educate Japanese children, because they didn’t want their kids mixing with the Koreans. Because my father was so smart, he was one of only a few Koreans permitted to attend one of the exclusively Japanese schools. He even skipped a grade and started a year early. His mathematics teacher initially favored him because of his talent but erupted in anger when the teacher discovered my father was Korean. (My father spoke impeccable Japanese.) The teacher would put a problem on the chalkboard and ask if anyone could solve it. Often, no one but my father knew how to do it. He approached the board and solved the problem correctly. When he was done, the teacher beat him with a ruler. This would happen a couple more times before my father stopped volunteering.
But the teacher found another way to humiliate my father. All the Japanese students would come to school with their lunches packed in bento boxes. My father was too poor to bring one. The teacher said that someone had been stealing lunch boxes and wanted to discover who the culprit was. He asked everyone to place their boxes on the table, and when my father was the only student without one, the teacher announced that he must be the bento box thief. He proceeded to beat my father again. Decades later, my mother and father went to Japan for a school reunion. My father told my mother that if he saw that teacher again, he would punch him in the face. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the opportunity.
When the Japanese occupation ended after the war, my father was in tenth grade. The principal of my father’s school told him to sit in the front of class every time a new math teacher was hired. He was to ask the teacher questions in order to vet him. He was recognized as a genius. My father was eighteen when the Korean War broke out and the North Korean army marched into Inchon. One day, he was summoned to a meeting at the local ward office, at which all the unsuspecting attendees were forced to join the South Korean Volunteer Army on the spot. None of them returned home from the meeting. They were made to travel by foot to an unknown destination in North Korea. At some point north of Seoul, my father began to slow down, moving farther and farther away from his group and eventually turning back without being noticed. By dint of sheer will and a little luck, he escaped and made it back home.
He did his first two years of graduate school at Seoul National University and finished his studies at the University of British Columbia in 1956, after being invited there by one of his colleagues. He returned to Korea to teach mathematics at his alma mater.
My parents married on November 15, 1960, and my brother, Heesok, was born March 13, 1962. A few months after he was born, my father came to Vancouver to teach at the University of British Columbia. He told my mother that he cried every time he saw babies because he missed his son so much. My mother followed in the fall of 1963, leaving Heesok behind. My father’s mother was worried that if the whole family left, they would never return to Korea, so she promised to raise Heesok while they were gone. This is a common practice for migrants that allows the parents to establish themselves financially and settle in before having the children come over. She brought Heesok to Vancouver in early 1964. The next year, I was the first in my family to be born outside of Korea, and the only one to be named in English. My father named me after a Polish mathematician. Sophia is the Latin word for wisdom.
According to my family, I was independent from the gate. My earliest memories are from 1968, when my father taught at the University of Michigan for a year. We lived in one of four units within a campus housing apartment complex. The most striking thing about our community was its diversity: There was another Korean family, a Japanese family, an Indian family. My brother became close with a black neighbor named Robert Brae, whose older brother wore Malcolm X frames, very much of the era. Another neighbor we talked about and, frankly, made fun of, was Lubo, a recent Polish immigrant. Lubo was an adolescent who used to rummage through the dumpsters, not because he was poor, but because he couldn’t believe what Americans threw away. He found toys that were practically new and other random household items.
While Heesok was at school at Northside Elementary, just outside of campus, I would spend all day in the sandbox, mostly playing alone. One day, I got it into my head that I wanted to go for a spin around the grounds on the campus bus and took it upon myself to do so. The stop was right outside our apartment building. I rode the perimeter of the campus and got off back at home. I was three. There are so many things wrong with this picture: How did I get out of the house, into the streets, and find the bus stop? How did the bus driver allow an unattended toddler to board without any questions asked? What were the other passengers thinking? The parent in me now would shame the shit out of those parents, but I’ve got nathan. It was 1968 and things were much different back then. Perhaps not so much so that a toddler could ride semiprivate transportation alone with ease, but certainly parenting in the late 1960s did not involve the constant hovering that it does now. All things considered, my parents did a remarkable job.
In addition to riding the bus, I have a couple of clear memories of my father’s tenure teaching in Ann Arbor. I distinctly remember learning to read. My father had written a bunch of words on index cards and was teaching Heesok to read. Three years old and already extremely competitive with my brother, I was fiending to catch up. The first word I read was butterfly. Until this moment, I had been fastidiously but silently studying as well. When my father held up the card, I blurted it out before Heesok could.
The intellectual sibling rivalry between my brother and me was, in fact, no contest whatsoever. Heesok is exponentially smarter than me and everyone else I know combined. It was intimidating to walk in the oversize footsteps of my brother, a challenge for someone as competitive as I am. We went to a small elementary school, an even smaller high school, and we took many of the same classes in college. Every first day of class throughout my underwhelming academic career, when I raised my hand for roll call, the teacher would lower their glasses, raise their eyebrows at me, and say, “Oh, so you’re Heesok’s sister.”
Heesok also teased me to no end. Like my father, I had a mean, unpredictable temper and seemingly had a large button on my back stating PUSH HERE that my brother activated frequently. He knew precisely how to get under my skin. I remember screaming and chasing him around my uncle’s house with a boot, while my mother and aunt sat calmly talking and drinking tea, as if nothing were going on. There was another incident at our home that involved me wielding a steak knife screaming “I hate you!” and Heesok laughing his ass off. Our tube-socked feet ran laps from the slippery linoleum kitchen floor over the clear vinyl multi-gripped protectors to the wall-to-wall carpet of the living room and dining room that was a slightly graying pale yellow except for under the vinyl mats. He dipped and dodged around the new off-white matching love seat and sofa, the low walnut coffee table, the two chartreuse faux velvet rocking chairs, and the teak dining room table that my father built. In a quieter moment, one summer day we were examining ourselves in the mirror and I said proudly, “I’m more tanned than you.” And I was. Finally, a win. “Yeah, but you’re shit brown and I’m golden brown,” he replied.
Heesok’s excellence was not limited to academia; he was also a phenomenal athlete. That motherfucker could play any sport. He taught me to spiral a pigskin, shoot a three, slap a puck, and throw a curve, but I was never very physically gifted. This shortcoming was impossible to hide and very humiliating. Back in the day, the phys ed teachers would elect two captains—always the jocks—who would stand at the front of the classroom to choose their teammates, excruciatingly peeling off one person at a time from best to worst. I was almost always last to be chosen. Then there were physical endurance challenges that we had to do with the whole class watching: the flexed arm hang or running laps or climbing a rope. I couldn’t do any of it. I had neither stamina nor strength.
But I could dance my bony ass off. The first time, I was on the couch boogying with abandon, and my father exclaimed, “Where did you learn to dance?” I don’t know what music was playing, but I recall how moving my body in rhythm with the beat felt free. When disco hit, I was engrossed. I watched American Bandstand every Saturday and went to see Saturday Night Fever and Thank God It’s Friday multiple times. I taught myself the hustle, the bump, and how to spell out YMCA with my body, and I created routines in my bedroom. I helped plan dances at friends’ houses as well as the ones at school.
I was a natural-born leader and extremely social. I worked hard to be the most popular, smartest, best dressed, and teacher’s pet. And I could be a cruel ruler. In fifth grade, there was one particular girl, Janet, who was my best friend, until I felt like she was getting too close to some of my other friends and copying everything I was doing, particularly my style. Once I decided I didn’t want to be friends with her anymore, I ostracized her. One day my teacher, Mrs. Elden, asked me to stay after school. As her favorite, I was sure she was going to laud me for my scholastic achievements. Once the classroom had cleared out, I slid into an orange plastic seat and crossed my hands atop the attached fiberboard desk that had initials carved into it just under the groove intended for holding our 2B pencils. I studied her slightly pockmarked face and thin lips as I sat across from her, beaming, smugly waiting to hear how amazing I was.
“You know, Sophia, there are a group of parents who have come together against. . .” For some reason I was convinced the next word out of her mouth was going to be Asians, but instead she said, “people who don’t let others be friends with certain students. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
I feigned innocence, but she knew that I knew that she knew. I left the classroom and walked out the double doors, Mrs. Elden’s words ringing in my ears. I swatted at the dingy tetherball hanging off the end of a gray fraying rope. As I heard it swinging around the cold metal pole behind me, I thought that the girl’s parents must have said something. I felt a mix of indignance, guilt, and humiliation. The next day the desks were moved, and I was forced to sit next to Janet. It was just the two of us, whereas the other desks were clustered into groups of four or six. It worked—we ended up becoming friends again.
When I look back on that incident, it’s amazing that despite being the queen of my school, I thought Mrs. Elden was going to tell me that a group of parents was conspiring against Asian students. I still felt “other.” And surely my overachieving ambitions were in response to feeling marginalized. Having been called racist names, I understood on some level that a lot of the prejudices propagated by the children were passed down to them by their folks. There was racism lurking in the tidy stucco homes behind the white picket fences.
One sunny spring day as I walked alone across Balaclava Park, one of Vancouver’s many massive public greenspaces, I was suddenly struck by how empty it was. Typically, there would be people playing rugby in the giant field or running track and kids lolling about in the sandbox. The sprawling emerald meadow meant fun and freedom under open skies, but it was about to become a battleground. I sensed a presence behind me.
“Where are you from?”
Ruben, the class bully—a big, lurching white boy with dirty blond hair and a dull rage in his eyes—circled me slowly on his blue Schwinn Chopper. He stopped right in front of me, shifting from cheek to cheek on his vinyl banana seat, cutting me off in my tracks. I looked at him and didn’t answer. I was caught off guard by his overt hostility.
“I said, where are you from: China or Japan?”
I was only nine and had already felt the demeaning sting of thoughtless, racist barbs for years. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I would be serenaded with this charming little ditty: “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these,” the kids would sing, using their fingers to slant their eyes up, indicating Chinese, then down, indicating Japanese, putting their hands on their knees, and then, for the roaring finale, pulling their shirts out to mimic a big chest. In addition to being made acutely aware of my difference in ethnicity, I was also constantly reminded of my size. I was short to medium height, but really skinny. The older boys in school used to literally toss me from one to the other like a ball. It was all in fun, but in retrospect, it was still a clear assertion of physical dominance. People would also hold my arm up in midair and say loudly, “Look how skinny she is! Look how small her wrists are!”
In the past, I had kept quiet or responded feebly. Only days before, I had stood silent and helpless while a greasy white teen passed by our house, yelling, “Hey, chink, go back to your country!” at my dad’s back as he tended to the peonies in our garden. I watched as my father ignored the bait and clenched the wooden handle of the spade in his gloved hand. My mercury rose in a tide of rage, while my heart sank in a pit of humiliation and heartache. All the chinks, japs, and gooks carelessly hurtled my way were an indignity, but watching my father be the recipient of such bile irreversibly activated something in me.
The difference between my father and me was that I had the most lethal weapon at my disposal: the English language. And this brilliant, sunny afternoon in the park was the day I would unlock the safety. Truth is, in a battle of wits, me against Ruben was like bringing an AK to a plastic knife fight. But I held back on unleashing an automatic, choosing to fire only a couple of choice shots instead.
“I’m from Korea,” I rallied back.
“What?”
“Korea. Your geography is pretty bad if the only countries you know in Asia are China and Japan. Maybe you should study harder in school, Ruben!” I could taste the rage in my saliva.
He grunted in response. When he realized that he hadn’t succeeded in terrorizing me, he got back on his bike and trundled away. I saw Ruben again in school, but there were no more confrontations.
Walking home, I was high on victory. I felt indomitable. From this day forward, I felt prepared for any verbal jousting match. My life wasn’t a horror show of constant racist attacks and threats, but growing up the child of Asian immigrants in a white world made it a challenge to establish my identity. My birth certificate says I’m a citizen of Canada, but I didn’t feel fully Canadian because I wasn’t white. Nor was I totally Korean because I had lost the language, a common experience among first-generation immigrants. Heesok, too, had lost Korean.
In an effort to get back the language, Heesok and I studied Korean at the Korean United Church, which my father had been instrumental in starting, despite being an atheist. He had helped Rev. Lee, who founded the church, stay in Vancouver rather than going back to Korea. My mother attended services on Christmas, but we never went with her. We were brought up broadly, like many in the West, in the Christian ethic, and my father used to say that all Asians were raised with an organic blend of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Heesok and I recited the Lord’s Prayer for the first several years of school. To this day, I remember the first several lines. When I was nine, one of my classmates took me to her church with her family. My father was not happy about it at all. He didn’t say anything but grunted his disapproval. He loved the poetry of the Bible, as he did of opera, but he was not a believer.
I rejected not only the Korean language, but also the culture and cuisine. When I was around age ten, my mother had to make me cheeseburgers for a few months, while the rest of the family ate robustly textured and complexly flavored Korean meals. My mother thought I was a picky eater, so she did what she thought any mother should: feed her child, even if it meant preparing a separate meal. But it wasn’t my palate, it was my pride—I was embarrassed by and ashamed of our food, which kids made fun of because it looked and smelled different. Part of my rejection of Korean culture was witnessing it being rejected by our adopted country. Despite my desperate measures to assimilate, my world continued to remind me in no uncertain terms that I was other, lesser, and an outsider.
Assimilation meant, quite simply, trying to be white. Everyone I saw as I pored through the pages of fashion magazines, flipped through the TV channels, or sat in movie theaters was white. The only time I saw characters who looked like me were the extras in M*A*S*H, Hawaii Five-O, and Kung Fu. I was blissfully unaware that I didn’t see myself. It didn’t even cross my mind that David Carradine was a white man playing an Asian character!
One of my favorite shows in the 1970s was The Partridge Family, about a widowed mother who forms a band with her five children. Like millions of other girls across North America, I was infatuated with the eldest son, Keith, played by David Cassidy—with his soft brown eyes, perfectly feathered hair, and signature puka shells that glowed beneath his large-collared polyester shirts. If David Cassidy was my first puppy love, then Susan Dey, who played his sister Laurie, was my first girl crush: she had big green eyes, long thick eyelashes, and flawlessly curled hair.
Little did I know that this bubble gum reverie would slap me in the face. One afternoon, alone in my room, I was pretending to be Laurie Partridge, singing and playing keyboards on my bed. I lost myself in the performance. When I reached the chorus of “I Think I Love You,” I turned and looked in the mirror, and to my shock, saw an Asian face. I had convinced myself that I was white. As someone who has complained about feeling invisible her whole life, I now recognize that in that moment, I had erased myself.
The other show I watched without fail was The Brady Bunch. I thought they were the perfect family, never mind that they were the result of two divorced parents coming together, each with their three children from previous spouses. All I saw was Hollywood happiness in the home. A beautiful blond mother with three blond daughters. My family looked different and talked different. One night after dinner I got up and said, “Thanks, Mom, that was a delicious dinner.” Heesok sneered at me. “Did you just see that in The Brady Bunch?” It stung because he was dead-on. I felt like a fraud.
The Asians we went to school with were predominantly Chinese. They embodied the model minority: hardworking, bespectacled, great at science and math, squeaky clean, and kept their heads down. There was also a group of Vietnamese kids who were in the English as a second language program at our high school. I used to look at them as other because we didn’t speak the same language. I likened myself more to the white kids because of linguistic and cultural alignment.
By high school, I became aware that we differed not only in physical appearance, but also in class. Our high school sat at the bottom of a valley. We lived on the middle-class side, while many of the other students lived on the wealthy side. These kids alternated between their Whistler homes and Hawaii for Christmas vacations. They would come back looking like raccoons because other than their eyes, protected by ski goggles or sunglasses, their faces were kissed by the sun.
The rich kids were also often the popular kids. They were white girls and boys with shiny, straight teeth and feathered hair, who cruised the streets of Vancouver in their parents’ Beemers, Benzes, and Porsches. Though different, my brother and I were still very popular—my brother because he was so fucking smart and funny, but also because he was such a good athlete. I followed him in his other hobbies as well: I knew the name of every car, collected comic books, and could name most of the fighter planes from the Second World War.
Heesok and I attended the Mini School, a small annex of Prince of Wales Secondary School for self-motivated and bright kids. It was filled with brainiacs and misfits. One of the great things about our school, in addition to the rigorous academic program, was the diverse range of extracurricular activities. We did a lot of fundraising for our three annual field trips. We got to travel to places where we could ski, rock climb, hike, and kayak. The first and last time I saw a night of shooting stars was on our end-of-the-year trip on Salt Spring, one of the Southern Gulf Islands off the coast of Vancouver. It was warm and we lay in our thin down sleeping bags on the huge rocks that lined the beach. We were cracking jokes and yelling at each other over the sound of the crashing waves of the Pacific when someone said, “Look at the stars!” The stars shone brighter and seemed more plentiful, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary as I stared into the clear endless sky on the stelliferous night. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught one flashing across the great black canvas. Then another and another and another until it seemed as if the stars were racing toward each other to reunite after a long separation. The first and only night I would bear witness to the wonder of a night of shooting stars.
Our school dances were filled with classic rock sprinkled with new wave. The perennial last song of every dance was Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” For all the boys and girls who had been crushing on each other, this was their chance to grope and grind for eight unchaperoned minutes. Even though I was elected social coordinator two years in a row and painstakingly designed and printed the invitations on a mimeograph machine, I was never the girl who got asked to slow dance. I dreaded this part of the evening and always made sure I wasn’t near the auditorium so I could avoid the humiliation of standing against the wall as the song started to play. I would go into the brightly lit administrative office and talk and laugh as if I didn’t care, playing with the stapler or weighing myself on the scale in the nurse’s office as if it would tell me anyting other than 107 pounds, which I was throughout high school and well into middle age. To this day, I bristle when I hear the opening acoustic guitar strains of the song. It takes me right back to those days of rejection.
In grade school, I grew up on Top 40 pop and classic rock, but it was disco that I loved the most because it was dance music. In high school, we started listening to new wave and punk: the Jam, Joe Jackson, and my favorite band of all time—the Clash. When Sandinista!, the group’s homage to the Nicaraguan political party, came out, I rocked a red beret and went to the Vancouver Public Library to study the history of the movement. This album inspired my first interest in politics.
But there was something beyond the anti-establishmentarian and leftist leanings of the punk movement that drew me to the music. There was also the anger that swelled in those imperfect vocals and screeching guitars. Punk was my gateway to hip-hop.
In my final year of high school, Ray, a handsome Greek classmate known for being a music aficionado, brought a twelve-inch record to school, excited to share his latest discovery with a group of us assembled in the music room during lunch hour. He lovingly tilted his two-dimensional prize at a slight angle and slowly slid the paper-sleeved vinyl from its crisp cardboard cover.
I didn’t recognize the label at the center of the disk. It was light blue and appeared to feature a colored snake. He set the turntable to 33 rpm and placed the needle onto the edge of the shiny black disc. As the familiar scratch crackled through the speakers, I studied the cover, which featured seven black men rocking studded leather belts, wristbands, and gloves, along with Kangol hats and tight designer jeans. I’d never seen anything like it.
I cocked my head as the first beats of “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five sailed through the room. My whole body moved, almost involuntarily, when the synth notes came in. I had been a dancing fool since the age of three—from shimmying on the couch to making up routines in my bedroom to learning to do the hustle. The bottom of the song hit me in the solar plexus, and the lyrics set my imagination on fire. The urban jungle the MCs painted was so far from my quaint suburbia, but something in the music spoke to me.
Listening to that song was like taking the red pill in The Matrix. Once I’d heard it, I could never unhear it, and all music thereafter would be held to that standard of excellence and urgency and poetry and storytelling. In other words, I became a hip-hop devotee in precisely seven minutes and ten seconds.
My first boyfriend was a rakish Irish guitar player named Aaron. The moment I set eyes on him playing bass in a dive bar in Gastown, I knew he would be my boyfriend. We shared a love of music, mostly British punk and new wave, but diverged enormously when it came to hip-hop.
One night in 1985, we were sitting in the basement of my parents’ house watching MuchMusic—Canada’s version of MTV—when the video for Run-D.M.C.’s “King of Rock” came on. I was glued to the TV and could barely contain my enthusiasm. His face curled in disgust and disdain.
“You like this? How could you possibly like this? It’s not music!”
That sentiment would be echoed by many all over the world for years to come. To me, hip-hop was a perfect potent parfait. It combined all the elements of the music that had informed my life: the compelling drama and narrative of opera, the infectious melodies and hooks of pop, the powerful vocal performances of crooners, the four-on-the-floor beats and danceability of disco, the rebellious messages and stripped-down arrangements of punk. And that’s just what I could hear. Listening to “The Message” on repeat was ear-opening, but seeing Run-D.M.C.’s “King of Rock” video just that one time was eye-popping.
It occurs to me now that hip-hop was the first time I’d seen people of color telling their own stories as opposed to seeing them through the dominant white male lens of Hollywood. These artists were so physically assertive—stomping their feet, slapping their chests, and the ultimate B-boy stance: arms crossed high, hands tucked into the armpits, feet apart. This kind of unapologetic bearing was completely novel to me, an Asian woman who had been trained to shrink herself to accommodate others. It all spoke to an exhortation to be seen as they wanted to be seen. And unlike me, they were so proud of who and what they were.
Like most teenagers, I rebelled against my parents. Once I started driving at sixteen, it was hard to keep tabs on me. I didn’t get drunk or high, mainly because I hated the thought of not being in control, but I started sneaking out to clubs in twelfth grade. I took Heesok’s ID and used an X-Acto knife to cut out a photo of myself and covered his with a thin layer of plastic. I went to the Pit, the university pub in the basement of the Student Union Building, to dance every week. It was filled with frat boys in letterman jackets, drinking cheap beers by the pitcher. I would go to the center of the empty circular dance floor, which was in the middle of the room, like a stage in a roundabout theater, and let loose to whatever was playing, but my jam was Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” When Michael’s voice proclaimed, “Yee-hah!” I would jump up on one foot and kick the other in the air.
Then there was the Luv-A-Fair, where the new wavers with gelled hair and asymmetrical shirts would dance to the likes of Depeche Mode, the Human League, and Culture Club. My signature song there was not a 1980s hit, it was Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” I would get on top of the speakers and get down to the Queen of Soul. I also went to a number of venues downtown—the Commodore, the Town Pump, and the Savoy—to see countless live shows. I figured out how to get backstage and became a straight-up groupie, except I didn’t want to sleep with the artists. Well, not all of them. I mostly just wanted to meet them. I loved talking to the people behind the music.
As I became friends with a few of the local bar bands, I also got to know their managers and talked to them a little about what they did. I learned about studios, sound checks, and touring. I was also constantly at the local record store looking at the new releases and asking for posters, many of which I have in my closet right now. The business side of music started to intrigue me as much as the bands themselves.
My going out was a source of tremendous tension between my father and me. Heesok told me that my father said to him, “We don’t know what to do about Sophia, we never had these problems with you!” My father didn’t know how to handle it when I asked if I could go shopping with a twenty-two-year-old guitar player. Why did I even ask? My father didn’t really have a choice and was right to be concerned—I had sex for the first time with that musician on a dirty mattress on the floor.
In my life, I can only recall seeing my mother cry twice. Neither was at my father’s death or his funeral. The first was when I was taking a bath around eight years old and started scooping the water out of the tub with both hands, because she’d done something to annoy me. I watched as she got on her hands and knees with the omnipresent gullae (Korean rag for cleaning every surface) and mopped up the water. The second was when I came home at around eighteen and found her in the basement, by herself, crying. I asked her what was wrong, and she opened her hands to show me that she had discovered my birth control pills. “I just want you to have a good life,” she sobbed. She couldn’t stand having no idea who my partner was. She must have been concerned for my safety overall as well. Seeing her cry was devastating, but I didn’t stop having sex and I only grew more enamored with the music scene and musicians. Naturally, my focus on school waned.
My parents didn’t demand straight As. They didn’t yell at us if we fell short of perfect grades; rather, they would kill us with silent looks of disappointment. I was a good student, but I was terrible at math, and when my father tried to teach me, it was dreadful for both of us: for me because calculus is Latin for “torture” and I was clearly disappointing my father, and for him because I was so terrible at the thing that was his lifelong passion, and he couldn’t get through to me.
At some level, my brother and I understood the sacrifices our parents had made for us, particularly my mother, who took up sewing clothes for other people to make extra money. When I was nine, she went to work full-time at the UBC library, where she wrote out the catalogue cards in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and English by hand, which involved romanizing the Asian languages. Because of the occupation, she was fluent in Japanese, and luckily, she had studied Chinese at night school because my father had wanted to visit China.
French was my favorite subject in high school. It came so easily and I had a perfect accent. I sucked at the sciences and think I failed geography. My English lit teacher told my parents that I wore my disdain for him openly on my face. Good thing he never found out that we used to call him Caliban, after the deformed beast in The Tempest. One of my science teachers definitely had a crush on me. I remember he once came up to the window of the door of the classroom I was in and licked it, knowing no one else could see him. When I met his Japanese wife, it was the first time I understood yellow fever.
When I got to the University of British Columbia, where my father taught and my mother worked, I followed again in Heesok’s academic footsteps, still falling far short of filling them. There was an amazing interdisciplinary program called ArtsONE that provided three of the five required credits for the year. It was a combination of English, philosophy, and history. There was a weekly lecture on the given book, as well as a seminar and tutorials with your assigned professor. It was here that I truly learned to read, write, and analyze. We had to write a paper every two weeks. My favorite professor of all time was a tall bearded man, child of Russian immigrants, named Ed Hundert, a New Yorker, who told me that Barney’s used to be a discount men’s clothing store. He spoke slowly and deliberately with a booming voice and had a wonderful laugh and smile. When I think of my favorite lecture of all time, it was one that he gave about Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and love.
In my second year, I started to focus on French and took literature classes as well as a pronunciation class. I remember watching my professor Jocelyne Baverel round her lips to show us how to make the “uuu” sound in French, which doesn’t exist in English. And I had a professor named Ralph Sarkonak who taught us Proust and made fun of me all the time. There was one professor who reminded me of the actor Louis Jourdan. He was tall, dark, and handsome, from the south of France. I could tell he was attracted to me too. One day he drove me home and though nothing happened, I felt the chemistry. Total fantasy to fuck the hot French professor, but it never happened.
I got decent grades that would have been much better had I done the required reading, but I was too busy skipping classes to go to the newly opened Mexican restaurant with my friend Jen Fraser, whom I knew from high school. She, Stephanie Lysyk, also a high school classmate, and I used to go out all the time to the clubs. I would tell my mother I was going to Sedgewick Library because it closed at 1:00 a.m. She told me years later that she always knew that I wasn’t going to study. I think it’s pretty great that she never confronted me about it and let it rock. One of the best grades I got was on a paper I wrote about Dante’s Inferno. Why Inferno? Because I hadn’t read Purgatorio or Paradiso. There was a woman in the class who was really competitive with me and was furious that I got a 92 without doing all the reading.
As I made my way through college, skipping classes, neglecting reading assignments, and going out at every opportunity, it started to become clear to me that I had to get out of Vancouver. Neither the city nor my parents could contain me. I didn’t have specific dreams, I just knew I wanted to leave. Like many of us raised in the suburbs or small towns, I longed to spread my wings in a major metropolis.
