Don Lee - The Collective

Only three weeks were left in the semester, and there was a rush of activity as we geared toward finals. The first Saturday in December, the school held the annual Winter Ball, a semiformal dance for which you were supposed to show up in your nicest outfit, replicating — sardonically — what you had worn to your prom or homecoming. In high school, I had gone through a preppy phase, and I pulled out my blue blazer, pink button-down oxford shirt, argyle sweater vest, and penny loafers. Didi teased her hair into a poodle perm, adorned with a lacy bow, and donned a taffeta dress with spaghetti straps, white tights, and granny boots. She was, all irony aside, gorgeous. As we made our entrance at the gallery of Olin-Rice, the science building, I was proud of her, of us, of our identity as a couple.

Joshua was sporting a beat-down leather motorcycle jacket, holey jeans, and a Red Sox cap — his usual garb. “I didn’t go to my prom,” he said. “Where the hell have you been? I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age, and we live down the fucking hall.”

I nodded toward Didi, who was loading hors d’oeuvres onto two plates for us. “Doesn’t she look beautiful?”

“Jesus,” Joshua said. “You’re a goner. You’re totally pussy-whipped.”

For the rest of the term, Didi and I had to buckle down, catch up on everything we had neglected. We studied in my room — with our clothes on, for a change. I sped through Dog Soldiers and Going After Cacciato (the author, Tim O’Brien, was a Mac alum), and I wrote a paper on the role of drugs and surrealism as a counter-exposition to colonialism. Didi integrated partial fractions and differentiated logarithms and calculated polynomials. I marveled at our industry, our focus. We were actually studying, getting things done, while sitting in the same room, although all it took was a single glance from either of us to abandon everything for a quickie. But then, miraculously, as if nothing had occurred, we would slip our underwear back up and return to our books.

During exam week, we stayed up all night, cramming for tests. The school held a midnight breakfast for us, with professors and administrators — including the president — in aprons, serving us pancakes, the repast occasionally interrupted by primal screams and the time-honored appearance of students, Joshua among them, streaking nude through the hall.

And then, before I knew it, it was over. I was back home in Mission Viejo, Didi was in Massachusetts, and we would not see each other again for a month.

I moped. It was seventy-two degrees and sunny out, but I stayed in my bedroom, trying to puzzle my way through Gravity’s Rainbow —the first title on the recommended reading list that Joshua had given to me for my vacation. I slept late, watched TV, and hoggishly ate the meals my mother prepared for me (“You’re so skinny!” she had said, horrified, when she met me at John Wayne Airport).

I saw a few friends — high school buddies who had remained in Southern California, attending one of the UC or Cal State schools — but I felt little connection with them anymore and preferred staying home, renting videos of foreign films from Blockbuster and listening to Lou Reed (first on the recommended albums list that Joshua had given to me) on my headphones, occasionally interrupted by my mother as she brought in my folded laundry and asked if I wanted a snack.

I let her pamper me — something I had resisted mightily in high school, something that had, in fact, led to awful rows and appalling cruelty on my part.

My mother, Junie, had been born in 1940 in Korea and had come to the States soon after World War II, when her father, a prominent chiropractor in Seoul, was hired to teach at Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. He eventually moved the family to L.A., where he set up his first clinic in Koreatown (he would build a chain of them dotting the Los Angeles Basin, yet was lousy as a businessman and was perpetually in debt). My mother grew up in Boyle Heights and attended community college, LACC, then worked as a postal clerk, a job she held until my sister was born.

From then on, her focus was solely on the maintenance of her home and her children, making our lunches and getting us to school every weekday, fastidiously cleaning the house, gardening, grocery shopping and prepping our dinners, picking us up and ferrying us to various places and activities. My mother’s typical sack lunch for me included two homemade chicken salad sandwiches, sticks of carrots and celery, cookies, potato chips, and an orange. It wasn’t a fancy lunch, not like the elaborate bentos some of my Japanese American classmates clicked open, but it was meticulously prepared, exemplified by the orange. My mother would slice the outer skin so it would open up like the petals of a flower, still connected at the base. She would peel off the inner white membrane of the orange, then put it back — now pristine and tender — into its protective skin. An ordinary piece of fruit turned into an art form.

She tried to spoil us rotten, my father, sister, and me. And how did I repay my mother for her devotion in my teenage years? I snapped at her. I belittled her. I was sarcastic and rude. Unconscionably mean. I yelled at her to stop trying to do everything for me, stop doting on me, stop being so nice to me (“You’re not my maid! Don’t you have any self-respect?!”). I raged when she cleaned my room (“Don’t ever come in here again without my permission!”). I fulminated when she ironed my clothes (“I’ll look like a nerd!”). I was apoplectic when she uniformly bleached my acid-washed jeans (“You’re an idiot!”). Her mere presence, taking a seat beside me on the couch, inquiring how I was doing, was enough to provoke my fury (“Why can’t you leave me alone?! You’re suffocating me!”).

It shames me still, the insufferable way I treated her. She had no career, no intellectual pursuits, few hobbies or interests other than horticulture, her world almost entirely confined to the domestic, to caring for us, and I thought less of my mother for it. I took her completely for granted.

She would die prematurely, when she was just fifty-nine, a month before I turned thirty. In the latter part of her life, she was diagnosed with high blood pressure, but wasn’t good about taking full doses of her medication, disliking the side effects. While she was swimming laps at the local pool, she had a stroke, a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The lifeguards were late pulling her out of the water and couldn’t revive her. Technically she drowned. My father called me with the news from California, incoherent as he wept.

For several years afterward, I could not get one question out of my head. Its arrival — usually when I was in the middle of the most humdrum things, riding the subway, washing the dishes, peeling an orange — would undo me. I was always afraid of breaking down in public. The question was this: What was going through her mind those last few seconds, after the sunburst in her brain, as she was choking facedown in the water, knowing she would likely not survive? Unlike with Joshua’s suicide later, I knew exactly what her last thoughts must have been. I knew she was thinking she would never see her children again, me and Rebecca, she would never see us marry or have children of our own, would never spend another Thanksgiving or Christmas with us, would never be able to hold us and say she loved us, and I knew this must have been unbearably, heartbreakingly sad for her.

I am forty-one years old now. Indeed I did not fully appreciate her until — relatively recently — I got married and had children. In retrospect, it dismays me how little curiosity and empathy I had toward my mother when I was young, how rarely I tried to imagine her inner life, or even acknowledged that she had one, with hopes and disappointments of her own. That image did not come complete for me until the last Christmas our family spent together, in 1999, before she died. I found a bunch of old slides in a closet, and I set up a projector in the den for my parents, Rebecca, and me to view after dinner. They were slides of my mother and father’s wedding and honeymoon. We howled and cried, we were laughing so hard, looking at the antiquated fashions and hairdos, but privately Rebecca and I were impressed by our parents’ youth, how handsome and vibrant they were. Our mother recounted their courtship, and she made fun of my father’s strenuous pursuit of her, but she was plainly delighted by the memory.