Chapter Two
TWO
There was exactly one from South Dakota (me). There was exactly one from North Dakota (Eunjin).
Most people at school, upon hearing that we are both from one of the Dakotas, assume we met via some organized function for incoming students.
But no. You may be surprised (or unsurprised) to hear: there were meet-ups for matriculating freshmen in Dubai, London, Singapore, and even Warsaw, but not in the Great Plains.
The way Eunjin and I actually met was three years ago, on the third day of freshman orientation during a seminar on sexual assault prevention. We had both arrived early and sat in the second row of the auditorium.
My first impression of Eunjin was that she was very pretty.
Probably in the 80th percentile of all women, regardless of race.
She was half Asian, so I wasn’t sure whether to compare her to other white women or other Asian women.
I still haven’t figured out if being half means that you fall in the median of Asian and white women’s attractiveness or if you’re actually placed even higher than white women, paradoxically.
Anyway, I thought she was really pretty, which meant that for the entirety of the seminar, I did not suspect that she would be the one other student that Columbia University had accepted from the Dakotas.
I would’ve assumed Los Angeles. Or Hawaii.
Which would automatically mean that she was cooler than me.
I leaned over and introduced myself.
“Isn’t it kind of funny that they think a two-hour lecture will prevent rape?” I asked. She didn’t respond right away. I started to worry I had offended her.
“Yeah, it is kind of funny. But maybe it’ll prevent one or two. I’m happy with sitting through two hours of this if it means even just one or two.”
Afterward, we bought boba and hung out in my room. Eunjin told me that she hadn’t even tried boba before and she wasn’t sure how she felt about the texture. I told her that she wouldn’t be a proper Asian unless she liked boba, and she looked stunned until I clarified that I was joking.
“But how have you never tried boba?” I said. “I’m from a small town in South Dakota, and even we have boba.”
“Wait, you’re from South Dakota? No way. I’m from North Dakota.”
By hour three of our hangout, we knew everything worth knowing about each other.
Eunjin confided in me about her dreams of becoming a concert violinist, how the fingers on her left hand were permanently blistered from practicing hours each day.
I confided in her about my plan to attend Harvard Law School, how I had started studying for the LSAT and already knew which professors had the best hookups to clerkships.
It wasn’t long before I told her about my parents as well.
They were the classic immigrant story. In the ’90s they moved from China for my father to get a PhD in physics at the South Dakota School of Mines.
Upon graduation he got a job at a lab in Brookings.
My dad was in his second year of working when my mom became pregnant with me.
They scrimped and saved for a 20 percent down payment on one of the newly constructed ranch-style homes that were popping up on every corner in the early 2000s.
I’ve never understood why, but Chinese people are obsessed with owning real estate.
In those years, when money was tight, anything they could spare financially went toward me.
Diapers, baby clothes, a highly rated stroller; when I got a little older, ice-skating lessons, Kumon classes, and summer camp.
Neither of my parents bought new clothes or shoes for themselves for three years, and they celebrated most milestones at McDonald’s, placing me in the red high chair as they downed their Big Macs and french fries.
There was a period when things finally started to stabilize.
I had just started the second grade but even I could feel things getting better.
My father was moving up in the lab, which meant McDonald’s was no longer an occasional treat but a Friday night ritual, and we started celebrating birthdays at Applebee’s—for really special occasions, maybe even Outback Steakhouse.
“Someday you’ll be able to eat Outback Steakhouse every day,” my dad used to say to me.
“Actually, by then, you won’t even want to go to Outback Steakhouse.
When you’re my age, it won’t be good enough for you.
” I could not fathom that anywhere could be nicer than an Outback Steakhouse.
My dad said those types of things a lot.
I had to work hard, get good grades, get a good job, and I would be better off than he and my mother could ever imagine.
“You don’t have the language barrier, the culture barrier, any of that.
You can do anything you want,” he would tell me during dinner.
Years before I ever watched The East Siders, he was the one who first told me about the Ivy League.
Get into one of them, and you’d be set for life.
All of them were good, but Harvard was the best, he liked to remind me.
Maybe that’s why I wanted to go to Harvard Law so bad.
I had made it to good, but I still hadn’t made it to the best.
When my dad went off on these tangents about my future, my mother would slap him on the shoulder.
“Don’t put too much pressure on her. Money isn’t everything.
Status isn’t everything. We don’t want her to start valuing the wrong things.
” But he’d be back at it the next night.
It was only when I was older that my mom told me that my dad had been struggling at work in those years—being passed up for promotion after promotion, getting told he needed to work on his “communication skills,” feeling powerless as his less qualified colleague ended up as his manager, and, on some bad days, wondering if moving to America had been worth it after all.
We had obtained a comfortable, middle-class life, but my father was beginning to see that that was all they were willing to give him.
I was going to leave it there. I usually don’t tell new friends about the rest of the story until at least the third or fourth hangout.
I wasn’t sure what was different about this time.
Maybe because she was the first person I met in college who was also from a state that you never hear about. Or maybe I was just feeling lonely.
“He’s not in my life anymore,” I said. “He ended up moving back to China. Got a job there, has a new family now. He didn’t want to stay in the US, but my mom did. For me, she said. So I could have the opportunities that she never had.”
“But your dad must still be so proud of you. You’re in New York now, you’re at Columbia. Looks like the risk he took paid off.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. I called him when I got in. He said congratulations, then asked me why I hadn’t applied early to Harvard instead.”
Maybe something in me sensed that Eunjin had her own parental issues, and that’s why I was more forthcoming than usual.
It’s a blend of independence and vulnerability that characterizes people who had to at least partially raise themselves.
Later in the conversation, Eunjin told me about her father’s alcoholism, which her mother hadn’t known about until the day after they got married.
She had been a gifted violinist in South Korea, the concertmaster at their local symphony who had once dreamed of the Lincoln Center, of Carnegie Hall, of audiences in tuxedos and ball gowns dazzled into a standing ovation by her renditions of Beethoven, Bach, Chopin.
But when she moved to the United States to marry Eunjin’s dad, she became pregnant and never auditioned again.
For Eunjin’s fourth birthday, her mother gifted her a 1/16th size Stentor. It was the smallest available in the store, but when Eunjin tucked the instrument under her chin for the first time, she still had to stretch her left arm to reach the finger tapes.
—
The night after Eunjin’s performance at the gallery, the two of us went to our friends Leah and Alex’s dorm to smoke weed.
It was our Thursday night ritual. Most students didn’t have class on Friday, so the atmosphere on campus was energetic, full of release.
The sound of rustling leaves accompanied my evening walk, which made the campus buildings seem more imposing than usual.
Alex and Leah lived together in a double on the seventh floor of a building across the street from ours, pushing together their twin mattresses to create a king-sized bed.
Leah was the kind of beautiful that made you want to hate her but also be her best friend.
When I met her in my University Writing class freshman year, she was still sleeping with much older drummers of niche Brooklyn bands, but a few months later she started dating Alex, who went by they/them pronouns.
They had delicate, birdlike features and a shaved head.
They were also the only person close to me who I didn’t know the percentile of.
I tried, but I didn’t even know where to start.
Would I compare them to men or women? According to the beauty standards for men or the beauty standards for women?
Alex was too complex and unique a person for me to place on any scale.
Leah took out some weed and rolling paper from a wooden box under her bed. Alex rolled the joint on the kitchen counter, expertly nudging the paper into a tight cylinder. We crouched on the fire escape and watched the glittering lights of skyscrapers downtown.
The four of us smoked until everything in the room started to look like boobs: the ceiling light, the blueberries on the kitchen counter, the smudged tail of Alex’s eyeliner. We giggled for fifteen minutes before falling into a deep silence, each of us entranced in our own thoughts.