1
Maslow
Bo wanted to be cautious.
In the spring, he enrolled at Fullerton College and took two classes while still working at Exodus fifty hours a week. The math classes were far too easy for him.
When he received A’s in Calculus II and Discrete Mathematics, he made an appointment with Mr. Gonzalez, a soft-spoken counselor in the Transfer Alliance Program, whom the students called TAP Guy.
A month into his first fall semester, Bo showed Mr. Gonzalez a draft of his course selections for the next year and a half.
“You did all this yourself?” Mr. Gonzalez asked, impressed.
“My friend Lion helped me think it through,” Bo said. “I created the spreadsheet and chose the classes.”
“So how’s this semester going?”
“Good so far.”
“Favorite class?”
“Psychology 101,” Bo said, adding, “Honors Focus.”
“Ah, you have Dr. Wilson. She’s great. Once you have her for Honors Focus, you might get converted.”
“How so?”
“She might make you want to be a psych major. She’s that good.”
“Do you become a psychologist then?”
“You can do lots of things with a psych degree, but you’d have to get an advanced degree to become a clinical psychologist. You can ask Dr. Wilson all about that. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.
“For now, if you stay on the honors track, there’s a lot of upside: smaller class sizes, meeting serious students like yourself, and most of your credits can transfer over to a school like UCLA,” Mr. Gonzalez said, snapping his fingers.
Self-conscious about getting too excited about his work, TAP Guy lifted his wire-framed eyeglasses, which had slid down a bit from the bridge of his button nose.
“That’s where you said you want to aim, right? UCLA? My alma mater.”
Bo shrugged. Lion had already explained that he could get his associate degree in two years and then transfer to a four-year institution like UCLA to get his BA.
“I need to stay in Southern California,” Bo said. “Do you think I could get in? To UCLA?”
“Yeah, definitely. But man, you need to work a little less. Not your schoolwork, but your paid work. Fifty hours is a lot. Even if it isn’t mentally taxing for a brainy dude like you, it’s still a lot of time.
You still need to sleep and eat. Can you afford to work less hours?
” Most students at Fullerton had to work. “You got a kid or something?”
“Me?” Bo looked startled, then laughed. “Oh, no. I don’t have any kids. I help my family. We just moved apartments, and the rent’s gone up.”
“Right. I get you. Same,” the counselor said, nodding. “Life. Family. It’s expensive.” Mr. Gonzalez shook his head, feeling sorry for Bo. He, too, had worked since high school to help his mom and younger brothers.
Bo did his problem sets in the van while waiting for the kids.
At Exodus, before teaching, he’d finish his homework in the lounge, and if that was crowded, Lion let him use his office.
At home, when everyone went to sleep, Bo did his studying at the kitchen table.
The family had recently bought a television and a VCR from Costco, but after dinner, no one watched anything, and the house was kept quiet so Bo could do his schoolwork.
It was all work, school, and, on Sundays, church, but he felt like the family was making progress.
Just last month, when a family moved out of the building to try their luck in Atlanta, the Kohs had moved into the vacated three-bedroom apartment on a lower floor, which had an extra bath and an additional bedroom with a window for Bo and DH when he visited.
The unit cost an extra $400, but with four people working, the rent was manageable, and now they would have a houseguest. Sonya was arriving, and she’d stay in Mido’s room.
Bo was picking her up at the airport after Psych 101.
This fall, there were twenty-six students enrolled in Intro Psychology 101 (Honors Focus), taught by Dr. Rhoda Wilson, a forty-eight-year-old mother of two, who had earned her PhD in Psychology at UCLA in her late thirties, after putting her husband through law school.
The professor was highly regarded for her pioneering scholarship on anxiety and immigrants from the West Indies.
The daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and Saint Kitts, she had grown up in Altadena and started at Cal State Long Beach, then transferred to UCLA. It had been her idea for Bo to meet with Mr. Gonzalez.
On campus, Professor Wilson was famous for her unbelievable recall.
She could learn the class roster on the first day and somehow remember your name years later.
Attractive, friendly, and able to pass for mid-thirties, she was used to older male students flirting with her during office hours; however, when a student lingered too long and tried to make a move, she’d tilt her head and say with a smile, “C’mon now, really?
That’s how you want to get an A? No, thank you, dear. ”
Attendance was part of the grade, but even if it weren’t, Bo couldn’t imagine missing Professor Wilson’s class. Before Fullerton College, he had known almost nothing about psychology, and he had never expected to like the subject this much.
“Definitely take Intro Psych. It’ll help you understand Americans, who are not like Koreans,” Lion had advised him, and whenever Bo did the reading from the used Myers Fifth Edition, which had cost almost $40, he found that he enjoyed it even more than his eighteenth-century British literature class, which he loved, and certainly far more than Multivariable Calculus, which he could handle fine since he’d done so much math in Seoul.
As he settled into life at Fullerton and Exodus, he thought about his years spent studying for the Suneung.
Having failed three times to hit the target score for Yonsei, Bo had felt stupid and ashamed.
Looking back, he couldn’t understand why it had been so important to him.
His aunt Sonya had argued that if he wanted to remain in Korea and be more Korean, he could apply to another school with easier requirements, but he hadn’t.
Bo had bet everything on one school, one of the toughest in the country, for which there was an entrance exam given only once a year.
Now that he earned a living teaching college entrance exams that were given several times a year, he wondered why the Suneung for schools like Yonsei, SNU, and Korea University was offered only once each November, when the nation held its collective breath for the exam’s duration.
Almost never did Bo talk about his years studying for Yonsei, but even as he grew more optimistic about his life in America, he could not forget his stubborn quest. More than anything, he hoped that he’d never make such a mistake again with his time, his choices, and his life.
Once he had tabulated the cost his family had borne for his three tries, and the number humbled him. Of course, Bo wanted to make it up to them.
Psychology appealed to him. In Seoul, he’d selected sociology largely because his high school counselor said that if he wanted to get into Yonsei, a sociology concentration would be easier for admission than, say, law or medicine.
As for psychology, he had once believed that it was the study of people who were not well mentally, and the idea of it had scared him.
In class, no one seemed unwell. Professor Wilson was easily one of the most joyous adults he’d ever met, and her class was fun.
The class was full of interesting people who asked intelligent questions he’d never considered.
Students didn’t talk as much in his other classes, but here, his fellow classmates surprised him at each meeting.
Every time he did the reading, he thought of more people he’d encountered in his life. He wanted to know more about his own life and started to remember how he had grown up in Paramus, Sydney, Seoul, and now Southern California.
In addition to chapter 7 of Myers, the reading for today’s class was Abraham Maslow’s “A Theory of Human Motivation,” a research paper from the 1940s, which was supposed to be important. Professor Wilson put up a poster of a five-layered pyramid symbolizing the different levels of human motivation.
“Maslow himself never depicted his theory using the pyramid image. Others did that. However, I think the image is helpful,” the professor said, and looked across the room, not expecting anyone to agree or disagree on that point.
She had a tendency to offer a thought, let the statement linger in the air, then move on.
The students shuffled in their seats, took notes on loose-leaf paper or in cheap notebooks not much different from the paper they’d used in middle school or high school. Bo copied the diagram, certain that the material would appear on the midterm.
“Initially Maslow argued that human beings had five stages of needs: At the base level are physiological needs—air, water, food, shelter; then above that is the need for feelings of safety—the wish to be free from violence but also insecurity. For example, even the need for insurance would fall under the need for safety because that feels like protection from harm to one’s body or property.
Above physiological and safety needs is our need for love and belonging.
Human beings are social creatures, and we crave love and community.
“Above physiological, safety, and love needs, we have our need for esteem—both self-esteem and esteem from others. For example, if you are a football player and achieve a touchdown, you may feel good about yourself, and the crowds may respect your achievement. The touchdown can do both things.
“Finally, the top of the pyramid is self-actualization, when a human being fulfills his potential. Maslow later revised the five and added more over the years, but today, we’ll focus on the original paper.”
The class wrote down the five.