“You might’ve been smarter after all, Suzy. To cut out when you did, when you followed your asshole Damian to the ends of the earth. At least you stuck to your heart. You did what you wanted to do, no matter how you reproached yourself afterward. Who’s to say what’s right and wrong? Who’s to say the right path is so right after all?”
Suzy stops biting the rim of the paper cup and stares at Jen. It is unlike Jen to be so filled with doubt. Jen has always been confident, and right. She has always been the image of what Suzy was not, what Suzy could never be—the ultimate emblem of the American dream. It was Jen who begged her to stay when Suzy packed her bag in her senior year. “This isn’t love,” Jen repeated with unflinching certainty. “You don’t love him; love shouldn’t make you run.” Four years later, when the escapade with Damian was over, it was also Jen who took her in without asking any question. She cleared her study so that Suzy could sleep through those unfathomable weeks following her parents’ murder. Jen always knew exactly what to do. It is not fair, Suzy thinks, for Jen to retreat like this suddenly. It is not fair for Jen to break down before her.
What do you want after all, do you want me to tell you?
Damian had struck the right chord. The impossibility of desire might have been at the core of their union. The escape with Damian, why did it happen? Did he manipulate her into their reckless affair, as Professor Tamiko had once suggested? Did he claim nineteen-year-old Suzy in order to punish his wife, whom he failed to love? Would he have wanted her still had she not been Asian, so much younger than Yuki Tamiko, and definitely less fierce? What Suzy had wanted in return is still not clear. Neither an act of courage nor mindless passion. In fact, it was very mindful, each step measured. It had to be Damian. It could only have been Damian. No one would have claimed her with such absolute disregard.
“But I had no choice.” Suzy is not sure how to continue this, how to explain the inevitability of the past. “The difference between you and me is that you’ve always been on the right side. You say that you’re not sure anymore. But you are. Because you’re outraged still. Because you’re sad, not for fear of losing your job but for its injustice. You search for explanation. You won’t give up until you find the way. You have the eye to discern what is good and what isn’t. You can point a finger and tell me where and when and why. You’re confident in that knowledge. You’re secure. No one can take that away from you.” Suzy draws a quick breath and glances at Jen, who is quietly listening. Jen has one thing Suzy could never have: a sense of entitlement, the certainty of belonging. It was not a quality Suzy could learn to adopt, or even pretend to assume. Jen belonged, Suzy didn’t. It was as simple as that. If Suzy had resented Jen for it, she would have hated herself, because it was easier to blame the one who lacked. And such resentment would have been so lonely that Suzy could not have borne it. Jen, Suzy knows, would understand this.
“Me, I’m not sure if I ever had it in me. For a long time, for as far back as I can remember, something was amiss, something fundamental. It’s as if I’ve never had a home, as if I’ve never known what it is to have faith, as if I was never taught what’s right from wrong, or if I was, then somehow the difference didn’t matter. Why is it that I never felt guilty toward Professor Tamiko? Or Michael’s wife? Why did I choose Michael? Why did I run with Damian? Why did I run from my parents?”
She did not mean to bring up her parents. Kim Yong Su. His dead wife out in Montauk. Her poor, sad parents. Missing Grace.
Jen stares at Suzy, meeting her eyes for the first time. She is about to say something, but she looks away instead at the empty green patch of grass where pigeons had flocked only minutes ago. The late-autumn breeze is sharper now. The bare branches have formed hard shadows. The lamps along the fenced path appear bright, giving off a warm glow when everything else is shutting down. Finally, without turning her face, Jen asks, “Do you still hate your parents, Suzy?”
It is useless to pretend with an old friend. Yet there are things one should never say aloud, never admit. So, instead, Suzy says with forced clarity, “But they’re both dead; it’s been five years.”
“Five years, but you’re still hiding,” Jen mutters slowly.
“Not any more than what you’re doing here with me,” says Suzy, changing the subject.
Jen is smiling now. The first real smile since she got here. “Decaf sucks, doesn’t it?”
“It was your idea.” Suzy puts down the cup, which has gotten tepid too quickly. “So you still have to go back to the office?”
“Yeah. The issue ships tomorrow, and Harrison still hasn’t faxed in his corrections.”
“The control-freak writer?”
“More like the pain-in-the-ass writer. If he didn’t have such a stunning mind, we would’ve severed our ties with his last piece, which came in three months late.”
“What’s this one about?”
“Nabokov. The pre-Lolita years, when he was teaching at Cornell. Harrison was one of his students then and makes a case about how Nabokov had hated America, and, even worse, how he despised writing in English. Harrison claims that Lolita was really a metaphor for how Nabokov felt toward the English language. The strange mix of desire, subjugation, remorse. It’s an interesting theory, although I’m not sure how much of it I really buy. Nabokov wrote in English almost exclusively, you know. Once he moved here in the forties, he dropped his native Russian, which was a peculiar decision. But he’d been raised trilingual—English, French, and of course Russian. As far as I can tell, he was at ease with all three languages. The man ended up retiring to Switzerland, of all places, talk about neutral ground! They only okayed this article because it’s controversial, and of course because it’s Harrison. He even claims that Nabokov’s decision to adopt American citizenship was little more than a pretext, that it gave him cover for his anti-Americanism. It happened in 1945, not exactly an innocent year. It offers a totally new reading of Lolita. I’m not convinced, though.” Jen turns to her, knitting her eyebrows. “Does it mean all that much? What does it mean to adopt a new citizenship?”
American citizenship. Of course, Suzy, having come to America at five, had to have become a naturalized citizen at some point. The question rarely came up. She has never even applied for a passport. The idea of flying seized her with vertigo, but in reality, the opportunity never arose. Damian talked about their taking a trip together, since his research often took him to Asia. But it soon became obvious that he did not want her along on his trips. Without a passport, nothing proves her citizenship. She has always checked off the “citizen” box on financial-aid forms, because she once asked Mom and was told that she was a citizen. Since she herself was a citizen, wouldn’t her parents and Grace be as well? When did they all become citizens? How did it happen? She was told that they had left Korea in 1975. They had followed a family member who had been living in the United States, a cousin on Mom’s side, who must have applied for their visa. When Suzy asked the whereabouts of this cousin, Mom said that she died soon after their arrival. Suzy remembers feeling bad about it. Since they had no relatives in America and had not kept in touch with anyone from Korea, an aunt nearby would’ve been nice. But as it turned out, the family had no one. When other kids boasted about visiting a grandmother or a cousin or an aunt, Suzy just shrugged. She had never had any, so she felt no terrible loss.
Contrary to their insistence on everything Korean, her parents rarely discussed their life back home. Dad had been an orphan. A war orphan, a leftover from the 38th Parallel, he used to say. He’d been all alone from birth, and yet he’d managed to get himself to the richest country in the world, so how about that!—Dad would grunt at little Suzy and Grace on nights when he downed a whole bottle of soju. On those nights, Dad seemed to forget that they were there at all. The rage they often witnessed was gone too. He seemed to be fighting the urge to remember and yet could not stop recalling the demons from his Korean past, which had nothing to do with his daughters or his wife or this faraway land, as far as the ocean, as far as the length of a decade or two decades or however long it took to call it a home, a place called Queens, a place called the Bronx, a place called America, none of which assuaged whatever stuck in his heart unturned. What Suzy saw was a kind of sorrow, so raw that it felt contagious. Had his recollections at such times signaled the seed of all his angers, she could not have known, because he would not have told, because he was a type of man who should never have had a family.