Chapter Text
As a child, Choi Nam-ra’s mother gives her daughter a mathematics problem to solve instead of the box of crayons she asked for. Society would dictate this to be surprising, even a little strange, because girls her age should be outside playing and eating ice cream and dreaming about becoming princesses.
Even more surprising: she solves it, with the wit and intellect of someone far beyond her age, so her mother briefly pets her hair for a job well done and gives her more math problems to solve.
Her mother’s friends come to the house, sometimes. When that happens, the house is cleaned from top to bottom, and so is Nam-ra. The maids make sure that her hair is brushed out and her palms are scrubbed and there isn’t a speck of dirt underneath her fingernails. She’s given a pretty, flowy dress to wear, with soft layered skirts that she likes to twirl around in, until the head maid of the house spots her spinning in place and warns her to behave. This is an important day for your mother, says the maid. You’d do best to act like a little lady so you don’t disappoint her.
Her mother calls for her, and Nam-ra comes obediently. She curtsies and says hello to her elders, just like she’d been taught, and the adults gush and coo about how pretty and grown-up she looks in her champagne dress.
Then she’s ushered out the room by the head maid and told to stay out of the parlor until she’s summoned again.
Nam-ra has nowhere else to go, so she climbs onto a large ottoman and sits and waits until she is called elsewhere. From this room, she can still clearly hear the voices of her mother and her friends tittering from the parlor.
“She’s a little genius,” her mother says. “A true prodigy. She’s solving algebra problems already. Soon we’re going to move onto trigonometry.”
Her mother’s friends hum politely, a chorus of Oh I see and Is that so? and You must be very proud.
The math problems were just something she did because they were there. She could figure out how the numbers worked together when she concentrated on them. Now she knows, it must be very important for her mother.
One of the other mothers says, “Well, my little Mun-ho has a lot of promise with the piano. He’s taken to it quite a bit since he started lessons. I think he could have a bright future as a classical pianist.”
“Actually, Nam-ra has some talent with the piano too. She loves it. I’ll have her play for everyone some day.”
Nam-ra has never heard this before. The last time she tried to touch the piano in the parlor, the head maid had scolded her something fierce for getting her little fingerprints on the pristine keys.
But if that’s what her mother says, then it’s only right that she listens.
The hair-petting stops, eventually, but the mathematics keep coming, along with many other problems from many other subjects, and she is pushed and pushed until she solves each one.
“You’re going to become one of the most powerful women in Korea one day,” her mother says. “I’ll make sure of it.”
If that’s what her mother says, then it’s only right that she listens.
She’s kept running on a tight schedule. At five in the morning, she gets her wake-up call. At six in the morning, she reads classic literature. At eight in the morning, breakfast is served. On weekdays, tutoring begins at nine, with subjects on a revolving schedule depending on what day it is. At twelve o’clock, she has lunch and takes her supplements. On Saturdays, she has piano practice. At seven, she has dinner and takes more supplements, and then studies for the rest of the evening until bedtime is allowed.
It is more than just routine: it’s normal.
Years later, she’ll learn that the word “normal” is as much a loss as it is an advantage.
By twelve years old, Nam-ra has an entire team dedicated to her every need: a personal chef, a personal shopper, a personal trainer, a masseuse, a piano teacher, a whole fleet of maids, and at least a dozen different tutors coaching her on anything ranging from mathematics to Mandarin Chinese.
They are there to do their jobs, and nothing more. Her mother makes that perfectly clear. Once, she had caught Nam-ra asking one of the housemaids if she would sit and join her for lunch.
Her mother had dragged Nam-ra away by the wrist with a grip so tight she thought she’d twist her arm right out the socket.
“We don’t fraternize with the help,” her mother had admonished, wagging a finger in Nam-ra’s face. “They’re beneath us. They work for you, not with you. Do you understand me?”
Nam-ra never does it again.
When the maids call her to lunch, Nam-ra nods and doesn’t speak. When one of her tutors arrives, they sit, and they study, until the next one tags in and the cycle repeats.
(Nam-ra knows them all by name. She’s observed them enough to know bits of who they are and what they like to do outside of work, and she knows—just knows—those things will never involve her.)
Her father is present and simultaneously absent in her life. He works at the office during the day, and he arrives home in time for dinner, in time to be fed and to laze around watching golf on TV for the rest of the evening until one of the housemaids fetches his slippers for bed. He comes from old money, the third son of an investment banking mogul, of a long line of investment bankers, and all of these would be wonderful details to tell her friends if she had any.
He has never shown any affection nor guidance, no sign that he stakes any parental claim over her besides biologically bearing the title of “father” and so he becomes just another generic face in the cloud of people surrounding her life everyday.
Nam-ra remembers only brief moments in her life that weren’t entirely dedicated to studying. They flash in her mind like frames of a film strip cut and taped back together. There was the time she had used the pages of her notebook to fold paper cranes. There was the time she spent the day humming the jingle for a ramyeon commercial she heard on the way home from school. There was the time she was lounging out in the backyard, and she had stared at the bright red of a ladybug that had landed on the back of her hand.
They happen so infrequently that she wonders if she just dreamed them up, yet they stand out all the more in her memory for it.
They must have been real, she surmises. They must have really happened. She gets so very little sleep, she doesn’t know when she could possibly ever have the time to properly dream.
She complains exactly one time—just one time—about how her schedule has left her exhausted, really just an observation more than a complaint, and it throws her mother into a rage.
She screams and screams and screams about how Nam-ra doesn’t understand, how she can’t see all the hard work her mother has done for her, how she should be grateful for how she’s treated so well in this household because her mother used to do so much worse. My mother used to let me starve until I got good grades. My mother used to hit me so hard I was sent to the hospital. At some point a priceless vase is broken, shattered into a million pieces, and her mother holds up one of the jagged shards to her wrist. You want your poor mother to drop dead right now, is that it!? Is that what you want? Will that finally make you happy??
Nam-ra speaks barely five words during the whole exchange, too petrified to do anything or say anything that may further aggravate the situation the way she has already so catastrophically done.
(Her father, she learns later, sits quietly in his armchair in the living room reading the news from his tablet.)
When the rage subsides, and the house goes quiet once more, her mother approaches and takes a quivering Nam-ra into her arms, as though she were only a lost little lamb in need of guidance. “Come here, darling. It’s okay. It’s okay.” She seems to note how her daughter stands rigid and still in her arms, so she says, “A mother’s anger is never really anger, you know.” She strokes her fingers through Nam-ra’s locks to check for gray hairs. “When a mother gets angry, it’s only because she loves you.”
(Nam-ra wonders if her mother’s mother ever told her the same thing. Her biology book details how animals learn by emulating their parents. She doubts humans are much different.)
The thing is, her mother rarely smiles.
Well… Her mother smiles a lot, in front of the camera, for VIPs and VVIPs, but never for her, her only daughter. She regards her with only pursed lips and stark reminders that the 95 she received on her world history report is still not good enough and a perfect score would have been infinitely better.
(But Nam-ra remembers a time when her mother would smile and pet her hair, a soft touch of her hand against her scalp, and Nam-ra would smile too. As the years go by, from adolescence into teendom, Nam-ra grows with the feeling that she wants to make her mother happy.
(That’ll happen eventually, won’t it?)
At 15, when the maid asks if she’d like anything else, after delivering her daily red ginseng supplement packet and a cup of hot bitter tea, Nam-ra answers, “Cigarettes.”
The maid’s face goes alarmed, then tentatively amused, and when Nam-ra continues to stare back in that serious, unblinking way she does, it goes alarmed again. The maid sputters, chewing at her bottom lip, because she knows it’s her job to provide for Nam-ra’s needs but not to this extent.
“Young madam, I-I— I couldn’t possibly— Y-Your mother would—”
“Cigarettes,” Nam-ra repeats. “Or I’ll do much worse.”
She doesn’t elaborate much worse but the maid must imagine a whole slideshow of possibilities because her face goes very pale: Nam-ra breaking into her father’s wine cabinet, Nam-ra hanging herself by her bedsheets, Nam-ra finding a dirty back-alley dealer peddling weed or cocaine or heroin—
The maid hurries out to the store and comes back with a lighter and a neat pack of cigarettes. Nam-ra assures the trembling maid she won’t tell her boss before finally lighting up her first puff of nicotine.
It’s, perhaps, Nam-ra’s first abuse of power. She’s spent fifteen years learning from the best, after-all.
She doesn’t get into an elite high school like her mother planned.
The landscape was fiercely competitive this year, it seems, what with the mayor’s son and a national assemblyman’s triplet daughters all entering high school at the same time.
She endures another screaming tirade from her mother, knows by now to just sit there and nod and nod and apologize until she’s done.
When the initial outburst is over, her mother scoffs about how unfair it all us. The mayor’s son isn’t even in the top 10 of his class, let alone the whole school, and the Seo triplets don’t even have any meaningful extracurricular activities to their names. It’s just that their parents have more money, have more power and sway over the system, and Nam-ra wonders if her mother can even hear herself speak sometimes.
It’s no matter to her mother. That’s what her mouth says, at least. (In her stare, she says, Well now watch me fix all the problems you’ve caused.) She makes a large enough donation to the high school Nam-ra will attend. It’ll be enough to get her the preferential treatment she clearly deserves.
(That night, her mother ties Nam-ra’s wrist to the desk and locks her in her room until she writes three essays “like someone who’s actually worthy of staying under this roof.”)
She gets the first hint that something might be wrong with her lifestyle after her mock trial at nationals.
She spends thirty days and thirty nights preparing. The extra hard work is necessary because her mother is going to be there and her mother will watch and her mother will know if she doesn’t try hard enough, because her mother is a bloodhound like that, sniffing out a lack of effort that wasn’t given at 500%.
The week leading up to nationals is almost entirely sleepless. She rehearses with her coaches again and again until it feels like her entire vocabulary has been replaced with her case argument. If she can impress the residing judge (a retired but lauded judge in the Korean national court), then it’ll be all the better for her future.
As soon as she steps into the courtroom, with all the fluorescent lights shining in her face, the room spins. She’s running on an entire case of canned coffee and three hours of sleep combined over five days. When she begins her opening argument, she feels so thoroughly disconnected from her own body, like she is only a spirit watching everything from above while some other entity controlling her mouth recites the well-worn script she’s written. She makes it through the witness testimonies, the cross-examinations, the closing arguments without missing a beat. She’s perfect.
When the trial is over and the counsels are granted to leave, she only barely manages to make it to the back hallway before her vision swims, her legs give out, and the floor is suddenly the ceiling.
When she comes to, she’s lying in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV, and she can overhear her mother saying, Thank god she fainted after leaving the courtroom where no one could see her. How mortifying that would’ve been!
Her blood pressure numbers come in at 150/101 mm Hg.
The nurse looks deeply concerned, and Nam-ra has learned enough life science to know this isn’t normal.
They do all sorts of tests, ask all sorts of questions about her family’s medical history, but cannot find any physical reason as to why an otherwise healthy girl her age could be one bad scare away from a heart attack at 18.
When they can’t find anything wrong with her body, they try to examine what’s going on inside her head.
“Stress can certainly elevate blood pressure. Has she been under any stress lately? High school can be a very busy time for a student.”
Nam-ra wants to bring up how she sleeps for three hours a night. She wants to bring up how she gets locked in her room, or how she’s not allowed to cry, but the weight of her mother’s bony fingers digging into her shoulders reminds her of who she is and where she lies on this pyramid. “Of course not,” her mother says, steely. “We take very good care of her. She has everything she needs.”
When the doctor suggests a psychiatric referral, her mother swiftly steers Nam-ra out the door like a toy because My daughter is not crazy, you useless quack.
She’s taken to a different doctor, one who will kowtow to her mother’s hard stare and doesn’t speak a word about mental illness.
She’s prescribed medication for hypertension and advised to take more vitamin supplements and then she’s sent on her way.
(It’s just a minor setback, her mother assures her. As long as it doesn’t affect your studies, it’s unimportant. Don’t think about it.
(Still, when it comes time for her mother to brag to her friends, her aunts and uncles and any of her mother’s elite peers who will bother to listen, it’s one of the few things about Nam-ra she never chooses to include.)
She’s accepted into Seoul National University because of course she is. Her carefully-structured list of accolades was too extensive to fit on one page. There was never any doubt.
How could she settle for anything less?
There is no celebration between her and her family, no fanfare for the achievement; her mother reserves that for her friends, and it’s just one more little thing she can brag about to her dinner guests while Nam-ra sits at the piano, banging out a concerto she was made to learn a week ago, not because her mother has any hope of her one day becoming a famous concert pianist (and she is quick to remind her that a musician is a rubbish profession made for starving lower-class commoners), but because Mun-ho’s mother needs to know that her son isn’t as special as she thinks he is.
Graduation day is just that. A day. A day when she graduates, but, regardless, just a day.
Their high school is littered with flower petals and streamers and banners strung up on the branches of trees and Nam-ra stands in the center of it all like a river trout floating in the middle of a tank of bright colorful sea creatures.
All around her are happy families and happy students, balancing bouquets in their arms and taking selcas. Some of the girls are sobbing and hugging each other tightly while Blackpink blares from one of their Bluetooth speakers. Nearby, she hears a group of boys—friends, she guesses—loudly discussing getting jjajangmyeon at the local Chinese restaurant to celebrate.
Nam-ra gets no flowers. Neither of her parents could attend the ceremony, too caught up between work and business luncheons to attend a graduation populated by mostly commoners. Graduating from high school is not an accomplishment worth celebrating, it’s an expectation, the way winter always precedes spring.
With her new diploma dangling loosely from her fingers at her side, she just leaves. Doesn’t stop to chat with anyone, doesn’t stay for photo ops, doesn’t visit her old desk one last time like some of her former classmates do.
(If she did, perhaps she would have noticed the single, solitary tulip left on her desk.)
A day after graduation, her mother gives Nam-ra her revised schedule. It is more of the same, only now she needs to make room for a commute to and from university, which pushes back the start of her schedule earlier, and squeezes out more of her designated sleep time.
Her mother certainly has a funny definition for a graduation gift.
It’s not long before she’s up all night again for a week straight.
Night after night, she foregoes sleep for the sake devising an entire presentation to convince her mother to let her stay at the dormitories instead of at home. She knows this song-and-dance by now. It will save her two hours of uninterrupted studying time every weekday, time she’d have to waste otherwise during her commute to and from school. Even if she studied in the car, the environment and variables would lead to a lower quality of life, and the unpredictability of class schedules each semester would add unnecessary complexity to her own.
Her mother is uncharacteristically quiet, listening with a haughty tilt to her chin, as if she were an adjudicator for one of Nam-ra’s mock trials.
The math is undeniable though, and in moments like these, her mother will always choose to believe the numbers.
So Nam-ra goes to college with a trunkful of her belongings and a whole cocktail of pills to take every day.
It’s not difficult to secure a single dorm room for herself. She doesn’t even need her mother’s help for it (though she’s sure her mother still has a hand in it, whether directly or not). Already she feels the different atmosphere of university. She was always very good at disappearing into a crowd, but no one here lets their gaze linger on her, or whispers too loud about who her family is. Not yet, at least.
She’ll be entering into the College of Social Sciences. The goal is to become Chief Justice. Maybe even the youngest Chief Justice ever appointed.
Her admission into SNU never surprised anyone, like how it was no surprise that she placed first in all subjects all throughout high school, so even if the goal is far-reaching, it is not unattainable.
She thinks of someone like the mayor’s son or the Seo triplets snatching away her chance at success, the same way they snapped up her place in a prestigious high school, merely from the existence of their birthright.
She studies. She studies because she must succeed. She studies because no prize is ever guaranteed. She studies because it’s all she knows how to do to quell the feverish, twisting ache within her chest.
It’s a Friday evening. She’s studying for her contemporary democracy exam at her desk while Lee Na-yeon makes herself at home in her dorm room, flopped over her bed and tap-tap-tapping away on her phone.
Nam-ra and Na-yeon aren’t friends, not exactly. They merely exist in the same circles, living in the same upscale housing district since middle school. Sometimes Na-yeon’s family gets invited to the elite social functions her mother regularly hosts. (Na-yeon seems to believe they are friends, though, what with the way she invites herself over to a campus she doesn’t even attend.)
“Just get a boyfriend and that’ll solve everything,” Na-yeon says matter-of-factly without looking up from her phone.
Nam-ra hates Na-yeon’s propensity to speak unsolicited, and she hates even more how her own problems (a minor setback) are ostensibly so apparent that even the neighborhood gossip can sniff them out.
“I don’t have time for a boyfriend,” Nam-ra replies. She barely has time for herself.
But Na-yeon only cackles, “You don’t need to make time for a boyfriend. Just get one and he’ll do all the work for you.”
Na-yeon has never lifted a finger to do anything in her life. Nam-ra thinks of Na-yeon and her fancy string of boyfriends, the ones who buy her expensive bottles of perfume and designer purses while she bats her eyelashes and simpers babe and oppa.
It’s degrading and humiliating, and Nam-ra wonders how Na-yeon isn’t astonishingly ashamed of her own behavior. But then she thinks about how Na-yeon reads fashion magazines during lectures, how she eats luxury chocolates everyday, how she spends an obscene amount of time on her skincare routine every morning and night. Na-yeon probably doesn’t have to deal with choking down five pills a day.
“If you got a rich, handsome boyfriend, I bet your mother wouldn’t bother you as much as she does too.”
Nam-ra doesn’t say anything. She goes back to highlighting the notes she took for her latest democracy class and waits until Na-yeon eventually grows bored and leaves her alone, like she always does.
You see, college is much like high school, just in a more colorful package. She’d been wrong in her earlier assessment. The presentation may be different, but all the cogs are the same.
Choi Nam-ra has no friends. Not in Lee Na-yeon and not in her team of tutors and certainly not in any of her peers during her grade school years. That is a fact.
It lasted all through middle school, all through high school, and will surely continue on through her stint in college. And probably for the rest of her life, if she had to say.
Friends are exhausting. They require so much effort. She may have never had a friend before in her life, but she has observed enough of her peers to know that she’d never want one. Friends push themselves into your space. Friends expect you to make time for them. Friends ask you to do things for them and she doesn’t want to do Anything for anyone anymore. She already does so many Things for just one person.
She doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t—
She sends status updates to her mother every three hours. That was part of the agreement to let her stay at the campus dorms. Her mother wants to know that she’s keeping up with her schedule and eating only menu-approved meals and not “peasant food,” so she doesn’t become lazy and fat, “like so many commoners do.” She gets weekly deliveries of all her required supplements, ones she keeps in a mini fridge beneath her desk and somehow it’s like she never left home at all.
And somehow, Nam-ra muses, it’s like I never left home at all.
Her second hint hits her like a stop sign.
It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. She’s hunched over her desk, furiously scribbling away because she has to get down these notes for her public administration class, and then she has two exams coming up that she has to study for, one for Korean history, the other for comparative politics, and then she has to review her worksheet for college English because she only managed a 91 on her analysis report and that’s just not good enough, and then—
—There.
A drop of scarlet on the white pages of her notebook.
The writing halts. She touches a finger below her nose and it comes away red.
She drops her pencil and scrounges for a tissue. Papers and stationery are pushed out of the way while she digs around in her bag.
This has never happened before. Sure, she’s had the dizzy spells and the jittery nerves, but she’s never bled from stress before.
When the blood flow finally stops, she takes in the state of her room. It’s messier than she remembers it ever being before, with her notes scattered out of their neat, neat pile and crumpled bloodstained tissues littering her desk and floor.
The rapid urge to clean never arises, though, the way it normally should. She leaves the mess there, goes to get her three hours of sleep before morning class.
(Once she returns to her room after class, she scrambles to pick up all the used tissues and tidy all her papers, like she can’t believe she had let herself live in such squalor for even a second longer than necessary.)
The next day, in the dark, early hours of the morning, Nam-ra flips open her laptop and searches:
How to get rid of stress
A whole catalogue of results cascades down her screen. She clicks on one and reads.
The first suggestion is to not use nicotine or caffeine, and she’d sooner jump off the roof than let either of those go.
Some are not entirely applicable. Loathe as she is to admit, her mother has always provided her an abundance of healthy, balanced meals and a variety of supplements, so there’s no reason to change that. There are no friends and family she can spend time with, so that’s entirely out of the question.
The rest are within her capacity, though she’s dubious about their effectiveness. It all looks like ludicrous pseudoscience, the kind that middle-aged mothers like to cluck about while peddling their home remedies, not findings backed by proper academic research and concrete evidence.
At this point, she has very little room to complain, though.
And so she tries.
And so she tries. She starts going out for morning jogs at the crack of dawn. She listens to more soothing, gentle music, rather than the cacophonous metal she often played through her earbuds to block out any distractions. She makes the effort to study outside more often for some fresh air rather than staying cooped up in her dorm room all the time. She meditates, gets a massage, spritzes herself with cold water, drinks more green tea, watches ASMR, eats a spoonful of honey, opens the curtains on a sunny day, squeezes a stress ball, reorganizes her room, stretches before bed, stretches after bed, lights scented candles and anything and everything in-between.
Sometimes she can trick herself into believing that the efforts help, that doing morning yoga has contributed to lowering her systolic blood pressure by a whole 5 mm Hg.
But no matter what she does, a furious, insatiable monster still exists at the forefront of her mind, with pursed lips and a steely gaze, and the impossibly tangled knot in Nam-ra’s chest makes itself known once more.
She lights up a cigarette.
Instead of going outside, where the chill is starting to set in, she opens up the window and perches on the windowsill to smoke.
It’s the middle of October. Soon, she’ll be done with the semester, and thus her first year of university.
Her mother wants her home for the winter break. Even though it’s still a few months away, the expectation is still there, even if it hasn’t been said. If she plays her cards right (and she continues to score high enough), she can make the excuse that it would be more beneficial for her to stay on campus, to keep up the momentum. She had only escaped going back during the summer break because her mother had gone on a business trip overseas for two months.
(She doubts she would be so lucky again. She could get perfect marks straight down the line, and her mother would still ask why she hadn’t gotten extra credit.)
Nam-ra squeezes her eyes shut and tries to count to 100 while taking deep breaths, the way some cheesy mom blog suggested.
By the time she reaches 80, she knows this isn’t going to work either and she feels foolish all over again.
Na-yeon’s shrill voice echoes in her head, unbidden.
Just get a boyfriend and that’ll solve everything.
She’s never had a friend before, much less a boyfriend. She wouldn’t even know where to begin. She shouldn’t even be thinking about useless, time-wasting things like this, but she’s doing it anyway. She wants to chide herself for even considering something she swore never to do, or, frankly, any idea that came out of Lee Na-yeon‘s mouth.
From outside, one of the groundskeepers shakes his fist at her, hollering about how there’s no smoking in the dormitories allowed.
She snubs out the rest of her cigarette and shuts the window.
“Enough,” she says.
Her mother may not care about her having a heart attack by her mid-20s, but Nam-ra does, and she’ll be damned if she succumbs to a stress-induced death before she makes the Supreme Court.