IN 2000, I BECAME, somewhat by accident, the director of All Souls Unitarian Church’s Monday Night hospitality program for the homeless, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The former director had a medical emergency and had to leave her responsibilities immediately, and so the next week when I went in for my volunteer shift, I was asked if I would consider running the program, at least until someone else could be found. I would be acting director for three years.
On my first day, I went to Western Beef, a low-cost butcher shop and grocery store where the program did its shopping, the week’s dinner budget in an envelope of cash. And even though I had previously gone along with the director, as her assistant, I was nervous that first day on my own. The program fed one hundred guests on a first-come, first-served basis—more, if more showed up. Some diners even took leftovers back to their shelters for those who couldn’t leave. This was a big responsibility. I planned the meal, bought the food under budget, and returned to the church, and I did the job for three years. Gradually the program expanded, especially after September 11, 2001. I was proud of the work we did.
The calm with which I did this every week was not visible in the rest of my life. In the apartment I returned to after those volunteer shifts, my closet was full of stacks of boxes of files and receipts going back fifteen years. Many were unpaid bills, missed payments, or collection notices. Letters from the IRS. A personal organizer I had hired a few years before had said, looking them over, “Oh, wow, you don’t need these,” then she laughed and told me to throw all the papers away. But I could not. When I eventually moved out in 2004, I moved with those boxes.
In some way I wasn’t quite aware of, I had imagined the problem was receipts. But I did not feel that pain when I shopped for the church’s program and put the receipts in an envelope before turning them over to the office. The more I kept a steady hand on the program, the more I was aware I was in the presence of a revelation about myself. The ordinary transactions contrasted with the pain I faced, almost supernatural, every time the money was mine.
THE PAIN WAS THERE in every transaction. Whenever the question came, “Would you like a receipt?” I never wanted it. But I took it, knowing I should, and would put it quickly in my wallet instead, until the wallet bulged like a smuggler’s sack.
I had no system for the next steps. The receipts stayed in there, usually too long, sometimes fading to meaninglessness. Or I emptied the wallet into the pocket of a backpack, or I stuffed them into an envelope, always with the promise of getting to them later. Then I put them in the boxes. There they fluttered around like some awful confetti, saved for a celebration that never came.
I knew they represented, in part, money that could come back to me, but for me they mostly represented money lost. Pain is information, as I would say to my yoga students at the time, and my writing students also. Pain has a story to tell you. But you have to listen to it. As is often the case, I was teaching what I also needed to learn.
THE PAIN THESE RECEIPTS represented was not particularly mysterious to me then. I had just never examined it. I hadn’t even felt I could. I simply thought everyone had these difficulties. But this was a lie I told myself, a way of accommodating the pain instead of facing it.
In a file I still have from 1989, there is a letter from my sister, when she was fifteen and I was twenty-two, asking me to send my tax form to my mother so she could give it to our accountant. This is in a folder with the tax return from that year, completed after I sent the form. I can see the earnings from the sandwich shop I worked at in Middletown, Connecticut, while a student at Wesleyan; earnings from my first months at A Different Light, the bookstore where I worked in San Francisco just after college graduation; and the taxes paid on the stock certificates I sold from my trust in order to pay off my tuition bill at Wesleyan.
Asking my younger sister to write and ask me to send the tax form was my mother’s way of communicating, off-kilter and indirect. To this day, she will ask one of us to communicate something to the other, though she could just as easily call directly. I have tried my whole life to change this in her, as I have tried to change my own relationship to money and pain, which are forever twinned in my mind. The anxiety about receipts was anxiety about money, but also much more than that.
Underneath that anxiety was the belief that there would be an accounting demanded of me, one that I would fail. After reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, where she describes keeping her late husband’s things as if he might return for them, I understood it a little better: I imagined someday having to tell my father about everything I had bought with the trust fund I received after his death. And having to explain how I’d failed him.
MY FATHER WAS SO young when he died, forty-three years old, that he hadn’t made a will, due in part to the faith the young have that a will can be written and notarized at some later date, because surely death is far away. As a result, the State of Maine divided my father’s estate four ways, among my mother, myself, my brother, and my sister—my mother receiving, by law, the majority. I was given a trust that would be vested to me when I reached the age of eighteen.
Just three years earlier, at the time of his death, three years after the car accident had rendered him paralyzed on the left side of his body, my mother had confessed to me she was repaying his medical bills, which totaled more than a million dollars, and this was after what was paid for by medical insurance. He’d had repeated surgeries over those three years, home care, physical therapy, and experimental treatments. My father’s family was wealthy enough to have helped us out, and for one year they had, but they’d held the cruelly contradictory belief that my mother should both be able to pay the bills and also not have to work—to stay home and take care of my father. I can only think they believed the money would magically appear out of my father’s business, a mistaken notion born of a mix of sexism and parochial privilege so extreme as to be laughable, if the price of it were not so steep. My father’s father had worked very hard, but his family had mostly never worked, or if they had, they did not understand the structure of my parents’ financial lives. My father’s family have been, in my experience, people who believe something is wrong if the world is not the way they imagine it to be. And so they treated us as if my mother was lying, or deceitful.
This was unexpected and difficult. My mother did the only thing she could do. She put in fifteen-hour days to turn the assets of the business, now the assets of the estate, into something that could meet the scope of the problem, leaving me to cook for my siblings, to drive them to sports practices, to grocery shop, and even to shop for her clothes while she did this. She was soon able to pay off my father’s medical debts, and did.
And now we had arrived here.
My mother told me the trust was, first and foremost, for my education and anything related to it, and I should spend it wisely. “Your education is the one thing you can buy that no one can take away from you,” she said portentously. Also: “I wouldn’t have given you control over that much money at age eighteen.” But the state had decided it, and she had to allow it. I rankled at the thought, but it was also true that for me to be presented with money enough for college after years of worry over mortgages and my father’s medical bills felt like an unearned luxury at best.
As a result, the first thing I did with my money was part rebellion, part panegyric. My father had loved fast cars and expensive ones, both, and so I bought what I thought he’d want for me, a black Alfa Romeo—a Milano, the first year they were available in the United States—a sort of cubist Jetta with a sports car’s heart.
I drove off to college with my younger brother literally along for the ride—he wanted to see how fast it could go. He was the king of auto shop in high school, and had saved up the regular gifts of money given to him by our relatives over the years until he could buy the cars he rehabbed in autoshop, and then he sold them for more money. He has always had a gift for making more out of what he was given. He had taught me how to drive stick shift on his red 1974 Corvette 454, a car so beautiful the police would pull him over just so they could look at it.
My brother had been reading the Alfa Romeo manual, and after he looked at the speedometer, he said, “It says this car tops out at 130 mph,” and he gave me a little smirk.
I nodded. The highway ahead of us was oddly empty, and so I floored it. For a brief moment on the Massachusetts Turnpike, we flew, pushing the speed as far as I dared, a 130 mph salute to our father.
I DROVE THE CAR for the nine years the trust lasted, except for when I lived in California, during which time my mother, despite her objections to the purchase of the Alfa Romeo, drove the car and enjoyed it, in what amounted to a truce on the subject. I used that money not just for my tuition costs, but to turn myself from a student into a writer. I paid for my college and left with no debts—an extraordinary gift. This gave me the freedom to intern at a magazine that published my first cover story, and to take a job at an LGBT bookstore that let me read while at work, meet authors, and even help with the planning of the first LGBT writers’ conference, OutWrite. And while I went to graduate school on a fellowship with a tuition waiver, I had no health insurance, and so the trust money paid for my regular dental work and a trip to the hospital back in New York, where I lived before and after grad school. I know this freedom looks ordinary to many, but I also know all too well that it is rare when the children of Korean immigrants are given this kind of latitude from their family to pursue the arts.
Besides the car, what I thought of as my excesses at the time now seem more or less pragmatic to me. My clothes were usually secondhand, my books also, or purchased with an employee discount. I bought a used Yamaha 550 motorcycle, which I drove while I lived in San Francisco, where there were four cars for every parking space. I made a trip to Europe in the fall of 1990, to Berlin, London, and Edinburgh, which I took to investigate whether I could live somewhere other than the United States. And while I ended up staying in America after all, the trip was its own education. My greatest indulgences were probably during a long-distance relationship while in Iowa: phone bills that regularly cost as much as the plane tickets for said relationship, not otherwise affordable on a graduate student’s budget.
For those nine years, I felt both invulnerable and doomed, under the protection of a spell that I knew to be dwindling in power. The Alfa broke down finally while I was driving from Iowa to New York City. I left it where it stopped, in Poughkeepsie, on a block in front of a friend’s apartment. That summer, newly released from graduate school, with no job and no prospects, I had no money to repair it or move it. Eventually the car, covered in unpaid tickets, was impounded and sold by the state to cover the towing and storage costs. My money gone, I surrendered to life without either the trust’s protections or the car. I know it was all stupid, and I was ashamed, and felt powerless in the face of the problem and ashamed of that powerlessness. But I was also tired of being mistaken for someone who was rich when I felt I had less than nothing.
I had believed I would feel lighter without the money, free of the awful feeling of having it but not having my father. And yet spending the last of it was not just like failing my father. It was like losing him again.
WE LEARN OUR FIRST lessons about money as children, and these shape much of our ideas about it. We learn these lessons from our parents, but from others also. But I feel as if I have always been taught about money by everyone, every day of my life a lesson, whether I want it or not, in what money is and does.
The lessons my life had provided until the point I describe were that money is conflict, strife, grief, blood. Money is necessary. Money divides families. Even the promise of it, hinted at. And that nothing destroys a family like an inheritance.
My mother likes to tell a story of me at age two. We were living in my grandparents’ home in Seoul in 1968, and three of my father’s siblings were still of school age—two uncles and an aunt. The three-story house was surrounded by a high wall, covered with nails, barbed wire, and broken glass, that I would later come to expect on houses like this all over the world—the homes of the rich, living amid great poverty. The house is near the Blue House in Seoul, the presidential residence, and the Secret Garden, formerly a palace where the king kept his concubines, is visible from the third floor. For years it was one of the most privileged of neighborhoods, exempt from development.
The reason we were living in Seoul at the time this story happened is that my parents could not afford me on their own. When I was born, my father was a graduate student in oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. A favorite photo I have of him from that time shows him posing with his URI classmates, holding a whale rib. My mother taught home economics at the local public school, and since women were not allowed to teach while pregnant, married or not, when she started to show, she was dismissed, and the economic crisis that I was began. My birth was unplanned; my parents were not financially ready to start a family. In the first photos of my father holding me in his arms, he looks tired and dazed, and the expression on his face is one of amazement, love, and frustration. He seems ready to agree to his father’s offer of a job back in Korea, which came soon enough.
My father’s siblings had lined up to ask for their lunch money, and after the youngest had taken her turn, I went and asked for my lunch money, as they had. My grandfather was so charmed—he was worried I would never speak Korean—that he came downstairs, laughing, and gave me some money, just the same as he did them. I was then allowed to spend the money across the street at the small market, to get a treat.
I did the same the next day, and the next, as it made him laugh, and he gave me money for treats. Soon he gave me the money daily.
My father’s siblings still resent me, I think, because of it. I became just another sibling to compete with for attention, approval, and money.
I was born slightly premature, and so at age two, because I was underweight, I was allowed to use my daily allowance to buy a chocolate bar at the snack stand across the street. This is the context for the next story my mother likes to tell about me from this time: She decided one day to punish me for something, and told me I could not go to the stand. Later, she found me eating my chocolate bar. Confounded, even alarmed, she asked me how I had done this.
The maid explained that I had sent her with the money I’d been given.
My mother tells this story as an example of my shrewdness in the face of an obstacle, also my devilishness. And I do like to think the story is about my improvisational mind. But it also shows that even at a young age, I understood how power worked. I was adapting to my sense of the class I belonged to, as all children do. That this class would change, that I would become a class traitor—as all writers are, no matter their social class—was all ahead of me. Perhaps this was preparation for that change: reading context clues for signs of how to get around the stated rules—how to find the real rules, in other words, that no one ever tells you but that everyone obeys.
However it happened, my relationship to money began before I can remember it, and it seems it started that way.
I WAS A TRICKSTER child, whether by accident or fate. My first Korean words were “Obi Mechu,” the name of a beer (the Korean Budweiser, really), spoken as I sat on my mother’s lap and saw the sign over her shoulder while we were driving in a car through downtown Seoul.
I am still someone who absent-mindedly reads aloud from any signs I see, as if it is some way of learning where I am.
I was also a regular source of anxiety during my time in Korea, most of which I was not aware of. Biracial Korean and white Amerasian children in Seoul in 1968 were typically thought to be the children of American GIs and Korean women, and were often kidnapped and sold, as, for some time, your patrimony was your access to personhood. Put another way, if your father was a white GI, no government authority automatically thought of you as a citizen. My mother was warned never to let me out of her sight in public, and I did have a knack for disappearing. My eyes had been blue when I arrived, alarming my father’s family, my grandparents especially, but they quickly settled into hazel, green coronas with brown rings, which was seen as more acceptable. As the eldest male child, certain responsibilities and privileges accrued with that status: during the first months I lived there, until my eyes changed, the family struggled with the idea that a blue-eyed half-white boy might become the jongson of the forty-first generation of Chee.
My father liked to joke that, as a part of my status, a house in Korea would be mine when I got older, and only as adults would my younger brother confess to me just how unfair this had struck him. I used to wonder sometimes if this was why he went into private equity. But in truth, his first distressed assets were those cars he’d refurbished in auto shop. And being the jongson was not exactly a prize to be jealous of.
The jongson does typically receive a greater share of the inheritance. He does not always get a house, but he often does, because when he becomes the jongga, the head of the family, he is supposed to care for his parents in their old age, hold the jesa—a ceremony held annually to honor one’s ancestors—and tend the graves of the family’s ancestors. In the most conservative families, he isn’t supposed to live anywhere but Korea. He looks after the entire family, the living and the dead. My brother and sister and I now joke that Korean traditions like this exist only to create conflict and pain—and that has certainly been our only experience of it. Brothers turn against each other; sisters feel invisible and powerless. Most of what I know about my nonmonetary, spiritual responsibilities came to me from people who were outside the family.
My father, the middle child, was forever settling disputes between his siblings, and they were always over money and patrimony. After he died, no one was left to settle these fights, and after the death of their father, the siblings sued one another for a decade. I will forever remember my oldest aunt, a respected translator and professor in Korea, when she reflected on the long battle over my grandfather’s estate, saying, “My sisters were so talented. And yet they did nothing with their lives except this—this fight over money.”
She said this, though she had joined in too.
MY PARENTS DID NOT give me lessons in money so much as they enacted them. My father spoke of money only rarely. He explained his absences from church on Sundays by saying, “My church is the bank, and I’m there five days a week.” He dressed for work in well-tailored suits from J. Press, wore handmade shoes from England, and was uninterested in cutting a low profile. He was the first nonwhite member of his golf club and the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, and he never looked less than sharp. That this sort of dapper dressing was something he had to do—that his appearance, as an immigrant, required him to be tailored, impressive, to project wealth or at least comfort, just to be treated with respect—would not be visible to me until much later. I remember he said, “I’m treated better when I fly if I wear a suit jacket,” and each time I put one on to fly—and he’s right, I am treated better—I feel close to him.
Both of my parents had worked hard for what they had—my father, with his older brother, had scavenged for food from abandoned army supply trucks in Seoul during the Korean War. My mother had cleaned hotel rooms during the summer for the money she used to buy the car she drove away from Maine. My father believed money was for spending, and my mother believed it should never be spent. Her clothes were handmade also—for much of her life, she made them herself. She was as stylish as my father, but by her own hand.
The only time I recall hearing my parents speak of money together was the day my father came home with an antique eighteenth-century Portuguese cannon, “the only one of its kind with a firing piece,” I remember my father explaining. My mother was as angry as she’s ever been. He had spent their savings on it: $750 at the time. The seller was a marine who had, with his buddies, each taken one of these cannons back to the United States from Korea at the end of the war. Or so he said. Part of my mother’s anger then was that there was no certification of its authenticity, but also, as she said that day, “What are we going to do with it? Declare war on the Mullinses?” It was a strange, brute artifact, out of place, and after the purchase, it stayed behind our blue corduroy couch alongside many of our father’s rifles, by the entrance to our suburban two-story house. As if it were hidden there in case we ever really did need it.
After my father’s death, we considered having the cannon appraised, even selling it. We also thought of selling his Mercedes. We did neither. The cannon sat behind our living room couch for years and is now my brother’s. The car went into storage in Vermont during the summer of the bankruptcy. My brother may have it still. The last time I asked about the car, he never answered my question. He did recently admit to having the cannon appraised by Christie’s; it is now worth $28,000. Thirty-seven times its original price, thirty-seven years later, the lesson of the cannon is at last visible: my father was right.
THE EVENTUAL ALLOWANCE I received as a child in America, from my own father, the first allowance I remember, was given to me to soothe the pain of the allergy shots I required, starting around age seven. There was the sharp flash of the needle’s injection, and then, at the corner store near the doctor’s office, my father would hand me a quarter, which I could use to buy comic books.
The cycle was pain, then money, then power over pain. A feeling like victory—if not over the pain, at least over powerlessness. And one of my earliest experiences of fatherly love.
Pain, money, power over pain. My mistake being that money is not power over pain. Facing pain is.
In the first years after the end of the trust, I had dreamed of a payday as big as the trust had been, imagining it could save me, because it was all I could imagine. I see now it never could. It was a dream that the sacrifice of the trust could return to me as a payday the size of the trust, a simple exchange that would clearly mean it had all been worth it, in the primitive religion around money and self-worth that I had made for myself. But this longing for a payday was really just a mix of two stories in my head, turning the money from the father into something that both conquers the pain and also stands in for it.
I was searching for new narratives with which to remake my relationship to money. I had several identities, whether I was aware of them directly or not: as the child of a scientist and schoolteacher; as the child of entrepreneurs; and, as a friend of mine likes to say, as a lost prince, far from his kingdom. My identity as a writer was the newest of these.
But to the extent that I identified these ways, it is because I did not want to be a jongson, or at least not in the way it had been described to me. My experience of that role was that it had made me a target. I wanted to belong to myself, much as my father had, and the stories I had of him, as someone who had worked multiple jobs in order not to rely on his father, inspired me also—and so, with my trust fund gone, I not only waited tables, but took any work I could get. I followed the example of my father, and not his family.
I had been raised with the idea of writing as an inherently unprofitable enterprise from which one derived token sums of money while being supported by other means, and I had to teach myself to fight this too. But my dream of a writer’s payday was just as unrealistic. My mother was fond of asking me to get an MBA and write on the side. My grandfather, in our last visit before his death, said to me, “You are a poet, which means you will be poor, but very happy,” and then he laughed uproariously.
I laughed too.
These allowances, this trust, had taught me one thing: money belonged to other people, not to me. I was trying to undo the spell all of this had cast on me, beginning with the lunch money my grandfather used to give me back before I could remember, which became the $100 bill he would give me whenever he visited from Korea. This was something my father’s oldest brother, my Uncle Bill, did as well. And while I could never imagine myself being like my grandfather, the self-made millionaire with an international fisheries conglomerate, and the seven children who would, after his death, sue each other repeatedly for a decade, I could imagine all too well being like Bill someday.
Bill was a well-dressed man who favored a uniform that hardly ever varied: a chambray shirt with a paisley ascot, worn under a navy blazer with gold buttons, khaki pants, tasseled oxblood loafers—he was the man who taught me what paisley meant. When going outdoors, he topped this uniform with a Burberry overcoat, Burberry scarf, and a beret that hid his hair, a raffish comb-over that I always viewed tenderly, for even as a child I knew it fooled no one. He loved us deeply and was forever smiling and impish, so much so that when he was sad, it reverberated. A legal scholar, a lawyer, a professor of law, Uncle Bill had pursued a distinguished academic career in the United States before being summoned home by his father to be a good son. He began teaching law in Korea, at Hanyang University in Seoul, eventually rising to be a cabinet-level presidential adviser on international treaty law, and was the first Korean elected to the United Nations International Law Commission. In 1994, as I was finishing my graduate degree, Bill asked me to copyedit a translation of one of his books, which I still have, detailing his work on behalf of stateless Koreans inside Russia and China. He lived, until his death, in the home left to him, the house I had lived in as a child with my father’s family. It was too much house for one man, but he insisted on it, despite the punishing tax burden. His mother had always dreamed the family would gather there, and he lived there in a lonely vigil, against the day the next in line would take his place.
I have always suspected that this was the house my father spoke of, the one I would have one day inherited. Bill, like me, had been an eldest son. I visit the house whenever I am in Seoul. For years after his death, it was a ruin, open to the weather, left to a cousin he’d adopted as his heir. Now it is a Vietnamese restaurant, no doubt the cousin’s decision—we do not speak, a product of the estrangement created after my father’s death, when the family’s disagreements over money took aim at what my father had left behind. The persimmon trees in the backyard still stand, taller than all of the new buildings built around them.
I come here to see what I know, without speaking to him, is true: that he is struggling to do, even to be, that which was denied me.
IN THE YEARS AFTER the end of the trust, which I still think of as the loss of the trust, I taught myself to do without the idea of my being jongson, except perhaps for the jesa. Two years ago in October, I made my first, but my version. I made an altar in my home with an elaborate Korean meal I made myself. I poured soju, wrote a letter to my ancestors, telling them how angry I was with them, asking them to tell me what they wanted from me. Then I burned the letter, to send it to them.
My father’s rebellion against his family became more fully my own. I taught myself to live without so much as the idea that anyone would help me but me. Someday I would learn how radical it was to have a Korean immigrant father who asked only that his son become himself—with no expectations that I be a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer, like him. It felt that I was learning to walk in a new world, in new gravity, and by the year 2000, when I was made the acting director of the All Souls Monday Night hospitality program, I had been living in that world for six years. I had joined the church with a boyfriend, and had stayed after we broke up. “We don’t expect to see you on Sundays if you’re here on Monday nights,” the reverend had said to me when I apologized once for missing the services—the church, on the Upper East Side, was a long way from where I lived in Brooklyn. That idea of acts of charity as service, as a way of offering something to God as well as to others—the Monday service counting as much as or more than the Sunday one—made me feel at home.
I did not cure myself entirely. I am still curing myself. I am almost through those boxes of files. I let go of the fantasy of a massive payday and taught myself instead to get by with the shepherding of sums. I came up with rules I still live by: always keep your rent low, no matter the city you live in; write for money more than for love, but don’t forget to write for love; always ask for more money on principle; decide how much money you must make per month and then make more than that as a minimum; revise the sum upward year by year, to match inflation. Do your taxes. Write off everything you can.
To the extent I have survived myself thus far, it began there, when I realized I treated money emotionally. I decided that I needed to treat myself as I would anyone else I was taking care of. It was just ordinary thrift and self-forgiveness that I needed to learn, together with the payday only I could provide, but this realization was the gift of that time, and as close to a Unitarian grace as I think I’ll ever get.
These small things I did saved me when nothing else could.