A pain shot through my stomach for the fifth day in a row while I texted my sisters mundane details about my week. I was only a couple of months into my freshman year of college. I can’t believe I willingly signed up for a natural science class with a quantum physicist, it is actually very hard, I didn’t think this would be real physics?? or I’ve been getting nightmares lately, which is weird, or Tried out a new Thai spot on The Ave for dinner, or Do you think my stomachaches are just stress cramps or something? I was heading into my dorm when a stretch of sirens sounded off in the distance and approached campus. I would later learn that a man named In Soo Chun had stopped along the oversized concrete and brick platforms in Red Square near the university president’s office. For a couple of years, Chun worked for the university as a custodian. Amid the throng of students meandering to their next class, he doused himself with gasoline. Then, he lit himself on fire.
The school newspaper published a photo of Chun covered in flames. Seeing this image all these years later, I feel a similar revulsion and need to click away from the screen: A crowd of students surrounds a blazing mass, which upon first glance, is easy to mistake for anything besides Chun’s engulfed body. Students dump water on Chun and try to beat away the flames with their jackets. Everybody looks in motion, bodies leaning toward Chun.
* * *
Why did he do it? many asked afterward. The university’s narrative, which most seemed to accept, was that Chun was mentally unstable. A few people online wondered, though, if Chun’s self-immolation was a form of protest; they mentioned that Chun was Korean, implying there might be something “cultural” at play.
I wasn’t satisfied with these theories, certainly not the latter. I did not know enough to draw any conclusion, but for weeks, I kept surfacing Chun’s story in all my conversations.
Don’t you just keep thinking about that man, I found myself saying to new friends, the guy I was starting to date, people I met on campus or at parties.
I don’t know, they said. They entertained me for a few minutes before they slid us toward safer topics, as though talk of death was contagious.
A few years later, one of my friends will write about In Soo Chun for the school’s paper. Chun was in his sixties and worked for two and a half years as a custodian for the university. Chun had left behind a manifesto that revealed that he thought the university had a covert drug and prostitution ring and that there were Korean operatives who had infiltrated the custodial department. He was certain that he was being monitored. He also wrote that he had, since 1987, “seriously suffered with a thought disorder and a brain slash and a sudden black-out and memory loss.”
I couldn’t articulate why his death stuck with me. His circumstances were different from my parents’, but something about him brought them to mind, and the way they seemed alone in their interior lives. There was the obvious connection—that they were all immigrants. But there was also the way in which their needs in life had slipped beyond notice; how Chun returned me to a defensive stance—so bothered by how easy it was to look past stories like his.
* * *
In a couple of years, during my winter break, my family would convene at Steph’s apartment in Rhode Island, where she was completing a medical residency. My sisters, father, and I sprawled, starfished, on Steph’s sectional, watching the movie A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.
I need to watch it as part of my honors thesis, I had announced. I was writing about intergenerational grief, so clumsily searching for reflections of my own family. Is it OK if we all watch it?
Wow, that’s something, my father had said. You want us to help you with class work?
I hit play anyway. It was an adaptation of a short story by Yiyun Li. A man named Mr. Shi visits his adult daughter, Yilan, in America. Though he does not speak much English, he makes friends everywhere: with a woman on his flight, Jehovah’s Witnesses in his daughter’s apartment, an elderly woman in a park. Yilan has recently gone through a divorce, and ever since her mother died, she and her father have not spoken much. In her small apartment, the two of them are tense. They circle around one another, litigating and re-litigating their pasts. Yilan grew up believing her father had been unfaithful to her mother. Mr. Shi worried that his daughter, recently divorced, was lonely in America. Though Yilan’s mother does not appear in being, only mentioned in conversation, her absence blankets the film.
After it ended, my family remained in our seats. We blinked slowly. My father took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
What did you think? I said to the room, cautious.
Well, my father began. He shrugged and brought up a supporting character, an elderly Iranian woman, whom Mr. Shi had met in a park. The two of them, both immigrants, spoke in a mix of Farsi, Mandarin, and the occasional English. Seems to me that the father has a good, new friendship with the old lady.
That was your takeaway? The on-screen friendship he mentioned had ended abruptly because the woman had been sent to live in a nursing home against her wishes.
My father shrugged again and announced that he was tired and going to sleep. After he left the room, Steph turned to Caroline and me.
I was so worried that this would make Daddy sad, she said. I thought this might make him think of Mommy.
Yeah, Caroline and I agreed, our voices flat. If we saw ourselves in the film, we did not share. All those years later, we still did not know how to talk about our mother, her death, and what it had done, was doing, to our family.
In one scene that I highlighted in my college paper, Yilan tries to explain the dissolution of her marriage and snaps at her father.
“You don’t know what it’s like, Dad. If you grew up in a language in which you never learned to express your feelings,” she says. “It would be easier to learn to talk in a new language. It makes you a new person.” As a twenty-one-year-old, I took this exchange literally, writing that Yilan and her father’s problems arose from gaps in translation. I attributed this to the fact that Yilan had moved to the United States and her father had not. This oversimplification was so hopeful, as though language skills alone could remedy a father-daughter relationship. Now, watching the film again all these years later, I am devastated instead by the familiarity of the distance between Yilan and her father—how despite their efforts, they continue to talk past one another, or not at all.
* * *
A week after Chun’s death, I woke in the middle of the night, sweaty and fevered. In a panic, I burst into the hall, freshly nightmared.
I ran into a girl I’d chatted casually with a few times. She lived a few rooms down on what my friends and I deemed the quiet side of the floor, where everybody kept their doors closed so they could study. She unlocked the communal bathroom’s door.
Can you tell me that I’m not dreaming? I floated into the bathroom after her. I just had a nightmare that I was possessed.
I paced frantically by the showers. Can you please tell me that I’m awake?
She led me to a bench by the sinks, still carrying her bathroom caddy.
You’re awake, she said. Her voice soothed me. I fanned my T-shirt and took deep breaths. It was In Soo Chun’s death that had me so bothered, I was certain. I would not realize until a week later, after visiting the medical clinic on campus, that the stomach pains I had experienced for the past weeks were symptoms of a kidney infection.
You’re OK. You’re OK, she repeated. You’re OK. It only occurs to me now that I had wanted somebody to tell me that for years. Your death warped me. I had not realized that all this time, I had taxidermized myself. My grief had entombed me in my emotions. It made me hyper-attuned to the ways we exchange our bodies for ash.