—————————— “WHAT UP, FOOL!” CJ YELLED AS she ran toward the car. I smiled and reached over to open the passenger door of the Prius, which I’d borrowed to escape dinner. I’d parked in the lot underneath CJ’s apartment building, a K-Town monolith with the address in oversized green letters on a white stucco wall. I’d never seen the inside, all my years knowing CJ, because, she’d told me, Umma would slice your balls off. No men allowed.
CJ climbed inside and slammed the car door shut. She wrapped me in one of her quick, strong hugs, like she was trying to pop a balloon.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. The zippers on her black jacket rattled as she did one of her impromptu dances, her arms shooting around in excitement. “I had to take this huge shit. No joke, it was that big.” She held her index finger halfway down her forearm. “I had to break it up with the plunger.”
I laughed at seeing CJ back to her old self, then realized what she was saying and mimed a retch.
She beamed her big, toothy smile and slapped my arm. “Where do you want to go?”
“The spot?”
“Perfect,” she said. “I’m gonna roll this joint.”
CJ balanced a little kit in her lap: rolling papers and ends, a baggie of weed, a red Bic lighter. She snipped the bud with the tips of her nails and placed the small, sticky grains in the thin paper chute with the seriousness of a watchmaker.
We both thought CJ had made it when she got into Hah-bah-du, guaranteeing, at worst, a lifetime job of tutoring for a hundred bucks an hour—thought she could finally drop the stress that choked her with every test, every big paper during high school. But the release never came. The grind of getting into Harvard only gave way to staying afloat there: navigating the students who treated Harvard like one more playground guaranteed since birth, the secret societies they formed to hold the line between themselves and the Dorm Crew workers like CJ who got there early to scrub toilets, the professors who condescended to or hit on her or both.
Finally, last semester, she sent me some texts about feeling dead and I took the Peter Pan bus up to see her. She didn’t want to leave her dorm room, so the two of us sat on the blue carpet all weekend, smoking and watching season after season of The Office on her laptop. I only left to buy us shitty sandwiches from the Au Bon Pain in the square, two of them each time, though I knew she’d only nibble at hers and leave the rest in the minifridge.
I drove north, where the homes of millionaires glittered against the black mountains.
“Dude,” she said. “How’s your halmoni?”
I shook my head. “She looks terrible. Like, a different person.”
“That fucking sucks.”
“It’s whatever,” I said. “How are you?”
“Better, dude. Way better,” she said forcefully. “I just needed to be away from all the fucking stress and cold for a minute.”
“With the meds should you be—you know?” I looked at her rolling.
CJ huffed. “Please. The meds plus a little weed and I’m floating.”
“So you’re going back?”
“Hell yeah. I’m gonna beat those dumb fuckers. Not because I need to prove shit, but because I freaking can, you know? I actually need to start planning my thesis for next year,” she said, an excited buzz coming into her voice. “I’m thinking about Joyce.”
“Seriously?” I blurted. “I’m so done with the ‘core’ curriculum. What are you going to learn from some dead white man going on about his amazing thoughts as he walks around?”
“Ew,” she said. “Don’t come at me with that Twitter social justice shit.” She slapped my arm again. “Have you even read Ulysses?”
“Do I need to read it to know it reifies a Eurocentric, patriarchal world view?”
She sighed as if she felt sorry for me. “Remember how I used to joke that the Irish were the Koreans of Europe? They’re alcoholics, always fighting and beating their wives, because they’re stuck in a broke, tiny-ass country that was colonized? Anyway, I read Ulysses and I was like, I get this shit. It’s about how history fucks with the psyche, and constituting a postcolonial selfhood.” CJ waited for a response from me, and seeing none, chopped her hand against her pelvis. “Suck it.”
I chuckled out of embarrassment. The “core” had become my nemesis, a two-year slog through dozens of dead white men until we got a brief breath of Toni Morrison or Frantz Fanon at the end. Ash was a year older and told me not to wait that long: I skimmed Plato and Rousseau to get to the Audre Lorde and the Combahee River Collective she handed me. But judging from the grades I was getting back, it was showing.
Maybe, though, I’d turned that fight into a sort of laziness. I was used to saying something damning about the great white canon and everyone else in the room nodding, whether or not I or they had read it. CJ never cared about that—she tore through everything with equal force, able to read her life in the lives of others.
CJ sniffed the air, brought her nose to her armpit, and then let out a bleating noise. “Can I tell you something? This shirt smells like BO. I was like, why? I don’t smell like that.” She tugged at the shirt, a thin black fabric studded with silver beads. “I realized it’s from some white girl who tried it on before me at the store. I smell like some fucking white girl’s BO now. I want to die.”
I laughed so hard I had to steady the wheel.
“Stop laughing!” she said, laughing too. “Fuck it, I’m going to take it off and just wear my jacket.” She undid her seat belt and squirmed out of her jacket, then pulled the shirt off over her head and stuffed it into her purse.
My eyes darted toward her body, then away. The way she undressed had always been a relief, all those long afternoons in high school when we were sort of dating. It had no tease, no self-consciousness to it. She understood the baroque gender constructs of high school sexuality—she always had the best slim jeans, taught others how to apply eyeliner—but carried herself like a tomboy. I never understood the rules of that game, and it was a relief to be with someone who didn’t need me to play it.
She zipped her jacket up to the top. “Maybe it’s different in New York, but East Coast bitches are so basic, it’s like, why even bother dressing well?”
“Only if you go downtown. The white kids on campus all wear the same North Face fleece.”
“Ugh,” she turned to me. “Let’s make a pact never to wear that shit.”
“Would sooner get hypothermia.”
We slid palms and bumped fists. It was a gesture I didn’t know was particular to L.A. until the first day of college when I held my palm out to someone who cocked his head, then shook it, stiffly, as if I were a trained animal.
“Anyway, I won’t be around those kids anymore,” I said. “I’m dropping out.”
“For real?” CJ’s eyes widened. “That’s fucking crazy. What did your parents say?”
“They went into shock.”
“Dude,” she said slowly. “My momma said she would stab me, then stab herself, so she could haunt me forever as a ghost if I didn’t go back next semester. Be glad your mom’s so chill.”
“Wow,” I said, appreciating her imagination. “I wouldn’t exactly call my mom ‘chill.’”
“What are you going to do instead?”
“Organize. March. Work outside the bubble.”
“Ohh!” exclaimed CJ. “It’s because of your intense-ass Columbia friends. The ones who are all, Burn the system down.”
I’d introduced CJ to Tiff and Ash when she visited me in New York, thinking they’d get along because of their shared don’t-fuck-with-me sureness. But the combination backfired: CJ started mocking the middle-class kids at Harvard organizing with the striking cafeteria workers, until it turned out Tiff and Ash were friends with them through labor groups. I sat there listening for a tense half hour, all of us sitting in the uncomfortable blond wood chairs of my dorm room, until finally CJ offered to light a joint. The one thing they all had in common was that and a love for Erykah Badu, whose raspy voice emanated from my MacBook, as we relaxed onto the floor in a tense silence.
“It was my idea,” I shot back. “I mean, as a middle-class East Asian kid, I feel like it’s really the only option; otherwise, the degree is just another resource I’m hoarding, propelling myself up the ladder toward whiteness.”
Silence fell and I was listening, I realized, for a sign of CJ’s approval.
“Pffft.” She cackled. “Damn, you need to destress and smoke some good-ass Cali weed.” She held up the joint, thin and elegant, tapered smoothly to a point where a little tab of cardboard served as the mouthpiece.
“Still the master,” I said.
“Mastery is a Western patriarchal construct,” CJ said in a heavy voice mocking mine, then she slapped my arm and we laughed.
We crossed Sunset Boulevard into Laurel Canyon. The mountains rose on either side as the street narrowed and the light and noise of the city dropped away. I’d missed this drive, the calm and focus it demanded, a quiet tunnel through the city.
We came to the mountaintop and I turned onto Mulholland Drive—named after the white man who’d stolen water for L.A. I’d learned in my ethnic studies class how this city was taken from Mexico and advertised as a white haven away from the grimy East—a lie that Hollywood exploded around the world. But the whites were upset to arrive and find it was already Brown, would soon be Black and Yellow, and so retreated into the hills where they could live on streets called Mulholland and gaze down at the smoggy, colored basin below.
The road grew darker and windier. There was no reason to come here unless you were visiting one of the mansions, or doing exactly what we were doing. I parked in the small lot with a sign warning in bold letters that it closed at sunset. We stepped onto the gravel and leaned against the hood in the darkness. The engine was still warm, clicking and hissing. The city spread below us, a field of orange streetlamps and red and white car lights in an endless grid to the very edge of the horizon. A band of muddy air hovered above it, gathering the light.
“Not bad,” I said.
“Yeah,” said CJ. “What the fuck did we know? Turns out the East Coast sucks, and most of the shit I wanted to get away from was me.”
CJ lit the joint and the tip burst into red curls as she inhaled, a flash of light amid the darkness of the mountaintop. She handed me the joint then let the smoke seep from her mouth.
“Be careful with this shit.”
I puffed. The vapor moved down my throat like scalding soup. I coughed and handed it back. It left a taste of berries and ash. Dullness bloomed through my brain and I looked down at my hands to make sure they were still there. “I think I’m good.”
“Lightweight,” CJ chuckled and puffed away.
“When we were visiting Halmoni,” I said, slowly, feeling my tongue loll around my mouth, “I tried to ask my mom about her past. She wouldn’t talk about it, but that doesn’t stop her guilt-tripping me for my bad life choices.”
“Duh,” CJ fluttered her lips. “You’re Korean.”
“Half. What does that have to do with it?”
“Just two centuries of colonialism and war and poverty.”
I reached for the joint, sensing we were going somewhere I didn’t want to go and needing to dull the feeling.
“I’m Asian American, though,” I said. “Half of our work with the Liang-Gurley trial is to show we’re not all Asians focused on their small businesses, totally ignorant of the racial context that allows them to succeed.”
“Good luck with that,” CJ said coldly.
I winced as I realized CJ’s mom was one of those people. She’d run a dry cleaner on the edge of K-Town for years, where the clientele was mostly Latino. CJ would prop her AP calculus textbook against the register during her shifts. She’d tell me about the small dramas: the man who always stumbled in drunk and hit on her mom, the constant little repairs for machinery and lights that ate at their profits, the white people who screamed at them about little stains on their clothes. I’d always nodded as if I understood, but both of us knew I didn’t.
“I mean, not like they’re doing something wrong,” I said, “just that our project is about the American context.”
CJ flicked the last of the joint away and grunted. “You remember in high school, when my mom was in the hospital?”
I nodded.
CJ shifted in her jacket and her silhouette grew hard. “When she was lying there recovering, she started to tell me all this shit about her life, how she was depressed because of being lonely in this country where she didn’t know anyone and didn’t have time for anything but the fucking dry cleaner. How sometimes she wanted to vanish.
“And then I left to go back to school. She got better and went right back to working so she wouldn’t have to think about how depressed she was. Some Candide shit. Anyway, I got it, then: of course she was such a dick to me all the time, of course everything in my life—studying, Harvard, all that—was for her, even though I didn’t know it. Her depression, her wishing it was all different, was soaked into me before I was born. But if she never told me that stuff in the hospital, I’d just think she was some crazy bitch who happened to be my mom.”
CJ hunched forward and shoved her hands into her pockets. “Of course your mom’s not going to make it easy. But you have to figure that inherited shit out before it fucks you up worse. Freaking Korean moms.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. Korean moms. It felt like CJ had brought us to some totem inscribed in symbols we could sound out phonetically but didn’t understand. Whatever it meant, it wasn’t the all-American tenderness that bonded mother and child.
“Blah!” CJ yelled. She stuck her tongue out and threw her arms in the air as if she were drowning and signaling a ship. “Blerrr! Next topic! I’m tired of being all fucking serious. Let’s get boba or something.”