Hyeseung Song lays bare the difficulties she encountered trying to fit into American culture as a girl of Korean descent in Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl (Simon & Schuster 2024). Throughout her young life, Hyeseung longs to be seen for who she really is. She feels she is either invisible to White Americans or appreciated only when she is perfectly obedient and super-achieving. This is a fine memoir that will appeal to those interested in the search for identity and also those who are dealing with depression themselves or with a loved one who is coping with depression.
Although her parents live in Sugar Land, a magical-sounding place of cookie-cutter modest homes in Houston, they have vicious fights over money. Her mother supports the family through her nursing salary. Her father has an engineering degree, yet he dreams of “being a successful businessman but lacked the motional aptitude and savviness to maneuver even normal life.” Hyeseung becomes a shield between her parents during these arguments, her mother’s “best friend and confidante.” She worries her mother’s sorrows are her fault because she is somehow bad:
“I hugged my mother to my body and through my skin leached the sadness out from hers, and ate and ate and ate her sadness away with my life.”
Ultimately, she ends up angry with both parents: her father for “screwing things up again” and her mother “for not being able to control him.”
Hyeseung Song
Throughout her childhood and teen years, Hyeseung makes various friends, but they fall away quickly when she moves from one school to another. Her mother informs her that “They don’t like you as much as you like them, and someone needs to open your eyes to that.” Her mother makes her feels that her 92 grade makes her mediocre. It takes years for Hyeseung to realize her mother doesn’t really comprehend American culture all that well; that Hyeseung did have friends who liked her; that 92 was hardly mediocre. Her mother is appallingly demanding, making her daughter feel as if her love was entirely conditional. In a horrible moment that reinforces Hyeseung’s feelings of inadequacy, her high school gives out senior superlatives, publicly shaming her with the “Thinks She’s Smartest” award right after her rival Grace Cho receives the “Smartest Girl” award. Years later, she learns a former boyfriend arranged for her to get that slap in the face. This is one time her mother says the right thing: “Don’t worry about what anyone thinks. I know who you are.” Sadly, it is not enough to erase the shame and feeling that her classmates think she is a fraud.
At Princeton, Hyeseung hopes to find a more egalitarian world, but quickly learns that is not to be the case. She is at home academically, but her friends have all come from more privileged backgrounds. She avoids friendships with fellow Asian Americans who might have understood her deepest fears.
Periodically, beginning her senior year in high school and continuing through college and early career, Hyeseung suffers from depression serious enough she has to withdraw to her bed for days on end. She even stays in the infirmary for extended times. Medication and therapy begin to help her. When she receives admittance to Harvard law school, she is in one way relieved. It feels like justification of previous efforts. Yet she also recognizes that career path may not bring her happiness:
“Passing through this door meant more punishing work, more contests that could be won or lost without any regard as to whether I might find joy in the endeavor or even discover who I was.”
It is not surprising after such a rocky start that Hyeseung would find it difficult to make a life that brings her satisfaction. Eventually, she begins to find an identity and sense of self worth:
“In the end, the search to understand myself cracked everything open. I wanted not just this one thing—the artist’s life—but real, unaccounting, unconditional love, and the risk and danger that went with it.”
She also learns that her parents just wanted her to be happy: “they told me they had seen me.” They want her to be “someone with spirit and responsibility.”
Hyeseung Song is a first-generation Korean American writer and painter. Raised in Houston, she now lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York.
Leave a Reply