Poster Child (24 page)

On my last night in Seoul, I took my laundry off the clothesline that stretched across the narrow sun porch behind the kitchen. The neighborhood lay before me: a tangled nest of wires, clotheslines, red roofs, and rows of small back porches and patios. There wasn't a free space in sight: people living in boxes stacked on boxes stacked on the ground and then raised up as high as the sky. I pressed my face against the glass and looked down into this modern electrical net. If I fell, I might never reach the ground. Rice bubbled in the cooker behind me. The dusk light was a warm, hazy gold. A few small ants marched around the east-facing windows. A bird flew toward me and then away again, its black wings beating a clear path in the fading light.

The next morning when the taxi picked me up at the apartment, Mrs. Park took my hands and spread my palms over her warm cheeks. Her eyes were closed. Finally, she released me and shut the door. As the taxi pulled away, I looked in the rearview mirror and watched Mrs. Park's home become smaller and smaller until I could no longer find it among the other high-rise buildings.

Chapter Thirteen

SHAPE-SHIFTER

After I returned to Colorado, a friend sent me some of the letters I had written to her while I was in Korea. There was no mention of Itaewon, struggles at school, nightmares, trouble at my host family's house, or the terrifying panic attacks. Instead, there were detailed descriptions of streets, sunsets, students, and food. "I thought you were doing great there," she said.

I never let on that I wasn't having the time of my life. I could not bear to let anyone know that I was struggling. Who was I if not the overachiever who barreled through adversity with a laugh and a can-do spirit? Who was I if I could not
withstand?
Travel had failed me. How could I admit this, when months before I was so sure it would not just make me feel better, but make me whole?

After receiving the letters from my friend, I opened the box of journals I'd shipped back from Korea and read my private recollections of that time in the colorful notebooks I had purchased every week at the Kyobo bookstore in Seoul. While I was writing positive, upbeat letters, the journals tell a different story. I wrote: "I have an ill-proportioned, overweight body. What is the root of this horrible lack of self-esteem? Why does it pull on me so much? Why do I repulse people or feel like I do? Still, I must work harder. I must work harder to be better."

I did not know who—or even what—I was. I had yoked my identity to the physical appearance of my body, yet it was always changing. In that sense, it seemed to have little integrity—it was disassembled and, in a sense, violated—each night. My body felt like an unsafe place: a place I inhabited but felt disconnected from at the same time. No wonder I was afraid of the dark; I was terrified to be alone with myself.

When I returned from Korea, I felt more confused and desperate—more disembodied—than ever before. Would it ever be possible, I wondered as I closed the last journal and placed it in the box with the others, to rescue a whole from the parts, as I had so brazenly claimed to do in my senior thesis the year before?

Over the next months, I visited doctors and counselors, searching for answers and healing. Using a device that strapped around my chest, a cardiologist tracked each pulse and beat of my heart for one week, looking for signs of trouble. There was nothing wrong with my heart. The first counselor I went to prescribed heavy drugs; the next one suggested yogic retreats that involved relaxing chants and self-guided meditation. I flatly refused to do either, because the chanting made me sad and meditation made me anxious and uncomfortable. "I'm not doing that hippie shit," I told Mom.

One therapist gave me tapes of falling rain and suggested that I imagine painting the word "P^ELAX" on the inside of my forehead as I listened. The tapes made me giggle. None of it helped. Dad dropped me off at a different office each week. As I stepped out of the Volkswagen, he called, "Good luck!" as if this might be the person who could heal me. I stormed into the house after each appointment and announced something like "Another quack. Another insane shrink trying to tell me what to do."

Although I stopped fluctuating between feeling numb and frantic and the panic attacks eventually subsided, I felt unraveled and raw. I spent my days sleeping and reading nineteenth-century novels, taking long walks, and sitting on the porch with Fred, the family dog, after dinner. No medication or chants would supply an immediate understanding of what had happened to me. It was going to take time.

My experiences in Korea had shocked me out of a way of thinking that had guided my life for as long as I could remember. I had been fully invested in the lie that I was able-bodied. I had practiced and perfected this fiction, living within it and according to its dictates as if it were a moral framework instead of a complex system of self-deception: I did not want to be abnormal or
less than
because of my grievous, irrevocable physical flaw, so I had to be abnormally fantastic in order to compensate. The paradox: Being extraordinary was the only way to be ordinary. This worked to my advantage in many ways. Motivated by the fear that I would be worthless if I wasn't hugely successful, I worked hard to achieve my goals. But the fear that fueled my work ethic had devastating effects on my self-image. I had convinced myself that if I admitted my limitations, if I faced the truth about my body, if
I failed
in any real or imagined way, it would ruin my life. Who could love a person so deformed and scarred? A person with a body part that was not God-given, but manufactured, artificial? How could I have pride in an embodied existence that was such an aberration? I thought overcoming my disability was the only way for me to be loved, yet I was already deeply loved by many people; I just couldn't manage to love or accept myself. The problem was mine.

I realized that if I did not break free of my faulty logic, I might spin forever in a destructive trap of my own making, and then I would never be whole. In South Korea, stripped of language and the trappings of familiar culture, I was reduced to my body, a disabled body, a malformed, disfigured body: a difficult and complicated reality to claim.

For twenty-two years, I had been living as a willing stranger in the country of my own body; the geography and landscapes of its terrain felt foreign, although I'd lived within its borders all my life. I wanted to know and accept it, but I didn't want to ask for help. I knew a change was needed, but I was so afraid that if I finally accepted my body, if I dug deeply into my feelings of shame surrounding my disability, then I would be completely ejected from the normal world. It seemed so much easier to keep "passing"— even though doing so had already cost me so much.

In an effort to impose some structure on myself, get out of the house, and also make some money, I took the job I'd had for years during the summer: selling lingerie at a store in the mall. I spoke in my "bra and panties voice" for eight hours each day; listened to women complain about how much they hated their bodies as I measured them for new undergarments; hung tiny little bras carefully on tiny little hangers; and convinced people to buy matching robes for their silk chemises. At night, I collapsed in front of the television. I didn't even have the energy to impersonate the perky sorority girls I worked with, something that had particularly entertained Dad during previous summers.

I was back home and should have felt safe, but I felt like shit. My parents tiptoed around me, giving me space, letting me sleep until the middle of the afternoon on my days off, not saying anything when I snorted angry responses at them from behind whatever book I happened to be reading.

One Saturday, I was invited to a party by a college friend who was in Denver working on her master's degree. I took hours applying glittery makeup, curling my hair, and squeezing into a pair of tight jeans and a lacy black top.

"It's good you're getting out!" Mom said, neglecting to comment on my outfit.

As I crossed the lawn to get in my friend's car and go to the party, I felt giddy. I was determined to shake this foul mood by putting all of my fears, doubts, and confusion about where I was going in my life and where I had come from into becoming as drunk and flirtatious as possible. It had partially worked in Dublin, hadn't it? Wasn't that the best year of my life? I wanted to feel like a woman; this meant having the question "Am I desirable?" answered in the affirmative. I stayed up until six in the morning, making out with a guy whose name I never bothered to learn.

When I arrived home, Mom and Dad were waiting up for me in the living room, exhausted and furious. "Where the hell have you been?" Mom asked.

"Having fun for once, what's wrong with that?" I yelled.

"You could have at least called us!" she shouted.

"I'll do what I want," I said. "I'm an adult."

"Could have fooled me," Dad said.

As a result of forging short-lived romantic flings slapped together by alcohol and adrenaline, I often found myself in precarious situations I wasn't prepared for and with people I didn't want to be with. I was addicted to the promise of intimacy. A man's desire for me instantly colored my perception of him: Suddenly he seemed perfect, and more than lust, more than anything else, I felt gratitude. Each new man held out the false hope that he might change my life, make it better, make it mine. Impulsively and without much thought to the consequences, I leapt at every opportunity for what might be reinvention, happiness, change—something.

I made promises to be responsible when I went out, and each weekend I broke that promise. "I don't do anything stupid. I'm careful," I told Mom, although standing in the front room on yet another Saturday morning with my tights balled up in one hand, I felt ridiculous, having morphed into the cliche of a rebellious high school teenager even though I was twenty-two.

After several weeks of this behavior, Mom became frantic. I was too old to be grounded, and parental lectures were having no effect. "Where are you?" she'd ask, crying while I struggled up the stairs to sleep off my hangover. "We are losing you!"

Because I couldn't always remember what happened during my drunken encounters, I got an AIDS test. Worried and frantic as I waited for the results, I followed Mom around the house, asking her if she thought I looked sick.

"What do you have to be concerned about?" Mom asked. She was in the laundry room. "You said you were safe." I poured some detergent on a pile of towels, slammed the lid shut, and adjusted the dial. "Weren't you?" She pulled the dial, and water poured into the tub.

"Tell me," she said, and as the washing machine swished and whirred, I did. I told her plenty of things she would rather not have known. We stayed through the wash and dry cycle of one complete load, and when we left the room, Mom closed the door.

"My dirty laundry," I joked.

"Not funny," she replied.

When the test came back negative, Mom really let me have it. "You will get your shit together, young lady," she said. "I'm not going through this again. I am
not!"

After this incident, my relationship with my mother deepened and improved, in part because she had changed. As a school nurse with several districts under her partial administrative jurisdiction, she helped implement a revolutionary inclusion program that helped integrate special education kids into the regular classroom; no more hidden, corner rooms for them. Her newfound professional confidence changed her toward me, and I felt I could tell her more. She seemed less traditional somehow and much more open and free. Powerful in a new way.

At Thanksgiving, we drove to a Lutheran retreat center in the mountains. Through the car window, I watched evergreens pass in a green, spiky blur. I rolled down the window and inhaled the clean, thin, snow-tinged air of my childhood, and then I felt it. Something broke inside me. Some horrifying pressure was released. "Fuck it, fuck you! Fuck
everything!"
I yelled out the window at the stoic trees and the old snow piled between them. I banged my hands against the car windows and thrashed around in the backseat. I screamed and cried and cursed and pounded my fists against my thighs.

"What is it? What's the matter?" Dad asked, slowing down so much that the car behind us on the winding road began to tailgate impatiently.

Mom looked at me as if she didn't know me at all. I felt for a brief instant that I really had been lost and lost forever. I felt that ground of being I had been so desperate to find slip from beneath me. Soon I was sobbing, and so was Mom.

"Shit," Dad said, and pulled onto the road's shoulder. He looked straight ahead for a few moments, and then he started to cry, too. "Okay, you two," he said. For several minutes, the car shook with our crying and the trucks racing by on the steep mountain road.

That night, I tried to write letters by the fire in our cabin but found I had little to say. After Mom and Dad had gone to bed, I crept out the front door. The night was freezing and clear; the stars looked as if they were pinning down the land. For the first time in a long time, I felt gripped by the faith I'd had as a child and just as quickly released again. I felt solid, supported, taken inside my body in a way I hadn't felt in years or maybe ever before. Lumps of snow falling from the tree branches broke the quiet with a muted thump as they hit the ground. I listened to the trees creaking and shifting; I felt the cold ground beneath my boots.

In the morning, Dad was in the kitchen making the only meal he can—pancakes.

"I'm going to divinity school," I said. However fleeting the previous night's connection had been, I'd felt embodied in a way I hadn't for a long time, and I hadn't been thinking about it at all; it had been effortless. I felt faith in what would happen next, and I decided to act on it.

"Excellent plan!" Dad exclaimed. "I'm surprised, honestly, but good for you!"

"Why so surprised? Don't you think I can do it?" I sneered. I felt the fears rushing back. Maybe it was madness to pursue theology any further. Maybe I would just continue to tell nice-sounding lies. Maybe what I'd felt had been nothing more than a hoax, just another trick of the mind.

"Oh, lighten up," he said, and slid a pancake onto my plate. "Just thought you'd given up on the whole study-of-God path."

"You make seminary sound like vacation Bible school," I said.

"I would know," he replied. "Good luck with Greek."

"Listen, Happy Hank, don't be such a grump," Mom said, shaking my arm and then handing me a cup of coffee. "I can totally see you as a theologian. I think grad school is a great idea."