Raw and articulate, Sung fumigates her life with forceful sincerity. I devoured her highs and lows, swept up into the story of her life through her sapient prose and detailed memory.
Starting from her early childhood, Sung begins by describing some of her earliest memories: the house in Sugar Land that her parents bought, her father’s schemes to make “big money,” her mother and father fighting. Through these grounded images, Sung begins weaving the tapestry of her life: tracing the outline of the person that she has become today. She grew up in Sugar Land, then moved to Memorial after several of her father’s schemes to get rich ended up going nowhere. Life in Memorial was different for a young Korean American whose family lived in an apartment in a suburb full of picket fences. Even at such a young age, Sung understood that to survive in the world around her and to meet the expectations of her peers, and more importantly, her mother, she must perform. There was the right thing and the wrong thing to say. Pulled taut by the expectations of her mother, her father, and her community, Sung experiences her first bout of depression in her senior year of high school, which she will eventually discover, many years later, was the first of many waves of Bipolar.
College is difficult for Sung, though it’s not the course material that causes her strife. Despite thousands of miles of separation between herself and her mother, Sung still feels her pulling at the strings of her life. She hears her mother’s voice in her head as she lies in a depressive state in her bed, unable to drag herself awake.
Throughout all of this, I appreciated Sung’s ability to handle dichotomy and contradiction. She describes her parents and her siblings in very real and raw ways: how her father, though abusive verbally and physically, still loves his family and has such a passion for the things that he does. How her mother, manipulative and capricious, was still a person that Sung relied on, even until her death. These very frank and honest descriptions are brimming with one of the core themes of the memoir: love. To love a person is to love all parts of them, even the ugly parts.
Though my story is not the same, and in some ways is so far removed from Sung’s, there were parts that my fragile ego latched onto. Her own struggles with mental illness helped me understand my sister a bit better, who has, for most of her life, struggled with severe bouts of anxiety and depression. Sung’s descriptions of trying to find herself without school, her smarts, or her family reverberated in my own experiences. I graduated college a year early, but am still trying to figure out what I want to do. I feel the pressures of the world around me, demanding that I make something of myself, demanding that I become Big Money Corporate to survive and make art. Sung’s story shows me that there are many ways to make the life you want, make the art you want. I hope that one day I can find the kind of space and peace for art and love and life that Sung has managed to achieve.
