When I was child, my parents told me to “be smart” at least once a day. Depending on the context, these words stood in for a range of different things: a goodbye when I ran out the door for school, an admonishment when I misbehaved, or a reminder to study harder. In our family, being smart was everything.
According to my father, the smartest person he knew was his youngest sister, my Aunt D. In the late 1960s, she immigrated from South Korea to the United States by herself and eventually landed what my father referred to as a “steady” job. He could never quite explain what she did for the federal government, but he was quick to list the things he coveted.
A combination of temperament and language had forced my father to make do with self-employment, which was decidedly unsteady. When he first started out, he taught tae kwon do classes until ten o’clock at night and touched every dollar he made, unfolding the wrinkled bills and occasional check that he received from his students. My mother, whom he sent for a year after his arrival in the States, worked the line in a frozen pizza factory and waited tables until they eventually saved enough to buy her a small business.
The words “be smart” kept ringing in my ears. Trying to be a writer seemed like the opposite of that advice. For my parents, America was all about the hustle.
It didn’t matter if they were too tired or sick or sad to work. Having witnessed the Korean War as children, they understood that life could turn sideways with very little warning. There was no safety net for them in this country—or by extension, for me or my sister.
In comparison, my Aunt D., with her nice office job and health insurance and personal days, had reached the top of a ladder they didn’t know how to climb. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I followed my Aunt D’s example and began my career in government after college. By my late twenties, I was living what my parents proudly referred to as “a very smart life.” I had a graduate degree, I owned my apartment in Brooklyn, I was married to a boy from a good family, and most importantly, I had a job that paid well at a major New York cultural institution.
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