MEDITATIONS ON HOME
Sung
J. Woo
Growing up in the
suburbs of New Jersey, what I wanted more than anything was for my home
to be a
house. Frankly, I didn’t know what was
taking so long. Why couldn’t my parents
save up some cash and move us out of our ratty apartment and into a
little Cape
Cod? I never thought it was much to ask. It wasn’t like I was expecting a ten-bedroom
mansion, just a little bungalow that we could call our own. A house was permanent while an apartment was
in-between, ephemeral. I always felt
like we were on the verge of escaping to a better place.
Except we stayed
put. Money, I was told, didn’t grow on
trees, and I should appreciate whatever roof I did have over my head. We lived between those anonymous white walls
for my entire adolescence, and even after I left for college, my
parents
remained, finally relocating when the rent got too high and they found
more
affordable senior housing elsewhere.
During my freshman
year, I lived in the dorms, which felt no different than the apartment
of my
youth. You weren’t allowed to nail
anything into the walls, so I bought sticky blue clay-goo to put up my
poster
of Salvador Dali’s melting clocks. The
welcome letter that came with the room made it very clear: at the end
of the
year, I was supposed to leave the room exactly as I found it today. I was a transient, living on borrowed time,
in a borrowed space.
I was miserable,
and when a friend suggested that I join a fraternity, I looked at him
like he
was crazy. Couldn’t he see how much I
hated my life already? Why in the world
would I want to join a bunch of beer-swilling meatheads?
Well, my friend
suggested, because maybe they’re not a bunch of beer-swilling meatheads?
My friend, who was
a sophomore, pledged that fall with three of his buddies, and when the
spring
semester began and I seriously considered transferring to a different
school,
he invited me over to the house.
It was painted
white with green trim, three stories high on a gentle hill, and unlike
most of
the frats I’d been to, the place actually looked like it was kept in
decent
shape: no empty beer cans strewn on the front lawn, no holes in the
wall where
a drunk person slammed his or her head through.
It wasn’t immaculate, of course; after all, a bunch of college
kids
lived there. But it was no worse than
the dorms where I was living, either.
And like my
friend, who was most definitely not a beer-swilling meathead, who was
in fact
one of the nicest people I’d met in my entire life, the rest of the
members of
the fraternity were just the same. A lot
of them were geeky, awkward engineering majors, my kind of people, and
I would
soon learn all of their names and call them my brothers, because I
ended up
pledging.
One of the
requirements of becoming a part of the brotherhood was to upgrade the
house in
some way, to change its physical structure.
My fellow initiates and I chose to repaint the dining room, and
even
though I agreed with them that we were being used for slave labor, I
was
actually ecstatic. Here I was, dipping
my brush into the paint and making my mark: I was here.
It turned out that
what people hated, I loved. Once a week,
everyone was given a common room to clean, such as scrubbing one of the
bathrooms or vacuuming the carpeted stairs, and I couldn’t have been
happier
performing my chores. I was taking care
of this house that had stood since 1910, my first house.
I never much cared for open parties, but even
those I learned to adore because there were domestic duties to be
performed:
manning the bar, refilling bowls of potato chips and pretzels for the
guests,
DJing the music so my brothers and friends could dance the night away.
What
I treasured most of all was coming home after a long day of classes. Walking over the suspension bridge, making a
left at Fall Creek Drive, trying to forget about the test I’d flunked
or the
paper I’d turned in late, wondering if I had the gumption to ask out
the girl
in the Faulkner class – and then there it was, my safe haven, and
whatever
problems I had accrued seemed a little less daunting.
One of my fondest memories is this: it’s
practically arctic out there, the snow coming down hard, the winter
wind sneaky
and painful, and as I wend my way through the blinding flurries, I run
into one
of my brothers, and we struggle up the driveway together, our boots
crunching
through the cake of snow and ice, and we’re running and laughing and
bursting
through the doors, and we throw our Michelin-man coats down on the
floor and
scurry to the two radiators in the Red Rug Room, our backs to the warm
metal,
alternately blowing into our hands, thawing.
They
say you can’t go home again, but that didn’t stop me from trying. After I graduated, I returned to the house
twice, glad to see the innocent pledges turn into know-it-all
upperclassmen,
glad to see the dining room still in that awful yellow paint of my
doing, but
there was a bittersweet sadness, too, telling me this was no longer my
home. This past June, I drove back to
campus for my
fifteenth reunion, and when I visited the house, walking through the
halls I
knew so well, I felt like I was being pulled apart in two.
How could a place that felt so familiar also
feel so distant? There were a few people
staying there over summer break, and I kept thinking that they didn’t
belong
there, that this was my house with my brothers.
But
of course, it was me who didn’t belong.
Sung
J. Woo’s
s short
stories and essays have appeared in The
New York Times, McSweeney’s, and KoreAm
Journal. His debut novel, Everything Asian (2009),
has received
praises from The Christian Science
Monitor, Kirkus Reviews (starred
review), the Chicago Sun-Times, and
won the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature (Youth
category). His
short story “Limits” was an Editor’s Choice winner in Carve
Magazine’s 2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest.
A graduate of Cornell University with an MFA
from New York University, Woo lives in Washington, New Jersey.