Reviewed by Brian Watson
Early on Hyeseung Song’s lushly written memoir, Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl, I had to stop and laugh.
Hyeseung and I share a Chinese zodiac year, the Horse, and she lamented the same prediction my Japanese colleagues shared with me nearly 40 years ago. People born in the Year of the Horse (women, particularly so) are headstrong and, therefore, hard to marry. Thankfully, Hyeseung is 12 years my junior and escaped the Fire Horse double-whammy (the twelve-year zodiac cycle repeats through five different elements before completing a full sixty-year rhythm). Even if my connection to this author could have been more auspicious, I felt a moment of shared pride: Year of the Horse babies, unite!
Hyeseung is a first-generation American, born to Korean immigrant parents, and struggled with the unique culture shock that can result when your parents grew up in a very different context, a theme Hyeseung explores in beautiful detail, bringing the reader away from potential stereotypes.
As Hyeseung’s story progressed, so too did my empathy for her. Her struggles with depression were faintly familiar to me, as were her varying prescriptions to address that depression. One of the medications she is given triggers minor seizures and eventually amplifies her suicide ideations. When she attempts to overdose on Ambien while at Harvard—pursuing both a law degree and a doctorate at the same time—she is admitted to the Short Term Unit at McLean Hospital for several weeks.
This is where the critical relationships within Hyeseung’s life become clear. Her Princeton grad student boyfriend, a selfless white man named Nate, ratchets up his need to care for Hyeseung, portending both the Nightingale Effect that leads to their marriage and Hyeseung’s ultimate decision to divorce Nate many years later. That relationship also contrasts with Hyeseung’s connections with her parents, particularly with her mother.
The relationship between the two women perplexes both Hyeseung and this reader for most of the book. The second chapter opens with a fight between her parents, one that Hyeseung witnesses with heart-wrenching pathos. When the seven-year-old protagonist tries to comfort her mother, there is ache all around:
“This woman had taught me that love was an obedience, and the guilt inside me pricked hard that I had wanted to run away and leave her behind…. I bowed under the immense darkness of my mother’s psyche. ‘Hyeseung-a, don’t be like me when you grow up,’ she said. What would be so bad about being like her one day? What would be so bad about being kind and generous in the face of lack and clever in everything? But I knew what she meant. Where was the key to her prison? I wanted to scream at the universe.”
While in the Short Term Unit, Hyeseung calls her parents from a phone booth, and she second-guesses her parents’ anger and shame at her need for clinical help—spending time, yet again, away from her studies. She demurs, makes excuses, and then collapses before returning to her bed: “This is who I am. Someday, I will die because I will have killed myself. In the darkness, I called God’s name as if he were lost to me, or perhaps I to him.”
Hyeseung’s depression seems to be more resilient than she is, and reading through her struggles with medications and her additional suicide attempts reminded me of the challenges I faced when fighting my own brain-chemistry-induced demons. And yet Hyeseung resurrects herself and the reader within the book’s last chapter. Her mother is dying of cancer, and a moment of revelation arrives:
“[My mother] loved through fierceness, which was either directed at you or towards your enemy. ‘Hyeseung-a, you are going to be okay, do you understand?’ ‘Yes, I understand,’ I said. If she had been there with me, she would have wiped my tear-stained face with a cloth, as she had done when I was in the intensive care unit months before in Houston, where she’d seen for the first time what it was for me to be ill. There, so close to my face I could feel her breath on my cheek, she’d whispered, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. Hyeseung, you are my star.’… The prospect of happiness she’d always tried to withhold from me—she now held it forth: choose yourself and no one else, open and close the doors you need to, celebrate the fire that is inside of you.”
And here is where I cried, once more, at this book’s beautiful closing. For readers like me, conditioned to be selfless, to think of parents, siblings, partners, or colleagues first, Hyeseung tells us what we need to know: celebrate the fire that is inside of you.
Brian Watson has been a queer leader/mentor for more than 35 years. In addition to reviewing for Hippocampus Magazine, his craft essays appear in the BREVITY blog. White Enso selected his essay, “Bending Time,” for their nonfiction award. Cutbank and Columbia Journal named “Unfolding,” a braided essay, a finalist for their respective 2023 non-fiction contests. His writing mentor from the AWP Writer to Writer program is Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased, and he shares his outlooks on the intersections of Japan and queerness with more than 500 subscribers to Out of Japan, his Substack newsletter.
