Where the Wind Leads

by Dr. Vinh Chung

  Han and Sunny had very modern ambitions for their daughter, but at the same time they were a traditional Korean couple and followed traditional roles. Leisle has a brother named Isaac who is three years younger than her. Sunny once walked into the kitchen and found her son washing dishes, and she told him to stop. “When you’re married, break a few dishes,” she advised him. “Your wife won’t ask you to do dishes anymore.” Han insisted that his daughter learn how to cook, or else she would never find a man who would marry her. Who would want to marry a president who can’t cook?

  If there was anything lacking in Leisle’s education, it was social. To keep her focused on her studies, dating was out of the question for her in high school, and since she had an eight o’clock curfew, her dates wouldn’t have lasted very long anyway. Leisle’s parents had reason to be protective of their daughter; her high school had the highest pregnancy rate in the state of Arkansas, and it was the first high school in the state to offer contraceptive advice in the school health clinic.

  By the time Leisle graduated from high school, she was valedictorian and student council president. She applied to Yale early because that’s what Koreans did, and she was accepted in December of her senior year. When Leisle’s parents heard their daughter had been accepted to Yale, her mother collapsed on the sofa and wept while her father scooped up Leisle in his arms and swung her around until she was dizzy.

  In some ways Leisle and I were similar, but in other ways we could not have been more different. We were both high achievers, but we did it in different ways and for different reasons. Leisle was confident, but I had something to prove. She was disciplined while I stayed busy. She was focused like a laser beam, but I was like a fire hose with no one holding on to the end. She knew where she was going, and she worked hard to get there; I worked hard, too, but with no particular destination in mind. Leisle’s motto was, “Aim for the stars and see what you can hit.” My motto was, “If you hit what’s right in front of you, you don’t have to aim.”

  But despite all our differences, there was one quality we had in common that would ultimately bring us together: she knew nothing about boys, and I knew nothing about girls.

  Forty

  BOY MEETS GIRL

  THERE IS A WISE OLD CHINESE PROVERB THAT SAYS, “Even when a girl is as shy as a mouse, you still have to beware of the tiger within.” My mother taught me the truth of that proverb, so I should have known better when I met Leisle Chung.

  In the spring of 1993, I was completing my junior year of high school and thinking about the upcoming summer. While my classmates were looking forward to pleasant summer jobs working retail in air-conditioned malls or ogling attractive girls from a lifeguard stand, I was facing another brutal summer in hell’s kitchen at Chungking Chinese Restaurant.

  Just before school ended, I was told I had been recommended for a summer program called Arkansas Governor’s School. After an entire year of classes and homework, the idea of another school-related event didn’t interest me at all, but when I read the brochure carefully, I realized that it was exactly the kind of academically enriching program I was looking for: it lasted most of the summer, it took place out of town, and it was free. Harry Truman was famous for saying, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” and I decided to take his advice. I filled out the application, wrote the required essay, and was accepted.

  When my brother Thai heard about it, he was furious because he was going to be home from college for the summer and would have to cover for me in the restaurant. “You lazy bum,” he grumbled. “You’re just trying to get out of work.”

  I was indignant: “Give me a break! I’m going for an academic program here.”

  At Lincoln High School, forty miles to the north, Leisle Chung had also been recommended for Governor’s School and decided to attend for reasons nothing at all like my own: it was a highly regarded program that would look good on the résumé she planned to include with her applications to Ivy League colleges.

  Governor’s School was held at a small liberal arts college called Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, just outside Little Rock. It began in early June, which was perfect timing for me because it was just about the time the temperature in Arkansas started to peak. On the first day of the program there was an orientation, and when I looked for my name on a list of attendees, I spotted a name just before mine that said “L. Chung.” At first I thought it might be a mistake, but then I met this L—an attractive, articulate five-foot-tall Korean girl named Leisle.

  It might seem like an odd coincidence that we happened to have the same last name, but Zhang happens to be the most common surname on earth, and it’s often transliterated Chang or Chung. There are an estimated one hundred million of us out there, so running into another Chung was statistically no more unlikely than one Smith or Jones bumping into another.

  We all were assigned mailboxes for the summer, and because there were 440 students attending, we each had to share a mailbox with another student. Apparently they were assigned alphabetically because my box-mate turned out to be none other than Leisle Chung.

  It’s hard to imagine what I must have looked like to Leisle when we first met. My brothers all shared clothing, so when I packed for Governor’s School, I had to pick from what no one else was wearing that day. My pants were usually too big; whenever I stood up straight, I had to hitch them up, and some of them had a big patch on the crotch that didn’t match the other material. I had a cowlick that stood up defiantly, regardless of what I did to try to plaster it down, and Leisle told me later that the Nerd on my glasses was clearly readable in Korean.

  What I had going in my favor was that I was tall, I was in good shape, and I was one of the first Asian boys Leisle had ever seen. Sometimes it helps to be first in line.

  Leisle liked me right away. I like to think it was because I was tall and good-looking, but the truth is she liked the fact that I was sociable and outgoing and seemed to smile all the time. She didn’t realize that my pleasant demeanor was part of my coping mechanism to avoid rejection and confrontation; I had learned long ago that people tend to be nice to nice people, so I was as nice as they came. We met at our mailbox every day, and after every brief conversation we liked each other a little more.

  Leisle got letters and care packages from home almost every day, but she noticed that I rarely got any. When I finally did, she asked, “Is that from your girlfriend?”

  Sheepishly I replied, “No.”

  “Doesn’t your girlfriend write to you?”

  “I don’t really have a girlfriend,” I mumbled.

  Clever girl—she didn’t need Facebook to figure out my relationship status.

  The Governor’s School program exceeded my expectations—there were only a few classes each day, and the rest of the time was free. There was a boys’ dorm and a girls’ dorm, and after hours the students liked to hang out in the lobbies and fraternize. Leisle was in the lobby, playing cards one day when I returned from a workout. I ran and lifted weights every day to stay in shape because it was the summer before my senior year and two-a-day football practices were going to begin in August.

  I walked into the lobby with no shirt on and sat down right next to Leisle. For some reason she got unusually quiet; in fact, she wouldn’t even make eye contact with me—her face just got red and she kept shuffling cards. I had no clue what was going on, and she had to explain it to me later—much later.

  I knew nothing about girls at all. I can honestly say that at that point in my life, I had never had a single meaningful conversation with a member of the opposite sex, including my mother and sisters. I talked to my sisters only when I needed help with homework or chores, and the most profound thing my mother ever told me was that swallowing a live gecko will cure asthma. My mother was a very loving woman, but she didn’t express it in words—my family just wasn’t like that. My mother and father never hugged me or told me they loved me. They loved me by providing for me and keeping me safe, and I
always knew that I was loved; what I didn’t know was how to talk to girls.

  The only time I ever spoke to girls in school was to say, “Hi” or “Excuse me.” Part of the reason for my reticence was ethnic, part was my own insecurity, and part was because I just had no idea what to say to a girl. When I started to excel at football and mathematics at Northside, I became well-known but didn’t know anyone well. My only relationships were on the football team, and we mostly communicated by butting heads and swatting butts. All the other football players had girlfriends, and they seemed to talk to them about deep things all the time, but I never had that experience myself.

  Leisle was way ahead of me. She never had a real boyfriend, but her family was much more expressive than mine. They hugged each other and said “I love you” all the time—they even kissed, and not like the Vietnamese do. In traditional Vietnamese families, they don’t kiss; they sniff. They don’t pucker up—they press their lips together, lean forward, and sniff. No wonder my parents never had the sex talk with me.

  Leisle understood emotions far better than I did, and she was comfortable talking about her feelings, but since she had never been allowed to have a boyfriend, there were a lot of topics she had never discussed with a boy. When she met me, she was ready to talk, and I was surprised to discover that I was ready too.

  There was a jazz concert during the first week of Governor’s School, and we both attended because there was nothing else to do. Neither of us really liked jazz, so after a few minutes we decided to go somewhere and talk. We ended up talking for hours; it was the longest conversation I had ever had in my life. I didn’t think it was possible to talk that long, and the idea that I could talk that long with a girl was mind-altering.

  And Leisle was not only a girl; she was an Asian girl. Though her family’s specific experience was different from mine, our cultures had much in common, and we could actually understand each other. When she told me that she could never look her father in the eye when she disagreed with him because it would have been disrespectful, I understood—it was the same way in my family, and no one outside my family had ever been able to understand that.

  For me, it was more like an explosion than a conversation. There were hundreds of topics that I had never been able to discuss with anyone, and when I connected with Leisle, they all came pouring out. Social issues, political issues, theological issues—I wanted to talk about all of them, and I was so excited that I was almost shouting. At first I would pick a topic and take a controversial position just to see what Leisle would do, and her responses were always insightful and challenging. Whenever I pushed, she pushed back—and she could push hard. I didn’t find out until later that Leisle was a twotime Arkansas debate champion.

  I was amazed. I kept telling Leisle, “I didn’t know girls were that smart,” which I’m sure impressed her. I thought only scientists and mathematicians were really smart, and I figured men were always superior in those fields. It was a remarkably ignorant position, and I should have known better since my own experience as a refugee had taught me that discrimination stems from ignorance—but I was so ignorant about girls that I was blind to my own form of prejudice.

  I felt like a biologist who had just discovered a new species; I probably told her that and impressed her again. From that day on we spent every spare minute at Governor’s School talking. We talked for hours every day, seven days a week, and we talked so late into the evening that we had to run back to our dorms to make curfew. Our relationship grew closer every day, and every day the topics became more personal.

  One day, out of the blue, she asked me, “When was your first kiss?”

  I started blushing. “I can’t believe you asked me that!” I blurted out. “How could you ask me that?” It was obvious to her that I had never been kissed before, but being a boy, it still took me a couple of days to admit it.

  Though Leisle never had a boyfriend, she had been kissed before. When she was in junior high, she realized one day that she was the only one of her friends who never had been kissed, and she didn’t like being behind. She knew there was a boy in her class who had liked her for a long time, so she walked up to him one day and told him that she liked him too. After two days the boy got up enough nerve to kiss her, and then she broke up with him—problem solved.

  Before Governor’s School was over, I solved that problem too—I kissed Leisle.

  I was in the habit of keeping a journal at the time, and in my entry that evening I wrote:

  I did it. For the first time, I KISSED.

  It wasn’t as bad as I had expected. I enjoyed it. The sensation was far more appealing than the thought.

  For me, that was practically poetry.

  Then one day our conversation turned to plans for the future. Leisle asked me what I planned to do after graduation.

  I shrugged. “Go to college. Become a doctor.”

  “What colleges are you applying to?”

  Colleges? Why would anyone apply to more than one college? “U of A,” I said. “That’s where all my brothers and sisters have gone.”

  “Have you thought about the Ivy League?”

  Ivy League—I had never heard of it before, but it didn’t sound particularly appealing. Northside High was the Grizzlies, and Arkansas was the Razorbacks—who in the world picked Ivy for a mascot?

  I turned the conversation back to her. “Is that where you’re going?”

  “I plan to go to Yale,” she said. “I want to major in history or political science; then I plan to go to Yale Law School and eventually become a Supreme Court justice.”

  My mouth dropped open. I thought I was ambitious, but this girl was aiming over my head. I had a few plans, but she had an overarching vision. She knew what she wanted to do and had a path in mind to get there, and for me, it was just the opposite: I had a path in mind but only a vague idea of where I wanted to end up.

  But it wasn’t the clarity of her vision that impressed me most; it was the sheer size of it. Leisle thought big—bigger than I ever thought I was allowed to think. She was planning to do things that I assumed were impossible for someone like me. Could a little Korean girl from a farm in Seongnam actually become an American Supreme Court justice? Was that even possible? What astonished me was that she actually thought it was.

  Leisle’s vision and confidence were infectious, and after six weeks of exposure to it, I was beginning to catch the disease. I kept thinking about how similar we were and how much we thought alike. And then the thought occurred to me: if she believed things like that were possible, maybe I should try believing it too.

  When Governor’s School was about to end, Leisle asked me the hardest question of all: “What are we, Vinh? Are we boyfriend and girlfriend? What are we really?”

  I really didn’t know. I knew the feelings I had for her, but I was unable to name them—they just felt consuming and confusing. How could I be Leisle’s boyfriend if she wasn’t allowed to date, and how could she be my girlfriend if I didn’t have time for one? We lived an hour apart; we would never see each other, and when we graduated from high school in a year, we would be headed in different directions—me to the college down the road and her to Alpha Centauri. The only thing I knew for certain was that I did not want to let her get away—but I had no idea how to answer her question.

  “You’re more than a friend,” I said. “But you’re not really a girlfriend.” Then it came to me: “You’re my special good friend.”

  We all have flashes of brilliance in our lives, but that wasn’t one of mine. I was so confused about the nature of our relationship that I invented a whole new category for it: special good friend. When I look back on that conversation, I’m surprised Leisle didn’t just roll her eyes and walk away because it must have sounded to her like a complete lack of commitment on my part—which it was. I didn’t know how to commit, and this was all so new to me that I wasn’t even sure what I wanted.

  Fortunately Leisle understood I was sailing in uncharted waters,
and for that matter, so was she. It was the first real relationship either of us had ever had, and we were just going to have to fumble our way along and figure things out as we went.

  And so we parted as “special good friends.” Arkansas Governor’s School turned out to be the most important program I never attended. My course of study was outside the classroom, and I had discovered I had a lot to learn.

  But I had never enjoyed homework so much.

  Forty-One

  SPECIAL GOOD FRIEND

  WHEN LEISLE AND I RETURNED HOME FROM Governor’s School, we were immediately reimmersed in our busy lives. We were both about to begin our senior years of high school, me at Northside High in Fort Smith and her at Lincoln High, and we each had plenty to occupy our attention. Leisle had studies, student council, and debate, while I had studies, football, and dissecting chickens. But we had started something at Governor’s School that did not go away when we got home, and neither of us was quite sure what to do about it.

  When Leisle’s parents came to pick her up from Governor’s School, she introduced me to them but only as one of several friends she had met there. We had to be careful because in her parents’ eyes I already had three strikes against me: I was a boy, I wasn’t Korean, and I was a potential distraction for Leisle. We both knew her parents were not ready to hear that their Yale-bound daughter had picked up a “special good friend” at summer camp, so I just said a quick hello and tried to make a good first impression in case my name ever came up again.

  We knew we wouldn’t be able to visit each other, though Leisle lived only a short distance away. I couldn’t drive to see Leisle because I was supposed to be concentrating on becoming a doctor. The way my parents looked at it, I would have plenty of time for girlfriends after medical school—a brief delay of nine years.