Issue 21: "Less Than Perfect: What I Left Off of My College Admissions Applications" by Hannah Bae
Immigrant Hustle: A Monthly Mini Memoir
Heeey KP!
This month’s IH Mini Memoir is written by Hannah Bae — an amazing storyteller with the audacity to tell the truth and confront unhealthy cultural norms. There is so much I want to say about the profound impact I think Hannah’s memoir will have on KP readers, but it’s better to just jump into her story and consider the toll that ignoring mental health and intergenerational traumas can bring on a young person and family. We trust that Hannah’s experience will comfort those who have experienced pain at home or reveal the damage that neglect or avoidance can bring. Thank you Hannah for bringing consciousness and the potential to heal by inspiring us to center healthy minds, bodies and spirit.
"Less Than Perfect: What I Left Off of My College Admissions Applications" - A Mini Memoir
Hannah Bae is a Korean American Komerican freelance journalist, nonfiction writer and illustrator who is at work on a memoir about what it takes to build a beautiful adult life after healing from childhood trauma. She is a 2024 grantee in literature for the New York State Council on the Arts, a 2024 juror in nonfiction for The Kirkus Prize, a 2021 and 2022 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, and the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. You can find her work in anthologies such as Our Red Book (Simon & Schuster) and (Don’t) Call Me Crazy (Algonquin); and online at Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins, Catapult, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle and other outlets. You can follow Hanna on IG @hannahbae.
NOTE: The full version of this essay was originally published in the 2018 anthology (Don’t) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation About Mental Health, edited by Kelly Jensen. It was adapted and published online in abridged form by Bitch Media, RIP.
It had been dark for hours by the time I turned onto my street. I was coming home from an after-school activity—crew practice, or Model United Nations, or student government. My shoulders sagged as I thought about the piles of homework waiting for me. As I pulled into the driveway, my headlights flashed across the house and my heart lurched. It took a few seconds to register what I’d seen in the glare: a face, ghostly and wild-eyed, standing sentry inside the front door. I had put the car in park when she burst out the door, all flailing arms and rage.
“I see you!” she screamed in Korean, loud enough for the neighbors to hear. By now, they’d already written us off as “that crazy Asian family.”
“You whore! Stay away from my husband!”
She was only inches from my face when Mom realized it was me.
“God, you can’t even recognize your own daughter?” I said bitterly in English, without betraying the pounding in my chest. I headed straight to my room without looking back at her.
Some version of this started happening about once a month during high school. Mom, paranoid that Dad was having an affair, was convinced that “she”—another woman—snuck into our house at night. Of course, there was no other woman—not at this point in our lives. But that didn’t stop Mom’s delusions.
As a high school student, I didn’t have the words to understand what was happening to my mother. But years later, I began to understand when she received her diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia.
It became an exasperating, painful routine. I’d be stressing over a paper on the old desktop computer, chatting online, or struggling to make sense of precalculus. Then the screaming would start.
It never occurred to me that this was important enough to tell a trusted adult. And so I didn’t.
Instead, I did anything to stay out of my own house. To my classmates, I appeared to be just another golden child. I attended the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Alexandria, Virginia, a notorious powder keg of teenage stress. Known locally as “TJ,” from 2007 to 2013, U.S. News and World Report named it the best public high school in the United States. I was a leader in student government, varsity coxswain on the crew team, and a member of homecoming court.
As Mom’s mental illness worsened, I felt frustrated by my family’s inaction.
In Korean culture, mental illness is an incredibly taboo subject. It comes as no surprise, then, that South Korea has the highest suicide rate of any industrialized country, and studies show that suicide is the leading cause of death among the country’s teens.
As a Komerican teenager born and raised in the United States, I couldn’t understand why Mom wouldn’t seek help. It was clear that she was sick, but she wouldn’t even take the meds she was prescribed the few times she saw a doctor. Why didn’t Dad make her take her pills? Why did it feel like he’d given up on her life? Why didn’t they get anyone else involved?
The only way I knew how to survive was to shut my home life out and immerse myself in my world at school, keeping my emotions tightly bottled up. That way, I could hold myself together enough to maintain a sunny disposition, excel where I had natural talents, and scrape by elsewhere. (As I write now, in my 30s, I have to stop myself from saying “barely scrape by.” I graduated high school more than 20 years ago with a B+ average! It’s still hard to maintain perspective after coming out of an environment where everyone else seemed so perfect.)
But a few adults could tell something was wrong. Before I could drive, I was often stranded after activities wrapped up, forgotten by my parents, who were tied up in their own drama. Kind teachers would take pity and offer me a lift home. Other times, concerned parents would gently let me know that a check from my parents to pay for some regatta or conference had bounced.
Yet I didn’t want to make excuses for my middling grades or air out my family’s dirty laundry. I was never completely honest with anyone about the full extent of the turmoil happening at home. I felt ashamed, especially when I compared myself to my affluent friends. I thought the key to clawing my way up in life was to ape my privileged peers as closely as possible: dress the same, listen to the same music, apply to the same colleges, aspire to the same goals. Acknowledging problems at home would have set me apart.
Then, my senior year, I got one college rejection letter after another. At one point, late in the spring, I believed I hadn’t gotten into any college at all. I felt like the perfect world I’d carefully constructed at school was crumbling around me. What I had left out of the college admissions equation were the details of my family’s struggles with mental illness.
Devastated, I wept openly in the halls at school. I had thought that college would launch me out of my parents’ damaged orbit. But it seemed I had aimed too high, and reality had smacked me back down to earth.
I did end up going to college—a welcome packet arrived a few weeks late, but with a generous scholarship. It was a thousand miles from home, and that distance allowed me to thrive as a student. Many Komericans believe that family comes first, that creating boundaries even with abusive kin is unthinkable or dishonorable. But my truth is that getting away from my family gave me my first taste of safety—and I finally got to see what life could be like outside survival mode.
H Mart Happiness: What’s your favorite product and why?
“These insanely delicious spicy Sichuan peanuts! They’re not Korean, but they are my jam.” - Hannah B.
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Great read, important topic
Most def! Hannah is 🤯 ❤️🩹