Shauna Woo 1

I've always tried to do my best. It shows. I never hurt my parents with drug use or a "bad-influence" boyfriends. I'm valedictorian of my class and I'm headed to Yale. I'm a model minority. I'm almost perfect. There's nothing to complain about me.

Then why is it that I'm so terribly unhappy. Why do I feel so bottled up inside? It's like self-torture.

Recently, I decided by myself that I'm not going to college. I want to experience life for myself, not be so sheltered. I'm also tired of feeling so self-righteous all the time. I'm tired of so many things. I feel that this is what God wants me to do. This is what God wants me to do. So I told my parents that this is what God wants me to do:

-Are you crazy? What kind of God does not want you to go to Yale? What the hell is the matter with you? Did we raise you up all this time to have you turn your back on us? All those years of tutoring, all those years of directing you in the right direction, and you want to do what God wants you to do? Do you personally talk to God or something?

I had never seen Dad so mad before. He was still yelling at me. So I was sheltered and I wanted to see real life? He yelled that real life was cruel, meaningless, and racist. He just couldn't believe what he heard. Mom looked so wounded that she looked like she needed to go to the hospital for a month. I could not bear to look into her eyes and Dad was still yelling. All I could see was the color yellow in front of me and THEN, it happened. He stopped yelling. They both just disappeared and I was left sitting on the couch. There was so much that I wanted to tell them, but they were gone. They were always right. They had more experience than me. They had more knowledge. They had more everything. They had the whole entire knowledge of the Confucian system, they had thousand of years of knowledge, they knew everything about everything and once they had their say, they left me alone on the couch. This was reality. I was to be molded by them into this perfect Asian, a perfect Korean, a proof that the system worked and produced identical beings of such calm and illuminating and reasonable minds.