Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl
Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl is the autobiography of a first-generation Korean American girl and then woman who tries desperately to fulfil the dreams her immigrant parents have for her, to succeed in American terms, while remaining faithful to her Korean roots—even by always eating Korean food for breakfast! As is usually the case in such stories the parents’ ambitions for their daughter reflect their own unfulfilled attempts and yearnings for successful integration.
Hyeseung Song’s mother, Umma, who works as a nurse is beautiful and driven in all her endeavors whether that be in elaborate calculation of minute savings to be made on the weekly grocery bill (“the poverty math”), the appearance of her house, or her daughter’s Ivy League success and belonging.
Her father, hearing “the siren call of the American dollar,” intends to be a billionaire, and periodically gives up a salaried engineering job for a series of precarious private enterprises for which he seems ill-equipped, though returning in the end to his roots as an engineering consultant of respectable but not extraordinary achievement.
Her parents’ relationship was tumultuous (“I flinched hearing him use that word: SsangYong, whore . . .”) usually on account of their insufficient means, and only toward the end of the story does Hyeseung recognize the depth of their love for each other.
Docile takes us, in detail, through Hyeseung’s striving to be the daughter her mother wants her to be in elementary, and high school, and later at Princeton and Harvard. We see her humiliations as a poor, sometimes wrongly dressed, non-white girl; her dropping out and taking leave of her courses; her periods of intense depression and suicide attempts; as well as her many academic triumphs.
Her sometimes imaginary or trivial humiliations are even more keenly felt by her mother, Umma, whilst her triumphs are never quite enough. Hyeseung describes her relationships of various duration with her own and the opposite sex, including a marriage to Nate, which she leaves; and her mental and physical health breakdowns leading to an eventual diagnosis at 35 years of age of bipolar disorder, though the full impact of that diagnosis remains for another day . . . or memoir.
Eventually she finds the tenacity and courage to do what she wants to do, which is to be an artist, rather than what she ought to do. She finds success on her chosen path and is reconciled with her parents shortly before her mother’s death from cancer.
Docile is in many ways a classic version of a first- generation American’s complex journey to eventual success, self-knowledge, and self-fulfilment.
It is always elegant and clearly written, though not every one of the Korean terms sprinkled here and there is self-evident. The main characters, her parents Appa and Umma, are clearly and convincingly delineated though some of the minor characters who move in and out of various chapters and episodes somewhat less so.
This is a very heartfelt, intensely personal, and moving story of boredom, depression, suffering, and striving to reach eventual self-realization, and it is a tribute to Hyeseung that she carries the reader and reviewer along with only minor longueurs. The primary appeal of this book will be to those readers who can also personally identify with Hyeseung’s story.