is my real dream school. But Mom-n-Dad have already nixed that notion. Music? How you making money? How you eating?
Hanna’s two names are Hanna Li (character count: seven) and Ji-Young Li (nine). Dad named Hanna Li after Honali, from a popular 1960s marijuana anthem disguised as a children’s song, “Puff (The Magic Dragon).” The song had found its way into high-school English classes in Seoul in the 1970s. Dad has never smoked pot in his life. He had no idea what he was singing.
Hanna is the oldest; Hanna did everything right. Mom-n-Dad told her to study hard, so she got straight As. They told her to go to The Harvard, so she did, and graduated with honors. She moved on to Harvard Law School, and graduated with a leap big enough to catapult her above assistants her same age at Eastern Edge Consulting downtown, which specializes in negotiating ridiculous patents for billion-dollar tech companies. She’s even dabbling in venture capital now from her home office high atop Beacon Hill. Weekdays, she wears very expensive pantsuits; weekends, sensible (but still very expensive) dresses. Someone should put her on the cover of a business travel magazine or something.
But then Hanna did the one wrong thing. She fell in love.
Falling in love isn’t bad by itself. But when it’s with a black boy, it’s big enough to cancel out everything she did right her whole life. This boy gave Hanna a ring, which Mom-n-Dad have not seen and might never.
In another family perhaps on another planet, this brown boy would be brought home for summer vacation to meet the family, and we would all try out his name in the open air: Miles Lane.
But we’re on this planet, and Mom-n-Dad are Mom-n-Dad, so there will be no Hanna this summer. I miss her. But I understand why she won’t come home. Even though it does mean I’ll be left high and dry without someone to make fun of the world with.
The last time she came home was a Thanksgiving holiday two years ago. She was at a Gathering. It was the Changs’ turn to host. I’m not sure why she did what she did that night. So I have this boy now, she said. And he is The One.
And she held out her phone with a photo of Miles to Mom-n-Dad and everyone. It was like she cast a Silence spell on the room. No one said shit.
After a long minute, the phone turned itself off.
Mom-n-Dad went to the front door, put on their shoes, and waited with eyes averted for us to join them. We left without a word of explanation—none was needed—and the next morning Hanna vanished onto a flight back to Boston, four days early. A year later, after six or seven Hanna-free Gatherings, Ella Chang dared utter the word disowned.
And life went on. Mom-n-Dad no longer talked about Hanna. They acted like she moved to a foreign country with no modern forms of communication. Whenever I brought her up, they would literally—literally—avert their eyes and fall silent until I gave up. After a while, I did.
So did Hanna. Her text message responses fell from every day to every other day, then every week, and so on. This is how disownment happens. It’s not like some final sentence declared during some family tribunal. Disownment is a gradual kind of neglect. Since Mom-n-Dad gave up on Hanna, Hanna decided to give up as well. I get that.
But I never gave up on her. I still haven’t.
It’s a scary thing to watch someone you love vanish from sight.
I talk a lot about Hanna with Q. Q is what I call my top chap, and I am his.
I’m forever grateful for Q’s patience with me, because I can’t imagine it makes Q feel all that good to hear how Mom-n-Dad rejected a boy with the same skin color as his.
Q’s full name is Q Lee. He Lee and me Li. Like two brothers from Korean and African-American mothers. His parents, Mr. and Ms. Lee, are normal people who seem forever astonished that they gave birth to such a meganerd of a son. Q has a twin sister named Evon who is so smoking hot I can barely look at her. You say Evon Lee like heavenly.
Q’s Q doesn’t stand for anything; it’s just Q. Q decided to rename himself a couple months ago on his eighteenth birthday. He was originally born as Will. Will Lee.