And that something was usually my father. My parents insisted on taking me to school. It was not that they were helicopter parents. They were the opposite. They had nothing else to do. They were like balloons that had escaped a child’s grasp—pointlessly floating. “Focus!” I would plead with my mother as she took a twenty-minute detour from making me breakfast. And my father was forever jumping from one obscurity to another. By the time he and I got to know each other, his life had become a diversion from a task long forgotten. Each morning began with the intention of getting me to school on time, but my dad would soon get distracted, and the next thing I knew, I was in the middle of the street with him, traffic swerving and honking around us, trying to get a cab to take us the eight blocks between our house and the school. Needless to say, I was never on time. One day, before I’d finished breakfast, my father, heading out the door, announced that he was picking something up from his tailor (a short Korean gentleman, whose shop was across the street).
