When I left customs, I turned on my phone and was hit with a billion unread texts from my mom.
Text us when you land!
Okay looks like your flight is on time.
Maybe a little early. We’ll leave a little early, too,
just in case.
Dad says he’ll wait in the parking garage and then come out when you text him.
Nevermind we are all coming now.
I blew out an agitated breath. Of course they were.
We are here! No rush, just text when you are done.
No rush. Just texting you again to passive-aggressively remind you to rush!
We’re by baggage claim now.
I gripped my carry-on handle as I rolled it through a dingy corridor. Once, it had probably been really sleek and modern, but now it was just neglected and worn out. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead. LAX was such a pit. I thought back to the impeccably designed spaces of Heathrow. Why did anyone live in the US?
Two months had flown by. My summer academic program in London had been a dream. After winning an essay contest, I’d been invited to study engineering for free at some random fancy British high school. It was the best summer of my life. Everything but flights were covered, and my parents had let me stay an extra month.
“Aren’t you homesick?” my older brother Ron would ask from his dorm room at UC Irvine. Orange County was the farthest Ron would live. He drove the hour home most weekends so that my mom could do his laundry for him.
No, I hadn’t been homesick. In fact, the second I’d arrived in London, I had felt so grounded, so assured. I was able to be a version of myself that I’d known was in there—buried under sixteen years with my family.
“Nari-yah!”
Hearing my Korean name yelled out in public was always startling. But there was my mom, waving her arms frantically, like she was hoping for a helicopter rescue on a desert island. Ron and Dad were next to her.
A claustrophobic trio of good intentions.
My dad clapped me on the shoulder. “You look skinny.”
“Because bad British food, huh?” my mom said, looking at me with a furrowed brow. She was doing the Korean Mom Body Scan: skin too tan, hair unbrushed, approximately 3.25 pounds lost.
My brother grunted a hello. Right. This was my family. I thought of how I’d cried and hugged every single friend in my fellowship program my last day in London. Generous in my feelings.
“I love you guys,” I had said while weeping. It was so easy to say.
I missed them already.
When we got home, all I wanted to do was to crash in my bed and sleep for a week. But my parents had other plans.
“Everyone’s coming over tonight,” my dad said as he turned on the TV, the sound blaring through the house.
“Oh, my God,” I hollered over the noise. “Can we not? I’m so tired.”
“It’s okay, you can just eat and go to sleep,” my mom said.
But that was never going to happen. That evening, extended family members stuffed themselves into the one-story ranch house. I was happy to see my cousins, as close to me as siblings. Their noisy company kept my jet lag at bay.
“Nari Unni, were the guys in London cute?” My cousin Rachel slumped into a giant pillow in our family room and wagged her eyebrows at me. She was fourteen, obsessed with K-pop boys, and her horniness had no bounds.
I laughed. “So cute. They dress really nicely there.”
“Better than me?” Rachel’s twin brother Daniel kept his eyes on the video game he was playing.
“Better than a T-shirt with a dragon wearing sunglasses and the words Summer Is Coming underneath? Yeah, somehow they’ve surpassed your level.”
Ron held the other controller. They were in some medieval landscape filled with white-people elves and mossy ruins. “Nari thinks everything in London was better than here. She’s so worldly now.”
“Shut up.” I frowned. “When you guys leave here—if you ever leave here, Ronald—then you’ll know, too. The world is big.” And I was ready for it.
“It’s not like we live in some podunk town,” Ron said as his character shot an arrow into a troll thing. “You live in a place that other people dream of living in, too, you know.”
“Yeah, actors.”
Dinner was well-orchestrated chaos. After years of dining together, everyone knew when to reach for the banchan—the little side dishes—and when to dip their spoon into the communal bowls of soup.
Living with a bunch of Europeans, I’d had to adjust to a lot of new table manners. With my family, there was no Can you please pass the salt? Life was too short for that. You ate when you could, no offense taken when your uncle almost elbowed you in the face to get to the blanched spinach.
“Mom, remember when you made this soup on that one camping trip?” Ron said after he shoveled a huge spoonful into his mouth.
She nodded as she flitted around the table, refilling side dishes, checking on everyone’s rice bowls. When they hosted dinner, my parents never sat down; there was too much to do in the kitchen. They ate when everyone else had finished.
“That camping trip was such a long time ago. What, three years?” said my oldest uncle from my dad’s side.
“A long time,” one of my aunts said with a nod. “The kids don’t want to do trips like that anymore.”
“That’s not true,” Ron protested. “I love camping.”
“Me too,” said Rachel.
The little kid table piped up with “Yeah!”
“Camping!”
Oh no.
My dad sat up, excitement thrumming through him with big chihuahua energy. “Let’s do it! The kids don’t start school for another couple weeks!”
I tried to make eye contact with my cousins. Like, let us thwart this while we can. But everyone was into it except for me. And by the end of dinner, we had a plan.
I slept for thirteen hours that night.
* * *
One week later, we were, indeed, headed on a camping trip.
“We’re still using that tent?” I asked, pointing at the orange nylon bundle covered in a fine coat of dirt.
My dad shoved a beach chair into the trunk next to the tent. “Yeah!”
“Dad. It’s tiny.”
“We still fit into it,” he said, his voice strained as he maneuvered the cooler in.
“Barely! You got that tent when we were little kids. Don’t you think it’s time to upgrade?”