Meet the Kims

August 12, 2016

Family is a weird thing. It’s just a group of people that you live with for the first part of your life; in that time, you somehow learn more about them than anyone else—their likes, dislikes, quirks, pet peeves, everything in between. You don’t choose them, but they become the biggest factors in defining who you are. They are the ones that shape you most.

They are the ones that I will soon be leaving—not forever, but after eighteen years of sharing the same roof (and hopefully, unless my life is a complete failure, never doing so again), it certainly has been a while—so let me tell you a little bit about mine.

We are two parents and two daughters, of which I am the oldest. My poor father, in his household of females, magnanimously submits to our various whims and desires, often (alongside my sister) acting as the mediator between my mom and me when one of our overblown, hysterical fights shakes the very foundations of our home. When not dealing with that, he tries to keep up with the capricious and perplexing minds of his two teenage girls, who—at fourteen and eighteen—do their part to keep him on his toes.

(Dad once told me that his friends, when he was younger, always joked that he would be a very attractive girl. Well, I’ve heard many a time that we look alike. And I’m a girl. So—thanks for the genes, Dad.)

He always cleans the table after dinner before falling asleep on the floor or on our longest living room couch (we have three). And yet more often than not, he will be up at all hours of the night in his corner of our blue workroom, typing away, performing miracles. He is a physicist at heart, driven by a love for the logical world of mathematics—the only language that makes sense in his brain, so different from my own. I stopped asking him for homework help two years ago after his need to show me how things worked—he’d spend twenty minutes proving the derivation of a formula that I simply wanted to know how to use—wore down my patience and my time (a girl only has so many hours in a night to finish all her calc problems). Since then, he has moved on to my sister, who is the only person in this family with the impossible ability to make him angry enough to raise his voice.

I took my sister to lunch and bowling the other day, and it was the most fun I’ve had in a while. She, just beginning high school, and I, just ending it, are at two different junctures in our lives. Over pancakes and eggs (Elmo’s serves breakfast all day!) we laughed and chatted like sisters should, and Adri, I was so happy to be there with you. At four years apart, our past has been rocky ever since my sister, upon learning to speak, ceased to be my life-size baby doll and began to follow me around everywhere. I, at the strong independent age of five, realized just how annoying that could be, and throughout elementary and middle school, we bickered and cried and generally drove our parents insane. (For a good ten Christmases straight, my dad’s only desired gift was “one day of Veronica and Adri being nice to each other, please.”) I swear, we fought about everything. Adri would order the same meal at a restaurant—I’d get mad. I would refuse to move my seat up in the car to give her more leg room—she’d get mad. She would borrow my nail polish without asking—I’d get mad. And so on and so forth, until there were literally no more topics over which we could argue; we’d exhausted them all.

And so we became friends.

Of course, nothing’s perfect. We still fight sometimes, and we’re both blunt to the point of aggression, which means personality clashes are inevitable. But however belatedly—he gave up three years ago—my dad’s Christmas wish has come true. Adri and I shop, or browse dessert recipes, or discuss volleyball (she with a much deeper understanding of the sport), or share music tastes (I force my music tastes upon her; she rejects them), or girl talk in the car (mmm, Dave Franco) when I’m driving her somewhere. We keep each other’s secrets and can speak candidly in a way that I otherwise reserve only for my closest friends.

It makes my mom happy, because she’s been hearing both us complain to her—about each other—for entirely too long.

And speaking of my mom, she is the one who holds this whole shebang together. Although she likes to say that it is my mood that affects the family’s wellbeing—if Veronica’s not happy, no one’s happy—it is she who keeps me sane, who makes sure my dad’s outfits match in the morning, who plans carpools and mealtimes so my sister always gets to volleyball practice fifteen minutes early. My junior year, Mom took up baking, both to calm her nerves and to keep me fed, since my stress levels were so high that I often forgot to eat, exacerbating my constant bad mood. She’s a kickass cook. She worries a lot. I think the news of my first kiss sent her into mild shock.

Yet she is also the one who showed me how to draw, sketching princesses at the coffee table while I gripped a pencil in my fist and clumsily attempted to copy her motions; she taught me the alphabet at a year and a half; I was reading by three. My dependence on her as a toddler was so strong that she gave up professional school to take care of me—I would cry so much in her absence that I threw up. (Yes, I know, I’m an awful child. I still feel guilty about this. Trust me.) I have inherited from her my flair for the dramatic, my love of arts and crafts, my steady hand, my aesthetic eye. Somewhere inside of me, I hope, is her determination, humility, and altruism, her exceptional ability to give without taking a single thing in return. My mom is a queen. She understands me in ways that I don’t even understand myself.

Tonight, the Kim family is relatively calm. My dad and I are in the workroom—I write this at my desk while he sits to my left, scrolling through the Korean news on his computer. My sister packs for an overnight trip to the beach with her volleyball team. She is notoriously bad at packing, and my mother warns that she will be checking to see just how much stuff Adri plans to bring. Too lazy to move, they bicker loudly from their respective bedrooms, which are right across the hall from each other; my dad and I, mere bystanders, laugh.

Veronica, would you take a pair of jean shorts to the beach?

No.

Silence.

Okay, but—

Adri, you don’t need this much, just—

Okay, okay, stop yelling at me—

I’m not yelling, I’m just—

The sun is finally setting. In my room, it throws orange and pink and yellow light across the floor. My sister and mom are now outright arguing in the hallway, so my dad gets up, approaches, wraps an arm around my mom’s waist in an unsuccessful attempt to defuse the tension.

(One lecture later, and)

Our house stills. It’s night.

Soon, we will gather in my parents’ room like we always do, maybe turn on the Olympics, open a board game. The Kim family is always partial to Scrabble, or Qwirkle, a recent discovery. We trade off who keeps score, banter, tease each other when we take too long.

In just over a month, this Chapel Hill house will no longer be my home. I’ll be gone and my mom and my dad and Adri will have to adjust to a daily routine that no longer involves me.

Family is a weird thing. But the Kim family—that’s all I’ve ever known.

I’m going to miss them so much.