Free Food for Millionaires
Min Jin Lee
For Umma, Ahpa, Myung, and Sang
Our crowns have been bought and paid for—all we have to do is wear them.
—JAMES BALDWIN
Book I
Works
1 OPTIONS
C OMPETENCE CAN BE A CURSE.
As a capable young woman, Casey Han felt compelled to choose respectability and success. But it was glamour and insight that she craved. A Korean immigrant who’d grown up in a dim, blue-collar neighborhood in Queens, she’d hoped for a bright, glittering life beyond the workhorse struggles of her parents, who managed a Manhattan dry cleaner.
Casey was unusually tall for a Korean, nearly five feet eight, slender, and self-conscious about what she wore. She kept her black hair shoulder length, fastidiously powdered her nose, and wore wine-colored lipstick without variation. To save money, she wore her eyeglasses at home, but outside she wore contact lenses to correct her nearsightedness. She did not believe she was pretty but felt she had something—some sort of workable sex appeal. She admired feminine modesty and looked down at women who tried to appear too sexy. For a girl of only twenty-two, Casey Han had numerous theories of beauty and sexuality, but the essence of her philosophy was that allure trumped obvious display. She’d read that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis advised a woman to dress like a column, and Casey never failed to follow that instruction.
Seated in the spacious linoleum-covered kitchen of her parents’ rent-controlled two-bedroom in Elmhurst, Casey looked out of place in her white linen shirt and white cotton slacks—dressed as if she were about to have a gin and tonic brought to her on a silver tray. Next to her at the Formica-topped table, her father, Joseph Han, could’ve easily passed for her grandfather. He filled his tumbler with ice for his first whiskey of the evening. An hour earlier, he’d returned from a Saturday of sorting laundry at the Sutton Place drop shop that he ran for Mr. Kang, a wealthy Korean who owned a dozen dry-cleaning stores. Joseph and his daughter Casey did not speak to each other. Casey’s younger sister, Tina—a Bronx Science Westinghouse finalist, vice president of the Campus Christian Crusade at MIT, and a pre-med—was their father’s favorite. A classical Korean beauty, Tina was the picture of the girls’ mother, Leah, in her youth.
Leah bustled about cooking their first family dinner in months, singing hymns while Tina chopped scallions. Although not yet forty, Leah had prematurely gray hair that obscured her smooth pale brow. At seventeen, she’d married Joseph, who was then thirty-six and a close friend of her eldest brother. On their wedding night, Casey was conceived, and two years later, Tina was born.
Now it was a Saturday night in June, a week after Casey’s college graduation. Her four years at Princeton had given her a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, wealthy friends, a popular white boyfriend, an agnostic’s closeted passion for reading the Bible, and a magna cum laude degree in economics. But she had no job and a number of bad habits.
Virginia Craft, Casey’s roommate of four years, had tried to convince her to give up the habit that taxed her considerably while she sat next to her brooding father. At the moment, Casey would’ve bartered her body for a cigarette. The promise of lighting one on the building roof after dinner was all that kept her seated in the kitchen—her bare foot tapping lightly on the floor. But the college graduate had other problems insoluble by a smoke. Since she had no job, she’d returned to her folks’ two-bedroom on Van Kleeck Street. Seventeen years earlier, in the year of the bicentennial, the family of four had immigrated to America. And Leah’s terror of change had kept them in the same apartment unit. It all seemed a bit pathetic.
The smoking, among other things, was corroding Casey’s sense of being an honest person. She prided herself on being forthright, though she often dodged her parents. Her biggest secret was Jay Currie—her white American boyfriend. On the previous Sunday night after having some very nice sex, Jay had suggested, his elbow crooked over his pillow and head cradled in his hand, “Move in with me. Consider this, Miss Han: sexual congress on tap.” Her parents also had no idea that she wasn’t a virgin and that she’d been on the pill since she was fifteen. Being at home made Casey anxious, and she continually felt like patting down her pockets for matches. Consequently, she found herself missing Princeton—even the starchy meals at Charter, her eating club. But nostalgia would do her no good. Casey needed a plan to escape Elmhurst.
Last spring, against Jay’s advice, Casey had applied to only one investment banking program. She’d learned, after all the sign-up sheets were filled, that Kearn Davis was the bank that every econ major wanted in 1993. Yet she reasoned that her grades were superior to Jay’s, and she could sell anything. At the Kearn Davis interview, Casey greeted the pair of female interviewers wearing a yellow silk suit and cracked a Nancy Reagan joke, thinking it might make a feminist connection. The two women were wearing navy and charcoal wool, and they let Casey hang herself in fifteen minutes flat. Showing her out, they waved, not bothering to shake her hand.