“Unmasking Expectations: How Hyeseung Song’s ‘Docile’ Shatters the Stereotypes of the Perfect Asian Girl”
While in the Short Term Unit, Hyeseung calls her parents from a phone booth, and she second-guesses her parents’ anger and shame at her need for clinical help—spending time, yet again, away from her studies. She demurs, makes excuses, and then collapses before returning to her bed: “This is who I am. Someday, I will die because I will have killed myself. In the darkness, I called God’s name as if he were lost to me, or perhaps I to him.”
Hyeseung’s depression seems to be more resilient than she is, and reading through her struggles with medications and her additional suicide attempts reminded me of the challenges I faced when fighting my own brain-chemistry-induced demons. And yet Hyeseung resurrects herself and the reader within the book’s last chapter. Her mother is dying of cancer, and a moment of revelation arrives:
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