Docile

From Texas sugar cane fields, Ivy League halls to Hyeseung Song's homeland of South Korea and back again, this memoir is a journey through identity crises, mental health struggles and the quest for selfhood.


Born to Korean immigrant parents, Hyeseung spends her early years in the sugar cane fields of Texas, caught between her father's "get rich quick schemes" and her beautiful, domineering mother who is skeptical of Western idealism.


With her parents constantly at odds, Hyeseung learns more Korean words for hatred than for love. When the family's fake Gucci business lands them in bankruptcy, Hyeseung starts at a new school where she's immediately singled out with the question, "Can you speak English?"


Growing up, Hyeseung internalizes Western expectations of the "model" Asian-American, striving for approval and getting into an Ivy League school. Yet, she resents the other high-achieving Asian students she meets and clings to her "token" status among her white peers.


In an attempt to reconcile her identity, she takes a trip to Korea, facing an even greater crisis of self, and after a series of shocking events, she is admitted to a psychiatric hospital and ultimately attempts suicide. Marriage to a doting white physicist and a new career as a painter seem to offer refuge-until they don't.


Unflinching and lyrical, Docile is one woman's story of subverting the model minority myth, contending with mental illness, and finding her self-worth by looking within.