5H. Every turn led to another group of Spanish mission-style apartments with those signature clay tile roofs that were everywhere in the Southwest and California.
When I finally got to 5H, the door was ajar. Han welcomed me with an uncharacteristic hug. “Giftyyyyy,” he said, lifting me up a little.
He was drunk, another rarity for him, and though I’d never noticed it before, I noticed it then—the tips of his ears were red, just like the day he’d found me crying in the lab.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in shorts before, Han,” I said.
“Check out my bare feet too,” he said, wiggling his toes. “Lab regulations have really deprived you from seeing me in all my natural beauty.”
I laughed, and he flushed even deeper. “Make yourself at home,” he said, waving me in.
I moved through the living room, chatting with my cohort. We ranged in age from twenty-two to forty-seven. Our backgrounds were similarly all over the place—robotics, molecular biology, music, psychology, literature. All roads had led to the brain.
I was bad at most parties but good at these. It’s remarkable how cool you can seem when you are the only black person in a room, even when you’ve done nothing cool at all. I wasn’t close to anyone at the party, certainly not close enough to tell them about my mother, but by the end of the night, the alcohol had loosened my lips and I started to get comfortable, to talk around the subject I most wanted to talk about.
“Do you think you’ll ever go back to practicing psychiatry?” I asked Katherine. She was one of the more senior members of my lab, a postdoc who’d done her undergraduate studies at Oxford and a medical degree at UCSF before starting her PhD here. We had a tentative friendship, predicated mostly on the fact that we had both been raised in immigrant families and that we were two of the only women in the department. I always got the sense that Katherine wanted to get to know me better. She was friendly and open, too open for my comfort. Once, in the lounge, Katherine had confided in me that she had snooped through her husband’s things and found little “o’s” written in his calendar on the days when she was ovulating, and she thought that maybe he was trying to trick her into having a baby sooner than the time frame they’d planned on. She’d been so free with that information, like she was telling me about a cough she couldn’t kick, but I was enraged, self-righteous. “Leave him,” I said, but she didn’t, and as I talked to her, Steve, her husband, was on the other side of Han’s living room, sipping sangria, his head tilted back just slightly so that I could see his Adam’s apple bob as the drink moved down. Knowing what I knew about Steve, I couldn’t look at him, his Adam’s apple, and not see a kind of menace, but there he was talking, drinking, ordinary.
“I think about going back to my practice all the time,” Katherine said. “With medicine, I could see that I was helping people. A patient would come in, so wracked with anxiety that they were scratching their arms raw, and months later, no scratches. That’s gratifying. But with research? Who knows.”
My mother had hated therapy. She went in arms raw, came out arms raw. She was distrustful of psychiatrists and she didn’t believe in mental illness. That’s how she put it. “I don’t believe in mental illness.” She claimed that it, along with everything else she disapproved of, was an invention of the West. I told her about Ama Ata Aidoo’s book Changes, in which the character Esi says, “you cannot go around claiming that an idea or an item was imported into a given society unless you could also conclude that to the best of your knowledge, there is not, and never was any word or phrase in that society’s indigenous language which describes that idea or item.”
Abodamfo. Bodam nii. That was the word for “crazy person,” the word I’d heard my aunt use that day in Kejetia to describe the dreadlocked man. My mother refused this logic. After my brother died, she refused to name her illness depression. “Americans get depressed on TV and they cry,” she said. My mother rarely cried. She fought the feeling for a while, but then one day, not long after the Naked Egg experiment, she got