The story of Bear
Bear is a pillow-shaped stuffed animal who is the preeminent 'pet' in our family. He gets told toddler stories, always has a spot in bed for cuddling, is offered delicious bites to eat at our meals and gets featured in sketchbook depictions of our daily family life.
Bear is oblong, yet organically shaped, with paws and feet and a little round tail. He lays on his tummy, with his short arms and legs dragging behind him. He has no neck, and his pointy head droops slightly when he's been held a certain way, tucked in the crook of my toddler's elbows. He is light caramel and made of soft polyester, with moderate stuffing. His eyes are closed in deep, serene slumber.
He can be easily hugged and dragged along by both my boys, even though he is as tall as my 1-year-old. He tags along in the stroller on walks to the lake, in the car on trips to the doctor. He gets regular baths in the washing machine, an absence which often triggers immense tantrums. He's come apart at the seams several times now, near his ears and in the butt next to his leg. My mother has repaired him with ugly black thread at my request; later I picked up sewing, and put him back together with neat ladder stitching after a particularly rough bath left him deflated. He received a proper Head Augmentation, at the same time.
Bear is from Korea. Bear has had a somewhat difficult life.
Bear is a child of separation.
The summer after college graduation, my boyfriend Hubert and I decided to be long-distance. Our parents had finally met; we had survived a peaceful year together, no weird drama, just quiet nights tucked up at his little apartment on Warring St.
Both of us had graduated on a relatively high note – a solid roster of close friends, extracurriculars, some work experience and well-rounded academics. But neither of us had job offers in hand.
I embarked on a two-week tour of China and Japan with our marching band, a rare opportunity for our group. Hubert was also in band that year but was one of the few fourth-year seniors who didn't make the cut, and it was bittersweet for me to go on that trip without him. Afterwards, I packed up all my things to move down to LA, where I decided I would give myself the summer to properly job-search. It felt safer to be at home where there was no pressure to pay rent. At the time I was still involved with the prospect of screenwriting, and being in LA made more sense.
Hubert also went to Asia, on a much longer family trip. He and his sister visited grandparents in Taiwan, and also hopped over to Japan and Korea for some sightseeing. They took this trip with their wealthy aunt, who I had never met, but who apparently held me in high regard because Hubert told her once that I read The Analects for fun.
Within the first month of being home, I felt overwhelmed and increasingly anxious. On a meetup with my screenwriting mentor and his wife, I was receiving mixed messages – the mentor wanted me to keep working for him and go to film school; the wife quietly suggested I find a real job. I listened to the wife.
I sent out endless applications to large firms with no referral. Predictably, I never heard back. My resume was all over the place – graphic design, screenwriting, geophysics. What had seemed so harmless in the course of college abruptly stopped making sense in the 'real world', in my tiny stifling room, staring at my computer and melting in my pajamas.
A friend's cousin who was in band in previous years and had been on the Asia tour with us sent out an email blast about an internship position at a tiny firm in SF. I scraped together some video and writing samples. They flew me out for an interview. I got the spot, and within the week I was looking for housing.
Hubert, in an impulsive decision after a "shoo-in" interview with a large firm didn't pan out, opted for a one-year grad school degree at Berkeley. The application process was shockingly easy. It was yet another year of costly tuition, but at least he had the rich aunt in his court.
Suddenly, he was looking for housing too.
Before graduation, we had briefly toured some studio apartments, tentatively testing out the idea of our own little abode. Something bright, with wood floors and windows and plants and space for two bikes. We were rather idealistic, and only liked places with astronomical rents.
Now, I was on the fence about living with him. He would need to commute to campus, and I would need to commute to the city. I had one contact from my mom with a converted garage out by the zoo, who was looking for a tenant. It was a beautiful house, above ground at least. She talked about her two kids and her career in marketing. She was offering a very reasonable $1k, which I later learned was a 'friends and family' rate. There was no kitchen. I turned it down, and my mom got a talking-to from her friend, for my inconsiderateness.
Unable to find a long term suitable spot on such short notice, and uncertain about my internship's outcome, I decided to sublet Hubert's sister's place on College for the summer. It was a moldy apartment, a cramped triple, but for that summer it was peacefully empty and the bus commute was breezy, door to door. I thoroughly enjoyed living on my own. I stayed up late reading, went swimming on the leftover bit of my college gym pass, and worked my ass off for that internship.
I hung out with my friend Matt, a classmate from my first year of college. We became friends because I was so impressed that he used Dvorak layout on all his keyboards, which is a quirky setup I had endlessly proselytized to my friends. He was a programmer who loved to read everything under the sun, a walking wikipedia who liked to explain as much as he liked to debate – about psychological biases, game theory, the stock market. He enjoyed listening to what I was learning about derivatives at work. I enjoyed all his book recommendations, especially the deeply cynical Black Swan which was authored by a derivatives specialist, and we discussed it constantly.
We met up for long chats at Asha Tea House, on University. He started joining me on my swim workouts, glad for the social accountability. He was dating an older girl, Grace, who I was friends with, someone whose church I used to attend for three years in college.
We talked about our relationships often. I was one of his few friends who understood the world that Grace came from. The fervent Korean church scene is hard to understand as an outsider, and a deeply skeptical atheist-leaning programmer is no exception.
He was reading the Bible, The Brothers Karamazov, anything he could get his hands on to untangle the confusion he felt about Grace's beliefs. He shared openly about his anxieties, how he was scared of losing her over theology, when he embraced so much of her as a person – he told me of their long talks, and described her affectionately as his 'journal'. The circumstances of their differing beliefs struck me as bittersweet, but faith comes differently to everyone, and I encouraged him to keep searching for his answers.
Yet just as I saw the hints of red flags in his relationship, he also saw them peeking out in mine.
"Do you love him?" he asked me once.
Matt often asked blunt questions, but I felt caught off guard on this one. I struggled to give a straightforward answer.
"I think we had a troubled beginning, and that's always been on my mind. I think if we both put our minds to it, we could make a life together."
"Is that love, do you think?"
"Well. To be honest, sometimes I wonder. If my feelings are... all that unwavering. We've broken up so many times, you know? We have a lot of bad memories. I can't seem to just brush them off."
"Hmm. That kind of sounds like overfitting, to me. You shouldn't view your past life from your current values."
Matt didn't personally know Hubert, but he had known me for a long time, and was genuinely interested in the details of my relationship. He had less dating experience than I had, and I suppose he took it as an anecdotal learning experience. I knew deep down his curiosity was simply research-oriented, but still it nagged at me.
Not long after, Matt and Grace broke up over their ideological differences, both on theology and on the practical matters of physical intimacy. He was extremely distraught and buried himself in work to forget the event. I felt him recede, and didn't know how to help.
The summer came and went, and I eventually secured a full-time position at the end of my internship. It was all very informal, a quick meeting in the conference room. There was no offer letter, no fuss.
I found out that my middle school friend Mirabel was looking for housemates. Might I be interested in the $1200 master bedroom with attached bath of a newly renovated 3bd apartment, in the hip part of Temescal?
Hubert and I took the leap. It was in a bad neighborhood – years later an arsonist burned down a crack house across the street, and someone with a machine gun shot up a parked van next door that exploded in a fiery rage – but it was an airy upper unit of a duplex, with a skylight and French doors that opened onto a deck and backyard. I didn't know the other two tenants, but they seemed nice enough. Ava and Julia, two Vietnamese girls from the year above, had been close roommates throughout college and shared a room with bunk beds. Like Mirabel, they were interning and prepping for grad school. Ava was studying for optometry, and Julia was planning to go to med school.
Hubert came back from his Asia trip, with Bear, a birthday present for me. He took me out for dinner at a trendy new spot in Oakland that only served deep fried things and I squirmed in my seat, thinking of the salad that I would have gladly eaten instead. His parents shipped over their old Camry for his commute to school. We bought a mattress from IKEA that we put on the floor, and he set up his cardboard boxes into the shape of a desk.
We made vague plans to redecorate, but none materialized. I wanted a real bed so the mattress could be off the ground; he wanted a gigantic desk with a rolling chair for his schoolwork, but he wouldn't have been able to fit both in the room.
"If I don't get to have what I want, you don't get to have what you want," he said to me.
The TV became the center of life at the apartment. All afternoon and all night it raged on, one reality show after another. Hubert fell into his late night, late morning student schedule again. He got along well with Mirabel and Ava, who were becoming close friends, cutting out Julia in the process. Eventually Julia spent less and less time at home, and was often at her girlfriend's place. I was the only one working full-time, and slept early so I didn't miss my 7am bus.
At night after work I found myself sulking alone on our mattress on the floor, resenting the thin walls and the mess. I was battling an H. Pylori infection, drained from the symptoms and from the antibiotics I was taking, too fatigued to enjoy swimming. I tried to read and to wring out what little writing I could muster, but all that came was complaint. Bear stared at me from the corner of the room atop piles of unfolded clothes, smug in his repose.
I struggled to find peace and quiet in that apartment, to think, to write. I raged at how badly I wanted to live alone, but how it seemed hopeless with the steep rents and concerns of safety. Hubert went to bed regularly at 3am and disturbed my sleep, and I often heard his murmured whispers with Ava out in the living room. There was always someone laughing in that apartment, whether it was conversation or simply the television's laugh track. Compared to them I was a deeply cynical and ascetic aberration – refusing to put data on my phone plan, worried for our generation's screen addiction, horrified at them all cradling their phones while absentmindedly slurping down food in front of the blaring television.
In due time Hubert began to develop a little crush on Ava, who was lithe and artsy and fashionable. Perpetually smiling, she had a glow about her and I could hardly blame him.
She had a very specific look and it was all very high-maintenance – there were the hours spent getting ready in the bathroom, the crammed shelves of product, the elaborate makeup routine at the beginning of every single day, even on the days where she only went out to the grocery store. It was the intricate kind of no-makeup-makeup that complimented her slender and picturesque face. She only dressed in neutral tones and covered her mouth whenever she giggled. She had an art portfolio on her website and sometimes did modeling work for professional artists as a side gig. On her instagram, obscured nudes were featured. Her boyfriend, also from her year, worked as a junior architect. It was Hubert's secret dream job, and he marveled at them as a couple.
Mirabel clearly had a soft spot for Ava too, and called her 'wifey' in front of her boyfriend.
"That girl, always at her boyfriend's place," Mirabel said to me one afternoon, in a gossipy mood. "I mean, his place isn't nearly as nice as ours, what do they even do there? He doesn't have a TV, or a decent kitchen."
I shrugged. A place without a TV sounded marvelous to me.
She chuckled to herself. "Okay, well, I guess they privacy for that, but come on, that's just one activity."
I found Mirabel's snide remarks and putdowns triggering, calling to mind all the drama from middle school and high school that I thought we had put behind us. I was positive she was talking about me behind closed doors, too.
Two months after we moved in, Ava and her boyfriend broke up. Mirabel was at the center of it all: she had orchestrated their relationship in the first place, introduced them and practically instructed them to go on dates. She mediated their breakup and was outraged when conversations took place without her notice. In teary confrontations, she criticized and guilt-tripped Ava severely for sleeping with him afterwards. In truth, she was in love with Ava, and not just in a friendly way. This all took place a couple years before Mirabel actually came out.
My own fights with Hubert grew ever more frequent: over laundry, money worries, food preparation, promises he carelessly made and forgot about, my jealousy over Ava. How he needed me to want him, when it constantly felt like he was belittling me for being 'antisocial' and 'unfriendly', code words for "why can't you be normal and just watch TV with us?". Weekly I would try to reset and urge myself to practice kindness, only to be disappointed again and again by his seeming readiness to be kind to everyone but me. The things that held up our relationship in the past – quality time and physical intimacy – had all but disappeared.
One night I was reading in bed when he came home from a tennis hangout with his close friend from architecture studio, Laurie. He had met her partner, who was a couple years older and also lived with her.
"They have an open relationship," he told me, stupefied.
"What, like sleeping with other people?"
"Apparently, yeah. I just never expected it from her. Isn't that crazy?"
"I mean, if it works for them."
"What, like you would be interested in that?"
I thought about Matt, who I was scarcely talking with any more.
"Not exactly," I said. "But sometimes I wonder if, you know..."
"If what?"
"If maybe our interests are incompatible. And that it makes living together difficult."
"Huh."
"I just have all these vibrant and intellectually satisfying conversations with some of my friends, you know? I come home to our moronic fights and I feel so, so tired."
"What, so you talk about a couple books with other guys, and all of a sudden you want to fuck them?"
"No. It's more complicated than that."
"Is it?"
He stopped in his tracks and saw the tears beginning to well in my eyes. He went to go brush his teeth and change.
Then he sat down and told me a story.
There was a girl, a younger architecture classmate I had met before, during late night vigils at Wurster, who looked up to him. They had been chatting a lot, on Messenger, last year. Just homework and little jokes. He told me about how she was so much more available than me, that it was nice, and easy, to know that he always had someone to reach out to.
Shortly after graduation, while I was away on my Asia band trip, they hung out alone at his place, late into the night. Wine was poured, and in a drunken state she confessed her feelings, knowing full well he was in a relationship. He said he turned her down, and asked her to sleep in the living room, but that the emotional fervor of the encounter haunted him. That he felt guilty because he already knew. He had feelings for her, too. That now, even months later, daily he thought about when his relationship with me might end, not if.
We cried together that night, and slowly made an effort to paste back together our broken pieces. It was the most honest we had been in many months. And for a short while, it held, enough to peacefully get us through the holidays.
Hubert and I lasted all of seven months in that apartment before we finally came undone. The end was petty and anticlimactic, as these things usually go. Before the final break, we had decided to stay in the apartment but in separate rooms, to see if a bit of space could even out the difficulties in our logistics. Mirabel was moving out to attend grad school, and I was moving into her 9' by 10' box of a room.
The timing was all a bit on the nose. In retrospect, I think resolving to not share the room anymore took away the pressure to make things work.
We spent two very difficult weeks broken up and still sleeping on the same mattress, not saying a word about it to our other roommates. I hugged Bear and cried myself to sleep while Hubert kept his nighttime vigils in the living room, savoring the last hangouts before Mirabel moved out. Ava, now thoroughly single, had freed up all her time to spend with him and Mirabel. He had his new friends to focus on, and for a while he didn't seem the least bit bothered about me.
"Do you want Bear back?" I asked him, when we were finally dividing up our things for my little 'move'.
It was a loaded question. I didn't care about the stuffie. I wanted some semblance of proof that our nearly three years of dating weren't just vanishing into thin air. The swiftness of the break up was still a fresh shock to me – that I had finally found the anger to call it off, and that he assented so passively, confirming my suspicion that after all this time he had been just waiting for me to give up.
"Of course not," he said. "He's yours. You get full custody."
He grinned at me, proud of his lighthearted joke.
Hubert and I lived together for eight more months after our breakup, an experience I would not wish upon my worst enemy.
We played at being friends, a cat and mouse game that wore away at us. Broken up, freed from consequential rules of decorum, we had far more chemistry than we ever did when we were together. He wasn't on my team anymore, but he didn't properly quit the game either.
He spent a summer cavorting around with Ava, whispering and giggling together as if their intricate friendship was one, big inside joke. He drove her around in her car and they went out constantly, to the gym, out to eat, to meet up with friends. Whenever anyone else came in the living room, they would instantly fall silent, then burst into a fit of giggles again.
Julia spent more time at home that summer, newly single and focused on med school apps. We started jogging together to get out of the apartment, away from the other two. It was such a relief to find that someone else agreed with me, that Hubert and Ava were downright obnoxious. The apartment took on a strange symmetry – Ava had effectively abandoned Julia as a longtime friend, just as Hubert had abandoned me.
Julia soon left too and was replaced by Alice, who vaguely knew Ava and was enticed by the astonishingly low rent. It turned out that Ava misrepresented the room and didn't mention the bunk bed. Incensed, Alice was out in less than a month. But in that brief month, she and I also grew especially close, out of a shared dislike for Ava. We worked a couple blocks from each other in the city, and hung out often during the years we both lived in the Bay. Alice was also Vietnamese, but she was laid back, witty, gorgeous in a minimal way and superbly creative. She had entrepreneurial ambitions and a mind for business. We found out we had mutual friends in common, and rejoiced at our strange luck in finding each other.
Eventually they all left, as if in choreographed procession – off to their respective grad schools, or else to live with other friends. Strangers came in and filled their spots – the student who struggled to pay for groceries and gladly partook in my meals with me, the baker who fell in love with the farmer across the street, the vegan biologist who gave her boyfriend moody haircuts in the backyard.
Hubert moved to the city with friends and faded from my reality. He became something of a legend – my new roommates were aghast that I had survived so long in such an arrangement. One of them even came across his profile on her dating app potential matches, and we had a good laugh about it.
When I finally left that apartment three years later to move into my first place with my now husband, Bear came with me. He is the only momento from that relationship that I haven't thrown out. It seemed harmless to keep him, after all that he's survived. Little did I know that one day my children would become so attached to him.
"Do Bear's eyes ever open?" my toddler asked me once with mild concern, before nap time.
I considered his plaintive face for a moment. We were curled up together on the bed, both my boy and his Bear under my arm.
I thought of everything that Bear had seen, and not.
Regardless of his somewhat sordid past, for better or for worse, Bear was here to stay.
"No, they don't open," I said. "Bear will simply sleep forever."