Just before I left Korea, bigbro and I got disinvited to our aunt and uncle's house, where our mum is staying. The story behind it is long and tortured and complex, but the end result was that we went, they saw us, we had a long discussion, and we're okay now. Or so I thought.

They're making a big effort to keep in touch with me now, calling every weekend, but I don't want to talk to them. It's gotten worse over the past few weeks, to the point where today, I was nearly hostile to them on the phone and then burst into tears after I hung up.

My aunt and uncle have been fixtures in bigbro's and my lives since the get-go. They were stable parental-like forces when our parents weren't. We got shipped up to them a couple summers in a row and they treated us like we were their kids (they don't have any of their own).

They are working class people, my aunt and uncle. He's career military -- joined when he was 18, and never left. She dropped out of junior high in Korea to work and take care of the other kids in her family. They both married young and divorced, and found each other and struggled through some tough years in their own marriage before coming to a mutually respectful place of comfort and understanding.

bigbro and I grew up solidly upper middle class, with private schools and private lessons all over the place. I've only recently started to understand how profoundly my aunt and uncle and their working class background affected the way I see the world. I never would have dated John if they hadn't been in my life. John and I were an odd couple, mismatched in almost all ways, and no one really understood why we started dating, not even me at the time.

Many people here, many people at my undergrad college, come from families where there were lots of lawyers or doctors or psychologists or other professions requiring college and a graduate degree. Those people know where they are headed. They know who they're supposed to become. More than that, their parents and their families know who they are, what they are experiencing.

It's odd. My aunt and uncle are very proud that I'm here at this school, getting a law degree. They are so proud they could burst. They urge me to study hard, not to catch a cold, to eat well. They have no idea what I'm doing. And they have no idea that the more education I get, the more our lives diverge. Sometimes I wonder, "Don't you understand that what you're urging me to do is alienating me from you? That I have to drastically dumb down my conversations with you? That I can only deal with you in short doses because it's tiring to have to do that? That I lead a completely different life, one that you can't even imagine?"

I am simplifying all of it, I know. I think they do have an idea. I think they do feel the distance. I think they are afraid of it. I am afraid of it too.

Which is why it is so upsetting to me that I was disinvited to their house, which I always thought of as my home, this summer. If the primary way in which I connect with my aunt and uncle is through emotional channels, then what happens when those channels get stopped up? What happens when they choose to turn a valve and close off the duct? What then?