Side Effects: Winter Solstice, 2008

She came on the shortest, darkest day of the year, a cold, snowy, wintry day in Tacoma, in the middle of a series of fierce snowstorms that paralyzed the area for weeks. Rage contorted her lined face, mussed her soft dyed brown hair with the gray roots, turned her smiling mouth into an ugly thing, a grimace twisted with hatred.

She came equipped with the strength of someone twice her size, a strength that enabled her to throw a 20-pound --- "no, closer to 30," the cop said --- slab of marble covering a side table, after throwing the table and the vase sitting on it. The vase, black enamel with mother-of-pearl swans, was from her first marriage, nearly four decades ago.

The rage gave her a voice, gave her the words to curse her husband. "Goddamn son of a bitch!" she cried. "Goddamn thief!" She was always so quiet, made shy by her country upbringing in Korea, and her difficulty with English, and her fading hearing. But this person, this person was strong and vocal and above all, angry. "Give it to me!" she demanded, grabbing at her husband's ring and gold necklace, things she bought with her own money and gave him, she thought. If he was going to steal her diamond ring, if she had to do without her jewelry, jewelry she had bought and paid for, he would have to do without his jewelry too.

This person, this man, this husband, the one shying away from her words, her anger, the table she threw, and the vase, and the stone -- this goddamn thief, this cowering form -- the one who had been a drunk and a womanizer and a nothing of a man -- she had made him into a man, she had been the one to fight and scream and by sheer force of will turn him from a drunk, a womanizer, a smoker, a nothing of man into something resembling a good husband.

But he had stolen her ring from her. The diamond ring. Where was it? Where was it? There was no one else. He must have stolen it. She started toward him. Her sister was crying, her sister's daughter tried to stop her, held her back, and she didn't resist, but she could see him on his phone, dialing the police again like the coward he was, calling the police on her like a common criminal instead of trying to talk it out with her.

It was still the darkest, shortest day, still snowing, when the policemen arrived, two tall young men who filled her small house with their height and their black uniforms and watch caps. Their boots were wet when they walked into her house. They asked her questions and she answered them calmly. Otherwise, they would handcuff her like the last time, and she might end up standing in That Place again, against the wall, wondering why she was there, hands cuffed behind her, cell bars in front of her.

But they took her anyway, even though she hadn't stole anything, she hadn't struck anyone so hard their ears rang and never heard the same after, she hadn't come in drunk and smelling of smoke. What had she done? Nothing, that was what. Nothing but work her whole life and make her husband into a man, when before he was nothing -- an alcoholic, a smoker, no good.

The young cop started saying something, but he spoke so fast, they always spoke so fast and mumbled, and someone said something, and the other cop bent down a little and said slower and louder: "We're going to take you to the hospital, okay? We're going to take you down to St. Joe's. And you don't have a choice."

He said the words not unkindly, and she maintained her composure, getting dressed in warmer clothes, putting on stockings, her red coat, saying only that he needed the hospital, not her (for who in their right mind would steal a diamond ring from their own wife of 35 years?).

"I won't see you again, so take care, honey," she said as she hugged her sister's daughter, and it was only when she hugged her sister, 12 years younger and so much the baby, always her baby sister, that she broke a little and said in a choked voice, "Make him go tomorrow."

She walked out of her house, then, into the cold, wintry night, the snow falling. Out of her front yard, through the chain link fence, a tall young cop in black before her, a tall young cop in black behind her. She was just a small Asian woman in a red hooded coat, walking in the white snow between two giant figures in black. She slipped a little bit, and the cop behind her offered her assistance, but she didn't need it. She got in the back of the police car. Somewhere inside, her sister and her husband (so sick, he must be sick, because why would he steal from her otherwise?) were weeping in each other's arms. Her sister's daughter stood by the gate. Snow was falling on her. The car slid in the snow, gained traction, took her away.

Free

Today, 16 months after I began work as a corporate lawyer, I paid off the last of my law school loans.

Over $80,000 I owed my law school and the U.S. government are now off my books. I am in the black.

I'm early. I originally planned for this to take 2 years. 104 weeks. 730 days. (It actually took 490.) It helped that I came here, to Hong Kong, with an expat package that's looking more and more obscene as the days pass and the global economy goes from bad to worse. It helped that I went through hell and high water to find a subletter for my apartment. It helped that I don't have a taste for expensive clothes or accessories. It helped that my grandmother gave me a graduation present of enough cash so that I had a rainy day cushion already.

There's a line from an Eliot poem that I only know because in college, BC had it printed out and stuck on her wall: "But our beginnings never know our ends!" The beginning of this race to pay off my law school loans could never have guessed all the twists and turns of the course, the most twisty and turned of them occurring in the last four months, what with the economic meltdown, the U.S. election, my and my brother's moves across the world, my aunt's Alzheimers and subsequent institutionalization. (If the list of those events sounds haphazard and incongruent, it's because they are that way in my mind.)

The beginning could also not have known the extent to which I did not hate my job, or the strange way in which Hong Kong expat life worked in tandem with my repressed response to my aunt's dementia to suddenly free me. I've been good for a long time. Cautious and careful and responsible -- a good girl. But life doesn't reward you for being cautious and careful and responsible, for being a good girl. It doesn't reward you at all. It just is. It's up to you and me to find our own rewards, and our own joys, and never more so than in the tough times.

So, just as the world economy starts disappearing into the toilet, just as the Middle East goes haywire yet again, just as my firm starts laying off people in New York and other cities, just as my aunt's brain began to melt down, just as my aunt and uncle's hopes and dreams of a quiet and joyful retirement are irrevocably and utterly dashed -- at the same time as all that, I find that I'm having the time of my life here. In the past four months, I have acted and sung and danced and drunk and flirted and hiked -- sometimes all in the same night! -- far more than I did in the past four years. I feel awake. Free.

So, as Mrs. Esq very wisely asked me 470 days ago: Now what?