Not learning Korean was fine by the girls. Rosemary detested the Korean language on aural grounds. When Korean rolled off the tongues of Westerners who came to the language late in life, it took on a strange baroque musicality, like drunken Italian. But when native Koreans like her parents spoke it, it sounded guttural, coarse, accusatory. It skewed combative whether one was asking someone on a date or threatening them with a cleaver.

Sometimes Rosemary didn’t know what bugged her more—having to hear Korean spoken all Sunday, or the fact that her father’s church had a name with bad syntax. All-Friends Worship. First, there was the weird hyphen; then the ambiguous logic: Was it an exhortation for all friends to worship or a worship belonging to all friends, in which case an apostrophe was missing?

At school, the kids who took an Asian language were mainly adopted Chinese girls. They studied Mandarin only to please the parents who’d rescued them from the fleapit orphanages of Fujian—and they always looked miserable about it. If she’d had a say in her own ethnicity, Rosemary would have opted to be a Latina, not of the stumpy Central American variety but the whippet, Gap assistant kind; she wanted to be the type who could bleach her black hair chestnut and still have it look natural. Like a less trashy Christina Aguilera, with quadruple-pierced ears and a Grumpy Bear hoodie from Hot Topic. In other words, just Latina enough. And oh yes, a nose stud.

Rosemary didn’t mind the Mystery Boom Box as much as Mira did. Sure it was loud, and whoever was playing it had to be either deaf or out of their mind. But at least there was a reliable schedule to the madness. It began at 4:02 every day and ended at eight. Two rounds of Aguilera’s Stripped, followed by a couple hours of KROQ. It might have made it harder to concentrate on calculus, but she did enjoy watching the reactions it provoked in her otherwise sedate, otherwise non-communicative parents.

It became dinner conversation.

“Kee Hyun, the music. We must stop music,” her mother would say. “For the girls.”

Her father would grunt and chew on a pickle. “Maybe they stop soon.”

“Stop soon?” Her mother would take her father’s bowl before he was done eating. “Music has been here three weeks. Girls hard for study, Kee Hyun.”

“Maybe I go tomorrow.” Her father would grab his bowl back.

“You always say tomorrow. Yesterday you say tomorrow. Last week you say tomorrow.”

“Maybe I go tomorrow this time.”

“You always say maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe!”

“Hot damn! I go tomorrow.” It would be the only time the girls ever heard their father swear.