As the period of mourning faded away, Mrs. Park’s concerns sharpened. How would they buy groceries? She couldn’t drive. How would they make the money to buy groceries? She had nothing but a high school diploma, from a provincial school near the North Korean border. The Koreans she knew in America had never heard of her district, let alone her high school’s excellent cheerleading program.

For the first few weeks, she walked to the nearest mini-mart where she picked up milk, bread, ramen and peanut butter. It was three-quarters of a mile away, not a difficult walk on a cool spring day, but it would be far less pleasant in the fast-approaching summer. Once a week, her husband’s Koreatown relatives would bring her tofu and surplus produce such as cabbage, lettuce and spring onions, and she tried to make these last. But she knew this arrangement couldn’t go on forever. These distant cousins weren’t generous people—they were acting out of duty, and duty, unlike charity, had a limited hold on the American mind. She learned to take the bus to a supermarket three miles away. But the interminable wait at the bus stop, often with suspicious-looking types, made her fear carpal tunnel from gripping her purse so tight.

Once, she waited twenty minutes with a frail, white-haired black woman in a security guard’s uniform who tried to put her at ease with friendly conversation. But she was nervous about her poor English and didn’t say anything back. Later, she regretted her unfriendliness and thought about how melancholy the woman had made her feel—a woman that age shouldn’t have had to work, let alone wait for the bus home after a twelve-hour shift watching a vacant lot. That said, the old woman had a job, which put her in a better position than Mrs. Park herself. All she had was a 2003 Camry with a full tank of gas sitting in her driveway, not going anywhere at all.

Her husband had left behind the modest bank account of a decent, naïve minister. His poor financial planning was, she knew, partly her own fault. Five years before, she hadn’t let him spend $500 to take part in a regional church seminar on money management. As it turned out, all the younger, more ambitious Korean ministers in LA and Orange Counties attended and, according to the church circulars, gleaned inspiration about fund-raising and business development, while Mr. Park lagged farther behind.

The mortgage payment was $1,200 a month, and they had seventeen years to go. If they lived very frugally, with both girls maintaining good enough grades to remain in their schools’ scholarship programs, Mrs. Park reckoned that they could survive for two years on her husband’s savings. But that would mean absolutely no meals out, no movies, no overnight excursions to Ojai with the Girl Scouts.