Mr. Park’s cousin, whose tofu restaurant had become so successful that they opened three branches outside Koreatown, dutifully offered Mrs. Park a job waiting tables at his Alhambra outpost. He rescinded the offer as soon as she accepted, saying her English might not be good enough for his clientele—young American-born Koreans.

Mrs. Park talked to her girls about planting their own vegetables—eggplants, tomatoes, maybe even bok choy. Rosemary kept her dismay to herself and said she would take Driver’s Ed as soon as the course was offered at school. Mira, the truth-teller, spelled it out to their mother: “This is America. You have to drive. And you have to have a job. Or else you might as well forget it.”

Her words bruised Mrs. Park. There was no way around it, she had to find a solution. For the first time in over a decade, she prayed.

Rosemary was eating a bowl of ramen and watching the news in the den. Not long after her father’s death, she began following a story she’d found personally appealing: a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl from New Jersey had gone missing. Five weeks later, the saga was still unfolding.

The story gripped her because this was the first time in her memory that the news media had ever picked up on a missing-teenager story where the girl wasn’t blond and blue-eyed. This time, she was a silky Eurasian Rosemary’s own age, a scholastic all-rounder who was in the Girl Scouts as well as her school’s math decathlon team. She went to a chichi girls’ school. Her father was a therapist and her mother was a professor at one of those picture-perfect Seven Sisters colleges that Rosemary dreamed of attending.

She felt a surge of abstract pride whenever pictures of the missing girl flashed on the screen. She liked the fact that there was rarely any mention of the girl’s ethnicity, except on the Fox News network where she was continually misdescribed as “Japanese teenager Brittany Ann Yamasato.”

The Yamasato family was holding a “live” news conference just then. While the girl’s father wept in the background, the mother, a tall brunette who resembled the actress Sigourney Weaver, announced gravely that FBI agents had finally broken into her daughter’s computer and found that she’d been communicating via AOL Instant Messenger with a sophomore from a West Coast university. From the salvaged message fragments, the authorities had reason to believe that Brittany had run away with this boy, after a series of coffee shop rendezvous. As if on cue, the mother broke down, pleading for any leads surrounding the young man who went by the name Paul. Sobbing, she confessed that she and her husband had “no idea” that their daughter had been “so unhappy.” When the news conference ended, CNN brought on a dour panel of educators to pontificate dryly on Alienation in the Honor Roll League.