In engineering school, 85% of the students are male. No one tells you that before you start. No one tells you that in the first week, a boy from your statics class will look at your calculations and ask: “Who helped you with this?”
And if you say ‘nobody’, he laughs as if you told a joke.
No one tells you that the study groups will form without you, that the lab partners will already be paired while you are still looking around, that for four years you will be quietly and politely invisible in a room full of people who are louder and less precise than you.
I was not noisy.
I was accurate.
There is a certain reassurance in numbers. A beam either holds up or it doesn’t. A foundation distributes the load evenly or it cracks.
There is no ambiguity. No, you get it, honey. No preferential treatment. Steel doesn’t care whether you are the right or the wrong daughter. It is about the yield strength, the cross-section, and whether you performed the calculations correctly.
I have always performed the calculations correctly.
Graduated in 2019. Summa cum laude.
No one came.
I rented a gown, walked across the stage, shook the dean’s hand, and took a selfie in the parking lot with my cap askew, because I didn’t want to straighten it.
Then I went to Target, bought a fifteen-centimeter steel square—one of those good ones that costs 40 dollars and lasts a lifetime—and I kept it in the Target bag during the bus ride home and thought: this is my diploma.
The real one. The one I bought myself.
Mercer & Associates hired me that fall. A mid-sized construction firm with an office in Culver City and a client base ranging from residential renovations to commercial high-rises.
I started as a junior engineer and performed calculations that were checked by someone else. In my second year, I checked other people’s calculations. In my third year, I led earthquake-resistant renovation projects, assessing whether buildings could withstand the next major earthquake. If the answer was no, I designed the reinforcement that would ensure they held up.
I was good at keeping things together.
At least on a professional level.
I called home during the holidays. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Mother’s Day. My father’s birthday.
Why?
Lorraine answered whenever she felt like it. She would talk about Shelby—Shelby’s pregnancy, Shelby’s new kitchen, Shelby’s children, and that funny thing Levi had said in church.
I would listen.
Sometimes I tried to tell her about a project. We were reinforcing a theater from the 1920s in Silver Lake. A beautiful old structure, and I was proud of the solution we had found for the unreinforced masonry.
“That’s nice, honey,” she would say.
In the same way you say “that’s nice” to a child when you show them a drawing with colored pencils.
Then: Oh, Shelby is calling on the other line. See you soon.
My father and I didn’t talk. We hadn’t really spoken to each other since the day he stood at the door and told me not to come back to ask for money anymore.
Sometimes he answered when I called, and then we exchanged weather reports as if we were two strangers waiting for the same bus.
Is it warm outside?
Yes.
It is warm here too.
Then Lorraine took over the phone and started the Shelby report.
Three years of this. Building in Los Angeles. Packing in a void in Oklahoma.
Structurally, I was a kind of cantilevered construction, stretched over nothing, supported only by my own stiffness.
Then I met James.
October 2022. A documentary crew came to film at a construction site in Koreatown, where we were conducting a seismic assessment of a mixed-use building. I was on the third floor checking the spacing between the reinforcing bars when a man with a camera on his shoulder asked me to explain what I was doing in a way his editor would understand.
“I make sure buildings don’t collapse,” I said.
“That is the shortest interview I have ever given,” he said.
He smiled.
He had the kind of face that always looked as if it was about to smile. Mouth ready for a smile. Eyes already there.
His name was James Park. He was a cameraman. Freelance. Korean-American. Grew up in Torrance. He was 30 years old.
He was cordial in a way I didn’t quite understand, because in my experience, cordiality was always conditional. Always something that preceded someone saying he only had four tickets.
We talked for 40 minutes.
He asked me what I liked so much about technology.
I said: certainty.
He asked what I meant.
I already said that a weld is either strong enough or not. No one can determine in hindsight that it should have been a different weld.
He looked at me for a long time after that. Not the way men usually looked at me. Not assessing. Not calculating. Just looking.
It was as if he was reading a blueprint and found it interesting.
First date. A pho restaurant in Little Saigon. Small, noisy, plastic chairs.
I told him about the Disney trip.
I don’t know why I told him. I hadn’t told anyone in LA. Not my roommates at university. Not my colleagues. No one.
But James asked about my family, and instead of the usual answer, ‘they’re doing well, they’re in Oklahoma,’ I opened my mouth. And then the Disney trip came out like a splinter that had been creeping to the surface for 17 years.
He didn’t say it was terrible. He didn’t say he was sorry.
He was silent for a moment, his chopsticks remained still, the broth cooled down.
Then he said: “So you never got the photo album.”
Five words.
And I knew that he understood.
Not the anger. Everyone can understand anger.
