Emily: Kwon Su-jeong and White Rose Boarding School
August 2001. (One year and six months earlier.)
Su-jeong had graduated from White Rose Boarding High School and was on the verge of starting at Boston University. Even her application to the prestigious club affiliated with White Rose had already been approved for college. Life was going well enough—yet lately something oppressive had been weighing on her, and her head throbbed more often than she cared to admit. Since the previous month the pain had only grown sharper, steadily intensifying.
Why is this happening? My mind feels restless, and I keep recoiling from the idea of going to Boston University…
White Rose, Boston. The dormitory.
She was still allowed to stay through the end of August, so Su-jeong had been scouting for housing near campus.
“Su-jeong, maybe you’ve been pushing yourself too hard lately?”
“Kate. I haven’t really overdone anything. My head just keeps throbbing.”
Su-jeong lifted her face from the desk at the sound of the voice. Beside her, Kate was watching with open concern. Three years as roommates had made them closer than sisters.
“You’ve been grinding all semester for grades. Isn’t that it?”
Kate pressed a little harder. Su-jeong thought it over carefully. Studying in America had been less stressful than middle school in Korea. She had come in knowing the boarding school’s reputation, yet among the freer American students she had never once struggled academically.
“No.”
“Hmm. Then get some real sleep. Once you’re at Boston University you’ll need to manage your condition if you want to survive campus life.”
“Yeah. I should sleep.”
She swallowed a painkiller and went to bed. Kate’s hand brushed gently through her hair. Su-jeong liked being cared for like a sister. The headache eased a little, and she drifted off.
Catherine Brown.
Su-jeong’s roommate looked down at her with pity. Compassion and worry filled her expression as she stroked Su-jeong’s hair, letting her rest.
Should I tell Su-jeong what White Rose really is?
An unspoken rule of White Rose: those who knew the school’s true nature almost never told their classmates. The White Rose circle at Boston University was merely an extension of the same social arena—no different from the boarding school itself. No one fretted much about the practical disadvantages. What troubled them was the psychological shock the truth would deliver once it landed.
Kate—Catherine—had learned about the place in her junior year from something her divorced mother let slip. The shock had left her with panic attacks and social withdrawal for a time; only Su-jeong’s warm nursing had pulled her through. Looking at the girl who was, in a way, both sister and savior, Kate sank deep into thought.
If I tell her the truth, can Su-jeong even handle it?
When Su-jeong decided on Boston University and announced she would join the White Rose circle, Kate had argued against it with everything she had. Su-jeong had signed up anyway, as if under a spell. The guilt of never speaking the truth had driven Kate to cancel her own plans to head west and enroll at Boston University instead—if only to ease that burden a little.
I have to tell her. What this place really is.
The pity drained from Kate’s eyes as she looked down at Su-jeong. Only a hard resolve remained.
Stroke. Stroke.
Three hours later.
“Kate, why are we going somewhere so far? I haven’t even found a place to live yet.”
“Hmph. Were you trying to ditch me? I already booked the room, so we’re taking a proper graduation trip together.”
Su-jeong found herself dragged onto a plane with no real explanation—only Kate repeating “graduation trip.” The look in Kate’s eyes suggested no harm was intended, so Su-jeong endured it, though her uneasy gaze kept trembling.
“Why L.A.?”
“You’ve never been out west, right?”
“Yeah. Just New York and Boston.”
“Country girl. Your big sister is showing you the other side of America—feel honored.”
“...Fine.”
Su-jeong stared blankly out the window through the throbbing in her skull. Kate made no effort to stop her. Su-jeong decided Kate was simply trying to lift her spirits, and felt grateful.
Huh?
Boston fell away behind them. Strangely, what rose inside her was not wistfulness but a sense of relief. Su-jeong smiled faintly at the inexplicable liberation and slipped back into sleep.
Su-jeong’s eyes had gone unfocused after the psychiatrist’s shocking words. A blank face, then a contorting expression. Her lips moved soundlessly before she finally let out a long breath.
“Haa…”
The doctor watched her in silence, the look of someone who understood. Su-jeong had drawn close to the truth, and her mind was too tangled for speech.
How…
“White Rose is that kind of place?”
After a full minute of silence, her mouth opened. The doctor nodded with a pained gaze, then turned the monitor toward her. As Su-jeong read, her pupils trembled.
3. Boston White Rose Girls Boarding High School
— A storied institution dating from the mid-1800s.
: Aims at Puritan abstinence, chastity, and obedience to a husband.
— Based on case compilations from the American Psychiatric Association, the school is believed to conduct a form of brainwashing education.
: Excessive ideological implantation regarding chastity, obedience to a husband, and submission to the family line. Presumed to remodel the mind according to a medieval ideal of womanhood.
— In women with strong egos, three years of this education can produce acquired dissociative identity disorder. Precursor symptoms include headaches, panic disorder, and social withdrawal.
: See research paper by Professor Robertson, Department of Psychology, University of Texas (March 2000).
When alumnae of this school were tracked, all mental pathology vanished the moment they married the spouse arranged by their family. They then lived as if performing the role of a perfectly obedient wife. To a third party the result looks grotesque; the women themselves report a sense of happiness. No treatment currently appears available.
— In recent years, one of the boarding schools seeing a sharp rise in students from the Middle East and Korea.
These students receive additional positive conditioning toward polygamy.
Su-jeong read the nearly two-page summary with shaking eyes. The doctor only clicked the mouse for her and stepped back.
This can’t be.
With trembling hands she moved the cursor. One by one, the things she had always found strange began to surface.
Unlike the dramas and American shows she had watched, the American girls at school had been far more obsessed with chastity than Korean girls. That dissonance had driven her, on free days, to ask around outside. She had confirmed that Puritan roots still ran deep among the upper classes.
—Movies and TV exaggerate a lot. Sure, those kids exist, but the higher you go in society, the bigger the gap with the media.
The answers had always been the same. Internet research had confirmed it. So whenever the teachers hammered on about chastity, Su-jeong had eventually nodded along like a proper student.
Boarding school was supposed to be more competitive than Korea. The rumor had frightened her—yet the curriculum had been surprisingly loose, and she had closed her eyes to it. Cooking, etiquette, childcare methods… subjects she had first found odd, she had at some point accepted as natural.
Etiquette classes were a cover for planting obedience. Every lesson was training to become a good wife.
Three years of school life flashed past like a lantern show. Guilt, despair, terror—a tangle of emotions shook her body. When she turned the next page, her eyes fluttered and tears began to fall.
“You can cry as hard as you need.”
The doctor nodded with understanding. Deep sympathy sat in her eyes.
— Of particular note: in recent years, female students from collateral branches of Korean chaebol families have been enrolled without understanding what they are entering, brainwashed, and sent home. Cases have been documented in which, according to the interests of the chaebol head, these women are then sold off as concubines to politicians, business partners, and the like.
Rather than resentment toward her late parents, Su-jeong’s mind filled with the faces of the aunt and uncle who had always pretended to be good people. Murderous intent rose with them.
Park Yong-ho. Kim Yu-na. You call yourselves human…
She cried for a long time, cursed her aunt and uncle, and sobbed.
“Hic…”
When she seemed somewhat calmer, the doctor turned the monitor back toward herself, pulled a chair beside Su-jeong, and drew close.
“Su-jeong. Just one question. In class they talked about the ideal spouse, didn’t they?”
The abrupt question left Su-jeong staring blankly through a tear-streaked face. For a moment she gazed at nothing. Then her mouth opened.
“You… mean the trigger?”
Classes that stressed obedience to the family line, obedience to a husband, and blind love for the one who had rightfully taken her chastity. They had run through both semesters of senior year, and she had never found them strange.
Until now.
“Yes. With this kind of brainwashing, they leave a very narrow escape route open. That way the subject feels less resistance while being conditioned.”
—Ho ho ho. That’s right. Losing your virginity to rape doesn’t count as losing it at all. Your spouse’s grade drops, of course, but in that case your spiritual chastity remains. Mindset is what matters. If you love only one spouse for a lifetime, you never lose your chastity in spirit.
—But what if a man more splendid than the one your parents chose appears?
The year before, after her long illness, Kate had thrown that question at a teacher in open defiance. Without a flicker of disturbance, the teacher had smiled as if she had expected it, then written something on the board.
Trigger
—We’ll just call it a trigger for simplicity. Ideal types are fine. But is it really an ideal type? Or just hormones? From now on, each of you will set one impossible condition. Only someone who meets that standard can be called your ideal. Imagine the trigger in your brain being pulled—and if living with him would make you happier than the man your parents chose, then you’re free to live that way.
The teacher had acted as if she alone held the power to grant or deny permission. Su-jeong had been rejected several times before her trigger condition finally passed.
—Keep it simple. Like this: even if you spend a night naked together, he does not force himself on you. Pass.
“Your counselor knows all of this, doesn’t she?”
“Th… yes.”
“And when you think about it, that condition isn’t actually impossible, is it?”
“No.”
Every girl had written an impossible condition, and every one of them had been a Non-Pass at first.
The doctor nodded and paused. Su-jeong’s eyes locked on the woman’s mouth; her heartbeat climbed until the doctor spoke again.
“The person who enrolled you in that boarding school almost certainly knows about your trigger. They’ll arrange for you to ‘coincidentally’ meet the spouse they want for you.”
“Th… that’s…”
Despair bowed Su-jeong’s head. The one fantasy, the one source of happiness she had left—her ideal type—crumbled to pieces.
“Isn’t there any way?”
“The mind is an extraordinarily complex mechanism. Psychiatric medicine advances, and so do these brainwashing techniques. Can you sever ties with the person who put you in that school? Are they even a parent?”
“Yes. My parents are gone. My… uncle—the chairman of Seomin Steel—enrolled me.”
The doctor nodded and wrote something down. After a long moment of thought she looked at Su-jeong and handed her a slip of paper.
Do not go to Boston University. Is that possible?
Su-jeong nodded.
Why the doctor wrote by hand, she did not know—but the woman’s face was utterly serious as she wrote again.
If you cut ties, is there any risk—financial or otherwise—that the relationship would resume?
Su-jeong shook her head firmly.
Her father and mother had been quite wealthy; the inheritance was substantial. She would never go crawling back to her uncle for money.
The doctor’s relieved expression brightened Su-jeong’s own face a little.
Add a simple extra condition to your trigger. You don’t need to tell me what it is.
If a man who matches your previous trigger appears as if by coincidence, cut him off without mercy.
Your mental symptoms will vanish cleanly once you marry. You will live as a submissive wife—but think for yourself, and keep thinking hard.
Su-jeong stared blankly.
And put the notes in here. I’m burning them now.
Dazed, she did as instructed, dropping the slips into what looked like a milk-powder tin. The doctor lit them with a lighter and watched them burn.
Su-jeong could no longer remember what her ideal type had been in middle school. She felt how thoroughly contaminated she already was, and spent a long time turning the trigger over in her mind.
A lecherous boyfriend of a woman I happen to designate—a man who, even alone with me overnight, can hold himself back for a full day and leave my chastity untouched.
An impossible condition.
In that moment Su-jeong decided that if the alternative was being dragged around by her uncle’s will, she would rather become a lesbian. The odds that a randomly designated woman would permit bigamy were low. That woman would also have to date a lecherous boyfriend. That boyfriend would then have to end up alone with Su-jeong—and still protect her virginity. An atrocious mission.
Just as Kate had changed after that day, given up on everything, and begun acting like a lesbian, Su-jeong would do the same.
I’m going back to Korea. College admissions there don’t start until November anyway.