My mother, in her torrent of anxious wing-flapping, was set on sending her firstborn off to college with a briefcase full of life advice that would last a lifetime. Don’t read in the dark. Don’t go out at night. Don’t smoke “the pot.” These bits of advice were broadcast in her nagging, projective voice, a tone that can render my heartbeat comatose when I fail to sneak in past curfew. Her words clearly went in one ear and out the other, but a single sentence — whispered to me on the first night I can remember and on my last night under her weather-resistant wings — were scorched into my being.

Don’t be like me.

My mother was the embodiment of the American dream and my personal hero. She had fled from her abusive father and her family’s poverty in South Korea and found her way to New York, graduating summa cum laude from the top accounting university at the time with her stilted English. Picked up by one of the so-called Big Four accounting firms straight out of school and jetted first-class between countries, she shakes hands with old white guys swimming in gaudy luxury and signs deals worth billions. Her English stands perfected, except for the Z’s that sound like J’s, which make her suggestions for a family trip to the zoo hilarious. She can and has roasted me into a clump of smoldering ashes, only to bring me back up with home-cooked meals and aged wisdom.

But beneath this nearly impenetrable cloak of badassery lies a woman who stayed with a man who hit her regularly when she was pregnant so that her child didn’t have to call some strange man “dad.” A woman who left the financial security of her prestigious career in New York for the mere hope of reuniting our family in California. A woman who hid her tears from me when my father refused to see my five-year-old self on the weekends he had promised, instead taking my half sister to Disneyland with some other woman. Glistening cheeks blurred purple bruises as she drove hours and hours away from my father’s apartment that we had waited in front of for most of the day. Those seven hours on the empty road, I learned, were moments spent contemplating ending her own life, a notion quelled by the thought of leaving her child behind. She handed over checks three times a week for figure skating lessons we definitely couldn’t afford, keeping quiet about the absence of both child support and occasionally electricity. And she stood defiantly at the door with me in hand a decade ago on the night she found out she was pregnant with my brother, as my father, ignorant to this fact, screamed at us to leave.

She says not to be weak like she was, not to take the abuse like she did, not give up to the storms of poverty like she did. She blames herself for everything I’ve seen and experienced, first refusing to accept my reassurances that she did her best and then my words of forgiveness. She lives in a self-imposed cell of regret.

Now, far from my family and closer than ever to my memories, the illocution of her words is not of apology but of warning of a culture of apathy. The domestic violence, her fear of demanding child support or calling the police or calling anyone, for that matter — the burden of those terrors could have been lightened if she had believed she could reach out. If she had believed that there was someone out there who would help or just listen. But we’ve been conditioned to treat poverty, familial violence and socioeconomic plagues as vague figments of the “other” part of society — dirty little secrets that should be addressed in holy, crusading terms and ads against child hunger, but that are ultimately swept under the rug. If we ourselves are not steeped in it, it somehow does not exist within our horizons.

I am incredibly privileged to be padded by all the luxuries of my current hometown of Irvine: 24- hour Korean food, meticulously planned neighborhoods and the gentle warmth of the Southern Californian sun. But I’m also honored to have known the “other” side, the rest of reality that lies beyond this little bubble, a world all-too-distanced from my peers by archaic constructs of secrecy and board positions in high school human rights clubs. The hope of this column is to pull back that crusty-ass rug and shine a personal spotlight on the issues that we are the most uncomfortable with, to make us squirm and yearn the comfort of ignorance and, perhaps, finally spark that long-overdue conversation.

Sarah Heo writes the Friday column on the semblance of security. Contact her at [email protected].