Two years ago, I watched as my mother ironed my clothes on the frayed wooden floors of our home in Queens in preparation for my first day as a summer associate at a Biglaw firm. I hadn’t realized that the only professional suit I owned was badly wrinkled from my travels between Boston and New York. Frustrated with the slow pace and sloppiness of my handiwork, my mom–like any other impatient mom watching her daughter panic over clothes–took over. She used the floor in lieu of our lack of a proper ironing board, wielding the same iron that we’ve had since we immigrated to the United States 20 years ago. Her wizened hands smoothed out the creases in my blazer, and I wondered how much time had passed while I hadn’t even noticed that my mom had grown old in the years she waited for me to achieve my dream.
That memory of my mom hunched over, ironing my clothes using the rotting wood flooring as a backboard at 8PM before my first big day at a job that I never thought I’d end up in, remains fresh in my mind. A reminder that becoming a lawyer is not just an achievement for myself, but for the generations that came before me.
“You know, I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, too,” she mused as she ironed my pants. I didn’t have the heart to ask her why she couldn’t, because I knew what the answer was: due to needing to take up part-time jobs to support the family in the midst of Korea’s economic crisis, she fell behind in academics. My mom is intelligent, funny, and kind, but none of that mattered because she ultimately did not have the means to pursue her dreams. She didn’t come to America to pursue her own dreams–she came because she hoped that her dreams would pass onto her children, who could achieve those dreams in her stead.
At some point, my mom’s dreams became my own. As I grew up, I began to recognize all the sacrifices my parents made so that I could succeed. We never went on any family trips because any extra money we had went to sending my sister and me to after school programs designed to prepare students for standardized testing. My parents could rarely attend recitals or concerts I was in because they had to keep the store running, and I would find myself staring out into a crowd full of proud parents who weren’t my own. I remember being embarrassed that my mom showed up to my middle school graduation in a T-shirt and jeans, because she had to go and tend to the store right afterwards.
As a child, it was frustrating that I wasn’t allowed to live the childhood that I saw my friends living–and as an adult, I still feel that I am experiencing a lot of things I wanted to do as a child for the first time. But I always think about how it’s my mom’s first time living life, too, and while I was able to get to a point where I could begin to structure life the way I wanted to live it, I couldn’t help but feel that she always stayed in the same spot, watching from afar as I got to a finish line she could never reach.
“I haven’t ironed any clothes in…20 years? Not since your dad stopped working as a salaryman.” My late father, who also came to America for a better future, traded in his white-collar office job in Korea for ratty T-shirts that he didn’t mind getting dirty as he worked his small store in Brooklyn. Neither of my parents really had a need for formal clothing for the twenty-something years they lived here, a stark contrast to the business casual setting I would adapt to in the coming months–and a living reminder of the two worlds I was traveling between.
Working in a white-collar setting is truly a foreign experience when you grow up watching your parents working a completely different occupation. While my mom stood on her feet for 10 hours a day, I sat in front of a dual-monitor setup for ten weeks, perusing documents and sending emails. While my mom ate her lunch quickly in a corner of her store, I was eating lunch at places I couldn’t even dream of affording not too long ago. While she closed up shop and made the 40 minute commute in traffic from Brooklyn back to our home in Queens, I would be clinking glasses of champagne with people who worked with Fortune 500 companies. And throughout it all, I felt a profound sense of guilt for the “success” that I worked to achieve. It was unfair to me that I was able to experience all of these activities when it took a village to get here; when, if she were to have been offered the same opportunity, she could have been in my shoes as well.
This guilt is something that I have been battling with since 1L year. As I write this, it is dawning on me that I’m graduating from law school in exactly a month, and that I am in my last week of classes. I am only five months away from working in an incredibly prestigious profession, at a powerful law firm, and I am so close to finally reaping the benefits of all the sacrifices that my family, friends, and fiance have made to push me here. It’s strange, isn’t it; you would think that an achievement such as this calls for significant celebration. But I think that the celebration should be dedicated not just for me–not just for any of us who have made it this far–but for the people who helped steer us down the right path. All of us in law school, no matter what background, are fortunate and privileged enough to have ended up here somehow. And it’s important to remember that it’s not just hard work, resilience, or even luck that brought us here, but the support that we had in bringing us to this point.
I made a promise to my mom that I would get here. When my dad passed away in 2017, and as she wept at his open casket, I promised her that she hadn’t come here in vain–that I would succeed and bring her and my sister along with me. When my grandfather passed away in 2023, I promised him that I would become the first lawyer in our family, something he wanted to see before he passed, but sadly could not. Whenever things became difficult in these last three years, I would think back to the promises I made to the most important people in my life, and remind myself that this legal journey bore the weight of generations’ worth of hopes and dreams.
This final blog post is a tribute of gratitude to those in my life who have worked tirelessly to get me here. My family, with their limited resources, opened as many doors as they could at their expense so they could see one of their own achieve a singular dream. My friends back home and at school were a never-ending source of support and laughter when things got hard. My fiance showed me unconditional love through stressful nights when the Bluebook made no sense and I couldn’t understand why we needed to learn about the rule against perpetuities. I am going to be a lawyer not just due to my own virtue, but because of the pillars in my life that supported me.
And it’s also a tribute to all of you: all of you who made it here, all the students who are graduating and all of the students who still have some time left; all of the parents who made so many sacrifices to see their children succeed; all of the faculty and staff making this legal education possible; and the fortuity of being part of an institution that will set the tone for the rest of our lives. If you’re reading this, take the time to call your mom, text your dad, DM your friends, and let them know you’re thankful for what they’ve done.
I hope that my posts over the years were able to bring even a little bit of joy and a feeling of being seen to your lives. Thank you for being a part of this journey with me.
Seung Hye “Shang” Yang is a third-year student at BC Law. Contact her at yangben@bc.edu.
BC Law: Impact 