I pulled out a pencil and started calculating what it would take to build something new.
I arrived in Los Angeles with $800 in a checking account and a suitcase that smelled like Oklahoma hay and motor oil and the particular brand of dryer sheets my mother bought in bulk from Walmart.
I remember standing outside the UCLA dormitory at seven in the morning, the August heat already pressing down like a hand, and thinking, this is the farthest anyone in my family has ever been from Bartlesville.
It wasn’t far enough.
Engineering school is 85% men. Nobody tells you that before you show up. Nobody tells you that the first week, a guy in your statics class will look at your calculations and say, who helped you with this?
And when you say nobody, he’ll laugh like you told a joke.
Nobody tells you that the study groups will form without you, that the lab partners will pair off while you’re still looking around, that you will spend four years being quietly, politely invisible in a room full of people who are louder than you and less precise.
I was not loud.
I was precise.
There is a particular kind of comfort in numbers. A beam either holds or it doesn’t. A foundation either distributes the load evenly or it cracks.
There’s no ambiguity. No, you understand, honey. No favoritism. Steel doesn’t care if you’re the right daughter or the wrong one. It cares about yield strength and cross-sectional area and whether you did the math correctly.
I always did the math correctly.
Graduated 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 tilted because I couldn’t get it to sit straight.
Then I went to Target, bought a six-inch steel T-square—the good kind, the kind that costs $40 and lasts a lifetime—and I held it in the Target bag on the bus ride home and thought, this is my diploma.
The real one. The one I bought myself.
Mercer & Associates hired me that fall. Midsize structural engineering firm, office in Culver City, clients ranging from residential retrofits to commercial high-rises.
I started as a junior engineer running calculations that someone else checked. By year two, I was checking other people’s calculations. By year three, I was leading seismic retrofit projects, evaluating whether buildings could survive the next big earthquake, and when the answer was no, designing the reinforcement that would make them hold.
I was good at making things hold.
Professionally, at least.
I called home on holidays. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Mother’s Day. My father’s birthday.
Why?
Lorraine answered when she felt like it. She’d talk about Shelby—Shelby’s pregnancy, Shelby’s new kitchen, Shelby’s kids, the funny thing Levi said at church.
I’d listen.
Sometimes I’d try to tell her about a project. We were reinforcing a 1920s theater in Silver Lake. Beautiful old bones, and I was proud of the solution we’d found for the unreinforced masonry.
That’s nice, honey, she’d say.
The same way you say that’s nice to a child showing you a crayon drawing.
Then: oh, Shelby’s calling on the other line. Talk soon.
My father and I did not talk. We had not talked, really talked, since the day he stood at the door and told me not to come back asking for money.
Occasionally he’d pick up when I called, and we’d exchange weather reports like two strangers waiting for the same bus.
Hot out there?
Yep.
Hot here too.
Then Lorraine would take the phone, and the Shelby report would begin.
Three years of this. Building in Los Angeles. Hauling into a void in Oklahoma.
Structurally speaking, I was cantilevered, extended out over nothing, held up only by my own rigidity.
Then I met James.
October 2022. A documentary crew came to shoot at a construction site in Koreatown where we were doing a seismic evaluation on a mixed-use building. I was on the third floor checking rebar spacing when a man with a camera on his shoulder asked me to explain what I was doing in a way that his editor would understand.
I make sure buildings don’t fall down, I said.
That’s the shortest interview I’ve ever done, he said.
He was smiling.
He had the kind of face that looked like it was always about to smile. Mouth ready. Eyes already there.
His name was James Park. He was a cinematographer. Freelance. Korean-American. Raised in Torrance. He was 30.
He was warm in a way that I didn’t fully understand, because warmth in my experience was always conditional. Always the thing that came before someone told you they only had four tickets.
We talked for 40 minutes.
He asked me what I loved about engineering.
I said, the certainty.
He asked what I meant.
I said, a weld is either strong enough or it isn’t. Nobody gets to decide afterward that it was supposed to be a different weld.
He looked at me for a long time after that. Not the way men usually looked at me. Not sizing up. Not calculating. Just looking.
Like he was reading a blueprint and finding it interesting.
First date. A pho restaurant in Little Saigon. Small, loud, plastic chairs.
I told him about the Disney trip.
I don’t know why I told him. I hadn’t told anyone in L.A. Not my roommates in college. Not my co-workers. Nobody.
But James asked about my family, and instead of the usual, they’re fine, they’re in Oklahoma, I opened my mouth. And the Disney trip came out like a splinter that had been working its way to the surface for 17 years.
He didn’t say that’s terrible. He didn’t say I’m sorry.
He was quiet for a moment, chopsticks still, broth cooling.
Then he said, so you never got the photo album.
Five words.