I Serve. I Decide. – Chapter 1 – The Hum of the Void

The city hums. That’s the only way to describe it at two in the morning when you’re twenty-five floors up and the only thing you’ve successfully conquered today is a mountain of mind-numbing corporate bullshit. It’s not a loud hum, not the chaotic scream of sirens and drunken idiots you get on the street. Up here, it’s the sound of a million other lives, all blurring together into one low, constant thrum that vibrates through the glass of my window and straight into my bones. It’s the sound of everything and nothing, a perfect, hollow symphony for the empty fucking ache in my chest.

I’m standing in my underwear and a faded band t-shirt I bought in college, a relic from a life where I thought I might actually be a different kind of person. The t-shirt is soft, worn thin, and it’s the only comfortable thing I’ve touched all day. My feet are cold on the polished concrete floors of my apartment, a space so minimalist it looks like a goddamn magazine spread. All clean lines, neutral colors, and strategically placed furniture. It’s beautiful. It’s expensive. And it feels like a hotel room I’m borrowing. My apartment is the physical manifestation of my life: looks perfect on the outside, hollow as a drum on the inside.

I lean my forehead against the cool glass, my breath fogging a small circle that obscures a thousand tiny windows. Each one is a story, a life, a fight, a fuck, a lonely Tuesday night just like mine. Down there, someone is falling in love. Someone else is getting their heart shattered into a million pieces. Someone is probably eating a pint of ice cream and wondering how the hell they ended up here. I know the feeling.

My phone buzzes on the kitchen island, a sharp, insistent little sound that cuts through the city’s hum. I don’t even have to look. It’s my mother. It’s always my mother this time of night. She and my father operate on a completely different time zone, one that exists only inside the walls of their home in Flushing. It’s a time zone built on obligation, tradition, and the unshakeable belief that a daughter’s primary function is to be a good, obedient girl who eventually marries a nice Taiwanese doctor or lawyer and produces suitably impressive grandchildren.

I let it go to voicemail. I can’t do it tonight. I can’t paste on the bright, cheerful “Yes, Ma, I’m eating well” voice or the “No, Ma, I haven’t met anyone yet, work is just so busy” deflection. 

The truth is, work *is* busy. I’m an assistant at a corporate law firm, which is a fancy way of saying I’m a highly-paid, highly-educated professional shit-shoveler.

 I’m good at it, too. I’m organized, efficient, and I can anticipate the needs of partners who are too important to remember their own goddamn names. I’m respected. I’m on a track. I’m everything my parents wanted me to be: successful, independent, stable.

And I am miserable. Not in a crying-into-my-wine kind of way. It’s a deeper, more insidious kind of misery. It’s the slow erosion of the soul. It’s the feeling of being a ghost in my own life, going through the motions with a smile plastered on my face while inside, something vital is just… withering.

Growing up was like living in two different countries without ever leaving New York. 

At home, we were in Taiwan. The air was thick with the smell of my mother’s cooking – star anise, ginger, soy sauce – and the sound of Mandarin. We spoke the language, we followed the rules, we bowed to the elders. My world was small, contained, and safe. Obedience wasn’t just expected; it was the air we breathed. My worth was measured by my grades, my modesty, my ability to be a quiet, pleasing reflection of my parents’ hopes.

Then I’d walk out the door and step into America. Public school was a fucking alien planet. I was the weird girl with the strange food in her lunchbox, the girl whose parents didn’t let her go to sleepovers, the girl who was always a step behind the latest slang, the latest trend, the latest everything. I was an outsider looking in, desperate to belong but terrified of the price. For years, I was just… awkward. A collection of sharp angles and quiet desperation, trying to fold myself into a shape that would fit in.

I take a sip of the whiskey I poured an hour ago. It’s good stuff, a single malt I can’t really afford but buy anyway because it makes me feel like I have taste, like I’m part of this sophisticated adult world I’ve built. The burn in my throat is the most real thing I’ve felt all day.

Something shifted in high school. My body decided to stop being a gangly disappointment and grow into itself. My legs got longer, my hips curved, my face lost its baby fat and settled into a structure that was… striking. My dark hair, which I used to hate, became a sheet of silk that people wanted to touch. My eyes, which I’d always thought of as plain and brown, were suddenly described as “deep” and “mysterious.” I didn’t know what the fuck to do with it at first. The attention felt like a spotlight I wasn’t prepared for.

But I’m a quick study. I learned that being watched wasn’t a vulnerability; it was a power source. 

I learned to control my movements, to hold my gaze a little too long, to let a small, knowing smile play on my lips. 

I learned how to make people want me, and then I learned how to decide who was worthy of that want. It was the first time I ever felt truly in control of my own life. I wasn’t just the obedient daughter anymore. I was the girl who could make a room full of boys hold their breath. It was intoxicating.

I look around my perfect apartment, at the designer couch I never sit on, at the kitchen I barely use to cook anything more complicated than toast. 

I took that power, that control I discovered in high school, and I channeled it. I got into a good university, I got this job, I built this life. Brick by fucking brick. I am the master of my own destiny. I am a strong, independent woman.

So why does it feel like I’m serving a life sentence?

I set the glass down on the counter with a soft clink. 

The hum of the city presses in on me, and for the first time, it feels less like a symphony and more like a cage. 

I have everything I’m supposed to want. The career, the apartment, the independence. I escaped the world of my parents, the world of forced obedience and predetermined destiny. I ran straight into the open arms of freedom and choice.

And I have never felt more lost.

The question hits me then, not as a thought, but as a physical blow, right to the solar plexus. It steals my breath and leaves me leaning against the counter, my hands gripping the cold edge. 

All this time, I’ve been running *from* something. The traditions, the expectations, the suffocating weight of being someone else’s idea of a good daughter. But I never stopped to ask myself the most important question.

What the hell am I running *to*?

I have built a life that works. A life that looks good on paper. But it’s not a life that feels like mine. 

It’s a fortress I built to keep the old world out, but now I realize I’ve locked myself inside. 

And I have no fucking idea what I actually want. Not what my parents want. Not what society wants.

What do *I* want?

The silence in my apartment is deafening, a gaping void where an answer should be. And in that void, I feel a terrifying, thrilling, and utterly undeniable pull toward something I can’t even name. Something more.

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