debate palace

I was attending a debate tournament in a massive neoclassical palace. Terraced sloping hills, gravel paths, and then through an ornamental gate and out into a faded high school gym. Towards the end of the day, my mom arrived and we watched a trial presided over by EL and some other Yale students. Mom interrupted the proceedings with an oddly formal speech against cruelty: tight metaphors, long pauses, and a pattern of eye contact that couldn’t have been random. We walked back to the car as I tried to gather my childhood belongings from the topiary. Beside the hedge, a girl from Terrace House (the one who spoke Korean and started a lingerie brand) invited me to her house in Hope Ranch for “something less dour than all that”. She was there on behalf of the Singaporean treasury. As we left the formal gardens behind, my Mom turned to me and said “Watch this”: and then she was in the air, twirling down a tree-lined hill into a city that resembled downtown Seattle.