The Space Knoll

Sung J. Woo
4 min readAug 24, 2021

I recently screened a film, After Life, by one of my favorite directors, Hirokazu Koreeda. The question the film asks of its recently dearly departed characters (as per its title, it is about the afterlife) is this:

If you had to choose one memory to carry with you for eternity, what would it be?

Wow, I thought. That’s a heavy question. I mean I can’t even imagine how I would pick my…

And then I had it, my forever memory. Just like that. A day later, I revisited my decision to see if I’d been too hasty, but it wasn’t even worth spending a second. Rock solid.

Now even though I reserve no doubt about my eternal memorial choice, I couldn’t tell you exactly what days they were. Logically speaking, they had to have happened twice, both on this very month of August, though almost three decades in the past: 1992 and 1993. Those were my first two summers spent in Ithaca, New York, living in 106 The Knoll, the home of the Alpha Tau chapter of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity at Cornell University. And as odd as this may sound, what I wish to bring to my infinite existence is the day when my friends made their return from wherever they’d spent their summer break.

As I recall, the fall semester began on the final week of August, which meant the bulk of them would arrive the previous weekend. If I were a betting man, I’d place my wager on Saturday, a day that would begin with me downing a bowl of Cheerios. Then like a dog pining for his owner to get back from work, I’d listen for the slam of a car door.

Just what was it about this day that filled me with such unbridled joy? Nothing grand, purely pedestrian. If I gave anyone a hug, it was the manly kind, a single arm with a couple of slaps on the back. What I adored was helping to unload their cars, which were filled with the staples of the early 1990s: heavy-as-sin fatscreen monitor, beige-colored desktop computer, a boxy stereo with a double-deck auto reverse cassette deck. Dave had a nice hifi with a pair of speakers that came up to my shoulders, plus that sweet five-disc CD changer.

How I reveled in hauling up their trash bag stuffed with their bedsheets, pillows, and comforter. That was almost always the first thing to bring up, as it was the last to be shoved into the trunk. Orange milk crates stolen from the Dairy Department served as excellent textbook carriers, and the last item was often a mini-fridge, which would soon be home to many bottles of ice-cold beer.

It was a day of beginnings, the school year ahead of us as free and inviting as the open road. Oh, the optimism of youth! Misguided, of course, as the semester would be overrun with term papers and lab reports that invariably led to all-nighters, but even those I didn’t mind. There was nothing as reassuring as seeing Earle in the dining room at four in the morning, cramming for a math final while I faked my way through comparing a pair of Faulkner novels I had barely skimmed. On the relationship front, heartbreak and loneliness were waiting to pounce our desperate hearts like a tiger on the savannah, but on this bright sunny day of reunion with my fellow academic inmates, all I felt was brotherly love.

Unless Albert Einstein is wrong, space cannot exist without time. (And come on, he’s not wrong — he’s Albert Einstein!) The white house with green trim where I spent three and a half years of my life has stood on the hill for more than a hundred years, and my time was but a blip in its history. For those years this place meant everything, and each subsequent visits have meant a little less. This is what it means to grow older, to let go. My special space is now someone else’s special space, which is the way it should be.

p.s. The title of this essay refers to something only the folks of my generation would understand. Before streaming, music was best gotten by way of CD clubs, and BMG Music Service was one such vendor. They sent you 12 CDs for a penny (you literally taped a cent onto the postcard), though you had to buy one CD at full price within a year, a pretty good deal. Anyway, one day Mark called them to change the address from his home to 106 The Knoll. And when he spelled it out for the customer service agent — T-H-E space K-N-O-L-L — the agent took it all down literally. Thus, his CDs were sent to 106 The Space Knoll. The United States Postal Service wasn’t fazed.

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Sung J. Woo

Novelist (Skin Deep, Love Love, Everything Asian), essayist (New York Times, Vox), occasional traveler. www.sungjwoo.com