Rick Woo—Jenna Chu

Rick Woo—Jenna Chu is a long-term relationship rooted in childhood companionship but increasingly strained by family opposition and Jenna’s dependence on Rick for emotional support. Its defining tension is not a lack of love: Rick affirms that he loves Jenna, even as his family presses him to leave her and his efforts to care for her risk making him carry more than one person can bear.

History and Attachment

Jenna moved in next door to Rick in sixth grade. Her parents asked him to walk her to school; she began waiting for him after school as well. In high school she brought him snacks after football practice, and he invited her to freshman homecoming. They had been together since. The relationship thus begins not with a dramatic encounter but with repeated acts of attention and a friendship that becomes a couple’s history over time.

That history helps explain why Rick’s attachment persists under pressure. Jenna is not a passing romance he can simply set aside: their shared past stretches from childhood into high school, while his family’s objections threaten a relationship already woven into his daily life. When he later tells Ever about his relatives’ campaign against Jenna, his thumb worries the scars in his hand, a familiar gesture of tension that recurs as he discusses the relationship.

Family Opposition and Rick’s Choices

Rick’s relatives disapprove of Jenna and exert pressure on him to end the relationship. During a Christmas visit with his mother, he says, he received an earful every day from five aunts and uncles urging him to drop Jenna and find someone they considered suitable. His mother had also fasted for three days in an attempt to make him break up with her. The opposition is therefore not a single objection but a sustained family effort, involving both extended relatives and his mother.

The conflict surfaces again in a telephone call from Taiwan. Jenna is angry at Rick and his family, and argues that if he wanted to treat her this way, he should not have gone to Taiwan but could have done so in her bedroom at home. Rick apologizes and suggests that she could fly out to him, but the exchange makes their separation and her resentment audible. The call also shows that family pressure has become entangled with the distance between them: Rick is away, while Jenna is left to contend with the relationship and its surrounding conflict at home.

Rick tells Ever that the only thing likely to get his family off Jenna’s back is for him to bring home a girl who is not Jenna. The remark captures the coercive bind: rather than expecting his relatives to accept his partner, he imagines having to present them with a substitute. He is distressed enough to pack socks and boxers into his Chien Tan bag, then abandon the effort and say he cannot take his family right now. His response suggests exhaustion, not a resolution; the demand remains in place.

Jenna’s Distress and Rick’s Caretaking

Rick describes Jenna as someone who holds on to pressure rather than releasing it. She is an only child whose parents travel frequently for work and expect a great deal from her. Stress from friends and school, he says, accumulates like stones sewn into her clothes. During junior year she lost fifteen pounds, and came to his house every night to fall asleep in his bed while he worked on homework. These details make visible both her vulnerability and the extent to which Rick’s room and presence became a refuge.

Rick was meanwhile juggling school, football, and his relationship with Sophie, who objected to how much time Jenna took up. He tried to encourage Jenna to develop interests beyond grades and their relationship. She had volunteered at a children’s clinic but stopped; Rick did not want her to focus only on school and him. His account complicates the image of a devoted boyfriend: his care includes an effort to imagine a life for Jenna that is not organized entirely around his attention, even though he remains a central source of support.

Jenna has asked Rick to keep her depression from her parents. He believes her father would blame her for weakness, since her parents had taught her not to cry, and says she is not close to them. Keeping the secret leaves Rick with a heavy responsibility, but Ever challenges the idea that he can carry Jenna by himself. Rick answers plainly that he loves her. The exchange marks the difference between loving someone and being able to solve every condition that makes them suffer: the relationship’s tenderness is real, but so is the limit of what one partner can bear alone.

Reciprocity, Distance, and Uncertainty

Rick’s generosity becomes part of how others interpret the relationship. Ever describes him as a giving tree, saying that he drove Jenna everywhere, listened to her worries until three in the morning, then stayed up to finish his homework. She argues that love should be shared between equals, with give-and-take rather than one person continually giving. This is Ever’s judgment, not a declaration from Rick, and it reveals her concern that devotion may have become unbalanced.

That concern gains another dimension when Ever hears that Rick is trying to transfer to Williams. He says it is his own idea, while his parents are convinced Jenna is insisting on it. Ever is surprised that he might be withdrawing from Yale, a possibility he has not clearly discussed with her. The disagreement over whose choice the transfer represents underscores how easily Rick’s intentions become contested by other people’s assumptions. It also places his education among the stakes of the relationship, without establishing that Jenna actually asked him to move.

Distance remains present even in a small, practical gesture: Jenna sends Rick a carefully made care package. He unties lavender ribbons from a white box to reveal homemade chocolates shaped like squirrels, birds, and acorns, packed with silver confetti and dry ice for the express delivery. The package gives material form to her attention and labor, complicating any account of the couple as one-sidedly sustained by Rick’s care. Her anger on the phone and her tenderness in the gift coexist; the relationship contains strain as well as acts of intimate consideration.

Later, Rick leaves for Hong Kong for a few days, driven to the airport by Li-Han. Ever learns about the trip from Marc rather than Rick, and reflects that by the time Rick returns she will be gone. The departure extends the story’s pattern of physical and emotional distance, while its timing gives the relationship an unresolved quality from Ever’s perspective. The evidence establishes neither that Rick and Jenna have broken up nor that their conflicts have been settled: it leaves them together in a history of attachment, under pressure, and still separated by choices and circumstances.