NEW YORK — She stopped working at the sushi restaurant, laid two mattress pads in the back of her Jeep and drove away from Florida with her new girlfriend, bound for a small town in the Cascade Mountains that looks like Christmas. She brought a basketball only out of habit. Abbey Hsu had to see what else there was. Anywhere else seemed like a good place to start.
This was an impossible couple of years. She tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee near the end of her junior season of high school. On that Valentine’s Day in 2018, she hobbled to a parking lot while others ran from the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in history. A pandemic cut short her freshman year at Columbia, and shortly after her coach sent everyone home, her father got sick. Dr. Alex Hsu became the first medical professional in Florida to die from complications related to COVID-19. It was two days after his youngest daughter’s birthday.
Instead of returning to Columbia in the fall of 2020, with contact athletics canceled, Abbey Hsu stopped. For once. Then she changed directions.
It’s been a long time since she crammed her 5-foot-11 frame into the back of a Jeep to sleep roadside during that trip, taken on a gap year from school. Two weeks of hiking and skiing and hot springs and a…
