December 10, 2025
The gift of connection
She had left Andover in the rearview, but a chance encounter with another alum changed her lifeby Stephanie Han '82
Life is a continuum, but like many people who divorce, I divide my life into two segments: before and after. The structure I had built my adult life around collapsed, and so for the first time ever I reached out to the Andover network for help.
I had moved in 2015 with my child from Hong Kong to Hawai’i—home of my maternal clan since 1904. I had wanted to come home, but it was about more than a physical location: I wanted to be myself.
A few phone calls and the coconut wireless led me to the downtown Honolulu office of Francis T. O’Brien ’61. Frank, son of a Harvard trained medical doctor, studied literature at Yale and was drafted for the Vietnam War while finishing Boston College Law School. Basic training was not only his entry “into the real world,” but also a wake-up call to what awaited on the ground. He moved out of the artillery unit, became a Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps attorney, served in Korea, and returned to teach at West Point before settling in Hawai’i to work at Tripler Army Medical Center.
(Above, the author with her friend and divorce lawyer, Frank O'Brien '61. Courtesy photo.)
“Didn’t care that much about authority,” Frank shared. “A senior judge once said, ‘Always remember, you are lawyers first, officers second.’ Later I got a note that read, ‘Captain O’Brien allows his being a lawyer to interfere with his duty.’ I left the service and told my wife I wanted to make a mark on the law. A dent. I did—in appeals in abuse and neglect cases. And I’m reasonably proud of that.”
Frank and I shared geography and history aside from Andover: my medical doctor dad got drafted right after getting his green card, so we lived on the Korean base a year after Frank’s tour. Neither Frank nor I stayed back East. He and his wife of 54 years, Chris, tried returning to Boston early in their marriage but lasted only nine months.
“There’s a great deal of pressure in the Northeast,” Frank said. “No sun. No smiling. There are edges on things. You live here (in Hawai’i) a few years, and you always run into people you know, no matter where you are.”
I was far away from red brick buildings, the clatter of Commons, despair about unfinished homework, and awkward responses to racial slights. Yet Andover was buried in my bones.
Adolescence in an extraordinarily competitive boarding school meant that Andover broke me and made me.
”
The author in 10th grade at Andover. She lived in Paul Revere North. (Courtesy photo)
Andover helped me become a writer, but it wasn’t only through the Bulfinch Hall English classes. I learned to perform, I learned to bury myself, I learned to survive. Writing became a place of refuge, the only place I felt seen. And yet marriage had shut me down; I had lost confidence in expressing who I was.
Frank felt the same way. During our first meeting he told me that he cried when he first went away to Andover; he had missed his mother. I had too much pride to cry when I said goodbye to my family. Even now I can picture my 6-year-old sister bursting into tears at the door of my room at Paul Revere and feel nostalgia for what was lost. I was 13. Until that very moment, I didn’t understand that I was leaving home forever.
I made up for not crying decades prior within minutes of meeting Frank. Acquaintances told me that Frank is the go-to family attorney, someone who understands high-conflict divorces. I’m not the only one who has emptied his box of tissues.
Not long after meeting, Frank gave me an assignment: write my divorce story. I procrastinated by drinking countless cups of coffee and systematically eating my way through the first, then second, display case shelf of pastries at a local café. I listened to podcasts, watched self-help videos, doomscrolled, and did a boot camp fitness class. My kid told me I was the second-worst person in class. I was miserable.
Two days before Frank’s deadline, I wrote 50 pages. Something had shifted. Writing my story allowed me to reclaim my voice. “I asked you to write your story because I knew that if you wrote what had happened and how it became your life, it would help,” Frank explained. His strategy worked.
D-day fast approached. After reading my divorce story, the mediator ordered that my ex and I sit in separate rooms. This arrangement allowed me to negotiate more effectively. Even with Frank present, I began the day nervous and shaky, but by the time we exited the meeting I had more confidence and clarity.
When the proceedings ended, I walked out of the building overwhelmed and exhausted, squinting at the sun. Frank asked how I felt. “Awful,” I replied.
We sat in the downtown McDonald’s. “Stephanie,” he said, “you are not a servant. You can do what you want to do. You can teach at a school. You can write a best-seller. You can live where you want to live. It’s your life. You are free.”
Months passed before I fully grasped how Frank’s assignment had helped me to recover and move on to a new self. I had written myself into freedom. A before and after. Andover brought me full circle.
Stephanie Han (drstephaniehan.com) is the author of Swimming in Hong Kong, writes the woman.warrior.writer. Substack and is writing a memoir on divorce. Francis T. O’Brien practices law in Honolulu.
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