“Does someone powerful hold a vendetta against me or something?”
He laughed. “No, you’re not that important. It’s something else, but it’s not going to be fun to hear.”
“And you’re sure that this is the reason I didn’t get in.”
“I am pretty sure.”
“Great. Then tell me where I went wrong.”
FIVE
I could join the PeaceCorps. Volunteer in the South Bronx for a year. Develop and recover from a debilitating drug addiction and use the fodder to write a best-selling memoir. Take care of a schizophrenic uncle or an orphaned niece. Work as a night manager at McDonald’s and write think pieces about the working class. All to remove what Robert said had been wafting off my application like the stench of New York City curbs on garbage day.
I was boring. And not boring in one of the acceptable ways—wanting to go to that law school because your parents are graduates of the same institution, being one of those rich kids whose parents went to boarding school with the dean of admissions, or being the other kind of rich kid whose parents will donate a sizable sum just so your application gets a second look. I was boring, and I was a nobody. And for all they knew, I didn’t even want to go to law school. I was just another robotic Asian kid who didn’t want to study computer science or go to medicalschool, so this was the only other option my parents would approve of. I was squarely in the “Asian female” bucket, and that was a damn hard bucket to stand out in.
As much as I wanted to defend myself, I couldn’t argue against the truth. As soon as he said it, I could see it myself—the room of five admissions officers poring through the applications. They would see me—Elizabeth Zhang, fresh out of a top undergrad, sky-high scores—and say to each other, “I’m just not sure what she adds to our student body.” It was the politically correct version of what they really meant: “Do we really need another one of these?”
I was boring. Specifically, I was a Boring Asian Female.
Robert had explained to me that law school applications were changing. That they weren’t so formulaic. That having the right scores just didn’t do it for you anymore. His exact words were “You are too similar to all the other applicants in your particular demographic, so you probably just didn’t stand out.” And when I asked him what he meant by my “particular demographic,” he cleared his throat and said, “Well, you know, Asians. And I should say, women, since on average more women apply to law school than men.”
Was it my fault that my backstory just wasn’t very compelling? Should I have wished that my mother was poorer, had still been a waitress rather than an accountant, and that I could milk the struggles of a single mom to show I overcame a sufficient amount of adversity? And apparently, attending Columbia neutralized any sparkle I would otherwise get from being a native of South Dakota. Besides, according to Robert, because I was Asian, the admissions committees wouldn’t really see me as anative of South Dakota, at least not the same way they’d see a white kid from South Dakota.
To make matters worse, there was no use in the typical gap year plan for people whose application cycles didn’t go the way they hoped. Robert said that taking a paralegal job for a year or two would only make me appear more boring when I applied again. It would be yet another tally in the category of “follows all the rules.”
“But I know another girl, the same year as me at Columbia, who I’m pretty sure has worse stats, who got in. Also Asian. Also female. And arguably far more boring than me. How could that be possible?”
Robert shrugged. “I wouldn’t know unless I saw her application. It could be a variety of things. Maybe her parents donated a lot of money. Maybe her essays were really compelling. Maybe she did something cool outside of school. She must’ve just stood out in some way.”
—
In the lobby of theacademic advisory center, I sketched out some numbers on a spare sheet of notebook paper. Each class at Harvard Law had 550 students. According to the most recent demographic data, 50 percent of those were women. 10 percent were Asian. That meant there were twenty-seven spots for Asian females. And one of those had been taken by Laura.
If Robert was right, then that meant that Laura and I had been competing against each other for Harvard’s limited number of slots for Asian females. She had won one of the twenty-seven spots. I had not.
“But isn’t affirmative action illegal now?” I had asked Robert.
“You don’t strike me as someone who’s particularly naive.”
“So what do you mean? They still have strict quotas for each racial group?”
He rolled his eyes. “It’s not a quota. It’s more like…they want a well-rounded student body.”
Fine. But if these law schools really did aspire to a well-rounded student body, a diverse class, could I have been the one to fill the quota for the cohort that both Laura and I had belonged in? It was true that I hadn’t even gotten wait-listed, but perhaps that was because the admissions committee read both Laura’s and my applications at the same time, anticipated based on this initial volume that there would be many more Boring Asian Females applying later on in the application cycle, and determined that there was no need to wait-list me, as there would be so many more me-type students applying later on. But without Laura, maybe I could’ve appeared to be just a slightly rarer breed; maybe it would’ve been enough for at least a spot on the wait list, or even an acceptance. I didn’t have any proof, but I was filled with the conviction that I would’ve been number twenty-eight. That if it weren’t for Laura, it would’ve been me. After all, we were both undergraduates at Columbia. Both liberal arts majors. The admissions committee must’ve compared our applications side by side and decided that they’d only need one.
The next few days, I dreamed that it was all a mistake, that I got into every school I applied to. I dreamed that the dean of admissions at Harvard called me personally to apologize. But the relief never lasted long. Each morning, I’d wake up with the same pit of dread in my stomach, the plans for my future like a puzzle I was unable to solve.
SIX
I couldn’t tell if itwas just confirmation bias, or if I was seeing Laura on campus more frequently than usual. Everywhere I turned, there she was with her petty, smug smile and her perfect hair, a mundane and constant reminder of my inferiority. It wasn’t like I was conjuring her presence. It was a relatively small campus; we just happened to be in the same place all the damn time. For instance, every Monday and Wednesday I’d see her at Ferris Dining Hall at 1:05 p.m. We must’ve both had classes in that 11:40–12:55 block. I wasn’t surprised that she usually beat me there, since I was coming from my art history class on the other side of campus. I couldn’t help but wonder where she was coming from. I also noticed that she never actually ate her food at the dining hall. She’d stand in the line for the pasta bar, cover her bowl with a paper plate, and walk out.
One Wednesday, I was sitting with Leah and Eunjin at one of the round tables on the first floor of Ferris Dining Hall. Leah and Eunjin were talking about a class they had taken togetherthe prior semester. I had never taken the class and had nothing to contribute to the conversation, so I let my mind drift to other topics. For instance, it was already 1:30 and Laura was nowhere in sight. Maybe she was sick that day, or maybe she had stopped by Duane Reade to pick up a bottle of shampoo. But no, Laura probably didn’t use drugstore shampoo. If she were going to Duane Reade, it’d be to pick up Plan B after having hooked up with a hot rower, one of those guys I didn’t even bother trying to talk to because they were out of my league. Or she could have gone to a different dining hall, like John Jay, or even JJ’s Place, the diner that served french fries, fried chicken, burgers, and made-to-order quesadillas. Actually, what was I thinking? Laura wouldn’t eat at JJ’s Place. She cared too much about staying skinny for that. Or maybe she was one of those people who could eat anything and still maintain a 25th percentile BMI. Maybe she was one of those people for whom things just worked out without her even having to try.
“Elizabeth, what do you think?” Leah asked, bringing my attention back to my friends. “Should I take the nonviolence seminar with the boring professor or the history of liberal thought seminar with the cool professor?”
I silently repeated the question back to myself so I could process it before answering.
“Hm,” I said. “I feel like we’ve all been let down by a class with a cool subject but taught by a not-cool professor, but I haven’t heard a lot of people complain about the opposite. Do history of liberal thought.”
