Option A:
I use the $3,000 in my bank account to start a charity, which I can write about in my personal statement when I reapply to Harvard next cycle. Hopefully the nonprofit makes me seem more interesting and worldly to the admissions officers. The problem is, they’ll see that they have rejected me once before, and it may come across as a calculatedmove. Plus, plenty of other people start nonprofits, so I would need to pick a truly unique cause.
Option B:
I get a job as a paralegal. My résumé won’t change much, except a little bit more work experience and hopefully a better letter of recommendation from one of my managers. Basically, I’m counting on a less competitive class and a little more luck, and neither of those are guaranteed.
Option C:
I have the baby and brand myself as the modern woman who wants to do it all: motherhood and a law career at the same time. In my personal essay, I write about how my experience as a mother has encouraged me to pursue public interest law that advocates for marginalized women and children (once I matriculate, I won’t actually follow through on the public interest part). The problem is, I’ll be stuck with a baby.
There was no option D. The prior night, before drifting off into a melatonin-induced sleep, I had contemplated giving up the idea of Harvard altogether. But the notion that Laura Kim would take my spot at the top university in the world was inconceivable. Laura, who didn’t even seem interested in law until just now, who had not suffered and sacrificed nearly as much as I had—who didn’t spend the entire summer before college working at a fast-food drive-through so she wouldn’t have to ask her mom for more money, who didn’t drive for two hours each week to take calculus at the local university because they didn’t offer it at herhigh school, who already had everything going for her—managed to be superior to me in truly every single way possible. I didn’t know how I would wake up every day and be able to look myself in the face. It was bad enough that she had even gotten in. That already made my work much harder: I would need to guarantee that I could achieve more than her at Harvard in every possible way—better grades, better clerkships, better extracurriculars, and, of course, a better job. And all of that required that I get accepted first.
By the time I finished thinking through each option, it was already midnight. I realized I had already made my decision. I would keep it. I would keep the baby.
ELEVEN
It was the middle ofFebruary, and the days began to stay bright for minutely longer each evening until one day I got out of my evening seminar and it was only twilight, the streetlamps not yet casting their fluorescent lights on the shrub-lined sidewalks.
It had been unseasonably warm the past week, the temperature rising to the fifties. Earlier that day, as I walked to Low Beach to hang out on the steps with my friends, it felt as though the sun was disinfecting my mind and body from any worries that I had harbored before. A temporary nirvana, a temporary self-consciousness that extended beyond the self as it was now to the way it would be reflected upon in the future. The closest I had ever come to this sensation was the first week of college, when I realized I could go anywhere, do anything, and no one would know. It was the realization of freedom—realization in both definitions of the word, in both perceiving my freedom and obtaining it. Yet the feeling as I crossed the sundial, as I wavedto my beautiful, smiling friends, transcended even that: it was the realization of youth. The realization that I was young, that I’d never be this young again, and that I was currently living a moment that I would someday feel nostalgic for. There was a paradox in these two sensations. When I was eighteen, I felt old, as though I had entered a new stage of life. I was focused on all I had left behind. But now, at twenty-one, I felt young. I realized just how much there was ahead of me. A baby. But more importantly, what the baby would give me: an acceptance to Harvard Law.
I knew that most people would think I was crazy. Who in their right mind would decide to have a baby before they even graduated from college? But I had it all planned out. Robert was right. Harvard wanted to diversify its class. They didn’t want too many Boring Asian Females from immigrant families and elite colleges. Ironically, they probably wanted people more similar to the ones I went to high school with. I was from South Dakota, but in their eyes, I wasn’t a true South Dakotan. I wasn’t a born-and-raised Midwesterner, the type of rural Real American that East Coasters accepted at their institutions to pretend they didn’t live in a bubble and to prove that their dedication to diversity extended beyond just race and class to other related-but-not-quite-the-same factors like geography. I would find Harvard’s efforts admirable (kind of) if it weren’t for the fact that they cost me the acceptance I deserved. This pregnancy would allow me to rebrand myself from a typical try-hard Asian to someoneinteresting.
Funnily enough, I had always looked down upon my high school classmates for having kids too young. And now here I was, showing that I was a true Midwesterner after all.
I set up another meeting with Robert to confirm my hypothesis. Of course, it took him a moment to get over the surprise that I, an unmarried twenty-one-year-old undergraduate living in the most liberal city in America, was pregnant, but I framed my situation as the following: I was excited to have the baby, but I was worried that it would destroy my dreams of becoming a lawyer. Would being a mother make me even more uninteresting? (I knew that couldn’t be true, but better to frame it this way so I wouldn’t come across as a calculating psychopath.)
“No, not at all,” he said. “In fact, it’ll be the opposite. These schools are all looking for people who’ve overcome adversity. Who better demonstrates that than someone who’s raising another human and who also wants to further their own education? I gotta admit, that’s going to make you a very, very compelling candidate.”
I strolled back to my dorm, grinning the entire time. I mapped out the timeline. Based on my last period, I was approximately six weeks pregnant. I’d work on my application during the second trimester, when symptoms would be mildest. The baby would be born sometime in September. That left me almost exactly a year to spend some quality time with it before starting law school.
Of course, David would have to pay child support, as I certainly did not have the financial resources to raise a child alone. But he should just be grateful that I wouldn’t expect him to be involved in the child’s life in any way. With his payments, I would hire a full-time nanny and night nurse so that I could devote all of my attention to my law school applications.
I could hear the hypothetical criticisms from my friends. “You’re having a baby as an unmarried twenty-one-year-old with someone you barely know, and when you have literally no job? Have you really thought this through?” In my head, I respondedto their questions with calm rationality. “Yes, I’ve thought it through completely, just like I’ve thought through everything else in my life,” I would say. “I always knew I’d have kids someday. And if you just take a moment to erase all your misconceptions and open your mind, now is the best time for it to happen. I’m taking a gap year before law school, so this is the most free time I will ever have. I don’t have to worry about finances because David will be legally forced to pay his share. Having the baby will help me go to law school, which means it’ll also help me get a good job. Plus, I’m mature for my age. I feel confident I’m ready.” How could they argue with that?
—
I felt confident now thatI would get into Harvard. I should’ve never doubted myself; I’d always known that I was a 99th percentile person, and I needed to start acting that way. There was just one problem.
I didn’t want to—Icouldn’t—wait an extra year to attend Harvard Law. Sure, I could go along with my original plan and have the baby during a gap year and matriculate next fall instead of this fall. But how would that be fair? How would it be fair for the undeserving Laura to get to go to Harvard right out of undergrad while I would have to wait an extra year? If she was a year ahead of me in law school, then she’d also get to work in big law a year sooner than me. She’d get a head start in making a big law salary, in climbing the big law ladder, in making partner at a big law firm. She’d always be one year ahead for the rest of her career, and that was just not something I could accept. Especially if I were making as big of a sacrifice as the one I had decided to make.
As a single, expecting mother with grades and test scores that were on par with if not superior to Laura’s, I knew without a doubt that I’d be considered the more compelling candidate. And even though the official application deadline had passed, there was technically no deadline for providing an update to your profile. I could submit an addendum about my situation, and the admissions officers would immediately see that I was more interesting than all the Asian females in their applicant pool. The only problem was, they had already accepted Laura. By this time in the application cycle, they probably had already filled up all twenty-seven of their allotted spots for high-achieving Asian females. It wasn’t like they could take that back once they had someone better in the mix. They’d still have to reject me, regardless of how much sparkle my impending single motherhood would add to my application. They’d just think that it was a shame that I hadn’t provided the update earlier.
But sometimes universities did rescind acceptances. It was rare, but it happened, usually for one of two reasons: if someone’s grades fell dramatically after they got in, or if they were caught in a moral scandal.
Hypothetically speaking, if Harvard rescinded Laura’s acceptance, wouldn’t that open up an extra spot for a different, even better candidate?
I realized it was time to focus on a different mission. Now that I knew how I was going to get into Harvard, it no longer mattered to me how Laura had gotten in. To get myself in, I needed to get Laura out.
Of course, I wasn’t cruel. Laura could still go to law school; she just couldn’t go to Harvard. Maybe Georgetown, actually. That seemed more suitable for her.
TWELVE
I didn’t tell Eunjin Iwas pregnant. I decided I’d tell her after the point at which I could no longer get an abortion. If I started showing before then, I’d wear baggy clothes or complain that the freshman fifteen seemed to be hitting me late. I didn’t want her to freak out, to make it out to be a bigger deal than it actually was. I didn’t want to explain my plan to her. I knew she wouldn’t understand.
My symptoms had eased; for the most part, I felt normal, and I told Eunjin that she was right, it was just food poisoning, likely from the foie gras.
Sometimes I searched online for photos of David, looking closely at his features, at his smile, at his eyes. Once the seed inside me grew into an actual human being, what would they look like? Would they have David’s high cheekbones, my dark hair? On one hand, we would have something significant in common: being raised by single moms. But on the other hand, would their upbringing in New York City as the child of a high-powered attorney prevent the development of a true closeness? The closeness that two people have when they’ve both been looked down on their entire lives, when they both know what it feels like to be unimportant, to be inferior, to know that the default is that you don’t matter? They would never know what it was like to look for ants in a one-bedroom apartment, to feel constantly inferior to everyone around them, to want nothing more than to escape. Each generation builds off the one before it. My parents sacrificed so I could have a better life. I strived so my children could have a better life. And my children wouldn’t have to sacrifice or strive. They could just enjoy. And maybe that was a good thing.
