“Again, your experience is totally valid, Eunjin. But it’s different.”
The moderator asked Eunjin if there was anything else she’d like to share, but she just shook her head. The conversation moved on. A blond-haired, blue-eyed guy from Argentina shared a heartfelt monologue about how his country still experienced the legacy of colonization. An Indian guy from the Bay Area said he hated that everyone assumed he studied computer science, even though he actually was studying computer science.
I immediately hated Laura. Of course, part of the reason was that she made my new friend feel bad, but I couldn’t lie—at least some of my disdain derived from envy. Laura was quite pretty, at least 80th percentile, maybe 90th on a good day. She was tall and thin and dressed well—not too well, like she was trying hard and had something to prove, but effortlessly well, with clothing that looked high quality and simple in that way you could tell cost money without featuring any flashy branding. Still, I tried to evaluate her with an objective lens. Even putting envy aside, I found her holier-than-thou, politically correct attitude more than a little annoying. But it seemed I was the only one who felt that way. Afterward, I searched for her on all the social media platforms. She was popular. She received a lot of engagement on her posts. People seemed to like her.
I thought that I had overcome my less-than-ideal standing on the coolness food chain but I realized I was just as uncool at Columbia as I was in South Dakota, only for different reasons. In South Dakota I was uncool because I was a nerd and wasn’t white. At Columbia I was uncool because I was not rich and was from South Dakota.
Laura became an inside joke between Eunjin and me.Whenever we passed by her on campus we’d joke about how the other person “was just simply not as other-ized as I am.” Laura made a LinkedIn post the summer before senior year announcing she was starting an investment banking internship in the industrials group at Goldman Sachs. It received 428 likes and 52 comments. At first, I experienced a pang of jealousy. Wasn’t investment banking at Goldman Sachs the holy grail internship for all the economics majors? But it was fine, I told myself. It wouldn’t be long before I’d announce that I was attending Harvard, which was the holy grail of higher education. Besides, people respected lawyers more than investment bankers anyway.
After I talked myself through the initial bout of jealousy, I sent a screenshot of Laura’s post to Eunjin.
“Doesn’t her dad work there?” she replied. “Wasn’t her whole spiel about how her dad, the Korean investment banker, experienced racism because the Chinese cleaning ladies working on the floor kept trying to speak Chinese to him because they thought he was Chinese?”
“Yep.”
“Wow. Truly insufferable.”
TWO
Four years ago, the ColumbiaUniversity Undergraduate Admissions Department announced that its incoming class of freshmen would include at least one student from every American state. Of course, the students weren’t distributed evenly across the fifty states. Among the 1,523 matriculating first-years, there were 357 from California (23 percent), 310 from New Jersey (20 percent), and 223 from Washington (15 percent).
There was exactly one from South Dakota (me). There was exactly one from North Dakota (Eunjin).
Most people at school, upon hearing that we are both from one of the Dakotas, assume we met via some organized function for incoming students. But no. You may be surprised (or unsurprised) to hear: there were meet-ups for matriculating freshmen in Dubai, London, Singapore, and even Warsaw, but not in the Great Plains.
The way Eunjin and I actually met was three years ago, on the third day of freshman orientation during a seminar on sexualassault prevention. We had both arrived early and sat in the second row of the auditorium.
My first impression of Eunjin was that she was very pretty. Probably in the 80th percentile of all women, regardless of race. She was half Asian, so I wasn’t sure whether to compare her to other white women or other Asian women. I still haven’t figured out if being half means that you fall in the median of Asian and white women’s attractiveness or if you’re actually placed even higher than white women, paradoxically. Anyway, I thought she was really pretty, which meant that for the entirety of the seminar, I did not suspect that she would be the one other student that Columbia University had accepted from the Dakotas. I would’ve assumed Los Angeles. Or Hawaii. Which would automatically mean that she was cooler than me.
I leaned over and introduced myself.
“Isn’t it kind of funny that they think a two-hour lecture will prevent rape?” I asked. She didn’t respond right away. I started to worry I had offended her.
“Yeah, it is kind of funny. But maybe it’ll prevent one or two. I’m happy with sitting through two hours of this if it means even just one or two.”
Afterward, we bought boba and hung out in my room. Eunjin told me that she hadn’t even tried boba before and she wasn’t sure how she felt about the texture. I told her that she wouldn’t be a proper Asian unless she liked boba, and she looked stunned until I clarified that I was joking.
“But how have you never tried boba?” I said. “I’m from a small town in South Dakota, and evenwehave boba.”
“Wait, you’re from South Dakota? No way. I’m from North Dakota.”
By hour three of our hangout, we knew everything worth knowing about each other. Eunjin confided in me about her dreams of becoming a concert violinist, how the fingers on her left hand were permanently blistered from practicing hours each day. I confided in her about my plan to attend Harvard Law School, how I had started studying for the LSAT and already knew which professors had the best hookups to clerkships. It wasn’t long before I told her about my parents as well. They were the classic immigrant story. In the ’90s they moved from China for my father to get a PhD in physics at the South Dakota School of Mines. Upon graduation he got a job at a lab in Brookings. My dad was in his second year of working when my mom became pregnant with me. They scrimped and saved for a 20 percent down payment on one of the newly constructed ranch-style homes that were popping up on every corner in the early 2000s. I’ve never understood why, but Chinese people are obsessed with owning real estate.
In those years, when money was tight, anything they could spare financially went toward me. Diapers, baby clothes, a highly rated stroller; when I got a little older, ice-skating lessons, Kumon classes, and summer camp. Neither of my parents bought new clothes or shoes for themselves for three years, and they celebrated most milestones at McDonald’s, placing me in the red high chair as they downed their Big Macs and french fries. There was a period when things finally started to stabilize. I had just started the second grade but even I could feel things getting better. My father was moving up in the lab, which meant McDonald’s was no longer an occasional treat but a Friday night ritual, and we started celebrating birthdays at Applebee’s—for really special occasions, maybe even Outback Steakhouse.“Someday you’ll be able to eat Outback Steakhouse every day,” my dad used to say to me. “Actually, by then, you won’t even want to go to Outback Steakhouse. When you’re my age, it won’t be good enough for you.” I could not fathom that anywhere could be nicer than an Outback Steakhouse.
My dad said those types of things a lot. I had to work hard, get good grades, get a good job, and I would be better off than he and my mother could ever imagine. “You don’t have the language barrier, the culture barrier, any of that. You can do anything you want,” he would tell me during dinner. Years before I ever watchedThe East Siders, he was the one who first told me about the Ivy League. Get into one of them, and you’d be set for life. All of them were good, but Harvard was the best, he liked to remind me. Maybe that’s why I wanted to go to Harvard Law so bad. I had made it to good, but I still hadn’t made it to the best.
When my dad went off on these tangents about my future, my mother would slap him on the shoulder. “Don’t put too much pressure on her. Money isn’t everything. Status isn’t everything. We don’t want her to start valuing the wrong things.” But he’d be back at it the next night. It was only when I was older that my mom told me that my dad had been struggling at work in those years—being passed up for promotion after promotion, getting told he needed to work on his “communication skills,” feeling powerless as his less qualified colleague ended up as his manager, and, on some bad days, wondering if moving to America had been worth it after all. We had obtained a comfortable, middle-class life, but my father was beginning to see that that was all they were willing to give him.
I was going to leave it there. I usually don’t tell new friendsabout the rest of the story until at least the third or fourth hangout. I wasn’t sure what was different about this time. Maybe because she was the first person I met in college who was also from a state that you never hear about. Or maybe I was just feeling lonely.
“He’s not in my life anymore,” I said. “He ended up moving back to China. Got a job there, has a new family now. He didn’t want to stay in the US, but my mom did. For me, she said. So I could have the opportunities that she never had.”
“But your dad must still be so proud of you. You’re in New York now, you’re at Columbia. Looks like the risk he took paid off.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. I called him when I got in. He said congratulations, then asked me why I hadn’t applied early to Harvard instead.”
Maybe something in me sensed that Eunjin had her own parental issues, and that’s why I was more forthcoming than usual. It’s a blend of independence and vulnerability that characterizes people who had to at least partially raise themselves. Later in the conversation, Eunjin told me about her father’s alcoholism, which her mother hadn’t known about until the day after they got married. She had been a gifted violinist in South Korea, the concertmaster at their local symphony who had once dreamed of the Lincoln Center, of Carnegie Hall, of audiences in tuxedos and ball gowns dazzled into a standing ovation by her renditions of Beethoven, Bach, Chopin. But when she moved to the United States to marry Eunjin’s dad, she became pregnant and never auditioned again.
