High school was serious. We faced a test, and the test was about college. We wanted to get into Stanford, which was how to pass the test. Then the trial would be over. We would be judged not guilty. We would… actually, once we passed the test, we weren’t sure what would happen. Our world didn’t extend beyond our ambition and our fear.
It’s been more than twenty years since I graduated from high school and started college at Stanford, and I still remember how weighty I found those college prep years. The stakes of my life have never felt higher, not even today, when arguably they are higher: I’m a breadwinner and a parent of two.
I grew up in an affluent Asian American suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area—home, according to The Wall Street Journal, to a phenomenon called “the new white flight,” in which white parents, not wanting their children to have to compete for class rank with Asian American kids, leave the suburbs they once fled to from urban centers. The white kids who don’t leave become, as we affectionately called them, “honorary Asians”: taking Calculus BC as sophomores, winning national competitions, staying up all night talking with us on AOL Instant Messenger.
My high school molded us, psychologically, in particular ways: we strove to earn our existence through unblemished excellence. We stunned our teachers and won our tournaments. We believed that our parents’ love required our perfection. We were, mostly, wrong, but we didn’t know it. Good grades weren’t enough—everyone got them. But to get a bad grade meant ruin.
One day in Chemistry Honors my classmate Tim, frustrated by his attempts to identify a clear substance through calculations, tasted a drop of what we’d been told was either NaCl, table salt, or HCl, a corrosive acid that causes intestinal necrosis if swallowed. I yelped when he did it but I understood: he was willing to die in order to succeed. We all were. Luckily, it was salt.
It was at Stanford, ironically, that for the first time I met people who cared more about life than they cared about grades, and I started to care more about life itself. It was there I met Sunil, still my best friend and writing partner today, late at night when I was riding the bus to buy candy to fuel a study session. And in Introduction to Queer Studies I met Althea, my first girlfriend, who had the title of my favorite Italo Calvino book tattooed on her side. And I met the friends I would room with in a large co-op, cooking night after night of experimental meals.
Most importantly, though, in college the thing I loved most in the world—talking about books and ideas—became my chief occupation. As a freshman I took my first creative writing workshop, and one day after it was my turn to lead the workshop, my instructor emailed me and asked if I had ever considered becoming a teacher. Teaching and writing are still how I earn my living today.
At Stanford, I was so passionate about existence that my object was, for the first time, not to justify it but to savor it, and to savor it in community with others—at midnight picnics in Rodin sculpture gardens, in learning to juggle from a Computer Science professor who had known Timothy Leary, in proposing to student-teach a course on San Francisco nonprofits for women and then having to actually teach it. Confronting my crippling perfectionism when it was time to write a story for others to critique.
It took me a long time to unlearn that perfectionism. But once I got to college, growth and joy were immediate, and they haven’t stopped.
The truest thing about this story is that I didn’t have to go to Stanford to get there—that what mattered wasn’t which college, but college itself.
My high school pressure cooker was born from particular circumstances, demographic and personal—but in working with today’s youth, I see that they live through their own version of it, too. Or perhaps their problems are entirely different. Regardless, college will give them a place to become someone beyond what they previously imagined. As a writing coach with 7Sage, I’m honored to be able to help them find their way there.
