It was also the first time I’d heard anyone close to my age make a vulnerable, public confession. In the backdrop of freshman trepidation about where we fit in and the curated perfection of the university, evident even in the flawless production of this orientation program, I held on to Caleb’s testimonial about mistakes and misfits, about proceeding through life with fear until self-knowledge inspired courage. My self-confidence had been shattered by the previous year, but I also knew my tentativeness might not appear as insecurity but rather as Eastern subtlety.
The house lights went up, and I followed my advising group outside. Abigail and our resident advisor passed me, looking like sisters in their North Face. The boys in the quad upstairs, so different from one another in a fun, kitchen-sink sort of way, caught up to me. There was a party tonight, did my roommates and I want to come out? they asked. I smiled noncommittally and fell behind.
Soon, another cohort of freshmen strolled up behind me, a few boys not in my advising group.
“What a colossal waste of time,” one said.
“Why do they always have to put a faggot onstage?”
There was no breeze, and yet a chill overtook me. A third piped up, in a fey imitation of Caleb’s voice, and I turned my head: a long-jawed boy in a lacrosse shirt pretended to jerk off; another pirouetted in a limp-wristed dance.
I faced forward again. I had seen enough. Back then, the hope I harbored about college and the East Coast was monolithic and needed everyone to hold it up. Princeton was where the enlightened of America—of the world—was supposed to converge, but exiting the auditorium, I found the world the same as it ever was.
As the boys high-fived each other, I passed under the arch.
The ivy-clad buildings, rarefied East Coast culture, the extreme wealth and apparent birthright of so many of the students, like Abigail, who was the seventh generation of her family to attend Princeton, rendered the school no different from Memorial in princely robes. Over the course of my first semester, I found myself in a familiar position—at home academically and with friends more privileged than I.
In the dining hall, a massive, castle-like structure where the underclassmen consumed mediocre food off cafeteria trays at banquet tables, I recognized one of my first friends from Memorial: Avery Stern who’d taught me accents my first morning in Mrs. Howards’s class. Obviously uncomfortable, she stood alone at the top of the line of tables, trying to decide whether she should insert herself into a group of strangers, or start a table and hope for the best. I called her name, and she sat down. I attempted to jog her memory (“I went to your birthday party in third grade”; “We used to jump on the trampoline after lunch”; “We traded books every week”), but she stared at me blankly. That was the first and last dinner we ate together.
Less than fifteen percent of the undergraduate population was Asian, which included international students from Asia. As in Houston, however, I kept mostly to whites, not realizing that upper-middle-class suburban white culture was what I had adopted as my own. It might have been refreshing to immerse myself for the first time among people who looked like me. But instead, I avoided friendships with anyone who might understand my deepest fears and stayed far from the Asian Americans, some of whom walked around in a set I referred to as “the Asian Invasion.”
Eventually, I ran in many disparate circles, and even got along well with Abigail, or Abby. A couple of months into the year, I felt something break and it was the ice that had existed between us. We spent the hour before sleep discussing our favorite topic, the male species of our class. “George wears tapered white jeans, and that’s all I’m going to say about it,” I declared from the top bunk, and a cackle issued from below. It was then that Abby said, “You’re nothing like my docile Asian friend from boarding school. Yoko never says anything.”
2.
SUSANNAH RAN OVER AS I tucked into some salad in the dining hall.
“Free on Valentine’s weekend for a double date?” she asked, her brown eyes sparkling. Susannah was nice. I had met her the first day of orientation in the line for lunch and knew she was a youthful version of her mother. Her voice went singsong in enticement. “Chuck has a car. The four of us could watch a movie and go out for dinner on Route 1.” Chuck was Susannah’s boyfriend, a junior and an officer of an eating club.
“And who exactly is this scintillating person?” I asked.
“He’s a politics major. His name is Guy Chung, and—” She gasped. “He’s Korean!”
I was never used to white people thinking I would get along with other Koreans, especially Korean guys. I wondered why Susannah didn’t pay attention to what my friends looked like—they mostly looked like her.
“Chuck showed him your picture in the Freshman Facebook.” She giggled. “He said you were cute.”
That softened things for me, as it would for any woman, and I agreed to her plan even though Valentine’s seemed a little aggressive.
On Friday night, Susannah picked me up at my room, where I’d changed into slacks and a sweater, an upgraded version of my library outfit. We met the boys, and the four of us walked to the car. I had checked out Guy in the Upperclass Facebook. The two Facebooks—the Freshman and the Upperclass—got a lot of reading time in every Princeton dorm room, and I’d heard some upperclassmen circled the photos of the freshman girls they intended to “conquer” before the year was out. Guy and I sustained a decent conversation. He was lean but athletic-looking, and he told me he played flag football, which I sensed wasn’t real football, not the kind they played in Texas anyway.
I was relieved when I caught sight of the theater; Chuck had let Guy drive and the couple was in the back making out. The movie was a new Star Wars, and Guy dutifully paid for my ticket. Afterward, we ate burgers and fries at a diner, and Guy paid for me there, too.
When we returned to campus, Susannah suggested closing the night at an eating club. At the movies, Guy and I had been silent, our eyes glued to the screen as if we were going to be tested on the material; at the diner, extremely focused on our chewing. I wanted to go back to my room, but Susannah insisted.
Our breath sent up steam into the night air. Susannah shivered, and Chuck slowed down to put his arm around her. But Guy? Long out of lockstep, he barreled ahead. The eating clubs were where reputations were made and destroyed, and whom you walked in with was a big deal if you cared about that sort of thing. Guy cared.
Once we were inside, it was Susannah’s boyfriend, not Guy, who offered to fetch me a beer. Guy had already walked away and did not say goodbye. We were too late for the DJ, and stragglers lingered in the tap room and parlor. I was cold and arranged myself in front of the fire, and after a while, I spied Guy in the corner talking with some people, his back toward me once again. The date was officially over, and he would become a stranger who looked away if we passed each other on campus, as though suddenly entranced by something over my head.
Susannah came over. She was a little drunk now. “Are you okay? Chuck’s going to talk to Guy and tell him we think he’s being an asshole.”
“No, don’t do that. I’m totally fine. I just got cold.”
Just then, Guy called out to someone at the door. “Jude!” I looked up in time to catch him striding over to a girl with more energy than he’d shown all night. I examined this Jude. She was tall, regal, and white. In her presence, Guy’s entire demeanor changed—he was supplicating.
Susannah left. Alone, I peered into the flames and wondered whether it was fair of the Korean Guys of the world to be so cavalier in their rejection of me. Maybe the answer was simple and had nothing to do with our race. But if I was honest, I did not want Guy either, did not want to be with another Korean because in this world would we ever be greater than the sum of our parts? In the end, I didn’t blame Guy Chung. Perhaps he had engineered his life at Princeton to be one of tokenism, too.
Suddenly, I felt a tap on my left shoulder and looked left, but no one was there, and then there was a tap on my right, but no one was there either, and then I realized someone was playing with me and it was the stunner Nik Federov from the dorms.
“What’s going on, Hyeseung?”
I told him I had been on a date.
He glanced over at the corner of the parlor. “I don’t know him. Did you have fun?” he asked tentatively. Nik was a good guy. He didn’t push when I shrugged and just asked, “Want another beer?”
When we returned to the fireplace with our cups, Susannah, Chuck, and Guy were gone, and the club was very quiet. Nik wound his arm companionably around me. I looked over into his kind and handsome face. He stroked my shoulder. I realized I wanted to touch him, this boy who was a year older than I and not Keanu Reeves, and then his fingers moved to my face, and when we kissed, his tongue was warm and not disgusting in my mouth, but lovely.
Susannah, apologetic, ran over the next morning at brunch, but when I told her I had been making out with Nik Federov, she went from embarrassed to ecstatic. “Serves Guy right,” she said with pleasure. I told her I didn’t do it to get back at Guy, but that naturally it wouldn’t bother me if he did end up hearing about it. “I doubt he got anywhere with that Jude chick,” I said, and we clapped our hands over our mouths and giggled. As for Abby, her eyes rolled back in her head when I walked in that morning. “The Walk of Shame?” she exclaimed. “I’m so jealous! Fed is gorgeous. Tell me everything!” And I did tell her everything, except that it was my first real kiss.
Nik dropped by in the afternoon. By then, some of my neighbors had heard the news, and, titillated, everyone hung around the common room. “Not the first Guy, but another guy!” was the refrain. Nik came in bearing a gift of chocolates, and I thought it was nice but wanted to say, You didn’t have to.
3.
I ROLLED AWAY FROM THE window Abby had left open and tugged the covers over my head. Still, I could hear the sounds of spring outside, could smell the hydrangea and meadowsweet, which had in recent days suddenly erupted on the campus. I hadn’t been outside in two days, not since leaving my last class and tripping over reading groups in shady patches on the grass and sunbathing girls on beach towels, a copy of Lolita or Pride and Prejudice splayed over their faces. Sidestepping a spirited game of Hacky Sack and another of ultimate Frisbee, I had made it home and been in bed since, alternately sleeping and wondering how to avoid the merriment of spring. My internal weather was supposed to have been different at Princeton, but here I was again, drowning under the same water. The idea of dying became a meditation.
Friends dragged me to eating clubs. The mansions housed billiard rooms, libraries, tap rooms, hot tubs, and formal dining rooms with oil paintings and tapestries, but it all felt like Avery Stern’s ninth birthday party—children playing dress-up in Mother’s pearls. I lay in bed up to the moment I had to leave, then extricated myself from warm sheets, threw on my jacket, and followed the group out. As we closed in on the clubs, the music grew thunderous, my friends raucous, but I trailed behind, a lone remainder. When it was time to enter the first club, my tactic was to stop suddenly, walk backward from the door, and shout, “I forgot something in my room, I’ll meet you at the next!” They knew I was putting on a show. Stretching out their arms, my friends protested, “Hey, no, don’t pull that shit again!” But it was too late; I was already halfway down the lawn.
It was on a night I had steeled myself to stay out as penance for my depression when I heard some news about a high school classmate. In a stroke of irony, Harrison had also ended up at Princeton, though I never saw him on campus and hadn’t spoken to him since our breakup in high school. While I observed a lively game of beer pong, a friend from the dorms joined me.
