no regrets, right?

on the topic of me being rejected from United World Colleges

him: I can see how you would be the perfect UWC candidate.

me: Really? Why?

him: Because you’re suffocatingly enthusiastic about everything.

bon appétit!

Food is never just about food.
- my Lit Hum professor

A a self-proclaimed foodie with a slightly above abysmal palate, I’ve always approached food for its own sake. The texture, the smells, the heat of a well cooked meal.

But what he said rang so true. My family always made a big deal out of eating dinner together. I always tried to get out of it by staying out late with friends, but my mom would always call me incessantly to get me to come back. (I somehow know that one day, I will always regret not spending enough time with my mother.) Big D and I always found ourselves eating; take-out from food courts, menu fixe in France, horse meat at his place…

I eat the majority of my meals here alone… not in a pathetic kind of way (well, maybe), but in the way that I enjoy my own company more. Or is it because I enjoy reading or watching TV while I eat? On Saturday, I headed out to Jean Georges, a rather frou-frou place for a lunch prix fixe with Shopping-loving M, Innocent P and Russian S. It was rather odd, because we were an unlikely bunch. M and P had just come down from Montreal for a weekend, S and I just recently met when we realized that we had nearly every class together this semester.

The meal itself was good, not spectacular… but our reasons for being there were interesting, I guess. It was a status symbol, in a strange way, despite the fact that we were poor students. Conversation around the table was mainly centered around how the food was and … I don’t remember.

Relationships are made and broken over meals, friendships are either strengthened or weakened. In my pseudo-snobby way, I realized that S had rather crude table manners… and that M was very dainty in her bites. And in a truly haughty way, it made me like M better. I was annoyed at the fact that S, at my table, was probably making us look bad… although I may have been doing just that too, with my poor posture and Asian eating manners.

Maybe what the food really showed me was how much I wanted in on a higher society. I often boast about the advantages of being from a low-income family, how I do have so much more gritty life experience than those trust fund kids… but from afar, maybe I just want to be one of them.

pride

I had a skype conversation with the daughter of a family friend in Singapore today. She was accepted at Columbia on the fated March 30th date, following which her mother emailed my uncle and I with a message titled “_____ is accepted by Columbia”. It brought a sinking feeling to my stomach, something for which I hated myself. I wasn’t able to be happy for her success because somehow, it took away from mine.

I met her during my Asia trek in the summer of 2006. Since most of my time there was marred by the fact that my father threated to beat me after my mother had called us with the discovery that Big D and I were still dating, I don’t quite remember the girl that she was. From the little recollections I have of her family, her parents were quite intelligent and typical in the sense of wanting their child to over-achieve. She, on the other hand, seemed mostly distant and pretty quiet, for a teenage girl. My family and I, in our usual fashion, discussed them in length, and especially examined her chances of making it to the Ivy League. The conclusion was that she’d had a difficult time, especially in a British Singaporean high school where the competition for top American school acceptances is fierce.

I had worked hard to get to Columbia. Probably harder than most of the kids here; not because I’m a better person for it (… mais si?) but because I’m not that smart to begin with. I’ve gone through a lot of shit to get there, not the least of which includes pleasing my parents with every decision I’ve had to make. I’ve also given up a lot to be here; an MD, a JD, what appeared to be the love of my life. This is not to say I regret any choices I’ve made to be here… but to see others, who I haughtly (and most likely wrongly) deemed as a lesser candidate arrive at the same destination… it seems to negate all those years of near-Hell I experienced.

To compound my strange superiority/inferiority complex, Asian families talk. A lot. I know that when I first got in, the general buzz was around how great of a student/daughter I was. Now that she’s also gotten in, the buzz will change its pitch, going from an evaluation of “great” to something mediocre (“Well, she’s just OK. I mean, our daughter got accepted too”).

My relief came in the form of an unexpected discovery. She was accepted, after all my self-doubt and criticism, to SEAS. A SEAS kid. Well, looks like I can sleep easy again tonight.

natural beauty

while getting ready for the banquet at the NCTTA Nationals

her [in Chinese]: I really like the colour of your lipstick.

me [in Chinese]: Uh… I’m not wearing any lipstick.