Photographs

An old friend, who I'll call J, is in San Francisco for a conference. It’s been a year since we last saw each other—another conference. We run that circuit. This night is one of those rare moments we’ve seen each other outside of an event with suited-up adults and boring keynotes we do our best to avoid. The one constant of both our lives, when they intersect, is that we are the only teenagers most places we go. At the white-tablecloth Italian restaurant we enter, we are the youngest people in the room. As we do, we immediately start talking about fanfiction and masturbation and hookups and pop music. There's a genteel elderly couple sitting next to us, conversing about a timeshare. 

I avoid eye contact with them, but I'm pretty sure they look scandalized.

J and I belt out Blank Space in his ritzy suite at the Prescott Hotel at 11 PM, and he says that I can crash overnight. The next morning I get on BART at 7 in the morning—earlier than I’ve been awake in weeks—and my mind wanders. Like an old-fashioned movie theater projector, it sends me images in flashes: 

Paper sailboats I never learned how to make, drifting slowly away from me down a river I dare not swim to catch them. 

Bigger boats—boats in the marina at Jack London Square one night in late January. It’s after midnight. There's a boy with a contagious smile standing next to me, and we have managed to walk from Berkeley to Oakland, sans intentionality or direction--an accidental fourteen-mile trek in the night. 

Speedboat at Lake Chelan. I am a loudmouthed ten-year-old, hair cropped short, four years into glasses and still remarkably unable to pull them off. We ride the choppy waves and leave a bubbling wake as white and frothy as the foam seeping over the edges of a beer stein. We inner-tube and my sister flips off into the water, but when she comes up she’s smiling. 

Sunny Capitola Beach and summer camp camaraderie and ice-cream-lipped-stickiness and two years later, summer camp crush putting his arm around me in the dark that flickers with Mary and Max, a black-and-white animated movie that almost makes me cry. 

Sunlight pooling on the couch where I’m reclining lazily on New Year’s Day, watching Bob’s Burgers for two hours with friends, being completely unproductive and feeling no guilt--a guiltlessness I feel again in a gym, with the yoga instructor almost a year later who says gently, "Let your body do absolutely nothing," as we lie back into shavasana. 

There are no pictures of these moments, and occasionally, I wonder if there should be. Social media is saturated with snapshots of euphoria, all gleaming smiles, glistening waves, pretty boats, and the prettier people sailing on them. Sometimes I find myself scrolling aimlessly and getting jealous of the pictures, of the people. There’s the white girl who everyone went to high school with, she of the big smile, bikini top and cutoff shorts. She's perched on someone’s shoulders, raising a PBR to the sky at a music festival in a desert. There are three teenagers from the cross country team, having the time of their lives as they crouch over a precipice about to dive into clear blue water. 

And then there’s me, with my Europe vacation album and my grainy screenshotted Snapchats, posed pictures with my freshman year Hall Association, or TEDxRedmond, or a million other things but—there's no photo of the time I burst into laughter on the street while standing behind a couple who had just said a not-very-funny thing about Burgermeister but they were so happy and I was, too, happy to be happy and to be alive. Not everyone feels a sense of inner warmth from listening to the genial conversations of strangers. Happiness says a lot about your personality and values, more so than humiliation or anger or even grief. Fart in church, get maligned by an acquaintance, or face the death of a loved one, and those reactions are all predictable; but happiness, like Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia, is not a tame or predictable lion. The tl;dr version: sometimes, weird shit makes us happy.

But in a social environment that pushes for constant documentation, "pics or it didn't happen," all of us accruing digital stacks of photo evidence to rival FBI dossiers, I fear that we narrow our conceptions of what "true happiness" can be. We try too hard to cast our experiences in the light we see as common and acceptable--just check out the Instagram account/art project "Socality Barbie" to get an idea. 

But there is so much joy to be found in idiosyncrasy, and the kinds of things that don't make for good pictures. My mom still asks me to take more photos, though, and I realize the value when I'm clicking through her monstrously large "iOS Photos" album on Facebook and find myself tugged back to moments in the past with greater clarity. It's good to have photos to look back on. But it shouldn't feel like a necessity when you're doing something you love, with people who matter, to catalogue every moment. I know many people who feel compelled to background themselves in social outings just so they can snap picture after picture. It may seem like a way to extend an experience, to forestall the inevitability of endings.

But gazing at pixels is no way to re-live a life.

Sitting next to each other in the dark, J and I start talking about mortality. 

“We shouldn’t be sad that our footsteps in the sand will get blown over, we should be glad that we got to go to the beach at all,” I say slowly, with the feeling of unwrapping an exotic fruit and discovering what lies inside--realization and action, not one before the other.

It occurs to me as I’m walking away from the Prescott Hotel, down the streets of SF in the pale dim morning, air nipping around my ears like the breath of absent passersby, that he and I didn’t get a picture together.

But that’s OK, I think. 

I blink, the flash goes off, and the camera I call memory fills with light.

An open letter to The Atlantic's Caitlin Flanagan on political correctness

Dear Ms. Flanagan,

As a UC Berkeley student and a longtime reader of The Atlantic, I was very interested to hear what you had to say on Real Time with Bill Maher regarding political correctness on college campuses. I hoped to hear you provide a nuanced analysis of some of the reasons many students ask for trigger warnings and seek to identify microaggressions. I was disappointed to instead hear you launch into an ad hominem attack questioning the intellectual capabilities of college students. “When kids come to college, they are by definition ignorant. They don’t know anything yet!” you said blithely, going on to describe us again as “poor kids who don’t know anything yet” before saying “the whole system is now being run by these kids.”

In 2010, I gave a TED Talk entitled “What adults can learn from kids,” and went on to speak at conferences around the world about the need for increased student voice in education (particularly K-12 education reform). This need exists because unfortunately, students do not generally have much of a say in the vast majority of schools—and yes, I’m including colleges in that estimation. At UC Berkeley, we were not even invited to the meeting where UC Regents raised our tuition—without taking the time to hear the concerns of students. California’s Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom openly criticized that action when he addressed my political science class last semester. A system where students like me slept on the cold ground of an on-campus building, Wheeler Hall, over the course of several nights simply to make our voices heard in protest over these tuition hikes is not a “whole system being run by these kids.” 

Mario Savio, a leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement.

It’s unfortunate, too, because the level of awareness and connection among my peers is unprecedented. Although our weapons of protest have certainly evolved since the days of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement, I would argue that a higher percentage of students is taking action on causes we care about now than ever. Thanks in large part to the democratizing power of the internet we grew up with, students my age have founded technology education non-profits, started popular magazines, done ground-breaking research, and fostered greater awareness about racial justice. Although we are certainly imperfect when it comes to our attitudes on a variety of social issues, we are more tolerant than our parents’ generation; according to Pew, young people continue to be the strongest proponents of same-sex marriage, with even 61% of young Republicans in support.

Your supposition in the face of all this that we are “poor kids who don’t know anything yet” makes me wonder what sorts of attitudes you would like us to learn instead. You said that college students are “the inheritors of 30 years of identity politics, and that’s part of the problem…that means that instead of saying we all have general principles by which we seek to live, that we’ll stand up…for the feminist cause, for the racial or ethnic cause.” Of course I support working toward general principles of empathy, kindness, equality, and justice. But our genders, races, and ethnicities may preclude some of us from receiving those things. You can find a testament to this in the stories of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, or the 35 women and the empty chair on the New York Magazine cover. Choosing to act in the name of unity and ignore the disparities that stem from our differences precludes us from creating a just, kind society. That’s why it’s Black Lives Matter and not All Lives Matter, why it’s feminism and not egalitarianism. Dismissing identity relies on the wishful belief that our identities don’t matter. But until African-American boys aren’t cautioned from an early age to behave a certain way around law enforcement, and until mothers like mine don’t tell their young daughters such words of advice as “Always choose being raped if the alternative is being killed,” our identities do matter, very much. 

You discuss microaggressions as the invention of privileged young people who aren’t paying attention to bigger problems. In actuality, the term “microaggression” was not coined by a privileged group of students; it was the psychiatrist and Harvard professor Chester M. Pierce who first used the term in an academic setting. Pierce wrote in 1974, “These [racial] assaults to black dignity and black hope are incessant and cumulative. Any single one may be gross. In fact, the major vehicle for racism in this country is offenses done to blacks by whites in this sort of gratuitous neverending way. These offenses are microaggressions. Almost all black-white racial interactions are characterized by white put-downs, done in automatic, preconscious, or unconscious fashion. These mini disasters accumulate. It is the sum total of multiple microaggressions by whites to blacks that has pervasive effect to the stability and peace of this world.” This language is more radical in its estimation of long-term effects than most of the discussion around microaggressions on college campuses today. If you want to criticize microaggression theory, you should be spending your time not lambasting “privileged and pampered” kids but rather challenging a respected professor who has spent decades researching racism and its effects. I can understand, of course, that this may be a harder fight to pick.

The year I started at Berkeley, everyone on campus received the book Freedom’s Orator, about Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio. Enthralled, I read all 544 pages. So it was with great interest that I noticed your mention of Savio in your Atlantic piece, “That’s Not Funny”: “frat boys and other campus punksters regularly flout the thought police by staging events along elaborately racist themes, events that, while patently vile, are beginning to constitute the free-speech movement of our time. The closest you’re going to get to Mario Savio—sick at heart about the operation of the machine and willing to throw himself upon its gears and levers—is less the campus president of Human Rights Watch than the moron over at Phi Sigma Kappa who plans the Colonial Bros and Nava-Hos mixer.” This statement implies that fraternity brothers acting in racist ways is a recent and modern phenomenon, when in truth, as the Washington Post points out in its thoroughly-researched article “The Long, Fraught Racial History of American Fraternities,” fraternities have been flying Confederate flags, banning non-white students from rushing, and worse for decades. Don’t fool yourself: belittling minorities by dressing up as stereotypes or popularizing slogans like “No means yes, yes means anal” (as members of DKE chanted at Yale, and Texas Tech fraternity brothers wrote on a banner) doesn’t make you edgy or cool or an activist. It makes you an a**hole. A**holes are not the unintended spawn of political correctness; they’re the offspring of cultures and families who don’t challenge themselves to analyze race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and inequalities in our society.

Challenging ourselves, and providing better education about inequality, is a lasting way to address racism, sexism, and classism among students. Someday, maybe we will have an America where students learn more nuanced perspectives on history and culture than our traditional Eurocentric diet, where we have open and honest conversations about race and gender and sexuality in our classrooms, and where people learn to respect each other before anyone ever has to call them out. Right now, in many parts of the country, we go to school with people who (roughly) look like us and talk like us and whose parents make the same amount of money as our parents. You claim that college students are being self-infantilizing in our quickness to be sensitive to members of other races or cultures, but it is the kind of insulation we grow up with in our K-12 educational experiences that provides the real infantilization. 

You have helped to propagate the false dichotomy between freedom of speech and sensitivity; the truth that I’ve experienced in my life so far is that creating environments of respect engenders more openness and free speech. College student KellyNoel Waldorf wrote an article about “coming out” as poor at Duke, aptly describing how difficult it is to reveal identities that we may not share with the majority of our peers. If your friends toss around disparaging jokes about "welfare queens," are you really going to reveal that you spent a year on state-subsidized healthcare? If your fraternity brothers, who yell homophobic epithets and laugh at anti-gay slurs with impunity, demean your sexual orientation, can you really talk about being gay? 

Speech may be free for them, but not you. 

And we are losing out on having important conversations because of it. If you seek to defend free speech, try putting yourself in the shoes of those people who society often silences. Many people argue that we are coddling ourselves, and that our bubbles of liberal sensitivity make us unprepared for the world after college. To that, I’d say that we create what we want to see in our societies in our schools. And I surely hope that you want your sons to live in a world where we are just and kind, sensitive and free.

Sincerely,

Adora Svitak

UC Berkeley Class of 2018

Mind over matter

I read a Salon article, "Mindfulness is a Capitalist Grift: How Faux Enlightenment Maintains our Status Quo" today, finding it pretty relevant to the experiences of lots of students around my age who are interning at "cool" companies this summer. Whether at small startups in Silicon Valley or chic non-profits that attract millennials, sprawling tech companies or booming media organizations, buzzwords that encourage us to take breaks, be mindful, and improve our physical and mental health dust the air more thickly than pollen in the springtime.

There's nothing wrong with encouraging your employees to be healthy and happy. If you want to set up a nap room in your office (I'm looking at you, Arianna Huffington) or buy your workers free subscriptions to meditation sites, power to you. But what is obnoxious about the motivations of some workplace improvements is that they are diametrically opposed to their origins. These Buddhist-inspired (and now heavily secularized) ideas of meditation and mindfulness are supposed to encourage greater productivity, which in turn implies the production and consumption of more material possessions. Yet Siddhartha Gautama considered the suffering he saw in the world and walked away from his material possessions. Mindfulness is not supposed to be a pathway to profit.

It's as if you're supposed to be mindful, but not too mindful, lest you start asking questions that make you uncomfortable (and maybe unproductive), like "Why am I working so hard on something I don't even believe in?" "Do I really need all this s**t I own?" "Am I causing harm to others by participating in, and benefitting from, an unfair system?"

I think about the last one a lot, less because of my current place in the system and more because of what I will potentially do after school. When people asked me as a kid, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I never answered anything that would make me even remotely rich. I said things like "teacher," "writer," "principal," and the inexplicable "philanthropist," without explaining how I would accrue the savings to get there. Sometimes I wonder if this would have been different if my parents had loved their jobs. If I'd seen my dad spouting eloquent soliloquies about the beauty of computer science or dreams of raises and promotions, maybe then I would've wanted to work 9 to 5 in a corner office somewhere, and try to work my way up a ladder with top rungs so distant it seemed to stretch to the heavens.

This is what I actually saw: my dad working hard to stay afloat, not climb a ladder. I saw him stressing out before big deadlines, leaving early in the morning and staying at work late at night. Around midnight, I'd wake up to the sound of the floors creaking and see him in the hallway, bags under his eyes and laptop in hand. My sister and I joked about growing up at Microsoft because of all the time we spent there -- we'd go there for a "quick stop" so my dad could "check on something," quick stops that would turn into several-hour-long detours. Detours, for my sister and I, through labyrinthine hallways dark as candle-lit restaurants. Detours, for my dad, through uninspiring lines of code.

It gave me an odd sense of guilt to slowly realize, as a kid, that my parents didn't do the things they loved, much as they told me to follow my dreams. People say "I wish I had never been born!" in a hateful way in arguments with their parents a lot; the only times I've thought it seriously, it's when I'm thinking about what my parents wanted to be when they were around my age. My mom thought about studying journalism when she came to the United States for college, but she took a job that conflicted with the hours of the journalism classes for the sake of financial stability. And sometimes I still see the journalist who could have been, in the moments when she draws out stories from just about anyone--asking a question like "What kind of void in your life are you trying to fill with buying things?" to a taxi driver (who'd been telling her about his debt problems) we'd known for all of one hour, or starting conversations with waiters in vegan restaurants and piano movers in Washington Square Park alike.

And there were a lot of times when I wished my dad hadn't made his (very sane) decision to work in software when he could have schlepped around the country living the tormented life of a postdoctoral student looking for teaching positions. It would have been really hard, but much easier without kids along. And maybe then he could look out at auditoriums of bright-eyed students, and explain his doctoral thesis on semi-classical dynamical models of vibrational spectra to people much smarter than his teenage daughter who never took high school physics.

Instead of fulfilling work, they got really sweet health insurance that bought me more pairs of glasses than I've ever needed. Shelves upon shelves of books. Apartments in Europe for a month-long stint abroad. Organic produce from Whole Foods. My education.

"I'm only able to consider doing things I love because you guys did things you hated," I blurted to my mom.

"That's how it works," my mom said. "One generation does something they don't like, you do something you like. If you don't do something you like, I would think we failed."

"So you're saying if I was a millionaire because of...uhhh...I dunno, working in advertising at Coca-Cola, you would think you failed?"

"Well, I wouldn't brag about it," my mom said, eyebrows raised.

People have asked me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" since I was a kid, but now I actually think seriously about the answer, and my uncertainty. Perhaps this uncertainty is born from the clash between the values of self-reliance and self-interest all my high school American lit reading inculcated me with, and the values of self-sacrifice for collective good (presuming a definition of "collective" that equals family and "good" that equals financial stability, anyway) my parents' actions and my extended family have exemplified.

If I choose to fulfill my dreams, perhaps at the cost of financial stability, am I selfish?

If I choose to sacrifice the things I want to do in the name of greater financial stability, am I passionless?

In the end, I'm reminded of mindfulness because too often the way that meditation and other techniques for R&R function in the corporate world is to serve as distractions from a discomforting reality -- churning out products at the cost of our environment or children laboring in factories, or advertising goods that people don't really need, or creating apps to help people send self-destructing 10-sec photos (much as I may wear those shirts, love some of those ads, or appreciate Snapchat) is not really affecting the world that positively. And I think from the moment we're born, we want to affect the world. We toddle around and try to put everything in our mouths and on some level, we want to think, I matter, I can change things. That hope should never go away. Being "mindful" in the name of increasing productivity merely puts a Band-Aid on our feelings of insignificance; instead, let's work toward a world where our goals are larger than increasing profits, and our opportunities to matter are more plentiful than our opportunities to forget that once, we cared about mattering.

My Mother, My Father, and Me

Mom and Dad

In her Daily Cal article "I Now Pronounce You Arranged," Ilaf Esuf writes about her hometown’s tradition of arranged marriages and her certainty that she will marry someone who shares her precise cultural and religious background. Several lines particularly stood out: "I realize that to some, this concept reads like a nail in my coffin, but I disagree. My culture defines me. And though I could combine two different cultures and teach my children two different values, I know how hard that is. Beyond that, I want my husband to awkwardly talk politics with my grandfather in Tamil and to sit in one of our fields eating homemade chicken biryani with his hands—and most importantly, I want to perform Hajj with my husband. I want to share all the things that define me with the person who completes me.”

This line stood out to me, maybe because I wouldn’t exist if either of my parents thought this way. My mother grew up in poverty in 1960s and 70s China. The stories she told me from her childhood were typically light-hearted: herding ducks, having a crush on another kid in elementary school who was the classic “bad boy” because he rolled cigarettes, my aunt getting in trouble for eating peach skins off the floor.

My aunt (left) and my mom (right), some time in the late 1960s or early 70s.

Only later did I hear some darker things, like how my grandfather faithfully filed applications to join the Communist Party week after week, only to get rejected constantly because of being the son of a landlord. To this day, he beseeches me to read the Little Red Book, and has a Chairman Mao magnet on his fridge. Despite his adherence to Mao’s Communist ideals, as an educated teacher he was exactly the kind of person often persecuted by radicals during the Cultural Revolution. My grandmother knew that he would be especially targeted if anyone found his books (in—the horror!—English and Russian), but with Red Guard members going door-to-door, she knew that burning them—causing a plume of black smoke to rise from the home—would be too suspicious. So she hid them in pickle jars.  

During a recent family vacation my grandmother told another story, of an ancestor of mine. During one of China’s famines, she bought some chicken—a precious rarity—to bring to her husband, at work in a city far away. Bearing only a tiny scrap of paper with his address, she boarded a train. Somewhere along the arduous journey the paper was lost; illiterate, she had never read the address herself, and so upon her arrival at the train station, had no idea where to go next. When her husband received the telegram announcing her impending arrival that had been sent before she left, he went to look for her. He found her, dead of starvation and exhaustion, in a small hotel. The precious chicken she had meticulously prepared for her husband was intact, uneaten.

It’s hard for me to grasp how my mom emerged from this family tree so resilient, unafraid of risk, and constantly idealistic. After all, so many of the deprivations of her childhood were caused by political leaders enforcing their own iron wills (cough, Great Leap Forward, cough) in the name of progress and ideals. And I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand the world my mother came from; I frequently find myself still uncovering pieces, like when we visited Alcatraz. She looked around the bleak bathroom with its stall-less line of shower-heads and commented that it reminded her of the showers she used in childhood. 

 “These are better, actually,” she said approvingly. “Ours were in a factory. We would sneak in every few weeks or so to use them.”

“You didn’t have them at home? Or at school?” I said, aghast.

“No,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. 

While my mom was grateful to be showering in bathrooms slightly inferior to those of felons in Alcatraz, my dad, a white kid with a funny last name (the Czech name “Svitak” has as many ways to be mispronounced as it has letters), was getting C’s and D’s on his math quizzes in elementary school. I know this because I discovered some old quizzes of his in my grandpa’s house in New Hampshire, on vacation a few years back, and held them up to the light in shock. “Are these really yours?” I asked in disbelief, as if closer inspection would prove that the handwriting was Counterfeit Seven-Year-Old Dad. 

“Yeah. But you know, I was going through a tough time with my parents’ divorce…I think my teachers knew that,” he said, shrugging.

I was shocked because I’d always thought of my dad, with his doctoral degree in physics, as one of the smartest best-at-math people I knew. Suddenly, like the song the British sang at the Siege of Yorktown, it was “the world turn’d upside down.” 

In a lot of ways, my father’s childhood seemed to me like “the world turn’d upside down.” At an age where my parents wouldn’t let my sister and me walk to the grocery store by ourselves, he was sprinting into train stations, sometimes jumping onto trains that had started to leave the platform (another thing I would never be allowed to do), to travel between his divorced parents in separate cities. He moved a lot as a kid, too; legend has it that my uncle got so used to moving around the same time every year that he had a ritual: going downstairs and waiting in the driveway with his suitcase packed. 

They moved from New Jersey to Maryland to Pennsylvania (before he went back to NJ for school). Visualize a map of the United States at night. My dad grew up on that un-flickering archipelago of light stretching from Boston to Washington, DC; he lived with some of the nation’s biggest cities at his fingertips’ reach, long as the railroads could take him. It’s a reminiscence that makes him grumble about poor public transit on the West Coast (best coast!) and the way people drive in Seattle. Living in New York City this summer makes me feel simultaneously close to Dad and faraway. These madcap pedestrians, densely packed subway cars, and drivers who stop for no one (“it’s survival of the fittest,” Dad would say with a wink) all seem to exist in collusion to remind me that I will never really know how to travel these metropolitan East Coast streets. 

While my mom was reciting lines from the Little Red Book, my dad was poring over every book he could get his hands on. My grandmother (his stepmother), a voracious reader, filled the house with books on history, science, parenting, and more. He found himself doing science experiments in the garage, and his grades in high school in science and math were a lot better than those elementary school quizzes I dug up. He wrote poetry, and drew, and went to church with his family. I think of my mom’s stories from China the same way I think of my dad’s stories from the East Coast of sometimes tumultuous family life and unsupervised exploration of the world around him (he lost a front tooth in a bike accident before he was in high school); that is, they seem like tales from other worlds. 

Being half-Asian, half-white, I quickly learned that it was not their worlds that were Other, but myself. Society does a good job of teaching me that—we were never quite Asian enough for Asian parties, and to paraphrase the character Brook Soso in “Orange is the New Black," “you have an ounce of ethnic blood, white people think you’re made in China”; family takes care of the rest. I have never felt perfectly at home with either sides of my extended family, occasionally feeling like an anthropologist in the field as I observe my white relatives’ world of tables with runners, Sundays at church, and weird foods like meatloaf and fruitcake, chopped liver and cranberry sauce from a can. And when I visit my Chinese grandparents and speak haltingly in Mandarin I learned imperfectly, looking toward my mom or aunts and uncles or even five-year-old cousin for translation, I can see why you might think that I, and not just my language skills, feel incomplete. 

But ultimately it is this very upbringing, and my parents’ marriage of differences, that makes me feel loath to accept the idea that I should "share all the things that define me with the person who completes me.” In Daily Cal, Esuf writes that her culture defines her, “and though I could combine two different cultures and teach my children two different values, I know how hard that is.” My parents didn’t have to teach my sister and me two different values. The only values they us were the ones that know no borders—standards of human decency and empathy. The rest, they left up to us to decide. We were exposed to my maternal grandparents’ unique melange of tenets of Communism and Confucianism, and the genteel New England Episcopalianism of my paternal grandparents. My mother put a scarf over her hair and we walked into a mosque in London to talk to an imam about Islam. When I went to speak in Calcutta, conference organizers took me to the Hindu Dakshineswar Kali Temple, where we took off our shoes and bought sweets to offer the idol. My family walked under the tall wooden gate of Meiji Jingu, the Shinto shrine in Tokyo. And my parents gave me euros to buy candles to light under stern pictures of the Virgin Mary in Catholic cathedrals in Paris. My life is rich, not confused or torn between two opposing poles, because of the diversity of experiences afforded to me by my parents’ open-mindedness. I say "I wouldn’t exist if my parents didn’t think the way they do" not only because they never would have married, but because the mindset they espoused in their parenting made me who I am today. 

In thinking about race, culture, and love, I have to step back and appreciate that we have come so far within three generations. My paternal grandfather, growing up in Maryland, went to a segregated high school. My maternal grandparents casually make racist comments about any race that isn’t Chinese. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. In 1967, my father was five years old, and my mother was three. They were about to live completely different lives; but there’s something incredibly beautiful about the kind of world that allowed their paths to intersect. And maybe I’m biased, too, because I’m dating someone who is neither Chinese nor white. One of our mutual friends mused out loud once, “I don’t think this [interracial dating] will work out in the long term…it’s too hard with different cultures, you know?” I’m young. I can’t claim to divine what lies ahead. But this is what I know: my boyfriend’s different growing-up story and family narrative means that I have a window into a world I’ve never lived, the same way my parents gave me a window into theirs. Us being different means that we talk about stories in The Mahabharata and joke about the crude Mandarin phrases we both know. We eat Swedish lingonberry jam at IKEA and on the way back, listen to Bollywood tunes with the car windows rolled down and wind whipping through my hair like we’re a freeze frame in a new kind of all-American road trip movie. And sometimes I realize, I wouldn't be in that passenger seat without my parents. After all, without ever trying to, they taught me the important lesson that distance between the worlds we come from doesn’t have to equal distance between the hearts we share.

posts elsewhere

Hey y'all! Hope you've been having a wonderful New Year thus far. I've been writing a lot this Winter Break (mainly poetry, but also some blog posts), and those posts are viewable here:

Last Friday Night - this one's more personal (a very reductive tl;dr might be "Adora has a breakdown in a shower stall")

New Rules - this one is a rumination on the odd complexities of modern social / romantic interactions

If you enjoy reading both or either please recommend them on Medium and feel free to share with your friends! Thanks so much :)

on not being a popular kid in high school

I guess I achieved a certain measure of notoriety by the time I was a senior in high school, the kind that comes from whispers about "the little genius" in AP Lang (whispers I never heard directly), "the child prodigy," "the published author," "the girl with the Wikipedia page." This was cute, flattering, and constantly surprising.

But notoriety is different from popularity.

Someone might have heard of me, sure, but that was different from the kind of all-consuming desire to be with me, to be me, that shadowed the popular kids.

In tenth grade I was a shy fourteen-year-old, the kind of person who sat back in my chair and watched events I didn't fully understand. But I quickly realized who was "popular." They were carefree, rich, and beautiful. They had cars which they talked nonchalantly about crashing, and cabins at Steven's Pass or Whistler. I wasn't old enough to drive. I'd never been skiing. The popular kids all seemed to be athletes, too--beautiful lithe cheerleaders, dance team girls, tall volleyball or soccer players, and a whole lot of football and track and cross country. I didn't have a team or a club that felt particularly like home; it would be another year before RHS Speech and Debate formed for real.

Because of that lack of a cohesive group, the struggle that epitomized high school stress for me was the task of finding who to sit with at lunch. In the hallway leading from the classrooms to the cafeteria, illuminated by sunlight flooding in through floor-to-ceiling windows, were wooden benches. They lined the walls, gleaming rosily. They were always packed with people. The cafeteria itself was a zoo. Both the benches and the cafeteria tables seemed reserved for that separate class of the species: people who knew people. Oh, sure, I knew people, but I wasn't confident enough to feel like I could barge into their tightly-linked circles. My sister and her orchestra friends sat on one of those wooden benches in the hallway. We said hi, tersely, once. I didn't expect to be able to rely on her for an entry into high school social life in any way other than being introduced sometimes as "Adri's little sister."

My main point is this: much as I hate to admit it, and probably tried to forget it, I know what it's like to look around furtively for an empty table, somewhere in a corner you can sit with a laptop and some food to pretend like you're eating alone by choice. (Hint: I'm not.) I know what it's like to make a last-ditch effort to bond with two of your older sister's friends just so you have some friendly people to sit with (holla, first day of junior year). I know what it's like to sit in the emptiest of empty bathrooms with your plastic sandwich container and a sandwich you suddenly don't feel like eating that much anymore because you don't want anyone you know to see you eating by yourself. I know what it's like to feel unwanted because it takes your big sister's intervention to get you a homecoming group (sophomore year!) And oh, the most painful--I know what it's like to hear one of the boys in that homecoming group tell your sister afterwards, "Adora kind of dances like a spaz."

It does get better--so much better. In a sort of exquisite karmic retribution, the boy of the spaz comment asked me to homecoming in junior year. And at lunch I started having philosophical conversations with a classmate from my AP Psych class, debates on cynicism and idealism, and alternating dirty jokes and heart-to-hearts with my best friends. I looked around a cafeteria of hundreds of people and realized that I could find a friend at almost any table I wanted. It was the kind of thing I'd only dreamed of as that shy fourteen-year-old of sophomore year.

There's a New York Magazine article entitled Why You Never Truly Leave High School, a (grim for some) piece on the disproportionate influence of your late adolescence in shaping the rest of your life. "Our self-image from those years...is especially adhesive," the article states. Maybe that's why I revert a lot to that shy fourteen-year-old I once was, feeling like I'm just tagging along with the big sister who didn't want the nerd kid sister around to cramp her style. Just tagging along with the boy who never really liked me that way. Just tagging along with the popular kids who find something entertaining or philanthropic or astute about being kind to the petite girl with half-framed glasses and big vocabulary, whose worksheet answers were always available for copying in the madcap minute before the bell.

When I think of my true self, sans all the impurities that come with time and the experiences that mean little more than X's on a checklist, I think of a fourteen-year-old girl who's never been kissed, still lights up with the joy of the unexpected when someone calls her beautiful, acts like everyone's kid sister, tells two boys she likes them with inelegant apology-and-pathos-filled letters, loves hard and runs fast. I think of a seventeen-year-old girl who will always feel grateful for the invite to the party and the seat at the table, and tries to pay those forward too. Sometimes it's those moments of struggle we try to forget that enable us to rescue the reincarnations of our past selves, as their eyes scan crowded cafeterias, looking as delicate and vulnerable as we once were--

in some ways, as we will all always be.

where are you going, where have you been?

I'm seventeen, which means that I'm overdue for the Next Big Thing. 

That's the way the voice in the back of my head talks. It's the voice that feeds on every "So what are you doing now?" "Are you planning on writing another book?" "What are the issues you care about?" "When's your next speaking engagement?" -- in short, every question that could possibly be asked by some well-meaning person who's watched my TED Talk and recognizes that I'm not a twelve-year-old girl anymore.

In wishing me happy birthday on my Facebook wall, one of my roommates welcomed me to my "last year of being a child prodigy." I never really thought of myself as a prodigy, mainly because prodigies are people like Mozart. Prodigies don't sway enthusiastically to the song "Stay High" at parties or get B's on history papers (sorry, Mom and Dad). They most definitely don't write angsty blog posts about their past and future while listening to Marina and the Diamonds in order to procrastinate on writing speeches they need to deliver in less than a week.

But for the sake of discussion, let's say that this is my last year of being a prodigy. That means 18 will be my first year of being...what? Will the candle on my eighteenth birthday cake be, like a swaying flame in one of those mysterious ceremonies for sororities or secret societies I never joined, a first initiation into blissful, anonymous, normality?

That question, or some version of it, reliably wraps my mind in knots tighter and cleverer than anything my fingers could tie. It's done that ever since I turned 13 or 14, when I first became conscious of the fact that luck and opportunity had pushed my starting block ahead on the track of the archetypal rat race. At that age I was turning down some opportunities to speak in front of lots of people for various reasons: the impact wouldn't be great enough or the travel time would be too much.

I knew I had friends who would kill for those same chances.

Those are the moments when you think I'd look down at my metaphorical starting block and just be glad for where it was, but all I wondered was this: could I keep pushing it ahead? At what point my friends would catch up and start lapping me? And would anyone forgive me if I turned around and ran in the other direction, to join them? Because I wanted to go to prom. I wanted to have summer romances. I wanted to stay up too late talking to friends on weekday evenings.

But didn't I also want the inspiration of the people I met at conferences? The chance to be an influencer? The opportunities?

Por que no los dos?

The voice in the back of my head believes in a Wonder Woman, of the type that illustrates Barnard College president Debora Spar's book of the same name. A woman (or girl, I haven't decided which I am yet) who can be productive and popular, who can study in the library and finish writing her speeches and stories on time and run infinite miles per week, make oodles of close friends who she calls up for 2 AM heart-to-hearts and snuggle parties watching her favorite tear-jerkers (Philadelphia, A Single Man, and Casablanca, fyi). She is able to sing. She faithfully attends those free Zumba group classes at the gym. She delivers well-prepared speeches at every conference she attends, speeches that earn her standing ovations, and writes books that earn her all the money, power, and glory of the Lana Del Rey song. She is perfect. And she is not me.

The problem with the rat race is that it treats life like one of those clear white lines on a track, and if there's anything that isn't linear, it's life. Screw the rat race. Screw running in one direction. And you know what, screw the fact that I'm using "screw" here because using the more profane alternative in a public blog would compromise my "image" (to quote the sole line I remember from Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," "The horror! The horror!")

The other night, my friend Julian asked me what makes me wake up in the morning and I realized I didn't have a good answer. This morning I woke up around noon (in my defense, I went to bed pretty late) and stayed there until almost 1pm trying to figure out the answer, finally fixing on the thought that I really, really needed a glass of water. "I wake up in the morning because I realize I need water" is so low on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs that the distance between me and self-actualization seems mildly insurmountable at 1pm.

The truth is, I don't know sometimes why I wake up in the morning. I don't know if my verbose anger at the rat race is just my sturm-und-drang-heavy defense of an imperfect life.

Maybe the whole rat race metaphor is the wrong one, at least one that's been keeping me looking at my feet for too long. I like to think instead that we're ships on a vast and endless sea with no land in sight. That's terrifying to some, but it gives me the thought that the sooner we stop searching for the land we'll never reach, the sooner we can turn our gaze away and upwards, to lose ourselves in the twinkling constellations where we will someday find our place.

So you're saying achieving temporal perfection is less important than finding grander meaning?

Yeah.

Nice try. Now get your f***ing speech done, kid.

having fun by myself

It occurred to me a few months ago that other people watch movies and TV shows by themselves.

I know, I know, this is the sort of epiphany that isn't supposed to be an epiphany, in that class of Realizations Adora Has Way Too Late (like "Three left turns make a right? WHAAAAAT?" as my classmate patiently taught me me how to make my robot turn in my comp sci and engineering class, or learning how to tie my shoes when I was...uhhh...older than 10, or finally doing precalc over the summer before my senior year).

But this realization has deeper roots than sucky spatial reasoning or laziness in the shoe-tying department or math avoidance. Consciously thinking, "Huh, other people watch stuff for entertainment by themselves" made me reflect on why I don't.

One of my neighbors, around my age, has a TV in his own room...and in almost every other room of his house. My family owns a grand total of one TV, so out of necessity turning on the TV at all has been a family affair since I was a kid. It started with watching episodes of Friends with my parents, laughing at all the jokes before I was old enough to understand what most of them meant. Then we watched 60 Minutes and America's Funniest Home Videos, switching between ABC and CBS in time to see some dude getting whacked in the balls on one channel and some dude getting subpoenaed before Congress on the other (obviously, AFV and 60 Minutes aren't that different).

When I was a tad bit older Saturday Night Live became the latest family tradition, and when I got a little older yet we started piling into the living room on Thursday nights to watch the Big Bang Theory, religiously, at 8pm. Back in the DVD days of Netflix, we had to come to a consensus on which movies to order; grudgingly, my family once agreed to watch the thinly-veiled political commentary movie Miral, if only because I put up with my sister's 1990s chick flicks and Mom's French romantic dramas. (I allied with my dad on Humphrey Bogart/Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn movies and weird comedies). When we started Netflix Instant Play, the member of the family who skipped ahead and watched a later episode of Arrested Development without the rest of the clan (cough ADRIANNA cough) would get scolded.

The only show I ever watched by myself, without my mom or my dad or my sister or friends around, was NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. But that was never really for fun fun the same way the Big Bang Theory or Friends was for fun fun. It was fun, it just wasn't fun ^2. You know.

It was chatting with people on Facebook that tipped me off to the fact that I was weird. They'd tell me "I'm watching X show right now" (while chatting, which is pretty blasphemous--seriously, who talks while watching TV?!?! That's like farting while praying or something, right?) and I'd realize Wow, people have fun by themselves.

People have fun by themselves.

Why should that be so surprising?

My first love was reading, and reading books is the poster girl of solitary fun. Sure, you can read to someone else, but it's basically an individual thing. Except there's that scene from A Single Man (one of my favorite movies, by the way) where the two are reading, and it's gorgeous and AHHH 

But let's put that aside for now.

I've decided that I want to make having fun by myself more of a priority, because, extroverted as I am, being around people can be as exhausting as it is exhilarating. I don't need to call up a friend every time I want to watch a movie, and I can give myself permission to watch the last episode of Bob's Burgers without my sister (sorry, Adrianna).

After all, if I divide my life into this false binary of alone + working vs. with people + having fun, I'm never going to know what my laugh sounds like in an empty room, with my covers pulled up to my chin as I watch some Monty Python movie for the 3rd time.

And I think the lone laugh might just be beautiful. 

This House

Yes, it’s stupid, but I wanted this to be the house

To go to for Thanksgiving when I’m 30,

After all, this is the house where I slept with boys for the first time,

In those platonic fumbling moments during “co-ed” sleepovers,

And told horror stories on a creaky bed at 3 AM.

This is the house where I told my first crush that I liked him,

In the unjudging darkness of my pink-walled room,

The eyes of wooden dolls looking down benevolently

At my hopeful, hopeless six-year-old self.

This, the house whose nooks and crannies I knew

Like the curves of the handle of my suitcase,

Where I could fling the door open after getting home on a red-eye flight

And pad across the hall in a millisecond flat to jump on my twin bed.

The floor in the entranceway is a black-and-white chessboard,

And it occurs to me when I walk on it with sockless feet

That there’s no other place where cold marble is so welcoming.

I’ve come back so many times, that I can ride the curve of the freeway winding into this city

in my dreams, and I do.

This is the house whose green walls were Base when we played tag,

We played out in this backyard with mud and hands and knees,

Used sticks and bandanas for Capture the Flag games where

No one knew the rules. We took prisoners without asking

And when we won, we yelped from one wooden deck

Across to the other, then went inside for watermelon slices bigger than our heads

laughing at the sticky juice,

as if the raindrops that go missing from Seattle in the summertime,

dripping down our cheeks onto these granite kitchen floors like a baptism.

Sorting as a prevalent plot device in YA lit

This weekend I went to see Divergent, the movie adaptation of Veronica Roth's bestselling and Hunger Games-esque dystopia novels for young adults, largely because of the buzz in my school's feminist club about the main character who (gasp!) stands up for herself, has a girl best friend with whom she does not compete over boys, and manages to save the male lead/love interest practically as many times as he saves her.

Conflict in Divergent arises because the character is, as the title might imply, different; she fails to fit into a single "faction," a group determined by your strengths--selflessness, honesty, intelligence, kindness, or bravery. The story itself isn't an unusual one for YA lit: main character faces romantic subplot plus conflict with a corrupt government that threatens her life. And there's another thing: the prevalence of sorting. Think about popular YA novels/series of our time--Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, the Giver, Percy Jackson and the Olympians--and then think about how sorting plays a role. Hogwarts houses in HP. Districts in HG. Assigned roles (Birthmother, Giver, etc.) in The Giver. Houses based on parentage in Olympians.

After watching Divergent I wondered why. Why do we rely so much on sorting in YA lit? Is it because in real life, characterization of teenagers and kids happens more by the groups we express allegiance to than the values we ourselves espouse? Because people don't think that our morality has emerged beyond Kohlberg's conventional level of moral development, and thus we need our group loyalties to keep us in line?

Or is it something else entirely, a shrewd way for writers to tap into the innate desire of so many youngsters, who are struggling with finding their own groups, to simply belong? In other words, a rather terrifying question: do all these dystopian (or simply fantasy, in the case of Harry Potter or Olympians) sorting mechanisms speak to something we actually desire?

keeping up with the joneses, when the joneses are high schoolers

When I came back from South by Southwest EDU, I felt excited. Vitalized. Energized. Motivated. All the good words that end in -ed. But I also came back pressured. 

It wasn't the kind of pressure that anyone put on me explicitly. It was the kind of pressure that comes from talking shop with some of the smartest people in the teenage jet set, the kind of people who start awesome non-profits, build their own apps, launch political action committees, and compare speaking engagements the way some of my classmates compare who went to which parties. Instead of "Were you at Dana's? Joe's? Sarah's?" these peeps ask "Were you at CGI? Davos? TED?" 

In NY Times article the Youngest Technocrati, UChicago economist Gary Becker was quoted saying, "This surge in youthful innovation and entrepreneurship looks unprecedented."

As our resumes get longer, younger, the insecurities pile up too. Impostor syndrome, which Wikipedia describes as "a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments...those with the syndrome remain convinced that they...do not deserve the success they have achieved. [They believe that others think] they are more intelligent and competent than they [really are]," runs rampant. I've heard inventors and TED speakers and university valedictorians under 20 years old all say some variation of, "I don't think I'm that smart."

It's gotten so bad that at this point, hearing someone disparage their own intelligence has practically become a sign of its existence.

Combine a room full of smart teenagers with too many accomplishments to list, all thinking that everyone else is smarter and more accomplished, with the modern world, and you have a recipe for the kind of gut-wrenching, anxiety-breeding busyness profiled so prolifically in everything from books (Overwhelmed) to NY Times opinion pieces ("The Busy Trap"). In "The Busy Trap," author Tim Kreider writes, "Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day."

And existential crises are, like impostor syndrome, common among the "smart" and accomplished. On the Davidson Institute's website, J. Webb writes, "It is such existential issues that lead many of our gifted individuals to bury themselves so intensively in "causes" (whether these causes are academics, political or social causes, or cults)." 

Burying oneself in a cause? 

Sounds like a lot of people I know, perhaps including yours truly.

On the flight home from Austin, I pulled out my iPad and started a frenetic brainstorming session listing all the possible organizations to get involved with, internships to apply to, influencers to contact, topics to write about, websites to write for, causes to advocate. I tried to dream up issues to have an opinion on and vulnerable groups that people hadn't stood up for already, because I didn't want to be late to any party. 

Yes, this was how shallow I was on that evening flight out of Texas, and in retrospect, I hate it.

I got home that night and looked critically at my calendar. I decided, quickly, that there was too much emptiness. This, even though I regularly stayed up until 1 AM on school nights finishing homework and answering emails. This, even though I had to schedule in time with friends ("Hang out with J," "Froyo with H," certain days' appointments would read) and often had to struggle to find a convenient place to schedule a phone call. But it seemed like everyone else was busier yet. How could I complain when my friends were getting 2 hours of sleep and on red-eye planes to Europe and winning robotics tournaments and pulling straight A's and getting jobs, and I was...napping?

It was guilt for not being busy enough. Tim Krieder in the NYTimes went on to say, "Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work." It was immensely relatable. When he went on to write about a friend who'd taken a sabbatical of sorts from the whirlwind of NYC, he said that she'd changed for the better. "What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do."

"Force" might be overstating it. None of my friends at school or at conferences ever looked me in the eye and told me that I had to churn out some new accomplishments. In fact, our indulgent late-night conversations indicated the opposite: in our drowsy musings out loud, we idealistically assured each other that we would still be friends with each other, regardless of what we chose to do (or not). 

And yet there's still that ever-present sound in the background like a heartbeat that reminds us to get busier. In the Washington Post article, "Why Being Too Busy Makes Us Feel So Good," Brigid Schulte writes, "People compete over being busy; it’s about showing status. “If you’re busy, you’re important. You’re leading a full and worthy life,” Burnett says. Keeping up with the Joneses used to be about money, cars and homes. Now, she explains, “if you’re not as busy as the Joneses, you’d better get cracking.”" 

I need my boredom. I need my sleep. I need my 30 minutes on Thursday nights with my family to watch the Big Bang Theory, because let's face it, the fate of #Shamy is way more important than anything I'm working on.

Most of all, I need a society that's okay with me having a Google Calendar that stretches on and on with unfilled white pages, the way the sky stretches on and on above me when I'm trying to trace shapes in the clouds. I need pausing to find beauty. And sometimes it takes beauty--like a thought provoking late-night conversation with a friend, or a spontaneous adventure ditching class to run in the woods, or a highly relatable NYTimes article--to make us pause.