A Memory from a Certain Register

It was a Saturday in the winter of 2008/2009, and I had just finished taking one of two SAT II subject tests. What the subject was for either of the tests, or how well I did on them, I cannot remember. The slightest act of learning about what months the tests were offered feels like raising the undead from a crypt. The dreadful unpreparedness that I feel now in recalling anything about these college application tests mirrors the dread of taking the tests themselves, which were so much tacked on as an afterthought. I had learned about them at some college preparation function, and added them to my tasks as a desperate final resort halfway through senior year to add to the final test of the value of my entire life thus far at the age of 17.

It was a cold but sunny day that I walked back out the door of Mount Carmel High School in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago, and trekked around the piles of snow to find the right bus stop. When I think back to how I felt at the time, perhaps the answer would have been akin to a dim and low-pitched sound that overwhelms, within which other faraway isolated notes might drown. What mattered was on the register of the dim and low sound. After a while of waiting for a bus in the southside on a Saturday, when I looked back at the school, it seemed dead. There seemed to be no one else around for miles.

At some point this young Black man appeared next to me. He was perhaps in his late twenties, perhaps a young professional, in warm casual clothes. He had an open and affable demeanor, in contrast to the vibes of strictness and order I got in the hallways of the all-male Catholic high school across the street. Given this immediate sense of character, along with his lean figure and (I thought) stylishness, I could imagine that he was cool, within whatever part of the world he was part of.

We began to talk. We were both waiting for the bus to the red line station towards the loop. We exchanged names, and might have made a little more chit-chat. I appreciated his interest and curiosity in someone so different like me, as there was an isolated sound within me that shared the same. Then, he asked what brought me to that neck of the woods, obvious outsider that I was, and I told him I had just taken an SAT subject test.

He then talked about how great and awe-inspiring the students at certain elite universities were. He could have been talking about the University of Chicago, located just down the street (so much just an abstract idea at the time, ever out of my reach, before I would attend its graduate school of social work), or Harvard, or Yale, or all of the ivy leagues. As with much of this encounter, I cannot recall the precise details. I recall how he took care to distinguish how these students were not merely smart, but his final choice of word: bright. How on top of doing well in tests and studies, they might have qualities to them like creativity or originality that altogether sounded to me like they belonged to a whole separate species of people.

Clearly, he himself was self-assured enough, of that world enough, to be able to say these things. And yet he was also admitting that he was not among them. This was a source of mind-breaking confusion for me. “How can you be so cool and not be one of them?” This is what I wanted to ask, naïve that I was for having bought into the all-encompassing greatness of these universities and all who receive diplomas from them myself. (His demeanor brings to mind now of musicians I have met since –a vocalist, a percussionist, a saxophonist. I have heard from a composer that generally musicians, as artists go, are among the more sociable. He could also have been a graduate student that was speaking of undergraduates.)

I remember that there was, too, a part of me that wondered what had prompted him to tell me this, and how it was in response to my having just taken an SAT II test. Was he expressing a good wish for me? (In which case, I’d heartily thank him.) Was he just piling onto the pressures and expectations of me without having the most remote consideration that I might already want to be like one of those students? (In which case, I just wanted to disappear.) When the memory wafted into my mind earlier today, I wondered if perhaps that I am Asian-American might have contributed to a perception that I may possess or lack certain qualities.

Given how foggy my memory is of the occasion, and how I have by now countless times come to realize that my interpretations and explanations as an immigrant outsider for the causes of human social behaviors at certain times were wrong, I could not fathom what his thought process might have been. I could not even say that it was actually as close to something so special and deliberate as a short monologue as I perceived it to be. In fact, he might very well have revealed the connection himself, and I might have been too caught up in the idea of these bright students to listen. This happens a lot with me, too. I cannot know, but I’d readily believe that he had a perfectly fine reason.

And then there was another part of me, and another part of me, and another part of me, that was so strongly attuned to, latching onto what he was saying in a different way altogether. There were different distinct notes that wanted to sing and be heard, that wanted to join in the free and open music that he was making all by himself at that bus stop. This idea that made him look to the sunlight, made him stop and take the time to ponder for the right word, that made his eyes alight –I wanted to regard this idea in the same way, too. He was a breath of fresh air. These schools were clearly everything.

I turned this memory over throughout the day, as it slowly revealed to me a yearning that aches. I thought it was about these schools and all that they promise, and the disheartening truths they revealed by the end of that college application season. I thought I was having a strong reaction because he was voicing an admiration about certain people that I, too, felt, even if I could not voice myself.

When I listened to him and watched him, I was speechless, as if I did not know how to speak or what to say. Maybe it was that there was always too much to say, with too many ways to react, for a young immigrant taking in an entirely new world (much different than that of her parents as well as that of her place of birth), so that one always feels as if there is both a bottleneck and a blank at one’s turn to speak. Maybe it was that I did not yet feel that I had the permission to bare my thoughts and feelings so freely and openly. Both of these could have played a part. But having now gained a substantial comfort over how to respond to these challenges as they arise, these do not alone explain for why the moment felt so significant to me.

There is, wrapped up within the matter, that I was responding to the young man himself. Specifically, I was reacting to his way of being. It was true that I was listening to this man reveal a comfortable relationship to certain institutions and people that terrified me then and still intimidate me now. But there is more.

I was watching someone feel and express awe and inspiration about some group of others, and sharing it freely, because it came from somewhere trusting and honest, somewhere where there was no fear or insecurity about himself. I was watching him express something unabashedly, without any potential ulterior motives or reasons for performing another being. These observations about him in a casual and passing moment revealed something about the person he might be that seemed remarkable to me. This man’s way of being was what I desired, and in the zeal for life that he revealed when talking about these students, even transforming the idea of them, I felt ever so acutely that I did not –could not-- share the same. The idea of these students in the context of him was ironic, and in the prospect of responding I felt I was at the cross of various opposing forces that I could not identify or name --the subject matter or the presentation of it, the being that was expected of me and the being that I wanted to be, the predetermined fate of my lot and the possibility for a chosen alternative.

The subject of elite institutions has thrown me through an arc that has, over the years, left me pained, worn, frustrated, and, at times, even bored. That encounter with the young man, however, delights me at the best of possibility that America can offer.