My Story From Relative Poverty and Obscurity to Columbia: A Satire
Cher has lived in Beijing, Weihai, Singapore, Alabama, North Carolina, and New York, in that order. Now she doesn’t know where she is living, given the coronavirus and her lack of a stable home. Here is how all that came about and why she thinks it’s funny —
When Cher was five, her mother quit her job at Beijing University to reunite with Cher’s father in Weihai, a small city in coastal China with a vibrant fishing industry that was picture perfect for retirement. “We can go see your daddy now,” her mother whispered with tenderness. Cher remembers how her mother held her tiny body in her arms as she signed the resignation papers. In one stroke of the pen, Cher thought she had turned from the kid in China with the most privilege and opportunity into that with the least, which may be a gross exaggeration but did accurately describe her turn of fortune in the hierarchy of children’s opportunities.
Indeed, while her former friends were enrolled in China’s top secondary schools and studying for a strange thing called the International Mathematics Olympiad — she did not know how math had to do with sports — she rode around her skateboard with the neighborhood boys and tossed mud and gravels at each other until all parties involved were covered with dust and sometimes blood. Although she grew up with childhood joy and the unreserved love from both parents, she could not help but think about her other friends who already had a bright future in front of them. Hers was much less certain.
All she wanted was redemption. Redemption from her fall from grace, redemption from her misfortunes, and redemption for her being so vastly removed from everywhere she wanted to be and everyone she wanted to become. She had faith, nevertheless, and believed in her own power. That through her own exertion and a sheer will to power, she could reach whatever goal she set to do and that if she didn’t get it, it only meant that she did not try or desire it enough.
The first step is to leave the small town. So she kicked herself out of her home.
What Happened to Cher the Second Week in Singapore
She didn’t know where she would go except somewhere far enough from home not to resemble her small town but also close enough so that she could sleep on her own bed when she really missed her mattress. In the end, it was probably random. Anyway, that’s how she ended up in Singapore.
She soon found Singapore a fascinating city. There was always the vanilla ice-cream cones at the McDonald’s dessert stand for 80 cents a piece, the bubble milk tea with ice-cream for 3 dollars, and the weekend performances on Sentosa Island for free! She did the mental calculation that one month of rent for her and her mom could buy 600 bubble milk teas, which is a lot of milk teas. Indeed, except for the prohibitive price of daily living, she had no complaint about her new home, at least not initially. As for money, she did not really understand anything about it except that they were poor — they had to be, lest how can she be the girl from the scums who rise above her circumstance that she is destined to be?
And of course, she focused most of her attention on academics because her imagination was too limited to think of any other way to be successful. She had to ace every exam even though in practical terms, those exams do not count for everything.
The class that bothered her the most was Food and Nutrition, where she had to both cook food in her school lab and take exams about the difference between carbohydrates and proteins. The teacher hated her because she thought Cher’s cooking projects were always like “World War III”. What baffled her more, however, was how the day before the midterm exam, despite having paid 600 milk teas, she still got kicked out of her apartment by the landlady. It greatly distraught her that she could not study for which layer of the fridge should raw meat be stored to avoid cross-contamination. The only redeeming factor of this occurrence was that she could stand outside the apartment with her blue exam fold pretending not to hear her mom futilely talk some senses into the landlady, and that later as she sat on the curbside waiting for one of her online posts asking for help to be responded, she could also peer at her notebook.
She could not count how many hours had passed, but out of boredom, she memorized through the entire exam binder front the front page to the back, and then front… until finally she heard a promising ring on her phone and someone finally agreed to take them in for a few nights. That excitement of moving to a new place many subway rides away eclipsed how her arms hurt while carrying the many bags of processions that she did not have time to pack into a suitcase. They often had to make three trips back and forth with the miscellaneous things just to advance ten meters, but hey — it was exactly like the shuffle runs she used to do in Track and Field for no good reason.
Maybe the lost bubble tea is not that much a loss after all, since she did stellarly on her Food and Nutrition exam. As an aspiring law student, she thought about bringing a lawsuit against the landlady for robbing her of her lifetime’s rationing of bubble tea, but upon realizing how much such a debilitating procedure will take away her time of personal advancement, she promptly gave up. Besides, from a food and nutrition point of view, it was beneficial to not drink that much milk tea anyway.
On Transferring to a different school
Her relentlessness in pursuing personal advancement that night — or in any circumstance thereafter — finally gave her some results. At the end of the second semester, she was the top of her class! She was elated to think how she was able to pull herself up the bootstrap. How she was able to do so despite being one of the worst students in the beginning, and how this tiny report card is something worthy of celebration! She ran to the McDonald dessert stand to buy one of the ice cream cones with chocolate that cost 20 cents extra, before running to her English tutor’s office to stick the result slip right in his face.
Mr. Ho sniffed his nose and said congratulations, unexcitedly. Cher ignored that signal and pushed him a bit more, “Mr. Ho, do you not think that my efforts are indeed excellent? I started at rock bottom and pulled my way up, and now in relation to the other kids in Singapore, I am…”
“Still at the rock bottom”.
Cher knew Mr. Ho wasn’t just being rude because he was never rude, only inspiring and brutally candid. She felt knocked awake from her dream slightly as she heard the following words:
“You know, all the kids at this tutoring center are from Raffles, Hwa Chong, and places like that. Take Jack, for example. He can write essays citing Napoleon and Bismarck much better than you can. Do you even know who Bismarck is? Anyway, Jack is mediocre at best in his Raffles cohort and just failed his literature exam. That is why he is here for remedial lessons. So, where do you think you are in relation to other kids in Singapore?”
These words dealt a hard blow to Cher’s idea of progress. Over the past year, she had poured her heart out to reach the top of the herd, and it seemed to have worked until it didn’t. With all the hard work, it still didn’t seem to have led her far from where she started. Could it be true that her faith was wrong — that once she is trapped in the small town of stagnation, she is always trapped as so?
No, it could not be. After two minutes, her religious zeal for her credo came back, and she realized that if anything, the recent reversal of events confirmed her belief: she had lagged behind more than she thought during her years in Weihai; in other words, she had more to redeem.
Mr. Ho’s words reminded her that her current school environment is just a residual effect from her misfortunes of her earlier years that prevented her from learning in a prestigious school. Through her toil and labor, she may have grown out of her old school. It was time to level up in this game and find another school.
A Journey against the Odds
For the days after that incident, Cher locked herself inside her room to write applications, or essays where she got to illustrate her disadvantages and what she hard labored thus far to overcome them — and, more importantly, how the studies at the next institution would help her overcome her limitations. She made drafts after drafts on her legal pad before crushing them into balls and tossing them into the trash. If this was her chance to win an education nearly as fair as everyone else’s, whatever she turned in to the admissions officer at Raffles and Hwa Chong (which she later realized was a boy’s school) must be perfect.
She eventually came to be satisfied with one version which was no better than the others, which she nevertheless adopted because out of skepticism that she could produce anything better.
The next step of her sally was to march through the streets and canals of Singapore to turn in physical copies of her application to each of the schools on her list, since Singapore was too technologically backward to have online applications. As she hustled and bustled throughout the city, she quickly crossed off every school on her list for one reason or the other, besides the last one. This last man standing gave her the hope that her folklore of success and progress might be closer than she imagined.
She put in the pinyin of the school name into Apple Maps, Xinmin Secondary School — alas, it was only a 9-minute taxi ride, but more than one hour by public transportation, where she had to switch between the bus and walking up a huge hill, but the latter would save them a whopping four dollars. She did not agonize over this decision before picking the public transit — after all, she must be poor; that was the only way she can make a more dramatic ascend upon the social ladder. So she dragged her unwilling mom onto the bus, who was finally convinced by the pretext health benefits of exercising but, in fact, gave into the reality that her daughter had to be poor to be somewhat content.
As Cher should have expected, she took her mom to get off at the bus stop. Singapore’s public transportation system was not exactly friendly to people who were not from the exact neighborhood, and the buses never notified passengers which stop it was arriving at. This meant that they had to spend extra thirty minutes taking the bus in the opposite direction, paying double the bus fare, so that in the end, public transit for the two of them turned out to be more expensive than the taxi ride. Cher lamented the fate in which the poor were always kept poor by the illy-designed public transportation system, and marched on with the rest of the journey onto the Xinmin Secondary School that may give some hope of realizing her personal advancement.
The two marched under the scorching November sun before the school finally appeared. The campus looked unimpressive and nothing unlike her old school, but it must have been a lot better, since some school ranking had said so. Smelling success, she pushed open the glass door of the front office and a cool breeze of air-conditioning refreshed her sweaty skin and smelly uniform. Now in high spirits, she gingerly handed her application essay. The front office lady absent-mindedly scanned at the form and raised her brows at the “country of origin” column. “We can’t take applications from non-local students,” she demanded, stuffing the painstakingly-crafted application letter into her face and chasing both of them out, leaving Cher to lament the loss of the air-conditioning as much as the dramatic failure of a struggle for equal opportunity.
Back in Weihai for the winter break, she questioned life and everything she believed that she could trade her toil in exchange for more opportunities out of this place. In her dismay, she self-medicated by signing up for the TOEFL exam on December 14, 2014, a distraction of the most productive kind, after which she promptly forgot that she had taken the exam. Then eleven days later, on Christmas Day, she received the first package from Santa Clause she had gotten after she had accidentally read her mom’s diary and found out that there was no Santa Clause. 114. Right, she took this test, and was it not just out of 120? 114 out of 120? At this thought, she fainted prostrate on the floor. With this score, who needed Singapore! She could just go to America —
America!
O’er the land of the free
And the home of the brave
On how Cher sprained her ankle on the first day of college and what she thought of it
On the first day of college orientation, Cher sprained her ankles and, as a result, had to hop around campus sullenly for the first two weeks of school, when she was supposed to leave the impression as the most fit and outgoing girl in front of the peers with whom she would spend the rest of her college career. It happened as such:
Cher and the other twenty-nine peers in the Robertson Scholars program were driven off to the Appalachian Mountains for an outdoor survival camp because the donor of the scholarship thought that by suffering together, the college students would create everlasting bonds. Cher was anxious to make friends with the others in her scholarship cohort, so when the rest of them seemed to have known each other for a century the minute they met, it gave rise to even more anxiety to behave just the same, laughing at the right moment even though most of the times, she had no idea what they were talking about.
But she remembered what she believed in. If she couldn’t make friends with the people she was supposed to be friends with, it means that she did not try hard enough. So she was determined to strive harder to talk to people on the hiking trip. When the scholars from California and D.C. were talking about their magnate schools, she enthusiastically went and asked about what was a magnate school so that she could show interest in their lives, and not at all show her ignorance about the education system; when the African Americans scholars congregated to talk about what racial activism they could hold together on campus, she chimed in and unreservedly praised their solidarity. The best moment was when the other kids interested in law were having a debate, she cited case laws to demonstrate that she is the most knowledgeable about America’s constitutional history and that consequently, people should notice her superior knowledge.
Her peers were extremely friendly to her; they always gave her the biggest smile with the corners of their mouth reaching up to their eyes and thanked her effusively for her praise, offering some in return before going back to their conversation and leaving her at the back of the hiking group.
As Cher drove her feet on, she was confused. She had already strived the hardest to make everyone happy or be impressed with her, but nobody was paying attention to her still. If only somebody notices me!
As she walked down the serpentine hills three quarters through her first day of opportunity to be popular, she thought bitterly —
You Can Look Right Through Me
Walk Right By Me
And Never Know I’m There
Apparently, she was too engrossed in her friendship masterplan and its debacle to notice where she was going because she felt something empty beneath her right foot where there was supposed to the solid ground. That ankle twisted violently and her body was like a feather that fell headlong into the dirt.
“My wrist!” She shouted, meaning her ankle but forgot the English word for it.
Hearing the scream, everyone stopped and rushed to her help. Two started to examine the swell on her ankle while the others wiped off the dirt on her face and arms. As there was still a mile before the group reached the base camp, the group took turns carrying her off the mountain even though they themselves were sweaty and exhausted.
Back at the base camp, she was placed gently on a chair with ice-bags on her right ankle, which had swollen like a purple baseball. Each of the twenty-nine scholars took turn, once every two minutes, to inquire as to how she was doing, to which she invariably answered that it pained her a lot, but that each of their concern was what made her day tolerable. They brought her blackened corns, melting S’mores, and hot dogs from the campfire that seemed rich in calories, but their profuse attention made her accept every time, and by the end of the night her stomach was stuffed into a ball.
By this time, her ankle had swollen into a black baseball, and she knew she would probably not be able to walk for the first two weeks of college, but she was happy nevertheless to have gotten what she had wanted, the unequivocal attention that made everyone notice their girl lying on the chair eating S’mores while the rest sang by the bonfire.
Cher v. COVID-19
When the pandemic that had swept across the world made a surprising landfall in the truly excellent nation of the United States of America, Cher knew that it was she versus COVID-19.
I was a lost cause. In the span of two weeks, she was kicked out of her beloved college campus, separated from all her friends, lost the summer internship in Israel to eat falafel every day, and of course, to build her resume. Although she was now a student at Columbia, she was still at a disadvantage; she still had a lot to be salvaged — from what, she didn’t know, but something for sure.
She felt terribly lonely because all of her local friends have gone home; even most of her friends from China had flown back home, where the pandemic was much more in control. At these times when she did not have anyone around her, she was at her most vulnerable. Even so, she knew that she could not go home. She had to stay in the country and stick it through in case that she might find an internship that might help her career.
There were two benefits, though, about staying in the U.S.. First, washing her face had become much easier. If anything, she did not even have to worry about it because if there was one thing she could count on amid all the uncertainty, it was the tears that could always well up from her eyes, whether they were on demand or not.
Second, she easily quit her Instagram addiction because her favorite social media had become, by far, LinkedIn. After connecting with everyone from consulting and finance firms, to vegan-preaching nonprofits, to a wellness and balance beverage company that sold tiny bottles of “ginger-based recuperator” for five dollars, she finally found an internship that she loved working in IoT Strategy at Sprint. She could not believe that the weeks of crying had finally yielded her something positive. What she could not believe even more was that the day she got her offer was also the day that she got increasingly more tense.
Because she was so afraid to lose the opportunity that she had strived so hard to get.
She could lose it so easily given all the disruptions in the world. This time, it was once again her nationality (her lack of a social security number) that could put her whole life in peril. She was sure that many years later, she would still remember that loss and think of it bitterly.
She had always thought she had control of things. That from that day when she watched her life in Beijing dissolve into a single stroke on the resignation papers, her every action had been intertwined into the giant web of destiny that she — and she alone, through her will — must do to break out of her circumstances, and that if things were otherwise, it must have been because of her.
But now, she felt things as they were, completely out of control.
She could make plans, goals, and todo lists, but all of these are frail in the face of a reality that could rip apart her schemes; what an absurd irony it would be that she poured her heart out to secure an offer, but in the end was foiled by something completely unforeseeable and even silly, like the closure of the Social Security Administration? There was something so theatrical about this debacle that it suddenly appeared funny. Suddenly, she just wanted to laugh at her own plight as if gloating at someone else’s.
It is sometimes amusing to watch someone else’s wreckage, as in the way people read Candide or watch Tom never catching Jerry. Could it be just as funny to watch one’s own?
She wanted to laugh, really hard. Not just about her present situation, but also about the past, about being kicked out from her apartment her second week in Singapore, about traveling for hours under the scorching sun to submit transfer papers that never got looked at, or about praying to sprain her ankle just to make friends. They all seemed funny because of how her painstaking plans to advance her opportunities had spiraled out of control. But somehow, they also worked out in the end through events that were unplanned, unexpected, and entirely fortuitous. And for that, she thinks that it is worthwhile to laugh through adversity.
