Why do I want to attend Columbia? I have a pretty good imagination, but it fails me when I try to tell a lie. On the other hand, as you may have heard, we Chinese are big on filial piety. My parents are great people, don’t get me wrong, but they’re real snobs when it comes to higher education. I really can’t bring myself to defy them directly, so let me just say why I want to go to college in general. Then I’ll let you convince my parents why the Rutgers Honors Program won’t give me the same quality education at a much lower cost.
Speaking of money, I admit my parents can afford to pay the bill. As you can see from the application forms, Dad is an actuary and computer programmer, while Mom is a gastroenterologist. You probably also saw that Dad is a CC graduate, and I’m pretty sure he’s greased some palms on your side. I have no plans to continue this particular family tradition. I want to major in art history, but if by some fluke I ever make a lot of money, you won’t see a thin dime of it.
Why do I want to go to college? It’s not to make the world a better place. It’s not to find self-fulfillment. It’s not to get a job. It isn’t even because I can’t think what else to do. It’s because I actually want to become a scholar, or at least learn from real scholars how to look scholarly. I’m sorry I was born too late to study with Meyer Schapiro and Rudolf Wittkower. If the current art history department is too feminist and/or queer to let me study art, I can always switch to economics.
I recognize that I won’t add much to the diversity of your student body. You aren’t in desperate need of Chinese-Americans with perfect SAT scores. Well, that’s OK, because diversity doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. My education will come from professors, textbooks, reading assignments and term papers. I plan to learn as little as possible from my fellow students. I already know how to drink, although I’ll never be very good at it, and Mom, MD scared me out of taking any drugs. Plenty of kids learn all about sex with just a high school degree. Just so you’ll check the right box, I’m heterosexual, but rest assured: if anyone could make me change my mind, it would be a Columbia man. I’m a serious Christian and as soon as I turn 18, I plan to vote Republican. Is that the kind of diversity you’re looking for?
Just to be entirely fair to my parents, whom I do love dearly, snob appeal isn’t the only reason they want me to go to your school. They also want me to meet lots of nice Chinese boys. Mom saw a bunch of these paragons on our campus tour, and she still thinks I want to meet them. My parents don’t seem to learn. They sent my older sister to Berkeley and Harvard Medical School, and now she’s shacked up with a Jew, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I admit Sis is a hard case, being five foot ten in stocking feet. She literally looked down on all the nice Chinese boys, but then ended up with a five-foot-eight-inch Jewish resident. Go figure. Hey, I meant no offense—his parents don’t like it any better than mine.
So there you have everything you need to know. It’s not the best application essay, but perhaps is among the more honest. I really hope it is useful to you for some purpose or other. I’m sorry I couldn’t use softer paper.
No hard feelings,
Alexa Yang
Yeah, you guessed it. The dumb bastards let me in. I was fated to succeed in school even when I tried my best to fail.
Once on campus, I made it through freshmen orientation, but just barely. I snickered through all their attempts to classify me: male/female, gay/straight, cis-/transgendered, white/minority/Asian. I suffered through all the indoctrination regarding sexual harassment, whose message for college boys was: have sex, and you risk being expelled. Now you better go have sex, because withholding it is also sexual harassment. When my dorm counselor told me to “check my privilege”, it damn near triggered a macro-aggression.
Fortunately my roommate was a very sweet and smart Indian girl who was also very religious. When she found out I was Christian she put away the elephant-god statue lest I take offense. I thought it improved our decor, but I didn’t want to embarrass her by calling attention to her tactfulness. Once classes started I threw myself into them and ignored all the advantages of being at an Ivy League school in the greatest city on earth. I spent my life between my dorm room, classes, the library and the cafeteria. Maybe Rutgers would have been cheaper, but I had to admit I was happy as a clam.
I was all but invisible on campus. The only feature distinguishing me from the hordes of Asian girls was my height. I’m no Amazon like my sister, but five foot eight is still well above average. My classmates may have been of different colors and nationalities, but under the skin they were all upper middle class and largely interchangeable.
I’ll give you one example. In Art Humanities the instructor was unfortunately a real jerk of a grad student. He probably has heard of Meyer Schapiro. That’s as far as I can go to mention the two in the same breath. He put up a slide of Delacroix’s Abduction of Rebecca and asked how we know it was painted from the imagination, a Walter Scott novel rather than real life. There were no takers, so he supplied the answer: “There is no such horse.”
That roused a girl sitting behind me. “What do you mean, there is no such horse?”
“There’s no such thing in real life as a dappled grey horse with a golden mane and tail.”
“Of course there is. It’s called a Welsh pony.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes I’m sure. I own one.”
The equestrienne in this instance ought to have been a Greenwich debutante straight out of a William Hamilton cartoon. Instead she was from somewhere in Latin America and spoke with a noticeable accent. Columbia College was matchless in the diversity of its snobs.
One break from my routine was chemistry lab. My parents drilled into me that the only science courses worth taking were the ones science majors took—none of this “Physics for Poets” nonsense. I got matched up with a lab partner named Joseph Churchill. The class was pretty big, so the simplest way to contact him was via email. We arranged to meet in my floor lounge to go over the first lab.
He wasn’t hard to spot. He was a couple inches taller than me, with dark curly hair and brown eyes. What distinguished him was his clothing: a white shirt, necktie and dark pants. “Crap”, I thought, “don’t tell me he’s a Mormon.” Indeed not; Churchill was wearing the black velvet skullcap of an Orthodox Jew.
As soon as we were done going over the experiment, I told him I bet I knew why he was dressed up. “Feast of Tabernacles, right?” He seemed astonished but admitted it was so, that it was an intermediate day where he could do schoolwork, but wanted to dress as if it were as a full holiday. “Then why aren’t you dwelling in a booth?” He explained he only needed to eat in one. But how did I know all this about the holiday of Succos? I dug under my collar and pulled out the gold cross.
That provided the excuse for a longer personal chat. He said that his friends called him “Yossi”, a diminutive of his Hebrew name Yosef. My own nickname was “Lexie”, which came in handy when Amazon named a zombie robot by my real name. As for his last name, “you’re probably too polite to ask, but I’ll tell you. My grandparents were named Münsterberg, and when they came to this country they anglicized it to Churchill. They didn’t want their children to be called “Monsterburger” in school. So no, we’re not Winston Churchill’s long lost cousins.”
I told him I had a Chinese name but never used it. I was third-generation American and barely spoke enough Cantonese to avoid being cheated at a restaurant. I couldn’t read at all. My older sister and brother were raised in Queens and went to a Chinese post-school program, but no such thing existed in the wilds of suburban New Jersey. My family had been Christian since the 1850s or thereabouts.
“So if you don’t mind me asking, why do you hide that cross under your clothes?”
“Aha! Why do you hide your fringes under yours?”
Yossi pulled the side of his shirt up a bit and fished out a couple of his tsitsis. “There, you happy now? First of all it’s always been the custom of German Jews not to wear them outside clothing. Second of all, I tried wearing them out once and they got torn and dirty. But surely Christian symbols aren’t meant to be concealed, at least not since the time of Diocletian.”
“I never thought about it. I guess I figured it was out of place once I came to Columbia. But you’re right—I shouldn’t be embarrassed. Thanks for pointing it out. I wonder what else I’ve quietly concealed since I came here.” German Jews: that explained the formal dress and good manners.
Our friendship warmed and deepened as the semester went on. Yossi explained that he lived off-campus because that was the only way his parents would agree for him to attend Columbia. His parents had retired to Israel, so he inherited their rent-stabilized apartment around 70 blocks further uptown, in Washington Heights. I was already enough of a New Yorker to be consumed with envy. Yossi said he agreed completely with them. “I don’t trust myself to live in a dorm. There’s a limit to how much faith you should have in your own self-control. I’m pretty good in that regard, but what would I do when everyone around me is drinking and doing … other things? But I didn’t mean to insult your own choices, Lexie. You don’t seem to have suffered, but I imagine it’s easier for girls.”
I told him I’d not really thought much about it. I’d been so focused on my course work I hadn’t had time for even thinking about a social life. But now that I was more confident about academics, it was a real question. I didn’t tell Yossi how I hadn’t worried much about my isolation until I became friends with him. It seemed so matter-of-fact to discuss more than course work with your lab partner. I didn’t notice how much I looked forward to our meetings, to talking about whatever I wanted, with someone with whom I felt entirely at ease.
“Yossi, I understand entirely. Alcohol isn’t an issue—it makes me sick, and I don’t like it. But the other thing, sex, we may as well call it by its proper name, I think I’ve fooled myself into believing I was above being affected by it. Look, please, I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable, and if you want we can change the subject.”
He seemed all ears, so I continued. “But it occurs to me seeing what goes on from the outside, that sex is very much a symbolic act. I hear these girls go on and on about how horny they are, but I don’t think they’re that much different from me. We’re lonely, and the solution to horniness is so much more obvious and less threatening than to try and make friends. It’s so hard to go up to someone of the opposite sex and say, hey, here I am. Do you like me? Can I trust you? Will you reject me? It’s so much easier to drink until you’ve almost passed out and wake up next day next to someone you barely know. You’ve violated your physical aloneness, but it’s a false symbolism, because you’re even further from the guy than the night before.”
Yossi at first looked startled, but as I spoke he leaned towards me, at once listening to every word and impatient to add his own thoughts. “Lexie, I’ve never talked to a girl about anything really important before. It’s not that I was forbidden to speak to one, but in my circles you hold off dating until you are ready to get married. I’m nineteen, since I spent a year in Israel studying in a yeshiva, but that’s still way too young to get serious. What I mean to say is that I’m thrilled to talk to you, so much so that I’m worried it’s getting dangerous. I’m just like you. I feel terribly alone a lot of the time and the guys I’m friendly with don’t have this kind of conversation.”
I said, “Yossi, I’ve never really talked with boys that much myself. My parents weren’t all that crazy about me dating, but they wouldn’t have prevented me. I prevented myself. I also thought I wasn’t ready. I’m also very conscious of the fact that my husband will emerge from the guys I choose to date, so I’d better choose wisely up front. I don’t want to end up like my sister, putting off marriage on account of her career and then drifting into a problematic relationship. Trouble is, at some point we will be ready, but we won’t know how to make it work all of a sudden, to talk seriously with a guy or a girl, when you’ve never even learned how to talk about ordinary trivial matters.”
“That’s just what I would very much like to do. I want to be friends with you, Lexie, because we have a lot in common, and we like each other as friends, and most of all, feel comfortable with each other. I’d like to think that when I do go out on dates, I’ll be as comfortable with them as I am with you. Maybe that’s not realistic. Maybe the impossibility of anything serious between us is the whole reason we find each other so easy to be with.”
“Yossi, I know it’s tough for the likes of us, but let’s try to not over-analyze things. How about this: let’s make a deal. I’ll help you become comfortable talking to girls, and you help me be comfortable talking to guys. Let’s shake on it. What’s wrong? I thought you said it was OK for you to shake a girl’s hand.”
“It is, Lexie, when it’s a simple matter of social convention. It’s not any more, at least not for me. If you gave me your hand now I wouldn’t want to let it go. It’s late, I’d better head home.”
My mouth stayed locked open as Yossi quickly left the room. At first I felt giddy and wonderful. What a sweet thing for him to say! He really feels that way about me! Here I was at the age of eighteen, realizing for the first time that a boy liked me, so much so that the touch of my hand was a danger to him. Then I began to worry if I’d done anything wrong, if I’d crossed any line which might ruin things between us. Next my fantasies started piling up, one more daring and thrilling than the other, of kissing him, of crushing his body against mine, of him touching me wherever I willed myself to be touched. I felt like a complete fool, but my need was so intense I could not turn off the deluge of erotic fantasy. It was if four years of adolescent anguish were compressed into a single evening.
I had often had romantic fantasies, sexual fantasies even, but always with a safely distant figure. I fell in love with John Keats and Frédéric Chopin, haunted, handsome young men whom I could save from a tragic fate, presumably with time-travelled antibiotics. They would have been much less attractive had they just died of old age. (Byron and Liszt were even better looking but they’d be a real handful, and I wasn’t interested in falling for such bad boys.) I loved them through poetry and music, making me feel wonderfully high-minded and pure. I felt so superior to girls whose masturbation fantasies were only of Brad Pitt.
I told myself, this is different, you idiot. This is a real human being, a very nice and decent human being, as liable to get hurt as I am myself. I resolved to do my best to keep our friendship alive, but more or less resigned myself to never seeing him again after the semester was over. Nevertheless, the only way I could get to sleep that night was to pretend Yossi Churchill was thrusting himself into me.
Two days later he emailed me asking when would be a good time to talk on the phone. The first thing he did was to apologize. “Lexie, whatever I may have felt the other night I had no right imposing on you.”
“That was the sweetest imposition I could have asked for, Yossi. I was really flattered. Just out of curiosity, what do you think would have happened if you did hold my hand a little while?”
“I would have kissed you, and if you had kissed back, I would have wanted more.”
“An honest answer, and quite flattering. Yossi, I shouldn’t be embarrassed at being so pure, but I’ve never kissed a boy. Not properly, that is. Just a couple of stupid games of spin-the-bottle.”
“What’s spin-the-bottle?”
Wow. I never thought I’d be out-virgined by a boy. “What I said, a stupid game played by junior-high kids. Now what exactly would have been wrong with you kissing me?”
“If you ask me a question in physics, I’ll give you one of three answers: yes, no, or Heisenberg. Jewish law is never so simple. There are specific ritual prohibitions, such as sex with a Jewish woman in a state of impurity. There are others more obviously in the realm of morality, such as the ban on adultery. According to the Rambam—Maimonides—only marriage to a non-Jewish woman is forbidden: ‘Do not marry them; to not give your daughter to his son.’ If we just had sex? I wouldn’t get any special honors for it, but technically it might not be so bad.”
“Yossi, we’re talking about kissing, not having sex! And what do you mean, ‘not so bad’? Give me some credit—it might be pretty darn pleasant.” Why not talk about having sex with Yossi? My body may have been a temple, but just then it was itching for a virgin sacrifice.
“Lexie, I’m terribly sorry, of course I wasn’t implying anything of the sort. It’s just the old slippery-slope argument. You’ve got to admit that being in college greases it up pretty thoroughly.”
I had a vision of Yossi and I covered in oil, happily screwing our way down the side of a mountain. “Well, it’s a good thing we’re just talking on the phone. I’ve got a pretty good reach with my right-hand slap.”
“That’s just what I wanted to say. It is a good thing we’re not having this conversation face-to-face, and I don’t think we should meet any more outside of chem lab. It’s entirely my fault, Lexie. Since the other day I’ve had a hard time thinking about anything other than what might happen if we keep getting together in person. I’m not presuming anything on your part, God forbid, just telling you what’s inside my own head. Look at it this way: if we don’t actually meet we’ll be freer to say whatever we want in email or over the phone.”
“Yossi, you’re absolutely right. You’re my very best friend right now and I’d hate to give up talking to you. So if we’re free to say what’s on our minds, let me go first. I’d never slap your face, Yossi, no matter what you say. I desperately wanted you to kiss me, and I wasn’t particularly worried about where things might end. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I’ve been put on the Pill because of an irregular period. I’ve also had trouble thinking about anything else.”
There was a gasp, then silence on the end of the line. “Wow. Lexie, could we talk again a bit later? This is a lot for me to absorb right now.”
So began the next phase of what Yossi called, “Yiddishe Tristan meets Chinese Isolde.” We only had two more lab sessions, which we took pains to keep on the highest level of correctness. Other times we talked and texted and emailed away at all hours. It’s not like we were having phone sex, just what the diplomats call an open and frank exchange of views. For a time we tried to concentrate on the Bible, the Hebrew part of it. Yossi’s knowledge of the New Testament came exclusively from Milton, Dante and the St. Matthew Passion, and he planned to keep it that way. I noticed he hesitated before quoting each verse as he translated it into English. We finally had to admit holy subject matter wasn’t going to keep our thoughts pure. He knew a couple of guys who were walking Concordances to all the dirty parts in the Talmud.
Once we had tested the limits of sexual candor, our conversations took a wide turn. We started sending each other drafts of term papers. His visual sense was pretty poor, but he was able to tighten up the arguments of my art history papers and suggest better phrasing. Neither of us was about to start dating. We both had friends and family who were so occupied and we made ourselves busy deciding what was best for them. My sister’s affair with her fellow resident was of particular interest. He was puzzled as to why a non-religious Jewish family would object to a Chinese doctor as a daughter-in-law. I told him my father had a talk with the boy’s father. Not only did he come across as a devout Christian, but he managed to slip in some ambiguous comment about circumcision, which drove the boy’s family into a frenzy. I made a note not to mention any young man to my parents until we’ve signed a contract with the caterer.
Yossi kept pestering me about matters Chinese. Just to make him happy I took a course in Chinese history and civilization my second semester. My parents were of course delighted by my new interest, and I was almost tempted to tell them it was inspired by my Jewish boyfriend. That’s what we called each other, boyfriend and girlfriend, first as a joke and then as a matter of fact. We didn’t try to hide our deep mutual affection. Two lines were never crossed: the word “love” and any explicit mention of us having sex.
Our secret friendship made each of us more self-confident, to the point where late in the spring I agreed to go out on a date. He was a second-year engineering student named Chaucer Chang, known to rest of the world as Chuck. His family was from Hong Kong and even after the Communist takeover kept up their reverence for everything English. He sat next to me in the Chinese history class. I noticed his attempts at engaging me in conversation, and for the first time in my life tried to flirt and set the hook. He was only an inch shorter than me and not at all bad-looking. Yossi was thrilled at this development and tried to give me the viewpoint of a guy just as clueless as he. My parents were of course even more thrilled, and vied with Yossi as to who could take up more of my time on the phone.
The date was fixed as dinner on a Saturday night. I went clothes shopping for the first time in a while and picked up a pretty and flattering light dress. It had a halter top I thought made my small bust look interesting. With my height I had plenty of leg to work with, so the hem was set noticeably higher than any I’d worn before. I sent Yossi pictures and he agreed it was flattering and alluring without turning me into a Sexy Lexie.
Chuck asked me to meet him on the street rather than call on me in my dorm room. That seemed a bit odd until he pulled up in his father’s sparkling Lexus. That made me a bit uneasy. Columbia students went places on the subway or if need be, in a cab. Chuck explained there were no really good restaurants left in Chinatown because of the real estate prices, so he was taking me to one in Queens.
He chose the restaurant not for its quality but for being owned by a relative. It wasn’t a matter of money, which he spent freely, but their willingness to serve him alcohol. I had to tell him quite firmly that one more drink and I was calling a cab. That made him back down in a hurry, and it took a few minutes for him to regain his poise. I wasn’t sure whether I should be flattered at him wanting to calm his nerves, or insulted to think he needed to drink in order to tolerate my company. For an engineer he was quite a conversationalist, although no match for Yossi. I had to remind myself to stop making such comparisons.
After dinner he started driving in a strange and pointless direction, only to park at the waterfront with a view of Manhattan. I tried not to get upset. I kept my seatbelt on, folded my arms across my chest and kept up the light conversation. He suddenly unbuckled himself, turned towards me and put his hands on my shoulders. I batted them off and really let him have it. How dare he think that just so he bought me one lousy dinner he was entitled to—and so on, with considerable heat and a bit of real nastiness. I didn’t want to end matters for good or even for that evening, so I paused to let him apologize. The little bastard actually justified himself, dwelling on his generosity in wallet and spirit, implying that an oversized nerd like me should be grateful for his attentions. We got into a fierce argument, ending only when he actually tried to kiss me. I slapped him hard enough to hurt my hand and played my dirtiest trick: “I could get you thrown out of school.”
Chuck collapsed in terror and I in horror at what I was threatening to do. I was disgusted with myself for even thinking of using Title IX for what should have been a routine personal annoyance. I was now the one apologizing to him, until I was too embarrassed to continue. “Thanks for dinner—I’ll get a cab”, I said, slammed the car door shut and set forth towards civilization.
I got the number of a car service off a parked car and arranged for a ride. My mother had carefully prepared me for this possibility: a fully charged phone and a $50 bill hidden inside my small bag. As I scanned incoming traffic, I was suddenly knocked off my feet. Someone grabbed my purse and my phone, then threw the phone at my face when he saw it wasn’t worth the risk of stealing. It happened very fast and I only saw the guy from the back as he ran off. I wasn’t badly hurt—a skinned knee and a sore wrist from trying to stop my fall—but I was furious and deeply humiliated.
It didn’t take me long to realize I had no money to pay the cab. I had only one number stored which could offer me any help, and that was Yossi’s. As the cab pulled up he finally picked up the phone, and Yossi finally calmed me down enough to give me his address. That’s all the jerk of a driver wanted to know, not if I was OK or whether to notify the police.
Yossi was waiting outside to pay the driver. He was shocked at my appearance and nearly as upset as I was. He insisted I come upstairs to clean off my knee and make sure my wrist wasn’t sprained. He was concerned only for me, I was glad to see, not caring how it looked to his neighbors.
When I came out of the bathroom Yossi was standing in the hall. “Oh Lexie, I was so worried,” he said. He pulled me against him in a hug. I felt his bone and muscles straining against my own softer body, then threw my arm around his neck and pulled his face against mine in our first kiss. We stood there kissing for some minutes. We managed to exchange only two complete sentences: “My roommate’s not coming home until Monday,” and “I’m still on the Pill,” before taking off our clothes and embracing naked on his bed.
Over that night and the following day we threw ourselves into many different varieties of sexual experience. I won’t go over them in any detail, for if you’re old enough to read this you almost certainly have done them all yourself. Your imagination is probably better than my memory. Yossi and I had read enough erotic literature and watched enough porn that the mechanics of sex presented no real challenge. Like the Mercury astronauts who trained so thoroughly on simulators, we found the actual mission almost routine.
Our conversation boiled down to one thing repeated over and over: we loved each other very much. We understood this was the absolute end of our relationship, that the slightest contact would send us straight back into bed. We made a deal: I’d invite him to my wedding, he would invite me to his, and that would be the final end to our acquaintance. It never even occurred to us either might have trouble finding a mate.
Afterwards I went about my life with a feeling of fulfilment and peace. My conscience was clear. I wasn’t about to embroider my clothing with a scarlet “F”. I missed Yossi, but only because I wished he were there to be happy for me. I started dating a variety of guys, sometimes kissing or even more, but never having sex. I’d scratched that itch quite thoroughly, and I knew it couldn’t possibly be as wonderful until once more I knew I was in love.
Two years later I got an invitation to Yossi’s wedding. I had never been to a Jewish wedding, and there’s a great deal I could say about it, but not right now. There was so much for me to absorb I didn’t have time to worry about what I’d say to Yossi and his bride. I noted that he’d invited two other non-Jewish Columbia students, who didn’t think they knew him all that well. Were they just camouflage for my presence?
I felt a touch on my shoulder, turned around and saw Yossi’s bride. She took my hand, directing me out of my chair, and hugged me hard. “Thank you” was all she had to say. Since then I have met someone very special and think I once more may be in love. He says I’ll probably marry him just so I can see Yossi one last time. Whatever happens won’t be a tragic ending for the Jewish Tristan and the Chinese Isolde.
