I am very grateful to be where I am right now. The finish line is in sight. All my life I have viewed the future in steady, four-year-long increments — high school, college — but here is where the sidewalk ends, and in two months, I could become anybody at all. It’s senior spring, baby! Stanford in the spring is so lovely that it makes me want to weep. The sun is so gentle that I can’t imagine anyone who could deserve it, aside from little children. On top of everything the California poppies open like skirts and wildflowers grow out of every curb. This spring I have downloaded this plant identification app, Seek, to learn the names of the wildflowers around me. Now when I see the stalks of baby blue eyes or arroyo lupine, I feel like I am being winked at by a friend.
My last senior spring was in 2019, my final year of high school. I was eighteen and full of melancholy and rage. (I feel a genuine need to apologize to anybody who knew me then!) I felt that I had served my time, eighteen years in Central Florida (a place I have now grown to love), in a public high school of four thousand where nobody was out as gay, where I often felt like the designated political loud-mouth in my classes, and where I was determined, by any means necessary, to never, ever peak. I could not wait to go to college, somewhere far way. I could not wait to unfollow everybody on Instagram. That semester I was barely in school. Already my heart was half out the door. Almost every other week I took a plane: to walk at the Women’s March, where I was a teen organizer, to lobby with other youth gun violence activists, to perform at a youth arts summit, to visit colleges, and, most memorably, to take a picture with the president. I made a lot of my still-closest friends in these programs for weird, high-achieving, extra-ass seniors. I didn’t get to go to prom, but I didn’t feel super sorry about it. I was leaving Florida, and I thought I was never coming back.
The next spring, of course, I was back in my childhood bedroom, like a reverse fairy-tale. Two thirds into freshman year, all of my friends were sent home unexpectedly by what became The Pandemic, with no warning to pack up our clothes, fully expecting to return after spring break. I remember that I had just — just! — mutually confirmed a crush with someone, and I was about to act on it, just in time for spring cuffing season, and it felt like the biggest cock-block from the universe. I longed for nothing more than to return to campus. What I daydreamed of, for those lonely spring months of the pandemic, was the life I am living now: wandering campus with my friends in the warmth. Packing, arm-to-arm, into auditoriums, to see famous people tell us from podiums that we can be anything we want to be. Going to literature seminars with the same rotating cast of (let’s face it, queer) classmates. Running into friends in the dining hall. Watching people in the library. I was missing a life I barely knew, but had already taken for granted. I understood then that I could never take such things for granted again.
Like I said, I am very grateful for where I am now. I was always aware of what a privilege it is to attend Stanford (what’s more, for the express purpose of reading books and hitting on girls!) but the pandemic made me extra-grateful for my college experience. College is such an unbelievably good place for girls like me. I get why so many children’s novels take place in boarding schools, in weird little castles and summer camps for troubled kids. I have learned so much from this bizarre, ludicrously well-endowed institution. So much that I could write a novel about it (and lowkey I will!) For four years my entire life existed inside Campus Drive, my heart belonged to the quirky and smart (and occasionally war criminal-esque) people who live here. It felt like the center of the universe. I couldn’t imagine life outside of it.
I haven’t felt that way this year, though. This senior year I have felt, just like last time, half-out, adrift. Part of this is because I am graduating a year later than planned, at 23 instead of 22. Like hundreds of other kids in my class, I took a gap year for the pandemic. The circumstances of the gap year were less-than-ideal, but it ended up having some positive outcomes for me, some of them in roundabout ways. The first was that it taught me, in a trial-by-fire sort of way (which is how most life lessons are taught, I am gathering) to feel comfortable standing on the only support system I am guaranteed on this earth, which is my own two feet (though sometimes these are shaky, too.) What I mean is that it taught me how to exist as a person outside of school (which provides a lot of built-in personhood), and on top of that, in so-called ‘unprecedented times,’ outside of any historical context that felt recognizable to me. It sounds ridiculous to say it aloud — like, millions of people on this earth don’t go to college, and have a full life and identity outside of a traditional educational path. But still! When everything I took for granted fell apart in a single spring — the linear progression of my life, a unified ‘college’ ‘experience,’ whatever that means, the protection of institutions that give you community and belonging and purpose in your life every day — I realized that, wow, most adults are freestyling it. I learned I could do it, when the time comes.
Another reason I have felt half-out of school is because, last summer, I decided to test-drive adulthood by moving, on my own and without a plan, to New York. That summer (amid a booklaunch and heartbreak) I got to hang out with lots of women in their late twenties and early thirties, many of whom are queer women I’d admired forever, who were kind enough to answer my fan-girl DMs, and who have given me a model for what my adult life could look like. How to find belonging as an artist, activist, community member. All my life I have looked for examples of how to exist, and as a Gen Z person I am grateful for the half-generation of millennials (as much as we like to shit on them) who took that leap before us, thanks to whom I can see a path ahead.
But right now, I am still in school, at least for another seven weeks. Last weekend my mom came to visit me on campus. We ended up both sleeping in my Twin XL bed because neither of us could keep the air mattress from deflating. It was nice. My mom looks very youthful and whenever she asked people to take our photo in the tourist-y parts of campus, like the Quad and the Oval, they assumed we were friends or sisters. That made me feel good about, at least, the genetic portion of my post-grad prospects. The whole time, my mother was talking about the last time the two of us came to campus, five Aprils ago, when I was deciding where to go to college. I had never thought seriously about Stanford and only applied because of a fee waiver. I was busy dreaming of chunky sweaters, brick buildings, and freezing my ass off in New England. But when I got in, my mom said we could do a mother-daughter trip for the visit weekend. I complained about the cross-country flight. I complained some more when my mom made me visit a million Bay Area aunties who promised to be my “local guardians” when I enrolled. A fun fact is that when my mother immigrated at 23 — which is incidentally my age — she came to the Bay. To her, it must have felt like coming home.
I am thinking about visit weekend because preparations are underway for it right now, when I look outside my dorm window. It happens, like clockwork, on the last week of every April. One of my friends remarked today that Stanford intentionally hosts their visit weekend two days before the decision deadline, so that you don’t have time to change your mind. People joke that Stanford conspires with Bill Gates to get the weather so perfect, the sky so blue. That was what charmed me when I visited: the grass, the warmth. The kids lounging in fountains, seeming genuinely at peace. Already I suspected that I had a mental predisposition for anxiety, and I thought, if I am going to be anxious anywhere, it might as well be under a motherfucking palm tree. I made a pros-and-cons list of coming to Stanford, the farthest school from home, the school known least for its humanities, the lazy heat and leisurely bicyclists the opposite of New England, whose schools had given me a bad feeling when I visited, and somehow I decided to go. I think it was the right choice for me. But of course I can’t know that for sure.
I am comparing this senior spring to my last one because it’s my only point of reference. But I have a lot of different, wonderful stuff in my life that I couldn’t have dreamed of then. A lot of things that I already know I will miss. For example, I am writing my second Big Girl novel (a campus novel hehe), which I am going to submit as my senior arts thesis. I know how special it is to write in campus coffee shops, to build an internal world that mirrors the world around me. I am also writing a second senior thesis, which is a literary analysis about Dalit women’s autobiographies, because I have always loved reading as much as I loved writing, and I realized in undergrad you could do that professionally, too. (I have been told that if you complete your undergrad thesis and you don’t hate it, you might be destined / doomed to go to grad school. I think I want to be a literary academic someday.) I am also teaching an Asian American Studies course I designed as an opportunity to nerd out about South Asian American pop culture, diasporic identity, and power structures. To top off the senior vibes, this year I am an RA and get to keep bowls of candy and condoms outside my door. I am 95% recovered from my first breakup. I am feeling quite competent and good.
I just finished reading Stay True by Hua Hsu, which is one of the most relatable novels I have read about college friendships, how intense and precarious they can be. The author describes a campus ecosystem of aspiring young Asian American artists that — although taking place at Berkeley in the ‘80’s — felt weirdly similar to my own. It is probably going to be one of my top reads of the year.
What struck me about Stay True, in addition to its thoughtful insights on friendship, grief, identity, and loss, was the retrospective tone of its narrator. I have not read many novels about college, and even those that I have are coming-of-age journeys whose narrations hew closely to the perspectives of their young protagonists, breathless and in-the-moment, with enormous stakes but little perspective. I love these novels because I relate to them; they give language to my anxieties. But rarely do I read about college from someone who has survived it. The grown-up Hua writes lovingly about his college self, his dreams and aspirations, how pretentious he used to be, how little he knew. He writes with the benefit of years of growth and hindsight, of what it felt like to be my age, to fall in love for the first time: One passage that stood out to me was about a college person’s sense of time:
“At that age, time moves slow. You're eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next. Life happened elsewhere, it was simply a matter of finding a map that led there. Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you're so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen. A day felt like forever, a year was a geological era.”
It was in moments like these that I felt read for filth by Hua Hsu! How did he remember what college used to feel like? How did he put it into words? (It helped, I think, that he had a whole archive of college diaries, letters, and writing projects to draw from.) It occurred to me, then, that one day this era of my life will be in the rearview mirror, and I will look back on it and be able to talk about it like he does: tender, knowing, with both ridicule and empathy for his younger self. I will process and fit things into their larger context, all of these disparate and accumulative and seemingly life-altering experiences I have had in college, and finally it will all make sense. I felt this way, on a much smaller scale, when writing All the Yellow Suns, which, while not a memoir, depicts a high school experience similar to mine. With ATYS, which I wrote during the pandemic, I felt like I was finally able to answer the questions that plagued me at age 16 (is it okay to be gay? Will it ever be okay with my parents?) Like I had made a time capsule of a specific moment in my life, something that felt honest, like a hug for who I used to be. I got what I needed out of writing it, which was understanding, and by publishing it I hoped it could be useful for somebody else, too.
All this is to say: I am grateful to Hua Hsu for writing the literary companion to my senior spring, giving me a sense of closure and shifting perspectives. I still think it is insane how books can do that.
I don’t know exactly what I want for my life after graduation. I know the qualities of it: space to read and write, an apartment with plants and kitchen appliances, the opportunity to do good for people, whether that’s through my job or outside of it, friends I can love on, preferably living in walking distance, and ~just~ enough structure and legitimacy so that my parents don’t worry about me too much. I know in this horrible post-grad jobs economy (like, even the CS girlies are suffering) even this might be a lot to ask. But I am hopeful I can figure it out. I am going to do what I have done in all points of transition in my life, which is to open my heart, full-send my desires, and take lots of notes, leaving bread crumbs for myself in case I stray too far from what is good for me and need to find my way back to myself. I feel very lucky and grateful.
beautiful reflections, always such a privilege to experience a lil snippet of your genius mind!
so beautiful! being in transition can be such a tricky thing and i always feel more grounded seeing how others navigate the messy spaces of growing up. wishing u the best of luck on your post-grad journey <33