The first time was last semester in ConLaw when we started going over all the classic civil rights cases. Plessy, Brown, Katzenbach v. Morgan… Once we hit Korematsu, I lost it. And it was totally awkward because I sat in the front of the room of hundreds, on the left. There was no standing up and casually walking out of there. I was trapped and there was nothing I could do to suppress the tears or the sniffling. I think I actually started heaving a little. Laura, who sat next to me from my section, wrote frantically on her notes, “WHAT’S WRONG???” When I could not calm down she later turned to me and asked, quite rationally, “well, can’t you just meditate?” Before I knew it, a small pack of tissues landed from behind on my table in front of me. (Thank you Stewart!) I began to wrap my face and head in the scarf I was wearing so pretty soon it looked like I was wearing a navy blue and cream plaid flannel hajab. Since the earth had not kindly opened up and swallowed me at that moment, it was all I could do to disappear.
What had happened was that I had been transported. Ten years ago at the same school, I learned all these cases for the first time. But then it had been different. I was a young Political Science major and I really believed in everything. I believed in the world and I had faith in everybody and everything. Most of all, I believed in my own power, that I had power, and I was going to go out into the world and stop these injustices from happening anymore. God had been generous with me, I had gotten the Fulbright, went to Colombia and afterwards had the opportunity to study in one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Yes, I was privileged and I was going to infiltrate and make a difference in the system.
Funny because once I arrived to England and started my grad degree, things didn’t go quite as planned. Imagine my shock when the department I had gotten accepted to, Land Economy, spent most of its time on English Town and Country Planning. And I had thought I had come there to learn ways to create land reform in countries of armed conflict. When told that everything was “Economics” and not just leftist ranting, I was forced to then watch the world renowned Economists fight over the most pressing concern of whether or not Economics was a hard science. Is it Math??? I don’t know??? Just throw in some more numbers and models that only mathematicians can understand and then call the chart “Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa.” (By the way, no one ever actually said that but that’s what it pretty much felt like. I did have a professor who suggested that slavery in the U.S. would have ended on its own anyway because it was losing its economic viability because slaves began to shirk. Sure that’s hearsay but it did happen and for one of my exams, I wrote a 15 page paper on why I thought she was wrong.) However, what I DO have on tape, (because I used to tape all my lectures in one of my favorite classes) was how land reform should be accomplished in the following way, “you do as the Americans did with the Homestead Act. You send all the European settlers out West. Sure it wasn’t a good thing if you were an Indian but…” This was the second oldest university in the English-speaking world.
I had two best friends at the time, one was a Swedish girl named Anna and the other was my Colombian friend Paula. I met Paula in French class and we bonded for the most obvious reasons. (Just imagine me squealing in the middle of class, “TU ES COLOMBIENNE!!!!” JE VIENS DE LA COLOMBIE!!! and forcing her to hang out with me until we became friends.) But Anna, (my liebling) and I met on separate terms. I don’t know how it started but existentially mental people are like magnets, we always find each other, anywhere. We played football (soccer) together for St. Edmund’s. She was your typical and gorgeous, blonde hair, blue-eyed Swede and I was, well, crazy little Asian-American me. She was a Botanist? (Sorry Liebling, I can only remember that it was an environmental subject and that you were always belligerent about tuna fishing off the coast of Ecuador). Anyway, the first day we hung out off the soccer field, I learned her story. Before Cambridge, she had travelled the world with the money she had received from her father’s inheritance when she was young. She ran with the Russian cocaine circuit in Israel, travelled all throughout Africa and her scariest moment was when she made it through a checkpoint in Johannesburg solely because “I was white, Tina.” Her best friend was murdered by a drug dealer in South Africa. She loved science fiction novels. She couldn’t sleep either.
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| My friend Nicho, Paula, other friend Tulika and Tulika's mom |
Anna and I would often go running together and went to the same “counselor,” or free, on-campus therapist. Her name was Leslie. Nice, plump, a little-older than middle-aged British woman. Much better than the first therapist Anna used to go to who used to say things like “Oh don’t stress out, school is hard but everything will be okay.” (That is the most cliché thing a therapist at Cambridge could ever say since it is notorious for mental disorders, depression and rampant drug use.) But the problem wasn’t school. (How could it be? I spent most of my classtime in Café Nero with Paula.) I don’t know why, but Leslie got it. Anna and I both loved Leslie. She got it. She understood that, no, it wasn’t an exam we were upset about but more like we were having problems reconciling all these pretentious theories, castles and callous formalities with well, the rest of the world. It’s a little difficult to go from the daily realities of social cleansing, war and displacement to old white English men trying to prove that Economics is really Math. Leslie not only understood us but did the most perfect thing ever, at times made us feel like what we were saying was the most, natural, blasé thing ever. She used to fall asleep during our sessions. “OH MY GOD!” Anna exclaimed when I asked her if she did that to her too, “She does that with me too! And I think I’m telling her the juiciest, most interesting story ever…”
So today, I cried again. This second semester of law school began full-fledged this week and it was stressful. We were all stressed. All the doubts I had in my mind last semester of “Really Tina, what the fuck are you doing here after you promised yourself you would never put yourself through academics again” began to re-root in my mind and become firmly planted. I cried yesterday because my internal fight or flight was telling me to put the book down and stop reading before I was plunged into that hideous battle with insomnia again. I didn’t understand any of the ten pages it took me two hours to read in my CrimLaw book. I came downstairs and was shaking. “Stop it. Stop it Tina. It’s a different moment now. Stop.”
Everyone has been stressed. And today when I sat in Property and began the group project, I was already a little tense from the night before. Our row had been assigned to answer questions as a group. The girl at the end who led our group was eager to get her voice out, a little irritated but answering the questions, making it a point to let us all know that she had spent an exorbitant amount of time reading and outlining the night before. I asked her to re-read one of the answers she was telling us and where she had found it in the book. She said she didn’t know and had it in her outline because “I always outline everything I read every night.” She was quite vocal, making it a point that the professor who sat in earshot could hear her. I asked her if I could see it because I didn’t understand the way she was telling it to me. She snapped at me “well if you want to see it, you can come over here and look at it.” (She was four people down from my row.) Reluctantly, she conceded and passed me her outline. I didn’t know where in it she was referring to so I got up, walked over to her and asked her if she could show me. She really didn’t like this and made it clear. I began to get upset too because I felt that all the attitude was unnecessary and she was yelling at me because I didn’t know where exactly she had written down what she was saying. I told her, “I’m sorry, but I have a learning disability where I don’t understand everything when people say it out loud so I have to read it.” Then she pointed it out but I was mad that I had to say that. Really mad. I told her to check her attitude and stop speaking to us like that and yes, I gave her the hand. She went off “don’t you EVER put your hand in my face…” When the groups reconvened and class resumed, I got up, visibly upset, went to the bathroom and cried until class was over.
I obviously cannot be a litigator. And this is not about making her look bad. She was stressed too and I’m sure she felt like we were all a bunch of free riders at that moment. But I was upset because yes, on her side she was right, she was cutthroat and she would go far in this field. I spent the whole time crying in the bathroom wondering if I still even wanted to be in this field. I should go back to teaching little kids how to paint. But that gets boring. So I’m between intellectually-stimulating adults who are rewarded for acting like douchebags and loving kids. There must be a middle ground. Maybe I can teach law to five year olds?
I’m okay now and no, not all my law school classmates are cutthroat or mean. On the contrary, I ran into many of them in the bathroom (yes, because I was still there when class ended) who asked me if I was okay and didn’t just walk away when I nodded. One girl who I didn’t even know had witnessed the whole thing just said to me when I told her I was fine, “Don’t worry, that girl snaps at everyone, even professors, she just thinks she’s better than everyone because she graduated in three years.” No, no I insisted, all this really wasn’t about her.
And it isn’t about her. So what is this about? Understanding. Last semester, I had noticed the girl who had yelled at me, (who is a youngin', but a very intelligent one) because she was always vocal in ConLaw. I had always been impressed with her knowledge and how well-prepared she was. I don’t know how, but I found out through the gossip line that she was trying to transfer into a better school, (I think it was Georgetown) and that she was a staunch Socialist. So basically, what had happened today in Property was that I ran into the me ten years ago, and she had yelled at me.
God, bless her, bless this moment and bless us. May her path be fulfilling and may she have all the success she desires. Being a Socialist in this day and age is a rare and noble thing. Especially for someone her age. May she carry it out and make use of her intelligence and education in a way that is much more effective than I was able to. And God, please be gentle with her when you teach her that the biggest power that we all have is not what we do in the movement, but how we treat others and create the world around us. That was definitely difficult for me to learn too.
On my dresser is a postcard that Anna sent me after Cambridge for Christmas, a black and white postcard of the destroyed town center of Cologne in 1945, after World War II. On the back she wrote:
Hello Tina,
Maybe you’ll think this is the most depressing Christmas card you have ever received, but for me – and I hope that I can share this – [it] symbolizes the enormous survival capacity that exists in humans. They shelled Karneval and ripped the piss out of the Austrians and the Swiss, even though around them was total destruction. It does not matter which city you look at, London, Berlin or Cologne, it’s all the same. Seeing this picture also kind of puts ____ events in a bit of perspective as well – you don’t think! However, as humans are only 50 years later people start to forget, and even worse: remember the events overly one-sided. Perhaps what I wanted to say is that most people don’t get it and will never do but it’s ok. Maybe the point of struggle to fight to rebuild and heal is to have those few hours of Karneval in February and walk through the destruction and laugh, not at it but to be alive. It is the single meeting, the one life, no the one second of reflection over an old photograph that makes everything worth it. And no coca-cola colored, dressed old man in the white beard is going to tell me anything else!
BIG HUG + Happy Christmas!
-Anna Z.
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| The Liebling and I on my birthday in Cambridge. Ich Liebe Dich Anna. |
Brilliant.
ReplyDeleteI'm very impressed by your writing style and story... definitely lends a bittersweet flavor to some of the notions of cultural communication that we talked about before; namely that people who only consume video are missing out!