I’ve been meaning to start this article for a while now, but every time I do, I am afraid that when it is done the next day, I would have gone through another phase of change. And that has been the college experience for me: acquiring new things without even searching for them in the first place, discovering new passions that I did not know were rooted inside of me, and fully embracing my identities as a young person by demolishing everything I had ever known about myself, only to rebuild with something I did not know I had acquired, something entirely new to me that was probably possessed by me all along.
College has been a thrill ride that was nothing short of scenic, and the more I practiced intentional thinking in the moment, the more vivid and moving the scenes lead themselves into the next. And when I don’t enjoy the moment and just let things glide through mindlessly, I try my hardest to replay them in my head and connect the dots.
Why am I more patient now?
Why am I less excited about this one thing?
Why is it that the food at the Pit (our biggest, all-you-can-eat dining option) becoming more and more tasteful when I acquire a positive attitude?
Why do I have to try so hard around these certain people and not at all around another?
Why didn’t this friendship last?
Where is this person on campus and why have I not seen them in a while?
Is the reason behind why I have not seen them in a while one that is worth reflecting and worth pondering?
College has many times, given me the feeling of living life through a film. When I walk by Wait Chapel, the midpoint and the hallmark building of the campus, I often gain new intentions for the moment. My sense of smell becomes heightened toward the soil after a night of rain, my sense of touch becomes sharper around the cozy summery wind; and even my sense of sight, the smiling of people around me as they relax on the quad with a blanket and a good story to tell.
That is when I feel that the camera is rolling while I become more mature, more seasoned, and less camera-shy about the infinite possibilities of life. The magic of independence when it is also met with more long-term goals for the future, more choices to make in order to channel that independence into useful projects, and more time to travel amongst unknown people and places.
I call this life or a transitional version of it ------ perhaps a process of nonstop metamorphoses, ceaseless pursuit of what makes you tick and abandonment of the things that stray you from it, things that do nothing but strangling you with deadlines. It’s finding the balance between work and play and converging them both so that there is no distinct line between either.
It’s grasping what makes our hearts beat, running across the pond until you’ve gained another strand of muscle and burned through another pair of shoes, just so you know that you have worked your heart out for a project that you desire and love. It’s life, one in a greenhouse of course, but it is not short of reflections and wonderments for what is outside and what we could do to understand it better.
“Home is not where you come from, but where you can become yourself.” This statement by Pico Lyer, an international who was born in the UK, spent most of his life in the United States, and resided for a while in Japan, resonated with me greatly. Sometimes I spent so much time looking forward that I forget to recount how much I have evolved in the past, where all my known experiences are stored and brewed into the person I am in this moment.
I forget that time is linear with a “before” and “after” segments and I am the dot in the center, constantly recalibrating the here and now with things I have gathered along the way. I see my experience at Wake Forest University oftentimes a process of concentrated growth and diligent studies, but also one that is insulated from the outside world at times.
Maybe to the surprise of many, being in a largely homogenous university where some 80% of its students are Caucasian, has allowed me to reflect on my diverse, cross-cultural, and adapting experiences even more, and meet people who are on the same boat as me when it comes to holding on to ourselves in an environment where many are pushed to fit in. I am grateful for that, although I didn’t expect this gratitude, and that is the feeling ------ thinking that you know your direction only to realize that your perception of the road was something else all along, and having to develop new tools for resistance against what it meant to be “normal” and what it meant to be “out of order”.
By comparing how starkly my experiences contrast with many people here, I could pick out things about myself that make me stand out that I will continue targeting, and things that will bring me to people and ideas that I have always dreamed of encountering but never had due to the fact that I lived in a small town, at least for the more recent times in my life.
Indeed, before the first semester of college, I came in with some idealistic expectations of how a college is a place that I will thrive as a young person, and most of them are met. I was also happily struck by the level of intelligence and steadfastness a lot of my peers possessed.
So, I dived in with a packaged version of myself that was more vibrant but also more whitewashed, a survival mechanism that I adapted to make as many friends as possible within a short amount of time, and to fit in with the celebrated zeitgeist more which is largely privileged, preppy, and culturally homogenous.At first, I stuck with it, and I was happy for a while, but that happiness did not sustain past half a semester.
I remember when I had encountered some people down my hall and tagged along with them to a pregame. I had never actually gone through the motion of pregaming before so I had no idea what I was getting myself into. This was also about to be the first time I see alcohol in a college setting, and I was not nervous but I was not exactly settled either because I barely knew these people.
There were these two boys whom I still recognize around campus today and run into at parties, but I no longer associate myself with them because I did not agree with a lot of the things they were saying about people. In that room, there was a mix of people, and a lot of them had done the same pre-orientation program conducted by Outdoor Pursuit which is an organization I love on campus.
The girls were friendly and fun, and a lot of them had cool summer and spring break stories to tell, and the boys brought beer and juul’ed, and that was also the first time I had ever seen a juul because my high school’s substance trend was a bit different, so I took it all in and went along, even trying it once. The boys were outnumbered by the girls which I later learned was common for pregaming because we wanted to meet the ratio for going to parties, and the more girls the merrier because they will likely get you in.
Once the night set in a bit more and we went for a round of food and festivities at a new student fair, I began feeling like that I and some other people were getting left out a lot because we were not in the same pre-orientation together. The boys also became haughty and excited, and this is when I remember them using the n-word in a casual context even though neither of them were black, and making homophobic remarks without realizing the seriousness of their biases.
Having walked back at this moment, I looked around the space and saw the girls nodding along and sat on the couch with the friends I had just met, and I felt the air was frozen. I felt uncomfortable and suffocated by an alarming intuition that told me to leave the situation, but a more stubborn part of me did not want to because I did not want to turn things down and leave a bad impression so early into college.
Then, a small group of us branched out and I found out that this group also had the same fear as I did, and we got to know each other a bit more. This group of people went on to become my friend group for about a semester when thing began to turn sour and they began acting more distant before I realized that I was doing the same thing because I had very little in common with them in terms of ideologies.
I am still pretty good friends with one of the people to this day, but the rest were acquaintances at best because I feel that both parties could have been more upfront about the falling out. But, the falling out also made me realize the nature of college friendships ------ that they are easier to make, but harder to pinpoint.
So, by letting things flow, we save ourselves the trouble of having to be hostile to people we will encounter for the next four years in casual and professional settings. And by falling out, I could reach out to other like-minded people in the process and develop relationships with them that I never saw coming, and with my outgoing nature, making friends was not difficult, but making the right kind of friends is a whole other challenge that took me a while to handle. And in the process of adjusting to college and settling into a group, I also found out things about myself, many times the hard way, that I had to stop and reflect on and make major decisions about.
From trying to fit in at the beginning to gradually branching out into who I fundamentally am, the process of “playing the game” is one that I barely realized existed, but understood as one that was necessary and worth celebrating. In short, falling out from people, going a bit wild in different fields of life, trying new things, and trekking into the unknown, have all helped me realign and redefine my comfort zone and my adaptation skills toward obstacles.
Second semester is the time that I finally began embodying the “becoming myself through mutual acceptances between people and places” concept by exploring different spaces on campus. First, I dropped out of sorority recruitment because while I enjoyed talking to the girls, I did not enjoy what the institution of Greek life brought upon young people.
Aside from the fact that I was personally marginalized, I did not click with the dynamic of complacency toward rape culture and how it perpetuates the campus at large. Instead of staying with the current, my gut told me to swim away from it and examine the flaws within Wake’s campus culture in a more coherent way and target what I could change as a student.
The day I dropped out, I woke up feeling refreshed, new, but most importantly, honest. I had never felt this comfortable and this empowered about any decision I had to make than this moment. Because of the high concentrated whiteness in a small, intense, and expensive academic environment, there are a lot of things that I have faced at Wake are things that I never had to embody growing up, despite growing up in two different countries, China and the United States, and having met some very difficult unlikable people in very hostile situations. And I believe a lot of Wake students understand that their daily actions contribute to larger dogmas of prejudice, but they choose not to care.
Why? Because they have the luxury to do so yet they feel that prejudice does not affect them directly, therefore it is not a priority. I think that is a shame because a lot of these people have the power to modify their actions and even to help others who are less recognized for who they are, yet they choose to take what they believe to be the more comfortable way out.
Looking back on the night when I was with my very first large group of friends at Wake, I have grown a long way not because this place has fundamentally changed me, but because this place has stimulated me to dig deep in finding the things that are already there inside of me, and posed as a stark contrast to what I have usually experienced. I love Wake Forest with all my heart because it loves me back, not exactly the same way I was used to be loved, but definitely a type of love that is nuanced and requires a lot of thinking.
The organizations and efforts, such as Musical Empowerment, a nonprofit on campus that stresses free musical education for people in need; and Compost Crew, where we are launching compost efforts in South Campus, etc. and the ones I partake and lead now. It is safe to say that organizations like these are ones that love me better than some, because they challenge me to be who I am.
College is definitely a time of experimentation and exploration, and I have done enough of it, sometimes too much, but all of us had morphed me into the person I am today, a person who believes that peaceful thinking toward obstacles is an unstoppable power, and there are no situations that we cannot learn from in life.
