Chapter Ten #2
I thought back to four years ago, when I was applying for college.
The advice that I read online all said that in your essays, you should try to sound smart, but you shouldn’t appear like you were trying to sound smart.
Similarly, you should show extensive engagement in community service and extracurriculars, but in a way that made it appear you did it not just so you could get into a good college, but out of a genuine passion.
Passion was what made you interesting, but passion cost a lot of money.
And if you were from a middle-class family or lower-class family, you wouldn’t want to invest that much money unless you knew you were getting a return, perhaps a return in the form of admission to a great college.
That was where you ran into the catch-22.
Universities didn’t want the students who were trying to game the system; they wanted students who were genuine.
Who weren’t desperate. They didn’t want the items on your résumé to appear like they had come effortlessly, but they weren’t supposed to be too effortful either.
If genuine passion made you interesting, then it was desperation that made you boring.
Perhaps this was the secret language I had missed all along, the language they spoke at Arnold’s art gallery event, the language that made you friends at places like Annelise’s anniversary party.
I used to believe that it was the wealthy’s intrinsic understanding that they were better than everyone else, but I understood now that this wasn’t the case.
Only insecure people tried to be better than everyone else.
No, this secret language was simply the ethos of abundance that only the rich and elite can espouse without delusion: a complacency that comes from the fact that you want, and will want, for nothing.
Its opposing force was desperation: the need to strive and try because you lacked this abundance, yet desired it with every ounce of your being.
I was no stranger to this sensation; I recognized that the ethos of desperation, of striving, engulfed every action I committed and every word I spoke.
I finally understood what Robert had meant all along.
I was just another robotic Asian kid with good grades and good scores that showed I was exactly what they didn’t want: a try-hard.
But how was I supposed to get interesting, authentic, non-calculated life experiences on short notice?
If I were Laura, I could just buy them—a lifetime of private schools and travel that contributed to an overarching worldliness—but I was already twenty-one years old and all I had in my bank account was five hundred dollars in savings from my work-study job and the twenty-five hundred that David had sent me.
I stared at the number in my checking account.
Three thousand dollars wasn’t nothing. It was more than I had ever had in my checking account.
I could probably do something with three thousand dollars.
After all, I was scrappy. I mean, I got into Columbia from a random high school in South Dakota, didn’t I?
Four years ago, when applying to college, I managed to make myself seem like not too much of a try-hard even though I totally was one, didn’t I?
I pulled together enough interesting experiences for the application despite having grown up in a single-parent household in South Dakota, didn’t I?
If I spent all three thousand dollars on strengthening my application, I would still need an abortion, but maybe I could go to one of those nonprofit clinics that don’t turn anyone away.
I told the receptionist that I had changed my mind about the procedure. I took the train home.
—
I dropped my bag on the floor and sat at my desk.
I took out a stack of Post-it notes and wrote down ideas on each of them.
Then I grabbed a sheet of notebook paper and made three columns: Yes, No, and Maybe.
As though I were taking a standardized test, I started with the easiest answers, placing most of the Post-it notes with Robert’s suggestions in the No column.
I didn’t have time to join the Peace Corps or write a bestselling memoir.
I didn’t think I was capable of becoming a night manager at McDonald’s.
But not all of Robert’s suggestions were nonstarters.
Founding a nonprofit wasn’t a terrible idea.
I’d just need to figure out the right cause.
I could use the three thousand dollars to file the paperwork to form an official nonprofit, with an official-sounding name that would indicate a noble mission.
The type of mission that only an interesting person would devote their time and resources to.
To brainstorm more ideas, I took my computer out of my backpack and typed “what makes a person interesting” into the search bar.
Most of the answers had to do with “overcoming hardship” or “having unique life experiences.” I thought growing up in South Dakota was plenty unique and contained plenty of hardship, but Robert had mentioned that going to college in New York City negated my upbringing in South Dakota.
I would need to think of something else.
I considered the more recent events in my life.
Just two hours ago I had been sitting in the waiting room of a clinic that offered abortions.
Having an abortion was interesting, but didn’t a lot of women have abortions?
Besides, it was just a one-time procedure, not an ongoing experience.
You did it, then it was over, and you avoided the actual permanent, long-term thing, which was having a baby.
I scoffed. To think if I didn’t do anything about my current state, I would grow a child inside of me.
A real-life human being. Now, that would be interesting.
It would demonstrate both hardship and a unique life experience.
I mean, what other Columbia senior, unmarried, alone, would choose to have a baby?
And raise it while applying for law school?
I rolled away from the desk and held the weight of my chin in my right hand.
Was I seriously considering having a baby to get into law school?
That was an insane plan, even for me. The norm in New York was to have babies in your mid-to-late thirties.
And I was going to have a baby right out of college?
When I had literally just hit drinking age?
Besides, weren’t babies supposed to be super annoying?
But the plan started to sound less crazy the more I thought about it.
I always knew I wanted kids, so I’d have to deal with the annoying parts of having a baby at some point in my life.
Wasn’t it better to deal with an infant now, when I had time, rather than when I was a busy corporate lawyer?
Also, I had resources at my disposal that other people in my situation might not, like an Ivy League education and a rich baby daddy.
Once I got over the initial shock of the situation, I realized that maybe it wasn’t such a bad plan.
Sure, it was crazy, but if I really thought everything through, it wasn’t that crazy.
I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as crazy; maybe just bold.
And unique. Wasn’t uniqueness what Harvard was looking for?
Maybe this was exactly what I needed. Following the conventional path didn’t work, so now I needed to pursue something unconventional enough that it would truly set me apart from all the Boring Asian Females knocking on the doors of Harvard Law School, begging to be let in.
I dumped all of the Post-it notes into the recycling bin. I flipped to an empty page in my notebook and scribbled down the following:
Option A:
I use the $3,000 in my bank account to start a charity, which I can write about in my personal statement when I reapply to Harvard next cycle.
Hopefully the nonprofit makes me seem more interesting and worldly to the admissions officers.
The problem is, they’ll see that they have rejected me once before, and it may come across as a calculated move.
Plus, plenty of other people start nonprofits, so I would need to pick a truly unique cause.
Option B:
I get a job as a paralegal. My résumé won’t change much, except a little bit more work experience and hopefully a better letter of recommendation from one of my managers. Basically, I’m counting on a less competitive class and a little more luck, and neither of those are guaranteed.
Option C:
I have the baby and brand myself as the modern woman who wants to do it all: motherhood and a law career at the same time.
In my personal essay, I write about how my experience as a mother has encouraged me to pursue public interest law that advocates for marginalized women and children (once I matriculate, I won’t actually follow through on the public interest part).
The problem is, I’ll be stuck with a baby.
There was no option D. The prior night, before drifting off into a melatonin-induced sleep, I had contemplated giving up the idea of Harvard altogether.
But the notion that Laura Kim would take my spot at the top university in the world was inconceivable.
Laura, who didn’t even seem interested in law until just now, who had not suffered and sacrificed nearly as much as I had—who didn’t spend the entire summer before college working at a fast-food drive-through so she wouldn’t have to ask her mom for more money, who didn’t drive for two hours each week to take calculus at the local university because they didn’t offer it at her high school, who already had everything going for her—managed to be superior to me in truly every single way possible.
I didn’t know how I would wake up every day and be able to look myself in the face.
It was bad enough that she had even gotten in.
That already made my work much harder: I would need to guarantee that I could achieve more than her at Harvard in every possible way—better grades, better clerkships, better extracurriculars, and, of course, a better job.
And all of that required that I get accepted first.
By the time I finished thinking through each option, it was already midnight. I realized I had already made my decision. I would keep it. I would keep the baby.