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I’ve noticed that a lot of our social activities here in Hong Kong have been quite classy, especially this weekend’s events. High-end bars, Australian restaurants, the Hong Kong Jockey Club… this isn’t quite Hong Kong to most of her citizens. Most of these major events were organized by Yale alumni, who are, no doubt, upper class members of Hong Kong society. That said, these experiences are indeed fantastic and I’m enjoying myself a great deal, but it did get me thinking about our expectations and how they play into our quality of life. It occurred to me that this summer, and, to a degree, the entire Yale experience is rapidly preparing me for just that kind of life: cocktail parties, fancy dinners, and watching horses run around in circles.
However, having just finished my second year at Yale, my future as a member of that society is far from guaranteed. Every year, hundreds of Yale graduates leave to pursue work in inner cities, developing countries, and other environments where wants give way to needs. Yet this summer is building a set of expectations and behavioral assumptions in which image rises above wants and needs, and that image is one of class and status. And I suspect that even those Yalies working in inner cities and developing countries still expect a level of high class in their own projection of themselves.
To be sure, there isn’t anything measurably wrong with the upper class and their social mode. Yale, like it’s ivied cousins, has a level of prestige to uphold, a level of grace and history that its name demands. These most recent experiences, however, have made me far more aware that very recently, Yale’s student body was almost entirely children of wealth and status. While this is fortunately no longer true, it is still very much the image of Yale, and the Ivy League, that prevails. With names like Yale and Harvard and Princeton come a sense of privilege that is often begrudged by the rest of the world.
Maybe this is why I hesitate to tell newly-acquainted strangers where I go to school: not because I’m ashamed of my school – quite the contrary – but because I fear that their image of me will be incorrigibly colored by prestige and status, that they will immediately regard me as inaccessible and elite. Perhaps I hesitate because I want and need to prove to them (and myself?) that I am no different, that just because I go to Yale does not mean that I live a life of entitlement and prestige, that just because I was given these expectations by a singing bulldog does not take away my upbringing in a family built by hard work and sacrifice.
And yet, here I am in Hong Kong, where alumni after alumni shows me what the world looks like on the other side, and all I can see are high heels and twenty dollar cocktails.
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It’s nice to see that other people notice this as well.