timxu

The following is my finished essay for English 120: Reading & Writing the Modern Essay with Professor Ariel Watson. This particular unit is entitled “From Personal Experience.”

On the first day of pre-school, my new teacher asked me for my name, so I replied, “I want to go to the bathroom.” It was my first day of pre-school; I was four, and I didn’t have a lick of English in my head. Earlier in the morning, my parents had given me strict directions: don’t eat anything that doesn’t smell right; don’t take food from other children without asking; if you need to pee, tell the teacher “I want to go to the bathroom”; eat all the food in your lunchbox. And so, after my teacher asked for my name, I decided to reply with the phrase my parents had taught me in the morning. My teacher, my parents, and, I’m sure, many of the other children laughed. I did not. But I stood silent not because of embarrassment, but because of ignorance. Not only was I incapable of understanding my teacher’s question, I did not even truly comprehend the words that came out of my own mouth. Fortunately, there were no major consequences from my mistake – I did not become “I-want-to-go-to-the-bathroom” for the rest of the year. The teacher already knew my real name. In fact, she gave me my name.

In the most literal sense, my pre-school teacher forged my identity as an American. My parents had realized that my given Chinese name could be a liability for my social success and so, when they sat down with my pre-school teacher in the weeks prior to that first day, they asked her for ideas. They gave her my Chinese name, and she picked an English name that sounded closest to it. “Tim,” she told them. For the next fourteen years (and counting), I would answer to that name. My birth certificate reads ‘Xu Tianji,’ born in Xi’an, China, but since I was four, I have answered, as an American, to the name she gave me.

When I was two, my parents left me in the care of my mother’s mother in China while they established a new life in America. While I ran about in cloth diapers on dusty streets, they enjoyed their first meal at McDonald’s: a sixty-nine cent hamburger that they shared because it was all they could afford. I followed their trail a year later, boarding a fifteen-hour flight from Beijing to Detroit International Airport.

It had been a full year since I’d last seen my parents. Yet when my father first picked me up off the ground, I whispered into his ear, “Where’s our car?” Over the course of our overseas telephone conversations, I discovered that my parents had purchased a new vehicle. This was quite the luxury, one nearly impossible to attain for the average Chinese family at the time. Naturally, it trumped all else in my toddler mind. I was not interested in the sentimentality or emotion of the moment. Something far more important and exciting had captured my mind. During the drive home, I attached my face to the window, watching the hundreds of cars and their shining, spinning rims in awe. At one point, we stopped at a traffic light next to a large tractor-trailer. Moments later, I wondered why we were moving backwards.

In those early days, our apartment was on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise in the center of Detroit’s Wayne State University, where my parents did their graduate studies. I spent the first weeks at home with my grandmother, playing inside the apartment or outside in the playground. We were quite the pair, with no more than a dozen English phrases between us. But we quickly mastered the essential art of hand gestures and awkward grunts, our only method of communicating with the neighborhood children and their mothers. It must have been how the cavemen conversed tens of thousands of years ago. I would wave to say hello, then point from myself to the swing a few times, as if to ask, “Can I please use that swing you’re sitting on?” Finally, with a handful of nods or shakes of the head, I would either get onto my newly won swing, or storm away from the stubborn child who had refused my negotiations.

Of course, it did not always work. My parents often socialized with their fellow students, two of whom also had children of their own. They were older than me, the two girls, and they, too, had recently moved from China. Without a language barrier, we quickly became friends. However, they moved to America several years before I did, and thus already spoke English well. They readily used this advantage against me. Whenever they wished to ignore or exclude me, they did. I could only complain to my grandmother, “They’re speaking English again!”

A month later, the first day of pre-school came and passed. I learned English quickly – with no one there who could speak Chinese, pre-school forced me to speak English. By that Christmas, I was speaking in full phrases. By the next one, I was fluent. The girls could no longer ignore me by merely speaking English (though I quickly discovered that locked doors can be just as potent). I did not have to rely on wild hand motions – negotiating swings and see-saws became a matter of voice.

I could not have understood the significance of those first few months in America. In April of 1994, I was Xu Tianji, a Chinese toddler waddling down the dirty, cramped streets of Xi’an in hand-sewn pants and paper-thin shoes. By the time 1995 dawned, I was Tim Xu, an American boy running through the wide, grassy lawns of Detroit in cheap pants and sneakers. Perhaps that lack of understanding was exactly what enabled me to become so unmistakably American as quickly as I did. With an American name given to me by an American woman in an American city, I did not find my new identity – I was given it. I became Tim Xu not because I wanted to, but because my pre-school teacher thought it sounded like the name inscribed on my birth certificate.

I was too young to understand the remarkable nature of those opening months in America. I had passed through the ugly cruelties of adjusting to a new country relatively unscathed. Unlike my parents, I did not have to worry about my professional reputation, about creating a financial base from scratch, about starting over as an adult. My age, then, was my crutch, my get-out-of-hardship-free card. By the time I started kindergarten, I was more American than my parents would ever be. I had forgotten what life was like in China. Although I would not legally become an American citizen for another eight years, I was no longer a true Chinese citizen the day I stepped foot on American soil. At the age of three, I held only the most tenuous connection to a national identity. It was in the hurried process of learning English, of adapting to America’s culture that I assumed its identity and melted into its churning pot.

When I walked into that classroom for the first day of pre-school, I didn’t realize that all the other children looked different. Some were white, others black, but none were yellow-skinned. I didn’t realize the true difficulty of becoming fluent in a completely foreign language. And I certainly didn’t realize that this new ‘me’ could bring me so far.

A couple of months ago, I read a book called “Letters to my Son” by Kent Nerburn. I pulled a group of quotes from the book that especially hit me deep inside, which I rediscovered when I was searching for something else in Gmail. Here they are, with some thoughts attached to some of them.

“Strength based in force is a strength people fear. Strength based in love is a strength people crave.” — Strength based on love is stronger than any force possible. Though I wonder: how does one know that his strength is based in love rather than force? Is it the strength of a parent while his child is sick? Is it the strength of a man or woman who sacrifices everything for his family?

“Measure your greatness by the length of your reach, but also by the gentleness of your touch. For now, the world needs hands that love, not hands that conquer. Let your hands be among them.” — This sounds like something Barack Obama would say.

“Care for those around you. Look past differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices in life no more easily made.” — I believe very strongly in this statement, although I may not always live by it. However, recognizing and embracing differences in opinion, differences in character in everyone is something worth striving for.

“Find the few pieces of your life that help you live. Value them for the way they help you give. Never forget that if you just accumulate possessions as the logical outcome of pursuing your desires, you will lose your wings to fly.”

“Remember that you can’t choose love. Love chooses you. All you can really do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel the way it fills you to overflowing, then reach out and give it away. Give it back to the person who brought it alive in you. Give it to others who seem poor in spirit. Give it to the world around you in any way you can.” — Perhaps my favorite quote of all of these. There is so much depth in this one quote. The ideas: that love cannot be forced, that once you have it, you ought to share it.

“Money is nothing more than a commodity, an agreed-upon abstraction of exchange. It is the spirit of that exchange that animates money and gives it meaning. Great givers, rich and poor, use money to close doors between us all. Be a giver and a sharer. In some unexpected and unforeseeable fashion, all else will take care of itself.”

“The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others.” — Truer words have never been said. I love to teach, and this is why.

“We have the power to create joy and happiness by our simplest acts of caring and compassion. We have the power to unlock the goodness in other people’s hearts by sharing the goodness in ours.” — Unfortunately, Former-President Bush did not get this message. Although it wouldn’t have worked, it certainly would have been better than his idea.

“The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become longtime friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know each other’s laughs, passions, sadnesses, and fears. They see each other at their worst and at their best. This is ideal but not often possible. You need to look beyond your sexual attraction for other keys to compatibility. One of these is laughter. Laughter tells you how much you will enjoy each other’s company over the long term. If your laughter together is good and healthy, then you will have a healthy relationship to the world. Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other laugh, you can always surprise each other. And if you can always surprise each other, you can always keep the world around you new.”

“Choose a vocation, not a job, and you will be at peace. Take a job instead of finding a vocation, and you’ll be waiting for retirement. We all owe ourselves better than that.”

“Though there are many good reasons to fight, there are no good fights. Someone always gets harmed, and when one person is harmed we are all diminished. Rise above your passions and fears and you will be able to avoid most fights.” — I’m not sure my predilection for avoiding conflict is based on such poetic terms, but it’s a good sentiment.

“Death should hold no terror, and we should embrace our dying as a momentary passage into the great harmony of eternity.”

Male or female, all of you should definitely look into reading this book. It’s got so many nuggets of great wisdom about growing up and being a truly good person.

Well, I think I’m pretty much settled into this new semester. It’s definitely pleasant to have this happen three weeks into the semester. I’m quite busy, with five classes and a lab, along with a plethora of organizations and clubs and the job, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I still have time to be (somewhat) social, to get my work done, and to relax and watch a bit of TV when I need to take a break.

I’m quite happy with life at this point. I’m rarely bored, and there’s a good mix of fun and work. Of course, stress happens occasionally, but what’s life without excitement?

In other news, happy birthday to Daniel and Tasia! I hope you guys enjoyed the party (and the gigantic card) last night. It was certainly fun to plan. Also, my Obama HOPE poster came in! It’s quite the backdrop to my workspace. If I ever need inspiration while banging out the last hundred words of a paper, I just have to look up!

And yes, I am working on a paper as I write this post. I’m just taking a break! Seriously!

Here’s my tentative schedule for this semester, pending a few lotteries and whatnot. I’ll know what it is for good by the end of the week.

They say college is a period of self-discovery and self-realization, of epiphanies and maturation. Yet yesterday morning, at approximately 10:45 AM, when I handed in my Chemistry final and ended my first semester at Yale, I felt no different than I had the day I first walked through Phelps Gate. But I soon realized that, though I felt unchanged, the first eighth of my undergraduate experience left an indelible mark upon me.

My first steps on this adventure were rather timid. Awkward hellos and hi-my-name-is-Tim’s were the theme of the morning when the FPC freshman gathered in Old Campus for the first time. Yet by the time we returned to Yale two days later, I had friends, a few of whom I anticipate will be familiar faces for the rest of my life.

To say the least, FPC gave me the confidence to introduce myself and to smile. And, of course to introduce myself again, after I had forgotten his name. The two days I spent at Camp Awosting truly represented a great prelude to Yale and its experience. But I cannot forget its most important lesson: that my roommate from Texas did not have a southern accent – and that this was normal for Yalies from the south.

The first month of school was, and, in my mind, still is a blur. I met people from different organizations and through different people. I spent time with some friends, then promptly abandoned them for other friends. It was truly a strange period of unrest during which I never stopped to think. I plowed forward, forgoing books for friendship, sleep for fun. My closest friends remained my closest friends, yet everyone else shuffled around me. I had forsaken my friends back home, caught up in this whirlwind of novelty and excitement. Yet, as fate would have it, all the disparate threads I sewed in that first month would interweave in short order.

If I had to pick the single moment that turned the page, it was a late night in early October. Myself and a few friends watched “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and then we talked. And talked. And after that, I settled. I found a group of friends with whom I could laugh, with whom I could be stupid, and with whom I could just relax and have fun. Then time began to fly.

At this point, I reconnected with high school friends, and the semester continued at a rapid clip. Looking back, all I remember is fun moments, great conversations, and, unfortunately, several late nights at the library. Nonetheless, I was comfortable and happy.

Of course, over the semester, there were a few down moments. I am certainly not proud of a few decisions, yet I realize that each one, each wrong decision, is but another block to build upon. And I don’t regret those moments. I don’t regret, for example, the nights I spent hanging out with friends instead of studying for that midterm. I don’t regret any decision that turned out poorly in the rear-view mirror because I learned.

And so here I am, a semester done. From FPC to late-night talks to partying to turning eighteen to The (freezing) Game to reading week and finals – it’s been a long three-and-half-months, yet I feel like it’s gone by in the blink of an eye. I’ve learned about myself, and learned about what’s truly important to me, but fundamentally, I am the same curious little boy I was before this all began.

So, past all the self-discovery, all the lessons learned and mistakes made, I can only count one real epiphany. The primary reason why I love Yale so much is not the history or the grandeur, not the beautiful campus or the wonderful residential colleges; no, the first and foremost reason why I love Yale so much is the friends and peers that embody its ideals, and who have made this first semester one of the best three-and-a-half months of my life.

Here’s to three-and-a-half more years.

I’ve been working on this for a few days…this is for the friends back home.

Bound by Time

Well there’s a voice outside
that sings a sad, lonely song
I never thought that I
would ever sing, sing along

Its tune is familiar
I know its melody
With every passing year
it beats inside of me

These are the words that I couldn’t say

This is our static
moment in time
I found a new life

And when the sky lights
our memories on fire
We’ll watch the sun rise

So this is our last
embrace with the past
We’re not looking back
We’re bound by time…
Bound by time.

Those were happy days
times of laughs, joy and tears
But now the echoes fade
replaced with this silence here

I’m looking ahead but I
can’t see through the haze
And this is the last goodbye
before we part our ways

Today commemorates the completion of the first eighteen years of my life, the first eighteen years after leaving the safety of my mother’s womb. Yet it also marks the beginning of the nineteenth year, and, by our culture’s seemingly arbitrary placement, the beginning of my adult life. Today marks my entry into the hallowed ranks of the grown, of the experienced, of the adult. It also means that my childhood is now, by all means, over. The innocent happiness, the ignorant bliss, the thoughtless giddiness is, by definition, gone, relegated to random moments of synaptic motion, to memory. And so, on the verge of this brave new world that awaits me, I look back, look back at the life I’ve led, the childhood of eighteen years that has, for what it’s worth, made me who I am. This is the story of my life.

I don’t remember much of my earliest years – everything I know has been told to me through stories. I was born in Xi’an, China, the eldest child of a young Chinese couple. My father was a graduate student in Northwestern University in Xi’an, my mother a manager in a local chemical plant. It was at this point that the first major incident happened: my parents left me. At the young, impressionable age of two, my parents obtained Student Visas and left for America. I, thanks to the wiles of the U.S. Immigration agent behind the counter, was not granted a Visa. And so, for nearly two years, I was separated from my parents by an ocean.

In hindsight, I realize that this separation was far more than just physical. I was deprived of the two people who have, for the other sixteen years, given me everything. Even if it was just less than two years, I think that deprivation has made the greatest impression on who I am. I’ve always felt a certain shyness with my parents. I don’t share with them my personal life, my social life, as much I should. I often feel awkward talking about life with them. They give me advice, and I take it and try my hardest to use it, but there’s always a certain disconnect, a certain emotional distance whenever we have the deep, life conversations.

My parents would often tell me a story about when I was two-and-a-half years old. They called me, and my grandmother, who was taking care of me at the time, picked up the phone. A few minutes later, my parents asked for me – they wanted to talk to their little boy. So my grandmother called me over to talk with them. I said no. Why would I want to talk to my stupid parents after they left me all by myself in China and were living the good life in America?

But a year later, I was here. My parents, who collectively had $180 in cash to start their new life, had more or less established themselves, and so I arrived into a relatively stable environment. According to them, one of the first things that I asked them, one of the first words I said to my parents after eighteen months of silence, was, “Dad? Where’s our car?” The car, it turns out, was in the parking lot of Detroit International Airport, outside the city I would spend the next five years of my life.

The apartment was called Deroy, 5200 Anthony Wayne Drive, a highrise on the campus of Wayne State University, where my parents were doing their graduate work. I went to nursery school, where I learned my first English word, “elephant.” My first, and nearly only, friends for these early years were two girls, daughters of my parent’s friends. We didn’t exact get off on the right foot. They were two peas in a pod, and I was the new kid who barely spoke English. I remember complaining to one of the their mothers that they were speaking English again, and I couldn’t understand.

Elementary school started too soon. I cried on the first day, I threw up my first lunch, and my father secretly came by the school four times to make sure I was okay (I wasn’t). But I learned, and I learned quickly. My English problem was soon not a problem at all. I memorized how to spell the most words in my kindergarten class. Mrs. Cameron held this game every year where each student had a ring of index cards with words he learned to spell, and the winner had the most cards by the end of the year. In first grade, the evil lady in the front of the room, whose name I cannot remember, gave us daily grammar problems. I graduated ESL in record time, and even passed into the advanced reading class. Like any young immigrant, English came quickly and easily.

And at the same time, I grew closer to the two girls, as close as three young children can get. My mind is filled with random memories – images that, for some inexplicable reason, stick out to me today. I remember the Lego pirate set we put together; I remember watching cartoons and playing house – I was always the father and the son (at the same time) – while our parents laughed and played cards in the living room; I remember playing with barbie dolls; I remember the rabbit we picked up from the park and the time I swung a golf club and hit one of the girls in the neck; I remember the Sega Genesis; I remember the Easter egg hunts and the birthday parties and the Christmases; I remember the playground outside of Deroy and the Chinese school and the brand new library down the stone path; I remember the myriad of toys in the basement of our godmother’s house; I remember Amber, another family friend’s cat; I remember the garage sales and church sales; I remember orchard-picking and the accident on the way back, where I cried as our brand new car lay smoking on the side of the highway; I remember trips to California and Florida and Northern Michigan, where the stars littered the sky, innumerable and starkly beautiful. These were memories I cherished, memories that defined my childhood.

I feel like this segment of my life, until I was eight, tempered me. Being with these two girls molded me, softened who I could have been. I was young, innocent, and curious – ultimately unknowing. There was no awkwardness to taking baths with them, to sleeping in the same bed with them. We were little kids who knew nothing of cooties and the pubescent awkwardness that would eventually have its day.

(more…)

So I, feeling in a particularly nastalgic mood, browsed through my now defunct xanga. It was quite interesting, trying to figure out what I was thinking all those years ago. But then I came across this. I don’t remember who I wrote this about. But I wish I did.

“don’t worry. it’ll all be fine — i promise. don’t let guises and whims fool you. i’ve found what i’ve been looking for — you. i didn’t even realize it until recently, but there’s just something about you that makes me feel at home. with you, i can be something other than boring old me. i know the cliche is “with you i can be myself”, but it’s different. for good or for bad it’s different. i didn’t know what i wanted; i didn’t know exactly what i needed until you came along. you made it all right. everything clicked together; i stopped seeing life in black and white. you gave it color. i view everything i do with a new perspective and my motivation has changed. i’m a better person. you made me realize that there’s more to life than i subconciously made out in the beginning. heck, i don’t even know if you realize what you did for me; to me. thanks. i guess it doesn’t matter where life takes me and i guess it doesn’t really matter if you’re even there. but i will never forget what you did for me these few days. you changed me indefinitely without really meaning to. but i must give you credit, because it was you and you alone that did this for me. my life is forever changed; my vision; my view; my life: it’s better now. thank you for being there. thank you for being who you are. i love you.”

-September 20, 2005

Emotions can be quite the wild animal. I’d spent a month at Yale, happily enjoying my new life, making friends, growing close to people who I’d not known a mere month ago, and having a generally easy transition into college life. I still talked to my friends from high school on AIM and such, but I didn’t really think about the fact that I was two hundred miles away from the kids still stuck in high school, and even farther from some of my peers.

Then I went home.

I went home for my high school marching band’s annual home competition, to help out as an alumni, and to see everyone again. When I got home and saw my brother, I felt an upwelling of emotion hit me. It’s almost like the feeling you get in a really sad movie when that heart-wrenching moment happens near the end. In my obliviously frenzied life at college, I had forgotten how much I missed him. My parents, too, escaped my emotions while I was away. I’d forgotten what it was like to be able to speak freely and openly about my life without fear of prejudice or misconception.

And then I saw my friends, especially the few I shared my greatest passions with. These were the people who shared my love for the band program and the group of teenagers bound by it. The people who I spent countless hours talking and laughing about the one thing that permanently brought us together. The people who grew into themselves alongside me, who helped shape me into the person I am today. The people who crossed my mind too few times throughout the first month.

So we talked. We talked about our lives in college or high school, we talked about the band, we talked about each other and ourselves. We laughed like we were still part of the same group; we felt our kinship reignite with each hug and each smile. And when I sat on that old, creaky gray chair again, I watched, with pride, the legacy I helped leave. I watched the kids enjoy high school like I did, enjoy each other like we did. I remembered, if only momentarily, our proudest moments over the years. I remembered our shared joys and sorrows, triumphs and failures. And I realized, again, that I didn’t love the program for what it gave me; no, I loved the program because of the people within it, the people who gave me far more than any of them know.

And that’s why I felt that same upwelling of emotion after it was all done. Driving alone through the darkness after saying my last goodbyes, I felt it. In the frenzy to start a new chapter in my life, I had forgotten what it felt like to be with the people who defined the last. When the day ended, as we scattered to our new lives across the country, I really missed it. We’re confined now to sporadic days over the course of the years during which we can come together and relive a special time in each of our lives. And so I missed it.

We created something special in our four years in high school, a part of which will always be in my heart. And as for those few with whom I truly shared this love of mine, I know you feel it too. Our lives are diverging, traveling on paths spread too many ways, but our hearts, or at least the small part that will always remember, still travel together.

I miss you guys.

Tomorrow (or today, if you’re gonna be a stickler) is going to be extremely hectic. Classes are the same as every Monday and Wednesday, my heaviest days by far, but still not that bad. But it’s the various events that follow that make the hecticness.

After my Literature section in Harkness Hall, I have half an hour to walk half a mile to my faculty advisor’s office. I’ve heard that he’s a nice guy, so I’m looking forward to this meeting. Afterwards I have only fifteen minutes to return to where I was, for an Economics Discussion Section in Harkness Hall. From there, I go straight to Linsly-Chittenden Hall on Old Campus, where, at the Maya event, I’ll grab my pizza dinner. If I’m still hungry, I can grab a quick bite back in the suite before heading off to the Yale Daily News building for the journalism training workshop.

I’ll have to leave that one slightly earlier in order to make my way to Payne Whitney Gym for Intramural Table Tennis. After that, I finally get a breather back in the suite, before heading over to Phelps Gate for a two-hour long game of Frisbee Golf with the YPMB. When that’s done, or before then, I’ll collapse somewhere near the vicinity of my bed and sleep until 9.

Why does everyone schedule everything on the same date?