Tiger Woman on Wall Stree (7 page)

After my reading session, it was time for evening class. It took an hour and a half by bike to get back to the inner city, so I had to leave around 4:30, when the sun was at its worst. There were almost no cars on the streets then, only a sea of bikes in an endless wave of heat. I swerved through masses of gray and blue uniforms, racing through the areas where the sun beat down and slowing in the shady stretches. By the time I got to the classroom, my clothes were stained with sweat, but I wasn’t embarrassed. I was even a little proud that my dedication was visible in this basic, bodily way.

I grabbed a seat near the front of the room and waited to stop sweating. It was a huge auditorium—so big that TV screens hung in the middle of the room to broadcast the class to students in the back and corners. Seating was first-come, first-served, and those who came late would end up sitting on the floor or windowsills. My teacher was one of the center’s most popular instructors. Because his students typically scored well on the TOEFL classes he taught, hundreds of eager students had signed up to take his class.

At the time, attending class was the closest thing I had to socializing. After it ended, it was back to the dorm for more vocabulary review.

  *  *  *  

After a few weeks of this grueling schedule, Dad came by the evening school to check up on me. When he first saw me, his eyes grew wide with alarm.

“Junh, what’s happened to you? You look sick and starved!”

There was no mirror in our dorm, so I had no idea what I looked like to others, though I had noticed my clothes becoming looser. In fact, I was red as a tomato from sunburn and emaciated from my watermelon diet. I had always been thin, so losing 11 pounds made me look skeletal. By then my TOEFL score hovered around 630, so I didn’t mind.

I don’t think Dad could quite believe the intense and focused monster he’d created. From then on, my father or mother would stop by twice a week to deliver a dinner box stuffed with something nutritious, like chicken or smoked fish. The delicious food seemed to shake me out of my malaise. After a few minutes of ravenous eating, I would sit and savor what had just happened, staring at the empty tin bucket. I then biked all the way back to my dorm and collapsed onto my bed by midnight.

I was running on fumes. To make my dream happen, I had to work that hard. For Chinese people, logic and math are easy
topics, but English is tricky. Since I never had the opportunity to practice English in real conversation, my listening comprehension was poor, and I found slang to be baffling.

The only other human being I had contact with that summer outside of class was Catherine, a brilliant and equally driven girl. By pure coincidence, she’d planned to take the test at the same time as I was. While it was comforting to realize that I wasn’t the only one slaving the summer away, in my mind I’d turned her into a “frenemy,” measuring myself each day by her progress. I always made a point of getting up earlier and going to bed later than she did.

Catherine brought out the super-competitiveness in me. I was already aware of this cutthroat tendency of mine, but this experience with my unwitting rival reinforced it. In many ways, she served as a more effective propeller than my father did.

I vowed to nail the TOEFL, and I did. After receiving 640 on my TOEFL in the spring of 1995, I applied to a dozen liberal arts colleges in New England. I was determined to attend this type of school, seeing it as a place where I was likely to be the only Chinese student on campus. It was my intent to spend four years studying hard and absorbing everything I could about the United States and its culture.

Just a few months after I submitted the results of my TOEFL test, Middlebury College in Vermont granted me early admission—plus an annual renewable $23,000 financial aid package. My rival Catherine got a similar package from Wellesley.

The college admission came like a sigh of relief. Everything in my life had prepared me for this admission. Oddly, the America I knew was still a distant stranger, a land I had become obsessed with through movies and the VOA.

But far from being scared to leave, I thought that the more different my new home was from where I grew up, the better.

Vermont, 1996

M
AKING THE 20-HOUR JOURNEY FROM
S
HANGHAI TO
B
URL
ington, Vermont, may have been the most important event in my life, but my grand arrival to the United States was greeted with silence. It was the middle of the night when I landed, and the airport was nearly empty.

The cultural differences I encountered at Middlebury College presented far greater challenges for me than learning a new language and living a different campus lifestyle. The hardest changes lay in the social and ethical rules that governed the campus. At Middlebury, there were different expectations of how to behave in and contribute to the classroom and community.

Everything ideological that my Chinese educators had taught me about America—that it was a depraved society of selfish capitalists—was simply false. My American education gave me a chance to do something I had never done before: to discover my personal principles and to choose a career path. For the first time, I
was allowed and encouraged to make decisions about my own life.

Looking back on my two disparate experiences in education, it is clear how the United States and China got where they are today. Competition was fierce in Chinese schools, but we were spoon-fed information. Our teachers wanted us to do well so that they looked good, and they ensured this by holding our hands through endless testing. At college in America, the professors wanted me to do well, but at the same time, they cared about me as an individual. The long comments they took the time to write on papers, tests, and assignments are a testimony to that. My American professors also pushed me outside my comfort zone by teaching me to consider the
how
and not just the
what
. For someone like me who had to work her way out of an authoritarian system with hundreds of millions of competitors, these changes were not just opportunities; they were privileges. Without that push, I could not be the analytical thinker that I am today.

  *  *  *  

When I applied to Middlebury, I intended to inundate myself with every American experience I could. I certainly got that right: I could not have ended up in a place more different from Shanghai than Middlebury, Vermont, which forced me to make nearly constant adjustments.

Growing up in Shanghai, I hadn’t noticed that I was living my entire life surrounded by concrete and steel—there was nothing to compare it with since I almost never traveled outside the city. At Middlebury, I was shocked when the green mountains on all sides of the campus suddenly blazed red in autumn and then faded away with the winter. I took the first hike of my life in those mountains, which was also the first time I had ever walked any considerable length on unpaved ground.

I immediately recognized that Americans behave differently from the way Chinese people do. I found them strangely
intimidating because they smiled a lot and looked you directly in the eye—something that rarely happened back in China.

My fellow students were also apparently experts at lounging. I couldn’t help but stare every time I saw this phenomenon, and it was everywhere: students were lying on the grass, sprawled out in student lounges, milling about in the hallways, and sitting in the dining halls after meals. Even though they had books open in front of them, they were often talking to their friends.

It was frustrating to watch this form of “studying” and still not be able to outperform them in class discussions. The American students spoke in class with such ease. While I certainly did well on my TOEFL, I could not really speak English confidently, so I usually kept my mouth shut. But they would talk for more than a minute at a time, sometimes several minutes, completely unrehearsed. I spent most of the first semester watching them as if I were watching a farce: they would interrupt and challenge the teacher, and the teacher would reward them with a smile and encouragement. This show was almost opposite from what I had experienced in China, where the teachers were the masters who ruled the classroom.

Later, an American classmate shared with me his insights: we pay high prices for a college education in the United States, he said, making us customers of top-tier education. The students were, in a sense, entitled to be the masters of the classroom.

  *  *  *  

During the first week of my freshman year, I was shuffled from one orientation event to another, clutching a folder with my name on it that contained an events schedule inside.

One of the event listings said: “Saturday, 3:30 p.m., Mead Chapel: Honor Code Ceremony.” I imagined this was yet another welcome event. I was in no position to deviate from the schedule, especially since this event was starred as *MANDATORY*—a word I had learned in my TOEFL class.

The honor code turned out to be one of the oddest things I had to learn about American education. It was a contract that all students were required to line up and sign. It was essentially a promise that we would not cheat on any assignments. Later I was told it was called a pledge. The pledge also applied to witnessing such behavior; failure to report a cheater could result in one’s own expulsion or suspension along with the culprit. Big deal, I thought. Of course we’re not supposed to cheat. But how was this piece of paper going to stop anyone?

In time, I learned the enormity of this contract. For example, a few Chinese upperclassmen warned me that so-and-so had been kicked out of school for something called “plagiarism.”

This plagiarism was a very tricky thing to wrap my head around. In China, we learned by copying down what the teacher said. To study, we copied from the book, over and over again, until we had it memorized precisely. Sometimes, my teachers in high school would green-light us to copy out of the book on tests, because even the teachers knew that no normal kid had the capacity to memorize the large amount of information the test required.

Even having the book was still a challenge, because we were under time pressure and had to know exactly where everything was. But this collective behavior of copying from books didn’t change the ranking of grades: the students who studied the most still did the best. What others called cheating, we just considered a means to an end. Simply put, copying from the book was never considered wrong—if anything, it was the only way to be right.

At Middlebury, on the other hand, tests were not proctored. It was shocking to learn that the professors were not even allowed to be with us. Sometimes we took tests home with us. At the top of each test and paper, we wrote, “I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid in the completion of this assignment” and then signed our names. This was all strange to me, to say the least. The
school was so strict on cheating and yet took no measures to police it—something I came to learn firsthand.

One semester I enrolled in a large mathematics seminar—the kind held in an auditorium where the professor wouldn’t notice if you didn’t show up for a month. But I attended every class and couldn’t imagine why anyone would bother skipping.

Apparently Nikolai, one of my fellow students, had a different opinion. Nikolai was also an international student, like most of the other students in the math seminar I was taking. In fact, the majority of the math and economics classes were made up of international students. Nikolai was a big blond Russian, tall as well as broad. He was always trailed by a few smaller-looking guys. His wavy blond hair swung across his brow, and his chin pointed up when he walked, likely to ensure that he was always looking down at everyone else.

I probably would not have even noticed him except that he took several bathroom breaks during the first test. While it was obvious he was cheating, I was mostly mad at him for not being more discreet about it. Didn’t he know we were required to report cheating? I just put my head down and hoped that someone else would do it. I focused on my test.

On the second test, he did it again. This time, he brought his textbook to the bathroom with him! Of course, there was no teacher in the room to notice him, but you could tell from all the uncomfortable shifting noises around the room that other people had noticed what was going on. I decided to bite the bullet. I finished my test quickly and went to the professor’s office to hand it in.

“All set?” he smiled as I walked in. I always thought that was a weird English phrase. “Yep,” I smiled back, nervously. “Also, I . . . I think someone might be cheating.” He took off his glasses and looked very serious. I couldn’t back out now. “How do you know?” he asked. “It was Nikolai,” I told him. “He keeps leaving
the room to go to the bathroom. I saw him take his textbook with him. It’s just really obvious.”

He put his glasses back on. “Yes, I did notice he was doing remarkably well for not having attended most classes . . . you do realize that this is a very serious offense and that you will need to testify in front of the academic committee?”

I had not thought that far ahead, but I said the default American word
okay
.

In the dining hall a few days later, I felt someone standing over my shoulder as I filled up at the coffee machine. It was Nikolai.

“Grades not good enough?” he sneered. “You afraid of me outdoing you?” I was in fact terrified of him—mostly physically. I put my head down and scuttled out of the dining hall.

Every time I walked past his table for the next few weeks, he made an obnoxious snorting noise. His cronies laughed and threw me arrogant glances.

At the committee hearing, I repeated what I had said in the professor’s office—most of it at least. “So you saw him leave several times during the test?” a woman behind the desk drilled me. “Did you ever witness him cheat?”

“No,” I replied as I looked down. “I saw him leave several times during the test—during both tests—but I’m not positive that he cheated. I just saw him leave and come back.”