Lost In Place (26 page)

My roommate showed up the next day. His name was Holden Young. He was Chinese American, tall, athletic,
beautifully dressed, supernaturally handsome, had gone to a high-powered prep school, and was a soccer and tennis star. Apparently in its wisdom the student housing department thought we might have something in common—namely, China. But Holden, an all-American dreamboat who had already aced calculus, organic chemistry and Latin in high school, didn’t seem to know much about China, whereas I, the yokel from Ridgefield who had tried to grow pot in his parents’ house, had never seen a soccer game or a tennis match, so it took some time for us to figure each other out. The first thing he did upon arriving was to tack up a poster of a soccer ball bulging through the net after having streaked past the goalie. It was one of those slightly three-dimensional posters made of thin plastic, so the ball really did stick out a bit. Over my bed I had hung one of my paintings of a guy in a robe with a topknot staring at a waterfall.

“You play any sports?” Holden asked.

“No, but I did kung fu for a few years.” Holden looked suspicious. Another white kid who took kung fu lessons; I think he was afraid I was going to ask if his family kept ancestral tablets in their living room.

“Do you speak Chinese?” I asked him.

“Only the words for sweet and sour pork,” he answered, and I’m sure that in turn I must have looked disappointed. But within an hour we discovered that in fact we did have something in common: we both couldn’t wait to look at the pictures of our female classmates in the freshman directory.

For me it was a bit of a theoretical exercise because I was still going out with Annette and only twenty-four hours earlier had pledged eternal fidelity. But for Holden, who was unattached, it was a very real concern, and I
enjoyed helping him with his research. Part of my enjoyment, I’m sure, can be explained by analogy: helping Holden find a girlfriend was something like how I imagined it would be to help Neil Armstrong get a job as a commercial pilot—you could brainstorm freely, knowing that your man’s qualifications were beyond dispute.

We went to all of the orientations together, played Frisbee together out on the lawn (he could throw it with either hand, flick it like a bottle cap, catch it on his raised elbow or pop it up with his heel and make it land on his head like a hat) and accompanied each other to the mixers at night. Those were the days before the nationwide crackdown on students’ consumption of alcohol, so you didn’t have to walk more than a hundred yards before reaching a table set up with free beer, wine, mixed drinks or hard liquor—all served in giant plastic pails. Expensive, powerful stereo systems propped in windows all over campus competed with one another for supremacy, treating us to a never-ending auditory menu of Van Halen, Hendrix, Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Pink Floyd, Kiss and Fleetwood Mac. I was beginning to like college, which made it all the worse, because I assumed I was going to get kicked out for quitting the cello.

On the fifth day I had to face reality. I had an eleven o’clock appointment with my assigned faculty adviser to discuss my course schedule. His office, I noted grimly, was in the new School of Music building. The moment of truth had arrived.

Apparently the building had just been completed; it looked brand-new and masking tape was still on some of the windows. As I walked down the echoing hallway toward my adviser’s office, I passed by several practice rooms, all of them occupied by serious-looking young virtuosi.
To my relief, I noted that at least one segment of the student body appeared more out of it than me. All the males in the practice rooms had frightful cowlicks and at least one sneaker untied, while the females all seemed to be wearing pillowcases with holes cut out for their arms and heads.

I entered the professor’s office at the appointed time and he offered me a seat. In contrast to the students in the practice rooms, he was rather dashing; he had silver hair that flowed down almost to his shoulders, a neat silver mustache and a kindly, wise, European-looking face. It was the kind of face you couldn’t lie to, and I didn’t see any point in dragging things out.

“Sir, I don’t know exactly how to explain this, but I’ve decided that I’m not cut out to be a cellist.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Even the thought of practicing now makes me—”

“Sick to your stomach?”

“Yeah …”

His face broke into a grin. “I think that’s marvelous!” he said cheerily. “What other interests might you have?”

I was confused. “But, sir, I applied as a music major. Doesn’t that mean that I have to … I don’t know … reapply to one of the other schools and wait till next year?”

He paused for a beat, then laughed jovially. “Is that why you look so glum? Son, you don’t have to reapply or explain this to anyone! It doesn’t matter at all what you
said
you wanted to major in when you applied. Once you’re accepted as an undergraduate, you can major in anything you like. When I said that it was marvelous, what I meant was that it’s good that you’ve realized this now, as opposed to two or three years from now, when it
would be too late to switch majors and you would have to stick it out just to graduate. Do you have any idea how often that happens, particularly with music? So many kids get pushed into music when they’re young, they do it for all the wrong reasons, then they get to college and keep at it out of a sense of guilt and they hate it. What a waste! There’s no point to music if you don’t love it.”

Wow. This guy was amazing. “Are you a musician, sir?”

“Who, me? No, I’m a photographer. They just stuck me in this building because it’s the only one where I could fit my darkroom.”

A long-haired photographer was my faculty adviser. Wow. I was
really
starting to like this school.

“So to go back to my earlier question, Mr. Salzman, do you have any other interests at the moment?”

I couldn’t think of a thing.

“Well, then, you should find a nice place on campus to sit, take a good look through the course book and see if anything appeals to you. Visit a few classes, listen to a few lectures. You have a couple of weeks to decide, you know. When you have some ideas, give me a call and we’ll make sure you’re covering the distribution requirements and so on. Enjoy yourself; there’s too much here to not find something that turns you on!”

Drunk with relief, I stumbled down the hallway and out the main entrance. Taped to one of the window panels of the main door, I saw a piece of paper with a handwritten note announcing, “Welcome to your new practice building! Take good care of it!” I laughed out loud. I’d take good care of it, all right; when I graduated someday, I would probably be the only prospective music major
who could honestly say that he had left the building in exactly the same condition that he had found it.

By the time I had finished reading the course book, I almost wished I
had
been kicked out. It was the most intimidating document I had ever seen. I asked Holden to help me figure out what classes to visit, and he showed me the schedule he had worked out for himself. He had a biology class, a chemistry class, an English class, a physics class, a U.S. history class and a French class. Using his schedule as a model, I worked out a similar menu of courses. The next day I visited a biology class, a math class and a chemistry class. All of them were listed as introductory. When I got to the lecture halls I picked up copies of the syllabi, and that was when my agony really began. I couldn’t even understand the course descriptions! The lectures were so far over my head that I left each of the classes after ten minutes. Defeated, I went back to my room and told Holden I wasn’t cut out for college.

“Did you go to any of the Chinese classes?” he asked. “I mean, that’s something you already know about. Why not give that a try?”

I had briefly thought of that, but whenever I tried to think of studying Chinese again I got a stomachache thinking of my earlier foolishness: all those kung fu lessons, eating with chopsticks, walking to school barefoot, the incense—it was too embarrassing to face all over again. But Holden had a point; at least it was a subject I had some chance of being qualified to pursue. Holden found the listing in the course book, but then winced and said, “Oh, no, you’re not going to want to do this.”

“Why not?”

He pointed to the course listing. “That building’s in the middle of nowhere,” he said, “at least a half-hour walk from here. And look, first-year Chinese meets from eight-thirty to ten-thirty in the morning! Forget it! Let’s find you something else.”

I explained to Holden that out of sheer habit I was up by six every morning every day anyway, so the time wasn’t a problem. “Oh,” he said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Is that why you disappear before ten every night? It never occurred to me that you might actually be going to sleep.”

The next morning I was at the East Asian languages building before eight and got the best chair in the classroom. Gradually other students trickled in, all of them looking bleary-eyed. At eight-twenty-five the instructor arrived, a tall, thin, fine-boned, elegant Chinese woman; she was probably in her sixties, but she moved like a thirty-year-old. All of the students, I noticed, came to life the instant she arrived and started beaming with pleasure. As soon as she began the class I knew why.

Mrs. Li was hands-down the most charismatic, comic, energetic and enthusiastic language instructor any of us had ever seen. Those first two hours were not so much a class as they were a case of interactive performance art. Introducing the phrase
kaiche
(to drive a car), she thrust out her arms, grasped an imaginary steering wheel, bent her knees 90 degrees so that her thighs were parallel to the ground, then shuffled between the desks, honking a horn and trying to parallel-park. She finished the demonstration by skidding and crashing into her desk, then shrugging and explaining in a loud stage whisper, “What can I say, dears?
Chinese driver!
”

The touch that made all of this so entertaining was the contrast between Mrs. Li’s dignified appearance and her outlandish clowning; if you can imagine Grace Kelly teaching a beginning dance class by acting out Buster Keaton routines, you’ll get the picture. The other thing was that she somehow managed to shower individual attention on every student. If you sneezed in class, Mrs. Li gave you a tissue, Sudafed tablets and a glass of water; if you coughed, she gave you cough drops and a scarf to wear home. If you did well on a test, Mrs. Li led a one-woman parade around the classroom in your honor; if you did poorly, she tutored you privately until you improved. Every student was smitten with her, and Mrs. Li’s most impressive gift of all was the ability to make each of us think that we were really her favorite. I chose all the rest of my classes around this one.

From that day on I loved college. I loved the classes, I loved the homework, I loved the starchy food, and I loved introducing myself as Holden Young’s roommate. “Really?” people would ask, their faces inevitably brightening. The boys would follow this with, “Holden Young? The soccer player? Cool,” while the women would glance from side to side to make sure no one was eavesdropping on the conversation, then say, “He’s the most gorgeous Asian guy on campus.” My association with him became the foundation of my social life, which was fine with me. One might imagine that it would have been torturous for me, five foot seven, skinny, a Chinese-studies nerd and full-time secretary of the Mrs. Li Fan Club, to have to live with such a monumental stud, but what redeemed Holden entirely was that he was not a playboy at all; he was even more shy around women than I was. He would stare at
the freshman directory with one hand on the telephone and stay frozen that way until it came time either to eat, sleep or go to class. He ended up having one relationship during his whole college career, whereas I had two. By my calculations that makes me twice as virile as Holden Young, a statistic that gives me pleasure to this day.

17
 

M
y freshman year of college brought me the longest uninterrupted stretch of happiness that I’d known since the year my parents brought home our first used color-television set. My mind was almost constantly occupied, so time lost its usual meaning. I no longer measured time in hours, as I had at work, or in minutes, as I had while practicing the cello, or in seconds, as I had during algebra class or school dances. Now I seemed aware only of days and weeks. Every teacher I had was clearly passionate about his or her subject, and they gave the impression during their lectures of stretching their own minds to their limits, which I found highly contagious. Most of the students at Yale were passionate about something as well, although not necessarily academics. Many of them took their interests to the same extremes that I had, if not further. One fellow, known as the Morse Monocle Man because he lived in Morse residential college, was so
interested in turn-of-the-century European history that he wore period clothes, a period haircut, refused to go out in bright sunlight without a period hat and wore a monocle even when he showered. The first time I saw him was in Sterling Library hunched over a book; I thought he was a wax-museum figure set up as part of an Oscar Wilde exhibit. At the other end of the spectrum was a woman whose legal name was Bird of the Phoenix Movement; I’m not sure what her interests were, but she wore ponchos, beads and floppy hats, and dyed the fur of her enormously popular dog (nontoxic edible dye, I’m sure) a different color every month. For the first time in my life I was a comparatively normal member of a community; I could have worn my baldhead wig if I’d wanted to.