An ivy league of my own: being a BIPOC woman at Brown

All BIPOC — and especially Asian — families dream of having their kids attend excellent colleges including the Ivy League schools. Though university alma matter is not necessarily an indicator of future career success or even intelligence, nonetheless, these schools serve as cultural currency for many communities that prize education above other social accolades, like an athletic or artistic achievement. 

Though any Ivy makes the grade, for the Asian family, there is still a hierarchy within it. So, when I got into Brown University on a wing and a prayer, my parents were somewhat relieved yet still disappointed that it wasn’t King Harvard or Queen Yale (especially since my Dad had once taught there). 

“Though any Ivy makes the grade, for the Asian family, there is still a hierarchy within it. ”

For me, though, it was a dream come true, and I mean that quite literally. I’m still not quite sure how got in. My SAT scores were subpar. My ACT scores fared better, but back then they weren’t considered an equal standard of measurement. I wasn’t Valedictorian. My parents weren’t celebrities. But Brown did place particular emphasis on the personal essay, which they required you to do in longhand. I can only guess that my sky-blue-inked meditation on teenage homelessness sealed the deal, a reflection of being influenced by a combo of The Babysitters Club and Charles Dickens. Like I said, a wing and a prayer.

Once I arrived at Brown, I was so out of my depth that I felt thrown into James Cameron-deep abyss. With no core curriculum to its name, I clung to the stability of pre-med requirements like Chemistry and Biology 101 at Brown. Even though I had taken AP classes in both, my high school’s version of “AP” seemed to differ greatly from, say, Dalton or Exeter’s. Always the last to finish a project or paper, I stayed late many nights in Chem lab trying to keep up. 

I had pursued the sciences because I’d had some skill in it in high school. No longer. It was time to test out my passion: the arts. Except that my freshman English classes walloped me as well. I felt like a gossip column scribbler compared to my post-post-modern classmates who had taken over their high school newspapers then burnt the concept of structured sentences to the ground. 

Freshman year seemed like a self-taught education in how basic I was. I didn’t know this at the time, but the school whose name was the same color as my skin rewarded innovators and protestors — even if they were only 18. 

But this was the antithesis of what the good Asian student was supposed to be. You followed the rules, you adhered to the course guidelines, and you never ever disagreed with your teacher, no matter how biased you sensed they were. This Ivy wasn’t having any of that. Part of the reason there was no core curriculum was because they wanted us to decide for ourselves and carve out our own path for learning what we most wanted to learn. But for the Asian parent, such an education is anarchy. 

Faced with the choice of failing catastrophically in the sciences or treading water for a chance at the arts, I picked the latter. This was not an easy one to make. Brown pushed you to pursue your passions, even if that meant playing catch-up with your abilities. Since I was lackluster skill-wise in both arts and sciences, I went with love: books. And I think by finally narrowing down what it was I yearned to learn, the concern over grades (which were also optional – Pass/Fail was a valid grading system) fell away to the joy of the pursuit of knowledge. 

“Brown pushed you to pursue your passions, even if that meant playing catch-up with your abilities. ”

My parents were horrified at the selection of an English major without a Pre-med core or even science minor. Because even though the Ivy League has currency, the arts and humanities did not (even at old Harvard), and it was akin to setting money on fire. What can you do with an English major?

My response was, what can’t you do with an English major? I credit it with getting me into film school. Journalists wouldn’t be able to break stories without it. Lawyers need it to construct a brief or compelling argument. If politicians studied proper diction, we might not be in the mess we are in today. I’ve said it before, and I’ve said again: words have power. Being able to wield them well is important. 

The only thing that could have been improved upon, perhaps, was the focus on the Western canon. Brown was not so traditional that it didn’t take post-modernists in its breadth — but the writers we studied still represented a largely white, male, often-privileged background. 

I suppose the onus was on me to pursue my own independent study, where I could strike out into the wild diaspora and bring back the tales of BIPOC female authors. But this was the 90s, and though I searched, there were a handful of lightning rods, but nothing that could compete with the white male canon and power of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, even Pynchon. 

To give a bit of context of the literary world at the time, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest had just burst onto the scene with much fanfare. Despite Jane Austen having an entire semester’s class devoted to her, studying women’s fiction coded as somehow inferior or not as serious as that of men’s. That was reflected in the publishing world at the time too. And writers of color? Forget it. 

So, I continue my education even now well after graduating, and will perhaps always be on the search for innovative female writers forever. And that’s a learning journey I’m happy to be on for a lifetime.