Leisle was struggling to adjust at Yale too. The first time her parents drove her to New Haven, they took the wrong exit and had to drive through the worst part of town. When it came time to say good-bye, Sunny broke into tears, and in Leisle’s first care package from home, she found a can of Mace. Leisle was so lonely at first that she was calling home almost every day, and her mother finally had to say to her, “Leisle, I love you. Do not call home this often.”
In my first week at Harvard, there was an open tryout for the football team, so I walked on and made the team as a linebacker—but within a week I quit. High school football had been more than just a sport for me; it was a world of justice and fairness and honor. My high school coach talked about sportsmanship and character constantly, and if a player ever cussed, my coach would run him until he gave back his lunch. At Harvard the coaches cussed a blue streak, and no one on the team seemed to be having any fun. To me, the sport had been hijacked; it was still the same game, but the heart had been ripped out of it, and football quickly lost its appeal.
My scholarships and loans completely covered my tuition and housing, but I had no money for books and no spending money either. I would have to get a job to earn that money, but the only job-related skills I had involved preparing soup broth. There was a job working at the college library that would have paid me $7.00 an hour, which sounded good because that job would have allowed me to study while I was working—but when I heard about a job that paid $8.25 an hour, I grabbed it without even asking what it was. My father would have been proud.
The job was cleaning toilets. The official name was Dorm Crew, which was a student-run organization that essentially paid poorer students to clean richer students’ bathrooms. I worked four hours per day, five days a week, and during each four-hour shift, I was expected to clean eight bathrooms. I did the math: that was thirty minutes per toilet.
Every day I went to the superintendent’s office to get a master key to all the dorm rooms, then went to the janitor’s closet to collect a bucket, a mop, a can of Comet, a spray bottle of pink liquid cleaner, and rubber gloves—and then I spent the next four hours knocking on dorm rooms and shouting, “Dorm Crew!” If anyone was home, they were supposed to let me in; after thirty seconds of silence, I let myself in. Sometimes I opened the door a little too quickly and got a tutorial in human biology. Those were actually good situations for me because the embarrassed couple usually ordered me out—and that meant one less bathroom to clean.
One thing the restaurant taught me was how to work quickly, and I turned bathroom cleaning into a science. Step one: turn on the shower and use it to wet everything down. Step two: cover everything in sight with Comet. Step three: spray down the toilet and sink. Step four: scrub the bathtub, toilet, and sink. Step five: rinse everything and mop my way out backward. Women had the cleanest bathrooms, but they had the dirtiest ones too; athletes were terrible because they left wet gear everywhere; seniors were worse than freshmen because freshman dorms were not allowed to have parties; and the bathroom of a senior woman athlete was the perfect storm.
It was supposed to take me four hours to clean eight bathrooms, but I became so efficient at it that I could finish all eight in an hour and a half. I did the math again: that was only 11.25 minutes per toilet. I calculated that if I was being paid $8.25 per hour to clean eight toilets but finished the job in an hour and a half, I was actually earning $22 per hour. I suddenly felt wealthy; when I worked at the restaurant, I used to receive an allowance of $30 per week, and now I was making $22 per hour—that was more money than I had ever seen. I had been at Harvard for only a few weeks, and already an Ivy League education was paying off.
At first it didn’t bother me to have to clean my classmates’ bathrooms, but after a while I began to notice that only poor kids like me worked for Dorm Crew. I had to qualify to attend an elite university like Harvard just like everyone else did, but the other students were out studying or having fun while I had to clean their toilets. Some of the students understood how I felt; when I knocked on their doors, they would say, “Our bathroom is fine—you don’t need to clean it.” That was very gracious. But there were other students who just didn’t understand. Once I cleaned the bathroom of a woman I knew personally, and after inspecting my work, she said to me, “Vinh, couldn’t we do a little better job here?”
Once I was facing a very tough final in organic chemistry, and I needed every minute I could get to study for it. When I knocked on one door, shouted “Dorm Crew!” and no one answered, I opened the door and saw organic chemistry textbooks and class notes spread all over the floor. Whoever the student was, he was preparing for the same test I was, but while he was studying, I was cleaning his toilet. That was hard for me because I knew the two of us might end up competing for the same spot at a medical school, and he had an unfair advantage.
On Friday nights I met with a Christian fellowship called InterVarsity while Leisle was involved with a group at Yale called Cru. We both considered it an important part of our busy schedules. Harvard and Yale were incredibly competitive environments, and it was easy for high achievers to become obsessed with grades and lose sight of the larger picture. Like our churches at home, our student fellowships gave us a sense of community and helped us grow spiritually—and also reminded us not to base our self-worth on the outcome of the next exam.
Since I was so efficient at cleaning bathrooms, I decided to pick up a second job to earn even more money, so I started delivering newspapers. The Harvard Independent was delivered to every student’s door, and I was assigned a delivery route that was supposed to take me four hours to complete—but I got it down to forty-five minutes. I was able to speed it up so much because I ran up and down the dormitory stairs while I was delivering papers. I figured I could get a workout at the same time I was earning money. Then it occurred to me that I could double my salary by delivering a second local newspaper using the same route. After a while I became a familiar sight around the dorms, though no one could figure out exactly what my job was. I was either the paperboy who cleaned toilets or the janitor who delivered newspapers.
I saved money every way I could, and thanks to my mother’s training, I was always looking for a bargain. I got a free Sprint T-shirt when I bought a long distance phone card so I could call Leisle, and I applied for a credit card because it came with a free Visa T-shirt. I managed to save a lot of money, but I didn’t win any prizes for style; every shirt I owned had some company’s logo on it, and at times I looked like a walking billboard.
By the end of my first semester, I had saved enough money to buy myself a plane ticket to fly home for Christmas—no more thirty-one-hour bus rides for me. After buying my ticket, I had a thousand dollars left over, so I mailed the money home to my parents, and when my mother received it, she immediately called me and demanded to know where I had gotten so much money. She wanted to know if I had joined a Vietnamese gang at Harvard or if I had broken into someone’s car and stolen a stereo. I tried to explain to her that there were very few Vietnamese gangs in Cambridge and that I wasn’t in the habit of breaking into cars. But my mother had always warned us growing up, “Don’t pick fights, don’t join a gang, and don’t break into cars and steal stereos.” She figured that just because I was at Harvard didn’t mean I couldn’t get into trouble.
I had the good fortune to be assigned a terrific roommate, a young man named Dan from Chicago who came to Harvard to study physics and applied mathematics. Dan owned one of the latest laptop computers, an Apple PowerBook with a black-and-white screen, and he allowed me to use it whenever I wanted. What I especially appreciated was the gracious way he did it; he never reminded me that the computer was his property or ordered me off of it so he could use it himself. Dan understood that, for me, owning a computer would have been like owning a yacht, and he wanted to be generous without making me feel ashamed. That was a very special gift, and it was one of the reasons we remained roommates all four years and became lifelong friends. I made a pr
omise to Dan that when his own children go to college one day, I will buy them any computer they want—as long as they share it the way their father did.
It took a long time before it finally sank in that I was actually at Harvard. It seemed too good to be true, and something inside me secretly feared that maybe it wasn’t true—maybe it was all a mistake. The entire time I was at Harvard I felt that at any moment someone might tap me on the shoulder and say, “Mr. Chung, you don’t belong here. There’s been a mistake. You have to go home.” I was haunted by that feeling for four years—right up until the moment I finally held a Harvard diploma in my hand. I thought that feeling might have been the refugee part of me, the part that never felt that it deserved anything and never quite felt at home. But as I got to know other students at Harvard, I came to realize that just about everyone there felt the same way.
I actually had one advantage over most of the students at Harvard: I had been working long hours all my life, and I had learned how to juggle multiple tasks at the same time. There were students at Harvard who did nothing but study, and some of them still dropped out because of the pressure. When I was growing up, I never had time to feel pressure—I was too busy doing the next thing. I had spent my entire childhood scrambling, stumbling, recovering, improvising, and learning how to do things after I did them. That wasn’t always easy, but it turned out to be very good preparation not only for Harvard but for life as a whole.
I knew how to juggle multiple jobs, demanding classes, physical exercise, and spiritual development—what I didn’t know was how Leisle fit in. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that there was something missing in my curriculum.
Forty-Three
LOVE STORY
WHEN LEISLE AND I FIRST LEFT FOR COLLEGE, WE agreed that we would communicate as little as possible. The reason wasn’t a fear of commitment; it was a fear of distraction. We both had definite goals in mind—medical school for me and the Supreme Court for her—but neither one of us knew how difficult college would be, and we didn’t want to distract each other from our studies. We nobly agreed that while we were away at college, we would both be free to date other people; but since Leisle was the first girl I had ever really talked to, and since I was Leisle’s first Asian friend, dating someone else wasn’t likely for either of us. Still, the agreement was important in principle, and we both went off to college free and clear.
We mailed a few letters back and forth at first, but they were nothing like the thirty-page tomes we used to compose in high school. Then one day we were introduced to a remarkable new technology that made waiting by a mailbox obsolete: electronic mail. E-mail allowed us to jot quick notes back and forth and receive an almost instantaneous reply. It was a fast and efficient way to spend twice as much time writing to each other as we had been doing by snail mail, and when we discovered instant messaging, it was almost like talking to each other face-to-face.
Almost.
At Thanksgiving, Yale had a weeklong break and most of the students left campus. Leisle didn’t want to be the only one remaining in her dorm, and a week was not enough time for a visit home to Lincoln, so she decided to come up to Cambridge to attend the annual Harvard-Yale football game, which Leisle insisted on calling the Yale-Harvard game. The game was being played in Cambridge that year, and when I heard that Leisle was planning to come, I invited her to stay longer and make it a personal visit.
I heard it was a terrific game, but I had to take Leisle’s word for it since I had taken a part-time job in the college library, earning $7.00 an hour, and I had to work during the game. The annual Harvard-Yale game is the only game anyone in Cambridge really cares about, so the library was like a tomb during my entire shift—but I made $28, and I could never afford to pass up money.
Leisle’s visit was a turning point for us because that was when we decided to upgrade our relationship status from “special good friend” to official boyfriend and girlfriend. After that visit we were officially dating, though we agreed not to announce our new status to our parents just yet; we figured there was no sense in starting a panic before it became necessary.
Soon after that visit I took the relationship up yet another level by telling Leisle that she was not only my girlfriend, but my best friend. I’m not sure Leisle could appreciate the distinction, but it was a big step for me because I had never told anyone he or she was my best friend before. From special good friend to girlfriend to best friend in a single semester—our relationship was taking off like a skyrocket. By the end of my freshman year, I finally did it: I told Leisle I loved her, and I was greatly relieved when she told me that she loved me too.
That was the first time in my entire life that I had ever said the words I love you to anyone.
But we still had three years of college ahead of us, and that was only to get our undergraduate degrees. I had dropped the L-bomb during our freshman year, and I didn’t know where to go from there. What else was there to say to a woman? What was I supposed to do next? I had no idea because no one had ever told me. I never talked about things like that with my father or older brothers, I never had a mentor, and I never went to the movies to watch romantic comedies—I had barely said hello to a girl before I met Leisle. No one had ever taught me the rules of relationships or the etiquette of dating, and I was clueless about what was appropriate to say or not say—which is probably the reason I asked Leisle to marry me without intending to.
It happened during the summer after our sophomore year, when I went on a six-week mission project with InterVarsity to Xinjiang, China. Xinjiang is one of the remotest regions in China, so instead of writing letters to Leisle that I wouldn’t be able to mail, I decided to take a tape recorder along to record my thoughts and experiences and give them to her when I got back.
A very strange thing happened to me while I was in China: I missed Leisle. Every day I saw breathtaking panoramas and met fascinating people, but I kept thinking, This is great, but I wish I had Leisle here with me to see it. That feeling surprised me; it was something I had never experienced, and it made no sense to me. Why would I need to have someone with me to enjoy an event? But for some reason the experience seemed incomplete without her, and I wanted her to be a part of it. I really missed Leisle, and that sense of longing reassured me that I must really be in love.
I couldn’t wait to tell her what I was feeling, and there was no way I could call or write, so instead, I poured out my heart to the tape recorder so she could listen to it later. When I returned to Arkansas, I gave Leisle the tape, and I was eager for her to listen to it because it told about everything I had seen and done in China and everything I was feeling while I was there. Somewhere in the middle of the tape, she heard me say, “. . . Oh Leisle, I miss you so much, and I really love you, and I want to marry you and spend the rest of my life with you . . .”
I was not proposing. I had no intention of proposing. I was not ready for marriage at that time, and in my opinion, neither was Leisle. I was only telling her how I felt: I felt like I wanted to marry her, and I felt like I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her—that was all. How could anyone interpret the words I want to marry you as a proposal?
Leisle managed to explain the problem to me without using the word fool, which I very much appreciated. Something positive even happened as a result of my ignorance: after that event we both knew we were headed in the same direction.
My lack of education wasn’t limited to relationships. I was behind in all my social skills, which was made painfully clear to me when I decided to take Leisle to a classy restaurant for her twenty-first birthday. I heard about a restaurant on the top floor of the Prudential Tower, Top of the Hub, that overlooked the city of Boston. That sounded fancy enough to me, so that’s where we went.
I knew I was in trouble when I saw that the waiters were all dressed up. I was always intimidated by people who wore suits and ties because to me they symbolized authority and brought back feelings of p
owerlessness. Sometimes they even made me stutter, and it’s hard to impress your special good fiancée when you’re trying to order duck à l’orange with a stutter.
I looked around the restaurant and was disappointed to find no buffet. Asians tend to love buffets because we get a lot of food for our money and we don’t have to be embarrassed trying to order from an English menu. But apparently it wasn’t Asian Night at Top of the Hub, so I opened the menu and took a look at the prices.
My first thought was, Wow—that’s a lot of toilets. I was working with Dorm Crew at the time and was in the habit of calculating the cost of everything in terms of toilets. I earned $4.12 for every toilet I cleaned, so I always calculated how many toilets I would have to clean to pay for any particular item. I looked at the menu and realized that I was going to be cleaning bathrooms for a long, long time.
Since it was Leisle’s twenty-first birthday, I decided to order wine, so I selected a three-toilet vintage with an impressive-sounding name. When the sommelier brought the wine, he removed the cork and handed it to me, and since I had no idea what to do with it, I dropped it in my pocket. He poured just a little wine into my glass and then looked at me and waited. I kept watching my glass, waiting for something more to happen, but when I glanced up at the sommelier, I could tell by the expression on his face that he was expecting me to do something—so I turned to Leisle and asked, “Do you want some too?”
But the evening was more than a series of social faux pas; I threw in a few relationship faux pas too. Earlier that evening I had given Leisle twenty-one roses for her birthday, and on each rose I attached a strip of paper where I had written one of the reasons that I loved her. On one of them I wrote, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” and on another one I put, “You’ll be a good mother and wife one day.”
Where the Wind Leads Page 31