Our Fresh Frosh columnists will be spending the year documenting their transition from high school to Northwestern life. Check out all four of our writers — and read their stories.
Mouths gaped and brains spun as Leonardo DiCaprio raced with bullets across the screen. The action was intense, the ideas cutting-edge, and the audience breathless as the characters plunged into yet another dream.
When the credits rolled, my cousin, Karen, and I stared at the blank screen and then at each other, eyes wide with stunned wonder, and by the time my mind regained function, we were squeezed into an elevator, crushed by strangers who chattered like jaybirds — in Chinese.
Lu Xin, who rarely used her English name, and I were both seventeen-year-old females headed off to college. We grew up together, in the most literal sense. When I visited Taiwan in 2002, we both sported boyish haircuts and bodies that consisted mainly of awkward arms and legs tanned to darkest degree. The six of us cousins nimbly clambered over giant rocks and through trickles of streams. Even after I hit high school, Grandma would call and update us on all of her other grandchildren’s latest accomplishments, no doubt pumping my mom for tidbits to carelessly bring up in a conversation with her retired friends.
It only took seeing Lu Xin again to prove that we were no longer children, no longer the same, skinny tomboys who kneeled in the trunk of my uncle’s CR-V, fascinated with the way the ground moved forward from underneath us.
My aunt, whose mothering tendencies made her my first friend in the Lu family, was also our translator and mediator. That first night, with her ice-breaking amiability, she fed us cherries and pushed us two careful teens into adding each other on Facebook. It was a start. By midnight, with the men (and Grandma) snoring loudly enough to be heard downstairs, we were scrolling through pictures and cracking up over favorite YouTube videos.
When I left for Taipei, my aunt arranged for Lu Xin to take me out to play in the big city. I spent two days exclusively with my cousin, meandering past screaming vendors and over-enthusiastic merchants. We rode the underground subway to the community pool, she with her feet planted firmly and I skidding at every stop. I listened attentively to the announcement of destinations over the speakers but, in my report to my grandma at the end of the day, could not remember any of the names that blurred together in my brain.
We wandered the streets of Taipei, making small talk. Teenagers littered the sidewalks of the city, oblivious to the moist heat that seemed to suffocate and that left my body covered with the sheen of sweat. I would sometimes stop Lu Xin in the middle of a ramble to ask the meaning of a certain word, and would nod my head at her explanations, which left me even more stumped. But as I picked my careful way through the Chinese language and listened to her enthusiastic descriptions of her life, our differences began to sprout far beyond the verbal.
Although we both had an affinity for animals and kids (we joked about adopting several toddlers splashing around the shallow end of the pool), our tastes in clothes, music, television, and food split into a fork road. Although we both loved to play sports and hang out with friends, she couldn’t swim the butterfly, and I couldn’t impress her friends with what I thought was my witty humor (around them I could only speak Mandarin, and my jokes just weren’t as dry and sharp when translated into another language and muddled with word-searching pauses).
And although we were both about to leave our families for the great adventure of college, she would study architecture and I English. I was more than ready for the freedom that would inevitably come with the distance from home; Lu Xin only shrugged nonchalantly when I mentioned homesickness. To me, college was a life-changing. To her it was just a continuation of her education.
While the fact that she and others her age could essentially travel the entire island on their own made them seem so mature, traces of the watered-down Chinese culture (one of over-protective parents and thus naïve, dependent children) I had grown up with leaked through. In one instance, Lu Xin’s younger brother packed half of his entire house for his 10-day boarding high school orientation. I almost snorted, “Isn’t his school only fifteen minutes away?” But this was no laughing matter. For a minute, I thought that my aunt and uncle might cry during their goodbyes, as they continued to stuff what I thought were unnecessary objects into his suitcase. I found out later that this week long orientation had cost a hefty $1000. The scene replayed itself in my head as I packed my own bags and flew alone across the Pacific Ocean towards home.
I had to remind myself of the cultural differences when I met Lu Xin’s friends. It was an education, one that many American students eagerly pursued their junior of college, something labeled “study-abroad’, something I called “the angst of assimilation.” Glancing at the Spongebob backpack they were admiring, I struggled to mask my incredulousness and, more than once, had to remember my manners and keep my mouth shut. Although I knew enough Chinese to hold stilted conversations, I mainly listened, unable to keep up with their quick quips and slang. They made no attempt to include me; I would try to jump in when English responses popped in my head, but the connection to my tongue was retarded by the necessary translations.
I missed home, with its open spaces, sitting toilets and pizza joints. I was born in Taiwan, but I was a foreigner, grimacing at the gray sky, the gray buildings, and at the gray oysters that my grandma slurped down. I was forced to stay in all day by the humid weather, by the assignments I was given for my NU freshman seminar (a ghastly gargantuan book appropriately named Gargantua and Pantagruel), and by the crazy, winding streets of the cities, where one was as likely to get lost as to be hit by law-breaking traffic. Often, I sulked at home, flipping jealously through pictures of dorms that friends had posted online.
But amid all the discomfort I experienced during my scant time on the island, I came to enjoy haggling over an insanely over-priced ring. Grabbing dinner for merely two bucks. Picking out unique pencils and souvenirs that would draw satisfying compliments back in the States. And despite all of our barriers, Lu Xin and I were still cousins, friends, and teenage girls on the brink of adulthood, living the same vastly different life.
Right before I pressed the button for my bus stop after a night out on the town (of which I forget the name), I grinned at her and, referring to our soon-to-be comings of age, wished her, “Bon voyage!” She asked me what that meant.