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Shock and Denial
I started working at BobaPop in January, motivated by nothing but pure curiosity and my love for milk teas — specifically brown sugar lattes. I thought: Hey, I like drinking boba, so why not try making it? How hard could it be to make drinks and take orders? Turns out, pretty hard.
When my parents and I decided that I would study college abroad, we signed a silent agreement: Long breaks were for them; otherwise, I was free. Despite quietly signing this tacit negotiation, deep down I’ve known that I had to give up summer holidays to internships and research programs eventually. I dismissed this thought and made it my future self’s problem to breach the contract, yet when I got accepted to the intern abroad program I applied to, I knew I couldn’t postpone the discussion any further.
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve eaten oysters in my life, mostly because my mom is allergic to them, but a couple of weeks ago, I found myself eating an exorbitant amount of them with some college friends because of a 75-cent deal. There I was with my friends, ecstatically ordering oyster after oyster and laughing away, thinking, will life always be like this?
For years, I’ve let numbers define me. The number on the scale. The number of calories consumed. The number of minutes spent exercising. It was a battle I fought silently, a war waged against myself, my body and my mind.
By nature of circumstance, college students are forced — for the first time in their lives, for many of them — to become serious spenders. I should clarify: serious spenders, rather than serious spenders. They must retire from free-ride public schools and low-wage part-time jobs, the biweekly paychecks which they spend in one day online shopping and paying too-high upcharges for DoorDash or other food delivery services; now, they have tuition and textbooks and Lyft rates — plus tip — going to their volunteer or shadow positions, and they’re lucky if they have the time to supplement this hemorrhagic spending with a student job or federal work study.
Allegedly, moving slowly is yet another way to calm the nervous system. I think I first came across this idea in a short-form video where a flash of text crossed the screen, hovering over an image of a person going about their day. This text would say, “slow down,” after which, the individual would be relieved of all this tension – their shoulders would drop, they would unclench their grip from the steering wheel (how they were filming while driving, I still don’t know).
I have been writing stories for a while now. I cannot remember for how long. Some time in elementary school I decided I wanted to be a writer, after some endless iteration of another Disney-inspired handwritten short story of mine. Though my writing looks a little different now, this future aspiration has not changed. What has changed, though — more recently than I’d like to admit — is how I’ve thought about writing, and how my perspective on it has evolved.
As I was getting acclimated to Hopkins and starting to be involved during my freshman year, I attended the Student Involvement Fair and came across Hopkins Community Connection (HCC). The sign read, “Are you an Advocate for Health Equity?”. Intrigued, I stopped by to chat with a student who explained that HCC connects underserved Baltimoreans with resources such as food stamps and energy assistance programs. Like many of my friends, I put myself on the mailing list and filled out an application. It was a decision I made on a whim that day, which has since reshaped my understanding of healthcare in Baltimore, and more broadly, in America.
The start of something, be it the calendar year or the semester, usually makes us want to change our lives. Entire industries are built on this. We buy gym memberships and new planners, classic novels and stationery all in the hopes that we’ll transform into someone we’re not — someone better. This new person sticks around for a week, or maybe two, and then we’re back to who we were.
The dining table was overflowing on the Tuesday evening — sliced century eggs placed in a flower shape, crisp-skinned Peking duck, steaming vegetables in pork broth: These dishes were full of the taste and smell of home. My grandmother ladled out bowls of hot fish soup, reminding everyone that in Chinese, “yú” (fish) sounds like “abundance.” We displayed the Lunar New Year Gala on TV in the background with (less funny than usual) skits that we half-listened to while passing around plates of dried tofu snacks and pastries. It was a warm familiarity I had missed. For one night, it felt like I had never left for college.
It’s a running joke between my friends and family that I’m always talking to the wind. The breeze hears my bitterness, my overzealous conversations are lost to the zephyr, the gusts gather my grievances and my chattering chases the currents as they’re scattered like secrets never meant to be uncovered. Being at a school filled with big personalities and opportunities that I could barely even dream of, I often feel like I’m even less heard.
We are back in Baltimore and the real feel has been closer to ten degrees than I would like. How utterly tragic. On my first day of classes, I donned two layers of pants and three layers of tops and treated my walk to Gilman like a treacherous journey (it was, in fact, treacherous). I spent the rest of the day in bed, under every single blanket I own, with my heater blasting.
I probably have around 10 tabs open on my laptop at all times. As I write this, I have a record low of eight: today’s Wordle (3/6 — great starting word), a 30-page reading for class, a video essay on Kafkaesque, LinkedIn, a guide on simple living, Outlook, an assignment that was due last week and an article on high protein vegetarian recipes that I will never look at again. Each tab feels like a microcosm of the chaos in my life.
British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is my favorite type of book. Instead of a fast-paced plot with witty one-liners and gritty characters, the mind space accompanied by the story is a bit like having an entire afternoon to run one errand. Eventually, the task has to be completed, but there seems to be an abundance of time to meander while daydreaming, prod at a few things that catch your attention and stumble across a memory to unravel. You pause. Bracing yourself, you tug.
There’s a hidden pseudoscience behind every child’s dream job. Just as people scrutinize the skies under which they were born to determine their star chart — to figure out why they are a caretaker, why their last relationship didn’t work out or why they can’t eat raw carrots but only stewed — one can extract an unfathomable amount of information based solely on what they wanted to be when they were kids. Or at least I think so.
There’s a Maya Angelou quote that’s always resonated with me. It goes, “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
I recently got coffee with a professor and I was, of course, ranting about school, classes, friendships and family. With a voice thick with frustration, I said, "People act like they're entitled to your time and energy.”
The bus ride to the med campus will never cease to amaze me. I love seeing the city shift with the seasons, passing through different neighborhoods and watching new parts of town fly by outside the window. There’s a word for this, and it’s on the tip of my tongue... ugh, what is it? In Spanish, the term would be recorriendo la ciudad.
Two weeks into starting college, I joined my first lab, a number of student clubs and enrolled in many pre-med classes. As a first generation student, it was safe to say I was led in a blind eye, never knowing which step was the right one. As long as I moved forward and kept on doing what I was doing, that was all that mattered.