I'm not the protagonist of this story
Why I ran away to China, what I was running from, and why I am baring it all now
I started to feel awkward about some of the pieces I have written. I come across as too confident, too cocky, too self-assured. In a sense, I felt like I was only giving you half the story, the pretty side.
I decided to write this piece both to share the moment in time that gives me the greatest shame, but also, in some ways, to give color and context to everything I have said before. How can you know about my time in China without knowing the real reason I ended up there in the first place, and not the manicured version I probably said at one time?
I ran away to China because, for the first time, I couldn’t handle life. There was a series of increasingly intense and bizarre episodes that surrounded my time in graduate school that proved overwhelming. Running away was an attempt to erase that past.
I feel like Odysseus, banished from home for so long. Only by admitting this truth, by offering it as sacrifice, will I be able to come home again.
College Peak
By some measures, my life peak was in college. It was the last time I was truly at the top of my game. I don’t mean to say that I can’t surpass that peak in the future (this is why I mentioned Bill Campbell’s story in a recent post). But I think, rather objectively, it is the benchmark from which future efforts will be measured.
I couldn’t fail. And even when I should have failed, the absurdity of life fixed everything. Junior year, I was set for a B- in a Spanish class, when our graduate student instructor decided to show up to class hammered, harassed the girls, and insulted everyone. The head of the department, thoroughly embarrassed, gave everyone A’s. It would end in greater tragedy for the instructor.
I won awards in academics and leadership. I was a true two-way player. It appeared as if I would have a brilliant future. I became absurdly confident about who I could become. I wanted to be consequential. I wanted to change the world. I always was sure to keep my thoughts to myself, but I am sure most folks knew my ambitions.
The Prestige Problem
Before accepting my offer to Chicago, I traveled for campus visit day in late March. I had only applied to 3 programs that winter, and I didn’t get into my preferred program where I had already built a relationship with the professor. But I got into Chicago, which was renowned for its Mexican history program. I was the only student admitted that year as a Mexicanist (i.e. a scholar who focuses on Mexico) at a school with two of the top 10 Mexican scholars in the country. By most measures, it was a continuation of my Midas phase.
On the day of my visit, the sky was a deep grey. The wind bristled in over the lake, and then I met the professors, equally chilly. I had spent a lot of time with faculty while at Columbia. They were nerds, of course, but there was a humanity about my interactions where I felt I knew how to talk to them and what to say. There was a standoffish arrogance at Chicago. Over the course of one day, not once but twice was I told that if forced to say who was a peer school of Chicago, they would only consider it to be Harvard. Yeah, it was that bad. I don’t know if it was just their lack of ability to read the room, a genuine belief, or I had a bad sample set, but the visit felt off.
I caught the eye of another admitted student who seemed to feel the same way. We fell back to the end of the pack as we walked on the tour and began to giggle like high schoolers at the absurdity of it all. “Are you coming?” “I don’t know, but this is my best choice.” “This is the best stipend for sure.”
I almost said no. I should have said no. Not because I didn’t learn a lot in graduate school. I learned to read. I learned to think. I learned to do it like a machine. I learned failure. Indeed, no matter what I say below, I should preface by saying it was academically the most intense experience of my life, and I was paid to do it.
But I couldn’t think about doing another year in admissions, and I wanted to do something consequential. Going to one of the best academic programs in the country seemed like a good start.
Young, Dumb, Stupid
I found an apartment closer to campus in the golden triangle, the nicest and safest part of Hyde Park. It was expensive, far more than other students my year paid, but I wanted to be able to walk to class even in the winter. And I thought by continuing to read applications for Columbia that year, I would make enough money to afford it.
Though the money itself was respectable, the amount of work for reading, writing papers, and all the extra work that I did was easily taking up 70 to 80 hours a week. I felt that no matter how organized I was about my schedule, I never had enough in the day. And I never felt I had enough money to have a life that would remotely compare to what I had before I went to school.
My diet consisted of coffee in the morning, one meal a day, and money for drinking on the weekends. When I discovered Dominos delivery, it turned out to be the best calorie for cost deal. I ate so much pizza that I gained 10 pounds in a quarter.
But the real cause of all my troubles was my carefree spending. Even in college, I would jump to pay for dinner or drinks, a skill that seemed to predict that I should move to Asia where bill-fighting was a sport. While I was frugal eating alone, I liked to treat my friends without a thought, even if they came from more money or had their parent’s credit card. I guess I liked the idea that I didn’t need to be rich to be someone that wanted others to enjoy their night.
On the first Sunday of the month, we would journey up to Berlin Nightclub for Madonnarama. I would splurge for the cab to save time and avoid going through Washington Park. I would buy a round or two, making sure people had a good time.
My liberality made a tight financial situation even tighter, but I remained committed to never go into credit card debt. I would soon take on more tutoring clients than be pushed to paying interest to any bank. Life was a constant oscillation between work, spend, work, spend, and then because of overspending, more work.
Love in Theory
My boyfriend broke up with me a week before my birthday and two weeks before the start of the school year. Our relationship was topsy turvy for a year and a half, but it was finally hitting a point where the silly fights had ended. I had grown comfortable with his non-monogamous attitude. I had figured out what fights to pick, and we both agreed going to graduate school was good for our future even though he would stay behind in New York.
I had moved to Chicago already, but before classes started, I came back to New York to visit. All things were normal until in the middle of a bar he told me that we should be friends. I was shellshocked. The night got worse from there. Nasty words were said. Computers were thrown. The next day, I flew back to Chicago drenched in tears.
I pulled myself together as much as binging Love Actually could do. I threw myself more into my studies. Perhaps it was a good thing that I wouldn’t be distracted by a long-distance relationship between New York and Chicago.
Graduate education in history is dependent on the relationship between mentor and mentee. Your mentor could make or break your experience, casting those they didn’t care for aside and treating those that they liked with kid gloves.
My mentor was a slender intellectual of urban Mexican history who was notoriously hard to please, though he did have a soft spot for good looking gentlemen. I recall impressing him at our first monthly workshop, being able to incisively comment on the paper. In our seminar class with first- and second-year students, he would call out my analysis in front of others as an example. In our one on ones, he would share obscure texts by Kosseleck on historiography and the meaning of history. It is not often that graduate students early in their academic career focus so much on theoretical works, usually it is on the classic texts in the field. But my mentor trusted that I could consume these texts, and I felt emboldened by his confidence. I was in his good graces.
I had lost my heart, but my path in life was still steady.
Worst Writer Ever
A few weeks later, I sat in the office of another professor, a scholar of the French Revolution, where he discussed a short paper I wrote for his class. I had been lured to believing from my other interactions that depth of thought was what won brownie points. I tried to do a complex analysis about how other historical traditions might help us better understand a historiography as rich and concentrated as the French revolution. But I had misread what mattered. The professor cared about the mechanics of being a scholar. Only if you could write in the standard form could you become a successful scholar. It was then that he said the words that I have carried for all these years. In all his years of working in academia, he reckoned I was the worst writer he had ever read.
Now, I won’t lie and say that I had spent hours pruning ever line to clear out wasteful words or duplicitous phrases. I wrote as if something should be read out loud. There was always a lyricality, a poetry to my writing, even in formal academic scenarios. My phrasing was not tight, the structure of my paragraphs not precise. By the standards of academic writing, I was not a model. I knew that, but I had always thought scholars brought different advantages to the table, and usually what I brought was imaginative analysis borrowing from different regions or theoretical traditions.
It was his phrasing that bothered me most. For someone that cared so much about precision, I assumed he must have chosen these words on purpose. I was the worst writer he had ever seen. Not the first-year college student that had written an essay twenty minutes before class. Not some poor schmuck that wrote in his town’s newspaper growing up. It was me.
Of course, I pressed him on it a bit. He reiterated. I asked him what I could do to fix it. He said something that has stayed with me for a long time, and from which I learned a lot. He said that writing is like putting up a skyscraper. To start, you need to use scaffolding to help the tower rise, using extraneous phrases and ideas that were necessary to help you get to the point where the entire building is complete. Great writers, he said, knew how to remove the scaffolding and provide the reader with the essence of the argument and nothing more. It was an elegant metaphor.
I left the room trying my best to think about scaffolding and writing, but I couldn’t. I had always been proud of my writing. Writing was how I best expressed myself and understood the world around me. His words stole that from me. I no longer felt like I belonged.
For the subsequent weeks, I couldn’t write anything. Every time I started, I stopped. I was timid. I was scared. A friend mentioned that it was possible to not submit an essay in graduate school and finish it later without any impact to your grade for the essay. I don’t know if this is unique to graduate school or UChicago, but it was a horrible option that changed everything.
I wonder if I was forced to complete the essay on time or if threatened with a lower grade, would I have submitted the paper in a less than ideal form. Maybe this story would have ended differently. When the quarter ended and I didn’t hand my paper in, my transcript didn’t show a failed grade but just an incomplete. There was no pressure for me to finish the paper. I had all the time in the world to work on it. This made it even worse.
As weeks turned into months, as the pressure of everything began to lay on top of each other. The end of my relationship, my poor finances, my inability to finish papers. I cracked. I had never felt so out of control in my entire life.
I am the kid of psychiatrists. I always felt I had an extra burden to never end up on the couch. I was even afraid to talk about my insecurities to my parents because I didn’t want to worry them with frivolous ideas. They dealt with extremely difficult cases. My petty thoughts weren’t worthy of anything serious, and I learned to hide my feelings from them. (Hiding your feelings from a forensic psychiatrist requires Platinum Level mastery of Freudian projection.)
For me to admit that I couldn’t handle it took a lot. I decided to set up an appointment with a counselor with the hope that I could learn to cope with everything I was feeling. If I could get back on the straight and narrow, maybe this episode would be a blip not worth mentioning to anyone.
The help helped. The counselor stalled the downward spiral, and I slowly built up my confidence again. I began to not take my professor’s words so personally. The toxicity was normal for academia, I gathered. His professors had shat on him, and now it was my turn. The question was whether I wanted to live in a world where professors could ruin your day, week, or year with an off-handed comment.
I just wanted to get to the summer, where I hoped that I would have the necessary distance and perspective to get my life and mind in order. I finished the first year with two incompletes, two papers I needed to hand in at some point the following year.
No Home
That fall, I moved to a new apartment further away from campus, but right near a free bus that would take 10 minutes to get to campus. The apartment building itself was a lot nicer, including a gym, a convenience store, and a doorman, which in Hyde Park meant you didn’t need to worry about some stranger following you into your apartment. Safety was a big issue back then.
The building was popular with professional school students, especially the business and law school. I had met my roommate through some gay friends from the business school. He was looking for someone to rent his second bedroom. When he told me the price of the room would save me over 25% on rent, I felt it was a great deal, especially with the amenities.
The week I moved in, my roommate had unprotected sex with his ex. Two weeks later he had an awful fever. One month later, he told me he had contracted HIV.
He spent the next few months lost. When he was home, he stayed in his room, his door always slightly ajar. I would come in from class to a crack in the door framing his naked body, his computer on his stomach, masturbating his pain away. When he wasn’t home, his dog would stay in his crate, sometimes for hours, growling at me each time even though we had a strict arrangement that I was never to take care of him. I began to feel a horrible sense of responsibility, guilt, and awkwardness. I wasn’t his friend; we were barely acquaintances. I didn’t know what to do.
It pushed me to spend more time outside of the apartment, to drink more, to eat more, to do anything outside. When I was at the apartment, I made a quick beeline to my room or the bathroom, leaving all the other spaces unused.
I never felt at home.
Sabbaticals and New Beginnings
Before the end of my first year, my mentor told me that both he and the other Mexicanist would be on sabbatical for the next year. It was rare for this to happen. I would be put under the care of the third Latin Americanist and a scholar of US Latino history. But for the most part I was given no instruction about what I needed to do. I was left to my own defenses.
At Chicago, you needed to take a two-quarter seminar each year and complete a seminar paper. Without a traditional Latin American seminar offering that year, I needed to look elsewhere. I decided to take a seminar in international history. The professor was the mentor of a friend of mine, and so I had known him by reputation.
The readings for the seminar were fascinating, opening my mind to a completely new way to do history, but also to the importance of different styles of mentorship. Whereas my wiry mentor was erudite in a Sherlock Holmesian way, this other professor was warm and fatherly, talking to you with the familiarity of someone that had known you their whole life. He encouraged some of my more imaginative thoughts, finding the boldness of my thinking to be worthy of nurturing. I still read the comments that he wrote for my seminar paper from that year. I finally found someone that truly believed in me.
I decided to confide in him my predicament with incompletes. Instead of shaming me for my own failures, he shared with me about his time at Harvard and how he had many incompletes too. He normalized how I had been feeling for some time, and it was because of his support that I began to close out my incompletes from the previous year, allowing me to receive my master’s degree.
The Backup Plan
The university offered students a single gap year that they could take while maintaining stipend eligibility. In previous years, they offered even more accommodations to take time off or to slowly go about graduating, but as pressure to get graduate students in and out of the school grew, they became stricter with what you could do.
If I took the gap year, I would want to do something temporary, so I wouldn’t treat it like a new life or career. This cancelled out the obvious thoughts of moving to the political world or back to New York. Second, I would want space and perspective from the Chicago and the US. Something overseas seemed to make the most sense. I began to focus on an opportunity to work in China at a private education company that my friends had started. It would read the right way on a resume if I ended up not going back to school. It would be an experience that would teach me something about the world if I went back. I felt that it thread the right needle.
Just before the start of my second year, the education company invited me to visit China to give a few lectures and get a feel for the business. China felt foreign and yet familiar. As someone that had grown up in Mexico, there was the same feel of a city in chaos. Life was inexpensive. The daily movement of people was infectious. I felt like it was the last place on earth I would live forever but a place that I wouldn’t mind to stay for a year.
I began the process of negotiating with them what a one-year project might look like. They were open to the idea as it would give us all an out if it didn’t work out, but it might help them jump start their business as well.. I wanted options, and I had one.
Sex, Power, and Drugs
We were stuck in Hyde Park, locked away from the rest of Chicago with a few places to eat and even fewer things to do. The only real pastime was pleasures of the flesh. The most obvious choices were other students in the program. Then, maybe a student in a nearby field or the professional schools. If you were really naughty, as I ended up being, you might meet an undergrad. But the most dangerous liaisons were those with professors.
Most of the peers I know who had relationships with professors all ended up being more fucked up by the situation. Trysts with married professors would play mind games about grades and progress in the program. It was also impossible for this to be kept a secret. Rumors spread quickly amongst those of us starved for anything interesting. Professors we had assumed were straight had affairs with men. Those we assumed were most wholesome were anything but. It was truly a fuck buffet.
It was under these circumstances that I built a rather uneasy relationship with a professor that I knew had taken a more than intellectual liking to me. I suppose because I had survived ‘daddies’ for most of my twink years, I knew how to balance giving attention while never agreeing to anything that I didn’t want. It didn’t impact me as it did some of the straight guys in the class, who probably are still scared by these experiences.
But I felt I needed more people in the department to support me in case I needed protection from being removed from the program, and so I made the somewhat calculated decision to play a little with danger.
When he asked me to come over for dinner, I enthusiastically agreed and went together with another gay friend from the department. We knew that the professor would have good food and good drink. My Dominos diet was not cutting it, and so it felt like a necessary bargain for what might turn into a night that might descend into awkwardness.
I drove my car, believing that it would give us the perfect excuse to only have a tipple. Over dinner, which was wonderful, he regaled us with stories of graduate school in the 80s and the pill parties that they used to have. We moved over to the salon where he broke out a bottle of Oban 14, his favorite. He then offered marijuana as a digestif. I looked at my friend, I thought about my car. I protested a few times before I justified the stupidity of the following decision by the fact that I would come up in the next morning before the meter would start and move my car.
As the crossfading took effect and the conversation grew more tense, my friend and I suggested we go out to a bar in River North. The professor wanted to come too. We went together, enjoying further libations and delicately swatting away advances in a way that wouldn’t injure the eventual goal. Eventually, we decided we needed to figure out a way to shake our tail. I recommended we go further north to Boystown, which proved a bit too much for the professor and became our exit.
That night, however, turned out to be one of the worst blizzards in Chicago’s history. As we sat in the cab on our way to a random bar, the snow began to accumulate with fury. It was then that I had my worst idea of the night. I became obsessed by the thought that I would not wake up early enough the next day to get my car before getting a ticket. The ticket didn’t fit into my booze and Dominos diet. And what if the snow made it impossible to even get my car? I pulled my friend aside and insisted that we needed to go rescue my car before it was too late.
The rest of the night was a rolling brownout. From picking up the car to driving in the middle of Lake Shore Drive going 25 mph, to dropping off my friend, I have spotting images that remind me that I was somewhat conscious. The next afternoon, as I finally got out of bed, I couldn’t remember what I did with my car. I went to the parking lot, searching across different floors before I finally found it, parked perfectly in its spot.
The following days as the city remained paralyzed by the storm, I barely saw anyone. I was deeply embarrassed by my self-destructive tendencies, though thankful no one got hurt and my car in one piece. I know I made poor choices that night. No one forced me to do anything. And the professor, while weird, had not cornered me into doing anything. But it was this experience in all its absurdity that I began to feel that the school and the city itself was encouraging the worst in me, and probably many of my peers as well.
Alcoholism and drug abuse was rampant amongst students in the program. Drinking and drugs were coping mechanisms, ways to dull the anguish of everything…of feeling poor, of professorial scolding, of a job market that was increasingly dwindling, of losing yourself.
I filled paperwork for my sabbatical a few weeks later.
One last goodbye
During my year away, I came back to campus once to meet with professors under the guise of preparing to come back. The meetings were perfunctory and cold, except the one with the international history professor. Could one man be enough? It didn’t feel that way, but I didn’t have an alternative yet. I left the decision incomplete.
I spent the next few months wondering what I really wanted out of life. I wondered where my passion had gone, my ambition. I waited for months for something to change and wake me from that stupor. It was then that I met a guy. I fell in love the first night we met. For the following five months, every free moment I had was spent thinking about him and when we could find time to meet again.
In between, a deadline passed for me to re-register for graduate school. There was no formal notice required to say I wasn’t going back, not responding was enough. Unceremoniously, my time in graduate school ended.
Time to Stop Running
Was it Chicago? Was it graduate school? Was it as problematic as I make it out to be, or was I not ready for the experience?
I think about the graveyard that Chicago left behind, friends of mine that were chewed up and spit out by the grinder that is graduate education. My story is not unique. But no, I don’t think majority of blame rests on the school or graduate education, though I do think both are worthy of greater investigation.
My story is a story of growing up, of losing the innocence of young adulthood, and being slapped with the reality that no one cares about what award you won when you were 21.
I ran away because the artifice of who I thought I was supposed to be—this consequential person that would make an impact on society—was too much pressure for me to live up to. As I took the scaffolding away, the building that I had constructed collapsed upon its own weight.
My 12-year odyssey to China can in some ways be seen as an attempt to reclaim the confidence and the pride that I once had. But China is its own beast, all-consuming and not a place for peaceful reflection or salvation.
And so, my focus in life shifted. I became consumed by a desire to chase love across the world. I stayed in college counseling a few years longer than I should have because it afforded me the luxury to fly back and forth to visit my boyfriend in Europe. When he moved back to China, I shifted to tech companies because they were the only fast-growing companies dumb enough to hire someone like me without specific expertise. I did it to stay as close as possible to him.
My life became focused around trying to maintain the love of someone. And should this be the end of my story, it would be sanguine and grand. But my jobs, instead of keeping us closer, kept pulling us further apart. I sat in Guangzhou in the middle of the pandemic while he was in Beijing over a thousand miles away. It wasn’t the life I wanted. Moreover, my partner confided in me that he felt I had sacrificed too much for us to be together in China. He appreciated my selflessness for finding a way for us to have a life together, but he felt it was my time to figure out what I could achieve.
It is our assumption that in a culture that is more my own, in a language where I have greater command, and by virtue of the sheer experience I have collected over these years, my ceiling is highest in the US than it might ever be in China, especially at this time.
I don’t have any preconceptions what it might look like. It could mean that I have a solid life as just one of millions of people working in tech in America. It could mean that I might finally be mature enough, humble enough, thoughtful enough to scale to greater heights.
But the one thing that I know for sure, it gives me the best chance that I will get to come home each night at a semi-reasonable hour to kiss my husband and hug our kids. That would be enough.
And so, Poseidon, I humbly request safe passage to come home again.
Had to say this is THE most captivating story I've read for a while that's probably worth turning into a Netflix series at some point. You are definitely a great writer!