Confessions of a Cat-holic (149)

The fact that Kelly came straight from Manhattan, and in the middle of Harlem, helped assure me that I needed this girl by my side more than ever. I believed that she could be my guide in New York, especially after deciphering all the marketing materials, admissions letters, financial aid package, brochures, prospectus and information package signed by our admissions director, Eric Furda, who was allegedly a native of Philadelphia and an alumnus of UPenn.

Kelly lived on Carmen 6 and I lived on Carmen 9 in our freshman year. After that, we had been living next to each other for the rest of fours years, either on a bunk bed in a double, or in a single right next to each other on the same floor. I dropped by her suite one day in the first month of school. I couldn't believe what I saw. She had all and more than I could have ever asked for from a friend. She had a television, a DDR machine and a playstation in her room, shared with 4 other equally intelligent and pleasant looking friends from Stuyvesant. Oh, Stuyvesant was another feeder school to the Ivy League. I believed Columbia had taken more talents from that public school than all of the prep schools combined. In my year, there were around 40-50 people from Stuyvesant, in a class of less than 1400 people. Stuyvesant was predominantly Asians, and was one of the most selective public schools in New York City, sharing rivalry with Bronx School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech. This could be another reason why I felt more in common with Kelly, than say the preppy kids who were all stuck up and pretentious, especially after conducting a subconscious 6-degree-of-separation social experiment on my peers.

Kelly's roommates in freshman year were Lisa Tong, the Taiwanese immigrant and biomedical engineering major, who moved to Sydney and wedded a Japanese doctor after college (Lisa herself had also finished the dentistry program in Australia and became a dentist); Daniella Loh, a quiet and shy girl who graduated from the NYU medical school; Rebecca Liu, a humanities major and the cousin of my friend later, Stephen Liou, who was the son of the owner of the internationally renowned diner, Joe's Shanghai in Chinatown. Apart from Stephen Liou, I rarely talked to Kelly's friends because they were not as talkative, even though Lisa lived in a single with us on the same floor in junior year. Lisa complained about my sleeping habits in front of me, because I could not wake up to my alarm clocks in the morning. It was usually Kelly who woke me up for school and told me that I had snores with my eyes opened the night before.

One of my favorite activities with Kelly was checking out the guys in our school, and secretly giving them a rating. Back then, there was no online social media Facebook, so we had to rely on the paper printed facebook (yes, literally) of all the students in our year. It listed the names and portraits for everyone from Columbia College and SEAS. We both agreed that Leon Williams was the hottest guy in our year, but no one had ever really seen him around on campus. I heard he went by the fake name, Chris, in our community. He was a Canadian Chinese in the engineering school. Other than the fact that he had been on a date with one of the hottest girls in our year, Nathalie Torres, I had not known much about this mysterious hottie from my home country.

There was another thing that drawn me to Kelly; it was that she was one of the most relaxed persons I had ever known. Given her grades and test scores, I didn't know how she managed that. That was very much the same trait of Karen. Karen worked less hard and did better than me in all subjects always. She could spend her entire week shopping before exams and ended up with better grades than me. I used to be a very anxious person before I met Kelly. Since the beginning of F4 after choosing to specialize in the science stream, I had been working nonstop day in and day out, all the way through college.