Confessions of a Cat-holic (152)

That September in 2003, I remembered I shedded a lot of hair due to stress. Stress didn't come from school work, it was from co-living with other equally competitive students from all walks of life. In Chinese, it would be "工作不累，累的是要應付一些精神病".

There were a few incoming students announced dead in the first week of school. One of them was a girl living in a single at Furnald. She was found dead in her room because she was allergic to peanuts. She obviously would not have tried the peanuts herself. I suspected that she was poisoned but I could be wrong. Another one was a guy who fell off the window after drinking too much alcohol in a party at one of the fraternities.

So you could feel how anxious I must have been. I told myself, never ever never ever let anyone know my biggest fears and allergies, or I could be dead.

Academically, I was not strained at all. The stuff I learned in calculus in sophomore and junior year was easier than what I had been taught in F4 and F5's additional mathematics. I didn't have to study at all for many of the science classes, because I pre-learned all of that in IB already.

That September was an eventful one. I met my roommate, Hannah Temple, who was a Jew raised in Colorado. She was from Denver, to be exact. Her dad visited her occasionally, and I just all of a sudden felt like I was in the movie, American Pie.

Yes, I watched Hollywood movies too. At that time, I always worried that I would get killed in New York. There was a fire drill at Carmen Hall some time during the first month of school. I thought it was a terrorist attack. And I was petrified so I ran all the way from Carmen 9 to the lobby bare feet, just to realize that it was just a fire drill. There was a micro water flood on the first floor so my toes were all soaked as a result. I realized that there was no one as petrified as me in the hall. It seemed like I was the only one freaking out about living in New York. I honestly thought that there could be a bomb targeting Columbia students. But Hannah told me that she was going to major in the Middle East Language and Culture Studies program, and only through co-living with her for a year that I had come to realize the Jews and Muslims (or terrorists) were friends.

Having lived in Manhattan for four years, I came to realize that Columbia was a magnet school for Jews. I didn't know about that before I got there. My roommate was Jewish. And there were a lot of transfer students from the liberal arts colleges doing the 3-2 engineering program. Many of which were Jews from Brandeis. I took Chinese class with them and these Jews' Chinese proficiency had well exceeded my expectations.

The subway too. I hated the subway a lot. But that being said, I still learned something new every day about the city. I saw many Hasidic Jews in the subway. They looked very strange to me. I had never seen such people ever in my life. They liked to walk around the city in groups, with a shtreimel and side curls in black suit. There were also Orthodox Jewish men who always covered their heads by wearing a skullcap known in Hebrew as a kippah or in Yiddish as a yarmulke.

We had a cafeteria dedicated to Jews at Barnard College. I never really had eaten there because I was so authentically Chinese. I ate everything, from beef organs to pigeons and from ducks to rabbits. But I knew that many Orthodox Jews had to follow a very strict diet, namely the Kosher meals. I knew many guys, especially the engineering students, liked to drop by Barnard's cafeteria to check out the girls there. And maybe I should have too, but I was quite happy with my Ferris sushi and John Jay brunch.

It was a big Jewish community at Columbia. You could see them everywhere on campus. And I knew they were just concentrated in New York after Edmond's visit on campus in the first month. He was calling those bagels "donuts". Obviously, bagels were a Jewish food and he had not seen it before. Then I realized that I had been in the right place, in the right hands, with the right people on my side.