I wouldn’t admit to being poor in conversation, but for colleges, on paper, I did. Below a certain household income, some of the best schools were free. Then you applied for book allowances each semester and winter coat funds. You ate only at dining halls, never out. Fang got a full ride first and helped me do the same. Forms like these were straightforward enough to fill out. We had been filing our parents’ taxes for years.
Merit-based scholarships, we told our parents, who we both agreed never needed to know. But had my mother just checked, she would have seen that neither place Fang or I went to offered merit-based aid.
Certain Americans could be two-faced. Acquaintances and other parents from our school made their implications about us clear.
You must be so proud of your children.
But how had your son really gotten into Yale? Because Yale looks out for minorities. They save a certain percentage of seats for them.
How had your daughter really gotten into Harvard? Because Harvard is even easier on minorities and on women too.
Settling the question that I’d always had then. No success of mine had anything to do with me, my work ethic, or my brain.
During college, Fang began coming back home in newer and more expensive clothes.
Scholarship money? my mother would ask, rubbing the lapel of his blue wool blazer with gold buttons, but perhaps already knowing full well that it wasn’t. Borrowed from a roommate. But in short order he was able to afford his own.
Fang in his late twenties, taking me out to lunch. I was a senior at Harvard then, and he had driven up from Manhattan, where he’d just been promoted to associate of something, or in my own head, the associate of money. No more D-hall food for once, and I could pick any place I liked. I requested Asian food, some semblance of what our mother would’ve made, which the D-hall never served. Think bigger, he told me, arriving outside my dorm, dressed in fine long linen pants and a cashmere T-shirt sweater, before I knew that T-shirt sweaters were a thing. Per his suggestion, we went to a French restaurant, Boston’s most expensive, where in the parking lane, I watched him toss his new Audi car keys to a white valet and say, Take care of this for me, will you? and then tip this man fifty bucks.
Inside, I had my own white server who stood next to me the entire time like a bodyguard. Each crumb that fell out of my mouth, he scooped away with a silver scraper. Warm bread slices were held out to me with silver tongs. And then when I had to use the restroom, my bodyguard followed, opened the soundproof bathroom door, closed the soundproof door, and stood outside while I peed.
Did I remember anything about the food? The actual taste of it? No. I wanted my mother’s food the entire time.
Back at the table with our bodyguards, my brother asked whom I had befriended at Harvard, whom I’d connected with. Because I was, he said, at the most well-connected place in the country, the starting place of future presidents, industry scions, CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and Silicon Valley tycoons.
I hated this. Hated the sense that I got from Fang that there was some magical beanstalk I had to climb. Nothing good comes from climbing beanstalks, didn’t he know that? There are giants up there.
But Fang did know. The whole point was to climb to the giants and become a giant yourself.
Jiu-an, don’t think you’re any less, he said, and then sipped his Scotch at half past noon.
This is our chance, don’t throw it away.
What is learned outside of the classroom is just as important as what you learn in it, if not more.
Meet the right people. They can open the right doors.
Wouldn’t it be cool if someday you became a senator’s wife?
（The famed MRS degree, because in practice, a female brain is worth nothing. Four lobes of the cerebrum, and I have sometimes imagined one of mine labeled rage.）
After my brother said those things, I realized that he and I had officially diverged. Siblings grew apart gradually, but, on that day, it felt like a cliff and then a crash. I let him talk to me that way because, as a young adult, I had started to recognize guilt, that I’d had our parents since birth and he had not. This point he never brought up, but I could sense between us, he had been left behind. Spoiled, Fang must have thought of me, to have had both Mother and Father all to myself, when he needed them the most. Our mother didn’t hold his hand for long enough, and by the time he saw her again, he was too old.
But as I watched Fang instruct his bodyguard to bring us an assortment of desserts, I felt he had still let me down. Just as I didn’t know about having an older brother until he appeared, I suddenly knew that I once had a brother, but now he was gone.