Reunion is a strange thing. It could feel like a mental torture, for the first timer at least. The thought of it was downright scary and threatening for me: What am I going to find out? What if I don’t like what I hear or see? What if I do? What does it all mean? Who would show up in one of these meetings anyway? The accomplished? The survivors? The showoffs? The has-beens? The retirees leisurely sneering at the working stiffs?
It also begged the next set of questions: Who DO NOT show up? The forgotten? The depressed? The shy? The sinking ones? The wash-outs?
I know I shouldn’t doubt myself, but I can’t help it. With this, I tiptoed into the Beinu 35th reunion held in Washington DC on the weekend of October 13, 2007.
*** How did it turn out?
Not as bad as I had thought, although I must admit that I felt awkward in the beginning, being one of the five Shu classmates from among 120 attendees. 120 was a respectable turnout, considering the size of the total of 1972 graduates (about 1,000 girls), and considering whoever made it to America all these years since…
They say that you’ll make new friends at the reunions. It’s sort of true; but it will take more than one reunion to know your new friends well. I still prefer my Shu confidants (“Si Dang”). Too bad that few of them bothered to make the trip from the West Coast to join us this time.
I picked out some friends from as early as when I was at the West Gate (‘Ximen’) Elementary School 40+ years ago. One girl (or one lady now) in DC was apparently doing quite well, wheeling and dealing in real estate, while working as a pediatrician, married to an elderly white man from the FDA (who was once a cardiologist.) Her current status and reputation (a dragon lady to be sure) seemed at odd with the image I had of her when young - fresh, demure and understated.
Such a scenario played out over and over again in the reunion. In the end, I’ve decided that people grew to match their lives; and life is full of accidents/surprises. The majority who came to America, took the road of least resistance, working for large corporations, played by the safe rules, tended to become cautious, reserved, and appropriately polite. The few who took the roads less traveled, working for themselves as entrepreneurs, tended to become resourceful, outgoing, and appropriately aggressive. This was true with or without the blessing of previous dispositions.
I belonged firmly in the former group. What I am now is a somewhat timid, conservative, and risk-averse individual, contrary to what my Beinu classmates have thought of me as a wild teenager. Was it my age? My coming to America, compelled as a perpetual foreigner to stay invisible? Or, my marriage to a settled and conservative academic? I don’t know. I suppose it could be a little bit of everything.
Ah, the reunion made me reminisce my vivacious youth. My good friend Sheila Chen from the Shu class, now in Tempa Florida, told me how, in high school, I showed up one Saturday morning at her house in Taipei, asking her mother to relay this message to her (who was still sleeping), “If my mother calls to find out where I was last night, tell her that I spent the night with your daughter at your place.” It was a boldface lie, told to a wrong person -Sheila’s mom. Now everything came back: I did have one boyfriend in high school whom my mother detested. He was a cool kid from a rotten, second-rate school. I was sentimental about him, and rebellious about my mother’s strict forbiddance of my association with him. My boyfriend was to be sent off to serve his military duty; and we spent a night together sitting in a nearby coffee shop, bidding each other farewell and crying all night. The next morning, I must be desperate for an excuse to get out of my mommy trouble, so I thought of Sheila…When you’re young, you do stupid things…
In the big gala on Saturday night at the reunion, I stood up to recall an adventurous journey through Africa, the dark continent, with my little family back in 1987: My American anthropologist husband would not suffer an escorted, guided tour with a group, but we wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit Kenya and the game parks that we had heard so much about. So he rented a white Toyota wagon, with me and my 6-month-old infant daughter in toll. In Kenya, you wouldn’t dream of camping once stepping out of Nairobi the capital. For foreign tourists, reserving hotel stays in game park resorts was a must. This was, after all, the real THIRD WORLD. But being a naïve traveler, my husband underestimated the time it took to get from Nairobi to the first game park resort. 40 short miles on a map took us a full day to travel through dry dirt roads and muddy puddles, not to mention the blown tire, low gas (no gas stations until the resort), and many curious, threatening stares from the 6-7 foot tall spear-carrying, loin-cloth clad Masai warriors coming and going by our dirty white Toyota (for the dirt road was the main thoroughfare connecting villages where people’s only means of transportation was their two lower limbs.) There were more harried tales to follow: My infant daughter was locked out by accident by her young mother at the game park, while the baboons outside stared right in, ready to jump in to devour her whole (or kidnap her from the crib, whichever); We were blackmailed by two border police from the neighboring country of Tanzania for trespassing while following a school of loitering hippos up the river (An obvious tourist trap, for we only remembered seeing a dry cow skull hanging by the roadside, hardly a legitimate border symbol between two states.)
When my classmates clasps their hands for more of my safari stories (or they were just being nice), I realized that I had had some pretty amazing experiences that were beyond “normal” for my fellow classmates, thanks to my husband – A true explorer, and a renaissance man from the 60s. I also realized that so many of our lives were forever changed by the men we were married to, in ways that no schooling, career or parenting could have ever made a difference.
Through finding things out about others, I found out about myself. This reunion has made me step out of myself, learn about myself, discover my past, re-examine my present. And because of it, I am refreshed, waiting for the next chapter of my life to unfold – and that is intriguing. There lies the beauty of the reunion.
On the way back to New York from the reunion, in the car, all seven of us who have warmed up to each other quite well by then, were scheming for our second lives. We talked about some dreams, not too distant in 10-15 years, when we shall retire from our day jobs, or from being someone’s wife or mother or daughter. We may pool our money and brains together to invest in a kind of reunion complex (built to be like the Beinu “GuangFu” hall where we once studied at), to work on a skill co-op (I’ve counted a lawyer, a business analyst, a cancer researcher, a wine expert, an artist, and a property manager among us).
There you have it.
October 18, 2007
Susie Li
It also begged the next set of questions: Who DO NOT show up? The forgotten? The depressed? The shy? The sinking ones? The wash-outs?
I know I shouldn’t doubt myself, but I can’t help it. With this, I tiptoed into the Beinu 35th reunion held in Washington DC on the weekend of October 13, 2007.
*** How did it turn out?
Not as bad as I had thought, although I must admit that I felt awkward in the beginning, being one of the five Shu classmates from among 120 attendees. 120 was a respectable turnout, considering the size of the total of 1972 graduates (about 1,000 girls), and considering whoever made it to America all these years since…
They say that you’ll make new friends at the reunions. It’s sort of true; but it will take more than one reunion to know your new friends well. I still prefer my Shu confidants (“Si Dang”). Too bad that few of them bothered to make the trip from the West Coast to join us this time.
I picked out some friends from as early as when I was at the West Gate (‘Ximen’) Elementary School 40+ years ago. One girl (or one lady now) in DC was apparently doing quite well, wheeling and dealing in real estate, while working as a pediatrician, married to an elderly white man from the FDA (who was once a cardiologist.) Her current status and reputation (a dragon lady to be sure) seemed at odd with the image I had of her when young - fresh, demure and understated.
Such a scenario played out over and over again in the reunion. In the end, I’ve decided that people grew to match their lives; and life is full of accidents/surprises. The majority who came to America, took the road of least resistance, working for large corporations, played by the safe rules, tended to become cautious, reserved, and appropriately polite. The few who took the roads less traveled, working for themselves as entrepreneurs, tended to become resourceful, outgoing, and appropriately aggressive. This was true with or without the blessing of previous dispositions.
I belonged firmly in the former group. What I am now is a somewhat timid, conservative, and risk-averse individual, contrary to what my Beinu classmates have thought of me as a wild teenager. Was it my age? My coming to America, compelled as a perpetual foreigner to stay invisible? Or, my marriage to a settled and conservative academic? I don’t know. I suppose it could be a little bit of everything.
Ah, the reunion made me reminisce my vivacious youth. My good friend Sheila Chen from the Shu class, now in Tempa Florida, told me how, in high school, I showed up one Saturday morning at her house in Taipei, asking her mother to relay this message to her (who was still sleeping), “If my mother calls to find out where I was last night, tell her that I spent the night with your daughter at your place.” It was a boldface lie, told to a wrong person -Sheila’s mom. Now everything came back: I did have one boyfriend in high school whom my mother detested. He was a cool kid from a rotten, second-rate school. I was sentimental about him, and rebellious about my mother’s strict forbiddance of my association with him. My boyfriend was to be sent off to serve his military duty; and we spent a night together sitting in a nearby coffee shop, bidding each other farewell and crying all night. The next morning, I must be desperate for an excuse to get out of my mommy trouble, so I thought of Sheila…When you’re young, you do stupid things…In the big gala on Saturday night at the reunion, I stood up to recall an adventurous journey through Africa, the dark continent, with my little family back in 1987: My American anthropologist husband would not suffer an escorted, guided tour with a group, but we wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit Kenya and the game parks that we had heard so much about. So he rented a white Toyota wagon, with me and my 6-month-old infant daughter in toll. In Kenya, you wouldn’t dream of camping once stepping out of Nairobi the capital. For foreign tourists, reserving hotel stays in game park resorts was a must. This was, after all, the real THIRD WORLD. But being a naïve traveler, my husband underestimated the time it took to get from Nairobi to the first game park resort. 40 short miles on a map took us a full day to travel through dry dirt roads and muddy puddles, not to mention the blown tire, low gas (no gas stations until the resort), and many curious, threatening stares from the 6-7 foot tall spear-carrying, loin-cloth clad Masai warriors coming and going by our dirty white Toyota (for the dirt road was the main thoroughfare connecting villages where people’s only means of transportation was their two lower limbs.) There were more harried tales to follow: My infant daughter was locked out by accident by her young mother at the game park, while the baboons outside stared right in, ready to jump in to devour her whole (or kidnap her from the crib, whichever); We were blackmailed by two border police from the neighboring country of Tanzania for trespassing while following a school of loitering hippos up the river (An obvious tourist trap, for we only remembered seeing a dry cow skull hanging by the roadside, hardly a legitimate border symbol between two states.)
When my classmates clasps their hands for more of my safari stories (or they were just being nice), I realized that I had had some pretty amazing experiences that were beyond “normal” for my fellow classmates, thanks to my husband – A true explorer, and a renaissance man from the 60s. I also realized that so many of our lives were forever changed by the men we were married to, in ways that no schooling, career or parenting could have ever made a difference.
Through finding things out about others, I found out about myself. This reunion has made me step out of myself, learn about myself, discover my past, re-examine my present. And because of it, I am refreshed, waiting for the next chapter of my life to unfold – and that is intriguing. There lies the beauty of the reunion.On the way back to New York from the reunion, in the car, all seven of us who have warmed up to each other quite well by then, were scheming for our second lives. We talked about some dreams, not too distant in 10-15 years, when we shall retire from our day jobs, or from being someone’s wife or mother or daughter. We may pool our money and brains together to invest in a kind of reunion complex (built to be like the Beinu “GuangFu” hall where we once studied at), to work on a skill co-op (I’ve counted a lawyer, a business analyst, a cancer researcher, a wine expert, an artist, and a property manager among us).
There you have it.
October 18, 2007
Susie Li
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