Junior Year: Spring Quarter (Trinity Term, for you Brits)

I suppose it’s time to write about Oxford—which sounds a little ironic, because I’ve been doing nothing but writing since touching down at London Heathrow. It’s just been very hard to collect my thoughts about spring quarter on Punderings, because without the benefit of retrospect, there seemed to be no linear narrative to spring quarter.  

Oxford felt less like a physical location than a happening: I know that when I reminisce, it won’t just be about the glow of the lamplight on the cobblestones after a midnight rain, or the vaulted dome of the Radcliffe Camera, or an oar cutting into a river made blue with dawn. It’ll be about the continuous revelations and confrontations with myself. Oxford was a time of the hardest truths and the gentlest comforts. I started therapy, came out to my mother, set boundaries with my family. I cried and cried and cried, for all sorts of reasons. What became of the rawness of it all was a startling growth of myself into a softer, more sincere person. A person who learned how to make a home for herself and in herself, who could anchor her body to more than just its fears, and whose first instinct was no longer to flee. 

Oxford was a time of limitlessness. I’d unknowingly gone through much of my life believing that it was too late: too late for me to choose or experience a path outside the confines of high achievement and dance, too late for me to have a good romance after a comically terrible romantic history, too late for me to define a self separate from traumas and hurts and wounds. All of this was proven wrong. For the first time in a decade, I took an intentional break from ballet and joined the Magdalen College Boat Crew (my fat ass broke a boat during our last race in the Oriel Regattas, but that’s a story for another time), spending my mornings on the green skein of the river. I took a class on political theory, and the vocabulary I gained from it enabled me to write about gender violence for the first time since surviving sexual assault in 2018. I started therapy, and after breaking down into tears when my therapist asked me about my relationship to myself, I slowly began to dismantle my belief that there was something inherently wrong about me, a process reaffirmed by a romantic relationship that was brief but ever so gentle and good. I stopped performing my personality to compensate for how invisible I’d felt in my own life before 2022, and suddenly, all my relationships felt imbued with magic and meaning. I felt so present, guided to the edge of myself by the sheer brilliance and love of the people around me, and then past those edges into personalities and pursuits I could’ve never imagined myself undertaking a mere quarter ago. I was no longer being tossed every which way by the world and its expectations—at Oxford, for the first time, I took a step back and constructed a life on my own terms, with an agency that was both bewildering and beautiful. The experiences of my pre-Oxford life, including my survival instincts and coping mechanisms, were no longer adequate frameworks or tools with which I could approach my Oxford life. Nothing—not even my year in Shenzhen, which felt less like a revelationary new way of living than a linear progression of the standard Asian American narrative (the Prolonged Return to Homeland, And Its Necessary Dissonances and Disillusions)—could’ve prepared me for how thoroughly I stepped out of my preordained life. I felt unmoored to all but my dearest and most instinctive pursuit: writing. 

And words flowed from me. In terms of sheer word count, only my freshman winter—when I deluded myself into thinking I needed to produce at least ten-thousand words per day—could compare. I wrote about everything: flowery descriptions of campus, unsparing appraisals of my Stanford House and Magdalen classmates, my own wandering and contradictory thoughts regarding therapy sessions and romance and the future. I spent hours on the second-floor balcony of RadCam, hammering away at my gay novel beneath the stern gaze of Johannes Radcliffe. I saw my tutorial papers clearly before they took form, my arguments and wordplay bending to my whim with an ease I’d struggled to find at Stanford. During my last weekend at Oxford, I bought three notebooks at Scriptum, a god-tier stationary store that’d become my post-RadCam-study-session haunt, and had been surprised when the cashier took out the gift-wrap. “Those are all for me,” I said. And then, more smugly, “I’ll probably finish them by the end of the summer.” It was the kind of brag to which I’d wanted so badly to lay claim when I was younger. I’ve always known what it felt like to be carried away by my words, to be compelled to write—but this was the first time I took control of that compulsion, channeled all my creative energy into challenging myself and my world through the written word. Not a single page of my journals was wasted—everything brought me something new. I felt like I was burning, blazing, with intent, despite the seeming directionlessness of living such a different life at Oxford. I was trying to get to the bottom of myself, and I soon realized that this search was the bottom of myself. I entertained the idea of calling this search my soul: one’s soul is one’s search for themselves, including the evidence and methods of that search. This definition is still a work in progress, especially as I’ve been playing around with another concept: 混, the Chinese character used in “primordial chaos,” “anarchy,” and “mess.” 混 implies a deep unknowability at both the personal and existential levels, a certain unformedness that can’t be shaped into a personality, chain of events, or linear narrative—and while it stands in opposition to my definition of a soul, it is also part of us (and a part of myself that my self-curating and controlling tendencies were loathe to accept). The oldest Chinese texts do claim that a person’s soul has two parts (hun and po), though, so maybe my idea isn’t entirely unfounded: the search to know oneself and the utter unknowability of the self are two most basic qualities of the human soul, and they sustain each other. If my time at Oxford brought me closer to both my search and my unknowability, it brought me closer to my soul. 

My newfound agency extended beyond my creative writing and to my academic pursuits. In true ADHD fashion, I took full charge of my tutorial. My tutor, Dr. Nie, gave me free rein over what to study and what to write, and in the name of interdisciplinary studies, I bounced through a dizzying array of subjects: Chiang Kai-shek’s narration of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, the 1980’s documentary River Elegy as an analytical framework for Zha Jianying’s China Pop, the similarities in Russian and Chinese memorializations of war, the cultural phenomena of Iris Chang’s and R.F. Kuang’s The Rape of Nanjing and The Poppy War in Chinese America, the combination of Rana Mitter’s moralist interpretation of WWII geopolitics with Shelley Chan’s model of “diasporic moments” to study global diasporic activism. I produced weekly essays, which we discussed and debated in two-hour sessions over Oreos and tea. Dr. Nie was a Chinese woman—and it was only with her guidance, which at times reached aunty-level care as we talked about our days and worries and families in Chinese—that I felt comfortable with such a wide range of topics. International relations and Chinese politics had always felt intimidating at Stanford, especially as almost all classes are taught by conservative white faculty; there was no footing for my budding interests in diaspora theory and ideology at a school so dominated by empirical and quantitative political science. Dr. Nie’s tutorial felt distinctly human, meant to build and reshape the frameworks through which I viewed the world: for the first time, I confessed to my hatred for studying war and violence at a dehumanizingly quantitative school (Stanford). I told her that creative writing had become the means through which I asked and answered the world—then, on a whim, sent her the first five chapters of my book. I know now that I want to continue with tutorial-style studies when I return to the States, perhaps with a directed reading.

Which brings me to senior year. In September, I’ll have my last first day of school, and I’ll start my two honors theses: a quantitative and theory-based project with the International Relations department on diaspora politics, and a novel with the Program in the Arts. Senior year will be the first year I don’t do research for a professor, and it’ll be my last year dancing in a semi-semi-semi-professional capacity. I’ll apply for grad schools. I’ll graduate. I’ll be deeply thankful to leave the Bay Area. And the rest of my life will be there to catch me. I had a taste of what that rest of my life might feel like at Oxford—a life that was under my control, that was so utterly different from everything that had come before. At times, it felt like I was escaping into a life that couldn’t possibly be mine, like I was stealing moments from a parallel universe Ana: an Ana who had stayed for her last year in high school and was now a second-year student at Magdalen. An Ana who spent her mornings rowing with MCBC and bused to the China Centre for her tutorials in her afternoons, an Ana who lived off Sainsbury’s green smoothies and long evenings in the RadCam and picnics in the Christ Church meadows. An Ana who was gentler and unhurt, and who glowed with possibility. It took me a long time to understand that what I was experiencing was not a parallel universe or a temporary deviation from normalcy, but qualities of myself I’d long thought dead. I’d flung myself so completely into Oxford, had given myself the space to lay roots into grounds I’d thought could never be mine. I’d never fully understood the implications of them being mine until they were. 

“I don’t want to leave,” I told my therapist during our last session. I’d been so full of dread during my last days at Oxford that I’d hardly been able to muster any excitement for my summer in Berlin. “If I leave, I’m gonna go back to my old self—all my old coping mechanisms, my old fears, my traumas. I’m gonna lose this life and the opportunity to be someone better. Someone more.” 

My therapist had shaken her head. “No,” she said. “Don’t you realize? This isn’t some sort of parallel life, or someone else’s life. This is your life. Oxford might have reflected back at you all the possibilities within you, gave room for you to grow, but it was all you. And if you want to come back—”

“I do.” 

“—it’ll still be here. It’s been here for so long, for better or for worse, and it’ll be here for you when you return.” 

Huh, I thought. It was all me. And she was right. I’m in Berlin right now, in a cafe called Hallesches Haus, which I suspect will become my weekday summer haunt by virtue of its hanging plants and sunlit spaciousness and good food and casually queer staff. I am alone, away from Oxford’s cobblestones and secret libraries, away from all my friends and tutors, away from the only place in which I’d thought I could live as this version of me. Yet still I feel calm and at home in myself, and still the words flow so readily from me, and still the world stretches wide before me, ready to catch me with all its possibility. There is so much magic, I could cry.