Yale Will Not Save You

Abstract

Yale Will Not Save You Esmé Weijun Wang (bio) The moment I received my acceptance letter from Yale University was one of the happiest of my life. I stood at the bottom of my driveway, where two tin mailboxes nestled against one another, and found a large envelope waiting inside. Large envelopes from publications were a bad sign; they almost always bore my own handwriting, and usually held a rejected manuscript and a perfunctory note. But a big envelope from a university — an envelope with instructions, with welcome, with a full-color look-book — that was news. I stood at the mailboxes, shrieking. I was not the type of girl to shriek, but I was seventeen, and I had gotten into Yale. I was to be in Jonathan Edwards College, Class of 2005. ________ I was an overachieving child, the daughter of twentysomething Taiwanese immigrants who came to Michigan and then California with their baby girl. My parents were broke. They applied for food [End Page 18] stamps; they told one another that someday they'd be rich enough to eat at Pizza Hut any time they wanted. Eventually we moved for the sake of a different school district, and while raising me and my baby brother in a largely white small town, my parents told me that school was all-important and that I should always do my best. In elementary school, I assigned myself essays to write while on vacation. In fifth grade, I wrote a two-hundred-page novel about a kidnapped girl who becomes a cat. Soon my parents were both working in tech jobs at the height of the boom in Silicon Valley, and were no longer broke. They never spoke the words "American dream," but that was what their lives signified, and so in middle school I chose to take a 7:30 a.m. class in C++ programming, and I wrote a short story that my English teacher went on to teach even four years after that. In high school, when I told my mother that I was thinking of suicide, she suggested that we kill ourselves together, which I didn't fully recognize as the bizarre response it was until I told the story again and again over the following decades of my life. I won a gold medal at the Physics Olympics, was a California Arts Scholar, and crossed the stage at graduation with a GPA that belied the hundreds of self-inflicted scars lurking beneath my nylon gown. I chose to go east for college because I wanted to get away from the chaos — the accusatory fights, the sobbing — that occurred inside our home too often to take note of. ________ I dated someone briefly at the end of my senior year of high school who broke up with me because I was undiagnosed and frightening. Before he ended our relationship he invited me to a poolside barbecue. He wore girls' jeans. We stood around the glassy pool at his apartment complex and his mother asked me what I was doing after graduation. [End Page 19] "I'm going to Yale," I said. She did a double take. "Good for you," she said. Even back then my instability was clear to most. ________ "I went to Yale" is shorthand for I have schizoaffective disorder, but I'm not worthless. ________ Yale is the third-oldest university in the country, after Harvard, which is the oldest, and the College of William & Mary, which was established in 1693. Yale used to be called the Collegiate School, but was renamed for Elihu Yale after a succession of gifts from the English merchant and philanthropist, including books, exotic textiles, and a portrait of George I. These generous donations, the sale of which helped to fund the construction of Yale College in New Haven, were vigorously encouraged by Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who also vigorously encouraged the Salem witch trials. In troubled Salem, babbling and odd movements could signify witchcraft. The bewitched Goodwin family children, he said, "would bark at one another like Dogs, and again purr like so many Cats." We all know what happened to the witches. ________ I was diagnosed with bipolar...