10 things I love about Princeton
1. Unassuming significance
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1. Unassuming significance
It was a warm summer afternoon in Karachi. Our school bell had just signaled the beginning of the last period. By the time our Islamic Studies teacher walked into the classroom, my fourth-grade self was yawning and ready to go home. But a few minutes later, I was wide awake, absorbing a lesson that I have never forgotten:
These days, all my essays are about other people. My mom often tells me that maybe I should spend less time worrying about boys and more on my classes, or earning money, or whatever. But I’m aware that my specialty is making other people cry with my poetry-prose on heartbreak — pieces inspired by and dedicated to people I’ve loved. I am rarely the star of my own works, which is oxymoronic since they’ve all been labeled “self essays.”
Before I came to Princeton, the word “chill” was merely an indicator of temperature, often useful for describing the weather. Now, I use “chill” to describe people, places, classes, and almost all my Princeton experiences. It’s a blanket word with an overall positive connotation and an indistinct meaning. The versatile “chill” is a word my friends use for various — practically all — contexts.
The fall of my junior year, I sat in one of those dark wood-paneled East Pyne classrooms, learning about the transformation of France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For weeks on end, I heard the same French word I did not know over and over again. Slowly, from context and repetition, I pieced together some understanding of it.
It wasn’t until a month before Feb. 24, 2023, the date marking one year of the war, that I truly registered the ongoing reality of the crisis in my birth country. Every day, the people of Ukraine exist in a state of unimaginable horror. They exist, carrying on with their work and studies, taking care of their loved ones, and praying for a tomorrow they don’t know will come. They exist, until they do not.
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Strolling down Elm Drive at midnight as the wind pierced through my layers of wool and fleece, I was at an odd sense of peace. Whether it was the wintry chills that numbed my senses or the absence of students rushing up and down campus, the environment was just how I liked it: placid. Save for a few barely discernible silhouettes off in the distance, the road was a desolate slope of asphalt.
In movies, books, and real life, we’ve all encountered the classic scene when one person drops the L word. Finally, after waiting many moons for the honeymoon stage to pass, a lover professes: “I Love You.”
When your friends ask what happened to me, I know what you’ll say. You will shrug and say that you could never date an American girl. You will shrug and say we were just never a good match, that an American girl could never understand you the way a Japanese girl could. It’s where you spent 18 years of your life, anyway. It’s what you’re used to.
Two young people meet on a train, each on separate journeys to find themselves. Instead, they find each other. In the “Before” trilogy, Jesse and Céline find love and romance, laugh and bicker, and lose and regain each other through a series of disconnected conversations — once in their 20s, again in their 30s, and then as parents. The films repeatedly confront and resolve the contradictions of an ideal love interrupted by the demands of real life.
See the first part of this two-part installment here.
Day One
From the first floor of East Pyne, I head toward Chancellor Green and turn right just before reaching the doors of the rotunda. There are four benches in total, three on one side and one on the other. The three oriented toward Nassau Street face a rusted statue of John Witherspoon, and the last one stands alone. Even though these wooden benches seem old and worn, often suffering the harsh wind and rain without proper support from the slanted ground underneath them, they have character. One is more intimate than the others and hides me from the open space of Firestone Plaza. Another encourages vulnerability as it inches me toward a pair of trash cans.
The routine goes like this. By 10:30 p.m., I arrive in the Midtown area — the 34th Street-Herald Square station is closest and most convenient if I’m coming from downtown, like I usually am. I turn onto 6th Avenue, walk down two blocks, then make a left onto 32nd Street. On Friday nights, this block of 32nd Street — the backbone of Manhattan’s K-Town district — is a frothing, swirling mess of gorgeous young adults dressed in their best night-out clothes. Platinum-blonde hair, the thump-thump-thump of the latest K-pop track, and heavy eye glitter pass by; as always, I can’t help but marvel at this display of glamor, beauty, and nouveau riche excess.
“Paris is cold,” I offered, and he responded, “The weather or the people?”
You are reading the words of someone who has celebrated Christmas Eve in a McDonald’s and New Year’s Eve in bed before 10 p.m. These are the words of someone who spent Thanksgiving online shopping for five hours in a fit of mild delirium and Independence Day frowning at the American tourist who yelled “Happy Fourth of July!” in the middle of the seventh arrondissement of Paris last summer.
All this from noticing an architectural quirk: these nine empty statuary niches led me along a year-long journey of observation and intrigued writes head editor José Pablo Fernández García in a visual journey through history and memory on campus.
The first two times I watched Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” I got awfully close to crying at the end when all the staffers assembled to write the editor’s obituary. I certainly at least teared up at this scene — not because of the film’s own emotional stakes, but rather because it made me think of my own newsroom experience as an editor at The Daily Princetonian.
Some spring day, a close friend told me that I’m very comfortable being the exception. She meant it as a compliment — that I’m confident enough in myself to find and follow my own path. I understood it as such. But it has also been haunting me since I heard her speak it. It’s an idea I’ve found myself returning to quite often, whenever not distracted by the day, or music, or some writing.