I remember when I was 12 feeling so helpless that i wasn’t legally allowed to work. My family had no money and I would daydream about working at a fast food restaurant, and how relieved my parents would be.

I spent summers working on our land and selling produce at the farmers market. I remember one year we had a bumper crop of onions and our stand became known as the place to buy the big onions good for onion rings.

Those onions paid for our house note one month.

In high school I participated in a summer vocational program for low income students. They had speakers come and talk about their jobs as construction workers and truck drivers. There was a summer job placement program but I wasn’t interested in what they offered...

...so I reached out to the local library to see if they would be willing to take me. They were, so I got the program to place me at the library and I spent the summer reshelving books and hiding behind the shelves, reading parts of books that interested me.

People talk about that barriers that people face in attending elite colleges, but I’ve never heard anyone mention the #1 prerequisite for attending an Ivy League—knowing it exists. I didn’t know what Columbia University was until I was 23.

I’d heard of Harvard, of course. I thought it would be sinful to go there. That’s another barrier I’ve never heard people talk about. You have to believe that going to an elite school won’t put your soul in jeopardy.

I got a full tuition scholarship to college in my hometown and worked evenings, weekends, and summers. I got a Luce fellowship that covered the cost of a study abroad program to China. It was $5,000 and I saved half of it while I was in China.

So the semester I came back, I was able to use that money for food and expenses and it was the only semester I didn’t work while I was in college.

One of the most amazing and striking things about being in China that semester in 2004, for me, was that for the first time in my life, I could buy things. The conversion rate meant I could just go out and buy a pair of shoes. It felt like magic.

I bought a pair of fake Converse for 20 kuai (around $3, at the time). It felt like I had won the lottery. The feeling of putting those shoes on and walking around in Converse (even if they were fake)—I felt like a million bucks.

I guess reading this thread it seems like I’m talking about feeling poor but I never felt poor. My family wasn’t poor. Or maybe we were, I don’t know. But sometimes it feels hard to relate to people in DC. Sometimes I feel like I come from another planet.

I have these moments where I freeze up in terror, I mean physically stop moving, at the thought of wasted money or money wrongly spent.

Speaking from personal experience, conservative/rural fear of universities, and of knowledge in general, is nothing new.

The problem with feeling like I come from another planet is that now I live on whatever planet I’m on now—meaning I’ve left all those people behind and I have almost no way to translate for them what my life is now.

It’s like I am cut in half, one thing on the outside and one thing on the inside, and utterly unknowable to anyone.

Well, that concludes Tuesday Evenings with Bethany.

Back to regularly scheduled china programming tomorrow!

Ok well thought of an example. One summer in college, I worked on an assembly line at a factory in a small town in Arkansas, because that was the best job that I knew how to find.

A few years ago, I mentioned this to a DC-area journalist. ...

... and they said “oh how interesting!! Were you doing that for research for an article?” And I was like, no. And they were like, oh but it must have been a fascinating experience.

It wasn’t. It was a factory assembly line. There’s nothing glamorous about lack of opportunity.

I mean, you trying detailing printers in a dingy warehouse for 40 hours a week for months on end in a town of 10,000 people.

It was weird seeing a journalist’s eye on that work, exoticizing it in some way.

(That factory is now closed of course, along with every other factory in that town).

I often feel this way about published dispatches to American Religionland. I understand it’s not a great look to parachute in and criticize something, but it’s weird to read journos trying to justify the unjustifiable, or writing things off as simply different custom.

In any case, I was the aspirational factory worker who taped up Chinese-language flash cards to my assembly line work station, so I learned how to count to 10 and read pinyin that summer, in preparation for my semester abroad in China later that year.

People sometimes ask me when I first started learning Chinese and I have never replied this way but some day I should say, “oh, at a factory in Arkansas!” and enjoy their confusion.

If any of you have ever read Chen Da’s Colors of the Mountain, I related so much to his educational experience.

I’ve craved knowledge my entire life. Sometimes I feel like I split my soul apart in my quest for education. And to think, some people are just born with the path laid right at their feet. That is true wealth.