Homecoming Weekend

Last weekend I attended my 40th college reunion, at Stanford. I’m going to spare you the “how could it be that long since…” blah blah blah that everyone feels. Suffice it to say, I definitely felt too young and too old at the same time. An odd feeling.

Stanford makes a big deal of its reunions. Happening very five years, they call it “homecoming weekend,” and no! — it is not JUST two days of events, but starts on Thursday night with the spectacular Dinner on the Quad, goes through a Saturday football game, and ends on Sunday afternoon. Interspersed are nature walks and museum tours, lectures by Stanford-affiliated luminaries (“Classes Without Quizzes”), which this year included Condoleeza Rice, a panel of rock stars from our own class, which included a Pulitzer prize winner, a County Director of Health during COVID (whom I used to sit next to in Human Biology class), and the guy who created and debugged the first version of Microsoft Word (lots of jokes there).

I have to say that I have had a mixed relationship with Stanford. When I was an undergrad there, while I had fun both academically and socially, I always felt somewhat uncomfortable, like a fish from a vastly different pond, not smaller or bigger, just very different. I was a FLI — first generation, low-income — student before there was an acronym for it. In fact, I was an I-FLI — immigrant, …. (I just made up I-FLI, but Stanford, please feel free to use it. You’re welcome.) It was an era in which we hid that stuff about ourselves in order to fit in. And while I had enough confidence in myself not to feel like an imposter (again, a new word/phenomenon), it was enough to make me feel like an outsider.

I have attended reunions now-and-then over the past 40 years, and my normal-achieving friends and I would mock the over-the-top achievements that some classmates might humble-brag about. I’m beyond grateful to be here after a near-death experience swimming — without cages! — with sharks in the Bermuda, because I hadn’t had a vacation in ages from launching my second billion-dollar company. This time, however, it felt really different. Maybe everyone has finally gotten over themselves, or felt secure enough with each other. Maybe it was because so many — too many — of our classmates were no longer with us, the “In Memoriam” list stretching silently on and on. But whatever the case, there was an air of humility and gratitude, of genuine pleasure to connect again, to see and be seen by the people who knew us only as nineteen year olds, and who would, in most cases, only know and remember us as that. I was struck by my own gush of affection for people from my freshman dorm that I didn’t know all that well, greeted with genuine openness classmates I hadn’t met before (so many!), and participated in a storytelling event.

The storytelling event! Forty-years ago I would never have dreamt that I could go onstage and say anything real about myself. Oh, I’d go on stage. But like in a lot of papers I wrote back then, I would make up experiences to fit what I imagined to be the typical American. There was no way I would write about the actual foods we ate (dim sum was not even a thing back then, except in Chinatowns), the actual parents I had, my actual life. I invented Christmas presents that I imagined American kids received (skis), because we were poor and our presents were like magazines and stickers (which I loved, by the way, but knew that they were “stocking stuffers,” if that, to the rest of the world.) For the reunion, somehow circuitously my name wound through the radar of the reunion organizers, and I was invited to tell my story in accordance with the theme “Works in Progress.” I had just dropped my twin boys off in college across the country, and was wrestling with the empty nest as a single parent (read: just me and the dog at home), wondering anxiously what I would do for the rest of my life.

I was perfect as a work-in-progress.

I thought I would listen to what Lisa, the coach and organizer, would have to say before deciding, but in my mind, I had decided I wanted to do this. Nervous or not, I wanted to tell my story. A true story, finally. I wrote out what I would say and sent it to her, who was beyond encouraging. Then I worked to memorize it, while I cooked, worked out on the rowing machine (my son left it when he went to college), painted by numbers (new hobby to empty my brain). Then, in order to not sound memorized, I followed Lisa’s coaching to just remember the “beats,” the inflection points of the story, and talk around it. I was ready.

Storytelling night was like a dream. Set in an intimate ambience with small cafe tables, dim lighting, and an easy chair with light bulbs spelling out “MY STORY” on stage, it was the cool, spoken-word setting I’d ever dreamed of. And other than flubbing the first line, I did well! Relaxing into the story after the first “beat,” I found myself enjoying telling the jokes and the emotional punches, and feeling the audience with me at every turn. Instead of feeling apart like I always had, I felt, finally, a part of. My fellow storytellers each told funny and touching stories of change, challenges, and profound life lessons. We all started at a different place if life but arrived at the same. I was as proud of them as I was of myself.

My dear friend Rick, whom I had met at Stanford when he was a freshman and I a junior (as he reminded me that night that I was older, which I had conveniently forgotten), came down to hear my story. We met while tutoring kids at a community center in East Palo Alto, a resource-poor neighborhood adjacent to Stanford, and after we graduated, the director of the community center asked us to work for him writing grants for job-training and childcare programs for the city. Through all that and the next forty-plus years that we meandered through (well, I meandered; Rick went straight to Harvard Law and is now a law professor at Stanford), he has become one of my closest confidantes with whom I can be my true self. Even so, after my story, he said, “I did not see that coming!”

Afterward, Rick and I hung out at Tresidder Union for awhile, our feet up on the sofas like we are nineteen. He pulled out his laptop to send out an assignment for his class, while I complained that he was taking too long and I had to go. Just like old times. I texted my sister, with whom I was staying the night, that I was on my say. I asked if she had any food in the fridge that I could raid. As my oldest sister, she is used to that kind of behavior from me, and she always had dumplings and other Chinese comfort food around, which I was craving. She texted back, “There is some leftover chili.” Oh. Chili.

Then, a beat later, she wrote, “And some dumplings in the freezer if you want to steam them.”