I wished I could have told him how alike we were, that I ended up in California not because of rich white parents but because my relatives were there when we immigrated, in smoggy Chino and not Santa Monica. But I was already too deep inside the fantasy I’d built, for his benefit and mine.

I held my breath as the cab turned to cross the short bridge from Storrow to Memorial Drive. We passed buildings I knew were collectively known as the River Houses, dorms for upperclassmen, and as the cab wound through Cambridge streets to deposit me next to the passageway that led to my dorm in Harvard Yard, and my roller luggage rattled through the uneven brick sidewalk, I fancied that if I could dream my future into existence, maybe I could dream away my past too. Maybe I didn’t have to be the child of poor immigrant parents who neglected him, who left everything he cared about to be in this country, literally half a world away. If I could turn the dream of becoming a Harvard student into reality, maybe I could just forget that I was anything other than American, live and study among my rich white friends, never have to deal with my life being cleaved. Maybe this was the place where I could erase everything about me that didn’t add up or make sense, the place where I could finally belong.

—

I sat cross-legged on a wooden bench in Emerson Hall, my back against the wall, thirty minutes early for a class I wasn’t sure I had the courage to take: Topics in Gay Male Representation. I had promised myself I would come out of the closet as soon as I got to college, but there was still a gigantic part of me that was invested in being seen as someone whose life was unassailable, who did nothing—at least in public—that anyone would be ashamed of. I was afraid to break this pact with myself, the possibilities for my future such a move would foreclose.

I considered returning to my dorm to lie in bed and think, search for answers on the blank ceiling. But I knew I’d be too scared to go back if I left, so I looked down at the floor to find some mind’s rest, made of blond wood in narrow stripes of slightly different shades. I thought of our old bamboo floor back home, the same rows of wood that joined at random places. In Chino, all the houses I’d been in were built in the last twenty years, with drab carpet floors and dull-colored walls. The layers of history and handmade details at Harvard comforted me, because they felt truer to the place I grew up in.