The School in New York City
This essay is part of my college essay collection Ignorances and sort of like my “Goodbye to All That.” Written 2022 and posted here October, 2025, from my bedroom in Boston.
It doesn’t happen quite as much as before, but that doesn’t stop me hoping that it still might, that on a day like this, like any other, walking to class, I might look up at Butler or one of the academic buildings, the river of people down College Walk from Broadway to Amsterdam, people and conversation and tote bags, picnic blankets, Nike hi-tops, sun over flowerbeds and cobblestone—that I might see these things and feel that same rush I felt the first time I visited this school. Three years ago, when I saw it for the first time. Three years ago, when I was still a senior in high school. That day, I stood on the balcony by the left side of Low, a little bit over from Kent, listening to “Girl,” by Jukebox the Ghost, wearing a white sweater with The Great Wave printed on it, which I’ve since lost, and I looked out at this sprawling piazza of a campus, breathing it in for the first time.
How often do you find an impulse like that? Between the emerald-tipped brick buildings, the laughter floating in from the lawn that day, something, something—some unplaceable, magnetic drive—rushed through me like a current, cut through the confusion of who I was in high school, who I wanted to be, to tell me that this, this school, was where I should be. I was a confused kid; I had considered my future in only the most vague of terms. And so, in the way life leaves those invisible signs we interpret as feelings, the first moment I looked out from the balcony by Kent onto the bustling piazza confirmed to me that this was the only path that I should try to set myself on.
Columbia. The images of my visit to the school in New York—that misty, warm film thrown over the campus, washing the lawns and steps in glimmering gold—stuck with me that night, the next morning, the next week as I took the train ride back to my Connecticut high school. Like a dream that comes back to you, unguarded, in the daytime, my memory of the visit hung over the remainder of my time there, short-circuiting me at random moments—math classes, lunch blocks, idle walks to the gym or the dorm or the science building. New York City distracted me from everything else, washing away any other intentions I might have made for another life, so much so that, after some weeks, to put the impulse to rest in the only way that occurred to me, I logged onto the college portal and deleted the drafts of every other essay I had saved until then. I wrote a new one to Columbia and submitted it.
A month later, on a late night after orchestra rehearsal, I cried to the aerial shot of campus in the acceptance video, Butler to those oblong skyscrapers running downtown, the trumpeted fanfare of the school anthem puncturing the silence of my dorm room. I would go to New York City. I looked at that bright image of Butler and wondered what it would be like, in less than a year, to study there, to spend long hours there, to make friends there. I wondered, in those romantic corners of the stacks, those I had heard so much about and could only dream of, which corner would soon become a place of my own.
***
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been enthralled by the myth of this city, the one fed by all that imaginative material that gets attributed to New York City—youth, skyscrapers, reinvention. Joan Didion was unsure that it would be “possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South”; I take “the West” and “the South” to mean anyone around the world in whom there arises an impulse to come to New York. As though an imperceptible, magnetic rope yokes together those who feel a calling to the city, the only place that could reveal to themselves what they desired.
I didn’t like myself in high school. I was tired all the time, and I was painfully anxious about breaking the rules. Above all, I was still uncomfortable with myself—I didn’t know, yet, how to find the words to express what I felt. If the quietude of boarding school suburbia stifled any chance at the romance I wanted out of my life, then New York would alleviate this. Somewhere in its historied, gridded streets, the passion of the city bore the self I wanted to become—cool me, confident me. Unapologetic me. Somewhere between the pamphlets, YouTube videos, admissions packages, he was born. To know of his very existence, hovering on the horizon of just a few more months, bestowed on Connecticut humdrum a hope, an excitement, for impending change.
Somewhere in those days, my parents told me over video call that a “pandemic” had begun. Apparently, Hong Kong had begun issuing lockdowns, and people were starting to wear medical masks on the street. Other words began to proliferate, first in Chinese, and then across American media—“novel,” “distancing,” that “it” was “spreading.” They all carried something unreal about themselves, like they described a fictional place that existed in a parallel reality. To integrate these words into the same sentence as “college,” “Columbia,” “New York City” felt silly, like I was being asked to verify the truth of a local superstition.
On a Sunday morning that February, before high school ended, I remember listening to a podcast as I jogged through the woods around my high school's campus. It mentioned that pockets of the virus had finally begun to pop up around the U.S.—only really in Washington state so far. I vividly remember thinking that it was too far, way too far, from rural Connecticut, to cause any real harm. I stopped on the bridge on the cross-country trail as the chill of the Sunday morning air set on my forehead, listening carefully to Michael Barbaro assure me, through my earphones, between breaths, that the virus was nothing to worry about yet. We were on the brink of it, clueless, without an idea.
***
Some months passed. Spring break came. My friends and I had planned a trip to Miami, and because the frame hadn’t begun to crack yet, we went. A stillness hung over everything that week, something deafening in the unbroken heat of the Floridian sunshine. It seemed like the whole country was holding its breath, anticipating something that was just around the corner—though what, exactly, none of us knew. We visited museums and South Beach, shopped for groceries at a nearby supermarket whose shelves had been emptied of rice and disinfectants. Late into those nights, we spent hours talking in the corner of that house where the moonlight fell in, wondering how our futures might change in the face of the coronavirus. “Coronavirus” was a new word to us, too. The headlines and stories about the pandemic had grown more frequent, but they seemed only to magnify our uncertainty.
That week, spring break, in-person school was finally called off—first for two weeks, then, some time later, for the rest of the semester. We were booked onto the first flight back home, to Hong Kong. In a deserted terminal, we were swabbed for COVID, strapped with tracking bracelets, issued custom orders to quarantine for two weeks. My brother and I moved into a small apartment in one of the low-rises in Stanley Village, where, every few days, our parents brought us toiletries and takeout meals from local restaurants. At night, we watched the sun set on the small roof of the apartment, and then we went to our classes, newly “virtual.” During the days, we slept.
I was still a senior in high school, and in the ignorance that shapes that stage of life, I had persisted in my disinterest in the whole situation, almost eerily so. I had been led through all of life like a child, and the whole thing carried a novelty to it that only someone who hasn’t yet realized his place in the world around him could conceptualize. By some charming, preventative logic, I felt that COVID was just temporary, unserious. That I would be immune from its effects. That, perversely, it was an elaborate performance to make my entry to New York even more grand.
***
That summer, the summer of 2020, passed by long and lonely. News of the virus abroad continued to proliferate, ceasing all the functioning of a normal world. Hong Kong fell into a microcosm in itself, sealing itself largely off from visitors, mandating masks, nasal swabs, tracking apps to go from place to place. Most days, I walked the few minutes to Stanley Beach from my house, admiring the beauty in its emptiness, haunting in its lack of the tourists that usually swarmed through. I ate at the local cafe and McDonalds, both adorned with plastic partitions that separated every seat from the next, sealing diners into their own worlds. The thought of college singularly obsessed me, suspended at the horizon of this limbo like a buoy. This lonely stint back home wasn’t what I had expected, but I would make it mine. It would make for a funny story to tell people over orientation in September.
And didn’t it seem so close? September? Some lonelier nights, I scrolled in excitement through posts and group chats, bedecked with colorful pre-pandemic pictures and well-chosen fun facts, looking at photos of the people who would be my classmates and wondering who would become my friend. There was talk of a “Make-up prom” that went around for a while to stand in for the one that the Class of 2024 hadn’t gotten a chance for in high school, and I was especially excited about this as I imagined myself wearing the suit I would have worn, dancing with new friends in the hazy glow of a college hall. Everyone seemed eager to make friends, to persist through the separation and be together. Some days, I caught myself thinking that these strange circumstances might even be better, simply because they were unique to us.
We all have our little dreams of what Columbia might be like, and that summer after I graduated from high school, I spent the empty hours at home imagining what life would be like in September. In the tranquil of my childhood neighborhood, I imagined the sun hitting my face as I lay on blankets on the lawns, imagined looking out at a soft, pink sunset from Central Park. Each fantasy was so potent it felt almost like a promise—a life so real that, even today, I’m convinced that someone, surely, must be living it.
***
Somewhere in August, around two weeks before the first day of class, I woke up to an email that notified me that courses were to be online for the fall, not in person as originally intended. Change. Consequences. We remain committed to the academic success of all undergraduate students in these difficult circumstances. Concern began to spread online, shock across the circles of international students—visa complications, the bureaucracy of already-confirmed air travel. Meanwhile, a murky, indistinct void arose in me, throwing black and white onto the images I had begun to imagine of myself in the last half year. At that moment, I had just gone through that year’s makeshift housing lottery—not a fifteenth-floor room in John Jay, surrounded by other first-year students, but one on the third floor of Broadway, at least—and had only just showed my parents the floor plan of my room to-be the very night before. To have even that experience taken away—so soon, so suddenly—gave the whole thing a mildly diabolic quality, like I was the butt of a tasteless joke.
In the grand scheme of things, I reasoned to myself that all of this, this putting up with the novelty of things, had been a price—even a small price—for normalcy come September. Truncated high school, virtual graduation in a stranger’s living room, and even an internship, to pass the time that summer: all felt justified, as though giving up something in the name of universal sacrifice would guarantee the return of a normal autumn. But that bargain fell through when September came, and still, I hadn’t made it to New York.
So college started, at long last, not between streets numbered 114 to 116, not in dining halls or libraries, not in blankets thrown over a field hemmed in by stone facades, but in my childhood bedroom, strung up with neon-flecked fairy lights and a poster of Hong Kong’s skyline intended for my room in Manhattan. As it started with the experiences of pressing a blue icon to “raise my hand” instead of doing so in a classroom, or visiting Japan Home City instead of University Hardware, where, as my mom shopped for gardening tools, I wandered through those sterile, fluorescent aisles in search of the dehumidifier and black tea leaves that would keep me up through those classes late at night—Augustine in Zoom Lit Hum, Monday and Wednesday nights, and University Writing, Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I could get only uncomfortable sleep after those school days that ended at 3 a.m.—after daylight savings time, 4—and maybe it was something about the late hours themselves, in the end, that solidified my impression of the otherworldliness of all of it. We had entered an alternate reality that had no guidebook—a reality that shouldn’t have happened, couldn’t have happened, and had happened anyway.
***
One of my first courses, on Roman art, dragged on in two-hour recordings that I watched every morning when I woke up, and which I loathed. Another, in the classics department, decisively ended my interest in classics—which, looking back, feels like a vague affront to the essays I had written when I first applied. But the strangest emotion I experienced was that nameless tug when I registered, in pockets of laughter and awkward silences across the static, that I liked the people in one of those first-year year courses, and that we would probably have become good friends, if only we had had the chance to attend class in person—to have shared a smile over something that happened in class, a coffee together after. But the rectangles containing our faces disappeared so quickly from the screen when the 70-minute blocks ended that I couldn’t help but wonder how I would describe to myself, after all this would be over, how I might describe the melancholy of connections that existed only on schedule, and vanished twice a week.
Some nights, I slept over at the apartment my friend was staying at. Like me, she was supposed to have started at her own college, in London, but because it was impossible to go, she had instead moved into an empty apartment, for the sake of “independence”—recreating at least a little bit of the life she had hoped for. In that dim flat, we studied in silence, putting on earphones once in a while to join our classes thousands of miles away. If we were hungry, we cooked, and if there were no groceries in the fridge—which was often the case—we walked to the stall down the road and ordered a rice with two sides. Those convenience-store meals, oily and tasteless in moist styrofoam, were still enough for us to pretend like we were eating in the dining halls, surrounded by hordes of others. Just the same, the gray moonlight that fell through her glossy window, stained with dust and fingerprints, were the lights of a luminous common room chandelier.
For a while I developed the habit of taking the bus to the coworking space that Columbia had booked out for international students—a wide office floor that sprawled the sixteenth floor of an industrial building high above Central. On that ghostly floor, far too large for the few students who showed up, were diner-style booths to work at, conference rooms, even a small space with a yoga mat. Most people stayed to themselves, in their own corners, but on a few afternoons, I started conversations with some people and eventually made friends with a few. If we needed a break in our work, we went down the road to the coffee and boba stores lining Hollywood Road, and the days it got late enough, had a drink at one of the few bars open nearby. Over Aperol Spritzes, we puzzled over questions that, in a normal year, would have easily been answered, perhaps even fun to navigate—how often we were supposed to talk to our advisor, how SSOL functioned, which clubs we should join. We spoke of what our lives could have been like in New York City, whether we would have met, let alone befriended each other, if the year had been normal.
Mostly, though, I was alone, in my room or at the Starbucks in my neighborhood, where I’d plug away at my homework at the same table by the store’s entrance. Coffee and complimentary Wi-Fi fueled my education several time zones away—working through problem sets, scouring CLIO for journal articles, brainstorming pieces to report on for the school magazine I had joined. Sometimes, to rest my eyes, I would look up from the essay I was writing, or the spatial distortion problem I was stuck on, to gaze out at the plaza, where there always ran an unhurried stream of people, going about their everyday lives. A vague resentment began to color my view of them: I felt jealous of the aunties with their bags of shopping and the schoolchildren just out of class, how they seemed to move about their lives with easy uninterruption.
Over time, as the pandemic became clear that it would span multiple years, my enthusiasm began to chip. Somehow, it no longer made sense to hold onto the Columbia that I had once wanted. I stopped caring about schoolwork, about friends, about the concerns and commitments of a school that, in a way, seemed to have given up on me first. Why attempt the semblance of a normal life in New York, from Hong Kong, when I already knew that I would never remember this year, 2020, as a normal one.
***
There was a point I had convinced myself that, no matter when or where I would be in life, there would be no place I’d yearn to be at more than New York. The time came, but the opposite seemed true. A year and a half had passed—hundreds of days, hours, minutes of Cantonese, moments with my family, time that had created the impression that this wasn’t a temporary sojourn, but the way in which I could finish college, and move onto whatever came next. If the disjunctures and the removals had to be so strict, there was no reason why I should still care about that school in the first place. I wanted our second year to be canceled too. I wanted hybrid lessons to ferry me through the three more years of college that remained, so that I could stay put at Stanley Plaza, at the seaside, at those sun-beaten afternoons in the yard.
I couldn’t have predicted the pandemic, of course, but what surprised me more were how intensely my emotions struck me when I arrived, how I despised the city as much as the conditions that had led to my delayed arrival to it. Once I landed at JFK, a year after I’d intended, not only did an unmistakable homesickness run me over, but also, a biting hypochondria around COVID. Hong Kong had treated it sensitively—two cases a day, in the city of seven million, was cause for alert, upwards of ten an extreme; in contrast, the indifference it was regarded with here felt lousy, even rude. I was shocked by the looseness with which people dealt with it, disgusted especially at people who shared photos of themselves at the Governor’s Ball that very week, maskless. Above all I remember texting my parents in true, unbridled shock when I walked into my first class—a political science course on a Thursday morning, in which 400 people sat in a cramped lecture hall. Some masks were cloth; fewer were worn properly. I had the indistinct sense that someone had betrayed me. But why, and by whom, I couldn’t figure out.
I went to my classes. I went to the club fair. I lined up for food at JJ’s, and I wrote discussion posts for Republic, and I went down to Chelsea with suitemates on the weekend. I made a desultory effort at reaching out to old friends: coffee with one, ramen downtown with a couple others. But it was all a grand waste of time. I did not care about other people—not about how they had been doing since the pandemic began, not nearly about their anxieties now. It was unimaginable that people could possibly have carved out lives at Columbia the year that I had been away, or that they could have found community in a year the world was supposed to have shut down. One of those dinners, I remember someone talking on and on about a sorority she had joined over Zoom. It was such a rewarding experience! You should definitely look into Greek life! I still laugh about it today.
I was cold to those who tried to get to know me. I shunned the few invitations to parties that I got, wallowing in homesickness. I ate alone in my room after my 10:10 classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, content with the silence of the suite in the afternoon and the little light that filtered into my shafted Carlton double. Nothing mattered to me. Everything felt too unsafe or too insincere or too hopeless, a beginning to college so delayed that already it seemed irredeemable.
***
A year has passed since I’ve gotten here, my first true year in New York City. In many ways, I feel like Columbia has only just begun, that nothing feels that different to the beginning. But that’s not true. So much has happened.
Almost too much. I have met new faces, gone to parties, and cried. I wrote 17 papers and depleted 92 meal swipes. I visited California twice. The first time, it was the three weeks Omicron took over the city—long, noiseless afternoons in the Bay Area—and the second time, I visited Los Angeles over spring break, where I biked and visited Universal Studios with friends whom I didn’t know this time last year. My familiarity with this place grew subtly, until I looked back one day and realized my relationship to it had, in fact, become something else entirely.
In September, I will be a junior, and that stuns me, because the images that come to me most intensely are still those from when I first arrived—those where I thought I’d never cut through the heartbreak and learn this city. Those first days of class, I never got my bearings—where the Kent entrance really was, which was Broadway and which was Amsterdam—and I’d always stumble into courses late, apologizing with the profuse ingenuousness of a first-year. I feared that I wouldn’t ever belong, that I’d never pass over the indifference and commit myself to learning this maze of a world.
I have, though. Somewhat, at least: I know what NoCo is, that it’s Joe Coffee and not Joe’s, that I prefer Hewitt to Ferris or John Jay, but that it closes the most abruptly of the three. I haven’t gone to Hungarian nearly as much as I’d thought, but I have come to love Wu and Nuss, whose bagel with lox I have for lunch some Wednesdays. I saw scaffolding come down outside Lerner and up outside Milano Market, and luckier yet, happened on the breathtaking beauty of Riverside Park—the corner of my world that I never anticipated would enter the picture. Still, I miss the New York that I knew before I lived here—the one that had nothing to do with anything real in my life, the one that stretched on endlessly in my imagination.
I suppose we all learn to put meaning to disappointment, to loneliness, in different ways. For me, it was starting college during the pandemic. There’s no scene where I learn something at the end and find myself somehow better off when the credits roll, no option to yell “cut” and start over. There are just a series of floating images, fuzzy and out of order. It occurs to me how so many of the narratives I’ve heard of New York are similar: They’re never about the drive that propels one here, but the deconstruction of that magic in exacting detail.
If there’s any comfort in an ending, though, it’s that there must have also been a start. It’s a faint solace, but I insist on it. Here’s the first scene I will remember: A younger person, burning to make something of himself.
I see him still, see him in elongated, summery stretches of memory. He tours that school in New York on a bright October day, falling in love with it. He breaks into tears at the acceptance video. He jogs through the woods on that quiet Sunday morning, the lushness of spring all around him in the trees, in the branches that snap beneath his feet. He dozes off in his high school’s assembly hall as the school nurse delivers a speech about how, in January of 2020, the virus is just about as serious as the common cold. It’s nothing to worry about. It’ll be over soon. Like the rest of the world, he does not know anything yet. I won’t break the news to him.