While I was in China, I learned that my grandfather determined when my mother was 10 that his only daughter would learn three things: to swim, to bike and to take photographs.
In China in the 1970s, these were unusual things for a father to aspire for in a daughter. Few Chinese girls my mother’s age learned to swim because the requisite exposure of bare skin was too flagrant a violation of natural modesty. But swimming also meant survival by your own means if you fell into one of the many waterways that ran through the neighborhoods of Hangzhou, as daughters were apt to do in the overactive imaginations of their anxious fathers.
But I think my grandfather’s hopes for my mother were marked less by concern for safety than for distinction. He wanted her to be able to move freely where others were paralyzed. My mother was the only girl in her high school to pass the physical fitness requirement by swimming. It was a short lap: just two lengths of the pool.
Biking was another declaration of independence. Pedaled locomotion granted a girl a degree of autonomy by enabling her to move smoothly from one road to the next, propelled only by the pistoned efforts of her own legs. Navigating streets and bridges of the city would perhaps ease her into the confidence she would need to move boldly in other environments.
Families that my mother knew who had no camera of their own would go to photography studios. My mother’s father borrowed cameras — folding, medium-format things — and he insisted on setting shutter speeds and apertures himself, calling automatically focusing cameras shaguaji — idiot machines. He wanted to teach my mother to learn the finer, technical points of observing the world through a viewfinder.
After a car, the second most expensive purchase my parents made when they moved to the United States was a Ricoh film camera. They bought it so my mother could send back snapshots of them moving freely in a new, bold environment, distinguishing the images of their new lives from the past already preserved in silver nitrate in China.
I think my grandfather always wanted my mother to be able to propel herself into ever newer, ever better environments rather than settling into the stasis of life in China. His hopes for my mother make me wonder about the ways in which my time at Princeton may or may not be preparing me to be resourceful and at ease in life.
Swimming, biking, snapping photos — college student that I am — I would need to travel far in time or space for any of these to make me a remarkable, independent girl. No, my lessons about being capable and imaginative need to be culled elsewhere and also, perhaps, for other reasons.
For so many young people I know, there has never been a danger of stasis. Life for us has been a study in the art of maintaining the momentum and poise to launch ourselves into the next scholarship, internship, job. Princeton is just one of these launching pads, albeit a lofty and comfortable one. We won’t stay long, just four years at most. As much as anyone can, we’ve settled into this perpetual swing from one good thing to the next one, we hope, a little higher up.
In the midst of this perpetual motion at Princeton, one of the most perfect moments I’ve passed was with my friend Yu-Han at the beginning of this year. We were practicing something that would have been utterly unremarkable for my mother, even in her 1970s childhood: We were cooking. We were astonished that we could summon the flavors and feelings of home one dish at a time over a portable one-burner stove in a kitchen with supplies that owed more inspiration to OA than Williams-Sonoma.
I am certain my parents have cooked far tastier dishes with crispier cabbage, a better blend of garlic and chili on the mapo doufu and saucier tomatoes on the tomatoes-fried-with-eggs. But I’ve never made such unbidden smacking noises over my rice at home. Perhaps it was the layering of memory upon the present — home, Princeton, Yu-Han, all in one moment. Or it was the delicious delight over this proof of our self-sufficiency, the serene confidence that we could satisfy our own longings. If I could conjure up my home here, then why not anywhere else?
Being at ease at Princeton is more about being able reassure myself of the persistence of a familiar world than about having the confidence to move into new ones. Relentless forward propulsion is as exhilarating for me as it was for my mother, but it also induces a kind of motion sickness. With one eye toward the burner and the other to my books, though, I can conjure enough of the familiar flavor of home to give me back my appetite for novel things in strange environments.
Sophie Jin is a Wilson School major from Salt Lake City. She can be reached at sjin@princeton.edu.
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