#68. The New Blue Devil (Saturday, September 8, 2012)

What was your best day…of realizing that you were part of a new community?

As a Canadian who grew up with a large number of his childhood friends having moved away with their parents to the U.S. for “better opportunities” (like we almost did, #87), I had by now developed quite an inferiority complex when it came to where I lived. Just the feeling that, if I wasn’t working or studying in the U.S., I was automatically worse than anybody who was.

Side Note: Worst of this had to be that span from age six to age nine. During which: (1) we moved into a new house (#79), and my new neighbor who was my age (and named Geoff!) moved to the U.S. three weeks later; (2) my family friend/best friend through second grade, Fred, left for New Jersey the next summer; and (3) Harry Liu (#100, #87, #82) relocated to San Francisco, with about two weeks’ notice, midway through fourth grade.

Which explains why, for the first week while I was in Durham, North Carolina, to start my Master’s at Duke, I felt the happiest that I had been for a long, long time.

That first week wrapped up without much occasion. I was taking a first-year PhD Asset Pricing class, a Master’s-specific Time Series Econometrics class, and a fourth-year undergrad Real Analysis class. And the only class where things had happened yet was Real Analysis – where just getting my head wrapped around this concept of doing a proper mathematical proof was enough work in itself¹.

But with Saturday, came a respite. One of the friends of a family friend lived over in Cary, a half-hour drive away, and had invited me and this third-year Duke undergrad, Edward Hao (also from Ottawa), over for a barbecue.

So the wife drove over to Durham and picked the two of us up. Despite us being from the same city and the same broad Chinese network, that was my first time ever meeting Edward – and we ended up becoming pretty close friends throughout our joint time at Duke and afterwards.

At the barbecue, there were a couple of other families there with their kids; and Edward and I had a good time chatting with all of them for a couple of hours. Including their daughter, a high school senior and competitive swimmer; who showed us her Ryan Lochte poster and swimming cap that she had gotten autographed weeks ago², and was asking for our advice on whether to take a scholarship from Duke or Emory (she ended up going to Emory).

That was literally all that happened. But for some reason, just the fact that I was doing all this mundane socializing in a completely new city, a completely new country; it just made me feel so important and mature – like I had stepped to the next level of my life.

And as I was being driven back with Edward to my residence that night, I just couldn’t shake off the amazing feeling that had come over me.

I’m not only a Blue Devil now. I’m an American.

After nearly failing my first-/second-year pure math classes at Waterloo and kind of skating by with statistics and more applied financial math classes the rest of my undergrad (#92) – I really did not have the sufficient math background for pursuing a PhD (which at that point I was strongly considering doing post-Master’s). Hence the class.
Right after the 2012 Olympics, and before he fell from grace at Rio.