Birds of a Feather
I’ve been sorted into Ravenclaw three times.
When I was in the first grade, my teacher Mrs. Ocker decided to throw a Harry Potter party. She had just finished reading to us Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, one chapter per day, after recess. We lined up and took turns sitting on what must have been an ordinary classroom chair but in my memory is always remodeled into a three-legged stool. When it was my turn, an assistant teacher put a pointy black hat over my head. It must have fallen over my eyes. Like Harry, I repeated two words under my breath.
Not Ravenclaw. Not Ravenclaw.
Mrs. Ocker’s voice came out of a little speaker taped to the inside of the hat, just above my ear. Unlike the real Sorting Hat, she didn’t take my wishes into account.
I got up from the stool and sat down among my fellow Ravenclaws, who were busy making up a password to guard our cluster of desks. I half-heartedly joined in the discussion, but my eyes kept wandering to the Gryffindor table. I knew I would be a Ravenclaw before I’d put on the hat, but still I had let myself hope.
I tucked the memory away for years, until last month, when my medical school classmates decided to throw a Harry Potter themed party to fundraise for a service trip to Nogales, Arizona. There would be a Yule Ball, a House Cup Competition, and butterbeer. Every student in the Class of 2018 was sorted into a house. Once again, I was in Ravenclaw.
As a first grader, I knew my teacher put me in Ravenclaw because I was smart. I memorized all my times tables and helped the other students with their homework. On the chart where Mrs. Ocker gave us stickers for completed assignments and good behavior, my name had the most stickers next to it. But I wanted to be a Gryffindor. I wanted to be good and kind and loyal. I wanted to be a person, not a calculator. Hermione got to be a Gryffindor, so why couldn’t I?
I must admit that I’m selling Ravenclaw short. After all, when did Ravenclaw become equated with intelligence—and nothing else? It doesn’t help that Gryffindor and Slytherin have a whole host of well-developed characters to serve as prototypes, while the only Ravenclaws who spring to mind are Luna Lovegood and Cho Chang. (And let us not forget the poor Hufflepuffs, who truly got the short end of the stick when their pride and joy perished with Cedric Diggory.) To me, the greater message of Harry Potter seems to be that Houses aren’t the end. Case in point: Snape. Character trumps category. Humanity defies taxonomy.
When my first Harry Potter party ended, I agonized over proving myself. Mrs. Ocker put me in Ravenclaw, but boy would I show her the error of her ways! I spoke up more in class. I volunteered whenever an opportunity arose to perform a class chore. I even tried to crack jokes. (“Why couldn’t the witch tell time? Because she couldn’t tell which is witch!”) I thought about being mean—even Slytherin was better than Ravenclaw—but my goody two sneakers just couldn’t do it. My parents were proud of my intellect, but I was determined that my tombstone would not read, Here lies Sue, the smart one. When I was sorted into Ravenclaw a second time, my stomach dropped. After all these years, hadn’t anything changed?
I’m flattered that certain people find me intelligent. After barely passing my ASM midterm and incorrectly subtracting 1931 from 2015 the other day, it’s nice to know that someone out there thinks I’m competent. I wonder if Ravenclaw isn’t too far off. All medical students, on some level, could be Ravenclaws. We wouldn’t have gotten this far without “wit and learning,” and here, in the anatomy labs and on the wards, may we “always find [our] kind.” And I can’t write about intelligence as a stereotype without acknowledging the elephant in the room. More than one classmate observed that the Class of 2018 Houses seemed racially imbalanced. “They put all the Asians in Ravenclaw.” To be honest, I hadn’t noticed. All I did was locate my name, search for my friends, and reassure David that he, above all others, deserved to be in Gryffindor.
The third person to sort me was J.K. Rowling. On the Pottermore website, there is a list of the original 40 Hogwarts students. Li, Sue is on the list, between Jones, Megan and Longbottom, Neville. I’ve actually encountered FanFiction written about me, in which I am often renamed “Su Li,” to my irritation. I am the star of a Twilight x Harry Potter crossover in which I flee to La Push after the war to escape my father. I also cross dress. I am a half-blood. I am a Ravenclaw.
I like to think that J.K. Rowling spent a few minutes of her life thinking about me, what I looked like, what hobbies I had, who my parents were. Unfortunately, I never made it into the published Harry Potter books. I will remain a figment of her imagination, and the five letters of my name will forever occupy a couple pixels on the Pottermore page. I think, too, that she never wanted the Ravenclaws to be just smart. They must have had their unique personalities, if only we were able to see more of them. The way I categorize Ravenclaws precisely enacts my own fear of categorization, of having my dimensions reduced to a single adjective. I confessed this to David: what if I’m just being House-ist? What if by refusing to accept Ravenclaw, I’m just as bad as the people who sorted me? But he disagrees. Ravenclaw is a faceless, fictional group of people who are known only by their attributes in the Sorting Hat’s song. I am a distinct, living person. Apples to oranges.
I wish we had never Sorted in the first place, and I’m suddenly grateful that the residential colleges at Yale were randomly assigned. Why would anyone put all the courageous people in one college and all the morally dubious ones in another? We’re better together. No one is courageous or quick-witted or mischievous all the time. In real life, the Houses probably work more like Myers-Briggs types: percentage break-downs for each letter, with some people in-between, and no one really remembers what they are anyway, except at cocktail parties.
To easy my anxieties, I finally took the official Sorting quiz on Pottermore. For the record, I got Slytherin.