Hiding Behind Books to Avoid Social Awkwardness (and other reasons I became an English major)

My job as an interviewer at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions ended two weeks ago. One of my most frequently asked questions (other than, “So why did YOU choose Yale?”) was why I became an English major. After 100 interviews, I’ve managed to distill my life into a 1-minute answer. But I’ve never tried to tell the whole story.

I grew up a hard-core math/science nerd. I was the kid in kindergarten who, on Career Day, raised my hand and told everyone I wanted to be a doctor, just like Mama and Baba. English—or rather, Reading—was always my worst class. It wasn’t that I didn’t like books. In first grade, we had a reading challenge where everyone got a “road map” and stuck a red footprint-shaped sticker on it every time we read a book, either at school or at home. At the end of the month, I had the most stickers. (I think I had over 100. My best friend Ming, the only other Asian kid in the class, almost beat me. Almost.)¹ I freaking loved reading. It’s probably why I hardly had any friends. I was good at books, but it was the comprehension part that always tripped me up. Amy Tan explains it better than I can in her essay, “Mother Tongue”:

Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, “Even though Tom was —–, Mary thought he was —–.”

As much as I loved reading, I was terrible at answering questions about what I read. There were a billion things Mary could have thought about Tom. Maybe she thought he was cute because he wore his purple striped shirt that day. Maybe she thought he was funny because he made her laugh, even though everyone else thought he farted too much. Maybe the other kids hated Tom because he was smart, but Mary wanted to be his friend. And besides, why does it matter what Mary thought about Tom. All she wanted to do was go home and eat a popsicle.

It wasn’t until junior year of high school that I finally appreciated the study of literature. We read The Great Gatsby as summer reading for Glowacki’s class. That was the book that changed my life. Not because it opened my eyes to social decay and the corruption of the American dream (which, I’ve heard was in turn corrupted by the recent film production, the irony), but because I was blown away by the pure aesthetics of language. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” I looked up SparkNote commentaries and was struck by this new dimension of depth, layers of meanings behind the words on the page. Endless caverns to explore. Don’t ask me why it took so long. It wasn’t that I’d never analyzed things in previous English classes. It simply never occurred to me that the infinite possibilities I imagined every time I opened a book weren’t something to be dismissed because they crippled my fill-in-the-blank abilities—they could be embraced. They were meaningful.

I started reading SparkNote commentaries for every book we read that year. Whereas my friends mostly did it to skip out on reading the actual books, I wanted to see what other people, not just my teacher, had to say about the things we read. The existence of an entire canon of pure analytical output was thrilling. I loved reading other people’s thoughts and comparing them to my own. Class became so much more exciting because I took it as a chance to take my own research and put it to use. No longer was I only interested in reading books: I realized I loved talking about them, too.

A year later, I selected “English” as my potential major from the drop down menu on Common App. In my college interviews, I explained that I wanted to become a writer, I wanted to study books in order to produce my own. By some miracle, here I am, three and a half years later, trying to write my Writing Concentration prospectus on a bus from DC to New York. (But I find myself writing this instead.) My history teacher told me that most people change their majors during college; he’d changed his seven times. I realized I am incredibly fortunate to have found something I loved early on and to have been given the opportunity to pursue it at one of the best academic institutions in the world.

There are so many reasons why I love being an English major. I love that my homework consists of one of my favorite past-times. On most days, there is nothing I want more than to sit in a library with a cup of tea and a book. To have the luxury of reading for a grade seems almost too good to be true. Studying English literature has forced me to become “well-read.” I don’t lament the lack of time for pleasure reading because I get enough of it at school. Granted, I don’t get to pick the books I read, but at least one of my required readings each semester has had a profound impact on me. Lost in the Funhouse, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Book of Salt, Othello—I doubt I would have read any of these on my own, yet all of these works have reminded me of the magic of storytelling, the beauty of language. They have inspired me to become a better writer and a better person.

Being an English major has dispelled certain misconceptions I once had about literature: that it was written by a bunch of crusty dead white guys, that it has no bearing on contemporary situations. When I found out that the English major at Yale requires three pre-1800 courses, I was dismayed. I didn’t want to study Shakespeare or read Victorian novels—yet those classes have been some of the best I’ve taken at Yale. Shakespeare feels just as alive to me as my own voice in this tumblr post. The plot lines of Dickens’s novels are as intriguing as the latest blockbuster movie. The emotions of these characters are as real as anything on TV. The Moonstone was a page-turner (okay, maybe not enough of one because I never finished), one of the defining novels of the mystery genre. I fell in love with Othello for his charisma and unwavering confidence; his devastating self-betrayal over the course of the play broke my heart.

A lot of people have written about the decline of the humanities. I, too, chuckled at the joke: [What does an English major say?] “Do you want fries with that?” At the same time, I’ve had uncomfortable encounters with strangers asking me what the hell I’m planning on doing with a B.A. in English, as if majoring in the humanities is akin to not being able to figure my life out. When I came home for winter break, my dad handed me a stack of articles about English majors and our abysmal career prospects, low median salary, high unemployment rates. (This was before I became premed.)

As a future medical student, I often feel that I can’t properly defend the English major. After all, I’m not the one scrambling to apply to jobs right now or convincing my parents to let me live at home for a few months until I get things settled. But every time I am disheartened by the amount of flack humanities majors get, I am cheered by the fine job my colleagues and other individuals have done of defending our honor. Over the summer, I read Prof. Verlyn Klinkenborg’s essay, “The Decline and Fall of the English Major”:

The gift [of being an English major] is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature… writing well isn’t merely a utilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you. No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance.

My inheritance is the treasure trove of books stacked across my common room shelf, the dog-eared pages and underlined quotations I’ve shared in my Facebook statuses, my confidence in putting my voice on this page and using it to broadcast my identity. All this I owe to the Yale English department—to Anne Fadiman, Ruth Yeazell, Amy Hungerford, Joe Stadolnik, a starry list of professors and TAs whose teachings could fill an entire essay of its own. As a prefrosh, I stared at your names in the Blue Book with awe, and I am humbled by the opportunity to learn from you. I was fortunate not to need a loan for college, yet I will graduate feeling more in debt than I ever have in my life.

It’s a debt I do not yet know how to pay. If med school doesn’t work out, I have no clue what I’ll do. Will probably start my own essay-editing business. $5 per thousand words. Hit me up.