IT WASN’T EASY FOR ME TO DECIDE BETWEEN HARVARD and Yale. Since so much of my future depended on my choice, I wanted to take a careful, rational, and objective approach to the decision-making process—so I decided to flip a coin twenty-five times and go with the winner. But when Yale turned out to be the winner, I sensed a gut-level feeling of regret that the coin toss did not go to Harvard, and that was how I knew that Harvard was the place I really wanted to go. So much for rational and objective.
There was another criterion that I carefully considered that swung the decision to Harvard: Harvard had a lousier football team. Selecting Harvard over Yale based on their football teams might sound like choosing a BMW over a Mercedes because the BMW had a full tank of gas, but it was more than that. In my senior year of high school, I had been named to the All-Conference and Arkansas All-State football teams at offensive guard, and I entertained the possibility of playing college football. At five foot eleven and two hundred pounds, I never would have made the team at a Southeastern Conference school like Arkansas, but Harvard and Yale were much smaller colleges, and I thought I might have a chance of making the team at one of them. Harvard had the weaker team at the time, so off to Harvard I went.
When Leisle and I enrolled at Yale and Harvard, the annual cost of both schools was around $35,000 per year. When Leisle first opened her acceptance letter from Yale, she looked at her father and asked, “How will we ever pay for this?” Her elated father said, “Don’t worry. We’ll sell everything we own if we have to.” That was a generous offer, but even if her parents had sold everything they owned at the time, it wouldn’t have been nearly enough to put Leisle through Yale.
When I saw the cost of tuition, room and board, and fees, I suffered a serious case of sticker shock myself. The market value of the house my family was currently living in would have barely covered the cost of my freshman year. The cost of attending Harvard gave me second thoughts about turning down Hendrix and Arkansas because I had been offered a full ride to both of those schools, plus spending money on the side. But both Leisle and I spent our senior years applying for every scholarship and grant we could find, and by fall we were packing for our first semesters at Harvard and Yale.
I couldn’t afford suitcases, so I packed everything I owned into two cardboard boxes and a backpack. My mother brought me a few extra clothes to fold in, which meant that Anh and Hon would have less to wear to high school that fall, and she handed me some pencils and a plastic cup and said, “Here. You should use these.” The only thing my parents could afford to contribute to my college education was a one-way bus ticket from Fort Smith to Alexandria, Virginia, where Jenny and her husband were to meet me and drive me the rest of the way to Boston. The one-way bus ticket was symbolic of what my parents had been saying to me all my life: “All we can do is get you there; after that it’s up to you.”
The bus trip from Fort Smith to Jenny’s home in Alexandria took thirty-one hours. Jenny’s husband, Hung, took me to an army surplus store and bought me two canvas duffel bags to upgrade my cardboard boxes, and Uncle Lam bought me my first watch and an alarm clock. When Jenny’s husband dropped me off at Harvard, he asked, “Is there anything else you need?” The Harvard Independent had a list of suggested items for incoming students that included a desk lamp, wastebasket, bed linens, fan, laundry money, computer, calling card, bicycle, camera, umbrella, duck boots, mittens, guidebooks of Boston, and formalwear.
I shook my head. “I guess this is it.”
In my first days at Harvard, I was overwhelmed. The student body included movie stars, sons and daughters of famous politicians, students whose dormitories were named after their grandfathers, and even a princess from a Middle Eastern country—and there I was with my two army surplus duffel bags. In Fort Smith I had been a big fish, but Harvard was like Sea World. All my classmates seemed to be brilliant; some of them had won national competitions in math, science, or geography, and some had already published papers. I had won statewide math contests back in Arkansas, but when I took my first math class at Harvard, I thought, This isn’t math—this is something else.
Leisle was struggling to adjust at Yale too. The first time her parents drove her to New Haven, they took the wrong exit and had to drive through the worst part of town. When it came time to say good-bye, Sunny broke into tears, and in Leisle’s first care package from home, she found a can of Mace. Leisle was so lonely at first that she was calling home almost every day, and her mother finally had to say to her, “Leisle, I love you. Do not call home this often.”
In my first week at Harvard, there was an open tryout for the football team, so I walked on and made the team as a linebacker—but within a week I quit. High school football had been more than just a sport for me; it was a world of justice and fairness and honor. My high school coach talked about sportsmanship and character constantly, and if a player ever cussed, my coach would run him until he gave back his lunch. At Harvard the coaches cussed a blue streak, and no one on the team seemed to be having any fun. To me, the sport had been hijacked; it was still the same game, but the heart had been ripped out of it, and football quickly lost its appeal.
My scholarships and loans completely covered my tuition and housing, but I had no money for books and no spending money either. I would have to get a job to earn that money, but the only job-related skills I had involved preparing soup broth. There was a job working at the college library that would have paid me $7.00 an hour, which sounded good because that job would have allowed me to study while I was working—but when I heard about a job that paid $8.25 an hour, I grabbed it without even asking what it was. My father would have been proud.
The job was cleaning toilets. The official name was Dorm Crew, which was a student-run organization that essentially paid poorer students to clean richer students’ bathrooms. I worked four hours per day, five days a week, and during each four-hour shift, I was expected to clean eight bathrooms. I did the math: that was thirty minutes per toilet.
Every day I went to the superintendent’s office to get a master key to all the dorm rooms, then went to the janitor’s closet to collect a bucket, a mop, a can of Comet, a spray bottle of pink liquid cleaner, and rubber gloves—and then I spent the next four hours knocking on dorm rooms and shouting, “Dorm Crew!” If anyone was home, they were supposed to let me in; after thirty seconds of silence, I let myself in. Sometimes I opened the door a little too quickly and got a tutorial in human biology. Those were actually good situations for me because the embarrassed couple usually ordered me out—and that meant one less bathroom to clean.
One thing the restaurant taught me was how to work quickly, and I turned bathroom cleaning into a science. Step one: turn on the shower and use it to wet everything down. Step two: cover everything in sight with Comet. Step three: spray down the toilet and sink. Step four: scrub the bathtub, toilet, and sink. Step five: rinse everything and mop my way out backward. Women had the cleanest bathrooms, but they had the dirtiest ones too; athletes were terrible because they left wet gear everywhere; seniors were worse than freshmen because freshman dorms were not allowed to have parties; and the bathroom of a senior woman athlete was the perfect storm.
It was supposed to take me four hours to clean eight bathrooms, but I became so efficient at it that I could finish all eight in an hour and a half. I did the math again: that was only 11.25 minutes per toilet. I calculated that if I was being paid $8.25 per hour to clean eight toilets but finished the job in an hour and a half, I was actually earning $22 per hour. I suddenly felt wealthy; when I worked at the restaurant, I used to receive an allowance of $30 per week, and now I was making $22 per hour—that was more money than I had ever seen. I had been at Harvard for only a few weeks, and already an Ivy League education was paying off.
At first it didn’t bother me to have to clean my classmates’ bathrooms, but after a while I began to notice that only poor kids like me worked for Dorm Crew. I had to qualify to attend an elite university like Harvard just like everyone else did, but the other students were out studying or having fun while I had to clean their toilets. Some of the students understood how I felt; when I knocked on their doors, they would say, “Our bathroom is fine—you don’t need to clean it.” That was very gracious. But there were other students who just didn’t understand. Once I cleaned the bathroom of a woman I knew personally, and after inspecting my work, she said to me, “Vinh, couldn’t we do a little better job here?”
Once I was facing a very tough final in organic chemistry, and I needed every minute I could get to study for it. When I knocked on one door, shouted “Dorm Crew!” and no one answered, I opened the door and saw organic chemistry textbooks and class notes spread all over the floor. Whoever the student was, he was preparing for the same test I was, but while he was studying, I was cleaning his toilet. That was hard for me because I knew the two of us might end up competing for the same spot at a medical school, and he had an unfair advantage.
On Friday nights I met with a Christian fellowship called InterVarsity while Leisle was involved with a group at Yale called Cru. We both considered it an important part of our busy schedules. Harvard and Yale were incredibly competitive environments, and it was easy for high achievers to become obsessed with grades and lose sight of the larger picture. Like our churches at home, our student fellowships gave us a sense of community and helped us grow spiritually—and also reminded us not to base our self-worth on the outcome of the next exam.
Since I was so efficient at cleaning bathrooms, I decided to pick up a second job to earn even more money, so I started delivering newspapers. The Harvard Independent was delivered to every student’s door, and I was assigned a delivery route that was supposed to take me four hours to complete—but I got it down to forty-five minutes. I was able to speed it up so much because I ran up and down the dormitory stairs while I was delivering papers. I figured I could get a workout at the same time I was earning money. Then it occurred to me that I could double my salary by delivering a second local newspaper using the same route. After a while I became a familiar sight around the dorms, though no one could figure out exactly what my job was. I was either the paperboy who cleaned toilets or the janitor who delivered newspapers.
I saved money every way I could, and thanks to my mother’s training, I was always looking for a bargain. I got a free Sprint T-shirt when I bought a long distance phone card so I could call Leisle, and I applied for a credit card because it came with a free Visa T-shirt. I managed to save a lot of money, but I didn’t win any prizes for style; every shirt I owned had some company’s logo on it, and at times I looked like a walking billboard.
By the end of my first semester, I had saved enough money to buy myself a plane ticket to fly home for Christmas—no more thirty-one-hour bus rides for me. After buying my ticket, I had a thousand dollars left over, so I mailed the money home to my parents, and when my mother received it, she immediately called me and demanded to know where I had gotten so much money. She wanted to know if I had joined a Vietnamese gang at Harvard or if I had broken into someone’s car and stolen a stereo. I tried to explain to her that there were very few Vietnamese gangs in Cambridge and that I wasn’t in the habit of breaking into cars. But my mother had always warned us growing up, “Don’t pick fights, don’t join a gang, and don’t break into cars and steal stereos.” She figured that just because I was at Harvard didn’t mean I couldn’t get into trouble.
I had the good fortune to be assigned a terrific roommate, a young man named Dan from Chicago who came to Harvard to study physics and applied mathematics. Dan owned one of the latest laptop computers, an Apple PowerBook with a black-and-white screen, and he allowed me to use it whenever I wanted. What I especially appreciated was the gracious way he did it; he never reminded me that the computer was his property or ordered me off of it so he could use it himself. Dan understood that, for me, owning a computer would have been like owning a yacht, and he wanted to be generous without making me feel ashamed. That was a very special gift, and it was one of the reasons we remained roommates all four years and became lifelong friends. I made a promise to Dan that when his own children go to college one day, I will buy them any computer they want—as long as they share it the way their father did.
It took a long time before it finally sank in that I was actually at Harvard. It seemed too good to be true, and something inside me secretly feared that maybe it wasn’t true—maybe it was all a mistake. The entire time I was at Harvard I felt that at any moment someone might tap me on the shoulder and say, “Mr. Chung, you don’t belong here. There’s been a mistake. You have to go home.” I was haunted by that feeling for four years—right up until the moment I finally held a Harvard diploma in my hand. I thought that feeling might have been the refugee part of me, the part that never felt that it deserved anything and never quite felt at home. But as I got to know other students at Harvard, I came to realize that just about everyone there felt the same way.
I actually had one advantage over most of the students at Harvard: I had been working long hours all my life, and I had learned how to juggle multiple tasks at the same time. There were students at Harvard who did nothing but study, and some of them still dropped out because of the pressure. When I was growing up, I never had time to feel pressure—I was too busy doing the next thing. I had spent my entire childhood scrambling, stumbling, recovering, improvising, and learning how to do things after I did them. That wasn’t always easy, but it turned out to be very good preparation not only for Harvard but for life as a whole.
I knew how to juggle multiple jobs, demanding classes, physical exercise, and spiritual development—what I didn’t know was how Leisle fit in. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that there was something missing in my curriculum.