Arrival

(Copyright Ryan Pyle/Corbis)

My graduate dormitory at Brandeis was a three-story building by the Charles River. I had two roommates. Benny was from Israel, and Hosan from South Korea. Hosan, a broad-framed man with a square face, was a second-year graduate student in the chemistry department, which had a number of Chinese students, so he spread the word among them about my arrival, probably because I was an oddity studying literature instead of science.

The next afternoon, I strolled along the Charles. The sky was clear and high, much higher than the sky in China, thanks to the absence of smog. A pudgy angler was fishing with a tallboy of beer in his hand. Behind us, Canada geese strutted and mallards waddled. A young mother and her toddler boy were tossing potato chips at the waterfowl. Soon the man caught a bass, about a foot and a half long, wriggling like crazy. He unhooked the fish, observed it for a few seconds. "Dammit, it's you again," he said, and, to my amazement, dropped it back into the water.

"You don't keep your fish?" I asked him.

"Nope."

"You can't eat it?" I was still baffled.

"I'm fishin' jus' for fun."

It occurred to me that people here had a different view of nature. That night, I wrote in my first letter to my best friend: "By comparison, our old land must be overused and exhausted. Nature is extraordinarily generous to America."

My roommate Benny was a first-year graduate student in Judaic studies. He was a skinny man and had a German girlfriend, Bettina, who had just arrived as a special student, doing graduate work at Brandeis for one year. At first, I thought that they both spoke English fluently, but I soon discovered that their vocabulary wasn't that rich and that they might not know more English than I did. Yet compared with theirs, my spoken English was quite shabby, partly because I had learned it mainly from books. For example, several times I introduced myself as "a freshman," assuming that the word referred to a first-year grad student as well. I couldn't understand the news on TV at all, and it took me two months to be able to follow TV shows. Some Chinese students in our dorm loved watching American wrestling, believing that the stunts, the moves, the pain were all real.

Below us, on the first floor, lived a young Indian couple, both graduate students. The wife, Aparna, was tall and vivacious, specializing in social policy and management. One evening, as we were having tea in their living room, she asked me, "Why didn't you bring your wife and child with you?"

"They were not allowed to come with me," I said.

"Who didn't allow them?"

"The government."