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_projects/Yale_and_Me.md

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 Speak, memory. At least, try.
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 It wasn’t easy to be a visiting student. Visiting students before me told me it was impossible to fit in. Why would Yalies care about us? They are living their own best lives, why would they make room and time for someone from a less prestigious institution, who is probably “useless” to them in all aspects, and who is leaving again as swiftly as they had come? This was a fundamental insecurity in the visiting student’s mentality. We emerged at Yale on the margin, and most of us came and went like ghosts, like K in Kafka’s *Castle*.
 
 
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 But I also remember, being stunned by all of Yale’s radiant beauty, I never once felt that the world was unfair because I only had one semester but they had eight. I only felt increasingly grateful that I had one, and the world was unfair because so many deserving students never made it to Yale, and so many more would-have-been-deserving students were snipped in the bud by poverty, disease, and institutional flaws before they had the chance to bloom. As amazing as my Yale friends were, and as aware of the Yale bubble as they tried to be, some of their mindless words made me think perhaps the biggest shortcoming of going to Yale is that they don’t know what it feels like to *not* go to Yale. It’s hard to feel the full weight of how privileged one is with what one already has – we often forget how privileged we all are to be able to breathe.
 
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 At Yale, I saw ideals happen in reality, and I saw my idealism revive.
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 I saw the humanitarian spirit at a density I didn’t know existed in the 21st century. I saw what seemed to me to be organizational miracles. I saw such a diverse spectrum of life stories and thought profiles. I felt like everything I wanted to exist but thought didn’t, did exist. And I saw Yale’s idealism, irreversibly, fatally, affecting me.
 
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 Of course, Yale wasn’t all roses. It gave me one of the biggest trials of my life.
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-[[1]](notion://www.notion.so/cind-/49dc0c8664aa4e3da3df3b3b2bc25cb8#_ftnref1) Yi-Ling Liu, “China’s ‘Involuted’ Generation | The New Yorker,” The New Yorker, May 14, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/chinas-involuted-generation.
+[[1]](notion://www.notion.so/cind-/49dc0c8664aa4e3da3df3b3b2bc25cb8#_ftnref1) Yi-Ling Liu, “China’s ‘Involuted’ Generation,” The New Yorker, May 14, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/chinas-involuted-generation.
 
 [[2]](notion://www.notion.so/cind-/49dc0c8664aa4e3da3df3b3b2bc25cb8#_ftnref2) Edith Wharton, *The Age of Innocence*, ed. Stephen Orgel, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford university press, 2006), 50.