Visitors

This mortarboard was easier to keep on than the one for my highschool graduation, but I still fidget with it in line. Hundreds of the little black hats and robes dot the chunk of the road just around the bend from the ceremony.

My freshman roommate's now ex-boyfriend is at the front of the line which will eventually become our row of chairs for the duration of our graduation ceremony. A former housemate is standing directly behind me. I realize I haven't had a serious conversation with either of them for over a year. Events like this shuffle people back together, and remind you of people you didn't even remember you missed.

I'm wearing cords, they're wearing cords, seems like nearly everybody's wearing cords. Some are for graduating with honors or making an honors society for the student's respective major, yet they are fairly indistinguishable from the ones which are given for participating in Greek Life. I realize that my pair will only be worn by five students, and wonder quietly if that in reality makes them look more or less credible to an outsider. The wide array of colors remind me of being seven and attending the awards dinner of the soccer season. We all got shiny trophies for participating. The parents ooohed and ahhhed affectionately over them, but the kids were disinterested or even ashamed looking to hold them. They knew that these meant nothing, that they had no value, because they were given to everybody for just existing.

"Heh," I said, turning to my former housemate and trying to make light conversation, "they give these out for everything, huh? Look, they even seem to have one for...what is that yellow one...the asian students minority recgonition club?"

The housemate turns to me and glares with an expression that clearly says he took my mistake as a malicious slur, "That's the designation for somebody who is graduating with a masters."

So much for small talk I guess.

***

"Call me Oliver," he said.

"Oh...alright..."

"My real name is difficult for Americans."

I'd seen the boy in class before but never talked to him much. Now that I had joined the master's and Ph D student poker nights I was getting to know some of them a little better.

"So who knows how to play?" he asked. A smiling Indian boy and the wife of one of the Ph D candidates raised their hands.

"Ok," she said, turning to me, "He's going to explain the rules to you in English and I'm going to teach everybody else in Chinese."

I wonder sometimes if this is what a brain drain looks like. Then I hear them talk about missing their families, or even for those who want to stay how difficult it is to get a work visa or citizenship in America, and how they may never be cleared for high government work due to their foreign connections. All and all America doesn't graduate a lot of engineers, and these are normally counted as American engineers. We celebrate the fact that we have a Chinese brain drain, that we are getting intelligent and hard working students into this country to help develop new products that will help America profit, and then we legally make it difficult for them to remain here to execute the plans we help lay in their minds. I wonder who profits from this system. I do not think it is anybody at this table.

***

Same group, different day. We're all lined up along a table in a Thai place. One of the master's students has produced a pair of wooden chopsticks from his pocket and is eating with them. I guess he's more comfortable that way. The conversation remains mostly in English, and as it continues I gather scraps of understanding that the boy with the chopsticks has not been to America before.

"Have you seen fortune cookies yet?" Pei, who is teaching the class, asked him.

"No, what is that?"

"Ahh," Pei begins. The voice isn't unlike the one he uses to lecture class, although he's nearing a lethal dose of sarcasm as he gestures to explain, "They are an ancient Chinese tradition... you open up a cookie, and inside, you find..." he waves his fingers and opens his eyes wide for effect, "your fortune!"

The whole table laughs for a short while. I now remember reading The Joy Luck Club in highschool and learning that fortune cookies were an American invention, but somehow I had forgotten it until that moment.

Oliver laughed too, turned to me and smiled, "Americans, so crazy."