well i did wonder when it would happen and the answer is: right about now. as soon as i woke up this morning i started crying. perhaps it was triggered by a dream, but i kept on at it for another hour and then made myself talk to su-lin and minyin and then felt better and rang von up to go to lunch. this is not going to be first year at uva all over again. i am older and much more used to america. and i have been liking cambridge. but the feeling i have is not of dissatisfaction with the land but fear of not finding my own people. i feel, more acutely than before, that i have lost the ability to interact with americans in a group context, which in anycase i never was very good at in the first place, but now i have really forgotten how and find i hate to learn. a group of people talking, and i never know how to cut in or take my turn at speaking because there never is any suitable pause or cue and when i try no one can hear me anyway and after a while people say how quiet and nice i am and i feel completely thwarted. my mind stays blank and i never seem able to crack the social ice in a group and when i do say anything sometimes people laugh becos it comes out all wrong because i'm thinking like an asian in an asian social situation. and i did think, perhaps, that i will find friends in the dorm, for i've never lived in a large dorm before, and i was sure there would be many new students equally anxious to make friends, and most of them would be outside the department. i had looked forward to opening my large room as a salon, seeing in my mind the grad students wandering in and out, and there would always be fresh-brewed tea and tea snacks and flowers and music and cushions and space for discussions, but this is far too early to expect, isn't it? but the doors so far have always been shut except when i make my week's round of fruit deliveries, and even then i feel awkward. the graduate dorm council activities involve pubbing and dance parties and barbecues and these things sap me. i don't really want to, for the sake of making friends, go to them, that isn't i think the way i know to have fun, and the trouble is that humanz and gep has spoilt us for the only way we know to have fun is to sit around talking about anything under the sun and that isn't the kind of relationship we can acquire quickly, but the kind that must be built over many years. and much as i think boston is full of opportunities and excitement without being new york city it's still not the kind of place that encourages people to be friendly. it is not a place where you can smile at people on the street for no one meets your eye and bus drivers and shopkeepers and dustmen are always rude and impatient as if my trying to be nice was the greater crime. and of course there are the singaporeans to fall back on they're a social safety net you can speak singlish and order the right things at penang and you know how to fit in only i don't really, deep down, do i? i can simulate it easily enough but that is precisely what i don't want they are all very nice people i give them that but you know what i mean: they are all engineers and economists and biomedical sciences and this is harvard for goodness sake what do you think it's like when you go over to MIT to meet the singaporeans there? and they're half of them psc scholars who ask about virginia and go, ah, FMS lah, as if my family is just rolling in it. dear god i miss the humanz people back home like nobody's business and why why why is it the engineers and political scientists that get government money to come to MIT whereas all the brilliant literature and philosophy people are bonded to MOE and have to teach people to pass their o'levels. what would i give to be arguing with choonping about grammar right now, or quoting thurber to yen, or being in bedok or jurong library with poach or su-lin or julian?