Back to School, at 64

Wenting Li

“Will I be the oldest person here?” I asked the chairman of the nonfiction writing program at Columbia University, shortly after I was accepted. He laughed and said no. There were two or three older, but not by much.

“It takes a lifetime to make a writer,” he continued.

And I’ve had the lifetime.

I was 64 when I entered graduate school. I had just left the work force — not retired, just tired. Tired of hitting the glass ceiling and of policies that failed to protect employees from abuse. As disenchantment with my job grew, writing became a healthy distraction.

Read - Big Sugar Versus Your Body

I applied to Columbia with no expectation of acceptance and no idea how to pay for it. My husband and I had just finished paying for our kids’ education and we didn’t have enough for retirement. But then one snowy February evening, the head of the writing program called as I stirred a pot of soup, and said, “You’re in, and there will be a scholarship.” I dropped my wooden spoon.

Sure, I’d written copy at ad agencies for 20 years, started a memoir and taken some online classes. But did that make me a writer? And the Ivy League part scared me. I imagined I wasn’t smart enough. But I also realized I had some things to say.

Read - Coming face-to-face-to-face with David Attenborough in VR

I sat in workshops and seminars during my first semester at Columbia, ashamed of my age and surrounded by brilliant young people. They were polite, but I assumed my work held little interest for them. I don’t swipe for sex. I haven’t pulled an all-nighter in decades. I thought they’d laugh at my flapping upper arms and my wrinkly neck, even though many of them admire Nora Ephron.

Some of my instructors were close in age to me, winners of Pulitzers with decades of writing and publishing experience. Some were just a little older than my children. I wondered, was it too late for me to do this?

Read - 'Minority Report' gesture control is about to get very real

My peers wrote about online dating, strange roommates, odd living situations, first big loves and rejections. Others wrote memoirs about life with a meth-addicted father or what it means to be biracial. We all struggled to be emotionally honest on the page. For me, that meant finding restraint and perspective by stepping back, seeing my own complicity in much of what’s happened in my life.

My classmates transported me back to my own 20s and 30s. I attended the University of California, Berkeley, during the second wave of feminism. In the 1970s, solidarity with the antiwar movement meant cooking for the male demonstrators. Now things are different. Gender identification is not assumed. Respect for difference is. I’ve been asked not only for my name but also for my preferred pronouns.

70NEWSJAPAN

Back to School, at 64

0 Response to "Back to School, at 64"

Post a Comment