Roommate

My former roommate is from a small town called Monroe in Louisiana. She is short-haired brunette with an eyebrow piercing and a leopard tattoo on her arm. She sometimes would intentionally put on her Southern accent to tell me stories about life in the South and it was super funny. One day I was talking to her and she told me this story about how she met a man not long ago who is so much older than her, but they can relate with each other on so many levels despite the age gap. I told her, “If a man is so much older than you and he still thinks he can relate to you, then he must be a failure in life.” Then we all burst into laughter. Oh by the way, she is 20 and the guy she was talking about is 46.

Her story is probably another side of the coin of the US, or a reflection of a divided American society. She is from a broken family. She has a dad who is always on the lookout for lovers younger than him and a mom who constantly switches between boyfriends because, in her words, “I am a lonely woman, I need to be loved”. It was a complicated mother-daughter relationship mixed with love and hatred. I firmly believe that hatred is almost always bred from love. The deeper you love someone, the more hatred you would develop out of that love. I occasionally heard her crying in her room and once knocked on her door, asking if she was okay. She didn’t open the door but told me she was okay in a sobbing and broken voice.

She dropped out of high school because she shaved her head. Her mom, like a lot of Southern woman who holds traditional values, thinks it’s a sin to not behave like a girl. So she unenrolled her from school and made her stay at home to do online school. Unsurprisingly she lacked the self-discipline to do online school and ended up not being able to get a high school diploma.

She moved out after she had a huge fight with another roommate and I haven’t heard from her since.

A while ago, I discovered she had removed me from her Instagram followers list. In her new post, she was smiling hard. So hard that you would never associate her with the person who cried hysterically in her room.

School

Before I came to the US, I was dreaming of sitting in a class filled with people from different countries, different states, having different color, but later I found out it was filled with Chinese and Indian visa refugees.

After two years, I finally came to the realization that Chinese plus Indian equals the Bay Area and the tech industry.

Work

My mentor looks like a typical reserved and rigid middle-aged Indian woman, but as I talked more with her. I found out she is actually pretty funny and has her unique views towards life. One day I talked to her, and she told me she has been in the US for 10 years and still couldn’t get her green card. She has to wait for another 9 years to get it if nothing goes wrong. It’s only because the kind of visa she is on has a long backlog. If you are a manager, then it will take a lot less time to get it. “That’s why we have so many bad managers,” she told me.