I’ve heard black students at Amherst talk about how college education will separate them from their communities back home, but I didn’t anticipate how much Amherst would separate me from my white working class community until I came home last week.   

I’ve never really belonged in Lakeside.  Lakeside is a white, Christian-conservative, rodeo town, where work and sports come before school.  I am a half-Filipino, agnostic, liberal, pro-choice vegetarian, who is unable to keep quiet about almost anything is.  Growing up, I uncomfortably listened to homophobic and racist comments and complaints about affirmative action, been offered a lot of Bibles, and been called un-American.  Somehow, I maintained my sanity by forming close friendships to my teachers and a few friends from school and sports, who either agreed with my politics or overlooked them.  Despite the differences, I played sports, joined clubs, and felt like I was part of the community.

            I keep in touch with a handful of high school friends, but when I come home and meet them, most of whom go to school or work locally, the gossip about whose pregnant, getting married or dropping out of school now seems removed from my life at Amherst.   Each time I come home, I’m less eager to see most people.  I feel uncomfortable at parties or with anyone outside of a shrinking number of close friends.  Sitting in a dirty bowling alley in a shady neighborhood by the mall with my friend Jamie and her boyfriend, I feel the divide between myself and Lakeside more strongly than I ever had imagined.  I come home after finals, thinking about my research projects and travel plans to Tanzania.  But I can’t tell Jamie how much I can’t wait to learn Swahili and then come back from Tanzania and plan my thesis or how I’ve found my passion for researching black studies questions and hope to get a Master’s Degree in Ethnic Studies someday.  She couldn’t relate to those dreams. I used to be able to tell her everything, but now I couldn’t tell her anything that mattered to me.

            Instead, she tells me about how she and her boyfriend have to move out of the apartment she shared with her cousin and his girlfriend because her cousin’s girlfriend’s drunken brother keeps coming over and harassing her.  She needs to find a second job because she wants to save up so she can pay rent and take community college classes in the fall.  She doesn’t know what she wants to do after college.  All she wants is to be the first person in her family to graduate.  While I  escape my own dysfunctional family in the Amherst bubble and worry about paper deadlines or whether Val will have the New York Times at breakfast, concerns about making payments, keeping jobs, and old family and high school drama dominate Jamie’s life.

            In high school, I wanted to be more like Jamie.  She’s prettier and funnier and more charismatic, athletic, and confident than I am.  She doesn’t have to try to captivate guys; she just has to laugh.  I love her for openness and honesty and how much she’s always loved me.  But sometimes she makes me cringe when she laughs at lesbian couple or says something racist without realizing it.  Going to Amherst has made me more acutely aware of and easily offended by the racism and homophobia that permeate daily conversations in Lakeside.  Jamie and I are growing up in such different directions that I’m terrified to correct her when she says something racist, homophobic, or generally ignorant.  I don’t want her to start feeling ashamed of her lack of education or exposure to outside world or uncomfortable being herself around me.  If I correct her too often and make her feel ignorant, she’ll realize how big that gap between us has grown and eventually, I will lose one of my friends since 8^th grade.  Instead of hurting Jamie’s feelings, for the first time in my life, I keep my opinions to myself.  I let her say things I couldn’t tolerate out of my Amherst friends.  Like with most friends from my childhood, our friendship lives on past memories and I hold on to these memories as long as I can and hope they’re enough to build a future on.  I wonder how long Lakeside can keep being home.