Barbri

I have been hearing about the ridiculousness of bar review classes from the very beginning of law school. Everyone goes through it, after all. Thousands of law graduates, every year. I think usually the urge is to write about unique experiences. This is not one of them. But that's part of what makes it so bizarre.

After paying $125,000 to study the law for three years, I graduated on Sunday and then began on Monday this new course to study the law again, only in two months, for another few thousand dollars. I was literally back in class not 24 hours after receiving my diploma, to learn in three days the same subject I spent a whole semester on in my first year. And then I will spend another three days covering another subject that took another semester during law school, and after we've covered everything we learned in law school, we'll spend a few more days here and there covering all the things we didn't learn in law school.

This is strange enough. What makes it even more surreal--and again, this is an experience almost every single American law student goes through--is that it's all done by video. I pack my computer in my bag at home, catch the bus to GW Law School, walk up the stairs to the second-floor lecture hall, sit down, and for four hours a day watch the larger-than-life image a of a professor projected on a screen. And in law school lecture halls all over the country, this same video is being played, like we were all watching the moon landing or something. If you get there early, you can hear the morning class watching the end of the same lecture, and if you stay late, you'll hear the night class watching the beginning again.

So far, the professor has been great; lays out the law really clearly and tells funny stories to help us remember the material. But I will never actually meet him. We laugh at his stories, but he'll never hear us. I really can't overstate how odd it feels to catch myself genuinely laughing at one of his jokes, and to see everyone else in the classroom laughing, at a picture on a screen. I guess it's no different than going to the movies.

But it is different. It's completely different. We're studying for the bar exam, to be qualified as lawyers. That's not at all like watching a movie. And since the majority of students go through bar review with this one company, most of the bar exam takers, who come from all different sorts of schools with all different sorts of course requirements and offerings, will all only be thinking of the same lectures by the same professors on the days of the exam. I'm both looking forward to and dreading the moment when in some huge conference hall or ballroom in an Albany hotel, everyone turns to the same question about a hypothetical that today's professor made a great joke about, and we will laugh at the same time, the way all 20 of us kids in my AP Physics class laughed at the same time when we saw a question we definitely hadn't covered in class.

This is how people become lawyers in this country. Strange days.

A missing box

I graduate in less than 48 hours.

Right before I started law school, I sent a box of my things from my friend's place in Stanford to my new dorm address in DC. It was stuff I had left at his place on the way back to Hong Kong right after college, knowing I would be back in a year to start at Georgetown. I sent it media mail, because that is really the only affordable way to send anything of any significant weight, and it was, mostly, media: my favorite history books from college, including The Search for Modern China, and my DVD collection, including the first four seasons of The West Wing. I cheated a bit by also throwing in a light French Connection jacket.

When I got to DC, the box hadn't arrived at my dorm. A week later, it still hadn't arrived. Another week later, still nothing. Maybe most frustrating was that I had actually ordered delivery confirmation, and the online record showed that it had been delivered, but to a slightly different zipcode. So I then went on a scavenger hunt around the various post offices in the area, trying to figure out where in this craziness my box had gone. Each post office would refer me to another. Thinking I might have written the wrong address, I went to each building with an address that resembled my dorm's. Nothing. I even hung around my dorm waiting for the mailman to arrive, to ask him personally if he remembered such a box. I seem to remember him saying he seemed to remember. Useless.

Because it wasn't insured, the only thing I ever got from USPS was a check for about $15 for lost mail. I was in regular contact with some USPS not-so-higher-up who said she was bringing it up at her weekly meeting but to no avail. And then I took a break from school, and this clearly fell off my radar. But I did make a couple more attempts when I came back another year later. Nothing, of course.

It grates at me just to think about it again. It's like this tiny, insignificant knot inside my stomach that is nevertheless a knot and can't ever be untied. Because I just can't imagine what the hell has gone on with my stuff in that box. Could it really just have gotten lost and thrown away at some point? With all that stuff in it? Or is someone sitting at home right now with my books on his coffee table, along with his feet, resting on a couch watching my DVDs, while wearing my jacket?

There were lots of pirated DVDs in there, I admit (The West Wing ones were real, I swear). And I sent it media mail even though there was a jacket thrown in. But is this really fair punishment for that? I haven't thought about it for a long time, but when I do, it has this way of making my life incomplete.

adfsadlkfjslkdj.

A friend once wrote a short piece about a coin she found, musing about all the places it could have traveled to end up in her pocket. It was so hopeful, so happy, like the feather in Forrest Gump floating along to that nostalgic theme music.

This is kind of like that. Only the opposite.

The Chase-Down Block

Maybe the single thing I like most about the Times is that despite it being everyone I know's first stop for news, it doesn't take itself too seriously. Even the hard news stories sometimes have a wink in them, and often they just have completely loony stories like the Chinglish piece over the weekend. Today they wrote a whole article about LeBron's chase-down block. If you have watched any basketball at all in the last couple years, you know that block. But I had no idea they had a name for it.

(The article links to one of ESPN's Sports Science segments, which I've always found pretty lame, but this one does actually illuminate just how ridiculous LeBron is.)

The chase-down block, as I now know it's called, has a special place in my heart. Almost a decade ago, I got to do that which gets inevitably rarer as you get older: I lived an actual dream of mine.

When I was in kindergarten, my family went to watch a game at the annual HKIS Christmas basketball tournament, when it was still played at what was then the high school gym, which I grew up knowing as the middle school gym, and which is now the elementary school gym. And we kept going to a couple games each year because we usually hosted players from other schools. My mom thought this was our way of contributing to the school, since she didn't usually have time to do the parent-faculty stuff.

By about third grade--right around when my mom bought me a Utah Jazz cap--I was starting to take a serious interest in basketball. Made my parents find copies of USA Today so I could cut out the box scores and especially to go over the final regular season stats (I was a one-man Elias Sports Bureau, which, by the way, I think I once read is really just a one-man gig). Taped Inside Stuff and actually rewound Rewind. And the cards. God damn, the cards. The thrill of opening a whole box, 24 or 36 packs inside. To this day I think you could blindfold me and I could tell you what brand a card is by the way it smells.

When, the summer before fourth grade, we moved to an apartment complex with its own basketball court, it was all over. No other sport would ever come close. In third grade, I won an award for being the star goalie on my soccer team; by fifth grade, I was the backup goalie who still couldn't get goal kicks off the ground.

We were still hosting visiting players, and at least I was still going to watch the Christmas tournament games, now held at the Tai Tam campus. Naturally, I relished the TAS-HKIS rivalry, and I remember names like Migz Carreon and David Mock, or Mike Lane and Mike Elliot, as if they had been in the NBA. I actually remember a specific play, where Mike Lane was on a fast break going from the far side of the gym to the side with the locker rooms, and he pulled a spin move on his defender while letting off a bounce pass at the same time. I remember the HKIS crowd snickering when the TAS players would get back on D and slap both hands on the floor and yell, "Defense!" That was where I thought that came from. I had no clue it was a Duke thing.

I remember picking up the programs each year, going through the rosters like they were NBA media guides, always looking for which teams had the tallest players. Anyone over six feet was someone to look out for. And yeah, I dreamed that I'd be on there one day myself. I used to wear my HKIS hoodie and dribble my ball down to the court, imagining I was being introduced to the crowd. Sure, I dreamed about getting introduced at the Delta Center, too, the game seven buzzer-beaters, but every kid did that (just not at the Delta Center).

Somehow, I don't think I ever thought it wouldn't happen. I've spent most my life thinking I'm better at basketball than I really am. I was the last freshman on not just any freshman team but a 16-freshman freshman team. There were only 15 uniforms, so I alternated with freshman 15 (ha). One game, coach sent me in even though it was my off-week, so I went on with a jersey or maybe even a t-shirt without a number. I got called for a technical, the only time I've ever been T-d up.

Junior year, I got cut altogether. Even when I finally made the team as a senior, coach kept giving me asterisks: I was an alternate at first, and even when a couple guys pulled out to play tennis, coach made clear I was on the team because I was the only leftie. Oh and I was smart. Because, you know, AP classes help you on the court and all.

One final thing had to go my way before I got to be on the Christmas tournament roster, because we had one more player on our team than was allowed. Dustin Hinton, a new kid who was in my homeroom, had made the team with a style of play I can only call Jerry Sloan basketball. This guy volunteered to sit it out, somehow just knowing how badly I wanted in. I don't remember ever expressing the feeling to him. I think he just sensed it. He was, I swear, from Utah.

Our first game was the one game each year that the school required all other students to watch, or at least strongly encouraged them to by canceling class for half the day. I remember being in our warmups and going through the layup line, trying not to look too excited. It was a great game; we beat Jakarta in the last minute. But the only time I got off the bench was to cheer.

It was only after we lost a couple, when it was clear we weren't going to finish in the top half of the draw, that coach played us seniors a lot more. And in the last few minutes of a tight rematch with Jakarta, I was still on the floor. I think I may have even scored a few points. Neither team couldn't have been up by more than a basket when a white kid on Jakarta stole out on a fast break. I ran my ass off. He had no idea, and as he went up for the layup, I swatted the ball out of bounds. It was, I wish I had known then, a chase-down block.

The kid, patronizing as hell, turned around and said, "Nice block." I pretended to ignore him. A few minutes later, we lost on a missed three at the buzzer. The next day, we played for next-to-last place and lost again, to a Beijing team whose two best players were a couple guys I had spent the better part of my adolescence playing with in Taipei, who had been way ahead of me on that 16-freshman freshman team. We finished last. At our own tournament.

Clearly, I have never gotten over my basketball failures. The final day of that season, collapsed over a bed in a hotel in a military base in Guam after another last place finish, is one of the more miserable moments of my youth. When people ask me if I played in high school, I am almost ashamed to tell the truth, and I always add, apologetically, "It was in Hong Kong."

But if it had been anywhere else, I'd still be dreaming. No way I'd have ever made any other basketball team. No way I'd have gotten to play competitive, organized ball and travelled to do it. And no way I'd have my very own chase-down block.

欻冰

There's a 7-Eleven a couple blocks down from my apartment, and I think it's great. I'd only been in once before tonight, but I always look at it when I walk by because, well, it's 7-Eleven. 7-Elevens dominated my life before I came to the States. In Taipei and Hong Kong, if you start at a 7-Eleven and then walk in any direction for 15 minutes, you will come across another 7-Eleven. No joke. In my apartment complex alone, there were two. Maybe three.

So I'm walking towards a cafe/diner place earlier tonight to get some dinner and do some work, and just before I pass the 7-Eleven, a couple guys walking towards me are talking and the only word I catch from their conversation is, "Slurpee." I decide right then that I will have myself a Slurpee, though I hold off until after I do some eating and studying, on the walk back to my apartment.

Slurpees and their next of kin have been an important part of my life.

In Taipei, circa 1986, my obasan would buy me chua bing in those thin plastic baggies that she would then empty out into a bowl. I remember it being purple.

In Hong Kong, circa 1990, I think I probably had my first actual Slurpee, from the 7-11 at Repulse Bay Beach. My brother and I always got Slurpees at 7-Elevens starting around then. Always the Coke flavor. I can't seem to remember if they even had any other flavors back then.

In Taipei, circa 1994, I hung out a lot at the TAS snack bar. Doughnut in the morning, chicken nuggets for lunch, and a pretzel with cheese after school. And also a slushie at some point. Usually the orange flavor, I think. So really just a Fanta Slurpee.

In Taipei, circa 1996, the convenience store across the street from my apartment changed from whatever chain it was before to Niko Mart (it changed once more before I left, but curiously, it was never a 7-Eleven). And I walked in one day and saw their chua bing/Slurpee/slushie machine and thought I'd give it a try. I picked the orange-colored flavor. It came out more ice than slush, so more chua bing than Slurpee. But it wasn't orange-flavored.

It was something else, something wonderful. It was the very flavor my obasan used to get me in a plastic baggie when I was three years old. I had been searching for this flavor my whole life up to that point, but no purple-colored flavor ever came close. But this was it. 百香果. Nice, easy characters which I could read. And which I later learned was passion fruit.

So my memory was playing tricks, but to this day I don't know if it was tricking my vision or my taste. Was it really purple when I was little? Or was the sweet goodness of passion fruit so delicious that I had to convince myself this was the taste that made me first fall in love with chua bing?

I have wondered this all my life.

Room 200

Just came out of my last class, held on a sunny Saturday afternoon because the professor had to make up for one a few weeks back. I thought about not going; it was probably going to be taped, and it was a sunny Saturday afternoon. But I went, even woke up early to finish the reading. I have always made an effort to be at all my last classes, if only to be part of the applause for the professor at the end. I was so impressed the first time that happened in college, and I do believe I've been to every last class since.

But this wasn't just any last class. It had been twenty years coming. Forty semesters. If it's been about 150 days a year, 5 hours a day, for 20 years, that's 15,000 hours in class, and these were my last 2. Maybe I'll go back to school one day. Maybe. But for now, I am well educated enough.

I could tell you that my last class was criminal law, and the subject was insanity, and that might get some chuckles, the kind of thing that makes you want to say, "Isn't that ironic?" without actually wondering if indeed there is any irony involved. But I would rather tell you that we talked about the guy who the Supreme Court said could stay locked up in the criminal ward of a state hospital for 25 years because he was found not guilty for reason of insanity. For shoplifting. Or that we discussed whether Andrea Yates knew what she was doing when she drowned her kids, and whether she knew it was wrong because it was Satan telling her to do so.

There's a lot of interesting legal substance to these issues--I wouldn't have enjoyed law school at all if I didn't think so--but I've always wondered what happened beyond the pages of my casebooks. The opinions we read tend to end with an order to remand the case back to trial, and you rarely learn what actually happened to the person whose name you type over and over again throughout your notes, in your outlines, on your exams. They are almost always fascinating stories, the tough calls, because why else would they end up in a casebook? And when I hear a fascinating story, I want to know how it ended, not just (and often not at all) what the majority on the court thought about the legal issues.

Especially in criminal law, when we spent half the semester talking about murder and rape, it could get overwhelming for me to think about the scale of the drama that must have backdropped each case. We snicker in class about the ridiculous circumstances that lead to tricky legal issues--who's guilty when some kid dies playing Russian Roulette?--but can you even begin to imagine what that kid's mom went through? Or the friends who were playing with him? Whole lives upended by a fantastically stupid mistake, the memory of it producing who knows how many sleepless nights or disgruntled marriages. And a generation letter, a bunch of Georgetown law students sit in room 200 and laugh over whether the bullet was placed to the left or the right of the chamber.

Even the bad guys, the ones we read about not because there's any doubt that they did the deed, but because maybe they should only get rape instead of accomplice to murder. How did they live out the rest of their days, whether in a cell or not? So many of the cases we read are relatively recent; sometimes I just want to know what bars the guy is looking out from behind today and what he's thinking right now, at that same instant we sit in class and discuss what he was thinking then, the flash of time before his rival drag racer hit an oncoming car and killed everyone in it.

After twenty years of going to class, the rhythms of my life knowing precious little else besides going to class, I may never go to another class again. But I will always be looking for stories.