I didn\u2019t like Columbia. It was too big. It was not fun, like being in high school. You didn\u2019t get to know anybody, hardly. The buildings looked like factories.<\/p>\r\n
By the end of my first term I got to know Chun, a Chinese boy, pretty well. And a boy named Best, whose father made pencils and who lived on Riverside Drive. And a very rich boy named Craig in my dormitory, who always asked me to help him do his French or write his English themes. The rich boy used to know lots of chorus girls and sometimes, after the Broadway shows were over, he would drive up to the Hartley Hall windows on the Amsterdam Avenue side with a taxi-full of girls, call some of his pals and they would all go out for a ride. He would never call me, of course, but if he saw a light in my window, he might yell in: \u201cSee you tomorrow, Lang, third hour, and we\u2019ll get on them French verbs. I don\u2019t need no verbs tonight.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
Like me, Chun, the Chinese boy, didn\u2019t like the big University, either. He said white people were much nicer in the missionary school in China from which he came. Here nobody paid any attention to him, and the girls wouldn\u2019t dance with him at dances. (I didn\u2019t expect them to dance with me, but he did, not being used to American ways.)<\/p>\r\n
Nobody asked him to join a frat and nobody asked me, but I didn\u2019t expect anyone to. When I tried out for the Spectator<\/span>, they assigned me to gather frat house and society news, an assignment impossible for a colored boy to fill, as they knew. I remember Corey Ford was on the editorial board. And there was a pleasant young man around named Charles A. Wagner, a poet, who later became Book Editor of the New York Mirror<\/span>. But they were upper classmen and, I suppose, not particularly interested in the relationship of Chinese and Negroes to the rest of the student body, anyhow. It was all a little like my senior year in high school\u2014except more so\u2014when one noticed that the kids began to get a bit grown and girl-conscious and standoffish and anti-Negro in the American way, that increases when kids take on the accepted social habits.<\/p>\r\n As for the instructors at Columbia whom I knew, the only one who interested me much was a Mr. Wasson, who read Mencken aloud all the time. In physics, I never understood a thing. And the instructor would never explain. He always said you had to work it out for yourself\u2014which isn\u2019t so easy if you haven\u2019t got that kind of a mind or anybody to help you. Higher mathematics were like a Chinese puzzle. And French was taught to an enormous class, with the instructor having each one recite by going down the roll with the speed of an express train\u2014evidently so he could get some sort of mark down for everybody before the bell rang.<\/p>\r\n Living in New York was higher than my father had anticipated, and he asked every month for an accounting of my expenses, penny by penny. Since I had always spent it all, \u201cAll gone\u201d seemed to me a sufficient accounting to give, simple and clear. But it did not please my father.<\/p>\r\n About that time, my mother and step-father had parted again. My mother came to New York to live, so I had to use my allowance to help her until she found a job. My father kept on wondering why I ran out of money so quickly. But I didn\u2019t have enough for college, my mother, and me, too.<\/p>\r\n What an unpleasant winter! I didn\u2019t like Columbia, nor the students, nor anything I was studying! So I didn\u2019t study. I went to shows, read books, attended lectures at the Rand School under Ludwig Lewisohn and Heywood Broun, missed an important exam in the spring to go to Bert Williams\u2019s funeral, sat up in the gallery night after night at Shuffle Along<\/span>, adored Florence Mills, and went to Chinatown with Chun. I even acquired a small Mandarin vocabulary.<\/p>\r\n Of course, I finished the year without honors. I had no intention of going further at Columbia, anyhow. I felt that I would never turn out to be what my father expected me to be in return for the amount he invested. So I wrote him and told him I was going to quit college and go to work on my own, and that he needn\u2019t send me any more money.<\/p>\r\n He didn\u2019t. He didn\u2019t even write again.<\/p>","rendered":" I didn\u2019t like Columbia. It was too big. It was not fun, like being in high school. You didn\u2019t get to know anybody, hardly. The buildings looked like factories.<\/p>\n By the end of my first term I got to know Chun, a Chinese boy, pretty well. And a boy named Best, whose father made pencils and who lived on Riverside Drive. And a very rich boy named Craig in my dormitory, who always asked me to help him do his French or write his English themes. The rich boy used to know lots of chorus girls and sometimes, after the Broadway shows were over, he would drive up to the Hartley Hall windows on the Amsterdam Avenue side with a taxi-full of girls, call some of his pals and they would all go out for a ride. He would never call me, of course, but if he saw a light in my window, he might yell in: \u201cSee you tomorrow, Lang, third hour, and we\u2019ll get on them French verbs. I don\u2019t need no verbs tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n Like me, Chun, the Chinese boy, didn\u2019t like the big University, either. He said white people were much nicer in the missionary school in China from which he came. Here nobody paid any attention to him, and the girls wouldn\u2019t dance with him at dances. (I didn\u2019t expect them to dance with me, but he did, not being used to American ways.)<\/p>\n Nobody asked him to join a frat and nobody asked me, but I didn\u2019t expect anyone to. When I tried out for the Spectator<\/span>, they assigned me to gather frat house and society news, an assignment impossible for a colored boy to fill, as they knew. I remember Corey Ford was on the editorial board. And there was a pleasant young man around named Charles A. Wagner, a poet, who later became Book Editor of the New York Mirror<\/span>. But they were upper classmen and, I suppose, not particularly interested in the relationship of Chinese and Negroes to the rest of the student body, anyhow. It was all a little like my senior year in high school\u2014except more so\u2014when one noticed that the kids began to get a bit grown and girl-conscious and standoffish and anti-Negro in the American way, that increases when kids take on the accepted social habits.<\/p>\n As for the instructors at Columbia whom I knew, the only one who interested me much was a Mr. Wasson, who read Mencken aloud all the time. In physics, I never understood a thing. And the instructor would never explain. He always said you had to work it out for yourself\u2014which isn\u2019t so easy if you haven\u2019t got that kind of a mind or anybody to help you. Higher mathematics were like a Chinese puzzle. And French was taught to an enormous class, with the instructor having each one recite by going down the roll with the speed of an express train\u2014evidently so he could get some sort of mark down for everybody before the bell rang.<\/p>\n Living in New York was higher than my father had anticipated, and he asked every month for an accounting of my expenses, penny by penny. Since I had always spent it all, \u201cAll gone\u201d seemed to me a sufficient accounting to give, simple and clear. But it did not please my father.<\/p>\n About that time, my mother and step-father had parted again. My mother came to New York to live, so I had to use my allowance to help her until she found a job. My father kept on wondering why I ran out of money so quickly. But I didn\u2019t have enough for college, my mother, and me, too.<\/p>\n What an unpleasant winter! I didn\u2019t like Columbia, nor the students, nor anything I was studying! So I didn\u2019t study. I went to shows, read books, attended lectures at the Rand School under Ludwig Lewisohn and Heywood Broun, missed an important exam in the spring to go to Bert Williams\u2019s funeral, sat up in the gallery night after night at Shuffle Along<\/span>, adored Florence Mills, and went to Chinatown with Chun. I even acquired a small Mandarin vocabulary.<\/p>\n Of course, I finished the year without honors. I had no intention of going further at Columbia, anyhow. I felt that I would never turn out to be what my father expected me to be in return for the amount he invested. So I wrote him and told him I was going to quit college and go to work on my own, and that he needn\u2019t send me any more money.<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t. He didn\u2019t even write again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"menu_order":19,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[49],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-147","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry","chapter-type-numberless"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/147\/revisions\/148"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/147\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebigsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}