Living Happily in Poverty

Columbia University cost about $10,000 a year when I went there. I had an annual scholarship of $2,500, a student loan of $2,000 and $2,500 from my father. I needed to make up the difference of $3,000 by working part-time. I first did tutoring, and later worked in the computer center on campus.

My roommate Russ had a similar situation. Russ came from a Polish immigrant family. His father worked as a security guard in prison. His mother was a housewife. They couldn’t afford his college education, so he had to support himself. He worked as a kitchen assistant in one of the university’s cafeterias. Sometimes he brought leftover bread and hot dogs back to our dorm room at night. I got to share the midnight snacks with him.

I still remember the day I first met Russ in our dorm room. He was a brown-haired, blue-eyed young man about 5’10’’. He smiled at me and introduced himself. Soon we became best friends.

Russ had a great sense of humor. We made fun of each other all the time.

“How come you’re still not done with the programming homework?” I often shook my head in front of him and said in an exaggerated tone. “You’re slower than a cow!”

I thought he might fight back with something like “not as slow as your swimming” because I had broken the slowest record in the swimming class. I didn’t get any of my PE teacher mother’s athletic genes.

Instead, Russ said, “Come on, buddy! You are slower with girls. You turn all red whenever talking to a girl. How are you ever going to get a girlfriend?”

That was indeed truthful. I was bold about almost everything but incredibly shy in front of girls my age. I couldn’t and still can’t explain my psychology in that stage of my life. I just didn’t know what to say when meeting girls.

However, it didn’t bother me too much because I was too busy with school and my part-time job to think about getting a girlfriend. Russ, on the other hand, often faced quite a different problem when he was unable to submit his homework assignments on time. Sometimes he asked me for help.

One day, I knew he needed me to help him with his homework, so I intentionally stayed out. Unable to find me, he went to the computer lab by himself. As soon as he logged in, he saw a warning message, “The computer will automatically shut down at 11 p.m. for maintenance.” That meant he would have to complete his work within three hours, which seemed too challenging to him. He began to sweat, trying very hard to speed up his programming. When he was almost done, a pop-up window suddenly appeared on the screen to display, “Disk damaged, file lost.” He was terrified, and immediately started to redo his work. But only in a few minutes, another pop-up window told him, “System damaged, all files lost. Please click on the following link.”

Russ followed the instructions and saw a message:

You are fooled, Dummy! All those warnings were made up by me. I’ve already done your homework for you. It’s in your drawer. Just come back!

Kai-Fu

Then Russ knew I had stolen his computer lab password to pull this trick on him. He rushed back to our dorm room, pretending to be outraged. We ended up laughing so hard that tears came out.

When it was time to go to bed, Russ rarely used his bed. The mattress was too soft for him because he had a back problem. He had taken off a closet door and placed it on the floor to sleep on it..

Every time I saw him frown, I knew his back was aching and would stop all my crazy jokes. But that only happened once in a long while. Most of the time Russ was a happy fellow. We often stayed up chatting until after midnight.

Sometimes we got hungry at night and went out to eat the cheapest fried chicken. Or we took the subway to Chinatown for low-priced midnight snacks. Once we went to a Chinese restaurant at 2 a.m. and ordered seven large plates of food, including fried rice, chow-mien (fried noodles) and chow-fun (fried rice sticks). When we asked the waitress for the check, she was shocked to see all the plates empty. She asked, “Did you guys eat up all your orders?”

We nodded.

“My God!” she uttered her astonishment. “Don’t you need an ambulance?”

Like many other young men, Russ and I had huge appetites. It was often hard for us to get enough food with little money. But one winter we came up with a brilliant idea to solve the problem.

We were both staying on campus for Christmas because we couldn’t afford the travel expenses of going home. In order to minimize our food budget for the winter break, Russ took 55 pounds of cream cheese from the cafeteria where he worked. We planned to make 20 cheesecakes and replace our daily meals with them throughout the winter break.

The plan worked for a few days. But then we got so sick of the cheesecakes that we couldn’t even bear hearing their name. A week later, Russ suddenly announced, “Kai-Fu, I have great news! All the rest of the cheesecakes got molded. We can’t eat them anymore!”

I was excited to hear that. Then we took the subway to a Chinatown restaurant that offered the lowest prices for the largest servings. We ordered six dishes to celebrate the end of our cake eating days.

From then on, we often used the word “cake” as our exclusive metaphor. While the idiom “a piece of cake” normally means “easy,” we would describe the difficulty of a task by saying, “Oh! It took as much time as eating a piece of cake!” Other people would look confused upon overhearing something like that in our conversation. Then we would give each other five and laugh.

Russ kept cake making as a hobby after we graduated. Even after he moved to Germany, opened a gallery and married there, he would still send me a cake he made every holiday season. The cake sent from Germany in December would arrive in late January or February. No one in my family dared to eat it. I emailed Russ to thank him and ask him not to send any more cakes. But he replied, “For old time’s sake, I must do it.”

In 2000, I transferred from Microsoft Research China back to the Seattle headquarters. I was too busy moving that I forgot to notify Russ of my address change. That December he sent a cake to my old address in China. It took more than two months to get there and nearly three months to be returned. After Russ received the returned cake, he emailed me, “I always thought adding rum and chocolate was an outdated way of preserving a cake. But when I got the returned cake in May, I finally had a chance to test the old method. Now I’m happy to tell you I ate the cake, and the better news is, I’m still alive.”

I burst laughing in front of my computer. All of a sudden I realized how blissful our college years had been despite our tight budgets. After going through lots of complicated life experiences, we would probably never regain the kind of simple joy that had once filled our young hearts.

In my reply to Russ, I wrote, “Glad to know you tested a five-month-old cake. Did you know that I actually mailed you a slice of the cheesecake we made in 1980? I sent it through your Polish post office. You may receive it in the next few months. Then please tell me how the 20-year-old cake tastes!”

歡迎各界惠賜各類創作稿件，email：lulijen46@gmail.com

並歡迎轉載，但務請註明出處----編者

【法奶日報www.lulijen.com 2013.1. 29.出刊，第9830號】

刊登日：2015/8/1

瀏覽人數：2151