I bought the Cool Girl, bullsh*t, u?

Writing about my college years, reflecting on a generation propelled by male violence

Spoilers ahead for the book & film Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

I spent last year writing about high school, which was difficult, but now, is paling in comparison to my pages about college.

Last month, during a residency at Hewnoaks, I gathered all my journals and mixtapes from the four years I spent at Bishops University in Quebec. I felt relieved that I could pull memories a little easier than high school. I joined Facebook the same year I started school in 2004. I am still connected to a lot of the people I went to class with. I told myself the chapters in this section would be a little bit funnier, and a little bit lighter than the previous ones.

The way that the residency is set up, is that artists get a lot of private time to really dig into whatever craft they are interested in. Nestled among giant pine trees, with the view of Kezar Lake as an anchor point, I let myself completely slip into the headspace I was in when I was a freshman at school. By the end of the week, I was, well, wrecked. Thank goodness my husband and daughter were in the safety of their life back in Portland, because mom was staring into Maine’s night sky, having an existential crisis to the sound of loons. A few times I gave into these emotions, feeling deep sorrow, wondering how in the hell could I have attended that school for four years and emerged relatively unscathed.

As this newsletter is all about finding my voice as I pluck away at this monster of a memoir, I’ll finish by sharing some of the rough pages on my first impressions of Bishop’s. But first…

There are two themes emerging that I didn’t see coming. I have yet to find the exact language but I’ll try my best: The parallels between an obsessive desire to be a “Cool Girl” and violence that men and the pop culture of the 90s inflicted on women, is starting to connect in almost every page I’ve written. Now, when I say violence I don’t always mean physical, and I hope that in today’s world, we realize both types carry weight and inflict harm.

 

It just so happens that I recently consumed two pieces of media that have brought these themes to the surface more clearly for me.

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl has one of the most incredible monologues (both in the film and book) about this intangible personality trait I’ve been trying to describe for so long. I’ll let the lead character, Amy Dunne, played by Rosamund Pike, speak for herself:

TRIGGER WARNING: Unsettling self-harm in the last five seconds of this clip. Strong language.

Some of those lines sent a lightning bolt right to my chest. How many dingy apartments have I laid in, watching Caddyshack, drinking dollar beers, all in hope of being the laid back “girl who can be friends with the guys.” For young women, after the Disney princess fairy tale fades from view, the next unattainable goal is presented to us, via films, music, and literature. Except, the pursuit of the “Cool Girl” can last for decades, and it’s chased by both genders relentlessly.

In the novel, Flynn continues Amy’s reflection with, “Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them… There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”

This particular brand of “must-have-chill” was especially marketed to young females in the 90s, and I fell hard for it, over and over again. Now, hopefully on the “other-side,” I’m trying to figure out where it started, and who was patient zero? And like so many things in my life, I always come back to movies.

Sometime toward the mid to late 90’s, the revenge of the nerd plot line started hitting big at the box office. Being popular was losing its cool. It was Romy & Michelle who got the last “IDGAFlying-fuck” in, nerdy Laney Boggs who (after becoming “new and improved”) won Freddie Prinze Jr’s heart, and Cady Heron, aka Lindsay Lohan, who found out how to straddle her passion for math with her Spring-Fling Queen title.

Then, this week I watched Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99. Over the past twelve hours everything blew up in my head and came together again. The missing thematic pieces that might weave my entire book together have combusted together. As I watched a festival fall apart (in a way, more epically than Fyre Fest), with 250k angry boys, groping women and ripping their shirts off, while they mosh to Fred Durst and Korn, well, I started to see threads that connect, the threads that unfortunately make up so much of who I am.

In each chapter I wrote about Bishop’s that week at Hewnoaks, I figured I’d be meeting a girl that was more adult, more in control, when really, it became the total opposite. Sure, I shopped for my own groceries, wrote my own rent checks, and stocked my own beer fridge, but each movement, each motion forward, was either in pursuit of male acceptance, as a potential friend or potential lover. Or worse, my movements were in avoidance of some type of male violence. Whether that was crossing the street when I saw a group of lacrosse players coming towards me at 3 in the morning, or being approached dick-first by some horny student on the dance floor.

Midweek at Hewnoaks, I thought to myself: How did this happen? I was so carefree, a punk loving, mosh-pit owning, whiskey-sipping film student, who threw middle fingers up in every photo. How come when I write these memories on the page, all I see is a shaking little girl, unprotected and exposed?

While my anti-heroes twirled in their sadness and wrote in their journals, I cheered them on to conquer the bullies. I imagined myself as them. But who was wearing the back-brace on the big screen? Who was tripping down the stairs into the arms of her Prinze charming? Who was a badass at math? Lisa Kudrow, Rachel Leigh Cook, Lindsay Lohan. If these Hollywood starlets were the replica of the nerds that were supposedly walking my hallways, or meeting me in the mirror, I was truly fucked. I felt myself falling deeper into despair as a young teen as I noted one more very specific factor that connected all of these “nerds,” they were all white.

Like any good story, the protagonist should mirror the reader, no matter how they are described. But after 50 movies with the same premise, and only 1 or 2 types of leading girls cast, I started to lose my self-esteem all over again. I wondered: maybe there is a group of girls that are never actually “allowed” to climb out of the revenge plot line. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that “little Chinese babies are so cute,” and Pampers and Welch’s juice ads dating back decades have proven this. But in the 90’s and 00’s, I didn’t have to look as far as ANY TEENAGE MOVIE EVER to know that Asian girls, or any young girls of color, were not being cast in leading roles.

Then things started to shift, both in popular culture and in myself. As I gained more confidence in late high school and early college, a new narrative started to form around me. One senior in high school, who was half-Asian herself, said to me one day: “You just wait until you get older. Your exotic beauty will set you apart from the rest of these assholes. You’ll be the coolest.”

I clung to that, silently. I wondered if to circumvent my “situation,” I could use bargaining chips. Without explicitly naming it, to be “exotic” in that time, meant that my Chinese self, (which I was learning was inherently negative currency) could, or would be evened out by something else. My whiteness, my coolness. As if I didn’t already see it around me already, like some sort of fashion craze, where famous white pop stars wore silk dresses, embroidered with dragons. Why couldn’t I capitalize on my “mix” to forge an “interesting” person. The element missing for me, was being cool, and with college, what is the coolest tool? What can I mix in opposition to my nature? It all comes up in Amy Dunne’s monologue: Sex. Booze. Giving up all autonomy in favor of men, which I often disguised as “falling in love.”

I see it so clearly now. I always doubled down in social situations. If a boy put his hands unasked on my hips on the dance floor, I wouldn’t push him away even if I wanted to. If a guy referred to me as Asian Sensation, or made fun of me for turning red after a beer, I would challenge him to a game of flip cup. I would keep going, yelling at him to stop being, “Such. A. Pussy!” until one of us was puking in a corner. I did this to a lot of people, using my unhealthy relationship with drinking as an advantage just because I could “hold my alcohol for an Asian girl,” which eventually I found out, I couldn’t.

I can’t recite all the things I did in the name of becoming Cool Girl, the list is probably hundreds of lines long.

In writing about these years so specifically now, I feel finally the strings being cut from this girl I was. It looked like she was fun, in those days, but according to who? I exposed her to so much pain, so many substances, and set no boundaries. When I meet her in the pages I write now, I feel like I’m going back in time and being the guiding voice she needed so badly. To heal from everything that happened in those four years (and let’s be honest, many years afterwards), I know now I have to go back, and re-write my history.


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As promised, I’ll leave you now with a rough version of what I started on at Hewnoaks. This is a scene of my dad driving me to Bishop’s on my first day of school.

PART 3: BISHOPS

Dad whistled the last few kilometers to Lennoxville, the little town Bishop’s University was nestled in. Even though we’d been in his minivan for seven hours, something woke us up when we crossed the town line. At first, I thought it was in my head, the sound of drumming, the movie soundtrack of my over-active imagination preparing me for the next step of my adult life. But looking out the window it was actual drumming. A six foot four man was scantily clad in a Viking costume, complete with a horned helmet. He had streaks of purple war paint from his cheeks all the way down his torso, stopping at the tiny loin cloth that barely covered his junk. He slapped his hands on a drum, the other hand holding a staff just as tall as him. When we made eye-contact he screamed what sounded like a howler monkey mating call. It was so loud it shook our car windows.

“What the actual fu—”

“I’m excited for you to make new friends,” Dad laughed, “But maybe not with that guy.”

As we turned the corner, I could see the Viking was not alone, and it made sense that I could hear the town before I saw it. A lawn filled with at least a hundred older kids dressed up in all sorts of costumes were drinking beers and cheering. Looking around at the cars beside us, I realized we were in a small convoy of freshmen arriving for dormitory move in. It was barely nine am. I spot a few pretty girls wearing nothing but bikinis and Mardi-gras beads lounging in a kiddie pool filled with beers and ice. A ten foot funnel was shepherding beer from the second floor apartment building to the main level where an assortment of other students were doing keg stands. Dad’s laughter filtered into a high pitched squeak then, and he moved into silence. We were moving impossibly slow, almost across the bridge that connected campus to town. I turned around and saw the Viking beating his chest, and a loud roar erupted like a wave at a baseball game across the outdoor welcome parade. That’s when the signs came out.

A bright white sheet was like a strike of lightning in the morning sun. “WELCOME FRESH MEAT,” it said in crude purple spray paint. Like a signal, the next building let their signs down, a Rapunzel reveal of more notes just for us. “DADDY LEAVE YOUR DAUGHTERS HERE,” one sheet unveiled. Then they finger gunned to his friend on the next door balcony. They let theirs down: “AND YOUR WIVES TOO.” Luckily the worst one I caught in my side mirror, just as we turned onto campus. Dad was too busy pointing out the University while I saw the final sheet flop down: “NO MEANS YES — YES MEANS IN THE A$$.”

Dad didn’t cry in front of me after we unpacked my room, much like the movies told me he would. But I did, when he pulled out of my building’s parking lot and gave his final wave goodbye. That last crude sheet would be the first thing he saw after saying goodbye to me.

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