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I went to graduate school of University of Illionois, eventually
receiving a PhD in biological field. My class was huge, but within a month
or two, more than half quit.[1] One classmate who stayed was a Jewish man,
who was not religious (none of American Jews I have met is religious or dwelling
on Israel).
[1] The year was 1984, economy was booming and inflation looked being tamed
(the first after more than a decade). But many who left cited personal
reasons (if they told me): it takes too many years to get a PhD.
His grades were poor, and he often said no employer would read grade
transcript before hiring a person (which turns out to be true for PhD's; I am
clueless about college graduates).
In my second year, a white technician[2] told me when we had lunch together
that my classmate asked Mari (a white student who was a year ahead of us)
if she was a virgin.[3] The technician then shook his head, "Can you imagine
that?"
[2] who just received BS in biology, whose wife, having finished BE (
engineering) in 3 years and ME in a year, started working for AT & T, which
was hot at the time. They were poor so their honeymoon was spent in St.
Louis, Missouri. After my graduation, he went back to school to obtain a PhD
in biology.
[3] Mari had Indian blood, because a recent ancester (great grandfather?)
came alone from Europe (to US) and married an Indian woman. Later there was
this actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who was famed for being virginal. My memory of
Mari was she looked like the actress, more or less.
My classmate was not an oddball to me. He invited me once to his home,
whose wife treated me to a dinner. An MD from University of Michigan (a
terrific school), his wife was a resident at a major hospital (possibly
Northwestern University hospital, I cat not recall exactly). It was rare for
me to be invited to an American home--and a meal was my dream--so I was
eternally grateful.
My laboratory shared the same big room with the laboratory of my classmate,
whose boss was a respectable and rich (grant-wise) spinster. (My boss had been
a rainmaker, but by then was in the twilight of his career.) That professor
hired a part-time "dishwasher" to clean lab glassware The first dishwasher was a
white, female, wholesome, easy-going dental student, who jogged every day. She
graduated and the replacement was a white female sophomore of biology, who
was reticent.
Around that time (summer, 1986), the wife of my classmate had completed the
residency and accepted employment at Wichita, Kansas. After 2 years in the PhD
program, my classmate switched to the master program, so that he could reunite
with his wife. And he would have to work hard to do research, defend thesis in order
to obtain a master's.[4]
[4] In my university--at least biological field (engineering was diagonally
opposite and that was how technician's wife got ME in a year)--the
requirement for a master's was similar to that of a PhD, except that the former
demanded fewer credits and less caliber of research. Still it took four years on
average to get a master's.
Then something happened. Remember that was the beginning of my third year in
US, so I could not tell if it was unusual. You see, graduate students in
biological field were, and are, supposed to work all day, all nights,
weekends and holidays.
My classmate would have dinners with this lady, who went in and out together
, quietly (but we all noticed).[5] There were subdued gossips (e.g., a lab mate said,
"I saw them sitting in the dark" of a building nearby--nobody used the term "hang out").
[5] The Cheating Elephant in the Room. Annie's Mailbox, Sept. 4, 2010.
http://www.creators.com/advice/annies-mailbox/the-cheating-elephant-in-the-room.html
* The elephant in the room.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/elephant-in-the-room.html
* Chicago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago
("The name 'Chicago' is a French rendering of the Native American word
shikaakwa, meaning 'wild onion' or 'wild garlic, from the Miami-Illinois
language. The first known reference to the site of the current city of
Chicago as 'Checagou' was by Robert de LaSalle [French explorer; 1643-1687]
around 1679 in a memoir written about the time. The wild garlic plants,
Allium tricoccum, were described by LaSalle's comrade, naturalist-diarist
Henri Joutel, in his journal of LaSalle's last expedition")
His boss decided to accelerate his research and pushed him out (gifted with
a master's) in three years. Similar to 送瘟神 in Taiwan, though Americans do not
have that Chinese concept. (Naturally nobody told his wife, I assumed. But all
thought that was the right thing to do--to dispatch him back to his wife. A few
American columnists have opined that marriage like that won't last, for whatever
reasons.)
What was exactly my classmate doing? Did my classmate have an illicit sex? I
never asked--and probably nobody cared, or had time, to find out.
※ 修改:．choi 于 Sep 6 14:16:53 修改本文．[FROM: 129.10.0.0]
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发表于 9-5-2010 10:14:04
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