One day, I noticed a poster in the hall for summer classes at the Hotchkiss School, which offered electives that Bronx Science didn’t have. I sent away for a catalog and found a class on public speaking. I asked my parents for the money so I could take this class, and they gave it to me even though it must have been a lot for them. At Hotchkiss, the teacher gave us assignments like tell a long joke, explain a piece of art, and persuade the listener to an unpopular position. I told a long joke and no one laughed. I was not very good, but I was starting to understand rhetoric. For the following summer, I mailed away for another brochure, this time for Phillips Exeter Academy, and I took another public speaking course.

When I went to Yale for college, I felt outclassed by my peers who had attended the private schools I had visited during the summers. They spoke with ease about music, art, and faraway places and wrote beautiful papers about books I had not read. Some knew Latin and Greek. I stumbled through my classes and ill-advised romantic relationships. I majored in history, and without a clear plan, I went to law school at Georgetown.

Not once did I consider being a litigator because that seemed like professional debating. I thought I’d be better suited as a corporate lawyer. I figured I should try to be financially better off than my parents who worked throughout the year without breaks in an underheated store, scrimping to pay their greedy landlord, who refused to kill the enormous rats that roamed in the basement.

After my first year at Georgetown, I went to the career services office because I needed to learn how to do a job interview. The career counselor, an older white woman, said to me in the gentlest way, “You need to boast about how great you are. You’re an Asian girl, and when you boast, you’re playing against the stereotype of the meek Oriental. Your interviewer will never think you’re bragging. I don’t give this advice to pushy white men.”

She was telling me how the world might see me. I had to talk, and I had to build myself up, because others might see less than there was. Though I couldn’t really do what she said, I never forgot her words.