I have known Charlotte since the fall, when we were in a class together at City College. She is always bubbly, talkative, and exuberant, with a winning smile, explosive laughter, and a bounce in her step. She has a peculiar interest in Asian culture: she studies both Chinese and Japanese, and once before class I caught her on her iPad watching a Taiwanese TV drama. As I got to know her better, I learned that she was an English major on the pre-med track. For a long time I thought her story was simple. It was only during my interview with her that I began to understand how much she overcame to get to where she is today. When she sat down with me for our interview, she told me to prepare myself, because she had quite a lot to tell.
(By the way, Charlotte is not her real name.)
Charlotte grew up in the projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn, which she says were “gang-ridden and crazy.” Today she jokingly calls the neighborhood “Hipster-Town U.S.A.” Her mother, a single parent and a nurse, comes from Augusta, Georgia and her absent father is an immigrant from San Fernando, Trinidad. Charlotte is the first in her family to go to college.
As she was growing up, Charlotte was a victim of child abuse: “They called child services all the time, and I learned how to lie from early on. They always checked your back, so she never hit us on the back.” She went to Taft High School in the Grand Concourse region of the Bronx, and she spent as much time as she could at school. She hated coming home, where there was “nothing but screaming siblings and no food.” In the evenings she ran on the track team, and when she was not running, she was studying. Good grades came as a result.
While she was in high school, Charlotte got into a fight with her mother and was kicked out of the house. She began living with her grandmother in Brooklyn and continued attending school as usual. However, life at home remained difficult: “Where my mother was neglectful, my grandmother was overpowering and over-controlling and crazy.” Her Trinidadian-born grandmother imposed strict restrictions on Charlotte in an effort to keep her out of trouble. She often locked Charlotte in her room and forbade her to see any friends.
“At the time, we had a tiff, or whatever, and my mom kicked me out. I was homeless for a little while. But then I remembered I had a grandma in Brooklyn, so I went to Brooklyn. I hopped a train, and I was like, ‘She lives somewhere…’ I found her, which was miraculous. I’m not super-religious or anything, but that was one of the times when I thought, ‘Something’s up there,’ because it led me straight to her house and I didn’t know where she lived.”
In her senior year of high school Charlotte began considering a career in medicine, and so she applied and was accepted to a seven-year MD program at Touro College. But the program was a disappointment. The students were rushed through the science curriculum and gained little from their studies: “This program didn’t prepare us for anything—not even life, forget it!” She realized that Touro would never prepare her to be a doctor.
“The cadaver lab is what really convinced me that I wanted to be a physician, because first of all, the guy was dead, and I was like, ‘that sucks, and it would be cool if he wasn’t dead.’ But then I realized that I wasn’t afraid of the blood and the death and everything. But I didn’t revel in it. I wanted to cut people, but not dead people. So I thought, I should become a surgeon: I can cut live people and keep them alive!”
She transferred from Touro College to City College, where courses were much more challenging. She majored in English, hoping that writing would give her a break from the intensive pre-med science curriculum. Soon she realized that an A in English took as much work as an A in biology: “It was a whole different world, and I began to see that being smart was not enough. It blew my mind, and I was really depressed. I was like, ‘I’m gonna be a hairdresser! I quit! I don’t want to do this anymore!’” But still she kept studying.
College life was made even more difficult by a period of homelessness. For a while she lived with her boyfriend, until a fight forced her to leave. She moved to an under-21 homeless shelter called Covenant House. For the most part, the homeless children of Covenant House were either drug-addicted or mentally ill, and they lacked the ambition to work or attend school.
In the following audio clip, Charlotte reflects on her experience being homeless:
Charlotte never told anybody she was homeless. She continued to attend classes and go to work as usual, so that nobody knew that anything was wrong. Eventually Charlotte returned to her ex-boyfriend and stayed with him until she could find a place of her own.
In the following audio clip, Charlotte speaks about the challenges of working while studying and also reflects on how she keeps her own problems in perspective:
“You really have to force yourself to be happy. Otherwise you’ll drown in the misery that New York can bring you.”
Charlotte will graduate from City College next May. She needs another three years to finish her pre-med requirements and apply to medical school. Though she is not very optimistic about the future, she remains persistent: “It looks pretty bad, and it’s gonna cost me a fortune to get this dream of being a doctor. But I’m gonna go for it because I don’t really have a passion for anything else.”
“I find I have the hardest time in life when I start thinking about myself only. When I think about other people, it gets a little bit better.”
Charlotte is remarkable for her persistence, for her selflessness, and for the way she has accepted the past and moved on. Her motto is “fake it till you make it”: even in the most desperate situations, she keeps moving forward as if everything is fine. She has not truly “made it” yet, since she still has a long way to go before she will be a doctor. But she has already “made it” through a lot. She has emerged strong from experiences that have crippled many others. Moreover, she speaks about her experiences in an incredibly perceptive, thoughtful, and penetrating way. For this reason, perhaps it is best to close with Charlotte’s own reflections:
Comments