Aiming for the A-List

I have often said that everything I have learned at Harvard, I have learned from Salada teabags. Salada, if you’re not familiar with it, is the off-brand orange pekoe tea HUDS buys; each teabag comes with a delightfully punny or inspirational aphorism. After each meal in the dining hall, I would pick out a teabag and ponder the message on its label. The tea itself isn’t particularly good, but taste is a small price to pay for spiritual clarity.

Take this gem, for example: “I’ve never looked through a keyhole without seeing someone looking back.” I interpret the message here to be about the importance of privacy. In my second year studying Japanese at Harvard, we learned that there is technically no word for privacy in Japanese; when the Japanese need to use the word “privacy”, they use the English derivative “pu-rai-ba-shi.” Until the twentieth century, there wasn’t even a word for the concept. From small Japanese towns to Tokyo highrises, everyone knows their neighbors’ business, because the walls are made of a very thin—but equally delicious—rice paper.

Like Japan, Harvard is not known for its privacy. This is, after all, a school in which the three tasks to complete before graduation all involve some form of public nudity and exposed genitalia. The halls of Annenberg echo with last night’s tale of dormcest and the walls of Canaday are just as thin as those in Japan—although not nearly as delicious.

Initially, as a freshman used to the separation of home and school, I found this lack of privacy frustrating. But after a couple of months here, I began to realize that I was willing to sacrifice secrecy to achieve my real goal: campus-wide fame. I longed to be one of the select few whose names peppered dining hall conversation and lit up the pages of the Crimson. With all this gossip and openness, it would be pretty easy to make a name for myself… right?

Luckily, I had my trusty Salada teabags to help me out. After a popcorn chicken-filled lunch, I came across this line: “Before a man can find himself famous, he must first find himself.” Eureka! I thought. If I wanted to become famous at Harvard, I had to first construct a killer Harvard identity. Perhaps I could be a final club-hopping heiress—Sachi Ezura, heir to the Meineke Tire and Brake Pad fortune—but this would require entrepreneurial skills on the part of my parents, let alone more brake pads than we could afford. I could be the fearless leader of a campus abstinence movement, but I doubted anyone would care that I wasn’t having sex. I could audition for Beauty and the Geek, but I was neither beautiful enough to be a beauty nor geeky enough to be a geek.

So much for national fame; I couldn’t even make it onto FM’s Fifteen Hottest Freshmen list. As unique as I made myself seem in my college admissions essay, I was way too normal to be famous. And the competition was steep. Tons of students were striving for the same campus-wide fame I was, from UC presidential candidates to world record holders to that kid who wore shorts all winter. Every time I tried to do something absolutely crazy, some kid from the Advocate came along and did the exact same thing ironically. How could anyone compete with that? I felt like a poster hung up at 7:15 and then rapidly covered up by eight other posters, each advertising an event just as mundane as my own.

By senior year, I came to terms with my lack of fame. The people who I cared about knew who I was. If Gossip Geek was going to ignore my antics, there was nothing to do but revel in my obscurity. After all, if you’re famous, it’s much harder to get away with stuff like stealing teabags from the dining hall. Besides, most of the so-called celebrities at Harvard were more infamous than famous and were forgotten about by the time a new shopping period rolls around. In the immortal words of somebody great, “Fame is a matter of dying at the right time.”

Okay, so I read that off another Salada tea bag—the message still stands. Even those of us who have graced the pages of IvyGate find that the bloggers-that-be lose interest as soon as something newer comes along. We can clutch at all the fame we like while we’re here, but soon enough, we’ll have to pass that fame on to some young whippersnapper. And even if you never grace the pages of Gossip Geek, the people who are important to you will always know who you are.

I wish everybody luck in the post-college real world, whether you pursue fame or a quieter life. And if you ever need inspiration, it just might be hanging on the outside of your cup.



Sachi A. Ezura ’08, a Crimson magazine editor, is a sociology concentrator in Eliot House.