The Boston Tea Party

A weekend at MIT Splash

I’ve always wanted to go to MIT, that crystal-walled dream factory in Beantown where aspiring scientists and engineers get turned into real scientists and engineers with big piles of cash and patents in their basements. But MIT was just a place of fantasy until I got off the T at Kendall Station that first starry night and waited for Joanna “Po” Zhu, our hostess. As soon as Po took me to the dorm, I fell in love with it. Po’s room was a tight squeeze for me and my friends, but everything else about the dorm captivated my senses, which had been long sheltered under the protective wing of the black helicopters. It was comfortable, with carpet covering the entire floor except for the large kitchen, where we helped Po bake dessert while listening to music and chatting, and the large unisex bathroom. As you’d expect at a nerdy place like MIT, the murals and ceiling tiles contain Monty Python and xkcd references, and the second floor is nicknamed the “Irrational Floor” because some math geek once painted a big radical sign around the floor number by the entrance. The best part: No Tiger Mom hovering over us like the Illuminati’s black helicopters, so we were practically free to do what we wanted.

Of course, it took a while for me to acclimate myself to the laid-back environment of a college campus on a weekend. After all, MIT Splash wasn’t Stuyvesant, so it wasn’t important to attend all of the classes I signed up for. One year, I had a class first thing in the morning called “Machine Learning and Audio Analysis with Python,” but I lost track of the time chatting with my friends in the dorm room. I realized that I was an hour late for the class, which was supposed to be the highlight of my weekend. I figured that it would be awkward for me to butt in at such an ungodly time, so I decided to go with Jion to crash a different class, “Philosophy and Morals in Anime.” The teacher of the class that I missed, Daryl Sew, was one of Po’s friends, and when we met afterward he shrugged it off.

Splash was on a weekend, so I stayed up late and partied with Po and her friends in the lounge and kitchen. I sang and played “Maps” on my ukulele in a lively A minor and got them enthusiastically dancing and clapping along. From what I saw, MIT students also watch movies, play cards, and stay up very late on weekends, but they’re careful about their health; the large, multicolored jar of condoms stands proudly beside the bathroom sink as a testament to their vigilance (I never noticed it until my second stay). One night, we played bullshit. The players had assigned themselves titles as if they were running a country; one player was the “President,” another the “Vice President.” Then, we played liar’s poker (with cards, not dollar bills). They had devised two polar opposite sets of rules for the game, respectively called “Capitalism” (in which the object is to have the most cards by the end of the game) and “Communism” (the fewest); we were playing “Communism.” We went until 3:00 that night, and by then my friends were all asleep.

But it’s not like Tiger Mom was watching us.

Originally written for my Creative Nonfiction class at Stuyvesant High School, April 2015.