Dear Readers, I’m back! Thanks for your patience and thanks to Davy for his succinct and kind comment – “waiting…” 
We’re on the other side of graduation now, and my heart is still radiating a quiet warmth from the days of joyful moments that I’ve shared with friends and family in the last week. I appreciated the fact that our graduation was a two-day process, with several ceremonies and many speakers, plenty of photo opportunities, and a beautiful physical space in which to capture the end of a trek of approximately a thousand days. So much has happened in those thousand days, and a single, two-hour ceremony wouldn’t cut it for me. The long, protracted process of Harvard’s graduation seemed an apt mirroring of the long journeys that we had each taken and trodden here.
And now, the end of a significant chapter. The end of TWO significant chapters, for me. The first, I shared with each of my 560 or so juris doctoris classmates. We opened that chapter with excitement, ambition, and varying degrees of trepidation three years ago. Since then, paragraphs upon paragraphs have been written in each of our books. The structures in our stories are consistent — class, reading cases, outlining, eight- and three-hour exams — but the textures and tales woven into the fabrics of our lives give individualized depth and color to each our stories. No one’s law school experience was the same.
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My three years here were most significantly marked by a remarkable discovery of kindred spirits, fellow believers in Jesus Christ who happened to also pursue an education in the law, and sought to live their lives for His glory.
I met a brother who inspired me to engage more deeply than ever in social justice issues. We had weekly Sunday evening conversations, during which I sat on the one bare spot on his cluttered dorm room floor (almost but not quite, like a disciple) and he perched in his wooden chair, and we mulled over issues of poverty, God’s heart for the weak and oppressed, and our duties as Christians to serve our brothers and sisters. He’s now overseas, living out his dream, and I’m happy for him – but I miss him.
Right away during 1L year, I began having weekly lunches with a sister, not knowing at the beginning that our mutual love and support would sustain me through three years of various heartaches, and that her bright smile would appear and reappear at three years’ worth of celebrations.
Also during 1L year, we had a prayer group in the dorms – we met every morning Monday through Friday at 8:15am to read the Bible together, share prayer requests, and lift one another up in prayer until 8:45. We wrote our requests in a notebook, and gave thanks through the year as we looked back on the previous pages to see that God had answered many of our prayers. That group was attended faithfully by about six to eight of us, and I still feel a special bond with each of them because of our times of prayer together. It was especially gratifying to attend the recent wedding of one of them; I still remember when we prayed for his relationship with his now-wife, even before they started dating.
Then there’s the sister whom I truly consider a sister in Christ as well as a real sister/sister. “Alice” is so precious to me, and our friendship has grown only stronger through our three years together. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like her, and her faith has made mine stronger. She has played a significant “big sister” role to me, from encouraging me to listening to my babble-like stories, to handing me tissues and singing “When the Rain Comes,” to playing guitar and piano worship songs with me on the weekends, to … I don’t know… just being there. Every step of the way. Pouring out endless love. Is there any better picture of Christ-like love than her unconditional and outrageously generous love? For me, there was no better picture — at least not at HLS. I love you, Alice!!!
Then there were my four “brothers,” to whom I became the “little sister.” My Eldest Brother is such a rock, and I learned so much from his wisdom, dispensed at times in word, but mostly through his deeds. He is such a picture of faithfulness, love, and strength. With Eldest Brother, I always felt loved, secure, and actively sheltered. I miss him dearly, as he is now overseas. My Second Brother is the stream of love, a tender brother who kissed the top of my head on the last day I saw him here in town. He is the one who taught me how to play guitar, patiently placing and re-placing my fingers on the strings until I got the chords right. We also used to take our Sabbath walks by the River, take pictures of things, and talk about relationships. I was so happy to attend his wedding earlier this year; I love his wife — and miss them both, as they too are now overseas.
My Third and Fourth Brothers are in the City, where I will be practicing law, and I could not be happier that they will be there. Third Brother is the practical one, perhaps the least talkative one, but certainly the one who shows his affection most through action. He makes a point to be present, which is often the thing we want most in our times of need. His faith is a quiet but very real one, and I have a lot to learn from him. He is also a great source of candor, and I never cease to believe that he always has my best in mind. It touched me so much when, after revisiting an oft-discussed topic of ours, he said, “Give it up and just take a year off, Little Sister. Let your brothers (Fourth Brother and I) just take care of you for a while.”
Fourth Brother is the deceptively silly but wise one. I think we became closer after he left HLS and went to work in the City. Every time I would visit Eldest and Fourth Brothers (who then lived with Social Justice brother) in the City, Eldest Brother would get tired around midnight and head off to bed, and I would inevitably stay up and chat with Fourth Brother well into the morning – usually until two or three o’clock. He dispenses an unusual amount of wisdom, and of the four brothers — he is, perhaps, the one who understands me best. He will go overseas in about a year, so I will have to enjoy my time in the City with him while I can.
One other sister, with whom I led Bible study this year, is yet another shining star. Her heart for Jesus is so evident in the way she speaks, carries herself, spends her time, engages with people… so often, I look to her for wisdom and for guidance in how Christians ought to live. That, and like me, she loves watching “Ugly Betty.” Our fall semester of 3L year was marked by a number of get-togethers to watch the latest episodes together.
I could go on and on. There are a lot of people who I missed in the foregoing litany, but… you get the idea. And I am forcing myself to stop, so that I can make my next point and also go to bed. :-p The point is that in this incredible family of God’s children, I found a place of enrichment and spiritual growth in “godless Harvard,” a most unlikely place to grow in faith and strength in God. But the Lord must have known what I needed; surely He knew that my spirit needed brothers and sisters to walk alongside — to encourage and admonish, to share and support, to be loved by and to love. God truly showed me what a Christian community can look like — even among lawyers.
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While my three-year chapter was most significantly marked by the people I met here, it was also impacted greatly by the legal experience that I gained through internships in both local and federal prosecution offices, as well as through being a public defense attorney myself this year. If my spiritual growth at Harvard was a joyful and exhilarating experience, my gradual realization about the limits of the law and the courts dented my legal worldview with disappointments, disillusionments, and disenchantments.
I learned that the law is imperfect on countless levels, as it must be – since it is haplessly (though admittedly earnestly) crafted by mere men who have neither the full wisdom nor the perfect love that is necessary to create a system of real justice. Only God can do that, and we are not He. It has been frustrating to work under and for a system that claims to be a “justice” system, when in reality, the best that it can crank out is “something akin to maybe-justice, at best, part of time.” I now wish that our legal system simply referred to itself as a “legal system,” and that its flame-tongued orators would confine themselves to referring to “that which the LAW demands,” rather than “that which JUSTICE demands.” Having spent some time on the ground doing real legal work, on both sides of criminal cases, I’m more convinced than ever that we don’t really know what real “justice” is. Only God does.
At the same time, I understand that the system cannot improve if everyone stays away on account of imperfect “justice.” It is infuriatingly difficult to work in this type of system, but the solution or coping mechanism ought not to be a despondent farewell. Rather, an active and honest struggle to study justice while recognizing that it is an ideal from which we drastically part in reality, is necessary. The goal should be to more closely approximate justice – to swim upstream against a torrential current toward it, desperately and tirelessly, for all of our lives depend on it. But in all of that, again, we need to understand that real justice does not currently exist on this side of heaven.
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I said above that there were two chapters closed yesterday. For me, the second chapter is that which began for me when I was not even ten years old. I declared at the tender age of nine that I wanted to become a lawyer, and lined up my stuffed animals to play Court accordingly (I even placed the dinosaur who played the judge on a towel, so he’d be positioned higher in the “courtroom” relative to the other animals). At age eleven, I wrote, “In fifteen years, I will have graduated from Harvard Law School…” for my fifth grade graduation document which I rediscovered just a couple years ago — shocked at its seemingly prophetic content.
I saw God protect this dream throughout my teenage years, when my parents both passively and actively opposed my goal to study law. God shielded me from awareness of my parents’ objections until I was fully convinced that law was my calling; absent that conviction and the attendant stubbornness, I believe I would have conformed my will to that of my parents’ wishes as most “good” Asian children would.
Furthermore, having grown up in a town that sends few students to out-of-state colleges, and even fewer to the Ivy League, I did not expect to journey to the East to complete my legal studies. I had an English teacher in high school who once announced to our class, “There’s no way any of you could ever become President of the United States; look at where you came from.” I inwardly seethed upon hearing his words, angered by his seemingly flippant dismissal of our little town and its modest and provincial stature. In honesty and in hindsight, though, I think part of me actually — albeit reluctantly — shared his view. And by the time I enrolled in college, I had long forgotten about my short-lived Harvard childhood dreams. I planned to attend the state university for law school and begin my law practice back at home.
God, it seemed, had other plans. In a story that is too long to share here and now (this post is getting quite lengthy), three days before taking the LSAT exam in June 2004, I drastically elevated my aspirations and aimed at sights much higher than those for which I had been conditioned to dream. And yesterday, three years and a full legal education later, I hold a Harvard Law degree.
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Here my mental ruminations end for the day. It’s late, and I have yet to let the other feelings percolate and settle into coherence. I often find that distance from a situation gives me more useful perspective. So perhaps in the days to come, I will have more interesting things to say about graduation. For now – suffice it to say that I am thankful, so thankful, for the fantastic week from which I now emerge. And I’m endlessly grateful to my family for raising and supporting me, to my friends and brothers and sisters for making the experience a joy, and to God for letting everything happen in His good time.