Where the elite meet
One thing you can’t help wondering about is whether or not these women, all elite students in their teens and many now leaders in their respective fields, felt any sense of competitive pressure about their individual accomplishments in life.
Lo, a senior figure in her law firm, mentions that whereas most people equate “housewife” with “dependent and unaccomplished,” right from the beginning of the earliest preparatory meetings, if anyone introduced themselves as being “a housewife” or “retired,” there was a tacit agreement that they should get the greatest applause. “Now that we have reached the age we are, there is a common understanding that what really matters is to live well, and everything else is secondary. For those women who have been able to retire early or become housewives, how could we feel anything but envy!”
The stimulus of the 30-Year Reunion can prompt even those forced to withdraw from society to re-emerge. Lin Ying, Class of 1980, was struck by systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). In a letter to classmates she wrote, “I have no job, and I don’t make any contribution to society or my family. My health just keeps getting worse, which is worrying to my family and to my old classmates who still try to do what they can to help me. I will never know what it is like to love someone, because I can’t even leave the house, even though this is the thing I would most like to do in the world.”
She felt especially touched, therefore, that her classmates stayed in touch and sent her e-mails and videos to keep her spirits up, and they even gave her a surprise birthday party. Surrounded by affection, she was ultimately able to participate joyfully in her 30-Year Reunion in 2010. She stayed in contact with classmates via notebook computer even from her sickbed right up until she passed away last year.
Moving as such stories are, Helen Wu, now a high-ranking manager at IBM Taiwan, says that the organizers recognized from the start that although the term “classmates” might appear to suggest familiarity, the lives of these middle-aged women have diverged far apart. This is why, when they started searching out old classmates, they stressed that they were “only trying to set up a contact network,” did not want to inquire into people’s personal lives, and would “leave it up to fate” to decide whether there would be any follow-up interactions. She also observed that when they got together the women generally avoided mentioning their job titles. By middle age, the course of life has been set for most people, so there’s not much point in worrying about professional rivalry or advantage; on the contrary, it’s all the more possible to have pure friendship.
Back in high school, students had not yet been introduced to the complexities of social relations in the adult world, and they treated each other with artlessness and innocence.