west coast vs. east coast

reflections from a second immigration

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Hi Cece! I have been a huge fan of your content (TikTok, YouTube, podcast) for awhile now and I stumbled across your website. I had no idea you were from the Bay Area! I was born and raised in San Jose, CA and I was wondering what is your perspective about growing up in the competitive Bay Area as an Asian-American and the difference in your lifestyle/socialization as a university student / young professional in the East Coast (New Haven, Boston, NYC). Thank you so much!

- Anonymous

Yay Area!! Yes, I spent most of my formative years in San Ramon, California! Due to the extreme cultural shock I experienced coming out east for college, I still feel a large affinity for California. I hated growing up in the suburbs at the time but now look upon those years fondly—in many ways, the Bay Area serves as the perfect backdrop for the platonic ideal of teenage angst. Local band shows! Public skate parks! Neighborhood pools ostensibly closed after dark!

One of the best things about growing up in the Bay was being able to experience what being in a majority as a minority felt like. I was aware that I was Chinese, of course—but in a comfortable way. A lot of my high school was Asian. Because of this, I never felt like an outsider solely on account of race (although I certainly felt like an outsider for other reasons). This was an immense privilege—one that I only began to appreciate once I went to college. Sure, Yale was 15% Asian—higher than the 4.8% in the general population—but compared to my high school’s ~40%, the difference was palpable.

I also don’t think my high school experience was as competitive as other Bay Area high schools, which helped me not have too much anxiety growing up. My high school was considered the “worst” high school in the district (even though the district itself was quite high-performing), and my mom frequently took issue with how terrible some of the teachers were. (So much so that she marched into the school offices after I had failed to test into AP Chemistry and demanded that my chemistry teacher be fired—which is a story for another day.)

I would hear about ultra-competitive environments like Mission San Jose and Lynbrook and Gunn and Palo Alto, but those spaces felt quite removed from me and my friends. I felt pressure to do well in school and on standardized tests so I could go to a “good” college, but my parents’ limited knowledge of U.S. college admissions mixed with my high school’s “slacker” status meant I didn’t actually perceive high school to be ultra-competitive. I certainly did not face the immense pressure of high schoolers nowadays to do twenty extracurriculars and excel in five sports, because no one around me was doing that. Whatever I was doing at the time was already seen as The Most, relatively speaking.

In retrospect, I am grateful for this slightly more “relaxed” Bay Area high school experience, because I know neither my parents nor I had the mental health or communication skills to weather a higher-pressure storm together. I see TikToks every spring about college admissions, and it breaks my heart a little—I wish I could give everyone a hug and reassure them that no matter what happens, it will be okay.

It wasn’t until I got to Yale that I felt constantly behind. College was also when my anxiety increased—in the form of fully picking off all the skin on my thumbs (as opposed to only picking some skin) and many years of disordered eating. Candidly speaking, I had felt like a big fish in the small pond of my California high school, and now I was a tiny fish in the ocean of Yale and elite education, more generally. (How poorly I adapted to Yale in the beginning is what makes me say above that I likely didn’t have the mental health to attend an ultra-competitive Bay Area high school.)

I consider going to Yale my second immigration. Much about the east coast—from banal questions like figuring out how to dress appropriately for cold weather to more pressing concerns like indicators of friendship and kinship—differed from the norms I had grown accustomed to in California. In high school, everyone hugged hello and goodbye, which I then associated with friendship-making and a signal of goodwill; in college, barely anyone hugged. The bodily and spoken language of relationships and intimacy were entirely different—I had mastery of “California culture” but very little grasp of “east coast culture.”

(As an aside: East coast culture is, of course, varied, just like California culture is varied. My memory of California predates the rise of Silicon Valley, which I’m sure greatly impacted California culture in ways I do not know and have never experienced. Similarly, I do not purport to describe all east coast culture but rather the subset that permeates Ivy League education and the jobs and social groups that those schools tend to funnel into.)

The biggest difference I noted throughout my second immigration is the much more subtle displays of class that exists on the east coast. A lot of that, I suspect, is because of how much earlier the east coast was settled. California has old-money families, sure, but New York/Connecticut/Massachusetts have even older money (the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, etc.).

Forgive me for speaking in broad generalizations, but I found that older-money types signaled their status in ways often invisible to those who were not older money. Older-money pheromones, if you will, undetectable to new money and even many old money. I pride myself on being able to detect these subtle indicators of class belonging—a lot of my workplace advice videos center around these indicators—but I still haven’t quite figured out how the older-money heiresses at Yale immediately gravitated towards each other. I’m sure it was something, but whatever it was, it has eluded me and my fresh-off-the-mint money for years now.

This greater awareness of older money can drive some transplants crazy. They’ll go into credit card debt in an attempt to keep up. They’ll endlessly social climb, aiming for the next society party invite. They’ll become scammers (ahem, Anna Delvey). It’s why I love the depictions of wealth in Succession so much—the show does a great job of characterizing what it’s like to always have had money and what it’s like to be near so much money when one hasn’t always had money. (And Succession isn’t even about older money—just old money!)

Aside from this greater class awareness (which may or may not be a good thing), there are a few other lifestyle differences that I’ve embraced since coming to the east coast:

• Wearing black. As someone whose closet was primarily pink and other bright colors in high school, I’ve really come around to the color black. I like anonymity when walking around the city, and black (as well as other neutral colors) helps me blend in more.

• Comfort with renting for a really long time. Most of my friends in California have bought houses. In contrast, many people I meet in New York are renting, regardless of whether they are older, have kids, or make a ludicrous amount of money. Renting forever—especially in NYC—is much more normalized.

• Embracing my inner workaholic. There is workaholism everywhere, but it’s ingrained in NYC’s DNA. In California, I get more questions about when I’m going to have kids, when I’m going to “settle down.” I never get those questions in NYC. I love that. It turns out I like to work. That fact poses certain problems—making it more likely that I will make work my identity, disappoint loved ones in favor of work, etc.—but I appreciate not having to constantly defend my love of working, even if it means I have to read a laughable number of books about how to not let work take over my life.

• Seeing that I never have to “settle down.” I’m gonna be honest here—the thought of “settling down” has always terrified me. Even in high school, my motto was live fast, die young. One of the most rewarding aspects of living in NYC is seeing how others navigate aging and children without “settling down” in the classic sense. It’s proof of concept that there’s another way to do all of this, this living thing, in a way that might not kill me on the inside.

Now, please don’t take any of the above as a knock on California or the Bay Area—or your desired lifestyle or your friends’ lifestyles. Lifestyle is a personal matter, and I am not saying that my preferred lifestyle is superior to any other lifestyle. It’s just my preferred one.

I always caution people against moving cities in the hopes that it will solve all of their problems, because frequently the problem lies within oneself and not with one’s environment—but sometimes, the problem is with one’s environment. So if you read all of the above and think it sounds horrible, then my slice of New York is likely not for you. And that’s okay! Different strokes for different folks. But if you think it sounds wonderful, then have no fear—New York is waiting for you. ◆

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