Reflections on My High School Reunion

On Private Schools, Social Climbing, and the Elites

Last week, I headed up to the University of Chicago for my high school reunion.

I attended a decently renowned high school. Its flashiest claim to fame is its role in educating Malia and Sasha up until Obama’s presidential term—as well as Rahm Emanuel’s kids—but it is perhaps most notable for its unique intellectual background. The University of Chicago Laboratory School (or “Lab” as we refer to it) was founded as an educational experiment by pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (yes, that John Dewey) in 1896 and has accordingly risen as a bastion of progressivism in the K-12 educational sphere.

Before I go down the rabbit hole of calling out the absurdities of progressivism, let me be clear: I do not wish to say anything negative about my high school. In fact, I am eternally grateful for the scholarship that allowed me—a no-name middle class immigrant kid—to be thrust into the same circles as the Obama girls, our former mayor’s kids, and the children of distinguished UChicago faculty members. At Lab, I took classes with relatives of John Mearsheimer, Eric Posner, and Sian Beilock. I read Nietzsche, Hegel, and Rousseau as part of a required European history course in the 10th grade and whizzed through five separate Shakespeare plays in my English classes. I can only imagine what our world would be like if every single high school in America mandated such readings at the high school level, and I cannot praise Lab enough for its role in my early intellectual development.

But despite thriving in Lab’s bustling intellectual environment, I struggled inordinately in my social life. I had a total of two friends at school and spent my afternoons serially avoiding conversation with anyone my age, preferring to ensconce myself in my teacher’s offices while asking them provocative questions about William Faulkner’s view of African Americans or Nietzsche's role in the rise of Nazi Germany. As a teenager, I could only ascribe my discomfort with my peers to some sort of social inadequacy; believing that I lacked some brain wiring that got my classmates invited to parties in their parents' basements, I gave up attending dances, basketball games, and theater productions. It did not help that I was the weird literature kid who sat around scrutinizing my classmates’ behavior patterns like an alien who had come to Earth for the first time, noting down my most vivid observations about my peers in my novels and short stories. I was convinced that there was something wrong with me until I arrived in New York City for college and suddenly found myself surrounded by people who were deeply interested in what I had to say. I quickly grew out of my awkwardness, made friends, and began to see people as more than just fodder for my novels. My new circle of friends made me quickly forget about my high school woes, and I never gave a second thought to why I hadn’t fit in, attributing my discomfort to random error.

That is, until I went back to my high school last week and realized in hindsight what had gone wrong.

I don’t know what exactly compelled me to show up to an event with an army of people who hated my guts ten years ago. Perhaps I wished to reprise my role as an intergalactic observer and find inspiration for my next novel—or, perhaps, I thought that it was likely that bullies, jocks, and cheerleaders¹ would change their ways after ten years and find something in common with the weird literature kid. In other words, I thought that I would put my grievances aside and try my hand at reconnecting with members of my high school class.

Spoiler—I did not find anything in common with these people and did, indeed, reprise my role as an interstellar visitor whose observations gave rise to the very words before you now.

It’s been ten years since I exited the nebulous world of private schooling, so I almost forgot that much of the ridicule directed against private schools is somewhat warranted. The evening reception took place in a new $25-million construction courtesy of The George Lucas Family Foundation (yes, that George Lucas) that was unveiled the year after I graduated. As an Ivy League kid, I’ve been to a lot of pretentious events, but my mental picture of a high school reunion was a bunch of senior citizens gathered in the school gym with pizza boxes and party hats—not a catered event with a full-service bar in an auditorium with a 50-foot ceiling. I immediately located my only high school friend—the nerdy Asian kid who was bullied to no end who now out-earns everyone else as a software developer—and felt like I was back in high school again, making brief eye contact with the old popular girls, who turned their noses up at me, before retreating into conversation with my old friend—let’s call him Ajax.² I stood around awkwardly for twenty minutes before Ajax—who is somehow still as awkward as he was at seventeen—pulled us into a conversation with the daughter of a prominent professor who, despite her vocal social justice activism (or, perhaps, because of it), might have been one of the most condescending people in my school. I often crossed paths with this notorious SJW because she was involved in all of the writing-related activities I attended to pad my college application resume, and I can tell you that while many people at my school made a point of ignoring me, she made it into an art form. Given what I knew of my old classmate and her radical feminism, I was prepared for a showdown about the value of monogamy or the virtues of child-rearing, but my mouth immediately dropped when, coming out of the crowd, a perfectly ordinary-looking man introduced himself as her husband and announced that she was pregnant with their fourth child.

That was when I realized what was wrong with my high school and why I had never fit in.

Prominent Substacker and public intellectual

Rob Henderson

explains the phenomenon I experienced last week in his memoir Troubled, coining the term “luxury beliefs” to describe ideas held by affluent people that confer status while imposing costs on the less privileged. I’ve been following Henderson for several years now since a friend sent me his podcast episode with Jordan Peterson on sex and dating apps, and last week, I listened in on Henderson’s live office hours on Substack, where he described the difficulties of social mobility (as opposed to the more attainable economic mobility) based on quasi-insuperable class divides. Several days later, I attended my reunion and put two and two together.

These factors perfectly explain my experiences at Lab, where students formed cliques based not only on certain status symbols and behavioral quirks but also on belief systems. My classmate with her fourth child on the way not only spent her high school days throwing around buzzwords like “the patriarchy” and “mental health stigmas” but also joined the BDS movement at her university. Given both her words and her ideological activity, one might expect her to be a lesbian with blue hair living in a commune, but she chose instead to enter a traditional marriage, become a stay-at-home mom, and bear four children by the age of 28. Her father’s high-profile status gives her the luxury of doing whatever she wants, yet she chose ultimately to spend her free time not fighting for social justice but bringing children into the world and becoming a mother. While I have deep respect for this particular personal life choice, I am morally troubled by such displays of hypocrisy. After all, the wealthy classes hold power over the less privileged. My classmate likely grew up in a family that taught her the value of monogamy and child-rearing, and as someone from a prominent family, she should have a duty to promote values that hold our society together rather than veering off into displays of radical feminism and anti-Israel sentiment.

This professor’s daughter was not the only classmate I encountered whose personal life played out in this way. Many of my less radical yet nonetheless leftist classmates ended up living in affluent neighborhoods and complaining about taxes. Female peers who frequently joined “Women in STEM” campaigns became mothers who do not work at all—in STEM or otherwise. Several PhD students seemed disturbed by the impact of the Trump funding cuts to their research while privately enjoying more money than the president pulled from Harvard this past month. I do not begrudge anyone who wishes to fight for social justice in order to promote a better future for everyone, but these students do not really care about redistributing wealth or sending more women into STEM fields—at least not in their personal lives.

This hypocrisy was more than evident back when I was a high school student during the Obama administration, but I simply could not put my finger on it back then. Looking back, I realize that I could not in good faith interact with my AP U.S. History classmate in a Burberry polo who praised the Obama tax hikes in history class but lamented their effect on his family in private. I could not interact last week with a girl who periodically lambasted traditional gender roles in class but who showed up pregnant at 27 to my high school reunion. I did not fit in because in my immigrant household, the only thing that mattered was hard work and persistence—in fact, my dad’s most signature piece of advice to teenage Liza was, “You have to be financially independent.” I was shocked, then, that after years and years of hearing my classmates parrot bowdlerized talking points about the patriarchy, I was the only unmarried, childless, and career-oriented woman in the pack.

Over dinner—another catered event in a separate venue at the University of Chicago—I was left to reminisce with Ajax about the old days. While there was a group of people that made a point of recreating the high school days and ignoring me (I suspect that many of them were jealous of my career), I had some interesting conversations for the first time in my life with the majority of my old classmates, many of whom seemed taken aback by my sudden conversational aptitude. Being around these WASPy kids for several hours left me with several other observations about my past and the reason I had trouble fitting in as a high school student. For one, Columbia had taught me to speak the language of the elites, and I suddenly knew exactly what to say to the people I could never find a common language with as a teenager. Interacting with my old classmates, I used the same phrases and truisms that helped me blend in back at the Columbia English department, where everyone was a leftist from an affluent family. I praised a Harvard policy student for her work on the Harris campaign and threw in a “How’s your funding looking?” every time one of my classmates mentioned a PhD program. I shook my head at another classmate’s mention of J.K. Rowling and called an old French teacher racist for introducing a unit on the ills of the burqa (go French teacher, what a legend). These were nuances that I was perceptive enough to understand by the time I got to college but that completely eluded me back in high school, when I would have just spouted my actual opinion on Rowling or the French teacher.

By the end of the night, I was invited—for the first time in my life by these people—to a UChicago bar. I chatted with another classmate about his filmmaking career and the importance of the arts, inserting a disdainful comment about Trump’s recent takeover of the Kennedy Center, and was suddenly a hit among my classmates. I had figured out how to fit in because I had learned not only French, German, and Latin at Columbia but also the language of the elites—the worldviews that these students have been spoonfed since Kindergarten. Looking back, I realized that I had been unable to make these connections with my classmates earlier because of a stark class difference—after all, I grew up in a post-Soviet household where bluntness was the cornerstone of all conversations. I was blunt and unpracticed—I did not know how the elites spoke or where they spent their time. Unlike many of my classmates, I was not off cavorting at the University Club of Chicago during my weekends, and I certainly did not enjoy many of the beach vacations that the popular girls took together on their father’s dimes. Yet gravitating in the Ivy League sphere taught me a lot about how these people think; I realized that I was a social outcast in high school not because of my fundamental lack of social skills but because I came from a different world.

I do not want to be another one of those “let’s-scorn-the-elites” commenters, but I do think that my personal experiences speak volumes about how these people think and how difficult social mobility can be based on nuances of class divides. After spending more than twenty years of my life in elite circles, I have certainly mastered “the ways” and often surprise people when I reveal that I come from a very middle-class immigrant family. Years of private schooling, after all, have rubbed off on me, and I do often spend my weekends at private clubs or at the Metropolitan Opera. I remain grateful to my parents for thrusting me into a private school and making social mobility a reality for me, but if my high school reunion has taught me anything, it’s that I’ll always be that awkward immigrant kid deep inside—and proud of it.

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1. I don’t actually think my high school had these, but I was so abstracted from the world of my high school outside of the classroom that I actually could not tell you.

2. Since reading The Iliad, I have always wanted to name a character “Ajax,” and now is my chance to do so. I will singlehandedly popularize this name and bring us back to another Renaissance where children are named Ajax, Achilles, Telemachus, and Patroklus.