After they graduated from Brown in 2007, Jessica Pan and Rachel Kapelke-Dale promised they’d keep each other updated about their lives via email. They did, over the course of at least three years, and the result is this book, which is an epistolary memoir of their friendship during a period when they were living across the globe from each other. They’re a little younger than me (I graduated in 2004), and my post-college experience was different from theirs in some ways (I was living with a significant other; I didn’t travel abroad; my post-college life was in the same city that my college life was – though the experience of being in New York post-college did feel very different than being here in college did), but I still found this very relatable. I remember the long emails I sent and received when I was in my early twenties, and I remember what it felt like to have graduated and to not yet know what I was doing next.
Graduates in Wonderland starts off with Jess having arrived in Beijing, not totally sure what she’s going to do there, and with Rachel in New York, with a job as a gallery assistant on the Upper East Side. Their emails about daily life are alternately poignant and hilarious: Jess and her roommate Astrid (another friend from Brown) are both crushing on the same guy, who’s been teaching English in China for a while and regales them with stories about “the young Chinese kids he taught, who gave themselves English names like Tiger Dinosaur or Nightclub” (4). The crush, plus the experience of living together abroad, is straining Jess and Astrid’s friendship, and Jess isn’t sure what to do. Rachel says she will tell Jess “what happens next, just as soon as it happens,” and wonders whether she will “order six cups of drip coffee from Starbucks and pour them into the coffeepot at work to make it look like [she] learned to make coffee” (9). But Rachel’s boss is awful, and she’s feeling down about life in New York: she writes about feeling like she’s there by default, because “New York is just where you’re supposed to go after college,” rather than because it’s necessarily the right place for her. (6)
I liked the funny parts of this book a whole lot, and kept laughing out loud/asking my boyfriend if I could read passages to him. Like when Jess goes home to Texas for Thanksgiving and writes about comparing her Mandarin skills with those of her dad (who was born in China and left when he was eight): “Once he tried to tell my Chinese grandmother we were going skiing, and all he could say was, “We’re going down a big hill with two sticks. There will be snow.”” (40). Or when Jess accidentally takes two of her roommate’s sleeping pills, thinking they’re antibiotics, and hilarity ensues. I could have done without some of the parts of the book that focused on boy drama and/or qualities that Jess and Rachel were looking for in a guy, and Jess’s tendency to see past relationships as “mistakes” seemed reductive to me, but some of the relationship stuff was funny or interesting or sweet.
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