21 Years Young: Essays by Amy Dong
Recent college graduate Amy Dong’s collection of connected essays explores what it means to grow up, at home and abroad, and what happens when life doesn’t go according to plan.
THE PREMISE: Over the course of 14 essays, Dong comes to terms with a life-threatening medical condition in “So It Goes,” discovers that it’s easier to say yes than no in “He Means Well,” and through various travels, she comes to see that we are all just a small part of our connected world. Each essay follows her search for a place in this world. For instance, in “Had I Gone to Harvard,” she feels like she’s going to throw up when she enters school on college T-shirt day wearing an NYU shirt that shows she failed to get into an Ivy League school. Yet almost as soon as she arrives in New York, she tries to make the most of her college years. Also in “So It Goes,” she studies abroad in Prague and returns home confident in her new role as world traveler yet unsettled that she’s no more versed in everyday Czech life than she was before. That experience leads her to think less about herself and to better connect with the people she meets when her education takes her to Ghana and Singapore.
THE SETTING: Although much of 21 Years Young is set in Houston and New York, her experiences abroad are especially memorable. In a Singapore hawker center, Dong contemplates what it means to travel alone and how it’s important to observe. It’s her second night in Singapore and as she waits for her oyster omelet order to be called, she listens to “Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian, and Chinese families comfortably jabbing in a mix of English and their home languages. I walked past stalls serving dishes that were distant cousins of my family’s: char kway teow instead of hand-pulled beef noodles, chili crab instead of steamed scallion and ginger tilapia. I watched people separate red trays from green because the latter meant ‘halal only,’ but despite how strange all these elements seemed, I knew I was the stranger.” Even as she eats alone and knows no one in Singapore so far, she questions whether single travelers are ever truly alone.
Her trip to a village in Ghana questions the purpose of voluntourism and is another highlight of the book. Dong was skeptical going into the school-sponsored trip to teach villagers sustainable business development and English. She wondered if her time in Ghana would differ much from the “private schoolers who teach English in Costa Rica to buff up their college resumes, or the blond-haired, blue-eyed caricatures who ‘do good’ in Kenya and come back with an Instagram feed full of smiling dark-skinned children.” What she found in the village of Woadtze Tsatoe wasn’t people in need of saving, but rather women, men, and children who welcomed American college students into their homes and proudly introduced their culture. The women take care of all the business matters in Woadtze Tsatoe, a place “where the papayas are sweeter than syrup and the air shimmers with heat”. Dong learns early on that no American business development method could ever improve the way these women both run their own market stalls or bargain for produce and meat. There was nothing to improve. “What started as a desire to help others soon turned into a desire to hide my own embarrassment,” Dong writes.
IN THE END: Dong’s essays are both thoughtful meditations on what it means to travel as an American and why it’s often more important to enjoy the journey than the destination. Her brush with a life-threatening illness gives her a new perspective on mortality. It was never the T-shirt or the college, but rather the choices she made along the way. Her lessons are relevant not only to her own generation but also to people in middle age and in their twilight years. I, for one, identified with her take on the midlife crisis—a term she would rather change to a midlife readjustment or recharging.
Dong is now teaching in Taiwan on a Fulbright. I hope there will be more books in her future—and ours.
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