In her column “Dispatches From India,” Sharis Hsu ’28 details the good and bad times of moving to Mumbai, India. 

I tell my parents I am moving to India during a car ride. In hindsight, I should have picked a more open, public place, one where I could have made a desperate escape if things went awry. Instead, as the words settle, I look out the window at the 101 and wonder if I could survive jumping out of a car moving 70 miles an hour.

“You are moving to India?” My dad questions. “INDIA?”

My head is spinning. 

“Yes, I think so,” I say, as if I don’t know so. As if my work contract isn’t about to be signed and the ticket isn’t halfway bought. 

My mom takes a deep breath. I wonder if this is one of the worst things you can do for your parents’ health: inform them that you will be moving nearly 9,000 miles away at twenty years of age to a country that is notoriously unsafe for women. 

“Does it have to be India?” she asks.

And yes, I think it does.

In the many conversations that follow, I am asked what exactly I’m doing, and why exactly I feel the need to run away to the furthest corner of the earth. 

I tell people it’s because I grew up in the Bay, I’ve gone to college in the Bay and I will probably still be in the Bay a decade from now. I tell people it’s because I don’t want a typical study abroad program that looks like a vacation and leaves you in an exclusive bubble of Stanford students. I tell people it’s because biotech is different in India and has the potential to move at a much quicker pace. 

I tell people plenty of things, but I, myself, am unsure.

Instead, I spend my nights running the same pentagonal loop from Wilbur, down the Row, between Hewlett and Packard, along Jane Stanford Way and back up Campus Drive. For the first time, the three miles of breathless overthinking aren’t enough to quiet my mind. 

One night, I walk to The Dish, sit on a curb underneath a traffic light and cry. Tomorrow, I think, I will sign the contract and turn down my Bay Area biotech offer. Yet, I am still terrified that this is a career and life-defining mistake.

Sometimes, I do believe that this is my life, that I am in charge of this story and I can do with it whatever my heart truly wants. I grew up advocating for women in STEM and LGBTQ+ rights in a conservative school, which has always made me see myself as untraditional and free from societal expectations. But on this freezing curb, I realize there are limits to how far out of the mold I am willing to squeeze and how many judgments I am able to withstand. Perhaps my life has never been mine, and there have only been brief moments where I felt like it was. 

I type my name on the Docusign the next morning. 

This is my narrative, and I am wholeheartedly in control.

I tell my friends over dinner at Casper. Spring quarter is ending in three weeks, and my move, which had previously felt so distal, is now scarily proximal. My friends are shocked to say the least, and suddenly the cacophony of fears is drumming in my ears again as I turn in my final problem set and bike to my last lecture. 

With two weeks remaining, I go to a travel clinic and sit across from a physician assistant who points at malaria hotspots across India, followed by dengue, and yellow fever and all these other life-threatening diseases I could get. I wonder, momentarily, if it’s too late to go back. If spring quarter could, for once, just slow down so I don’t need to go on this self-imposed leap across the universe. Amidst this, a needle is being stuck into deltoid (my yellow fever vaccine) and ninety-something prophylactic malaria pills are waiting to be collected at CVS. Truly now, it feels as though there is no going back. 

At a birthday party, exactly a week before I will be flying above the Atlantic Ocean, a friend of a friend rambles on to me about India through slurred words. 

“I’m so happy for you,” he tells me. “You’re going to have such a great time.”

After, I learn he thought I was “positively cooked.”

India has always been a myth to me. A place my best friend was supposed to spend the summer in last year until a series of Air India flights exploded and he ended up in Canada instead. A place I was always strictly forbidden from going to under the blanket guise of “safety.” A place I often saw glimpses of on “The Amazing Race,” though the only scene I remember is watching two women get groped on the train.

I tell my bosses about my fears on the phone. They tell me that Mumbai is the safest city in India, that none of my fears are true and that with time I will lose my Californian vocal fry. These are the truths I have to hold onto as I open what feels like the scariest chapter of my life.

In the span of 72 hours at the end of my sophomore year, I take two final exams, go to the beach, work two shifts, pack my entire Stanford life into boxes, renew my driver’s license and wave goodbye to my parents on the curb of the San Francisco Airport. 

As I walk through the glass double doors towards the American Airlines counter, I am fearful that this is the start of some sort of splinching. There is a version of me now, fractured across the timelines and the three continents that I will touch. I am unsure if I will ever be able to put them back together, if I will ever be whole again.

My final breaths of American air are running through LAX, trying to catch a connecting flight I have already convinced myself that I will miss. Is this chaos, these sleepless nights, a sign that this international adventure was never part of the plan? That this extreme reality I’ve created for myself was just a delayed teenage rebellion? 

I turn up my music and scan my boarding pass. I am the final person on flight AA134, and a young flight attendant asks what my travel plans are in London. I don’t have the heart to tell her that London is a brief stop in my across-the-globe move. 

As California disappears from sight, so does the girl I have been for the last twenty years. Tomorrow I will be in another continent, one where I know no one and no one knows me. 

This idea, the one that sounded so fun and novel when spoken into existence, could be a massive mistake. But now that I am actually here doing it, it is even more liberating than I had ever imagined. 

I never thought I would have the courage to leave, and now I have.  

Goodbye Stanford. Goodbye sophomore year. Goodbye Sharis.

I’ll send you a postcard from abroad when I’m free.