Class Note 2011
Issue
November-December 2023
Please welcome a guest column by Frank Santo.
Since leaving Hanover I’ve focused almost all my energy on one thing: writing a novel. It was a dumb idea and I don’t know where I got it. But anyway, here I am, 13 years later, finally presenting my book The Birthparents to the world on September 12 via a Chicago-based literary press called Tortoise Books. It’s a novel about a foster care caseworker with a white savior complex and a questionable moral compass who tries to make a difference by helping a troubled young mother in the Bronx and in so doing makes her life a whole lot more difficult. It’s inspired by (but not based on) my own experiences working in this exact situation for my first five years out of college, and I personally think that it is very good. On the other hand, one time at a writer’s conference, an academic who I’d paid $150 to give me feedback on an early draft looked at me with grave, almost fatherly concern and whispered: “You cannot publish this, people are going to hate you.” So I guess it’s my word against his.
Anyway, thanks for indulging that bit of shameless self-promotion. I feel a little hypocritical attempting to leverage the Dartmouth network for my own advantage, because the truth is, outside of a few close friends and my wife, I’ve mostly lost touch with my ’11 classmates through the years. Sometimes I wonder if I ever felt the deep connection to Dartmouth that so many alumni cherish. As the years pass by and memories fade, it’s harder and harder to say.
The other day though, my wife Andrea Jaresova ’12 and I happened to be driving through the area with our two little kids, and I felt a sudden urge to visit campus again. We parked near the library, and I held our 3 1/2-year-old on my shoulders and showed her various buildings: the Choates, frat row, the unnervingly warm top floor of Baker. As we went around campus I was struck by how little changed most of it seemed. Even the students looked like slight variations on people that I used to know. Finally, we ended up at Novack. “This is where Mommy and Daddy met,” I told my daughter. “We used to work here together.” Of course, my kid could not possibly have cared about that less. I’m pretty sure she thinks her mom and I are brother and sister. But still, in that moment, it all came rushing back. There was something special about being here, I thought—as everyone else has been saying all this time. I hugged my daughter close and told her maybe someday she would go here too. She’d swim in the river I was telling her about, study in that fetid tower. Maybe she’d even meet her partner in this same coffee shop, like Mommy and Daddy did 15 years ago. I felt Andrea looking at me then.
“Why are you telling her that?” she said.
“What?” I said. “It’s nice.”
Andrea rolled her eyes at me, the way I’ve always loved.
“We met in the Bones Gate basement.”
I guess I’d remembered that part wrong too. Still, the point stands, right?
—Hillary S. Cheng, 26611 La Roda, Mission Viejo, CA 92691; (603) 546-8452; hillary.s.cheng@dartmouth.edu
Since leaving Hanover I’ve focused almost all my energy on one thing: writing a novel. It was a dumb idea and I don’t know where I got it. But anyway, here I am, 13 years later, finally presenting my book The Birthparents to the world on September 12 via a Chicago-based literary press called Tortoise Books. It’s a novel about a foster care caseworker with a white savior complex and a questionable moral compass who tries to make a difference by helping a troubled young mother in the Bronx and in so doing makes her life a whole lot more difficult. It’s inspired by (but not based on) my own experiences working in this exact situation for my first five years out of college, and I personally think that it is very good. On the other hand, one time at a writer’s conference, an academic who I’d paid $150 to give me feedback on an early draft looked at me with grave, almost fatherly concern and whispered: “You cannot publish this, people are going to hate you.” So I guess it’s my word against his.
Anyway, thanks for indulging that bit of shameless self-promotion. I feel a little hypocritical attempting to leverage the Dartmouth network for my own advantage, because the truth is, outside of a few close friends and my wife, I’ve mostly lost touch with my ’11 classmates through the years. Sometimes I wonder if I ever felt the deep connection to Dartmouth that so many alumni cherish. As the years pass by and memories fade, it’s harder and harder to say.
The other day though, my wife Andrea Jaresova ’12 and I happened to be driving through the area with our two little kids, and I felt a sudden urge to visit campus again. We parked near the library, and I held our 3 1/2-year-old on my shoulders and showed her various buildings: the Choates, frat row, the unnervingly warm top floor of Baker. As we went around campus I was struck by how little changed most of it seemed. Even the students looked like slight variations on people that I used to know. Finally, we ended up at Novack. “This is where Mommy and Daddy met,” I told my daughter. “We used to work here together.” Of course, my kid could not possibly have cared about that less. I’m pretty sure she thinks her mom and I are brother and sister. But still, in that moment, it all came rushing back. There was something special about being here, I thought—as everyone else has been saying all this time. I hugged my daughter close and told her maybe someday she would go here too. She’d swim in the river I was telling her about, study in that fetid tower. Maybe she’d even meet her partner in this same coffee shop, like Mommy and Daddy did 15 years ago. I felt Andrea looking at me then.
“Why are you telling her that?” she said.
“What?” I said. “It’s nice.”
Andrea rolled her eyes at me, the way I’ve always loved.
“We met in the Bones Gate basement.”
I guess I’d remembered that part wrong too. Still, the point stands, right?
—Hillary S. Cheng, 26611 La Roda, Mission Viejo, CA 92691; (603) 546-8452; hillary.s.cheng@dartmouth.edu