Anh Nguyen Austen

and ambition.

And you kind of grew up in this idyllic world where, well, feminism was a given, like you didn't even have to worry about anything else.

Oh, my mom, I think they didn't really understand what I wanted to do, which was English literature.

There's always the need to probably not go into poverty.

No, really.

They knew I was very bookish and, you know, they feared that the romanticism would...

would lead me into poverty.

And I remember telling them, Mom, if I'm homeless, I could just go to the library and shower there.

I think when she's exasperated with me, she says, you're just like your father.

I had this nagging, you know, like if I was anything like my mother, I would be more career and I would be a good businesswoman.

And so, you know, even like going to women's college, I had looked at an article of Hillary Clinton and I had gone the other way.

I went to Bryn Mawr instead of Wellesley.

But it just never came to fruition.

I even went and interviewed for MetLife in New York City, you know.

And I remember interviewing with them and then not being able to like hail a cab back to the airport because it was rainy.

And I thought, there's no way I'm going to survive this city or this corporate life.

And I had felt already called to go to Harvard Divinity as a kind of a...

a moral obligation and also fear of going into the real world.

But I tried being a nun and there was this kind of sense of vocation that I had to find in the world.

So I wanted to figure it out what the meaning of life is or what was the meaning of life for me in terms of why was I not the drowned and why was I the saved was kind of my big personal question.