If Only I Were Taller

-- By SarahChan - 25 May 2025

To Be a Muse

Helen of Troy, Xi Shi, Audrey Hepburn—women who broke kingdoms and made poets weep. Perhaps, every little girl dreams of being seen like them: oh, to be a muse—adored and immortalized in verse. Yet, too often, beauty became something the world tried to own. Men fought wars, generations framed desire. Lost in it all is the woman herself, stripped of voice and held only in gaze.

Early Resistance

I consider myself lucky. Not because I possess transcendent beauty, but because my smaller build and facial features were read by a culture that prized the delicacy of East Asian femininity while harboring a quiet obsession with Eurocentric ideals. In China, I seemed to invite a familiar question: “Are you half white?” When I answered no, teachers, the nurse, a friend’s parent, or even strangers would surgically deconstruct my appearance. Double eyelids: good. High nose bridge: even better. Long, black hair: excellent. I was told that my future is bright—with looks alone, I could be an actress, Miss Hong Kong, or some rich man’s wife.

How could I complain? The world was at my feet. Still, I resisted—silently, with shame, but in ways that felt deeply real. I never owned a doll. I always chose the blue over the pink lunch box. I avoided my passion for the arts; music, dance, interior design, fashion, and literature felt all too predictable. Instead, I ran. Hard. My varsity bag and letterman jacket were testaments to my defiance. I naively believed that an A transcript and Brown admission would change how people saw me. Instead, I was met with: “If you were just a few inches taller, then the world would really be at your feet.”

In response, I joked that if I had it my way, I would be a quantitative trader at Jane Street. Private equity was a romantic alternative. Alas, my distaste for math steered me toward law—a front-row seat to the lives I briefly considered.

The Illusion of Freedom

As I practiced active listening (and struggled to resist the soft lure of my laptop), “Something Split” from Lawrence Joseph’s Lawyerland pressed at the edges of my calm. I remember Sol asking Eben how he left Cravath—the money, prestige, and reverent whispers of young, aspiring lawyers. He said: “I know what is enough. Everything else? I get paid in freedom.”

Freedom is a strange word to me. I’ve only studied it in the abstract. To Sartre, man is condemned to be free—forced to choose and defined by each choice. That responsibility breeds anxiety. In “bad faith,” people retreat into institutions, seeking shelter from what Kundera sums as the unbearable lightness of being. It had never so clearly occurred to me that I was one of those people.

Escaping one system, I ran headfirst into another—trading ornament for machine. Even in the West, where freedom is promised (though debatable now), I defined myself by the masculinity I thought I had rejected. Success, to me, meant chasing credentials and polishing myself into the model son. In this performance, I had forgotten why I chose law—to regain my voice and wield it for those forgotten by society.

Being Heard is a Privilege

My recent reflections on freedom and responsibility came into sharper focus as I read the New York Times article “Who Gets to Kill in Self-Defense?” The author ponders how many of the 12,000 women incarcerated in the U.S. committed murder to protect themselves against years of fear and abuse. While the law is designed to recognize immediate danger, it struggles to account for the slow, cumulative violence of coercion and control in the private sphere. These cases reveal a systemic legal failure to address lived experiences that do not fit neatly within formalistic structures. It is in such passing moments of clarity that I feel most defeated.

Reimagining Freedom

As I revisit these words after my conversation with Eben, I am less afraid. My previous reflection on where I stood in this messy process of unlearning and discovering what lawyering meant was premature.

My academic journey began with a misplaced idea of liberation. I clung to the East’s scripted success and tied knots—stubbornly, but with great care—to show myself I still had a hand in shaping something. I didn’t realize that by working with Sanctuary for Families, applying to a prosecution externship, and questioning how provocation defenses fail to reflect gendered realities of violence, I was already unknotting what once felt like defiance. My true fear lay in taking the first step toward an exit sign; one that is there but not yet touched by light.

I resisted freedom because its vastness felt both nebulous and crushing. I did not want to confront the unknown. For years, I internalized and moved through my struggles alone. Yet, the resistance was always structured—mimicking power and following paths trodden by men. It is easy to forget, at a place like Columbia Law, where buzz animates the high-gloss gateway to corporate success, imagining an alternative future requires proactivity—but this may be as simple as reaching out for guidance.

I've come to understand that freedom is not always a grand rupture. It can be piecemeal and shared. Eben was the first person to point me in the right direction. My research on faculty, course offerings, guest speakers, non-profit organizations, jury consultants, and trauma-informed counselors has lifted parts of the invisible burden I placed on myself. Sending emails makes me hopeful. Hopeful that through conversations with people who forged their own paths, I too can carve out a meaningful space within the legal field to best address domestic violence and lived trauma. In the remaining two years, I trust the exit sign will grow brighter and help me find the courage to choose it.

I am now signing off as Eben had each class—with music. My pick is Billy Joel's "Vienna."

The draft is clear and effective, sometimes moving. I think Anita Ford is either given one sentence too few or didn't need to be there at all, and there are one or two other places where a little editorial hard-heartedness should be exercised. But I think the most important route to improvement is to head back into the center of the mystery: Why is freedom a foreign concept when it is also the one you have been seeking all the way along? To resent the world's shaping of the female role for you, to occupy yourself with forms of physical training and discipline designed to make escape possible, to prepare your mind for the need for freedom, to be receptive to the signals in the environment indicating the direction, and then also to be fearful, or—in the usual spasm of high-school exstentialism—sure that people mostly are unsuccessful in resisting the burden of it: how very human, don't you think?

This is, as you see, at the center of law school for you. Your writing is bringing you there, so let the current take you further. You have something immensely valuable to gain from the trip.

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