The President's top grad

During the first few weeks he was at the UW, Roy Chan, freshly out of Cleveland High School, was terrified.

He was a product of an inner-city high school, where students, mostly blacks and Asians, were constantly told the UW is as high as one can go. He never had brilliant extracurricular activities; he didn't, and still doesn't, play music or any sport.

Getting into the honors program was a "fluke" he says he didn't expect. He wasn't even used to most of his peers being white.

"I didn't know if I was going to pass college," he says. "I didn't know if I was going to barely scrap by."

Chan, a Russian and comparative literature double-major, can now reminisce about the early years with a smile. He has just been named this year's President's Medalist, an award given to the graduating senior with the most outstanding academic record.

In the past years, it has usually been awarded to students in science-related fields.

Unlike the many Asian students from affluent backgrounds, Chan grew up in a working-class family on Beacon Hill, where he had to share the same bed with his two brothers up to the age of 8.

His father, from a small town outside of Guanzhou, China, immigrated to the United States in the 1970s with Chan's mother, a native of Hong Kong. The two didn't speak much English and worked night shifts to support their three sons. Neither of his parents was college-educated.

However, Chan remembers very little academic pressure from his parents, who were usually too busy making the ends meet.

"It wasn't so much pressure as a sense of responsibility," Chan emphasizes, "that as a family, the five of us, we're working together to get ourselves out of where we were."

Noticeably, he talks in complete, articulate sentences unpolluted by the "ya knows" or the "likes" so common in many college students' vocabularies.

Out of a passion for writing, he worked for the student publication in high school and, after entering the UW, wrote for Ruckus for two quarters. The demands of school eventually prompted him to quit journalism. Literature, on the other hand, is something he keeps up.

For him, choosing comparative literature was simple, because he couldn't make up his mind as to the kind of literature in which to specialize. An avid reader, he's maintained a strong interest in Soviet history and literature from Russia and France that began way before college. He professes a fondness of the poetry by Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet.

He found the abstract questionings of French existentialism fascinating, while "with the Russians, there's this whole emphasis on philosophy and a lot of moral questions, which I've always been very interested in," he notes.

Chan wrote his honors thesis on gay 19th-century Russian writer Mikhail Kuzmin.

In the future, he plans to become a literature professor, something he's wanted to do since he was a teenager.

The first in the family to go to graduate school, Chan will study Russian, French and Chinese at the UC-Berkeley this fall. He now hopes that he, as an Asian humanities student who's gay, can provide an inspiration for those struggling to get into college in the first place, either because of ethnicity, social-economics status or sexual orientation.

He is particularly concerned about the issue of what he identifies as "internalized racism."

"It's very hard in an anti-affirmative-action climate," he says. He found it hard for minority students to speak out, because people will tell you to be quiet and not to be "too sensitive."

"You say one thing about Abercrombie," he continues, "and they all say you have no sense of humor." Sometimes he even found it hard to go to professors and ask for recommendation letters, because he simply couldn't convince himself he was good enough.

These personal experiences motivated him; if he becomes a professor, Chan says, he wants to be one that can identify students who are encountering these obstacles, telling them, "You can do what you want; you don't have to do what society expect you to."

He now works in the Dean's Office of Undergraduate Education, helping with the Mary Gates endowments that provide funding for student literary or research projects.

"They are very committed to making sure undergraduate students, no matter the background, have access to resources they need to do well," he says.

Willis Konick, associate professor of comparative literature, remembers his surprise a few years ago when he found out Chan, one of his students, was still in high school.

"Judging by the maturity of his writing, and his remarks in class, I decided he must be a young-looking (college) junior or senior," Konick said.

"He is a phenomenon."