What is bro?

In college, I specifically made the decision to not join a fraternity because I didn’t feel like I had the time. I wanted to focus on academics in a way that I was not given the environment to in my upbringing. WashU was actually a great place to get some serious work done. Saint Louis–at least where the school was located–is a very quiet city with good food. Also, because everything, including the land, was relatively cheap there, WashU has a lot of very impressive architecture associated with the campus. There’s something about a prestine college campus that just makes you want to elevate the level of the work you’re doing. Of course, it can also make a beautiful venue for a wedding, which is something I’m sure other students were aiming for.

Additionally, being an Asian immigrant to the United States, I just didn’t know what a fraternity is, to be honest. My only impression of Greek life is secret societies that I’ve seen in the movies: does that even count? There’s a specific 2006 movie (The Good Shepherd) where Matt Damon, portraying a Yale student, stripped down naked in front of a group of cloaked and masked Skull and Bones members and revealed his deepest and darkest secrets to them. I have some deep and dark secrets associated with my childhood, but it’s difficult to put those experiences into words. I think you had to experience them to truly understand, and so I didn’t want to be misinterpreted by my fellow students. I personally didn’t want to strip down naked at WashU, so to speak, and a part of that was actually because, at the end of the day, I had a difficult time finding a close friend. Believe me, I went through a lot of students in those first two years and settled with a group of relatively conservative peers with whom I can have a few drinks with after a day of hard work.

Yet, it was interesting that within that conservative group, some of the students, for better or for worse, hinted at a fraternal relationship within our friend group (i.e. the concept of bro). What is bro? I had just wanted to make friends in college and to network. Evidently, that was not enough for some of the male peers I interacted with. They had wanted another level of connection–while I had just wanted a drink–and I think that level is bro.