post- 02/28/20

In This Issue Small Pieces, Big Picture ANNA HARVEY 6

About Coming Home

JORDAN HARTZELL 5

Insights on Coronavirus

SYDNEY LO 4

Walking Through Museums ALISA CAIRA 8

The Book of All My Hours DAVID KLEINMAN 7

postCover by Joanne Han

FEB 28

—

VOL 25 —

ISSUE 15

FEATURE

Insights on Coronavirus sniffles, sickness, and stigma

BY SYDNEY LO ILLUSTRATED BY GABY TREVIÑO

A

few days before the start of the spring semester, I walked up the steps of Brown’s Health Services building. I pried open the heavy doors, escaping the frigid Providence weather. As I entered, I sniffled and blew my runny nose, a side effect of the trek across campus. A stranger in the waiting area looked up at me, seeming wary, and I fought to ignore a fear that had grown throughout January: a fear of someone thinking I’m sick. Specifically, of someone thinking that I’d contracted the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

Aside from my time spent in airports traveling from my home in Minnesota back to campus in Providence, there was little to no reason for anyone to consider me at-risk for contracting SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19. First reported in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), COVID-19 had not even had its first confirmed case in the United States when I climbed the stairs of Health Services to visit the campus pharmacy. Even as I write this a month later, there are only 60 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States—the virus remains concentrated primarily in mainland China.

Nevertheless, I am half-Asian. Therefore, even though I have never traveled to Asia and my Asian

heritage lies in Laos with the Hmong people, I cannot escape the suspicion others now have toward my every sniffle. I worry, as I did entering Health Services, that I will be stigmatized—or worse.

This is not to say that concerns about COVID-19 in general are unwarranted. According to the CDC, “the clinical spectrum of COVID-19 ranges from mild disease with non-specific signs and symptoms of acute respiratory illness, to severe pneumonia with respiratory failure and septic shock.” According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it has a case-fatality ratio (total number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases) of 2.3 percent within China as of February 24, with a lower estimated ratio outside of China. Yet, with a wide range of contributing factors, including geography, healthcare access, disease course, and transmissibility, case-fatality ratios only represent one of many ways to measure an infectious disease’s threat, current or potential.

Still, SARS-CoV-2 is a novel coronavirus, meaning it has never before circulated in a human population— and its severity shouldn’t be understated. Several health officials—like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease— have predicted that the virus will become a pandemic (the

worldwide spread of a new disease). I discussed the virus with Dr. Richard Bungiro, a Senior Lecturer in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Brown who teaches BIOL1550: Biology of Emerging Microbial Diseases (among other courses). He voiced a similar concern of a pandemic: “[COVID-19] does have that capacity—it spreads very effectively. It seems to be capable of being spread even when a person is asymptomatic, which is obviously troubling because it’s not like you can just isolate people who are symptomatic and contain the virus, because there are going to be people that aren’t.” Dr. Bungiro cited the 2009 strain of H1N1, a novel strain of the influenza virus originating in Mexico, as one recent example of a novel virus turned pandemic. At the same time, while the prospect of a pandemic may feel panicinducing, it is important to remember that in 2003, many experts also predicted that SARS would become a pandemic—possibly an annual one like the flu—but the outbreak was contained before it could infect a global population. Unfortunately, wide gaps remain in the scientific community’s knowledge of COVID-19, and in many ways the virus’s future path remains unknown.

Although the COVID-19 outbreak is a serious matter, the paranoia and panic that have arisen from it are not necessarily proportionate. Dr. Bungiro said, “I think we have to be careful not to forget what traditionally have been infectious diseases that have infected a lot more people and killed a lot more people than new coronavirus [sic]...I think that [COVID-19] should be taken in context of the larger picture of global infectious disease.” For instance, the influenza virus causes annual pandemics, with 9 million to 45 million illnesses and 12,000 to 61,000 deaths per year, but public responses to influenza rarely echo the panic surrounding COVID-19. Additionally, while measles has much greater infectiousness than COVID-19, many still choose not to vaccinate or treat the disease seriously.

Ekim Luo, a psychology student at the University of Southern California and my friend from high school, encountered the consequences of COVID-19 panic firsthand. She described her experience visiting family in Shanghai after the WHO declared COVID-19 a global emergency on January 20: “At this point, all public places (malls, grocery stores, restaurants, temples, etc.) were closed down. We were technically free to go outside, but

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, We are a little over a week into Pisces season. Ah, yes, I can hear your collective groans all the way from the editorial office. What even is a Pisces? Just say fish, goddamn it. I hear you—but I choose to ignore you. Because, beloved reader, I am a Pisces, and I am inviting you to suspend your disbelief for a short while to indulge in this wildly exciting time with me. If you are unfamiliar with this star-steered season, it means that the next few weeks are going to be emotionally tumultuous, deeply insightful, and, quite frankly, chaotic. In short, you’ll be crushed but ultimately come out better because of it.

If you truly don’t believe in the stars, take solace in the fact that this prediction also rings true due to the fact that we are well into the semester. With all the meetings, midterms, and deadlines that are fast approaching, it’s easy to feel like we’re hamsters in a wheel, running interminably toward nothing. And I don’t want to sugarcoat your semester, but I truly believe all of us are getting one stop closer to somewhere.

Whether that’s a degree, a newly realized passion, a roughbut-adequate understanding of organic chemistry—whatever goal is at the end of the tunnel, you’re getting there.

4 post–

Leaps

This week, post- takes it slower to contemplate the people and world around us. In Feature, a writer interviews people about the coronavirus and touches upon the cultural panic that has ensued. In Narrative, one writer considers her relationship with her sister through hypothetical letters, and another writer discovers puzzles as a hobby that allows her to appreciate the little things in life. And in Arts & Culture, a writer uses his favorite novel to analyze his insecurities, and another evaluates how trips to museums have impacted her relationships.

During these hectic weeks, please take the time to sit down every now and then to recharge. Check in with your loved ones, enjoy the few warm days our mercurial Providence weather gods are bestowing on us, and be kind to yourself. It’s cliche, it’s overused, and it’s easier said than done. But so long as we are caught in a frenzy, either induced by the stars or the academic calendar, it’s important we give ourselves the space to breathe as we grow. Thinking about you all here at post-.

1. Leap Day 2. Leapfrog 3. OLEEP 4. LeapPad 5. sLEEP 6. Leaping to conclusions 7. “One giant leap for mankind” 8. Leap of faith 9. Leaps and bounds

Take care,

Amanda Ngo Editor- in-Chief

10. Lords a-leaping

the streets were empty...Face masks were all sold out, and some businesses jacked up the prices, but the [Chinese Communist Party] stepped in and I believe people went to jail for it.” She continued to describe how the closures and panic resulted in a mild food shortage as well as price spikes, heavily impacting China’s working class. Ekim observed people losing their jobs and businesses going bankrupt with no customers to visit them.

This frantic rush to secure resources is not limited to China. News sources like the New York Times have reported a worldwide scramble to obtain surgical masks in the wake of COVID-19, with pharmacies in the United States selling out for weeks on end despite evidence that such masks don’t actually protect healthy individuals from contracting airborne diseases—they only prevent sick individuals from spreading them. Ekim managed to fly out of China just a few hours before a travel ban went into effect, but her family and friends remain behind. She described her correspondence with them, telling me, “For now, it's still really grim over there, and most places remain closed. China is probably going to suffer economically in the long term, so the primary concern for most people is how they will be able to sustain financially in the recession that follows.”

This pervasive and sometimes irrational fear in response to outbreaks is, lamentably, nothing new. Dr. Bungiro offered a historical perspective, explaining, “In disease outbreaks in history, there have been people who have died not because of the disease itself, but because of the fear of the disease, they might not have been able to get services, get food, what have you. So the fear, in some cases, can be worse than the disease itself. You can look back on just about every major infectious organism we’ve dealt with and see fear.”

Disease panic can often be characterized by xenophobia and stigma. The article “Stigmatization Complicates Infectious Disease Management” in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics describes the danger of stigma within public health: “Stigmatization looms large in global health ethics because it prevents those with disease from seeking care, engenders fear of those who have disease, causes prejudice against entire groups or communities, and has, in some cases, led to violence against the stigmatized group.” In the case of COVID-19, Ekim witnessed a wave of prejudice in China directed against those from Wuhan. In Beijing, some citizens have taken it upon themselves to track and register those from Wuhan with local authorities. South of Beijing, the local government of Zhengding county even offered 1,000 yuan ($145) to individuals willing to disclose information about unregistered people with suspected links to the Hubei province.

In the United States and many other countries, the panic around COVID-19 has reignited a not-soold form of xenophobia and racism: yellow peril. This racist ideology discriminates against those of East Asian descent, though individuals of other Asian descents are often included. In the case of COVID-19, yellow peril depicts Asian people as disease-carrying “others” who could contaminate the rest of the world. Ekim shared her perspective: “What's happening now rings a bell to when the first wave of Chinese immigrants/indentured laborers came to the US. There is nothing original about xenophobia, and I still believe misinformation and the lack of education play a big role.” With the spread of COVID-19 and the resulting panic, incidents of yellow peril remain abounding: a man assaulting a woman with

a face mask on a New York City subway, people throwing rocks at Chinese students in Southampton, high schoolers assaulting a boy and accusing him of having COVID-19 in California. As Ekim mentioned, yellow peril doesn’t follow reason, but prospers instead off of unawareness and historic intolerance.

Beyond the occasional look of suspicion, like when I picked up my prescription at the Brown pharmacy, I’ve been mostly spared from direct stigmatization. However, I have little cousins, also Hmong, who have been teased in elementary school for “spreading coronavirus.” I have a friend from home whose grandmother ordered her not to sit next to Chinese people. In my position as a physician’s shadow, I have watched patients at Rhode Island Hospital refuse or complain about treatment because the attending physician is Asian.

Dr. Bungiro voiced his thoughts about the recent rise in prejudice: “It is troubling to see some people react with xenophobic tendencies. There was some of this with SARS, and there was some with MERS as well. I think that the thing that we have to keep in mind is that nobody wants to make other people sick, or at least not anyone I interact with. The Chinese population has borne the brunt of this infection, and a lot of people have gotten sick, and over 2,500 people have died, mostly in China.

That’s something that we should all be aware of and not use as justification to be hateful or hurtful. On a campus like Brown, I’d like to think that we are usually able to put aside prejudices.”

As a co-head teaching assistant for Dr. Bungiro’s course BIOL1600: Development of Vaccines, I know that a vaccine for COVID-19 is months away at the earliest.

While we wait for a “cure” or the rise of herd immunity (people getting infected, building an immunity, and thus preventing further disease transmission), we have a responsibility to resist xenophobic panic and support those most affected by the outbreak today. When asked how best to do so, Ekim recommended supporting local Chinese businesses who may not be able to sustain months of minimal revenue. She also suggested calling local representatives and advocating against racist travel restrictions. Others have advocated donating medical supplies like surgical masks to medical professionals and sick individuals (who actually need them) or seeking out trustworthy organizations to help support evacuees.

On the disease’s social impact, Ekim added, “I want [people] to rationally think about the situation. The xenophobia and mass paranoia have already caused many severe consequences. People are losing their jobs, small businesses are going bankrupt, and this is happening in China and outside because people are scared of Chinese people.”

Similarly, Dr. Bungiro advised students to respond to COVID-19 with informed and reasonable precautions, not panic. He said, “I would want them to understand some of the basics of how infectious diseases are typically transferred so they have a realistic understanding of what the risk is. I would want them to get a flu shot, if they’re medically eligible to get one, which almost everyone is. I want them to pay attention to it but not panic and turn to information sources of dubious quality.”

During periods of global crisis like this, we must make extra efforts to advocate for solidarity, empathy, and knowledge. We must fight against the suspicious stares, unfounded prejudice, and moments of weakness where unreasonable panic wins out. Dr. Bungiro put it best: “Fear feeds on ignorance, and there’s no vaccine for that.”

About Coming Home letters for syd

BY JORDAN HARTZELL ILLUSTRATED BY HEE WON CHUNG

Dear Syd, I don’t know if you remember this. When we traveled as kids, Dad let us each pick out one treat to take on the airplane. I’d get Sour Skittles and you’d get Regular Skittles, but you’d eat all of yours before the flight attendant even showed us where the exits were. And then you’d do this devious thing—this terrible thing—where you’d tell me that if I put a Sour Skittle in your mouth, you’d guess the color, and it would be tons of fun for us both. Red and purple were the best, and you always got them right. We’d play until you ate my entire bag of candy, guessing colors and licking your lips and never saying thank you once, because, wow, was I lucky to get to play this game with you.

Dear Syd, You’ve always walked so much faster than the rest of us. Told us that if we weren’t in a rush, we must not be going somewhere that mattered. So, one day, on a trip through some city—I don’t really remember where—Mom and I ducked into a CVS while you were walking ahead. When you turned around, we weren’t there, so you called and we said we’d taken the subway back to the hotel because you had walked ahead again. So you hung up and figured things out, and never stopped walking fast because you already knew how to ride the subway by yourself.

Dear Syd, Today, someone at work asked what I plan to do with my degree when I’m out of here and I said I’ll probably hang it above my desk. It takes too long to explain: Well, I like math, but I’m not sure if I want to teach in the long run and, if I’m being honest, I’d like to live with my sister in California someday because we once visited San Francisco and she can go to business school there and maybe I’ll work in tech and we can go hiking on Mount Tamalpais on the weekends.

I think, the next time someone asks, I’ll just say that I want to be a farmer. Roots return to roots return to roots.

Dear Syd, I killed a mosquito today and when I picked its legs off the wall, I remembered getting sick in Peru. So many mosquitoes at Machu Picchu, but not enough repellant at Machu Picchu. Alérgico. How do you say antibiotic again? I remember being dazed in Cusco, Mom on the phone at 2 a.m. with an emergency doctor: “But they’re having trouble walking…sure, I’ll hold.” We lay in our beds holding glass soda bottles from the hotel kitchen against our legs to bring down the swelling. Sprite and Coca-Cola, just like the doctor ordered.

Dear Syd, We both loved The Parent Trap because I was Hallie and you were Annie and then we could be twins instead of being 16 months apart. There’s a scene in the movie where the twins learn this elaborate handshake, so you and I made one up. Do you remember how it goes? You start with your hands crossed on your chest, fingers to shoulders, then uncross and tap your knees. There’s a double-fist-bump somewhere in there, but I’m starting to forget. I haven’t seen The Parent Trap in a while.

“Ethnographers basically ask, ‘What’s the tea?’”

“As a lit arts major, I would rather die than attend a Goldman coffee chat.” february 28 , 2020 5

NARRATIVE

Dear Syd, You’ve co-opted some of my memories and I’m not sure if that matters. We had this babysitter, a 19-yearold with a tongue ring who let us watch movies half an hour later than Mom said we could. I told Mom that, when I turned 19, I’d get a tongue ring too, and that if I couldn’t get a tongue ring, I’d take a motorcycle instead.

And now we sit at dinners with family friends and they laugh when you tell them how you wanted to pierce your tongue and that if you couldn’t pierce your tongue, you’d have a motorcycle instead. I used to fight back. It was me! Me! But now I laugh too, deciding that it probably was you, anyway.

Dear Syd, I was thinking about Croatia today—orange and burnt sienna and aquamarine. Do you remember how we refused to eat the octopus salad? They’re too clever to eat, you said. Lots of olive oil, too, but we had no praise for olives. I think of your slice of New York in colors as well—maybe gray and dark purplish-red and champagne. Like steel and bruises and diamonds. Light orange, too, but just for the sandwiches at Katz’s Deli across the street.

Dear Syd, I never realized how badly my seizures scared you. All I knew was that Dad was crying and Mom was crying but that I got to buy a new skateboard. “Benign Childhood Epilepsy” was doctor-speak for “she doesn’t have brain cancer,” and everyone let out a breath they didn’t realize they were holding. We don’t talk about it too much because feeling it wasn’t so scary for me, but you were the one who had to sit there and hold me. The doctor was right when she said I’d grow out of it by 14, but by then we didn’t share a bed anyway.

Dear Syd, My favorite place of ours is the fairy tree at the old house on Fay Lane. A willow with a crook at six-yearold-shoulder level. We’d leave acorn tops full of honey and red autumn leaves and daisy chains tucked into the bark: gifts for the fairies that lived inside. Overnight, they’d make an exchange, leaving candy and trinkets and notes in Mom’s handwriting. The next morning, we’d sneak into the neighbor’s garden and sit on the bench next to their koi pond. There, we’d comb through our treasures in secret, gold sparkles on our hands.

Dear Syd, Feeling homesick. Call me?

Yours, J. 6 post–

Small Pieces, Big Picture the healing power of puzzles

BY ANNA HARVEY ILLUSTRATED BY NINA YUCHI

Two weeks ago, my housemate came back from Boston with a puzzle. It was a staggering thousand pieces because, as she told her dad, we’re smart and capable women who can handle a challenge. The box displayed an intricate map of snaking rivers, pine trees, and log cabins; the top third sported a large bald eagle clutching a banner reading “Historic New England.” Lighthouses perched on the craggy coastline studded with all manner of sailing vessels, and a diverse array of wildlife—birds, fish, even a pair of seals—dotted the puzzle’s interior. Tiny scrolls of parchment strewn throughout the landscape boasted historical facts about the various landmarks painted in bright blues, reds, and greens. Yellow highways linked together major cities and pointed to interesting rest stops: “America’s Stonehenge,” for example, is in New Hampshire, just off I-93. My three housemates and I cracked open the box and set to work separating out the edge pieces.

Until recently, I wouldn’t have called myself a puzzler. That’s a title reserved for my mom, who, every winter break, takes over the dining room table with whichever design she has chosen for the year—classic novels, Broadway plays, Art Nouveau posters—and spends hours each day rapt with

concentration. She even has a felt pad that she places underneath her puzzles which allows her to roll them up and store them without dismantling them entirely.

She is a puzzler; I am a casual fan. My attention span is too short to devote myself to something requiring such focus—I am easily frustrated and dislike sifting through hundreds of cardboard pieces just to find the one piece I need. At least, that’s what I thought.

It took a little over a week for us to finish “Historic New England.” I spent most of my time painstakingly working on Maine, where my dad is from. I exaggerated his accent as I searched for pieces—had anyone seen Pen-awb-scawt Bay recently? What about Bah Hahbah? I found Bowdoin College, where he went to school, and slotted it alongside a tiny thicket of trees.

I found Brown as I moved down to Rhode Island for a change of perspective and smiled to myself. New England really is compact, I thought, in contrast to the suburban sprawl of the Midwest, where I’d grown up. In three months, I will graduate and I will leave New England, likely forever. My dad did, right after graduation: he went first to Minneapolis and then to Chicago, where he stayed. I thought of migration as I pieced together the hooked elbow of Cape Cod. My housemates and I are getting ready to scatter—two of us aren’t even staying on this continent—but for a few days, as we belted “What Dreams Are Made Of” from The Lizzie McGuire Movie and drank mug after mug of herbal tea, we were, each of us, rooted to this tiny slice of land.

Some find puzzles calming. I usually find them infuriating. But, after conquering “Historic New England,” we cracked open another, this one a little more my speed. Painted in rich jewel tones, it depicts “Jane Austen’s Book Club.” Jane and Virginia Woolf perch on a plush crimson couch, while Mary Shelley, George Eliot, and Zora Neale Hurston preside over the back. I notice that Virginia Woolf, the subject of my senior thesis, is disconcertingly blonde in the puzzle, as blonde as I am. Though Woolf was, after all, a brunette, I take this mistaken similarity as a sign that the universe is working out as it should. This is perhaps a lot to ascribe to a historical inaccuracy in a jigsaw puzzle, but puzzling has taught me to see the connections between even seemingly insignificant details. A splotch of red might be a stripe on the American flag or it might be part of a lobster’s tail.

Sometimes, it is easier to look for the tiniest smudge on the corner of a piece rather than its larger picture, because only that way will you know where it connects. Sometimes, it is worth it to just try pieces at random until you find the one that fits.

There is no particular strategy to puzzling, other than doing the edges first, but I would call that

ARTS & CULTURE common sense. You can move methodically, either by separating pieces by color or focusing your attention on one particular area while excluding all others, but there are no hard and fast rules. I find puzzles frustrating because they require me to recognize that I can’t know everything—I can imagine how the pieces will fit together, but I can’t know for sure until the whole thing is done. They require me to confront my failures, one after the other, until, finally, something clicks. They require me to stop worrying about putting my thoughts into words and to focus on images instead, to understand that things probably won’t make any sense until, suddenly, they do.

Puzzles allow me to see the big picture, which is exactly what I have been trying to avoid. The next year of my life is starting to coalesce; a picture is forming, in streaks and smudges. I am going to graduate school, moving once again, this time across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom. I do not know where my life goes from there—I am trying to be okay with that. I may not know what the finished product will be, but I do know that I can find out. I am, after all, a strong, capable woman who can manage 1,000-piece puzzles. For now, I can focus on the small pieces: making the most of my last three months here at Brown, accepting failure, and spending as much time as I can at our narrow table, trying to keep the puzzle pieces from falling onto the floor. I can trust that the big picture of my life is out there somewhere—I just need to pay attention to the details until the day it all comes together and I realize, for once, everything is in its place.

The Book of All My Hours

on living forever and obscure scottish novels

BY DAVID KLEINMAN

ILLUSTRATED BY YUAN PU

In October 2017, I realized I might have unknowingly been holding the key to immortality my entire life. When I cracked open a new copy of my favorite novel, Vellum: The Book of All Hours, a relatively obscure 2006 work from a relatively obscure Scottish author named Hal Duncan, a bizarre feeling washed over me—almost like deja vu, but far more intense. It’s not that I was transported to the first time I opened it back at the beginning of high school, nor was it like catching up with an old friend. The best analogy I have for the way I felt was that re-opening Vellum was like closing down a video game: For some amount of time, I had been operating under the rules of a life that was but an artificial extension of my own, and now I was returning to the real world. Within that subset, time moved impossibly quickly; in the pages of Vellum, no time had passed at all, and I was still what I had been when I began the game.

It felt, to a degree, like coming home—not to a person or place, but to myself.

I think, on some level, I’ve always wanted to be immortal. Not in the sense of eternal life—though that’s obviously a concern—but in the sense of unchangeability.

Poets of the past hoped that their works would be monuments to their personalities in the future; with the advent of mass, permanent communication, we suffer not from a dearth but from an excess of monuments.

There are now records forever of my dressing up as Archie Andrews for Halloween before Riverdale was popular, as well as digital copies of truly embarrassing songs I wrote one summer when I thought I was deep. I cringe at these childhood faux pas, but in those moments would have fought tooth and nail to prove the validity of my emotions. For a risky decision to be met with a parental “are you sure that’s what you want?” would

merit an exhaustive and inexhaustible defense of myself.

Hallmark movies, moreover, warn that regret stalks even the most successful among us: All it would take to completely destroy my life would be just one magical night with my soulmate, or a missed offer from my dream job, or what have you. The last person I’d want threatening my legitimacy would be myself. And with Vellum, I think I found my magic cure. Side effects may include total selfalienation and reading one very good book.

Vellum’s conceit is simple in the same way that religions or political ideologies are simple: one clear-cut idea troubled by a hundred nuances and complications of putting it into practice. In Vellum, the world as we know it is but a single fold in the titular Vellum, the grand fabric of space-time on which all people, places, things, and ideas are inscribed. Rather than a patchwork of planets, the Vellum is a massive quilt of stories. Travel a few folds away and you may end up in a faerieland where the residents’ idea of Adam and Eve is the Shakespearean fairy monarchs Oberon and Titania; lying between your fold and that one would be a world similar to yours save for a few key differences that may cost you your sanity.

Narrative is both description and transportation—a “fold” is as much a place as it is a moment, and some characters even learn to time travel by dropping cigarettes in puddles. This dropping is not a loophole in physics or an act of magic, but rather a method of accessing every time someone has dropped a cigarette in a puddle: The cigarette briefly becomes the very concept of a cigarette dropped in a puddle and you can change the time and space surrounding it to fit your fancy. Like I said, simple.

What differentiates Vellum from a run-of-the-mill multiversal story is the way the characters grapple with the Vellum’s existence. I’ve always had trouble with, for instance, multiversal superheroes—since so many of these heroes are so personally motivated, avenging a death or righting a personal wrong, it’s unclear to me how they could stand up to an infinity of possible worlds. Batman’s parents are alive somewhere, ripe for resurrection-by-dimension-hopping, as are Superman’s, and the Flash’s…I’m detecting a theme. The answers these stories give tend not to satisfy me, since even apocalyptic threats pale in the face of such an expanse. Who cares about the fate of one Gotham when there are countless others unaffected or facing threats of their own? How can you claim to serve as a symbol when you’ve seen worlds upon worlds where your symbol doesn’t exist? Vellum answers this problem by inverting it. The characters do not trespass from their multiversal backwater into the great infinity of reality, but are rather extensions of something within that infinity that reach every fold of the Vellum. They don’t meet up with their alternate selves so much as understand exactly what and who they are,

getting a glimpse of everything their presence couldand will mean—a glimpse of the Vellum. In one chapter, we see a character manifest as an escaped prisoner, a deserting soldier, a blues singer running to make a deal with the Devil, and a shepherd in the distance of an ancient cave painting. This character is not merely one who always runs away, but is also the embodiment of the concept of running away, and every time he gets caught, he slips free in some other time, some other place, some other story. He is beyond humanity: In the language of Vellum, he is “unkin.”

Reading Vellum felt like my first glimpse into the Vellum, my moment of becoming unkin. For the longest time, I’d felt like I wasn’t truly a real person. I had managed to be an outcast at a middle school with a graduating class of 19 students; I had substituted my lack of real desires with plots borrowed from Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts, removed from the real world. Yet seeing the grand patchwork of stories around me made being outside of them a blessing, not a curse, because it was only from the outside that I could see their true pattern. Circumstance of any kind became my enemy, and being “in” any group meant being outside of the transcendent truth. So long as I didn’t do anything a person would do, I was immortal.

Needless to say, this has made living as a human being somewhat difficult. Choosing concentrations, classes, plans for a Friday night—each has been fraught with intense knowledge of the sheer existential dread of insignificance accompanying the slightest wrong move. I had always thought that someday down the line, I’d regret being trapped in whatever fold of the Vellum I’d sewn for myself, wishing for the days when the vast expanse of possibility stretched out before me. And yet, in a moment out of The Bell Jar, I woke up one somewhat recent morning to find out I was running out of choices not to make and wished for nothing more than to go back in time and be able to grow and change. There was comfort in thinking that, in whatever passes for a realworld Vellum, my story had already been told and would be told and re-enacted forever, but I had forgotten how it felt to actually live and break new ground.

Immortality, it turns out, has its share of unforeseen costs. With that said, I still highly recommend reading Vellum. It’s a world concept I had never seen before and have never seen since, coupled with prose so suited to a poetic worldview that any passage captivates the heart.

Beware, though, of time travel—the moment to which I was sent back was the first time I closed the book and said, “I don’t know how I can ever read another one.” february 28 , 2020 7

ARTS&CULTURE

Walking Through Museums it's harder than it looks

BY ALISA CAIRA ILLUSTRATED BY TALIA MERMIN

If we haven’t gone to a museum together, I probably don’t like you very much. This isn’t to say anything against you—I’m sure I’m the problem in our potential relationship. It’s just that, at this point, I feel like I’ve gone to a museum with everyone I know—so many people, in fact, that I feel qualified to write an entire piece on it. So, if we haven’t gone together, I could tell you it’s nothing personal, but the truth is that it probably is.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a community where kids were regularly taken to museums by their family members. However, that generality didn’t include my family, and I learned of this apparent norm only as I fell behind my friends in conversations and experiences.

The things my family did together, from watching sports games to watching crime television, didn’t feel appropriate any more as I learned of the times my friends’ families spent exploring downtown Boston’s museum scene.

As I grew older, I started to walk to the closest train station from my first boyfriend’s house, the two of us using our student passes to take the Green Line into downtown Boston. We learned which places we could get into for free because we were under 17. We also learned which places it was better to visit while pretending (unconvincingly) that we were college students.

Soon enough, the world of museums began to open up its heavy doors to me. Eventually, that boy and I went to every museum in Boston. With time, we broke up. I went to the same places with new people. I went to new places with even newer people. I got my license and drove for hours to go to that contemporary art museum everyone had always told me about visiting during their family vacations.

With more time, going to museums became a habit of mine, and was increasingly anticipated by my friends.

The discomfort I felt when people shared their museum memories faded as I began to accumulate enough of my own to feel like I could keep pace. I began to pull people into the world of museums, to jokingly take friends of mine who said they hated modern art to my favorite exhibitions, to go back to the same places with the same friends time and time again.

When I arrived at Brown, taking trips to the RISD museum was the way I cemented some of my first and longest friendships here. When friends visit me, it’s a traditional stop, one of a grand total of roughly three Providence must-sees. But beyond that, art exhibition and creation have become essential tools for relaxation, connection, and nostalgia for me. A space that once felt far from me has become familiar and known.

The walks I’ve taken with friends, partners, and family members through these spaces have all been deeply informative and valuable, even if the art wasn’t at the center of the moment. Museums have become a rare way for me to glimpse the ways in which people I care about interact with a world that is bigger than them. Whether those interactions become "deep" or remain silly isn’t the point. What I have found matters more than anything else is simply showing up for those moments and letting them root themselves deeper into my foundations.

I’ll be the first to admit how difficult it can be to connect with the environment of museums as someone who, for so long, felt uneasy and unaccepted in their world. But I think it’s important that these places are not just for people of a particular appearance or personality.

Museums are places for almost anyone—in fact, everyone—to connect with each other and experience things that could emerge in no other setting.

up to each other more than we had previously. Just as he laughed at the art, he also began to share more of his life with me. In those moments we shared together, I think we began to feel more real to each other as the museum triggered intimate responses from us.

I was the last person he had opened up to about the experience, just earlier that day. Accordingly, I was the first person who came to mind as he thought through the list of people he had to tell.

Museums certainly can be about the history or the art they have on display. On many of my visits, they have been about that, and, at this point, art is something I know a decent amount about. But museums don’t have to be that way. They can just as well be places where people share their experiences and grapple with their emotions. Many of my greatest memories are from time I've spent in museums across the world, the groups of people I go with and learn from growing bigger with each visit.

One of my most poignant museum memories comes from going to a museum with someone who was a self-declared hater of art.

One of my most poignant museum memories comes from going to a museum with someone who was a self-declared hater of art. We went to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art on one of the first days of summer. He disliked most of it, and we talked about all of it, along with the rest of our lives, as we wandered through the galleries. Later that day, when he got into his dream school after being accepted off of the waitlist, I was the first person he called about it. Why? Well, I can’t say for sure. He didn’t tell me. What I do know is that our visit to the ICA had allowed us to open EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amanda Ngo

“Seniors may still remember walking into Leung at 4:50 p.m. in the spring of 2016 to do homework, setting themselves up for a productive afternoon, and then being jolted by the sounds of Justin Timberlake blaring over the sound system at 5:00 p.m.”

-Sarah Lettes, “forever leung” 3.1.19

“On the brick wall behind the counter, beers, juices, open tea containers, and decaf espresso beans sat alongside T-shirts and tote bags, arranged like 3D wallpaper.”

-Liza Edwards-Levin, “faces, places, cable car spaces” 3.2.18

FEATURE Managing Editor Liza Edwards-Levin Section Editors Alice Bai Erin Walden Staff Writers Gaya Gupta Anna Harvey NARRATIVE Managing Editor Nicole Fegan Section Editors Michelle Liu Minako Ogita

Really, walking through a museum is about more than looking at what’s on the walls or reading the information on the plaques. It’s a more difficult activity with a lot more potential for growth and vulnerability than I think we often allow it. It’s about letting oneself open up to an experience that changes every time a ticket is acquired and used. This is what we truly learn from and store in our memories. It is what we share each moment when we exchange stories and recollections. These experiences become our own museums, nostalgia and experiences held in frames and returned to frequently.

Staff Writers Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Danielle Emerson Jordan Hartzell Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair Kahini Mehta ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Griffin Plaag Section Editors Olivia Howe Maddy McGrath Staff Writers Rob Capron David Kleinman Julian Towers

LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Caitlin McCartney

SOCIAL MEDIA Head Editor Paola Solano

Section Editor Christina Vasquez

Editors Cecilia Barron Tessa Devoe

Staff Writers Eashan Das Lauren Toneatto COPY Copy Chief Moe Sattar Copy Editors Kyoko Leaman Aditi Marshan Emma Schneider

Want to be involved?

Email: amanda_ngo@brown.edu!

8 post–

HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Gaby Treviño LAYOUT Co-Chiefs Amy Choi Nina Yuchi Designers Joanne Han Steve Ju Iris Xie WEB MASTER Jeff Demanche