Issue
In This
World on Fire
James Feinberg 3
A Summer with Young Gurus
Ava Rosenbaum 2
Harry Levine 4
Purple on the Palette Catherine Bai 4
Uncertain Progress Levin 5
liza Edwards-
The Rat Lap Naomi Kim 6
Schooled
postCover by Halle Krieger
SEPT 14
VOL 22 —
ISSUE 1
FEATURES
A Summer with Young Gurus A Study of a Selfless Corporate Culture
L
written By Ava Rosenbaum
ast semester I
Letter from the Editor
was fervently searching for internships, looking everywhere from media outlets in New York to law firms in Raleigh. Nothing was falling into place. My Turkish friend kept telling me, “Check out Young Guru Academy. It would be perfect for you.” After a few weeks and a few more rejection letters, I finally decided to follow her advice. Little did I know that this would be one of the best decisions I would ever make. At the time, all I knew about Young Guru Academy (YGA) was that it was an international nonprofit based in Turkey. I had visited Turkey once before on vacation, but I had never thought of living there. Nonetheless, an interview and a few months later, I found myself on a plane to Istanbul for my month-long internship. Before arriving, the international coordinator told me that YGA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to cultivating selfless leaders. YGA achieves this goal through a multifaceted approach: they host a summer camp for middleschool students and run a three-year program for selected highschool students. They believe in handson learning, allowing the students to develop their own products and work with distinguished leaders in various business, scientific, and technological fields. In this way, students become what YGA calls “double-winged” leaders who practice both competence and conscience. The first Monday morning of my internship I met with two other Brown students. Yuta and Ruban were both computer science concentrators who had just graduated from Brown. During their senior year at Brown, they had taken a computer science class called Tech for Social Good. In that course, they had coded a social media application to complement the science kits that YGA produces. They were there to present and share the app as well as to receive insights on how to improve it. We walked into YGA’s office, housed in Istanbul’s Ozyegin University. The office felt like a Google workplace, complete with petrified seaweed decorations, one large table, beanbag chairs, and the company’s motto—“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main the main thing”—on the wall. People sipped on Turkish coffee or tea while they chatted in corners or typed on their computers. We were led into a glass-walled conference room where we met with two sisters: Sezin Aydin, the Head of International Programs, and Melike Aydin, the Head of Marketing. They told us that Melike had left her job as an executive for Nestlé, where she had begun to feel purposeless and stagnant. But now, she has found a sense of fulfillment in her job at YGA. They gave us a presentation about YGA’s high-trust culture, where everyone worked and lived selflessly. They told us that YGA focuses on the symbiotic relationship between personal and community growth, on the process rather than the result. They told us that everyone shared their introspections and vulnerabilities in weekly “feedforward” sessions. Later that week, we met with Sinan Yaman, the founder of YGA. Before the meeting, Sezin told us that he was extremely excited to meet us. This surprised me—I had previously worked in companies where only my supervisor knew my name. In contrast, Sinan knew all of our names, as well as what we had been working on. He even asked us for our feedback on his performance. He further explained YGA’s philosophy of high trust and selflessness, and he told us he was moved to tears every week seeing the YGA employees truly practicing these values. We realized YGA was not just an organization—it was a mindset. Ruban, Yuta, and I thought YGA’s mindset of intrinsic motivation, selflessness, and growth aligned harmoniously with Brown’s culture. Sezin agreed—although YGA had partnered with students from Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia, Brown Welcome to a new year of post-! We
students were the fastest in understanding the organization’s values. Sezin told us about Harvard Professor Scott Snook’s research, in which he identified three types of mindsets: dependent, independent, and self-authoring. People with a dependent mindset tend to follow directions, whereas those with an independent mindset tend not to listen to others’ critiques. A self-authoring mindset focuses on personal growth and working alongside others to constantly better oneself. Professor Snook found that 70 percent of the incoming Harvard freshmen are in the dependent mindset, and only 10 percent are in the self-authoring mindset. Even more surprisingly, those numbers do not change after four years at Harvard. Based on the average Brown student’s drive for growth and self-actualization, I would guess that more fall into the self-authorizing category. Both Brown and YGA attract a specific kind of person. Both are places full of passion, growth, and a sense of social responsibility. Both embrace big-picture thinking and cross-disciplinary innovation. However, this mindset stands in contrast to today’s typical corporate culture. This culture often focuses on external, quantifiable measures of success: the name on the degree, the number on the paycheck, the title on the door. It is easy to see why this is the case—these tangible figures are comprehensible, comparable, and concrete. And this feedback happens quickly—every three months, a person’s merit changes depending on their revenue or sales. It is common for leaders to derive their selfworth and motivation from external measures, to constantly strive for a quantifiable success. But this success is often elusive. People at YGA often came from high-powered positions in multinational corporations like Microsoft, Unilever and Nestlé. They told me that they felt like they were on a climb for elusive success in those companies. Just as they reached one goal, one number, one benchmark, there is another one just out of reach. So, they continued to climb and climb, lone hikers on an upward trek. Nevertheless, when they reached the top of the mountain and looked around, instead of feeling content with their accomplishment, they felt hollow. They felt like something was missing. For them, YGA had that missing piece: selflessness. This deep belief in selflessness drives every aspect of YGA: it shapes its workplace culture, it fosters innovation, and it cultivates leadership. At YGA, selflessness does not mean a lack of a sense of self—it means going beyond yourself. A selfless mindset allows people to prioritize shared values and goals above individual desires. Selflessness promotes collaboration but not competition. Selflessness fosters confidence but not cockiness, self-reliance but not self-importance. A selfless mindset engenders growth and unconditional appreciation. It is like trying to plant a garden—even with all of the right seeds, they will not grow if the soil is contaminated. The mindset is the soil; with a selfish mindset, the seeds—challenge, evaluation, and appreciation—will die. In a selfish mindset, challenges become obstacles, evaluations become criticism, and appreciation becomes flattery. However, with a selfless mindset, these same seeds can flourish. Challenges become essential, evaluations become constructive, and appreciation becomes genuine. This one change—from selfish to selfless—entirely transforms the culture of an organization. This may seem unbelievable, idealistic, only theoretical. Yes, it seems good on paper, but how can people actually practice this? Can a company be selfless and successful? That is the key: YGA is successful because it is selfless. It may seem counterintuitive at first. Nonetheless, YGA and its members have won numerous
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ARTS&CULTURE accolades, including Best Place to Work, Forbes 30 Under 30, MIT Innovators Under 35, and an Edison Award. This is because when employees are intrinsically motivated, they take on greater challenges, and they work harder for the shared goals. For example, two days before YGA was to host its week-long summer camp for over 200 students, the lead coordinator called and said that she was not going to attend the camp for personal reasons. Instead of getting angry, people at YGA were calm and understanding. Her absence meant that two other employees suddenly had the enormous task of running the camp, something they had not prepared for. They worked over 100 hours that week to make sure that the camp ran smoothly. At the end of the camp, they sent the woman a video thanking her for all of her hard work in the previous months. They told her that it was because of her prior work that the camp ran so smoothly. Instances like these are common at YGA. YGA employees are not concerned with personal gains or losses, superiority or inferiority, accolades or aspirations. No one ever demands credit for their ideas—instead, they work to make sure that others receive the recognition and appreciation they deserve. In no other company did I feel as though people valued my ideas just as much as those of the founder. Because the focus was not on personal gain, my coworkers did not feel threatened by interns working alongside leaders in the company. Instead, they embraced and encouraged our contributions, realizing that the organization’s mission came above all else. Yuta and Ruban only stayed for the week of the summer camp, but I stayed on for three more. Although the summer camp was over, the spirit and the energy did not fade. I worked with the founder on further developing YGA’s philosophy. YGA had the pieces—high-trust, introspection, role models—but they didn’t have a concrete way to explain them to the public. Sinan is a very conceptual thinker, and his ideas often flow out in a disjointed and tangential stream. We would talk through these concepts of selflessness and appreciation, and I would help organize and clarify them. I drew diagrams and made models of what he said, and we examined how the pieces fit together. I realized how much my political science studies helped me through this design process, as political science often deals with the connections between seemingly unrelated events—for example, how one event in one country can give rise to a movement in another. This big-picture thinking and ability to maneuver conceptual ideas proved very useful in helping hone YGA’s cultural model. Through our work, we designed YGA’s unique cultural model for social innovation. YGA’s cultural model naturally gives rise to social innovations and leaders with conscience. This cyclical model consists of four elements: role models, introspection, high-trust culture, and social innovation. Each element leads to the next, in an iterative and sustainable process. YGA’s socially conscious role models promote introspection in others. When people share this selfless mindset, a high-trust culture develops. This environment fosters fearlessness, which naturally produces social innovations. These social innovations transform the culture of a country, and in turn, produce more role models.
When my internship came to an end, I was shocked by how deeply I was going to miss the environment and the people. I have plans to continue working with YGA, and I strongly encourage other Brown students to do the same. I had never before been in a working environment so invigorating and purposeful. This experience made me rethink what meaningful work really is and what kinds of people I want to surround myself with. I realized that YGA's model is not only one for an office but also one for life.
World on Fire Watching Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan on Amazon By James Feinberg illustration by Monika Hedman
You know Jason Bourne, John Wick, John McClane, and Ethan Hunt. Now, to the universe of square-jawed, untouchable American heroes whose skills in combat and approachable handsomeness allow them to leapfrog rooms of baddies in a single bound, add Jack Ryan, as played by John Krasinski in the new Amazon series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, which dropped eight episodes August 31st. Jack’s a CIA analyst, a supposed desk jockey, who gets drawn into an international manhunt when he discovers the identity of a Lebanese-French terrorist mastermind named Mousa Bin Suleiman (Ali Suliman), referred to ad infinitum as “the next bin Laden,” “the new bin Laden,” and even just, simply, “he’s bin Laden.” Ooh, boogie boogie. But Jack is up to the task. After all, the character’s not only an ex-Marine and (weirdly) a stockbroker, but a veteran of 21 novels, five films, and three video games. With that kind of resume, what could go wrong? Well, that depends on whether you think the world needs another dour Middle Eastern shoot-emup, another Homeland, Fauda, The Honorable Woman, or Tyrant, to which my instinctive answer is “no.” It doesn’t help that Krasinski’s humor is smothered by creators Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland (both of Lost), who aren’t sure whether this Jack Ryan is a jock, a dreamboat, or a savant, and consequently decide to make him a complete blank. Though there are moments when Krasinski’s towering dignity as an actor shines through, the series’ ever-widening net of characters and situations largely just drives home the point that Jack Ryan himself is the least interesting one of them. Anyone looking for an adventure series with a sense of humor in the style of the Jack Ryan films will be sorely disappointed. The appeal of that character, when done right, was that he was fully unprepared for the field. In the first film, The Hunt for Red October
“I’m on the Blueno side!”
(1990), Alec Baldwin’s version, faced with a mutinous submarine crew, gulped, “I don’t react well to bullets.” Right from the pilot, Krasinski’s Jack, trapped in a room with an armed-to-the-teeth Suleiman and his brother, bests the baddies with his bare hands and a well-deployed grenade. In later episodes, he complains about his back hurting, but that doesn’t stop him from chasing terrorists down the street or carrying French policemen out of burning buildings. All in a day’s work. Not that Suleiman is anything to sneeze at. Hell, he runs an international terror finance ring, escapes from a heavily guarded US base, and at one point, thanks to some fascinating editing, manages to make love to his wife without ever removing his drawstring pants. Terrorism gets more devious every day. Hero, check, villain, double check. There’s also a dutiful love interest, Cathy Mueller, an epidemiologist, who, as played by Abbie Cornish, spends most of the series waiting around pleasantly for something to do. And don’t forget the alternately fatherly and explosively angry boss, James Greer (Wendell Pierce), a shootfirst CIA honcho who’s also—what’s this!—a Muslim. Every time his prayer beads appear on screen, they are presented in arrangements of shadow and light that make them out to be a major reveal, even though we’ve already seen them fifteen times. The ensemble is filled out with secondary protagonists and antagonists—at work and abroad—many of whose storylines verge on the bizarre. (John Magaro plays a drone pilot who at one point falls ass-backwards into a sadomasochistic semi-threesome with a couple who call themselves Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. Sure, why
the series’ ever-widening net of characters and situations largely just drives home the point that Jack Ryan himself is the least interesting one of them. not.) The best of these minor players is Nora Guerch, who has a blink-and-you-miss-it role in episode two as a Suleiman draftee who accidentally deploys her suicide vest when shot by a SWAT officer. The look of genuine terror on her face when she shouts “Please!” in the moment before the bullet flies beats the rest of the episodes combined for pathos. Jack Ryan has lots of bright ideas about what a globe-trotting action series ought to be, but not a lot of success in applying those ideas. In a genre rife with casual Islamophobia, Cuse and Roland try and fail to portray religious extremism intelligently. In an oversaturated media landscape of duds that look like duds, Amazon’s money keeps the explosions at least looking explosive, but they rarely feel that way. What the series lacks is a compelling reason to exist. It feels visually and narratively lost, a ship in search of a port, despite evident effort by high-profile directors like Morten Tyldum (who directed the pilot as well as 2014’s mordant The Imitation Game). It doesn’t lack action or ambition— it just happens to be deeply boring.
“Let’s go to B. GOOD. B. GOOD is LIT.”
“Tell your mom I’m marrying you.” “I like your slides.” SEPTEMBER 14, 2018 3
ARTS&CULTURE
Purple on the Palette
Exploring VanJess’s new album, Silk Canvas By Harry Levine illustrated by Katya Labowe-Stoll Albums aren't that long. At times, I think about certain albums and it’s hard to relate them to, say, a 50-minute lecture on 19th-century American art. Albums and musicians are in the business of packing in their artistry, of conveying their ideas, expressing their influences and pushing certain sounds forward in a tight window. What VanJess, a NigerianAmerican R&B duo, is trying to do on their debut album isn’t just to bring their many influences into one cohesive blend, but also to convey a style, a color, a texture. Silk Canvas is the name of this album, but it’s also their goal: to make something that’s smooth to the touch and easy to swallow. The cover of the album itself is helpful. It’s not the two faces of VanJess that take up the center of the photo. Instead, it’s the color purple. Purple encapsulates this album’s core: it’s soft and gentle, but it’s not fake. Purple is not a color that lies to you or fudges the truth. In this way, VanJess uses purple to convey the complexities of their own lives and music. The music is bright, but it’s also real, prickly, and quite modern. They do all this in a paltry, 52 minutes. Jessica and Ivana Nwokike (Ivana + Jessica = VanJess) got their start on YouTube. Their covers of “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga and “Man Down” by Rihanna received a combined total of around 10 million views. They sung and beatboxed well, and the videos were cute and sweet. It was clear they had a love for the source material in each video and purely loved to sing and harmonize. The choice of songs was interesting as well. Both had lyrics that detailed complicated relationships, and each offered a different way to approach a “bad romance.” One way is to go along for the ride as Gaga does, another is to kill your abusive lover as Rihanna (theoretically) does. These were huge pop hits with themes of control, abuse, and manipulation. VanJess continues to explore these themes on Silk Canvas, but like Rihanna (less so Gaga), they do so with music that sounds deceptively like a laid-back summer’s night. In the album, one of the best examples of a sound that potentially betrays the lyrics behind it is the song “Through Enough,” which features GoldLink, who had everyone’s third favorite song of the summer last year, “Crew.” The song is incredibly bright, with an atmosphere similar to that of house
4 post–
group Disclosure of “Latch” fame. It’s supremely danceable, or at least very head-bob-able. The lyrics tell another story. “Don’t take me ransom babe / Yeah I’ve been through enough, through enough, ah yeah,” they sing on the chorus. On the pre-chorus, they hit us with more personal and affecting lines: “Ooh my heart ain’t making it through / Another break it’s been loose / I’ve got to set the rules / Before you coming at me.” It’s a plea for control and restraint in a song where letting loose is actively encouraged in the music. GoldLink helps to grease the song along with some on-brand bars about “D.C. summers” (it’s not a GoldLink song unless the District is mentioned). It’s a really exceptional track and definitely a favorite of mine on the track list. The sound VanJess is crafting has two main pillars: ’90s R&B like Zhane, SWV, and Mary J. Blige, as well as present-day SoundCloud producers who use these ’90s influences to create new, sleek soundscapes. On paper, this sounds seamless, but VanJess isn’t simply trying to make a “throwback” album. “Off My Mind” by Zhane for example, with sparse production consisting of some drums, a piano, and a bass guitar, still sounds fresh 24 years later. Similarly, VanJess asked themselves the question, “How can we make this album sound crisp now and still crisp in 25 years?” The answer lies not in the record but in the liner notes. SoundCloud is a huge place with music and reactions to that music happening constantly. The music that has made SoundCloud’s name is trap infused hip-hop—a genre where emotions are conveyed constantly and overtly. Subtlety is at a minimum at the top of the SoundCloud charts. In reaction to this, a culture of mellow rose to the surface. Producers like KAYTRANADA, IAMNOBODI, Louie Lastic, and Atu create a different setting, one where the sun sets and the twinkling lights are just coming on. With night comes fear and anxiety and grayness but at times, true freedom. These producers, all featured in some way or another on this album, create a world of varying emotions. Songs like “Touch the Floor” express the magic that happens when a connection is made through dance, and “Another Lover” bashes a soon to be ex-lover for violating her trust. These songs both exist in the same world where life is honestly lived. The sounds they have created allow for contradictions and doubt to breathe within the album. These songs don’t have to be “happy” or “sad”—they can just be. VanJess’s influences go beyond the internet. As Nigerian-Americans who have lived for extensive periods in both Nigeria and America, they convey both sides of their cultural experience on Silk Canvas. In “Control Me,” they make use of a Naija dialect and exalt the impact it has on Nigerian listeners. The music video for “Control Me” is loaded with comments congratulating the women for being able to bridge the gap between American and Nigerian music, making songs that are accessible to both sides. The song itself is par for the course on the album, meaning it’s very good, sensual, and feels like it’s both ripped from the past and a ticket to the future. The last two tracks, honestly, I don’t care too much for. The features take a little too much away, and I mean that as a compliment to the main attraction. VanJess on Silk Canvas create a real portrait that’s as complex as it is smooth. Their past as Youtube D-listers, their deep understanding of the internet and its sounds, their subtlety and their background as Nigerian-Americans—all are separate paints on the palette. Each make it onto this beautiful, soft, purple-ish canvas.
Uncertain Progress
Crazy Rich Asians from Page to Screen Written by Catherine Bai Illustrated By Ella Rosenblatt When Crazy Rich Asians came out this summer, I was determined to read the book before seeing the movie (a point of pride as a self-proclaimed booklover). A friend warned me that doing so would dampen my enjoyment of the film, and he was right—but not in the way I expected. Though I almost always believe that books are better than their movie adaptations, I still enjoy book-based films: I’m fascinated by how stories transform in their journey between mediums. For a book with as many characters and subplots as Crazy Rich Asians, I was prepared for some dramatic cuts from page to screen. The changes, however, were too detrimental, stripping away the complexities necessary for full and authentic characters—a weakness compounded by the film’s burden of being the first Hollywood movie in twenty-five years to feature a majority-Asian cast in a contemporary setting.
Watching the movie as a Chinese American, I felt a small, electric thrill every time a piece of my parents’ culture manifested on the big screen. Hearing the song “Tian Mi Mi,” playing softly in the background, felt like a voicemail from a forgotten friend. Watching the Mahjong game scene triggered a primal muscle memory, reminding me of how the large and cold tiles felt in my childhood hands. Understanding the Mandarin dialogue felt like an invitation re-extended after years of rejection. For me, these details—catering exclusively and unapologetically to a specific subset of American audience members—are the film’s biggest triumph. In a Hollywood that had the audacity to suggest reimagining the movie’s Chinese American protagonist, Rachel Chu, as white, Crazy Rich Asians is a win for mainstream Asian American representation. But despite its progressive casting (by Hollywood standards, at least), the movie has garnered controversy over its uncritical portrayal of extravagant wealth and opulence, the erasure of brown faces in its Singaporean setting, and Awkwafina’s “blaccent” in her performance as Peik Lin, Rachel’s friend from college. It’s clear that the movie was intended for an American audience: The film revolves around Rachel, its only Chinese American character, whereas the book divides its attention between characters. More importantly, while Chinese Americans make up less than two percent of the U.S. population, ethnic Chinese represent almost 75 percent of the population in
NARRATIVE Singapore. In the United States, Crazy Rich Asians champions an underrepresented group, but in Singapore, the movie would be complicit in the country’s racism towards its Malay and Indian minorities. The conversations raised by these criticisms are important; in every piece of cultural production, there is something worth interrogating. The only way for Hollywood to reconcile the issues related to Asian underrepresentation, however, is by supporting a proliferation of Asian American narratives. Asking Crazy Rich Asians (which doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a lighthearted rom-com) to provide insightful visibility for all Asians who are not crazy rich and not Chinese Singaporeans is a burden no single movie should bear, especially one that struggles with providing holistic, empathetic portrayals of its own characters to begin with. The movie’s Peik Lin (dissimilar to the book’s) gets to the heart of my biggest issue with the film: the truncation of character dimensionality as Crazy Rich Asians made its way from page to screen. Out of all the problems brought up by critics, Awkwafina’s “blaccent”—which does an alarmingly large portion of the work of characterizing Peik Lin—cannot be even partly justified by the movie’s limitations and intentions. There’s a lot to unpack about Awkwafina’s performed Blackness by a non-Black (but also non-white) American, and that unpacking requires more space and depth than the scope of this article allows. For now, though, I’ll say this: Peik Lin’s caricature sends the message that Asians (and Asian Americans) are one-dimensional characters lacking unique narratives. Awkwafina’s Peik Lin steals the show with sheer energy, yet she has no motivations, no nuance, and no inner story. Though the novel’s Peik Lin is less visible, she is inflected with a broader spectrum of emotions. She’s still the unabashed woman who, “while being filthy rich, [i]s never a snob about it,” but she is not immune to the natural vulnerabilities we endure when comparing ourselves to our peers. At one point in the novel, Peik Lin quitely acknowledges how lucky her friend is to be dating Nick Young, heir to the fortune of a powerful family clan. The envy is implicit and fleeting, its presence endears her to the reader. My greatest fear is that Crazy Rich Asians hasn’t done enough to encourage a mainstream desire for more Asian and Asian American stories. Walking out of the movie, a friend mentioned that Rachel’s character felt flat and repetitive until the majiang showdown between her and Eleanor (Nick’s mother); another friend said Astrid (Nick’s It Girl cousin) was the subject of the most boring subplot he had ever seen, a comment that both disappointed and resonated with me. Reading the book, Astrid was my favorite character: beautiful and kind, unpretentious and original, an idea existing in the imaginations of others, but also a woman struggling to find an identity that is hers alone. Her (ostensibly) cheating husband, Michael, reveals that being married to her—the daughter of one of Asia’s wealthiest families—has made him feel inferior and ornamental. In a moment met with snaps and whoops from my fellow audience members, Astrid ends the relationship (“It’s not my job to make you feel like a man”), putting on a pair of $1.2 million earrings before making her defiant exit. But, to me, this moment isn’t cause for celebration—it feels like a perversion of Astrid’s complexity. In the book, Astrid acts in ways both strong and vulnerable as she struggles to define her relationship with
LIFESTYLE
her family’s wealth, attempts to empathize with Michael, acknowledges her mistakes and thoughtlessness in their marriage, and prioritizes her son’s interests over her own emotions. However, in this applauded movie scene, she seems to, rather simplistically, embrace her extraordinary wealth as a defining aspect of her identity and use this reclamation to alienate Michael—becoming alarmingly less nuanced than the Astrid I admired in the novel. Having read the book—knowing what the adaptation could have been, recognizing the choices that were made and the choices that weren’t—I am, overall, disappointed by the movie and its portrayal of Asian and Asian American characters. I wanted Crazy Rich Asians to feature characters swathed in the kind of cultural and individual specificity that injects fictional personas with humanity, to leave the audience no choice but to feel invested in their stories. That is the great paradox of storytelling: that universality comes from a place of specificity—it’s why figurative language can be so powerful, why the details can make a story. This movie took the opposite road, paring down each individual character as if the sheer number of Asian characters could do the work of imagining Asians complexly. The rom-com genre is notorious for its predictability and reliance on character tropes, but Crazy Rich Asians deserved more. The novel deserved more. Asian Americans deserved more.
The Rat Lap
Come for Lunch Rush, Stay for Run-ins Written by liza Edwards-Levin Illustrated By Halle Krieger
My first-ever Ratty meal, I forgot how to feed myself. The dining hall’s roundabout shape confused me; after half a round, I was already lost. Meanwhile, new floormates clustered: filling booths, picking at the salad bar in search of fries. I grabbed a fistsized bowl, too small for dinner, and frantically filled it to the brim—soup, carrots, beans, raisins, seeds, something called “special chicken.” Like college itself, mastering the Ratty seemed to require a kind of adult maturity: courage, confidence, quick charm to find a good seat. And knowing what you want, how to fill your plate. I have a saying now. The Rat Lap: a full lap around the Ratty to scan for available food and tables. May include unexpected run-ins. * “How’s the Ratty?” Mom asked as we walked across campus on Family Weekend. “I don’t really eat there much,” I said. After more than a month, the Ratty still felt like a map I couldn’t read. “Oh, really?” She frowned. “Can I at least peek inside?”
We snuck in through the back and did a Rat Lap together: past the salad bar and rows of cold cuts, through the soup and bread tunnel, ending at the cereal station. There, Mom sampled Rhode Island coffee milk and crunched on a handful of Cracklin’ Oat Bran. “The Ratty is amazing,” she said. So that fall, I gave the Ratty another chance. Alongside new friends, I found my favorite Ratty meal: Seven Stars Bakery bread topped with peanut butter and apple slices. We spread homework across a rickety, wooden table but never really did it, instead swapping stories about tests, dates, and roommates. We Yelp-reviewed our lunches out loud. We walked the Ratty together—pausing to people-watch or taste-test a mysterious menu item—and together we coined the Rat Lap. Come winter, five or six of us shared daily meals, crowded into a four-seater booth if we arrived in time to claim one. On the way from class, we texted play-by-play details…The line’s so long today. THEY HAVE THE GOOD PESTO! I’m in, where are you? Some days I felt myself speed-walk, almost jog, to beat the lunch rush. Slow down, I would remind myself. It’s just the Ratty… By now I can identify my friends by their Ratty selection. Pato’s plate features the Ratty’s signature grilled chicken and a handful of saladbar pita chips. Isaac assembles a Caesar salad, then goes back for pizza. Maddie, gluten free, fills colorful to-go boxes with quinoa, protein, and the Roots and Shoots’ finest veggies. Ben meticulously peels a handful of hard-boiled eggs before tossing them with olive oil. Twenty minutes late, Oscar pours creamer into a coffee mug. For dessert, Rekha spoons her cereal without milk. Ratty food tasted better the more I ate it. I learned by imitation—to top my salad with feta and to bring a whole bottle of Sriracha to the dinner table. To eat a minimum of three courses, to always choose whole milk over skim. To grocery shop like my friend Camilla, who fills her backpack with Ratty oranges, apples, and rare avocados. I shared Rat Laps with strangers too. One day at lunch, I stood alongside a few others waiting for the peanut butter to be refilled. We stared at the overhead clock in silence until one guy pointed at the empty jars. “You guys here for the natural peanut butter?” he asked like he already knew. “Mm-hm,” I nodded. Someone else chimed in: “I always wait for the natural.” Another night, I spooned tofu-tempeh stirfry onto my plate—cherry-picking the tempeh and avoiding the tofu. “Are you actually looking for tempeh?” the guy behind me in line asked, eyebrows raised. I started to apologize for being that person— but he cut me off. “No, no it’s just funny,” he started, “because I always look for the tofu. So you’re actually doing me a huge favor.” I passed him the serving spoon, and we finished our Rat Lap together, debating tofu versus tempeh. The Ratty quieted down come summer, mostly populated by lanyard-wearing highschool students. Working on campus, I ate meals with fellow Resident Assistants, including Jeanelle—a recent Brown graduate who had been on meal plan all four years. She met her first friends over 7:30 a.m. breakfasts and pointed me to the booth where she once sat for 12 hours. As a vegan, Jeanelle’s dining hall diet is both SEPTEMBER 14, 2018 5
NARRATIVE limited and expansive. Unexpected combinations occupy her plates: Pasta mixed with hummus and marinara sauce, for instance, is garnished with raisins and cereal. But Jeanelle’s love of dining halls, like mine, isn’t really about the food. It’s something else, maybe the same thing my mom felt when she visited: a shared energy. In the same space, people notice each other. We take Rat Laps hungry—hangry even—looking for different ingredients. We try new concoctions or stick with what’s familiar. We’re all here together: hoping not to run into that one guy, fishing for tempeh, and sometimes, still not knowing what to eat. A year after that first freshman dinner, I crave the flavor of watery, smoky Ratty coffee first thing every morning. And I love my Ratty oatmeal so much—a dollop of peanut butter, extra craisins— that I try to replicate it in my kitchen at home. It just never tastes the same.
Schooled
Lessons Learned from Toddler Teachers By Naomi Kim illustrated by Molly Young "Mama! Mama! MAMA!" screams the two-yearold girl circling my legs, arms outstretched and face screwed up in the effort of crying. My hands are trembling slightly as I pull on purple gloves. I want to burst into tears like her and scream, “I AM NOT YOUR MOTHER!” But what little sanity I have left tells me that this would be unreasonable. So instead I squat down and say, desperately, to the wailing toddler, “Wait, okay? I can’t hold you right now. I have to change diapers. Your mom is going to be back, okay?” I stand back up. The two-year-old boy on the diaperchanging stand before me is content to play with his toy. For him, diaper-changing is more familiar and routine than handwashing. For me, it’s an unfamiliar and daunting challenge—made worse by the unstoppable crier at my feet. It’s only my second day of work at the daycare, one of my two part-time summer jobs. Of all the teachers here, I’m the only one who is unmarried and childless—the only one who has no idea what to do when faced with nine two-year-olds. Everything, down to the incessant wailer, would be fine if only my usual co-teacher were here. But one of her own kids has gotten sick. The substitute in her place is a girl my age and just as clueless. She, too, has never changed diapers. The unpleasant task has fallen to me. My heart is racing: is this the front of the diaper? Surely it isn’t this complicated. I can’t focus, not
with the crying toddler resolutely stuck to my side. I’ve spent all morning holding her, getting tears and spittle on my arm. She’s the biggest child in the class, and the next day, my arms are sore. I envy my peers researching bacteria in quiet, sterile labs. No diapers. No crying toddlers. No goldfish crumbs. It’s what I dream of as I wait for the toddlers to arrive in the 8:30 a.m. stillness before the storm— knowing that the chaos of the daycare day will soon begin. But as I watch the kids stringing pop beads together and crowing with laughter, I can’t help but smile. They drag the colorful rope of beads behind them on the carpet and race around the little table, pretending they’ve got a pet snake. I watch as they transform the mundane into the marvelous right before my eyes. A printout of a big yellow smiley face, taped to the floor for one of our activities, is nothing special to me, but it’s an occasion for excitement and interest for my daycare charges. A little girl with wispy white-blond hair leans forward with the breathtaking flexibility of a two-year-old and plants her hands right over the smiley face. Then, she looks up and beams at me. “Smiley face!” she announces. Then there are the moments when I’m struck by their healthy amount of indifference to what others might think. They scribble their grass red and their houses purple. They ignore the lines. They look through whichever book catches their eye without concern for whether it’s a “boys’ book” with trucks or a “girls’ book” with fairies. They babble on, even though most of it is unintelligible to me—and to everyone else. And yes, maybe it is because they don’t “know better” yet. But I can’t help but think how fearless, how free, they seem, mispronouncing words without embarrassment, putting things in their mouths,
“The show’s mix of rapid-fire, 30 Rock-style humor and the emotional resonance of Golden Age drama is beginning to wear thin.” —James Feinberg, Back in the Saddle, 9.14.17
“When ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ dropped, I became convinced that there’s a distinct part of Taylor Swift that enjoys trolling her fans.” —Joshua Lu, Character Assassination, 9.14.17
dancing without a thought for what anyone might say. I begin to think the daycare is worth it. That suffering the searing south Georgia heat on the playground is worth it. That wiping countless noses and mouths throughout the day is worth it. I’m acquiring the skill of changing diapers and steadily cultivating the virtue of patience (or trying to, anyway), but it’s interacting with the kids—learning from them—that is the true highlight of my short daycare stint. Here I am, a so-called teacher looking up to these toddlers who only come up to my knees. But it’s true. They remind me to be awake and alive. I want to be as free from self-consciousness as the toddlers are instead of hesitating every time I think I have something to say in section. I want to introduce myself with confidence to new people. And I want to emulate the toddlers’ starry-eyed outlook instead of walking from dorm to Ratty to library like a zombie lurching along. I want to be bowled over breathless by the New England foliage and by the springtime tulips on Congdon Street. (I’d also like to be super enthusiastic and excited about all my courses and assignments, but that seems like a bit of a stretch.) My daycare charges love to dance. They’ll dance to any upbeat song that plays, stopping whatever they’re doing in favor of dancing. Mostly, this dancing involves wiggling around or executing a funny sequence of hops and skips and sways. I haven’t danced in ages—actually, I have no clue how to dance, and I move with the grace of a broken robot. But I cast my awkwardness to the wind, just like they do, and take my cues from their moves. So there I am in the middle of a bunch of toddlers, as silly and unskilled as they are, as silly and unskilled as I am. It’s the greatest dance party of all time.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
NARRATIVE
HEAD OF MEDIA
Jennifer Osborne
Managing Editors
Samantha Haigood
a
Celina Sun
FEATURE
Section Editors
HEAD ILLUSTRATOR
Managing Editor
Divya Santhanam
Remy Poisson
Anita Sheih
Jasmine Ngai
Kathy Luo
COPY CHIEF
CHIEFS
Sydney Lo
Amanda Ngo
Jacob Lee
Assistant Copy
Nina Yuchi
ARTS & CULTURE
Editors
Layout Designers
Managing Editor
Mohima Sattar
Ella Rosenblatt
Josh Wartel
Sonya Bui
Yoobin Park
Pia Mileaf-Patel Section Editors Julian Towers Liza Edwards-Levin
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Section Editors
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