ART Kiara Barrow, Brad Bolman, Ben Chabanon*, Harry Choi, Lucas Cuatrecasas*, Isaac Dayno, Luke Fieweger*, David Herman*, Mattie Kahn, Julian Avery Leonard, Graham Moyer, Sarah Rosenthal, Jake Seaton, Nora Wilkinson, Yunhan Xu. BUSINESS Nelson Arnous, Hayden Betts, Jack Kleinman, Joy Lee, He Li, Sarah Rosenburg, Kristin Tsuo, Krithika Varagur, Calvin Willett. DESIGN Garrett Allen*, Julia Cohn, Connor Cook, Louise Decoppet, Simone Hasselmo, Michelle Long, Eric Macomber, Kathryn McCawley*, Kelsey Miller, Mahan Nekoui, Myagmarsuren Purev-Ochir*, Sam Richman, Jeannie Sui Wonders.
The Harvard Advocate
FEATURES Moeko Fujii, Caleb Lewis*, Olivia Munk, Sam Reynolds, Lily Scherlis*, Indiana Seresin, Kurt Slawitschka, Ezra Huang Stoller, My Ngoc To, Bailey Trela, Faye Yan Zhang.
www.theharvardadvocate.com
FICTION Emma Adler, Chris Alessandrini*, Liza Batkin, Brad Bolman, Miles Counts*, Bryan Erickson, Gina Hackett, Anna Hagen, Matt Krane, Julian Lucas, David Neustadt, Rebecca Panovka, Yen Pham, Henry Shah*, Maia Silber, Ben Sobel, Emily Wang.
EDITORIAL BOARD President Publisher Art Editor Blog Editor Business Manager Design Editors Features Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Technology Editor Hermes Pegasi Dionysi Circulation & Publicity Managers Librarian Alumni Relations Manager Communicorn
JULIAN LUCAS KEVIN HONG BRAD BOLMAN MOEKO FUJII CALVIN WILLETT SIMONE HASSELMO JEANNIE SUI WONDERS INDIANA SERESIN YEN PHAM COLTON VALENTINE JAWAD HOBALLAH JENNY GAO ISAAC DAYNO SAM REYNOLDS FAYE YAN ZHANG NELSON ARNOUS KIARA BARROW MAHAN NEKOUI MAIA SILBER KURT SLAWITSCHKA HAYDEN BETTS EZRA HUANG STOLLER
BOARD OF TRUSTEES Chairman JAMES ATLAS Chairman Emeritus LOUIS BEGLEY Vice-Chairman DOUGLAS MCINTYRE President SUSAN MORRISON Vice-President AUSTIN WILKIE and Treasurer Secretary LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER CHARLES ATKINSON PETER BROOKS EMILY CHERTOFF JOHN DESTEFANO JONATHAN GALASSI LEV GROSSMAN ANGELA MARIANI D.T. MAX CELIA MCGEE THOMAS A. STEWART JEAN STROUSE
POETRY Claire Benoit*, Robbie Eginton, Edith Enright*, Reina Gattuso, Brandan Griffin, Roxanna Haghighat, Zoë Hitzig, Kevin Hong, Alice Ju*, Ben Koerner, Matt Krane, Eli Lee, Ethan Loewi, Daniel Schwartz, Christina Teodorescu, Colton Valentine. TECHNOLOGY Luciano Arango, Brendan Bozorgmir*, Juliana Castrillon, Dan Citron, JN Fang, Zach Fogelson, Jenny Gao, Ethan Glasserman, Henry Gomory*, Jawad Hoballah, Yuqi Hou, David Hughes*, Josh Palay, Rachael Smith. *The Harvard Advocate congratulates its newest members.
The Harvard Advocate considers all submissions of art, features, fiction, and poetry anonymously. Submissions may be emailed to art@theharvardadvocate.com, features@theharvardadvocate.com, fiction@theharvardadvocate.com, or poetry@theharvardadvocate.com. Submissions may also be mailed to 21 South St., Cambridge MA 02138. All submissions should be original work that has not been previously published. If you wish to have your submission returned to you, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Questions about submissions may be directed to the individual emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com. Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continuously published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from 21 South St., Cambridge MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not necessarily those of the The Harvard Advocate. Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), and $90 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and international addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), and $110 for three years (12 issues). Rates are payable by cash or check made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase at www.theharvardadvocate.com. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2014 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.
THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 1
TABLE
OF
CONTENTS
ART 6
Game Changer
Kara Zona
10
The Beginning of a Career
Kara Zona
11
A Queue for Dispossession
Bianca Vázquez
14
Head Turn
Kara Zona
15
Visible White
Kara Zona
18
Le premier matin du monde
Jérôme Karsenti
19
Le premier matin du monde 1
Jérôme Karsenti
FEATURES 7
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
25
Portraits of Mao
30
Notes on Nonsense
LL 2014
Olivia Munk Faye Yan Zhang
Indiana Seresin
FICTION Prester John Shugut
Brad Bolman
5
Aria Bendix
16
POETRY Nearsight
ZoĂŤ Hitzig
12
Discoloration
Matt Krane
24
Adiabatic
Matt Krane
29
THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 3
illustrations by yunhan xu, myagmarsuren purev-ochir, kathryn mccawley, and jeannie sui wonders.
4
FALL 2014
Prester John BRAD BOLMAN
He’s got utilization behavior problems, see, and so it’s no surprise to me that Garney is gonna fondle some sweet girl eventually. He’s done it before, even, so it’s not unexpected and far as I know there’s no resolving a mental situation like his, so sometimes he’s gonna automatically fix a spoke with tools no stopping and sometimes he’s gonna fondle a set of breasts and the fallout of the latter situation is where I come in with the mediation business. The former just ends up with useful hands, a fixed spoke and no need for mediation, so seems clear which of them I’d prefer. As they vow. Broader problem is we’ve got food enough for centuries and a pile of these red things look somewhat like rubies but aren’t rubies sitting near my back room but I preside over a city of slobjools and hoggers and far as I’m aware the others aren’t ever going to find me. Ils n’arrivent pas, as it goes. I practice French sometimes on micro-Nathan but he doesn’t speak French and I just tell him it’s the word of THE LORD even though clearly it’s not the word of THE LORD just French. He knows even less about the word of THE LORD than he does THE LORD himself but appreciates a biteen of theatricality so it suits everyone, me with the revelating and he the idiot guffawing. Waited quite a few years in this place. They don’t put much thought into maps or even really spatial organization given the houses all open outwards and the trees aren’t brown, so I wouldn’t begin to know where we are save some part of the big orb. Least the drinks are nice enough and we get a good perspective on the sun. Originally there was quite a bit of hope about the search mission, and I even had the subjects fired up about the prospects of getting refound but now they’ve got heavy cases of refound fatigue and I don’t blame them much. This one time we mistook some animal-types cross the grass dunes for horseback-men and macro-Albert came close to soiling his new robes. These days he wouldn’t change for the magi themselves. Not sure I would either, all things said, though they never will be. I’ll be the first to tell you I wouldn’t have chosen being a king. I was more of a fiddler and I preferred the word bricoleur even more but I’m not much of either now and must admit I fit most parts of the definition of “king.” As they vow. Tomorrow evening is the big fallspring gala, and the local customs and celebrations will be on full display. Rhinoceros petting might have to end with sunup unfortunately given the influx of chalky saplings. All in all the subjects enjoy themselves, and the one who got fondled is claimed to be an excellent dancer by a wide set of sources. Hopefully we avoid excess brouhaha this week and the mediation keeps tension low. Gossip is good around here, tends to make for a laugh or two, but that’s really all there is. Repeat the good phrases and skip the difficult to pronounce ones. Gossip is good around here, tends to make for a laugh or two, but that’s really all there is and will be.
THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 5
Kara Zona Game Changer Mustek Flatbed Scanner 17 x 11 in
6
FALL 2014
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors OLIVIA MUNK
There is an urban legend commonly whispered among schoolchildren in southeast Queens, New York City, that goes like this: A high school girl has been babysitting for some kids in her neighborhood. (In local retellings, it’s usually Bayside, Glen Oaks, or Bellerose.) One day, she’s putting the kids to bed and sees a life-size clown statue in the corner of the room. She inspects it and concludes it’s just a recent, unpleasant addition to the nursery. Satisfied that her charges are safely asleep in their beds, she heads to the den and flips on the TV. A news channel announces: Escaped Mental Patient On The Loose from Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, Believed To Be Dressed As Clown. The rest of the story is prone to variation. Tamer versions have the hapless babysitter call the parents and the police, who remove the deranged clown to a padded enclosure where he is never again to be seen. Others recall the clown hacking the unsuspecting babysitter and sleeping kiddies to bits. In these accounts, the clown remains at large to this day. The children who pass along this story do so on ragged scraps of paper, in hissed, stolen gossip. Each weekday, they are trundled by tired parents or aged buses along a winding path framed by massive buildings on either side. To reach the two regional middle schools and single district high school in a cul-de-sac at the road’s end, a driver must take its passengers past older structures, decrepit ones with bars on their windows. Barricaded abodes squeeze and shadow the road, un-
til the vehicle finally emerges into a courtyard of tasteful stucco and slate playgrounds. The schools glimmer in the morning sun, as precious offspring are placed safely in the hands of their teachers. A snake of SUVs and hybrid sedans creep away from campus and directly onto the tree-lined Long Island Expressway. The brand-new grounds are a welcome substitute for the older local schools, all in desperate need of funding. It’s a shame they were built behind a cluster of mental hospitals. * Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, established by the Lunacy Commission of New York State, took up residence in Queens in 1912. The name of the outpost, a portmanteau of Creed’s Moor, is a lasting jeer at the previous owners; the large plot of land on which the Center was built was originally billed as a farm, though moors are notoriously useless for producing crops. The state-owned plot, purchased from the Creed family in 1870, was first lent to the National Rifle Association and National Guard as a firing range. Situated in a far-flung corner of the borough, its activity only irritated some livestock and their owners. The first hospital building took in 32 patients and quintupled its population in six years. When it ran out of beds, patients slept in abandoned barracks left on the property. An onslaught of development in the mid-20th century sought to catch Queens up to its shinier THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 7
siblings, Manhattan and Brooklyn. Farmlands like the Creeds’ were destroyed in favor of housing developments and strip malls. Commuters took up residence from the head to the tail of Long Island, a land mass whittled by the Atlantic to resemble a Florida-bound flounder. Creedmoor continued to establish outposts along the island as if punctuating its shape, defining the vertebrae of the fish’s spine. The number of admitted patients to the Center swelled to over 7,000 by the 1950s, filling over 50 massive, dingy yellow outposts to capacity. Along with the purchase of the moor, the state bought one of the few neighboring farms that had been left undeveloped. Working on the farm became a component of treatment for the patients. The labor was thought to be therapeutic, budgets were tight, and the number of mouths to feed kept rising. Felons deemed too insane for prison were sent to the most secluded regions of the vast premises. In a dark basement, Dr. Lauretta Bender would place a soothing hand on the head of a trembling child, and turn it to the left or the right. A schizophrenic child, she believed, would yield to her touch; a normal child would turn away. Those deemed psychotic by her diagnostic tests would be administered the fruits of her most recent labors, the newly experimental electroconvulsive shock therapy. The advent of antipsychotic drugs like thorazine allowed many patients to return to the world beyond the bars of the windows. Some went on to lead normal, happy lives, adding daily pills to their habitual, all-American nine-to-fives. Many went back behind bars, greeted this time by cold prison floors. Others tried the former, served a stint in the latter, and ended up huddling for warmth beneath layers of clothing on the city streets. * My father grew up in the house we live in now, three blocks and a long, uphill walk from the Creedmoor site. He remembers a different Bellerose, one where he and his friends were forbidden to play around the mental hospital and farm by worried parents. But the pristine rolling lawns of the grounds were too tempting; the neighborhood boys often took to the hills with their wooden toboggans after a particularly en-
8
FALL 2014
ticing snowfall. When we drive past a certain exit on the Long Island Expressway, my father sometimes waves a finger over the passenger seat at some overpasses and trees, saying, “In my day, this was all Creedmoor.” The administration of antipsychotic medication, an outpatient treatment that did not require 50 buildings’ worth of beds, caused the patient population at Creedmoor to dwindle from 7,000 to 500. Today, only a few active buildings remain, relics of an empire for patients who require something more than pharmaceutical care. Purged of its reluctant participants, the farm became a public park in 1975. With too little money to fill it or even demolish it, one of the Creedmoor outposts—referred to as Building 25—was left abandoned for 40 years. Amateur photographers who delight in grotesque, abandoned locations have published pictures of its interior. Multicolored pigeon droppings form stalactite formations that coat the walls and ceilings; wallpaper and paint peel back to free the asbestos beneath; a collection of rusted cash machines and typewriters, already outdated when they were left behind, rust by a broken window. But you would never know Building 25’s interior decay from the outside. Its façade, better-kept than those of many still-active facilities, bears no mark of the deterioriation within. I attended one of the intermediate schools constructed behind Creedmoor. My mother says she never truly got used to the dismal morning drive to deposit me behind a mental institution for eight hours a day. My father worked as a clinical psychologist, performing evaluations of at-risk students in public schools and overseeing outpatient treatment at a clinic in Staten Island. He had a long commute from our home in Bellerose to the clinic each morning that required him to leave while I was still eating breakfast in my pajamas. One day in eighth grade, I came downstairs to eat and noticed that he, too, was in his pajamas. He was going, he informed me, to a conference at a new clinic for children that Creedmoor had built in a lot right next to my school’s campus— today, we could walk to our respective day jobs together. I passed that lot every day on my way home from school, but I had never noticed that the perpetual construction had come to an end. I was stunned to learn that there was something new being created for an institution that had seemed so static and quiet beside three schools of
screaming children. He came home that day to report that the new facilities were beautiful and modern, worthy of comparison to the brand new schools that now mark the campus. After the creation of the new center, I always wondered why my father didn’t transfer jobs to work closer to home, but deeper down I knew that his work in outreach was more important to him than it was to cultivate a new career to avoid a commute. Some evenings, when he and my mother locked the office door, I knew he was telling her horror stories from work: parents abusing their children and children abusing their parents. And these were the patients deemed well enough for outpatient treatment, leaving my mother to wonder about the condition of those who remained in the facilities next door to the school. Only once in my three years on campus did I ever see someone emerge from the remaining Creedmoor buildings. We had just been released for recess. In the distance, I noticed a slow row of people emerge from a Creedmoor side entrance. They milled around the enclosed playground, some stalking the perimeter, others half-heartedly tossing a basketball. I thought of all the times kids in my middle school would ask each other if they were “in the wrong building,” a joke I now understood as a cruel jab at the actual sick people who were our neighbors. I stood paralyzed
by this realization. A few minutes later, a guard rounded the Creedmoor patients back into a line. Our lunch aide blew the whistle, signaling the daily headcount and the dreaded return to math class. The inmates returned to their respective institutions. * On January 28, 2014, Raymond Morillo escaped from Creedmoor during a psychological evaluation. Though he had recently maxed out his 1998 sentences for slashing and manslaughter, authorities deemed the 33-year-old too dangerous for the city streets and sought to place him behind a new set of bars. Around 11:30 a.m., Morillo quietly exchanged clothes with an insider friend and strolled off of the premises. The hospital did its best to hush up the breach, and my mother only found out a week later in a community newsletter: Garage Sale, Church Fair, Escaped Convict. By this point, Morillo had been caught boarding a Greyhound bus outside Memphis, Tennessee, one step away from anonymous freedom out West. I have not been back to my middle school for several years, but I can already hear the phony, prepubescent chatter: Those in the know can guarantee that Morillo evaded capture by donning a clown suit.
THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 9
Kara Zona The Beginning of a Career Mustek Flatbed Scanner 190 x 300 cm
10 FALL 2014
Bianca Vรกzquez A Queue for Dispossession 35mm reversal film
THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 11
Nearsight ZOË HITZIG
It is with his mirror he reconstructs the passage of time. The warden walks from the north wall to the south one time every hour. Cannot hear his approach—too loud with the flushing, the slamming echoes of the two—but can see it in mirrors if held here like this yes, only if you are outside can you look in, only with a mirror can you look out. The forcing of myopia through the frosting of glass windows. It is with his mirror he waits, thinks, “is there such a thing as normal when I am a person, people have teeth, and I am not entitled to them?” Just wants teeth to not hiss when speaks, so can be heard, understood. They say you will die anyway, what need you teeth for—to atone, to whet a blade for carving? It is with his mirror he shows a creation: thirty-two gamepieces, and a board. Carved of soap, dyed with pen. It is with his mirror he counts backwards, inducts backwards, comes to the chill
12 FALL 2014
that comes of it. It is with his mirror he sees a nick and blood. Cut himself shaving because the present
is closer to him than he could see is closer to him than to anyone else I know. It absorbs him as a blanket facing wind. There is no wind here nor any toy or string to wind, find wound. But there is a wound where the selves in mirror are closer than they appear.
THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 13
Kara Zona Head Turn Mustek Flatbed Scanner 17 x 11 in
14 FALL 2014
Kara Zona Visible White Mustek Flatbed Scanner 17 x 11 in
THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 15
Shugut ARIA BENDIX
The day the package arrived, the boys ran into the common room, pushing and shoving like animals at a watering hole. The House Mother had to fend them off as she cut through the thick cardboard box to expose the glittering gifts inside. The instant she was finished, they began to swarm the box, eager to select the nicest gift from the bunch. Each boy was allowed to take a single gift, and each was determined to make it a good one. Jaseyn stood on the outskirts of the mob, his tiny head attempting to peer through the mass of bodies for a glimpse of the package and its contents. Just as soon as they had come, the children issued in a mass exodus from the room, their carefully selected items clutched firmly in hand. The remaining box was almost in shreds, empty but for a small, brightly-colored paper hat. Jaseyn looked around at the decaying orphanage, examining the low, wood-beam ceilings, patched together with pieces of palm leaf, and the cracks forming at the base of the walls. Their soft beige color had turned a muddy brown, and were it not for the vibrant green of the bamboo plants tucked in the corner, or the faded maroon of the boys’ mats on the floor, the room would have been a desolate sea of this putrid color. That is, until the hat arrived. Shifting his focus back to the floor, Jaseyn picked up the hat, admiring the glaring yellow writing on the front and running his fingers across the soft white string that hung below. Jaseyn was four years old, the youngest of the boys. On the day of his arrival at the orphanage, he had broken custom by looking a nine-year-old named Akra in the eye. Ever since, the group had called him shugut, or stupid, whenever he passed, hissing when he got too close. They knew his story, for they had watched as Jaseyn’s mother dropped him off at the orphanage exactly one year ago. “Go play with the other boys for a minute,” she had said from the doorway, the rain forming a cloud of mist around her silhouette. Jaseyn obeyed, forgetting to remove his muddied boots. The boys crowded around him just as they had the package earlier that day. Akra was the first to speak. “Look at the dirt on his shoes,” he said. “Do you come from filth, or just decide to wear it?” “I do not come from filth,” said Jaseyn. As soon as he said it, he remembered to put his head down, but it was too late. From behind a wooden pillar near the entrance, Jaseyn’s mother was speaking with the House Mother in hushed tones. She turned to look at the group of boys encircling her son, their faces dripping with disdain. Jaseyn stood, petrified, in the center, looking smaller than ever before. She winced at the sight, but turned her head to look away. For a few moments, his mother stood there, her body shaking. Eventually, however, she regained composure and, careful not to make a sound, slowly crept out of the building. The eldest boy, Narith, was the only one to witness her departure. “Look, your mother’s leaving you!” Jaseyn jumped at the sound of his voice, but did not move from where he stood. “No she’s not,” he said, careful this time to keep his eyes on the floor. Jaseyn knew the truth, but he refused to watch her go. The boys often referred to this moment when they harassed him. Not only was he shugut, he was a motherless bastard whose own family had been so ashamed of him that they abandoned him once and for all. “I saw your mother the day she left you,” Narith would say. “She wouldn’t even look at you. She just turned around and walked away.” “I’ll bet she was glad to get rid of you,” said another. “No one wants a fool with mud-stained shoes for a son.”
16 FALL 2014
*** Over time, Jaseyn became used to the taunting, but this new gift changed things. When the boys saw it, he thought, perhaps they would decide to leave him alone. It was, after all, sure to be the best gift in the bunch. Careful not to break the string or crumple the paper, Jaseyn delicately placed the hat atop his head. He wished he could see the way it would look to the others—the vivid colors nestled into his thick brown hair, the yellow writing glistening whenever he happened to pass through a stream of light. It would be an impressive spectacle. The House Mother, who had left to avoid the mob of screaming boys, appeared in the room once more to collect the scraps of cardboard left behind. She was a large woman with large feet that stuck out underneath her clothing. Unlike most, she wore her krama around her neck so that it cascaded diagonally across her thick frame, as though to swaddle an infant. She was a dispassionate woman, hardened by years of caring for children who were not her own in the midst of a war-torn nation. Even still, she was not entirely blind to her surroundings, and could tell from the beginning that Jaseyn did not fit in with the other boys. As she watched him standing there alone, examining the hat, she took pity on him. “Your hat is beautiful, little one,” she said. “Do you know what it says?” Jaseyn shook his head. “It says ‘Happy Birthday’ in English. Do you know what a birthday is, Jaseyn?” He shook his head once more. “A birthday celebrates the day you were born, and it only happens once a year, so it’s a special day just for you.” Just for you. The words intensified in his mind. This was indeed the best gift of them all, something special, just for him, something that none of the boys could share. He imagined their faces when they saw the hat, how exotic it would look and how envious they would be when they learned what the writing meant. But when the boys returned to the room an hour later, they erupted in laughter. “What the hell is that on your head, shugut?” Narith asked him. “It’s a birthday hat,” Jaseyn said. He ignored their laughter. In a minute, he thought, their expressions will change. “What’s a birthday?” one of the boys asked. Jaseyn explained that it was a holiday celebrating your day of birth. The words “Happy Birthday” were a way of congratulating someone on their special day. The House Mother had told him so. “How does she know what the words mean?” Narith asked. “She probably made that up to make you look like the fool that you are.” “You’re probably walking around with a hat that says shugut in English,” said another, causing the boys to burst into laughter. Jaseyn put his head down, this time not to avoid eye contact, but to prevent the other boys from noticing the stream of tears cascading down his face. It was no use. “Look, he’s crying,” said one of the boys. “Maybe the hat has some magical power that turns you into a woman.” “Look, shugut,” said Narith. “We can’t have a woman hanging around us. We must take that hat off right away.” He snatched the birthday hat off Jaseyn’s head, causing the string to snap in half, and Jaseyn’s patience along with it. He lunged at Narith, but he had already stepped backward. Jaseyn fell to the floor. Birthday hat in hand, the other boys sprinted away. Jaseyn did not know what exactly propelled him to chase after them. It was just a hat, a hat that had only been in his possession a short while. But something inside him believed in its mystical nature. For that brief moment, the hat had made him feel invincible, like nothing had ever made him feel before, and he would do everything in his power to hold on to that feeling for as long as possible. Lifting himself up off the floor, Jaseyn began running as fast as his little sticks for legs could carry him. He ran through the doorway and out into the courtyard, a large expanse of dirt extending all the way to the forest up ahead. Jaseyn could see the herd of boys heading toward the dense foliage, laughing and tossing the hat back and forth. When they spotted Jaseyn chasing after them, they continued to taunt him with their laughter.
THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 17
J茅r么me Karsenti Le premier matin du monde Silicon carbide ink on canvas 190 x 300 cm
18 FALL 2014
J茅r么me Karsenti Le premier matin du monde 1 Silicon carbide ink on canvas 190 x 340 cm
THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 19
“He’s on our tail! Run faster!” one of them said, but somehow they made sure to run just slow enough so that Jaseyn was never out of sight. After reaching the heart of the forest, the boys stopped and formed a blockade, so that Jaseyn nearly ran into them when he finally caught up. The mangrove trees loomed, forming an emerald cloud so thick it hid the sky from view. Narith stood in the front of the pack, the birthday hat dangling from his right hand. “Catch,” he said as he threw the hat to one of the boys. “Stop it!” Jaseyn said, taken aback by the sheer aggression in his voice. Narith motioned for the boys to stop, a smile inching its way across his face. “Shugut says to stop,” he said. “Well, maybe he’d like to be thrown about instead.” A group of three boys approached Jaseyn and hoisted him into the air. “Wait,” said Narith. “There’s something missing.” He grabbed the birthday hat and placed it atop Jaseyn’s head. “There.” The boys split into three groups, throwing Jaseyn back and forth between them. At first, the shock of it so overwhelmed him that he did not realize the pain. But soon, he began to feel the boys’ sharp nails puncturing his skin. Jaseyn cried out, powerless against the forces propelling him as he collided with each new set of hands. With every impact, his body grew limp, until he could no longer sense the sting of collision. When they grew tired of throwing him, the boys flung Jaseyn to the ground, a rag doll left to rot on the forest floor. Although his mind was racing, Jaseyn could barely feel his body, save for the shooting pains in his arms and legs. He lay there for hours, the dirt soaking into his open wounds, until finally regaining the strength to stand. Raindrops were seeping through the gaps in the leaves, pelting his body as they fell. Jaseyn looked around at the surrounding abyss of emerald, unable to find a way out. He turned his eyes to the forest floor, where he spotted a patch of brilliant multicolor near the base of a tree. Blinking twice to focus his vision, Jaseyn watched as the birthday hat came into view. It was covered in mud, and had been crumpled and torn from the altercation, but nevertheless remained intact, its bright yellow letters still projecting a slight glow in the middle of overwhelming obscurity. Jaseyn limped over to where the hat lay, and slowly bent down to pick it up and place it on his head. In the midst of it all, a dazed smile overcame him, for he knew that in spite of that day’s violent occurrences, it had ended with him in possession of the hat once more. Adorned with his beloved gift, Jaseyn resolved to navigate the forest alone. He could tell that it was nighttime by the chill of the breeze and the fact that the rain had picked up speed. Jaseyn wondered whether the House Mother would worry that he had not returned, but she rarely checked to make sure each boy was present. To her they were all the same. It took all Jaseyn’s strength to lift one foot after another and propel himself forward. As his bare feet made contact with the damp and muddied ground, he thought he felt something slither underneath them. Taking a painful step back, Jaseyn realized it was simply a moss-covered branch. He remembered hearing once that stomping warded away cobras, but the stomping motion proved too much for his weak frame to handle. Even so, Jaseyn was not afraid. The hat would protect him. And so he made his way through the forest until at last he saw an opening in the trees that gave way to the light of the morning. With every step, the light grew closer until, after what seemed like hours, Jaseyn emerged from the forest, the orphanage in plain sight up ahead. *** For the next few weeks, Jaseyn refused to remove the birthday hat, despite the House Mother’s plea that it had grown too dirty for wear. Since the string had been severed, the hat constantly fell from his head. Each time, Jaseyn picked it up and replaced it, careful not to squish it down too hard or widen any of its tears. It had become a signal to the other boys that he could not only withstand their torture, but remain unshaken by whatever violence they hurled. The boys, in turn, never mentioned the hat again. The truth was, they were impressed by Jaseyn’s resolve. Jaseyn knew what their silence meant, and even though they still called him shugut and hissed at him when he walked by, their insults now had a little less bite.
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Three months after the incident, the House Mother informed the boys that a couple was scheduled to visit the orphanage the following day. “They are from America,” she said, adjusting the krama on her hip, “so they might look a little different from you, but you needn’t be scared.” This was not the first time that foreigners had visited the orphanage. The older boys knew what was at stake. The couple would sit with the boys, laughing and smiling, talking in a language they didn’t understand. After the couple left, one boy would receive a gift, often accompanied by a photo. Over the next few months, the gifts would continue until, finally, the couple would come back to the orphanage to take him home. Unlike the other boys, Jaseyn was too young to know what was going on, and the idea of strangers in his home frightened him. He knew that Americans were responsible for the package that contained his birthday hat, and wondered if this couple had come to retrieve their gifts. The thought of losing his hat was more than Jaseyn could bear. That night, Jaseyn dreamt that he was lying on the forest floor, his lifeless body covered with bruises and scars, attempting to will his body to move. In a daze, he glanced up at the treetops above him to find Narith and the rest of the boys nestled in the mangroves, cackling at him and swinging from branches. In a second, they were gone, and Jaseyn saw his mother standing over him, the precious birthday hat in her hand. “Here you go, son,” she said, offering it to him. Her expression was vacant, and her eyes were cold. Jaseyn tried to lift his arm and reach for the hat, for his mother, he didn’t know which one, but he could not summon the strength. With every contraction of his muscles, every tightening of his body, Jaseyn witnessed his mother getting farther and farther away, until the hat in her hand became a small blur of color. Jaseyn cried out, begging for her to wait, assuring her that he would be able to stand soon, but she simply turned her head and faded out of vision. *** The following morning, the House Mother informed all the boys that the American couple had arrived. Jaseyn was overcome by his vision from the night before. The boys’ laughter still rang in his ears, and his mother’s empty expression was emblazoned in his memory. He knew now that he could not trust anyone, especially not a couple he had never met. Jaseyn resolved to hide, lest they force him to surrender his only prized possession. When the House Mother officially summoned them all to the common room, every boy put on his best behavior, taking care to walk calmly and politely into the room rather than push and shove as usual. When he thought no one was looking, Jaseyn slipped away from the pack and hid behind a bamboo plant in the corner of the room. The boys saw him run and hide, and they smiled to one another, as if to say, “Look at shugut, living up to his name once again.” *** From behind the bamboo plant, Jaseyn watched as the couple, a slightly older man with brown hair and a pair of thin-rimmed spectacles, and a woman of the same age, her blonde hair tinged with gray and pulled into a tight knot at the nape of her neck, laughed and interacted with the children. Of all the boys, they seemed to pay special attention to Narith, who was the first to accept their offer to play with the small colored blocks they had brought along with them. As always, Narith stood out among the pack, maintaining a constant level of enthusiasm during each new game. When the visit began to wind down, the couple patted each of the children on the head, the woman stopping to plant a small kiss on Narith’s, and made their way to the doorway. Before their departure, the House Master asked the boys to thank the couple for their time. “Awkunh!” they all said in unison, the brightest of smiles on their faces. The woman smiled back. She motioned to her husband, and pointed in the direction of the bamboo plant. Everyone in the room turned to where Jaseyn was hiding, the now-faded colors of his birthday hat still visible from behind the leaves. The woman walked toward the corner of the room, and found Jaseyn
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crouched in the fetal position, his knees shaking. “What’s his name?” the woman asked the House Mother. “Jaseyn,” she said. “Shy little boy. Never goes anywhere without that hat.” The woman and her husband examined the hat, eventually making out the words “Happy Birthday.” They exchanged glances. “I wish every day was my birthday too,” the woman said, and they laughed. *** Weeks passed, and the boys taunted Jaseyn relentlessly. “You really blew it, shugut,” Narith said one day. “Those are the type of people that give you a home, and you made yourself look like a common fool. They were mocking you, shugut, didn’t you notice?” “No,” Jaseyn said. “I didn’t.” The other boys laughed and hissed. Jaseyn tried once again to avoid eye contact by putting his head down, but every time he did, his hat fell to the floor, the string no longer present to hold it in place. This caused the boys to laugh even more, but still they kept their distance from Jaseyn and the hat, never venturing to touch either. The following day, a package arrived again at the orphanage and was met with much the same reaction as before. All of the boys crowded around to see what was inside, elbowing one another to get in front. The House Mother opened it in a similar fashion, but this time pulled out a small gift wrapped in multicolored paper. Attached to the gift was a card with a name written on it in English. “What does it say?” the boys asked her. “It says ‘Jaseyn’.” At these words, the crowd shifted so that Jaseyn was surrounded on both sides. As he walked toward where the House Mother resided, Jaseyn could sense without looking that all eyes rested on him. When he eventually arrived in front of her, the House Mother handed him the card, which he opened slowly, careful not to crinkle or rip the paper. Inside was a note written in English, and a picture of the couple that had visited those few weeks ago. The rest of the boys gasped, and even Narith hung his head. Jaseyn, on the other hand, wondered to himself why on earth this couple had sent him their picture, let alone a card with words written in a language he did not know. “What about the gift?” the House Mother asked, nudging Jaseyn, curious herself as to its contents. He proceeded to retrieve the box from her hands. Once more, Jaseyn was careful in opening it, removing each piece of tape individually and delicately loosening each fold. His work was done, and he opened the box to find a hat nearly identical to his own sitting squarely in the center. This one was brand new, so it still had a glossy sheen, and its string was intact. “Put it on,” said the other boys in unison, but Jaseyn merely stood there in silence. Right away, he was drawn to the beauty of this new hat, its clean, crisp writing, the way the colors seemed to glisten in three-dimensions, but he remembered what had happened the last time a hat had arrived. He thought about the torturous night in the forest, the couple coming to take away his precious gift, and he knew what he had to do. Resisting temptation, Jaseyn threw the hat to the floor, turned around, and walked away. The boys looked at one another in confusion. Some moments later, Narith finally spoke. “He is a fool, that shugut.” As he left the room, however, Jaseyn thought to himself what a wonderful decision he had made. He couldn’t, after all, afford to start over again.
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Discoloration
after “Landscape with a Stone Bridge” MATT KRANE
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as if eaten away beyond the storm
the shroud lifts menacing brush
a canvas corner strokes against realism
overwhelmingly searing colors
here a guest the season ends
appearance of blood that swan in the sky
beating back clouds fixed by light
pulled out of sight uncharacteristic
a pupil’s bridges turning in wind
cleaning wounds stroke deeply & clear
in water, silhouettes (tears, shriek, hush)
raise their oars a thick cocktail
eddy of dark water today with cancer
uncomposed it doesn’t affect you
scans came back you unravel
Portraits of Mao FAYE YAN ZHANG
Cryogenic
There is a building somewhere in the bowels of Beijing, beneath the gimlet sky and jungle streets. It is probably not too far from Tiananmen Square, where thousands of tourists scurry under the eyes of pimpled plainclothes policemen. On even the smoggiest of Beijing days, the air inside remains cool and dry. There are probably no windows and no indication of this building’s meaning or purpose. This building holds national treasures of the People’s Republic of China, of no monetary value, yet zealously guarded: over 50 years’ worth of 15 by 20 foot canvases, all painted over in white. Each one-and-a-half-ton canvas was carted here in the dead of night, a monumental secret. To destroy one is a criminal act. If you were to scrape away the paint, a damaged but recognizable image would emerge: the face of Chairman Mao Zedong. Like a game of spot-the-difference, each portrait would seem identical—receding hair, plump cheeks, mole on the chin—save for some slight detail. In some, Mao’s face would look stern and fatherly, as if disciplining an errant child. Recent portraits would present a flushed, benevolent Mao with a Mona Lisa smile. The earliest portraits would have him donning an octagonal cap and coarse woolen jacket. All the portraits share one certainty. Starting from the first in 1950, each has hung for one year,
more or less, over the gate to Tiananmen Square in Beijing. A small handful have been assaulted by rotten fruit, black paint, and even fire. During the Tiananmen Square protests of 1984, one was pelted with three ink-filled chicken eggs. Whether it survives its year-long tenure or not, each canvas comes to the same end. It is taken down, painted over in white, and placed in storage for an imagined future, when the country might need it again.
Lifework
If the storage building is a graveyard—a cryogenic vault—then another building tucked away in a corner of the Forbidden City is a birthplace. It is called “the metal shack” by those in the know. Built in the early 1970s, the shack is fireproof and would be air-proof if not for the vents near the door. Despite its utilitarian appearance, the metal shack is an art studio. Here, Ge Xiaoguang has worked since 1976. According to rumor, the government pays Ge a salary of 250 dollars every month to lead a team of artists who paint China’s political leaders, from past heroes to modern luminaries. His main and most important job is duplicating the Tiananmen portrait of Chairman Mao, so that it may be replaced every September. Ge boasts that his nearly 40 years of practice allow him to complete the portrait in only 50 days. “It is still hard to get him right, because it is more than just another piece of art,” he says. “EvTHE HARVARD ADVOCATE 25
ery year I try to make the painting better. This has been and will always be my most important creation.” The official No. 4 Standard Photograph of Mao Zedong, owned by the state-operated New China News Agency, is Ge’s blueprint. He makes a few modifications. The official photograph is monochrome, so Ge remakes Mao in ruddy technicolor, aglow with a hearty red blush. Ge analyzes the portrait’s pose meticulously. If Chairman Mao were to face straight forward, the portrait would lack dynamism and depth. So Ge turns Mao’s face slightly to the side. Not too far, however, for both ears must always remain visible. One of Ge’s predecessors was banished to a rural district to work as a carpenter, his punishment for painting only one visible ear. Authorities thought the arrangement might imply that the Chairman was but halfhearted in his attention to the voice of the people. Nor were their fears entirely unfounded. Reports circulated of a visiting schoolboy, who pointed at the Tiananmen portrait and shouted, “Look! Chairman Mao has no ear!” Some days, Ge ventures forth from the metal shack and into Tiananmen Square. He stands on a scaffold and works directly on the currently displayed portrait. Its giant size makes it impossible to take in at a close quarters, constantly compelling him to descend from the scaffold to view it from a hundred feet away. While he perches on the scaffold, Ge sweeps the painting with a fan brush to produce an airbrushed quality. Mao’s face glows jovially through the canvas.
Workshop
Ge was once a protégé. Now he’s the only one of his kind. Once, dozens of Beijing art students studied the art of Mao portraiture. His image was in constant demand. It hung in schools, workplaces, and factories. It was pasted onto banners, buttons, and badges. From the years 1964–1976, Wang Guodong—a recluse who gave no interviews, and of whom no public photographs exist—was the only official painter of Chairman Mao. In his youth, Wang had been the errant painter who gave Mao only one ear. Banished by the Red Guard to a remote framing factory, he was forced to construct picture frames. But after two years in exile, Wang reclaimed his official title and kept it for two more
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decades. In 1975 government authorities, perhaps anticipating Wang’s approaching old age, demanded that he take on apprentices. Wang selected ten Beijing art students—including a 21-year-old Ge Xiaoguang—more for their political reliability than their artistic talent. From the moment of their selection onward, they studied only political portraiture: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and most of all, Mao. Even with such bounds on their creativity, disparities in talent emerged. Some, like Ge, excelled. Others, it seemed, would never be able to capture Mao’s spirit. Their color palette was too yellow and sickly or their brushstrokes too crude. Despite the apprentices’ varying levels of aptitude, orders poured in from all over the country. Factory-style, the apprentices painted non-stop. Their sentiment was not creative. They viewed themselves as art workers, rather than artists. Like interchangeable parts, not a single portrait from Wang’s factory was ever signed with a name. By the 1980s, as China entered its great economic revolution, the demand for Mao’s image had waned. Bicycles gave way to cars, caps gave way to blue jeans, little red books were cast aside for chat rooms. Mao’s face fell out of fashion as brand name logos became de rigueur. Excepting Ge Xiaoguang, Wang’s apprentices turned elsewhere. The hand-drawn boldness of their propaganda style translated well to the world of advertising. Instead of replicating Mao, they drew movie posters, cosmetics labels, commercials, magazines. By the time Mao portraits had become passé, Wang Guodong had already retired. He relinquished his brush in 1976, the year of Mao Zedong’s death, for the first time (even through his years at the framing factory, Wang had gone on painting). In 1976, for the first and only time in history, a black-and-white photograph replaced the technicolored portrait over Tiananmen, in an expression of mourning.
Chopping Block
In June 2006, online chat rooms across China exploded over the alleged mistreatment of a faded, gray, gilt-framed 1950 portrait of Mao. The painting, an early model for the larger one in Tiananmen, had long been kept under wraps by its owner, an anonymous Chinese-American collec-
tor. In June, the state-controlled Huachen Auction Company announced the painting would go up at a Beijing auction for an estimated 120,000 dollars. “How dare they do such a thing,” wrote one user online. “If they sold Mao’s portrait today, they will auction off Tiananmen Square tomorrow!” Huachen Auction Company refused to comment, but quietly withdrew the portrait. At a 2014 Sotheby’s auction, a 1977 portrait of Mao by Andy Warhol sold for about 12 million dollars—18 times the price it fetched when it was last up for auction in June 2000. The painting shows Mao with a yellow sun-halo over his face, casting his eyes and left side in a deep, inky shadow. His jacket is glossed in crimson. Warhol often painted Mao: in green and blue and red, with clown makeup, or Marilyn Monroe-style. For some reason, all of Warhol’s portraits show Mao from an angle that reveals only one ear. It is unknown whether Warhol chose to imitate Wang Guodong’s failed portrait, or if Warhol fabricated his own portrait of Mao from existing images. Knowingly or not, he had depicted the Chairman as a bloody one-eared Van Gogh.
Novelty Warhol’s repetitions of Mao are far outstripped by those of Ge Xiaoguang’s former peers. In an age of computer-manufactured graphics, these political art workers’ hand-drawn skills are out of fashion yet again. So they’ve returned to their roots, creating novelty items and nostalgic propaganda. Iterations of Mao now appear on bookmarks, posters, pins, playing cards, and liquor bottles. A restaurant on the outskirts of Beijing called The East is Red goes a step further, repackaging the Cultural Revolution as a dinner theater. Giant black-and-red socialist-realist murals and stenciled portraits of Mao cover the restaurant’s walls. Waiters dressed in Red Guard costumes scamper between tables, while entertainers toting plastic rifles serenade customers with revolutionary songs like “March of the Revolutionary Youth” and “I Love Tiananmen.” Wedding parties, birthdays, and reunions crowd the massive concrete atrium. Old ladies stand and wave miniature red flags, tears in their eyes. Banquet tables groan under the weight
of dishes with translated English titles like “a peasant family is happy” (root vegetables and steamed bread), “recalls past suffering the food” (grain with sand or hard millet), and a speciality from Mao’s home province, “Hunan earth, Hunan passion” (corn cakes stuffed with wild nettle greens). Younger customers, a generation removed from the Revolution, view the restaurant as an entertainment, akin to a Tudor-themed bar in England. “People in my generation barely ever hear or read anything about the Cultural Revolution, so restaurants like this are really fun for us,” says a young patron. “Today’s China feels so cold and detached compared to the land my grandparents lived in.” For older customers, verdicts are mixed. “The first time I came here,” one says, “I was frightened. Sometimes, when everyone was singing, I felt like maybe the bad times were coming back. Maybe this could happen again. But then some songs made me so happy, too.” The performers onstage belt out rousing verses, “One after another following the party, smashing the evil of the old world! The East is red, the sun is rising, China has birthed a Mao Zedong.” As restaurants dish out Mao-era specialities, Mao’s original portraitists and newcomers continue to churn out images for companies with nostalgic names like Red Years (a playing card manufacturer) and Red Star (a hard liquor brand). On city streets, Mao impersonators of varying levels of believability (some are women) pose for photos with tourists, like the costumed superheroes of Times Square.
Posterity It is unknown whether Ge Xiaoguang will retire, whether he has selected an apprentice to succeed him, or whether he is even the real painter behind the Tiananmen Square portraits. Ge may simply be a photogenic face authorities have chosen to represent the artist, when the “real painter” is really an assemblage of dozens of interchangeable art workers. But Ge does look right when placed next to Mao’s portrait. If he is the artist, then his years of work have transformed him into a convincing double of his subject, save for the lack of a trademark mole on the chin. Ge’s receding hairline follows the same pattern, his round cheeks glow
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with the same jovial flush, his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth possess something of the portrait’s keen benevolence. Of previous official portraitists, little is left but a handful of faceless names: Zhou Lingzhao, Zhang Zhenshi, Wang Guodong. Unlike them, Ge Xiaoguang has become something of a minor Beijing celebrity. Walking the streets near Tiananmen, he is often recognized by passersby. The
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painter and the portrait have converged. A picture exists of the painter that shows him standing on his scaffold, facing the Mao portrait with his back turned to the photographer. It’s a closeup shot, and all we can see of Mao are his eyes. At close quarters, they look bittersweet. Between them stands the artist—half turned, head tilted, lifting his brush to add one more stroke.
Adiabatic MATT KRANE
down the sink : rushed water funnels after fish entrails, or grease gives a type of collapse inward, frying in a pan fennel-seasoned. An equation equates oil and flowers, fields and division. Descent is a disintegration by parts. What is missing? I want to peer down at myself from above and point out algae. How my grandfather took me to the pond for the gutting of it— one blink’s worth too much. Why isn’t there more inside? Why isn’t there more to bleed, protrude, be stripped? All these still stalks come from somewhere. Fennel was a field, was a marathon, was a death in a field under clouds of phosphate. I slice a fish sideways and grasp at the inside. Now things go quickly, death is its own mass and caves in time toward the event, and viewed from without, each second slows to a whisper never to cross over. Here. Here seem all horizons to end the same, bundled up in one ribbon tucked between the teeth and tongue.
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Notes on Nonsense INDIANA SERESIN
The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything. –Maria Montessori All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth. –Antonin Artaud Adults fundamentally misunderstand children. Few talk about it, which is odd, because the evidence is everywhere. Tune into any form of media, and you’ll learn that education is in crisis, that toys are too gendered, or that the internet has become too dangerous, while playgrounds are now too safe. Even the most essential facts about children—the level of their need for supervision, for strictness, and for stimulation—appear to be completely mysterious to the people tasked with raising them. Confronting this widespread mystification, it becomes difficult to believe that all adults were once themselves children—let alone how recently this was the case. You could argue that film and television made for children is an exception to this principle of misunderstanding. Think of the unshakeable pink joy on a child’s face as she bounds for the couch in time for Spongebob, or belts out Frozen’s theme song for the hundredth time. Yet this enthusiasm hardly proves that producers of children’s film and television have any real understanding of the minds of children. Adults buy the movie tickets, 30 FALL 2014
after all. And as anyone who’s ever seen a child go glow-eyed in front of the TV will know, they’re as entranced by adverts for cereal and vacuum cleaners as they are by cartoons. It is the screen itself that hypnotizes, not the content. This isn’t to say that all film and television made for children is primarily shaped by the tastes of adults. Universal Studios’ Despicable Me, released in 2010, is a useful illustration of where children’s movies go right. Simultaneously schmaltzy and bizarre, the film’s premise—a supervillain adopts three orphans as part of a plot to steal the moon before growing to adore them and embracing the role of fatherhood—mangles tropes in a delightfully self-aware fashion, spooling out a narrative that feels both expansive and familiar. The film grossed over 500 million dollars and spawned an Oscar-nominated sequel, plus plans for a third (to be released in 2017), as well as a 2015 spinoff devoted entirely to the invention at the crux of the films’ success: a sea of small, banana-colored, absurdist creatures called minions. A relatively minor feature of the original Despicable Me, minions have since become a cultural phenomenon. They are ubiquitous online and endlessly purchasable, not only as toys and costumes, but also as images plastered on the surface of every object a child could conceivably desire, not to speak of products that could only be of use to older people, like phone cases and adult-size shoes. (There is even, floating somewhere out there in this world, a minion blimp.) It can be dif-
ficult, once this alarmingly rapid evolution from character to brand has taken place, to recall exactly what was appealing about a given figure in the first place—think Mickey Mouse. Yet a clue to the popularity of the minions can be found, I think, in a children’s show that, at first glance, bears little similarity to Despicable Me at all. Pingu ran from 1986–2000, and chronicled the escapades of a young penguin and his igloo-dwelling family in claymation. A joint British-Swiss production, the show consisted of 156 five-minute episodes. Unlike Despicable Me, which, like most CGI blockbusters, delivers layers of meaning on multiple levels in order to appeal to viewers of all ages, Pingu’s intended audience was primarily very young children. Its episodes were designed for the shortest of attention spans. They contain not so much actual narratives as quick strings of events that blur into each other, thanks to a strikingly ‘90s overuse of the dissolve technique of scene transition. Between the vast, complex, flashy cosmos of Despicable Me and the retro, minimalist landscape of Pingu, we encounter a surprising connection: invented language. A key source of the minions’ comedic appeal is their distinctive mode of communication, which consists of a mishmash of mispronounced and seemingly random phrases of English, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese, etc. (“gelato,” “what,” “para tu”), mixed with a gibberish that echoes the intonations of real language. The characters in Pingu express themselves in a nonsensical yet melodious series of babbles, honks, squawks, mutterings, sighs, and squeaks. The minions’ language is only a small aspect of Despicable Me, one zany element in a narrative otherwise dominated by American English. Pingu, on the other hand, features no real words of any kind. Only once in the entire length of the show’s 14-year run can a coherent English phrase be heard. At the end of the Christmas Special episode, first aired on December 25, 1992, Pingu turns to the camera and honks the words “Happy Christmas!” while his plasticine beak pokes out roundly. (The result sounds a little more like “Happy Christ-moose!” implying that, like a real mother tongue, Pingu-ese leaves an indelible imprint on its native speakers.) Despicable Me and Pingu are hardly alone in their representation of nonsensical communication. Though markedly absent from American
children’s television and from movies in general, several other British kids’ TV shows also feature creatures who do not speak anything close to comprehensible English. The vaguely nightmarish Teletubbies coo and burble like toddlers making their very first grasps at language, while the more obscure, rodent-like aliens that populate the creepy and claustrophobic world of the Clangers (1969–74) communicate exclusively in haunting whistles. Teletubbies was heavily criticized for its use of babble-talk. Angsty child psychologists and parents chastised its creators for supposedly exacerbating the delay in language fluency that has been proven to result when young children are exposed to too much television. This criticism has since been refuted, though the fact remains that the Teletubbies’ sing-song gibberish might be, if not developmentally damaging, so insufferable as to cause real psychological harm. The major difference between Pingu or Despicable Me and shows like Teletubbies or The Clangers is that the penguins and minions in the former speak not gibberish but actual invented languages, however rudimentary they may be. After watching a series of Pingu episodes, you will begin to notice patterns, rhythms—even something like structural rules. “Penguinese has a complex intonation pattern,” writes Tony Thorne, Director of the Language Centre at King’s College, London. “It seems to mimic not just the language of human beings, but the sounds that animals—and birds, of course— make, too.” Key elements of the minions’ language have been explained and interpreted by enthusiastic amateurs on fan pages across the web. Universal went so far as to develop an app that humorously “translates” the minion’s speech—just one part of its menacingly extensive marketing campaign. It is this complexity that accounts for the extent of the Despicable Me trilogy’s critical success and saturation of pop culture. Yet—like the sprawling Pingu Wikia that cannot possibly have been constructed by the show’s primary viewing audience of infants—this interest in the linguistic construction of minion-speak explains the films’ appeal for adults, not children. Kids, while they might be unconsciously aware of the similarities between minion- and penguin-talk to human language, are hardly going to be delighted by analysis of these constructions’ surprising linguistic sophistication. Could this be another
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case of mistaking adult enthusiasm for real engagement with the minds of tiny viewers? Or is it possible that, while adults are drawn to the obsessive pleasure of picking apart the machinery of these constructed languages, they hold a different—and even more significant—magnetism for the minds of children? Compare, for a moment, the delightfully weird babble of the minions and Pingu family with the way English is spoken in the rest of children’s TV and cinema. Recall the deliberate slowness, patronizingly exaggerated emotion, and intense, syrupy feminization of the voice in shows such as Barney and Friends and Dora the Explorer, not to mention the limited vocabulary and extreme oversimplification of what’s actually being said. If anyone spoke like this in real life, it would be nightmarish—perhaps this is why the eerie, singsong intonation reminiscent of children’s TV has become something of a trope in horror movies. Yet we subject children to it by the mouthful. The simplified language of children’s films and television shows reflects the tamed, narrowed, decluttered version of the real world they construct. It is as true on the visual level as it is on the linguistic. Visually, Pingu has a distinctly German minimalism: a sparse white landscape set against a block-blue sky; a homogenous cast of near-identical clay penguins; a set of simple, symbol-like objects (ball, fish, skis). Despicable Me, though infinitely more expansive and varied, remains anchored in the visual archetypes of children’s narratives (orphanage, suburban street, villain’s lair) which tether it to recogniz-
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able terrain like a tent to soil. The made-up languages of Despicable Me and Pingu open these landscapes up—tearing their horizons like seams, collapsing the boundaries of their conventional narrative arcs. Once they have tapped into the immeasurable imaginative capacity of their young audiences, the possibilities of meaning and sensation within each story become limitless. The central problem—even tragedy—of children’s TV and film is that productions fail to utilize their most potent asset: the outlandish, surreal, and inconceivably vivid minds of their viewers. What makes Despicable Me and Pingu so successful is that—with the melodies of their warped and gabbled chatter— they manage to do exactly this. After we emerge into the grayscale latter stages of our lives, it becomes easy to forget how frustrating life was when we were children. A child spends her days being spoken down to, misunderstood, and ignored—being told she must follow rules “just because,” that her deepest concerns are humorous or nonsensical, and that she won’t possibly be able to understand until she’s grown. Imagine the relief of that child—legs tucked up against the black plush of the movie theatre seat or the familiar folds of her sofa—as she listens to a language that belongs not to adults but to her and to her alone. A language that is honest as music and rich as a full young heart, without boundaries or barriers keeping her out. A language that, to a child, probably sounds most like the truth.
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THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 33
SPECIAL THANKS
The Harvard Advocate is committed to publishing the most accomplished student art and writing at Harvard College. This would not be possible without the generosity of our donors, whose contributions support not only the quarterly printing of our issues, but also our broader mission to promote the arts and letters on campus. The members of the Advocate would like to express our gratitude to the poets and musicians who visited and shared their talents with us this fall. We are indebted to William Fuller, Chloe Garcia-Roberts, and Daniel Bouchard for a rich and strange evening of verse, to GOP and Earprint for their mind-bendingly good jazz, to Sam Wolk for bathing us in sound, to L.A. Jeff for reminding us that glam-rock never really died, and to the Harvard Intrinsics for catalyzing the greatest floor-pounding the Sanctum has experienced in years. A special mention is in order for Harvard’s Instant Gratification Players, whose Halloween murder mystery filled 21 South Street with an extravagance of laughter. We would also like to thank Dennis Sun, Brad Riew, Dre Cardinal, and the other members of the Harvard College Writers Workshop for collaborating with us on two wonderful writing workshops.
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Your contributions have supported the maintenance of our website (www.theharvardadvocate.com) and our blog, Notes from 21 South Street (www.theadvocateblog.net). Your support will continue to be vital as we rebuild our website, explore the narrative possibilities of digital essays, and make our magazine available on phones, tablets, and beyond. In 2016, The Harvard Advocate will celebrate its 150th Anniversary. Contributors at the highest level of support will be recognized in the special anthology which is in the works for this historic occasion.
PATRONS Office for the Arts at Harvard, Dr. Michael Coppola and Mrs. Ann Zumwalt, Joseph Hearn, Sarah Hrdy, Kun Yan BENEFACTORS Anna Sui DONORS Bruce Boucher, Odyssey, Morgan Hitzig FRIENDS Cody Carvel, Tamara Richard, Anna Roth, Millicent Younger
All gifts to The Harvard Advocate endowment fund are fully tax deductible according to 501(c)(3) non-profit donation guidelines. Gifts will be acknowledged in the four issues following receipt according to the giving categories of Patron ($1,000 and over), Benefactor ($500 and over), Donor ($200 and over), and Friend ($50 and over). For a limited time, Patrons will receive a copy of the Advocate’s Winter 2014 issue signed by Dorothea Rockburne, whose design, Focus, adorns the cover. All contributors will receive a complimentary year’s subscription to the magazine. Checks should be made out to “Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.” Envelopes may be mailed to 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. We also accept donations through our website, www.theharvardadvocate.com. Please email contact@theharvardadvocate.com with any inquiries regarding gifts to The Harvard Advocate. Thank you for supporting Mother Advocate.
THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 35
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CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTES
ARIA BENDIX IS WORKING ON HER FIRST NOVEL. SHE CURRENTLY WRITES FOR THE ONLINE MAGAZINE BUSTLE. BRAD BOLMAN WRITES. ZOË HITZIG IS FIGHTING SHY. JÉRÔME KARSENTI IS AN ARTIST FROM BERLIN. MATT KRANE WOULD RATHER BE CLIMBING. OLIVIA MUNK NEVER CLOWNS AROUND. INDIANA SERESIN’S MOTHER IS GOING TO BE THRILLED. BIANCA VÁZQUEZ SERVES STEAKS TO THE WEALTHY, TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS, AND SNEAKS INTO LECTURES AND DINNER PARTIES IN LOS ANGELES. FAYE YAN ZHANG WOULD LIKE SOME MORE SPAGHETTI SQUASH. KARA ZONA IS A NEW MEDIA ARTIST FROM 37 THE ATLANTA, HARVARD ADVOCATEGA.
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