Io Y. Gilman ’25, Ciana J. King ’25, Sage S. Lattman ’25, John Lin ’25, Graham R. Weber ’25, Sam E. Weil ’25
Jem K. Williams ’25, Sazi T. Bongwe ’26, Ellie S. Klibaner-Schiff ’26, Adelaide E. Parker ’26,
Dina R. Zeldin ’25
FM DESIGN EDITORS
Julia N. Do ’25
Olivia W. Zheng ’27
Xinyi C. Zhang ’27
FM MULTIMEDIA EDITORS
Briana Howard Pagán ’26
Lotem L. Loeb ’27
COVER DESIGN
Sami E. Turner ’25
PRESIDENT J. Sellers Hill ’25
MANAGING EDITOR
Miles J. Herszenhorn ’25
ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITORS
Claire Yuan ’25
Elias J. Schisgall ’25
Dear Reader,
What is art? How is it produced, and how is it shaped by the interactions between artist and environment? Read on, and you may find the answer to those questions in these pages, both in the content of each piece and in the vivid stories themselves.
With vivid detail and colorful on-the-ground reporting, TCW goes searching for what happened to the arts in Cambridge. Artists used to define the city, but over the past years, rising rents and a changing city landscape have forced many artists to relocate and many art spaces — galleries, studios, and venues — to shut down. Though the city government is trying its best to preserve the culture, the few spaces still open are rarely paying market price. What would a sustainable arts culture look like in Cambridge, and who is going to pay for it?
The rest of glossy is rife with colorful profiles, some of the best we’ve published yet. First, Professor Gary King, who has founded six companies, written nine books, and published over 170 scholarly articles, lets NHS in on the secret of how he simultaneously succeeds in industry and the academy — and leaves him with an idea for a startup. Next, Sungjoo Yoon ’27, better known as the Datamatch leaker, tells JBT, KJK, and AEP about his day of infamy on Sidechat, the book he’s writing, and his non-presidential political aspirations. MTB talks to Ava E. Silva ’27 about a project she is spearheading to preserve the endangered Alabama language.
On a brief interlude from the profiles, DRZ and SSL embark on a journey to Vilna Shul in Boston, where they make pickles while talking to people about finding Jewish community in the city.
KJK writes an incredibly lively piece on Wesley Wang ’26, whose short film “nothing, except everything.” won him national attention, and who is now on a path to creating a full-length feature film. And beloved FM^2 (Fifteen Minutes x Folk & Myth) legend SWF falls into the orbit of Caroline Calloway, a former Instagram influencer who got even more famous her various scams. “The coin of her realm is attention,” and with a story this well-written, how could you not give her yours?
Finally, wrapping up our issue is an poignant endpaper by XSC exploring what it means to be Asian non-American; an international student living in the U.S., trying to figure out who and how to be.
With that, we leave you to peruse our carefully curated and crafted collection of some of our most artistic pieces this month.
Sincerely Yours, HD
& KT
GARY KING — Professor and serial entrepreneur Gary King argues that his frequent traversal of the boundaries between academia and industry is “not a double life.” Rather, they’re just different facets of the same job — and, if anything, that back-and-forth “helps both.” SEE PAGE 4
CAMBRIDGE ARTS SCENE — Artists imbue the Square with the culture and charm that give the city its character — and its market price. But what would a sustainable arts culture look like in Cambridge, and who is willing to pay for it? SEE PAGE 12
PICKLE MAKING — With national attention trained on Harvard the past few months, engaging in Jewish spaces on campus has felt like more of a political endeavor. Picklemaking, gimmicky in all the right ways, was enough to get us out the door. SEE PAGE 10
INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS — Categorization can help us feel a sense of belonging to a certain group. But what happens when these categories become exclusive? What happens when these categories instead entrap and ensnare us? SEE PAGE 28
WESLEY WANG — Wang’s last film gained 3.7 million views on YouTube in the span of a few months. “You never expect anything to go viral,” he says, “although I did know for a fact this one was going to do better than my other ones.” SEE PAGE 6
ALABAMA LANGUAGE — Ava E. Silva ‘27 and a team of Harvard researchers are currently developing the Alabama language project, a five-year initiative that aims to document the language, study its grammar and lexicon, and produce educational resources for the AlabamaCoushatta community. SEE PAGE 8
DATAMATCH LEAKER — Sungjoo Yoon ’27 became a campus celebrity when he leaked a list of Rice Purity Test scores from freshmen’s private Datamatch profiles. But despite his newfound celebrity status, Yoon doesn’t see himself as the infamous “Datamatch Leaker.” SEE PAGE 22
CAROLINE CALLOWAY — “I actually think ultimately, in the long run, my first priority in this life is my art,” Calloway says. “If it’s: make books that live on after your death, or have a fulfilling family and be happy, I’m choosing books 10 times out of 10. I would rather make my art than be happy. SEE PAGE 24
PAGE DESIGNED BY OLIVIA W. ZHENG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
Entrepreneurial Academia with Gary King
BY NEIL H. SHAH CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Gary King might have a clone — or, at least, that’s what I thought while skimming his Wikipedia page in advance of our interview.
On the one hand, there’s Harvard University professor King — a social scientist who holds Harvard’s highest faculty rank, has written nine books and more than 170 articles, and has advised several prominent scholars (including former University President Claudine Gay, though he declined to comment on Harvard’s recent woes).
And on the other, there’s serial entrepreneur Gary King, the founder of six companies — four of which have been acquired, including by giants like educational company Pearson, and one of which has over one million users.
But King argues that his frequent traversal of the boundaries between academia and industry is “not a double life.” Rather, to King, they’re just different facets of the same job — and, if anything, that back-and-forth “helps both.”
Those industry connections, King explains, have made his scholarly work “much, much, much better” because they give him access to more data.
Here’s the typical cycle: First, King’s scholarly work inspires him to found a company or create a product. That company, by bringing those ideas to scale, gives him access to more data. Then, King takes that data and writes a new paper, and it all repeats — something King says “has happened dozens of times.”
He gives the example of Crimson Hexagon — a company founded to
monetize the methodology that King and a team of researchers used to analyze trends in social media users’ views of Hillary Clinton and former U.S. President Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.
“We developed this method, it worked great, we wrote academic articles on it, and then it turned out that that could be commercialized and used for others,” King says.
A few years later, when King wanted to expand the methodology to work with Chinese texts, obtaining Chinese social media data was simple. From Crimson Hexagon, he downloaded its archive of scraped Chinese social media posts.
In 2013, King and his colleagues published an analysis of social media censorship by the Chinese Communist Party, a widely-cited and foundational paper in understanding Chinese social media censorship.
“It’s so cool — the thing that we found,” King explains. “What everybody thought was you criticize the government and you get in trouble — they censor your posts. Not true!”
“But, if you say ‘And let’s go protest,’ that will be censored. In fact, if you say ‘The leaders of this town are doing such a great job, let’s have a rally in their favor,’ they will censor you,” King adds.
King says academia-industry collaborations like that are essential for the social sciences.
“It used to be that most of the data in the world was created here — at the University,” King says. “Now, the vast majority of data in the world about the people that we study are tied up inside private industry.”
That craftiness, of finding unique data sources and insights, is something King feels contributed to his meteoric
rise in the social sciences. Even when he consulted as an expert witness in gerrymandering cases, he says, being able to later use the data for research was often his “price of admission” — a prerequisite for his expertise.
I’m skeptical of how King’s work might blur the boundary between data he’s making money off of and data he’s studying, but he explains that there’s a clear separation. He says that once one obtains user data outside of academia, an institutional review board verifies that data on human subjects is acquired ethically.
And, per King, he’s always had that entrepreneurial spirit — his eyes light up as he recalls his past as a magician, quipping that he “had a business doing that as well.”
“That’s how I paid for college,” King says.
He even gave me a startup idea on my way out the door — though I won’t share it with you all in the hopes of being rich one day.
Not all of King’s companies are concretely tied to monetizing his research or a need for data that only industry could acquire, though. Some of them, he says, served to solve problems that he experienced himself as a teacher.
In 2015, for example, he founded Perusall — which makes software for increasing engagement in classes. For instance, a professor could upload a reading and have the class annotate it together on Perusall. The idea, he explains, stemmed from his own desire that students would do more of the readings he assigned in his classes.
And it just happened to be successful: “I built it for my own class. It just happens that a million and a half other people also use it,” King says.
‘Going Viral’ with Wesley Wang
BY KATE J. KAUFMAN
WRITER
Wesley Wang ’26’s reputation precedes him.
He cofounded a
nonprofit before middle school, became a chess FIDE Master in 2018, and opened for Nicky Youre at last year’s Crimson Jam. However, he is best known for writing and directing “nothing, except everything.,” a short film that went viral on YouTube last fall and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Indy Shorts International Film Festival. Still, he tries to avoid introducing himself as a filmmaker.
“I kind of just let people figure it out on their own,” he says.
One of Wang’s classmates, sitting at the other end of our table in the Science Center Café, disagrees with a laugh.
“When I first met him, he said, ‘I’m a filmmaker.’”
Wang started making films as a creative outlet when he was just 11 years old. In his early movies, he cast his father and brother as the main characters and paid for production costs by teaching chess lessons.
Gradually, Wang’s creations became more elaborate. His most recent short film “nothing, except everything.” is a far cry from those early projects. Filmed while Wang was still in high school, it involved over a dozen cast members and a crew of more than 30 people.
“To start off this project, I literally cold-emailed 200 different producers,” Wang says. He eventually teamed
6| PAGE DESIGNED BY
up with Oscar-shortlisted producer Scott Aharoni, who boosted the film’s credibility and brought aboard acting stars David Mazouz and Lily Chee.
“nothing, except everything.” quickly took off on social media, gaining 3.7 million views on YouTube in the span of a few months. “You never expect anything to go viral,” Wang told me, “although I did know for a fact this one was going to do better than my other ones.”
Virality brought a flood of attention
“You never expect anything to go viral.” — Wesley Wang ’26
to the project, with YouTube users commenting praise like “a rare example of perfect cinematography and storytelling” and “it literally changed me after I watched it.”
At the same time, the film received significant anonymous hate, particularly on the review platform Letterboxd. In the most popular viewer comment, one user called the film the “most vapid attempt at intellectualism ever formed,” ridiculed its montage-based storytelling as “everything putrid and offensive about 21st century Generation Z filmmaking distilled into a repulsive short,” and even went so far as to call Wang the “antichrist with a camera.” Other commenters similarly criticized the heavy-handed flashy visuals and quasi-philosophical monologues. More than a few honed in on Wang’s status as a Harvard student, arguing that his privileged background granted a level of popularity that was
OLIVIA W. ZHENG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
unearned.
A few days after our initial interview in the Science Center, I interrupt Wang during a game of hand-and-brain chess to ask him about this criticism.
“The experience was very cool in the sense that at least people are willing to talk about it a lot,” he says slowly, as if weighing each word. His storytelling approach was irregular, Wang acknowledges, but it was also intentional — he wanted to stylistically blend the “modern content that we see on TikTok and Instagram” with the medium of film. He says he’s glad the film “is generating controversy-slash-conversation around what a movie can be.”
Still, Wang is frustrated by the hate that came from assumptions made about his character and background, telling me that “a lot of it’s not true.”
While he recognizes how fortunate he is to have resources and connections, he clarifies that networking is not just about privilege or luck.
“A lot of it is knowing how to pitch yourself,” he says, “which at some point is an art of itself.”
Right now, Wang is putting that skill to work as he undertakes his first feature film: a science fiction expansion of the story he first explored in “nothing, except everything.” The project is being produced by Darren Aronofsky ’91, the Oscar-nominated director of “Black Swan” and “The Whale,” who reached out to Wang after seeing the short. The two are currently pitching Wang’s movie concept to major studios.
Wang tells me about these high-stakes pitch meetings with top executives over lunch at the Science Center Café. He sits with a Clover to-go box in front of him, but he seems too excited with talking to take a bite. “It’s been a ride,” he says
CONTRIBUTING
“A lot of it is knowing how to pitch yourself, which at some point is an art of itself.” — Wesley Wang ’26
when asked what it’s like to attend school amidst his career take-off. “That’s hard, definitely, to maintain — to keep my
relationship between academia and industrial technology research.
The script idea he’s currently pitching
by the work he’s doing right now. “I’m definitely where I want to be.”
PHOTO BY ISHAN TIWARI — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
Alabama Language Preservation
BY MAEVE T. BRENNAN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
When Ava E. Silva ’27, a Crimson Arts editor, gave a presentation to the Harvard
Undergraduate Linguistics Society about Alabama, an endangered language of the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe, she asked her grandmother to record a short video introducing herself in the language.
Silva’s grandmother — or áapo, in Alabama — sent back a two-minute long video, but it didn’t exactly follow the script Silva had given her. Curious, Silva asked
her áapo what she added. The gist of it, Silva says, was “no one cared about our language for a long time. My granddaughter is bringing it back.”
With a few hundred native speakers, Alabama is a dwindling language, particularly for the younger generation.
Silva’s áapo grew up only speaking Alabama until she began elementary school, where she was both forced to learn English and punished for speaking her first language. Because of this, Silva’s áapo didn’t teach the language to her children.
When Silva came to college, she was set on studying Government. Interested in preserving endangered Indigenous languages, like Alabama, she joined the
Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society after learning about it at the linguistics booth during an academic fair.
Silva’s presentation to HULS marked the beginnings of more expansive work in language preservation at Harvard. After her presentation, she became involved with the Working on Language in the Field (WOLF) Lab. Led by principal investigator Tanya I. Bondarenko, an assistant professor of Linguistics, this newly established lab conducts fieldwork on understudied and under-documented languages.
Within the lab, Silva and a team of Harvard researchers are currently developing the Alabama language project, a five-year initiative that aims to document
the language, study its grammar and lexicon, and produce educational resources for the Alabama-Coushatta community.
In January, Silva, Bondarenko, and freshman Ph.D. student Jacob A. Kodner traveled to the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation in East Texas to discuss project plans. The team met with both Alabama speakers and non-speakers, gauging the tribe’s needs and desires. For example, members of the tribe talked about an Alabama-English audio dictionary and curating learning materials for a planned education center.
For Kodner, the winter break trip was “one of the most profound experiences I’ve had in my linguistic career.” He sees the project as an opportunity to combine the more traditional aspects of linguistics — data collection and theoretical study — with community-oriented education.
Rather than vocabulary lists and rote memorization, Kodner explains, a linguistics-based curriculum for Alabama would focus on how words are structured. “If you learn the building blocks of a language, you can create, for example, an infinite amount of combinations in the language,” he says. “It creates more opportunities to really engage.”
More than anything, however, this trip was about forging a connection. “We didn’t do a lot of fieldwork, because our main goal was just to talk to the community,” Silva says. The tribal council approved the project, giving WOLF the green light to return for further fieldwork in the upcoming summer and winter.
The winter break trip helped WOLF outline its more immediate goals: a grammatical sketch of Alabama, a basic curriculum, and a linguistics workshop for interested community members. “The Alabama language is very endangered, and so contributing to preservation efforts that would benefit the community is definitely our top priority,” Bondarenko wrote in a statement.
Each week, the project holds seminar meetings, where members of the growing
research team take turns presenting a paper on a linguistic subfield, such as syntax. The group then applies linguistic theory to the Alabama language itself and transcribes audio clips collected during the January trip.
Academic research on Alabama, however, is scarce. For the project’s first seminar, the team read a paper published in the 1980s about Alabama’s phonology. “It was written on a typewriter, if that says anything,” Silva says.
Kodner hopes that the discoveries in studying the Alabama language will
“I’m always going to be on my tribe’s side.”
— Ava E. Silva ’27
contribute to the larger field of linguistics, particularly morphology, or the study of how words are formed.
“There’s not much information about the morphological processes in the language,” Kodner says. “I definitely think there’s not only a lot to discover, a lot to develop materials around for the community to document, but also a lot that can offer to the study of language itself.”
Any language data the lab collects, however, will belong to the AlabamaCoushatta tribe. All of WOLF’s outputs will be shared with the community, and any academic findings will be published in open-access venues. The emphasis on information sharing comes at the heels of apprehension raised by the community. “A big concern for the community was is this going to be kind of an exploitation,” Silva says. “Especially because people have come in and worked with our tribe before, and then they promise so, so much.” She isn’t sure how many people in the tribe know about previous academic scholarship on
the Alabama language.
Silva sees herself as a “middle-person” in this project, connecting the researchers at Harvard with people in her community. “I’m always going to be on my tribe’s side,” she says. “There’s no room I’m going to be in where I’m going to advocate for Harvard over my community.”
In the lab, Silva occupies many roles: she is both a liaison to and an advocate for her community, both a peer of graduate students and a freshman taking Ling 83, Harvard’s introductory course for linguistics. “Definitely it’s daunting sometimes,” she says.
“My community is kind of on my shoulders,” Silva says. “And I’m in Ling 83. I’m not some linguistics expert.”
Even if Silva sometimes feels that linguistic skills do not always come naturally to her, the “curiosity and passion” do.
For her, work in the lab goes beyond the theory. “When the language touches my ear, it’s just like a hug,” Silva says. “It’s been amazing to not only learn the language and get to hear the language and just have the language be a part of my weekly life, but also learn from elders.” During the lab’s winter trip, they began to learn new stories about Alabama history as elders opened up about their native language.
“They didn’t want to teach [Alabama] to their kids. They didn’t want to talk it because they grew up with so much pain with it,” Silva says. “And now, they’re like, ‘oh, my language is beautiful. I want people to know it.’”
Silva hopes that her work in the Alabama language is a stepping stone for further language documentation in Indigenous communities. “Language preservation represents, as a whole, Indigenous futures,” she says. “And I think that’s something Harvard can and should continue to learn from. My number one goal is working for my community, but also my community means Indigenous populations in general.”
PHOTO BY ISHAN TIWARI
At Vilna Shul, Shabbat is a Big Dill
BY SAGE S. LATTMAN AND DINA R. ZELDIN CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
It’s 5:45 p.m. on a Friday, and our calves are straining up Beacon Hill. The air here is peaceful, and we feel so far away from campus.
Our Google Maps promises that somewhere, nestled amongst the neighborhood’s brick townhouses, is a synagogue. It is hard to imagine that it’s really there until it is — set back from the sidewalk behind an iron gate. We tilt our heads toward the sky to meet the stained glass Star of David, illuminated by the light inside. A security guard lets a stranger in, and we follow close behind.
We’re here for Shabbat
from work of any kind, from using the phone to turning on the stove. For secular Jews like us, Shabbat is often just a good excuse for Challah French toast.
Tonight, the main draw is pickles. We’re heading to a pickle-making workshop and deli-themed dinner at Vilna Shul, a Jewish cultural center in Boston.
service and dinner, a Jewish practice of commemorating the end of the week and celebrating the day of rest from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. For observant Jews, this means abstaining
Part of the impetus for our journey is a desire to engage in a Jewish community beyond Harvard’s campus. With national attention trained on Harvard the past few months, engaging in Jewish spaces on campus has felt like more of a political endeavor. Pickle-making, gimmicky in all the right ways, was enough to get us out the door.
Vilna Shul is a contemporary Jewish cultural space, but it’s also a relic of Boston’s early 20th century Jewish immigrant community.
Founded in 1893 by Eastern European émigrés, the synagogue moved around the West End
before settling into its current building in 1919. The Shul was the centerpiece of the West End Jewish community, but the synagogue’s fervor dissipated over time as families moved to the suburbs.
In 1985, Mendel Miller, the only remaining member of the congregation, held a service in the synagogue for what would be the last time. The synagogue was left to decay for over a decade until 1995, when philanthropic groups began a renewal of the building. The community revived.
Sitting in the pews of the synagogue, the sense of history is palpable. The walls are filled with weathered murals, and unpolished Judaica glimmers in the chandelier light. It’s grandiose and ornate, yet the peeling paint makes it feel homey.
The Rabbi’s service takes us back to the present. We sing the “swing version” of an ancient Hebraic text. Her dvar torah is about “dressing the soul,” and she explains how traditional rabbinical garb was “some serious drip.” She holds for laughter, then continues, telling us about her “Challahback girl” socks. We join together to sing the nigun — a lyricless melody — and the music fills the space, waves swirling around the bima. The melody engulfs us and we feel for a moment that we have been missing out.
Afterwards, we head downstairs to bless the Challah bread and wine. More than 40 of us quickly fill two rows of plastic folding tables. Most of the people we meet over deli sandwiches and canned beers heard about this on Facebook or Instagram. One girl admits she’s looking to meet “new people” or “someone,” and her mom suggested
she turn here. Some are regulars. There are also quite a few fermented food fanatics, drawn by the promise of fresh cucumbers and a new Mason jar. They are accountants, master’s students, Jewish youth group coordinators, and just about everything in between.
The chit chat of strangers becoming friends fills the room, but many here already know each other. One group of 20-somethings told us that there are a lot of Shabbat events to pick from. For next week’s dinner, many will migrate to the Chai Center in Brookline, which hosts Shabbat on the first Friday of each month. Moishe Houses — subsidized co-living spaces for young Jewish adults — have open Klezmer soirees, wine tastings, yoga classes, and Mezuzah-painting workshops.
Many grew up within the structure of a synagogue, but now they meander from Jewish space to Jewish space:, whatever strikes the fancy. Tonight, clearly, the mood was pickles.
“Shul” is the Yiddish word for synagogue, and it implies a sense of structure. However, Vilna Shul’s Director of Operations and Finance Geo I. Poor tells us that “it often ends up being people who haven’t found their place yet, a reality of being in your 20s and 30s.” He says, “We’re a place you can connect to without the pressure or baggage of being your place.”
The kinds of Jews that find themselves in Boston, Poor tells us, are there for the cultural enrichment of city life. In addition to the 20s and 30s demographic, Vilna Shul also has programming for empty-nesters. Like young adults without spouses or
children who moved to Boston for school or work, they don’t quite fit into the conventional synagogue model centered on family life. “The traditional synagogue isn’t for everyone and until the last few decades, we didn’t recognize that,” Poor tells us.
Soon, it’s time to do the thing we came for. There are buckets of cucumbers in an ice bath, stacks of mason jars, and bags of green beans. Each person measures mustard seed, red pepper flakes, and heaping tablespoons of salt. We slice and combine, pour in water and a black tea bag (for crispiness, we’re told), and the whole thing is over faster than we thought. Over the course of the next week, the cucumbers will become pickles.
Vilna Shul is a synagogue where Jewish people, often in their 20s and 30s, gather to find community over their shared background through events like picklemaking. COURTESY OF SAGE S. LATTMAN
From Bob Dylan to a Shrinking Cambridge
to This? Surviving Cambridge Arts Scene
Artists imbue the Square with the culture and charm that give the city its character — and its market price. But what would a sustainable arts culture look like in Cambridge, and who is willing to pay for it?
BY TESS C. WAYLAND CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
It’s me and a bunch of old men here tonight. One wears a Canadian tuxedo, one sings a song dedicated to his late wife, and one goes by the stage name Blind Dr. Bob. One of them tells me it’s always been his dream to perform here. Among the young people, an intrepid hipster tries out throat-singing, and a class-conscious grad student sings a tune about unionization at the North Pole. Very few of the performers, young or old, live in Cambridge.
I write my notes over a promotional ad for beginner banjo classes at the music school, waiting to hear something that sounds like a rolling stone. But most of the original songs trade in clichés. Love takes flight, sparks ignite. It’s open mic night at Club Passim, and I can’t help but wonder — we went from Bob Dylan to this?
Joan Baez got her start here, playing every Tuesday night. Bob Dylan strummed for free during an intermission, just to say he had played Passim. Tracy Chapman wrote a New Years card to the club before jetting off to Argentina. Van Morrison lived a quick walk away on Green Street, where he wrote lines about “coming from Cambridgeport with my poetry and jazz.”
Folk revival gave way to punk’s arrival. The Pit ruled the Square. The punks ruled the Pit. The pits were ruled by hair. Skaters, freaks, radicals, lefties, boomboxers — above all, artists — had a home in Cambridge.
But that home has been threatened by forces of gentrification. Since this storied heyday, it seems to many that the arts scene is on the decline, losing spaces to rising rent.
As the cost of living goes up, the artists who once defined Cambridge can no longer afford to create here. The median rent in Cambridge is $3,500, sitting $1,500 above the national median. Though businesses were already shuttering before 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated conditions for local artists.
But they aren’t just getting priced out. They’re existing in a precarious ecosystem, where one shuttered business, one closed
studio or gallery, or one relocated friend, ripples to impact the entire network of artists.
Since 2011, Cambridge has seen a significant number of arts spaces relocated or shuttered altogether: Mobius Performing Arts, Out of the Blue Art Gallery, New Alliance Gallery, the Deborah Mason School of Dance and the Bridge Repertory theater company, Green Street Studios, and EMF Studios. The 2018 shutdown of EMF Studios, now offices, marked the closure of the last major music and arts studio space.
To try to define how many arts spaces still exist, I first had to define an arts space. A walk through the Square makes the category blurry — do you count Harvard-owned museums and galleries, commercial movie theaters, locally-owned book, comic, and record stores, Instagramfriendly murals and free-agent buskers, Free Little Libraries and public statues made out of rusted shovels?
“Skaters, freaks, radicals, lefties, boomboxers — above all, artists — had a home in Cambridge.”
I found that the few arts spaces left mainly survive through makeshift rent arrangements, the generosity of benevolent patrons, and the backing of generational wealth.
Though the Cambridge Government has launched a number of initiatives to try to preserve the city’s once-thriving scene, the results of their efforts remain unclear amidst a regional crisis of housing instability. Biotech windfall may offer an alternate way forward, but it can’t change the fact that many artists are no longer here.
Anxieties around artist displacement aren’t new — they’re part of a longer discourse on the changes in Harvard Square and Cambridge at large. Residents, developers, and politicians argue over
whether these changes constitute character decline or creative destruction.
Cambridge has always been split between corporate chains and local business, between tradition and reinvention, and most of all, between the ivory towers and the rebellious people living beside them.
Between all these camps — punks, professors, politicians, professionals — most seem to want an arts scene in the city. At the very least, they want avantgarde aesthetics overlaid on upperclass establishments: buskers playing outside of buildings they can’t swipe into, commissioned graffiti on the wall of a million-dollar makerspace. Artists imbue the Square with the culture and charm that give the city its character — and its market price. But what would a sustainable arts culture look like in Cambridge, and who is willing to pay for it?
Selling at the Sacred Space
The Grolier Poetry Book Shop’s 400 square foot space houses almost 100 years of history. The space has transformed from an old boys club with Harvard men like T.S. Eliot sitting on the couch to an immigrant-owned, globallyminded community space.
Ifeanyi Menkiti, a poet-philosopherprofessor, fell in love with the Grolier while he wrote his dissertation under John Rawls and ended up saving the bookstore from bankruptcy in 2006. Over the course of my call with two generations of the Menkiti family, who lost their patriarch in 2019, the Grolier is called a “sacred space,” “passion project,” and “cultural institution.”
“My husband believed very much in community. He believed in a community of poets,” Carol Menkiti tells me. If you push back the display table in the center of the building, there’s room for the shop’s “intimate” readings, which usually run twice a week.
The Grolier is also, technically, a retail establishment. The bookshop’s longevity is a testament not just to community, but to the sacrifice and dedication of individuals, a theme across enduring arts spaces. It survives on the family’s personal contributions and the donation of time, money, and books from that poet
“What is the role of the shopper in keeping retail establishments with a cultural value alive, even when they’re not economically solvent?”
— Carol Menkiti, Grolier Poetry
community. To ensure the survival of the Grolier, the Menkitis have even considered conversion to a nonprofit.
In its historic tenure, Grolier has seen the storefronts around it change. The Square’s activist presence off the heels of the Vietnam War dampened foot traffic, causing local joints to shutter and chains to crop up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Meanwhile, Cambridge’s rent control policy came under attack, and organizing in favor of it began to falter. After the dissolution of key advocacy groups, landlords and developers ran a campaign to ban rent control at the state level.
In 1994, they succeeded, and the city’s housing landscape radically changed. Housing valuations in the area spiked by 1.8 billion in the ten years following the ban, and rent prices rose accordingly.
Recent calls to revive rent control in Massachusetts, under the new branding of “rent stabilization” have stumbled.
On top of rising rents, square footage itself is a scarcity. Even with pushes for affordable housing from city councilors and local activists, Cambridge lacks the room to meet the demand. As of 2023, over 20,000 people were on the waiting list for affordable units, a clear mark of an ongoing housing crisis.
City government isn’t the only entity after space — developers hold large swaths of land throughout Cambridge. In Harvard Square, one of the major players is Trinity Property Management, whose president is longtime resident John P. DiGiovanni. He may be best known to students for his plans to remodel The Garage, a shopping mall with favorites like Le’s and Newbury Comics, into upper-floor office space.
Alongside DiGiovanni, billionaire Gerald Chan, the namesake of Harvard’s School of Public Health, started making major acquisitions in the neighborhood
in 2014, including the historic — and still shuttered — Harvard Square Theater. At the time of purchase, his holdings totaled $100 million.
Harvard itself is the other major real estate player, with over 80 properties across New England publicly listed on its Harvard Real Estate website. A handful of their properties house arts and culture spaces — though many bear the stamp of the Harvard name.
Harvard is also the landlord of the Grolier. “It’s very small, it’s a very old space that hasn’t been renovated,” says Ndidi Menkiti. “And it’s a historic store, so they’ve kept the rent quite low.”
Menkiti adds that poetry stores aren’t exactly profitable — something she’s sure Harvard recognizes. She finds that the friction between the Grolier’s scant dividends and deep cultural significance raises questions about who bears the responsibility of supporting Cambridge’s art scene.
“What is the role of the state?” she asks. “What is the role of the shopper in keeping retail establishments with a cultural value alive, even when they’re not economically solvent?”
‘Trying to Hang On’ in Damaged Ecosystem
Beverley Coniglio wears black eyeliner and flared black lace sleeves, her hands decorated with what she calls “boyfriend rings.” Coniglio heads the Cambridge Artists’ Cooperative on Church Street. The co-op is a workerowned-and-operated space that has peddled craftsman wares since the late ’80s.
“We’ve just been trying to hang on. It ebbs and flows,” Coniglio says.
When the pandemic forced temporary
closure, the co-op survived off of federal grants to pay their rent. Not all of their neighbors were so lucky. Though Coniglio notes that many local businesses were struggling before the pandemic, she says that Covid-19 “wiped out a lot of the last handful of little shops.”
The co-op itself has faced a rising rent on their two-year lease, which forced them to negotiate their three-floor space down to one floor. Since paring down their space, they’ve had to limit how many artists they display. And as artist opportunities go down, there’s less and less of a point to paying the skyrocketing Cambridge rent. into, commissioned graffiti on the wall of a million-dollar makerspace.
As I interview Coniglio, two older residents browse the store, looking for Valentine’s Day gifts. They overhear our conversation and start to chime in.
They don’t want to grumble about generational decline — everybody their age thinks character’s gone, and everybody my age thinks we’re going to fix it. But what both generations can agree on, it seems, is that character has changed — and more importantly, so has livability.
One of the biggest losses, they tell me, was Dickinson’s hardware. Workers at the co-op used to be able to walk a few storefronts down, pick up a nail, and install paintings on the wall right then and there. Coniglio also recalls a bead store next door, where artists could grab new wire and charms on their way to drop off their latest necklace for display. Coniglio and the patrons are describing a closer-knit city, one where a resident could access all essentials within a 15-minute walking radius.
The panic over dying neighborhoods bleeds into the discourse surrounding local businesses and large chains. People worry that the Square is going too corporate, an
anxiety that can seem strange, considering the Square gets its name from the socalled oldest corporation in the western hemisphere: Harvard.
One of the patrons points out the University’s influence. “It’s ambitious for expansion, and Harvard, it buys buildings, drives up rent.”
With its annual influx of students and researchers, Harvard guarantees the neighborhood a customer base of tens of thousands. But the needs of that base are transient, demanding change over time.
The patron chimes in again. “Any institution has a tendency to create a dead zone around it, which is completely saturated by things that are related to the function of the institution and not to the people who happen to live in the neighborhoods around it.”
“Ensuring that Harvard Square remains a vibrant hub of dining, retail, and entertainment remains a long-standing priority,” Harvard spokesperson Amy Kamosa says, “not only for the Harvard community, but for Cambridge residents and for the Square’s thousands of annual visitors as well.”
The Many Deaths of Harvard Square
DiGiovanni, the developer behind Trinity Management and a former president of the Harvard
Square Business Trinity Management and a former president of the Harvard Square Business Association, has a different view on the “dead zone.” He asks me to meet him at Black Sheep Bagel — his home territory, a space he can show off for its ivy-vined, family-owned image of success.
When I pitch DiGiovanni on my piece, I put it in the context of a national housing crisis. He interrupts me the minute I suggest rent is rising — he tells me rent is going down, tapping the table with each word. DiGiovanni, who has spent his whole career in Cambridge, sees himself as a steward of Harvard Square and the arts. He’s helped to stage street festivals, organized film screenings, and puts flowers and banners on the street lamps every year.
“I’m not gonna put myself as altruistic, because the truth is, if it doesn’t work, on some economic basis, it’s not relevant,” DiGiovanni tells me. Rent rates are just a reflection of how much business a storefront brings.
Relevance is one of DiGiovanni’s guiding principles, and he knows it’s possible for local business to meet the charge — look, again, at Black Sheep Bagel. According to the Harvard Square Business Association, about 72 percent of businesses in the Square are still local. Chains, however, tend to have more square footage and better locations.
They’re hard to miss. Walking from
class to Kirkland, I salute the inflationera CVS. I start counting boba and coffee chains. I wonder who decided that Harvard Square needed another Starbucks, and who before that put a Santander bank in place of the Curious George store.
I’m not the only resident to notice the corporate presence. Catherine J. Turco, an MIT economic sociologist and a concerned citizen of the neighborhood, writes in her book “Harvard Square: A Love Story” about the phenomenon she has named the “Harvard Square Death Discourse.”
Since the 1920s, she argues, residents have grumbled about local shutterings and lost character, some indefinable spirit that’s finally, for real this time, died out. She quotes a Boston Herald Reporter from the 1930s: “Harvard Square is a different place. The old stores, the old friends are gone.”
In Turco’s framework, there is always someone who responds: we must adapt. Businesses that close do so for a reason. We don’t have horses and buggies anymore. Harvard Square should look different from decades ago.
This is DiGiovanni’s role. The Square, he says, must constantly reinvent itself for its shifting client base of students. Those students should be demanding: “the Square must serve them.” In this view, Harvard Square isn’t dying. It’s simply being reborn.
The Cambridge Artists’ Cooperative has faced a rising rent on their two-year lease, which forced them to negotiate their threefloor space down to one floor. Since paring down their space, they’ve had to limit how many artists they display.
LUCY H. VUONG — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
Pouring and Performing
If you’re looking to make art in this rebirth of Cambridge, the options are almost null. But if you want to watch art — in a concert hall or a dive bar — you’re in luck. But venues have also been relying on patronage or starting to reconsider their models altogether.
DiGiovanni helped develop Church Street music venue The Sinclair, a Bowery Presents Boston project he says he gave a lot of “runway” during development because of the venue’s ability to “anchor” the neighborhood. DiGiovanni’s investment is clear in the sound-proofed, high-ceilinged, double-deckered modern venue. He says he keeps the venue’s rent reasonable: his approach to any lease, he writes in an email, is to let the occupants advocate for “an appropriate rent or occupancy cost relative to their particular industry.”
It’s not fair to say the rent is subsidized — the crowds the venue draws, he claims, help nearby businesses survive.
“We really believe that entertainment was critical and is critical,” DiGiovanni says. “It usually costs a lot to start these up, so you have to create some space and time for them to be able to do that.”
“I think they’re a great example of why we can afford to have more of that in the Square,” he adds.
DiGiovanni is looking into putting venues and event spaces in other properties, including the now-open event space Dx @Dunster.
They would join historic venues like Club Passim, along with The Cantab Lounge and The Middle East Club in Central Square — anchors of the arts scene, operating since the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, respectively. Though venues still face tough profit margins, alcohol licensing gives them an advantage an art gallery or book store doesn’t have: wine and beer.
But even the old venues are looking to change their model. The Middle East has been exploring a proposal to redevelop the site to include hotel and retail space, following rumors of closure and demolition.
For others, turning a profit is a secondary aim. The Cantab Lounge had been pouring and performing for decades when it shut down during Covid-19. This
would have been a window for the venue’s landlord to approach the city and start to redevelop prime real estate, right across from City Hall and perpendicular to Mass Ave. But the landlord, in a burst of generosity, supported keeping the dive bar open.
In came Tim and Maureen Dibble, ready to buy. The Cantab wasn’t their first date — but it was dates two through ten. Back when they were my age, in the ’80s, they would leave the Cantab bathed in sweat.
“You’d have Black and white and gay and straight and rich and poor and old and young moshing on the same dance floor,” Dibble recalls. “It was live music seven nights a week, and it was this place with serious character and serious soul.”
Dibble used to camp out in the rain and snow to get in the Cantab, but postpandemic and post-technology, Dibble says, people are too used to staying at home for him to count on them for reliable rainor-shine profit.
Luckily, the couple doesn’t have to count on them. Dibble, a partner at the private equity firm Alta, described himself and his wife as the “right buyers at the right time.” They hoped to keep the place almost exactly the way it was in their heyday, plus some fixed toilets — and they had the means to do so.
“We had done well enough in our life and cared so much about the institution that we could afford to buy it and reopen it on a basis where the daily financial viability of it was less of a concern for us,” Dibble says.
“We don’t need to pull an income out of it,” he says. “If we did, it would be really hard.”
‘Can I Make It Here?’
But if artists are to live here, they need not just places to perform, but spaces to make and hang their art.
David Craft came to Cambridgeport hoping to start a vegan restaurant. Instead, he ended up with Gallery 263, a non-profit arts space that hosts weekly yoga, critique workshops, music nights, and exhibit openings that routinely spill out into the street.
Craft, a former assistant professor at Massachusetts General Hospital complete with a tech-bro beanie, yogi-beard, and tasteful Fjallraven slacks, tells me he’s always “clowning around” and looking for “some other trouble to get into.” He pulls up two chairs as the Exhibitions Director Douglas Breault nails Gallery 263’s latest showcase — a meditation on why people make portraits — to the wall. Though Craft is in machine learning and medicine by trade, this is his passion project, which he sustained out-of-pocket before moving to a crowdfunded model.
“Everyone who loves it is poor. And everyone who works for us is poor,” Breault says.
The space is small, with past lives as the ’70s era Brinkerhoff gallery, an antique furniture resale shop, and a personal studio. Only 20 artists go up on the wall, but the gallery receives 200 to 300 submissions per cycle — a sign that the space, one of the only nonprofit galleries in Cambridge, is a rare opportunity for local artists.
If rising rent challenges artists to find space to display and space to live, space to create is an even bigger ask. Since the closure of the EMF Studios in 2018, there are almost no major studio spaces for rent. Across the river, studio space at 1199 Braintree in Allston is being demolished and redeveloped into multi-use retail, restaurant, and residential space.
With limited studio or gallery space, artists are running out of reasons to stay.
Breault, a photographer, painter and sculptor, has moved farther and farther from Cambridge and Boston since finishing grad school in the area. He’s had to do the same with his studio.
He’s part of a flood of younger artists migrating out of the city. The more reliably quirky — and more reliably livable — havens of Providence and Salem are two popular choices, but people also make the pilgrimage to Medford or Watertown. They go nearby if they can, to Allston or Brighton. They’ll go most places with square footage left to flock to. In the Cambridge area, they pay the same rent they could pay in Brooklyn, which has hundreds more opportunities.
Breault frames the question of living in Cambridge with stark terms.
“Can I make it here?” Breault asks. “Or
do I have to have three jobs to live here?”
At the Passim opn mic, the sound tech tells me she doesn’t know any artists who live or work around here, and that she herself is in the process of moving into an under-the-radar “music house” for artists. When I email Coniglio asking for other Cambridge artists I can talk to, she has bad news: “Only one of our members lives in Cambridge, and she owns her building.”
The owning class has a notable advantage in the Cambridge arts scene.
Craft bought Gallery 263, at the time a home studio-gallery, from a middle-aged artist supported by their wealthy spouse. This story seems to be common — older artists who dig in their heels and stay, whether it’s because of access to generational wealth and property or a stubborn spirit. They’ve been here for a while, and they won’t be driven out.
Gallery 263 is isolated from market trends because its landlords, an older couple who lives in the area, have rented it to Craft below market rate with almost no increases since 2008. Almost every other residential tenant of the building — among them teachers, artists, yogis, guitarists, and antique sellers — has been in the building since the gallery’s occupancy began.
happen and our rent triples, and we don’t know about it until this year,” Breault says.
Art in the City Annex
Tucked out of Harvard’s reach on Broadway Street is the “city” everyone keeps talking about. Or, at least, the city’s annex, where the government-run Cambridge Arts Council is housed. The Cambridge Arts office is smothered by flyers: open mic advertisements, applications for block parties, street performer permitting, home
full-time jobs and generating $13.6 million in government revenue.
The reality for artists these days often falls short of these numbers. Weeks knows living and creating in Cambridge has been hard for a while now. To combat this, the city is exploring live-work residential units for artists, city-appointed artists-inresidence, and creating more affordable cultural space. But he explains that the city struggles to compete for space against faster, better-resourced developers.
“It happens so quickly that most of the time, you don’t know it until somebody is actually building something up out of the ground,” Weeks says.
David Craft, a former assistant professor at Massachusetts General Hospital, founded Gallery 263, a non-profit arts space that hosts weekly yoga, critique workshops, music nights, and exhibit openings that routinely spill out into the street.
DANIEL M. ROSALES — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
It increasingly seems to me that when places and people manage to make it, they do so in unconventional arrangements, negotiations between the public, private, and philanthropic sector.
Though there’s a certain beauty in these makeshift, make-ends-meet maker spaces, occupants know it’s a precarious solution.
“We don’t know how long our landlord will be this generous. There’s no guarantee or things written in stone — something can
studios maps, invitation to buy art shares. The office space opens into a gallery, which will soon launch an exhibit on caring for public art.
With six full time staffers and a budget of 1.27 million, the Cambridge Arts department might best be described as small but mighty. Executive Director Jason Weeks, who oversees the patchwork of arts initiatives and programming, believes firmly in the value the arts brings to the city — not just in the abstract, but in concrete financial terms.
A commissioned study by the department found that, pre-Covid-19, the arts were a $174.8 million industry in the city of Cambridge, supporting about 6,000
With space as an obstacle, the office tries to get as much money into people’s hands as possible with different grants run every year. Some focus on social justice, some on creative business, and some on Covid-19 relief. They started one of the earliest and longest-lasting artistic survival funds during the pandemic, which has now transitioned into a dedicated “cultural capital” fund. In some ways, Weeks says, the industry is still clawing its way out of the pandemic: arts were the first to close and last to open.
As a part of their Creative Marketplace program, which encourages arts-driven economic development, the office supports artists through professional development workshops. They’ve offered programming on artistic identity, grant-writing, financial literacy, health and wellness, and arts as advocacy. Arts governance is tapped into many of the questions artists and art spaces are asking: How do you market yourself in order to survive? How do you value work in order to survive? How do you survive, point-blank? And where do you do it?
This last question is perhaps the most daunting. Housing and cultural space
were identified as the top two needs for Central Square, which has been a statedesignated Arts and Culture district since 2012. This designation overlaps with a Business Improvement District, where property owners buy-in to provide what the government calls “enhancements” including arts and culture — to contribute to neighborhood feel.
This neighborhood-scale strategy, that utilizes zoning and municipal structures, is one approach to the dearth of cultural space. But in the past two years, Cambridge has started to try something new with Claudia Zarazua, Cambridge’s inaugural Arts and Cultural Planning Director, and the Making Space for Art project, a collaboration with Boston and Somerville.
All three cities have heard from artists and activists — at public hearings, in the streets — that they need more cultural refuge. The study looks at the three contiguous cities as a bigger, porous network for art-making. An arts closure in Cambridge isn’t always a loss — instead, it might simply be a relocation into these neighboring arts scenes.
The team is working on collecting data to pinpointing the locations of in-demand rehearsal and venue space, which is set for release this summer. The next step will be figuring out how the three governments can incentivize the creation of new space while protecting existing assets.
The line of thinking starts here: Developers agree that to be competitive in the region, they “need” public art. Data already exists to map public art — Zarazua can go into a meeting with a developer or community partner and point to a threeblock radius where a mural is needed. But now they want to be able to do the same with developers, pointing them to “cultural deserts” on the map.
“If we already agree that public art is the bare minimum, the next level is how do we provide affordable cultural space for our artists, and that looks like access to a storefront to share more about their work, or that may look like an affordable rehearsal space,” Zazarua says.
Cultural development might look like converting lots in Central Square to flexible art space or building housing on top of music venues, with housing for artists as a
buffer between the noise pollution and the rest of the residential areas.
To sustain such an ecosystem, the office gets support from partnerships with companies and universities.
“When it comes to arts and culture, no community provides enough resources, or enough capacity, or enough physical space. It always needs to be more,” Weeks says.
“I think we do better than most,” he adds.
Even if Cambridge does do “better” than other communities at supporting arts and culture, there are still plenty of ideas for what more the city could be doing. Across the 2010s, activists have pushed for artists to receive preferential points on the affordable housing list and for rezoned residential spaces to allow for house studios. All have failed or stalled so far.
New York has zoning laws that allow artists to live in lofts designated for commercial use. Somerville boasts “fabrication districts,” meant to protect the use of commercial spaces for creative industry. Even so, many of these sites are at risk of being rezoned.
“Don’t F with Fab,” a Somerville-focused advocacy campaign, has been lobbying city councilors and building citizen awareness to keep this protective designation in place. Meanwhile, Art Stays Here, a regional coalition of activists and community members dedicated to protecting the arts, hardly organizes in Cambridge. When I reach out to the FAB team, they email back: “We don’t know of any arts buildings left in Cambridge…do you?”
A Mural On ‘Hideous Scrim’
Tucked behind Kendall Square is Cambridge’s Port neighborhood, historically one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Massachusetts. But in recent years, diversity has gone down and median income is on the rise. The Port is not safe from the boom of biotechnology and pharmaceuticals next door, a wellfunded, land-hungry industry that began surging in Cambridge around the 2010s.
“In a neighborhood that’s rapidly changing, the uncertainty is always sitting on your shoulder about what’s next,” Erin Muirhead McCarty, executive director of
the Community Arts Center, tells me in her office.
A hold in the Port neighborhood since the 1930s, the project — part-childcare, part-community space, and part-arts school — began out of the basement of Newtonne Court, one of the oldest public housing developments in the country. The center provides a vision of the arts as a public service, done from the bottom-up.
“It’s really amazing that we’ve made it this far, this long, because it is a scrappy grassroots organization, and people have sacrificed a lot and given a lot of themselves to keep this engine moving,” says McCarty.
Kids and teens work on film festivals, podcasts, sculptures, and murals that can be brought out into the neighborhood or city. In the mural “Past, Present, and Future,” smokestacks billow next to a Victorian-style house uprooted from the ground, in the shadow of the Volpe Center for Transportation Innovation, while tootsie rolls — Kendall Square’s old industry — rain down on everyone.
Many of the center’s staff and families have been a part of the neighborhood and the center for generations. “So many of them don’t really recognize this neighborhood as much anymore,” says McCarty. “It is a gentrified community.”
McCarty says that amidst the changes in Kendall, meeting and community space has dissipated. No one, community organization or corporation, wants that. She says there’s often a real interest from biotech and pharma companies in the area in giving back — but that they shouldn’t look to do something new.
Instead, she suggests, new arrivals should “tap in and check in with people who’ve been here before and ask them about their needs, and their wants, and their dreams.”
McCarty says the center has collaborated on public art for development companies like Alexandria and Boston Properties, creating something visually appealing for a “milquetoast” wall or a “hideous scrim” during construction. But even the relationships built through collaboration are unstable, as companies often come and go in Kendall Square.
Within that precarity, the almost100-year-old center feels like proof that
A hold in the Port neighborhood since the 1930s, the Community Arts Center — part-childcare, part-community space, and part-arts school — began out of the basement of Newtonne Court, one of the oldest public housing developments in the country. The center provides a vision of the arts as a public service, done from the bottom-up.
something can last here.
But lasting is a balancing act. Their current space is housed in a building owned by the city, leased to the Cambridge Housing Alliance, and then leased to the Cambridge Housing Authority. Their convoluted lease agreement helps keep the rent lowered. McCarty stresses that the space would not survive if its owners had to pay rent at market rate, at this point a common refrain among those I talk to.
Though the center would love to have their own footprint in the neighborhood, McCarty tells me, they’re used to sharing — and know that space in Kendall Square is a hot commodity.
‘Steam to STEAM’
DiGiovanni may take pride in the Sinclair, but when I bring up the redevelopment of the EMF Building — another building he owns — he reaches over to pause my recording.
The EMF Studios closure was a major flashpoint in arts activism in Cambridge, displacing around 200 musicians from affordable practice space. In 2016, DiGiovanni bought the building for $4 million before converting it to office space
in 2018.
DiGiovanni was villainized by artists who saw themselves as not only pushed out of their studio space but out of their city. His only on-the-record response to the critique: read the fire department’s report.
The 2018 report on EMF, which followed several up-to-code evaluations from
The 2018 report on EMF, which followed several up-to-code evaluations from the fire department, declared the building’s conditions unfit for tenants to work in, citing asbestos, building deterioration, space heaters, exposed wirings, obstructed doors and outdated sprinkler systems. Though occupants argued many of the complaints were disprovable or fixable and asked the city to intervene, artist evictions went forward as planned.
The mythology of the artist calls to mind a flammable lifestyle — cigarette smoke, hanging fabrics, crowded floors, disorganized papers ready to catch and burn. To an insurance-coded mind, the idea must seem a natural liability. The lifestyle must be extinguished, one might reason, or it’ll go up into flames on its own.
There is a place where the arts can survive, in one idea of DiGiovanni’s: underground. As in, literally beneath the
earth.
He’s long had his sights on an abandoned MBTA tunnel, which he hopes to turn into an events space. Some of those events might even be adjacent to art. In this vision, perhaps I’ll be there at my reunion to watch my classmate give a TED Talk. For now, it’s just some concrete in need of a feasibility study.
Aboveground, other developers are visualizing space for the arts in Kendall Square. In 2026, the life science developer BioMed will give 30,000 square feet of a 600,000-square-feet Takeda development to the previously mobile Global Arts Live project. Though not yet operational, mockups of the 585 Arts performance center boast a glass exterior and gallery rooms where thoughtfully diverse computergenerated children play with blocks.
But during the wait for 585 Arts, another future is already here: The Foundry.
It started as a bargaining chip. Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a firm that develops biotech office buildings and laboratories, owned the 133-year-old Foundry building. Once the home of the Blake and Knowles Steam Pump Company, the high-ceilinged, 50,000 square foot space sat idle until 2015, when it was taken
over by the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority.
To mitigate Alexandria’s acquisition of large amounts of property — and in exchange for rezoning some of them to build up eight or nine floors — Cambridge took possession of the building. The community demanded it be filled with something in the public interest: open cultural space. The almost decade-long process solicited proposals from nonprofits, eventually selecting the newlyfounded Foundry Consortium, which aimed to start a STEAM maker and education space. So used to sharing space, it seems, art now slips naturally into the familiar “STEM” acronym.
At the Foundry, you can reserve studio space, host an arts event in a maker studio, sell your wares at a night market, or apply to display in The Point, their conference room and gallery. Children dance in a black box theater to Vampire Weekend. All the maker spaces are glass-fronted. A sign explains the building’s history, titled “From steam to STEAM.” The open floor space and high ceilings are textured with cement columns, raw wood, and reused brick: the telltale signs of creative refurbishment. The programming on the day I visit ranges from “Introduction to Parkour” to “Drum, Sing, Dance, Freedom!” to “Celebrate the Year of the Dragon with Paper Cutting.”
It seems like the idyllic arts oasis the city has been searching for — $46 million idyllic.
On the wall of the Foundry’s gallery this week are screen-prints from Lesley University, mostly depicting the Foundry itself. Some look vaguely like an acid trip, but one, hidden behind the rolling TVdisplay, reads: “After you’ve been forced out, come back visit Suburbia Cambridge.” The piece, rendered in deep red ink, seems to understand the anxiety of its own sentence. After you’ve been priced out, it seems to say, you should still hang out doing parkour at our refurbished maker space. It’s hard to printmake your way out of steep prices and scarce space.
Initially supported by a generous investment from the city, the Foundry is now sustained, in part, by the biotech industry.
“When biotech showed up on the scene, it blew every other economic factor out
of the water,” Executive Director Diana Navarrete-Rackauckas tells me, “to the point where it became difficult to talk about arts or academia as a major factor in both the culture and then the sustainability of the city.”
Large portions of The Foundry’s funding comes from full-building rentals for Microsoft and Google company retreats. To cover operational costs, they lease the upstairs as office space to tenants including Deep Genomics, a company that aims to develop drugs using AI.
The whole project is overseen through the government by an advisory council of Cambridge citizens. The Foundry touches
“When biotech showed up on the scene, it blew every other economic factor out of the water,” — Diana NavarreteRackauckas
on every player on the arts’ stage.
I want to be skeptical, but in my interview with Navarrete-Rackauckas, done in a laser-cutter scented room, it seems the consortium covered all their bases. Most classes are pay what you can, reservation fees are done on a sliding scale that disadvantages corporations, and programming focuses on youth, elderly, and the marginalized. They have hosted over 300 community organizations since opening.
“Yeah,” Navarette-Rackauckas says, as she shows me a list of their collaborators, “we don’t fuck around.”
It may not matter, then, if all this is done in a space reminiscent of Harvard’s Cabot Science Library. When people are given space to create, Navarette-Rackauckas suggests, they do.
“People feel like because a place like this exists, it’s a little bit more possible for them,” Navarette-Rackauckas says.
Still, the Foundry’s art programming is couched in the curious hybrid of STEAM, as if trying to prove that these forces are not always in opposition in Cambridge. Some patrons of the Foundry’s maker speakers are from the neighboring Kendall industries, coming in to exercise their creative side. Zarazua tells me many artists at the city’s workshops make their living in science industry day jobs.
As less and less actual creation happens, the word creative takes on new meaning. DiGiovanni tells me that the EMF building still has creative use as office space for Wistia, a content-creation, videomarketing platform.
Science is creative. Development is creative. Capital is creative. Just because something has been created, it possesses an inherent artistic quality. This, at some level, is the logic of the “makerspace.”
On my way back to campus from the Foundry, I learn that the MBTA has caught fire. I have to walk 40-minutes home — past the new Takeda construction site, past the MIT start-up incubator, past glass and brick buildings that seem unrelated to the place they are sprouting out of, into Central Square. Flyers are everywhere, advertising stonecarving sculpture classes, secret location DJ sets, full-street vintage markets, rock ‘n’ roll burlesque, and writing workshops. This is a place you are implored to dance, sing, watch, listen, make. A few blocks past the Cantab, I see an ad for the Socialist Party whose information has been scribbled out. I must be back in Harvard Square.
Here, an arts experience might be seeing an art film at the Brattle Theater, housed underneath the “New American” Alden and Harlow, with their three-dollarsign, carmelized-brussel-sprout brunch. It might be a DJ night at the newcomer Faro Cafe, with its $6 house lattes and neutral toned pillows, owned by a former Groton rower. But it might also be an open mic with Passim old heads. Somewhere between Harvard and MIT, history and potential, billion dollar endowment and biotech money, art exists in its compromised form. Sandwiched into STEAM, renting at submarket price, it survives.
Getting to Know the Datamatch Leaker
BY KATE J. KAUFMAN, ADELAIDE E. PARKER, AND JULIA B. TORREY
On an abnormally warm late February day, Sungjoo Yoon ’27 welcomes us into his dorm in Adidas slides, cargo pants, and a navy San Francisco Giants pullover. A worn oriental rug lines the hardwood floor and vibrant
information on the internet.
To gain access to the data, Yoon collaborated with his 14-year-old brother and a Stanford student who served as a liaison with the group of UCLA students who first identified the leak. Several of these students said that scraping the data was “definitely unethical” and “probably not legal,” but Yoon tells us he stands by what he did, describing his reporting process as “very by the book.” He partially anonymized the students’ data, listing each Rice Purity Score alongside a set of student initials rather than their full names.
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He initially published the website under the pseudonym “bernie marx” — not after Bernie Sanders and Karl Marx, he assures us, but rather after Bernard Marx from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Even so, his identity was soon revealed in The Crimson.
Hoards of Harvard students took to Sidechat to clown on Yoon, with anonymous users calling his actions “the height of arrogance,” saying the project was “copying the social network,” and describing Yoon as “an obnoxious little asshole.”
Yoon says the frenzy on Sidechat was “not what I expected and certainly not what I wanted.” Going to classes the day Sidechat descended on him, he says “I just wore sunglasses and hoped that I would blend into the 27 percent of kids at this school who
“I wanted the message to take the spotlight for a couple of days and then maybe later, for my identity to be an afterthought,” he says.
***
Though he’s talking to us from his freshman dorm — which happens to be
XINYI C. ZHANG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
Mark E. Zuckerberg’s former suite — Yoon actually considers himself a member of the Class of 2026.
“I’m trying to graduate in three years, so I’m taking six classes right now and I’m taking two this summer,” says Yoon. “This is motivated by the fact that I don’t have that much money and also because I want to join the U.S. Marine Corps.”
When asked what he does on campus, Yoon mentions overnight shifts at the youth homeless shelter but otherwise doesn’t see himself as particularly involved. Instead, he prefers to work on personal projects. He runs a Substack called “Napoleonic,” where he describes himself as a “milquetoast Clintonist who played high school football” and “the ultimate woman lover.” His past projects include working as a paid columnist for the L.A. Times, publishing an op-ed in the New York Times, and even moonlighting as a world high school debate champion.
Yoon’s newest venture is a book he’s writing, which he hopes will explore the “intersection of status, anxiety, and young men’s struggles.”
Yoon says that as a middle schooler, “I felt uncomfortable and unsure about my place in the world.”
Yoon says he fell into a series of ideological echo chambers that were leading him “down a really bad path.” He says he escaped this feedback loop, but watched many of his peers struggle with “very basic things like not being sexist” and “dealing with intimacy in healthy ways.”
While he recognizes his lack of expertise, Yoon believes he has “enough anecdotal evidence and enough life experience” to write a book providing young men with a path away from toxic echo chambers.
Yoon has already witnessed the impact of his writing. As a senior in high school, he wrote a column titled “The masculinity-
CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
intimacy question” on his substack. The response from young men at his public high school in Los Angeles was, according to him, unrivaled.
“Probably north of 200 young men approached me and wanted to talk to me about their thoughts,” Yoon says. “I had people coming up to me at lunch and saying ‘Hey, this is something I’ve been struggling with for a long time, would it be okay if I spoke to you about it?’”
At Harvard, his book has garnered the opposite reaction. Yoon says that anonymous Sidechat users criticized his idea as “such a Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Nick Fuentes thing to do.” He tells us his LinkedIn profile reached 2,000 followers due to the attention.
Yoon still maintains his Substack, posting what he calls “think pieces, drunk thoughts, polemics, rants, and more.”
While writing will always be Yoon’s passion, he says he would “love to go into policy making,” something “a lot of people alluded to on Sidechat, interestingly enough.” Contrary to the rumors, though, Yoon has no interest in the presidency or any federal position. Instead, his dream job is to be the Attorney General of California.
“What I want to do with my life is just make life a little easier for regular people,” Yoon says.
Sitting on the floor of his dorm room, we see Yoon’s bookshelf as the centerpiece. It rests beneath a huge but incredibly grainy “La La Land” poster. We ask him for book recommendations, and he picks up a small stack.
“These are two of my favorite books. ‘Capital’ by Thomas Piketty,” he says. “One of my favorite pieces of fiction is Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ — kind of a controversial take but it’s just a wonderful piece of literature.” He smiles, holding up his copy of the book.
Reflecting on the personal attacks, Yoon says he doesn’t mind being called “a nerd and a geek” — “I go to this school of all things.”
And despite his newfound celebrity status, Yoon doesn’t see himself as the infamous “Datamatch Leaker.”
“I was not meant to be in the place that I am right now,” Yoon says. “I truly see myself as someone who should have been chain smoking cigarettes in Eastern Europe and writing crazy political theory.”
ERICK CONTRERAS-RODRIGUEZ — CRIMSON
PHOTOGRAPHER
Caroline Calloway is Done Scamming
BY SARAH W.
The last time Caroline Calloway was in the Square, she went to the Harvard Art Museums on a date with a charming Australian art history student, to a party at the Lampoon where Scarlett Johansson had lit a cigarette on the fireplace the week before, and to Adams House to grieve her father, class of 1975, on the crimson couches in the library, while blue dawn broke over Cambridge and the Lampoon coke wore off.
There was a time when Caroline Calloway was (sort of) famous (to some people) — a time when the sight of her lounging on a couch in Adams House in 2019 would have been the stuff of at least a few Instagram stories. In the early years of the social media site, Calloway made a name and following for herself posting long captions romanticizing her lavish lifestyle and high-brow adventures with her old money European peers at Cambridge University. Think castles and flower crowns and Renaissance paintings and dating a cute Swedish polo player and bottles of wine on the banks of the River Cam. Calloway became Instagram-famous in the early 2010s, when it was both very cool and very rare to do so.
By the time she had amassed 300,000 followers — an incredible feat in the dark ages of 2015 Instagram — she leveraged those captions into a $375,000 book deal. With the sale of the international rights to the book, this figure came to the tune of half a million dollars. Only she never wrote this book, and never intended to.
By 2017, her book deal fell through, and she was more than $100,000 in debt. And battling a pill addiction. She sold $165 tickets to a trainwreck “Creativity
Workshop” that was compared to Fyre Fest. In 2019, her ex-best-friend Natalie Beach published an article in The Cut alleging that she was Calloway’s ghostwriter. It was The Cut’s most read article of 2019. A week later, Calloway’s father died by suicide. She gave the eulogy at her father’s funeral the morning after she appeared at a live show of the podcast Red Scare.
“The trip to Harvard just helped me so much. I needed to find some sort of pressure release from all that pain that was going on, so that I could think straight and make the right business decisions and put one foot in front of the other,” she says, before quickly pivoting to me. “Yeah, so you never answered my question. Do you want to be a writer?”
Calloway, as I assumed and as she admits unprompted, only agreed to do this interview because I go to Harvard. The coin of her realm is attention — but a certain kind of attention, from a certain name-dropping, media-literate, meta-analytical crowd. She has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, British Vogue, and the New Yorker. Attempts have been made to untangle her in countless Substack thinkpieces.
Enter The Harvard Crimson. This interview is special because it is a rare situation in which Calloway’s interviewer is beneath her. Journalists who profile her tend to emphasize the way in which Calloway tries to charm them, befriend them, and use their connections. But I am a child. I have nothing to offer Calloway other than my association with Harvard and a perhaps generous eye.
She seems to crave it. She asks me questions about my life, tells me she can see me raising chickens one day, and says that I should never let a man make me feel bad about loving “Real Housewives.” She texts me TikToks about Joe Alwyn and Lorde.
She references the drama with the girl who claims Olivia Rodrigo stole her idea for her SNL performance, and I tell her I haven’t heard about it, and she tells me “Sarah, I’m worried for you. This cannot be our intergenerational dynamic.”
I know this is just what she does, and that she wants to create a warmth and intimacy between us so I think she’s cool.
Well, it worked, and I love her. If you’re coming — in George Santos’s America — to read a rejection of content consumption, you will not find it here. I will not indict Caroline Calloway simply for wanting to be liked and talked about. Sorry, r/ SmolBeanSnark!
After the era during which Calloway passed through Harvard, she lived a series of grifts on her scammer reputation in New York. She sold $210 Snake Oil, which consisted of 70 percent grapeseed oil and 30 percent other oils like ylang-ylang, frankincense, and pomegranate. Her Instagram stories showed her on the floor of her famously anxiety-inducing apartment mixing vials by hand. She sold her life rights to Lena Dunham. (The deal has since expired as Dunham has moved on to direct a movie about Polly Pocket.) She went clubbing with her cat, Matisse, and dropped acid with the journalist writing about it.
She joined OnlyFans and made $25,000 a month selling topless photos of herself dressed as literary heroines for an audience she imagines as “boys who went to Princeton and now work on Wall Street and who think I would have been mean to them in middle school because they don’t know I was being bullied for my crutches then.”
She threw chaotic parties at her West Village apartment, on which she didn’t pay the rent for the last year. Her landlord sued her for the $40,000 of said rent and for the disheveled state in which she left the
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PHOTO COURTESY OF LIV KINGSLEY
apartment. And in 2022, she left it all behind to move to Sarasota, Florida and immerse herself in her writing.
“How old are you?” she asks me. Calloway is 32 — born in Fairfax Virginia at 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 5, 1991, making her a quintuple Sagittarius. I tell her I’m 21.
“When I was 21, I was nothing worth writing about. Or nothing worth writing a whole book — a whole best-selling book about,” she flexes, faux-facetiously.
“I was so hungry for it. And I definitely put myself in situations that would help ameliorate that. From 2010 to 2017, I was doing it for the plot nonstop,” she says. “If nothing interesting ever happened to me again, and if I never met a new person for the rest of my life, I would still have enough memories, enough professional connections, and now accumulated fame, enough of a lot of different things that I didn’t have at 21, that I do now, that I just don’t live like that anymore.”
Sarasota Caroline seems a sharp departure from West Village Caroline. She has a “chic lofted office downtown” that she goes to six days a week —
can buy an apartment in the West Village. Emphasis on “buy,” not “rent”; emphasis on “West Village,” not anywhere else.
Because she spent a decade living her life in such a way that she could write about it in the future, she’s ready for her next chapter.
“The driving force of my very existence is,” she reveals to me, “I have the memories. I have the friends. It’s time to put them on the page.”
Last June, the aforementioned Natalie Beach came out with a book of essays, “Adult Drama.” But before that — Calloway can’t remember when, just that it was before Beach’s book came out — Calloway released her long-awaited book, “Scammer,” which she started accepting preorders for three years before its publication.
Within six months, “Scammer” made $300,000, per Calloway. In an Instagram caption on a post featuring a New Yorker article about both books, she writes:
“GOD, MAKE ME THE BIGGER PERSON — JUST NOT YET!!!!!! GIVE ME THIS ONE LAST DAY OF SPITEFUL GLEE AND GLOATING, AND I SWEAR TO YOU, I WILL WAKE UP TOMORROW AND NEVER MAKE ANOTHER MENTION OF AN ARTICLE THAT RAVED ABOUT MY BOOK WHILE TRASHING NATALIE’S.”
Calloway’s use of “rave” and “trash” here are perhaps a tad flattening of the article, which pointed to strengths and weaknesses in both books and noted that each author is “trapped in an endless collaboration” with the other. But generally, “Scammer” was met with surprised delight from reviewers. Vogue called it “well paced, peppered with dramatic revelation.” Stylist called it “genuinely gorgeous.” The Washington Post called it a “masterpiece.” (n.b: specifically, they said “Caroline Calloway is a lunatic who has already written a masterpiece.”)
“Scammer” is self-published by Calloway’s imprint Dead Dad Press, meaning you can only get your hands on a copy through her website. My roommate had ordered ‘Scammer (For Peasants)’ for $30, which is hand-signed and numbered — but which lacks the ribbon, decorative stickers, Ex Libris bookplate, and Italian paper inner covers of ‘Scammer (Luxury First Edition!)’ for $65. She bought it in October; it came in January.
Before I talked to Calloway, I read “Scammer” cover to cover, including the
histories of the fonts she used and the 14 pages of acknowledgements. I scoffed and cackled and gasped audibly to no one in particular at certain lines, certain adjectives. She drops a lot of well-crafted analogies and a lot of names. Her descriptions of Beach are harrowing — in one anecdote, Calloway graphically describes being turned on by Beach’s description of being sexually assaulted. In another, Calloway sets out to have sex with a woman, but instead has sex with a pot-bellied man who she says looks just like Beach, down to the B-cup breasts.
“Scammer” is very unlike other books, in that Calloway keeps the “ever-living fuck”s and “like”s that are usually lost in transit between thoughts and page. I ask her what the editing process was like for “Scammer,” and she describes the three editors she worked with and the elite institutions they have degrees from.
“It’s not lost on me that all three of them are incredibly sexy men who fuck women,” she explains. “And I’ve never fucked any of them — would never fuck any of them.” This, she says, is key to the success of their working relationship. After what happened with Beach, she can’t see herself having an intimate creative relationship with a female editor any time soon. (Eventually she does answer my question about the editing process: she synthesized individual feedback from each of the three editors, but mostly stuck to her taste.)
“Scammer” is just one of three books Calloway calls her “juvenalia.” “The Cambridge Captions” and “I Am Caroline Calloway,” which will complete the trilogy, are both available for preorder for $65 each, though they haven’t been released yet.
The former is a compilation of Calloway’s Instagram captions from her days at Cambridge, the ones that Beach took partial credit for in The Cut — a Swiftian re-record, if you will, to own the copy that Calloway maintains she alone wrote. “If you’re so sure you wrote them, sue me,” she says to a hypothetical Beach. “Show me any proof that you fucking wrote this. This is mine.”
When Calloway tells me this, I believe her because, as I mentioned, she has bewitched me. It was not always this way: when the Cut article came out my junior year of high school, I was 100 percent team Beach. In the piece, Beach alleges she was
XINYI C. ZHANG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
Calloway’s ghostwriter for her Instagram captions during the summer of 2013, as well as for the book proposal that never came to fruition. Beach describes an incredibly toxic and exploitative relationship in which Calloway made her feel small and used.
In “I Am Caroline Calloway,” the third work in her “juvenalia,” Calloway says she will explain her side of the story. After its publication, Calloway explains, she won’t have to answer any more questions about Beach — she can just direct hypothetical journalists to the text. While she says she’s over being defined in relation to Beach, she also knows that everything that went down is an important part of her narrative arc. And her brand.
“I really believe that one of the reasons Natalie’s book sold so few copies and that she got so little press for her book, was that the angle that her imprint tried to use was like: ‘With ‘Adult Drama,’ Natalie Beach leaves the drama behind,’ or, like, ‘Natalie is breaking away from her story with Caroline,’’’ she says. “And ultimately, that’s absolutely what I want to do, too. But you can never tell the public when they’re done with a story,” Calloway expounds. A smart public figure, she explains to me, must “overfeed the public with that story until the public says, ‘Enough, we don’t want to hear about it.’”
In an email in response, Beach asks who “would want to spend their whole career retelling the story of one band coworker?”
“Sounds like hell,” she adds. “I remain excited about the work I’ve been doing, and relieved to have closed the book on writing and thinking about my time with Caroline. To state the obvious, there are more urgent matters at hand than litigating 10-year-old Instagram captions.”
When I hop onto our second Zoom, Calloway is making pottery. I’m well-versed enough to know that she is making pottery so that when I write about our conversation, I’ll say “Calloway is making pottery.” But, alas, she is!
With Calloway, it’s hard to separate the artist from the art, because the art is the artist herself, and the artist is her work, and it’s all performance, and truth — which is the art, and the artist, and the performance — is besides the point. How do you write faithfully about someone whose life is
theater in the round? To what extent do I trust what she’s doing, and the feelings she engenders?
In the Callowayan spirit of pop academia, I turn here to Susan Sontag. In her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” Sontag writes: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman but a ‘woman.’ To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”
To be clear: I don’t think Calloway is Camp. I don’t know if Calloway thinks she’s Camp. Probably she does. I do think, though, that Calloway lives her life between quotation marks, and that the role she plays has slowly become her real self. Calloway
“The driving force of my very existence is, I have the memories, I have the friends. It’s time to put them on the page.”
— Caroline Calloway
is a ‘scammer,’ at least in narrative, but she’s no Elizabeth Holmes or Anna Delvey. What she’s stealing isn’t money or any other exhaustible resource — it’s attention. And are you not entertained?
As always, Calloway has projects on the horizon: she’s releasing a “scamazine,” and turquoise velour sweatpants with “SCAMMER” in rhinestones across the butt. She used $20,000 of her OnlyFans money to buy up rare, out-of-print books about an academic subject she’s passionate about that she intends to edit into an anthology. But she can’t tell you what that subject is. It’s a surprise.
I ask Calloway if she thinks the scammer branding will get stale, especially now that she’s following through on her projects.
keep up my reputation when people are out here slandering my name? Calling my book
“It’s been terrible for my reputation. I mean, people finally know that I’m not a scammer now. Like, how am I supposed to
Calloway says. “If it’s: make books that live on after your death, or have a fulfilling family and be happy, I’m choosing books 10 times out of 10. I would rather make my art than be happy.”
Asian Non-American?
BY XINNI (SUNSHINE) CHEN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Guess where I’m from” is my favorite game to play when I meet someone new.
“Maryland?” they ask.
“No. Further east.”
“Wyoming?”
“No, further east.” I didn’t even know where Wyoming was.
“California?” They ask, taking in my cottage-core dress and my perfect English without a hint of an accent.
“Nope, I’m from Shanghai.” I finally tell them, earning incredulous looks of disbelief.
“You’re international? I thought you were an American Born Chinese.”
I grin, mission accomplished.
Four years ago, when I first came to America for high school, I yearned to be recognized as someone from China. I would introduce myself, unsolicited, as “Sunshine from China.” I was that person who wore traditional qipaos during dances and holidays, wrote opeds in the school newspaper about how we should embrace foreign cultures, showed Chinese TikTok reels to my friends, and posted on Instagram about Chinese National Day on October 1.
I felt the need to represent an entire country of 1.4 billion people and push back against stereotypes. In the process of doing so, I shunned other Chinese internationals who weren’t in touch with their culture — those who refused to speak Chinese or show up to any cultural events, who didn’t know how to write commonplace characters like 洗澡 (shower), and who didn’t know the lyrics to famous Jay Chou songs.
Changes in politics and the onset of the pandemic, however, forced me to be more careful of revealing where I’m from. I began introducing myself as
merely from Shanghai, secretly hoping that they didn’t know Shanghai was part of China. Later, when I was paired up with someone from Syria as a penpal to practice English, I said that I was merely from “Mass”: partially because I attended high school there, but also because I didn’t want him to think any less of my English skills (ironically, I said “Mass” instead of Massachusetts because I couldn’t pronounce the state’s full name properly).
Though my initial reluctance stemmed out of fear of xenophobia and judgment, it eventually became easier to pretend that I was American in a country that groups people together by race rather than nationality.
One day, I found myself using the pronoun “we” rather than “they” when talking about Asian American advocacy. It felt terrifying to erase who I was in just one sentence. It felt terrifyingly easy to pretend to be someone else.
A one-time remark slowly progressed into a whole act. Subconsciously and consciously, I found I was distancing myself from the international community. I stopped reading and writing in Chinese and had to (embarrassingly) search up how to write 导航 (navigation). I brushed off the waves of guilt that washed over me when the pen faltered in my hand. “It’s easy to relearn the language,” I reassured myself when muscle memory failed me. I forced myself to ditch the JJ Lin for A Boogie, the polite waves for G-locks and daps, and the long trench coats for puffers. I didn’t want to be known as another international student.
I became the very person I used to judge.
When my Hong Kong friend gets called “fake Hong Kong” because of her perfect English and literacy in American culture, she takes offense. When people make similar statements about me, I don’t.
Yet in the process of trying to be American non-Chinese, of trying to find a sense of belonging, I lose my sense of home. Caught between two shores, I no longer know who I am.
In my dorm, the quote “不忘初 心，方得始终” (never forget why you started, and your mission would be accomplished) is stuck on my wall. But what am I accomplishing if I don’t know where I started from? Where am I going, if I don’t know who I am?
I’m reminded of the words of philosopher Hannah Arendt, who described this feeling as a double layer of loneliness. Or as New Yorker Columnist Masha Gessen aptly said, it’s “having no place in the world, nothing to give to the world.”
Where am I going, if I don’t know who I am?
I don’t know where I end, and where the world begins.
At Harvard’s Chinese Student Association’s gatherings, I felt like I was unnecessarily Chinese when I spoke Chinglish or hummed to JJ Lin songs. Yet in Harvard Chinese international student gatherings, where I used to think I could find more people like me, I could no longer keep up with all the slang and puns they threw around.
Even my name pulled me in two separate directions. In the West, Americans would tell me that they loved my name “Sunshine.” Yet, in China, elders would grimace when I said my English name. “You should change it when you apply for jobs,” they would tell me. “It makes you sound too Chinese international in a pool of white
applicants.” I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry over the irony of the situation.
Funnily, I named myself at four years old because it was my favorite word at that time after an American kindergarten teacher insisted I abandon my Chinese name to be more American. But what does it mean to be Chinese, to be American?
Now, when a Harvard professor tells me “your English is so good for someone from Shanghai,” I freeze. I overthink.
Is this the same as a white person telling an Asian American, “your English is good for an Asian?” Should I take offense to his statement? If I do, does that mean I see myself as Asian American? If I don’t, does that mean I falsely admit that I grew up in China all my life until college?
This train of thought is exhausting to untangle. Sometimes, it simply feels like I live without the feeling of soil underneath my feet.
Categorization can help us feel a sense
of belonging to a certain group. But what happens when these categories become exclusive? What happens when these categories instead entrap and ensnare us?
My years in Shanghai had made me too Chinese in America. In China, my nine years of bilingual education and five years of American education had made me not Chinese enough.
I am not enough, for either side. Or perhaps, I am enough, for anyone but myself.
GRAPHIC BY OLIVIA W. ZHENG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
CARTOON BY EMILY N. DIAL — CRIMSON DESIGNER
For solutions and more puzzles, visit https://www.thecrimson.com/section/fm/crossword/
