The College Hill Independent Vol. 43 - Issue 6

THE INDY*

05 FOR GRANDMA 08 POEMS 18 DEAR INDY BREAKUP GUIDE

Volume 43 Issue 06 29 October 2021

THE RECOLLECTION ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY* This Issue

Masthead*

00 “WHEN THE WATER COMES AT THE FOOT OF MY BED”

WEEK IN REVIEW Alisa Caira Asher White

Yolizbeth Lozano

FEATURES Ifeoma Anyoku Emily Rust Gemma Sack

02 WEEK IN FORTUNES Alisa Caira & Asher White

03 REDEVELOPING SUPERMAN

NEWS Kanha Prasad Nick Roblee-Strauss

05 FOR GRANDMA

ARTS Jenna Cooley Nell Salzman

07 “BRYOZOAN ETC.”

EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Lauren Lee

08 POEMS

METRO Leela Berman Ricardo Gomez Peder Schaefer

Jack Doughty & Rose Houglet Ifeoma Anyoku Ella Wood

Rachel Carlson, Ricardo Gomez, & Miranda Luiz

11 WANTING/NEEDING/WAITING Kenney Nguyen

SCIENCE + TECH Lucas Gelfond Amelia Wyckoff BULLETIN BOARD Lily Pickett

13 AGAINST FORGETTING Noble Brigham

15 OF PRIDE AND CONDEMNATION Tianyu Zhou

X Yukti Agarwal Justin Scheer DEAR INDY Amelia Anthony

17 “RULES”

LITERARY Alyscia Batista CJ Gan

18 DEAR INDY

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain

19 BULLETIN BOARD

ALUMNI RELATIONS Gemma Sack

From the Editors

MVP Ifeoma Anyoku

Joshua Koolik Amelia Anthony

I’m a little scared by the search function of Google Photos. To type in “beach” and in return get photos of me and my brother as toddlers, Red Sox hats slipping down over our eyes, digging like dogs in the sand, brings up questions of privacy and archives and the technological singularity. It’s unnerving how much these lines of code remember about me.

I’m also a little scared by how much I don’t remember. Without the photo of myself in a blue mesh jersey (“Soccer”), would I ever have thought of my first games again, of my dad the coach with absolutely no soccer experience and a lot of heart? Is there an unnaturalness to that act of remembering? Or can I appreciate Google Photos for this gift? For it is a gift.

There is a picture of me in elementary school, pointy witch’s hat perched on painted green face (“Halloween”). Arching black eyebrows are messily painted over mine—I wonder if I did them myself. I wonder if me then would understand how much effort it took for me now to leave the house with my eyelids painted for the first time.

That was a good Halloween. Come to think of it, as I scroll through the other costumes of years past (“Halloween”), Halloween has always been a pretty good holiday for me. I think there’s something about the childishness of it—the acid reflux of a candy-filled stomach, the escapism of fantastical costumes and long nights with friends.

This spooky season, look through the photo album of your choice. Let it remember for you what it was to care so much less about what other people thought of your costume. And remember for yourself what you are: every moment of yourself, stored like photos in an ever-growing archive.

Be a kid again.

-IM 01

Volume 43 Issue 06 29 October 2021

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DESIGN EDITORS Isaac McKenna Gala Prudent COVER COORDINATOR Iman Husain

MANAGING EDITORS Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deborah Marini SENIOR EDITORS Alana Baer Audrey Buhain Andy Rickert Peder Schaefer Ivy Scott XingXing Shou STAFF WRITERS Hanna Aboueid Rachel Carlson Lily Chahine Bowen Chen Jack Doughty Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Danielle Emerson Mariana Fajnzylber Tammuz Frankel Leo Gordon Rose Houglet Jana Kelly Nicole Kim Bilal Memon Loughlin Neuert Rhythm Rastogi Issra Said Kolya Shields Sacha Sloan Ella Spungen COPY EDITORS Rebecca Bowers Swetabh Changkakoti Megan Donohue Elizabeth Duchan Jayda Fair Sarah Goldman Zoey Grant Anushka Kataruka Madison Lease Jasmine Li Abigail Lyss Addie Marin Kabir Narayahan Eleanor Peters Janek Schaller Gracie Wilson Xinyu Yan

DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Briaanna Chiu Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Clara Epstein Lola Simon Jieun (Michelle) Song Sam Stewart Floria Tsui Sojung (Erica) Yun Ken Zheng WEB DESIGN Andy Rickert ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Sage Jennings Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Yukti Agarwal Sylvie Bartusek Gemma Brand-Wolf Ashley Castaneda Hannah Chang Claire Chasse Luca Colannino Michelle Ding Quinn Erickson Sophie Foulkes Camille Gros Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz Olivia Lunger Talia Mermin Jessica Minker Kenney Nguyen Xing Xing Shou Joyce Tullis BUSINESS Jonathan Goshu Daniel Halpert Isabelle Yang — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in Fortunes

TEXT ALISA CAIRA DESIGN FLORIA TSUI ILLUSTRATION IZZY ROTH-DISHY

Traditionally, we understand that the Week in Review is meant to ‘review’ the ‘past week’ for all ‘readers’ of the Indy. However, we have decided that, really, the past is the past, and it would be a lot more helpful if we, as editors and as psychics, could predict the future for you. After many grueling months of preparation, we are ready to give you a fully accurate prediction of what the week ahead will look like.*

Friday:

Friday, while not the traditional start of the week, is the day that the Indy comes out. The rest of the world may not yet realize that the Indy’s release restarts our weekly cycle, but they’ll catch up in time. Anyways, on Friday, you will pick up your copy of the Indy after being lured in by the pretty textile cover art and then you will flip to this wonderful, premiere page. After debating for a second whether you really need a 21-year-old they/them to predict your life for you, you will keep reading in pursuit of some sort of satisfaction you have not yet learned to create for yourself.

Saturday:

Moving right along, Saturday will be a day of immense highs and lows for you. After nursing your first (maybe second) night of Halloweekend hangover until about 6 PM, you’ll eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner as one combined meal before beginning your preparations for night two (maybe three). Dressed as either a sexy fairy or vague cowboy, you will briefly feel limitless as you swank through the spooky Providence night. After a few hours of feeling hot or proud that you tried just hard enough for people to know you’re in costume, the exhaustion of the day before and the three meals combined into one will come rushing back. In your late-night food restaurant of choice, you’ll have to excuse yourself to deal with some more urgent matters.

Sunday:

Sunday will also be a day of immense highs and lows, but in the reverse order. After a long morning of everything bagels, iced coffee, and analyzing your life path from about 16 onward, the ability to get off your couch and stop watching a Netflix top ten series will return. As the actual night of Halloween approaches, you will decide to heal your inner child by trick-or-treating. While the actual children of Providence might not enjoy your company, you will find great joy in the economical value of free candy.

Monday:

There is no need to describe Monday. Already, a universal feeling surrounds the day that I can put no further words to. You already know exactly how Monday will feel, and I have no power to tell you differently.

Tuesday:

Tuesday is going to be great!

Wednesday:

Wednesday will maybe not be great. After a great Tuesday (really, start looking forward to Tuesday now), it will be a bit hard to settle into the mundanity of Wednesday. You’ll try to bring some joy into the day by walking across the Pedestrian Bridge. However, this walk will only make you wonder why everyone is so obsessed with that silly little bridge in the first place.

Thursday:

Thursdays are my favorite day of the week, so mine will be great, but yours will be just okay. After a hard week of doing whatever it is you do, you will decide to treat yourself and order out for lunch. You will then be disappointed by a soggy bowl of Thai food with not enough napkins. After this, you will promptly give up on ‘productivity’ for the week and begin to look forward to the next issue of the Indy in which, hopefully, your next week is predicted to have better fortunes in store.

*The Indy is not responsible for any inaccuracies in this prediction or any adverse effects of placing full faith in the Week in Review Editors.

Week in Fortune Tellers TEXT ASHER WHITE 1. Fold corners into center.

2. Turn over.

3. Fold corners into center.

4. Fold in half.

5. Turn over.

6. Insert fingers and predict your fortune.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 6

02

Redeveloping Superman

TEXT JACK DOUGHTY & ROSE HOUGLET

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION CLAIRE CHASSE

METRO

How a planning discourse obsessed with the past harbors elite power

03

Towering at 428 feet, the empty Industrial National Bank (or the ‘Superman’) Building, shrinks the rest of Downtown Providence. Once housing 26 floors of corporate office space at 111 Westminster Street, the city’s tallest structure— totally vacant since Bank of America (BoA) left in 2013—is seen, by some, as emblematic of the supposed economic ‘disrepair’ of Providence’s geographic core. And yet, Providence’s issues on the human scale—material poverty, depopulation, social segregation, and inaccessibility, to name only some—have long existed, and were exacerbated by the Superman Building’s operational life. The function of this corporate tower as a multinational banking hub spent over a century disrupting Downtown as a home for public life in the interest of one corporation’s massive enrichment. Efforts to rehabilitate the building hinge on the argument that fixing it will fix Downtown’s problems, but such an effort could never do the reparative work that can only come from publicly-led urban planning processes.

Public officials and developers including High Rock Development, the proprietor of 111 Westminster since 2008, have yet to commit to affordable housing beyond lip service to the needs of singles and young millennials. Their urgency to ‘revitalize’ and ‘redevelop’ this structure threatens to usher in yet another urban renewal for Providence, completely lacking a broad view of the ‘public.’ In the midst of a sudden and intense reckoning over the building’s future— peaking in late August 2021—High Rock publicized its interest in seeking $45 million in state subsidies and $22 million in federal historic tax credits to build around 280 “micro-lofts,” the group’s spokesperson Bill Fischer told the College Hill Independent. “Students, empty nesters, and millennials,” Fischer said, will find it to be “the coolest place in town.” He confirmed the scale of this project, indicating it would require upwards of $200 million propped up by a “stacked” portfolio of federal, state, and city subsidies. Presumably, this public investment would hedge High Rock’s sunken costs of maintaining this property for the last thirteen years.

Financial pathways to construction have been riddled with a decade of controversy, bureaucratic red-tape, and public scrutiny, but developers’ arguments for the redevelopment of the Industrial Trust Bank Building now have greater political traction due to the recent influx of ‘American Rescue Plan’ federal relief funds into the state.

These funds are largely unregulated and have yet to be earmarked for specific projects. An influential manager of these dollars, RI Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor, recently gave High Rock an indication of support for the use of public subsidies to revive 111 Westminster during an interview with The Public’s Radio. Acknowledging this momentum, Fischer told the Indy that “now’s the time to do it [develop the building] and get a long-term return on [High Rock’s] investment,” as preliminary conversations with public officials are already underway in anticipation of the 2022 General Assembly session.

As part of this upsurge of insider discourse around the building’s future, the Rhode Island media landscape has regurgitated the following description, repeatedly submitted by High Rock, of what the building’s redevelopment would offer: “the project would literally add a neighborhood of approximately 450 residents downtown—adding vibrancy to the city’s core, preserving the acclaimed historic character of

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the capital city, as well as being transformational for Kennedy Plaza.”

High Rock’s Fischer doubled down on this vision with the Indy. “The building was constructed in 1928, at a time when Providence had unbelievable wealth,” Fischer said. He signaled that High Rock wants to rebuild and re-attract such capital to Providence. “We’re having a conversation about workforce housing—marketplace, market rates—that’ll bring people down here, spending, eating, dining, getting on the train to Boston, that’s where we see the opportunity,” he said, illustrating the desired professional class socioeconomic demographic of such a “neighborhood.”

Echoing this commitment to privilege a professional class, Secretary Pryor told RI’s Public Radio that “there is good dialogue occurring with the university community about their needs for graduate housing and other forms of housing.”

This vision of development provides housing and services for a highly educated consumer class, fabled to return and ameliorate Providence’s ‘economic disrepair.’ This proposed redevelopment serves to replicate the histories of dispossession that have molded Downtown Providence, and its effort to center such classes in its built environment works to disappear the working class physically and structurally.

By monumentalizing this building’s past, and casting it as an enduring symbol of prosperity, elite actors (developers, government officials, journalists, wealthy academic institutions) have endorsed and mobilized a specific vision for its redevelopment—one that is rapidly becoming a dangerous reality. +++

The Superman building is regarded as a preeminent symbol of opulence. Providence architectural critic William Morgan considers it a “magnificent expression of America’s economic might.” In reality, the structure helped cement stark imbalances of power and privilege that inform discourse surrounding its redevelopment to this day. Erected in 1928 to facilitate American industrialism, the building housed a corporation—The Industrial Trust Company, which through mergers became BoA—that maintained $150 million in assets ($2.5 billion today).

To the Indy, Fischer painted signatures of this imposing wealth as imperative for preservation: “There is a vault downstairs that you could move into; it is cavernous. There are rooms just for the East Siders who would bring their rugs—not their money, their rugs—to the vault when they would take summer,” he said. Today, Fischer noted, the space would be a “great area for a restaurant or wine cellar,” demonstrating that this infatuation with past lavishness is an impediment to imagining an accessible, open, affordable environment.

Marisa Brown, an architectural historian at Brown University, helped the Indy understand

the weight and larger implications of such a statement. “What we have in Kennedy Plaza are these kinds of monuments to the hyper-capitalist system that we have built, which is all about extraction,” she said. “It’s interesting in some ways that the building sits vacant. You could almost look at it and say that it’s vacant because the system has run its course, everything has been extracted, it’s the end game.”

As they are siphoned away from communities and their needs—for schools, transportation, and care infrastructure—public subsidies are being sought to bolster an economic model for Providence that is both extractive and, evidently, unsustainable.

Rhode Island has repeatedly failed to lure ‘Anchor Tenants’—including Hasbro, Samsonite, PayPal, and Citizens Bank—to center their operations at 111 Westminster and ‘resuscitate’ Providence’s economy by ‘creating jobs.’ Marisa Brown told the Indy that the recent conversations about redeveloping Superman are, following this repeated failure, another iteration of attempts to uphold a trickle-down economy Downtown, along with its scathing inequalities.

“When we choose to preserve a thing, we are then also choosing not to do other things with the resources that we will then direct to that preserved site,” Brown said. “It’s decision-making about resource allocation, and that very quickly gets into discussions of power; which communities are valued more than other communities, which communities have members in the decision making room… If we choose not to preserve this [building], what might we choose to do instead?”

Any attempt to preserve this building as a center of economic power is ultimately a quest to maintain and further solidify the inequalities integral to its extractive history. Inherent to this affront is an exclusionary urban planning discourse that functions to exclude residents whose demands advance more holistically sus-

METRO

tainable alternatives to the present development ideal—one immediately focused on growing consumption and spending Downtown. +++

So many specific details—zoning regulations, quantity of affordable units, how “affordable” is defined—remain contingent upon an increasingly delayed legislative session. At this point in time, the crux of all discussions surrounding 111 Westminster’s future are profoundly about the distribution of resources in Providence’s spaces and who has opportunities to use them.

Rochelle Lee, a member of the Board of Commissioners of the Providence Housing Authority (PHA), presented to the Indy the perils—environmental, economic, racialized—of these planning processes being treated by developers with such urgency. To her, they’re designed to exclude local residents.

“What does it take away from the neighborhood, what resources and attention and contributing factors happen when whole neighborhoods are [made] invisible,” Lee asked. “If we were to be talking about this as a 5 mile radius, and not a half mile radius, I think the conversation [would be very different] around how the building fits in, and what it can do or not do, and who should benefit from all of it—whether it’s preservation or ‘innovation’ or whatever.”

Exposing the deliberate one-sidedness and rapidity of an anti-democratic planning discourse, High Rock’s Fischer said to the Indy that the group believes this project will face its most potent opposition from fiscal conservatives, and those generally disillusioned by government subsidization. Larger structural, systemic, and socioeconomic critiques—like ones espoused above by PHA’s Lee—have thus far been made invisible by a real estate–centric, dialogue-void, manufactured consensus that “people want to see something here, and people want to see this building occupied again.”

The redevelopment of the Superman Building is not an isolated project, but instead serves as a symbolic linchpin for a larger, anti-democratic, pro-real estate development agenda building Downtown Providence. In conjunction with a sentimentalized, frenzied urgency to reimagine a prosperous Providence via the Superman Building’s past and desired rebirth, the multi-hub fragmentation of Kennedy Plaza is looming to become yet another infrastructure of a disparate, systemically unjust Downtown environment.

These projects, on the planning level, demonstrate how Downtown’s prospective redevelopment is structured to exclude BIPOC, low-income residents, and people from other marginalized backgrounds. South Providence Neighborhood Association (SPNA) President Dwayne Keys talked to the Indy about a general aggravation around South Providence surrounding the imminent deadline to allocate a taxpayer-funded bond through the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT). The bond—trusted with public support in 2014 and due to be dispersed by November 4—has yet to be concretely invested in publicly supported projects. Instead, it is situated to support the largely unpopular “Kennedy Plaza Multi-Hub Plan,” against which a Title VI violation of the Civil Rights Act was recently filed. According to Keys, this bond’s encroaching expiration is oc-

cluding robust opportunities for the transit-oriented needs of local residents to be addressed, and then meaningfully incorporated.

Still, with this critical date in the next couple weeks, Keys cements the following imperative: “Our position is very clear, I don’t care what alternative [Kennedy Plaza developer] the plan comes from ... whatever idea needs to have three components: (1) robust community engagement, (2) impact assessment, and (3) democratic decision making [throughout],” he said. “Those need to be top, key in any development project, especially those that are involving public money… We need to be having a say, particularly those who have been historically excluded, in the democratic process as to what we want.”

This mandate should be a guiding principle for developing Downtown, illustrating that beyond any one isolated development vision or futuristic architectural rendering, Downtown’s overhaul and its included projects—from their conception as an idea to their physical manifestation—impose a rigidity to who will participate in public life, be seen as part of it, and serve to benefit from its essential services. +++

Invoking specific histories to imagine the present roles of city spaces has starkly material outcomes because “preservation” is synonymous with “resources.” Importantly, we can and must draw attention to communities that articulate sustainable, alternative imaginaries in Providence. The redevelopment of the Superman building is, at its core, a blatant expression of which communities have been and are legitimated in their navigation of Providence’s public spaces.

This tension is also seen in ongoing mandates to preserve the land of a historic Narra-

“What does it take away from the neighborhood, what resources and attention and contributing factors happen when whole neighborhoods are [made] invisible?” gansett community—with remnants literally intact—have collided with and rightfully interrupted ambitions to expand a major downtown thoroughfare, the Providence Viaduct.

To expand a highway megaproject across the footprint of this site and receive federal subsidy to do so, the State would have been required to invest $23 million to preserve these covelands, just barely half of what High Rock is seeking in state subsidies. Instead of recognizing this imperative to preserve and its associated costs, Rhode Island went to court against the Narragansett Nation in legal battles that persist to date over abrasive violations of Native sovereign immunity. Even after mounting an aggressive le-

gal defense in the U.S. District Court, the State proceeded to invest $105 million in rebuilding the Viaduct, crossing the Woonasquatucket River.

PHA’s Lee offered the following framing to understand the lived realities left in the wake of 111 Westminster’s redevelopment: who will this ‘neighborhood’—devoid of new schools, critical care infrastructure, reliable transportation—be inhabitable to? Who do developers imagine and consider when making invocations that this building should return to prominence in Providence?

When historical preservation and collective memory is called upon, material realities, as Lee suggests, inevitably follow. Organizing in Providence to elevate marginalized histories, as a reparative demand, makes material claims—to space, to land—that are situated to steward and create more just urban environments. Haus of Glitter, a BIPOC Queer dance troupe—with support from the city’s Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism, and its Director, Stephanie Fortunato—moved into the former home of Esek Hopkins, a naval officer who brutally oversaw the voyages of Brown family slave ships departing West Africa. Matt Garza, a Haus of Glitter member, told the Boston Globe: “Our task moving in was to grapple with the space’s layered history, and because it’s been such an underutilized space, to revitalize it as an asset for the community.” Through organizing political education programs, providing emotional care spaces, and feeding the community from their garden, Haus of Glitter makes material gestures that reflect a modest but reparative response to the historical reality, and present ramifications, of massive wealth being built in Providence via trans-atlantic chattel slavery.

We should call the entire history of Providence’s built environment into question and problematize its direct entanglement with settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Yet, as has been stressed throughout this piece, what we preserve is what we invest in legitimating, upholding, and subsidizing. Even in her capacity as the public official bestowed with stewarding Providence’s commemorative works, Fortunato could not answer whether a truthful reckoning with the Superman building’s exploitative symbolism and material legacy could disrupt the blistering pace of this project or shape its ambitions into more equitable ones.

Most crucially, this lack of crisp conviction lays bare the enduring influence of the old Industrial Trust Building. While this proposed development scheme begs for copious funding streams, the discussion has yet to be had regarding its “cobbling up,” as Fischer put it, of funds that should be invested instead in questions of livelihood, and informed by robust democratic processes. As it stands, this dated structure’s makeover is a significant obstacle, taking up tremendous attention, resources, and space—and in turn threatening to define the trajectory of Downtown’s ‘renewal’ in accordance with centuries-old, entrenched hierarchies.

JACK DOUGHTY B’23 and ROSE HOUGLET B’23 urge readers who are able to donate to the weekly Kennedy Plaza Survival Drive: Venmo: WideAwakes-PVD Cashapp: $MutualAidMondays

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 6

04

TEXT IFEOMA ANYOKU

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION JOHN GENDRON

FEATS

For Grandma

05

Navigating transcultural approaches to grief The day that my grandmother died, my parents bought me a vanilla milkshake to soften the blow.

Death never used to scare me. Growing up, I was taught that spirits come and go in cycles, so I always found comfort in the promise of reincarnation. The Igbo people believe that reincarnation occurs within the family, so that when we die, we always return to our loved ones. It is a belief that has shaped my view of life for as long as I can remember. My mother is sure that certain members of our family have been here already. She insists that there are similarities between long departed relatives and our family’s newly arrived babies. When I was a child, she would point to birthmarks and scars on my body, trying to guess which ones might be signs of a Before. While the idea of multiple lives might be overwhelming to some (You mean I have to do this over and over?) and futile to others (Then what’s the point of even trying in this life?), for me it meant that life and death were merely points on a larger, metaphysical cycle. I knew that I never had to fear losing the people I loved, if loss itself was only a stop on the pathway to welcoming. Reincarnation was a source of great peace: that we may depart many times and then enter again through a different door. I have always loved the guarantee of our return. I treasure the idea that even in death, we can all be together once again.

And so, I always assumed I would be prepared for The End. Years of existential contemplation have seen me conjuring up several elaborate scenarios of love, loss, and general apocalyptic anguish. I resent the truth. The truth that says: you can never prepare. You can anticipate. You can understand the odds. Accept that when the hospital calls you the day before, encouraging your entire family to say your goodbyes, the future is certifiably grim. And yet, you will never be ready for the day that the earth cracks beneath your feet and sends you plummeting through.

For me, it is a day as normal as any other, as I trudge through my incomplete assignments, racing against the clock of an academic warning.

A Bonnie Raitt song plays through the Google Home, a crooning voice commanding: “Don’t patronize me.” All that is to say, I don’t suspect a thing is amiss in the universe. When Mom and Dad walk in, their smiles calm me. Mom places the milkshake in front of me, and I notice that she even remembered to ask for no whipped cream. Dad turns on CNN as he takes off his shoes in the living room, and Mom sips her own strawberry milkshake beside me, as if nothing is wrong. The silence settles in as I drink, continuing to type up my final paper. “Grandma’s not coming home,” he suddenly says. Okay, I think.

I expected that. I ask him how long they think she has. He looks at me as if he doesn’t know how to form the right words. Eventually, he settles on a simple “She’s gone.”

Vanilla milkshakes don’t taste nearly as sweet on their way back up. I haven’t been

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able to drink one for months, the very idea of its taste sending me into a nervous spiral.

I’ve reverted to chocolate ice cream––a flavor I hate––but that, at the very least, doesn’t trigger horrific, dissociative reactions. Mom froze the milkshake she bought me that day, just in case I might want to finish it for later, but it sat in our refrigerator for weeks before I finally mustered up the courage to throw it out.

In the weeks following my grandmother’s passing, my mother and I consistently wake up in the middle of the night. I am avoiding nightmares of hospital rooms and IV drips. I find that I prefer late nights and under-eye bags to the trauma of memory. My mother, on the other hand, spends her 2 AMs with a cup of hot tea clutched in her hand as she flips through her childhood photographs. She lingers on snapshots of her parents, both gone now, gazing at their faces and recounting the stories captured in each image. My mother does not evade remembrance––she runs toward it with open arms. At night, she cradles me as I sob, holding me close and reminding me that sadness and

joy split from the same strand. Shallow words, it felt, against a hurt that suffocates, a hurt that drowns. To me, there was no bliss in mourning.

When I meet her one night, cup of tea in her hands and photographs spread out as usual, she tells me, “Grandma visited me tonight in my dreams.”

Dreams, she calls them. She isn’t haunted by these flashes; she doesn’t hide in the corners of this house to escape the ghosts that call it home. My grandmother’s face is a welcome dream to her, a heavenly visit that doesn’t send her running but inspires her to keep searching for her mother in more places. I, on the other hand, can feel myself retracting inwards.

I search within for any pieces of myself that might still be alive and extricable from my grandmother. I avoid phone calls and visitors, retreating to my bedroom at the sound of every doorbell ring or insistent knock. The sight of anyone in my grandmother’s bedroom sends me into a blind rage, and I hear myself snap at my family for even suggesting that we clear out her things. There is a part of me that believes she is

FEATS

alive for as long as her bed sheets still smell like her. I expect her to pick up her earrings if I leave them in the exact spot she would put them on each morning. At night, I instinctually keep the corridor lights on, so that she doesn’t trip in the dark. I am not sure where she lives––whether it is in the way she used to fold her clothes, or the sound of her laughter, or in the memories of the people who love her. And if I am not sure then I have to hold onto everything, just in case.

Mom pushes back. Mom says that if we never let go, Grandma will never let herself leave.

Mom says this like it is a bad thing. Mom insists that we have to accept loss, or the deceased will never make it to paradise. I struggle to envision a paradise that is not all of us here, together, forever. I try to trust that Mom knows what she is talking about. I try to remind myself that the only way out is through; the only way to return is to leave.

Even so, I do not let anyone wash her sheets, and the corridor light remains on at night.

I don’t say it, but I am jealous of the way that my mother grieves. I’ve spent my entire life trying, but I don’t understand her, and I fear that I never will.

our native village awakens for a party. In the Igbo tradition, death is met with celebration.

My grandmother’s burial is a service backed by horns and drums as the attendants dance and walk through the town, greeting one another and laughing the entire way. In the center of this congregation walks my family, all dressed in white. We call this celebration of life ikwa ozu, a combination of the words ‘sewing’ and ‘body.’

The ikwa ozu helps usher the deceased into a new plane of existence, as we believe that death is not the true end­­––it is merely a transition. In

“To die means to have once lived. To mourn is to remember. To remember is evidence that in these empty spaces there was once a joy that overwhelmed, a joy that filled every crevice.”

+++ On the last day I saw my grandmother, I cried upon realizing that she would likely pass away alone due to the hospital’s coronavirus regulations. Dying alone seemed like a punishment–– something I never imagined would happen to my grandmother, who lived her entire life surrounded by loved ones. It felt like a sick twist of fate that she would leave this earth contrary to how she lived on it.

Soon after my grandmother passed, my mother began the preparations for her burial.

She and her siblings made sure that my grandmother’s body was returned to our native land in Nigeria, a wish that she had made clear to them years ago. She now lies next to her husband––my grandfather––forever tied to the ancestral land on which she was born. In this region lived generations of our ancestors, and together they will always be. I take pause, now, when describing how my grandmother died. To say she died alone feels dishonest and too simplistic. I refuse to let a singular moment in her life supersede the countless others that were filled with love, happiness, and connection.

Beyond that, I refuse to believe that just because she was physically alone on the day that she passed, she was not still surrounded––by our love, by our reverence, by the memories we will forever keep with us. I also like to believe that she was never alone––that our ancestors guided her in her return to them. I am still grateful for our ability to return after death, whether physically or spiritually. I find peace in the knowledge that after we depart from this life, those we love will be there to welcome us back.

The morning of my grandmother’s burial,

a sense, this ritual serves to make up for the initial grieving process. After a period of sadness and tears, the ikwa ozu is an opportunity for us to honor the life of the person who has passed rather than to fixate on their death.

I see the influences of my culture in the way that my mother grieves. In the days following my grandmother’s passing, she filled the house with music, laughter, and photographs. She danced around the house, calling friends and family, preparing everyone’s favorite foods and drinks as she invited life back into our home.

My mother has always believed in mixing the painful with the sweet––that the solution to loss is, quite aptly, gain. I’ve watched as she connects with estranged friends and family, opening her doors even wider to make up for this latest departure. She still can’t wrap her head around wearing black to a funeral service. She has lived over two decades in the United States, intimately acquainting herself with their traditions and beliefs. On matters of living, she is willing to make concessions. Such as, weddings don’t always have to include the entire village. Dinner can (and probably should) be eaten before 9 PM. Plantain is not a food group. These, she agrees, are reasonable, agreeable even.

On matters of death, however, she is far less understanding.

That in death we should focus on what we have lost rather than what we once had makes little sense to her. To die means to have once lived. To mourn is to remember. To remember is evidence that in these empty spaces there was once a joy that overwhelmed, a joy that filled every crevice. Sadness and joy split from the same

strand. I know it is this mentality that inspired her to buy me my favorite dessert moments before delivering crushing news, as if a frozen treat would somehow make it better. When she later confirms that it was her idea to stop in the drive-through and pick them up for us, I can’t help but laugh. Of course she would.

My mother believes that tragedy does not have to debilitate us––that we can find the small moments of triumph and celebration even in times of indescribable loss.

I am not all the way there yet. I still find myself awake in the early hours of the night after a particularly hallowing dream. I can no longer find my mother sitting in our living room, but I find comfort in the steady presence of her voice on the other end of a phone call. I remind myself, now, that one of the most important parts of the ikwa ozu is community. That in loss we may all find each other. +++ Weeks before she passed away, we celebrated what we did not know would be my grandmother’s last birthday. My extended family crossed borders and state lines to come sit in our Long Island home, surrounding her as she rang in a new age. My family has never taken anything for granted. Another birthday is not just a new number to mark on the census. Aging is sacred— life is a gift. So, we thank the universe for one of the hardest years of our lives by throwing a party.

It is an acknowledgment that despite illness, uncertainty, and reminders of looming mortality, we are still here. I wonder how this scene must have appeared to my grandmother: holding her great-grandson, the youngest member of our family, surrounded by the products of her life and her love. I wonder if in that moment, she also believed, like I do now, that the cure to pain is togetherness.

IFEOMA ANYOKU B’22 is learning to drink vanilla milkshakes again.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ELLA WOOD “BRYOZOAN ETC.” EPHEMERA

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TEXT MIRANDA LUIZ DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

somewhere inside mapping the lines that cross underneath perfect fifths in afternoon twilight, twig people touch the moon while I smell its reflection. moon beams under snow beams all around me engulfs leaves and feelings, we touch our lips to the same thing, anyway at least, this fire here, we burn it for a bit, pass it back to one another to burn into one another at the lake

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH CHANG

this water is so still so unlike my dreams you see this melody is stuck inside my stomach you see these ducks emerge in bunches crumbling, fractals batting lashes language has no fixture, I tell you in these words (words spawned by rhythms of your wordlessness) these wonderlands of frozen tongues, winter lands of frozen love this winter stabs at left rib cage and I wonder is this the end

the hours inside seconds glob and roll over into one another that’s how I know I’m really inside of time, not just clicking in every once in a while I watch the globs turn inside out, expand and swallow me whole but

I think about it all too soon and tell you to open your eyes so you can see it. it is in this moment I fear that you might not know what the globs are and I’m defeated to understand discontinuity disunity disconnection. when i dreamed up this dimension (ever morphing, but no doubtedly existing nonetheless) I thought this might be our destination somewhere inside where we can feel the weight of it, the shape of time embroiling time. sounds shifting like blood behind organs I can’t recognize, melodies pull me -mories of dreamscapes out before my eyes these very eyes

MIRANDA LUIZ B‘22.5 likes shapes.

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1

cuddly and/or sensual and/or kissing curve-like forms in structural geology?

RICARDO GOMEZ B’22 plays with rocks.

LIT TEXT RICARDO GOMEZ & RACHEL CARLSON

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH CHANG & CJ GAN

synclines1 what subjectless wonder could there be in the blinking, stare of the

tides’ geographic livingness. paused like long crush, snug water on stone( shy grime star cloaked cochleae lonely coralline colorist bluesy urchin

fleshy limpet or crossed over wobble jewel vibrant/quiet/livingness .;:;.. ;;;: :;. heart banded ;;;: ;:.

—crag and tide bandit ;.

—strata & calcium queen :.

—grey and clocked in rock ; —crustal and/ kelp shimmer: explosion lovin’ —mineral fold and navel bloom .:;:;..

—dust calf& estrella stems .;:;:;:; :; —cliff lip and/ conchita cracks .;:;:;:;:; ; —plate curvelet & spiral grove ;:;:;:;:;:;: : —shoal cusp and: :;: :;:; ;:;: tide punch swept through edge on

;:;:; ;:; ;: ;:; edge in time ;‘ “, ,‘rifted ;w;:;:;:; grinded :;:;”

“a;:; thoughtfall into border aa::’”;:; into bor ;:;”’;:’:e der blend( ;:;” Pescadero is here? ‘ r“ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘“ ‘ (washed over after rifting ‘ ‘ ; de Mission terror) ‘ ‘ c o ; r ‘ synclines, land grants, and forgotten sense of

‘ ; di ‘ brown(

n at e :seventy summers pass thinking of what must ‘ d ; ‘become to ‘love in the tides’ dynamite grooves

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LIT

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ARTS TEXT & DESIGN KENNEY NGUYEN

ILLUSTRATION XINGXING SHOU & KENNEY NGUYEN

“I’ve been living on an island made from faith”

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A cornerstone of the pop world is the MTV Video Music Awards. Besides giving white artists a chance to flaunt their cultural appropriation, platforms like the VMAs allow artists to give their work a whole new visual dimension. For instance, at the 1993 edition, the ceremony opens with Madonna in full Victorian gentleman drag. As the spotlight focuses, the silhouette of her manspreading in a tophat and tailcoat becomes clearer. She welcomes the audience with a deepened barker voice, and proceeds to perform “Bye Bye Baby,” her latest single from her studio album Erotica. The entire performance features her flirting with and seducing a female backup dancer dressed like a courtesan. 28 years later, Lil Nas X steps foot on the 2021 red carpet in a lilac mutant between a tuxedo and a prom gown. He then closes the night performing Montero in bedazzled boxer briefs, gyrating amongst a bunch of similarly scantily clad male dancers. While they’re not the only artists to do drag at the VMAs, Madonna and Lil Nas X are the notable few to center themselves as objects of queer desire on this national stage.

“Androgynous” wouldn’t be the right word; it is too much of a catch-all that doesn’t encapsulate the full playfulness within the binaries.

Specifically, what happens when you pull elements from both extremes? Rebecca Kennison’s idea of “double drag” applies. It’s “not androgynously devoid of masculinity and femininity, but constantly playing with those concepts, always fully feminine and fully masculine, and thus appealing to all audiences, gay and straight, female and male.” In other words, double drag is like wearing a cone bra over a pinstripe suit, or wearing patent leather thigh-high boots with your rock-hard abs out. It’s about attracting everyone on the gender spectrum in an exaggerated manner. It’s about playing with the overall boundaries of sexuality and oozing confidence in gender expression.

However, more than anything, double drag is a celebration of being othered. In a society that favors the heteronormative voice, these looks are a bold queer statement. In planning these performances around the queer gaze, both artists hijacked a seat at the mainstream table on behalf of The Others. The stakes are much higher in pop than any other genre; a wider audience means more discourse, but that means the gap between positive impact and negative reputations is greater. It goes beyond pleasing the white neckbeards at Pitchfork. Once all eyes are on you, the pressure to please is heightened.

It’s easy to judge pop for being superficial, but it’s interesting to view the shimmery veneer of bridal veils and glitter as a shield. Like a piece of

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

glass, double drag allows you to see the artist at their shiniest, but provides a layer of separation and protects them from the outside elements.

“Our scars, they’ll dance with each other” Let’s talk about Sex, baby. No, not the Salt-NPepa banger, but the Madonna coffee table book.

At the height of her career, Madonna produced best-selling album Like A Prayer, an even more successful tour (plus a successful documentary about it), and the cherry on top was the most successful greatest hits album of all time—The Immaculate Collection. Pair that with her constant support for and from the LGBTQ+ community. Essentially, Madonna is the ultimate f*g hag. It’s not a stretch to say that for most of her career, she was knighted by queers. Her career is informed by the bohemian art scene of the 1980s New York, and by proxy, was informed musically by the gay clubs of the time. However, while these clubs were an aural museum for her, it was a church for others.

Shortly after the final date of her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour, the death toll of AIDS in America hit 100,000 people. Among those numbers were some of Madonna’s dear friends—from roommate Martin Burgoyne, mentor Christopher Flynn, to famed artist and close friend Keith Haring. The gay community was at their lowest. America was in a new wave of conservatism, and the government demonized HIV/AIDS but was apathetic to solving the issue. When it did decide to address it, it propagated the wrong things. Lawmakers mentioned abstinence, but not condom usage; it was about absolving the country of “sin” rather than encouraging safe sex. Sex, therefore, became an intrinsically queer issue. Touching a queer person was seen as dangerous, gay sex was out of the question. Even extending any sort of compassion to a queer person was taboo. In fact, we still feel the aftershock to this ignorance, from a certain artist’s tone-deaf “what if there was no AIDS in the 90s” single launch party in 2019, to another’s insensitive comments on the 2021 stage of Rolling Loud. Everyday, people are not immune to this historic pattern of ignorance either. Though there’s widespread encouragement of the prevention drug PrEP, there’s no widespread recognition of U=U (that means if someone with the virus has undetectable levels, they cannot transmit it to a sexual partner).

When all eyes were on her, Madonna decided to make the issue of sex unavoidable.

Shot by famed fashion photographer Steven Meisel, Sex featured Madonna engaging in various explicit—but consensual—sexual acts with various icons from the time and Vanilla Ice. Madonna was careful to not trivialize the issue, but

rather to reclaim her own agency and sexuality in a time when it was taboo. Throughout the pages are Madonna embracing her bisexuality, aloof androgynous figures disrupting the cistem, and a healthy dose of gay porn stars. It was sex positivity in a time when queer sex was the most negatively framed topic around.

The book gets richer when you consider its companion album, Erotica. This period in Madonna’s career was all about taking everything that was marginalized and ostracized at the time and placing it in front of the mainstream’s eyes.

However, whilst Sex was about putting on a show, Erotica was about giving you a tour behind the scenes. The lyrics read like they come from a wiser, yet jaded older sister. Sex was the party story to Erotica’s pillow talk. As producer Shep Pettibone recalls from the time, “Madonna’s stories were getting a lot more serious and intense, and she was definitely driving the creative direction of the songs into deeply personal territory.” This shines, especially on a cut like “In This Life,” which is a lament on the friends she lost to the AIDS epidemic. Throughout, she pleads, “In this life I loved you most of all; what for?” grieving over the energy she spent loving those that society neglected.

Pettibone puts it best when he says, “For all the multimedia extravaganzas that were braying for her attention, it was still the music that mattered and it was the record that we fawned over.” Of course, the book Sex was revolutionary, but the heart of the package lies in the album and her words. Each album title is an innuendo, let’s be honest. However, even in a song as overtly provocative as “Where Life Begins,” you have lyrics like “go down where I cannot hide.” Is she singing about flat-out nudity, or is she talking about a partner developing an emotional connection? But then again, who’s to say either are mutually exclusive? Your life and identity are interconnected and fluid, and the album’s inability to give specific answers highlights that. In a time when sexuality was a checkbox, it was transgressive for Madonna to build an entire album around the nuances and fluidity of sexuality.

“It was so easy in the beginning, when you didn’t feel like running from your feelings” Let’s saddle up and talk about one of the biggest hits in 2019 and ever. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road’’ was a genre-defying bop that united both the Roblox generation and the hip elderly Baptist demographics alike. However, it was

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made by a closeted man who was torn between two worlds: one of success at the hands of dishonesty, and one of self-actualization with the potential of professional implosion. With this newfound, diverse audience, should he reconcile with his identity, and if so, how? Clearly he decided to go balls to the wall with it. There were allusions of this before he adapted a more flamboyant image, but it wasn’t until Montero— where he used a full body of work to investigate the full spectrum of the queer psyche, specifically his intersectional status as a gay Black man in a racist society and homophobic hip-hop culture. There’s to be the expected conservative backlash in 2021, but it was heartwarming to see someone so overtly othered hit number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

You clearly see him reconcile with both in the music video for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).” Before even touching the high-camp visuals, the plot alone should inform everything that needs to be said—Lil Nas X is judged and damned for giving into his pleasures, eventually becoming demonized. It’s a simple premise, but in his hands, it becomes a clever reclamation of the common trauma that is the damnation of homosexuality within religion. I mean, what gay person hasn’t been told to go to hell for merely existing? As such, a lot of his success was at stake in creating such a provocative statement, but more would’ve been at stake had he remained silent. Pop stars can easily be on the right side of history with the right PR team and Notes app screenshot, but it takes actively representing the community and getting in the front line of criticism to truly be a representative icon. He himself states that he wants his art to foster “more acceptance, more open-mindedness amongst humanity as a whole. [He wants] kids to know that they don’t have to harm themselves—and that they’re capable and worthy.”

He further contextualizes his desire to use religious iconography in interviews, explaining, “I grew up in a pretty religious kind of home— and for me, it was fear-based very much.”

Beyond that, the letter addressed to himself to accompany the release expands the optics of the project even further, stating, “I know we

promised to never come out publicly, I know we promised to never be ‘that’ type of gay person, I know we promised to die with the secret, but this will open doors for many other queer people to simply exist.” Specifically, in highlighting “that type of gay person,” he acknowledges and transcends internalized homophobia into a realm of self-acceptance. It’s even more heartwarming to then see him flash a limp wrist in the “Industry Baby” video as he says, “I don’t fuck bitches, I’m queer, huh.” In short, this self-addressed letter highlights his thesis best: “You see this is very scary for me, people will be angry, they will say I’m pushing an agenda. But the truth is, I am. The agenda to make people stay the fuck out of other people’s lives and stop dictating who they should be.”

“When all the hurt inside of me comes out, you understand” It’s funny to see history repeat itself with the two albums. Neither are strictly about sex per se, but rather intimacy—queer intimacy. In a society that shames your identity and shuns your intimate desires, how can you be intimate with other people if you’re not allowed to be emotionally intimate with yourself? Madonna ends Erotica’s title track with a simple platitude: “Only the one that inflicts the pain can take it away.” However, how can society even begin to take away the pain that is decades of queer self-loathing?

Each one of these albums presents an all-encompassing world for queerness to exist.

Montero creates an effervescent wonderland, whilst Erotica presents a nocturnal alleyway of thrill. However, this hubris is a shield; in reading the lyrical contents, the bravado is truly a cry for intimacy and understanding. Each is about looking inward and giving the audience a confessional reading of inner thoughts. There’s a reflection of the artist’s success thus far and

a reconciliation of their insecurities in the face of it. Then, the classic tale of self-destruction follows, relying on countless vices to numb the pain of personal and relational dysfunction.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. There’s sometimes a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (pun entirely intended). Triumph follows, with the vivacious declaration of queer love and yearning to share one’s self-actualization with someone else, not to mention the flat-out horny anthems. Each is juxtaposed with a garish music video that takes the themes and puts them in their world.

All of this is to say that these artists subverted what it means to be arbitrarily othered in a fluid life. With their feminine-yet-masculine imagery, they physically embody this fluidity and flaunt it in front of a society that refuses to acknowledge it. Like their performances, these albums proclaim that you will always be on the outside, so why not make it fun for yourself?

It’s not about loving yourself first, but about acknowledging that you are trying your best in a system that may prevent you from doing so.

It’s about creating your own world where you are free to be anything. As such, these albums act less like a confessional booth and more like a support group. When you listen to them, you have an additional voice telling you that you are not sinful, that you will not be shamed, and that you are not alone.

However, one can’t help but wonder about the complexity of double drag in a meta-contextual sense. Do these artists use double drag as fun mischief against a cishet world, or do they use it to create a spectacle that obscures the intimate lyrics they perform? But then again, who’s to say it has to be one or the other in such a fluid world?

KENNEY NGUYEN B’22.5 just wrote his fourth piece on Madonna in an academic setting.

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Against Forgetting Recovering the memory of an overlooked great-uncle

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newspaper clippings, interviews with relatives, and public records. But these records and oral histories from people who were children when he died present an incomplete picture that leaves much about his personality unknown.

In reconstructing this hidden family history, I hoped I could go beyond a simplistic narrative of his life and suicide and show that he was a person with his own hopes, dreams, and problems rather than an outcast defined by his solitary death. +++

TEXT NOBLE BRIGHAM

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON

content warning: suicide, homophobia

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Every Sunday, when my father and his siblings were children, they would visit their maternal grandparents in Stafford Springs, Connecticut.

There were photos of their mother, Alma, and her siblings, Elvina and John, displayed prominently around the first floor of the small house.

But there were no pictures of Bobby, the baby of the family.

Upstairs, the door to Bobby’s old bedroom was kept closed, seemingly untouched since he drove to Ohio to visit his brother in September 1964.

Bobby died of the flu, Alma told her children.

His mysterious death, which was attributed to “natural causes” in his obituary and kept secret for decades, cast a pall over his close-knit Italian-American family and raised more questions than answers. His siblings mostly kept quiet about his life and death, but decades later, pieces of knowledge filtered down to my generation of the family. Bobby had not died of the flu.

Instead, he had killed himself on the side of the road in rural Fayette County, Ohio as he made his way to Cincinnati, where his brother John was a turbine engineer for General Electric.

Memory changes across generations. Bobby’s parents and siblings actively tried to forget the pain of his death. His nieces and nephews, who were children when he died, forgot in a more passive way. It’s been my generation that has begun to recover Bobby, learning what happened to him and what his life meant.

My cousin Jess Kulig is gay and, after spending a lot of time looking into the family history, believes Bobby was too. She thinks his story was purposefully forgotten by his immediate family, repressed because of denial, embarrassment, or guilt. In the last few years, she has begun bringing Bobby back into family conversations. For her, this recognition of him is a way of restoring intergenerational memory and reckoning with the way that gay people have been discriminated against throughout history.

Nearly six decades later, he’s a shadowy figure, mentioned in passing in his siblings’ obituaries, but rarely discussed. Jess and I are the historians in our generation, and after she started talking about Bobby, I became intrigued and wanted to learn more. While I will never be able to unearth all of the hidden details of his life, I was able to acknowledge his legacy and piece together much of his story through old

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

In 1936, nine-year-old Alma Fontanella’s parents brought something new into the house: a baby. They told her that they had travelled to Boston to get it; sex and pregnancy were taboo topics in those days. Alma had not even realized that her mother––who wore large one-piece aprons that could conceal anything––was pregnant. “How stupid could I be?” she would joke with her own children years later.

Bobby’s siblings, who were all much older, doted on him and would dress him up in little costumes. There are pictures of Bobby posing on a pony in a cowboy costume in old family albums. In another photo, he wears short pants and a sailor’s hat. Smiling widely, he stands with his hands in the pockets of a zipper jacket, surrounded by his mother and older siblings, including his brother John in a Navy uniform.

Alma and Bobby were especially close. They would roller-skate and sled together, depending on the season, and go on excursions to Stafford’s tiny downtown, which had rows of small stores, a movie theater, and a bowling alley where men stood the pins up manually after a bowling ball knocked them over.

The family was poor. In the winter, Elvina, who was quiet, and Alma, who had a good sense of humor and smiled easily, would bicker over whose turn it was to wrap hot bricks in blankets so they wouldn’t catch cold in the night. Until at least the 1950s, they did not have a phone or car.

Bobby’s mother, Marina, was a chronic worrier. My grandmother told my aunt Carol that she had cried when, as a 14-year-old who loved learning, her parents told her eighth grade would be the end of her school career. It was time to get a job at the Willimantic Thread factory, where she worked as a teenager before she was married.

Bobby’s father Geno was a stonemason who never made much money but, as the still-standing garden wall at my father’s childhood home proves, could build a New England dry stone wall better than anybody else. He worked hard on construction sites, and drank when he wasn’t working. He was away for long periods of time building roads for the Works Progress Administration in upstate New York during the Great Depression.

Geno had high expectations for his children and as Bobby grew older, his father compared him unfavorably to John, “the golden child,” who was much more debonair and masculine.

Yet Bobby considered John a confidante. John went to Cornell on the GI Bill after serving in the Navy during World War II and became an engineer at General Electric, which made him the most ‘successful’ of his siblings. He was the center of attention whenever he visited, and he brought the latest newfangled GE gadgets–– irons, toaster ovens, electric knives––which his mother proudly displayed but refused to use because they didn’t seem practical to her.

Bobby had accomplishments too, but they were never as celebrated by the family as John’s.

He sang in a boys’ choir and played intramural basketball at Stafford Springs High School. He also became the editor-in-chief of his school newspaper, The New Era, which his older sister Alma had also worked on. And Bobby was apparently appreciated by his classmates. His yearbook caption reads: “None but himself could be his parallel...New Era boss...above all likes being liked...unhurried and unharried…”

His nieces or nephews never knew about his high school journalism career until I found his yearbook on ancestry.com while researching this story. +++ When Bobby’s nieces and nephews––who were teenagers or small children when he died––describe him today, common themes emerge. He was overweight, they’ll say. He was a loner. No one can remember any jokes or stories he told.

By his 20s, he was an enigma. The way they describe him, he seems old before his time.

Something happened to Bobby between his ambitious high school years and his isolated days in the early 1960s.

In the late 50s, Geno fell off a roof while doing a masonry project. He landed on a pile of shingles, broke his back, and never worked again. His children had to help to support him. Bobby stayed at home after high school and eventually got a job as a security guard for Mather’s Private Investigating Service. In the evenings, he would put on a blue police uniform and go work the lonely night shift. David Fontanella, John’s son, recalls that when his mother talked to Marina she was always worried about Bobby. He would go to community college, take a couple classes, and quit.

On Sunday visits in the ’60s, the family would be chatting in the kitchen and munching on iced Stella D’Oro cookies. But Bobby sat in a chair apart from everyone else in his flannel shirt and scuffed slippers. He didn’t talk, smile, or interact with his relatives. It seemed like he was forced to be there. If he wasn’t in the house, he was in the garage, sitting in his green ‘52 or ‘53 Chevy and listening to the radio. Still, there were signs that he wanted to connect with his family. He just couldn’t quite figure out how to do it.

Much of Bobby’s life, especially in these years, is unknowable. Did he ever date, covertly or otherwise? How would he have described himself? What did he want out of life? Did his identity––and the lack of acceptance that he seems to have faced––contribute to his tragic death?

His family loved him and wanted to help him, even if they couldn’t quite figure out how.

But society was homophobic in the 50s and 60s.

Their church, contemporary cultural norms, even professional psychiatry were all stacked against accepting gay people for who they were.

Homosexuality was listed as a mental illness in the American Psychological Association standards until the 1970s.

In the mid-70s, my father’s cousin, Gary Neff, asked his mother Elvina: “Whatever happened to Uncle Bob anyways?”

She explained that he was gay and “couldn’t handle it.” He got the impression that she meant Bobby’s sexuality and personal values were in conflict. But it was clear that it was hard for her to talk about and Gary didn’t press her.

She never spoke about Bobby again. It’s unclear

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how she had known that he was gay.

Chris Skelly, my aunt, remembers two anecdotes that her mother, Alma, told years later. One was that Alma drove Bobby to see a psychiatrist in Massachusetts. Maybe he was depressed or maybe his sexuality (if he was, in fact, gay) was seen by family, his therapist, or even Bobby himself as a problem. The other story was that Marina, Bobby’s mother, had gone to St. Edward Church to get the nuns to “help” with Bobby. They refused, and she didn’t return to church again, even though it was just across the street.

My father’s cousin Gary says that Bobby would stop by their house for brief visits when he ran errands in Rockville. He also went hunting and fishing a few times with Gary, his brother Bill, and their father. A couple times, he played catch with them.

For my cousin Jess, part of the tragedy is that Bobby did not live longer. She wishes that he could have been a presence in her life when she was younger and struggling with her own identity. “It would’ve felt like I wasn’t so alone,” she says. “I would’ve felt less fear around my own family, wondering if they would be accepting. I think it would’ve made my life easier, and I would’ve just had some example of what it meant to live life as a queer person from someone who was an adult and who I could confide in and look up to.” +++ On September 3, 1964, Bobby Fontanella wrote two suicide notes. One was addressed to his parents. The other said, in part, “If I could not live like a normal man, I shall die like one” and asked that his body be used for “medical research.” The first note was quoted in a newspaper article that a librarian in Ohio found on microfilm for me. No one knows what the other one said, and at this point, neither note exists.

Shortly after he drafted his suicide letters, Bobby drove to Ohio. He planned to visit his brother John and had an important problem to discuss, says my father’s cousin David Fontanella, who isn’t sure what the issue was. The newspaper story published in Ohio about Bobby’s death suggested that he was on the way to a new job in Cincinnati, where John lived.

Bobby and John were very close and liked to go hunting and fishing together. David speculated in a phone call that John may have been the only person he really felt comfortable with.

Before I found his name on a public records website, no one in my family had been in touch with David for over 20 years. We talked for hours about family stories, our lives, and my

grandmother’s generation of the family.

On the highway, Bobby called John from a rest stop to let him know he was coming. It might have been the only notice he gave of his trip. His next hours are a mystery, but, according to that newspaper story, around 3:45 am on Sunday, September 6, 1964, Bobby parked his car on Route 22 in rural Fayette County near a park and the small town of Johnson’s Crossing.

Around 6:45 am, Ray Nauss, a doctor who lived close to the location of Bobby’s car, discovered his body. He called Sheriff Don Thompson. In the backseat, resting on a suitcase, investigators found the notes.

The letter to Bobby’s parents listed their address as Stafford Springs, Connecticut.

Thompson called the Stafford police chief and, following Bobby’s instructions in the note, had him find a priest to go break the news to Geno and Marina. After they heard, John and his wife Sally rushed to Fayette County to recover Bobby’s body. They made a positive identification, claimed his remains, and shipped the body back to Stafford.

Later that morning, the Neffs’ phone rang.

It was Marina, and she explained to her daughter, Elvina, that Bobby had been found “passed out in his car.” She told them to come to Stafford immediately.

When they arrived, Marina and Geno were “distraught,” recalls my father’s cousin Gary Neff. He and his siblings were sent outside to play in the yard while the adults tried to figure out arrangements. Once they had been notified, the family moved quickly; Bobby’s obituary was published the day after he died.

Bobby’s request that his body be donated to science was ignored. He was buried in the family plot at St. Edward Cemetery in Stafford Springs. Despite the Catholic Church’s dim view of suicide, his family said the Rosary at the funeral home the night before burial. They also held a requiem high funeral mass in St. Edward Church. And they were careful to conceal the fact that he had ended his own life. One of his death notices did not report the cause of death.

The other said he died of “natural causes.”

But Bobby’s death was still an object of neighbors’ curiosity. Gary Neff remembers that some time after Bobby died, the Fontanellas were dealing with family business, so his father, Donald Neff, took him and his siblings for a walk. A neighbor, who was on his porch, recognized them and said, “Geez. I heard that Bob Fontanella passed away.”

“Yes, he did,” answered Donald.

The neighbor said, “Well, what was the cause of that? What happened?”

Donald replied, “He had a bad heart.”

Geno Fontanella 1899–1978 John 1922–1996

David

(Son with John’s first wife)

Sally 1916–1998

Gary Neff

Bill Neff

NOTE: Tree does not include other relatives who are not in story.

Geno and Marina never discussed Bobby. After he died, my father says there seemed to be a cloud of sadness in their house. The rest of the family mostly remained silent about Bobby too, even as they carried the pain of his loss.

But death changes people. Geno mellowed after his son died. He stopped drinking and became more affectionate towards his wife. When his grandchildren visited, he was more likely to show off his vegetable garden than to compare their accomplishments. Until he died in 1978, he carried a carefully folded copy of Bobby’s obituary in his wallet.

Years later, Alma would sometimes talk about Bobby and how she had learned not to favor any of her children. But her generation didn’t dwell on unpleasant things, at least outwardly, and she only spoke about the real cause of his death once. Holly and David Brigham, my parents, remember that about 20 years ago they were getting ready for a meal when my grandmother, Alma, told them, apropos of nothing: “You know, Bobby killed himself.”

It was clear that she had been holding that in for a long time and needed to share it with someone. She didn’t volunteer anything else and never mentioned it again.

Alma was the last surviving sibling. On the day of her funeral in 2018, my cousin, Jess, posted on Instagram about Bobby. “I felt that it was important because we were all remembering Grandma and it felt like there was no one to remember him and no one to share the story of his life,” she said. Posting about him and telling his story creates a space for Bobby in the world posthumously. It’s a way of bringing a hidden history into focus and recognizing the struggles faced by someone who would otherwise be forgotten. Writing this piece was a therapeutic way for my family to come to terms with the pain of Bobby’s death, and the legacy that he left behind.

Jess could identify with him because she had endured a similar experience growing up in small town Connecticut. But she realized that she could make a place for herself. Bobby couldn’t see a way out, she thinks.

NOBLE BRIGHAM B’24 believes in telling the untold story.

Marina (Panciera) Fontanella 1898–1985

Donald Neff Alma 1922–2000 1927–2018

Elvina 1923–2016

+++

Chris Skelly

Carol Kulig

Rodney Brigham 1927–1991

Steve Kulig

Jess Kulig

David Brigham

Robert “Bobby” 1936–1964

Holly (Trostle) Brigham

Noble Brigham

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 6

14

NEWS

OF PRIDE AND CONDEMNATION

TEXT TIANYU ZHOU

DESIGN ERICA YUN

ILLUSTRATION LUCIA KAN-SPERLING

China’s troubled past with Confucianism

15

In January 2011, a Statue of Confucius was erected in front of the National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square (天安门广场孔子 像). For many, this symbol exemplified a larger revival of China’s national heritage. The museum curator Lü Zhangshen (吕章申) stated in an interview that the statue was constructed to champion Confucius as the cultural hero of China’s 5000-year-old civilization (5000年的 文明古国). Zhangshen drew parallels between Confucius and the role that figures like Socrates, Jesus, and Gautama Buddha have played in other cultures. He also expressed a desire to set the Museum on equal footing with other “great Western museums” such as the British Museum. Many scholars see the Confucianist traditions embodied in the Statue as a new source of China’s “international soft power” (国际软 实力), namely its cultural influence and civilizational prestige. Others have argued that the recognition and elevation of Confucius boosts “national confidence” (民族自信) — an integral part of “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (中华民族大复兴) — that has become a nationalist buzzword since the early 2000s.

Exploiting the rising cultural nationalism, the Statue is also part of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda scheme to strengthen its political legitimacy. The National Museum in Tiananmen Square has received more funding from the state than other museums in China after being deemed an important “representation of the Great Country (大国)” in China’s Eleventh Five Year Plan in 2006. Former Premier Wen Jiabao supported the revival of Confucian traditions as its teachings of “living a life without contention” (和为贵) would support his vision of a “harmonious society” (和谐社 会). The ceremony honoring the completion of the Statue was attended by many high officials of the People’s Republic of China. For some members of the CCP, the Statue was intended to cement the government’s role as the mastermind of China’s national revival. Tellingly, Lü himself is a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

However, just 97 days after its erection, the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Statue of Confucius was removed under the cover of night after it received criticism from both liberals and Marxists outside and within the Party. Representatively, on January 23, 2011, Marxist Li Dingkai (李定凯) protested vociferously against the statue’s installation on the influential online publication Utopia (乌有之乡).

To paraphrase his argument, the Chinese revolutionaries took great lengths to liberate the “people” from Confucius and his “authoritarian, feudalist” legacy and resurrecting him would directly contradict their revolutionary spirit.

Critics such as Dingkai see Confucianism as an “authoritarian,” “feudalistic,” and “backward” hindrance to the modernization and growth of China. Efforts by high officials within the Party such as Bo Xilai who shared these sentiments finally led to the removal of the Confucius Statue from Tiananmen Square.

This article argues that China’s troubled attitudes towards its Confucianism are informed by two opposing narratives of its history—narratives of “pride” and narratives of “condemnation.” Confucianism has been the official ideology of Chinese Empires for 1900 years. A basic familiarity with China’s history can ignite the nationalist pride of the civilization to many intellectuals and Chinese citizens. More than ever, the current Chinese government today sees itself as a successor to Chinese Empires in its ideology of civilizational unification and centralization. Members of the CCP and the current Xi Jinping leadership are increasing funding to studies of Confucianism and selectively propagandizing Confucianist teachings and imperial history conducive to the regime. The narratives of condemnation take the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in the early 19th century as their starting point. This collapse has proven to many educated people since the early 1900s that Confucianist teachings which had hitherto been dominant would be insufficient to resuscitate Chinese society. As proponents of this narrative have internalized Western concepts of the rightful social and political order, they see the Official Confucianism of Chinese Empires as the source of backwardness and authoritarian-

ism and search for a permanent transformation from China’s imperial past. Many contemporary Marxists and liberals both within and outside the Party still hold this line of logic against a revival of Confucianism.

Confucianist Traditions: In this analysis, the term “Confucianism” consists of an array of traditions found in the texts, discourse, and praxis of people from various social strata. While the exact contours of the ideology have shifted over the course of time a few core traditions within Confucianism have remained stable and are transmitted to present generations through education and cultural reproduction. Most notably, these are: the teachings of Confucius, his disciples like Zi Si ( 子思), successors like Mencius (孟子), the Four Books and Five Classics attributed to them, and key Confucianist thinkers such as Zhu Xi (朱熹) and Wang Yangming (王阳明). The Confucianist traditions also include very important texts such as moralist teachings that include the children’s textbooks Dizigui (《弟子规》, i.d. Stipulations for a Good Confucian Pupil), San Zijing (《三字 经》, i.d. Book in Three-Character Mnemonics), and those which offer historical exemplars that include Official Histories《二十四史》, Spring and Autumn Annals《春秋左传》, and Zizhi Tongjian 《资治通鉴》.

Like Plato who was both a teacher and an avid political activist, Confucius’ teachings provide not only a novel moral philosophy for communal and familial associations, but also a theory of the state. Among these, certain doctrines are prominent: (1) The “correct political order” should be hierarchical and dependent on prescribed social roles (分) and ritualistic behaviors (礼 lǐ); (2) concepts of moral qualities like benevolence (仁 rén), duty (义 yì), faithfulness (信 xìn), and socially-embedded behaviors (礼) should be the basis of domestic and foreign political authority; (3) moral qualities differentiate those with aristocratic origins from those without (君子、小人) and those who live in “China” from those outside (夷狄、诸夏). An acute observer can immediately see why these

NEWS doctrines can become problematic in contemporary discourse because they collide with modern conceptions of citizenship, egalitarianism, and liberty and most theories of democracy that recognize cultural diversity and human rights.

The History of Official/Imperial Confucianism: Though Confucius himself, like Plato, failed to instantiate his vision of politics (and society) in his lifetime, his successors were able to have Confucianism nationally recognized. In 134 BC, the court of the Han Dynasty endorsed the proposal by Confucianist scholar Dong Zhongshu (董仲舒) to “officially dismiss and demote all teachings except the Confucianist ones” (罢 黜百家，独尊儒术). Since then, with very few exceptions, succeeding Chinese Empires that have ruled China have adopted Confucianism as their official ideology, establishing institutions modeled on its principles and promoting its beliefs to people under their rule.

The Official Confucianism developed by imperial officials espoused a strong central government. Under its discourse, the imperial court possesses both the highest political and cultural authority of the known world. The Chinese Emperor (皇帝) is the Son of Heaven (天子), Son of Father Heaven and Mother Earth (父天母地), and the Parents of the People (黎 庶父母). His authority commands the entirety of His imperial apparatuses (号令四海), determines the righteous social order (礼乐、纲纪), and demands loyalty (忠) from its servants ( 臣、卿). The regions and peoples from outside the Chinese Empire’s sphere of influence, to those under it, then to those living in the capital are understood as a spatial continuum of this civilizing interaction, referred to as tianxia (天 下, i.d. “what is under the sky”). The Emperor’s political and cultural influence elevates the moral qualities of peoples living in tianxia as they would voluntarily align their cultural practices with His interpretation of Confucianist teachings (文命敷于四海，祗承于帝；美教化， 移风俗).

Influential revisions of the Confucianist traditions did deviate from older theories of the state; however, these theories often were incorporated into Official Confucianism and served to strengthen the imperial authority rather than weaken it. For instance, the neo-Confucianist discourse (理学), headed by Ou Yangxiu (欧阳 修, 1007-1072 CE), Cheng Ying (程颐, 10331107), and Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130-1200), among others, built up a systematic metaphysical dimension to the Confucianist traditions through reinterpretation of Confucianist Classics. Recognizing its influence, the imperial court of the Song and later regimes adopted the neo-Confucianist theory of daotong (道统、正统, i.d. “rule of dao”) in justification that the Empire inherited the sacred qualities of the dao from Confucius and Mencius.

The 2000-Year Transmission of Confucianism: Confucianism was transmitted in the successive Empires by two primary ways: first, a ‘common culture’ was reproduced through generations of stakeholders, and this culture was institutionalized through a nationwide testing system.

First, since the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127 CE), the Chinese-speaking imperial cultural and political elites began to adopt a “common culture” that solely recognized what they deemed as part of the Confucianism traditions (儒). Neo-Confucianist scholars debated with each other on which philosophical thesis best represented the dao (道) in Confucianist classics, such as the true meaning of moral qualities like benevolence and duty. Most educated people were proficient in Confucianist texts and teachings, conversed and wrote in refined Classical Chinese, and reasoned by Confucianist moralities and historical exemplars. People living under the Empire read about or listened to tales from Confucianist historical traditions that tied their social identities strongly to the millennium-long Empire. Central and local judicial authorities issued judgements on the justifications of Confucianist moral philosophy.

Second, since the Northern Song Dynasty, Confucianist knowledge constituted the most important means of social advancement. As there was no politically independent merchant

class, the only available means of attaining respectable reputation and wealth was to acquire a good position in the bureaucratic system of central government (仕宦之途) which was mostly achieved by elite networks and the imperial examination system known as keju (科举制度).

The mid Northern Song central government fully institutionalized the triennial examination system that tested one’s immense knowledge of Confucianist Classics including texts attributed to Confucius like the Analects and Zhu Xi’s Commentary on the Confucianist traditions.

The vast majority of families willingly or unwillingly spent their savings to help their sons acquire Confucianist texts, attend local schools, or attend studying sessions for exam preparation.

In summary, the role of Confucianist traditions as the “common culture” of the Chinese political elite and its institutionalization through the keju allowed for its 2000-year transmission.

Downfall of Official Confucianism: In the early 19th century, the Qing Dynasty and the Confucianist ideology that sustained it grew increasingly weak until the dynasty eventually collapsed in the early 20th century.

This historical period is remembered by many contemporary Chinese as China’s “Hundred Years of Humiliation” (百年屈辱). While the factors leading to this decline (衰落) are many and complex, they can broadly be divided into internal and external causes. Internal problems included the Qing institutional design and policy orientations such as corruption and excessive state extraction, lack of economic adjustment policies, erosion of the imperial taxation system, overpopulation, Manchu un-rational favoritism inherent in Qing central authority, and court infighting, which weakened the state and impoverished the society under its rule. Additionally, external forces such as British opium imports massively drained the Qing silver reserve and caused unstoppable stagflation, overseas opium smuggling chains, and the invasions and exploitation by the foreign powers including the European Powers (First Opium War, 1839-1842; Second Opium War, 1856-1860; Eight-Nation Alliance, 1900-1901), the Russian Empire (1850s-), Central Asian (1820s to mid 1870s), and the Japanese (1894-1895) also put a strain on the empire and heightened social tensions.

By the end of the 19th century, Qing Confucianist institutions were essentially defunct.

Internationally, China fell from the ‘center of civilization’ (天朝上国) to a country overridden with social issues and foreign intervention ( 弱国). Internally, the bureaucracy crumbled.

Graduates from keju could barely earn a living; local governance and judicial authorities became quite predative (if they still existed); social order was generally lost; rural immiseration and indenture to localized elite landlords deepened; Christian groups, secret folk religions, local gangs, local commanders, and warlords superseded local Qing government in the countryside as security providers. With the collapse of the Qing state, Confucianist traditions no longer provided social incentive to the younger generations. People prioritized and even idolized what they saw as “West learning” (西学), as the “West” was seen as the “superior” and “stronger” civilizations than that of imperial China. In 1891, an important reformer Kang Youwei (康有 为) remarked that “some scholars who don’t understand the Western learning appear ignorant of current transformations; if they ever know it, they worship it ad absurdum, baptizing themselves to be Westerners (缘学者不知西学，则 愚暗而不达时变；稍知西学，则尊奉太过，而化 为西人).” The narratives of condemnation thus have their intellectual roots in the 19th century with the weakening of the Chinese empire and the Confucianist ideology that sustained it.

Narrative of the Humiliation and Condemnation of Confucianism: By the early 1900s, most political elites and intellectuals in China condemned teachings of Confucius and other Confucianist traditions as “backward” (落后) and “authoritarian” (专制、 君主制), using concepts and symbols borrowed from the European and Japanese discourse on evolution (天演/进化), citizenship (国民、公民),

liberty (自由), egalitarianism (平等), republicanism (共和), and democracy (民主). They interpreted Chinese history simply as many millennia of Confucianist imperial authoritarianism that enslaved the people (梁启超1901 《中国积弱溯源论》). The Qing court and the emperor were seen by the new Chinese nationalists as a clique of barbaric Manchu invaders that used Confucianism to cover up their cruel oppression of the Chinese race. In 1919, a very influential author Lu Xun (鲁迅) openly equated teaching Confucianist traditions of social order ( 礼教) with selling people “mantou stained with human blood” (人血馒头). On top of all this, Marxists labeled Confucianism as the teaching of “feudalism” (封建) and proclaimed their mission to supersede it. The above intellectual transformation is well-documented by scholars like Wang Fansen (王汎森), Luo Zhitian (罗志 田), Lin Yusheng (林毓生), and Lydia H. Liu (刘 禾).

Both the positive and negative sides in contemporary Chinese discourse on the modern role of Confucianism are aware of the above criticisms against Confucianism, mostly due to the cultural and educational atmosphere in China. As the CCP was born out of the early 20th intellectual ecology that sought to modernize China by total transformation of the Confucianist past, it has consistently maintained a discourse in its publications and national educational system that criticized Confucianism as authoritarian and backward. For many, especially the liberals and Marxists, its teachings such as “hierarchy,” “prescribed social roles,” and “political moral qualities” was a clear cause of China’s Humiliation. According to them, the Chinese Empire was a tyrannical institutional design, Confucius and his successors collaborated with the despotic system, the emperor (帝 王) was a self-interested, hypocritical autocrat, the keju was a brainwashing indoctrination tool, and the Confucianist elites were a bunch of corrupt and ineffective officials. This is the line of logic which informed the arguments of Marxist writer Li Dingkai and those in the Party who removed the Statue.

Chinese Cultural Nationalism and Pride of Confucianism: Like many other post-colonial societies, in China, “modernity” (现代) also entails the “intrusion of the West.” Following this logic, the collapse of the Qing state was lamented as an act of injustice by foreign aggression. The nationalists cite external causes, mostly those in association with Western imperialism (西方列 强), to explain China’s humiliation. In response, they equate the Confucianist traditions as China’s ancient civilization (儒家文明) comparable to other civilizations in the world. They argue that this justifies the revival of Confucianism that gives meaning to rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. This line of logic informed the arguments Lü Zhangshen made above.

Since the late 1990s, the Chinese government has begun to more publicly position itself as the architect of China’s rise from its Hundred Years of Humiliation that includes the recuperation of China’s lost Confucianist traditions. On the one hand, this boosts the ideological and political legitimacy of Chinese Communist Party; on the other hand, more and more political actors in the CCP have begun to adopt cultural nationalist arguments about Confucianism as they see China’s civilization “standing up” to that of the West, including Lü and other high officials who attended ceremony for the Statue.

The conflicting narratives of pride and condemnation have proven extremely valuable in attitudes of people in China towards its Confucianist past. In the next publication, I will examine the current Confucianist revival in China by discussing its three different forms as enacted by various social groups with distinct motivations and interpretations of the Confucianist traditions: cultural Confucianism, neo-political Confucianism, and unofficial religious Confucianism.

TIANYU ZHOU B’24 wants you to check out the National Museum of China.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 6

16

X JOSHUA KOOLIK “RULES” 17

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DEAR INDY

My long time partner just broke up with me and I’m so so so sad. What do I do??

Dear Heartbroken,

Love,

My heart goes out to you :( <3 Active heartbreak is so

Heartbroken

all-consuming. I’d thought I’d compile all of my advice, gained from trusty friends and being dumped plenty, into a handy-dandy...

Take a break. When you’re in an active crisis post-breakup, do your absolute best to do nothing. Call off work. Don’t go to class. Watch “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and cry. Tear-splatter your journal.

Call your mom or your bestie and ugly-cry. Order soup. Treat yourself like a sick kid home from school.

This phase should last between two days and two weeks.

The playlist. Preferably listened to while walking around Providence, smoking cigarettes and looking dejected and edgy. (Smoking doesn’t count during a breakup.) New England is absolutely the best place to romanticize being sad, so take advantage of that. Some tried-and-true hits: “Everything Reminds me of Her” and “Somebody that I Used to Know” by Elliott Smith, “I Wish I Were the Moon” by Neko Case, “Silver Dagger” by Joan Baez, and “Ex-Factor” by Ms. Lauryn Hill (you can later graduate to “I Used to Love Him”). And of course—actually the only song you’ll ever need—"thank u, next" by Ariana Grande.

Over and over and over. You may need to switch your Spotify to private listening mode for the time being.

Distance. Return their clothes/books/etc as soon as possible. If you can’t face them, drop it off. Mute your ex on Instagram if you broke up amicably, but if it was messy, unfollow/block. If you’re scrolling through old photos, delete them! Grab a piece of paper and write down 50 reasons you hate your ex and shouldn’t be together. All the fights you had? Times they were in the wrong? It’s kind of mean and petty, so keep it secret, but refer to the list whenever you get sad or sentimental. Write them an angry letter and burn it. DO NOT TEXT THEM OR DRUNK CALL THEM OR ATTEMPT TO PROCESS THE BREAKUP TOGETHER!!!! Even if your ultimate goal is to remain friends, try to put at least a few weeks’ time between you with absolutely no contact.

Reinvent. Instagram debut your breakup via untagging and deleting. Post a hot selfie and try not to check the likes. Pull a geographic—relocate physically, for a weekend or for a summer. Get into a hobby or skill you’ve been meaning to, now that you’ve been given so many more hours in your week. Change

we went on a break.

Rebound. Text an old flame or the person you’ve kinda been back-burnering. Sleep with someone random who looks nothing like your ex. Or at least redownload Tinder tonight, swipe liberally until you can’t keep your eyes open any longer, and hopefully you’ll wake up to at least one “good morning beautiful” tomorrow morning.

Invest. Take all the love you were sending this person and channel it elsewhere. Reach out to people

TEXT AMELIA ANTHONY

your look, preferably impermanently—shout out to my ex who got a tattoo of a broken heart after

you maybe didn’t have time to see as often. Meet new people and make new friends. Go to parties,

and make new memories. Invest in you.

All my love,

Ask Indie your spooky questions at the form linked here.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 6

DESIGN GALA PRUDENT

restaurants, parks, and bars alone or with friends. Walk the same streets you once did with your ex

18

THE BULLETIN Keeping up with Striketober ———

This month, workers all over the country are collectively expressing their unwillingness to labor under poor conditions and for meager wages, a moment that labor activists have begun to call “Striketober.” The sheer number of workers engaged in labor actions this month is staggering; in all, about 100,000 workers are striking or have threatened to strike in the past month. See below for updates on the strikes we covered last week.

Support for unions is at its highest since 1965. Beyond the organized strikes of this month, “labor shortages” across the country are revealing worker’s power to push corporations and bosses to follow through on a national living wage, as people continue to refuse to work for anything less.

Stand in solidarity with workers fighting for better futures—don’t cross the picket line!

Updates on Strikes Covered Last Issue ———

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION YOLIZBETH LOZANO

John Deere Strike More than 10,000 John Deere workers in Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas entered the thirteenth day of their strike for better wages, benefits, and pensions this past Wednesday. That same day, Richard Rich, a United Auto Workers striker, was killed in a traffic accident while walking to the picket line.

A week earlier, strikers spoke to reporters about unsafe conditions on the picket line after another worker was struck by a vehicle. Local police did not follow up on the incident, despite requests from picketers that traffic be rerouted. UAW President Ray Curry said in a public statement, “It is a somber time to lose a member who made the ultimate sacrifice in reporting to picket for a better life for his family and coworkers.” The UAW is continuing negotiations with the manufacturing company, though a deal has not yet been reached.

Mutual aid* & community fundraisers *Mutual aid is “survival pending on revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

Emergency Fund (by Railroad) Venmo @theorytakespraxis Support a formerly incarcerated person for housing and warm winter clothes.

Community Cares: Sponsor a Family for the Holidays (by DARE) https://bit.ly/DareCC Fill out Google Form to sponsor a family for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas COYOTE RI Closet (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI) Now accepting donations of hygiene products and new and used clothing at the Love and Compassion Day Health Center; 92 East Avenue, Pawtucket RI, 02904. Contact Sheila Brown (401) 548-3756 to donate or collect items.

Queer and Trans Mutual Aid PVD Venmo @qtmapvd, PayPal.me/qtmapvd Support mutual aid for LGBTQIA people in Rhode Island! There is a current backlog of 31 requests, equal to $3,100. Help QTMA fill this need!

Kennedy Plaza Survival Drive (by Wide Awake Collective) Venmo WideAwakes-PVD Cashapp: $MutualAidMondays Support the weekly survival drive at Kennedy Plaza! This drive distributes food, water, hygiene materials, warm clothing and other important items to folks in Providence who need them.

NYC Taxi Drivers on Hunger Strike for Debt Relief On Wednesday, Oct. 20th, several members of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance—a 21,000 member group—began a hunger strike to protest Mayor Bill de Blasio’s most recent inadequate plan to reduce debt burdens for drivers, and to call for a “city-backed guarantee” that would give relief to drivers suffering under debts from the city’s medallion lending scheme of the early 2000s.

While the rise of Uber and Lyft are one part of the taxi industry’s decline in recent years, strikers are specifically targeting the city for its wanton inflation of the price of taxi medallions (licenses to work and own a taxi) in the past two decades. Drivers who purchased medallions for hundreds of thousands of dollars in the early 2000s/10s have seen values drop to $75,000 today, since prices began to fall around 2015. The results have been devastating, as many drivers now face hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. In the past year alone, several drivers have died by suicide under this financial pressure. Drivers have been organizing for relief for years: this hunger strike is another strategy aimed to confront de Blasio and the city with the dire stakes of the situation for drivers. As of Oct. 27, the hunger strike is still ongoing.

GoFundMe for tents for people experiencing homelessness (by Andrea Smith) tinyurl.com/tentsri All donations go towards buying tents for people currently living in inhospitable places, to be distributed by service providers and street outreach teams. There are currently over 1,000 people on waiting lists for individual and family shelter, while the state has only 608 year-round shelter beds, all of which are currently full.

International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) IATSE and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) have solidified the tentative three-year agreement (released on Oct. 16 to avert a major strike) and are beginning the process of ratification. The agreement would affect 40,000 film and television workers represented by 13 West Coast IATSE local unions, and includes many new wins for workers: a boost of up to 60% in hourly minimum wages, a minimum of 9% scale wage increase by the end of the three years, better compensation for streaming services and improvements to rest periods and meal breaks.

Members will receive memorandums of agreement in the coming weeks with the fine print details.

The ratification votes will occur online after this communication has been received.

———

#DoesBrownCare fights to amplify the demands of workers with Brown Dining Services (by Matt Rauschenbach) Last week, a coalition of students released a statement decrying the conditions of our dining halls in response to a Brown Daily Herald article entitled “We’re in desperate need of help.” In that piece, speaking under a pseudonym for fear of disciplinary action, a worker said that once students bring an issue to the forefront, the administration listens. The goal of #DoesBrownCare is to outline broad goals: better wages, better conditions, better communication, and more. The specific demands of workers must happen once contract negotiations begin in November.

As students at Brown, we have an obligation to make noise; and once we have, we have the responsibility to step back and let workers lead the way with specific demands.

Go to bit.ly/doesbrowncare and sign your name. Add your voice to the 1000+ students (as of Tuesday, Oct. 26) who know that workers deserve better.

Even having this discussion at a University with a nearly $7 billion endowment is embarrassing. We have one question: does Brown care? It is up to the administration to take action and show us the answer.

Scan QR to sign the petition.

Upcoming Actions and Community Events RIOT RI, Battle of the Patriarchy Show Oct. 30 @ 2-6pm Location: in the RIOT parking lot, access through Washington St. or Westminster, behind Nice Slice @ 763 Westminster. Follow the music!

Battle of the Patriarchy (aka BoP) is a battle of the bands program where participants are placed into bands with strangers to write original music and fundraise to support their local rock camp. All donations go to support their scholarship fund which provides music education and instrument accessibility for trans and nonbinary youth and girls in RI. Live Music at Red Ink Community Library!

Nov. 3rd @ 8pm Location: Red Ink, 130 Cypress Street Come out from 8-10:30 pm to watch @ ponderingmusic @ladyqueenparadise and @ theythemfemmemusic perform! The event is all ages; accepting $5-10 donations at the door.

Understanding the Movement to #TeachTruth & Defend Educational Freedom: A Teach-in with Black Studies Scholar Marco A. McWilliams Nov. 11 @ 7pm Location: Via Zoom, register at tinyurl.com/TTRINov10TEACHIN SURJ RI (Showing up for Racial Justice-Rhode Island) and Towards an Anti-Racist North Kingstown (TANK) are hosting an online teach-in with Marco A. McWilliams to discuss Critical Race Theory and local historical truths.

A major objective of this workshop is to deepen our collective analysis and continue to build our local movement for educational justice.