Volume 52 - Issue 5 by The New Journal at Yale

The New Journal Volume 42, No. 55

The magazine about Yale and New Haven

April 2020

WHEN THE WORLD STOOD STILL

editors-in-chief Helena Lyng-Olsen Candice Wang executive editor Elena DeBre managing editor Hailey Andrews associate editors Jack Delaney Alexandra Galloway Zachary Groz Madison Hahamy Tiffany Ng Meera Rothman Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits

senior editors Beasie Goddu Jack McCordick Eli Mennerick Trish Viveros Elliot Wailoo Alejandra Larriva-Latt copy editors Nicole Dirks Ella Goldblum creative director Meher Hans design editors Brian Chang Natasha Gaither Rebecca Goldberg Annli Nakayama

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

Dear readers, In a time of social isolation, we can find togetherness through storytelling—through listening to the voices of those you know and those you don’t. The New Journal’s mission for fifty-three years has been to produce human-centered narrative journalism. These are strange, uncharted times, but they remind us more than ever that stories reinforce our sense of common humanity. We bring to you the voices of students who are grappling with the idea of what academic excellence and grades mean during a global public health crisis, students who are lingering behind in an empty campus, and students who are trying to find out what “home” truly means to them. We follow the extraordinary efforts of a New Haven activist supporting survival sex workers during the pandemic, and we witness the trajectory of an unlikely close friendship between a disability rights activist and a visiting student. Our feature paints a vivid picture of a Muslim man’s decades-long resistance to deportation, and our issue ends on a poignant note about how Yalies can still remain together, even when apart, through Zoom. Our editors, scattered from Connecticut to California to Hong Kong to Illinois, have reunited through the screen to create The New Journal’s first ever remotely produced issue. Let us know your thoughts on the magazine, or about any ideas you’d like to share with us—we’d love to start a conversation. Yours, Helena & Candice

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

The New Journal Volume 42, No. 55

The magazine about Yale and New Haven

April 2020

FEATURES

Photo by Caitlin O’Hara

STANDARDS

Photo by Caitlin O’Hara

APRIL 2020

THE COMPROMISE A college-wide debate about grading has unearthed a deeper conversation about sacrifice and inequity on Yale’s campus. by Mara Hoplamazian

SHELTERING WITHOUT PLACE New Haven’s survival sex workers are particularly vulnerable to the life-or-death repercussions of COVID-19. by Rachel Calcott

WHAT IT TAKES TO STAY When ICE came knocking, two religious communities stepped in to save a Muslim man from deportation. by Ko Lyn Cheang

essay: NO PLACE LIKE HOME by Ko Lyn Cheang

photography: 587 by Kellen Silver

profile: THE SURVIVOR by Caitlin O’Hara

poem: MORNING by Jack Delaney

poem: A CAVE by Jordan Cutler-Tietjen

snapshot: THE STUDENTS WHO STAYED by Ella Goldblum

photography: OLDSMOBILE DELTA 88 & PROVINCE- TOWN HARBOR Beasie Goddu

endnote: THAT’S WHY I CHOSE ZOOM by Alexandra Galloway 3

CRITICAL ANGLE

“THE

COMPROMISE A college-wide debate about grading has unearthed a deeper question about sacrifice and inequity on Yale’s campus BY MARA HOPLAMAZIAN Alannah Maynez ’20 wakes up at 8:30 a.m. in Portland, Oregon and makes herself a cup of coffee before she Zooms into her English seminar. The seminar has felt off ever since the pandemic started—–her professor has stopped implementing class plans, and students have started planning the lessons, instead. Alannah is three hours behind her professors in New Haven, so her daily schedule has shifted significantly earlier. She Zooms into a psychology seminar at 10:30 a.m., then “Drugs and Brain Behavior” at 1:00 p.m.. When her classes are over around 2:30, she laces up her sneakers and goes for a run. In the afternoon, she hangs out with her brother, cooks dinner, and FaceTimes with friends on the other coast. Around 9:00 p.m., her mom comes home from her shift as a nurse practitioner, where she has spent the day treating immunocompromised and elderly patients, many of whom are sick with COVID-19. Ten people have died of the virus in one of the facilities she serves. Alannah stays up to chat with her mom about her day before going to bed. She says, “When I was at school all I would do is study. Now I don’t study that much. There’s just a lot of stuff going on at home.” A few hours after Alannah, in a different time zone, Abey Philip wakes up in Louisville, Ken 4

tucky. His mother, also a nurse, returns home at 8:30 a.m. from her night shift at Baptist Health, the same night shift she’s been working for sixteen years. She works on an all-COVID floor now. The hospital only allows her to check out two face masks for each twelve-hour shift, a rule that leaves her without necessary protection for much of her time at the hospital. In the morning, Abey does some homework, says hi to his mom, and then Zooms into L3 Spanish at 10:30 a.m.. Afterwards, he cooks himself some lunch, and spends the afternoon doing schoolwork. Then, he laces up his shoes and heads for the park he’s been visiting since childhood. His mom leaves for the hospital again around 6:10 p.m., and Abey settles down for the night to finish his homework. The night before we talked, he’d stayed up until midnight to turn in a paper due the next day. “But if push comes to shove, and I sat down and talked to my mom and grandparents and we were about to watch a Bollywood movie, I would skip a seminar. In a heartbeat,” he says. “At this point, when everyone is so stressed, the times we can spend together as a community and as a family are really important.” Alannah and Abey are worrying about the same

THE NEW JOUR NAL

Photography and design by Annli Nakayama things: their mothers, who are both working as nurses, and their grandparents and siblings, who they take care of at home. Both of them told me they’re most worried about those who are more vulnerable right now. Alannah worries about the workers who are on temporary contracts and don’t have paid time off, like some dining hall workers and facilities staff. Abey worries about students, specifically those from rural areas and first generation or low-income backgrounds, who are navigating financial uncertainty and other barriers to online classes, like issues with internet access. They’re both coping with life during a global pandemic. And yet, they’ve found themselves on opposite sides of a divisive issue—how they should be graded on schoolwork during this crisis. Lurking within this question, another, quieter debate has emerged around grades themselves: what do grades measure? And do they reflect our achievements equally, even when we’re on campus? On April 7, Dean Marvin Chun announced that all Yale College classes would be graded on a Pass/Fail basis for the spring semester of 2020. His announcement arrived after three weeks of contentious debate, throughout which students’ concerns unfolded into a full-fledged movement called No Fail Yale. Abey was one of the organizers of this movement, which advocated for a Universal Pass grading policy. Under Universal Pass, all Yale students would earn a grade of “P” on their Spring 2020 transcripts. Dean Chun thinks that this is the only equitable way to move forward, given the diversity of issues that students are facing at home. Alannah doesn’t agree. She’s concerned that the movement misrepresented the interests of marginalized communities and feels disappointed that students are spending so much time talking about grades. “This is literally a debate over, like, marks on a transcript,” she said. Instead of the debate around Universal Pass, she wishes students were spending more time pushing Yale to support the other members of our community—casual workers especially—who have been impacted by the pandemic. The No Fail Yale movement emerged from inequities within the student body that arose in the wake of COVID-19. Organizers acknowledged that students have different kinds of access to resources like Wi-Fi, free time, and quiet study spaces wherever they’re sheltering-in-place, and

APRIL 2020

“"No

Fail Yale encourages us to ask: have grades ever evaluated us equitably?" that these differences impact students’ focus on schoolwork––and, ultimately, their grades. Their goal was to ensure that no Yalies are penalized academically for circumstances beyond their control when they’re home. But students’ removal from Yale calls into question the differences in resources that have existed on campus all along. No Fail Yale encourages us to ask: have grades ever evaluated us equitably? Central to that question is another one of equal importance: what is a grade, really? The first recorded grades in the United States were given out at Yale, in the form of a diary entry by Ezra Stiles, the seventh president of Yale College. He evaluated the fifty-eight seniors graduating in the class of 1785, recording “Twenty Optimi, sixteen second Optimi, twelve Inferiores (Boni), ten Perjores,” based on public and private displays of knowledge. For Stiles, grading was a personal practice—a record of his interpretation of how well students were displaying what they learned on campus. This impulse to rank students against one another based on their demonstration of knowledge remained salient, though grading systems varied widely among universities for the next two centuries. Yale changed grading systems four times between 1967 and 1981, cycling through a numerical system, an Honors/High Pass system, and an A-F system before settling on the A-F system with pluses and minuses in use today. This pandemic is not unique in having the power to shift systems of grading. In the late nineteen-sixties, when students removed from

Yale due to academic failure became eligible for drafting into the Vietnam War, one Yale professor simply gave all of his students A’s. In the spring of 1970, during the New Haven Black Panther trials, students decided to strike, and held late-night meetings in their residential colleges to ask faculty and administration to do the same. Nine of twelve residential colleges decided to shut down academically and voted to open their doors to those who arrived from out of town to attend the trials. After the vote, a large majority of Yale students stopped going to class and instead trained as marshals, attended teach-ins, and directed their energy towards the trials. In a meeting convened by Yale’s president Kingman Brewster, faculty voted that normal academic expectations, including classes, would be suspended for the duration of the trials. In the spring of 1970, students convened across New Haven to organize a halting of business-asusual on campus. In the spring of 2020, students from all over the world convened on Twitter timelines, Instagram stories, and Facebook profile pictures to do the same thing. No Fail Yale drew wide support from students, cultural houses, professors, and the Yale College Council, or YCC. Due to students’ social distancing and migration off campus, the movement was held exclusively online, without any marches or sit-ins. The reliance on social media as a tool for organizing opened up conflict particular to the internet—conflicts that became biting, then personal. Isaiah Schrader, a junior, wrote a 179-word Facebook post about why he disagreed with the movement around Universal Pass. The post received 196 comments, many of which were from students who vehemently disagreed with him. “We are in the midst of a fucking catastrophe,” wrote one commenter to Isaiah. Isaiah worried that law schools and medical schools would not approach the lack of grades with compassion. In his opinion, more choice, not less, would provide students in tough situations with better options. He also mentioned that a Universal Pass system would not represent the interests of all first generation, low-income, or FGLI students––even though some of these students have become the core of the No Fail Yale movement. Alannah, who identifies as a low-income student, said, “I feel like the entire movement is trying to capitalize on the suffering of marginal-

ized communities in order to derive some self-interested gain. And, like, this is a group of privileged Yalies.” Her concerns arose mainly from the way the movement has used the rhetoric of “marginalized students,” and the way that other vulnerable people—like workers at Yale who aren’t in unions—have been forgotten within that language. “This whole conversation is not about the most vulnerable in our community. We forgot about them a month ago. We erased them,” she said. “I don’t know how anyone would feel that the best way to help marginalized groups during this situation would be to, like, inundate our administration’s and faculty’s inboxes with emails about grades.” Joe Peck ’21, a student from England, also did not support Universal Pass for reasons tied to his experience as a FGLI and international student. “FGLI students generally do better as they go through Yale,” Joe said. “I think a lot of students are very prepared when they come here, they come from nicer schools and they’re able to fit in very well. But it’s been true that my first semester here was my worst, and every single semester I’ve been here I’ve improved my GPA.” When Joe is at Yale, he works sixteen hours every week to fulfill his student income contribution. Now, for the first time ever, he doesn’t have to work those long shifts anymore, because Yale has committed to paying student workers their salaries even if they’re unable to work remotely. With this newfound time, he can focus on school without pulling all-nighters, as he often does on campus. Some of Joe’s friends accused him of being selfish for his stance. “It’s very frustrating for me for a number of reasons. I never heard that throughout the year—no one ever said, ‘Oh, those kids who aren’t working sixteen hours a week, they’re being selfish.’ There was no solidarity there. Suddenly I’m doing well, despite everything I’ve had to go through. And now I’m the selfish one,” he said. Joe’s concern—that life at Yale has always been inequitable—is one that the organizers of No Fail Yale anticipated. On their “Frequently Asked Questions” document, one of the questions is, “Yale was unfair anyways. Why should this change now?” The organizers respond, “We should strive to be the change we want to see. There is no reason to confine our expectations of the institutions we love to what the world has tried to force us to accept as reasonable and just.”

THE NEW JOUR NAL

No Fail Yale focuses around the idea that we are on more equal footing on campus than off. But when I asked Abey about whether he thought of Yale’s campus as an egalitarian place, he said, “I think it’s an equalizer, but it doesn’t make things equal. So yes, Yale provides us with necessary resources like Wi-Fi, quiet study spaces, et cetera. But you can plainly see at Yale that things aren’t equal.” Sarah Pitafi, another organizer of No Fail Yale, believes that this movement reveals the underlying inequalities that permeate the Yale experience. “We are finally able to make the administration collectively recognize the degree of inequity on campus,” Sarah said. “Students have been saying, ‘well, we’ve always been reliant on really badly paid jobs, we’ve always been struggling with accessibility issues, we’ve always been struggling with lack of access to technology.’ The list goes on. All of these issues have always existed. Now it’s a matter of them being exacerbated greatly by a global pandemic.” Sarah hopes that when students return to campus, they won’t forget. She hopes that the pandemic has presented a moment to discuss inequity in all its forms—on and off campus. “Now the University is forced to start addressing the reality of students’ daily lives,” she said. Sarah notes the way that grades play into these realities. She questions whether grades are the best way to document students’ success. “You’re kind of held captive by this idea of your grades being almost like a function of who you are, of being a function of your success,” she said, “but realizing how quickly grades can be discarded whenever you need to focus on what matters most has also turned into a larger conversation about— are grades really necessary?” With Universal Pass comes the realization that has been happening across institutions throughout the United States during the coronavirus crisis: people created the systems we live our lives by, and people can dismantle them, too. Each day, Alannah, Abey, Isaiah, Joe, and Sarah are faced with a new set of numbers. Millions of total cases, worldwide. Thousands of people dead. There are numbers that measure the success of their state’s responses to the pandemic; there are numbers that measure the likelihood that someone they love will die. A 20% increase in New York City hospitalizations with each new

APRIL 2020

day; 4,600 patients on ventilators in New York. Two to six weeks for patients to recover. There are numbers to guide them when they go outside. Six feet of separation. Three hours of virus viability in the air. There are numbers that become routines. Five hours of Zoom class on Wednesday. Two masks for each twelve-hour shift. With Universal Pass, their contributions to classes won’t become numbers too.

- Mara Hoplamazian is a senior in Grace Hopper College

NO PLACE LIKE HOME BY KO LYN CHEANG

In the midst of a public health crisis, how can you return home when there is no straightforward answer to the question of what ‘home’ is?

Photo by Ko Lyn Cheang Design by Brian Chang

Matt Song ’23 had a sandwich, a plastic container of pudding, Doritos, and a bag of fudge stripes for lunch one day in late March. The dining halls were closed. His friends were gone from campus. He ate alone behind the stone and concrete walls of Morse College. Without bicycles littering the courtyard and students crowding the common room, the space is cavernous. As of April 10, he is one of ninety-nine students who are remaining on Yale’s campus after the University asked all undergraduates to return home for the rest of the semester on March 14. Yale hired a group of local movers to help the fifteen first-years remaining on campus move their belongings from Old Campus to residential colleges, where they’ll reside for the rest of semester. On March 19, the overworked movers shifted Matt’s boxes to Morse College. Among his possessions were a microwave, packets of frozen food (“In case Yale Dining is not feeding me,” he explained), and his books. Matt, like all students who remain, has swipe access only to the gates and entryways of his college, the kitchen, and Trumbull College, where his meals are distributed. Twice a day, Matt picks up his meal in a brown to-go bag provided 8

by Yale Dining. He makes it a point to have his dinner outdoors, in the vacant Morse courtyard, to feel more normal. How can you return home when there is no straightforward answer to the question of where home is? Evacuations from college campuses, shelter-in-place orders, and travel restrictions have forced people to decide where they will hunker down for the long haul. But a significant minority of students do not have a place to go. Foster youth, LGBTQ+ individuals living in hostile home environments, and international students are particularly vulnerable. Yale is allowing students to remain on campus for a limited number of reasons: if they’re from CDC Level 3 countries, emancipated from their parents, international students affected by travel restrictions, or students who would be in unsafe living conditions if they left. After speaking to three Yale students who chose to not return home, I realized that home could be a place of our choosing, or a place that we have no choice but to return to. And if you are one of the lucky ones, it might be both. — When I left Singapore, my family’s home THE NEW JOUR NAL

for five generations, to fly back to Yale in January, I told a friend that I was simply going from one home to another. After all, nestled in a hundred-year-old brick building in New Haven, was my sunlit desk, my books, my towels and sheets, my spare contact lenses, and my favourite stuffed bear. Home was a feeling. It was swipe access into dining halls and Monday dinners with my debate team. It was meeting kind-eyed Muslim leaders in New Haven for an article I was writing. It was knowing which cubicles in the Sterling Library hold shelves had the good seat cushions and which were best for a cry. But over spring break, while I was in Mexico, I was banned from reentering the United States because I had been in Europe in the past 14 days. I had celebrated my mother’s 60th birthday in the UK. Initially, I had planned to return to my off-campus apartment in New Haven to retrieve my belongings before returning to Singapore later in the month. But now, with only a duffel bag of summer clothes and none of my books, I scrambled to find flights to Singapore that did not layover in a U.S. airport. Chicago, Texas, New York, San Francisco—the biggest aviation hubs were now sealed off to me. Minutes passed and the earliest flight I could find left Mexico City in a week. Around Latin America, countries were closing their borders in response to a rising number of coronavirus cases. I did not know if Mexico would be next. I imagined being stuck in Mexico while flights out of the country were grounded. I wanted to cry. When I realised that I couldn’t board a plane taking me back to New Haven, I understood that home was no longer the warm feeling I got cycling down Cross Campus on the first day of spring. Home became a legal term, the only place I knew with certainty would always take me in. Only U.S citizens, permanent residents, and certain immigrant visa holders were permitted to enter under the travel restrictions placed to manage COVID-19. As a student visa holder, I did not qualify. The Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs had said that all Singaporeans abroad will be allowed to return home—they would never shut their borders to their citizens. Even though I was stranded in Mexico, my displacement was only temporary, a mere blink in the long view of life. I eventually found an Air Canada flight that would take me back home. But what about people without a passport, without citizenship, who shuttle between iron-clad borders every day, unable APRIL 2020

to find a place that would accept them? Refugees and stateless individuals are going to be among the hardest hit by the virus if they are left without access to healthcare and sanitation. As I waited for my flight out of Mexico, I thought about why I was upset at this situation, even though I understood the strong necessity for travel restrictions. I realized I felt betrayed; America had softened me, deceived me. In the ease and freedom of life in her coffee shops, highways and gas stations, I grew too accustomed to thinking of her as my home. The welcoming how-are-you’s and cheerful smiles of her bus drivers and cashiers, her college professors and high schoolers, her watch engineers and religious leaders, had lulled me into complacency. I drank up what she had to offer and sank into her sheets each night believing I’d still have a place here tomorrow. This reminded me that I am in mere transit in this country. America is not my home, however much I want her to be. — Matt realized he hadn’t used his voice for a day. He has not had a conversation in person, hugged a friend, or spent time in someone else’s presence in over a week. Seeing a person on the street now strikes him as a noteworthy event. Around 11 a.m., he goes to Trumbull College to collect his paper-bagged meal. He sees a couple of other students like him picking up their meals; it’s one of his rare moments of human interaction in a day. He is the only Morse first-year still on-campus, “which makes me special and also lonely,” he said through a phone interview, laughing. At night, he walks around Yale’s unoccupied cobblestone-lined campus, alone, looking at the stars. Just two weeks ago he was with his friends, adjusting to his first -year in a new country as well as a new school. Now, it is completely empty. When Matt first received the email asking all students not to return to campus after spring break, he knew he wanted to stay in the U.S. He had lived in Shanghai since he was twelve, but the home he grew up in no longer belonged to his family. With his mother and grandmother in Michigan, and his father in Shanghai, it was simpler for him to stay on campus, as he’s from a CDC Level 3 country. Furthermore, flight tickets to Shanghai were expensive. It would have imposed a greater shock on his life to move back. 9

As a Chinese student, he began to notice racist behaviour on the rise in the U.S. His friend from Shanghai told him that on the subway in Boston, a stranger began yelling at him to go back to China and to stop eating cats. “In America, it’s treated not only as a health problem but also a foreign attack,” Matt said. “Some people really do seem to think that Chinese people caused this.” He has begun to feel less at home in the U.S., less welcome and less safe in this country. “It made me miss being in China and made me miss that community of people who knew what it means to have yellow skin,” said Matt. He has been trying to manage the stress of living alone. He and his friends on campus have been practicing social distancing, and for him, that means near-complete social isolation. “A weird sense of hollowness sneaks up on you,” he said, “but for me it’s not like other people where it’s immediate soul-crushing loneliness or boredom.” His mom wishes to visit him, but the travel from Michigan to Yale would be too risky, especially because his elderly grandmother is staying with her. On March 28, Matt was relocated to another college to make room for first responders dealing with the outbreak in New Haven. When I asked him where he would call home, he paused for a long time. “I think it doesn’t exist right now,” he said. “Because I feel like home is one of those things that only appears when you have a certain set of conditions met. It has to be a familiar space. It has to be a comfortable space. It has to have people you know and love and care about. There is no place that would feel like home if I was there right now.” For Michelle ’22, whose last name has been omitted to protect her privacy, Yale is home. When the school told students to return home for the rest of the semester, she knew she wanted to stay. Growing up in a sunny California suburb, Michelle had what she now describes as a difficult upbringing. In her parents’ house, studies always took precedence over socializing or play. They carried with them a mindset forged by a childhood of poverty in China, forcing the children to finish every last scrap of two-day-old food waste, even if it was growing sour. And they didn’t shy from the use of a ruler or stick for discipline. “If it got leaked what was happening to me at home, I’d probably end up in foster care,” said Michelle. When she came home from school, it was always to an empty house. “I felt I really had to raise myself,” she said. 10

“I feel bad for saying this, but the strongest ties to my house are almost purely financial.” When she arrived at Yale in 2018, she instantly felt at home. Two-hundred-year-old Elm trees grew on Old Campus, elegant neo-gothic spires rose toward a bluebird sky, the stained glass windows glimmered in the sunlight. After being pressured by her parents to be pre-med in her first-year, she met peers that inspired her to pursue her interests. “I feel super liberated being here,” she said. She is now a Computing and the Arts major. She knew that it would be better for her mental health and happiness than if she were to return home to the Bay Area. “I see New Haven as more of the place that has brought me up in the correct sense.” — For fifty hours, I am in transit. At Mexico City International Airport, I try in broken English, using hand gestures, to ask a big-bellied man where I can find the airport shuttle to Terminal 1, where my flight out of Mexico would leave at 5:25 a.m. He does not understand me and points in some distant direction. Vision blurry, face hot, back aching, I wander the terminal where travelers snooze on metal chairs. Then, I see the words “sleeping capsules” shimmering in the empty airport bay like a mirage. The woman at the counter of the small capsule hotel pretends not to notice that I talk to her through tears. She gives me clean socks and leads me down a long, lightless hall where sleeping pods are stacked atop one another, glowing with blue neon light. I swipe my access card to unlock my pod and see the clean sheets, the pillows, the duvet. As I stand under the warm shower, I feel the day’s stresses dissolve from my greasy skin until all that is left is me, a lump of soft flesh. Travellers drift, faces covered by foam masks and hands rubbery with disposable gloves. There are old women being ferried to the gates in wheelchairs and small children being carried in their parent’s arms. It seems too normal. I wonder if they are going home. I board a flight from Mexico City to Vancouver. The plane is so empty that I can sleep lying down across all three seats in my row. I use Stephen King’s memoir On Writing as my pillow. The plane touches down over the desolate Canadian landscape and I see craggy, snow-capped mountains. For a moment, I am transported out of this human drama into the eternal world of stones, mountains, THE NEW JOUR NAL

and the sky. They existed long before us and will certainly outlive us. In Vancouver, the airport is emptier than usual and you can feel it. Canada had shut its borders to non-essential travel by foreign nationals. Only two staffers tend to the passengers making international connections. When I sneeze into my sleeve, a short-haired Caucasian woman shoots a dirty look at me. She ushers her daughter along, distancing herself. As I watch two boys play football over an empty row of chairs, I call Sara, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, to talk about her experience. — Sara ’21 was sightseeing with her friend in Seville, Spain, when she received word that the Trump administration was considering a travel ban in Europe; she needed to book the nearest plane ticket back. Ticket prices had risen to as much as $18,000 for a one-way ticket from Madrid to JFK Airport, but she managed to book a one-way flight to London, and then a seat from there to New York. She calls me from Chicago, where she’s staying at a friend’s apartment indefinitely. She is from a CDC Level 3 Country and did not consider returning home. If she flies back, the U.S. might implement travel restrictions that would prevent her from returning to New York for her summer internship in finance. Without this internship, she will lose her chance at getting a full-time job offer. “My family is very worried about me, but I don’t think they necessarily want me back because they know how much my job means to me,” Sara said. Although she is a foreign student, a “non-resident alien”, in the United States, and like me, cannot call it her home, it is home to her ambitions, her dreams, her future. “I think the impact on international students is present in a way that isn’t always recognised,” Matt said. The sense of displacement, Matt explained, accompanying isolation from one’s family, can be dangerous for the mental health of these students. Now, he is passing time by writing poems. In one, he asks, “Homecoming, coming not. / Who knew celebrations stopped for breath?” — Boarding the plane from Vancouver to Tokyo, I see dozens of Japanese students returning home. APRIL 2020

False eyelashes and fair skin peek out from beneath their face masks. I can tell it is a flight full of Japanese students because hardly anyone has put their seat down—they are acculturated to be considerate. I feel guilty for lowering my seat as far as it can go; America has inflected my behaviour with unabashed individualism. From Tokyo, I fly to Singapore. The plane is less than a quarter full. I count only nineteen heads in my cabin. Soon, international flights to Singapore will dwindle to no more than a few a day. By then, I hope that my friends will all be safely sealed into their homes, certain they’ll have a place to wait out the pandemic. I think of how the virus is encouraging countries to put up borders and bans in the interest of national security. But when Vietnam stops exporting rice and Europe hoards medical supplies, rice bowls in Asia may go empty; hospitals in developing countries will suffer. I remember the first day of international orientation at Yale, when I climbed the hill to the planetarium to watch the solar eclipse with my new friends from Kenya and Malaysia, and Taiwan and Indonesia. We squinted at the burning orb through a pinhole camera, and I thought of how this coin-sized star illuminates not only the seven continents we call home, but our entire solar neighbourhood. I wonder when I will meet these people again. When I said goodbye to my best friend and travel partner in Mexico, arms wrapped around him, tears seeping into his shirt, he told me that he will see me back home—our real home, not the one where we can be barred from reentry. Yes, I say, our home, as if to remind myself that it is a real place. As the plane descends over Singapore, I see the narrow river of lights lining the causeway to Malaysia. Our closest neighbour closed her borders just days before. The aircraft grounded in the airport wink at me; they were once bound for a different destination. To them, Singapore is just a port of transit. To me, it’s my only home. - Ko Lyn Cheang is a junior in Grace Hopper College

‘587’

Design by Brian Chang

- Kellen Silver is a senior in Pierson College 12

THE NEW JOUR NAL

Design by Rebecca Goldberg

PROFILE

THE SURVIVOR After an encounter on the New Haven Green, an unlikely friendship sparks between a visiting student and longtime disability rights activist Elaine Kolbe. BY CAITLIN O’HARA

Through my camera’s viewfinder, I could scarcely make out someone signing ‘I love you’ to me in ASL among the throngs of supporters at New Haven’s climate rally in September 2019. I put my camera down and saw Elaine Kolb beaming as she approached me, a faint squeak audible as her power chair rolled across the New Haven Green. She had a ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ button on her shirt, a rainbow-printed bandana tied around her neck, peace sign necklaces to gift to passers-by, and a sticker reading ‘DISABLED AND PROUD’ on the back of her wheelchair. I figured she must have noticed me pointing the camera in her general direction and decided to pose for a photo with the ‘I love you’. After a brief self-introduction, she began talking about her experience living with a disability. “There’ve been many times when people—total strangers—came up to me and asked, ‘Were you born that way?’” she said to me. I wasn’t sure how to respond to her sharing something so intimate even though we’d just met. She broke my silence and carried on, “You know what my reply to them is? ‘Well, actually no. When I was born, I was a lot smaller!’” She burst loudly into laughter, and I chuckled politely. I couldn’t help but wonder how

she confessed a hard truth and laughed afterward, combatting insensitivity with humor. She reached into a purple and orange haversack and handed me a sheet of freshly printed song lyrics. I asked if she had written them, and she pulled out a whole book of songs she authored. She sang one of them to me. Her voice was beautiful—soulful and resounding. Elaine flipped to her biography in the songbook and handed it to me. I skimmed through it, but found myself re-reading one sentence: “In September 1977, Elaine was stabbed in the back by a mugger on the street, resulting in a spinal cord injury.” She was 28 years old. —

Elaine grew up watching civil rights demonstrators on television in the 1950s and 1960s. “I always admired the ones that were willing to risk great things for positive principles that would help people… And so part of it was just as soon as I had a chance to do it, I started doing it. It seemed [like] a natural thing to me.” In high school, Elaine gave a speech against the Vietnam War; in college, she directed her school’s volunteer program and helped the new Black Student Union organize a Black arts and music festival. She’s since participated in demonstrations and writ

APRIL 2020

Photo by Caitlin O’Hara

ten dozens of songs about climate change, women’s rights, disability, and more. She aptly describes herself as “a disability and diversity rights artist/activist, singer-songwriter, performer, and grass-roots organizer.” (She also describes herself as “a fat, old, ruddy-white dyke, driving a 6-wheeled power wheelchair, flying a rainbow flag, with a squeaky wheel.”)

autonomy, most disability rights advocates see it as a deadly form of discrimination. Their work combats the manifestations of what Elaine and other disability rights activists call disabiliphobia—the fear of disability expressed by the disrespect for, prejudice against, and distancing from people with disability. Elaine explains that disability is the only minority that any-

Elaine has been arrested 27 times in the course of her 53 years of activism work—including once with the new Poor People’s Campaign - A National Call for Moral Revival. Mostly, she practices non-violent, civil disobedience with the American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today (ADAPT) and Not Dead Yet. In 2017, she was arrested along with four other disability rights activists for refusing to vacate the governor’s office in Hartford, in protest of budget cuts affecting communities in need—including the disabled. She was also arrested several times in the struggle to get the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed. It was thanks to the ADA that disability access routes were installed at Savin Rock Park, where we met for our interviews. Not Dead Yet fights against assisted suicide for disabled persons. While people on one side of the debate see assisted suicide as a right and exercise of patient

body can join at any moment, whether through illness or accident. “Most non-disabled people have a really difficult time because of their fear of becoming disabled themselves.” This fear has led others to say hurtful things to Elaine. “People will say to me, ‘Oh Elaine you’re so amazing, you’re so brave! You go out there and do everything, and if I was like you, I’d rather be dead.’ They think they’re complimenting me that I’m so brave, that they’d rather be dead than be me? This is not a compliment!” She laughs in exasperation, then alludes to the assisted suicide of disabled people, “This is why so many of our people get dead!” At this point, I start to feel a little uncomfortable— this fear of life with a disability has crossed my mind before. We are sitting in Jimmie’s Restaurant, and it’s crowded. I take an anxious sip of my latte and avert my gaze, watching the other customers eating their

Photo by Steve Pavey

THE NEW JOUR NAL

seafood platters and burgers instead of looking at Elaine. But she admits she once had this fear, too: “I did not understand and appreciate how much of my identity was tied up in my physical capacity and how deeply I feared having a physical disability where I couldn’t run… once I couldn’t run anymore, I really was more vulnerable.” Recounting the struggles she faced adapting to the injury, she shares, “I had to also rebuild a way of being confident and being able to travel in the world by myself… when you have a visible, obvious disability, it’s like you have a flashing neon sign on your forehead that says ‘Easy Victim! Come and get it!’” I think back to that image of her when we first met, with her rainbow flag and scarf and loud stickers and buttons (and she’s always dressed that way). She sure had confidence, but maybe it was out of necessity. Despite her accomplishments, Elaine is still hard on herself. “I feel guilty that I haven’t done more. And I’ve been a compulsive overachiever…with this deep-seated sense of guilt and shame that I deserve to be punished. Whatever recognition I received I would have to find a way to punish myself to counterbalance it.” She tears up slightly as she says this, before laughing loudly again—exactly as she did when we first met. “This is very complicated!” I think back to how she told me she experienced her first hysterical outburst at age twelve, yelling between her sobs, “I hate my mind!” Her teacher then, Ms. Otruba, sat and cried with her. “I don’t know if I would still be here except that she cried with me and she said, ‘Elaine, you have a beautiful mind.’” “I can point to certain things in my life, that without them, I don’t know how I could have survived… I was given these gifts, or these people appeared at just the right time or things just happened a certain way and you know, a slight variation and I would have been gone; I would have just been lost.” Specifically about her stabbing, she tells me, “as bad as it was, it was as good as it could be.” I’m almost relieved by how much Elaine has to say. After all, how do you respond to someone who confesses after having met you two weeks ago that, as a troubled teen, she might have spiraled into drug use if then she had access to heavy drugs; who was severely ostracized upon coming out as a lesbian in the 1970s; who survived two traumatic rapes; who holds your hand while recounting the deaths of APRIL 2020

partners, family and friends; who was stabbed half a block from her home at age 28? I couldn’t find the right words to return her vulnerability and strength. —

Two interviews later, I knew so much more about Elaine. She deliberately keeps her wheel squeaky because of a promise she made to a visually impaired friend (who could place her more easily in space). She has two cats named Izzy and Bonnie-boy who “help lessen tactile deprivation.” She is a woman of confidence coupled with a sense of inadequacy; loudness coupled with silence; profound loss coupled with a sense of being blessed. The more Elaine shared with me, the more she asked about me in return. I told her about my parents and older brother back home, about how I aspired to be an OB/GYN catering to the healthcare needs of marginalized populations, and about what I loved to do, like embroidery and theatre. Hearing this, Elaine invited me to participate in a community theatre piece about disability and difference with her and four others. It was the second installment of the Hear My Soul Speak series—a set of plays devised around various themes of social justice, produced by the Elm Shakespeare Company. Despite having to miss rock climbing practices in order to attend rehearsals, I agreed to participate—something just told me it’d be worth it. And it was. We performed a series of scenes depicting how the disabled are commonly discriminated against, and offered do’s and don’ts on interacting with the disabled. To top things off, we led the crowd in a song that Elaine wrote in 1981 (while on a Fulbright scholarship as part of the United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons) about the institutionalization of the disabled. Following the performance, Elaine and I met for meals, shared an hour-long phone call, and exchanged dozens of emails. Over time, that stranger I encountered on the New Haven Green became my trusted confidante and greatest giver of advice. She walked me through the doubts I was having about myself at school, guided me through my then long-distance relationship, and never failed to remind me to wear layers (something I wasn’t at all used to, coming from equatorial Singapore). She had predicted it in one of her first emails to me, dated October 1, 2019: “while I am old enough to be your grandma, I feel like we are sisters ;-)”. 15

Photo by Caitlin O’Hara

When Elaine came to watch one of my theatre productions in February 2020, I teared up when I saw her. She sat right in front of the stage (of course), and after the performance, I proudly introduced her to all my friends there as “my New Haven Grandma.” She told me once that she was looking for a young person to

family.” And true enough—a corner of her apartment was stacked almost floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes and keepsakes. But Elaine knew her way around just fine, reaching into cardboard boxes and pulling out one memento after another. A printed scarf emerged from a box, a gift she received from three Vietnamese

build a connection with, and just as well, I had been searching for a deeper relationship with someone significantly senior to me. Last year, my aunt passed away three months after we grew close. Since the day we met, Elaine has reminded me of my late aunt. Elaine and I thought we’d share many more meals before my departure from the United States in May, when my year-long visiting program at Yale would end. But COVID-19 washed up on American shores, and my plans changed dramatically. I had to return home two months earlier than anticipated. I hastily typed an email on a Friday night asking to meet her on Sunday. I was anxious about seeing her, since she was turning 71 this year and the coronavirus disproportionately affects older people. We decided to compromise and meet as soon as possible to minimize the chances of me contracting the disease beforehand. This time, she invited me to her home. “Mi casa su casa,” she replied on Saturday, “YOU are my whole agenda tomorrow.” She warned me prior to our meeting that she had “inherited rat pack syndrome from both sides of her

friends she met in Cuba in 1971 on the third Venceremos Brigade (which sends delegations to Cuba to work in solidarity with Cuban workers). We listened to her songs on the many CDs she had recorded, Elaine singing along live, almost perfectly on-key. As we sat in comfortable silence, I gazed around her apartment in admiration; it archived 71 years of a life well-lived, a life full of what Elaine calls “backhanded blessings.” A sense of finality hung in the air throughout our meeting that day – I knew we’d have to say goodbye. We walked on the boardwalk at Savin Rock Park and sat out at the pier till our hands grew numb from the cold, rushing wind, as if doing so would make each minute longer. She treated me to an Irish Coffee and molten chocolate lava cake at Jimmie’s Restaurant and saw me off to my Uber after a long, bittersweet hug. The last image we have of each other is us signing “I love you” as the car drove away.

– Caitlin O’Hara is a visiting junior from Singapore.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

MORNING BY JACK DELANEY

Morning ladies through their poses pages upon pages of peace which I flip quickly as morning clouds burn up as gas where in his wisdom flipping is talk of love yawning morning lifts her legs coffee’s ready I am the only one awake like Allen while steamships carry on in poses arms thrown back the waking smell I am awake asking sink where’s that soft name in all this morning gratitude for life the taste is sweet I added nothing the ships wait like ladies reaching through top-flaps of white tents I am flipping footfalls father mother sister other flipping morning coffee’s ready the clouds burn as gas there are many names blue black silver Allen none of them is right. - Jack Delaney is a first-year in Pierson College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal Illustrations by Cindy Ren, design by Brian Chang APRIL 2020

Illustration by Cindy Ren, design by Brian Chang

a cave

BY JORDAN CUTLER-TIETJEN

Cry three nights in a row and you win a prize. You’re blindfolded and driven to the nearest cave. Cup your hands, shower yourself with cave water. And explain yourself. One of the nights might come easily – I watched a boy sing an old woman’s song, for instance, or I’m afraid it’s over soon. But to speak the others you must stumble into the cave pool and swim laps, breast-stroking into the dark and glittering tunnel and back to the mossy entrance, and each lap you’ll need to swim deeper and stronger, and

though you wouldn’t admit it to your rational friends, you imagine the eyes and the brain might look like this, might be connected by unwept tears like this, and you’re shocked when your hand smacks the back wall and you follow the echoes and you trace the perimeter and dripping over the moss you cannot find the mouth. - Jordan Cutler-Tietjen is a senior in Jonathan Edwards College

THE NEW JOUR NAL

THE STUDENTS WHO STAYED

Yale’s campus stands empty, and the students who remain face a new, isolated reality. BY ELLA GOLDBLUM design by Natasha Gaither

Antonio Cilibrizzi ’23 is reading Madame Bovary— over and over again. On March 12, Dean Chun sent an email to the Yale community asking that students leave campus “if at all possible.” Yalies scattered all over the globe, boarding flights in a hurry and leaving behind the majority of their belongings. Antonio, however, belongs to a group of students with “exceptional circumstances”—international students whose home countries are under a Level-3 CDC travel advisory, emancipated students, and others with special permission from the Yale College Dean’s Office, roughly 200 total—who are allowed

APRIL 2020

to remain on campus until the end of the term. For this group, the physical world is unchanged; they have remained in the same location all throughout the spring semester. Yet the pandemic has suspended campus life. These students confront challenges that wouldn’t have made sense two months ago, like how to keep in touch with quarantining families across the globe, or how to “social distance” when getting takeout meals in the Trumbull College dining hall. — The same week that Dean Chun sent students home, New York City began setting up field hospitals for its

over ten thousand COVID-19 patients. Italy reported record death tolls on two consecutive days, and the number of worldwide coronavirus cases surpassed 300,000. Already in late March, the pandemic could be felt everywhere, including in New Haven, where small businesses shuttered and tens of thousands of residents filed unemployment claims in just four days. Payne Whitney Gym, once a space for Yale athletes and community pool goers, was converted to a temporary medical facility. Antonio is a first-generation, low income student whose academic resources would be limited at home. He plans to return to Anzi—his small town of 1,000 in Italy—by early May. When he goes home, he will be required to self-isolate in his grandmother’s house for fifteen days. Antonio’s father works at a hospital in Italy. Antonio worries about him, though he knows his dad is extremely cautious about the virus, “disinfecting everything he touches.” Though Italian citizens are worried about hospital overcrowding, Antonio says, he feels more concerned in the United States, where people are denied testing and healthcare altogether. “I have a lot of reservations about this country as a whole, and its systems,” he says. “I think healthcare is an unalienable right.” He also wishes Yale would use its gargantuan endowment to assist students during the pandemic. Approximately one in five Yale College first-years and sophomores qualify for a Federal Pell Grant, and families on full financial aid operate on the assumption that their college students will receive University-sponsored food and housing. Even for students who can safely

“"ON THE GROUND, YELLOW CAUTION TAPE MARKS EVERY SIX FEET, AND HAND SANITIZER DISPENSERS AWAIT USE."” go home without endangering their health, these concerns remain. — Twice a day, Antonio traverses the empty campus to pick up Smart Meals in Trumbull, which consist of non-perishable foods in brown paper bags. He describes the meals as “unhealthy” and “a little sad.” In Trumbull, the only dining hall still open, the din 20

ing hall workers wear masks, and most of the students do, too. On the ground, yellow caution tape marks every six feet, and hand sanitizer dispensers await use after students swipe into the dining hall. Students are not allowed to exit the same way they came in; they do U-turns through a passage of rearranged tables and chairs to avoid physical contact. “It’s hard to get used to it because you don’t stand there and talk to people, you just kind of swipe in and keep walking, six feet behind the people in front of you,” says Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits ’21, who stayed on campus after a shortened spring break trip in order to protect his immunocompromised father and sister in Virginia. “There’s one dining hall worker, Leo, who always talks to me, so it’s nice to still have some human interaction.” Recently, Nicholas and another friend studied for a class in the Trumbull courtyard’s lawn chairs together, six feet apart—a welcome departure from his relentless daily routine. He says it’s important to take a break from staring at the wall. Other times, solitude prevails. All residential college common spaces have closed, and Yalies on campus are not allowed to let other students into their colleges. “I ran into somebody I knew a few days ago, and she stopped and said hi, but there wasn’t really much to say, so we just kept walking,” says Nicholas. In downtown New Haven, people are still taking daily strolls to pick up delivery from restaurants, crossing to the other side of the street to avoid one another. The same group of four-wheelers drives down Elm Street at late hours, and when Nicholas tries to sleep, he hears the usual sirens of ambulances. He compares the everyday quarantine atmosphere to that of an average Sunday morning in the Elm City: hushed, but still alive. “New Haven doesn’t die and become a ghost town when Yale students leave,” he says. “The only difference is that Wednesday and Saturday nights are a little quieter on York Street.” Outside Nicholas’ window, he can see a beautiful view of Broadway and Elm Street. For a second, it is almost normal. “What surprises me is how easy it is to just kind of forget that anything’s happening, if you don’t look at the news,” he says. When he walks outside his bedroom, though, he can no longer hear the sound of video games from the dorm across the hall, and he remembers all that has changed. Valerie Nguyen ’22, another student who stayed on campus, is keeping herself occupied inside: composing music, drawing, and taking on “home improvement” projects in her Pierson College suite, where she’s THE NEW JOUR NAL

accompanied by one of her suitemates. “I’m at least half an introvert,” she says. “So I’ve always had stuff to do.” Valerie’s entire family is across the globe in Hanoi, Vietnam. She’s concerned about her parents in Hanoi, but they’re much more worried about their daughter in New Haven. “I just assumed that Yale would take care of me, and that I’m more safe here than anywhere else I could be,” she says. “But people back home were really worried about me, because New York is a shit show right now.” In New Haven, Valerie witnesses colossal change. She rides her bike to Cross Campus and to Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray Colleges, and sees how empty they are. She never forgets to bring a mask with her, and in the supermarket, she has started wearing gloves. She has some friends from the international student community still on campus, but she can’t see them. It is hard and strange to be alone together. Valerie is especially saddened by the emptiness of Cross Campus and the closing of beloved local businesses. The bubble tea shops were the first to go: Vivi’s, T-Swirl, and The Whale Tea. The majority of shops on Chapel Street and Whitney Avenue have shut down. Valerie had already planned to be on campus through the summer doing psychology research in a lab in New Haven. She holds out hope it will happen, but is bracing for the possibility of cancellation. She had also planned to return to Vietnam to visit family and renew her student visa, which must be done annually. But as of Thursday, March 19, the U.S. Embassy and Consulate in Vietnam cancelled routine immigrant and nonimmigrant visa appointments. The next Friday, they announced that they were no longer accepting applications for visa renewal by mail for nonimmigrant visas, saying that they will “resume visa service as soon as possible.” Valerie says this new policy will not affect her as long as she doesn’t leave the United States, and her I-20—Certificate of Eligibility for Nonimmigrant Student Status—remains valid. Acutely aware of the hardships low-income and international students face right now, Valerie joined the student advocacy group in support of a universal grading policy for spring 2020. Even though she’s living in Pierson College, Valerie—a Statistics & Data Science and Cognitive Science double major—struggles to concentrate on Zoom lectures and seminars. But if she had gone back home, “healthcare access would’ve been shit,” she would have been forced to attend classes in the middle of the night, and she wouldn’t have had an internet connection for at least half a month. “A lot of what we were advocating for was for the most affected demographic,” she says, and pauses. APRIL 2020

“And I guess I count.” Yale’s decision to send students home invited discussions about the physical university’s role in ensuring student well-being. Even beyond concerns about food security and housing, students who rely on Yale’s campus for services like therapy, students whose families do not accept their gender or sexuality identity, and students who come from abusive homes, felt that they had been stranded without resources. “The one thing I kept thinking about was that there were other students who were very affected who could have benefited from staying, but they really couldn’t,” Valerie says, adding that the petition process for remaining on campus could have been more transparent. In a March 12 email, Chun said he planned to work closely with residential college heads and deans to determine which students need to stay. But Neche Veyssal, former co-president of First-Generation Low-Income at Yale, told CNBC that she spoke to many students who were forced to move into friends’ off-campus apartments in New Haven when their requests to stay at Yale were

“"THE WAY WE’RE FEELING RIGHT NOW IS VERY EXISTENTIAL. EVERYBODY HAS TO WORRY ABOUT THEIR SURVIVAL."” denied. “The way we’re feeling right now is very existential,” says Valerie. “Everybody has to worry about their survival. But I wish the administration was a little more decisive.” Antonio, too, finds it harder to concentrate on academics amid mental health struggles, fears for his family, and forays into the news. “I understand that it’s not a priority these days,” he says. “Even if we try to make it a priority, I think we would still struggle so much. It’s not just about socioeconomic factors, but also mental effects of quarantine.” Yet Antonio enjoys being alone. He does yoga by himself and laughs at his own jokes. He reads a lot—books matter a great deal to him—and has been returning to the lessons of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. He says the book reminds him how to cope when reality does not match up with his ideals, a prescient lesson during quarantine. 21

S W P

He does miss hugging and kissing his friends, describing himself as an “extremely touchy” person. He was raised in a community where a high level of physical affection is the norm. Over Zoom and FaceTime, much of our humanity—our physicality—is lost. But even through video chat, Antonio’s voice retains its characteristic warmth. “I feel like being able to bear solitude is something that we should all aim for,” Antonio says. “It should be a pivotal thing in our lives, because it teaches us that we embrace the way we are.” - Ella Goldblum is a first-year in Saybrook College and a Copy Editor of The New Journal

THE NEW JOUR NAL

SHELTERING WITHOUT PLACE

design by Meher Hans

New Haven’s survival sex workers are particularly vulnerable to the lifeor-death repercussions of COVID-19.

BY RACHEL CALCOTT

The only people one expects to see on the streets of New Haven this spring are masked figures shouldering grocery bags or hurrying to work in uniform, and the occasional spandex-clad jogger. But despite orders to shelter in place, at noon on April 7, Beatrice Codianni, age seventy-one, walked the streets of Fair Haven handing out face masks to those who can’t source them elsewhere: the members of the Sex Workers and Allies Network, or SWAN. Codianni’s red hair falls around a face whose upper half is taken up by a pair of thick-framed glasses, the lower half dominated by a wide smile. Codianni, who founded SWAN in 2016, has been working with survival sex workers for thirteen years. “We hand out supplies, we do street based outreach. We have no fixed office site or anything like that,” she told me over the phone. Street sex work is often undertaken as a last resort, to support a drug addiction or as a response to an untenable home situation. SWAN has found that for the majority of survival sex workers, the alternative to finding a date is spending the night on the streets. Each week, as the rest of the nation isolates behind closed doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Codianni and her team load up on an assortment of toiletries, sex protection gear, and face masks, and head out to find their members on the streets.

APRIL 2020

Photo by Caitlin O’Hara

In the last week of March, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont issued an executive order: “Stay home; stay safe.” As New Haven approaches one thousand coronavirus cases, residents who can are sheltering in place. For sex workers still sleeping on the street, the consequences of being unable to find shelter this spring could be fatal; on the same day that Codianni went back out to Fair Haven’s sidewalks to distribute face masks, news headlines read that one in three of Boston’s homeless had contracted the virus. While COVID-19 is a threat to anyone unable to isolate, for survival sex workers, it has the added effect of compounding issues of homelessness, discrimination, and pre-existing poor access to medical care. SWAN’s philosophy centers around harm reduction and prioritizes leadership by those who have experience in sex work. “Our motto is ‘Nothing about us without us,’” said Chloe Andree, a member of SWAN’s outreach team. Before the pandemic, SWAN provided a variety of services for survival sex workers—from self-defense and sexual health classes to ‘know your rights’ workshops and trauma informed therapy. But in the current moment, SWAN’s focus has narrowed to the daily struggle of keeping its members alive. The formidable heart of the SWAN operation, Codianni is a New Haven local and activist whose work has revolved around tackling issues of sexism and margin 23

alization. “I’ve been an activist for decades,” Codianni told me. “I was part of the first women’s liberation center right here in New Haven… then the anti-war movement… and civil rights.” But in her early forties, Codianni’s interest in community activism led her to join the local board of directors of the world’s largest hispanic street gang, the Latin Kings. By the early 1990s, when gang turf battles directed the attention of the FBI to the streets of New Haven, Codianni was on the gang’s Board of Directors. “I was concerned about some of the kids in my neighborhood who are Latin Kings… three of them committed suicide,” Codianni explained to me. She wanted to act as a liaison between the gang and the community, so she called up the gang’s Vice President. “He said, ‘look, if you joined, they’d have to listen to you and you could get further if you were a member.’ So I joined.” In 1994, Codianni landed in Danbury jail on charges of racketeering, and spent 15 years behind bars. “I’m part of the real women of Orange is the New Black. [The series] is a load of bullshit,” Codianni laughed. After nearly two decades of incarceration, Codianni returned to her native Fair Haven. She moved in with her son and tried to recover the threads of a normal life, 24

maneuvering around the loss of her thirties and forties. But in November 2016, Codianni had just walked into a City Hall meeting when she looked down at her phone to see the faces, names, and ages of 14 sex workers splashed across local news feeds. They had been arrested in a sting operation. Codianni herself had engaged in survival sex work before her Latin King days to support a drug addiction. Aware of how the police’s disregard for the women’s privacy would shatter and endanger their personal lives, Codianni began advocating for the rights of sex workers. “I was in the closet and I said, it’s time to come out of the closet and make some noise.” Codianni went straight to the Chief of Police. “I talked about the collateral consequences of doing stings. You’re never going to arrest away sex work,” she argues. Following a public demonstration at City Hall decrying the stings, the New Haven police released a statement calling off future sting operations. But Codianni knew more needed to be done to support New Haven’s survival sex workers. Today, SWAN works with around 70 core members who engage in its programming, and reaches an overall ‘caseload’ of 125 individuals—the majority of whom are houseless. “When we formed SWAN we got together and said, what do we want to do? How are we going to work?” Codianni’s decision was informed by her own history of survival sex work, and her first-hand knowledge of the discrimination that these women face. “Some people want to form a sex workers union, but I said we have to go after the most vulnerable population. And that’s people doing survivor or street sex work.” In a pandemic, many face financial struggles—but survival sex workers are finding that all avenues to making a living have been cut off. “They’re not getting dates with the same frequency that they were able to before, which was still not enough to make anywhere near a livable wage,” explained Evan Serio, a volunteer with the New Haven medical core and member of SWAN. The Connecticut state government’s reluctance to recognize sex work as a non-criminal avenue of employment has meant that sex workers find themselves ineligible for unemployment benefits and unable to access community relief funds without a functioning bank account. So the members of SWAN are pursuing the only options remaining to them. “They’re going to find [work] any way they can, and folks have to do riskier and riskier things… we’re seeing all these kinds of tangential terrible realities that have nothing to do with COVID-19 directly.” Sleeping on the street for nights on end can have dire health consequences. Feet swell under the comTHE NEW JOUR NAL

pression of shoes that rarely come off. Hand washing requires a hunt for an obliging restaurant’s bathroom. Lack of access to nutritious food increases the risk for type 2 diabetes. The alternating realities of weather exposure, and tightly packed shelters—which can have up to eight people crowded into four feet of space— means that staving off infection from airborne viruses is difficult, if not impossible. And with the closure of homeless shelters, a severe situation has become a nightmare. “There’s folks that are living with conditions that are going to be far exacerbated by the fact that they don’t have a place to get a steady meal, a place to get out of this cold, or being able to charge their phones and keep up on their appointments,” said Serio. “I’m just as worried about somebody’s on again, off again treated diabetes as I am about COVID.” In most cases of COVID-19 infection, early hospitalization and medical care will mean recovery. But Serio is worried that systemic discrimination may prevent members of SWAN from finding their way to hospitals in time—and that those who do may experience a hostile reception. Codianni told me about her own experiences at medical centers—stories of derogatory name-calling, being forced to wait longer than other clients. While the treatment of sex workers varies from clinic to clinic, there are practical measures that prevent equal access to testing. “Folks have to have a car to get tested at drive-through places. And people need to have state issued photo ID on hand and other documents in order to get the referral in the first place.” With the majority of survival sex workers unwilling or unable to seek out clinics, a few medical professionals have decided to take their services to them. Phil Costello, director of Homeless Care at Hill Health Center, is one of them. I asked him how COVID-19 had affected his work. “Other than wearing face masks and gloves and PPE… we haven’t drawn back,” Costello said. “[The homeless] aren’t going to go to doctors and ERs… because of the humanity they feel they lose in those places.” As the majority of people sleeping on the street have a chronic cough, Costello relies on the intimate task of taking temperatures to diagnose infection. “I think a lot of people are going to do as they tend to always do,” Costello said quietly. “Just keep, you know, running and existing how they know how until they get so sick that an ambulance is called.” As the number of COVID-19 cases in New Haven climbs, the perennial problem of homelessness in the city has taken on a new sense of urgency. The prevalence of survival sex work in New Haven is tied to the city’s lack of affordable housing; nearly all of those who find themselves without homes resort to street sex APRIL 2020

work at some point to survive. Codianni’s main concern is that the majority of SWAN’s members are still on the street—a problem that SWAN doesn’t have the resources to address. “The biggest thing is interior spaces, right?” Serio remarked. “There are a couple of agencies that house folks in the city, but there was still homelessness before this pandemic. They were already living with a reality where homelessness exists, which means that there were already not enough interior spaces.” With homeless shelters closing one after another to avoid acting as nurseries for the virus, the city’s three thousand–strong homeless population is being turned onto the street as New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker scrambles to find and fund the interior space necessary for the homeless to “shelter in place.” Elicker faced two options: house the homeless in the city’s empty hotels, or ask the city’s universities for access to their thousands of vacant dorm rooms. After an initial request for Yale to open its doors to house first responders and firefighters—to which Yale’s answer was no, carefully packaged in statements of remorse and concerns about moving students belongings—the University eventually agreed to house 300 first responders. Elicker then turned to the city’s hotels to take in the homeless, including the street sex worker population.

But on April 6, the plan to house people in the Best Western hotel fell through. West Haven Police Chief Joseph S. Perno had requested close to five thousand dollars to hire police officers for the “safety and well-being of those housed,” and the city’s budget had buckled under the additional costs. The policing of homeless housing presents a serious threat to providing shelter for those still sleeping on the streets. “They expect people to just come into the hotel room and leave everything behind,” Codianni muttered. “No. Some of the people who are going to come in have mental health issues or drug use and they’re going to throw them out again.” Codianni explained that survival sex workers are often turned away from shelters due to continued drug habits or limited number of shelter beds. As the city considers how best to save lives, street medic Evan Serio is concerned that putting regulation before safety will be reflected in the death count. “Are you doing this to save people’s lives, from keeping them from getting sick or affected?” he asked, “Or are you doing it to try to change their way of life to meet your standards?” I put down the phone after my call with Codianni, only to find it ringing again minutes later. I pick up and hear her New England accent on the other side: “Well, aren’t we going to talk about Yale?” New Haven and Yale have been in a muted deadlock over Yale’s ballooning real estate holdings and lack of tax payments for years, but the coronavirus has laid bare the cracks in the University’s relationship with its host city. To Codianni, Yale’s closed doors and empty dorm space are the marks of its continued disregard for New Haven’s needs. “They said they were setting up the [Lanman gymnasium] for the Yale community. Well you know what, this is the New Haven community!” Codianni nearly yelled into the phone. With just a wall separating the empty dorms of Old Campus from homeless sleepers on the Green, the disparity has become impossible for organizations like SWAN to ignore. “People are out in the cold. It’s still cold out here. People are hungry. People need a place to go to the bathroom. Open your goddamn door, Yale.” Codianni repositions the phone, and I hear the plastic rustle of groceries bags being put down on the kitchen table. As a member of the age group most threatened by the coronavirus, I asked whether she’d considered the risk of continuing her work. “I’ve cut down a lot,” she responded. “I mean, I used to be out there every day, and now I go… maybe three times in the last three weeks,” she said with a sigh. “But they’re not just members, they’re friends now. They are, you know, our tribe.” I asked her whether she’d taken up any hobbies (baking bread? gardening?) 26

during quarantine. “Um, conference calls,” she replied with a rasping laugh. “I’m still working closely with the Global Health Justice Partnership, planning strategies of what we’re going to do, what we can do.” The peak of the infection curve for Connecticut is expected around mid-May. Despite the work of the city and non-profits, the majority of the homeless population and survival sex workers may weather that peak on street curbs, or gathered together around benches on the Green. But the members of SWAN haven’t resigned themselves to New Haven going the way of Boston. As the infection and death figures climb steadily, Codianni sits at home and reaches out to anyone who will listen—governors, philanthropists, and reporters. “And you can’t shut me up, as you just found out.” - Rachel Calcott is a sophomore in Branford College

THE NEW JOUR NAL

OLDSMOBILE DELTA 88 & PROVINCETOWN HARBOR BY BEASIE GODDU

Oldsmobile Delta 88 (top), Provincetown Harbor (bottom) design by Natasha Gaither APRIL 2020

â&#x20AC;&#x2030;27

When ICE came knocking, two religious communities stepped in to save a Muslim man from deportation.

What It Takes To Stay

design by Meher Hans

BY KO LYNG CHEANG

I meet Sujitno Sajuti on a Friday afternoon in late February. He greets me, impassive eyes appraising this Chinese girl who has entered his house of worship, a mosque in Hartford, Connecticut, to hear the story of what he lived through: he was targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation, spent 599 days in sanctuary, and finally was able to leave in the summer of 2019. His face is lined with crevice-like wrinkles. He slouches a little. He came to this country when he was 32 years old. He is now 71 and has spent more than half his life here. And yet, he still has the threat of deportation hanging over his head. Even though he

is free from sanctuary—where he took refuge in a Meriden church as a form of protection against arrest and deportation—his struggle with his immigration status is far from over. His legal team is working to vacate his deportation order as we speak, and until they succeed, he will remain at risk of being removed from the place he calls home. This summer, two Yale seniors, Jordan Cozby and Christina Pao, are launching a digital archive about the interfaith sanctuary movement in Connecticut, featuring Sujitno’s story. And as the next U.S. presidential election fast approaches, undocumented immigrants like Sujitno wait to see whether the past four years of increased deportations and ICE

THE NEW JOUR NAL

arrests will become a historical anomaly, a blight on the long arc of justice, or the new normal. — It is Ramadan in 2018. But Sujitno Sajuti and his wife, Dahlia, are not breaking fast with their friends from the mosque upon the evening call to prayer. They are in the meeting house of Connecticut’s Unitarian Universalist Church of Meriden, where Sujitno has been taking sanctuary from ICE agents since October 9, 2017. They share a small room, no bigger than ten feet across, on the second floor of an old farmhouse in the town of Meriden, Connecticut. They have a trundle bed, dresser, desk, and closet. It is not their West Hartford apartment in a brick building with wroughtiron railings that they have called home for the past twenty years, but they don’t have a choice. They must stay inside—Sajuti faces an ICE deportation removal order. On Mondays, Thursdays, and for three days in the middle of the Islamic month, they fast. To keep his spirit strong, Sujitno reads the Koran. He memorises the Surah Ar-Rahman, a chapter in the holy book which calls for man to express gratitude toward Allah. He prays for justice. He and his wife wake every morning well before dawn, between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., while a church volunteer sleeps in a cot downstairs, keeping vigil in case ICE comes knocking. The arrangement was made by the Chalice Sanctuary Team within the first day of Sujitno moving in. The team is a self-organised group of fifteen-odd church members who decided to contribute their time and resources to provide sanctuary to Sujitno. While the couple washes their hands, mouth, nostrils, arms, head, and feet in accordance with the Islamic practice known as wudu, the volunteer sleeping downstairs rises. On Sundays, while the congregation meets in the sanctuary to sing Unitarian Universalist hymns and light the chalice, the couple rests. Unitarian Universalism is a liberal, non-doctrinal religion that emerged when two separate faiths with roots in early Christianity, Unitarianism and Universalism, consolidated in the second half of the twentieth century. The church and the couple have developed a delicate rhythm to negotiate the differences between their faiths. I spoke to Sujitno and five of the people at the core of the complicated, high-stakes endeavour to protect him from deportation, which has spanned multiple years and involved a legal team, more than a dozen

APRIL 2020

church volunteers, fellow mosque members, and many well-wishers. The story of Sujitno Sajuti and the Meriden church that sheltered him for close to two years is one of inter-faith empathy and the deep capacity of human beings to care for their neighbours. — Almost three years ago, on Monday, October 9, 2017, at 4 p.m., Reverend Jan Carlsson-Bull, then the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Meriden, received a call from Reverend Paul Fleck, the pastor who initiated the movement to declare sanctuary congregations in Connecticut. Fleck informed Carlsson-Bull that Sujitno Sajuti was due to be deported the next day. He needed to find a place that would give him sanctuary, where ICE agents could not arrest him. The church’s Board of Trustees had voted to become a sanctuary congregation just weeks prior. Immediately, Reverend Carlsson-Bull called for an emergency phone conference with the leaders of the congregation, including Nancy Burton, a midwife who would soon lead Sujitno’s sanctuary team, and several Connecticut immigration activists. By 8 p.m., they voted yes. The Unitarian Universalist Church of Meriden would become an active sanctuary congregation, and Sujitno and Dahlia would be their first guests. Within hours, the team brought in a cot, linens, towels, and bathroom supplies from the church members’ homes and converted the empty second floor office into a bedroom. Fourteen miles away, Sujitno Sajuti was packing in his apartment. Just days prior, his request for a stay of deportation had been denied for the second time. Before Donald Trump was elected, he had been granted repeated stays of removal annually from when the original deportation order was issued in 2004. But now, he was fighting to remain in the country under an administration that was aggressively acting on the President’s post-election declaration to deport two to three million undocumented immigrants from the country. “Bring everything, quick, whatever we can bring,” he told his wife. They searched for the few hundred dollars they had saved from teaching Indonesian cooking in Connecticut but could not find it. They later found it hidden in their Koran. Sujitno brought clothes, books, and, most importantly, his immigration documents. Dahlia took her wedding ring and a gold necklace from her mother, who had passed away in 1999 in Indonesia. Even though Dahlia was not at risk for deportation, she accompanied her husband. At the church, Steve Volpini, a former reporter,

ex-Catholic and long-time acquaintance of Sujitno and Dahlia, helped them move their suitcases to the makeshift bedroom. Carlsson-Bull and some church members drafted a letter to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut and to the regional ICE office notifying them that Sujitno was in sanctuary with the Unitarian Universalist Church in Meriden. At 11 a.m. the next day, barely awake, Carlsson-Bull held a press conference in the meeting room of their church—aptly called “the sanctuary.” Standing at the pulpit of the large room lined with windows, Carlsson-Bull announced that Sujitno Sajuti, ordered by ICE to leave the country by 10 October 2017, would take sanctuary in their church for as long as necessary to prevent his deportation. A band of a dozen-odd Unitarian Universalists were soon to become experts in giving sanctuary. Nancy would take the lead. Steve would take care of food. Diane and Maureen would organize shifts for overnight duty—a team member would sleep in the church every night in case of unexpected visits by ICE agents or troublemakers. Richard and other members would do the couple’s laundry in their own homes. Sandy would set up WiFi for their guests. Peg and Carlsson-Bull emailed and phoned Unitarian Universalist sanctuary congregations around the country to learn from their experiences. There was a lot of work to be done. They needed to raise funds and find doctors willing to provide medical care to Sujitno if an emergency arose. “We weren’t sure how much risk we were taking as individuals and for the church,” Nancy said later. “But this was what we were going to do.”

—

The members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Meriden were heroic in their last-minute effort to provide sanctuary to Sujitno. The question is, why was it necessary? One part of the answer involves the status of sanctuary institutions. ICE has an internal policy of not making arrests in schools, hospitals, or houses of worship. But even though all houses of worship are, in principle, protected spaces, no mosque has been reported as having offered sanctuary to persons under threat from deportation as of 2018. Sujitno’s mosque in Hartford, the Muhammad Islamic Center of Greater Hartford, had considered giving sanctuary to him. “We would have been the first Masjid to be tested with the laws that were already in place,” Imam Kashif Abdul-Karim said, “We were afraid that the Patriot Act might create new rules, which would not offer him the same pro-

tections as if he was a Christian facility. And we didn’t want Sujitno to be put under a test. We wanted his safety first and foremost.” The immunity held by individuals in sanctuary from ICE arrests is not legally enshrined. This fact makes it unclear how safe Sujitno would have been if he had taken sanctuary in his mosque instead. Less than nine months prior, the Trump administration had implemented the Muslim ban. But Imam Kashif and his wife had received death threats for being Muslim long before the ban, and were cautious of the possibility of anti-Muslim attacks. They decided that Sujitno would be safer in a non-Muslim house of worship. The second part of the answer goes back to a law from 19 years ago, which first trapped Sujitno in the deportation order. The Patriot Act, signed into law in 2001 by President George W. Bush, allows the government to use law enforcement to search homes or businesses without the owner’s consent and indefinitely hold suspects, for the purpose of countering terrorism. The act spawned the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which tracked the movement of mostly Arab and Muslim non-citizens. Like thousands of other immigrants in the US, Sujitno reported to the government under this system. But this action directly led to him becoming known to ICE. That’s when he was targeted for deportation. When he reported for registration, his counsel failed to advocate for him. She never discussed his eligibility to stay in the country with the immigration officials. The Immigration and Naturalization Service staff ini-

“"They decided that Sujitno would be safer in a non-Muslim house of worship." tially denied him the right to have his counsel present, but when they eventually allowed her to join him, the lawyer left early. Sujitno had to navigate the registration process alone. Sujitno was then served with a notice to appear that initiated removal proceedings, where his lawyer accepted a voluntary departure order on his behalf without fully informing Sujitno. There was no Indonesian language interpreter at the hearing, and the audio recording makes it clear that Sujitno did not comprehend what was going on.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

By signing the order, he had committed himself to leaving the country by February 6, 2004. When he did not do so, his voluntary departure order was converted into a deportation removal order. This was the removal order that ICE acted upon when they threatened him with deportation in October 2017. “It should be understood that this man was placed in removal proceedings because he voluntarily complied in 2003 with the US government’s rather shockingly Islamophobic special registration,” said Diana Blank, Sujitno’s lawyer. Today, Sujitno speaks of his decision to register with NSEERs with regret. “I try to follow the rules, but in fact, it’s not really as it is,” he said. “There must be something wrong.” — It was 1989 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Sujitno was working as a public health researcher and policy analyst in the bustling capital city. At all hours, one could hear the pedicab drivers tooting their horns, motorbikes rumbling with exhaust, and neighbourhood cats sparring in territorial battles. Five times a day, the fullthroated voice of the Muslim call to prayer echoed through the streets, under highways, and in mosques, drawing the faithful out of their homes and workplaces to face mecca. He lived with his wife, Dahlia, whom he had met at a wedding in Jakarta eight years prior. Dahlia was a librarian and, like him, spent most of her time in the library. She was studious, like Sujitno. She came from a strict family, like Sujitno. And neither of them had much experience dating. They immediately connected and grew close. “We told [each other how we felt] by our actions, it’s much better than words,” recalled Sujitno. “It’s not like in the films.” A year and a half later, they were married. With a Masters in Public Health from Columbia University, which he attended as a Fulbright Scholar, Sujitno enjoyed the privilege of an advanced degree in a country where only 2.3 percent of the population had a Bachelor’s degree and over half had no schooling. But it was not enough; his colleagues at the Jakarta research office asked him, “Why did you come home? Finish your PhD!” In 1989, he arrived in Connecticut, a state where winter lasts a third of the year. It was a far cry from tropical Indonesia. Eager to complete a PhD in medical anthropology, a small discipline at the time, Sujitno went to the University of Connecticut on a scholarship to study with one of the few medical anthropologists in the field. Research in medical anthropology, he

APRIL 2020

believed, would give him a fresh angle from which to study public health, making him more employable. But before he completed his doctorate, his advisor took an early retirement. Without anyone to replace him, Sujitno couldn’t complete his doctoral degree. He tried in vain to find another advisor. I asked him if he considered returning to Jakarta at this point. “It’s too late, how can I go back to Indo-

“"Like thousands of other immigrants in the US, Sujitno reported to the government under this system. But this action directly led to him becoming known to ICE."” nesia?” he replied. “If I go back without a PhD, I’d be nothing.” He believed that his supervisor at work would stall his career advancement if he returned. “It would have screwed up my career,” he said. For the next three years, Sujitno finished his dissertation coursework, worked at supermarkets, and continued teaching language classes for Bahasa Indonesia. His student visa expired after he had to pause his studies, but he gained authorization to work in the States. He and Dahlia moved into an apartment in West Hartford. She taught Indonesian cooking while he laid low until the national registration system for Muslim men was announced in 2003 and he came onto ICE’s radar. In December 2011, ICE agents arrested Sujitno at his apartment on the grounds of the 2004 deportation order against him. Under the Obama Administration, ICE agents were increasingly targeting undocumented immigrants. During the sixty-nine days that he was held in detention, he tried to remain positive and made dawah—an invitation to Islam—to his detention officers. He was released on 17 February 2012, having successfully filed for a stay of removal. For the next five years, he filed annually for renewals of his stay of removal, and they were granted each time. Then, Donald Trump won the presidential election. “When he went into sanctuary, he was working with authorization,” said Diana, his lawyer. “He was doing everything that was in his power to comply with the law, except returning to a country where he had no means of survival.” Under the Trump administration, his stay of deportation was denied for the first time since 2011. He found another lawyer who had one last chance to file a stay of

removal on 6 October 2017. It was denied. Three days later, he entered sanctuary. — Overnight, the sanctuary team and its members had to figure out the nuts and bolts of how to sustain sanctuary for their guests. They set up a Facebook page to advocate for Sujitno’s cause, wrote thank you notes to the donors, and met with the Meriden Police Chief. They checked whether their insurance policy would cover the added liability of having residents in their house of worship. Crucially, they learned what was required for ICE to enter their meeting house and possibly arrest Sujitno. Sujitno’s situation was met with an outpouring of public attention and support. Unitarian Universalist groups and well-wishers donated to the sanctuary efforts, providing Stop & Shop gift cards for Steve, who volunteered to buy the couple’s weekly groceries. “You have two scholars past normal retirement age who were being ejected from the country after being here for thirty years,” said Steve later. “The sheer unfairness of this really angered people and activated people.” As the days turned into weeks, the sanctuary team’s efforts became routine. Every week, Steve would go to the church, ask the couple for their grocery list, chat with them for a while, and leave to buy the groceries. The couple ate vegetarian, and the weekly shopping bags would be filled with fruits and vegetables: asparagus, dates, carrots, potatoes, onions, scallions, tofu, tempeh (if they had it), and various spices and seeds. In time, the team purchased another fridge for Sujitno and Dahlia to use. Nancy’s book club sponsored a second trundle bed for the volunteers who slept in the church each night. The collective effort grew as other activists, Unitarian Universalists in the state, and members of Sujitno’s masjid, or mosque, contributed to the sanctuary effort. One Sunday soon after Sujitno arrived at the meeting house, Reverend Carlsson-Bull led a sermon focusing on loving your neighbour. “This isn’t an act of charity,” she said. “It was an act of being an ally and being in solidarity.” And so they lit the chalice in the sanctuary of the farmhouse where they had, for many years, gathered each Sunday for congregation, a place that was now also a sanctuary for Sujitno Sajuti and Dahlia. — The symbol of the chalice has its origins in Lisbon

during World War II, when a Unitarian Universalist Reverend named Charles Joy ushered Jewish, Roma, and gay individuals fleeing Nazi persecution to safety. He used a flaming chalice as a secret symbol to indicate that a building was a place of sanctuary. When the time came for Sujitno’s sanctuary team to choose a name, it made complete sense that they use the symbol that had saved many lives half a century prior. And so Carlsson-Bull suggested the name “Chalice Sanctuary Team.” Social activism and justice is written into the history of Unitarian Universalism. More than 177 Unitarian Universalist ministers and seminarians marched with African Americans along the fifty-four-mile highway from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, protesting against continued segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Americans. Of the two hundred thousand people who participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, sixteen thousand were Unitarian Universalists. Early Unitarian Universalists thinkers like Clarence Skinner and James Luther Adams espoused a vision for the faith that embraced liberal values, defended human rights, and fought to eradicate race and class-based injustices. The Unitarian Universalist Church of Meriden is a church of activists. Nancy Burton is on the board of the Universal Healthcare Foundation and is an advocate for healthcare reform. Steve had been taking part in immigrant rights marches outside the federal courthouse long before Sujitno took sanctuary in the church. A group of 20 activists, including several church members, filled the courthouse rows during every day of the

“"This is a church of midwives and school teachers, of factory workers and construction workers." 2019 court appearances of Miguel Castro, an activist accused of assaulting two judicial officials. Steve explains that he was defending an undocumented child who was to be separated from their parent outside a courthouse. On one occasion, when the church members arrived, the prosecutor asked, “Is the posse here again?” “Most of us do not have deep pockets,” said Nancy. This is a church of midwives and school teachers, of factory workers and construction workers. But Nancy,

THE NEW JOUR NAL

like most of the others, was committed to upholding justice. Her favourite hymn, titled “We’ll Build a Land”, sings of captives going free. It imagines a world “Where justice shall roll down like waters, / And peace like an ever flowing stream.” As I listened to Nancy, I couldn’t help but wonder: if a small band of activists from a not-very-wealthy, working-class church were able to provide sanctuary to an Indonesian Muslim couple for 599 days, why couldn’t the United States, with its vast resources and diverse languages, allow the couple, who have spent thirty-one years building a life for themselves in this country, to stay? — The mosque at Hungerford Street in Hartford is a handsome two-story house with a pitched roof and green trimmings—the sacred colour of Islam. In a large space where sunlight streams onto red and cream-coloured masjid carpet, over one hundred men gather every Friday to participate in jummah, a sermon delivered in mosques before the Friday prayer. The small bedroom in the meeting house where Sujitno Sajuti spent his days in sanctuary at the Unitarian Universalist Church was to serve the same function as the mosque—a clean, well-lit place for prayer. On Fridays, Sujitno led the jummah for himself, Dahlia, and sometimes, Dahlia’s friends. He sang the adhan and the iqamah, the call to prayer, before beginning to pray. It was not an ideal arrangement, given that congregation is important to Muslims, especially during Friday prayer. But it was a necessary one. In the Hartford mosque, white square tiles line the wudu rooms in the basement. Water flows from the tap as the members carry out the ablution. While in sanctuary, before praying and reading the Koran, Sujitno and Dahlia would make wudu in the kitchen sink on the first floor with paper towels instead. But when members of the church were around, they would retreat to their private bathroom to make wudu, unwilling to invite confrontation by washing themselves in the kitchen sink. “Actually, it’s not okay to do wudu in the bathroom,” said Sujitno, explaining that the bathroom is considered unclean, “but when you have no choice, it’s different.” Sujitno and Dahlia maintain a strict adherence to ritual fasting. However, at the beginning of their stay in sanctuary, this practice caused confusion and misunderstanding with the sanctuary team members. “When I’m fasting I don’t like to have guests. We don’t want to be negative,” Sujitno explained. Fasting is not just

about refraining from eating; it is also about maintaining one’s spiritual focus. But as a result, the church members were unsure about when they could and could not talk to their guests. “There’s a lot of stuff we had to figure out as we went. They are Muslim, from another culture and another religious base,” said Nancy. In the end, they decided to hang a small sign outside the couple’s bedroom door on days of fasting that read, “Our guests are fasting. This includes not focusing on material things and keeping the mind at peace. Please respect this tradition.” Nancy and the team came to understand the delicate balance that had to be struck between the couple’s needs and theirs. If they were fasting or praying, the team gave them space to practice their religion. Sometimes, they would hear Sujitno and Dahlia talking in raised voices, arguing like normal couples. Arguing was a normal part of life, and the team did not want to intrude on their privacy. Most of the time, the couple kept to themselves. They cooked, cleaned, and prayed. “I have never known a more devout couple than they

Photo by Jan Carlsson-Bull

APRIL 2020

are. I think that was [how] both of them got through this ordeal,” said Steve. — Sujitno is thin and sturdy, but was approaching seventy when he entered sanctuary. The team worried that if he had a medical emergency and the team were forced to call an ambulance, he might end up arrested by ICE on the way to or at the hospital, as had happened to a ten-year-old girl in Texas. So they set about searching for a sanctuary doctor. When Sujitno needed eyeglasses, an optician came into the church to do the eye test and provide prescription glasses. There were other moments of fear while Sujitno was in sanctuary. In March 2018, letters declaring April 3 to be “Punish a Muslim Day” were anonymously sent to families, lawmakers, and businesses in the United Kingdom. The handout listed a cruel point system that rewarded attackers with points for committing hate crimes: verbally abusing a Muslim would grant 10 points while torturing one with “electrocution, skinning, use of rack” would give them 250. Nancy called the Meriden police and spoke to a desk sergeant. She told them about the letters and explained that they had a Muslim couple in sanctuary at their church. “We would just appreciate a police presence,” she said. On Tuesday, April 3, the Meriden police sat in the parking lot of the church all day, keeping watch for potential attacks. “I was really really pleased. They really responded,” Nancy said. Thankfully, nothing happened. During their time in sanctuary, Sujitno and Dahlia became fearful that someone was watching them. “They were really somewhat traumatized whenever there was a fire engine that went by or a police car, flashing lights or something,” Steve said. “They would keep everything dark inside the church and look through the windows to see what was happening in the dark hours. Sujitno never so much as put a toe outdoors, the entire time, nothing.” ICE never paid the couple a visit during the 599 days they were in sanctuary, but they had clamped a bulky GPS monitor to Sujitno’s ankle. The officials monitoring the ankle bracelet called at odd hours to check in on him, often early in the morning. “It seemed to me to be a form of harassment more than anything else,” said Steve. Recalling this experience in his apartment months later, Sujitno showed me sheets and sheets of yellow legal paper stapled together—this was his log, which he used to do calculations and keep track of when he

charged the battery, and the time he expected the battery to run out. If the monitor ran out of battery, the officials would call him. Sujitno organized his praying, visits from his friends, and his meals around the ever-present ankle monitor. — For most of his time in sanctuary, Sujitno Sajuti had

“ "Sujitno organized his praying, visits from his friends, and his meals around the ever-present ankle monitor."” an application for a U-Visa pending approval by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS. A U-Visa is a special form of status reserved for victims of certain crimes in the U.S. who have suffered substantial abuse, physical or mental. These victims must prove that they cooperated with law enforcement in the investigation or prosecution of the crime. His lawyer, Diana Blank, saw it as his ticket to remain in the U.S., legally. Shortly after Diana heard of Sujitno’s case in late 2018, Alok Bhatt, a coordinator for the Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance who had supported Sujitno since he entered sanctuary, raised the possibility to her that Sujitno might be eligible for a U-Visa, since he had been a victim of armed robbery in 1995. Diana, a staff attorney at the non-profit organization New Haven Legal Assistance, immediately got to work with her legal team at the Yale Law School Immigrant Rights Clinic. They filed for a motion to reopen Sujitno’s deportation proceedings and vacate the order of removal on the basis of the U-Visa application. The team then applied for a U-Visa on Sujitno’s behalf in February 2018. The process took over a year and hours of work by his legal team, who are working on his case pro bono. Finally, in May 2019, USCIS granted Sujitno deferred action, a protective status stating that Sujitno would no longer be a priority for removal proceedings because he was deemed prima facie eligible for a U-Visa. The evidence was strongly in his favour. USCIS had issued a statement saying that the only reason he was not being granted the U-Visa immediately was that Congress had set a cap of ten thousand on the number of visas that could be granted each year. The

THE NEW JOUR NAL

queue was several years long. Nancy was at a faculty meeting at the Yale School of Nursing when she received a message from Diana Blank. “Please call me as soon as you can,” Diana said. “When you get that kind of message you assume it’s bad news,” Nancy recalled. She called Diana, who told her of the judge’s decision. At last, Sujitno was no longer at risk of imminent deportation. “It felt wonderful to know that you actually can make a difference,” said Nancy. “You know that old Margaret Mead saying, that all you need is a small group of dedicated, committed people to really make change? It felt like we did.” The last day of May 2019 was the warmest day of the week, and also the day Sujitno Sajuti would take his first steps outside the white farmhouse in which he had taken sanctuary for the past 599 days. He put on a

"She held the door open for him as he stepped into the sunshine." black kufi, white shirt and grey jacket. Dahlia, with her penchant for wearing beautiful clothing, wore a bright green hijab and a matching embroidered baju kurung printed with flowers. She held the door open for him as he stepped into the sunshine. His first stop was an ICE office, where he would be unshackled from the ankle monitor he had worn since October 2017. From there, he would go home. For Steve, the moment when Sujitno left sanctuary was bittersweet. The couple had become such a fixture in the daily lives and thoughts of the sanctuary team members. They had shared many dinners and conversations during late nights in the farmhouse. “We were losing him and he was losing us,” he said. Now, Steve doesn’t see Sujitno very often. But sometimes, when Sujitno needs a ride to the Hartford train station, he gives Steve a call. Nine months later, on a Friday morning a week after I first met him in the Hartford Mosque, Sujitno Sajuti and his wife are doing laundry in their white-carpeted apartment in West Hartford. The aroma of frying oil wafts from the kitchen, where Dahlia is cooking. In a spacious corner of the living room, a prayer mat is unfurled, facing mecca. A Koran sits on his crowded bookshelf. The journey of Sujitno and other people like him to gain legal protection and recognition continues. In

APRIL 2020

his state of the union speech earlier that month, Donald Trump reaffirmed his desire to restrict immigration into the country, declaring that “[t]he United States of America should be a sanctuary for law-abiding Americans, not criminal aliens.” Sujitno, with his neat attire, staunch devotion to prayer, and measured manner, ought to meet even President Trump’s test of being a law-abiding American, if that test should matter at all. I ask Sujitno what he would say to President Trump if he had the chance. He responded, “Trump’s wife is from another country. His father-in-law is from another country. Why should they become citizens?” he said. “It hurts me.” There will be more court appearances and rallies to attend. The Meriden church will carry on with organizing pro-immigrant events. Activists and lawyers like Steve and Diana will charge forward in their ceaseless efforts so that Sujitno and Dahlia, and others like them, can continue to enjoy peaceful Friday mornings, making breakfast in their own home, which is a right that has been twisted into a privilege. On this day, Sujitno is preparing to catch a train, and Dahlia is making a delicious meal, dressed in a vibrant green hijab embroidered with pearl-like beads. Before I leave, he tells me he has been living in this apartment for a long time, more than twenty years. I pray that he will have twenty more.

- Ko Lyn Cheang is a junior in Grace Hopper College

*On May 17, 2020, the article was altered to clarify that Unitarian Universalism emerged when two separate faiths with roots in early Christianity, Unitarianism and Universalism, consolidated in the second half of the twentieth century.

đ&#x;&#x17D;ś THATâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S WHY ENDNOTE

I CHOSE ZOOM

đ&#x;&#x17D;ľ

ALEXANDRA GALLOWAY

Congratulations, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been admitted to Yale Virtual University Class of 202X! BY ALEXANDRA GALLOWAY Behind my classmate, I can see the golden glint of Pierson Tower as the sunlight hits it just right. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studying in the Davenport courtyardâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the grass a sea of emerald, the paint on the spire blindingly white and her hair aglow in the sunshine. I almost believe that I am back at Yaleâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;â&#x20AC;&#x201C;until the disembodied voice of another classmate interrupts the illusion created by her virtual background. His video is off; I fixate on the letter â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sâ&#x20AC;? that fills the screen in lieu of his picture. Welcome to Zoom University. Since late March, Zoom, a video-conferencing platform, has become an integral part of our lives. It has replaced many of our communal spaces, offering a new means of virtual connection as we shut down public life and isolate ourselves in order to fight COVID-19. Jimmy Fallon hosts celebrity guests over Zoom. Parents call into work from their dining room tables over Zoom. Friends grab bottles of wine and reunite for Zoom happy hours; long-distance couples Netflix and Zoom. Strobe lights flash and bass booms as students sign in to Zoom dance parties and jump around their childhood bedrooms. In the realm of academics, Zoom has transformed how students engage with professors and with one another. Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, reported in early April that over ninety thousand schools across the world were using Zoom and that over two hundred million people were using the platform daily. Instead of meeting in seminar rooms and lecture halls, students and professors are now logging into

class from across the world, across time zones, and across backgrounds, offering new opportunities for engagement but also new challenges. Students joke that they are now students at Zoom University, even designing sweatshirts and t-shirts to show school pride. Yet for all the jokes, Zoom seriously strains Yale studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; sense of community. To me, the Yale experience is defined by racing to be first-in-line for Pierson Collegeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s breakfast for dinner, sharing Kookie Monster donuts with my friends at Donut Crazy, late nights dancing and laughing at the local nightclub Toads, and collective suffering in Bass Library. When that is gone, what are we left with? Can Zoom fill that void in any meaningful way? â&#x20AC;&#x153;Hestia, you ready?â&#x20AC;? Stephen Latham, professor of Yaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s popular course Bioethics and Law, asks his cat, at the beginning of a pre-recorded Zoom lecture. His hair is silver and tousled as he raises his cat like Simba in The Lion King. Her white paws splay out to her sides and she looks straight into the camera with bright green eyes. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Go!â&#x20AC;? he says. But instead, Hestia jumps out of his lap and saunters to the door with a meow. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We went over this. Alright, go out, but you are definitely not getting the salmon.â&#x20AC;? Latham sits again and sighs, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Very unreliable cat,â&#x20AC;? before launching into a fifty-minute lecture. At the beginning of each lecture, Latham makes his students smile with short skits, ranging from him listening to K-Pop songs to him chiding a stuffed animal for its prolonged screen time. Cormac Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Dea, a professor of economics at Yale, is also grappling with the new reality of online instruction. Given his discipline, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more than familiar with the allocation of scarce resourcesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but he never expected that his home Wi-Fi would become one. Over 120 students join his Zoom lectures on Introductory Microeconomics each class, so every Monday and Wednesday from 1:00 to 2:15 p.m. he has to monopolize the Wi-Fi in his house. â&#x20AC;&#x153;In choosing my Wi-Fi package, I did not imagine this particular scenario,â&#x20AC;? Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Dea laughs over our Zoom call. Teaching over Zoom certainly poses more difficulties than just Wi-Fi. Like many other profes-

â&#x20AC;&#x2030;36

THE NEW JOUR NAL

design by Annli Nakayama

sors, O’Dea has had to adapt to a new way of teaching and engaging with students through Zoom. Normally while lecturing, O’Dea can look out into the audience and gauge student reactions, but now it is much harder because students have to turn off their video in lecture to conserve his Wi-Fi. He cannot tell whether students are smiling when he uses Vizzini from The Princess Bride to explain game theory, or whether students are following along when he is lecturing on Pareto Efficiency and the Second Welfare Theorem. “You can’t see if the students are interested, bored, excited, or confused,” O’Dea said. To overcome these hurdles, O’Dea has kept an open mind and found new ways to keep paths of communication open, including encouraging participation in lectures through interactive activities like break-out rooms, open polls, and a suggestion box linked on Canvas. “This is as new for me as it is for you folks,” O’Dea said, “I don’t have the presumption that I know how to do this.” O’Dea has also adapted the content of the class to the current crisis. At the start of each lecture, he shares economic news related to the pandemic. “It is important for us as instructors and students to engage in the world around us and [understand] how this crisis is affecting people other than ourselves,” O’Dea said. Although he was worried at first that students might not want to hear about the pandemic in

class, ninety-five percent wanted him to continue, according to an in-class poll he conducted. He finds it important to remember how the crisis is affecting not only the world but also our community. “For many students, this is not just abstract; this is affecting them and their families intensely,” O’Dea said. Students are facing an overload of barriers to full academic participation in online classes, including responsibilities at home, sick loved ones, lack of reliable internet or technology, having to get a job, worsened mental health, and vast time differences, according to a recent poll conducted by the Yale College Council. These obstacles, while experienced by every student to some degree, are felt most acutely by first generation, low income, and international students. When Keigo Nishio ’21 found out that Yale was moving classes online for the rest of the semester, he was shocked. He did not understand how he was going to overcome the thirteen-hour time difference between New Haven and his home of Osaka, Japan. Since then, Keigo has found a tenuous balance between school, work, family, and sleep. Keigo starts his school day off at midnight. He attends his classes until 3 to 4 a.m., works as a teaching assistant for a couple hours, and then only sleeps one to two hours a night. He cooks breakfast at 9 a.m. During the day, he has meetings, chores, and homework, and he tries to nap in whatever spare hours are left. Despite the challenges posed by the time difference, he has felt supported by Yale faculty. “Luckily, my professors were all so accommodating,” Keigo said, “I really appreciate my professors.” Most of his professors started recording class so he did not feel obligated to stay up, but he also appreciated his professors’ care and consideration. They often reached out to check in, his anthropology professor even dedicating time in lecture to reach out to see how his students were doing.

Pictured: Stephen Latham and Hestia in Bioethics and Law lecture APRIL 2020

“We, both students and professors, are now required to consider and accommodate our diverse needs, which is actually an essential thing even at normal times,” Keigo said, “I hope this mutual care will continue, even after the pandemic is contained.” When I asked Keigo how he has enough energy to get through the day, Keigo said, “I don’t know.” He paused. Then, with a laugh: “Somehow it works. Everyone has their own way to deal with things.” Beyond the classroom, students have tried to deal with this jarring disruption in their lives by reaching out to one another. Almost six hundred thousand people have joined the Facebook group Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens where students commiserate with each other through TikToks and memes, and immortalize moments of levity. Over Facebook, students have worked together to make masks and support medical staff. No Fail Yale, a student driven movement to fight for a universal passing grade for all Yale College courses, mobilized students internationally to organize and fight for educational equity. Yale students have also tried to preserve traditions through Zoom. Secret societies tap with furtive Zoom invites instead of their traditional nighttime congregations. Political parties of the Yale Political Union debate from their kitchen tables. Instead of visiting Yale, wandering around in the cold, and bouncing from extracurricular booth to booth to find pizza, prospective students now participate in “30 Bulldog Days of April,” featuring a new master class or information session each day. One of the most renowned student traditions at Yale is Woads. Every Wednesday night, the local nightclub Toad’s Place closes the club to everyone except Yale students, serves penny drinks, and offers free and reduced admission. Even though students are spread out across the world and social distancing, the tradition has not died out. Victoria Bonano ’21 hosted a Woads event over Zoom––what she calls Zoads. “Zoom… provide[s] a platform for all of us to come together and hang out, as we usually would while in New Haven, despite being so far away from each other at the moment,” Bonano said. Her co-host Paulina Halley set the mood with Sound Activated DJ Lights and a DJ controller. Students joined from their bedrooms, from the basements of their fraternities, and from all around

the world, including New York, New Haven, Illinois, California, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Chile. “One of the hardest things about not being on campus has been missing out on many big events all of us were looking forward to, like birthdays and formals, as well as day to day activities, like study dates and GHeav runs with friends,” Bonano said, “Woad’s represents a mid-week study break with our friends that we look forward to every Wednesday, so we hosted Zoad’s to try to keep some sense of normalcy and fun during these times.” It was not quite the same––there was more laughter and chatter than at a typical Woad’s. But it made sense that people wanted to talk. After all, it was the first time many of them had seen each other since they had gone home for spring break. I am not sure if Zoom can ever approximate what it feels like to be at Yale––to trudge up Science Hill in the icy slush to get to physics study hall, to wander around campus at night drinking bubble tea, to look up and see Harkness Tower and wonder to yourself, “How the hell did I end up here?” But in the small, precious moments of Zoom, when my friend calls me from across the country to try to wake me up for class, when our professors’ children sneak into lecture behind them, when a brave soul in your lecture uses Club Penguin to explain game theory––in these moments, the distance becomes almost bearable. Yale, with all its ups and downs, does not seem so far away. - Alexandra Galloway is a first-year in Davenport College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal

THE NEW JOUR NAL

Truth History Democracy Hear from some of the most outstanding journalists in the world and gain insight into the media and its role in contemporary culture. poynter.yale.edu