Volume 54 - Issue 2

VOL 54 / ISS 2 / NOV 2021

THE NEW JOURNAL THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YALE & NEW HAVEN

Labor at the Library.

INSIDE: SECRET PETS COVID ISOLATION HOUSING SEX IN THE STACKS

Editors-In-Chief Alexandra Galloway Zachary Groz Executive Editor Jack Delaney Managing Editor Eli Mennerick Associate Editors Nicole Dirks Jesse Goodman Rose Horowitch Caroleine James Noa Rosinplotz Dereen Shirnekhi Will Sutherland JD Wright Katherine Yao Senior Editors Beasie Goddu Madison Hahamy

Copy Editors Meg Buzbee Jabez Choi Anna Fleming Lucy Gilchrist Ella Goldblum Ella Pearlman-Chang Kaylee Walsh Creative Director Annli Nakayama Design Editors Savannah Crichton Ada Griffin Ally Soong Photography Editor Lukas Flippo Business Manager Sherry Chen

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 Rawbin, 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

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 3311 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06515. All contents Copyright 2021 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 thenewjournal@gmail.com. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

2

THE NEW JOUR NAL

54 T H E VOLUME ISSUE 2 NOV 2021 NEW JOURNAL T HE MAGAZINE AB OUT YALE & NEW HAVEN

Jack McCordick

Avery Mitchell

cover 12 LABOR AT THE LIBRARY

In late September, Yale’s clerical and technical workers won a new labor contract. But Yale continues to subcontract much of its library work to non-union workers.

4

points of departure GO AHEAD, YALE. TRY TO TAKE MY HEDGEHOG AWAY.

Yale prohibits pets in dorms, but that hasn’t stopped some students.

Hailey Andrews

8

SEX IN THE STACKS

Some students go to Sterling Memorial Library’s stacks to study.

Others, not so much.

Will Sutherland

personal essay 16 SOMEBODY HELP! I HAVE COVID AND I'M STANDING ALONE OUTSIDE MAISON MATHIS What happens when you test positive for COVID-19 at Yale.

STANDARDS Meg Buzbee 6

point of departure DEAD ON IMPACT

personal essays Jabez Choi 19 NIGHT LIFE Jesse Goodman 16 WHEN A VIRUS CALLS Alex Rocha-Alvarez 26 FILLING IN THE BLANKS poems J. D. Wright 21 BARBED-WIRE BALLET John Nguyen 31 PACEBREAKER Elena Unger 33 AFTER THE SURPRISE PARTY MY BEST FRIEND LIKES TO SLEEP IN THE DARK

NOVEMBER 2021

asides Michaela Wang 17 CRYING IN THE L-DUB SHOWERS Miranda Jeyaretnam 21 MEW HAVEN CAT CAFE Abigail Dixon LEITNER HOUSE RITUAL Idone Rhodes 32 BOSTON BOUND endnote Yonatan Greenberg 34 CODING COMBAT

3

Go ahead, Yale.

Try to take my hedgehog away.

Yale prohibits pets in dorms, but that hasn’t stopped some students.

by Avery Mitchell Knock knock. A winter chill leaks through the window of her Berkeley single, and she tightens her blanket burrito like a tourniquet. Instinctively, she reaches for Fat Louie, her black and white “cow” cat (who doubles as a portable furnace). He isn’t on the bed. She turns over. Through sleep-bleared eyes, she sees Louie sitting at the foot of her bedroom door, expecting company.

“Facilities!” shouts a gruff voice from the hallway.

She leaps to her feet. She hears the hand on the knob, the key in the lock. Almost out of time. She tries to shepherd Fat Louie into his carrier. He refuses to go in. What to do...

“Ah—don’t come in! I’m in bed!”

The hand falters, then extracts its key. The inspector shuffles away to screen another room. This Berkeley senior lives to cohabit with her secret pet for another day.

wasn’t really much ‘hiding’ to do,” admitted the Berkeley cat concealer. “No questionable encounters,” said the Hopper hedgehog smuggler. “We just put him in the closet sometimes,” claimed my fish-favoring Trumbullian neighbors.

The day-to-day duties of the secret pet owners on Yale’s campus are at once a burden and a gift. Feeding, bathing, and exercising can be chores or welcome reprieves.

One Hopper senior, who had received a hedgehog as a surprise birthday present during the pandemic, admitted, “she’s a double-edged sword.” The owner and her suitemates were unable to use their shared bathroom for her weekly baths, so they made do with a halloween candy bowl. The hedgehog was also an avid explorer, often escaping her cage to eat the grime under the couch and scamper down the hallway beyond the common room. “Hedgehogs move surprisingly fast!” the Hopper source said, “and they poop A LOT. She would often poop on my blankets.”

On tough days, however, the chaos could be comforting. The hedgehog was a “constant presence” for her owner. Prickles and flightiness aside, hedgehogs don’t hold grudges. And when application season gets overwhelming, it’s important to have someone to hold.

Fat Louie, too, became a pillar of his owner’s community during the pandemic. Last spring, she ran into a classmate sitting on the steps of Sterling, about to burst into tears. Instinctively, she invited her over to visit Fat Louie. “Even though she claimed she ‘wasn’t really a cat person,’ she ended up not wanting to leave,” the owner shared. The visitor wouldn’t let the cat go, petting the pain away. “She stayed through breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and definitely left as a cat person.”

As it turns out, she isn’t the only one hiding pets on campus. A clandestine menagerie exists behind the suite doors of Yale’s fourteen residential colleges, even though it violates the University’s housing regulations: “Pets are not permitted in Yale Housing.”

Rulebreakers may be punished with “termination of the housing agreement.”

My pet-owning sources were not alarmed when I reminded them of this rule. They shouldered their violations willingly, almost nonchalantly. “There

4

THE NEW JOUR NAL

ART & DESIGN BY SAVANNAH CRICHTON

Little did she know, she’d fixed my whole day.

Archie the Ginger Doodle waddled around my room, a melon-sized bundle of red, bouncy curls, two endlessly surprised eyes, and a little wet nose. He contemplated his reflection in the mirror, sniffed my tea, embraced my upset tummy, and sat on my lap while I worked through the night. I FaceTimed some friends I hadn’t talked to in a while to show them how well Archie matched my furniture. Starved for physical touch in a pandemic world, I cuddled him all evening.

According to my freshman-year neighbors in Bingham, Marvin the goldfish was a welcome distraction from the academic grind. The suitemates described cleaning Marvin’s bowl as “a grounding ritual,” and “a good part of Yale.” The bowl was a one-gallon bear-shaped animal cracker jar, housing a flea-market statuette of a Grecian Madonna and a floor of blue rocks. Marvin was a bright spot in Bingham. His owners characterized their fish as an “instant celebrity,” drawing an “endless rotating cast of friends.”

The Pandemic Exodus of March 2020 displaced Marvin from his beloved Yale. He ended up hitching a ride to Manhattan on Metro North in a water bottle. His new home: a mason jar on the kitchen counter. He survived the turbulent journey, but the worst was yet to come. On March 15th, Dean Chun announced that Yale College students would not be returning to campus for the remainder of the academic year; that morning, Marvin’s owner walked into the kitchen and found him dead.

— I, too, have experienced the joy of pet cohabitation at Yale. Last Saturday, I was supposed to go to a party, but I’d had a rough, unproductive day. I was suffering from the kind of high-pressure headache that only comes after staring at screens, avoiding sunlight, and eating junk food all day. I wasn’t in the mood to do anything.

My day as Archie’s stand-in-owner reminded me of the pet contact I’ve been missing from home.

Ollie, my oversized goldendoodle, is a snuggler. The pandemic was heaven to him—he had his whole pack under one roof, five people to loop around like a furry snake. When I squeezed between my two younger sisters to watch TV each night, Ollie lay over us like a weighted, heated blanket.

Yale, in contrast, feels like an open expanse, filled with the freedom and individualism I craved while locked inside. But it’s easy to forget how lonely liberty can be. Living off-campus without a meal plan, I’m hard-pressed to even get a visitor. Hugs, kisses, and cuddles? My tally is alarmingly low. And when the deadlines start to stack up and sleep becomes a rarity, physical contact is a lifeline.

These animals seem to make life at Yale a whole lot easier. “Most definitely, he improved my experience 1,000%,” said the Berkeley senior and owner of Fat Louie. Marvin’s shepherds cited his constancy as a contributor to their sense of home at Yale. The Hopper hedgehog handler said the same about her pet. Has our year at home, disconnected from Yale and forced to rely on our pets and family, taught us something essential about what we need to feel like real people, especially in crisis? For these Yalies, the answer is “yes,” and they’ve taken matters into their own hands.

Avery Mitchell is a junior in Trumbull College.

But then my roommate texted: “My friend is insane and she wants to bring a dog to the apartment. Could you look after him tonight?”

NOVEMBER 2021

5

DEAD ON IMPACT

Evans Hall is one of Yale’s most striking buildings. It’s killed over 300 birds.

BY MEG BUZBEE

T

he white-throated sparrow, thousands of miles from northern Mexico where it began its spring migration, surveys New Haven from the air, flying over Prospect Street and then landing in a tree on Hillhouse. When it takes off, on track for its breeding ground in Canada, the sparrow, flying north at 20 miles per hour, slams directly into the glass windows of Evans Hall. It falls to the ground with a thunk.

On Sunday, September 25, Viveca Morris found and collected twelve dead birds from the ground outside Evans Hall, the center of the Yale School of Management. Wearing gloves, she carefully placed each bird in a Ziploc bag, along with a map marking where it had been found. “I really love birds,” said Morris. “It’s a little bit of a macabre hobby.”

Morris visits Evans Hall several times a week to gather the birds that have died after colliding with its windows. She first noticed the problem when she was a student at SOM. Sitting in class, she and her classmates watched birds hit the iconic glass facade of Evans Hall and fall to the ground. In the winter, there might only be a few per week, but in the fall and spring, dead birds materialized almost every day.

Although bird-window collisions are a common problem in cities, the architecture of Evans Hall is uniquely harmful to birds, thanks to the huge windows wrapping around the building. An astounding 2.25 million pounds of glass were used in its construction. From one side of the building, the sky on 6

the other side is visible through multiple layers of glass, which confuses the birds. A less obvious culprit, however, is the abundant vegetation in the back of the building. At first glance, the secluded area, filled with perennial plants, seems to be a haven for wildlife, shielding them from humans and cars. But when birds flock there to feed and rest, they have trouble finding their way out. The glass facade looms over them, largely made invisible by the reflection of the trees and sky. As they try to leave, many head directly toward the reflection, where they collide with the window and die.

From a young age, Morris loved animals, but she became increasingly invested in animal rights after learning about factory farming in high school. At Yale Law School, where she now works as an associate research scholar, Morris founded the Law Ethics and Animal Program (LEAP), a “think and do tank for animal protection,” as she calls it. In 2017, Morris began working on a report about Evans Hall that she would later publish in 2019. With the help of a few graduate students and Yale facilities personnel, Morris monitored the building daily and collected fallen birds. She delivered them to Kristof Zyskowski, a scientist and collections manager at the Yale Peabody Museum, who then entered them into the University’s permanent collection.

Zyskowski describes himself as a “systematizer.”

“I’m really interested in assigning things to categories and finding patterns,” he says. Since 2017, over

THE NEW JOUR NAL

Morris delivers her Ziploc bags of birds in a cooler to the Environmental Science Center. Zyskowski then stores the birds in a larger cooler for a few days, next to various other found animals, before he or one of his research assistants has time to remove the inner carcass, preserving it separately from the outer skin and feathers. In death, the birds lose none of their color. Many have yellow or orange chest feathers that stand out against the grey filing cabinet. Laid on their back or on their side, their thin claws rest gently in the air. Preserved so artfully by Zyskowski and many others, it’s easy to forget the violence of their death. Not all birds make it into the permanent collection. Zyskowski described one bird whose head was consumed by ants after hitting the Yale Science Building, leaving just its skull behind.

“Your little brown bird that’s normally seen as unremarkable…when you’re looking at it up close, it’s hard not to think that this is just an incredibly beautiful and remarkable animal,” Morris says. “What a shame to lose it, unnecessarily.”

Morris maintains regular contact with facilities staff at the Yale School of Management. In spring 2021, facilities put up window film on one part of the back facade, per the recommendation in her report. These window films, a sort of half-transparent wallpaper with periodic opaque dots, are one of NOVEMBER 2021

the most popular bird-friendly adaptations available to buildings. The opaque sections of the wallpaper are visible to most birds and signal to them that there’s a structure they need to avoid. Other solutions include covering the whole building in a taut netting the birds can see, or replacing glass with some other material. Window films, however, are generally considered the most cost-effective and discreet option.

According to Jill McSorley, director of facilities operations at the Yale School of Management, it would cost 500,000 dollars every ten years to cover the glass in these bird-deterring window treatments.

The facilities team is in the process of ordering more sample decals for the back windows, but have no plans yet to cover the whole facade.

On a Wednesday afternoon in September, Zyskowski walked up to the Yale Science Building to check on a bird he had noticed that morning. The bird had been lying still, near a bush, directly under a wide patch of glass. When he went back in the afternoon, however, the bird was gone. “Maybe it flew away,” he said. Sometimes that happens; the birds are momentarily stunned, and later able to get up and finish their migration. Most aren’t so lucky.

Meg Buzbee is a sophomore in Pierson College and a Copy Editor of the New Journal.

7

DESIGN BY ANNLI NAKAYAMA

300 birds have been collected. The majority now rest at the Environmental Science Center on Sachem Street.

SEX in the STACKS

BY HAILEY ANDREWS

Some students go to Sterling Memorial Library’s stacks to study.

Others, not so much.

I

’m sentimental. I like to collect things. I take shells from the beach. I have every bus pass from high school saved, their weary magnetic stripes and all. As a first-semester senior, my daily excursions into New Haven are constantly intruded upon by the emerging nostalgia I feel for places I am on the cusp of leaving. Once annoyed by the weekly email advertising Brick Oven’s Sunday Special in searing and enlarged Helvetica, I recently felt a wave of panic that I had yet to try their fifty percent off Large One-Topping Pizza.

My time is running out. What about apple picking? A trip to Lighthouse Point? Or, sex in the stacks?

Having sex in the stacks of Sterling Memorial Library has long been a canonical bucket list item for Yalies, an “almost mythical” albeit “known” thing Yalies do, according to Jasper*, a senior who was recommended the excursion during their first year. The opportunity presented itself spontaneously during a Grindr date, and Jasper thought, “Why not do it?”

For Calvin*, a graduate from the class of 2018, the experience was diligently preplanned. Calvin visited the library in the days before to get a sense of which floors were less frequented, and decided on a time when most other students were attending classes. “My partner and I wanted to experiment with public sex, and the stacks seemed like the most obvious choice.”

Of course, sex in the library is not an experience exclusive to Yale by any means. Yale, however, does have a particularly rich history

8

around the public exploration of sexuality.

Throughout the nineteen seventies, the Yale Law School Film Society screened porn regularly out of lecture halls in the Sterling Law Building. Porn n’ Chicken, a club formed in 1999 that gathered once a week to eat Popeyes and watch porn together, garnered significant media attention when the group began posting flyers around campus soliciting auditions for The StaXXX, a pornographic film starring Yale students. Shortly after, club members alleged that filming was underway.

After the club was profiled in the New Yorker and Time magazine, the status of the film was called into question. James Ponsoldt ’01, one of Porn n’ Chicken’s founders, claimed in the article “Porn n’ Chicken,” published in the Yale Daily News in 2002, that footage for the film had been shot in Sterling, but the scenes were ultimately destroyed after one of the participants withdrew from the project. The film never came to fruition, though Ponsoldt sold the rights to the story to Comedy Central the year following his graduation in 2002.

That same year, the first Sex Week was organized by Eric Rubenstein ’04 and Jacqueline Farber ’03 with the intention of encouraging conversations around sexuality on campus.

Rubenstein and Farber recruited ​​ a range of speakers for a series of panels on sex and intimacy, including clergy members, academics, sex therapists, and adult film stars. In 2011, the Yale administration denied use of Yale’s name, campus resources, and corporate sponsorship for Sex Week, after facing criticism from stu-

THE NEW JOUR NAL

DESIGN BY ANNLI NAKAYAMA

dent groups and faculty. In the years since, Sex Week has resurfaced periodically, but without the same vigor and support as when Trojan was a corporate sponsor. Other campus organizing around sex has become more covert; current Yale students may be added to the orgy panlist, via which an anonymous group of students coordinates orgies throughout the year.

What, then, about the stacks makes it a staple location for Yalies’ sexual escapades? The appeal is in part linked to the prestige, seriousness, and modesty of Sterling, and the comical intrusion of sex into that space. Modeled as an “ecclesiastical metaphor” in the words of architectural historian Margaret M. Grubiak, the space is fitted with a vaulted nave, stained glass, and an altarpiece mural greeting every student as they venture into the stacks. The stacks themselves are of course less ornate: rows of library-bound books in uniform demure shades, patches of stippled light and dark, and a general cold aura from the white brick and tawny shelving. “Would I? Definitely,” one anonymous student wrote.

“Maybe it’s the English major in me, but doing something illicit in a hallowed space of scholarship is pretty hot. To be fair though, Starr would be much more picturesque.”

The experience is not just alluring because it is illicit. It’s also democratic.

“I feel like sex in the stacks definitely ranks among the top three most hyped sexualized (or at least nude) experiences on campus, along with naked parties and the orgy email list,” Calvin wrote to me. “It is a bit unique,

NOVEMBER 2021

though, in that it doesn't require knowing a particular person to get invited like the other two. Thus, it's certainly the most accessible, and also the most private (assuming you don't get caught!).”

Reviews on the quality of the experience are varied. For Jasper, the novelty of the experience exceeded the quality of the sex itself. Still, they are glad to have had the opportunity, and they find the tradition amusing, having “seen some things” during their campus job in the library. “It is definitely full circle.” They paused to laugh. “From participant to spectator…I’m a voyeur!”

Speaking to Jasper made me wonder where I fell in the cycle. Would I be content to graduate without partaking? Likely not. The candor, humor, and sentimentality with which students spoke of their sexual experiences exemplified some of the best qualities of Yale’s sexual culture. According to Jasper, it’s part and parcel of Yale as a generally “very sex-centered, sex-positive place,” which is perhaps why this aspect of the Yale experience persists in the student body’s cultural memory. It would be a shame, I realized, to graduate without my own excursion among the carrels and the rows of deserted carts, to leave the fluorescent lights buzzing over nothing but dust and cellulose rot. *All names marked with an asterisk are pseudonyms.

Hailey Andrews is a senior in Pierson College and a former Managing Editor of The New Journal.

9

Labor at the Library.

In late September, Yale’s clerical and technical workers won a new labor contract. But Yale continues to subcontract much of its library work to nonunion workers.

BY JACK McCORDICK

“I

hope they hear me,” shouted former New Haven alderwoman and longtime Beinecke Library employee Dolores Colon ’91.

She gestured behind her to the colonnaded façade of the newly-renamed Schwarzman Center, where Yale President Peter Salovey was busy emceeing the kickoff of Yale’s seven billion dollar “For Humanity” capital campaign, the largest in its history. Colon’s voice, amplified by microphone, echoed across the intersection of Prospect and Grove: “It’s time for the leaders of Yale to respect their workers, and to respect their community.” The crowd—a two hundred-strong mix of Yale workers, students, community organizers and local politicians—whooped and hollered.

Colon was the penultimate speaker at the October 2nd event, a rally held by New Haven Rising, a community organization formed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to combat state budget austerity and the evaporation of good jobs. That the event over-

Reverend Scott Marks, the director of New Haven Rising, kicks off the October 2nd rally by calling on Yale to pay New Haven its fair share of taxes.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LUKAS FLIPPO DESIGN BY ANNLI NAKAYAMA

lapped with Yale’s capital campaign kickoff was no coincidence.

At the rally, attendees brandished signs with the question “What should Yale be for?”—a direct response to the administration’s email announcing the fundraising bonanza, which had asked its recipients, “What are you for?”

The mood on Prospect Street, where upbeat music and dancing alternated with remonstrative chanting and searing jeremiads, was by turns euphoric and indignant. For Locals 34 and 35 UNITE HERE, the unions representing the university clerical and technical (C&T) workers and service workers, respectively, there was much to celebrate.

Earlier that week, Yale and the unions announced that they had reached a tentative agreement for five-year contracts that included unprecedented job security provisions and created a pipeline that would give New Haven residents an additional forty jobs per year, half of which would be full-time positions with union wages and benefits.

The contracts, which were ratified by both unions on October 20th, capped an acrimonious sixteen months of negotiations. At a New Haven Rising rally at the same intersection in early May, Local 35 Chief Steward and New Haven Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers had given the University a stern ultimatum: “Either [Yale] deliver[s] fair contracts, or we’re gonna shut this city down.” Given the unions’ power on the Board of Alders— since 2011, pro-labor candidates have dominated the city’s legislative body—this was no empty threat.

Yet many of the speakers that October afternoon painted a darker portrait of the state of the city, still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, where a quarter of residents live below the poverty line and one in three adults in its lowest income neighborhoods routinely goes hungry.

Nearly every speech connected New Haven’s chronically underfunded schools and threadbare social services to the $157 million

Former New Haven alderwoman and longtime Beinecke employee Dolores Colon '91 speaks to a crowd of two hundred at an October 2nd rally on Prospect Street.

Yale, speaker after speaker insisted, needed to step up. tax break New Haven bestows upon the University and Yale New Haven Hospital. Many also castigated Yale for failing to fulfill its 2015 agreement to hire a thousand New Haven residents into full-time, permanent jobs, with half of those hired coming from “neighborhoods of need.”

The deadline for that hiring commitment—which Yale agreed to only after city organizers held its feet to the fire—came and went in April 2019. While Yale says that it fulfilled its promises, New Haven Rising organizers argue that the university intentionally inflated its job numbers by including temporary postdoctoral associates and journeyman construction workers. “We need better hiring opportunities right now,” Remidy Shareef, an organizer with Ice the Beef, a local youth organization working to stop gun violence, told the crowd. “If Yale treats the community with this little regard, how do donors believe that a donation to Yale is a donation to humanity?” Shareef said, referencing the title of Yale’s capital campaign. Yale, speaker after speaker insisted, needed to step up.

Colon echoed these arguments at the October rally, but she had also come to Prospect and Grove to raise a more specific issue. In 2019, Beinecke administrators had initiated a plan to start subcontracting some of the library’s cataloguing and processing work instead of hiring union employees to do it, she told the crowd. “Our collections are being loaded onto trucks and being shipped to Pennsylvania, where they are being processed by workers hired for as

12

THE NEW JOUR NAL

little as thirteen dollars and fifty cents,” Colon said, her last few words drowned out by boos and jeers. “I can’t believe it either,” she pressed on, shaking her head. “It’s a lot less than what Amazon warehouse workers make per hour. It’s just shameful.”

In its recent history, Yale has been no stranger to subcontracting, a labor practice in which a company hires an outside firm instead of directly employing workers itself. Yale’s insistence on its right to subcontract was the central issue of the 1996 contract negotiations, which culminated in two bitter monthlong strikes.

In the midst of those negotiations, American historian Robin D.G. Kelley wrote that university subcontracting “has been part of a larger corporate strategy to reduce wages and benefits and to bring in casualized, temporary nonunion labor”—a strategy, he argued, which let “the administration off the hook by rendering even more invisible the exploitation of labor at the university.” A quarter-century later, Colon was there to make sure no one would look away.

“People in New Haven neighborhoods know that if they do get a job here and get a foot in the door, they can have good benefits for their children and themselves,” she said. As a single mother with two young children, Colon was speaking from personal experience; she couldn’t make ends meet until she began working at Yale.

“Instead of shipping jobs out of state, Yale should be honoring their commitments to hire from neighborhoods of need into good jobs,” she said. “Will they continue to spend millions on outof-state firms? Or will they invest money in their own community, here in New Haven?”

NOVEMBER 2021

— The morning after the rally, I drove twenty minutes south of Yale to Ocean Avenue, a winding street that snakes along the beaches of West Haven’s coastline, between the mouths of Cove River to the north and Oyster River to the south. The houses on Ocean Avenue are two-story, single-family dwellings with modest front yards and spectacular views of the Long Island Sound. I knew immediately which house I was looking for when I saw a flash of red on the door: a “Yale: Respect New Haven” sign, just like the ones that have dotted the campus and city for years. After knocking on the door, careful to avoid disturbing the sign, I was ushered inside by my host.

Even if you had no idea what she does for a living, you could tell pretty quickly that Amelia Prostano is a librarian, and an extremely fastidious one at that.

Open on her kitchen table in anticipation of my arrival was a photo album, dozens of pages long and meticulously organized, covering Prostano’s nearly forty years as a member of Local 34 and an employee at the Beinecke, where she currently works as an acquisitions assistant. While she fixed me a coffee, I flipped through page after page filled with photographs of picket lines, marches, rallies, and the odd busload of cops dispatched to intimidate striking workers. In her four decades at Yale, Prostano’s personal archive of Yale’s labor activity certainly hasn’t lacked material. “Unionbusting,” the New York University historian Kim Philips-Fein once wrote in The Nation, “is as much a Yale tradition as Lux et Veritas.”

Prostano came to Yale in 1983, during the crucible of one of the

fiercest anti-union campaigns in Yale’s history—and one of the most consequential moments of labor struggle in late twentieth century U.S. history. In the decades before the nineteen eighties, national labor organizers had tried and failed multiple times to unionize Yale’s clerical and technical employees, a workforce largely made up of female secretaries, librarians, and laboratory technicians. In May 1983, following a three-year organizing drive spearheaded by the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), a slim majority of Yale’s 2,600 C&T employees voted to unionize as Local 34. After a year of trying and failing to negotiate a contract with a hostile administration, the fledgling union went on strike in late September 1984.

At a moment when the archetypal union worker in the American imagination was a white, male factory worker, Local 34’s campaign was notable for being avowedly feminist in both its makeup and its demands. Prostano, who earned just $9600 during her first year at the library, remembers a casual conversation just a few weeks into her job in which her supervisor commented on how nice it was that she had the chance to make “pin money.”

An expression dating back to the seventeenth century, “pin money” denoted the allowance a man would give a woman to purchase clothing and other incidentals. “I

“Unionbusting,” the New York University historian Kim Philips-Fein once wrote in The Nation, “is as much a Yale tradition as Lux et Veritas.”

13

Professor Davarian Baldwin, an academic at Trinity College and the author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities, caps off the rally. "Whether you know it or not, this campaign, this struggle, these conditions, place New Haven at the dynamic epicenter of a nation-wide battle being waged between profit and the people," Baldwin said. thought to myself, I’m working a full-time job, and you’re telling me it’s nice to have pin money?” Prostano told me. “But that’s where we were in 1983.”

Prostano was there in early October 1984, when nearly 200 C&T workers were arrested during a silent protest in front of then-Yale President Bartlett Giamatti’s house. And she was there three weeks later, when civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy blessed the striking workers in a packed United Methodist Church on the New Haven Green before they went out to a protest in front of Woodbridge Hall. “Yale is a great institution. Yale is a wealthy institution. But Yale is treating certain segments of its population unjustly and Yale University ought to be ashamed,” Abernathy, one of the late Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest friends and advisors, told the crowd. “You have the opportunity to witness for justice and equality. . . for a grand and noble cause.”

“There was no way you could have stopped us in 1984,” Prostano told me. “It’s a feeling I can’t even explain. It was life-changing. It 14

changed my life in so many ways.”

The union emerged victorious from the strike, winning a contract that went a significant way toward eliminating the gender pay gap at Yale and provided benefits tailored to the needs of women workers.

When Prostano lost her husband in 1995, it was only because of her union job and the raises she knew were coming that she was able to keep her house on Ocean Avenue, where, a quarter century later, she weathered the pandemic with her two young grandchildren.

The 1984 strike wasn’t just life-changing for Prostano. For many labor historians, it holds a special place in recent U.S. labor history. Local 34’s ability to win substantial concessions from the university was a rare bright spot for the U.S. labor movement in the nineteen eighties, which faced a presidential administration hellbent on union-busting and an economy hemorrhaging industrial jobs. (In New Haven, the vaunted Winchester Arms factory, once the largest employer in the city, shuttered its doors in 1977.)

The strikers also pioneered a

social-movement style, democratic approach to labor organizing that has become a model for successful campaigns in recent years. Instead of centering their campaign around wages and benefits, the 1984 strikers focused more on dignity and social justice, a strategy which gave them a broader base of support. Their aim was to expose the Yale administration’s hypocrisy and harm the University’s brand, its most important asset. In that sense, the strikers were acting with oracular foresight. “What Local 34 figured out in 1984 presaged our current moment in the economy, when attacking a companies’ brand is what you do to build power,” Jacob Remes ’02, a labor historian at NYU working on a book about the 1984 strike, told me. Throughout the fall of 1984, union members carried signs claiming that they were “On Strike for Respect,” a rhetorical flourish that echoes across four decades of New Haven labor history and reappears in the New Haven Rising slogan, “Yale: Respect New Haven.”

The strike and its most memorable slogan even inspired its own book, On Strike for Respect, published by three labor historians and one lawyer in 1995. While the book’s sales only reached a couple thousand, Prostano, true to her profession, has a good-as-new copy, which she kindly offered me later that afternoon on my way out the door.

— But I hadn’t come to Prostano’s house just to talk history. And I wasn’t her only guest. A few minutes after I arrived, Jennifer Garcia and Cecillia Chu walked through the door—Prostano’s colleagues at the Beinecke and fellow members of Local 34, where GarTHE NEW JOUR NAL

cia serves on the executive board.

I was there to learn more about the library’s use of subcontracted rather than union labor, a problem which goes back years, as all three of them explained.

Garcia was hired by the Beinecke as an archives assistant in May 2013. At the time, the library was in the midst of what it called the “Baseline Processing Project.”

The initiative was a response to the growing mismatch between the library’s steadily-growing mass of acquired materials—a product of its robust budget—and the amount of people it employed to do the cataloguing and archiving work necessary to make those materials accessible to teachers and researchers. As part of the project, two temporary employees had been hired to help Garcia and the other two archives assistants in the manuscript unit. Within two years, however, the two other permanent archives assistants had left the unit, and when the temporary positions expired, the library didn’t extend their duration or hire the workers into either of the two permanent positions that had opened up.

“For the next two years, I was the only person providing support on the processing end of the department, which was a lot, and very difficult,” Garcia said, especially as the collections kept growing and the backlog problem remained unsolved. “Beinecke is really wonderful, and has robust budgets for developing its collections. But in many ways it’s been frustrating to see that the same emphasis they have on enhancing what we have in-house doesn’t seem to apply to the employees that work there.”

In late March 2019, Prostano and Garcia, who serve as union stewards in the department, were

called into a meeting with the then-head of Beinecke Technical Services and one of Yale’s financial analysts, who matter-of-factly explained that the library—at the behest of the Provost—was planning on hiring subcontractors to help deal with the ongoing backlog problem. Both Prostano and Garcia were completely blindsided by the news. Later, they discovered that the Beinecke had signed multi-year contracts with two companies: Backstage Library Works and the Winthrop Corporation, based in Utah and New York, respectively (Backstage operates the Bethlehem, PA warehouse that Colon mentioned in her October 2nd speech). The contracts were each worth millions of dollars. “I was shocked,” Prostano said. When union members dug through Backstage’s website, they discovered that it was advertising processing positions for half of what a Local 34 worker would normally make.

Once Prostano and Garcia learned about the subcontracting project, they sprang into action, holding a series of employee participation meetings to inform the other union members at the Beinecke about the project and to start pushing back. “Bad management decisions often become a really good organizing impetus for us,” Garcia said. “It was a really

unifying thing to watch the union members, first in technical services at the Beinecke and then at the Beinecke as a whole, rally together to push on management to respect our work and the library.” After months of pressure, the library offered a partial concession and created four new temporary positions to help with the backlog. But the multimillion dollar contracts— and the potential local jobs they represented—remained.

What made the 2019 subcontracting issue particularly troubling for the union was that its announcement came just months after the deadline for Yale’s hiring agreement had passed. It seemed like a pointed refusal to hire local residents for union jobs, even though Yale needed the workers. That anger grew during the pandemic, when many New Haven residents who lacked stable employment struggled to pay rent and put food on the table.

“The beautiful thing about belonging to a labor movement is that your interest is not just in making life better for people who are part of the union, but also to make that ripple outward to the communities that are negatively impacted by a large employer,” Garcia told me. “If Yale, instead of shipping our jobs out, really wants to make a positive impact

Throughout the past sixteen months of contract negotiations, "Secure Jobs, Stable Retirement, Strong Community" has been Local 34's main slogan.

At the October 2nd rally, attendees brandished signs asking "What should Yale be for?", a response to the University's recently announced $7 billion capital campaign, titled "What are you for?" on its community, then hire us.

Hire people from New Haven.

Be a better neighbor. There’s a real opportunity here, not just to push for respect for people who are already Yale employees, but for the entire community as well.”

— Toward the end of their generally glowing appraisal of the 1984 strike, the authors of On Strike for Respect offered a single reservation: the strikers, they argued, hadn’t generally made a major issue of “Yale’s dominant position in the city of New Haven—and the contrast between the University’s wealth and the city’s poverty.” They warned that failing to do so in the future courted the possibility “that unions within universities can become as insular as the institutions in which they organize.”

Yale’s dominance over New Haven was a central theme of the October 2nd rally, but at no point was it more poignantly rendered than in the afternoon’s final speech. After Colon finished speaking, she handed the micro 16

phone to Davarian Baldwin, a cultural critic and professor at Trinity College whose most recent book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities, had exposed what labor economist Gordon Lafer once called the “tension between the enlightened promise and self-interested practice of urban universities.” Sporting a black tracksuit, black sneakers, and tinted Ray Bans, Baldwin paced back and forth across Prospect Street, his thundering voice rising above early-fall gusts of wind. “When I want to make people understand higher education’s growing control over the economic development and the urban governance of our cities and towns,” Baldwin boomed, “there’s no better place to talk about than Yale and New Haven. This is ground zero.”

But Baldwin considers Yale and New Haven “ground zero” not only because of the problems it so acutely represents, but also because of the forms of resistance that have emerged in response to them. From the 2001 founding of the Connecticut Center for a

New Economy (which became New Haven Rising in 2012), to the unions’ 2011 takeover of the Board of Alders, to the recent pushes for local hiring and for Yale to pay local taxes, the movements that have developed over the past several decades show how “intimately connected” the relationship between labor and the community has become in New Haven, Baldwin told me a week after his speech. Looking back over the past four decades, the fears of the authors of On Strike for Respect never materialized; indeed, the opposite has largely been true.

That library workers demanding an end to subcontracting are making common cause with grassroots social movements pushing the university to fundamentally transform its relationship with the city is evidence of how far things have come.

Three-and-a-half weeks after the rally, at noon on a rainy Tuesday, a group of several dozen Local 34 members marched into the cavernous lobby of the Provost’s office at 2 Whitney Avenue. They were there to present the Provost —who THE NEW JOUR NAL

...[T]he library workers’ struggle is intimately related to deeper contestation over what the university is, and what it should become. had initiated the subcontracting project in early 2019—with a book filled with nearly 150 photographs of Local 34 members. In every photograph, a worker held a sign calling on Yale to “Respect Our Work!”, with each sign including a personalized note explaining why they opposed subcontracting.

“Good paying jobs with real benefits should stay in New Haven, which improves the local economy and lifts people out of poverty,” read one sign. “Everyone should have union representation.

Worker rights are human rights,” read another.

In response to Local 34’s photo petition, Yale University Librarian Barbara Rockenbach said that the library is “contractually obligated to the companies doing this work, and we continue to believe this is the most effective solution for a time-sensitive, short-term need.”

Rockenbach added that the library remains “committed to maintaining and supporting robust clerical and technical employment at the library and to advancing and supporting, wherever we can, Yale’s commitments to the New Haven community.”

While it is unclear how the library and university administration will ultimately respond to the petition’s demand for the library to commit to ending subcontracting, what is certainly clear is that, as in 1984, the library workers’ struggle is intimately related to deeper contestation over what the university is, and what it should become.

NOVEMBER 2021

“Especially for people in the administration that I speak to, their first thought is that people like me and people who are activists hate the university, that we’re anti-university,” Baldwin told me.

“Nothing could be further from the truth. The point is that if we take the charters of universities, their mission statements, the lofty claims of their capital campaigns, and the general presumption that universities’ job is to solve the most difficult problems that face the globe to their logical conclusion, why wouldn’t universities solve the problems in their own backyard, especially if they’re involved in creating those problems?”

engraved on the façade of Sterling Memorial Library is the phrase, “The Library is the heart of the University.” She and her colleagues want Yale to live up to that vaunted claim. They care about the university, just as they care about the city it calls home.

For the Local 34 members pushing for more local hiring and an end to subcontracting, the goal isn’t to snuff out Yale’s heartbeat, but rather to make it thump to a tune that can appeal to everyone who lives and works under Yale’s ever-lengthening shadow.

Jack McCordick is a senior in Branford College.

Prostano offered a similar sentiment, reminding me that,

ASIDE

CRYING IN THE L-DUB SHOWERS

BY MICHAELA WANG

​​ I’ve been crying in the L-Dub showers. This is where I came to mourn my first graded problem set, to admit that college guys aren’t interested in committed relationships, and to meditate on how chicken breast doused in pepper will be my entire diet for the next four years. The four-by-four-foot confines offer a rare moment of privacy, inviting emotional vulnerability like that boy on the first night of orientation couldn’t. The shower also offers a quick disposal of evidence––no tissues flooding the floor, no mascara crystallizing along the rims of your eyelids.

And because Yale Facilities still hasn’t called me back about my high-water-pressure complaint, the pounding of droplets against the moldy granite floor provides a built-in white noise for my sniffles and occasional wails. I’m bathing in (and involuntarily sipping) a cocktail of shower water, my own tears, and a little bit of Coconut Vanilla 2-in-1 hair product. What could be more cathartic?

17

Somebody help! I have COVID and I’m standing alone outside Maison Mathis What happens when you test positive for COVID-19 at Yale.

BY WILL SUTHERLAND “Yeah, I’m getting into the rhythm of classes and everything, and I’m just feeling like I have my sea legs,” a close friend told me four weeks into this semester––the first of my senior year. I remember looking down at my own legs then and thinking, these are not sea legs.

Three weeks earlier, on the first Friday of the semester, on the day before my twenty-second birthday, a year and a half after the start of the pandemic, six months after my second dose of Pfizer, roughly a week after I had gone to a friend’s birthday party in Bushwick, and a day before I ended up alone outside Maison Mathis, I opened the MyChart app on my phone to check my weekly COVID test result: positive.

Having spent last year in New Haven doing online classes, living off campus, and getting tested in a standing coffin in the basement of my residential college twice a week, I had checked my MyChart test result at least forty times before. It had always been negative. Still, there were always familiar nerves when opening a new result, a fresh batch of internal questions and speculations about what would happen if it did, in fact, come back positive. How the fuck would I tell my roommates? Would I get taken away by a team of guys in hazmat suits and forced to live inside an insulated plastic bubble in isolation housing? Would I have to talk to my dean?

Despite FAQ sheets on the Yale Health website outlining the need to stay home and follow the advice of your medical provider, it seemed like every story that I heard last year was different. Some people moved to Old Campus isolation housing; some 18

off-campus students rented Airbnbs so that their roommates would feel more safe. Some isolated for a full two weeks; others were released earlier. Some close contacts stayed locked in their rooms, while others felt confident enough to resume some semblance of normal social life. The lingering question then, was whether or not each student determined the terms of their own isolation, or whether Yale told them exactly what to do.

When I opened my positive test result, all I wanted was for Yale to tell me exactly what to do.

—

I am sitting on the edge of my bed, lacing up my boots and getting ready to head out to dinner with a group of friends. My phone vibrates in my lap and I think, yeah, I should probably check the result, just for some added peace of mind. Positive, typed in bold black lettering. Fuck. I had a mild cough for a few days, but I’d also been smoking all summer and just assumed it was one of those weeks. Don’t panic, I think to myself, someone is going to call and tell me what to do, and everything is going to be fine. I put a mask on and peer out through a crack in the door to look at one of my roommates, sitting at our kitchen table. “Helena,” I say. “I tested positive.”

“OK, OK, don’t panic. What do we do?” she says, half getting out of her seat. “What did they say to do?” Nobody has called yet. There are no instructions, just the white rectangle on my phone screen with the result. After a year and a half of watching people get COVID, it actually happens and I have no fucking clue what to do. I Google “yale covid THE NEW JOUR NAL

test positive” and find there are at least three links

with different guidelines and FAQs. I am redirected to a CDC webpage called “What to do if you are sick?” Apparently, I need to isolate myself and monitor my symptoms. Is that it? There should be alarms going off. Someone should be knocking down my door and carrying me away. At the very least, somebody should have called by now. My roommates are now wearing masks, sitting in the living room on the other side of my bedroom door, waiting.

About an hour and a half after reading the result, somebody calls. It’s a nurse whose name I don’t catch.

She asks me whether I’m aware that I have tested positive. Yes, I’m aware, I say. Do you have symptoms?

Nothing more than a mild cough. Do you know where you might have been exposed to COVID? I can’t be 100 percent sure, but probably at a party in New York last weekend.

When I opened my positive test result, all I wanted was for Yale to tell me exactly what to do. kitchen…Clearly, this isn’t going to work. I need to go to isolation housing.

The next morning, a man from contact tracing calls and I go over the list of people and spaces again.

At the end of the call, I ask hopefully, “Do you know how I might be able to get to isolation housing?”

Unfortunately, that isn’t his department, and I should call the nurse back and ask for more information.

The nurse and I speak on the phone for about half an hour, going over my every move for the past week, everyone I have been in contact with, every surface on campus I might have touched. She tells me that a contact tracer will be in touch the next day, and that I should isolate in my bedroom for the next ten. She tells me that other nurses will call to check in on my condition, and that I should schedule another test for the next day to make sure it wasn’t a false positive. I listen to her instructions and try to think of a game plan.

It’s a Saturday, and the nurse isn’t picking up her phone. I try the COVID-19 resource line, where I’m redirected to a man at the Yale ITS help desk who clearly wants to help but has no knowledge of the housing policies for people who test positive. I hang up and try the campus COVID-19 hotline, where I speak with another aspirationally helpful woman who also can’t help. I’m told that the hotline is for reporting purposes, rather than figuring out what to do if you test positive and need help. I try the resource line again, then the hotline, then the resource line, then the hotline. Finally, I try the Yale Student Health phone number, where, again, I’m told to refer back to the instructions given by the original nurse.

Four of us live in a small apartment on Dwight Street, sharing one bathroom and one kitchen. Okay, so, if I go to the bathroom as little as possible, and wear gloves and a mask and wipe down every surface afterwards and you guys bring me food on paper plates and then we set fire to the plates and I don’t step into the

lier and lived in quarantine housing in Arnold Hall, so that’s where I need to get. One of the people from the resource line refers me to the Graduate Housing phone number, which I try and get no answer; another man tells me that I should call the School of

Two close friends tested positive a few weeks ear-

ART & DESIGN BY ADA GRIFFIN

NOVEMBER 2021

19

At this point, I have made at least ten phone calls. I decide to take matters into my own hands.

Music because they run the quarantine housing. He doesn’t explain why the School of Music is in charge of Yale’s COVID patients, but I take his word for it.

I end up on hold, classical music blaring in my ear.

Nobody answers. At this point, I have made at least ten phone calls. I decide to take matters into my own hands. I pack ten days’ worth of clothes into a yellow duffle bag; put on sunglasses, a cap, and a mask; and walk to the tall metal gate outside Arnold Hall.

It’s Saturday afternoon; Maison Mathis is pumping.

Everyone from Yale and their parents and their pomeranians are sitting on the folding chairs on the sidewalk, chugging café au lait and waiting for me to infect them.

My swipe access to Arnold Hall doesn’t work; there is nobody on the other side of the gate. I stand outside for ten minutes, acutely aware of the Maison Mathis mob to my right, who are watching me flounder as I search for any sign of life on the other side of the gate. Eventually, tail between my legs, I walk back to my bedroom. In a last ditch effort, my bag still packed on my bed, I call the resource line again, and am finally given a phone number for the people in charge of isolation housing. They tell me that I can move in the next day. On Sunday afternoon, forty-eight hours after testing positive, I make it to the promised land, the inside of Arnold Hall.

I spent those ten days grateful that I could still taste and smell the microwaved Mac and Cheese that my roommates and friends dropped off food and a paintby-numbers of a cowboy cat to keep me entertained, and that, by all accounts, I was fine. Most days, all I did was sleep and sit and think.

What I still remember is the disorientation of the whole experience. A year and a half of speculating what it would be like, what it should be like—then, you get it and nothing happens the way you thought it would. Going back to classes, some professors treat you as if you had been intubated in a hospital bed, granting extensions and graces and heaping kindness on you. Others treat you as if nothing happened, bugging you about missed work and asking repeatedly why you are struggling to catch up. There is no specific guide to what to do when you test positive, there is no guide to re-entry, there is no single experience.

When I was released from Arnold Hall, I walked home past Maison Mathis on the opposite of sea legs.

It has now been a month and my brain still feels foggy. I dropped a class because of work I couldn’t catch up on. I tell myself that I just couldn’t get into the rhythm. Things are starting to calm down, a break will be good, but I’m still throwing up from the seasickness.

Will Sutherland is a senior in Grace Hopper College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal

— My time in quarantine housing was pretty great.

The food was repetitive (frozen Mac and Cheese, frozen lasagne, tuna sandwiches on rye), but I never had to hassle my roommates; the bathrooms were sanitized; and the bed was the same kind I had slept on for my first two years at college. My symptoms remained relatively mild—cough, fatigue, brain fog. A nurse checked in every few days to monitor symptoms, but other than that, there was nobody to tell you what to do with your time, or with your thoughts. There were no staff inside Arnold Hall, no one watching your every move to make sure you didn’t escape and infect the community. Just silence and empty space.

20

THE NEW JOUR NAL

ASIDES

MEW HAVEN CAT CAFE

LEITNER HOUSE RITUAL

​​ After pulling together $1.75 in change for the bus (I had decided against the forty-five minute walk, but another Yalie I met there told me she’d run), I ended up in Westville, a quaint neighbourhood with flyers for various flea markets pasted on each traffic light. Here lay Mew Haven Cat Cafe, the first of its kind in Connecticut. The cat lounge was outfitted with tall structures stretching to the ceiling and pocketed with hidey holes, little cat homes stacked atop each other. Each time I turned to look at a spot, what looked like an empty couch would materialise as two cats cuddling each other.

I drank my first pumpkin spiced latte, “Mr Kitty’s Pumpkin Spice Coffee,” (totally understand the hype now) as Davinci, a big black and white cat, padded past me. Already, I could tell some of their personalities—Davinci, who greeted me at the door but got catty when stroked for too long, was sassy, Dumbledore, a large grey cat, napped through most of the session, unbothered by any amount of attention, and Josie, only a couple months old and so, so tiny, nudged my hand to be petted. Angela, the owner of the cafe, told me that the cafe also serves as an adoption service (she herself has taken in Colossus) and that now was a popular period for adoption—“kitten season.” I thought of the neighborhood cats back home in Singapore, that lived downstairs of public housing flats and were mostly cared for by old aunties and uncles. If a community of cats could exist in the same way here, I thought, Mew Haven Cat Cafe was definitely it.

​​ Cattywampus. This key is the last word I will utter tonight. I step into my H.O.C.’s dining room, a table full of cheese and cookies to my left, and a decision to my right. Do I sit at the table, for convenience? Or in the living room, where I can tower over Dr. D from the couch as he lounges on the floor? I choose convenience—there is always next week. The table also means my cheese is safe from Josie. Even still, her tail thumps intermittently on my leg as she makes her rounds under the table. I read, I write, I dunk this week’s cookie of choice in my hours-old dining hall coffee.

When the clock strikes eleven, we file out into the night, still hesitant to speak. I carry a plate of cookies for my suitemates who did not come.

The next week, when sign-ups arrive, I promptly message them: “SSB.” This becomes our chant on Monday as we venture to Leitner House once again: SSB, SSB, SSB!

BY MIRANDA JEYARETNAM

BY ABIGAIL DIXON

POEM

BARBED WIRE BALLET

BY J. D. WRIGHT

in the quietest hour, I sever strings of barbed wire from their homes.

I am braiding them together, slow and steady like a mother whose hands are bloody, but tender nonetheless; I weep, strip until I’m ashamed, and wrap the wire around my naked body, pretend it’s swaying like a dress

NOVEMBER 2021

21

later for him. There were many reasons to be up late on a Friday night. He didn’t tell me his own.

NIGHT LIFE Two months wandering until dawn

BY JABEZ CHOI

I.

One night, I became nocturnal. Not by choice, but from fear. At the time, I was a fearful man.

I even feared the sun. The last time I saw the sun, it was red. Like a blood-shot eye. Look, I thought. The sun is angry at you. So I hid. I hid for two months.

In hiding, I couldn’t always tell the difference between my slumber and my wakefulness. I didn’t dream. When I woke up, I didn’t think. Instead, I yearned. At the time, I did not know what or who I yearned for. I just knew I was incomplete. There existed an incompleteness so strong that I had to move. But the slightest motion felt violent. Am I a violent man? I asked myself.

Then, in the blinding night, I walked.

Those walking nights, I believed in destiny. I believed I could walk and end up in a promised land.

For hours, I wandered to find some place distant, unfamiliar. Always, I ended up back at home.

I don’t remember everything from my walks. My memory, like Sappho’s lyrics, became fragmented.

Memory is oddly picky. It seems like yesterdays and mornings are always forgotten. But something curious is lodged in my mind. My mother, holding a pen, writing on a well-worn desk. Outside the window, a roaring beach. No—an interstate highway. Perhaps, my father’s cries, or are those my own tears? In the memory, am I young? When was this? Maybe long ago. Or not at all.

II.

The walks were sometimes lonely but not always. One night, my friend called me. He lived across the country for school. It was late for me, 22

How are you?

I’m drunk, he said.

What was that noise?

I threw up.

At least it’s all out now.

Finally.

Before he left for school last year, he told me he was in love. Not with me. With someone who I thought undeserving of his love. I didn’t tell him this. Instead, I listened as he revealed his feelings for someone else.

When he left, there were many things I wanted to tell him.

Sometimes, I feel so far away, he said.

From?

I don’t know. It’s just that feeling.

What was that noise?

I threw up again.

It wasn’t all out?

Not yet.

He would later miss over half of his classes that year.

He, too, would turn nocturnal. He would tell me that his behavior was stupid. All he had to do was get out of bed. For some reason, he would stay. He would describe its familiar mold, a mold that would hold him tight. He knew it was wrong to stay in bed. But strangely, it made him feel safe.

I missed you, he said.

I missed you, too...Hello? Hello?

He went silent. He stayed silent for an hour. Perhaps he passed out. I imagined him, keeled over on a vomit-filled toilet. In place of his voice, his soft breath, and sometimes a snore. I did not turn the phone off.

I walked along the dark streets with his soft breath in my ear. I walked until I found myself back in my bed. Then, I slept, just like he had been sleeping, miles away.

Later, he texted me. He said how sorry he was for calling me. I told him it was okay. I told him to be safe. I didn’t tell him that I wished he called me more often. I didn’t tell him that for the first time in months, I had not felt alone.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

DESIGN BY ADA GRIFFIN

III.

I established a route. I would walk to a high school parking lot. Past the 7/11 gas station. Past a flattened cat or possum or raccoon. Past a dirtied blue mask. Past a used lush ice Puff Bar. Past the woods near the military base. Past the police station, I would find the water. There were no streetlights on the beach. When I walked into the water, the coldness burned me. Only the coldness told me where to go. Then, back home I walked.

Once, I peed behind the 7/11 gas station. When I walked around the corner, my eyes met the back of a woman. She walked out of the gas station onto the streets I thought I alone walked. I followed. Not out of curiosity. But out of necessity. The route was my ritual.

On the road outside of the beach, a man stood. The woman walked up to the man, tapped him on the head, and pulled out a roll. Together, they smoked.

They didn’t speak. They stared out into the water.

What did they look at? I stared into the water to find the black, a black darker than black. Like looking at a Rothko painting, I searched for meaning.

When I decided there was no meaning, I walked back home. The two still stood, looking into the black.

IV.

One night, I decided I was tired of walking. So, I texted a man from a dating app to pick me up. I didn’t know what he looked like. Even when I entered his car in the obscure night, I couldn’t see his face. His voice, though, a deep bass, I heard.

When he asked me where I wanted to go, I told him near the water. On the way, he stopped by a Starbucks. Did I want anything? I asked for lemonade. He didn’t order anything for himself.

By the water, we didn’t touch each other. Instead, we talked. What did he say? He lived on base, just out of training. Did he say he was last stationed in Texas or Idaho? He had a little sister. Maybe they were estranged. I can’t remember. A clear memory, though: his quivering voice, a lament, confessing that he had been hiding for twenty-five years, twenty-six soon. He hated it, and he didn’t hate many things.

Bah! Who cares? Nobody. Why were we awake at 3 AM, anyways?

The same reason you are.

In all honesty?

All honesty.

During the drive back, I fell asleep. Later, he touched me for the first time, gently, nudging my NOVEMBER 2021

shoulder. We were back at my place. I said goodbye and shut his door. As soon as I did, the car sped away, as if embarrassed. That morning, he texted me again.

I deleted the app soon after.

I have not seen him since. But, I remember his voice. If he had called out to me on the street today, I would recognize him. Though, what would he even say? I never told him my name. He never told me his.

V.

And then there was light. I woke up one morning to find the sun. Where was I now?

Still in my bed. The laughter of the neighbors’ children spilled into my room. I hadn’t heard them in months. Were they taller now than before?

As if my two months of nocturnal existence had not existed, I acclimated to the day. I went for runs, worked, talked to friends and family. During the summer, the sun shone on my skin every day. As soon as the dark came each evening, I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, I would find the kind light again.

Sometimes, I wondered if my nocturnal existence even existed. There were so many things I couldn’t remember. At night, I couldn’t see everything. The world seemed smaller. Though, on occasion, something indicated that the world was indeed large. A yowling cat, a speeding car, a shout, murmuring from behind a lit window, and if nothing else, the whir of the streetlights above.

Often the only thing clear to me was the streets, the streets I would walk on, the streets I knew. It was simpler that way. I knew exactly where my next step was going to land and where my next step would take me. Do I miss those times? I still do not know.

VI.

There are so many things I can’t remember. But the same memory is stuck in my head. I was young when my father cried. I laid underneath my mother’s desk. My mother’s leg shook. The scratching above me. What was my mother writing? I could see the cars just outside our window, the interstate, busy as ever. Even the closed window couldn’t hide its deafening roar. Where was my father? In all of this, where was he crying? And my mother, her voice, commanding, angry. After, I remember nothing. Perhaps, beneath the desk, I had closed my eyes.

Perhaps I learned to darken a turbulent world. In this darkness, I learned how to escape.

Jabez Choi is a first-year in Pierson College and a Copy Editor of The New Journal 23

WHEN A VIRUS CALLS Tonight is my turn to use the kitchen, so I’ve got the place to myself. No one else is allowed in. I could strip naked if I liked, pick my nose, smoke—whatever people do when they know they won’t be seen. But instead I’m standing at the sink, doing the dishes. It’s six o’clock in the evening, and I’m wearing a mask.

It’s an N95, white and surgical, the kind that makes you feel like your mouth has gone camping in a tent.

My mom knows someone who knows someone who works at the hospital, and they had some extras in storage. It’s much better than those awful cloth masks that irritate my skin and cause fat-tomato pimples to ripen on the tip of my nose—good thing no one will get a chance to notice them. The only people I see anyway are the man at the deli who smears cream cheese on my bagel, and the guy with the lip ring who sells me weed from the front seat of his beat-up Toyota. And as long as I wear my N95, I’m protected from their stares.

The sky is bruised purple and black. The tree in our backyard clutches its last leaves. It’s early November, and, despite the chill, I’ve thrown open all the windows in the kitchen and the living room. The house is hushed, like places that are empty but shouldn’t be—a deserted football stadium, or a classroom after school has closed. The wide, pink tiles are cold beneath my

24

“It’s calling from inside the house.”

BY JE SSE GOODMAN

feet. My kitchen feels like a morgue.

Upstairs my mom has started coughing again; she’s been at it all day. Coughing is okay, so long as her lips don’t turn blue. As I watch the water gurgle through a damp plug of food in the drain, I meditate on some numbers. 237,000, as of today—that number’s big, too big to really worry about. 2 percent—a shittier number, 1/50. I don’t want to think about it for too long. I remind myself that the 2 percent includes seniors, really old people, people with acrylic teeth and titanium knees. But how far away is my mom from them, really? She’s 55—ten years from 65, twenty years from 75. Back in May, when The New York Times published a list of the dead on the front page, the very first person was 57 years old.

I know of someone who died at 54, the mother of a friend from high school. A single cough strikes overhead like a clap of thunder.

I stuff my ears with headphones and crank the music real high, until it’s the only thing I can hear.

For a moment I feel more cheerful, but then I realize I’ve been singing out loud, and I quickly shut it off. I shouldn’t be opening my mouth at all, let alone singing—spraying invisible droplets across the shared eating space like shrapnel shells. This is how the virus spreads: through an accidental laugh, through tears

THE NEW JOUR NAL

and yawns. Through the lyrics of a Frank Ocean song, sung with abandon.

My dad got it first, a single line of bold text on a piece of paper: POSITIVE. So he isolated in his room and my mom slept on a cot in the guest room, jamming a thermometer in her mouth over and over until the digits took up the whole screen. Then I started to feel unsteady, flattened, like an elephant had sat on me in the night. So I got shut away too.

My brother went to sleep in my sister’s room, the two of them in one bed. We divided up the day into shifts: thirty minutes apiece for the kitchen—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Disinfect the bathroom after every use. Don’t linger in hallways. Wear a mask in communal spaces.

It felt like a betrayal, a breach of the unspoken arrangement we’d made with the virus. The streets are yours, we conceded, but the home is sacred: our last and safest haven. But the virus reneged on the deal. The invisible assailants had slipped through the gates of Troy, hiding in my dad’s nasal passage. This was a forced entry, a home invasion—“Jill, we’ve traced the call. It's coming from inside the house!”

Yesterday I woke up to find a piece of paper slipped under my door. It was a picture of my mom, her hair tucked in a bun and held together with a thermom-

NOVEMBER 2021

eter. She was smiling and giving a thumbs-up to the camera; in the background, her cot was a mess of rumpled sheets, used tissues and cough drops. Below the picture she’d written: Feeling pretty good today!

I think I might take a walk around the room, get some exercise. 7/10. Later I heard her footsteps outside, and another slip of paper came under the door. The walk was a bad idea. Now I’m dizzy and my stomach hurts. 3/10. The next day the notes stopped coming.

I ripped out a piece of notebook paper and jotted down: How’s your stomach? She responded with a text. Don’t worry about me, doing fine!

The dishes are done, the counters disinfected.

I head upstairs to my room and flop down on my bed. I’m suffering from a symptom of the virus that doesn’t appear on the WebMD page: skin-hunger.

I haven’t seen another person in six days. I haven’t touched anyone in much longer, probably weeks.

I’m starting to learn that our muscles need touch the way they need protein.

My stomach gives a lurch of hunger. Nothing to do but wait for morning, when my turn for the kitchen comes around again.

Jesse Goodman is a junior in Berkeley College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

25

filling in the blanks Along California’s Pájaro River, a father and daughter trace a complicated family history.

By Alex Rocha-Alvarez

O

n our walks to the riverbank, my father pretends he is an expert commander. “Follow me,” he says, his feet maneuvering expertly over the tread marks where a tractor’s wheels have pressed into the earth, their weight leaving behind a narrow path of dried soil amid the mud. His right foot presses into the ground while the left one taps it briefly with every step, that semi-permanent limp from two-and-a-half decades of kneeling in front of strawberries with one foot in front of the other, always rushing to take the next step and finish the row. My little brother walks slowly behind him, careful not to crease his new pair of Jordans.

I walk slowly, too, in a single file behind both of them, the toe of my Chuck Taylors digging into the places where the soil is still soft when I step. This past weekend’s rain, besides giving my father a few days off from work while the mud hardens, means that the Pájaro River might actually have water, and there might even be birds.

We cross the fence dividing our eighteen-unit apartment complex from the neighboring agricultural fields through a jagged opening in the metal links that’s been there, unrepaired, for as long as I can remember. A ‘No Trespassing/ Private Property’ sign, with a small strawberry and the words ‘Reiter Berry Farms’ tucked in the corner, hangs above it.

That, too, has been there, ignored, for as long as I can remember. “Okay, ‘manos,” my father says, “Duck down, we’re about to cross the border.” My little brother laughs and ducks behind a spot where overgrown grass clings to the fence, obscuring himself from the view of an imaginary border agent.

My father likes to play this game because he thinks it makes our walks more interesting, makes it feel like there is some danger to what we’re doing, some rebellion, even though there isn’t. Most of the residents in our complex take walks through the fields, and the owners are probably aware. I don’t laugh when we play anymore; I find the game too morbid.

We move through changing landscapes of produce. First, an acre of broccoli florets, just beginning to sprout. Then, a small apple orchard, dry and barren at this time of year. A solitary walnut tree. Blueberries and raspberries housed under white, gleaming tarps. Strawberries, or at least hints of them, tiny pink bulbs that promise the start of the coming harvest season. And finally, the Pájaro River, tucked behind a row of wetland trees.

My father turns to us, the lazy smile on his face revealing a missing incisor and chipped front tooth,

NOVEMBER 2021

and beckons us forward. “Por aquí, síganme. Walk straight forward, leave only one pair of footprints to throw off la migra. Otherwise, we’ll all have to run.”

I want to tell him that it’s not funny, it’s really not funny, but I think it’s not my place. Instead, I roll my eyes and throw out an exasperated “Ay, apá” before taking my little brother’s hand and climbing down the path where my father’s feet have trampled the wild earth. When we reach the river, flowing with rain, my father points out how miraculous it is that we found water. He tells us to drink up. We’ll need to be hydrated for the rest of our journey. My little brother laughs and scrunches up his nose in disgust, remarking that river water is “so gross.”

The stakes of this game aren’t lost on me; my brother and I are the only members of our family who were born on “this side” of things. Our entire lives have been sustained in and by these fields, these strawberries, this city filled with people from our

We didn’t make the journey over, but inherited its promise. could-have-been home, from elsewhere. We didn’t make the journey over, but inherited its promise. I wonder how much of his game is based in memory, how much in imagination. I wonder this because, despite my father’s desire to play-act migration with us, he’s never been one to divulge the specifics of his own journey. That’s why I don’t like to play along anymore: I can’t fill in the blanks. There is so much I don’t know, and I’m afraid that if I let myself interrogate his journey, my brain will conjure up some dark possibility I can’t disprove. Worse, I might stumble across something true, something painful, then wish I had never started turning over stones. The thought of it feels wrong, like picking at a scab on a wound that isn’t yours. Still, on our walks to the river, I look at my father’s face and can’t help but imagine him on a different journey, not smiling then, but dreaming.

— My father’s journey started on a tiny sliver of land in the arid Valle de Guadalupe in Gomez Farías, Michoacán, in central México. The youngest son in a family of four sons and five daughters, he quickly learned to make himself useful and to stay out of the way. At age nine, he dropped out of elementary 27

school to start helping out on the rancho. He and his siblings were dutiful in their work: pulling weeds, planting crops, milking cows, and making themselves busy to avoid my grandfather’s drunken rages.

Once, he found my father screwing around in their driveway with a slingshot, and nearly ran him over with his truck. That memory is now a jagged pale scar protruding from the right side of my father’s forehead, always with him. Everything I know about my father’s childhood and adolescence comes to me like this—in scars and half-stories, missing all the hows and whys.

What I do know is this: my father grew up surrounded by people in a state of constant fear—and buried beneath, hope. He came of age in the aftermath of the Dirty War, the name given to the Mexican theater of the Cold War, during which U.S.backed government forces disappeared an estimated 1,200 of their own citizens due to suspected political opposition. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was supported by CIA officers who served as station chiefs in México City as late as 1969, the year after tensions between the government and leftist guerrilla and student groups peaked at the Tlatelolco Massacre. On October 2, 1968, police officers and soldiers shot into a crowd of unarmed student protestors, killing at least 300. My father was born four years after this massacre and six years before the legalization of left-wing political parties officially ended the Dirty War. Despite the government’s attempts to eradicate its rebels, México’s revolutionary spirit kept breaking ground, like a weed whose roots are planted firmly into the soil. Two decades after the end of the Dirty War, the newly-emerging leftist Zapatista National Liberation Army began organizing against the still-ruling PRI on a platform demanding land rights and political autonomy for Indigenous people. In 1994, on the day NAFTA came into effect, dissolving the trade border between México and the United States, the Zapatistas declared war against the state with their battle cry: La tierra es del quien la trabaja. The Zapatistas demanded “work, land, housing, food, healthcare, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace.”

Like most people who grew up poor in thirdworld conditions, my father understands that capitalism necessitates dispossession; the patrones need the laborers with the bodies to use and discard. When I think about this, I get the urge to lie down. My father keeps on instead. He buys bags of oranges 28

from the trunks of street vendors’ cars to make their days a little shorter, and then gives a dollar and the ripest ones to his primos, the unhoused men who linger at the margins of our intersections with cups full of pennies and dimes. I’ve always believed that my father should have been a Zapatista—he is, in practice, the most radical person I know—but he wasn’t.

Because he came of age as the families of victims of state violence demanded answers and accountability from the Mexican government, he knew it was safest not to get involved.

As the Zapatistas attempted to appeal to campesinos’ ties to the land they cultivated, my father witnessed the men in his village disappear to work in foreign lands. This was not a new phenomenon; every spring during his childhood, busloads of braceros were picked up from the station in Morelia, off to labor in the fields of California, Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico, and dropped off again in the fall. But now small towns all over México were emptying out.

Once you left, you weren’t coming back.

Up until the nineteen nineties, crossing the border both ways was relatively straightforward: you paid a coyote to smuggle you over, came back, rinsed and repeated. But with the ending of the bracero program and the militarization of the southern border, deportation was becoming a new beast, and people who made it to the United States were incentivized to settle down there. No longer welcome on the land they’d been working for decades, the men of my father’s village figured out ways to get to the “other side” for a share of its promise, without the possibility of return. Many of them found their way to California’s Central Valley, vying for a home around the fields where their fathers had labored as braceros before them.

In 1997, my father married my mother in Gomez Farías, and later had his first daughter. With a family to support, it quickly became clear that it was his turn to make the journey over. Two of his brothers and three of his sisters had already migrated to a small town on the coast of Central California, a town whose name was whispered like a hand-medown promise in the villages of Michoacán. Watsonville: A promise of work, of money, of better, if not good. So, my father prepared to make the trek up to Tijuana, where he would pay a coyote to smuggle him through the urban crossing. Then he would hitch a ride from San Diego to Watsonville, where he would sleep on a mattress on the floor of his brother’s apartment until he raised enough money to pay THE NEW JOUR NAL

ART & DESIGN BY ALLY SOONG

for his wife and daughter’s journey north. It sounded simple enough, but my father knew it wasn’t.

Over the last decade, as the United States militarized its southern border, more and more stories of terrible things happening during people’s journeys north trickled down to my father’s village. The stories were repeated, exaggerated, made into myths.

It’s a bit like my father’s game on our walks to the river: part reality and part imagination. Somebody got their organs scoped out in Jalisco, somebody got their legs stuck under a train’s wheels in Chiapas, somebody died of dehydration hidden under a seat in Sonora. Nobody really knew what happened on the journey north except those who made it out, but that didn’t stop people from guessing.

What is true is this: since 1993, the United States government has benefitted from making the journey north more treacherous for migrants. After passing the North American Free Trade Agreement to make crossing the border easier for merchandise, President Bill Clinton made it harder for migrants.

Stadium lights went up, shining into Tijuana. More armed Border Patrol agents and advanced surveillance equipment turned the border region into a war zone. Thermal-imaging devices, motion detectors, in-ground sensors, and biometric scanners were employed at urban border crossings to deter migrants. The goal was to force migrants to cross instead through the South Texas flatlands or the Arizona desert, a longer, more dangerous journey under scorching heat. Clinton’s Immigration and NOVEMBER 2021

Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner claimed during the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s annual death-watch update that the “geography” of the southern border was an “ally” of the United States.

According to the Border Patrol, just under 8,000 migrants turned up dead in the desert between 1998 and 2020. That’s one a day, pretty much every day, for the last twenty years. I feel lucky that none of them were my father. But I feel devastatingly sad when I think about the number 8,000, and all the others who may never be found, their bodies stuck between home and their destination, never fulfilling the promise of arrival.

— I’ve never been to Gomez Farías, but I see it in my dreams. I close my eyes and enter dusty valleys, walk down sepia-tinted dirt roads, look up at ripe-green avocados clustered on trees angled towards the sun.

Some of what I see is real—a replica of the landscape that is burnt onto my retinas from spending hours on Google Earth, dropping the little explorer into every street of my father’s town, making him take the walks my father took—from my father’s cotton-candy pink terracotta home to the kindergarten near San Antonio Ocampo where he learned to count. Mostly, though, the dreams are superimposed on the terrains of my own hometown, on the landscapes where I strut in my Chucks and Zara jeans, where I steal blueberries from vines and stare at an empty riverbed. I know 29

These borders are not real, but the possibilities that separate them are, the ones that make people cross through miles of arid desert without water or protection for a taste of what’s on the other side. it’s México only because even in my dreams I feel foreign there.

In my favorite dream, I wake up in a bed that looks like mine but isn’t, a bed inside that pink house that could have been mine if times had been different, and to a rooster crowing outside my window. I drag myself out of bed with leaden legs, and the conviction of someone who knows she’s got shit to do. I walk into a living room that looks like the one at my grandmother’s house in Watsonville, and my father is cutting fruit into tiny pieces. He smiles but doesn’t speak; I sit at the kitchen table and look out the window toward dry flatlands that never stay flat for long.

Before my eyes, the landscape morphs, pixelates like the images on Google Earth do when I make the little explorer walk, and hills pop up out of the ground like unwanted zits. This part of the dream makes me anxious, although I’m not sure why. Once the curves of Mount Madonna and the California skyline appear outside the window, the landscape doesn’t go flat again. Then my dream is over, and when I wake up, I’m back in my own bed, in my own house, in this town that has always been mine.

I’m grateful that my roots are deeply planted in a place from which I can’t be taken, that my body won’t have to risk its survival to cross any border, but I still feel like there’s something crucial that I’m missing; like the gap between my father and me is unbreachable, spanning across miles of terrain and through the years between us, like I’ll never see the world the way he does. My father is all make-do and make-believe and make-the-best-of-a-bad-situation. I’ve inherited his dream of success and safety, of growing roots into this new land of promise, but all of these ideals look different to me. I want to make-better. I want to make-move and make-shake and make-the-wholesystem-burn-goddammit! I don’t think this difference is inherent to us; I think it’s all circumstantial, 30

tied to the landscapes on which we are planted and watered. These borders are not real, but the possibilities that separate them are, the ones that make people cross through miles of arid desert without water or protection for a taste of what’s on the other side.

My father’s eyes are hard and warm; he is easy to love, but harder to understand. He offers love to me in bowls of chopped papaya, triangle shaped strawberries, jicama cut into little strips, raspberries stolen from the fields we call a backyard. He is anxious and overprotective, says things like “ten cuidado, be careful; be home before dark; don’t get involved, don’t fight back, just follow directions; don’t forget to look under your car for assaulters before you get in so nobody slices your ankles; te quiero mucho, mija.”

As his daughter, a girl who just wants to experience a world that’s mostly been kind to her, it’s kind of annoying. As his daughter, a girl who sees herself as an extension of his dreams, his journey, it’s devastating. I can only reply, “Okay, okay, I’ll try, okay, yo también lo quiero, apá.” He has been through a lot. I can tell by the way he moves, slow and calculated, always wanting to know where his foot will land before taking his next step.

I have been through a lot, too, if measured in a different pitcher. When I walk, I am not ladylike, and rarely graceful, but I am nervous like him. I let the heel of my shoes hit the ground first. I don’t make noise; I don’t want to leave a trace. In November of 2016, when I was a junior in high school, I told my father I was heading to the ‘Not Our President’ demonstration in Oakland, and he told me I would never see him again. I rolled my eyes, said “apá, it’s my right” without considering that, in his world, it wasn’t. In his world, university student protestors were shot by soldiers in broad daylight and never came home. I get it now, mostly, because it’s my world, too. I inhabit it through the fragments of him I can grasp, through the history I’ve imposed onto them in an attempt to make them whole, and through my own memories of seeing protestors on screens fall to the ground to the tune of rubber bullets and tear gas and the National Guard filling our streets. Like a stained-glass window, the fragmented pieces of our experiences come together and tint my world a different color.

Alex Rocha-Alvarez is a senior in Saybrook College

THE NEW JOUR NAL

POEM

PACEBREAKER

BY JOHN NGUYEN Each time my mother wraps an eggroll, another piece of a new story shatters. Glass noodles, pork, carrots, cabbage, all clothed in fleshy paper—a beige soft as old book pages. Masterchef go cooking school, but Ma no need! she often boasts.

An aspiring singer-zitherist in a past life, my mother now performs other forms of art. There’s the cooking on the side, then her main job: assembly line work. Ma inspects constituent microscopic pieces that when sculpted into a pacemaker will keep a stranger’s heart pumping.

Eight hours later, my mother returns home and starts to create. Floating in the steel stockpot of vegetable oil, the eggrolls become gold with tender magic, as of a silk dress.

Two dollars for each piece of my mother. The factory, the eggroll-crafting— both have bedeviled her hands with a human -made darkness: carpal tunnel syndrome.

Later, after she’s finished all her other art—laundry, dishes, orchid-watering, husband-and-child-handling—long after these, in the violet night, Ma reposes on the bed, blanketless, and within five minutes she is snoring— her belly button rising and returning, like the climax of a song.

Now and then, Ma asks me to lie down, sleep next to her: Ma can’t see you a lot. You always have no time. Please? But I decline: Your snoring is loud. I mean it jokingly, of course.

But words can pierce at odd angles. Loud: implicitly annoying. The snores, and the snorer.

Language is layered like busyness, of which there are two types, mine and Ma’s.

Needless to say, I’m an ignorant son— that is, just a son. Now I lie in my own bed, wrapped in my own blanket, beneath the stars and beside them, a million sleeping mothers from home. I lie here, as someone who’s worth each beautifully cracking wrist, and wonder: Hasn’t she been dreaming all this time?

NOVEMBER 2021

31

ASIDE

BOSTON BOUND

BY IDONE RHODES

Outside the train window, the sun blurs out pink across industrial New England. Old factories and local marinas glow; people are barbecuing in their backyards, riding their bikes, sailing their boats as I surge past towards Boston. These people who live on the water in the summer and watch the leaves turn red and then wither—I am supposed to be one of them. It makes me worry that when I get home, it will not feel the same. Have you ever recognized a face but forgotten the name that goes with it? The Acela gets stuck outside of Providence for twenty minutes, and there’s no cell connection to tell my dad I’m going to be late getting into the station. This feels like a bad omen, and I listen to California by Joni Mitchell because it reminds me of a homecoming to a foreign place.

Will you take me as I am?

32

THE NEW JOUR NAL

POEMS

AFTER THE SURPRISE PARTY

BY ELENA UNGER

How does one capture the feeling of being made to feel like a moon—cratered and whole, a silvered face, catching and returning lemon-laced sun.

It’s a gift to know your light reaches the soil. A gift to see the imprint of your touch.

I felt the way you all felt me when I saw you assembled like a fated family.

Each of you standing in the dark of my dorm, woven between strands of love hung streamers.

NOVEMBER 2021

MY BEST FRIEND LIKES TO SLEEP IN THE DARK

BY ELENA UNGER

She wraps a t-shirt around her eyes and the budding moon wanes to a yawning black— a personal eclipse of sorts.

To her, even the smallest sliver of light is too tempting.

The mere prospect of day will excite her to life before she has a moment to rest.

The murmur of starlight and the cluck of the sun make her so hungry to change the world, she can’t bear to lie still.

33

CODING COMBAT Salovey and Chun square off in a studentbuilt Street Fighter game.

BY YONATAN GREENBERG From Harvard came Facebook, from Stanford came Google. Will Yale be next to gain Silicon Valley fame?

On a Sunday afternoon in mid-September, a group of twenty-odd students gathered in an otherwise empty Watson Center. Staring intently at their screens and typing in silent determination, the students worked with unwavering focus on their contribution to the internet’s next major site. Welcome to the future, readers. Marvin Kombat Bulldog Bash lies just around the corner.

Students in Amoriem Labs, a video game design club of undergraduates, are developing a Yalethemed street fighter game, akin to a simplified Super Smash Bros or Tekken. Instead of dueling with Kirby, Peach or Falco, however, players of this soon-todrop game will fight as Marvin Chun, Peter Salovey or Handsome Dan, throwing punches and dodging fire-powered blows on a pixelated replica of Yale’s campus.

Modeled after nineteen-eighties video and arcade games, Marvin Kombat Bulldog Bash can be played as a “local multiplayer,” in which opposing players control their respective fighters from opposite sides of the same keyboard. Two students sitting next to each other in section mashing away on the same keyboard might have a hard time avoiding detection by their professor, but club leaders have tentative plans to make single-player and online multiplayer versions as well.

Eric Doddy, a club member majoring in art, demonstrates the process by which he creates the 34

Salovey, Chun and Handsome Dan images. After he sketches the characters on paper, he recreates them on his tablet with remarkable precision. Perhaps most impressive are Amoriem’s Salovey and Chun avatars: though the two differ by little other than hair color, most students will likely be able to easily identify the two.

To simulate continuous movement in the avatars, the game toggles rapidly between a set of handdrawn frames. When players unleash their attacks and behold, say, their Salovey character launching a lethal kick, they are really watching the program rotate rapidly through a series of images: Salovey standing upright, Salovey half-way through his kick, Salovey finishing his kick. Be it Handsome Dan blocking a punch or Marvin Chun jumping through the air, every movement of each character requires its own unique set of drawings. If the game’s creators continue to add features to the game—a chicken tender attack and DUO mobile buffering traps are among the proposals under consideration—even more frames will be required.

Amoriem’s scrupulous attention to detail can also be seen in the game’s audio, which features a backdrop of independently-composed music. Ethan Pesikoff, a junior majoring in Math and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, did much of the work to create the game’s current soundtrack. He says the music for Bulldog Bash is inspired by a Balkan folk music band—Taraf de Haidouks—that he “really likes a lot.” To make the music for the game, Pesikoff begins by composing a melody and writing out the notes—he does so on a computer program but points THE NEW JOUR NAL

out a student to his right who was doing the same with a pencil and a piece of paper—and then adapts the tune to match the game’s retro style. In its current form, the music’s computer-generated notes carry the energy of Halloween-themed trance music written for pre-2000 Nintendo.

One possible issue the club could face is its use of the names and likenesses of university officials. Asked whether she was concerned about such a prospect, student leader Christie Yu was undisturbed. “Worst case I think we can just change Peter Salovey to Seter Palovey or something like that,” Yu said.

The creators of Bulldog Bash expect the game’s old-school style to be popular among students, but the design’s simplicity also makes the avatars’ movements easier to replicate. “The pixelated style gives us more room for our own input,” Doddy says. On his screen he pulls up a series of hyper-detailed drawings he has sketched for other games—mystical-looking knight characters with cloaks and long daggers—and explains how labor-intensive it would be to handdraw the necessary number of frames for such elaborately-drawn characters. The game’s relative simplicity also gestures to the club’s main goal: to provide interested students with a space to develop their game-designing skills.

In their north campus meeting spot, the club’s members sit around rectangular arrays of tables and form mini-departments of impressive efficiency—the musical composition team sits at a set of tables in the room’s center, with the graphic design team across from them and the coding team to their left. With nearly two dozen students working on the game at once, the group maintains levels of focus and concentration reserved usually for final exams; rarely

NOVEMBER 2021

Though a far cry from The Social Network’s scenes of adrenaline-fueled coding marathons interrupted only by shots of vodka and the cheers of beautiful women, the group impresses in its own way. was the quiet clatter of steady typing interrupted by anything louder than a cough. Halfway through the meeting, Isabella Yang, a student-leader working on Planet 112—a space colonization game that Amoriem is also creating—suggested to her team that they take a short break. The students in her group quickly clicked onto other tabs, closed their laptops, or quietly pushed out their chairs to stretch their legs for the prescribed rest. No such breaks were announced on the other side of the room, where the club members continued working with tireless commitment on their chicken tender assaults and Handsome Dan defenses. Though a far cry from The Social Network’s scenes of adrenaline-fueled coding marathons interrupted only by shots of vodka and the cheers of beautiful women, the group impresses in its own way.

As to when exactly the game will be available to play: Yu shares a concerned look with the clubmate to her left. “I mean, we say it every year but … definitely this year.” She pauses, then nods vigorously twice. “Definitely this year. For sure.”

Yonatan Greenberg is a junior in Saybrook College.

GAME GRAPHICS COURTESY OF AMORIEM LABS 35 DESIGN BY ALLY SOONG