Volume 54 - Issue 5

VOL 54 / ISS 5 / MAY 2022

THE NEW JOURNAL THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YALE & NEW HAVEN

SECOND

E X I L E For years, city officials knew about hazardous levels of lead in the homes of resettled refugees, yet several families were exposed.

What went wrong?

IN S IDE: A DYIN G BUSINESS T H E BO DY IN DRAG PI MAI FROM NEW HAVEN

Editors-In-Chief Nicole Dirks Dereen Shirnekhi Executive Editor Jesse Goodman Managing Editor J. D. Wright Associate Editors Samara Angel Amal Biskin Meg Buzbee Jabez Choi Lazo Gitchos Ella Goldblum Yonatan Greenberg Abbey Kim Yosef Malka Cleo Maloney Paola Santos Kylie Volavongsa

Senior Editors Beasie Goddu Madison Hahamy Noa Rosinplotz Katherine Yao Copy Editors Marie Bong Adrian Elizalde Julia Hornstein Rafaela Kottou Edie Lipsey Lukas Trelease Yingying Zhao Creative Director Annli Nakayama Design Editors Meg Buzbee Sophia Elizalde Photography Editor Lukas Flippo

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., PO. 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.

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54 T H E VOLUME ISSUE 5 MAY 2022 NEW JOURNAL T HE MAGAZINE AB OUT YA LE & NEW HAVEN

Tyler Jager

22

Serena Lin

38

Isabella Yang

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cover SECOND EXILE For years, city officials knew about hazardous levels of lead in the homes of resettled refugees, yet several families were exposed.

What went wrong? features BODY POLITICS Jovanni Cabanas navigates identity, embodiment, and a flawed drag performance scene.

A DYING BUSINESS At the West Haven Funeral Home, Celia Pinzi keeps her macabre business alive in an increasingly challenging industry.

STANDARDS Yosef Malka 4 Judah Millen 6 Madelyn Dawson 9

points of departure A MATTER OF BROWSING WELL, WELL, THE WELL? BEHIND THE GLASS

snapshot Kylie Volavongsa 17 THIRTY-TWO TOO. poems Awuor Onguru 36 SISAL 37 LESSON

asides Abigail Dixon 46 TAKE ONE, IT'S FREE Abbey Kim 21 REVEALING YOUR HAND Paola Santos 34 THE POPSICLES ARE MELTING AGAIN Rafaela Kottou 48 CAR WINDOW endnote Yonatan Greenberg 49 BIKE INSURANCE Jesse Goodman 51 crossword

personal essay Rachel Shin 46 WILD ONIONS

MAY 2022

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The harm that the internet has done to brick-andmortar bookstores is well-known. But they still exist, argues Paul Freedman, a professor and food historian at Yale, because algorithms such as Amazon’s are “laughable”—they will never replicate the experience of browsing. “The whole point is to emerge from the store with something you hadn’t been looking for,” he says. On a recent trip through New England, he and his wife happened upon a small used bookstore with a large collection of community cookbooks— recipes assembled and bound by small communities to give to friends and record important dishes. Freedman took home the “Rolls Royce Club Cookbook,” a cookbook created by members of a car club. The rigid categories and subcategories of online stores and research databases, Freedman speculates, would have made it near impossible to find something so unique.

A MATTER OF BROWSING Yale professors view him as the angel of death, Sam Burton jokes, because he visits them before they die to relieve them of their literary treasures. As the owner of Grey Matter Books, he is not just a bookseller, but a master collector for his customers. His search for fresh, intriguing books often means waking up at the crack of dawn, scouring trunks at estate sales, and traversing the state to poke around in long forgotten collections. It can lead him anywhere: recently, he found himself fishing for books in the wine cellar of a man who “supposedly killed his wife…and then committed suicide.”

Burton has worked as a book buyer for thirty years.

He started at the Strand in New York City, where he jokes that you could get a job “if you knew who Virginia Woolf was.” From the Strand, Burton moved to San Francisco and finally to Powell’s in Portland, Oregon. After an interlude selling books online, which was “lonely and alienating,” Burton established two bookstores of his own, hoping to recapture an intimacy with surrounding communities that bookstores like the Strand and Powells have lost since becoming national empires. The first Grey Matter is in Hadley, Massachusetts, and the second is on York Street, nestled within the imposing shadow of Sterling Memorial Library.

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“I don’t lament as many things as other people do,” Freedman insists. Freedman has faith that books are not like vinyl, destined to become vintage relics. He believes the internet’s ability to categorize material will never replace the feeling of browsing for used books or scouring through archives—what Freedman calls “the thrill of the chase.”

Burton embodies this nonchalant optimism about the fate of the used book. He does not romanticize the book trade. There are no signs in Grey Matter imploring customers to support struggling used bookstores.

“I don't feel that missionary about really anything,” Burton says. “The only thing I feel strongly about is having enough cheap books…you can get a copy of Dante for $3, or Homer for less than the price of a sandwich across the street,” he reminds me. “Mine are always cheaper than [Amazon's].”

But Burton’s model is also not driven by pure economic efficiency. Most used books are “garbage anyway, or they’re just kind of bland, or common,” he says, referring to the quickly recycled popular fiction that you will never see in Grey Matter. Instead, he lets his own tastes and growing sensibility for the community’s preferences drive his book buying and shape the store’s selection. He has found that his taste is usually “positively reinforced” by his customers, but he also takes notes about our literary preferences. “The hunger for classics, for Latin stuff, Greek stuff [in New Haven] is pretty much bottomless,” he reports.

Henry James books seem to fly off the shelves, but “I can go a month without selling a Henry James book at the other store. And you take note.”

While I was interviewing Burton, he reached back

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and pulled out a book of sonnets by Raymond Queneau, sliced into horizontal strips to invite the reader to make their own poems in various permutations.

“This is something that, in a way, I hope I don’t sell, cause I think I like having it around.” Burton bought the book from a convicted forger, he reports with a grin. “Luckily that one was not signed.” For now, the book sits on the back wall above the check-out counter. “There’s a lot of stuff that I like having, that I’m not in a big hurry to sell, although after a couple of years, I’ll either take it home or I’ll mark it down and actually price it to sell.”

From a perch amongst the unruly stacks of recent acquisitions, a boisterous voice chimed in. “Sam is a pioneer!” exclaimed Jay Gitlin, a Senior Lecturer in American History at Yale, and a regular at Grey Matter. For him, browsing is therapeutic. It’s a chance to discover new ideas that hadn’t occurred to him and hold a piece of communal history from the collections of Yale scholars. He is grateful to Burton for helping keep print culture alive and encourages his students to buy paper copies of the books he assigns from Grey Matter whenever possible. While he does lament the passage of many used bookstores that used to line the streets of New Haven during his undergraduate days, he sees Burton and Grey Matter as “the forefront of a changing of the guard.”

According to Freedman, there used to be a book buyer from West Virginia who specialized in buying out the collections of aging Yale professors, and it seems that Burton has largely taken over that role.

Burton reserves the slim shelf facing York Street for the collections of late professors—a sort of literary gravestone. Rather than distributing these books by subject throughout the store, he keeps the collections intact and affixes a sign with the name of the professor. “My concerns are always more about getting books than selling them,” Burton muses. In recent years, he has acquired books from the collections of renowned scholars including Geoffrey Hartman and Immanuel Wallerstein.

“People like me are desperate to get rid of books…I can’t bring these books home,” Freedman tells me, pointing to his office shelves. “These aren’t particularly valuable. I’m not going to live in my old age with books piled on the floor everywhere.” This is the golden age of book collecting, Freedman claims, because there is little demand for the books being discarded.

Burton’s trips to appraise collections and buy books

MAY 2022

from people who are getting older and starting to downsize are often “intense and personal,” he reflects.

Freedman went through this process with his parents when they passed away ten years ago; he could not keep all of their books, and instead sold them off as a collection to an estate liquidator. “They were unsellable…I wonder what they did with the 90 percent of stuff [that has] no commercial value.” Burton’s process is similar: he remembers purchasing four thousand books from the collection of J. Hillis Miller, a member of the Yale school of deconstructionist literary critics. Burton estimated that four hundred of them would sell.

Part of what keeps the community coming back to Grey Matter is a chance to inherit books from thinkers like Miller. The selection of the store takes its shape from the collections that Burton purchases. Eventually, he says, he will bring many of these books— including an inscribed Edward Said—out of storage.

“I’ve had this long standing plan to have a second rare book case that will be more focused on the history of ideas, [but] IKEA has been out of this cabinet for two years. So that’s, that’s horrible.”

Walking into Grey Matter, I gravitate towards the massive philosophy section at the center of the store.

Burton studied philosophy as an undergraduate and wanted the subject to have a prominent place in his sanctuary. I glance around to see what’s new: the shelves at Grey Matter look completely different from week to week. This week, there’s a beautiful hardcover set of Montaigne’s complete essays. Its colorful dust jacket and thin but sturdy pages are tempting.

Do I really need to spend $15 on this right now? It’s a completely reasonable price, but I set it back down and decide to wait a few days. The next time I return, it’s already been sold. I am not disappointed: I am confident another will crop up before long.

Burton has dedicated his life to wading through this literary labyrinth—to chasing and searching and bringing the books worth saving to a community with a seemingly endless desire for them. “I’m always at least trying to guess what is going to mean something to people around here,” Burton reflects. As I browse my way through Grey Matter and assemble my own collection, I know that thanks to Burton, I am inheriting from a grand collection built from those who came before me.

—Yosef Malka is a sophomore in Morse College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

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the almost-empty room and told me that it could get busier, sometimes. When I asked her what it’s like to work in The Well, her face lit up: “This is the best job in the world: we get to see whatever happens here.

When the professors start to loosen up a bit and begin offering to buy people drinks…” She trailed off but quickly caught herself: “of course, nothing scandalous happens, but it is interesting.”

WELL, WELL, THE WELL? I often find myself strolling through the bowels of the Schwarzman Center, Bow Wow sushi in hand, in search of a quiet place to study. Occasionally, tempted by the porthole-like windows on the double doors at the base of the rotunda, I bypass the bustling Elm and approach the Schwarzman Center’s new bar, The Well. Peering inside, I’m beckoned by a scene that’s part speakeasy, part corporate waiting room, with warm lighting, brass fixtures, and orange armchairs galore. On one such sojourn, I mustered the courage to attempt to swipe in, only to be thwarted by the jarring red beep of the card scanner. Was my intrigue insufficient for admission to The Well? It was exclusive. It was strange. I needed to know more.

A few days later, sitting in the Starr Reading Room on a spring evening, the magnetic draw of The Well—now newly open for business—reached a fever pitch. I couldn’t stay away any longer. I shoved my laptop into my backpack and trudged across the pristine granite of Beinecke Plaza and back into the Schwarzman basement. This time was different. I was greeted at the door of The Well by a friendly bartender who scanned my ID and wrapped a printed band around my wrist, which listed my full name, birth date, and driver’s license number. Although the white plastic of the wristband made me feel as though I had just entered a hospital rather than a bar, I was glad to have finally made it in. The bartender surveyed 6

My intrigue intensified and I approached the bar in hopes of loosening up myself. As I perused the menu, a few balding men wearing blazers spoke in hushed tones on one side of me, while a woman laughed loudly with the bartender on the other. I ordered a beverage entitled, rather meticulously, “American Hard Cider Stormalong Unfiltered Wallingford, CT Blue Hills Orchard EST 1904 Hard Cider.” I sipped my drink (which was delicious) and plopped down in a chair. As I sat observing the scene, lit by a soft golden light, I was struck by the oddness of the space. A few men in their mid-twenties wearing khaki pants arrived and awkwardly highfived one another before quickly downing a couple of beers. Some tattooed graduate students laughed in the corner over their glasses of sauvignon blanc. Despite being firmly in the heart of Yale’s campus, I felt profoundly uncertain about my surroundings. What was this place? Was I the only undergrad present? After finishing my drink, I rose and ascended the stairs back into the dark, warm night.

Later, in hopes of settling my confusion, I began probing whatever authorities I could find on The Well. The Schwarzman Center website promises that one can “refresh and unwind under the Rotunda… [in this] 21+ pub with comfortable seating and a curved, two-level bar.” The sparse description left me with more questions than answers, primarily: why was this place created in the first place? To my disappointment, my emails to Schwarzman Center employees went deflected or unanswered. I decided that my inquiry would require me to traverse through the murky depths of the internet, and, beckoned by the second yellow ‘O’ in the “Goooooooooogle” at the bottom of the page, I forged on.

There, I found a website linking to the designers of The Well. I contacted Melissa DelVecchio, of Robert A.M. Stern Architects, LLP, the head architect for the Schwarzman Center project. DelVecchio claimed that the idea for The Well came from students, who she said requested a place where those of age could responsibly consume adult beverages together as part of the 2015 report to President Salovey. “[Our team] THE NEW JOUR N AL

discovered that the space below the Rotunda had beautiful foundation walls made of local Stony Creek Granite hidden behind the plaster,” she said, “making it a natural fit for the student-requested area where alcohol could be served.” Surprised by the notion that students had spearheaded the idea for The Well, I searched for the document DelVecchio mentioned.

The closest thing I could find was a ninety-six-page report from 2015 entitled “The Schwarzman Center Advisory Committee: Report to Yale President Peter Salovey.” The titular committee, composed of only twelve students (four of whom were undergraduates) and fifteen faculty and staff, envisioned in meticulous detail the space and programs that would one day comprise the Schwarzman Center: “‘Sunrise Yoga’ lessons in the Dome Room at seven a.m.,” “periodic wine and cheese parties for g&p students…in the Presidents’ Room,” and “several Yale minibuses… on site to take students safely home” are just some of the many offerings described with rhetorical flourish.

It was replete with flashy graphics, five appendices, a narrative describing “A Day in Schwarzman,” and only passing discussion of The Well. This seemed to be the official document which largely informed the completed Schwarzman Center we know today.

Although this document did reference a space which would sometimes serve alcohol—“We do think that wine and beer should be available in the Bistro in the evenings,” it says—it contained scant rationale for such a space. The committee wrote that, “We hold the hope that offering beer and wine will stem the ‘pre-gaming’ drinking tendency, at least for events at the Schwarzman Center.” Although it did seem that some students had some minor role in the idea for The Well, I was curious whether this was representative of the student body’s views as a whole.

I continued my search and found a document from 2014 titled “Student Center at Yale,” released by the Yale College Council (YCC), the Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS), and the Graduate Student Assembly (GSA). In this eleven-page document, where the student governments argued for the merits of a student center, there were no references to the sipping of spirits. The document had the word “alcohol” fourteen times, with the suffix “-free” appended almost every time. Student desires centered on a departure from Yale’s drinking culture, rather than further investment in it. My confusion abounded.

DelVecchio claimed that the vision for a bar came from a student request. While the 2015 report she referenced did indeed include a vague recommendation for a space which served alcohol, it did not clearly MAY 2022

indicate that this came from the students (who composed a minority of the committee) and provided only minimal rationale for the space. When contrasted with the enthusiasm and idealism with which the student governments had described their vision of a space to provide alcohol-free programming—described as “a student center with compelling alternatives to drinking [which] would disentangle campus-wide social interaction and alcohol consumption…[and] foster a greater sense of community across the university”—I found DelVecchio’s claim of student support for The Well to be unconvincing.

I wondered if student attitudes towards a bar on campus had grown more outwardly favorable in the past eight years, so I turned to my friends for their perspectives. “Schwarzman is just made to entertain Yale’s donors, surely The Well is no different,” came one cynical response. “I am just waiting until a professor holds office hours there,” another friend chuckled as we walked by it one day. “I think it would be inappropriate if [a professor] is even sighted there!” a third friend responded. I had yet to find a student who was enthusiastic about The Well, although there were plenty who were skeptical.

As if in answer to my continued bewilderment, an email arrived from Dr. Maurice Harris, the Director of Marketing and Communications for the Schwarzman Center. “The design and programming of Yale Schwarzman Center, based on the vision of Yale’s three student governments,” he wrote, “called for a space onsite that could offer beer and wine to stem the ‘pre-gaming’ drinking tendency.” He added that, originally, The Underground would have hosted the beer and wine offerings, but planners feared the risk of underage drinking in such a “popular, all-ages venue.” Finally, he concluded, “The Well provides a way to honor students’ original vision while enforcing our commitment to the care and safety of our Yale community.”

This appeal to students’ enjoyment of partying seemed to be an insufficient explanation, too. The phrase “pre-gaming tendency” was also used in the Schwarzman Center Advisory Committee report, which barely referenced spaces that serve alcohol. If Harris’ discussion of “Yale’s three student governments” is a reference to the report from 2014, then his claim that a space serving alcohol was the vision of the student governments seems untrue. That report never asks for a place that serves alcohol, instead arguing for the merits of alcohol-free socialization. If he is instead referencing the 2015 Schwarzman report, 7

claiming that the recommendation of the committee (with a minority of students) is the “students’ vision” seems an exaggeration. Perhaps there is another, definitive declaration of the student governments’ vision?

Hours of searching yielded no answer, and when I asked Dr. Harris for clarification, he directed me to a website which only included links to the 2014 and 2015 reports. These reports hardly constitute evidence for a pre-existing student desire for The Well––and verge on cherry-picking. It seemed that the administration’s carefully crafted language and repeated attribution to the student governments' vision lacked any definitive proof in the public record; in fact, there was ample evidence to the contrary.

Yale presents itself as a progressive institution that believes in harm reduction, which fits its reputation as an Ivy League school home to a relatively robust social scene. Rather than RAs who administer punishment for underage drinking, Yale employs FroCos who pour out the alcohol when they catch first-years with red Solo cups. The University asks all students to undergo training administered by The Office of the Alcohol and Other Drugs Harm Reduction Initiative, which promises that they will not get in trouble or have their parents contacted if they seek help for alcohol-related health incidents. But when it comes to implementing safety measures that threaten to compromise their reputation, Yale falls short. Although there is no Greek life officially sanctioned by the University, Yale coexists with frat houses that throw raucous parties only steps from its academic buildings and most of its firstyear dorms. Students are still commonly brought to Yale Health in ambulances due to alcohol poisoning, fraternities are the sites of sexual assaults involving intoxicated students, and it is socially acceptable for people to drink as frequently as five nights per week.

This culture does not seem healthy or balanced, but Yale allows it to exist.

many issues facing the student body, the University’s choice to sink millions of dollars into the construction of The Well allows Yale to applaud itself for reducing “pre-gaming” without designing an establishment to do that. This carefully constructed space reflects a familiar tactic of the administration in dealing with student complaints: it curates exclusive spaces that appear to be a solution, but in fact leave the roots of problems intact. To a professor or donor sitting in the basement of Schwarzman, watching one or two students slowly sip their alcoholic beverages, the drinking culture of Yale might appear safe. Yet this does not capture the mad, weekly rush to High Street, the toilet bowls full of vomit, and the ambulance calls routinely made by concerned friends after long Saturday nights. Melisa DelVecchio’s team may have peeled back the plaster of the basement room, but their true contribution was not to reveal beautiful Stony Creek Granite: it was to hide the dark reality of the Yale Administration’s often dangerous and dysfunctional attitude towards alcohol consumption on campus.

—Judah Millen is a sophomore in Pierson College.

The Well, on the surface, seems like another misguided half-measure to reduce harm without really changing anything—a student-safety advertisement wrapped in a Yale bow. In reality, students didn’t seem to ask for anything close to The Well, nor does it reduce the “pre-gaming tendency” for the quarter of the undergraduate population that’s of legal drinking age. Are we meant to believe an on-campus bar that closes at 11 p.m., serves single glasses of beer that cost as much as a handle of cheap liquor, attracts mainly professors, and lacks all the charming interior décor of Sig Nu is really going to tempt students away from their Dubra shots and drinking games?

Rather than taking further steps to address the 8

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interrogate their identity. But this would not always have been possible for someone like Hasselmo.

The modern conceptualization of the zine arose first in post-World War I science fiction circles. They came to be known as an art form that combined images and writings, often self-published and created by individuals or a small handful of people. Fans of the medium would use them to share literature and ideas they were passionate about. In the nineteen-nineties, a third-wave feminist movement called Riot Grrrl expanded the countercultural significance of the zine, and centered it around the experiences of young, often lesbian and bisexual women making radically feminist punk music.

BEHIND THE GLASS “The attic was a fascinating place for me,” reads a note atop six panels of navy blue linework drawings.

In the upper three panels, a young boy digs around an old chest, discovering a gun, bullets, a grenade, and other military equipment. In the lower three panels, another character comes across some clothing, a vial of morphine, and a sword. The caption: “Attic discoveries—1925 and 2020.”

It seems like what the characters are really discovering is pieces of themselves; we are just not sure what. Simone Hasselmo, who uses any pronouns, drew these panels as part of one of their first longform comic projects in which they explore their grandfather’s experiences growing up in Nazi Germany, alongside their own experiences in medical school. As my eyes travel from panel to panel, I am struck by the unchanged expressions of innocence on their characters’ faces as time inevitably passes.

“I don't think I would be doing it if I felt like I had a choice,” Simone Hasselmo, a Yale School of Medicine student tells me about their passion for zine and comic making. For Hasselmo, narrative art is a compulsion— one that informs and is informed by their passion for medicine. Hasselmo’s art combines the clarity and precision of comic-style minimalism with the complicated nature of their identity—leaning on humor, caricature, and the exploration of familial bonds. But narrative art doesn't just contain Hasselmo’s identity. It informs it, too. They are able to explore their own relationships, like that with their grandfather, as well as their own queerness and femininity, they tell me. Like an attic discovery, zine-making provides a medium for Hasselmo to uncover parts of themself, to MAY 2022

Despite how progressive the Riot Grrrl creators were, the scene was almost completely dominated by cisgender white women. Not only were transgender and BIPOC women denied the same platform and prominence, many of the white, cisgender musicians within the scene continued to remain loyal to trans-exclusionary radical feminist causes.

For instance, artists like Kathleen Hanna of the Riot Grrrl band and zine both titled Bikini Kill performed at a festival called Michfest, which was marketed as only for “womyn born womyn.” Transmisogyny and racism existed in the Riot Grrrl community, but concurrent movements emerged that were more inclusive. Women of color during this time created something known as Sista Grrrl Riots, as a rejection of Riot Grrrl’s exclusivity. The Riot Grrrl movement fell mostly apart only a few years after its inception, and zine-making became more and more inclusive as it persisted into the twenty-first century. Though still far from perfect, there exists a robust zine community today, built on collaboration, collectivity, and support of each other's art.

For a creator like Hasselmo, whose zines connect them to the present, zines are more than just historical artifacts. “I’m actually a really private person,” Hasselmo tells me. “But I somehow just feel the need to get my experiences down on paper.”

Despite being a self-proclaimed private person, Hasselmo finds joy and meaning in New Haven’s zine and comic arts community. Hasselmo was featured recently on February 26 at the New Haven Zine Fair at Bradley Street Bicycle Co-Op, organized by Connecticunt Magazine and Bridge and Tunnel Crowd.

The Fair offered space for queer creators, like Hasselmo, to share their experiences through their art and engage with a community that is beginning to reflect a more multi-faceted queer experience that includes 9

disabled creators, asexual creators, transgender creators, and creators of color.

For as long as people have been creating them, zines have been a communal medium. As a zine creator myself, I have grown used to connecting on all levels with other creators, circulating my magazines by trading back and forth with other creators, giving a piece of myself in return for a small window into another worldview. Zines at Yale, though, are all the more complicated. Thousands of pieces of paper memorabilia are held in Yale’s Queer Zines, Magazines, and Newspapers Collection. The archive is vast and varied. I was touched by handwritten love notes on the backside of sepia stained photographs—declarations of queer vulnerability and longing are all the more painful when confined to vignettes. I was almost embarrassed reading Brat Attack, a 1993 black, white, and red comic newsletter that was full of visual and textual imagery, sparing no details about the experience of queer femme sex and bondage. The last zine I explored was the best: the words of Allison Wolfe of the femme punk band Bratmobile in the zine Girl Germs, examining what it means to be “punk” and writing, “We should really think about and talk about what punk means to us and who we really are and what kind of privilege (or lack of) we come from.”

Yet, as someone familiar with both the history and present face of zine culture, it was troubling to visit the archive room. Why were they even there? Zines have always been deeply intertwined with their creators and their zine communities, and in the folders of a Yale archival collection, even the most lively expressions of alternative, progressive culture are reduced to inert records. The troubled yet important history of collectivity that they represent is completely tucked away in the recesses of an institution which, for a lot of people, represents the same status quo that contributed to their exclusivity.

In 1989, the Yale Police Department arrested activist Bill Dobbs for hanging posters in Yale Law School to spread awareness of AIDS care groups in New Haven. Many artists and prominent figures of zine culture died of AIDS, largely due to the negligence and homophobia of powerful institutions. In fact, less than a year after Dobbs’ arrest, the artist Keith Haring died due to complications with AIDS. Now, just a few decades later, how we are supposed to accept that Haring’s work is sitting in a collection of archives owned by an institution that perpetuated queer violence durning his lifetime? Bikini Kill, probably the most lastingly popular zine of the Riot Grrrl movement sits closed, untouchable, behind a glass case as 10

part of an exhibition called Points of Contact, Points of View. With or without the glass, as long as they are tucked away in little folders, we will never confront them as part of a living history.

On campus, as marginalized students carve spaces for themselves that prioritize inclusivity and accessibility, zines have found their place. I am drawn most to a zine on campus called DOWN Mag. Lighthearted listicles are an important aspect of their content, such as one example entitled “Nonhuman Characters That We All Know Are Black,” which includes Marceline the Vampire Queen from Adventure Time as well as all of the penguins from Happy Feet. But they also produce more serious pieces, such as their call to “Abolish Directed Studies,” on account of its serving as “a vehicle committing violent acts of intellectual privileging against marginalized groups at Yale.” I spoke with staff writer Anaiis Rios-Kasoga ’25 (she/her) about her experience writing for DOWN. “DOWN is the only on-campus publication that only publishes things written by people of color and for people of color, so that is really cool,” says RiosKasoga. “Our main goal is just to highlight community and culture voices that don’t find an outlet at most other publications at Yale.”

Rios-Kasoga was drawn to DOWN for its grassroots nature—writing for the magazine didn’t feel like working for a distant institutional force, like journalism at Yale often has a tendency to feel. “[We] don’t have a classic editorial structure that most print magazines have. We are just a board of directors, there is no editor-in-chief—there is on paper, but it doesn’t operate like that.” Rios-Kasoga will serve as the arts and culture editor for DOWN next fall, and she hopes to continue using the platform to communicate her experiences as a woman of color, as DOWN continues to be a space for collectivity and communication for students of color navigating Yale’s many tumults.

Zines are collectiveness distilled into its purest form. They are objects of communication, self-sustaining pieces of art, and personal declarations of one’s right to own and express their perspective. As both a creator and a consumer, I am moved by their power.

After speaking with Hasselmo and immersing myself in New Haven’s zine culture—past and present—I am left certainly with more questions than answers, but also with the overwhelming desire to keep creating. Personal creativity, I am beginning to learn, has the power to open dialogues and doors that are long overdue to be unbarred.

—Madelyn Dawson is a first-year in Silliman College.

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A DYING BUSINESS

BY ISABELLA YANG

At the West Haven Funeral Home, Celia Pinzi keeps her macabre business alive in an increasingly challenging industry.

I wasn’t expecting the line to be so long. Beyond the point of Celia Pinzi’s outstretched finger, the line snakes backward from the hallway into the parking lot. It hugs the white wooden fences. Somewhere down the block, its end disappears. Police are parked outside the building, directing traffic. This, Celia explains to me, is one of the largest post-lockdown crowds she’s hosted as the owner and chief funeral director of West Haven Funeral Home. It is around five p.m., and the wait time for those at the end of the line is estimated at five hours.

We walk through the back door, brushing past the lightly chattering, sometimes weeping, extremely well-dressed, and orderly crowd of people that takes up half of the hallway. Celia briskly strides forward, occasionally stopping to greet familiar faces, or to clear empty tissue boxes out of the MAY 2022

way. She is dressed in all black, her medium-length blond hair tossed behind her back, and she wears a stern, concentrated expression.

Worry not, it says. Everything here is under my control.

We walk on. An ornamental jumble covers the walls—there are clocks, mirrors, old maps of West Haven, pictures of sunsets, gold-sprinkled flower paintings, sketches of Italian towns, wreaths of dried flowers, decorative fragments of old ceilings. When we pass some old-fashioned, candle-like standing lamps, Celia turns to me.

“Now you’re in the heart of a traditional American wake,” she says.

When there is no wake, the entire funeral home smells of WoodWick’s signature Redwood reed diffuser; but as we walk into the parlor, the aroma of flowers permeates the air. Trails of flowers, purple and white and yellow, follow the trickling line of people to a single point in the center of

the room.

Against the soft white fabric inside the gleaming steel casket, the body of a 36-year-old woman lies with her hands peaceably folded in front of her chest. Under the soft glow of overhead incandescent lights, her long red hair shines like rivulets of water and cascades down the sides of her face, mingling with the flowers underneath. Visitors sob in front of her.

Some may have touched her hair.

With the line between me and her, I cannot tell. I cannot look at her for more than two seconds without feeling a need to avert my gaze–– because I didn’t know her, because Celia has turned her body into something too delicate and private to be beheld by an outsider. In fact, Celia has turned death itself into something too delicate and private to be beheld by an outsider.

...

The only dead body I have seen up to this point in my life was that of my paternal grandfather, who was cremated in rural China when 11

PHOTOS COURTESY OF WEST HAVEN FUNERAL HOME

To my father, who has just started washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant in North Carolina.

I was 12. I caught no more than a glimpse of him, stored in a wooden coffin filled with ice to keep his body from decaying in the summer heat. He hadn’t been embalmed; there were few embalmers in China, since so many people preferred cremation. His body looked blackened. Blackened by the ice, or old age, or both. There was little glamor in the ceremony. Family circled the coffin before it was taken off to the crematory. There, death was presented as a fact, a blackened fact.

At Celia’s place, things are different. In the “prep room”—a metallic, clinical space where bodies are received, washed, embalmed, and adorned—Celia shows me the box of cosmetics she and her fellow embalmer, Mike Dion, used on the deceased woman with the red hair.

With tiny tweezers, she picks up a pair of artificial eyelashes from the stainless-steel table. “Would you believe that? People now have those magnetic eyelashes that they attach to the magnetic eyeliner they put on,” Celia says, pinching her eyelids and imitating the movement of applying eyeliner. “She used to use these all the time, so we just had to do the same.” Before the wake, she tells me, Mike had to make an extra run to grab a fresh pair from CVS. One of Celia’s many jobs is to make death, however sudden and repellant, look presentable, even dignified. The woman with the red hair died of an overdose at a friend’s house. Her body, prior to entering the funeral home, under-

One of Celia’s many jobs is to make death, however sudden and repellant, look presentable, even dignified.

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went an autopsy that carved a wide triangle in her chest and sliced open her head. Celia has made sure the body looks intact. Lacerations closed, eyes closed, mouth closed, hair done, nails done, magnetic eyelashes done. Though only the upper half of the casket was open for the wake, she put high heels on the woman’s feet. Underwear, too, is a must for every body that passes through her hands. A body must always be in good order, clean and preferably beautiful, but not only for the purpose of presentation. What people cannot see is as important to Celia as what people can see.

Dead bodies are among some of Celia’s most familiar things. She has been in the funeral industry for over forty years, and has handled thousands of cadavers. But the embalming practice, Celia admits, can still feel foreign. “It's not just bathing, or grooming them, but actually making an incision into someone. Removing their bodily fluids and replacing them with embalming fluid,” she says to me.

“How would you ever have exposure to that?”

Celia was exposed to the death business by her father, Nello J. Pinzi. Nello, an Italian man who moved to Connecticut from Wisconsin in the nineteen-sixties and founded West Haven Funeral Home, still has his picture hung at the entrance of the building. He was by Celia’s side as she ran down the same hallways we had walked through, after countless childhood days out ice skating on West Haven Green. He was by Celia’s side as she became an embalmer and a funeral director.

...

If Celia and I were to compare fathers, I think both of us would agree that they have little in com-

mon. Hers was born in Italy, came to America at a young age, and quickly found his place. Mine was born in China, came to America at a relatively old age, and is still struggling to find his place. Hers served customers from one town.

Mine served customers from all around the world. Hers spent a lot of time with her. Mine spent next to no time with me. Hers was the person she modeled her career after. Mine is the person I deliberately chose not to model my career after. But there is one thing they have in common: both ran businesses. Yet her father’s business is flourishing in her hands, while my father’s business collapsed into a debt-stricken shutdown after three agonizing years of trade wars, mysteriously-vanishing clients, and a pandemic.

Unlike Nello J. Pinzi, my father always made a strenuous effort to separate his daughter and his business. Perhaps it was out of a masculine unwillingness to ask his daughter for help. Or, more likely, perhaps he felt I could do better than his business. He was one of those “Made in China” tag makers, the first college student from his small rural town who went back to establish a small factory there, making large quantities of cheap clothes to be sold in North America. Though his factory made lots of clothes, many of them for children, he almost never brought any home for me. His clothes, according to my mom, were too ugly for me. I grew up wearing Korean brands my mom had handpicked from city-center shopping malls, while the extra samples printed in the factory were thrown onto our car’s backseat to be used as napping blankets.

In the fall of 2018, in the midst of Trump’s trade war with China, my father visited me in New THE NEW JOUR N AL

Haven and gave me a yellow leather jacket. It was a sample his factory had printed. His clothes had improved enough to suit my style, he insisted. On the same visit, he asked me if I could make a few calls to some potential clients in New York, since my English was better than his. Swamped with work and annoyed he couldn’t promptly get his tax return forms for my last-minute financial aid application, I put off making the calls. When I finally got around to it half-a-month later, no one expressed any interest. The few who didn’t hang up at the words “Chinese factory” asked about prices and sample types—questions I could not answer—so they hung up as well. Ashamed and infuriated by my defeat, I sent my father a long text blaming him for not having provided outlines for my call and lists of his company’s past accomplishments. “Understood,” he responded. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I realized I had said “textiles” instead of “clothing” in most of the calls. I never wore the yellow leather jacket.

Now, my father’s business is officially dead. When cutting costs to the bone still did not yield any profit, and instead drove him deeper into debt, he closed the factory. He managed to pay all the workers, but only by borrowing from loan sharks behind our family’s back. Earlier this year, my mother had to personally drag him to the sharks and pay off his nonbank debts using all of her savings. Bank debts remain unpaid.

I wouldn’t say I’m responsible for his business’s demise. But I feel guilty. If I had learned how everything works, would I have prevented this? Could I have saved his dying business?

Celia learned how everything worked, and Celia did save a dying MAY 2022

A selection of protective vaults on display at West Haven Funeral Home. business. Her mother was a teacher, just like my mother. Her mother had discouraged her from pursuing the “blue collar life” of her father, much in the way my mother discouraged me from wearing those made-in-China factory clothes.

Celia went to Georgetown. She decided to go back home and apprentice with her father after graduation. Recounting her mother’s attitude toward her choice, she chuckles. “Given how we were brought up and what education meant in our family… Yes, it’s respectable and all that. But it was not exactly, you know, the Georgetown…” Her voice trails off. I knew what she meant. The Georgetown graduate expectation.

Or, perhaps more accurately, her mother's expectation.

But Celia chose her father’s path anyway. She acknowledged that it could be because she grew up very close to her father, but there was also a feeling of obligation, like she had to take over her father’s business despite her mother’s reluctance. At the time, though, neither she nor Nello was sure if she could do it. Celia repeatedly referred to the year she spent apprenticing

with her father handling cadavers as a trial; she and Nello agreed that if she passed the trial, she would stay. “He was like boot camp. Very, very, very difficult,” she said. “And I thought if I can survive that, then I'm really okay.”

She survived. Nello lived for another twenty years, with his daughter running his business by his side, before his death in 2009.

His funeral, including the embalming, was performed by his staff, and for once, Celia assumed the role of griever instead of director. To her, funeral directors are buffers between the family and death— composed, professional figures that distraught families can rely on to shield them. Celia had acted as that buffer many times before, but for her father’s funeral, she let her staff be her Celia. She then took over the business completely, and people started calling her “the boss.”

West Haven Funeral Home has long been the busiest funeral home in West Haven—by a mile. Keeping it in the family keeps it alive— the home has been handed down through generations, both for the family who owns it and for the families who use it. At the age of 13

62, Celia has been recognized as “Celia Pinzi, L.F.D., past President of the Connecticut Funeral Directors Association and public member of the Medical Legal Commission for the State of Connecticut.”

In a trim blazer and sparkling jewelry, she strides down the hallway full of memorabilia from her father’s time, converses confidently and tilts her head intently whenever she inquires about a funeral detail, as if that detail were the most important thing in the world.

The young apprentice freshly graduated from Georgetown has become a woman with wrinkles on her hands and neck beneath the jewelry, one whose vast experience has taught the subtle tricks of the death business.

One trick is to compartmentalize. Almost everyone at the funeral home agrees that compartmentalization is a necessity for their work. At home, the staff meticulously avoid using the same brands of shampoo and shaving creams they use in the prep room; even the little things can bring death into the house. They also try to avoid emotional attachment to the cases they work on. Celia is extremely good at compartmentalizing. When she works on a body, she forces herself to not think about the stories behind their death. “The things that disturb the average person disturb me,” she says. Suicides are always tough—so are overdoses.

Working on children is the hardest for Celia, especially after she had her own kids and truly understood what the loss of a child can mean for a family. But whenever she gets emotional, she reminds herself that she is not there to walk in the family’s shoes. She is there to hold her breath 14

in a room reeking of formaldehyde and to keep everyone calm.

Less appealing than the smell of formaldehyde, to Celia, is the capitalism of the funeral industry. “It’s all marketing and consumerism,” Celia tells me as we walk past the samples in her casket room: Champagne Rose, $4995; Belvedere, $1995; Clairmont, $3295; Valencia, $2695.

Polished stainless steel caskets, gold and green and blue and purple, line up on wall shelves like jewelry on display. A corner with a sign reading “CASKET EXPRESSIONS” contains customizable decorations, like little freezer magnets or laptop stickers, to be hooked on the edges or embroidered on the insides of caskets: an American eagle, golden angels, roses, jumping fish, army and navy prints, motorcycle prints.

With thousand-dollar personalized caskets, custom-made DVD

tapes, and obituaries posted in the local newspapers, the price of a funeral can easily get into five digits, sometimes even reaching as high as $20,000—and that doesn’t include the gravestone, the reception, or the cemetery plot. The large wake I saw was just a part of one such funeral. For some, there is an allure in the dignified grandeur of an expensive funeral. Even one of the staff members at the funeral home, a young man around his thirties named Jim, tells me he quit a finance job in New York to work in the funerary industry with Celia because of the “formality, decorum, and the black cars.”

The glamor of elaborate wakes and ceremonious burials endures, but behind the ornamental flowers and delicately made-up bodies, things are changing in the death business, and Celia senses it. On the other side of the wall from thousand-dollar caskets sit the different, but equally various species of urns: Anoka Blue, $295; Avalon Bronze, $495; Imperial Stone, $395; Tree of Life, $495. Celia points out a pair of smaller, pocket-sized urns called “footprints,” telling me they can be portable keepsakes and were used recently in another local middle-aged woman’s funeral. They are made of fine blue-and-white gradient porcelain, polished to perfection, and cost no more than $295. Cremations can cost a tenth of a full-scale funeral, or even less at places where procedures are not so personalized. To a community like West Haven, where many live paycheck-to-paycheck, the choice is obvious.

...

Celia Pinzi.

I’m no stranger to cremations. In China, where I grew up, a piece of legislation THE NEW JOUR N AL

called “Regulations on Funeral and Interment Control” released in 1997 restricted all burials in cities and encouraged cremations in rural areas to preserve farmland.

Burials quickly became things of the past, a relic now largely experienced through funeral objects in museums, excavated from ancient tombs. Cremations, on the other hand, exhibit a mechanical efficiency that many prefer to the impractical pomp and ceremony of an old-fashioned burial. Beijing’s Babaoshan Crematorium processes approximately 25,000 bodies each year; bodies packed in cardboard boxes enter automated cremation machines on belts, burn in furnaces, and turn into ashes packed in little bags with QR codes to help families identify their loved ones.

In modern Chinese crematories, operations are clean, quick, and minimalist. The funeral services, colloquially called yitiaolong (one full dragon), can take care of all the steps between receiving the body and delivering the ashes. A similar service exists at Celia’s place now. In the middle of one of my conversations with Mike and Jim, Jim pauses to pick up a call from a potential client. The woman, whose grandmother had just passed away at a nursing home, wants West Haven Funeral Home to pick up the body, perform the cremation, and deliver her the ashes. She doesn’t need to see the body. After the call ends, Jim, a strong proponent of formal burials, sighs and says, “It’s another one of those.”

The “ones of those” have been taking over. The National Funeral Directors Association’s website currently has a whole section called “Cremation on the Rise.”

According to data from NFDA, cremations have outnumbered burials since 2014. Almost 60 percent of bodies in the United States MAY 2022

are now cremated, while a little under 40 percent are buried. It is estimated that in twenty years, 80 percent of bodies will be cremated.

The Vatican has even allowed practicing Catholics to be cremated, despite their common belief in the resurrection of the physical body after death. COVID-19, too, is accelerating the change: cremation is faster than burial—a great advantage during the pandemic when funeral homes are strained by an unusually large number of bodies—and the World Health Organization has recommended cremation instead of embalming to prevent the spread of the virus.

Celia has referred to an open-casket funeral with an embalmed and dressed-up body as a “traditional American experience.” This tradition, it seems, is dying.

Oak Grove Crematory, the official cremation branch of Celia’s business, now receives as much attention as the funeral home.

In one corner of the casket room are pamphlets about “The Living Urn,” a new, $129 service that allows people to grow plants out of the ashes of their loved ones. Celia hasn’t gone as far as some funeral homes in incorporating services that turn ashes into cups, rings, fireworks, glass art, memorial tattoos, or vinyl records, but she is already adjusting to the new trends to keep her business alive.

...

There is, however, only so much one can adjust and only so much one can control. Celia has her uncontrollables: kids who do not want to take over the family business. Unlike my father, who kept me away from his business, Celia would very much love for her two sons to take over her place. But reality speaks differently. Both of her sons live in New York now. One graduated from Yale

Celia has referred to an open-casket funeral with an embalmed and dressed-up body as a “traditional American experience.” This tradition, it seems, is dying. and works for American Express, the other works for the Michelin-star-winning Momofuku Restaurant Group. Neither has any intention of returning to West Haven. They believe they could do better than her business.

We are in Celia’s car driving back to campus when I ask her what will become of West Haven Funeral Home. She stays silent for a good moment, and I see her tighten her grip on the steering wheel.

“Big corporations will buy it,” she finally says. She would retire completely and receive good compensation. But is that what she really wants?

When Nello started the business, he named it “West Haven Funeral Home” so it carried the name of the town instead of his own Italian name. Back then, West Haven was a town divided between Italians and Irishmen; funeral homes served either one group or the other, and a place named “Pinzi Funeral Home” would only attract Italians. But Nello wanted his place to belong to everyone in West Haven. Through the name, he left Celia with a special legacy.

She feels the weight of the name every time she sees a crowd gather in her hallway and spill into the parking lot, or when she and Mike restore a mutilated body’s dignity and open the casket for visitors to weep at the ephemeral beauty of their loved one, resting among flowers, which will soon become 15

their last memory of the deceased.

But West Haven Funeral Home, despite its name, is fundamentally a family business. When Celia cannot take care of it anymore, her father’s business will be, despite all her efforts keeping it alive, as dead as my own father’s.

Then comes the ultimate agonizing question: why do we try?

Why do we try so hard to keep something alive, knowing that it will eventually die? If death is inevitable, how should one go?

When Celia prepares a body for an open-casket wake, she does it so that the family remembers only the beautiful ending, not the ugly thing leading up to death—be it traffic accident or overdose, an act of violence or a long, painful, disease. But Celia has no one to turn to when her business dies, someone like her to make everything neat and clean and hide away the ugliness behind flowers and cosmetics. Instead, there are two big funeral corporations, Carriage Funeral and Service Corporation International, which have been conducting “cluster business” for a while—joined businesses with shared staff and shared equipment in a certain region. Both trade on the stock exchange. “They go into an area and saturate it,” Celia tells me. And they are saturating Connecticut. One has already acquired a family-owned funeral home in West Haven, to pair with another in Milford. Celia knows the ending. She tries not to think about it.

She is good at compartmentalizing, after all.

Nine years ago, Celia worked on a series of funerals for the children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. She heard the news right after her office’s in-house Christmas party and immediately decided to drive up to Newtown where the school is 16

located to visit Daniel Honan, the only funeral director in town. For some reason she felt that she had to be there, the same way she felt that she had to take over her father’s business. When Honan saw her, he recognized her as the late Nello J. Pinzi’s daughter, and asked her if she needed any help. “I came to help you,” Celia responded.

She was the first to help. Others followed. Soon, a circle of funeral directors nearby set up a temporary command station at Honan’s funeral home, and they divided the work. Celia took the bodies of three children back to West Haven Funeral Home and embalmed them before bringing them back to Newtown. “They needed so much reconstruction for the families to view them,” she said. “I was exceedingly aware that these were babies, that these were little kids.

And why is it different from any child?”

“It was twenty of them. That’s what’s surreal.”

At the command station, there were always at least two people working together at a time, and people took turns when they felt that they couldn’t continue the work anymore. Every once in a while, Celia held hands with the other funeral directors, encouraging each other that they still had everything under control. Families came; state troopers came; the media came; President Obama came. Celia did not know about Obama’s attendance because she deliberately avoided the news. A few reporters attempted to interview Celia, asking her if she had any comments. “And sometimes I would say, I just don’t, I’m—I’m overwhelmed. And I’m speechless. I don’t know what to say,” she remembered. Finally, all the bodies were restored, dressed, fingerprinted so jewelry could be made

with prints, set up for viewing, sent to church services and eventually to cemeteries or crematories.

The work was done.

Celia told me about her work with the children from Sandy Hook nine years to the day after the shooting happened. It had been almost a decade, yet what happened had never left her. I asked her what made her carry on, both with her work there and with her work after that. Celia acknowledged that it was partially the humanity and empathy she saw among the funeral directors and helpers, and the overflows of anonymous letters, flowers, and gifts sent to every service. But, being Celia, she also felt a duty to carry on. “Again, my compartmentalization,” she said.

“This is what I need to do.”

On my last visit to the West Haven Funeral Home, Celia was supervising two temporary employees as they loaded a van with bodies to be cremated. I stood in the hallway while the men hurried around, carrying at least halfa-dozen caskets to the van. One of them, wearing a faded baseball cap and smelling of tobacco, asked me to step aside so he could remove another body from the prep room.

I stepped into the slightly hazy afternoon sun. The van was right in front of me. It was filled with caskets, mostly simple, resembling cardboard boxes. It was hard to imagine that each cardboard box contained a person who had once walked the surface of this planet.

In this dying business, there is a lot of burning to be done.

—Isabella Yang is a senior in Saybrook College.

THE NEW JOUR N AL

April 3, 2022

COLLAGE BY KYLIE VOLAVONGSA

My stomach hurts when I step into Pad Thai for a late lunch.

The visit is at my dad’s recommendation, even though he’s only been to New Haven twice and to Pad Thai never. If this were any other Thai restaurant, I would’ve shrugged him off. What does he know about the New Haven restaurant scene anyway? Not much. But in this case, my dad does know the owner’s brother, who happens to be his bowling buddy back home in Kansas. Like me, the owners are Lao. And since coming to New Haven for school about eight months ago, I’ve yet to meet another Lao person.

Though Lao-owned, Pad Thai’s menu is filled mostly with Thai dishes: chicken satay, a rainbow of curries, and som tam, a spicy papaya salad known to Laotians as tam mak hoong. Much of Thailand’s northeast Isan region is ethnically Lao, so Lao and Isan food

MAY 2022

are incredibly similar. But it’s actually quite common for businesses to brand themselves as Thai restaurants instead of Lao restaurants, even if they don't serve exclusively Thai cuisine. This makes their businesses more marketable to an American audience.

Call it a visible invisibility.

I order the drunken noodles, which arrive in a golden-brown nest garnished with chili flakes, yellow bell peppers, and a sprig of holy basil. Wafts of steam tell me it’s too hot to start eating, but I choose to burn my mouth anyway. The food tastes like my dad’s—soft rice noodles balanced between the salt of the soy sauce and sweet suggestions of brown sugar.

I could scream and cry about how good it is, about how it sends me back to my kitchen table at home in Kansas. But I eat in silence. It’s three o’clock, there is only one other group of patrons

here, and I’m mentally preparing to introduce myself to the owner.

The restaurant’s interior looks like my grandmother’s house— dim and warm, the walls decorated with a yellowed map of Thailand alongside black-and-white portraits of family members that exude nostalgia. When I’m done eating, I ask for the owner, explaining that my parents are friends with her brother in Kansas and that I’d like to meet her. In a dirty apron and worn non-slip clogs, she emerges from the kitchen with slow, heavy steps. Still, her exhausted expression melts into a welcoming grin.

It turns out that my dad had called earlier that weekend. She was expecting me.

I’m always nervous when it comes to meeting new Lao people, especially elders. Seeking Laotians outside of my family feels like an unearthing, like calling out to someone you haven’t seen in so long that you’ve become strangers.

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It scares me, especially because my understanding of the Lao language is nowhere near where I wish it was. But Pi Mai—Lao New Year— is coming up soon. And after an emotionally turbulent start to the American New Year, one that’s left me lonely and confused long after returning to campus, I want to start again. I want to find someone both new and familiar.

“Saibaidee!” Ba Mai calls. Hello.

Are you comfortable? ‘Ba’ means ‘older auntie’ in Lao—we refer to everyone as if they were family.

‘Mai’ is a nickname meaning ‘silk.’

We do not call anyone by their full first name, just the one-syllable fragment.

I rise from my seat to greet her properly.

March 6, 2020 Lao people are traditionally animists. Many of us believe that everything has a spirit, that every spirit has a home. Our bodies are home to not just one spirit, but to a collective of thirty-two that drift away from us as we progress through our lives. Every so often, they must be called back and retied to us, preserving our health, good luck, and balance. Kwan, we call them. Kwan, we reach out for but cannot see.

Nay Saysourinho’s essay, “Your Body has Thirty-Two Kwan,” reminds me of all the things that make me, and I’ve been thinking a lot about her lately. She was a panelist at a literary conference in San Antonio, which I attended during a trip with my high school English program. Most other panels had been canceled due to the emerging threat of the coronavirus, but it so happened that the one with Saysourinho was one of the few still taking place that day. It was also, by chance, the only panel

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I was interested in, a discussion about Asian exoticism in contemporary fiction.

I remember almost falling asleep at the panel, drowsy from a late afternoon slump. But towards the end, the panelists began to open up more about themselves as Asian women in writing. When it was Saysourinho’s turn, she mentioned that she was raised by refugees. I sat up, my new sense of alertness motivated by my similar upbringing. Curious, I looked back at the program and found her last name, distinctly Lao with its four flowing syllables. My heart began to race. Suddenly, I didn’t want to miss a word she said.

Looking back, I like to think that electric feeling, so unexpected and ineffable, was our kwan being called to each other. Growing up in Kansas, I rarely saw Lao people outside of my own family.

Surrounded instead by whiteness and its elimination of otherness, I wonder if I was made to drift from my kwan rather than the other way around, the way it naturally happens. I like to think that Saysourinho, who grew up in Canada, understands me for this.

Of the kwan Saysourinho lost in her own youth, she admits in her essay, “There are souls I no longer understand.”

A secret history Lao people have a traumatic history of fragmentation. This history was never made clear to me until after high school, the result of my family’s unspeakable memories and a lack of information everywhere I tried to look. Even when my history teachers covered the Vietnam War, not once did they mention what was happening across the border in Laos.

Growing up, I knew that there

had been a war—my family called it “The War”—but I didn’t know much more than that. Most of this violence, muted and long-lasting, stems from the seldom-mentioned and often redacted history of the Secret War, an unauthorized military operation carried out by the CIA on Laotian soil.

The most destructive phase of the Secret War took place from 1964 to 1973. Over the course of 580,000 total bombing missions, the United States dropped more than two million tons of cluster bombs over Laos. To this day, only about one percent of the eighty million undetonated leftovers have been removed.

The bombings were an effort to thwart the North Vietnamese Army along the Ho Chi Minh trail and combat the communist forces of the Pathet Lao. Direct foreign intervention in Laos had been restricted by the 1962 Geneva Agreement. Nonetheless, to bolster U.S. forces within Laos, American military personnel enlisted as “volunteers” of the Royal Lao Air Force to train a small group of Laotians and a larger group of the ethnically Hmong people living in the Laotian highlands. Once the U.S. withdrew after the Fall of Saigon, the Pathet Lao would go on to overthrow the royal government, persecuting the U.S.backed allies that were left behind.

Waves of fleeing Laotians resettled in America, scattered further by a far-flung network of sponsor families and Catholic volunteer agencies. As suggested by former President Gerald Ford’s Advisory Committee on Refugees, these resettlement structures were intended to mitigate the economic strain on towns receiving these refugees. Should a concentrated ethnic enclave form, much of THE NEW JOUR N AL

COLLAGE BY JARED CROWLEY

those towns’ funds would have to go towards financial assistance for individual families, not to mention support programs like ESL classes at community colleges. Government aid aside, many of the towns’ locals were fearful of a job market saturated by new arrivals, raising further issues of xenophobia and racism.

other wisdom slips past me, and I find myself focusing mostly on the words I can recognize. I take what I can from the conversation anyway: a paper bag of hot sticky rice, skewers of ping mu, and that feeling of wholeness from the familiarity of spoken Lao. That feeling of reconnecting with one of my kwan.

This is the history our diaspora carries-–a history we negotiate as we create spaces like Pad Thai, spaces where we can safely exist together.

“Kawp jai,” I say with my hand on the door. Thank you.

April 3, 2022 Ba Mai gestures to the man at the host stand—her husband—who smiles and waves. “This is Luong.”

Older uncle. I smile back.

“Your name is Candy, right?”

My name is Kylie. I have a distant cousin back home who happens to be named Candy. For whatever reason, I assume she knows Candy, and because I only understand about ten percent of what Ba Mai is saying, my next assumption is that she must be asking if I know Candy.

“Dawy,” I answer. Yes. I still haven’t cleared up my mistake with her.

Ba Mai goes on. “You want to meet more kon Lao, right? Your daddy told me over the phone.”

She pauses for a minute to think. “There are a lot of Lao people [in Connecticut], especially in Bridgeport and by the Walmart.

[There’s also] a temple we all go to in Morris. And if you want, I can take you there to meet everyone…”

It’s an enthusiastic outpour, delivered in the musical, up-anddown cadence of our tonal language. But much of Ba Mai’s

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April, of any given year

Pi Mai is always celebrated for three days in the middle of April.

It marks the beginning of monsoon season, which is often the hottest time of the year. It is also the time of year when the Lao diaspora is most culturally visible, when we come together on the grounds of Theravada Buddhist temples around the world.

In my hometown of Kansas City, Pi Mai looks like this: the open field by the temple where lines of tents sell sinh skirts of bright blues, purples, and greens; cheap bubble wands and cans of silly string for the kids; steaming bowls of pho that lace the air with anise and cardamom. There’s a main tent where the uncles’ bands play mor lum on electric guitars and keyboards that appropriate cheesy nineties synth with a rhythmic Lao flair. The aunts, meanwhile, sway and arch their fingers in a traditional fawn dance, floating their hands along like flowers on the dance floor.

Pi Mai is a cultural beacon, a welcome-home gathering for the local Lao community as well as a few curious outsiders from nearby towns. Tucked in the quiet of its own little corner is the temple itself, where monks in saffron robes perform su kwan, the longawaited ceremony that calls all

thirty-two of our spirits back to our bodies. Finally, those spirits are bound to us when a monk ties to our wrists a bracelet of delicate white thread.

April 4, 2022 I’m in my room, talking to Luong Janh over the phone during his half-hour break at work. He is Ba Mai’s older brother and, according to my dad’s text from the day before, he is a community leader who can give me a broader sense of the Lao people living here. I have never seen his face.

Our call is mediated by my dad back home, splitting and mending our conversation from the Northeast and the Midwest. In real time I watch my transcription app incorrectly record Luong Janh’s spoken Lao as “Caitlyn Jenner longtime mean young lady,” “how to play an accordion with gun,” and then, “I’m a Libra. I’m a Libra. I’m a Libra. I’m a Libra.”

“Okay Kylie,” my dad says, then Luong Janh through my dad: “the Lao people are the people who want to reach out and help others. It’s not just about our community—we want to reach out to everybody. We want to share. We want people to see our weddings and to visit for Pi Mai.” There are over fifty Lao families living in the New Haven area, according to Luong Janh.

When he resettled in one of the first waves of Lao refugees, there were only about thirteen. And where they have contended with fragmentation, they also move continuously in the direction of wholeness.

“Every time more people arrived, we would try to get in touch. We’d share our things with each other so we could all get by with what we had.”

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As my dad translates, I wonder if he is thinking the same about himself.

April 12, 2022 Luong Janh, Ba Mai, and the rest of the Lao community are not the only ones currently reaching for wholeness in New Haven.

Within the city, there is a growing momentum towards connection by broader groups of Asian Americans. On Zoom, I spoke to Jennifer Heikkila Diaz, Christine Kim, and Caroline Tanbee Smith, three leaders of aapiNHV (Asian American & Pacific Islander New Haven). The group was established about a year ago, spurred by widespread community grief in the aftermath of the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, along with the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes that made clear the need for AAPI spaces in order to see and be seen.

“This group started as an action to overcome the great fear and anguish that a lot of us and I personally felt, especially after the shootings,” said Kim. One way to overcome these feelings was to come together. Like the Lao people, to reach out and gather and share. Like our kwan, to join a body seeking a feeling of peace.

“Part of the way we did that was just by really holding space for each other’s experiences and stories,” Smith chimed in. “And that was a way of building a foundation of respect and acknowledgement of the complexity and differences that we all experienced moving through the world…”

Heikkila Diaz said the group finds itself in uncharted territory, as it is a non-hierarchical organization. They aim to grant all members the same amount of influence in group activities, from youth to elders, and from East Asians to

MAY 2022

South and Southeast Asians—who have historically seen less representation in pan-Asian groups.

I looked at the square on my Zoom screen and its four subsections. Me. Jennifer. Christine.

Caroline. Perhaps, in their own ways, they also embody our Lao patchwork of thirty-two.

April 14, 2022 I write my ending at the beginning of Pi Mai. Tonight, I will catch up with a friend at one of the dining halls.

Tomorrow, I plan to call my parents and grandparents. On Sunday, I hope to go to the temple with Ba Mai and Luong Janh. Over the course of this piece’s creation, I’ve been called to a gathering of kwan that I did not expect to find.

This weekend, I will call to mine and welcome back a body of thirty-two. I think of everyone I’ve met in this process and wonder if I can make room for their kwan too, joining a body of sixty-four, one hundred twenty-eight, and maybe even two hundred and fifty-six.

Maybe even more.

I will tie us all together—for now—with a small white thread.

—Kylie Volavongsa is first-year in Silliman College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

ASIDE

TAKE ONE, IT'S FREE

BY ABIGAIL DIXON

From the outside, Grey Matter Books is imposing with its unadorned awning and an eerie baby doll holding a “WE’RE OPEN” sign in the corner that warrants a second look when walking down York. Step inside and the gloomy storefront gives way to a cozy shop with uneven wooden floors and haphazard stacks of used books behind the window.

The shelves are packed, curated by demand. Then there are the free books. Cardboard boxes and milk crates just inside the entrance are filled with them, to be taken at will. I wonder if the fluctuations in consumer demand cause them to be demoted to the corner.

Crouching near the front door, I rifled carefully through the crates.

Children’s books, theory books, books in languages I do not know, and books in a language I am still learning have all found themselves in the same home. I take four: an analysis of The Bible’s Genesis, though I am not religious; an independently published poetry book, though I don’t read poetry; humorous short stories in Portuguese, though I only just started learning the language; a study of the lives of women in the twentieth century, though I was born in the twenty-first. If something is free, might as well give it a try.

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SECOND

PHOTOS BY LUKAS FLIPPO DESIGN BY ANNLI NAKAYAMA

EXILE

For years, city officials knew about hazardous levels of lead in the homes of resettled refugees, yet several families were exposed.

What went wrong?

BY TYLER JAGER

1.

Left in the Dark Author’s preface: This article is the product of a four-month-long investigation into how delays in New Haven’s lead poisoning prevention practices affected families with young children in the city, including many refugees. I reviewed over two hundred pages of previously unreleased government documents related to four New Haven addresses, the bulk of which were obtained through three Connecticut Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. This article involved dozens of interviews with former and resettled refugees, government officials, medical and legal academics, employees of IRIS and other nonprofits, and property owners. Some names have been changed, and some details omitted, to protect the locations and identities of interview subjects.

24

Before writing this article, I formerly worked at Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), one of the organizations in this story, as a remote intern in 2020-2021. My work consisted of filing Section 8 applications and UI claims during the COVID-19 pandemic. I met the Naqibzois separately, through sources at Elena’s Light, who connected us through a mutual friend.

This article could not have beeen completed without Elena’s Light, a refugee-led organization dedicated to women’s and children’s welfare in New Haven, that provided Pashto and Dari interpreters under contract with The New Journal.

Earlier this year, on a cold February day around 2:30 p.m., Shahid Naqibzoi got off the bus from Wilbur Cross High School and walked toward his home in The Hill neighborhood of New Haven, still thinking about favorite class, biology. A tall, wiry fifteen-yearold, Shahid knew he wanted to become a doctor, or maybe an engineer, with the encouragement of his new teachers. When he turned the corner to his backyard and saw strange men digging outside his family’s yellow duplex, he assumed they were “from the government.” In Afghanistan, when U.S.-funded infrastructure began to crumble during his adolescence, he had seen officials in similar attire fix the potholes.

There

were

four

of

them,

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A delineation line can be seen between new and old gravel in the parking area of 423 Saw Mill Road in West Haven, Connecticut, on Thursday, April 21, 2022. end of the lot, they had left a shadowy rectangle of gray gravel, in a darker shade than the rest of the yard, as if a cloud had floated over and stopped at the edge of the fence.

When Amila and her husband, Navid, first saw the vinyl-sided façade of 18 Dewitt Street, they thought the property was a step up from their first American home.

The Dewitt Street apartment was more affordable––a lean $1,200 per month––and closer to the K-8 school in The Hill that four of their six children attended. But after signing their lease, a series of unpleasant discoveries made the property less attractive: mice, insects, and raccoons frequently scurried across the living room floor and into the kids’ bedrooms.

Outside the room that Shahid shared with his brother, a long rod of twisted iron swung slightly from the top frame of a bay window. bearded men, with black jackets—military jackets, Shahid thought. He watched as they shoveled gravel out of the back of a white, unmarked van and tossed it into the earth, near the duplex’s drainage pipe. An assortment of children’s toys from the families at the duplex—remnants of a Cozy Coupe and a pink bicycle, half-buried—dotted the back lot, which was surrounded by fence.

Shahid tried not to make eye contact with the men who watched him, silently, as he climbed the wooden stairs that hugged the back of the duplex. He walked into his family’s third-floor apartment, where he lived with his parents and five younger siblings.

By noon the next day, when Amila, Shahid’s mom, left the house for a doctor’s appointment, the men were gone. At the south MAY 2022

Later in March, after living there for over a year, the Naqibzois learned another fact about 18 Dewitt Street that had gone undisclosed: the property was contaminated with toxic levels of lead. A city inspection, conducted after a suspected poisoning at the property, found the chemical on their windowsills, in the dust lying on the stairwell, and, in its most concentrated form, in the soil surrounding the drainage pipe of their house. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), soil with lead concentration at 400 parts per million or greater is considered so great a public health hazard that the lead must be removed immediately, and children must vacate the residence. The soil surrounding the Naqibzois’ home, where children used to play, was over three times

that number.

What Shahid had witnessed that day in February was the final step of the removal process, called a lead abatement: the legally required remediation of lead-based hazards in a child’s home. When toxic lead is present in the ground, the EPA says, the contaminated soil must be carefully dug up and hauled away.

Then, a property owner, usually dependent on hired maintenance contractors, brings a “clean” soil deposit to the premises, making them safe for small children to inhabit.

Six months earlier, their landlord, Shmuel Aizenberg of Ocean Management, was ordered by the city’s Health Department to perform a lead abatement of 18 Dewitt. Yet city officials were aware of the soil contamination as early as November 2020, when an inspector received lab results that confirmed hazardous lead quantities in the property—and in 2016, a city inspection report had found similar levels of contamination.

Eight years before the Naqibzois were made aware of it, the property’s history of lead poisoning was marked in the public record.

For the Naqibzois, information about the lead contamination came too late. 18 Dewitt Street wasn’t their first time as Ocean Management tenants—it wasn’t even the first Ocean property where they had lived with lead contamination. The first house in America where the Naqibzois lived, on Howard Avenue, was another one of the hundreds of Ocean-owned low-income properties in New Haven, operated under the names of smaller companies. While living there, at age 2, Shahid’s younger sister tested positive for lead poisoning.

25

reports from three Connecticut Freedom of Information Act requests show that city officials and landlords neglected to remove toxic lead for months from properties in New Haven where refugee families with young children were living.

The Naqibzois were not alone.

Over the course of this fourmonth investigation, I confirmed that at least seven refugee families in New Haven, including over a dozen children, were exposed to toxic levels of lead in their homes without their knowledge. Emails, lab results, and city inspection reports from three FOIA requests show that city officials and landlords neglected to remove toxic lead for months from properties in New Haven where refugee families with young children were living.

Refugee families in the United States, who are disproportionately affected by lead poisoning, have little say over the first places where they are told to live, and receive few federal protections against lead exposure during resettlement. Where toxic lead is found, children who left homes once for safety must leave new homes again: after resettlement, a second exile.

2.

The Poison Lead, the most common industrial contaminant in America, can cause significant negative health effects for anyone exposed, but particularly for children under six. At that age, even low levels of 26

exposure can permanently damage brain development. At extremely high levels, lead poisoning can lead to seizures, coma, and death.

“No amount of lead exposure is safe,” Erin Nozetz, a Yale pediatrician and the director of New Haven’s Lead Task Force, told me.

Yet the behavior of New Haven landlords form a pattern: they often fail to remove lead contamination, or alert families about its presence in their homes, within the time frame required by law.

Along with city officials, landlords often fail to provide translated information about the risks to families who don’t speak English, many of whom are refugees. (One reason frequently cited in city documents for inspection delays: “language barriers.”) None of the families that I contacted, with the help of Pashto and Dari interpreters, had been promptly informed by their landlord of toxic lead levels in their home. In some cases, we were the first to inform families of lead contamination in their current or former homes.

The New Haven Health Department’s policy is to inspect a house for lead after a child under six has already been poisoned.

So far this year, inspections have discovered lead contamination in

at least 44 properties with young children, according to public records. The most common culprit is paint: until 1978, when the product was banned for residential use, lead paint was a staple of American real estate. According to a report by former health director Paul Kowalski, 83 percent of New Haven’s housing stock was built before 1978. The paint is particularly hazardous when it chips or peels, making it easier for a child to ingest.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers children under six “lead poisoned” when their blood lead levels (BLLs) are 5 micrograms per deciliter or above. A recent, internally-circulated report from the Connecticut Department of Public Health shows a staggering statistic: while 1.7 percent of Connecticut children under six have BLLs at that level or higher, 43.7 percent of refugee children under six do—nearly one in two children poisoned.

“Refugees and other newcomer persons resettled to the U.S.,” the CDC says, are a “population at higher risk” of lead exposure. One explanation for that higher risk is children’s prior exposure before coming to the United States.

In Afghanistan, for instance, a greater presence of lead-based gasoline could signify a greater risk to children. Another, in the CDC’s phrasing, is exposure to risky “cultural practices, traditional medicines, and consumer products”—or as Camille Brown, the director of Yale’s Pediatric Refugee Clinic, puts it, “behaviors of different cultures.”

It’s true that many products made abroad, such as metal jewelry, spices, or cosmetics, contain lead, often because lead is cheap and easy to mold. Yet at best, THE NEW JOUR N AL

these assumptions of exposure abroad provide a partial picture: prolonged American exposures to lead are a regular occurrence for refugee children too. During the COVID-19 pandemic, at the lead treatment center where Nozetz works, families took her on a “Zoom walk” through their house, and she’d point out potential hazards. Common sources included peeling paint, windowsills, and stairwells covered in lead dust. If refugee children are placed in further harm’s way, Brown said, U.S. resettlement risks “exacerbating” prior exposure. Children’s BLLs should start to decrease after a few months in lead-free environments; high BLLs after three months could signify that they are still being exposed. One 2017 study suggested that newcomers’ “joint exposure”—first, to lead-based products in a country of origin, and second, to an older home in the United States—was a significant driver of higher BLLs. In the Connecticut Department of Public Health report, “paint/lead dust” is listed as refugees’ primary source of exposure to lead. Contaminated soil is second.

One of the most recent fatalities of lead poisoning in the United States, in 2002, was a refugee child. Sunday Abek, a 2-yearold girl, died of lead poisoning in Manchester, New Hampshire, after the landlord of the property failed to disclose the presence of lead paint in their apartments.

Sunday’s mother settled a lawsuit for $700,000 against the property manager and building owner; the property manager was also sentenced to fifteen months in federal prison. Her lawyer said, “had she known the price for coming to America would be the life of her youngest child…she never would have come.”

MAY 2022

3.

The First Exile Amila, a skilled tailor and dressmaker, met her husband Navid Naqibzoi in 2003, in their hometown of Khost near the Pakistani border. He was her next-door neighbor, and they married the following year. In 2012, Navid began to work as a medic on a U.S. military base, Forward Operating Base Chapman, in Logar Province.

Everything from simple sutures to I.V. drips to EMT calls fell under his purview. Navid accompanied American soldiers on missions outside Chapman, and he was adept at making friends. He liked to crack the occasional grim joke about the American War on the base, which endeared him to the others. At home, he kept details about Chapman to himself.

Eventually, concerns that the Taliban would target Afghans working at the base in Khost became so extreme that Navid warned his family not to venture beyond their walled home except for emergencies. Each morning, he carefully mapped the directions of his driving route to Chapman, so that he could follow another route back home and avoid a tail.

On the advice of a close friend, Amila and Navid applied for Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) status in 2016. For Iraqi and Afghan nationals who face persecution as a result of working for the U.S. military and its affiliates, SIV status is a means of protection by relocating: applicants who are approved for SIV status receive permanent residency and a green card to move to the mainland United States. Successful receipt of SIV status, however, is a notoriously slow, bureaucratic process. In 2018, a group of Afghan and Iraqi nationals sued the U.S. federal government over

application delays that lasted as long as five years, which a federal judge later ordered the Trump administration to remedy.

After three years of waiting, the Naqibzois’ SIV application was finally approved. On November 18, 2019, they boarded a plane, for thirty-six hours of flying and an eight-hour layover in Dubai.

Shahid was bored: the novelty of his first flight wore off quickly, and he wanted to get on the ground.

In Khost, when he watched the World Wrestling Entertainment channel, he especially liked American wrestling aficionado Roman Reigns, whom other WWE audiences loved to hate. “Even though he’s the World Heavyweight Champion!” Shahid protested. He was anxious to see the country Reigns was from, where “they said they don’t have war.”

Upon their arrival in the United States, a refugee resettlement caseworker told the family to move to a multi-family unit on Howard Avenue, at that point owned by an affiliate of Ocean Management.

Navid searched for a medical job in New Haven, but no hospital in Connecticut would recognize his certificate from Chapman. He worked as a delivery driver downtown, for Uber and DoorDash, to make money. He learned the addresses of Yale’s residential colleges, and grew to appreciate Silliman College residents for their reliable late-night Papa John’s orders.

Shahid and his siblings, including his younger sister, who goes by 'Naz,' underwent a mandated “refugee health assessment,” which included testing for the children’s blood-lead levels, measured in micrograms per deciliter. When Naz’s results came back from YaleNew Haven Hospital, a few days later: her BLL was nine micro27

grams per deciliter, placing her above the ninety-ninth percentile of children in America with respect to BLLs.

months later.

“We were so worried,” Shahid said. There are few cures for lead poisoning, besides changing a child’s environment. Unsure of what to do, Navid and Amila wiped down every surface of their home, and proceeded to bathe their daughter, twice a day, for several days following her diagnosis.

Cases like Naz’s weren’t supposed to keep happening. In May 2019, a class of over three hundred families, represented by the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, sued the City of New Haven for neglecting lead-prevention protocols. Muhawenimana Sara, who was poisoned in 2018 at age 3, was one of them. Displaced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sara’s family moved into a three-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood of Fair Haven. Her lead tests upon U.S. arrival presented no concern; but one year later, Sara’s BLLs had risen to 10 micrograms per deciliter.

The timing of Naz’s lead test, soon after arrival, could suggest prior exposure or exposure in America. (A later inspection of their apartment at Howard Avenue found lead paint on twenty-seven surfaces.) But without prompt action, a secondary, prolonged exposure would further imperil her health. “The longer you’re exposed to lead, the higher the likelihood there will be long-term cognitive effects on children,” Nozetz said.

After weeks and months of chronic lead exposure, neurotoxins can lurk in a child’s system for decades, leaving residues behind in bones and teeth.

A few months after their arrival, Navid’s cousin offered the couple his old apartment in The Hill, 18 Dewitt Street, down the street from the K-8 school where Navid’s younger children would go. The apartment was along bus routes that could eventually take Shahid to a magnet high school. Amila and Navid accepted.

In early 2020, three months after her initial assessment, Naz tested positive for lead poisoning again.

According to New Haven city law, any report of a child with blood lead levels over five micrograms per deciliter triggers a city inspection, which must take place within five days of the child’s lead report.

The first inspection came eleven 28

4.

The City

Amy Marx, a New Haven Legal Assistance (NHLAA) staff attorney, attributed Sara’s poisoning to U.S. exposure. The lead paint on Sara’s front porch was chipped and peeling, increasing the risk of ingestion. The city had made one attempt to send an inspector unannounced to Sara’s home, who gave up when nobody was home and “left a business card with a note and materials in English only.”

Court documents allege that the inspector “was aware that the family spoke Swahili.” The year before, the city had relaxed the threshold for lead inspections to a child’s BLL test of twenty micrograms per deciliter—four times the CDC standard. City administrators blamed staffing issues.

The City signed a settlement agreement with the suing class in May 2021, creating a thirty-onestep oversight process of legal and regulatory duties to ensure that the city would follow pre-existing Connecticut law. After a poisoning report, inspectors must come

to a child’s home within five days, armed with dust wipes and containers for water and soil samples, to send their findings to a laboratory. If lab results yield evidence of “dangerously hazardous” levels of lead, the city must notify every family living in the house, as well as the landlord, within another five days. After that, responsibilities lie with the landlords: they have forty-five days to begin an abatement. “The biggest change here is a determination to make sure that what is in the law actually happens,” Marx said in a press conference following the settlement.

But delays and the lack of language access persisted in Naz’s case.When the city received notice of Naz’s first positive test, in 2019, and again in 2020, inspectors attempted unsuccessfully to reach the Naqibzois to schedule a follow-up lead inspection. In February of 2020, a city inspector sent a letter to the family’s Howard Avenue address, asking why they had not responded to her queries. The letter was sent in English only, with Naz’s first name (her legal name) misspelled.

The family left Howard Avenue later that year, in September. Another city inspector, Joy Waldron-Clouden, located the Naqibzois at 18 Dewitt Street on November 5, 2020. According to a summary of her visit, Waldron-Clouden’s first training as a city inspector was less than three weeks beforehand. At the time, none of the families in the duplex spoke English.

On November 24, the Connecticut Department of Health emailed lab results from the visit to Waldron-Clouden and the director of the Health Department, Maritza Bond. Residual lead was present at “dangerously hazardous” levels, high enough to trigger THE NEW JOUR N AL

abatement, in two locations: in the stairwell, and the soil in the backyard. On the left side of the backyard, lead was found at concentrations of 1560 parts per million, well above the threshold of four hundred parts per million. At that level, the E.P.A. says, backyard soil isn’t fit for a home garden, let alone for a child under six to play in. (On the city’s copy of the lab results received on November 24, that lead amount is highlighted in bright yellow.)

After receiving the lab results, Waldron-Clouden didn’t file an inspection report until January 8, 2021, more than two months after her initial visit. That same day, she sent an order to Wade Beecher, a maintenance employee of Ocean Management, to wipe down dust in the stairwell, but did not mention soil contamination. At the end of the inspection summary form, she filled out the paperwork to conclude the case: Per section 19a-111-14(a) and 19a-111-2(e) of the Lead Poisoning Prevention and Control Regulations, a lead abatement is required for this property:

{ } YES { } NO

Waldron-Clouden marked a check by “NO,” and wrote her signature. The report was filed eighteen months after the city received Naz’s first positive test for lead poisoning.

After Beecher, the maintenance manager, claimed to have removed the lead dust in the stairwell, Waldron-Clouden re-inspected the house in June. “I have determined that the order letter to abate lead from this premise, data January 8, 2021, has been met with compliance,” she wrote. Temporarily, the case was closed. By the time health officials finally sent an order to Beecher to remove lead-conMAY 2022

children under six have high bloodlead levels (BLLs), 43.7 percent of refugees under six do—nearly one in two children. taminated soil in the Naqibzois’ backyard, on August 3, 2021, the city had known about the toxins present for over nine months.

In the same visit, Waldron-Clouden was required to attain a family signature, assuring the city that the Naqibzois had received an Educational Packet of Lead Poisoning Prevention. Amila signed her name in big, all-caps letters. Waldron-Clouden crossed out Amila’s signature and rewrote Amila’s name in her own lower-case handwriting.

I met the Naqibzois at 18 Dewitt Street for the first time in March, after Shahid had returned from school one day. Navid opened the door and invited me into the living room, where we sat on burgundy IKEA carpets under a framed plaque of the Shahada. Over tea, we spoke about the lead found in their home. I provided them with a copy of the city’s inspections, although Amila and Navid told me that the family was already looking for a new house to live in. “These little animals,” Navid said, pointing to the mice-infested walls and shaking his head. “We can’t sleep at night!”

Naz, who is now four, walked into the living room, wearing a dark-green dress with golden trimming. She was playing with a green balloon, and had shoulder-length curls. According to her parents, their daughter struggled with learning words well after

turning three, and she speaks far less than other children her age.

Sometimes, inexplicable outbursts led to fights with her father—even more so, her parents worried, than a typical four-year-old. Troubled, Amila and Navid returned to Yale New Haven Hospital for more follow-up appointments. “A year ago, we didn’t understand what she’s saying,” Navid said.

“Now, she is O.K.” Some doctors attributed Naz’s delayed speech to hearing problems or “oral-motor problems.” Her full range of symptoms, however, also closely resemble those of long-term lead poisoning victims.

I showed Amila the document where the inspector claimed to have acquired the family’s signature, eighteen months prior. She stared at me, uneasy. “That’s my handwriting,” she said, looking at the crossed-out name, “but I don’t know what that says.” Amila and Navid say that the inspector did not come with an interpreter. City documents show no record that one was present.

5.

Housing the Evacuees Compared to other housing assistance programs that receive federal funding, housing for resettled refugees is far less regulated— largely because their federal grants are not directly related to housing.

The “Lead-Safe Housing Rule,” which applies to Section 8 housing 29

an order to Beecher to remove leadcontaminated soil in the Naqibzois’ backyard, on August 3, 2021, the city had known about the toxins present for over nine months. and other programs funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), requires, among other things, that landlords offer tenants a ten-day window to conduct lead inspections in their prospective homes before signing a lease. Property owners must also disclose every “record and report” of lead contamination in federal public housing, according to the Housing Rule.

But refugee resettlement is not within HUD’s purview, even if housing is involved. Nonprofit “resettlement agencies,” under contract with the State Department, handle the U.S. refugee admissions program, which includes arranging housing for families when they arrive. Since these agencies’ funding is determined by the number of refugees they resettle, the Trump administration’s cuts to refugee admissions wrought long-lasting damage to their staffing and infrastructure.

By August last year, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan, and thousands of SIV applicants and “humanitarian parolees” sought refuge in the United States, the nine “voluntary agencies” that assist refugee resettlement had not fully recovered.

For New Haven’s resettlement agency, Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), the greatest hurdle was finding 30

affordable housing for refugees once they arrived, as rent is usually their greatest expense. Chris George, the executive director of IRIS, described the process as “a nightmare.” When George arrived as director, only one or two landlords in New Haven were willing to rent to refugee clients, most of whom possessed no credit history. In 2006, IRIS had taken the unprecedented step of co-signing refugee clients’ leases. “Most resettlement agencies would call us crazy,” George told me. Other agencies won’t risk the liability for paying their clients’ rent, but IRIS wanted to guarantee their housing security. George also said that, after Sara’s poisoning in 2018, the nonprofit decided to conduct lead inspections into any home where refugee clients with young children would be living, before those families arrived.

In practice, however, the pre-arrival inspection policy seems rarely implemented. I confirmed at least four cases of families who were placed in homes by refugee caseworkers, only to discover lead contamination afterward. One SIV holder living in The Hill, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that IRIS claimed to inspect his apartment before sending him there with his wife and three children in 2019. “[IRIS] said it was fine,” he insisted. The property in question was in poor

condition: in the first week, he noticed illegal utility tapping and incorrect metering in the basement. The house also had a long history of lead contamination, according to public records—three children were poisoned while living there, in 1999, 2002, and 2017.

His youngest daughter became the fourth child poisoned while living on the premises in 2020, after which an abatement was completed.

“I think nobody would care for such a family, an immigrant family,” he told me. He wanted to move, or file a complaint—but after searching for weeks, he couldn’t find another affordable place to live, or an attorney to represent him. Since he had lived in the States for over a year, and was working, he was no longer eligible for many refugee and rental assistance programs; the U.S. resettlement system considered him “self-sufficient.” “Everything is going well, except for housing, and the landlord. They make it dangerous for my children.” He had a guess as to why his family was mistreated by his landlord, an affiliate of Ocean Management: “[The landlord] knows we are immigrants, so they think we won’t complain.” This year, he began receiving legal aid services.

In another case, a former soldier in the Afghan army, whom I’ll refer to as Amir to protect his identity, arrived in the United States in November 2021, living in his uncle’s house until IRIS found a home that would be suitable for him, his wife, and his daughter, who was eight months old. His caseworker eventually found him a unit in a brick building with dusty windows and stained curtains, a stone’s throw away from the Yale Bowl.

After their move to the new THE NEW JOUR N AL

home in December, Amir’s daughter tested positive for high bloodlead levels. Just as in Naz’s case, the test triggered a legal duty for the city to inspect the property within five working days of the report. Internal city documents show that the Health Department did not inspect Amir’s apartment until February 9, 2022—almost two months after Amir’s daughter had tested positive. The reason for the delayed inspection, written on Health Department documents in neat cursive, was, once again, “language barriers.”

When Health Department inspectors arrived at the apartment, they found toxic amounts of lead paint at seventeen different locations, including within the family’s kitchen, living room, and bedroom. The report ordered the landlord to repaint the interior rooms and the building’s front porch, where lead on the doors and windows were sixteen times greater than the concentration deemed “hazardous.” In response, the landlord presented Amir with a document and asked him to sign it. “During time of construction, [Amir and his family are] going for a few days (3 days or more) to their relatives with his family,” the written agreement read. “During this time the managers will change the windows, paint the apartment.”

Amir agreed, and left for a few days in March.

Amir’s landlord made no mention of lead or hazardous health conditions in the agreement.

What’s more, the 2021 settlement requires that where lead paint is found in New Haven, children and their families must be relocated “at the expense of the property owner,” and not on their own dime, as Amir did. Amir told me that he guessed why his landlords removed the paint, after hearing MAY 2022

from his daughter’s pediatrician and reading educational materials sent by the Health Department. Had he depended solely on his landlord for information, he wouldn’t have known that lead paint was even present.

Amir and his family weren’t the only IRIS clients placed in a lead-contaminated property via a pre-arranged lease: his caseworker, Zaker Sultani, was resettled to one himself. In an earlier interview with me, Sultani confirmed that before he worked for IRIS, he had formerly lived at 18 Dewitt Street—the Naqibzois’ past property. Our conversation in February, 2022 was the first time he had heard about the toxic lead in his old backyard. His children, a fifteen-month-old and a four-yearold, regularly played in the soil behind the house, sometimes for two hours a day. “Ocean Management was very callous, very reckless,” Sultani told me. “From day one, the property was filled with mice.”

I could not confirm whether Amir’s or Sultani’s homes were tested for lead before they arrived, either by their landlord or IRIS. But the eventual discovery of lead contamination on those properties suggests that pre-arrival inspections did not occur.

Resettlement agencies like IRIS are required, as a condition of their federal funding, to ensure that refugees’ housing is “free of visible health and safety hazards and in good repair.” Their cooperative agreement with the State Department states, “no peeling or flaking interior paint” for dwellings built before 1978. “IRIS is stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Amy Marx, the NHLAA attorney, said. The organization is responsible for finding refugees housing, but it remains under-resourced,

and constrained by poor conditions that afflict most affordable units in New Haven.

When I arrived outside Amir’s building for the second time, hoping to speak with his property owner, a man of middle age in a gray pickup truck arrived. He got out of his car and stared at me icily.

I explained to him that I found the address and its lead paint inspection results from New Haven’s public records.

“Why do you all care about this?” he said. “They”—gesturing at the building, where Amir’s family lived—“had lead in them before they arrived. They came here from Mandy.” Mandy Management is another local landlord whose properties are frequently found with housing code violations. When I asked whether any tenants on the property had been informed of their rights while the landlord removed lead paint, as required by law, he said he did not care to answer.

“I shouldn’t be talking to you,” he said. “I’ll report you for trespassing!” He told me to leave.

One IRIS employee recounted the condition of a basement in one Mandy Management-owned apartment, which was being rented by refugee clients. It “would make you vomit,” he told me. There was “raw sewage, spilling onto a basement floor, attracting maggots, it was the result of ridiculously dumb plumbing.” Despite the risks of renting with Mandy or Ocean, the employee said, there are few alternatives for refugee clients, given the two firms’ dominating shares of affordable housing stock in New Haven. Multiple IRIS employees wished not to speak on the record for fear that Mandy and Ocean Management would retaliate by refusing to rent to future clients.

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Mandy, alongside Ocean Management, have been called “investor-landlords” in local press. “The pattern we see,” Marx said, “is that these landlords continue to neglect their properties.” ‘Investor-landlords’ partner with private-equity firms, who package landlords’ loans into mortgage-backed securities, then purchase formerly-owned properties with the extra credit and convert them to rental housing, largely in low-income neighborhoods. Ocean’s director, Shmuel Aizenberg, put 101 multi-family

homes on the city’s housing market as a $52 million package deal last month. This Monday, Aizenberg pleaded guilty to charges brought last October for fifteen housing code violations at three properties.

He paid a fine of $3,750.

A representative of Ocean Management told me in February that the company did not currently keep a maintenance agency. “We get Farnam Realty Group to outsource for us,” the representative told me. (As of April 30th, Farnam, a local brokerage firm, had severed

Shahid Naqibzoi poses for a portrait outside of his family’s home in New Haven, Connecticut, on Thursday, April 21, 2022.

ties with Ocean Management.)

When I inquired about Wade Beecher, the maintenance manager of 18 Dewitt Street, the representative informed me that as of January, Beecher was no longer an employee at Ocean Management.

In May, the representative said they could not comment on individual properties or ongoing legal cases.

6.

The Second Exile

By April of this year, the Naqibzois had moved to their third home since arriving in the United States, a recently-constructed, affordable-housing complex, still close to their children’s K-8 school. Amila and Navid successfully applied for a unit there. It is clean and safe and the rent was slightly cheaper.

Erin Nozetz, the Lead Task Force director, recalled asking a social worker with a poisoned client at the hospital about what could fix the lead contamination crisis: “She said, ‘if I could wave a wand, affordable housing.’” Median rent in New Haven has risen sharply, and getting off the waitlist for a Section 8 housing voucher, alongside about eighteen thousand others in line, can take seven to ten years. “Where do you go?” Nozetz asked.

I spoke with Alice Rosenthal, the director of Yale-New Haven Hospital’s medical-legal partnership, about the impact of the city’s lackluster prevention policies on vulnerable families. After I described the case of the Naqibzois to her, she was silent for a moment.

“That’s terrible,” she said. “You’re leaving a kid in a home that’s incredibly vulnerable to further permanent damage for their brain.

That’s egregious.” Yet accountability for affected families may

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prove elusive. Rosenthal explained that families who learn about lead contamination later, from a past apartment, have little to no hope for a successful lawsuit, especially if they cannot prove where their child was first poisoned.

Advocates hope that H.B. 5045, which passed the Connecticut House on May 3rd with the support of the governor, will tighten the state’s threshold of “actionable” lead levels in children to match the CDC’s newest standard, at 3.5 micrograms per deciliter. As the House debated the bill, New Haven’s leadership on lead since the settlement was cited as a positive. Mayor Justin Elicker has maintained a stricter standard for investigating lead cases since his election in 2020. But Connecticut is just the beginning—and legislation does not always imply enforcement. New Haven is an “improvement upon other cities,” Brown and Nozetz say. But these improvements haven’t met the needs of families like the Naqibzois.

Maritza Bond, the current director of New Haven’s Health Department and the person who received the Naqibzois’ case files by email, has also expressed support for the bill. She announced her candidacy for Connecticut Secretary of State last March. As she considered a run in September, 2021, Bond said, “I’ve led New Haveners through one of the worst moments in human history, while tackling long-standing, unanswered issues like lead poisoning in our infants and children.”

When Bond was hired as Director in January 2020, after leading Bridgeport’s Public Health department for three years, she made lead poisoning a major priority.

The reason so many lead abatements appear in public records at MAY 2022

all, some have argued, is because of Bond’s updated procedures, digital record-keeping, and newly hired lead inspectors—including Joy Waldron-Clouden. Even Amy Marx, who closely observed the city’s reforms after the class-action lawsuit, was impressed.

In July 2020, Bond blamed the city’s COVID-19 shutdown for delays in identifying young children with lead poisoning. From mid-March to early June, she told the New Haven Register, the Health Department received no new reports of high lead levels because “there was a delay in routine children’s care.” Naz’s case, however, began in November 2019, well before the shutdown. While the city’s first inspection delay in 2020 could conceivably be explained by the pandemic, the Health Department had lab evidence of her home’s contamination for months after in-person inspections and home visits resumed. Marx guesses that the delays were due to the “period of transition” for Mayor Elicker’s administration, which had to close an overload of lead poisoning cases left from the Harp administration.

Even so, the Naqibzois’ case is “totally unacceptable,” Marx said.

“But not unexpected.”

Rosenthal points to Massachusetts, where tenants must receive a property’s lead contamination history before signing a lease, or the District of Columbia, where inspectors have broader authority to assess any houses where children are living, as more preventive models for lead poisoning. “But that’s really it, across the country,” Rosenthal said. “Generally, we’re being very reactive.” Landlords, insurers, and the lead paint industry have successfully fought lawsuits and lobbied on the state and federal level against greater protections. In Connecticut, health departments

have even pushed back against the more stringent standards in H.B. 5045, protesting that it presents an undue burden on inspectors and officials. Rosenthal scoffed at that idea. “These are children—this is children’s development!” she said.

“I’m not even understanding why this is a conversation. How many kids do we have to poison before we take this seriously?”

*** Recently, I joined the Naqibzois as they broke the day’s fast at sundown. It was Ramadan, and Naz was preparing to start kindergarten the next fall at the school across the street. As we sat on long maroon couches, trading flatbread, dishes of beans with lemon, pakora fritters, and vegetable samosas, Navid described his past annual vacations to Afghanistan. Each time, he tried to bring a gift to the friend who had helped him with his SIV application in 2016. But with the Taliban’s takeover, the vacations are no longer possible, and his friend is still in the country. I asked whether the family had any way of contacting him, and Navid shook his head. “I can’t reach him. I don’t even have his email anymore.”

Amila and Navid were optimistic about their children’s new beginnings, but dispatches from Khost were difficult not to think about.

As foreign aid evaporated, and their friends reported “no salaries, no food, no money,” Navid tried to budget $550 each week and wire it to his parents in Afghanistan. He did not know whether to expect to see them again.

After dinner, Amila and Navid packed away the leftover flatbread for tomorrow’s 4 a.m. pre-sunrise meal. Shahid and his younger brother deciphered the paperwork required for Naz’s entry into kin33

dergarten while Amila started cutting red linens for her daughter to wear on her first days of school.

In the living room, as his sisters turned on a Bollywood movie, I talked to Shahid about his weekly routine. He attended an IRIS youth group after school on Fridays, in the church next to Yale’s Timothy Dwight College. He would start attending again, after Eid. Shahid remembered Eid last year. It was May 2021, and his friends took him to Lighthouse Point Park for a barbecue. The boys had hoped for an empty park, so that they could dance Attan along the boardwalk. Attan is a traditional Pashto dance, involving left-to-right pivots, careful steps, and twisting wrists. “There were Americans, and they were taking photos of us, they were recording us,” Shahid recalled. He didn’t like it, at all—the silent gaze of strangers made him feel self-conscious. The boys preferred to dance unseen, going out as late as 3 a.m. in the park to do so.

Shahid guessed the Americans “thought we were Arab, or from Turkey.”Eventually, the boys asked the onlookers not to post any of the photos they took, and his friends decided to post their own videos of Attan on TikTok, to claim the recordings for themselves.

In past years, the park had hosted the annual New Haven Lead Poisoning Awareness Picnic, the short-lived brainchild of former health director Paul Kowalski. “We’re trying to keep the issue alive,” Kowalski told the New Haven Register in 2018. At one picnic, Kowalski dismissed the lead-related lawsuits against the city as “lies and distortions.” The fair was discontinued when Kowalski resigned, in 2019, after he was named in Marx’s class action suit.

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Picnics featured a banner with a slogan used in lead awareness campaigns across the country: LEAD FREE IS BEST FOR ME! The message is no longer on display at Lighthouse Point Park.

But on the day Shahid visited with his friends in 2021, to remind their onlookers in the park who they were, he hung the tricolor banner of Afghanistan from the ceiling

of the park’s wooden pavilion— though today, the Taliban’s flag flies in Kabul. Wind buffeted the flag in the direction of the lighthouse, whipping bands of red, black, and green toward the sea.

The boys kept dancing Attan. ­—Tyler Jager is a senior in Silliman College.

ASIDE

REVEALING YOUR HAND

BY ABBEY KIM

In the last months of high school, I learned tarot with my best friend beneath the new spring sun. The key to tarot is cycles; each suit contains a patchwork of highs, lows, and hesitations. Her favorite card is the High Priestess—a powerfully intuitive woman draped in blue, ruled by the Moon—while I love the Sun and its emblazoned sunflowers, dancing baby, and new beginnings. Card by card, the summer unfolded in front of us.

Seeing the future did not stop it, and it’s been a year since we’ve last drawn out our fate together. Instead, I offered my services to a stranger I met on a convoluted campus tour in August. He drew nothing but cups, ruled by emotional and insightful water energy, and now we get dinner every Wednesday. I read cards for my suitemates, knowing little more than their names, and watched their personalities emerge in swirls of blues and greens. Now, I puzzle why my suitemate pulls the High Priestess again and again.

I ask strangers turned friends if the Fool sounds right, if they too have taken a leap of faith armed with hope alone. I buy cards for a new friend to teach them to read, to carry the Sun with me.

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MAY 2022

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POEMS

BY AWUOR ONGURU

SISAL i To weave a sisal basket one’s fingers must be nimble the way they touch necks or turn pages. They must be very dry. We will dye these baskets brown or leave them yellow. Whichever is easier for winnowing. A single stalk moves inwards, guided by a thousand. The wind moves around us like chewing. In a way, you are also my child, she says. You were also in my womb when I had her.

To be born means to take responsibility for whoever birthed you. This is what I am learning today. So I say, grandma, look at that dog rolling in the sand. So that we can laugh. And then laugh harder. ii Because I am my grandmother’s mother. and the mother of my great grandmother and of my mother and of myself.

I am the mother of my mother of my mother of my mother I am my mother.

Remember iii my therapist asks me who takes care of you. what? who takes care of you. what? iv Outside the weather sticks to skin like wet skin. Light reaches us like scattered flour. there were three of us.

It is easy to be lost.

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THE NEW JOUR N AL

LESSON i My father and I drive in silence. No sound but the grinding of the gears. A car as old as my resentment. He shifts for me. Then the sudden urge to hit metal to metal, sending the car skidding endlessly towards an end. Handling stick is like handling a woman so why couldn’t he be good to my mother. As if responding, the leather on the steering wheel begins to peel away. Black bits sticking to my hands. The neighbourhood we drive through is a place I’ve always wanted to grow up in: houses big enough to hide anything you want. Anywhere you want. The trees lining the road guide us into a dream of gentle suburbia, where someone tightly holds their child. She has not yet torn up the pages. A jaguar slinks by carrying someone’s father. I ask the trees what a metal box could do to erase the drift between generations. ii I sleep the dream of a sick person Between my dreams there are patches of darkness that vibrate to the pulse of whatever love song I heard last.

The black pulses are desperate.

There is a film called loving where all the people kiss for three minutes. my fists clench where their eyes meet.

I go out into the streets in the middle of the night.

Is loving in this tree? In the scent of a flower? In the stones of the stair? iii Yesterday we drilled seven holes in the wall trying to look for a place to hang my mosquito net.

So that I could have a place to rest.

The first hole was Thunder Road—I held you as you cried in the parking lot.

The second was the races. I still have the picture: me bald, you alive.

The third was an empty Josh Groban CD case stashed in between the car seats.

The fourth is a leather passport case.

The fifth hole is the frame of our picture at the races. It is made of cardboard, pink beads and playdough.

The sixth is the thing that holds up the frame, which is missing.

The seventh is when you came to our bake sale and made the other dads laugh by putting queen cakes on your head.

Today my only home is a P.O. Box.

MAY 2022

37

BODY POLITICS

BY SERENA LIN

Jovanni Cabanas navigates identity, embodiment, and a flawed drag performance scene.

T

eetering mountains of clothing filled the apartment. Here and there, I could identify patches of fabrics—neon polyester, black latex, rhinestone-encrusted fishnets, and crumpled tulle. A yellowing Singer sewing machine sat atop plastic IKEA drawers overflowing with costume jewelry. On a pile of clothing hangers in an open suitcase, a black cat perched.

Jovanni Cabanas, who uses they/them pronouns, considered themself in a flimsy mirror, their face illuminated by a ring light.

To their right was a lime green television tray packed with dusty jars of makeup brushes, stacks of eyeshadow palettes, and one can of Mango Loco Monster Energy Drink. Jovanni had secured their hair in place with a wig cap made from a cut nude stocking. It had a hole at the top, a tuft of dark curly

On the first Friday of every month, Partners Cafe in New Haven, Connecticut, hosts an XL Drag Show.

PHOTOS BY LUKAS FLIPPO DESIGN BY MEG BUZBEE

hair sprouting through. Jovanni, though six feet tall, has a gentle way of holding themself. Their shoulders slope downwards—the curve of their back a concave “C.” Jovanni unscrewed various makeup jars, laying out a selection of tools. They began by slicking back their eyebrows with a purple Elmer’s glue stick.

Jovanni is a drag queen. They were preparing for a performance at Partners, a gay club in New Haven. Their makeup routine took at least two hours, starting with three coats of a custard-like foundation. While waiting for each layer to dry, Jovanni fussed over my comfort. I assured them that I didn’t mind their cat Tux’s newfound interest in wrapping himself around my legs (he was a kitten, Jovanni explained), that I wasn’t cold with the window open (Jovanni was prone to overheating), that it was fine to leave a muted episode of Charmed on the television (it was a part of Jovanni’s preshow routine), and that I hadn’t minded the drive to Jovanni’s apartment in Hartford (they always got ready at home).

Jovanni performs under the drag name Xiomarie LaBeija (Xiomarie, I was told, uses she/ her pronouns). Xiomarie is a regular presence at certain clubs and restaurants throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts. She also performs at Pride parades, college LGBTQ events, charity fundraisers for queer advocacy groups, and once, a retirement home.

Xiomarie is not the thin, white drag queen you would expect to see on an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race, which has been criticized for forwarding conventional beauty standards. Jovanni, now in

40

their late twenties, is Afro-Latinx, gender nonbinary, and plus-sized (they sometimes refer to Xiomarie as “Xiomarie XL”). They told me that race and gender prejudices run rampant in the business, and it’s not easy to get opportunities when you don’t resemble the archetypical drag queen (thin and white). Drag, once a subculture forced to remain underground, has now come to resemble most other entertainment industries, luring people in with the promise of fame and money. Its proliferation is driven by mainstream programs like RuPaul, which purport to pluck queens out of obscurity and deliver them to the Met Gala or the pages of Vogue. This is the world that Jovanni exists within— one that promises a neoliberal color- and gender-blindness while chasing the approval of institutions that opened their doors only when they realized that drag sells.

ers” take in fledgling performers.

In a community where biological relationships may be strained, these family units provide necessary support. They also function as apprenticeships: older members train younger ones in presentation and performance. Jovanni learned how to vogue—a style of dance inspired by fashion model poses— from their drag mother. Their drag family was also an early and crucial source of queer solidarity.

It’s a tradition that Jovanni has carried on with their own drag daughters.

Drag families are also important because jobs aren’t easy to find, especially paid ones. Fledgling queens might be asked to perform for free drinks or “exposure.” More established queens will bring their drag daughters on as supporting

For Jovanni, though, drag was a calling. They spent most of their childhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut as “that fat gay boy.” At 18, they were introduced to drag at a small gay club in Bridgeport—the only of its kind at the time. Watching the performance, Jovanni had three thoughts in rapid succession: 1. I can totally do that.

2. I totally want to do that.

3. I’m totally going to do that.

There is a steep learning curve to drag. Before drag makeup tutorials became commonplace on YouTube, most queens learned their professions through mentors.

Many join “drag families,” where older members called “drag moth-

Xiomarie Labeija performs at a drag show at on April 1, 2022.

THE NEW JOUR N AL

acts, helping them find a foothold in the business. But even so, few drag queens make enough money to perform full-time. Jovanni has often had to work two or three jobs on top of performing. They recently got a full-time job as a caseworker at A Place to Nourish your Health, a Connecticut nonprofit that provides services for people impacted by HIV/AIDS, substance abuse, and mental illness.

money made. But tips are notoriously unreliable. Fewer and fewer people carry cash these days, and audiences that are new to drag may not understand tipping.

Jovanni has adapted by advertising their Venmo account before and after performances. They have also always been frugal—driving a fifteen-year-old car that doesn’t have heating and improvising drag outfits from discount Halloween stores.

In Connecticut and Massachusetts, established queens are usually paid a flat fee of one to two hundred dollars per performance.

These flat rates are barely enough to cover the cost of costumes, makeup, and transportation. Cash tips are what might make a performance “worth it” for Jovanni, in terms of money invested versus

So why do they continue to do drag? Jovanni is full of aphorisms like “representation matters” and “everyone is equal.” These phrases mean more coming from someone like Jovanni, who truly believes that seeing a drag queen (especially a plus-sized one of color) could change someone’s life. And why not? It changed theirs.

As Jovanni puts it, “The conversation changes once I perform. I don’t think you’ve ever seen someone who’s three hundred pounds do handstands while lip-syncing.” ♦♦♦

Partners Cafe in New Haven, Connecticut,

MAY 2022

Drag began as female impersonation. At one time, the success of a drag was judged on a cis man’s ability to pass convincingly as a cis woman. It was about creating a feminine silhouette—tucking genitalia up and away, padding the breasts and hips. It was about erasing masculine features from the face—softening a jaw, paring back the brows. Julian Eltinge, a female impersonator at the turn of the twentieth century, sold out shows and scored astonished reviews in major newspapers. Eltinge became something of a fashion icon to women, who flocked to his shows to take note of his stylish gowns and exquisite posture. Though

This is the world that Jovanni exists within—one that promises a neoliberal colorand genderblindness while chasing the approval of institutions that opened their doors only when they realized that drag sells. one is not necessarily indicative of the other, female impersonation has long been associated with homosexuality, so Eltinge had to work hard offstage to prove otherwise. He gave interviews about his upbringing on a farm and his interest in duck hunting.

Being perceived as gay was dangerous at the time. Police often raided gatherings where men reportedly dressed like women.

Attendees were arrested for “social vagrancy”—code for homosexuality. As historian Sharon Ullman puts it, the public has tended to “read sexual practice onto public gender presentation.”

Around the same time as Eltinge was on Broadway, the formerly enslaved William Dorsey Swann held secret cross-dressing balls for Washington, D.C.’s gay community. Swann took on great personal risk in throwing these par41

Leishla Thompson performs on stage at Partners Cafe in New Haven, Connecticut. ties, which were attended by other formerly enslaved Black men. He was arrested several times and sent to prison at least once. Writer Channing Gerard Joseph claims that, as the leader of his circle, Swann was known as the “queen of the drag”—“drag” being a portmanteau for “grand rag,” a term for a masquerade ball. This, Joseph argues, would make Swann the first known drag queen.

Swann makes a fitting predecessor to Harlem’s balls of the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties. These balls were almost entirely populated by Black and Brown members of the queer community, who gathered to compete in events evocative of beauty pageants. Sometimes the contests were judged on “realness”—the ability to pass convincingly as the aspirational 42

object, which could range from a businessman to a military officer, a gangster to a schoolgirl. Other times, contestants were judged on stylistic and dramatic flair.

lamé and donning black opera gloves, saunters down an improvised catwalk. Audience members fling their hands back in mockswoons.

Ballroom culture was immortalized by Jennie Livingston in her 1990 documentary Paris is Burning.

The film is credited with introducing the underground subculture to mainstream audiences, but it’s often overshadowed by the controversy surrounding Livingston, a queer, white Yale graduate who has been widely criticized for not compensating her subjects despite the film’s considerable profits. The documentary depicts the balls as raucous and joyous gatherings of a vulnerable community. The specter of poverty, homelessness, and the coming AIDS crisis looms large. Inside the ballroom, though, a queen, draped in billowing gold

Notably, the documentary also features “drag houses,” which is a grandiose way of describing a multigenerational drag family.

“House” is borrowed from the term for royal bloodlines, as in “of Windsor.” Belonging to a house allows you to claim an artistic lineage; the best houses can often trace their roots back to these Harlem balls. (Jovanni belongs to the House of LaBeija, which touts itself as the first drag house.)

Today, drag queens can be found performing anywhere from boozy brunches on the Upper East Side to children’s story times at public libraries. RuPaul’s Drag Race has won four Emmys and THE NEW JOUR N AL

inspired six spin-offs. As drag has found new audiences, it has also found new practitioners. Trans and cis women, as well as nonbinary people have established forms of drag. Drag has long been tied to public and private expressions of the queer self, whatever form that may take. ♦♦♦ In Hartford, Jovanni drew out the contour of their nose with an even hand. They left this unblended. They overlined their lips into a pink pout. As I watched them carve out the shadow of a cheekbone in a deep brown, Jovanni promised, “It’ll all come together.”

Drag is meant to be an exaggeration. Lashes are often inches long and thick as caterpillars.

Wigs are voluptuous and flowing. The point is to sell a fantasy, but not the fantasy of the ‘ideal woman,’ or at least not one you might imagine gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated or Cosmopolitan. Drag is femininity in the extreme, so extreme that it might defy femininity altogether. There is no illusion of realism. Drag is a satire of gender performance, asking, ‘what is gender anyways?’

she/her pronouns, and went by Xiomarie. It was easy to pass, but being Xiomarie all the time didn’t feel authentic. “I realized I needed to take her off,” Jovanni told me.

“I almost lost myself.”

The transition also stopped, in part, because Jovanni moved home with their mother. They grew up in a traditional Christian family, where church was a big part of everyday life. Jovanni’s mother believed that homosexuality was a sin and that Jovanni’s queer identity was a curse. Jovanni said, “For years, I’ve compromised my identity just to make sure that I wasn’t disappointing her.”

Early this year, Jovanni had a breakthrough with their mother.

During the last hour of a long drive back from Baltimore (where Jovanni had two very successful gigs), their mother called. Jovanni’s brother had always been supportive and, unbeknownst to Jovanni, had confronted their mother about her relationship with Jovanni. He knew that Jovanni’s strained relationship with their mother was preventing Jovanni from fully embracing their identity.

During this call, Jovanni finally told their mother about being nonbinary. They also told her about their career as a drag queen.

To Jovanni’s surprise, their mother was supportive.

“We were able to break down

Jovanni might know better than anyone. They’ve moved through a spectrum of gender identities— cis man, trans woman, nonbinary person. When they first entered the drag community, Jovanni thought they were a gay man trying out a new form of self-expression. Xiomarie, their drag alter ego, was just one facet of themselves. But Jovanni never felt quite at home in their masculinity.

At college and away from home for the first time, Jovanni started identifying as a trans woman.

They wore their hair long, used MAY 2022

43

boundaries and barriers that have been up for so long,” Jovanni told me, “And I was able to hear words that I’ve never thought—even in my dreams—I would hear.”

Jovanni felt that a burden had been shed, that they could finally be themselves in all facets of their life.

What does drag mean to someone who has struggled with expressing their queerness? It might seem odd that someone who has rejected the gender binary would come to embrace an art form that seems to be a performance of gender in the extreme.

This was a six-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound person executing a five-minute dance routine with the pep and stamina of a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

But as queer scholar Nick Cherryman writes, “Much of mainstream drag comes to represent another gender altogether removed from, yet integrally linked to, the social idea of the gender binary…The ‘drag queen gender’ [exists] in the queer-‘other.’” Drag isn’t easily categorized into male or female gender expression. It is a form of gender expression within itself. It has its own gender norms—expectations of social behavior, physical appearance, and sexual preferences. These norms are enforced, like most gender stereotypes, by both in- and out-group members.

In a subculture under much public scrutiny, the expectations may be more stringent.

Drag is a performance much like—à la Judith Butler—all gender is a performance. It’s a testament to Jovanni’s skill as a performer that I found it difficult to pinpoint the moment Jovanni became Xiomarie. I asked them if there is a particular moment when they feel themselves stepping into another identity. “When I have those lashes on,” Jovanni said, “honey,

Attendees of the XL Drag Show at Partners Cafe 44

you can’t tell me anything.” ♦♦♦ Jovanni and I parted ways at their apartment in Hartford, taking our own cars to the venue.

When I arrived at Partners in New Haven, it was Xiomarie I found.

She was in a makeshift dressing room in the dingy basement of the club, putting the final touches on her look. Xiomarie wore a tiedyed leotard with sewn-on yellow mesh sleeves, trimmed with large rhinestones. Paired with a flouncing and voluminous pink wig, it gave the effect of an nineteen-eighties aerobics instructor to the nth degree.

The club was packed, leaving little room between Xiomarie and her audience. The closeness made the physicality required for her routine all the more obvious.

When Xiomarie flung her leg into a perfect high kick or launched herself off the stage directly into a split, you could feel her movement through the air, hear the thud of her heeled boots against the floor.

This was a six-foot tall, threehundred-pound person executing a five-minute dance routine with the pep and stamina of a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. As promised, everything came together in the performance. The makeup was meant to be seen in movement.

Even from across the club, you could make out every lip-synced word and dramatic wink. The wig clung to place through each hair flip and somersault. (I later learned that Xiomarie had duct-taped the wig to her scalp.) Between the headstands and the triple axel, but before the closing death drop, Xiomarie had worked the crowd into a fervor. They jostled against each other to get a better view.

They cheered so hard their vodka THE NEW JOUR N AL

Drag removes the body from what it means or what it should be. The body just is. sodas splashed onto their neighbors. Those who had brought cash were frantically waving it, which Xiomarie collected with appropriate dramatic flair.

Drag is a fantasy that engages both the performer and the audience. There are meaningful comparisons to be made between drag and stripping, as queer scholar Sarah Hankins notes. Some queens, like strippers, create intimate and even erotic connections with audience members. There may be individualized attention, the allowance of some touch, or a privately shared smile. Like strippers, drag queens rely on cash tips and know how to get them. Like strippers, drag queens work in the medium of their body. There is the flourish of an arm, the swivel of a hip, the extension of a leg.

There is something sensual and heady about the performance and its proximity. You feel that, perhaps, you can share in the queen’s beauty.

By the end of Xiomarie’s set, the stage was littered with crumpled bills. The hostess, a drag queen in a red Jessica Rabbit dress named Kiki Luca, commanded “white twinks” in the audience to get on all fours and collect the money. In the tittering commotion, Xiomarie disappeared into the back of the club.

In the dressing room, I found Xiomarie draped over a velvet sofa, trying to catch her breath.

The other queens were either recovering from or preparing for their own performances. It looked like a beauty store had exploded.

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All over, there were open bottles of loose glitter, disembodied mannequin heads (for wigs), tins of translucent powder, and all sorts of serums and glues and creams.

Xiomarie seemed to be taking it all in—the cacophony of queens trading barbs and the din of the crowd upstairs, the soft blanket of cigarette smoke and hairspray settling over the room.

I was watching from my own corner, thinking about how drag returned the body to itself. Drag removes the body from what it means or what it should be. The body just is.

Back in the dressing room though, Jovanni had more important things to do than agonize over the phenomenology of it all.

There was only one hour between the first and second show and an entire costume change to execute.

Tape was readjusted, dresses shimmied off, wigs swapped, powder reapplied to every crevice.

After all, the show must go on.

—Serena Lin is a junior in Branford College.

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Wild Onions Rachel Shin

Though I dreamed of raising piglets, sugaring off sap, and hunkering down through fearsome Wisconsin winters, there were no such opportunities on

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our suburban Pennsylvanian homestead. My hometown, growing off the edges of a turnpike, offered little in the way of adventure. Gas stations, fast food joints, and supermarkets clustered around the pike like pins on a magnet, while lush plains fluttered in my daydreams. My imagination filled in some gaps: telephone wires transformed into clotheslines, and the new-growth dogwoods became bulging maples ready for sapping. I could not, however, conjure acres of crops, and my mother’s perennially empty soil bed saddened me. Our little brush-cut lawn was too neat. I told my father to stop cutting our grass so that it could billow freely in the wind. He responded that, thanks both to biology and our development’s landscaping regulations, our grass could never grow as tall as the grass on the prairie. It was forever fettered to a manicured existence. I could sympathize.

I told my father that there was not enough rugged glamor in this life for me, not enough mustangs or twenty-foot snowstorms. My Old Navy sweaters and khakis were suffocating me. I was born to be draped in calico and gingham.

My father—with his clean-shaven face and neat, professorial wardrobe—didn’t fit into my picture of a hardscrabble life on the American frontier, either.

Instead of reading books by the TV, I wanted him to grow a full beard and oil muskets by the fire. I wished that he would, just once, stave off wildcats in the night instead of shooing away rabbits from

THE NEW JOUR N AL

DESIGN BY SOPHIA ELIZALDE

In elementary school, I was a nightmare library patron. Every two weeks, I checked out one of the Little House on the Prairie books and thumbed through its chapters until my greasy fingerprints dappled each page like mud tracks on a kitchen floor. Each book in the series bears the marks of my affection—the chapter of By the Shores of Silver Lake where Mary goes blind is puckered with my dried tears, and Farmer Boy features a fissure down the spine marking the location of my favorite colt-breaking scene. I wanted to live in this world in which young girls are important, where their everyday chores are as big as the whole world. Laura had it all: she filled her days with the most exciting activities that were also a boon to her family. There were endless situations in which to exercise her creativity, her tenacity. Even her simplest tasks were full of charm, whether she was drizzling syrup into hard candies on the snow, or leading a spindly legged pony to the stream. Planting things, uprooting things. Quotidian magic shined in every corner of Laura’s life. I read and reread her accounts of discovering patches of wild blackberries and exploring fecund coves on the plains. Her adventures and her resourcefulness sparked a sense of longing in me. It seemed her life was suffused with all the novelty that mine lacked.

the bushes. I mistook his gentleness for a lack of necessary vigor. But in his own way, my father entertained my fantasy. One July morning, he showed me that there were wild onions growing sporadically in the empty lot behind our house. We crouched down, observing how the clay-toned soil threw the onions’ emerald sprigs into relief. My father knew that I would delight in any opportunity to forage, to act out the enterprising nature I so admired in Laura. He offered to pay me ten cents per onion (ludicrously generous by eighteen-seventies standards), and I jumped at the offer. Every day that July, I scavenged for wild onions in the back lot. That summer was particularly dry, and heat relentlessly chased away the clouds and morning dew, baking the dirt of the lot into a leathery citrine. Only the most hardy tufts of grass and weeds survived––and, surprisingly, so did many wild onions, which flourished in otherwise barren patches.

My eyes sharpened. Soon enough, I could detect the wild onions’ slender bristles from a distance, even through the glare of the midday sun. Spotting one always brought the thrill of finding a clever hideand-seek player. If these onions learned to tame their unruly cowlicks, I thought, they’d be imperceptible.

Upon finding an onion, I’d excise it carefully from the ground, never tugging its mane for fear of damaging my precious find. After trowelling around it, I’d remove it with a surrounding womb of earth, then finish by dusting it off with reverence. I always felt a little intoxicated by the sharp-sweet smell of a freshly unearthed onion fermenting in the heat.

Granular beads of juice dripped from the skin, accentuating its luster and making it sticky to the touch.

The bottom of the onion, where its slopes converged into a perfect point like the tip of a medieval helm, was my favorite.

My delight in finding onions never wavered. I imagined that the barren lot, home of my prairie fantasies, was once a rippling green plain now laid bare by a locust storm. And the miracles were believable: whenever it seemed I had exhausted the onion supply, I found that the weary earth somehow mustered the strength to graciously provide more.

One day, after harvesting a particularly bountiful crop, I squatted to detangle the onions’ knotted stems in the shade of the car in our driveway. Nearby was my mother’s small soil bed, which had been empty since she had attempted to cultivate basil there at the start of the summer. She planted the seeds and

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watered them diligently to no avail. Every day for a month, I watched her inspect the earth for signs of growth, but not even the smallest shoot emerged. I brushed it off. That, I thought, was life on the prairie.

Not every crop had the fortitude of my wild onions.

As I untwisted and arranged my onions into neat three-by-three columns, I saw my father walk out of the house and approach the empty bed. He didn’t see me behind the car as he poked around the soil, examining it with a gentle bobbing of the head. I was curious; I thought only my mother nursed the fantasy that something might still sprout there.

But my father knelt gingerly beside the dirt and revealed a small pot, which had been nestled in the crook of his arm. I craned forward, convinced I was witnessing something secret. He pulled a miniature trowel from his pocket and dug a hole in the graveyard of my mother’s basil seeds. Tenderly and slowly, he extracted a tiny sprout from his pot and transplanted it. He muddled the mulch around the sprout, disguising its true identity, and threw the pot into the trashcan in the garage before hurrying back inside.

I watched all of this so intently that I didn't realize my onions were frying on the pavement, their stems reduced to limp strings while their bulbs deflated like birthday balloons a week after the party.

I took them back to the empty lot and left them in a row for animals to eat. I didn’t want to disappoint my father with low-quality produce. From the lot, I looked over to my house and saw my parents come outside. My father pointed at the bed, and they both doubled over, inspecting what I knew was the newly transplanted sprout. My mother sprang up, and her delighted voice rang out as she thrust her arms into a triumphant V above her head. I laughed to myself, knowing what she never would. She thought that the growth of her basil was a miracle. I decided not to tell her. I was content to turn back to my work, glancing up to see her silhouette moving in the heat, arms outstretched in victory like the stems of a wild onion.

Only years later did I realize that the lot behind my house was completely barren after that summer—and that there were marks of my father’s affection that I didn’t see.

—Rachel Shin is a first-year in Silliman College.

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ASIDES

THE POPSICLES ARE MELTING AGAIN BY PAOLA SANTOS

CAR WINDOW

The Walgreens coolers aren’t cool. The hollowed-out stumps hug the Fanta-orange tulips (she loves tulips).

You’re scouting out perches, not-so-secret gardens, and benches if they’re free around noon. These unending days make you feel invincible, but also bring a tinge of nightly turbulence. Are you sun-kissed or is that sucker-punched feeling just a fever? You indulge in three-hour naps. You dream of Managuan rainstorms, but then remember what humidity does to your hair.

You miss the snow because it was new, but you like the trees because they are old. “They weren’t supposed to have flowers on them.” But they do. You’ve always liked generous seasoning, but you never quite understood the seasons like you did on Tuesday.

My mother let me sit in the front seat of her car when I was far too young to sit in the front seat of any car.

None of my friends were allowed to sit there. They all sat in the back and their mothers waited until they buckled their seatbelts before driving. My mother never reminded me to buckle my seatbelt, but I did anyway because I knew that kids were supposed to use seatbelts and the other mothers would look down on my mother if they found out I wasn’t.

It’s these big, little changes that grip you.

Your friend wears silver streaks in her hair, but she’s not graying—she’s just bored. It’s a blissful sort of restlessness. Dangerous, even.

You asked her for blue streaks in yours.

The sprouting of spring feels like the tinsel tied to your curls. It glimmers, it hides. It tucks behind your ears, and sometimes when they see it, strangers speak to you for no reason at all.

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BY RAFAELA KOTTOU

My mother always had the radio playing in her car: 100.5. I traced circles in the frost from the cold water vapor on the passenger seat window. My mother drove fast, her car chasing the street lights and the moon chasing us, and the radio playing “Hey There Delilah.”

What’s it like in New York City, he asked. I didn’t know what New York City was. I didn’t really want to know. I drew a tulip in the frost, bending my knees so that I was sitting like the ugly bird my mother once showed me in a science book. Tonight you look so pretty, he sang. I leaned my chin against the window and traced a butterfly, then covered the drawings with my thumb because I didn’t want anyone to see them.

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BIKE INSURANCE An enlightening bike ride with Yale professor (and expert cyclist) Jacob Hacker is eclipsed by questions of mortality.

BY YONATAN GREENBERG Where was it that I first heard the rumors? Was it a comment on a drive back from a bike race? A stray remark at a holiday party? I struggled to believe that one person could be so many things: a Yale professor, the architect of Obamacare, and the fastest cyclist in New Haven. Looking to separate truth from fiction, I set out to find the man.

I had started biking more seriously only during the pandemic. Hours of open road and blue skies served as a vital escape from the constraints of lockdown life. But the risks of the sport always weighed heavily upon me. Riding on the shoulders of car-filled roads, I thought often about what would happen if one of the cars swerved. Perhaps a ride with an expert in healthcare policy could help me figure out if the sport was really worth it.

On the same day that Obama visited the White House to mark the 12th anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, I met Jacob Hacker, Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science, outside his East Rock home. I could spot his neon-yellow gloves from two blocks away, the only spot of color on his otherwise all-black, skin-tight kit.

In his professional life, Hacker is most known for his work on social and public policy. Though he didn't create Obamacare, he did generate the idea for the public option, a government-created health insurance plan that would have functioned as an affordable alternative to options on the private market, though it never became law. Elsewhere in his work, he has written about how the U.S. government has transferred burdens and risks from corporations onto individuals and the working class in the post-Reagan years of anti-government politics. You might not guess it while watching Hacker cycle—in the groups he rides with, bikes are worth sums that others would not save in months—but concern for lower-income citizens permeates his writings. One of his books— MAY 2022

Jacob Hacker rides at the Tour of the Battenkill in Washington County, NY in 2011 (photo courtesy of Jacob Hacker).

Winner-Take-All-Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class— became a New York Times best-seller during the Occupy Wall Street protests.

After meeting at his house, we set off for Sleeping Giant State Park, a dozen or so miles from Yale’s campus, and the site of a weekly road ride that is notoriously brutal and fast. Hacker insisted he's not the fastest cyclist in the city today, but he is one of the fastest.

I had no hopes of keeping up with Hacker and his fellow racers once that ride began. So, as we rode up through East Rock and then north out of New Haven on our way to meet the group, I worked to get in as many questions as I could. More theoretical questions about, say, the neoliberal resonances of cycling tights, would have to be explored another time.

As our ride progressed, it became clear to me that Hacker is the closest thing to Rob Lowe's The West Wing character I could hope to meet in person. A three-time collegiate national cycling champion, he's a triple threat: a celebrated intellectual, a top-tier athlete, and, frankly, pretty handsome. On the day of our ride, even Hacker's salt-and-pepper stubble seemed to sparkle.

As Hacker and I dodged protruding sewer grates and made way for passing cars, I asked him about some of the darker aspects of the sport he has come to love.

I jumped straight in.

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"Have you had any friends get killed while cycling?"

At the heart of road biking, there's a bit of a paradox. If all goes well, you usually come back from your ride energized, relaxed, and more tolerant of the irritations of daily life. Exercise is understood to improve mental health, and if it's true of running on a treadmill, it's a good bet for biking as well. Whizzing through the countryside with little beneath you but a pair of wheels and nothing above you but the sky, life is better.

The risks of the sport, however, are hard to ignore.

More than eight hundred cyclists have been killed each year since 2015, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And though the odds of getting hit on any given ride might not be particularly high, it's little consolation as an eighteen-wheeler zooms past. Cars have passed me by little more than the length of the hair on my legs.

Hacker told me he hasn't had any friends killed in bike accidents, but he’s had some bad crashes of his own. A number of years ago, he was riding with a group from New Haven down Connecticut Route 17 when he struck debris in the road. Unable to react in time, he was catapulted headfirst into the road's side rail, and his face split open. The other riders in the group called 911 immediately, and he was rushed to a hospital where he received the care he needed. If they hadn't been present, things may not have worked out as well.

"I would probably be dead," Hacker said.

After the crash, he did not cycle for a long time, and he questioned whether the sport was really worth the

risks. I asked him what ultimately brought him back.

"The joy," he replied.

The shoulder narrowed, and he pulled ahead of me as we rode over a highway overpass. In the distance, the clustered trees of a nearby state park sat unmoving beneath the overcast, light gray afternoon sky. To our right, a pair of birds circled patiently in the air.

Moments later, a pair of cars took the opportunity to pass us. The noise of their engines growled in our ears from a few feet away, and my left-side peripheral vision was momentarily subsumed by a rush of black and gray, the colors of the cars driving past . A blend of suburban tedium, car-induced micro-terror, and pastoral ideal, it's typical of rides in the area.

We turned off Ridge Road and wound our way through a hilly neighborhood that sits between Hamden and North Haven. Feeling short of breath, I bracketed hopes for extended conversation and focused on keeping up. Hacker, ahead of me by a few bike lengths, had crested the section's final climb and began the descent. As I pushed my way to the top, Hacker tucked his forehead to his handlebars to minimize air resistance and sped down the hill. A driveway sat treacherously at the bottom of the hill, partially hidden by a curve in the road. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the thinking goes, a driver would look both ways before exiting the driveway. As for the one in a hundred? Hacker and I are lucky to have health insurance.

—Yonatan Greenberg is a junior in Saybrook College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

The Yale cycling team at Collegiate Nationals in 1998 (photo courtesy of Jacob Hacker).

DESIGN BY MEG BUZBEE

CROSSWORD BY JESSE GOODMAN

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