Issue 4 Spring 2020

TUFTS

OBSERVER ISSUE IV VOLUME CXL

table of contents w

EDITOR IN CHIEF: Owen Cheung

ART DIRECTOR: Laura Wolfe

MANAGING EDITOR: Myisha Majumder

LEAD ARTIST: Kelly Tan

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Abigail Barton

LEAD COPY EDITOR: Mira Dwyer

EDITORS: Rachel Dong Yumei Lin Ethan Lipson Brittany Regas Akbota Saudabayeva Evan Sciancalepore Cana Tagawa Siddhant Talwar Josie Wagner

STAFF WRITERS: Issay Matsumoto Myles Platt Sevie Browne Lee Romaker Aroha Mackay Rachel Carp

CREATIVE INSET: Brigid Cawley

DESIGNERS: Kate Bowers Janie Ingrassia Joanna Kleszczewski Richard Nakatsuka Sofia Pretell Brenna Trollinger

COPY EDITORS: Amanda Westlake Melanie Litwin Unnathy Nellutla Robyn Lee Addie Lovell Gloria Revanche MULTIMEDIA DIRECTORS: Maddie Oh Esther Tzau PUBLICITY DIRECTOR: Nasrin Lin PODCAST DIRECTORS: Ethan Lipson Arely Mancia EDITOR EMERITUS: Lena Novins-Montague CONTRIBUTORS: Kareal Amenumey Sofia Chon Anthony Davis-Pait Elaine Gao Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez Rabiya Ismail Priyanka Kadam Genki Kadomatsu Zoe Leaf Charlotte Mondale Julia Proshan Madison Reid Leonardo Ruiz Sanchez Karen Ruiz Juliana Vega del Castillo Juliette Wu

page 2 - Letters from the Editors page 6 - opinion

Food Pantry Future

by Kareal Amenumey, Abigail Barton, Zoe Leaf, and Charlotte Mondale

page 10 - opinion

Global Citizen vs. Étrangère: My Struggle with Coronavirus

by Elaine Gao

page 14 - news

The Hidden Exception to Mandatory Distancing

by Rabiya Ismail and Julia Proshan

page 16 - arts & culture

An Escape to New Horizons

by Lee Romaker

page 18 - creative inseet page 22 - voices

Disparate Worlds: A Return Home to Ecuador

by Juliana Vega del Castillo

page 23 - voices

A Few More Days in Peru

by Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez

page 26 - news

Coming Together Amidst COVID-19

by Aroha Mackay

page 28 - voices

Should I want to explain feminism to the men in my life?

by Priyanka Kadam

Page 30 - opinion

Liberation as Sunbeams on my Skin

by Sonya Bhatia

Page 32 - poetry Early Spring

by Madison Reid

Page 34 - Voices

Panic! at the (CVS) Disco

by Cana Tagawa

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

I was recently reminded of the relief I felt when I discovered the Tufts Observer freshman year. The other day, I was moving into a new apartment, stressed out of my mind, all because I had to move one very large couch through a very, very narrow door. For days before the move, I was absolutely convinced that the couch was simply not compatible with my door frame—that the couch would never reach its new home in my apartment. I know, it was such a small thing to worry about in retrospect, and it did (eventually!) fit through the door, but that couch was where I decided to place my anxiety. Freshman year, I had placed that brackish nervousness in the emptiness I felt not having found a community at Tufts in my first semester.

I was reflecting on this recent moment I had—moving a couch into my new apartment—and was confused about why this vastly different moment in my life reminded me of the relief I felt joining the Observer. I realized, of course, that it was that same sense of relief and joy that I found in succeeding with the couch that I had felt finding a home in the Observer. These were both moments of anxiety for me, but it’s the joy from these experiences that I remember the most.

Upon reflection, I might categorize another recent experience in the same way. The budgeting process for the Observer this semester has felt, at times, aggravating and disheartening as I am scared of the challenges our magazine will face. Yet, I also feel joyous in that I have seen the passion people have for the Observer.

While the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate has voted to increase the budgets for most student groups, publications have faced continued budget cuts in the past few years. This has forced every printed publication at Tufts to reduce its costs. During the process, this is what the TCU Treasury told us: that the budget cuts are to reduce the number of printed magazines that students at Tufts can create, encouraging a transition to an online format. The only feasible way we at the Observer have been able to deal with these cuts is by printing fewer copies of our magazine.

TCU Treasury told us that funding printed magazines would contradict student senators’ commitment to sustainability, and TCU Senate would likely not feel comfortable voting for such budgets. At the Observer, we believe in the importance of environmental sustainability and it is a common focus of our work. The Observer, and many other publications, also serves as an outlet to amplify marginalized voices. I firmly believe that ending printed student publications at Tufts would only marginally improve the University’s environmental impact at the grand expense of student voices, artwork, and activism, whereas broader solutions such as divestment would have far greater impacts.

I hold this to be true because the paper that we print on is important. If these budget cuts continue, in just a few years, we will not be able to print our magazine. This is harmful to the Observer’s mission, and to the people whose time and energy are poured into creating the words and artwork that appear on our pages. Without hard copies of our magazine, we would lose the readers who pick up our magazine on their way to class. We would lose the ability to create a physical connection between the viewer and our art. Our issues would no longer exist as cohesive units—with articles and design that speak to one another. Our artists and designers and writers and editors would lose the physical product of their labor.

We have our own website and we publish our magazine digitally, but the paper honors our work and tells stories in ways that do not translate the same on the screen.

My point is that this magazine has meaning to a great deal of people. The Observer is for the freshman who comes up to me and says that picking up a copy of the Observer in Dowling Hall is the reason why they came to Tufts. It’s for the faculty members who risk institutional retribution for speaking to us. It’s for the artists and writers, whose imaginations complete our pages and make them burst with color—whose work makes us feel ire and pride and sorrow and hope. It’s also for the other student publications at Tufts, who also face these budget cuts. I have so much love and admiration for each of these publications, and the talented students who pour their hearts into their magazines. Thank you to all of you.

And to Abigail and Myisha, thank you for taking on the ups and downs of this tumultuous journey with me.

Lastly, thank you to the Observer itself, for giving me late nights when all I could hear was the whirring of the air conditioning. I loved staring at sparkling screens with dry, blurry eyes, wanting to crawl into bed and wake up to remember what we created the night before. The comments on Google Docs, the friends I have made, and each magazine I have ever saved in the box under my bed will always be in my heart.

As our magazine continues onward, I have found solace, just as I did when I miraculously fit that couch through my doorway. The continuing cuts to our budget by TCU Treasury and Senate are a threat to our mission to raise marginalized voices and hold institutions of power accountable, but I am confident that the Observer will persist. I believe in all of you who make the Observer the wondrous vehicle of celebration, accountability, and change that it is.

Sincerely,

Owen Cheung Editor in Chief 2 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7, 2020

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 3

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

4 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7, 2020

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

I’ve been thinking a lot about the last time we were in the MAB Lab, our little cramped attic in Curtis Hall where we do layout, which entails designing the pages of the magazine and preparing articles for print, every other week from 9 p.m. until whenever we’re done. It was about an hour after we had all received the email that cancelled the rest of the semester, and we had made the difficult decision to postpone the issue we were supposed to be completing that night. Many of us showed up to layout anyways, in shock and in tears, eating dinner, and laughing. It felt like layout always does: chaotic, a little sweaty, yet somehow grounding. When everyone trickled out, it was just Owen, Myisha, and me left. We sat in silence for the longest time looking around at this special space, littered with memories of Observers past like forgotten Polaroids, art from old issues on the wall, little notes that have lost context, a few used solo cups. The night before I had begun to clean the space as it badly needed it, but while I was soaking in my last moments as Creative Director in the flesh, I loved all the MAB trash more than ever. It is a place of memories! A place where important things are occurring and have occurred! We said goodbye to it with a sigh, some tears, and a managing board selfie according to our tradition.

I’m so grateful for all the early mornings this year when we’d leave the MAB. We’d text each other the whole walk home about how we accomplished yet another issue. Despite having stayed up all night, I was often filled with such a rush that I couldn’t fall asleep. For our first issue of fall semester, we left late enough to see the sunrise that delightfully dipped the world in a honey glow. I took pictures of the trees on my street and felt so excited for what we had created, and for what was to come.

I wish I knew that my last physical issue was in fact the last one. It feels weird to have not been sentimental while creating the cover. So many of my goodbyes this semester, to people and places and this stage of my life, have been equally disorienting. So I’ve been thinking a lot about the rituals I have experienced and that have been special to me.

This sunrise after the first layout comes to mind a lot, along with other moments on the Observer. Paper plate awards, learning I would be photo editor, seeing my first layout in print freshman fall…

The Observer has and always will be Tufts to me. I picked up a copy at Jumbo days and knew it was what I wanted to be a part of. It’s so crazy to think that five years later I’m writing a letter as the Creative Director of that same publication. I’ve learned and grown because of the Observer, accompanying the Observer in its own growth all the while.

I have heard the murmur of conversations across campus on Monday mornings when issues are released. The Tufts community has been challenged, students have organized, and the administration has been called to respond because of pieces that the Observer has published. Other ripples have been felt more quietly as front covers hanging on walls long after their release or the resonance with a Voices piece or poem.

I want to thank everyone on the O and tell them that I love them. To Myisha and Owen for their commitment and leadership. It is crazy to think we didn’t know each other very well before this. I’ve learned so much from you and I miss you. To Lena for being EIC last semester and making all the long nights enjoyable with company and food. To Erica who is calm and I think shares my way of seeing the world. To all the designers who work so hard and make me so happy every layout with their spunk and arguments over the pronunciation of Behance. The magazine is in extremely capable and smart hands, and I cannot wait to see how it grows in the future. You all are amazing.

It’s my last week in Somerville as I write this, and I’m thinking a lot about how sounds and smells are especially potent these days, visceral and often unexpected vessels of all that I have experienced and that I carry with me. One of these sounds is the incessant walk sign beeping at the intersection in front of Curtis. Every time I walk past it, I am instantly transported to an Observer layout. If you know, you know. How lucky I am!

So much love,

Abigail Barton Creative Director P.S. These memories and rituals require a printed magazine. Tufts should divest from fossil fuels instead of cutting physical publications.

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 5

FEATURE

FOOD PANTRY FUTURE: How Students Have Mobilized to Address Food Access Concerns for the Tufts Community

By Kareal Amenumey, Abigail Barton, Zoe Leaf, and Charlotte Mondale

W

hen Tufts students received the email announcing that classes would be online for the remainder of the semester, the community was thrown into a sea of unknowns. For some students, the announcement brought difficult questions like “Where will I live?” or “How will I get my next meal?”

While the COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated the severity and urgency of these uncertainties, a portion of the Tufts campus is certainly not experiencing them for the first time. One long-standing uncertainty is a consistent and reliable access to food, or food security. While this is certainly an unprecedented time, these uncertainties, such as food insecurity, have affected students on campus long before the COVID-19 crisis. For the majority of students at Tufts, it is hard to imagine that food insecurity exists in higher education, let alone on our own campus. One reason for this collective misperception is that food insecurity is inherently a nebulous problem; it’s lodged in different issues including socioeconomic status, housing, and job insecurity, among others. The rapidity of Tufts’s deadline to leave campus not only left students and staff feeling frenzied but also quickly revealed how these issues might now be exacerbated, along with how pressing food insecurity is to our community. This prompted a coalition of actors to respond by creating the Tufts Community Food Pantry (TCP).

6 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7, 2020

ART BY KELLY TAN

OPINION

The TCP is an ongoing, collaborative effort between Tufts Food Rescue Collaborative (TFRC) and Tufts Mutual Aid (TMA), with support from the Tufts identity-based centers, Dining Services, the Graduate Student Council, and the Office of Sustainability. The project began as an effort to provide food and personal care supplies for students, particularly low-income students impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak. Madeleine Clarke, one of the leading TFRC coordinators, noted that the pantry “is serving as a powerful reminder of the vital role that collaboration and dedication—as well as love and community— play in this sort of immediate, relief work.”

The TCP Story The community pantry effort was borne out of the realization that students evacuating the undergraduate campus and the Medford/Somerville area would likely have groceries and pantry goods that would potentially be wasted. Instead of throwing out food in the chaos of moveout, these essential goods could be used to support community members in the form of donations to a food pantry.

From the Office of Sustainability move-out stations alone, 936 pounds of non-perishable food were collected, not including other donations. TFRC and partners’ priority in this situation is to support the Tufts University students whose food security status is impacted by this crisis. The pantry is currently being used by undergraduate and graduate students, as well as staff members.

This effort would not have been possible without the commitment of TFRC collaborators in supporting students through this unprecedented time. It has been incredible to see how quickly and passionately TFRC and our partners have mobilized to help create the community food pantry.

Members of TMA and TFRC connected to link the multiple student support efforts happening in light of the COVID-19 crisis.

TFRC is a two-pronged student-led organization that coordinates food rescues from dining halls through the “Family Meals” program, and rescues groceries DESIGN BY KATE BOWERS

from local grocery stores for community partner-organizations through the Leonard Carmichael Society “Van Rescue” branch. The TFRC coordinators—Morgan Berman, Kareal Amenumey, Yas Salon, Alexandra Wolf, Leslie Spencer and Madeleine Clarke—work intimately with issues of food insecurity in the surrounding community and were concerned about the impacts of campus shutdown on food insecurity among undergraduate students at Tufts.

It is important to recognize and appropriately credit the student interns at the Asian American Center (AAC) who spearheaded their own pantry in the center before the Community Pantry was fully operational. Shortly after Tufts University announced campus closure, TFRC coordinators connected with the AAC and other identity-based centers to create additional food and supply drop-off donation locations at the Women’s Center and FIRST Resource Center. FIRST provides support for low-income, first-generation, and undocumented students at Tufts.

Later, when it was announced that the identity-based centers would close, student leaders coordinated with various campus staff and faculty members to establish a central, accessible location on campus where students could continue to access pantry goods and refrigerated foods.

Joe Golia, Director of the Office of Campus Life, worked with student leaders to set up what is now the Tufts Com-

munity Food Pantry in the Mayer Campus Center Room 012. The TCP is open Monday–Friday between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. Student leaders involved in this project have partnered with the Tufts Graduate School Council to keep the pantry stocked and are also accepting donations from Tufts community members.

Defining and Addressing Food Insecurity College food insecurity has become a popular news topic, with articles in publications like the Washington Post and New York Times. These articles have made their way into everyday conversations, prompting creative approaches to mitigating the issue of campus food insecurity. College campuses across the country such as Iowa State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Oberlin College have implemented permanent food pantries, often run through their FIRST-equivalent centers, for students to “buy” food for free. It is possible that FIRST-equivalent centers have spearheaded this work because these organizations tend to be closer to the issues at hand, and more in touch with the students who are most likely to experience food insecurity.

In fact, there are a number of wellestablished guides on the Internet which walk students through how to start a food pantry or food bank on their campus.

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 7

OPINION

“While the Tufts administration might claim to celebrate diversity by admitting low-income and marginalized students... the university is not exempt from the interacting and unjust systems that perpetuate food insecurity.”

Most college food rescues source their food through partnering with food rescue programs and gleaning leftover items from dining halls, grocery stores, and restaurants in the community.

Acknowledging that food insecurity encompasses an array of issues, we are operating with the definition that food insecurity is one’s lack of consistent access to a variety of nutritious and desirable food.

While the Tufts administration might claim to celebrate diversity by admitting low-income and marginalized students—sometimes even providing full meal plans and housing for students—the university is not exempt from the interacting and unjust systems that perpetuate food insecurity.

Students do face food insecurity here for a number of reasons: though food insecurity is understood to be rooted in poverty, there are many other barriers including lacking a kitchen, time to cook, knowledge

of cooking, or money to buy groceries that limit one’s consistent access to nutritious, affordable food.

Efforts to ameliorate the problem of food insecurity have been made by student organizations, identity-based centers and by Dining Services programs. For example, Dining Services, TCU Senate, and the FIRST Center collaborated to establish Swipe It Forward, “to provide a platform for students to donate their meal swipes to other students in order to alleviate ongoing food insecurity on campus” (Tufts Student Life).

These efforts have alleviated some of the burden of food insecurity but are ultimately imperfect and impermanent.

Greater institutional support from Tufts could prevent food insecurity and eliminate altogether the need for programs like Swipe It Forward.

The term “Food bank” refers to a warehouse where food is inventoried and then distributed to local soup kitchens and food pantries; whereas food pantries are smaller grocery centers that distribute food directly to those in need.

While these food pantries provide great utility to students who rely on them to feed themselves, they are “band-aid” solutions that do not address the core issue of students’ food insecurity. In their conception, food banks and pantries are intended to be short-term measures used in times of emergency, while longer-term solutions are being devised.

Unfortunately, these pantries have taken on undue responsibility as they are often considered to be an acceptable and complete response to hunger and food insecurity. In a systematic review of the role

of food banks in addressing food insecurity, Australian public health experts found that while “food banks play a major role in the food aid sector…they are limited in their capacity to improve overall food security.” Although food pantries temporarily and critically alleviate hunger for those who are able to access services, they do not address the systemic injustices that cause food insecurity and ultimately allow these injustices to perpetuate.

Already, organizations such as Foodlink, in upstate New York, haved shifted from simply focusing on food to addressing poverty, “to nourish this community by nourishing the economy and the individuals in it,” according to Julia Tedesco, executive director of Foodlink. This shift should be mirrored in systemic, nationwide efforts.

The Future of the TCP and Food Insecurity at Tufts The TCP, then, is currently a perfect example of what a food pantry should be: it was established to address the immediate needs of students experiencing unexpected or exacerbated food insecurity. However, to conclude that a permanent food pantry is the answer to campus food insecurity ignores the variety of additional structural approaches that need to be taken by the Tufts administration in the effort to more substantively address the issue.

If only provided with a reactive measure, rather than protective, food insecurity will continue to exist, even with a cam-

8 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7, 2020

OPINION

pus food pantry. Additionally, sustaining campus food pantries over long periods of time yields particular challenges. These challenges include: identifying what products students need most; maintaining a relationship with a food bank to source food; relying on the donations of community partners to stock the food pantry, which is unsustainable; obtaining and renewing a food vendor license and adhering to state vendor guidelines; and determining campus logistics regarding funding, space, and volunteer recruitment. Students and staff should not have to rely on the aid of other students, staff, and community members, such as in the case of the food pantry, rather than institutional support from Tufts.

There is also a critical social and emotional component to accessing a food pantry on campus. These spaces are often stigmatized, and efforts to destigmatize the use of the pantry as well as to ensure the privacy of students accessing it would be a necessary and significant undertaking, particularly on a campus where students are in constant close proximity.

There are a number of other approaches schools have adopted to address students’ needs more holistically. Many schools hold regular communal meals through affiliation centers which encourage students to come together for free meals. While this strategy is beneficial for bolstering a sense of community through family-style meals, the irregularity of these meals makes it an unreliable option for students facing daily food insecurity.

Cornell, among other schools, has a low-cost, student-run grocery store available to all students, with subsidized discounts available for eligible students. This system provides employment to students who manage the store and removes some of the stigma surrounding obtaining free food from a pantry.

Some solutions have been explored in theory, but not implemented on a large scale for cost and bureaucratic reasons. For example, colleges could keep dining halls open over all school breaks to allow students with meal plans to continue to access food. Tufts Dining has continued to provide for students during this time of crisis; perhaps this can serve as a model for operating on a reduced scale for students who remain on campus during breaks.

In collaboration with others, experts from Young Invincibles, a youth advocacy organization, have researched a large-scale proposal to extend SNAP to cover students so that those eligible could purchase food from local establishments that accept SNAP. As it stands, it is very difficult to qualify for government-subsidized food discounts. Students facing food insecurity are stuck between a rock and a hard place: The government does not support them on the premise that schools provide for them, while schools fail to create the infrastructure needed to adequately provide for these students.

The COVID-19 crisis has provided the perfect opportunity to address the issue of food insecurity on the Tufts campus.

While this collaborative effort and the con-

tinued use of the pantry are demonstrative of the power of student-led and partnerled efforts at Tufts, it also reveals a lack of comprehensive institutional policy around food insecurity. Tufts should implement more sustainable, interdepartmental, and Tufts-specific measures to prevent food insecurity and support students who are potentially likely to experience it. Time will tell if the food pantry being used as a measure in the meantime becomes part of the permanent support system on campus, and if Tufts is able to implement a more comprehensive policy addressing food security, recognizing that a food pantry is not necessarily the most suitable solution.

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 9

FEATURE OPINION

GLOBAL CITIZEN vs. ÉTRANGÈRE MY STRUGGLE with CORONAVIRUS

By Elaine Gao

part I.

I

t has always been absurd how people can stay completely unaware about their imminent change of fate. The day before Paris turned into an empty city, I was casually enjoying a five-course French meal with L in a nice little place in St. Germaindes-Prés. When the duck confit arrived at the table, L mentioned that the number of coronavirus cases in France rose to over 400 today. I said yeah, holding a duck leg, the Tufts in Madrid program just got cancelled an hour ago, and continued gnawing on the bone. As night came, young Parisian people filled the street. When the waiter brought the next dish, my phone vibrated once, and then started shaking crazily with new messages.

An evacuation email came from Tufts, saying that, in order to remain in the Tufts in Paris program, students must return to their country of origin before March 17th.

I looked at the date: March 11th. I had six days.

As an international student from Shanghai, I was aware of the chaotic situation unfolding in China: Although the number of corona patients was drastically declining, the quarantine policies were only getting stricter. The Chinese government, after just managing to contain the first wave of spread, was doing everything they could to stop foreign cases from pouring in. The country was traumatized by the sudden outbreak. People paid the 10 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7, 2020

price in tears, blood and life. And now, after exhausting its financial power and manpower, China wanted nothing but security. However, as the situation in the US and in Europe was getting out of hand, lots of Chinese citizens abroad were trying to return. Airports and hospitals were overpopulated by potential coronavirus carriers, and airlines were cancelling flights out of the fear of cross-infection on flights.

Flight prices were sky high and ran the risk of cancellation and cross-infection, not even to mention the mental fear and the physical hardship of not eating, drinking or taking off the mask while traveling.

“Now might be the worst time to return to China,” a friend texted me after just returning to Shanghai.

“How many returned today?” I asked innocently.

“Twenty thousand. Airports and hospitals did not expect so many people returning from abroad. They want to make sure every potential carrier is quarantined to avoid the second wave of spread. But there isn’t enough staff to handle us. I’ve been stuck in the fever ward with a group of forty other people for over ten hours now.”

“None of us dared to take off the mask to eat or drink,” she added.

“Stay safe.” I did not know what else to say.

“Wait for another week to return,” she suggested.

“Hopefully they will figure it out by then. It all happens too fast.”

L finished his duck confit, saying, “You should not return now. I’m worried.”

I opened my phone to read all the messages from other students in my program. They were all disappointed and anxious about the change of situation, but no one seemed to be facing the same difficulties as me. I realized that I was the only person in this program who would have major problems returning home.

“I don’t think that Tufts took the situation of Chinese international students into consideration when they made this evacuation policy,” I said to L. “Yeah, you are the absolute minority in this program.”

L thought for a while. “So is Tufts saying that you will be expelled from the program if you don’t return to China in five days? Like, can you go to the US or other countries where you have family?”

“I don’t know.”

“If so, It’s like a threat, almost. Either go back to China or get expelled.”

“Plus, if you want to go back to the US, you will have to be quick. The US border will close in two days—” L looked at my face and did not continue.

We left the restaurant without eating the last course of the meal.

FEATURE OPINION

———— I made lots of phone calls to Tufts Medford that day, but no one from the Global Education Program picked up.

The second day, Senior Director of the Global Education Office, Mala Ghosh, responded to my email by saying that: 1) Tufts denies my request to stay in Paris after the 17th, and 2) Tufts also denies the option for me to return to Medford, without explaining why.

I went to see the local program director, J, in her office to explain why Tufts’ evacuation policy was not reasonable for Chinese students.

I talked about the risk of China’s strict quarantine policies, the mandatory health check, the risk of being cross-infected in the airport and hospital and the quick change of policies every day.

The second I opened my mouth; J turned her face away.

“Elaine, I did not make Tufts’ policy.

My boss did. There is nothing I can do.”

“Can you give me the contact information of your boss?”

“I don’t have their phone numbers.”

“I emailed every possible person. No response at all. I called every number. No one picked up besides interns.”

J went on to explain how this is not her responsibility and she couldn’t help me at all.

I said, “Would you please let your boss know that this policy is unreasonable and life-risking for me?”

“Please,” I started sobbing out of embarrassment and helplessness, “All I need is another week.”

She opened her palms and laid them at me, as if I was being so ridiculous.

“Can I ask your boss if I am allowed to return to my family members living in other countries that are not China?”

“You can try. But I don’t think Medford’s decision will change.”

“Can you please help me— “ “Elaine,” J said in a harsh tone. “If you are not in China by the 17th, you cannot stay in our program. I will have to remove you.”

I looked at J, this middle-aged Parisian woman, her brows furrowed and eyes wide open out of annoyance, and suddenly realized that she will never help me. There DESIGN BY RICHARD NAKATSUKA

was a conflict of interest: She wanted to keep her job, but that was at the expense of me risking my life.

On my way back to Rive Gauche, I walked down the same streets as usual, and realized that Champs-Elysées, the Parisian avenue as famous as the Fifth Avenue to the American, was emptied out. Paris stayed pale and dead silent from ChampsElysées all the way to Arc de Triomphe.

Nothing was leading to triumph.

———— The next night, I emailed President Monaco about my situation. A friend suggested so.

“Fight for it,” he said. “Don’t let them decide your life.”

I sounded so aggressive in the email that I barely recognized myself. Magically, the second day after I sent the email to President Monaco, Mala reached out to me on the phone. However, I soon realized that instead of helping me, she was merely calling to justify the lack of communication. After hearing about the risks involved in returning to China, Mala paused for a second and asked, “Why didn’t you return to Medford?

Did you read our emails closely? You could have applied for on campus housing.”

“You sent me an email days ago saying that option was denied.” Mala clearly couldn’t remember what she sent to me.

“Why didn’t you go to Japan to stay with your other family members?”

“Because I was told that I can only return to China, otherwise I will be expelled.” I was so surprised that Mala did not remember any of the things J told me.

There either was a severe lack of communication, or she purposefully chose not to remember.

Mala went on justifying why Tufts could not respond to me for three days while posing more questions I had already previously addressed. I stood on an empty street near a couple closed bars, rubbing my hands together to stay warm. Whenever I tried to say something, Mala always found a way to interrupt.

“Mala, you are calling to help me. But this isn’t helpful for me at all.”

“But Elaine, this is helpful for me. At least I’m more familiar with the situation now that my questions are answered.”

“I’m glad at least one of us is getting helped then.”

Mala was silent for a while, “How about we get you back on campus in Medford?”

“But the US border is closed now. I’m neither a citizen nor a green card holder.

And plus, I don’t want—” “I’m asking now to see if you can return from the UK. Tufts will pay for your flights. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

The call ended. I wanted to tell her that I was fine going back to China. All I needed was a couple more days for my parents to arrange things in Shanghai for the quarantine. Not until this moment had I realized how much I missed my parents, and my friends. Within the last two days all my friends in this city were gone. They all went home safely. Paris is no longer the city it used to be. Cases rose over 2000 in one day. And I was stuck here, all alone.

———— The next day I went to J’s office again.

She used the money in her work account and bought me a one-stop flight to Shanghai connecting in Frankfurt. When I was about to leave the office, J looked at me and said in French, “Elaine, thank you for making this choice that works for us. I’m sorry your experience in Paris ended in such a way but did you have fun before things fell apart?”

I said yes—I had lots of fun. I looked at J again, probably the last time. The wrinkles on her face and her familiar voice reminded me about all the good times. She’s only a human, trying to do her job. Maybe she was not very professional dealing with the crisis, but she did care about me, as much as her job allowed her.

On my way home, I again passed by Montparnasse, the famous French district written by generations and generations of American expatriates. This once frenetic place, where poverty was even a luxury, went dormant. It lost all its glamour now.

The bright neon signs were grey and there was no more Brett Ashely to be found. I looked up to the sky. It was a cloudy day.

The Chinese always say that above the clouds, there would be a new sky.

I couldn’t wait to see it.

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 11

OPINION

part II.

D

ays after the unpleasant incident with Tufts administration and the end of the expulsion threat, I thought I was all set for leaving Paris and flying back to my home country. Little did I know that my trip to China had only just begun. My parents sent me a news article saying the flight J purchased with me was unsafe: everyday around four people were confirmed with coronavirus on that flight. Mom said she was afraid that the flight had become Noah’s ark for unconfirmed infected patients.

I emailed Tufts about the news, asking if they could help me get a non-stop flight.

No one responded, as usual. I looked up the flights and realized there was no nonstop flight until a week later, and the next one cost way over 5,000 USD. I went to six pharmacies in Paris to look for hand sanitizers, a thermometer and masks, which were all scarce resources. Masks were only by prescription I got the feeling that I was fighting a war, but with an unknown enemy. When I got home, however, my host mom came to tell me that my flight was cancelled due to the high risk of cross-infection on board.

Tufts wanted me to stay in Paris indefinitely.

10 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 12 OCTOBER 7, 2020 14, 2019

OPINION

“We can’t find you a flight and we can’t take the risk of you being cross-infected on the flight, or later in China during quarantine. But we can’t have you stay with your host mom either. We will find you a new place by yourself.”

On the other hand, my parents wanted me back in China immediately. “We can’t take the risk of you getting corona in France. We can’t afford the high medical fee and we have no friends or family there to help you. Paris isn’t safe anymore. If you are infected, you are on your own.”

I thought about my health insurance with International SOS. A friend once told me the story of how he dealt with all the paperwork, phone calls and bureaucratic things just to get reimbursed for forty bucks. And he still hadn’t got that money back. I imagined living alone under the fear of being infected. I looked at the funloving family videos my friends sent during their home quarantine and realized how much I wished to be with friends and family.

I told Tufts I was going back to Shanghai anyway. Tufts said that if that was my decision then they could not provide any help and would not be responsible for anything that might happen. I said that was fine and started searching for flight home.

Chinese quarantine policies were changing every day. One news outlet said all international flights to China were diverted to Beijing, while others said Hong Kong and Taipei were no longer open for connection flights. Most of the airlines cancelled their flights from Europe to China. After several frustrating and unsuccessful attempts, I managed to get a flight departing a week later from Paris to Shanghai, connecting in Beijing. I packed all my belongings and went to sleep, thinking about how it would be like being quarantined in Beijing.

———— I hadn’t slept over four hours per day for the entire week. Around six in the morning Mom called.

“We got you a flight straight from Paris to Shanghai!”

“Oh awesome.” I buried my face in the pillow with my eyes barely open, “what date does it leave on?”

“March 18th. It leaves in five hours.”

DESIGN BY RICHARD NAKATSUKA

“What?” Now my eyes were wide open.

The rest of things happened in a blur as I fled Paris. I bumped elbows with my host mom, the sympathetic woman who truly cared about me throughout the whole thing. She decided to host me no matter what. She said that if Tufts did not want the risk of taking care of me, she would.

And now it was time to say goodbye.

The flight was completely full, with the last five rows left empty. The crew members took every passenger’s temperature twice through the eleven hours. Everyone wore masks and gloves. Some wore giant rain jackets and goggles. I did not see anyone eat anything—no one wanted to risk taking the mask off. After we landed, the quarantine process started, different from what my friends who had returned already told me. People with fevers, coughs or headaches left the cabin first. Then every fifteen minutes, thirty people were allowed to leave to decrease the chance of cross infection. Airport staff and doctors were very friendly. After waiting for my test result in a hotel room for half a day, I tested negative and was sent to my apartment by government staff.

The first day during my home quarantine in Shanghai, I started to realize the awkward position I was in. As a Chinese national, I was exposed to racism abroad.

From being called “corona” all day walking on the street, to witnessing other Asians being beaten up for wearing masks—I was aware of how fear can lead people down the path of hatred. However, I never thought that the same thing would happen to me in my own country.

Neighbors could not stand my existence. Since my apartment was on the first floor near the entrance, every day I could hear people talking about me.

“She came from abroad? Where?”

“Paris? That’s terrible.”

“She lived right below us. That’s awful.”

“She’s very inconsiderate to choose such a time to come back!”

“And she might bring the virus back too.”

“She’s a danger to all of us.”

Comments on social media were even more vicious, calling Chinese students re-

turning from abroad selfish traitors and suggesting the government to close the border to returning citizens. I told my parents about these public opinions, and my sister jumped in: “You’ve experienced so much racism abroad. This kind of hostility should be nothing to you.”

I was at a loss for words. I realized that I was seen as an ungrateful intruder to the community, a burden to my own country.

In a xenophobic era, the idea of global citizen is not much different than being a stranger to every country.

My neighbors’ concerns soon came to an end on the day when my mom came to “visit”. Since I was in quarantine, she could not come in. We stood on two sides of the same window. It was a very strange feeling, which reminded me of those moments when prisoners are visited by their families in the movies. A neighbor saw the “visit” and angrily went to the neighborhood council to report me for “standing too close to the window”.

Before the neighbor returned, I got a phone call. A person who sat three rows in front of me on the flight was confirmed to have coronavirus. According to the policy, I was in close contact and thus had to be strictly quarantined in a government mandated location. My mom started to pace back and forth—she did not say anything.

The ambulance arrived shortly after, with a doctor to take my temperature and some neighborhood council people to facilitate the process. Everyone hid behind masks, goggles and quarantine clothes.

I could not see their faces. As I clumsily moved my two huge suitcases with all my life packed inside, they carefully adjusted their own position to keep a safe distance away. People were spraying on the hallway where I passed by. I threw the suitcases into the ambulance and looked back outside.

Some neighbors who happened to pass by stayed and watched, happily talking about my situation. And my mom, standing with everyone else a distance afar, silently watching me struggling with my luggage. I knew she cried. I realized that this was the first and last time I would see her for at least two more weeks.

“I will see you after fourteen days.” I said, as the ambulance drove away.

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 13

NEWS

I THE HIDDEN EXCEPTION TO MANDATORY DISTANCING How Tufts Can Help Incarcerated People

By Rabiya Ismail and Julia Proshan

14 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7, 2020

n a time of crisis, it is inspiring that Tufts has taken a leading role in housing healthcare providers and patients battling the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 18th, days after Tufts students were forced to evacuate from campus, President Monaco wrote a Boston Globe op-ed calling for other colleges and universities to do the same. This came to fruition when first responders, medical personnel, and patients began arriving on the Medford/ Somerville campus in late April. Hillside Apartments currently houses Cambridge Health Alliance medical personnel and Miller Hall houses Cambridge Health Alliance patients who are COVID-19 positive but do not require critical care. Community Housing (CoHo) houses first responders from the City of Somerville and Bush Hall houses Tufts employees. Current students who are living on-campus are downhill and students who are traveling back to Tufts are required to self-quarantine in Sophia Gordon Hall for two weeks before moving to Harleston Hall.

While Tufts may have a plan for patients and healthcare providers, others are left without guarantee of stability. The virus poses a severe threat all over the world, but one population, particularly in the United States, is often overlooked: incarcerated individuals. With unsanitary conditions, overcrowding, and a lack of healthcare resources, America’s prisons and jails are dangerously susceptible to an unmanageable and lethal spread.

The severity of this issue is demonstrated by one notoriously dangerous facility— the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City. According to a study from the Legal Aid Society, Rikers’ infection rate is eight times larger than the entire city. In an article from The Marshall Project, they found “there were 51 or 52 men in the dorm on any given day” but also a lack of soap, toilet paper, and other basic products for these individuals. Given the dire circumstances inside prisons, a key solution to protect incarcerated people is reducing the prison population. Various states are releasing numerous people in an effort to prevent the spread. California is releasing 3,500 people who have committed nonviolent crimes or are already close to their release date and New York City has already released 900 people. Massachusetts needs to follow suit.

In response to an emergency petition, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that people held on pretrial who have committed nonviolent crimes are entitled to an expedited release process, but the Massachusetts government is not acting fast enough. Governor Charlie Baker has maintained the position that there is enough testing in prisons. However, the number of incarcerated people in Massachusetts contracting the virus continues to increase. In mid-April, Prisoners’ Legal Services reported that 180 incarcerated people tested positive for the virus; a month later on May 20, this number increased to 534.

One main problem is that in order to be released, incarcerated people must have stable housing lined up. Recognizing the increasing number of COVID-19 cases and the great need of support on the outside, two undergraduate leaders of Tufts University Prison Initiative at Tisch College (TUPIT) took action. TUPIT is a program bringing Tufts faculty and students and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people together with corrections staff, educators, and scholars of criminal justice to respond to the issues of mass incarceration. Nora Maetzener, a senior, and Claudia Guetta, a sophomore, have been heavily involved in this work since they arrived at Tufts. They reached out to Tufts Medical School students Megan Murphy and Saki Kitadai to make this action a cross-campus effort and started a petition requesting President Monaco to extend a hand to incarcerated individuals. They saw people were being released and had nowhere to go due to the pandemic and advocated for Tufts to make use of its empty space.

Murphy and Kitadai already had experience writing petitions and letters during the push to remove the Sackler name from Tufts Medical School.

Maetzener and Guetta say the reason they are only asking for certain populations to be housed is because the Department of Correction has said they would not release someone who was not ready for re-entry, and realistically, Tufts does not have enough room to house all incarcerated people because of their promise to house medical personnel and COVID-19 patients. The petition urges a portion of vacant student housing to be allocated to

NEWS

incarcerated individuals, who are either finishing their sentences or being offered early release due to medical “vulnerabilities” during the COVID-19 outbreak, but who are unable to be released due to the closure of and inadequate access to reentry housing. Studies show these populations who are ready for re-entry are less likely to go back to prison when released.

In only a few days, the petition garnered over 473 signatures from students across Tufts’s campuses. President Monaco did not respond to the petition, but the students received a response from Rocco DiRico, Director of Community Relations.

According to Patrick Collins, the Executive Director of Public Relations, “The university is only able to make housing available in the context of an institutional partnership with a governmental or nonprofit organization which can commit to providing all care and support, including medical care, food delivery, waste removal, cleaning, security and other needs, as is the case with our hospital and city partners. To date, [Tufts] has not received a proposal from a nonprofit organization or a government agency seeking to house formerly incarcerated individuals on campus.” The TUPIT undergraduate students are in

DESIGN AND ART BY JANIE INGRASSIA

conversation with organizations willing to do this, but have no concrete answers on when this is likely to happen, if at all.

On a broader scale, the mere existence of prisons has come into question due to the pandemic. People across the political spectrum are advocating for the release of low-risk prisoners and even alternatives to prison. Fifty-six percent of voters, including those who identify as “very conservative,” support releasing people who are within six months of completing their sentence. These Tufts undergraduates are not shying away from stating that they believe the same. Maetzener personally believes in prison abolition regardless of the pandemic, saying she does not believe in prison as an institution but recognizes that “when working with institutional politics and regulations, you have to find a medium.”

While students at other universities may be conversing about providing support to formerly incarcerated people during the pandemic, the Tufts student body was the first to publicly take action. TUPIT passed on this work to other Boston-area universities. Guetta said they reached out to help Harvard, Boston University, and Boston College students who aim to take similar measures at their respective universities. On May 11, the Boston University Coalition for Decarceration circulated a petition similar to TUPIT’s, calling on the BU administration to utilize empty dormitories to house people recently released from prisons.

Furthermore, TUPIT has taken on additional projects to support incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people during this time. Fifty TUPIT members have been working on building the Tufts Education Reentry Network (TERN). A third of these members are formerly incarcerated individuals; these Educational Justice Fellows receive a stipend to spearhead the network-building process. Network programs include financial literacy, professionalization, and computer coding workshops as well as opportunities for mentorship, an internship, and a literature course.

In terms of TUPIT’s Associate’s Degree program at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord, Tufts professors teaching courses set up contingency plans a week before the prison closed to out-

side visitors (aside from lawyers). They encouraged students to work together if they are able to congregate; they also instructed them on how to complete their assignments independently. For a period of time, professors were able to drop off assignments outside of the prison and then pick them up later when students completed the assignments. However, it was not long before they were no longer able to do this. Plans for the fall semester are currently undetermined.

After creating the petition, the organizers received messages of support and communication from students who wanted to know how they can help. Maetzener and Guetta, along with Murphy and Kitadai at the medical school, have created a student coalition group for prison advocacy. They hope to form an intercollegiate student coalition of correctional housing advocates, with representatives from schools and programs across the greater Boston area. This student coalition will use one central line of communication to update one another on progress within schools and even put pressure on state-level elected officials.

Additionally, Maetzener, Guetta, the Educational Justice fellows, and many Tufts community members continue to develop TERN. Guetta said, “We are trying to create a re-entry program that bridges the difference between when you are still incarcerated inside and when you are out.”

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 15

ARTS AND CULTURE

An Escape to New Horizons

By Lee Romaker

I

magine this: you wake up in your own house, in a room decorated exactly how you want it, fully furnished, and filled with scattered trinkets that you picked out. You hop out of bed and head outside to your mailbox, where you find some clothes you ordered, a letter from your mom, and a gift from your neighbor. The sun is shining in a clear blue sky overhead.

A babbling river and buzzing insects can be heard nearby. You take a deep breath and smell spring flowers, apple trees, and fresh grass. Beyond your yard, you see a few of your neighbors; they all know your name and cannot wait to wish you a good morning. You have no obligations today, but you would love to say hello to the nearby shopkeepers and go fishing on the beach. Whatever you do with your day is up to you; there are no deadlines and nowhere to rush to.

For many young people, this fantasy provided by the Animal Crossing series is an extremely enticing one. Owning your own home that you don’t have to share, living nearby all of your friends, and having the money and complete autonomy to decorate your home, your surroundings, and yourself as you please all seem 16 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7, 2020

like fantastical ideas for a generation that has only known housing crises, staggered wages, and crushing student debt.

Especially when several states have stayin-place orders, leaving millions quarantined within their homes, even having the ability to go outside and see one’s friends feels like a separate reality.

The newest installment in the Animal Crossing series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, could not have come at a more opportune time. Released on March 20th, New Horizons came out just as millions of Americans began to shelter in place. Since its release, New Horizons has smashed records, becoming the fastest selling Nintendo Switch game ever, selling 1.8 million units in Japan alone within three days of release. The game has also resulted in increased Nintendo Switch revenue , with sales increasing 150% in the latter half of March and leading to worldwide Switch shortages, according to a Nintendo spokesperson.

It’s also no coincidence that the game has been especially well-received by college students, many who began New Horizons just as they had been uprooted from their college campuses and

forced to quickly return to their childhood homes indefinitely. For Animal Crossing veterans and newbies alike, the game’s design is an ideal escape from what many see as a bleak reality amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

Like other Animal Crossing games, New Horizons has no set path for players to take with their character. There is no linear story, no lives, no dying, and no “Game Over.” Players begin on a deserted island covered in weeds. It is the player’s task to clean up the island and turn it into a bustling place by establishing shops, homes, a museum, and a town hall. Islands can be customized by decorating the outdoors with furniture, planting flowers and trees, and ultimately even by shaping the land and rivers. All of this is accomplished by gathering natural resources to build tools and furniture as well as selling goods such as fruit, insects, or fish. And who can forget the anthropomorphic neighbors you share the island with? Players are also given the chance to develop relationships with their adorable neighbors, as well as characters such as Able and Sable, the porcupine tailors, Tom Nook, the raccoon island manager,

ARTS AND CULTURE

and Isabelle, a fan-favorite Golden Lab that works in the town hall.

How players decide to develop their island and which characters they bond with is ultimately completely up to them.

The game occurs in real time, so New Horizons is designed such that players can upkeep their island a little bit every day, even if there are arguably daily “chores” that players can complete to give the game a sense of daily structure. The process of building up one’s island to completion is designed to take weeks, if not months. The game even follows the seasons in whatever hemisphere the player is based in and contains seasonal challenges waiting for players throughout the year. This gradual process of developing an island translates into a lot of time spent farming materials and completing menial tasks for hours on end as players transform their island from a deserted wasteland into a utopia of their design.

While some may call this seemingly unending cycle of farming supplies boring, amidst a collective trauma such as the COVID-19 pandemic, New Horizons is an ideal escape for those whose lives have been disrupted.

ART AND DESIGN BY BRENNA TROLLINGER

New Horizons offers a daily respite from morbid news reports and days that seem to blend together. As coronavirus spreads across the globe at breakneck speed, toppling economies and taking lives, it is incredibly easy to feel hopeless as we watch the world around us fundamentally change with nothing we can do but sit tight in our homes. In comparison, New Horizons players have the autonomy to shape their world entirely as they see fit. Players can spend hours in the virtual outdoors, catching bugs and running in the grass, while still remaining in their own homes. Players have their own home, building it up from an unassuming tent to a grand mansion, even if in their actual home they don’t have their own bedroom. New Horizons’ multiplayer mode can allow friends thousands of miles apart to spend time together, and some have even used the game to celebrate key anniversaries or even hold a virtual graduation ceremony.

New Horizons also offers a unique opportunity for LGBTQ+ people looking for an escape from unaccepting homes.

According to Forbes, the coronavirus is likely to have a disproportionate impact on

the mental health LGBTQ+ community members, especially those that identify as transgender or gender-noncomforming.

For trans people, this may mean being forced to quarantine in a household where they are called the wrong name and pronouns, unsupported by their family, or simply not out of the closet. While New Horizons can never make up for a lack of safety or community, the game can provide players with an affirming escape. In New Horizons, players can pick whatever name they please and are never referred to with pronouns. Although there is a choice between playing as a “boy” or “girl,” unlike previous games, this setting can be changed at any time, and the full array of facial features, hairstyles, and clothes are available to all players, regardless of their gender setting.

In a time when even getting up and putting on a fresh pair of clothes can be a serious challenge, New Horizons gives people in quarantine the opportunity to go outside, take control of what they do that day, express themselves how they want, and interact with others--even if it’s from the comfort of their own bed.

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 17

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3 1. Sofia Chon, photography • 2. “Cult of Reason,” Juliette Wu. • 3. “Forrest,” Karen Ruiz, watercolor.• 4, 5. Anthony Davis-Pait, photography • 6. “Sunset Through the Passenger,” Leonardo Ruiz Sanchez, photography.

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LAYOUT BY BRIGID CAWLEY

FEATURE

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1. Sofia Chon, photography. • 2. “Blinded by the Light,” Karen Ruiz, markers. • 3,4. Anthony Davis-Pait, photography • 5. Genki Kadomatsu, photography.

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18 TUFTS OBSERVER OCTOBER 14, 2019

FEATURE

5

OCTOBER 14, 2019 TUFTS OBSERVER 19

VOICES

By Juliana Vega del Castillo

Disparate Worlds A Return Home to Ecuador

O

n March 10th, Tufts announced they were canceling on-campus classes and that every student had to move out by Monday. I had a ticket back to Ecuador for Tuesday; I was going home for spring break. I figured I had time to pack everything up from my on campus house and to fly back home. But on Thursday, Tufts announced one of the on-campus students tested positive for COVID-19—and on Friday morning, nothing was packed, and I woke up with a sore throat, a fever, and body aches. I went to health services, they gave me a mask, and made me wait for what seemed like forever. I just wanted to go home. The doctor came in to examine me, and screamed from excitement. I had tonsillitis. At any other time tonsillitis would have been news that put me to bed for days. In this case, it was the lesser of evils.

I could barely walk home, I had to call a friend to bring me my antibiotics. I thanked God I still had three days to pack and get everything in order. I slept all of Friday. and was rudely awakened at noon on Saturday to a frantic call from one of my friends. “Juli,” she exclaimed, “you cannot go home on Tuesday, Ecuador is closing its borders on Monday.”

That’s ridiculous, I thought, there is no way in hell my country will deny me entry. That’s my homeland, that is the only nation in the entire world I belong to.

There was NO way this was real.

In my feverish state, I entered a state of denial, and slept for hours. I woke to an email that said my flight was cancelled and called my parents crying. We booked a 200 dollar one way flight for 8 a.m. Monday, and I attempted to pack in a hallucinatory mix of days, nights, snacks, and solitude.

At the time, I felt Tufts did not have my back. My university was practically throwing me out. Nevertheless, my friends did. I slept on one of my friends’ couches Sunday 22 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7, 2020

night, and woke up at 5 a.m. I popped ibuprofen like gummy bears in order to push my temperature down. Ecuador was closing its borders, and if I dared to walk in with a fever, who knows where in the city they would have kept me in quarantine.

Our flights were eerily calm. There were a few worried people, including me, but no one was too panicked, during the flight, or the layover in Panama—and then I walked into Ecuador.

I was greeted by pandemonium. A line of people waited to get their temperatures taken, by alien-like beings dressed in hazmat suits. It was my turn, and it seemed like the ibuprofen worked—no fever in sight. They gave me a paper to sign: “I, _________ will stay in quarantine for the next 14 days since I have travelled. If I don’t, I will face up to three years of prison.” Nope, I was definitely not in the US anymore.

That afternoon, the government announced that the country would be on lockdown for the next two weeks. Two weeks eventually turned into three months.

When my friends in the U.S. talk about quarantine, they talk about staying at home AND shelter in place. Supermarkets are still there if you need last minute butter for your cooking adventures, runs outside are definitely a thing. No one has heard of curfew.

I was faced with a very different set of circumstances. People can only leave their houses from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. We cannot go grocery shopping as a family; only one person can be in a car. Markets are filtered by social security numbers. Cars can only go out one weekday per week, depending on the last digit of their plate. And Saturday and Sunday? No cars. No outside.

What if you disobey this? A fine. And for a country whose economy is plummeting and the minimum wage is 400 USD a month, that 100 USD fine is significant.

The next few weeks it got worse.

Guayaquil, Ecuador’s port city, faced an outbreak that the city could not handle.

For about two weeks, bodies were left in the streets, medical centers were overflowing, and people had to resort to cardboard coffins. An exact number of fatalities can not be given, it is estimated that the number is 15 times higher than the official number reported by the government.

Being a third world country, there is a significant amount of people who work for daily wages. They are only able to eat from what they earn that day. What about them?

What about the families that are 20 people in a 50 square foot apartment? What about victims of domestic violence, now stuck at home with their abusers?

This is not an economy that can give 1200 dollars to everyone that pays taxes.

On the 11th week of lockdown, I had to leave the house to run an errand for my dad. I drove to the town centre. I was shocked. People were out and about as usual, all of them wearing masks, but business had gone almost back to normal.

We are still on strict lockdown, but there is nothing else the government can do to contain the spread.

I have to travel back to the United States in a week, and, pending no further travel restrictions, international borders will open June 1st. I will be leaving Ecuador feeling impotent and extremely anxious because I know that, at least for Quito, the worst is yet to come. There will be no resources to alleviate the toll this pandemic will have on the medical system, the already precarious economy, and Ecuadorians themselves.

PHOTOS BY JULIANA VEGA DEL CASTILLO, DESIGN BY SOFIA PRETELL

VOICES

A FEW MORE DAYS IN PERU

By Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez

A

s my friends and I gathered around ceviche and pisco sours, we cheered to our week long abroad experience.

Peruvian universities start in March, so my study abroad program began later than most. I watched my friends abroad in Italy return home even before I arrived in Peru. During my first few days in Lima, the remainder of study abroad programs across the world shut down and students were repatriated. With a slight sense of amusement, I felt like the last one standing. Most of us in Lima were clinging on to having a few more days abroad and anxiously chatted about the things we wanted to do before we left over dinner. But the next morning we woke up to frantic emails and texts breaking the news that our plans had been nothing more than wishful thinking. The Peruvian President, Martín Vizcarra, had declared a national emergency in response to COVID-19. He announced that Peru would be under a strict, mandatory 15 day quarantine with the border closing at 11:59 p.m. that very night. No one was getting in or out. An email from our study abroad directors let us know that our program had been cancelled and urged us to get out of the coun-

try immediately. Otherwise,we would be forced to stay in quarantine for the next 15 days. The entire day, we raced against the clock, scrambling to find plane tickets that would get us home before the borders shut.

But we came up empty handed, caught in the reality that while we would be getting our few more days in Peru, we would be spending them in quarantine.

With this realization, my program, my friends, my parents home in D.C., and I urged the U.S. Embassy and local representatives to help U.S. nationals return home.

They kept telling us to wait for news from the embassy and that, soon enough, flights would be organized to take us home. Despite words of reassurance it felt like there were no concrete actions actually being taken on their part. But during the first few days of quarantine we watched as Mexico and other nations swiftly evacuated their citizens while Trump spoke of a fictitious military rescue plan. The Peruvian government had set certain conditions in order for the American government to repatriate the thousands of stranded Americans. Our return home was contingent on the U.S.’s commitment to getting Peruvians back home too. No American flights would be

let in unless they were returning Peruvian nationals. But in his press conferences, Trump made no mention of his plan to bring back U.S. nationals, instead blaming us for being “too late” to leave the country.

In fact, the U.S. government had given us no formal warning of the travel suspension. By the time word finally spread, most airlines had cancelled their international flights out of Peru, and the few flights left cost thousands of dollars. The 15 days of mandatory quarantine were just the beginning, with the travel suspension likely to be extended.

Quarantine was lonely and volatile at times. I had spent the past week creating relationships with people I was supposed to be spending four months with, and now we were separated indefinitely. The embassy told us to keep our bags packed and be prepared to leave at any moment. As a result, my sleep was often interrupted by anxious night sweats and the urge to check for updates. But the hardest part was the inability to go outside and stretch my legs, a luxury I had taken for granted. Government mandates in Peru were clear: anyone outside without previously registering to buy groceries would be detained—a stark JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 23

VOICES

contrast to stay at home orders in the States.

The neighborhood I was staying in, Miraflores, used to be full of life. In the days before quarantine people were everywhere: lounging in parks, surfing at Playa Makaha, bustling through sidewalks, honking their horns, and laughing freely. But from photos I was shown by my host mom Carmen, the city was now empty and silent, with a heavy police and military presence.

I was saved by Carmen’s rooftop (azotea in Spanish). Every day I went upstairs and laid my red blanket on the concrete roof, basking in the sun, letting its rays warm my skin. I’d lean against the cream colored wall, carefully observing the colorful buildings surrounding me, the linens drying on the clothesline, and the potted plants decorating the perimeter. Up on the azotea I lived vicariously through Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, listened intently to the podcast Heavyweight, put BENEE’s EP FIRE ON MARZZ on repeat, binge watched Élite on Netflix, FaceTimed my friends and family, munched on chocolate chip cookies, and deciphered the clouds.

When evening fell, I watched the sky fade to soft pinks and oranges while the sun

24 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7, 2020

crept down. I clapped and cheered along to the 8 p.m. applause for the city’s healthcare workers. It was on the azotea where I found my sanity.

I am also beyond thankful for the care and kindness I received from Carmen. Every morning I woke up to a ham and cheese sandwich with vanilla yogurt on the side, a breakfast that she attentively prepared for me. In the afternoon we would make time for ourselves, but at night we sat down for dinner together. My favorite dish consisted of squash lentils with an egg on top that she had meticulously fried because she knew huevos fritos were my favorite.

For a week, we were each other’s dinner company. Even when the food was gone, we stayed up for sobremesa, time spent in conversation after our meals. I am grateful for our late nights. Her crinkled green eyes wide open as we talked about the history of Peru, traded gossip, shared stories of love and heartbreak, laughed at memes, reminisced on travels and adventures, and filled out coloring books. She brought a warmth to my short time in Lima that is unparalleled. I miss her dearly.

On March 22nd, I woke up to yet more frantic texts and emails—but this time, they bore good news. The U.S. Embassy had finally secured us a humanitarian flight home for the next day. In the morning Carmen and I tearfully said our goodbyes and I promised her I’d come back to visit. Her parting gift to me was a Machu Picchu puzzle. I ate my sandwich and yogurt for the final time, and rolled my bags out of the metal gate. Soon after, I was greeted by a van full of my friends who I’d been away from for the past week. We had spent as much time together as apart by the time we reunited, yet I felt relieved to be going through this with them. Dripping in sweat from Lima’s scorching summer heat, we waited in the van parked outside of the walls of the Peruvian Military Base for an hour before being released to sit under tarps guarded by armed soldiers. Another hour passed and we were taken from bus to bus until we arrived at our destination.

When I peered out of the bus’ window, I saw a plane emblazoned with giant United lettering—the confirmation of our evacuation. During the flight back, my friends and I talked through the memories we had

PHOTOS BY PAULA GIL-ORDOÑZ GOMEZ, DESIGN BY SOFIA PRETELL

VOICES

created in the short, but beautiful time we had shared. When we landed in Dulles International Airport the whole plane burst into applause—but I didn’t quite feel the same as my fellow passengers clapping and shouting. While I was relieved and grateful to be home, my heart still dropped. Reality set in—my experience abroad was over, and I wasn’t going to get it back.

The repatriation of students studying abroad was necessary, but it left thousands of college students across the country with a panging disappointment of how their semester turned out. I remind myself how lucky I am to be safe and healthy, to have a caring home in the U.S. to be returned to, and to have my family and friends be in good health. I know that not every college student shares these privileges, and I’m careful to not take them for granted.

However, I’m also making the decision to allow myself to be sad. I am sad that I didn’t get to explore the different barrios of Lima, eat more ceviche and drink more pisco sours, have more late nights sprawled

in the park with my friends, take classes at the local university, watch more sunsets at Playa Makaha, hike the Inca Trail and visit Machu Picchu, and fill in more coloring books with Carmen.

As a first generation American with all of my extended family spread across the globe, mainly in Mexico and Spain, I’ve grown up viewing travel and exploration as a way to recenter myself. Engaging with my own different cultures as well as new ones has taught me that everyone looks at the world differently and we can learn so much from each other. For me, traveling has opened my eyes to different perspectives that have shifted my world view and reshaped my priorities and values. I wanted my experiences in Lima to become a permanent part of me in the way that my previous times abroad have done

for me, but even more so. I would get to settle down in a new place for an extended period of time and make it a home. For all of us abroad this semester, our time was cut short. We collectively mourn for a rite of passage—an adventure we were given a taste of before having it taken away.

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 25

NEWS

Coming Together Amidst COVID-19: The Tufts Community Response

D

espite the uncertainty and stress this pandemic has caused, communities around the world have been brought together in proactive and creative efforts to help fill in the gaps caused by the pandemic. The Tufts community is no exception. In what President Monaco describes as a “Dunkirk moment,” Tufts students, staff, and the administration are working together to alleviate pressure on the local health care system and to support the needs of the Greater Boston community as they respond to COVID-19. The administration, alongside students and faculty from the Fletcher school, coordinated an effort to turn parts of the Medford campus into a military style hospital, providing alternative testing sites and housing for patients, medical personnel, and first responders.

At the same time, student-led efforts have combined the expertise and manpower of Tufts graduate and undergraduate schools to accomplish everything from coordinating volunteer networks to creating prototypes to repair medical masks.

For many Tufts students, leaving campus on such short notice became a stressful experience. As TCU Treasurer Sharif Hamidi said in an email to the Observer, “A significant number of students felt abandoned in the middle of a crisis, with less than a week to fully pack their belongings and leave campus entirely.” Luckily, this stressful situation did have some positive consequences.

As the majority of students have left campus, the abundance of empty dorms can be used to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19 for healthcare providers and patients to reduce the strain on hospitals.

As Hamidi noted, “This course of action at least achieves some good in a deeply flawed situation.”

Regarding the choice to transition campus to a military style hospital, President Monaco expressed in his email to the school that it “is not only our civic obligation but also an important way for us to help minimize the spread of the virus.” To ac-

26 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7 , 2020

commodate both the needs of patients and medical personnel, while still ensuring the protection of on-campus students, staff, and faculty, the administration decided to split campus into uphill and downhill zones. The administration enlisted help from medical professionals alongside Fletcher students and faculty for operations and communications advice to successfully segment campus into two zones.

Staff, faculty, and about 150 students have been housed and fed downhill. To protect students, campus facilities have increased disinfections of high touch points and instituted a daily deep clean of the dining halls. For the safety of the on-campus staff, shifts have been adjusted to ensure minimal contact and laundry rooms have been made available to avoid bringing potentially infected clothes home. Lastly, the administration explained that members of the Tufts community remaining on campus will be at no additional risk as patients and hospital staff only have access to the building they are housed in.

Uphill, the administration has made a total 1600 beds available for the community. However, due to isolation protocols it is unlikely that all of them will be used.

Patrick Collins, Tufts’ Executive Director of public relations, told the Observer that Tufts is working with “two major healthcare providers, Tufts Medical Center and Cambridge Health Alliance, and two of our host cities (Medford and Somerville) to utilize the university’s and health care providers’ resources to complement the efforts of local governments.” Tufts has identified four groups to which they would provide housing. To free up hospital beds and keep at risk members of rehabilitation centers— such as elderly patients—safe, non-critical and recovering COVID-19 patients will be housed in Miller Hall. First responders and medical personnel who cannot go home because they are waiting to receive test results, have already tested positive, or have family members from high risk popula-

By Aroha Mackay tions, will be able to live in Hillside apartments or CoHo. Bush is available for Tufts staff members who don’t feel comfortable going home because they were exposed to COVID-19 or have at-risk family members.

Lastly, Tufts Medical Center personnel in need of temporary housing can live on the Boston Health Sciences Campus.

Currently, medical personnel have been housed on the Boston Health Sciences campus, but Collins did relay that the “number varies from day to day but is usually in the single digits. The medical workers are healthy but are using the overnight lodging at Posner due to their concern for family members, loved ones, or roommates.”

Regarding the transition, Anna, a student currently living on the Medford campus, told the Observer that she feels safe on campus and that “it seems like the separate zones plan is working.” When she first heard about the administration plan her initial reaction was “a mixture of panic and fear” as she didn’t know how the process of transitioning campus would affect her own safety. Moreover, she felt frustrated that the administration hadn’t consulted her or fellow students living on-campus about the decision. The feeling of fear and frustration diminished after the administration sent out an email informing the students about what the transition would look like and assuring them that “no arrangements have been made without first confirming that the health of our students remains safeguarded and uncompromised.” As patients and first responders begin to move into campus, Anna notes that apart from avoiding going uphill she hasn’t experienced any adverse impacts or drastic changes on campus. Overall, she thinks that the initiative is a good thing, saying, “In a time like this, we need to put our own priorities and differences aside to help each other get through all this craziness.”

Both Somerville and Medford’s mayors have expressed their gratitude to Tufts.

Medford Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn

NEWS

told Tufts Now that for health workers preparing for the coming surge of patients “having a safe, clean, and stable place to rest without fear of spreading the disease to family members and the general community is essential.” Additionally, Tufts Now reported that Somerville Mayor Curtatone hopes that “what Tufts is doing here becomes a model for college campuses across the state, region, and country.”

Similarly, in various interviews, communications emails, and articles, President Monaco has been pushing for other colleges and universities to take similar measures. In a school wide email, he said, “I feel strongly that Tufts and other universities, particularly research universities, have an abundance of resources to offer our community and healthcare partners in their fight against this unprecedented and rapidly changing challenge.” In an email to the Observer, Collins said that “Other colleges and universities in the Greater Boston area are making similar arrangements with nonprofit organizations, city and state agencies.” Following suit, various colleges across the country have been volunteering their buildings and medical students to help the cause. Some universities, like Columbia and NYU, have even gone so far as to graduate some of their medical students early.

The administration is not the only member of the Tufts community hard at work to help our host communities through the pandemic. In a student-run effort, Tufts students and faculty from both undergraduate and graduate programs worked together with graduate students from MIT and Harvard to repair donated protective gear.

After discovering that the elastic bands on masks donated to the Tufts Medical Center were badly damaged, Military Fellows from the Fletcher School coordinated an effort to crowdsource prototypes and to repair the bands without damaging the masks. After harnessing engineering expertise from Harvard and MIT, the effort produced viable prototypes in no time. Using a space in the Tufts School of Dental Medicine, engineering students from Tufts along with graduate students from MIT and Harvard worked together to refine the prototypes.

Two days later, around 20 volunteers from Fletcher, the Tufts Engineering School, Harvard, and MIT used the NOLOP makerspace at Tufts to repair thousands of masks.

In a Tufts Now article, one of the volunteers, James Aronson, who is a recent graduate of the Tufts School of Engineering, explained that they all “recognize[d] that this is an opportunity to make a real, measurable difference.” Every step of the way, the volunteers documented their progress, methods, and materials, which they hope can be used as a starting point for similar projects elsewhere. By combining their expertise, volunteers from different schools within Tufts and within Boston managed to repair the masks for the Medical Center while also providing a roadmap for others across the country and the globe to do the same.

Similarly, a volunteer collective called Collect2Protect Healthcare Heroes, which was founded by a Tufts dental student in conjunction with Tisch College, has produced almost a thousand face masks and shields for Boston area health-care facilities. After the School of Dental Medicine postponed clinical and preclinical training, Stephanie Smith realized that the additional free time could be put towards solving the shortage of face masks for health-care workers. Right now, almost a hundred volunteers have signed on to the project, who beyond contributing their time and skills have also found creative solutions to an increasing shortage of fabric and elastic. Along with Smith, several dental students have been coordinating the production, collection, and distribution of the protective gear. Nancy Marks, the Tisch and Tufts Dental School Community Service Coordinator, told the Observer that the protective gear is going toward the nurses, patients, and cleaners in hospitals and services providing care to the homeless, the disabled, and the elderly.

Additionally, the gear is being sent to those working at “various assisted living facilities, laundromats, grocery stores, [and] pharmacies.” Collect2Protect Healthcare Heroes is housed under the larger network of volunteer opportunities called Tufts Civic Impact platform.

The Tufts Civic Impact platform is a Tisch College initiative where Tufts students, alumni, faculty, and staff can sign up to volunteer to aid the response effort. The online platform organizes and trains volunteers to be deployed to aid the response either virtually or in person.

Jen McAndrew, Director of Communications for Tisch College, told the Observer

DESIGN BY JANIE INGRASSIA, PHOTO BY PATRICK MILEWSKI

that one of their preexisting platforms was adapted to assist with the COVID-19 response and that they “were able to get [the volunteer groups] up and running quickly, partnering with the Office of Government & Community Relations and others across the University.” Currently, the platform boasts 17 volunteer opportunities, both virtual and local, with “over 350 registered overall [and] about 60-80 active volunteers right now.” The volunteer opportunities include everything from filling in shifts on the USDA’s food insecurity hotline to collecting supplies for a local domestic violence service provider and working with the Massachusetts Immigrant And Refugee Advocacy Coalition to remind local residents to fill out the census. In addition to receiving specialized training from the volunteer opportunities, Tisch College provides “support for how to join the groups and get started, as well as general guidelines for volunteering safely at this time.”

McAndrew ended her message by expressing gratitude towards the Tufts community response and “the many community organizations for their tremendous work at this time of crisis.”

While the pandemic has caused a lot of stress and uncertainty, there are still some bright spots. Responding to the crisis has facilitated cooperation between the students, faculty, and staff of the different schools under the Tufts University umbrella and within the Greater Boston area. Working together has produced proactive, creative, and effective solutions to a pandemic that creates everchanging problems. Tufts is just one of many communities serving as a reminder that, even in times of crisis, cooperation and shows of solidarity prevail. That being said, it is important to acknowledge that Tufts’ transition under COVID-19 has not been without its flaws and that there is still work to be done to ensure everyone’s needs are being met. However, the initiative and determination shown in the actions of the Tufts community so far provide a positive outlook for the future.

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 27

VOICES

Should I want to explain feminism to the m

Sexism entered my life in stages, gradually increasing in its prevalence as I grew older. Those men that I allude to may not be excited to read this, but it should come as no surprise that the men in my life haven’t always been the greatest allies. My male relatives have stood by our family of successful women, but many of them grew up in 1970’s India, a time when suggesting how a woman should act or dress wouldn’t result in a social fallout. The same excuse can’t be used for my male South Asian peers who remain unaware in this regard: there are too many resources easily available these days to still remain in the dark. But regardless of any ignorance they may hold, I still believe they can learn.

“So, I’ll teach them,” I think. I will patiently and relentlessly explain what feminism really means to those who don’t quite get it yet, because I am convinced that change is possible. That with the right efforts, I can turn anyone into a man who defends women when they’re blatantly interrupted in a meeting, into someone who speaks up when he sees a guy taking advantage of a drunk girl at a party, into an advocate for ending the tax on period products as luxury goods (yes, that’s a thing).

But, should I have to? And, more importantly, do I want to?

At what point does my responsibility to turn men into feminists end, and their responsibility to want to become feminists begin?

Sometimes, I get angry, and sometimes I just feel tired, but in both cases I try to genuinely point out the source of their errors.

But the problem persists, because as soon as I attempt this, I find myself fearing that I’ll be written off for the exact reason I am confronting the issue. She gets angry too fast. She doesn’t listen. I didn’t do anything wrong, she’s just crazy. I’m trying to have a conversation, and she’s getting all emotional.

And there is an intersectionality to mine and other’s experiences, further within the identity of being a woman. Misogyny perpetrated by South Asian men is almost always magnified when the target is a South Asian woman versus a White woman.

It’s a familiar feeling, especially when considering misogyny in the context of our South Asian diaspora: that when I am not heard, not listened to, not respected, it is my responsibility to calmly and sweetly ask to be heard, to be listened to, to be respected – and not the man’s responsibility to give me that consideration in the first place. But I wasn’t born to replace a brown boy’s mother, to coddle them in their ignorance and make excuses for their poor treatment of women or inability to mature.

And when that teeth grinding, forced sweetness gives way to anger and frustration when those requests are blatantly ignored, then I am too much. I become the bitch, The Angry Brown Girl.

28 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7,, 2020

And it makes me pause. Because my fear of venturing into that territory, where my desire for fair treatment is framed as instability, sometimes counteracts my desire to educate. This irony is maddening, because the only solution to this issue is for me to keep talking, for me to keep pushing my views on how women deserve to be treated on those who refuse to listen.

Is this a job I must take on if I want things to change for me and the women around me?

When I’ve found myself in these situations – in classes, dance teams, even my own house – I have come to the realization that it’s difficult to have one without the other. Yes, I can speak up, but it might make things worse before they get better, for me and those around me.

This frustration has reared its ugly head consistently on this campus, in our insular South Asian community. I am reminded of personal moments that exemplify this theme of patient, sweet women expected to maintain this sweetness in the face of disrespect: to calmly explain why they deserve respect. Those moments I’d attempt to voice opinions to my dance team captains: to call them out on decisions that blatantly hurt me or others, or urge them to face and correct problems within the maledominated leadership culture, only to have my voice ignored.

I soon felt ostracized from the group, only after I began vocally disagreeing with them. I would quietly leave each practice more hurt and angry than the last, confused as to why men with the same vocal opinions appeared welcomed while I felt shunned.

Listening to friends’ advice, I tried to confront this treatment – only leading to more hurt, an ugly cycle perpetuated by men who keep each other and themselves in power. This leadership, which has never been questioned, has existed as a boys club: a microcosm of the patriarchy that has only been allowed to further grow. And when I confronted the leaders of my team about this culture, I was placated with, “Yes, I see it too!” But my question was never whether they’d seen it - I wanted a solution, but I was given an empty confirmation, and the real issue was never addressed or remedied. Their intentions didn’t matter, because the impact remained the same regardless: a culture that dissuaded me and other women from pursuing leadership was allowed to continue.

And as I danced while injured or ill, and tended to myself alone after each performance, I saw the care for the other female dancers’ wellbeing that was never extended to me: I never received that same treatment, and that was something I watched and noticed. Then as I watched my work go uncredited, and as

VOICES

men in my life?

By Priyanka Kadam

texts urging them to reconsider decisions made without team input went left on read, I grew frustrated. And as I suddenly felt pushed to the very back of our performances until I spoke up about it, as their eyes rolled when I complained, as I felt my presence cease to be acknowledged in any space with the team, as I left every practice feeling less welcomed and cared for than the last, I eventually understood. I felt retaliated against, only after I decided I would not fall at their feet.

The cherished women within this group have always happened to be the sweet and obedient ones. I felt most respected and most loved when I would revert back to my quiet freshman self who refused to voice my opinions - and I’ve seen this pattern in every other girl who was either celebrated or demonized on this mostly female team. Even if it was subconscious on their part, my refusal to accommodate a man’s lack of respect or inability to lead automatically placed me in a position where I felt less consideration, now miserable in a place once full of love and joy.

My complaints of this treatment to mutual friends were met with responses that only enabled this culture: “You’re overthinking,” “They’d never do that,” and “Are you sure? They’re so nice to me.” And with each comment that erased my experiences, I slowly retreated. I stopped speaking up, and stopped making an effort to seek advice. It hurts knowing I saw this happen to other women, and didn’t understand it until I felt it too.

Eventually, I came to the sad realization that the difficult decision to leave had already been made for me: these experiences I had ultimately manifested in two options, but only one truly made sense. I could stay and feel disrespected, knowing I was only happy when I chose silence and subservience, or I could leave with my dignity still intact. I chose the latter.

The truth is, the labor of explaining why women deserve fair treatment is something I’m tired of, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop. I probably don’t have the energy to call out every aggression I see, but I’ll keep trying to. Lots of men in my life still probably don’t get how they contribute to this culture, but it won’t stop me from correcting them until one day they do.

I have not been arbitrarily assigned this task by virtue of being born a girl. I do not have to give in and accept this culture for what it is, but that doesn’t mean I am automatically designated the role of teacher. Women come into this world as unassuming and impressionable as men, and if we can work to make the world slightly more equal, men can too.

So, to my women: stop blindly supporting the men who hurt your sisters because “he didn’t do anything to me.” This complacency is what allows these men to go on and assume positions of power where they can do the same to others. More importantly, it hurts the women who trust you to tell you these things, who put their faith in you to defend and support them.

And, to men: yes, this is a call out. Stop lazily assuming that if women care enough they’ll correct you. When a girl complains of retaliation, believe her and don’t brush it off because it’s part of a system you benefit from. Make it your responsibility to know more and be better. Proactively read articles, watch movies, and seek out uncomfortable conversations that aren’t sent to you and initiated by the women in your life. Respect, love, and support every woman - not just your mother and your girlfriend and the women who never disagree with you.

I know this article might be met with the same reactions that I fear, that these men might write me off as crazy for writing this and not think twice about their behavior, or worse, justify their actions. But it was never my job to make myself smaller and sweeter, shrink my voice down to a palatable level, so as to be treated with decency and respect – a culture so deeply ingrained in this community, it took me all year to realize just how fucked up it is. It was certainly not my responsibility to patiently explain why I deserved that consideration.

And I urge you, the reader, to understand that if any man with a history of harassment has never treated you with disrespect, to consider yourself fortunate rather than the standard.

For whatever reason, you were not made a target, which I am grateful for. But that does not mean such seemingly charming men are incapable of harm.w I am not writing this for revenge, or to imply I myself no longer have any learning to do. I am not writing this for the men I speak about to learn a lesson, or for them to receive the same ostracization I did. I am speaking to you, the reader. It is just the two of us here: I am holding your hand, and gently letting you know that if you have ever faced this kind of treatment on campus, I believe you. I am telling you something that I have kept to myself out of fear of retaliation and sadness, something that has pushed me away from doing the things I love most. I am telling you this because you are human just like me, and one day this battle might visit you too, and it is not your job solely to try to educate those who refuse to learn. I hope you talk about it, I hope you are not silenced. And I hope you know I’ve felt it too, and I love and respect you just the same.

DESIGN BY JOANNA KLESZCZEWSKI

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 29

OPINION

Liberation

By Sonya Bhatia

O

ver the past few months, I have reflected upon how capitalism’s tenets and virtues have affected the way that I operate. As I am a kinetic learner, I started with how capitalism’s values feel in my body. I feel (feelings: not valued in a capitalistic society) as if my body is just a vessel, and sometimes an enemy. I sense capitalism’s urge for me to work or keep moving in the way I cannot physically keep still; sitting in class I notice my legs twitching, in therapy I always am moving my hands. I feel an 30 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7, 2020

emptiness and a chronic sense of exhaustion.

As a person existing within the system, I sense the tensions of my internalized need to work and the physical and emotional limitations of my body. There have been many times, especially in college, where my body needs rest and I feel the urge to sleep. But I push on—for that last page of reading due the next day, the problem set due at the end of the week— to put a checkmark on what I presume to be too many empty boxes in my planner.

When my emotional and physical being cannot be pushed, and I fail to continue my work— the crux of my value within the system— I resort to mental stress. I become both the worker and the boss, the laborer and the punisher, inflicting upon myself what has been so ingrained that it feels inherent—at the expense of my body’s needs.

I first started ruminating on how capitalism influences my inner workings last year in my sociological theory class

ART BY SONYA BHATIA, DESIGN BY BRENNA TROLLINGER

OPINION

sophomore spring. Capitalism thrives off the exploitation of labor, disproportionately for marginalized and oppressed identities. Capitalism puts pride into hard work and success, while blatantly ignoring inaccessibility some oppressed communities have to this idealized success. In the pursuit of work and success, competition arises, which leads to alienation from one another and even from our own bodies. We become machines, in a conveyor belt in which each minute of labor we put in holds up the framework of capitalism.

As students, we seamlessly internalize the mechanisms of capitalism.This system has quantified our worthiness based on our results in a deceptively meritocratic system. Capitalism expects the same value of product from everyone, blatantly ignoring how different systems of oppression impact someone.With the competitive nature that precipitates out of capitalistic endeavors, inequality is accepted as an inevitable truth.

I identify as a woman of color. As a WOC, I have internalized “otherness” and inferiorities. Racism and sexism intersect and compound to damage my wellbeing and the way I operate; capitalism further exacerbates the damage done by these oppressive hierarchies. As a woman, I am taught to do labor that often goes unseen and unnoticed. This is because capitalism only values labor in which there is a tangible output, which often disregards the emotional and biological labor that is often expected and also stigmatized.

Emotional labor feels antithetical to capitalism’s definition of labor. My mental health issues feel like a burden and an excuse to this system; it creates a toxic cycle as when it has impacted my performance, the more pressure I put on myself and the worse my mental health becomes. Sometimes, I am in an emotional state where I cannot work, and I have to calm and recenter myself. But in this time, I have not studied enough or done less homework. It then becomes harder to reconcile this tension as work piles up. Being gentle on myself has felt gratuitous as it does not have a bearing on my academic performance, the prod-

uct in which I can prove my labor to the capitalistic system.

Grades then become a benchmark in which to rate us. Each semester, I receive a series of numbers that I feel define me. A grade on an essay or an exam—the good ones give me a sense of elation, the bad ones leave me defeated, as if I have failed. These numbers rank us and give us a sense of value; we become commodities ourselves. We advertise ourselves as products to be sold to employers in the form of resumes—one page to list all we have done (not how we feel or who we are), all the academic labor we have engaged in to be displayed for (often unpaid) short-term opportunities. Grades become an intermediate to sense our place in the hierarchy of capitalism, as we prepare to go into the workforce. The labor we put into these four years of college are advertised so we can go into further labor as adults. Grades become salaries, and career success becomes a currency of our worthiness. Capitalism is enduring, and its effects are persistently damaging.

College sometimes feels like a ridiculously expensive way to make us more attractive in the labor market, to prove ourselves in a capitalistic system.

Time becomes a means in which to accrue capital, and is thus critical for a student. There are often jokes about Tufts students never having time and how overbooked we are. If we dig further, there lies a deeper issue. We can never stop doing: working, going to club meetings, leading, creating. Whatever it is, we feel a need to be doing something all the time. Free time feels foreign, almost forbidden. And when it comes to academics, there is a twisted sense of pride associated with the amount of work we are able to do in a given scope of time. Hours spent being idle or not doing schoolwork become associated with guilt. But where does this guilt come from? It comes from our deeply internalized values of capitalism.

This is the first semester in which I can honestly say I have put my mental health and wellbeing over my academic success. Yes, it comes at a cost—to self worth that has been constructed from and tied to the capitalist system. But at

the same time, I feel closer to liberation*. I still have so much more to work through in terms of how I have internalized the system of capitalism. But I have taken tangible steps to start to untangle these ingrained, damaging values. One of these steps is I have stopped using the word ‘productive’ to describe how I spend my time. I have found that the concept of productivity controls the amount of self-satisfaction I feel. I use productivity as a litmus test to evaluate how my days are: days spent being ‘productive’ mean days I can be proud of, whereas the opposite results in a feeling of longing and almost regret. I have come to hate the word ‘productive’ because of its ties to our capitalistic values. Stopping myself from using this word has slowly helped me grow as my own person and reconcile what should be important to me.

The onset of the pandemic has exposed the ways our higher education institutions also perpetuate and place emphasis on capitalistically inspired academic performances. Essentially, the way Tufts handled the fate of our academic futures was “business as usual”, to the detriment of students’ wellbeings, disproportionally so for students of color, low income backgrounds, first generation status, and from unstable households. We were told to push through the pain, anxiety, and festering dread of uncertainty— that our work should hold precedence above all else.

Yes, learning is important. But the stress, labor, and emphasis we put on academic success, at the expense of our own wellbeing, points to a deeper, societal problem. We shouldn’t feel that time not spent towards finding labor post-college or college work itself is time wasted. We must learn to balance, to deconstruct the values of capitalism and listen to our own bodies. We must heal. *liberation: to float, let my body rest under cool water and the sun warming my shoulders

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 31

POETRY & PROSE

Early Spring My square mirror sits like a postage stamp on the left corner of my wall, reminding me of the post office last week. How the attendant wished me health, how I thanked her for being there. Worried that I’d tainted the envelope I handed her, or her the receipt she handed me. Google: “How long does coronavirus live on paper.” No results. Not “positive,” not “negative.”

And I am wondering if we’ll even be sending letters in twenty years, distrusting strangers and surfaces and strange surfaces. I am conscious of how my gums throb because I’ve been flossing lately, of all things, and I am conscious of how I am trying to capture what it felt like to feel how I felt one second ago, two, twelve. This morning I crawled out of bed, reached for the pint glass perched on my desk, half-filled with water. Took note of the mess. The usual jumble: grocery store receipts and books I swore I’d read/dancing tablets of vitamin D or B/blossoms in a glass milk jug/juvenile poetry Riley gave me when I was seventeen/ A blue cotton mask.

by Madison Reid

32 TUFTS OBSERVER JULY 7, 2020

POETRY & PROSE

ART BY BRIGID CAWLEY

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 33

VOICES

Panic! at the (CVS) Disco

By Cana Tagawa

As we left the car a single thought kept coming up again: “Do you really need to go inside?” I knew the answer was no, but my mom had missed our shopping excursions that we so frequently used to go on together. I tried to calm myself, thinking “Cases have been relatively low. We are wearing masks. I won’t touch anything unnecessarily. I will keep my distance.”

When my mom and I entered the CVS we immediately navigated our way through the store, unexpectedly teeming with people. We thought the fact that it was Easter would mean many people were at home celebrating the holiday, trying to find a shred of normalcy in traditions that could be carried on in some fashion this year. Everyone else must have had the same line of thought.

The lifeless looks on the faces of the people in line said it all: “I’m tired of this.” They seemed to be questioning whether or not any of these inconveniences to their lives were worth it. People stood idle, three feet apart, not taking the guidelines seriously.

I made a beeline for the nearest vacant aisle, losing my mom instantly. I was acutely aware of every person I passed, how far away they were, if they seemed to be over 65.

I saw pairs of people shopping together

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like my mom and I, and I wondered how seriously the stay-at-home order was being taken. I felt guilty as charged.

I veered toward parts of the store I knew fewer people frequented, trying to distract myself with toaster strudels and teriyaki burgers. I took deep breaths. I awkwardly walked. Paused.

Let people pass.

I noticed that the Top 40 tunes over the loudspeaker were on hold for now. Playing instead was generic Hawaiian music that is both tourist-cheesy and completely comforting to any local. I guessed the decision was purposeful since people needed something familiar to hold on to in these very unfamiliar times.

Growing up in Hawai’i, I have always felt that our geographic isolation led to an insular community consciousness. I have tried reasoning that living in a place as idyllic and remote as Hawai’i may lead to a contentment that generally leaves people

VOICES

happy with the way things are, and not necessarily concerned with issues beyond our shores.

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases here lingers above 600. People have begun to feel more comfortable with the low odds of getting the virus––I figured at least by the way people whisked past me taking no precautions.

I took another deep breath, and tried to not give anyone a dirty glance although all I was feeling was frustration and a lack of control. Aside from the foolish decision to go inside the store with my mom instead of going in her place, I have limited all of my activities to the bare necessities.

As I neared the end of the toiletry aisle I was reminded why. There stood an eldery man, maskless, using all of his energy to prop himself up against his shopping cart so he could make out what was left on his grocery list. I stopped in my tracks, took a deep breath, turned around and told myself that was all I could do. I didn’t have a mask to give him. I didn’t have the number of an organization that could deliver groceries to his home.

I turned around and I thought of all the people I care about in New York, New Jersey,

Massachusetts––where the situation is much more dire. Where I imagine that precautions are taken. Seriously. And perhaps it’s simply a matter of necessity, not one of community awareness like I see it here at home. Nonetheless, all I wanted to do tell the elderly man that he should try to find a mask, if he can.

As my mom finished up, I stood staring at amber bottles of essential oils wondering if the calming lavender could really help me sleep through the night. As we left she asked if I was ready to go to the supermarket and I mustered the courage to tell her I didn’t think we should both go. That I would be more comfortable if I went alone or if she did. She looked exasperated and said “I don’t get it! If one of us gets sick then the other one will anyway! Whatever, I’ll go.”

I sat down in the passenger seat to wait for her, opening my phone to find some distraction. Something that would make me forget what little control I have over the wellbeing of the people I care about. Over people I don’t even know. I took another deep breath in the car and told myself that the best I could do in that moment was exactly what I was doing. And then I listened to Brendon Urie tell me “don’t give up, it’s a little complicated.”

ART BY KELLY TAN, DESIGN BY JOANNA KLESZCZEWSKI

JULY 7, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 35

yearning