April 2019

COUNTERPOINT the wellesley college journal of campus life april 2019 volume 52 issue 3

have any last regrets? have any last thoughts? have any last feelings? have any last opinions? have any last advice for first-years? submit them to Counterpoint

writing and art submissions due monday, april 29 to senglis2 or myang5

SUBMISSION POLICY The magazine accepts non-fiction submissions that are respectful, are submitted with sufficient time for editing, and have not been published elsewhere. The magazine does not accept poetry or fiction submissions. We encourage cooperation between writers and editors but reserve the right to edit all content for length and clarity. Email submissions, ideas, or questions to the Editors-in-Chief (senglis2 or myang5). The views expressed in Counterpoint do not necessarily reflect the views of the magazine staff or the Wellesley community. Counterpoint does not solicit specific pieces from students, rather we publish the pieces that we receive each month and do our best to publish all appropriate submissions that we receive.

Images: Tara Kohli ’21 (cover), Aremisia Luk ’21 (left)

THE SENIOR ISSUE

E D I TO R I A L S TA F F Samantha English ’19 Midori Yang ’19

Editors-in-Chief Managing Editors

April Poole ’19 Francesca Gazzolo ’20

Features Editors

Seren Riggs-Davis ’21 Marina Furbush ’21

Staff Editors

Katie Madsen ’19 Lucia Tu ’19 Ashley Anderson ’21 Megan D'Alessandro ’21 Eleanor Nash ’21 Sage Wentzell-Brehme ’21 Gus Agyemang ’22 Zaria George ’22 Stella Ho ’22 Vivian Nye ’22 Parker Piscitello-Fay ’22 Deana Weatherly ’22

D E S I G N S TA F F Layout Editors

Roz Rea ’19 Sarah White ’19 Marinn Cedillo ’21 Gus Agyemang ’22

COUNTERPOINT THE WELLESLEY COLLEGE JOURNAL OF CAMPUS LIFE APRIL 2019 Volume 52 / Issue 3

M E N TA L H E A LT H ANONYMOUS

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SEIJIN OMEDETOU!

SOFIA ROSE

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COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

CAMPUS LIFE GABRIELLE SHLIKAS

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A LESSON ON HOMESICKNESS

ANONYMOUS

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MISTIMED AND MISPLACED: WAAR’S PROTEST AT SOC

IDENTITY NATALIE MARSHALL

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HAMELDAEME

ELY WILLARD

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STAR ISLAND

GRACE DRIVER

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FINDING BEAUTY IN MY BLACKNESS

MIRANDA TRAN

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I HATE* NYC TOURISTS

B U S I N E S S S TA F F Vanessa Ntungwanayo ’21

Historian Publicity Chair Social Chairs

Cheryn Shin ’21 Natalie Marshall ’21 Sage Wentzell-Brehme ’21

Secretary

Corinne Muller ’21

Treasurer

Vanessa Ntungwanayo ’21

TRUSTEES Olivia Funderburg ’18, Allyson Larcom ’17, Hanna Day-Tenerowicz ’16, Cecilia Nowell ’16, Oset Babur ’15, Alison Lanier ’15, Kristina Costa ’09, Kara Hadge ’08

F O L LOW U S Website

wellesleycounterpoint.org

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POLITICS ANONYMOUS

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RETURNING

A R T S & C U LT U R E STELLA HO

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DERIVE: FIVE WAYS OF LOOKING AT MIT

F E AT U R E S COUNTERPOINT STAFF

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POLL: SHOWER ETIQUETTE

COUNTERPOINT STAFF

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CROSSWORD: CURRENT COMEDIANS

成 人 お め で と う SEIJIN OMEDETOU!

BY ANONYMOUS

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counterpoint / april 2019

Content warnings: discussion of depression and anxiety, mentions of an eating disorder.

This was originally written on January that up by running away to my semester 20, 2019. It functions as a retrospective abroad, 7,000 miles from Wellesley. I conpiece. I was largely inspired to write this be- tinued to ignore Wellesley, asking my procause my mom had recently ordered framed fessors abroad to reach out to me through prints of the professional photos from the my personal email. I spent almost all of day of my seijinshiki, my coming of age cer- my time alone, exploring my temporary emony. The photos are beautiful and mean a city with headphones in, safely cloaked lot to her, but they mean something entirely in anonymity. When it came time, I redifferent to me. Displayed in the entryway of turned home, still thousands of miles my home and since sent to family members away from Wellesley. around the world, these photos capture a me I know now (and maybe I knew then) at my lowest, not a me I would’ve chosen that all of this avoidance did little to actuto showcase. Although written in response ally help me. If anything, it just enabled to this event, this essay will likely never be me to continue hiding from my problems. shown to anyone in my family. Nonetheless, When I made it back to our lovely it means a lot to me to have been able to campus, I finally started attending counwrite it. Thank you for your time. seling at the Stone Center. Even then, I was a ghost of myself; I don’t remember y 2018 began with my seijin- much of that semester, but here are some shiki, my coming of age cere- things that I do: mony. It was an all-day affair at • biweekly counseling sessions (tears the local Japanese garden that celebrated in every one) the adulthood of a dozen seijin. Like so • roommate troubles and thus sleepmuch of my life during that time, I was ing troubles just going through the motions, smiling • finally admitting to my eating disfor the camera and feeling dreadful. I order knew how lucky I was to be able to ex• committing to too many things perience this ceremony even though my because I felt bad saying “no” family couldn’t make it back to Japan, but • avoiding professors because I was I was in the throes of depression, anxiety, scared to show my face and an eating disorder, all of which made • dread, dread, dread, dread, dread it difficult to feel like anything at all.

• taking two withdrawals and anLooking back, I only remember that day other incomplete through the photos taken. It wasn’t really The only thing that got me through me who was there. was the knowledge that my mom was I feel the need to explain myself. ready to welcome me home with open The year before, 2017, was the absolute arms. worst year of my life. I ended a relationMy last summer as an undergraduate ship, multiple friendships, and finished student was the least productive of them the spring semester with a permanent in- all. No internship, no job, no will to do complete in a class for my major. I was anything. Instead, the terrifying prospect so embarrassed and ashamed that I spent that I had no idea what I was going to that whole summer in hiding, dodging do in my next phase of life. The desire to messages and emails, and disappearing disappear but not to die. into a 9-to-5 job that helped me appear I was supposed to continue therapy like I was functioning. As if that weren’t at home, but I was scared to ask for it. enough avoidance behavior, I followed Scared to be a burden to my parents.

M

Images: www.ac-illust.com, freepik.com (left), dissolve.com

MENTAL HEALTH

Scared to admit to them that their daughter had become a complete and total mess despite all that they had given her. Scared to be a disgrace. I’m lucky that the few breakdowns I had during those months revealed to my parents how poorly I was doing. Even though this recognition was the start of finally getting the help I needed, I couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t all “too little, too late.” I had already let so many people down in the past year. Was there even anything left to put back together?

But I at least had to try. Even though I was filled with dread, I returned to campus this past fall. This time, I was armed with SSRIs (prescribed at my parents’ request), fewer extracurriculars, and zero social media accounts. My sessions at the Stone Center increased in frequency as I started to see three separate counselors and attend sessions with the nutritionist at Health Services. Everything about this semester felt more intentional. I lived day by day, hour by hour, almost entirely for myself. For the first time during my years at Wellesley, I imagined I was living how a full-time, dedicated student should. I was forced to take that step back to tune in with myself again (if I had ever been tuned in before).

It takes looking back to notice, but somewhere along the way I did start to get better. I’m better at waking up. I’m better at exercising and taking regular showers.

I’m better at showing up to classes and doing my assignments. I’m better at being more honest and open with myself and others. I’m better at recognizing unhealthy coping mechanisms. I’ve made new connections and new friendships I would’ve been too scared to make before. I didn’t take any incompletes this past semester.

I’m not cured and sometimes I still worry that I’ll never be. I still don’t know what I might do after I leave Wellesley. But I do know I’ll make it there. I know I’ve grown so much and will continue to do so.

Some things are still hard. My counselors wanted me to seek out more intensive treatment for my eating disorder this winter break through an outpatient program. However, I returned home to find my dad unemployed. I didn’t want to ask for help, especially since it was something that had to be paid for. Even though my parents know about my depression and anxiety, my eating disorder would be entirely new information to them. I hate coming to them with more problems when they have already supported me so much in my mental health journey. I wish I only had progress to show them.

The disappointments of this year still haunt me, mostly because they were all caused by me. It was me in the throes of mental illness, but at the end of the day, it was still me. I’m sorry for it. I’m sorry that I’m still too scared to reach out and actually apologize to people, to take responsibility for myself and my actions. Maybe one day I’ll get there. Maybe 2019 will be the year for amends.

I want to explain. I wanted to tell somebody, somewhere, somehow what

I’ve been going through. I wanted to account for myself, to map it all out. I wanted to say that, even though I couldn’t tell at the time, 2018 really was the year I would come of age.

Life is hard, and for a while that’s all I thought it could be. You work and you work and you work and then what? I’m hoping that in 2019, I’ll find that life is something more.

For information about publishing articles anonymously, please contact the Editors-inChief (senglis2@wellesley.edu or myang5@ wellesley.edu) counterpoint / april 2019

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MENTAL HEALTH

cognitive dissonance cognitive dissonance P

art 1. You have a terrible day. Then it turns into several terrible days. A bunch of awful things happen in a row, and you feel yourself spiraling. You start doubting everything you do. That wasn’t the right decision. That was mean.

I shouldn’t have said that. Why didn’t I say anything? I’m a terrible person. I’m a terrible friend. I’m lazy. I could have done better. I’m not doing enough. I’m wasting time, and I’m wasting money. I shouldn’t be here. Everything is awful. You’re doing bad. Even when you’re sitting still, you have a constant, dreadful feeling like you’re walking down a staircase and you’ve missed a step. It’s uncomfortable, and it leaves you vulnerable. Everything is piling up so much that even little things set you off. You start crying in class and leave to go to the bathroom. Then you feel even worse because no one noticed you were upset.

Part 2. You are hit with a brilliant epiphany! You’ve been stupid! When you’re feeling bad, you should reach out for help! Obviously! You are a fully functioning person in control of your fate, so you make an appointment at the Stone Center for Monday. Although right now you’re still doing pretty bad, you focus on finishing your paper, and then you go to bed. You congratulate yourself for being proactive. Great! It’s great that resources are available with no judgement. And you don’t even have to pay to go! The last time you tried going to therapy you “got better” in two sessions because you felt page 6

counterpoint / april 2019

so guilty about how much it cost. You’re certain that as soon as you go, you’ll feel better. You still have the missing-a-step feeling constricting your chest, but you tell yourself it will be over soon. Thank goodness!

Part 3. Your Stone Center appointment is cancelled because of the snow.

They offer you another one, but you have a class you can’t miss because you have a quiz. Later that day, they offer you a slot from a cancelled appointment, and you can’t make that either because you have to work. It’s a doctor’s appointment, you tell yourself. It’s your health! It’s important! You can justify missing things for it.

But you can’t make yourself do it. Going to class, going to work, writing your midterm paper––they’re all more important than making time to take care of yourself.

There isn’t any time that works, and you find yourself apologizing to the counselor you had an appointment with. Why are you apologizing to them? Finally, you’re able to make an appointment later in the week that sort of fits in your schedule.

You’ll only have to be a little late to class.

But, you worry, what if by then you feel better? What if by then you lose the courage to go?

Part 4. The week creeps towards your appointment, and at first you’re aching for it to happen. You can’t wait to get everything off your chest. Then you deflate. You talk yourself out of your own pain. This problem isn’t that bad. None of these problems are that bad. You’re

Images: Alexandra Gross ’21 (left), wellesley.edu (right)

BY SOFIA ROSE

overreacting. You’ll be late to class. You’ll have to leave another meeting early. It’s not worth it. You’re taking up an appointment slot from someone who actually needs it. What are you even going to say?

The thing that made you upset in the first place wasn’t even that big of a deal; you’re just being melodramatic. That feeling of constantly missing a step? That’s because you’re stressed. Everyone feels that way.

You’re not special. You’re actually very privileged. This problem isn’t that bad.

This problem isn’t that bad. Don’t go don’t go don’t go. These are your thoughts the days before. They get so repetitive and controlling, you find yourself once more in tears.

Part 5. The morning of. You could cancel. You don’t. Mostly you go because you told your friend you would and she was happy for you. You know, logically, you should go. You know, logically, that it could be helpful. That’s why the Stone Center is there, so you can reach out for help when you need it. You know it is good to go talk about what you’ve been feeling lately. But you can’t make yourself believe it. You get up from your meeting, self-conscious about leaving early, hoping no one will ask where you’re going. You feel like you have a flashing sign on your forehead as you trek across campus: I AM GOING TO THE STONE CENTER BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN HAVING A BAD TIME. Please, don’t let me see anyone I know. You cast your eyes down and step into the building.

Part 6. You examine the two dissonant truths you hold in your mind at the same time.

The first truth is that the Stone Center exists solely because you’re supposed to use it. That there is no shame in using any resources as much as you need them. You know this is true for everyone who goes to the Stone Center, or uses Disability Services, or uses off-campus counseling, or any other resources they need. You know, on some level, this is even true for you.

You are allowed to reach out when you need to, even if you feel like your problems are not big enough.

The second truth is that you, personally, do feel shame going to the Stone Center. You’re uncomfortable opening the “Health Services” tab in Banner to make an appointment if you’re sitting in the dining hall. You’re uncomfortable sitting in the waiting room trying desperately not to make eye contact with the other people there. You’re uncomfortable walking to the Stone Center, worrying that someone you know is going to see you and ask you where you’re going and you’ll have to say, “The Stone Center” and then they’ll wonder why.

The Stone Center isn’t helpful for everyone or every situation. It isn’t always accessible. You said yes when they offered to schedule another appointment, but it was difficult to fit it into your packed schedule. On campus, there is so much rhetoric about taking care of your mental health, taking advantage of resources,

reaching out when you need help, and that there is nothing wrong with any of that. At the same time, it is hard to reach out. It is hard to make time to take care of yourself. Sometimes the resources offered are not helpful at all. Going through the process of asking for help can be exhausting and daunting, especially for people who suffer from serious mental health issues. And the shame is no small element.

Despite all the discourse about the importance of erasing the stigma around mental health issues, the stigma is not gone. It’s ingrained in you, making you feel guilty for going to the Stone Center, then making you feel guilty about feeling that guilt.

For now, you must be comfortable with these contradicting truths. And you also must go to your next appointment.

Sofia Rose ’22 (srose5@wellesley.edu) is already making post-graduation plans to become a reclusive beekeeper.

counterpoint / april 2019

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CAMPUS LIFE

W

hen I got in the car to make the eight-hour trip to Wellesley, homesickness was low on my list of fears. I was worried about what I would eat since I am the pickiest eater known to man (I could out-ew a five-yearold throwing a temper tantrum in regards to what I will not eat). I was worried about getting along with my roommate, as we had been randomly assigned. She seemed nice enough in our emails, but she could still be really loud, too cool for me, or a serial killer, though some of those were more likely than others. I was not worried about being homesick.

A year before, I had moved in with my aunt while my mom and sister moved about an hour and a half away to a small town right across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. So before moving to Wellesley, I did have almost a year’s worth of experience living away from my family. Even though my mom and sister lived close-by, I didn’t visit often because of my full-time summer job.

Living with my aunt Jo, cousin Liz and grandmother Gommy had spoiled me in a way I didn’t realize as I made my way to Wellesley.

Living with my extended family meant I never had to be alone. I could always have coffee with Gommy in the morning and dinner with the whole family in the evening. Despite not living with my mom anymore, I was still with family.

There was Oscar, Aunt Jo’s adorable ten-pound dog, who refused to be picked up but would cuddle with me on his own page 8

counterpoint / april 2019

terms. Molly, another pet, was a herding dog with so many quirks that she needed more anti-anxiety meds than the rest of the house combined. She didn’t like to snuggle, but she was always down for tricks and chasing squirrels (two of which she caught).

Even when no one was home, the house still buzzed with the sound of fish filters running. Red Fish, Orange Fish, and Corey Booker Fish (all actual names) swimming merrily in their tanks. There was always a cat meowing or snoring somewhere in the distance, Squirt (the 17-pound ball of irony) was never far off, always looking for someone to rub his belly. Callie stalked in the corners, ready to demand attention only to immediately fall asleep. And Kitty, meowing at doors

she didn’t really want you to open.

When I got to Wellesley, the heat was sweltering despite the fact that I was told this was the North. After we unpacked and ate lunch, I hugged my mom, sister, and step-dad goodbye, knowing I would see them for Thanksgiving.

I was okay.

Thanksgiving was delightful, hanging out with my step-dad’s family, trying not to start political conversations and trolling Fox News lovers when the opportunities arose. Still, I wasn’t too homesick.

Then came winter break.

My first college winter break was magical. It was the first time in my life when I truly had nothing to do or stress about.

I didn’t have a job or school work. It was heaven. I had only just started to live with

Images: Cindy Tang on Unsplash

A Lesson On

Homesickness

BY GABRIELLE SHLIKAS my mom. I got to spend so much time with my family, visiting Callie and Squirt, Gommy, Liz, Aunt Jo, and Uncle John. It was amazing.

Having such a great break made coming back to Wellesley harder than arriving the first time.

I know I’ll be going home for the summer soon, but I can’t keep the feelings of homesickness from taking root in the bottom of my stomach. I want to pet my dog Remmi, and have my step-dad remind everyone that he is not allowed on the couch, only to let him nap with me as we binge-watch a TV show. I want to play with my parrot, Parker, and hear him mimic my laugh. I want to keep trying to teach him to say curse words. I want to go to breakfast with Gommy at the

same diner we’ve been going to since I was born. I want to pet Oscar and see what new habits Molly has developed (last time it was eating napkins).

I can’t wait for family dinners, both at Aunt Jo’s and at home. I can’t wait for warm summer nights, the winter chill in my bones long forgotten. I can’t wait for the crackle of bonfires and the roar of a boat engine, and the sweet pain of a mild sunburn on my shoulders.

In the meantime, I’m learning to revel in the strangeness that is life at Wellesley.

One of my goals this year was to be more spontaneous and as a result I’ve gone on some fun adventures around the city because I’ve started answering “yes” more often. I get dinner with friends and am steadily building a Wellesley family full of

some of the brightest people I’ve ever met.

Going into college, homesickness was at the bottom of my list of fears, but it fought its way up. I discovered that the dining hall serves grilled chicken at almost every meal, so I won’t starve out of pickiness. My roommate has a big personality, a warm smile, and has not tried to kill me.

Sometimes I get that gut-clenching feeling in the pit of my stomach calls sometimes, but I’m learning how to handle it. I write letters to my best friends from home and text them frequently, all of us sharing memes and our reactions to the latest season of Queer Eye. I FaceTime my family a lot, making my mom hold the phone up to the parrot so we can talk. I look back at pictures of family gatherings, of me and my pets, and remind myself that I’ll be home soon.

Gabrielle Shlikas ’22 (gshlikas@wellesley. edu) is really counting down the days until summer break.

counterpoint / april 2019

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CAMPUS LIFE

Mistimed and Misplaced D

uring President Johnson’s speech to prospective students on the Monday of Spring Open Campus, an org called Wellesley for Adequate and Accessible Resources held a protest.

They interrupted the speech with megaphone chants of “when our health care is under attack, stand up, fight back” and a banner stating their grievances. On posters, handouts, and social media everywhere, Wellesley for Adequate and Accessible Resources urged students to “Ask Wellesley Why”: Programs for disadvantaged students are underfunded.

Our minority advisors are overworked.

We have minimal disability accommodations.

There are no accessible entrances to the Stone Center.

There are no wheelchair accessible vans.

We wait weeks for Stone Center appointments.

We have ‘stress less weeks’ instead of true mental health care.

We are asked to leave campus to take care of our mental health.

All of these questions are important and they deserve complex answers.

My issue is not with the complaints of Wellesley for Adequate and Accessible Resources. I agree with them, and I think Wellesley needs to enact major changes.

However, President Johnson’s speech was not the appropriate, or most effective, time and place to demand those changes.

While, yes, Wellesley is admittedly more inclined to take action when there is money at stake—like the tuition money page 10

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WAAR’s Protest at SOC

of prospective students—this protest did much more harm than good.

This protest reminds me of a similarly contentious event this summer. A current Wellesley student released a video entitled “5 Bad Things About Wellesley,” which, as of this month, has twelve thousand views. The video was posted to the Class of 2022’s Facebook page over the summer, before the first-years had set foot on campus. Listing five “bad things” about Wellesley, this video paints a very cynical picture of the College that doesn’t capture its complexity and joy. Many new students worried over whether they made the right decision to come to Wellesley. I fear the same thing happened to prospective students with the protest during Spring Open Campus. If I witnessed my potential college president get interrupted by a group demanding immediate remedy to seemingly egregious issues, then I would seriously question attending that college.

Indeed, I witnessed many prospective students questioning their decisions. I spoke with one who said she thought the protest was telling her “not to come to Wellesley.”

Many other students voiced the same sentiment.

While the protest organized by Wellesley for Adequate and Accessible Resources expressed important concerns, I fear that it had some serious unintended consequences. The students I talked to—who all identified as students of color—were seriously considering not attending Wellesley after the protest. If this is the perspective of Wellesley potential students are getting, then the students who want to be a part of our community and who deserve to be a part of our commu-

nity won’t come to Wellesley. Our community is made better by its diversity, and marginalized students attending Wellesley might have an even more difficult experience if their communities shrink. While this protest may discourage marginalized students from attending Wellesley, more privileged students will be able to ignore many of these issues and will attend regardless. This discrepancy would create an exclusive space, deepening the inequity intrinsic intrinsic to our institution—the very inequity that the protest aimed to address.

While Wellesley always has room for improvement, a lot of Wellesley students forget that comparable institutions do not do nearly as much as Wellesley does for marginalized students. We have resources that, while underfunded, most other institutions lack entirely. We have accessible administrators who will work with you in order to help you succeed. There is a lot of talk about our billion-dollar endowment and how, for having so much money, we don’t put the money where it needs to be.

In order to sustain the college, we cannot dip into our endowment—especially for recurring costs, such as salaries for more Health Services staff. Instead, we annually benefit from its interest. Our perceived underfunding comes, in part, from Wellesley’s low tuition cost compared to our peer institutions. (As someone whose Wellesley bill has been mostly paid by financial aid, I know this sounds outrageous, but it’s true.) Our tuition hike, while bemoaned by all of us, will help the school fund important projects and resources that benefit historically marginalized students (it is important to note that

Images: Clem Onojeghu

BY ANONYMOUS

our tuition hike will not affect students on financial aid since aid will still be determined by need; it is meant to target students who do not receive aid). I worry that this well-intended protest will send these students to institutions that demonstrably do not provide the same resources or care for their marginalized students as Wellesley does.

Additionally, this protest asks for immediate material change that cannot be achieved instantaneously, and ignores the progress that Wellesley is already making. Institutions, by nature, cannot make immediate change and asking for that is naive. Wellesley cannot unilaterally decide tomorrow to suddenly allocate more resources to underfunded areas, hire new staff, and upend its entire institutional structure. We may see these restrictions or these institutions themselves as unjust, but we’re choosing to attend this school, and these are the realities we must deal with.

Working in a long tradition of campus activism, Wellesley students constantly put pressure on administration to make positive change—and we really do see the results. The Stone Center is in the process of hiring new staff and is allowing students to interview them, ensuring they will adequately respond to their needs.

The Wellesley Plus Program, while limited in enrollment due to its “pilot program” status, can be expanded with new money from tuition, positive feedback from students, and tweaks to the program as Wellesley administrators figure out how this cutting-edge effort can best serve the populations it seeks to help. Our official disability accommodations are much

more extensive than the ones at any other schools I have encountered. When the official accommodations are not enough, my professors and administrators have always been more than happy to help me.

This assistance may not be the case for all students, but by and large we have a support system here which does care for us, even if its choices are difficult for us to understand or are not the choices we might have made.

This article is not to say that we should not push for faster and better change and provide meaningful input wherever we can. However, we are working within the confines of real life, and it would be cynical—and disingenuous—to ignore the positive changes towards which Wellesley is already working.

For information about publishing articles anonymously, please contact the Editors-inChief (senglis2@wellesley.edu or myang5@ wellesley.edu)

counterpoint / april 2019

page 11

IDENTITY

Hameldaeme

B Y N ATA L I E M A R S H A L L

For my English class on diaspora and immigration, I interviewed my grandmother Arlene, whom I call Yaya, about her experience with immigration. She immigrated to the United States from Scotland when she was fourteen. Based on our conversations and the stories she told me, I wrote several vignettes describing moments from her immigration. The vignettes are based on her descriptions of true events, however some moments are fictionalized in order to emphasize important emotions. Before five of the six vignettes I chose to include epigraphs. These short scenes are snippets of dialogue between Yaya and I, often moments from my childhood.

She begins and I join in, singing at the top of my lungs.

Our voices blend together, both off-key.

BUT ME AND MY TRUE LOVE WILL NEVER MEET AGAIN, ON THE BONNIE, BONNIE BANKS O’ LOCH LOMOND. Our laughter echoes in the shower.

March, 1958 As her mother Euphemia talks, the only thing Arlene can seem to focus on is the gray. The gray outside the window, the gray walls of their house, the gray stove.

The four of them are sitting before the fireplace, Arlene’s younger sister Margo on her left, her older brother Jim on her right, her mother facing them. With her shoulders back and jaw clenched, hands folded over the pleats of her dress, Euphemia is the picture of fortitude as she tells her children they’ll be leaving for the United States in a month.

Arlene knew this day would come, the one where her mother would tell them they were going to follow her older page 12

counterpoint / april 2019

brothers, older sister, and father. She had known it ever since her father left to find work. I don’t want to be here when three of my children are there, Walter, Arlene remembers her mother saying. So her father left with the understanding that the four of them would follow as soon as he had settled the arrangements.

Somehow, Arlene’s knowledge of these facts in no way lessens the pain she feels as her mother begins to explain the plan.

She wants to scream, to cry, to rage. What about our life here? I don’t want to live without my friends! I can’t! A hundred responses course through her mind, but she can’t bear to say anything at all. She knows her mother will be occupied by Margo, by her illnesses and tears. Her mother will be the one to deal with all the anxieties of traversing such a great distance, with finding a job once they arrive, with making sure they’re provided for. She won’t add to her mother’s burden, she can’t.

Arlene wonders for a moment how her mother’s wee body can contain so much strength and resilience. She decides hers must be able to too.

She remains silent. She swallows everything she wanted to say, almost convincing herself she had never wanted to say it at all. Almost.

Yaya! Get in the pool!

I’m happier here.

I like watching you and Bop Bop. Why? Are you afraid?

18 April, 1958 One Thursday in April, at a dock in Southampton, Euphemia, Jim, and Arlene board the RMS Queen Mary with Margo in tow. As most tickets are beyond their means, they are consigned to the steerage level of the ship; there they stay in a tiny room with two sets of bunk beds for five long days and nights. When she tells this story later, Arlene will recall the seasickness and the tempest. She’ll talk about her fear of the water, about the gut-wrenching horror of standing on the deck and looking out at the horizon where there is only sea, forever, in every direction. She’ll describe her certainty that they would just fall off, that there was nothing else out there, no other land, nothing besides that which they’d left behind.

In this moment, though, she stares up at the bookshelves around her, thinking that everything in her new world might be okay. She and Margo discovered the room their first day on the ship, but waited to enter, taking time to figure out how to

Images: Antoine Fabre on Unsplash

O

h ye’ll take the high road, and I’ll tak’ the low road, And I’ll be in Scotland a’fore ye—

get in without being noticed. The library wasn’t in their class, of course, and though Arlene’s only intention was to look at the room, to soak in the space and touch nothing, she knew they needed to be surreptitious in entering. Silently she opened the door, Margo behind her nearer than her shadow. Now she stands in silent awe as her sister pushes past her. Floor to ceiling bookshelves filled with volumes bound in rich colors—royal blue, maroon, chocolate brown—cover every wall.

Arlene thinks she has never seen so many books in her entire life. Their school in Fallin had none, and in their home there were but a few. Margo plops down on a leather chair, a mahogany coffee table at its side.

But Arlene doesn’t move. She pictures all the rooms in the United States exactly like this one, all the books in the whole country. More books than people, probably. She dreams of her bedroom to be, imagining it set up in the same way. She would sleep amidst it all, at rest between the words, the safe musty smell, the assured bindings.

Someone enters. You can’t be in here, a disembodied voice. Margo exits quickly, Arlene reluctantly, both throwing last glances behind them, planning for the next time, looking for another point of entry, anywhere they can slip in unseen.

Cookies and other baked treats cover every flat surface in the house.

Thousands of them.

Empire biscuits, shortbread, toffee bars, gypsy creams…

She makes them every year.

And every year she eats one, two, maybe five of her creations.

You know I don’t like sweets, lovey.

They’re for everyone else.

22 April, 1958 They stop at an ice cream shop on the

drive home from the bus station. Well not home, but someone’s home—their relatives’ house in Whitinsville. Everyone gets out of the car, Arlene’s uncle explaining something about where they are, but she can’t make sense of his garbled words. It’s as if there is a rift between her and the rest of the world. Dissociated, she observes everything, but feels slightly removed, unable to affect change in her environment. They walk inside and everyone but her uncle sits down at shiny, white tables.

Margo anxiously thumbs the vinyl chair’s piping, worrying at the white lines that stand in stark contrast to the cherry-red seats. Like sweets, she thinks, or hospitals.

At the counter near the front of the shop, Uncle John orders ice creams for the three kids, chatting with the server.

Margo starts crying again, and under the table Arlene squeezes her hand as if to say It’ll be alright, consoling her young sister, if not herself. Euphemia locks eyes with Arlene from across the table, a look of motherly gratitude, but also of reassurance, concern, apology. Soon, their uncle returns bearing three boat-shaped, paper dishes with mesmerizing contents. They’re banana splits, he says, setting one down in front of Margo, Arlene, and Jim in turn, I thought you all might want a treat after your long trip. Jim starts eating immediately, devouring the whipped cream, vanilla ice cream, fudge sauce, and banana, without so much as pausing to breathe.

Margo is more hesitant, she sucks on her spoon savoring the flavors, the cold sweetness she had rarely known before.

Arlene is the only one of the three who eats her ice cream with little zest.

Sweets had never been her favorite; given the choice, she would always choose something salty. In this moment, sitting in this too-clean diner on squeaky seats, surrounded by family, but utterly alone, she wonders what will happen. A tear falls into the whipped cream near her abandoned spoon—maybe it’ll taste better now.

Why do you say it like that Yaya?

It’s so funny, say it again! Say it again!

Because it has two ‘o’s.

And because that’s how I learned to pronounce it.

Read your boooook, lovey.

June, 1958 She stands in front of her mirror, black curls haphazardly framing her face. She doesn’t pay attention to her hair though.

Or her eyes. Or her nose. Instead, she concentrates on her mouth, her bucky teeth too big for the space they occupy, her thick lips curled around them. She contorts her face, mouthing words, overemphasizing the pronunciation. She decided she would do anything to not stand out. Anything to speak and be understood, not heard. Now, she practices for hours, repeating phrases, watching how her mouth forms the sounds, thinking about how people at school look when they talk. Silence, reserve—these were skills she had never mastered. Instead she teaches herself a new language, easier to change herself in this way, she thinks. Except it’s really not like learning a new language at all, because learning a new language would imply that she gets to keep her old one. This is erasure.

But she doesn’t tell herself this. Instead, she thinks of it as trading in her old way of speaking for a new one. Scottish English for American English. Old for new. Broken for whole.

June, 2008 She stands in front of her mirror getting ready to see her older sister, salt and pepper waves too short to touch her cheeks rest softly atop her head. For a moment sorrow overcomes her. She mourns the fourteen-year-old girl she lost. The one that didn’t change the way she spoke.

The one that did what she always promised herself she would do—return. The one that never left at all. Every Saturday, counterpoint / april 2019

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tea with Eleanor, 10 a.m. sharp, like looking into a mirror that shows her what could’ve been. Eleanor’s language is crisp and curled like the click of her fake, pink nails on the table. Arlene’s own is harsh and foreign. In moments like these, she finds herself looking into inescapable mirrors, into reflections that never move. She glances back at herself, only half aware of having thought anything at all before turning and walking out of the room.

Lang may yer lum reek … ?

I read the words hesitantly, studying the embroidery on the small pillow.

The one that hangs from her door knob.

It means may you never be without fuel for your fire.

It’s a greeting— wishes for a home.

July, 2015 It’s hard to identify what’s different, to quantify the nearly imperceptible change in someone I know well. We’re sitting at Mag’s round kitchen table, just the three of us, Mag, Yaya, and I. Before us plates of food steam. The cups of tea with just a wee-bit of milk in them steam too. I study my plate apprehensively. The food is deceptively beautiful: the golden eye of a perfectly fried egg stares back at me, next to it juices leak from bright red tomatoes split open from heat. There are triangles of toast and squares of butter, baked beans and sausages, HP sauce (of course), brownish, chopped meat, and black disks the size of my fist. Everything smells like grease and blood. I don’t breathe as I chew and rapidly swallow a small bite of my haggis. I refuse to process what I’ve just put in my body and instead turn to something more familiar—rye bread.

As I sit there eating and listening to Yaya and Mag talk, my surroundings be-

come hazy and distorted, as if I’m looking at the world from inside a giant bubble.

Jet lag is the most likely culprit, but still I’m surprised by how foreign their speech sounds. It seems they must, impossibly, be conversing in some language other than English, a language that is unknown— and unknowable—to me. In my stupor, I feel distanced enough from my surroundings to make sense of the shift I had noticed before. Yaya is sitting down, sitting down. The woman who never sits for longer than 20 minutes at a time, who finds something to do, dishes to wash, milk to fetch, a surface to clean anytime she determines she’s perched at the table for too long. Now at ease, she sits laughing and talking with Mag. They’re telling stories of Gala Day, the three-legged races and dresses made by their mums. Reminiscing about getting the strap in school for talking too much, and being sent home when their fingernails weren’t sufficiently clean. Smiling about laying on the tracks under railroad cars that came whistling through, and staying out late pretending they couldn’t hear the voice calling from the kitchen window.

It’s then, I realize, that never in my life have I seen her so comfortable. Almost as if, for as long as I’ve known her, she’s been playing a part. Not deceptively, but just in the way that you present yourself in different ways to different people. She took on this role years ago, one that was almost herself, but ever-so slightly removed and has never since broken character.

But now, in this foreign kitchen, eating foreign food, Yaya seems foreign too.

Foreign to me, but for once, not foreign to herself.

For Natalie Marshall ’21 (nmarsha3@ wellesley.edu), home is wherever Yaya is. page 14

counterpoint / april 2019

Images: Natalie Marshall ’21 (left), Ramy Mans on Unsplash (right)

IDENTITY

E

B Y E LY W I L L A R D

very summer, my family goes to Star Island for a week. It’s a tiny island ten miles off the coast of the New HampshireMaine border, in a cluster of eight other islands known as the Isles of Shoals. For the past hundred years, Unitarian Universalists and Congregationalists have hosted week-long conferences there throughout the summer. My family always goes to one of the UU weeks even though none of us go to church that often.

But people from all faiths are welcome, and most of the programming has no direct religious connection. It’s kind of like summer camp, but for whole families, not just kids.

My parents have taken me almost every year since I was six.

The same people always go to the same conference. I have friends there who I first met when we were little kids. There are also adults who have watched me grow up, only seeing me one week of the year. Star Island is my favorite place in the world. It’s where I played guitar in front of an audience for the first time, learned to reconnect with my spirituality, and met some of the most interesting people I know. There’s a song we sing at the end of every week with the refrain, “Star Island is our spirit’s home.” It sounds cheesy out of context, but it’s really true.

Since the conference isn’t cheap, my family saves money throughout the year so that we can afford it. We’re not as welloff as the average family who attends, but I’ve always felt more welcome there than in my equally wealthy hometown. But in the summer of 2018, I got nervous about fitting in on Star. Our conference is at the end of August, so I always spend the whole summer anticipating it, but this time, the anticipation wasn’t entirely positive.

The problem was that for the first time I knew I was transmasculine. I had identified as nonbinary in 2017. I held that secret close to my chest throughout the week on Star, telling only one person about my identity on the last day. It had been awkward, but not horrible, because at the time I was fine with wearing dresses and letting people assume I was a girl. But this year, I wasn’t. I had spent the whole summer wearing sundresses and pretending to be a woman at my job, and I wasn’t looking forward to repressing my gender on Star. But it was better to pretend than to come out and face rejection or confusion from people I actually cared about. As far as religious communities go, UU congregations are often pretty progressive. But middleaged people, and honestly cis-people of any age, have a hard time wrapping their heads around the nuances of nonbinary identity.

It’s often easier to just say nothing. So that was the decision I made, but I didn’t feel good about it.

The first night we were on the island, my mom and I ran into Rachel, the mother of one of my childhood friends. The family had stopped coming to Star Island when I was quite young, so we hadn’t seen them in years. After hugging Rachel, we quickly asked about my old friend. She told us that her child was now counterpoint / april 2019

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using they/them pronouns, and had changed their name to Olly, a masculine version of their old name, while they waited for Rachel to choose a new name for them. Even better, they were working on the island this summer. My heart skipped a beat. I couldn’t believe that a friend who I had assumed I would never see again was here now, and not only that, but they had the same experience as me. It meant that I wasn’t completely alone. When Rachel asked how I had been, I stuttered, “Well, actually, I’m using they pronouns too now.”

The next day, I ran into Olly when they were doing their rounds on chamber crew, and they pulled me into a bonecrushing hug. That week, I got to catch up with them and also meet their partner, another nonbinary person. In fact, I discovered that a significantly higher-thanaverage percentage of the young adults who staffed the island were trans and nonbinary.

This realization lifted a lot of my anxiety, but it wasn’t completely gone. The mentality and acceptance in a group of young people would of course be different from that of the mostly middle-aged

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conferees. But as the week went on, I noticed a lot of the conferees talking about nonbinary identities too. I overheard one person, a few years older than me, explain to their uncle why they used they/them pronouns. Halfway through the week, I heard a cis guy praising the front desk of the hotel for providing pronoun stickers. I wandered over later that day and surreptitiously added a they/them sticker to my nametag. At first I wasn’t sure if I actually wanted anyone to notice the sticker, but gradually, I started having conversations about gender with the adult friends who I thought would be receptive and it went better than I expected.

Every morning that week, I went to Writing Circle. For the adults, workshops are offered every morning and afternoon.

The only one I have ever gone to since I aged out of the youth program has been Writing Circle. Every day, Ellen gives us a prompt and a short time to write, and then we go around and read our work to the group. You don’t have to share, but I’ve found that I enjoy the workshop more if I do.

On Thursday, the second-to-last day, her prompt was “You may not know this

about me.” As I copied the words down into my journal, I knew there was only one thing I could write about. I glanced around the room at the 20 or 30-odd middle aged-to-elderly people around me, and anxiety flooded my body. I could always bail and choose not to read what I wrote, I told myself. So, hands shaking, I put pen to paper and began, “I’m not, technically speaking, a woman.”

Reading it back, the piece I ended up writing sounds overly defensive, with lines like “I think using they as a singular pronoun sounds awkward, too, but it’s not my fault the English language doesn’t have a better alternative.” But I remember my cold terror at the prospect of coming out to all these people. Some of them had known me since I was six and some of them didn’t know me at all, and I couldn’t decide which was worse.

I don’t remember a single thing that was read before Ellen got to me. I spent the whole time clutching and twisting my notebook. I made up my mind that I wanted to read this, I wanted to share both my writing and myself, but I couldn’t tell if that was going to be a massive mistake. When it was my turn,

counterpoint / april 2019

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Images: freepik.com

IDENTITY

I read in a faltering voice, my usual anxiety about reading aloud combined with a much larger anxiety.

But when I finished, Ellen responded warmly, sharing her awareness of genderneutral pronouns in other languages.

And after Writing Circle, several people came up to me. That was what I had been dreading, the questions and the curiosity, but I was surprised by the kind responses I got. A couple people wanted to tell me about every other trans person they had ever met, which made me inwardly cringe a little, but I could see their genuine empathy.

After that, it was like a weight was lifted. I normally hate that metaphor about coming out, but in this case it felt true.

Even though I had only explained my identity to a small fraction of people on Star, I felt like, for the first time, I was truly being myself somewhere other than Wellesley or the privacy of my own home.

On the last night of every conference, we have a fancy banquet dinner where we all dress up. Before I had any intention of coming out to the whole island, I had packed a shirt and tie to wear on Banquet Night. It was the same outfit I had been

wearing to semi-formal occasions since ninth grade, years before I had any idea I wasn’t a girl, but I guess it was the first time I had presented strongly masculine on Star, because everyone around me seemed to treat it as a statement worthy of celebration.

The girlfriend of one of my former youth group leaders, about ten years older than me, joked that we looked like prom dates with my skinny black tie and her outrageous red dress, so we got a picture together. A middle-aged family friend complimented my tie but noticed that the knot was crooked, and he and another man I had never had a conversation with before set about straightening my collar while I just laughed. Later, as I was talking to one of the adults from Writing Circle, another, older member came up and said, with all the enthusiasm in the world, “You look just like a twelve year old boy!”

Thankfully, she left before I could think of anything to say to that, so I just turned back to the guy I had been talking to, trying not to feel mortified. “Well,” he said after a moment, “I guess that was a compliment.” And just like that, we were able to laugh it off.

Maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but these little moments of acceptance— awkward as some of them were—meant the world to me. Before that week, I had been weighing the pros and cons of staying closeted throughout my working life versus facing harassment and ignorance if I came out. I am fantastically lucky to have parents who have been vocally supportive of my gender, but I often felt like they were the only adults their age I could ever be honest with. To know there is a whole community of people out there who can accept me, even if they don’t entirely understand me, fills me with hope.

Yes, they’re a statistically unrepresentative concentration of liberals who value acceptance and love, but if they go back to their home communities after the conference and keep spreading that acceptance, it’s got to do some good on a larger scale.

And even if it just means that Star Island is another place where I can be myself, well, for now, I’ll take it.

Ely Willard ’20 (ewillard@wellesley.edu) is counting down the days to August 17th when they’ll be back on Star Island.

counterpoint / april 2019

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IDENTITY

Finding Beauty in my Blackness

I

grew up in Poway, California, a small suburb of San Diego. Only 1.67% of the town’s population is AfricanAmerican, and I am proud to call myself a part of that small, but important, community. Actually, being a member of that minority offered me positive opportunities and experiences. For example, as the founder and president of my school’s Black Student Union, I was able to educate my peers about my culture, as well as the social issues facing the African-American community. However, being a part of Poway’s African-American community was also a challenge, both emotionally and spiritually. I haven’t always been black and proud. One of the greatest challenges I faced as a young black woman in a predominately white environment was learnpage 18

counterpoint / april 2019

ing to find beauty in my blackness.

For as long as I can remember, I have been greatly influenced by Eurocentric beauty standards. For instance, my favorite Cheetah Girl was Sabrina, the blondehaired blue-eyed one (this is so upsetting to think about because The Cheetah Girls were diverse af!!). I thought Sabrina was the “pretty one,” not because the others weren’t pretty in their own way, but because the others weren’t beautiful in my eyes. Later on, I’d come to realize that my standards of beauty were altered because of the lack of diversity in my community.

When I was in the second grade, I vividly remember bringing home a family portrait that I had drawn, and my dad saying to me with a worried look on his face, “This is a great picture, but why did

you draw our family as white? You know we’re not white.”

Why did I do that?

While I knew that my family and I were black (well, except for my mom), I did it because I thought it looked better. Even at seven years old, I was conditioned to think that whiteness was more appealing. As I grew older, I only continued to struggle to find beauty in my blackness. This mainly manifested itself in my hair choices. I went through countless “hair phases” from ages seven to seventeen, from the slicked back ponytail in elementary school to the sock bun in middle school. Hell, I was even blonde with straight hair my junior year of high school! My hair has been through it all.

Well, all but natural.

I remember always feeling embarrassed of my natural hair. When I was young, other kids would tell me, “Wow your hair is so puffy!” or when it was straightened they said, “Your hair looks so much better like that, you should do it more often!”

These comments led me to further reject myself for not fitting my own perceived standards of beauty. I saw myself as ugly because I wouldn’t and couldn’t look like everyone else around me.

High school was where my identity crisis hit its peak. My flat iron was my best friend. Every Sunday night I would spend

Images: Jurien Huggins (left), idreamofbicycling.blogspot.com (right)

BY GRACE DRIVER

a good hour and a half straightening (frying!!) my hair for the school week ahead. I literally developed a fear of people seeing my natural hair. You don’t even know how many beach trips and pool parties I had to bail on out of fear that the water would expose my curls. It got to the point where during my junior year, I decided that I was going blonde...yes, this happened (you can peep my Instagram to witness this truly tragic phase). I came home from my hair appointment and my dad’s jaw dropped. “WHAT DID YOU DO?!” he said. At the time I was so offended that my dad met me with this reaction, but now I realize he was worried. He was worried that I saw my natural beauty as inadequate. He was right. I was a product

O

of my own environment. My exposure to other black people, let alone black women, was so limited that I had no one to show me that black was beautiful.

I’m now at a point in my life where I’m proud of my blackness and my beauty that comes with it. It took me a long time to get to this point, and I still have some work to do, but I have come such a long way in finding comfort in my identity. My sense of black beauty came when I began to interpret beauty through my own eyes rather than through the eyes of society. Black women need to be empowered so that they can be protected from a society that doesn’t always favor them. We need to acknowledge the damaging effects of Eurocentric standards of beauty, and

counteract it by reinforcing the notion that all black skin tones should be part of the established beauty standard.

I hope to be a mother one day, and it would break my heart to know that my young black daughter didn’t see herself as beautiful because of her race. We owe it to ourselves and to our daughters to empower black women and make them feel like they’re beautiful. At eighteen years old, I am just learning to associate my beauty with my race. But I know that I am black, and I am beautiful.

Grace Driver ’22 (gdriver@wellesley.edu) has beautiful hair.

HATE* C TOURISTS

BY MIRANDA TRAN *I know how this title sounds, but stay with me.

ver spring break, I walked the Brooklyn Bridge with a couple of friends.

Walking along the Brooklyn Bridge is definitely the touristy thing to do instead of strolling along the Coney Island boardwalk, since the sand and water are not that clean—not to mention, it’s a long subway ride just for a casual stroll.

In seventh grade, my English Language Arts teacher held a Brooklyn history class instead of a music appreciation class. We learned about Gravesend Cemetery and visited the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. I learned that the Brooklyn Bridge was the largest suspension bridge in the world when it was opened in 1883.

In 1884, P. T. Barnum led 21 elephants over it to show how much it could carry.

In order for this ridiculous stunt to have worked, the Brooklyn Bridge had to have counterpoint / april 2019

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a solid base. The workers dug down to the bedrock and built the foundation with granite.

Nowadays, the Brooklyn Bridge is open to pedestrian and car traffic. In order to get onto the bridge, my friends and I got an Uber from Williamsburg—yes, I know—but it dropped us off in the middle of Brooklyn Bridge Park, rather than at the entrance to the bridge. Eventually, we found our way, à la Google maps, to the second, less picturesque pedestrian entrance: an underpass on Washington Street. The ubiquitous food carts selling hot dogs, grilled kebabs, and pretzels made the stairs smell like barbeque as we walked up.

The walk itself was fine and I got less of a sunburn than I had expected for crossing the East River at high noon. The best part of the walk was talking with my friends and taking pictures. But the true travesty was all the (frigging) pedestrians IN THE BIKE LANE. The dotted line is a bit faded, but one would think that for all the bikes that pass by carrying harried cyclists, one would learn to stay on the pedestrian side of the lane. The issue is that the walking lane is on the left side when you travel from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

So when I try to be a good pedestrian and walk to my right, I am inevitably forced into the bike lane with every clump of tourists giving me a dirty or confused look, or both, as they veer around me.

This is where I draw the line. I refuse to be a tourist in my own home.

The hallmark of a true New Yorker is that no matter how long they have lived in New York City, they haven’t done any tourist things. This is mostly true, in attitude if not in truth. I have been to Times Square, but not because it’s “Times Square”—I just happened to be there.

My trip to Ellis Island was part of a class trip. I’ve only seen Broadway musicals as part of class excursions. When my cousins from Texas came to visit some time in my page 20

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earlier childhood, my parents took us to Liberty Island (to my surprise, I had been there before, but as a young child who had a tantrum on the ferry). Along Canal Street, there used to be old men who would paint your name on a four-by-one framed cardstock canvas for $5 (or was it $10 or $15?). They did this by dipping parts of a flat surface into pots of paint and drawing each character in the form of an animal or a flower. I went to school in Chinatown and passed by these local tourist attractions everyday. It was only because my cousins each got one that I did, too. New Yorkers do touristy things, but not all the time, and sometimes as tourists and other times not.

But what does it mean to belong to a city? New York City is home to 8 million people. When people tell me they prefer Boston to NYC, I understand their point: the NYC skyline makes you feel like an ant, as do the people scurrying around you, focused on their own affairs. But I also think that it’s because they haven’t found a part of the city to call home. In Chinatown, my parents showed our Texan relatives the Fay Da Bakery on Canal that sold a pull-apart, sweet butter loaf that we always got as a snack when we travelled. The outside is a warm brown—like the browning on egg-washed cinnamon rolls—but the inside is light, moist, and

sweet. The bottom is the best part because of how oily it is, so you hold it by the top while you eat it from the bottom.

Now, I know New York City, and New York City would not be all that it is without its foundations. That means that for all the people that live in it and move in its streets and walkways, the tourists are just as necessary to sustain the system.

Simply put, if no one came and looked at the Statue of Liberty, took trips to Ellis Island, or paid any attention to the salespeople donned in bright red and brandishing pamphlets along 42nd, New York City would not be New York City.

I love my city and I don’t really care if the main purview of every tourist is to take a picture of themselves dead-center between the pedestrian and bike lane on the Brooklyn Bridge (you know the Instaworthy photo I’m talking about). If someone asks me how to get to 42nd St-Times Square, I’ll point them in the correct cardinal direction and honestly, I’m quite happy to do so. Don’t ever believe that all New Yorkers are surly or miserly.

But I’ll be damned if I walk on my own sidewalks and get side-eyed like I am the one who is out of place.

Miranda Tran ’19 (mtran3@wellesley.edu) just wants to learn to walk in high heels gracefully.

Images: Cathy Ye ’19 (left), commons.wikimedia.com (right)

IDENTITY

POLITICS

returning

BY ANONYMOUS Content warnings: descriptions of violence, mentions of racism and anti-Semitism am from the northern suburbs of The attitudes of my Jewish friends Chicago, home to a large Jewish towards Israel vary from staunch Zionpopulation. Though I am not Jewish, ism to equally fervent pro-Palestinian many of my friends are, and I took part in sympathy. I am always careful around the their traditions as a grateful shiksa. I grew subject. In school, our curriculum never up singing transliterations of Hebrew covered contemporary issues, let alone prayers at Bar and Bat Mitzvot, drinking the contemporary Middle East, so I genManischewitz at Passover seders, and toss- erally stayed in my lane. Last fall, I had ing bread into Lake Michigan on Rosh a week off from school during my study Hashanah. abroad term in Ireland, and I decided to The North Shore was both sheltered visit the Holy Land on a whim. The trip from and familiar with anti-Semitism. was supposed to be many things: a break Our classes gave us a basic understand- from schoolwork, a time to see friends, a ing of Jewish history (more than most can pilgrimage to the holy city of three major say), and Holocaust survivors—many of world religions, and a crash course in the whom had settled nearby—shared their Israeli-Palestinian conflict. stories during school assemblies and People tell you about days or moments museum excursions. But that collective that changed their lives. I had never exknowledge has not uprooted bigotry, in perienced that—a single day in which I Chicago or elsewhere. My hometown of felt the train track of the universe shifting Wilmette is close to Skokie, a majority beneath my feet—until I went to Aida.

Jewish village and the site of a planned Aida is the second-largest refugee neo-Nazi march in the late 1970s. Just camp in Bethlehem. It was established in last year, eleven people were killed at the 1948, after what Palestinians call the nebL’Simcha synagogue in Pittsburgh. Anti- ka, or catastrophe—the forced removal of Semitism is far from dead. Amidst a wave 800,000 Palestinians from their homes by of violence against religious minorities in the Israeli government. Generations of this country, the discussion around Israel Palestinian people have grown up here, and Palestine has become increasingly left for school, and come back to raise fraught. Broaching the topic can feel like families or work. They return because it touching a hot pan. is the home they know—the only home

I

they have—and because it keeps generational memory alive. Aid workers and youth from the camp showed me a film that documented the daily trials of living at Aida, from water shortages to weekly middle-of-the-night raids by the Israel Defense Forces. Residents of the camp usually respond to the raids by throwing rocks at the camp’s concrete walls or the armored tanks. In this video, an Israeli soldier shouted at the residents, armed only with stones, to “get inside, or I will shoot every man, woman, and child in this camp.”

In 2015, an Israeli soldier shot a thirteen-year-old boy named Abed al-Rahman Obeidallah on his way home from school. Different reasons were given for the attack. Some say the children around Abed were throwing stones; others say the IDF soldiers were in a state of heightened vigilance after disturbances in nearby areas. The official IDF report called it an “accident.” Abed’s father called it an “execution.” A memorial to Abed now sits below the entrance of the camp, beneath the UN sign and a thirty-foot-long key.

The key is a symbol of Haqq al-‘awda, or the right of return. When Palestinian families were forced from their homes in 1948, homeowners could take only their counterpoint / april 2019

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keys, and many Palestinians living in exile still hold onto them. Their homes have likely been demolished or occupied, but their hope is still alive.

I was able to visit Aida through the help of a friend, a Palestinian-American who moved back to the Middle East to dedicate her life to helping refugees. This friend, whom I will call “Luna,” has lived in Palestine for ten years. In one afternoon, Luna cleared the muddied waters of hearsay and news reports that had made me throw up my arms at the conflict and say, “It can’t be solved.” She augmented her narrative with the stories of refugees and the rubble of their once-upon-a-time homes, visible from the rooftop garden of Aida. She started at the beginning, with the emergence of political Zionism. I had always thought Zionism was a rather simple idea: the right of the Jewish people to return to their homeland. I was shocked when Luna called it racism.

That designation refers to a specific form of Zionism, a philosophy upheld by the current right-wing Israeli government. Zionism has existed in disparate forms for centuries, but political Zionism arose in the nineteenth century. It bloomed out of the bloodshed of an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe, when an Austrian Jew named Theodor Herzl began advocating for the collective gathering of the Jewish diaspora in the Holy Land.

European Jews sporadically emigrated to then-Ottoman Palestine, as yet unsupported by any European nation. During World War I, however, the power balance shifted. The Ottoman Empire was falling, and France and Britain brokered a deal to carve up “Arabia.” When the empire gave its last gasp, Britain established control over Palestine.

The state of Israel has never been a place in which all Jews are welcome.

Though the British nominally endorsed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in 1917, Palestinians resisted British ocpage 22

counterpoint / april 2019

cupation, leading the U.K. to curb Jewish immigration to the area in the 1930s.

While thousands of Jewish people found safe haven in the Holy Land during the Holocaust and other episodic horrors of history, many did not. We must honor the collective memory of those who fled European anti-Semitism, but we must also not erase the political machinations of imperial Britain.

War is a constant in the Holy Land.

Luna and other Palestinians call various territories by number—’48 or ’67. These refer to the years in which those lands fell under Israeli occupation, often in violation of international law. Today the Israeli government continues to subsidize settlements in the West Bank, an area nominally controlled by Palestinian authorities but occupied by IDF soldiers in many places. Palestinian families in this area live in fear of a mandate from the Israeli government, ordering them to vacate their homes or demolish them to make room for new settlements. One man, Omar, lives on the outskirts of Bethlehem in one of the few Palestinian homes still left intact. He has to go through an IDF-controlled gate any time he enters his house, and, since leaving the property for even a few hours could open it to occupation, Omar or his wife must be physically present at all times. I sat in his home, drinking Arabic coffee, and met his children who have never left their house with both their parents.

Omar’s story indicates a shift towards a one-state solution, the ultimate goal of the conservative ruling party. Earlier this year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that “Israel is not a state of all its citizens.” This declaration came on the heels of the new nation-state law, which says “the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”—it doesn’t apply to Arab citizens. Many people say Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East,

but how can a nation be a democracy if it is “not a state of all its citizens”?

In 1975, the United Nations declared Zionism a form of racism. This act in itself divorces Zionism from world Judaism, once and for all. Any movement that claims to speak for all Jews cannot be racist. Why? Because Jewish people exist all over the world in every color, race, and ethnicity. There are Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, Sephardic Jews from Spain and North Africa, and Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East. There are Arab Jews and Asian Jews and Latin American Jews. Before 1948, there were even Palestinian Jews. Judaism embraces people all over the world. Zionism does not.

Luna told me the story of a group of Ethiopian Jews who, watching their government crumble after nearly two decades of civil war, sought help from Israel in the early 1990s. In May 1991, the Israeli government airlifted over 14,000 Ethiopians across its borders. Many supporters of Israel see this as a heroic example of solidarity with the Jewish diaspora. But the Israeli government refused to even recognize Ethiopian Jews as Jewish until 1973; some say the effort was too little, too late.

Luna and many other Palestinians believe this was a strategic move before a peace conference later that year, when Israel demanded that the U.N. strike down their designation of Zionism as racism. The U.N. agreed to repeal the law, but the stain of racism remains: today North African Jews all over Israel are subject to housing discrimination, poor job prospects, and racial profiling by the Israeli police.

The Israeli government claims that Palestinians are not native to the area, that they are Jordanians or some amalgam of Arab nationalities who wandered into the Holy Land and are now caught in between states. This is not true. The Palestinian people have lived in this area for centuries, often fostering peaceful coexistence between Christians, Muslims,

Images: velvetrocket.com (left), flickr.com (right)

POLITICS

and—yes—Jews. Like the Jewish people, they have suffered under various forms of colonization, from the Romans to the Ottomans to the Israeli state.

I believe Palestinians have the right to return to the land that was wrested from them in 1948. I believe Jewish people also have a right to return to their land from two millennia ago, if they feel it is their home. But the Israeli government is not representative of the world’s 15 million Jewish souls. One must look through the veil of history, separating the threads of deeply-ingrained myths and multifaceted truths, to create a more nuanced picture of the state of Israel. Netanyahu’s administration—and many administrations before him, since the British established their mandate in 1922—have hidden behind the guise of Jewish liberation, promoting a racist and imperialist agenda that has left many Jewish communities of color in darkly ironic ruin. As someone who strives to be an ally for the Palestinian and the Jewish people, I reject the idea that their struggles are irreconcilably opposed. The collective liberation of all

people is connected; one cannot be truly free until all are free.

One might ask why, out of all the colonial projects operating today (many supported by the mighty U.S. dollar), I have chosen to focus on Israel. It is a fair question. I am writing about Palestine and Israel because, quite simply, I went there. But if we are to call ourselves proPalestinian because we are anti-colonialist, then I think we must also oppose colonial regimes in all places—from Standing Rock to Northern Ireland to Kurdistan to Tibet. Of course, this requires us to educate ourselves about the unique contexts of these would-be nations. Each situation is a dense tapestry of historical, cultural, and political forces that is difficult to deconstruct. Carefully and deliberately, we must work to identify which parts of these tapestries are salvageable, and which parts need to be re-woven.

A better world is possible. The homecoming of one group need not create the refugeedom of another. How? I do not know the answer. What I have written is not an exhaustive history of Palestine or

Israel, nor an anti-Israel manifesto, nor a call to arms. It is a reflection on my experience and an attempt to elucidate a complex and tragic conflict that continues to destroy lives every single day. Over five million Palestinians live in exile. Many of them still hold onto the keys of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who fled their homes so many years ago. We are called to listen, to learn, to keep an open mind—all good things.

But listening is only half the battle. We are not blank slates upon which other people write their stories. We must honor our own values, and at the bottom line of this conflict are people who are suffering, people who are dying, and people who just want to return home.

I believe we can heal. We can find, as Luna calls it, “a just peace.” We must.

For information about publishing articles anonymously, please contact the Editors-inChief (senglis2@wellesley.edu or myang5@ wellesley.edu)

counterpoint / april 2019

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IDENTITY

dérive Five Ways of Looking at MIT

I

have been to MIT twice in my life: when I was nine, to see my dad’s hallowed alma mater, and last night, when I was stood up by a current student. Because of my dad, the school’s name awed me, a feeling that increased for an hour last night. The sunset—and quite possibly my excitement about seeing Jason again—turned the campus into a living dream. Any building, no matter how ugly, is beautiful when it’s framed by a swirl of warm colors in the sky.

Earlier in the day, I was working on a project due for my writing class, snapping photos of Boston. I was supposed to compose a dérive, or “drift,” by wandering aimlessly to find something critical to say about my surroundings. But I was too rushed to let my mind wander. Where else could I find the time and space to drift with a due date in two days?

The drift around MIT began by accident after my friend Erin and I dropped our friends off at the Kresge Auditorium, where they were tuning up for the musical we would be seeing at 8 pm. Jason had said he would drop by to say “Hi” at 7:30 pm.

“So, what should we do for a solid hour?” page 24

counterpoint / april 2019

1. The Student Center Erin needed Band-Aids for blisters on her ankles. According to Google Maps, the student center right next to Kresge had a convenience store.

Even if Jason hadn’t told me their student center was built in a depressingly Brutalist architectural style, I probably would have come to that conclusion on my own. The outside was tan-gray stone, sunken windows, and sharp angles; inside was sharp angles, sparsely populated food court tables, and hospital green.

The echoing of my heeled boots on the linoleum floor made me particularly conscious of the feeling that we were intruding on some sort of sanctuary.

2. The Sidewalk I needed movement and fresh air to distract myself from thinking of seeing him again. We chose to walk in the direction of the theater, beyond which there seemed to be some sort of sports field. The sun had begun to set; yellow and coral tones spreading like a watercolor over the cloud-dotted blue sky.

Evidently my mind had been drifting too much, because I didn’t notice how perfect an opportunity this was to wander until Erin elbowed me and said so.

We were walking around. There was a gate with the name on it—Briggs Field.

To circle it, we had to go through an area under a balcony that juts out from the student center, and my senses immediately heightened at the dark, empty stretch of path, especially when a male student entered behind us. I assumed he was a student because he had a gym bag near a sports field and was on a college campus. When I go to other colleges, I assume people don’t question my presence there because I look like a student. He passed by without incident, and I chided myself, as I always do, for being overly wary of strangers. The campus felt too quiet and empty for a Friday night. Even the people practicing on the field were doing so at a hush.

3. The Fence A black wire fence surrounded Briggs Field. A guy inside had been walking at our pace, and I didn’t give much thought to it until he stopped and asked if he could drop his backpack and skateboard over the fence to us. He was going in the opposite direction from the gate, so he probably thought vaulting over the fence was easier than finding a different exit. I guess Erin and I blended in well enough

Images: Michael Muraz

BY STELLA HO

as students for him to trust that we wouldn’t run off with his things. I set his skateboard on the sidewalk and stopped it with my foot when it started rolling away.

Someone who I can only assume was his friend came up behind the three of us and started laughing at him. On our right was a blocky building that looked like the shinier, more colorful sibling of the student center. Multicolored squares were set inside the walls, reminding me of Legos.

I loved it.

4. The Charles River Following the sidewalk took us to the banks of the Charles River. To our left were dorms, as tall as high-rise apartment buildings and lit up enough that we could see the comfortable chairs—one looked like a massage chair—inside. Looking around, I realized in awe that I was standing in the very scene I had always admired from the Boston Red Line subway car while it crossed over the river. I thought of telling Erin a joke disparaging Harvard that my dad had told me about the nearby Harvard Bridge, but decided not to ruin the atmosphere. The windows of one building acted like a mirror for the sunset, which by this time was glittering across the entire sky.

I didn’t even know if we were at MIT anymore. The river bank was empty, but the wind added some life. We had to find a way back to Kresge, so we took a path on the left since we were walking parallel to the green the theater was on. For some reason, the sidewalk ended and there were cars driving by, so I struggled to stay on the curb in my heels, losing my balance and stepping into the street once. Kresge appeared right in front of us, and I smiled.

5. Kresge Auditorium Kresge Auditorium is perfectly oneeighth of a sphere. I had thought it looked like a flatter, deformed version of a sail on the Sydney Opera House, until Jason enlightened me one evening about the sphere. The things you learn from MIT

students.

At 7:32 pm, I got a text from Jason apologizing for not being on campus because of a sudden change in plans. I wanted to get out of this mathematically precise building. Any kind of drifting ended then; I was now laser-focused on being bitter.

Still, I’ll probably go back to MIT a third time. I was too lost in my thoughts to really see the campus this time around.

The mathematical beauty of its buildings must mean the grandeur I saw at first was not completely subjective. Though I do question how, without the expectation of seeing Jason, I might have interpreted these same places differently. Or if it is even possible to objectively wander,

since my feelings in one location guided my next steps. When emotions become part of the landscape around me, what’s in front of me can change with a blink.

In fact, come to think of it, that’s another way to describe the Kresge Auditorium–– it also resembles a half-open eye.

Stella Ho ’22 (sho2@wellesley.edu) still thinks Kresge resembles a flatter version of the Sydney Opera House, but she’s open to finding a sixth (and seventh, and eighth…) way of looking at MIT during her time at Wellesley.

counterpoint / april 2019

page 25

Ar ey ou Ot se he rio r Ur us ine ?O is fc st o er ile , it 's fin e

POLL

Shower Etiquette

Are you serious? Of course not (38.1%)

Other (5.8%) Urine is sterile, it's fine (56.1%)

Not for me, but that's why I wear shower shoes • If you gotta go, you gotta go • no but everyone does it anyway, wachu gonna do • Not in a shared shower • Urine is not sterile but it’s still fine • If you know for a FACT everyone else on your floor wears shoes go wild • Only ok before shampoo and soap so the soap cleans it • It is inhumane to urinate in the shower • Only if it goes DIRECTLY DOWN THE DRAIN. Mind your posture • Admittedly a little gross, but I'll still do it. • only if it’s a fucking emergency • Its like using the death stairs in the snow—technically its prohibited, but everyone knows people do it anyway

Do you wear shower shoes?

I wear them to the bathroom and take them off to shower (5.0%) No (6.1%) Yes (88.9%) om ro th ba wer e th ho to o s m ft he of rt m ea the I w ke ta

No s Ye

d an

Do you listen to music in the shower?

Yes (33.6%)

No (58.5%)

Podcasts Only! (0.7%) Sometimes (1.4%) Other (5.9%)

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counterpoint / april 2019

I watchNoyoutube videos mostly • Excuse me, I'm classy. I listen on a real-ass Other radio • only if it’s a normal time and there’s no one else showering • I rewatch Sometimes episodes of West Wing and The Clone Wars • How would you do that?? If I Podcasts only! wear earphones, they die or my head stays dry. If I leave it on speaker, I invite Yes the rage of my fellow bathroom-goers. •The music of my voice • Only at the wee hours of the night • sometimes but not late at night unlike some people...

• Lizzo on shuffle only. • Forcing others in the common room/hall to listen to not only your ridiculously loud music and sometimes awful singing is NOT OKAY • Fuck yes, cause y’all need music recs • Yes, and if you want to file a noise complaint at 3 PM ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON WHEN I'M PLAYING AT HALF VOL then you can find me in the comments section • I listen to Rachel Maddow at 4am just to feel powerful • only through my earbuds because i don't want others to hate me and my shitty taste in music.

• how dare you, go use the single • Only when I’m taking a long shower

Images: assos.com (left), glamour.com (right), retrorenovation.com (background)

Is peeing in the shower okay?

What do you do with shed hair?

My hair? I take care of it. Some other slut's hair? Leave it. • I want to pick it up but I always forget :( I'm sorry • I catch the hair as it slides down my body, twirl it around my finger, and put it in my shower caddy for my future self to throw away. • I make the art installation and THEN throw it out bc the floor is gross • brush my hair thoroughly before getting into the shower so it all doesn't come out in the shower • I am able to brush out most of my shed hair after I get out of the shower • Goes down the drain • I make temporary art: then I pick it all up once I am done • I collect it as it comes out and put it on the shower wall for "safe keeping" then I ball it up and throw it out. • My hair does not come out in giant clumps in the shower idk what’s wrong with y’all • Clean up your hair, you animals • I have short hair, so I don't shed much. If I find someone else's hair clogging the drain, then I pick it up with a disposable glove and throw it out • Hair "art installations" are nothing compared to the used panty liner I saw stuck on the shower wall.

I have short hair so it isn't a problem (2.1%) Try to force it down the drain (16.1%)

I wear a shower cap (0.5%) Leave it for someone else to deal with (9.7%)

Other (4.8%) Pick it up and throw it out (62.7%)

Make an impromptu I ha vthe art installationpron e ob sho lem rt h shower wallsI (4.1%) a

we ar as Lea ho we v e wit rc i t for h a so m Ma e o ne ins ke an tal lat impr ion o Oth on mptu er the a Pic sho rt k it we u r p Try an dt to hro for wi ce to it d ut ow nt he dra in

Have you ever had sex in a dorm shower?

No, I don’t have awesome balance anyway and...I fear the disaster that could happen if the space was even more cramped. • showering with intimate partners sure, but not sex, its a public bathroom • GROSS • Yo what the fuck if you slip in the shower you crack your head on the tile and die. Absolutely not. • No but I’ve showered with another person • Everyone knows shower sex is impossible. • Y'all are nasty • my first-year roomate did almost once a week: with her "just a friend" • I’ve made out with my gf in the shower • I wish • by myself if yaknow what i mean ;)

N

Y

Yes (9.3%)

No (90.7%)

counterpoint / april 2019

page 27

Images: bbci.co.uk

CROSSWORD

ACROSS 9. Writer and star of Bridesmaids known for their SNL performances as Target Lady, Penelope, “doll hands” Dooneese, and Kathie Lee Gifford 10. Amy Schumer and Bill Hader star in a romcom about a magazine writer and a sports doctor who fall in love 12. Hannah Gadsby’s iconic, not-quite-comedy special that left everyone in collective angry tears 13. This cancer survivor jokes about her wife, cats, and the Indigo Girls 14. “Jimmy Falloning” is known among this show’s cast members as the blunder of laughing and breaking character 17. Produced classic comedies Anchorman, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad, and Stepbrothers 18. This year, President Trump is getting rid of the tradition of a comedian speaker at the White House Correspondents Dinner in response to this comedian’s hilarious performance at last year’s 2018 dinner 19. “There’s a _____ loose in a hospital” 23. Jim Gaffigan is known for his comedy bit about these cheesy microwavable turnovers 24. Just like that fifth round of “What’s New Pussycat,” you knew this clue was coming

25. We’re really tired of Alec Baldwin’s overused impression of this person on Saturday Night Live 27. The Comeback Kid is both the name of John Mulaney’s 2015 Netflix special and the nickname of this former US president DOWN 1. Musical comedian famous for his songs, “Kill Yourself,” “Sad,” and “From God’s Perspective,” got his start in comedy on this social media site 2. World’s highest paid comedian achieved fame after starring in his own television special which aired on NBC in 1989 3. Louis C.K. was not the only comedian to face sexual misconduct allegations in 2018 during the rise of the #MeToo movement 4. This comedian who stars in Community and The Hangover can legally practice medicine in California 5. This comedian publicly came out as lesbian on The Oprah Winfrey Show before her character with the same name also came out on this sitcom with the same name 6. Comedy talk show named for its host going on its tenth year 7. Demetri Martin, Yale and NYU Law School student-turned-comedian, is known for his

performances with this instrument 8. Hasan Minhaj’s Netflix show puts a stand-up twist on global issues 10. According to Sarah Silverman, her autobiography released in 2010 largely contains “stories of a woman who has spent her life peeing on herself ” 11. Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld, is also the creator of the comedy series, Curb Your __________.

15. Dave Chappelle has released _____ Netflix comedy specials to date, which made him $20 million a piece 16. Star of Hulu’s new series Shrill, as well as SNL skits such as the immortal “Dyke & Fats” 20. Before her SNL days, Amy Poehler got her start in comedy at ______ College as a member of of the improv comedy troupe, My Mother’s Fleabag 21. You’ve never had a sex-ed class like Ali Wong’s first Netflix special 22. Can someone please tell us what the hell is so funny about ventriloquism?????

26. Iliza Shlesinger’s famous bit about a mythical creature who “will awaken when she hears you say, ‘I guess I’ll just come out for one drink.’”