Yale Daily News Magazine | February 2019 Issue

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE VOL. XLVI ISSUE 4 FEBRUARY 2019

U H I L E AND I IN I A N N E H C

Yale traded slaves in my father’s hometown.

Where does that leave me?

BY ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Magazine Editors in Chief Jordan Cutler-Tietjen Liana Van Nostrand Managing Editors Nicole Blackwood Isabel Guarco Senior Editors Flora Lipsky Frani O’Toole Will Reid Jacob Stern David Yaffe-Bellany Fiction & Poetry Editor Lucy Silbaugh Audio Editor Cam Aaron

06 HOW TO MAKE AN ENGAGEMENT RING Feature by TC Martin

Associate Editors Ko Lyn Cheang Julianna Lai Kyung Mi Lee Zoe Nuechterlein Alexa Stanger

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Magazine Design Editors Lauren Cueto Jesse Nadel

Photography Editor Madelyn Kumar

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Illustration Editor Keyi Cui Copy Editors Maddie Bender Selena Lee Alan Liu Editor in Chief & President Britton O’Daly Publisher Eric Foster Cover photo by Ananya Kumar-Banerjee ASSISTANT MAG DESIGNERS: Crystal Cheung, Andre Costa Jose Garcia, Rebecca Goldberg, Michelle Guilbald, Emily Lin, Laura Nicholas, Maggie Nolan, Lauren Quintela, Ella Stark, Macrina Wang, Nicole Wang, Will Wang, Chris West, Christie Yu, Karena Zhao, Daphne Zhu

04 SHITAL PATEL

Portrait by Ryan Benson 2 | February 2019

poetry

Beyond Dusk GABI SEO

poetry

Homicide #54 TERA HOFMANN

insight

It’s (Not) Complicated ASHLEY FAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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READY PATIENT ONE Feature by Nicole Blackwood

ELIHU AND I IN CHENNAI Cover by Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

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insight

Conjouring a Career HELENA LYNG-OLSEN

essay

Through the Glass LAURA NICHOLAS

essay

Act Your Gender JULIA LEATHAM

34 INKING

Bits & Pieces by Benjamin Rewis

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PORTRAIT

Shital patel At her popular New Haven liquor store, business runs on trust.

BY RYAN BENSON

W

hite light melted the black ice on the concrete outside the entrance of Chapel West Wine & Liquor. It was the morning after the first snow in New Haven, and the city

streets had sobered up from the novelty of the previous night. Inside the store, owner Shital Patel prepared for her Friday afternoon delivery. For the past three years, she has operated the liquor store situated on the corner of Chapel and Park Streets, a space where Yale’s campus and New Haven intersect.

Patel unpacked cans of Natural Light into a refrigerator that doubled the size of her small frame. In her bulky snow boots, dark jeans and black fleece, she looked serious and practical against the neon liquor labels and peppy hum of Top 40 hits that fill her small store.

There was much work to be done in the following hour. Her employee couldn’t come in the night before because of the storm, so Patel had catching up to do before the delivery. But she was not panicked. She worked peacefully, methodically unpacking wine bottles,

rearranging labeling on the shelves, sorting and stacking brown paper bags.

Each movement was lived-in.

“My parents ran a mechanics business in India,” she told me, as she closed the glass doors of the refrigerator.

“Business is in my blood.”

When Patel was 17, she moved to Hamden from Mumbai, India. She learned to speak English by working in a McDonald’s and watching the news.

She told me that, at first, she was afraid.

She was nervous and quiet and young, far different from the woman she is now.

After McDonald’s, Patel worked in gas stations and helped her husband with his jobs here and there. Three years ago, the man who owned Chapel West retired after working there for over 30 years. He sold the store to Patel, and for the first time, she worked

LOGAN HOWARD

4 | February 2019

PORTRAIT for herself. She had never studied business and had no previous experience running one of her own. For Patel, buying the Chapel West was an exercise in trusting herself.

“I own the store,” Patel said. “And I learn from that.”

The door beeped, and a middle-aged man waddled in.

He spent a minute stomping the ice and slush off of his black Timberlands and then moved toward the counter and smiled at Patel.

She smiled back at him, and he cracked a joke, and they laughed together.

The man laid a fistful of coins on the counter, and Patel asked him what he wanted. She grabbed a couple of 50-milliliter bottles of vodka from an arrangement next to the cash register and laid them on the counter before him.

The man looked down at his coins again.

“I’ll give it to you Sunday,” he said.

Patel nodded. The man left.

Patel returned to her spot in front of me and resumed dusting and sorting bottles.

“He missed 15 cents. Because at the end of the month, they’re broke.”

She explained to me that this was not a unique incident.

Patel has several

“For Patel, buying the Chapel West was an exercise in trusting herself.”

customers who cannot always pay for their purchases in full, so she sells to them based on an honor system.

“I know they’ll come back.” She continued cleaning the bottles with an exercised calm. Her store is a space of trust.

Last year in late January, a man burgled Chapel West Wine & Liquor.

Patel told me that he smashed the door in the night with a brick and stole a bottle or two of wine. “And that’s it,” she said. “No cash.” The value was about fifty or one hundred dollars. I asked her if she knew who did it, and she told me that it was the same man that has broken into a couple of other liquor stores nearby. When Patel speaks of him, she calls him a “neighbor.” Even though he has violated her atmosphere of trust, she recognizes him as a member of the community that exists within the walls of her store, within the city lines of New Haven.

The door beeped again, and another man entered. He was thin, wearing glasses and loafers, wet with slush.

He looked about 25, maybe younger. Before he bought two 50-milliliter bottles of liquor, Patel asked for his ID. She inspected it, returned it and completed the transaction. Typically, Patel asks for two forms of ID when a young person buys alcohol in her store: Yale ID and state ID. There are state regulations that allow Patel’s trust to stretch only so far within the walls of her small store.

“I make less money, but it’s safe.

It’s peace of mind, you know.”

If Patel is caught selling to an underaged person three times, her liquor license will be revoked, and for a period of time, her store will have to close.

I ask her what happens when a student gives her a fake ID. “By law, I can take it [away]. The trouble is on me too. I lose my business.”

To give Patel a fake ID is to threaten the business she has made for herself, to threaten the system of trust she has made for her customers. Still, Patel loves the students that come into her store. They are nice, she told me, and in the summer months and over winter break, business is slow without them.

“Chapel West Wine & Liquor is a space dominated by men but operated by a woman.”

After a couple of hours, a woman came into the store. She and Patel chatted about Thanksgiving. It is one of the three days in the year that Patel’s store closes.

“It’s hard work for a woman,” Patel said of all the cooking on Thanksgiving, and her customer agreed. They laughed, she bought a small bottle and then left. It was the first female customer who had entered the store in the previous two hours. Until that moment, I had seen only men in Patel’s store.

They bought cans of beer, miniature bottles of Fireball and the occasional handle. While I was with her, two different men came in twice in the same hour.

Chapel West Wine & Liquor is a space dominated by men but operated by a woman. I asked her many times if this reality makes her feel uncomfortable, but always, she said no.

“I never feel unsafe here in my mornings alone,” Patel said, pointing out the multiple video cameras secured to different corners of her store.

“Men and women both come through. I have all different types of customers.”

High above her perch behind the counter, a glass evil eye ornament is pinned to the sky-blue walls.

When I asked her about it, Patel told me that one of her husband’s friends gave it to her when she purchased the store, to keep away the bad.

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FEATURE

how to make an engagement ring Step 1: The big bang. Step 2: A shady Hollywood advertising scheme.

Step 3: Mike and Carrie DeCristofaro will take it from there.

BY TC MARTIN

T

he gold engagement ring centimeters away from Mike DeCristofaro’s fingertips was on fire. Just minutes before, Mike had sawed out a slim wedge of gold from the smooth lower half of the ring, which I would soon learn is called the shank. He dunked the ring into a glass jar of pungent boric acid and denatured alcohol; this kept it from oxidizing under intense heat. He brought the orange-blue flame of his propane torch near the shank.

Immediately, the ring burst into an emerald green corona. Soon the fire burned itself out, releasing a cloud of white smoke

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PHOTOS BY LUKAS COX

whose saliferous odor reminded me of hot dogs.

Mike dipped a slim brush into a pool of a milky-white fluid and painted the shank’s raw edges, where he would solder the ring back together. This fluid, known as flux, helps the solder flow more easily, he explained. He placed a tiny rectangle of gold on his ceramic soldering board.

Under the torch’s flame, the gold melted and cohered into a molten sphere, which he then drew through the opening in the shank, letting it bind.

At last the solder settled. All it would

take was some polishing to make “her” really shine. For a moment, with his torch casting his forge in a celestial glow, Mike appeared almost divine: a goldsmith for the gods, an earthbound Hephaestus. He reached for the ring, his resplendent creation — then recoiled.

“Fuck! Forgot the bitch was hot.” He shook out his hand as though he had only been pricked by a pushpin and not scorched by near-molten metal.

Before polishing the ring, he retreated to the back room of Westville Jewelers, the jewelry retail and repair shop he has

FEATURE

owned and operated for a year and a half. He returned moments later with a cigarette. Plopping down in his revolving chair, he turned to his torch and lit his cig with the tip of its flame. He took a deep drag.

“Smoke break,” he puffed.

— Surrounded by chic cafes and antique furniture dealers, Westville Jewelers sits on a historically artsy block of Whalley Avenue; just one block down, however, are a seedy-looking liquor store and the moderately grimy Dunkin’ Donuts where Mike gets his morning and afternoon caffeine fixes. The jewelry store itself is divided between the sales-floor, where Mike’s merchandise dazzles beneath intense white lights, and his workbench, where he does his repairs.

When someone enters the store, the ruddy and mostly bald crest of Mike’s head springs up, peeking gopher-like over the partition that demarcates his workbench. A pair of begoggled eyes soon follows, along with a sharp furrowed brow, an aquiline nose and a stubble-ringed mouth. He’s fond of wearing a loose T-shirt, a pair of worn-out blue jeans fraying at the cuffs and scuffed New Balance sneakers. He habitually squints at people through the magnifying lenses of his jeweler’s headband, as though he were examining their facets.

Mike grew up in Pontelatone, a small township about 25 miles north of Naples, Italy. He and his family — his mother, father, his older brother John, older sister Josephine — moved to New Haven in 1968, when Mike was 6 years old. Six years later, he got a job at Elm City Jewelers, whose owner was an Italian man then in his 70s named Natale Cuomo. For the first six months of his training, Mike was told to sit and watch: watch as Natale deftly set diamond after diamond in rings, pendants, bracelets and brooches (it was the ‘70s, after all). This is what Mike was to become: a professional diamond-setter.

After several years at Elm City Jewelers, Mike bounced among other jewelry stores and repair shops in the New Haven area, acquiring skills like casting, soldering and polishing. During a stint at the Lisa Lee Creations jewelry design factory in the mid-‘90s, Mike met Carrie, his future wife who is also Italian, while making plaster molds used for casting engagement rings.

Carrie, who has dark wavy hair and a warm face inscribed with Jane Goodall-esque laugh lines, pronounces mozzarella like “moot-zah-rell” and chuckles while telling me the story of her engagement to Mike. The pair had become friends while working at the factory and remained close for several years before beginning to date in 2000. About two years later, on New Year’s Eve, Mike proposed to Carrie with an antique white gold ring. The ring was set with a brilliant round center diamond and two small marquise diamonds (the ones that look like tiny footballs).

They married five months later in her sister’s backyard, surrounded by family members getting drunk on home-made wine. She now laughingly refers to their wedding as “D-Day.” She still wears her original engagement ring along with a white gold wedding band that looks like something Daisy Buchanan might wear to brunch.

Mike’s ring was a plain yellow gold band that he almost never wears.

“I’m not a ring guy,” he explained.

With his expanded skill set, Mike began doing general repairs for jewelry stores in the New Haven area that didn’t have a goldsmith on staff. In October of last year, he assumed the lease of an antique store on Whalley Avenue and converted it into Westville Jewelers. For any goldsmith, the daily business of sizing rings and repairing clasps helps to pay the bills. But the true stars of the profession — the lucrative artistic creations on which a good, solid buck can be made — are engagement rings.

— Nowadays, most engagement rings consist of two materials:

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FEATURE

“

She now laughingly refers to their wedding as ‘D-Day.’ She still wears her original engagement ring along with a white gold wedding band that looks like something Daisy Buchanan might wear to brunch. Mike’s ring was a plain yellow gold band that he almost never wears. ‘I’m not a ring guy,’ he explained.”

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some precious metal (usually gold or platinum) and any number of diamonds. The creation of an engagement ring begins when those materials coalesce into existence, long before they reach a goldsmith’s workbench.

The precious metals formed more than 4 billion years ago, back when our planet was little more than a steaming ball of space vomit left over from nearby supernovae. About 200 million years after that space vomit ball first congealed, it was pummeled by 20 quintillion (20,000,000,000,000,000,000) metric tonnes of asteroids bearing rare metals such as tungsten, platinum and gold. Over time, these metals got churned into the geologic Slurpee machine of our planet’s mantle, the thick layer of rock swirling slowly beneath the Earth’s crust.

About a billion years later, in the upper layer of the mantle, something much harder than gold was being cooked up. When carbon atoms find themselves about 100 miles underground, intense heat and pressure arrange them into crystals with rigid three-dimensional lattice structures. Subterranean volcanic eruptions blast these crystals closer to the Earth’s surface, where they are found as diamonds today.

For most Christian societies, the connection between matrimony and ring-wearing began during the papacy of Innocent III, who reigned for about two decades during the Middle Ages.

Pope Innocent III was, shall we say, concerned about the sanctity of marriage in Christendom, and vowed to preserve the sacred institution with ruthless efficiency. (Imagine Mike Pence, but with the worldview of a medieval pope. So, imagine Mike Pence.)

One of Pope Innocent III’s major reforms was the enforcement of an engagement period.

During this period, a couple’s planned nuptials were made public to allow for previous marriage claims to come to light. The wearing of engagement rings was mandatory for both parties, and the styles of those rings depended heavily on one’s class. Members of the nobility could wear ostentatious rings bejeweled with stones such as rubies and alexandrites, while the lower classes settled for simpler bands.

When large numbers of lower-quality South African diamonds flooded the market after their discovery in 1870, Cecil Rhodes, of the famed Rhodes Scholarship, laid the foundation for a sweeping, imperialist monopoly. Purchasing mine after mine, Rhodes capitalized on his holdings for several years until the ballooning supply of diamonds led to an inevitable crash in their value. To prevent a future crash, Rhodes merged his holdings with another mine owner’s to found De Beers Consolidated Mines. The merged company sold diamonds at artificially low rates to convince consumers of a dwindling supply, thus boosting demand.

These manipulative market tactics were accompanied by De Beers’ abusive labor practices. Migrant African miners in Kimberley, then the nerve center of South Africa’s diamond industry, were forced into self-sufficient closed compounds that limited workers’ freedoms and subjected them to inhumane conditions. The purpose of these compounds was ostensibly to prevent workers from stealing rough diamonds from the

FEATURE mines. Rhodes’ politicking indicated that he thought the compounds were not effective enough: He once lobbied for a law that would allow mine owners to forcibly administer laxatives to their workers, ensuring that no swallowed diamonds would ever leave the mines.

The company’s tactics returned profits for a few decades. But shortly after World War II, De Beers realized that a steady, sustained demand for diamonds would be more profitable than a boom-bust cycle that went south every time a new diamond cache was uncovered. As such, he coordinated an advertising campaign that began to redefine diamonds as necessary luxuries: objects of incredible value and resilience that, paradoxically, were owned by almost every married woman you knew. Diamond engagement rings started to appear on the ring fingers of soon-to-be-married Hollywood starlets as part of a deliberate media spectacle that Olivia Pope would find impressive. This scheme, which would later be studied and aped by Big Tobacco, turned diamond engagement rings into something more than jewelry. They became the romantic ideal we know them to be today, a quintessential aspiration of the collective Western mind.

“

Mike asked him what he had in mind. Like most men in jewelry stores, Rolando had no clue. But he did have a picture on his phone of a ring he thought his girlfriend might like.”

— More than a century after the first diamonds were unearthed in South Africa, a young Puerto Rican guy named Rolando visited Mike’s store to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend. Mike asked him what he had in mind. Like most men in jewelry stores, Rolando had no clue. But he did have a picture on his phone of a ring he thought his girlfriend might like. It was made of white and yellow gold and had a sizeable pear-shaped diamond in the center, bordered by two pear-shaped rows of smaller round diamonds. Mike could work with that. He used the photograph to order a cast for the ring.

When the raw cast arrived at Mike’s shop, I barely recognized it as jewelry. The metal was gray and unpolished like pencil lead. Several odd protuberances, called sprues, poked out of it like vestigial toes.

The yellow gold portion of the ring had been cast separately from the white gold setting; Mike would solder it on later. First, though, he had to set the round diamonds along either side of the ring’s base and in the outer pear-shaped row of the setting. But before doing so, he had to spruce up the raw cast.

He reached into the main drawer of his workbench for his jeweler’s saw, a handheld contraption with a detachable blade no wider from tooth to back than a guitar string. Mike plucked out the old dull strand with a lively twang and replaced it, threading the new blade through the instrument and tightening its screws. He sawed off one sprue. Then another, and then another.

They plink, plink, plinked into the wooden drawer of his workbench. He saved the sprues to sell as scrap. “It’s all money, all money in the bank,” he announced. He then scraped a file along the ring’s outer edge to smooth the residual bumps left over from his sawing. He did this many, many times. The sound of the scraping lay somewhere between nails on a chalkboard and “Sir, you need new brake pads.”

The ring file is great for getting rid of sprue bits, but it leaves a fine trail of

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FEATURE scratches that need to be sanded out. With a deft twist, Mike opened the mouth of his Dremel rotary tool (a power tool that looks rather like a futuristic dental drill) and inserted a stout cylinder wrapped in sandpaper. He stepped on a foot pedal beneath his workbench, and the Dremel whirred like a remote-control car motor, tinny and vicious. When he began to polish the inner circle of the ring, it sounded as if I were trapped inside a tooth during a violent root canal.

Peering at his workstation, I expected to see sparks flying off the ring in every direction, along with maybe one or two of his fingers. I was surprised to find him holding the ring rather gently, with just a small trail of smoke rising from the now smooth shank.

He then pounded the ring into shape with a rawhide mallet and carved out a seat for the center diamond using the dremel. He brought the ring to the back room and turned on the buffer, the growling, highspeed death machine disguised as a legitimate tool used for in-

10 | February 2019

“

Was the stone perfectly flat?

Was it wobbling any? Was one half of the setting tighter than the other?”

tense polishing. As soon as the machine warmed up, a delivery driver from Cappetta’s Italian Imports entered the store.

Lunch had arrived: one meatball sub for Carrie and two “Godfather” paninis for Mike and me. Carrie tipped the driver and we all grabbed napkins.

Mike turned off the buffer. The ring could wait.

— After lunch, Mike polished the ring. He pressed a halfused block of Tripoli polishing compound against the buffer’s worn muslin wheel to prime it. Tripoli is the substance responsible for the indelible gray stains embedded like tattoos into his hands. As he brushed the ring along the underside of

the buff wheel, a fresh coating of gray dust settled on his fingertips. When he was satisfied with the polish, he switched off the buffer and dropped the ring into a vat of clear cleaning solution that crackled like Rice Krispies in milk, only much louder. This was his ultrasonic cleaner, a device that produces high-intensity sound waves to remove embedded pockets of gunk. He swished his hands around in the vat — don’t worry, it’s nontoxic — and tried to wash off the gray Tripoli stains to no avail.

It was then time to set the side stones. The method for setting diamonds is quite simple, in theory. The problems begin when you have an elaborate engagement ring, like Rolando’s, whose plentiful diamonds keep getting in each other’s way. Along the band of the ring itself, there were 14 miniscule settings awaiting tiny diamonds, seven on each side. Then there were two rows of diamonds encircling the center stone: 22 on the inside row, 28 on the outside row.

And there was the center stone

itself: a 1.14-carat, G-color, VS2-clarity, “very good cut” diamond. There are many other variables that determine a diamond’s worth (some as surprising as how brightly the stone fluoresces under a blacklight, others as immeasurable as the stone’s reflective “fire”), but the four Cs — carat, color, clarity and cut—are the main ones. All in all, Rolando’s stone was pretty damn good.

Mike bent back the prongs and used one of his teensiest burs to drill seats for the stones. He picked up each diamond with a small ball of putty, then gently laid it into its setting, as eager and receptive as a warm bed. Then he tilted the setting to inspect the diamond’s contour from every direction. Was the stone perfectly flat? Was it wobbling any? Was one half of the setting tighter than the other?

Inevitably, the answer to one of these questions was yes. The first try was never perfect. After a few minutes of tweaking and sculpting, Mike was ready to commit. He bent the prongs down, sanded them and moved

FEATURE

on to the next stone.

He did this 41 more times, then realized that the shop had technically been closed for half an hour. The following Monday, when the store reopened, he soldered on the yellow gold portion of the ring and set 22 more stones. All that remained was the center diamond. This is what he had been trained to do. He nabbed a piece of chocolate from the Halloween jar by his display cases, then shook out his exhausted fingers like an elite rock climber.

“Let’s see if I can fuck this shit up.”

Eyeing the center stone warily, Mike announced: “Once we get that bitch in there, we’ll be done.”

Pear-shaped stones can be tricky. Any cut of diamond with a pointy end tends to chip. Diamond may be the hardest naturally occurring material in the world, but if struck at the right angle, it’s quite brittle. He peeled back the five prongs of

the central setting like the petals of a reticent flower. He picked up the stone with his putty, then laid it softly in the cradle of the head.

Nope. Not flat enough. He picked it out, adjusted the prongs and tried again.

Still not good enough. He carved out the seat some more. Then a little bit more.

Then some fiddling with the prongs, another round of carving and at last the stone settled. He bent four of the five prongs over the stone and filed them down to sharp points. He folded the fifth prong around the fragile peak of the stone to keep it stable and protected.

Before polishing the ring one last time, he stamped “14KT” — meaning fourteen karat, the purity of the ring’s gold — onto the inside of the shank with a loud thudthunk. Then he added a layer of a buttery substance called rouge on the buffer that makes gold and diamonds flare. He dropped the ring in the ultrasonic clean-

er for a few minutes, then tossed it, still warm from the steamer, into my lap, and nabbed a celebratory KitKat. “That’s all she fucking wrote,” he said between bites.

— About a week later, I visited Mike’s shop and asked him how the customer liked the ring. “The guy loved it,” he said.

I didn’t ask how the engagement itself went. That is the part Mike never sees: the popping of the question, the moment when one person gives another a lavish pebble and the pair decides to spend the rest of their lives together. Unless the ring needs to be sized or repaired in the future, Mike will never know how the engagement went. What he does know is that never in his 44 years of making jewelry has a customer returned an engagement ring. Not once.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

POETRY

Beyond Dusk

BY GABI SEO All I can think of are the frogs — the ones I cupped between my small palms at the creek’s edge. Years later The same palms cupped my father’s face, his frame limp like a jacket hung on a hook, except of course he was a person It was then I first walked through his woods and among the things hidden inside: found where the black elk crumpled, its tracks punched into mud the fallen branch and divot beside saw how the monarchs obscured the sky, two thousand wings pressed into a dark cloud stood over the trout and listened for pulsing gills beneath the abundance of air.

My father brought me to the creek, but never to his woods.

I knew nothing of them And now can hear only the croaking frogs, who ask for answers all through the night

12 | February 2019

Homicide #54

BY TERA HOFMANN On the speckled playground floor, bits of stone collaging our knees, we admired a beam of sun you pointed with your glasses Did you know an ant can lift more than 10 times its weight?

That’s how this one on your foot will carry the one we killed Science, we called it.

We laughed as the sun concentrated from cloud to ant to pavement underneath We were gods ants were people unnecessary suffering, simply that.

I didn’t realize until later — when I stepped on a cricket and wanted desperately to apologize.

INSIGHT

it’s (not) complicated A cross between exclusive relationships and hookup culture sounds like an oxymoron, but open relationships at Yale straddle both worlds.

BY ASHLEY FAN VALERIE PAVILONIS

L

ast fall, first years huddled around a whiteboard, shuffling around cards labeled with various romantic and sexual activities ranging from “holding hands” to “oral sex.” Our simple task in this Community Health Educators orientation activity was to order the cards from least to most intimate. On the completed intimacy spectrum, sex fell somewhere in the middle — less intimate than sharing a Netflix password.

Attitudes toward love and sex are changing. Expanding sex education and contraceptive options have made sex more accessible, and perhaps as a result, less remarkable. A decline in the perceived importance of sex,

coupled with the everlasting human desire for meaningful emotional connection, give rise to an unconventional but established relationship dynamic in Yale’s dating scene — open relationships. There is no exact definition, but the most common notion of an open relationship is consensual nonmonogamy that involves one primary romantic partner but several other sexual partners. At Yale, open relationships take many complex forms, shaped by students’ personal needs and wants.

DTR Roughly half of the incoming first years responded to the Yale Daily News First-Year Survey of the Class

of 2022, and nearly 64 percent had never had sex. For many students, then, college presents ample opportunities for sexual experimentation.

Isabel Johnson ’21 took that chance to transition from monogamous to open relationships. Free from the social pressure and confinement she felt in high school, Johnson tried a nonexclusive relationship structure that worked better for her.

“In college, in general, people are starting to consider [relationships] with more of an open mind and think seriously about how they construct their relationships,” Johnson said. “I feel like [my partner and I] are both able to think for ourselves more as independent agents, whereas the sto-

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INSIGHT ry we tell of monogamous relationships is operating more as a team, as a single unit.”

Johnson, who is bisexual, also noted from her experience that it is often more common to see open relationships in the LGBTQ community. She sees them as part of a long history of people trying to love whom and how they want to, including the fight for marriage equality.

“If you’re not heterosexual, you’re much more likely to be exposed to the queer sexuality dialogue,” Johnson explained. “You start questioning and poking holes in the simulation or whatever this is and realizing that people should be free to construct relationships in ways we don’t see, and that can also be productive and healthy.”

For Dylan Forgione ’20 and his boyfriend, the dynamics of their long-distance open relationship were initially intertwined with their local LGBTQ communities. When Forgione transferred to Yale in his junior year, a school commonly dubbed “the gay Ivy,” his boyfriend remained in New York City, a hub for LGBTQ culture and nightlife. Both felt that they were missing out on what the other had.

“There were points where [my boyfriend] would be jealous because he felt like I was open to all these new sexual endeavors [at Yale] that he didn’t get the opportunity to have,” Forgione said. “But [my boyfriend] is out in New York, and his opportunities, to me, seemed bigger.”

Jealousy can drive a bitter wedge between partners new to open relationships. The opposite of jealousy, though it comes less naturally, is infinitely more rewarding. “Compersion,” or deriving happiness from a partner’s happiness, takes time and trust to achieve.

Over a year into his open relationship, Forgione has realized a clear distinction between restriction and commitment. A desire for other sexual experiences never compromised his emotional love and care for his boyfriend.

“I know that [my boyfriend] and I have something special that we both put a lot of value and work into.

That’s something that has come with time and effort,” Forgione said. “We’ve learned a lot of things about ourselves and each other that we weren’t expecting to. We’ve experienced other things, both sexually and romantically, that we’ve really enjoyed.

We’ve been able to incorporate that into our relationship, and I think that it’s made things a bit more fun and interesting.”

A sophomore in a long-distance open relationship, who requested anonymity because his relationship status is not public knowledge, shared a similar sentiment. He wanted to maintain his relationship with his boyfriend without missing out at Yale, but would return to their original closed relationship anytime.

The exact structure of his relationship is flexible, as long as the foundational emotional connection stays strong.

“I’m glad that I’m in an open relationship, but I

14 | February 2019

don’t take it to be the main element of my current relationship,” he said. “It certainly means we’re able to communicate in a good way for us to maintain an open relationship, so this both gives me more freedom and makes me feel better about our communication skills.”

While societal resistance against nonmonogamy may stem from a reluctance to deviate from traditional expressions of love, open relationships break and reshape prior dating conventions. People in open relationships differentiate between love and sex, which are still widely associated as two sides of the same coin.

“I think that being in an open relationship makes someone aware of the difference between loving someone and devoting yourself to them sexually,” he explained. “People usually don’t think of them as two different things, but when you start seeing them as two different things you can realize that just because you might want to have sex with [other] people, it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person or your relationship is failing. It just makes you realize that you’re human.”

You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It Too? Open relationships don’t have any secret formula; like all other relationships they are founded on trust and communication, and so are just as vulnerable to emotional rifts. A first year, who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the topic, tried an open relationship once but found it more suffocating than freeing. Anticipating the strain of a long-distance relationship, she broke up with her steady high school boyfriend before coming to Yale. The separation proved too difficult to maintain, creating an ambiguous on-again, off-again relationship.

“When I got to college, we were still doing all the things that a relationship involved, except for the label. It naturally progressed into a type of open relationship, but we never put that label on it either,” she said.

Without labels, the boundaries of their relationship bent when tested. Although they had verbally agreed to allow casual hookups, they broke up again before either had acted on their agreement. The perpetual uncertainty was emotionally draining — she was constantly distracted, worried about what her boyfriend was up to halfway across the world.

“In hindsight, if he had hooked up with someone else, I don’t know if I would have actually been okay with it. I think it takes a lot of willpower to actually be okay with it,” she said. “We put so much pressure on figuring things out [that] we both stopped being ourselves. It just became really mentally time consuming and toxic.”

This difficulty adapting to a nonexclusive relationship may be an indication of why open relationships, as opposed to polyamory, are mostly “open” to sex alone. Despite having interactions with multiple sex-

INSIGHT ual partners, people in open relationships almost always choose to preserve one emotional bond with a primary partner. Forgione described this as the most difficult aspect of navigating an open relationship — determining where to draw the blurry line between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy and never crossing that line with anyone beside their primary partner.

This natural preference for one primary partner may find its primordial roots in biology. According to Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, a professor of biology and anthropology at Yale, a distinct desire for emotional exclusivity is a display of the prevalent sociobiological concept of “pair bonding.”

“In studies of communities of people who have chosen open relationships … they always express that there is a preferred partner. It’s a pair bond,” Fernandez-Duque said. “Even in communities of people involved in polyamory … they acknowledge that the bond, the emotional experience, was not the same.

They would describe it as unsustainable.”

Though the experiences of students in open relationships diverged based on individual circumstances and desires, every person interviewed by the News regarded emotional connection as the utmost priority, relegating sex to a side activity rather than the center of a romantic relationship.

“The time you spend together, with whom you have sex, ends up being the most meaningful and [has the] strongest psychological, sociological effect on happiness and satisfaction,” Fernandez-Duque said. “It doesn’t have to be the specifics of the sexual act, but it has to do with what surrounds the act.

That’s where relationships are cemented … the physiology underlying attachment requires that before and after.”

Fernandez-Duque also cited University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor William Jankowiak’s research report on concurrent love bond experiences, which found that it is too demanding — perhaps even contra human nature — to simultaneously harbor serious romantic emotions for multiple people at once.

“The primacy of the dyadic bond [is] based more on emotional, rather than sexual, exclusivity,” the report concluded. “In the end, love’s pull toward dyad-

ic exclusiveness conquers all.”

Open at Yale While open relationships are certainly not limited to any one demographic, Yale’s generally open-minded environment may be especially conducive to open relationships. For some students, the appeal has nothing to do with sex. A more highbrow interpreter of open relationships, Eui Young Kim ’21 alluded to the infamous love affair between French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as an ideal open-relationship model — an “intellectual relationship” of commitment to each other’s minds, not bodies. “[Sartre and de Beauvoir] would be

hibits all kinds of relationships because we live in such a high energy environment that there’s really no time. When people are confronted with the idea of having to devote so much [time] to one person, [it is like] taking on a whole new project,” Johnson said. “No matter if it’s monogamous or an open relationship, it’s really scary to commit to that in this environment.”

Such is the misunderstanding of open relationships — they carry a stigma in mainstream discourse even though they require much deeper emotional investments than casual hookups. People commit to open relationships for an array of reasons, to varying degrees of success. But as long as they are mutu-

KEYI CUI

each other’s critics, writing partners, and have a lot of intellectual discussions. That’s the type of thing I want — a constructive relationship,” Kim described. “It would almost be like being in a two-person seminar over the course of a lifetime.”

Yale students have seemingly developed their own relationship norms, from the simultaneous popularity and mockery of Tinder U to the desperate culture of setting up suitemates’ FirstYear Screw dates. There is an abundance of love on campus that aches to be shared, but often finds itself undesired, unrequited, unfulfilled. Perhaps the appeal of hookup culture is its sheer convenience, risk-free and commitment-free, though short-lived.

“I think the Yale hookup culture in-

ally consensual and preferred, they are simply another part of the complex human experience.

“A lot of people have their preconceived notions, and sometimes it causes them to participate in building a stigma around open relationships, and I wish that more people would, even if they wouldn’t do it for themselves, be a bit more open to the idea of other people doing it,” Forgione said. “Just because something doesn’t work for you doesn’t it mean it wouldn’t work for other people.”

Amidst the cultural destigmatization of sex, people are branching away from traditional relationship pathways.

Intimacy looks different for everyone, whether it’s sharing Netflix passwords or sexual partners.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

INSIGHT

Conjuring a career For Yale’s magicians, turning a hobby into a livelihood requires some sleight of hand.

BY HELENA LYNG-OLSEN

S

ome students were shuffling cards in their hands — others spread them out along a felt tabletop, arranging them in various pyramid structures. Every member of the Yale Magic Society was fiddling with a deck of cards when I walked in the room and continued to do so throughout the 90-minute meeting.

“I mean, you might as well do that trick with duct tape,” remarked Max Lukianchikov ’20, president of the society. “This item [for an upcoming magic trick] came in the mail, and it’s the most gorgeous piece of inventory I’ve ever seen in my life.”

He erased some writing from the board and added duct tape to the list next to the trick. Over the next hour, he and the six other members in attendance discussed tricks and how they were going to accomplish them, with references to magic books and famous magicians throughout. Members bantered back and forth, sprinkling magician’s terminology like “inception” and “table vision” amid ideas and criticism. Lukianchikov offhandedly mentioned that he had always wanted to learn how to perform hypnosis, which launched a 20-minute conversation about the most effective methods of hypnosis.

This is the convening of the Yale Magic Society. Founded in 2010, the society brings together students interested in practicing magic and allows them ample opportunities for performance and preparation. Its members do more than simply pulling a rabbit out of a hat; their magic is performance, expression and, ultimately, art. In each meeting, members perform their individual tricks — ranging from putting together a “broken” chair to reading minds — and plan new tricks to be used in the future.

The society is also involved in so-called magical outreach.

Each year they take a trip abroad through an organization called Magicians Without Borders, which allows them to perform and teach magic. The group also volunteers with the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, teaching recovering drug addicts how to do magic tricks.

The Yale Magic Society serves as a single point where magicians expand their passion for the art form and gain valuable experiences. But beyond the thrill of performance, members express gratitude for the community the society has brought to them.

When Jen Kramer ’14, founder of the Yale Magic Society, came to Yale, she assumed that there would be a magic society “because the place was practically Hogwarts!” As it turned out, there was no outlet and community for the art form — so she started one. The newly formed group met each week to give feedback on each other’s work, performed in New Haven and hosted residential college teas with magicians from around the world who would sit in the Pierson College basement and talk to

16 | February 2019

PHOTOS BY BRIAN GALDERISI

the aspiring magicians for hours.

“It is such a fun, creative and spirited group,” said Alexander Posner ’19, the Yale Magic Society’s former president. “We have a terrific time designing new magic routines for our shows.

In many ways, I’d say that the creative process is even more fun than the product.”

Magic had been a significant part of Kramer’s life since she was 10. She joined the Society of Young Magicians, a group that met every month in the backroom of a Manhattan Magic Shop to hear from veteran magicians and critique each other’s work. It was there that Kramer met Posner, an aspiring middle school magician who had been going to magic summer camp. He practiced magic regularly throughout high school, and by the time he took his gap year in 2016, he was traveling to dozens of countries to perform. When he arrived at Yale, Kramer had graduated, but the legacy of her contribution remained. Posner quickly joined and performed with the community at Yale.

The Yale Magic Society, for Kramer and Posner, was both an outlet for magic performance and a way to bring a vital part of their lives to Yale. Both emphasized how magic, at Yale and in the world, is more than enjoyable entertainment.

“Magic, when done well, evokes a sense of childlike wonder,” said Lukianchikov.

Unlike Posner and Kramer, Lukianchikov had never performed in high school and considered himself an amateur magician, learning card tricks from YouTube. When he came to Yale, he met then-president Posner, who lent him books and resources for further study. On top of classes and other extracurriculars, Lukianchikov began practicing 4-5 hours a day and was soon

INSIGHT performing both with Yale Magic Society and through paid gigs for businesses and parties.

“Performing for other people is incredibly gratifying, and being able to use magic in the business setting, to help people’s relationships, to genuinely elicit emotions out of people that you would not expect, is incredible,” said Lukianchikov. “I’ve made the CEO of a company cry in front of all of his employees. … [Magic] transcends language, it transcends culture.”

Lukianchikov is seriously considering a career as a professional magician, but he has various other interests, namely math and music, that he also might pursue. He often asks Kramer for advice on the topic.

“The overlap between Yale students and people wanting to be professional magicians is incredibly small, and, as far as I’m concerned, one person deep: that’s Jen Kramer,” Lukianchikov said. “So, if there’s anyone who can help me, it’s Jen, because she has done it, and it makes it easier for me to realize that it’s viable as a full time career.”

Kramer always knew she was passionate about magic and approached her college years as a time to figure out the concrete steps to make her dream of being a professional magician a reality. She interned at the Nathan Burton Magic Show in Las Vegas for two summers, learning what the day-to-day life and work of a professional magician would be. When she graduated in 2014, she decided to move to Las Vegas and pursue magic.

“I figured if there was any time in my life to take a risk and do what I love, this was the time to do it,” she said.

Kramer contacted over 40 hotels to set up a weekly show, and eventually one, The Wyndham Grand Desert, said yes. A month after arriving to Las Vegas, she received three more offers for weekly shows. In 2017, she began headlining a show at the popular Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino in front of hundreds of people.

In recent years, Kramer has earned accolades such as the Merlin Award and Best Female Magician of the Year, the highest recognitions a magician can earn.

But while most magicians in the Yale Magic Society will perform and learn magic for the rest of their lives, Lukianchikov noted that few want to pursue it as their primary career.

Posner entertained the idea of being a professional magician at one point but now has plans to focus on environmental policy. He is the president of the nationwide coalition Students for Carbon Dividends, which advocates for a carbon tax.

“I’m very interested in climate change,” Posner said. “But I think the tools of magic are totally applicable.”

Posner believes his presentation and persuasion skills from magic will help with furthering his cause, and that he will in no way be shutting the door on magic forever when he graduated in the winter of 2018. He plans to keep magic as a hobby for years to come.

Lukianchikov spends a large amount of his time traveling to gigs in New York and Connecticut. Businesses fly him out to cocktail parties and networking events around the country.

Though Lukianchikov thinks working as a magician could be economically viable after graduation, he has had some doubts about pursuing this path full time.

“If you had told me [about magic as a full time career] when I was first doing it, I’d have said, ‘Oh no, I can’t do that. What a waste of a Yale degree,’” he said. “Which are all partially true things. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I go, ‘I don’t know, I’ll see.’ I’m in the position where I can choose something that makes me happy and it’s a win-win situation.”

Lukianchikov believes that magic is important beyond its entertainment value because of the way it brings people together. But he has also learned how magic can concretely better lives through the society’s partnership with Magicians Without Borders, a nonprofit whose members travel to different countries to perform and teach magic to children. Posner traveled with the organization during a gap year and served as its vice president throughout his college years. In his first year at Yale, he organized a collaboration with the society, and the Yale magicians traveled to India. It was on this trip that Lukianchikov first met Kramer. The next year, he travelled to Costa Rica, and this past winter break he went to Bogotá, Colombia.

Most might consider magic a harmless, even eccentric hobby. But Posner credits his experience teaching and performing magic with Magicians Without Borders as opening his eyes to the stakes and life-changing potential of learning magic. For him and for the people across the world to whom the organization teaches magic, magic is not just about the entertainment; it has the potential to scaffold self-worth and make life, even in dire circumstances, a bit better.

“Magic in itself isn’t life threatening or enhancing,” said Posner. “But it helps to bring life meaning, and color, and texture.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

ESSAY

Through the glass For decades, women at Yale have lived in a fishbowl.

Could I escape it by ignoring it?

BY LAURA NICHOLAS

I

have an adversarial relationship with clothes.

My reactions to “What Not to Wear” and “American Ninja Warrior” are the same — “I could never do that.” My off-mannequin forays at the mall frequently end as misadventures; even when an outfit checks all the stylistic boxes, I’m consumed by tucking and untucking, pulling up and pulling down, because it somehow never feels just right. Besides, I’ve decided with some post hoc rationalization magic: I don’t want to care about clothes. That would be a waste of my very precious time. So, it’s with a manufactured pride that I raid my father’s closet for his oldest sweatshirts with the least shape, turn my mother down every time she asks to go shopping for nice shoes and stubbornly avoid any events that require dressing up. In high school, my deliberate nonchalance slowly baked into the morning routine of throwing fabric onto my body until the absence of effort and action became inexorable. It was rote, part of who I was.

Coming to Yale I expected more of the same.

No need to fish for validation through hair futzing and clothes fidgeting rituals because I already had it — I’d made it to the top. Then I looked up and saw that the real top, made of impressively grand buildings and statues, was firmly colonized by men. Between 1968 and 1969, the number of women students at Yale went from zero to 500, but the campus remained static. Gently pushed into the Sterling Memorial Library manuscript reading room by a class, I wanted to put this turning point under a microscope, to watch it happen in slow motion. Piecing together fragile newspaper clippings, monochrome photographs, poems and dozens more yellowing documents, I saw a Yale emerge that was at once thankfully alien and yet terrifyingly familiar: Speaking as someone

18 | February 2019

who lives on the first floor, I can testify that Yale no longer sequesters women in the upper floors of colleges for their own safety, but I received roughly the same pamphlet as the one released by the first Women’s Center detailing all the ways I can prevent my own sexual assault.

I pictured the women taking their first steps onto Old Campus, 50 years ago now. They pass under Phelps Gate, looking up at the banner painted “Yale University Police Welcomes Guys & Dolls of ’73,” before being swarmed by the notebooks and cameras of national news outlets. Journalists and photographers from the likes of Newsweek and Life magazine had descended upon New Haven to pepper, pry and prod the coeds for sensational, fit-to-print quotes.

When the women were asked about their thoughts about being on the vanguard of modernity and postcollegiate ambitions, I wonder if they knew The New York Times would color in their answers with details of the hair dryers they brought, the length of their skirts and the shyness of their laughter. Women described an existence as “exotic” and “curiosit[ies]” in the minds of their male peers. Under the gaze of all Yale men, the University administration and now the whole country, they were destined for a fishbowl existence.

Between the male students’ attitude of “a child who finally gained a long-desired toy,” as the Yale Undergraduate Women’s Caucus of 1975 put it, and the horde of lenses pointed at the women’s lives, perhaps it was inevitable that an assault would end up on a roll of film.

In the black and white photograph, a man in a suit pulls up the hem of a girl’s plaid skirt as she walks away. Her face is hidden; to the cameraperson, to the man with his hand on her, she is only the skirt. I hoped she was not the same skirtclad woman the Times had ogled earlier.

I think she’d hate that skirt, blame it, maybe even burn it for becoming the only thing people see about her.

But maybe I’m projecting. Because that’s what I would do. My clothes put up walls because I don’t want people to look at me. I want them to listen to me and looking too long makes it hard to hear.

I could barely put words to the feeling until I read professor Margaret Homans ’74 describe in the book “Reflections on Coeducation: A Critical History of

Women at Yale” how as a student she wore a “baggy brown woolen jumper” to feel “ungendered in a space that often felt toxically gendered and sexualized.”

The relief that comes from a new kind of solidarity — the kind where finally you know you’re neither crazy nor alone — is immense. I don’t fear for myself the fate of the plaid-skirted girl in the photo the way Homans probably did, but I dress defensively all the same. If I make a mistake at the board in calculus while wearing my blue jeans and an extra large sweater, maybe I can spare my fellow women from an ugly, persistent stereotype about our mathematical abilities.

Maybe I can close my eyes and put my fingers in my ears and believe the glass above me is gone.

Pants were supposed to be the great equalizer. Yale men interviewed about the new addition to campus repeatedly spoke of how the fresh[wo]men’s jeans and slacks made them equals on the quad and in the classroom. Yet even their comfort was politicized, imbued with an imaginary agenda. Dresses and skirts made them a “dumb broad,” and pants made them “over-intelligent” and “boring.” When will the double bind no longer bind femininity into a universal experience?

Constant commentary on their appearance must have been obnoxious but eventually numbing — easier to tune out after four years. Truly chilling is the experience of listening to others speak about you as if you weren’t there.

I pressed play on an audiotape of Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. debating students in Trumbull College on coeducation’s implementation. A boy analogizes the addition of women as being “tossed a piece of meat” because “these girls who will be in Trumbull will be sort of our domain, we have first shot at them.” My stomach turned, and goose bumps rippled up my arm. The fate of Yale’s first women was put completely at the mercy of rooms just like these, where they had no presence and no personhood.

When the tension broke and the whole room laughed, the men unleashed an uproar composed entirely of bass. In her testimony, Christine Blasey Ford told Congress that “indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.” At the time, I didn’t understand how that could be her

ESSAY

ZIHAO LIN

singular memory, but I do now. Laughter is so primeval and revealing. I had been party to a conversation I was never meant to hear.

The tape clicked off after the static ended, and I was left with a disgust and regret I’d felt only one time before.

During a long bus ride with the boys’ tennis team in high school, the upperclassmen surrounded a sophomore and began spitting out the names of girls in his class. I listened to him systematically rate each with a number between one and ten or discard them with a simple “ew.” Did they forget I was there? Had I ever come up in one of their lists? How could they tap on the fishbowl, point and jeer, believing it was soundproof?

In 1969, chair of the University Committee on Coeducation Elga Wasserman laid out a vision for the inaugural class of women: “I would like to see you here as Yale students rather than as Yale women.” Decades later, my reality finally fulfills her wish. It’s so rare that I’m subjected to the condescension and dismissal the first freshwomen endured daily that I can easily convince myself of sexism’s obsolescence. After all, a world that isn’t working against you is a far easier one to live in.

But the archives have shaken me a little. Poring over records of Yale women’s pasts forced me into an uncomfortable confrontation with my present. The laughter of the Trumbull men will forever be fused with the laughter of the bus ride, planting a seed of distrust. The faint outline of glass surrounding me has started to come into view, so perhaps I’d rather take off these lenses, make it disappear and agree to never ask again.

I could try to fight the vestiges of injustice that remain. But to pound against the fishbowl until it shatters, I must acknowledge it exists. And then wouldn’t that simply place me back within its walls? The 588 women who came to Yale to break open a man’s world did not have this choice. Their discomfort wasn’t optional, but it drove them to persist so that mine eventually could be. I don’t think one option is better — this is part of the freedom the class of 1973 and its successors earned — but I do think one is braver. I’m not sure I’ve chosen it.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

ESSAY

Act your gender Bloody knees or bloody sheets: what does it mean to be feminine?

BY JULIA LEATHAM

I

grew up next door to four boys, all more or less my age. We shared a fence. In the afternoons, I’d climb up on our compost barrel with a handful of Pokemon cards, stand on my tiptoes and reach them over to exchange for others. We all played together, but it was clear the boys came over to see my then-brother Alex, who has since transitioned. I was always the token girl. I wasn’t allowed to pee in the ditch we’d all dug in the yard. I was chased with sharp sticks if I tried to enter the tinfoil castle. No one stuck around for my turn to climb the tree.

Then there was school, the playground. My classmates and I loved to play capture games — boys chase girls. The girls loved it because these were the times we got to play with the boys. When I played with my girl friends, we built fairy houses or practiced cantering like horses. When I played with the boys, there was shrieking, jumping, bloody knees and a little fear.

The phrase “boys will be boys” refers to boys acting childishly or without weighing consequences. No one says “girls will be girls,” but if they did, it would probably refer to cattiness or hypercontrolled competitive behavior among girls. Of course, not all girls or boys are like this. I must sound dated with my stereotyping. But still, these phrases persist. They are terms that categorize certain behaviors as “masculine” or “feminine” with roots in “male” and “female.” At this point in history, society largely accepts feminine men and masculine women but these adjectives are still tagged on, marking when someone acts contrary to their expected gender norms.

I’m a woman now (with blood on my sheets, not my knees) and a year ago, I acquired a pair of men’s jeans. I found them in the dona-

20 | February 2019

tion bin at my grandmother’s retirement home. They’re work pants: two layers of thick denim at the knees, deep pockets, loops to hang wrenches and ratchets, extra clasps around the waist for a tool belt. In the retirement home basement, I stripped to try them on right away. It embarrassed my younger sister Lauren, who was 16 at the time, the same way my not wearing a bra embarrasses her. She shrieked. We were past two doors and a long hallway but there was still a thrill of possible discovery.

She squealed. Finally, she giggled. I rolled my eyes. She compared me to the lead of her favorite comedy-mystery: “That was such a Sean Spencer move.”

When Lauren was a little girl, she wasn’t so easily frazzled. As an elementary schooler, she was rough-and-tumble, strong, masculine. All of her friends were boys. They’d meet after school to flip tricks on their skateboards. She wore black skinny jeans and a kind of fringed bowl cut that hung in her eyes. She’d toss her bangs out of the way, sweat sticking them in place off her forehead. In photos, she’d pop up two peace signs, smirking in that nonchalant kind of way that boys do. When she swam, she went topless in trunks. “Topless” would be redundant and insignificant if she were a boy. She didn’t understand why this should be significant and felt uncomfortable when adults made her put on a shirt. Why did she have to be the one to dress differently from all her friends?

While Lauren was friends with her skater boys, I was best friends with Madison, a tall blonde fourth grader. Our favorite game was “slutty suburban mom,” though we didn’t call it that. We’d put on tube tops (stuffed busty with thick socks) and large sunglasses, snag our mothers’ phones and sit out in her mom’s Ford Explorer pretending to pick up kids and gossip. Our moms caught us stuffing our shirts once, when we were searching for the car keys. They told us we looked very cute.

Madison’s mom, Karen, was a cheerleader until she dropped out of high school to be a groupie. I thought she was much cooler than my mother because she could paint my nails perfectly and bought Madison her own lipstick. She thought she was much cooler than my mother too because my mother sent me to math groups and Karen taught us what it meant to transition an outfit “day” to “night.” She had

done just fine without school, Karen told my mother, and everyone loves a pretty girl.

Madison and I loved pretty girls. Madison was the one who taught me to use YouTube so we could watch the plastic bodies of Barbies stripped and arranged precariously around each other. We realized our own bodies could look that way too. It fascinated us. We read the American Girl “Body Book” and bounced up and down in the bathroom mirror to check how far along our chests had developed since last week. Madison taught me what discharge is and, once we were 11, told me I should probably start shaving my pubic hair so I wouldn’t get made fun of like Amanda H. had been by the boys in her PE class.

Once our days “as moms” ended and the “kids” were put to sleep, we’d go “out to the club.” We closed the door, dimmed the lights, played Britney Spears’ “Womanizer.” We started by strutting across her room, pulling off the oversized sunglasses to reveal our eyes. We parted our lip-glossed mouths, slid off our skirts, then our shirts. The socks fell to reveal our shapeless frames. We moved to the bed.

Side-by-side, we pretended to kiss her pillows. We knew none of the physicalities of kissing; we could only mimic what we’d seen. I wondered what that word meant, “womanizer.” Madison jumped up, “Did you hear that?” She was quick to the door, “I think we must go feed the babies!”

One of these adolescent days, I arrived back home from school to find Lauren crouched in the bushes wearing a floppy hat, button-down shirt and jeans. She tossed a rope at me when I approached the door and belted the Indiana Jones theme song.

It’s one of those things I’ll never stop feeling guilty about: stealing her wig and boxers, hiding them. I’d see her dressed like a boy and I’d scowl. “Girls don’t do that,” I’d insist, “you can’t do that.”

Now Lauren is 17 with long silky hair.

She sent me a photo last week making fun of herself for having uneven eyebrows.

Her eyebrows did look slightly lopsided in the picture but she’s beautiful nonetheless. In the photo, she is wearing fitted jeans, a patterned blouse, two necklaces; she tucks her hair behind one ear shyly, smiling beside another two girls her age who are dressed similarly.

A search for “feminine traits” turns up: gentleness, empathy, sensitivity, caring,

ESSAY sweetness, compassion, tolerance, nurturance, deference, succorance. Imagine the phrase, “She’s so tolerant and nurturing.” Listen to it played in your mind.

Can you imagine that sentence with a tone of voice implying intimidation? No, positive “feminine” traits are admirable because of the restraint they represent.

They are measured reactions, never an initial force.

I’ve never been seen as a man and never wanted to be but I love the power I feel in my retirement home jeans, in my father’s shirts, in my friend’s brother’s jacket.

Dressing femininely makes me feel powerful too, but the kind of powerful that is measured by who notices. I wore a tight black dress to prom with a plunging neckline that harnessed so much attention even my teachers gossiped about it. I savored the eyes. But that is an empty kind of power, a vacuum of power. The leverage, like with character traits, comes from restraint. The power isn’t just that you look good. It’s that you look so good that people want to have you — except, they can’t. Otherwise, you’re just a slut.

But why do we need the words “masculine” or “feminine” at all? “Masculine” is a title for a collection of character traits. It means nothing besides labelling an ill-defined sum of characteristics we’ve decided appear more commonly in males. Traits such as assertiveness, aggressiveness, strength, independence, lack of sentimentality. Traits which are powerful and admirable. When a woman possesses such traits she is powerful and admirable. We dub these parts of her “masculine” — less female. We admit she is still a woman but she is acting counter to her gender’s nature. We have gendered strength so women can never fully embody it; they can only try it on. Strength, on a woman, is drag.

Last week, I performed in a drag show in a cast of 10.

Three of us identified as cisgendered. The other seven performers are nonbinary. My friend Lola, who’s nonbinary, performed “Candy Store” from the musical “Heathers” as a critique of queer spaces valuing masculinity over femininity. They held the stage in plain clothing: jeans and a jean jacket with a shirt underneath. The characters Heather, Heather and Heather who perform “Candy Store” in the original musical are all popular, conventionally attractive high school students. The song is coarse: “If you lack the balls, you can go play dolls, let your mommy fix you a snack. Or you could come and smoke, pound some rum and coke, in my Porsche with the quarterback.” Their point was: It’s always the same. It doesn’t seem to matter gay, straight, bi, male, female, genderqueer. We all see that masculine is powerful.

In my early years, I was a girly girl, Alex was a crafty boy-scout-boy and Lauren was the infant we bossed around. Then, we grew up, a little at a time. Now, Alex wears dresses more often than I do; her hair is longer than mine; her legs are shaved smooth and mine remain hairy up until I have a date. It begs the question: How much does acting femininely have to do with being female?

ZIHAO LIN

Yale Daily News Magazine | 21

FEATURE

ready patient one

Can scientists assess your anxiety with animated spiders?

When reality lags, researchers turn to the virtual.

BY NICOLE BLACKWOOD

ILLUSTRATIONS BY VALERIE PAVILONIS

O

n the third floor of the Yale Child Study Center, a whitewalled room hides behind the receptionist desk. The room is small: a round folding table, a few chairs, a refrigerator in the corner, a scale, a collection of loose papers lying on a wooden desk (instructions for making a puzzle, a list of patients). On the east wall, a rectangle is marked out in tape on the carpeted floor. Tess Anderson, a postgraduate associate, watched me as I stepped into the center. It was 9 a.m.

The office was empty. I was there to play a game.

“We ask people to not move out of the taped section,” Anderson said as she fiddled with the computer that was hooked up to a TV monitor in front of me. Input logs flashed and disappeared. Though she would usually read the game’s instructions aloud to patients in the center — in this room, mothers and their 7 to 12-year-old children — I was an exception; I already knew the rules.

The game design was simple. Still a prototype, it evoked Wii Sports of yore — all back-and-forth movement,

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exertion and strategy, strategies for avoiding exertion. The goal in the first round was to catch falling rocket ships on a launch pad. In the second, it was tennis balls on tennis rackets. The launch pad-turned-racket hovered above my head on the screen, my body silhouetted in clumsy video-capture, swerving wildly as the objects fell. Images cluttered the left and right of the screen: a spider and a starfish; a spider and a flower; then, later, a scrunchedup angry face and a neutral face.

After I finished both rounds, Anderson shut down the computer. Normally, she explained, mothers and children fill out a questionnaire regarding their anxiety before and after playing (for example, ranking “I feel upset” on a scale of one to four).

Sweaty and tired, I had almost forgotten that the falling rockets and tennis balls and where they were caught (near the spider? near the flower?) hinted at something clinically significant: levels of avoidance, a key anxiety measure. If I were a patient, an Excel file would reveal each time I turned toward and away from the spider, spider-

web or angry face, accurate to the 30th of a second.

The monitor hummed as I stepped out of the taped rectangle, game finished. A jumble of wires complicated the computer shutdown, though the game had recently upgraded its interface. The technology was still fussy, as though it didn’t yet know it had a job to do.

Interrogating reality Yale Interactive Kinect Environment Software, or YIKES, was developed by Eli Lebowitz of the Yale Child Study Center, in conjunction with autism-focused researcher Frederick Shic GRD ’08 and the rapid prototyping company PreviewLabs. Lebowitz believes that both avoidance and approach — how motivated a subject is to achieve a goal in spite of anxiety — are key elements in anxiety research. In a typical study, a researcher would ask a patient with a spider phobia how close they were willing to get to a real-life spider. YIKES removes the middleman.

“Anytime you as a doctor or researcher ask somebody to do some-

FEATURE thing, you’re placing a strong demand on them,” Lebowitz said. “Their motivation is going to be to try to do the thing that you ask and the behavior might be different than what they would do otherwise.”

YIKES provides a new method of studying “natural” behavior, how anxiety subconsciously manifests when the subject is focused on falling rockets. Intent on the game, subjects should be motivated by their score alone (10 points per rocket or tennis ball. I couldn’t get past 2,100.)

In a 2014 clinical study, Lebowitz’s lab observed 86 children with demonstrated anxiety, as well as their mothers, playing YIKES. The goal was to determine whether parental avoidance would point to avoidance in children — spiders, a common phobia, were the test case.

Not only did the study determine that children subconsciously modeled their mother’s avoidance, but the results were

statistically significant enough to unofficially deem YIKES an accurate means of measurement — “another tool to include in a toolbox of ways you can address the question you want to,” according to Shic.

Shic, whose lab at Yale used the versatile YIKES interface to measure and detect autistic traits, is uniquely equipped to understand the futurity of such a toolbox. Currently an associate professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Pediatrics, he started his career as a game developer for Sony PlayStation before beginning to program in a friend’s magnetic resonance spectroscopy lab.

He shifted his focus to autism research after he obtained a Ph.D. in computer science.

“Video games pay a lot more,” he said, laughing. “[But] at some point I realized that if I’m going to sleep under my desk, I should do it for something I find value in.

I just loved asking questions.”

Fifteen years ago, a discussion of game technology was a discussion of its potential harms: Did violent video games yield real-life violence? Were they an art form

or a commercial evil, innately dangerous to children?

Now, Shic believes that game technology — motion tracking, virtual reality and augmented reality, all often referred

to under the umbrella term of “blended reality” — exists in what he terms an “incredibly nuanced gray area.” Questions are complicated, even unanswerable, addressing not the potential harm but rather the potential good of an ever-evolving medium.

Yet as technology finds its way into mainstream medical research and education at Yale and its peer institutions, ineffable questions demand concrete answers: whether blended reality is vital or disposable, whether it will alter medical research or be merely a footnote.

It’s uncharted territory — researchers are gambling on the technology’s longevity. Shic, for his part, is optimistic; the fundamental principles of research stand firm, in our reality as well as in virtual ones.

“The development of games tends to be the iterative development of scientific questions,” he said. “One question leads to the next.”

“It’s a game. You can experiment.”

While blended reality is a recent addition to labs and patient logs, the technology had been a pillar of the virtual landscape long before the development of Facebook’s Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, the current most-cited platforms. The image of a player in a bulky headset, tripping over furniture, is an old one: In the 1980s, Sega’s Master System 3D glasses generated an at-home 3D effect, and Nintendo launched their Virtual Boy headset in 1995.

Video games, not unlike medical research, offer a certain degree of creative freedom via a clear distinction from the real world — it’s what happens in Vegas, if Vegas were built out of pixels. Blended reality, when it works, enhances this freedom, blurring easy distinctions between real and make-believe. “Serious games,” or games meant for a particular, often educational, purpose have slowly entered this growing field, buoyed by increased attention to blended reality.

Bernard François, founder of PreviewLabs, attributes this newfound welcome to a younger generation’s inheritance of game development. PreviewLabs, based in Belgium, recently moved their United States office to Milford, Connecticut. The space is still near-bare, the most colorful

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FEATURE element the glow of François’s computer screen. When I asked about games he played as a child, his face lit up as he Googled images and YouTube videos to show me, huffing with impatience as an advertisement hin-

rious game” genre, reimagines smokeSCREEN, a 2D computer game developed by the Center’s play2PREVENT Lab in 2017 that focused on nicotine intervention more broadly. Lynn Fiellin, who founded the Center and directs play2PREVENT, emphasized that smokeSCREEN and its VR counterpart are meant as alternatives to typical health curriculums, ways to make mandated lessons deceptively fun. Like YIKES, smokeSCREEN involves a redirection of attention; the player’s response to the virtual stimuli, the theory goes, is reality. “We are not competing with Grand Theft Auto or Fortnite,” Fiellin said.

“What we’re trying to do is create a way to deliver [information] to kids in a space that they want to be in.” smokeSCREEN imagines its player as a new kid in school; the object is to make friends while the player’s “risk” level flucPHOTOS BY DAVID ZHENG tuates. Higher risk levels dered his demonstration. mean an inability to counGames, serious or not, have allowed him to teract peer pressure in battle royal-esque bend the rules of a world that mimics our scenarios — the school is a hivemind of stuown, and this same experimental freedom is dents who want nothing more than to see the inherently imbued in serious games. player smoke. The game design was based “I’m a pacifist,” he said. “But if I have a on feedback from New Haven students; pargame and it’s a simulation of a city, I could ticipants were asked to send pictures of their do reckless driving in a game without doing houses, their shoes, their hairstyles. it in real life. It’s a game. You can experi“A lot of times, kids know what the right ment.” decision is, and it’s just that they don’t live YIKES is the brainchild of Lebowitz and in a vacuum,” Fiellin said. “There’s a context Shic but was engineered and prototyped that makes that decision-making challengby PreviewLabs. François referred to it as a ing. We try to recreate that in our games.” “deterministic” interface, with a code that This context is not only visual but an eledrops objects in the same location each ment of gameplay: Players are free to experitime. Yet experimentation is a cornerstone ment, making both the “wrong” and “right” of another PreviewLabs partner, Yale’s Cen- choices in an environment that at least reter for Health & Learning Games. François sembles their own, if on a cartoon plane. The is helping to program smokeSCREEN VR game presents choices, and the choices feel (a working title), a collaboration with the real. If developers have done their job, the Center’s play4REAL Lab designed to high- consequences do, too. light the risks of vaping and teach teenagers refusal skills by allowing them to speak re- “Nothing beats palpitating” fusals aloud.

Of course, serious games are not necessmokeSCREEN VR, epitomic of the “se- sarily good for learning, and game technolo-

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FEATURE gy, though new, will not necessarily revolutionize medical research. If blended reality is a tool in an evolving toolbox, researchers must make decisions. The rusty screwdriver may be older, but sometimes it’s better, depending on what’s broken.

Travis McCann NUR ’20 has spent the past year testing tools. Ordinarily, educators at the School of Nursing create realistic patient simulations for nursing students by applying makeup to “high-fidelity Manikins,” mannequins with the ability to breathe, cry, even talk.

Students are then tested on their ability to identify and address points of medical concern.

McCann, a Masters of Science in Nursing candidate and a member of Yale’s Blended Reality project, initially planned to use VR technology to do away with Manikins altogether, generating approximations of human injuries on virtual bodies. But there was something lacking, a tactile element he didn’t miss until it was gone.

“Nothing beats palpitating,” he said.

“If you’re always just moving things around in the air, it’s not real. But when you put your hands on something, it’s real. … If you’re using VR, as soon as you step into a world that’s not the world you’re actually living in, there’s always that false sense of security that nothing can go wrong.”

McCann’s new goal is to implement augmented reality — game images layered atop a mobile device’s video capture — into the nursing curriculum.

The Manikins, which lie eerily still in simulation rooms, mouths open, will not be forced to retire. With McCann’s technology, students will either use QR codes or the Microsoft Hololens to witness, for instance, a video of a tick stuck in the Manikin’s leg.

The Blended Reality project, a cross-disciplinary exploratory opportunity for Yale affiliates, originated in 2016 to support projects like McCann’s, in particular those whose outcomes or even methodology are unknown. The project relies on the fact that no developer can foretell VR’s future with any confidence. It’s largely untested in classrooms, research and treatment. Re-

“

It’s going to be a hard sell to convince people that this algorithm cares about you.”

searchers might spend years on a project that functions but does little else or doesn’t function at all.

Justin Berry, critic at the Yale School of Art and principle investigator of the 2018-2019 Blended Reality project, believes this trial and error is an inevitable feature of untested technology. He contrasts it with drawing — students in his classes will claim they’ve only been drawing since high school, when really they’ve been drawing all their lives.

“Every time they picked up a pencil, they’re slowly having this content feedback mechanism,” he said. “When it comes to VR or AR or these immersive technologies, we don’t have that history of use.”

At this point, with significant time invested, learning is the only option.

“Say we make something and it’s perfect and it takes off on day one. Everyone uses it to save the world, congratulations,” he said. “I’d love to do that, but then you don’t actually learn much about why it works. You don’t really know much about it.”

Research and/or commerce Investment is undeniably crucial. The slow crawl of serious games — including games used for research purposes — into both education and medicine generates gray-area questions of not only longevity but sustainability. Serious games, often funded by organizations such as the National Institutes of Health or private corporations, operate on a different financial wavelength than commercial games, which are intended to be mass-produced and sold.

While Shic attributes the spike of serious games to new, widespread knowledge about game technology, he

believes how far such technology advances will depend on how deep NIH or private pockets stretch. With typical research funding from the NIH, he said, researchers are rarely motivated to complete projects; once completed, funding dries up.

Serious games thus exist at a unique crossroads. If Shic is right that serious game development is a scientific process, then on the one hand, researchers should drive development, as they understand the genre’s future possibilities from a scientific, and often a psychological, standpoint. On the other hand, game development depends on a transactional business model, which centers around commercial production.

For most researchers, psychology comes first. François, who has worked on exposure therapy prototypes, emphasized that blurring the “real” and the “make-believe” often requires an academic pedigree — in a game built to address claustrophobia in elevators, for instance, you don’t need precise realism. The number of virtual individuals in an elevator or the elevator’s suggested cleanliness might be all that’s needed to trigger a response.

“The games and experience interventions we create are rooted in what we already know,” Kim Hieftje said regarding smokeSCREEN VR’s development.

Hieftje is the director of the play4REAL lab. “It’s not like we’re creating something new.”

Lebowitz believes YIKES might someday be used as a form of exposure therapy, and Fiellin hopes that smokeSCREEN will find its way into classrooms across the nation. Neither are interested in widespread commercial dissemination for a large profit margin. They have an idea with psychological underpinnings; established gaming companies have a means of mass-producing it. The technology exists, and most researchers believe it will expand, but how significantly depends on who blinks first, or whether both sides of development, research and game companies, can work to answer the same questions. If not, and perhaps regardless, the medium is one giant unknown.

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FEATURE As to whether or not blended realities will replace researchers altogether, Shic turns a skeptical eye.

“My personal belief is that the human aspect of [psychology] is inescapable,” he said. “There’s nothing, no substitute, no technology or algorithm that is going to get us there because ultimately someone cares about you when you’re talking to a therapist. It’s going to be a hard sell to convince people that this algorithm cares about you.”

Randy Rode, director of Campus IT Partner Relationship and Development and of the Blended Reality project, believes blended reality is moving too quickly to halt altogether. The real question, then, is how significantly it will alter what we see as the boundaries of our own reality. Meanwhile, mothers and their children will continue to dance around spiders.

“It’s a good time to be skeptical, to be cautious, to ask a lot of questions,” Rode said. “But none of those are reasons not to do anything.”

Who’s updating whom?

I spent many hours playing smokeSCREEN from a computer in my childhood bedroom over winter break, a simulation built of both remembered childhood and game technology. The game is buoyant, even addictive; much of it revolves

26 | February 2019

around conversations with potential new friends, each eventually classified as a “smoker” or a “nonsmoker.” There was something comforting about such binary distinctions within an opaque medium, such a singular and solvable problem — I was asked by my new friend Brian why I didn’t want to smoke if the characters in “Grease” did and chose to cordially reply, “When actors smoke or vape in movies, people get the impression that it’s cool.” Brian, ever-receptive, accepted this rote recitation of curriculum basics.

The trailer for smokeSCREEN VR demonstrates the same general philosophy, though in a VR space. The player walks through the high school hallway as their friends implore them to score a party invitation. It’s startling, perhaps, to think that kids may absorb health education via three-dimensional cartoons. Some things, though, remain familiar. In the trailer, a new friend turns to the player: “Hey, kid. You thirsty for some mango juice?” I couldn’t help but laugh, imagining a teenager’s reaction, imagining the adult who wrote the line.

But the kinks of the game will be worked out, and the format isn’t going away. If an algorithm can’t replace the study of health at large, then we aren’t adapting to game technologies.

Game technologies — spiders and Manikins and cajoling cartoons — are adapting to us.

STAINED, LACQUERED, CHECKERED: ELIHU AND I IN CHENNAI

BY ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE

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PHOTOS BY ANANYA KUMAR-BANJEREE

S

t. Mary’s Church is stained a clean white that balances out the blues and greens of the landscape. Nothing in the building’s architecture suggests how close it is to the Hindu temples 15 minutes away, let alone to the dark-skinned people that frequent such establishments. It seems to try to exist independent of its circumstances. The pews are wicker-laced benches, a typical product of South India. In the living room of my grandfather’s house 15 minutes away, we sit on similar wood benches. They were my grandmother’s.

If I were to trace my lineage back in time, past the limits of our family records, I might find myself standing alongside a woman whose nose resembles my father’s, in the year 1680.

It was then that the church held its first marriage ceremony — for Elihu Yale.

The church is one of the oldest British building in India.

During the height of the East India Company’s empire, British subjects commonly referred to it as the “Westminster Abbey of the East.” Yale was one in a string of governors to

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be married in this church. But the brown congregation members I speak to don’t remember any of these weddings. In fact, they tell me they see the namesake of Yale University as just another unremarkable figure in what can only be called a fraught history. People do not like to revel in their history because no narrative can make sense of what happened here.

The people I speak to here like to say that it is colonization, and then move on. We do not discuss the centuries of domination. Often I am told it is more helpful to look to the future, if not the present. Wallowing does not help anyone, says the church pastor here. They believe the future holds hope, I think. They have to.

When we first stumble into the church, I hear my father curse under his breath. Like most of Chennai — the capital of Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state — it is swathed in sultry air. Crowds of dark-skinned people move back and forth on dated motorcycles and Vespas on a neighboring street. In the throng of skin, my father and I stick out as light,

COVER drawing stares. My father is with me partially as my escort: He grew up here and speaks Tamil fluently. But he’s also here because of what I’ve been telling him about Yale, about what was done to our people. He is no fan of religion, and certainly no fan of a religion meant as a proxy for imperial governance.

The air here has the same moisture and thickness as the air in St. James Parish Church in Montego Bay, Jamaica. The rafters are just as grand as those in Tan Dinh Church in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. These are both places my father and I have travelled to together, trying to understand the messy world we live in. Wandering past this church’s threshold, his eyes widen. But I don’t see what is immediately evident to him, to anyone who grew up in the open wounds of colonization, who knows “British” as a bad word like the back of their hand.

The pastor is an older woman with a sari under her white gown. She asks my father and me if we are Christian. No, says my father, I am from here. Her dark hair is tied up in a bun that is decorated with jasmine flowers. I can smell the fragrance following the wind as I chat with her after service. When she talks to me, I can’t help but wonder if this is how my grandmother, Vijaya, might look if she were alive. I wonder if this is how she would treat me, with soft oiled palms. And then I wonder about her mother.

When I press the pastor about Yale, she does not seem to know whom I am talking about. I say, he was the governor of Fort St. George, which draws a short pause. She takes my hand and directs me to a marble plaque with Yale’s name on it. In her office, set in a water-stained frame, is a small engraving of him. I think it’s all we have.

Thank you, I say. I come back here many times during my stay in Chennai. The walls: some white, some now stained a sulfuric yellow.

— The Tamil Nadu Archives are painted a brilliant sienna.

When I see the outlines of the red and white arches beyond the gate, I stop to take some photographs. Later, I learn this design was made in the Indo-Saracenic architectural style, meant to reference the Islamic architecture for which India is traditionally known. But no Saracenic buildings were commissioned by brown voices or brown hands; instead, the revival style was used by the British during the period of the British Raj. The library itself is practically open air, shelves saturated with dark pages, some of which are laminated, others imposed on cotton. The librarian who helps me mentions how the archive is severely understaffed because there isn’t enough government money. Looking through 300-year-old pages, I see the toll that lack of money takes on preserving history. The archive is stacked with books on the Indian Ocean slave trade, books that Yale’s Orbis Library Catalogue has never heard of.

The librarians who worked there didn’t seem to know why I was there. I kept telling myself that I did, that I knew what I was walking into. I didn’t. I still don’t really understand what happened there. I am still trying to clarify the facts.

Yale served as the governor of Fort St. George, now known as Chennai, from 1697 to 1692.

As I understand it, Fort St. George was a part of a larger network of stations in the Global South that was central to the British commercial venture. We had natural resources, and so they used us. We had people who could work, and so they took them. The truth is that I have written and rewritten this piece praying it will expose itself, crystallize or evaporate, like a bedside glass of water. It won’t.

— During shopping period, I looked for a class on the Indian Ocean slave trade. If I couldn’t teach myself, maybe someone else could. There wasn’t one. The world does not offer the Indian Ocean slave trade the attention it requires, despite the fact that it enslaved many people. This disregard towards the region is often called the “tyranny of the Atlantic.” Despite

“

They believe there is hope in the future.

They have to.”

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“

I am missing the faces in the puzzle where I know people are supposed to be.”

growing up in the wake of the Indian Ocean slave trade, my father didn’t know anything about it.

When reading, I learned that many of those kidnapped and sold were African, and, according to scholar Richard B. Allen, “tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of slaves were exported from India and Southeast Asia …”

In lieu of the class I wanted, I am taking a class I need, called “Mobile South Asians and the Global Legal Order” with professor Rohit De. The class is mostly about South Asians and indentured servitude, another overlooked topic. One day, I approached him after class. I knew the Indian Ocean trade was different from the Atlantic, but the Atlantic was all that I knew, all that I grew up learning about. Could he explain?

He started by explaining major differences between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trades. First, the slave trade in the Indian Ocean was associated with a pre-existing trade in the region in which enslaved individuals primarily performed household and domestic labor. Further, slavery in the Company was usually a result of “debt bondage” in which families sold their children to the Company to address debt.

De left the room in a flurry, and I thought of all those spare moments when he had reoriented the little knowledge I had.

As one of the few South Asians teaching in the humanities at Yale, he is very valued by the brown community. Very valued, and thus, very busy. He told me to reach out to Tiraana Bains, YGS ’21, a past student of his.

I posed the same questions to her. “There were several forms of slavery … the kind that involved the purchase and sale of local people from South Asia itself, especially during times of famine …, the transport of enslaved Africans brought from West Africa to St. Helena and then to Madras

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or from East Africa and Madagascar via Bombay … many of these slaves found their way to English, later British settlements in Southeast Asia, which was in itself also a source of traffic in slaves.” What she said was starting to match what I was learning in De’s class. Though marginal, I had found the corner pieces of my people’s history. I knew a lot of histories.

But I didn’t know the history my father would have called his own, had he been taught it. If I wanted to build a picture from the corners, I would need edges.

Edges, like the flush grass in Chennai, daffodils decorating the bottom of the picture: Those who were sold “had no way of escaping the situation they [were] in,” said De. But then I am lacking the colors of the sky, the architecture; I am missing the faces in the puzzle where I know people are supposed to be.

Professor Jay Gitlin, the associate director for the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, wrote in an email that “scholars have not fully investigated the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades. They should.”

So I have been told that I must build my own canon, start my own section in the library. But how much are we expected to build before we grow weary?

I learn many things in Chennai. At the Fort St. George Museum, amid pearlescent, peacock blue walls, I learn that the slave trade was moderated by the East India Company. A stained-brown map shows that the EIC divided Chennai into “White-town” and “Black-town.” “Black-town” compromised the entire city outside of the fort’s walls and was populated by the native peoples, who were commonly referred to as “black” in the EIC’s records. I can’t help but think of every story my mother had told me about how happy my father’s

COVER extended family was when they met her; you’re so white, they said. Yale was responsible for the fortification of said dividing walls even though the Company objected, was responsible for driving the separation of these communities into the physical soil, according to East India Company records in Manuscript and Archives.

The archive teaches me that the EIC relied on local slaves from the beginning of their time in the subcontinent. As in, looking down on people who are smaller and browner than you isn’t new. When I first get off the flight from the U.S., my dad and I meet a couple from Belgium. Excitedly, the woman mentions that they have seen a slum already. I know the real India, she says to me. As in, she wants to teach me. As in, I want to retch. Mostly from the jetlag, or because of the flash of images that jolt through my head.

Local scholarship tells us that teenagers were often sold as slaves in the market. At one point, it was common practice for slave traders to kidnap children away from their parents. Those taken and shipped to other colonies — including Sumatra, Indonesia, the “East Indies” and Southeast Asia — were joined by individuals condemned by the EIC to hard labor in lieu of capital punishment. While many Company records in the Tamil Nadu Archive press the point that Madrasis often “sold themselves” into slavery, records show that this argument was usually a “defensive trick played by the slave traders to justify their greedy activities.” The community’s desperation was made worse by famines, which became more common as the British transitioned the community into commercial farming.

In 1683, the slave trade of Madras was supposedly abolished by Governor William Gyfford because of outcry from the local community. However, the fine associated with breaking the law was so small that the trade continued, unaffected. In fact, the Madras slave trade peaked in the 1680s.

By the end of 17th century, the Madras slave trade, which was regulated by the Company, had increased in volume tremendously.

I am standing by the beach in Chennai. We are looking east, towards the Andaman Islands, Indonesia and Thailand.

The sky is kissed a kind of blue for which purple is an afterthought, a blue that makes me think of the sky at 4 o’clock in New Haven. Women stand in the water wearing white. No one wears a swimsuit, all saris. It is one of my last Sundays here.

I have been at the archive today. I have been to the ocean. I have been to my aunt’s university. I have been through great confusion and great sadness. Now, I am thinking of a painting I looked up on my phone on the way here. It is a portrait of Elihu Yale with a few other White men. In the far right corner is a boy, presented as a conceit, I later learn. But in this oil painting he is as plain as day, and he is Black.

Professor Joseph Yannielli — previously a postdoc at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition — has extensively studied Elihu Yale’s involvement with the Indian Ocean slave trade. I read a lot of his work while I was in India. While some sources seek to portray Yale as an abolitionist, this is counterfactual, Yannielli writes.

Yannielli notes that in addition to supporting the Company’s policy of exporting black South Indian slaves to colonies like that on St. Helena, Elihu Yale attended a meeting wherein it

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was agreed that “a minimum of ten slaves [must be] sent on every outbound European ship … ” At least ten. This is the figure that bothers my father the most. Ten. A number large enough to be a whole family, and small enough to comprehend. Ten. The number of people who left on boats, looking back, looking like him. The number of people who probably never came back.

Yannielli noted that in 1689, Yale sent a ship to the island of Madagascar requesting that slaves be purchased and taken to the colony on Sumatra. While Yale himself didn’t own any slaves, “he profited both directly and indirectly from their sale,” Yannielli said. To me, there isn’t much of a difference.

If you traffic in the suffering of others, you are far from exonerated. This wealth is what allowed his money to come to our University, and certainly, Yannielli said, it was what incentivized the University to chase after men like Yale.

I emailed Gitlin on the advice of someone in Yale’s Manuscripts & Archives. I don’t know what I was expecting. Certainly not the response I received. Gitlin believes that “it would also be misleading to characterize [Yale] as a slave trader … Yale’s personal wealth came primarily from a private trade, on the side, in diamonds and other precious gems.” While this may be true, diamonds are far from pure. Diamonds, like the big one on my father’s gold ring. The diamond is from his grandmother’s, my great grandmother’s, nose ring. Even dia-

32 | February 2019

monds tell stories. Even diamonds come from somewhere.

“It’s impossible to disentangle the diamond trade from the slave trade,” Yannielli told me over the phone. “The East India Company used the slave trade to consolidate political and economic power, and that power enabled Yale’s mercantile activities.” It is worth recalling that the Company’s initial interest in the subcontinent was to extract natural resources; Yale himself signed “… profitable treaties to the Company’s benefit [that were] … undoubtedly exploitative,” according to an article in the Duke Undergraduate Journal of South Asian Studies by Nikila Sri-Kumar ’11.

The reality is that the slave trade was central to the Yale’s life. Bains notes that “… Yale was part of a broader milieu in both India and England, in which people thought of slave trading and the deployment of slave labor as a political economic strategy …” The Yale Center for British Art possesses a painting in which a black slave can be seen alongside Yale and his compatriots. He is young. He is a child. Defenders of Elihu Yale continually reiterate that Yale himself did not own slaves. Yannielli explained to me that, regardless of whether this is true, Yale is present in two portraits that feature slaves, unusual even for other imperialists.

Yale’s involvement in the slave trade is such a central point in his personal narrative that former Dean of Yale College Jonathan Holloway felt it necessary to preempt a conversation on the issue in his Opening Assembly Address to the class of 2019. “...There’s no doubting the fact that he participated in the slave trade, profiting from the sale of humans just as he profited from the sale of so many actual objects that were part of the East India trade empire,” he said in the speech.

Titus Kaphar ART ’06 had two paintings on display in the Yale University Art Gallery in September of 2016, before I came to Yale. I was drawn to one in particular, titled “Enough About You,” a reconfiguration of the original portrait of Yale and the little boy. The White men in the painting are contorted, their faces and features now missing from the image. All is obscured save for the boys face, framed in gold. Now there is a little gold frame around the boy’s face.

— This trip to India was my first trip to the subcontinent in a long time. It was my first to Chidambaram, the town south

COVER

of Chennai where my grandfather is from.

The town was built around the temple, which is about 1,100 years old. It is a UNESCO heritage site. Still, people here are casual about the beauty of every archway, the gold statues, the kumkum. I’ve been raised in the United States, where we put things behind glass, explains my father. Here, he says, the history does not get stuck in the past. It’s part of current reality. So they walk casually through temples older than the United States. They inside the memories and outside the reality so that they are intertwined, imbuing one with the other.

When I visit St. Mary’s Church, I see a plaque with Elihu Yale’s name on it. It makes me angry.

I want to know why history allowed the name of this man to be immortalized in stone while some, like my great-grandmother’s, go missing. Samuel Delany says that “the language you speak in is the world you see.” I have, as a person of South Asian origin, written this article in English. I attend my classes in English.

I live my life in English. I see Elihu Yale’s name carved in that white stone in my first language, in English. Wandering through that church, and here, in these hallways of dark wood and stone in New Haven, I realize: We cannot seek to exist independent of our circumstances.

That painting is part of our history at Yale, just like Fort St. George is part of mine. So, too, is whatever was taken out of the ports in my father’s home city and never returned.

The East India Company isn’t here today, but it left a mark on the land. While I am in India, I keep thinking about how lucky I am, finally appreciating everything here. There is so much beauty to be seen, by the beach at sunset and at my grandfather’s temple. The thick smell of honey and sugar, carted in big trucks just in time for Pongal. I have never seen sugar cane stacked so high. There is so much about the universe to love in these small square miles of lush land, especially understanding the violence that was here before, that truthfully, is still here. But sometimes it feels like this gift of sight is coming two generations too late.

In our last visit to the church, I think I understand what my father is saying. In my grandfather’s house, we make sambar with my grandmother Vijaya’s karai. I carry her name in mine. Her stories live with me and color my present. So, too, it is with Elihu Yale. His memory, what he did, who he was, lives in the present for every person in Chennai, but also for us, here, in New Haven.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 33

BITS & PIECES

inking

BY BENJAMIN REWIS

I

still can’t make the leaf on cappuccinos. I work at Pavement Coffeehouse in Boston as a barista, but I’m not exactly a natural. My arms always stick to the cups, and when I try to shake them off, the foam caves in on itself.

Making other drinks is no easier; I get ink in the iced teas every time. Whenever a cute guy walks in, I instinctually change to my mating coloring (white with black stripes).

I worry this is off-putting. There are not many octopuses in the greater Boston area.

My parents are deep-sea conservatives, so I was raised in a traditional household. My mother likes to point out that she met my father when she was only 1 year old.

“Don’t you think it’s time you settled down?” she likes to ask. “If only you’d meet a nice hen and find a crevasse somewhere,” my father might add on. But I want to be a writer; I went to Kenyon, for Christ’s sake. There’s nothing waiting in a crevasse for a writer. For now I’m working day shifts at Pavement. I have submitted to the New York Times “Modern Love” column several times, but I have yet to hear back.

On Grindr, my bio says I’m a top from the Pacific, but I’m actually a bottom from the Atlantic. A friend told me about Grindr a couple months ago, and I’ve been “grinding” ever since. You sign up for an account, take a photo of yourself and then match with other gays nearby. I’ve received a respectable amount of messages. Today, for instance:

34 | February 2019

SAMMY WESTFALL

“i literally love davy jones,” from singlenearby. “do you do tentacle stuff?” from otterboy172. “are you into inking?” from slimedaddy6. I don’t know what “inking” is in this context, and I certainly don’t have the gall to Google it. Recently, I’ve been talking to a guy named Brian; he messaged me first. He thought it’d be fun to get dinner instead of hooking up, so we’re going to Legal Seafoods later tonight.

When I get home from work, Romero, my roommate, has left our apartment littered with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos bags and Four Loko cans. His friends are over, and I feel awkward calling him out in front of them. I lift a Cheetos bag with one suction cup, place it in the garbage and attempt to make eye contact with Romero. He stares at the coffee table. Romero is a little slow, I think.

“Isn’t Four Loko banned?” I ask. “How do you survive on this?”

“Dude. You haven’t even tried the gold flavor.”

This is true; I haven’t. “I think a guy might come over later tonight,” I blurt out. I have butterflies in my ink-sac.

“Could you clean this up before then?”

Romero looks up from the coffee table. “My man is getting some. Huge!” Romero springs to his feet, pulls up his pants and offers a hand for the “bro-hug.”

More butterflies — I can never get this right. I wrap a clumsy tentacle around his hand and bump my head into his on accident. He is unfazed.

Later, as I experiment in the mirror with a French tuck of my floral button-down, Abba’s “Waterloo” starts playing from my phone. It’s my father calling. I let the

BITS & PIECES phone go for a few seconds.

“Are you busy? Your mom said I should call you.” I can hear my mother scolding him in the background.

“Oh. Thanks. So, what’s new down there?” I go back to looking in the mirror.

“Well, we saw a shark earlier today.

Looked like he was headed east. Oh, and the Goldmans are moving grottos; they said they wanted more natural light. Honestly, I’m fine living at 400 feet. Your mom thinks the shallows have better schools, but it’s so much quieter down here.”

“Oh right, yeah, wonderful family. The Goldmans, I mean.” I speak with my phone between my shoulder and my cheek. “Hey Dad, could I actually call you later? I have a dinner thing.”

Love is, right? I scan the menu, and after finding nothing of interest, I look up.

God, there are a lot of old people here. One white-haired woman across the room is staring at me. I can’t break eye contact — Why me? Does she know I’m gay? Does she not like octopuses? Is it the French tuck?

She turns her head back to her conversation. I sigh and click the home button on my phone: 7:32 p.m. Forty-two minutes have passed since I sat down. One notification from Grindr. “show me what them tentacles do,” from slimedaddy6.

I sag in my chair, eat three rolls of bread and decide to walk home along the Charles.

I try to distract myself with the view of the

skyline, but I keep thinking of Brian — lying in bed with him, meeting his parents. I think of him thinking of me. I think of him reading my writing and being outraged that Modern Love wouldn’t take it. I think of jumping into the sea. I call my mother.

“So wonderful to hear your voice, sweetie.”

“Hey mom, I just went on a date.” I can hear her reiterating this to my father.

They’re probably still eating dinner. He went on a date!

“Well, how was it? She wasn’t from the Pacific, was she?”

There’s a lump in my throat. I turn a shade of dark, dark purple.

“Honey, did I lose you?”

I arrive at Legal Seafoods 15 minutes before the reservation. The waiter leads me to my table anyway. “We don’t get octopuses in here that often,” he says, laughing awkwardly.

“Oh.” I’m too nervous to be offended.

I stick and unstick a suction cup to the glass table, imagining what I might say to Brian. Yeah, I’ve submitted some work to Modern Love. He’d know what Modern

SAMMY WESTFALL

Yale Daily News Magazine | 35

ELIHU AND I IN CHENNAI by ananya Kumar-Banerjee