Yale Daily News Magazine | February 2022

VOL. CXLIV ISSUE 3 FEBRUARY 2022

EDITORS’ NOTE Hi Mag Fam,

Magazine Editors in Chief Claire Lee Marie Sanford Managing Editors Abigail Sylvor Greenberg Oliver Guinan Galia Newberger Associate Editors Isa Dominguez Sarah Feng Zack Hauptman Samhitha Josyula Margot Lee Dante Motley Ana Padilla Castellanos Sean Pergola Idone Rhodes Production & Design Editors Jose Estrada Rachel Folmar Naz Onder Stephanie Shao Isaac Yu Photography Editors Zoe Berg Yasmine Halmane Karen Lin Regina Sung Vaibhav Sharma Illustration Editors Cecilia Lee Sophie Henry Copy Editors Josie Jahng Hailey O’Connor Chris Lee Yingying Zhao Caroline Parker Editor in Chief & President Rose Horowitch Publisher Christian Martinez Cover Collage by Regina Sung Assistant Design Editors Chris de Santis Catherine Kwon Sophie Sonnenfeld

How are you all? Here at Mag, things are going well. This semester has seen an increase in our editorial board, a shift in our managing editor role, the introduction of Magazine weekly endnotes and dare we say that this has been our smoothest issue from start to finish yet. This issue — one that centers writers of color and topics that concern minority perspectives — is also one of the most special to us as women of color ourselves.

The question of representation at a publication as established as the Yale Daily News is always thorny — for more of Marie’s thoughts on this, you can listen to a Yale Daily News Podcast special featuring four Black editors at the News — but we hope this issue contributes to the necessary work to expand the fields of journalism and writing more generally to students of color. In our cover story, “Finding Home,” Suraj Singareddy beautifully explores what it means to find community on Yale’s campus as a queer student of color. Awuor Onguru’s essay “What’s so Black about Black TV?” considers the American Black sitcom tradition spanning from “Amos ‘n’ Andy” to “Insecure.” This issue also features two profiles on Yale alumni of color making waves in the creative realm — basketball player and popular content creator, Trey Phills ’19, and prolific playwright, Lauren Yee ’07.

As always, we would like to thank our wonderful staff writers, editorial board, Production and Design, Photos and Illustrations. This issue was truly a labor of love as we produced for the first time a multi-writer Insight — see page four “Welcome to the Metaverse” — and our take on The New York Times’ Tiny Love Stories — see page 34 “Mini Love Letters.” We’d also like to thank Photo Editor Regina Sung who absolutely wowed us with her cover collage. Cheers for completing one fourth of the spring term!

Best, Claire Lee and Marie Sanford AKA Marie Claire :)

4 insight Welcome to the Metaverse GAVIN GUERRETTE, ET AL. 13 poem unknot DU NGHIEM 18 painting Time Travel CATHERINE KWON 19 feature Finding Home SURAJ SINGAREDDY

9

HOW TREY PHILLS FOUND — AND SHARED — HIS PERSPECTIVE 2 | February 2022

Profile by William McCormack

TABLE OF CONTENTS CENTER STAGE Profile by Margot Lee

34

MINI LOVE LETTERS Insight by Wilhemina Graff

31 26 poem The Lot ALEXA MURRAY 27 personal essay Hospitable Soil ELLIOT LEWIS 36 fiction Seven Ways of Looking at a Backhoe XAVIER BLACKWELL-LIPKIND

12

40 multimedia Sounds of Yale DANTE MOTLEY 42 humor Let’s Go to the Metaverse ZACK HAUPTMAN

14

WHAT’S SO BLACK ABOUT BLACK TV? Culture by Awuor Onguru

Yale Daily News | 3

INSIGHT

Welcome to the Metaverse

By Gavin Guerrette, Simona Hausleitner, Sarah Feng, Anabel Moore and Zack Hauptman

T

he concept of the metaverse has its origins in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, “Snow Crash,” a dystopian vision of the 21st century which depicts a virtual reality-based internet successor with electronic currency, virtual real estate, and user-controlled avatars. Meta, previously known as Facebook, has set out to build its own iteration of the metaverse: a centralized virtual reality world that it has deemed “the next evolution of social connection.” Meta has presented the future of the Metaverse in characteristic Silicon Valley techno-utopianism fashion.

While there are disparate efforts to build the Metaverse, some of which emphasize a more decentralized approach, Meta intends to create and manage the infrastructure for their vision of the internet 3.0, providing an asset library for its users and controlling the virtual real estate that they will inhabit. Meta’s Metaverse will be organized under the “social platform” Horizon, which is divided into Horizon Home, a customizable virtual home base for users where they can invite friends, watch videos and transport into other apps, Horizon Worlds, the space where users can build virtual worlds and interact with them, Horizon Workrooms, where professional collaboration can take

4 | February 2022

place in a virtual workplace environment, Horizon Venues, where virtual events such as concerts can be hosted and Horizon Marketplace, the Metaverse economy where users can buy and sell digital items such as nonfungible tokens and 3D artwork. Meta has invested billions of dollars into their vision of the Metaverse in the past year alone, as part of a virtual space race to outpace competitors both big and small in the tech industry. With numerous viable competitors and diverse avenues of research and investment, the buzzword-filled future of the Metaverse is not entirely clear, leaving many questions and concerns to be addressed. Two of the most pressing concerns about the Metaverse and its adjacent projects are a reduction in user privacy that harms user agency as consumers, and potential damage to interpersonal relationships as a result of exacerbated social media use in the Metaverse world.

Data and Manipulation “Dark data is everything you do that Google and Facebook don’t know about, and they want to create a world where there is no darkness,” said Joanna Lawson, a graduate student in the

Yale Philosophy Department. Data points, no matter how obscure they might seem, provide tech companies with valuable information about the behaviors and preferences of their users that allow them to direct advertisements through their platforms with unsettling accuracy. There is immense power — and profit — to be had in the collection and strategic use of this data.

As the sources of data become more intrusive and the means of data analysis more sophisticated, the dark data of metaverse users becomes more accessible for harvesting and effective in manipulating consumer decisions.

These

INSIGHT

sources include virtual reality headsets that can track eye movement and heart rate, eyewear capable of taking 3D scans of the interior of one’s home and neural interfaces that can connect to the nervous system — all ongoing Meta projects that are in research and development stage. Users of these technologies will effectively be sharing what increases their heart rate, what draws their gaze, what maintains their attention the longest, what makes them laugh and cry, how they decorate their homes and what stimuli activates their nervous systems, among countless other data points.

in favor of thoughtless, predictable transactions. “It becomes very unclear whether we’re like rats in a Skinner Box or human beings choosing autonomously for ourselves,” Lawson warned.

Social media is being built into the very foundations of the Metaverse.

Whether in the new Horizon social platform or the incorporation of existing social media apps into the virtual space, elevating the experience of interconnectedness has become a central component of the Metaverse. As Facebook founder and current CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg explains, “Everything we do online today, connecting socially, entertainment, games, work, is going to be more natural and vivid.” The areas of improvement for this embodied internet, however, could exacerbate existing problems with social media.

In previous iterations of social media and the internet more generally, users could meticulously curate their profiles, compiling photos, expressed opinions, associated users and other interests into a representative online personality with asynchronous detachment.

While the Metaverse will incorporate the platforms that allowed users to do this, it also presents the opportunity for synchronous reality curation. That is, it presents users with the ability to maintain, in real time, appearances that are not theirs while interacting with others in the various aforementioned social aspects of the platform.

“Rather than encountering a morally-demanding person online, we encounter a repre-

“The affordances of social media make us more likely to adopt the objective attitude by inhibiting certain interpersonal emotions.

Interpersonal Harm

The Metaverse distinguishes itself from past iterations of the internet because the technology necessary for its use makes it especially well equipped to capture the behavioral exhaust of its users, run it through ever-improving algorithms and then sell its users exactly what they were thinking about buying. These developments eliminate the necessity for choice and deliberation altogether,

//JES

The Metaverse has been presented as the next evolution of the internet, a massive leap forward in the ways that we will be able to communicate with one another, but Benjamin Barasch, a Yale postdoctoral associate and lecturer in the humanities, doubts these motivations: “I don’t think human interaction needs to evolve. I think that’s code for ‘let us find more ways to weasel into your brains and drain you of every last cent that you have.’”

sentation of a person. This representation is in fact a mere thing and not a person. Although we may associate the representation with the person represented, it is harder to do so in the absence of humanizing or personalizing cues. The representation is less likely to trigger our interpersonal emotions and other reactive attitudes,” Michael-John Turp said in an article for the journal Ethics in Information Technology. The Metaverse will maintain this social media characteristic, permitting users to create customized avatars of themselves through which they can interact with the virtual world and others, continuing the reduction of social media users to mere representative objects and promoting their moral detachment from one another.

SAI F

LORE S

Yale Daily News | 5

INSIGHT

This is problematic for two reasons.

First, the objective attitude tends to undermine interpersonal relationships, including friendship. Second, the objective attitude is a morally risky attitude to adopt towards persons. It makes us more likely to treat persons in ethically problematic, thing-like ways,” Turp wrote in his article. This adoption of the objective attitude is made far more possible by Meta’s technological advancements and adoption of avatars because users are presented with moving, expressive humanoid things that act as stand-ins for human beings but are nonetheless objects incapable of expressing “the full range of human expression and connection” as Zuckerburg has claimed.

The Ultimate Display As Zuckerberg lures in VR-fanatics with his vision of the Metaverse as the climax of technological evolution, more than 160 other companies have thrown their support behind this new concept, regarding it as the next great step in constructing an immersive virtual reality. But this quixotic narrative ignores the reality: that Meta’s version of the new sociality — the way we interact over digital platforms and real life — is one that is being forced upon society, driven by Silicon Valley technology behemoths desperate to stay relevant in an ever-changing world.

In 1965, Ivan Sutherland, a pioneer of early computer graphics and the inventor of a predecessor to the modern

6 | February 2022

user interface, conceived of “a looking-glass into the mathematical wonderland,” a sort of VR universe that he dubbed “The Ultimate Display.”

He prophesied the development of a room in which a computer could directly control matter by merging the digital and the physical world. What he couldn’t have foreseen, however, is the dystopian reality: a metaverse that skeptics consider to be a marketing ploy rather than the final destination in the field of computer science.

in her doubts. With Meta’s negligence fueling the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, the Federal Trade Commission fining the company $5 billion for rampant privacy violations and the spread of misinformation during the 2016 presidential election, Zuckerberg has come under fire from both the public and international authorities. “So why would we trust them to lead us into the next phase, whatever that might be?” Messeri asked.

Lisa Messeri, professor of anthropology at Yale and a leading researcher investigating the emerging technology of VR, said that “the worst thing we can do is blindly accept what Facebook thinks the next way we ought to be social is.”

She continued, “They have proven that they’re not thinking expansively enough about the implications of their model of sociality.” With recent scandals enveloping Meta and Zuckerberg essentially standing trial in Congress for the entire tech industry, Messeri isn’t alone

And yet, early adopters of VR technology continue to believe in the Metaverse’s potential as the next big breakthrough in modern technology. The business model that Meta is using to sell its version of the Metaverse is one that has been used for years to promote the widespread adoption of social media services and other virtual platforms. Charles Hodgson, a professor of economics studying the intersection of technology and market forces, explains that “for this type of social network, because of the strength of network

“Instead of democratizing access to media platforms, it is likely that support of the Metaverse, and therefore Meta’s monopoly on the VR market as well, will simply serve to make the billionaires that exploit our user data even wealthier.”

INSIGHT

externalities, the natural market structure that emerges tends to be a monopoly.” He added that “the value of that platform is going to increase the more other people are on the platform, and so those network effects are what drive the growth of these platforms.” Essentially, Meta is relying on the fact that the number of individuals using VR will eventually reach what Hodgson calls a “tipping point”: a critical mass of users that will eventually “force” the rest of the world to adopt VR technology due to the psychological fear of missing out.

Moving Forward

There has also been a major, although seldom discussed, shift from software to a much more hardware-centric business model. Hodgson sees this as a result of Meta needing to innovate in a much more competitive market.

If the company creates an existing install base of people who purchase the hardware — i.e., VR headsets and related tech — then Zuckerberg will have an audience ready to join a VR networking service as soon as he decides to release it.

“Without having grown up with technology, lawmakers lack the intimate knowledge of the consequences of social media and the feeling of having one’s entire social world be encoded in zeroes and ones.”

Hodgson states that instead of democratizing access to media platforms, it is likely that support of the Metaverse, and therefore Meta’s monopoly on the VR market as well, will simply serve to make the billionaires that exploit our user data even wealthier. “We’re being told what we need, rather than ourselves determining what we might need,” Messeri agrees. Meta is creating a demand that is producer and profit driven, rather than consumer driven.

In May 2021, Frances Haugen, a lead product manager at Meta responsible for an internal ethics board, took action against the troubling underbelly of one of the biggest companies in the world. In a consequential but well-thoughtout decision, she resigned and took with her tens of thousands of internal documents to show Congress that the nearly trillion-dollar company was — and is — aware of the skeletons in its half-shut closet: destructive misinformation,

human-trafficking activity and domestic terrorism. The platform knew it was being used to organize insurrection and criminal activity, but regulators didn’t know so until Haugen brought these skeletons out to see the light of day.

In a comprehensive Time magazine profile, Haugen outlined her future plans: she’d certainly be happy to help create and consult for a Big Tech government oversight agency, but wants mainly

“to help build a grassroots movement to help young people push back against the harms caused by social media companies.” She told Time magazine that “there is a real opportunity for young people to flex their political muscles and demand accountability […] no company has the right to subsidize their profits with your health.”

The spotlight is on Haugen, but she rightly shares it with youth, arguably the most valuable demographic to Meta and its subsidiaries. Companies like Meta depend

on the dedicated attention of Generation Z, a guinea-pig generation to immersive social technology, to secure the platform’s future success. Without youth loyalty, Meta’s foundations crumble.

Emma Lembke is a first year at Washington University in St. Louis. She founded two organizations in high school that have grown into large social technology advocacy platforms for youth, LogOff and (Tech)nically Politics, the latter of which is orga-

Yale Daily News | 7

INSIGHT

nizing a lobbying effort to bring the youth voice to Congress.

“Frances Haugen has hit the nail on the head,” Lembke said. “There are no lost generations. This is not like Peter Pan. But a lot of senators, congressmen and politicians have reached the point in their careers where they can have a large impact on what’s going to happen in 20 or 30 years because [the technological landscape] is evolving and changing.” She stated that without having grown up with technology, lawmakers lack the intimate knowledge of the consequences of social media and the feeling of having one’s entire social world be encoded in zeroes and ones.

In the Metaverse, attention is a commodity, one companies like Meta have commercialized beyond belief.

What these companies fail to realize, however, is that a youth grassroots anti-social media movement under the guidance of someone like Haugen may have the power to check them. If Meta can’t ensnare attention — or, if it can’t get youth attention without a fight — it loses the certainty of its future profits.

Lembke frequently returned to the term “neuromarketing,” a novel

8 | February 2022

term that describes the cunning tactics technology companies use to hook user attention. With the expansion into the metaverse, avenues for neuromarketing expand exponentially; there are more nooks and crannies of the internet for advertisements and sponsored content to pop out of. Lembke remarked that “no individual, no matter how

“In the Metaverse, attention is a commodity, one companies like Meta have commercialized beyond belief.” much digital consciousness [they] gain, can overcome the neuromarketing and data collection that is happening at all times.”

Lembke sees education and advocacy as the key demands of youth but acknowledges that the concessions she seeks are some-

times ambiguous. She’s launched character education programs in schools and is working to involve more youth in (Tech)nically Politics. With that said, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that life can exist, persist and resist without the guiding hand of an algorithm.

“Our society’s entire container for public discourse is in social media,” Lembke said. “The question we have to ask ourselves is how can we push, break and better that container while we’re in it, using it for its positive aspects?” The metaverse expands this container exponentially without the input or guidance of those inside it; thus, what Zuckerberg intended as a promise can be taken more aptly as a warning: “The future is going to be beyond anything we can imagine.” *In the interest of consistency, Meta’s iteration of the metaverse will be referred to as the Metaverse. While other companies are partaking in similar efforts, Meta has provided the most information about the current state of their project and visions for the future, thus making the Metaverse the object of our consideration.

PROFILE

How Trey Phills found — and shared — his perspective “You can’t just wait until you’re up to be yourself,” Trey Phills ’19, the former Yale men’s basketball guard, said. Sharing struggles along with the successes has given him more than 800,000 followers on TikTok as he juggles careers as a creator, professional basketball player and startup co-founder.

BY WILLIAM MCCORMACK

F

ifteen minutes into my first face-to-face conversation with Trey Phills ’19 in three years, we started talking about a washing machine in Denmark.

I met Phills as a first year covering Yale’s men’s basketball team for the News. During that 2018–19 season, he was a starter whose relentless perimeter defense and soft-spoken senior leadership helped guide the Elis to an Ivy League championship and a March Madness berth. In the three years since, Phills has come to juggle three unique careers — a professional basketball player, a TikTok creator and the co-founder of an athletic facility reservation startup called Gymble. He played a stint in the NBA Summer League and signed a contract that took him to the Denmark BasketLigaen last fall as his TikTok audience, of more than 800,000 followers now, grew.

When we reconnected last month, I had a lot I could ask Phills, who wore a gray Yale hoodie and an infectious smile as Zoom transported him to my computer screen in New Haven.

The now 25-year-old has turned the pandemic into a period of career advancement and self-discovery, and I wanted to hear about everything that has kept him busy since his Yale Commencement.

But his washing machine stood out among topics on my to-ask list. When Phills moved to Denmark last fall to play the season for Randers Cimbria, he found that the washer in his apartment was hilariously misplaced. Like an overturned tractor-trailer on the highway, the machine jutted out from the counter, obstructing the narrow lane of open space in Phills’ kitchen.

This American Ninja Warrior obstacle would later go on to serve as the narrative framing device in a TikTok video with 1.3 million views that Phills

published on Nov. 2, 2021, a day after tearing his Achilles tendon.

“It’s like the lowest you can go in sports,” Phills said of the injury, which ended his season in BasketLigaen after five games and sent him on a nine to 12-month-long recovery process.

Hobbling around on crutches for two months also elevated the nagging inconvenience of his washer to an even greater impediment as Phills struggled to move around his kitchen. But in the span of this 50-second TikTok, Phills turns the appliance “that couldn’t have picked a worse place to be in” into “a perfectly-placed” object of his gratitude. By the end of the video, he sits on top of the machine, his crutches propped against the adjacent counter, swinging his legs lightly as he pours a container of “maelk” into a bowl of cereal. An inner calm seems to ground him as he glances out the window.

The shift in his mindset transpires so quickly in the TikTok — the response to a setback so impossibly and impressively optimistic — that I couldn’t help but push back. Does he always believe what he films? Phills said the answer is “absolutely.”

“No matter what happens, I am here, and I have no problem telling people that because I know I’m not going to be on the washing machine forever,” Phills said.

“And now I can walk,” he added to prove the point, having returned to America in mid-January to continue with his Achilles rehab.

It took him some time to develop this “I’ll-begood” attitude, Phills admitted, but broadcasting painful moments has ballooned his following on TikTok. As Phills lets the world grow acquainted with the full scope of his story, his

personal history and career journey have resonated with millions of pandemic-era viewers.

What keeps those viewers around is Phills’ own mile-high vantage point, a frame of mind helping him weather the turbulence of his professional basketball career and the highs and lows of life as a young adult.

OPENING UP Before talking about his terribly, perfectly placed washing machine, Phills thought back to 2019 when Chicago’s G League affiliate, the Windy City Bulls, waived him on Halloween. The franchise cut him just five days after the team selected him in the fourth round of the 2019 NBA G League Draft. The Bulls purchased him a oneway flight when they cut him, but Phills was too ashamed to return home to Charlotte, where so many friends and family had congratulated him on getting drafted some 120 hours earlier. He instead flew to a cousin’s in Dallas, avoiding social media while he continued to train.

“Not only am I in a bad situation,” Phillis said of being waived. “I’m not even telling people.”

While hundreds of thousands of TikTok users now hear about his Achilles injury and ongoing recovery, Phills was often private when mishaps arose earlier in his basketball career. During his final two games in a Yale jersey, a foot injury dealt him a different wound he chose not to pry open for public consumption. After the team’s most joyous moment that season, when the Elis beat Harvard in the Ivy Madness final to secure them a spot in the NCAA Tournament, I saw Phills walk through the makeshift media workroom and exit the back of Payne Whitney Gymnasium on crutches. A left-foot injury he suffered in that win should have kept him off the court for three months, he later explained in a TikTok video

Yale Daily News | 9

PROFILE posted on the two-year anniversary of Yale’s first-round game. But Phills, who ended up playing only 16 minutes in the team’s five-point loss to No. 3 Louisiana State University, was intent on starting the final contest of his college career — an opportunity to showcase his game to professional scouts and a national audience. As a first-year beat reporter that season, I approached Phills in the locker room during the NCAA Tournament’s open practice day at Yale’s site in Jacksonville, Florida to ask if he would share what happened with his foot. He told me he didn’t want to make it a story.

“I’ve learned as a pro athlete how to separate my ups and downs in my career from who I am as a person,” Phills said looking back on the injury. “Back then when you asked me that, basketball was tied more to my identity and happiness. So it hurt not being able to play [fully healthy] in March. It sucked.”

As a professional, fighting for a spot in the G League helped him treat basketball like a job that he could disassociate from his self-worth.

“Basketball is basketball,” Phills said of that evolving relationship.

“If I’m myself and I’m vulnerable, I can cope with the lows a lot better than I could back then.”

But even when he was not transparent about every pitfall, Phills was still not fully closed off to the world.

From a young age, a very personal element of his life was public the moment it happened. His father — Bobby Phills, an NBA player for the Charlotte Hornets — died in a car accident leaving a pregame shootaround in early 2000. Trey, whose full name is Bobby Ray Phills III, was three at the time, and his mother Kendall raised him and his younger sister Kerstie, who is currently a graduate-student guard at Florida Gulf Coast. In honor of their father, both children have sported No. 13 for much of their careers. Trey’s

10 | February 2022

father grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where LSU is also based, and that connection added an extra spotlight on Phills at March Madness. The same morning I asked Trey about his foot injury, reporters asked Yale’s head coach James Jones questions about Phills too. Speaking in a press conference room tucked among the concrete maze of hallways in the VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena, Jones told them, “He’s the kind of guy you want your daughter to marry. I don’t know if you have any daughters, but if you do, try to get his number.”

The attention on any March Madness matchup is immense — 691,000 viewers watched that Thursday Yale-LSU game on truTV, according to television viewership statistics. But today, the reach of Phills’ online presence is even greater, and he’s not just a part of the story. He’s the very narrative itself.

EXPLORING CONTENT CREATION Phills’ TikTok page has accumulated over 21 million likes to date. The content he produces now is largely inspirational and autobiographical videos that feature snippets of his past and glimpses into his current life. There are both positive moments, like footage of his daily routine with the Houston Rockets during the 2021 NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, and gloomier ones, like shots of his surgical boot and the early days of his Achilles recovery. All of them are hopeful — Phills tags many of his recent videos #motivation. A smattering of lighthearted basketball content — “NBA Free Agency updates be like:” — which are now often sponsored by brands that market in the sports industry, accompanies the personal narratives.

Edvin Dapcevic, a team lead on TikTok’s media and entertainment vertical who first saw Phills in his “For You” feed, helped invite Phills

to make his first sponsored content on behalf of Gatorade. A former Division III college basketball player at Concordia University in Milwaukee, Dapcevic works with brands who advertise on the TikTok platform and loops in creators to participate in campaigns. He said TikTok’s Creator Solutions team also facilitates Phills’ involvement in other sports campaigns, which in addition to Gatorade include videos for Dick’s Sporting Goods, the nut brand Planters, Spotify and Under Armour, among others. Last February, Phills became an official TikTok partner when he was selected to join a cohort of 100 creators in the TikTok for Black Creatives incubator program.

to TikTok and made a bet with a friend to see who could be the first to score a million-view video.

A self-described “nerd at heart,” Phills’ interest in the algorithm and the analytics — e.g. “What are the metrics that produce virality?” — helped him take off.

When I told Phills I had scrolled down far enough to watch the first video available on his feed, dated March 14, 2020, he let out a lighthearted groan.

“Pandemic Trey on TikTok was a dream, right? It felt so fake,” Phills said. “It’s always embarrassing when people are like, ‘I’ve watched your first 10 TikToks,’” he added, raising the pitch of his voice.

While Phills’ first actual TikToks are now archived, the earliest surviving videos on his profile date back to the early moments of America’s COVID-19 lockdown, three days after Utah Jazz forward Rudy Gobert’s positive test shut down the NBA. At the time, Phills had been playing in the NBA G League, the NBA’s minor league, having recently been signed by the Greensboro Swarm, the Charlotte Hornets’ development team, in late February. He’d only played four games, averaging 12.5 minutes off the bench, before the Swarm’s season abruptly ended.

With no games to play and little else to do at home, Phills decided to apply his competitive nature

His early hits featured phone stunts, dunk challenges and a 9.5-mil-

PROFILE lion-view rendition of the CatchTheSplashChallenge, where Phills timed two deep shots on his backyard court to music. He created a three-video saga imitating the pregame runway stroll of high-fashion NBA play-

e r s , who had been off the court for about a month at that point. Six or seven weeks into the pandemic, Phills’ follower count had crossed 100,000.

Nagging at him was the understanding that people weren’t following Trey Phills for Trey Phills. They just liked his content.

When he realized he had a platform, Phills said he wanted to do more with his content. “I’m not doing these trick shots when the pandemic’s over,” he thought.

Beginning his shift towards more personal and authentic content, Phills reached out to Mady Dewey for a

// CATHERINE KWON

brand consultation in early April 2020.

Dewey, a former Google and You-

Tube employee, was making her own TikToks with tips targeted at content creators when Phills came across one of her videos in his feed.

Dewey could tell Phills was a strong storyteller; the traction his early content generated was significant.

“We were able to pick out different pieces of his life that he wanted to talk about,” Dewey said. The goal: to allow Phills to open up and be “more of a personal trainer versus just making short videos about random stories that he comes up with.”

“Working with creators, you have to understand that [these are] some of people’s biggest insecurities coming out, things that they struggled with in the past,” Dewey added. “And that makes really good content, but they have to be fully confident and ready to put that out to the world.”

Phills’ first video after talking with Dewey marked a new start for his feed, and they started opening Phills up to the world. “Kind of like peeling back layers of an onion,” Dewey said. He debuted his updated style with the story of his basketball journey, a personally-narrated, 60-second montage of photos and videos from childhood and high school through his time at Yale and his pre-pandemic action with the Greensboro Swarm.

“Sadly, I wasn’t comfortable being open until I was back up,” Phills said. “But that’s not healthy. You can’t just wait until you’re up to be yourself. It took me a little while to understand that.”

A NEW NICHE FOR BASKETBALL CONTENT Being able to watch Phills work through hardship might be one of the main reasons his audience remains engaged. Rey Crossman, who coached Phills as the Yale program’s director of basketball

operations from 2018-20, pointed out that Phills’ path to college basketball is somewhat relatable to the majority of high-school athletes looking to play collegiately.

Compared to high-school basketball players with the largest social footprints today, Phills was a relatively underrecruited prospect without any NBA Draft buzz or offers from powerhouse, power-conference schools.

In recent years, basketball-loving American teenagers have consumed short-form highlight bursts from social media superstars like Zion Williamson — 4.8 million Instagram followers — LaMelo Ball — 8 million — and high-schooler Mikey Williams — 3.6 million. Their screen-shattering dunks and superhuman feats represent the pinnacle of individual basketball achievement — the highest seconds of success stories — and have helped power the growth of basketball media companies like Overtime and Ballislife.com. On TikTok, Phills’ content adds a twist to the genre, using the same medium with slightly longer videos, a personal focus and an emphasis on the bumps that set up successes.

The result is more accessible, honest content that is both inspiring and entertaining. Dewey said that most creators’ followers segment themselves into one of those categories, but Phills appeals for both reasons.

When Williamson had committed to Duke and was bound for the top echelon of the NBA Draft, users could “oooh” and “ahhh” at his latest windmill dunk. Williamson’s clips are very fun to watch but not directly applicable to most viewers.

Phills complements that existing super-highlight strain of content: when young basketball-playing TikTok users listen to Phills overview his college career and his attempts at making the pros, they can at least envision a similar future for themselves and get to work, trusting that commitment, drive and some skill will move them forward.

“There’s only a select few that are going to be five-star, four-star, so big and so fast and so skilled that they’re just more elite than everybody,” said Crossman, who is now a full-time basketball trainer working with younger athletes in the greater Charlotte area. “[Phills’] story is more so being consistent, having your blockers on, not being worried about what the person next to you is doing, focusing on yourself and what you’re doing. That’s what the kids need to hear more than anything.”

In fall 2020, Crossman, who also briefly worked with Phills on strength and conditioning in North Carolina, brought the former Yale guard to speak to eighth-grade players at a defensive skills clinic.

Phills, who talked to them about playing defense with effort and intensity, a role that he owned at Yale, shared his basketball experience in person instead of via smartphone. With Crossman on his left, Phills lectured from a seat up against the wall as the small group of middle-schoolers stood and listened attentively in a semicircle. A sportwide bias for scoring and shooters exists in basketball — “Because after every single game that every kid has ever played, the first question they’re asked [is] ‘how many points did you score?’” Yale coach Jones said at March Madness in 2019 — but Phills made defense his specialty.

“I’m just gonna embrace my role and see where it takes me,” Phills told the younger players at Crossman’s clinic. “And it ended up working out: I’m in the G League.”

His speech would have seamlessly fit in with the rest of his TikTok feed — and it soon did, with a 40-second fragment of the conversation that got 315,000 plays. Phills in-person was Phills on-screen.

Phills said he thinks his main viewership demographic, mostly teenagers aged 12 to 18, has not changed over time, but those younger players have come to inform his TikTok

Yale Daily News | 11

PROFILE “why.” He hopes to be the figure a younger Phills would have appreciated seeing when he was working towards college offers and dreaming of a professional career: the athlete who cares about education and life outside of basketball.

Dapcevic, the team lead on TikTok’s media and entertainment vertical, suggested Phills’ appeal also spans outside sports. “I really think [his audience is] anyone looking for growth — people that have a growth mindset looking to better themselves,” he said.

on the platform. The team is planning an official nationwide launch in March 2022.

Phills’ specific role at the company is chief marketing officer, a role that connects directly to the skill set that has helped mushroom his TikTok following. There are

and growth that he can add to his feed — can drive interest in Gymble: “For me, I am going to continue to tell my story on TikTok and social media channels.

I’m a young, Black athlete who is starting a business. I will continue to tell the story and be transparent on how to balance things,

For the time being, Phills’ Achilles tear has temporarily derailed his playing career — not so unlike the pandemic in March 2020 — but as he recovers, Phills has more time to devote to work as a creator and to building Gymble, his startup. The concept for the company emerged from his own experience as a professional basketball player in fall 2019. Once he returned home to Charlotte after getting cut by the Windy City Bulls, he and his trainer struggled to secure consistent access to a basketball court. Phills wanted software to make the process earlier. Gymble seeks to fill that gap, with an app that allows users in a community to find and reserve local athletic facilities.

12 | February 2022

As he and his co-founders get set for Gymble’s full launch in March 2022, Phills’ most immediate basketball story is still one of incremental progress and a long, patient recovery from his Achilles tear.

Looking back, Phills’ growth on TikTok seems directly tied to the pandemic. COVID-19 was what allowed him to commit time to the platform during the infancy of his content creation. Lockdowns and a complete reliance on online life also gave him a captive audience. TikTok’s monthly active users in the U.S. more than doubled between October 2019 and June 2020. As the state of the pandemic developed, what began as a need for distraction and entertainment — trick shots, NBA fashion spoofs, funny stories — evolved into a deeper search for inspiration. Phills’ content matured to fill a need for those seeking purpose, support and perspective — an elusive quality that he, at just 25 years old, has found and shared over the past couple years.

EMBRACING THE RIDE

Phills co-founded the company with a former high school classmate at Charlotte Christian School, Akim Mitchell and Mitchell’s basketball teammate at Hampton University, Devon Oakley. The three founders, along with family and friends — including Houston Rockets head coach Stephen Silas and former Yale guard Miye Oni, a 2019 NBA Draft pick — have put forth an initial $50,000 in funding. The app, which conducted a soft launch in June 2021, currently has more than 60 athletic facility business partners in Charlotte and Atlanta

else,” he added. “You can’t become what you don’t see … Kids just want to emulate what they see, so I’m just showing them what else they can be in addition to playing a sport.”

// TREY PHILLS

other synergies that could connect the two pursuits. Phills cited the example of Emma Chamberlain, a YouTube personality who now owns an eponymous coffee brand. “She loves to drink coffee the same way I love sports,” he said, noting that her personal platform doubles as a marketing tool. Phills realizes that his own TikTok following — and the transparent glimpses into life as a tech founder balancing fundraising

how to get into the tech industry. I learned a lot, and I’m gonna share all that to my ‘why,’ people I wish I would have had when I was younger,” Phills said.

Being public about his progress with Gymble also relates to the young viewers that Phills sees as his core audience. “Kids out there, they think they want to go to the league until they see themselves able to do something

In a TikTok about his last night in Denmark, Phills eases himself off his crutches and crumples onto the top of his bed, laying on his back as he reflects on his basketball career in 2021. We hear his thoughts, captioned on the screen over basketball footage: “I reached unbelievable highs and I thought, ‘You know what?

I’ll be good. Things might just work out after all.’ Months later I’m at unbelievable lows, and you know what? I think I’ll be good.

I’ll be good because I’m embracing the ride. I’ll be good because I know what I do doesn’t define who I am.”

POEM i never use apostrophes where they should be, sentences hanging like a waxing gibbous moon cat emoji, blush emoji, heart emoji, with double 3s bracketed notes (ps) with random abbreviations hyd ttyl smd (you know the drill) and i can never apologize in full form sowwy /j sry sr

unknot

By Du Nghiem

i only eat grapes with skins peeled off, boiled veggies dipped in soy sauce i gnawed on all my tea bags before throwing them away mom still thought i used chopsticks wrong for eating is just hand and mouth mouth and

hand movements with no grace as i swallowed stiff i left the table before dad had his second serving forgetting to count the rice grains i draw roses in the form of cabbages a single eye at dog-eared fringes, granny squares across the spines and my signature looks like bananas — two letters but with triple the loops held up in the bank twice because they didn’t recognize my cursives — the vietnamese ‘d’ i blamed on unappreciated arts i call the scars from my dog’s bites badges of love i have acne you can play connect the dots on, too low of a nose bridge (my glasses slip down) and i feel shrinking yet never petite not conventionally attractive, fit for the unfit for how much should i cut and carve and sculpt i say “having a body is so weird what in the metaphysics” and fold myself neatly into a cutout without thickness i listen to the same songs, yet call one bold and the other italic crisscrossed with times new roman, calibri (must be light!) and gothic i think white music tastes like comic sans yet still got closer secretly on repeat i spin words in uneven circles, checking boxes of whats and what-nots this is an ode to myself, as i unravel the failed knots of stitches over stitches over stitches, my body a triple crochet breathing etched on needles and yarn unspool and weave them around your pinky a frail strand of scarlet for closed fists and open palms, for clasps that ring platinum not iron for i dig promises into silver-lined joints and gold-plated knuckles, fingers crocheted, and i would never let go

Yale Daily News | 13

CULTURE

What’s so Black about Black TV?

Black Television has moved far from its racist beginnings. But is it reaching its full potential?

O

BY AWUOR ONGURU

n Boxing Day, after packaging various leftovers and saying goodbye to family friends and neighbours, I sat down to watch the finale of “Insecure.” The TV show, created by media superstar Issa Rae, ran for five total seasons that explored the lives and times of millennial Black Americans. I couldn’t help but smile as I watched the characters’ arcs come to an end. Out of all that I’ve seen on television recently, “Insecure” felt the most like something that belonged to me.

“Insecure” wasn’t like anything I had ever seen before.

I grew up watching seasons of “Fresh Prince” and “Moesha” on bootleg CDs that we purchased from the side of the road: to avoid copyright infringement, the CDs were printed with nothing more than “Frsh prnce szn 3” scribbled in black permanent marker. Still too young to understand the complex plotlines of life in America — a life very distant from mine

14 | February 2022

in Nairobi, Kenya — it was the small details that came to matter the most. Brazen with the kind of self-confidence only pre-adolescent youth can afford, I would mimic Will Smith’s American accent while playing with friends in the neighbourhood or beg my mother to try out the hairstyles Brandy wore on “Moesha.” Eating soggy Weetabix with bananas on a Monday morning, I would imagine myself in a suburban American home, gulping down my breakfast before running out of the door, brown paper lunch bag in my hand.

Locally, we tuned in every Thursday night to watch television shows like “Tahidi High” — a less drug-addled, more dark-skinned version of “Euphoria” — or “Inspekta Mwala,” Kenya’s response to police-themed television that told the story of a neighbourhood watchman.

The plotlines were safe and family-friendly: in what was deemed the most scandalous plotline on television at that time, a student at “Tahi-

di High” discovered she was pregnant with her teacher’s baby. Those whose parents paid for it also watched satellite television, where they kept up with Disney Channel and Nickelodeon.

“One of the biggest issues with Black Television in America today is that it’s not very Black at all.”

At home, television was about watching Americans move around the screen like mannequins, romanticising Black lives despite observing these lives every day: on the street, in church, at school. It wasn’t until I grew older and moved continents from Africa to North America that I began to listen closely to the nuances of Black TV. In a country where

I was “thrown against a white background” as Zora Neale Hurston via Glen Ligon put it, Black Television came to represent much more than just entertainment: it became the very backbone of my being and the lens through which I allowed myself to exist in the world.

— Growing up in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late ’70s and ’80s, television was Black by default for renowned choreographer and artist Faustin Linyekula.

Watching television meant selecting between a small list of shows and music videos vetted by the government of Zaire. He remembers watching the Michael Jackson music videos and learning how to dance to them, not fully realising that there was more to offer than four or five television shows until he left the country. In our interview, I asked him about his consumption of Black media during his emigration outside of his home-

CULTURE town of Kisangani, Democratic Republic of Congo and his eventual relocation to Europe. “Listen,” he replied, “No one would ever dare to call it white Television, or white art or white music. It’s just television.

Why do I have to give it a separate name?”

It would be foolish to say that such a cultural situation could ever exist in the United States, but it’s worth examining the ways in which having a Black majority allows so much freedom of expression. Black Television on the continent has neither had to defend nor define itself against misrepresentation because it has always been made for and

by Black people. Black Television in America, however, has no roots in Blackness: its creative and executive history features and centres whiteness all the way down.

To truly make TV for and

by Black people, we have to sever ourselves from the idea of “Black Television” altogether.

— One of the biggest issues with Black Television in America today is that it’s not very Black at all. Early Black Television in America revolved mostly around caricatures of Black people: “Amos

n’ Andy” (1928-53), one of the earliest examples of the Black sitcom, was steeped in racial stereotypes. Before being replaced by a Black ensemble for its TV debut, it was a radio show voiced by two white actors. Refreshing the television show could not save it, however, and it was canceled after a twoyear run and heavy protesting from the NAACP. Even as television began to develop to feature more Black characters on screen, their identities remained still largely influenced and typecast by white executives. They often featured a well to do family navigating the hijinks of everyday life, while occasionally touching on racial topics like Black History Month, and the policing of Black communities — think “Fresh Prince,” “Diffrn’t Strokes,” “Sister Sister,” “Proud Family,”

“That’s so Raven,” etc. In an article for The Atlantic exploring “the unwritten rules of Black TV,” Hanna Giorgis remembers an episode from the ABC sitcom “Family Matters,” in which the protagonist’s son Eddie has a run-in with the police.

The protagonist Carl, who is a police officer himself, insists that his son is somewhat responsible for his being targeted: “That’s unusual procedure — unless you provoked it.” Hanna writes that the tension created by this statement is barely addressed, and the show opts instead for “the kind of safe conclusion that wraps up a ‘very special episode’”: Eddie was right to be upset because some police officers really are racists: Carl is able to get away with reconciling with his son and staying within the boundaries of what’s acceptable to

say about law enforcement on cable television.

The problem evidenced in “Family Matters” reveals itself: Giorgis reports that while there were Black people in the writer’s room that disagreed with this choice, the ultimate decision fell to senior writers and showrunners, who are almost always white. Research conducted by consulting firm McKinsey and Company revealed that Black talent is severely underrepresented in the entertainment industry, especially off screen. An analysis of the racial mix of on and off screen talent in film leadership found that the proportion of Black directors and producers was a mere 6 percent. Black writers, 4 percent. As of 2020, 92 percent of senior executives in the film and entertainment industry were white. If the industry is majority white, then it can only concern itself with whiteness. Narratives that truly represent Black populations become watered down in the interest of making it easier to write, easier to direct, easier to sell.

However, the dawn of modern television shows like “Insecure” mandates a new direction for Black Television — one that dis-

// SOPHIE HENRY

Yale Daily News | 15

CULTURE

tinguishes itself from stereotypical family sitcoms.

In these new television shows, space has been made for Black characters to exist on a much larger emotional, social, and political spectrum than they ever had before. Issa Rae has said about creating “Insecure” that “we’re just trying to convey that people of colour are relatable … this is not a hood story. This is about regular people living life.” Issa’s eponymous character on “Insecure” makes several mistakes: quite far from the stereotypical sitcom woman. She cheats on her boyfriend, lies to her friends and makes bad decisions at her place of employment. The people around her make several mistakes too: the show is written not to inform, but to showcase Black-

16 | February 2022

ness in all of its nuances.

“Amos n’ Andy,” though groundbreaking, still had its “roots planted firmly within the tradition of blackface minstrelsy,” as Aisha Harris writes in Slate.

Semilore Ola ’24 spoke about her issues with

“The future of Black Television is to selfishly concern itself with Blackness.” how Black Television represents itself these days.

“In a world where very few Black people get to tell their stories, individualism is disguised as a collective Black expe-

rience. Television is so hyper-focused on telling us about Blackness, but isn’t honest about what that actually is,” she said.

“Shows like ‘Black-ish’ are expected to tell the story of every Black person in America, but crumble under that burden because really, it’s just the story of the writer’s life.”

“Black-ish,” an ABC sitcom by Kenya Barris that ran for eight seasons, was notorious for trivialising Black life in the name of educating white audiences. In one “Family Matters”-esque episode, the youngest, dark-skinned daughter accuses her light-skinned family of perpetuating colorist stereotypes, only to apologise at the end of the episode for her insecurity. In another plotline, the family explores

CULTURE their “African” heritage, which involved donning dashikis and practising “African” accents. When trying to represent the story of Black life in America, “Black-ish” fell into the trap of trying to universalize the Black experience, which meant that the story could never be anything more than a surface-level portrayal of a particular kind of Black life.

This portrayal has no intention of serving Black, audiences.

A 2017 Nielsen study found that 79 percent of the “Black-ish” audience is non-black.

When you combine little Black input with audiences and executives that don’t understand the need for diverse Black storylines, you get tokenism.

As Ola put it, “Black Television stops being an honest artistic endeavour and more of shows that talk about race to virtue signal for the cause.”

But the issue of Black TV isn’t just an issue of Black people representing them-

selves fully. The very definition of “Black Television,” like Faustin said, predicates itself in the idea of mainstream whiteness. In order for a “represented Black’’ to exist, there must be the onlooking White — hundreds of years of media and entertainment that has trimmed and shaped the Black character into something that is palatable to the majority audience. The dawn of modern Black Television, while carrying the torch miles ahead, is still in many ways restricted by its inability to stop itself from catering to white audiences. It’s easier to applaud depictions of “The Black Experience,” for example, than talk about how colourism factors into conversations about race today. In an interview with Teen Vogue, Issa Rae talks about how one of her aims with “Insecure” was to break those boundaries. “I want the portrayal of dark-skinned women to evolve in such a

“The responsibility of Black TV is not to be Black in any way that we can think of it. It is to be Black in every way Black people know how to be.”

way that you see us as multi-faceted …

We are more than just the sassy friend or the maid,” she said.

The future of Black Television is to selfishly concern itself with Blackness. At the very basic level, the entertainment industry needs more Black executives making decisions about how television shows present themselves — more radically, perhaps, it is time for Black

Television to turn inwards and abandon mainstream media completely. Whatever we call it, the perfect Black Television is concerned with Black people in their multitudes. It is a work of art that gives itself to a people that will celebrate it and that will treasure it, that will take care of it as their own. It frees itself from stereotypes, from being shaped into a box for public capitalistic consumption. It presents narratives that young me was excited to talk about with friends and family, because I saw myself there — because any Black character could be me. It requires a severance from Blackness only in relation to majority whiteness, and a recentering of diverse narratives and creative ideas. The responsibility of Black TV is not to be Black in any way that we can think of it. It is to be Black in every way Black people know how to be.

CALEB DUNSON CONTRIBUTED TO REPORTING

Yale Daily News | 17

PAINTING

TIME TRAVEL

BY CATHERINE KWON

Time Travel draws upon themes of reflection, regret, and reassurance. Depicted are four versions of myself: three of the present—or perhaps future—talking to the younger self of the past, representative of recurring thoughts of “If I started X earlier, worked harder on X, did X differently, then maybe I would be in a better place now.”

This piece reflects the somewhat unreasonable—yet at the same time, somewhat reasonable— desire to forcibly sacrifice the past and present for the future. Perhaps it’s a justified feeling; after all, such a mindset is commonplace among many of the communities I belong to, such as the immigrant and FGLI communities. But maybe it’s merely a product of selfishness and greed, making the choice to chase an unpredictable future, all while blinded to the benefits of having a non-burnt out lifestyle. ---

18 | February 2022

// CATHERINE KWON

FINDING HOME

FEATURE

How BIPOC students navigate belonging within Yale’s queer community

BY SURAJ SINGAREDDY On the evening of Dec. 1, 2021, a group of students began to gather in the upper level of the Native American Cultural Center. A sense of comfort infused the room, despite all of the end-of-semester stress. Coats were piled in one corner, puffers stacked higher than the couches. Some students chatted idly, while others eyed the coffee table at the center of the room.

On the table was an assortment of herbs and spices: rooibos, lavender, cardamom, rose petals, dried hibiscus, jasmine and witch hazel.

These students weren’t brewing occult potions, despite what the gothic atmosphere of campus might suggest –– they were using the exotic spices to brew tea at the inaugural tea and wellness night for queer students of color.

“Tea is something that’s very common in a lot of POC and immigrant communities,” said LGBTQ Office peer liaison Akweley Mazarae Lartey ’23, who created this event with fellow LGBTQ Office peer liaison Alex Chen ’23 and the support of peer liaisons from other cultural centers. Lartey thought the event “could also be a space of knowledge sharing, which is exactly what happened … People just started sharing like ‘this is good for this’ or ‘we should try this.’” The chit-chat helped to fulfill Lartey and Chen’s goal — creating a space where queer people of color could feel welcome, whether they wanted to make tea, socialize or just sit and relax.

Although this goal may seem simple, it is one that has not been accomplished by other groups on campus. Groups like Queer + Asian, Indigenous and Queer, De Colores and BlackOut cater to LGBTQ+ members of specific cultural communities. In addition, some of these spaces, such as Queer + Asian and De Colores, have been inactive during the pandemic. Until this tea making event, there has not been a place — at least, not one that has been widely publicized — where queer, Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) undergraduates can gather cross culturally. Chen hopes that this event may help in tackling this problem, and that it can live up to the promise of being “a recurring space for queer people of color to build community.”

Many other queer, BIPOC students experienced this feeling as well. Chen said that one of the motivations for starting this gathering space for queer, BIPOC students was “a general feeling of discomfort in white-dominated spaces,” which is what the Office of LGBTQ Resources has felt like according to Chen, Lartey, and others.

In addition to this “general feeling” of whiteness described by Chen, some students say they have witnessed racist incidents on campus as well. Nolan Arkansas ’23, co-president of the student group Indigenous and Queer, remembers being part of a groupchat in which members of Yale’s queer community made racist remarks. “That’s another thing that I think made me feel a bit out of place or a bit just not welcomed,” Arkansas said.

“It’s just seeing how within the queer community there exists so much racism and there’s just so much complacency by our white, queer peers.”

Discrimination is one reason why demand for events like tea and wellness night is so high. However, there are also more pervasive factors causing students to seek out queer, BIPOC spaces.

According to a 2014 article for the Yale Daily News about the University’s reputation as the “Gay Ivy,” many students feel that “cisgender gay men — and, more specifically, white cisgender gay men” receive elevated visibility on campus. This often leads to other groups in the queer community being overshadowed and ignored.

Uncomfortable Spaces

The elevated visibility of whiteness pervades the dating and hookup scene as well, with people with eurocentric body standards seen as more desirable. This causes BIPOC students to choose between conforming to whiteness or having their gender or sexuality invalidated. “A lot of growing up and queerness was like ‘If you’re not white, if you’re poor, if you don’t look like a certain body type, if you don’t fit all these socially-constructed norms … your queerness can almost feel less valid,” said Gabby Montuori ’24. “Things like race, sexuality, body image, social status, financial status and ableness compound each other in ways that can be really damaging for queer and gender nonconforming people of color.”

Many students feel the conditions on campus make spaces like Lartey and Chen’s tea night necessary. Riley Macon ’25 explains that “being a Black, queer female [in itself is] already alienating ... a lot of times on campus I had low self esteem.” For Macon, this feeling was compounded by not having a place to share these feelings with others who might understand.

Montuori said that, often, people within the queer community talk about tackling internal biases relating to social norms, such as whiteness and thinness; for example, saying they’re open to dating people of all body types. However, “putting those things into practice and also unlearning their own biases is much harder for them,” he said.

Yale Daily News | 19

FEATURE It may not be possible to completely destroy the pressure to conform to ideal body standards on campus. However, recent events suggest that change, or at least increased discussion about the place that BIPOC individuals occupy within Yale’s queer community, is on the horizon. The closure of Voke last spring was one such event.

Voke was a queer spoken word group based in the Office of LGBTQ Resources.

A March 10, 2021 open letter explained that the group had chosen to shut down due to “the overwhelming whiteness and lack of BIPOC in Voke and in Voke’s leadership in particular.” It went on to apologize for “the ways Voke [had] failed [its] BIPOC members’’ and for creating “a culture of normative whiteness & uncomfortable silence around issues of race.”

Sasha Carney ’23, a board member of Voke at the time of its closure, explained that in addition to a “nebulous sense that [the lack of diversity] was something that had been lingering around the edges of Voke for such a long time,” there were also some specific incidents that lead to the closing. For instance, when the conversation around Voke’s whiteness began, Voke’s only non-white board member explained to others that “they often felt kind of tokenized or overwhelmed being one of very few queer people of color involved in Voke.”

This lack of diversity was also felt by Voke attendees, such as Arkansas, who remembers attending one event pre-pandemic.

“It was just a lot of non-BIPOC people there,” they said. “I think I was probably the only person of color in that event. …

So I just felt not super uncomfortable, but just a little bit out of place.”

Carney believes that this problem isn’t recent, but rather something that goes back to the group’s founding.

The group was founded on the “idea of ‘Oh, there’s not a space for queer spoken word and there’s not a space for nonaudition spoken word,’” she

20 | February 2022

said. “The premise of ‘Oh, we need spoken word for queer people’ kind of just automatically becomes ‘Oh, we need spoken word for white, queer people’ because it’s not like [other spoken word groups] aren’t already incredibly queer, it’s just that they don’t center whiteness.”

The Problem with Institutional Support It is often difficult for queer, BIPOC students to receive institutional support due to their intersectional identities, which raises the question: who should be responsible for providing support?

Asian students, for example, know that the Asian American Cultural Center is able to provide culture-based support.

White, queer students know to access identity-based support at the Office of LGBTQ Resources. However, when a student holds multiple cultural, gender and sexual identities — backgrounds that are often deeply entangled — this question becomes much more difficult to answer.

Some students feel that the answer is in Yale’s cultural centers. Arkansas, for example, feels most comfortable at the NACC. “There’s a lot of queer Natives, there’s a lot of women that I trust … I’ve felt generally pretty comfortable in my identity at the NACC,” they said.

This is a sentiment echoed by many other BIPOC, queer students, especially those who come from hometowns with large BIPOC communities. “I’m from Miami,” Mela Johnson ’25 said. “I’m very used to being surrounded by other Latino people constantly, and it’s really weird being at school here and not having that all the time. So, going to La Casa is very important to me, just culturally … It feels a little bit more like home.”

This sense of community has been important, with Chen noting that places like the AACC have been more effective at creating this communal atmosphere due to how established they are on campus.

FEATURE For others, though, the cultural centers haven’t provided the comfort they seek.

Lartey, who visited the Afro-American Cultural Center often in his first year, remembers that “there were not very many openly Black, genderqueer folks.

And, especially, there were not a lot of dark-skinned, Black, genderqueer folks.

In particular, there was [him] and this one other person, who very often carried the burden of being the ‘token queers.’”

This tokenization caused him to feel “rejected by ‘organized’ Black spaces that were run through the House or through student groups.” However, Lartey also noted that queer inclusivity at the Afro-American Cultural Center seems to have improved since.

So, Lartey instead turned to the Office of LGBTQ Resources, where he found “there was more of a raw understanding of being marginalized in those spaces [and] a lot more inclusivity about talking about differences.” He said that he felt like he could talk about his immigrant family, disability and other intersections of identity with people at the LGBTQ office.

Some students who come from more conservative countries or conservative areas of the U.S. have also been able to find solace in Yale’s queer community, whether that just be in the general student body or organized spaces like the Office of LGBTQ Resources.

That is the case for Nawal Naz Tareque ’25. However, part of this is due to the support their peer liaison, Lartey, has provided. “I lucked out, in the sense that my [peer liaison] is a person of color,” said Nawal Naz. “A lot of what I feel … that experience of racial discrimination and discrimination as a gender minority … that intersection is something that I get to address, and I get to discuss that with Akweley.”

Still others prefer the cultural centers over the Office of LGBTQ Resources.

Whiteness is felt, by some, as an unspoken rule in queer spaces. Johnson’s experience has been that these spaces “default to whiteness as the expectation ... it feels less culture blind, and more like they’re just approaching it without considering anybody outside of their own realm of experience … because the organizers are usually white.”

thereby upholding an expectation of whiteness. “I think about how my status as someone who is brown, as someone who is poor, as someone who — as far as Yale, the institution, goes — maybe does not belong here … I see that feeling of not belonging at Yale very much transposed onto my experience iterating within the queer community,” said Montuori.

That expectation of whiteness can lead many to feel excluded for a variety of reasons. Montuori explains that his “racial and ethnic backgrounds fully inform how [he] operates as a queer individual” and “how [he’s] perceived as a queer individual” and how people assess him, “as far as gender and sexuality is concerned.”

One anonymous queer, BIPOC student believes that this problem has worsened recently with the passing of Andrew Dowe, assistant director of the Office of LGBTQ Resources, last January. “The Office kind of fell apart,” said the student. “[Dowe] was a Black man from the Caribbean, who was then replaced by a white person from the U.S. South. The Office has a lot more white faces, I mean it’s always been white, but has a lot more white faces, which feels very alienating for queer students of color.”

Arkansas’ Cherokee background has influenced them in similar ways. They explained that “in the Cherokee language, there are over 24 pronouns, but none of them are gendered pronouns … There’s no real way to say ‘him’ or ‘her.’” This “explicitly nonbinary way of speaking” is the reason why they identify with all pronouns in English.

Cultural backgrounds also impact how many students experience queerness due to the multifaceted discrimination that their intersectional identity is subject to. Ale Campillo, the organizer of a Trans/Non-binary BIPOC panel for Transgender Awareness Week 2020 — an annual, national event which the Office hosts on-campus programming for — elaborated in an article for The Yale Herald that “Black trans women and Indigenous trans folks, trans folks of color in general, are at the forefront of a lot of the violence and a lot of the problems that are happening within that community, because we are the most vulnerable.”

These factors, as well as the lack of discussion surrounding them in the majority-white Office of LGBTQ Resources, can lead many students to feel as if queer spaces at Yale are geared towards those who aren’t affected by such matters,

Comfort from that alienation is something students are likely to seek out, as evidenced by the success of past programming. Johnson remembers that for the tea and wellness night, she “went out of [her] way to go to that … [She] was like ‘I’m gonna rearrange my evening cause I want to be there.’’’ Johnson’s experience suggests that if the Office creates places where people feel comfortable, students will naturally be inclined to populate those spaces and thereby feel more comfortable in the Office as a whole.

In the meantime, until more of that type of programming exists, students are relying on groups such as BlackOut, Indigenous and Queer and student-organized programming such as the tea and wellness night. However, Chen thinks this student-led programming isn’t a permanent solution.

“I think that quite a lot of the existing efforts to help queer people of color feel more welcome on campus are more reliant on individual, student effort and are not yet institutionalized. For example, the tea and wellness night was literally

Yale Daily News | 21

FEATURE

just because Akweley Mazarae and I decided ‘yeah, let’s do it!’... Like, that’s not a sustainable solution. In two or so years, when we’re both gone, there’s no guarantee that this will continue,” said Chen.

In many ways, the lack of university-led spaces is a result of Yale’s past inadequacies in supporting both the BIPOC and queer communities. For example, the Middle Eastern and North African Cultural Center was not established until 2021.

According to a 2009 article in the News, “by 2006, Yale was the only Ivy League institution without a dedicated staff member for LGBT student issues.” This lack of institutional support extended to academics as well. That same article explains how “In 1997, Yale alum Larry Kramer ’57… offered Yale a multi-million dollar gift to create either an endowed chair in gay and lesbian studies or a student center for gay students … Yale said no to his millions.” More recently, in 2019, thirteen faculty members in the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Department went on strike, “citing lack of university support.”

The problems facing both of these communities individually have compounded upon each other to produce the issues that queer, BIPOC students currently face. These problems aren’t new, it’s just the intersection they are occurring at that’s new, or at least newly visible.

Solutions on the Horizon According to Samuel Byrd, newly-appointed director of the Office of LGBTQ Resources, culturally-inclusive programming is high on their list of priorities. One of the first steps will be expanding “collaborations and partnerships locally and nationally to help support [the Office’s] work,” said Byrd. “This includes collaboration and partnership with other cultural and community centers and organizations

22 | February 2022

that specialize in supporting/engaging queer and trans people of color.”

Due to their own lack of experience in the Yale community, Byrd will also begin by “setting up a process by which [they] will be able to hear from the experiences of students, faculty, and staff across the university—with queer and trans people of color central to that listening.” This listening will contribute to “the Office’s collective visioning process: Who do we want to be together? What do we want to do together?” As of right now, many of the Office’s future plans, in this realm, seem to be abstract. However, this lack of definition could also mean an opportunity for the Office’s future programming to be truly shaped by the students it serves.

Ultimately, though, the heterogeneity of queer people makes building this community much more difficult. “I think, just culturally, we are such a heterogenous community … If you look at queer folks of different socioeconomic backgrounds and genders and sexualities and races, ethnicities, nationalities it’s just — it’s a lot,” said Oscar Lopez ’22.

As to how that community building has progressed in recent years, people have varying opinions. Chen notes that the problem has been something he’s noticed since arriving at Yale. Unfortunately, “it doesn’t seem like there’s been quite a lot of progress. Although, [he doesn’t] know whether that’s because of the nature of the problem … cultural shift takes a lot of time,” said Chen.

Lartey, on the other hand, feels like “the queer of color community, queer community at Yale — things have improved a lot since [his] first year.

There’s a lot more connectedness, and [he sees] that especially with first years and sophomores.” He added that “there will always be, unfortunately,

people who don’t feel like they fit in or takes a longer time, but [he feels] like it’s less of a common narrative.”

Whether or not the situation is improving, students have been able to find community in other, unorganized ways in the meantime.

“I wouldn’t say I’m involved in Yale’s queer community,” said Montuori. “But do I have queer friends? Yes. Do I have people who are queer who I really love?

Yes. Would I say I’m involved in Yale’s queer community? No.” Lartey echoes this sentiment, saying that he relies on his individual and group relationships to reaffirm his queerness.

Calista Krass ’25, a white student, also doesn’t feel the need to seek out organized, queer community. ”Yes, I’m not that involved in the ‘community,’ but I don’t really feel like I’m missing out,” said Krass. Instead, she relies on her friends, nearly all of whom are queer.

Krass also notes that she doesn’t “really care about [organized] events” because “they feel so forced, so [her] social anxiety jumps ahead.” She finds such spaces uncomfortable because she’s “used to [her] own friend group. So [she feels] like it would be weird for [her] to go to an event that is specifically like ‘Oh, this is a queer event.’” “[The event] is not about the people,” she said. “It’s about the fact that we are all going there because of this one thing.”

Krass’ choice to avoid organized spaces is based on her social preferences.

However, for many BIPOC students, this choice is made based on both social preferences and on how they feel their culture or background is treated in queer spaces. While Krass raises a valid critique of the way queer spaces are organized,

FEATURE

her critiques might also be inherent to the very concept of a queer space.

Meanwhile, cultural-inclusivity — or the lack thereof — is a treatable issue that only affects a subset of the queer population. This issue is an obstacle to students having equal access to queer spaces and consequently being able to feel equally comfortable in their queerness on campus.

Home Perhaps the benefits of Yale’s queer community are best described by former Samuel Knight professor of history and American studies George Chauncey ’77 GRD ’89 in an article for the Yale Alumni Magazine, as he recounts what one first year wrote in his class: “Whereas the majority of students at my high school regarded gays and lesbians as outsiders, people fundamentally unlike themselves, Yale undergraduates seem to regard gays and lesbians as perfectly normal.”

While this understanding of queerness may seem rudimentary today, the basic idea still resonates. The ability to feel normal, to feel accepted, to be your whole self — that’s what Yale’s queer community can offer when it’s functioning at its best.

Perhaps, one day, Yale can live up to this ideal. For now, however, it falls unfortunately short for many queer, BIPOC students.

“I want Yale to be my place. I want to feel like that is my second home, and in order to do that it needs to be more than just a place where I can be successful academically and find a career path,” said Macon. “I need to find my family there, I need to find a place where I feel comfortable, a place where I feel safe.”

// SOPHIE HENRY

Yale Daily News | 23

FEATURE

24 | February 2022

FEATURE

// REGINA SUNG

Yale Daily News | 25

POEM

THE LOT

BY ALEXA MURRAY

June dusk and the air is like water pouring over your skin the dark is rest for your eyes the night is bounty. Dusk and the cavernous sky arches over the asphalt, the cars, the shopping carts — now all disconnected parts, your movements untethered under artificial light.

This is the moment when noise slips under the drone of the expressway; it mutes clatter, insects, speech — passing cars flicker under sterile light.

Dew clings to the surface of metal corrals and come morning, there will be a trace of frost over grass tips.

26 | FEBRUARY 2022 // SOPHIE HENRY

PERSONAL ESSAY

hospitable soil

BY ELLIOT LEWIS

At dinner on my first night on the farm, Brandon pulled a tick off his hand and chopped it in half with a pocket knife.

“We’ve got a lot of ticks,” he told me in a scratchy baritone as he pushed the corpse around the table with his index finger. “And rats this big,” he said, holding his hands a possum-length apart.

Brandon was a farmer, and his skin was matte from 12 years of caked-on dirt. He and his wife, Christine, had once worked for Whole Foods. They left shortly after the Amazon acquisition to explore regenerative agriculture in rural Connecticut.

I had found their farm on a website dedicated to student farm “internships.” At the time, I’d been looking for a place to spend the summer. The pandemic had uprooted me from college; I took the year off, and I spent most of my time either alone or on my computer, almost always in my room. I was living in New Haven, but I didn’t really feel like I belonged there anymore. I honestly didn’t know where I belonged.

But I knew I liked farms. Like many in my generation, I have a romanticized view of rural life. Nothing seems more purposeful than a hard day’s work and a gratifying walk back

to a farmhouse with a basket full of carrots and tomatoes. The open air, the night sky, a great expanse of greenery. So I applied to work at Brandon’s farm, and I got the job.

Brandon’s farm practiced regenerative agriculture, a set of agricultural practices that rebel against industrial techniques. The regenerative movement focuses on undoing the damage done to our crops and soil by things like pesticides and manures. Over the years, when soil is treated with regenerative methods and not disturbed by farmers or massive machinery, it can grow fertile and resilient. And when done right, regenerative agriculture has climate change-fighting capabilities. Soil on a regenerative farm can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, stowing it away deep below ground.

Things that don’t belong anywhere else — insects, rodents, even carbon emissions — belong on a regenerative farm. I was hoping I could belong there, too.

I arrived at the property about a month later. Christine scuttled out of the farmhouse and gave me a warm hug, pressing her big red cheeks into mine. Brandon was out working in the field, so she brought me inside and showed me to my room.

Yale Daily News | 27

PERSONAL ESSAY

Brandon and Christine’s house was built in the 18th century and smelled like it. When I stepped into the room, the first thing I noticed were the floorboards: they were spaced sporadically, some as far as half an inch apart, and I could see ants crawling through some of the larger gaps. Christine had thrown a rug into the room to cover up some of these gaps, but the bugs still found their way into my 18th-century bed. The room I shared with the ants was small, and the luggage I’d brought barely fit. But there was a chair where I could read, a desk where I could write and a window through which I could see the whole farm.

I wonder if Brandon was disappointed when he first saw me. The deep, bassy voice he heard over the phone probably made me seem a few years older, a few inches taller and much, much stronger. So when he met me, a 5-foot-7-inch, bespectacled wimp, it’s not unlikely that he — tall, bearded, and brawny — was a bit underwhelmed.

While he chopped ticks at the dinner table, testing me with his list of critters, I couldn’t help but sit there quietly, shyly, feeling endlessly small.

Brandon put me to work the following morning. I was allowed to wake up at 9 a.m. instead of the soon-to-be-standard 7 a.m. By the time I got out of the house, dressed in tick-proof pants and drenched in lemon-eucalyptus bug spray, Brandon and Erin — another farm intern, who’d arrived a week before me — had already been working for two hours.

I spent the day on a single row in the high tunnel, a green-

28 | February 2022

house-like structure that kept the plants warm enough to stay alive and kept me warm enough to pass out. For hours I shoveled compost and dug holes. The work quickly left me exhausted and sore. Brandon let me stop working at 4 p.m., three hours early, probably because he could see how pitiful I looked, my sweat gluing shirt to skin, back arched, calories sapped, on the brink of collapse. He told me if I could dig three more holes without damaging the carrots in the next row, he’d let me go. I was panting heavily, and I could barely control the movement of the shovel. I ended up crushing two or three carrots, but I kept it to myself and was allowed to leave. I walked back to the house with my head pointed down, the seeds of regret germinating within me as I considered the arduous summer ahead.

In the church of regenerative agriculture, soil is sacred: it’s home to a microbial civilization integral to the success of any plant. Brandon worked to keep those microbes alive. So, he didn’t till his soil, instead letting the tiny beings mingle and thrive. He relied on the doctrine of nondisturbance, live and let live, grow and let grow.

Regenerative agriculture is not a lucrative industry, and it’s not easy competing with the cheap bounty of produce offered at supermarkets. Brandon often told me that we were crusading against large corporate farms, the sort of operations that low-

ered their overhead by employing migrant workers who’d be offered cents for every pound they picked. Farm workers experience poverty rates twice the national average, partially because many are undocumented immigrants who are easy targets of wage theft: if they’re being underpaid, they don’t really have anyone who will help them or any authorities they can call. And they’re the reason you can get a pound of tomatoes for just a couple bucks at Target or Walmart.

Brandon and Christine didn’t employ migrant workers. They employed, well, me. They were a progressive couple who strove to be as ethical as they could — it’s what led them into the regenerative movement, and it’s why they put an effort into getting to know me and Erin. But ethics don’t mean profits, and they weren’t able to offer me much in payment. Each week, after my 60 hours of work, I was to receive a room to live in, all the vegetables I could eat and a stipend of $100.

Brandon, Erin and I spent the next few days planting. The process went like this: we shoveled compost — several tons of which sat on a grassy patch about thirty feet away from the high tunnel — into a wheelbarrow; we brought the wheelbarrow into the tunnel; we poured the compost over the plot; we raked the compost until it was even; we covered the compost with a thin layer of straw; we dug holes in the straw and compost until

PERSONAL ESSAY

we reached soil; we deposited cupfuls of pelletized chicken manure — which smelled like salmon rotting in a truckstop bathroom — into the holes; we mixed up the manure, compost, straw and soil; we placed seedlings into the holes; and we covered the base of the seedlings with more soil. For a 30-foot row, the whole process took about four hours. In the morning, we could plant sweet onions; in the afternoon, tomatoes; in the evening, scallions.

Brandon was absent most of the time. When he was there, his role was mostly supervisory. This frustrated me. I was doing work on his farm, and he was barely even helping?

This was not the least of my frustrations. After a couple days, it became apparent I was

allergic to the house. I couldn’t stop coughing and sneezing.

I’d wake up in the middle of the night to hack up mucus. Even while I was working, I’d often need to leave to blow dirt and snot out of my nose. It may have been the dogs, Ray and Chloe, whose hair clung to every surface in the house.

Chloe was an old chocolate lab. Her head tilted eternally to one side, and her eyes dripped as she walked. Dripped, not drooped. Like a slug she left a trail of liquid everywhere she went. Each morning, Christine would need to force pills into Chloe’s mouth just to keep her walking.

I was also expected to provide my own meals. Most days, my 12-hour farm shifts left me too tired to cook, so I’d drive

ten minutes into town to pick up Taco Bell or McDonald’s. I’d intended to keep this secret, because I didn’t want Brandon and Christine to know I ate fast food; it didn’t seem very farmerly of me. Of course they found out, my second night, when they found me in their kitchen shoving Taco Bell chalupas down my throat.

But there were times when I could feel at home in this house. Brandon and Christine were in their early 40s — a bit too young to be my parents, a bit too old to be my siblings.

Sometimes this made talking difficult, as we scraped our brains for mutual interests; other times, the age difference gave us ripe ground for conversation. Out in the fields, Erin and I could explain things like

Yale Daily News | 13 // SOPHIE HENRY

PERSONAL ESSAY

TikTok and cottagecore to Brandon, and he could tell us about his life and his family.

In the first week, we had a few shared dinners, where Brandon and Christine would cook for Erin and me. The four of us would sit around a table and discuss politics and drugs. We talked about the Capitol insurrection over vegetable chili and whippits over barbecue sandwiches. Brandon told us that he used to deal and almost went to jail for it when he was younger. The experience of getting off without harsh punishment, having a second chance at life, propelled him into the food industry.

During those meals, the four of us became a prototypical American family — except for the illicit discussions and the lack of shared blood. At the end of our long work days, we could find joy in each other’s company.

Because of the pandemic, these moments were some of the only times I experienced real connection with new people. We’d talk for hours, and even though I knew I’d have to wake up at 7 a.m., I wouldn’t want to go to bed. I could’ve stayed around that table forever, and I was looking forward to all the things they’d tell me, all the things I’d learn, over the course of the coming summer.

A week into my time at the farm, Brandon and Christine sat

30 | February 2022

me down for a discussion. Christine did the talking. Brandon pulled ticks off his arms, taking occasional breaks to remove his hat and comb his hands over his balding head. Christine told me they were disappointed with my performance. The fact that I was dog-tired by lunchtime, she said, was a very bad sign for my work ethic. They weren’t even assigning me the hard stuff yet, she told me. While I was doing my work, Brandon labored over tasks much more arduous and skillful than mine, and they were losing hope I’d ever reach that level. Also, I lacked an attention to detail, and I was too slow and I was a liability because I was constantly almost getting injured.

They weren’t firing me, she said, but if I were to stay, they would need to see a marked improvement. I’d get a day to decide what I wanted to do.

I wasn’t totally surprised — of course I knew I wasn’t doing a stellar job. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t offended. To be honest, I wasn’t really used to failing like that. It hurt to be told I probably didn’t have it in me to do the same work they did. And who were they? Who were they to be telling me what I could and could not do? What did they know?

Brandon looked up, probably noticing the tears sprouting in my eyes. I looked down at the floor, avoiding eye contact with the man who had betrayed me.

“I don’t want to be somewhere I’m not wanted,” I mustered, trying hard not to croak between each word.

“It’s nothing personal,” Brandon said. “This just isn’t for everybody.”

In my mind, I could see the artificial blood that connected our little family dripping out before me. I had sincerely wanted to impress them, to make them proud of me, like they were my own parents. I had a deep respect for Brandon and Christine. I had respect for their mission and for their ability to do things that I clearly could not physically do.

Because at some point I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t any good at this job, that I could never be a farmer and like a crop in inhospitable soil, I did not belong here. My body was heavy with dirt, and my lungs were tired from coughing. I told Brandon and Christine that I would be leaving.

My last day on the farm, I ate oatmeal next to Christine as she lay down by Chloe’s dog bed. When Brandon entered, Christine told him she believed Chloe would die today. “Okay,” he said. “Let me know if she does.” He slid on his work gloves and went out to the field. After I packed up my car, Brandon came back to shake my hand; Erin gave me a hug; Christine, for her part, offered me a wave. I didn’t know where I was going next, but I drove off thinking of Chloe, thinking of the last drops that would leave her tired eyes, her head finally resting peacefully against the soft cotton bed until I reached the highway.

PROFILE

Center Stage

A Profile of Lauren Yee, Playwright and Screenwriter

BY MARGOT LEE

T

he setting is San Francisco, Chinatown. The characters are Lauren Yee and her father, Larry Yee. On the stage are two large red double doors, the doors of the Yee Fung Toy Family Association.

“This is a true story,” Lauren tells the audience.

“About my dad, about dying Chinatowns, about how things fall apart and how to say goodbye.”

“King of the Yees” is not quite a true story. It’s Lauren Yee’s metatheatrical and semi-autobiographical play-within-a-play, which premiered in 2017 at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Yee ’07 is a playwright, television writer and producer from San Francisco. In 2019 alone, she won the Doris Duke Artist Award, the Steinberg Playwright Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award and the Whiting Award for her work. She was America’s second-most produced playwright after William Shakespeare in the 2019-20 theater season.

Growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Yee was keenly aware of her complicated relationship to her culture. She attended Lowell High School, a public school where almost 60 percent of the student body today identifies as Asian, according to the U.S. News. Despite being Chinese American, Yee felt alienated.

“The thing that I struggled with in my childhood was feeling like an outsider in my own community,” Yee said.

“The majority of my classmates spoke Cantonese and I didn’t. It felt like they had a closer relationship to culture than I did.”

While members of Yee’s family immigrated from China to the United States at different times, the oldest was Yee’s great-great-grandfather, who immigrated in the late 1800s.

Since then, her family has become embedded in the community of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the oldest and largest Chinatown in America. This family history is distinct — most Chinese Americans today cannot trace their heritage in the United States back that far because they immigrated after the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943. Since her family has resided in the United States for generations, Yee’s relationship with her Chinese culture is at times disjointed.

“Growing up, Chinatown didn’t so much feel to me as a place of home, but a place of alienation,” Yee said.

“It’s a community where I don’t speak the language. I didn’t feel in tempo with this community. It took me growing up and getting more comfortable with my own insecurities and sense of inauthenticity that allowed me to embrace Chinatown and recognize the

beauty in it and be able to see where I could still fit into it.”

This community became the backdrop for Yee’s burgeoning writing. She read voraciously and was immersed in storytelling through television, and in high school, playwriting became an outlet for exploring themes of family and culture.

At the time, Yee’s family shared her father’s email account. Checking to see if she had received any messages, she saw an email from the Asian American Theater Company, or AATC, in San Francisco.

The email was a call for new short plays. Although she did not have a background in theater or acting, Yee wrote her first short play in one day and sent it in response.

“There was something in the call that clicked for me,” she said. “I’d always loved writing, but writing for distinct character voices felt empowering.”

Her submission was accepted and the theater invited her to an evening of readings, where she heard her play aloud. Yee said that hearing her work read for the first time was a transfor-

Yale Daily News | 31

PROFILE mative experience.

“Until you see something modeled out there in the world, you don’t know it’s an option for you,” she said. “Being able to see a round table of people and not only that, but Asian-American faces and bodies telling stories together … as soon as you read it on the page, it becomes a thing.”

Inspired by her experience at AATC, Yee decided to create a theater company to put on original plays at Lowell High School. The company was named Youth for Asian Theater. Yee casted her friends as actors and produced her own plays over one summer. Like her work today, her plays at Lowell “ran the gamut,” Yee explained. They touched on history and cultural identity, love and family drama. The Herbst Theater became the venue for her plays because it was owned by the city and affordable to rent out for productions. Reflecting on Youth for Asian Theater clarified why theater was important for her community. “Who is this for?” Yee asked. “Who is the audience? What’s the goal of it?”

After high school, Yee came to Yale to hone her writing in the University’s vibrant undergraduate theater and arts community. She took classes with professors Deborah Margolin, Donald Margulies and Toni Dorfman — “a wonderful trio of playwriting professors,” she said.

32 | February 2022

In Toni Dorfman’s writer-director class, Yee worked with Josh Brody, a director in her graduating class. After graduating they became collaborators. Brody directed the first production of “King of the Yees” and helped develop other plays. “I don’t think I could have anticipated that when we were at Yale together,” Yee said. Her close collaboration with Brody offered her an unusual freedom: “I can just try to explore and fail. It makes the work so much better.”

Yee also met her husband, Zachary Zwillinger at Yale — all due to the quirk of first-year housing. Yee was in Ezra Stiles College, housed in Lawrance Hall on Old Campus during her first year, and Zwillinger in Jonathan Edwards College, housed in the adjoining Farnam Hall.

In an email exchange, Zwillinger recounted meeting Yee in the first few days of their first year. “We lived next to each other, and her suite’s back door was my front door,” he wrote.

“I remember she had a very strong handshake.” From then on, the two spent time together almost everyday throughout college.

“That’s how we got to be best friends,” Yee said.

Since Yale, Yee’s playwriting work has astounded with its wit and range.

“Cambodian Rock Band” follows a Khmer Rouge survivor on his return home and features Cambodian psychedelic rock from the band Dengue Fever. An earlier play, the satirical “Ching Chong Chinaman,” which was read at the Yale Playwright’s Festival in 2007, is about an assimilated Chinese American family living in Palo Alto who comes to acquire a Chinese indentured servant. Among her oeuvre is also a “slasher comedy” about a serial killer who targets young women — “Hookman” — and a story about a house with talking walls — “The Hatmaker’s Wife.”

“King of the Yees” is perhaps the most emblematic of the themes of community, family and cultural belong-

ing that run throughout Yee’s career. It is also the most personal, drawing on her own experience and family heritage as the characters journey through San Francisco’s Chinatown. In its two-hour run time, “King of the Yees” depicts an exaggerated, character-version of Yee as she attempts to produce a play about Chinatown. The disconnect she feels from her Chinese American heritage conflicts with her father, who devotes his life to serving the Chinese community. In both the play and real life, he is a member of the Yee Fung Toy Family Association. Chinese Family Associations as they exist today are legacies of history — fraternal organizations that formed among new immigrants in the late 1800s and exerted social, political and economic influence in Chinatown.

A complex image of Chinatown forms in the play. Chinatowns in the United States were created in large part because of anti-Chinese racism, including violence and discriminatory housing practices that isolated the community. Nevertheless, the ethnic enclaves have acted as support networks for new immigrants and cultivated their own cultural identities. In “King of the Yees,” Yee believes the Family Associations and Chinatown are obsolescent. In Act II, in search of her missing father, she must journey through a whimsical version of Chinatown that houses a world of “tongs” — Chinese gangs — ancestors and riddles and comes to understand her father’s pride and love for the community.

Despite her success in writing for the stage, Yee’s career continues to surprise with her forthcoming pursuit in screenwriting — what she describes as “an exciting new challenge.” Yee worked on the writing staff of “Pachinko,” a new television show for Apple TV set to release at the end of March. The 8-part series, a multi-generational family epic about a Korean family living in Japan, is based on the 2017 novel of the same

PROFILE name by Min Jin Lee Yale ’90. Soo Hugh is its showrunner and executive producer, and the show boasts the talent of South Korean acting heavyweights including Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung from “Minari” and Korean drama star Lee Min-ho from “The Heirs.” The show will feature three different languages — Japanese, Korean, and English.

“It felt so exciting to see the experience of this family and going through displacement outside of an American lens,” Yee said. “There are a lot of exciting parallels to what it might be like being an immigrant family in America, but at the same time, ‘Pachinko’ has its own unique resonances. It was a beautiful show to work on.”

Yee is also executive producer for an upcoming TV adaptation of “Afterparties,” based on Anthony Veasna So’s short story collection of the same name about Cambodian Americans living in California. So passed away at the end of 2020 and “Afterparties” was his debut book, published posthumously in 2021. Yee described it as “a wildly kaleidoscopic, exciting, raunchy, funny take on an experience that I feel is based on his experience as a Cambodian American queer man growing up in Stockton

and all the crazy characters that he met growing up.”

Yee’s foray into television writing is a natural transition from her playwriting, she said. She learned the craft of storytelling from the television she watched growing up — she recalled ensemble shows such as “I Love Lucy” and “Remember WENN” as significant influences. Still, the move into television writing was not something that Yee could have anticipated. “Ten years ago, TV as a medium was in a very different place in terms of how much room there was for writers and content and what stories they wanted to tell,” she said.

The realm of television today has changed dramatically, but if anything, Yee believes that it’s becoming more similar to theater. “There’s a greater appetite for lots of different stories,” she said. “For Asian-Americans, that really wasn’t happening when I was growing up. You had one show or no show. I think the more stories that are being told, there’s less pressure on one story to be everything for everyone.”

The new multiplicity of stories is both thrilling and a relief to Yee. “It’s exciting to hold ‘Afterparties’ and ‘Pachinko’ in two different hands and be like, this is all part of the Asian and Asian American experience,” she said.

Yee discussed her approach to writing about different cultures.

“To the best of your abilities, which may succeed and sometimes may not

be successful, find something truthful that you identify with in that story,” Yee said. She referred to the experience of writing “The Great Leap,” a play about a Chinese American basketball player — loosely based on her father — and a Chinese coach who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, a very different experience from her own family. “You need to be aware of what stories are already out there, whether they feel truthful, whether they feel stereotypical and overplayed and what someone from that community might be interested in,” Yee said of her process for writing the character. “Whenever possible, being open to conversations about those experiences and listening.”

Yee understands the limits of her own perspective. In “King of the Yees,” Lauren and her father Larry discuss dying Chinatowns and the play Lauren is writing. The exchange exemplifies Yee’s linguistic wit and keen insight to the dynamics of telling stories about culture.

LARRY: You talking about Chinatown, you gotta mention the whole community, make sure you telling the story for them instead of telling the story for them.

LAUREN: That is the exact same thing.

LARRY: No, there is telling the story for them and then there is telling the story for them.

When asked where that line came from — the difference between telling a story for the sake of someone else or telling a story in someone else’s place — Yee explained her thought process.

“In trying to capture the spirit of a place or a person or a memory, we are these inauthentic vessels that will inevitably have leakage,” Yee said.

“You cannot tell the story fully or the way someone else, a previous generation, would tell it. But it’s about embracing who I am and what I know and how I can tell it and that’s the best I can do.” // COURTESY OF LAUREN YEE, JESSICA PALOPOLI, APPLE TV

Yale Daily News | 33

INSIGHT

MINI LOVE LETTERS

COMPILED BY WILHEMINA GRAFF

Written by people in the Yale community, these 100-word stories celebrate the people and the things they love — ranging from a long term partner to a favorite mug. We hope you’re surrounded by people you love and we invite you to appreciate love in its many forms.

Everyone says finding love at Yale is hard, but I disagree. I’ve found love in the Commons dining room, the unplanned meeting spot in which I always find a familiar face and a saved seat. I’ve found love in the words of wisdom scribbled on post-it notes and left on my desk by the suitemates-turned-sisters I never thought I’d get so close to. I’ve found love in the sanity-inducing late night walks down Prospect Street in which I talk about everything and nothing with friends, knowing that as long as they’re walking by my side everything will be okay. There really are few places on Earth in which I’ve said “I love you” more than I have at Yale.

-Irene Colombo //IRENE COLOMBO

The thing I love most about my University of Nebraska mug is how it feels in my hands when it’s filled with Trader Joe’s organic ginger turmeric herbal tea and there’s snow on the ground outside. I bought the mug a couple of years ago at an all-thingsmust-go office sale. I also bought a big cork board and a desk chair, but the mug remains my favorite purchase because it is the only one from which I can drink Trader Joe’s organic ginger turmeric herbal tea. I like to think its previous owner attended the University of Nebraska. Go Huskers.

-Will Cramer

34 | February 2022

I look exactly like my father. I have his tonsils, too: gigantic, gargantuan, larger than most medical professionals previously thought possible. I was sick all five weeks of winter recess.

When my fever came back my dad took me to three doctors in six days. Maybe bronchitis, maybe strep throat; maybe you should consider a tonsillectomy. My dad waited in line at the Duane Reade for each prescription and kissed my forehead to see if I still had a temperature. Don’t worry about the surgery, he said, I’ll buy you ice cream after — pretending we weren’t both lactose intolerant.

-Audrey Kolker

INSIGHT After many years, your face looks more familiar than my own in the mirror; your moves and gestures often liken to extensions of my own body. Our love takes refuge in these consistencies, yet also occasionally peeks out in fleeting surprises.

The world may sometimes trip us, and our daily dance isn’t always graceful, but by now we’re well practiced in straightening those stumbles, regaining that rhythm. The world can also gift us novel and fascinating syncopations; and when we manage to catch these in stride, we recapture the naive freshness of our first beautiful promenade, half a lifetime ago.

-Professor David Evans

// TENZIN JORDEN

Remember when we collaged together? We collected articles, newspaper clippings, literary magazines, old letters. Cut them up into bite-sized pieces — literally bite-sized, to hold in your mouth, let melt on your tongue — wherever and whenever our attention drew us.

My grandma takes me to lunch. Over Arnold Palmers, she tells me that when her first husband divorced her, she realized her deficits — bills, paperwork. She tells me to drive my own car and answer jury duty summonses. She has had three long-term partners. Still, independence is her gospel.

Then we sat in the clouds. Clouds of words scattered around us on the wooden floor. Some we grouped under categories — family, love, loss, GHOSTS, death – while others I sorted by feelings.

A cloud for the sentences that smell like rain. A cloud for the chirping of birds after an all-nighter. A cloud for you: for home and hope.

-Eunsoo Hyun

It makes me think of how I love my Robinhood account. I’m not kidding. I love its line graphs — “checking on my investments.”

And I love affixing a comforter to a duvet cover with the corner ties … I just found out about those. I love these ways of knowing I will be alright.

-Abigail Sylvor Greenberg

The sand we laughingly flung at each other knee deep in the lagoon; our living-room wrestling matches and foam-sword fights; the bedtime ritual of obstacle courses, over bed, around corners, under the table; frisbee throws connecting sender and receiver, back and forth. For the first 15 years of our siblinghood, my younger brother and I were linked by the materiality of our shared activities. College has brought physical distance, but debriefing campus frisbee culture and tournaments, the tangible connects us again. With the buzz of a text or the crackle of his voice, I’m glad to feel him near me.

-Wilhelmina Graff

//SEAN GRAFF

Yale Daily News | 35

FICTION

SEVEN WAYS

of Looking at a Backhoe

BY XAVIER BLACKWELL-LIPKIND

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.

—Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” I (remembering) Tuesday is one of those snowy days when the streetlamps switch on at four and cast their gray glow over the wheel-painted road. He’s always amazed by the quietness of cold things, the silent hum that runs shivering down the hills and between the houses. The only sound is the faraway drone of a snowblower.

A mechanical whale song.

Mom tells him winter is a time for thinking, because there’s nothing else to do. He thinks that’s stupid. When there’s nothing to do, he thinks, you sit at the window and stare at the icy white until something blurs into nothing. Winter is a time for not thinking, for forgetting. Summer, when the wallpaper melts into little wet strips of color, calls for thought, frantic thought, manic buzzing sweat-beaded thought: about the past, about the future, about the shapes in the clouds, about the color of thunder. About

36 | February 2022

whether mosquitos fall in love.

But not winter. Winter is a time for forgetting.

He stands at the end of the street next to the backhoe. Nobody’s quite sure why it’s here.

The construction happens, but nobody sees it. Like magic. Is there an hour every day when people stay inside, not looking, not listening, compelled by some strange invisible force? And the workers rush in, dig up their asphalt and pour their concrete, then sneak out just as the neighborhood wakes up and returns to the wobbling rhythm of suburban life, bread-buttering and lawn-mowing and divorce-delaying? The snow is streaked with the mud-brown memories of a day’s work unseen.

No snow without mud. He finds himself repeating the four words silently, chanting them to himself. No snow without mud.

It feels like night but there’s the sun, barely visible under the clouds, a diffuse orb of yellow-white. The snowblower has been joined now by another, and the duet smells of gas and candle wax. The scent of a Hanukkah lighting gone wrong.

Winter is a time for forgetting, but he’s shit at forgetting. He remembers everything simultane-

ously. Radio interference, channels melting together. Like when the ghost of a polka sneaks in over an NPR report about Benghazi. A frenzied static of memories: eating cookie dough with a half-friend, waking up late on Saturday in a writhing mass of blankets, feeling the back-slap of an ocean wave, reading a 400page Romanian novel and understanding nothing, sitting in a chair with Mom and watching the sky go by.

Sometimes he resents the overwhelming, headache-inducing simultaneity of it all.

Sometimes he wishes the memories would wait their turn. There was a time when a cat scratched him, when he kissed a pillow, when a toaster caught fire, when he cried on an amusement park ride. But when? Which came first? Which came last? His brain promises him that these are meaningless questions. And so here he stands balancing on the curb, remembering and remembering until his entire past starts to feel like yesterday morning, distant but strangely close.

Maybe tonight a faceless man will come and drive the backhoe away. And tomorrow morning, when the moon falls behind the snow, all that remains will be the

fat tracks of the backhoe, pointing down toward Park Road and curling right right right until they disappear under the blurry fingerprints of a million cars.

And the mud, too: wet, squishy mud. No snow without mud.

II (punching) He’s not angry. He’s not. “How was I supposed to know?” That’s what the other man said. The man he gave a white gold ring.

The idiot. “How was I supposed to know?” What a load of crap.

But he’s not angry. “I’m going for a walk,” he said. And so he is. Down the hill, past all these sloped lives, happy couples by the fire and kids in the snow. Just when he thought they’d gotten through it all. And now: a glance, a hookup. The idiot downloaded the app with torsos in boxes. Little clickable infographics. Desperate desire for spontaneity.

“Affair.” Such an ugly word. “You weren’t picking up my calls,” the idiot said. Not angry. Down the hill, down the stairs, falling, down, down. He asked: “Do you need a dictionary to look up the words ‘business’ and ‘trip’?”

Clever. What a jab. Remember the first date? The burrito that burst all over his lap. Levi’s.

FICTION Trainwreck. He’s not angry. Not angry, not angry. The idiot: “This is hard for me, too.”

Yeah. Now the wind blows the snow into frantic spirals. He wants to lie in the snow, under the snow. Feel his fingers harden and freeze. Become something solid. An object.

He always wanted to live in a museum, behind the thick glass, with the mummies.

And the remains of the dead. The things they held. It’s not like he was in Indonesia. Cleveland, a flight away. At a conference. “No, I’m not joking. Look,” the idiot said. Not angry.

Jesus, it’s cold. He didn’t grab his gloves on the way out. Where do they go from here? To counseling. Ha, ha. No, but really. Where. Ice on the road, ice on the road. Careful. Slick and sneaky. Not to be trusted. He loves the husband. Loved? Loves. And what is this?

Always forgets the name. Bulldozer, dump truck. Backhoe. That’s it. It sits there, leering.

Taunting him. Daring him. Like on the playground. “Positive.” He’s not angry. Not angry.

“Positive.” Eight letters, fat and flat and heavy.

“Positive.” Positive for? Three letters, hopefully never four. In the ’80s men went gaunt.

Wasted away. Positive positive positive. The idiot is positive. Right hand back, fist balled.

He punches it. The backhoe. Punches it hard. He hasn’t punched something before.

Realizes the problem with punching things is they punch back. Knuckles bloody, snow and mud melting into the wound. An ugly palette of red and fleshy brown. Almost lets himself cry. That’s almost, to be clear. Idiot.

There are pills now, they say. He’s not angry.

He loves the husband, loves the husband so much it hurts. The backhoe stares, dumb and dirty. Not angry. He’s not angry. “How was I supposed to know?”

III (plowing) The snow roars and she listens to “The Girl from Ipanema” on re-

peat. It’s dark, but the headlights trace out circles of blinding white. She’s alone on the road. “Tall and tan and young and lovely … ” Thirty years ago, still young and lovely, she started plowing snow. She had just returned from the trip. She plowed for hours, plowed until the loveless cold woke her up, made things real. She forgot about him. For a time.

Soon the dreams started. Dreams about the dark-eyed man who worked in the gloomy cafe. In these recurring dreams, the waiter’s eyes remained hidden in a sea of shadows. He smiled, and she woke with the bitter taste of unrequitedness dancing across her tongue.

Her favorite time to plow is at night, when the world sleeps and the spray of white looks like sea foam if she squints. Right turn. Here are two little elms, growing side by side. Do they, too, enjoy bossa nova?

Night is the cradle of insanity. This she has learned. Three decades of driving through black soup have taken their toll. She dreams of strange shapes, triangles bathed in sharp purple light, circles rolling frantically in place, and many others so strange she doesn’t know their names. Shapes with many sides and no sides all at once, shapes that laugh and cry, shapes dancing, shapes on boats, dead shapes, blue shapes. Left turn. And yet still she plows at night, because there’s something intoxicating about that pulsating liminal space between here and there, sundown and sunup. The moon seduced her long ago. No going back to the world of the d ay - p e o ple.

A man walks his ugly dog. “And when she passes he smiles … but she doesn’t see … ” She likes to imagine that she still lives in Brazil, in a town by the Atlantic. That she sits in a cafe where she can hear the whisper of the water and orders an espresso from a dark-eyed waiter who loves her back. That her shoes fill with sand and her hair with salt. Right turn. That after dark she runs naked into the ocean and swims until she can’t breathe.

She slams the brakes and swerves left, passing inches away from a backhoe parked by the corner. Here is reality. The moon and stars jerk right and the plow hits the snowbank with a dull thunk. Deep breath.

It wasn’t there and then it was. These things happen. Shapes fade, appear, samba across the windshield. Some shapes are more dangerous than others.

Now the moon hangs still. Its gentle crescent curves an invitation. Come, it whispers, come to the cafe by the beach. A winter moon is the saddest moon there is. I’ll be waiting in Brazil. Brighter, happier. She backs up, puts the truck in drive. Continues into the night.

M a y be I will go back, she thinks.

Maybe I will buy a ticket to Salvador, stay in a condo by the singing sea, wander the snowless streets.

Will I? Maybe I

Yale Daily News | 37

FICTION will, maybe I won’t, maybe I will.

And as the tiniest sliver of light peeks up from behind the rows of houses, she smiles a half-moon smile. Right turn. “Tall and tan and young and lovely … ” IV (mothering) The truth is they wanted one kid.

Two has figured out how to push open the door. She runs out, careens down the steps, zips across the yard and stops in front of the backhoe that’s been there for a week now.

Shoots her mother a mischievous look. Starts climbing into the big metal hand at the end of the orange arm.

Mom sighs and goes and tries to pick up Two by the waist, but Two holds on tight to the metal hand. Finally Mom feels the stubborn girl fold in half

38 | February 2022

like a napkin, sobbing, screaming.

She’s so tired.

Two stands on the couch, face stained with tears, and stares out the window with a pout. Mom almost goes to console her.

Here comes Three. He’s been watching his sister, plotting, perfecting his escape. Toddles straight by, opening the door like a seasoned expert, almost like an adult, except he’s shorter than the doorknob. Dad, sensing trouble, comes in from the kitchen.

Three crosses the yard, little velcro shoes striking the snowy slush with remarkable power, and heads straight for the backhoe. Reaches up for the door handle, grasping at the air. He can’t quite get there. Realizes not all doors can be opened. Turns in horror as Dad approaches. He’s trapped.

Three joins his sister on the couch as One makes a break for it. But they’re waiting, Mom and Dad, legs like a wall. “I just want to taste it,” One cries. “I just want to taste it.”

“Taste what?” Mom says.

“The big orange car. I just want to taste it with my mouth. Please, Mommy, I just want to taste it.”

One and Two and Three had a backhoe toy once. It was small and made of plastic. They played with it on the rug upstairs, making nonsense noises, trying to fit it into their mouths. Saliva everywhere. Mom stepped on it one morning and sliced open her foot.

Cursed. Threw it out. Three and Two and One have been yearning for a backhoe ever since.

When they stuff their fingers into their spit-filled mouths, they pretend that their fingers are long, fleshy back-

hoes. When they crawl under tables to hide from seekers, they imagine their meaty hands and calloused knees melting and reforming as fat rubber backhoe tires. They live their little lives like leeches. Instead of skin, metal. Instead of blood, soil. At night, backhoe-shaped shadows slink across the walls. Their mouths water in the dark. Mom and Dad wonder why they don’t sleep.

Dad carries One over to the couch, and Mom locks the door twice and pulls the chain taut.

They’re all crying now, egging each other on, a feedback loop. Dad is back in the kitchen, cooking. She groans, grabs her hair. Just leaves, goes upstairs and shoves earbuds deep inside her ears. She locked them in. Free spirits, full of life and love and curiosity.

They just wanted to go for a ride, to lick the cold hard flesh of the sleeping machine. Just wanted to feel its touch, to hold its calloused hand. And she brought them back inside, collecting them like objects, lining them up on the couch. Like when she was little and her marbles rolled under the table and she crawled and found them all and choked them in her hands.

And she locked the door. Trapped them with her. No, bound them to her, clutched them to her breast until they stopped fighting, until their skin was hers and hers was theirs.

She’s so tired. Digs out the earbuds, goes downstairs, finds One and Two and Three still on the couch, quiet now. Says, “I love you guys.”

The truth is they never wanted triplets.

V (landing) She sits straight in the seat and stares ahead with blank terror, her ears popping, her stomach lurching with the bumps. They must be through the clouds by now, but she refuses to look out the window at the tiny world below. She’ll know when

FICTION the plane lands because it’ll hit the ground, and it’s as simple as that.

Now comes the braking, that horrible grinding sound, and she sags forward, her lungs stuck behind her, pulled like a string through honey. All around her people murmur, giggle, babble. How can they chit-chat when they’re sitting on padded chairs in empty space?

Her therapist told her to glance out the window, to take the smallest peek, just once. All it would take is a lean to the left. In her peripheral vision, there unfold streets and neighborhoods and towns, but somehow the blurriness makes it more tolerable, more distant.

Two of those oddly comforting dings.

Like church bells. A pleasant sound in this symphony of rattling plastic and wailing babies and rumbling engines.

The plane hits an air pocket and a few passengers gasp with mock dread. Almost involuntarily, she crosses herself, peeling her right hand from the armrest and flicking the stale air up, down, left, right. She’s Jewish.

How close are they to the ground? A couple thousand feet at most. She can practically hear the cars passing down below. It would only take a turn of the neck, “a little looksee,” to use her therapist’s patronizing words.

No way in hell.

No. Way. In. Hell.

She does it.

Against her will. Her neck turns. String cheese roads and cranberry cars and there, on that corner, a fat golden raisin atop a dollop of yogurt. A backhoe in the snow. Yellow.

Impossibly yellow. What is it about the color, the screaming color of that machine? It’s an unafraid color. Her jaw unclenches, her shoulders soften, her arms hang loose.

Now the plane is whizzing low over the treetops of an asparagus forest, and she finds herself unable to look away, plastered to the ice-laced window, eyes darting from tree to snowy tree.

The plane lurches right, and she laughs.

VI (being) A backhoe. Still. Fat. Feels the caress of a child’s hand, the strike of a man’s.

Hears the high-up growl of an airplane, the low-down growl of a plow.

Most of the time, silence. A backhoe is lonely.

Big, on a corner.

A backhoe.

Who is this boy standing nearby? Why is he Big fat wheels in the snow.

Cold wheels.

A backhoe.

VII (remembering) The snowblower shuts off and he’s left trying to forget. The mud is almost gray under the thin, cold light of the streetlamps. He’s reminded of an old movie.

No snow without mud. Is that true, though? Sometimes it snows and there’s no mud to be seen. But no, there’s always mud.

Sometimes mud hides, on the windshields of tarp-covered cars and under the toenails of treetop squirrels. But there’s always mud.

Now he’s remembering the time when he slipped and fell in a deep brown puddle by the middle school. He walked home sopping wet, hair dotted with earthy dandruff, shoes squelching and stained.

And the other time, six months later, when his bike sloshed through a patch of seemingly dry grass, spraying a slimy claylike mush up his shins and under his favorite blue shorts.

Mom spent hours scrubbing the cotton with soap and tired fingers. The result was a

frothy coffee-colored syrup that soaked even further into the fabric.

These are the things people are supposed to forget in the winter. But at least, he thinks, at least now he’s remembering things in order. He feels the backhoe plucking his memories apart, one by one. Spreading them out like cards on a table. The first mud stain, then the second mud stain. Mud stain memories waiting their turn.

From the overwhelming simultaneity there emerges a neat sequence of discrete recollections: 4 years old, toaster catching fire; 6 years old, neighbor’s cat scratching leg; 8 years old, crying on Tilt-A-Whirl; 10 years old, kissing pillow. Memories as dots on a line. He sighs, almost audibly, as the headache he didn’t even realize he had fades to nothing.

Other things fade. The backhoe’s yellow fades into a dull almost white. The sky is gray and the road is black under the white snow.

For a moment, he finds himself unable to imagine a color other than none at all. Finds himself living in a Christmas TV rerun with gray-faced children opening gray-wrapped presents around a gray-needled tree.

For a moment, the whole world is a pencil sketch.

Then a fox crosses the street some 20 feet up the hill, its fur the brightest red he’s ever seen.

// AMELIA DILWORTH

Yale Daily News | 39

MULTIMEDIA

SOUNDS OF YALE

Yale is a sensory experience. So here is a collection of sounds that shape our experience as Yalies accompanied by the photos that represent the world we hear. Scan the QR code to access a playlist of Yale’s day to day noise.

BY DANTE MOTLEY

BLUE STATE COFFEE ON YORK

COVID TESTING AT THE SCHWARZMAN CENTER

40 | February 2022

MULTIMEDIA // KAREN LIN

GRACE HOPPER DINING HALL

PROSPECT AND GROVE INTERSECTION

GOOD NATURE MARKET ON BROADWAY

Yale Daily News | 41

HUMOR

Let’s Go To Come On, Let’s Go To The Metaverse!

The year is 2030, and you’ve finally made it to the Metaverse. A digitized version of our human world, the Metaverse, has been waiting for you all summer long, and it’s so glad that you’re finally here. Using virtual reality equipment and spy-esque glasses, you are now able to enter the Metaverse wherever, whenever. Let’s take a stroll through it.

My Brand New, Super Cool Room Wow, this room is pretty cool. Above my bed frame there’s a poster of the teenage pop artist that I am currently obsessing over, but the poster changes whenever I want. Ten years back I bought one of Monet’s “Water Lilies,” and it’s hanging above my dresser! It’s a nonfungible token, an NFT as those before me used to call them, worth less than I’m willing to disclose here. But look how nice! I’ve designed my Metaverse bedroom so that it is as similar as possible to my real-life room, except for the art and a pet unicorn named Frosty that hangs out in my foyer. Even though it isn’t technically “real,” it feels as though it is. From the comfort of my brand new room, I can do all of the things I would do in the real world — but in the Metaverse!

Getting Ready For Bed I went to VCS the other day to pick up my various skincare products, and I’ve always wanted to film one of those vintage YouTube style “Get Ready With Me” videos. Lucky for me, everything is filmed, all of the time, right here in the Metaverse. I’m like a walking “Truman Show”!

While I rub micellar water all over my face and pour caterpillar cream into the inner-corners of

42 | February 2022

my eyelids, I play a hit song by the Metaverse’s latest all-girl pop group. The band, better known as Strands of Code, look human but come with smaller-than-usual animal heads.

The lead singer is a giraffe, and their newest song is called “Get Me Out.” It’s super catchy.

Once my nighttime routine is all complete and I’ve had two glasses of a yellow liquid called “L2QRVR4837410,” which allows my brain to clear. I hop into bed for a virtual night’s sleep but decide to turn on my holographic TV. It hovers right above my bed sheets and if I squirm around, my feet cut straight through the screen.

I flip through various channels for a while, although the Metaverse programs are nothing new; I’m left wondering where the dolphins with feet are or when there will be a sitcom set inside a giant city made of candy. Instead, all that is on is just your average tennis match. I cozy up in my bed and close my eyes, feeling the weight of my virtual reality headset still on my face as I do so.

Hanging With My Pals High school used to be tough. But that was before I met one of my bestest friends, Avatar Version of Mark Zuckerberg©. Avatar Version of Mark Zuckerberg© loves — and I mean loves — to play ultimate frisbee with me, which is particularly fun because his hand-eye coordination is so incredible. Avatar Version of Mark Zuckerberg© and I take long walks on the beach.

We dip our feet in the burning hot ocean. He insists that I don’t give him any sort of nickname, like “Mark,” or “Marky” or “Markie,” because he isn’t “real.” Avatar Version of Mark Zuckerberg© and I like to explore the inner-workings of playgrounds and parks. He’s trying to create his own Metaversepark, which he says will have the “largest waterslide ever.” One time he became

HUMOR

The Metaverse

By Zack Hauptman incredibly distracted by the squirrels chasing one another through one of the many parks we frequent, and decided to capture one. He snapped his fingers, a cage appeared and trapped the squirrel so he could add it to the zoo he’s been trying to build inside an igloo. I like to think that Avatar Version of Mark Zuckerberg© likes my company. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what he’s feeling, if anything at all. I have never, after all of this time, figured out who he really is. Robot or not, he’s still my bestest friend in the Metaverse, and that has to be worth a whole lot.

Let’s Have A Car Race!

I was busy doing nothing at all in the Metaverse in my brand new, super cool room when I saw a notification appear in the top right corner of my eye. “MULTIPLAYER CARS,” it said. So I clicked it. When I was young I used to play this game called “Grand Theft Auto,” and I imagined this must be something similar, but somehow better. I prepared myself. I even switched out my human legs for bionic ones. I ate a handful of my robot Labraroobot’s homemade muffins. I was ready to go. Finally, my car appeared out of thin air. It had custom decals on it that said my name in bright colors, along with the words “YOU ROCK.” After the excitement of my new car wore off, I realized something: we had yet to move. I rolled down my window, looking for fellow drivers. To my left was a dinosaur in another car’s driver’s seat, squished by the roof of the car. I asked him what he was doing, but he insisted he was just trying to go to work. “It’s gridlock traffic out here!” He exclaimed. I sighed. If only I could be in a race.

Instead I just put on my favorite Strands of Code song and pretended as though I was in fact in the grandest car race of my life, pretending as though the Metaverse was significantly more interesting than real, everyday life.

What Is That Noise?

There’s a noise that I can’t seem to make out.

My room is far away, so I’m sure that it isn’t my unicorn Frosty. Really, I don’t think it’s anyone I know. I have, ever since I entered the Metaverse, heard nearly every noise. I’ve heard groups of other players obsess over the latest trends, or a specific breed of cat.

Never in my life have any of them made this sort of noise. It’s so out of the ordinary that I can’t even describe to you what it sounds like, just that it’s bothering me and distracting me while I attempt to lay in my bed, or go skiing or transform into an orangutan and swing across the jungle. Eventually it occurs to me that I have forgotten my favorite elixir, that good ol’ L2QRVR4837410. When I try to summon more of my Metacation nothing works.

Not even my robot Labraroobot can help.

Eventually, the noise becomes louder, and at last I can make it out. A woman — someone vaguely familiar to me — yelling. What is that word? Dinnertime, she says. “Honey, take that headset off. It’s time for dinner.” I take my virtual reality headset off, to the sight of a rolly polly walking slowly across my bedroom floor. After a few moments of silence accompanied by a pounding headache, I walk downstairs. Mom and Dad are fighting about how there is an indent as well as a tan on my face from the headset. The dinner tastes bland, especially with no help from the sous-chefs I once met in the Metaverse. I roll my eyes, and run back upstairs after eating a bowl of peas. With my headset back on, I find my drink — the elixir — sitting by the giant hot dog I recently bought for my super cool room. I chug the L2QRVR4837410. Silence.

The noise is gone. Time to play pool in a casino with Avatar Version of Tom Cruise©.

// JESSAI FLORES

Welcome to theFROM Metaverse CONFESSIONS pg 4 THIRD PLACE THE KYLIE VOLAVONGSA PAGE 25

// Jessai Flores