Yale Daily News Magazine | September 2021

RECONSIDERING

THE SUMMER INTERNSHIP

Summer break is no longer a break.

Do summer internships exemplify privilege or exploitation?

By Isabella Li

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE VOL. XLVIII ISSUE 6 SEPTEMBER 2021

Cover by Emily Zhang

EDITORS’ NOTE Dear readers, We are thrilled that after a year, you are finally holding a Mag issue in your hands. For us, this is a glossy, gorgeous miracle, just as it is being able to be physically present on this campus and in community with each other. We are so excited that this is an issue you can touch, sniff, and shape into a party hat if you so desire.

Magazine Editors in Chief Macrina Wang Isabella Zou Managing Editors Ashley Fan Claire Lee Associate Editors Elliot Lewis Serena Lin Marie Sanford Olivia Tucker Owen Tucker-Smith Magazine Design Editors Jose Estrada Rachel Folmar Stephanie Shao Isaac Yu

This issue is all about close looking. Mag’s writers challenge you to stop and take stock of what you see or don’t see. They zero in on corners of our community, find common connections, and think critically about topics ranging from language “gut” courses to the race politics of a painting from the Yale Center for British Art’s collections. This issue’s cover story, resiliently reported by Isabella Li, plunges into the phenomenon of the summer internship and how it interacts with questions of privilege and exploitation. Through their introspective work, Mag’s creative writers and artistic contributors think out loud about touch and intimacy in our daily lives.

This is our final issue and we are so proud of it. The team succeeding us have so many amazing things up their sleeves, so keep reading Mag! Love always, Macrina and Isa

Photography Editors Zoe Berg 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 Illustration by Emily Zhang

TRUST YOUR GUTS

35

Feature by Elliot Lewis

4 feature Undefining Misbehavior PHOEBE LIU 18 insight Enough about Yale CLAIRE FANG

I GET MISTY

Fiction by Caroleine James

2 | September 2021

22 poem Bared LEILA JACKSON

13

TABLE OF CONTENTS

26

RECONSIDERING THE SUMMER INTERNSHIP Cover by Isabella Li

23 portrait With Food We Grow DANI FLORES 32 painting + essay On Finishing Touches KATIA VANLANDINGHAM AND MARIE SANFORD 34 portrait The Mathematical Genius from Silliman’s Attic ISABELLA DOMINGUEZ 39 fiction Nicolae Zdârcă: History in a Hat ANDREAA CIOBANU

10 DO IT YOURSELF

Photo Essay by Tiffany Ng

12

QUALMS

Poem by Eileen Huang

Yale Daily News | 3

FEATURE

UNDEFINING MISBEHAVIOR How teachers have been reimagining discipline in New Haven Public Schools

BY PHOEBE LIU

H

ow did my words or actions make you feel? What do you wish I understood? What do you wish had happened instead? What do you need from us?

Teachers and students sit in circles, share stories and ask each other these questions. This process, which centers affective language, lies at the heart of restorative practices.

Restorative practices — with roots in ancient Indigenous communities and several of the world’s most practiced religions — focus on both prevention of and response to student behavior that is disruptive or harmful to themselves or others. These relationship-focused practices aim to lessen schools’ reliance on punitive discipline that some say criminalize misbehavior without reducing it and perpetuate racial inequity in schools. And amid the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers in New Haven Public Schools, a district with 44 schools and 20 magnet schools that serves over 20,000 students, have turned to restorative practices to address student behavior and student needs that the pandemic has helped them better understand.

4 | September 2021

“I’ve had situations where kids have done something fairly serious, and in conferences, the teacher completely retracts their original request for punishment because of the context of the kid’s situation,” said NHPS Director of Restorative Practices Cameo Thorne.

Thorne emphasized that context can completely change how a teacher responds to disruptive behavior — when they try to understand what’s really going on, restorative practice becomes an exercise in cultural competency for both teacher and student.

In recent years, alongside the growth in restorative practices, fewer students are being disciplined in traditional, punitive ways. According to the Connecticut Board of Education’s 2019-20 report published in February, the total number of suspensions, expulsions and school policy violations in Connecticut all decreased by more than 12 percent over the last six years. In NHPS, 1,818 students were suspended or expelled in the 2014-15 school year, while in the 2019-20 school year, 991 students were suspended or expelled — a nearly 50 percent decrease.

Racial disparities in exclusionary discipline remain, nationally and in New Haven: Since the 2014-15 school year, suspension rates in NHPS have ranged from 60-64 percent for Black students and hovered around 30 percent for Latino students — but fall at just 5-7 percent for white students, according to a 2019 Board of Education presentation on suspensions. And although data on student discipline from this past school year is not yet available, statistics on learning loss from the national testing organization NWEA have made clear that COVID-19 has hurt Black, Latino and low-income students hardest.

NHPS teachers like Thorne said the pandemic has helped them better understand what their students are struggling with, facilitating a shift toward a classroom dynamic centered around restorative practices and social-emotional learning — the latter focuses on self-awareness, social awareness and relationship building in education. But they said the pandemic’s long-term effects in bolstering restorative practices could be precarious without wider systemic change to

build community and mitigate the disproportionate impact of punitive school discipline on Black and Latino students.

“I’d like to think that collectively, teachers will be more aware [of restorative practices] because we’ve seen so many students struggling,” said Chris Kafoglis, a high school math teacher at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, an interdistrict magnet school in NHPS. New Haven’s Restorative Practices and ‘misbehavior’ At the root of student discipline in the Elm City are several codes of conduct, one for the entire NHPS system and one for each individual member school. These codes set the tone of student disciplinary procedures across the district, delineating how schools respond to student violations and what counts as “misbehavior,” if the term should even be used at all.

NHPS’ broader shifts toward restorative practices have been reflected in changes to its code of conduct. In January 2021, the Board of

FEATURE

Education unanimously passed a revision of the code: the NHPS’ draft Public Schools Code of Conduct. The policy is part of an effort that began in 2014 with a $300,000 award from the American Federation of Teachers Innovation Fund grant to the New Haven Federation of Teachers, the local teachers’ union, to train teachers in restorative practices and run pilot restorative practices at the school level. Over the next seven years, a group of parents, administrators, teachers union members, mental health professionals and legal experts collaboratively rewrote the code.

The code is centered around the principles of restorative

practices, which include social and emotional learning, collaborative approaches to solving community issues and repairing harm. It defines restorative alternatives to punitive discipline.

For example, if a student commits an infraction of a school code, a teacher should check in on them individually first — part of a framework called positive behavior interventions and supports, or PBIS — instead of defaulting to detention or suspension. The new code includes the phrase “restorative” 71 times; the 2019-20 code of conduct mentions it once.

Notably, unlike in most student conduct handbooks, one word is absent from the more than 50-page document: misbehavior. Instead, the district uses

the phrase “behavior that is disruptive or harmful to learning.” “[The term ‘misbehavior’] is not a neutral word; it starts with the idea that I know for a fact that you’ve done something wrong,” said Thorne, who helped draft the code. She successfully advocated for removal of the word “misbehavior” from the policy. “Then, from that perspective, I’m already in the place where I am not open to hearing what it is you might say that might change everything.”

Teachers emphasized that using the term “misbehavior” can overlook the underlying social-emotional and physical needs that almost always lie at the root of disrupted behavior.

And more often than not, these characterizations contribute

“[The term ‘misbehavior’] is not a neutral word; it starts with the idea that I know for a fact that you’ve done something wrong.”

Yale Daily News | 5

FEATURE to the disproportionately high number of Black and Latino students who are subject to punitive discipline.

“If you start with ‘I haven’t already decided who’s bad or who’s good,’ that sort of balances the knee-jerk reaction of a cultural difference that is rooted in racism and bias,” Thorne said.

David Low, a high school math teacher at the Sound School, an aquaculture-based school in NHPS, agreed with Thorne that the term “misbehavior” can be counterproductive.

“What we would traditionally, on a societal level, call ‘misbehavior’ is a symptom that something else is wrong,” Low said.

When students “misbehave,” Low responds by engaging with students and connecting to their identity rather than seeing them as “doing something wrong.” He starts by addressing the student by their name and goes deeper from there, making analogies based on their interests and going the extra mile when he can. In his four-student ocean engineering class, he bought each student a 3D printer and delivered it to their home.

While some other teachers — such as Kelly Hope, a high

school English teacher at New Haven Academy, an interdistrict magnet school in NHPS — did use the term “misbehavior” to describe disrespectful or disruptive behavior that prevents others from learning, all teachers interviewed expressed a desire to approach their students in a way that mirrored language in the NHPS code. They wanted to address their students respectfully and relationally, even when students behaved in a way that was not in accordance with class expectations.

More intentional ways to address disengaged students Although they had different approaches, Low and three other teachers spoke about one student behavioral issue they encountered every day, an area greatly exacerbated by the pandemic: low student engagement, due in large part to remote learning. They said that low student engagement was frustrating and complicated the process for teachers to understand how students are doing or how they are absorbing the material. And ultimately, low engagement compelled some teachers to look for root causes of disengagement — which led them to shift toward a restorative mindset.

“[Students having their videos off] meant that we were less engaged and less connected and that they were less connected to us,” Low said. “It didn’t feel personal — they could basically sit there doing nothing, and you’d never know it unless they actually spoke. It was an absolute horror show.”

Even though Low spent time and money driving to his students’ houses and dropping off materials for engineering and robotics classes, he often had no idea whether students were even using the equipment. Because students’ cameras were off, he had trouble fostering a highly engaged virtual classroom.

Kafoglis agreed: “The number one complaint the teachers have is kids not engaging, not being there or not attending.

Most of the behavioral issues we’ve faced have had to do with the social-emotional wellness of students.”

Throughout the period of virtual learning, Kafoglis coldcalled students often to increase engagement — but in a way that emphasizes that a teacher cares, not in a way that makes them feel like they’re in trouble for doing something wrong. He emphasized that when students are not engaged, he doesn’t want it to be a “relationship-killing

situation.”

“If a student doesn’t respond, I would recommend against saying to the student, ‘where are you?’” Kafoglis said. “That sort of tone won’t get you anywhere” and does not help the “particular relationship between you and the student … [it] damages what you’re trying to create as an overall classroom environment.”

Other teachers took more active steps during class sessions when students were disengaged while remaining aware of students’ individual situations. Ramya Subramanian, who teaches at Elm City Montessori School, NHPS’ charter school, recognized that students were fatigued from virtual learning, but she made sure they had their videos on and were unmuted when they spoke. When students didn’t engage, she said to the class, “I need you to make one comment or ask one question.”

Still, Subramanian said that for as long as she remembers, her teaching at ECMS has been centered around

“Now, you know, if a kid is misbehaving, instead of thinking, ‘how am I going to correct this?’, the thought is, ‘what’s happening, what’s wrong?’”

6 | September 2021

FEATURE social-emotional learning and restorative practices. She emphasized that “you can tell when there are other things going on,” and in those cases, she will reach out to a student individually after class.

But as students have started to learn in classrooms again, most educators said engagement issues have lessened as students get to see each other face-to-face again. Now, Kafoglis and three other teachers added, teachers are more sensitive to other cues about students’ social-emotional wellness; they’re more inclined to look for underlying causes in disruptive behavior rather than apprehending and punishing.

“Now, you know, if a kid is misbehaving, instead of thinking, ‘how am I going to correct this?’, the thought is, ‘what’s happening, what’s wrong?’” said Maria Parente, Yale’s coordinator of community programs in science, who works with NHPS students as part of her programming. “Let me talk to this kid … and find out what’s going on.”

Better support systems To meet student behavioral and social-emotional needs, and ultimately, address root causes of student “misbehavior,” multiple schools have bolstered their academic support programs, advisory sessions and social-emotional learning circles — a key component of restorative practices.

The Sound School, where Low teaches, increased the frequency of its advisory period from one day a week to five days a week amid the pandemic. Advisory periods are small group sessions not tied to explicit academic work but instead focused

on restorative or connective conversations, virtual circles and social-emotional learning.

Over the last year, schools have had these sessions both virtually and, when permitted, in person.

“We knew the challenges of their emotional needs are going to be amplified this year,” Low, who leads one such advisory group, said. “I think people got even more invested in it during this remote time.”

Low doubts the daily advisory sessions will continue post-pandemic, but guessed that the school might bring their frequency down to three days a week, still an increase from the pre-pandemic sessions.

Other schools have similar practices. ECMS holds daily 25-minute social-emotional learning circles, which Subramanian said help students practice strategies for dealing with interpersonal conflict or other stressful situations, even though they take up teaching time. Susan Ellwanger, who teaches high school English at New Haven Academy, said her school created daily advisory sessions with a restorative lens at the beginning and end of each day for “bonding that helped the students engage.”

These systems of support are restorative practices that serve to proactively prevent misbehavior, according to Thorne, who said one of the “big misunderstandings” surrounding restorative practices is a sense that it’s “all about repairing harm.”

“Putting people in settings … to listen to each other and hear each other is the first part of the work, and really it should come before the healing of the harm,

to build culturally competent communities,” Thorne said.

Increased behavioral leniency?

Taken together, the shifts toward restorative practices have contributed to increased discourse on behavioral leniency, or how strict teachers want to be with their students, especially those who may be struggling.

Some teachers, such as Hope and Subramanian, said they largely kept their expectations for behavior and school work the same — while understanding that there are challenges each individual student faces.

Subramaniam, who said she would like to imagine herself as “always warm and demanding,” added that part of keeping her expectations similar was possible because ECMS, as a charter school, did not have to align with NHPS’ phased reopening plan and has conducted in-person instruction since last fall, months before NHPS entered a hybrid learning model.

For Low and Ellwanger, however, expectations for virtual learning amid a pandemic were inevitably different, they said.

“Everybody was forced to be more lenient; we gotta have empathy for their kids and give them a lot more leeway,” Low said. For years, he has accepted work “at any time from any kid” as long as they had completed it but said that due to the pandemic, more of his colleagues have adopted a similar mindset.

Ellwanger also said she has always offered leniency around work and deadlines when students need it, but during the pandemic, more students have realized that it is actually okay to take her up on her offer of flexible

deadlines.

Even for more severe disciplinary issues, which teachers largely said were few and far between, the pandemic caused teachers to develop an increased focus on compassionate approaches to disruptive behavior.

Hope, for example, said that early in the remote learning period, there were two instances where she removed a student from a virtual classroom due to disruptions that were harming others’ learning — in both instances, a student repeatedly turned their microphones on with music blaring that made it difficult for Hope to continue class. Even though she undertook a “punitive” action, she supported students in social-emotional learning by following up individually after the incidents to connect with them. “[Removing a student and filing a behavioral log] is a way for the students to take responsibility for their learning, education and behavior, but also for me as a teacher to say ‘I am not going to negatively penalize you and never allow you to recover,’” Hope said.

Subramanian, who teaches at ECMS, took the focus on social-emotional learning even further — she disagreed with the premise of asking someone to leave a learning space or shutting down any kind of communication but rather spoke about addressing incidents like Hope’s through positive reinforcement in the form of social-emotional learning circles — something that can be implemented as students have returned to in-person learning.

“Rather than saying, ‘you need to leave the [discussion] circle,’ if you use positive discipline, back again to those social-emotional learning cir-

Yale Daily News | 7

FEATURE cles, where you have agreed on the norms, what does it look like?” Subramanian said.

She said that in the circles, she asks questions, observes and gives mini lessons. “You fix [the issues] and there’s no need for you to be crying out, that’s wrong or that’s not right … so that [kids] feel like they’re being targeted by the adults.”

A deeper disconnect Regardless of whether a behavioral issue meant lack of student engagement or something much more severe, all teachers interviewed spoke about the need to address the underlying causes of student “misbehavior” especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and most used the language of restorative practices to do so.

Low said that behavioral issues such as low engagement levels are emblematic of a deeper disconnect between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Learning how to distinguish between them and focus on the intrinsic motivators — deeper investment in academic material and a sense of community — can help prevent disruptive behavior in a restorative way, according to Low and Thorne.

“There’s a pile of motivation in every person,” Low said. “And the problem is that

8 | September 2021

extrinsic and intrinsic motivation are inversely proportional. The more externality you give to the learning — grades, rewards, punishments — all of that leads to low-level engagement.”

“There’s a pile of motivation in every person,” Low said.

“And the problem is that extrinsic and intrinsic motivation are inversely proportional.”

Low aims to build intrinsic motivation in his students from the very beginning, by deep relationship-building and by avoiding an urge to control every aspect of a student’s behavior.

“Put simply, how many times have you heard people talk about students owning their learning? How do you actually do that?” Low asked. “You can’t have externally and internally motivated work simul-

taneously. It’s either a lot of one or a lot of another. So the more control you attempt to exert, the more you’re going to disengage the intrinsic motivation of any person to learn anything.”

Subramanian said that, possibly in part due to Zoom fatigue from the period of virtual learning, “the work itself does not excite them, and that continues to this day,” which she said is an ongoing struggle. Ellwanger expressed a similar sentiment and pointed to advisory time as a way for more intrinsically motivated students to mentor others.

Generally, teachers emphasized the role of social-emotional awareness and relationship building with students in building intrinsic motivation.

“We are training for empathy, recognition that another person’s perspectives and experiences are real and we need to be as aware of them as possible,” Ellwanger said, describing the premise of restorative justice circles — putting one’s own perspective aside and trying to understand another person’s background or their point of view in a specific situation.

The need for systemic change Although restorative practices and a focus on social-emotional learning are taking hold in NHPS, educators said more cultural and systemic change needs to happen.

Claudia Merson, director of public school partnerships between Yale and NHPS, commented on the broader cultural shift. Merson cited data showing that the district has invested in restorative practices since before the pandemic — referencing the sharp decline in suspensions and expulsions in the 2019-20 school year in NHPS. “[Moving to restorative practices] is a culture shift that will take some time, but I think that it starts with the commitment to do it, and then you figure out how to make it happen,” said Sarah Miller, a community health organizer for youth mental health organization Clifford Beers, New Haven Public School Advocates member and parent of two elementary school students at Family Academy of Multilingual Explora-

FEATURE tion. “It requires a vulnerability that’s very hard for adults.”

Miller added that creating restorative practices circles in response to conflicts is not enough to effectively prevent behavioral issues and create a positive learning environment. But even though there’s still much to be done, the district has come a long way, according to Low, who has taught in NHPS for almost 40 years, and Hope, who grew up in Newhallville as a student in NHPS. “When I started, it was ‘don’t smile till Christmas,’ and I went with that for many, many years,” Low said, referencing a zero-tolerance approach to classroom discipline. “The way we handle things now is much more effective now in terms of developing human beings, which is, if a student is having difficulties, it’s much more effective to develop a relationship with the kid.”

Hope said that when she was a student in NHPS, “if you were disruptive, you were going straight to in-school suspension … or [even] ... being suspended right out.

Now, there’s room for having those conversations, correcting the behavior and then coming back into the classroom.”

Thorne said that over the years, many teachers have embraced the concepts of restorative practices in schools. But she emphasized that “when it comes to implementation, we need to coach each other.”

In her capacity as director of NHPS’ restorative practices project, Thorne is currently licensed to train teachers in restorative practices. She planned two-day training sessions with educators over the summer and extending through the fall, during which educators explore their own values and talk through scenarios to understand how to apply restorative practices in classrooms.

Hopefully, Thorne said, the city’s Youth and Family Services department will devote resources toward additional trainers and training for restorative practices. The department has allocated some money for this purpose, she said in June, although the funds will not be used to hire additional employees but instead to retool current positions. For example, she plans to facilitate moving people who oversaw in-school sus-

pensions into a broader “school support” position.

Genuine understanding and implementation of restorative practices go far beyond individual relationships with students and builds on a sense of community trust, according to Thorne and Mira Debs, executive director of Yale’s Education Studies Program and a founding board member of ECMS. “One of the pieces about restorative justice is that it really takes time to implement,” Debs said. She commented on how, as students are returning to the classroom, the comfort of parents, students and teachers in trusting that “school is a place that’s safe and will do things to keep them safe” is critical to the success of restorative practices.

Low agreed: “Misbehavior is systematic.

It’s just that misbehavior has had so much less to do with the individuals that it has to do with the construct in which they’re being placed.”

“Misbehavior has had so much less to do with the individuals [than] with the construct in which they’re being placed.”

Hope, Miller and Thorne emphasized the school-to-prison pipeline and its relevance in NHPS, a district where two-thirds of students are on free and reduced price lunch, 36 percent of students are Black or African American and 47 percent of students are Hispanic or Latino.

“Kids of color, especially boys of color, are subject to much more punitive kinds of discipline, and if you create alternative structures for dealing with issues, then that minimizes that sort of targeting,” Miller said.

Thorne spoke about restorative practices’ potential positive effects in closing this

disparity: “Restorative practices honor everybody by making sure everyone has a voice, and the people ‘doing’ the discipline aren’t even the ones making the decisions.”

Still, looking ahead, Miller said that even successful implementation of restorative practices may not be enough. This will be especially true in the current school year, as students return to a more normal form of learning despite continued worries about COVID-19: In NHPS, students are proceeding with in-person instruction with a teacher vaccine mandate, student mask requirement and weekly testing.

School psychologists nationally anticipate greater concern over student engagement and social and emotional well-being, while New Haveners, in a mid-August rally, expressed both excitement and apprehension for the upcoming year. Amid continued uncertainty, teachers stressed the importance of focusing on a single bottom line: student support, at both individual and systemic levels.

“Some of the [restorative] practices can help unearth what’s really going on, but there have to be systems of support to really address what’s going on,” Miller said. “The practices themselves won’t solve that.”

Yale Daily News | 9

PORTRAIT

Do It Yourself

BY TIFFANY NG

34 | September 2021 10

PORTRAIT

It’s a c*ming of age story, really.

I met Chloe on a film set during the summer of 2020. I was the art director and she was the costume designer. We bonded over being two of the very few gals on set and our mutual love for the film “Le clitoris.”

“Wouldn’t it be hilarious if there was this Gwai Lui who just secretly loves masturbating?” Chloe asked.

“What’s funnier would be if we made a film about it,” I joked.

“I wonder what that would look like.”

Growing up in Asia, the concept of a “Gwai Lui” (“good girl”) is a given — you are to be respectful of your elders, be conservative in your views on relationships, and always sit with your knees tightly glued together. In my experience, however, being a Gwai Lui didn’t mean embodying the character of a submissive, ill-represented schoolgirl as much as it was a painfully confusing journey through puberty. My parents never gave me “the talk,” and I could only really describe my preliminary relationship with intimacy as looking for the doorknob in a pitch black room. So when Chloe posed that question, I was taken aback — it was probably the first time I was pushed to articulate the sensations of such a culturally “taboo” act.

“Sort of like that Colbie Caillat song ‘Bubbly,’” I said. “‘Cause every time I see your bubbly face / I get the tinglies in a silly place … / And I crinkle my nose … ’” I distinctly remember the one sex ed session my high school held during finals week, sitting in an auditorium with a comically large shower curtain drawn between the boys and the girls when someone asked our beloved (and very soft spoken) English teacher what a female orgasm felt like.

“A mix between a perfect cup of hot chocolate on a winter’s day and the most expensive bottle of champagne between your legs,” she said. You had to give her credit for how poetic she made it sound.

It was recalling these cringe-worthy moments of secondhand embarrassment that drew me to this project. The way our uncomfortable high school exchanges about intimacy remain so dormant in our memories pushed me to spend my last three days in Hong Kong scrambling to put together a concept, a crew and a sex-positive production. I wanted to start a conversation about female masturbation, even if it meant crafting a photo-story that’s funny to say the least.

DIY is about finding humor in something seemingly awkward at first. Because sometimes … it’s better to do it yourself.

11 Yale Daily News | 35

POEM

Qualms

BY EILEEN HUANG

Mother, quiet and pregnant with fear, raised a daughter with no tongue.

I remember in our old house the door opened outward to the grass, freshly cut, a fleeting playground for any small child to call kingdom, to dig out any poor worm.

My worst secret is that I used to cleave worms in half with plastic spoons. Really, I fear that one day no boy would want to tongue me because of this fact, that the doors of companionship would shut and cut me off from being un-lonely, like a child reminded that their fear of the dark is only childish. This keeps me restless. I wade, I worm my way out of this deep and fearless hole under which I’ve buried my tongue.

Inside of me, my worries open like doors, or maybe an orchid, and bloom before they’re cut and uprooted. I think I’d like to take a shortcut that would lead me back toward childhood, something more demure, domesticity before worms eat me back into dirt. A funny, fickle thing, fear roots in my stomach and doesn’t vanish, slides its tongue across my open mouth — a silent, gaping door.

I know nothing of nurture. At the station door, once, I watched a man with one arm cut clean off raise his grime-covered hand toward a child, demanding more change as the boy wormed his way out the crowd, and I did not fear the black and pink of the man’s languid tongue.

All night I stay up thinking about the tongue flaps on my shoes, how they bend, as if little doors, in the rain. If this were a movie, we’d always cut to me never wanting or thinking of a child.

Truthfully, most days I feel obviously wormlike. I want to know what it’s like not to fear my tongue saying another name, to not fear plant cuttings, how they sprout, seedless, at front doors, like a worm regrowing, cut by a careless child.

//DORA GUO

12 | September 2021

Trust Your Guts: A CLOSER LOOK AT YALE’S GUT LANGUAGE COURSES

By Elliot Lewis

// ZOE BERG

A

s part of Yale’s distributional requirements, every student is required to take a foreign language. Students sometimes balk at the requirement, perhaps believing their four years of high school Latin ought to count for several language credits and maybe even a few awards. Other students, however, see the choice opportunistically. It gives them the chance to explore a new language and culture. It’s often that these two types of students find themselves as deskmates in a hallowed Whitney Humanities Center basement seminar room for an introductory level language course.

For students with no experience in a foreign language, the requirement is to complete courses from Level 1 (L1) to Level 3 (L3). For students who have fulfilled L1 to L3 requirements through high school courses, the requirement is to take a single Level 5 (L5) course. Between Yale’s over 45-odd language options, some find difficulty in choosing which language is for them. The range in language department size is quite stark, from large departments like Spanish (with more than 15 current faculty members) to small ones like Czech (with only a single lector). While choosing which language to take, students may rely on several different techniques: continuing the language in which they have AP cred-

its to get a single L5 credit and be done with it; learning the language their parents or relatives speak to reconnect with their culture; taking a language whose literature they admire; or, perhaps, being one of many students in search of a gut language — an easy class.

Every distributional requirement at Yale is associated with storied guts: “Galaxies and the Universe” for science, “Classical Hollywood Narrative” for humanities, “Estimation and Error” for quantitative reasoning (the anecdote I’ve heard: nobody’s ever wrong because it’s all estimation). Languages are no different, with certain departments designated as guts by the Yale grapevine, aka CourseTable, a course catalog which rates every Yale course by difficulty on a scale from one to five based on crowdsourced student feedback. Hindi L1 has a rating of 2.8; Czech L1 has a 2.6; Polish L2 has a 1.8.

Usually, the language courses associated with gut status are denoted as Less Commonly Taught Languages, or LCTLs: Egyptian, Finnish, or Punjabi, as opposed to Russian, Chinese, or German. There are exceptions: “Legal Spanish” (an L5 course) has a 2.2 , and “The Short Story in Russian” (also L5) has a 2.4.

But for the most part, smaller language departments are known among students as guts.

Yale Daily News | 13

INSIGHT However, after speaking to the professors of these so-called “gut languages,” it became clear that the gut narrative is an oversimplification. And although the term “gut” may be associated with a somewhat critical connotation, the “guttiness” of these courses is nothing worth critiquing, but is rather commendable. ***** Karen von Kunes is Yale’s sole Czech lector, a Slavic bulwark against a wave of students more interested in Western European and East Asian languages. She’s taught at Yale for 26 years. She’s an author of textbooks, monographs and dictionaries, and she teaches L1 to L4 Czech along with classes on Czech novelist Milan Kundera and Czech filmmaker Miloš Forman. Additionally, she leads a study abroad program titled In Kafka’s Spirit, a combined course in Czech language, film and literature.

Calling Czech a small language department may be misleading. Yes, there is only one professor, but there is certainly demand. Last year, 40 students signed up to take L1 Czech; von Kunes could only accept 22, which, she said, was pushing it — this year the course was capped at 23. In some years, von Kunes told me, she alone taught as many as 100 students across all her courses.

This was not always the case for Czech. Before the language requirement was instated in 2005, not as many students expressed interest. In fact, when she first arrived at Yale in 1995, von Kunes was hired as a Czech lector with the possibility of teaching Russian should Czech enrollments be

14 | September 2021

minimal. After the Velvet Revolution in Prague in 1989, though, there was an emerging renaissance of Western interest in Czech. “Language depends strictly on politics,” she said.

Von Kunes recalls a time, only five or so years ago, when she’d only have around 30 students total. But recently, she told me, she’d had more students in her introductory Czech course than her introductory Russian course. “Most of the students seem to enjoy [my teaching]. There are a few who don’t — perhaps I would say over my teaching career [that they] might be less even than 1%,” von Kunes explained to me with a smirk.

But it’s busy being so likeable. “I get so many demands that it’s becoming really quite a bit. Basically, I just work all the time on the weekends, and currently I’m in Newport, and there [are] former students from Yale who invited me a couple of times for coffee. I don’t even have time, it’s just really sad.”

While the growing interest in Czech is clear, von Kunes isn’t quite able to offer an explanation for it, although she points to the usual suspects. “Some [students] say they have a friend who knows some Czech, or they’ve been to Prague, or they are interested in hockey. And the Czech Republic is known for hockey,” she said. Many Yale hockey players take Czech. To appeal to such students, she may have them write Czech dialogues about hockey or give Czech presentations about hockey.

Many, however, would be quick to admit that their interest in Czech is due to its rumored gut status. When I proposed this narrative to von Kunes, she

vehemently disagreed. “The language is very, very difficult,” she said. “Even Polish is simplified to Czech. All the Polish, to me, looks very complex. But actually, grammar wise, or morphological wise, it’s actually slightly easier.” Czech, like Latin, Russian and many other world languages, has a declension system, meaning that words are altered slightly depending on their syntactic position in a sentence. These fall into a variety of cases, including genitive, vocative and dative. Czech has around 138 total cases, making its grammar extremely complex and difficult to apprehend as a foreign learner.

Von Kunes hopes that her students have at least a meager understanding of Czech by the end of their time with her. “It’s impossible — I mean, not impossible — but very unlikely that someone [who] learn[s] Czech within four semesters will be fluent,” she said.

Occasionally, there are exceptions: a student who after two years of taking her courses translated a Czech novel; another became a journalist in the Czech Republic after only four semesters. But usually, the learning curve is steep. In class, von Kunes compares the process to learning one’s native language: it took us all the first couple years of life to begin stringing together even the most rudimentary of sentences. Language learning is quite an involved process.

Because the language is so difficult, von Kunes tries to grade with kindness. “We all know that learning a language is actually quite difficult.

So perhaps we have more understanding on the part of students.

If I would look at every single little mistake, and take, let’s say, one point off, [that] could fail all students.”

INSIGHT

von Kunes said. “This was the system under communism — that’s how I was actually trained. If we made one single mistake, that was B, if you had two mistakes, that was C, and so on.”

Politics, then, do not merely influence what courses are taught, but also the teaching styles of professors.

Von Kunes’ grading has had a positive effect on her students. Mary Orsak ’22, a Russian major, has worked quite closely with von Kunes both in class and through outside research.

“I think that in no way is the language itself a gut … but I think when you have a professor who really cares about the well being and success of the students, sure, that ends up seeming like an easy class, because you have the best support system you could imagine,” she said. ***** Like Czech, Polish at Yale is intimately connected to geopolitics. “Polish was the strongest in the Cold War era … Poland was like the mediary [between the Soviet Union and the U.S.],” explained Krystyna Illakowicz, Yale’s lector of Polish. Illakowicz teaches L1 through L5, along with two English language courses about Polish theatre and film. A recent resurgence in Poland’s international significance, as relations with the European Union grow ever rockier, has propelled the language into a new importance. “Maybe the negative, as well, is in some ways interesting,” she said.

In recent years, around thirty students have enrolled in Polish each semester. Five years ago, however, Illakowicz experienced a slump. To combat it, she began advertising. “If you don’t [advertise], you stop existing,” she

told me. There is a precarity of being a small language professor: always at the whim of the demands of your students, always at risk of becoming too niche.

Von Kunes has expressed similar concerns: despite the interest in Czech, she fears that after her retirement in only a few years, Yale will cancel the program.

To help increase enrollment, Illakowicz asked professors in other de-

“It's like a vicious circle. Because when the course is invisible, then, of course, students don't know about it. If they don't know about it, then somehow [it] slowly, slowly disappears.” partments such as history, philosophy and theatre studies to advertise Polish through their departmental emails.

She also placed signs all over campus declaring Polish as “the language of love.” She’s happy to inform that romantic relationships — and even a few marriages — have sprung out of her Polish classes, she told me.

Historically, Illakowicz struggled with the student perception that her

language was too difficult. In the past, in order to have a course appear in the catalog, a teacher needed at least five students to enroll. For a while, Illakowicz teetered on the edge of fading into obscurity. “It’s like a vicious circle.

Because when the course is invisible, then, of course, students don’t know about it. If they don’t know about it, then somehow [it] slowly, slowly disappears,” she said.

Illakowicz admits that Polish is a difficult language. But to temper such a tough second language, Illakowicz tries to teach with kindness. “As in every class, we want to make these languages attractive, available to the students. … Learning a language is like moving back to your kindergarten, okay? So you need to play in class, you need to enjoy,” she said. They play games, they sing songs, they eat candy (to teach her students about diminutives, Illakowicz brings in a fudge candy called krówka, or “little cow”) — language students become children once again. But Illakowicz pushes back on the label of “easy.”

“I would say playful,” she said. “But I don’t think that easy is the right word.

Playful. Engaging.”

Illakowicz values the community that can be built in a language class.

When students meet five days a week, close connections form. Perhaps it is not just Polish that is a language of love — each of these introductory language classes, in a way, forms a loving community, especially so in small languages. “I think that we build very strong relationships with the students because there are not 100 students. I know every student; students know me. So it’s a very, very close relationship. I’m always very willing to keep those relationships,” she said.

Yale Daily News | 15

INSIGHT

Having such a community in these introductory classes proves integral, according to both the Czech and Polish lectors. Von Kunes pointed out that many students struggle with self-confidence at the onset of learning a new language.

“Languages are often taken by freshmen,” she explained. “[Some] freshmen go through that crisis, [where] they were the best in high school, and suddenly, they find … tremendous difficulty [learning a] foreign language.” But when students are offered the chance to fail together, to make mistakes side by side, they are more willing to take chances and more willing to experiment with the language. These classes are all about cultivating comfort. ***** Swapna Sharma has taught Hindi at Yale since 2009. She came to the U.S. in 2008, spent one year at the University of Chicago, and has been in New Haven ever since. Each year, she teaches courses ranging from L1 to L5, along with a class on Modern Hindi Literature. “I’m coming from more [of a] research background. And when you’re teaching language courses five days a week … you don’t get a chance to do anything [else]. … If you are really [trying] to give your best, then you are busy all the time.” Teaching five days a week leaves little time for outside work — especially as a lector who also balances teaching several classes with conversation sections, office hours and tutorials. Despite the heavy workload, language lectors like Sharma are paid less than professors and are not on a tenure track. Now, Sharma only has time to conduct research

16 | September 2021

and write papers over the summer.

Despite being a lector in the world’s fourth most spoken language, Sharma has less access to resources than other lectors as part of the relatively small South Asian Studies Program. The program is one of a few that is only allowed as a second major. Sharma told me, “If South Asian [studies] can be [a] first major, then we can do a lot of different things, which we are capable [of doing], but we don’t get a chance.” Sharma would like to use her research background to teach more research-oriented courses on higher-level literature.

But teaching is Sharma’s passion.

She loves her students, and she loves watching them succeed. “I feel [my students are] like my extended family when I’m there. … A student comes in the class and knows nothing. And then suddenly that person is writing journal entries and saying something.

It’s like [how] we feel when kids start walking and you know, ‘oh my God,’” she said.

Like Illakowicz and von Kunes, Sharma has a reputation for being a kind, relaxed teacher. She follows the same dogma that students in a language

class ought to feel comfortable in order to learn. “Maybe somebody is very sharp, very intelligent, but he or she is struggling with the language. …

[You have] to provide [the] best help to encourage the person to not feel left out because this is very isolating,” she said.

In order to achieve this goal of inclusion, Sharma makes sure not to overload her students. “My purpose is not to give too much work also, but in the class to motivate them. … By just giving more homework, they feel a burden and they don’t enjoy class.

I think you don’t learn a language until you feel fascinated [by] it,” she said. She assigns work she hopes the students will enjoy: poetry, films, TV shows, newspaper articles and Bollywood songs.

Vijay Pathak ’24 has enjoyed his experiences with Sharma so much that he has considered taking on South Asian Studies as a second major.

“We were invited over to Professor Sharma’s home when COVID guidelines permitted, and that was for me a

INSIGHT

truly unique experience, because I got a taste of what that culture at Yale is, which I suppose encourages learning even outside of the classroom,” Pathak said. “But also I think that was just a direct benefit of the fact that we are maybe her only students, just by virtue of how small the department is.” Professor Sharma’s classes also had meetings on Cross Campus, where students across all levels could meet each other and connect.

The assignments, too, helped cultivate community in Sharma’s classes. For example, Pathak had an assignment to write a group skit in Hindi. “It’s difficult not to become friends with people you’re learning a language with and acting [with],” he said.

Pathak had very little background in Hindi before joining the class. Unlike Czech and Polish, Hindi requires learning a new script in addition to new grammar and vocabulary. “I found it tricky, personally — very enjoyable — but it took a lot of effort for me, because I wasn’t necessarily as good as some of the other, maybe slightly more fluent speakers in the class. So I wouldn’t see it as a gut necessarily.” The format and class size, he told me, helped him through the difficult aspects. Sharma led small conversation sections with her students, where only two or three students would be on the Zoom call with her, and they would carry out a conversation. Such individualized learning on a weekly basis was hugely beneficial to students like Pathak.

The term “gut” is a broad label that glosses over deeper particularities of how a course is taught. CourseTable ratings cannot distinguish between classes that don’t require participation, classes that require minimal effort, and classes that have kind, understanding professors. For language classes, the first two are certainly untrue. They meet everyday. They require learning new scripts, new grammar and new vocabulary.

It is the kindness of professors like von Kunes, Illakowicz and Sharma that earns them their gut status, as professors who see their students as their own children and try their best to make the complicated language acquisition process as simple and enjoyable as possible. Low CourseTable difficulty ratings are not always reflective of a lack of rigor, but rather an indication of the conscious effort by instructors to take the time to truly engage with their students and ensure the comfort of each and every one of their children.

// ZOE BERG

INSIGHT

ENOUGH ABOUT YALE

Reframing the discussion around a controversial painting in Yale’s history.

BY CLAIRE FANG

I

n late August, a mysterious whiteboard appeared outside Woolsey Hall. On it was a monochrome photograph of a painting: “Elihu Yale, Members of his Family, and an Enslaved Child” by John Verelst, painted in 1719. This now-controversial painting was intermittently displayed in the Yale Center for British Art — first, briefly, in 1981, and then from 2014 to 2020. The photograph outside Woolsey cropped the painting to frame a single figure in the artwork: the enslaved child. In cheap printer monochrome, the child stares hauntingly, only his face and shoulders visible.

The portrait of Elihu Yale and his family has often been confused with “Elihu Yale and his Servant,” a similar painting that also shows Elihu Yale posing next to an enslaved African boy, which actually belongs to the Yale Undergraduate Art Gallery across the street. Both paintings, after all, have been removed from display and replaced, and both portray the imperialist and racist scene of Elihu Yale next to a slave. Given that its subject matter is not particularly distinctive, and that it depicts a problematic scene, it is difficult to see how the Elihu Yale family portrait could be especially valuable nowadays as a

18 | September 2021

specific art piece. However, tracing the Elihu Yale portrait’s journey through time and space reveals the particular educational mission of a museum, and how a museum can yield fresh information and relevance from art pieces old and new.

“Elihu Yale, Members of his Family, and an Enslaved Child” was originally named “Elihu Yale; William Cavendish, the second Duke of Devonshire; Lord James Cavendish; Mr. Tunstal; and an Enslaved Servant.” In long, buttoned coats, Elihu Yale’s relatives look head-on at the viewers with neutral expressions in the painting. Bedecked in the brightest blue coat, Elihu Yale himself gazes placidly at a point above the head of his tablemate. The only other distinct human figure in the painting is the enslaved African boy with a silver collar around his neck. He is located in the periphery, almost as though Verelst added him as an afterthought, head tilted towards Elihu Yale. Painted as if he is in the dark, he blends into the background next to the other subjects of the painting. Behind him are aristocratic children at play, blurry, yet brighter and easier to see.

In 1970, the group portrait was gifted from the Devonshire Collections, the store

INSIGHT

of paintings and paraphernalia owned by the relatives of Lord Devonshire, to the YCBA. However, when the museum opened to the public in 1977, the painting was not displayed because the director and curators deemed it to be “of inferior quality” compared to other works in the collection, according to the Elihu Yale Portrait Research Team (which consists of members Eric James, Abigail Lamphier, Lori Misura, David K. Thompson, and Edward Town).

In 1980, former Head of Berkeley College Robin William Winks requested the painting to be hung in the Berkeley dining hall. There, the portrait was displayed for 17 years, with a brief break in 1981 when the painting was temporarily placed in the YCBA as part of “The Conversation Piece: Arthur Devis and His Contemporaries” exhibition. In 2014, the Elihu Yale portrait was displayed as the opening painting in another YCBA exhibition called “Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture,” and it remained in the museum until fall 2020.

Then, it was replaced with Titus Kaphar’s “Enough About You.” In “Enough About You,” the enslaved child is centered, his expression defiant, his neck without a collar. The other figures, including Elihu Yale and his relatives, are not visible at all; the rest of the canvas is crumpled.

Currently, the Elihu Yale portrait is in temporary storage — and “Enough About You” has, since May 2021, moved back to the custody of the Collection of Arthur Lewis and Hau Nguyen.

The Elihu Yale Portrait Research Team wrote in a collective email that no other replacements have been found, or requested, because “the wall where these works previously hung is now intentionally void of art — only the two object labels and a text panel describing [the research project on the Elihu Yale portrait] remain.”

Since October, the Elihu Yale portrait has been housed in the YCBA painting conservation studio for study and analysis, including infrared spectroscopy and a historical investigation into its painter’s capabilities and former career as part of an official research project planned when Courtney Martin took on the director role for the YCBA in 2019.

Why was the portrait replaced in the first place? It wasn’t purely for political reasons, and it wasn’t purely for research purposes, either, according to Martin.

“The current research project commenced immediately following George Perry Floyd Jr.’s murder on May 25, 2020,” she said.“The aim of this project is to make transparent the history of the painting and the multiple ways in which its complex past has been explored.”

For all the attention it has received, the painting is unnoticed outside of its association with Yale, said Adam Chen, head guide of the YCBA’s Student Guide Program. He cites the painting’s link to Yale as a major factor behind the YCBA’s decision to display it, although he clarifies that historical worth was also a factor. Even so, visitors looked down on the painting for being “not technically skilled, ugly, ghastly.” The Elihu Yale Portrait Research Team described how one reviewer decried the painting as “a gross and nightmarish portrait of Elihu Yale, the Duke of Devonshire and friends.”

As a YCBA student guide from 2017 to 2020, Sohum Pal created and delivered a tour for museum visitors. His tour theme was “Spectacles of Race and Empire,” and focused on depictions of racialized people. He did not include the Elihu Yale portrait in his tour.

Pal is critical of the portrait’s replacement for Titus Kaphar’s painting. “To what extent is Yale trying to provide itself ideological cover?” he said. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. We will have no civil rights movement until there is a convergence of interests between oppressed and oppressors. The question I would see with the Titus Kaphar replacement — where is the convergence?”

Yale Daily News | 19

INSIGHT

The painting was discussed in a few of the art history classes Pal took, however. “We mostly talked about the colors, the boy, the way that power is directed by the gaze, and by the organization of the painting — boy to the side,” he said. He does not think that the boy is present in the painting because of “some great gesture of humanism,” he said. He believes the painting uses the boy as a “symbol of power,” and noted that Elihu Yale, as a former governor of India, was complicit in slavery and colonialism. “He is using a slave to represent racialized dominion over lesser nations, darker nations.” Following the 2020 BLM protests, Pal gained a “better understanding of what this painting was meant to do: it’s a reminder of, and testament to, racialized power.”

The Elihu Yale Portrait Research Team concurred: “The depiction of a child of African heritage wearing a metal collar around his neck was and is disturbing; that has not changed.”

However, they noted that “the accurate identification of more of the sitters in the painting has changed our opinion about when, where and why the painting was made, and gives us a better chance of recovering the personhood of the child in the painting.” Through comparisons with other paintings, the children in the background have been identified as Elihu Yale’s grandchildren, and the seated man in a blue coat previously thought to be William Cavendish is now agreed to be Dudley North, Elihu Yale’s son-in-law.

Through observing their ages as represented in the painting, and

20 | September 2021

keeping in mind the painting’s own age (previously thought to have been painted in 1708, but the presence of the Prussian Blue pigment indicates it was painted between 1719 and 1721, the year of Elihu Yale’s death), the enslaved child’s date of birth has been estimated to be 1712.

“Should we talk about the history of slavery only with the Eli Yale portrait, or when it’s seemingly intentionally left out by the artist?”

Given the painting’s racial stigma and lack of technical artistry, many believe the painting should not be on display, said Chen. But he believes that “only by having images like this on display are we able to confront uncomfortable histories of the university and British art in general.” Members of the YCBA staff generally concur. The Elihu Yale Portrait Research Team pointed out that “the prominence of the padlock around this collar and the young age of the child make this painting difficult to encounter, yet it is only one of the many sources, documents, and paintings — in our collection and in others — that bear witness to this distressing and often overlooked aspect of Britain’s history.”

The dilemma that now surrounds the Elihu Yale portrait

is a familiar one on campus and across the United States, concerning Confederate paraphernalia, and especially statues.

Only a few years ago, Grace Hopper was known as Calhoun College (John C. Calhoun was not involved with the Confederacy, but was vehemently pro-slavery and was subsequently honored by the Confederacy). Proponents of keeping Confederate statues standing assert that they are integral to teaching history and emphasize the sculptures’ artistic merit. Meanwhile, critics state that keeping the statues makes the statement that racist figures, and their racism, are still worthy of our respect and adulation. They argue that museums should do a better job of teaching history, without needless and dangerous glorification of national sins.

Chen raised an interesting question about the costs of “censoring” history in an art museum: “Should we talk about the history of slavery only with the Eli Yale portrait, or when it’s seemingly intentionally left out by the artist?” He mentioned William Hogarth’s “Portrait of a Family,” a painting in the YCBA, which depicts a family and their slave. At some point, the painting was cut into two, so that now the only evidence that a slave was ever depicted manifests in two dark hands holding a serving platter. “At one point it showed the history of slavery. Then it was cut out,” Chen said.

The general consensus among the YCBA staff is that museums do not best serve their educational purpose by either “beautifying” ugly parts of history

INSIGHT

//ZOE BERG

(calling the enslaved child a “servant”), or by pretending that past atrocities simply never happened.

By purposefully displaying a variety of objects to avoid advancing any one ideology, museums can conscientiously respond to the complexities of racial history in something so full of colonialism and imperialism as a collection of British art. For example, Chen said the YCBA includes both a bust honoring former British Prime Minister William Pitt and a series of political cartoons that mock him.

Martin hopes to have “Enough About You” return to the YCBA at some point. Perhaps the two works will hang alongside one another to “continue the conversation,” she said.

“By collapsing and reworking the composition of the historic portrait — literally reframing the picture — Kaphar’s work was most instructive and inspirational in its

ability to refocus our attention on concerns surrounding representations of slavery and Black bodies,” she said.

As propaganda demonstrates, art has a keen ability to affect the ideals and unconscious biases of a people, especially when associated with a famous figure.

It is important that when harmful or hateful art is recognized as such, it is not presented as equally benign as artworks without hateful ideologies attached. Still, whitewashing the past by erasing discussions about historical atrocities is counterproductive.

Museums play a large role in public education by presenting the past in its proper context. In the past, Elihu Yale was considered the most important figure in his portrait, his family members second and the enslaved child merely an afterthought. In fact, the first 1981 catalog entry for the Elihu Yale portrait did not men-

tion the enslaved boy at all. Now, priorities, both political and artistic, have shifted.

On Sept. 12 and 13, several mini-portraits of the enslaved child, printed scans like the Woolsey photograph but in color this time, manifested on Old Campus bulletin boards. As of the time of this writing, such portraits can be also seen on utility poles near campus. They are accompanied by a QR code and the hashtag #RECLAIMTHECHILD. Scanning the code brings up the #ReclaimTheChild website, hosted

by Making A Village Radio, which calls upon 100 artists to “reclaim the child in the 21st century” by painting him. The resulting paintings from this project are intended to be displayed to the public and sold at auction to raise funds for underserved communities. Instead of the figure of Elihu Yale, the humanity and dignity of the unnamed, anonymous enslaved child captures attention and inspires action now.

Yale Daily News | 21

POEM

BARED

BY LEILA JACKSON

there are pomegranates in your cheeks. a saccharine smile leaves the sap

over their sweet flesh as she tears them open. i bring

in its place. your eyes sparkle with the sugar. there’s a tree

my lips to the severed, salted slices. the juices swirl in my mouth.

in the backyard of my childhood home.

under your skin, the hue of your cheeks grows redder

our stems grow irreversibly intertwined with that of others. my abuela pulls fruits from their roots. she pours salt 22 | September 2021

as our bodies search for the sensation(al); selfish skin stirring skin. i’ve grown tired of belonging to others,

yet this doesn’t stop the pomegranates in your cheeks from bursting. you tell me we deserve to know who we are. to ourselves, at the least, we should be bared. as reverie engulfs me, i wonder how we can even come close.

PORTRAIT

With Food We Grow: A Portrait of My Mother

BY DANI FLORES

BAKLAVA When you enter Havenly, you’re welcomed by the warm chatter of people enjoying hibiscus tea with baklava, falafel wraps and mujadarra. Busy college students working on laptops and businesspeople on their coffee breaks are all connected by the flavors of caramelized onions, fresh hummus and the crunch

of baklava. Inside the kitchen, behind the veil of the white swinging doors, is where the preparation happens, the creation of falafel dough, the layering of baklava sheets. There, my mother flows across the kitchen to make sure everyone is served a meal worth smiling for.

My mother, Maria, spends most mornings in the Havenly kitchen cleaning, prepping ingredients and greeting everyone else as they arrive for their shifts.

She is the kitchen manager of Havenly, a community café that employs and supports immigrant and refugee women, and takes on the responsibility of preparing falafel and other Middle Eastern treats, training the community’s new fellows and keeping track of inventory.

“I hate taking inventory, but I have to master it,” she told me when she arrived late from work one evening. Recently, my mother has learned Excel to keep a spreadsheet of all the items in the kitchen: to count every cucumber, box of gloves and sheet of phyllo dough. Sitting at our kitchen table, I watched her fill in a column, check her list for errors, erase her work and start over.

My mother was born and raised in Mexico, and immigrated to New Haven about 20 years ago to find better opportunities for work to send money home. She is often saddened by the fact that she has to live so far away from her family, but she reminds herself of Mexico through her cooking.

At home she makes traditional Mexican dishes from tomatillo salsas, chiles rellenos and memelas.

She is most known for her tamales, made with love and wrapped in a corn husk. My Tía Araceli taught her how to make them from scratch and they would

//YASMINE HALMANE

Yale Daily News | 23

PORTRAIT

spend their weekends kneading dough by hand and delivering orders of hundreds of tamales for parties and family gatherings. I remember they would tightly wrap their hair with bandanas, making sure no strands dropped into the food, and no one with malas vibras (“bad vibes”) was allowed into the kitchen, because we believe that the tamales won’t cook if we make them upset. I was rarely allowed into the kitchen because I was usually grumpy when I had to wait for the tamales to cook. Tamales are my favorite dish because of their doughy texture that makes them feel light. My mother’s tamales are special because the dough is never too soggy or stiff. She has made thousands of tamales and knows the perfect mixture of masa, salt and lard.

I always knew my mother was a skilled cook, but I had thought that skill was limited to Mexican food because that was what she knew best. Before the pandemic, she did not have much time to experiment with new dishes because she was juggling a job in fast food and work as a housekeeper. When she had the time to cook for us, she quickly

24 | September 2021

boiled soup, made salsa and seasoned beans — all tasks and recipes she had memorized. I watched her go through the routine of work, eat, sleep, leaving early in the morning and coming home late at night. I hated knowing that she had very little control over her time and life outside of work.

Last fall, I told her about the Havenly fellowship, which offers paid job training opportunities to immigrant and refugee women. I thought it would be helpful for my mother to have a job that encouraged her to grow and learn skills like using a computer or understanding restaurant administration. At first she was scared to take the risk of a new experience, but she knew the fellowship would allow her to have more time to spend with family.

As my mother began the fellowship, she’d bring home samples of what she created in the kitchen.

Not even a month into the program, she brought home baklava that melted in my mouth, and I was surprised when she told me it was from a batch she had made herself.

Baklava, she told me, is tricky to cook. The phyllo dough can crack

if you are not gentle enough, and the sheets burn easily so you must keep a watchful eye on them as they bake.

When I asked my mother’s secret to mastering the art of baking baklava, she just told me that it was effort. “Whenever I do something new, I want to make sure that I practice and do it well.” To master baklava, you need patience and precision. In the Havenly kitchen, she carefully watched Nieda, her instructor, as she demonstrated the steps for each dish. Because of the language gap between them (Nieda’s first language is Arabic and my mother’s is Spanish), Maria focused on the movement of Nieda’s hands, the spices she grabbed, instead of the words. Every time she stepped into the kitchen, she repeated images of the cooking process in her head. Eventually, she learned the words of certain ingredients in Arabic and adapted to the fast pace of the kitchen. As she continued through the process of learning new dishes alongside her colleagues, she learned about new seasonings as well. Cumin stands out — it is rarely used in Mexican cooking but is a staple in Middle

PORTRAIT Eastern cuisine. Food is a kind of universal language to her. She has learned which ingredients make a dish spicy, smoky or salty, and she appreciates new flavor combinations: grape leaves and tomato sauce, chicken and baba ghanoush. Understanding the food of different cultures takes love, she reminds me, and when people eat food we are reminded of that love and feel joy.

FALAFEL SANDWICH I always wondered what a day in the kitchen looked like for my mother, as I had never joined her at work before. Cooking with her at home is a challenge because she works fast. When we cook together, she gives me small tasks like chopping vegetables or shredding chicken; She inevitably catches up to me and finishes my duties. “I enjoy working by myself,” she tells me. I know my help slows her down, but she always enjoys laughing at my unevenly cut vegetables.

“This one looks like a finger,” she says and points to a giant piece of carrot.

My mother invited me to work with her in the Havenly kitchen one evening to help prepare 100 chicken shawarma and falafel wraps. We enter the kitchen and join Nieda, the head chef of Havenly. Maria tells me that most of the ingredients are already prepared, so all we have to do is assemble the sandwiches. First, I put dishes into their place, count bags for the sandwiches and bring out the hummus for the wraps.

“Nieda is speedy, follow her pace,” my mother warns me.

Nieda and I form a small assembly line of wraps, I smear hummus on tortilla wraps and hand them off to Nieda so she can fill them with chicken and tabbouleh. I slightly lag behind Nieda, and I watch my mother walk through the kitchen preparing fresh falafel.

The dough forms perfect spheres in her hands, and she calculates the amount of time they fry in oil so accurately that all of the falafel is browned to a uniform color. When she cooks, she never trips and her hands never tremble. Neither my mother nor

Nieda use measuring tools — it’s obvious they are professionals.

They work efficiently together when they cook, they know when some of them has run out of an ingredient, they judge each other’s food, “This sauce is too watery,” Nieda tells my mother.

TAMARIND JUICE My mother admitted to me that she never invited me to work with her before because she did not want me to see how people bossed her around. In her previous jobs, she was only seen as a worker and her managers and coworkers would not even greet her; In Havenly, she is treated like a human, someone with incredible potential. She is invited to board meetings and special events where she contributes ideas to further the organization’s visions of empowering immigrant and refugee women.

Cooking in Havenly, she was not anxious like those days when she only cooked when she had the time. When she cooks with love, you can feel it in the spice of her tomatillo salsas, the crisp shells of her taquitos dorados, the light aroma that effuses from her tamarind juice. Once we finished the last falafel wrap, she still had a smile on her face, a sign that there were no malas vibras in the kitchen.

On our walk back home, we exchanged our memories of being in the kitchen together until we became exhausted. My mother opened bottles of tamarind juice she had prepared earlier that day and we both took large gulps. It was sweet with a refreshingly bitter taste that eased the heat.

Yale Daily News | 25

FEATURE

RECONSIDERING THE SUMMER INTERNSHIP

Summer break is no longer a break. Is it privilege or exploitation?

BY ISABELLA LI

T

o those who know her, Michelle Bao’s July 13 tweet was both totally expected and a complete bombshell. “very excited to announce that i got so burnt out from this year of remote work that today i dropped nearly all of my commitments to visit friends and live out

of a minivan for an indefinite amount of time,” she tweeted, attaching a photo of herself sitting next to the small bed in the back of her renovated vehicle.

Bao, a rising junior Computer Science major at Stanford, is one of my best friends from high school. I’ve always known her to be spontaneous and bold — debating those she disagreed with, riding a Ripstik down our school hallways, reaching for the blueberry barbecue sauce at a local burger joint. In 2018, she moved across the country to attend college in California, leaving our North Carolina-based friend group behind. Her 2021 minivan decision was, in this way, a direct spiritual descendent of the past.

But she is also one of the most professionally ambitious people I know. At the start of the pandemic, she juggled a part-time internship at Uber with spring quarter classes. She worked at Bloomberg over the summer of 2020, then, refusing to partake in another year of remote learning, took a gap year to work for the ACLU and the New York Times.

“I fell into this mentality of, ‘Oh, since we’re doing remote work, we can be extra productive,’” Bao said. “But I think I definitely sacrificed personal joy and fulfillment.”

When she found herself dissatisfied with her summer research position, she quit, commiting to traveling around the East Coast full-time.

“It’s just something that I’ve been wanting to do for this past year,” she said. “It’s fine that I’m not extracting specific points of value or achieving specific things.”

After rigging up the back of her family’s old Honda Odyssey with a small bed, rugs, curtains and a water pump, she drove from her home in Greensboro, North // SARAH FENG

26 | September 2021

FEATURE Carolina, to New York City. There, she spent weeks couch-surfing with friends before making her way up the Northeast. She hunted for free showers and slept in hotel parking lots. She visited thrift stores and ate good food. In Portland, Maine, she ventured alone to a speakeasy and left with two new friends in their mid-twenties.

“I feel like this has actually been the most fun summer I’ve had,” Bao said. “I’m free of commitments, feeling liberated.”

I spent my own summer in a medical school lab at Yale, following a distinct routine: the same oatmeal for breakfast, the same walk downtown, the same benches and equipment. I was funded by a Yale research fellowship that, assuming I worked standard hours, paid less than minimum wage. Part of me could not fathom her life, the uncertainty and fearlessness of it all.

But another part of me longed for her freedom — regardless of how much I enjoyed or was learning from my work.

When I connected with friends from Yale also spending their summers in New Haven, Bao’s van life felt even more alien. “What are you doing this summer?” became a popular conversation opener, to which every person, unless they were taking classes, answered with an internship, research role or otherwise career-advancing position.

For many students at schools like Yale and Stanford, summer has become a key period for career advancement. According to the annual summer activities survey conducted by Yale’s Office of Career Services (OCS), in 2020, 25 percent of Yale students held paid internships, while 18 percent held

unpaid internships and a little over 10 percent conducted some form of research.

What conceptions of productivity stopped me and my peers from giving ourselves a break and following in Bao’s steps? Was the value gained from our own summer experiences — financial compensation, lines on our resume — worth the sacrifice of freedom?

And ultimately, how did my ability to ask these questions reflect my own privilege?

Money, or lack thereof Like Bao, Will (name changed for fear of employer retribution) traveled this summer. His experience, however, came directly from his employer, the financial services company Citadel, which flew its interns out to a retreat in Palm Beach by private jet this June.

Last year, in a sharp contrast to most other companies, which cancelled their summer 2020 programs or translated them to a virtual format, Citadel rented out five-star resorts in Florida and Wisconsin.

For two months, its interns worked in-person in COVID-safe bubbles and were even provided social activities — canoeing, karaoke, golf lessons — for their downtime.

This year, though the program returned to offices in New York City and Chicago, the perks remained.

In addition to the retreat to Palm Beach, for example, Citadel interns were treated to corporate housing in high-rise buildings, Uber credits for their commutes and covered meals. And, of course, there’s the salary. “I make more in a summer

than what m y high school E n glish teacher made in a year,” Will said.

But the luxury resorts and apartments come at a high price.

Will noted that a typical Citadel intern works twelve hours a day, five days a week — already more grueling than

Yale Daily News | 27

FEATURE

the standard 9-to-5 one might expect of a job or internship. This summer, Will and some of his peers have at times experienced even worse: workdays that extend beyond thirteen hours, with additional tasks to be completed at night from home or on the weekends.

“I wake up, get ready as fast as possible, Uber to the office, stay there from eight to eight, Uber straight back to my apartment, work a bit, go to bed, and then rinse and repeat. The only time I step outside during the workweek is going to and from my Ubers,” Will said.

For Will, the work becomes even more draining when he considers its implications. “At the end of the day, what’s the point?” he asked. “If you’re at a finance firm, then the goal is just to make money for outside investors or the top people at the firm.

I would rather work on problems that more directly benefit society, but unfortunately, in the society we live in, there are these perverse incentives to not help other people.”

Lucrative internships in finance or its sibling field, consulting, have an outsized influence over

28 | September 2021

campus culture, noted Diego Haro ’22, a Global Affairs major at Yale who interned at Boston Consulting Group, or BCG, this summer. “The second you get [to Yale], you learn about investment banking and consulting,” he said.

Haro aspires for a future career that will include “impactful, meaningful work” in issues like homelessness, poverty and mass incarceration, he told me.

This year, he worked for a public sector client and has a more optimistic outlook than Will about the meaning of his employment.

“At the end of the day, if your employees don’t want to do a certain type of work, then obviously, [the company] won’t be doing that sort of work,” Haro said. “I think there are very tangible ways that I’ve learned and seen of actually affecting change.”

BCG doesn’t expect interns to work on weekends and has instituted biweekly mental health check-ins. But the job is still grueling. “I would not say you have a good work-life balance,” Haro told me. “But I would say it’s fair given what you signed up for and what they pay you.”

These considerations loom large for Haro, who was raised in Sacramento in a lower to middle income background. “I’m now almost making more than my parents. It’s kind of crazy,” he said.

“That’s part of why I’m working there, the financial stability.”

For Blake Bridge ’23, a Global Affairs major, his State Department internship at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin has had a more direct connection to his future career goals. “[Through studying at Yale] I can learn all I want about international relations.

But you can’t learn what it’s like to be a diplomat or to work at an embassy. You have to experience that [in real life],” Bridge said.

“I’ve learned a ton, and that’s been vital for me in understanding what I want to do next summer or when I graduate.”

Though his program is remote, Bridge chose to divide his summer between London and Berlin so that he could work the same hours as the rest of his office.

Unlike Will and Haro, he has no complaints about his work-life balance and has enjoyed exploring Europe on his weekends.

But Bridge’s experience comes with a caveat: internships in the federal government are typically unpaid. Bridge, who navigated several complications due to Yale’s policies on international travel during the pandemic, supported his work through fellowships awarded by the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. In this way, Yale students are given a key advantage over students at other universities, who must participate in similar opportunities on their own dime.

Unpaid internships have become flashpoints for discussions over labor exploitation. These conversations date back to 1938, when, following the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, which established guidelines protecting workers’ rights and wages. A 1947 Supreme Court ruling set a precedent that labor could be uncompensated if it had training purposes, providing legal justification for unpaid internships.

This was reinforced in 2011, when two unpaid interns who

FEATURE

worked on the set of the film “Black Swan” sued Fox Searchlight Pictures for violation of the FLSA. The Second Circuit ruled against the interns, arguing that they were not obligated to receive compensation because they were the “primary beneficiaries” of the arrangement, learning more from the company than the company gained from their work.

Sarah Feng ’25 observed that unpaid internships also reflect privilege, as only those with a substantial level of financial security can afford to take them over a paid internship or job. Feng deferred enrollment before her first year — cutting her off from Yale fellowships — to work two unpaid internships: one at the San Francisco district attorney’s office where she corresponded with prisoners and one conducting research for the Virtual Student Federal Service at the State Department.

“I was living purely off of my parents’ money and our financial situation,” Feng said. “I was spending eight hours a day doing a lot of work that was giving me a cool experience, but I had other friends who were honestly equally as qualified as me [who] couldn’t take on things like that, and instead had to take on other jobs that were less meaningful.”

Internships often help students explore their interests or provide valuable paths for employment. A 2017 Gallup survey, for example, found that having relevant internship experience more than doubled recent graduates’ chances of having a secure job immediately after leaving school. In this way, the inaccessibility of unpaid internships to some may uphold existing class divides.

Yale and other elite universities have programs to lower these barriers for their students. In 2020, 31 percent of Yale students funded their summer experience with help from the university. Many claim the Summer Experience Award, which provides a stipend for any student on financial aid to pursue an unpaid or underfunded research, arts, government or non-profit position. Students can also access fellowships from a variety of other sources, such as their residential colleges or Dwight Hall.

Jeanine Dames, director of the Office of Career Strategy, noted that this is a huge equalizer for first-generation, low-income, or FGLI, students. “We have not seen a sig-

nificant difference between our FGLI students and non-FGLI students in the rate they participate in unpaid internships. In fact, we see a slightly higher percentage of FGLI students accepting unpaid internships,” Dames wrote in an email. Dames cited preliminary results from the 2021 OCS summer activities survey, which has not yet been concluded at the time of writing: 72.3 percent of first-generation respondents held a paid or unpaid internship or research position this year, compared to 67.6 percent of non-first-generation respondents.

Privilege, productivity, and patterns of history Modern-day internships have their roots in tradesmen apprenticeships dating back to the Middle Ages. The medical field first popularized the term “internship” at the turn of the 20th century, in reference to the period where newly graduated doctors gain more practical training before launching their independent careers.

Industrialization drove white-collar industries such as business and engineering to professionalize and adopt their own expectations for experience-based internships. Over the coming decades, Census data indicates that the labor market became increasingly saturated with college graduates, with attendance rates more than tripling between 1940 and 1980. During the same period, companies and universities increasingly expanded their internship programs, cementing internships as an unspoken expectation for many college students’ educations by the end of the century.

The archives of the Yale Daily News reflect this history. Mentions of the

word “internship” appeared in med-

// YALE DAILY NEWS

Yale Daily News | 29

FEATURE

“I make more in a summer than what my high school English teacher made in a year,” Will said.

ical contexts in the 1920s before exponentially increasing throughout the 60s and 70s. More intriguing, however, are the clear ways in which Yale students have always had exclusive and unique access to internships, both paid and unpaid.

The first non-medical reference to an “internship,” for example, came in 1938. That year, United States Representative Frederick Davenport (NY-R) visited New Haven to interview Yale students for unpaid government internships, which were set aside for “Seniors and Graduates from the leading universities in the country.” In the 1950s, the university sponsored its first official internship program, the Yale Summer Intern Program in Government, which placed students in positions throughout the federal government and provided funds of 50 dollars per week for unfunded opportunities. By the 1960s and 1970s, similar programs proliferated — Urban Studies internships, Dwight Hall internships, public policy internships

30 | September 2021

in Washington coordinated by the now-defunct Summer Term Office — helping students to secure and afford government and nonprofit work. In the same period, fellowships also became available to fund students’ research.

Yale students received special attention from private companies, too. “Who says liberal arts isn’t good preparation for business,” wrote the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance company in an advertisement in the News for its summer 1968 internship program, which held interviews on campus that February.

In 1975, the Summer Term Office facilitated a program to help students find corporate internships, leaning on connections with “alumni in Yale clubs across the country” who specifically “elected chairmen to assist students.” Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, companies such as the New York Times, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company held interviews and information sessions on campus. Other companies, including Procter and Gamble, Grace and Bain and Company, took out ads inviting students to apply to their summer internships.

Yale’s internship culture can, at some points, feel incredibly disconnected from the rest of the labor market. “What’s the difference between a summer job and a summer internship,” read a

FEATURE

1985 ad in the News for a book called “Getting Work Experience.”

Yale students, the ad implied, were destined for the latter.

The numbers reflect this: In the Summer of 2020, while almost 67 percent of returning Yale seniors held an internship or conducted research, just 8 percent spent their summers in another type of paid job such as a camp counselor.

The entire concept of internships is, after all, paradoxical for students at schools like Yale. We’re beneficiaries of decades-old institutional privileges that give us the information and financial support to pursue opportunities in white collar sectors like government, academia, tech, finance, and consulting.

But beneath all summer internships is a capitalistic system, one that forces us to choose between passion and salary, and one that insinuates that productivity — for-profit or nonprofit, paid or unpaid — must persist, even during summer vacation.

That mentality can be exhausting, Feng observed. “I would sometimes feel unable to move for a while, because I felt I had let myself down the past month, even though I was trying really hard to do what I wanted to do — even though I was already fortunate to have these opportunities,” Feng told me. She, in addition to holding two unpaid internships in her gap year, spent time away from her Bay Area home to live in New York City this summer, working as a creative writing tutor and writing a novel. “I started questioning, was productivity something that was actually making me happy? Or was it the semblance of produc-

tivity that was fueling my sense of self-worth?”

Bao, traveling around in her van, unemployed without a clear goal for herself, might seem to be rejecting our capitalistic obsession with productivity altogether. In reality, she was only able to spend a summer unemployed because of multiple layers of financial security. “Ultimately, if my situation was different and I had family members that needed me to take care of them, there’s no way that this would have been a viable path,” Bao said. She emphasized that the various internships s h e had

worked over the past year — internships she accessed in part because “elite institutions give you a huge advantage” — helped her accumulate the necessary savings to pursue her summer travels.

In this way, she is just like any finance, consulting or government intern, deeply intertwined with the privilege and productivity that saturates our capitalistic internship culture. That, she believes, is exactly the point.

“It’s very naïve to think that a personal change can wholly reject a capitalistic mindset,” Bao said. “Rejecting capitalistic values requires you to have embodied them in some other form.

And that’s a huge part of capitalism in our current system, a huge problem. There’s no consent.

There’s no alternative. There’s nothing else.”

// EMILY ZHANG

Yale Daily News | 31

PAINTING

ON FINISHING TOUCHES PAINTING BY KATIA VANLANDINGHAM

32 | September 2021

ESSAY

AN EXERCISE OF ARTISTS ON ARTISTS ESSAY BY MARIE SANFORD Outside, people are protesting for Yale to pay its fair share. Or at least that’s what the sign says, from the brief glimpse that Katia manages to catch.

We are in Saybrook F21 together, the empty suite across from her own. We’re listening to music made by queer women (first Arlo Parks, now King Princess) as Katia paints our friends and I write this piece to procrastinate writing my art history essay on the sacrality of Grove Street Cemetery.

Normally when I write, I make it that day’s affair. I wake up early and have a big breakfast. I leave my phone in the bathroom so as to only use it when I’m peeing. I put on noise canceling head-

Her movements are not arbitrary. But she doesn’t seem to place pressure on them either.

She just thinks, then acts; Thinks, then acts. phones so that I can “lock in.” I don’t move until I’m too hungry to think.

And my subject matter is usually me.

But today, I sloppily eat leftover Special K, spilling soy milk all over the undressed mattress I am sitting on, as I watch Katia paint someone else’s everyday routine.

The subject matter is Angel and Stefano — one using their phone, another his laptop — sitting side by side on their red couch against the dark wood of Say-

brook’s suites. Katia’s just now crossed into the left panel. Her continuity is good, save maybe the lines of the radiator. But I doubt those are touches her painter’s eye will leave unfinished.

When Katia told me weeks ago that she’d chosen this to be her final term painting, I was secretly skeptical. It seemed too simple to be inspiring.

And sitting in F21 now, I’m still a little miffed that if she was going to choose a mundane subject, she didn’t choose to paint me. But these earlier assumptions fade away as I forget what she’s painting and zero in on how she’s painting.

Literally speaking, it’s a brush here, a dab there. And I suppose part of her process is listening to music aloud to “lock in” — we are listening to her fourhour-long playlist “college 13 paint.”

The most exciting thing about watching Katia paint is when she steps back from the canvas to plot her next move. Her hand doesn’t waver when she extends the brush. Her movements are not arbitrary. But she doesn’t seem to place pressure on them either. She just thinks, then acts; Thinks, then acts.

An admission on my part here: I don’t know what makes a painting “great.”

This fact doesn’t bring me anxiety — I have no ambition to be a painter. But I do wonder if a painter’s greatness, like a writer’s, comes from their ability to mold the truth into something that evokes visceral emotions. For me, the most exciting part about writing is the power of form to convey meaning. I love run-on sentences when they serve to convey disorientation. I love sentence fragments when they serve to convey numbness — or anger. I love stories that end where they begin, and I

love stories that spiral out of control. I love when the writing behaves how the writer, or protagonist, feels.

Katia tells me she took several pictures of Angel and Stefano sitting in their suite, and for the final composition, she is stitching together elements of all of the pictures based on where the light in the photo hit best. (“Caroline” by Arlo Parks is playing now.) True, the composition seems to glimmer and shift as your body moves across the frame — a fact I only notice when I get up to pee.

I was wrong. The piece — not only its methodology, but also its subject matter — is exciting precisely because it is not concerned with objectivity.

Looking at Angel and Stefano, I almost feel embarrassed to be intruding on the private moment. I feel that I am witnessing a ritual — that 30 minutes or so of lazy unwinding after a long day, before the evening’s activities ramp up.

Or maybe I am watching a moment where Angel and Stefano happen to get out of Zoom class at the same time so they chat in their common room briefly before retreating back to their individual rooms. Maybe they’re secretly fighting. Or maybe they’re both doing that nose-exhale thing while scrolling Twitter and Angel is about to lean over to show Stefano something funny on their phone. Or maybe none of these things are true and this was the first thing they both thought of when Katia requested they “act normal.”

I am amazed that Katia is able to paint normally with me watching over her shoulder. My presence here has felt, even to me, transgressive. But goodness feels fleeting these days. (“Fleet of Hope” by Indigo Girls now.) I stay.

Yale Daily News | 33

PORTRAIT

The Mathematical Genius from Silliman’s Attic

BY ISA DOMINGUEZ

L

ast June, my friend and I found the door to a makeshift attic inside of Silliman College’s Grove Street tower. It was locked, but with a little jiggling of a plastic knife, my friend and I accessed the ladder and climbed up to the dark, hot, empty space. When we turned on our flashlights,

//DALE PETERSON

34 | September 2021

we realized that we weren’t the first to enter: there was colorful graffiti, various class years and doodles painted on the beams, a warning that said “Watch ya head.” A lone chair sat in a corner, a crochet pillow with a unicorn tossed across the room. Then, underneath dust, insulation fluff, haphazardly placed wood planks and metal pipes, I found a scattered stack of letters, photos and documents, dated from 1968 to 1969.

More than half of the letters were written in German and some of the notes and envelopes had math equations scribbled on them. From the letters I could read, I noticed a few things: a mention of the moon landing, the Beatles, a call for an “open discussion” at Ingalls Rink with several signatures, ICYE (which I found out later to be the International Christian Youth Exchange), and the name Dale Harvey Peterson.

In this pile, there was a medium-sized brown envelope titled “Unfinished letters.”

There were notes, questions, and index cards inside it, but one blue letter stood out. Unlike the other letters that touched on everyday events in Germany or in Sacramento, California, this letter read like one piece of a deep

PORTRAIT conversation: Dale admitted to a friend named Rick that he felt like Benjamin Braddock, the main protagonist from the 1967 movie “The Graduate.” “[I’m] learning all about many of the wonderful meaningless things I’ve done once in a while but cut off from meaningful contact with almost everyone…. I have no capacity for enthusiasm…. And of course I want, like Ben, [for] the future ‘to be different.’” I had no idea who Benjamin Braddock was, and I knew much less about Dale. I didn’t understand why these letters were hidden in Silliman. Were they abandoned? Or could they have been deliberately left as a sort of time capsule?

After tracking him down via Ancestry.com and a couple of university math department websites, I first spoke with Dale over Zoom on Aug. 4, 19 days before he turned 70. His dark-gray hair curled past his slightly asymmetrical ears and stubble covered his upper lip and his chin. He wore wide framed, black-rimmed glasses and a white shirt. Behind him stood colorful shelves filled with math books. He relies on Ethernet and he doesn’t have a cell phone. He spoke deep-

ly and he erupted in laughter after saying a joke — or what seemed to be an obvious fact. In contrast to his 1968 letter to Rick, he had a warm, bubbly sense of humor.

Dale doesn’t know how the letters ended up in the tower. He doesn’t even remember writing them. “They have these little desks in your bedroom… and I could have just put them somewhere where I couldn’t see them or something…. Anyway, it’s not any big deal,” he said.

Instead, I learned more about him and how he got from the person in his letters to living alone in Vancouver, Canada. Dale grew up in a small, one-story home in Sacramento, California, near Mira Loma High School, with his older brother John and his younger brothers Burt and Marc. According to Burt, they had one car, got their hair cut at the local air force base for 25 cents, Mom sewed all their clothing and the curtains in the house, and she “always made dinner and had [it] ready for dad when he got home.” The Petersons seemed like a normal family, but they certainly weren’t: Dale was a “world-class mathematician.” In his

sophomore year of high school, he scored the highest in the country through the Mathematical Association of America (a test “taken by more than 280,000 students”) and he was featured in the Sacramento Bee. During his undergraduate career at Yale, he mostly took graduate math courses. He completed his PhD dissertation at Harvard University in 1978 about the “Geometry of the Adjoint Representation of a Complex Semisimple Lie Algebra,” as a Putnam Fellow.

Over the next few years, he gave a series of 22 individual lectures at MIT. He even had a couple of concepts and theorems named after him, such as Peterson’s “Quantum equals Affine” theorem. “You take two totally different things, but they actually sort of intrinsically are really the same,” he explained.

“That’s a very important thing.

Usually has some deeper meaning.”

But Dale halted his work. “I intended to get [the lectures] all written up. It would have been 400 pages,” Dale said. “And I lost my concentration. There were a huge number of things I had to deal with.” He forgot about equations and ideas that he had written down.

From left to right: Burt, Dale, Marc (left photo is from 1978, right photo is from 2014)

Yale Daily News | 35

PORTRAIT

Sheafs of paper remained stacked, untouched and unpublished on desks. His early accomplishments drifted further back and his wallet shrunk. In 1986, he was offered a position at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to teach as an associate professor in entry-level mathematics courses.

He took it.

For 30 years, he never moved up the ranks. “In the opinion of the new chairman, I was not doing any research,” he wrote in an email. He was required to teach twice as many classes as most of his colleagues. Since he taught three morning classes a semester, he had to wake up at 4 a.m. five days a week, sleeping less than five hours a week for 15 of those years.

As much as Dale was devoted to thinking, reading, writing and lecturing about math and dwelling in questions about its infinite dimensions, the field wasn’t as patient: “The work I had done during the previous 10 years, amounting to a series of important discoveries comprising a greater whole, and my MIT lectures… counted for nothing.”

Instead of a mathematician, he “became a ‘zombie…’ one who stumbled, who had to drive the same route each day to avoid getting lost, and who increasingly did not even understand the elementary mathematical courses he taught.”

Wondering used to come naturally to Dale. Burt, Dale’s younger brother, recalled that late at night during the 1960s, while he was in high school, Dale would sit in his room, and he “would have these thoughts, these ideas, and he would write this stuff down.”

36 | September 2021

About what specifically, Burt didn’t know. “He knows stuff in very disparate disciplines,” Burt said in awe. “He has a surprisingly good working knowledge of just an incredible breadth of topics.”

Mathematics wasn’t a part of the world; it was a way to observe and analyze it.

And it didn’t matter where Dale was; he kept thinking. In his letter to Rick, Dale wrote about how a five-day trip in East and West Berlin was “a sharp stimulus to discuss and think — again — about very basic things which have been disturbing and stimulating me for the last two years,” including mathematical, political, philosophical and sociological issues: “Authority; a feeling of being caged in; Gulf between generations; School; Maturity; Art; Manipulation; where do I go from here; Tolerance; WAR.” The only solution to these things that Dale could “imagine” was “the solution at the end, a union of two people, a solution for two people, but no solution for the society. But what comes in between?” The rest of this letter is left blank, unfinished.

In the same manner, Dale speaks as though he’s writing a letter, but only using commas, colons, and semicolons. In our conversations, he occasionally paused when new memories suddenly came into mind. He would close his eyes and try to remember certain details, or lick his lips between phrases and look away.

What he gazed at, I don’t know.

Maybe he was watching someone in his memory, a picture frame on top of his desk, an open notebook. There was no one behind him passing by, saying that it’s

time for dinner; only the buzz of air conditioning.

He’s aware of the mind’s capacity to forget: “People feel as if their minds can live forever… but they don’t admit to themselves that their brains have gone downhill at all.... And so people actually fool themselves,” he said.

He’s aware that he fools himself: “I still believe that I’m actually younger than I am.” As he spoke, fragments of memories intertwined with subjects like American politics in the ’60s, algae blooms, the Vietnam War, human motivations, aging, death and the cultural and philosophical differences amongst mathematicians and physicists all tied together in a single sentence without transitions. Everything was crammed in, almost as though there was always something more he wanted to say.

Although he says that he thinks in “terms of things that people actually know,” he’s confused by what motivates people, what influences their attitudes towards others. On our calls, he would often refer to others as “human beings” instead of “people.” Thirty minutes into our first Zoom call, he admitted, “I’m actually a person that doesn’t really know very much about other human beings.”

He’s not completely sure why.

“Maybe I could be isolated in my life because I’m a mathematician” — he has numbers to factorize and calculate, new methods he must weave to replace the “lost thread” of his work that unraveled over the years. “The mathematical thing doesn’t change,” he told me, “but the mathematician does.”

FICTION

I Get Misty

BY CAROLEINE JAMES

M

y special-occasion soap, the lemon verbena with the exfoliating beads, was not behind the half-empty Free and Clear conditioner bottle where I’d left it, which meant Heather had taken it again. I pushed back the shower curtain with my nonshampoo hand and hollered in the general direction of the kitchen. Heather practically lived in that coral tile and linoleum room. It was the heart of our apartment — all corridors led to the kitchen — and she laid in wait there every evening, like a spider, to ask me about my day.

“Heather— ” “What’s up?”

“My soap.”

“Oh, your soap!” She poked her round face into the bathroom and pointed, her eyes squinched shut. “I put it with the good green razor. I had a couple of ingrown hairs.”

I fumbled for the soap and ran it along my arms, rivers of ashen skin flakes flowing down my body and into the drain. Only new skin allowed tonight. Infant skin, buffed red, un-

touched by mortal cares. I would scorch myself in hot water and rise renewed from the ashes like a phoenix.

I reached for the good razor.

Heather had left the door slightly open. Heather. She was a vet tech and talked about her body in the same casually explicit way that she’d talk about

“I pumped some lotion into my palm and reached for my legs, but my fingers grasped mist. dog bodies: the smell of her period blood, the regularity of her bowels, the color and consistency of her phlegm during allergy season. She kept asking why Brett never stayed over at our apartment. I only ever get to see the back of his skull as he walks you to his car, she’d say. But Brett was classy. I couldn’t introduce him to Heather and her ingrown hairs.

I massaged soap between my toes and excavated gunk from under my nails with a scrub brush. Brett had the wiry build of an ex college runner.

He wasn’t much taller than me — he’d spent his pubescent energy on speed, not height — and his colors were muted, like he’d been left out in the sun too long. Sandy hair, sandy eyebrows, sandy lashes, sandy skin. He was distant last week, I thought, as scorching rivulets of water pooled in my clavicles and traced the insides of my thighs.

Probably trouble with Christina. I’d keep the conversation light, at first.

Don’t pry, don’t fidget, don’t laugh like a goddamn mental patient.

Steam turned the bathroom hazy and smoothed the sharp edges of the countertop and doorframe. Eddies of warm, wet air curled around my hips and my feet looked faraway. I turned off the shower, stepped out of the tub and groped for a towel. There were no towels on the rack. Heather. I pumped some lotion into my palm and reached for my legs, but my fingers grasped mist. My shoulders were obscured by shower fog. The mirror had become an

Yale Daily News | 37

FICTION opaque, unhelpful, grey blue rectangle. Where are my legs? I threw open the bathroom door and entered the kitchen, where Heather was making hot chocolate.

“What, in your medical opinion, is going on with me?” I asked.

Heather turned around and gave me an appraising look. The mist had followed me out of the bathroom.

Where my body used to be, there was a vague, swirling pinkness.

“In my medical opinion, I don’t know,” said Heather. “Do you want a Pepto?”

“I want you to fix it.”

“Hmm.” Heather put her hands on her hips. “Okay,” she said and left the room.

In her absence, I took stock of my situation. I felt fine. My head, my hands and my feet were solid. The rest — incorporeal. A smudge. A waste of a good bikini wax. Not ideal for a highstakes date night.

“Try this,” Heather said, handing me a dark bundle of cloth. “It should hold you together nicely.” I slipped the long black shift dress over my head. It had a turtleneck and wrist-length sleeves.

“I look like a dowdy witch.”

“Or a sexy nun.”

The dress corralled me into a rough woman-shape. But my waistline was nonexistent and my midsection undulated like a drunken snake. Heather took a step back and squinted.

“We’ll belt it,” she said. *** Dinner was delicious. I ate two slices of honey butter bread, carrot

38 | September 2021

soup in a wooden bowl, beef stroganoff, a quarter of Brett’s Tex-Mex salad (off the low-cal menu) and a scoop of pistachio ice cream, all without feeling bloated. Then, Brett

I suffused the inside of the car, fogging up the windows, twisting through Brett’s hair, settling on his eyelashes and in the swirl of his ear.

The skin on his hands was leathery, the skin under his armpits and behind his knees was tender. I glowed, like predawn light. Brett looked at me the way I’d always wished he’d look at me when I had a body — with awe and desire, as if the conglomeration of parts that made up me was somehow uniquely attractive. As if my arms were better than two million similarly-shaped arms on a million other women.

“Come closer,” he begged.

I floated under his eyelids and nestled in his lungs. He reached for me, but his hands grasped the air.

“Where are you?”

“I’m right here.”

I watched him while he searched for me in the empty car. His mouth was open, his lips were dry, his skinny arms were flailing.

Brett — a creature of defined veins and skim milk and fitness powders of various colors, functions and flavors, of stringency and self-discipline, of tall iced tea women with hair ties on their wrists — made me sad. Try as he might, his body would never be purified. I evaporated out the tailpipe and into the sky, and he didn’t notice when I left. ***

//VALERIE PAVILONIS

drove me to an abandoned Jimmy John’s parking lot. “Christina’s been staying over,” he explained, before reaching for the hem of my dress.

“How was your date?” asked Heather. As usual, she was waiting for me, an “I’m Having One of Those Decades” coffee mug in her fist.

I spread across the floor and covered Heather’s slippers in dew. “It went alright,” I said.

PORTRAIT

Nicolae Zdârcă: History in a Hat Thinking about handiwork and tradition with Bucharest’s oldest hat maker.

BY ANDREEA CIOBANU

“T

his is where Dracula would hide,” said Elena Mușat, our tour guide, as we stepped through a virtually hidden,

narrow passage in Bucharest. The smell of warm pretzels from the corner cafe we had passed lingered in the air as we entered the passageway, while the scarlet walls and the sunlight pouring in from the curved glass ceilings warmed our perception of the alley.

This was Pasajul Englez – the English Passage – once home to an English-style hotel, a high-end brothel and now an apartment building for the citizens of Bucharest. While international visitors and I walked through the passage, we noticed a cardinal red sign halfway through: Palarii „la mesterul Nicu”.

Some of us, members of the Romanian diaspora, read the sign aloud. The rest followed the white hand whose finger pointed to a display window on our left, where every hat imaginable hung on pegs: fedoras, sun hats, panama hats. Through the frosted glass of the door adjacent to the display, a man fiddled with the knobs on his antenna radio until traditional folk music filled the alley’s silence with song. Later, I returned to hear my homeland’s forgotten history through the words of this man: Bucharest’s oldest hat maker.

At 92, Nicolae Zdârcă carries heavy memories of the second World War, communism, the show-trial execution of president Nicolae

//ANDREEA CIOBANU

Yale Daily News | 39

PORTRAIT

Ceaușescu, Romania’s growing diaspora and the pandemic. While he has lived through his share of tough historical moments, Zdârcă does not let them deter his mood, which seems eternally joyful. “He’s 92, but he has the spirit of a 29-year-old,” said Mușat, who had met Zdârcă through her tours. In his plaid shirt and knee-length shorts, Zdârcă’s eyes widen at the sight of a friendly face near his door. He stands at his waist-high desk, with a hat block in hand, and fills Pasajul Englez with infectious laughter.

“If I were to be born again, I would still become a hat maker,” Zdârcă told me in Romanian one day while glancing at his fingers, strong and calloused after almost eighty years of labor. Hats, once a crucial symbol of status and essential protection against the sun, transcend the waves of time. They help us make social statements and remind us of the past: cloche hats of the ’20s, fedoras of the ’50s, bucket hats of the ’80s. Most importantly, they serve as markers of change, each a product of thousands of years of craftsmanship evolving to present needs.

Zdârcă began his own journey with hat-making when he was 14, after he had moved from his hometown in rural Oltenia to live with his uncle in Bucharest. “I hadn’t seen a car before I came to Bucharest,” he remarked as he leaned back in his wooden chair while we talked. “Or a train.” As Romania grappled with the effects of World War II, boys who lived in the countryside often left to search for work

40 | September 2021

opportunities, such as apprenticeships, in larger cities. Through a neighbor of his uncle’s, Zdârcă met Ion Popa, a hat maker at an atelier close to Gara de Nord, the Bucharest North railway station. Under Popa’s guidance, what started as a four-year-long, unpaid apprenticeship became a lifelong passion for hat-making: “I can’t bring myself to stay home. My hands can’t stop working. If I had to stay home, I would become ill; I would die.”

“In a society where uniformity was celebrated, the hat was a symbol of rebellion.”

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the trades industry took a hit. “Hats [gave] a tone of elegance,” Zdârcă claimed, something which threatened the communist ideals pervading Romania at that time. In a society where uniformity was celebrated, the hat was a symbol of rebellion. In 1951, the National Union of Handicraft and Production Cooperatives of Romania, or the UCECOM, rose to power to fight for the rights of craftsmen. Despite their attempts, craftsmen still gave up their businesses. It was during this period that Zdârcă received his first hat atelier. He had previously served

three years of service in the military, during which the UCECOM took over the late Popa’s atelier and nationalized it. At 25, Zdârcă obtained his own atelier, transforming him into one of the youngest hat makers in Bucharest.

The changing tides brought new opportunities but also sacrifice. “[I] adapted to the fashion of those times,” he told me. Zdârcă set aside his notion of “elegance” and picked up wool to create practical winter hats, promoted by the sudden influx of Russian people and ideals. “I wanted my children to learn my craft,” he said, “but we barely had enough food.” Despite economic hardships and limits on creativity during communism, silver linings presented themselves: near Zdârcă’s atelier was the artistic center of Bucharest and the National Theatre of Bucharest. Through a customer base of actors and artists, Zdârcă’s craft and business survived. His hats appeared in director Sergiu Nicolaescu’s movies and on the heads of actors on stage. “Slowly, slowly, hats come back into fashion.”

During the interview, I thought about whether hats were still in fashion. I glanced at the wooden hat blocks piled in the corner, wondering how many pieces of wool, felt and straw grazed against Zdârcă’s hands daily. Earlier, I had waited among pigeon coos in Pasajul Englez while Zdârcă measured strips of replacement ribbon against the black wool of a customer’s floppy hat. “How has your business been affected by the pandemic?” I asked,

PORTRAIT

looking back at Zdârcă. He shook his head and folded his hands one over the other: “It’s not the pandemic that’s the issue... It’s poverty.” According to the World Bank, the Romanian economy contracted during the pandemic, elevating levels of poverty. But Zdârcă explains this isn’t strictly pandemic-related. The local factories that supplied his materials had already shut down, pushing him to source internationally from Poland, the Czech Republic and Italy. This importation feeds into the larger problems facing the Romanian economy: high levels of poverty, limited access to services, a lack of workforce due to diaspora, corruption among functioning businesses and widespread closures of local companies. For the hat-making business, the absence of young craftsmen is another issue. “Nobody learns craftwork anymore,” Zdârcă lamented as he stared down at the concrete floor of his studio. “They all run from the prospect, dreaming only of leaving the country.”

For Zdârcă, working with his hands is the finest pleasure on Earth. Although he officially retired at 62, he continues working in his hat shop and does not allow

either history or norms deter him from his visions. “Anything you do in life, do it so that you like it first,” he recommended as advice for today’s youth. Throughout his lifetime, Zdârcă passed through four ateliers: three in cooperation with the UCECOM and the final

on Pasajul Englez purchased with his own money. Despite anything that came up, the passion he held for his craft pushed him to adapt to shifting times.

“Look, I have some tomatoes.”

Zdârcă stretched his right arm to open the white refrigerator in the corner of the room. He wrapped his fingers around the circumfer-

ence of a fruit so plump that even his thumb and forefinger could not touch. “They’re healthy, watered and not chemically enhanced.” He looked up from the fruit of his labor, the corners of his lips upturned in a smile. As the interview came to a close, Zdârcă told me about the swing in his yard that he sits in every morning, admiring the rows of roses lining the perimeter, the four leafy trees in front of the gate, the green onion shoots sprouting from his garden soil. “I worked hard in life, but I also reaped the benefits,” he said. By keeping himself busy, finding pleasure in the overlooked things and sticking alongside his devotion to hat making, Zdârcă has uncovered the secret to a long, fulfilled life.

Instead of allowing history to determine his future, he has continually fought against the currents and altered the trajectory of time. As the oldest hat maker in Bucharest, he makes history.

“When my clients shake my hand before they leave, that’s the best feeling,” Zdârcă told me during our last conversation. I paused the recording button on my phone and extended my hand.

Yale Daily News | 41

Do It Yourself

BY TIFFANY NG

Page 11

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE