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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2021 · yaledailynews.com
OPINION My People I
t’s 1 a.m. on a Thursday morning, and faithful to the optimistic spirit of the first weeks of school, there’s a problem set pulled up on my laptop — but for the past hour, I’ve been draped across the back of my chair, talking with my suitemate about how we see friendships, acquaintances and interpersonal relationships. We didn’t set out with such poetic intentions, but rather with honest reflections about what our friendships had been in the past, how they had developed recently and what they would probably become in the days, weeks and maybe years to come. We had been back on campus for less than two weeks, and already huge changes had been set in motion. We now knew to some extent who we got along with and who would remain casual acquaintances, and we no longer crowded out to form huge circles in the courtyards. We were more confident in who we were, but we still had questions as we tentatively felt out the new school year. Recently, I had had doubts about the new dynamics of our friend group: last year, we had hung out constantly due to online classes and college quarantine, but with the second year of Covid Yale, we were busy with classes and meeting new people. At moments, I found myself questioning whether our friendships were only thanks to the circumstances of last year, and how our friendships would fare in the face of diverging majors and widening social circles. What helped set off my thoughts further were the times I would bump into people from the summer or classes, and immediately hug each other and excitedly catch up, and sometimes introduce each other’s friends. One time, my friends waited for me to say my hellos and, after they had left, wondered out loud about the meaning of those friendships. This started a conversation around the dinner table about how, at Yale, the go-to conversation ender was “We should get lunch or coffee sometime,” and how in a lot of cases these statements weren’t followed up on. This conversation continued later that night with my suitemate, one of my dearest friends. At first thinking on a surface level, I suggested that it was hard setting up a date when both people involved were full-time students with multiple engagements — which is probably very true, at least for me. But as the conversation continued, we started questioning the depth of the friendships that formed from briefly meeting people at parties or classes and saying hi to them on the street. If I’m being completely honest, there are some people at Yale that I have spent more time greeting on the street like old friends than the time I spent with them when I met them for the first time. What, then, does it really mean when I greet people I honestly hardly know as if they were childhood friends? I genuinely feel a rush of happiness when I bump into them, and I am genuinely excited to talk to them. And when their names are brought up in conversation elsewhere, it is instinctive to vouch for
G U E S T C O L U M N I S T J E A N WA N G
Ready or not
them as if they were family. But one thing I can’t deny is that the word itself, “friend,” rarely comes out, even as I write this. The BIANCA words I choose NAM are something along the lines of Moment’s “I know them,” “they’re so chill,” Notice “they’re great, I had them for so-and-so class.” So somewhere in my head is the distinction between friend and… acquaintance? Is that the right word? It seems too clinical for somebody I am so happy to see and talk to, somebody I am excited to get to know better every time I meet them — somebody who is a precious person to me.
I’M ALONE, SOMETIMES IN BODY AND ALWAYS IN SELF, AND YET I’VE NEVER BEEN MORE SECURE IN THE CAMARADERIE OF THE FRIENDS AND PRECIOUS PEOPLE WITH WHOM I HAVE CHOSEN TO POPULATE MY BEAUTIFUL WORLD. I think in the end, I came to realize and accept how alone — alone and not lonely, because there is a difference — I was. My friends and my precious people will always be immensely precious to me, but at some point I had started relying on them for my sense of self and completion, and that wasn’t healthy for me; it only left me feeling emptier when I was by myself. After these realizations, I realized a newfound peace in solitude and independence, in self-determination. I’m alone, sometimes in body and always in self, and yet I’ve never been more secure in the camaraderie of the friends and precious people with whom I have chosen to populate my beautiful world. And honestly, I like the place where I’m at. I feel like now, having come to terms with and begun to transform a core need of myself, I am one step closer to who I am meant to be. HYERIM BIANCA NAM is a sophomore in Saybrook College. Her column, “Moment’s Notice,” runs on alternate Wednesdays. Contact her at hyerim.nam@yale.edu .
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COPYRIGHT 2021 — VOL. CXLIII, NO. 30
“Y
ou’re real!” my friends would say after meeting me for the first time off Zoom. And after a conversation, “You’re exactly the same person you were online.” Could I belong here, as I have belonged online in the past year? I don’t quite remember how the fall 2020 semester ended. It could have been a Directed Studies seminar at 1 a.m., a lecture in Canvas I never watched or a loving “happy holidays” text from a friend I have never met. What I do remember is closing my laptop after a long night, watching the sunrise through the pink, tinted window of my childhood bedroom in Suzhou, China. One by one, these incoherent moments settled into a routine that no one has ever lived through before. By the time the semester ended, I was sure that this was the way it would always be. In many ways, it is impossible to understand the remote semester, even as a memory. I was a student in college, I was living with my parents, I was 18 and eager to learn. But I was also not there, I was always talking to screens. I was on a 12-hour time difference, I was 7,000 miles from New Haven, half a world away. Zoom backgrounds of campus landmarks and classmates’ Instagram accounts became the sum total of the Yale I knew. But college itself was nowhere and no place. Despite all my friends, all the Zooms and all the passing hours, I still thought to myself every once in a while: “None of this is real, none of this really happened.” Weeks passed, and the entire semester seemed to melt into the same autumnal, overcast day. I stopped imagining what college would be like: I was sort of there already.
I moved into Yale on an unseeming, cloudy day in early July. No one was on Old Campus; I had the whole of Bingham Hall to myself. During my first night, I battled insects with a can of Lysol, drank straight from a gallon of Poland Spring, and wondered if the fireplace was real. It’s not. Jetlagged, bemused and gleeful, I sat on the bench eating a sandwich from GHeav and watched the sunrise. Most first years live on Old Campus before moving into their residential colleges as sophomores, but there I was on Old Campus, watching my day-long first year disappear into a hot, gray morning. I was going to attend Yale Summer Session after taking a semester off, and after many tribulations, I was here at last. In the coming days, I would move into Hopper and meet all my “internet friends.” I would go to Koffee? five times in my first week and see all the moving faces I know, now that I’m here, now that we’re all here. My friends would give me tours of Sterling and Bass and tell me the details of where to go and when. I would put names to places and faces: New Haven Green, Harkness Tower, Cross Campus. Things were slowly becoming true all around me. I couldn’t help but feel slightly fearful: Yale was suddenly physical and manifest. At times, it was difficult to believe I have never lived here before. Being here in the summer meant that I had plenty of time to gawk and wonder. I stood beneath the entrance to Sterling and searched for the figurine carving that bore my mother tongue. I would bring my boxed dinner to Cross Campus and watch the students, the dogs, the tourists and the occasional bride. At night, I walked under the string lights in
the Hopper courtyard as laughter broke out from a tall window. Like a tourist, I took pictures of everything, and like a tourist, it felt difficult to believe that I was here at all. It’s true that I caught Yale in its sleep, but I also caught Yale as a friend. We had the entire summer to make our peace with each other. This university and I, we were both rehearsing for the fall. But it didn’t feel real. Before coming to New Haven, I kept asking myself if I was ready. I didn’t feel ready to be seen and perceived again, to study again, to think of the future without putting it on hold. Now that I’m here, I have no doubt that we are all ready to plunge into the fullness of college again, but I’m not sure if we are all ready to accept the past year as a year of our own. Everything we have experienced about college in my Zoom rectangle was already real: we have made these friends, taken these classes and came into a place of our own. Whether it was a year of rest and relaxation, of grief and confusion, a year enjoyed, a year lost, wasted, thrown, it was nonetheless a year that occured, and thus a year that made us who we are. Remembering and talking about 2020, albeit painful, is a duty to our future selves. Young as we are, we might not understand this period of our youth for years to come. But we cannot let 2020 become a euphemism of itself. This was the year I came of age, in all my pain and complexity. And coming out of 2020, this will be the year I think of when I face all the future unknowns to come. JEAN WANG is a first year in Jonathan Edwards College. Contact her at jean.wang@yale.edu .
G U E S T C O L U M N I S T M A R I S S A WA L L I N
The ethics of the COVID-19 vaccine booster I
n the Aug. 26 town hall, President Peter Salovey made it clear that booster shots for low-risk members of the Yale community will be available as soon as they are recommended by the CDC. According to a recent email from Dr. Paul Genecin, this is anticipated in the coming months.As members of the Yale community, I trust that we all place a high value on outstanding teaching, learning and research. And, as President Salovey put it so memorably in his Aug. 16 email, there is undeniably a “palpable energy and … catalytic potential we create when we study and work in person.” However, I ask the Yale administration to consider the ethical implications of their planned course of action. Is ensuring an in-person semester more valuable than the lives of systematically disadvantaged people around the globe? There are over 5 billion people over the age of 15 currently living on our planet, and most of them have been touched by the COVID-19 pandemic. 3.3 billion people are currently at least partially vaccinated, leaving almost 2 billion people in eligible age groups completely unprotected. The global poor are suffering from COVID-19, perhaps especially so because they tend to be less able to reliably access hospitals, ventilators, oxygen and antiviral drugs. Vaccine distribution has been extremely unequal, with rich countries controlling access. As of Sept. 13, only 5.8 percent of Africans are fully or partially vaccinated; the majority of these vaccine doses are concentrated in a small number of countries. A lack of even partial vaccination is seen in much of the Middle East, south and southeast Asia and parts of Central and South America as well as a number of post-Soviet countries. Over 90 percent of the Yale community, by contrast, is fully vaccinated.
In the immediate future, preserving our academic environment and saving the lives of people around the globe is not a both-and situation. Vaccine production capacity is finite, and every dose of a COVID-19 vaccine administered by Yale could have gone to a population in desperate need. This raises ethical questions about our duties toward people in far-off places. Do we owe it to people in other countries to prioritize their access to vaccines right now over our own? I think we do. Some moral philosophers argue that we have no greater duty to a person living in New Haven than we do to a person living in India. One argument for this position goes like this. We have certain moral obligations or duties towards other people because their lives have objective value, and where a person lives does not change the objective value of their life. Therefore, we have the same moral obligations to people living in far-off places as we do to people living in our own area. Philosophers who subscribe to this kind of view might suggest that we should not have prioritized fully vaccinating the Yale community in the first place. After all, what does being a Yale student or staff or faculty member have to do with deserving protection from COVID-19? Most people, however, have an intuition that we do have special duties to the communities that we are embedded in. At Yale, we live together, support one another in our personal and academic pursuits and look out for each other. When COVID-19 seemed to pull us apart, we did what we could to stay connected and rebuild, which included taking vaccines. Placing a special value on interpersonal relationships and helping the people right in front of you who are in need is not unreasonable. This supports the decision made by the Yale administration to prioritize fully
vaccinating the Yale community. But upholding these values does not mean that any good, no matter how small, for the Yale community should be prioritized over any bad that happens in other communities. In this case, the good is an in-person academic environment and the bad is loss of human life. One might argue that we have to do everything we can to eliminate breakthrough infections among healthy people at Yale because these infections can still threaten the health and lives of vulnerable people who have had boosters, such as people who are immunocompromised for whom vaccines are less effective. The lives of at-risk individuals in our community are not disposable, and I do not suggest that we put them at risk by exposing them to the breakthrough infections that seem to be inevitable. However, we have ways to protect vulnerable members of our community without hoarding vaccines. Offering hybrid or fully online classes allows at-risk individuals to protect themselves — some may want this option even if many people receive boosters. Online classes are far from ideal, but what would it say about us if we treat classes as more important than the deaths of people who have no vaccination access because their countries are less economically developed and/or are marginalized on the global stage? While most of us will feel comfortable that our community was protected from severe illness as soon as vaccines were available, we should not feel comfortable prioritizing our own convenience and preferences over the lives of people suffering in far-off places. MARISSA WALLIN is a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy. Contact her at marissa.wallin@yale.edu .
