DAILY NEWS
MAGAZINE
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The Gist Who was Rahmatullah Hashemi?
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PHOTOJOURNALISM OF NEW HAVEN
photo essay
feature by ARIELLE STABLER
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19
EMPOLERMENT
Wild-minded small talk by WESLEY YIIN
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The new Chinese dream
27
Something other
feature by VIVIAN WANG
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Salt and pepper personal essay by SALLY HELM
Sewing our mouths observer by IVY NYAYIEKA
DAILY NEWS
MAGAZINE
fiction by CARLEE JENSEN
feature by TAO TAO HOLMES
THE NEED FOR SPEED cover story by Eric Stern
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Editors Sarah Maslin Joy Shan Managing Editors Abigail Carney Alec Joyner Photography Editor Henry Ehrenberg Design Editors Jennifer Lu Daniel Roza Mohan Yin Associate Editors Jennifer Gersten Andrea Januta Claire Mufson
Copy Editors Adrian Chiem Ian Gonzalez Elizabeth Malchione Douglas Plume Copy Staff Maia Hirschler Design Staff Amra Saric Editor in Chief Julia Zorthian Publisher Julie Leong Cover photograph by Henry Ehrenberg
by Sarah Maslin
A perverb, or an anti-proverb, is a twist on a common idiom that, when distorted, reveals deep hidden wisdom. Below are perverbs contributed by Leah Chernoff, Nathan Kohrman, and Jacob Osborne.
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ý You miss 100 percent of the shots you take and subsequently miss. ý Honesty is in the eye of the beholder. ý Don’t count your chickens before you bury the hatchet. ý Pot calling the kettle hackneyed. ý He who laughs last did not understand the punch line. ý Opportunity doesn’t knock twice, but Jehovah’s Witnesses
sometimes do. ý The grass is always greener a few days after you coat it in industrial-strength pesticide.
CAPTAIN RICHARD PHILLIPS REAL TALK
by Abigail Bessler Merchant mariner and author of A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea, which detailed his experience being taken hostage by Somali pirates who hijacked his ship in 2009. His story, recently made into an Academy Awards-nominated film starring Tom Hanks, propelled him into the national spotlight for his bravery and his sacrifice for his crew.
ON BEING A CAPTAIN “It does have its advantages. While millions of people every day deal with morning rush hour and afternoon traffic, all I have to do is roll out of the rack, climb a ladder, and I’m at the office.” ON PIRATE ATTACKS “I’ve always told my crew it’s always a matter of when, not if.” ON PIRATES BOARDING THE MAERSK ALABAMA “I looked over and there was the pirate with an AK-47. He fired twice, then lowered the weapon and walked into the bridge saying, ‘Relax, relax, no al-Qaida, just business, relax, just business.’” ON GETTING KIDNAPPED “When we came back to do the exchange for the pirate leader, they didn’t let me go. That was when I learned: never trust a pirate.” 4 | Vol. XLI, No. 7 | Summer 2014
WIKIMEDIA
ON PIRATES AND PROM GIRLS “I felt no sympathy for the pirates. We had a relationship. I mean you put five girls in a limo to prom and you have a relationship. But they didn’t care about my life and I didn’t care about their lives. We knew whose team everybody was on.” ON ATTEMPTING TO ESCAPE “For a time I thought of grabbing the AK-47, but at the time I didn’t know how to operate one. Since then I do know how to operate one. It’ll be a shorter story next time.”
BIT LIT
LAUGHING MATTER
Perverbs
he judge shuffled his papers and peered down at the line of protestors. Their matching t-shirts peeked out from under their blazers. The phone number they’d all written in permanent marker on their wrists — their lawyer’s number, to call from jail — had yet to fade. The clerk said: “Docket #3120, Linda Rivera. One count trespassing, one count civil disobedience.” Linda stepped forward. The lawyer representing the protestors whispered something to the lawyer representing the state. “Your honor,” said the state’s lawyer, “the Commonwealth moves to dismiss the charges upon Ms. Rivera’s payment of a $100 fine.” The lawyer representing the protestors said, “Your honor, we have no objection to that.” Linda turned to the lawyer and whispered something into his ear. The lawyer said: “And, your honor, my client wishes to speak.” The judge waved Linda forward. She cleared her throat. “Your honor, I would like to explain why I did what I did. I believe in the dignity of all human beings, citizens and non —” The judge cut her off. “Ms. Rivera, you will have your moment to explain yourself, but that moment is not now. Charges dismissed upon payment of $100 fine. Next case.” Later, Linda borrowed money from a local advocacy group to pay the fine, and, after collecting her belongings and saying goodbye to the other protestors, she went home.
ON MEETING TOM HANKS “The only advice I gave him was, if he’s gonna play me, he’s gonna have to put on a little more weight and get a little better looking. He did neither.” ON THE LARGEST INACCURACY IN CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, THE MOVIE: “Vermont doesn’t have a four-lane highway.”
ANNELISA LEINBACH
Femail Art by Chen-Eddy Wang n the 1950s, a new way to share art was launched in the form of â&#x20AC;&#x153;mail art.â&#x20AC;? By exchanging art via mail, artists could reach distant audiences and circumvent the influence and schedules of museums, curators, and galleries. The Canadian artist Anna Banana has created and pioneered mail art BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY for over 40 years. Inventor of the artistamp (using the structure of stamp as an art form), Banana has published newsletters and magazines to conglomerate the work of mail artists and to help them connect with each other. Vile magazine (pictured) was one of her ventures. In the introduction to Vile 6 WLWOHG øIH Ă˝ PDLO Ă˝ DUW Ăš %DQDQD wrote, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Through [mail art] at least, I was able to get response and interaction that I had felt lacking in my pursuit of recognition from more conventional art outlets.â&#x20AC;? Each Vile issue displays an international aggregation of mail art corresponding to a particular theme.
MAP OF THE MONTH
FROM THE BEINECKE
Asian Lands and Kings by Elizabeth Miles
YALE DIGITAL ARCHIVES
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he name of this map means â&#x20AC;&#x153;A picture of the eastern regions, of Asian lands and kingsâ&#x20AC;?. By the time of the mapâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creation in 1570, European traders were already fiercely competing for sea routes to China. Navigation technology still having a ways to go, some voyagers would overshoot it and end up in Cathay. Referring to northern China, Cathay (a name popularized by Marco Polo) was thought to be a country separate from real China. On the way from Europe, explorers would pass todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Southeast Asia, a region of jagged edges, peninsulas, and islands, labeled on the map as â&#x20AC;&#x153;Malacca.â&#x20AC;? Nevertheless, adventurous explorers inland would stumble upon the Regio aurea, meaning â&#x20AC;&#x153;beautifulâ&#x20AC;? or â&#x20AC;&#x153;goldenâ&#x20AC;? region. Not a bad payoff for an unpredictable journey.
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DESKSIDE WITH BOBBY DE LA ROSA â&#x20AC;&#x2122;15 ARCHITECTURE MAJOR
1 French press and coffee grounds
2 Sketchbook 3 A model that shows the various ways to move through a building
1 4
6 5
2
3
4 â&#x20AC;&#x153;Liquid Lunchâ&#x20AC;?: a
cocktail set constructed for a project on food products and consumption
5 A model of a new
addition to Hillhouse Avenue: a bar
6 Drawn map of a site on Hillhouse Avenue
yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 5
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ver the course of the spring semester, the 15 students of CSSY 300: Photojournalism of New Haven have developed their photographic and narrative skills by exploring street photography, creating in-depth stories, and studying the history of photojournalism. Here is a small sample of their work.
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JOSH ACKERMAN
DAMIAN WEIKUM
ALEXANDRA SCHMELING
RYAN L
RYAN LAEMEL
DAMIAN WEIKUM
RYAN LAEMEL
JOSH ACKERMAN
Who was Rahmatullah Hashemi? The Taliban student, the Times story, the alumni controversy
REUBEN COX
BY RACHEL SIEGEL
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n August 2005, at the start of Yale’s fall semester classes, Rahmatullah Hashemi took his seat among 150 other students in Luce Hall room 101. It was around 1 p.m. on the first day of Politi-cal Science 145, “Terrorism: Past, Present and Future,” taught by professor Douglass Woodwell. Though only a freshman that August, Hashemi had been in this room before — four years prior, in March 2001. That first time, he sat at the front of the stage, his head wrapped in a turban, as one of two participants in a debate on “The Taliban: Pros and Cons.” Hashemi, one of the Taliban’s top dip-lomatic representatives at the time of the debate, argued the pro side. And now he was back — four years older, no longer associated with the Taliban, no longer wearing a turban, in a full lecture hall to learn about global terrorism. According to Woodwell, Hashemi intro-duced himself as having “lived in Afghanistan under the Taliban” and was among his most talkative and engaged students, always sitting front and center. He said Hashemi was always willing to help clarify the tenets of Islam and 8 | Vol. XLI, No. 7 | Summer 2014
the Koran whenever the subject came up in class. “There was all this religious terminology and one day [Hashemi] gave me a warm smile and said, ‘It’s OK, we get it confused too,’” Woodwell said. Other instructors also noticed Hashemi’s unique thirst for learning, particularly notable in a man whose formal schooling ended in the fourth grade. Here, he sat in class alongside Jews, Christians, African Americans, women. Here, he could somehow slip thousands of miles between himself and a complicated past — until he couldn’t.
during their time in the field together and later introduced him to Bob Schuster ’67 of Jackson Hole, Wyo. Schuster would ultimately help finance Hashemi’s time at Yale, and even set up an educational charity to finance his tuition costs. Ronald Neumann, the United States ambassador to Afghanistan during Hashemi’s time at Yale, said Hashemi would not have encountered any major difficulty obtaining a visa despite his ties to the Taliban. (Neumann did not personally deal with the controversy surrounding Hashemi’s status as a student while in office.) “If he hadn’t been in any fighting ashemi’s journey to Yale capacity, he wouldn’t necessarily hardly resembled the normal have shown up on any black-list and trajectory followed by most [his application] would not have been of his class-mates. Years before his disqualified,” Neumann said. arrival to the United States in the Neumann added that many Afghans summer of 2005, Hashemi, who in the late 1990s and early 2000s had declined to be interviewed for ties to the Taliban. this article, had been assigned by In February 2006 during his first Afghanistan’s foreign minister to spring semester, Hashemi’s face act as a translator for American appeared on the cover of the New filmmaker Mike Hoover. Hoover, York Times Sunday Magazine. The while on one of many reporting trips headline ran in bold: “He was the to Afghanistan, befriended Hashemi Taliban’s spin doctor. So what’s he
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feature doing at Yale?” In 12,000 words, the story Hashemi had kept almost entirely private — of his high rank in the Taliban as an English-language translator, of his wife and two children — had been chronicled in one of the most widely circulated publications in the world. The article’s first section was titled, “The Talib in Luce Hall.” Originally, Hashemi had been appointed by the Afghan foreign ministry to act as a bridge between the Islamic world and the West. Following the article’s publication, Hashemi was given a crash course in the power of Western media. CNN cameras chased him through the campus. Fox News’ Sean Hannity ran multiple interviews characterizing Hashemi as a terrorist walking the New Haven streets. Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund ran a series of opinion pieces chastising Yale administrators for “abdicating their moral responsibility and admitting Mr. Hashemi.” All called for Hashemi’s immediate expulsion, if not deportation. But the most vehement campaign for Hashemi’s removal came from a group much closer to Yale itself: the alumni. Led by Clint Taylor ’96, a vehement campaign dubbed “NailYale,” alternatively known as, “Give Yale the Finger,” encouraged alumni to substitute their regular donations to Yale with fake fingernail clippings that would be mailed to then-President Richard Levin’s office. According to one of Taylor’s blog posts for the conservativeleaning website Townhall.com, the name refers to the “Taliban’s policy of pulling out the fingernails of Afghani women who dared to wear fingernail polish.” “Most importantly, send your money somewhere else,” Taylor’s post read. “While Yale made a choice to embrace an unapologetic supporter of a regime which
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uestion and answer with Times author Chip Brown
was your original objective do you think your piece QWhat QHow when writing the story? played into the controversy?
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I had several objectives: the first was simply to write an account of a very bright young man’s remarkable and — oddly enough — very American journey from war-time refugee whose formal schooling ended in the fourth grade to his discovery of modern multicultural America and the new prospects of life as Yale’s most improbable 27-year-old freshman. I also hoped to introduce his informed and nuanced point of view as to the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan where the US has now been fighting a war for 12 years against an enemy we hardly understand, in a culture we seem unable to fathom, in a country I daresay most Americans couldn’t find on a map – a war that has cost us billions of dollars, the deaths of more than 2,000 American soldiers and countless thousands of Afghan lives, and has arguably compromised our ideals and our moral self-esteem. And a third objective: I suppose because I still believe in the virtues of a liberal education, I thought Rahmatullah’s story might illustrate the genius of “Lux et Veritas” as Yale puts it in the school motto — that is, it might remind us why it’s more important to be educated in a university than a madrassa, why it’s not enough to grow up reading only the Koran or the Bible without being exposed to biology, geology, art, literature and other disciplines that train students to think critically, empathetically and independently, virtues I’m sorry to say were not much in evidence among many of the Yale alumni and the rest of the banshee hordes who condemned the university for admitting Rahmatullah as a student, and who probably think that anybody who tries to make an argument like this is some softheaded liberal keen on burkas, beheadings and religious zealots.
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Unfortunately, I don’t think my 12,000 word story played into the controversy, I think it created it. It’s a miserable accomplishment and ongoing source of regret. There wasn’t any controversy until Rahmatullah’s freshman status at Yale was publicized. If my story had never existed, I believe he would have been able to complete his education and would have graduated from Yale.
did Rahmatullah wish to QWhat come across through the story?
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I am not sure he had a clear-cut objective or concrete expectations because I don’t think he’d ever been the focus of an article in a publication as visible as the New York Times Magazine. I can speculate that he thought sharing his life story and his experience would help Americans understand Afghanistan, and perhaps might inspire other Afghans to follow his path and seek western educations. I don’t think he had the faintest idea that his desire to get an education and to explain some of the dynamics of his troubled country and his own past involvement in the Taliban movement would provoke the hysteria it did. He had quit the Taliban well before he enrolled at Yale but he was excoriated for ever having been a member of it and for having the temerity to speak out in defense of the Taliban movement in his debate with Harold Koh at Luce Hall when he visited Yale in March 2001. It’s another of the twists in his amazing story that four years later, he was sitting in Luce Hall for a class on the history of terrorism.
was your overall impression of QWhat the social climate here at Yale in the midst of the controversy?
yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 9
feature oppressed women and sheltered as Yale’s most improbable 27-yearOsama bin Laden, we prefer to aid old freshman.” Brown added that he organizations that support the troops hoped the story would lend some who defeated that barbarous regime.” insight into the burgeoning conflict Though those posts were written in Af-ghanistan. over eight years ago, Taylor still It seems Hashemi himself hoped stands by his views. Contacted the story would give readers a fuller recently via email, Taylor said that he understanding of his home country had no regrets regarding the NailYale and the values of a liberal arts campaign, as he believes that the education. Taliban has yet to change its ways. “I can speculate that [Hashemi] “Has the Taliban reformed?” Taylor thought sharing his life story and his said. “Has it laid down its arms and experience would help Ameri-cans embraced human rights? Rebuilt understand Afghanistan, and perhaps the Bamiyan Buddhas? Has it might inspire Afghans to follow his stopped murdering journalists? Has path and seek western educations,” Hashemi’s old boss Mul-lah Omar Brown said. “I don’t think he had undergone some mystical, Dickensian the faintest idea that his desire to get conversion? I’m pretty sure the an education and to explain some of Taliban hasn’t for-gotten what they’re the dynamics of his troubled country all about. Neither have I.” and his own past involvement in the With news crews waiting for him Taliban movement would provoke the outside of class and his phone ringing hysteria it did.” incessantly, Hashemi with-drew to his off-campus apartment to ride out hen Hashemi’s special the storm. Charles Hill, a professor student status expired of International Studies who became at the end of the year, close with Hashemi during his time at Hashemi applied to become a fullYale, said that as the days passed with time Eli Whitney Scholar, a degree little relief, Jewish students would program offered by the college for deliver plates of hot food from the nontraditional students. Professor Slifka Center to Hashemi, who could Hill said Hashemi’s goal was to be not walk through campus due to the admitted as Whitney Scholar so that heavy media presence. he could prepare himself to go back to “It really moved him because in Afghanistan and found an education [Hashemi’s] upbringing, he was system. This way, the radical taught that Jews are out to kill you madrassas would not be the only and that if you are in the Taliban schooling option for young Afghanis. you’ve got to kill the Jews first,” said According to Master Jeffrey Brenzel, Hill. “This society was entirely unlike Hashemi was never asked to leave the the one he had been taught [America] school but was simply not accepted to would be like.” the Whitney Program. Meanwhile, the person who opened “[Hashemi] then decided on his up the controversy — Chip Brown, own not to take further courses as a the author of the Times Magazine non-degree special stu-dent, which story — felt only regret. is something that he could have Brown, who came to know continued to do at the time,” Brenzel Hashemi through Hoover and his said. friends in Jackson Hole, said his origiSome reported rumors that the nal objective when writing the piece University changed the criteria for was to shed light on Hashemi’s “very admission to the Whitney program so American journey from war-time that Hashemi was no longer eligible, refugee … [to] new prospects of life a decision that Hill noted would have
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been “a kind of ploy to get rid of someone.” Hill added that he wasn’t sure Hashemi would have returned anyway given the chaos and negative publicity he had received. Brown said the university’s motto of Lux et Veritas hardly seemed to be its guiding principle in the midst of the controversy. “I think of all the ignorant and craven responses to the former Taliban student at Yale, the University’s reaction was the most disappointing,” Brown said. “As far as I know, the administration cowered in the face of controversy. No one in an official capacity spoke out in defense of the student they had accepted whose background was not a secret to the admissions office, nor, for that matter, to the U.S. consulate officials in Pakistan who granted him a visa.” According to Brown, Hashemi did not return for his sophomore year because he could not obtain a visa to re-enter the U.S. after visiting his family in Afghanistan in the summer of 2006. Brown fur-ther described the circumstances as “a kind of soft deportation.” Hashemi’s name was also added to an International Stop List, which complicated his ability to enroll in other international universities. He eventually landed at the American University in Cairo where he double majored in political sci-ence and international law, graduating with honors. He is now believed to be working for the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Kabul.
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rown said he recently obtained a copy of a 12-chapter English language manuscript written by Hashemi on the history of the Taliban and his own beliefs regarding the value of education. “It was education that had shaped my world view in the past, education that shapes it now, and education that will continuously shape my outlook in the future,” Hashemi wrote.
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If by social climate you mean what sort of reception Rahmatullah received from students and professors at Yale after his background became widely known, I don’t really know. Some of the friends he’d made at Yale knew of his background, others didn’t. Certainly the admissions office was aware of his past, and I also believe some of the administrators who looked after foreign students knew where he’d come from. But he’d made some friends who didn’t know about his background, and as I recall — this was nine years ago now — he told me some of them were upset. There was a student from Texas he’d befriended who wouldn’t talk to him. Bu he was treated well when he was just another member of the freshman class in 2005. After the story came out, he was hounded by people outside of Yale, many in the media. His apartment was staked out and he was chased around New Haven by a TV crew from FOX News. In general, I think he was unprepared, overwhelmed and perhaps a little scared by the media response, and by the response of the Yale alumni who organized the “Nail Yale” campaign goaded by a series of snide and obtuse articles by a Wall Street Journal columnist. For a while I tried kept track of the various things written about Rahmatullah in newspapers and on websites — I think I had a list of over 200 citations at one point. I was amazed by the outpouring of self-righteous hostility and the general shortsightedness of people eager to bomb first and ask questions later. I wonder if that willfully ignorant quadrant of America is puzzled by the failures of American policy in Afghanistan, where the outcome seems to be so unlike what we thought we would achieve, and violence and corruption are as rampant as ever. Are Nail Yalies mystified by the April 14, 2014 cover story in Time Magazine entitled “Return of the Taliban.” Do they have any appreciation for the complexity of regional politics in which the Taliban (hardly a monolithic category) figure prominently and which we seem to be caught in the middle of? Do the people who were baying for Rahmatullah’s scalp have any clue what they might have learned from him, and
how America might have profited from his desire to educate himself and work to improve Afghanistan for his children and his people? Or are they content with their cheap victory of getting him out of the US while America wastes billions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting a war it hardly understands?
you surprised by the universiQWere ty’s reaction to Rahmatullah’s background? Did it seem narrow-minded to you?
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Narrow-minded is putting it mildly. I think of all the ignorant and craven responses to the former Taliban student at Yale, the University’s reaction was the most disappointing. I want to say this carefully because I don’t know what Yale owes its students, or whether it is naive of me to think that a University with Light and Truth on its letterhead ought to have the courage of its convictions. I don’t know what the Yale administrators did or didn’t do behind the scenes. I don’t know what they thought about the wisdom of bringing Rahmatullah to Yale in the first place, or whether they thought the controversy of his presence was a stain on the University’s reputation or posed a grave threat to their ability to raise more millions for the endowment. But to my mind the Yale Administration covered itself in shame with what seems to have been lily-livered silence if it wasn’t something more pernicious like making sure the ex-Taliban kid wouldn’t be around for a sophomore term. It’s easy to espouse values like Lux and Veritas, another to actually adhere to them when push comes to shove. As far as I know the administration cowered in the face of controversy. No one in an official capacity spoke out in defense of the student they had accepted whose background was not a secret to the admissions office, nor, for that matter, to the U.S. consulate officials in Pakistan who granted him a visa. No one in the administration seemed to think the controversy had any lesson in it, or offered educators any teachable moments; it was just something to smooth over.
you stayed in touch with RahQHave matullah since the story? What can you tell me about his life since Yale?
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I have exchanged a few emails with him over the past nine years. As I understand it he did not return for his sophomore year at Yale because he could not get a visa to come back to the U.S. after he went home to visit his wife and two kids in Kandahar in the summer of 2006. I think what happened to him is called a “soft deportation.” Some kind of government official saw him to the airport and made sure he got on the plane. Barred by the U.S., Rahmatullah enrolled at the American University in Cairo with a double major in Political Science and International Law. He graduated magna cum laude a few years ago. Mike Hoover told me Rahmatullah is now at the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Kabul where he is “working on bridging the giant intellectual canyon that he fell into. He has nothing but good things to say about his experience at Yale.” Not long ago I had a chance to read a 12-chapter English language manuscript Rahmatullah wrote about the history of the Taliban where he talks about the importance of education. Toward the end he writes: “The reason for the emphasis on education is because of my personal experience in the United States where as a student I learned first-hand that the US government was mostly indifferent about the importance of education in changing attitudes in Afghanistan. In 2006 at the behest of some hyperbolic critics, the US government not only denied me [a] visa to continue my college education in the United States but also added my name to some International Stop List which caused me serious problems in pursing my education in other countries as well. It was education that had shaped my world view in the past, education that shapes it now; and education that will continuously shape my outlook in the future.” Looking back on the tsimmis kicked up by Rahmatullah’s story in the winter of 2006, I wonder who learned more, Yale or the kid it didn’t have the guts to keep.
yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 11
Wild-Minded
BY WESLEY YIIN PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROLEE KLIMCHOCK
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re you feeling okay?”
My friend keeps asking me this question. We are with our teacher and seven of the other students in the class “Wilderness in the North American Imagination,” riding in a motorboat across the Long Island Sound on our way to Horse Island. For the next 24 hours, this island is going to be our classroom. I smile. “I’m not seasick,” I tell her. I don’t tell her that I’m terrified.
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ow in its 30th year, “Wilderness” is one of Yale’s more eclectic seminars. The course is funded by an endowment from Charles Simonds ’60, who stipulated only that the course be called “Wilderness in the North American Imagination” and include a trip and dinner. The syllabus differs from year to year, as does the instructor, who has free rein to decide what the class covers. Our teacher, Carolee Klimchock GRD ’14, titled the first class meeting “Was Thoreau a Hipster?” and plans to end the course with a discussion on counterculture and LSD.
“I’ve wanted to tap into that place for students where being lost in the beauty or wonder of the wilderness can be mysterious, beguiling, and sometimes also unsettling,” Klimchock wrote in an email. “I’ve interpreted wilderness broadly to include the wilds of the outdoors and the wilds of the mind, because one’s own mind can be a very wild place.” Klimchock, 38, is an American Studies graduate student whose dissertation focuses on coach driving during the Gilded Age. She’s no environmental scholar, but she’s drawn upon her extensive background in performance
wilderness, however, includes anything “mysterious, beguiling, and unsettling.” And that’s what the course is supposed to reveal: you can find wilderness anywhere. It’s in the Peabody, it’s on East Rock, it’s all over New Haven, it’s in the basement below HGS. It’s within the depths of your own mind. And, of course, there’s wilderness on Horse Island. Our class had decided early on that we wanted to go somewhere far away from civilization for our class trip. When someone proposed Horse Island, where Yale owns a rarely used ecological laboratory, the class was overjoyed. An abandoned island, a body of water and a few miles between campus and us sounded just right to everyone — except me. I’d never even used a port-a-potty before, I thought. How will I survive in the wild?
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studies to come up with projects for the class. Almost every class session has featured some kind of hands-on activity. On the first day of shopping period, Klimchock led a group of 30 to 40 students on a walk to the Peabody. We’ve finger painted sunsets, meditated, pretended to negotiate between settlers and Native Americans, and collectively written poems. We walked to Grove Street Cemetery, hunted for the graves of notable people, and read short eulogies. A cemetery might not seem like such a wild place. Klimchock’s definition of
here’s no electricity on the island. I’m underdressed for the 30-degree night. We unload our bags and carry them to the center of the 17-acre landmass, where there is a house that belonged to the island’s previous owners. The house is supposedly haunted — a rumor corroborated by the two knives on the shelf upstairs, with “I am loved” scrawled on the wall in red crayon. We go outside to explore. I follow some classmates onto a rocky beach, where we lie down and watch little waves hit the rocks. In the distance, geese quack, and we think we hear seals barking. Everywhere else, there is silence. I know I’ve taken the wrong path on the way back to the house when I find myself in the midst of a thicket. Thorns are hooking onto my pants, and later I’ll find they’ve left cuts all over my skin. I push on. Back at the house, I grab a sandwich and think. I spin around. I can see the water everywhere through the trees. I don’t see any people. I drag a plastic lawn chair off the dilapidated porch onto the grass. I sit. I remain there for an hour, staring at the ocean, the sky, the wilderness. I sit there, unperturbed.
POLITICAL THEORY Never like to hear Women talk politics Real turn off. Loud mouthed and brash. They are— Coffee cups and brass bands In a washing machine together. Someone left spare coins, The mess is more. They know No Ups or downs They know Kitchen sinks. So cliché, But kitchen sinks, I could tell you That Drano is blue The front page of the paper Works best For Kitty litter. Women talking politics With Lipstick on their teeth. Round mouths, Round heads, Circular. They are circular creatures Made for circular things Mothering And dying And sex. Hate to hear Women talk politics There are other ways They should be Using their breath. Olivia Klevorn
yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13
Salt and Pepper BY SALLY HELM
personal essay
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ooking back, I realize that I’ve never burned down a kitchen. I’ve never let a strawberry layer cake slip off a plate and splatter pink sugar flowers on my shoes. I’ve never poisoned my parents by mistaking lighter fluid for apple juice or dropped a 20-pound Christmas turkey on my grandma’s big toe. My cooking faux pas have all been fairly run-of-the-mill. I’ve boiled pasta well past al dente. I’ve charred omelets. Once, when I was 6, I set too many minutes on a microwave timer and made a hot dog explode. I believe myself to be a terrible cook because my twin sister, Eliza, is a fucking cooking prodigy. She knows how to do a special thing to cut basil — promenade? tapenade? (Just texted her — it’s “chiffonade.”) She would know how to “chiffonade,” because she owns, like, 1,000 knives. And a juicer. And a baster. And a zester. And three graters. Last year, she invented a salad. I didn’t even know you could do that. Here’s how she makes it: she takes oranges, avocados, green apples, raw kale, and pine nuts, and chops them up in a Cuisinart and serves them with a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil. It’s incredible. When we were growing up, we’d each ask our mother, “What are we eating tonight?” But Eliza’s question was motivated by culinary curiosity, and mine by foraging instincts. She would explore the cookbook cabinet and suggest that we try corn and pumpkin chowder or vichyssoise. I had a favorite cookbook, but I read it for the introductory notes and the marginalia, not the recipes. It was called One Bite Won’t Kill You, and it featured funny stories from frazzled parents with sentences like, “My daughter Boco thinks that butter is food.” I read a lot in those days, and not just cookbooks. My shelves were stocked with novels about scrappy female knights. I’d climb trees and pretend that I was them (the knights, not the trees, though the latter wouldn’t have been out of the question). Eliza thought that reading was lonely. She chatted easily
with our aunts about perfume and other girly stuff, while I busied myself eating peanuts from the basket on the counter. Deep down, I knew that we were doing something we would later regret: we were divvying up the world into brains and social skills, school and art, mine and yours. I now feel that I was the lucky one, but back then I felt that I had gotten the scrubby, ugly end of the deal. In middle school, Eliza started cooking for herself. I remember her first stab at lemon curd bars, our mother’s specialty. They had golden brown tops and perfectly tart centers. They lounged on the cooling rack like bathing beauties, evenly tanned. I was certain that I could never replicate them. Baking fell squarely within Eliza’s assigned territory: girly and finicky. We all subscribed to the comforting family myth that Eliza was meticulous while I was absentminded. Like most myths, this one was based on fact. Every Christmas, we decorated our front hall with two versions of the same elementary-school craft projects, but Eliza’s nutcracker had two hands pasted neatly under his blue paper sleeves, and mine had one hand stuck on backwards and pasted on top of the sleeve, exposing a stumpy wriststalk. Unsurprisingly, baking was not my thing. I was not patient enough to sift flour. I confused baking powder with baking soda and took chocolate chip cookies out of the oven while they were still gooey. I didn’t try to improve. “Whip these egg whites with me,” Eliza would say. “I can’t,” I’d say. So now I still can’t. We’ve torn down some of the territorial walls (it turned out that Eliza loved Anna Karenina, and I wanted to be friends with girls), but we’ve left some of them standing. It’s a safe way to define who we are. Last summer, alone in my Washington, D.C. apartment, I faced the terrifying task of defrosting a chicken. (I know that there is a very specific way to defrost meat. I believe the process involves water. The microwave has a Defrost setting, but I think it’s only for frozen vegetables, an icy clump
of peas or beans or corn kernels. You can’t defrost chicken in the microwave because, naturally, however, insomuch as, something to do with microbes.) The easiest thing to do would have been to call Eliza and ask how to do it. Instead, I impetuously filled a bowl with hot water and left the whole package of chicken in it for several hours. I went on a rainy run and took a shower in the humid basement apartment. When I returned to the chicken, it was whitish on the outside, and I could still feel ice crystals in the center when I poked it with a squeamish finger. The surface was slimy, like the underside of your tongue. Oh no. What if I got salmonella, or E. coli, or whatever? Though it was now too late, I Googled “how to defrost chicken.” The Huffington Post recommended, first, using the refrigerator. I had not done this. The next picture was of a running tap, and I felt a momentary lift. It turned out, however, that the proper thing was to run cold water over the meat while keeping it in a sealed bag. Oops. I looked sideways at the chicken to see if I could detect bacteria. I smelled it. It smelled OK. But I believe that in cooking there are mysterious rules I do not know and governing intuitions I do not possess. Eliza could take one look at that inert chicken breast and know not only its bacterial content, but also its weight and girth and whether it should be boiled or fried. She probably defrosts chicken in her sleep, just because she can. She probably does it for fun, while she’s watching TV, or putting on eyeliner. I bet she can do it with no hands. I dumped the meat into a trash bag. It sat on the curb outside, a monument to my defeat, until the garbage men came and took it away. A few days later, fretting that I had wasted perfectly good protein, I gave in and asked Eliza what she would have done. “Thrown it away, I think,” she said. “Man, I always forget how to defrost things.” Our voices have the same rhythm, and those could have been my words. Come to think of it, that time the hot dog exploded, we set the timer together.
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新 梦 feature
The New Chinese Dream BY VIVIAN WANG
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50 Church St., home of Yale’s East Asian Languages and Literatures Department, is a brick structure behind Timothy Dwight College. It’s easy to miss: the porch is on a side path off of the main road, and the building looks more like a residence than a Yale structure. I walk past it twice before I find the entrance. “Qing jin!” Shucheng Zhang calls out when I knock on his office door. Please come in. I step inside, and Zhang, looking up from behind his desk, realizes that I am not one of his colleagues. He stands up quickly to shake my hand and apologizes in English for the mistake. I had emailed Zhang, a lector in the EALL Department, asking to speak
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PHOTO BY JASON LIU
with him about Chinese graduate students’ and professors’ experiences at Yale. He would love to, he replied — and P.S., did I speak Chinese? Zhang came to Yale in 2012, after stints at other American universities, including Harvard, MIT, and Brown. He immigrated to the United States in 2006, when his wife took a job teaching Chinese at Harvard. They have lived in the States for nearly a decade; they have two young sons, aged 1 and 3, born and raised here; they have, in almost every way, set up a new life, and have no plans to return to China in the foreseeable future. Still, when I agree to conduct our interview in Chinese, Zhang looks relieved. Our conversation is a struggle for me, the girl who quit
Sunday afternoon Chinese school at age 12, but it’s a boon for Zhang. My parents immigrated to the United States from China over twenty years ago, at a time when leaving the country for America was seen as the surest road to success. Only the best of the best were able to make it to America: young, ambitious people who g raduated from the top universities. Even then, success was not guaranteed; my mother, who studied linguistics at China’s premier university, Peking University (“the Harvard of China”), spent years nannying and waitressing before eventually taking a job in information technology. Twenty years later, China has transformed into an economic
feature powerhouse, and, now that they have wealth and resources in their own backyard, many of its well-educated young people no longer see America as the ultimate destination. But graduates of China’s best universities still flock to the United States in search of education and careers. What brings these Chinese citizens to the U.S., and how do they adapt to the American life they find upon arrival?
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he walls of Zhang’s office are bare, except for some Chinese vocabulary written on butcher paper and two maps, one of the world and one of China. A well-stocked bookshelf holds a framed picture of his two sons. Zhang, like my parents, attended Peking University. He went to law school there as well, and were he to return to China, he says plainly, he could secure a job in law that would pay much more than he earns as a teacher here at Yale. The money would not be the only benefits if Zhang went back. If Zhang were to return to China, he would not have to write down key English vocabulary words every time he goes to the doctor, looking up the proper words to describe how he feels. He would not have to place personal ads in the newspaper looking for English language tutors. He would not have to ensure that the reporters who want to interview him about his accomplishments can speak his language. But Zhang loves teaching Chinese at Yale, and his kids have grown up in the United States. “Once you’ve been here for a long time and have a household and kids, there is a sense of stability,” Zhang says. “To go back — I’d have to restart. It would be a great inconvenience. The change is too great.” Of course, he admits, he already undertook a great change when he decided to come to America in the first place. But the opportunity seemed worth it: a career, an exciting new
location, and a country where the air and water are clean and the schools are not too high pressure. So was he chasing the same American Dream that my parents were looking for? Not quite. Chinese people, Zhang says, don’t have a need for the American Dream anymore. What was once a far off
place. “Both studying and being far away from each other, it’s not easy,” he says, his voice matter-of-fact. “This kind of long-distance love is very common. It’s a challenge to everybody.” What is appealing about coming to America, then, if it entails large cultural differences and separation from loved
What was once a far off dream — a house, a car, financial independence — is now within reach for many Chinese who stay in China. They now have their own “Zhongguo Meng”: the Chinese Dream. dream — a house, a car, financial independence — is now within reach for many Chinese who stay in China. America, once seen as the best way for people to improve their lives, is now more of a vacation spot. They now have their own “Zhongguo Meng”: the Chinese Dream. “People won’t be as crazy to come here anymore, studying the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) every day or breaking up with their girlfriends or divorcing their husbands,” Zhang says.
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or the most part, Guojun Wang, a fifth-year EALL Ph.D. student, is happy here. He finds the intellectual environment at Yale stimulating and the work engaging. A significant challenge, though, is his long-distance relationship. Wang’s wife is also pursuing her Ph.D. in America, but she is studying at a university in the Midwest, over 800 miles away. Wang tells me that this kind of separation is the norm for many Chinese couples in America, because it is often difficult to find jobs or Ph.D. programs in the same
ones? Soft spoken and a bit shy, Wang studies late imperial Chinese literature. He completed his undergraduate and Master’s degrees at Beijing Normal University, one of China’s top universities, and upon graduation was offered a job teaching language and literature at one of the best high schools in China. Ultimately, however, he knew he wanted to come to America to further his education. Wang explains his decision by citing the West’s long tradition of interdisciplinary study and respect for the humanities. “In China, if you tell people you are studying philosophy or literature, many of them will say, ‘What’s the use for that?’” Wang says. “When I was in high school, the situation was that the worst students in the class would study the humanities.” This phenomenon, while not exclusive to China, is magnified tenfold in a country where technological progress and economic development are at the forefront of the public consciousness. The world of academia in China was heavily influenced by
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feature Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, when scholars and thinkers were criticized and persecuted, and today the humanities are still considered by some to be second-rate disciplines. The Western style of thought fits Wang better, he says. When he talks to his classmates about his literature research, he feels perfectly in his element. Yet culture shock may exist in the classroom as well, says James Tierney, director of the English Language Program at the Yale Center for Language Study. His Chinese students’ learning styles sometimes highlight differences between Western philosophies of learning and Confucian philosophy, which is devoted to mastery and tradition and demands close reading of texts. Some of Tierney’s Chinese students, who would never dream of skipping a paragraph of their reading, are surprised when their nativeEnglish-speaking classmates, some of whom have only skimmed the assignment, speak up freely in class. The idea of speaking up in class was completely foreign to Rong Fan, an archaeology Ph.D. candidate who arrived at Yale last June. “In China, we just sit and listen to our professor, who will speak, speak, speak all the time and not allow us to interrupt,” she says. “But here everyone who has an idea can just shout it out. I can never get used to that.” She pauses. “But I have to.”
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efore arriving at Yale, Fan was nervous about adjusting to American social life. She had been told that Americans valued their privacy and didn’t like to engage in each other’s lives. She was happy to find that the Americans she met were friendly, welcoming, and more than happy to invite her to their parties. Her American friends have been an integral part of her transition to life here. But, she says, lowering her voice slightly, sometimes she does feel lonely. “I think sometimes I prefer the 18 | Vol. XLI, No. 7 | Summer 2014
Chinese style of friendship,” she says, describing how in China it is the norm for people to call up their friends in any moment and drop by their houses. In America, she feels that she needs to tread more carefully. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because everyone here has their own life. It’s easy to make friends here, but it’s hard to engage deeply.” The loneliness is compounded by the fact that coming to America inevitably meant that she, too, had to leave people behind. Her parents are still in China, as is her boyfriend. Fan would never ask her boyfriend to come to America to be with her — he has a job at the Chinese National Museum, she says proudly. If she were to consider going back to China after completing her degree, it would be for him. That is a big “if,” though; jobs and funding for archaeology are much easier to come by in America, she says, whereas in China she would be under pressure to work in technology or other more lucrative fields. “A Chinese archaeologist’s dream is to be here,” she says.
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he process of adapting is slow, and it can be difficult. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. “At the beginning it was very difficult to speak out in class, but I’m getting used to it now. It’s tricky. I don’t know how to find the perfect time,” Fan says. “Maybe when everybody’s in silence,” she adds, giggling. I contacted nearly a dozen Chinese faculty members and graduate students for this piece, because I was afraid people would not want to tell me about their process of cultural assimilation. Here at Yale, where we talk so much about the pressure to always appear in control, I didn’t think anyone would want to acknowledge difficulties adapting. I was happily surprised when not a single person said no. They didn’t just agree to be interviewed — they were eager, even excited, to tell their stories.
SEASON’S HAIKUS There is nothing like The fall, the whistling in air— The way the ground feels. Margaret Atwood Eats fat in winter, she says And I feel close by. I tried to wake up In spring. But I took naps. Cooked the squirrels. I did not wake up In summer, days for dogs who Drank from bowls of dreams. Joey Lew The reason, I found, was that they do not think their experiences have been difficult. They acknowledge obstacles, such as the language barrier, but overwhelmingly, they feel welcomed and comfortable. Still, from an outside perspective, it may not appear that they are fully assimilated. They freely admit that their friends are mostly Chinese, and outside of the classroom, they speak Chinese more often than English. Maybe, then, we need to redefine what it means to be assimilated. Maybe assimilation doesn’t mean eating hamburgers and dancing the night away at GPSCY. Maybe it means carving out one’s own niche at Yale, which is itself just one corner of America. Finding comfort in the familiar does not preclude a desire to experience the unfamiliar. 250 Church St. may not be the heart of campus, but it is still a part of Yale. Although the members of Yale’s Chinese community may not have assimilated in the way we usually envision it, they still see Yale as their home. “I think the fascinating part about America is that here they give us equal opportunities to express our ideas,” Fan beams. “Everyone has the chance to be themselves.”
EMPOLERMENT
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If a girl dances on a pole and nobody sees it... ... is it sexy? ... is it sexist?
BY TAO TAO HOLMES PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARIA ZEPEDA
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crouch with my palms and knees on the hardwood floor. A floor to ceiling mirror spans most of one wall, and a few spotlights in the corner beam a soft teal-green and orange-yellow glow about the studio. This is our last warm-up before we shift to the metal poles: It’s called the “juicy” Buttercup, and it’s “kind of like a sexy, stripper push-up,” says Kelly, our instructor. Trying to follow Kelly’s sinewy movements, I stick my bottom in the air, stretch my arms in front of me, and slowly shove my jaw into the floor as if listening for termites. Clumsily, I switch into reverse, imitating Kelly and struggling to raise myself up off the floor, butt first, boobs last, right cheek smooshed against the ground. “Y’all look like inchworms!” shouts Judy
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feature Jovanelly, a short, stout woman in her mid-fifties who owns the pole dance studio, The Girl Spot. Inchworms? I take it that we don’t look sexy.
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bout a year ago, while we were both juniors in college, a friend of mine at Penn took some pole dancing classes with her sorority sisters. Her sorority sounded like a malfunctioning airline announcement (Delta Delta Delta), and its activities mostly involved penning marriageable frat brethren into small drunken spaces, so I more or less wrote these girls off as coquettes. I questioned how they could justify signing up for classes premised on female objectification. I’d only ever seen pole dancing in movies: Guys get drunk and go to a strip club; guys get their awkward, left-at-thealtar friend drunk and go to a strip club. But in the year after those Delta Delta Delta sisters jumped on what I then considered stripper poles, several of my Yale friends mentioned pole fitness classes. In the last decade or so, alternate fitness for women has seen all sorts of curiosities, from Pilates and Zumba to heat yoga and aqua cycling. And in the last few years, pole dancing — whether it’s categorized as dancing, stripping, or exercise — has been spreading as far and wide as a stripper’s legs. The names of the studios are often painfully creative: Luscious Maven Pole Dance Fitness, Foxy Fitness & Pole Training Studios, Divine Moments Pole Dancing, Strip Xpertease, Strippercise. The tone of these classes seems to appeal more to those seeking frill over thrill, aesthetics over athletics. After all, middle-aged moms make up a lot of the pole fitness clientele, a demographic that might appreciate some encouragement from Gypsy Rose Exotic and Pole Dancing studio, “Where ‘sexy’ is a state of mind!”™ But what is meant by the notion of “sexy”? Pole, whether 20 | Vol. XLI, No. 7 | Summer 2014
fitness-oriented or not, seemed predicated on archaic definitions of sexuality — interpretations of “sexy” that estrange women (and men) from their sense of internal self-worth, of confidence, and of attractiveness. Interpretations that lead people to see their value entrenched in their bodies, rather than in their minds or their motivations. Unlike Strippercise, pole dance at a professional level requires immense physical ability. So challenging, in fact, is pole dancing that the U.S. Pole Dancing Federation, founded in 2008, has joined a worldwide campaign to include competitive pole dance in the 2016 Olympics. The Olympics — now there is something that could seduce me. Athletics have been a core component of my confidence and identity since I was in the womb, where, I’m told (by my forgiving mother) I dedicated myself to a daily bicycle kick regimen. I’ve played on a girls soccer team every year since I was eight, competed with a coed ice hockey squad in middle school, and spent a lot of time throughout my life on the tennis court, on the track, in the pool, and in front of the lacrosse goal — a place where angry thirteenyear-old girls flung rubber balls at my body and where “sexy” was not a state of mind. The idea of pole, so firmly premised on this wispy concept of “sexy,” made me uncomfortable. But I’d heard from gal pals that pole workouts leave one sore and exhausted, and, to the athlete in me, this presented itself as a challenge. Despite its lack of goal posts or power plays, if this stripteaseturned-sport took real strength, then I wanted to put myself to the test. I had looked up the pole studio closest to me (and then, like a proper Yalie, checked out the one book on pole dancing housed at Sterling Library). Judy, the owner of The Girl Spot, told me over the phone that there are plenty of women who come and don’t want to venture near the realm of sassy and sexy; they just want
an alternative to the gym. I wanted to believe her, but I couldn’t shake the fact that the business was named The Girl Spot, or that the studio’s “Joy of Sexy” workshop claimed to teach participants how to “incorporate your head, hands, legs and tongue on and off the pole.” The photos of women rubbing against poles in skimpy outfits unsettled me; I was an athlete trying to give myself a new type of physical challenge, not some forlorn lady looking for something to lick. What kind of sport involves tongue?
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arrive at The Girl Spot, located on the second floor of the same sports complex as FitPro Personal Training Studios, Next Dimension Gymnastics, and the Trumbull Racquet Club. Judy’s sign out front used to have a big curvy “G” against a much smaller “irl,” but she changed it to uniform capital letters after some gymnastics moms complained that the name looked too similar to “The G-Spot”. She tells me she was just looking for something “unique and memorable.” Uh-huh, I think to myself. There are no windows inside the studio, but three sets of window curtains adorn one dark wall. On the opposite wall is an enormous mirror, and eight glistening poles extend from the floor to the ceiling. I write my name on the sign-in sheet and scribble my signature on the accompanying waiver. The first line says: “I understand and acknowledge that the activity and events conducted by The Girl Spot LLC are physically strenuous and may place me at risk of serious injury, even death…” The words “physically strenuous” begin to lift my spirits. Another document catches my eye: a chart titled “What’s Your Pole Name?” Mine, according to a combination of birth month, birth year, and the last digit of my phone number, is “Lady Hissy Paws.” In soccer, I’m just number 22. “Oh, that silly thing?” says Judy, looking over. She swats the air with her hand. I put down the chart and pick up a hefty set of cards
feature produced by the Pole Federation of America, or PFA. There are nearly a hundred cards of different pole dance moves, ranging from the Stag Spin to the Speed Bump. But it’s almost time to start, so I take off my shoes and shimmy out of my sweats. Judy’s email specified “NO LOTION” of any kind, since it will make the poles slippery. She explains that more skin equals more grip, hence the consistently scant clothing. I stand beside one of the poles. Today’s other Girl Spot Girls also appear to be in their twenties, and both seem quiet and reserved. Our instructor, Kelly, glides to the front of the room and cocks her head. “What’s the first thing you think of when you think of pole dancing?” Kelly asks us. No one says anything for a few moments. “Strip club,” I respond reluctantly. “Exactly!” says Kelly, beaming. She has long, toned arms, strong thighs and calves, big brown eyes and a bright white smile. “That’s exactly what people go for!” She laughs while nodding. “But there are other kinds of pole dance and pole fitness. What we focus on here is kind of the athletic side.” Facing the mirror, we complete a set of basic arm and hand stretches, wrist rolls, hip circles, rib cage circles, lunges, and crunches to a generic hip-hop playlist. This is where the Buttercups comes into play, right before Kelly shows us the two basic pole grips — the handshake and the cup grip — and asks us to practice our pole walk. “Throw your head around, move your hips. This will be your sexy walk, so I hope you all like it,” Kelly trills. Was this supposed to be conditioning? I try not to feel idiotic, which means avoiding any attempt to be sexy — not that it proves difficult. I’m relieved when this part ends, eager to move on to moves that place me at a more legitimate risk of “serious injury.” Half an hour has passed, and I’ve barely broken a sweat. Our first real spin is the Basic Fireman. I copy Kelly,
holding the pole with my right hand as if raising my arm in a toast. I walk around the pole, place my right foot on the floor a few inches to its left, pivot, and simultaneously fish-hook my left heel on the other side of the pole and clutch with my left hand. I tuck my right leg behind me so that my right instep is against the metal, and then I’m stuck, hanging like a monkey glued to a tree. “You need some momentum!” says Kelly, demonstrating again. She walks a few steps and swings effortlessly into a well-controlled spin, her muscles taut. I try again. This time I get my feet confused and end up just straddling the pole. Judy points out that I’m gripping too hard with my hands. I loosen my fingers, and finally swing into a successful Fireman, spinning nearly two rotations before slowing to a stop. A little tricky — I could be into this. Yet, by the end of class, I still can’t overcome the fact that I’d spent the last half-hour practicing a sport that consists of moves entitled Flirty Fireman and Ankle Attitude. I imagine incorporating “sexy” into soccer. We’d be doing drills to finesse our “flirty free kick” and “carnal croif.” In hockey, maybe a “sensual slap shot” and “kinky backwards crossover.” As for tennis, perhaps a “lusty lob”?
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fter Intro Pole, my arms feel just fine. I figure the soreness and strain might not kick in until the next level, so I enroll in The Girl Spot’s five-week Pole Basics course. I am feeling hopeful about this session. I will be $120 poorer afterward, but five sessions closer to entering the Olympics. On the drive to my second session at The Girl Spot, I contemplate the concept of empowerment. To me, there are few things more empowering than sending a boy swerving into the ice with a well-placed hip check. Being able to keep up with the boys has always been important to me. That’s empowerment: winning at freeze tag, sprinting the fastest in PE, being
the only girl playing touch football at recess. In third grade, when all the girls started piercing their ears, I swore a personal oath that I’d never follow suit, and despite my friends’ exasperation, I’ve kept it. It has always seemed to me that societal constructs and expectations of femininity stand in opposition to real female empowerment. In fact, it sometimes seems that femininity itself stands in the way of female empowerment. I think that eightyear-old me wrote all of this down somewhere in my third grade diary. As I pull into the parking lot, a girl and her dad are walking out of Triple Play, an indoor softball and baseball facility right below The Girl Spot. The girl’s softball helmet still sits on her head and she balances a bat over her shoulder. Cool and confident, she looks like she owns a little chunk of the world. My second class I am with two single women in their forties. Nikki is slim and black, with ~Nikki~ tattooed on her upper left arm. She has gold fingernails, red toenails, and long but convincing fake lashes. Jacqui has a blonde ponytail and is reasonably fit, though getting wrinkly in places she’d rather not admit. The two of them heard of The Girl Spot from flyers and friends. We sit in the small lounge area as they slip off their shoes and jackets. I ask them about pole. “This class gives me a whole new respect for strippers who get up on that pole,” says Nikki. “You don’t even have to do it for someone else. It doesn’t have to be slutty,” says Jacqui. She pauses. “And the nice thing about it, there’s no guys watching. ‘Cause you know, I don’t have a ‘sexy walk.’” “I don’t have that whole sexiness,” adds Nikki. “Me neither! There’s nothing sexy about me!” Jacqui exclaims. I ask them what their friends think about the
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feature I wait for Gabby to finish counting out each beat. We do the Flirty Fireman and Ankle Attitude, then a spin called the Back-hook, which involves rotating backwards around the pole in a horribly uncomfortable position. Finally, after completing the day’s moves, our instructor Gabby incorporates them into a simple routine, dims the lights, and puts on sultrier music. We are told to be creative, play around, experiment. The speakers begin to ooze a breathy R&B melody. “Hey girl, show off your bidness… Hey ma, where yo man at…,” sings a male voice. I walk forward and stiffly execute the moves on each side. Then I stand still, waiting for the music to end and the overhead lights to come back on.
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class. “They think it sounds fun!” says Nikki. “My friends said it was salty,” Jacqui mutters. “What do you mean, salty?” asks Nikki. “You know… slutty,” says Jacqui. “There’s nothing wrong with that!” Nikki replies. Jacqui doesn’t respond. 22 | Vol. XLI, No. 7 | Summer 2014
Moving to the poles, we go through the warm-up then shift to pole squats. I squat down and squeeze the pole into the squishy spot behind my knees. Were I to execute the move perfectly, I’d be able to hold myself aloft on the pole by squeezing my legs and flexing my muscles. But I can’t stay up without hanging onto the metal with my arms, and my legs quiver uncontrollably as
t’s about being comfortable in your own skin — and that is about embracing your sexuality and your femininity or embracing your strength and your badass-ness,” says Ellen, another instructor, as a few of us wait for the second Pole Basics class to start. Her lithe body is relaxed, and blondegray hair curls down her back. “Pole dancing is both — and there aren’t that many things that are like that.” I suppose Ellen is right. But what do terms like “sexuality” and “femininity” even mean? I realize that I’d been allowing Ellen, Judy, and the whole idea underlying The Girl Spot to define these concepts for me, subtly convincing me that strength and sexuality are a tandem unit. I wondered, is each woman’s empowerment really just her affair alone? It seems that these days, the way some women choose to empower themselves affects the way the rest of us are perceived. I’d looked up a recent article that, according to Judy, had caused severe disgruntlement in the pole community. Published by Goal Saedi, Ph.D., on Psychology Today’s website, the article stated, “It’s unlikely that pole dancing will ever be reclaimed as a sign of women’s
feature strength and empowerment... It objectifies women’s bodies and was historically set up for the satisfaction and pleasure of men.” I decide to talk to Goal later that week. She’s never actually taken a pole class, and when I get her on the phone, she softens her tone, admitting that the problem lies largely in the activity’s automatic associations. If there were a way for pole to distinguish itself completely, that would be different, Goal says. For example, even changing the name from “pole dancing” to “vertical bar” would allow athletes to claim the activity as their own. After our conversation, I reread a comment on Goal’s article posted by “paintidlady” that reflects on the female ability to be “extremely sensual, sexual, erotic, sexy, provocative.” The commenter writes: “To be ashamed of these things is to lose out on the power, strength, and gifts of life you have been born with but refuse to experience or try out because you are ashamed. Do you want to be like a man?” Wait a minute — no. That isn’t what I want. To my repeated frustration, I am attracted to men, but I don’t want to be one of them. But then, what do I want? Have my rejections of jewelry and makeup and my lifelong competitiveness in both athletics and academics been just that — attempts to be more like a man? No. I don’t want to be more like a man — instead, I want to be as free, and strong, and witty, and valued, and alive as a man. I don’t ever want to be “Lady Hissy Paws.” Millions of women across the world are denied the right to drive, or travel, or vote, or choose who they marry, or go to school, or own property, or expose their legs or shoulders or faces in public. For them, I want women to be treated like men. If I can put myself on the same level as men, maybe they will raise all women to that level, or at least afford them the opportunity to raise themselves. In the meantime,
if equality isn’t given, then it must be earned. Being “sexy” just never seemed like the best way to earn it.
M
y fourth time at The Girl Spot, I learn my hardest move yet: the pole sit. I use my arms to lift myself about four feet off the ground, the pole wedged between my legs. I clumsily cross my right leg over my left and lean my upper body slowly to the left, shifting my arms and chest in front of the pole, until finally, I am sitting. Look, ma, no hands. My reflection in the mirror exudes ease and grace, but my inner thighs are screaming. I drop down, but hop back up, trying the move using the other leg. Class ends, but I ask Judy if I can keep practicing a little longer. When my skin is too chafed and raw to try any more pole sits, I flip through the PFA flash cards and see, in the beginner section, a woman holding herself off the ground, parallel to the pole, one arm gripping low and the other above her head. Using the physics of “pushpull” (pull with the upper arm, push with the lower) she keeps herself aloft. I wander back to a pole and give it a try. And another. And another. My arms fail me. Gabby suggests I try shifting my grip. This time, I lift myself off the ground for a split second. The next time, for a half-second. I can’t hold myself steady, but I know that, if I try hard enough, I could at least hold myself up. It’s just a baby step, but right then, it felt pretty badass. None of that dimmed lights, breathy music bullshit.
A
s the classes at The Girl Spot progress, the moves increase in difficulty, leaving me with visible bruises and soreness in the days following the lessons. The space begins to resemble less of a pole dance studio and more of a jungle gym— after class, Judy, Gabby, and the rest of us become a bunch of overgrown children, hanging and flipping ourselves upside down, seeing what our bodies can do. I realize that, when I first began, I
convinced myself that I was drawn to pole only for the physical challenge. But what actually attracted me to the Girl Spot were the illicit and archaic ideas of sexuality embedded in the language and movement that hovers around pole. A tomboy and an athlete, I’d been a total sucker for the “sexy” shtick even while calling it all into question. I’d never ventured into a “sexy” state of mind before, and, once I finally did, I discovered a place that turned out to be confining in its definitions of “sexy” and “feminine.” I ventured back out of that place, and eventually, I ventured back out of The Girl Spot, back to the soccer fields and swimming pools, and a few months later, to a marathon finish line. Hobbling those last few feet after running for four consecutive hours in windy drizzle made me feel sexier than I’d ever felt on one of those poles. I suppose if I had to define empowerment, I would define it as attainment. The attainment of knowledge, of experiences, of equanimity. The attainment of physical strength — whether in the ability to spin upside down from a pole or send a lacrosse ball into the back of the net. The attainment of confidence and compassion and self-worth. The attainment of equality. I want to see pole as a pure and simple activity. No frills, no sass. No stripping. No subordination of women to men, whether conscious or implied. I don’t think pole should be about helping women find their “inner sexy,” but rather their inner strength — an opportunity for women to realize their physical potential, push their own boundaries, and raise themselves off the ground. I’m not convinced that studios like The Girl Spot are the best places for this, but I suppose that for some, they’re a place to start. Once women can raise themselves up in the seclusion of that windowless room, then I hope they’ll realize they can do so elsewhere — on street posts, on subways, in living rooms — no matter who is watching.
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ewing our mouths BY IVY NYAYIEKA ILLUSTRATION BY ANNELISA LEINBACH
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he girl behind me speaks French on the phone. There is something about the way she speaks that reminds me of Anna, my Senegalese friend, and I conclude that she too must be from francophone Africa. Raucous laughter and storytelling emanates from the three African-Americans at the back of the Greyhound bus, and I find myself chuckling at their humor. The driver turns off the light in the bus, and after he makes an announcement in his Spanish accent, everything seems quiet, despite the activities of these diverse people. I consider calling my Kenyan friends so I can add my Swahili to the ecosystem of languages in the bus. That, and I need a distraction from thinking about Boston, and about how Muthoni, a friend at MIT, is currently embodying the problems that some African students face at competitive American colleges. I recall Anna, who is learning Swahili, saying that in Swahili, when one asks, “How are you?” the only answer is, “Fine.” When I think about
observer it, I realize it is true, even to the extent that a reply could be something like: “Fine, aki I have never been stressed like this.” I am not in the mood to say that I am fine. I start to relive Boston in my head. When Muthoni* told me that she was taking a medical leave from MIT for clinical depression, it distracted me from the problems I was facing keeping up in class myself. She had to leave within the next week, she was told. I excused myself from classes to visit her. I told my teachers that it was a family matter, and it was, because all we have here, 11,000 kilometers from home, is each other. Boston is a story I need to tell — for the sake of the African students who have been through a hard time in school. But I hesitate. Even in my mind, and in the private space afforded by my writing, I hear myself stutter. It reminds me of how in kindergarten our teachers made us hold our first finger and thumb together and make a sewing movement across our mouths so we could pretend to sew our mouths shut. Sewing your mouth is comfortable. I like it. But liking it means that every time I need to speak up, I do not know how. I do not know how to tell you that last semester Muthoni and I would do our homework together via Skype, and then she just went quiet. I do not know how to tell you for the past few months she could only talk to me if I was not working on any homework, which happens almost never at Yale. I do not know how to tell you that I saw her begin to spiral down when she made jokes about not graduating from MIT. I do not know how to tell you that I let the demons that resided in her silence be. I knew the refuge that comes with sewing your lips.
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hat happens when you just can’t? What happens on the day that, in the middle of a semester when you are barely keeping up with your classes, you
get sick but not enough for a dean’s excuse and you fall behind in your classes? When you are aware that you barely survive your work when it is just a day’s worth, let alone a week’s? When you have been at the bottom of the curve all semester and have no more motivation to convince yourself to work hard? What happens when you know sending an email to your professors will in fact help a little, but you just can’t? What happens when you just can’t? American students do not have it easy, but they have grown up in a culture that knows how to identify depression. When Muthoni told me that she was having a hard time at school, it broke my heart to hear her blaming herself. “I am just lazy,” she repeated when I tried to explain to her that it is OK to mess up, and that it is all right to have a hard time managing. At home, people believe, I do not know why, that education in the U.S. is easy. Perhaps it is because of the movies showing college as a partying and drinking fest. I have friends at home who swear non-Kenyans can’t get better grades than they can. Although I came here aware that Yale comprises geniuses, and that I would not be the smartest kid in class, I did not think that I would spend so much more time than everyone else studying and still see no results. One day, as I was walking down from Science Hill after my physics section, I was balancing tears in my eye because everyone had figured the problems out and I, for the hundredth millionth time that semester, felt dumb and un-teachable. My friend, in twisted coincidence, teased me in a text about how I used to teach my physics professor in high school, and I wondered for a moment if I would ever be that confident again. School in the U.S. is hard. In Nairobi, classes met just once a week. Here, submitting work for each class two or three times a week is demanding. Doing pre-lectures and readings is tasking. Submitting online
quiz answers every week, and essays, and assignments... it is all a flurry. Cramming this into 24 hours in a day is already hard enough. You beat yourself up for failing despite having access to tutors and the Writing Center and study sessions. There is little room for slipping. Every time you lose time — those extra minutes at lunch or dinner, that nap on the couch — it comes back to bite you in the ass. It is unhealthy to demand perfection from yourself but you have no option. You cannot be sent home. You must be hard on myself. I see lights spelling out “Road Speed. Go slow.” I remember Elizabeth’s words at dinner a month ago: “It is one thing to come from far. It is another thing to be poor. It is the hardest thing to be the two of them combined.” Elizabeth says these words halfway in tears. It has been two months since the incident but she still is scared to tell. Elizabeth has always been the emotional pillar for a good number of the African freshmen. She has meals with us, and gives us academic advice, and sends us cute emails about what to do to keep warm when Yale starts to ‘get chilly’ (read: freeze up). But as a rule, she, and many other African upperclassmen do not tell us what they are going through when they are having a hard time. This was the first time I was hearing what exactly happened during winter break. Over winter break, Elizabeth was staying at the Omni Hotel, where OISS houses those of us who have no family in the United States. She found out that her father back home was terribly ill, and asked her dean if there was anything he could do to help. He said there was nothing he could do, and pointed out that no one else in the administration could help, either. As Elizabeth told us this story, many students said that maybe this particular dean was just giving her a hard time. Annette told of how she was stuck with her luggage after everyone had left for summer break because
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observer she could not fit her belongings into two boxes. Another person related how financial aid officers had no idea what her financial situation back home was, because they translated her parents’ finances as they would for an American student. And we all agreed that although Freshman Counselors are trained to deal with international students, a lot of students’ problems still fall through the cracks. You learn pretty early on that you need to go to your international peer liaisons, or other upperclassmen from your region, to get tricks on where to get cheap, and I mean really truly cheap, not American-cheap, books. You learn that, although your Freshman Counselors mean well, and many times do a lot to reach out, they may not be able to understand your academic struggle here. Still, another of my friends, Chihera, talked about how supportive her college has been, helping her to cover the cost of air tickets and electronics. My friend at Cornell has pointed out that Yale has the best safety net for African students, in the sense that the African community is active and close knit. And for me, Branford’s Master’s and Dean’s Offices have been amazing about understanding me and making me feel that I am in a space where I can say I am different. “It is not that they do not give us an extra storage box as international students,” Elizabeth finishes. “It is what not giving us that extra box says about how much they value us.”
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hen I see the students from developing countries at Ivy League universities, I know the admissions councilors chose well. I can tell from these students’ ideas and how good they are at what they do that they are an extraordinary lot. Although many come from sewing-your-mouth cultures, and do not speak of their achievements, I can tell that these people, at their age, have achieved more than many of us 26 | Vol. XLI, No. 7 | Summer 2014
are still dreaming of achieving. Why then is there such an alarming number of people who are barely surviving school? I know everyone from everywhere goes through hard times. But I cannot neglect the story of how many people change from a major they love to a major that is easier for them not because their dreams changed but because they just can’t manage it. How many people here complain about being weak students when they were among the best students in the exams they took in their countries? Do they have a chance in America? I walk into a science class, and I feel like I am working to change misconceptions about the ability of my gender, my race, and my continent to succeed all at once,” Elizabeth jokes, and we laugh, but in the way that you laugh at something you are not sure is funny. Yale is the most academically challenging institution we have been to. We have to work to find our niches here, and we have to find time to have fun. In addition, the financial frustrations of being here, despite our considerable financial aid, reduce our level of success. A lot of international students have stellar records at Yale, and, when they graduate, stellar prospects for the future. But the struggle that comes between matriculation at Yale and graduation is a story that should be told. It does not make sense to me how many people I have seen struggling, while many people back home would still tell us, “How hard can it be?” I guess that is one other thing we have managed to sew our mouths about. In the two days that I am with Muthoni, she struggles to secure a loan from her school so she can pay to take classes back home. Many of us cannot afford to pay for classes at our local universities if we take time off. For international students, the loans at some colleges have painful interest. Hoping to pay your loans back while unsure about the possibility of even
finishing your education here is bleak. What $1,500 means here and at home in Kenyan shillings is worlds apart. Going home also means dealing with a society that does not consider mental illness a real issue. Perhaps because there are fewer cases of mental illness, the societies back home still have the “remember to smile” solution to clinical depression. In the two nights I was with Muthoni, she did not sleep. It was only proof of what I suspected, because I always found her social networks online whenever I logged on.
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he sound of a video game startles me from my reverie. A boy is playing a game on his device, and I can hear when he shoots at his opponents. He has a bad cough, and I play my own game, trying to guess which is the sound of the video game and which is the sound of him coughing. There is snow on either side of the road and I worry for the millionth time that it will not be spring during spring break. Everything is different here. There are seasons here. Heaps of snow lay on either side of the road. I look at it. I recall all the texts I got from people at home asking how beautiful snow must be. I wonder why nobody told us that snow is beautiful when it falls, and it reminds you of children and lovers, but then it gets dirty, and it looks more like life. We have passed New Brighton now, and there is a billboard to my left that says “Keep Dreaming.” I look, but I cannot figure out what they are advertising, and I am grateful. Tomorrow, Muthoni will text me to tell me: “Guess who I met on the plane?” She will say the name of another amazing young person I know. Muthoni will tell me that this friend is going home for the same reason as she. * All names in this article have been changed to protect the sources’ privacy.
personal essay
SOMETHING OTHER BY CARLEE JENSEN ILLUSTRATION BY ANNELISA LEINBACH
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eborah was a rebel child before she met me. You can see it in the old photographs. The one I love best is taped to our refrigerator. Her hair is bubblegum pink and her legs are draped over the back of a couch. In that photograph, she is the kind of beautiful that makes you wonder whether she has all the confidence in the world or absolutely none. I am sitting in five oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;clock traffic in a car that smells like spilled coffee and sand. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been told there is an Ethiopian grocery store somewhere on Fairfax, and that I need to stop there on my way yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 27
fiction home to pick up two bottles of honey wine and a pound of unroasted coffee. I had just finished cleaning the teeth of a fidgety greyhound when Deborah called to tell me this. My clothes were damp with dog slobber, and I had wanted so much to ask what a white Jewish girl from Pasadena, who had Pottery Barn sheets and a cat named Stewart, for Christ’s sake, needed with two bottles of honey wine and a pound of unroasted coffee from the Ethiopian market on Fairfax. But she’d sounded so thrilled about the whole thing on the phone, and I was the one who named our ridiculous cat anyway, so I told her of course, I’d get anything she needed. Theodore is coming to dinner. I’ve been with Deborah almost three years and heard every story she’s ever cared to tell, but I had never heard Theodore’s name until he emailed Deborah a few days ago. She explained that they had lived together their first year at Berkeley, on opposite ends of a hallway in Clark Kerr. She’d moved off campus as a sophomore, into a dumpy little apartment on Virginia Street, but she still saw him hanging around, doing the dishes naked at the co-op where she went to chain-smoke with her friends. Theodore got married after graduation, Deborah told me, to a stranger with glossy black hair; but he’s divorced now, moving to Los Angeles for a new job. “It’s funny he should get in touch with me now,” she said over dinner one night. “I’ve been thinking about those days a lot lately.” There was a bowl of cucumber slices between us on the table, soaking in a puddle of rice vinegar. Deborah fished one out of the bottom and held it between her teeth, sucking the sourness out of the pallid green flesh. When I asked what it was she’d been thinking about, she chewed her lip and stared at the wall above my shoulder. “Not anything about Theodore, or even really about Berkeley. About the semester I spent abroad, more than 28 | Vol. XLI, No. 7 | Summer 2014
anything else. I just felt so together when I was in Barcelona; it was like I’d found the answers to everything I’d ever need to figure out. I almost didn’t come home, did I ever tell you that? Spring semester was ending, and I spent two weeks getting drunk every night, trying to work up the courage to tell my parents I wasn’t getting on the plane back to California.” “What made you change your mind?” She bit down on the cucumber. “I guess I never really did. The plane showed up one day, and I got on it. When I got back to school, I signed up for the LSAT and everything just started happening.” The Ethiopian market stocks macaroni noodles and boxes of Lipton Tea on the shelves above the Berbere seasoning mixes, the bulk bags of lentils. The woman behind the counter is listening to Car Talk and biting her nails. She is the one who scoops the green coffee beans out of a burlap sack and weighs them for me. Before she seals the paper bag, she asks whether I’m sure I really want unroasted beans. I realize I’ll have to roast them myself before they’ll brew good coffee, don’t I? The question makes me blush. I’m not like Deborah, who carries herself like she belongs everywhere. I’m a yellow-haired girl with a face like a soybean. I grew up in a suburb two hours outside Chicago, eating casseroles my mother made from RiceA-Roni and canned mushroom soup, and the best thing to assume when someone like me walks into a room is that she doesn’t know what’s going on. Yeah, I tell the woman. I know the beans have to be roasted. I get the expensive wine. I can’t remember the last time I paid thirty dollars for a bottle of anything, but I don’t want to be that woman: the frugal lesbian with bad shoes, the girlfriend who casts a shadow over a nice dinner because she can’t bring herself to pay for grownup wine. I love it so much when Deborah’s excited,
so I’m trying hard not to think about the seventy-eight frivolous dollars I’m about to spend, or how hot the wine will get in my car while I’m stuck on the 405, or the fact that I’ve never heard of the man my girlfriend is bringing to dinner. There’s a bell over the door that tinkles when I leave, and the sound of it follows me out to the parking lot, into the traffic, home.
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eborah is barefoot in the kitchen when I get home. Her work clothes are strewn around the living room: heels next to the table, stockings balled on a chair, suit jacket over the back of the couch. She’s at the sink in her skirt and slip, peeling potatoes with the water running. When I come up behind her and put a hand on her waist, she cranes her neck over her shoulder and kisses me without putting down the potato in her hand. The counter is spread with foods whose uses I can’t anticipate: yellow spices and heavy cream, cabbage, shallots. “It looks like a fiesta in here,” I say. Little glass jars of spice are lined up in a row, and I pick one up to read the label. It’s turmeric. I unscrew the lid and sniff it. “I don’t know that they have fiestas in Ethiopia,” Deborah says. “Well, it’s pretty then.” I put the turmeric down. “Though I don’t fully understand what it is about this guy that inspired you.” Deborah’s shrug is a whole-body affair, her arms spreading open like a gesture of blessing. “I thought it would be fun,” she says. “It feels like we haven’t had anyone over here in so long. I can’t even remember the last time we ate anything more interesting than spaghetti.” She isn’t trying to make me feel guilty, but I do. When I met her, Deborah worked in the immigration department of a private law firm in Beverly Hills where she won green cards for the pretty wives of European expats. I was the one who encouraged
fiction her, when the offer came a year ago, to quit and move to the immigration clinic where she works now with refugees and mail-order brides and mothers about to be separated from their citizen kids. She was proud of the choice, and I was proud of her, but she sleeps less now and frets more and works long hours while her corporate friends go out for drinks after work. There are four potatoes on the counter. I pick one up and help Deborah with the peeling. Theodore arrives right on time. He’s tall, and good looking in the way that people who have recently transitioned to liking themselves often seem to be: meticulously groomed and dressed, with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up in crisp symmetry that begs me to imagine him standing at the mirror, adjusting them by centimeters until they’re perfect. He has brought Deborah an expensive-looking bottle of olive oil, and though I don’t know him I suspect right away that he did not stand starting at it in the store, wanting to buy something nice but wary of spending so much money. Deborah takes his hand in both of hers when she tells him hello. She has put on the long, light dress she wears when she’s feeling earthy. Theodore kisses her on the cheek when he greets her, but to me extends his arm for a handshake. I’m both grateful for the formality and a little put off — I don’t want to be kissed, but the handshake makes me feel manly and inelegant. There’s wine and bread and a puddle of olive oil poured into a little glass bowl. The apartment fills up with the smell of frying potatoes, of coffee beans roasted and burned and roasted again. There’s cider-soaked cabbage and bright sauces laid out on the table in good serving dishes, the ones Deborah bought the year she volunteered to have her family over for Thanksgiving. The ends of her dress trail in the air behind her while she lays things out. Theodore is sent to sit in the living room and eat his own
olive oil. I’m sent to sit with him so he doesn’t feel awkward, but the two of them talk easily over the back of the couch, so I just sit and sip my wine. Stewart sits in my lap, and I pet him behind the ears. He has one eye and
actually as much of a joke as you think it is. I hated working in advertising. Everyone is wasting their lives selling crap, and they all know it’s crap, and know they’re crap for selling it. We were all just prostitutes for global
Theodore is sent to sit in the living room and eat his own olive oil. a stump for a tail, but his fur is thick. The night I brought him home was the night Deborah asked me to move in with her. “I love this cat, and I love you for loving this cat,” she’d said. Deborah comes out of the kitchen with a pitcher of water and waves us over to the table. She sits down with a bright exhale, and in one fluid motion reaches across the table to rest her hand on Theodore’s arm. “So, you’re here in my house,” she says. I think of the way she used to flirt with me across restaurant tables. “But I don’t actually know why you’re here. You have to tell me about this new job you’re starting. You were very vague in your email, but now I’m feeding you, so you’re obligated to entertain me.” Theodore smiles and takes a spoonful of potatoes. “I’m editing scores with an independent film studio,” he says. “I’ll be going between the directors and the musicians and the visual people, making sure the music fits with what’s happening at any given second. It’s a lot like the work I was doing in advertising, except I make less money and don’t hate myself.” I wonder as I listen why directors can’t just talk to their composers themselves. “Were you making a lot of money in Seattle?” Deborah asks. “Theodore, I never thought you’d be a sellout!” Theodore hasn’t stopped smiling. His teeth are white but uneven, with one long, pointy canine disrupting the whole left side. “I’ll be honest,” he says, “that’s not
capitalism.” Deborah laughs. “Why did you stay so long if you hated it so much?” “Responsibilities. I had a wife; not that any of this made much of a difference to Elena in the end. I’m happy that’s over. I feel so much more like the person I used to be when I was in school. I used to be a very serious musician —” “You played violin,” Deborah says. “You’re sweet to remember. Yeah, I played violin for years. I thought I would do it professionally — travel with an orchestra or something — but when I got married that idea faded away.” Deborah is nodding with sympathetic eyes. “I understand completely. I mean, look at me! I was a Spanish literature major, do you remember that? I was going to get a little house in Majorca and become a translator. Now I’m just another lawyer in Los Angeles.” Had Deborah ever mentioned Majorca before? She must have, I tell myself. “The thing, Deb, is that it’s just so easy. It’s so easy to get caught up in trying to act like a grownup. That’s why this change has been so good for me. There’s something invigorating about working with people who care about what they’re doing. None of this “Kung Fu Panda” bullshit. They’re making real art. I’m sure you know what I mean; you were always very artistic.” I get up from the table then. The
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fiction first bottle of honey wine is almost empty, and I reach over Deborah to get it. For a moment, my body blocks the space between them. They keep talking anyway. In the kitchen, I pour what’s left of the bottle into a glass. There isn’t much, but there are two bottles of red
long. That was one of the first things I noticed about her when we met, at the strangely cosmopolitan Passover Seder of a mutual friend, when she got so bored during the Haggadah that she started eating her bitter herbs leaf by leaf. Theodore waves me toward my
Growing up, I never knew a person who did their dishes naked. next to the toaster, and I uncork one and fill my glass to the top. The two wines mix together in my throat, sweet as cough syrup. I sit on the counter and let my feet dangle off the floor. Even with the door closed to blur the words, I can hear the changing registers of the voices in the next room. Theodore monologues, Deborah laughs. They’re talking about the old days: the vegans and the men who knit, how good it was to be so young and feel so much like themselves. The photograph I love is taped to the refrigerator. Nineteenyear-old Deborah sticks her tongue out at me without malice. I wonder what that girl would think of the woman who will fall asleep with me tonight, and whether she would blame me for the things that have gone wrong with her. I try to remember the last time I had a friend who wasn’t also a friend of Deborah’s. The people I knew from veterinary school stayed in Illinois. It hasn’t been long since I moved, but I have a hard time, as I sit there tracing the alphabet in the air with my feet, remembering why I came to Los Angeles in the first place. Deborah grew up here, came back after she burnt up her savings in southern Europe, flirting with dark-eyed men she didn’t want to sleep with. I miss the Lutheran church in South Beloit, the simplicity of the minister’s black coat and white collar. Deborah is wiping tears from her eyes when I get back to the table. She always starts to cry when she laughs too 30 | Vol. XLI, No. 7 | Summer 2014
empty seat, inviting me to take a place at my own table. “Jamie, you’re so quiet,” he tells me. “I haven’t learned a single thing about you all evening. What do you do?” “I’m a veterinarian,” I tell him. Deborah puts her hand over mine. “Today she cleaned a dog’s teeth.”
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fter dinner, Deborah tells Theodore she wants to take him out. She’s got a friend in the movie industry who doesn’t live far and who she knows he’d love. They can drive on Sunset, since he hasn’t seen it at night yet. I’ve had more to drink than either of them, and when Deborah rubs my arm and asks if I’d be up for it, my lips are too numb for a smile. I tell them they’ll have more fun if they go without me. Before they leave, Deborah reminds me that we have Gatorade in the refrigerator. Theodore kisses my cheek when we say goodbye at the door. Once they’re gone, I sit in bed with the cat, watching a television show about straight people. On our third date, Deborah drove us up the Pacific Coast Highway to a place where rocks hid a quiet corner of beach. It was the beginning of March, and the sun was starting to set. Deborah pulled over onto the little strip of shoulder and brought me out of the car with her, barefoot onto the cold sand. “Do you like to swim?” she asked me. She left her clothes behind when she waded out into the low tide. I followed her. I told myself, treading water and
laughing through chattering teeth, that it would be good for me to have a soul like Deborah’s in my life. I loved her a lot in that moment, the way I loved her the time we drove up Topanga Canyon and camped in my car by the edge of a cliff, or the time she baked a gram of marijuana into a batch of Betty Crocker Ultimate Fudge brownies and we ate them with our fingers from the pan, wrapped together on the floor watching old Nickelodeon cartoons. These days, Deborah and I both come home tired. We watch movies and go for walks sometimes. I still call her my rebel child, but I’ve found I like her best when she’s wearing sweatpants and reading Dan Brown novels on the couch. Growing up, I never knew a person who did their dishes naked. Everyone around me liked casseroles with RiceA-Roni and cream of mushroom soup. I’m not sure now whether that makes me better than Deborah or worse, but I feel certain it must be one or the other.
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eborah comes home early enough. I hear her rattling around in the living room, clicking across the floor in high-heeled shoes she’ll leave by the table when she goes to bed. I imagine her in the kitchen, eating cold potatoes out of the pan and drinking Gatorade so she won’t have a headache in the morning. I mute the television when she comes into the bedroom. She is surprised to see me awake, and kisses me on the head. Her faced is flushed, though from what I couldn’t say. I tell myself that it is highly improbably that she’s been fucking Theodore, but as soon as the thought occurs to me, I realize it’s beside the point. “I’m so sorry you couldn’t come,” she’s telling me. “We had the best time. Jillian came to meet us — I’ve told you about Jillian, right? She was a paralegal at my old firm. She quit around the same time I did, to study composition. She and Theodore hit it
fiction off right away.” She disappears into the closet. When I can no longer see her, I ask the question that’s been rolling around in my mouth all night. “Since when have you been artistic?” She steps halfway out of the closet. She’s standing in her underwear, hanging her dress. She’s thick and broad-bellied, and the hair that used to run wild is smooth now, tamed with expensive product. “Who said I was artistic?” “Theodore said something about it. He said, ‘You were always very artistic.’ I didn’t know that about you. I mean, I’ve never seen you paint or anything like that.” Deborah disappears back into the closet. She leaves her bra on the door handle and pulls a t-shirt out of the dresser. There’s a long silence, and I remember how she once told me that she loved the long blank spaces that filled up our conversations while I thought and thought about what I would say next. “I don’t know, Jamie,” she finally says. Her voice is light and level. “I don’t think he was talking about anything specific. That’s probably just the impression he had of me when we were in school together.” “That’s good.” There’s a hangnail on my left middle finger and I study it, bite it. Deborah picks up her stockings from the floor. She’s waiting for me to finish. “I don’t think I could stand it if you suddenly became an artist. You’d have to start talking like Theodore: ‘Ah, my work! My work makes me feel so alive!’ I mean, come on. I know he’s your friend — but Christ, what an asshole. This guy isn’t an artist. He’s a corporate stooge, he’s just stooging for a less successful corporation than he used to.” Deborah raises her eyebrows at me. “Finished there, little tiger?” “Come on, Deb. The guy’s a hack.” “You’re acting like a brat, Jamie. I don’t understand why you’re getting so mad about this, when you don’t give
a damn about art to begin with!” “I just don’t understand why this guy impressed you so much. You worked seventy hours last week trying to make sure those girls in Monterey Park were okay while the INS harangued their mom. But you act like that means nothing. You respected Theodore in a way you’ve never respected yourself.” “That’s crap, Jamie.” My name sounds vulgar the way she says it. “God, I was being nice. Somebody needed to be, since you were so busy sulking and staring at your food all night. You barely said a word, even when Theodore tried to talk to you. What, are you jealous?” “No, I’m not jealous. I’m frustrated. Theodore wanted to play violin in an orchestra, so he gets a job corralling real musicians and then says he’s one of them? That’s bullshit. And what about you, Deborah? You suddenly claim all
you ever wanted was to move to Spain and pet goats. It’s like the last five years of your life didn’t even happen.” Deborah throws up her hands. “I’m not having this conversation with you. Good night, Jamie.” She shuts the door behind her when she leaves. I lie in bed and listen to her. There’s the clatter of dishes, and the humming sound of the television. The lights go out. She is my rebel child. If you tell her she’s a white Jewish girl from Pasadena, an immigration lawyer who has never held a paintbrush, she’ll tell you about the woman who sleeps in her bed, the Illinois milkmaid she educated in the music of being alive. And what if that woman is just a frugal lesbian, soybean pale and thick through the legs? What if we’re right about ourselves and wrong about each other? We would fall apart then, both of us.
A BEGINNER’S ROADMAP TO THE SUBCONSCIOUS The absence of color, Born into chasm, Outstretches its wiry arms, Elbows buckling, cracking, Collapsing, under the bulk of converging tectonic plates. This absence... this severed molecule... How detached it seems from the known continuum, How it drifts across the fabric of space time, Paralyzed in orbit, Deafened by quietness, Swaying to the ill-conceived tempo of ringing silence, Negative space on a defunct canvass, This absence.... Meddlesome and absorptive, This blurred image, This dulled, broken set of headlights, Forever muddling the uncertainties of forgetful men, Who half-heartedly rinse the muck from the coarse bristles of soiled brushes JT Flowers yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 31
THE NEED FOR SPEED BY ERIC STERN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY HENRY EHRENBERG GRAPHICS BY MOHAN YIN 32 | Vol. XLI, No. 7 | Summer 2014
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The use of Adderall as a study tool is a pervasive trend among Yale students. What does the drug say about our school and our society, and is there anything we can do to combat its misuse?
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tephen looks around the serving area of Davenport Dining Hall and considers: buttermilk or chocolate chip pancakes? Screw it, he thinks, and helps himself to a few of each. When we sit down at a table in the back, Stephen explains: “I kind of need to carb up early, because I don’t always remember to eat again.” He fishes around in his pocket for a moment before pulling out a small orange pill. Then he pops it into his mouth and grins. “Adderall,” he says smoothly. “It’s a hell of a drug.” Later, I sit with Stephen as he writes a midterm essay, and it isn’t hard to see what he means. While I idle nearby — checking Facebook, texting my brother, munching on a cup of cereal, rechecking Facebook — Stephen does not look up from his computer. Bowed low over the glowing laptop screen, he types fluidly, rarely pausing for more than a second or two to formulate his thoughts. After five hours or so, I ask, “Do you, um, want me to grab you any dinner or something?” It takes Stephen a moment to turn from the screen. “No, no thanks,” he says tersely, his eyes dry and red. “I, um, I’m almost done.” Stephen does not have a prescription for Adderall, and “Stephen” is not his real name. Because what Stephen does practically everyday — sometimes several times a day — is illegal, he and the other Yale undergraduates I interviewed agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity. (All of the names in this article are pseudonyms.) In recent years, The Yale Daily News and The Yale Herald have published articles about the use of study-enhancing drugs on campus. For the most part, these pieces have portrayed what appears to be a small problem, asserting that these drugs are used by a tiny
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segment of Yale, a niche roughly the size of the Yale College Republicans or fans of tofu apple crisp. A Herald poll in 2011 reported that “10.7 percent [admitted] to having used ‘prescription drugs,’ such as Adderall, Ritalin, and Vicodin, in a nonprescribed setting.” But nearly all of the students and many of the medical experts I spoke with scoffed at this low number. Various national surveys estimate the number of student users to be as high as 35 percent. A 2010 segment by 60 Minutes concluded that between 50 and 60 percent of college juniors and seniors (and more than four in five fraternity and sorority members) regularly use Adderall or Ritalin. For many Yale students, Adderall — a medication intended to treat attention deficit disorder (ADD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and narcolepsy — is an indispensable ingredient for success. As a Yale student, I have no trouble understanding the pressure to succeed on a competitive campus, but I still find something disquieting about Adderall. In order to understand what drives students to take this drug, I contacted 63 Yale undergraduates via email, text, Facebook message, or in person. (I had heard from other students that each of these 63 had taken Adderall at one time or another.) In total, 26 never replied to my inquiries, 10 denied ever using the drug, three responded but later hedged on an interview, and 24 acknowledged using and spoke with me at length. Through conversations with these two dozen Yalies — freshmen and seniors, men and women, frat stars and science double-majors — I hoped to comprehend the circumstances that make Adderall use so appealing to college students. I hoped to determine whether or not our university stands a chance at combatting the illegal use of a
drug that many consider a competitive necessity. I hoped to understand why it unsettled me that, when Stephen’s essay was handed back to him two weeks later, a large scarlet “A” was scrawled across the top.
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hen I spoke to Clyde on a blustery afternoon in March, he was high on Adderall. An athlete who will be working next year at a white-shoe consulting firm, Clyde often finds his Google calendar completely filled — from before the dining halls open for breakfast until after Durfee’s closes for the night. “Without Adderall, there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day,” he told me. “If you want to do everything and do it all well, then you need a little something extra.” A few days each week, Clyde takes a 20-milligram Adderall capsule with his morning orange juice. The drug, he said, makes him feel wide-awake and, more importantly, makes even the most banal schoolwork interesting. “Maybe not interesting, exactly,” he said, correcting himself. “But it lets you focus 100 percent.” Often when he takes Adderall, his stomach feels scrunched up and empty, but he’s never hungry. Sometimes, his head aches behind his eyes, but he pushes on. “Adderall isn’t a crutch for me,” Clyde said. “It’s a way of life.” For Clyde and the other students I spoke to, Adderall’s growing presence on campus is a result of Yale’s demand for effortless excellence, for academic and extracurricular distinction, for the ability to binge-watch House of Cards and still ace tomorrow’s exam, for the necessity to do it all with an unworried grin. Adderall, which contains the stimulant amphetamine and comes in either an instant release (IR) tablet or an extended release (XR) capsule, works
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Student use of prescription stimulants (in past year) Gender Male 5.8%
Female 2.9%
Race White 4.9%
Asian 1.3%
African American 1.6%
Other 3.1%
Grade Point Average B or lower 5.2%
B+ or higher 3.3%
Data for graphs from a national survey of over 10,000 college students published in 2005 in Addiction
by flooding the brain with dopamine and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters that help the user stay alert and focused. Amphetamines have been used pharmaceutically in the United States since 1927; initially, they were available without a prescription and provided free to doctors to treat any and every ailment. “The drug was a cure in search of a disease,” Elaine Moore wrote in her 2010 book The Amphetamine Debate. Today, many users believe that Adderall allows them to perform almost any task with enhanced intensity. A 2012 study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that a third of student users report taking prescription stimulants to “stay awake to party.” Bart, a Yale junior, told me that he spent most Friday and Saturday nights last year high on Adderall because “it allowed me to stay up all night and drink a lot more a lot more quickly.” To Bart, partying, like studying, is something for which there is always room for improvement. Adderall, besides allowing us to write more pages
and memorize more Chinese characters, could also have the power to enhance our social interactions and experiences. Two athletes told me that taking the drug makes their workouts more intense. But, I wonder, is Adderall actually helping us achieve short-term results? What about long-term success? And what does this need to do it all effortlessly, to break the rules and win anyway, say about the institution we’ve erected around ourselves?
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s I began to write this article and grow more cognizant of Adderall’s presence at Yale, I was struck most by the reticence that surrounds the drug on campus. Whereas marijuana and alcohol are typically viewed with apathy or amusement, students uniformly hide Adderall use from even their closest friends. One user I spoke with in a New Haven coffee shop earnestly said he didn’t have any close friends who used the drug: “I don’t really hang out with those kinds of people.” Either he is a very convincing liar, or he honestly didn’t know that my next interview — at a café half a block away and with lemon loaf twice as expensive — was with his suitemate, who is a regular user come midterm and finals period. The silence that surrounds the drug compounds the difficulty that researchers and administrators face in separating the users who take Adderall just to study or party from those who use it to combat a serious attention disorder. In fact, of the 10 students I interviewed who had been formally diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, only half believed that whatever trouble they had concentrating and finishing their schoolwork actually warranted a medical label. Amos, one of these five students, was formally diagnosed with ADHD as a college senior after years of buying Adderall from dealers to self-medicate. Even now, armed with a legitimate prescription, Amos hides the diagnosis from all but his closest friends. If classmates knew he took Adderall, he said, they would likely view him differently, as an addict or a cheater. But
Amos believes the medication simply helps him regulate impulsive behavior, ameliorate a dismal attention span, and improve his admittedly terrible memory. “It’s just, I haven’t lost my coat this year, and I don’t usually make it through winter season without losing my coat,” he said. According to the National Institutes of Health, ADHD is characterized by impulsiveness, inattention, and excessive motor activity. The disorder first entered the public consciousness in 1844, when Heinrich Hoffmann, a German doctor, published the story of “Fidgety Phil” (“Zappelphilipp”). Little Phil — who “wriggled and giggled, and then, I declare, swung backward and forward and tilted his chair” — is today a popular allegory for a child with attention problems. Phil has been reborn as a number of cultural icons, such as Dennis the Menace and Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame). Historically, ADHD was estimated to affect about 5 percent of children. In the last decade, however, the numbers have ballooned — climbing to 11 percent nationally in a 2012 CDC study. Of these children, between half and two thirds are put on medication, sometimes as early as age three, a fact that alarms many medical professionals. “Some kids have bona fide ADHD,” said Dr. Jerome Groopman, chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a professor at Harvard Medical School. “There are other kids who just have shpilkes, Yiddish for ants in your pants.” A March 2014 report from Express Scripts, the largest pharmacy benefit management organization in the United States, found that the number of young adults taking ADHD drugs doubled between 2008 and 2012. According to Express Scripts, nearly 1 in 10 adolescent boys is currently prescribed ADHD medication, including Adderall. “Using any sort of mathematical common sense, you can see that the suggestion that ADHD is not over-diagnosed is preposterous,” Alan Schwarz, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated New York Times correspondent who has written a series of articles on ADHD, told me.
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Geographical region North Central 2.8%
Northeast 5.8%
West 3.2%
South 4.6%
The students who believe they have genuine ADHD were largely ambivalent about the disorder’s overdiagnosis. “They can have as much of this stuff as they want, as long as it isn’t harder for me to get it,” Karl, a junior who was diagnosed at age 17, said of nonmedical users. But, he continued, “if … I couldn’t get the pills, I don’t know what I would do.” Even though his closest friends know Karl actually has ADHD, and have seen the difference the drugs make in his dayto-day interactions, many still ask him for the occasional pill. “These are the most proper, toe-the-line sort of people, and they’ll hit you up for it,” he told me in his dorm room, the only place he felt comfortable discussing his condition. Karl recalled one acquaintance who would hang out with him all the time while he was providing her with leftover pills. They would grab a meal, or go to parties together, or just sit around and talk. But once he decided to stop giving her the drug, he rarely saw her anymore. “And I wish I could say she was the only one,” he said. 36 | Vol. XLI, No. 7 | Summer 2014
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ost of the students I spoke to do not use Adderall to treat a debilitating medical problem. Rather, the drug is a tool that allows them to study late into the night, reading more pages, and writing more flashcards. For Roy, the transition from high school to freshman year was difficult — classes and extracurriculars dropped, grades far lower than they had been at home. Difficult, that is, until he started taking Adderall. Late into his first fall semester, Roy made an appointment with a New Haven psychologist, whom Roy easily convinced he had an attention disorder. “You just say that you can’t focus and stuff, and that you have ADD,” he told me, although he does not believe he actually has the disorder. The psychologist sent him to a Yale psychiatrist, who wrote him a prescription for two 20-mg XR capsules per day for ninety days. (Federal law requires that a new prescription must be written every three months in an attempt to prevent abuse and large-scale distribution.) I interviewed Roy the night before a midterm. For the past week, he said, he’d
been slowly upping his Adderall dosage in order to study more effectively. A junior and fraternity member, Roy said he remains cautious about using Adderall too regularly — and tries to take breaks after midterm and finals periods. “Let’s not fuck around, it’s meth. It’s a big boy drug,” he told me. “Has it worked for you?” I asked. “Well,” he responded, grinning. “My GPA has gone up.” For many of the students I spoke with, Adderall functions not so much as a conduit for excellence, but instead as a last resort — a tool they use to just barely keep up with the competition. When I asked Sam, a Yale senior who graduated from public school, whether he thought his Adderall use counted as cheating, he responded: “The rich kids from New York City who went to Collegiate and Dalton and had SAT tutors that get paid more than their high school teachers — are they cheating?” Robin, a junior on full financial aid, felt similarly. “The prep school kids all take Adderall so they can go out and party, fuck around, and still get good grades,” she said. “I’m working twenty hours a week in addition to school. So you better believe I’m taking Adderall too.” “It used to be that if you went to an elite college like Yale, you basically wrote your ticket. There were a lot of jobs,” said Groopman, the Harvard Medical School professor. “But now … there is a sense that if I don’t get an A in my economics course, then I’ll never go to Goldman Sachs. So I’ll take Adderall to stay up for 24 hours and cram in every fact.” This point, repeated in different words by all of the Yale students using Adderall without a prescription, made sense to me. I understand the feeling that there are too few jobs and too much competition. For students falling behind, the drug can seem like the only way to keep one’s head above water. But what, exactly, does Adderall do for these students that helps them stay afloat? Undoubtedly, the drug keeps nonmedical users awake and alert longer, much the same way Red Bull and Five Hour Energy do. “If you think staying awake is a competitive advantage, then
cover yes, it works,” said Dr. Les Iversen, a retired Oxford University professor of pharmacology and chairman of the British government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. “But these drugs are not improving your IQ,” he told me. What’s more, a 2012 study at the University of Pennsylvania found that Adderall use resulted in no consistent cognitive improvement among college students. On the contrary, students only believed their performance had improved. The users who plug Adderall as an effective study tool are indeed the ones who believe the drug works for them. But according to Dr. Amelia Arria, director of the Center on Young Adult Health and Development at the University of Maryland, Adderall does not improve academic performance at all for many students, and even those who report increased productivity are not actually experiencing enhanced cognition. “It’s not a brain steroid,” Arria told me. “We’re not there yet in terms of brain chemistry. There’s no little blue pill for your brain yet.”
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ven though the doctors I interviewed unanimously believed that Adderall does not actually improve cognition, I discovered a thriving — albeit underground — market for the drug on campus. One Yale sophomore, Francine, used to sell marijuana, but profit margins were small and interactions with suppliers made her uncomfortable. “Adderall, though … a bottle of thirty pills costs me $5, with insurance. If I can sell pills for $10 each — just think about that for a moment,” she said. Prices on campus run anywhere from a few bucks per pill to a dollar per milligram (pills range from five to 30 milligrams). Because people discuss Adderall less than recreational drugs like marijuana, it is difficult to know the market value and find a reliable dealer, which drives up prices. Francine, who has been dealing for the past year, said that she has between fifteen and twenty “semiregular” customers. Most of them fit into expected categories: athletes,
members of Greek life, and students who use other drugs. “But I also sell to lots of people you wouldn’t suspect: section assholes and girls who go to church all the time and people like that,” she said. Under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, Adderall is classified as a Schedule II drug, the same designation as other amphetamines like cocaine and opium. Selling even one pill could be a felony. Still, when I mentioned Adderall’s legal classification to Francine, she laughed. “Something tells me the police aren’t too concerned with a few Yalies studying too hard,” she said. Sgt. Karl Jacobson, supervisor of the New Haven Police Department’s narcotics and intelligence unit, said that while the officers he oversees occasionally deal with cases of prescription drug abuse, none of their pending cases involve Adderall. “In a city environment where we’re battling street violence and people are dying from gunfire, this isn’t a priority for us,” Jacobson told me. During the 2012-’13 academic year, a grand total of four students were charged with violating Yale’s drug regulations, for smoking marijuana. The Yale Executive Committee Chair’s Report made no mention of Adderall use. In fact, a careful examination of reports for the last 15 years reveals not a single reference to the terms “Adderall,” “stimulant,” or “amphetamine.” Pamela George, assistant dean of academic affairs and a member of the Executive Committee, told me via email: “I am not familiar with any cases involving Adderall that have come before the Executive Committee.” She followed up, “Nonmedical prescription drugs are a violation of the Undergraduate Regulations. If they come to our attention, we’d most certainly be concerned about it. The cases we commonly hear involve illicit drugs.” (In response to repeated inquiries, a Yale Health representative told me: “We are not responding to students at this time.”) Still, I was assured in off-the-record conversations with professors and other
faculty members that Yale administrators are aware of the drug’s prevalence on campus. But awareness is one thing; stopping nonmedical use is another.
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oger Griggs entered the pharmaceutical industry, he said, because his day job as a schoolteacher and a football coach “wasn’t the most lucrative thing in the world.” In 1993, Griggs acquired a small company that produced, among other things, a pill called Obetrol. Only one physician in the entire country was actually using the product, but this doctor found that, while Ritalin worked in calming roughly half of hyperactive children, patients responded to Obetrol 70 percent of the time. Renamed Adderall (a portmanteau of “ADD for all”), the drug was approved by the FDA in 1996 and quickly became one the nation’s most popular prescription medications. According to Griggs, much of the drug’s success is due to aggressive marketing, including print and television ads aimed squarely at consumers. “A couple of years ago, that drug did about $1.3 billion in sales,” Griggs told me. “It went from $40,000 [a decade before] to $1.3 billion — so that’s probably one of the better success stories out there.” In 2008, the pharmaceutical industry spent $31.5 billion on research and development. It spent nearly twice as much, $57.4 billion, on marketing. Since 2000, every major drug company has been cited by the FDA for false and misleading advertising, many more than once. “The FDA has rules, but it’s quite clear that the rules are designed to address issues in retrospect,” said Schwarz, the New York Times correspondent. “So if you put out an ad that the FDA doesn’t like, they will slap you on the wrist four months later.” Of all the things that can make Adderall so appealing, one of the biggest is its seeming legitimacy. After all, it’s prescribed by doctors and even advertised on TV; the high-definition videography and expensive time slots make the drug feel safe and ordinary. Griggs told me he does not believe it is responsible to advertise a drug as
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Admission Criteria Less competitive students
1.3%
Competitive
Most competitive
4.5%
5.9%
powerful as Adderall on television when doctors are still unsure of its effects. “Do you have any idea what the long-term impact of stimulating your brain is?” he asked. “I don’t have a clue. I’ve probably done more studies on this product than anybody and I don’t know what happens after twenty years of stimulation.” A number of doctors I spoke with repeated this concern. Adderall has existed for just two decades; by comparison, the first epidemiological study to clearly link asbestos with lung problems was published 72 years after the chemical was first mined in the U.S. and used for insulation. It is possible, the experts said, that the consequences of Adderall use could prove much more dire than students believe. “There have been deaths from amphetamines,” said Iversen, the former Oxford pharmacology professor, noting that Adderall is a close cousin of meth and other dangerous drugs. “And there will be even more down the road.” The side effects that students reported to me were relatively mild. They included anxiety, loss of appetite, and a crash following an initial burst of productivity — one sophomore used the drug to stay up for 24 hours to cram 38 | Vol. XLI, No. 7 | Summer 2014
for an exam, but then slept through the test. Even so, most students who experienced side effects continued using because of the drug’s potency. “I took Adderall and my first reaction was, ‘Fuck,’” one freckle-faced freshmen said. “It worked. Like, really well. Like, finished all my readings and p-sets and aced the midterm well. I think I was secretly hoping it wouldn’t work, so I wouldn’t need to use it. Too bad.”
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hen I asked doctors and medical ethicists about how to most effectively combat Adderall abuse, I thought they would all argue for increased public education, advertising restrictions, or a higher bar for ADHD diagnosis. A surprising number, however, said instead that Adderall and other psychostimulants should be made available to all American students. Since so many are already taking the drug, they reasoned, it would be fairer and safer if all students were allowed to use. In 2009, the Ethics, Law and Humanities Committee of the American Academy of Neurology recommended that “the prescription of drugs for neuroenhancement [be]
legally and ethically permissible.” Dr. Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford Law School, told me that pharmaceutical-based neuroenhancement could indeed benefit society — speeding up technological advancements, for example. “If such drugs were proven safe and effective, and issues of fairness and coercion were addressed, I would have no problem with students using cognitively enhancing drugs, just as I have no problem with them using laptops or, in the old days, handheld calculators,” Greely said. “I’m a liberal Democrat, but I always joke with my friends that there’s a certain amount of libertarian in everyone,” Dr. William Graf, a professor of pediatrics and neurology at the Yale School of Medicine, told me. “So what do I think about Yale students taking a little Adderall around exam time? It comes down to the ethics of autonomy: these are adults that are making informed decisions.” Many of the doctors argued that bringing Adderall usage out from behind closed doors would allow for regulation and oversight, which would in turn prevent abuse. “This culture of competitiveness and getting ahead isn’t good,” said Dr. Kelly Kelleher, a professor at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. “I would prefer what we did with pot in Colorado — legalize, but intensively tax and monitor; a lot of supervision so we know people don’t do it too much.” Studies have demonstrated that Adderall (and nearly all drug use, in fact, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) is most common among the wealthy and white. Because such students are more likely to know physicians (and because they often have parents who are more comfortable utilizing their resources to boost their children’s academic performance), most have an easier time procuring prescriptions than their poorer peers. In fact, Adderall
cover abuse has spawned a new term: whitecollar addiction, the kind of crime acceptable for the young, the white, and the rich. I suppose that if Adderall were available and affordable for everyone, it would seem less unfair. I can conceive of a Yale in which study drugs are institutionalized and out in the open. And yet, there is something about this image that makes me uncomfortable. Even after hours of conversation with students â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and doctors, ethicists, professors, administrators, corporate executives, and police officers â&#x20AC;&#x201D; I still canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t quite wrap my head around popping a pill or two to do schoolwork. Perhaps my classes are too easy, or my view of the classroom stuck in the storybook realm of Ms. Frizzle. But Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not sure Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m ready for a world in which competition is so central, or a few more points on the midterm so essential, or the need for sleep so tangential that drug use is justified.
pipeline. For instance, ampakines, which target glutamate receptors in the brain and have shown potential to combat Alzheimerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, may one day improve the cognitive abilities of nonmedical users. As I watch Christine, a sophomore international student, flip through her chemistry textbook with the rigid efficiency Adderall induces, my mind drifts back to Elaine Mooreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book The Amphetamine Debate and her observation that Adderall was once â&#x20AC;&#x153;a cure in search of a disease.â&#x20AC;? It seems to me that Adderall has finally found its disease: a student body that prioritizes excellence to the point of sacrificing its own health, of breaking the law, and of alienating classmates who have genuine attention disorders. Watching Christine â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the first in her family to attend college â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and Stephen, and Clyde, and Roy, and all the rest, I wonder if the cure has actually created the disease, by fostering a society in which people believe they have to do
drugs to keep up, and in which such behavior is becoming increasingly mainstream. Maybe Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m overreacting. Maybe our collective Adderall habit really isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a big deal. Maybe itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on the same level as Sparknotes and a language tutor and the caffeine in Christineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s triple venti Caramel Macchiato with extra cream. But as medicine and technology improve, there is little doubt that drugs and procedures will soon be able to guarantee returns: focus, absorption, perhaps even cognitive enhancement. Is that really what we want? At the end of our interview, Greely told me: â&#x20AC;&#x153;It is an untested empirical question whether a smarter society is a better society. But it is at least plausible that smarter scientists could lead to better breakthroughs, smarter politicians could lead to better laws.â&#x20AC;? He paused for a moment, before adding: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Then again, smarter criminals.â&#x20AC;?
E
thical questions aside, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve realized while writing this article that the entire argument surrounding Adderall use may be futile. Ours is a culture of fast fixes â&#x20AC;&#x201D; of chemicals to treat every ailment, big or small, real or perceived: from Advil to Xanax to Botox to Viagra. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I think civilization is about enhancement,â&#x20AC;? said Greely, the Stanford biomedical ethicist. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Everything since weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve come out of the savannah has been about enhancement.â&#x20AC;? While Adderall appears to be the dominant study drug for now, no expert I spoke with thought it would stay that way. Already, a number of other drugs have begun to eat into Adderallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s market share. Vyvanse (another stimulant) contains a more powerful amphetamine compound and lasts up to 12 hours in most patients. Several non-stimulant drugs, such as Intuniv and Strattera, have also been introduced to treat ADHD. Moreover, a number of new neuroenhancers are currently in the
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