YDN Magazine

yale daily news magazine Vol. xxxix 路 Issue 6 路 April 2012 路 ydnmag.com

Singapore: This Is Your Clean, Bright Future p. 26 Plus, Students and Police Make An Unlikely Team on page 9.

Christopher Buckley ’75.

Fareed Zakaria ’86.

Samantha Power ’92.

YOU? join US: MAG@YALEDAILYNEWS.com visit US: ydnmag.com

table of contents

9

shorts

Around the Colleges Q’s with Cynthia Zarin Top 10 2 small talk

aby new law & order James Lu

21

Legos and Lasers The Dress-Up Closet Get Lost, Find New Haven 6 personal essay

Letters from Sichuan Aaron gertler

18

Portrait of a communist

by Edmund Downie

26

Photo Essay

On the Straight and Narrow Jacqueline Sahlberg

34

Crit

Linvisible Man Alec borsook

stories of Singapore

by Tapley Stephenson and Ava Kofman

38

The back garden

by Zoe Greenberg

36

Personal Essay

Fleeting

Cecily carlisle

43

poetry

Intaglio 20 Lockport 24 Mary I and Mary II 44 ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 1

Magazine Executive Editors Eliana Dockterman Molly Hensley-Clancy Nicole Levy

shorts

AROUND THE

COLLEGES

Which college snagged the biggest celebrity for a recent Master’s Tea?

Deputy Editors Daniel Bethencourt Madeline Buxton Edmund Downie Lauren Oyler Amelia Urry

Design Editors

Berkeley

Meryl Streep Needs no explanation

Branford

Ludacris Dubbed Master Smith “S.Diddy”

Calhoun

Whoopi Goldberg Nun, The View host

Raahil Kajani Mason Kroll Lindsay Paterson

Design Assistants Michael DiScala Ryan Healey Rebecca Silvers

Photography Editors Zoe Gorman Kamaria Greenfield Victor Kang Harry Simperingham

Davenport

Fred Armisen SNL actor and hipster icon

Ezra Stiles

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Lakers All-Star, actor in Airplane

Jonathan Edwards Jason Alexander We still “can’t stand ya,” Costanza

Yale Daily News Editor in Chief Max de La Bruyère

Publisher Preetha Nandi

Cover photo by Ava Kofman Correction: Illustrations for the February feature “Flying through the Catacombs” were by Casey McLaughlin, not Madeleine Witt.

Morse

Art Garfunkel Simon wasn’t invited

Pierson

Paul Giamatti Actor, future Hamlet at Yale Rep

Silliman

Denzel Washington Hottest Yale dad

Subscriptions: To subscribe to the Yale Daily News Magazine, please contact us by email at mag@yaledailynews.com.

Subscription for 1 year (7 issues): $40.00

2 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

Timothy Dwight Morgan Freeman Actor, God

Saybrook

Paul Marcarelli Can you hear me now?

Trumbull

Edward Herrmann Got the invite because of his role on Gilmore Girls

shorts

VOCab•yale•ary Bud | bud | noun 1) a knob that forms at the end of a twig in springtime; the beginning of a flower 2) what a person might call a friend, a suitemate, or a classmate who is helping him with his problem set 3) colloquial name for a plant that will be widely burned and inhaled on the 20th of April

book review tweet The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistable Shift of Global power to the east

by Kishore mahbubani ydnmag nus prof argues the west must give up its dominance of global institutions #singapore #future

Yale-NUS: visualizing the story, p. 26

COMMON GREEN

Source: Yale-NUS

These are the plans for and renderings of the Yale-NUS campus, scheduled to open in 2014. ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 3

shorts answering: meander. I still like it, a wandry word with the taste of mead. I don’t think I’ve ever used it — written down, that is. Too shimmery.

How do you take your coffee?

Regular, no sugar. But I’m from New York.

What’s the most difficult piece you’ve ever had to write?

Whatever comes next! In the past, probably a profile I wrote for The New Yorker about Madeleine L’Engle, who turned out to be someone other than I thought she might be. But that’s always true.

Do you have a Facebook account?

Why or why not?

Ya

No. It wouldn’t occur to me. le

un

ive

rsit

y

for Cynthia Zarin Cynthia Zarin is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing. She currently teaches “Profiles and Portraits” and “Writing the Contemporary Essay.” Born in 1959, she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received an M.F.A. degree in writing from Columbia. Her collections of poetry include “The Swordfish Tooth” (1989), “Fire Lyric” (1993), and “The Watercourse” (2002), the last of which was selected for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

She has also written extensively for the New Yorker and was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship awardee.

What is your favorite memory of Yale?

With a group of students, turning a class assignment, “Twenty Questions” in English 457 (“Profiles and Portraits”) into a one-act theater piece performed at the JE Theater.

If you could go back to college now what would you do differently?

I wouldn’t worry so much about what people thought of me. Now, that was preoccupying!

What’s your favorite New Haven establishment?

Yale.

Writing today needs more ...

The most embarrassing moment of your career was ...

If you could meet one character from a novel, who would it be?

What advice do you have for Yale Students?

Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. I love mysteries.

How wonderful that someone else figures it all out!

Find something you love and do that. Be kind.

Listen.

If you could ask President Obama one question, what would it be?

Most importantly, why is Yale better than Harvard?

Reading. Books are the best teachers. And revision. I never get anywhere until at least the third draft.

Stop pandering?

You can’t live without?

Alas, I have to say it, coffee.

What is your favorite word and why?

I remember being asked that question in third grade and 4 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

Interviewing a naked woman posing as Lady Godiva. She was riding a horse.

Well, well. Do we have to go there? Aren’t you all tired of that question yet?

shorts

TOP yale-isms 1. “Let’s get a meal sometime!”

Let’s not.

2. “I go to school in New Haven.”

That’s in Massachusetts, right?

3. “So, what are you doing this summer?”

How about we talk about it in September when you ask me how my summer went.

4. “I haven’t slept in [insert # here] [insert unit of time here]!”

9. “Sorry, can’t tonight!

I’ve got society.”

If unit of time is hours, don’t expect me to be impressed.

5. “There is no food in the dining hall.”

Really? None? None at all?

6. “Sorry, can’t tonight!

Sillidinner with my sillisibs.”

I guess I’m eating Trumbalone.

And it’s really secret, so don’t tell anybody.

7. *snaps in conversation*

Well, I guess it’s better than clapping in conversation.

10. “That’s why I chose­ —” Stop it. Now.

8. “Excuse me, are you Jewish?”

– Magazine Staff

If I’m not, can I still go on Birthright?

ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

Small Talk legos and lasers D The Dress-up closet get lost, find new Haven Yale’s optics laboratory is spotless.

Anyone who enters must don a hairnet, shoe covers, and a lab coat (preferably white). A jumble of optic wiring emits an eerie green glow as concentrated light leaks out through small breaks in the line like slime. Complex instruments perch atop tables, daring observers to approach them and upset their delicate balance.

This lab is Zachary Kaplan ’13’s playroom. He uses it to fine-tune technology that can determine details about planets far beyond the bounds of our solar system.

“I like to compare this to building Lego sets,” Kaplan says, “except with lasers.”

Kaplan is part of an elite Yale program that hunts for planets outside our solar system using some of today’s most advanced equipment. Founded by veteran planet hunter Debra Fischer, the Yale Exoplanet Group has facilitated the discovery of numerous planets. Since she began her work in 1997, Fischer herself has co-discovered several hundred.

“In those early days,” Fischer says, “it was easy to point to ‘the most significant’ find.” Nowadays, however, she admits that she’s stopped keeping track of the exact number of worlds she’s found in the sky.

As small as they are, planets outside the solar system can’t be seen directly, even with modern equipment. Fischer, Kaplan, and other night-sky explorers like them have to search for planets with a different method: they look to stars that are influenced ever so slightly by the pull of planets orbiting around them. The planets’ gravity makes these stars “wobble” back and forth just enough that, with sensitive equipment, the Exoplanet Group can pinpoint exactly where the planets are. This kind of observation requires instruments that can detect movement of just a few meters from hundreds of millions of miles away. Such instruments are rare, and at most institutions, researchers can’t even see the equipment until they’re enrolled in graduate school.

“I’m not explicitly working for a professor. There’s a possibility I’m doing everything wrong.”

6 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

At Yale, undergrads can spend time in the lab themselves, working on problems alongside senior faculty members in a way that Fischer describes as “quite unique” among planet-hunting groups worldwide. Though Fischer’s exoplanet lab sees its share of graduate student activity, there are just as many undergraduates working there.

Some go when they can; some go every night.

Kaplan has accumulated enough course credit through Yale’s accelerated graduation program that he has enough time this spring to work in the lab full-time. His focus is astronomical technology: in February, he traveled to Chile to help fine-tune a new instrument designed to seek out extrasolar planets the size of Earth, which could hold the key to discovering life beyond our solar system. So far, current technology can’t detect a planet that small, but Kaplan’s work, along with that of many other experts, could help to change that. Though he’s decades younger than many of his peers, Kaplan has already co-authored two journal papers and a chapter of a book about optics in astronomy.

Another undergrad, Charlie Sharzer ’12, is essentially searching for Star Wars’ forest moon of Endor. Sharzer’s work focuses not on extrasolar planets, but the moons that orbit them. By observing the large planets’ orbits, Sharzer hopes to find a moon within the so-called “goldilocks zone”: an area with temperatures not too hot and not too cold, perfect for sustaining life. So far, no extrasolar moons have been found, meaning that Sharzer’s research is some of the first of its kind. Since he works independently of his professors and peers, his research comes with some risks — something that Sharzer is well aware of.

“If I come up with a lot of captures in my simulations, that would raise a lot of enthusiasm in the study of exomoons,” Sharzer said. “But since I have little experience and I’m not explicitly working for a professor, there’s also the possibility that I’m doing everything wrong.”

Fischer, Sharzer, Kaplan, and the rest of Yale’s team are intent on making one ultimate discovery: finding planets outside our solar system that could support life. It’s that goal that drives Kaplan and Sharzer to spend long hours in the lab every week on top of their other activities. Getting started so early on their planet-hunting careers makes it more likely that they’ll eventually find what they are looking for. If it’s even there.

– Robert Peck

small talk

In my more romantic moments,

I imagined that entering Fashionista Vintage & Variety, the vintage clothing store on Whitney Avenue, would be like stepping into a time machine — women in flapper gowns, cigarettes in pencil-thin holders, and a crystal chandelier.

But realistically, I was expecting a dank antique store whose clothes should have been thrown out years ago.

Instead, I enter something that resembles the costume room of a theater. Feather boas, hats, elbow-length red gloves, and other accessories swing from the mini-cabana that houses the cash register. Clothes, of impossible variety and in every color, hang from racks crammed into the viewing rooms of the boutique. A line of petticoats in pastel colors forms a curtain in front of the street-facing window. Only the jazz playing in the background belongs to the 1920s milieu I had thought I would see.

I’m still absorbing all of this when Todd Lyon, manager of the boutique and business partner to owner Nancy Shea, sweeps in from a back room. She’s a bottle blonde and cheery, wearing black from head to toe: a black lace shirt, a black skirt, black tights, black leather oxfords, and a studded black belt. She tells me she chose her outfit that day because she had just cut her hair into a mullet and “wanted to look a little tough.”

Fashionista, she says, started off as a tag sale. At the time, Shea was working as an environmental planner for the city of Waterbury, and Lyon didn’t feel satisfied by her career as a freelance author. The two quit their jobs to open Fashionista, undaunted by the risks of the retail world. “We’re just making it up as we go along,” she says.

“One of our mottos is, ‘We don’t need a business plan.’”

Their free-spiritedness shows in some of the boutique’s traditions: Lyon and Shea host dress-up karaoke parties, and every day at around 5:30 p.m. they open up a bottle of wine, in a ceremony they call “wine-thirty.”

Right now, however, Lyon is focused on a more immediate concern — a new batch of clothes just picked up at an auction. “Let’s untie it and see what we bought,” she says. The contents: a peach lace-up bustier, a striped vest, sixties floral pinafores, and a handful of failed attempts at early 1900s-style costumes. She matches a flouncy peaches-and-cream striped skirt to the bustier and finds the bustle that goes with it. The costume comes together, but Lyon wonders if the bustier could be put to better use. “Some girl could rock it just by itself,” Lyon tells me, grinning.

Lyon takes me on a mini-tour of the boutique — first, the window display full of what Lyon calls “cupcake dresses,” and then onto the Tunnel of Love, whose items include nightgowns, lingerie, and a pair of thigh-high black leather boots, and the fur room. She’s an exuberant guide, spilling anecdotes about everything from her new boyfriend to

kelly hsu / contributing photographer

the origins of certain items of clothing. There aren’t any other customers, but then, there hasn’t been a “fashion emergency” today. Fashionista specializes in these: the latest was a wave of Yale Forestry students seeking appropriately gaudy attire for a tacky prom.

But Fashionista isn’t just a camp store for people playing dress-up. Amidst coats made of chinchillas, Lyon tells me that many customers have come into the store expecting only costumes, and instead find something that entirely changes their style — a man who thinks he can only “dress in Abercrombie & Fitch” and instead finds that a pair of 70s style, short leather boots suits him more. “It’s fun pushing people’s perceptions of themselves,” Lyon says.

“Sometimes we can actually see people evolve, because they haven’t seen themselves in a certain light before.”

I stay for a few minutes after Lyon concludes her tour to browse through crowded racks of dresses. Many are too flashy for my style, except for a quiet dress in coral, or what Lyon calls “thinking girl’s pink.” It’s comforting to know, though, that if I ever wanted a shiny gold oneshouldered dress or an African beaded skirt, I could come to this boutique on the outskirts of campus. Just like it was a way for Lyon and Shea to reinvent their lives, it’s a way for anyone to escape to their own private dress-up closet — as Lyon calls it, “fantasyland.”

– Anisha Suterwala

When they swear me to secrecy

, I imagine it’s because I’m about to hear highly sensitive information — talk of illicit deals or citywide conspiracies.

I’m sitting on the floor of Laura Snow’s third-floor apartment off Whitney Avenue in East Rock, waiting with bated breath to become complicit in this secret. I should have expected no less from a group so shrouded in mystery that it does not even have a name. Known only as The Group With No Name (TGWNN, pronounced “tigwin”), the organization has worked since 2001 to connect over ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

small talk 1000 young New Havenites to each other through social and community development activities.

Tonight is the third planning meeting of the year for Cluefest 2012, TGWNN’s annual citywide scavenger hunt in which participants scramble around New Haven deciphering rhyming clues and fulfilling the event’s motto, “Get Lost, Find New Haven.” Last year, 60 teams ran relay races outside Frank Pepe Pizzeria, rode tricycles at the Peabody Museum, and shared a community meal of hot wings and pizza at 360 State. Snow, Cluefest CEO and president, is about to reveal the group’s ideas for the surprise they have planned for Cluefest’s 10th anniversary.

The ideas are still tentative, but they make it clear to me that nothing about them can be printed lest it dampen the hype surrounding Cluefest. Snow estimates that between 300 and 400 people will participate in the event this July.

Miles Lasater ’01, one of the event’s founders, believes the group has stayed true to its original conception. “A few principles have guided us along the way: have fun, learn about New Haven, and keep it free,” he says.

8 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

Those principles have also guided the evolution of TGWNN itself. When TGWNN founder Janna Wagner ’95 returned to New Haven in 1999 to start the childcare cooperative All Our Kin, she encountered a vibrant but decentralized community of young people. One night, she and a friend emailed all of the people that they knew about creating a group that could bring that community together.

At TGWNN’s inaugural meeting, someone suggested the group host a year of happy hours. Ten people came to the first event and told their friends about the next one, and the word about TGWNN spread.

Today, TGWNN hosts many events throughout the year: happy hours at Bentara, dance parties, Cluefest, and an annual Holiday Party that epitomizes the bridge TGWNN tries to build between fun and service. Last year’s party raised $3000 for New Haven Reads, providing a venue for the literacy organization’s representatives to “talk it up in a relaxed environment,” according to Daisy Abreu, one of the party’s organizers and the Deputy Director in charge of communications for Town Green. TGWNN also advertises other noteworthy events in New Haven, such as shows by New Haven-based theater troupes and panels on the city’s ability to attract young professionals. Each of TGWNN’s 1000 Yahoo! subscribers has an equal say in the events the group hosts — anybody can suggest an activity, be a leader, and attend the events. According to Wagner, “We need dreamers and doers. TGWNN has a good mix.”

The group’s founders see its lack of a name as an appropriate designation for an organization with such open-ended goals. TGWNN’s founders initially planned to think up a name once its purpose became more clearly defined, but the lack of a specified name stuck. “The name reflects the group’s identity,” Wagner says. “It’s really still a group that is defined by who is in it.”

Christine Kim ’99 GRD ’01, a member since 2004, believes TGWNN provides the kind of network that Yalies in particular are used to interacting with. “Going to Yale and then moving to New Haven is such a different experience,” she says. “Yale has such an infrastructure. A lot of us were very involved in school. Coming back here, we wanted that kind of engagement.” TGWNN has given Yale graduates compelling reasons to build a life here after college, whether it be because of discovering a nonprofit to work for through TGWNN, finding a group of friends in a city of unknown faces, or even finding a spouse — there are couples who have met at TGWNN events.

While Wagner initially created TGWNN for what she calls “selfish purposes,” it now provides a service for a much greater network of people. “When people say to me they stayed in New Haven … because of TGWNN, I can’t really believe it. I can’t believe we’ve grown into something that is actually meaningful to people besides ourselves.”

– Arielle Stambler

A NEW LAW & ORDER

by Ja m Photo by Grey Grissom

es LU

feature

T

he police stormed the building shortly after 12:45 a.m. The lights came on and the music cut out as between 10 and 15 officers — two of them clad in blue SWAT gear and carrying M-4 rifles — filed into Elevate Lounge. While they climbed the stairs to the second-floor nightclub, students there for the annual MorseStiles Screw rushed to get out. Some students shoved and pushed past officers in a bid to escape the venue before the New Haven Police Department and Liquor Control Commission began their inspection.

Officers fanned out around the venue, instructing students at the club to sit on the floor so that the policemen could check their identifications.

Initial compliance was mixed — some of the 250-odd students, possibly intoxicated, openly defied explicit police commands by standing, talking loudly, and using their phones to text or record the scene in front of them. In response, students say, officers barked at them: “Sit the fuck down!” — “Take out your fucking IDs!” — “Shut the fuck up!” — “Put your fucking phones away!” Later, the police denied using any vulgar or explicit lan-

Offic

ydn

threats of arrest.

By 1:20 a.m., many students had been assembled in a single-file line for identification inspection that students say was slow-moving and required multiple checks before they were permitted to leave. Still, several continued to refuse to comply with instructions, officers reported. Police said two students in particular — Zachary Fuhrer ’11 and Jordan Jefferson ’14 — did not heed the multiple instructions from Assistant Chief Ariel Melendez and one of the SWAT officers, Lt. Thaddeus Reddish, to put away their cell phones. Officers reported that Jefferson was using abusive

reported he said he didn’t “give a fuck” and “I go to Yale” — he too was taken and seated near Fuhrer, away from the crowd.

At this stage, Liquor Control Commission agents had largely finished checking identification and permitted students to exit the club. As students passed Jefferson on the way out, he tried to make conversation with several of them; a student passing by said he responded to threats of arrest with “so put handcuffs on me then,” and police said he told fellow students that “nothing’s gonna happen with this bullshit.”

But something did happen. Officers told Jefferson to stand, and one officer, Matt Abbate, grabbed his shoulders to help him up. Abbate then took out his handcuffs and began to arrest Jefferson. With one handcuff

ers p fuck unched an ing h ands d kicke d ,” an d Tas jefferso n, ye ered guage. lled him Within several minutes, the major“gim f ity of students remaining at Elevate our me y mor were seated and complying with poour e lice identification checks. But a few language — “Fuck this, fuck t i m e persisted in disobeying the officers’ or- this guy. Who does this guy fucking s. ders — some repeatedly took out their phones after receiving instructions not to do so, and others began singing a medley of Journey songs and tracks from Mulan. The police employed several confrontational tactics to stop the singing and phone usage, including

10 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

think he is? This is bullshit” — toward Reddish; students said both parties exchanged profanities.

Officers instructed Fuhrer to sit on the floor, then placed his cell phone on the bar. After Jefferson continued to resist police commands — officers

placed on his wrist, Jefferson tightened up, stiffened his shoulders, and stepped forward slightly, students reported. Police interpreted this movement as “teasing” and said Jefferson

feature

James Lu / staff photographer

pushed Abbate’s hand away.

That’s when Abbate took out his Taser and attempted to stun Jefferson.

Jefferson slapped the cartridge from Abbate’s hand and struck both Abbate and Reddish with his forearm, police said. Abbate grabbed Jefferson’s right wrist again and Tasered him in the right shoulder. Jefferson struggled free and staggered toward the dance floor.

Five or six other officers rushed toward Jefferson and forced him to the ground. Students reported that the officers punched and kicked Jefferson, yelled “gimme your fucking hands,” and Tasered him four more times before successfully handcuffing him.

While two officers escorted Jefferson out, one officer turned to the students around him and shouted, “Anybody else?” Another said, “Who’s next?”

T

he New Haven Police Department’s October 2, 2010 raid at Elevate Lounge — reconstructed here from the department’s February 2011 Internal Affairs report on the incident, which included the testimony of 25 students and 18 police officers, and from several dozen interviews with students conducted by the News in the days following the bust — was an “aberration,” then-Chief Frank Limon told the News last March.

“There was poor leadership and poor planning, and we lost control of the inspection,” Limon said. “The department has learned some lessons from this.”

But the raid, which took place as part of the downtown violence-reduction initiative “Operation Nightlife,” also marked a low point in police-student interactions in the Elm City. The widely divergent accounts of the incident, for instance, testified to a divide

between student and police perceptions of law enforcement: while over 30 students said officers used profanity during the bust, not one officer said they used expletives. While students tried to use their phones — legal under state law and now explicitly addressed by the NHPD in their “Video Recording of Police Activity” policy — officers told them to put them away, often in a confrontational tone. While a student was Tasered five times, Limon stood on the street outside the club.

Five students — four of them Yalies — were arrested during the raid: Alfredo Molinas ’11, Fuhrer, Steven Winter ’11, then-Harvard senior Seth Bannon, and Jefferson. While Jefferson faced three felony accounts of assaulting an officer, the other four students were charged with disorderly conduct, interfering with a police officer, or criminal trespass. The charges against all five students were dropped. The case

ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

feature

christopher peak / senior photographer

against Jefferson was the last to be dropped, in November. “[This incident] really resulted from police overreacting to a misunderstanding of the situation, and unfortunately my client and others were caught in the middle of it,” William Dow ’63, Jefferson’s New Haven-based lawyer, told the News in November.

“The whole incident never should have happened — it was a question of extremely poor judgment exercised by 12 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

law enforcement.”

I

n the wake of the botched raid, the NHPD has undergone substantial changes. Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. called Melendez’s decision to send the SWAT team into Elevate a “mistake,” and the assistant chief resigned within three months of the bust. (He was also under investigation for another case of alleged misconduct.) Limon abruptly announced his resignation

October 17, following a resounding no-confidence vote from the NHPD Union last March. Then, DeStefano appointed Dean Esserman to take over the reins of the department in November. From the outset, Esserman promised to take the department in a “new direction,” one that emphasizes a community-based approach to policing. “My marching orders are firm: address the violence and connect to the community,” he said at the October 18 City Hall press conference announcing his appointment.

Esserman’s approach to policing differs markedly from his predecessor. Limon adopted strategies like “Operation Nightlife” that recalled policing tactics from the 1980s, when police took a militant approach to engaging with the public, and the relationship between cops and the community was often contentious In contrast, Esserman is a “living embodiment” of the community-policing model, a man who understands that policing is more effective when conducted in tandem with community involvement, said William Bratton, who headed the LAPD and NYPD and has mentored Esserman since the two worked together in the New York City Transit Police. This policing strategy is particularly designed to combat violent crime — New Haven’s 34 homicides last year were the most the city had seen in 20 years.

But it could also have a positive side effect for police-student relations.

“It would be an understatement to say this chief is trying to foster a relationship with the community and students, who are an important part of the population,” says NHPD spokesman David Hartman. “But they’ll never be afforded more favors from the police department because of their being Yale students.”

Hartman describes the central piece of Esserman’s policing philosophy as reaching out to every citizen in New Haven and saying, “This is your police department, and this is what we

feature expect of you and what you should expect of us.” By moving officers from their desks and cars and putting them on walking beats in the city’s neighborhoods, community policing helps bridge any “disconnect” between the public and the police, Hartman explains. The new strategy is “gentler [and] more engaging” with community members so that cops and citizens “feel more comfortable working with each other,” says Bishop Theodore Brooks, a former member of the Board of Police Commissioners.

Citywide, Esserman is implementing an ambitious strategic vision that will restructure and strengthen the NHPD, swelling its ranks to 467 officers as budgeted by year’s end and 497 within three years. This growth will boost the NHPD’s patrol units, which will allow the department to better execute its community policing initiatives.

Likewise, Esserman has signaled his engagement with the Yale community, said University President Richard Levin. “I’m a huge fan of Dean Esserman,” Levin says. “I think the general philosophy that he represents can only be good for students, since he’s been engaging the communities he’s served for his whole career.” Already, Esserman is teaching a Law School clinic on “Innovations in Policing” with Professor James Forman Jr. LAW ‘92,

munity policing theory — and the opportunity to interact with students in the classroom. And Esserman has also met with on-campus groups, including the Dwight Hall Urban Fellows Program, the Yale Police Department’s Citizen’s Police Academy, and Middleman.

“What I expect with the ongoing relationships this new chief will forge is that, most definitely, we won’t see police brutality and they’ll interact better with civilians and students,” says Ward 29 Alderman Brian Wingate, who chairs the Board of Aldermen’s Public Safety Committee and serves as a facilitator for Yale’s unions.

W

hile the NHPD seeks to revive its community policing strategies first adopted in the early 1990s, the Yale Police Department (YPD) has consistently maintained a community-based approach since it was first founded in 1894, according to Assistant Chief Michael Patten. After several riots took place on or around campus in the early 1890s, the NHPD assigned two officers to police the Yale area with the specific goal of improving relations between students and the police. Student distrust

“We believe in partnering with all members of the community and realize community members and police officers share responsibility for providing a safe environment and community safety is best enhanced and ensured when all work together,” Patten says. “We believe in the value of community understanding of the police and their role and recognize the community has a voice in how police services are provided.”

The YPD has renewed its community policing efforts in recent months, as Chief Ronnell Higgins highlighted in a February email to the Yale community. The YPD maintains foot patrols around campus and on Wall Street, Howe Street, Edgewood Avenue, and Park Street because “active patrolling deters crime,” he explained.

For the YPD, community policing does not just involve proactive and engaged patrols and enforcement. It also involves an active commitment to building police-student relations so that all parties feel like they are on the “same team,” Patten says. As part

nit u m m

y

co e h t of n. ” o t t t n me m Bra i d o mb willia e g of this effort, YPD leadern ys ivi a l s ship meets with student groups such as “ , l a e d s i o the Freshman Counselors and Walden n m a g m Peer Advisors, as well as Greek organ esser polici of local law enforcement was nizations and athletes. Higgins high-

and Yale College Dean Mary Miller said her office was working on details for a potential residential college seminar taught by Esserman. Esserman says he is “very much looking forward” to the class — which Miller indicated would likely focus on com-

high, so the two officers had to work to establish relationships and trust on campus before they could begin to effectively police the community. The department has kept this in mind over the years as it has expanded and become more sophisticated in its policing, Patten said at a YPD Citizen’s Police Academy session at their Ashmun Street headquarters last month.

lighted the Yale College Dean’s Office, which includes the YPD in discussions related to student events or concerns, and Yale Athletics as two partners who help facilitate student-police interaction. For instance, Higgins says he and Patten meet with members of the Yale Football Team during summer camp as part of an outreach program begun years ago. “Both Assistant Chief Patten

ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

feature and I are former student-athletes, and we’re also coaches. We talk to studentathletes about making good decisions both on and off the field,” Higgins says.

In all, the YPD and members of the Yale administration held more

an a

appeared in the Magazine in February echoes the views of many students, who can recount several broken-up parties and a pattern of police activity new to them during their time at Yale.

She tells a story of a police raid of an off-campus party that’s similar to other stories recounted in interviews: The officer asked whose room it was, and the called-for individual

spread perception on campus of an uptick in police activity. “Maybe it’s just because I’m back on Old Campus this year, but I’ve certainly seen and heard of the police appearing at more parties both on and off-campus,” says one freshman counselor who asked to remain anonymous because of his position on campus. “The impression I get from my freshmen is that they’ve experienced the same thing, that they’re a bit scared of police just showing up the next time they go out.”

Whether or not this crack-

naly stud sis of th ent p e erce ypd cri ptio n of me logs does a wi than 50 meetings with student d e spre n’t bea and staff groups in 2011 about pubad c lic safety and policing, says Associate rack r out th Vice President for Administration Jae dow net Lindner, who oversees the Univer- stepped forward. The rest of us asn . sumed the silence of school children in sity’s policing operations.

B

ut even as local and campus police seek to strengthen relationships with students and the community at large, interviews with over 20 students on Old Campus, fraternity brothers, and freshman counselors reveal a widespread perception on campus of a “crackdown” against underage student alcohol-consumption in the past several months. A critical essay by Dana Glaser ’13 that

penance. Is this your room? he asked the host again. Yes, sir. Is this your alcohol?

Yes, sir. How old are you? Twenty, sir. No, sir, not everyone, sir. Sorry, sir. Yes, sir, we will sir, we’ll do it right away sir.…

Another officer proceeded with the business of teaching us a lesson, collecting IDs and calling us forward one by one to take down information.… [The officer at the door] smiled and informed us that ‘this’ would be happening a lot more often now.

Glaser’s account matches a wide-

jacob geiger / staff photographer

14 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

down is an actual reality is less clear. In a March 27 interview with the News, Dean of Student Affairs Marichal Gentry denied that University administration or the YPD were conducting a crackdown on underage drinking, and the data doesn’t support the perception of a widespread crackdown. An analysis of the YPD crime logs — posted online daily, in compliance with the reporting requirements of the Federal Department of Education’s Clery Act — conducted by the News found that the YPD registered 25 “possession of alcohol by a minor” and “other liquor offenses” in January, 26 in February, and 10 in March. This data does not correspond with widespread student reports of citations — students interviewed recalled more incidents than the YPD has documented in their activities, calling into question their perception of a crackdown — and is roughly on par with past data.

Part of the reason for this misperception may be that while the YPD seeks to enforce the laws, that enforcement may routinely not align with student interests. “When a student is the

feature victim of a crime, or is transported to Yale Health for alcohol poisoning, he or she tends to be grateful that the Yale Police are there quickly, taking care of the issue,” Lindner says. “However, when students are the ones breaking the law, they tend to be less appreciative of YPD’s role in enforcing the law. Yale Police are extremely aware of the consequences of overdosing on alcohol or drugs, and they’ve seen students get into some terrible situations, so it’s not a matter to be taken lightly.”

Higgins echoed those sentiments when he explained his department’s policy on enforcement to me last month. Officers respond to calls or patrol the campus, often in specific geographical areas of responsibility, but do not specifically investigate or crack down on behavior unless they either receive reports of incidents or see or hear something that might indicate the breaking of the law. Officers exercise their professional judgment on how to proceed in a given situation based on “experience, training, the law, department policy, and the circumstances presented,” Higgins explained.

Though Higgins said that students do sometimes seek his department’s advice when planning an event, and that the YPD is happy to help to ensure a successful and safe event, the police do not keep abreast of all student parties and events. As such, when police arrive at events and parties both on and off-campus, it is often in response to complaints of noise or unruly behaviors. In addition, Hartman says the NHPD and YPD share information on a daily basis about events they learn about, ranging from “a huge keg party on Lake Place to a hockey game with thousands of people.” While the YPD typically handles anything on University property or nearby, the NHPD is routinely called out to deal with cases at off-campus addresses or cases where there might be a “large number of underage drinkers,” Hartman explained.

“We don’t plan any types of ‘raids,’ but we do respond if we are called

harry simperingham / photography editor

about an issue, or if we see something problematic when patrolling,” Higgins said. “Sometimes, enforcement is necessary, which can run the gamut from a warning or a citation to an arrest, depending on the severity of the crime.

We have seen all types of incidents, including, unfortunately, overdoses, alcohol poisoning, and even deaths.”

The YPD has has deployed more foot patrols around campus as part of its community policing efforts to be “more visible and active” within Yale, Higgins says. By being “‘out and about,’ we are going to know more about

what’s going on,” he explained, adding that this can better position them to “respond appropriately to enforce the law.”

This has a positive effect in “detecting and deterring violent, property, and quality of life crimes,” he says. Based on 2010 crime data — the latest to be released by the University, submitted to the government in accordance with the Clery Act — Yale saw an 11 percent drop in crime on campus during that school year. And the University sees comparable or better crime rates than its peer institutions on a per-student

ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

feature basis. According to the most recent data available, Harvard University saw roughly 4.6 crimes against persons per 1000 students — double Yale’s rate of approximately 2.3 crimes against persons per 1000 students — while the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia had rates of 3.3 per 1000 and 1.9 per 1000, respectively.

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mous so as to not jeopardize relations with the police, said he had noticed increased police activity on High Street.

“This semester there’s been more of a crackdown, which was kind of a surprise to us,” the officer says. “Before police would come and shut our parties down, but now they are giving citations and it seems like a trend across campus.”

Sig Ep has been raided twice this semester and several students received

uptick of enforcement in the wake of the fatal Harvard-Yale tailgate accident last November, in which a U-Haul hit and killed a 30-year-old Massachusetts woman.

In the past several months, the University has implemented several changes to the way it deals with tail-

taken to Yale Health had been injured at the house. Several other brothers of Sig Ep and SAE, who were not authorized to speak on behalf of their fraternities, said they had noticed an

freshman from rushing Greek organizations in the fall, and administrators also discussed a policy that would prohibit freshmen from attending Greeksponsored off-campus events during

man h s e it fr fall. b i h pro ts next d l wou s even t a cy th f -campu i l o gating and fraternities. a p red of d e Yale announced new tailgating regs s o s u c n s o i ulations in January that ban kegs and d sp s k r e o oversized vehicles, establish a vehiclee r at g r t g s free tailgating zone, and require all atcitations, while neighi in din n m e d tendees to leave the student tailgating bors Sigma Alpha Epsilon were raidt a at m ed once after miscommunication led area by kickoff. Then, in March, the o r f police to believe a student who was University announced it would ban or students, however, the heightened patrols that have improved campus safety come with their own cost. More officers on the streets may mean police are more likely to spot cases of underage drinking or

other illegal activities.

This tension is most evident in the relationship between police and Yale’s fraternities. An officer of Sigma Phi Epsilon, who asked to remain anony-

sharon yin / staff photographer

16 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

feature the fall.

Greek officers interviewed by the News after the policy announcements said the University should communicate more readily with their groups in devising such policy. In a similar vein, improved communication between police and fraternity officers as well as greater familiarity between the two would help improve cop-student relations, the Sig Ep officer says.

Both Brian Ruwe ’13 and Pat Dolan ’13, the presidents of SAE and Sig Ep, respectively, said they have made efforts to strengthen relationships with the police. Both said that the YPD reached out to them at the start of the semester, and they communicate with the officer on beat patrol around High Street, Adam Marong, to give him a heads-up about parties and resolve any issues that may arise.

Ruwe says that because of their cooperation with the police, SAE has not had any parties shut down under his leadership or under the leadership of former president and current vice-president Ben Singleton ’13. That fact is “remarkable” given the number of social events held at the fraternity house, he says, and may be attributable to a new policy of having pledges manning the door to check identification — complying with Connecticut’s Underage Drinking Law requiring “reasonable efforts to halt [underage] possession” of alcohol.

Still, Ruwe admitted that it can be “stressful” as a fraternity president to face liability for injuries that may take place in his fraternity’s house and that he works hard to strengthen relations with police. To that end, he also decided to attend the YPD’s Citizen’s Police Academy to “better get to know the YPD and its officers,” an effort Higgins said was very welcome.

At a March 20 class at the Citizen’s Police Academy — open to students and members of the local community — the mix of participants is eclectic.

Seated in the room is former University Registrar Jill Carlton, Ruwe, anoth-

er SAE brother, five other undergraduates and a similar number of graduate students, and Ward 24 Alderwoman Evette Hamilton. The program, held at the YPD’s Rose Center headquarters on Ashmun Street, exemplifies the new era of police-community interaction, which emphasizes engagement and information-sharing. At the session, the YPD leadership discuss the history, operations, and capabilities of the department in an accessible manner.

Assistant Chief Patten introduces Eli, the bomb squad’s black Labrador.

With two secondary explosives planted around the room, Eli is led around the perimeter to sniff them out, giving attendees a first-hand look at how the YPD secures locations when high profile guests visit campus. Once he is done finding potential bombs, Eli is fed a doggie-treat by his trainer and left to roam free around the room as attendees eagerly pet him. The class is not so much about learning the technical side of the YPD as it is about demonstrating the human side of the department and engaging community members.

A

round the corner from the YPD’s headquarters, fraternity brothers walking to the Alpha Delta Phi and Delta Kappa Epsilon houses on Lake Place often encounter patrol cars returning to base.

But brothers in both fraternities interviewed said they had not noticed more police activity than in previous years. “At the beginning of the year, it felt like there was maybe more of a police presence then there has been at the past, but I always felt that was what would come along with the start of the new year, when police want to establish some control,” says ADPhi president Jamey Silveira ‘13.

At the start of the semester, Silveira says he “made a point” to introduce himself to the officers he saw around the house, so he could establish rapport and a mutually beneficial rela-

tionship where police could be confident “we could handle our parties and not let them go out of control, and [we] could trust them to not come knocking all the time.” Silveira says he disagreed “with the idea that police are out to get us,” explaining that as a fraternity leader, he didn’t feel that police drove around “with the intent of establishing probable cause and coming in to break up parties.” Rather, police served an important role in ensuring public safety by clearing people from the front of the fraternity house or the middle of the road, and ensuring people “aren’t doing anything stupid outside.”

This balance between respect for public safety and student autonomy is what students and police should work to improve, said Wingate, the chair of the Board of Aldermen’s Public Safety Committee. “Parties are part of the student culture, no one’s faulting that, but if both sides work better to communicate it’ll create a better environment and help resolve any issues,” Wingate says.

Increased communication and interaction is the central tenet of the community policing strategies emphasized by both the NHPD and YPD in the past year. While this type of policing, which emphasizes community engagement and proactive policing over traditional response and enforcement, may be potent in tamping down violent crime, it also provides the foundation for strengthened studentpolice relations.

Silveira says, “With more open interaction, from my point of view, then this perception that there’s an inherent conflict between police and students doesn’t have to be the case at all.”

D D D

ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

Personal Essay

Letters from sichuan D by aaron Gertler D

Madeleine witt / staff illustrator

‘T

here’s a letter here for you, Aaron,” said my mother as I lugged my third suitcase into my freshman dorm.

“For me? We just got here!”

“See? For you.” She handed me a folded piece of paper with torn edges. The outside was, in fact, marked “For You.” It’s strange to think of Danting Li writing her first message — long since lost to time and clutter — with only an impersonal “you” in mind. It seemed, at the time, natural that her words wound up on my windowsill. Having spent the last 18 years in an average suburb, I assumed I’d need an early start here to catch up on the excitement and mystery of my classmates’ lives. What better oddity than a message in a bottle (minus the bottle) from a Chinese highschooler inquisitive enough to end her time at a Yale 18 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

summer camp by reaching out to an unknown college student? Nevertheless, her English wasn’t great and my expectations weren’t high — if she responded at all, it would be at best a minor story to tell the friends I hoped to make at some point. Assuming we’d learn a few facts about one another and share a moment of serendipity, I dashed off a reply “to the person who slept in my bed.”

A week passed. I had almost forgotten Danting in the blur of Camp Yale, but Saturday morning, I woke to find a message in my email inbox: “Hello Aaron! I read your letter just now, and I’m too exciting to sleep if I don’t reply! I wrote the note just before I left Yale, and I was not sure if you can see it, I worried about cleaner may throw it (so I hid it behind your bed) or you can’t find it. But you found it and wrote to me!!

This feeling is amazing!”

Sixty thousand words followed those first replies, and despite my early attempts to sound like The Most Interesting Freshman in the World, Danting eventually learned more about the real Aaron than anyone besides my journal and maybe my mother ever had — mostly because no one else had ever asked. As long as she fired off her questions and requests, there wasn’t much I wouldn’t send her; I realized this one moment in March when I hit “record” on an iPhone voice memo, confirmed the emptiness of my floor’s bathroom, and started to sing.

When she said she wanted to hear my voice, I offered her Young MC, or perhaps Les Miserables, but she insisted on Justin Bieber’s “Eenie Meenie.” She sent back a song of her own (her voice is much better than mine), and called my singing “more eloquent” than Bieber’s (nope). Reading her reply, I rushed to play back the recordings I had made, trying to hear myself as Danting had.

Emailing back and forth with Danting — her English now close to fluent — has been like hearing from my prefrosh a year in advance. She wanted to know about Yale: the classes, the students, the parties (I’m keeping Toad’s a surprise for when she gets here). She wanted to know about America, and I’ve struggled to present a balanced picture: much of her knowledge outside her summer program comes from “Gossip Girl” and “The Big Bang Theory.” She wanted to know about my adventures, and somehow my daily life became an adventure whenever I wrote to her.

We might be separated by seven thousand miles and a seven-percent admissions rate, but week after week, message after message, we came to realize we share personality traits, high-school experiences, and a mission: get Danting into Yale. Her application will read much like that of any American girl — tutoring in disadvantaged schools, Model UN, interest in psychology and economics — but she’ll have to deal with problems few Americans might imagine. What if the only English-speaking teacher you have is a racist and you have to translate the only praise your closest mentor could give? How will you compete with classmates who transfer to high schools built around test prep and outsourced essay-writing? Why haven’t you seen a single one of these SAT vocabulary words before?

Danting hated to focus on school alone, so our conversations soon moved beyond grades — expanding from kung-fu movies to political commentary. She gave me the chance to rethink the views I’d developed during a decade of Western media exposure, about her country and my own. I

personal essay saw Communist Party propaganda, Chinese civics classes, and our countries’ respective educational philosophies filtered through the mind of a clever teenager who hadn’t often had the chance to question her culture. Danting once mentioned a student famous in Chengdu (population: seven million) for his perfect SAT score, then asked for my numbers.

When I replied, she remarked: “Your high school must be proud of you. Did they make a poster about you and put it next to the gate of the school to advertise?” I laughed so hard I nearly fell off my chair, but then I began to wonder what I’d have been like if I had been born into an average Chinese family, studying for hours so my name could top the public lists. Suddenly, I no longer regretted coasting through my American schools, even if they never plastered my face on a billboard, and Yale’s comfortable grade inflation seemed all the sweeter.

Danting, on romantic strategy: “You can use psychology knowledges to chase girl. I read an article said you can make a girl thinks she like you by increasing her heartbeat rate!”

Beyond grades, I shared with Danting — at her request — early crushes, in language hopeful enough to induce rueful chuckles upon later readings. Her conservative upbringing made hookup culture at Yale tricky to explain, and I sometimes worried about being the strangest pen pal in the history of epistolary communication. Danting told me not to fear: “Talking about creepy things with a person on the other side of Earth is cool!” And she was right — the world would be much more relaxed if every person with a computer could dictate their lives and opinions to someone they might never see. Especially if every pen pal loved stories that fell flat when told in local company, and every pen pal thought of you as a cool, witty observer of the social scene. Actually, if Danting does get into Yale, I fear that the real me won’t impress her.

In the meantime, though, the knowledge that there’s someone else looking forward to tales of my life has actually emboldened me. My quiet room on the third floor of TD had kept me from appreciating ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

personal essay Yale’s nightlife, but when Danting regretfully spoke of “never joining a real party,” I realized I was passing up on opportunities to build my social skills, something we’d promised each other to do after bonding over stories of our shared shyness. A Saturday night I’d once have spent on news or a novel turned into my first stab at a frat party (I need more practice) and even a few sips of sake at Miya’s (sour, spicy; should’ve

intaglio Bones carved from linoleum and pressed into paper callus over the walls of the basement printmaking studio, obscuring the scars of thumbtacks that set out so many phantom frames.

The lights go on by themselves when we open the door. Above the surface of the worn wooden drawing table, inside the plane of the computer screen, lines draw across the skin like wires of suspension bridges, shadowing forth seams that could be incisions or mere surface marks. Confronted by the flat world-within-a-world of the operating room, we return to our own hands, our own skin. The carving tools silvered dark where our fingertips converge, or at the point from which they emanate. As we draw our own lines, mold our own image-worlds, the edges along our fingers, arms, shoulders, profiles, eyes become lines also: drawn. When we carve space away, we press the shadows into the new lines with our nails and separate ourselves, cut open our paper bodies with the traced-over contours of our tarnished hands, whose fingers melt toward etched translucency, until the edges we imagined reveal themselves to be our own disintegrating bounds.

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– Anna Renkin

stuck with sobriety). I packed the highs and lows into my next email, alongside a strategy to fare better next weekend.

When Danting wrote of her struggles to engage fellow members of the Red Cross club in a donation campaign, I’d never led a volunteer group in my life, but I found myself engaged in my first consulting project. “Talk to freshmen,” I told her, remembering my own eagerness to join clubs. “And give out prizes, so people will want to do well.” In the hands of Danting the businesswoman, my ideas took shape, and when she reported a successful fundraising drive, I was thrilled enough to imagine some future business partnership of ours spawning a SinoAmerican corporate empire. Since then, I’ve attended my first Bridgewater info session and taken a summer job with a private firm. It wasn’t all Danting’s doing, but she’s pretty sure I’ll either be rich or be president someday, and who am I to doubt her?

Actually, chances are that we’ll both enjoy modest success at ordinary jobs — as will most of the people around me, even at Yale, among the most exciting places on Earth. Comparing my first to my most recent messages, I see that I’ve become a creature of habit; enough club meetings and late nights hunched over a desk, and any place can lose its early thrills.

Maybe life is best lived through others; two weeks’ activity best recapped in five minutes. In her third letter, Danting startled me with the words “I think I’ve figured out what kind of person you are now.”

I’ve known me all my life and I’m still not quite sure about myself, so at first I marveled at her personal insight and my own expressive powers. But “now” was the word that mattered. Looking more closely at my old messages, I feel disembodied — someone kind of like myself wrote the first, but then someone a little closer to me wrote the second, and so on down the chain of Aarons until one reaches my present.

Now I’m a creature who August Aaron might barely have recognized, to say nothing of Aaron 2010 and Aaron 2000. Why seek the exotic in other countries when, with enough documentation, you can unveil a never-ending stock of novelty in the form of your own future? That’s enough reason to tell your stories and write letters, to anyone at all.

D D D

Portrait of a Communist

By Edmund Downie

His remembrances ... are valuable for old and young alike, for they are a lesson of principle activity under difficult conditions in the cause of humanitarianism, against racism, for peace, labor unity, and radical social change. – Joelle Fishman, forward to Saul Kreas: My Life and Struggle for a Better World

photos by Edmund Downie

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profile

T

hirty-seven Howe Street, or the New Haven People’s Center, is in a border zone of sorts, tucked just two blocks from the edge of Yale’s campus in the Dwight neighborhood.

The building stands alone, cut off from its neighbors by a driveway on one side and a scraggly strip of asphalt on the other. Its structure dates back to 1851 and looks as if it were cut from a New York City tenement: blocky, with a flat roof and blackened bricks.

Opposite, a small strip mall crouches beneath an open skyline, suburban encroachments that make the center seem even more isolated and more defiant.

I’m here to meet with People’s Center coordinator Joelle Fishman.

Joelle is in her mid-50s, though the slight shuffle in her walk suggests someone older. Her salt-and-pepper hair runs down her back in a thick braid, and she tends to wear loosefitting clothes — today, a pink-threaded

22 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

denim jacket comfortably draped over a pink sweater. She speaks in a steady voice, never rushed, and her frequent smile is one of those so earnest that it creeps into her voice and softens the edges of her sentences.

First, some brief biography: Joelle was born in 1946 in the workingclass town of Camden, New Jersey, to George and Edie Fishman, both children of Jewish immigrants from Philadelphia. After graduating from Douglass College, at that time the women’s college at Rutgers, Joelle moved to New Haven in 1968 and has lived in the West River area ever since. She met her husband Arthur in the early 1970s while taking classes in Manhattan, and they have been married for 36 years.

Right now, I know none of this. What I do know is that Joelle Fishman is not just the coordinator of the People’s Center. For nearly three decades, she’s also been the

chairwoman of the Connecticut chapter of Communist Party USA (CPUSA), whose most recent program calls for the end of capitalism in America. Her mother, Edie, is a communist. Her father, George, was a communist. Her husband, Art, is a communist. And when Joelle says to you that someone is a plumber, or a carpenter, or a painter, she says it the same way that the well-heeled mother of an upper-class boy might tell you that her son is a lawyer — as if the profession were a testament to the person’s inner character.

T

o say that Joelle Fishman was destined to become a fixture of the New Haven left would be somewhat of an exaggeration. “If you had asked me when I was in high school, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’, I think I [would have] said a teacher,” she tells me.

Even if Joelle wasn’t yet involved in politics in high school, growing up in the Fishman household meant she knew well the outlook of the workingclass left. Both her parents came from immigrant families in Philadelphia, and her mother’s story, in particular, reads as a parable of the workingclass struggle. Growing up in the Depression, Edie never finished high school; both her parents were ill, and she and her sister had to take turns staying home to take care of them. She worked unskilled jobs for most of her adult life, and it was only after Joelle graduated college that Edie could finish her own education and move up to a better job as an art teacher.

Edie and George met as members of the Young Communist League in the late 1930s, and their shared loyalties formed the foundation of a marriage that would last 67 years, until George’s passing in 2009. (In reflections he wrote in 2007 for his 90th birthday, he refers to her as his “comrade-in-arms.”)

Their dedication to communism didn’t come without its drawbacks; in 1952, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-

profile Communist campaigns forced George out of his job as a high school history teacher. But their commitment left a lasting impression on their daughter, who stresses to me how “fortunate” she feels to have grown up in a household committed to the values she espouses today.

To this day, the family remains close. Joelle tells me with a note of tenderness that, before George passed away, he and Edie were inseparable.

Now, Joelle and her mother take a walk every day — three times around Wooster Square, when the weather’s good. Joelle is fiercely protective of her family, as I find out when I ask when Edie dropped out of school.

Her response makes clear to me that’s none of my business.

J

oelle’s shift into politics began at Douglass College, where she joined the local W.E.B. DuBois Club, a CPUSA-sponsored youth group. She also tried her hand at journalism, editing the college newspaper and documenting life in the local housing projects. By the time graduation rolled around in 1968, she knew that her future would have little to do with her B.A. in speech pathology. “Doing that work required all of my energy and attention and skills,” she says. “It took everything out of me, and I didn’t want that to be my whole life.”

Upon graduating, Joelle moved to New Haven, where she met Sid Taylor, the plumber who then chaired the CPUSA’s Connecticut chapter (CT CPUSA). He organized her first job in the party, running the chapter’s bookstore on Broadway. Soon enough, she was commuting to New York for classes at a party-run school in Manhattan.

From its early stages, the party proved a breeding ground for some of the most important friendships in Joelle’s life. One was with Sid Taylor, who acted as her mentor during her early years in the party. Every day for the four years she ran the bookstore,

she would call him at 4:00 p.m. and pick his brain on current events. “He was a fabulous human being,” she says, “a worker-scholar.” Meanwhile, down in Manhattan, she became friends with a party organizer from Westchester County named Arthur Perlo, and they eventually married.

(Interestingly, Arthur’s father Victor Perlo was a world-famous Marxist economist as well as a suspected

stopped running. She speaks highly of 1982 victor Bruce Morrison and his successor, current Rep. Rosa DeLauro, and she’s also a steadfast supporter of Barack Obama, a man who has lost much of the left’s confidence since he took office in 2009. She went doorto-door for him in 2008, writing on CT CPUSA’s blog that his election represented a chance to “uproot ultraright corporate political dominance.”

“It’s so frequent that someone will join the Communist Party and tell me, ‘Wow, I’ve really been a Communist all my life, but I never knew it.”

Soviet spy. Joelle tells me the former but not the latter.)

But Joelle wasn’t in the CPUSA to make friends. She was there because she thought they were right. Marx was right, she tells me, in predicting the end of capitalism, to be replaced by socialism and then communism.

“I believe people will see,” she says.

“If they don’t, well,” — she chuckles resignedly — “but I really think that objective conditions kind of force the issue.”

The Party bookstore left Broadway in 1974, but Sid already had Joelle taking on a much bigger project: running for Congress, or, as she jokingly puts it, “baptism by fire.” Joelle was, in some ways, an improbable choice — just 28 years old, and not a campaign type by nature. (“When I joined the Communist Party, I doubt there was anybody who was more quiet.”)

Yet she would run for Congress in Connecticut’s Third District every two years from 1974 to 1982, with her best campaign in 1976, when she received 1.7% of the vote.

The CPUSA has not put up candidates for the seat since Joelle

Today, she sees the Tea Party as the real villains of the past three years.

“When you look at the things that have been accomplished in the face of that,” she says, “I find it amazing.”

Defending Obama brings out in Joelle an ideological flexibility surprising for a leader of a movement often caricatured for rigid thinking.

Conservative efforts to label Obama a socialist are “ridiculous,” she says angrily, “because that’s not what he is.

But it’s also ridiculous,” she continues, because it’s suggesting that “socialism is a bad word, which it’s not, and which loads of people in this country are coming to understand.” Joelle believes that Obama is only the first step. The real change will come later.

I

n 1968, when Joelle arrived in New Haven, she went to Yale to apply for jobs. She thought her college degree would give her a shot at a relatively high-level position.

The staffer present told her that she couldn’t hope for anything more than a clerical job. “I said, ‘But I just worked my way through college with clerical jobs,’” she says. “And she said,

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profile ‘Then go look somewhere else, Miss Fishman.’” The way the staffer spat out Joelle’s last name made it clear, Joelle says, she wasn’t interested in hiring any Jews. Telling this story, Joelle catches herself. “That’s not a big feature of my life. I don’t know why I’m going into that.”

It’s hard to find elements of Joelle’s life that both matter to her and don’t involve her politics. She’s a secular Jew, but it’s clearly not a big part of her identity. (About the Holocaust, she says, “They did go for the Communists first, and the trade unionists, and that isn’t always fully appreciated and known — that it was beyond Jewish people.”) She calls the friends she’s made through activism her “extended family.” And she considers politics the foundation of her relationship with her husband, as it was for her father

and mother. “What [Art] thinks is important,” she says. “We share those values, and I think that creates a really strong bond in a marriage.”

In fact, it’s thanks to Art that she has been able to devote herself to politics at all. The CPUSA used to cobble together a $50 stipend each week for her, but she tells me that ended some 25 years ago. She and Art live mostly on the income he earned working at Yale over the past thirty-five years.

Volunteering full-time “is a risky thing to do in terms of your later years — you don’t have the same equity buildup,” she admits. “But I just feel that I’ve been given an opportunity to do something I love.”

T

oday, Joelle shows little evidence of the reticence that inhibited her in her pre-

Lockport Come summer, night rises clear and cool, slate blue, like water off Lake Eerie and each house down the street from yours clicks on a porch light.

Past the road sign, the parking lots turn incandescent, all quiet, but for the churn of tires against the street gravel and the now and again pop of a firework in the west.

There is nothing for you here.

The small weight of your life has followed you, and you settle into the earth, the small sounds of crickets, the mint.

All around you, the fireflies rise up and down, turn on and off, like promises.

24 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

– Felicity Sheehy

campaign days. Thirty-eight years as an activist have left Joelle quite at ease asserting communist viewpoints such as the inevitable collapse of capitalism, the pervasive racial inequalities in America today, and the revolutionary promise of socialism. Buttressing this ideological framework is a host of anecdotes that she relates with the ease of a seasoned activist — stories about the night Yale workers unionized, about Sid Taylor’s first years in the Party, about legislation that CT CPUSA helped design to ease the lives of New Haven’s working class.

Memories unattached to this network of stories can sometimes elude her. She can’t remember when she became chairwoman of the Communist Party (“sometime in the mid-1980s”). Once, she even asks me when “nine-one-one” happened. It’s as if there’s not a place in her head for this sort of extraneous noise, not when a revolution is on the way.

And it is on the way, by some definition or another. “I think we’re living in — well, if you want to use the word ‘revolution’ to mean ‘change’ — I think we’re living in revolutionary times,” she says. She pulls out a favorite talking point, a December 2011 Pew Center poll showing that Americans aged 18-29 view socialism more favorably than capitalism. “The extremity of the control of wealth in just such a few hands and what that means for the living conditions and the shattered hopes and dreams of millions of people — it’s an objective force that’s bringing people together.”

In the Party, she sees that force made real. “It’s so frequent,” she tells me, “that someone will join the Communist Party and they’ll say, ‘Wow, I’ve really been a communist all my life, but I never knew it.’”

In the eyes of many on America’s left, 2012 has not been a kind year.

The number of Occupy camps shrinks each week. The economy continues to sag. Obamacare could fall within the month. All of the local victories over

profile

the past few decades that Joelle says CT CPUSA helped to secure — a civilian review board to oversee policing in Hartford, more democratic ballot access regulations in Connecticut, a six-year skirmish in tandem with unions to prevent the closing of the Winchester rifle factory — may seem small in the face of these setbacks. But she finds strength in her conviction that capitalism should fall, that it will fall, that it must fall — because the people demand it.

I

n keeping with the communist tradition of self-education, the People’s Center contains an impressive collection of leftist books and pamphlets that spill out from the third-floor library, past the art gallery, and all the way down to the People’s World office. After one of our interviews, Joelle takes me upstairs into the thick of this collection, to a stack of boxes on the near wall of the art gallery. She’s got something to show me; she knows I lean left in my politics, and, like any good activist,

she doesn’t pass up opportunities to advance the movement.

Bending down, she pulls out from one of the boxes a spare-looking white book, titled, “Saul Kreas: My Life and Struggle for a Better World.” Joelle put this book together on Saul’s behalf back in the 1970s by taking dictation from Saul for five years, one hour each week. She assumes he asked her because she was an organizer for the Party. As for why he wanted his biography written, she says, “He knew that he had a lot of important experiences. That’s all.” Her face is blank and somewhat impatient, as if she doesn’t understand why I would ask these questions.

It is not just anyone who would volunteer an hour each week for five years to take dictation for another person’s autobiography because of his politics. Nor is it just anyone who would have the strength of purpose to devote a lifetime’s work to a party that most Americans consider either a relic of the past or a threat to American values. Even at a time when CPUSA

membership figures are hovering at just a few thousand, she wants to talk about the Party’s future — about breaking down barriers between races, about empowering a wave of young people restless for change, about helping to unite the world around the promise of a better tomorrow.

At the end of our first interview, after fielding 50 minutes of questions about her past, Joelle asks me if she can address a different topic. “Before we finish, I want to say a little bit more about today,” she tells me, “about these times.” She will do the same at the end of our final interview, to make sure that we have fully covered the subject.

It is the only thing that she explicitly asks to address, the last message she feels the need to share. After all, these are revolutionary times.

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26 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

SINGAPORE STORIES BY TAPLEY STEPHENSON AND AVA KOFMAN

ydnmag.com | Yale

Photos by Ava Kofman and Tapley Stephenson

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A Pragmatic Balance

by Tapley Stephenson

I

n Singapore, the older generations remember a time before dazzling skyscrapers and glamorous shopping malls.

“When I was young this was just a fishing port,” one elderly Singaporean cab driver tells me as we weave between the giant office buildings of Singapore’s financial district. “People my age, we appreciate what Mr. Lee Kwan Yew did for us,” he says of the country’s founding prime minister.

of Singapore (NUS) and Singaporean resident of 20 years. “But he did turn [the country] around, and they went from chaos to a well-ordered society.”

In Orchard Row’s basements, food stalls display large sheets of paper with government-issued letter grades — most receive a B, though they look immaculately clean. The food courts offer an enormous variety, from traditional Singaporean prata to Chinese fragrant chicken to sushi,

a swamp, and in the mid-1960s, the poverty level in Singapore was, says Bishop, “legendary.” But under the “paternalistic” control of Lee and the People’s Action Party (PAP) — the ruling party in Singapore since 1959 — Singapore stabilized and eventually underwent an economic boom. Tan Tai Yong, vice provost for student life at the National University of Singapore, says that his children’s generation “never experienced this

The cab drops me off at a shopping district called Orchard Road, where the malls are looming towers called “cities” and where enormous crowds of citizens, tourists, and expats alike swarm the manicured sidewalks each weekend. Depending on the “city” you’re in, shops might market temporary calling cards to the city’s many migrant workers to hawk the newest Gucci suits to the 15 percent of Singaporeans who are millionaires.

Much of the Singaporean success story can be credited to Lee Kwan Yew, but his policies remain controversial. “One could argue about Lee Kwan Yew’s method of doing this because he did it with an iron fist,” says George Bishop, an American professor at the National University

curry, and hamburgers. The food is as diverse as the country itself, but with every sign and menu set in the same font and format, the restaurants feel like part of a giant template.

Walking past a career fair promoting jobs in firefighting, policing, and civil defense, I stop to watch a police recruiting video in which a group of officers tackle a fictional drug dealer in a dramatically lit alleyway. In real life, I realize, the criminal would be executed under Singapore’s mandatory death penalty for drug traffickers, but thoughts of that unpleasantness fade by the time I reach the next flashy storefront.

It wasn’t always like this.

Orchard Road, like many other parts of Singapore, was originally

hardship.” The country is now a financial hub and major trading port, with the third-highest GDP per capita in the world according to the International Monetary Fund.

Unemployment is at two percent and homelessness is almost nonexistent.

As Shawn Tan ’01, vice president of the Yale Club of Singapore, explains, “People will vote based on whether their needs have been met.”

On Orchard Road, I walk by sparking letters on a storefront that reads, “Shoes make me happy. I’m materialistic. Whatever.”

28 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

I

t’s 3 a.m. on a Saturday night, and I’ve just finished exploring Singapore’s downtown with a group of NUS students. They’ve

cover promised to take me to a building that is home to some of Singapore’s best Thai food and, as I soon learn, to its unregistered brothels. The mall’s official name is Orchard Towers, but it’s colloquially known as “four floors of whores.” We sit down with our pad thai at a booth next to a group of scantily clad transvestites; prostitutes converse with their clients in the fluorescent hallways nearby.

In many countries, a hub of illegal prostitution would have felt dangerous, or at least chaotic, but in Singapore, there’s a strong sense of order — even though police are almost never seen. “It’s the safest place I’ve ever been to,” says Etkin Tekin ’12, who studied at NUS for a semester. “I never once felt uncomfortable at any part of town, at any hour, and that’s something you don’t even have here [in New Haven]. There’s a perception that you’re protected.”

In comparison to today, Singapore’s past was utter chaos. The city was expelled from Malaysia in 1965 — becoming the only country in modern history to gain independence against its own will — and it soon faced high crime rates and racial tensions between its Chinese, Indian, and Malay populations, which led to violent race riots in the 1960s. Many in the older generation, Tan said, still vividly remember those riots.

Order was created through the occasionally repressive policies of the PAP — such as barring any speech that could be construed as racist or critical of a religion, which helped quell racial tension — and with no Eighth Amendment barring excessive fines or punishment, the Singaporean government can be incredibly strict.

Gum-chewing or littering can lead to hundreds of dollars in fines or even arrest, so most city streets are spotless. Vandals are often caned — beaten with a wooden rod — so graffiti is incredibly rare. For more serious offenses, punishments escalate: kidnapping, illegal possession of

In real life, I realize, the criminal would be executed under Singapore’s mandatory death penalty for drug traffickers, but thoughts of that unpleasantness fade by the time I reach the next flashy storefront. firearms, and murder are all capital crimes.

Bishop says this compromise — harsh policies in exchange for an ordered society — is a fair deal in the eyes of many Singaporeans.

“Americans are afraid of someone telling you what to do, of tyranny; Singaporeans are afraid of chaos,” Bishop says. “There may be some price to pay, but we have an ordered society, we have peace.”

Outside Orchard Towers after dinner, waiting for a taxi back towards Yale-NUS’s eventual campus, I feel safer than I do walking down High Street near Yale’s campus at 2 a.m.

I

step off the bus and walk towards a building called AS3, an open-air classroom building at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Sciences. There’s a nice breeze in the hallway when I turn into a bright orange, green, and yellow room to find 17 students sitting in desks arranged in a circle.

Rajpal Singh, an NUS student, invited me to his discussion section for the NUS lecture “Government and Politics of Singapore.” We had spent the night discussing academic freedom in the country, and he said he wanted to show me a political discussion at his school. Twenty minutes into today’s class, the conversation turns towards Singaporean restrictions on free speech.

“You just get a sense that the

government distrusts you and that they treat you like children,” says a girl sitting across the room in black, thick-rimmed glasses, clearly frustrated. “What we have are petty ways to show that we are angry, since deep down, we cannot stand there and say something.” Since the newspapers are commonly censored and protest is illegal, she explains, most Singaporeans complain via Facebook or blogs — the equivalent of “slamming the door of your room when you’re angry with your parents.”

The girl’s comments stir a heated debate over whether Singapore is a free country. Would they trade some of their society’s order, the students ask each other, in exchange for fewer government restrictions?

The teaching assistant cuts in after some time, but he’s smiling and laughing. His lightheartedness seems genuine, though it’s unclear to me what his motivations are — on the one hand, the students are getting worked up about a lack of civil rights, but the class has also strayed from the course material.

“We’ll save this revolutionary talk for the next session. I’m not teaching a class on how to bring down the state,” he says, laughing. Then he turns to me and adds, with a self-mocking smile, “Make sure that’s written.”

The students echo his laughter, and the conversation turns back to the day’s proscribed topic.

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cover It’s hard to say where the line is drawn in Singapore between government censorship and peer censorship, says Wang Yufei, a student at an elite junior college called Raffles Institution that sends students to both Yale and NUS. When the government declares a topic “out of bounds,” she says, the effect can “trickle down” to the population, and eventually the people censor each other and themselves.

Alex Au ­— whose blog, Yawning Bread, is widely read throughout Singapore — says he sometimes finds himself self-censoring his work in an attempt to avoid the defamation lawsuits the Singaporean government has used against those journalists and bloggers who criticize Singaporean officials. “In Singapore, our judiciary has adopted the view that the more public you are, the more watchful the law shall be to protect your reputation,” he says.

liberal arts, and residential colleges.

After 15 minutes of light discussion and questions, Melissa Tsang, a prospective student, asks if she would be able to start a queer advocacy group at Yale-NUS, even though sex between two men is illegal under Singaporean law. The admissions officer remarks that this is a good question, and that Yale-NUS will help her, so long as the group is lawful.

“Yale-NUS is in Singapore, and our organizations will abide by Singaporean law. It will be lawful,” the Yale-NUS admissions officer responds. “If you want to start an organization, we will help you start that organization, lawfully. So that’s a balance we will have to strike.”

Though Yale-NUS wishes to help its students in any way possible, it seems the school’s values may come in conflict with the laws of the Singaporean government.

Just like Singaporean society, YaleNUS will have to weigh concerns over freedom of expression and

“We’ll save this revolutionary talk for the next session. I’m not teaching a class on how to bring down the state,” he says, laughing. Then he turns to me and adds, with a self-mocking smile, “Make sure that’s written.”

A

t a Yale-NUS information session, recent Yale graduates — now working for the YaleNUS admissions office — and two Yale seniors who work for Yale admissions answer questions about the new college in an auditorium in NUS’s University Hall, the flashy new campus administration building.

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the comforts that the government provides.

University President Richard Levin, Tan, and Bishop note the advantages that the country provides the University, many of which are directly related to the government’s policies. The island offers a safe climate to start a school; it embraces both Chinese and Indian influences; it is willing to pay for the entire venture, down to the salaries

of Yale professors who visit the YaleNUS campus.

But these benefits can come at a cost, says Mark Oppenheimer, a Yale lecturer of political science and head of the Yale Journalism Initiative. “[Yale administrators] will not speak circumspectly about human rights abuses and unfree practices about Singaporean government because they don’t want to offend their partners,” Oppenheimer says.

In response to the New York Police Department’s monitoring of Yale’s Muslim Student Association, Levin declared in February, “Police surveillance based on religion, nationality, or peacefully expressed political opinions is antithetical to the values of Yale.” After returning from Singapore, I ask Levin if he thinks the Singaporean government’s monitoring of the press and political blogs constitutes an analogous situation. He declines to comment. I ask if he thinks Yale-NUS will help to liberalize the country. No comment again.

D

espite the People’s Action Party’s often restrictive policies — such as censoring the press or curtailing freedom of speech — Shawn Tan, the Yale Club of Singapore’s president, says that the majority of Singaporeans choose to be “pragmatic” rather than idealistic about the costs and benefits of a growing economy under the Party.

When Yale-NUS finally opens, it will have a similar decision to make. YaleNUS can help liberalize the country and government that supports it. Or it can remain pragmatic.

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cover

An Uncertain Coastline

by Ava Kofman

S

ome say they’re just playing Sim City. That Singapore’s hands-on approach extends to the ground it builds on.

“We have a running joke here about the funeral parlor business,” says Richard Wan, editor of the Singaporean blog TR Emeritus. “The punchline is that it’s the only sector where the Singaporean government isn’t involved since there’s no money to be made.”

The Singapore City Gallery in downtown Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority Center gives an idea, though downscaled, of the government’s monumental ambition to make the tiny island nation into a global

conducts the crescendo of economic growth with a light touch; it administers criminal justice with heavier blows.

But the hands of government censorship are less clear, orchestrating affairs that are somewhere in between the unseen workings of self-regulation and explicit judiciary intervention.

In recent years, the government has taken a subtler approach: making calls to publications before they cover sensitive issues; asking stores not to stock books rather than ban them outright.

Yet this year, two lawyer letters were sent to publications asking them to remove content. Whereas the defamation laws involved in this case are

not see censorship as a continuum or a spectrum?”

Many NUS students say Americans’ biggest misconception about Singapore is that it’s a police state, where chewing gum leads to imprisonment and security guards menace passersby in streets and in the endless shopping malls. Sitting in a mall, across from a mall, in front of a different mall, Kirsten Han, a prominent blogger, anti-death penalty activist, and documentarian, explains that security guards may be nosy sometimes but only because they don’t have anything better to do. “Maybe it’s too boring to say that people in Singapore live like normal people do and aren’t disappearing off the

crossroads — from its plans to build a midnight Formula One racetrack to its construction of a skyline of Vegas excess.

At the gallery, city planners lay out the entire country’s past and future development — ­ in thousands of two -inch-high plastic buildings, colored pins, and tan wooden replicas — to virtually eliminate inefficiency and waste. As the government’s Housing Development Board (HDB) owns 80 percent of the country’s housing, sprawl is obsolete.

After scaling the statistics to size, Singapore is one of the world’s fastest growing economies — low tax-rates, stellar healthcare, clean streets, the most efficient trains, and so on. Singapore

codified, the mechanisms government authorities use to regulate other forms of expression are less clear. Imposed at the state’s discretion, the exact boundaries of the out of bounds (OB) markers — the term used to denote areas of unacceptable speech — are ambiguous beyond the general sense that they limit discussion of race, religion, and politics. Their reach extends past political discourse into education, media, activism, and creative endeavors. “We often see censorship in binary terms, yes?” National University of Singapore (NUS) student Bay Ming Ching writes over email. “However in many cases, censorship usually takes place on a variety of levels. […] Why

streets,” she says. But, she adds, it’s not useful to stereotype Singapore as “either a shiny Asian tiger or like North Korea.”

n March, a member of Singapore’s parliament (MP) considered suing the popular blog The Online Citizen (TOC) for defamatory statements they had allegedly made. Siew Kum Hong, a member of the core team for TOC, thinks that public attempts to restrict speech like defamation lawsuits “just don’t work” because the removal of content paradoxically draws more attention to the content itself. But almost anyone who receives a threat to sue will immediately take down the offending

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cover content, says Ravi Philemon, TOC’s interim editor. The cost of fighting a lawsuit with a full-blown trial would start at upwards of 200,000 ($SGD), Siew estimates.

And in the long term, these explicit examples of censorship may shape the sphere of public discourse in subtler ways. When higher-ranking MPs threaten to take legal action or follow through with filing a suit, they set an example by “encouraging other [MPs] to do the same,” Philemon says, which can create a “culture of fear” in citizens. “The result is that the default approach in Singapore is to reserve discretion when speaking about ministers,” he says.

But Raashi Mukherji, a Political Science graduate student at NUS, does not think these restrictions limit debate, as shifting the conversation to “question[ing] the system of power is no less effective than questioning the person.”

W

ith limited space for social protest, theater in Singapore has often been a space for airing the political as well as the personal. Alvin Tan, founder and artistic director of Singaporean theater company The Necessary Stage, negotiates the restrictions on sensitive speech to stage original works about marijuana, pedophilia, political detention, homosexuality, and censorship. He says people always ask him “how in the world did the government let you do this?”

32 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

Tan’s secret lies in the way he arranges his iPhone, glasses, water bottle, and notepad into the cardinal points of a compass on a cafe table in the NUS Performing Arts Center. As the four points of a compass, the objects represent the director’s idea of incorporating multiple perspectives, as opposed to polemicizing a single viewpoint when writing a play. Tan doesn’t think a play is successful if it allows its audience to simply applaud anti-establishment criticism and exit the theater with its hands and consciences clean. Instead, Tan believes his productions should “disturb” all citizens — both inside the government and out — to question their own policies, affiliations, and assumptions to take responsibility for social issues and problematic stigmas.

But the barriers to staging performances — about a thousand people fit into Tan’s privately owned venue, and funding from the government varies by production — guarantee that some attempts to develop a culture of

public interest may only reach a limited audience. “The mechanisms of control have become more sophisticated,” Tan explains. Whereas government authorities used to ban films or censor scripts only to attract international attention, they now ask venues in advance not to stage works or they give movies restrictive ratings. When political art translates into political action, that niche audience transforms into a selfselecting crowd.

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peakers’ Corner in Hong Lim Park is the only place in Singapore where public assembly — after registration with the park — is allowed.

It’s also where one of the more specific descriptions of the OB markers is spelled out on a sign: “The speech should not be religious in nature, and should not have the potential to cause feelings of enmity, hatred, ill-will or hostility between different racial or religious groups.”

At the Pink Dot parade in 2007, an LGBT awareness event that activist Kirsten Han attended, attendees had to stand in a circle cordoned off in Speakers’ Corner. Although the purpose of the parade was to raise awareness and visibility for LGBT issues in Singapore, its organizers had no other choice of venue, and foreigners could not participate. The stage in the park is for park-sponsored events only, and protestors must supply their own generators. “There’s only so much you can do when it’s the same group of people preaching to choir,” Han says.

The parade was banned from the park, and therefore from the country, after 2007 — the same year the government said laws banning homosexual sex would not be “enforced proactively.”

With heavy restrictions on peaceful assembly, political associations, and the press, activism is a constant balancing act.

Social progress comes slowly because advocates have to justify the concept of social progress before they even begin to campaign for specific issues, says Indu Rajeswari, co-founder of Sayoni,

cover a non-governmental organization that advocates for queer women.

Melissa Tsang, an intern for Sayoni and prospective Yale-NUS applicant, calls the tension in balancing these boundaries the “Kumbaya Effect”: “The government pretends we’re one big, happy family,” she says, “but that’s just not true.” Tsang says when the government speaks about “social harmony” and “balance,” they are using euphemisms that do citizens a disservice by making real discussion taboo.

Until recently advocates in Singapore, by definition, were those who explained their issues to policy makers behind closed doors, where there’s less chance of creating a public outcry.

“The government prioritizes economic development because they don’t want society to get too divisive,” Rajeswari says. “That is the framework we come from so whatever advocacy we do has to work within framework.”

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ingapore’s speech codes cannot be understood outside of the contextual framework of the country’s history, size, financial success, and cultural sensitivities. In the last four decades, the PAP transformed the nation from a colonial opium den in a jungle swamp into a prosperous, clean metropolis.

Singapore’s economic growth rate since gaining independence in 1965 is, by all accounts, exceptional: 4.9 percent in 2011, and counting. Vice President of the Yale Club of Singapore Shawn Tan GRD ’01 says he is unsure a booming economy could have been achieved “without proper sanctions to maintain social harmony and order in place.”

Though Singapore’s racial riots of the 1960s seem distant to younger generations, Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, remembers watching his neighbor, an Indian, beating his other neighbor, a Malay. Singapore has come a long way, he explains, towards peaceful multiculturalism and modernization.

He remembers growing up without

“Yes, Singapore has given us space, but it’s a controlled space. There’s more to come, but it comes with a lot of strings.” telephones, washing machines, or flushing toilets. Mahbubani explains that Singapore’s trend is towards even greater liberalization and openness, but in its own way and on its own time: “There is a gray area, but the boundaries keep opening up.”

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ince Speakers’ Corner may not be big enough for everyone, the Internet has also opened up a venue for Singaporean citizens and residents to voice opinions, debate politics, vent complaints, and organize for human rights. Bloggers, including those at The Online Citizen, say they started writing to push back against the lack of discussion about social issues, like race and discriminatory policies, in the mainstream media.

Though the OB-markers still apply online, NUS Professor of Law Michael Hor says that, until last year, the government didn’t allow persistently political websites to exist without registering before elections.

“The group of people willing to be vocal is growing much more than it used to be,” he says. “There’s just no way other way to go. Being repressive is just not cool anymore — it passed its time in Singapore long ago, but nobody cared to change anything.” Plus, illiberal policies, he adds, might also scare away investors.

And votes, suggests TR Emeritus editor Richard Wan. Many of those interviewed by the News in Singapore says that the growing plurality of voices represented in Singapore’s online public sphere has translated into political representation and results. But a lawyer by training as Hor’s former student at NUS Law, Rajeswari is more cautious about citing the election as a momentous mark of change “after 40 years of quietness.”

The extent of Singapore’s

liberalization depends on how you measure time. “Singapore has liberalized if you take a longer view,” says Ravi Philemon, who is also a social activist.

“Yes, there’s internet and social media.

Yes, Singapore has given us space, but it’s a controlled space. There’s more to come, but it comes with a lot of strings.”

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epending on who you ask, Singapore is the world’s fastestgrowing island nation — in terms of landmass. Over the last half-century, Singapore’s government has shipped in billions of barrels of sand from Indonesia so that it could “reclaim” — that is to say, build — land out of sea. And there’s not even a volcano, they’ll tell you. Yet even without the constructive excess of ash, the country will soon grow to be as large as New York City.

Looking at a built-to-scale version of a newly modeled city, it’s easy to wonder about the Real and hard to tell what’s what, really. The iconic skyline is no accident. Later, from the plane, shiny selfsame skyscrapers appear in Hong Kong, New York. There, where there was once the lawless walled city of Kowloon in Hong Kong, and the green of the New World in Dutch sailors’ eyes.

There too, in time, palimpsest blueprints and hollow wooden models eventually settled into substance and took on their own authenticity. For now, Singapore is an hourglass city — either the glass runs empty or the sands are still shifting.

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photo essay

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photo essay

On the straight and narrow by Jacqueline Sahlberg

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linvisible man D by Alec Borsook D

Creative Commons

I

t would seem that Linsanity, in its early fervor, has passed. Two months after Jeremy Lin’s headlong surge to NBA superstardom, the overwhelming buzz that initially spread across campus, as it spread across the world, has quieted down. After the Harvard alum joined the Knicks’ starting lineup and began his career in earnest with one of the most remarkable streaks in the history of the league, his numbers dropped. His proclivity for turnovers emerged like an elephant in the Garden. The Knicks lost six games in a row and saw head coach Mike D’Antoni resign before returning to their winning ways, followed closely by the announcement that Lin will miss the remainder of the season with a torn meniscus. Commentators, all the while, have begun to wonder whether Lin, in this Cinderella story, was handed his crown too soon.

Boxing champion Floyd Mayweather, Jr., for one, expressed his skepticism through Twitter, writing, “Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he’s Asian.

Black players do what he does every night and don’t get

36 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

the same praise” — and he was (mostly) right. Others have asked, why does Jeremy Lin have to be the Asian basketball player? Why can’t he just be a good player who happens to be Asian? Anyone can relate to an underdog story.

Everyone here at Yale can root for a fellow Ivy Leaguer.

On a basic level, they’re simply calling for equality.

But when you try to be politically correct, it can be easy to miss the point.

I asked senior swimming captain Chris Luu, whose parents migrated to California from Taiwan and Vietnam, if he had any Asian sporting heroes growing up. After a pause he said, “No — I know that there was a pretty good Asian tennis player named Michael Chang, who, I don’t know ….” He clicked his cheeks, as you might when you realize at the bottom of the stairs that you’ve forgotten your wallet on your desk. “You know, none of the sports that I really followed, so … no.”

Jeremy Lin is one of only a handful of Asian-American players to make it to the professional ranks in any major American sport. The first was Japanese-American

crit player Wataru Misaka, who in 1947 suited up for the New York Knicks of the Basketball Association of America to become the first non-white player to reach the game’s highest level. In the same city and year in which Jackie Robinson became baseball’s first non-white professional, Misaka did the same for basketball. But unlike AfricanAmericans in the major leagues, very few Asian-American players have followed suit and made it to the NBA since then. Overshadowed by the Knicks’ other guards, Misaka played only three games before he was cut.

Lin, too, was nearly cut by the Knicks before his lastminute emergence in February. He was cut twice before, in fact (by the Warriors and then by the Rockets), after going undrafted out of college (despite leading Harvard to an NCAA tournament berth) and receiving no scholarship offers out of high school (despite leading Palo Alto to a California state championship). He was overlooked — in no small part because of his ethnicity.

“I’ve come across stereotypes,” said Nick Okano, a Yale freshman football player of Japanese and Russian descent.

“I would say more so in the recruiting process. Junior year and summer going into senior year, I went to a bunch of college camps, and I would just say I feel like I kind of have to prove myself a little more.”

The job of a scout is to discover athletes capable of competing at the next level, but in sports where talent is largely subjective — unlike in swimming or track and field, where times tend to speak for themselves — Asian athletes can be overlooked. Their success, in the eyes of recruiters, results from first-rate skill, but they lack the basic athleticism necessary to compete at the highest level (except, perhaps, in sports that require a different kind of athleticism, as in table tennis or gymnastics). Lin, for example, has frequently been praised as “deceptively quick” because, as common knowledge tells us, Asians aren’t fast.

“Not many Asians play at a high level,” Okano continued.

“Not a lot of Asians, I would say, even play to begin with.”

One of the reasons for the relatively small representation of Asian-American athletes at the college level, including Yale, Luu suggested, may be “that Asian-American parents tend to have their kids focus more on academics than anything because there has been a stereotype that Asian-Americans cannot — or, are inferior to other races when it comes to physical ability.” Lin is important, of course, because he’s begun to challenge those claims.

But it remains that most Asian-Americans can’t, won’t, and, in fact, don’t want to be the next Jeremy Lin. Beyond the most manifest declarations of physical inferiority, though, Lin dispels stereotypes that affect all AsianAmericans — not just those that are exclusive to Asian athletes and not just the instances of plain racism that have emerged over the last two months and would have been condemned anyway. Rather, he defies several less

evident manifestations of prejudice, those subtle stereotypes that operate not through overt hostility but through conditioning — not through bigots but through friends — to the point where even those whom they affect begin to believe them.

It’s easy to deny stereotypes; it’s more difficult to dismiss them entirely and believe in yourself fully when no one has been able to succeed before. It’s not that Lin is a better player than everyone else. (He’s not.) Rather, it’s that he’s Asian and fully capable of competing with those to whom he was just months ago deemed second-rate; that he was born and raised in the United States and is not treated as some perpetual foreigner; that he plays point guard, actively directing his team’s offense with the ball in his hands, and that he’s not too quiet or acquiescent to make a good leader; that he competes with a Band-Aid hanging off his chin or a wad of gauze plugged up his bleeding nose; that he can sink a game-winning shot and then celebrate, the thrill unmistakable on his face; and that he’s more than just a smart, diligent machine lacking the same passion or heart as everyone else. He can’t be just a good player who happens to be Asian. He can’t be an exception rather than our example.

When I was in high school, my co-captain, training partner, and best friend on the cross country team was white — technically Argentinian and Jewish, but white in most people’s eyes. He frequently got sick and occasionally missed workouts for a week at a time. I sometimes broke down with injuries but didn’t miss practice otherwise. We’d go back and forth in races. A couple of times, he ran so hard he collapsed at the line. His eyes rolled back in his head, and an ambulance took him away until his temperature dropped and he was rehydrated.

Sometimes when I did a workout alone, on one of those days when I felt light and strong and was hitting my assigned times to the second, my coach would call out, “You’re a machine!” It’s a compliment in our sport.

It was the best thing he could have yelled in that hurried moment as he glanced at his watch and I darted past. I heard it a lot.

After one of those workouts, another teammate repeated after him: “You’re a machine.” My co-captain, though — “He just has heart.” My teammate didn’t mean anything by it, of course, but that essential sort of misunderstanding from a friend has a way of hitting harder than a stranger’s hate is capable of. Whenever a race didn’t go as planned, the questions came: did I really push as hard as I could have? Do I just lack something that everyone else has? There was doubt. It’s still there, but it’s begun to quiet down. I’ve found some Linspiration.

D D D ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 37

In the Back Garden

By Zoe Greenberg Illustrations by Maria Haras 38 |  Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

fiction

T

hree weeks after she arrived, Ana and I decided to build a fire in the stone-circled pit behind the house. We arranged twigs and logs while I told her about George Washington’s views on love.

“Washington is mostly well known for other stuff, but I read a book once that quoted him talking about his wife, and he said basically, even if the whole world were at war, he would be happy just to be by her side.”

“I never really thought of him as a great lover,” she said, pulling dried husks off the decorative corn necklaces Mom had hung along the porch. “How long does it take you to build this kind of fire when you’re by yourself?” I grew up on the farm, and I’d been building fires since I was little; at sixteen, I’d probably made hundreds. I used to make a game out of it, and time it with my Dad’s atomic level stopwatch. On my fastest day it took me four minutes and thirty-seven seconds to get a flame. Ana bent her head to examine the pile of pockmarked wood.

“It’s faster with you,” I told her. She struck a match against the Stowe Restaurant matchbox but it only made a staticky tchhh sound and didn’t light. My mom showed me how to light a match against your zipper, so that it flares up right away, but I didn’t want to teach Ana because she liked the process of trying.

She came to the farm on a Thursday at the beginning of June. Her dad and my mom went to college together, but then her dad moved to Anchorage and my mom moved to a mountaintop in the middle of Vermont. She had just graduated high school and was staying with us until she figured out what to do next.

She called her dad every Sunday night and told him about any new ideas for her future. Last week she was thinking about being a swim coach.

While we talked, she stacked the dead matches in a pile by her elbow. “Did you know that Madison was our shortest president?” I asked her.

She grinned. “Tell me another one.” She was wearing dark khaki work pants that were too big and a wide white t-shirt covered in dirt from the day’s work.

Her long brown hair was tied in a ponytail down her back and it swung from side to side when she struck the matches against the box.

“I don’t have another,” I said, though I did, but I wanted to save it for later.

“I’ll tell you one, then,” and she leaned forward conspiratorially. “Alaska is two times the size of Texas.” I already knew that because I read three books about Alaska before Ana arrived, just to be ready.

“Oh,” I said, trying to look surprised. “That is so, so weird.”

“These don’t work at all,” she said, handing me the matchbox. I took two large logs out of the pit, rearranged

the smaller twigs, lit a match and started the fire. She put her hands in her oversized pockets. “Cool, Ben,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was pleased or angry.

The last day of her first month, Ana decided to make pierogi. She hated kitchens, with their confined spaces and cookbook directions, but she claimed she’d been craving pierogi all month. After she finished twisting the dough, she set out a white tablecloth and glass bowls and glass cups, and called my mom and dad ceremoniously to the table.

“Tonight we’re going to eat like Polish kings,” she said, and put four pierogi on each of our plates, lumped in sticking piles. “Bon Appétit!”

“Did you know there was once a hairless Polish King?” I said. “He became incredibly famous because he just couldn’t grow hair.” Ana asked why that was so remarkable.

“Well he started out with hair and then it suddenly went away,” I told her. “They thought it was some kind of sign he shouldn’t be king anymore.”

“My mom’s bald, too,” she said, and laughed. “Maybe I should tell her she’s following in the tradition of the Polish kings.”

I stopped laughing and cut into the mass of pierogi.

My mom and dad were quiet and chewing.

“You probably shouldn’t tell her that,” I said, and put a whole pierogi in my mouth so I wouldn’t have to say anything else.

My mom liked boys better than girls, generally speaking, but she loved Ana. A week after the pierogi, I came home late at night and found them sitting together at the kitchen table, drinking tea and talking about Ana’s ex-boyfriend.

“He was nice,” she said, “but a little too narcissistic for me. He used to show me his journal, pages and pages about what he did every day.” My mom laughed and sipped her tea. “And he didn’t understand how punctuation worked, honestly.”

“That’s not so bad,” my mom said. “As boyfriends go. I used to have a boyfriend who worked in a fish factory. He stank of fish so badly that I had to wash my clothes after I saw him.” Ana stacked one cracker on top of another.

“Was it hard when you broke up? Even though he smelled so bad?”

“It was a relief. Except for a year every time I ate salmon I did miss him a little.” My mom took her empty mug to the sink and started to wash it. “Have you seen that little golden rooster I keep by the sink?”

She picked up a dishtowel and, finding nothing underneath, put it down again. “Oh, Ana. You’ll find someone good. I only met Ben’s father when I was twenty-nine, and I was sure I was alone for life.” My ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 39

fiction mom leaned her back against the sink and shook her head. “We met at a party in New York. I don’t want you to get any ideas, but we were both so drunk that when we met up for coffee the next day he thought I was going to be blonde.”

“So I should get drunk and go to a party?” My mom laughed and looked up at me, waiting in the hallway.

Her cheeks were red like Ana’s and she was smiling.

“All right you two,” she said, “I should probably get to bed.” She kissed Ana on the head and me on the cheek and went upstairs.

I’d wanted to ask her how long her mom had been sick and why Ana was living on a farm on the East Coast while her mother was bald in Alaska, but instead I just focused on the thorny branches in front of me.

It was summer and things were blooming. Every July we made cans and cans of jam, so Ana and I went to pick blackberries from the bushes that stretched out in long hidden lines behind our house. Ana liked the farm work. She told me it was the concreteness that got her. “Back home, I just sat around a lot, watching TV or something. But here, you can put your hand into dirt.”

“Lots of things are concrete, though.” I tried to think of something useful I’d read but in my mind I could only see stacks and stacks of cartoon books with nothing inside. Ana was a little breathless. She tugged at her ponytail, which she’d tied in a bandanna for the day. I remembered something I’d read the week before.

“Did you know last year twenty-seven percent of Americans didn’t read a single book?”

“Have you ever stolen anything?” Ana asked me. I shook my head no. “One time I stole something from a supermarket.” She leaned down to tie the laces on one of her work boots. “It was a notebook, I think. I don’t even remember it. I just remember feeling the hardback cover in my hands and not wanting to put it down.” I looked at her, surprised. “Anyway,” she said. “I like the farm because you can put a seed in the 40 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

ground and you know what’s going to happen.”

“Not always,” I said. “Sometimes crazy things happen here.” She smiled a little and ducked behind one of the bushes. I’d wanted to ask her how long her mom had been sick and why Ana was living on a farm on the East Coast while her mother was bald in Alaska, but instead I just focused on the thorny branches in front of me. After our buckets were each half full we lay on the ground in front of the bushes and sucked on the ripest berries.

“Ben,” she said, pulling up grass with one hand and covering her eyes with the other, “it’s been kind of fun getting to know you.”

Throughout the summer, Ana was trying to read the first “Harry Potter” book in Spanish, but she said reading another language was too difficult to do alone.

Sometimes after my parents went to bed, she read aloud to me in her halting, delighted accent. One night I brought her one of my old Spanish workbooks. I had taught myself Spanish two years earlier.

“We could start with pronunciation,” I told her.

“You should work on your pronunciation.” She brought her book down and gave me a long, curious look.

“I don’t want to just learn grammar and mechanics. Grammar is boring. If I learn too much grammar I won’t be able to think anything except subject-verbobject.”

“OK,” I said. “That’s actually dumb, though.” She started to read again, this time to herself. “I mean, grammar and mechanics, or whatever you said, is really important.” She kept reading. “Did you know Spanish is one of the world’s most phonetic languages? Usually if you see a word spelled you’ll know how to pronounce it.” Ana put her book down and looked into my eyes as if making up her mind. “Have you ever even kissed a girl?”

I had kissed one girl twice, first in a game of Truth or Dare and the other time outside of the school bathroom. I didn’t say anything.

“I mean like really kissed,” she said, and pulled her knees up onto the armchair.

“Why are you acting so weird?” I asked. “You’re missing your boyfriend from back home or something?” She frowned.

“Not really,” she said then, thoughtfully, “I don’t really miss anything from home.” She paused. “Except for my cat. My cat loves mice, but in a friendly way.

She brings me mice who are alive, like they’ve been hanging out or something.” She started to laugh so I started to laugh, too. I didn’t know if we were done talking about kissing or done talking about home or still talking about both. I looked up at her from below;

fiction saw the shadow her nose made and the length of her eyelashes.

“You guys are like my family now, anyway,” she said, and went back to reading aloud.

The next day, my mom and dad left the house early carrying weedcutters and left a note saying they wouldn’t be back until later. I decided to make omelets for Ana and me; when they were done, I put them on yellow painted plates to carry up to her room.

Maybe I should have told Ana that I had dated one girl, but three years ago, in seventh grade. She lived in town and I lived on the farm so we only saw each other the three days a week I went to school. Her name was Margaret. After we kissed during Truth or Dare, everyone told us we should start dating, so we did.

She was obsessed with dinosaurs, and I was reading a history of the paleontological Bone Wars, so I wrote her notes about it during math class. Just got to the part where he puts the bones together all wrong! I wrote, and she wrote back, Maybe there are bones beneath our school!!!! After we had been going out for two weeks we stayed after school together. We sat in a back corner of the library and ate a bag of pretzels. I told her my dad grew up on a farm and my mom fell in love with the idea of planting.

“Wow!” she said, full of enthusiasm. “What was it like to grow up on a farm?” I couldn’t really think of a way to explain it.

“It was cool,” I told her.

“Yeah, that sounds really cool!” We ate more pretzels.

When it was time to get picked up, she took my hand and we went to the water fountain outside of the girl’s bathroom. She stood in front of me and looked at me without saying anything until I leaned in and kissed her. She snapped her eyes shut and tilted her chin up like girls do on TV. Her tongue darted into my mouth and darted back out. Then she pulled away.

“I think it’s best if we’re just friends,” she said, in a very professional tone. “Not because I don’t like you but because I don’t think it will work if we’re dating.”

“OK,” I said, though it didn’t seem like the best reaction to get after kissing a girl.

“I’ll see you on Monday then, right?” She picked up her green backpack and headed outside, as if she were leaving a very productive business meeting.

I had no interest in telling Ana this, because she was two years older than me and had enough experience with a narcissistic boyfriend to confide in my mom about it. I was hoping that over eggs, Ana might talk about her family and her ex-boyfriend and her whole life. If she started crying, she could rest her head on my shoulder. Her hair was very long and straight and

I wanted to know what it felt like, up against my skin.

I picked up the two plates of eggs and went to find her. At the top of the stairs I saw her, through the door of my parents’ bedroom. She was at the dresser, looking at photos of my mom and dad on their wedding day. I stood at the side of the stairs, and watched her face as she moved one frame aside to look at another.

Then she went over to the jewelry box on the nightstand and opened it. She took out the pearl necklace my mom wore on Christmas and put it in the back pocket of her jeans. I pressed my lips together until they hurt. She was humming as she shut the box and continued to wander around the room. She stopped to read the back cover of the book on the shelf, and look inside the closet. My breath sounded too loud. I turned around and walked down the stairs as quickly as possible.

In the kitchen, I ate my eggs. Ana came down a few minutes later, but I focused on the metal tines of my fork against the yolk.

“I just read a book review I think you would like,” she said, sliding into the chair next to me. “Did you make these for me?” She picked up a fork and surveyed the omelet set out before her. “That was really nice. Thanks.”

We sat together in silence while she poured ketchup on her plate and cut her eggs into pieces.

“I wish it was raining,” she said. “Storms are so fun

If she started crying, she could rest her head on my shoulder. Her hair was very long and straight and I wanted to know what it felt like, up against my skin. here.”

“Yeah,” I said.

After we ate she went upstairs to take a shower. I washed the dishes and sat at the table, trying to read an article on the phenomenon of lightning. After reading the same sentence four times, I put the magazine down and went to Ana’s room. I waited outside for a minute, listening for the shower; the water was still running upstairs. I had never snooped before, but now I felt desperate for facts, and somehow I thought her room would provide them. Her comforter was rumpled on the floor and a pile of books sat disorgaydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 41

fiction

nized on the nightstand. She had taped a picture of the four of us above her bed. I swallowed and stood still in the center of it all, trying to breathe deeply.

Underneath her bed, I saw the edge of a red suitcase; I pulled it out. The top was unzipped and the inside was half filled with dirty clothes — sweaters, leggings, a blackberry stained shirt. The other half, though, was filled with things I recognized. The little golden rooster my mom kept near the sink, a pair of headphones, a rusty shovel from the garden. I looked at all the objects she’d taken from us. Then I shut the suitcase and, feeling the prickling of sweat under my arms, pushed it back under the bed.

Ana came out to the garden after I was already weeding. She liked to weed without gloves. Her hair was loose and hung down to the middle of her back.

“Everything okay?” she asked, looking up at me as she dug a thorny bush out of the dirt.

“Everything’s good,” I said.

She was quiet, then, “Sorry I acted weird last night.

I didn’t mean to freak you out.” She was biting her lip.

“The kissing thing was obviously inappropriate.”

“It’s not a big deal,” I said, adding a flowery weed to 42 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

the pile at our feet.

“I was only wondering because it’s actually fun to hang out with you.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that. Thanks for the omelet.” She stopped talking and went back to weeding. I looked at her, kneeling in our garden in her ripped jeans and stained shirt. She had a smudge of sun lotion under her right eye and she was pushing hard on her shovel. Her hair almost touched my knee; it smelled like soap and grass.

“Ana,“ I said. “I saw —” she looked up at me and then we were looking at each other under the bright white sun. We sat for a little while.

“Maybe, I could kiss you, now,” I said, very quietly, and I thought she might ask me to repeat it, but she just put her hands on the top of her legs.

“OK,” she said. We kissed then, and there was no darting of her tongue like there had been with Margaret. Her body was warm and sturdy against mine, so we kissed and then, afterwards, we kept weeding.

D D D

Personal Essay

fleeting

illustration by Mona cao

M

y mother kept lovers the way most people keep dogs: well-groomed and outside the house. I didn’t start to catch on ‘til I was ten.

Then, she kept men’s razors stashed in the bathroom cabinet; and after dropping me off for bowling on Saturday nights, she’d dash over to Pineapple Jack's pub across the lane. Though it was my grandmother who retrieved me from the King Pin alley, my mother was always home when I awoke, seated in our dimlit kitchen, a coffee cup and Virginia Slim as her only company.

In those days, she dressed to the nines, decked out in black platform stilettos, big-bodied hair, and burgundy lip stain. Perched at the rim of her tub, I was allowed to watch as she assembled herself for work at Tornan Intermodal. Tornan was a trucking operation run out of a tin-roofed trailer and gravel lot in Memphis, Tennessee; when I asked my mother what she did there, she said she flirted, mostly.

“When you’ve got a man for a boss, big tits and sweet-talking's the only thing that'll get you anywhere.

On top of having half a brain, of course.” With her D-cups, sticky delta drawl and eight years of selfschooling, she was fully equipped for the task. By the start of her second year there, she'd been promoted to lower management.

When I began dating, she had only two pieces of advice: never fall in love and save giving head for the rare occasions that you do. Just two weeks later, I broke the second rule behind a Mormon church. But I practiced the first like a daily-made mercy; sex soon became my religion, and love its lone vice.

They say single-motherhood breeds daddy disorders, young women looking for the lost affection of their fathers. But I wanted only men’s moans, and equally the wide, winking thighs of other daughters. I sought the wise smiles and leashed glances exchanged across discount grocery aisles. I spent nights craving the ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 43

personal essay tired skin of thirty-somethings. Nothing was better than their bedrooms: the mingled smells of hot, tossed murmurs and long-damp laundry. Plenty of men said they loved me, and I’m sure some believed they did. What was the fun in love? Infatuation, as I phrased it.

“When you’ve got a man for a boss, big tits and sweet-talking’s the only thing that will get you anywhere. On top of having half a brain, of course.”

Twenty is a year for making mistakes, and that summer I fell in love. He was a graduate student, and earnest. It was my policy not to mess around with married men, but this one said he was mid-divorce, and what a mouth. My mother called daily to scold. “It was an accident,” I said. “I swear!”

He taught me to make tea, the way Yankees drink it, searing and creamed. On weekends we took midnight drives to the docks in Branford, Connecticut, where we rolled cigarettes and kissed each other’s stomachs, spoke broken Spanish between dead rocks and cradled

faces when sleep started to creep in. The whole way back, we sang along to the Monkeys, pitching out hands to grasp the push of wild air.

We made love only once: outside, splayed naked in park grass. That night, it was the color of plums.

The lawn had a pulse, and with our rhythms we met it — down, I know I kept my head down, and his eyes were squint, shut. When that mouth made my name, I cried.

And after, all quiet. The night not even tuned to static, silent.

D Law school boys like to ask the same question: How can a feminist fuck so many people? But you don’t get it, I protest. Sleeping together is one thing, but every after-sex coil, with love-locked arms around my middle makes me cringe. It’s then that I feel instrumental, a pole to grip in the wash of insecurity: Was I good, baby? Did I come too quick, baby? You’re not seeing anyone else, are you, baby?

I have to ask whether we aren’t all just framing fantasies across the faces of breathing, feeling people.

Maybe it doesn’t matter when it’s mutual. All I know is this whole thing feels pretty fleeting, and I don’t think I’m ready to let any dogs inside the house.

DDD

Mary I

Mary II

When we first met, you were the sickly one – All tangled hair and sweat inside your tent.

I had a child’s distaste of, and need to shun The ill and found no reason to repent,

I said I disliked vaporetti, dear.

“They’re too expensive and slippery in the rain!”

But you, on foot, would probably miss your train.

Unsaid: It’s not the money, it’s the fear That with my pack strapped on I’d miss the pier And slip in the canal, not seen again.

Onshore, to toast to Venice, to maintain The buoyant mood, we pause to seek out beer,

Deserting camp and picking loquats – less Guilty still, when we tried in groups of four (at thirteen, too: imagine our success) Cocksure, to hitch-hike 5 k’s to the store.

But there are no more leper colonies – In health (not this same summer but another), Too far from the beach, we tripped and skinned our knees, Though I still tried to charm your gentle brother, And you, thin-skinned and just as sharp and sweet As stolen, golden, dripping loquat meat.

44 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 6 | April 2012

And somewhere, secular steps on which to booze.

The coat with golden cocks in appliqué On velvet was your great regret, you sigh.

I breathe and count the fissures in my shoes.

A task at hand gives you the right of way And pigeons scatter in the wake of your goodbye.

– Tessa Smith

Christopher Buckley ’75.

Fareed Zakaria ’86.

Samantha Power ’92.

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