Yale Daily News Magazine | November 2020

VOL. XLVIII ISSUE 1 NOVEMBER 2020

The Church at the End of the World

BY SHARLA MOODY

A

Catholic

anti-nuclear

activist

awaits

judgement

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITORS’ NOTE Dear readers, MAGAZINE EDITORS IN CHIEF Macrina Wang Isabella Zou MANAGING EDITORS Ashley Fan Claire Lee Zoe Nuechterlein SENIOR EDITORS Jever Mariwala Marisa Peryer ASSOCIATE EDITORS Julia Hornstein Eileen Huang Elliot Lewis Serena Lin Sharla Moody Olivia Tucker MAGAZINE DESIGN EDITOR Isabella Huang

Nowadays, we’re constantly experiencing newness. For the first time in recent Yale history, students won’t return to campus after Thanksgiving, family-weary and turkey-full. There are also the shifting political tides, record-hot November afternoons and relentless pandemic strangenesses.

At Mag, we’re encountering both familiar and strange kinds of newness. For one, we’re the freshly-minted Editors in Chief: former Staff Writers turned Associate Editors turned the people-with-all-the-passwords. Our newly-appointed Board brings verve to the age-old project of telling good stories — and in a few weeks’ time, we will welcome our next class of Staff Writers. There’s also the novelty of producing Mag issues solely for the digital terrain. It’s weird that they will only exist through hyperlinks and Avenir, and will never have long afterlives as makeshift coasters or silly hats.

In this issue, some of our writers explore particular layers of our newness-soaked world. They examine how enforced distance affects New Haven kindergarteners, museums as aesthetic and political sites and students battling eating disorders. Our cover story highlights Catholic activists faithfully protesting a different “end of the world,” and our creative writers attend to themselves and their surroundings in poignant ways — from a poem that insists on dancing to an audio essay about making homes in new cities.

As newness continues to texture our day-to-day, we are grounded by the old, the familiar, the stubbornly resilient. Things like friendship, community and well-told stories will tide us through.

Love, Macrina and Isa

PRODUCTION & DESIGN EDITORS Zully Arias Megan Graham Louie Lu Annie Yan

10 paintings + description Wrath & He Told Me to Do It KHENZOM ALLING

PHOTOGRAPHY EDITORS Zoe Berg Ryan Chiao Lukas Flippo Vaibhav Sharma Amay Tewari ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Dora Guo Anasthasia Shilov COPY EDITORS Erin Bailey Maya Geradi Ako Ndefo-Haven Natalie Simpson Katie Taylor

16 poem I WANNA PLAY WHERE YOU PLAY WITH THE ANGELS IRENE VAZQUEZ

4

17 personal essay Missed Connections MARIE SANFORD

KINDERGARTEN ONLINE Feature by Owen Tucker-Smith

EDITOR IN CHIEF & PRESIDENT Mackenzie Hawkins PUBLISHER Susan Chen

Cover Illustration by Dora Guo ASSISTANT DESIGN EDITORS Zully Arias Jose Estrada Megan Graham Louie Lu

2 | November 2020

12

THE DANGERS OF THE “LOCKDOWN SLIMDOWN” Insight by Jordan Fitzgerald

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LISTENING FOR HOME

24

19 feature A Tale of Two Cities RAZEL SUANSING

Audio Essay by Jonathan Jalbert

30 feature Museums at a Time like This JULIA WU 41 poem My Front Yard, According to Texts from My Father MEGAN BRIGGS 42 personal essay <Character List> CLARA PARK 44 bits & pieces Isollation in Tallies LYDIA KAUP

THE CHURCH AT THE END OF THE WORLD Cover by Sharla Moody

15 FIELD TRIP

Fiction by Emily Schussheim

35 Yale Daily News | 3

FEATURE

Kindergarten Online

The pandemic’s toll on New Haven’s youngest learners

BY OWEN TUCKER-SMITH

S

ometimes, when it’s time to gear up for another day of school, Vicki Parsons Grubaugh finds her 5-year-old daughter Sophie huddled beneath the dining room table. Often, Sophie is screaming so loudly that Vicki has to take her daughter out to the back porch until she calms down. In these moments, Sophie isn’t afraid of monsters, or the dark, or any of the typical terrors children hide from. She hides from school.

“The computer is so hard for her,” Vicki said of her daughter. “She’s screaming, ‘I hate school. I hate computer school.’ And that’s from a child who’s smart, and a traditional learner. And that’s heartbreaking. This isn’t working for her.”

Sophie is social, energetic and extroverted, Vicki told me over the phone, and she builds deep bonds with her teachers. Like many kindergarten-aged children, she loves being around other kids, so nowadays, as she isolates at home away from most of her peers, she reminisces to her parents about her preschool days.

Sophie, enrolled at Worthington Hooker School, is one of around 1,500 kindergarten students in New Haven Public Schools. In August, the district voted to delay in-person learning for at least 10 weeks. As November approached, families prepared for a hopeful Nov. 9 opening. But after a series of

4 | November 2020

contentious Board of Education meetings and a spike of COVID-19 cases in the city, the district announced on Oct. 29 that kids like Sophie would have to stick with “computer school” for the time being.

In the middle of a pandemic, school has been radically disrupted for all students. But for a kindergartener, Vicki said, the struggle is compounded. “[One of] the most important things you learn in kindergarten [is] social-emotional development — laying that groundwork for a love of learning and for school,” she said. “That whole second piece is missing on the computer.”

Of course, these difficulties are magnified for families facing financial uncertainty. Director of Education Services at Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services Dennis Wilson said at a New Haven Public Schools board meeting that many immigrant and refugee families are dealing with “the trauma of dislocation.” Wilson said that among the families his nonprofit serves, there is a middle school student who takes classes in a car due to the lack of quiet in his family’s apartment and there are older siblings who have to juggle school on top of caring for their siblings. Virtual school therefore

falls particularly short for refugee and immigrant students who are learning English, he said.

“For many English language learners who thrive off their personal relationships with teachers and classmates, there is no replacement for in person learning,” Wilson said.

In New Haven, some families are facing an especially brutal experience handling virtual school. But even households like the Parsons Grubaughs with two active parents and job security are in a state of chaos.

“CHILD CARE IS INTERACTION”: PANDEMIC DAY CARE Earlier this fall, the Parsons Grubaughs attempted a pandemic day care setup for their children — Sophie and 2-year-old Phillip. Vicki, a licensed clinical social worker, has been cram-

FEATURE

//YIMING ZHANG ming her work into the early morning and late night in order to help Sophie with her remote learning during the day.

Her husband Nate, a professor in the Yale School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, was at the forefront of developing the SalivaDirect COVID-19 test, while also juggling parental duties.

On a typical weekday in September, Nate Grubaugh would drive Sophie and Phillip to Creating Kids day

care center, 2 miles from their home.

He’d drop his son off to play in a room with fellow 2-year-olds and take his daughter to the director’s office, where he’d crack open her school-provided Chromebook and log into Google Classroom so she could begin her morning meeting and literacy section.

Twice a week, Vicki would take his place around lunchtime and help Sophie do her math lesson. Sophie would spend the rest of her day in her old

preschool classroom, learning with 4-year-olds who wouldn’t be headed to kindergarten for another year.

In the evenings and on weekends, Vicki and Nate would work with Sophie to try to complete as much make-up work as they could — a side effect of Sophie spending afternoons with the preschoolers. Even so, Sophie was participating in just 50 percent of her live class sessions on a “good day.” The hustle, Vicki said, was stressful.

Yale Daily News | 5

FEATURE Nate and Vicki are parents and employees, but these roles no longer have a clear separation.

“I’m just never completely in work mode,” Vicki said.

“And I’m never completely in home mode, because you’re just basically doing both all the time is what it feels like.

And that’s exhausting.”

And the exhaustion, she noted, is present even in a family with two parents who have been “very involved” in their kids’ lives. In New Haven, over 50 percent of families are single-parent families, and 75 percent of single parents in Connecticut are working. In a normal year, education means child care for these single-parent families. But in a pandem-

6 | November 2020

ic, this child care has evaporated for all working parents.

“We didn’t want Sophie doing pre-K all over again,” Vicki said. “We wanted her around kids her age. We wanted it to feel real for her.”

Sophie eventually left the day care center around the beginning of October.

When the pandemic hit in March, Mayor Justin Elicker issued an order to close all child care centers serving over 12 kids. As of the first week of November, according to Connecticut’s Office of Early Childhood, 68.2 percent of all licensed centers are open, a 4-point increase from the start of October.

Some day care centers, like the Yale New Haven Health

Hospital Day Care Center, haven’t had a choice in staying open. As the center is located within a major medical center, it lies on the frontlines of the pandemic. “We are going to be open — we have to serve our staff at the hospital; it’s just what we have to do,” Center Director Lynn Wiener said.

Throughout the pandemic, the center has adhered to standard COVID-19 precautions: mask usage, regular cleaning, an altered drop-off system.

Despite the precautions, Wiener said YNHH’s center has fostered an environment of meaningful interaction among the kids.

“As far as I’m concerned, child care is interaction,” she said. According to Wiener, the core purpose of the center simply could not be achieved without this physical relationship between child and caregiver.

There’s also an even deeper issue, Wiener said: For small children, facial expressions are a necessity. With all health care providers being mandated to wear masks, however, children can no longer experience this integral aspect of body language. “[For] an infant, [not being] able to see our smiles is an issue,” she said.

Rachel Katz and Helen Shwe Hadani, education reporters for Brookings, warned of the issue toward the beginning of the pandemic. “Children rely on their caregiver’s facial expressions and tone of voice to regulate their response toward peo-

ple and new situations,” they wrote in an April 21 story.

Paula Niedenthal, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has studied the different types of smiles.

She found that without seeing the lower half of the face, it’s much harder for adults to even be able decode facial expressions, so when kids see adults in masks, it becomes tough for them to develop an awareness of these expressions and their meanings.

Still, at YNHH, they are determined to maintain as much of the pre-pandemic experience as possible. “Does it mean we’re not able to adjust?” Wiener said. “No, we can. We have to.”

But at the Creating Kids center in September, Sophie would sit alone with her parents, completing her math lesson. In these moments, day care for her was no longer about socialization, but about having a quiet room to focus on school. Both she and her parents felt the loss.

Then October came. She stopped attending day care and new challenges ensued.

THREE PEERS IN A POD At the beginning of the month, the Parsons Grubaughs teamed up with two other kindergarten families to create a learning pod. Each family takes turns hosting the children throughout the week, with the hosting par-

FEATURE

ents providing supervision and assistance as the kids go through their virtual day. The move was a good one, Vicki said, not only because they “literally couldn’t manage it” in their previous arrangement, but because Sophie craved companionship.

And yet the challenges continued. Sitting with two other peers in their pod, Sophie would get restless. “Why do I have to sit in the middle?” she’d ask. “I didn’t get to go.” “Why didn’t I get to go?”

“I wanted to share!”

Sophie’s teacher is “doing as [well] as anybody could do,” Vicki said. “But in a classroom, [students are] given cues and looks and that nonverbal support and encouragement to help them learn how to be in a group and learn together. You can’t do that on the computer.”

Ilana Richman, the parent who suggested the learning pod, has felt a similar stress to that of Vicki.

Richman works full time at Yale New Haven Hospital as a physician practicing internal medicine. Normally, public school would mean free child care for her family — and with that, the ability to go to work. But with a kindergarten-age son enrolled in virtual school, Richman must now fulfill two roles: full-time physician and fulltime teacher’s assistant.

“It’s so hard to toggle back and forth between ‘now we’re sitting down listening’ to

‘now we’re going to do this assignment’ to ‘now we’re taking a break,” Richman said. “I have to constantly reorient him.”

For the members of Richman’s pod, the day has a manageable format, she said: 15 minutes of interactive class session, some time away to complete work, and then a period of small group collaboration with the teacher.

Richman’s son has a relatively happy disposition, she noted, and she’s been surprised by how much he’s been able to make out of the virtual experience.

“He’s connected much more with his classmates online than I might have expected,” she said. “And he loves his teacher. And that’s a total testament to her talent and skill.”

But in contrast, many images of virtual learning for younger kids that have circled the media across the nation since most schools

shut down last spring have been decidedly negative. In The Atlantic, author Emily Gould called remote learning “a bad joke” for her preschool-aged child. CNBC reported in September that parents across the country felt like they were “constantly failing” when it came to remote learning. The headlines continued: “The Sad Realities of Virtual Learning” in The Dispatch; “My 5-yearold Refused to Participate on Zoom” in Chalkbeat; “I Just Don’t Want My Kids to Give Up” in The Baltimore Sun. Even with the best teacher possible, Richman isn’t satisfied with the quality of education. She emphasized that virtual kindergarten wasn’t suited to her child and his peers’ social needs.

“Nobody, if they were designing a way to hold kindergarten, would choose a remote format.” she said. “It’s just not well-suited to how kids that age interact with the world.”

“A ROLLERCOASTER OF WAITING”: THE CHAOS OF REOPENING Over the summer, New Haven Federation of Teachers President Dave Cicarella said the district found that schools were, in fact, not ready to reopen based on safety standards. Back then, he said, he and others in the federation and board were appalled by a variety of sanitation and air quality issues across the district, and decided schools shouldn’t open until they fixed those problems. The Board of Education voted to conduct fully remote learning for the whole district for at least 10 weeks, making New Haven the only Connecticut school district to open without some element of in-person learning.

But New Haven was a unique case, Cicarella said.

“Our facilities department is incredibly understaffed and completely underfunded,” he

Yale Daily News | 7

FEATURE

said.

“They don’t do routine things like change filters. Things break down, and they don’t fix them. We have these brand new buildings with HVAC systems that essentially don’t work. What the hell’s up there — is it mold?”

As Nov. 9 — the proposed opening date — loomed, officials were less and less confident in the district’s ability to safely host in-person learning.

In late October, the New Haven Board of Education met over Zoom to discuss the impending reopening. The mood at the meeting was frenzied and demonstrated stark division among the NHPS community about reopening. Some parents expressed excitement about the reopening, telling the board how much their kids were ready to return — a clear plea against the unspoken fear that this return wasn’t going to happen. Others pushed the board to reconsider the return to in-person learning, citing rising COVID-19 cases in New Haven.

Mayor Justin Elicker announced the halt of the in-person transition just 10 days before the scheduled hybrid start date, after the city recorded a rising rate of

8 | November 2020

13.9 positive cases per 100,000 residents. In the midst of the reopening chaos were families like R i c h m a n’s , unsure of when to expect a return and forced to rapidly react to the rippling effects of the board’s last-minute decisions.

“It’s always hard when reality deviates from expectations,” Richman said. “Parents were looking forward to stability. Kids were looking forward to going back to school. We’re having a serious uptick in cases, so I understand the decision. But it was hard to be on that rollercoaster of waiting, and tough to experience the last-minute plans change.”

While parents may have been disappointed by the delay in reopening, New Haven Public Schools Advocates parent Sarah Miller told The New Haven Independent that it was “the right call.” Both Richman and Vicki Parsons Grubaugh acknowledged that the rise in New Haven cases was dangerous and a valid concern of the district.

But in November, the Parsons Grubaugh family was ready for an end to the table-hiding. That end never came, and when it didn’t, Vicki held it in — for days. How was she supposed to tell Sophie, a social girl for whom virtual kindergarten “wasn’t working?”

“I didn’t even tell Sophie that we were going back until that last board meeting, when I felt certain we were going to return,” she said. “And then when

it didn’t happen, I couldn’t even tell Sophie for days. I was too heartbroken to tell her. I knew she’d be devastated. That feeling is horrible.”

FIRST GRADE WITHOUT HUGS: IMAGINING INPERSON EARLY EDUCATING Virtual kindergarten has been a struggle for Sophie. But the question remains: Even if children in New Haven did go back to school, would the experience be productive?

Jennifer Wells-Jackson, who works in a district public school as a literacy coach, has a first grader in the district. She said that based on her experiences and what she knows about her child, in-person learning in the age of COVID-19 would be heartbreaking. Before New Haven announced its cancellation of the hybrid learning transition, she overheard one of her daughter’s lessons.

“Her teacher reminded the class, ‘Remember, we’re back soon, and remember that we won’t be hugging like we may have done before — you can talk to your friends, but you cannot touch your friends,’” Wells-Jackson said. “Children just want to be friends. Our kids are going to be kids, and it will be difficult to deal with that.”

At the late October Board of Education meeting, several preschool employees warned of the dangers of in-person education for young children. Minnie Evans, a paraprofessional at the Dr. Reginald Mayo Early Learning Center, told the board that “we need more help.” Preschool students, she said, are tough to keep from one another and tough to

keep off the swing set. “It’s going to be hard to walk 10 little kids down the hallway.” she said.

Jennifer Graves, who works in a district preschool, also spoke at the meeting, questioning the value of preschool when basic physical interactions are risky.

She noted that as they prepared to reopen on Nov. 9, her preschool was given a list of guidelines to follow: dress-up and puppets would be shelved; the cozy corner, meant to feature comforting objects, would lose its coziness; without exchange of physical objects, there would be “no more learning how to share.” The guidelines would end any conception of playing with friends or engaging in group learning activities, she told the board.

“This guidance strips away much of the integrity of developmentally appropriate practice in preschool,” Graves said. “It is unrealistic to keep our youngest learners engaged and happy when we do not have what we need to be effective teachers. It is truly disheartening that this is what a child’s very first school experience will be.”

But for most teachers in NHPS, the considerations of how to make in-person learning worth it are far off.

TIME RUNS LOW AND FRUSTRATION MOUNTS The Hartford Courant reported a “critical shortage” of Connecticut child care in June.

Even before the pandemic hit, the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood estimated a 50,000 child care slot shortage, but COVID-19 has been estimated to almost double this gap.

FEATURE New Haven has tried to provide resources for learning, specifically to families who may have struggled to simultaneously take care of children and work. NHPS set up “learning hubs” in locations like Barnard Nature Center and Trowbridge Square, where children who had not been logging into online classes — 1,500 when the hubs were established — could come in and take their classes. But these hubs have been shut down due to an uptick in COVID cases, and the struggle for families continues.

“Why can’t we be better?” Richman asked. “It just makes me angry. We know K through five kids aren’t contributing to community spread.”

Richman’s last point has been debated frequently in conversations regarding child care and the pandemic, but just last month, Yale psychology professor Walter Gilliam was the lead author on a study published on the relationship between the virus and child care.

“The worry at the beginning of COVID-19 was that schools and child care programs may be ‘super-spreaders.’” Gilliam told the News. “We found

that there was zero relationship between child care givers’ exposure to child care and whether they tested positive for COVID-19.”

He noted that the study does not suggest that the virus “can’t” be spread through child care, but that most child care programs have successfully “guarded the front door” and mitigated spread inside the facility.

But research on child care’s potential to spread the virus has been varied. A September study from the CDC reached a different conclusion — the study tracked three Utah child care facilities and found 12 children who not only tested positive but who spread the virus to their families.

For Richman, some of the frustration she feels as a parent comes from what she’s seen is possible as a physician. As the pandemic hit New Haven this year, Yale New Haven Health has boosted ICU capacity by 75 percent. In March, Yale repurposed spaces in Payne Whitney Gymnasium for COVID-19 patients who did not need to be hospitalized.

This level of action has impressed

Richman. NHPS’s reopening efforts have not.

“In the spring, as a medical system, we put it all out on the field,” she said.

“There were enormous changes made to be able to accommodate the influx of patients. There were societal sacrifices made — we had a huge response. It’s hard to see that all that effort was not parlayed into reopening schools. As a society, we just haven’t prioritized that.”

As COVID-19 cases continue to rise in New Haven and beyond, considerations of the transmission risk in school-aged children is increasingly important. Although parents and children alike have struggled with the ramifications of remote learning, reopening New Haven Public Schools is not feasible for the foreseeable future.

Sophie looks forward to seeing her pod-mates every time — recess and breaks are a bonding experience for her, Vicki said. And she’s repeatedly stressed her love for her teacher. She’s also getting better at reading.

But she still hates computer school.

And for now, computer school is what she’s going to get.

Yale Daily News | 9

O

IT

A three-eyed, 6-foot, human-crushing demon — painted on my parents’ 18th-century Tibetan scroll — has been the centerpiece of our dining room since the late 1990s.

Known as a “wrathful deity,” the demon is a frequent figure in traditional Tibetan art. From the deity mask perched above our front door frame to the painted deity glaring down at me at the dinner table, their wrathful gazes terrified me throughout my childhood.

M

E

TO

D

PAINTINGS

D

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In high school, I began researching traditional Tibetan art and learned about the true nature of wrathful deities. Despite their fearsome physical appearances, they serve as benevolent protectors.

They are wrathful manifestations of peaceful deities who’ve taken on frightening forms of evil in an effort to scare away evil itself.

IN

H

L O T E

BY

10 | November 2020

KH

Z EN

OM

A

LL

PAINTINGS This year, as external demons seem to run rampant all around us, I felt compelled to make a painting honoring the wrathful deity symbol. “Wrath” is a self-portrait of me taking off a wrathful deity mask. Removing the mask one hides behind is about courage and the choice to confront evil directly. More than that, I see this painting as a form of self-reflection. If wrathful deities wear the face of evil to scare away evil, this painting reveals that the true face of evil is sometimes one’s own. At a time when there’s so much we can’t control, we can always start by addressing inner demons.

W

RA TH

In “He Told Me to Do It,” I wanted to paint a closer examination of “Wrath,” zooming into the hidden ear behind my mask to find a tiny wrathful deity chilling inside. I interpret the deity in my ear as a symbolic guiding force, whispering words of encouragement and protection.

Yale Daily News | 11

INSIGHT

The Dangers of the “Lockdown Slimdown” Eating disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic

BY JORDAN FITZGERALD

D

Content warning: This article extensively discusses eating disorders.

uring the 2020 spring semester, students moved freely, rushing to classes, gathering indoors and speaking without masks. They weren’t aware a deadly virus would soon burst the Yale bubble. Amid this quotidian chaos, Alex Taranto ’23 skipped breakfast every morning.

Instead of sitting down for lunch at a dining hall, Taranto would use her Durfee’s swipe to grab nine dollars’ worth of grub. She ate none of it, instead giving the food to the first homeless person she saw on the streets of New Haven. Taranto only ate at dinnertime, when she dined with her friends. No one noticed.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced Yalies off campus, Taranto lost more than her first spring semester at Yale. Taranto, who has struggled with disordered eating since middle school, planned to participate in a Yale Mental Health support group for students battling eating disorders, but the support group was canceled when the University moved online with the onset of the pandemic. Without vital mental health support, Taranto began to relapse. She checked into an in-patient program to treat her illness. While her peers grappled with the new normal from their childhood homes, Taranto found herself at the Fairhaven Treatment Center in Memphis, Tennessee, hours away from her hometown in Virginia.

“I couldn’t control COVID, but I could control my eating,” Taranto said. “I could restrict and fight

12 | November 2020

hunger pains until I didn’t feel hungry anymore. My eating disorder made me feel safe — in a time when nothing was certain, I could be certain about how much or how little I would eat in a day. This relapse was justified and normalized by the oft-repeated sentiment that quarantine was a time to ‘work on yourself,’ to get fit, lose weight.”

The pandemic has been especially hard on individuals with eating disorders, decreasing their access to treatment and often worsening their symptoms. Eating disorders are a category of mental illness characterized by abnormal behavior toward food and fixation on body weight. Common eating disorders include anorexia nervosa — the restriction of food intake — and bulimia nervosa, bouts of binge-eating followed by purging. Lesser-known manifestations include orthorexia, an extreme preoccupation with healthy eating, and binge-eating disorder, impaired feelings of control that lead to consuming uncomfortably large portions. Most individuals with disordered eating go without treatment or diagnosis.

A joint American-Dutch survey released in July studied how the pandemic has affected those with eating disorders. Researchers found that half of the 1,000 subjects were not receiving treatment. Of those receiving telehealth counseling, 47 percent of patients in the US and 74 percent of patients in the Netherlands reported that their care was “somewhat or much worse” than it was before the pandemic.

INSIGHT

A VULNERABLE POPULATION

//ALEX TARANTO

Eating disorders are disproportionately prevalent among college students. Dr. Whitney Randall, a Yale Mental Health counselor specializing in eating disorder treatment, said between 8 and 17 percent of college students meet the criteria for an eating disorder, with heightened vulnerability among those with a history of dieting, Type 1 diabetes or a close relative with an eating disorder. Athletes, international students, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community are also overrepresented in these statistics, Randall said. “[Disordered eating] is so normalized in college,” Taranto told the News, noting that many students may not realize that their behavior qualifies as disordered eating. According to Taranto, Yalies normalize unhealthy eating patterns by engaging with diet culture, skipping meals and drinking to the point of sickness.

Julia Hornstein ’24 has struggled with disordered eating in the past.

Hornstein echoed Taranto’s sentiments, adding that people need to stop considering it “cool” to flaunt how little they ate.

“I feel like it’s really damaging for people going through [disordered eating],” Hornstein said. “It’s invalidating.”

Psychology professor Laurie Santos runs the Good Life Center, a space promoting wellness on campus. The pandemic has been a dangerous time for those predisposed to disordered eating habits, Santos wrote in an email to the News. Interrupted routines, isolation from support systems, loss of control and the difficulty of grocery shopping are all contributing factors.

“People are reporting feeling more depressed, anxious and frustrated than ever,” Santos said. “And whenever any stressor hits — especially one as significant as COVID-19 — it makes it much harder for people who are already prone to struggling with disordered eating.”

Hornstein told the News that she has worked to maintain a positive relationship with food and exercise during the pandemic. However, the lack of routine “was the hardest part” of staying healthy, she said.

“Some days I’d wake up for class at 8 a.m. and try and fit in breakfast before class, but sometimes I wouldn’t have time,” said Hornstein. “Some weekends I was just so tired and I’d sleep through a lot of the day and then wake up with my schedule all messed up and thrown off.”

Yale counselor Dr. Randall noted that political tensions regarding the pandemic, police brutality and the presidential election have also exacerbated stress levels. While stuck at home watching the world fall apart, many turned to comfort eating — ingestion for emotional rather than physical fulfillment — said Leah Beck, a registered dietician and Yale Hospitality’s manager of menu design.

For Taranto and other Yale students, social media play a huge role in perceptions of health, fitness and weight. As some Twitter users joked about gaining the “COVID 19,” others became proponents of healthy diets and daily exercise.

For Taranto, her TikTok “For You” page featured content that might compel teenagers to hyperfixate on their bodies and adopt weightloss behaviors that are not substantiated by science. Taranto has watched her peers, and even her parents, fall prey to harmful exercise and diet fixations, she said.

“I’ve dealt with [disordered eating] for most of my life, but it was scary to me to see my

Yale Daily News | 13

INSIGHT

“I couldn’t control COVID, but I could control my eating.”

14 | November 2020

friends going through quarantine and starting habits that I could recognize were toxic,” Taranto said. These habits include daily weight measurement, meal-skipping, subsequent binge eating and dieting — which Taranto calls “basically just restricting but with the approval of a magazine, or a fitness guru or a TikTok star.”

Taranto found herself screenshotting “thinspo,” or “thinspiration,” from TikTok. Watching her friends, family, and fitness gurus engage harmful behavior under the guise of self-improvement helped trigger her relapse, she said.

Other Yalies felt a similar pressure. “I feel like there was a really unhealthy standard for people to come out of quarantine with stereotypically perfect bodies and be as healthy as possible,” a user on Yale Unmasked, an app on which people can anonymously discuss mental health, told the News after seeing other people’s weight loss on social media. “For me it was such a bad mindset to think that I could somehow change my body in a few weeks.”

Hornstein added that watching people’s meager daily meals and workouts on TikTok can be harmful for viewers and that social media posts don’t always reflect reality.

“In a picture, you’re going to make sure you look your best, and on TikTok, you’re gonna show that you’re eating the healthiest food. I think this warped reality of behavior makes it really hard for people to distinguish between what’s truth and what’s a kind of fabrication of truth,” Hornstein said.

According to Taranto, social media served as an escape and an entrapment during quarantine. While social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok could distract her from the virus spreading across the nation, TikTok showed her skinny women espousing advice on how she could look just like them.

“So often this rhetoric, these ‘tips and tricks’ and ‘healthy’ diets are just disordered eating in disguise,” Taranto said. “They recommend cutting out ‘bad’ foods, eating ‘good’ foods in small portions and drinking certain types of

water that they say will boost your metabolism.

These things are the foundations for the ‘safe’ foods and ‘fear’ foods that are such a big behavioral focus in eating disorder treatment.”

Randall agreed with Taranto’s assessment, and said she urges her patients to avoid labeling foods as “good” or “bad” and to refrain from negative self-talk that reinforces dangerous, shameful perceptions of food.

OBSTACLES TO TREATMENT Hornstein feels there are broad issues with eating disorder treatment and believes eating disorders should be viewed on a spectrum rather than as a distinct diagnosis, she said.

“The diagnosis process feels almost like you need to think about your relationship with food in a certain way all the time, and if you don’t fit into that category completely then [some mental health professionals] brush off your feelings as something that doesn’t necessitate a diagnosis,” she told the News.

Taranto used to insist that she didn’t need treatment. It wasn’t until a mental health professional told her this summer that ignoring her eating disorder until she was too sick to do anything was akin to insisting her house wasn’t on fire until the heat melted the sidewalk outside.

Dr. Randall rejected the common eating disorder archetype because she felt like the dominant image could prevent people from accepting that they have a problem.

“People often conjure an image of a frail-looking, young, white, cisgender upper-middle class woman, but people of any different appearance, race, gender, body-type, etc. may be struggling with disordered eating,” Randall said.

Yale dietician Lisa Canada added that eating disorders are a serious health threat regardless of a person’s body weight. Most individuals exhibit multiple disordered eating patterns — for example, restricting eating while also engaging in binge eating, she said.

Taranto struggled with anorexia nervosa initially, but when her parents discovered her ill-

INSIGHT

ness and forced her to eat, she would purge her meals as soon as she was alone.

“There’s something else that’s controlling you, like you’re trapped in this thing,” Taranto said.

Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Yale Mental Health is working to help students who have strained relationships with food through telehealth services. Students with eating disorders can take advantage of one-on-one mental health counseling and individual diet planning with Yale Health’s nutrition department.

Yale Mental Health also hosts a Zoom-based support group for those who struggle with eating.

Students enrolled remotely, however, aren’t guaranteed access to these resources. Connecticut has relaxed its guidelines that prohibited all virtual treatment across state lines, but a student’s access to care still depends on their location and type of treatment, according to the Yale Mental Health and Counseling website. Only students in some states are eligible for care. Students taking leaves of absence who don’t have access to Yale healthcare, moreover, may be similarly underserved.

For Yale students who cannot afford external treatment, losing Yale Mental Health services can be extremely dangerous. Although Taranto has struggled with disordered eating for years, she was never able to afford professional help before this year. After her spring support group was canceled, she felt lucky to

enter the in-patient treatment program in Tennessee.

However, Taranto had to leave the program early — and against medical advice — because her insurance cut off after only a month. While she knew treatment was essential for her health, the cost was too high to pay out of pocket, and she returned home.

Given the non-linear road to recovery, eating disorder patients often need long-term professional care. But help is often too expensive, turning recovery into a luxury reserved for those who can afford it. Taranto called the cost of treatment — and insufficient insurance coverage — a “deadly problem,” emphasizing the potentially fatal consequences of depriving disordered eating patients of necessary care.

Taranto is upfront about the financial and mental difficulties that her eating disorder will create in the future. “[Recovery] is always going to be an ongoing process,” Taranto said. “I know that I’m going to have to go back [into in-patient treatment] at some point.”

The National Eating Disorders Association helpline can be reached at (800) 931-2237.

Yale Daily News | 15

POEM

I WANNA PLAY WHERE YOU PLAY WITH THE ANGELS

BY IRENE VAZQUEZ I CANNOT SPEAK TO THE MAGNITUDE OF THESE UNPRECEDENTED TIMES / THESE UNCERTAIN TIMES / THESE UNSTABLE TIMES / OR ANY OF THE SYNONYMS FOR LIFE-ALTERING THAT I MAY HAVE USED WHEN EMAILING YOU // TO BE HONEST / EVEN ON THE MORNINGS WHEN I AM CONTENT WITH THE SIMPLE GIFT OF NESCAFE / AND A NICE BOOK / I CAN BARELY MUSTER ANYTHING APPROXIMATING THE GRANDEUR OF THE FEELINGS I WAS ONCE KNOWN FOR BUT AS INA GARTEN ONCE SAID / IF YOU CAN’T MAKE YOUR OWN SEROTONIN / STORE-BOUGHT IS FINE // AND SO CARLY RAE JEPSEN DOES IT FOR ME / AND CUTS STRAIGHT TO THE FUCKING FEELING / DEPOSITS MY HEART BACK INTO THE BASEMENT OF SOMEONE I LOVE AND RUNS AWAY WITH IT / TWIRLS ME AROUND MY KITCHEN WHILE THE MEATBALLS BROWN / WHILE THE TOMATO SAUCE SIMMERS / SAYS ANY FLOOR IS A DANCE FLOOR IF YOU BELIEVE IN IT / SAYS CELEBRATE / WHAT ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH ALL THIS EMOTION / SAYS I WILL NOT LEAVE YOU DESERTED ON YOUR ISLAND OF THE EVER-PRESENT / THIS, IS THE KINGDOM OF OUR DESIRE / GAZE UPON ITS MAJESTY / IT’S A PARTY NOW THAT YOU’RE HERE / YOU ARE IN THE CENTER OF EVERY DANCE CIRCLE / AND THE DJ IS TAKING YOUR REQUESTS ALL NIGHT LONG WE LIVE IN THE DOT BALANCED IN THE MIDDLE OF E•MO•TION / BEHOLD OUR ENDLESS STRING OF TOMORROWS / YOU TOO, CAN BE HAPPY NOT KNOWING / I MEAN, YOU’D BETTER BE / THERE IS NO FUTURE MORE COMFORTABLE THAN THE PRESENT / I WILL TRANSFIGURE YOUR ENDLESS DISTANCES / COUPLED WITH / YOUR LACK THEREOF / I KNOW YOUR HOUSE IS GROWING SMALLER EVERY DAY / SO THROW UP THE LUSH LIGHT OF POP / AND MAKE THE MOST OF EACH AND EVERY NIGHT / YOU CANNOT CONVINCE ME THAT THE SODA BUBBLES OF YOUR HEART HAVE FALLEN FLAT / I KNOW THE DEEP WELLS OF EBULLIENCE THAT LIVE INSIDE YOU / I NOURISHED THEM LONG AGO FOR TIMES LIKE THESE / THERE ARE NO RUNS AT THE SUPERMARKET ON YEARNING / DON’T YOU KNOW THAT SCARCITY IS A MYTH PROPAGATED BY LESSER MEN / I KNOW YOU STILL PRAY AT THE ALTAR OF TOO MUCH & NOT ENOUGH / THAT YOU BAPTIZED YOUR WANT IN BUBBLE GUM SYNTH / IN PINK WINE AND DANCE FLOOR SHEEN AND TUBE TOPS OFF THE CLEARANCE RACK / I WILL CARRY YOU UNTIL YOU CAN HOLD AND BE HELD AGAIN / AND SO HERE WE ARE / SCALDING THE ROOFS OF OUR MOUTHS ON UNEVENLY REHEATED LEFTOVERS / BACK PRESSED UP TO THE REFRIGERATOR / THE CLOSEST I WILL GET TO APPROXIMATING THE INTIMACY OF A CROWD FOR MONTHS / AND WHEN THE SMOOTHEST SAX KNOWN TO THE EARS OF HUMANKIND COMES ON AT THE TOP OF RUN AWAY WITH ME / I TURN IT UP / I PLAY IT LOUD / AND I DANCE BEFORE THE WATER ON THE STOVE TOP BOILS OVER

16 | November 2020 //ANNIE YAN

PERSONAL ESSAY

MISSED CONNECTIONS

BY MARIE SANFORD

W

ho was the first classmate you saw in real life this year? Whose flesh was the first to send a jolt through your spine and make you pause, in that previously unfamiliar but now familiar way, Is that — “Sam?” I said, uncertain it was actually her, from English class.

“Oh, Marie! Hi! How are you? I almost didn’t recognize you!”

“I know,” I laughed, more off-center than amused. “I thought the same thing!”

“It’s crazy, you know! On Zoom, you don’t even know what anyone’s body looks like. Like how tall are you or anything, you know.”

“Yeah, that’s such a good point ...Well, this is me!”

We awkwardly chuckled. It was 3 P.M. on a random Saturday on Cross Campus. I was on a walk with a friend; Sam was studying on the lawn with her suitemate. I’m five foot five inches tall, and she was right — it was a crazy feeling, the whiplash between craving human contact and actually seeing someone you’ve only known in 2D. The interaction ended, as all do, because there was nothing left to say. It should have been normal — on the surface, it really was normal — but upon resuming our Saturday stroll, I couldn’t answer my friend’s simple follow-up questions like, “What is she like?” How should I know? In-person Sam was more a stranger to me than shoulders-up e-Sam. Suddenly, I craved my room and my rectangle of metal in which many rectangles of e-people congregate in breakout rooms — not real life, I now realized, but a contained and sensical life all the same. I smiled vaguely at the joke my friend was making as my brain kept turning over whats and whys. *** Every single year, I struggle to sleep the day before it all — the excitement and stress of classes, the lovely chaos of revelry with friends — begins. It doesn’t matter if I sleep early, have my outfit planned for the next day and have my class schedule down pat. My mind remains an

anxious ball of anticipation. Not this year, though. This year, I slept like a baby. What’s the point of worrying?

My body seemed to understand. I was a transfer student and we were in the middle of a pandemic. I had everything to gain.

At least that’s what I told my mom when she last-minute expressed nerves about me returning to campus. Would I follow the rules?

Would I promise to be safe? Most importantly, would I tell her if things weren’t going okay — if I didn’t feel happy, disregarding feeling safe?

Yes, yes and yes, I answered determinedly, if not honestly.

I did have a slight concern. A maybe concern. A thought that first came to me early one summer morning.

I was carefully sprinkling my granola on my yogurt as my breakfast pastry heated in the microwave, or I was carefully carrying my pastry to the dining table, or I was carefully swirling my granola into my yogurt at the dining room table or — well, you get the point — when a tiny voice whispered: Maybe the lack of control at school might be difficult to handle after all?

Though it doesn’t matter now how precisely I happened to be arranging my meal at that moment, it did matter a whole lot to me then. In the midst of summer quarantine, when my days were stagnant, it was up to my imagination to fill them. The fact that no matter what was happening outside, I knew I would take a bite of yogurt followed by a bite of almond butter-slathered pastry, meant the world.

Yale Daily News | 17

PERSONAL ESSAY But no matter. I didn’t have high expectations — I was prepared to wait and see what it would be like — but the thought of the opportunity to just be with people my own age getting wrenched away from me sent a spike of anxiety through my body.

So, I smiled confidently at my mother to ease her doubts. Being with people, I knew, would compensate for everything else that just couldn’t be quite “normal.” ***

9/21/20 Oh my god it’s been so long! In the depths of my hellish last week, while mid-revelation that not only are things isolating, overwhelming and lacking control, I realized not having time to journal and let off your thoughts makes it so much harder to gain perspective and coach your inner voice into kindness. The most ironic part is that of course these moments of distance from your journal — or just time to watch Avatar and chill in your bed — happen when you most need your journal. Both for the perspective and because the busy in-between moments are the small things that future you will feel surprised and amused by most.

Things weren’t bad, but I was spiraling because I couldn’t fathom why I couldn’t say decisively that they were good. Why wasn’t I thriving? What makes meeting classmates in person so weird?

Where is everyone right now?

Why does my brain literally exit the building as soon as my lectures start? Do I want to go home?? How G come I am on two pieces of underER B N wear left but feel no urgency to wash my I SE E clothes!??

H RA //SA My breaking point was a brief foray into a more-than-nothing romantic-leaning relationship.

The thought of providing someone else with what I knew a healthy relationship demanded terrified me. I anxiously excused my slower and slower text responses because of perceived distance, the disconnect between the iMessages, Zoom and our living,

18 | November 2020

breathing faces — so many points of connection yet so many missed connections. All the while, a former, more direct version of myself couldn’t believe my present evasiveness. And underneath, though shame barred me from fully articulating it to myself, let alone others, I hate … I hate … I hate …

On a call with my best friend from high school, I told her how so much of my self-loathing came from my frustration that all of a sudden, I had become bad at college. I didn’t understand what had happened to me. She reassured me that from the outside, all things considered, I was objectively thriving even if I didn’t feel like it. Moreover, she suggested maybe I should just accept that I won’t feel like it — maybe not forever but definitely right now. I clung to the comfort of her matter-of-fact words.

And more: after hearing me complain for three weeks, my suitemate got me committed to GCal. Control over the simple pleasures, when I could master it, much like my breakfast routine over the summer, came to my rescue. I began to compartmentalize my life: one week to focus on schoolwork, another to meet people, another to exercise more consistently, another to get outside and explore New Haven, another to call distant friends.

At home, I had been concerned that the opportunity to be with people — both platonically and romantically — would get wrenched away from me. I didn’t stop to consider that, in coming back to campus, I was choosing to be wrenched from substantial control to absolute submission with the expectation, also self-imposed, that I would just, poof, make it work.

The difficult part is not that shit’s broken — by now, we all know that none of this is normal. Rather, it is the continual realization, week after week, that I am still in the long haul — that I am on a university campus with thousands of other students yet still feel, if not lonely, alone in the world — that has defined this semester as one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my little life thus far.

To myself, I am sorry for the times I didn’t forgive you for being less than 100 percent. Your new normal is a war zone of you versus you. You are not alone in this new normal world.

To others, you’ve met me constantly wrestling with this version of myself. I can’t afford to be sorry you haven’t been acquainted with my best person. All I can say is, “This is me.” I’d say I’m working on it, but in truth, I’m working on self-kindness first. In the words of Dean Chun, “It’s okay to not be okay,” and as I’ll add here, “It’s okay to not be okay, alone.”

FEATURE

A Tale of Two Cities

Amid this pandemic, are off-campus Yale students exacerbating New Haven’s housing crisis?

BY RAZEL SUANSING

“H

elp, Housing, Hope.” The front mural of the Christian Community Action’s Hillside Family Shelter on Davenport Avenue displays this three-word motto in pastel blue and yellow hues.

Merryl Eaton, Christian Community Action’s director for advocacy and education, said that the shelter’s directors follow this motto by bolstering the voices of those most affected by the housing crisis.

“The voice of the people most impacted by an issue should be heard, and their recommendations should be used in the making of public policy,” Eaton said.

The Christian Community Action (CCA) Hillside Family Shelter, named for its location in The Hill, the southwesternmost neighborhood of New Haven, provides temporary emergency housing for in-need families. Unlike some religious shelters, the doors of the Christian Community Action (CCA) Hillside Family Shelter are open to single mothers and their teenage sons, same-sex married couples and single fathers with their daughters. Like most shelters, they face logistical constraints when placing families into shelters, but their “Room for All” policy never separates the 34 families they house. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, CCA — specifically its advocacy group Mothers and Others for Justice — has

been on the front lines of the affordable housing fight.

The United States’ pandemic-induced economic decline has exacerbated the existing housing crisis in Connecticut.

Additionally, the state’s surging unemployment rates have left many residents unable to pay their rent. Though Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont signed an executive order to extend eviction moratoriums — a legal authorization to delay the obligation to pay rent — until Jan. 1, 2021, affordable housing advocates are concerned that the pandemic will have long-lasting effects on renters and landlords.

Nicole Barnofski is the chief program officer at New Reach, a nonprofit that helps those affected by homelessness and poverty by providing housing and other forms of support.

“It’s been an increased challenge for us to be able to work not only to support the housing needs of our clients, but look to the best interest of our landlords and partners...knowing that they’re [experiencing] strenuous circumstances,” Barnofski said. Some landlords are uncomfortable working with programs knowing they might have to undergo expensive legal processes, she said.

Marta Goldman, the director of investments and partnerships at New Reach, added that she is concerned about the economic conditions that renters will face once the morato-

Yale Daily News | 19

FEATURE rium is lifted. Goldman and Terri Jo Ciocca, the organization’s grant writer, said that Connecticut’s unemployment rate has more than doubled from March to September 2020.

“We’re looking at that, and we’re thinking, obviously that’s going to trickle down and cause problems for people that are vulnerable,” Goldman said.

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, New Haven averaged 20,000 evictions per year.

This year, eviction filings are predicted to double to 40,000. New Haven evicts residents at twice the national rate — with 4.05 percent of renter homes evicted every year. According to a donor briefing by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, the rising housing costs in Connecticut, caused by the influx of residents moving to Connecticut, has led to the current housing crisis.

IN A DICKENSIAN REALITY

“To me, New Haven is a Dickens novel.

It’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities,’” Eaton said. “On a block of pretty beat-up, dilapidated houses, there’s [also] a really contemporary, lovely home.”

Developers construct affordable housing around the state area median income — the “midpoint of a region’s income distribution” — which is $62,741 for an individual in Connecticut. Given that affordable housing is defined as no more than 30 percent of the individual’s gross income, however, the cost of affordable housing for an average New Haven resident — who has a median income of only $37,508 — should be significantly less than in Connecticut at large. In poverty-stricken neighborhoods in New Haven, specifically Newhallville, the figure is only one-third of the state median income — $27,800.

For Eaton, this definition of “affordable” housing is a major hurdle.

“One of the things that has happened is that housing is no longer a human right. It

is a way of amassing wealth,” said Eaton.

Increasing home value is the primary way both affluent and middle-class families amass wealth. Home value spikes make the rich richer but have an adverse effect on communities struggling to find affordable housing like those in New Haven.

“There is not a state in the country where a tenant can afford a two-bedroom apartment on minimum wage,” Eaton said.

According to Eaton, there is a rift between Connecticut social service programs and the on-the-ground reality of what types of housing poor families can afford.

“For instance, due to high rents and low wages, a single mother with children in CT can probably only afford a one bedroom apartment if they need immediate housing,” Eaton said. “However, since this seems too small for a family with older children or children of a different gender,

//ERIC WANG 20 | November 2020

FEATURE

the Department of Children and Families often will not approve the apartment as satisfactory.” Social services may separate children from single mothers who can’t find appropriate housing.

ON PREDATORY LANDLORDS Out of state landlords — most notoriously Mandy Management — often buy New Haven’s low income properties. Several of the Mothers and Others for Justice members have raised concerns about Mandy Management, a top New Haven real estate agency. Moldy apartments and dangerous electrical systems, which can amass over $2,000 in electric bills to be paid by the renters, were just some of Eaton’s clients’ complaints. In a Fair Rent Commission hearing this year, the commission eliminated a Mandy tenant’s rent for the calendar year after a persistent rodent infestation in his apartment. During the hearing, alders from Newhallville and the Hill also expressed their dismay at landlords neglecting their properties and mistreating their tenants.

In an email to the New Haven Independent, Mandy Management founder Menachem Gurevitch addressed these allegations.

“We learn from our mistakes and keep improving our management systems and staff,” Gurevitch wrote. “We provide housing to families burned out of their apartments or after other terrible losses. Agencies are now coming to us in times of crisis to provide housing because we have a strong reputation for responsiveness, honesty, quality, and affordability.”

The Livable City Initiative also countered the allegations against Mandy Management by stating that most of the housing code violations in New Haven’s private rental market are not

against Mandy and other prominent local landlords.

Still, Eaton said that her clients only accept Mandy housing because of circumstances that make them unappealing to other landlords.

“If you are somebody that’s had felony convictions, who’s had evictions, who’s had low credit and Mandy Management says, ‘I’ll meet you in the parking lot and I’ll hand you the keys to an apartment for $800,’ you don’t have many choices,” Eaton said.

Billy Huang, the president and chief executive officer of Source Development Hub — a New Haven social enterprise that is developing software tools to improve affordable housing access — said that it is important not to view landlords as a monolithic group.

“A lot of landlords are pretty strained right now because their tenants haven’t paid rent because of [the] moratorium,” Huang said. “For smaller landlords, this is a difficult situation because they might not have the financial flexibility to continue operating without rent.”

Huang said that the landlords face a crisis of their own because they have much fewer protections from foreclosure, with most mortgage forbearance and foreclosure protections applying only to landlords with federally backed mortgages. If smaller landlords are subjected to foreclosure, the city may see a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis, where bigger, less empathetic landlords — like Mandy Management — buy foreclosed properties and own most of the properties in the city.

YALE’S ROLE The new housing developments in New Haven target a new, more affluent population, according to Eaton.

Now, apartments are smaller, usually studio-sized, which means that three- or four-bedroom apartments

Yale Daily News | 21

FEATURE

are in greater demand and shorter supply.

If Yale students decide to rent these bigger apartments together, according to Eaton, families in New Haven that are also looking for those apartments will face greater difficulty.

“If three Yale guys decided that they want to rent an apartment together, those larger apartments they want to rent are really, really desirable apartments,” Eaton said.

Eaton pointed out that non-Yale BIPOC communities in low-income neighborhoods often have out-of-date or state-issued laptops, slower internet and limited technological knowledge on using Zillow or other housing online applications. In that way, according to Eaton, Yale students indirectly worsen the housing crisis.

Claudette Kidd, a Mothers and Others for Justice organizer, wrote to the News that those who choose to reside in New Haven must do so for the right reasons.

“Permanent affordable housing is a human right, not just for those who want an urban experience,” Kidd wrote.

“House those in the urban neighborhoods 1st!”

At 2.7 percent, New Haven has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, which presents a grim environment for New Haven residents seeking affordable housing.

“I think we have to be very careful when saying Yale students have increased rental prices in New Haven,” Huang said. “Personally, I wouldn’t draw the line so far. We can speculate that Yale students contributed to it. It could be development trends. It could be driven by other market factors where the University develops as a whole so you need higher rental housing for professionals who come in. I’m not sure if Yale students themselves are a big enough group to warrant that increase in the rent.”

Sylvia Cooper, an advocate for New Haven Rising, asserted that Yale’s impact on the community goes beyond student decisions. In the monthly Mothers and Others for Justice meeting, Cooper raised the issue of Yale’s tax exemption. As a nonprofit organization, Yale is exempt from paying certain taxes to the city of New Haven, leading to an enduring revenue issue.

According to a New Journal article, Yale only paid $4.9 million in taxes in 2018, and New Haven has claimed the University should be paying twenty-six times that amount.

Yale’s tax payments are much lower than those of other highly-selective universities. The article cites the annual fiscal report of Hanover, the New Hampshire town where Dartmouth College is located, which states that Dartmouth paid 7.3 million in taxes in 2017.

Cooper emphasized her non-hostile attitude toward the University and said that she wanted Yale to have a “seat at

22 | November 2020

the table” when considering what the University’s role in the city should be, instead of making demands without communication.

“They can pay a little more than the average resident because they should. They represent New Haven and they’re in our town — though Yale was built hundreds of years ago — they still reside here,” said Cooper.

If Yale paid only 10 to 40 percent of their taxes, it would help alleviate New Haven’s housing crisis enormously by creating affordable housing projects, according to Cooper.

Still, Source Development Hub president Huang said that Yale’s role in the housing crisis might be more nuanced than presented.

THE CASE FOR YALE OFF-CAMPUS HOUSING Students living off campus are motivated by various factors. Sarah Pillard ’22 told the News that she decided to move off campus before the pandemic began to allow more flexibility in her schedule.

Pillard reflected on how off-campus housing for Yale students has affected the New Haven community.

“Because our time in New Haven is somewhat transient, it is easy to go four years without thinking about what we owe to New Haven and the more permanent community here,” Pillard said. She added that it might be “easier to spend those four years without thinking about the relationship between Yale and New Haven if you are always on campus.”

When living off campus, “you are taking up space that otherwise would be taken by longer term New Haven residents,

FEATURE not only in terms of housing but also at the supermarket, laundromat, etc.,” Pillard said.

Still, Pillard was very careful not to attach a “moral judgement” to deciding to live on or off campus.

“I decided to live off campus and know that by doing so I am contributing to things like rising rent rates closer to campus,” Pillard said.

With this in mind, Pillard said it is important for students to do the best they can to foster community outside of Yale and actively work to hold Yale accountable. She cited the “Yale: Respect New Haven” campaign as a great way to get involved.

Ultimately, Pillard agreed with the sentiments mentioned by nonprofit leaders.

“I think it is really important to remain cognizant of individual impact, but in reality, the institutional power that Yale has lends the University a lot more potential to make lasting change in New Haven than any one person can, and so supporting movements that make significant asks of Yale is something that we can individually do to create that larger change,” she said.

Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project Co-President Tomas Car-

rillo ’21, who also lives off campus, said that in some cases, the choice to live off campus stems from institutional as well as personal reasons.

Carillo said that a lack of on-campus housing, as well as yearly increases in class size, have pushed many students off-campus. For instance, annex housing, usually a housing option to accommodate residential college overflow, was not offered to students this year. Carillo said, “[Students in off-campus housing] want to live close to campus, so those apartments will see a rent rise. It’s almost unavoidable for the student and it’s a Yale issue rather than a student issue. To put the onus on the student is a bit unfair — even students need a place to live.”

Like the nonprofit leaders, Carrillo added that Yale students’ effects on the housing crisis in New Haven might be difficult to quantify immediately.

“It’s something we can talk about a lot but we’re not really going to understand it right away,” Carrillo said.

A CALL TO ACTION Students and [community leaders] mentioned several ways in which Yale students can get involved. For instance, Yale students can volunteer at the Yale

Community Kitchen on Fridays and Saturdays. Students can also check the YHHAP website and join the panlist to find more volunteer opportunities.

Eaton also suggested finding work with the New Haven Legal Aid Association, which handles pro bono eviction cases. Goldman mentioned donation drives for hygiene products and peerto-peer fundraisers such as New Reach’s “Adopt a Family” initiative. Goldman also said that New Reach is open to finding ways for students to get involved.

Source Development Hub president Huang said that Yale students’ unique position to raise awareness about the issue is advantageous.

“I think having student activism to talk about these housing, eviction and homelessness crises is very important,” he said.

Above all, Eaton emphasized that though immediate solutions to create affordable housing are important, creating systemic change must remain at the forefront of advocacy.

She recognized that Yale students have “bright futures” and will one day have the opportunity to donate their time and money to the causes they choose.

“When they are in positions of power,” Eaton said, “I hope they don’t forget all that they’ve learned here.”

Yale Daily News | 23

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tening y lis b s ro u g h ie l e t h c op ttention. elationsh a r w e ds so u n ds ips with n h p ing l i u , con wit p y r b ring s n t e c o , y a t t s r he narra es ro u g h t f dio he practice o e c u g th u r c s a d o n n mfort i e fi his kin ma I n t s e l y. H d i t a t e e s on hom clo nd me a sic, mu

//DORA GUO

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BY J AT H ON

24 | November 2020

FICTION

FIELD TRIP

D

//ANASTHASIA SHILOV

BY EMILY SCHUSSHEIM

espite my best passive aggression, my mother took a Wednesday afternoon off from her extremely demanding job as the E.D. (executive director) of an elite boutique investment bank, JRG Capital, to chaperone my sixth-grade class’s field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. JRG Capital specialized in the healthcare space and performed M&A (mergers and acquisitions) and restructurings, which were

my mother’s specialty. She was one of four total restructuring E.D.’s, and, on each of the few times a year she’d try to explain restructuring to me in cabs or over Thai takeout (her favorite), she’d encourage me to imagine companies as Lego buildings.

Lego companies became her clients when they fi led Chapter Eleven Bankruptcy, sad, and it was her job to take apart the Lego companies, brick by brick, and rebuild smaller, stabler Lego companies. She didn’t

Yale Daily News | 25

FICTION

“I understood, at twelve, that my mother had a complex about being a semi-absent professional parent.” update this analogy when I transitioned from Lego to Minecraft, and watching anime, and drawing cartoons. So, it was the case that still, at twelve, attending her semiannual firm dinners, to which I was strongly encouraged to wear a dress, I would shake dozens of identical, squishy hands and picture the hundreds of fleshy fingers handling brightly colored Lego blocks.

I threw out each of the three chaperone leaflets I got sent home in the bathroom trash like I’d done with the leaflets for the previous Museum of Natural History field trip. In fact, I think I would have succeeded in eluding my mother had it not been for Ms. Teplica’s desperately enthusiastic email calling for “fresh chaperone blood.” Ms. Teplica had sent this pushier email, I overheard, on account of Nina Roth’s divorcée mother and Derek Kowalchuck’s divorcé father being the only two parents who volunteered, again. Allegedly, Ms. Teplica simply did not have enough “un-fried nerves” left over for a repeat of the Roth-Kowalchuck Museum of Natural History affair, during which the two aforementioned chaperones disappeared together in African Mammals, completely MIA until Gwen Stein, trolling for her misplaced Epipen fanny-pack, found them canoodling in a water fountain alcove. I overheard this all from Sasha Feldman, my longtime Hebrew school acquaintance whom everyone knew had shoplifted two

26 | November 2020

hippopotamus bottle openers from the Museum of Natural History gift shop, one for herself and the other for Mel Seitz, her accomplice.

I understood, at twelve, that my mother had a complex about being a semi-absent professional parent. For example, she got fidgety and terse when she couldn’t remember which friend from Brooklyn I was video chatting (Mikey Costello from Tae Kwon Do), or what instrument she was coming to see me play in the school band (trick question, orchestra and viola), or what kind of puppy I wanted for Hanukkah (tricked again, iguana).

Needless to say, I’m sure she felt pressured to show up for me, to inject herself into my mysterious sixth-grade life, as if I’d been on the edge of my seat for the past decade, waiting for her to demonstrate interest.

That morning at the museum, my class first toured the Arms and Armour wing thanks to the input of the museum’s enthusiastic, enthusiastic enough to invoke pity, Youth Outreach curators. Whereas I would have otherwise stood alone, or maybe in the vicinity of Sasha Feldman, who sought me out on field trips like this (I was edgy? More vulnerable in “public” than in PE?), I had to stand next to my mother. Sasha tended to make weekly rounds, targeting the five class peripherals in rotation, but had developed a more consistent interest in me since an anonymous cartoon appeared in the girls’ bathroom of Sasha’s head, snarl-

ing, on the body of her yippy chihuahua Maxwell. When she asked me if I drew it, I confessed.

It followed, then, that I was standing next to my mother when Derek Kowalchuck and Sasha Feldman started to play The Penis Game, the objective of which, for those unfamiliar, was to take turns repeating the word “penis” louder and louder until it either became physiologically impossible to emit a louder “PENIS” or, in the case of Derek Kowalchuck, Ms. Teplica flared her nostrils at you and threatened an after-school detention, because no one had seen that coming.

Retrospectively, I really didn’t dislike my mother. The problem was that she made me uncomfortable in close proximity. The problem, more specifically, was that this looming, cyclingsculpted giant in a beige pantsuit, wearing lip-liner and thick gold jewelry, who loped between the glass display cases like a giraffe, was the source of half of my genetic material.

This, and upon observing my mother up close, how she existed in the Real World, it was more obvious to me than usual that if I were to chop off my hair and make it red like Gerard Way’s, she would be confused and blame herself for my deviance, and I would feel guilty and sad.

After Arms and Armor, my class was shuffled into the stadium-sized Temple of Dendur room and was allotted 30 minutes of exploration time to walk in and out of the stone struc-

FICTION

ture and fill a graphic organizer. I hid myself strategically on the far side of the room, where the Temple separated me from my mother. There, leaning on the moat, I started a drawing over the graphic organizer of my mother as a robot when, surprise surprise, Sasha Feldman materialized behind me.

“So, Dylan, this is a prop mom you found on, like, Craigslist?”

I nodded sincerely. “Stabbed my real one to death with safety scissors.”

Sasha’s eyes widened and she fixed her smirk to read unamused. Momentarily, comeback-less, she stuck an index finger on my clipboard and pushed down to peek at my doodle.

I flattened the clipboard to my chest.

“The body is decomposing in my bathtub.”

“Anyway she’s obviously a banker. I can tell by her purse. And what’s funny is my dad says that the kids of bankers become bankers nine times out of ten.

I think I would pay to see you in that silky suit.”

Then, I heard my mother’s Work Phone go off and saw her holding an apologetic “one sec” finger out at Ms. Teplica, who looked genuinely sad to see her excuse herself. Why Ms. Teplica seemed genuinely sad to see my mother evaporate into the hallway, as a matter of fact, was not only beyond me, but annoying. Mel Sietz, who had been lurking arm’s length behind Sasha and vigorously scratching a mosquito bite, took the beat to slide in next to me.

“Apologies for interrupting, Mrs. Popkin junior,” Mel’s voice dropped

to a whisper, “ but, Sasha, I’m feeling like now is a good time to go do the,” she paused and glanced toward me, “thing in those bathrooms around the corner,” she finished, making a special effort to make “thing” three syllables.

Sasha narrowed her eyes, but Mel, missing the red light, took a peek at Ms. Teplica and went to straighten her blue sweatshirt with both hands.

“When they took our backpacks this morning I had to stick both of the,” she trailed off again and restarted in a softer whisper, “items in my literal bra, no freaking pockets, but, I’m ready when you are,” she said, poking at something hard on her ribcage.

I’d started doodling again, and Sasha, reaching out with a knobby fist, knocked on the back of my clipboard until I dropped it to my side.

“Would you, Ms. Dylan Popkin, have any interest in venturing to the women’s lavatory with me and Mel, my colleague, to get high smelling Sharpie markers?”

“I thought you guys were on crack at Derek’s bar mitzvah,” I said. I hadn’t been invited, but heard from Gwen that Sasha had disappeared into a coat room with Liam Keely, an eighthgrader whom Derek knew from lacrosse and who was by all accounts a zitty ogre.

“Bankers do a lot of crack,” Sasha said.

I started off toward the bathroom first with Sasha and Mel skip-walking behind me to keep up.

The door to the women’s restroom was right next to a fire alarm, red in

its clear plastic box like the exposed heart of a giant robot fossilized into the white wall. Inside, there were two very old ladies. One, washing her hands, wore a sparkly owl pin and the other, fixing her scarf in the mirror, had thin highlighter-yellow hair that was tufted up on her head like a troll doll’s. She was humming to herself, and the song sounded like a show tune my mother played on the rare occasion she cooked ziti.

All three of us then went into the larger handicapped stall together, and inside, Sasha Feldman put the toilet seat cover down and sat on it, and Mel Sietz and I positioned ourselves in front of her. Then Sasha Feldman opened her hands and on cue, Mel went fishing under her sweatshirt and delivered the two markers from her bra.

“I actually really like the Sharpie smell,” Mel said, “and also, like, the smell of gas.”

I noticed Sasha shooting me a salty smile.

“But I saw this thing once about this kid who stuck a pencil so far up his nose that he stabbed his brain, and his brain started bleeding, and he gave himself agrarianism.”

“An aneurysm,” I said, catching a whiff of Sharpie as Sasha pulled off one of the caps with a hiccup. Mel’s eyes widened, fixated on the wet felt tip like it was about to say something.

“You hold them right outside your nostrils and take a deep breath in,” Sasha twisted off the second cap, “I did research, apparently your speech

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FICTION

should slur, and this guy in the video started saying all sorts of crazy shit, like stuff he would never normally say, and if either of you get snot on these, Mel,” she paused, “I’ll give you agrarianism.”

Then Sasha slowly brought both Sharpies up to her nose, flashed the two of us a jack-o’-lantern smile, took in a big, snorting breath and let her eyes roll back. She teared up while she exhaled, tensing her eyebrows upwards so her eyelid veins bulged blue raspberry. Slowly and then all at once, the bathroom started to feel cold and too quiet to me, like I was underground, or a very little kid lost in the supermarket.

And I did not once ever get lost in the supermarket as a little kid, at least not by accident. Sasha giggled loose, disjointed giggles as she passed Mel the markers.

“Mel, go, and breathe in until you feel lightheaded,” Mel got into position and closed her eyes, “and then tell me if you really saw Teddy Moskowitz jacking off in the computer lab.”

Mel copied Sasha, rolling her eyes backward. “Holy fucking,” she exhaled, “fucking shit,” she laughed through her nose and a tear glittered in her eyelashes. “And a thousand times yes, and he was watching a Bruno Mars music video,” Sasha chuckled, “and the worst part is I’m in love with him.”

Sasha was bent over at the waist hissing when Mel presented me with the markers.

“I have to pee, ladies,” I said, “I’ll be back.”

Really, I only vaguely had to pee.

The truth was that my stomach was churning, and dodging Sasha’s eye roll, I slipped out of the handicapped stall and into the stall next door. I could hear Sasha and Mel giggling while I got at the button on my jeans. Seconds after sitting down, I then heard heels, sickeningly familiar heels, clicking on the white bathroom tile.

Squinting below the door, I saw my mother’s snakeskin Work Pumps strutting into the stall to the exact left of me, heard her whistling to herself, and smelled her amber perfume wafting under the divider, amber perfume I smelled when I’d sit in her couch indentation accidentally, and when she’d lean over me in the early morning and tell me goodbye for the day, and I’d grunt, performatively half asleep, a muffled, “love you.” It was then, between the laughing and sniffing coming from Sasha and Mel on my right, and the jangle of jewelry and huff of slacks being slid off my mother to my left, that I realized I was having my period for the first time.

Stuck to the cold toilet seat, I inspected the inky blood blotch that had seeped from my underwear into the seat of my pants, when I heard Sasha Feldman bark “what the fuck is wrong with you Mel, out of your nose.” Then there was the rustle of mother reassembling her suit, the squeaking of her stall door, and the click of her shoes. I, for a single stupid second, focused very hard on willing my mother to either melt into the floor or evaporate into parti-

“Then Sasha slowly brought both Sharpies up to her nose, flashed the two of us a jack-o’-lantern smile, took in a big, snorting breath and let her eyes roll back.”

28 | November 2020

cles I could keep in an aerosol deodorant canister in my sock drawer, next to the pink blanket I slept with as a baby and other things I didn’t use anymore.

“Excuse me, but is that Mel Seitz and Sasha Feldman?”

Neither of them responded, only Sasha laughed weakly, and I saw my mother’s heels pull off the floor while she, I deduced, craned her neck over the door, provoking a long and expanding silence.

“Girls,” my mother’s voice echoed, almost too majestically, majestically to the point at which I was almost embarrassed for her. “I need the two of you to come with me and speak with Ms. Teplica. This,” she paused, remembering how to scold, “activity is very unsafe and irresponsible, and I’m disappointed in both of you.”

I still had my jeans around my knees and felt hot and cold in all the wrong places to feel cold, my armpits, the backs of my knees. “I’m here too, Mom,” I said.

“Dylan, is that you, honey?” said my mother.

“It’s me, Mom,” I said, “and I was also smelling the markers with Sasha and Mel.” There was a second silence, broken only by the reverberating drip of a few faucet tears.

“What, Dylan?”

“I was also smelling the markers to get high,” I said, “I just had to pee.”

“Dylan, honey,” my mother said, “I’m not sure how you think this will help your friends.”

FICTION

“I was, Mom,” I said, trying extremely hard not to yell.

“Sasha,” my mother exhaled slowly, angling her voice downward, “Did Dylan smell the markers with you?”

“No, Ms. Popkin,” said Sasha.

It was during moments like this one that I would sometimes, at twelve, mentally assemble myself a different life.

This wasn’t because I hated my mother or Sasha Feldman, but because I wondered if I had instead been abandoned at a monastery in Tibet, or born to alpaca herders in the foothills of the Andes, or adopted by a single father, whom I would call by his first name, Zeke, and if Zeke were a retired semi-professional skateboarder who made his living screenwriting science fiction movies in L.A., I might have been happier with myself.

“Dylan, honey,” My mother said, “Would you like us to wait for you?”

I didn’t answer, mostly because my voice felt stuck inside my throat, like it had hardened there into some spiky crystal. I instead flushed and rolled up a tennis ball of gossamer museum toilet paper, which I stuffed into my underwear.

Taking off my sweatshirt and tying it around my waist, I

saw the toilet water swirl like fruit punch and left to face my mother, looking pale and smaller than I’d expected, with Sasha and Mel behind her, both coolly staring off into the mirror. Mel had a black stripe on her nostril looping up around its rim like a nose ring.

It was barely raining outside on the white museum steps while Ms. Teplica called Mel’s and Sasha’s parents, and they got picked up by their respective mother and babysitter. My class knew I was the only remaining witness to the restroom’s events, but no one crowded me, or, I had stopped all of them from swarming me by sitting three steps above my mother and Ms. Teplica and ignoring everyone. I noticed, sitting down, that I’d bled onto the gray sweatshirt around my waist, and I tightened the knot the arms made against my stomach. When the group clustered hungrily around Derek Kowalchuck, who seemed to have gotten texts from Sasha Feldman herself, I was freed, and asked my mother for a five-dollar bill and got myself a hot dog with mustard, which I ate standing off to the side, staring into space and feeling the rain collect in my hair and stream into my eyes.

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FEATURE

M U S E U M S T I M E L I K E

A T A T H I S

Exploring virtual art terrains during the pandemic era

BY JULIA WU

O

n Chapel Street, the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art’s empty galleries invite only the distant, sterile click of a security guard’s boots and the stilled, vacant gazes of portraits without an audience. The YUAG and YCBA closed along with the University nearly eight months ago and have since only had a brief reopening at the beginning of the semester. An on-campus spike of COVID-19 shut them down again in October.

These closures are not unique to New Haven.

COVID-19 launched museums around the world into crisis due to evaporated ticket sales, forced closures and staff layoffs. The National Gallery in London, which notably kept its doors open even through the turmoil of World War II, has been closed for over 100 days. Similarly storied institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Vatican Museums have also made historic closures.

The pivot to digital spaces, alongside the recent protests for racial justice, have forced museums all over the country to think more critically about what they are and who they are for. The YUAG and YCBA have been grappling with their positionalities in New Haven and against a global backdrop of museums re-assessing their collections.

NEW DIMENSIONS Instead of understanding digital initiatives as substitutes for an in-person art viewing experience, many curators see

30 | November 2020

them as an entirely different medium. Clicking through a series of photos cannot recreate what Molleen Theodore, the associate curator of programs at the YUAG, refers to as the “erratic encounter,” or what John Giurini, assistant director for public affairs at the Getty Museum, calls the “contemplative moment” of looking at art in the same physical space. It is difficult to express the true scale or precise tactility of an object over a Zoom tile; the virtual space divorces the body from the viewing, curators said.

“When you encounter a work in person, you automatically have the feeling of ‘I’m in a relationship to this object,’” Roksana Filipowska, the programs and outreach manager of the Wuertle Study Center at the YUAG, explained.

“Maybe the scale is massive and you feel small, or maybe the object is small and you feel like you’re overpowering it, or maybe it’s exactly on your eye level. You are very aware of your body, while virtually, it’s easy to be disembodied.”

Many museums have not fully explored the possibilities of the digital realm. When lockdown first occurred, most institutions scrambled to transfer their collections online.

Additionally, different institutions have different goals. The Yale galleries, for example, are primarily teaching institutions. Thus, their main goal has been to support professors in collecting teaching courses rather than assembling virtual tours or other exploratory media.

Created in March by curators Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen, Art At A Time Like This, ATLT, is a self-proclaimed “online artspace” that has managed to capitalize

FEATURE

on the current moment and innovate a space beyond museums and art fairs.

Completely not-for-profit and free for all audiences, the project’s website hosts global exhibitions with international artists.

“We could have an immediate response to what’s going on in the news. If I read something in the news on Tuesday, by Wednesday we could have an artist responding to that,” said Pollack. “The beauty of the internet is that we were able to secure works by top artists from all over the world, because all they needed to do was send a JPEG. They didn’t have to ship a work, they didn’t have to think about how long it would be on loan for — it’s up in perpetuity.”

However, they both pointed out that they don’t think ATLT replaces the museum experience. “There are paintings I miss when I don’t see them in the museum context,” Pollack told me, taking a drag from her cigarette.

“I’m old fashioned in that way.”

Instead, they wanted to offer an additional way to view art. Although their projects initially took an entirely virtual format, ATLT found a way to incorporate an in-person, socially dis-

tant, element through their exhibition entitled Ministry of Truth: 1984/2020 — a collection of billboards scattered around New York City that can be viewed like a scavenger hunt. While ATLT’s public street art vision is hinged upon accessibility, they are also uploading videos of billboard-passersby to emphasize the symbiotic relationship between real-life and virtual viewership.

Visit their website and you’ll find an interactive map marking out each billboard. You’re encouraged to go on a self-guided tour — start from the middle if you want — and look out for billboards conflating photos, graffiti and tally-marks. “DISSENTS SPEAK TO A FUTURE AGE,” declares one on Webster Avenue and Belmont Street. Another, in Brooklyn, depicts a man piggy-backing a boy in the water, shoes laced around his neck.

EXPANDING ACCESS The YUAG and YCBA have curated a wide range of digital presentations.

In addition to talks from featured artists, the gallery streams conversations between YUAG curators and muse-

ums around the world. A recent one, moderated by James Green, the Frances and Benjamin Benenson Foundation assistant curator of African Art at the YUAG, featured a dialogue between museum professionals from Zimbabwe and Namibia. The gallery’s furniture study center, as well as its prints and drawing center, have led close-looking programs where the audience examines a singular object with a museum guide.

“When you encounter a work in person, you automatically have the feeling of ‘I’m in a relationship to this object’... while virtually, it’s easy to be disembodied.”

The biggest difference many museums are seeing with their virtual pro-

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FEATURE grams is in the scope of their reach, both in terms of numbers and geography. “[At the YUAG,] on Wednesdays, pre-COVID, we would have these talks in the galleries and they would focus on a specific theme or a single object, and maybe 15 or 20 people could come on this talk,” Theodore said. “[These e-gallery talks] have been viewed by 400 or 500 people on Instagram.”

Not only is the reach greater in terms of sheer numbers, these digital initiatives are seeing a lot more global engagement from audience members overseas, from Latin America to Europe to Africa. The YUAG has even shifted the times of their programs earlier so as not to exclude individuals from different time zones from attending, Theodore said.

Indeed, the greatest advantage to museums’ online shift has been improving accessibility. The option of asynchronous learning offers greater flexibility for students with different socioeconomic, geographic, and learning backgrounds. Museums that typically have admission fees are offering entirely free programs. Logging onto an online program is an easy and risk-free way to interact with art.

“Often in bigger museums, people feel intimidated to walk into the space and have a feeling of needing to know a lot about contemporary art in order to have an opinion or in order to feel a certain way or to be moved in a certain way by an artwork,” Verhallen added. “I think when you are at home or when you are looking at a website, it is much easier for you to find your own opinion or some emotion that is triggered by seeing a work.”

But this accessibility has not extended to everyone. Museums haven’t developed the infrastruc-

32 | November 2020

ture to gather information about whether more traditionally underrepresented groups have attended their new virtual programming.

Board members and donors along with works in the galleries still tell an overwhelmingly white, European story, at a moment when there are widespread movements for racial justice.

“Virtual programs will not save us,” Damon Reeves, interim curator of education at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said.

“It is merely a new form. Questions like: ‘Whose voices are being amplified? What stories are we telling? How can we better represent a greater diversity of experiences?’ need equal consideration in order to create lasting change.”

VIRTUAL ALONE WILL NOT SAVE US One of the baseline internal improvements being undertaken in most major institutions is greater diversity and equity training for staff members — from the level of volunteers all the way up to their boards. The YUAG and YCBA have both committed to working with their guides to present objects in a way that is more relevant to local communities.

In addition to diversity training, Linda Friedlaender, head of education at the YCBA, explained that “[the YCBA has] done a much better job of disassembling the hierarchy of jobs at the museum” than ever before.

Instead of meetings being just exhibition curators, Courtney [Martin GRD ’09, the director of the YCBA,] has opened the meeting up to virtually the entire staff,” she said. “Come and hear what the proposals are, let’s talk about them. Which ones interest you?

Which ones do you not see as being able to touch people?”

FEATURE Although the organizational structure of museums is evolving, Art At A Time Like This introduces a system radically different from museums. Without having to get approval from a board or sell an exhibition idea to a curator, they create more intimate relationships with artists and with viewers. In fact, many of the artists that ATLT has worked with have signed petitions or withdrawn their works from museums because they took political issue with their institutions.

“Artists trusted us — that’s the big thing,” curator Pollack notes. “Museums are often sites of political struggle right now, and so they are not neutral spaces. People trust them less and less.”

But museums are recognizing their shortcomings as well, and cross-sectional work between departments has been crucial to projects of reinterpretation. The YCBA has been tasked with the particularly complicated duty of balancing the entirely inherited private collection with painful representations of people of color and women. One way they are doing this is by leveraging the wall texts. While rewriting the label copy for the gallery, Friedlaender said that the curatorial department will ask the education department for their opinions on labels. She said, “[The museum wants] to redo a lot of the labels so that they are more honest, so that they give different kinds of information about the objects that have never been given before.”

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles faces a

similar problem because their inherited collection is primarily pre-1900s Western European works. However, they have created new narratives from the collection by situating existing works in different contexts. One such exhibit focused on images of King Balthazar in Medieval and Renaissance art. “It showed how over the course of time, Balthazar was first represented as a white male and eventually was a black, African king,” Giurini said.

“Museums are often sites of political struggle right now, and so they are not neutral spaces. People trust them less and less.”

Other moves of reinterpretations take place outside the gallery. Two years ago, the National Gallery in London had their first conscious purchase of a painting by a female artist, Artemisia Gentelleschi. “Rather than showing it in a conventional way, [the gallery] toured it around the United Kingdom, not to museums but to places where the picture could make a difference with a small amount of people,” Caroline Campbell, director of collections and research at the National Gallery, said. “It went to the

women’s library in Glasgow, it went to a doctor’s surgery in Pocklington in Yorkshire, it went to a girl’s school in Newcastle in the northeast of England, a women’s prison in South of London and to a library in inner-city London too.”

This tour presented a radically different approach to expanding the reach of art, one where instead of waiting for groups to come to the museum, the museum brought art to them. The National Gallery pursued a similar project during lockdown through increased virtual flexibility.

“Our civic spaces all over the world have been empty. We worked with an advertising company who provided digital platforms, pro-bono free, to be able to put huge blown up images of great art from our collection in unexpected places such as on the motorway, in the center of a narrow deserted street, outside a shopping center,” Campbell recalled.

Another way to retool a given collection, while deliberately engaging with questions of representation, is by tailoring it to fit the needs of the local community. The YCBA has conducted multiple focus groups with New Haven teachers to get a better sense of what would be most useful for them when teaching their students. From there, they put together two notable initiatives which aim to build lasting, collaborative connections between students and museums.

The first initiative organizes different museums in town with arts organizations to

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FEATURE put together bags of art supplies since, in this virtual landscape, many students don’t have materials to do art at home. The second project involves the Henry Moore and Bill Brant exhibition on show at the YCBA. “The museum is going to buy students their own digital cameras. The curators are offering workshops after school, on the weekends, in photography. Then we are going to conclude by having them submit, and we will have a display of photographs that these students take,” Friedlaender said. The workshops will offer a way to teach about curated works in a way that the students can directly engage with. After learning about a particular technique used by Brant, they can then experiment with similar methods in their own photographs. These efforts reveal that art is not just contained in the moment of looking, but it involves building a close tie between the individual and the works they are viewing.

LOOKING FORWARD Museums are considering how to synthesize virtual programming with the in-person experience. The YUAG is already planning on incorporating iPads into next year’s programming, as they have found them to aid close-looking. YUAG employee Filipowska relates an anecdote about a professor who taught a Directed Studies class about the Hoppin Krater, an Ancient Greek vase that depicts scenes from the Oresteia tragedies. By zooming in on high-definition photos, Matheson discovered details about the furies on the vase that she had never seen before. “There has been tremendous academic debate [about one of the furies]: ‘Is she holding a spear, or is this just a crack on this krater?’” Flipowska said. “We were actually able to say, ‘Yes, this is definitely a spear.’”

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the National Gallery created an augmented reality project to place a Florentine altarpiece from the 1370s back into its original context of a destroyed church. Their app allows in-person viewers to move seamlessly between a physical gallery wall and a digital space that recreates the work as hanging in the church. “[Artworks] aren’t just the stories they tell hanging in the gallery space,” Campbell said. “They all have histories and they all have pasts.”

Digital spaces offer museums an opportunity for rapid experimentation. While in-person exhibitions could take years to assemble, it takes a fraction of the time and cost to organize a virtual exhibition, Giurini said.

The Getty has already hosted a LGBTQ history month exhibition, which com-

34 | November 2020

bined works from the Getty and the Getty Research Institute to rearticulate the colors and meaning behind the colors of the pride flag. “That’s not something we would put together [for the galleries,] but we had this opportunity and said, ‘Let’s do something for Pride history month that’s unique and interesting,’” Giurini said.

For the YUAG and YCBA, beyond just ways of viewing art, Filipowska hopes that this experience with Zoom will help reshape the way that we think about giving students greater choice. “I would love in the future to change the conversation around mental health and mental health days and maybe there will be an option for the student, if they work it out with the professor, in addition to in person class, the student can log onto Zoom and do something asynchronously,” Filipowska said.

Curators hope this greater awareness will translate into all aspects of art viewing and teaching.“Before I had always thought about giving space for personal reflection between jumping into comment, but Zoom really encourages this,” Sydney Simon, Bradley assistant curator of academic affairs at the YUAG, said. “Zoom really slows the conversation down. It’s such a good reminder that people process things in different ways, that people feel comfortable expressing themselves in different ways.”

The gap between normalcy and life as defined by COVID-19 continues to stretch. There are both remarkable moments of quiet and turbulence. Our critical self-reflective moment lies in the space between where we end and the art emerges — and now, it also lies between us and our computer screens.

COVER

THE CHURCH AT THE END OF THE WORLD

In 2018, a group of Catholic anti-nuclear activists made national news when they broke into a naval base in Georgia.

One of its members — a New Haven resident — now awaits his sentencing.

BY SHARLA MOODY

M

ark Colville is relaxed for someone expecting to be sentenced to federal prison in a few weeks.

He stands in front of a stove, white hair sticking out from under his hat, cracking eggs on the stove and piercing the yolks with the shells. As he cooks, he talks about his expectations for the hearing, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has forced him to choose between traveling out of state for an in-person hearing or being sentenced via a virtual meeting.

He rolls up the sleeves of his sweatshirt, flips the eggs, then adds slices of cheese and hot dogs. He’s not worried, he says as he glances up from the food, even though it’s a less-thanideal situation. He’s been arrested as an activist so many times he’s lost count, and he has spent enough time behind bars that he feels prepared for what awaits him. He places the eggs and hot dogs between two bagel

halves and wraps them in aluminum foil before handing them off to another man, who will distribute them to hungry people standing outside in the rain. Then, he cracks more eggs.

On April 4, 2018, Colville, who lives in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, and six other Catholic activists who call themselves the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, broke into Kings Bay Naval Base in Camden County, Georgia. Among the activists were a Jesuit priest, a couple of grandparents and a journalist. Under the cover of darkness, they cut a padlock on a gate and replaced it with another to cover their tracks. They walked several miles by moonlight to a bunker that stores nuclear weapons and vandalized models of nuclear missiles.

They were convicted as a group of three felonies and one misdemeanor — conspiracy, destruction of government property, depredation and trespassing. As of November 2020, six of

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COVER

“I’m worried about the end of the world. I’m not worried about going to prison.”

them have already been sentenced.

Colville expects to be sentenced in December.

“I’m worried about the end of the world,” Colville chuckled, referring to the ongoing pandemic and political turmoil in the United States.

“I’m not worried about going to prison.”

RESISTING AN IDOLATROUS ABOMINATION Plowshares began as a Christian pacifist and anti-nuclear weapons movement in 1980, when Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan and seven others protested nuclear weapons by breaking into the General Electric Re-entry Division in Pennsylvania, where vehicles for the Minuteman III missile were manufactured. There, they vandalized trucks and documents and prayed for peace. Since then, there have been over 70 Plowshares actions and protests around the world, according to research compiled by

36 | November 2020

Arthur Laffin, an activist who has written two books about the movement.

Colville, who has been involved in peace and progressive activism his entire life, recounted that the Plowshares 7 began “whispering to each other about possibly doing an action” at Berrigan’s funeral in 2016. “I think part of my motivation was in fact Dan Berrigan’s death,” he said. “I felt like that was a good way to honor him, to take up the hammer again and do a Plowshares action.”

Colville believes that nuclear weapons and the United States’ nuclear policy are tantamount to religious idolatry.

“Nuclear weapons represent [a] perpetual posture of hostility … that amounts to a compulsory religion that us citizens are forced to abide by,” Colville said.

Anti-nuclear activism is not the type of action typically associated with Catholicism. In the United States, Catholic activism usually

//REGINA SUNG

concerns pro-life or sexual ethics issues and has a politically conservative bend. But pacifist activism has a place in Catholicism, as evidenced by the Kings Bay Plowshares 7’s work, which represents just one group action in the Plowshares movement. In 1984, two members of the Plowshares movement were sentenced to 18 years in prison for breaking into missile silos and launch sites in Missouri.

“If you look at nuclear policy in this country, it does have all the elements of religion,” Colville said.

“We’re talking about ultimate sovereignty that a nation claims over the whole planet, and to wield that power puts us into a situation of basically idolatry as a social practice in the United States.”

The Plowshares movement takes its name from a few verses in Isaiah, an Old Testament prophetic book in the Bible. Chapter 2, verse 4 of Isaiah states: “He [God] shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples;

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and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” A plowshare is a broad blade used to turn soil during tilling and plowing. The phrase “swords to plowshares” has been adopted by anti-war, anti-nuclearism and veteran advocates alike to represent the transformation of violence to nonviolence.

Plowshares asserts that militarism and nuclear arms are equivalent to religious idolatry, arguing that the direct funding of weapons is a misappropriation of money that would better serve the poor. These ideas inspired actions such as the 2018 protest at a Georgia naval port where U.S. Navy submarines armed with Trident nuclear missiles are stored. The Trident missile is armed with thermonuclear bomb warheads, which are each a thousand times more destructive than atomic bombs. The U.S. Navy has a fleet of fourteen Ohio-class nuclear submarines that carry these missiles. In 2011, the Obama administration budgeted $70.5 million per Trident missile.

Plowshares believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s teaching from a 1967 speech that

the triplet evils of racism, poverty and war must be addressed holistically.

“I look in my neighborhood and see this place that has been laid waste by the military and this idolatrous commitment to funding this idolatrous abomination. That’s a direct theft from the poor,” Colville said.

“My daily life and lifestyles revolves around trying to bind up some of the wounds that are caused by this unbridled commitment to militarism.”

This militarism, Colville believes, has been so pervasive throughout American culture that it must be actively resisted.

“We’ve been living under the shadow of nuclear weapons for 75 years. It can feel like this is a permanent reality,” Colville said.

“You can really start to absorb the idea that these weapons are approved of by God.” CONVERTING DEADLY FORCE The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 planned for their action in Georgia for about two years, Colville said. The planning involved discerning whether they should perform the action and training for how to diffuse situations.

“It was a long discernment process,” Plowshares 7 activist Martha Hennessy said.

Hennessy is a retired occupational therapist, grandmother of eight and community worker who has been arrested and imprisoned several times for protesting nuclear power, drone use, the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and the use of starvation as a weapon of war in Yemen. “I’ve grown up with this nuclear threat. It’s imperative that we pay attention to this nuclear holocaust.”

Building community beforehand was integral to the protest. “I was scared to death,” Colville said. “But again, we do it in community. We spent two years discerning this as a group.”

Community as the foundation of progressive Catholic thought goes back to Dorothy Day, an American anarchist and Catholic convert who was influential in Catholic pacifism. In 1933, she started the progressive Catholic Worker Movement, which was centered around building local communities. Those involved in the movement live together and dedicate their time to local social justice causes. Day also wrote prolifically in support of pacifism. Today, the Vat-

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COVER ican is considering Day for possible canonization into sainthood — in Catholicism, saints are people recognized for their holiness and closeness to God, and they are the only people the Catholic Church confidently and officially claims are in Heaven. Hennessy is Day’s granddaughter.

Hennessy said her participation in Plowshares was driven by the work of her grandmother. When Hennessy was a teenager, Day gifted her the book Hiroshima by journalist John Hersey, which documents the lives of Hiroshima survivors in the wake of the 1945 atomic bombing. This helped Hennessy prepare to take part in the Plowshares movement, she said.

As the day of their action rapidly approached, Colville felt strangely calm. It was Colville’s third time participating in a Plowshares action, and he felt somewhat ready.

“I kind of knew what to expect,” he said. “But I was, particularly because of the deadly force zone, trying to bargain with God. ‘Let this night end in a jail cell and not a morgue or a hospital.’”

“Let this night end in a jail cell and not a morgue or a hospital.”

The Plowshares group entered the Kings Bay Naval Base near a dirt road at what looked like a disused gate. They broke the lock at that gate and replaced it with another one to avoid being detected.

Then, they followed the road for several miles in the dark before splitting up.

“Every 10 or 15 minutes you got this recorded announcement saying you were in a deadly force zone,” Colville recalled. “It was just really chilling to hear that announcement. Our group, we pray a lot. On the walk we were praying the rosary, a litany of the

38 | November 2020

saints, a lot of traditional Catholic prayers. That was a real calming sort of thing for all of us.”

Colville and Patrick O’Neill, a hospital chaplain in North Carolina, parted from the group to see what they perceived as a shrine to nuclearism — a collection of missile models on the base. It was still dark, but they soon found themselves on a busier road in the base. Cars passed periodically.

“I said to Patrick, ‘I need a rest.’ I needed a psychological break before going forward, I needed to really get my head and my heart into this before we went further,” Colville said. “We sat down, did a little talking and strategizing, a little prayer, had granola bars.

Then when I was ready, we ran across the street and hid behind a tree and waited for the right moment. And then we went over there. Once we got there and pulled out our tools and started doing the action, that’s when I found my legs and it became a lot easier once we got there.”

After writing “Thou shalt not kill” and “blasphemy” on the missile replicas with markers, they prayed and waited to be arrested.

Other members of the group entered a bunker where nuclear weapons were stored, as well as an administrative building, where they left a copy of The Doomsday Machine, a book by Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers.

The Plowshare members’ real fear — aside from being killed — was being arrested before they could complete their protest, Colville said. In this case, they were able to reach each location before they were arrested. According to Colville, their protest was so markedly peaceful that officers waited until they finished vandalizing the last model to make arrests.

“We go into these actions with the intent of doing conversion, converting swords into plowshares,” Colville said. “So, it’s not like we were trying to make trash out of these things. We were symbolically converting them into something useful for life.”

O’Neill, who is garrulous and good-natured even over the phone, struck up a conversation with one of the officers who arrested their group. Their conversation reached significant

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depths, with the officer sharing that he had experienced the death of his two-year-old son. O’Neill believes he was able to “convert” part of Kings Bay and transform it into something other than a base for nuclear weapons.

“The site … was really not a deadly force zone,” Colville said.

“We converted it into something other than a deadly force zone, at least for those moments.”

Hennessy, O’Neill and Colville all believe that in court, these details were brushed aside in favor of a narrative that depicted them as criminals rather than activists. They spent varying amounts of time — for Colville, over a year — in the Camden County Jail in Georgia.

“I do time well,” O’Neill said. “I look at it as an opportunity to do ministry. I make friends, I like to read, I like to write, I run every day. I don’t get bored in prison. I make the best of it.”

In the Camden County Jail, O’Neill was popular, and he ministered to other inmates. Once, he taught them the Richie Havens song “Freedom” at a “party” he threw in his cell. Still, O’Neill thinks that the group’s sentencing was affected by their depiction as malicious criminals rather than activists. Judge Lisa Godbey Wood, who sentenced O’Neill, was “cold,” O’Neill said, but he added that she showed him mercy by giving him a shorter sentence than the probation department recommended.

“She’s sentenced literally hundreds of people to thousands of years in prison,” O’Neill said. “To be in a job where you do that — I think it’s hard not to see the person on the other side of the bench as being someone you have to punish, and they need to be punished, and all of that is in the interest of justice. So she [sent] a hospital chaplain with eight children, whose youngest child has Down’s syndrome, who runs a Catholic Worker house and works with the poor, and basically devotes his life to peace and justice work … to prison for a year and two months. She still had to punish me pretty severely for what I did.” O’Neill’s daughter provided character testimony in her father’s defense.

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 activists faced up to 20 years in federal prison for their action. So far, the longest sentence given to any of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 activists has been 33 months in federal prison for Fr. Steve Kelly, a Jesuit priest. Of the 20

years O’Neill could have been sentenced to, he was only given 14 months. Colville expects to receive between 21 and 27 months in prison, plus restitution, which he says he will refuse to pay.

“Hopefully I’ll get to go along for the canonization [ceremony for Day] and not go to federal prison for too long,” Hennessy said.

On Nov. 13, Hennessy was sentenced to 10 months in prison, the lightest sentence received by any of them so far.

WAR, DOGMA AND CATHOLIC LIFE Plowshares actions are not explicitly condemned or condoned by the Catholic Church, though the Church views nuclearism unfavorably. In 2004, the Church published the “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church,” which stated that nuclear deterrence must be replaced with disarmament. According to Carlos Eire, the Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale, every pope since the invention of nuclear weapons has stated that they should not be used. While popes’ condemnations of nuclear weapons aren’t rigidly dogmatic, they should have great moral weight to the beliefs of Catholics. This moral weight resonates deeply with Colville.

“I have to go to the site where sins are committed, where idolatry is practiced,” Colville said. “Idolatry isn’t to be avoided or argued against or simply ignored. It’s not about nonparticipation when it comes to idolatry. Idols are to be smashed. That’s a basic call of faith in the Bible.”

For issues not dogmatically defined by the church, individual Catholics are able to form their own opinions in good conscience with church teachings. The Catholic Church teaches that there is such a thing as “just war,” and Catholic theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas developed early versions of just war theory. But during the Vietnam War, opinion began to shift. Some Catholics, like Berrigan, were imprisoned for burning draft cards.

“There are plenty of Catholic clergy who have been arrested, and not just for the nuclear weapons issues, but other issues that fall in the area of ethics,” Eire said. “People are on a spectrum in the Catholic Church, and they don’t have to match up.”

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But the idea of just modern warfare is waning among Catholics, even those at the head of the church. In his October encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis wrote, “We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war’. Never again war!” Whether opposition to nuclear weapons justifies breaking a nation’s laws, however, remains undetermined by the Church.

“To be a Catholic in this country naturally means that we must resist this government,” Colville said. “It’s imperialist, violent and incredibly racist. As a Catholic, I have to have a response to that.”

Pacifism, anti-militarism and advocating for the disadvantaged can exist alongside more traditional Catholic stances of being pro-life, anti-euthanasia and anti-death penalty, Eire explained, and holding these beliefs has been described by Catholics as a “seamless garment” of views of the sanctity of life, or “consistent life ethic.” Pope St. John Paul II stressed the importance of a consistent life ethic but upheld just

40 | November 2020

war theory after witnessing the Nazi invasion of Poland as a young man, Eire added.

Conservative critics of Catholic pacifism have argued that war is necessary in cases of terror states and in cases of religious persecution. Others sympathetic to Plowshares’ goals worry that its confrontational methods alienate potential supporters. Still, Plowshares activists view their efforts as intertwined with their faith and as actions they are morally obligated to carry out.

“I like to study the works of mercy, the spiritual works of mercy, relating to resistance,” Hennessy said. “Admonish the sinner, instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, comfort the sorrowful, bear wrongs patiently, forgive all injuries, pray for the living and dead. And then of course the seven corporal works of mercy, which is what we do at the [Catholic Worker] house: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the imprisoned, visit the sick, bury the dead.”

Hennessy, O’Neill and Colville are all involved in Catholic Worker communities and live according to these spiritual works of mercy.

Colville lives in the Amistad House, a Catholic Worker house in the

Hill neighborhood of New Haven, where he, his wife Luz Catarineau-Colville, and others cook and distribute meals for over 60 people a day.

“The experience of running a Catholic Worker is all about day-today living, trying to simplify your lifestyle and voluntary poverty, looking for peace and justice for all,” Catarineau-Colville said.

In many ways, Colville’s work and Amistad House seem to embody the most radical interpretation of Catholicism. But Colville, Hennessy and O’Neill view the Catholic Worker Movement, as well as the actions of Plowshares, as the correct mode of living according to Catholic principles in this age.

Colville opens another carton of egs and cracks them onto the stove.

The oil sizzles and sputters, and he cracks the yolks with the shells.

Later today, he will repeat this for lunch for the people who gather outside of Amistad House. Whatever tomorrow may hold for him, he isn’t concerned. The two greatest commandments, after all, are to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself — Colville leads a life oriented around these missions. He wraps another sandwich in foil and hands it off.

“Idols are to be smashed.

That’s a basic call of faith in the Bible.”

POEM

My Front Yard, According to Texts from My Father

BY MEGAN BRIGGS “An awesome big and beautiful orange moon rising tonight.”

Our aging porch creaks out grief beneath my father’s footsteps. He turns his heavy eyes to the spill on the horizon, to the awesome big beautiful orange moon.

The wood beneath his hands is faithful and worn. My father’s knees ache going down the steps and he stops, two heavy work boots on gravel pointed East.

The big and beautiful orange moon pauses, resting her heavy eyes for a moment on his.

She cries, where is my daughter, where is my son?

Not so long ago there were four blue butterfly nets raspberry brambles an herb garden littered with bones of birds and a fishing pole made of twigs and string, clutched between ardent hands.

Remember when the dog killed the duck and my daughter cried — how after, she learned the word ending.

Remember races through cornfields, calloused feet. The birds brought home dead from the barns. Where is my proud young boy with his kill?

“Probably the last moon rising from our front yard that I’ll see.”

The last moon is pulled away.

Sky darkens and cool air settles on the back of my father’s hands. He heads inside.

Far, far away, I am full of a yell for what I left scattered in the yard.

Yale Daily News | 41 //KELLY ZHOU

PERSONAL ESSAY

<Character List>

BY CLARA PARK

A

good Korean drama begins and ends with the characters. Despite both of my parents being immigrants from Seoul, the only time Korean is heard in our household is in the evenings, when the language sputters from the TV in our living room. In front of that flickering blue screen, the five of us observe these scripted characters — we befriend the 900-year-old 도깨비 (goblin) of “Guardian, the Lonely and Great God”; root for the supernaturally strong female lead of “Strong Woman Do Bong Soon”; and mourn the lead of “Uncontrollably Fond” as cancer ate away at his mind and body..

During my gap semester, I’ve been working at a drama production company in Seoul. In Korea, the invisible lines that are drawn between relationships, between versions of selves, are clear. “Be yourself ” is an undercurrent in American culture. In New York City, my hometown, people flaunt their identities in leopard print coats and sequined tights. In Korea, when people introduce themselves, they say, “잘부탁드립니다.” I trust myself

to your care.

When our company starts a new project, the first thing I read is the list of characters. A good writer makes webs with their words. Character lists are the very first insight into the full tapestry of a story. At the center is the main character, fleshed out through the relationships she has with those around her. 잘부탁드립니다 — I trust myself to your care. I trust that both of us know the roles we are expected to play.

APPEARING CHARACTERS 안창현 (Director Ahn, Clara’s Boss, 39, Man) Director Ahn is one of two directors at our company. With his wide round eyes and unkempt hair, he strongly resembles the black bulldog that he lovingly raises. Most strikingly, he has a thick Busan accent that grows thicker when he curses. And Director Ahn swears like a sailor. I learned this on my first day of work.

42 | November 2020

//DORA GUO

PERSONAL ESSAY

During my first meeting that day, Director Ahn’s voice crested and fell in waves. In one moment, profanities were pouring forcefully from the pit of his stomach. In the next, he turned to me, smiling. He asked: “What’s your name?”

I had to think for a second before answering. At work, I go by Clara instead of my Korean name, Inyoung. The way Korean people say “Clara,” my name stretches into three syllables: 클라라, Ceu-la-ra. 친할머니 (Clara’s Paternal Grandmother, 83, Woman) My grandmother calls me In-young.

The first syllable of my name means mercy. It was chosen years ago by my grandfather. All my cousins and siblings share this syllable in their names. This is our 돌 림자 — a shared syllable in the names of one generation in a family. The second syllable of my name means bell.

It comes from my mother’s name, Young-ah.

When my grandmother calls my name, she always says: “우리 인영이” — “My In-young” When she says my name, I can hear the 정 (jung) folded into the syllables. It is warmth learned through 83 years of life and infused into my name. It’s a warmth I’ve known my whole life thanks to my father, who says my name in the exact same way.

Sometimes, I cannot understand my grandmother.

Korean is thick in my brain like congealed honey that refuses to drip from the bottle. But my name is easy to understand. It fits into a pattern of naming that stretches back for generations. My parents, who gave something of themselves to raise me, added onto this pattern. The result is those two syllables. 인영. 최보경, 최지원 (Choi Bo-kyung, Choi Ji-won, Clara’s Co-workers, 20s, Women) When I first met Bo-kyung and Ji-won, I introduced myself as In-young. The thing about Korea, though, is that a title always comes with the name. Producer Inyoung. Intern In-young. It’s a linguistic quirk reminiscent of the importance placed on relational boundaries in Korean culture. In Korea, relational identities are constantly in flux — we play the main character, the dense sidekick, the abject underling when the occasion calls for it.

But when speaking, the added syllables of those

titles are clunky on my fat American tongue. On the page, the extra characters make a buffer around my name. They draw an icy line between us. Co-workers, not friends.

So I made a compromise: 클라라 (Clara). An English name pronounced in a Korean way. No need to tack on the title at the end. I think it sounds prettier pronounced the way that Bo-kyung and Ji-won do.

At the office, I call Bo-kyung and Ji-won 피디님 — Producer Bo-kyung, Producer Ji-won. But outside of work, I call them 언니, older sister. 최영아 (Clara’s Mom, 49, Woman) I call my mom on the bus on the way to work in the mornings. My Korean melds with English, and people stare at me.

When I hear my mom’s voice, it’s grounding. I think about what it must have been like moving to America at my age. I wonder how she decided to go by Caroline instead of 영아 (Young-ah). Like me, she would have been maybe 22 or 23. Like me, waiting for English words to register meanings like trying to squeeze honey from the bottle. While living here, reading scripts for work and trying to decipher the blocky white letters on billboards, I appreciate for the first time how difficult it must have been to leave home. When she hangs up, I feel anchorless. 박인영/Clara Park (20, Woman) I like the sound of my voice in Korean more than I do in English. I have to concentrate, to make sure that the sounds come out round and full and correct.

That little second of buffering puts a distance between myself and my words. It’s like listening to someone else talk. I get to marvel at this version of myself — this girl whose words roll off the tongue and who can sometimes fool people into thinking she is Korean.

Reading scripts in front of the white-blue monitor of my work desktop, I’ve come to enjoy reading character lists. I like to watch the versions of characters tumble out across the page, overlapping and contradicting. Before even diving into the scripts themselves, you can tell how captivating a drama will be — all from the character list.

Yale Daily News | 43

BITS & PIECES

Isolation in Tallies

Bits and Pieces of 10 Days on Old Campus

I

I switch my duffel bag from arm to arm as the PHC watches helplessly from six feet away. The random assortment of toiletries, pajamas and books weighs into the crook of my elbow, leaving angry welts along my forearm. I set the bag down, and it glares at me like a forsaken pet. We’re in the COVID “Playpen,” the small, fenced-in area with warning signs at every boundary. Passerby stare at me like some rare zoo exhibit, and I wonder if I should play along. Snarl? Claw at the fence? Twirl?

We wait for my new room key. And wait.

And wait. My first-ever class at Yale, 9 to 10:15 a.m., comes and passes.

II I open an empty minifridge. After calling about 15 different contacts from Yale Health, I hear a knock at my door, and open it to find a freezer bag full of turkey sandwiches and a microwavable box of chicken tikka masala.

Every day, I complete an emailed survey, picking between various deli sandwiches and wraps as well as a few “hot” meals. I’ve been told on multiple phone calls that as one of the first COVID cases at Yale, I’m one of the university’s “guinea pigs.” I guess I should get used to the frequent “glitches” in the meal survey.

III After 48 hours in Bingham Hall, I’ve

//ALICE MAO

44 | November 2020

BY LYDIA KAUP familiarized myself with every square foot of my new home. Of the five available bedrooms in my suite, my key unlocks only my own. Labels for “Person A” and “Person B” hang over the stalls and sinks in the bathroom. The empty shower constantly reminds me that I am the only person here. In my selfish wish for companionship, I imagine the arrival of a “Person B.” A co-positive, if you will.

A co-problem.

Above the couch in my common room, there’s a huge duct-tape rendition of the Hopper crest. I examine it for hours between classes. On Zoom, my classmates notice the glaring green design in the background and comment on Hopper’s merits. Instead of explaining why I’m not in Silliman, I’ve begun to pretend I’m living in Hopper. “Yeah, I love Hopper’s community! Uh-huh, the room layouts are great!”

Across from the duct-tape crest, I add my own decoration — a countdown where I mark each new day spent in quarantine with a tally mark. I press the pen aggressively onto the drywall, hoping that the ink encapsulates the bleak monotony of the day and releases it onto the cracking paint.

IV How to pass the eternity that is the half-centimeter between tally marks? I spend two hours a day on phone calls:

BITS & PIECES

Yale Hospitality, the COVID-19 Hotline, Conferences and Events and a various assortment of Yale-affiliated nurses and doctors. In order to organize the stream of “203” calls I receive, I interrupt every caller when they begin speaking and ask them for a name. Post-isolation, I still retain a series of contacts in my phone entitled “_____ the Nurse” or “_____ from Hospitality.” A personal favorite is “_______ who is bringing me my EpiPen.” V I call my dad at least twice a day.

Both of us had mysteriously contracted the virus on the 15-hour drive from Chicago to New Haven. While I isolate in Bingham Hall, my dad quarantines himself in his apartment.

On day five, I learn that my dad’s symptoms are far worse than I had thought. While I only have a slight cold and a general sense of exhaustion, my father struggles to sit upright for extended periods of time. In an effort to keep me at ease, he has managed to conceal his condition until now — when he falls asleep in the middle of the call.

I sink to the floor of my Bingham common room. My dad, newly single, lives with no one to take care of him. Does anyone even know he’s there?

VI In the three days before my move to Old Campus, I became closely acquainted with about five people… all of whom were con-

Beyond Silliman, word has spread that a first year has already tested positive for the virus. On one of my first days of class, I find myself in a breakout room with a student who begins to discuss the terror of Old Campus. “Can you imagine?” he asks. “Thank God it’s not me.” I just play along.

VIII On the eighth day of quarantine, my father begins to recover. To the surprise of the juniors residing on the “healthy” side of Old Campus, I skip across the Playpen. I participate in virtual Chloe Ting workouts in the common room. In a final act of rebellion, I rip the duct-tape Hopper crest off of the wall, leaving a glorious, sticky residue on my hands. That night, I devour my chicken tikka masala.

IX I spend my last 24 hours in quarantine packing the same duffel //Alice Mao bag I’d brought with me on my first day and finally lug it jubitact traced shortly after I tested positive. We waste away the summer evenings on Zoom lantly back to Silliman. Over the next four calls. I share my worries about my father days, I come back and visit the window of my contact-traced friends, yelling words and apologize over and over again. of encouragement and bits of gossip to the second floor.

VII The Silliman-wide GroupMe explodes X with warnings about “that girl who tested positive” and pleads to “be more careful.” Three days after the move from Old Campus, Within a week of stepping on campus, I’ve I receive an email from an unknown junior become Silliman’s biggest problem. My entitled “B-A11A friend.” She had found my friends jokingly say I should revel in the name on an ID card that I’d left in my old fame. But I worry that I will be known ex- bedroom in Bingham Hall. As the newest clusively as “COVID Girl” once I return to occupant of Bingham A11A, she informs me that she is adding to my tally wall. the Silliman courtyard.

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KINDERGARTEN ONLINE by Owen Tucker-Smith p. 4