CLOCKWORK/NEWS
Vol. 4, Issue 18 Wednesday, March 23, 2016 Yale-NUS College, Singapore www.theoctant.org
NEWS Community Service at Yale-NUS
FEATURES How the Yale-NUS community deals with loneliness
OPINION Why Yale-NUS should care about race issues at Yale
COMMUNITY SERVICE REBOOTS AT YALE-NUS A tongue-in-cheek-view of events around school Save the Date: The Octant has exclusively learned that May 29, 2017 is the day when the Class of 2017 finally leaves the nest. The date may change depending on the availability of the guests of honor by a day or two, but now might be a good time to let the parents know.
KidsAccomplish is one of Yale-NUS’s most visible service groups. Story by Li Ting Chan, News Editor Picture credit to KidsAccomplish
ommunity service at Yale-NUS College had a rocky start, but ComPact, a new service-oriented student organization, is hoping to change that. The volunteering scene at Yale-NUS could finally be getting a second wind. More than 50 students have indicated interest in joining ComPact, which held its welcome tea on March 18. This level of participation is a stark contrast from the days of the now-defunct Service Executive Committee (SEC), which saw little engagement from the student body. The SEC was disbanded after slightly more than a year because of low student interest. Founded in early 2014 by members of the Class of 2017, it aimed to encourage the growth of service-oriented student groups and promote service related experiences for the wider Yale-NUS community. The initial lack of engagement in community work was puzzling, because a
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good number of students were involved in service work prior to entering Yale-NUS. Li Nanlan ’17, who volunteers regularly with external organizations, said that YaleNUS students hold different perspectives of how one should contribute to society, and this affects the level of community involvement. “The concerns of Yale-NUS students tend to be less localized and more global, and I think that… contributes to the [lack of service] within the local community,” she said. On the other hand, recruiting volunteers was not a problem for KidsAccomplish, one of the more visible service groups in Yale-NUS, according to its vice president. However, Lim Chu Hsien ’18 said that maintaining manpower was more problematic because of the high level of commitment required. At KidsAccomplish, volunteers teach children from low-income families every Saturday and are involved in planning the curriculum. “We want our
What an Honor!: Speaking of graduation, Yale-NUS finally has a system for giving out honors, based on CAP. Summa Cum Laude to top 5%, Magna Cum Laude to the next top 10% and Cum Laude to the next 20%. That is 35% of the class getting an honor. There are a few restrictions to ensure that certain majors don’t dominate the list. Expect a lengthy update and analysis from The Octant on the system. But remember, you read it here first. (Less than) Super Submissions: Stage one of the mascot voting concluded on Sunday, with the whale, kingfisher and clouded leopard going forward to the next round. Here are some of the highlights from the nomination period: generic white man holding a Chinese lantern, because “we are East meets West, but only one of the sides gets to be a person”; a “No” symbol imposed over the NUS and Yale logo’s respectively, because “we are not NUS” and “we are not Yale”; and anus, because “if we’re okay with punning with Yale’s name, we should be okay with punning with NUS’ name as well.” Cat Attack: There is a reason why the entire a cappella community at Yale-NUS has been feline enamoured. Thank you to the Yale Alley Cats for their clawsome meowsic on Sunday. We’re not kitten, it was purrfect… apologies for the catastrophic puns. A Major Decision: Congratulations to the Class of 2018 for declaring their majors. We hope you didn’t stress too much. If the number of juniors changing their majors is anything to go by, you still have plenty of time to change to an Economics major.
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NEWS/FEATURES
curriculum to enrich the volunteer as well, and thinking about how to curate the lessons also takes time—not everyone can commit to that,” she said. Still, community service groups at Yale-NUS remain hopeful about maintaining their pool of volunteers, especially with an expanding student population. Clarissa Leong ’17, president of ComPact, said that students are becoming more aware of the gap in the community service culture on campus, and have shown more interest in becoming involved in volunteer work outside Yale-NUS. Lim also explained that KidsAccomplish tries to work with its volunteers’ time commitments so that less-committed volunteers would still be able to make meaningful contributions. Similarly, Li stressed the importance of making meaningful contributions when volunteering. She pointed to Cendana Serves, in which first years from Cendana College collectively volunteered at a local soup kitchen. Li said that there was virtually no interaction
between the students and their beneficiaries. In fact, the students had at times created more work for the regular volunteers because of their poor culinary skills. Li overheard the regulars—aunties and uncles from the community— complaining in Hokkien about the students. “It’s better to have small groups of students volunteer on a regular basis [as compared to] a large group going [to volunteer] on a single day,” Li concluded. Moving forward, the various service-oriented organizations hope that the community service culture at Yale-NUS will grow in strength. According to Leong, ComPact plans to partner with the already well-established community service programs at the National University of Singapore (NUS). It also hopes to hold a community service fair in the near future, so that different service groups from Yale-NUS and NUS have a platform to raise awareness of volunteering opportunities.
“WE DON’T KNOW OUR OWN SOULS” Mrs Dalloway,by Virginia Woolf, was originally published in 1925
- Aaron Pang, Elm College, Class of ’18 “There’s hardly time to feel lonely—or so I thought. Sitting in my room by myself, with no one to meet, no errands to run for once, I realized just how lonely I could actually feel. Here I am, living in a room of six girls, but none of them in to talk to. Even if they were, what could there be to talk about? We all share the same experiences, our conversations settling into comfortable silences sprung from familiarity. Perhaps using my phone will help. In an instant I could reach out to my old friends, my boyfriend. I could even Skype them in an instant if they were overseas. But strangely, it does not negate the fact that I am alone. I am by myself in this room. They cannot come over just when they want to, they all have
Story by Justin Ong, Opinion Editor Picture credit to Flickr User Trash World
ast week’s Literature and Humanities lecture on Mrs. Dalloway, a novel by Virginia Woolf, sparked a campuswide discussion about loneliness and the sanctity of one’s private life. So The Octant asked members of the Yale-NUS College community a simple question: “How do you deal with loneliness?” The answers we received were anything but simple. Below are excerpts from a series of interviews and five-minute free writes:
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EDITORIAL TEAM Editor-in-chief Spandana Bhattacharya Managing Editor Dave Chappell Co-News Editor Chan Li Ting Co-News Editor Elaine Li Co-Opinion Editor Justin Ong Co-Opinion Editor Annie Wang Ting Fang
“I’m lonely when I’m on my bike. It’s the good kind of lonely. For far away from the incessant drone of Facebook events, the screams and shouts emanating from below, the wind blows in my face and the supple road sings below my feet. I am alone because I choose to be so, here, and in fact anywhere, really. I feel free. Detached, I am content with myself; I can reflect in silence as my legs pump the pedals, hands stay firmly on the handlebars. I can understand the things I never did before, the reason for my friend’s displeasure, weigh the pros and cons of pursuing this internship or that. Sometimes you need to see things from a distance for them to make sense. Most of all, I can feel, and be with myself.” 2 | MARCH 23, 2016
Co-Features Editor Yip Jie Ying Co-Features Editor Nicholas Lua Co-Arts Editor David Chia Co-Arts Editor Tan Jia Hui Copy Chief Rebecka Lindeberg DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The Octant. Questions can be directed to yncoctant@gmail.com
FEATURES/OPINION
their lives to live. Suddenly I am reminded of an article I read on Facebook with photos of people using their phones, but with the phones cropped out. They were looking at a space that didn’t exist, but with that space perhaps they would have the capacity to look at each other. Maybe it’s really easy not to feel lonely. I guess I’ll just have to try harder.” - Lian Szu Jin, Saga College, Class of ’19 “What I feel about this school is, that when you’re in a college that expounds itself to be so happy and cheerful, you feel like it’s not okay to be lonely, or at least not okay to express loneliness. I don’t mean that people discourage it or that you would be condemned for it! It’s just that I personally value privacy and mystery, and I am just super self conscious about the way I express myself, and I don’t feel the need to air my emotions if they’re jarring or incongruous with the way much of the community shows itself to feel. I don’t want 15 people asking me about how I feel as I walk down the halls when I express my sadness. The care that the community could potentially show for me makes me more reluctant to express loneliness, and ironically there’s loneliness in that prospect, too. In a community so closely knit it feels natural for me to avoid any extra attention. However, I understand why Yale-NUS has to do what they do, making the school welcoming
and friendly. It’s a crucial selling point for our college, and I guess there’s no alternative but this.” - Anonymous, Elm College, Class of ’19 “Loneliness can be terrifying. But it can provide a space for me to see more clearly. A balance of community and loneliness is actually a healthy thing. When we’re healthy, we are in a good position to keep up with time! We meet all our deadlines, fill up our schedules perfectly and feel useful to the world. But the moment we are ill or fall off the treadmill of routine we experience absence. We begin to have an outside perspective where our daily routines don’t seem to be the whole truth. So what do you do? You lie in your bed; you stare at your ceiling and you think. Of course, this sickness is metaphorical, it could manifest in a loss of motivation or sudden, unexplainable bouts of sadness. I personally deal with this by recognizing the opportunity to be outward looking by being introspective and hence to be less afraid. I sit with loneliness, recognize it, for it is as much a part of the human experience as community and interaction. Of course, beyond this I go for swims as well, there’s a nice pool at Kent Vale.” - Professor Heidi Stalla, who presented the lecture on Mrs. Dalloway.
ZOOMING OUT: HYPOTHESIZING OUR HYPHEN Column by Mx D Dangaran, Guest Columnist Picture credit to YNC Singer’s Guild
hen people of color at Yale University suffer, we all suffer. When activists at Trump rallies in cities across the US suffer, we all suffer. When Malays and Indians applying for jobs in Singapore suffer, we all suffer. When the Rohingya people of the Rakhine State suffer, we all suffer. McKinney. New Delhi. Chicago. And most recently in the forefront of my mind, in part because of my imminent attendance: Harvard Law School. We are all racism’s students, unwittingly overloading in back-to-back semesters of suffering. It is difficult to see how one more person pushing will help to move the boulder of institutional racism that has caused so much suffering. But isn’t that precisely the reason for collective action? As a Yale alumni, I felt like part of this movement when I wrote “Zooming Out” in the Yale Daily News. As a Yale-NUS College staff member, I believe our campus community has much to reflect upon in terms of how we associate with this half of our name, especially as conflicts continue to arise that garner international attention. Do we turn a blind eye and remind ourselves the hyphen separates us, or do we engage and strive to become better for it? Teach-ins at Yale educated many about racism and misogyny, but we’re all on different schedules of enlightenment. I was racially
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awakened in high school when “friends” hurled “blackie” and “nig nog,” and would click their tongues to imitate isiZulu sounds, condemning my blackness as the reason for my acceptance to the universities that rejected them. At Yale I became proficient in the (subtle? blatant?) racism and femmephobia some gay men espouse in their “preferences.” Once I embraced and expressed my trans identity, I absorbed transphobic comments from hookup partners. A leader of the Black Student Alliance at Yale encapsulated my point best: “Yale is as much as it ever was.” Singapore has opened my mind as a teach-in of an experiencedriven, ethnographic variety. Similar to Baldwin and Coates, living in a place where chattel slavery is not imprinted on societal memory—and where the population is majority Chinese—has provided a critical distance from which I have been forced to examine de facto discourses and internalized racial hierarchy in the U.S. I’m not sure how to be connected to this movement from Singapore. While our distance from the U.S. can make comparative efforts seem contrived, I cannot change the fact that I straddle the bridge Yale built into Asia, pulled in two directions by competing demands: current Yalies need support, but discussions at YaleNUS require my full attention. The desire to bring the uproar at Yale into the Yale-NUS psyche is tangled in an unshakeable sense
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OPINION
The Yale Alley Cats perfomed at Yale-NUS on Sunday, 20 March.
of futility: is it relevant to this Singaporean-majority campus, or am I devoting a navel-gazing focus to this issue? On 11 Nov 2015, Yale alumni working as Dean’s Fellows led a three-hour discussion about events at Yale, in which 28 students, staff and faculty reflected on implications for Yale-NUS. Someone asked if Yale’s residential colleges (RCs) were “homes” or “intellectual spaces.” Another student replied: “RCs break down that false dichotomy, like we do here.” The conversation instantly shifted. Did we feel like our RCs were intellectual homes? Does institutional racism exist in Singapore or at Yale-NUS? Though 1,200 strong, Yale’s “March of Resilience”—larger than Yale-NUS’s student body at foreseen capacity—did not earn recognition from Yale-NUS President Pericles Lewis or The Octant. The demonstration was an act of solidarity in response to all too common experiences of racism Yale students face on a daily basis. Perhaps contentious activism is where the hyphen connecting YaleNUS to its parent institution—and future alumni association— tapers off. In New Haven, Yale President Peter Salovey responded to the march by detailing “four key areas” of focus for the administration to build “a better Yale.” All Yale affiliates, YaleNUS students included, must share that responsibility, or the crux of the work will not be achieved. This is far from the end, and we cannot lose steam. Yale-NUS students travel to Yale for student life exchange trips over spring break, spend semesters and summers there during study abroad, and bear its name within our own. We have a unique opportunity to optimize our campus culture as we build it. I urge everyone to critique Yale during visits, to push me and other Dean’s Fellows or faculty who have studied or worked there whenever we laud it, to keep a keen eye facing inward to ensure we do not allow similar forms of racial (or any other form of) discrimination to take
root on our campus and to name any instances of discrimination when you see them. The burden of change cannot lie with marginalized people alone. We need the harmony of voices that feel removed from suffering. For instance, my former a capella group and our campus’s recent guests from New Haven, the Yale Alley Cats, is predominantly white, and I am the only black member in the past 12 years. Should they ask a black friend - or a black alumni like myself - to educate them? I think not. No one should be asked to perform emotional labor. Minority-group membership should not be a prerequisite to thinking critically about racialized humor and problematic discussion threads. As in a cappella arrangements, each voice adds power, and maybe even some shimmer. The onus should be on all of us. Yale professor Crystal Feimster teaches that we all have “linked fates.” The Yale-NUS community continues to build a school where everyone is respected even when they disagree. I hope everyone at Yale-NUS can zoom out from instances that catalyze conversations about race and think about how they involve all of us. Think about who is included in your “we.” Start there. The task of combating institutional racism at Yale, Yale-NUS and around the world begins with small conversations. Now is the time to put this issue on whichever table we frequent. Now: Speak. A different version of this article appeared in the Yale Daily News on Jan. 27. The views expressed here are the author’s own. The Octant welcomes all voices in the community. Email submissions to: yncoctant@gmail.com
LETTER TO THE EDITORS
Send your letter to the editors (maximum word count 150) to yncoctant@gmail.com by 5pm on Friday for the chance to have it published here next week.
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