PRIME Winter 2021

from the daily bruin WINTER 2021

Lost in translation Serving those who’ve served A stale American ideal

homecoming

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PRIME CONTENTS

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WINTER 2021

WORLD

FEATURES

18 Serving those who’ve served written by BENJAMIN KONOLD

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The definition of freedom that cost 300K American lives written by HYEYOON (ALYSSA) CHOI

CAMPUS

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A campus divided written by JUSTIN JUNG

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12 From someone else’s keyboard written by MATTIE SANSEVERINO

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PRIME CONTENTS

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WINTER 2021

COMMENTARY

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The activist’s balancing act written by LAUREN CAMPBELL

PERSONAL CHRONICLES on the cover illustration by MEGAN FU

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Lost in translation written by MEGAN FU

42 A stale American ideal written by ASHANI SHARMA

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36 Looking up the family tree written by BREANNA DIAZ

letter from the editors

Anushka

Justin

Samantha

Dear reader, Thank you for picking up a copy of our winter issue. In these uncertain times, as COVID-19 wreaks havoc in Westwood and beyond, we hope the stories you are about to read feel grounding – that they offer a sense of connection to the broader Bruin community, whether you’re on campus or back in your hometown.

In our first piece, writer Hyeyoon (Alyssa) Choi details her experiences in Los Angeles during the pandemic, as well as at home in Seoul, South Korea. She explores how the American idea of freedom played a role in how the United States has handled the pandemic. Additionally, Lauren Campbell considers life as a student activist – specifically, what spring quarter of 2020 entailed for Bruins who participated in social justice movements like Black Lives Matter.

Mattie Sanseverino and Justin Jung both investigate aspects of campus culture – an interesting task given our current reality of virtual learning – from the academic dishonesty lingering among lecture halls and Zoom calls to the ingrained divide between North and South campus essential to Bruin culture. Benjamin Konold spoke to a fourth-year veteran student about his experience at UCLA and writes about the various struggles that Bruins who served encounter on campus.

Finally, writers Megan Fu, Breanna Diaz and Ashani Sharma all tackle their respective identities in the closing chapter of this issue. Back at home because of the pandemic, they each analyze how their identities were shaped by their heritages and upbringings.

In “Homecoming,” we explore campus culture like always, but we also hope to capture what happened when thousands of Bruins returned home, their lives upended by COVID-19.

Thank you for picking up a copy of our magazine, and we hope you enjoy the stories!

Anushka Jain PRIME director

Justin Huwe PRIME content director

Samantha Joseph PRIME art director

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M O D E E R F F O N O I T I N I F E THE D K 0 0 3 T S O THAT C S E V I L N A AMERIC

CHOI OON (ALYSSA) written by HYEY IH KO SHLEY SHUE-L illustrations by A H ANTHA JOSEP designed by SAM

S

tepping into my old room in South Korea – which was to be my solitary cell for 14 days – was ironically freeing.

After an 11-hour flight to Incheon, South Korea, in July, I was ushered through a lineup of public health officials and government authorities decked out in white overall gowns, full-face visors, masks and gloves. The first person told me to download a selfquarantine application on my smartphone on the spot.

The next explained how the application would allow the government to track my location – to ensure I sheltered in place for the mandated two weeks – and allow me to self-report my temperature and symptoms twice a day.

To last me the two weeks I was to be confined at home, public health officials put together and delivered a gift bag full of masks, spray sanitizer, biohazard trash bags, paper thermometers and a safety manual on how to stay away from family members.

Government officials frequently called me when I would leave my phone immobile for too long to check that I did not leave home without it. Some days, local public health workers would show up at my front door, occasionally accompanied by a police officer who would ask me to verify my ID. The government kept a close eye on me even after quarantine. Whenever I entered a building, a store or a restaurant, a temperature check was the first order of business, and putting down my contact information via QR code or on paper was a must.

Are you feeling a tinge of discomfort? Rattled, maybe?

Any flashbacks to “1984”?

Some people may think these procedures are a blatant breach of privacy, that this kind of authority would never be tolerated in the United States because it is a clear-cut violation of individual freedom.

But the visits, the location tracking and the contact tracing – and of course, mask wearing – were all natural to me because I believed this was my right: to be protected by my government.

At the end of the two weeks, in mid-July, I was sitting at a quaint indoor restaurant, catching up with an old friend, cutting French toast – without a mask on. Face covered, I was going to pilates, riding populated subways and, if I wanted to, visiting a bar or an amusement park. The weekly case count was in double digits most days of the summer.

Around the same time, the U.S. averaged a steady fivedigit case number – between 20,000 to 80,000 infections daily. Taking the population into account, consider this: South Korea houses 51 million people with 739 COVID-19 deaths as of Dec. 23. By comparison, California is populated by 39 million people. There have been 23,284 COVID-19 deaths as of Dec. 23.

My American friends were green with envy. Some gave

up adhering to COVID-19-related rules altogether.

I am an international student hailing from Seoul, South Korea. I lived in Seoul for 17 years before coming to UCLA. As COVID-19 trampled every corner of our planet, killing more than 1.3 million people in a matter of 11 months, I hopped between a country with one of the most highly praised COVID-19 responses and one with the most heavily criticized.

Beyond rating the competencies of government leaders and their political rhetoric, there were two strikingly different axioms held by the people of South Korea and the U.S. that I believe pushed the nations in opposite directions.

And that difference is the very definition of freedom.

When I was in the U.S., I frequently heard comments such as, “I went to the beach today with my family, and no one else was wearing masks.” When I was in Korea, spotting a person without a mask on outside an eatery was like finding a needle in a haystack.

In America, my social media feed picked up memes reflecting America’s stark political division over social distancing rules. One captured Jonathan Van Ness, a professional hairdresser who stars in “Queer Eye,” mockingly commenting “Just because you Ameri-can, doesn’t mean you Ameri-should” dine out or attend parties. Meanwhile, in Korea, the government lit monumental buildings in pink as a show of gratitude toward its citizens for bearing the responsibility of social distancing and wearing masks so responsibly.

The difference was as vast as the ocean that divides the two countries. The reasons for this are complex and diverse. Korea is experienced in dealing with infectious diseases. Korea is a more collectivist country. Korean leadership took earlier and more drastic measures to curb the spread of the disease.

But in terms of the political framework, South Korea and the U.S. are both functional democracies. In fact, South Korea used America’s constitutionalism as a blueprint for its own constitution and democratic framework. In 1948, General John R. Hodge, who oversaw Korea’s transition to democracy and commanded the United States Army forces in Korea, issued “The Ordinance on the Rights of the Korean People.”

The measure included 12 America-inspired articles that guaranteed fundamental rights such as privacy, property, voting and a speedy trial. It also guarantees

It seems to me that the hallmark of freedom in the U.S. is essentially following one’s heart apart from any mandated control, and it is often touted with a sense of American exceptionalism.

freedom of religion, press, assembly and speech.

If citizens of both countries live under democratic values of freedom, where did they diverge and why?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I watched as thousands of Americans swarmed beaches, merrily and blatantly ignoring government mandates to wear masks or social distance.

As I was trying to swallow this bizarre phenomenon, I came across another meme, satirically depicting an American man walking on the moon in a bathing suit, flouting health experts’ exhortations to “please wear protective suits in space.”

I was not amused. Not when there were 300,000 people already dead.

The U.S. calls itself the land of the free, and the free people vote, protest, feast, drink and pray. It seems to me that the hallmark of freedom in the U.S. is essentially following one’s heart apart from any mandated control, and it is often touted with a sense of American exceptionalism.

Merriam-Webster’s definition of freedom is the “absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice of action,” “political right,” “franchise” or “privilege.” But COVID-19 has revealed that freedom has different definitions in different cultures.

The conception of freedom in America can be traced back to the American Revolution, when colonists fought for freedom from British rule.

Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Americans have believed that “America, and America alone, was the place where the principle of universal freedom could take root,” wrote Eric Foner, historian and author of “The Story of American Freedom.” Such belief in American exceptionalism and American nationalism was grounded in the devotion to freedom.

Beginning in the 20th century, Foner observed that Americans coupled freedom with the Bill of Rights,

which subtly named the federal government as the most prominent threat to freedom. Since then, discussions about people’s rights have been a battle to balance liberty and government power.

Just as freedom of speech allowed for democratic governance and was defended as a protection against government intrusion, according to Foner, I believe that so too are mask-wearing and contact tracing treated as both necessities and violations of freedom today in the U.S. In the case of wearing masks, Stephen Gardbaum, an internationally renowned constitutional scholar and law professor at UCLA, said that there exists a misguided view as to whether it is a constitutionally protected freedom or liberty.

An anti-mask protester interviewed by Vox journalist Emily Stewart in August said she feels justified in defying mask mandates on grounds of the 14th Amendment, which reads: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Citing the 14th Amendment, the protester told Stewart, “No states are allowed to make laws that take our freedoms and liberties away.”

In protest, an anti-mask organization called United Patriots Alliance in South Carolina wrote a statement to the state House saying, “the people of SC have been living under multiple and unconstitutional Emergency Executive Orders issued by the Governor.”

As I watched drone footage of COVID-19 victims being buried en masse, I could not shake the feeling that such constitutional justifications were painfully and plainly wrong. After having studied constitutional law and civil

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liberties that quarter, I wondered if a sense of autonomy and privacy was so great that Americans could not perceive the grave danger that COVID-19 posed to the general public.

I had a way out, so I took it. I flew back home in July.

My friends and family thought it was the right choice all along anyway.

After having months to chew on what might be behind these disparate COVID-19 climates, I talked to Gardbaum, who told me that people who are resisting masks are tapping into the belief that America is a country of extraordinary freedom and that government interference should be almost nonexistent.

According to constitutional law, he added, there is no constitutionally protected freedom or liberty that allows people to argue a case against mask wearing in light of a public health crisis. “(This) reflects a lay person’s ... view that if they have a right, somehow that means it can never be justifiably limited,” he said. “There is an erroneous assumption that the U.S. has a greater list of liberties against the government than it actually does.”

This is in part due to the ideologies of President Donald Trump, which lean toward the extreme of conservatism.

But it can also be attributed to a constitutional culture that promotes negative rights – the right not to be subject to certain actions – instead of positive rights, Gardbaum said.

Positive rights include the rights of the people to receive provisions from the government, such as health care.

As former President Barack Obama put it during a 2001 interview with Chicago’s WBEZ radio station, “Generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties – it says what the states can’t do to you.”

Time and time again, the courts have reaffirmed this American judicial principle that the government cannot

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breach the people’s inalienable rights – sometimes to the extreme.

This is the kind of freedom that explains the opposition to mask wearing in many parts of the U.S. Gardbaum explained that the U.S. Constitution does not enumerate positive rights unlike the constitutions of other countries such as Korea.

For instance, Article 35 of the Korean Constitution reads, “The State shall endeavor to ensure comfortable housing for all citizens through housing development policies and the like.” On the other hand, the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly express any guarantees that the government will do anything for the people.

Because the constitutional culture of America is founded on negative rights, America’s conception of freedom is that there are things that the government cannot do to you.

In contrast, the Korean Constitution plainly declares “the health of all citizens shall be protected by the State,” in Article 36 and “the freedoms and rights of citizens may be restricted ... only when necessary … for the maintenance of ... public welfare” in Article 37.

The Korean government has a constitutional duty to protect its citizenry from harm, such as COVID-19, whereas the American government does not.

Ju Hui Judy Han, a UCLA gender studies assistant professor who studies Korean protest culture, said it was a given that contact tracing went undisputed in South Korea, except in a few cases involving churches or gay clubs out of fear of societal retribution.

When any new cases of COVID-19 are confirmed in Korea, a messaging alert notifies people how many tested positive, where they reside and where they have been. I received anywhere from five to 10 such alerts on a given day. Once, when the alert dinged, I was at a cafe with about 15 people in the area. The chime, which has a distinct

I believed this was my right: to be protected by my government.

tone, occurred synchronously, and everybody peered into their screens and began discussing the information they had just received.

Can anyone conceive of an American version of this episode?

I believe that many Koreans, if not most, and definitely at a larger scale than Americans, know that freedom is only made possible by everyone’s – not just a few’s – sacrifice.

Political leadership, not citizens’ attitudes, is the most commonly discussed reason for the difference between America and Korea’s responses to COVID-19. Coherent, cogent and consistent communication by a leader, many might say, is the single most important factor in determining the success rate of blocking the spread of COVID-19.

I believe that many Koreans, if not most, and definitely at a larger scale than Americans, know that freedom is only made possible by everyone’s – not just a few’s – sacrifice.

Dan Schnur, a political communication professor at USC and UC Berkeley and a veteran of four Republican presidential campaigns, said that Trump is divorced from the traditional strain of conservatism, which holds individual freedom and individual responsibility at equally high standards.

“A traditional conservative would talk about the importance of individual freedoms, but would also say that with those freedoms comes individual responsibility,” he said. “If all you talk about is freedom without responsibility, it’s anarchy.”

So let’s consider for a moment the possibility that America had a different president,

anyone other than Trump, when COVID-19 arrived at the West Coast. Would Americans – as in those who protested lockdowns, mask-wearing and the likes thereof – have reacted differently to the pandemic if the president were anybody but Trump?

Shortly put, yes, Schnur said. He believes those who are inclined to reject that call to take responsibility for the good of the community were tucked under Trump’s rhetoric.

“They can say, ‘The president of the United States doesn’t think we have to do this, so why should we?’” he said.

If the president were more traditional in dealing with a public health crisis, whether conservative or liberal, Schnur believes that those who resist public health recommendations would have been less vocal.

“Even though these people would still exist, they would be more isolated,” he said. “If you take away the authority, it would become a lot harder for that resistance to sustain.”

So in conclusion, yes, leadership does matter. But it isn’t everything. A political analysis alone cannot answer the big question: Why did America fare so badly?

We have to remember that politics do not occur in a vacuum. Only when we begin to consider the principles each nation is founded upon can we answer the looming question.

The idea that freedom is an absolute and inalienable right, however extreme or stifled, lives on to this day in America. It was one of the driving forces leading to America’s independence.

So, sans Trump, would there have been no opposition to mask wearing and contact tracing at all? America’s definition of freedom whispers, “No.”

written by MATTIE SANSEVERINO illustrated by BRIDGETTE BARON designed by KATHERINE WANG

I

From someone else’s keyboard

t was around 1:30 in the morning when I opened my eyes. About two hours earlier, I had turned in a lengthy assignment, which would usually lead to a peaceful night of sleep. But I wasn’t getting any rest.

I glanced across the room at my laptop and opened it up.

I refreshed the CCLE tab and grabbed my phone to look out for a Duo Mobile request, tapped on the green check mark and logged in to my class’s webpage.

Submitted at 11:57 p.m., it said.

It was a coding project, one that should have consumed weeks of my quarter. Stressing about and failing to comprehend the project took weeks – writing my code did not.

Calling it “my code” was a very generous statement. The code I submitted was scrapped together in the final days before the deadline, after I spent more than 40 hours writing and deleting and writing and deleting failed solutions.

Most of my submission came from a place of desperation.

Most of it came from someone else’s keyboard.

“Edit/Add submission.”

The button stared at me. Without this project, I could still pass the class.

“What are you trying to prove?” I asked myself. I had no answer.

I clenched my hands in my hair and took a deep breath.

After hovering my mouse over the button for a few seconds, I closed my eyes and clicked it.

“Submission deleted.”

Maybe it was the cushion of the spring 2020 pass/no pass policy that led me to delete the submission or a stark realization that I shouldn’t be so comfortable about the idea of academic dishonesty. But I deleted it, despite the hours I spent crying over my computer and the days I felt too anxious to type.

As a product of my own weakness and of the deeply ingrained culture of dishonesty within computer science classes at UCLA, I let myself get too accustomed to the idea of cheating.

After scraping by with a passing grade in the class, I began to question the culture of fraud within the computer science department. It was something I sensed as early as freshman year, as if every student sitting next to me in a 300-seat classroom had been simultaneously and silently inducted into the world of cheating.

Cheating is a broad term. From my own observations, there are different levels to it and different ways to do it.

But after a couple of quarters in the department, the most common cheating-adjacent word one hears in the Boelter Hall hallways is GitHub. GitHub is a website created by a company for software storage and management. To the general population, it’s a noun, something that exists. But for UCLA’s computer science students, GitHub is a verb.

GitHub verb 1. Complete a programming assignment with the help of an existing solution, probably on GitHub.

Since GitHub hosts the work of software engineers, many student software engineers in training upload the projects they’ve completed. So, a simple Google search of “CS 35L GitHub Lab 2” will lead to pages of GitHub accounts that host solutions to that project. To “GitHub a project” is to look at those existing keys, which may act as inspiration for algorithm design or a source for a copy-paste.

Hersh Joshi, a fourth-year electrical engineering student, has taken several classes within UCLA’s computer science department, some of which are widely known for cheating.

According to Joshi, it’s likely that students learn about the dishonest use of GitHub early in their computer science journey.

“You start noticing it around (Computer Science) 32 or 33,” he said. “By 35L, you’re fully aware of it.”

During Joshi’s time in Computer Science 33: “Introduction to Computer Organization,” he watched a large cheating scandal unfold that found about one-third of his class guilty. Joshi, along with his classmates who were not involved in the scandal, had either chosen to avoid the GitHub solution or had not yet discovered its availability.

For Joshi, solving the problem from scratch meant an extra 10 to 15 hours of work. Although a chunk of his classmates got caught, facing grade deductions or meetings with the dean, this wasn’t enough to scare other students away from GitHubbing in the future, he said.

Although I’ve noticed GitHubbing in most of the computer science courses I’ve taken so far, it’s no secret that the method is wildly normalized in what students call “an Eggert class” – a class constructed or taught by notable computer science senior lecturer Paul Eggert. Some students are introduced to him as their instructor for Computer Science 33, some see his name for the first time on their syllabus for Computer Science 35L: “Software Construction

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Laboratory” and some learn about his impact through memes in Facebook It was something I sensed as early as freshman groups even before taking one of his year, as if every student sitting next to me in a classes.

300-seat classroom had been simultaneously I reached out to Eggert to learn his perspective on the culture of cheating. and silently inducted into the world of cheating.

Given his intense reputation and timeconsuming classes – some of which have made me question my major – I was candidly joke about how they just GitHubbed the whole nervous to even reach out. But, he responded to my email thing.” quickly and enthusiastically, and we set up a time to talk.

This idea is no surprise to me. During my first quarters My first Eggert class, and one of the most challenging at UCLA, I’d hear from my upperclassmen friends about classes I’ve taken at UCLA so far, was Computer Science GitHub, and they’d joke about a particular profile they 35L. The course includes hefty assignments due every week, cherished that posted the best, most organized solutions. and many students turn to GitHubbing their assignments This specifi c profile holds everything from class notes to rather than constructing them fully themselves. Eggert was coding homework solutions for 13 computer science courses. clearly aware of this – in fact, he classified it as a course in The author acknowledges that students may be turning to “ethics” more than anything else. their code for copying.

“Are you going to cheat or aren’t you?” Eggert said. “I’m “Feel free to use the source code as inspiration/guidance afraid we have too many students that are failing that task.” for your own projects, but copying will be at your own risk!”

With students and professors all well aware of the issue, Knowing how many students visit profiles like these, I academic dishonesty is still casually discussed. didn’t expect it to be as hard as it was to find someone to “Everyone I know has cheated at at least some point,” interview about their experiences using GitHub. I reached Joshi said. “When you talk to your friends (about) how out to classmates, looking for someone to talk to. Few far they are in a project, a lot of times they’ll openly and people were interested.

During an interview, I would ask about personal experiences using GitHub or other resources, and I was met with long pauses and blank stares, perhaps in an attempt to

trick me into thinking the Zoom call was frozen.

Eventually, I was connected to a recent computer science alumna who was willing to speak with me about her experiences. The recent graduate, who requested to be anonymous in this story, had a similar experience to mine.

During a difficult upper division class, Computer Science 131: “Programming Languages,” she found herself particularly stuck on a project. As the deadline approached, she showed up at office hours and consulted with all her friends. Although there was a forgiving late policy for turning in assignments, she preferred to make the deadlines to not end up behind on the next week’s project.

In order to turn something in on time, she consulted GitHub. As the clock inched closer and closer to midnight, she remembered how she stared at the GitHubbed assignment and thought to herself, “Am I going to submit this?”

Turns out, she wasn’t. Although she had turned in GitHubbed assignments in the past, she felt motivated to stop, she said.

“There was a lot of guilt and feeling like I was being bad or not doing the right thing,” she said. “I was getting more stressed and worried than it was worth getting a good grade.”

For her and her peers, however, they sometimes felt like there was no other way to stay afloat in their classes, she recounted. They would try to help each other out but

realized if they didn’t use GitHub, they would have to spend so much time trying to figure it out that they would fall behind in other classes.

Like the alumna, I myself have experienced how the assignments in some of these computer science courses take absurdly long chunks of time. Although I’m the type of person who tries to go to bed by 11 p.m., I’d watch the little clock in the upper right-hand corner of my screen advance past 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. while I coded.

As I worked on assignments that were already days late, my tired roommates would complain about the loud clicking of my keyboard, the sound probably amplified by my stressed fingers. I bought a cover for my keyboard to lessen the noise and began spending more nights in a study room on campus. And when I would finally get to sleep, I’d dream about code. After all those hours, it was still hard to feel confident in my own work.

“I feel like the attitude is that people have no choice, almost,” the alumna said. “It’s either use GitHub or spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what to do and submit it late.”

And professors like Eggert are aware, to some extent, that it’s happening. When I asked him about the different modes of cheating he knew about, Eggert was visibly disheartened, shaking his head and sighing over our Zoom call. But he made it clear that tracking down cheating was neither his main job nor interest.

“To some extent, it doesn’t really matter,” he said.

“Students in our department are really good at writing

software, so even if we magically waved a wand and closed down all the sites that promote cheating, they could just create new ones.”

Although GitHub is the most common culprit I’ve heard in my discussions with students, Eggert acknowledges that cheating could happen anywhere, and he can’t stop it all. For him, the most important battle isn’t to catch the cheating student, it’s to educate the honest student.

“Obviously minimizing cheating is part of (my job), but it’s not the whole story. It’s not my whole job,” he said.

The department takes measures to prevent, or simply lessen, the amount of cheating that occurs.

Eggert has removed popular sources of cheating from the internet, he said, and several computer science courses have implemented plagiarism checking software.

But plagiarism in coding is a complicated thing, and most students aren’t caught.

Instead of detecting copied words and phrases in a plagiarized essay, the plagiarism checker needs to detect copied logic and functionality.

To Joshi, success is more about understanding the code than it is about coming up with it yourself. Although he avoids GitHub, he believes his friends who performed “higheffort” cheating, intensely studying code on GitHub before trying to reimplement it themselves, had about the same level of understanding and success on exams as he did.

“If you fully understand how it works, I don’t know if that even counts as cheating,” he said.

I’ve hovered on the line between cheating and being resourceful myself, and I know it’s a difficult line to understand. In my software engineering internships, I’ve been encouraged to ask for help and read through pages of sample code and open-source documentation. I’ve found comfort in the software community that fosters opensource work and the sharing of information.

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The recent alumna, now working as a software engineer, said she doesn’t necessarily believe that cheating or not cheating has affected her experiences in the industry. She said some of the classes at UCLA have helped her do her job, but the skills required depend on the position – so UCLA’s impact really varies from person to person.

Still, she added that someone who relied fully on GitHub and essentially never wrote their own code would definitely struggle with a job in which the main responsibility is writing code.

Preventing a student from graduating without writing much of their own code is a difficult task, although the alumna had a few ideas on how to decrease the amount of cheating that occurs within the department.

“More structure, more help, less ambiguity and more examples on how to do things,” she said.

Some courses do offer extra structure and examples, especially the introductory courses. The examples were helpful to “I feel like the attitude is that people have no my friends and me, and we enjoyed choice, almost,” the alumna said. “It’s either use completing the homework as if it were like solving puzzles. But projects grew GitHub or spend a ridiculous amount of time trying harder and deadlines got closer and to figure out what to do and submit it late.” cheating became normalized.

Joshi suggested assignments should be original every quarter, which would Funnily enough, this is something I share in common eliminate the possibility of using GitHub for cheating. with Eggert. Eggert himself said he was at the frontlines But Eggert argued that writing new assignments is more of the creation of open-source code, and he has been difficult than one would expect. He said it could take involved in the “pre-software movement” since the 1980s. days to create an assignment, and clarifications and He emphasizes the importance of open-source software and modifications continue to be added over time. learning to use code that isn’t your own.

For him and other professors, there simply isn’t

enough time to create new material from scratch every quarter, he said.

Eggert has his own ideas on how to promote academic honesty. For one, he is experimenting with a new course to replace Computer Science 35L. The new course, Computer Science 97: “Software Construction Projects,” mixes Computer Science 35L assignments with original assignments and places a greater emphasis on group projects.

Although Eggert suggests that the best thing a student can do when they’re struggling is to ask for help and pursue resources such as office hours, some students like the alumna argue that departmentprovided resources aren’t very helpful. She felt that during teaching assistant office hours, the TAs simply didn’t have the time to sit down and understand what was wrong with her code. There were always other students waiting for help, too.

Eggert notes that students should also ask for guidance to see whether what they’re doing is cheating.

“The problem is once you start navigating through a gray area on your own, there’s a chance you’ll cross the line,” Eggert said.

Many students, like Joshi and the recent graduate, have their own ideas on what “crossing the line” means.

As a freshman, I quickly learned that ignoring the ethical line was

a normal thing to do. It was hard to see the value in honest work when the internet had solutions just waiting to be looked at.

“I don’t really see the benefit to not cheating,” Joshi said, even though he said didn’t cheat.

I asked him why he chose not to, and he had trouble finding a reason.

As a freshman, I quickly learned that ignoring the ethical line was a normal thing to do.

In lecture halls that seat hundreds of students, I’d look around and wonder if everyone else was struggling as much as I was. They all looked like they understood what was going on or that they had already turned in the project that I had no idea how to start.

But my time speaking to students in TA office hours and interviewing students has revealed that struggle is a mainstay of UCLA computer science culture. While I fight with broken code and type into the late hours of the night, I’ll know that I’m not the only one struggling, and I hope to be focused on learning.

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Serving those who've served written by BENJAMIN KONOLD photos by ASHLEY KENNEY designed by SAMANTHA FREDBERG

T

he sun had set almost an hour ago, and now the De Neve Gardenia study hall was illuminated by warm overhead lights. We had been talking for well over an hour at this point and while at first he was energetic, constantly getting up to act out all of his many stories from serving in the Navy, he was now sinking further into his seat.

Now he sat completely still. He had stopped shaking his knee and was looking away from me, staring at something far away.

“You can see people standing around ... on trucks or you could see them with guns,” he said. “And you’ll see the bomb drop, and they’re just gone.”

He slowly shook his head.

Aaron Henderson, a fourth-year philosophy student, served as an aviation electronics technician while on tour in the West Pacific for Operation Inherent Resolve, a

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military intervention centered around combating the Islamic State group in the Middle East.

Henderson worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week. For two years, he was in charge of the maintenance and outfitting of fighter jets in combat operations.

Henderson spent a total of four years serving in the Navy, achieving the rank of petty officer third class. Yet after his initial deployment, Henderson knew that the military wasn’t for him.

“It was like ... being trapped on this floating cage,” Henderson said. “I knew I wanted to get out (of the

Navy) my first week in boot camp.”

After the Navy, Henderson said he had his sights on higher education. He enrolled in Irvine Valley College in fall 2016. Three years after attending his first class, Henderson ultimately decided to transfer to UCLA. “I went through all the colleges I got into,” he said. “I visited each campus and then I got to UCLA, ... and UCLA just ruined the others. There was just an energy at UCLA that wasn’t at other campuses. Everybody was smiling.

Everybody was happier and outgoing.”

Currently, the U.S. News & World Report ranks UCLA as the fifth-best college for veterans. According to the report, UCLA holds this distinction in part because it is certified under the GI Bill – which offers 36 months of paid tuition from the government to veterans. The university also receives high marks for being a top-tier public institution and consistently enrolls and graduates veteran students, with 452 veterans enrolled in the 2018-2019 school year.

UCLA has the most veteran students enrolled out of the entire University of California system as of the 2018-2019 year.

Yet, even with these high rankings, Henderson said he still had difficulty initially finding his place at UCLA. Henderson is unassuming at first glance. He looks much younger than his 26-year-old self.

“I still get treated like I’m a child,” he said, trying to stifle a laugh. “But as soon as I tell them (I’m a veteran), they treat me so differently.”

When people learn he is a veteran, it is often met with a look of surprise and an air of discomfort.

He hates how being a veteran always goes hand in hand with an interrogation, he said. Henderson has answered countless questions, from “Are you proud of being a soldier?” to “Have you killed somebody?” But what particularly irks him is the phrase “Thank you for your service.”

“What do you want me to say?” he asked. “Like, ‘You’re welcome?’”

Henderson said he not only struggles to integrate with the student community on campus but also feels disappointed with the academic counseling readily available for veteran students.

He said he had his own counselor specifically for veterans at Irvine Valley College as well as a therapist who specialized in veteran care and was available for same-day appointments.

At UCLA, Henderson said his primary option for counseling is being referred to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, a government program that offers various resources for veterans. Although the VA offers professional medical care, it serves almost 9 million veterans per year nationwide, according to the program’s website. Simply being able to see someone can take weeks, Henderson said.

Veteran students not only have to grapple with the transition to civilian life from a war zone but also have to compete against other students who have been better prepared for college, said Jesse Tossetti, the director of outreach and admissions for the Warrior-Scholar Project.

The Warrior-Scholar Project is a one- to two-week boot

camp that introduces recent veterans to higher education.

Henderson credits this organization with motivating him to pursue higher education. This training teaches students how to properly use their government benefits, how to develop the necessary skills to take college classes and how they should apply to highly ranked universities, Tossetti said.

For a veteran student to succeed in college, they need personalized care from a compassionate team familiar with the problems veterans go through, Tossetti said.

“What you have to understand is that it takes a village to get a vet through school,” Tossetti said.

UCLA funds many veteran programs run by faculty, students and veterans.

MOVE! Weight Management Program is a VA program that helps veterans stay healthy and active as they transition to civilian life. Veterans who participate in the program coordinate with a team of UCLA students and faculty on how to eat properly, exercise and where to find affordable therapy.

Through the UCLA School of Law Veterans Legal Clinic, a team of law students and professors provides legal guidance for underserved and marginalized veterans to receive their deserved benefits in Los Angeles.

Zack Sobel was previously involved in the Veterans

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What one has to realize is that it takes a village to get a vet through school.

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Legal Clinic. Students who worked in the program helped veterans contest unfair traffic ticketing, whether it be in court or through court alternatives as well as helped veterans navigate legal paperwork to ensure that they were receiving all their due benefits, said Sobel, a law student at UCLA and an Army veteran.

In the 2017-2018 school year alone, the Veterans Legal Clinic closed 267 cases and secured $10,869 for veterans, according to Sobel.

The UCLA Veteran Resource Center is where UCLA veterans students go for academic guidance and to socialize with other veterans. Trent McBride, a fourth-year political science student, is a student intern at the VRC. The center helps anyone associated with the military, whether it be a veteran student or their spouse or child, McBride said.

McBride served in the Navy for two and a half years as a ceremonial guard in Washington, D.C., performing ceremonies at landmarks like the White House and Pentagon, or performing military burial services for Navy soldiers. He then was a master at arms in San Diego for about three and a half years. He held the rank of petty officer second class before being honorably discharged from the military in 2018 after almost six years.

The VRC makes sure to reach out to every single student to answer questions about housing, classes, tutoring and whatever else incoming veteran students need, McBride said. The staff helps incoming students organize their class planner and shows them how to obtain all of their military benefits, he added.

Especially with the COVID-19 pandemic this year, he said

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that the staff is making more of a point to reach out to everyone and connect through their virtual office.

But despite the VRC’s efforts to help veteran students acclimate to UCLA, many still feel disconnected from the UCLA student community, McBride said. Out of the hundreds of veteran students at UCLA, he said only about 100 consistently engage with veteran resources on campus.

Henderson said he remembers when the VRC reached out to him, but he still hasn’t participated in any veteran services.

“There were a lot of community outreach programs, but I was never looking for that,” Henderson said. “There just wasn’t anything I needed, and they had a community already and I just didn’t feel like I was a part of it.”

The veteran community seems to be separated from the rest of the student body at UCLA, he said. The average age discrepancy between veteran students and students who attend UCLA straight out of high school is substantial, with most veteran students being in their mid-20s and early 30s, he said. Henderson said he feels like a kid around other veterans at times, but also faces trouble acclimating to an environment of mostly 20-year-olds in Westwood.

And because of expensive housing in the Westwood area, veterans almost never live in university housing, dealing instead with lengthy commutes and spending only brief intervals of time on campus for classes, Henderson said.

“The veteran community, I would say, isn’t too big on campus. But even if it was, I would say most veterans don’t really like to talk about their struggle,” Henderson said.

On a brisk winter morning in February while working on this story, I met Henderson at a hiking spot only a short drive from campus. We began walking down a trail, and at first, we conversed normally.

This time, he talked about the reality of war – how it comes quickly after one signs up. Every soldier in active duty has a price tag set on their head, he said. Henderson’s life, and the life of every soldier around him, is given a flat value of $100,000 dollars, according to the U.S. Department of Defense This valuation, formally called the death gratuity, ensures that the families of soldiers killed in action are compensated. However, the idea that our government has placed a numerical value on a human life doesn’t sit easy with Henderson.

“If I die, get blown up or get killed somehow, they already have an idea of what I’m worth,” Henderson said, “It’s dehumanizing.”

Gradually, we stopped talking and walked in silence together. All I could hear was the shuffling of our feet on the gravel. I thought back to our previous interview by Gardenia – and one thing Henderson had said that stuck out to me in particular.

“But one thing – what’s cool is as a veteran, you can always recognize veterans,” he said. “They’ll always have the scraggly beard ... always (have) clean, high and tight haircuts. And you can tell that, just in their face, they’re kind of motivated.”

“Veterans can always recognize another veteran?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “For the most part.”

a campus divided written by JUSTIN JUNG photo illustrations by NITYA TAK, JUSTIN JUNG and NOAH DANESH designed by SAMANTHA JOSEPH

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N

ot thinking twice about it, David Murillo asked his friend who goes to another college if he’s North or South Campus. “(My friend) was like, ‘What is that?’” said Murillo, a second-year psychobiology student. “I kind of assumed that all schools had that subtle distinction. I thought South Campus inherently meant you’re STEM. I didn’t know it’s just UCLA.” North and South Campus are characterized by the geographic split of social sciences and humanities in the northern part of UCLA, and physical and life sciences in UCLA’s south. As students tend to take more classes within their respective sides, they often find themselves aligning with half the campus.

While North Campus feels like a giant park, with landmark buildings and a close-knit community, South Campus feels like a city, with more streets running through it, said Matt Flynn, a fourth-year history student.

As a North Campus student myself, I’ve not spent much time south of Powell Library, but I have noticed stark differences on my forays south. Nearly every time I’ve been lost on campus, I was trying to navigate the labyrinth called Boelter Hall. Additionally, the midday crowds of students walking to class around Young Hall are always larger than any I’ve seen north of Royce Hall.

In contrast to the bustle of South Campus, I usually see students in North Campus sitting on the lawns of the Sunken Gardens, Dickson Plaza or the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden. Usually reading a book, having a picnic or tossing a ball, students there seem more relaxed.

Thinking about these differences led me to question why UCLA has a North and South Campus to begin with. It’s not as though there’s a physical barrier separating the two, but when you step across the invisible demarcation, it’s immediately apparent that the atmosphere has changed.

Is geography the ultimate answer to these differences, or is there something more? Do all students experience these cultures the same way, or is it individual?

The flow of students through these geographic spaces seems to be central to the distinction between North and

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South Campus. Although some spaces are already shared, like the dorms and Ackerman Union, academic spaces on campus don’t appear to be optimized for interdisciplinary collaboration.

The North-South geographic split is felt even more dramatically by graduate students, who rarely ever spend time outside of their own departments, said Eric Newberry, a computer science graduate student. As a result, graduate students find more difficulty forging cross-campus connections, Newberry added.

Students are more likely to frequent their respective areas of campus’s libraries and eateries, limiting the social spaces where cross-campus dialogue can flourish.

I asked Newberry what he thought about the geographic spaces where students eat lunch and spend time on campus, such as Lu Valle Commons, Broad Art Center and the South Campus Student Center, usually called the Bombshelter.

“The only place of the ones you mentioned (that) I know is actually the Bombshelter,” Newberry replied.

In line with the geographic disparities across campus, polarizing stereotypes seem to be everywhere, especially about South Campus’ allegedly more difficult coursework.

In my experience, South Campus professors assign more regular coursework and weight problem sets and midterms more heavily than their North Campus counterparts do.

North Campus professors also seem to love grading essays, as I’ve seldom taken a humanities class with fewer than 20 pages of writing expected.

Many students said they think South Campus students hold an elitist attitude over North Campus students.

Antwan Adams said he felt most hurt by a prevailing stereotype that North Campus students are unintelligent.

“It’s not as though there’s a physical barrier separating the two, but when you step across the invisible demarcation, it’s immediately apparent that the atmosphere has changed.”

At the Jan. 30 UCLA men’s basketball game, the school held a “Campus Wars” student giveaway, distributing T-shirts emblazoned with “North Campus” or “South Campus” to promote its home game against Colorado.

When one of the announcers at the game called for North Campus students to make some noise, Adams overheard South Campus students seated behind him say, “At least we’re not ... dumb.”

“You can’t have a world without North.

You can’t have a world without South.”

“I was shocked, and I was a little upset, because ... we’re all going to the same school, we’re all here, we all made it on our own merit based on who we are as students,” said Adams, a second-year communication and political science student.

Anonymous social media posts can also widen the split by spreading divisive jokes and hurtful opinions, and it is often unclear whether a post was written in jest or with complete seriousness.

One post on the UCLA Secrets Facebook page last year said that only STEM students had valid struggles over final exams, and that North Campus students just “scribble a few worthless paragraphs onto a blue book.”

“So the bottom line is this: during finals week, if you’re north campus, SHUT YOUR MOUTHS,” the post read. “You have NO RIGHT to complain. Especially don’t complain around your south campus friends or roommates who have REAL work to do.”

As of Nov. 16, the post had received 194 reactions, 164 of which were “Like,” “Haha,” or “Love.”

On the other hand, many of the 238 comments came to North Campus students’ defense. Some commented that South Campus course rigor was exaggerated, while others dismissed North Campus coursework as easy. Many drew attention to the daunting essays – often dozens of pages per quarter – commonplace around North Campus.

Some majors, though, have raised questions about what it even means to belong to North or South. Majors like economics and psychology, straddling the line between STEM and humanities, have found themselves in the midst of a cross-campus crossfire.

In November 2019, UCLA updated its academic classification of economics majors to STEM, in accordance with changes by the U.S. Department of Education. The economics and business economics majors were listed under programs that use mathematics and statistics to study economics.

Despite economics’ new status as STEM, the department remains housed in Bunche Hall, at the far reaches of North Campus.

The change primarily served to recognize that the field of economics had changed over time to involve more quantitative study, said Dora Costa, economics professor and department chair, in an emailed statement.

The Daily Bruin reported,

“Economics has arrived to South Campus,” but some students disagreed.

Nima Ashrafi said as a second-year economics student, he chooses to view himself as a North Campus student, because if he called himself South Campus, his friends would be indignant.

“My friends who are South Campus majors would get upset about it, almost as if it were an attack on them,” Ashrafi said.

The stereotype that South Campus is harder than North Campus has led to more than just bias between the groups.

It’s a poorly kept secret that South Campus lacks diversity, with many seats occupied by Asian and white male students.

Coming to UCLA from a majority-Hispanic neighborhood, Murillo felt intimidated by the rarity of seeing a familiar face on South Campus. The lack of diversity in STEM pressured Murillo to feel that he had to represent his culture well, he added.

“I felt out of place at first,” Murillo said. “My first STEM class was (Math 31A: “Differential and Integral Calculus”), and I was the only Hispanic student. ... And I’m not used to that because when I was in high school, everybody, 99% of my class was Hispanic.”

Anthony Friscia, an associate adjunct professor, said he thinks some students from underrepresented groups may avoid science majors because they lack opportunities to participate in the sciences. Many such students may not have had robust science programs or enthusiastic science teachers before entering college, and thus never been strongly encouraged to pursue a higher science education.

One second-year student, Kalena Oorlog, said that she

entered UCLA unsure of what to major in, but eventually decided on neuroscience after finding a supportive community of friends in South Campus.

Some of the most popular clusters – yearlong general education classes – are bridge clusters, meaning that they bridge North and South Campus topics, said Friscia, the director of the UCLA Cluster Program.

One such class, Cluster M71: “Biotechnology and Society,” draws faculty from biology, sociology, English and women’s studies to talk about biotechnology from various perspectives, Friscia said.

Genetically modified food, a topic discussed in Cluster M71, frequently elicits multidisciplinary debate, Friscia said. While sociologists weigh the ethical implications of gene editing, biologists examine the actual methods used, Friscia added.

“All of these things are interconnected,” said Maya El Jawhari, a fourth-year political science student. “You can’t have a world without North. You can’t have a world without South.”

However, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced Bruins into a virtual world, without North or South.

Amid multiple reported outbreaks at UCLA, there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight for mandated remote learning.

With all of campus closed, Bruins aren’t on North or South Campus as much as they are all just on Zoom.

Since students are now less likely to meet people outside of their own Zoom classes, the gap between the two sides of campus may grow even wider, said Rohan Battula, a second-year computer science student.

“I think it’s definitely going to polarize students super heavily, because they’re just going to be surrounded by the same people from their same South Campus or North Campus clubs and Zoom classes,” Battula said.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has made life harder for all students,

first-year students may be especially missing out on a common UCLA experience, said Alvin Vo, a second-year political science student.

“I feel kind of bad for first years especially, because they might hear the term ‘North and South Campus’ but they might not know what it actually means,” Vo said. “The overall context, the underlying stereotypes, the jokes, walking to and from class.”

Nevertheless, Vo said that the North and South Campus culture has been ingrained in the students and won’t permanently disappear because of the pandemic. Freshmen will see the terms online and internalize them, even if they aren’t able to be on campus physically, Vo added.

Regardless of one’s major or background, the North and South Campus cultures are quintessential parts of the Bruin experience.

When Ashrafi recently met a UCLA alumnus from the ’90s, the first thing the alumnus asked was if Ashrafi is a North or South Campus student.

“Thirty years ago, same deal,” Ashrafi said. “That remains today – so I think it definitely adds a good layer of tradition that is important to UCLA.”

THE ACTIVIST’S BALANCING ACT

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fter the death of George Floyd, as student organizers took to the streets to protest systemic racism, I was stuck at home writing a final essay about the plight of the Black community – an irony that did not elude me.

As I saw scenes of despairing protesters blurred by tear gas all over the country, the academic obligations that were so important just a few weeks before seemed to pale in comparison to the reality of the current social environment.

I remember reflecting at the time on how machinelike our institutions are. They were stuck on autopilot – spinning, whirring, crunching, moving and continually pushing us, not knowing when to stop. Our university was among these institutions – there were still essays to write, books to read and exams to take.

Many UCLA students pleaded with faculty to modify or cancel finals. Students who spent their days squaring

written by LAUREN CAMPBELL photos courtesy of DE ANNA PITTMAN and MADELYN ROMBERG designed by GEORGIA SMITH

off with police and dodging rubber bullets asked for extensions on their assignments. Others stressed how increasing social pressures ate away at their mental health and affected their ability to focus. Class GroupMe chats overflowed with student concerns about deadlines they could not meet. Petitions circulated on social media with students banding together to apply pressure on our university.

“I think it is ridiculous to maintain an attitude that it’s business as usual in a situation (like that),” said Mary Corey, a UCLA history lecturer. “I just felt like it was an unprecedented time and I had to listen to what they said.”

As a former UCLA student activist herself, Corey said she sympathized with the stressors of student organizers.

“I encouraged my students to participate, and once they started participating, it started to have an enormous impact on them,” Corey said. “Some were traumatized by it. Some were shot with nonlethal bullets. Some had scabs

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on their face.”

The twin pressures of protesting racial injustice and approaching finals put UCLA student organizers under tremendous stress.

Madelyn Romberg, a third-year atmospheric and oceanic sciences and history student, was among these organizers that flooded the streets to protest police brutality.

I met Romberg through the grassroots political organization Flip the West, and we recently had a Zoom conversation in which she recalled joining a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration in Westwood on June 1.

Student protesters chanted on a street corner on Wilshire Boulevard, only a few short blocks from UCLA. But as it neared the countywide 6 p.m. curfew, the National Guard was dispatched to displace the protesters, she said. The students decided to relocate and walked toward Beverly Hills, where they saw the side streets were blocked with armed officers. The noticeably panicked protest coordinators told students to disband.

Romberg dropped her poster, swung around and was met with the National Guard and Beverly Hills Police Department officers. She turned to leave the other way and was met with a wall of armed LAPD officers. The students were barricaded in and left with no way out, Romberg said.

Over their megaphones, the LAPD officers instructed them to get on the ground with their hands up. In response, Romberg and other white allies ran to the front to act as a protective shield for students of color, kneeling down before the LAPD officers. Soon, the BHPD officers announced they had determined the protest to be unlawful. They instructed the students to stand up and disband immediately, a command directly contradicting the request from the LAPD officers.

As students stood up, the LAPD officers drew their

My F is not going to kill me, but the issues at hand right now are killing people and they’re killing innocent people.

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weapons, instructing the students to get back on their hands and knees. As they knelt with firearms pointed at them, students were baffled and panicked, Romberg remembered.

Romberg was soon arrested and zip tied to another student by an LAPD officer. The students were loaded onto a community transportation bus and brought to UCLAleased Jackie Robinson Stadium, named after a Black icon – an irony that stood out to Romberg.

Amid all of this, Romberg described her schoolwork as hardly her priority.

“I actually had a girl on the bus get my phone out of my backpack,” she said. “I was still handcuffed so I was holding (the phone) and (another girl) was using her finger, and we had another girl moving her hand on my phone emailing my professors.”

Romberg said she stopped meeting her deadlines because she went to as many protests as she could. And when she was not at a protest, she was driving people to protests.

“I threw my work to the wind,” Romberg said. “I was like, that is not my priority right now. ... My F is not going to kill me, but the issues at hand right now are killing people and they’re killing innocent people.”

Nothing took precedence over human lives, simple as that, she said.

De Anna Pittman, a fourth-year African American studies and political science student, said she decided to fight back against the encroaching gentrification in her hometown of Compton by advocating for tenant rights to protect the residents of her city.

In May, she became a founding member of the Compton Tenants Union to fight for housing justice as the pandemic put more renters at risk of being evicted.

She used social media platforms to challenge local leaders to address homelessness and housing injustice, such as the homeless population being criminalized for using outdoor tents while people in New York were allowed to dine in them, and inaction in addressing potholes and gas leaks affecting residents in her city.

Pittman also joined the youth-centered organization Compton Rising, through which she helped bring a community fridge to her hometown during the pandemic.

She joined demonstrations to defund police, who were viewed as a constant threat to the community, in Compton, especially after they shot 18-year-old Salvadoran American Andrés Guardado in her city.

At one protest, she described how she marched with hundreds of fellow Compton residents to the sheriff’s station. At the end of the peaceful demonstration, police started firing tear gas and rubber bullets at the demonstrators.

“The scene was so chaotic,” she said. “It felt like a war zone.”

Even with impending deadlines, lectures to go to and finals week approaching, Pittman felt that Compton was in a state of emergency, and it was the time to act.

Though the organizations she joined and protests she attended monopolized a lot of her time,

Pittman described how, as a Black woman, it was most important for her to spend her time serving her community. When protests began at the end of spring quarter, Pittman was taking classes in the African American studies department and felt thankful that many of her professors were sympathetic to the cause and gave many students extensions.

It was a teaching moment, (and) it was a moment I’ve been waiting a lifetime for.

“All this work that we’ve been able to do would not have been possible if the school year and the pandemic didn’t happen,” Pittman said. “I can’t be in two places at once.

But because of online learning, I tend to be at home, and should I need to show up to an illegal eviction or a protest or something, I can do that.”

Kara Asuncion, a second-year public affairs student, also became involved with activism after schools were moved online during the pandemic. Her local school board in Tracy, California, imposed a hybrid model on schools in the Tracy Unified School District without providing the necessary guidance and infrastructure.

“Our school board did not bother to talk to parents or teachers or students to gauge how they felt,” she said.

“They just did not give (teachers) time to prepare.”

Asuncion challenged the school board by helping organize small protests outside of the Tracy Unified School District office, which caught the attention of local parents and teachers who joined the movement, helped create a Change.org petition and sent out emails to the school board pushing it to reconsider.

After about a week of applying pressure, Asuncion eventually got the school board to reverse its decision.

As she advocated for her local schools, her own schoolwork began to feel trivial, she said.

“During spring quarter, I wasn’t even very active with social justice issues because, at the end of the day, you still have to prioritize your mental health, and honestly school (was) so pointless, but (I) just had to go through the motions,” she said. “I think prioritizing your mental health is still important. ... You can’t be there trying to make a change if you’re burnt out.”

Corey – an ally herself, having participated in civil rights demonstrations since age 18 – understood student stories

like Romberg’s, Pittman’s and Asuncion’s and took these into account in her class plan.

“I was also too distracted to think that it was important to write a paper,” she said.

“We were participating in a historical moment. ... It was a teaching moment, (and) it was a moment I’ve been waiting a lifetime for.”

Corey would have been in the streets too had there not been a pandemic, she added.

“I didn’t get to go, and it was very painful for me not to be there,” she said. “Had there not been a pandemic, you would have seen tens of thousands of people from my generation.”

Corey modified finals to alleviate the pressure on students and created an option for student activists to write about their experiences in place of the final paper. “(Reading those accounts from students) was a way for me to participate because I couldn’t physically go out there,” she said.

Like Corey, many UCLA professors modified their finals or made them optional.

“I definitely would have failed my classes if they still made me take a full-on final,” Romberg said. “Those last two weeks of classes, I was not there. I was at a protest or driving people.”

In June, following the death of George Floyd, I remember anxiously attempting to write my research paper as I watched Washington, D.C., protesters squaring off with police on TV. These protesters, virtually all of them donning face masks, reminded me of a message I had heard a couple days before: America was fighting two diseases – COVID-19 and racism.

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As I watched events unfold on TV, I was writing about the past. My paper was about the marginalization of African American women throughout American history.

But it was difficult to concentrate as this significant moment in Black history passed me by.

I was frustrated. It felt like the moment I would gather my thoughts and attempt to type a few sentences, I was interrupted by the scenes unfolding on the newscast.

I would try to read research articles, get all the way through and realize that I didn’t retain anything at all.

The solution was to turn the television off, but that felt too much like turning my back on the very issues I was writing about.

As someone with a preexisting medical condition, joining the protests during a pandemic was not an option for me. But I wanted to spend all my energy getting involved.

I would participate in the ways I could, but I was always worried I wasn’t doing enough. When I sat before my computer screen that day, more than ever, I could not shake the feeling that I wasn’t.

When I last talked to Corey, she helped me understand

the value in what I was doing.

“Academics are intellectuals, ... and they help to articulate a narrative that other people can respond to,” she said. “Being an intellectual who is an activist is just a fact of life. ... There is a fight to be fought, and you use your intellection to add to that.”

I considered that, at a time when my own community was under attack, perhaps writing about the plight of African Americans was not a betrayal or loss. As a Black woman myself, I was participating in the articulation of our narrative, and there is value in that.

There is value in academia and scholarship. There is value in knowledge because it is a weapon for fixing our system. In some ways, writing about the Black community, even in an academic setting, was activism in itself.

But there are also times when the academic machine needs to be powered down. During a crisis, student activists put down their essays and their exams and immediately reacted. There are times when people may feel compelled to turn away from books and take to the streets, and there is value in that too.

personal chronicles 2020 brought many face-to-face with heavy questions to consider – in moments of crisis, uncertainty, and isolation, three of our PRIME writers started interrogating their own identities.

When considering stories to publish in PRIME this year, we wanted to showcase personal columns that reflected themes of last year’s struggle and introspection.

The first was posed to us by PRIME writer Breanna Diaz. In “Looking up the family tree,” Diaz writes about how returning back home for spring quarter last year robbed her of the freedom she once felt in Westwood, away from the strictness of her household. This led her to consider her mother’s parenting style and what their family history might reveal about their current dynamic.

In Ashani Sharma’s “A stale American ideal,” we see American life through the lens of a daughter of Indian immigrants. Sharma writes about trying to escape people’s perceptions of her because of her race while also trying to honor her Indian heritage.

In her mini graphic novel, Megan Fu illustrates her experience growing up Taiwanese American, from being initially hesitant to embrace her culture to now finding the joy in learning Taiwanese and appreciating authentic dishes. She talks about appreciating her mother’s traditional cooking and feeling excited at the opportunity to share boba, which finds its roots in Taiwanese culture, with her friends.

We hope this collection of personal stories reflects the feelings of others in the UCLA community and are a source of comfort after the difficulties of 2020. We chose to conclude our winter issue – our first printed issue since UCLA went virtual – with this chapter of stories we hope resonate with the rest of the Westwood community to commemorate a “homecoming” like no other.

Thank you for reading.

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written and illustrated by MEGAN FU

Looking up the family tree written by BREANNA DIAZ

photos by KANISHKA MEHRA designed by JOYCE MOK

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M

y dad never spent longer than he had to in my mom’s childhood home.

That was why we were parked on the opposite side of the street. My dad, brothers and I waited for her to come outside so we could all drive back to the spacious, semi-isolated ranch my dad lived on as a kid. The jagged edge of Jalisco, Mexico, where my parents’ hometown lies, was where my family spent our summers.

As we waited, he pointed to the far end of the street.

“I parked right there when I picked your mom up in the middle of the night when we ran away to the United States,” he said casually.

Ran away?

The exact timeline and logistics of when and how my parents crossed between countries to arrive in Los Angeles were largely mysteries to me. I was vaguely aware throughout my childhood that my dad sort of swept my mom away from her life in Mexico, but learning that she was rebellious enough to run from home came as a surprise.

I never felt as though I could simply ask how and why they came here. There were always walls up around what really happened when they crossed over.

“There was nothing to do over there except farm,” my dad said once.

“A bus,” my mom replied after much thought when I asked her how she traveled to the U.S. End of story.

But the story I was struck by most was not that my parents, like many other immigrant parents, came to the U.S. to make a better life for their family. It was the fact that something led my mom – someone whom I never saw as particularly daring – to cast aside the suffocating life she had in Mexico for the chance to even have a family of her own.

While being a teenager on its own is hard enough, being a teenage girl in an immigrant household can be even harder.

There is constant tension between the desire to be independent growing up and the struggle to please your family, who can be fiercely opposed to the former idea.

Meeting all their expectations – earning all the good grades in the world, doing whatever is asked of you every single time – just never seems to be enough. Your parents’ trust and the freedom that feels merited just never seem to appear.

Hadn’t I earned the right to make decisions for myself and to be trusted with doing so? I was doing my absolute best – in school, at home – yet always faced immense pushback from my own mother. Leaving the house for harmless reasons, like going to a high school football game or catching a movie with friends, was a battle every single time. My mom would guilt trip me, flat-out stop speaking to me and call me names when I would go out – instilling in me that every time I was enjoying myself, I was doing something wrong.

Heading off to UCLA was the long-awaited escape from one of my mom’s favorite phrases: “No, because I said so and that’s that.”

Finally, I understood why my older sister, who was no

stranger to my mom’s strictness, counted down the days until she herself would move away from home, at long last getting her life started in college.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic sent students packing, returning home only created more tension between what I wanted and what my mom did. Our ideas of personal freedom came to a head, and in unspoken ways, put cracks in our relationship as I stopped taking her controlling tendencies lying down.

It was more of the same – silent treatments and arguments – that felt like a dark shadow over my days at home. At the time, her behavior was unfathomable to me and incredibly frustrating. I spent the summer angry and unhappy, yet I detested making other people unhappy, so getting into arguments was emotionally draining.

I watched “Lady Bird” far too many times, empathizing wholeheartedly with the complex mother-daughter dynamics in the film. “Do you like me?” Saoirse Ronan’s character asked her mother, and I wondered how my mom would answer me if I asked her the same thing.

After several months stuck at home, my parents decided we would still go on our planned road trip 1,500 miles south to my parents’ home state of Jalisco. These annual road trips back to their home were essential for my parents, especially as their own parents got older and older. While traveling was risky, the COVID-19 case count there was close to none, and we made sure to take all the necessary precautions.

During the month we were there, the majority of my days were spent visiting my mom’s side of the family in her old house. That house was claustrophobic, cramped with high stone ceilings and surrounded by walls everywhere you looked. On the other hand, my dad’s childhood home was a small ranch planted in the middle of the mountains with nothing but lush fields and clear skies that looked like paintings in every direction.

The difference between these two places, while only 6 or so miles apart, spoke to the stark differences between the two halves of my family. My father’s side was kind, lenient and generally supportive of my dad and his many siblings. The naturally carefree atmosphere of his house was nothing like the severe, restrictive one of my mom’s.

I always felt guilty that my siblings and I preferred not to spend the summer days at my mom’s house with her and her family.

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“

We both struggled to understand our mothers yet love them dearly, and we both wished that parts of our past could have been different for us.

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However, the death of my maternal grandfather in November 2019, coupled with the looming threat of COVID-19, sparked anxiety in us all. Would we still have our grandparents around next summer? And so my brothers and I tagged along with our mom.

While the days in the small patio were long and gave me too many mosquito bites to count, spending time with my grandmother, aunts and mom lent me a glimpse into the past – letting me see how my grandma and late grandpa’s parenting styles came to shape who my mom is and subsequently who I am.

My grandma was a woman who was the princess of the house throughout her childhood. She was someone who always got her way, period. She was beautiful when she was young, with thick curly hair and dark eyes. In her old age, she still valued beauty, donning flowered blouses and skirts and coloring her curls a chestnut shade.

The unfortunate truth was that my grandmother was unhappy with her marriage, my mom told me, and it was clear to my mom that her parents didn’t love each other.

Struggling to make ends meet, my grandfather worked two jobs, and my grandmother was often busy finding ways to make money herself. Before moving to the village, she worked the land on the ranch she and her family used to live on – arduous labor that hardened her and contrasted her upbringing. These were things she complained about even in the present – nothing and no one really seemed to be good enough for her.

Connecting with her was difficult. Her outdated views and grievances about anything – from the kind of clothes I wore to the “behavior of young women these days” – were exhausting. In secret, I resented her for being a callous mother to her kids. Nevertheless, I was surprised to find common ground with her over art.

I had decided I’d spend one of the long summer days painting in my grandmother’s garden to pass the time.

The abundance of plants and flowers and cacti – many of which I didn’t recognize – were too alluring not to recreate in my sketchbook. With inks and watercolors, I recreated pieces of the tiny jungle that stood in the courtyard, much to the delight of my grandma when she saw them.

I flipped the pages of the sketchbook for her, and every page or so she would trace a finger along the outline of the painting before her.

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“Oh, look at those wonderful flowers,” she said. “I used to love painting things like these.”

The walls of the house boasted canvases my grandmother painted, and my own house has even more of these. Still lifes of sunflowers and lilies, a portrait of a girl rolling out tortillas with a somber face – these pieces gave me a glimpse into her mind as an artist, her appreciation for nature and love of the mundane. She explained to me the process of painting, from preparing the canvas to repainting minute details until they were just right. Art was something that brought us both joy.

I saw it as a common thread connecting me to her because my mom, the center link between us, is also a gifted artist. I remember her rendering an eerily realistic portrait of my little brother with precise strokes while my sister and I watched, enchanted. My mom showed me how to draw portraits of people when I was small, sitting me down and patiently explaining how to translate a model’s features from a photo reference onto paper.

Maybe art is passed down through generations – or maybe I’m reaching – but the thought that the three of us had that in common was profound. In inextricable ways, I am a product of the way these two women went about their lives, the decisions they made.

My mom’s older sister was married with her skin bruised black and blue – a bleak wedding gift from her father after his failed attempts to bribe her out of marriage by offering to buy her a car. It went without saying that my mom’s strict parents would have never given her their blessing to leave for the U.S. They disapproved of my dad on account of his being from the nearby rancho called Las Bocas, which supposedly had a reputation for having violent residents.

None of my mom’s four other sisters are married or have families but not for lack of trying. On a car ride back to the ranch, my mom talked about how her mom treated her sisters – if no one was good enough for my grandma, that also meant no man was good enough for her daughters.

Her high standards drove away potential relationships for them, and she even told one of her own daughters that she was too ugly to marry.

My aunt very well could have been married. She could have had the family and kids she wanted. But this treatment from my grandma kept her under her mother’s thumb.

“

In inextricable ways, I am a product of the way these two women went about their lives, the decisions they made.

“

While being a teenager on its own is hard enough, being a teenage girl in an immigrant household can be even harder.

Now I am well aware – and thankful – that my mom was never as controlling as my grandma was. But honestly, I was frustrated that she felt it was unjust for her own mom to be so conservative in the past, yet she inflicted those rigid expectations on her own kids later on. It was another thing about my mom that I couldn’t wrap my head around – how she was seemingly blind to the cycle happening here and the hypocrisy.

What I realize now, though, is that I never once put myself in my mom’s shoes as she struggled to understand her own childhood. I let my frustrations get in the way of understanding her trauma.

The pieces of my family history I picked up over the summer were still swirling through my mind as we said our goodbyes to family in Mexico and readjusted to life back home. The rest of the summer was more of the same, all the usual frustrations and arguments. It wasn’t until late in the fall that the fragments of the past began to come together and form meaning.

My mom, who will never refuse the opportunity to play with a small child, is incredibly passionate about early childhood development. In August, she took on a slew of community college classes in order to become a preschool instructor. At the beginning of the semester, she had to create a presentation about herself. When she was done, she showed me her slides and asked for feedback.

I was surprised to see so much retrospection about her childhood and family. One slide featured an endearing photograph of my grandfather, his face breaking into a wide smile, holding a happy little girl – my mom – close to his chest. The same slide read how her father, an only child to a controlling mother, became a verbally abusive man whom his children feared.

The next slide showed a more recent photo of my mom’s parents sitting side by side, their walkers situated next to each other, as they wearily smiled at the camera. The words on the slide explained that my grandma quickly learned marriage was not the fantasy she imagined and grew bitter because of it. Obeying your parents, adhering to rigid Catholic standards and respecting elders were central to my mom’s upbringing, she said.

“I wish I could have been able to talk with my mother about so many things in my adolescence,” she wrote in the final slides. “I use language now to talk with my

children. (I) make sure they have me unconditionally.”

Lastly, she tried to show her understanding of her parents’ ways, saying although they were severe and unyielding, they still loved their kids and were trying to protect them from making mistakes in life.

I failed to realize that my mom’s past was marred in many ways by how she was raised, and how that past shaped the person she is in the present. Reading her short reflections was like peering into a mirror and seeing myself – we both struggled to understand our mothers yet love them dearly, and we both wished that parts of our past could have been different for us.

In her own way – a way that I don’t always agree with – she’s trying to be a good mother, better than the one before her.

I have never been, and definitely never will be, the perfect daughter. It’s too late for me to correct my past behavior, but looking into the future, I can’t help but wonder how I will take the parts of my past and use them to try to be a good mom myself.

I wonder how my hypothetical daughter will look back on her family’s past and what she would think of her grandma and me. Would she look at us and see the resemblances, not just in the shapes of our faces but the way we speak or what we say? Would she have the same fascination with paint and ink that all the women before her have had?

When my mom was the age I am now, 19, she had the courage to leave behind everything she knew in search of a better life. Although I might not be as brave now as she was, I hope I somehow inherited her sense of determination and ability to do something life-changing. I admire her for that, and knowing I came from a woman like her does make me proud.

The arguments and disagreements between us are still and will always be there, as our ideals belong to different generations and are unlikely to ever fully align.

Taking that look up the family tree, however, opened a door to understanding my past and the present, and more importantly, colors my future.

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A stale American ideal written by ASHANI SHARMA illustrations by FIRYAL BAWAB designed by ARCHIE DATTA

“I

t’s easy being an American! Just lose your culture.”

My dad would sometimes recall this old joke to himself when I was growing up, saying he heard it once from Jay Leno. He’d repeat it, louder now, for my brother and me to

hear.

The joke never retained its intended humor, and no one laughed. But Dad wasn’t trying to be funny. The words held a certain gravitas before melting in the air. They exuded a wistful wisdom, and they were honest. They represented a stale American ideal, and they echoed in my mind.

I was Dallas born and Atlanta bred, American through and through. It was my pesky Indian culture that was always getting in the way.

At times I wanted little to do with it, yet I couldn’t imagine my life without it. But recalling the joke made me fear being seen as a foreigner in my own country.

I grew up speaking Hindi, eating daal roti and going to my parents’ home state of Madhya Pradesh for the summers.

Since I’d mostly stay inside, either because of the blistering June heat or the pounding monsoon rains, I was only ever aware of India through the lenses of family, the windows of cars or the screen of a TV. But India still held a bearing over my life through the foods, language and cultural differences that came with being Indian American.

I’d happily bring Desi snacks like mathri, a flaky fried biscuit, and panjeeri, a buttery, sweet dish, to share with kids on the bus. I’d seamlessly switch between English and Hindi at home. And I understood that sleepovers and shorts just weren’t allowed.

Now looking back, I realize that even when I was a young child, people were making assumptions about me in relation to my race. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it was something that stuck with me nonetheless.

I remember once telling my first grade class work partner, Wesley, that my favorite food was porridge. He subsequently, and I believe genuinely, asked if this was an Indian food.

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I think I realized at that moment that any minuscule difference or unknown fact about me would first be attributed to my race, my presumed culture. I meant oatmeal, which I still love by the way, but porridge was the British English word I learned for the Hindi “daliya” at home.

I had a feeling that I should remain aware of people viewing me through the lens of my ethnicity.

That feeling was solidified a few years down the road when a friend and I were jokingly insulting each other. You know, the classics. Stupid head, funky foot, stinky breath and the like, when my skin color was suddenly thrown into the mix. I became “brown body,” and it wasn’t a good thing.

The spotlight was now on the racial difference between us, and one race was implied to be better than the other.

I immediately became more curious about how people viewed my skin color and how I could try my best not to be viewed negatively because of it.

The first – and probably not the best – place I started looking was TV. There weren’t many Indian characters in the shows I watched. I’d nervously scan Disney Channel and Nickelodeon hoping for the sight of something different each year.

One character. One role. One normal Indian person.

Rocky Blue from “Shake It Up,” Tori Vega from “Victorious” and, of course, delinquent wizard Alex Russo from “Wizards of Waverly Place” all seemed like promising prospects. But alas, none held up to the test of a quick Google search.

The dream of seeing an Indian girl like myself on the big screen didn’t cease to excite me. But the few places I did see South Asian characters, I didn’t see myself at all.

I saw Barney from “How I Met Your Mother” imply that all Bangladeshi women were as unappealing as the “fresh off the boat” taxi driver’s wife, of whom he wished he had never seen a photo. I saw Ravi from “Jessie” being ridiculed for his Indian accent and traditional sherwani and making religious interjections that people don’t actually use.

I saw Hindi words, Hindu beliefs and South Asian

culture being taken out of context for the creation of this Hollywood caricature. Socially inept, undesirable and sorely unfit for American culture. But smart, of course, to make up for the rest.

As a kid, it was hard not to see these things as the supreme projection of my place in American society.

The issue was that I didn’t want to be any of these things.

It would be one thing if there were a variety of normal, human characters who happened to be South Asian and of them, these social outcasts were a few. Instead, there were only a select few to begin with, and they were always pigeonholed into these roles.

It was either accept your culture and fit into this stereotyped mold or forsake your culture and become a Kelly Kapoor who doesn’t know or care about the origins of Diwali.

Maybe Jay Leno was right after all.

It seemed like there was no middle ground. No way to be both Indian and American without doing a disservice to either.

I simply didn’t want my Indian-ness to be the first and only thing that people saw about me. But

though it felt so unnatural, on the phone with my mom if I was in public. And I swore I would never date another Indian person.

I became hyperaware of the races of the people I was around. In ninth grade, I stopped sitting with my mostly Indian lunch group. I didn’t want to be around other Indians because I thought after all my efforts to remove myself from my culture, my sheer proximity to them would “out” me to white America. I thought it would out me as “it,” the stereotype, Indian.

Not a great thought to be having, I know.

The way I was taught about my own culture at school didn’t help either. I recall being taught about the worst possible aspects of Asian cultures during a middle school social studies class.

So much for not being ethnocentric, Mrs. B. It was foot binding for China and female infanticide for India, with an emphasis on how the British came and heroically put an end to these savageries.

Learning about my own culture became a source of embarrassment. It was one thing to see it misrepresented on the screen but another to be tested on how well I could memorize it. I felt like I, alone, had to answer for the Indian Ganga River’s

I couldn’t change my notably Indian name, my curly black hair or my obviously brown skin.

Around 13 years old at this point, I went to the internet seeking solace, searching to see what results “Indian girl” would garner. Maybe there, I would find someone else like me, another person experiencing something similar.

I clicked on the first result and within a matter of minutes, I had just read a list of reasons never to date an Indian girl. “Ugly,” “hairy” and “prudish” I remember being among the chief concerns.

If this was what it meant to be an Indian woman in America, I decided I’d rather not.

I was certain I wanted to rid myself of this identity marker and all that came with it. I thought that for any white American to see me as Indian would mean for them to see me as a combination of all of these inaccurate and negative attributes, whether drawn from the media or some lone racist behind a computer screen.

The quest to combat my Indian-ness began.

I made sure I played up my American patriotism and my Southern “y’all.” I always shaved and wore makeup, doing what I could to prevent being perceived as the aforementioned “ugly” Indian girl. I spoke English, even

pollution or the caste system’s existence.

It wasn’t so much that these aspects of India were untrue as much as that they painted India through a very narrow, very biased lens.

Concepts that never defined the beliefs of Hinduism in a real Hindu household somehow become its most prominent features in the classroom: 300 million gods, a figure as unheard of as it was irrelevant; polytheistic, an overemphasized reminder of being unlike our country’s Judeo-Christian foundations; idol worship, like the kind that’s not allowed in Abrahamic religion.

I found them all to be new, more elaborate ways of othering. Where were the more culturally significant heroes and villains, Yudhishthira and Duryodhana? What about Shankar Bhagwan and Parvati Mata? Why did we have to focus on how many arms they had instead of what they represented? Why was the “Mahabharata” never mentioned alongside the “Odyssey” and “Iliad” as an important epic poem?

It was a lasting internal struggle. I didn’t have the answers then, and I don’t have them now. But my reactions were more than an overabsorption or taking to heart of media

di words, Hind n i H u be l w a s iefs and South “I ulture being taken out o nc a i s f context for A h i t s f H o o n l o l i y w ood at e r c caricature.” the

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tu re

“I t

l u c

lancing act in my y a ” b m a ? m f s i n o n d ca wa I have to trade in fo : How much i r e r m y st a d m l A u s t us a wo

representation, what someone said at school or something I read on the internet.

Really, I was dancing around the larger issue of assimilation. It was a balancing act in my mind: How much of my culture would I have to trade in for my status as American?

But, at the end of the day, it didn’t matter what I thought I was or what I thought I wanted to be – Indian, American, neither or both.

Despite my efforts, I was still mistaken for a foreigner, still called pretty with the kicker of “for an Indian girl” and still had Indian friends. A delay in finding the perfect Jim Croce song for the aux cord begged the question, “What? You only know Indian music?” Describing how I had tried poppy leaf curry in India meant being asked if it was “a sacrifice to your Lord Vishnu.”

I felt this overwhelming need to prove that I was something other than the collective group Indian-ness projected onto me, that I was an individual not defined by my skin color or ancestry. But it didn’t matter. People already had an identity and a narrative constructed for me whether I was faithful to it or not.

My parents are from India, and that has played a defining role in my upbringing, but I wished others understood that it doesn’t make me any less American.

Much of what I did was a concerted effort to prove that I belonged – making sure I said the right word and never took too long choosing a song. I never wanted to make the same mistake twice. I never wanted to give someone the opportunity to question my right to be here or to reinforce, by the mere fact of my being Indian, what they saw in a movie or learned in the classroom. In the process, I intentionally tried to lose my culture because I so badly wanted to be accepted as American.

But it wasn’t easy at all. And more importantly, it was a misguided journey altogether.

I feel embarrassed about the great lengths I went to in order to shun my Indian-ness, as though that would somehow purify my American identity to others. Maybe it

would, but I realized that losing my cultural heritage wasn’t what I really wanted.

Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Unaccustomed Earth” for a high school English class meant that, for the first time, I saw my own experiences staring back at me, sometimes word for word. It felt like any given page could have been taken out of a chapter of my own life. It was finally an authentic representation of my background, and just like that, I was no longer so alone.

Around this time, I started regularly talking with my Spanish teacher about her passion for yoga and her journey converting to Judaism. It was one of my first experiences talking to a non-Indian person who seemed to truly value my culture, and it was validating.

I was also excited to see how the lead singer of Greta Van Fleet, one of my favorite rock bands, proudly flaunted Indian clothing and a rudraksha necklace too.

If others could be proud of and appreciate my culture, why couldn’t I? All this time, I realized, I had been focusing on all the wrong things. There was so much to appreciate and so much to love.

To stand on the shoulders of women who inspire me every day, to learn about Indian tradition and philosophy, to navigate difference and culture, even if it can be confusing sometimes – these should be sources of pride not shame.

I’m not even sure who I would be if it weren’t for my experiences as an Indian American. It’s precisely because of this background that I’ve been able to speak another language and access the soul of another country.

No longer embarrassed of speaking Hindi in public, I want my future kids to speak it too. No longer so insecure in who I am, I want my past self to know there was nothing to disguise.

There is no one way to be Indian, American or anything else.

My will to hold on to my culture might mean I’m still not American by some people’s standards.

But so what?

ecause of this ba b y l e s i c ckgro o t s pre u ’ e n l a u g g e t n d b a a l nd acce that I’ve been a other “I n a s s k the s a sp e oul of a y.” r t n u o c n ot her 46

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