Volume 43, Issue 4—Roots

The New Journal Volume 45, No. 4

The magazine about Yale

and New Haven

February 2011

WHAT HAPPENS TO

UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS AFTER THEY

GO TO YALE? BISHOP’S ORCHARDS

GAY TALESE ON WRITING

ROOTS February 2011

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Publishers Samantha Ellner, Tim Shriver Editors-in-Chief Haley Cohen, Kate Selker Managing Editors Max Ehrenfreund, Jacque Feldman Production Manager Jimmy Murphy Photo & Design Editors Brianne Bowen, Susannah Shattuck, Andrew Nelson Senior Editors Bob Jeffery, Eleanor Kenyon, Sarah Mich, Sarah Nutman, Maya Seidler Copy Editors Heeseung Kim, Victor Zapana Associate Editors Julia Fisher, Helen Knight Online Editor Bay Gross

The New Journal www.thenewjournalatyale.com To write, design, edit, draw, or photograph, e-mail: thenewjournal@gmail.com

Photo and design credits: Andrew Nelson: pp. 5-8 Jacque Feldman: pp. 11, 30, 31 Libbie Cohn: p. 14 Jessica Su: pp. 22, 25, 26 Ali Abarca: p. 37 Clare Randt: p. 39

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Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Roger Cohn, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Tom Griggs, Brooks Kelley, Kathrin Lassila, Jennifer Pitts, Henry Schwab, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Thomas Strong Advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin Friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Josh Plaut, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

The New Journal

The New Journal The magazine about Yale

FEATURES

and New Haven

Vol. 45, No. 4 February 2011

18 Dreaming On

Life after graduation for Yalies who are undocumented immigrants.

by Liane Membis

22 Oceans Away

American families are increasingly adopting Chinese children in late childhood. Helen Gao meets two older adoptees adjusting to their new lives.

by Helen Gao

29 Apples to Apples

STANDARDS

Bishop’s Orchard has operated in Guilford, Connecticut for 139 years. Now, the sixth generation of Bishops is looking toward the future of the family’s farm.

by Jacque Feldman

4 Editors’ Note 5 Points of Departure 10 Snapshot

Down to the Wire

by Eleanor Kenyon

12 Snapshot

A Talk with Gay Talese

14 Profile d

Where Less is More

by Andrew McCreary

36 Personal Essay

On Height and Hiding

d

by Cory Finley

39 Endnote

by Victor Zapana

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2011 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publishers and editors-in-chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Forty-five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $18. Two years, $32. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and online comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include name, address, and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

February 2011

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EDITORS’ NOTE

In the spirit of this year’s theme, the editors of The New Journal find it appropriate to explain the roots of our very own name. The New Journal is not, in fact, all that new—we’ve been around since 1967. What the title refers to is the concept of “new journalism,” a name for long-form nonfiction that was coined in the 1960s and popularized by Truman Capote, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe. “New Journalism” was used to describe writing that went against established convention and brought creativity and artfulness to the field of nonfiction. The New Journal itself was Yale’s response to this shift in style and an attempt by students to shake up Yale’s journalistic scene.

In 1967, The New Journal’s founding editors penned the following mission statement: “The university has once again reached the stage in history where people are taking about the New Yale, presumably to be distinguished from the Old Yale, which in its own day was presumably considered new.

“Wishing to share in this modernity, we have chosen The New Journal as the name for our publication. Besides, things seemed slow around here.”

Forty-four years later, we may not be new anymore, but we’re still trying to invigorate and enlighten. We are still striving to push the boundaries of reporting at Yale— touching issues no one else will and exploring them in depth. We hope our work will not just make you think, but make you feel. After all, journalism provides the seed of information and the light of perspective—but it is up to you, dear readers, to let these thoughts take root.

—Haley Cohen and Kate Selker, co-Editors-in-Chief

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The New Journal

POINTS OF DEPARTURE Back to Square One Four millennia ago in northern Mesopotamia, archeologists speculate, a young Babylonian was practicing geometry. One problem required finding the length of the diagonal of a square. Taking his circular tablet of damp clay in one hand and his favorite reed in the other, he copied down the exercise, sketching out a diagram of a square with a few hasty strokes. He wrote the square root of two along one diagonal, multiplied by the side length, and scrawled the solution across the clay.

Having lain in the sand for a little under four thousand years, his discarded assignment is now part of the Yale Babylonian Collection: the oldest extant record of an approximation of the square root of two. The young scribe’s work became the centerpiece of “Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics,” a recent exhibit at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.

The student may have been just applying a formula he learned in school. There’s no proof he understood why multiplying a side length by root two gave the length of the diagonal. But his tablet is evidence that mathematicians in the Old Babylonian Period (20001600 B.C.E.) knew what we call the Pythagorean Theorem more than a millennium before Pythagoras taught in Athens. The approximation this Babylonian scribe used differs from the actual value of root two by only 0.0000006.

The exercise is “particularly cute,” says Duncan Melville, a professor of the history of mathematics at St. Lawrence University. “It’s particularly easy.”

That is, if you can read cuneiform base-60 notation. (Babylonian

February 2011

11 is our 61; 111 is 3661. The Babylonians also used this system for astronomical calculations, which is why we still have 60 seconds in a minute and 3,600 in an hour. When historians translate Babylonian numbers, they separate each digit with commas to avoid confusion, so

that 1,10 is 70, just as 1:10 a.m. is 70 minutes past midnight.)

With such a complicated numerical system, learning your times tables took dedication. The largest tablet on display at ISAW, also part of Yale’s collection, was a multiplication table, about 10” x 8”. “We think they learned them all,” says Melville. “There was a set of 40 multiplication tables you had to learn, and you practiced them.

People in the ancient Near East had what seem to us prodigious memories.”

The multiplication tables, in short, were of epic length. And if the system Babylonian mathematicians used to calculate square roots was as unwieldy as the 480-pound sword Gilgamesh used to slay Humbaba, it was also just as effective.

To divide, they multiplied by reciprocals. Melville calls this exercise “cute” because the side of the square on this tablet is 30 units long. That’s Babylonian for one-half—they had no equivalent of a decimal point—so when you multiply the side by root two, the length of the diagonal is just the reciprocal of root two. See how that comes out? Easy.

The exhibit at ISAW received an enthusiastic response. The museum had planned to close the exhibit on December 17, but, due to demand, it was extended another month.

CNN and The New York Times both interviewed Melville about it. Alice Slotsky, a colleague of Melville’s who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, told me, “A lot of people do Babylonian astronomy. Not many do math and do it correctly. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the master.”

“It’s great,” Melville told me.

“It’s an obscure field that’s not on people’s radar very often.”

Melissa Dallal and Tracy White visited the exhibit for Dallal’s birthday. Dallal’s parents, she said, are Jews from northern Iraq, so

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POINTS OF DEPARTURE she’s taken an interest in Babylonian history. “It just makes me wish I understood math to begin with,” White told me.

NYU Provost David McLaughlin was also curious to see the exhibit. “It’s striking, the age of the materials,” he said to me. “I didn’t appreciate how much math was known then.”

Babylonian math looks very familiar. A multipart word problem from one tablet suggests a prealgebra textbook from a Babylonian junior high school: “A canal’s length is five us, its width is three cubits, its depth is 3 cubits. A worker’s daily load of earth is 10 gin. A worker’s daily wages are 6 se of silver. What is the canal’s surface area, its volume, the number of workers needed to dig it, and the total cost in silver?”

Other tablets involve more theoretical math. One is a list of Pythagorean triples—the lengths of sides of various right triangles.

Others list problems that the ancient Babylonians lacked the techniques to solve—evidence of mathematical research.

“The abstraction of the concept of number, that takes a long time to develop,” said Melville.

There are centuries between adding goats and cattle in the sand and approximating quadratic roots. Because the Babylonians used clay, historians can chart the development of their mathematical system from everyday arithmetic to the most theoretical exercises, explained Melville. Other societies’ writing materials—papyrus, for example—have decayed over the centuries.

“What you see on a social level is very similar to what you see with children: dealing concretely with blocks and bricks and things, moving gradually to manipulating abstract numbers,” he added.

The numbers themselves,

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though, have not changed meaning since Babylonian times. Root two means exactly the same thing today as it did to the young man who wrote it down. So while Yale’s tablet is nothing more than a rough diagram of a square and a few numbers scribbled in cuneiform, it offers an unobstructed view into an ancient mind. It can be difficult to imagine what life must have been like for the Babylonians, but it isn’t hard to look at the square root of two on that crumbling piece of clay and imagine holding the tablet, its grooves still crisp, its base slightly warm from the palm of a classmate’s hand.

- Max Ehrenfreud

Root Beer & Skittles The invention of root beer predates our nation. Native American warriors during the French and Indian War carried sugar and ginger to flavor their water. Hardy White Mountain backwoodsmen sustained themselves with maple sap boiled with spruce twigs. Even 250 years later, the recipe isn’t too different. At Foxon Park, a small family-owned soda manufacturer in

East Haven, the Naclerio family has combined syrup with sugar, water, preservatives, and carbon dioxide in the same formula they’ve used since 1928.

Foxon Park’s customers are

loyal. Locals grow up eating apizza and drinking Foxon Park in Wooster Square. Coca-Cola Co. has come sniffing around their turf, their pubs, and their production facility a few times, explains Jay Brancati, manager of daily operations and an in-law of the Naclerios, but the people of New Haven know what they will drink. He adds, bemusedly, that Foxon Park often recieves fan mail—love letters, truly. “I drive down the road and people scream and give me the thumbs-up.”

Brancati shakes his head. “I don’t know why people get so worked up about it—it’s just soda.”

People love root beer partly for its flavor, but also for the impressions it evokes. Foxon Park operates on this emotional power— its sodas taste of the past. But is it possible for us, in sipping an earth brew, to tap into the collective memory of the past, to think back beyond our own experiences? Can we drink in the history of our worn northeastern mountains and the bright chill of facing a new land?

Foxon Park operates out of two small warehouses. Dressed mostly in navy Foxon Park sweatsuits, seven men work there, loading cases and ducking around bottling machines.

Foxon Park began with the freshwater spring that still flows out back. There, in 1922, Jay Brancati’s great-grandfather-in-law, Matteo Naclerio, founded a mineral water company that became the soda brand in 1928. Brancati and his men still use the spring to bottle Foxon’s 17 flavors of soda, which include the root beer and best-selling white birch beer, sold in glass twist-top bottles. The company belongs to the family and they work hard to make sure it stays that way. “I’m working every day like a schmuck, just trying to keep it going for our children’s children,” Brancati told me in the upstairs office, next to his

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daughters’ playroom.

In the last five years, Brancati has expanded Foxon Park’s market, cultivating contacts in Long Island and San Diego. But the company’s reach seems to transcend its official domain. A fan in Las Vegas recently sent a photo to Brancati of a Foxon Park bottle in the City of Sin, hundreds of miles from any of their distribution points. To increase business, Brancati also created a Facebook page and website, through which customers across the country can order Foxon Park soda.

From across the small conference table above his production facility, Brancati said, “We use the same distributor as Budweiser.” The white Foxon Park trucks that once trolled the streets like milk vendors, selling their bottles door-to-door, now sit idly in the parking lot. Only a few fanatic locals still receive personal deliveries from the men on Foxon Boulevard.

Brancati encourages me to sample a few brews. Foxon Park’s white birch beer explodes with a tang and far outstrips the soft caramel tone of root beer. In it, I taste latespring mornings, just as the thaw comes to the Northeast, and think of birch twigs snapped by cold fingers, chewed past their fraying point. But unlike birch or spruce beer, root beer is composed largely of flavoring from the sassafras and sarsaparilla plants with an extensive list of secondary ingredients that ideally meld to produce a complex, spicy, earthy, and frothy beverage.

Foxon Park’s flavors are created in extract form by companies around New York, the same companies the Naclerio clan has always worked with. Brancati is hesitant to discuss flavor, however—the ratio of the requisite herbs is a valued secret.

Inspired by the Naclerios, I decided to try brewing my own root beer. I ordered the flavor syrup and

February 2011

ale yeast, and set up shop in the Davenport student kitchen. The process was simple—boiling and mixing—but it took some time to diligently sanitize my materials with boiling water. The yeast fermented for two days, and after a chill-down to stop the chemical reaction, I twisted off the cap of a bottle that once held two liters of Fresca and sniffed my first batch of root beer.

Root beer nips your mouth a little. It feels fresher, hardier, more demanding than Coca Cola. My home-brewed version is rounder and softer than Foxon Park’s, whose peppermint tang lingers even after the bottle is slurped dry. But it’s not just the taste that lingers—it’s the impression of an older, quieter New Haven, the wonder of a wilder New England and a yet undiscovered continent.

- Juliana Hanle

Know Your Wyrts In the garden of the English language, “root” is a word in fairly fresh soil. Though the word itself has a very long history, it came into our language only recently, brought

by Vikings about 1000 years ago.

The word “root” came into Old

English from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, as rot, with a long ‘o’ (/o/, roughly like the ‘o’ in Spanish burro).

Even before “root” was adopted into Old English, the language already had a form cognate (that is, a word originating from a common verbal ancestor) to rot— the word wyrt. All of the Germanic words for plant/root descend from the Proto-Indo-European noun which can be simply rendered as *wrod or, in another form, *wrd, from which both rot and wyrt are ultimately derived.

Looking at spotted lungwort leaves, one might assume, falsely if justifiably, that “-wort” has something to do with “warts.”

Actually, “-wort” comes from the aforementioned Old English wyrt, which means “plant.” Therefore “lungwort” literally means “lungplant” (it is the “lung” and not the “-wort” part that refers to the pattern on the leaves).

A modern-day Swede or Dane might be able to tell you as much intuitively—in Swedish, one of the modern words for plant is ört, comparable to the Danish urt. Both come from an Old Norse urt. So, did

Old Norse possess two cognates of the same root, rot and urt? Yes, but only in the same sense Old English

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POINTS OF DEPARTURE did. Just as “root” is a borrowing from Old Norse, so was Old Norse urt a borrowing from Old English wyrt.

There is a third cognate of wrod in English as well. This is the “rad-” element of words such “radical” and “radish.” All words of

this rough group are derived, in one way or another, from the Latin radix, “root.” “Radish,” in fact, is a direct borrowing from Latin (the stem, or base form, of the Latin word was radic- with a hard c, changed into a “sh”-sound by the Anglo-Saxon borrowers).

Then how did the word “radical” become a synonym for “extreme” or “divergent”? One might think an adjective meaning “related to roots” would apply to conservative, old-fashioned, or fundamentalist views. Indeed, in post-Classical Latin, when radicalis came into written use, it originally carried the meaning of “primary” or “original.” However, in French, the word’s applications ballooned in number, and it soon came to mean “profound” or “intense”—and from “intensity” to modern “radicalism” the jump seems not too far at all.

8 February 2011

While the link between modernday revolutionaries and a certain red vegetable seems unlikely, the names for both are well rooted in the past.

- J. Max Mikitish

History in the Making Few know the location of the office of the Banner, Yale’s yearbook.

In fact, many students don’t even know that Yale has a yearbook, according to Banner senior class liason Ryan Carter ’11. So when that office was robbed the weekend of Safety Dance, the Banner’s six staff members were bewildered—first walking, then running from room to room searching for the two freshly delivered Macs (complete with Adobe CS5) that had mysteriously vanished. “It was right after we moved in,” editor-in-chief Evelyn Lopez ’11 says. “So we thought at first maybe we didn’t remember the room correctly. But no…”

The Macs were never found, but all sorts of other things can be discovered inside the Banner’s office suite, which includes a large common room full of couches (belonging not to the Banner but to Lopez), a coffee table (also Lopez’s), a wall of bookshelves stacked with Banners, empty wine bottles, empty cardboard boxes, an antiquated Schwinn bicycle, and a halfconstructed desk. The darkroom next door is littered with half-empty jugs of processing chemicals and possibly valuable but definitely unusable photo equipment. There’s a future office space in which each Banner member has tagged the desk where he or she hopes to sit one day, a computer room with replacement Macs, and an oversized storage closet lined almost floorto-ceiling with boxes. Each weighs at least 60 pounds and contains

hundreds and hundreds of leftover and undelivered yearbooks, as well as abandoned copies of Old Campus, the yearbook for the freshman class.

The boxes used to cover the floor of the common room. As soon as Lopez moved in, she organized cleaning and moving days, during which Banner staff moved each and every box into storage. Lopez’s tenure marks the second year that students have led the yearbook’s production, which was taken over in 1995 by the Association of Yale Alumni after former Banner staff took out a loan of $150,000 for equipment, which the publication was unable to repay. The loan is still outstanding. When Lopez met last year’s Banner editors after an information session last spring, she told them, “Look, I’m not going to lie, I want to be editor-in-chief.”

They agreed, and left their boxes for her.

Tidying up the office might seem like an odd priority for an organization that struggles with lack of interest, lack of involvement, and lack of funding. In recent years, however, the office was so neglected that an unidentified man once moved in after the spring term ended. He slept on a futon in the desk-room; he also had several boxes full of possessions that he tagged with his name. Lopez threw all of these items away (well, except the futon, which the staff still uses). At

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the time, it seems, the squatter didn’t matter—either because no one used the office or because no one cared.

Now, the editors are so concerned with office orderliness because they see the rundown Banner offices as a barrier to fulfilling the promise of The Yale Banner, the country’s oldest college yearbook. They are remodeling in order to reinvigorate and resurrect.

“Resurrection” has become the keyword for the 2011 Banner: new birth, new beginnings, new year, new yearbook. This might be a necessary strategy given that, despite 169 years of history, as Carter put it, “people don’t know Yale has a yearbook.”

That Yale students would not know or care to know about their school’s own yearbook mystifies Eddie Breaux, proprietor of a bed and breakfast called McKendrickBreaux House in New Orleans, Louisiana, and one of the foremost amateur collectors of yearbooks.

He owns many copies of the Banner and several rare specialty items of memorabilia, such as a Yale autograph book hand-made in the 1850s for students to collect each other’s signatures. His enthusiasm for the Banner (and yearbooks in general) is enormous. He will probably not buy the 2011 yearbook, though—he is less interested in modern designs.

Maybe someday, a future collector with an interest in arcane class data, quotes, and photos of students from 2011 posing against a speckled blue background may want to buy a copy.

And someday, the editors hope, a new generation will care.

In the cleaning process, they have found that others once did. Lopez and her staff unearthed mementos of past editors, including several oblong concrete blocks with names and nicknames painted on them— clearly part of an inside joke. Now,

February 2011

the Banner staff is on the outside.

Lopez points to them, saying, “See, there used to be a culture here.

These meant something, but I have no idea what, so I’m throwing them out. We’re starting over.”

Starting over means an eager but novice staff. Lopez, who has never edited a yearbook before, asserts, “We learn by doing here.” They are learning, they say, to get seniors to show up for yearbook photos, to fill out questionnaires, to offer candid photos. They are learning to do layout and design, to interact as coworkers, and to deal with difficult customers: a senior who insists on using her own glamour shot instead of a professionally taken photo, a mother who calls Lopez to find out if her son sat for his yearbook photo instead of calling the suspect himself.

The staff jokes and exchanges Secret Santa gifts, creating new traditions to take the place of the mysterious blocks. The Banner has a culture again, and they’ve tried their best to make it different from that of the past 168 years. But despite clearing out the old boxes and shelving thousands of tomes, it’s clear that history still weighs on them. When they get serious, they say they “can’t let the oldest college yearbook in the nation die.”

And if they get their way, the Banner won’t. The class of 2011 will buy their books at $100 each and keep them forever—or at least sell them to appreciative collectors some years down the road.

- Elisa Gonzalez

The New Journal www.thenewjournalatyale.com

To write, design, edit, draw, or photograph: e-mail: thenewjournal@gmail.com

9

SNAPSHOT

Down to the Wire

The first commercial telephone switchboard was built in New Haven in 1878. Is there a future for the landline in its hometown?

J

By Eleanor Kenyon

anuary 28, 1878, stands out in Yale history as the birthday of the Yale

Daily News, the nation’s

oldest college daily. That inaugural News—“justified by the dullness of the time and the demand for news among us”—told older Elis of local happenings— incoming Evangelicals, colleagues taking leave, and the arrival of female rowers from Wellesley College.

(Advertisements informed students that “Merle, fashionable barber, the most liked of all by the students” was closed on Sundays, and 296 Chapel St. now sold “Delmonico’s Cocoanut Cream.”) That same day, city residents rang in another era in communication, its impact not yet discernible to college reporters: the District Telephone Company of New Haven launched the world’s first commercial telephone exchange.

In 1877, a telegraph company manager named George W. Coy sat in on a lecture by Alexander Graham Bell at Skiff ’s Opera House in New Haven. Bell’s discussion of the implications of the telephone on business and trade—and accompanying music transmitted over a three-way New Haven-MiddletownHartford connection—spurred Coy into action. A pair of investors and a smattering of metal pieces bor-

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rowed from ladies’ bustles, carriage bolts, and teapot lids allowed Coy to whip up a telephone switchboard in the Boardman Building, at the corner of Chapel and State streets. $1.50—in those days, the price of a roundtrip to New York on the overnight steamer “Elm City”—bought New Haven residents a month’s subscription to the exchange; iron wire strung between housetops, trees, and the occasional small pole connected the new Boston-made Bell devices. “The Greatest Thing Out! Telephone!” ran an advertisement in the week-old News. “Can make connections with anyone else having instrument in the city.” For the first time in history, the human voice could transcend distance.

In just a few years, Coy’s telephone networks bloomed in New Haven and beyond. A Yalie with a Cooperative Society card in 1886 could call from a central campus phone, which could, according to the News, “furnish us with the desired information or impart our commands without delay.” The New Haven Daily Palladium, a local paper, lauded the telephone as a “blessed institution” for keeping the city connected through a traffic-and-trainstopping blizzard in 1888. After New Haven, exchanges popped up in Hartford and Bridgeport, Boston, and New York. By the 1890’s, there

were over 15,000 telephones in the country.

During the twentieth century, the progress of technology built sturdier telephone poles and put lines underground; now-insulated cables connected disparate voices. (By 1925, telephone lines stretched for 67.9 million miles across the country.) First, copper wire and then fiber optics replaced iron lines; public phone boxes led to rotary dials, touch-tones, and cordless handsets. Area codes usurped exchange names; satellites replaced switchboards. The District Telephone Company became the Connecticut Telephone Company, Connecticut Telephone became Southern New England Telephone; telecommunications giant AT&T came to town in 1998. At first, Yale students had a telephone in every hall. Soon there was one in every room.

T

oday, 133 years after Coy set up his exchange, the dial tone in New Haven is fading. AT&T, which employs 5,500 workers in Connecticut, lost 150,000 lines in the state a little over a year ago. And after laying off 152 state landline repair workers last October, it announced plans in late January to lay off 41 additional employees and is now facing a $1.1 million fine for breaching state service standards for landline repairs.

Soon, the number of mobile telephones is expected to exceed the number of landlines in the nation. AT&T representative Chuck Corsey acknowledged that while the company has reduced jobs in their shrinking wired business, it continues to hire in growing areas—“particularly wireless and video.” These days, radio waves have replaced wires as our choice connectivity medium, as cell phones project our voices across and over,

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rather than through, the landscape.

While landlines continue to link the offices and departments of Yale, the ringing that once resounded in residences has been replaced with techno jingles and not-so-indiscreet vibrations, with tweets and texts tumbling across campus and classrooms. In fall 2010, students made 17% fewer calls off-campus from in-room lines than they did in 2009, and 30% fewer calls than in 2007. Students’ numbers might begin with a 917, 617, 404, or 415, rather than a 203. While there are no immediate plans to phase out the 3,040 landlines associated with undergraduate residences, the proliferation of cell phones is causing ITS to evaluate future options, according to David Galassi, Yale’s director of network services.

Few Yalies know someone with a dorm phone installed, but you’ll still have to dial through to one to reach Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins ’12. The self-described “resolutely parsimonious” student from Alaska owns no mobile device, and depends on a friend’s room phone to stay in touch. “People joke that I’m the only one,” he laughed. “In some cases it’s inconvenient for others, and I feel bad about that,” he said. But Kreiss-Tomkins’ resulting need to make plans in advance, to “be a little more organized and on top of it,” suggests that our increasing interconnectivity has its casualties.

By pinning an individual to place, the landline phone demands dependability. (It should February 2011

be noted, however, that KreissTomkins routes his landline number through Google Voice, allowing him to receive voicemails wherever he brings his laptop.)

According to Paul Needham ’11, when News staff members reviewed the landlines assigned to 202 York St. last summer, they found dozens of numbers—some assigned to dark rooms, to pasting rooms, and even a “lettering room”—that had fallen out of use. When Needham was editor-in-chief, reporters and editors across town or across the building would email or text message him to communicate, while adults continued to dial his office line. Needham professed to like the “clear connection” provided by his desk phone, but the landline is more than just static-free. The wires woven in the walls of the News, active

and inactive, serve as lines between generations of students’ professional and personal lives, grounded in purpose.

In Bell’s original telephone transmitter, sound waves produced the electrical energy to work the device. Now, though, hastily composed messages displace voices from the communication process, sacrificing sound for convenience. Perhaps in New Haven, the birthplace of the commercial telephone exchange, we feel the loss of the dial tone more strongly—or perhaps we can accept that a beloved hometown tradition is coming to an end.

TNJ

Eleanor Kenyon is a senior in Trumbull College.

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11

SNAPSHOT

A Talk with

Gay Talese

Gay Talese is widely recognized as a pioneer of literary nonfiction, a journalistic genre that uses artful writing to tell factually accurate narratives, the same type of journalism we publish in The New Journal.

Earlier this year, one New Journal editor in Anne Fadiman’s nonfiction class was lucky enough to listen to Talese speak. Since our words cannot do justice to how Talese has shaped the field of literary journalism, we’ll let his speak for themselves.

On nonfiction storytelling and history:

You should never deviate from the facts. You should never use your imagination just because you want to fill in the spaces to make a better story. But even if you adhere to the traditions of serious nonfiction, you can still be a storyteller. Nonfiction is art, but it also has a reference point in history.

You don’t have to write about Lincoln to be a historian. You can write about obscure people and be a historian, because obscure people still represent their time.

On note-taking:

Instead of a notepad, I use shirt boards from the dry cleaner.

I take a shirt board, and then I get scissors and cut it into note cards that I use like a notepad. I should patent the idea. I usually don’t take notes in front of my subjects; I sneak off and jot down things on these cards. They fit in my suit and don’t stick out like the wires on stupid little journalism pads.

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Joyce Tenneson

On persistence:

Sometimes I go over the same damn sentence or the same paragraph five dozen times. I start writing in pencil, and then I go to a typewriter and type it over. I just do it again and again, and finally, finally I say, this is about as good as I’m going to do. And then I go to the next thing, and that’s it.

There’s no limit on the time I will spend.

On following up (theory):

If you’re a typical journalist, one who thinks in terms of a single day, you don’t follow up because you’ve done the story. I always want to do a follow-up because there is a continuation. What seemed relevant when you first interviewed them might cease to be relevant, but they move on, they get older, they lose their jobs, they get voted out of office, they get dismissed from the baseball team. Whatever it is—

they’re still alive, and they still have something to say.

No matter who you’re writing about, their stories are not going to finish because you’ve finished them. If you want to keep them alive, you can go back, and back, and back, and back. And if you do that artfully enough, you’re doing something creative.

On following up (praxis):

In 1964, I published a book called The Bridge about the building of a bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island called the VerrazanoNarrows. I spent the better part of three years doing it. In 1960, the first stage began with the eviction of 8,000 people in Brooklyn whose stores or homes happened to be in the pathway to this new bridge. So these people were driven out of a section of Brooklyn called Bay Ridge, and I wrote about that.

It was like a war. Like a

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bombing. People who had lived there for 30 years, whose children lived there, whose grandchildren may have lived there, were evicted.

[The government said]: This bridge had to be built, this bridge was important, this bridge was going to do magnificent things by linking Brooklyn and Staten Island. But for 8,000 people, it meant death to their homes, it meant the eradication of their neighborhood, it meant the severance of relationships.

But that was just the beginning of the story. Because into this neighborhood, into this pathway to the bridge that once would have been filled with homes, walked a whole new cast of characters—all kinds of hard hats and cement mixers. And I started following their stories.

And then finally, over the next year or two, out of the water, out of the Narrows, which is part of the lower Hudson Bay area near the Statue of Liberty, came these struts of steel, came these barges carrying materials, came these people from faraway places: high aerial workers, people who build skyscrapers, people who build bridges, people who take chances in the air, who sometimes fall down and die but don’t even get an obituary because they’re nobodies in a way.

But they’re somebodies to me. They’re like cathedral builders.

Who built all those cathedrals you see on your junior year abroad?

People like the bridge builders who cut the little rivets and link the steel.

You can’t see them do it because they’re operating five hundred, six hundred feet above the water.

Their names aren’t on the base of the bridge. But what they do is magnificent, and it’s there if you’re curious and you’re a writer.

I kept in touch with a number of those people, and in 2003, many, many years after that

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Talese with his wife, Nan, and two dogs. bridge was finished, I looked up the ones who were still alive. I learned for the first time that many of them went on to build the World Trade Center in ’65, ’66. And many of them, I’d say, that on September 11, 2001, many of them were watching television and saw the work they’d spent three years doing crumble into ash between the sunrise and sunset of a single day.

So I started talking to them about what it’s like to see such a thing, even if it’s on television, and they started telling me how embarrassed they were as construction workers when they worked on the building of the Twin Towers. They said that compared to the sturdiness of the bridge, the design was flimsy. In essence, the World Trade Centers were gilded birdcages. Glass birdcages. There was no real solid steel in there.

But the point is, these old bridge-builders that I saw in their

Mary Ellen Mark

lively form back in 1962, ’63, ’64— here in 2000, 2003—had a story.

It’s the story of how different it was working on the towers than the bridge, which would have deflected the terrorists’ planes like a screen door deflecting a moth. But when the planes hit those birdcages, which were shoddy to begin with, flawed in their design, and avaricious in concept—they went down in a matter of six, seven hours. That’s a story.

On the power of microcosms: Stories can be small and big at the same time.

TNJ 13

PROFILE

Where Less Is More

Six decades of haircutting and storytelling in Placido Mastroianni’s Whalley Avenue barbershop.

By Andrew McCreary

Placido Mastroianni takes a break.

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lacido Mastroianni cuts hair in a barbershop he calls a salon. “Salone means ‘you receive the people,’” he says. He takes a little off the top from any man who comes in. Men who don’t have much hair on their heads still have a lot on their minds. In the weeks before November 2, 2010, their minds were on the mid-term elections. And Mastroianni, like any good barber, was ready to comb out the tangles.

One customer calls Mastroianni the Walter Winchell of Whalley Avenue. Like New York’s old-time radio host, the New Haven barber seems to know what’s happening everywhere at once. But the comparison falls short. Winchell once ruffled his

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national audience by saying that President Truman “does not know what the h-e-double-l is going on.”

Mastroianni, on the other hand, whose voice is as reassuring as his hands are deliberate, takes care not to prick anyone’s ears. He focuses through his terracotta-colored rims and snips head hair, ear hair, nose hair, and “these three hairs on the neck,” he tells a customer, “because it bothers me.”

Customers come to talk; Mastroianni does the listening.

Listening has long been his livelihood. As a boy working the fields of Amorosi, Italy, Mastroianni listened for approaching American bombers. School had closed for the war, and when the chores were done and the sky grew silent, he and his

brothers became joyful vagabondes.

They roved through the soldiers’ camp outside town, where they played soccer and sometimes shared an idle soldier’s single cigarette. On weekends, the children gathered to hear the war news at the village barbershop.

When Mastroianni immigrated to Connecticut at age 17, he strained to hear instructions spoken in English over the din of factory equipment. He listened well and, wanting to become his own boss, left the factory four years later to enroll in barber school. Cutting hair has made up for an education cut short by the war. Since 1953, he has listened to as many as four men an hour (indeed a barber must, to make ends meet) and has mulled The New Journal

over each day’s news during the slow spells. After 57 years of work, Mastroianni’s back has come to rest at a curve somewhere between its one-quarter stoop for tending to black curls, grey tufts, and white wisps, and its three-quarter hunch for reading about the 1970 election of an Italian-American mayor in New Haven, the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, and the 2004 undoing of the Great Bambino’s curse on the Boston Red Sox. He looks up from the New Haven Register on his heavy desk. “All of a sudden, you sit here for hours, nobody comes in, you wonder, ‘What the fuck happened?’”

But the bells have always jangled again at the glass door, and each time, Mastroianni has risen to his feet to cut more hair, to listen to another side of the story.

An American veteran once told of flying over Mastroianni’s village during the Second World War. He dropped bombs near the town, low on fuel and forced to lighten his load. Other customers have brought stories that have become part of Mastroianni’s own. He once listened carefully to the mother of two boys whose hair he cut as she described her sister’s imminent arrival from Italy. Mastroianni won over that sister not long after she landed; the boys are now his nephews.

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n a morning in election season, the golden light on Whalley Avenue looks warmer than it feels, and the red and blue posters promise more than seems possible. Shaw’s Supermarket is boarded up, as is Minore’s Market, though only the first is out of business. Campaign signs totter on ground littered with chicken bones and empty single-shots of 70-proof Jeremiah Weed. BLUMENTHAL, Brains, Not $Buck$ and Brawns,

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lies belly up in mud.

Coming for “relaxing time” and his second haircut this month, Andy Esposito drives into town in his black Cadillac. He passes the For Sale signs that condemn century-old homes still on the block (Come See. . .Will Not Last), and turns into the driveway of the only one still well kept.

He drives past the bare earth where three bushes have been stolen from the front yard, parks in back, and enters the salon.

A purple awning leads

“Everything homemade is better,” says Mastroianni, “except haircuts.” customers up the stairs and into the baby-yellow clapboard home of Placido’s Hair Cutting Salon.

Though floors and walls are now covered with silver-swirled gray linoleum, the house still has a hearth and mantle. The hearth is covered with damp neck rags, the mantle with pictures of customers. There’s a photo of a mother holding her son for his first haircut, and then another of her holding her grandson for his. The salon has occupied this living room since 1976, when Mastroianni relocated from the YMCA. Today, he shares the space with Mike Maraucci, who brought his barbershop from Chapel Street to Mastroianni’s address in 2001. The two share expenses, talk baseball, and occasionally give one another a quick haircut. Mastroianni likes his spare hairs cut short and Maraucci

likes them cut off all together— shaved right down to a shine.

Esposito, who has been coming to Placido’s Hair Cutting Salon for 34 years, is the customer who called Mastroianni the Winchell of Whalley. “We talk a lot about what’s really happened in this country in the last fifty years,” he says. The talk gets hot. Esposito is an entrepreneur in protein powder. He takes pride in the value he provides for his customers, and offense at those who make money without offering customers anything of substance. His voice quickens with anger over “Wall Street fuckers,” then quivers with disgust when he describes a generation of “publicservice assholes” who are too incompetent to straighten out the Wall Street types. Mastroianni never dismisses complaints yet never fully allows for pessimism either.

“But I thought he was the guy we like?” He stops cutting hair and leans his upper body away from Esposito’s head, as if to get a better view of his thinking.

“Well, he sold himself as one thing, and as soon as he got in, he did everything the way he said he wouldn’t.”

Mastroianni is working on the hair that hadn’t passed his survey. “Hmm,” he sympathizes, as he combs—clip, clip. “They all do that a little bit, don’t they?”

The old barber “knows how to light a fire under my ass,” says Esposito. But 850 haircuts into their relationship, Mastroianni has proven competent at keeping Esposito seated in that big green Belmont, no matter how hot his seat becomes. Esposito leans back into the chair, his aviator glasses removed, his eyes closed, and Mastroianni’s hand at the back of his head. He looks like Julius Caesar, and opens his eyes only for emphasis. “I like to have somebody take care of me;

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I’m usually taking care of everybody else.”

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t’s warm enough inside for men to pull off Champion sweatshirts, roughened work vests, and Italian suits. Some go all the way down to undershirts, revealing gold chains and Catholic icons suspended in chest hair.

In barbershops, men drop their defenses.

An apron arrests their limbs, clippers cut close to their throats, and they sit face-to-mirror with their barber. He asks questions, he touches them with his hands, he listens. They don’t have much alternative. “Everything homemade is better,” says Mastroianni, “except haircuts.”

Men have feared and venerated barbers throughout history, as if with scissors and shaving cream barbers could take apart or put together one person or an entire political community.

In Mastroianni’s birthplace, an ancient tyrant allowed only his daughters to shave him. When they got older, he mistrusted even their hands with a blade and made them burn off his five o’clock shadow with blistering hazelnuts. Another emperor worried that barbers might cut away his popular support. With dissent spreading in barbershops, he banned all barbers from Rome.

In Mastroianni’s adopted home, barbershops are part of democracy, or so it goes. In the American barbershop, all men (no women here)—some with dry hair and some with wet, some seated in heavy green chairs and others waiting in delicate pink ones— become equal, and the opinions they express carry equal weight. It is a place where a community can form shared beliefs. Wisconsin Governor Warren Knowles told Dick Cheney in 1966 that a good

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campaign should visit three places in every town: the Republican Party Office, the newspaper, and the local barbershop.

Mastroianni has cut hair for so long that those with whom he once talked politics have become the talk of town. Joe Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67 was Mastroianni’s

In barbershops, men drop their defenses. An apron arrests their limbs, clibbers cut close to their throats, and they sit faceto-mirror with their barber. customer for 10 years, when he had just finished at the Yale Law School and was working for a firm in New Haven. Lieberman was, as Mastroianni puts it, “destinated [sic] to become a politician.” He was special because he could talk to anybody, “anybody like me.”

But when Lieberman became attorney general and then senator, his blonde hair became gray, and he stopped sitting where Mastroianni could reach him.

Today, the barbershop democracy governs less. Political campaigns—including Dick Cheney’s 2000 and 2004 vicepresidential campaigns on the Republican ticket—visit more

Internet blogs than barber chairs.

And while Richard Blumenthal was attorney general, Mastroianni’s best access to him was through a staff lawyer, who reported that Blumenthal’s senate campaign became so broke its managers were making fliers on personal printers (no $Buck$ is right).

Mastroianni himself has gotten slower and quieter in his shuffles around the barber chair.

He knows he has nothing to gain by changing a customer’s opinion, only business to lose. He used to be insistent and center-right. Now he’s on the left, but you wouldn’t know it. Mastroianni works around his customers. They sit in the center.

Even a careful eye can’t pick out Mastroianni in a picture from his 1967 return to styling school.

“It’s im-pos-si-ble! I was a different man.” He was there learning to cope with long hair and left-wing politics, both of which put a lot of other barbers out of business—the kids just weren’t coming in for the JFK cut. A decade later, Mastroianni learned never to hang political posters in his barbershop. When he promoted mayoral challenger Ben DeLieto in 1977, customers who supported the incumbent protested, and all his customers got more city parking tickets for parking near opposition sidewalk signs. “People don’t want opinions,” he says. “They want haircuts.”

Shared opinions in the barbershop might be impotent to change policy, anyway. Most of Mastroianni’s customers have moved out of the city and cast their ballots in suburbs like Woodbridge and Orange.

“I see the reason,” says Mastroianni. “You’re working like a dog all your life, you’re trying to make something. All of a sudden you’ve got a beautiful place, nice school system, and it changes. The

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property goes down, the school system goes down. So what do you do? You run! If you got wings, you run.”

Now it doesn’t matter whose side the barber is on, if it ever did. People, or at least politics, won’t be changed by Mastroianni’s opinions. But people don’t come to him to be convinced what to do; they come to be consoled about what they no longer can.

“H

ow ya doin’, John?”

“Just barely treading water.”

BaZRRRR. The clipper and the din of the double-cassette radio excuse Mastroianni while he comes up with a question. What the customer needs to express isn’t always clear, but each will soon say what he must. Mastroianni’s silence lets his customers speak, and his simple affirmations encourage them to say more.

Mastroianni asks a man with sparse brown hair about his brother’s pitbulls, and the man soon opens up about his brother’s drug problems. Marucci, also a practiced listener, asks a near-bald father about a son’s bachelor’s party. After telling what the strippers “made me do” (“Oh, they made you!”), the father talks disapprovingly of his future daughter-in-law.

Sometimes, the barbers help the men retreat into their pasts.

There are the war stories of Robert Wallick, who discovered Amelia Earhart’s briefcase; Jim Vaneris, who flew the Memphis Bell with his best friend from Tennessee; or Jeffrey Somner, who ran into an assistant barber drafted out of the Marucci’s old barbershop at Basic Training in Camp Grant, Illinois, and got his hair cut.

There are games that must be ritualistically replayed.

One customer reckons with his mistakes on the field when Yale

February 2011

lost to Harvard, 29-29. A hulking man relives tackles he made in high school as Mastroianni cuts his bangs, and his shadow head-butting nearly brings his eyes into contact with very real shears. But Mastroianni doesn’t let that happen. He rarely brings his customers back to reality, unless they want to bring themselves. In this case, disability distorts the former football player’s sense of proportion, and once Mastroianni has washed the man’s head (an uncommon rite brought to an end with “Up, Sir!”), Mastroianni helps him identify the cut wet hair that has fallen onto his tongue. “Brown? Then it must be yours!”

Mastroianni may be a born listener, or perhaps just a too-busy barber. Tufts and curls take so much attention that Mastroianni must ask more questions than he answers.

And when he’s combing to measure his next cut, the easiest question to ask is one that explores something further what his customer has said.

Like a good therapist or a good parent, Mastroianni listens—he knows to focus with full attention (sometimes there’s not much hair there to busy him), acknowledge feelings with a single word (“No!?”), give feelings a name (preferably an Italian one: “So you’re saying he’s a socialista?”), and grant wishes in a fantasy. After his haircut, the disabled former high school football player barrels into Mastroianni with excessive force. “You are strong today, Brucey!” For the 77-year-old man, it may not feel like a fantasy.

But for Bruce, one more tackle, twice each month, may make a difference.

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hen Mastroianni’s customers get around to talking politics, they do so as a release from other frustrations. They talk about things no one can change, it seems, as a way to forget the difficult

things that they must change themselves. The talk isn’t a sign of collective empowerment anymore, but of an individual powerlessness that everyone shares. Mastroianni’s customers don’t want political conversation, but rather a chair from which to sound a long complaint.

A young man comes in with gumboots, jeans that could catch wind, and a Sean Jean jacket that must have been kitten soft before it went through the wash. He has dark hair, and lots of it.

“I want it real short, short short short! You know, Caesar-like.”

“I see,” Mastroianni flicks on the clippers. “You want to be free, not a slave to your hair, right?”

Mastroianni lets the softfaced man move from “Platonic, you know, not sexual,” to “child support,” to the failing grades his teenage son is getting in school. He tires of talking until Mastroianni awakens him with a change of subject.

“So the economy’s got to change, huh?”

His cheeks alight with energy, but he soon sinks back into cold anxiety. The middle class just can’t compete with the money backing these politicians.

Mastroianni stops. The man’s head protrudes like the point of an iceberg from the black and ochre sea of his apron, a sea-foam napkin at his neck. Mastroianni seems unable to size up what’s beneath.

“Well, you know, we have to talk about it. We just can’t think about it.”

TNJ

Andrew McCreary is a junior in Silliman College.

17

FEATURE

DREAMING ON Life after graduation for Yalies who are undocumented immigrants.

By Liane Membis

U

nlike for many of her classmates, post-graduate mornings for Teresa Serrano ’10 don’t consist of 6 a.m. showers, daily caffeine rushes courtesy of Starbucks, or crowded subway rides to Wall Street. Nor can she be found enthusiastically singing the alphabet song to a group of kindergarteners in New Orleans as a Teach for America volunteer.

Instead, the 22-year-old Latina spends most of her days at home in Texas, unemployed, unable to drive, and underachieving because of the place she was born.

“My status has limited my life in unimaginable ways,” said Serrano, whose name has been changed to protect her. Like the other 9.3 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, Serrano lacks the rights of a U.S. citizen. She cannot get a driver’s license and is unauthorized to work because, though she grew up here, she does not reside in the United States legally. For now, she remains trapped in limbo, educated and unemployed.

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Home Sweet Home n the late 1970s, Serrano’s parents traveled from Honduras to the United States in search of economic opportunities and social advancement. Civil unrest and political instability plagued their home country, and her parents sought refuge away from an ongoing civil war.

Her parents’ attempts to bear children led them back home.

Her mother experienced several miscarriages and when she became pregnant with Teresa, she was diagnosed with a congenital heart disease that qualified her pregnancy as high risk.

“In the United States, my parents were alone and on their own, whereas in Honduras they had the support of their family and loved ones,” Serrano said. “They were more familiar with the language, customs, and medical procedures there than in the United States, and this made the birthing process easier.”

At 13 months, when her mother was healthy again, Serrano

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returned with her parents to the United States on a tourist visa. Even after this visa expired, she continued to live in Texas with her parents.

Shortly after their return to the United States, Serrano’s parents gave birth to her brother, who is now 18 years old and attends Columbia University. Serrano’s father finally secured a green card in 2008, but for the majority of her life, he could have been deported at any moment.

Growing Up American errano’s parents raised her on working-class wages. Her mother, 52, works as a nanny, and her father, 54, is a maintenance worker. For several years the family lived together in a small twobedroom apartment. After years of saving, her parents were able to purchase a new home. They were “extremely resourceful,” Serrano said.

Despite economic hardships, Serrano grew up in a loving household and retained strong bonds to her Hispanic heritage. She

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recalls a fondness for her mother’s empanadas and her father’s carne asada at family gatherings. Her mother, a devout Catholic, took her to mass every weekend and instilled in her the importance of faith.

She grew up with American culture as well. “I learned English from a purple dinosaur and my favorite food was chocolate chip cookies,” Serrano recalled. “I had a pretty happy, normal American childhood.” Like other girls, she flirted in high school and had twoweek long crushes. She was an active dancer and held records in cross-country track.

were in the process of legalizing their status, but until middle school, she believed she was born in the United States.

In high school, the fragments of Serrano’s complicated and broken immigration story began to come together. When she wanted to apply to get a driving license, her mother hastily changed the subject and wouldn’t let her.

When she started applying to colleges and wanted to get a job to save for tuition, her parents said no.

“That’s when it sort of dawned on me that I wasn’t a U.S. citizen,” Serrano said. “That’s when I began to realize the extent to which

secure financial aid based purely on their need; students whose parents earn below $60,000 a year can receive generous aid packages.

This aid and additional private scholarships meant Serrano could pay the annual $50,000 for Yale tuition, but no amount of money could afford her the same Yale experience as many of her peers.

Yale provides ample opportunities for international travel, offering fellowships for research in far-flung places, and summer programs around the globe. Serrano would have loved to study abroad—but because she was undocumented, she didn’t have a

“My status has limited my life in unimaginable ways,” said Cortez, one of the 9.3 million undocumented immigrants residing in the United States and a 2010 graduate of Yale College.

“Although I grew up in an inner-city household and my parents juggled several low-wage jobs to provide for my brother and me, they were always there for us, and they made our education a priority,” Serrano said.

Her high school in Dallas had a high drop-out rate, but Serrano beat the odds. She excelled academically, ranking third in a graduating class of 250 and receiving the National Hispanic Scholar Award. Like the rest of her close friends, Teresa dreamed of attending college, and she applied to schools in Texas and on the East Coast. By her final year of high school, however, she realized she faced an obstacle her fellow classmates didn’t.

“There was never a single light-bulb moment,” Serrano recalled about finding out she was undocumented. Growing up, she had a vague sense that her parents February 2011

my life would be restricted and shaped by my status.”

The Educational Escape ale University was among the list of colleges to which Serrano applied, identifying herself as an international student. She was admitted and offered full financial assistance even though she could not supply all the required documents to qualify her as a true international student. She is one of a small group of undocumented students admitted to Yale.

“We admit students for their academic and personal promise without regard to ability to pay,” explains Jessie Hill, senior assistant director of Yale undergraduate admissions. “We admit a handful of undocumented students every year, and a student’s legal status does not factor into the admissions or financial aid decisions.”

Undocumented students are able to

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passport. Carmen Alvarez, another undocumented Yalie from Peru, whose name has also been changed, agreed that travel was enticing but unattainable.

“The one thing that makes me so angry is when people pass up their opportunities to study abroad,” Alvarez said. “People don’t understand how much traveling is a privilege in this country until they are restricted from traveling home because of their status.”

Serrano, who was unable to travel home to see her family in Texas during holiday breaks, agreed. “We religiously avoid airports and anything resembling a terminal because of the risk of being deported or getting caught up in an Immigration and Customs raid,” she said. “The immobility that accompanies being undocumented can feel, at times, paralyzing.”

Instead, she spent all of her vacations and breaks in 19

Connecticut, thousands of miles away from her loved ones. Her parents couldn’t visit her either: they faced the same difficulties traveling as undocumented persons and couldn’t afford to drive the 1,000 miles from Texas to Connecticut.

Serrano passed her summers in cheap sublet apartments, funded by odd jobs like babysitting and Yale psychology studies.

During the school year, she studied anthropology and history.

Outside of her academic career, she was a committed community activist for local nonprofits that lobbied for immigration and labor rights.

It was in those moments— when she was working to protect locals and fight for a national cause—that Teresa fully appreciated being a Yale student.

“Despite my looming status, my time at Yale was remarkable,” Serrano said. “I found numerous sources of support at Yale and, although challenging, my experience was full of positive growth.”

According to friends and past roommates, Teresa Serrano was not the type of person to wear her worry on her face. “She was always on top of things and was one of the happiest people that I have met during my time at Yale,” Elizabeth Gonzalez ’11 said. Gonzalez met Serrano before her freshman year at Cultural Connections, a University organized pre-orientation program.

Additionally, Gonzalez has been a strong proponent and leader on campus for immigration rights through her work with La Mecha, a Chicano social justice student group. She did not discover that Serrano was undocumented until the end of Serrano’s time at Yale.

“People were attracted to her bubbly and cheerful spirit. You could have sat next to her and never realized all

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the issues she was going through.”

Once Elizabeth knew, however, she was aware that the issues weighed heavily on her friend.

Serrano worried relentlessly about her future during her senior year,

“We admit students for their academic and personal promise, without regard to ability to pay. We admit a handful of undocumented students every year and a student’s legal status does not factor into the admissions or financial aid decisions.”

Gonzalez recalled.

The rich tradition of faith and prayer instilled by her mother sustained Serrano at first.

“My mother’s answer to most of my questions in life was ‘Si Dios Quiere’—‘If God wants.’ For a long time, that was enough for me,” she said. But as she became increasingly disillusioned with her reality, Serrano found it difficult to maintain her faith. Confiding in friends about her status, however

difficult, became a source of comfort instead.

“One of the major challenges for immigrants is overcoming the culture of silence that dominates and colors the lives and narratives of so many non citizens,” Serrano explains. “So many of us are afraid to speak out for our basic rights. My parents simply avoided the subject for years, and I, in turn, inherited that same silence.”

Due to the danger of deportation, few students will discuss their undocumented status with their peers. As a result, it is hard for Yale students to identify each other as undocumented. Serrano felt alone, though she knew she was not.

Life After Yale y commencement in May, Serrano had become increasingly despondent.

Her inability to travel for job interviews meant many job applications sat incomplete on her desktop. With growing impatience, her mother insisted her best post-graduate job option was to become a nanny.

Graduation is usually a joyous occasion, but for Serrano, it was a “heart-wrenching experience.”

“What I felt on graduation day was different—something more severe,” she said. “I had spent the past four years at this elite institution, compartmentalizing a painful truth, and I knew that when I graduated I would be confronted with my harsh reality yet again.”

She left New Haven and returned to her home in Texas. Now her daily routine consists of nine-tofive job shifts at fast food restaurants and laundromats, the advantages of her Yale degree negated by her undocumented status.

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What comes next? try not to think about the future. I just live life day

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by day,” Serrano said, adding, “To live as an undocumented person in the U.S. is to grapple with daily exploitation, injustice, and broken promises.”

One such promise was the DREAM Act. The act proposed to grant conditional legal status to undocumented young people who have moved to the United States before age 16, lived here for more than five years, graduated high school, completed three years of college or military service, and committed no felonies or no more than three misdemeanors.

The acronym “DREAM” stands for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors.

Yale University President Richard Levin publicly recognized and endorsed the DREAM Act on September 20, 2010. “In my view anyone who has the ability and determination to complete college is the kind of person we should welcome to stay in our great country,” Levin said at the time. “Like many others, I would prefer that the DREAM Act be considered as part of comprehensive immigration legislation.”

In the months after his statement, lawmakers and their constituents remained hotly divided on the issue.

In Texas, where 37 percent of the population is of Hispanic origin, hunger strikes unfolded in San Antonio in support of the DREAM Act. These and other protests failed to sway lawmakers, including Senators Kay Bailey (R-TX) Hutchinson and John Cornyn (R-TX). On December 8, the bill passed in the House, but a vote in the Senate was delayed. On Dec. 18, the DREAM Act failed to pass again, after the Senate’s motion to prevent a filibuster of the bill fell short by five votes.

After November’s election,

February 2011

Congress is more conservative on the issue of immigration than it has been in years past, but some state politicians are still holding out hope for reform. On January 25, New Haven’s aldermen unanimously recommended that the Connecticut state legislature pass a law making undocumented students eligible to pay in-state tuition at state colleges, a measure New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. also supports. New York, Illinois, California, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin and New Mexico all have passed versions of this law, often called a “state DREAM Act.” Serrano’s post-graduate goal is neither to amass a fortune nor to start a family. It is simply to stay in the country in which she grew up. Her parents have been in legal proceedings to adjust their status for nearly 30 years.While her father recently secured legal status, her mother’s efforts have gone unrewarded. She cannot depend on her younger brother either; even when he turns 21, the necessary age to petition for a spouse or sibling, the process for Serrano would be backlogged for another 15 years.

“Somewhere along the way in our historical trajectory of quotas and immigration rights, the system ran out of gas and broke down on the highway,” Karen Weinstock, an Atlanta-based immigration lawyer, said. “Even if you enter this country legally and file paperwork the ‘right way,’ it can take nearly 15-someodd years to be naturalized. That’s 15 years regressing your life rather than progressing it.” Currently, the only way that undocumented immigrants can become U.S. citizens is through petitions by family members, company sponsorship, or re-adjustment of status through marriage.

In his State of the Union address on January 25, President

Barack Obama addressed the problems with the nation’s current system for naturalizing foreign students educated in the United States. He had previously called the Senate’s failure to vote on the DREAM Act his “greatest disappointment.”

The DREAM Act would have changed Serrano’s life drastically. She describes it as “the only hope for myself and for the hundreds of thousands of dreamers in the US, who have been deprived of basic human rights,” Serrano said. ‘It’s physically and emotionally draining to discover the deep limitations that come with being undocumented and the few pathways and decades it can take to legalization. The system is broken, and we need smart, humane, comprehensive immigration reform immediately.”

Unlike other undocumented immigrants, Teresa’s brother’s citizenship and father’s permanent residency increase the chance she’ll be able to legalize her status. But, like many others, she remains in a compromising position, her name and status leaving her in danger of exile.

“The thought of detention and forced removal still sends shivers down my spine,” Serrano said. “It’s the ultimate nightmare— to be detained without justice, to be permanently separated from your family and loved ones, to be banished to a country you have literally no memory of.”

She is left with her hope, her perseverance, and her education.

TNJ

Liane Membis is a junior in Ezra Stiles College.

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FEATURE

Oceans Away The number of Chinese children adopted by American families is increasing every year, as is the age of the children adopted. Helen Gao meets two such children to learn about their experiences.

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The New Journal

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A girl in the Chinese Adopted Siblings Program at Yale (CASPY) writes a message to her adoptive mother in chalk on the sidewalk.

February 2011

eng Tuo arrived at Donnasue Graesser’s New Haven home in January 2010, the year he turned nine. Just shy of four-and-ahalf feet, he spins around the house like a Frisbee, one moment fighting over a dreidel with his brother and the next jerking his mother’s apron, asking for hot chocolate. Occasionally, his dark, animated eyes pause on me in a long, curious stare.

Penelope (whose name has been changed by her mother’s request) joined Kathleen Heller’s family in February 2010 at the age of thirteen and a half. Sitting by the living room table, she attempts to answer her mother’s questions with English phrases, but often retreats to a nod or shake of the head, an embarrassed smile adorning her dimpled face. She converses with me in Mandarin in a low, calm voice, as if the story she is telling belongs to someone else.

Zeng Tuo and Penelope are Chinese orphans adopted by American parents. Neither of them knew the English word “parents” before their adoptions. They have flown across the Pacific Ocean, mixed in with crowds of businessmen in search of profits and students in search of education, to find families.

Their arrivals in the United States mark a new trend in American adoptions from China. Twenty years ago, when China first opened for international adoption, almost all the adoptees were infant girls in swaddling clothes, leaving their homeland before they even knew how to pronounce its name. After ten years, the number of children adopted from China to the United States per year reached 8,000, with a long line of parents on the waiting list. Today, according to the Chinese government, the demand has outstripped the number of Chinese infants available for adoption, and American families are encour-

aged to adopt instead from a pool of older children, many of whom have special needs. Since 2005, these children have constituted the main body of adoptees from China, a trend likely to continue as the number of domestic adoptions rises and the rate of infants abandoned at birth decreases. The older newcomers, usually moving to the United States between ages 7 and 14—the upper age limit set by the Chinese law for international adoption— face a new set of challenges. Unlike the children adopted at birth who arrive in America with blank slates, older adoptees struggle to reconcile their ties to China with their new lives as Americans.

Kneeling on a chair next to the dinner table, Zeng Tuo wolfs down rice with scrambled eggs and tomatoes, one of his favorite homemade Chinese dishes. His plump cheeks peek out from behind the large porcelain bowl he holds up to his face. Just back from a karate lesson, he is still in his white practice robes, tightened around his skinny torso with a red belt.

eng Tuo, referred to as Z.T. in the house, may have been born deaf, but was not officially diagnosed until age 2 or 3. From then on, he was deemed “unadoptable.” He has no birth certificate. The earliest documentation of his existence is a “baby found” advertisement posted on a local newspaper. “Zeng Tuo,” the one-line ad says, using the name given by the orphanage where he temporarily lived: “male infant, dark skin and average weight, found at Changsha West Bus Station.”

Looking at a photo of the advertisement Graesser puts in front of me, I shudder at the word “Changsha.” A charming city in southern China and my father’s hometown, I have spent many Chi-

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nese New Year’s Eves there, facing a table of steaming home-cooked dishes and surrounded by smiling faces of aunts, uncles, and grandparents.

The ad went unanswered, and Z.T. became a long-term resident of the orphanage. At age 4 or 5, he was sent to an asylum called “Hope House” built by a Christian missionary group, where he lived together with other children with special needs. There, he received just limited care, Graesser says, because “he was a little bit too highfunctioning” compared to some of his immobile peers. The missionaries sent him to school, but eventually he dropped out because of his hearing impairment. At 6, he met a family from New Jersey that considered adopting him. He spent two days with the family, but was sent back to the orphanage by himself.

“He wouldn’t calm down.

He was so hyperactive, and…they thought his table manners were bad.

He put his face down to his dish when he ate!” Graesser says. She explains that the family from New Jersey, after observing his behavior, felt he was too much to handle.

“I’m sort of glad they didn’t adopt him then,” Graesser says, her voice lifting. “Because he is a lot to handle. And, plus, he is now my son!”

Once again homeless, Z.T. returned to his familiar bed in the orphanage, reading all day and going to sleep immediately after dinner. It was not long, however, until he met a British foster family living in Changsha that took him to their house first for weekends and then for longer periods of time. The family assembled a photo album of the year they spent together. One picture features Z.T. spinning around on a carousel, grinning widely. Another shows him amid a group of boys his age, seated at a ceramics

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wheel, his hands and face covered in mud. But the foster family could not provide a permanent home for Z.T. They planned to return to Britain in only a few years.

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ince Z.T. arrived at the Graessers’ house, he has embraced body language to express his feelings. He devours his dinners with a satisfied grunt. When he wants a grape-flavored ice bar from the freezer, he yanks a corner of his mother’s apron and gestures in sign language. His thin arms draw animated lines and

Zeng Tuo has no birth certificate. The earliest documentation of his existence is a “baby found” advertisement posted on a local newspaper. curves across his chest, in front of his face and above his head. Determined to make himself understood, he furrows his eyebrows into a knot.

Z.T. seems to understand he is now part of a family from which he will never be parted. His father, Carl, drives him from school to karate classes, and his brother, Simon—the family’s biological son—has taught him to play computer games. Donnasue Graesser has learned both Chinese and American sign languages, so that she can use the former to teach Z.T. the latter. Language, she believes, is key to Z.T.’s integration into the new society, as well as his tie to his past one. In addition to learning the signs, he can pronounce some words verbally, albeit with dif-

ficulty.

“Z.T., come here!” Graesser gestures at him. “Tell her your name.”

The boy leans against the dinner table near me, his fingers rolling a corner of his shirt. “Zet, Tet!”

“No, no, your Chinese name,” Graesser shakes her head with an exaggerated motion and puts up a finger.

The boy’s thin lips curl into a smile, half shy and half sly, then he suddenly turns away to dash at his brother.

“I ask him all the time when he signs something: ‘How do you sign it in Chinese?’ I want him to retain his native language,” Graesser says.

She also takes him frequently to Chinese culture camps, encourages him to socialize with other Chinese adoptees, and makes a point to cook Chinese vegetable dishes at home every night.

After dinner, Carl makes green tea for the family. Z.T. signs that he prefers hot chocolate instead, with “lots and lots of marshmallows.”

As the family sits down around the dinner table, sipping their steaming drinks, I ask what Graesser hopes to achieve with her efforts.

Carl, who has remained quiet for the entire evening, suddenly starts to speak. He explains that they don’t want Z.T. to lose sight of his heritage. “For you and me, we go back to New Jersey, I drive around and could remember it all. For him, he won’t have that opportunity. We are not doing it for us; we are doing it for him.”

Graesser motions to Z.T. “Z.T., look at mom, look at me for a second.” Her smiling face turns stern. “When you grow older, will you want to take a plane to go back

The New Journal

Yale students and their “siblings” in CASPY make arts and crafts together in William L. Harkness Hall. to China and see it?” Her lips move slowly and deliberately. Her right hand index finger draws a line from left to right under her collarbone and down her torso for “China,” and the middle finger joins in to gently touch the corner of her right eye for “see.”

“No,” he mumbles.

“Why not?”

A series of short sticky syllables.

“What?”

“I want to be here.” Louder and more clipped this time—he’s speaking.

Driving me to the train station, Graesser confesses that despite all her efforts, Z.T. seems un-

February 2011

interested in his past.

“I am still in frequent correspondence with his British foster mom. I’ve asked him if he wants to talk to her. So far he said, ‘No, she’s old and she’s probably dead,’” she laughs. “She’s thirties maybe? She’s not old! I just don’t think he’s ready for it yet. Maybe he will be someday, but right now he’s not.”

A short silence ensues. “I don’t know if inside…Sometimes, I just think maybe I oversimplify him.

I think, ‘Oh, he’s happy here, and he just wants that to be done,’ but then sometimes I wonder if he’s really trying to spare my feelings. He might think, ‘My new mom prob-

ably wouldn’t like it if I talk to my old mom.’” Her loud, clear voice now shakes with uncertainty.

“I don’t know. I can’t place emotions on him. He’s hard to read.”

enelope is the newest addition to the Nicoloso-Heller family, which includes five adopted girls, eight rescued bunnies, and a rescued fish. Kathleen Heller is their mother, and a friend of Grasser’s. Two of the girls, who are twins, were adopted at birth, while the other three joined the family between the ages of 11 and 13.

In her blog entitled “Five

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CASPY participants share snacks while enjoying the sun and making chalk drawings and messages.

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Blossoms from China,” Heller records the hustle and bustle in her household.

One day Heller blogged about finding Penelope sobbing incessantly under a bed cover. Guessing that she had upset the young girl when she reprimanded her for staying on the computer, Heller tried to soothe her with apologies and encouraged her to communicate.

“It’s important to talk about what’s making you sad. Keeping it in doesn’t make it go away…

We’ve only known you for several months and sharing is a way for us to know more about you so we can be more supportive,” she recalls telling her daughter.

Her efforts only elicited more tears, and Penelope responded with a stubborn “Nothing.” In the end, Heller realized that was what she had to settle for.

“Well, guess what?” she wrote on her blog. “All that, ‘I’m making a breakthrough, I’m really reaching her, and whoa I’m really saying the right things...’ was bogus. It WAS nothing. She was just very tired and it turns out she becomes overly sensitive when she is tired. Hmmmmmmmm, guess the only thing I learned from this is— she becomes sensitive when she’s tired.”

Before I visit Heller’s family, I expected a reserved, perhaps sullen face from Penelope. I scrutinize my prepared questions on the train to their house, picking each word with painstaking caution.

James Nicoloso, Heller’s husband, picks me up at the Redding, Connecticut, train station. As the car winds through woods hills and fields, Nicoloso tells me that he works as an independent filmmaker.

He is currenly making a film about Mark Twain, who spent his last years in Redding. The task of taking care of the girls is mostly his wife’s.

The New Journal

The Nicoloso-Heller house, situated amid December’s bare woods in Redding, Connecticut, glows a warm yellow light at its windows. Penelope waits for me at the living room table, where she remains for the entirety of my half-day visit. Her face, tanned and heart-shaped in blog photos, has been bleached by life indoors and fleshed out by a year of American diet.

Her two youngest sisters, Juliette and Leigha, ten-year-old twins who were adopted at birth, have black, silky hair that falls to their waists. After running circles around the living room table, they sprint toward the trampoline in their backyard, their giggles echoing from afar. Marielle, the oldest daughter at 16, was adopted four years ago. She rambles in a mix of Chinese and English while showing me her drawings of Japanese manga characters. Aleena, age 12, joined the family at the same time as Penelope in February 2010. Hard of hearing, she attends a deaf school, where she became close friends with the Graessers’ son, Z.T.

Penelope completed ninth grade in China. When she arrived at Heller and Nicoloso’s home, she was placed two years back in eighth grade at the nearby John Read Middle School. She was expected to catch up within half a year and transit smoothly into high school.

Instead, Penelope returned from school crying every day. Her teachers’ speeches in English were all gibberish to her.

Worried, Heller made repeated requests to the school’s administration, asking for a special language teacher for her daughter, but received no answer.

“You know what the reaction was? ‘Oh, she hangs out with her friends. She will learn English.’

She is in a new country. She doesn’t

February 2011

have any friends. She is very shy. ‘Oh she will learn. We will assign somebody to hang out with her.’ No. That’s not how you teach a child.”

In May, Heller filed a complaint against the school in the district government. A few days after my visit, she announced the result on her blog: “We have won! I am so excited…She will get support in

“For you and me, we go back to New Jersey, I drive around and could remember it all,” says Carl Graesser. “For him, he won’t have that opportunity. We are not doing it for us; we are doing it for him.” all of her classes and have a separate time for tutoring.”

When she’s not at school, Penelope spends most of her time at home, chatting online with friends from China. Many of them have also been adopted by families on the East Coast.

Having lived with other children in a “welfare institute” in China for five years, Penelope experienced a teenager’s life before she came to America. She and her friends chased each other on their way to school, collaborated on homework after class, and huddled in the institute’s heatless common room to watch television soap opera on weekend afternoons. Before that,

she had even had a family.

“C

ould you help me with something?” Heller asks me after lunch, taking a pile of large yellow envelopes stuffed with paper documents off a shelf: Penelope’s records from the years she lived with her grandmother in the countryside, before she entered the welfare institute. “If we can somehow locate the town where she lived, we can find her grandmother!” Heller says, her eyes sparkling.

As I sift through the documents, Penelope’s past gradually emerges. Her father died in a coal mining accident more than ten years ago and her mother succumbed to an “unspecified illness.” Brought up by her grandmother, she lived in the countryside of central China’s Henan province until she turned 9, when her grandmother grew too weak to support her. One day, a car came to take her to a welfare institute in Luoyang, the capital of the province. By now she has forgotten the name of the town she lived in and the elementary school she attended, and she has not seen her grandmother since leaving Luoyang.

“Do you want to see her again if we find her?” I ask.

She stares at the table and nods slowly.

On a guardianship transfer approval form, the seal of the local public security bureau states “Wangfanhuizu County.” Wangfanhuizu could be a translation of any number of Chinese names. I do several Google searches on the Hellers’ computer while Kathleen and Penelope stand behind me, eager to see what I find. Christmas music blares from the television in the living room.

“Aha!” On the sixth or the seventh try, Google yields several hundreds of results, generously tumbling down the page, and the next,

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and the next. Several of them mention an elementary school—Wangfanhuizu Wangdong Elementary School. “I think that’s it!” I turn to Penelope.

She is already in her mother’s hug, her face hidden behind Heller’s thick, blonde hair. “This is big. This is big,” I hear the mother murmuring.

I copy down the name of the school and its street address, put it in my pocket, and tiptoe to the closet to grab my coat.

In the days that follow, I check Heller’s blog several times a day, without knowing what to expect. An outcry of joy? A motherdaughter heart-to-heart? Or a travel itinerary to China? Instead, a week later, an email pops up in my inbox.

It is from Penelope.

“Dear Yuxin,” she writes, “thanks for visiting us. There is something I hope to tell you. When you return to China, could you please not go look for my grandmother?”

Confused, I keep reading.

She confesses that she had seen her grandmother, in truth, not long before she left for the United States.

At the suggestion of the caretakers at the welfare institute, she had concealed this fact so that she would have a greater chance of getting adopted.

“When my grandmother heard that I was leaving for America, she cried for a long time and held my hands really tight. She told me to be nice to people I meet in America.

“For now, I don’t hope to disturb her. If I bring my family to the village to visit her, she would feel she had lost me forever—I am at home now, but she is all by herself. All I am hoping now is to grow up, until I can go back to China by myself. It’s my dream and my everyday wish.

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“My mom thinks scars can only heal if you expose them…I would rather endure the pain, and not let it heal. I am thankful of everything my mom has done for me…but only this, I prefer not to let her know. Can you help me, Yuxin?”

“Dear Penelope,” I type, “I am so sorry for not having noticed your feelings during my visit that day…”

I stop, not knowing what to type next.

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or both Z.T. and Penelope, perhaps there is a greater distance that separates them from their homeland than the 12,300-milewide Pacific Ocean, a distance that, despite kind attempts, no language or cultural activities could bridge for them.

Graesser shares this view.

“I was thinking a lot after your visit about why I want Z.T. to maintain some of his cultural identity,” she

writes to me in an email days after my visit. “The rest of us have a family ‘history.’ We know our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. We know their stories, occupations, travels—and we take pride in our connection to our ancestors. For kids like Z.T., they have no family history. Our adoptive family can never replace that missing piece of his history. So it seems the closest thing we can do for him is to at least maintain some connection to his birth country, although it never seems quite adequate.”

What kind of connection is it, I wonder?

Perhaps the boy in the karate robe and the girl crying under the blanket are still figuring that out.

TNJ

Helen Gao is a senior in Davenport College.

The New Journal

FEATURE

Apples to Apples Bishop’s Orchards has operated in Guilford, Connecticut for 139 years. As the sixth generation of Bishops comes of age, the season is turning once more.

By Jacque Feldman

“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”

—Henry David Thoreau

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ticky-fingered kids waiting in line at Bishop’s Orchards tugged at their parents’ pants, demanding more caramel apples. Outside, more children roamed, trying to pick up pumpkins too heavy for them to lift. It was a sunny afternoon, the first Saturday in October, and crowds had gathered to celebrate the apple harvest at the farm and market in Guilford, Connecticut.

Two little girls sang to the tune of Frère Jacques, as their father pushed them in a wheelbarrow: “We are pumpkins, we are pumpkins, eat us quick! Eat us quick!” Other families stood at long tables, stuffing old clothes with straw and decorating them with bits of yarn to make

February 2011

scarecrows. An older woman walked by, singing softly: “You are the apple of my eye.”

Arriving at Bishop’s that October afternoon, I felt at home. A Connecticut native, I spent my childhood among the trees of Applegate of Avon, an orchard owned and operated by my onetime babysitter, Nancy Hanelius, and her husband, Ray in Avon, Connecticut. I can still remember the dark, cool, cavernous room where apples were stored. The Hanelius family has since sold their farm, and uniform, colonial-style houses now stand where apples once grew. Their story is not unusual.

Since 2000, Connecticut’s annual apple production has dropped by 2

million pounds. Bishop’s Orchards, however, has managed to continue operating.

“It’s a neat place,” said Jim Plunkett, a Guilford native who attended the town’s high school with Bishop’s current CEO, Keith Bishop. “They have been around forever. They are a Guilford fixture.”

The Bishops have owned and operated Bishop’s Orchards for six generations, since 1871. They steered the farm through the Great Depression and the construction of Interstate 95 in the 1950s through a swath of what had been Bishop land. The small children making scarecrows that day owed their fun to a long tradition that now rests on the shoulders of Keith’s four

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Left to right: Sarah Bishop-Dellaventura with a row

of Ida Red apple trees; Young girls with freshly picked pumpkins; Making scarecrows; Apples at the orchard.

children, the youngest members of the Bishop family: Ryan, Carrie, Allison, and Sarah, his oldest.

Sixth Generation arah Bishop-Dellaventura loves apples. For her October wedding—“I had to get married during prime-time foliage”—her centerpieces were apples. Her party favors were two hundred jars of applesauce, homemade by her grandmother. Her place settings were colored leaves, and her decorations included mums and pumpkins. She would have held the ceremony in the apple orchard, if it weren’t for the potential problems a Porta-potty poses to a wedding gown.

When I asked Sarah her

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favorite type of apple, she didn’t think twice. “My favorite, and probably everybody else’s,” she said, “is Macoun.” We were standing just inside the entrance of the grocery store at Bishop’s Orchards, which stocks grass-fed beef, gluten-free cookies, local vegetables, and organic frozen foods alongside the bakery breads, fudge, pies, fruit wines, apple cider, and, of course, the fruit.

Sarah explained that the produce section is here, at the front, because this store started as a farmer’s market and produce remains at its heart.

At the forefront of the produce section are the apples.

All grown at Bishops’ Orchards, they come in rows, in big white sacks, and in every variety. Copies

of a green Xeroxed sheet, titled “Know your apples,” sit at the ready, categorizing the qualities of 16 varieties of apple and the fitness of each to eating, salad, pie, sauce, baking, and canning. On the reverse are nutritional facts about apples, paragraphs titled “Apples Relieve Tension” and “Nature’s Toothbrush,” and a recipe for applesauce.

Here, at the front of the apple section, are the Macouns.

“You bite into it and get that snap right away,” said Sarah. “A great eating apple.” They sell out quickly.

“As soon as we start saying we have Macouns,” she continued, “people come out of the woodwork to get them.” With a sharp eye for these trends and a degree in business The New Journal

A family of four on the road back to the farm stand after picking their fill of apples.

from Northeastern University, Sarah is poised to handle the booming business behind these apples.

She is the oldest of the four siblings. The others are Allison, a teacher; Carrie, an accountant; and Ryan, still a student. When it became apparent that neither of her sisters who had come of age was

eager to take on the farm’s operation, Sarah left the career she’d begun in marketing for Bishop’s. “I think everyone says, ‘What if,’” she says now. “No matter what industry you’re in. I may be wrong, but I think everyone has that side of them that says, Hey, I wish I could have been something else…There’s just

not enough time in a short life.”

Without training in spraying, pest management, or any of the other day-to-day tasks of a farm’s operation, it’s possible that Sarah may not be able to run the farm alone, as her great-uncle later told me. Watching Sarah handle the day’s tasks, however, I never would

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recent speakers include

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Event listings at opac.yale.edu/poynter.aspx February 2011

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have guessed. Periodically, her cell phone beeped—always a crisis.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, as we stood in front of the cider. “I’m having a heart attack as we speak.” She picked up a few bottles, examined them, replaced them, and hung up the phone.

“Always something.” This time, she had been informed that the bar code on the redesigned cider label was incorrect. The last time, the grill near the apple trees, which had been turning out hot dogs for customers picking apples, was out of propane.

To solve that problem, she found her father, Keith Bishop. Keith is one of the current CEOs of Bishop’s Orchards, in charge of its business operation. His cousin Jonathan, who presides over planting, harvesting, and spraying crops, is the other.

There are blood Bishops, Sarah explained, as we sat on straw bales, readying ourselves for a hayride around the apple orchard, and then there are spouses, like Sarah’s mother and uncle. Besides Sarah, her father, and his cousin, blood Bishops currently involved in the farm’s operation include her aunt, the bakery manager. It is Sarah’s grandfather Albert Bishop

and her great-uncle Gene Bishop, however, who remain the Bishops’ reigning patriarchs.

Fourth Generation his is the kind of weather we dream about,” crowed Gene when I joined him in his office one October day. “These are the days that make or break the business. A good weekend like this goes a long

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way.” From the lines of customers and cars parked close on the grass, I could see what he meant. I could see how the farm’s success might hinge on a single perfect day.

Gene had just come from

Sarah Bishop-Dellaventura loves apples. For her October wedding, the party favors were two hundred jars of applesauce, homemade by her grandmother. home, but, like all the other Bishops and Bishop employees, he wore a forest-green polo shirt with the company’s logo over his heart. He lives next to Bishop’s Orchards, and always has. “I can walk up that hill up the street over there,” he said, “and I can see all three houses I’ve ever lived in.” Gene drove a tractor for the first time in 1938, when he was five years old, eight years after a Connecticut agricultural report noted the Bishops’ own New Haven County as the largest apple producer in the state.

Growing up during the Great Depression, Gene graduated from Guilford High School with a class of only 32. “It was a small class,” he quipped, “because anyone born in 1933 was not planned.”

After a few years at the University of Connecticut, Gene returned to Bishop’s Orchards, married his wife at 21, and went about beginning his life as a farmer, working with his father and his uncle. He sold life insurance on the side for the first few years, but after that, he restricted his activities to farming and farm

management. He enlisted during the Korean War, and then delayed his service in order to farm.

“It’s been a very rewarding life,” Gene said. “The longer I’ve been here, the more I like it.”

He has been here long enough to remember peddling “second”-quality apples door-todoor around town. He can remember 1957, when Bishop’s Orchards was incorporated as a business, with Gene’s father as president, Gene as vice president, Gene’s cousin Albert as secretary, and Albert’s father as treasurer. Gene continued to work for the farm until his son Jonathan and Albert’s son Keith took over.

After that, Gene ran the town. He served ten years on Guilford’s Board of Selectmen, two of them as First Selectman, and he currently serves as the Chairman of Guilford’s Public Works Commission.

When Gene showed me the map hanging on the Bishop’s Orchards’ office’s wall, I could see that here in Guilford, his leap from farm management to town

Keith Bishop’s business card reads “Co-CEO, Treasurer & Winemaker.” management was logical. Bishop’s Orchards occupies a large patch of town. In fact, when this map was made in 1970, even more of Guilford was covered in farmland.

Gene stood and pointed out places where three other orchards once stood, all within a stone’s throw of Bishop’s.

Sullivan’s Orchards is all grown over, he said, because after Don Sullivan retired twenty years ago, none of his family would resume its operation, and “the farm just sat there.” Hilltop Orchards,

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too, “stopped growing anything” a long time ago. Desperate for funds after he couldn’t find anyone to inherit its operation, Hilltop’s last owner-operator sold all the topsoil.

“He doesn’t have anything left to grow on,” said Gene. “He sold the land to the YMCA.” Until recently, Guilford’s only active farm and farmer’s market besides Bishop’s was Fanicello’s, but its youngest generation showed no interest in their inheritance, and now, the land lies fallow.

“We’ve been fortunate so far,” Gene said of his family, whose way of life depends on the willingness of the sixth generation of Bishops to continue the farm’s operation.

An Inheritance for Generations he Bishops usually employ about one hundred nonBishops, Sarah explained, as we clambered aboard the hayride. This time of year there are closer to 120, or 140. Non-Bishop employees include a man whom Sarah called “Crazy John,” the man driving our hayride. Kids wait for his tractor, she explained, because they know he gives the fastest ride. “Most kids do end up crying,” joked Crazy John, as he latched the hayride’s railing behind us, “so I know I’m doing a good job.” Sarah and I sat on the straw as Crazy John went into the tractor and started up the hayride.

When we reached the top of the hill, the ride stopped with a shudder, and more passengers boarded. An hour later, people would line up twenty deep to take the ride to the best apple trees in this 220-acre section of land—the largest continuous piece of the 313-acre farm, where rows of applefreckled trees are clearly labeled so the orchard’s patrons can know whether they’re harvesting Ida Red or Macintosh, Golden Delicious or

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February 2011

Stayman. After all, some pickers are quite picky.

“Get the reddest, most beautiful,” said one mother to her three small girls. “And this is how you do it. Listen to me before you pick an apple. Twist, twist—and then pull.” The family lives in Guilford and comes here, the mother told me, “just about every year.”

Her daughters toddled at her feet, holding buckets, and their father explained today’s strategy. “My wife wants to make applesauce and pies,” he said, “and I want some for eating.

We tried to pick the ones that were good for all of those categories.

Jonagold, Mutsu, and—what was

Growing up a Bishop was hard, because everyone in town recognized Sarah and her siblings—and knew their parents, whom they’d notify when Sarah so much as ran a red light. the other kind we were looking for?”

“Cortland,” supplied his wife.

“Oh,” he said, “I see some over there, girls!” And the girls ran off, buckets in hand, between the rows, the early afternoon sun shining off their white-blond heads.

It was that time of year.

“Something about applepicking and fall foliage—it screams New England,” Sarah said. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else this time of year.” In fact, the American tradition of apples is rooted in New England, where early English settlers first introduced the fruit. By 1641, representatives of the king of

England had decreed that settlers claiming more than 100 acres of land in the colonies must use some of that acreage to plant apple trees.

Apple seeds and seedlings later found their way from New England into wagons of settlers headed westward.

Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman, the legendary outdoorsman who took sacks of apple seeds down the Mississippi and deep into the frontier, was from Massachusetts.

Today, Yale students frequently visit nearby Bishop’s Orchards on field trips subsidized by their residential college masters, who want to give all their students the chance to acquaint themselves with the autumn harvest. “The fall trip to Bishop’s Orchards for apple picking is a decade-long Pierson tradition,” proclaimed the “Pierson Sun,” a newsletter of Pierson College, in October. For these new Connecticut residents, it’s an important introduction to their home.

Unlike the Hanelius family, who owned the Connecticut apple orchard of my childhood, the Bishops feel no economic pressure to sell their land, Sarah reassured me.

The only pressure comes from loyal customers who want to make sure the Bishops keep the land they have farmed for 139 years. To Guilford residents, what Sarah is poised to inherit is nothing short of a legend.

She told me that growing up a Bishop was hard, because everyone in town recognized her and her siblings— and knew their parents, whom they’d notify when Sarah so much as ran a red light. “I grew up living in a glass house,” she said. “Everywhere you went,” her sister Allison Pasquier added in an e-mail, “people would ask if you were a Bishop like the apple Bishops.” In Guilford, the Bishops are an institution—one whose maintenance requires work, perseverance, and a certain steely attitude.

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Fifth Generation eith Bishop, Sarah’s father, wears many hats. His business card reads, “Co-CEO, Treasurer & Winemaker.” Also the Vice Chairman of the Guilford Board of Education, he told me he doesn’t take lightly his status as community leader. “To me, Bishop’s Orchards is synonymous with my family,” wrote Allison, “especially my father, who has lived his entire life in the context of the farm.” Keith’s e-mail signature includes a quotation from Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a nineteenthcentury British politician: “The surest way not to fail is to determine to succeed.”

Keith is a businessman.

When I asked him about Bishop’s Orchards, he leapt quickly to “services we’re offering,” “product lines,” and maintaining the building’s “historical look.” The Bishops are active in lobbying for agricultural initiatives, and they are charter members of the University of New Haven Center for Family Business, where they learn to stay on top of trends, Keith said. He began cutting cabbage and lettuce in the farm’s vegetable beds as a boy, and he returned to work immediately after graduating from Cornell. He has been CEO for 12 years, and he spoke fluently of trends in apple picking that vary with the traffic of New Yorkers to their houses on Cape Cod. Keith is the man to run this farm, but he plans to retire sometime over the next ten years, passing along his title to one of “those in the next generation who are interested in the business.”

“Whoever that is,” he added.

K

The Last Generation onathan, Keith’s cousin, has no children, but Keith has four, all

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of whom grew up with Bishop’s Orchards in mind. “The most memorable moments from my childhood would be the Guilford Fair Parade, which was always in September,” wrote Carrie Bishop, the youngest daughter, in an e-mail.

“We would stay up almost all night the day before the parade to build a float that represented the farm, and would ride on the float in the parade as my Dad drove the tractor. We are a pretty tight family brought up with good traditions and values.”

Carrie now lives in Boston, working as an auditor at KPMG,

When she saw that neither of her sisters was eager to take on the farm’s operation, Sarah left the career she’d begun in marketing for Bishop’s. “I think everyone says, ‘What if,’” she says now. an audit, tax, and advisory services firm. Recently engaged, she plans to settle in Massachusetts. “Currently, I do not have any hobbies that bring me closer to the farm,” she wrote, “besides being very picky about the fruit and produce I buy.”

Allison, the middle daughter, is living with her husband in Brussels, teaching preschool at an international school there. She wrote from Belgium that she loves shopping at the farm market when she’s home, but can’t see leaving what she does to take a more active role in its success. “As for her future,” said her father, “she’s doing her thing.”

That leaves Sarah—and the youngest sibling, Ryan Bishop, who

was out hiking with a Bishop cousin at twelve years old when he first realized that he and the other boy were the last two Bishops capable of passing on the family name. “Some people think my dad kept having kids until he had a son,” he’ll say now, recollecting that hike from his dorm room at Cornell University, his father’s alma mater, where he’s studying agricultural sciences and plant sciences with double minors in modern business and viticulture.

“At this point, I’m pretty sure I’m going back,” said Ryan, after listing his majors and minors.

He would fill Jonathan’s shoes as farm manager while his sister, like his father, keeps the books. Like Sarah, he’d like to enact certain changes to the farm; like Sarah, Ryan anticipates resistance from the conservative older generations, who continue to hold stock in the business after they retire. He’d especially like to put in grapevines.

“In middle school, people associated me with apples and gave me relevant nicknames,” Ryan said.

Even so, Ryan’s future as a farmer was never a foregone conclusion.

He entered Cornell as a pre-med student, shifting majors around the same time Sarah left her career in marketing. Ryan’s hobbies include playing saxophone and guitar, rock climbing, ice climbing, and whitewater kayaking. However, though he’ll join friends on a rockclimbing trip to Nevada over spring break, pruning work at Bishop’s Orchards was his destination in December.

Yet before he returns permanently, Ryan has two years left at college. In compliance with a Bishop family rule that young Bishops of his generation must work for two years outside the orchard before returning to the family business, he’ll then take more time away—at another farm, he offered,

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in order to learn new techniques, or perhaps pursuing travel coordinated through WWOOF, World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.

He also plans to apply to the Peace Corps. Those mandatory two years away from the farm, he said, might turn into five or ten.

His uncle, Keith’s brother, abandoned Bishop’s Orchards to start his own farm in Pennsylvania.

Ryan plans to return to the farm, but how long he’ll take “would depend on where I land when I get out of college, how much I enjoy what I’m doing,” Ryan explained, all too aware of the sacrifices he would make. “My free time would be cut down significantly if I were running the farm myself. Once Jonathan takes off, it’s on my back.” About the possibility of return to the farm, Ryan speaks dutifully and carefully, the sharp focus of this picture of the rest of his life giving an edge to his voice as well.

For Now hen Sarah and I disembarked the hayride, she found a comfortable picnic table, got us some cider, and we sat and talked business. Sarah told me to watch out for the bees that our opened bottles of cider attracted. She seemed to have inherited her father’s savoir-faire, mentioning renovation projects and trends that affect the grocery store (acai berries, glutenfree, the movie Food Inc). It’s a largescale operation: this time of year, the Bishops receive deliveries of twenty to thirty tons of pumpkins weekly.

Bishop’s Orchards closes only seven days out of the year.

And yet Sarah seems up for anything. Her father emphasized to me that Sarah keeps too busy with her young children and the farm, but in person, she doesn’t show it.

Tucking her blonde hair behind her ear, smiling when she talks, she is

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bright, efficient, and bubbly. The hayride was her idea.

Growing up, Sarah never thought she’d take over the family business. For a long time, in fact, she thought she might be a teacher. Then, after graduating from Northeastern, she worked for three years as marketing manager at Moffly Media in Greenwich, Connecticut.

This job happened to comply with the Bishop family rule—but, that mandate notwithstanding, Sarah had her own goals. She had planned on living in New York and “working for some big magazine or ad industry.”

“I envy her,” Sarah said of her sister Allison, the one who lives in Brussels. “I think in my next life, maybe I’ll do what she does.” But for now, Sarah has prioritized Bishop’s Orchards. “I decided as the years went on that I wanted to see the business continue,” she said. In her sisters’ absence, Sarah has decided to take on the farm, with all its limitations. “As frustrating as it can be to work with family,” she says, “you do it.” You do it if you love the farm as much as Sarah does.

“This is what I grew up doing,” she continued, batting a bee away from her hair. “It’s what I love. I’m hap—pretty happy. I’m pretty happy…I feel stressed about it at times, but I never have any remorse.” She persists in the hope that her brother will grow up to join her—in whatever hope has kept this business afloat through 139 years of modernization. The strongest guarantor of Bishop’s Orchards’ survival is to keep it in the family.

“I can’t picture this all being houses up here,” Sarah said, imagining what might happen eventually if the farm were sold to an outside party.

“I don’t know if I’d forgive myself.”

Apples themselves are cultivated by the grafting of branches onto trees already growing, but this farm’s

roots run deep.

Not Far From the Tree fter parting ways with the Bishops, I couldn’t resist buying one of the big white bags of apples—specifically, Macouns. I tried my first Macoun on the way home. The apple was small, filling my palm only partially, and bright red. When I took a bite, its skin gave way with a crunch, revealing a white, sweet interior. It was as crisp and hard as Sarah had promised. I ate the whole thing, quickly, and remembered joyfully that my bag of apples, the smallest size available, still held four quarts. The face of the bag told the apples’ story: APPLES & CIDER – BISHOP’S ORCHARDS – CONNECTICUT GROWN.

This story has been passed on through generations and culminates in that sharp, bright taste. In the end, that’s what all the effort is for. It’s the taste of my childhood and, for one Guilford family, something more important—something else entirely.

But that’s comparing oranges and you-know-what.

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TNJ

Jacque Feldman is a junior in Davenport College and a Managing Editor of The New Journal.

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Personal Essay

On Height and Hiding Cory Finley remembers what it was like to stand tall, but walk small.

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t six feet five inches, I am an abnormally tall man.

And therefore, I can expect the world to treat me pretty well. If the numerous studies on the subject can be trusted, I am, by virtue of my dimensions, likely to ascend my career ladder rapidly and attain a senior leadership position. Women on dating websites will seek me out.

The style pages of Details and Esquire will continue to feature fashion tips geared toward reshaping vertically challenged men in my image: pinstripes for the elongated look, or cropped jackets for the illusion of legginess. On the surface, being tall is a sweet deal. It’s curious, then, that the item in my wardrobe

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I’ve owned the longest is a pair of gym shorts so loose and long and baggy that they do the impossible: make me look damn near squat.

“Use your height!” I can still hear my father shouting from the edge of the middle school basketball court. He himself was a basketball standout in high school because he harnessed his six feet six inches. On offense, he stretched out his massive arms to loft the ball into the basket; on defense, he puffed himself up and threw himself between his opponents and their goal. I was an athletic embarrassment precisely because I refused to use my father’s genetic gift to me. Faced with more aggressive opponents, I curled up

and hunched down, once mumbling, “I’m sorry,” when my arm got in the way of an opponent’s shot.

And in some fundamental way, I was sorry. I didn’t ask to be tall.

Somewhere between fifth and eighth grade, my body shot up, my limbs stretching wildly in all directions.

My pubescent brain simply couldn’t keep up—there was just too much of me. I suddenly woke up each morning in a body that encroached on others’ space without even trying. I saw myself as an inherent intrusion, so in my personal life, as on the basketball court, I sought out means to hide my outsize dimensions. I scoured the Big-nTall section at Target for clothes— like those shorts—that engulfed me, clothes that hung around my body like great, big funeral palls and concealed me from public view.

Maybe this was partly to hide from the female gaze—a dreaded force in the ticklish years of middle school. The few times that a member of the opposite sex expressed interest in my physical properties, I assumed that she was joking. This body? This awkward lanky thing? My first kiss came sophomore year, a closed-mouth peck onstage in a production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, and the prospect of it so terrified me that I feigned illness during the dress rehearsal just to postpone it another day. The girl that I took to my first school dance began dating a woman a year later, and the next one was so much shorter than I was—even in four-inch heels—that we opted to skip the slow-dance entirely. The third one I ended up dating, but only to the extent that watching Hotel Rwanda on my basement couch and accidentally half-groping her left breast can be called “dating.”

That brief relationship ended shortly after our first kiss. It went like this: I positioned her carefully on a step of my porch, placed myself two The New Journal

steps below, and then attempted to press my scrunched lips against her mouth with the vigor one normally applies to scarfing down a roast-beef sandwich or blowing out a wad of birthday candles. Even today, the memory registers like an ice cube dropped down the back of my shirt.

Eventually I shed these growing pains. By the time I reached

I’m a man, I say to myself. I’m tall and strong and statistically desirable. college I had kissed a girl with actual success (we were both sitting down); I had started to purchase jeans that fit my legs and sent the old clownish corduroys to Goodwill; I had even begun to hit the gym on my own volition. But the shorts remain to this day. I’ve grown into them a little, but they still swing around noisily when I run, still shroud my legs, still look a little as though I’d snatched them from the closet of MC Hammer at his prime. I maintain an abusive relationship with these shorts, habitually tossing them into the corner, unwashed and unfolded. Perhaps this passive aggression betokens the Freudian baggage that returns whenever I tighten their drawstrings around my waist. For even as I distance myself from the psychochemical clusterfuck of puberty, I’m not quite

February 2011

ready to shed the adolescent instinct to hide, curl up, and bury my knobby limbs in voluminous nylon.

To this day, when I dress up to go out, and fix my hair in place with a few practiced swipes, and unbutton my top button so that just a tentative triangle of chest hair peeks out, I don’t quite believe the act. When late at night I break off drunken flirtations to stare at myself foggily in the glass of some bathroom mirror, I call my own bluff. I’m a man, I say to myself.

I’m tall and strong and statistically desirable. But then I blink and there’s a lanky seventh-grader, standing on the basketball court, apologizing to those he touches, swaddling himself in pendulous shorts. After all these years, I think my mind still hasn’t caught up to my body. Sometimes I have to shut it off: Only when I loosen those rangy limbs with rows of shots or packs of beers can I compel them to twine around the waist of another human being. And then, in the dark of a strange room, when my mind settles for a minute, again I want to murmur “I’m sorry” for being large and sloppy and intrusive by default.

I still don’t feel lucky to be tall. I feel far too small to be living in this body.

TNJ

Cory Finley is a senior in Calhoun College.

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www.thenewjournalatyale.com 38

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ENDNOTE

By Victor Zapana

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s a second-semester senior, with the clock ticking down to graduation, I feel compelled to make the most of my remaining time at Yale: to learn the lessons that matter, and to fill my remaining neurons with the most important information I can find.

By this, of course, I mean learn to play beer pong.

I meant Beirut. I knew that. Bei. Root.

I should have honed this skill long ago, but it can’t be that hard, right? You only need: one long table, 22 red Solo cups, two teams of two students each, another team waiting to play, and three random Yalies awkwardly watching because they don’t know anyone else at the party.

And the rules? Here are the basics, as I understand them from a single freshman-year foray into the game: 1.) Stand at one end of the table.

2.) Close your eyes.

3.) Throw a ping pong ball at the 10 cups on the other end. (They belong to the other team.)

4.) Hope that the ball drops into one of those cups.

5.) Open your eyes.

There are other rules to the game, which vary by region.

According to tradition, the original version of the game began at either

February 2011

Bucknell or Lehigh University.

Conceived in a fraternity (hopefully the only thing conceived there that year), it was named after the Lebanese city because a Hezbollah suicide bomber attacked an American camp there. (Real life too real? Keep drinking.)

After a colossal failure I won’t validate by mentioning here, I decided not to play another game of Beirut after freshman year. (Rather, none of my roommates wanted to play with me.) But I was sure I could improve. I just needed to find a tutor who was always playing the game, perfecting his techniques. I needed a Van Wilder, or that old guy in Glory Days who never graduates.

But I was afraid of fraternities. To whom could I turn?

“How can I even pretend to teach you when I have no idea myself?!” wrote Southern belle and sorority member Courtney Pannell ’11 in an e-mail. “I know this might be comical all-in-all, but I’m deeply distressed by the fact that I’m so bad at beer pong. It’s like a personal failure of mine that I cannot correct for. Can’t you get…someone who may have something more to say than ‘You just throw it at it and hope for the best?’”

Just throw it at it. Huh, I never thought of that.

I decided to test Pannell’s

strategy at Feb Club, 28 days of liquor-fueled fun, one of the last hoorahs for the senior class. At one of the parties, a group of three seniors announced that they needed a fourth player to start a game. I volunteered, ready to show how much I’d learned.

I picked up a ping-pong ball, looked at one of my opponents’ red cups, bent my arm, and—Ah! It went in! I got it in! THIS IS SO AWESOME. My team ultimately won that game, and I contributed (two cups). I said bye to those three seniors, whose names I did not catch, and moved on, saying hi to other awkwardly sipping seniors. I felt happy.

I was sure then that after I graduated Yale—and went to work sober, wallowing in memories of college—I would never play Beirut again. But I had finally learned the lesson that mattered. Whether I remembered it the next morning is another story.

TNJ

Victor Zapana is a senior in Trumbull College and a copy editor at The New Journal.

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