Volume 42 - Issue 5

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The magazine about Yale

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Haley Cohen, Kate Selker

and New Haven

BUSINESS DIRECTOR Helena Malchione

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PUBLISHERS

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Tim Shriver, Samantha Ellner

Laura Blake, Bay Gross, Julia Fisher, Helen Knight

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MANAGING EDITORS

Max Ehrenfreund, Jacqueline Feldman, PHOTO & DESIGN EDITORS Bob Jeffrey Brianne Bowen, Jane Long •

SENIOR EDITORS

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Maya Seidler, Sarah Mich

Jimmy Murphy

FRIENDS MEMBERS AND DIRECTORS Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Emily Bazelon, Roger Cohn, Peter B. Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Emily Bazelon, Anson M. Beard Jr. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Tom Griggs, , Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brooks kelley, Kathrin Lassila, Jennifer Brant, Susan Broudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Pitts, Henry Schwab, Elizabeth Sledge, Callahan, Daphne Chu, Jonathan M. Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Thomas · Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Strong Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard ADVISORS Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, SherRichard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua win Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, J_ulia Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina KelPreston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John ley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O'Brien, Laura MADE POSSIBLE BY A GRANT FROM: Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Josh Plaut, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, R. Anthony Reese, Rollin Riggs, Stuart Rohrer, Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Jessica Winter, Angela Stent Yergin •

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Art /Photo Credits:

Dwight Dickerson, Rebecca Schultz, Brianne Bowen, Jessica Letchford, Jane Long, Sarah Mich

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'IHE NEW JOURNAL

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Say a Little Prayer for Me f?y Kate 5 elker .

The interface between faith and love

34 The Last Lobsterman f?y SarahMich .

Is it the end of the line for Rich Gambarella's lobster business?

10 Public Option f?y Julia Fisher Reading between the lines at New Haven' s Public Library

POINTS OF DEPARTURE

4 Hitting a tfigh Note f?y M anssa Grunes How one New Haven organization uses music to build community •

6 Final Draft f?y H elen Knight

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The fight to Write the blue book •

7 Demanding Supplies f?y Madeleine H addon Taking art classes at Yale can be an expensive endeavor. Should Yale help its art students out?

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PROFILE Made of Mettle f?y H aley Cohen

53 year-old Dwight Dickerson was accepted to Yale College in part for his " exceptional background." So why don't most students know about it?

The ew Journal is published five rimes during the academic year by The ew Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, ew Haven, CT 06520.

Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2006 by The ew Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editor in chief is p rohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College stUdents, Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

Seventy-five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and ew Haven community. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, 18. Two years, 32. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, M.A.; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of ew Haven The ew Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and ew Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, ew Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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CRITICAL ANGLE Search Engine Failure f?y H elen Gao •

Chinese Yalies ' uncensored views of Google ' s China controversy

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PERSONAL ESSAY Interior Design f?y Kate Lind

Coming of age in a modern fam ily

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ENDNOTE That's Our M otto by B ob Jeffery

TNJ takes a look at New Hoven 's catch-a ll ca tc h phrase.

April 2010

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Hitting a High

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How one New Haven organization uses music to build community

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Tina Lee Hadari skips to the corner of the classroom with startling spunk for a woman in her third trimester. A young girl sitting in the middle of the room · pulls a bow across the strings of a cello that is almost her size. ''Am I warmer?" Hadari asks, crinkling her face into a s:mile as she peeks behind a piano for the teddy bear her student has hidden.

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Hadari is the founder of Musk .H aven, an not-for-profit organization for budding string players who live or go to school in the Hill, Dwight, Dixwell and N ewhallville neighborhoods, four of New Haven's poorest areas. Few of Music Haven's students have had experience with instrumental music before entering the program; few could afford less.o ns or instruments.

Music Haven itself is a young performer. In the fall of 2007, Hadari handed twelve youngsters wooden dowel rods with erasers on the end to practice holding . a bow. The newly-minted tnusicians, generally around seven years old, proved responsibility by bringing the dowels to class each day and not breaking them. After a year, they were handed a more precious gift a free musical mstrurnent.

For the musicians of Music Haven, community is paramount. At Music Haven, . . . . says Hadari, "this is a farrlily; we take can~ of each other." · The program's highly trained teachers violinists Tina Lee Hadari (YSM '04) and Yaira Matyakubova (YSM '05), violist Colin Benn (Bachelor of Music in '02 from Jumiard) and cellist · Elise Pittenger (YC '97) work

professional quartet, the four musicians bring world-class instrumental performances to the Elm City for free. Most chamber groups are based in an academy or conservatory, but the Haven String Quartet has an "urban residency;" the entire city is home turf. Though they play some ticketed performances ~n churches and other traditional venues, they play most concer_ts in libraries, senior residences, private homes and schools. Their aim is to make music "accessible ' to everybody within the community: financially, culturally, and location-wise" says Sarah Perkins, Program Coordinator.

Any donations from the concerts go towards the lessons program and the instruments given to students.

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AFTER A .__..AR, THEY

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hard to integrate themselves into the city fabric. Four days a week, each musician offers after-school lessons to twelve students at the Wexler Grant and John C. Daniels schools. By night, the group meets as the Haven String Quartet.

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As members of the

As a professional group, the quartet members confront matters of teamwork, accountability, and musicianship - the same ideals that they emphasize with their pupils.

Says Hadari, "we're still trying to develop all the skills we want to impart to the kids, like . communication, how we take care of each other. That's the bigger goal of Music Hav en: Through . . music, we're trying to teach them how to be part of a bigger '

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THE NEW JOURNAL

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community."

In 2007, after a year spent assembling a board of directors, applying for grants, an~ raising money, Hadari received the goahead to establish Music Haven in New Haven public schools.

She called in analysts from the Yale School of Management to conduct a needs assessment to decide where to set up residence.

The program began with twelve students. It doubled to twenty-four students in 2009 ' and trains thirty-six this year. Its waiting list projects over sixty students for next year, at which point Music Haven may be forced to cap the program. All students receive free instrurnents from Music Haven, which obtains them at wholesale discount with :help from localluthier Ute Brinkmann.

Music Haven even has a composer-in-residence Hadari's husband, acclaitned violinist Netta Hadari. Mr. Hadari composes music to accompany children's books like The Lorax and Giraffes Can't Dance, which the Quartet then performs while Mr. Hadari reads the stories. He is currently working on a piece called "Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks I .ike." The end result will give each quartet member a one-tninute solo ' played collaboratively with the New Haven Charnber Orchestra and the Music Haven kids themselves. · •

April2010

The Music Haven program is modeled after Conununity MusicWorks in Providence ' Rhode Island, a non-prc>fit organization that aims to unite a lessons program and quartet into a symbiotic entity. Hadari hopes that her quartet will "become more of a feature of the neighborhood" and "bring together a diverse audience" through local, long-standing relationships within the • commuruty.

The community members must be convinced that Music Haven will not go the way of the many other well-intentioned but shortlived endeavors that originate from Yale. Money is an ongoing concern for an organization funded largely by donations and grants.

But the program is being noticed. Music Haven recently received an Arts Award from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven in 2008 as a "Ground Breaker," an accolade given to "individuals or organizations whose fresh, raw ideas spur • mnovatlve programs." And David Brensilver, Director of Communications at the Arts council, lauds the program as something that "no one else is doing;" in bringing instrutnental lessons to students who wouldn't •

have had it before.

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Hadari does not think of Music Haven as catering to a particular group or 'serving' - disadvantaged residents, though; .instead, the organization should encourage community

members of different social ' ethnic, and cultural groups to mix. She envisions Music Haven expanding beyond the lessons progratn to become a "fun place for kids to hang out and play chamber music and talk about issues in their lives, almost like a youth group at church, but revolving around music."

The program is still finding its footing, but Hadari is conmutted to helping it adapt and grow. As Hadari says, smiling optirnistically and pau ing her own maternal bulge, ''progress comes in baby steps."

-Marissa Grunes

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Final

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The fight to write the blue book " ay what? SAYBROOI<! Say what? SAYBROOI<!" Residential ·college cheers are regularly heard at Intramural sports games, but this time, the setting isn't Yale's •

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playing fields it is a small classroom in Scheffield-SterlingSrathcona hall. After hours of preparation, the time has come - not to demonstrate athletic superiority, but to pick classes.

This is the residential college seminar draft, the cultnination of a long process of evaluation ' negotiation, and strategy.

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Most students know the Residential College Seminar Program for its nontraditional courses; recent offerings have included Christian Theology and Harry Potter, The Science of Brewing, and Hip Hop Music and Culture. Instructors· aren't Yale professors they are professionals, hailing from fields as diverse as screenwriting, children's literature, politics, rnvestment, and nonprofit management. The classes themselves are unique, but so is the student run process that gets them here in the first place.

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a period of social revolution as a response to what the yale College Dean's Office called "a · widely felt need for innovation and experimentation in the Yale College curriculum." In an effort to forge bonds between students and the administration, the Dean invited undergraduates to help build the course catalog. Four decades later, experimentation and innovation are still hallmarks of the program. College sen1inars are, in fact, required to offer something that the regular curricuhun doesn't already include. .

College seminar proposals flood Yale each semester between forty and seventy five individuals, on

read and discuss all proposals, then interview applicants before they decide which classes to select.

Each college meets candidates in a slightly different way. According to Ian Walker '1 0, head of the Si1lirnan Seminar committee, "a few colleges will try to have a block of interviews in one day. We kind of have a different philosophy ... we wine and dine our interviewees.

What we usually do is take them to dinner in Silliman dining hall, we spread it over a week or two." Davenport takes its own approach: interviews are conducted in faculty advisor Eytan Halaban's apartment to •

average, apply to teach. In each college, a srnall group of students gather with a faculty advisor to form a seminar comm1ttee.

They' e got work ahead of themconu.,..ruttee •

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Established in 1968, the sem....,...,lnar program "vas born during •

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members must

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contribute a homier feel to the process.

whole experience: "It's like the United Nations of colleges."

According to Shaw, Branford's seminar committee develops a detailed strategy before entering the draw. They determine a ranking of desirability for their choices, and decide how much •

When interviews are finished and applications are read, the committees must pick their top choice courses. They need to find which ones are most engaging, to sift through what's fun as a concept and determine what works as a class. According to Balaban, "a lot of proposals come that are frivolous. A subject is taken and given a sexy title."

It's up to the students to see through the title and make sure the syllabus itself is up to par.

What one committee finds compelling, another might find unappealing. That's a good thing - while all the colleges read all the applications, each can select only.t:Wo per semester. If they all pick the same favorite class, . they've got to fight for it later on. According to Geoff Shaw '1 0, former seminar committee coordinator for Branford, "there is never an objectively most popular class ... One tini.e, there was a class on I-banking that I thought would be the most popular - I thought it would go in a flash, but it didn't wind up going soon."

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The process finally concludes at the long-awaited "draft." Coordinators from every college meet to battle amongst each other in the name of academic selection. It can get intense. Walker sununed up the April2010

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they are willing to compromise in the sponsorship of certain courses.

But Branford's biggest rival puts them to the test.

"Saybrook is very passionate about the committee," Walker reports. "They're very passionate about the whole seminar process.

They have people come to the draft in Saybrook gear, facepaints.

It's really funny and it lightens the mood. I kind of wish more colleges did it."

Though one Davenport representative described the draft is "a passive-aggressive cutthroat process," Shaw and Walker categorized it as "collegial" and "friendly competition," respectively. Most seminar committee members will take . few, if any, of the courses they've personally picked; for them, the tirne and emotion invested in the draft comes down to residential college loyalty. To each college their own, and may the best class •

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-Helen Knight

Demanding Supplies Taking art classes at Yale can be an expensive endeavor. Should Yale help ·its art students out?

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The starving artist survives on canned beans and spends his or her pinched pennies on canned paint instead. The image is fan1iliar, cliched. Yale's undergraduate Art students are by no means starving, but they face far higher expenses than our other majors do. Liberal arts universities such as Yale pride themselves on their ability to offer students nearly absolute freedom in crafting their academic careers.

But for Art students at Yale, this freedom comes with a price tag literally.

Yale Art majors have been known to purchase up to $1000 in materials for a single class.

Art major Chika Ota '11 never spends less than $200 on materials each semester; she adds that oil painters and photographers often spend upwards of $500.

Art materials are generally more expensive than course books, and they don't come used. Moreover, art students often feel that the highest quality n1aterials tnake the highest quality art; if they can't afford them, they're at an artistic disadvantage.

In addition to the costs of buying personal materials, most art classes at Yale require an extra class n•aterials fee. These range from ·25 to 150 - the more •

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advanced the class, the steeper

on financial aid could afford to

of projects can vary so greatly

the price.

Most art students finance

take Yale's undergraduate art courses. Though the school often subsidizes academic books for students on financial aid, they

between classes and students.

"Some person might require a lot of material, and another person very little and both could

their own work through jobs during the school year. Ota has two jobs that help cover the costs. Another art student, Fidel Gurrola '12, has a job at the Art

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School and digs into his personal savings if his salary alone can't

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cover the cost of supplies.

Resources like the Digital Media Center for the Arts (DMCA), a building on York Street that houses top of the line technology for audio, visual, and printed work, also come with price tags .

In the DMCA students can rent digita,l cameras, digital video cameras, microphones, field lighting and recording equipment -- but they must pay to do so. According to Ken Lovell, the Associate Director of the DMCA, this is the school's way of showing to1.;1gh love. The facility exists, he explains, ""to train people to do the work themselves" instead of paying someone else to do it for them, ultirnately helping them to become more self-sufficient artists. He said, "their mission is to show you how to do your work, not to do your work for you."

Even keeping that in mind:J ies hard to imagine how students

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be equally good for equal reasons. It's better for students to take responsibility for their expenses," he said.

Our rival Uni•

versity has a different take on the matter. At Harvard, Art majors are not expected to fund eqwpment or materials for any dass.

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PECTED .TO FUND E DIPMENTOR TERI SFOR Y CLASS.

will not chip in towards the costs of art fees or materials. Van Assen, a member of the Art School faculty, explains that it would be difficult for Yale to fund under-

graduate work because the costs

Instead:J they are given a budget for the semester, usually between $150 to $600, to use at their discretion.

Harvard Art student Isidore Bethel '11, expressed that this stipend has helped the art major from becoming financially exclusive. Bethel is on a full scholarship at Harvard, and said that the Art department's subsidies were one of the reasons he chose the school in the first place.

The difference in subsidy raises questions about Yale's investment in their artists. The University has produced successful artists from both its undergraduate and graduate progra tns, such as sculptor Jessica Stockholder MFA '85, who is now a faculty member of the Yale School of •

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Art. If the school values their contribution, some students wonder, why don't they fund it?

Science students don't have to pay for their lab space, their equipment, or their chemicals. Why should art students be forced to pay for their paint and clay?

This year the art department counts 50 majors who were not deterred by the costs of pursuing their craft.

"Students are willing to set aside certain things that will allow them to do whatever they are passionate about." Van Assen explained. He sees it as a "matter of malcing choices." According to him, the ideal students will give up the luxuries that their peers enjoy in order to pursue their craft.

To Van Assen's pleasure, and to the credit of many of the faculty within the art school, many Yale art students agree that the work they produce is worth the costs. Instead of shelling out cash for summer travels or unpaid internships, some Art students work all summer long. to make enough to buy that new camera or new set of paints that they need.

Others are particularly economical with their spending during the school year. "I don't really buy anything I don't need," Ora says. Many art students don't view this frugal lifestyle as a punishment, but rather an unavoidable trade off in order to pursue what it is that they love. "What I am spending now is \ery important .\pn12010

for building a portfolio for later," says Fidel Gurrola '12, who hopes to be a graphic designer after graduation.

Gurrola's passion is admirable, but for some students, passion can't pay the bills. If our University wants to keep its talented artists, then it should not make its artists give up so much for their work.

While the starving artistin-training sentiment may have its place, it isn't at Yale. Yale has money. T he artists have talent.

Yale wants talent. Student artists need money. I t's in the University's hands to strike an even trade.

-Madeleine Haddon

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Reading between the lines at New Haven' s Public Library

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. by Julia Fisher

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At Yale, we do not •

. for public readings of student

the library's Head of Circulation/

simply house books, we worship

writing, and it's where a number

Access Services, estimates that

them. Sterling Memorial Library,

of Yalies do community service,

only one Yale student visits the

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according to its architect James

helping visitors with tax forms or

Gable Rogers, is a "Cathedral of

technology. Some Yale students

Learning" and Beinecke bears

use the library's local history

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resemblance to a marble-walled shrine. Our library system is the fourth .largest in the country,

room, which is home to old maps, city directories, and newspapers, for research.

closer to 0 ld Campus than

library, there's no line. Actually,

THES

Sterling itself, is the New Haven

there's not a single person on the library steps. A few people walk

Public Library. Though it is often

THE SAME TABLE IN THE BACI<CORNEROFTHE FIRST FLOOR RFJADING ROOM. •

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The Public Library may have fewer books than Yale's · library system, but each is more carefully selected for popular interest. Besides, while New

The library is supposed to open at

I arrive early. When I get to the

volutnes. Right off of the Green,

devotees.

on the Saturday before Easter.

forms before opening time, so

holding upward of 12 million

this city library has its own

I arrive for a visit at 9:39

10:00, but I've heard a line usually •

overlooked by University students,

library each day.

by on the street, but no one stops.

The website had told me the library was closed yesterday for Good Friday, but it said nothing of Saturday. A sign on the door •

indicates otherwise. "GOOD FRIDAY," says the printed sign: ''We Will Close For This Holiday."

But someone has reconsidered

Haven residents can visit Yale's .

and left a mark in Sharpie. ''Both

libraries during the day, they can't

GOOD FRIDAY + Saturday,

take out books for free, like they can at the Public Library.

Kathy DeNigris, the Chief of Public Services, guesses a mere 150 current Yalies hold library

Most interactions between Yale and the New Haven Public Library aren't for checking out books. It's sometitnes a site 10

April 3."

cards. "They're probably checking out bestsellers

and films are

huge," she said. Maria Tonelli,

As it turns out, many of the library's visitors hadn't gotten the message, either. A man saunters up to the doors a couple minutes aftet; I've arrived. He's 'H-IE ffi\\ JOURNAL

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shirt expresses disappointment

people visit. The same man sits at

and scruffy. He's wearing a dirty

before leaving. He arrives· alone,

the same table in the back corner

white tank top, a blue denirn

tugs on the doors a few times, and

of the first floor reading room.

jacket, and sandals. When he

grunts loudly before heading back

flis name is George Nelson, and

reaches the library's double front

to the Green.

he's leaning back in his chair.

maybe in his 60s

.older

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short,

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Nelson visits the library every

doors, he pulls. Nothing. He When I return on a

pulls again, then tries the other

Wednesday afternoon, I meet

door. He looks around, slowly

Alberta Taylor standing idly on

)Urns back and proceeds slowly •

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down the steps, hands in his

the steps. She has just left the

and Facebook, as he 9oesn't have

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a computer at home in Hamden.

He far prefers the New Haven library to the Hamden one,

pockets. He leans against a railing, standing idly, looks around for a minute, moves to the edge of the

BUT THE

though. Here, he says, "I know

ARI~

everybody." He sees friends from

SO A LLFULFEW · WHOSTICI< TO RPJADING __ ..

-sidewalk. He watches, as if about to cross the street, but several minutes pass and no traffic blocks his path.

other day, mostly to use M ySpace _

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Finally, I approach him.

school

he graduated two years

back and now works busing tables at the Omni Hotel

and family.

While we're talking, he sees his cousin across the room and stops to greet her. _ ·

'Were you trying to go into the •

library. ''I was trying to learn

library?" I ask.

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He looks at me. Pauses . .

Slowly, he responds: "No, no."

people every day, doing the

she tells me. She's been going to

sa_me things. And he sticks to his

school

routine: He uses the computers.

adult classes

for the

I thank hirn. I walk away. A

minute later, he crosses the street

been going recendy because she's

onto the Green, and he's gone.

working as a full-rime babysitter.

Her friends would use the library,

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how to take care of my math,"

last two years, though she hasn't

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In the next twelve minutes,

too, she says, if they were ''out

fourteen people try to enter the

here." But, she adds ''I don't have ~

library. Some arrive by car or

friends no more. Some of them

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bike, but rnost are on foot. A

Nelson sees all the same

are locked up."

"No books," he says as soon as I mention the library's other offering. Nelson isn't alone in passing on books. The larger attraction at the library is its mass of free computers

one needs

only a library card to access one of the seventy-five machines.

mom drops off her high school \

Taylor stands in the middle

daughter in a white pickup truck.

They're hea\-1.ly used by visitors,

A minute later, the girl is back,

of the stairs for a while, no\v one

especially by those looking for

dur nping her iPod and books in

of the small crowd of library

jobs in this hostile economy. In

the car. "They open at noon,"

loiterers, and I go inside.

recent years, many jobs have

she says, though I see no such indication.

Only a tall man in a red pril2010

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The

ew Haven Library,

like the books it holds, doesn't change much each day. The arne

required applicants to complete all application materials online, so

those who don't own computer come to the library. The library

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maintains a jobs task force with resolirces for the unemployed.

Now, Echols checks out five or six books every week. He reads about history, economics,

But there are also the willful few who stick to reading.

In the back of the library's main level, Everett Echols leans over the WallS treet Journal. He '

. is surrounded by books and newspapers. Under the Journal is the New York Times; next to him

HE STARTED TH WAITING FOR GO DOT.

philosophy, mathematics, and physics. "I like to read," he says several times. He started with Waitingfor Godot. which he picked up off a shelf in a library in Cleveland for no particular reason. "I just continued reading." '

Alterations

He moved on to Sartre, Camus, Virginia Woolf. He doesn't like

Tailoring

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fiction much anymore

turning

Fur · SlipCovers )ry Oeaning

instead to works like Principles of

T"'OII

Corporate Finance.

Suormi Shittsand

Echols doesn't talk to

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others at the library, though he is a bulky tome titled Principles of

SAME DAY SERVICE: IN BY roAM, OUT BY 5 PM

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recognizes many of the people

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Corporate Finance, which he says is

there. The library offers a variety

STORAGE'

of programs for its visitors, but

his favorite book.

51 Broadway ext to theYale (203) . ... 546

Echols has never gone to any. He Like Nelson, Echols comes to the library every day. He sits at the same table every day

unless it's

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talks quietly, slowly. It's clear he'd like to get back to his reading. I let

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him, and leave him to the quiet.

Mon-Fri 7-6; Sat8-5

taken. He sees "the same crowd

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every day." He arrives around noon

"I get up, I eat, then I

come here"

and stays until

closing. "Usually people have their

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Julia Fisher is a freshman in Berkelry College and an associate editor of TNJ

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routine," he says. This is his.

Echols has been retired for twenty years. Born and raised in Cleveland, Echols never went to college, instead working at McDonald's and in several other jobs in the service industry. He came to

ew Haven many ears

ago to work on Long Wharf, loading and unloading.

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Telephone: 20S.582...Q322

Fax.: 'IHE NEW JOURNAL

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The union of faith and romance

by Kate S elker ___..eah Libresco '12 hoped that her boyfriend, Chris Pagiriella '12, could find her a very particular Valentine's Day Card.

"I told him he didn't have to get me one unless he could find one that said, 'I love you so much that I am accidental!J condemningyou to hell f?y wishingyou existed. m She tells me.

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Chris looked. "But it wasn't in the Yale Book store! Not the first or second floor," he laments.

The romantic sentiment, which didn't quite make it to Hallrnark, began with a wild hypothetical:

Would Chri~ a practicing Catholic, rather have Leah, an ardent atheist, exist with her heart hardened complete!J against Christforever- or would he rather she did not exist at all?

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Chris thought for a moment. ''Well I'd probably wish you existed, but that would be for selfish reasons." He's in love.

Come Hell or high water, he wants her by his side.

Conunons is a cavernous, cro\.vded space, but when I meet · Leah and Chris in the back, they only see each other. Throughout 16

our conversation, Leah will squeeze Chris' cheek or he'll pat down her hair. When one puts . an elbow on the table, the other soon follows, and when one leans back, it's only a matter of tirne before the other is tipping in his or her chair. (I've read about this "chameleon effect" in psychology class - when a couple is close, they unconsciously mirnic each others' reactions.) .

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'12 in the Slifka Center, which serves as a hub of Jewish life at Yale. She is small and brown haired, with a cheery, high cheeked smile; he has a politician's gaze and blue eyes. They speak to me frofi! the same bench, opting to squeeze in next to each other instead of spreading out in separate chairs. He leans on her shoulder.

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Chris and Leah have agreed, along with three other couples, to be interviewed about religion and relationships at Yale. It's the type of stuff you're never supposed to bring up at a cocktail party.

We're told to avoid politics, avoid God, avoid talking about your great boyfriend or your horrible ex. But there's so much to learn if we do. Chris and Leah, Sloane and Harris, Jessica and Roland, and Michelle and Alan have let me into their private lives. So they talk, and I listen.

BY E .

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UIREDTO ~SEX

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Can you have sex on Shabbat?

I ask the pair. Shabbat is the tirne between Friday night and Saturday evening, considered holy in the Jewish tradition.

for Sloane Heller '12, is about doing a good deed. I meet her and her boyfriend Harris Eppsteiener

Sloane nods furiously. ''DOUBLE MITZVAH!" Mitzvot ' are acts of hun1an kindness. By THE NEW JOURNAL

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Harris corrects her. "No no no, that's basically only if you're married.''

Then again, they admit, college kids sometimes ignore that part.

And besides, Sloane and Harris argue, J udiasm is very pro sex. ''Within the context of the family, it's absolutely encouraged," Sloane explains. "There are passages in the Talmud, which is the main text of Jewish law, about how to please your wife."

"I've never read them." Harris adrnits.

Sloane turns to look at her • boyfriend. "I have. " . ·-

fn truth, they explain, it's more about procreation than pleasure.

By Jewish law, men are required to have sex with their wives. (There are some logistical dispensations.

"If you're a sailor, you can do it . notes.) £ewer t1.rnes,"Harns "Jewish babies! Yay!" Sloane exclairns.

But she's serious. "Since the Holocaust, there's a very prevalent fear in our grandparents' generation that we could be wiped out. And that's a very visceral thing, because all of my grandparents' friends were survivors.'' She looks at Harris.

"Barbara" she says. .

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it brings the greatest happiness

"Babs," she clarifies.

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"Oh, Babs." He gets it now.

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Babs is Sloane's grandmother; . the majority of her friends are Holocaust surVivors. With so many people murdered under Hider's rule, it makes sense that Babs' generation feels strongly about making sure the religion doesn't die out. And since Judiasm doesn't proselytize, the only way to perpetuate the religion is by raising Jewish children.

"It's the first commandment in the 613 commandments!" Harris says. "Be fruitful and multiply."

For a Protestant opinion, I talk with Jessica Letchford '11. She's dating a fellow Christian, Roland Reimers '11, long distance while he spends a semester abroad in Beijing. Jessica talks to me about their relationship from a bench in the Davenport courtyard, her blonde hair glows in the sunlight.

Roland emails me about Jessica from China. "Our fundamental trust in God is what binds us closely together," he-writes.

"Since we have assurance in God's plan for us no matter what, we can just enjoy our relationship exactly the way it is."

Jessica, too, says sex has it's place in religion -- when it is between a pair united in • matnmony.

"I think that God created sex to be a really good thing, but that

and the greatest fulfillment in the context that He created it for." That·context is marriage.

According to the Bible, Jessica tells me, God intended the relationship between a man and a woman to mirror the bond between Christ and the church.

As such, it shall be sacred.

RITUALS are common across religions.

Leah, the atheist, was skeptical of the ones performed at Chris' Catholic Mass. "At first, to be honest, it looked like when you watch a fantasy movie," she tells me. "There are these bizarre and arcane rituals!"

"I love your National Geographic take on this," Chris responds.

She softens somewhat.

"Mass doesn't seem to touch on Catholicism that much, but rather just on being decent people. I was su t prised," she acqmesces.

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Chris smiles goofily at his girlfriend. Leah turns to look at n1.e. She's read his mind.

"He thinks you can't ha e objective morality without God," she says, and Chris nods .

At least they're on the same page about how they disagree.

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Sloane and Harris, for their '~nd if you each grow part, keep Shomer Shabbat. The closer to God, you grow closer practice means different things to together!" she explains. different people, but it's mainly So they pray together, even about observing the Sabbath's though they're far apart. Skype is prohibition on work. From Friday their virtual chapeL at sundown until Saturday night, Harris doesn't use money, cook, ''We both close our eyes, and . . write, use his computer, or drive usually one will pray first, and a car. · the other one will pray next. We pray out loud together. We'll · "l .don't use lights." Sloane pray for each other and for each explains. She and Harris don't other's friends, and pray for our use their cell phones on Shab bat, relationship," Jessica tells me. either. (fhis can make it hard to meet up with friends on a Friday Roland writes to me that night.) But Sloane breaks one praying.over Skype "reaffirms and particular rule. cements the fact that we, first and .

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"I do take showers." She looks at Harris. "That shower's for you. That's a gift" she tells hirn, then looks over to me. ''You're not supposed to shower because you're hot supposed to heat water'' she explains.

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Harris smiles.

Jessica says she misses Roland.

But they, too, share a ritual that keeps them close to each other, by' keeping them close to God.

foremost, want to look to God for ever · g in our life, before we look to each other. Fears and co'ncerns that we have - whether about school work and classes, looking for jobs and grad schools, or o~her post-graduation plans - don't seem nearly as daunting when we can pray about them openly and honestly with each other."

For them, the ritual of prayer brings comfort. It works.

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S EIS THEIR VIRTUe PEL Christian relationships, according to Jessica, are like a triangle. God's at the top, and each partner forms a bottom corner.

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works, too. I learn this from Alan Wesson '11 and Michelle Ho '11; Alan's been a life-long Christian, but Michelle just recently joined the faith. One of their first shared experiences was at Alan's church. He'd invited

Michelle and two other friends, and none of the three were religious.

"One of them was like, 'Yeah, I don't think I'm going to find God in a church.' The other one found it hard to believe, too, because science makes sense to him," Alan remembers.

But Michelle was different.

She left the church changed. At that time, Michelle was absorbed in thoughts of her fatnily back home, and how she missed them.

The pastor spoke about love and cotnrnunity. He spoke more about people than about God. •

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"It was just like, oh, this is speaking right to me," she remembers. "That's what I needed to hear." Over the sutnrner, Michelle stayed at Yale, and the Christian community here welcomed her.

"Just through potlucks, and talking," she found her place in the Church. "My needs were being filled all over the place," she explains.

The process was moving for Alan, too. His world changed.

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"I just sat there, and I remember clearly he referenced 1 Corinthians 13, the passage about what love is." It felt right to her.

The choir started playing ''Your Love Never Fails," and Michelle was tnoved to tears.

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just remember being like, wait! Wait! What's going on? It was a paradigm shift- that Jesus can talk to people no matter what their background is." Michelle's mom had been Catholic, her dad had been Buddhist, and she'd never really been either.

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J.e y o "ten ta [(. a ::>out re 11g1on' and they often disagree. So, recently, they made a deal. As they tell me about, Chris and Leah go from holding hands to playing a feisty game of thumb war.

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"I wanted bim to dance with me at the Yale Political Union Ball. So I told him if he went to ~

''I was raised nothing," she tells me. With Alan's stray suggestion, she found something.

Chris and Leah are constant thinkers. They started sharing religion as part of an intellectual bargain. Do they ever have arguments about their beliefs?

"Oh rny goodness, we have them all the tirne!" Leah tells me.

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says, "which I really appreciated."

The thurnb war continues. ''As much as I make fun of Mass," Leah notes, ''I'm also pretty glad I go now. It's an important part of Chris' life.

And I like being able to have argurnents."

Chris' face breaks into a smile.

ballroom dancing with me for two hours, I would go to Mass with him. I'm still not Catholic, but he knows how to waltz!" She laughs.

Chris looks at her.

"You went on holy days," he

can be difficult. After Michelle's freshman year, she and her big brother sat together outside, watching the Perseid Meteor shower.

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"I just kind of popped it up, like, 'By the way, . I think I might've become Christian in the past couple months,"' she recalls. '

Her brother was surprised. He pushed back. ''He started asking questions · like 'How do you know the difference between God's love and people's love?' and 'Why does -

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the world keep turning if people don't believe?' These questions got me pretty flustered."

As Michelle speaks. today, she waves her hands around to help explain. Alan watches her closely.

wants Catholic grandkids, and

For Chris, God and rationality both serve important roles in the world; he's ·quick to ·apply academic rigor to his faith.

Chris is under some pressure to supply. Ms. Pagliarella, however, approves of Leah, even if she holds out hope that she'll convert. .

"I did a lot of research on

Chris explains that his mom and dad have gotten used to the idea of Leah. ''You'd think it'd be problematic that I'd bring home a liberal, bisexual, atheist Jew from Long Island," but despite it all, his parents have gladly welcomed Leah into their home on breaks.

If she doesn't keep the kids from growing up Catholic, eve.t;ything will be just fine.

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the historicity ofJesus and the Gospels, and it was a hypothesis I could·believe in," he·explains. .

Leah coughs a little, and Chris reaches out to pat her on the back . and continues, "The ·historical arguments are there~ I believe in Jesus as a man and as a part of the conception of the Trinity and God. I try to critically evaluate each Gospel claitn."

That works for Leah. She · . won't keep them from growing up anything they don't want to be. "I wouldn't stop hitn from taking the children to church," she explains.

"I ·should be strong enough in my truth c1aitn that it shouldn't be hurt by the fact that somebody saw the Cross."

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"I've never really seen a persuasive case" for God, she tells me, and, looking at Chris, adds, "despite many efforts."

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She calms as she comes to her conclusion: It took her brother a minute to grasp, but he understood her·conviction.

It wasn't that he didn't support her choice, but simply that he wouldn't have made it for hi tnself

"For hirn," Michelle told me, "ever · g, even down to feelings, can be explained by science, something other than God." And for him, that was enough.

She rubs his head. He rubs hers.

Michelle's mother, too, had • • oplllions.

PARENTS have ideas of their own. Chris' parents are very religious. Leah's parents are very much not. Her nineteenth-century ancestors were among the Europeans first printing Ernile Zola's radically socialistic, naturalistic books.

If Leah ever converted to Christianity, I ask, would her parents support it?

"Oh, they'd kill me," she exclairns.

"My morn and I have this running joke that boys need to 'apply' to be my boyfriend, and when I went home she really expressed concern about me dating Alan."

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Alan had plans to follow his religion to wherever it led him, and this wasn't safe enough for Michelle's mom. Faith did not guarantee a lucrative job, and Michelle's mother knew this.

Just don't tell Chris' mom. She 20

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Leah begs to differ.

"I would try to answer, and it would be pretty circular," she says.

"I kept referring to this 'litnitless feeling' that was 'pooling from this ocean of love,' and I just got flustered, and really frustrated, . because I thought, 'you're asking the wrong questions!"'

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"She was like, 'you need to be financially stable,"' Michelle explains.

When Michelle came home

what it would mean for my life

lucrative.

and your life if we decided to "It's like the security of the American dream, tossed out the window." He holds his arms out in front of hitn, to demonstrate .

stick together for the long haul."

Michelle plays with the side of her chair and looks towards the far corner of the room. .

.after break, she told Alan what her mom had said. '~nd he was just like, 'if there's an · g •

that could break us up, it's your mom."'

Alan's face gets serious and he nods. He stars speaking slowly. "I guess I should imagine more what it might feel like to be your mom," he says. "Like, I came on a boat from Vietnam and created a life for my family.

I sacrificed a lot to make sure Michelle had ever · g she wanted and needed to succeed, and now she's at Yale University and she seems to be floating, because she met this boy, talking this jivetalk about Jesus, but he doesn't have a concrete way to take care of my daughter-:-" and here~~Alan pauses, then speaks for ...· hirnself. '~d I think that's a valid question." He sighs, looks up · and away, put his hands under his knees and sits on them.

THE FUTURE then, isn't always clear.

But the couples I spoke to couples have faith that it's going to be O.K. "I worry about things sometirnes." Alan tells me, then turns back to look at Michelle. "I get anxious when I think about · pril2010

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"Like, "SECURITY!" and toss it out, five stories down."

in, how could we do that,

where following where Jesus might take us, knowing that we could be in the suburbs of a major city, but could also be in a slun1 in India!"

Michelle laughs now. Alan does, too.

"Just to make an extreme point," he clarifies. "I ask myself a lot of hard questions about well, ~an, you do have crazy ideas about your life, do you realize Michelle might not want to live in Fellowship Place for a year while you are chaplain, Michelle might · not want to go to Washington state and work with incarcerated prisoners, she might actually want to settle down and have a family!"'

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Michelle laughs again. No matter their circumstances, it seems, they'll be keeping tabs on each other.

We talk about a lot," she says.

Alan agrees.

"We have a library of conversations we need to talk about," he says. "But it bodes well for the future if we have things to talk about in restaurants when we're old." · Michelle smiles. "I have this overwhelming feeling that this is solid," she says. · We can pray for the best.

He pauses, then continues.

"Or, I think, 'you might actually want to settle down and have a family, Alan!"'

Kate 5 is a junior in Davvenport College and Co-Editor-in-Chief of

TN]

Michelle looks up; she's surprised. She smiles _at Alan. She looks back down towards the floor.

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Alan explains a little more of the dangers the two of them might face. A life spent in religious service isn't always •

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53 year-old Dwight Dickerson was accepted to Yale College in part for his "exceptional background." So why don't niost students know about it?

by Hairy Cohen .

, Many Yale undergraduates are surpri~ed to encounter Dwight Dickerson in their Spanish seminars and Political Psychology lectures. His usual uniform is collegiate enough - black Velcro sneakers, blue jeans, a black pinstriped button-down left untucked and a grey Yale Bulldogs sweatshirt but his bald head and . . the white hairs salting his pepper black mustache suggest he is a fair bit older than your average undergraduate. .

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Dwight sees them staring, and sometitnes even whispering about what he's doing in the classroom. Is he really an undergraduate? Perhaps he's just auditing? How old is he?

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If he wanted to, Dwight coUld volunteer that he is indeed an undergraduate - a 53- year-old . senior. He could tell them about the obstacles he overcame on his sinuous path to Yale - how he grew up in the poorest area of the South Bronx where he was once shot in the leg, how he had to drop out of Howard University when both of his

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parents passed away in the same year, or how his father's mistress . . seized his meager inheritance. He could reveal how he lost his job after September 11th, and had to -

work five temp jobs to stay afloat.

When his classmates complain about their overwhelming slew of exams and extra-curriculars, he could mention that in addition to taking classes~ he works 11 :30pm to 6:30am seven days a week as an inspector at the Sikorsky helicopter plant. He could tell them that his ·w ife is ill making him the sole breadwinner for his family of four.

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He could tell them all this if he wanted. But Dwight doesn't want to draw attention to himself, and sensing that his background is different, his .younger peers don't want to pry.

When I first met Dwight in my discussion section for Colonial Latin America, an undergraduate history course, I was one of those undergraduates too nervous to ask him about his background.

How would I even phrase the question, I wondered. How are

you here? No. Why are you here?

No, definitely not. Why are you so old? Even worse.

I resorted to asking other people in my section about Dwight. Though everyone I asked was intrigued, no one had any answers. One friend responded that she had once been in class with another older man - his name was Robert Johnson '10 and he was an active duty officer in the United States Army. She explained that he was part of "the Eli Whitney something or other", unable to remember the program's official name.

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Suspecting that Dwight might be part of the satne progratn, I visited the website for more clues. The most protninent item on the strikingly sparse and archaic homepage was a video titled 'CVoices of the Eli Whitney Students Program.''

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· I knew that voice: deliberate, articulate with pauses for reflection. "I would not have had an inkling of an idea that that would happen to an -individual like myself from the South Bronx ...

But it has."

Since 2004, Dwight has attended Yale as an Eli

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Whitney student. Previously known as Yale's Special Student program, the Eli Whitney Student prograrn accepts "nontraditional" students to work towards Yale bachelor's degrees.

These students are usually older than typical undergraduates because their college plans have been postponed or interrupted.

They are selected, according to .the prograrn's website, for .their unique life experiences and perspective that 18 to 22 year-old undergraduates simply cannot offer.

Past and current Eli Whitney students run the garnut from Mike Richter, a former goalie for the New York Rangers, to 25 year-old used car salesmancum-financial advisor William Chmelar and gay rights activist Gregg Gonsalves. The prograrn garnered international media attention in 2006 when former Taliban spokesman atullah Hashemi applied. Hashemi had sta1 ted talcing classes at Yale in September 2005 on the nondegree track, and applied for degree status -as an Eli Whitney April2010

student in Spring 2006. Possibly because of the controversy _ . sparked by his presence at Yale • even as a non-degree student, Hashemi was denied from the Eli Whitney students program - a ·decision that prompted even more . press. But in spite of the ample coverage of Hashemi, the Eli Whitney Students program and its participants still remain under the radar, relatively mysterious. ·

IN ADDITION TOTAI<ING CLASSES, HE wo s 11:30 PMTO 6:30 SE NDAYS A EK .

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My restraint eroded, I shot Dwight an email and asked if he would share his story. Instead of being offended that I'd violated his privacy, Dwight welcomed me into his world, insisting that I call hirn Dwight instead of Mr. Dickerson.

"I arn more than willing to do this," he wrote. ''The question I pose is: are you?"

The following week I find myself in a basement classroom in Rosenkranz Hall, where Norms and Deviance, Dwight's sociology class, meets every Monday. Taught by renowned ethnographer Elijah

Anderson, the sen1inar covers the origins, development and reactions surrounding deviance in •

contemporary soctety.

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Dwight flips deliberately through his copy of John Hope Franklin's autobiography Mirror to America. The book details Franklin's path from childhood in segregated Oklahoma to serving as first black president of the American Historical society.

Dwight has coated the book's pages with highlighter and penned notes. Unlike many undergrads at Yale, he actually seems to finish his reading.

Anderson calls on him, and he launches into a comment, subtly gesticulating as he speaks.

"I agree with Bianca's deduction that in parts of this book, Franklin tries to downplay his race." Dwight speaks slowly, taking ti rne to think and pause, picking just the right word. ''But even though he never directly alluded to it, there wasn't an hour where race wasn't an issue."

"The fact that he's black and grew up in the inner city in the '60s and '70s gives hin1 a different perspective than a lot of the other kids in class," explains Professor Anderson, Dwight's professor for Norms and Deviance. ''But he doesn't bring his background into his cornrnents much, it just comes out with conunenta 1 y." He adds, without a hint of irony, "He's a 23

\¡cr} bright young man." \\"hile Dwight's two classes last semester, Norms and Deviance and Colonial Latin 1\merica, might seem a light workload to your aYerage )ale undergraduate, your aYerage Yale undergraduates also don't work 6 7 c..lays a week from 11 :30 p.m. to 6 a.m. And if they did, you would probably find those normal Yale students sleeping in their free time instead of playing piano for the local church band, volunteering at a program to aid previously incarcerated indh iduals readjust to everyday life and singing on sales-"\vorthy demo CDs.

classroom, when it comes to Eli Whitney students, a tacit policy of ÂŤdon't ask don't tell"seems to be in effect. Younger Yalies don't want to seem rude by peppering their older peers with personal questions, and the Eli \X'hitney students keep quiet, wanting to assimilate as best they can. While this unofficial system protects the privacy of the Eli Whitney students, it also fails to honor the accomplishments that earned them positions at Yale.

Dwight invites me to spend a Saturday with him so I can better understand his life outside academia. He begins the day at 9:30 a.m. with band rehearsal for Sunday services at Church on the Rock, a cinderblock cube in ).Jew Haven's Long Wharf neighborhood.

When! walk into the Church's airy auditorium, I immediately spot Dwight on the stage, leaning over the piano.

He is dressed in his usual outfit: black Velcro sneakers, a black turtleneck tucked into jeans, and a gold cross Dwight at his home srudio. on a chain. His oftLastly, your average Yale worn Bulldogs sweatshirt drapes stuc..lcnts probably don't know any over a front row chair facing the stage. of these things about Dwight.

Both in and out of the 24

The room looks more like a

United ations conference room than a place of worship. Flags from Japan, Brazil, Jamaica and Scotland hang on the back wall, and there arc no stained glass windows, carvings of saints, or other religious symbols anywhere in sight. The only sign of the room's function is an inscription carved above the stage: "For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations ... - Isaiah."

Except for Dwight, a drummer, and a sprinkling of college-aged girls choreographing dances to gospel songs, the space is empty. Dwight checks his watch. It is pushing 9:50 a.m.; practice was slated to start twenty minutes ago. Dwight taps his foot an."<iously as his band mates slowly trickle in. He's on a tight schedule, and tardiness can throw things off.

At around 10 a.m. the conductor of the Church on the Rocks band arrh~es, a tall, broad shouldered man named Jason.

Dwight and Jason hug and slap each other on the back before Jason puts his arm around Dwight and leads him down the stairs off the stage. He summons the rest of the band, the dancers, and the singers to circle up. They join hands and .Jason leads the group in prayer, so impassioned he is almost shouting.

"Call us forward to prepare us, Lord God, soldiers in your name Lord God. Let

us inspire the young people to explode in the midst of worship, Lord God. Make us ready, Lord God!" .

onto his leg.

After rehearsal ends, Dwight and I jump in his silver 2003 Chrysler and drive to his - home on Westminster Street.

Painted · tachio and

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"Sit, Elliot! You know •

·better!" The dog drops to the •

floor for a few seconds before

They release hands and assume their appropriate positions at instruments or microphones.

Jason gives the go-ahead, and the music begins.

Is it enough to gather in . this place?The worship dancers

twirl across the floor and make sweeping movements with their - arms as if reaching to heaven.

Is it enough to liftyour hands in praise? The singers belt into their

microphones, eyes closed, rocking back and forth. You want it all: my spirilj mind and heart. Amidst this emQtional scene, Dwight seems ~

strit:ngely collected. He leans over his~ keyboard like a brain surgeon over his patient, meticulously following the notes on his music.

Dwight loosens up a little bit for the next song. He taps . his foot bobs his head, and in a ' rare moment of impulsiveness even sweeps his fingers across the keyboard. Perhaps because he's had to improvise so much in his life, Dwight adrnits he is mildly uncomfortable with musical spontaneity. He likes to have a plan, a blueprint that lets bitn know exactly what to do and when to do it. ''I don't like to be vulnerable," he explains.

April2010

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· Dwight as a young trurnpeter

surrounded by a snowy white picket fence, Dwight's house is inviting and homey. As we pull up behind the house Dwight rnutters something about needing to rake the "damn lea es," but otherwise he seems vet} proud of his home. He unlocks the door and a fluffy white dog catapults

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hopping up on my leg instead. ''Elliot)' D-wight ·warns.

The dog hits the ground. "Elliot's my daughtees dog, but for some reason that I can't figure out, he likes me the best. Oooh," Dwight says, remembering something. He rnotions for me to come to the rnantle. ''C'mere I want to how .

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you this."

He holds up a faded photograph of a woman and a man standing in front of a brick building with a fire escape snaking down the exterior. The pair is nicely dressed- the man in a suit arid the woman in a skirt suit and hat with lacey appliques. Only the woman is smiling.

"My parents," Dwight says, nearly whispering.

Born November 6th, 1956, to Elmore and Dora Dickerson, Dwight was the ninth of ten children. Five were from Elmore's previous marriage and lived out of the house, while Bernice, Patricia, Donna, Dwight and Betty all grew up together in the Dickersons' cramped apartment in the _M orrissania neighborhood of the South Bronx. Dwight's mother stayed home to take care of her gaggle of children while his father worked as a mechanic for Con Edison Light and Power.

Later, Elmore opened two Unoleurn·tile and carpet stores where the Dwight and his older siblings worked after school.

cornered him, guns cocked, and demanded he hand over all of his money. Though he immediately

AFTER T T, THE PULSE OF GUNSHOTS OFTEN RFJSONATED IN HIS HEAD. WHEN HE TRIED TO SLEEP AT NIGHT. •

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surrendered his wallet, the teens shot him in the thigh as they left. ''Went straight through," Dwight informs me. After that, the pulse of gunshots often resonated in his head when he tried to sleep at night.

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Dwight credits a different kind . of beat for keeping hitn out of trouble: music. When Dwight was nine, his father presented hitn with a guitar. Dwight mastered the riffs and chords so quickly that before a year had passed he was invited to play at his church's Sunday folk mass. Elmore Then, as now, poverty scrounged to pay for lessons for and desperation reigned in his son. Before long Dwight had Morrissania. When Dwight played mastered the tenor sax, piano and outside he had to watch for accordion. While his friends from hypodermic needles discarded by the neighborhood fooled around neighborhood junkies and avoid beneath the tracks of the Third known gang territories. Once Avenue elevated train, Dwight Dwight was carrying groceries fooled around on his collection of home when a group of men mstruments.

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"I owe a lot to my Dad for introducit).g me to music," Dwight says with a sigh. "Paying for my music lessons was pretty much the only thing my Dad did that showed he had any faith in me.

Otherwise he just told me I was good for nothing. That's part of the reason I am so determined to finish college." · At ten years old, Dwight joined a newly formed competitive drum and bugle corps then called the Morrissanian Lancers ..Within a year, ·he had honed his skills enough to become the lead horn soloist.

Dwight credits his involvement with the corps for keeping hiln "off the streets," though his tirne with the Lancers was also the ·closest he carne to being on them.

At its foundation, the Lancers was a fusion of two Morrissanian street gangs - the Savage Skulls and the Imperial Bachelors. To fit in, Dwight felt he needed to join one. He picked the ''Bachelors," where he eventually became the warlord, the leader of the gang.

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''They picked me as warlord because I was the least ... . "DWlg .ht remembers, assurntng, his lips curling into a smug smile.

"Everyone thought I was just a god-fearing, goody two-shoes Catholic school boy, which was pa r1 ia11y true. But it meant I could fly under the radar."

Dwight ~sists that the gang didn't get in too much trouble.

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Yes, sometitnes they jutnped onto the backs of buses to get around for free, on occasion they . '"'"smoked herb," but it was the 70s! Who didn't? The energy that most gangs would funnel towards violence, however, the Bachelors focused on music, teaming up with the Skulls to win many · •

state and national competitions. ''I was a lover, not a fighter," Dwight admits. Gang tensions fell away and the Lancers became a close-knit troop with a common purpose. Every member counted.

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Once, on the day of a competition, his father had grounded Dwight for talking back. He was sitting forlornly on his bed, fingering his Lancers .· . uni{orm - black pants and a red satft_l jacket- which he'd laid out the night before in anticipation of the contest. Suddenly Dwight heard a honk and ran to the window where he saw two big coach buses pull up and discharge the Corps director, Carmela Saez. Carmela winked at Dwight through the window and disappeared inside Dwight's front . door. Dwight's heart beat like a snare drum. After a few tninutes of suspense, Elmore opened the door and said simply: "Go." •

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Dwight's experiences with the Lancers are still very important to him. Dwight picks . up a multi-photo frame inscribed _ with phrases like '"Wow!" '"What a night!" '"'"Let the good titnes roll!" · •

An adult Dwight stares back from the photos, posing with various people in a hotel ballroom.

"This is from a few years ago when I was honored by the .

_JLLDO ' YOU WANT THE _JRSION _JRYONEORTHE

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·" It was my first experience with really feeling valuable - like I was part of a larger group. Man, if they were willing to drive up in two big buses to come get me, I must be worth something." ~

Apri12010

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pianos, and drums emanating

. .smung "1" L ancers," h e exp1a111s, down at the frame. "That's my wife, Loretta and those are the Lancers I used to jam with."

Dwight served as the lead horn soloist for the Lancers until 197 5, when he graduated from Cardinal Hayes high school, -an all-boys catholic institution, and moved to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music. For two years, Dwight thrived on the regimented practice schedule, living and breathing in scales, majors, and sharps.

But one day Dwight found that he couldn't practice any more.

Something just felt wrong. Amidst the cacophony of horns, strings, .

from the practice rooms, Dwight felt empty. He needed more more stirnulation, more variety, and more choice.

Dwight took tirne off to help with his father's_ business in the Bronx before enrolling at Howard University, a liberal arts institution, in 1979. The transfer allowed him to take politics and sociology as well as music. He loved Howard - he loved living in Washington, D.C., he loved his classes and his classmates.

But it didn't last long. After only two years at Howard, in January 1981, Dwight's mother, Dora, passed away. Dwight dropped out of school and returned to the Bronx to support his father and help hi tn run his linoleutn and · carpet warehouses. Only a few months later, Elmore married a woman with whom Dwight soon discovered he'd been having a long-term affair, extending back far before his mother's death.

When Elmore passed aw~y 4!

October of that same year, his . new wife seized the fam11y's assets, leaving Dwight and his siblings virtually penniless . .

''"It took me fifteen years to finally visit his grave," Dwight says, picking up a rolled American flag he'd taken from Elmore's burial site. "I felt a lot of anger towards him."

With no reason to stay in

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and no money to

support hirnself, Dwight moved · to Bridgeport, Connecticut to live with his sister Patricia. There, he worked odd jobs at homeless shelters and restitution centers until meeting Loretta.

Maryland, where they settled so D wight could finally finish his education at Howard. But Loretta was deeply unhappy living in Mar yland. She missed her friends, and above all her church back in Bridgeport where her uncle served as the pastor. She was hom esick.

W h en I ask how they met he laughs.

•

"Well do you want the version I tell everyone or the real story?"

Without waiting for an answer he launches into both.

Dwight's sister lived across the street from a woman named Doris who ran a hairdressing business out of her home; Doris·immediately took a liking to Dwight and insisted on trying to set hirn up. One day she dernanded that he come over to her house because .there was a "nice Christian girl" she wanted him to meet.

"The girl was nice enough, but she had this roorrunate that came to pick her up. I saw her pull up _in her car and I liked what I saw. When she rang the doorbell, you can bet I made sure to be the one who answered it," Dwight pauses and shakes his head, chuckling. "I always tell people that when I opened the door Loretta started drooling so much I had to ask her if she needed a napkin. In reality, it was probably the other way around."

"It got to the point where I would come home at night after . work and find her sitting on the side of the bed crying," Dwight remembers. "Finally, I _asked 'You wanna move back?"'

A close friend of Dwight's from Bridgeport put hirn in touch with another friend who was renting out his apartrnent on Auburn Street in New Haven.

Without even looking at the apartment, Dwight and Loretta packed up their things and moved back t o Connecticut, further postponing Dwight's college plan s.

•

Suddenly Elliot starts growling at the door. ''Elliot! Sit!" A key turns in the lock and the door open s to reveal a young woman overloaded with groceries.

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The couple was married on Valentine's Day of 1987 in

''A little help?" she asks.

Dwight rushes to the door and takes most of the bags.

"Lanna, this is Haley. She's following me around for a day because she thinks I'm interesting.

Haley, this is m y daughter Ta'Lanna."

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Ta'Lanna sets her remaining bags on the kitchen counter and gives me a once over. " So you're stalking hirn for a d ay?" Laughing, she raises an eyebrow and says: "His life is not that interesting. His kids are all raised and working, he has a great job and g o es to a great school. Sounds pretty easy to m e."

In addition to Ta'Lanna, a twenty o ne year-old junior at the U niversity of ew Haven, Dwight has two other children: Chris, a twenty• two year-old who recendy graduated with a B.A.

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in Theater from the University of Vermont and Andres, a thirty year-old son by a prior relationship who now lives in Texas with a wife and children.

For years, Dwight has also provided for one of Ta'Lanna's friends, Clarissa, whose previous home life was in Dwight's euphemistic words, ''unhealthy."

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"We give Dad a lot of. . crap for going to Yale," Ta'Lanna

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continues. "Whenever he makes a mistake, or adtnits he doesn't pril2010

know something we're like 'What?! You don't know this?! But you go to Y/4 T.EF" Dwight's smile fails to mask his exasperation but Ta'Lanna rattles on. "He's gotten better but he certainly has his moments."

"Lanna)" Dwight warns, in a

voice that resembles the one he used to speak to Elliot.

"Fine, well can I at least tell her the story about you at church that one titne? Please?"

Dwight agrees and the tension dissipates as Ta'Lanna begins her stor with a laugh .

"Dad doesn't get a lot of sleep so he's constantly 'resting his eyes.' At red lights, at the dinner table, whate er. Anyway, one day at our old church he was on stage because he'd played a trumpet solo, and he fell asleep during the preacher's sermon! The preacher was so offended that he turned around at one point and · shouted: am I BORI G you?!"

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Dwight counters, "Well it was 12:01. The sermon was supposed to end at 12. That was MY time."

Dwight schedules his life down to the minute. If he didn't • construct a daily plan to follow, . he might break down, like a helicopter without a blueprint. '

'

. . Ta'Lanna has satisfied her need to embarrass her Dad and Dwight is eager to show me other things. "Let me take you to my wife's favorite part of the house," he says, walking up the stairs. We walk down the hall and he opens the door to a large bedroom decorated in.rich beiges and brown.

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"Loretta decorated all this," he says, opening the door to the bathroom. ''I call this the . . . bathroom, but Loretta calls it her palace."

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The room is large and airy with a bean-shaped Jacuzzi, huge vanity mirrors, and a glass-paned shower that houses a waterproof phone and radio. The sinks and ftoors are pink marble and it smells faintly of flowers. The toilet is hidden from the rest of the room, separated by a wall and a door.

"This," Dwight says sweeping his hand across the room "is why I work."

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He explains that, seven years ago, Loretta developed

gastric fibrosis and had to go on disability leave from her job at the Yale Child Studies Center.

For a while she thought she'd be · able to return to work but then the disease triggered problems with her pancreas, and on top of everything she developed lupus, . a disease of the immune .system that causes joint pain, muscle pain, and chronic fevers.

For the first year Loretta stopped working, Dwight had a hard titne making ends meet.

In 2001, Dwight lost his job at aviation supplier G KN aerospace when they relocated to St. Louis after September 11th and for the next two years he juggled five temp jobs. He worked such long . hours that he barely saw the family he was working to support.

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It was only in 2003, when Dwight landed his job at Sikorsky, that things got a little bit easier.

His starting salary at Sikorsky was $55,000- more than his old illcome combined with Loretta's when she could still work - which allowed him to quit all his other jobs. · Working at Sikorsky also allowed him to fulfill his lifelong drearn of finishing school.

United Technology, the umbrella company that owns Sikorsky, runs an employee scholar program that completely covers the cost of the education of all its employees as well as offering paid study tirne.

As an incentive for employees to pursue education, the company also presents them with a $10,000 stock option upon completion of their bachelor's degree. This policy allowed Dwight to enroll at Yale, where he is set to graduate on May 24th, 2010.

The ample benefit package is not the only reason Dwight loves working at Sikorsky.

"I was born to be a machinist," Dwight insists as we walk into the plant, a, sprawling compound . right off of the Merritt Parkway in Stratford. "I've always loved taking things apart, seeing how they work, and putting them back together." ~

. Dwight's role as a final line inspector does not require active building, but it is just as important. Blueprint in hand, Dwight scours his assigned helicopters millirneter by millirneter to make sure every last screw matches the plan. It hurts his eyes a "heck of a lot" but Dwight finds the job extremely fulfilling. He knows that if he makes one misstep there could be dire consequences. The safety of the helicopter's future crew -whether it be Army men, navy men or businessmen - is in his hands and on his eyes.

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We begin our tour of the Sikorsky plant at the blades and spars station. As we approach ' the rows of metal rods, Dwight 'IHE NEW JOURNAL

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paneled bars, which sell ·for up to $15 million.

pushes me to the side as a forklift whizzes by, .nearly taking off my

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"I would just park it in my front yard for the neighbors

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. "This place .is chaotic like that. .

You've got to watch yourself,"

to gawk at. No _w ay I could pay •

he says handing me a pair of safety goggles that all employees and visitors are required to wear on the work floor. The complex is vast and mazelike, with long poorly lit hallways opening up to work stations. From the way he navigates it seems that Dwight - could find his way around the factory in his sleep - and perhaps he has. He has spent the past six years working the graveyard shift six to seven nights a week.

At first he tried to a:void working w~kend nights, but Sikorsky pays $1;000 for one night of overtime • -an offer Dwight finds hard to refuse.

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Despite the amount of titne he has spent looking at helicopters, Dwight has never . flown in one. On Sikorsky's annual fatni1y day, members of the Sikorsky ad rni nistration drive a number of helicopter models out onto the flight field ~here they allow employees and their fami1ies to sit in the luxurious leather seats and finger the controls, but the vehicles remain securely on the ground. ''I wouldn't argue if they tried to give me one of those," Dwight says, palling one of the corporate helicopters, complete with wood-

April2010

for gas, but can you imagine?"

Before we call it a · day, Dwight wants to show me som~thing special: a fleet of helicopters that Sikorsky is building for Obama. We wind through hangers housing completed helicopters and . storerooms with disembodied helicopter parts. We dodge forklift after forklift and weave in and out of a tour group of yoqpg children and teenagers dressed in camouflage. "Stratford Eagles: Stratford's Civil Air Force" I make out on their patches.

"Did you know that the President actually flies with three helicopters so that potential terrorists don't know which one he's in?" Dwight asks as we walk.

"It's an awful waste of fuel, but he is Obama."

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Finally we arrive at our destination: a door with a small wire-crossed window cut in it. .

We peek through the wired glass to catch a glimpse of the aitcraft, but a frowning guard taps at us from the other side and shakes his finger "no."

"Aw, shucks," Dwight says, sighing. "Security on those birds is ti-ight."

Defeated, he leads me to the cafeteria so he can get a · ·snack. I feel relieved. It is 3 p.m.

•

and I have yet to see hitn eat or drink anything since I met him at 9:30 a.m. I had started to wonder whether Dwight was a machine himself.

The hot food area is closed, so he opts for something from one of the five vending machines in the lounge. He punches in D7 and watches intently as the mechanical springs move to eject a plastic wrapped blueberry . muffin from its roost. He waits a split second to claim his treat, trying to figure out the mechanics of the machine.

Back at Yale, Dwight and I sit on a bench outside of William L .

Harkness Hall, and we talk about his overall experience as a Yalie.

Because he's so busy, Dwight has had little titne to get to know other undergraduates. In fact, in his five years at Yale, he tells me I am just the third person to inquire about his background. ''Whether people ask me about my story or not is not the issue," Dwight explains. "Even though the Eli Whitney Students Program has been in existence for over 20 years, a lot of people don't know about it. It was alrnost as if Yale was hiding it."

I had to put posefully dig to find infonnation on the •

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Eli Whitn ey program and its students. The web site, a small subset of yale.edu, is oddly sparse. The promotional video in which Dwight appears, a short description, and a F requently Asked Question s section are the only components. There is no list · of current or p ast E li Whitney students, or reports on their acco~plishments before enrolling at Yale .

other Yale undergraduates would be less fearful of intruding and more likely to engage their Eli Whitney classmates outside of lecture and section.

The promotional video on the website, fihned and posted in 2008, represents Yale's recent .realization for a need. to publicize the Eli Whitrtey students program.

would never amount to anything.

Finally, I can stop trying to prove him wrong."

A Yale Spanish professor once asked Dwight if there was anything she could do to help make her class easier for him.

Dwight was struggling with conjugations and pronunciation, and couldn't seem to remember vocabulary.

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Presumably, this is to protect the privacy of the Eli Whitney students who like their

DUATING FROM COLLEGE S BEEN HIS GO

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''When I first saw that video," Dwight says pausing, "I cried.

I used to walk around -campus looking at the buildings and think 'how did I make it here? Am I even alive?'" • Considering his circumstances, Dwight has done very well at Yale - earning 7 As and A-s in his 17 classes. .

Yale take classes. Yale doesn't publicize personal information or profiles about its other undergraduates, so w hy should the Eli Whitney students be treated differently?

Most Yale undergrads speak of their classmates as the centerpiece of their Yale exp erience; they often claim geu ing to know other students is more important than classes themselves. It seems strange, then, that the E li Whitney progra 111 accepts individuals with such unique life experiences, ·but does not provide a fra rnework in ·which they can easily share them.

If the program were m ore visible,

Dwight has never taken handouts and doesn't plan on starting now. When the dean of Ezra Stiles College hands hitn his Yale diploma in May, it will be because he's earned it.

"John Hope Franklin graduated Harvard with a 3.7," Dwight cormnen,ts, referring to the renowned black scholar whose Half!)' ohen is a junior in Davvenbiography he'd read in Norms and port College and Co-Editor-in-Chief of TN] Deviance. "But during that tirne he didn't work, or have a wife, or kids. To me graduating Yale with a 3.3 would be like graduating with a 4.0."

Dwight credits his graduation frorn Yale to years of hard work, . sacrifice and the support of his fan1ily. Graduating from college has been his goal for over 30 years, though he never dreamed it would be from Yale. '

"My father once told me that I 'IH E NEW JOURNAL

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"I thanked her for her offer, but told her that I wasn't looking for any sp~cial treatment. I'm just a Yale student just like -any other.

Except maybe a little older." . -

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The Last Lobsterman Is it the end of the line for Rich G a mbarella's lobster business? ~SarahMich

R ch Gambardella sets up shop at the corner of Chapel and Mill Streets, half a block past a drawbridge that separates a small Fair Haven inlet from the larger Long Island Sound.

Stacked lobster traps sit at the end of the driveway near a small dock. Across the inlet is a giant pile of mulch, covered by a black tarp and held down by tires. At least twice a week for the past twenty years, Rich has watched th~ sun rise over this shiny plastic volcano as he heads out into the Sound-setting gear and pulling pots before returning to his New Haven Lobster Shop by two in the afterno on. He is the last lone lobsterman of New Haven.

*** "We're very simple, very small. We don't draw attention to ourselves-not really used to press," he says as he walks me into his shop. "D on't mind the mess." Rich picks up empty plastic bags and moves them from the top of the freezer to the cabinet. There is a small 34

makeshift kitchen to the right, where he sometimes cooks crab with Cajun seasoning, and a desk to the left, where he keeps an eight-cup coffee pot that he finishes off daily. Lobsters and rock crabs scuttle about a green basin in the back half of the store, separated by species and size with white lattice. The one-room storehouse is damp but clean, and smells more like a fresh tide pool than a fish tank.

The way Rich tells the story, the sea was always in his blood. "My first memories are of fishing for big blackfish right here in New Haven," he says. Nevertheless, he stumbled into the lobster business unexpectedly. His uncle had been a lobsterman for thirty years when his brother-Rich's father--decided to join him in 1990. Just few years later, Rich's father got hurt, so Rich stepped in. "My dad said I could fill in for him for two days. I've done it ever since."

Rich has the outline of a lobster on his right forearm, a tattoo he got four years ago but THE :-:EW JOu&'JAL

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has never had inked in. He hopes someday to add his lobstermads license number and his buoy color · to the body of the crustacean.

Lobsters are very important to Rich, and he knows a lot about them. .

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"They say a lobster can live a hundred years," Rich told me one Sunday afternoon in early April.

"They· say they grow as much as 75 pounds, and they daim they can live to be 1 00 years old."

*** Since he began lobster fishing and selling in Fair Haven in 1999, Rich says the neighborhood demographic has trapsitioned fro~ Italian, to Black, to Puerto ..

Rican. "Now it's all LatinosGuatemalans, Ecuadorians, Mexicans. All big fish eaters.

Since Christmas, business has been great. It's been easy. They keep coming back." As he speaks, two women in a white car drive . onto the gravel. ''Ah-see, here's a customer here comes one now.

She was here yesterday. I close at 4 pm and it's 4:30. They're lucky. . . usually by halfway through Sunday I'm out of crabs." .

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"Two for me and two for her. And that one," the woman .. · requests.

Rich picks up a large rubber rake and scrapes the crabs .

.toward sun. h.

"G _ ee ... you 're making me reach all the way over there? You oughta get it."

By this time of day, he explains, the best crabs are mostly picked through. Tomorrow morning, the . stragglers will be sold wholesale, to be replaced by a fresh batch on Thursday.

*** There is, arguably, one other lobsterman in New Haven, a fifty-year old man named Johnny. He and his wife Rose

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Inside, one of the women moves around the basin, past the signs that Rich has labeled conchs, corucha, scungilli. "iQue grande es!"

She points to" a crab.

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''Ah yeah, you see a big one?"

Rich says.

2010

IF THE LOBSTER RFA TORETU IN FORCE, RICH THINI<S THE BUSINESS COULD BE _..JRY LUC stop by at five o'clock to pay their thanks for the rock crabs Rich gave thetn last night. ' 'Those were delicious, Richy. Salty. Definitely salty. I was spiu ing up salt this morning."

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Johnny and Rich have known each other since they were kids and they share the waters of the New Haven Sound. Rich sets his traps at depths between 40 and 98 feet, and Johnny takes the shallower water. Rich's boat is bigger, though, and his business is full-titne. ''Johnny's boat could probably fit on the back of mine," Rich tells me later, "which is why they might call me the last true lobsterman. But don't tell that to Johnny."

There is no doubt they're . different men. Johnny has many more tattoos; a Technicolor mermaid swirls around his right . shoulder. He speaks more loudly and more often than his friend.

Johnny's gestures reach closer to your face; Rich's are more conservative. When the two of them talk, they reminisce about the lore of the Sound. "In the last five or six years all the old-tirners have retired and gotten out of it. There used to be five in New Haven, and seven fishing in our part of the Sound," Rich says. .

"But even then, Richy, we're probably the only two guys who got along," Johnny adds. ''Richy could call me and say 'I need ya,' and I'd be there. The old guys were worried about what the other guys were doing. It was boat for boat."

Johnny wi11 be fifty-one next week. He mentions this, and Rich turns and puts his hand

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predictable. You used to know

to the side of his mouth for a loud aside. ''You see that~- I'm

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only forty. I still have ten rriore years on the incline before I head

coming May 15, then May 20.

You could tell by the barnacles.

downhill like that."

After 1999, we had to just wait and see."

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RICH HAS THE OUTLINE OF A LOBSTER ON HIS RIGHT -·

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onto his equipment and shop, _always hoping for the lobster to feturn in greate~ number. "That's ·what's in my heart ... to me, each

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GOT FOUR __.ARS AGO.

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In local lobster lore, .1999-will forever be kriown as

has a cycle. Right now w~'re in a low, and we have been for the last seven or eight years. I don't know how long it's going to take to come back, but I think it's . going back up."

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While they waited, though, the fishermen broadened their nets. Conch fishing has kept Rich in· business, allowing him to hang

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an apocalyptic year. Connecticut lobstermen like Rich and Johnny started pulling pots full of dead lobsters. Scientists thought the h<;)t surmer had warmed the Sound, weakening the lobsters' immune systems and making them vulnerable to parasites.

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'!'he lobstermen, for the most part, blame a pesticide blitz that, combined with sununer storms, drained chemicals into the Sound.

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"There was nothing left to fish. People lost their licenses.

It was a war back then." Johnny says. Lobster levels still haven't snapped back to the way they _ were before.

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While Rich is helping :~ "" ·: customer, Johnny pulls the largest · of the lobsters from the tank. ·.

He touches a finger to one of its claws. This orie, he guesses, is ~ . fifty-five years old. ~ •

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***

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_ On ~e water,·Rich guides his boat along lines that run North and South on the Sound ' sinking his lobster pots to the ocean floor, eight to each buoy, fifteen buoys every mile. There is no TV, no radio, no boss, and his wedge boat is a "big heavy, good sea boat from Canada" that he bought with a forme£- business •

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As Rich finishes with the· , •• •

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customer, Johnny looks toward . . .:_ them and rests his hands on the · · •

· edge of the tank. "You know, this business isn't luck, it's skill." The work is dangerous, his wife, R~se,. often reminds him, and business •

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has been draining. "I guess having your wife and kids say some Hail ~ · Mary's every day doesn't hurt either." p

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The customer walks out the open door of the shop, a bag of half-century old crustaceans • swinging from her hand. The lobsters inside cling to its plastic edges; that was the last sale of the day. Before dawn the next rnorning, Rich will ready the traps and head out on the Sound once more.

partner a1tnost ten years ago.

If the lobster were to return in force, Rich thinks the business could be lucrative. Rich's twelve year-old daughter Kristin likes to go out on the boat with ~ and next year, the boat will bear her narne. He imagines that some day he might pass the business on to her.

Sarah Mich is a junior in Sqybrook College and senior edior of TN].

Rich agrees. ''It stopped being April2010

37 •

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CRITICAL ANGLE

Search Engine Failure Chinese Ya lies I uncensored views of Google Is China controversy

by Helen Gao H alfway through January, Google announced on its blog that they would soon be taking "a new approach to China." The decision was sparked by an alleged cyber attack on Google's corporate infrastructure.

The company believed their attackers were Beijing government officials.

"We launched Coogle. en in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China ... outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results" read the announcement.

As time passed, however, Google continued, "[these} attacks and the surveillance thry have uncovered-combined with the attempts over the pastyear to further limitfree speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. "

Three months later, in March, Google took action. It took a stance against China's censorship and began redirecting all mainland searches to the uncensored Google engine based in Hong Kong.

38

On January 13,2010, after four years of flying relatively under the radar in China, Google's fame peaked overnight. Now, it Now, Google was more than a search engine: it was a controversy. Its fame skyi:ocketed overnight.

Debates araged amongst mong bloggers, computer scientists, entrepreneurs and human right supporters stormed American media. The American media eagerly followed the drama. Here at Yale, the Chinese students' panlist was Hooded with heated commentary: "It is apparendy the conspiracy of some ill-intended capitalists and the manipulated government to further destroy China's international image!" one student barked.

Government-GoogleTensions between the government and Google tensions had grown graduallyhad grown gradually as after 2008 as ChinaChina built it's so-called "Great Firewall" higher and higher.. Thousands of blogs and search terms were eliminated in the government's "anti-pornography campaign."

Google complied with the the governments's censorship

demands until December 2009, when they fell victim to a cyber attack that they believed originated from Mainland China.

Further investigation traced the attack to an elite Chinese university with the nation's top computer science program, and a vocational school that was a feeder of computer specialists to the military. It The attack targeted the G Gmail accounts of several Chinese human right activists.

These facts put put together convinced the Western media of the involvement of the Chinese government. that the Chinese government had been involved.

Google China, for all the political controversy it has now generated, had less of a force in my lifepresence in my life growing up in Beijing than the American media may have American commentators might assume.d.

Google is certainly a part of the Chinese netizen's daily vocabulary, but the company doesn't have a strong grasp on the market.

My mom, for instance, THE NEW JOURNAL

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trying to find a good recipe for a chicken dish, will exclaim "I'll ·

Coogle it!" but open Baidu instead.

Baidu is China's domestic search engine. The word Baidu, literally meaning "hundreds of times", comes from a poem written · eight centuries ago. For the Chinese, the word it suggests the persistent search for the ideal. It was l~unched in 2000, six years before Google entered China.

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have been a big move for those Western investors coveting China's fast-growing market, but it has barely affected the lives of ordinary families like mine.

Amidst the groWing media frenzy, some of my Chinese friends scoff. "Google is a big

in Asia reveals that other corporate giants like McDonald's and Starbucks also struggled for years before they finally reached their desired market share. The process requires initial losses, but ultimately pays off.

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company, and they got attacks almost everyday, from not just China but all over the world.

Why have they never complained

From Google's perspective, a cost-benefit analysis shows litde economic reason to leave .

In truth, the underperformance of its branch in China will barely cause the company to sweat: Analysts estitnate Google's China business is a modest 1 percent. to 2 percent of its $6.5 billion . in annual net profit. But by •

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leaving China so soon, Google is abandoning the largest potential market in the world.

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· So if the move is not about

During those six years, millions of Chinese families entered the digital world and first experienced the c·o nvenience of having endless streams of information lie only one just a click away. For most Chinese, this convenience •

carries the nametag of Baidu.

I .ike my mother, when in

China, I use Baidu when I'm home in China. The company boasts a tnarket share of 63.9 0 /o while Google owns a mere third of that amount. The 2006 founding of Google China may

until now?" one student wrote to Yale's Chinese students' panlist.

He thinks the move is more about saving face than saving information. He is not alone in his argument. The Global Times, China's biggest English-language daily newspaper, recendy announced that 70 percent of Chinese polled believe Google's threat to exit China as a result of its failure to compete with Baidu.

Maybe so. But a quick look at the cases of other international business trying to enter markets

money, then what's it about? Just as Western observers suggest the Chinese government was behind the most recent cyber attack, many Chinese suspect that the United States government plotted Google's departure from China.

There has long existed, after all,After all, there has long been tension between China and the US regarding the topic ofissues of media freedom. Emails sent betweenMany of Yale's Chinese students students atsupport this "conspiracy theory" rnodel. They decriedln recent emails to their panlist, they credit Google's move as an attempt by US government to further destroy China's international ilnage.

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difference in cultural expectations.

"Chinese people nowadays tend not to believe things the way they are told and always suspect

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AT THE DAVENPORT MASTERIS HOUSE

there are things left unspoken.

American people, on the other hand, do believe, because of the transparency of its society," Chinese Yale student Ge Yang '10 pointed out.

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Chinese youth, the most avid users of Internet, remain mostly silent. Besides the bunches of flowers left in front of Google's Beijing headquarter to lament its departure, Google's announcement has little brought little buzz to China itself. After ., all, -.With the poor state of the . job market and skyrocketing apartment prices in China, what is there to fret over in not being able to read about Dalai Lama?

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lAURIE R. KING IS A THIRD GENERATION CALIFORNIAN WITH A BACK· GROUND IN THEOLOGY, WHOSE FIRST CRIME NOVEL {1993'S A GRAVE TALENT) WON THE EDGAR AND CREASEY AWARDS. HER YEARLY NOVElS RANGE FROM POLICE PROCEDURAlS AND STAND-ALONES TO A HISTORICAL SERIES ABOUT WARY RUSSElL AND SHERLOCK HOLJ\AES ~BEGINNING WITH THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE.} HER BOOKS HAVE WON THE EDGAR, .

CREASEY, VVOLFE, LAMBDA, AND f.MCAVITY AvVARDS, AND APPEAR REGUlARlY ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSEllER UST.

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PERSONAL ESSAY Interior Design Coming of age in a modern family

by Kate Lund T he fust figure to greet anyone entering my father's second-floor apartment was the Martini Lady. Printed on poster board, she stood with her hip jutted, strong-jawed and slouch~ in a red strapless cocktail dress. Her hair was cut short and her raised hand exposed an unshaved armpit; I never knew if these spiky black tufts emphasized Martini's dykiness or exposed her to be not a lady, but a delicate man.

Despite her vamping, Martini was a welcome sight. Whenever I went outside with my father, I wanted desperately to get back in. Seattle's freeway was a direct shot to his apartment, but if he needed groceries, we'd detour along South Broadway, the gayest street in the second-gayest city in America. My father knew everyone on the avenue. As we passed men with hoops in their earlobes and Calvin Klein briefs peeking over their low-slung jeans, he'd greet them with a kiss on the lips and introduce me, hiking his voice into a higher register. I was never at ease with these men, and I didn't feel myself loosen until we turned off Broadway and the streets took on the same calm feel of the sleepy neighborhood where

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I lived six days out of seven with my mom. When I finally met eyes with Martini, I was like a sprinter crossing the capturethe-flag line from deep in enemy territory, safe at last.

Unlike the house I lived in with my mother, my father's apartment was furnished by selection, not accumulation, and each room looked torn from a catalogue on interior design. As early as elementary school, I perceived something threatening beneath the soft lighting and sleek Scandinavian furniture. A framed sketch of a cartoon king had pubic hair; a gridded poster in my father's room depicted a finger indenting a nipple; in the kitchen, a black man licked melted ice cream off his partner's balding head. ~!agazine racks displayed issues of 0Ht and GQ, whose covers exhibited some variation on the words HOT HOT HOT superimposed over gleaming pectorals. What wasn't on the walls, I uncovered myself. Once, I grabbed something in my father's closet, and a cascade of birdseed scattered across the floor, leaving me gripping an empty leg of pantyhose. He explained that he had gone to a drag party that weekend, and filled them to make breasts.

Another time, I remember handling a familiar Christmas tree ornament, and lifting its skirt to see two sewn-on jewel balls attached beneath a tiny beaded penis.

Every Friday, my father hung his coat on the rack beside Martini and closed the door to the apartment. We were home.

* I result from one of the world's most deliberate conceptions; my father was the accident. He'd agreed at twentyeight to donate his sperm to my mother, Annette, a forty-yearold lesbian determined to have a biological baby before the last slow tick of her biological clock.

Arranged by a third party, I was

... IN THE I<ITCHEN,A BLACI<MAN LICI<ED MELTED ICE CREAM OFF HIS PARTNER'S BALDING HEAD conceived through artificial insemination. My parents never met, nor did they plan to. But by the time I reached toddlerhood, my mom's partner had split and I was down a parent, so she decided to invite my father over.

He showed up with his thenboyfriend D avid, which caused some lingering confusion (ÂŤMy THE NEW JOURNAL

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·dad is John and David!" I told people for weeks), but things went smoothly enough for my • mom to 1ssue a second invite.

Gradually, Plan A was discarded.

Three .years and nine months after his initial contribution ' John Leonard became my father.

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Throughout my school years, neither of my parents had a partner, and the notso-keen observers at parent potlucks were quick to read them as affable divorcees.

Sexuality aside, I can't think of an unlikelier union. At a titne when my mother was routinely mistaken for my grandmother, my father could bring a bottle of wine to the checkout stand and still, from titne to tirne, get carded. Annette Lund makes flight-option spreadsheets; John Leonard misses planes. Pop ~ultm.e barely sneaks its way rnto .·my mother's house. She .. pretqr much only listens to Joni Mitchell; for years, we had no Tv. ~ -

But perhaps most importantly, my mother is not that gay. She never came out to her parents; she didn't send tne to any two-mommy playgroups.

With time, she came to identify more with heterosexual parents than the childless lesbians she had known. Given the Northwest penchant for comfort-conscious outerwear ' Seattle streets are lined with women in fleece and orthopedic Keens, so my tnotn never stood · out as unfeminine. But until I asked him not to, my dad would walk onto the Lowell Elementary playground wearing _ a hoodie advertising GAY CITY, the HIV prevention orgamzatton he had founded.

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"easy-to-assemble lamp" that never got completed, the trendy uncomfortable furniture, the fact it t?ok hitn three Junes to read Three Junes.

I couldn't make my father fade into the background. · ••

* Every Friday during middle · school, I'd drop my coat at Martini's feet, _kick off shoes and socks, and .sit cross-legged on the couch, waiting for the central ritual of my weekly visits to begin. My father would bring a blanket, and facing each other on opposite ends of the couch, I'd read aloud to a man who averaged a book a year a single chapter of Harry Potter. Our ritual was best on rainy days. My father · wocld warm my pruny feet under the blanket while I sucked on cough drops to recover from the latest round of nasal British accents I affected to win his laughter, like applause. We made it through the first four vohunes this way, ninety-four chapters, 1,824 pages overall.

Dad's Day, as we came to call it, was an exercise in distilled parenting. Infused with the deliberateness of a fatniiy relationship pursued once weekly, Fridays with my father never failed to be quality tirne.

This meant rituals. Before Harry Potter, we took turns reading from D'Aulaire's ~ Book of Greek Myths and covering the walls of my room with drawings of the goddesses. Before that ' the heart of Dad's Day lay in the weaving of five blindingly tiny rows on tny authentic Native American miniature beading loom, snacking while we let our eyes rest, then squinting our way across five tnore rows.

For years, I recycled any joke that earned its place within our father-daughter pantheon: the

And so, surrounded by gay paraphernalia, I occupied my father's space with a stubborn adherence to the · culture of

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WHEN FATHER'S THIRTIES C ETOA CLOSE, HE THREW A HUGE PUCK FOR COSTU PAR

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childhood. Our best joke and best ritual happened every -· Friday night. ''Tuck me in!" I'd yell, and my father would leap up from wherever he was and -r un to my bedside, his hands stuffing the blankets under the ntattress in a manic display of thoroughness. I'd kiss hirn on · the cheek and he would say goodnight. But in the sliver of the door shutting behind hirn I could always see a slice of the Martini lady, cleavage spouting above her bandeau ' and I'd feel my stornach tighten.

Surrounded by signs but cushioned by assntned illiteracy, I feared a tirne when I might be called upon to understand the language.

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* The older I grew, the rnore

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the apartment closed to the outside world became the one place I could interact with my father on my own kiddish terms.

His friends were kind to me, but they were just too edgy. One April, my father organized an egg hunt at one of his friend's houses and I came home sulky, complaining that the last time I checked, the real Easter Bunny didn't drink beer or smoke cigarette. At gatherings, ·he was constantly depositing me with some snarky dyke comedienne, only to find me alone in the garden ten minutes later, observing somebody's terrier.

I knew I should try harder.

But I didn't want to talk to these people on the plane of equivalence adolescence would provide. And I especially didn't want to be a teenager around my father, who was too young, too current, claiming the cultural and sexual territory I wanted for my own.

When my father's thirties came to a close, he threw a huge FUCI< FORTY costume party in a rented space near Broadway.

I showed up early with my mother to make an appearance b_efore the party really started, wearing a bra for the first time.

Only a handful of _ people had arrived, and I circUlated from guest to guest, doing my best to make cute, exuberant conversation. At one point, my father sidled up to me and, indicating a man on the opposite side of the room, cracked a joke about his outfit: red body paint and a black leather thong. It was a real gay man joke told just for me campy, blunt, the kind I'd hear hitn make to his friends

when discussing something like Monica Lewinsky's make-up.

I feigned confusion. What defense did I have except to act younger, remain a child who could still, in innocence, walk eyes open through . a parent's sexual world? But I felt a stab of shame at my .own evasion.

Now that I was thirteen, I was . . spending more and more time swatting aside my father's offers of parity. I wasn't _ready . for us to be equals. All I wanted was to return to the apartment~ where I could close my doors to GQ, and from within the walls of a bedroom decked out in my own pastel renderings of Aphrodite, wait for my father~s hands to tuck me in . .

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· Middle school marched forward into high school. The half-done lamp continued to serve as a mockable floor piece, but I was starting to worry. We needed new vocabulary, and

'-"I ASIDE, I C 'T THINIZOF AN UNLil LIER UNION the ice cream men and nudie king sketch bore down on me with accusation. Gayness was fair game if abstracted through art or politics the crazies in the Bush A · ·stration, The Laramie Project. But I knew I wasn't asking more about my father's AIDS work because

I feared the sex content of his answers. Who · ·else's father emceed anti-barebacking forums called "The Greatest Hole on Earth?" There were whole parts of his history I only knew about in pieces: the former boyfriends, the plague years of the eighties, the fully sketched story of his corrung-out.

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All those high school years in the apartment, I was haunted by who I might have been if I'd been raised entirely by my father.

In . a blue state, his brand of gayness was not a liability but an asset: what could be . cooler than having a dad who was ex-besties with .a nationally syhdicated sex columnist? But I had fallen-short of claiming my inheritance. Sideby-side, we looked like a fixer duo o;ut of Queer Eye. I felt stung whenever he suggested I . take my hair out of a messy bun and censoriously handed me a hairbrush.

And so my forays into teenagerdom and cultural literacy prom! first peacoat! familiarity with the films of Wes Anderson! were best concealed. I denied having crushes and never shared my tentatively emerging music taste, even as I eyed his cabinets full of alb{uns. I was so intimidated by his style-commentary that on Fridays, I dressed myself in T-shlrts. Flipping through his DVD collection, my father would always joke that we should settle for my favorite, Finding Nemo.

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"Don't you want to update your room?" my father often asked when he stopped in to find me, his curiously studious child, bent over my desk. My room in 'IHE NEW JOURNAL

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the apartment had the satne old things on the walls it always had: drawings of Demeter and Aphrodite from the Greek Myths phase, pictures from the Harry Potter movies. But I never · could decide how to replace them. I ·came in one day to see a poster for the Seattle International Fihn Festival hung above my bed.

He figured I needed something current.

* My father moved to San Francisco the fall of my senior year of high school, but didn't sell the apartment until the nine months later, after I graduated. Busy putting my own belongings into boxes for the trek to college, I only showed up to help him the verY.. last day. The apartment had• . been gutted and all that was left to do was move the remaining boxes out of the basement storage space.

Lugging files and folders in the still heat of August exhausted us, so after an hour,.we stopped to have a drink with some ·o f my father's friends who lived on the other side of Broadway.

Sitting on the porch with three gay men, I felt the detachment of an anthropologist, involved yet marginal. I ate more chips and guacamole than the three of them put together because I didn't have as much to say.

Back at the apartment, I was impatient to finish the last round of loa · up. Carrying my fathees boxes to the curb,· I thought of my own boxes geu ing shipped off to my dorm room at Yale, and how

little attention I'd given to what I would put up on the walls. At first, I had planned on pursuing an aesthetic my father had brought table runners and mood lighting and candle holders made of sea glass to college but quickly discarded the idea as overcalculated. I settled for shoving a few travel postcards and a painting of the Cascade Mountains into the bottom of my suitcase and calling it a day.

Tired and sweaty, we trudged up to the second-floor apartment one last titne. At the entrance, I kicked off my flip-flops to walk barefoot on the hardwood. Light flooded the open space. Our silence sounded without the mute of visual interference, and not knowing what else to do, I sat down in the center of the room. Even from where he stood by the window, my father loomed over me, enormous. This is it, I thought.

This is what I've wanted, to be surrounded by bare walls.

This is not something worth wanting. But here, with our accessories packed up in boxes, I felt an unfarniJiar comfort. In the moment before my- father stepped forward to kneel down beside me, our eyes locked across the width of the apartment, a tilted plane of contact m an empty room.

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Kate Lund is a sophomore in Silliman College

April2010

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' TNJ takes a look at New· Haven' s catch-all catch phrase .

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l?J Bob Jeffrry

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It's the stuff of legends: "what happens in Vegas stqys in Vegas." This slogan invokes a city of unadulterated debauchery where strippers are outnumbered only by slot machines and mistakes don't count. This promise of impunity has successfully seduced countless ·middle-aged men into squandering their savings and shattering their marriages in the city of sin. Yet as some know all too well, not everything stays in Vegas. Its . only after waking up with a spouse, a lawsuit, and/ or Chlamydia that we realize the sobering truth: we've been duped.

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Most would agree that New York really is the "City that Never Sleeps." But the motto of Houston, TX, formerly "space city: a space of infinite possibilities" was a little too ... out there. So the city learned a thing or two from sharnpoo conunercials and adopted a new unofficial catch-phrase: ..

'Houston: It's worth it!"

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And apparently the L'Oreal knockoff has been working. The Houston tourism website has generated · tens of thousands mo~e hits and sold altnost as many tee-shirts, and it may soon become the city's official tagline. (It's unclear what the outcome would have been had they taken the Herbal Essences route: "I've got the u,rge ... for Houston!") .

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How does New Haven's motto measure up? As a six-college town with transient four-year residents, what happens here, leaves here. And many of those sarne residents would argue they never get enough sleep.

But those mottos were taken. What did the city decide?

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'New Haven: It all happens here!"

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Well, surely it doesn't a// happen here (the Chlamydia happened in Vegas). And even if we dismiss the "all" as hyperbole, the "it" remains ambiguous: exactly what happens in New Haven?

If the past is any indication, quite a bit happens. We boast the first lollipop and the very first hamburger, the first Frisbee and the first game of football. Sulfur matches, electric trains, elevators and steamboats - all of them first happened here. We can also stake dai tn to the very first erector set, the very first public tree planting program and the very first pair of rubber overshoes! _ · •

One claitn TNJ finds contestable is that Vitamin A (described as ''the first fat soluble substance!) was c;I.!scovered and produced in New Haven. Carrots of the world beg to differ, but we'll let it slide. ~

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New Haven never alerted TNJ to any sort of motto contest, and never asked us to be on their motto planning board. We would have enjoyed such a position, and since we've got ~ way with words, we thought we'd give it a try, just in case the city ever wants to change: •

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_Where Yale is (for the particularly myopic) The city that never sleeps soundly (for New Raven's Red Bull devotees) Just an "E" away from New Heaven (Add twenty dollars for three kiwis and a #2 and we'll make it gourmet!) ~ Toad'sally Awesome (for the party hoppers atnong us) •

Our motto may not be pertect, but at least New Haven has bettered Connecticut's current catch phrase (yes, CT also has one): "Closer than you think." This indirect adrnission that not much happens in Connecticut is modest, and their insistence that we should still come visit because it's close to where stuff does happen is endearing: 'We're not that far from New York City! Honest!" And we definitely have Stamford, "The City that Works," beat in the motto depa 1 ttnent. Maybe the city works, but that slogan just doesn't.

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Bob Jeffery is ajunior in Berkeley college, and managing editor of .

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