Magazine Editor in Chief
Abigail Sylvor Greenberg
Oliver Guinan
Managing Editors
Margot Lee
Idone Rhodes
Associate Editors
Michelle Ampofo
Ana Padilla Castellanos
Kinnia Cheuk
Gavin Guerrette
Wilhelmina Graff
Zack Hauptman
Hannah Han
Audrey Kolker
Harper Love
Isabel Maney
Olivia Wedemeyer
Creative Director
Catherine Kwon
Design Editor
Christy Lau
Clarissa Tan
Photography Editors
Gavin Guerette
Yasmine Halmane
Tenzin Jorden
Tim Tai
Giri Viswanathan
Illustration Editors
Jessai Flores
Ariane de Gennaro
Editor in Chief & President
Lucy Hodgman
Publisher
Olivia Zhang
A friend spies a mouse in his dorm room. He bursts through the door just in time to spot the rodent catapulting across the floorboards into a nook. What am I supposed to do now? He wonders.
He can set traps and lure it back, finishing it off once and for all. Or he can do nothing, treating the incident as a one-off, an aberration. He imagines it scurrying away through an elaborate network of tunnels to an underground domain.
Coming to a story can be like seeing a mouse skitter through one’s room—a streak in the periphery, then gone. Hard to pin down. Harder to forget.
In every strange moment there is a story to capture and render. Some are troubling, needing to be coaxed out and pinned down. Others, like mice, jump out at you when you least expect them to. No matter what, they’re partial: there is always more to be learned, uncovered, imagined.
Every story in this issue started with a mouse—a blur of color, a desperate sign of life. For Samantha Liu, it was a visit to New Haven’s vibrant Oriental Pantry. For Gavin Guerette, the embers of a cigarette on the roof of a fraternity house. And for Thomas Birmingham, the author of this edition’s cover story, “The Death of the Liveable City,” it was a razor blade abandoned in the hallway.
Our writers have trapped their mice. Some such as Hannah Han in “Face to Face with Mortality” dissected them. In this issue, we hope to pry up the floorboards, so to speaking, rendering indelible the invisible life surrounding us.
We are, as always, incredibly grateful to our dedicated staff of writers, editors, and designers. Their talent, ingenuity, and willingness to help one another are at the heart of what the YDN Magazine is and aspires to be.
Please enjoy reading the January issue.
Best wishes,
Abigail and Oliver
In the days before my interview with Sheila Heti, I found myself questioning what it means to write. I had once thought that the best writers were like monks. Just as religious devotees depart from society in favor of spiritual purity, artists withdraw from loved ones and neglect physical existence to immerse themselves in the world of aesthetics. I assumed this type of life was sad, desperate, and relentless. I imagined that once you entered it there was no easy way out. I figured that writers choose between sets of mutually exclusive opposites: uncomfortable reality or comfortable fantasy, social engagement or spiritual engagement, happiness or excellence.
Within the first few pages of her second novel, Motherhood, Heti shatters this image. A loosely autobiographical protagonist complains of a boyfriend who insists that she must choose between having fun in New York and staying home to write. She thinks to herself, “I’m not the sort of writer who sits in her room and writes.” Reading this, I was baffled. What other kind of writer is there?
I entered the interview with that question—what kind of writer is Sheila Heti? Heti, who spent last semester as a Visiting Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, has penned ten books, among them Motherhood, How Should a Person Be?, and Pure Colour. It was clear by the end of our conversation that Heti, despite writing in her room, is, in fact, not the kind of writer who sits in her room and writes. Of course, she writes a great deal, and her writing is serious. But Heti doesn’t write to observe the world passively—she writes to live better.
It is normal for Heti to pause work for weeks or months at a time. When she is excited about a project, however, she can work all day. She writes according to where she is and what she is thinking about; she does not have rituals. As a teenager, she read interviews in the Paris Review to learn how authors write, but the only consensus she could find was that there was none. While all writers center their lives around writing, that center may take endless forms.
That is not to say there are no patterns to her craft. Heti prefers typing on a computer. After having written on one all of her life, the computer “feels like a part of [her] body.” Her raw material comes out in short, sporadic bursts that last no longer than an hour or two. “I mean, you kind of empty yourself out!” she explained. “Or, at least I feel like I empty myself out and need the day and the night to sleep to fill myself back up again and have something to write about the next day.”
She edits more than she writes–it’s her favorite part. It’s like cleaning without having to “move around the house and get your hands dirty.” In our conversation, I added that the pleasures of a well-structured essay may correspond to those of an orderly room. She agreed.
Heti did not write very much during her fall 2022 semester at Yale. She spent much of her energy adapting to life in Niantic, a town about 45 minutes outside of New Haven, where she stayed with her dog. She has always wanted to live by the sea and was happy to find a place on the shore. In Niantic, she went on walks, learned where to shop for groceries, and collected some notes for her next book.
Knowing that Heti thinks of her computer as a third limb, works in short, intuitive bursts of creativity, and needs to “fill” herself back up again before returning to her work, I had to wonder—is writing something of a natural process for Heti, one intuitive as breathing? When I asked her about fears of loneliness surrounding the profession, she said that the concern of solitude had never occurred to her; being a writer has allowed her to prioritize doing the thing she loves most.
Heti has written plays, compiled an anthology on fashion called Women in Clothes, alphabetized her diary entries for the New York Times, and collected and published her dreams about the 2008 Democratic primaries. In her novels, her narratives oscillate from meditations on the pur-
suit of the truth to accounts of kinky sex. Her passages regularly alternate between polished prose, streams of consciousness that last for several pages, and pure dialogue.
Critics have classified Heti’s writing as autofiction, memoir, theology, and everything else in between. But if you ask Heti herself, the answer is simple: she is a novelist. She may not be the most conventional one, but her books are essentially novelistic in that they follow characters moving through time and space. “I think I want to write a conventional sort of narrative,” she confesses, “but I just don’t. I probably don’t believe in it…You can’t really write what you don’t believe in.”
Sheila has found a form that, in declining to follow the structure of a traditional story, transcends it: “In the missing of the mark,” she reasons, “the literary interest happens.” She makes a distinction between the books that imitate the novel and the one that imitates life itself. Her own novels, I think, belong to the latter category.
The seminar that Sheila taught during her semester at Yale, Fate and Chance, included a scene from RuPaul’s Drag Race in its syllabus. In the episode, the contestants were tasked with making an outfit out of garbage. Ultimately, the winner was not the drag queen with the most high fashion, but the one whose design retained a resemblance to trash. The class came to the conclusion that, as Heti recount-
ed to me, “somehow transforming [the material] utterly, so that it no longer shows the trace, is not as beautiful or interesting as those transformations which retain the trace of what it was.”
Later, I realized that this must be true—the past gives us dimension. Maybe that is why Heti’s books often make reference to their own processes, capturing a series of motions and experiments leading up to their product. These experiments are, in themselves, substance.
Heti’s novel, How Should a Person Be? recounts both conversations between Heti and her friend Margaux and the moments when Heti sets out to record those conversations. In Pure Colour chronicles the divine creation art writ large. In Motherhood, she involves the reader directly in her artistic decisions, tossing coins and asking questions. She wonders if the book is good, if art requires an audience to make it worthwhile, and if it even matters in the grand scheme of things.
All of Sheila’s books follow her as she works through something specific in her life—the question of what life is and what it means to be a person. “At different ages,” she explains, “that question can center on different problems.” It might have to do with a desire to be famous, the meaning of womanhood, or what one owes to one’s friends. But these issues all circle back to that same, central, notorious conundrum.
Around the time she wrote How Should a Person Be? Heti was especially confused about her duties as a person.
“IN THE MISSING OF THE MARK,” SHE REASONS, “THE LITERARY INTEREST HAPPENS.”
“I just feel like I didn’t understand any of that,” she told me. “I didn’t, no one taught me or something, or maybe no one knows. But I felt like there were some things about living that other people took for granted that I couldn’t, I didn’t, for whatever reason.”
One thing Heti has found difficult to understand is love. She used to think that love was like an exercise. She assumed that the success of any given relationship was by who a person was, rather than who they were with. You can love anyone if you are a good person, she reasoned.
Heti’s understanding of love has changed, but still she maintains that there is something mysterious and impossible about it. “I haven’t heard firsthand of a lot of experiences of love that overflow the heart permanently,” she remarked. She asked me if I had. I hadn’t. Love, as she described it to me, always leaves some part of us unfulfilled. In her books, though, as gritty and confusing and difficult as the central relation-
ships are, there is never a point at which the characters give up on love entirely.
Heti convinces me that writing isn’t a radical sacrifice, nor are writers fundamentally separate from anyone else. Art is just one way, among others, to live and learn. The wisdom she imparts to her readers, though often brilliant, is not resolute. When I asked her if she had hopes for what readers would take away from her writing, she replied: “I don’t have that feeling.”
Writing carries Heti through the challenge, confusion, and beauty of her own life. As she moves on from her semester at Yale, she will doubtless pursue new sites of disorientation, interrogation, and discursive engagement. This is all part of Heti’s process. As she puts it, “I’m not looking for answers. I’m looking for resting places.”
Arguably, this is Coyote’s place— he wouldn’t admit it even if you asked. He’s got no deed dotted with age and spilled tea. His house is rotten logs bound together with mud-full mortar, lumpish, dusty, loved furniture.
I ran into Coyote once, when the hunting party lost hours, dogs lost in looming trees, lost in fog that coated our lashes. These sticky lashes, these marvelous curtains, opened to the clearing, more open sky than open ground.
Coyote seemed to be waiting. Not a man of so much speaking, his hand— sinewy, tired, coping— extended to my side, my hand becoming a child’s, soft and unworked, in his, rough.
He invited us, the hunting dog and me, into the parlor. The old dog, streaked with grey like Coyote, cracked stale tea cookie against his molars. Crumbs littered a fray-edged rug while Coyote brewed peppermint tea.
The old dog knew when Coyote was gone— rotten logs fell to dust, furniture unloved, tea moldy, unfinished in the parlor.
As if lost on purpose, the dog, greyer, greyer, greyer, returned to watch guard as the house became home to beetle and bug. And still, he lay there in grieving until a goodbye to both built a sooty altar of bones where Coyote’s place once was.
by Jessai Flores
Iwas fed up. I had been close reading since my sophomore year of high school, and I couldn’t seem to stop. I agonized over the construction of sentences. I coaxed secrets from ambiguous words. Then, I combined these minutiae into a larger observation about the text, which would inevitably yield a vaguely potent conclusion.
A Comparative Literature class finally shocked me out of this method. In “How to Compare,” an introductory course for the major, Professor Samuel Hodgkin asked my classmates and me to write an eight-page literature paper without close reading a single time. Instead, our job was to analyze the mechanics of plot, or narrative form. The assignment catapulted my classmates and me into crisis. Simply put: nobody knew how to do it. We clamored for extra office hours and exchanged angry mutters in the hallways.
The English major does not require a literary theory course. The Comparative Literature major, by contrast, requires at least three. English students love to seize on this imbalance, mercilessly caricaturing the Comp Lit department. “The joke was,” said Comp Lit Professor Ayesha Ramachandran (who has two English degrees) “in English we read texts, and in Comp Lit they read theory.”
Could the joke, though, go in the other direction?
Hunched in a personal cubicle in Bass Library, sweating over my anti-close read-
ing Comp Lit paper, I stared at my blank screen and laughed. After years of confidently cranking out English papers, I could not figure out where to start. In the serenity that was my life before literary theory, I had thought that close reading was the only way to approach a text. It was my reflex.
My harrowing Comp Lit paper set me on a path–I set out to learn how close reading had become ingrained in Yale’s undergraduate curriculum.
***
For much of Western history, interpretive close reading wasn’t a facet of literary criticism but a religious activity. In his Yale Open Course lecture series, “Introduction to the Theory of Literature,” Yale English Professor Paul Fry describes the religious origins of textual interpretation. Talmudic scholars, he said, understood biblical texts as mediatory documents for understanding the intention of the author, God. They used close reading to interpret and extract the Bible’s meaning. In the Christian tradition, the Protestant Reformation further spread Biblical close reading. In the absence of a priest’s interpretive help , individual worshippers relied on close reading to parse Scripture.
Romanticism brought interpretive close reading to literature. The movement reframed literary production as a moment of spiritual insight, arising from a spark of extraordinary genius. In increasingly secular
Western Europe, the literary creator became a placeholder for the divine creator. “There was a quasi-religious dimension,” said Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis, a Professor of both Comparative Literature and English. “The poem became like a prayer.”
Recitals were commonplace in classrooms, and these displays of religious awe made their way to Yale’s English Department. William Lyons Phelps, who taught literature at Yale for 41 years before retiring in 1933, represented this trend. “He’d go in, quote rapturously, and be done,” Fry said. His classes were enormously popular, and alumni donated enough to name Phelps Gate after him.
By the 1930s, though, literature professors were exasperated. They wanted scientific rigor, not religious ecstasy. In Britain and the United States, New Criticism was born. In the view of the New critics, a literary text was a self-contained, unified whole. The text was cut off from the author at the moment of its birth. Rather than analyzing authorial intent, these professors used close reading to identify and resolve tensions within an autonomous text.
For many readers, this method of close reading was liberatory. Students without knowledge of historical background could now participate equally: close reading democratized access to texts. “You wouldn’t have to be an upper-class person with an upper-class education to say something meaningful about the text,” said Professor Katie Trumpener, a
Professor of English and Comparative Literature. “It makes you fearless.”
While New Criticism fell out of favor by the 1980s, its pedagogy persists. Most Yale English classes still prioritize close reading the text as a self-enclosed whole. Although class conversations now include the author and their context, undergraduates are rarely required to read secondary sources. “You are English majors,” Fry explained, “because of New Criticism.”
“Close reading is the number one thing which has been hammered onto the students,” said Michelle Ampofo ’24. Ampofo, an English and WGSS double major, said that in her experience, close reading has been prized above all else. “I don’t have a problem with that,” she added. “It’s helped me think. You have to dissect something and pick it apart before you know the thing fully.”
The close reading method of New Criticism, however—studying a text without regard to its author and context—eschews politics. Self-enclosed close reading does not, for instance, require a moral evaluation of American poet Ezra Pound’s fascist collaboration during WWII. It does not provide the tools to integrate Edmund Spenser’s position as an English colonial administrator in Ireland into interpretations of his works. “Although it was originally considered democratizing,” said Dean Lewis, “people now treat it as isolating the texts from social and political context, and being elitist in this way.”
Treating texts as autonomous also cannot interrogate the politics of canon formation. The study of modern English started 19th century India, when English
colonial school systems assembled new canons of British authors to define and enforce British identity. They exported the result back to England. “English as a discipline is tied up with the question of Englishness,” Ramachandran said. “The canon wars are about the politics of inclusion and exclusion. What counts as English?”
Responding to students’ petitions to “decolonize” the major, the English department has reinspected its methods. The Department is now one of the few at Yale with a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee. Likewise, faculty diversified the English Major’s introductory requirements, making “Comparative World Literatures” and “American Literature” equivalent to “Readings in English Poetry” I and II. Although the major has diversified its content, it has not yet diversified its form: the New Critical method of close reading is still widely (if imperfectly) implemented. Close reading of the quasi-autonomous text is prized above all.
A different form of close reading, however, can be integrated with political analyses. “I don’t think they’re really at odds with one another,” said Dean Lewis. “Most critics use some form of close reading. Freudians might do a close reading to get at psychological questions. Marxists may do close readings to reveal class divisions.” A student, for instance, could close read to unpack expansionist rhetoric within a text, using the method to interpret how colonization frames the desires of a character.
Close reading can be used as a political tool, but this usage has its own limitations. Stuffing history into a fifty-minute literature seminar can lead to a reductive understanding of both. Politicizing literature, too, could preclude the ecstatic human experience of being alone and free with a book. “Literature’s business,” said Sterling Professor of English David Bromwich, “is not to make you want to go out and do something.” Instead, he said, “the primary thing is to have a new feeling, an original feeling, which taps into some-
thing. That feeling–you can’t always pick it up from life. You don’t have both binoculars and microscopes, which is what a work of art gives you.”
Every professor I spoke with agreed that close reading is crucial for a literary education. Careful attention to the details of a text, though, does not necessarily require treating the text as an autonomous whole. New Critical self-enclosed close reading does not have to be unthinkingly revered.
When I began research for this article, I felt that my English classes had duped me. I believed I was brainwashed into close reading the text as an autonomous, and I was alarmed by this method’s exclusion of politics. Now, though, I see that the method also has its virtues. It is democratizing. It prioritizes an individual’s creative and thoughtful relation with the text. It demands more than reductive historical causal claims.
“Reading of any value is an art, and certainly there's more than one kind of art,” Fry wrote in an email to me. I want an undergraduate education, then, which teaches me the multiple arts of reading. If and when we students choose to close read, we choose the form in which we practice it. We choose the end for which it is employed. We choose the questions we use it to ask.
On the wall inside the Livable City Initiative (LCI) office in New Haven City Hall, there is a sign boasting a picture-perfect family of black silhouettes. The parents, tall and thin, hold hands as they watch their daughter bike down a paved, pristine street. Freshly cut grass, blooming trees and shiny, modern buildings surround them.
This fantasy is the Initiative’s unmet promise.
Because in New Haven, the vast majority of the residents represented in those black silhouettes are renters. According to DataHaven’s 2021 New Haven Equity Profile, 72% of the city’s 49,000 households are rentals, double the national average of 36%. The rapidly increasing median gross rent–now over $1,200 a month–is also higher than the national average.
As rents rise, LCI’s website promises that they will “enhance the experience” of Elm City renters. Following the flight of thousands from New Haven and soaring vacancy rates in the ‘90s, a 1996 ordinance created the Initiative as a replacement for the Office of Housing and Neighborhood Development. According to LCI Executive Director Arlevia Samuel, one of the Initiative’s primary functions is to be a source of redress for renters whose landlords force them to live in unsatisfactory or hazardous conditions. This comes in the form of inspections, fines, and licensing regulations.
“LCI is extremely effective in the city,” Samuel said in an interview. “We do a very good job of what we do.”
But city records from over 320 addresses, numerous unresolved violations against landlords, and testimonials from 11 New Haven tenants paint a very different picture to Samuel’s promise of LCI’s effectiveness, and seem a world away from the family of black silhouettes. For over a year, Patricia Ramos tried to stop mold from overtaking her home while her ceiling collapsed. A
water leak caused Robyn Otei-Ntiri’s bathroom to flood for the fourth time. Jessica Stamp, along with the many residents of Elizabeth Apartments in West Rock, have contended with inadequate heating, unsafe wiring, and a lack of smoke detectors. The tenants had to endure without help from New Haven or LCI.
Of the 11 New Haven tenants, 10 did not believe LCI fulfilled its responsibility to them or the people of New Haven. The 11th had never heard of it.
“Watch your step,” Jessica Stamp, an Ocean Management tenant of four years, advised as she walked through the hallway outside her apartment.
She pointed out a collection of large, sharp screws which she said that building maintenance staff had left in the walkway when they replaced a light fixture. As she walked through the 70-unit, Ocean Management-owned Elizabeth Apartments, those screws proved to be just one example of an extended pattern of neglect.
A tour of the complex of graying red bricks revealed basements without smoke detectors, laundry rooms without lights and dryers without vents. According to Stamp, the basement room for storage units had an illegal electrical system with extension cords protruding from one outlet and wires stapled to the ceiling. At the base of one entryway’s staircase was a foot-deep hole in the pavement.
“When we were purchased by Ocean, everything went downhill,” Stamp explained. “They make it very, very uncomfortable for us.”
Ocean Management, founded in 2009 by Shmulik Aizenberg, did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls, including to Aizenberg directly, regarding matters detailed in this story.
The conditions inside residential units, which rent for as much as $1,600 a month for one bedroom, are even worse than those in the common spaces. In addition to a widespread mouse infestation and faulty thermostats, one elderly tenant had her water turned to 140 degrees. Another tenant reported going over a week without heat. Stamp said that when tenants tried to call Ocean Management, they were brushed off or outright ignored.
In fact, Stamp alleged that when she and other tenants submit a maintenance request on Ocean Management’s resident portal, the request is often automatically closed minutes later. One of Stamp’s requests regarding the laundry room, submitted at 6:18 PM on Oct. 29, was closed when she checked it 13 minutes later.
“It’s been ridiculous,” Stamp said with an exasperated laugh. “How does [Ocean] still have a license to be a landlord?”
Elizabeth Apartments is not an outlier among the roughly 1,400 units in Ocean Management’s New Haven portfolio. I conducted a public records search of 320 Ocean Management-owned addresses encompassing 1,002 units. My search found that housing code complaints have been filed in 71% of those buildings since 2015. Tenants have sent in at least 721 complaints, and roughly three complaints were filed per building. Elizabeth Apartments had four.
Of those properties with complaints, LCI recorded that 84% violated the housing code and that most had more than one violation. Over half of Ocean Management’s properties contributed to 2,471 violations. That’s a new housing violation almost every day since 2015.
“If you walk around New Haven, it’s obvious that housing code violations are rampant,” said Alex Speiser, who leads a weekly canvas for the Connecticut Tenants Union. “Literally the naked eye can see that. It’s a pattern.”
Ocean Management tenants Patricia Ramos and Robyn Otei-Ntiri echoed the Elizabeth Apartments tenants’ description of Ocean Management’s consistent failure to respond. Jeannie Ferraro of Platt Street said Ocean Management did address a water leak in her pantry by sending a maintenance worker to fix it. But a week later, the leak started again – and has continued for four years with no response.
Stamp said the volume of problems at Elizabeth Apartments has become almost consuming.
“Our question has been ‘Where is LCI?’” Stamp said.
New Haven created LCI to attempt to formalize the process for holding landlords accountable. The city’s 1996 ordinance states that “the bureau is authorized to en-
gage in any and all activities authorized by law which are related to the elimination and prevention of blight.” Those activities include “housing code enforcement in accordance with applicable law.”
Almost three decades later, New Haven tenants have been thrust into a bureaucratic nightmare.
Take the missing smoke detectors in the basement of the Elizabeth Apartments. It’s a severe safety hazard: a fire killed two New Haven tenants in a building with broken smoke detectors in 2019. New Haven housing code says that concerned tenants should first contact LCI to file a complaint. If the violation is urgent an LCI inspector should show up at the tenant’s door within 24 hours. The inspector is expected to record the violation and contact the landlord to demand that they fix the problem. Usually, landlords are given up to 21 days to respond. For most violations, however, this process can take weeks. LCI still sends letters by physical mail.
“That’s our process,” Samuel said when asked why physical mail is still used. “That’s how our processes go.”
Filing a complaint is just the first step. If Ocean Management fails LCI’s reinspection, the agency is supposed to seek an arrest warrant against the landlord in Connecticut housing court. If the judge approves their application, LCI is required to re-inspect the property within the week. But if Ocean Management fixed the detector by then the charges would be waived, even though the issue likely would have persisted well over a month since a tenant like Stamp would have first reported it.
“These things take a lot of time,” New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said in an interview. “We’ll continue to work to improve accountability.”
City data confirms Elicker’s description of consistent delays. A Freedom of Information Act request revealed that as of Dec. 5, 2022, the agency received 1,541 complaints since the start of the year. 68% of violation cases the city found are still open, some dating back to early February.
At Elizabeth Apartments, Stamp says the situation is even worse than these statistics suggest. In the building’s most recent effort for relief, they have struggled to advance through the process at all.
On Nov. 23, Stamp led another tour of the complex, this time with LCI housing inspector Nicholas Caprio. He saw all of it, she said: the piled-up garbage, the illegal outlets, the holes in the stairs, the decrepit dryers and furnaces and the missing smoke detectors. Public records confirm an inspection on that date, along with the result: “Failed.”
For weeks, nothing happened.
On Dec. 7, she called LCI during her own teaching hours at Platt Technical High School in Milford to figure out what was going on. She spoke with William Banks, an LCI administrative assistant, who, af-
ter pulling up the building’s file, told her three things. First, LCI didn’t postmark a letter to Ocean Management listing the violations until Nov. 29, six days after the inspection. Second, LCI can’t start the clock on Ocean Management’s timeline to fix the problem until they receive the letter. And third, for reasons that weren’t explained to her, the letter might not get to Ocean Management for three to four weeks. Banks brushed off Stamp’s concern about the urgency of getting the smoke detector fixed.
“I mean, that’s insane!” Stamp shouted. More weeks passed. Still nothing.
On Dec. 23, Caprio returned again to Stamp’s home for a reinspection, which was confirmed by Elicker’s Director of Communications Lenny Speiller in an email. After seeing the same unventilated dryers, missing smoke detectors and even more garbage piling up around untended dumpsters, Stamp said Caprio “threatened” Ocean Management’s Renovation Manager Jake Paps with a warrant.
Paps responded by saying Ocean Management never got a letter from LCI. Stamp repeated this over and over a few
times, as though she herself still couldn’t believe what she was saying. Per Connecticut law, the agency is not allowed to seek a warrant against a landlord until they have already notified them of a violation and allowed them time to fix it.
Whether or not Paps was telling the truth, Stamp said it didn’t matter. What mattered, and still matters, was the safety of her apartment. But as of Jan. 30, Stamp said the vast majority of the issues were just the same as when LCI first inspected the complex, more than two months before.
When asked for permission to speak to LCI staff members such as Caprio and Banks to confirm these events, Samuel responded, “My housing inspectors don’t do interviews.” She asserted, “I follow the rules, and my team does too.”
Elicker stressed that for more immediate dangers like missing smoke detectors, LCI “has a hotline” and “will respond immediately.” Calling the line, however, leads people to the fire department, who, as Stamp found out when she tried to call, are often dealing with more immediate emergencies.
Faced with the fact that the city is unlikely to hold Ocean Management accountable, tenants are furious.
“Who’s really responsible for the problem?” Stamp asked. “Is it the landlord, or is it LCI who’s just sitting on the issues? Every time Ocean steps out of bounds, LCI should be there to stop them.”
“That’s Kind of a Joke”
Mayor Elicker acknowledges that LCI has faced “challenges.”
He believes, however, that the state–not his administration–is to blame. Connecticut statute 7-148o limits the fines landlords can receive to $250 for each inspection demonstrating “that the blight-
ed conditions continued to exist after written notice to the owner or occupant, and the expiration of a reasonable opportunity to remediate.” Elicker said these fines should be increased, but didn’t say by how much.
He claimed that LCI is trying to be more proactive about bringing landlords to court. Thanks to LCI inspections, Ocean, for example, has paid $13,000 in fines at four separate court visits since October of 2021.
“As landlords understand that we will follow through on accountability, they're going to be more likely to follow rules,” Elicker said.
Still, these fines amount to little for a property empire of Ocean Management’s size. A 70-unit building like Elizabeth Apartments, where people pay over $1,000 in monthly rent, can bring in over $100,000 each month. Even if the fines LCI managed to levy against Ocean Management last year were quadrupled, it would only be roughly half of what the company re-
ceives from one address in a single month.
Elicker also raised that there is no state system in place to scale punishment appropriately for “repeat offenders.” Right now, Ocean’s 2,472nd violation must be treated the exact same as another property owner’s first.
But Samuel, who Elicker appointed to lead LCI back in 2020, took the opposite stance. When asked if she believed landlords with many violations and landlords with none should be treated equally, she said, “I don’t understand your question. We are unbiased. We have large landlords, we have small landlords, we have in between. Everyone is treated the exact same way.” LCI believes it is antithetical to their mission to show “bias” toward a landlord that disproportionately causes the problems the agency is explicitly charged with addressing.
When asked if, for a landlord with Ocean’s level of misconduct, his administration has considered stronger measures such as reviewing Ocean’s licensing rights to prohibit the company from owning
New Haven property, Elicker’s response was simple. “I hadn’t considered that,” he said. “We very much want to make sure people are living in safe environments.”
These responses come as the Elicker Administration plans to pay Aizenberg’s company $1.3 million to take possession of debilitated properties on Dixwell Avenue in an attempt to convert them into affordable housing. Ocean Management is charging $350,000 over the appraised value of the properties in the deal. All the while, Ocean tenants continue to beg for a modicum of aid and are left unsatisfied. Patricia Ramos, a disabled former property manager whose Ocean-managed apartment’s roof caved in, said it was more than a year and a half from the time an LCI complaint was filed to the time Ocean Management got fined for those violations in 2021. For a year and a half of persistent mold in her own home, which she said the company only fixed once the case was being disputed in court, Ocean Management paid only a $250 fine. Communications director Speiller confirmed these events in an email by writing “A warrant was issued in 2021 and the case was satisfied in court.”
Then there are tenants like Jeannie Ferraro, a renter who has lived in the city for over 40 years, whose apartment has been plagued by a persistent water leak. When asked if she’d spoken with LCI to push Ocean Management to address the constant drip in her kitchen, she gave a confused look. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is,” Ferraro said.
Stamp had never heard of LCI either until 2022. She said she wondered how many of LCI’s problems can be attributed to a lack of resources. After all, LCI employs only 12 housing inspectors for New Haven’s 49,000 households, leaving over 4,000 for every inspector to manage. To inspect each property once in a typical
work year would require 80 inspections a week. Since 2019, LCI’s general funds budget from the city has increased by only $17,000, while New Haven’s police budget has increased by $7 million in the same period, for comparison. LCI is far from the city’s highest budgetary priority. But Stamp’s willingness to give any benefit of the doubt is fading fast.
“I don’t want to throw people under the bus, but I think [LCI] is set up to fail,” Stamp said. “Either they don’t have proper training, proper technology, or adequate staff. Because when there are conditions like these, it doesn’t mean you just accept it.”
For years, LCI has failed to intervene on the behalf of New Haven tenants battling against one of New Haven’s most powerful corporations to fix emergency conditions in their apartments.
Samuel, though, does not see any issues in LCI’s operation. When asked if she thought average New Haven residents would agree with her stance, if the 11 tenants were merely outliers in an otherwise successful agency, she dismissed them.
“I don’t know what anyone else thinks,” Samuel said. “I would hope [New Haven residents] know what we do. Those that don’t will soon learn. But you want to interview me to analyze our efficiency? That's kind of a joke. I don’t need a reporter trying to poke holes in what we do or how we do it.”
As Stamp tries to maintain a 70-unit building without help from its owners or her city, every day brings a new disaster. While giving the tour of the premises,
Stamp stopped to briefly check in with one of her neighbors, Sarah Giovanniello. Giovanniello, appearing at the door pajama-clad, pointed out the razor blade by Stamp’s feet. She had found it that morning along with another lying on the steps. As the two spoke about the disarray their home had fallen into, an elderly woman in a blue bathrobe – Mrs. Cooper – began to slowly descend the stairs. When she reached the pair, she tapped Giovanneillo on the shoulder and asked if she wanted to see her broken sink faucet.
Stamp sighed.
“If I hit 27 people with my car, I should not have a license anymore,” Stamp said. “The same should apply to Ocean.”
“What’s really scary is when you think about people like Mrs. Cooper who are in their 90s,” Giovanniello added. “What are they going to do against a corporation who doesn’t care about anything but profits?”
Stamp sighed again.
Tenants aren’t giving up yet, though. Stamp and Giovanniello are currently leading a tenants union that Giovanniello formed within the complex. At an upcoming Fair Rent Commission hearing, they plan to help represent the woman with scalding water in her apartment. A good result could lower her rent, but won’t guarantee any safety net to prevent future issues. But nonetheless, she said that simply trying to keep herself and her fellow tenants in her building safe has been killing the optimism she once had that New Haven is with them in their fight.
Now, almost none of that optimism is left.
“For a while, I thought we could work with [Ocean] and get things done,” Stamp said. “But they weren’t responding. Then we thought, okay, now we go straight to LCI. But the more information we’ve gotten, we’ve had to realize it’s not working. It’s just not. We had no idea how broken it all was.”
Smoking kills. This fact is no myth to the marvels of modern science and medicine. Why, then, at a place such as Yale, whose students appreciate the value and application of such scientific knowledge, has smoking cigarettes made a resounding return?
Is it a plot by Big Tobacco? (Probably not. Cigarette companies are, famously, champions of public health). Is it the unmet oral needs of infantile bulldogs in a crucial stage of psychosexual development? (I took AP Psychology in high school, no big deal.) Is it a valiant last stand against the Francophile cultural Marxists that plague this culturally capitalist university? The answer will inevitably disappoint you.
Equipped with a pack of a cowboy killers, an “I <3 New York” lighter that I bought for my mom, and the brute force of journalistic method, I set out to crack the cigarette question once and for all. I undertook what might have been the most important assignment of my career as a journalist, risking life and lung as I reluctantly smoked countless cigarettes, all the while remaining stone cold sober. Because many interview subjects felt that their moms would be disappointed in them if they, for some absurd reason, read this article, anonymity of the highest
degree has been granted. Thus, the names and personal information featured in this article have been altered to protect students from a firestorm of matriarchal passive aggression.
One need not look too hard to find a cigarette on campus. Your best bet is to buy a pack for yourself by taking a hop, skip, and a jump down to the convenience store questionably called “Murder Mart,” (which is okay actually because it's comical classism and New Haven fear-mongering as opposed the more serious varieties of classism and fear mongering that abound at Yale. Your second best bet is to go to a party. The vast majority of my super extensive and unbiased research was conducted at Edon and the Fence Club, primarily because I’m just not like other guys and vastly prefer the atmosphere of social clubs to that of frats.
A pattern developed across my conversations with Yale’s carbon clique. When the question of how one comes to smoke cigarettes was posed, one answer rose above the rest: “I definitely just have a nicotine addiction,” was what Yale College student Jimmy Shoeshine had to say. Like most of his peers, Shoeshine felt that a culture of nicotine consumption via electronic cigarettes was popularized in his teenage years due to the glacial pace of research and regulation regarding vaporized nicotine delivery
systems. The early popularity of these devices was largely attributed to their blatant advertising towards minors, with flavors such as cotton candy, banana split, and gummy bear. Early access to nicotine that smelled like candy created a generation of teens and early twenty-somethings far more willing to smoke cigarettes, especially when drunk and disinhibited at a party. The powers that be, however, have dissuaded me from pursuing this line of investigative journalism any further because it is too, “sad,” and “serious,” and, “negatively impacts the interests of important donors.”
And in all honesty, I couldn’t agree more with the powers that be. I am tired of news being so serious and fact-driven. We need more funny haha material, more feel-good journalism as a respite from the soul crushing tedium and disappointment of everyday life. In the interests of good vibes, dear reader, I have assembled some other, equally convincing explanations for the cigarette culture on Yale’s campus.
One student, who requested emphatically that her pseudonym be Cheech, told the News, “I smoke to spite the French.” Cheech went on to tell the news a compelling story about the time that she once sat at a café in France, utterly famished and in the mood for some French lunchtime cuisine. To her chagrin, the waiter could not help but notice her Americanness and in utter disdain asked if she wanted a Caesar salad. To spite the waiter and prove her
knowledge of French lunchtime cuisine, Cheech ordered Pâté, which for those fortunate enough not to know, is a reviling conglomeration of meat and fat that the French force themselves to eat and pretend is delectable in the interest of cultural superiority. Cheech, who despises Pâté, ate every last morsel of it as an act of resistance against her snide French waiter. A cigarette, to her, is much like Pâté. “I choke it down to spite the French,” she said. Cheech added: “I also definitely have a nicotine addiction.”
For those who do not smoke to stick it to baguette-wielders looking down their noses at Americans, there is, perhaps, another explanation–the psychosexual approach. Believe it or not, this approach can be used for more than explaining why every male author you have ever read wants to have sex with his mom. “I have an oral fixation,” Oedipus Rex, a drunk cigarette enthusiast, volunteered (almost too eagerly) in an interview. Before I could ask further questions, however, I felt the need to escape in fear that he might finish the cigarette and start sucking my thumb. (He had been eyeing throughout the interview).
Okay, smoking kills. So what? Who are we to step in, to disrupt the spread of patriotism, to prevent the liberation of one’s sexual libido, or to fight any other number of obscure reasons for smoking? So, next time you pass by a smoker, instead of thinking about how cool and aloof they look, or about the long-term health effects of cigarettes, consider the private war they are waging—the cause they are willing to die for by smoking. And the next time you light a cigarette, light it in honor of these individuals, who march through clouds of gray smoke not as addicts, but as heroes.
Eric Li (YSM ’25) and his three lab partners stared at the coffin-sized metal box. The steel glinted beneath the lights, austere and impenetrable. Through his mask, Li inhaled the faint, familiar smell of formaldehyde.
Only moments before, one hundred of Li’s fellow first-year Yale medical students had filed into the cavernous, glass-paneled laboratory on the third floor of The Anlyan Center for Medical
Research and Education, a block away from the Yale School of Medicine. It was their first time in the dissection room. They navigated around rows of narrow steel tables mounted with rectangular metal boxes.
Their instructor, Associate Professor of Surgery William Stewart, announced the assembled students’ first lab assignment. Li and his classmates gripped the handles of the boxes at their lab stations and
pulled them open. A semi-transparent plastic bag lay inside. They unzipped it.
A 97-year-old woman faced them. A placard on the wall stated that she had died of cardiopulmonary arrest—caused when the heart and lungs cease to function. Li and his lab partners knew nothing else about the cadaver. For a moment, he struggled to fully grasp what he was seeing.
“[It was] a quite surreal experience,” Li recalled. “That’s somebody who used to live and have a whole life and a whole life story. It felt like we didn't get that much time to process the fact that this was happening.”
For first-year Yale medical students, dissecting a cadaver is often considered a rite of passage—a necessary practice that elicits excitement and dread. Each year, a new class of aspiring physicians wrestles with the psychological and ethical consequences of this macabre tradition.
Li observed the dead woman’s shriveled, jaundiced skin. It had a waxy sheen. The cadavers, most of whom died in their seventies and eighties, sometimes reminded students of their grandparents. Addy Feibel (YSM ’25), a Yale medical student in Li’s class, had witnessed bodies at open-casket funerals and was mostly unfazed, though she had never been in the presence of twenty-six cadavers at once.
Under Stewart’s instruction, Li and his classmates drew a part of their donor’s body, the body they would study for the next year and a half. They sketched sharp profiles, contoured hands, clusters of freckles, and tattoos. Then, the students used marking pens to trace
the areas where they imagined they’d find each organ.
They did not actually dissect the body until their third class. They made their first incision with scalpels, slicing through the torso to access the body cavity, navigating dense layers of striated muscle and dull, tan subcutaneous fat. The intestines and lungs glistened beneath the lights. The blood vessels were clouded, with thick clots that, when extracted, formed delicate networks like tree branches. They were nothing like the vibrant vessels illustrated in the medical textbooks Li poured over in his classes. Unlike a live body with richly colored, wet tissue, the donor’s abdomen was mostly sapped of moisture. Yet fluids gushed into the body cavity once Li removed the lungs and set them on the table.
“A lot of the times I felt it easiest for me if I went on an autopilot mode and just went about the dissection as a learning exercise or as an almost objective kind of thing. Like I'm going in here to look for these structures, and then I am done,” Li said.
Given the invasiveness of the procedures they perform, Feibel and Li said that the desensitization of medical students is inevitable. It becomes a necessary tool for survival, they said.
Over the course of twenty labs spanning a year and a half, Li and his classmates dissected every part of the donor, from the orbital muscles to the gluteus maximus, as generations of doctors had done before them. But the procedures took a toll.
Feibel, for instance, recalled feeling hungry every time she emerged from the anatomy laboratory. (Formaldehyde is well-known among medical students as an appetite stimulant). At first she found it unsettling that she craved food after hours of dissecting necrotic tissue. But eventually, “it becomes normal, not weird anymore, to be hungry afterwards,” Feibel said. “It's just the inside of a body. It’s kind of beautiful. [You] have to get used to what could be perceived by other people as kind of gross because that's what you have to do when you're doing surgery.”
The dissection of the head and neck, however, punctured the students’ protective emotional boundary. Most of the time, they kept the face of the cadaver covered. But on the day that they extracted the brain, Li confronted the
donor’s face. For the next few hours, the room was filled with the ear-splitting sounds of electric saws cutting through twenty-six skulls, cleaving the center of the face and exposing the maxillary sinuses. Bone particles floated in the air. They wore masks to prevent themselves from inhaling the toxic dust.
After drilling through the skull, Li and his lab partners removed the brain. They extracted a yellow sheath of nerves that trailed from the brain to the floor: the spinal cord. Li held the cadaver’s central nervous system—the source of a lifetime of sensations, thoughts, and feelings—in his hands.
“A lot of the general population has not seen what the underside of a brain looks like in person. Not in a picture, but right there, live, in front of you,” Li said. “That’s stuff that you either desensitize yourself towards, or you don't, and you always feel that sense of unease.”
Dissecting a once-living human cadaver introduces a host of ethical issues. How does one treat the donor with respect and dignity while conducting a violent, invasive procedure? And how does one reckon with the knowledge that the donor’s body may have been obtained in an unethical manner?
While they continue to struggle with the first question, Li and Feibel were not forced to grapple with the second because the process of procuring the bodies is highly regulated. According to Stewart, each individual donates their body directly to the Yale School of Medicine. The donors are embalmed in the Anlyan Center. After the dissection, the bodies are cremated and sent back to their families, or to the Evergreen Cemetery, two miles west of campus. Medical students are not involved in the process.
“I'm just a cog in the system,” Li said. “The donors voluntarily gave up their bodies; I'm at school; the school got
these [cadavers]; I’m in a class; they put me here. I'm not going out, robbing graves myself and dissecting. I know that's very black and white, but I'm not constantly having moral dilemmas while dissecting.”
Anatomical dissections were incorporated into Western medical education in 1231, when Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III decreed that universities training physicians must hold a public dissection once every five years. The practice was seen as a way for medical students to probe into the depths of the body to gain empirical knowledge of its inner structures.
Dissection emerged as a practice in the United States six centuries later, at a time when orthodox physicians (usually European American, upper middle-class men) were struggling to build their reputations. Denounced as murderers by rival botanic and homeopathic healers due to their aggressive therapies, orthodox physicians relied on dissections as a way to legitimize their practice. They established state medical societies and
medical schools outfitted with anatomy labs that excluded alternative healers. One such institution was the Yale School of Medicine, erected in 1810 across from the Grove Street Cemetery.
As hundreds of for-profit medical colleges sprung up around the country, orthodox medical students began to identify themselves as anatomists. According to John Warner, the Avalon Professor of the History of Medicine at Yale, the invention of cheap, accessible Brownie cameras in the 1890s popularized group portraits of medical students standing beside their cadavers in the anatomy lab. These photographs became an enduring symbol of orthodox doctors’ professional identity.
“[Posing in the anatomy lab] was the most common way that American medical students, for about a 50-year period, chose to have themselves depicted both together and at work,” Warner said.
Portraits from the late 1890s through the 1920s, unearthed from the archives of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, show Yale medical students looking up at the camera mid-dissection, wielding glinting scalpels in their bare hands. Pipes, intended to dispel the odor, dangle from their mouths. The cadaver rests
in front of them on the table, fully exposed and rendered unrecognizable by the dissection. Oftentimes, anatomy tables during this period were engraved with racist epigraphs or, more commonly, the sentiment: “He lived for others. He died for us.”
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dissection was frequently an act of racist or classist violence. Medical colleges were in constant need of cadavers since there were few legal sources of bodies. Students ventured into nearby graveyards with shovels to “resurrect” the cemetery’s most vulnerable citizens, typically poor African Americans. The dissectors were mostly upper-middle class white men.
Grave robbing was common in New Haven. In 1824, for instance, the body of Bathsheba Smith, a nineteen-yearold white woman, was stolen from her grave in West Haven. Her body was found by the townspeople on the dirtpacked cellar floor of the Yale Medical School, hastily covered in grave clothes. The Connecticut Herald covered the story on January 13, 1824, and the body-snatching sparked a riot on the New Haven Green.
According to Warner, about ten years later, in the 1830s, a similar, little-known incident occurred: a Black man was exhumed from his grave and carried through the streets, witnessed by a
crowd of New Haven residents.
“In this case, there’s not a word about it in the New Haven paper [from that time period],” Warner said. “It's a theft of a black man's body, and there's just silence. And that contrast, I think, speaks a lot.”
Today, disproportionately few Black people are willing to donate their bodies to science. According to a study conducted at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center (UMMMC) in 2018, the overwhelming majority of UMMMC’s 859 donors were white, outnumbering donors of color 82.4 to 17.6 percent and African Americans 82.4 to 4.9 percent.
Over the past few years, however, Stewart has seen the number of Black donors gradually rise in the Yale anatomy program—suggesting renewed trust among communities of color in the medical education system.
He lived for others. He died for us. The black-and-white anatomical portraits preserved in the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library seem like relics of a darker, crueler past far removed from
the sterile world of modern medicine. Yet this legacy has reverberated through the decades.
In June 2017, two graduate dental school students and a University of Connecticut orthodontics professor snapped a selfie beside two severed heads intended for research during a workshop held at the Yale Medical School.
Two years later, the Yale Daily News reported that a collection of Yale School of Medicine yearbooks published in the 1990s and in 2011 contained photographs of students dissecting uncovered cadavers, often accompanied by inappropriate captions. In one photograph, a student posed beside the detached arm of a cadaver with the caption, “Hand job.” In another, a group of five medical students stood behind a donor whose exposed face was penetrated by a surgical tool jutting diagonally from their forehead, evoking a murder scene. The words below read: “[A medical student depicted in the photograph] is thinking, ‘One down, four to go.’” In a third, four students and an instructor clustered around a cadaver held up a banner with the words: “She died so that we may learn.” The caption in the 1999 yearbook stated: “’Nuff said.” The photo was eerily similar to portraits of medical students in the 1910s.
Stewart said that while students often resorted to humor to relieve the discom-
fort associated with dissection, he had never witnessed any student blatantly disrespect the donors.
“I wasn't very happy [to see those photographs]. It did seem pretty disrespectful to me,” Stewart said.
Warner similarly expressed his dismay with the yearbook photographs. “It's a lapse of judgment. It is a lapse of professionalism. This is very much the kind of thing that we hope to give a different forum for talking about, reflecting on, and feeling what you're feeling, but being responsible about how you manage that,” he said.
After the publication of the YDN article in 2019, Stewart enforced a strict “no photography” policy in the laboratory, which had been introduced ten years before but was previously much more lenient. Now, students sign a code of conduct requiring that they behave respectfully and not disclose details of the lab with others. Before they enter the anatomy lab, Warner also provides each class of medical students with context about the history of dissection and opens a space for them to talk about their affective responses.
Warner acknowledged that dark humor has long been “infused into the fabric of dissecting culture.” Feibel expressed that while she and her labmates dissected their cadaver, they often made jokes, admitting that “the environment is a lot more light-hearted than you [would] think.” Yet she and her friends ensured that they always treated the donors with respect.
“These people have donated their bodies to us, which is a huge honor,” Feibel said. “I think it's important that we respect them just like we would any patient and not talk about them that way. They're kind of [like] our first patient.”
Because students work on the same cadaver for a year and a half, Stewart said they often develop a spiritual connection with their donor. At the end of the course, the School of Medicine hosts a Service of Gratitude, in which students present original poetry and artwork dedicated to their donors. The sentiment, Stewart said, is one of overwhelming appreciation. Student artwork hangs in the corridor outside of the lab: a patchwork quilt of a peony sewn by the YSM class of 2005; a knitted set of lungs, intestines, and kidneys from 2008; gorgeously rendered sketches of outstretched hands.
actually in an [operating room] seeing a procedure, a real, live, breathing, blood-pumping body looks completely different from a cadaver. Is it beneficial to dissect and learn via this method? Sure. Is it necessary? Not really.”
For Stewart, however, who has taught anatomy at Yale for the past 44 years, anatomical dissection is an irreplaceable part of the medical curriculum. He falls into the empiricist camp, believing that learning occurs not when the student “sees” something, but when they search for and “find” it.
The cultural and social implications of anatomical dissections are complex. Given their harrowing history, some medical schools have begun to question the necessity of anatomy labs. In 2018, the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine announced its revamped “cadaver-less” anatomy program, touted as a new innovation in medical education. The Cleveland school relies on three-dimensional renderings of bodies in virtual reality, coupled with CT scans and ultrasound images of real patients, to teach students anatomy. Other institutions have since followed suit, eliminating anatomy labs from their curricula. The Yale School of Medicine has kept its lab. Yet both Feibel and Li believe that anatomical dissection, while potentially helpful to students, is unnecessary.
Beyond the ethical implications, Li, who wants to specialize in ophthalmology, conveyed that anatomy lab doesn’t have direct clinical applications, even for aspiring surgeons.
“It's a very controlled environment,” Li said. “You have instructors telling you what structures are. I think if you were
“When you're touching [the donor], and you're emotional, and you're being encouraged by your friends, and you smell it, all of these contribute to the learning. So if you take away, one by one, all of those other senses, you're left with, in my view, a pale imitation of the actual learning experience,” Stewart said.
Anatomical dissections were once a symbol of the elite status of physicians: pioneers on the frontier of science, excavating the hidden mysteries of the body. Now, some view them as representations of the ethical failures of the medical profession. Regardless of whether dissections fall into obsolescence or remain a time-honored element of modern medical education, they have enabled over 212 generations of Yale medical students to experience the wonders of the human body in ways few will ever appreciate.
“Most people have the idea that dissection is a rite of passage: it's something that everybody has to go through, [and] it's miserable,” Stewart said. “We surely don't want it to be like that. At Yale, we want it to be an experience where people enjoy the camaraderie of the people they're working with, they enjoy the beauty of the body, they have an insight into how it works, and if it makes them feel better, they [forge] a spiritual connection [with] the donor. We hope that transfers to their patients as well.”
The rows of hoisin sauce, stacks of instant ramen, and arrays of teaware at Yoon-ock’s grocery store, Oriental Pantry, rival the inventory of an H Mart. The mismatched wooden shelves and cluttered kitchen, though, make the Orange Street storefront feel more like my grandma’s apartment in Xi’an.
When I walk in on a lazy autumn Friday, four graduate students sit near the entrance. They are speaking in Mandarin. Yoon-ock Kim scrubs dishes behind the counter. She is vibrant and lively, rifling through cardboard boxes while punching in my order for one plain bibimbap.
Kim’s easy grace is the product of thirty-seven years of business ownership. She’s been running the Pan-
try since shortly after her immigration from South Korea in 1977. When Kim arrived in New Haven and began working as a teacher, the city had only one Asian grocery store, a tiny Chinese market catering to the small population of East Asian Yale students, including four Korean couples who, like Kim and her husband, had come to New Haven for graduate school.
“But four became eight the next year, and sixteen the year after that,” Kim explains from behind the counter, where she flattens and arranges lettuce leaves.
She and another Korean-born classmate shared the desire to start their own grocery store to serve the growing Asian popu -
lation. Her friend established the business under her name, and in 1985, the Oriental Pantry opened its doors. For two and a half years, Kim helped her friend co-manage the store while she held a job at the Yale School of Medicine. Then, when her friend moved back to Korea, Kim quit her job and took over the store full-time.
Kim explains this career shift matter-of-factly, as if it requires no justification. She glides from the cash register, to a customer searching for ingredients, to the sizzling beef on the stovetop. Back at the counter, she takes an occasional break to lean over and address me directly.
Located a mile north of central
campus, Oriental Pantry is a universe away from The Shops at Yale. There are no price barcodes, only colored index cards that mark the products and their prices in neon highlighter. Some of them have been re-marked, taped over, crossed out. Kim’s handwriting covers everything in soft, even curves. Time crawls.
“SOBA is good for the Summer. It cool down your heat,” reads one cloud-shaped, lime-green label. A price card for Tonkatsu sauce is accompanied by hand-written cooking instructions for pork katsu (“Deep Fry & Serve with sauce & finely sliced cabbage.”) Kim tells me she wrote the labels to educate customers about how to use different products. She even used to hold cooking lessons on Korean and Japanese cuisines for international students.
I can picture Kim ten years ago
writing these note cards—tracing out the Hangul for international visitors, writing English messages for American students, a paper trail of her history across every wall.
While we talk, a Muslim man sifts through the shelves, interrupting every once in a while to ask Kim about her inventory. He wants to know if she carries udon noodles (she does), and if she can help him translate the Hangul characters on a different product (she can). After he checks out, Kim explains to me that she never intended Oriental Pantry to be exclusively for Korean students, or for students of Asian heritage. She loves teaching nonAsian guests about different foods and cultures.
Still it’s Yale’s international students for whom Oriental Pantry means the most.
The restaurant’s student regulars
sometimes forget to pay after finishing their meal, Kim tells me. A few moments later, they always run back into the store, apologizing. Kim laughs when she describes this, and I wonder if she sees her younger self reflected in them—displaced from home, and seeking something that resembles it.
Earlier, Kim had said teaching and shopkeeping were vastly different roles. As I think about the notecards, her cooking lessons, the graduate students chatting at the entrance, I’m not so sure. Everyone who comes to Oriental Pantry, it seems, takes away more than their weekly groceries.
When I ask her about retirement, she entertains it briefly. “I’ll probably have to retire soon,” she says, “but not until I find someone who can run this place like me.”
What does she mean by “like me”?
Well, the Oriental Pantry leans into its mismatched inventory: shelves of Japanese snacks beside Korean skincare, kids toys beside kitchen utensils. She doesn’t care about image curation or marketing—in fact, she doesn’t even take heed of the argument that “Oriental” is an offensive term because it exoticizes and generalizes all of East Asia. Like a remnant of a time when Yale had fewer than twenty East Asian graduate students, the store is colored by its intercultural customer base. It caters to anyone who comes craving a taste of Asia, and it welcomes them with indiscriminate warmth.
On the last day of classes in the fall semester, a friend and I passed in and out of Asian-owned shops on Chapel Street. We sipped lavender lattes and split a cheesecake at the French-Korean bakery Tous les Jours, picked out gifts at the Asian homegoods store UniLife. And as we walked through fluorescent-lit aisles of shoeboxes, she said what we were both thinking: “It’s so… sterile.”
I thought of an Eric Yip poem
that ends with him eating rice at an American dim sum restaurant: “Steamed, perfect, white,” he wrote. To me that line captures it perfectly—the too-clean, too-perfect branding of Asian businesses at Yale and across the United States. The eco-conscious, minimalist, Marie Kondo-esque Muji store in Midtown. The trendy, millennial, matcha-with-oat-milk-half-sugar boba shop, complete with the glow of LED lights and notes of 88rising. If these enterprises are meant to remind America’s Asian diaspora of home, that home has been thoroughly commodified, westernized, and sterilized.
When Kim told me she quit her job to run the store, I couldn’t understand what it meant to love a place enough that you’d give up a career to hold onto it. But some time later, I realize that her love pours into every nook of Oriental Pantry, from the fortune cats promising good grades to plastic boxes of hand-rolled kimbap.
Tomorrow is Saturday. The store will fill with students buying groceries, sharing bits and pieces of their lives with Kim in conversation over the
counter. As she replies, she’ll sometimes cross over the counter to shelve new goods or run to the register to get the bill. Oriental Pantry’s website claims that the store comprises three sections: gifts, grocery, and cafe. From the inside, where Korean face masks are crammed next to strawberry Pocky boxes and the footprints of all of its guests past linger in the aisles, I don’t think those divisions really exist. Everything just feels like home.
