YDN Magazine

yale daily news magazine Vol. xxxviii · Issue 2 · November 2010 · yaledailynews.com/mag

1 in 2 college students thinks about suicide.

What’s Yale doing about it?

Mental Health at Yale.

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Plus, How Elena Kagan Confirmed Me on page 48.

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Vol. xxxviii · Issue 2 · November 2010

elm cityguide.com Every Place in One Place

Dining, Shopping, Anything.

This fall, the Yale Daily News presents elmcityguide.com, a comprehensive business directory for New Haven.

Find listings and deals from local businesses, read and leave reviews, and more!

Vol. XXXVII, No. 2 November 2010

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kenta koga: be classy, be magical

by TaoTao Holmes 5 19 5

shorts 4 Q’s Jake Halpern '97

8 small talk

Costume Bazaar x Book of Quotes x Open Drawing

9 crit

Jewish Enough

12 poetry

Crush x Love Mope x Sailor

turning right

by Jaime de Leon D 24 D

45 Personal Essay

Confirming Kagan's Ambition, Unraveling My Own

48 ask mangy mark!

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Magazine Editors Zara Kessler u Naina Saligram

The rules of the game

by Helen Gao 3 32 1

IGa

by Greg Rubin . 40 .

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Associate Editors Sijia Cai x Eliana Dockterman Jacque Feldman x Molly Hensley-Clancy x Ginger Jiang Nicole Levy x Lauren Oyler Frances Sawyer Cooper Wilhelm Designers Raisa Bruner u Eli Markham Christian Vazquez Photography Editors Carol Hsin Christopher Peak Sarah Sullivan

Yale Daily News Editor in Chief Vivian Yee

Publisher Kyle Miller

shorts

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Editors’ Note

M

idterms and papers are piling up. Winter coats have emerged.

Halloween has come and gone, leaving us counting down the days until Thanksgiving break. Because what we all need right now is exactly that: a break.

Seniors are looking for jobs. Juniors are overwhelmed by leadership positions.

Sophomores are slumping. And freshmen are still trying to find their way.

With all of this, it’s easy to forget about taking care of our physical health and, perhaps more importantly, our mental health. Jaime de Leon reminds us to seek help when we need it in his personal investigation of Yale’s mental health resources. Helen Gao helps Mainland Chinese students navigate the stresses of coming to America for a liberal arts education. Nicole Levy follows the life of Elena Kagan to learn more about herself.

And TaoTao Holmes gives us a cheerful respite from our daily pressures in her profile of magician Kenta Koga ’14.

Since we last published, the Editorial Board has turned over here at 202 York.

We’d like to congratulate the Board of 2011 on a fantastic run — putting out a daily paper is no small feat. And we’d like to thank the Board of 2012 for welcoming us into the fold. Thanks to Vivian for her leadership and support. Moreover, thanks to the Photo and Production and Design editors, especially Raisa Bruner, Eli Markham, and Christian Vazquez, for their unwavering commitment to the Magazine and incredible work on this issue. Last but not least, thanks to Reed Reibstein for his continued and generous guidance with the design.

Enjoy the weeks before Thanksgiving.

Take a break. We’ll see you on the other side.

— Zara Kessler & Naina Saligram

david yu / staff illustrator

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Professor Recs

What is your favorite restaurant around New Haven?

MarLA GEHA

My favorite restaurant that I’d recommend to students, faculty, or anyone that asks, is John’s Shanghai in New York City. All you need to order are the soup dumplings, technically called “Crab Meat with Pork Steamed Juice Bun.” Pure genius.

Geha is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy.

John’s Shanghai is located at 144 W. 46th St. (between 6th and 7th ave.), New York, ny

tHOMAS NEAR Nick’s Char-Pit is a wonderful gem with great burgers, hotdogs, and traditional fried sea food. It is fast food as it should be made, and this is coming from someone who does not eat at chains (McDonald’s, Burger King, etc.). It is easy to find, once you know where it is, and worth a short drive.

Near is an Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Nick’s Char-Pit is located at 22 Middletown Ave., North Haven, CT

ROBERTA FRANK

Sitar is a great family-run restaurant with a warm, friendly atmosphere, and they really care about their clientele. The Baigan Bharta is irresistible.

Frank is a Professor of English and Linguistics.

Sitar is located at 45 Grove St., New Haven, CT

Langdon hammer Skappo on Crown and Orange.

It’s tiny, the food is excellent, home-style Italian served in small (not too pricey) portions, and you’ll instantly be members of the family.

Hammer is a Professor of English and American Studies.

Skappo is located at 59 Crown St., New Haven, CT

GEORGE CHAUNCEY

Mezcal Restaurant — super friendly staff serve delicious authentic Mexican dishes you’ll never find on a Tex-Mex menu. A warm and welcoming space, with great music (sometimes live), low prices, and the best margaritas in town.

Chauncey is a Professor of History and American Studies.

Mezcal is located at 14 Mechanic St., New Haven, CT

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

book review tweet how pleasure works by paul bloom ydnmag y do men ‘pay good money to get spanked by prostitutes?’ y do u crane ur neck to look at bloody car accidents? paul bloom’s pleasurable new book has the answers.

VOCab•yale•ary game \geym\ n. 1. When used with prefix pre-, describes drinking alcoholic beverages before a social event: Let’s pre-game Orgo lab today. 2. The ability to seduce someone of the opposite sex: He’s spittin’ game. 3. When used as a proper noun preceded by “The,” signifies the most important Yale athletic event of the year: Yale will beat Harvard in The Game this year.

emails from... stiles grad affiliates, 9:49 a.m.: Take a break from your security dance festivities for some food, sodas, and fun. master’s assistant, 10:19 a.m.: okay, okay, safety dance. whatever it is, there’s a study break.

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Top 10 clubs you should k Clearly the best club on campus is the Yale Daily News Magazine, but we recognize that there are others with merit. Here are some that have piqued our interest...

1

2 3

Architecture Appreciation Club for Underappreciated Architecture: Led by notorious architecture buffs Kevin Adkisson ‘12 and Leah Underwood ’12, this group spends their Sunday nights dissecting structural language, contemplating the intersection between aesthetic problems and conceptual frameworks, and hanging out in weird-looking parking garages.

4 5

Yale Skillshare: Don’t know

an oven mitt from a catcher’s mitt?

Have a desperate need for a cardboard bookshelf? Skillshare can help. The group hosts weekly workshops where students can teach and be taught anything from knitting to Thai massage.

Yale Children’s Theater: Not only do they offer two full-scale productions every semester as well as acting workshops for local kids, but according to publicity coordinator Sean Beckett ’12, they also “dress up, play games, spend time with awesome kids, and eat snacks.”

6

Microfinance Brigades: A brandspanking-new group dedicated to establishing sustainable relationships, this club is great because it gives you money to grant a personal loan to a member or organization in the communities it visits. In January, they’re making their first trip to Honduras.

SNAP PAC (Students for a New American Politics): An entirely student-run federal Political Action Committee that works to elect progressive candidates to Congress. Every two years, they endorse progressive Congressional candidates in close races and send college students across the country to work as paid fellows doing field organizing on their campaigns.

Yogis at Yale: With several certified teachers and free classes every day of the week, Yogis at Yale has been helping Yalies get their vinyasa flowing, their pranayama in-sync, and their bandhas stronger.

Namaste.

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

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d know about

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Math and Science Familia: Established in 2006 by La Casa to create a support network for Latino students studying science and math, the group is open to anyone seeking encouragement during their pursuit of a STEM (science, technology, engineering, or math) major.

Yale Mountaineering Club: Check out the YMC’s

Hide & Seek Yale is filled with great secret hideouts. We’ve already found them, but can you? This rooftop offers a gorgeous panoramic view of the city...if you can find it.

rock-hard deltoids every other week at club nights at the Connecticut Rock Gym; beginners are welcome at both club nights and outdoor climbing trips to spots around Connecticut.

Yale Pistol and Rifle Club: Guns are scary.

They know how to use them.

Safely!

Community Health Educators: If Community Health Educators had a theme song, it would be “Let’s Talk About Sex.” With around 145 members offering sexual health talks in New Haven middle and high schools an average of once a week, CHE talks about sex. A lot.

— Lauren Oyler nicole levy / contributing photograhper

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

8 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z If you could ask President Obama a question, what would it be?

Would he ever consider sporting an afro again?

What is your favorite word and why?

Swashbuckling. Why? Because it’s not exactly an onomatopoeia but swashbucking — it’s just dripping with old-fashioned adventure. It’s actually dangerous I tend to use swashbuckling too much.

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ou

gh

to

nm iffl in

for Jake Halpern ’97 Jake Halpern is an author, journalist, and radio producer. He has written three books: two nonfiction — Braving Home (2003) and Fame Junkies (2007) — and a fantasy novel, Dormia (2009), which has been hailed as the next Harry Potter by the American Library Association’s Booklist. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, Sports Illustrated, and New York Magazine, and is a contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered and This American Life. He is currently teaching a college seminar on Radio Journalism.

What is your favorite memory of Yale?

My freshman year, they had a Winter Ball in Commons and they had these massive ice sculptures. There was an enormous one that was a carving of a swan. And a whole bunch of us — like twenty guys — we took the ice sculpture out of Commons and went up to the top of whatever that street is where it goes up to Science Hill. We rode down the center of the street on the swan just cruising down past the cars. We called it “Juan the Swan” because we were all rowers, our coach was Juan. And so we rode Juan the Swan for a long time, and then eventually we hit a car and Juan’s neck broke off and it ended.

You can’t live without…

Ari Gold on Entourage.

If you could meet one character from a novel, who would it be?

Winnie the Pooh.

Writing today needs more...

Old-fashioned reporting and grit.

What’s the most difficult piece you’ve ever had to write?

I wrote a story about the gated community in Hollywood inhabited entirely by child actors. So I basically had to live with like 200 hundred child actors for two weeks. I should say live with the child actors and their stage moms. That was pretty spooky.

What’s your favorite New Haven establishment?

I like the Anchor because it reminds me a lot of the bars in Buffalo, where I grew up.

The most embarrassing moment of your career was...

I was interviewed by Adrian Grenier for that HBO documentary [Teenage Paparazzo] and despite spending several days with him I kept calling him Vince.

What advice do you have for Yale students?

Don’t worry about making money in your twenties. Do what you want to do.

If you could go back to college now what would you do differently?

I was a rower and I loved rowing and my best friends were all rowers. But if I had to go back to college I wouldn’t row. If I had to go back to college again I would also make sure that I did the best thing I did there right which is meet my wife. I made so many stupid decisions in college I can’t believe I actually made one right one.

Most importantly, why is Yale better than Harvard?

Because it’s smaller, because it’s in a scrappy town, and because it has heart.

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

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Small Talk the costume bazaar W book of quotes W open drawing X­­­­­

‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.’

So instructs the sign tacked to a strip of canvas hanging from the basement ceiling. Too late: a gap in the fabric offers a generous view of concrete floor, storage boxes, someone’s old bike. The wizard, it seems, has left the building.

Shoppers quietly leaf through racks of vintage clothing and period costumes. Ambiguous organization places Native American garb next to imitation Chinese silks and cheap blue jeans. An overflow of XL T-shirts declaring “I’m a mean son of a witch!” have somehow landed amid a series of sequined capes. Save for the rustle of shifting skirts, the only sound is the occasional screech of deformed wire hangers. Under the basement’s fluorescent lighting, a kid who looks like Seth Green examines a tree costume. I’m a little miffed he found it before I did.

1. While the new owners will continue to rent out costumes for theater, film, and television, the retail section and the Russells will be gone.

“End of an era,” Russell declares straight off the bat, as one who has given more than a couple of interviews on the subject. The phone rings. He apologizes as he picks up the receiver.

“Costume Bazaar, hello!” He draws out the final vowel. After listening for a few seconds, he gives a toothy smile of recognition, and the soft skin around his eyes folds merrily.

Russell takes care of the call quickly; he’s been doing business here since he was seven. He re-centers with a stroke of his salt and pepper goatee before giving me a brisk history lesson. Dad was the original Happy the Clown on television. Twenty-two years in that role, plus side gigs as Santa and the Easter Bunny, generated a lot of costumes. Russell’s mother, who still works in the store, struggled to keep up with the constant addi-

Eva Galvan / senior photographer

Upstairs, Jeff Russell sits at the computer in his dimly tions: a closet of outfits turned into a garage and then a lit office. Covered in old photographs, news clippings, small place on the second floor of a building in West Haand stacks of files, the cluttered room is not unlike the ven. The collection also turned rental. Poke your head rest of the Costume Bazaar, the costume shop started through a staff-only door on the first floor of the store,

by Russell’s mother in 1964. After 47 years of business, and there it is: a high-ceilinged, 5,000 square foot storthe Russell family will vacate the premises on January age space where 40, 000 costumes hang on double-deckYale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

10 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z er rows of hangers. Today, the Costume Bazaar rents its wares out to every high school and college theater from Springfield to Westchester, including Yale.

Removed as it is from campus — a ten-minute drive down State Street by bus — the Costume Bazaar has had a long-standing relationship with the university. On any given day, at least 20 percent of customers rooting through the racks are Yale students, Russell estimates.

Yalies have worked here, too: Timothy Shriver ’81, now president and CEO of the Special Olympics, once clocked hours at the Costume Bazaar.

Right now, students are after Halloween costumes, myself included. As Russell helps his mother with a costume consultation, I wend my way around the racks of bagged costumes in search of something not called “Pilgrim’s Pleasure” or “Sexy Nun.” There’s a fantastic mermaid getup and a pleathery nightmare stretched taut over the plus-size model’s curves — sadism reigns supreme on All Hallow’s Eve. I check out the cheerleader section, hoping I can find something to approximate the Cheerio uniform from Glee. Unfortunately, gothiczombie-cheerleader isn’t what I’m going for.

Overwhelmed by the costumes’ intensity and the Metallica playing overhead, I find myself listing toward the door. Across the store, Russell waxes enthusiastic about the tree costume, full of suggestions for jokes to crack when people ask about it. After all, costumes are his job, for now.

— Eliza Brooke

tion. Shapiro set out to fill this gap and create “the first major book of quotations geared to the needs of the modern reader.” The product of six years of painstaking research, Shapiro’s book is now one of a kind. It’s not every day, after all, that we find Emerson and Eminem in each other’s company.

“Where there’s a will there’s a way” —William Hazlitt, New Monthly Magazine, February 1822.

To compile his extensive collection of over 12,000 quotations, Shapiro embarked on a literary treasure hunt, following clue after clue to cross-reference and trace sources. He conducted library and Internet research, taking advantage of such resources as JSTOR and newspaperarchive.com. He went so far as to question witnesses of events in order to track down and confirm the origins of modern sayings. But Shapiro was not alone in his task: some of the most vital work, he says, was completed by research students across the country who tediously sifted through newspapers and magazines for individual citations. And for suggestions on the most famous quotes from contemporary pop culture, he consulted his children.

Shapiro’s detective work paid off. Take, for example, Murphy’s Law: “If anything can go wrong, it will.” “In popular legend,” Shapiro explained, “Murphy’s Law originated in 1949 at Edwards Air Force Base in California, coined by project manager George E. Nichols after hearing Edward A. Murphy, Jr. complain about a wrongly wired rocket sled experiment.” Shapiro had heard the expression was repeated in a 1950 news conference. However, after reading through every line of We say it all the time. But who said it first? Easy: every newspaper from the Edwards air force base in The Washington Post on January 23, 1983. Before The Yale Book of Quotations, though, modern sayings like this were much harder to place.

‘Get a life.’

“If you want a thing to be well done, you must do it yourself.” —Henry Wadworsth Longfellow, “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” 1858.

In 2006, Fred Shapiro, an associate librarian and lecturer in legal research at Yale Law School, published The Yale Book of Quotations. The book was not the first of its kind. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, now in its 17th edition, was first published in 1855, and in 1953, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations followed. Though each of these compilations contains over 20,000 quotations, Shapiro still found them inadequate. When the World Almanac carried out a survey in 2000 to ascertain the ten most famous quotations of the 20th century, he noticed that three of the ten — the “Serenity Prayer” and quotes from Lou Gehrig and Ronald Reagan — were not included in the Oxford Dictionary’s most recent edi-

Courtesy of Fred Shapiro

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv 11 1950, he found no record of a press conference or, for that matter, any mention of the “Law.” On further investigation, he discovered that the first usage of the adage was in fact George Orwell’s 1941 “War-Time Diary.”

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” —Freeborn County (Minn.) Standard, May 2, 1894.

Critics of Shapiro’s project might argue that his revisionist mission is flawed, that modern and contemporary quotes have no place among those of centuries past.

What right does the rap of Sean “Puffy” Combs have to stand next to the letters of Christopher Columbus? But no matter how different the two men and their words are, The Yale Book of Quotations suggests that both belong to an exclusive club of individuals whose terminology reflects who we are today. After all, at an institution like Yale, we learn that history still in the making is as important as that of the past. Through his book of quotations, Shapiro has determined to catalogue both.

— Madeline Buxton

to the diversity of their owners. I notice one man in his mid-twenties, dressed in the pressed khaki of business attire. Messer emphatically states that everyone is welcome: “This is truly an ego-less place.”

I pull a stool from the corner of the room to sit behind the easels, opting to remain in the background rather than draw. The model strikes her first pose: she thrusts her left arm straight out from her body and rests the other languidly down her back. The light accentuates the angles of her body and casts dramatic shadows across her delicate form. I quietly observe the art taking

Art has never been my thing.

I enter the dimly lit basement studio of Green Hall at the Yale School of Art, feeling out of place and intimidated — my only experience with art is a 9th grade Basic Drawing class where I drew smudgy cylinders, floating bananas, and a plastic flip-flop. Tonight, while class participants dart around the room setting up their easels, I stand still, trying to remain unnoticed. Shedding her pink-and-white-flowered kimono, the model adjusts the lights above the platform in the center of the room and arranges the blankets she’ll sit on. I look around frantically, trying to let my gaze fall anywhere but her naked body.

My gaze lands on Professor Samuel Messer, who organizes Open Drawing sessions every Tuesday night at 8 p.m. Open to anyone affiliated with the university, the sessions were inspired three years ago by the prestigious Yale-Norfolk Summer School of Art and Music, which accepts college juniors for an intensive six-week course every year. “There is such a demand for basic drawing and figure drawing,” Messer says, explaining the idea behind the program. “Everyone loves to draw, but they don’t have a place to do it.” Tonight the demand is especially high; about thirty easels are clustered haphazardly around the studio. “This is the most people I think we’ve had,” he says excitedly about the turnout.

In accordance with the “open” nature of the classes, the artists here are not artists by trade. “A lot of the people that come are in the sciences. It’s a great outlet for people who don’t get a lot of chances to draw,” Messer said. Assorted textbooks spill over the floor, attesting Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Emilie Foyer / contributing photographer

shape around me; the artists’ precise, graceful fingers work quickly, drawing elegantly overlapping bodies that fill page after page of thin white paper.

After about five minutes, the model changes poses; she bends over and wraps her arms around her knees, curling up like a cat, and Messer drifts around the room, offering quiet guidance. Forty minutes into the session, he wanders by my corner to rinse something in the sink.

When I tell him I haven’t drawn in years, he hands me a piece of paper and a stick of charcoal. As I begin tentatively sketching the model’s figure, my fingers naturally fall back into the rhythm of drawing. She is reclining back on her hands, seated with one leg draped over the edge of the platform. My worries about choosing a major and studying for exams drift away, lost somewhere with the notes of the classical music playing softly in the corner. I draw for about twenty minutes, remembering all the frustrations of foreshortening and shading, until the model gets up to take a break.

I look at my three sketches. In the second, the model looks like she has no arms; the third makes her legs look like tree trunks.

But the first isn’t too bad.

— Natalie Villa

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Crit

Jewish enough B

I

’m running late to class, and, as usual, I’m stuck on Cross Campus strategizing how I will dodge my way across the traffic on Elm Street. I spot the Hasidic Jews who line the sidewalk, coaxing select pedestrians — those they assume to be Jews — to consider orthodoxy. As usual, they ignore me as I walk toward them. Ordinarily, this would not bother me: I am not interested in their literature. Today, however, I feel myself slowing down, trying to attract their attention, and I’m annoyed when they continue to look past me. Why have they never identified me as a possible recruit? Why have they never identified me as a Jew? Yes, I am blonde. And, no, I don’t look “stereotypically Jewish.” But, then, neither does my friend whom they do call over, who has a very visible cross dangling from his neck.

A year ago, being dismissed as “not Jewish enough” — exactly how I feel when rejected by the Hasidics — would not have fazed me. I was very comfortable with my “Jewishness.” But since coming to Yale, I have begun to doubt my Jewish identity.

Hebrew School was half-Chinese (her mother, too, had converted). In fact, one of my favorite childhood memories is of our families eating potstickers together as an appetizer for our Jewish holiday meals. I knew that these were not necessarily aspects of Judaism that a more orthodox community would embrace, but I had never thought of myself as “less Jewish” because of them.

Then I came to Yale. I soon realized that I did not fit into the typical Jewish stereotype that people held in the back of their minds: I did not keep kosher; my mother had converted; I was blonde. Suddenly, because of all these things, I was somehow not a “real Jew.” My classmates, Jews and gentiles alike, reminded me of this fact every time I ate bacon.

This feeling was only intensified when, as a freshman eager to wade into the social mix at Yale, I first visited the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. My enthusiasm was dampened by what seemed to me to be very narrow “Jewish” events offered at Slifka — and since I had never thought of Judaism as my primary identity, I was not too eager to participate in Yiddish

Yes, I am blonde.

And no, I don’t look “stereotypically Jewish.”

My parents raised me as a Reformed Jew. I attend- classes or discussions about the Talmud. By January, I ed Hebrew school every Sunday and Wednesday and was hesitant to participate in any Slifka event because was duly Bat Mitzvah-ed when I was 13. Forty Jewish it seemed that those who did identify themselves first classmates in my high school graduating class of 110 and foremost as Jews had come to dominate the buildhad followed a similar path. Yet most of them were sig- ing. The people who devoted a large portion of their nificantly more reformed than I was — many of their time to Slifka had forged tight friendships with one anBar and Bat Mitzvahs did not involve a single word of other, and by not attending events that I had deemed Hebrew, and I was one of only a handful who actually “too Jewish,” I had been left out of the community alkept the fast during Passover. Back home in Chicago, it together. When I ventured to Bagel Brunch (one of the had never seemed strange to me that my mother had only Slifka events I never miss) with a friend who was converted to Judaism, or that my closest friend from very involved with the Hillel community, I felt too un-

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Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

14 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z comfortable to participate in the conversations he had with But Ponet and I also agree that there is something very his other friends from Hillel about their recent trips to Israel special about the question of Jewish identity. Wondering or changes in the Kosher Kitchen. if you are “Jewish enough,” he tells me, is a quintessential I broached the idea of not feeling “Jewish enough” to a Jewish experience: “Maybe part of being a Jew is worrying few of my Jewish friends — some Reformed, some Conser- [about] what it is to be a Jew…The fact that you are asking vative, some non-religious. They all agreed that there was a this question [of whether you are ‘Jewish enough’] and takdivision in the Jewish community at Yale between a group ing this time to sit with me to me just confirms that you are that one of my friends dubbed “the Kosher Kitchen crowd” a [real] Jew.” (the Jews who take their meals at Slifka or are otherwise inYet this question of what it means to be a Jew seems to tensely involved in the Hillel community), and the rest be fracturing Jewish communities everywhere. In fact, it of us. Jews who want a less intense involvement in is nearly impossible today to define what a “Jewish the community, we concluded, are gradually person” is. Different people have different critelocked out. ria: faith, heritage, practices, or the simple Curious, I then surveyed my nonfact of declaring oneself to be a Jew. Jewish friends about other culThe existence of these divisions tural houses and groups often means that Jews can, on campus and found consciously or unsimilar reactions. One consciously, create friend mused that he communities that are did not feel “black unwelcoming to other enough” to be inJews. volved in the AfricanOn college camAmerican House. Anpuses, where we beother friend wished gin defining our own that La Casa would identities, this probhave more events lem of stratification is outside the organizaparticularly relevant. tion so that it could Ponet believes that be more welcoming the issue is as old as to students who were Slifka itself and admits not already deeply that he had initially involved. These stubelieved the problem dents — who do not to be confined to Reconsider themselves formed Jews (like myer ph self ), who felt uncomforta primarily defined by their gr to able coming to a Slifka Center ethnicity, race, sexuality, or reliHo P ff whose culture was oriented toward gion — tend to fear getting involved ta /s g n with identity or cultural groups on campus.

Conservative Jews. Now, Rabbi Ponet acHa n C knowledges that the problem has expanded: a Ironically, it seems that such institutions are i Br prone to splinter, narrow, and alienate portions of “There are many different types of Judaism,” and the the populations they were created to support. As I turned more variations there are in Judaism, the easier it is for these findings over in my mind, I began to suspect that this Jews to create divides among themselves. fear represents a global phenomenon that does not just exist As we continued to talk, Rabbi Ponet and I eventually inside the Yale bubble. came up with a way for me to think about Judaism: as a secThis speculation was supported by a conversation with ond or third identity. Many of the people who are currently Rabbi James Ponet, the Jewish Chaplain and Director of the “regulars” at the Slifka Center identify themselves primarily Slifka Center. With regard to cultural unease, Ponet suggests as Jews. But for Jews like myself, being a Jew is an important that “maybe we’re in an age of the gradual disintegration of part of who we are, but it is not the only part. Ponet and I identity politics.” Perhaps, he says, more students are feel- agree that what Slifka ought to be doing — and is now doing disconnected from the cultural houses and the religious ing — is trying to reach out to these people who want to be communities on campus simply because they identify more involved, just less intensely, more tentatively, or even just as a human or an American than they do as a member of any occasionally. specific race, ethnicity, or religion.

In order to engage those Jews who think of their Juda-

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z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv 15 ism as their second or third identity, Ponet tells me, Slifka has already created an Engagement Team made up of rabbis and students. Their job is not an easy one. The problem, as Sam Gardenswartz ’13, the student head of the Engagement Team, identifies it, is a natural one. There will always be a group of people that will populate Slifka because: “a) they need to be [there] because they pray three times a day or for the kosher kitchen, or b) because that is the place where they imme-

“Maybe part of being a Jew is worrying [about] what it is to be a Jew.” diately feel at home. So for those people it’s good that Slifka becomes this kind of smaller community. So then the question is: how do you balance that with the desire for everyone to feel included?”

The faculty head of the Engagement Team, Slifka Executive Director Steven Sitrin, feels that Slifka has not done a very good job of finding the balance that Sam indicates is needed: “We spend so much time making the people who are here all the time comfortable that we don’t realize we are making an environment that is not so comfortable for other people to come into.”

The Jewish community at Yale has recognized my problem and they are working to solve it.

Knowing that this effort is taking place makes me more comfortable with the idea of making another foray into life at Slifka. Ponet’s words also assuaged my Jewish identity crisis: I am not alone in questioning whether I am “Jewish enough.” This question exists as part of the broader culture of a university community, as part of the Jewish culture itself, and as part of my own search for my identity. It is not for my friends or the Elm Street Jews to decide what my Judaism is. If I want to be a Jew who eats bacon and thinks of her religion as her second identity, then so be it. That will be my Judaism, and it is “Jewish enough” for me.

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‫בית יךםף‬

The Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life is working hard to encourage more people to take advantage of its resources.

There are approximately 3,000 Jewish students at Yale, and, according to Steven Sitrin, the new Executive Director at Slifka, about 2,800 do not take full advantage of the Slifka Center, its facilities, its activities, or its resources. In pursuing various ways to make all Jewish students feel welcome, Sitrin pledges: “We are not looking for one solution, but 2,800 different solutions.”To that end, Slifka has established an Engagement Team this year, whose mission is to ensure that the Center is more welcoming not only to first-time visitors but to those students who perhaps think of Judaism as their secondary or tertiary identity. The team is composed of Sitrin, faculty head; Sam Gardenswartz ’13, student head; the rabbis at Yale Hillel; a student representative from each class; and two sophomores who act as freshman coordinators. The following is a list of exciting opportunities the Team has been working to create: shabbat guides: Now, when you attend Shabbat dinner at Slifka, you can follow the events of the night through a guide. mix and match tables: There is a new rule at Shabbat dinner: no one may sit with the same people he or she sat with the four previous Friday nights. This rule should encourage regulars at Shabbat dinners to meet and converse with those who are new to the dinners or attend them only occasionally. jewish life fellows: Jewish life fellows are not new, but they are stepping up their game this year by hosting more events in their individual residential colleges. (Who can say no to Bar Pizza in a Sukkah?) wednesday night lounges: The Engagement Team will invite clubs or student organizations to Slifka on Wednesday nights to hang out, chat, and meet people involved with the Center. class trips: The Engagement Team will be planning an annual trip for individual classes every year, allowing students to meet other Jews in their year in a fun, relaxed, off campus setting (like trips to New York and Boston to visit a museum or attend a baseball game).

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Urban dECAY, FORMER wINCHESTER REPEATING arms FACTORY PHOTO ESSAY BY Joe BREEN

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by TaoTao Holmes

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enta Koga ’14 rushed Sigma Phi Epsilon so that he would have a place to store his doves. Luckily for the Berkeley College freshman from Fukuoka, Japan, he’s now secured that dependable home for the set of white birds he hopes to soon purchase from a magician in New York City.

I first met Koga while eating cheese.

I knew instantly that he possessed something special when a simple flick of his fingers was capable of drawing my attention away from Whole Foods Gruyère and Camembert, a feat not easily achieved. He’d slipped off a thick metal ring, and, in a deft series of motions, let it disappear, reappear, spin (perhaps even apparate — who knows for sure?) between his hands. I was mesmerized. Several requests and a few weeks later, on October 1, I found myself sitting in the Berkeley Master’s House for Koga’s first show at Yale, a carefully planned production titled PB & J.

photos by Florian Koenigsberger Koga has been practicing magic for over seven years. What started as a hobby has become a professional job, landing the young magician performances in front of some of Japan’s top businessmen, actors, and celebrities. Since arriving at Yale, Koga has begun to establish himself as a notable member of the freshman class. PB & J had a waiting list of over a hundred students. Those, like myself, lucky enough to secure a seat were instructed on their online invitation: “No T-shirts and shorts. Don’t be too formal but not too casual. Just be classy.”

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s an eleven-year-old, Koga had no entrepreneurial ambitions — he just wanted attention from girls. “The first thing that came up to me in my head was: magic.”

Koga’s sudden interest serendipitously aligned with an episode in Japan’s periodic magic infatuation. (Once every decade, Koga explained, Japanese TV broadcasters provoke a sudden nationwide magic craze and then phase it out, only to revive its popularity

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later.) Koga pored over television schedules hoping to tape every single magic program broadcast on TV. He then replayed the VHS tapes in slow motion over and over with painstaking intensity.

A rather precocious pre-teen, Koga’s ambition only grew. By junior high, he was spending every evening from six to 10 p.m. in a local magic shop, practicing tricks and getting to know the professional magicians who dropped by. He interned with one such magician, Jonas Jost, learning the complexities behind building allusions and drawing in audiences.

The majority of Koga’s debuting jobs in Japan were at kids’ birthday parties.

Later, he started faking his age to land better gigs. At 15, he gave his first individual performance at the All-Asian Street Performer’s Festival of 2006. The festival’s youngest performer, Koga left the two-day event with a top hat brimming with $3,000 in donations to Doctors Without Borders and a commission to perform at a Christmas party at Fukuoka’s most famous hotel for the city’s most prominent CEOs.

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“I mean, I was very nervous, and I realized how cold, actually, people are when you’re showing magic tricks to complete strangers.” But after years of experience, Koga told me he no longer feels nervous.

“Except maybe if I performed for Barack Obama,” he clarified.

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settled into my seat at the Berkeley show with a few complimentary cookies in hand and glanced around, recognizing

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Master Marvin Chun’s family and a number of other Vanderbilt freshmen. I spotted Koga and sent a short wave in his direction; he looked effortlessly put together in his polished glasses and sleek suit.

Once the last stragglers had made their way in, my attention focused toward the flatscreen at the front of the room. I leaned forward to catch a full view of the pre-recorded video of Koga introducing himself and his magic, narrated in a measured and somewhat austere tone. As he opened a door on the video screen, the side door of the room swung inward and Koga, composed and in control, strode dramatically onto the stage. Glancing back over my shoulder, I recognized a tripod and several members of his production crew standing nearby, geared for action.

PB & J began with two audience volunteers (neither of them me, disappointingly) and lasted for about half an hour — a meticulously planned and practiced half an hour.

Each volunteer chose blindly from a bag of socks; Koga told us that if they both chose the same sock, it was going to be a good show. If not, it wouldn’t go so well.

The first person held up a pink and green striped sock…the second, black with multicolored polka dots.

I felt my neighbors on either side share an anxious breath, clearly as concerned as I was that the ominous opening would dishearten Koga. Just as Koga’s seemingly equal sense of disconcertment began to render us increasingly uneasy, he raised his hand.

“There is one thing left that might still indicate that this will be a good show,” he declared slowly, initiating a nervous half-sigh of relief. He bent over and untied his shoes, calmly easing them off his feet. I crouched up a few inches from my seat to see over the front rows. His left sock: pink and green.

His right: black with polka dots.

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I eased back down and slowly joined in the applause as my mind attempted to decipher what had just passed.

For the signature trick of the evening, Koga brought his freshman counselor Victoria Perez ’11 to the front of the room. As he looked away, I watched her draw a soft slice of Wonderbread out of a stack and hand her selection to Koga, who placed it in a brown paper bag and returned it to her. After a short sleight-of-hand routine involving disappearing and reappearing jars of Jiffy and Smucker’s, I’d practically forgotten Perez was still there, tightly clenching shut the brown paper bag of bread. She looked a little startled when Koga asked her to open it but hesitantly reached in and pulled out her slice of bread. I watched her fingers slowly unfold it and lift it up alongside her incredulous face to the audience — it was spread with PB and J.

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innie Huang ’14, one among many of Koga’s freshman peers to laud his showmanship at PB & J, admired the simplicity of his routine. There were no elaborate materials, but those used were used effectively to put on a good show.

This style is exactly how Koga expressed his intent. While following logical magic formulas, Koga prefers to base his tricks around everyday activities. The two basic trick formulas are relatively straightforward. For example, say I want to make a coin disappear.

My first option is to present the illusion that it disappears (hide it in my hand, mouth, or pocket), whereas my second option is to actually move the object (to a table five feet away). Koga applies a strict logic in the unceasing process of developing new tricks.

“I always have to be thinking, no matter what,” said Koga, who

practices magic for at least an hour every day. “I just wonder, for example, what happens if while you’re drinking beer, the can started floating?” Out of the hundreds of ideas continuously churning around in his head, only five or 10 turn out to be feasible, Koga said.

Though the performance of these tricks has grown natural to Koga by now, he is not yet habituated to the shift in audience. Back in Japan, Koga had the script for his shows planned to a T. “I know all the answers to whatever happens on stage, in Japanese. And I have that in myself so firmly that when I’m on stage

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audience wants, supplementing his research of comedians on YouTube.

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oga has always been resourceful and hardworking. He attended Nada High School, the highestranked college-preparatory school in Japan. However, the quality of his education wasn’t necessarily what most stirred Koga to leave home and move to Kobe, where Nada is located.

“If I lived with my parents, I wouldn’t be able to grow as much as if I lived on my own, because they protect you, and you aren’t able to

He’d slipped off a thick metal ring, and, in a deft series of motions, let it disappear, reappear, spin (perhaps even apparate?). I was mesmerized. speaking English, it doesn’t work the way I would speak English in daily life. I have to translate it in my head. So it was very weird performing for the first time here,” Koga reflected.

Sitting next to Koga at the Fall Show, I clarified the meanings of a few words for him. I was reminded that English is his second language and that he largely taught himself with U.S. films and books, since the quality of English classes in his schools in Japan was poor. PB & J was his first show in front of a formal American audience, but I hadn’t picked up on any discomfort while watching. As an audience member at the comedy night, Koga was alert and observant. While I was there for a few laughs, he was there to get a better sense of the type of humor an American

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discover and gain certain elements within yourself,” explained Koga, an only child. With his newfound independence at boarding school, Koga continued to receive his parents’ full support.

Koga ended up skipping classes a lot in high school to go into Tokyo to perform; in fact, if he had missed one more day, he would not have graduated. When he did eventually graduate in February 2010, he spent the next six months living in Tokyo.

His parents let him live alone, on the condition that he pay his own rent — no small feat given that he was setting up in one of the world’s most expensive cities.

As an education consultant by day, Koga designed textbooks and tests for advanced English learners.

Magician by night, he performed a two-hour show, on average, three

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Koga didn’t come to Yale to become a professional magician; rather, he wants to become an architect. to four times per week, anywhere in the evening between five and 11 p.m. His shows ranged from movie premiere kick-off parties to cocktails for politicians, with audiences of one to two hundred.

It was at one of these shows that Koga met Engin Yenidunya ’02, a

Turkish graduate now working in Japan. Yenidunya persuaded Koga to come to Yale when Koga had, in fact, told everyone at his school he was going to Harvard — where only one Nada student had ever gone before. Koga, smiling at its mild absurdity, relayed the story behind

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his Harvard pursuit. He hadn’t really intended to apply there but had rather liked the ring of saying it. Before long, word spread and real expectation mounted. So Koga went home, Googled Harvard, looked through their admissions requirements, then promptly set to work studying for the SAT and TOEFL. Upon looking up “Top U.S. schools,” he also added Yale and Princeton to the list. After being convinced that “people at Harvard feel like since they go to Harvard they need to act like geniuses,” Koga decided to come here.

ow settled into Vanderbilt Hall on Old Campus, Koga has quickly established himself. “For the first few weeks of school I went to every single party happening on campus — literally every single one. I wasn’t sleeping a lot, I was just looking for people,” he said. “My ideal business structure is like Ocean’s Eleven: people with unique talents get together, have fun, make a lot of money, and — goodbye.” Koga has now recruited five other freshmen — Benjamin Boult, Florian Koenigsberger, Geoffrey Litt, John Stillman, and Seth Thompson — with photography, film, music, technology, and management skills, to serve as his production team.

They plan to expand his website, kentakoga.com, and have already begun planning for his second show at Yale. Koga intends to put on two per semester, each with a theme he hopes will arise spontaneously. “How are people at Yale feeling? I want to respond to them, such as cheer them up in winter,” Koga said.

Still, Koga didn’t come to Yale to become a professional magician; rather, he wants to become an architect. “Magic,” Koga said, “works best as a form of decoration.

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'For the first few weeks of school I went to every single party happening on campus — literally every single one. I was just looking for people.'

However, it also exists as a form of art.” Magic shows are not the most beautiful way of showcasing this art form. “Magic complements other things better than it stands by itself.”

He wants to design venues where magic will serve just such a purpose — an alternative, sophisticated form of decoration.

“For example, when I build a hotel, I want to design the entire business and organize every single party that will be happening there,” he said.

And this proposal extends beyond

hotels; it can be applied to airports, fashion boutiques, shopping malls, and other similar establishments.

As an architect, Koga said, he thinks he would best be able to bring into reality the enterprise he has so thoroughly designed in his mind.

Koga ambitiously plans to leave the world of professional magic with a bang: a one-year world tour accompanied by his production crew culminating at the 2014 Brazil World Cup. However, there’s one problem with Koga’s otherwise adequate

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

production team — it lacks some feminine touch. Since PB & J, I’ve let him know on multiple occasions that if he’s ever in need of an assistant, I’ll be here. I don’t have much experience with slinky dresses and white doves or saws and body boxes, but after spending time with Koga, I think I’d be in good hands. Koga knows what he’s doing, and he does it incredibly well.

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It’s not that I’m trying to figure out a way to kill myself — that I have already decided.

Rather, I am building up the courage to actually do it: to turn left onto the expressway instead of right, to unbuckle my seat belt, to flatten the accelerator pedal, to rocket my sister’s black VW Golf into oncoming traffic.

On each of three nights, I leave my house wordless, get in the car, and drive around for an hour. I turn my phone off so my parents cannot contact me. The first night, I return a video to Blockbuster. The next, I drive by some friends’ houses.

Invariably, though, my final stop is the intersection of Glasscock Road and Expressway 83. I press my palms hard against the steering wheel, tears streaming down my face. I want so badly to translate my despair and frustration into that final action — that one turn that will complete my existence.

Just turn the wheel left.

And then I turn right. I make the drive back home. Walk into my house. 10 p.m. My parents beg me to break my silence. “Please talk to us, Jaime. You haven’t said a word to us for days. Please. We love you.” I head to my room. Lock the door. Go to sleep.

I guess I’ll just try again tomorrow.

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even months ago, the suicide of Cameron Dabaghi ’11 — a passionate East Asian Studies major and skilled tennis player — shook Yale University. Cameron’s death was the third on campus last year but represented the first suicide of an enrolled Yale student in 11 years. This past July, Sang-Ohk Shim GRD ’10, a Ph.D. candidate in Cell Biology, also died of an apparent suicide. She had been receiving psychiatric treatment for depression before her death.

These incidents brought Yale into the fold of a serious national problem. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students. Moreover, more than fifty percent of college students have thought about suicide, and fifteen percent have seriously considered attempts, based on a survey presented at the 2008 American Psychological Association convention. What can be done to prevent these staggering statistics from becoming realities?

Yale offers counseling services through the Chaplain’s Office and Walden Peer Counseling, but the primary source for mental health treatment on campus is Yale HEALTH’s Department of Mental Health and Counseling, which celebrated its 85th anniversary this year. The department, located on the third floor of the new Yale HEALTH Center at 55 Lock Street, treats a range of issues including sexual assault, eating disorders, substance abuse, anxiety, and depression.

Dr. Lorraine Siggins, the department’s Chief Psychiatrist, explained in an e-mail that between 17 and 22 percent of stuYale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

dents uses Mental Health and Counseling resources each year.

“More surprising,” she claimed, is the fact that 48 percent of each undergraduate class consults the department over their four years on campus.

Siggins believes that these numbers are a testament to the efficacy of the university’s mental health offerings. “The figures are probably influenced by the number of services offered and the high number of counseling sessions that are available,” she wrote. “Yale has more [resources] available than most other universities.”

But does it have enough? Studies have shown that mental health illnesses among college students across the nation have become increasingly more serious over the past decade, and in the past year, concern over mental health awareness and reform has grown on campus. In the wake of suicide at Yale, many wonder: can the university do more to better protect its students’ mental health?

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ngela Lee ’11 first visited the Department of Mental Health and Counseling, in what was then called Yale University Health Services (YUHS), her sophomore year. After spending two weeks early in the semester in Yale New Haven’s ICU for an illness that doctors were never able to diagnose, Angela returned to school amidst a slew of extracurricular obligations and five course credits-worth of unfinished work. Following a teary breakdown while studying for

D FDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDE 27 an exam, Angela sought the advice of her dean, who led her to YUHS mental health facilities.

All Yale students, undergraduate and graduate, are entitled to free, confidential counseling at Yale HEALTH’s Mental Health and Counseling Center, regardless of their health plan. The official policy provides students with a “course of brief therapy,” which typically lasts a semester. However, Dr. Paul Genecin, Director of Yale HEALTH, clarified that there is no cap on the number of visits students are entitled to through the Yale Health Plan, and that the course of treatment depends on the severity of the case.

taking medication to solve her emotional problems, even though she had made clear on her first visit that this was not a route she would ever consider.

After two months of therapy, Angela decided to terminate her treatment. She believes that the support of her close friends was what finally relieved her of her negative emotions. For many students who turn to Yale HEALTH resources, she suggests, “we don’t need someone with an M.D. or even a Psy.D. to help us cope with the stress of school. I had a stronger friend base at the end of sophomore year. I honestly think that for many people, if you find good friends, that can be enough.”

‘Yale isn’t equipped to carry out the services that they claim to provide.

It’s just really important that the students don’t rely on the university.’

All students need to do to begin treatment is call the Department of Mental Health and Counseling at 203432-0290 to schedule an initial evaluative appointment, which according to the website should take place within a few days of calling in, or on the same day if the situation is urgent. Yale HEALTH also offers an anonymous online screening to help students determine whether they should seek counsel. Approximately 25 therapists make up the Mental Health and Counseling staff. Students are assigned to a therapist but can choose whether they want to work with a psychologist, psychiatrist, or social worker. An acute care psychiatrist is also on call 24/7 to respond to emergency situations.

“I think your experience with the Mental Health Department really depends on who you’re assigned to work with,” Angela said. “It’s very luck of the draw. I’m sure there are some clinicians there who are great at listening and offering real solutions, but there are also some people who just sit there and don’t do anything.”

Angela was altogether disappointed with her experience at YUHS Mental Health, finding that her treatment made her feel worse, not better. “Every time I would walk out of the psychiatrist’s office I’d feel bad, even though there was nothing to feel bad about.” She was also frustrated that her therapist continually suggested she start Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

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think the reason there’s this idea of a feeling of general unhappiness with Yale’s mental health services is that if you’re unhappy about something you’ll tell ten people,” says Dr. Carole Goldberg, a Yale HEALTH psychologist and the faculty adviser for Walden Peer Counseling. “If you’re happy with it, though, you’ll only tell two.”

Angela is not the only student to speak up about her discontent with Yale’s mental health offerings. Sally, who asked that her name be changed to protect her privacy, also decided to end her mental health treatment on campus.

From the outset, Sally, who was suffering from an eating disorder, found herself uncomfortable with her YUHS psychologist’s attitude toward treatment. “She basically told me that I only had a limited number of personal sessions — she really emphasized that point a lot. It was really alienating.” When the psychologist suggested that she join a group therapy session, Sally was hesitant, explaining that she didn’t feel ready for a group environment. Nonetheless, she agreed to receive more information about group therapy, but no one ever contacted her.

Sally was also dissatisfied with her therapist’s manner of counseling. She described an instance where the psychologist pointed out that according to the Body Mass In-

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dex, Sally was of a healthy weight. “For a person who has these problems, having someone take out a weight chart and tell me that it says I’m healthy is one of the worst things you can possibly do. It came across as her telling me I was a failure. Someone who’s trained to deal with these kinds of problems ought to know not to do that and that it’s not really about weight itself.”

After this experience Sally decided to hold off on further visits to the psychologist. However, several months later, she decided that her eating disorder needed critical attention and tried once more with YUHS. Last spring, she called again to arrange an appointment but was not able to set an appointment date for within thirty days of her call-in. She returned to YUHS for her scheduled visit only to be turned away by the receptionist — her appointment would have to be rescheduled for an even further date.

Fed up, Sally declined to reschedule and began researching the possibility of mental health resources outside of Yale. She scheduled an appointment with Dr. Laurie Grunebaum, a psychologist independent of Yale University, who confirmed that she sees “quite a number” of Yale students in her New Haven clinic. Sally reported her experience with Grunebaum has proved vastly more

effective than her experience with YUHS. “What Dr. Grunebaum emphasized was that though the nature of the illness is related to food, weight, body image, it’s really about coping with emotions,” she said. “She’s helped me so much.”

For students like Angela and Sally, Yale has failed to meet their mental health needs. Other students, too, have complained about Yale’s offerings. One student interviewed felt that Yale’s services alienate those who have relatively minor mental health needs, asserting that you will only be taken seriously as a patient if your case is extreme. Another student, on the other hand, felt that Yale is unfit to handle extreme cases: “Yale isn’t equipped to carry out the services that they claim to provide,” this student, who has taken time off from Yale for mental health reasons and asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy, said. “It’s just really important that the students don’t rely on the university.”

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fter that third night, my dad finally manages to bring me out of my silence. There is no moment of epiphany allowing me to understand that my situation can be

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eating disorders

a host of unanswered questions

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see sick people. I see them in my classes, obsessively circling their tiny wrists with their fingers as they sit through lectures. I see them walking across campus, their clothes hanging so unnaturally it looks like a wire hanger lies beneath them rather than a human being.

I see them in the dining halls, inspecting the nutrition facts a little too closely, picking just a little too much at their small plates of food. I see them anywhere and everywhere. These people all suffer from a common category of illness: eating disorders. I would know; I had one.

I struggled with anorexia nervosa my entire sophomore year of high school. Eating disorders are much more prevalent in people with certain personality traits, traits that are unfortunately characteristic of overachievers like Yalies. These include a need to please others, perfectionism, high expectations from family, and struggles with demands to be more independent and self-sufficient. College students are also particularly vulnerable to eating disorders due to academic stress and major lifestyle changes that come with moving away from home. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 10 percent of female college students suffers from a clinical or subclinical eating disorder. Of these, over half suffer from bulimia nervosa.

Many question whether or not one can “suffer” from an eating disorder or if an eating disorder can even be considered a mental health issue. Is it a behavioral choice rather than a medical condition? Dr. Kathryn Henderson of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity states that “most mental health disorders have a behavioral component” and that the characteristic failure to engage in health-promoting behaviors is “not a choice” on the part of those suffering from eating disorders. Dr. Henderson served as the Clinical Director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders from 2003 to 2008, becoming the Director of School and Community Initiatives at the Rudd Center after the original center closed in 2008. While Henderson acknowledges that the closing of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders “took away a valuable resource” for students, the Rudd Center as well as the Department of Mental Health at Yale HEALTH continue to provide information and help for those with eating disorders. The Rudd Center specifically targets food addiction and obesity while the Department of Men-

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tal Health deals more specifically with eating disorders and their treatment.

The evidence of my struggle with anorexia cannot be wiped away. There will always be the memories, the pictures, and the child-sized clothing in the back of my closet. But I don’t let it define me. While I can’t — and don’t — pretend it didn’t happen, I refuse to let that part of my past shape my future. Instead, I like to think that it was a painful, year-long lesson from which I’m still learning. I can still only describe my own experience as having two personalities: one domineering, compelling me to avoid eating, and the other, my timid original self, forced into silence. With time, maybe I’ll be able look back on that period of darkness and divine more answers to those questions that I have never been able to answer about myself. Because that is the only other way I can describe my struggle: when my mind became a question instead of an answer.

— By Sarah Atkins

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“Jaime, tell me honestly, are you thinking about killing yourself?”

I struggle to answer. How can I tell Dad that I want to kill myself? I can’t. He’ll be disappointed. He’ll think I’m insane.

There’s no way he can understand what I’m feeling right now.

I can’t tell him.

In a cracked voice: “Yeah.” Tears. Mine.

“Alright, well we need to go see a psychiatrist.” No admonishment. No bewilderment. No disappointment. No notable

al stress. Timeica felt that the stigma associated with discussing mental health issues made it impossible to turn to her parents: “My parents wouldn’t be able to understand or support me. They would tell me to pray more.”

Timeica thinks what people need for successful treatment of depression and anxiety is empowering feedback.

She related with enthusiasm Goldberg’s effectiveness at listening and helping her come to her own conclusions about her situation. As Timeica put it: “Dr. Goldberg responds, but I’m figuring it out for myself.”

‘The culture at Yale is one of anonymity.

You don’t want people to know you go to counseling.’ outburst of emotion at all.

“Jaime, everyone thinks about suicide at some point. Anyone who tells you they haven’t is a fucking liar.”

Dad gets it.

I spend the next two hours just letting my dad know what is wrong in my life and why I feel unequipped to handle it all. I tell him about the rumors that have begun circulating at school after an unhappy breakup. I receive the inquiries daily: “Aren’t you that asshole that broke up with Karen because you think she’s stupid?” “No, that’s a lie. I never said such a thing to her.”

I tell him about the academic competitor turning to deception to try and lower my GPA. I relay to him my anxieties in their full force, and he listens.

That’s what I needed all along: someone to understand.

F

or Timeica Bethel ’11, Yale’s Mental Health and Counseling services provided her with someone to understand. Timeica sought help her sophomore year after she found herself becoming very solitary. She was sleeping continuously, missing classes, and did not want to talk to others.

“The first few weeks of my therapy mostly involved me crying, trying to figure out my sadness. Dr. Goldberg talked me through my life. We talked about everything: family, my life before Yale, my friends at home, my boyfriend. I poured out everything to her in those sessions.”

For Timeica, talking to Dr. Carole Goldberg, her YUHS psychologist, provided invaluable relief for her emotion-

F

ollowing Cameron’s suicide, the Department of Mental Health and Counseling took emergency measures to increase the availability of therapists to students in order to help them cope with the loss and prevent “copy cat suicides.” Mental health clinicians were physically sent to each residential college to interact with students. According to Genecin, the measures taken by Mental Health and Counseling were typical for the situation. He described a 2003 car crash in which three Yale students were killed, and just as with Cameron’s suicide, clinicians were sent to the residential colleges to help students deal with the losses.

These expanded mental health services following Cameron’s death were temporary steps targeting the immediate effects of an isolated incident. But members of the Yale College Council took Cameron’s death — in addition to the deaths of Andre Narcisse ’12 and Annie Le GRD ’13 last year — as an impetus to evaluate and work long-term to reform Yale’s mental health offerings and culture of mental health.

“A lot happened last year; I saw firsthand how bowled over people were by everything that was going on,” said Annie Shi ’12, the vice president of the YCC. Mental health became a central issue in the spring YCC elections last spring, and Annie now heads the YCC mental health project group. She recognizes that there are some things the YCC has no control over. “Time delays” in setting up appointments — a common complaint against Yale HEALTH’s services that proved to be a problem for

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

D FDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDEFDE 31 students who have utilized Yale HEALTH mental health services along with an indicative caption. “We think that putting a recognizable face to the issue might help de-stigmatize it,” Annie said.

The YCC project group and Mind Matters have several other awareness projects in the works. Mind Matters is working on a mental health newsletter to be distributed to Yale students, and the YCC is thinking about asking college masters to give a number of free meal swipes to designated therapists so they might familiarize themselves with the residential colleges and their respective students.

As for Yale HEALTH, according to Genecin, the Department of Mental Health and Counseling is “fully staffed” with no plans for expansion.

Last spring, she called again to arrange an appointment but was not able to set an appointment date for within thirty days of her call-in.

She returned to YUHS for her scheduled visit only to be turned away by the receptionist.

Sally but not Angela or Timeica — “aren’t something YCC can really help with. Things of that nature are out of our hands, but it’s still something we’d like to ask the administration about.”

However, she feels that there is still much the YCC can do to effect change and in particular is hoping to reduce the stigma that surrounds using mental health services.

“The culture at Yale is one of anonymity. You don’t want people to know you’re going to counseling. There’s definitely a lack of individual openness about mental health issues,” Annie said.

To combat the lack of mental health discussion at Yale, the YCC project group is collaborating with Mind Matters, a student mental heath awareness group, to plan a poster campaign akin to the “Get Tested” STD-testing awareness campaign of last year. The posters will feature photos of

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

‘S

o, Jaime, for this first visit I have to ask you some initial evaluation questions; I know you’re just here to get a prescription, but bear with me. It shouldn’t take long.”

I’m four weeks into my freshman year at Yale, and I’m visiting the Yale HEALTH Mental Health Department for my diagnostic appointment to continue the psychiatric treatment that I began back home after opening up to my dad.

Dr. Mulkeen is young. I’m unsurprised to discover later that it is only her fourth year as a psychiatrist. But I decide quickly that I like this woman. She listens and watches intently as I tear up while telling her about my plan for suicide my senior year; her face is quite visibly concerned. She doesn’t say a lot, but I can feel that she cares.

My emotional state has been the most important aspect of my move to Yale for my parents. Beyond grades, classes, dorm furnishings, flights — all that matters is that I feel good about what I am doing.

“What good is it to go to an awesome school like Yale if you aren’t going to feel good about being there?” I hear my dad’s voice echoing against the walls of my skull as I walk out of the health center. It’s a warm Thursday afternoon. I think about my place here at this school, what I want out of my time at Yale, what all students should want, really.

And I can see that my dad is right.

FDE

32 5252525252525252525252525252525252525 1

the rules of the game

by helen gao toshiki sakiyama / contributing photographer

Every native Chinese student in an American university knows her.

Every one of their parents dreams to have her.

I

n the fall of 2000, while I was roaming around shopping districts in Beijing with my mother, I saw the smiling face of Liu Yiting. She was gazing out from the front shelf of every street bookstore, her Harvard admissions letter inhand, underneath red, bold characters — 哈佛女孩 — Harvard Girl. A fresh graduate from a local high school in her native Sichuan Province, Yiting was one of two Mainland Chinese students to be admitted to Harvard in 1999.

Xinhua, the government’s official press agency, issued the

news of her admission through its global wire service. Sichuan newspapers ran full-page stories on her experiences as an exchange student in an American high school and as an actress in a television drama. Within half a day of the news’ release, nearly a thousand phone calls bombarded four hotlines set up by a business newspaper to serve readers curious about Liu’s story.

Most of the calls came from pre-college students and their parents, to whom Yiting’s path to the Ivy League revealed a dream grander than any they ever dared to conceive, a dream that had Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

3 5252525252525252525252525252525252525 33 just turned into a possibility. Yiting’s parents Liu Weihua and Zhang Xinwu, both editors at provincial level magazines, decided to write the book. Harvard Girl Liu Yiting detailed the “scientifically proven” methods they used to raise their daughter to be Harvard material.

When Liu was an infant, her parents put toys above her cradle just out of her grasp, to make her work harder for them. In order to accelerate the development of her verbal skills, they invited relatives to their house to ensure that someone was always talking to her. When Liu reached elementary school, her parents assigned her daily homework of hand-copying as many telephone numbers from the Yellow Pages as possible within one minute, aiming to increase her attentiveness. They challenged her to hold ice in her hand and stand on one foot for as long as possible to boost her endurance.

“My parents had been waiting for me to go to university and to become a socially recognizable success so they could use that as a start to get people to look at their theory,” Yiting said in an interview with Harvard Magazine.

She noted that although Harvard’s name brought the book its initial publicity, it kept selling because Chinese families had embraced its direct, manual-like style.

Indeed, it sold. Today it has gone through 20 reprints and sold more than 2.6 million copies nationwide.

Back in 2000, the idea of American Ivy League schools was rosy but blurry to most Chinese people. Yale, Harvard, and Dartmouth had previously only appeared in history textbooks next to names of American presidents and Nobel Prize winners. The concept of a liberal arts education had no proper translation into Chinese. But suddenly, it was what everyone wanted. For students who aspired to become the second and third Harvard Girl, Ivy League admissions was a new game to play, though the rules remained murky.

During the past decade, the winners have accumulated. New books — on “Columbia Girl,” “Princeton boy,” “How We Got Our Child Into Yale” — have appeared.

The faces behind these success stories have been venerated by the public not only as pearls of China’s examination-oriented education machine, but also as those who learned to decipher the rules of America’s mystifying college admissions game.

Today, these earliest winners have navigated four years of a so-called “liberal arts education,” and most have graduated with honors. Now, they are embarking on careers in which they leverage their shining diplomas to the extreme. And this new game they are starting — that of finding a high-profile career — abides by a new set of rules.

A native Chinese student from Beijing and a senior at Yale, I find myself standing at the turning point that every Chinese undergraduate in the United States must Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

harvard girl Liu yiting, courtesy of wikipedia.org

encounter. I am between games, having conquered the admissions process, on the verge of entering the job market. Behind me, underclassmen survey this American land they have travelled far to see. Ahead of me, my predecessors have launched themselves high into glamorous careers, while their peers in China stand on their toes to catch a view.

For now, I am content where I am, watching the hustle and bustle of the games. The players are busy studying the rules carved out by the winners, while the winners are en route to their next round. For those wanting to make it from China to the Ivy League and find success thereafter, have no fear. I’ve been there, wide-eyed and pacing, clueless where to start. Now a tired player but a fascinated observer, I have extracted the rules for you.

Follow them, and you too can wear the halo of Harvard Girl.

哈佛女 34 5252525252525252525252525252525252525 1

rule #1:

remember the unfulfilled dreams conceived by the past generations who came to america for education.

It is no new challenge for Chinese students to strive to meet set standards and figure out the rules of the game. But it is new that they are finally in the game.

In the late 1970s, after China reopened its gates to the West, the first wave of Chinese intellectuals landed in American educational institutions. Dispatched by the Chinese government, they arrived set on introducing advanced Western science and technology to China to fill the intellectual vacuum left by ten years of the Cultural Revolution.

Mostly in their thirties, these pioneers lived on scanty government subsidies and conducted research in their assigned fields. Just as they learned to hide their amazement at the size of lobsters and lay aside their dictionaries when inching through academic papers, they were summoned back by their motherland, mandated to apply their knowledge to various fields of China’s modernization. Some found means to stay in America, steering their life courses in narrow sectors of academia and saving their meager salaries to purchase humble houses in residential districts with the best public schools.

In 1989 and 1990, another cohort of Chinese flocked to American universities — this time it was not respected scholars on government missions, but political outcasts exiled in the wake of the bloodstained June 1989 in Beijing. Having just hurtled from Tiananmen Square, where flags carrying

pro-democratic slogans fluttered and thousands of college students chanted patriotic songs, they now found themselves on a strange new continent, starting from scratch. Some of them toiled at low-paid jobs in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Others were accepted at American universities, their battle cries among tanks and bullets in Tiananmen Square reduced to ideological reasoning in political science papers.

The 1990s witnessed a continuous and steadily increasing influx of Chinese students to the United States. Having just finished their undergraduate study in elite Chinese universities, they came abroad to “gild themselves.” Most of them chose to study science and engineering, as those were the fields for which their Chinese education had prepared them.

The humanities and social sciences were still in an embryonic state in the Chinese education system, gradually coming into existence years after the trauma of the Cultural Revolution.

Distressing reality all too often crushes lofty dreams. But what has passed belongs to history. Wipe away your pessimism and march on, for what came next was the milestone marking a new era — the birth of Harvard Girl.

rule #2:

remember that you are in the age of harvard girl.

When Liu Yiting started to prepare for TOEFL, a standard test that American universities require international applicants to take, she had no study materials. As time was runVol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

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ning out, her anxious mother called a childhood friend in Beijing, whose husband drove to a bookstore in the city, bought a set of prep books, and sent them to Liu by express mail.

Within a year or two after Yiting’s Harvard admission, American college consulting agencies sprung up in major Chinese cities, their ads occupying billboards on skyscrapers and in subway stations. “For every hour the earth rotates, 2,210 students are sitting in our classroom, enjoying our professional guidance on TOEFL and SAT; for every round the earth rotates, 256 students receive admission letters from distinguished universities all over the world,” an ad cries, next to the words a giant golden globe in rotating motion. Chinese students rushed to Internet forums about the American college application process. They posted sample SAT questions, exchanged second-hand test prep books, compared interview strategies, and discussed potential major choices. On one forum named CUUS (Chinese Undergraduates in the United States), the title of one post reads “Is it true that your score will drop to below 750 if you get two math problems wrong in SAT I?” Another seeks advice on her personal statement, in a post reading, “Newbie, begging for help with my PS, tearful thanks.”

Due to the lack of SAT test centers in Mainland China, high school students from all over the country looked for travel companions online, booked discounted group tickets of 10 or 20, and flocked to Hong Kong to take the exam.

Later, as the test centers ran out of spots, students traveled

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

as far as Korea, Singapore, and Thailand. Seniors in Chinese high schools began to skip classes, take medical leaves, or quit school — thus giving up the possibility of entering a Chinese university — to make time for SAT lessons, essay tutoring, and interview preparations.

Application packages from China started to inundate the admissions offices of American universities. In 1999, the year Liu Yiting entered Harvard, just 44 students from Chinese high schools applied; in 2008, the number soared to 484. In 2003, there were 8,000 native Chinese undergraduates on campuses all across America. In 2008, there were 26,000.

rule #3:

don’t forget: american universities are trying on asian outfits, too.

The daunting number of students courting American elite universities may be disheartening, but study the stats, and you will see the relationship is not completely unilateral.

Take Yale. From 2005 to 2009, a fleeting moment in the university’s more than 300 years of history, the number of Chinese undergraduates doubled from 28 to 56, making China the most represented East Asian country on campus.

The number did not waver even during the rigid economic winter of 2007 and 2008, as the university’s budget cut did not reduce the fat financial aid packages set aside for international students. Geographically, the admitted students no longer came exclusively from Shanghai and Beijing, but also Shenyang, Chengdu, Taiyuan and Zhengzhou, second-tier

36 5252525252525252525252525252525252525 1 cities that sprinkle the country’s vast land.

In a September 2010 letter to Yale faculty, University President Richard Levin laid out his proposal to open a new liberal arts college in Singapore, in partnership with the National University of Singapore.

“Today, in virtually all of Asia and much of the rest of the world, undergraduates pursue specialized courses of study.

Entering students are enrolled immediately to prepare in medicine, law or a single academic discipline, and the pedagogy, in much of the world, focuses on memorization and mastering a particular body of knowledge,” he writes. “By giving students exposure to multiple disciplinary perspectives, and by steeping them in a pedagogy that encourages independent critical thinking, liberal education can help college graduates contribute most effectively to the economics and social advancement of their nation and facilitate the greater understanding among people that is so desperately needed in this country.”

As a Chinese national raised in preparation for the pedagogy that Levin details and now having spent five years in American educational institutions, I am finally able to begin to describe the idea of a liberal arts education to my peers at home. However, I still remember my confusion when the term was first explained to me by a bespectacled, soft-spoken American college admissions officer.

Liberal arts education with an Asian twist, I thought after reading Levin’s letter. Would it be as popular among my Asian peers as Chinese language study is trendy among my American friends?

But if you have the same doubts about the promise of a liberal arts education, put them aside, at least while you are being interviewed, for you are about to explain why you want one.

the concept of a liberal arts education had no proper translation into chinese.

rule #4:

once you’ve decided to take a stab at becoming harvard girl, fashion yourself into what the admissions officers call “a well-rounded applicant.”

On the website of Yale’s admissions office, under the conspicuous orange title “What is Yale Looking For?” the first paragraph reads: “Many years ago, former Yale President Kingman Brewster wrote that selecting future Yale students was a combination of looking for those who would make the most of the extraordinary resources assembled here, those with a zest to stretch the limits of their talents, and those with an outstanding public motivation — in other words, applicants with a concern for something larger than themselves.”

If President Brewster had met Eric*, a current Yale senior from Sichuan Province in China, he would certainly recognize in him the sparks of a future leader. (*Eric asked that his name be changed to protect his privacy.)

toshiki sakiyama / contributing photographer

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

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the faces behind these success stories have been venerated by the public not only as pearls of china’s examination-oriented education machine, but also as those who learned to decipher the rules of america’s mystifying college admissions game.

Eric’s high school resume conveys no less glory than those of his American peers at Yale: chair of the student council, head of the school radio station, editor in chief of the school newspaper, and the youngest winner of the Future Leader Award at a Model United Nations Conference hosted primarily for Chinese college students. Eric attended the same school as Harvard Girl but seven years apart. On the school billboard and official brochures, he was mentioned next to Harvard Girl as Yale Boy. While his success drew envy from students across China, he revealed in an interview with a local newspaper: “There’s no trick. Last year, Yale admitted seven students from Mainland China. They were not necessarily the most outstanding of all applicants. They didn’t have perfect TOEFL or SAT scores, nor did they attend the most extracurricular activities. But I think they did one thing well, which is to promote themselves.”

Perhaps it sounds easy.

In China, colleges select students solely by their scores on the annual National College Entrance Exam, a cutthroat competition often referred to as “squeezing through a single-plank bridge.” American colleges’ multi-dimensional admissions standards, taking into consideration personal statements, academic transcripts, extracurricular activities, recommendation letters, and SAT scores, baffle Chinese parents and students alike.

Jie Min ’13 from Nanjing, China admitted to me that for her, getting into an American university was harder than getting into a Chinese one: “American universities Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

measure their applicants from all sides and don’t set a specific standard for each. You can only try your best.

Every student is a different individual in their system, whereas in China, every student is only a score in admissions officers’ eyes.”

Knowing the importance individuality plays in American college admissions, she sent Yale a “love letter” after she was deferred Early Action.

“In the letter, I talked about how I felt about Yale during my campus visit, and how I thought it was a good fit for me,” she explained at the time to local Chinese media. “I called it a love letter because American universities really emphasize personality match.”

rule #5:

after you have proven you can become harvard girl…welcome to harvard.

“Getting in is the hardest part,” people often say about Ivy League schools. After you do, it is time to look around.

Sijia Song ’14, hailing from Beijing, is ready to embrace the academic freedom Yale has to offer. Always a fan of science fiction and Western literature, she has enrolled in Directed Studies. Although the program’s weekly five-page paper has won it the joking name “Directed Suicide,” Sijia beamed when she recounted the excitement of, for the first time in her life, discussing the humanities in a classroom setting.

“I’ve never taken such classes in China. You know the way English classes are taught back at home,” she

38 5252525252525252525252525252525252525 1 said. I smiled back knowingly. My high school in Beijing, similar to Sijia’s, set the ability to help students answer multiple choice questions on college entrance exams as the primary goal of its English curriculum.

Sijia said the most exciting classroom discussion that she’s had so far on campus was talking about Aristotle’s The Politics and the Constitution of Athens. “In the book, he put forward the theory that men who are ‘natural slaves’ lack reasoning, and women have reasoning but no authority, so neither of them can take part in politics. Instead, they need to rely on the head of the households — the citizens. Many people in modern society are not comfortable with the idea, but are we now truly in a world free of class differentiation? We still have migrant workers and people toiling at low-paid jobs who have no voice in the way things are. In class, we had a debate about whether Aristotle’s theory is still relevant to today’s society.”

In her high school in China, Sijia had to choose between a sciences track and a humanities track in 11th grade. She did not choose the humanities track, she explained, because she was afraid that her mind, after being formed by China’s didactic humanities curriculum, would not be able to adapt to American colleges’ training in critical thinking. She always knew she wanted to come to America for college.

Unlike Sijia, when Eric arrived on campus three years ago, he did not know what he wanted to study, but he was determined to find out. He signed up for Introduction to Programming, Introduction to Ethics, Moral Foundation of Politics, and Level One French.

“I didn’t do well in many classes I took,” he said with a shrug, “which was also a shock — I thought I could do well in college as well.”

The shock drove him into a spiral of worries and self-doubts, he said, an anxiety that needed to be quenched by a stronger sense of purpose.

“It was a painful process. I didn’t know what to do,

didn’t know what I wanted or who I was,” he explained rapidly in a hushed tone. “Then I started to think about what I should do in the future, and what I lacked and what I needed in order to do that. Finance is what I decided to settle on.”

During our sophomore year, Eric and I led a community service trip that took 13 Yale students to an elementary school in his home province. Our junior year, as I retreated to the library and battled with essays and papers, he disappeared into his bedroom off-campus.

Several times we ran into each other in the library; he carried a brick-shaped book titled Corporate Finance and described to me the courses he was taking at Yale’s School of Management. Over the summer after his junior year, he interned at Morgan Stanley’s Hong Kong office, and the little green figure of his instant messenger account, before always visible under my online contact list, disappeared altogether.

“I think everybody comes to Yale with some romantic idealism, wanting to save the world and contribute to the greater good,” he said, chuckling to himself. “But when you are in your senior year, you see that a lot of people are pretty practical.”

One’s level of practicality often results from where he or she comes from, he added. “American students could be idealists when they arrive as a freshmen and still be idealists when they leave as a seniors. It’s more difficult for the Chinese students, especially under the current social values — the richer ones are the bosses,” he snorted. “I feel that people in China, not to say everybody, but most people, don’t value the tranquility of life. A middle class person who owns an apartment, a car, and has a stable job could feel content about himself in the United States, or in any Scandinavian country. But he wouldn’t in China.”

Still, he explained, he saw China as his ultimate destination.

“I think that’s a rational choice. Ultimately every-

toshiki sakiyama / contributing photographer

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

3 5252525252525252525252525252525252525 39 body will go back to China, unless you want to go into academia, or do journalism.”

Hoping to go into journalism and to stay in the United States myself, I join a few of my Chinese peers at Yale in the “unless” category. But for every one of us, I’ve noticed a handful of students like Eric. And if you find yourself fol-

“I am planning on working there [at Morgan Stanley] for three to five years, if things go well. If not, maybe two years,” he said. “I will use the time to understand the industry and to gain some personal leverage. Look at me now, going to be a fresh graduate out of college, knowing nothing, with a liberal arts education, which means…nothing. What can I do?

‘ it was a painful process.

I didn’ t know what to do, didn’ t know what I wanted or who I was.’ lowing in his footsteps, you’ll need to continue playing by the rules. You no longer need a liberal education; you need a plan.

rule #6:

channel your well-roundedness into a career in finance.

In recent years, investment banking has emerged as the single most desired post-graduation career among Chinese undergraduate students at top American universities. A rundown of the employers of the recent Chinese graduates from Yale reveals names like Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, and Deutsche Bank. Of the 15 students from Mainland China in my senior class, 11 are applying to banking jobs.

Chinese students describe walking into interviews to see fellow Chinese alums from Yale across the table, people whom they once bonded with over late night scallion pancake runs and weekend rice wine parties. Rawen Huang ’07, in an e-mail to Chinese freshmen at Yale during his first year at Morgan Stanley, said he was confident that soon in every division at every bank on Wall Street, there would be members of CUSY, the Chinese Undergraduate Students at Yale. He conjured up the idea of a mentoring program, in which CUSY members interested in a banking career would be paired up with CUSY alumni on Wall Street. The veterans would enlighten the newbies, stumbling around the giant maze of Investment Banking, with their numerous tips and would point out to them the hidden pitfalls: which prep book did the job, how to frame your personality in cover letters, and a list of answers for the common brainteasers at interviews. When it became clear, however, that the newbies outnumbered the veterans by a wide margin, the idea was dropped.

Most Chinese Yalies, like Eric, say they only intend to stay in banking for a few years.

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

So I think I should learn something first, look around before I settle into a plan.”

And what is that plan?

“I don’t know” jumped out of his mouth, as though he should.

耶魯

Consider your predecessors who came for education in America but shared no part of the game; Consider the double currents you’ve ridden on — China’s awakening obsession with American universities and American universities’ growing interest in Chinese talents; Consider the hours you spent cracking SAT prep books and fine-tuning your application essays to groom yourself into the most well-rounded college candidate; Consider the sleepless nights you spent tossing in your bed in freshmen year, eager to retrieve your lost sense of purpose; Consider that Harvard Girl, having graduated from college with an applied math and economics degree, is now a senior investment manager in a private equity firm.

Ten years ago, the girl with ear-long hair in a striped shirt gazed out of the cover of her book. She now gazes out of her LinkedIn profile photo, donning a dark suit and wearing a pearl necklace.

rule #7:

there is no reason not to continue the game.

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40 YZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYZY

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IGA by greg rubin

a fictional piece

An old lady died at work the

other day. Rick was ringing up her groceries and she was getting her wallet out to pay, and then she stumbled backward into one of the loose candy racks and fell on the floor. There was candy all over the place.

When Rick went to help her up she was already gone, not breathing, not moving, nothing. The EMTs said it was probably a stroke, or a heart attack, and they rolled her out on a stretcher with a green sheet over it. For a minute everything was really quiet — the music was still playing and I guess people were probably still pushing carts, but everyone else had just shut up. It felt like when it snows, you know, and sound won’t carry at all. Then Rick started to clean up the candy and I heard the carts start rolling again.

At the other registers, the girls were bagging groceries and making sad sounds while they answered people who asked what happened.

“I don’t know,” I heard Jessica say.

“I guess this old lady just died.” She snapped her gum and tapped her fingers. Feliks — our boss — he was walking around mumbling in Polish, and then he yelled something in English about a lawsuit. “Feliks, forget about it,” Rick said. Rick was on the floor, trying to reach a pack of Lifesavers that had rolled under the cereal display. “There’s not go-

ing to be a fucking lawsuit.”

When we got home, I sat on the couch. I lit a cigarette, kicked my shoes off, and took a deep breath while the blood came back into my feet. Rick hadn’t sat down. He was pacing, and he had a funny look about him. Then he went to the fridge and opened it, and he stood looking inside it. I tapped my cigarette on the ashtray.

I said, “Shit, man. I can’t believe that lady just died.”

Rick nodded, but he didn’t say anything. He was still looking in Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

.

YZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYZY 41

When we got home, I sat on the couch. I lit a cigarette, kicked my shoes off, and took a deep breath while the blood came back into my feet.

emilie foyer / contributing photographer

the fridge. Then he said, “We need to get some beer.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“7-11.”

I smoked. “You want to drive there?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding. I put my shoes back on.

The only thing was Rick hadn’t been drinking since we moved in.

And he’d had a couple of cigarettes, but he wasn’t usually smoking. He said he’d been overdoing it and wanted to take a break. He’d been away on this language thing in India — his parents have some money so they sent him on this thing — and he’d just gotten back. Our plan was always that we’d live here and work for a year or two, then go to community college and get our lives started. He was a year ahead of me, so he took this trip while I finished high school — part of his whole Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

thing of having real experiences before college. But I guess he spent the whole time getting drunk. “Taking a break sounds good,” I said when he told me. I wanted to help him out, and I hadn’t been drinking that much either. But now we were on our way to get beer and I didn’t know what to do except be polite.

We went inside. Rick bought a 24-pack of Budweiser and a bag of potato chips. I bought Camels and an orange lighter. We stood outside the store while I threw away the plastic and the foil from the cigarette pack and yanked the safety thing out of the lighter. Then I lit one. It was already pretty dark out, and people were pulling up in cars with the windows down and the music blasting, being really loud.

There isn’t much to do out here on a Friday night except drink and be loud. Some of the people we saw we’d known in high school, but there were also all the tourists we didn’t know, who were still out here

for the last of the good weather.

Rick said, “Give me one of those.”

“What?” I said. He wasn’t looking at me.

He pointed at my cigarettes and then gestured across the parking lot with his head. Skye and Jessie were walking towards us. I started laughing. “Fuck you, man,” he said. “Just give me one.” I kept laughing and offered him the pack. He took one, and I lit it for him.

In high school, there’d been these two girls, these younger girls that we liked, Skye and Jessie. They were cute, and they were teases.

Rick and I would go to the beach to drink beer and smoke cigarettes, and sometimes they’d come and sit with us. They’d bum cigarettes from us, and we’d try hard to charm them. But they never stuck around for very long. We probably spent more time watching them walk away from us than we did talking to them. That’s what I remember most, me and Rick staring like dogs

42 YZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYZY at them as they walked along the water with their little frayed shorts and their hair blowing like a shampoo commercial. They were something else.

So they were walking towards me and Rick, and we were smoking the cigarettes and acting like we didn’t really notice. Then our eyes met and we all waved.

“What’s going on?” Rick said. “I haven’t seen you guys in forever.”

“Nothing,” Skye said. She’s blonde and blue-eyed, cookie-cutter cute. Rick’s favorite. “We’re just getting some cigarettes.”

“Aren’t you too young to buy those?” Rick said.

“We’re 18,” Jessie said, laughing.

She’s a brunette, shorter, a little funnier. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been in India,” Rick said.

Jessie walked right into that one.

Now Rick got to do his thing.

“What?” Skye said. “No way.”

“Yeah, I was in India for a year. It was fucking amazing.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Learning Hindi. Drinking.” He laughed.

Skye said, “That’s awesome!”

“Say something in Hindi,” Jessie said.

I’m not even going to try and say what Rick said. But Skye giggled at it and said “What does it mean?”

“It means, ‘You have beautiful hair.’”

The girls laughed. I turned to Rick and said, “How come you never say that to me?”

Rick said, “I’m sorry, hon,” and

put his arm around my shoulder.

The girls cracked up, then we did.

Rick took his arm off my shoulder. “What are you girls up to tonight?” he said.

“Nothing,” Skye said. “We were supposed to go to this party in Calverton but we don’t have a ride.”

“Oh, that sucks,” Rick said. He smoked. “Um, why don’t you hang out with us? We’re about to go back to our place and drink these.”

“You guys live together now?”

Skye said.

“We just moved in,” I said. “It’s nice. It’s like, part of a house. We have a balcony.”

“Cool,” Skye said. Then she looked at Jessie. “I don’t really like beer, though.”

“What do you drink at parties?”

“Like, screwdrivers.”

Rick grinned. “Okay,” he said.

“We’ve got orange juice at our place. Let’s go get a bottle of vodka and we’ll all have some drinks on the balcony.”

The girls looked at each other.

“You’re not 21,” Jessie said to Rick.

“I’ve got a fake that scans.”

I couldn’t tell if the girls wanted to come with us. Like I said, they never used to stick around. And Rick had this look to him that was kind of freaking me out. But they said yeah, they’d come over for a little while. They went inside to get cigarettes, and Rick went in with them to get a pack for himself.

Then they came out and we all got in the car. Rick started the engine, turned the radio on, lit a cigarette,

.

and slammed into reverse. His taking a break was over. I mean, these girls probably could have made him do anything.

‘To summer.’

“To summer.”

“To summer.”

“To summer.”

Rick had talked me into shooting a beer and the girls into shooting vodka. They put their glasses down, twisted their faces up, and reached for the orange juice. Rick crushed his can and said “…may she rest in peace” and laughed. The girls looked sick. I just sat there burping.

Rick handed me another beer and said “It’s been a while, huh?” and laughed again. “Yeah,” I said, taking it and burping one more time. Then Rick started telling stories.

“So guess what happened at work today?”

“Oh yeah,” I said, “oh my god.

Tell them.”

“What?” Skye said.

“I was ringing up this old woman — um — and she —” Rick took a long sip. “Sorry, I need more beer for this.” Everybody laughed.

“So this woman is buying like, bread. And milk. Just basic shit.

And she tries to pay me — I mean, she goes to open her bag. And she just falls over and dies.”

I was about to say, “She knocked over all this candy,” but then the girls both gasped and Skye said, “Oh my god. At the IGA?” “Yeah,” Rick said.

emilie foyer / contributing photographer

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

.

YZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYZY 43 “Who was she?” Jessie said.

“Lucinda something,” “Something with a W,” I said.

“The EMT guys told us, but it was all really weird. I didn’t recognize the name, so I don’t know if she’s like, somebody’s grandma.”

“Oh my god,” Skye said.

“It was crazy,” Rick said. “I had no idea what to do. I went over there to help her up but she wasn’t breathing or anything. She didn’t have a pulse. One guy said he knew CPR and came over, but she was just — I mean, she was totally dead. The

seemed like they kept mostly to themselves. Every once in a while, Skye would look at something on her phone, and sometimes she’d show it to Jessie and they’d laugh.

But mostly they just sat and ate the chips and drank really slowly. Rick and Skye did their thing, and I tried to flirt with Jessie a little bit. She didn’t really flirt back. But a few times our eyes met for a little too long while Rick was going on about something, and I was thinking maybe she was into me. Maybe I was just drunk. We’d killed most of the

Rick crushed his can and said “...may she rest in peace” and laughed. The girls looked sick. I just sat there burping. Rick handed me another beer. boss called 911 and we just had to close the register and wait there.”

“The EMT guys said it was probably a heart attack,” I said. “Or a stroke.”

Rick finished his beer. “I need another beer,” he said. “Let’s all have another. How’re those screwdrivers?”

“Good.”

“Good.”

“All right,” Rick said, and opened a beer.

Rick told more stories. He told a funny one about going to the Taj Mahal and how there are all these people there who try to take your picture and sell it to you, and how his friend got hustled out of a ton of money because he was drunk, and how now he has all these shitty pictures of him at the Taj Mahal.

He talked a lot about India, stuff he hadn’t even told me yet. He might have been making some of it up for the girls. I don’t know.

The girls didn’t say much. I realized that they were kind of shy.

I’d always thought that they were so cute, you know, they must have been the really social type. But it Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

beer in like, an hour and a half.

At some point Rick went inside to take a leak. I had to go too, and I walked in with him.

Rick laughed for a bit as he started to piss. “We’ve got these girls,” he said over his shoulder.

“No way,” I said. “No way. Rick, I’m so drunk.”

“What?” Rick was washing his hands.

“I’m so drunk. I’m not hooking up with anybody tonight.”

“What?” He finished washing his hands. “Come on. You should hook up with Jessie.”

“I’m not hooking up with Jessie.”

“You should! Hook up with her!”

“She doesn’t want to. I’ve gotta piss.”

I had to hold the wall with one hand, and I was swaying a little, but I managed. I hadn’t been drunk in a long time. I was tired, but I wanted to stay up. I was wishing I could get with Jessie, and thinking that maybe I could. I washed my face and squeezed a little toothpaste on my tongue. Then I walked back onto the balcony.

Rick was saying something, but I

interrupted him.

“Do you two remember when we used to hang out at Fifth Street beach?”

“Yeah!” Skye said. “You guys were always down there drinking.”

“Not always,” Rick said.

“We were down there a lot,” I said.

“You guys were down there when it was snowing,” said Jessie.

“Like, one time we drove down there and you guys were sitting outside with beers in the snow.”

Rick was laughing. “It keeps it cold!”

“That was his idea,” I said. “I hate drinking beer when it’s cold out.”

“You guys were crazy,” Skye said.

Rick made a face at her. Like, a crazy person face. “Crazy!” he said.

Skye and Jessie laughed. He picked up the empty bag of chips — we’d killed those too — and put it on his head. “We’re crazy!” He grabbed the vodka and got up on the railing, one hand on the side of the house and the bottle still in the other.

“Rick,” I said, “be careful. Don’t do that.” The girls were in hysterics. “Come on, Rick,” I said. “Come on.” I was really scared. This was it, I mean, he was finally going to kill himself. I just knew it. “You’re going to kill yourself,” I said. Skye looked over at me and said “Chill out!” I gave her a sort of a dirty look and drank some beer — I think I turned a little red. Rick was putting on a show for the girls, dancing up there and drinking out of the bottle.

They thought it was great. I just closed my eyes and waited for him to fall.

But he didn’t. He got back down at some point and took a bow. The girls clapped and kept laughing. He patted me on the back and offered me the bottle. I shook my head.

Then he offered it to the girls. They shook their heads too.

“You’re not drinking at all!” Rick said to them.

“I’ve had enough,” Jessie said.

44 YZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYYZZYZY “I’m drunk.”

“Me too,” Skye said.

“You’re not drunk,” Rick said.

“You are not drunk.”

“They say they’re drunk, Rick,” I said. “They’re probably drunk.” Jessie laughed.

“Have one more,” Rick said. He offered them the bottle again.

“I’m okay,” Jessie said.

Rick looked at Skye, and she shook her head. Then he looked at me. “I guess we’re gonna have to finish this ourselves,” he said.

There was a lot of vodka left.

We should have just saved it. But I didn’t like that I’d just looked soft in front of the girls. I said, “Shot for shot?” and Rick said, “Yeah!” and stood up smiling.

Rick took a long one, then I did.

We each had five and mine was the last.

“Last one breaks the bottle,” Rick said.

“That’s —” I burped. “That’s not a real rule,” I said. The girls laughed.

I felt sick.

“Gotta break the bottle,” Rick

said. He still had the bag on his head.

I remember thinking I wasn’t going to do it, and then just doing it. I threw it into the parking lot across the way, and I heard it shatter.

“Yeah!” Rick said, and patted me on the back. He sat down and opened another beer.

I was still standing up. I had been feeling drunk, but now I felt different. My body was tingling and my heart was beating really fast. I smiled, but like, slowly. Rick and the girls were looking at me.

“I think we should go do something,” I said. I might have whispered it.

Iknowdon’t really what happened after that.

Neither does Rick. I think we drove somewhere, but I know I didn’t drive. And I would have remembered Jessie, so I guess that didn’t happen either.

All I know is I woke up in my clothes and my cigarettes were

.

gone. I threw up in the bathroom for a while, and then I brushed my teeth.

Rick was on the balcony smoking. It was bright, and I shaded my eyes.

“Good morning,” I said.

Rick just sort of shook his head and laughed.

“What happened to the girls?” I said.

Rick shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”

I sat down next to him and reached for the cigarette pack, but it was empty. He had the last one.

I looked out at the parking lot and I could see where the bottle broke; the pieces were shining in the sun like glitter. I’d thrown it pretty far.

I looked over at Rick. “Can I get a drag of that?” I said.

Rick nodded, but he didn’t pass it to me. I don’t think he heard me.

We just sat there. !

emilie foyer / contributing photographer

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

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Poetry

crush ™ love mope © sailor r

crush when you touch my skin comes so awake that i shudder shiver shake and that scares me sometimes because i know that can’t be healthy, not really, not really healthy, not to care so much, not to feel like there’s lightning lightning lightning flickering through my veins, nervous system sizzling, short circuit in my soul, every time you smile i mean it’s just lips and teeth and a tongue and that shouldn’t be enough to seize my heart, to make it go shudder stutter stop and when they find me dead of heart failure then i’d just like to say it’ll be all your fault only that’s okay because i know you didn’t mean it and my silly heart should just shut up and get over itself — Juliet deButts

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

46 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z

love mope EVEN AFTER SINNING UR

A beauty FULL ONE

B beauty TOO CUT

C but he SIN NING AFT ER —AFTER

UR AF TER DUR ING BE FORE

ADB

FOR IN

A but he FOR IN

B but he FOR IN

B but he BUT HE —BUT

LATE R AFT ER MAN Y MINE

BBA

ABD

U but he

—LOVE

rebecca zhu / contributing illustrator

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv 47 AND HE MINE ING BEAU Y 4 MOPE DUR ING— EV EN AFT ER SIN NING U R A B— CAN HE B B D A A A A D— — Kenneth Reveiz

rebecca zhu / contributing illustrator

sailor The wind sweeps through your hair and breathes through your nose, tanned and slightly freckled — the water takes you away and you don’t wave goodbye the waves wash over me sputtering, stuttering I don’t care, I whisper as my hair swarms around me laden with memories it hangs I crumble sand in my fists — Emily Suran

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

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Personal Essay

Confirming Kagan’s ambition, unraveling my own W

S

upreme Court Justice Elena Kagan once smoked cigarettes in the bathrooms at our high school. I imagine her seated on a toilet lid, hand cradling the tobacco stem, long, stringy hair curtaining her face and eyes behind wire-rimmed aviators cast on the opposite wall.

She must have spent that time, arterioles flooded with nicotine, exhaling her future onto the blankness before her.

stir-crazy. Hunter taught me that I would achieve something. What that was, I didn’t yet know, but I wanted out of the Brick Prison on 94th Street and Madison Avenue.

Kagan walked the halls of Hunter when our school was housed on the 13th and 14th floors of an office building at 466 Lexington Avenue, graduating the spring of 1977 with what seemed to be one purpose in mind. She posed for her senior yearbook picture as president of

Kagan’s yearbook page, courtesy of Newscom

I spent a lot of time on bathroom breaks my sixth and senior year at Hunter College High School, the elite public secondary school in New York City that Kagan also attended. I wandered the halls, read posters plastered on the boards, lingered in poorly lit alcoves, deliberately clicked my heels on the tiled floors — I was

the student government, in judge’s robes, brandishing a gavel. The photo’s caption is a quote from Justice Felix Frankfurter, appointed to the Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938: “Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of arts.” Kagan headed to her freshman year at Princeton set upon studying this Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv 49 art, having pitched her gavel into the political arena.

What did she leave behind? The rigorous chemical electrolysis that is the Hunter experience divides the student body in two: there are the smart kids who did well on the entrance exam but can’t find the motiva-

But we cannot all be Elena Kagan; some of us are Irving. Irving Kagan ’86, Elena’s younger brother, earned his bachelors and masters degrees in history at Yale and taught my social studies and U.S. history classes at Hunter. (He also instructs an elective in Constitutional

But we cannot all be Elena Kagan; some of us are Irving. tion to complete their work and periodically berate themselves for being slackers; and there are the smart kids who did well on the entrance exam but can never perform up to their own daunting expectations and periodically berate themselves for being single-minded perfectionists. I belonged to the latter. I’m willing to bet that Kagan did, too.

Loneliness is symptomatic of inhabiting the perfectionist archetype. In the biographical articles I perused compulsively throughout her confirmation hearings, Kagan’s classmates depict her youthful self as thoughtful, deliberate, and focused, a committed citizen of her school. She is said to have been friendly and funny, but aloof. I think her mind’s reel had already fast-forwarded, past the prosaic end of adolescence and into the static of the future.

That’s where my mind was while I was at Hunter.

The word “thoughtful,” a recurring comment on my written work, almost troubled me. Sometimes, I wanted to hush my thoughts, but they wouldn’t stop whirring. While others said I spoke coherently, I knew my ideas to be disjointed. My 11th grade English teacher expected to see my name in print; my biology teacher sent me to a conference of “Women in Science;” my physics teacher, who made me DVDs of televised operas, was certain I’d enroll in a music conservatory. My yearbook implies I was friends with most classmates.

My memory says otherwise.

I came to Yale more driven and more lost — it is possible. Everyone wanted to know where my life was headed, myself especially. If I didn’t find my primary purpose soon, to motivate me through trying times at Yale and beyond, I would never be successful.

Kagan excelled as a history major at Princeton, graduating summa cum laude and clearly destined for a career in academia, public service, and law. After a year at Worcester College, Oxford, where she studied philosophy, she enrolled in Harvard Law School, and — surprise, surprise! — made Law Review at the end of her first year.

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Law.) I, among his other students, wondered how he’d managed growing up in Elena’s ever-expanding shadow of influence. Our tenth grade math teacher, whose career spanned decades and who taught Mr. Kagan in the 70s, told us his pupil had been a know-it-all. This didn’t shock me: when Mr. Kagan caught fallacies in his students’ reasoning, mischief flickered impishly across his visage.

He was, on the whole, a passionate teacher, well

courtesy of Hunter College High school (hchs)

50 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z versed in his subject. He has a keen sense of humor — a familial trait, it now seems, imbibed at the Kagan family dinner table on the Upper West Side. I assumed at one time that it was a defense mechanism against would-be critics of the “unremarkable” life he had chosen to live. Forgive my conditioned imprudence, Mr. Kagan. I know better now.

He sat behind his sister at the confirmation hearings, beside their brother Marc’s daughter, Rachel; both were beaming. Mr. Kagan — whose interview by local TV station NY1 I watched with rapt attention and acute anxiety, wishing he would stop interjecting those pesky “ums” — took diligent notes throughout the proceedings. I imagine he will be publishing his debut book sometime soon, and I will be pleased to see him seize this opportune occasion — the chance to document history from the inside — as his own windfall.

His sister was the image of composure. She answered the senators’ interrogatory onslaught with temperance, insight, and even wit. When the Republican senator from South Carolina Lindsey Graham needlessly asked Kagan what she had been doing on Christmas Day, she replied: “You

courtesy of HCHS

pretend we know what we want and what everyone else should want, too. Without Kagan’s influence in the Senate as deputy to Clinton’s director of domestic policy, how would the consensus on a contentious tobacco bill ever have solidified? Without her guidance as Dean of Harvard Law School, how would the ideologically divisive faculty ever have hired new professors?

This is part of the static I’m sure Elena hears, that I have heard. I’ve proven I can live with this as my soundtrack, but do I want to conquer majorities and win everyone’s heart? Is my idea of success casting a stifling shadow over others under my influence and their aspirations? No. Just as Mr. Kagan questioned my own assumptions in his Hunter classroom, I want to impel others to reevaluate the status quo of ambition, not an aim, driving us forward and the expectation of composure cleaving some of us in twain. I’ve come to prioritize unity in my thoughts and actions, however it is I reassemble them.

Forgive my conditioned imprudence, Mr. Kagan.

I know better now. know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

I’ve been told I too have poise. In truth, I can barely keep myself together. A year ago, under the duress of having to decide what direction my life was going to take, I cracked into a million pieces — mercury released from an old, glass thermometer.

I realized that my sense of self defied containment in the receptacle of my aspirations; I was scattered in spherical droplets across the laboratory floor. It was a fucking mess.

If you talked to me, you wouldn’t have known it: Elena’s confident self-possession endeared her to her constituents, and my apparent equilibrium rarely betrayed my depressive spiral. I played what I felt at heart to be a ruse, what I was conditioned to believe is a political stratagem we have to apply at some interval in our lives: we have to

W

by Nicole Levy W Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 November 2010

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv 51

Ask Mangy Mark!

Dear Mangy Mark, he other day my bike got stolen, which sucks because I used to ride it everywhere — to the library, to G-Heav, and, most importantly, to my 9 a.m. Orgo lecture up Science Hill. Now, I have a really hard time getting up there in time, and I always arrive both late and sweaty from running so hard. My parents won’t let me get another bike, because they say it’ll just get stolen again. What should I do?

- Bikeless in Branford

T

Dear Bikeless, Have you checked out Yale’s complimentary shuttle service?

It starts running at 7:20 a.m. and continues till 6 p.m., and all three routes go up Science Hill. They’ve also got this sweet online map where you can see exactly where the shuttles are in real time. So you don’t even have to wait!

Or, you could send me an e-

mail describing your bike and exactly where it was stolen, and I can get in touch with my buddy Brian, who’s sort of a go-to guy for this kind of thing. He’s really good at tracking things down (like people that owe you rent and stuff ). If he finds your bike, though, we’re gonna have to get it back. Do you have any large friends? Let me know.

We’ll have to get a car, so we can just drive up and grab it and then

drive away really fast. It’ll have to have a big trunk so the bike will fit. And maybe bulletproof glass and, like, flamethrowers in the headlights…. Actually, you know, me and Brian can probably take care of this. I’ll give you a call in the next couple days when we have your bike back.

—Mangy Mark

Dear Mangy Mark, ately, things have been tense between my girlfriend, Emma, and me. She does a lot of theater, but she feels like I’m not supportive enough of her interests.

Just last week, for example, she told me that if I really loved her, I’d explain to her whether the linguistic relationship between Nora and Torvald in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was more closely aligned with Wittgenstein’s theory of the “Language Game” or J.L. Austin’s “Performative Utterance” paradigm. I told her that I would do anything for her, but that I have too many other things on my plate this week to be able to answer her question as thoughtfully as she deserves. I asked her for an extension, but she said no, and that I had to give her an answer in no fewer than 1,500 words

by Friday at noon or else she and I are finished for good. Like I said, I’m crazy about her — I just don’t want to say the wrong thing, because it might really hurt her feelings. What should I say? If you could send me a response by Thursday night so that I can proofread it and add footnotes before giving it to her, that’d be great.

- Heartsick But Hopeful

L rrrrrrrrr

Mangy Mark has all the answers. Got a problem? E-mail mag@yaledailynews. com.

Dear Heartsick, Maybe you can find a way to date Emma Credit/D/Fail?

—Mangy Mark

By Jacob Paul and Brendan Ternus Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

“He creates tableaux of such beauty and clarity that the inner eye is stunned.”

-Publisher’s Weekly “He has simply galvanized the universe!”

-The Boston Globe

Branford Master’s Tea presents: Novelist

Mark Helprin

Helprin, who does not often make public appearances of this sort, is the author of Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, Swan Lake, and other novels.

Wednesday, November 10, at 4:00 Branford Master’s Residence 80 High St. Introduced by Anne Fadiman, Francis Writer-in-Residence