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A Conversation with Nicole Krauss. By Sophie Poole. It was a Thursday morning in September and, like any self-respecting undergraduate woefully majoring in English, I opened The New Yorker app on my phone before getting out of bed, scrolling to the newest issue to read a short story. The photograph, taken by Farah Al Qasimi for Nicole Krauss’s “Switzerland,” showed a young woman applying eyeliner. Her lips were a little too pink, a smattering of hair resting above them. The story’s narrator, a mother reflecting on her early adolescence, shares her experience living in a boarding house in Switzerland. As a thirteen-year-old, she watched Soraya and Marie—more mature boarders closer to the threshold of womanhood than girlhood—smoke cigarettes and sketch their sexual encounters. Soraya, especially, tests the limits of her power; the narrator observes Soraya’s vibrancy slowly dim as she becomes involved in a violent affair with an older, married man. From the first paragraphs of the story, I felt a personal connection to the narrator. Her precarious relationship with religion, her explorative walks through Geneva, and her nascent realization of the “terrifying vulnerability” that comes from femininity all resonated. I felt so moved that, still wiping sleep from my eyes, I wrote to Krauss and thanked her for writing the story. Coincidentally, her website revealed that she is the current Writer-in-Residence at the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia. Seeing her affiliation with Columbia, I decided to reach out for an interview, hoping to hear more about the story and the Institute. “Switzerland” is the first short story in Krauss’s newest collection, To Be a Man, out November 3. Many of the other stories unearthed my old memories, long forgotten or tucked away. In conversation recently, Krauss and I spoke about the formative power of coincidence, the complex and mysterious alchemy of writing, the habitation of male voices, the novel’s formal potential, and her career-long fascination with memory, especially as it relates to her residency at the Institute. Our condensed discussion is below. The Blue & White: Tell me about your time as the Writer-in-Residence at the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Institute this year. What have you learned? Nicole Krauss: Too much to give you a summation of in a brief interview. But suffice to say that my time there began with monthly, sometimes bi-monthly, sort of initial meetings with the scientists there, where I would just go into the Institute and have maybe three conversations in a row with three different scientists about their work. And sometimes they had questions about my work. It was just this initial period of really learning about what people do there and sort of deepening my own knowledge about the brain, of which I had some going in but now I have much, much more. And then the pandemic came along. And so, for a while, sort of nothing was happening, and then I started to have those meetings over Zoom, which has been one of the great gifts for me during this pandemic of just having that incredible connection with so many interesting minds who are working at the Institute. And so sometimes, depending on what the scientist specializes in, the conversation might be very, very abstract. It might be about computational neuroscience, which I will be struggling to keep up with and understand. Or it might be about somebody’s work on the hippocampus…and memory in birds and etcetera, etcetera. So it’s been an absolutely massive range of subjects, as you can imagine, because there are many scientists there working. The other portion of my work there has been bringing what I do as best I can to the scientists. In the beginning, when we were still in person, it started off with a kind of onstage conversation with my really dear friend and colleague there, Daphna Shohamy, and she interviewed me about my work, and then I went on to doing a book club with scientists that were interested there. And so we started off reading a book by Rachel Cusk together called Outline. And then they wanted me to do a book club on my own book, so we read and discussed Forest Dark, which is my last novel. And now we are doing something really interesting to me, which is an idea that was spearheaded by two of the trainees, the post-docs there, and they wanted to get interested scientists there trying to write creatively about science or about their own science, thinking about what they do in science and the lab through the lens of fictional writing. And so we have about twenty people in the group, and it started off last week, last Friday, with everyone bringing in their own prompt. And then kind of talking about what’s possible in fiction that’s not possible in their science and how they might use this. And they’ve all gone off now to write these fictional pieces. So it’s really a wonderful exchange, I think, for everyone. And I certainly am benefitting massively from being there. I don’t know exactly yet how what I’m learning will play out in my books. B&W: Who was one of your favorite scientists you spoke to? Did you have an interaction that sticks out to you as being profound or meaningful to you in some way? NK: Many. I mean, you know, the one that sort of shines above the rest is a friendship that goes on outside of the Institute. I mean, it’s how I ended up at the Institute. And that’s with the neuroscientist I mentioned, Daphna Shohamy. She’s really one of my very dearest friends. We met because the Rubin Museum, downtown, they have a really extraordinary series that brings neuroscientists in conversation onstage with artists. We met there. And it’s such a great and ironic story because each of us had been invited in years previous to participate, and each of us had declined. And I think the neuroscientist is invited to the series, and they choose the artist that they want to talk to. I guess someone in the past had asked to speak with me, and I remember at the time I just sort of, for whatever reason, I declined. Maybe I just wasn’t up for a conversation with a neuroscientist at that point. Maybe I had young kids—I just can’t remember why I said no. And I suspect there was some sort of wariness about how prepared I would need to be for a conversation. And Daphna, for her own reasons, said no. And then she said yeah the second time around—I’ll do it if I can speak with Nicole—and she hadn’t yet read my most recent novel at that time, Forest Dark. We set the date with the museum, and then she read the novel on a plane ride to Israel—the novel is set largely in Israel—and there were so many incredibly crazy coincidences and things in common with what she had been thinking about in her life up until then and what was in the book. And so she sort of arrived onstage kind of in shock, like: Oh my god, we have much more to talk about than I even thought. And very, very quickly, there was such a deep friendship there that is both, obviously, emotional but deeply intellectual. I mean still not a day goes by that she and I don’t talk about ideas and come at them from our different angles, but, you know, constantly meet in the middle. The great timing of that friendship is that the Artist-in-Residency idea had just begun at the Zuckerman Institute. I think Eric Kandel had brought in Jeff Koons the year before to try out this idea. And then the idea got off the ground to bring a jazz musician and a visual artist. And then Daphna spoke to me about being the inaugural Writer-in-Residence. Had it not been for that friendship and the intellectual sparks that flew right away there, I know I wouldn’t have found myself at the Institute. So, that’s one, but I can give you many other conversations. B&W: It’s so interesting that you speak about Daphna experiencing coincidences while reading your work, because I had a similar experience. I know you saw my note to you about “Switzerland.” I read it in the morning, and I read it so quickly, and it was immersive to me, and felt deeply personal, I just felt very connected to it. And as I got to read To Be a Man, I grew up Jewish and there were so many things you were talking about in the stories that were unearthing so many memories. NK: I think that happens kind of all the time as a writer, in the best possible way, which is that you write things and don’t necessarily know the way that they will reverberate with readers. And sometimes, of course, they don’t reverberate at all, but then other times they reverberate in such profound and strange and unexpected ways in other people’s lives. And actually, I’ve now been writing for so many years that I can look at a lot of the relationships in my life, the circumstances of my life, and I can trace them back to those crazy coincidences that happen because somebody read something I wrote and a friendship was born, a relationship was born, or I found myself invited somewhere that then led to something that then led to another book. So that the work begins to inform and shape the deepest aspects of one’s life and vice versa. B&W: Why now did you want to publish a collection of short stories? NK: Just to give you a little bit of history, I had wanted to be a poet from the age of 15 until I sat down to write my first novel when I was 25. And I hadn’t really written any fiction before I wrote that novel, which is called Man Walks Into a Room. So suddenly, here I was. I had discovered this new form—not just fiction, but the novel. And it was so exciting because it seemed so wild and open and flexible. It seemed to to fit me much better than what I had been trying to do before. For some long years, I was just really fascinated by this crazy, ultimately undefinable form that we refer to as the novel. And I still am. And I still sort of think of myself as somebody who, in life, that’s the form that I’m wrestling with, that gives me my greatest opportunities as a writer. But along the way, there were all these thoughts, ideas, beginnings of things that I was writing that didn’t become a novel or weren’t going to become a novel, and yet they were alive enough that I didn’t want to abandon them and sometimes couldn’t abandon them. And so there are beginnings of stories in this book, like the beginning of “Switzerland,” for example, and the beginning of “Seeing Ershadi,” which is another example, that were with me for years. So they were just files on a computer and I would return to them sometimes, and sometimes not. And so the voices of them, or the conditions of the story, were there. And then I’d write all these other things. And sometimes I’d start them on one side of writing Forest Dark and finish them on the other side of it. But what I found is that in the stories there’s a kind of playfulness. I don’t know if you’re aware of it as a reader, if a reader is aware of it on the page, but I certainly felt it as the writer. Because, for me, a novel is such a massive, massive emotional and intellectual investment. Particularly my novels, because they’re structurally really, really complex, and I only figure out the structure as I’m writing them. So, it’s kind of like a mental marathon to keep them aloft while I’m writing them and to make the structure finally work and come together, and they have many parts. They’re kind of exhausting in some ways. And a story in which one has many fewer structural choices along with many fewer general choices—it’s this chance to be playful. And if I started it and didn’t finish it, no big deal, right? And so maybe there were things that I could pursue or voices I could pursue that I wouldn’t want to pursue if I had to sustain them over the course of a whole novel. For example, the voice in “The Garden” was such a distinct voice in my head and on the page early on, but I really don’t think I could have or wanted to write a whole novel about that character or that circumstance. But the intensity of it wouldn’t let go of me, and so it became a story. A lot of short fiction writers start with short stories and they kind of mature out of them into novels. I think that happens a lot because people take writing workshops and then MFAs. I didn’t do either of those, and I came to fiction writing so strangely in my own odd way. I just did it backwards. B&W: You wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times called “Do Women Get to Write with Authority?” and then you’re talking about writing from the perspective of a man and how that lent you a seriousness that maybe wasn’t afforded if you were writing from the perspective of a woman. What do you think about that now? And then, in relation to the idea of the short stories and getting to inhabit a narrator ever so briefly, not living with them like in a novel, how do you think that relates to To Be a Man, as well? NK: To widen the scope of the New York Times op-ed, I really did choose to inhabit male voices early on. The first novel, it’s a third person voice almost entirely, except for the prologue and epilogue, but it’s a third person from the perspective of this man, Samson Greene, who loses his memory. But thereafter, I guess it’s worth pointing out that all of the novels are pretty equally divided between male and female first-person voices. So, History of Love has Leo Gursky, and then it has this young woman, Alma Singer. And then Great House has two men and two women. And Forest Dark is split in half with this male and female. So I think I’ve always known that I wanted to inhabit both. But there is something about knowing early on that to only–this was completely instinctive, not unconscious exactly, but certainly not well thought out, it was just an instinct that I had–that if I were to entirely inhabit womanhood or girlhood in my fiction that that wasn’t the easiest path to be taken seriously. And I also want to point out that this was in 2002 my first novel was published, so I was starting to write it in 2000. Things have really changed radically in these last twenty years. The measure of that is evident in how many young female writers are celebrated and read. I think a lot of critics would very quickly point out that much of the most interesting, most groundbreaking contemporary fiction is being written by women. Though that could have been the case twenty years ago, that wasn’t the language in the culture and among critics. And just to give you a footnote to that, just to give you some sense, at that time, the word most bandied around when it came to fiction by women was “chick lit.” Do you remember that? I don’t know. You were probably very young. That was the normal term. “Chick lit” was a normal term and constantly used. In retrospect, it seems so outrageous. But I think it was in my deep willful sense that I would be taken seriously, but that I needed to really argue to be taken seriously. And of course—and I think I mentioned this in the op-ed—of course I was surrounded by young men friends and so forth who were writing. It was clear that they didn’t have the same battle. B&W: They were already an “author.” NK. Yeah, exactly. I think it’s obviously very different now for both reasons. Times have changed and we’ve progressed—never enough, but we’ve progressed a lot in this regard. But also, I’m much further in my career, and I no longer have to worry about being taken seriously the way that I did when I was twenty-five years old and setting off to write my first novel. B&W: I noticed as I was reading the collection a connection between the narrator in “Switzerland” and the narrator in “To Be a Man,” both thinking about the power dynamics between women and men and the vulnerability and the violence in those connections. Did you think about the interconnectedness of your stories? NK: Yeah, I thought about it a lot. When I understood that I was going to make it a collection of stories, I think at that time I had only written and published four of them, and I decided I was going to write a novel and then a collection of stories–I sold those to a publisher before they had been written. And so I knew that was the plan. I think at some point, as the stories began to emerge, I had the title even at the beginning. And the title, I came up with it, and it reflects both the idea that I have inhabited men in my writing over and over and over again. So the question of what it is to be a man has been with me throughout. Like in Great House, for example, there’s this really difficult, tyrannical father named Aaron, this Israeli father. To become him and to be him was something else. Again, I drew on all kinds of experiences to be Leo Gursky or to be any number of the men that I’ve written about. It was thinking about what it is to be a man–that’s been a subject for me for a long time. But, then of course, it was also what it is to be a man from the perspective of a woman who has grown up with a father, and a brother, and around men, and have had many, many, many, many relationships with men. And then, finally, what it is to be a mother, as I am of two boys who are becoming young men, and what it is to raise boys in this age with all the complex, problematic, and contradictory ideas of manhood. How to raise them into men? And so all of those ideas were swimming in my head when I came up with the title which I gave to the publisher. And then I started to write these stories and so many of them were, just naturally, from the perspective of women. And so I knew I was going to have this title. You normally don’t name a collection something except after one of the titles of the stories. So I knew I was going to write this story with that title, and I saved it until the very end. I was really kind of moving, rising toward, this story for a long time. I don’t know if I already knew that it was going to be the last story, if I had that structure already. But I certainly understood that those two stories were bookends, in a way, and that they were drawn from a very, very similar source. A question of what is autobiographical I often have very little patience for, although I also understand the question. But I will say that I think both of those stories draw on an enormous, enormous, enormous amount of lived experience and lived observation. I was aware of giving that connection openly to the reader. I think it says in both stories that she grew up on Long Island, or at least an island. There’s just references. There’s references to the father. If you really look, it’s pretty clear, the connections there between those two stories. But at the same time, one story she has two girls and one story she has two boys. You’re never going to really be allowed to get away with assuming too much. But, yeah, in my mind, they definitely reverberate really, really loudly, and I hope richly, off of each other. B&W: They definitely did for me, I think just because they’re bookends and because I read “Switzerland” first, and then knowing the collection was named after “To Be a Man.” There is a quote from the same op-ed where you said: “To author is indeed to increase, to expand the self until it contains multitudes, and in so doing to expand a small corner of reality.” In reading and researching for this, I came across a lot of interviews where people were asking you about the autobiographical aspects of your fiction. For me, it makes sense–this expanding of the self into multiple realities and into multiple conditions. I really liked that quote. I noticed a fascination in interviews with the autobiographical aspect of your fiction. NK: One journalist recently asked me, do I think that people tend to assume those things more because I’m a woman? And although I wanted to leap and say yes, I really can’t say that that’s because I’m a woman, because I think about the person who received, in this country, in recent literary memory, the person who received the greatest brunt of that was Phillip Roth. There was nothing he could write that people couldn’t assume was autobiographical. And he did draw heavily from his own life. But he was endlessly and constantly transforming it into art. The fascination is so interesting to me, and I’m not without it. It’s not like I read things and don’t wonder, too. Like, wow, what part of this actually happened. It’s this natural question that we have. It’s part of our deep question of how close we should let this material get to us, how much we should affect it. You know, if something horrible really did happen, then maybe it will affect us more deeply than the representation of that thing or the imagination of that thing. There’s lots of things you could say about why people want to know that. When I go back to my position not as a reader but as a writer, the important thing to constantly point out is that the thing that the writer can do that other people can’t do is transform that stuff, through some alchemy that is so complex and so mysterious, that not even she or he knows how it works. To transform it into something else that is universal and accessible and moving to many. It transcends the specifics of autobiography and becomes something else. And so to kind of go the reverse route and try to bring it back, just seems to defeat the purpose of all that is being offered in whatever that work is. But, you know, the conversation has no end. It will go on always so long as people are writing about life. Illustration by Maya Weed B&W: Considering your work is so much about memory and you’ve been thinking about memory and neuroscience, the way that you figure memory in your writing is interesting. You write in “Switzerland”: If Soraya came to mind at all, flickering past in a mercurial chain of associations, she would recede again just as quickly.” And then in “Zusya On the Roof,” you write about Brodman remembering his obedience to his father in this “chain of relentless begetting.” And then in “To Be a Man,” you talk about “our memories of the past must always adjust to keep our stories coherent.” So, just in these very small fragments that I picked up on, I think it’s so interesting. Now, thinking about these passages and how you’re characterizing memory, has it been influenced by your time at the Institute? NK: I mean those ideas pre-date my time there. There’s this review I did for The New York Times of Oliver Sacks’s final book of essays, called River of Consciousness. Of course it’s a review of his work, but I think I write somewhat directly about this stuff. My fascination with the idea that the brain will always move to tell a coherent story, rather than give an accurate account of reality. The coherence of a narrative takes precedence over an accurate account of reality. That’s an idea that came from reading him when I was twenty-five and writing my first novel. At the time it was such a radical idea to me. And try to remember, too, at that time this whole notion that is now sort of very common in our culture, common to the point of nausea, for me, it’s a kind of Oprah idea, that we can shape ourselves and change our narrative and you’ve got to frame your narrative. But that idea was not at all spoken about twenty years ago. And when I read Oliver Sacks and sort of understood this really fundamental thing about how our memory works, which is that this narrative of self is so critical that the injured brain— time and time again, which is what he showed in all his case studies—will kind of block out enormous portions of reality in order to keep this consistency, this coherence of self. And if you take that out of the pathological and into the daily ways in which we live, and we all have experienced how differently we all interpret and remember lives and moments. It’s just absolutely fascinating. And I think that that idea has led me to all kinds of other ideas that became fundamental to my books, including in Forest Dark, this notion of the narrative of self and the ways in which we can get locked into it as a form and the possibilities of shattering and remaking that narrative; and why that’s frightening and why that’s an opportunity, asking the reader to inhabit that possibility; and using myself as a guinea pig by writing this character called Nicole and kind of shattering or breaking down her narrative to reinvent. All of that thinking was many, many years in the making from the time I was young. So I think now arriving at the Institute, it comes after many years of thinking and writing about these things, but without as deep a scientific training as I’m now getting and I have the privilege of getting. B&W: Is it strange to see your thoughts about memory that you’ve been putting in your literature translated into scientific writing? NK: I think it will be interesting to see how these trainees at the Institute who are doing this workshop with me—whose idea it was to do this workshop—it will be interesting to see how they bridge the gap or make sense of what is possible between the science that they do and how one can think about it and interpret it or reimagine it through a fictional lens. I’m not sure how that works. We’ll see. B&W: It sounds extremely exciting. I’d be curious to see the results as well. Do you collaborate with the other Artists-in-Residence at all? NK: I don’t. Partly because we only just began and then we had this pandemic. One of the visual artists, the painter Julie Mehretu—just by chance, she and I have known each other for 14 years because she and I were both fellows at the American Academy in Berlin when our oldest sons were half a year old. So our oldest sons used to play together in the American Academy in Berlin. And then we kept in touch a little bit, and then all these years pass, and we found ourselves as Artists-in-Residence at the Zuckerman Institute, so that’s been actually really lovely. And I was looking forward to more time with Julie, but of course we haven’t been able to really see each other. And then Miguel, who is the jazz musician, I also met I think on two occasions, and was delighted and was looking forward to more, but alas. B&W: And then just thinking about the pandemic, how have you been dealing with it through writing, or have you seen your own work impacted by this time? NK: I had finished the manuscript for To Be a Man, or I thought I had finished it in the fall, and then I wrote this very last story for it—the one that’s called “Amour,” I wrote that in January, and then decided to include it in the book. And then the book had just closed, and then it was February, and then it was the pandemic. Normally after a book is finished, so first of all, you have to do all this work on it, not editing the stories, but you kind of go through the galleys, copy-editing, lots of rounds of that. So I was sort of busy with that. But it’s always this really nice time where suddenly you can play again, particularly after a novel, because a novel is so strenuous, so after stories the playfulness just continued, I guess. I really felt very strongly about—there’s some aspect of wanting to resist every aspect of my life being locked down. So even though physically I was locked down, and even though in some ways attentively I was locked down to the numbers and the news, I kind of wanted imaginatively to resist that and to be free. And so I thought I would write about other things. I was working on other things. And then I ended up, I think in April or May, I wrote very quickly this new story which is coming out in Harper’s—I guess it will be on the stands in November—I ended up writing this story called “Drawing From Life,” and I won’t say exactly what it’s about because it hasn’t come out yet, but it does take place during Covid quarantine. It’s a really distant, invented story. I was surprised that that came as quickly as it did. And then since then, I’ve been writing. I’m working on a new novel. It’s really just the very early, early, early phases, so anything could happen. It’s just a lot of thinking out loud on the page and, as I said, playing. But it’s not been an unproductive time for me. I’ll say that much. B&W: I was listening to an interview with Miranda July, and she was talking about how writing a novel right now seems so impossible to her. Like if you are writing now, writing short stories feels like the most appropriate thing because it’s a story for people now, about people now. I guess you’re starting a new novel, though, so you’re still setting out on this project even with the question of how to set a novel in this time. Do you relate to that sentiment at all? NK: I don’t really because there’s nothing more about us than novels. Like there’s nothing I can think of that goes more deeply and overtly into the human condition than a novel, which is not to say that short stories don’t. I understand, I think, what she’s saying, which is maybe about timeliness. I’m not sure that timeliness is really the greatest tool of literature. A lot of things need to sink down through memory before a writer can reassemble them into something that’s really urgent and important to the reader now. So, it’s not that, like, the imaginary writer is just kind of setting a story in timely circumstances that the reader can relate to. The reader relates to the deepest, most essential aspects of what it is to be a person. Which is always, anytime. Catastrophe is ongoing; catastrophe is old. This is not new. And the circumstances of this catastrophe aren’t even new, or these many catastrophes. And I think that responding quickly is the job and work of many other professions—journalism comes quickly to mind, but many others. And I don’t know that that is the work or job or the best skill as the way of the writer. One interesting question is how there are lines in the sand in history. Like after the Holocaust, people didn’t know: How do you write without reckoning with that? How do you write about humanity without reckoning with that? And I think this is very different from the Holocaust, but I think there is a feeling probably among writers that this thing happened. So where do you set a story in time? Is it pre-pandemic or after? Because the very conditions of how we live and how we associate with each other physically and emotionally have changed so dramatically, and we don’t know when that will end. And having changed, you can’t anymore just write about a person casually going into a restaurant. You know, like in “To Be a Man,” where the narrator takes the German back home to her bed. It’s like, ‘Ooh, careful! Covid!’ Like all of us, we started watching movies during the pandemic, you watch and you’re like, ‘Oh god, you’re too close.’ There’s this instinctive sense of the rules of how we relate have changed, and they seem to have changed so profoundly. And even though it was so quickly, we have to somehow reflect them. So I think there is this question of how does one write right now. Do you set everything before? Do you set everything afterwards? And I guess those questions will be worked out. But I have no doubt that the novel is one of the great places to work some of those basic human questions out: Who are we? Where are we going? What’s happened to us? What do we want to be? #November2020

By Lilly Cao Oscar yi Hou, CC ‘20, paints people—not just as bodies, nor as the reduced, essentialized products of liberal identity politics, but people in all their complexity. The first time I encountered yi Hou’s work was at one of Columbia’s end-of-semester undergraduate art shows. As always, the walls were jammed with artworks, Prentis’s winding hallways were teeming, and beneath the clamor of small talk, someone was playing soft music from the second-floor common room. Amidst the din, a large, dense, prismatic portrait painting caught my eye. Depicting a single figure swarmed by objects against a neutral canvas background, the painting drew me to its detailed, cryptic contents. Some months later, I would discover that it belonged to yi Hou, a queer British-Chinese artist from Liverpool. birds of a feather flock together, aka: A New Family Portrait by Oscar yi Hou Yi Hou’s most recent work, birds of a feather flock together, aka: A New Family Portrait depicts him and two friends sitting together as if posing for a family photo, gazing out from the canvas, stoic. A sea of overlapping and interconnected symbols and patterns engulf them: a bull, cranes, a rooster, sheriff stars, calligraphy, beaded bracelets. The three subjects are interpellated as much through this network of symbols as through their own flesh and bone: their figures weave over, under, and alongside these images, as if forming a tapestry. Near the top two corners of the canvas, two corners of a frame are painted with conspicuous realism, denoting artificial boundaries. But the canvas and its web of signifiers overlap and extend well beyond these markers. In yi Hou’s work, representation is limitless. When I call him, it’s midday on a Saturday, and yi Hou is cooking omurice in his New York apartment. He carries the camera around the kitchen, answering questions as he finishes, and when he’s done, he proudly shows me the dish. Omurice is Japanese, but growing up, Oscar felt most closely connected to his Chinese heritage through food—his parents run a Chinese restaurant in Liverpool. Although he was surrounded in his home by Chinese symbols and art, he says he always lacked a proper understanding of both. In the fall of his sophomore year at Columbia, his grandfather passed away, and for the first time since his early teens, he went back to China for several weeks. With the dually fresh perspective of an adult and an emerging artist, he rediscovered Chinese visual iconography, buying art and calligraphy books at local bookstores. After returning to New York, he began researching East Asian history and culture in earnest. Art soon became another way for yi Hou to explore his identity. Confessions of two Chinatown Cowboys, or: Cowgirl A.B. & Cowboy Crane go smoke a cigarette by Oscar yi Hou While yi Hou’s prior works share some formal similarities with his current paintings—assertive colors, fraught brushwork, fluid shapes, and indeterminate forms—there are some striking differences in both content and technique. Dry brush doesn’t feature in the earlier works, but dominates his later paintings. Gaps between brushstrokes now reveal the surface of the canvas. And perhaps most notably, his characteristic symbols have emerged. His growing understanding of Chinese visual culture seems to have precipitated this change. According to Oscar, he uses dry brush and transparent primer, which retains the papery color of the canvas, to emulate East Asian calligraphy. Many of the symbols he uses are recognizably Chinese, or at least reference  Chinese art and culture, like the floating red knot at the top of Confessions of two Chinatown Cowboys, or: Cowgirl A.B. & Cowboy Crane go smoke a cigarette. Lately, Buddhist prayer bracelets have abounded as well. But his symbols are not limited to Chinese images, nor is his style essentially calligraphic. Like many diasporic artists, yi Hou turns to the symbols of his culture to produce his own identity, but he’s careful not to reduce or simplify his story. He juxtaposes Chinese symbols with sheriff stars, a motif in several of his recent works; in birds of a feather, they complement the cowboy hats donned by yi Hou and another figure. These allusions, he explains, stem from his fascination with the cowboy archetype as a representation of Western masculinity and Americana. Other non-Asian symbols permeate his paintings: his Aerolites shirt in 2 lovers, 2 cranes, the Romanesque lettering of the floating paper notes in many of his recent works, and the queer and feminist texts of Cruising Utopia and Woman, Native, Other in Self-portrait (21); or to steal oneself with a certain blue music. None of these signifiers of queerness, Chinese-ness, Western-ness, or masculinity stand on their own; they undulate together. And like many symbolists before him, Oscar shies away from lone interpretations of their meanings. His conceptual indeterminacy—even, at times, opaqueness—mirrors his views on the politics of artistic representation. In the contemporary art world, he observes, painters with minority identities—queer painters, women painters, Black painters, POC painters—have gained market value. They’re “trendy.” But, he says, “On the flip side of that, we’re being commodified, and the images of our likeness, our ethnic-ness, and our minority-ness are being traded and bought by predominantly white galleries and auction houses.” This economy of representation places a burden on artists of color to disclose their “colored-ness” in a way that’s palatable—which ultimately means sellable. Oscar’s response to this phenomenon, he explains, is to simultaneously communicate and conceal his identity, avoiding self-fetishization and self-exoticization. Viewers seeking immediate gratification for conceptualizing the ‘correct’ identity from symbolic queues ought to look elsewhere. Legibility, of course, depends on the viewer’s background, privileging those familiar with certain cultural significations and enabling the painter to partially circumvent tokenization. Yet yi Hou maintains that his works are accessible to anyone who spends enough time with them, regardless of their background. For all their mystery and specificity,  his paintings are anything but internalized—“otherwise they would be way too personal, like a diary entry or something.” All art is identity-based, yi Hou argues, but in the history of the West, white male identities were simply and brazenly privileged over others. Rather than try to speak for his culture, or his ethnicity, or any other categories that constitute his identity, yi Hou makes art as a “testament”—to having lived as a particular person, to having experienced a complex personhood. In a world besieged with crises, he’s forced to grapple more deeply with his work’s meaning: why make this kind of art? “The answer,” he says, “is just that I’m testifying to having lived. And I think that’s a good thing in itself.” Mlle. Chris à central park 103rd, en automne by Oscar yi Hou On September 11, the Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles opened a show called Myselves, which features Oscar’s work Mlle. Chris à central park 103rd, en automne alongside art by Romare Bearden, Wolfgang Tillmans, Amoako Boafo, and others. Oscar was contacted a year ago, and he hasn’t been able to see the show in-person, but he still keeps shaking his head and repeating: “it’s crazy.” Kohn is certainly a step above Prentis, and it’s obvious that this achievement is well-deserved. He’s set to show another work, birds of a feather, at Carl Freedman Gallery’s Breakfast Under the Tree next month. When I ask him what his plans are after graduation, he smiles slightly.  “I may be showing downtown sometime next year—can’t say much on it now, but I’m just going to try and paint and be an artist in New York. That seemed like such a pipe dream back in Liverpool—but here we are.”

Lacunae are, first and foremost, textual chasms—gaps on the page where something once was, or where something could be. They’re the Achilles’ heel of many an ancient work. But far from literary flyover country, lacunae can be rhetorically rich; my Lit Hum professor spent a justified week on them and them alone in Sappho’s poetry. And while, thanks to innovations in the papyrus industry, the majority of Annelie Hyatt’s poem in this issue of The Blue and White hasn’t been redacted over the millennia, readers will find plenty of meaning in the apertures she makes and describes: “You suspend yourself like a melody / you become the melody & tease me / from a crevice in the trees.” Lacunae in life—weeks of delayed course registration, say, or the 11-month interregnum in 1940s India—are tricky things, and they can provoke our ire. As awkward dissonances between expectation and reality, or between reality and imagination, they fuck up our plans or do away with them altogether. This month, Lyla Trilling’s lacuna is Columbia’s delay in rooting sexual assault out of frats for good: “Every institution in question has the money, power, and resources to substantially change their cultures of misogyny and ignorance,” she writes, referring to universities that fail to take action in the face of brothers’ Class A felonies. “But at what point will they gain the will?” In his essay on police brutality in Nigeria, Victor Omojola reframes the lacunae of justice that Americans are still trying to abolish. And Bella DeVaan shrewdly reveals the gaping—and widening—discursive lacuna between charitable donors and wealth redistributors at Columbia. Lacunae like these are so broad and deep that their borders are outrageously difficult to discern, their voids impossible to fill. They’re easy to fear, so we often shy away from identifying them, even when we know they’re there. When the media puts COVID on the calendar of the world, “lacuna” and its synonyms aren’t the spatial metaphors of choice; we hear more about ruptures, as if one of the most horrifying gashes in memory can be threaded, sutured, and somehow rendered seamless. When COVID is a wide opening, it’s a gleaming vat to fill with self-serving solids—by finally taking a MasterClass or, on the noxious end of the spectrum, launching a business that’ll fill that most glaring of “resume gaps.” Our writers are searching for other ways. The Columbia curators Claire Shang speaks to aren’t reveling in the lacuna or counting the steps toward its unknown end. Faced with a “stalled” arts industry, they are not only adapting to the pandemic, but formulating new ways to exhibit work; they’re filling (digital) spaces, even if they don’t quite know how. In her critique of the Wallach’s “Uptown Triennial 2020,” Lilly Cao reminds us that not all of those art spaces are being filled constructively, with deep knowledge of their contexts. And just when you think you understand the lacunae, Columbia students will prove you wrong—just ask the Southern students who relate the nuances of their identity-formation to Sophie Poole. Mind the gaps—paradoxically, they’re full of life. And mind them closely, as they like to hide in plain sight: except here, “lacuna” doesn’t appear in our issue, and even “gap” only shows up as part of a bathroom joke in Gabe Garon’s At Two Swords’ Length. Our writers didn’t have to veer into academese and declare their lacunae the ultimate sources of anything (insert inscrutable Lacan reference here.) They just found them, explored them, and tried to describe them. Enjoy. Happy break, and huge congratulations to Dominy Gallo, CC ’23, who will take over as Editor-in-Chief of The Blue and White in January, for one calendar year. Sam Needleman Editor-in-Chief #December2020

By Samia Menon

By Hailey Ryan Well, this just won’t do, thought Verily as he opened President Bollinger’s infamously verbose, oft-lampooned email announcing the complete shift to online courses. Lesser students would turn to group chats, Columbia Confessions, or perhaps even Reddit to find consolation and communion in these trying times. But Verily is not like other students. Quill in hand, he exhumed his favorite Columbia stationery from his chest of drawers and began penning a letter to the big man himself. Verily questioned the purpose of an education devoid of comforting mahogany beneath overworked derrières, the oh-so-erudite smell of coffee-stained books wafting into dormitories, or the Palladian symmetry of campus easing stresses for College Walk sashayers. And lo! How was Verily supposed to over-caffeinate with his family’s Keurig when his palette had grown so accustomed to the Hungarian Pastry Shop’s cappuccino? A couple of days later, Verily’s beloved great dane, Vergil, delivered the President’s letter to the foot of his bed. In stark contrast to his email, Bollinger’s response was brazenly curt—a pithy “no” that brought Verily’s world to a veritable halt. “Not even nay?” Verily gasped. “Chivalry died at the President’s Mansion this morning.” Self-righteous though he may be, Verily couldn’t bring himself to register for Zoom classes after desecrating their name. Plus, he knew that his ancestors, philosophers and scholars alike, would roll over in their graves if they knew their grandson attended Zoom University. Without the Core, he would have to recreate the Ivy League experience on his own. Home-school humanism would be the only solution. But oh, my! How to achieve such a feat in a small suburban town? In a moment of weakness, Verily flirted with the idea of strolling onto the local college campus—ever a risky move in Ithaca. When he did venture onto campus one morning, cloaked in his most discreet trench, he stumbled upon what the Cornellites call a darty. “What is this blasphemy?” Verily asked the nearest masked frat bro. “If you are going to have a party, there at least has to be a little party powder. None of this Natty Light tomfoolery.” Disenchanted by the apparent depreciation of the Ivy League’s good name, Verily solemnly strolled home, prepared to abandon his scholastic ventures for a gap semester of Downton Abbey reruns and perfect focaccia. He was trudging past the local saloon when, all of a sudden, he was hit by a stroke of entrepreneurial genius: “Aha! If the saloon is the working man’s saving grace, then a salon will be mine! Every intellect worth his salt establishes a salon!” Illustration by Rea Rustagi Reinvigorated, Verily seized his trusty quill and began drafting letters in his finest calligraphy to tap the most worthy scholars from Ithaca to Troy. Verily was on the edge of glory, on the precipice of a tour de force that would surely leave its mark on Columbia’s hallowed halls and herringbone bricks. #November2020

Tackling Ashkenormativity. By Noa Fay. A Jewish woman. If you are an American reading this, you likely pictured an Ashkenazi woman—a Jewish woman of European descent. And while not all Ashkenazim are white—I am a descendant of solely European Jewry, though you probably wouldn’t know it because my Black and Native American roots have darkened my skin tone a bit—your Ashkenazi image was likely that of a white woman. Because the majority of America’s Jewish population is Ashkenazi, assumptions like these are common; Ashkenazi culture is thought to apply to all Jewish people. But I’ve learned that many Americans are utterly unaware of other Jewish ethnic groups: Sephardim come from North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, Mizrahim come from Middle Eastern countries such as Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, and the Jews of Beta Israel are from Ethiopia. This is, of course, only to name a few. This frequent ignorance is the reason I received baffled looks as a child upon clarifying in class that I would, in fact, be celebrating Chanukah—not Christmas. It is why, while in shul, a woman began explaining to me what a rabbi is before my mother cut in angrily, “Her bat mitzvah was five years ago. She knows what a rabbi is.” It is why we have Ashkenormativity. Ashkenormativity is the Eurocentric perception of the Jewish community. People both forget and do not know that a Jew does not have to be white, leading to microaggressions like the ones I’ve experienced. While this is only my first year at Barnard—and I’ve not even lived on campus—it is clear that where it is present on campus, Ashkenormative thinking is rightfully challenged. The Jews of Color Caucus at Columbia provides a space for Jews of Color to gather and connect, a concept that is new to me; its presence alone counters Ashkenormativity. And more directly, Hillel programs like Judaism & Us ask participants to explore Judaism through an intersectional lens in order to better understand that there is no such thing as one kind of Jew. Now picture a Jewish woman. Hopefully, your visual idea has expanded. If it has, you could have pictured me, a multi-racial Ashkenazi woman. A Black, Native American, Jewish woman. One tenet of Ashkenormativity is identifying Judaism only with Ashkenazi traits. I am embarrassed to say that I was only recently exposed to one of Judaism’s many subcultures. I come from a French Ashkenazi family, and while historically France’s Jewish population was largely made up of Ashkenazim, this is no longer the case; today, much of France’s Jewry is Sephardic. I learned this last year, when family in Paris invited me to share Rosh Hashanah with Sephardic friends. That was the first time I had ever met a Sephardic Jew! I began to understand that each Jewish ethnic group has different ways of observing our religion. While celebrating Rosh Hashanah, I learned that Sephardim have an entire seder. My Ashkenazi family does no such thing; to us, seders are reserved for Passover alone. I also learned that because of France’s large Sephardic population, cultural signifiers are vastly different. Whereas in America, matzo ball soup, gefilte fish, and bagels may come to mind when thinking of classic Jewry, the French think of lamb meatballs, homemade nougat, and kefte de pescada, or Sephardic fish patties. (The more insidious stereotypes depicting Jews as money-grabbers plotting world domination, unfortunately, proliferate on both sides of the Atlantic.) On a more serious front, though, Ashkenormativity often forces Jews of Color to “decide.” I intentionally reject the “I” perspective in this statement because this is something I know all Jews of Color deal with. The decision is forced through an implicated question of loyalty: if you are a Jew of Color, you are Jewish and. Jewish and what? White Jews are not forced to decide between any identities of theirs because they are seen as purely Jewish. Why must I be Jewish and Black, or Jewish and Native American, and not just Jewish as my white Jewish counterparts are? The question can present itself in more ways than one, but the starkest memory I have of being forced to choose between my identities is from a national conference designed to connect students of color at private high schools across the country. On the last day of the conference, the acclaimed news reporter Marc Lamont Hill was slated to speak. Earlier that week, he had been fired from CNN for anti-Semitic comments; still, he remained on the docket. This alone made me uncomfortable. Here I was, at this conference for students of color, ready to be inspired by a fellow Black American, but how could I endorse him without betraying part of myself? Before he began his planned speech, he spoke about the injustice of his termination from CNN, citing a contrasting incident in which Bill Maher said the n-word live on HBO without consequence. He went on about this charismatically and was met with a standing ovation. A standing ovation except for one, of course. Whether he was aware of it or not, his words perpetuated a common discourse between Blacks and Jews—though more often now between everyone and Jews—known as the “discrimination olympics,” in which two or more marginalized groups compete to decide which of them has suffered more. It goes without saying that Bill Maher should have been reprimanded for saying the n-word, but HBO’s failure to do so does not exempt Marc Lamont Hill from punishment over his own comments. Invoking the “discrimination olympics” places Jews of Color in a difficult and uncomfortable position: which “side” are we meant to fight for? But of course there are no sides. One group’s suffering—be it more or less—does not cancel out the suffering of another. So I did not stand for Marc Lamont Hill. I did not feel I could stand in support of this man who so clearly did not stand in support of me. Perhaps he supported one part of me—my Black identity—but his comments on that day, as well as the comments that got him fired from CNN, showed he did not support the part of me that is Jewish. He was making every Black Jew decide between two identities, something that no one should ever ask of us. In much more explicit and personal displays of Ashkenormativity, I have been asked on more than one occasion which group I identify with more: the Black or Jewish community. The question is always asked out of mere curiosity, which I can understand among close friends—after all, it is a question I often ask myself and reflect on. And while I do have my answer, the fact that it is a question at all is a serious problem. There is a unique bond between people who share the same oppressed identity. Many, though, believe the bond to be so unique that it can really only be forged and shared within one group. To acknowledge that another minority group faces trauma equal to—or even similar to—one’s own is seen as a form of concession or disloyalty. After getting involved with both Columbia’s Jews of Color Caucus and Hillel’s Judaism & Us fellowship, I am confident that the Columbia community is on a trajectory towards eliminating Ashkenormative thinking. But these are just two examples of what everyone needs to be doing. The task to create inclusive and intersectional spaces should not fall only in the hands of Jews of Color. Everyone benefits when we understand that “Jewish” does not equal “Ashkenazi.” If you are a Columbia student, keep this in mind as you continue studying at an institution with such a large Jewish population. While most of the Jewish students you meet are likely Ashkenazi, many are not. And when you do inevitably meet those Jews of Color, don’t make them decide.

The second installment of a graphic series detailing interviews with Columbia’s spiritual advisors on the definition of happiness. By Kat Chen. Please wait while flipbook is loading. For more related info, FAQs and issues please refer to DearFlip WordPress Flipbook Plugin Help documentation.

Featuring an interview with Maureen Raymo, the Director of the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, in which she discusses her work as director and the newly implemented Columbia Climate School. As always, the episode concludes with a poem.

2020 Guide to Giftgiving Guides. Looking for the perfect gift for your loved ones this holiday season? But wait! How will you know where to begin shopping without a classic gift-giving guide? But wait! How will you know where to begin looking at gift-giving guides without a gift-giving guide guide? By Malia Simon Luckily for you, The Blue and White has done the research, and we’re thrilled to share our findings. From my tiny brain to yours, here is the Official 2020 Holiday Gift Guide Guide. Cosmopolitan Gift Guides Stay far away. If you’ve been fortunate enough never to have read a Cosmo gift guide, I pasted this year’s below to save you the trouble: “Hi, Woman. Here are some Womanly Woman things. Flower petal lotion. Wine-shaped candle. We just know you’ll love it. Also, we are definitely Real Women writing this and not aliens or AI-generated text.” Arts and crafts-y Guides These are a maybe. Those little intricate crafts can certainly make a friend yell out in elation, “Cool, you made this?” Unfortunately, this is only suitable for those proficient in arts and crafts. As for the rest of you, give yourself the annual reminder that no one over the age of three is into melted crayon art. Gift Guides “for men” A great option if you have $1,800 on hand to blow on a large appliance. But if you’re in a college relationship, why are you considering looking at one of these, anyway? Consider oral copulation as a cost-effective alternative. Something tells me it’s been awhile. Gift Guides From the Book Corner of Urban Outfitters Haha, funny gifts! Do you want to give your friends odd-ball gifts that will remind them you’re so cool and fun? You have to spend 45 dollars! At this store! Self-care-y Guides Nothing says “I don’t know you as a person” like a candle and face mask kit. That being said, what’s the holiday season without belligerent reminders of how many different perfumed liquids it’s possible to own and impose on your friends? Gift Guides by Influencers Proceed with caution: these are directly tied to multi-million dollar brand deals with Audible 100% of the time. The Office Depot Gift-Giving Guide We’re in luck. Just when we thought no one could create a suitable gift guide, Office Depot emerged from the mist, temporarily forgetting they are an office supplies store. Office Depot, I couldn’t agree more. This year, you should get each one of your friends a Duracell® Sync & Charge Cable, Micro USB, 10′, Gun Metal Gray, LE2294. You really should. I want you to. #December2020

By Jaden Jarmel-Schneider Uwade Akhere, CC ‘21, launched her singing career at a ’70s themed fifth-grade talent show. She’d grown up in elementary school choirs, where teachers liked her because she “could hold a tune or something,” but she hadn’t taken music seriously until she convinced two friends to dance backup for a rendition of “Natural Woman.” If you scroll far enough down on her Instagram, @uwade.music, you’ll find a video of it. In the clip, Akhere is clearly the star. Wearing a bright red dress, she belts out the lyrics with charisma and control. It’s clear that even then, she could do more than hold a tune or something. Since then, she’s developed a more mellow style in her music. Her voice is smooth, calming, almost ethereal. Drawing from classical chorale settings, Nigerian highlife tunes, and an eclectic list of contemporary artists, Akhere’s music is very much her own. The only single she’s released, “Nostalgia,” which has amassed over half a million listens on Spotify, epitomizes her songwriting philosophy, which she credits to The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas—“a stream of consciousness with a lot left out…showing instead of telling.” If you’ve listened to “Nostalgia,” you might have a sense of what she means. If you haven’t, you should. The song, which she wrote after accepting an offer to study abroad for a year at Oxford, is all about trepidation. The chorus is poetic and philosophical, like you might expect of someone who has pored over Catullus (She’s in the middle of translating his writings when she joins our Zoom call.) “It’s time to say goodbye to who you thought you’d be,” she sings. “Maybe one day you’ll be free.” I can’t stop listening to “Nostalgia,” but Akhere tells me that she hasn’t played it for a while—“my entire personality feels different now.” While it seems like songwriting is second nature for Akhere, she tells me that it took a long time for her to get there. It wasn’t until her sophomore year at Columbia, when a good friend who also wrote music convinced her to try it out, that she wrote her first song. At the beginning, she hated her lyrics. She would write about exactly what she was thinking and doing, leaving very little up for interpretation. But as she started to channel Casablancas, she found her groove and “learned from his style to leave things for the audience to interpret and resonate with, and find themselves in.” The cover art for “Nostalgia” is a photo of Akhere as an infant, smiling at the camera, and though she doesn’t explain it to me, I get the sense that she sees the song as her baby. A decade after taking her elementary school stage, it feels like Akhere is at the precipice of making her big break. Her music, evidently not only on my playlist, attracted the attention of indie band Fleet Foxes after a friend sent them a clip of her covering their “Mykonos.” Fittingly, she had just finished a study-abroad summer in Greece and was beginning her year at Oxford when she got a call from Robin Pecknold, the band’s lead singer (and a Columbia alum), and soon found herself on a train to Paris to record. Shore, which was released in September, features her vocals on its hypnotic first track. Like so many of us, Akhere entered the College as an Econ-Philosophy major but ended up studying Classics. She only began studying Latin seriously in high school, but it had always been around. Her dad, a hymnal aficionado and ex-choir boy, taught her Gregorian chants and choral harmonies in car rides—the “tricks of the trade,” as she calls them. She recommends that I check out Gregorio Allegri, who composed her favorite classical piece, Miserere mei, Deus. I joke that she must have aced Music Hum, but she hasn’t taken it yet. Illustration by Kate Steiner Three years later, Akhere has a lot to look forward to. She reassures me—and, I imagine, many of her Columbia fans—that she is recording a new album in Charlotte, her hometown, and is looking into graduate programs in Classics and Philosophy. But she’s already nostalgic for her time at Columbia. Her favorite memory? Retreats with Notes & Keys—she used to be the Music Director. I ask if she was drawn to classical poems that were presented in song. I go as far as asking if she ever sees herself as some neo-Classical poet—singer, songwriter, philosopher. She laughs. She’s far too humble to think this, let alone admit it. #November2020

By Benjamine Mo Ours is a community of change. As our institution contends with the existential threats of disease and dispersal, student leaders are reimagining Columbia as a series of communities mobilized to respond, adapt, recover. Amidst the confusion of transition—in University, national, and global politics—Columbia College Student Council (CCSC) Student Body President and former International Student Representative Joon Baek, CC ‘20, has proven to be an agent of the kind of proactive, student-driven change that’s more vital than ever. While I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting Baek once before, I am immediately reminded of his geniality when he appears on screen with a familiar grin during our mid-October video call. Judging by the view of a Midtown street out the window behind him, Baek is back in New York City. Yet despite the expected clamor of the urban jungle, the virtual space we meet in is hospitably serene, as if beckoning our conversation—undoubtedly due in part to his approachability. I begin with a simple inquiry: Why student council? Baek takes a moment to reply. As he looks away to formulate his response, he traverses time—it’s been five years since Baek first stepped foot on campus as a freshman—to identify the impetus for this journey. After returning from nearly two years of military service in South Korea between his freshman and sophomore years, Baek found himself estranged from the first-year communities to which he once belonged—communities that had, quite organically, changed in his absence. Presented with the opportunity to engage with the student body anew, Baek turned to community-building as a way to address the difficulties faced by international students such as himself in acclimating to life at Columbia. Friends urged him to join CCSC as International Student Representative. Baek graciously emphasizes his gratitude for their support, which he warmly reiterates more than once. Ultimately, Baek’s bid for the role came down to a pivotal realization—it was, he says, “a position I can actually be passionate about.” Representing an international student community that has endured dispersion, failed diplomacy, and the malicious whims of a xenophobic federal government seems to demand this passion—that is, the vital combination of tenacity and savvy that it takes to devote oneself to advocacy. And it seems that Baek’s got it. When I ask him about the pivotal moments of his time in his representative capacities, Baek first expresses his genuine appreciation for all of the experiences he’s had thus far. But what most immediately comes to mind are the events of the past summer, specifically ICE’s “whole fiasco on revoking [international] students’ visas if they didn’t come back to the U.S.” International students residing in the U.S., Baek explains, faced deportation if classes were held entirely online. He recalls the day that ICE announced the new restrictions on student visas. “I woke up and all my international friends reached out and asked me ‘Joon, have you seen this?’” Baek chuckles as he tells me this, perhaps in reaction to the absurdity of the proposed policy or perhaps out of relief that it didn’t take effect. Regardless, it’s clear that the memory of this panic remains distressing, to say the least. I remember this same confusion among my own friends who found themselves at risk of deportation. Many found solace in two emergency international student town halls, organized by Baek to clarify needs and determine next steps, and generously open to international students from any university. Baek was vocal in his advocacy for international students, and although he never anticipated any claim to fame for his role, he admits: “Speaking with the Attorney General—that was a highlight of my class council experience.” Most of all, however, Baek remains inspired after engaging with the international student community, having walked away with an understanding of “not only how diverse the student body is at Columbia,” but the “many voices Columbia students have.” He recalls with admiration, perhaps gratitude, that “people weren’t being defeatist—people were figuring out ways to petition.” As he recounts these events, Baek seems proud—not out of disproportionate self-regard (trust me, this would be wholly uncharacteristic)—but out of an unshakable respect for his constituents. Baek was elected Student Body President in May. In this new capacity, he and the rest of the CCSC Executive Board find themselves in constant negotiations with Columbia College administration to reconcile students’ ever-changing predicaments with the University’s attempts to maintain routine college operations. Without chipping the inscrutable polish of a politician, Baek explains that this is no small feat. It’s clear that he looks toward the future with both resolve and a pragmatic awareness of the hurdles still left to be cleared. “One of the things we tried to change was we tried to change the academic policy when it came to a lot of class situations, to extend the drop deadline, class withdrawal deadline, and the pass/fail deadline for a lot of classes,” he says. “The CC deadline [to drop Fall full-term courses] already passed last week—SEAS is in November.” In response to student concerns, Baek offers reassurance. “Our board is trying to change that.” CCSC has already begun finding ways to engage students in this new virtual format–an initiative that Baek argues has been successful. This has included proposing “a mutual aid fund, so that students could support each other and people who need resources and mobilize Student Council to help those students,” Baek tells me. Looking ahead, he predicts that “November will be a very chaotic and tumultuous period when a lot of people will be going through a lot of difficulties because of what is happening nationally.” Baek speaks with a slight, consolatory grin—what seems to be a tendency of his. He and the CCSC Executive Board will advocate tirelessly for increased flexibility, realizing that, as Baek puts it, “considering all this is happening, we should at least try to make wiggle room for our academic lives.” Illustration by Lilly Cao Although our community is in flux, Baek suggests that these inevitable changes can force us to grow–depending how we choose to respond. Aren’t we all just trying to make the best out of this chaos? As graduation approaches and the world—an oyster, although perhaps a bit caught in the mud for now—opens up to him, Baek maintains a relentless and imaginative optimism in spite of the murky future. As for what’s to come, career-searching and the like, Baek tells me matter-of-factly, “I still do have those sorts of self-doubt.” But, as we all know too well, he notes that he’s come to terms with the fact that “things change.” In fact, he’s found solace in “admitting these insecurities.” As we conclude our conversation, Baek does not abandon that reassuring grin he’s maintained for much of our call, a grin that reflects a mantra Baek tells me he has recently acquired. It’s one I’d say is vital to have, that I remind myself of now too: “I have confidence that whatever path I may take, one way or another, it will lead to something good.” #November2020

By Noa Fay. In a land Overmorrow A golden beam shines Beside, A rainbow– With misted, Colored lines. But such a Land Is not ours– We bear not The gift of peace For on our skin Is ebony and onyx, So we cry For our own release. Our sisters And brothers Shot dead in the streets, Our mothers And fathers Strung up in the trees. And with any Inch We gain, We are drawn Back A mile, On this soil We cannot laugh Or giggle Or hoot, Or holler Or smile. Damaged We are not But Perhaps misled. For within ourselves We argue And point fingers– Naming the accused. How many inches Would we take, If we could all agree? Maybe one full yard, Maybe our own mile– Maybe two, Or three. We may not be Executioner– Or judge Or even jury, But so long as Justice Is denied We will unleash Our Fury. Centuries have passed– Against each other We’ve been pitted, And At last We say no more. So do not cry And beg for mercy– Amerikkka has Waged This War. #December2020