I’ve always been jealous of couples, the ones on park benches, hands brushing thighs, cheeks blushing. They are together with nothing to say, but his eyes scan her freckles, she kneads on the cuff of his coat. They both smile at this conversation which has passed between them in a language all their own. This summer in London, I’d walk to Russell Square Park after class and look around at the children pinned to their mother’s legs, couples ripping up grass into heaps then brushing it into each other’s laps, bodies curving together on picnic blankets. Sometimes my eyes would meet a stranger’s. I’d hold the contact a beat longer than an accidental glance and sometimes the clouds would shift so the sun could paint their irises alive.

Back home, I stand with my mother in our kitchen and watch her. Her hands are covered in phulka dough, dry flour dusting her knuckles, her elbows. On the stove, the potato curry is burning, so I turn down the heat and hover over the bubbling pot. My mother and I do not speak. There are craters beneath her eyes, I notice, and I wonder about her life before she was my mother. Jaanmari, puttu, she says, my dear, my gold. I am hers now. She tells me about before, when I wasn’t. She tells me stories of her schooling in Delhi. She would stay late to paint women standing by firelight. She wanted to linger in the classroom; she didn’t want to go home and cook for her parents, my ajji and thatha. She wanted to listen to the silence, listen to the brush against paper, drawers opening and closing, the sounds of her own rummaging as she searched for art supplies.

Sometimes I wish that I did not have to speak in poems, that my mind didn’t move in stanzas. There’s an ache in my syllables when I try to speak over the phone with thatha in Kannada. I want to tell him that I miss him, but the conjugation, the intonation, will be wrong. I sit across my friend on a couch in his college common room. He asks me what’s wrong. My words don’t come out. If I could just speak in ums and pauses. If I didn’t have to say anything at all. If the silence didn’t harden between us, between my mother and I, on the phone with thatha. “Nīvu hēgiddīri?” I ask him, in an accent that isn’t quite right, and he can’t hear me, the meaning doesn’t translate. We both laugh, but I still don’t know how he is.

I can’t comprehend how people grow apart so easily. It’s been two months since I’ve really talked to my best friend. I’ve seen her, but our conversation feels hollow, gracing the surface of things we used to talk about. She didn’t do anything to me and I did nothing to her, but I no longer spent my late nights in her room singing “Hallelujah.” Since then, she’s reached out and I tell her I have to finish an essay, have to call my mom, I need to sleep because I’m getting over a cold. This weekend I walked by a coffee shop and saw her through the window, earphones in, sitting alone with her work. I couldn’t tell if she was sad or if I was projecting my own sadness onto her.

I walked back to my room, but I could not bear the weight of my body. I do not know what it is about the process of growing up, if this is growing up, that settles in the body like dust. I wonder when our silence lost its ease. I sat on the steps, cradled my head in my hands, and cried.

I couldn’t tell, from outside the coffee shop, rain clinging to the glass panes, whether I was cruel for not wanting to see my friend. There is a cruelty at the center of it all, when the violence of the world festers, curdles in us like blood.

On the steps, I kept thinking of my thatha, how I have not made the time to speak to him for months. I was busy, I was tired, the time difference was too large. I want to ask him about his walking group, whether any new members have joined lately and how is the weather, how is it really, do the clouds fade into the sky and is the rain the same kind of misty, warm haze like it was when I visited years ago, when I was younger and still too scared to climb the guava tree?

My parents are in India now, visiting ajji and thatha. Thatha is getting sick. They walk with him on the streets of Bangalore, visiting flower markets that sell kumkuma, a red powder that they spread on their foreheads before praying in the morning. They went to Mantralayam, a prayer village in the south of India, for one day and sent me pictures: people bowing down, scavenging for scraps of salvation. They pray for his health and for my happiness, they tell me over text. In the evening, my dad throws some cardamom, tea powder, clove, milk and sugar into a pot with water for chai, which my thatha, ajji and parents all drink together.

I open every photo they send me but most days I forget to respond. I don’t know how to tell them that sometimes, at night, I sit alone at my desk with my own silence. I don’t want to see anyone but I don’t want to be alone. In these moments, I look at the photo they’ve sent me, their faces pressed together, neither of them looking directly at the camera (they don’t know how to properly take a selfie). I feel sad when I see the wrinkles of my dad’s skin, when I see my mom’s eyes; they seem tired now.

I write poems and I write this but I am still envious of those who can sit together saying nothing. The world around them stills, and no one can break their closeness, can permeate the comfortable silence. Yesterday, my ajji commented on a Facebook photo I had been tagged in, and something in me broke open like an egg. It has been too long since I’ve heard her voice, I am forgetting its rhythm, too long since I’ve worn the scarf that she knit for me before I left home for college — now, I am broken, and I’m waiting for something to spill out.

Yolk was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

in this dream i rise from my seat

and become a professor, standing

at the front of the lecture hall.

i’m not speaking but looking

out at all the faces, and i think

one of them is my own.

i look at myself straight in the eye

for the first time in my life, and immediately

i want to look away.

i see what others see in me—my eyes

spilling fear, the scar on my left cheek,

rising and waning like a star.

i want to look away, and yet

to see myself

in truth, shrinking

in my seat, trying

so very hard to disappear.

i want to see my skin, how it is ruptured and alive–

my hands, the veined fabric, unraveling.

all my life i have only seen myself

behind the cloak of a mirror, and now,

to finally see myself,

to finally see yourself—

the words scribbled

on your lips, your mouth.

to know that this is not a dream

because you are really here, yes,

you are really alive.

In the past couple of weeks, we have received three emails about students passing away. We have also received a few emails about the aftermath of the election. Together, these emails felt like a flood—overpowering and destructive.

I wanted to do something—to shout, to scream, to change the situation somehow—but I couldn’t. The passivity of reading these emails feels much like the passivity of reading texts for class, in that we can’t change the words on the page. We have to receive news—Yale-related and national—without being able to change it.

Sometimes, in moments of quiet, I ask myself whether what I’m doing—reading old texts and writing columns like this one—matters. I wonder whether words can truly effect change. I feel far away from everything, from the families and friends experiencing the deaths of these three Yale students firsthand, and from the people worrying that they will be deported in light of the Trump election.

But still, through reading, I can see that pain and sorrow are universal and never permanent. When I’m reading Metamorphoses for class, for example, I can see the struggle of Daphne to be heard as she turns into a tree manifested in the fight of women, minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, Muslims, and every person who feels invalidated today. I recognize the voices of marginalized communities in different stories. I remember the patterned nature of existence, for the same struggles arise again and again, reminding us of our ability to rise out of them.

Reading offers solidarity in times of uncertainty: it unites us, connecting us as people across time and background. It provides a backbone to our questions and fears, grounding our thoughts in the stability of text. In other words, the texts we read stay the same, and in a way, this is comforting, for they act as constants in a world wrought with change.

Reading catalyzes action, providing us with direction in our efforts towards change, reminding us that people have overcome such marginalization before. Maybe, through reading Metamorphoses or Tacitus’s Annals—works that underscore suppression throughout history and the consequences of such suppression—I will be compelled to write, to act, to protest.

Reading has incredible potential, for it invites the possibility that, maybe, what you wrote in the margin of your history textbook is relevant and matters. The events described on the pages cannot be changed, but you can change how those events are understood today.

Yale itself is in a moment of change. We recently received word that Dean Holloway will be stepping down in 2017, and next year two new residential colleges will open. We have to look to the future. The morning after the election, we woke up, and we will keep waking up, and keep trying. So much lies in front of us—some of it positive, and some of it negative. Armed with the power of words, we will trudge ahead.  

The Winchester Repeating Arms Company closed its gun factory in New Haven, on the corner of Manson Street and Winchester Avenue, in the spring of 2006. This closure marked the end of a centuries-long relationship between arms manufacturing and the Elm City, which acquired the moniker of “the Arsenal of America” during the Civil War. And as developers vied to redevelop the factory into high-end apartments, government officials and New Haven locals countered the prospect of job loss that accompanied the closure with optimism: that Winchester’s shutting might make the city a safer, healthier place.

On Oct. 24 in New Haven, two men were shot at the Hess gas station on Ferry State Streets. In the span of one year—2011—167 shootings occurred. And in the last six years cumulatively, 65 deaths have resulted from murder or homicide. This, in a city of just 130,000 residents.

The Connecticut Mental Health Center, located on Park Street here in New Haven, sees patients every day who experience trauma-related disorders that stem from gun violence. According to the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, 34 percent of middle school youth in the city report, as of 2010, having seen someone get shot or stabbed—thus placing them at greater risk of suffering from mental illness. In New Haven’s low-income neighborhoods, too, between 67 and 77 percent of adults do not feel safe walking the streets at night.

This sort of violence outlives gunshots—it is the ensuing trauma, spurred by guns, that plagues New Haven residents and their communities at large. But this same violence has moved to the forefront of conversations surrounding Second Amendment rights and gun usage here in the Elm City. Perhaps, some advocates, police officers, and government officials argue, a more effective solution lies in looking at mental health.

—–

“The very presence of guns creates an atmosphere of concern and fear,” says Alfred Marder, founder of the Amistad Committee, which addresses issues of social and racial inequality in New Haven. The former chair of the city’s Peace Commission (and also of the United Nations International Association of Peace Messenger Cities and the U.S. Peace Council), he notes that there is a great concern among the community about the violence that guns have wrought. “There has to be a national institution of restrictive legislation,” he maintains.  

Achilles Generoso, Assistant Chief of the New Haven Police Department, adds that even when they are acquired legally, guns are often moved informally into the hands of others: “A criminal might acquire a gun from his parent or grandparent, for example.”

The subsequent violence that occurs when these people illegally acquire firearms has proven detrimental to the mental health of Connecticut, Generoso holds: “It affects every citizen from the victim to the neighborhood to the city and beyond.” In particular, he notes that many more people might come to New Haven to explore restaurants or shop, but—because they associate  the city with violence—decide to go elsewhere.

Generoso also highlights a more concrete manifestation of gun violence on the wellbeing of locals: “It affects the children in the city, and people in the neighborhood where violence occurred suffer from PTSD. It is incredibly traumatic to people when they see what is happening, and it becomes a mental health issue.”

***

Over the last few years, efforts to limit gun violence in New Haven have been largely successful. In November 2012, the New Haven Police Department, in cooperation with the state and federal government, instituted Project Longevity, which focuses on contacting gang members and making them aware of guns’ effects on their communities. This initiative takes a comprehensive and psychological approach to gun violence—and since its enactment, gun violence in the city has decreased dramatically. Michael Sierra-Arevalo, an affiliate fellow at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), and a graduate student affiliate of the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course (CIQLE), studies the patterns of gangs residing in impoverished neighborhoods in the context of urban violence. He emphasis that Project Longevity is not “stop and frisk style policing, but a focused approach that concentrates on those men that are engaging in violence.”

Initiatives like Project Longevity, as Assistant Chief of the New Haven Police Department Anthony Campbell notes, look at the underlying causes of gun violence. He emphasizes the strong link between gun possession, mental health, and violence: “Feelings of invalidation and disrespect escalate, leading to this violence.”

***

Many other initiatives are intended explicitly for children. “Parents are afraid to let their kids ride their bikes outside for fear that they will be shot,” claims Laurence Grotheer, Director of Communications for the City of New Haven. Sierra-Arevalo elaborates: “The exposure to continued violence engenders negative cognitive outcomes for children.”

For these children, gun violence is linked to broader issues of policing and social order. “The proximity to gun violence is often a traumatic experience, especially for young people and people who know those involved. It is stressful to have police looking through your streets and it’s harder to live in these neighborhoods,” Grotheer says.

It is for this reason that Mayor Toni Harp has engaged with each of the government’s departments to provide additional programming for young people: to give them spaces where they can feel safe after school and during summer vacation. This programming uses statistics and data to identify at-risk youths and to match these youths to tutoring, counseling, and anger management programs.

New Haven has also partnered with the Yale Child Study Center to counsel young trauma victims. Local public schools are offering wrap-around services to address any other issues that affected students might have.

***

Yet in spite of the successes of this mental health-based solution to gun violence, the majority of New Haven’s initiatives continue to work by targeting those who illegal possess firearms. “Keeping guns out of the hands of criminals is our priority,” Campbell says. “The mayor wants expanded background checks, prohibition of assault weapons, and gun safety laws. There are too many guns and they are too readily accessible,” Grotheer notes.

Harp has piloted efforts like “Shot Spotter,” which uses a series of antennae to record the sound of gunfire. Shot Spotter allows for the police to monitor three times more of New Haven than they could before—and instead of waiting for a 9-1-1 call, officers can respond to gunfire directly and launch an investigation within minutes. The technology is highly accurate: it can determine the number of shots fired and triangulate the sound to pinpoint the incident’s location and the caliber of weapon fire.

Additionally, the NHPD has begun to offer gun trade-in and buy-back programs, which are now commonplace across the United States. Campbell says that locals have turned in over 100 guns thus far.

But these more conventional efforts miss the mark, claims Sierra-Arevalo: “We need to think long and hard about the purpose of the criminal justice system and focus resources not on arresting more people, but on helping the right people. We need to reduce the number of people who come in contact with criminal justice system altogether.”

Efforts like Project Longevity—that is, efforts that treat New Haven’s gun violence epidemic in relation to issues of mental health—are a start.

When I came to Yale, one of the first things I noticed was how much time people spend eating and planning meals. Throughout Camp Yale, my suitemates and I would plan out every detail of every meal together—where we’d meet each other, which dining hall we’d go to, what time we’d arrive.

Sometimes during dinner, we’d all be together, but none of us would talk. It was almost like  the sheer presence of other bodies acted as a safety blanket. Even if we were alone, we could at least find comfort in the semblance of being together with other solo diners. After Camp Yale ended and our schedules stopped lining up, I began to eat alone. At first, the experience was strange. It felt wrong to be entirely alone when so much of college seems to revolve around meeting people, and it was difficult to listen to others’ conversations and not feel like the first person on Mars.

At Yale, loneliness is stigmatized outside of the dining halls on a daily basis. In many ways, Yale prizes a culture of constant socialization where students feel the need to network and add to their  their social capital. The process of making friends becomes, at least in part, a game of strategy.

On  weekend nights, the pervasive fear of being alone arises again when students go out to parties in the hopes of meeting new people. I don’t go to parties often, but from my limited experience, I’ve noticed a strange generic quality to social spaces at Yale. Despite an abundance of people gathering in one place, they appear simultaneously together and somehow still alone. In the mass of individuals at these parties, everyone starts to seem faceless. Each person fades into the next, attaining a physical closeness far from true togetherness. If I had to describe what loneliness looks like, it might be this.

And yet somehow the stereotypical images of loneliness at Yale are eating alone or sitting alone on a bench, both of which I enjoy doing regularly. But the next time I go by myself to Silliman to eat my breakfast of eggs and toast, I will not feel as alone as I would at a party, surrounded by people on every side. At Yale, we often think that if we are physically alone we are truly alone, but this is untrue. We try to boil down loneliness to the image of a solitary person, but in truth it is everywhere on this campus, especially in the places we wouldn’t think to look.

I suck air into my gut and hold my breath. It is winter break. My family is about to watch October Sky. I am seven, and my sister is 11. We both glue our eyes to the screen before us.

October Sky is based on the life of former NASA engineer Homer Hickam. The movie follows Hickam from his humble upbringing in the town of Coalwood, West Virginia, where he first starts building rockets, through his rise to fame. Something about the hope on Homer’s face after he learns that his team won the national science fair resonates with my family. The next year, we watch the film again, and again the year after that.

When I am 11, I still hold on to each word in the movie and am excited when we watch it, but I’ve started to memorize the phrases and gestures, the transitions from one scene to the next. The landscape of the film feels predictable. Still, I smile along with my family and say something about how inspiring the ending is when the rocket flies into the sky. My parents nod along, and my sister does, too. I wonder if they’ve started to memorize every word in the conversation between Homer and his father, or the surprise on Homer’s face when his first rocket destroys his mother’s fence.

When I am 18, the movie has lost some of its luster; every headshake and furrow of the eyebrow seems familiar. The inspiring ending doesn’t feel as inspiring anymore. Still, sitting on the same brown couch we always sit on, I make my usual comment about the rocket flying high in the air and the way it parallels people’s limitless dreams. Secretly, I notice how clichéd it is. In comparison to the complexity of Homer Hickam’s true story, the whole movie seems to employ a reductive, feel-good plot. Why can’t I be in awe like I was when I was seven?

I begin to think of all the things I believed in when I was younger: the tooth fairy, unicorns, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I wonder why I stopped believing in these things, and I feel a sharp pang in the pit of my stomach. I hunger to believe again.

For a moment, I feel that all of my younger selves are sitting next to me on the couch, but they fade like rockets in the night sky.

Mantralayam, India, 2012

These streets—lined with cows and crushed flower garlands—lead to places I don’t know and will never know. My parents walked here and felt the concrete below their feet, but I am not the child of this place.

My mother tells me to wear a sari so that I will blend into the crowd and seem less like a foreigner. My grandmother tells me that I have lost my native tongue. This is where you’re from, she tells me in Kannada, and I respond to her with a nod and a broken yes. The silk of my sari seeps into the fabric of my being and I feel at once part of something and separate from it, a stranger in my own skin.

We take a train to Mantralayam, where people go to pray. Outside the temple, I see a man peeing on the exterior of the holy dwelling. People’s shoes—dusty and unraveling—lie on the steps of the temple, scattered and forlorn. Inside, the people are insects, scavenging on the sweetness of the priestly, sacred honey. Put your hand out like this to receive the payasam, my mother tells me. I put out the wrong hand. Someone in the background laughs, and pushes me to the side. I don’t know where I am. The people here push each other to get to God. I don’t want to push anyone to get to God. If God wants people to push each other to receive a blessing, then I don’t want it. The people here are insects. This place is foreign. I am detached, growing out of my old skin.

If you zoomed out, I’d seem an insect like everyone else. I’d be indistinguishable from the crowd, cloaked in the safety of my sari. If you looked closer, though, you’d see me in an act of disappearance, an insect trampled beneath human feet, lost and aching for home.

Portland, Oregon, 2015

The walls of this house remind me of the skin on my palm—soft and yet tarnished, evolving through the years. I know this house like my palm. The outside is blue and every time I drive into the driveway I say I am home.

Today, after school, I park my car in the driveway and step outside. I sit for a while on the grass outside my house, close my eyes, and try to recreate its architecture in my mind. If I didn’t live here for many years, would I start to forget the ridged blue exterior or the wisteria draping the garage door?

It is strange the way we build our houses until they feel like home. It is strange how the architecture of a place parallels the architecture of one’s insides—and when the place crumbles, the same rupturing occurs within.

I step into my house and wonder what it would be like if I was stepping into it for the first time. I wouldn’t expect to see the rocking chair there, freshly washed clothes strewn all over it, or the red and yellow carpet, the right corner touching the fireplace. I wouldn’t expect anything, but would see with new eyes, tasting every detail for the first time.

I don’t think about it when I call this house my home. I don’t consider the possibility that the word home itself is limited and transitory.

New Haven, August, 2016

It’s move-in day and I feel as I did in Mantralayam: tiny, an insect, displaced. I don’t know the language of this place; I hope I’ll eventually learn it. People spread across the campus like jelly lathered on a piece of bread. They seem wonderful and nice, but I don’t know them.

Everything is beautiful here. Even the ground seems to glisten, alive with the stories of new students. I wonder if it can hold all the stories or if it will ever crumble, unable to shoulder the incredible weight.

When I enter my new room, it is empty. The walls bleed white and they too exude a kind of emptiness. It is a hopeful emptiness, though, for I can fill them with color. I shake hands with my roommate and her mother, ask them about their lives and where they came from. I meet my suitemates and their parents and shake their hands mechanically. I know one day it will not feel mechanical.

I throw my comforter onto the bones of my bed. I try to make all my clothes fit in my closet, but I don’t know if everything will fit, if I can make everything fit.

Now, this is an act of construction, of fitting, but maybe one day, it won’t be. One day, I won’t have to act and I won’t have to build. One day, I’ll call this place home without a second thought, and the walls and faces of people I’ll know will seep into my skin. I will not remember the emptiness, although the home I’ve left behind will lose color, beginning to seem empty in my mind.

New Haven, October, 2016

“Here’s where my class is,” I tell my mom, and she follows me, as if I know where I’m going.

“Here’s where I eat. This is my dining hall.”

My mother is a foreigner in this place, this place I’ve now started to call my home. She flinches when I tell her, here’s my home, as we enter my suite.

Maybe I’m forgetting something.

I call this my home now and it’s true in a way. Already, I’ve grown to know the trees on this campus and its geography, the people, my classes, the libraries, and the buildings, but something is missing. This is not entirely my home. When I call it home, I choke a little bit, and my throat closes, unable to believe the words. This is one of my homes, but it is not my only one.

I am a collection of homes, for in my wild and frizzy hair I contain the streets of Portland, Oregon, and the blue architecture of my house. In my lips, I hold the imperfect prayer of Mantralayam, while the bottoms of my feet hold a map to Welch B. When I feel my tongue sloshing around in my mouth, I can taste the remnants of so many different languages and places. On my palms, I see a world: a conglomeration of my homes, enmeshed into one another. Maybe I can never be fully home in one place. But when I look at my palms, I can be everywhere for one instant—on the train to Mantralayam, in my blue house, and sitting on a bench on Old Campus, looking out.

Once, someone asked me where I was from. I remember saying something ordinary, like, I’m from Oregon and my parents are from India. Now, if I could respond again, I’d just hold out my palms for a while without saying a word.

In early 2015, Provost Ben Polak informed the university community via email of yet another reconfiguration of Yale’s New Haven: the construction of a new housing complex for graduate students on Elm Street, which would move some residents of the Hall of Graduate Studies to the last undeveloped swath of land in the Broadway District. Here, among franchises of upscale brands, sat a final relic of the area’s less polished past—an asphalt parking lot, bordered on Elm Street by a rusted metal fence. This August, jackhammers and hardhats welcomed students old and new back to the Broadway District. The rusted metal fence was gone, and construction had commenced on the development at 272-310 Elm Street.

Come October, excavation work will begin; come early-2017, the mixed-use development will rise above ground. Just after the end of the next academic school year, graduate students will call the former parking lot home, and the Shops at Yale will stretch uninterrupted from one end of the strip of Elm Street between York and Park Streets to the other. Two floors of retail space will sit below four levels of two-bedroom apartments—41, in total.

In many ways, this construction marks the apotheosis of University Properties’ gentrification of Yale’s periphery. It also marks a different kind of phenomenon: the continued blurring of the boundary between town and gown, as students relocate away from the heart of their campus and deeper into New Haven. And so when university officials dug shovels into dirt for a staged groundbreaking on August 24th, they affirmed Yale’s unchallenged transformation of New Haven into a neo-Gothic and red-brick fantasyland for its students and visitors alike.

*****

Yale, for one, sees the construction of this new housing complex as a realization of its vision for the Broadway District. “Where students live is an integral part of their graduate experience at Yale,” said Karen Peart, Deputy Press Secretary in the Yale Office of Public Affairs & Communication. “The goal is for them to foster deeper connections with each other, with Yale, and with their surrounding neighborhood and community. The new building will be in the heart of New Haven’s downtown, close to the Broadway shopping district. This gives students an opportunity to live in a building that is central in terms of both the university and New Haven.”

There is more to this “surrounding neighborhood and community” than meets the eye. This is a landscape of Apple Stores, Urban Outfitters and American Apparels. There is an outpost of Kiko Milano, whose website identifies the company as providing “face and body treatments of the highest quality, created to satisfy women of all ages.” Maison Mathis, with two locations in Dubai, sits near the corner of Elm and Park Streets. This is to say that the Broadway District serves as a gilded fringe to the blight of  nearby neighborhoods, like Dwight and Dixwell.

But all is not well at the Shops at Yale: EmporiumDNA—an upscale clothing store with several locations across the United States—closed its shop at 1 Broadway last June after floundering since opening in 2014. Just across the street at GANT, retail associates mill about their under-frequented storefront. Manager Garrett Henson said: “We don’t see many students. They come and check things out, but not many of them buy clothes.”

From a safe distance, George Koutroumanis, the owner and manager of Yorkside Pizza, has watched this partial implosion of the Broadway District, which sits a block away from his own business. Koutroumanis noted: “In a nutshell, everyone’s trying their hardest to keep going.”

*****

It seems, then, that the Broadway District has not succeeded in all the ways Yale intended. To this end, one of the area’s few recent successes has been Junzi Kitchen, whose location at 21 Broadway is the only property in the Broadway District that University Properties does not own. In fact, Lucas Sin, DC ‘15, Junzi Kitchen’s owner, attributed the restaurant’s popularity to his practice of inverting the neighborhood-building efforts of University Properties.

Sin said that nearby big-box stores have done little to recognize their siting here in New Haven. It is for this reason that he has emphasized “hyper-locality” in building a culture for Junzi Kitchen: “Yale students have a next-to-zero relationship with the real residents of New Haven,” he said. “I like hiring locals who are younger. They’re all from New Haven and their work experience is working in a high school cafeteria or an old people’s home. They may be considered to have limited experience and prospects, but that’s not how I run kitchens. To me, the food that comes out is largely a product of the people who make it.”

In acknowledging the recent cultural sway of “hyper-locality,” Sin is onto something. Arethusa Farm Dairy, which opened its location at 1020 Chapel Street last spring and sources products from a farm in nearby Litchfield, Connecticut, often boasts lines out the door. At Four Flours Baking Company just up Chapel Street, a husband-wife duo from Woodbridge, Connecticut sell popular, baked-from-scratch goods. In other words, the big-box stores of Broadway are out, and local establishments are slowly creeping in.

*****

And so when the new graduate housing complex reaches completion in 2018, University Properties will face a dilemma: whether to pursue its Potemkin village of Urban Outfitters and American Apparel or whether to abandon this pursuit altogether and to subscribe to a new paradigm of development—of “hyper-locality” instead.

Sarah Eidelson, JE ’12, Alder to New Haven’s Ward One, where the development sits, hopes that University Properties adopts a strategy more in-line with Sin’s Junzi Kitchen: “It’s important that Yale is extremely thoughtful about what the residents of the area want to see and puts in businesses that are affordable and cater to the experiences of the people who live both in downtown and in other parts of the city.”

Some students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—who will one day inhabit the development—reiterate Eidelson’s sentiments. These students advocated for practicality over the sorts of showcase storefronts that currently line the Broadway District. Miranda Sachs, GRD ’17, for one, said:  “I think it would be really helpful to have a pharmacy or drugstore, as it would be helpful to have one a bit more central to campus.”

Eidelson and Sachs see the construction of the new housing complex as a chance for University Properties to revisit the identity it has long impressed upon the intersection of Broadway and Elm Streets. But not everyone is so optimistic: “University Properties is notorious for a long, arduous, bureaucratic process of vetting what businesses go into their spaces, in part because they want to make money from these businesses and they want to make sure that the businesses don’t screw up the culture of the space,” Sin said.

Perhaps, though, it’s this very culture that needs to change.

I swallowed a seed and now it rises,

but I am broken,

so it cannot live.

As a child,

I ravaged watermelons mercilessly,

ate them quick like candy.

And their seeds—swallowing them,

my mother said, would birth

a million watermelons in me.

I swallowed a seed,

and now it grows green,

leafy hands and flowered veins.

Mother, mother,

how could I tell you

I want to go back, want to grow in reverse,

to curl up and become a seed.

How could I tell you

that when I throw up these words

they turn to flowers bleeding

from my mouth. How can I say

I’m home when I ache for the soil,

to emerge a body suddenly whole.

This summer, Gabby Douglas became a flashpoint of controversy in the gymnastics world when she did not place her hand over her heart during the national anthem. In response to this action—or, rather, inaction—social media ignited with comments attacking her patriotism. Why, though, did Americans feel the need the criticize Douglas, and why did some feel that she was attacking tradition? Can a small gesture really capture what it means to be American, or what it means, moreover, to be a part of something?

People cling to traditions like those surrounding the national anthem, and attach undue importance to them, because they reassure us and those around us that we belong. It is almost as if we can grasp these symbols as instant demonstrations of identity, for if we recite the national anthem, stand up and put our hands over our hearts, we can show that we are American, that we are here, and that we are more legitimately here than those who fail to act in a similar way.

I’ve noticed something similar in the traditions I’ve been acquainted with thus far at Yale. At the end of orientation, all of us bright-eyed freshmen gathered in Woolsey Hall to sing “Bright College Years,” a song that is a tradition of Yale and symbolizes true entry into Yale’s gates. As the song finished, we took out our handkerchiefs, decorated with a Y and the year 2020. At the words “for God, for country, and for Yale,” we waved them from the left to the right to the left again, and I’m quite certain I somehow messed up this seemingly simple movement of the wrist and hand. Yale, as I’ve come to learn, is full of such traditions, and while they do remind me of how I’m attending a storied institution, they do not truly make me feel part of Yale. They make me aware of the history that surrounds me, but I still don’t feel like I’m interacting with this history. I interact with the students and people here but feel as though I’m only going through the motions with traditions that feel distant from me.

Tradition fails, at times, to incorporate perspectives and identities, because tradition is not elastic but rather rigid. Considering the controversies surrounding the renaming of Calhoun College at Yale, for example, we see exactly where tradition fails. Tradition, by its nature, is unchanging, while the university itself in terms of diversity and background of students has changed immensely. I understand that anthems, songs, and handkerchiefs are meant to symbolize all of these experiences in one universal act of unity, but sometimes symbols feel reductive, especially when we give them so much weight.

We assume that symbolic or traditional representations of belonging will always be able to represent all people, when in fact they cannot. Songs like “Bright College Years” might suggest a universal identity for the student body in its precise and measured lines and not of the different and yet equally valid stories and experiences of every student. They are inherently positive, and can demonstrate one aspect of belonging, but the problem arises when we see them as the most forceful or valid symbols of belonging. In the first few weeks of being here, it definitely feels as though these traditions are meant to capture everything that it means to be part of Yale, but they do not.

There simply is not enough room on a handkerchief to write down all the meaningful experiences I might have in my next four years here. I recognize the history of traditions and do not resist their existence, but I do not believe that they best represent belonging, for they are unable to change. With time, the qualifications of belonging evolve, and they should evolve. Our belonging to a place cannot be constrained to a symbol or a tradition, for often they are shallow and cannot do justice to the incredible color and variety of belonging.

I want to be part of Yale, and I hope I will be. I hope I will take many walks around campus until I understand its geography and until that geography somehow becomes part of me. I hope I will find myself having late night conversations with my suitemates about cereal and religion and everything in between. I hope I will find myself writing pieces like this one. These are the things, I think, that truly make me part of Yale.

People tend to hold onto symbolic forms of showing the world they belong somewhere, for it doesn’t seem enough to simply belong. It is, however, enough to simply belong, but it’s difficult to believe this in our culture, which prizes symbolic and visible belonging rather than the more real but often tacit kind. Tradition and belonging are not synonymous, and we should not treat them as such.

In four years, I will wrongly wave my handkerchief again—the blue of the “Y” now faded and the fabric slightly tattered—remembering all the experiences I couldn’t fit on it, and I will know I am part of a community.