ink.
issue 27.
To Whom It May Concern:
The Hotchkiss School has promised students that they will feel “safe, seen, and supported” throughout their time at the school. However, as illustrated by the recent posts from Instagram accounts @blackhotchkiss and @black.at.hkiss, Black students and other students of color have not received adequate support from the institution, which has resulted in an unsafe learning environment. Accounts of these experiences may have begun surfacing recently, but are by no means a new phenomena; students have been traumatized without receiving adequate support for far too long. We recognize that the administration has made efforts to initiate change at our school by creating an administrative Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, setting the goals that they would like to achieve, and responding to the “Black at” accounts with a post on the @hotchkissschool Instagram. However, these steps are just the beginning of the larger change that needs to take place. This proposal was drafted by current Hotchkiss students with input from both current students and alumni, with the purpose of enacting changes that will foster an actively anti-racist learning environment, in which marginalized students will truly feel “safe, seen, and supported.” This proposal outlines new policies, reforms, and long-term goals the institution should work towards in all spheres of its operation. Through this proposal, we hope to initiate conversations between the students and adults at Hotchkiss, to begin the process of implementing the following policies.
To emphasize the student body’s strong conviction to enact these changes within the institution, the students would like to point out that continually failing to provide adequate support for students would allow preventable cases of emotional, and in some circumstances, physically traumatizing situations to be normalized on our campus. This results in a great number of liability issues for the School. In no way is this proposal an attempt to antagonize the administration; students simply hope to emphasize the gravity of the issues at hand, ensuring that our school is in line with others nationwide, who are implementing specific action steps to end normalized racism. We hope this proposal will provide insight for the administration to understand precisely what the students feel would be the most effective approaches to take towards attaining a safe and supportive environment.
To Biryani, with Love
Prose by Evangeline Warren ’14
Five years ago, I spent a few days with my grandmother learning how to make biryani. This was the famed family recipe that my mother had never mastered and so I was sent on a mission to New Brunswick, Canada to learn my grandmother’s secrets in the hope that I would be able to pass them on to my own children one day. My grandmother, 82 at the time, moved slowly through the kitchen as she narrated her steps. Because no written recipe existed (and any reproductions always seemed to forget a vital ingredient) I had decided to observe and help, and then note every step taken. The three day undertaking culminated in a rice based dish with chicken, onions, raisins, and other delicacies. This was, by my count, only the third Indian dish I had learned from my grandmother and it was by far the most symbolic. Biryani is a staple of our familial and cultural history. When my white father and Indian mother had married at my grandparent’s Canadian Baptist church, for example, the reception had been catered by the Indian ladies of Fredericton, New Brunswick. The menu? Biryani. It was a dish of celebration and joy.
My grandmother was always the one who taught me Indian cooking. My mother, a second generation Indian, had grown up in a fairly assimilated and Anglicized household. Of- ten, our family joked that the two recipes everyone wanted most from my grandmother were her recipe for biryani and her recipe for fruit cake. In my childhood, my father’s American heritage was always predominant. Our holiday meals were composed of American and European recipes: Thanksgiving was turkey with a sausage stuffing, Christmas was Beef Wellington with mushroom pate, and Easter was a lamb roast, often with a Mediterranean bent. Dosa was never on the menu, neither were idli and sambar, or even the famed biryani. The first dishes I learned to make with my parents were Christmas cookies and chocolate mousse. I soon expanded my repertoire of recipes by working my way through The Joy of Cooking (at my mother’s recommendation). My only contact with Indian food consisted of pre-made sauces, heat and eat items, and an unhealthy love of Sunday buffets at New York’s Indian restaurants.
I have been lucky to live most of my life not deeply cognizant of my race. The bulk of my childhood experiences with race were tied into random people speaking Spanish to me or the immigration agents at the airport treating me with a bit more suspicion. I learned early on to wield my class privilege as a protective shield against the every day racism present in this country. After Hotchkiss, I attended Kenyon College in rural Ohio. Kenyon continues to be a place I deeply love but it also the place where I was first forced to reckon with the ways that others saw me.
My race has always been a big question mark. As someone whose parents are different races, my own racial identity has been complex and ever evolving. As a child, I saw myself as two pieces of one whole. Half Indian, half white. Now, I self identify as mixed race before anything else. I understand that regardless of how I see myself, others see me as amorphous brown and that’s the defining characteristic of my own identity in our racialized society.
Living in Ohio has forced me to recognize the fact that the way others perceive me more deeply impacts how I move in the world than any self identity I might claim. As I now start my sixth year living in this state, I have come to recognize the ways people quickly assign categories to those around them, and the dire consequences those assignments can hold.
My time at Kenyon has led me to a PhD program in Sociology (still in Ohio) where I study racial identity formation, racial assignment, and the health disparities that result from both. I have come to learn the language of intersectionality, racialized nations, and identity formation. But often, this just leads me to more questions about myself.
Who am I to claim an Indian heritage when I speak no shared languages, wear no shared clothes, and cook no shared dishes? In this country, little care is placed on the places we come from when our personal identities do not match our physical presentation.
Of late, my experience of my heritage has been Netflix shows and bad take out. The small vestiges of a culture I want to claim but feel little connection to. As my grandmother has aged past the years of teaching me to cook and telling me stories of her childhood I have felt myself grasping every more fleetingly to this familial past I do not recognize.
But perhaps there is something deep in my core that understands what I came from and where I have yet to go. Because when I’ve had a bad day or need a bit of comfort, biryani from the restaurant down the street still soothes my soul.
American African
The cloth that chokes me
Filled with patterns
Of love and war
Crafted by my ancestors
To continue their legacy
To remind me of them.
I throw away the fabric murals
they are no longer mine
I’ve changed.
Inherited new ancestors
Learned a new history
Made of new consistency:
America.
Learned a new language
Can’t remember my native tongue
The way in which my lips move
To form words in Bassar
Repress my cravings for ethnic foods
Eat western words instead
Assimilate to new attitudes
But my tongue will always linger on the taste of fufu
Despite being choked
By the pounded cassava dough
By the togolese cloth
That lay around my neck
As my mother cradles me on her back
Singing the sweet song
That her mother once sang
Swaying her hips side to side
Cradling me to sleep
The memory of Africa that comforts me,
leaves me grounded in my roots,
Always hidden underground.
I grow in the world of the west
living not exactly African
not exactly American
Somewhere in between
Prose by Richie Mamam Nbiba ’23
Art by Ryan Eom ’21
Deities
A colossal trio,
Piercing the insipid grey sky,
Towering over
Us “low-lifes”
Scavenging for scraps from squalid streets,
Sequestered in their shadows.
A palpable sense of
Mystery
Shrouds the three Urban Deities.
What happens
In your Kingdom high above?
Are we rendered
Utterly useless down here?
Could we
Join you
To be housed securely
Within your impregnable arrogant walls,
Safe on your higher ground,
To share
In your wealth
And prestige?
Your request
Is simply
Nonsensical.
Poem by Marcus Lam ’23
Art by Daniel Lee ’17
Art by Ryan Eom ’21
lost
Poetry by Emiliano Leal ’23
Art by Nicole Morikawa ’21
We come here for a better life,
An escape from our poverty, our war, our loss.
We fight to get here.
We try legally,
but it takes too long, or they don’t accept.
We have no choice so we pack, and, we run.
Nothing can stop us, and we arrive.
We know hope once more.
We forget our troubles.
We’ve left them behind.
Now new problems arise.
We look over our shoulders,
watching out for ICE.
We can’t trust anybody
they might give us away.
We learn the language, picking up a word here and there.
It’s hard at first, but we can’t be stopped.
Our accents remain strong, but that’s not going to change.
For once we settle down,
our worries vanish behind.
We find a husbands, our wives,
And families are born. Then one day,
We leave our guard down,
They come knocking down our door,
And all is lost,
once more.
where are you from?
Poem By Emily Heimer ’21
Art by Clark Dong ’22
Home is the ancient chinese tea-bed in our living room
traveling with us when we move,
her black satin and red embroidery embracing our backs
and caressing our hair.
Home is challah bread french toast with banana mash, so fluffy and gooey and sweet, unique to only
our sunday brunches and the most guarded family secret.
it is the forks and chopsticks hidden away in our drawers, the glossy clay menorah sitting on a shelf,
quiet cafes, and the red envelopes in my parents’ room, stacked in rows and ready to be used at eighteen.
Home is 美羊羊喜洋洋 recordings saved on our television and the shiny barbie movies tempting
our friday nights. The japanese, chinese, and english languages mixed with hebrew prayers that bounce
off our walls, proud of their variety, sprinting through the pipes and floating across our ceilings.
Home is this house,
never letting me stay but always letting me bask in its warmth on cold nights and walk its floorboards
for a couple days at a time.
Home is my mother’s voice, ranging from soft to abrasive,
piercingly comforting, sprinting across the room,
loud and proud and usually unintentional.
Home is her homemade yogurt and orange juice and tofu and soy milk and oat milk and plum wine.
her public dancing and stinginess. her food: fragrant fish dishes, soft salmon fillets, homemade shrimp
dumplings, salty tomato and egg, tea-eggs, stinky tofu. and just rice. she makes amazing rice.
Home is her hands clasped in mine and the streets she points to, down the alleys of shanghai where she
grew up.
Home is her story: growing up in poverty, bravely escaping a community that tied her down in hope of a
better life. what a woman
Home is my father’s sighs,
patient and possibly disappointed.
it is his calming words and huge hugs.
Home is the synagogue, where he salts his challah and drinks his wine. it is his tickle-monster.
absolutely terrifying.
it is his contagious laugh and terrible jokes, bellowing across the room, stealing our breath and hurting our
stomachs. his ability to make people bask in the love he radiates on cold nights when only his smile keeps
them warm.
Home is his eyes, blue and grey and green, caring, accepting, and trusting—never letting you down.
Home is my sister, with her multicolored braces
and gossip about middle-school boys too stupid for her.
Home is her miles of long, itchy hair, pesky and always getting stuck in her slime.
it is her hunched neck, looking at her iphone while furiously typing on wechat. it is her round glasses
— definitely a copy of mine.
it is her books and her picky-eating
Home is my sister’s love.
Home is what they teach me.
life is a temple of experience
Home is not just where you live
it is the idea of using what you learn to lift yourself and those you love
to dare dream a little bigger
to think about the new experiences that come with moving
and the same experiences and values that follow us as we do.
we move, we adapt, we live, we accept, we love.
“we support and trust you and your endeavors.”
we find Home no matter where we are with our food, our languages, and our hugs.
i do not have one home
i have three: Mama, Papa, and Leah.
i am from them
and they will always bring home to me.
20
Prose by Stephanie Ge ’22
Art By Olivia Mooney ’21
Strangers ask why I never smile.
The answer is simple.
When they learn my condition, they’re usually inclined to feel sorry for me, and ask in their heads how an autistic girl could be born into a family like ours. It’s like I can read the thoughts in their faces. The cheek muscles relax, the eyes widen and the mouth parts slightly as they nod in solemn understanding. But
I’m no fool.
There is no such thing as equality. Or true sympathy from people who don’t know you. People are pre-inclined to judge.
Contrary to popular belief, I did talk when I was very young. My silence isn’t a result of some terminal illness that you only see in sci-fi movies. No, it was everyone I ever met who worked on me steadily, day after day after year. It was not the result of my diagnosis, but the cause. Suddenly my condition was synonymous with nonexistence.
I can’t say the words out loud, but that doesn’t mean I have none in my head. I don’t often smile or laugh, but that doesn’t mean I am morose at heart.
Even Mama. She knows her hopes and dreams for me are dashed; I can’t become a doctor or business woman if I can’t speak. So her attention toward me, her efforts toward improving my reading skills, dwindled and eventually ceased. My brother Kai was no different - but it was Brian, only Brian, who loved and saw me as who I am.
“I’m jealous,” he murmurs once as we walk along the beach in Hawaii. The sun has gone down, and a ripe full moon hangs heavily at the lip of the world. The light it creates skims a trail over the water. He guesses what I am thinking, which is jealous? Of me? He knows I would give almost anything to have his life. Brian knows, yet he shakes his head and sees the good where none exists.
“Yes, Ophelia,” he says patiently, as though we were having a real conversation and I had just expressed my incredulity. Instead, I communicate my feelings through a glance of disgust.. “You are wonderful and talented. And even though most people can’t see it at first, you are truly one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.”
His compliment warms my heart like nothing else can, but I shake my head in disagreement. I have to be able to use my strengths to be useful. I have no reason to smile at anyone who doesn’t see me. Doesn’t even look at me. And, slowly, over the course of twelve years, I became what everyone else thought I was - dumb and morose and nonexistent.
All the intelligence in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t exist.
Brave New Me
I was taught to believe
that we can’t have wings
to spread out, to fly,
to lose everything.
The voices I hear,
that resound in my mind
have polluted my thoughts
and left me for blind.
Yet,
the more I breathe
this air of life,
the more I heal,
devoid of strife.
I was conditioned,
now in many ways askew,
my truths galed away
because
I trusted you.
Poem by Alex Cheng ’23
Art by Mariah Bell ’18
the cusp
we stand upon the cusp of time, arms like wings, hearts everchanging: the wind of spring when its caress finally blows warm and inviting is this how demeter, lonely and alone, soles in the soil of her earth, felt when persephone was on the brink of return from her elegant prison? sisyphus, bound to eternity, painful & infinite aeons, castaway but unswervingly shackled;
it’s the sweet harsh scent of the new: brooms pushing dust out of still & stale corners, long dark hair falls strand by strand to the floor to be swept away too. out with the old is its chant
bells & their euphonious tones strong, their vibrations golden, a momentary flicker-blink into existence, a permanent pulse thudding/tromping/flying through a soul & our souls
a cry, a lament, for the stuck & forgotten (harpooned by time) as the ceaseless current of the clock persists, will persist, long after we who stood on the cusp of time with the world grasped in greedy fingers have been long swept under by endurance.
Prose by Isabel Su ’22
Art by Yujin Lin ’05
que bien te ves
Play By Irisdelia Garcia ’14
Art By Olya Sukonrat ’21
Characters
MUJER: 20’s, Latinx. Fem. Strong willed but tested. Tired.
HOMBRE: 20’s, Latinx. Masc. Deeply caring, does not understand.
Setting
A liminal space. The stage is covered with red-orange flowers.
Time
Stuck.
Notes
All stage directions are not permanent and should be open for interpretation by directors and actors alike. However, all set pieces includ- ing the stage covered in flamboyan-like flowers (red-orange flowers), a sugar sack, are necessary. Movement is not written into the directions fully but is highly encouraged.
for my family, who taught me that being puerto rican is only second to being alive.
for mi isla bella.
for the ancestors who guide me.
Poem by Sydney Goldstein ’22
Art by Dear Liu ’19
“it will get
better,” they said.
“Tomorrow,” they said,
but just a whisper.
but would it be
Tomorrow?
like a glowing,
white,
frosty moonlight?
peering out from
the darkness,
just a peek.
just a taste
before, we start
to deteriorate, to shrivel.
of the leaves
like the
glimpse of a
desperate wanderer who
espied an unforeseen water,
so magnificent, so
deserved.
it might end,
for us, this unbearable
blight.
but let us hope that
a glimpse is not
just a glimpse.
the need is now
for the return of viridity.
maybe,
Tomorrow night.
The Theory of Observation:
Poem By Mariah Bell ’17
Art by Jerry Cao ’19
I
The act of observation will always change the measured result
the cat in the box
the tree in the woods
the You that remains unobserved
cannot prove their existence
without destroying their existence
II
What cannot be observed cannot be discovered
Isn’t it frightening
the things He keeps from us?
Isn’t it frustrating
that you must have faith
that you must have faith?
III
Erasure occurs when language fails to accommodate the phenomenon
What did you she he we they just say to me?
The emotion slips between your lips
and weighs so heavy on your tongue that your mouth
falls open
you she he we they wait for you to find the words, but -
A lyric for Ms. Rankine
IV
Description places boundaries on the limitless
She says she is terrified
that so much remains unknown about Dark Matter
Suddenly very angry, you tell her,
They want you to be afraid of what They don’t understand.
Don’t be.
V
Nothing can exist without context, therefore the body has a memory
You are walking down the street with your friend who is not from Here
You see the man walking towards you, whose complexion resembles your father’s, when
You notice her grabbing your arm, steering you both away from him
You frown, trying to find the words, but
You can tell she thinks she did you a favor
VI
Isn’t it frightening that you must destroy your existence to fit into a context that They will understand?
You’re in your room in your classroom
at 4 at 12 in the morning in the afternoon
one day in the middle of winter spring summer
and you think you know you don’t know what to do be think feel and you’re Tired
of having to explain yourself of having to feel this way of being changed by being observed
Famine, Pandemic, Poverty
Reprised in the whirlpool of history
Catastrophe after catastrophe
Pain after pain
Yet the fists are still clenched
Then we are truly free.
I can hear the bitter laugh coming from above
The chirpy crickets and flying birds outside in the dark
Remind me of how feeble the beings inside are
The laugh will linger
Until we see through the place of misery in nature
Until we capture the patterns of time
The road keeps on stretching
Rising and sinking with changing trees alongside
And the only power we have is to proceed
The green sign shows up sporadically
But we know it never fails us
Unlocking thoughts caged by fear, regret, and questioning
I know that suffering and relief will take turns to accompany
No matter who started or ended the former
I dream about the day I become a dot in the history textbook
That page ends in uncertainty, unfinished and unresolved
But I know the next chapter is one of solace
Because we ride on that zigzag road, and always will.
I dare not to lose in front of people
But I dare to lose in front of nature
To Retain Is To Let Go
Prose by Yuki Zhang ’22
Photo by Kenny Zhang ’22
Multimedia by Yujin Lin ’05
Interview with Yujin Lin ’05 regarding her exhibition “Under The Rainbow”
We expect and urge the administration to respond to this proposal with a specific list of action steps that are all clearly chosen with the purpose of implementing the policies mentioned below. In order to do so, we call for the administration to first proactively begin conversations with us, on enacting these reforms in a timely manner, so that action steps are mutually agreed upon, and owned by all stakeholders. After these discussions, the administration should release a public statement detailing all of the changes and policies that they will be making both short and long term.
issue 27 Summer 2020
Writing Director Nicole Morikawa ’21
Design Director Emily Heimer ’21
Club Advisor Brad Faus
Charlie Frankenbach
Editorial Alec Stern ’21 (Senior Writing Editor)
Anne Sappenfield ’21
Isabel Su ’22
Jerry Qiao ’22
Ha Trang Tran ’22
Layout + Visual Lucy Bulley ’21
Annie Xu ’22
Doug Wang ’23
Web Design Kenny Zhang ’22
Marcus Lam ’23
Outreach Olya Sukonrat ’21
Inside Covers Hotchkiss Proposal For Change