In the highly anticipated finale of The White Lotus, Mike White makes a powerful argument about belief systems, or the lack thereof. As he wraps up each storyline, he exposes the underbelly of his protagonists’ true values. Piper, a “sheltered” North Carolina native,  abandons her aspirations of spiritual enlightenment and a year at a Buddhist monastery for the affluence and comfort she has always known. Belinda escapes with her newfound fortune, leaving Pornchai and any dreams of co-opening a spa behind in Thailand. Gaitok listens to Mook’s advice and compromises his morals in order to be promoted as Sritala’s personal bodyguard. 

In a world of characters crippled by material obsessions and weak principles, Chelsea is an anomaly. Sometimes as a mockery, the 7 episodes prior to the finale displayed her obsessions with “twin flames” and fickle astrological predictions. Still, her firm belief in fate, soulmates, and Rick make her stand out among the morally questionable cast of characters. Surrounded by corruption, Chelsea is pure of heart. 

With her buck-toothed smile, confidence, and unwavering positivity, she is a unanimous fan favorite. And, ultimately, she is the season’s martyr. Her death comes as a heartbreaking punchline to the final episode. So it only feels only fitting for her to die in the arms of her lover, by whose side she has stood so faithfully. 

Over the last 48 hours, I’ve seen edit after edit of Chelsea running across the beach and leaping into Rick’s arm, clips romanticizing their tragic yin and yang ending set to lyrics like I have a feeling you got everything you wanted. But I’ve begun to question Chelsea’s belief system and this relationship that we’ve begun to celebrate posthumously. 

How did Rick actually treat her throughout the season? He walks away in the middle of meals at the slightest annoyance. He releases a poisonous snake that bites her and sends her to the hospital. He abandons her in the middle of their vacation with a death wish to fulfill. Yet Chelsea’s adoration for him and her faith in their fated love remain steadfast. To her, they are life partners, intertwined on a spiritual level. 

Is unwavering dedication to a troubled, balding, middle-aged boyfriend who seems to have nothing but contempt for her really the strong belief system that we as viewers are supposed to admire? 

Some may argue that Chelsea does more than provide emotional support to Rick. When she is left alone at the White Lotus, she forms a relationship with a similarly adrift Saxon. By the end of his vacation, he seems to be on a path to spiritual renewal. All thanks to Chelsea: his transformation becomes her legacy. Ultimately, her great purpose in life has been attempting to enlighten self-obsessed, self-pitying men. Although the show depicts her as its most likable character, both for her loyalty and her genuineness, Chelsea is in the end defined by her devotion and generosity toward selfish men who don’t seem to truly value her until she becomes unattainable––in life for Saxon and in death for Rick.

The post Bad things happen in threes appeared first on Yale Daily News.

You hosted your 19th birthday in a friend’s dorm on the fourth floor of Lawrence Hall. The cake was too sweet, the candles melted into the icing and the room was too full but just full enough. You looked around — faces warm with laughter, crammed into the common room, leaning against door frames, lying on Twin XL beds, dancing between silver streamers and taped-up string lights and newspaper stars — and you thought, maybe this is it. Maybe this is what joy feels like: slightly sweaty and barefoot in a dorm room with people you met six months ago who somehow already knew the shape of your laugh.

You’d wander Old Campus at night, tipsy on cheap wine and giggles, wandering paths that led both everywhere and nowhere. You met people in the shadows of Durfee, people you hadn’t seen since Camp Yale, and you hugged like long-lost siblings. Club initiations happened here, too, in the early days of fall: paper bags over heads, paper crowns, paper-thin bravado. High heels sinking into damp grass. Someone’s hand steadying yours as you laugh too hard to even stand straight, gripping arms in a line of absurd solidarity, drops of liquor dripping down your chin. You re-enacted battle scenes from Endgame and clambered up the statue of Abraham Pierson: dramatic, ridiculous, victorious. You swapped stories outside L-Dub, swapped secrets in the glow of street lamps, swapped numbers you might never text but needed to have anyway. You watched societies gather, secret rituals unfolding like theater on the first Thursday of the year.

You walked those paths drunk, happy, exhausted, glitter still on your cheeks from God-knows-what. You walked them sober, silent, phone pressed to your ear, calling home for the first time from the bench outside Bingham, your mom’s voice crackling with static and comfort.

You drank hot cider at Fall Fest as the air turned sharp and golden, and when spring came, you would end the year the way it began: on Old Campus, drunk at Spring Fling, screaming lyrics into the night. Here, in the mud and snow, you ran through the rain until your jeans were soaked up to the knees. You let yourself lie on picnic blankets as the last of summer waned. Let champagne wash over you in bursts of celebration. 

You stumbled out of GHeav with mozzarella sticks and dreams, wandered home from the YDN building, frozen fingers clutching a camera. You cried in front of Linsly-Chittenden Hall — once because you failed a quiz, twice because you thought the world hated you as the cold pricked your skin and the wind slapped your cheeks raw. You once slipped on ice just outside of the High Street gates and bled a little. Red streaks on white snow. The scar is still there, faint on the back of your hand, a quiet reminder that even here, you fell and got back up.

You took photos of orange leaves drifting down and thought, “God, even the trees at Yale perform.” You handed out hot chocolate during the first-year snowball fight, camera slung across your chest, cup after cup passed to people you barely knew but already loved. You danced barefoot in Vanderbilt until 2 a.m., met a boy on skis once at 3 a.m., and never thought to ask why. There were pre-games in L-Dub and post-games in Welch, and debates whispered furiously underneath blankets and between mouthfuls of popcorn and pretzels. You even watched Ben Shapiro on someone’s laptop in Durfee and whispered commentary to the person next to you, both of you too tired to care, too intrigued to look away.

You stood in the middle of Old Campus once, confessed your dreams like the prayers nobody taught you how to say. You saw your friends in Farnam drape Christmas lights out their windows, spelling out JE LUX in neon green. You watched the sunset from the third floor of Phelps Hall, the sky turning to fire behind Harkness Tower, and thought — how can anything this beautiful ever last?

You even memorized the time it took to walk from the fifth floor of Bingham to the second floor of L-Dub — four minutes, if you managed to cross Old Campus uninterrupted. You learned to send your friend the “I’m here” text one minute before arriving so you wouldn’t have to linger at their entryway, waiting in the cold. These tiny rituals — they made a home out of something so temporary.

And living in Bingham tower was like being Rapunzel, high above the chatter — in a room so small you could touch both walls with your arms outstretched, fingertips brushing chips of paint. But you filled it anyway and made it yours — newspaper clippings, posters, someone’s law school degree, and a handkerchief from a regatta tucked behind the mirror, smelling faintly of salt and sun.

And when the courtyard below emptied into silence, you slipped out of Old Campus like a secret, past midnight, with the lamps flickering and the gates yawning open. You walked fast and quiet through the streets. Your breath rose in soft clouds in the cold air, your coat clutched close, heart pounding — not out of fear, but out of possibility. 

Every inch of Old Campus has held you. It has held your hangovers and your heartbreaks with cupped hands, your half-written essays and your full-hearted friendships. It has carried your voice, echoing laughter and late-night confessions caught between the bricks, the moss and the stones. It holds every version of you: drunk and delirious, lost and found, laughing and crying and standing still in the middle of it all, feeling the chill seep into your bones.

And now, you walk those same paths again, the ones that go everywhere and nowhere, and think — maybe this is still it. Maybe this always was it. This is the closest your class will ever live together again. Will ever be together again — at least until you return for commencement. 

Before everyone scatters to their own residential colleges, and after that, to lives that stretch further and further apart. But for now, for this brief moment in time, you are here. Together. And that is enough.

The post An Ode to Old Campus appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“Everyone is adopted,” I announced to my kindergarten class on the first day of school. To 5-year-old me, this was as normal as sharing your birthday or favorite color. 

After school, I spotted Prudence with her little brother, Miles. Their identical shade of brown curls and slightly tanned skin caught my eye. “The agency did a great job matching you two,” I observed. When Prudence’s mother frowned, I explained that all families were created through careful selection. My parents, brother and sister sent their photos to China, and the adoption agency found me — their perfect match.

The other children’s confusion soon escalated into what my teacher later coined “existential crises.” Confused by their reaction, I face my own crisis.

II.

My parents had always told me my adoption story. When we were stuck in Michigan traffic on the way to school, I’d beg my dad to tell it again. From my booster seat in the back, I’d kick my legs against the leather and clap my hands, giggling in anticipation. My mom, who grew up in Taiwan, would chime in with her favorite details — how she spoke Chinese on the phone with the adoption agency. She translated everything for my American dad, who, even after 10 years, could only ask where the bathroom was.

“Tell me the part about the twins again,” I’d prompt.

My dad would explain how the agency initially matched them with twin girls, but they declined, hoping for just one baby daughter. Then came the waiting. Months of silence. My parents wondered if they’d ever hear back at all.

After a long camping trip through Arizona and Utah’s Red Rock, my parents came home to a blinking light on the answering machine. The voicemail played in rapid Chinese. My mom pressed her ear against the phone, translating in real time, until her voice caught and her eyes widened. 

“We have a match!” she exclaimed. “A baby girl!”

Soon after, they flew to Nanchang, China, where I had been left on the orphanage steps at around four to six months old. The orphanage staff told my parents that I had cried so inconsolably that they placed me with a foster family, where my first word was “Gege”, older brother in Mandarin.

The moment my parents entered the room to meet me, my mom rushed forward with outstretched arms, making silly cooing noises. In response, I screamed. Not just a momentary cry. But hours of relentless wailing, so intense that my exhausted parents eventually hid in the tiny hotel bathroom, exchanging bewildered glances as they waited for my tiny lungs to give out.

Once I finally quieted, my mom tried to give me a bath. I thrashed so violently in the hotel tub that she gave up and resorted to the sink instead. At dinner, my dad offered me Cheerios, which I threw on the ground. Later, I picked them up off the floor, one by one, and fed them back to him, eyeing his unfamiliar face with the caution of stranger danger. 

My parents brought me home to Michigan, to my brother and sister. That’s when my dad would always say, “The end!” And I’d shout, “Again! Again!” — already giggling before he could start over.

III.

As I grew older, cracks began to form in the fairy tale. Back in kindergarten, other children started asking questions I had never considered: “Why’d they give you away?” “Why didn’t your real parents want you?” 

Their words confused me, but more than that, they left a sting I couldn’t explain. I felt exposed, like there was something wrong with me. Not because of anything I’d done, but simply because I existed in a way that felt off. I couldn’t name it or point to what exactly set me apart, just that the feeling made me want to curl into a ball in some dark corner until I disappeared.

One afternoon in second grade art class, my friends and I were shaping lumps of clay into animals. Kayla, remembering I’d once said I was adopted, looked up and asked, “So… who are your real parents?” A tightness rose in my throat, dry and aching. My clay turtle smushed between my fingers. “Oh my God, no,” I choked out. “I was joking about that.”

IV.

The only time my birth mother was ever mentioned was on my birthday. My mom would remind me that it wasn’t my real birthdate. It had been assigned by the orphanage. “But you’re very lucky,” she’d say. “Just like your birthdate. Eight is a lucky number in Chinese tradition.”

Around my seventh birthday, we were standing outside under the night sky when my mom pointed to the moon and remarked, “You know, your birth mom is looking at the same moon right now, thinking of you.”

I scowled, forcing out a laugh. “She probably doesn’t even remember me.” 

My mother paused, her eyes lingering on the moon. “A mother never forgets her child.”

“But I’m your daughter,” I snapped, frustrated by the idea that this unknown woman could somehow still be a part of me.

“Yes,” she replied gently, “but when someone gives birth, there’s always a connection. We all share the same moon.”

V.

Being visibly Chinese in my predominantly white elementary and middle schools only deepened my sense of otherness. My mom and I looked alike by default, only because she was the only other Asian person around. Beyond that, I saw no one who looked like me — not at school, not at church, not anywhere in our little Michigan suburb.

In third grade, classmates asked if I ate dogs, laughing as if it were the funniest thing. Then came the sing-song names, “Ching Chong Chang,” mimicking what they assumed a Chinese name should sound like. I laughed awkwardly, confused, unsure how to respond. My last name was Ukrainian, inherited from my white, European-American father.

Looking in the mirror became complicated. Staring at my black hair falling just past my shoulders and the dark eyes that turned into little crescent moons when I laughed, I didn’t see someone Chinese or white. I saw someone who didn’t belong. On standardized tests and school forms that asked for race, I never knew what to check. Sometimes I marked “Asian,” sometimes “White,” sometimes both. Most often, I circled “Other.”

At home, my parents often reminded me how lucky I was. If I didn’t finish dinner, my mom would say, “Children in China are starving.” If I misbehaved, she’d sigh, “We’ve given you so much. Imagine your life in China — being in an orphanage.”

My parents told me I came from an impoverished village, hoping I’d feel connected to my roots. But instead, I felt guilt and shame. When they offered to take me back to my birth city, I recoiled, “I don’t want to see poor and dirty people.” 

After my eighth birthday, I never spoke about my adoption again.

VI.

When I transferred to my new high school, I looked like everyone else for the first time. Yet, I felt more out of place than ever. The school had a larger Asian population, and on the surface, I blended in. In my advanced classes, teachers automatically grouped me with other Asian students, assuming I fit the same “traditional Chinese girl” mold: quiet, bookish, another one-dimensional overachiever. 

My ninth-grade honors English teacher was known for grading Asian students harder, pushing us under the guise of “expecting more.” Looking back, he was just plain racist. 

One day, after receiving a disappointing grade on a paper I worked hours on, I asked him how he came to that decision. My teacher barely glanced up from his computer. “You guys have parents who push you. I’m just trying to push you too.”

“Excuse me, my parents don’t push me,” I sputtered, barely hearing whatever bullshit justification he tossed back. “I’m not Chinese like that…” My cheeks burned. My mind scrambled, searching for something — anything — to make him see me differently. “I’m adopted,” I blurted.

For the first time in almost a decade, I publicly claimed my adoption. And, for the first time, people wanted to learn more about me. They leaned in, listened intently, asked questions. Being Chinese had never seemed cool or interesting to anyone, but being adopted? That gave me unexpected social currency and a way to escape the stereotypes that eclipsed my individuality. 

Classmates approached with the same hushed voice, eyebrows slightly furrowed: “Sorry if this is too personal, but… do you ever want to find your birth parents?” “Who do you consider your real parents?” “I’m not sure how to ask this one… do you know why your birth mom gave you away?” I developed a repertoire of smooth, practiced answers: “Finding my birth parents would be unrealistic, impossible. Basically a needle in a haystack.” “My real parents are the ones who raised me.” “I was probably given up because of the one-child policy. Adoption was very common back then.”

The questions never changed. Neither did my answers. At some point, they stopped feeling like pieces of me and started feeling like lines — the kind you repeat so often you forget they ever had meaning. 

VII.

Then came college. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the high-achieving, composed version of myself I’d always been. I struggled with chronic health issues, difficult relationships, excruciating pain. Eventually, I took time off from school. For a long time, it felt like no matter what I did, I couldn’t fix anything — not my life, not my body, not even myself.

This pain cracked open parts of me I had long kept sealed. Through a depth of suffering I never imagined I could endure, something unexpected emerged, a deeper capacity to feel. Grief, despair, tenderness. Empathy, not just for others, but for myself. And slowly, without meaning to, I began thinking about my birth mother. 

I imagined my birth mother holding her baby for six months before laying her on the orphanage steps. I pictured the moment she let go. Her arms reaching for her daughter one last time, then falling limp at her sides. How did her heart feel? Did she call out my name? I wonder what she called me. For years, I buried these questions before they could fully form. Believing she didn’t care felt safer. It was easier to hate her than to open myself to the possibility that she might have loved me.

Letting her in felt like betrayal. My adoptive parents had done everything for me. They chose me, raised me, stayed. Acknowledging the woman who gave birth to me felt like rejecting all of their efforts. Wanting more felt ungrateful.

Love was who showed up. Storytime during car rides to school. Cooked dinners every evening. Arms wrapped around me when I cried. But grief taught me love isn’t only about presence. It’s about absence too.

In allowing myself to feel her pain, I began to recognize my own. Grief softened into a love shaped by empathy. A love that saw another’s suffering and ached alongside it. A love that hurt. 

When I looked in the mirror, I saw long, straight black hair framing crescent moon-shaped eyes, a small nose, a mouth that twisted slightly whenever I was thinking. I wondered what it would feel like to see my face in someone else’s. The closest I would ever come to seeing my birth mother was through my own reflection.

VIII.

As I try to write these words, my tears come in uncontrollable streams. How do you mourn something that happened before you could understand it? How do you miss someone you’ve never met?

I used to think sadness needed a reason. But some losses live in the body, even when the mind can’t trace their exact origin. The sadness I feel around adoption is not about something that happened. It’s about someone that never was. I was too young to remember my birth mother, too small to know her consciously. But a child doesn’t forget her mother. There’s a little girl in me who’s been heartbroken for as long as I can remember. In loving my birth mother, I’m letting that little girl mourn. Letting her speak. Letting her heal. And I’m learning to love her too.

On nights when sadness comes, I think about the moon my mom once pointed to on my birthday. Though my birth mother and I have never met and likely never will, we share more than blood and distant memories. We share this moon. Perhaps we share this ache — an invisible thread connecting us across oceans and lifetimes.

The post The Moon We Share appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Driving over the causeway’s crest, the Gulf of Mexico reveals itself. You can see the Galvestonian economy at work: commercial and local fishermen motor out of the marinas; tankers weighed down with oil and cargo, drained from international voyages, gather in throngs and wait at anchor to unload cargo; Carnival cruise ships bring Texans back home. If you listen closely, you can hear the shrimpers going out to sea: they pray for bountiful catches that will see them through the off season. 

From the causeway, the drive to the oceanfront is short. The buildings on the island are battered. Most of their exteriors are scarred and weathered, like the callouses on a shrimper’s hands. After getting through the stop lights, you reach the ocean, where the Texan sky collapses into the Gulf of Mexico.  

Galveston Island looks like the arm of Man of War jellyfish that frequently wash up on the beaches. Over two millennia, the constant churn of the ocean deposited sand in one spot, creating the barrier island. It’s seventeen miles long, and in some places three miles wide —  populated with around fifty-thousand people. Transients come down with their kids for a cheap vacation, filling campgrounds and shabby hotels. Galveston is a haven for Texans of every class and creed. 

The population is composed of whites, African Americans, Hispanics and the descendants of many Vietnamese immigrants who came in the aftermath of the war to work in the American fishing industry. All are represented in the shrimping business. The shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico supply 9 million pounds of shrimp to the United States yearly, and the Galvestonian shrimpers represent nearly half this catch. The fleet, once numbering over a thousand vessels, has shrunk below 100 and struggles to meet market demand in the face of government regulations. 

Many of the residents live behind a wall of concrete called the seawall: a coastal Alamo, fortifying the shore. However, it isn’t a wall dividing people from the ocean, but rather a platform on which the city is built to allow for peaceful coexistence with the strong-willed sea. For 122 years, the 17-foot-tall, three-mile-long wall has stood guard for the Galvestonians and transients alike. The top of the wall curves back towards the sea to keep the waves from overstepping their bounds. The beach sits at the base of the wall, where beachgoers can use stairs spaced to access the ocean. On top, a sidewalk runs parallel to the sea, with the main road nestled next to the sidewalk. On the other side of the road, opposite the ocean, businesses sit elevated out of the water’s reach, marked with stains of salty air. Many sport plywood bandages, which barricade windows and roofs broken in the last hurricane. 

Each day, Galvestonians and visitors line the seawall. Crime and pleasure exist in pockets up and down the beach. Plumes of marijuana smoke curl up from the lips of a group of men in front of the Waffle House. Children giggle as they fly kites. A man rolls a bike from the public rack that he did not come with. A woman sanctifies herself among the seagulls as she throws them pieces of bread. A green flag, signifying a safe surf, waves the beachgoers into the water.

Among them are hundreds of ghosts of bodies burned on the beaches here. The effects of the hurricane of 1900, the Galveston Flood, sit in the bones of this town. The seawall reverberates with the echo of the wails of drowning bodies being washed out to sea. In the aftermath, survivors gathered remains of loved ones who hadn’t been taken onto funeral pyres, all trash and sargasso weed, and burned the corpses because the cemeteries had been washed away. Galveston hasn’t changed much since then. Its victims haunt the seawall, souls turned phantoms, living as they were before the disaster came.

Buildings on the seawall are marked with a red line showing how high the water breached in 1900. Extreme weather has long ravaged the city, looming over the town like a guillotine waiting to fall. Texans hold their breaths during hurricane season — June to November — praying saltwater won’t claim their livelihoods. If you ask the old women of the island, they’ll tell you to look in the windows of the once-illustrious Hotel Galvez in the light of the moon. You’ll see the ghost of Sister Katharine, a nun washed out to sea on the night of the storm. The story says she died with a group of orphans huddled around her, tied together with a clothesline in a vain attempt to survive. 

More than a century after the hurricane, the night offers a peaceful version of Galveston, the dark providing cover from the glaring sun. Ghost Crabs scuttle across the sand, the moonlight turning them white as they arrive back at holes dug before the tide came in. A parent teaches a child to pick crabs up by the carapace to avoid being pinched, as the child’s finger bleeds from the pince of a claw. An old couple admires a Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle laying its eggs.  

After dark is when the fishing pier comes alive: mosquitoes swarm the lights that reveal the brownish-green hues of the water below. Vietnamese mothers pass homemade bánh mì to their children, while their fathers fish for flounder. The surf fisherman cut up squid as an offering to the elusive sharks that police the end of the pier. 

Bait, hook, reel it in. For a fleeting moment, the unspoken language of the 61st Street fishing pier acts as a lingua franca for Texans, uniting the rednecks, the rich Austinites, the immigrants, the pro fishermen and their children. One can always find people pridefully pulling in all the local catches. Those who fish to eat gently remove their prizes from the hooks to avoid mutilating their dinner. Those who fish for fun rip hooks straight out of creatures’ mouths, while scales fall like glitter back into the sea. 

As people leave, they renounce the language of the pier; a community is divided again. Some put on their Sunday best to dine at Gaido’s, where they will have lobster bisque and bountiful plates of seafood. Others return to homes and tents to fillet their catch and say grace over what they feel their God so graciously provided them. 

Early in the mornings, still under moonlight, the shrimp boats pour into the gulf, their hulls marked with names of shrimpers who survived hurricanes, oil spills, and the decline of the industry. The Rusted Pearl, Shrimp Kiss, Miss Lola. They purge the gulf of its shrimp to afford food for their families. They turn the bay into a sacrificial altar, performing the daily ritual of gather and slaughter. One must wonder if the shrimpers will rise before the sun to fill their nets until the gulf is empty of its shrimp and the town collapses into the sea. Gulf of Mexico, spare the seawall. Forever allow the ghosts, immigrants, shrimpers, rednecks and the haughty alike to find refuge on your shore.

The post Gulf of Mexico, Spare the Seawall appeared first on Yale Daily News.

• Denial: Think you have a clue 

You probably came to Yale with one of two plans: you thought you knew exactly what to major in or you were ready to brave the liberal arts exploration, expecting to find your passions here. I arrived firmly believing that I’d be an English and Theatre double major, and it seemed entirely straightforward. So I took Directed Studies, basked in my humanities-only schedule, and put no real thought towards my academic trajectory. I skimmed over the list of other majors, I collected pamphlets at the academics fair that ended up in my recycling bin. The logistics and requirements of a major slipped from my mind. After all, why should I even think about my major, I’m just a first year! Inevitably, you tell yourself you’re on track and think you have all the time in the world.

• Anger: Realize you, in fact, have no f**king clue what you’re doing

On Monday, March 24, I get an email:

“Yale Course Search is Open for Fall 2025.” 

I think, “How delightful, I can peruse next year’s selection of interesting and fun courses!” 

How ignorant I was. 

Yale course search quickly descends from a leisurely browse to an academic spiral. You’ll find a course that looks fascinating, but you haven’t taken its prereq — ok just take that course instead — no wait, that prereq has its own prereq. Don’t forget about fulfilling your distributional requirements! You’ll look for a gut in one of the skills you’re missing but for some reason they all have 2.0 ratings, are capped at 12 students, and are at 9:00 a.m… on Fridays… on Science Hill. Nevermind that, what about getting your major requirements out of the way — but are you sure you actually know what to major in? 

This stage is all about the crashout. Sorting out your classes will start to feel monumental, and somewhere in that chaos the deeper anxiety will set in: picking a major feels both impossible and imperative. It reaches a peak when the What Ifs hit: What if I end up hating my major? What if it’s unemployable? What if I’d be happier, more successful doing something, anything else? Everything is falling apart. 

• Bargaining: Try to make things work

In response, you’ll start to get crafty. This is when you’ll have twenty tabs open: all the roadmaps for majors you’re interested in, a plethora of courstable ratings and Canvas syllabi. You’ll add a million things to your worksheet, maybe even have a Google Sheet to catalog the major and distributional requirements you need to fulfill. You’ll question everything you thought you’d decided on and convince yourself that you’re capable of doing anything. You like animals enough, what about E&EB, no wait, psychology, everyone likes psychology! Or what about a double major, would that make your film degree more marketable? Or should you get a certificate? At one point you’ll decide to make your own Special Divisional Major — but then you look it up and lose all interest. You tell yourself: this isn’t spiraling, this is planning. 

• Depression: Giving up 

Now you take it all in: your Coursetable is an utter mess, your dream classes are impossible to get into, every schedule you’ve made would either academically or emotionally kill you and declaring a major is still looming over you. To make matters worse, when you finally close all of your course selection tabs in defeat, you’re left with all the homework that you put off. Even worse, you’ll remember that finals are in three weeks. That seals the deal, time to give up! How could you put thought into next year’s classes when you haven’t even survived the hardest part of this year’s?

• Acceptance: An epiphany hits

Finally, the panic will settle. Not because you’ve figured anything out, but because you accept that maybe you aren’t supposed to quite yet.

I spent high school following the philosophy of always living in the moment. I had no dream college, or dream job, or grand plan. I worked towards maximizing everything I had going at the present time. I didn’t go to Bulldog Days because it would mean missing some important last few days of high school. I don’t regret it. That way of living brought me joy and landed me here. 

However, I’ve since learned that living purely in the moment isn’t sustainable, especially as you get older — but neither is mapping your entire life out. Both will leave you lost, one floating, the other frozen.

So, here’s my advice: don’t have a four-year plan but do start to ground yourself in reality. 

Talk to upperclassmen you know, reach out to professors, shop classes, take stock of the courses that excite you and that you need to take. Don’t get married to any major after one date, be comfortable to let it change — maybe even several times. Accept that you’ll miss out on things you wish you could study but also will fall deeply in love with the things that you do. 

You don’t have all the time in the world, but you do have a lot more than you might think — 

unless you’re a second-semester junior looking to change majors, reading this piece in an attempt to bring yourself comfort — in which case, I do recommend you maybe start panicking a little more. 

The post Major Problems appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Anna and Tom live in Berlin, having moved there from their backwater, boring unnamed Southern European home. As digital nomads, nothing ties them down — so long as they have internet connection, they can build a life. So they are drawn to Berlin, which is young and lively, full of art and clubs and other young foreigners like themselves, with whom they can speak slightly skewed English and German.

Like many of my friends at Yale, I sometimes dream about living in another country. I wonder what it would be like to uproot my existence and transplant myself into a totally unknown place. I imagine the thrill of discovering that the world is larger and more interesting than the slice of the Northeast I have always called home. The grass is always greener, as the saying goes, and part of me truly believes the grass would be greener across the ocean.

In Latronico’s Berlin, Anna and Tom furnish a simple, sophisticated, humble and comfortable home. With plants and Scandinavian chairs and artistic, colorful magazines dotting the rooms, it sounds, again, like the fantasy life I have described to my friends. This apartment is not clinically clean, though. Uncluttered, yet homey nonetheless, it represents a perfection that somehow seems down-to-earth, because I can imagine myself picking out the herbs that grow on the windowsill in the kitchen and the “reproduction print of a British wartime poster” that hangs on the wall. It has shelves of blue and white enamel dishes, along with “mason jars filled with rice, grains, coffee, spices.” This is an attainable level of perfection.

It’s not perfect, though. Anna and Tom are unmoored: because they aren’t constrained by any community, by any working environment, they find themselves somewhat adrift in Berlin after a couple of years. Nothing keeps them tethered, and they miss that sense of responsibility, of obligation. Undeniably, Latronico has a good point. Without any sort of commitment or intentionality, without a path forward, life feels frustratingly aimless. It’s a rude awakening to read, hearing that the dream life I’ve always envisioned might just be a dream, might not be feasible — if I want to be truly happy. 

Anna and Tom — do they end up happy? After bouncing around to Lisbon, to Italy, in search of a new digital nomadic lifestyle, they are saved, ironically, by the family they’ve left behind. Anna inherits a rambling estate from a deceased uncle, which they decide to turn into a bed and breakfast. They find purpose in running the property, in crafting a curated, delightful image of life for their visitors, so that when guests come to stay, they believe they have found perfection. 

But this conclusion, to me, is tinged with a cynical undertone. Is this meaningful commitment? Or are Anna and Tom simply perpetuating the fantastical delusions that they’ve been caught in for years, now passing them onto others? In a way, it feels like they’re only going in circles, that they will never be free from reaching for an unattainably perfect future.

I reflect on my own expat dreams, which have, at various points, included studio apartments in Paris or evening bike rides along the canals of Copenhagen. But I haven’t chosen those cities for any particular reason, just like Anna and Tom didn’t choose Berlin for any reason. Berlin merely represented an exciting, exotic, new environment, a pool into which they could plunge headfirst and never emerge to the surface.

In reality, they — and I — will always emerge to the surface. The thrill of novel surroundings will diminish, and reality will take over. Then, the question is, do I like what I find at the surface? Anna and Tom did not. They found nothing. So I want to find something — meaning, intentionality — at the surface.

After all, my intentional connections and commitments center my life right now. Watching new movies with friends, attending College Teas in the afternoons, settling down at Book Trader Cafe with a vegan chai and an essay to write — my life is enriched by these things. Instead of being carried away by the unreachable depths of my surroundings, I want to bask in the meaning that I create in my life. And there, perhaps, is perfection.

The post What is perfection? appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Of course, that was a silly thought born from high emotions. But still, I didn’t see them for 6 months, and every time I’ve returned home since, my old friendships have never felt the same. 

At the beginning of freshman summer, my aunt and I visited my mom in Japan. After 2 weeks, they dropped me off at Osaka airport for my first-ever completely solo trip. I would spend the next three months backpacking across the Middle East, Europe and Morocco. Without looking them in the eye, I hugged my mom and aunt goodbye in Osaka, and headed off to a sushi restaurant in the basement of the airport. 

At the end of sophomore year, I visited my then-boyfriend in the U.S. On my last morning, he woke up at 4:00 a.m. to drive me to the airport to fly to China. Our goodbye was quick — just a hug and a kiss, nothing more. I looked back as I handed my passport to the TSA officer, and cried again. His familiar face faded away behind the roped-off line. 

One month later, I said another goodbye. After meeting up with my parents in China, they dropped me off at the Shanghai airport for the beginning of my four-month adventure in Southeast Asia. We talked all the way until I reached the gate. It wasn’t until I landed in Vietnam a few hours later that I received text photos from my mom of my back turned on the jet bridge.

Last August, my host family in Queensland was kind enough to drive me 1 hour to the airport. Charles and Julie had become like my Aussie grandparents, and they hugged me tight as I stood by the curb with 15 pounds on my back. “Come back soon,” they said, “you have a home here.” I turned away and walked towards security without saying a word. 

As much as it sounds like it, I’m not a crybaby. It’s just that ever since I started solo traveling, I created a rule to “never look back” at airports. When some random city unexpectedly becomes “home” — filled with memories, for which I’ve memorized the entire map, and I know which block I’ve lived in — I fear that if I look back, I might just be standing on the curb forever, torn between moving forward and staying behind. 

I guess the moral of this story is that people change, time is real, and life moves on. How silly do I have to be, to keep saying goodbye over and over again? It never gets easier. As humans, it’s only natural to wonder, “What if I stayed? What if I never left?” I like to remind myself that with every goodbye comes a new adventure. I trust the universe enough to believe that no matter where I go, something will come along to make the pain of leaving worth it. 

As my GLBL 275 International Security professor says, we can only ever “theorize about the counterfactual,” because realistically, you already bought the plane ticket, and you can’t experience an alternative universe where you stayed alongside reality.

So… should you look back at airports? I still haven’t figured out the perfect formula to saying goodbye—probably because it doesn’t exist. On one hand, marching forward keeps the goodbye short and painless. Out of sight, out of mind. On the other hand, what if it’s your last time seeing someone? What if you never plan on returning? Then maybe it is worth a final glance, to look back while you still can. 

There’s really only one thing I’ve ever wanted from airports, in this whole business of goodbyes and country-hopping and finding new places to collect lore. I want someone to pick me up at the end. I want to know that there’s someone waiting for me on the other side, holding a sign with my name on it — bonus if they have flowers, extra bonus if the sign is big — face pressed against the glass, waving and smiling as I walk through customs. 

Only one person has known me well enough to do that, and it’s my mom. On the question of goodbyes, all I can say for certain is that I owe a thank you letter to my parents, who pick me up without fail from OMA every year, holding the same, aged, yellow, “Welcome Home, Clarissa” sign painted in 2018 when I first left Nebraska for a summer camp in Baltimore. On the back of the sign, my mom has marked down the dates every time she’s picked me up, and from where I’m flying in. 

And that’s all I can ask for, really. 

The post Do you look back at airports? appeared first on Yale Daily News.

It happens everywhere once you start looking. In living rooms, in bedrooms, in courtrooms and in libraries that only exist on soundstages. Somewhere in the background, somewhere in the script, someone’s always going to Yale.

But for Brian Meacham, the Managing Archivist of the Yale Film Archive, those flashes of recognition weren’t just trivia. They became a project twelve years in the making.

“I’ve been working on it probably for almost as long as I’ve been at Yale, which is 12 years, just trying to find as many references to Yale in film as possible,” Meacham told me.

That obsession recently became “That Whole Yale Thing,” Meacham’s sprawling, loving, occasionally absurd compilation of every conceivable on-screen Yale reference drawn from over 200 films, from indie and Hollywood blockbusters alike, from blink-and-you’ll-miss-it name-drops to entire plots revolving around our hallowed New Haven home.

In one moment, Phil Hartman and Nora Dunn set down their phones, dial clicking; in the next, the footage cuts to Tina Fey picking up hers. Indiana Jones struts through Sterling Memorial Library. Robert Downey Jr. shelves books there. Across a hundred fragmented moments, Yale becomes a story people tell over and over again.

And fittingly, for a project about cinematic ephemera, it began not in a movie theater but online.

“There was once a website that was a searchable database of subtitle files,” Meacham explained. “And so you could do a keyword search for any word you wanted.” Naturally, he searched for Yale. “That’s where a lot of these started popping up,” he recalled. What started as a casual hunt for Easter eggs soon turned into something else entirely: a cinematic obsession, a digital scrapbook, a wildly specific labor of love — stitched together over late nights, odd hours and the rare quiet moments of an archivist’s life.

The film — which Meacham produced independently but connected to his work through the Yale Film Archive  — wasn’t even fully assembled until last month. For years, the clips sat dormant, scattered in folders, waiting. Finally, the long-running project found its moment among the festivities of the University president’s inauguration weekend.

What struck me most, watching the montage of film clips in the lecture hall of Sterling library, was how the image of Yale — its cultural meaning — has shifted subtly over time. In the old black-and-white films, Yale feels almost mythic, wrapped in this air of untouchable prestige and effortless belonging. It’s less a place you get into than a place you simply arrive at — if you’re the right kind of person. 

But in more recent films, that illusion begins to break down. The idea of Yale still carries weight, but it’s tinged now with distance, with improbability, even with exclusion. Movies like “Lady Bird” or “Do Revenge” capture that — Yale becomes not just a symbol of success but of longing, of something barely out of reach. It’s no longer assumed; it’s aspirational. It’s not just a place people go — it’s a dream people chase and often lose.

Meacham noticed this evolution, too. Early black-and-white films, he pointed out, regarded Yale with a certain “reverence” — a place that served as a finishing school for American boyhood where, in his words, “you send boys to turn them into men.” But as cinema crawled into the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Yale’s meaning warped.

“It maybe has become more unattainable or more of a kind of lofty goal as opposed to just sort of the next step in the stages of your life,” Meacham reflected.

In other words: Yale, in the old movies, was inevitable. In the new ones, it’s impossible.

There’s also something strange — even disorienting — about watching Yale exist outside of itself. 

That tension — between inevitability and impossibility — thrums at the heart of “That Whole Yale Thing.” The film revels in absurd contrasts: a scene of a lovestruck high schooler dreaming of attending college on the East Coast, a shot of Matt Damon looking forlorn inside the tomb of Skull & Bones, wide-eyed freshmen in black-and-white musicals singing “Boola Boola” and drunken alumni stumbling through reunions praising the Elis. Yale appears everywhere and nowhere, both a real university and a Hollywood mirage.

On campus, for students, the University is bricks and bodies and dining hall rushes; on screen, it becomes something else entirely: a symbol, an aesthetic, a punchline.

Sometimes, Yale is not just an image but a sound.

“There’s a whole section with the Boola Boolas,” Meacham said. “It’s hard to imagine a world where this was the case, but it certainly was, I think, in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, that those were internationally known songs.” “Boola Boola” and “The Whiffenpoof Song,” he explained, weren’t just campus traditions — they were mainstream pop culture, musical shorthand for college itself, and Yale in particular.

So when Clark Gable casually riffs “Boola Boola” while recounting his days as a silent movie pianist, or when Humphrey Bogart’s character belts it out because he canonically went to Yale, it’s not a coincidence: it’s recognition. In one rather jarring scene, a character in a “Tarzan” film sings about “the Elis” for no discernible plot reason. “I can’t for the life of me figure out why she would be singing that,” Meacham laughed. “But she is. It’s actually ‘Boola Boola’ — I checked.

This commitment to detail extends even to the structure of the film itself. Some clips featured quotes, like “The greatest battlefield is the Yale Bowl” — taken directly from a silent-era title card. The movie it belongs to, “Hold ‘Em Yale,” holds special significance for Meacham. 

“It was the first film ever shot at the Yale Bowl,” he said. “A sort of goofy romantic comedy” about an Argentine kid who comes to play football for Yale — and one of Meacham’s rediscoveries. “I helped bring that back from New Zealand,” he explained. “It was a somewhat lost film — no copies of it existed in America.” The Yale Film Archive now holds a print, which it screened during the Bowl’s 100th anniversary.

In moments like that, Yale becomes more than a backdrop — it becomes the story.

This was, in part, Meacham’s intent: not to create a perfect portrait, but a sprawling mosaic. “I will say, there are a few things I left out that were perhaps a little bit less than flattering,” Meacham admitted with a laugh. “I didn’t want this to… I didn’t, you know… it’s for a celebratory moment.”

Still, he hinted that an uncut, more irreverent version might exist one day — complete with “a little bit more warts and all,” and, crucially, “a little bit more swearing.”

Hollywood’s Yale is also notably a fantasy world governed by its own tropes: future presidents, tortured geniuses, bad-boy legacy kids, tweedy professors and gothic libraries that beckon like cathedrals. Watching Meacham’s compilation feels like peering into a national subconscious; the stories people like to tell about Yale say as much about America as they do about the University itself.

“It wasn’t until last month that I actually started working on putting the film together,” Meacham said. But when he did, patterns started to emerge almost naturally. Characters dream of getting into Yale. They triumph, they fail, they cheat their way in. They sit in its courtyards, linger in entryways and fall in love and sometimes — inevitably — commit crimes in its libraries.

What “That Whole Yale Thing” captures so vividly is Yale’s peculiar position in the cultural imagination: always a little larger-than-life, always caught somewhere between nostalgia and satire, status and absurdity. It’s not Harvard, but it’s always paired with Harvard. “There’s a whole section where it’s just like, Harvard, Yale, Yale, Harvard,” Meacham joked.

Part of the fun is also how wrong it all is. Movie Yale is impossibly glamorous. It looks like it was filmed at Harvard or Oxford half the time. Nobody mentions the Bow Wow lines or the wind slapping your cheeks raw as you walk up Science Hill or the cursed vending machines in Bass Library. And yet, against all reason, it still tugs at something emotional, even vulnerable, in the viewer who has been lucky enough to get to know Yale.

There’s a certain pride in seeing your school live rent-free in society’s consciousness for decades. But there’s also a deeper melancholy, the realization that Yale on screen is not your Yale, but someone else’s dream — or nightmare.

Maybe that’s the strangest part of it all: watching a place you know intimately get turned into a symbol for things far bigger, far messier, and far more universal than your own four-year experience. Yale, according to the movies, isn’t really about Yale at all. It’s about ambition. Nostalgia. Status. Romance. Escape. Everything people want and fear when they think about elite institutions.

Perhaps the most poignant moment in the film comes from the 1946 Cole Porter biopic “Night and Day,” which closes on a monologue about Yale’s timelessness: how the University “has gone unchanged,” how the buildings might grow differently, but “the feeling of Yale” endures. Of course, the character says “men” — the college was all-male at the time — but the sentiment lingers: What does it mean to belong to a place whose image has endured for centuries, even as its reality shifts?

Today’s Yale is more diverse, more complicated and more public-facing than its cinematic mythology. But that mythology still haunts us — in the navy blue merch, in the movie scenes, in the YALE crewneck worn by a villain or a dreamer or a side character in love.

To watch “That Whole Yale Thing” is to feel this double-vision acutely. Yale is the dining hall you eat at every day, the morning alarm set for your 8 a.m. library shift, the lingering conversations on the couch in your common room. And then, of course — in a hundred scattered movie scenes — someone knocks on a bedroom door. Someone walks in, wearing a sweatshirt. YALE.

And for a second, just a second — you feel it too.

The dream. The ache. That whole Yale thing.

The post That whole “Yale thing” appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I want to retake my photo for the yearbook. I look like the grimacing lovechild of Lord Farquaad and Rapunzel.

I want to hand my apartment keys back to my landlord, return the overdue textbooks to the library, and beg for forgiveness. 

In other words, I want to cross the finish line. 

The first significant paper I wrote in high school was about Shakespeare’s “Hamlet:” about the ghosts being Catholic, or something like that. I remember a few lines about purgatory; not being in one place or another, and not necessarily knowing whether the road you’re about to take will lead you somewhere good or somewhere bad.

Yale is not purgatory: the roads after graduation are bright and shiny, not quite made of yellow brick, but certainly something close. However, the last few months of senior year are pure purgatory. In this anxious moment of change, I choose to hold on to the good of Yale. The late nights we love; the brilliant minds whose dining-hall one-liners could land them a job in late-night comedy, if only Lorne Michaels were at the table. I hold in my hands the stacks of blank-paper-turned-study-guides, snagged from the nave printers at Sterling; the security guards at Bass who reassure me at 2:00 a.m. on a Wednesday, and the baristas at Steep who ask if a cookie would help after a bad exam (it would, and did). I will always hold onto the many professors, mentors, and friends who have taught me what it means to work for humanity, with a capital H. The good of Yale is not just the opportunities it grants us; it is the paths it affords  towards a life well-lived, full of light and truth. 

But in the spring-of-senior-year purgatory, we may also consider the bad of Yale. The stressed-out TFs and professors who don’t respond to our emails, then reply only after we’ve submitted work with the wrong header and the incorrect Canvas assignment. The many days with far more hours spent awake than asleep; the bunk beds on Old Campus; the defective hard drives that magically wipe weeks of research into a nebulous ether well beyond the understanding of the Apple Store on Broadway. We reexamine the friend break-ups and the real break-ups, over everything from politics to morals to a disconnect in values, and sometimes all three. 

The purgatory of the end game returns these memories to us. There is no longer a way to package them; they won’t translate into the Slack channels of our new jobs, PhD prospectuses or conversations with thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail. Yale leaves us with the shimmering strands of who we were, are, and will be. It is up to us to weave these strands into something meaningful. 

Yale has done its part. We leave our colleges to fight new battles, and for the university to find itself again. 

Seven years ago, I went to New York City for the first time with my high school orchestra. It was February, the air so bitter and dry it stung my eyes. I went to Ellen’s Stardust Diner and the Top of the Rock. I went to MoMA and lost the rest of the string section, running up and down the escalators, searching for a green hoodie or another bar of cell reception. I played the cello at Carnegie Hall, experiencing the first of many sublime moments in the years to come. 

Seven years later, I notice that the red seats of the Metro North are the same crimson as “Gallows and Lollipops.” My cello is now an expensive coat rack; I have several good friends named Ellen, and I doubt I will go to the Top of the Rock again. But I made it. It is time to move on, to let Yale — a dream birthed on that high school flight into LaGuardia — go. 

Thank you, Yale, for all you have given me. 

The post The finish line appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Lover, do you remember our wavering goodbyes in the corridor? 

그날의 끄덕임을 난 잊을 수 없다오

Lover, I cannot dare forget the slight nods exchanged that day. 

길가에 내린 새벽 그 고요를 기억하오

Lover, do you remember the twilight-laden street, its quiet? 

그날의 다섯시를 난 잊을 수 없다오

Lover, I cannot dare forget that day’s five o’clock

반듯하게 내린 기다란 속눈썹 아래

Beneath those delicately-shaped, long eyelashes of yours 

몹시도 사랑히 적어둔 글씨들에

The letters, scribbled with far too much love 

이따금 불러주던 형편없는 휘파람에

The ever-so-often, clumsy whistling 

그 모든 나의 자리에 나 머물러 있다오

Lover, in all of my dwellings, I still linger

아끼던 연필로 그어놓은 밑줄 아래

Beneath the line drawn by my so-cherished pen 

우리 둘 나란히 적어둔 이름들에

Our two names, scribbled side-by-side 

무심한 걱정으로 묶어주던 신발끈에

The shoelaces that you so casually tied 

그 모든 나의 자리에 나 머물러 있다오

Lover, in all of my dwellings, I still linger

좋아하던 봄 노래와 내리는 눈송이에도

Even in your beloved spring tunes and the fluttering snow-petals 

어디보다 그대 안에 나 머물러 있다오

Lover, more than anywhere, I dwell within you 

나 머물러 있다오 그대 울지 마시오

Lover, I still linger. Lover, please do not cry. 

It is the age of romance. Fingertips brush against each other. Skin touches skin delicately, fleetingly. In the blink of an eye, the two lovers are on opposite ends of the busy town square, both with a love confession in hand.  Secret smiles paint their lips, as their fingers loosely and gingerly encase the slips of paper, so as not to crush it. With each stride, the 쪽지 (slip) flutters inside their loose hands. 

When I watch the black and white, romance flicks from 1940s Hollywood, I wonder if this is the memory of love that my white American friends have inherited throughout time. Perhaps, they locate the love stories of their grandparents or great-grandparents on the screen. For me, it’s not as simple. I can’t find the faces of my grandparents in that of Humphrey Bogart’s “Rick Blaine” or Audrey Hepburn’s “Princess Ann”  — very few people can see their faces in Hepburn’s doe-eyes or prominently-curved nose, but you get my point.

My grandparents never told me about their cinematic love — probably, because the gloomy aftermaths of the Korean War, during which they grew up,  afforded them little romance. I weave together the bits and pieces of my ancestors’ stories in my imagination.

For Indonesian artist Niki, she pursued a similar endeavor when writing her hit-song, “Every Summertime” — one song from the Asian diaspora-spanning soundtrack of “Shang-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” In the song, two lovers stroll down the boulevards and dance under the streetlights of San Francisco. From the Genius page: “Modeled after Shang-Chi’s parents in the film as well as some of Niki’s own experiences, the song tells the story of two Asian teens falling in love in the 80s.”

This essay, and the beginning, italicized excerpt, is my answer to the question: how would my teenaged-grandparents have fallen in love in 1950s Korea? 

This story takes place in the musical landscape of 사랑 편지, or “Love Letter” — a song written and sung by South Korea’s darling singer IU. Accompanying the song is my own Korean-to-English translation of the song. 

I encourage Korean-readers to take note of the sentences that end with “오,” pronounced as “–oh.” From my research — consulting my mother and scenes from sageuks, or Korean period dramas — I gathered that the “오” ending is an in-between form of casual address (반말) and formal speech (존댓말) that was used in older times. 

According to my mother, the participle was usually used by noblemen (양반). Strangely, all of the instances of “-오” I could recall were used between lovers or close friends. Additionally, the “-오”  betrays a sense of mercy begging for mercy. 

As IU sings to an unknown lover, through this antiquated, strangely-nostalgic language, she pleads with her lover to remember her. For all of the sentences with -오, I attached the word, “Lover” — perhaps the “noun” that properly conveys/translates the identity of “bearer of mercy.” After all, aren’t we all in mercy when we love?  

In his scholarly article, “The World in a Love Letter,” Boduerae Kwon outlines the history of “yonae,” the Korean word for romance, and how this modern concept of romantic love was a colonial import. In fact, this “yonae” is at the heart of modern Korean literature’s origin. As modern literature appealed to readers with its sense of intimate and immediate communication, the concept of love letters was born (Kwon 21). In fact, the medium of the love letter soon became synonymous with the quiet, yet fatal intensity of the lovers’ correspondence.                                                                                                                                                                              

“Lovers would sometimes ride the same bus and get off through different doors, as though strangers, and exchange a few words while walking together… The more timid and awkward one’s actual contact with the object of desire, the more fervent became the confession of one’s inner self in letters (Kwon, 29).” 

To my ears, IU’s “Love Letter,” released in 2021, sounds like a letter that has time-travelled from the 1940s. Despite the vanilla actions described in the lyrics — the nonchalantly-tied shoe-laces, slight nods, wavering exchanges — she makes a burning confession: “I dwell within you.” Despite the presumed physical distance between the singer and her lover, the song’s lines destroy any sense of separation: “I still linger” in all of our shared exchanges, moments and places. 

In the warmth of her room, the woman grabs her so-cherished pen and hovers over the paper. Reaching for the diamond-shaped bottle of perfume, she presses lightly and sprays a mist of sweetness over the envelope. Heart stirring, she begins to write: ‘Lover, do you remember….’ 

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