Twenty-four hours before I moved into Yale, an email landed in my inbox with the subject line “Morse Asians!!!!!” I was intrigued, partly due to the sheer abundance of exclamation points, but more so because I knew this wasn’t another mass message sent to the entire school about another Chipotle block party on Old Campus with finance bros. It was meant for me: an Asian living in Morse College.
I remember reading something about PLs earlier in the summer. The Peer Liaison program intends to provide additional mentorship to new minority students through culture-centered events and initiatives to help first-year students adjust to life at Yale. Among Yale’s cultural communities is the Asian American Cultural Center (AACC), to which my PL—the mastermind behind “Morse Asians!!!!”—belongs.
I paid my first visit to the AACC during Bulldog Days. I remember staring up at the center’s mural, on 305 Crown Street, decorated with murals of activists and ginkgo leaves bathing under the April sunlight. I remember walking into the kitchen’s scent of kimchi fried rice, trying to rub away the sticky residue of brown sugar boba off my fingers as Jay Chou blasted in the background. The space was packed, and I wondered if it was as well-attended on a regular day in college. The house wasn’t home, but it was the closest replica I could find.
But I had my reservations. At the time, Yale’s cultural centers sounded like a more established version of something familiar to me: student-led affinity groups. I grew up attending predominantly white institutions in liberal Massachusetts towns where I watched the DEI work started by teachers of color get shut down by parents and administrations—with the occasional threat of a lawsuit. A few years later, the same admins posted the DEI program at the center of their website homepage in celebration of the multiculturalism at their still-seventy-percent-white-school. The affinity spaces themselves also reckoned with DEI’s paradoxical performance of inclusivity: after all, how do kids who never had a cultural community attempt to build one from the ground up? Many student leaders of these spaces knew how to facilitate collective vents about the hardships of being a minority in a PWI. We never realized, however, that complaints do not build community: solidarity does.
Can we find community and solidarity within Yale’s cultural houses? Following the email, I went to the AACC with the hope of something better than what I had in high school. I met up with my PL and picked up some free boba and chopsticks souvenirs. I chatted among the Morse Asians and heard about the many retreats and free Chinese takeout being offered to us. Every room was packed with first-years shuffling in and out, trying to pull up another chair to join the circle. It felt, to put it simply, like an organized playdate for the Morse Asians. The matter of identity felt implicit: however divergent our life experiences or beliefs are, the undercurrent of a shared background ties us together. I haven’t seen most of those people for a while—I hope they didn’t shuffle off to the Chipotle block parties.
Many of the cultural houses didn’t come to find a home at this school without a fight. The AACC worked out from a one-room office in Durfee serving 250 students for years. They made congressional records through petitioning against the McCarran Act in the 1970s—the ability for governments to place people in concentration camps for national security purposes. The Afro-American Cultural Center was founded as a response to mass civil unrest at Yale in the 1960s. They were a pivotal part of New Haven’s May Day Rally in 1970 and hosted members of the Black Panther Party during the murder trial of Bobby Seale. The list goes on. The presence of cultural centers, in this sense, is history in and of itself. We have a responsibility not to render these past efforts an afterthought. To realize our own role in this history. Or, at the very least, attempt to make a new friend over free boba.