Victoria Li

Welcome back to The Ear, The Eye’s podcast dedicated to documenting, detailing, and excavating Columbia’s history!

My fingers run along the rice paper pages as my eyes trace the inked lines for three characters: Yan Ji Ci.

Dr. Sidney Hankerson sits in a circle with reverends, pastors, social workers, public health professors, clinical doctors, and government officials from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Everyone seated finishes tossing and catching a ball of yarn across the circle to form a web that spans the entire room. They are instructed to loosen their grip on their piece of yarn, causing the interlocked threads to slacken and drop to the floor. This, according to the paper in which Hankerson and his co-authors describe their research project centered around mental health awareness programming in Harlem churches, is what happens when some individuals within a community neglect to uphold their responsibilities: The entire community suffers.

“I look like I have a loud, pink exclamation mark on my face,” I think as I tear my eyes away from the mirror, take off the glasses, and examine them closely. I wonder if, with a thin metal rim connecting two cat-eye lenses, the glasses would make me look like I have a pink unibrow. The lens feel light, yet sturdy, in my hands. They seem to have been designed to be sunglasses, worn to evoke the sense of being in a 1960s swimsuit commercial.