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Number of articles: 19
First Article: April 21, 2017
Latest Article: May 3, 2019
Surya Milner
Last June, we stuffed all of our books and beauty products into Phoebe’s old Volvo and hit the road. From Houston we blasted through Memphis, Nashville, D.C. and then New York, the city, eventually landing in Brunswick.
We talk a lot about hometowns, both in our casual conversations and within the pages of the Orient. Given that this is a column on our home state of Texas, we felt it’d only be fitting to pay our respects to our home cities in the Lone Star State—places that, by virtue of their complexity and size, dazzle and confound us, often at the same time.
We talk a lot about hometowns, both in our casual conversations and within the pages of the Orient. Given that this is a column on our home state of Texas, we felt it’d only be fitting to pay our respects to our home cities in the Lone Star State—places that, by virtue of their complexity and size, dazzle and confound us, often at the same time.
The bear wasn’t supposed to be there. It was just a black one, a mother whose deep eyes held ours for too long—so long that we continued to lock eyes, paralyzed, our weary knees locked by both reverence and fright.
On Tuesday evenings, the pink-lit walls of the basement that houses WBOR hold chatter that will never run on air: hypotheses on Marx, utopian visions of a socialist society and opinions on where Kamala Harris falls on the political spectrum.
We were squatting on the edge of the waterfront, warm brown waves lapping at our sand-speckled limbs. Oil rigs winked in the distance, the roar of a Confederate flag-adorned pickup truck occasionally punctuating the lazy ocean breeze.
The Orient’s midyear approval ratings showed that the senior class is overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the Career Planning Center (CPC)—but further investigation has shown that approval varies widely by industry, with students looking to enter consulting and technology generally expressing positive sentiments while students in arts and communications are the least happy.
We’re from Texas. Houston and Austin, respectively. At first, this didn’t seem to matter much. We both come from transplant families, families who found Texas by accident—or kismet—depending on which way you look at it. The more we talked, the more we fell back on this shared upbringing in order to make sense of who we are: two ethnically ambiguous, romantically adrift young women in Donald Trump’s America.
Oysters need time, movement and a little TLC, says Jordi St. John. Otherwise, their speckled shells clench up, congeal, lose the space they need to make a home. Carrying a brush and a sure grin, he runs fine bristles along the plastic bags where shellfish grow, brushing specks of algae that fall into the waves surrounding Merritt Island.
When Shankar Mahadevan hits the chorus of the iconic Bollywood ballad “Desi Girl,” impassioned drums and raucous claps fade into the titular line that’s captivated South Asian families and popular media for the past decade: “Dekhi Lakh Lakh Pardesi Girl / Ain’t Nobody Like My Desi Girl / Sab Toh Soni N Saadi Desi Girl.” Translation: We’ve seen millions of foreign girls, but ain’t nobody like my Desi girl / The most beautiful and down-to-earth girl is an Indian girl.
The 3,000-year-old stone slabs sit in silence, mostly. Weighing in at almost 2,000 pounds each, it took a lot to get them here—a boat ride down the Tigris to Basra, a skip over to Bombay, then, via ship, onward to Brunswick, Maine.
It was midsummer and Franklin Taylor ’19 was at a crossroads. Back home in Oak Park, an urban suburb of Chicago, Ill., he stared at the blinking cursor on his computer screen. It hovered over his email inbox, pointing to the question that had been needling him all summer long: would he don jersey number 86 in the fall?
When Octavio Castro ’19 was accepted to Bowdoin, the words on his letter of admission boasted of the College’s enthusiastic community, one bound together by intellectual growth, friendship and new horizons. So he flew from Miami, landed in Brunswick, met with his academic advisor and began class.
Ishani Agarwal ’20 says she came to Bowdoin “blind.” An international student from Mumbai, India, Ishani gleaned everything she knew about Bowdoin from pamphlets and the internet. Once transplanted to campus and settled in small-town Maine, Agarwal wondered about a lot of things.
Award-winning comic Jenny Yang was an organizer for over 85,000 labor union members when she decided to try her hand at professional joke-making. The Los Angeles-based comedian had made a career out of political activism when she took a risk and devoted herself to what she had always been good at: making people laugh.
Brooklyn-based lawyer Carrie Goldberg knew nothing about revenge porn—until she became the victim of it. The pawn of an ex-boyfriend’s online and offline sexual extortion, Goldberg says she started her own law firm to become the lawyer she needed when she was under attack.
Irfan Alam ’18 isn’t sure how to pronounce his first name. The confusion stems from the varied intonations of his friends at Bowdoin (air-fawn), his family (air-fawn) and his friends from his largely white private high school in Austin, Texas (urr-fawn).
Inside a well-lit warehouse somewhere between Portland’s East and West ends, five friends create. They make gestures on canvas, develop film, produce sound and cut video content. Sometimes they lie on the couch and scroll through Instagram, at others they gather around to critique one another’s art, like they did in college.
Raised in an immigrant household in North Carolina, George “G” Yamazawa was 17 years old when he decided to become a slam poet. Identifying as both Japanese and American, he often felt simultaneously at home and out of place.
