Junella Zhang, Co-Editor in Chief
Photo source: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images, from History.com
JOSEPH STALIN once called writers “the engineers of the human soul.” My dad, a big, middle-aged, occasionally employed Torontonian realtor who grew up in Beijing under the Deng Xiaoping administration, insisted that it was mathematicians, not writers, that Stalin attributed this line to. I chose to specialize in English and write literary fiction; my dad studied mechanical engineering and optical physics. Who knew the explanatory priority of that—whether he obsessed over logical proofs and quantum mechanics because Stalin told him he was engineering human souls, or whether he misappropriated Stalin’s words to justify his own obsession with the maths and sciences. Either way, I suppose it doesn’t matter. He went from sleeping overnight at university laboratories beside DIY superpowered fiber lasers to becoming an occasionally employed, totally unnecessary accessory to the housing market. And I… eh, chances are I’ll end up an unhoused artist (no, the irony isn’t lost on me) or commodify myself and write about big dicks and small vaginas. Maybe I’ll start an OnlyFans account for my hands. People are always telling me how disproportionately long my fingers are to my palms. Thanks, I guess.
In late March this year, a writer from the Gargoyle contacted me about the student newspaper budget at the Trinity Times. She was collecting fiscal data and interviewing various campus editors for an article that ultimately pushed for an increase in the Gargoyle’s levy from University College. I happily divulged the pressures of wispy finances and modest resource allocation, believing that as fellow leaders of undergraduate newspapers, this was solidarity in progress. An upgrade to their levy could perhaps help us secure a levy at all. I spoke on historical budget cuts prior to my tenure, arbitrary recruitment and distribution rules imposed on our staff during my years as associate and senior editor, and the general unease they produced while I was learning the ropes as co-Editor in Chief of the 2024-25 term. Then I markedly stated, multiple times, that I had not personally experienced any resistance from the Trinity student government this year and was very grateful to have received budgetary approvals with zero amendments in both the fall and winter sessions. Nowhere did I receive the impression that the contents of this interview would be relayed to anyone else before publication, besides the writer and her editors.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when a member of the Varsity masthead asked me to comment on a statement the Trinity College Meeting (TCM) made in response to my interview answers. The TCM representative was visibly upset. In private, I asked him whether he could disclose the message the Varsity had sent him, and what he sent me was a screenshot of a grotesque sensationalization of my words. It was a convenient patchwork narrative that spliced and omitted just the right parts. Call me callow and a simpleton, but I was completely disillusioned. The Varsity correspondent proposed a rewrite of our portion, which seemed satisfactory to me but not to the TCM, who at the time appeared intent on muscling out every final morsel of critique levied against them, even if it was directed at their predecessors rather than at themselves. The Varsity proposed another rewrite, even less substantial than the previous. Then another. It took me six hours of panicked correspondence between the two powerhouses—the older, better-funded publication and our immediate patron/sponsor—to finally say, “Fuck it, just pull us out of the article entirely.”
(The profanity is my own take on sensationalizing the situation. I wish I’d sworn, but sadly I’m not only a callow simpleton but also a wimpy, ingratiating sycophant who just wanted to pee and go to bed. And cry, maybe.)
The title of the article, now published on the Varsity’s website, is called, “Is there a story here?” No, the irony is still not lost on me. But all dramatics aside, it’s a pretty fantastic read.
The point here, however, isn’t to assign blame. It’s pretty silly to manufacture phenomena out of mundanity, especially because we’re all students under various amounts of economic, sociopolitical, and academic duress trying our hands at operating large hierarchical structures for the first time in our lives. Sometimes it’s fun to adult, to generate pretense and replace our childhood subliminal, imaginative vocabulary with the superbly academic and bureaucratic one we see legitimized by journals and legal textbooks. Other times we create meaningless layers of scaffolding between the thing and the word, the person and the institution, the problem and the solution. I guess that’s what we call individualism nowadays: in our haste to avoid accountability and temporary inconvenience, or conversely, to scapegoat and oppress, we presume guilt and champion “pragmatism” and “rationality” in a sort of bureaucratic decantation. Whatever you think you think those two words mean. We also get hierarchy, meritocracy, and productivity, but not necessarily in any particular order. They all inform each other simultaneously and permutate to manifest different reactions in different people, between different people. I think? (This is where I would typically recourse to a performative psychedelic meltdown over the idea that all words are monoliths and there is no real way to communicate anything properly in literature without fiction and metaphor… as opposed to admitting that my working vocabulary is just not that great.)
Anyway—I suppose it still doesn’t matter. My former partner-in-crime, Shirley Chen, visited the Legislative Building in June and reported that save for the grunting and nose-picking, our members of parliament were essentially toddlers (by choice!). They pointed fingers and boo’d. They screamed “Liar!” at each other. They planted trained audience members to read scripted questions. They tapped into rehearsed answers that, to paraphrase Shirley, sounded like bad ad breaks. Stunts like this encourage our budding pessimism about the helpfulness of literature/art/education, when it appears that decades of people’s hard-wrought skill and legitimacy will inevitably dissolve within the flecks of frothy spittle ejected from Doug Ford’s showstopping veneers. Ding!✧
This is all very pessimistic. Sorry. I’ve been rewatching Fleabag and haven’t yet gotten to the second season (read: the hot priest). Usually I’m happier then. You might have also picked up on my slight appropriation of Fleabag’s anxious, overexegetic dialogue style, sort of like the way we accidentally start speaking Brummie after marathoning six seasons of Peaky Blinders. That’s more hopeful, the way personal revolution can take place in the subconscious, away from the stubbornness of “rationality” and bigotry. I like that we are as easily salvageable as we are corruptible, given the right exposure. In literature, this is called “experience-taking.” Dad, if by some miracle you’re reading this, here’s a scientific study containing empirical evidence of its efficacy in case you find my anecdotes insufficient: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221981325_Changing_Beliefs_and_Behavior_Through_Experience-Taking.
So maybe it matters. It needs to matter.
(By the way, it was Yury Olesha who called writers “the engineers of the human soul.” And my dad thought it was teachers, not mathematicians, after hearing a modified version of the original from Xi Jinping. But Stalin and mathematicians, in that context, made for a better story.)
