All posts by

Letter from the Editors | Vol. 8

Volume 8 | 2023-2024

The 2023-2024 academic year during which this volume was compiled represents NYU Shanghai’s first full academic year without pandemic restrictions since 2018-2019. As our university turns towards the post-pandemic era, we are delighted to publish Hundred River Review Volume 8 as our first print edition since 2021. Our 8th edition truly showcases the diversity of outstanding work which students in NYU Shanghai’s core writing programs are able to produce. Essays which we have selected this year reflect on the recent past, take advantage of loosening restrictions to explore our wider home of Shanghai, and consider in detail the interaction between East and West which NYU Shanghai is proud to foster.

Volume 8 opens with Li Jiasheng’s piece on seniors and the Shanghai lockdown. Reflecting on lessons learned, Li challenges us to consider how the pandemic brought to light the “digital divide” between senior citizens and China’s ever more technology-oriented younger population and government apparatus. As China’s world of WeChat mini-apps and facial recognition purchasing is likely to continue expanding for the foreseeable future, Li offers a note of caution, reminding us that we “should learn from our elders” and avoid leaving anyone behind during digitalization. Taking the opportunity to explore the city of Shanghai beyond our new Qiantan campus, Volume 8’s second essay by Enkhijin Nerguibaatar scrutinizes the city’s linguistic landscape. Focusing upon signage in the Jingting Plaza and Tianle Place of Korean Street (hanguojie 韩国街), Enkhijin’s essay on Korean language use within this Korean cultural hotspot offers readers a window into one of the many diverse communities which call Shanghai home. Her work highlights how a diaspora makes ‘home’ in a new built environment, embedding a distinctive sense of place into the fabric of their everyday lives.

Moving beyond Shanghai’s recent events and lived landscape, the second half of Volume 8 addresses the fields of film, literature, poetry, and philosophy. Our third essay is Julie Wu’s “Weapons of the Weak.” Wu artfully analyzes how notional ‘submission’ to Confucian patriarchal norms displayed in Ban Zhao’s Eastern Han-era writings on etiquette and in the actions of the character Songlian in Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern can be represented as an attempt to seize female agency in a hostile world. While in Ban Zhao’s case this attempt proved highly successful, safeguarding her political position as a key adviser to empress Deng Sui, Songlian’s efforts resulted in tragedy. From subverting social norms within Chinese society, Volume 8 then moves to a comparative study of norms between China and the West. Carefully analyzing the intersection between the Socratic attack on poetry with the ancient Chinese poetic tradition, Lanyue (Alice) Zhang’s essay offers an in-depth analysis of how shi (詩) evolved a distinct educational and political purpose that deflects the attack on poetry leveled by Socrates. Zhang’s work is an example of the intellectual cross-pollination between China and the West which our core writing courses and NYU Shanghai more broadly are dedicated to fostering, and represents a worthy addition to our volume.

We are, as always, delighted to have received so many submissions to this volume, and are extremely proud of the masterful student work which we selected for our 2023-2024 edition. As we indicate in our journal’s mission statement, “above all, the Hundred River Review publishes works that can serve as pedagogical models and provides a space for students to share their writing, read their peers’ works, and engage in the exchange of ideas valued by NYU Shanghai.” We strongly believe that this year’s edition has fulfilled this promise.

Sincerely,

Peter Weise, Sarah Hakimzadeh, Jingsi Shen and Ben Hales

The Hundred River Review Editorial Board

Masthead

Volume 8 | 2023-2024

The Editorial Board
Peter Weise
Sarah Hakimzadeh
Shen Jingsi
Marcos Martinez

Managing Editor
Ben Hales

Contributing Faculty
David Perry
Mark Brantner
Amy Goldman
Chen Lin

Developmental Editors
Ben Hales
Scout Meredith Best
Ruby Foxall

Production and Design
Shi Xinran

Advisory Committee
Chen Lin
Yang Jun

Letter from the Editors | Vol. 7

Hello, how can I help you today?

Tell me a funny story.

Once upon a time, there was a sandwich masquerading as a prophecy. He talked with his lettuce and his bread was his hat. He told me the world would end; I told him it already had. He laughed, said the jig was up. He was not a prophecy. Just a sandwich making a living at the end of time and everything else.

—

Dear Reader,

The academic year of 2022-2023 marked a turning point for how NYUSH assesses what is good writing. This turning point was prompted by the emergence of ChatGPT; the platform required our academic community to fully reconsider what the process of writing can look like. We also, in turn, were required to question what it means to be a writer. If ChatGPT can – as the creators of OpenAI would like us to believe – generate complex thoughts on par with human experts in any given field, then why should we as humans even endeavor to keep writing? What is the point in investing into the process of writing?

Why create when a computer can not only do it for us, but perhaps even better than us?

Of course, the more that we have analyzed ChatGPT and many of the places where it falls short (particularly in writing cogent code, or attempting to pull actual sources to back up its claims), the fire with which these questions were asked last year have now cooled to still-warm embers. Nevertheless, these questions still plague us in a world ever-pressed to automate, industrialize, streamline. We must, as creators, makers, and engineers alike, ask ourselves how far we can go before we streamline humanity right out of our art.

The essays in Volume 7 of Hundred River Review offer us some insight into what it means to write, and what it means to be human in the artwork we create. Though each writer expresses this theme in extremely different and nuanced ways, the works in this volume either consciously or subconsciously explore the questions we were so haunted by throughout the academic year 2022-2023. In her essay “Victor Saparin’s ‘The Trial of Tantalus’: A Utopian Depiction of the Khrushchev Thaw Period?”, Kexin Deng analyzes Sarapin’s Soviet Era short story to interrogate the dichotomy between utopian and dystopian societies, and ultimately questions what it means for us as humans to chase after the “perfect” society. Shuli Wu turns to a modern analysis of the stigmatization of Chinese feminists on major Chinese social media platforms in “A Scarlet Letter on Feminists in China — Decoding the Pervasive Stigmatization of Feminism on Social Media Platforms”, interrogating how this stigmatization came into fruition and general (mis)understanding of Chinese feminist ideologies. The essay “‘My Guy Pretty Like A Girl’: How 21st Century Queer Men Are Changing the Hip-Hop Space” by Nomun-Erdene Surkhiisaikhan offers an alternative viewpoint to art-making by interrogating the evolution of hip-hop whilst introducing a quare lens to analyze the genre’s history and modern iteration.

In addition to the critical essays listed above, two writers also debuted a new style of writing to Hundred River Review: the literacy narrative. This style of writing takes on a personal essay format to explore the writer’s definition of and relationship to literacy, a very salient topic considering the diverse demographic of NYUSH. Hideko Mitani writes a simultaneously relatable yet unique meditation on the necessity of being content with not being “well-versed” and how this impacts her connection to her Chinese-Japanese-Chilean identity. Alex Perchatkin takes an alternative approach to literacy in his essay “Vending Machines and Their Future Usage Worldwide”, where he uses a compelling and unexpected essay structure to question what journalistic integrity means in a world desiring fast-and-easy writing.

All these writers offer up unquestionably strong writing that is exemplary student work from Writing as Inquiry and Perspectives on Humanity. More than that, though, they offer us work that encourages us, in different ways, to keep the humanity in our thinking, in our world-building, in our writing. And we must keep this humanity not because it is perfect, nor because it is efficient; we must keep it because writing lets us explore, question, and ponder in ways that our other faculties do not.

In the wake of these big questions that these wonderful writers of Hundred River Review: Vol. 7 generously give to us, I leave you with this, reader:

Sometimes, at the end of the world, there is a sandwich claiming to be a prophecy. Do not be afraid to tell him he is wrong.

Sincerely,

Bret Hairston

The Hundred River Review Editorial Board

Vending Machines and Their Future Usage Worldwide

Student Essays, Vol. 7 No. 1

by Aleksandr Perchatkin

Read the Faculty Introduction.

Throughout my life I have been acting as a camera: when I feel strong emotions, I “snap” a picture and put it in my storage. The storage is full of stories of different kinds, and the most important one is journalism. I care about these journalistic snapshots because the stories are not mine. They belong to someone else, and my job is to transmit them in a fast and efficient way. The snapshots are grouped in envelopes by different categories: date, theme, titles, and stories themselves. Now, I am opening the envelope titled “Vending machines and their future usage worldwide,” where three images are collected.

———

Snapshot No. 1: “Sorry”

9 September 2019

Dasha is sitting on a bench near “Aleksandrovskiy Sad,” a popular garden among tourists, trying to hide from the scorching heat of Moscow September. The garden is always crowded with tourists–it is almost impossible to find solace among the Soviet-style weird flowers and trees that were planted there long before Dasha was born. She cries and is surrounded by unfamiliar faces, who mingle with the natural scenery with their noises of astonishment and complaints. Dasha sits there, crossing her legs and arms like a tired student after classes, but her face is different. It bears an expression of emptiness and transparency. The spot that she is looking at is missing, either obscured by the crowd or the chaotic tourists, making it hard for her to focus on anything other than the touristic nonsense around her.

Notes:

On this day, Dasha and I agreed to do an interview about her experience. We went to the local Starbucks, bought lattes and started talking. The interview itself was too gloomy, much more controversial than I thought. I was not ready to hear all the descriptions of that incident, and she was not ready to tell me about the entire experience. I felt like a teacher examining an unprepared student: the situation was uncomfortable for both of us. Nevertheless, it was the most important meeting of my life—a meeting not with my father, who I have only seen twice since my parents’ divorce, nor with Mr. S, the person from the Moscow government, who I desired to interview since I was eight (I have been into politics since I was eight years old, and I would love to interview my spiderman from Tomsk who transformed Moscow of the 90s into a European city).

This realization was unexpected. I did not know which of my stories would be the most transformative for me. But it was Dasha with her story of domestic abuse, a story that made me think about the course of my career in journalism.

Snapshot No. 2: “The process of making”

10 September 2019

The room is dark and cavernous, resembling a barn with its closed blinds and complete lack of lighting. It emanates a peculiar odor, reminiscent of a place where something died a week ago. Despite the eerie atmosphere, I remain seated at my table surrounded by a multitude of energy drink cans, which I pretend are meant to be there. This is my room, and it’s 3 am.

My eyes are bloodshot and struggling to function due to their prolonged exposure to the computer screen. My headphones blare at their highest volume, and the computer’s cooling system drones on at its highest power.

Notes:

Typical evenings for me back then involved preparing for college admission exams and working. One of my jobs was producing my own podcast where I would interview teenagers about their struggles and challenges. In this particular scene, I was editing Dasha’s story using a sound editing program. Although the interview was meant to be an episode for the radio, I was hesitant to send the final version to the editor. I doubted the story would be popular; it lacked a catchy element and was not very convincing. Dasha used phrases like “I don’t know”, “I’m not sure” and “I don’t remember” which might have discouraged listeners who prefer more certainty in stories.

Snapshot No. 3: “Turn around”

12 September 2019

I leave the office of the XYZ channel, the media that considers itself to be the only independent one in Russia, where some of the producers invited me after hearing my podcasts about Netflix TV shows. I join the circle of smoking journalists after recording a program regarding Tik-Tok’s place in teenagers’ lives. They talk about how they are interested in major events in Russian social life, but they spend their money and time discussing such abstract popular culture topics on-air. One of the anchors politely says, “Are you okay? We were just talking about how well your podcasts are doing!”

Notes:

I once saw these journalists as role models, but I noticed a significant ethical difference between me and XYZ’s approach that day: I had one important story on my metaphorical camera, while their journalistic polaroids were wasted on naïve teenagers’ opinions. However, I did not make Dasha’s picture known because it was not “catchy” enough. This meeting at XYZ made me realize that I had turned from being a young journalist, who is still finding his way in this profession, to a vending machine that tempts people “to buy” stories that look fancy at first glance, keeping important ones in the last rows.

Snapshot No. 4: “Mr. S”

1 December 2019

The streets of Moscow are filled with two distinct smells: car fuel and the aroma of fresh baked goods. This contrast is a constant in Moscow, which contains both a bustling metropolis, with its abundance of cars and factories, as well as a quaint European-style city. As I walk the famous Tverskaya street, Russia’s own living Mount Rushmore comes into view. Although not as imposing as his US counterpart, he is alive with color and stands proudly at the entrance of his office, waving to a group of politicians from Armenia. His face is the same color as the stone bricks surrounding him, giving him a robotic appearance and masking any emotions he may be feeling. As he turns and enters his office, I feel hesitant and do nothing, even though only weeks before I would have eagerly sought out Mr. S for an interview.

Notes:

I did not see the point in trying to talk to Mr. S that day. All of the questions that I wanted to ask him had already been answered. This spiderman was still a hero to me, but his polaroid was not as important as Dasha’s. Her story could be far more useful than an interview with a Russian politician.

———

I am sealing this envelope full of snapshots and thinking about its title. In some years, vending machines will capture the labor market worldwide — their cool-headed working style attracts many investors. They do not cause any problems with people, they are repetitive, they have the same “beeeeeep” after every order. But do they recognize people’s voices, do they hear the fear, happiness, apathy, or excitement? One may say that for ordering pizza and sushi, there is no such need as recognizing emotions, and that may be true. But what about talking, not just supplyingfood? I have noticed that some people may rather talk to Siri than to a human being, and I am absolutely sure that is not the way things are supposed to work. Machines cannot solve people’s problems.As a journalist, I had once tried to be like a vending machine with a programmed evaluation regarding a story’s importance, but I learned that it simply was not who I am. I knew that the interview with Mr. S. would have received many views but releasing Dasha’s episode felt more right. I have more than a set number of buttons on a panel – I have a strong understanding of what is right, more important words to say than a simple “thank you for your patience, we appreciate it”. I am a journalist who wants to tell the stories that matter, that change people’s lives. Stories like Dasha’s are important to tell because they can create a strong sense of community amongst ourselves because this story feels more real and more personal than a politician’s story or a fluff piece on the news ever could.