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