October 2007 Stories

From Sea to Sea, We All Share Something

A year ago, a 17-year-old girl arrived at Portland International Airport (PDX) late at night. She was tired after 30 sleepless hours, but curious and insecure at the same time. She was eager to explore the unknown world that lay ahead of her, but first all she cared about was finding a soft bed for a good night’s sleep.

This girl was me on Aug. 26, 2006.

My name, as it is written on my passport, is Zhanran Li. All of my friends call me Jazmyn. I was born in Weihai, a small town by the ocean in eastern China, and I grew up in Jinan. When I was little, I wondered what the world looked like on the other side of the sea. My mother told me that people who lived on the other side of the sea looked different from us. This made me even more curious.

As I got older, I learned more and more about the world outside my country. I learned about histories and cultures very different from my own. I also studied English. I wanted to do something besides preparing for college, so I decided to become an exchange student for my last year of high school. I never thought that this year would become a milestone in my life.

As an exchange student at La Center High School in Washington state, I felt that I couldn’t have been placed in a better or more close-knit town. The town of La Center gave me memories, laughs, smiles and tears as well. It impacted my life dramatically by giving me an experience different from anything I have ever known.

Being a senior in an American high school is definitely something I could never have imagined back home in China. From spirit week to pep rallies and games, from homecoming to prom, from dance performances to state softball competitions, I filled my last year of high school with excitement, happiness and adventure.

However, I cannot forget all the culture shocks and homesick days that went along with this rosy picture.

On Sept. 1, 2006, I wrote in my journal that I missed everything back home, but that I was happy to be where I was.

I went to my first football game on Sept. 3. Kathi, a senior cheerleader who later became my best friend, took me to the game. That night, for the first time, I witnessed how crazy American drivers can be.

The winter was not the best period of the year. I was homesick for the first time since I’d left home. I was not as strong as I had thought. I guess there is a soft spot in every heart.

In March the rain finally stopped and the sunshine was back. I joined the softball team. Even though I had never played before, Oz, the softball coach, accepted me as a member of the team. I went to practice with the softball girls after school, I cheered with them at all the games, and I traveled with the team, which took fifth in the state.

On June 9, 2007, along with the other 88 students of the La Center class of 2007, I graduated. Although the diploma I received from LCHS was not real, the ceremony meant something special to me.

It represented my step into adulthood. Because of my experience abroad in the U.S., I am now better prepared for challenges and responsibilities that life will bring.

It was hard to say goodbye, especially to those to whom I was close and about whom I cared a great deal. I laughed when I saw a page of my diary saying that I wanted to go home as soon as possible. When the departure came closer, all I wanted was to stay — stay with all the wonderful memories and wonderful people.

On Aug. 18, 2007, I arrived once again at PDX late at night. I didn’t feel insecure anymore because I had grown so much throughout the past year. I knew myself better.

My high school abroad experience gave me so much that I could never explain everything in words. Even facing the unknown, I am now willing to try, fail, and try again.

Now I am at Willamette, again starting something new. I enjoy my days exploring new things and making new friends. Being an international student doesn’t mean being an outsider. It doesn’t matter what nationality you are, what race or what religion. From sea to sea, we are all people; we all share something deep in our hearts.

I hope my four years at Willamette will be filled with fun and exploration. From what I’ve seen, Willamette offers all kinds of opportunities to learn more about the world. Take a chance and step out; there is always something different worth discovering.

Jazmyn Li is a freshman at Willamette this fall. This essay originally appeared in The Collegian, Willamette’s student newspaper, on Sept. 19, 2007. Reprinted with permission.

Alumnus Wins International Fraternity Award

Two-time winner of Willamette Greek Man of the Year, president of the Sigma Chi fraternity and the Interfraternity Council, captain of his intramural men’s indoor volleyball team, winner of multiple awards for leadership and academic talent, volunteer in campus community service programs — it seems as though Eli Snider ’07 did it all while on campus.

And that was while maintaining a 3.95 GPA and completing a double major in history and philosophy.

“My decision to serve in the Greek community felt natural because it was something that I cared about,” Snider says. “I never questioned how much time I was putting into it because I found it to be so rewarding.”

Snider’s multiple talents got the attention of the Sigma Chi fraternity headquarters last summer when he won the International Balfour Award, the fraternity’s highest undergraduate honor. He beat out 219 other young men from Sigma Chi chapters across the U.S. and Canada to win the award.

“My participation in the Greek system at Willamette was central to my personal development, and I will forever be indebted to Sigma Chi for making me the man I am today,” Snider says. “Learning the importance of having good character and the role that plays in creating a successful and meaningful life is not always something explicitly talked about in the classroom.”

The International Balfour Award goes to a graduating senior with excellent scholarship, character, service to the fraternity and campus leadership. As the winner, Snider receives a Life Loyal fraternity membership and the opportunity to serve on the Sigma Chi International Executive Committee for two years.

Willamette has had multiple Northwest Province Balfour winners over the years — including Senior Director of Alumni Relations Jim Booth ’64 — and even had a top finalist a few years ago. But Snider is the first Willamette student ever to be named the international winner.

“Eli is very deserving of this award,” Booth says. “His service to the chapter, and indeed to the Greek system at Willamette, was extraordinary. It is rare when someone can achieve so much outside the classroom while accomplishing so much in it.”

Besides his fraternity leadership, Snider acted in a Willamette theatre production, participated in beach cleanups, did landscaping at a family shelter during a campus-wide service day, and twice hosted Willamette Bachelor Philanthropy, a date auction that benefits the Make-A-Wish Foundation. He was helping the Salem community even before he started classes at Willamette, when he participated in a Jump Start program called New Student Orientation to Community Outreach (NSOCO), a pre–Opening Days program focused on service.

So what’s in the future for this busy young man? Now he’s in Chicago, working at Sigma Chi International Headquarters as the associate director of leadership programs. This makes him responsible for managing and directing resources for recruitment and leadership training for all North American Sigma Chi chapters.

It’s a tough responsibility, but one that Snider is excited to take on. “If I were given the opportunity to do anything in the world right now, I would choose to do this,” he says.

After his stint with Sigma Chi, Snider hopes to attend law school. “The idea of working with and assisting others and having a job that’s really important to other people’s lives is what attracted me to law.”

A View into Medieval Times

Mention of medieval literature may draw more groans than cheers from many college students, but Ana Montero has made it her mission to change that view.

She understands where the students are coming from — she remembers her college years at the University of the Basque Country in her native Spain, when she thought medieval literature was only conservative stories about wars and politics.

Then Professor Eukene Lacarra, one of the world’s most renowned experts in Spanish medieval literature, showed her a different side of the subject. Montero found the literature included provocative themes that appealed to her, including feminism, love and sexuality.

“Professor Lacarra demonstrates the way I would like to see myself as a teacher, as someone who will change people’s perspectives and prejudices,” says Montero, an assistant professor of Spanish. “I want to show people that medieval literature isn’t boring.”

Teaching a course called “Sexuality and Eroticism in Medieval Europe” goes a long way toward dispelling the stereotype. She leads the class as part of College Colloquium, a program that allows first-year students to pick a class topic that mirrors their interests and pursue their intellectual passions as soon as they arrive on campus.

Students sometimes are intimidated at first by discussing sexuality, Montero says, and are surprised to find that it was a common topic in the arts during medieval times.

Take La Celestina, for instance. This widely studied story, published in 1499, is considered to be one of the greatest works of medieval Spanish literature. The title character: A woman who runs a brothel.

Montero has pored over the pages of La Celestina multiple times, but she isn’t just reading the text. Her main area of research is the way illustrations and printed text interact in medieval literature. She’s writing a book about the meaning behind the illustrations in La Celestina, and she hopes to publish it next year.

Numerous studies have been done on the classic story, but Montero found none on the illustrations. “We tend to consider these two representations in a hierarchical way, by seeing the illustrations as subordinate to the text,” she says. “But in medieval times, there wasn’t that hierarchy, and they were seen as being on the same level.”

The typical thought is that illustrations enhance the story, but Montero has found in some medieval books that the pictures actually contradict the text. This is partly because of differences in book printing of the time, she says. The books often were hand-copied, written on after they were published, or interpreted in different ways by different printers. Pages — and the illustrations on them — might not always be in the same place between different editions.

“They were considered a space for interaction as opposed to a fixed static space,” Montero says.

As for La Celestina, Montero describes the title character as “a woman in a marginal position,” someone simultaneously known as a sorceress, a healer and the leader of a brothel. In other words, she was a bit of an outlaw. But she also is a matchmaker, an activity she is so famous for that the word “celestina” has become a synonym for “matchmaker” in the Spanish language.

“The illustrations are very interesting because they give insight into the character,” Montero says. For instance, the pictures often depict Celestina in front of or between black doors. “This represents her status of being between places, between her public and private personas.”

It’s yet another medieval literature lesson where Montero is getting her students to sit up and take notice.

Running Toward Answers

Many students are looking for the beach this summer, but Daniel Yaeger ’08 is looking for people who will ride a stationary bike as hard as humanly possible for 45 minutes. Repeatedly. For no compensation.

Yaeger is continuing an exploration that began in high school. Poor coordination, caused by neuromotor dyspraxia, left him with an aversion to sports, but when he entered high school, he decided to prove himself as an athlete. “I gravitated toward cross-country because I felt that running depended more on persistence and dedication than an inherent gift,” he says. “In my first cross-country race, I finished at the back of the pack.”

Hoping to make the varsity team, Yaeger pored over the writings of sports trainers, looking for pointers. “I was a naturally ungifted runner,” he says. “After three years of lonely lactate-threshold workouts and hill sprints, I lowered my personal best by seven minutes.”

Feeling that he had maxed out on his physical potential for racing, Yaeger left the track for the lab to find how athletes can reach their own personal best — and discovered his best. This year, the exercise science major was named 2007 Undergraduate Summer Research Fellow by the American Physiological Society.

Yaeger is working with mentor and exercise science Professor “Stas” Stavrianeas to identify how athletes and coaches (and middle-aged men and just about anyone) can determine precise maximum lactate thresholds — in other words, how they can train at the upper limit of their physical capacity and reach their highest potential, without overdoing it. “If athletes under-train or over-train, their performance will suffer,” Yaeger says.

No one has yet devised a method to hone in on precise training prescriptions, according to Yaeger and Stavrianeas. They will increase their sample size this summer to arrive at more definitive conclusions, but they shared their preliminary findings at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Northwest American College of Sports Medicine in New Orleans.

“Stas is creative and insightful — and rigorous,” Yaeger says. “He pushes you to ask questions you can’t answer. But after lab sessions, he’ll buy you coffee and talk about life.”

Yaeger’s life took a new direction after a Study Abroad semester in Spain and North Africa. “In North Africa I saw dangerously malnourished children and beggars born without arms,” he says. “I thought of my own mother, a single parent who has been disabled from spinal injuries and fibromyalgia since I was young.” He signed on for a ninth semester at Willamette and loaded up on science courses he had missed, hoping for acceptance into a biomedical research graduate program. Having seen the toll of chronic pain and disability up close, Yaeger is hoping to use his career to help ease human physical suffering. He is especially interested in exploring the causes of cardiovascular disease. “Cardiovascular hypertension isn’t well understood,” he says, “but one in three Americans will die of heart problems.”

In the meantime, if anyone is interested in riding till they can’t ride any more, in a breathing mask, for zero compensation, call Dan Yaeger. He would love to hook you up.

Second Time Around for Alumna

Raissa Fleming ’79 returns to campus as guest actress for Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece of modern comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, scheduled for September and October at Willamette’s Kresge Theatre.

“I was a political science major at Willamette, but I spent all my nights in the theatre,” Fleming says. This is her second run with the play; this time around she’ll play the more mature Lady Bracknell. “Most actresses hope to play her sometime in their career,” Fleming says. “As a woman, you have the younger years as an ingénue, the years in between, and then the years when you get the juicy character parts. I loved this play when I first did it, and I still love it. The social digs are delicious.”

Fleming was a founding member of the acting company with the Portland Artists Repertory Theatre and is a regular at the Salem Repertory Theatre. “Working in the arts you have to be extremely flexible financially because you’re not going to be guaranteed an income at any point in your career. Very few actors make big bucks, so having a liberal arts education allows you to find other avenues of work. There are opportunities to grow beyond what you planned for, and the more you know, the more you enjoy life.”

Earnest is Wilde’s final and most recognized play. Set in 1890s England, the play focuses on a gentleman who assumes the role of his fictitious brother Ernest in order to enjoy himself in the city without ruining his reputation at his country estate. Mistaken identity drives the hilarity that ensues in the classic tale. More than a century later, it is a respected and studied piece of literature as well as an audience favorite. The first show of Willamette’s 2007–08 season is directed by Theatre Department Co-chair Susan Coromel.