She has been an American citizen for six years. Forsaking syntax for verve, she regularly inserts little dialogues in mid-sentence to make a point. The college dance that would come to signify a different kind of independence for Marta Ho is almost two years in the past. But her life has been altered irrevocably by the event. So, too, has the university.
Headlines tell a bare-bones story.
Eight Asian students step onto a crowded bus bound for a semiformal dance. They are spat upon repeatedly and called names. But headlines and news stories do little to show what it's like to be an Asian American on a college campus, to be the victim of racial harassment. Nor do they reveal the reverberations and deep tremors the incident still sends through the Storrs campus, or the change in Marta Ho.