Fifteen Questions: Carissa J. Chen on Poetry, Harvard’s History of Slavery, and the Old Jefe’s Location
Carissa J. Chen ’21 is a second-year economics Ph.D. student with a love for language, research, and preserving history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: You went to Phillips Exeter for high school, Harvard for college, Oxford for grad school, and now you’re back at Harvard. What has it been like to spend so much time in these elite institutions? Was that always the goal for you?
CJC: When I first went to Exeter, it was because it was a great chance — one, for my mom to be able to actually take care of herself more, but two, also for a chance to experience a new way of growth, academic growth.
For better or for worse, I really like these places. I like the people I’ve met in all of these places — they are so kind and brilliant, and very inspiring people. I love being able to talk to people from different walks of life and doing completely different research.
I didn’t think I was ever going to get into Exeter or Harvard. I don’t think you can plan for those things, but it was something that I worked hard to do.
FM: Do you have a favorite?
CJC: I mean, Oxford was the most fun.
FM: What was your undergraduate experience like, and how does it feel to be back?
CJC: I really, really loved my courses in undergrad. It was so fun. I think Harvard has the best classes in any subject you could take.
When I came here, I really met a lot of people who truly loved writing, and I made a lot of close friends who are now pursuing MFAs and careers in writing. I was involved in a lot of the arts groups, and it was just really inspiring to be around people who really, really loved writing and have a community there. I think, too, there was a lot of academic exploration — I never imagined I would end up doing Economics at all.
Through a series of personal experiences (and also a lot of reading), I decided to convert to Christianity, and I was really involved in the Asian American Christian Fellowship, which I really loved.
FM: For your senior thesis, you contacted “the first-known living descendants of the slaves who built Harvard.” What was this experience like? How did you go about such extensive research as an undergraduate?
When I was a junior, I took a class taught by Sven Beckert called Harvard and Slavery. I remember there was a plaque that you can walk past on your way to class that has the names of the enslaved people. I always wondered what happened to the living descendants.
History has been such a huge part of my life, like hearing the stories of my grandparents. My mom has a book of her family tree from the 1600s — it’s like a Chinese thing, some Chinese families have them. Admittedly, it’s only the men, but I remember being really interested and curious about this question of: What do we owe across generations? I felt like the people who mattered most in this conversation about Harvard and the legacy of slavery were the people who were the living descendants of the enslaved people who had come before.
I got really stuck in the late 1800s — that’s where archives are really sparse — but a lot of it was tracing newspaper records, obituaries, church records of baptisms.
Truthfully, if you look, I realized that research is actually not that hard. It’s about the courage to look, more than anything. It’s actually not that technically more challenging than anything I had done before in History. It’s just that no one has thought to look.
FM: Today, Harvard’s history of slavery is included in freshman orientation modules and has been acknowledged by administration. I’m assuming it wasn’t as much of an open conversation when you had done your thesis.
CJC: I think I had benefited from generations of historians who had started digging into Harvard and slavery. You couldn’t find the living descendants if you didn’t know the names of the enslaved people. There were amazing people like Caitlin Hopkins and Sven Beckert, who had already started doing a lot of this research.
At the same time as I was working on this, when I was in college, the Legacy of Slavery Committee had started working on their report. A lot of people had worked on this before, and people were starting to work together. So I was working at a time when there was a lot of excitement and a desire to acknowledge and think about this.
FM: What do you think is the most valuable thing you’ve learned from all of your time in all the academic spaces?
CJC: I think that right now, academic research is under attack, and a lot of academic institutions are under attack. It’s hard, because academic research is — to take a terminology from computer science — at the bottom of the stack. Academic research is one of the few places where you can pursue truth and innovation.
Truth requires a certain amount of bravery.
FM: Your poetry has been continuously published since you were in high school. What do you hope to express or achieve with your arts? How has your creative experience informed your research and your current expertise in economics?
CJC: I was initially drawn to poetry because it was one of the spaces where people were giving language to things that were either forgotten or just alternate states of reality.
When you get into experiences of great pain, language heals, language allows you to reckon with, and language is very much distorted, too. Poetry allows you to play with that distortion.
When I started off writing poetry, a lot of it was about history and these things that are unspeakable and deeply human and also easily forgettable.
As its continued, when I came here, I started taking a lot of poetry workshops. I was in workshops with Jorie Graham and Josh Bell and Tracy [K. Smith], and they really pushed me to explore even more. Now, I’m working towards my first poetry book. My writing has changed a lot since when I was younger. I feel like a lot of history ends up informing my writing.
I think economics, for me, is in some ways the opposite of poetry, because it’s so rational. But I think economics also tries to simplify things down, like you create theoretical models where you simplify things down. And poetry — you take these large, giant experiences of history or personal life, and then simplify them down.
FM: On your website, you say that you published poetry under your middle name from 2019 to 2022. Why did you use a pen name during those years? And why was this exclusive to your poetry?
CJC: I think there are two reasons. The first is that I found it aesthetically beautiful, because I went by my middle name and my mother’s maiden name.
I’ve always thought of poetry as existing for me from the inner world and the inner life. So I used my middle name, Jiarong, and then Zhang, because it was the interior part of me, the things that I hold most deep to me.
The other part of it is that when I was in high school, you have a lot of opportunities to submit your writing, and I ended up winning a lot of scholarships that were really helpful for me and incredibly life-changing. But I realized when you’re writing, and it comes with this hope of scholarship money and college and things like that, it’s easy to fall into writing from outside your personal experience, like you’re writing from the outside and thinking, “this would be really helpful for me.” But I wanted to write truly from my interior voice.
I did it both symbolically, because I wanted to write from the interior part of myself, and also because I wanted to have this moment where I was like, “let me remove this from my ego. Let me just be my complete internal world.”
Also, it’s easier to write about breakups if you write with your middle name.
FM: What drew you to academia, and what aspects of academia have encouraged you to remain in and pursue higher scholarship?
CJC: I love research. I love being able to search for things, discover things. I’m also a creative person, and academic research is fundamentally creative. I knew I wanted to do something that allowed me to be creative, but I also wanted to be able to impact people directly.
I just got really wrapped into the projects I was doing, and I really loved them, and I just kept doing them. Now I’m here.
It’s also helpful that you can take creative writing workshops while you’re a Ph.D. student.
FM: I saw that you have a collaborative art project called “Dear Loneliness,” which seeks to write the longest letter in the world in memory of the year 2020. How did this project conspire, and where is it now?
CJC: I don’t know if you know Sarah Gao — she’s a student here. Sarah and her sister, Jessica, and I were on a Zoom call in the pandemic. Sarah had just started a literary arts journal, and we all were people who were interested in poetry and creative writing. And we were like, “how do you continue being creative right now?” I’d been informed by working with archives a lot and thinking a lot about the importance of preservation of voices at specific moments.
We’re creating a little archive of it. I think at the end of the day, writing is a really important part of addressing loneliness, but it requires much deeper systemic change. The amount that one project can do is not that much, but the value is also its archival knowledge and documentation.
FM: On the “Dear Loneliness” website, I saw that you co-hosted a radio show where you interviewed strangers with 36 Questions That Lead to Love. Could you tell me a little bit more about that?
CJC: To be honest, we didn’t do a lot of planning. We were just having fun. We would just grab random people who are walking around on campus and be like, “Hey, can you be on our radio show?” And we’d just subject them to the 36 questions.
FM: Did any of them lead to relationships?
CJC: Oh, no, we weren’t having people do it with each other. Also, I think something about a radio show makes it maybe a little harder for people to be fully honest. It did not lead to love, unfortunately.
FM: A lot of your work seems to be duly centered around themes of identity, memory, loss, and reparation. What do you think the world right now needs to hear about any of these themes? What do you think is the most important in addressing and recovering from the past?
CJC: I think the most important thing is to really read and imagine yourself in the position of people who have gone through great conflict. I think that we’ve been in a really lucky moment in history, actually. We’ve grown up in a time period where there’s been, at least for a while, quite a bit of peace, and general development across different countries.
When you look back in history, it helps you see through other people’s stories and their lives. You can learn more about character — both your own character and how people react in different circumstances. Like, why is it that economic collapse often comes before mass violence? It’s because people are afraid. It’s a very basic fundamental fear in the reaction.
I think language is really important.
FM: What’s next for you? What do you hope to be doing upon obtaining your Ph.D.?
CJC: I want to be a law professor. Becoming a law professor means you need to have a J.D. and a Ph.D. I just finished my first two years of coursework in the Ph.D., and I’m starting my J.D. next year. I’ve been in school for a long time.
FM: How does that feel?
CJC: Honestly, I’m really excited. I love school!
I’ve been working on a project about using large language models to identify cases of wrongful conviction and incarceration. Over the summer, I'm hoping I can try to meet some of the people who we’ve since learned were wrongfully incarcerated, and also to meet the defense attorneys and prosecutors on those cases.
I’ve also been working on some stuff that’s about taxes. I think tax policy is really important because economic policy is really important for maintaining peace, but also it's important for questions of fairness and justice. I’m looking into some questions about how we maintain physical stability in the United States more broadly, and also thinking about the roots of taxation in American history.
FM: Is there anything that’s changed about Harvard or Harvard Square from when you were an undergraduate that you miss?
CJC: I miss the old Jefe’s location. I thought it was better!
FM: Jefe’s or Felipes?
CJC: I would have said old Jefe’s, but now I’m Felipe’s.
— Associate Magazine Editor Chelsie Lim can be reached at chelsie.lim@thecrimson.com.