Class Note 2011
Issue
July-August 2023
Please welcome a guest column by Anise Vance.
Hi, everyone! How lovely to be in touch through these Class Notes. Many thanks to Hillary for maintaining such a wonderful service. Here are some updates.
Prompted by snowstorms, my wife, Candace, and I moved from Boston to North Carolina almost a decade ago. Our two children, Taraz (6) and Ella (3), were born in Chapel Hill and have spent much of their lives toddling about the woods. We’ve recently discovered the joys of birdwatching, and I’ve found few greater joys than learning about thrashers and nuthatches and chickadees alongside my kids.
Family life has been coupled with especially rejuvenating and purposeful work. Following the murder of George Floyd, the City of Durham formed a community safety department tasked with diverting a subset of 911 calls away from law enforcement and to behavioral health specialists. I help to grow and guide that department and its 911 teams, which have now demonstrated that unarmed responses are safe, effective, and often the best method of meeting the needs of people in crisis. The work is rooted in principles of racial equity and at the forefront of a movement toward reimagining public safety.
I am also excited to share that my debut novel, Hush Harbor, will be published this September by the Hanover Square Imprint at HarperCollins. Its premise: “After the murder of an unarmed Black teenager by the hands of the police, protests spread like wildfire in Bliss City, New Jersey. A full-scale resistance group takes control of an abandoned housing project and decide to call it Hush Harbor, a term once used to describe the secret spaces where slaves would gather to pray.” (It’s available at all the major online book retailers if anyone wants to take a further look.) I’m thrilled to see it almost out in the world after working on it for nine years!
While the paragraphs above can read a little like a social media highlight reel, life has been filled with setbacks and struggles as well—missteps, accidents, deaths, anxieties, stressors ranging from the mundane (how I hate commuting) to the global (Covid-ing with a then newborn and 3 year old). If you’re reading this and feeling some of those struggles, please know that you’re not alone in that experience. Some books that have helped me process a troublesome world during the last six months: Carrying by Ada Limón (a collection of poems), Hell of a Book by Jason Mott (fiction), and Saving Time by Jenny Odell (nonfiction).
As for the future, my wife and I continue to experience a profound longing to move back overseas (she grew up in Jamaica and Israel; I grew up in Kenya, Botswana, and Egypt). Who knows when or how that will happen. For the time being, though, there is a bluebird couple that have nested in a hole some downy woodpeckers spent winter creating just off my balcony. My family is quite curious to see theirs grow.
—Hillary S. Cheng, 26611 La Roda, Mission Viejo, CA 92691; (603) 546-8452; hillary.s.cheng@dartmouth.edu
Hi, everyone! How lovely to be in touch through these Class Notes. Many thanks to Hillary for maintaining such a wonderful service. Here are some updates.
Prompted by snowstorms, my wife, Candace, and I moved from Boston to North Carolina almost a decade ago. Our two children, Taraz (6) and Ella (3), were born in Chapel Hill and have spent much of their lives toddling about the woods. We’ve recently discovered the joys of birdwatching, and I’ve found few greater joys than learning about thrashers and nuthatches and chickadees alongside my kids.
Family life has been coupled with especially rejuvenating and purposeful work. Following the murder of George Floyd, the City of Durham formed a community safety department tasked with diverting a subset of 911 calls away from law enforcement and to behavioral health specialists. I help to grow and guide that department and its 911 teams, which have now demonstrated that unarmed responses are safe, effective, and often the best method of meeting the needs of people in crisis. The work is rooted in principles of racial equity and at the forefront of a movement toward reimagining public safety.
I am also excited to share that my debut novel, Hush Harbor, will be published this September by the Hanover Square Imprint at HarperCollins. Its premise: “After the murder of an unarmed Black teenager by the hands of the police, protests spread like wildfire in Bliss City, New Jersey. A full-scale resistance group takes control of an abandoned housing project and decide to call it Hush Harbor, a term once used to describe the secret spaces where slaves would gather to pray.” (It’s available at all the major online book retailers if anyone wants to take a further look.) I’m thrilled to see it almost out in the world after working on it for nine years!
While the paragraphs above can read a little like a social media highlight reel, life has been filled with setbacks and struggles as well—missteps, accidents, deaths, anxieties, stressors ranging from the mundane (how I hate commuting) to the global (Covid-ing with a then newborn and 3 year old). If you’re reading this and feeling some of those struggles, please know that you’re not alone in that experience. Some books that have helped me process a troublesome world during the last six months: Carrying by Ada Limón (a collection of poems), Hell of a Book by Jason Mott (fiction), and Saving Time by Jenny Odell (nonfiction).
As for the future, my wife and I continue to experience a profound longing to move back overseas (she grew up in Jamaica and Israel; I grew up in Kenya, Botswana, and Egypt). Who knows when or how that will happen. For the time being, though, there is a bluebird couple that have nested in a hole some downy woodpeckers spent winter creating just off my balcony. My family is quite curious to see theirs grow.
—Hillary S. Cheng, 26611 La Roda, Mission Viejo, CA 92691; (603) 546-8452; hillary.s.cheng@dartmouth.edu