LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the title story of the collection Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang (©1998 by Lan Samantha Chang).

I often dream about the restaurant where I first met Tian. Late at night, the memory flickers up before me, dim and silent, never changing. I see the simple neon sign that reads “Vermilion Palace.” The drifting snow blows up against the scarlet double doors. I see myself walking toward those doors—a slight, brown girl with hair like an inkbrush, tilted eyes, and a wary mouth.

For my first few months in New York City, I could not stay warm. I wore a heavy coat and wound myself in woolen scarves, but the chill went deep beneath my skin, and the winter wind found every crevice as I walked to the restaurant on numb feet, past the subway stop, the university, and the music school, my gaze fixed on the icy pavement to keep myself from falling. I could not taste my food or feel the softness of my narrow bed. I had been in the city for two months before I even noticed the music school. And then one evening I heard a student practicing. Walking past a basement window, I (8) caught the thread of a violin melody, high and sweet. The sound rose up through a crack in the window and between the safety bars; it shimmered through me, (4) a wave of color, blooming past the gray tenements and toward the narrow sky. I drew one cold, sweet breath of air and truly understood that I had arrived in America.

A few days later, I saw Tian. He might have been to the restaurant a dozen times before, but I do not remember seeing him until after the music. I noticed him on a stormy evening near the end of winter. I was standing at the window, watching the falling snow make bright flecks in the headlamps of the taxicabs, when a man appeared in the doorway, carrying a violin case.

“One person,” he said, in confident English. At that time, in 1967, many new Chinese had come to live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Most of them turned up at the restaurant, sooner or later. But not many spoke English with such ease. He wore a brown felt hat, and his overcoat seemed cut to fit his shoulders; most of the other men seemed content to wear whatever would make do.

“Come with me,” I replied, in Mandarin.

I seated him and poured his tea, looking down at the swirl of leaves in the water. I felt the heat of the steam in my face, the warm steel handle in my hands; I watched the tea leaves drift and slide against the blue and white cup. He thanked me in Chinese. His dark eyes followed me. For the first time, I felt warm.

Before I left Taiwan, my mother had said, “Beware a man whose cheekbones are too high or low. Watch out for one who smiles too much.” Her warnings implied that I had a choice; that these things lay under my control. But when I was a child she had often talked about the Chinese myth that every man and every woman was joined at birth to their mate by an invisible, enchanted thread. With this story, she said that there could be no controlling fate.

The man ordered beef noodle soup and drank it quickly. He had placed his violin case in the opposite chair, upright and facing him. Then he glanced at his watch. He flung down a dollar, seized his coat and violin, and walked out the door. I looked twice to make sure it was true: he had forgotten his hat on the chair.

To this day I don’t know why I kept Tian’s hat. Perhaps his solitude gave me strength. I looked around to make sure no one watched me. Then I slipped over to his table and picked up the hat, brought it back behind my counter. He had printed his name inside: Tian Sung.

Late that night, the man reappeared in the doorway. I still remember his bare, wet head and sodden trench coat, creased with snow. He walked over and stood before me.

“You might have something of mine,” he said, in Mandarin this time.

“I don’t think so.”

“Would you please take a look?”

(9) I bent and looked under the counter. There was the hat, where I had put it. I knelt and took it into my hands. Seconds passed.

I could not give him the hat. My hands grew cold; I could not breathe. I looked at him. The storm had streaked his hair into his eyes—surely the blackest eyes of any man I’d ever met, the eyelashes laid flat with melting snow. They held an expression of deep and painful privacy. And at that moment I believed I knew(10) what would come to be. When I returned the hat, I would exchange it for the man who wore it. My senses opened; I grew large. I believed I heard, in the howling wind, a voice of admonition, but in the end I listened to the plunge and whistle of my blood. I put the hat into his beautiful, long-fingered hands.

SOCIAL SCIENCE: Passage A is adapted from an essay by Alan Williams. Passage B is adapted from an essay by Joan Simon. Both essays are from the book Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer (©2009 by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University).

Passage A by Alan Williams

 Alice Guy, later Guy Blaché, has fascinated film critics and historians since the publication of her memoir in 1976, eight years after her death and more than fifty years after her last activities as a professional filmmaker. Guy is a compelling figure for several relatively distinct reasons. There are very few obvious, clear “firsts” in film history. But Guy was definitely, unquestionably the first woman filmmaker in the his- tory of cinema. Guy had wanted, with her memoir, to reestablish her position in film history, and this is exactly what happened in the archives after 1976. For it turns out that many of her films were there all the time, but had not been identified as hers. This was and is the fate of most early filmmakers. Film prints had a distressing tendency to lose beginnings and endings with repeated showing, and directors were almost never identified in the initial titles that did survive. But armed with her book, and with a list she provided researchers of the films that she could remember making, it has been possible to (15) put her name to many “orphan” prints.

But her importance goes well beyond her films: a second way in which she is a compelling figure is her decisive participation in the elaboration of film production as an organized, industrial process. When cinema first appeared as a for-profit enterprise, filmmaking followed an artisanal model. Louis Lumière, who first clearly demonstrated the commercial possibilities of the new medium, trained his operators to photograph his cinematographer’s celebrated “views,” to develop them and make positive contact prints, and to project them to a paying audience: all the work of one person, with a single machine. George Méliès made more elaborate works, but he also did almost everything himself: he was scriptwriter, set designer, cinematographer, publicist, and star. When Guy proposed to Léon Gaumont that his company make its own films, and that she do the job, she did most work herself, assisted by a camera operator. By the time she left the company ten years later, in 1907, production had been organized, and Guy was, in modern terms, the company’s head of production. She hired, oversaw, and coordinated the work of set designers, directors, actors, and so forth, though she herself continued to direct her own films.

Passage B by Joan Simon

 Alice Guy’s confidence in her ability to write a story was one of the factors in Léon Gaumont’s granting her permission to make her first film. As she said, “In the beginning, everyone was always shooting street scenes, parades or moving trains, which I did not find terribly interesting. So one day I said to Monsieur Gaumont: ‘It seems to me we could do something better.’ Gaumont and Lumière were both inventors, and they were not interested in developing new possibilities. They were content with their technical achievement. Gaumont said to me: ‘OK . . . if you would like to . . . it’s a young girl’s thing! You want to make a film. You want to do something. Have you written a story?’, ‘Yes, I can write a story; I think I’m capable of doing something.’” Like many young people to this day who work at a second job to explore their independent creative work apart from the more quotidian ways of earning a living, Guy followed up Gaumont’s permission by working a second shift. And so, at the age of twenty-three, by her own account, Alice Guy made her first film, La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy).

The complexities of specifically dating her first film have puzzled historians. A more fundamental question seems to be this: how would a young woman, with no experience, have thought to suggest making a film, and one with a story? The short answer is that she asked and that Gaumont already had confidence in her administrative skills. The slightly longer version is that Gaumont had little reason to say no. Guy assured Gaumont that her filmmaking would not interfere with her secretarial chores. Moreover, what she proposed didn’t yet exist. At the time Gaumont saw motionpicture filmmaking as an adjunct to selling cameras, and the thought of projected motion pictures being a commercial endeavor as popular entertainment was not yet on the horizon. This “young girl’s thing”—what he may have meant by this specifically is not clear—seems to refer to something apart from the other uses of the motion-picture and other cameras, the scientific demonstrations, for example, in which Guy herself as well as Gaumont had taken part. Indeed, had commercial potential been envisioned permission might not have been so easily granted to her.

 HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the book Martha Graham: A Dancer’s Life by Russell Freedman (©1998 by Russell Freedman). Denishawn refers to the Denishawn School of Dancing, where Graham was once a student.

In 1926, Martha Graham’s first company, billed as “Martha Graham and Dance Group,” made its debut. Most of the dances, with titles like The Three Gopi Maidens and Maid with the Flaxen Hair, were reminiscent of her Denishawn days, though there were sparks of freshness and originality. Newspaper critics found Martha and her trio of dancers “decorative, pretty and undisturbing.” Graham herself would later describe those early dances as “childish things, dreadful.”

In the next few years her dances would prove daring and innovative. From 1926 through 1930 she created seventy-nine new dances for herself and her Dance Group.

In 1927 she stunned her audience with a short solo called Revolt, a dance that was anything but “decorative, pretty and undisturbing.” Revolt was Martha’s first dance of social protest, a stark, forceful comment on injustice and the outraged human spirit.

The 1920s were a decade of experimentation in all the arts—in painting, music, literature, and the theater—and a new breed of young dancers wanted to speak for the changing times in which they lived. While they respected classical ballet as an art, they felt that it could never say enough about the pressing concerns of contemporary life.

Classical ballet dated back more than three hundred years to its origins as an elegant spectacle in the royal courts of Europe. With its five basic positions of the feet, prescribed positions of the body, and geometric relationships among the dancers, ballet was a highly controlled dance form.

To the rebellious young American dancers of the time, traditional European ballet seemed decadent and undemocratic. They regarded its dashing princes and dying swans as escapist and antiquated, and its elaborate formal technique as artificial and restricting. In place of ballet’s fanciful stories they explored serious themes dealing with ordinary people and modern life. They did away with glamorous costumes and scenery and danced in simple outfits on bare stages. Their dances were meant to be challenging and disturbing.

In 1929 Martha Graham and Dance Group gave the first performance of Heretic, regarded today as her earliest major work. Dressed in white, and with loose, flowing hair, Martha danced in opposition to a double row of women clad in black Puritan garb, their hair drawn straight back and knotted, their stern faces set like white masks. Again and again the solitary heretic struggles to advance, trying to break through a barrier formed by the women in black. But each time they move rigidly in unison, blocking her way like automatons, as their bare feet slam down onto the floor. Some of the dancers lunge at the heretic, some seem to be spitting at her, while others turn their backs. Heretic was meant to be provocative. The dance can be seen as a powerful condemnation of intolerance, especially toward people who are different in some way—a theme that Graham would return to again. “To many people, I was a heretic,” she wrote. “In many ways, I showed onstage what most people came to the theater to avoid.”

(30) This new kind of dance wasn’t to everyone’s liking. It was neither beautiful nor romantic. Some critics complained that Graham’s spare, stark, unsmiling dance style seemed tortured and distorted.

Martha and her fellow “modern” dancers were often the butt of ridicule and hostile jokes. Women in America had won the right to vote only a few years earlier, in 1920, and many people were still uncomfortable with the image of the “new woman” who sought a career, spoke out on social issues, and went knowledgeably to the polls. It was all right to be a high kicking, scantily clad chorus girl, but a woman who ran a dance company and created works that commented on war, poverty, and intolerance seemed unnatural and suspicious.

Martha’s work was so startlingly different, people did not always know how to react. After one of her early recitals, a friend from her Denishawn days went backstage and said, “Martha, dear, how long do you expect to keep up this dreadful dancing?”

“As long as I have an audience,” Martha replied.

Graham’s last complete work, composed when she was ninety-six years old, is one of her most joyful. Maple Leaf Rag, a self-mocking commentary on human foibles and on her own legend, is set to the ragtime tunes of Scott Joplin. At the time of her death, she was working on a new dance, commissioned by the government of Spain.

“Many people have asked me if I have a favorite role,” Graham once said. “To which I always answer that my favorite role is the one I am dancing now.”

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article “When Birds of a Feather Mob Together, It’s Usually Bad News for Predators” by Mariette Nowak (©2000 by National Wildlife Magazine).

(33) Ornithologist Millicent Ficken was recording bird calls in Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains when she heard the screams of a Cooper’s hawk on a nearby ponderosa pine. “After the hawk’s last scream, a Steller’s jay sounded the alarm with its(38) harsh wah call,” recalls Ficken. Seconds later, a half-dozen jays were flocking about the hawk, darting in close to its back and head, and joining in a raucous chorus of wahs. Then one of the jays, despite being half the size of its target, struck the hawk on its back and sent the raptor plummeting to the ground. The hawk stood there briefly and then flew off.

Zoologists call this massing together of birds to attack a common enemy “mobbing.” In this case, the jays were mobbing a hawk that specializes in eating birds their size. A widespread phenomenon among birds, mobbing may involve a mix of bird species or, as with the jays, just one species attacking a predator. Rarely, however, do the birds actually strike the object of their wrath; the jay’s attack was the only instance that Ficken, a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has witnessed in more than 20 years of research.

In many cases, mobbing is a noisy (39) affair in which each species uses its own special calls to bring out its allies. By surveying the mobbing calls of more than 50 species of birds, Ficken has provided additional insights into this behavior. “I discovered that there is no one stereotypic pattern to the calls as had been previously believed, but an array of different vocalizations among the various species of birds,” she says.

Earlier research had suggested that mobbing calls enabled other birds to locate the bird sounding the alarm. Such calls would start abruptly and cover a wide range of frequencies, so they could be readily picked up by other birds. “The black-capped chickadee’s mobbing call is a classic example of this type,” says Ficken. But she discovered that less than half the species she studied conformed to this classic pattern.

Among other species, she found different kinds of mobbing calls. Some flock associates—birds that often hang out together—have mobbing calls unique to their groups. “Brown creepers, golden-crowned kinglets and Mexican chickadees, for instance, are frequent flock associates,” says Ficken, “and their high-pitched, buzzy mobbing calls are strikingly similar.” Bridled titmice and ruby-crowned kinglets give mobbing calls that are nearly identical. “The similarity in their calls may help to coordinate the group mobbing responses,” she adds.

(37)  Her research has also revealed some similarities within groups of birds with a common ancestry such as corvids (crows and jays), nuthatches and vireos. But underscoring the complexities of the avian world, she found that the mobbing calls within other related groups of birds such as flycatchers and chickadees were very different. Why the variation? “There are many possible reasons, such as differences in ancestry and flock associations,” says Ficken. “But we really don’t know. It’s a poorly understood area.”

Despite the differences in calls, however, the main function of mobbing appears to be to get the predator to move out of the vicinity. Stanley Temple, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sees evidence for this theory in his observations as a falconer. On one occasion, one of his red-tailed hawks caught a crow and brought it to the ground. The screaming of the captured crow sounded the alarm for the crows in a huge nearby roost and “they descended like (35) a black tornado on the hawk,” Temple recalls, and the captured crow got away.

Ficken’s observations also bear out the “move along” hypothesis. The Steller’s jays she watched in Arizona certainly sent the Cooper’s hawk on its way in a hurry. With its initial mobbing call, the first jay also put other jays on the alert, averting any surprise attacks by the hawk—another likely reason for mobbing.

One thing about mobbing is clear: It helps little birds even the odds against big predators. Ficken recently observed this in Arizona, where she saw five hummingbirds mob and chase away a northern pygmyowl more than three times their size. Says Ficken: “Even small prey species can defeat their larger enemies by mass action.”