The winter of our freshman year was subsiding into a long chill drizzle when Hugo, Varya and I decided to go treasure hunting.
The three of us had been initiated into The Harvard Advocate earlier that fall, and had recently begun our term as Pegasi, hosting all manner of arts and literary events at 21 South Street. Varya and Hugo were a beautiful blonde pair of best friends, intimidatingly cultured and European. If you had asked me to describe, in the Greco-Roman style, which of us formed which portion of a Pegasus’ body, I would certainly have called myself the butt. Unfailingly thoughtful and kind, my new friends were always proposing clever ideas for the magazine: launch parties and zines, wine nights with themes like “the virgin mary’s annunciation” and flea markets where acquaintances of theirs sold clay ashtrays or played the flute. They were tapped into a campus arts community I was just beginning to be aware of.
Game as I was to plan and host, I found myself perpetually dismayed by the house at 21 South. I felt it was a place that one must love either very little, or with one’s whole being: little enough to not despair at the house’s disrepair, or wholly enough that despair crescendoed to a point of action.
I was inclined to despair. I had joined the Advocate to write; I didn’t have a vision for the organization beyond the point of my pen. Varya and Hugo were art connoisseurs with developed taste, and saw what the house could become if lovingly restored. Their despair had bubbled over into a cheery, planful optimism. I admired their spunk; but even if I hadn’t, as Pegasus hindquarters, I was compelled to follow suit whenever they took to the skies.
And so our treasure hunt began. We haven’t paused since.
Beginning in the “banana room,” we worked our way through the downstairs. Menstrual cup: check. Expired Benadryl: check. Baby boot: check. 21 South yielded its junk reluctantly. Most of it was glued together by unidentifiable Franzia-scented sludge and coated in a similarly sticky dust.
Consequently, we were surprised when the discoveries began. As stingy as Mother Advocate was with her hoard, she was liberal with her secrets. Amidst heaps of issues from 2020 we found a thick blue card inviting us to a debutante ball thirty years past. Chagrined to have missed the RSVP deadline, we kept searching and were soon rewarded: buried in the President’s desk were the minutes from the executive board meeting during which members agreed to admit women among their ranks – but not let them hold office!
Treasure hunting in our building was not a linear sort of time travel but a looping, cyclical one: a tidbit discovered just twenty minutes prior would match perfectly with another presently grasped in one’s hand – but the former, in the jumbled span of those minutes, would once again have been lost. Existing in the building was less like traveling in a time machine than like bumping around against the undigested contents of time’s stomach.
We were totally overwhelmed: despair had vanished in place of wonder. X didn’t mark the spot so much as it marked every spot. We cleaned the President’s office and a month later it was stacked to the waist with boxes. I hung an evil eye from a vanity, and for good luck, the three of us took a Pegasus selfie inside its mirror. March arrived – April departed. Greeting incoming first-years at Visitas, we hauled out a pile of back issues to be cut up and collaged. None of the kids were very interested; nor were we. 21 South still deluged us with its mess.
We cleaned the banana room again; we did the dishes; we knew summer had arrived when the condensation fogging our windows after Friday night parties lingered until midday Saturday. This was our sign; we left.
September swooped in with hot breath. The house on 21 South Street, freshly repainted by our dedicated Publisher, Primo, was sparklier but smelled the same: like an old place filled with young people. Varya and Hugo were as stubbornly caring and careful as ever. That fall, the magazine began revealing its more intangible treasures: chairs half-broken to the curve of a nap; thick gray couches that just kept giving – cockroaches, crumbs, and ample room for a group of friends to yap until the wee morning.
All of us were driven to join the magazine from a love for arts and literature. But it would be a lie to say that we were not also allured by the aesthetics of the place: its warm wooden beams and old books, plastic vines and cheap wines, members who dressed for Halloween at nearly every party irregardless of season. The magazine’s history seemed a performance to be reenacted, over and over again, from late summer to the death of spring.
As autumn progressed into another snowless winter, these apparent treasures proved to be tricky ones. It was all too easy to become fixated on the performance of “artsy intelligentsia,” at the cost of actual artfulness or intelligence – to forget the collective duties we held to the publication and to one another. But whenever we became too absorbed in reenacting the magazine’s past, Ma Advo would guide us toward another treasure: an envelope of advice from an old executive board (Get some motherfucking momentum going and do NOT lose it). Crumpled photographs depicting un-aestheticized, unaffected joy. These missives from peers-long-grown nudged us forward, even as we looked to our history for guidance. They showed me what I loved most about the Advocate: that we got to create art together – all while being dramatic, overdressed, and sweaty.
Mostly this meant killing a lot of cockroaches, having a lot of arguments about writing, and mopping a lot of floors. Occasionally we drank wine and did stupid things. Always our President, Annika, took exquisite care to ensure that the Advocate had enough money, time, and random other resources (wax; fake blood; eye masks) to make our present possible and our future encouraging.
Autumn passed in another flurry of launch parties, concerts, cafes, and a newly-patented Pegasus event: “Beautification Days.” Hugo, Varya, and I had begun our term as Pegs with grand plans to fix everything that made us despair about the magazine: to clean shit out, open the building up, hasten the pandemic recovery that our former President Albert had begun and that Annika was pouring her heart into. But as despair turned to wonder and wonder into planning, the building constantly reminded us that we could do nothing alone – not even hunting for treasure.
Beautification Days (euphemistically named because we worried that “Cleaning Days” might put people off; optimistically named because we hoped that if we ever got enough cleaning done, we might eventually decorate) were our effort to bring all of Ma Advo’s children together in the restoration project. So we mopped and argued; we began naming our cockroaches and leaving them outside the university gym. October arrived and November soon followed. On the Beautification Day after fall semester initiations, cherubs began collaging old issues together for framing; others strung fairy lights across the ceiling.
We spent countless hours every semester putting the magazine together – but each board operated on their own, and writers on their lonesome. There was something magical about working together to physically transform the building we all shared. I loved being a Pegasus. I loved how generous 21 South was with its inhabitants, how my coziest sweaters spawned from its dustiest corners. And I loved how generous its inhabitants were with one another – lending clothes, ears, theremins, company. A year prior I had been reluctant to care for the magazine; now I seemed unable not to. I felt I could parse through the Advocate’s treasures forever, constantly surprised and occasionally jump-scared. My friends and I joked about having sleepovers in the building. Very rarely, when the floors were especially clean, I fantasized that we might all move in together.
This spring, the Advocate community has been enjoying the building we worked together to refurbish – and taking big steps to make our home a more inclusive space. We’ve conducted a comprehensive Diversity and Inclusion review of our process for admitting new members. Our newfound financial stability has enabled us to continue increasing the amount of support we offer to members through our recently-established financial aid program. We’ve hosted our typical parade of arts and literary events, from flea markets to art shows and essay readings. And yes – parties. Parties galore.
Sometimes all these awesome happenings make an even more awesome mess. Sometimes, I confess, I still experience an urge to de-jumble the place: to order and stack, optimize and chronologize. To spend my summer sorting our 150+ years of archives; to raise the money to buy new couches, retile the kitchen, furnish the bathroom. Varya and I will accomplish some of these things. But we’d be doing a disservice to our successors if we plumbed all the magazine’s secrets now, or oiled all its joints. Without their own strange treasure hunt through Ma Advo’s time-warp, how could they unearth their own love for 21 South?
I am always reminding myself to do as Annika wisely did: to leave the building better than she found it, and secret a few treasures away for future generations. So we gather tidbits for a Leap Day time capsule, collecting them in a used cake box; we tuck photographs deep in desk drawers; we present to you: The Harvard Advocate, Spring 2024.
This semester, the Features board asks you to dance. Roxy Hreb ‘26 meditates on pretense and performance as “Miss Savoir Faire”; while in “Afterlives,” Vanessa Hu ‘24 contemplates her ghostly presence on the dance floor. What does it mean to be here and not here, present but pretending? In respective interviews with literary critics Parul Sehgal and Adam Schatz, Tess Wayland ‘26 and Sazi Bongwe ‘26 discuss the art of political writing, and the vital ability to change one’s own mind. Does being a critic – and continually refining one’s critiques – mean being a consistent person with inconsistent ideas?
Where do ideas even come from, and when? Serena Jampel ‘25 and Katie Catulle ‘24 chat with author Lily King on shower thoughts and writing fiction about real people. The Fiction board sweeps us into the lives of the almost-real: Ellie Powell ‘25 cheekily reminds us that being a woman can be embarrassing; Ogechi Obi ‘26 unfolds the more sinister absurdities of female embodiment in the 21st century.
Frank Liu ‘26 designed the cover, which depicts “a cipher of ADVOCATE referencing Albrecht Durer’s monogram and medieval signatures, with some pseudo-Chinese elements.” I’m not sure what this means but I think that the cover is pretty cool, and that deciphering is a pretty good analogy for treasure hunting. As you dig through this issue, we hope that like Lily King, you “get ideas while reading” — a great description of art’s magical ability to reproduce itself in new forms.
I’d like to introduce you to Joann and Ingrid; to Mary and John; to a nameless narrator with many named friends; to the debutante’s Viennese waltz, and the social rhythms of bachata dancing in Seattle. Here is a bowl of crab fried rice. Here are sheafs of dreams and caducei. Here is an old woman, clutching a large baby doll, standing on a larger tortilla.
And here’s a secret – you only had to dig through my ciphers to find it: these pages will carry you across the globe; and the entire time that you are reading, you will be inside The Harvard Advocate. We offer to you the gift that Ma Advo offers to us: to always be traveling, and to always be at home. We gather art in our pages as we gather art in our spaces. Because art gives us wings and we may not be flying Pegasi, but we certainly look sexy in our costumes.
We love our magazine. We hope you love it, too.
Let your treasure hunt begin!
Maren Elizabeth Yoke Ping Wong
PRESIDENT
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2025