However, that beauty is quickly coming to an end. Soon, one of the more peaceful and open sections of campus will be replaced by a four-to-five story dormitory and cafeteria that will make one of the few remaining open areas on campus cramped.

Expected to be completed by 2014, the new complex will include two new dormitories and a new cafeteria. Also included in the plans are the closure of the Student Union following the completion of this project.

Most college campuses, especially in the Northeast, show their heritage through the aged buildings on campus. The old brick and mortar buildings stand as a testament to all that the university has accomplished. Some of these buildings date back to the 1700s in the case of the Ivy League. Shouldn’t the older structures be the ones that are most worth preserving?

We’re a young university when compared to others in our area, we’ve just passed the half-century mark. How would it feel to one day bring your children back to this campus, say 20 years from now, and not be able to recognize most of the buildings? It would feel probably as if you had lost a part of your personal history.

Not only will the building of these new dormitories further decrease the open space on campus, but they would also become an eyesore on the skyline. Sitting outside on the patio of the Wang Center, it’s nice to look out and see blue sky and trees. Imagine looking at that same skyline a few years from now, and seeing dormitories instead of that once wide open sky.

It’s sort of ironic in a way. By adding new buildings, we’re actually beginning to destroy the heritage of our own university.

This isn’t to say that modernizing the campus’ structures is inherently bad. It’s important. Even the oldest universities have constructed new buildings in recent years. They’re easier to maintain and some people enjoy walking into a modern building the first time they visit a campus.

There just simply is no need to attempt to condense the entire campus into one very small section of an enormous plot of land. If we really wish to expand our campus, why not venture into areas that aren’t being used? Sure, that would involve removing portions of the larger wooded areas on campus, but it’d be better to have some breathing room.

Stony Brook has accomplished a lot in its short life, and we will continue to do great things in decades to come. Let’s just be sure that the Stony Brook we know now, will be the same decades from now.

“I won’t start one, but I won’t walk away from one either,” Tyson said in the documentary. The 45-year-old holds the record as the youngest boxer to win the World Boxing Council, World Boxing Association and International Boxing Federation heavyweight titles; he was 20 years old at the time.

The documentary started off with Tyson reminiscing about his early years. At the age of 12 he was arrested for the first time, and by the age of 13, he had been arrested nearly 38 times. Tyson was sent to Tryon School for Boys in Johnstown, New York. It was at this school that Tyson was introduced to the sport of boxing and was discovered by Bobby Stewart, a juvenile detention counselor and former boxer. Stewart trained Tyson for a few months before he introduced him to Constantine “Cus” D’Amato.

Tyson and Cus’s relationship was stronger than that of any other trainer and fighter. “Even though he is my manager and trainer, I forget that sometimes,” Tyson said in the documentary. In the winter of 1985, Cus passed away leaving Tyson, who was 19 at the time, heartbroken and lost. “I felt very naked to the world,” Tyson said. “He taught me to be furious inside and out.” In the year that followed Cus’s death, Tyson became the Heavy Weight Champion of the World. “I wore the belt around my waist for three weeks,” Tyson said, adding, “I even wore it to the store, I was so proud.”

His life took a turn for the worse when he was accused of raping an 18-year-old girl in July of 1991. On February 10, 1992, Tyson was convicted of rape and was sentenced to three years in prison. “It basically took the life out of me,” Tyson said. “It’s a hard pillow to sleep on.” After being released from prison, he went back to fighting and won the Heavy Weight title one last time in 1996. He is now retired with six kids, and he ended the documentary by saying, “What I did in my past is history and what I do in the future is a mystery.”

Following the documentary, a panel discussion was held, hosted by Jed Morey, publisher of the Long Island Press, to “discuss the role of drug and alcohol abuse, and the social construction of masculinity in spiking incidences of violence against women.” Other panelists included: Nicole Behrens, Vice President at Merrill Lynch, who endured an abusive relationship for over a decade, and is now a board member of The Retreat. Charles Robbins, DSW, LCSW, Vice President for Undergraduate Education and Dean of the Undergraduate Colleges here at Stony Brook. He is also a clinical consultant and member of the leadership council of Long Island Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (LICADD). Paul Hokemeyer, J.D., Ph.D., a licensed family therapist, and a part of the Dr. Oz Show Panel of Experts, and Robert Lenahan, the Police Chief for the University Police Department since 2008.

All panelists agreed that violence is about control. Robbins made a clear point that, “not all abusers look like Mike Tyson. It’s not a cookie cutter; people don’t look a certain type.”

Behrens indicated a few key signs that might reveal a domestic violence situation. For example, needing to know where you are and who you are with all the time, and making you believe everyone else in your life, like your family, isn’t looking out for your best interests, like they are. “Tyson never referred to women as an individual, more like an object,” Behrens said.

Robbins added, “We need to be careful to not look for the stereotypes.”

Behrens openly admitted that she was in an abusive relationship. “It’s a slow process; they chip away at your self-esteem and self worth.”

When asked if fighters are prone to be aggressive, Lenahan said “domestic violence crosses all borders.” Being a former Deputy Inspector for the New York City Police Department, he was responsible for implementing aggressive crime reduction strategies which assisted in overall crime reduction throughout NYC.

The panelists closed with remarks about educating others about domestic violence. Behrens made an important statement that, “educating young men and women to look for these sign is something that needs to be done.”

It was certainly an important evening at the Wang Center, which educated those who attended about the subject of domestic violence and what we all can do to help prevent it. Tyson was really hard-hitting, giving the audience a brutally honest look into the life of the notorious former World Heavy Weight Champion.

Singgalot is produced by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program. According to the program, the exhibit “details the history of Filipinos in America, honors early immigrant pioneers… and addresses the community and culture of Filipino-Americans through historically-significant photographs.”

“It’s very informative and really interesting,” said Del Fierro, a sophomore and marine biology major. Del Fierro was born into a half-Filipino, half-Caucasian family. “To see my history laid out for me was just amazing.”

Each black and white photograph depicts Filipinos throughout history. Most of these film clips of historic moments donated by the Filipino American National Historical Society National Office, Filipinas Magazine and the descendants of the families displayed. For example, the Borabod Family of New Orleans and the Bacalso Family of Chicago were among the first Filipino immigrants who were hired as “sakadas,” or contract laborers, from 1906 to 1935.

There are also charts and graphs showing the “Population of Filipinos in the U.S.” This includes the “States with the Largest Concentration of Filipinos in 2000,” both pure and mixed, as well as the population of “Filipinos in the U.S. Trust Territories/Micronesia.”

But the pictures and charts do not just provide information.

“It shows how they overcome the challenges,” explained Nidihi Nair, 23, a student assistant for the Asian-American Program at Stony Brook University.

The panels narrate the fascinating story of an ethnic group colonized by the Spanish for more than 300 years that gained freedom only to be handed over to another colonizer, the United States, after the Spanish-American War in 1898. Each panel told a story of each struggle Filipino immigrants had to face while on American soil before finally being granted citizenship in 1946 along with the independence of their home country.

The exhibit has been touring the country since 2008, visiting states with large Filipino communities such as California, Illinois and Pennsylvania. This year, it has made its final stop in New York, specifically in Stony Brook.

“It’s good because it’s not in a large area like Manhattan but here in Long Island,” said Jennifer Iacona, the Program Coordinator of the Asian-American Program.

Not many students have visited the exhibit since it’s opened.

“It’s mostly been slow for now,” Iacona admits.

However, both the Community Opening Program on the March 3rd and the Campus Opening Reception a few days later on the March 8th have already received many responses from interested patrons, both students and non-students. Iacona is confident that the number of visitors will grow in the upcoming weeks.

Meanwhile, Del Fierro would love to attend either one of the programs if his schedule allows him.

“I don’t think Filipinos in America realize that there is such a culture,” he said. “Just because I’m Filipino doesn’t mean I’ll just act like a Filipino, or I’m an American so I’ll just act like an American. No, there’s also a Filipino-American culture.”

The exhibit in the Skylight Lobby of the Wang Center, open weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and weekends from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., includes artifacts from the World Trade Center site, a display of letters and notes for those that were considered missing and a timeline of events with carefully chosen images.

“Every artifact has some story embedded in it,” Mark Schaming, director of exhibitions and programs for the State Museum, said. “Objects are carriers of stories—powerful vessels, touchstones to a moment in history.”

The artifacts, all of which came from the New York State Museum’s collection, hold a specific significance to their location. For Stony Brook, the focus is on the story of commuters, he said.

A large flag frayed at the bottom that was draped over a fire engine during the recovery effort hangs over the reflective pool in the exhibit, just in front of a 35-foot timeline of the events and images. Also included is a panel from a Ladder 3 fire truck, keys from the World Trade Center and a triptych, a three-part panel used to barricade commuters from the rubble.

It took more than 100 people— curators, writers, designers, truckers, etc.— to organize and construct the exhibits, Schaming said, and such a sensitive project came with pressure.

“It’s not like anything we’ve done,” he said. Every image used in the timeline had to be carefully chosen and every piece of information had to be verified by three sources.

Each artifact was carefully handled, wrapped and transported in state vans and trucks from the State Museum in the capital to each location, and they will all be returned there once the exhibits close at the end of the month.

The State Museum has a collection of 2,000 artifacts, the largest in the nation, which the New York City Police Department, an FBI recovery team, 25 state and federal agencies and 14 private contractors inspected at the World Trade Center Recovery Operation at Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island. Only the artifacts that weren’t essential to the crime scene nor claimed as personal property, were transported to the museum.

“Stony Brook University is proud and honored to be selected by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York State Museum, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum as a host location for the ‘New York Remembers’ exhibition,” President Samuel Stanley said. “As home to the Long Island World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program, under the direction of Dr. Benjamin Luft, we anticipate that the Stony Brook University location will hold a high level of interest with the many thousands of first responders who are being cared for under that program, their family members and all Long Islanders who want to view this moving memorial exhibit.”

Performing comedy is hard enough when you speak the same language as your audience. The Yamamoto family’s success with their Wang Center performance of kyogen plays—stories taken nearly seven thousand miles and seven hundred years from their origin—was an impressive feat. All the more so when you consider how the audience was asked to put together what was happening by combining their perceptions of the live performance on stage with readings of subtitle-like translated text on stage-side monitors.

Unlike the naturalistic style of US theatre, kyogen is highly stylized and doesn’t attempt to create the illusion of reality—much like other Japanese theatrical traditions better known here such as kabuki or noh. The performers hold their faces frozen in perfectly still masks, use a formalized, sing-song cadence to compensate for the loss of facial expression and occasionally address the audience directly in almost vaudevillian manner. If the two plays chosen for the March 22 performance were indicative of typical content, maybe the best Western example to which kyogen could be compared is the work of English comedian and television star Ricky Gervais. The creator of The Office and Extras may be out of touch with feudal Japan, but there is a commonality in the kind of comedy he helped popularized, which can show silliness in one moment, and grimly real stupidity and cruelty in the next.

The first play, “Stop in Your Tracks”, begins with a buffoonish samurai who wants to look good for a party and orders his servant to borrow tea from the samurai’s uncle. The samurai is inadequate, however. His servant must, embarrassingly, expand the request for tea into begging for the sword and horse his master should already have. On the way to the party, circumstances conspire to create a role reversal, and the put-upon servant delivers back the abuse he has received from his master.

In the second play, “Moon-viewing Blind Man”, the title character meets a new friend while out for a walk one night. After apparently bonding with the man, his friend decides it would be funny to return and pretend to be someone else. The old blind man is confronted by a seemingly belligerent stranger, who picks a fight with him and throws him to the ground, disorienting him and separating him from his walking stick.

The second play hinted at a complexity in the canon of 200 or so kyogen stories. The event’s program used the word cynical to get at this face of kyogen; in a question and answer period following the show, actor Yamamoto Noritoshi called it, through a translator, philosophical. While the exact nature of this ineffable complication may be hard to pin down, the resulting bitter undertones made for a memorable evening of comedy.

Three of the traveling company’s four players come from the same aristocratic family with a long and celebrated kyogen tradition. They come to Stony Brook with a dizzying array of international cultural bona fides to go with their generations of family practice. Yamamoto Noritoshi was joined onstage by his son Yamamoto Norihide and nephew Yamamoto Yasutaro. Also joining the three was Wakamatsu Takashi, a student of Yamamoto Noritoshi’s brother. Kyogen theatre was developed to provide lighter interludes during a day of multiple noh dramas.

The Wang Center’s next cultural performance will be the April 15 show “Wounds Unkissed” by YaliniDream, featuring poetry, theatre, dance, hip hop, house and aerial circus. More information is available at www.stonybrook.edu/wang.

They say music and math are the universal languages. This was evident on February 25, when the Persian world music ensemble Niyaz played a sold out show at the Charles B. Wang Center. A fusion of Middle Eastern poetry and contemporary electronica, the group seeks to elevate the standing of Middle Eastern music and culture by raising the public’s awareness of what exists and what can be created out of it.

Niyaz started as an outlet for lead singer Azam Ali and multi-instrumentalist Loga Ramin Torkian. It was a safe space for them to share the music of their native Iran. But Niyaz is more than just Iranian music. Ali was born in Iran, but grew up in India before moving to the United States as a teenager. Oud player Naser Musa is a native Palestinian who grew up in Jordan. Their cultures blend together with contemporary music to produce something uniquely new. Ali feels that their music is “the story of our generation, of immigrants.” She noted that those who live outside of the West “often confuse modernization with westernization” and that it was their goal to “create something modernized without it being labeled westernized.”

Niyaz achieves just that. Even though it is heavily influenced and enhanced by technology, Niyaz cannot be mistaken for western music. Western music does not use the tabla (played masterfully by Gurpreet Chana) or the oud. Western music does not incorporate the poetry of the Sufi mystic Rumi. Western music does not use Turkish hunting on how a hunter is reminded of his love in everything he sees and finds himself unable to harm anything as the basis for songs. Western music does not create chants songs that feature oud players with fantastic voices doing solos in the distinct melisma, the singing of a single syllable while moving between notes in rapid succession, of Middle Eastern music. Western musicians don’t have a tendency to revive 16th Century instruments like the GuitarViol, a bowed guitar that died off in the 1800s due to the popularization of the violin family, but Torkian did just that.

And yet, during the question and answer session, all the musicians spoke of familiar themes. The desire to belong, a bridge to connect one’s past self with who he or she is now, music as a sense of identity—these are the musings of each person. As the token white guy, Jess Stroup joked, “Different cultures can like each other.”

There was one somber note in the evening; during the question and answer session, Ali was asked how she felt about the fact that she would never be able to perform her music in her native Iran. She was saddened by what she knew to be true. It would be impossible for her ever to perform publically there. She had given up on any hope of ever performing at home.

But, she noted that there was one positive thing to come out of the Iranian political turmoil of the last generation. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, all western music was banned. What followed was a renaissance of native Persian music. But following that, there was another crack down.

This momentary lapse into discussions of censorship and the longing to go home was interrupted, however, when an adorable child walked onto stage. The boy, Iman, was the son of Ali and her husband and band-mate Torkian. The Q&A session ended when Ms. Ali stated that she had to go, as her son wanted someone with whom to play with his trains.

As for Niyaz, they’re not sure what they’ll do next. They’ve already put out two albums. (The more recent, Nine Heavens, came out in June 2008.) Whatever their next work is, it will focus on cultural commonalities—like the fact that everyone, regardless of their ethnicity, can find small children, playing, to be adorable.

When Jacqueline Newman was engaged, she was given her very first Chinese cookbook as a gift. Fifty-four years later, Newman has compiled the World’s largest English-language Chinese cookbook collection, continuing over 3,000 books. Her complete collection, reported to be worth $400,000, was generously donated to Stony Brook University, first with the opening of the Wang Center in 2002, and the rest of it, just earlier this year. Newman’s collection provides Stony Brook with a total of 7,000 items, ranging from herbal medicine books, to cuisine magazines, to thousands of slides.

Newman grew up in Manhattan with a single mother who worked as a pharmacist. It was while her mother filled out prescriptions that Newman became exposed to the Chinese way of life, as she spent time with a Chinese friend of her mother’s for the good portion of her childhood. “Because she had two boys, I would always be around the kitchen helping out,” said Newman about her mother’s friend.  Thus Newman slowly acquired a taste for Chinese food. As a student of NYU, Newman was undecided as to what she wanted to study and grew frustrated by her clear lack of direction in her life. “One day the department said to me, you got to decide what it is that you want to do, and I felt pestered by their question.” Newman’s answer to the troubling questions that all college students face was Chinese food. Newman’s thesis, called “Chinese Food: The Nature and Direction of Change,” was based on the study of Chinese immigrants and changes in the style of their traditional foods. In addition to increasing her collection, Newman, a registered dietician, was a professor at CUNY Queens of food science and is the Editor-In-Chief of Flavor & Fortune founded in 1994, the only Chinese recipe magazine in the United States.

Having a Chinese culinary expert for a grandmother was something that did not phase Newman’s family. Leo Wolcott, Newman’s son-in-law, had a southern upbringing, but said, “now I try everything (pointing to a picture of silkworm cocoons) and you’d be surprised a lot of the things taste very good.” For Devin, a college student, and Emily, a senior in high school, their grandmother’s cooking is a treat and allows them to travel the world and try new things. “I mean we are the most atypical Jewish people I know, I mean for example we eat all types of different foods and experience different things than most people would,” said Emily. Devin, who says her grandmother travels the world for the sake of food, also added that, “she knows what she is doing and is an amazing cook. She cooks so many different types and varieties of food, it’s just awesome.” Newman’s spouse, Lenny, appreciates and enjoys the many foods his wife cooks. “Whenever she caters to a large party, she usually chooses recipes she has never tried before, and yet it always comes out excellent,” said Lenny.

After her engagement, Newman was selective about the books she bought, because  “it was financially unreasonable at the time to buy every book I saw,” according to Newman. However, ten years after her marriage, Newman saw her collection growing into an investment. Soon after, her investment had become somewhat of a competition. “It was a game to see who could collect more, but that was when I was younger which was always fun.” Yet as Newman became more professionally involved, she was more interested in donating her collection for the good of culinary, sociology, and anthropology studies.

Newman’s collection, which dwarfs the United States Library of Congress’ collection of related Chinese books and pieces by twice the amount, sparked interest from many universities such as Iowa State, which offered money for Newman’s collection. “They offered me money but I refused. When you sell something you give away your own personal right and they (Iowa State) would have the right to do whatever they wanted and that did not sit well with me.” In addition to the rights, the location of Iowa State was far away from Newman’s native Manhattan and current Long Island sanctuary. Newman also turned down CUNY Queens due to its lack of understanding and inability to house something as valuable as Newman’s collection.

Stony Brook would become home to Newman’s collection because of the growth in the food science department as well as the Asian American Studies programs and the unique addition of the Wang Center. Newman said how the library collection staff has also done an exceptional job making her collection available for free and accessible online. Newman added that she hopes a lot of people will use her collection as guidance whether they are interested in becoming chefs, sociologists, or even anthropologists.

Newman explained how there are three things that are vital to one’s existence in life, “a house to live in, clothing to wear, and food to eat,” and according to Newman, food is not something one just eats, rather it is a lifestyle and a taste of culture that one experiences.

Kristina Wong wants to make you uncomfortable. After all, it’s when we’re uncomfortable that we really start thinking. It was with this in mind that she brought her one-woman show, “Wong Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” to Stony Brook’s Wang Center on April 10.

“Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is about the high rates of anxiety, depression and suicide among Asian-American women. Described as “swear-to-God-not-autobiographical,” the show is centered on Kristina’s presentation of why Asian-American women suffer from such issues and what, if anything, can be done. Like many similar shows focusing on a dark subject, Kristina strives to raise awareness and exercise the topic’s demons through comedy. Her humor is invasive, yet, at its core, mostly innocent. When explaining the concept of the climax of a dramatic story, she faked an orgasm for a solid minute, leaving the audience shifting in their seats and nervously laughing. Even when Wong sought to drive an important point or message home, she was able to mix in a bit of light-hearted humor, keeping the audience on their toes and in anticipation of her next move.

Perhaps the most memorable aspect of her show was the way she kept the audience involved in the flow and narrative of the performance. Wong would stop her lesson-style monologues to chat (or sometimes argue) with a member of the audience. (In fact, The Stony Brook Press’ own Arts Editor, Andrew Fraley, was the target of one such tangent, in which Wong pleaded with Fraley for the chance to touch his “white-people” hair.) At other points in the performance, she urged (or, dare I say, forced) the audience to stand up and sing “We Are The World”, or chant an improvised song she cooked up during one of her more frenetic moments on stage. This aggressive, in-your-face style was a refreshing change from most shows and helped keep the audience both engaged, uncomfortable and completely aware of the very serious messages she presented.

Following the performance, the audience and three panelists, including Kristina, participated in a question and answer session regarding the central themes espoused in the show. The panel served as a more stripped version of the performance, allowing Kristina and the audience to tackle some of the issues in a more direct fashion.

“It was amazing. The performance just struck home so much,” said Yina Chun, a sophomore and editor of the Asian-American E-Zine here at Stony Brook, after the show. The rest of the audience seemed to echo her sentiments.

Kristina’s website, www.kristinawong.org, serves as a venue for her booking, upcoming shows, blog and similar. The layout and content of the site follows the same sort of charming humor that made “Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” so appealing. Later in April, Kristina will be performing in both Queens and Manhattan if you want to catch her. Dates and venues are available on her site. Either way, let’s hope that the next time she’s in the area she pops in for a visit to Stony Brook and, once more, makes us uncomfortable.

Ever since the Charles B. Wang Center was officially opened in 2002, many have anticipated the opening of the gift shop across from the popular Asian restaurant, Jasmine. Well, finally, on April 1, 2008, the Wang Center’s gift shop was opened. At first, it seemed like an elaborate April Fool’s joke played by the ol’ rascals in Administration. However, upon further investigation, the opening was found not to be a hoax. After six long years, the long-empty gift shop has finally opened.

The store is similar to other gift stores throughout campus in the fact that it sells a myriad of Seawolves and Stony Brook-themed apparel. From t-shirts and boxer shorts, to ties and handbags, the Wang Center gift shop has it all. (Disappointingly however, there is no “Wang Center” specific merchandise.) In addition to clothing, the gift shop carries a small selection of jewelry including necklaces and hand-made wampum. Still, some students believe that the gift shop doesn’t offer anything extraordinary. “I think they could offer a wider selection of things. There isn’t really anything good in there,” said freshman Jessie Stanzione. FSA Director of Marketing and Communications Angela Agnello was unable to comment on the future plans for the gift shop.

Student opinions on the gift shop are varied. “I think it’s pointless. There are a lot of things that the school needs before they open another location for us to buy Stony Brook t-shirts,” voiced junior Matt Finelli. Junior Joe Pietrafesa had a different opinion, claiming that the gift shop “is a great addition to an already great facility.”

The Wang Center gift shop is open Monday through Friday from 11am to 6pm and is located on the second floor of the Charles B. Wang Center.