From the moment she was invited to address Yale College graduates at this year’s annual Class Day celebration, author Min Jin Lee ’90 has thought a lot about the complexities they’ve been through and still face. A global pandemic. Wars. Climate change. Disruptive technologies. Job scarcity. Social distrust.“You are the so-called ‘anxious generation’ — a label that I have been considering,” Lee, a celebrated novelist, told the Class of ’26 on Old Campus today. “…You have been forced to be alert, and you deserve credit for being adaptive.”When young people ask her about confronting uncertainty and difficulty, Lee advises them to choose between the important and the urgent.For her, it became easier to understand the difference between the two when she started to think about time. She leans on the wisdom of the ancient Greeks.
Min Jin Lee ’90
Photo by Robert DeSanto
The Greeks, she told students, had two words for “time,” with very different meanings. The word chronos refers to time that can be measured, like clock time, while kairos means opportune time, “a strategic opening,” she said. “In our era when rapid change is our constant, I want you to have these time bifocals for you to either wear around your neck like a middle-aged writer or to carry in your breast pocket like a secret tool, so that whenever you face an unfamiliar situation, or experience something you may not understand, you can put them on as the author and historian of your life,” she said. For Lee, an internationally acclaimed author whose book “Pachinko” was a National Book Award finalist (and named one of the New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century”), the celebration was a sort of homecoming. About a decade after she had emigrated, at the age of 7, with her family from Seoul, South Korea, to Queens, New York, she arrived on the same Old Campus as a first-year student at Yale.On Sunday, Lee delivered her address from a stage looking out over a jubilant and often-boisterous class of 2026 celebrating their Class Day, a tradition dating back to the 19th century, when members of the graduating class gathered on Old Campus to swap stories about their experiences.Now a playful celebration of undergraduates’ time at Yale, the occasion includes the conferral of awards for excellence, remarks from class officers, student skits and songs, lots of inside jokes, and the traditional singing of the alma mater, “Bright College Years.”
