‘Time is our teacher’: Class Day at Yale

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.

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.”

And in the audience Sunday — some 36 years after Lee’s own Class Day —  were her parents. They had attended her 1990 commencement, but she hadn’t told them about Class Day, anticipating it would be hard for them to miss two days of work at their Manhattan costume jewelry shop, she said.

On Sunday, they saw it in all its vividness (and received an ovation).

Before the ceremony began, students streamed onto Old Campus by residential college, calling out college chants (“Davenport, Davenport, we are here!”) as they made their way to their seats on a sunny and decidedly warm mid-May afternoon. As tradition now has it, many students (and many university leaders) wore festive hats, often of their own making: cowboy hats and top hats (one made of playing cards), tri-cornered hats and a giant cactus, a putting green cap with golf pin and dangling ball, a boater topped by a tub of fried chicken, an ode to the City of New Haven.

Sovy Pham, an American Studies major from Atlanta, wore a hat bearing a tiny Vietnamese flag, in honor of her family’s heritage, and tiny animals arrayed to reflect the Chinese zodiac origin story, one of her interests. The first in her family to graduate from college, Pham said family members were visiting from Atlanta for four days of graduation festivities. 

“It’s a ginormous milestone,” she said. “I’m still kind of not registering everything. It’s just so exciting.”

Theo Kubovy-Weiss, an English major from New York City, wore a Muppet puppet on his head that had shared his adventures at Yale and reflected his childhood enthusiasm for “The Muppet Movie.”  (“He doesn’t have a name,” he said, “but he’s got quite the personality.”) 

Hannah Qin, who is graduating with a double major in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and History of Medicine and Science and Public Health, wore a hat topped with a plushie bull, the mascot for Trumbull College. A fan of Min Jin Lee, she said she was excited to hear her address (and had met the author at a book-signing the day before).

‘Grace of strangers’

In her address, Lee candidly addressed grave episodes that were key moments in her life, including a junior-year college tea in which an American missionary serving poor Koreans in Japan addressed the devastating consequences of bigotry on a family there. 

“Because of that college tea,” she said, “I have been privileged to spend decades of my life trying to understand the political nature of dehumanization, the power of resistance, the beauty of human resilience and the much-needed grace of strangers.” 

And it was because of that tea, Lee said, that she wrote “Pachinko,” her celebrated 2017 multigenerational saga about life for a Korean family in Japan. The novel — the second installment of her planned “Diaspora Quartet” — was also made into a popular Apple TV series.

Reflecting on her college years, Lee, who began professional life as a lawyer in Manhattan before turning to writing, portrayed herself as an uneven student. “It can be argued that I did not use my time well in college” or later in law school, she said. She even began to wonder if she had wasted her years as a student. 

But when she looks back now, she does so with a more-nuanced conception of time. Reviewing her college years through those separate lenses has allowed her to see that “what seemed deeply painful or even insignificant” were actually moments of kairos, openings for her to take risks, even if she did not recognize that at the time.

Instead, she did — and urged the graduates of 2026 to do — “what ordinary people can be expected do: to address the important needs; to keep learning when you don’t know things; to keep doing your share of the work; and to keep showing up… Nothing was wasted about your time here if you let the brightest and the darkest moments teach you to struggle better with truth. Time is our teacher, and you, Class of 2026, will not be shaken because you are well equipped for what lies ahead.”