Now, before you yell at me for my naïveté, I only do this at Kenyon. Nowhere else do I leave my belongings on a table in a public place, gallivant around and trust that everything remains intact. Only at Kenyon do I allow myself to be that trusting, because I believe I’m part of a community where people are — wait for it — respectful and kind.
My worldview turned upside down at Tops vs. Bottoms, an all-campus party two weeks ago. In the 30 minutes from when I put my puffer down on the coat table to when I returned, my jacket was gone. Ever the optimist, I thought somebody had taken it by mistake. After days of asking for help on allstu and Yik Yak, I found the puffer shoved into the Peirce lost-and-found box. Checking the pockets, I sighed in relief. My wallet was still there. Then I opened it. Empty. All of my cash gone. Not just the USD, but also the VND (Vietnamese currency) from the last time I was home in Vietnam.
In the following week, as I intermittently pondered this incident (and the implication of Hồ Chí Minh’s face, printed on polymer, landing in someone’s wallet via thievery), I blamed myself. That is, until a similar violation befell a friend: She left her wallet in Peirce Pub, got food and came back to find her wallet stolen. While a Campus Safety officer managed to find it just an hour later, the wallet came back to my friend lighter. Her money was gone.
Once is an isolated incident. Twice is a K-pop girl group, and a pattern. While I’m all for being careful with our stuff, I’m dismayed at having to worry about my possessions being purloined if I want to take a minute to enjoy the spring weather outside. I want to feel safe about my belongings in the presence of other Kenyon people again.
Maybe it’s foolish to deem strangers trustworthy just because they also go to Kenyon. But what is community without trust? My sociology theory reading would say that my trust is not misplaced. When I identify with a collective, that identification comes with a set of assumptions not necessarily dictated by the truth. So despite the truth being that some among us are willing to benefit at others’ expense, it’s vital to our sense of belonging at Kenyon that we believe, however guilelessly, that everybody looks out for each other, or at the very least, intends to do no harm to one another.
We all have stories concerning someone’s shocking lack of care toward other people: a name-tagged tub of Jeni’s ice cream gone from the communal fridge, clothes tossed to the laundry room’s floor, a moldy cup that a suitemate left out nurturing a whole new ecosystem. But stories of kindness also abound. Lost items swiftly returned after an all-stu email, shared car rides from the airport offered at no price and stray cats fed by a whole “village.”
Of course, it’s an actual pressing security concern if someone stole from both my friend and me, and will steal from others. But I’m also considering how a community of strangers learns to trust each other, and what can fracture that trust. Monetary theft is indeed one pollutant, but so are smaller acts of unkindness, like stealing food and displacing others’ laundry. Have I, out of momentary exhaustion or thoughtlessness, done something to dent community trust? I think that’s a question worth asking ourselves.
Going forward, I will be more guarded over my belongings, which many would say is an apt lesson. At the same time, I wonder if it’s better to revise my trust and move around Kenyon with more caution, or to continue believing in the best of this collective’s members. That is my other question for us.
Perhaps I should worry about getting my money back rather than raising sociologically loaded queries about what it means to be part of a community. But I might as well do this while I’m at a place filled with people who’ll entertain my theft-induced musings. In the meantime, if the person who took my money (not out of malice but maybe a very human moment of self-interest) wants to mend some community trust, my PayPal can be found with my Kenyon email address.
Chau Anh Nguyen ’27 is an English and sociology major from Hanoi, Vietnam. She can be reached at nguyen14@kenyon.edu.