One of the first things I noticed about JaQ Lai PO ’26 is that he likes to drink water out of a peanut butter jar. He’s one of the many characters in Claremont who catches eyes and comes up in conversations. Multiple friends of mine have commented on his always-exposed, sandal-clad toes, and you might’ve seen him around campus dancing on his skateboard or playing in an experimental music group.
When I sat down to interview him recently at Pearsons Hall, both of our favorite study spot, I finally got some explanations behind my first impressions. Since sandals aren’t uncommon in California, he told me that people probably notice his because “I present myself and dress in a certain way that gives people an ‘I’m-not-wearing-shoes-energy.’”As for the unusual water bottle, his old roommate loves Laura Scudder’s peanut butter, and the two of them would often reuse the jars as containers and drinking vessels.
This peanut butter ritual is in character considering Lai’s fascination with food, which for him plays an important role in how we relate to ourselves, the world and each other.
This interest guided him when he arrived at Pomona College from Hong Kong. He took his first-year seminar on the biological and cultural history of food, followed by additional history classes on food and environment in Asia-Pacific, eating under totalitarian Europe and Chinese culinary history. After all of these classes, he even considered building his own “food studies” major.
Lai’s interest in interpersonal connection goes beyond academic contexts. Take his well-loved mailing list, a tradition he continued from his friend Emilio Esquivel Marquez PO ’25. His mass emails — the latest addressed “Hello Fruits and Vegetables” — broadcast upcoming events, whether it was a religious studies seminar series or a concert in Los Angeles he’s planning on going to with friends.
The list is just one way he practices what he calls “unconditional invitation,” trying to move away from an “in-group” mentality or concern over “cultural capital” that can be found at the 5Cs.
Last weekend, I received a mysterious text from him: “moon parliament farm now.”
I was puzzled, but couldn’t investigate further at the time. He told me later that he was using the full moon as a chance to get his friends together at a place he loves, the Pomona farm, and bake them cookies.
“I picked the word parliament because I was tired of the word ‘gathering,’ which I was overusing,” Lai said.
Last weekend, I received a mysterious text from him: “moon parliament farm now.”
He also chose the word because of “Parliament of Fowls,” a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer that we both read for an English class called “The Beyond of Language” last semester.
“We can be like little birds, too,” he said. “And I think it’s just a beautiful word.”
Lai said that he wouldn’t have put all this energy into community if he had always felt a secure sense of belonging. When he first got to Pomona, he kept trying to ascertain: “Is this my group? Are they asking the same questions as me?”
Without this “unstable beginning,” he wouldn’t have felt so much gratitude following small moments of invitation, whether it be people starting conversations in lounges or referring back to his points in classes. This gratitude, he said, is essential to his efforts now.
“I had a really nervous experience when I started college, trying to figure out what I’m all about,” he said. “I haven’t figured out what I’m all about — it’s just the way I think about it has changed.”
His path to his major, religious studies, followed a similar process of rethinking. Lai described stumbling upon the department halfway through his time at Pomona.
“Looking back, a lot of the themes that were interesting to me in school up to that point were religious, I just didn’t necessarily think of them primarily in that way,” Lai said.
I don’t often meet people with this line of thinking, or at least those who are this conscious of it. He showed me that what we thought we knew can always be interpreted in a different way, and that this can be transformative.
It’s like what Chaucer wrote in “Parliament of Fowls”: “And out of olde books, in good faith, / Cometh al this newe science that men lere.”
I admire Lai not just for thinking about the same things in different ways, but also for different things in the same way. He explained how his interest in food has shifted to a broader interest in sensation and language, but that this is a reroute instead of a change in destination.
There’s a long precedent of comparing the experience of reading to that of eating, he told me. Take medieval Christian monastic texts, like those by theologian Hugh of Saint Victor, where reading is described with the Latin “ruminatio” (to chew the cud) as if it’s a digestive process. For Lai, it comes down to “internalization,” where the words or food “become a part of you, but at its deepest is inaccessible.”
The more I talked to Lai, the more I saw his eagerness to draw connections between everything he cares about, whether through writing essays about monasticism or hosting moon-watching parliaments with friends.
Even his name has latent connections within it. When his dad left East Timor for Australia, he shortened his name, Ni Quiaque, to just “NiQ,” leaving the Q capitalized to indicate the start of the second character. He named his son JaQ, pronounced like Jack, to match. Although JaQ isn’t short for anything, the capital Q ties him to his dad’s story, and to an invisible second name. It’s sort of like what he was telling me before: something that’s a part of him but inaccessible.
He’s exploring this idea of internalization for his thesis about Chaucer’s “Book of the Duchess.” Though you might not immediately guess that the topic falls under religious studies, he said it’s “standard to be non-standard” in that department.
My interview with Lai was prompted partly because he seemed non-standard in some ways. The further our conversation went, though, the more he made me question this.
For instance, though it seems unusual to spend so much time thinking about food, he told me that he started caring about it because it was how he experienced nostalgia for home.
“In a surface-level way, I think [this nostalgia] is pretty common, I don’t think I experience it differently from anyone else,” he said.
Perhaps Lai isn’t actually more unconventional than others. Then again, I couldn’t think of many people who would sign off an email with “Micronutritively Yours.”
If you’ve reached the end of this, you’re unconditionally invited to the religious studies snack and study sessions in the Pearsons library, hosted by Lai and the other liaisons every other Tuesday. Don’t be troubled by the solitude that studying seems to impose –– food and gratitude can bring us together.
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