07 Reflection

When i sat down and reflected on my experiences as a Freshman at Tufts, i realized that i had never before really sat down and thougt about my experiences. It was really refreshing to be able to mull on these thoughts, something that i think should be done pretty often. There were just so many thought swimming through my mind, i wouldn't be able to write them if i wanted. I guess my thoughts slowly moved to my accomplishments this year and how i will be able to do more than i had this year. It ultimately went to thoughts upon freedom and how my views of freedom has changed over the year.
It felt good to really sit down and remember everything that had already happened to me during Freshman year. When i first entered college, i remembered thinking of all the freedoms that i would have. But as the year progressed i found that it wasn't the freedom that i had craved, it was the independence. Freedom was fine, but if i didn't have the ability to manage that freedom, it would be as if i had never had any freedom in the first place.
I guess in the end it came down to me realizing that freedom wasn't exactly what i thought it was, and how freedom comes with a price.

Literary Analysis Paragraph

While most books that attempts to bring light to issues like these tend to use a more serious approach, American Born Chinese tries to bring light to issues such as these in a humorous light. Gene Luen Yang tries to get readers to laugh at these issues. By thrusting these issues in the reader’s face, he forces them to acknowledge these racial stereotypes. This style of writing is amplified by the book being a comic. Expressions become all the easier when using pictures rather than words. There are so many small details that the author includes, especially in the fable text, where he attempts to spin an ancient story towards a more modern audience.

Extra Credit Assignment

I recently attended the CSA culture show and i felt that overall, the show was a success in that it taught the audience a lot about asian culture yet at the same time kept the atmosphere comedic and entertaining. The two emcee's brought comedy into the set yet what they taught the audience rang true even though all the laughter. the tai-chi that was taught to the audience as "make the watermelon, cut the watermelon, this is your half and this is mine" seemed very funny but was real tai chi. And as always, the dancers showed a more tradition style of dance infused with a taste of modern hip hop. The skits were comical and seemed to poke fun at depictions of asian culture in modern media, with parodies of Bruce Lee's "the game of death" and disney's "mulan". Halfway through the performance, we also learned about a program that is seeking to help chinese orphans in China. Tufts China Cares went onstage and showed a brief clip of orphans in china and went though the programs goals and aims. The skits, movies and presentations all combined together to create an experience that was entertaining, yet still carried strong messages.

Questions

1. How is the idea of ghosts incorporated into the story or Woman Warrior, and how does it help the reader understand the concept of "ghosts."
2. How does the Author of American Born Chinese choose to integrate the three substories and what styles does he use in each different substory.
3. How does the book We Are All Suspects Now present the different stories and do you believe that it is more effective the way it is?
4. How does the Author of American Born Chinese appeal to the reader and what messages does it send in regards to the "Asian American Experience."
5. What does the Auther of American Born Chinese attempt to tell us when he reveals that the three main characters are all interconnected?

ABC

In American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang uses comedic art to retell an ancient story that many Chinese children may have heard growing up. He takes an ancient tale and spins it in another way, creating a story that is interesting to those who have heard it before and people who have never heard of the story.
Although steeped in tradition, he adds elements from the present, as seem with the attitude of the “bouncer” at the entrance to the party, kindly asking the monkey king to step aside for a moment. He also appeals to modern readers’ violent side by exaggerating small fights by recreating them as full blown violence. These elements combine together to provide an introduction that is witty, humorous and informative of an ancient Chinese tale.

Asian American Masculinity

I remember thinking that we have always heard about asian inferiority and what not but never erally seeing any raw data. but this time i feel that we actually have some data at least partially supporting the idea. What really struck me was that they found a way to actually quantify a test that was so hard to do. By giving a scale, the researhers were able to find trends that many asians see between while and asian males and whites and asians in general. I guess the survey agreed with what many believed was a stereotype, that asian males were a lot more submissive than white males. And that people tended to view asian women and more meek and submissive. But what the article failed to do i believe, is to try to find out why it is the way it is. How these stereotypes were formed and how they have come to be embedded in our present day society.

My Turn Topics

Asians and the Hip Hop Movement
Affirmitive actions
Stereotypes in Children
Tensions within asian cultures

Respons to Metcalf Presentation

It was really interesting to hear about how the concept of beauty could be so different in Asia than in America. It made sense after i though about what i had seen in my trip to china the previous summer. I was shopping outside with my parents when i saw a woman riding a bike with a dark visor and a white reflected sleeve pulled all the way up her arm. I believe that this represented the more eastern norm, where whiter=better. It could have come from a belief that people born from the western world was better than those from the eastern world.

The discussions that the people present had was very interesting. There was a lot of talk concerning "acting asian" and why people would try to be more white or asian. Yet i feel that we went around the issue and did't focus on the main problem, the huge difference between the two cultures and how the two cultures were not as easy to compare as they are vastly different.

Response to a comment

A lot of the comments on Woman warrior seemed to be about womens roles and changes in the present day society and how those may have become embedded in our society. The way that i see it, sexism has become so entrenched in our everyday lives, that it'll take a signnificant effort on our part to remove it. The reason why it has become so infused in our lives is because everyone has taken it for granted. We naturally assume that it is right for women to take on a more supportive role and for men to be the "pillar". There hasn't been enough attention paid to the diffuculties that most women face in todays workforce. The idea that women should stay home and cook goes as far back as anyone can remember. But perhaps it is time for a change. In order for us to overcome these stereotypes we must first create more awareness before we can have any hopes of solving the problem.

Woman Warrior Memoir

I grew up hearing stories of how my great grandfather on my mother's side would treat me horribly as a child because i wasn't carrying the family name. So naturally i grew up thinking that he was this evil person that would be rude to me. Since he passed away before i could actually really know him, these memories were the ones that were at the front of my mind.So you could see how these memories influenced the way that i saw my great grandfather. I eventually learned that none of the things that i heard in the story was true. It had just been a joke that my parents had with each other, but being so small i really didn't understand. In reality, i imagine that there really wasnt any mistreatment and that this story was warped intto something in my mind and forgotten, causing my mind to believe that what i thought was actually the truth.

Memoir

After reading We Are All Suspects Now, i felt guilty that something like this could actually happen in the US. But it does not really surprise me that things like this actually happen. Throughout highschool, when we were learning about US and World History, we would constantly read about how leaders would torture or detain people without legal permission. It really made me wonder how much our own modern government has been doing to deal with the threat of terrorism, whether they have also gone to the same extremes as the people that we have read about in history books, and how even if this did happen, we are so out of the loop that we will probably never hear about anything that the government might have done.
This reminded me about a friend that i knew a long time ago when i was 5 years old. I had been in America for about 6 months. I spoke very little English at the time and could only understand the most basic speech. I lived in the projects of Cambridge with three other families in a small apartment. One of those families was from Pakistan. I was friends with their son, who i used to play with all the time. Since we still didnt have school yet, we played outside all day. Then one day i saw their family packing up. When i asked my mother what was happening, she only replied that they were going to go back to Pakistan. I didn't really think about it after. During 6th grade, we had to do a project on people that we knew during our childhood. That prompted me to reask my parents about the story. I was then told that they had been questioned about possible terrorist ties, and they had then been deported after being found to have no connection to terrorists.
I now realize that what happened to this family is the exact same thing as what happened to the various people in the book. How these things were overlooked so easily until i heard the truth. In my case, it was because i was too young to understand. But there must be so many other cases that due to lack of received information, and how many other occurences like these have been kept away from the ears of the public.

We Are All Suspects Now

Tram Nguyen's book We Are All Suspects Now uses short stories depicting the stories of those affected by September 11th and the aftermath. Tram Nguyen uses in depth details to bring out the pain and the suffering that many families have faced since. When reading the book, readers learn to understand and "feel" the pain of the characters, which eventually lead to the realization that these hardships were really forced onto these people by the government.

Question for Tram Nguyen: How do you propose to bring more awareness to this problem seeing as how many immigrants do not know how recent policies could potentially affect their futures in the country?

Primary Source

I did not really know anything about the primary source article. But i knew that it had to have been pretty bad because of all the controversy that it caused. After reading it, i can see why people were so outraged that an article like this was even allowed to be published. It wasn't just because of what the article said, but the fact that they tried to target specific people with the carol. While the editor said that the article was supposed to be mocking affirmitive action, t was clear that this was not the case, the author of the article had clearly intended to target the african american community at Tufts. The university should cut funding to the primary source and move to censor any possible racist articles in the future.

White Privilege

Growing up in Boston, actually better yet, in America, i kind of took white dominance as the norm. It seems to be drilled into my mind as i grew up. All that we ever saw on TV was the white politicians giving speeches to crowds of white supporters. But as i grew, i slowly learned to understand why this phenomenon occurs. Although there has been a push to create a soceity where one race isn't favored over another, i think white dominance is an inevitable occurance. It will continue to plague our society and we will have to learn to cope rather than try to eliminate an impossibility.

Talking about Race

After reading the artible, i found it interesting that people would attempt to resist learning about racism. But as i thought about the issue, it kind of made sense to me. What would cause people to shy from learining about racism? I guess it is an issue that causes many people discomfort because its such a hard topic to talk about. Many people are afraid of revealing they're true feelings because they are afraid that they will be labled as a racist and be ostracized. Many people have grown up with a strict belief that talking about race is to be avoided. Discussions of race only results in one group being angered at another over a comment that was made. Because this issue of race isn't normally talked about, we scrutinize anyone that begins to talk about race and we "try" to analyze their intentions.
Tatum brings up a good point in saying that people have a resonsibiity to learn about race. But at the same time, there is this barrier that is preventing us from talking freely about race. Issues like slavery always ineviably come up, causing awkwardmoments which in the end go against what the discussion was meant to do.

Priviledges

Being Smart
Being able to goto school
living in america
Being Asian
Being a male
Being the immigrant
Being understanding
Not being an only child
Being in college
Being Chinese

January 23rd

This picture shows common stereotypes that other people see in Asians. The rice hat, slanty eyes, the buck teeth, round ears and the peasant clothes are all examples of different stereotypes and each one has a reason behind it. The rice hat and the peasants clothes comes from the belief that all Chinese people do is grow rice and work at farms. The slanty eyes come from the belief that all asians have small eyes and that they can't see, and the buck teeth is one that i am not familiar with but it apparently means that Asians typically have bad teeth

Question: What reasons could you give for the fact that these miscommunications affected the way that the play was composed and performed?

At first when reading the article, I found it pretty unbelievable that something as easy as a translation could have been botched so easily. But as i kept reading i realized how complex something as simple as a translation could have been. The complexities of language the the barrier between the two cultures provided for a project that was high in potential but eventually turned out to be one that may have had too much ambition. The Chinese culture and the American culture was too complex for people from the opposite culture to understand, thus making translating for another culture that much harder.The language barrier was not the only problem though. The ambition of each culture ultimately turned what was supposed to be a collaborative event into one where each side tried to take a little more from the other, which may have also contributed to its demise.