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.