For my final post...

I just wanted, like Shelly, to reflect on what I have taken form this class. Coming in with no background in Asian American studies at all, I felt initially like I struggled to relate to the authors' experiences. I feel now that I have seen several persepectives on what it means to be an Asian American. So many of the texts we read touched on ideas that I think are relevent to more than this class-- like race, gender, sexuality. As mentioned earlier, I think that the most recent novel we read was most enlightening and most enjoyable. There is something about the innocent child's voice drawing attention to the flaws within our society that rings more true to the reader than any other perspective.

I think this class has really broadened my horizons in terms of awareness. The brief discussion we had about the Virginia Tech tragedy got me thinking about how ideas we read about so much, whether it be about Asians or other ethnicities and races, are still so prominent in society today. I certainly noticed how the blame was shifted to an Asian student, but I did not initially see it the same way many others in the class did-- I didn't see the immigrant prejudice (for lack of a better term) right away. But as I followed up more and more, I started to notice things that I don't think I might have noticed before.

For that, I thank everyone in this class for their opinions and thoughts. Thanks again to the seniors for their advice.... you're almost graduates! I hope to see you all again next fall.

For my fourth and final post, I'd like to say a few things.

First off, thanks to the seniors for sharing their perspectives and your outgoing words. To the rest - I hope to see you all in some space or another (dining halls, classes, facebook, etc.)

Secondly, I wanted to talk about slam poetry from a curious but incredibly ignorant outsider's opinion. I say ignorant in the sense that I am not informed and educated about the rules and regulation, the different styles of competition and general exposure to the art of slam poetry. (on a slight tangent - is all of this even important when trying to understand and appreciate slam poetry?)

However, maybe my perspective, unadulterated by the institution of slam poetry which I believe Justin Chin was critical of in his Slammed essay, can still be of significance. Just as I started to mention and what Ashley has said in her most recent post, the conventionality and predictable sound of a lot of slam poetry really sticks out. Sometimes, I cannot take the poet seriously in what they have to say because of their delivery. But in light of Justin Chin's article, I am slowly realizing where some of the blame can be attributed - the space of competitive slam poetry. In the process of judging poetry and performance and awarding "good" poetry with prizes, I believe, creates a drive for winning and succeeding. Coupled with the prize aspect, the winning and success slowly becomes molded around this supposed objective look at poetry. Here lies the tension between the subjective expression of what poetry is and the competitive objectivity that slam poetry relies on (in order to score and award poets).

Trying to shape and create within the space of competitive slam poetry is talent in and of itself. Without any regulations or stipulations, there could be hours-long pieces, highly offensive works or just simply, terrible poetry. Not to say that any of the three examples mentioned are not false in the spirit of poetry. I guess what I am trying to discover is what is at stake, what is gained and lost, through this process of commodifying art and making slam poetry more readily available for the most amount of people to hear and experience. The sharing of poetry and the space of competitve slam poetry creates an space itself to be analyzed and discussed. I believe, just as Professor Suh mentioned in class, that the new generation of slam poets will soon realize this and something is bound to change. I think Ashley is correct when saying that Chin's critique has broader implications than just on slam poetry. It takes this awkward period of trying share certain ideas to the public within some sort of outlined and confined space, some kind of process of commodification, in order to realize that certain ideas cannot be contained in certain spaces.

It is interesting how for most ideas and beliefs, boundaries are created and instilled in order to for people to relalize the limitations and tensions caused by these same boundaries. It is as if, in order to fully appreciate and understand a form of art, an idea, a perspective, it must be challenged rather than embraced. I guess to fully embrace something would require a more active understanding and appreciation for it, which would included challenging, limiting and attempts at commodification.

anyways, I'm pretty sure I spiralled off somewhere in the last two sentences but I really enjoyed the discussions and texts that we were all a part of this semester and I hope everyone has a great summer.

PEACE

For my final post for this class, I would like to meditate on some things that have sort of been going through my head this semester, not in response to any particular readings but just in general.

What really cemented what I wanted to say in this blog post was actually a reading for another class. You may or may not be familiar with Snow Falling On Cedars, a novel by David Guterson. The plot centers around the inhabitants of an island in Puget Sound, many of whom are Japanese Americans and the older generation that actually migrated from Japan. Guterson is, of course, not Japanese, but if I did not know who the author was I would probably assume that the book was written by an Asian American just because it deals so much with the Asian American experience prior, during, and after WWII. I actually had to keep reminding myself that Guterson is not Asian American, he wrote so poignantly. However, when I did so, the experience seemed somehow cheapened. So I started wondering ... would it be legitimate for people of other racial identities to write about the Asian American experience?

All of the authors we have read in this class have been Asian American, and there have been several themes that appear in most works - the sense of being the other, gender identity, overcoming stereotypes, the difficulty of communication between people from different nationalities. We have read about biracial characters, characters set apart by their sexual orientation, and characters of both genders or whose gender has been unspecified. It seems to me that someone of another race could discuss these issues, but of course they wouldn't have the Asian American perspective. That's why I wonder why Guterson could have written from an Asian American point of view so well.

Coincidentally, I also saw a flier recently that advertised a workshop for learning to write from different racial/gender/sexual perspectives. I don't remember exactly what it said, but it claimed to be able to help you (probably in creative writing) to write about a character from an identity you don't share. At first I was intrigued, but then I was slightly irrititated. Isn't Asian American literature unique because it is written by Asian Americans and communicates something that people of other races would not be able to write about? Guterson's novel, while good and worth reading and incredibly moving, could never be Asian American literature because the author is not Asian American.

I'm not exactly sure where I wanted to go with this post. I think I am just trying to understand Asian American literature from the perspective of someone who is outside that community. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) I will never be able to share in the Asian American experience beyond what I can read or watch. That is why this class has been so inspirational for me ... I am looking at things from a different point of view now, and hopefully a more informed one.

Anyway. I hope everyone has a great summer, and I've really enjoyed this class! See most of you next year!

This doesn’t really have to do with our readings explicitly, but I was thinking about what I have gotten out of this class over the semester. I really enjoyed all of the readings, even the ones that were so difficult to understand that I wanted to put the book down. But even through all of the difficult readings or stories I didn’t like, what I got out of this course was more of a questioning of my preconceived notions of what “good literature” is and what characteristics constitute a great piece of literature in the eyes of society, basically what characteristics allow a book to be part of the canon and also the Asian American canon.

I have been thinking about this more after the class has wrapped up, but are there certain qualifications in a piece of literature to belong to the Asian American canon? Does the text have to talk about issues surrounding identity politics and the integration of history to the “home country” or what? In a sense, I feel like the Asian American canon contradicts what it really is supposed to be doing because there is a canon that exists. There are certain texts that are considered to be Asian American texts and I feel like in this class we read a lot of work that would not normally fit into the canon. And if people went to the IDAAS Senior Thesis Presentations, Sophia talked about this in her presentation of her thesis. There is a canon of Asian American texts and she questions why there are these limitations on what can be considered an “Asian American text.” Asian American texts don’t just deal with the issues brought up in Joy Luck Club or whatever, but a vast array of issues that could apply to all people color as well, not just Asian Americans.

I feel like in this course we read a lot of books that fit within the Asian American canon and not so much on trying to question the Asian American canon. That would have been interesting to have a mixture within the course to discuss not only the mainstream canon but also the Asian American canon.

But that’s all I had to say, have a wonderful summer everyone. It was fun.

“I plan to teach some version of this course again, though I will definitely change the syllabus substantially in future iterations. Name one or two texts we have read this term that you would recommend I include on future syllabi.”

To our last exam question, I personally wrote down M Butterfly and Dictee, but had also wanted to add The Gangster We Are All Looking For. However, in noticing that the question had specifically asked for only one or two texts, not to forfeit the easiest point on the exam by not following instructions, I left out Thúy’s book. But in the following week, Professor Suh asks us why so many of us wrote down this books, of all the novels we’re read for class. I find the question difficult to respond to articulately, but in feeling apologetic for looking sleepy/bored during the discussion, I thought I’d try and give it a feeble attempt.

As Sam has mentioned, the authors we have read reflect the wide spectrum of Asia/Asian America(?): east Asian, south Asian, southeast Asian, Philippina, hapa, and in some spoken word, Palestinian. However, in the realm of Asian American literature, I feel as though east Asians/east Asian Americans are the most common and have the most prominent voices, therefore I found it extremely refreshing to be reading from the south Asian, southeast Asian, etc…perspectives of Asian America. And to add to that, I want to say that I appreciated the more-or-less straightforward writing styles exhibited by Ozeki and the spoken word artists, and the use of format distortion in Hagedorn’s Dogeaters to display a historical construct formed by the stories of many characters. However, I was more artistly touched by the deliberate placement of holes in content and the utilization of the telling nature of silence, which I felt marked Yamamoto’s and Thúy’s writing.

King-Kok Cheung describes it well:

“Feminist critics tend to see indirection in women writers as primarily a means to avert the masculine gaze…Yet I differ with those critics who view verbal restraint as necessarily a handicap stemming from social restrictions. I view it more as a versatile strategy in its own right. While [this] style may reflect special external constraint at the time of writing,…stories are the more compelling for being tacit and indirect” (Cheung 33).

The combination of Ashley’s post and my paper got me thinking about the relationship between the mother and father in the gangster we are all looking for. While in class during my presentation I alluded to the idea that these two had a relationship not unlike the behavior of the sea, with constant movement and the occasional storm. But when I got to thinking about it, these two people don’t seem to have ever had a real grace period in their relationship. When they first begin a relationship in Vietnam, the narrator’s mother is forced to sneak around with him, and then is disowned by her parents when she decides to marry the guy. After they are married, the narrator’s father is sent off to a re-education camp—basically prison, and her mother is left to care for a son and daughter without him, and then must deal with the loss of her son on her own. (Granted, there were people around trying to comfort her, but mostly they tell her horrifying stories about “bad water” thus resulting in her refusal to ever let her daughter go swimming once they are in the United States.) Once the two are reunited and decide to flee Vietnam, they are again separated while one goes to the U.S. and one is forced to stay behind. Basically, what I’m trying to say is: these two characters never seem to have had a serene experience in their marriage. They seem to be constantly separated before the narrator’s mother comes to join her family in the United States. It is at this point that the fighting seems to begin. It’s possible that their frustration from constant separation is also at fault for the tension that is only increasingly built by the stresses of working menial jobs in the U.S. and having to constantly deal with the haunting memories of their pasts.

I also wanted to point out something about the narrator. While the narrator of the novel is a child, with a perspective of innocence and a cloudy way of recounting events, the narrator is also omniscient. I find this situation to be an interesting hybrid of ideas. It makes me wonder—just how does she know? How does she know about her parents courtship? How is she able to relate scenes of her father sitting alone in his house and driving his truck to stare down the ocean in the middle of the night? It gives an almost ghostly quality to the narrative, or maybe an element of the supernatural. Perhaps the author never intended this, but I still can’t help but recognize the result.

I wanted to post a few comments on "The Gangster We Are All Looking For" mainly because I enjoyed the text the most, and because writing my paper on it got me thinking about it. Briefly, with respect to the child narrative, I think it is so interesting that mature perspective was able to be integrated into the narrative. Aside from structure and all that we discusses in class, I think the narrator's reflections on the child-like observations were a big contributing factor. It seemed like a greater conclusion was always being eluded to. For example, she comments on her father's tendancy to walk around the house reciting the the letters of his name in english,

"Even when he was able to spell out his first name, he couldn't quite trust that this was he himself. Weren't these the letters? Was this his name?"

This is a commentary on not only the foreign-ness of the language and his name in the language, but perhaps also a commentary on identity in general. He has become so lost in America and lost in his drunk life attempting to forget the Vietnam War that he isn't sure who he is anymore. The way that one text can have two meanings is so interesting. Its something I addressed in my paper- the ability of the child narrator to in a sense "frame" the mature perspective on things. Essentially, the reader is able to read between the lines to gain understanding of race, class, gender, identity, etc. Its something I didn't notice on the first read... it only stood out to me as I was reviewing some parts of the book for the paper, attempting to become inspired. Did anyone else notice this... that you just got the sense that something greater was to be gained from a random observation, and that you almost knew what it was that you were supposed to think?

On another note, I wanted to speculate about the end of the fourth chapter... its so difficult to tell what is actually happening, and what is part of the flashback. I think its interesting how her father is juxtaposed dancing and not. At first, I was unsure of what this whole section meant, but now I am wondering if it has something to do with his identity again. Perhaps the dancing Ba is the real Ba, the one that the narrator's mother married- the 'gangster' who had a negative impact on her as a young woman. Then, she (the narrator) sees him as he is now, a man who is trying to escape his memory and problems. This man is not the cool gangster, just a sad drunk man. Also, it really is the narrator's vivid descriptions that make this novel so interesting and multi-layered.

Post by Kelly Cloward
MAKE UP for "The Women Outside" film

Just a few short comments on "The Women Outside" (I watched the DVD with Kari a couple weekends ago).

First of all I thought one of the women that they spotlighted (not the one that moved to Hawaii, but the other one...and I think I might be mixing people up, but I think she owned a bar or something) was very intriguing. First of all the way she got into the "service industry" was a complete shock to me. Apparently some guy (an American) just sold her, as if he owned her, and she didn't even know him! She'd just met him! That's so insane. What gives him the right to just pick her off the street and sell her like a stray dog or something...worse. That's just inconceivable to me and I still feel like I must have gotten some facts twisted or something.

The second thing that really struck me was her casual attitude. She talked about her situation in such an off-hand way, like there was nothing unusual about it. I guess this is just one of the ways that women cope with these terrible situations. If there's really nothing you can do about it, then you have to just accept it, but that's such a harsh reality. Also, her attitude made me realize how much this really is such a common thing. For her, and so many other women, it's just a part of life...that's just how things are. I hate that. And it's not her fault, but like the other woman showed, it's pretty much impossible to escape it. After the women are forced into these situations, their culture does not allow them back in. The only relief is if they are luck enough to find a foreign man that is willing to care for them, and not abuse them. But even this is difficult because of the cultural barrier and the unintentional racism--this can create psychological, if not physical, abuse.

I just wanted to deal a little bit with something that's been in the back of my mind this semester basically from day 1: the problems associated with defining who and what comprises the Asian American community, something I don't feel like we really dealt with in class. Although we read texts by authors who were/are east Asian, south Asian, southeast Asian, Philippina, hapa, and in the case of some of the spoken word, Palestinian, to the best of my knowledge there's little consensus about whether all of these groups are/should be included in the blanket term "Asian American." Putting these authors' work into an intro to Asian American lit amounts to, in this context, a political decision by Prof Suh that we all sort of implicitly accepted over the course of the class. I'm not prepared to argue for the inclusion or exclusion of any particular group as Asian American (although I would be elated to see a reading of mixed-ethnicity authors from a variety of backgrounds with an eye toward commonalities, but that's just being selfish), but I do think we need to unpack what we really mean when we talk about the Asian American community.

This runs parallel in my mind, actually, to the idea we talked about on the first day of class, that the texts we read were all in some sense non-canonical Asian American lit. Just from the authorship/content of the works we read, this canonicity of texts seems to dovetail with the identities of their authors. We read a lot of texts written by members of groups marginalized in most Asian American discourse: queer authors, mixed-race authors, children of working-class immigrants (marginalized because a lot of post-1965 immigration has been of the 'brain drain' variety), and the majority of the authors we read were(/are) women (though I'm not prepared to critically examine whether or not women's authorship is marginalized in Asian American lit, since the canon does include Amy Tan and "Woman Warrior"). Does the marginalization of the author lead to marginalization of their text?

I don't think there are any easy answers to these issues, but it's definitely hard to talk about Asian American studies as a field without at the least problematizing the boundaries of the Asian American community as it is commonly understood.

Thanks everyone for an interesting and enjoyable semester! I'll keep up my daily-life blog when I work abroad next year, so hopefully we can stay in touch.

This is my last academic thing I will probably do for a long time. This makes me happy. Anyways, getting back to the task at hand, I was looking at Ishle Park's poetry, and reread "Samchun in the Grocery Store". The line that stood out the most for me was "Suddenly I know why my love is a clenched fist, / why I can only love like this". Now, one can read this in a variety of ways I suppose. My first reading was, hell yeah, power to the people. The clenched fist represented the struggle, and the fight that went into the immigrant narrative, and living in the U.S. as a person of color. On my second reading, I read the clenched fist almost like...holding on to something really really tight. The next line that follows the clenched fist thing speaks to trying to hold on to her uncle like their lives depended on it, and it got me thinking about all of the things I would never give up, and how yeah, it does make sense this way too. I guess the part where my quoted line says "only" made me think of it as only one thing or the other, but now I think the clenched fist is both of these things, and probably more that I can't think of off the top of my head, and the point is that Park is saying that she is not going to pick one over the other, but have all at the same time, and THAT is the only way she'll have it. Which is kind of cool actually, and interpreting stuff like this is what makes me really like poetry. Usually of the Asian American genre...mostly because that is all I really read.

I think it will be around a year before I start missing doing this sort of stuff again. School is a really weird place I think. Ha, just wanted to make sure people knew that. Have a great however many years you all have left at the Claremonts, and thanks for an interesting class.



-Min