Okay, I finally figured out how to use this site!

I had an experience yesterday that I consider post-worthy. I was explaining to a friend what I was reading in this class. (At the time, I was halfway through Dictee and feeling as I assume most of us felt ... confused, jaded, and ready to go find a French-English dictionary.) I was then asked, "Well, what is the book about?" I was a little startled to find that I didn't have an answer, not even a small one.

This class has been full of new experiences for me. I'm reading things that I would never have read on my own and, for the most part, enjoying them. Occasionally I'm frustrated, and occasionally I feel left out. This being my first race and ethnic studies class, I had no idea there was such a wealth of Asian American experiences out there. Sometimes I have felt it difficult to identify with the people we read about because they depict such an Asian American experience. But I like having my worldview broadened and influenced, so I really don't mind.

Still, sometimes I feel at a loss when attempting to explain what I read in class. Dictee is a particular problem due to its unique form, but I even had a problem pinpointing exactly what My Year of Meats was about. I have given this a great deal of thought. My reply to my friend's question earlier was that Dictee was a postmodern novel-esque text about the fragmentation of language, and therefore the fragmentation of reality, and the inability of people to communicate with each other (specifically, the difficulty of Korean Americans making their voices heard in the wake of the Korean war). Like I said in class, it was largely about disorientation and disequilibrium, throwing us off balance from what we expect out of a novel. In some senses, Dictee is a deconstruction of the classic 19th century novel, disregarding European ideals of plot, character, and even sentence structure. If Cha had altered it to make it more understandable, it probably would have lost most of these elements and wouldn't be so effective in portraying an Asian American experience.

This seems to be a theme in the literature we read for this class. In My Year of Meats, for example, Ozeki uses mixed media (in the form of faxes, etc.) and multiple perspectives, and the same goes for Dogeaters. I think there are different levels of accessability to the three texts, but what they are doing amounts to the same thing. The deconstruction, or perhaps refusal to use, generic European norms is something all three of the authors has done. This was also part of the postmodern movement, I believe, but these authors seem to claim it for the Asian American experience by focusing on Asians and Asian Americans.

I think this post was at least half for me to get all of this straight in my head, but I'm curious about how people respond. The readings for these texts, particularly for Dictee, depend largely on what each particular reader brings to it (as we discussed in class). I think understanding can only be complete after we each puzzle individually over them, and then puzzle together.