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

I will also be posting on the lecture I went to in March "Songs of the Korean Comfort Women." I attended this lecture because I was unable to attend the screening of the Vincent Chin film. I thought this lecture was really interesting because of the approach the man (I forget his name) took on an issue that can easily be looked at through the lenses of “oh these poor women who had such a hard time and I feel really bad.” I thought that was what the lecture was going to be, but to my surprise, the approach of studying the songs sung and written by the Korean Comfort Women was an innovative approach and really pretty interesting. The songs were more a means of coping, especially the societal ramifications of returning to Korea after being a comfort woman. It was never good for a woman to come back after being a comfort woman, and they were basically social outcasts if they talked/admitted to what had happened to them during the war.

Throughout the presentation of his research, I could get more and more of the connection he had with the women in the shared house in Korea. This is a house where some of the comfort women live together. The photos and video really showed just how invested he was in not treating these women as tools in his research but researching through building close relationships with these women. I thought the content of the presentation was really good and I really like the approach it had taken. It wasn’t presented in a way where we should feel sorry for the women, but the songs were a means of empowering the women and allowing them to find a voice to talk about what had really gone on for them in that experience, especially after having to silence that after returning to Korea.

I guess for my last post I want to try and tie together some of the readings we did, and see if I can make some connections on their similiar themes. It seems that in a lot of the works we read there is a definitive break between first generation immigrants and their second generation children. I talk about this in my final paper a bit, but there is a common theme of the first generation not really being fully able to find their place in America, and thus their children often take on the "adult" mature role in the family situation. First generation parents are often stuck between two worlds in the literature we read. Think The Gangster We Are All Looking For, My Year of Meats, Seventeen Syllables, and the list goes on. These parents spend a lot of the plot of these stories clinging to their pasts in Asia for various reasons. Because of this, they cannot really "succeed" (in the American sense of becoming moderately wealthy) and thus are cought between their old home and their new one. Jane's mother in My Year of Meats takes her hight as a personal insult. She clings to the old traditions she is used to. I am not saying that every first generation immigrant needs to completely shut out their culture when they come to America. That would be terrible. I am just noticing a theme in the works we've read that places parents as representatives of the "old world." These representations are usually seen through the eyes of their children, who--with different success leves--have somehow managed to achieve what their parents can't, namely, find their place in society.
Another theme I've noticed in some of the works is a disjointed structure. This form has become almost second nature to us in the class, with works like Dictee, which zip all over the place, My Year of Meats, which switches narrators and continents continuously, Dogeaters, which jumps around in time and and narrators, and The Gangster We Are All Looking For, which switches time and place at the whim of its narrator. None of these works are exactly linear. I think that one possible reasons that these works jumps around so much is possibly to reflect their Asian American authors' experiences which may be jerky and disjointed themselves. Perhaps as Asian Americans the authors use their structures to comment on their singular experience of not belonging in one place or another, or to reflect their never-constant childhoods, or to express the multiple alleigences they feel as Asian Americans.
These are just some possible themes that I have been thinking about as I have noticed a lot of similarities in the texts we read this semester. One of the things I will take away from this class though, is that there is no disctint Asian American voice, as every author has a unique experience behind their work.

-RACHEL BERMAN

Posted by Vivian Lin
First a little hoop-jumping, and then something else.

The "Songs of the Korean Comfort Women" Lecture back in March (I think) gave historical background on the "comfort women" who were sex slaves (notably, not a term the women themselves would like anyone to use) to Japanese soldiers during World War II. However, the focus and goal of the talk was not to dissect the lives of these women or disassemble their stories into statistics and numbers, which is so often the case; the main concern for most people researching the Korean comfort women appeared to be the facts of what happened to them. In contrast, the lecturer had gone to Korea to speak with these women in order to get to know them personally, to learn about them as people, not just victims. As Professor Suh pointed out in class, the songs composed or adapted by the women were not meant to convey a hidden message, but were rather a means of coping with the trauma they had gone through. These songs were sometimes original compositions, or folk songs and other works that were modified in subtle ways; this allowed the women to speak about their experiences without directly declaring what had happened, as this would go against acceptable public/social behavior.

One thing I noticed about the speaker was that he began the lecture reading from the paper he had written on the subject; ultimately, while it was highly informative, the paper content did not lend itself as well to the subject because it seemed theoretical/analytical in many ways. Once the speaker moved away from reading his paper, the talk became much more natural and showed his attachment to the women and his admiration and appreciation for the songs, music, and stories.

Switching topics, I'd like to share a couple of the reasons why I, like several other people in the class, thought The Gangster We Are All Looking For was something we'd like to see on a future syllabus for this course. First off, I just happened to really enjoy reading the book, mostly for the aesthetic appeal of the prose, as Sam had mentioned in class. I told Professor Suh in my brief writing conference with her on Monday that the book resonated with me personally. This will seem silly, but I actually played with glass animals as a child (colored turtles, whales, dogs, cats, horses, fish with tiny features detailed on to them), and these animals did reside in a glass case (I didn't smash the case though). Also, when my family was making the move from North Carolina to Washington State, my sister and mother went on ahead, and I stayed behind with just my father in NC for a couple of months. The narrator's relationship with her father, watching him struggle with English, for a job, and with his own inner demons, spoke to me on many levels.

Obviously I'm not saying my life is like the narrator's or author's life. I didn't lose a sibling, immigrate to the United States, fool around in a "kissing box," etc. Rather, I felt that the experiences of the narrator, particularly her "child's eye," was something that sparked a memory of what it was like to be a child--that silly but strangely familiar idea of illogical, inexplicable "magical" things, talking to things that don't exist or aren't alive, and also uncertainty of what will happen in the future, why things are they way they are, inability to understand the "adult world," and so on. The Gangster We Are All Looking For was easy to read, simple in its word choice and presentation, and maybe we like it for those reasons, too. It certainly makes it easier to understand the storyline and recognize the characters when the form is straightforward. I don't know how well I can comment of the academic or scholarly worthiness of this book, since I like it for what it is, which is probably a really bad reason for wanting it included in this course in the future. In any case, I think sometimes it's hard to put into words what qualities make a piece of literature valuable to you.

As I'm nearing the end of my college career, I've been thinking a lot more about the academy, especially since I've been entirely immersed in it for almost my whole life up to this point. It's interesting thinking about how I've spent a lot of time in college unlearning what I learned when I was younger. I've been thinking a lot about multicultural education in the primary school grades and then the ways we start to deconstruct and critique multiculturalism once we reach college, and the ways we unlearn what we've been indoctrinated with as children. It seems like during each phase of my life, each era of schooling, I learn the "proper" way of dealing with certain issues, only to have that "right" way altered or transformed at a later stage in life. That's how education is. Constantly changing, evolving, being reshaped and rethought.

To concretize, I'll talk a little about multicultural education in elementary school vs. ethnic studies in college; and also my earlier experience of race/gender/class vs. my college experience of with these issues. In elementary school, I was presented with the very 90s version of "global village" multiculturalism; each "culture" is its own distinct force, with its "unique" traditions, customs, beliefs, etc. We've talked extensively in this class about the problems associated with viewing culture as static, fixed, essentialized, and that's precisely how I was presented with "culture" as a child. In college, though, I slowly started learning about the problems associated with this kind of discourse and learning. It was a gradual process of learning bits and pieces here and there, until it all started connecting. During freshmen year, I started learning a little about race theory, gender theory, but it was still fuzzy for me. And then during sophomore year, when I went through a lot of intense social justice programming and training and started actually taking more of these types of courses and challenging myself to have these difficult conversations, the idea of intersectionality of race, gender, class, etc. starting to click for me. This used to be a foreign concept to me, but at this point, I started understanding the definition and how it played out in my own life. I was starting to learn a framework to contextualize a lot of gut instincts and thoughts that I had about race and class and gender when I was younger, and starting to see the connections, how it all fit together and why it matters. It was a slow, enlightening process, and at times it was difficult because it involved unlearning a lot of what I'd learned before. Around junior year, I started to take some classes where my professors were very critical of talking about culture all the time. I didn't understand it at first, and it confused me that a lot of people disliked talking about culture, but slowly, as I read more, it also started to connect for me, why people were so critical of these static conversations about superficial qualities of "cultures," which of course relates to the discourse of multiculturalism. So around the middle of junior year, I also started understanding the critiques of multiculturalism, and around this time, I thought a lot about my own multicultural education up to that point. And I was thinking about how all these new analyses that I was having involved breaking down and criticizing so much of what I learned as a child. It made me really wonder why the education system was set up the way it's set up. And then it struck me that not everyone goes through these same kinds of racialized transformative or "unlearning" and relearning processes that I went through in college. There are definitely lots of people who don't even have to think about race or gender or class or choose not to. It happened that I made choices--took certain ethnic studies class, joined Asian-American organizations, talked to progressive friends and made mostly friends who were people of color--that enabled me to come to these analyses; and had I sheltered myself in other more privileged communities, I would probably still be comfortable and loving the "oh, we live in a wonderful diverse global village! I believe in one race--the human race! I am so liberal!" type of "liberalism" which a lot of people believe in.

And so, as I'm ending my college career and looking back upon how I got to this point, I realize that I still have a lot of growing and learning to do. When I finished high school four years ago, I thought I knew a lot about the world already, but little did I know that I would have the opportunity to learn about my own identities, as a woman, as a person of color, as a child of immigrants, from a more critical point of view. I am lucky to have had the opportunity to meet people who were also discovering new ways of looking at these things, and to learn with them, with each other. I'm glad for classes like Asian American Lit & Crit, because I feel like these classes affirm my identities more than other classes here have. As I continue on my academic and personal journeys in life, I hope that this learning never stops. I think I eventually want to end up teaching little children in an elementary school classroom, and I often wonder how I am going to teach them in a socially conscious way or about social justice issues. If I were an educator, I'd want to find some way to provide an American education that affirmed all aspects of their identities in a way that didn't essentialize them, so that the entire learning process is a good one and positively evolving. But I think, for me personally, it was necessary to learn all that multicultural/rainbow education stuff before I could start learning the critiques of it.

Anyway, yeah, education is an evolving process, that you build, constantly reshape, add to, delete, edit, unlearn, relearn, rediscover...it's transformative....just like writing a paper! Haha, and that is how you know I'm still a student at heart. I'm using this dorky English writing metaphor for talking about education.

Anyway, I've had a good run here. It's been amazing. Thank you, everyone. I wish you the best of luck in everything.

Signing off, Peace,
Viv

I’m writing my paper about “Mango” (the short story), and I did a mini survey about the first sentence of the story. (My brother and I were the sons of my mother’s clients.) I thought it was pretty clear that she was an Asian prostitute, but it occurred to me that this was probably because I read it in the context of this class. I asked my roommate about it, and she thought it was obvious that she was a prostitute, and would guess that she was not white. I wanted to get an idea of what people tended to assume about her from the first sentence, so I asked 15 people what they thought of when they read the sentence, and what assumptions or conclusions they drew from it about race and profession.

Most people guessed that she was a prostitute (12/15), but what surprised me was the race assumption. Many people had no assumptions about race (9/15), but the next largest group of people thought that she might be white (5/15). The remaining person guessed that she might be African American. I found the fact that a third of the people I asked assumed that the mother was white quite interesting, because I had thought that if anything, people would tend to assume that she was a minority, or anything but white. While conducting the survey, I thought that maybe people were guessing white for race because they hadn’t lived in Asia where there simply aren’t any white prostitutes, and we most commonly see and hear about Asian prostitutes (most notably, Thai prostitutes, but really, they’re all over Asia but never white). Looking back at the results, even people who had lived in Asia or are living in Asia didn’t assume that the mother was Asian, they either assumed that she was white or had no assumption. (Except the one person who guessed that she might be African American)

The fact that people would assume that she is white is intriguing, and I’m not entirely sure why this is, but I’m thinking that it’s because whiteness is so dominant, in terms of power and societal norms. Because of this dominance, when race is unspecified, many people assume whiteness. I think we were talking about this in my women’s studies class. Basically, if race, gender, and sexuality are unspecified, people tend to assume that the subject is a white heterosexual male. This idea is reinforced by the way people speak. We have different words to denote men and women, for example “waiter” and “waitress”. The example cited in our class was doctors. Doctor is a unisex word, but many people use the word doctor to refer to a male doctor, and “woman doctor” to refer to a female doctor. Apparently, to denote anything that’s different than the accepted norm, we have to add a word to mark the subject as irregular.

So in conclusion, my results were surprising on the issue of race. Did anyone expect this?

I also wanted to post about the spoken word/poetry slam topic. When we listened to them in class the other day, particularly Jejudo Dreams, I felt like the text had a whole different meaning and a whole different tone than what I imagined it to be (as many others have commented). I have only ever heard one poem done in this style live- so I am not terribly familiar with the style, and could be making assumptions that aren't true based one this one instance. While the spoken aspect of the performance gives insight into how the author felt and provides a sort of framework for the actual words to fit in so that they make sense to us, it strikes me as odd that these performances are so similar in execution. Is there some type of convention that should be followed? My interpretation of this type of work was that it is free flowing and personal.

However, I noticed in the recordings that we listened to, as well as the live perfromance I saw, that the execution techniques are the same. Starting slowly with a quiet, calm voice, the speaker inserts more pauses in the beginning... and gradually builds up to a loud, angry, passionate frenzy of words without pauses- and barely room to take a breath. The same process may occur several times within a poem based upon the inherent sectioning of the work and its themes. Why are they executed this way, in this pattern? Is spoken word truely a form of self -expression, or at least more full of self-expression than text alone, than why are so many executed as though there is some set of unspoken rules that need to be followed.

I think Chin's piece "Slammed" brings up an interesting point about the concept of "victim art" and getting points. He states that, " The pieces I witnessed the poets read were heartbreaking: abuse, incest, rape, gay-bashing, racism, failed relationships. My boyfriend died of AIDS.. give me points..." Is this not how society operates in general? People are always making themselves the victim to gain respect or recognition, or agency in society. Its unfortunate that this is often the only way certain groups, particularly queer groups, are recognized. it is not until you flaunt your pain and suffering in someone's face time and time again that they suddenly realize that something is wrong, that society's outlook on things perhaps needs to be refined. While Chin's comments applied specifically to the slam and to writers, I think it also has a broader interpretation that can be applied to different oppressed groups in society.

--Ashley

Kelly and I watched "The Women Outside" after the rest of you saw it, because we weren't able to make the Thursday night showing. Let me first say that I was appalled at the treatment which countless Korean women endured in their relationships with the American soldiers. I would have hoped that, with the United States purporting to be a progressive nation with "just" citizens who hold everyone as "equals," there would not have been such horrendous mistreating of these women. Granted, most of them are in the business to make money, to "sell" their bodies to men lusting for a woman (or women) after spending months or years overseas. Nevertheless, I feel that each individual in a relationship of any sort should be treated with respect. It is just so sad to see men who are portrayed as "American heroes" putting other human beings through more pain and suffering.

I wonder if war can truly change a man? Is he inherently good, but turns evil because of the situation he is put in? For anyone who was fortunate enough to go to his lecture at Scripps, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, psychologist and designer of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, spoke about what he called the "Lucifer Effect" - when good people go bad because of circumstance. He attributed atrocities such as the torturing of Iraqis prisoners not to a "bad apple" (an inherently evil person), but to a "bad barrel," or environment. During war men are exposed to all sorts of awful sights and experiences. Does he then transfer this horror to his own life, and act out because of it? Although I do not want to underestimate the impact which seeing so many human deaths can have on a person, I do want to say that nobody has the right to take their fears/frustrations/anger out on the innocent. Doubtlessly, combat takes a toll on all who are involved, but the jump from this to hurting a woman seems a bit of a non-sequitur to me. Dr. Zimbardo would probably agree; in his examples, once the men were removed from their hostile environments, they were not likely to commit the same kind of crime. The student "guards" in his prison experiment took on their roles too zealously, and beat their fellow students, "prisoners," although none of the guards previously would have thought they would do that sort of thing.

What makes matters worse is that these men not only terrorize their Korean girlfriends/wives; they also destroy their family/love life back home. I picture these women back in America running to greet their long-lost husbands/boyfriends at the docks and how they kiss and hug passionately and have looks of such bliss on their faces. Little do they know that back in Korea, or wherever their soldier went abroad, there is probably a girl who is just as miserable as they are happy. I never thought about that until seeing this film, and it is an awful reality check. I wonder if women in the military victimized men in the same way? Certainly there must be; then why do we not hear about these stories?

I can only hope that the couple who moved to Hawai`i has a strong and healthy relationship. The soldier seemed nice, and like he cares about his wife; however there were times during their conversation that I felt he treated her more as a subordinate than as an equal. An example is when she asked him how his day was, and why it wasn't so good, and he responded that she could never understand the things he did on his job. That is really something she should be able to judge for herself; and if his work were top-secret, he should just say that rather than imply that she is too simple-minded to comprehend what he does.

They also mentioned that they were having trouble finding acceptance in their community in Hawai`i. They mentioned that because she is Korean, from Korea, the women treat her differently. This made me think about social dynamics in Hawai`i. There are a multitude of ethnicities which dominate in Hawai`i - Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and white make up the majority of our population. Although the hierarchy is much different and most likely more fluid than it is on the mainland, this doesn't mean that gaining acceptance is much easier. It is true that locals aren't always immediately accepting of newcomers, especially if their culture is different from the culture in the islands. A good number of the inhabitants in Hawai`i have been here for at least four generations, and thus when a white person and someone from Korean move there, they have a hard time settling in. It is true, as in any community anywhere in the world, you have to work to fit in. People will take you in if you show respect, kindness and put in the effort to get to know people in a genuine way. No matter where you go, this is true. Though language or culture may be barriers, these can be overcome with such things as the "aloha spirit!" Sorry sounds cheesy, but take it from someone who lives in Hawai`i...it's true.

I was also struck by the same words of Chin that Elisa discussed in recent blog, but in a slightly different way. It is true that his words can be interpreted as jaded and a sense of surrender and hopelessness -

"I have no idea what it is to be gay or queer anymore; nor do I care. I am so over being queer, and I don't care what I call myself or what anyone else calls me; its all a matter of convenience these days."

"I've given up the dream of the Queer Nation. Race, class, gender, ideologies, and values will always divide us. It is ludicrous to think that since we share a common passion, we should all want the same things out of this life"

- However, the part that struck me the most were his words after. He goes on to say -

"I believe in being unapologetic for my desires. All I know is when I wake in the night to find my lover's body next to mine, no history ... can make me feel any less than brilliant in his arms."

For me, I felt that this resonated what Chin had learned was truly important and what ultimately drove him. I might be reading into this too much, but I feel that in the beginning, when Chin started out as a vocal activist and poet, his drive was to reach an ideal worth speaking out and fighting for. The Queer nation was his ambition and source for creative passion. Over the years, after experiencing the realities of pursuing this ideal, Chin has found something closer and more tangible to hold onto and ground himself in. For him, that source is his lover and he is unapologetic for his desires. I guess that last part is what really gripped me. Yes, maybe he personally has moved on and away from the Queer nation as a forerunner activist poet, but his perpective still echoes that sentiment in that he is "unapologetic for [his] desires." I keep harping on that phrase because I feel that that was the point I ultimately took from him. Whether he was starting out fresh and idealistic or jaded and tired, what made him an activist in my eyes was his belief in being unapologetic for his desires.

Also, he might have given up the dream of a Queer nation, but I feel that he has realized the realities of the ideal dream - "It is ludicrous to think that since we share a common passion, we should all want the same things out of this life." I feel that sometimes we get caught up in our ideals and in the righteousness of our dreams and not realize that people could go on living without hearing what we have to say, This is not to say that we should stop our workshops, discussion forums and activism, but to find your foundation not in these ideals but something closer and more tangible to you. In the though, he does say that the ideals might be compromised and surrendered but those fighting for these ideals will always be around.

"Beyond ourselves, there will always be those that wish for nothing more than to see us dead: They have been wishing and acting on it for centuries, but we are not vanishing."