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