Tag Archives: East Main Street

From Kung Fu to Hip Hop

Of course I am not surprised that the government or media does not expose the real history of things, at least not when I was younger. I find it very interesting that Jimi Hendrix is native. When I went to school in California, our history teacher allowed us to take a trip to Alcatraz on Thanksgiving morning so we could learn more about the native history. I will say that it was one of the most eerie things I’ve done. I arrived on the island at 6:30am so it was still black outside. Eventually, we got to one of the “cliffs” of the prison and there was a ceremony taking place right at sunrise to honor all the natives who were forced onto the island and imprisoned.

Anyways, back to the reading, I am not surprised that I learned more disturbing things about American history that I did not know about before. When I went to Alcatraz, I wondered how long American school systems will keep up this act of “Thanksgiving” and how the Indians/Natives and pilgrims got along and had a wonderful feast together. I enjoy this book in a way that it is challenging the American tradition of covering up the dark things of American history.

Reading the oppression that goes on reminds me of Wedding Banquet and East Main Street “Apu’s voice.” The power of deceit. When we are children we are fed this idea of harmony and peace among each race and we are blinded by it that school systems sweep true history under the rug; at least, up until high school we learn that history was never really taught until that moment. In Wedding Banquet Wei Tung feeds his parents this absolute fake identity of a straight, successful, soon-to-be married man. While his parents just accept it because it’s what they want to hear and they never knew about him (at least his father did at some point). The makers of Simpson’s know that the voice of Apu is nowhere to being Indian, but still sells it to the audience, knowing it is not a true Indian. 

Music Video’s and Readings

Watching music videos and connecting it to the “Cibo Matto” chapter made me think about a lot of music artists. The Black Eyed Peas represent the “power 4″ of races with Asian, Mexican, African, and European. Relating it back to the chapter, Cibo Matto was seen as “kawaii” or “cute” when in reality, that is not what they wanted. So yes, their first album was about food mostly because their english was limited; however, their songs evolved into more meaningful things about government and their social standing. Other music artists like Black Eyed Peas, Blue Scholars, and Kanye West are seen as like “pop” or catchy artists, but their songs hold a lot of hidden struggles. For instance, Black Eyed Peas “Where is the love?” or Kanye West’s “New Slaves” songs represent the struggles of living in todays society. Overall, the chapters we talked about on Thursday covered the idea of what society from these artists compared to how these artists want society to see them.

Faultlines

“Sometimes I feel like I was born out of a faultline, where two tectonic plates meet.”

You say it like it’s a joke. We’re standing in line at the Post Office, my second (failed) attempt at getting a passport. I scribble frantically, a pile of documents spilling out of an old manilla envelope. Fragments, highschool yearbook photos, newspaper clippings, anything to prove the existence of a body in motion. I keep thinking about the movements of bodies, of our bodies. Of barriers. Fences, blockades. From the French word barriere, a fortification defending an entrance.

What does it mean to be born out of a faultline? A faultline is a fracture deep in the rock of the earth  that splits it in two. Scientists are able to trace the displacement of the halves by identifying the piercing point, finding the two halves and following the geological trail back in time to when they were whole. You were born out of shattering rock and shifting plates.
Your father was an American soldier, your mother grew up in a rural village in the Philippines. You tell me that they were starving, surviving on only rice. It’s not a coincidence that all the Filipina women in your family are married to white American GIs. How much choice is there in the movement of bodies? In the movement of our bodies?

Barriers. Blockades. Boundaries. Like scars, like the fissures of stone.

A fault is responsibility for an accident, as in “It’s all my fault”. I can trace the fault line, the words of apology in the way we hold our bodies. How many times have you told me that I don’t need to apologize? I pronounce it the way my daddy does, the way his daddy does. This is what it’s like loving across diaspora. Voices thick with cities we’ve only been to once.

Power of deceit

“Apu is a naturalised US citizen. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science. He graduated first in his class of seven million at ‘Caltech’ — Calcutta Technical Institute — going on to earn his doctorate at the Springfield Heights Institute of Technology (S.H.I.T.).

Apu began working at the Kwik-E-Mart during graduate school to pay off his student loan, but he stayed afterward as he had come to enjoy his job and the friends he had made. He remained an illegal immigrant until Mayor Quimby proposed a municipal law to expel all undocumented aliens. Apu responded by purchasing a forged birth certificate from the Springfield Mafia that listed his parents as US citizens Herb and Judy Nahasapeemapetilon, but when he realized he was forsaking his origins, he abandoned this plan and instead successfully managed to pass his citizenship test with help from Lisa and Homer Simpson.” (Wikipedia)

Apu is an Indian character in the hit tv series The Simpsons. He’s funny and portrays a “vehicle to introduce current views and debates about minorities in the United States” (323). Though he is one of the few Indian representations on television in today’s society, who Apu is is not who he seems to be. The person who voices Apu is not Indian, nor is he Asian. Hank Azaria actually voices Apu. There had been dilemmas in the past where white actors would portray Asian ones even though there were Asian actors in the field. Why have someone who is not a certain race be a certain race? I understand that he is just acting, yet that gives privilege to other white actors to mimic and and give that one accent to that certain race. “The satire of ethnic assimilation illustrates how racial and ethnic identities operate beyond the visual and are influenced by the reception of accented speech” (315). What is happening is an accent is giving the audience an image (more than likely a racial image) of someone and then an assumption of some racial culture and binding it. For instance, if on the radio, there was a woman talking with an Asian accent, most people would picture an Asian, most likely Chinese, woman talking with having this certain Asian culture that she lives by.

We also watched a film, The Wedding Banquet, and the movie was about a gay Chinese man who marries a woman just to please his parents. When his parents decide to visit to help with the banquet, both Wei Wei and Wei Tung practically renovate the apartment. Instead of having all the modern art pieces around the apartment, they took all of it down and replaced it with traditional Chinese items. In the movie, Wei Tung has a typical Chinese accent, but he does not live the traditional Chinese culture. This movie sort of breaks that bond between sound and appearance.

Overall, I think both the book and movie show the power of deceit. The way someone talks with an accent can lead to an assumption on how that person looks and the way they live. The movie challenges it by Wei Tung covering his real living environment with “fake” Chinese living styles and Apu, in real life, not being Asian or any form of Asian at all.

 

hello sleepwalkers

East Main Street ch. 4, 13, & 17
& The Wedding Banquet

 

In group today, my group discussed chapter 4 of East Main Street, and I felt it had a great deal to do with the film. The film was largely about how race and gender fit into the every day lives of people, as well as a great deal of amazing food. And, naturally, sexuality. It’s why it was such an excellent correlation to the reading, which was all about these things, as well as many others. The over sexualization of Padma Lakshmi is a good example of this, but also an antithesis of sorts. While the movie was very genuine, Padma was very staged. She had difficulty in the kitchen with comedic laughter in the background, most ingredients or spices were pre-measured, and most of her fanbase were largely horny men, with no one really interested in the cooking. From the sounds of it the entire thing was very fake – it lacked in anything truly cultural.

The Wedding Banquet, on the other hand, was really refreshing to see. While it was full of standard traditions, it also had a good balance. It was life for Chinese people in America, as well as their families back home, without explicitly being about these things. There was no struggle with race or ethnicity, or any real judgment outside of the typical family judgment. It was about a man, his gay lover, his very traditional parents, and a woman willing to do a number of things in order to get a green card.

I wouldn’t say that the film had a happy ending, because it didn’t. The ending was a relief for all involved I think, but to say that it was happy is overlooking a great deal. Even as she was leaving, Wai Tung’s mother did not accept him, thinking right until her several minutes on the screen that it might ¨be a phase¨ or that she ¨went wrong¨ in raising him. His father was considerably more accepting, even if he didn’t actually want his son to be aware of that fact. It was a wonderful fusion of tradition and modern struggle.

On different note, does anyone know if there was some symbolism about red in the movie? At least two of Wei Wei’s dresses at the start of the film were red if I recall correctly, and all the gifts she was given by Wai Tung’s family were red as well. I wasn’t sure if that was correlation/director’s choice or tradition.

East Main Street, Cibo Matto, + The Wedding Banquet

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During this mornings seminar, I came away thinking about the word “resistance”. Typically when I think about resistance in music, I think about folk songs and protest songs over the years, but I guess I never really thought of lyrical resistance against stereotyping and cultural identities. Exploring Cibo Matto will obviously bring this notion to the forefront as they are a group who are constantly defying stereotypes. They are a group who exist on the fringe, not really fitting into any category. You have two women who are venturing into hip-hop and utilizing technology as their instrument – already you’re breaking boundaries. They defy the notions of stereotypes typically associated with the words female, Asian, Japanese, hip-hop and others, creating a sound and voice unique to themselves. Because of this resistance,  Cibo Matto give us a reason to celebrate how things in society have changed in the past 40 years or so, and I think help us embrace new points of view as well.

The-wedding-banquet-1993-poster

In the Wedding Banquet, Wei-Wei is a woman who is a product of her time – independent, artistic, and open minded. There is a scene between Wei Wei and Mrs. Gao later on in the film in which Mrs. Gao comments on how older women sometimes grow envious of younger generations because of that independence and spirit, which speaks volumes about the differences between generations and the times we live in. Wei Wei is definitely a form of resistance against the traditional gender roles and routes women have taken in the past. It is Wei Wei who makes the choice to keep her baby, and I love how she embraces Wai-Tung and Simon’s relationship (another form of resistance) and asks them to the be the fathers of her children.The shot of the three of them together as they watch the Gaos leave is touching and almost marks the new family as the new nuclear family – one that embraces new ideals and individualism.

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East Main Street
Jigsaw ch. 6, 10, 11, & 14

One of the main things I discovered I had never put a great deal of thought into while going over this reading was the relevancy of beauty pageants in pop culture. Despite this, sure enough, there are many examples of such things being immensely popular. I never watched a great deal of tv that dealt with competitions, sticking more to scifi or the horror genres, but when I stopped to think about it, pageants of many different varieties permeate our culture. RuPaul’s drag race is a good example, but there are also things like Project Runway, which is a personal favorite of my little sister’s. Things like this help shape popular culture in their own unique ways, and have significant impacts on all cultures around them, some shows even being popular enough to extend across continents, or influencing the creation of events in other countries.

Things like this even have an impact on the identity of those who enjoy it, as well as the ability to accept oneself. While such things have an unfortunate downside of being a potential breeding ground for stereotypes, it also has the chance of doing good and showing someone that they can accept themselves for who they are for the things that they themselves enjoy. It can even go so far as to teach queer youth to love themselves, provided that the people in charge are running things well. There are so many ways that beauty pageants can have an impact.

Questions of Authenticity in East Main Street

Notions of authenticity are a running theme in the chapters I’ve read so far in East Main Street. In this post, I’ll be looking at authenticity in the three chapters for this week’s reading.
What does it mean to be Asian or Asian American? Where do the borders between race, ethnicity and nationality lie? Who is “authentically” Asian, and what right do they have to engage with Asian cultures outside of their ethnicity/nationality?

In the chapter “Model Minorities Can Cook”, Anita Mannur focuses on dissecting Asian fusion cuisine. She uses two celebrity chefs as focal points for her argument, Padma Lakshmi and Ming Tsai. Questions of authenticity arise when looking at the way that both chefs present (and subsequently commodify) a wide range of Asian cooking styles outside of their respective cultures or training. They claim all of Asian cuisine as their own, with no regard for establishing a pan-Asian culture, instead, ”Asianness, as it filters into their respective culinary styles, emerges as something that they instinctively understand because they are Asian American” (85).

In ” ‘Alllooksame’? Mediating Asian American Visual Cultures of Race on the Web” the website alllooksame.com  is put under scrutiny. The website has a series of quizzes to test the user in identifying Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. Lisa Nakamura purposes that alllooksame challenges notions of authenticity by putting the user in the role of racial profiler. Who is Japanese? Who is Korean? The inevitable failure of the user in correctly categorizing “Asian” faces leads to the questioning and eventual discarding of essentializing notions of race. Alllooksame.com disconnects race from the realm of the visual, and reveals the role of the user in participating in the construction of race, “By calling into question what “Asian” is, at least in visual terms, Suematsue is interrogating the basis upon which racial taxonomies like ‘asian’ are built” (267).

Like Nakamura, Shilpa Dave locates race outsides of the body in “Apu’s Brown Voice”. Dave interrogates the role of accents in relation to power and cultural citizenship. Using the character of Apu from The Simpsons, Dave introduces the concept of “brown voice” to describe the particular Indian English accent that is mimicked by a white voice actor for the character of Apu. Brown voice homogenizes South Asian immigrant cultures, and because of the history of British colonialism, it aligns itself more closely with whiteness than with Asian American identity. Dave questions the authenticity of accent in performing Indianness. By performing brown voice, the user gains control over how they are going to be culturally received because of the accents association with class privilege. Examining the legacy of “mimicry” and the creation of the colonial subject, one is lead to question notions of authenticity in regards to voice and accent.

Talking Points

Chapter 10

“Japanese American women in the pageant were working with white standards of beauty pageants in mind and re-creating them with a Japanese American twist” (206)

  • Who exactly defined white beauty standards? If you say blue eyes and blonde hair then isn’t that the same as what Hitler thought as the ideal beauty? Didn’t the U.S. NOT want to be like him?

“…the pageant was a way to “mimic” mainstream America and to show how “American” Japanese Americans were.” (208)

  • What were American women exactly like?

“…changed it’s racial eligibility rules from 100 percent Japanese ancestry to 50 percent.” (217)

  • At one point is someone gonna be considered not Japanese enough though?

side note: I was very happy to read from Keith Kamisugi about whether or not girls with a white last name should be allowed to enter. My full name is Lisa Elizabeth Foster and I have been told by far too many people in my life that I am not truly Japanese if I have such an American sounding name.

Chapter 11

  • Cablinasian- is that cool? Or do you really think it does make people color-blind?
  • In some ways, isn’t it good that there is more diversity in a sport that is dominated by primarily people who are white?

“When children of every race can proclaim, “I am Tiger Woods,” race becomes insignificant” (229)

  • Is the statement above true to you? And why?

Chapter 14

“…multicultural exoticization of difference” (281)

  • Discuss recent things in pop culture that has done this with other cultures i.e. anime, food, language

“Is he Asian because he “looks Asian”? Or Asian because he self-identifies as Asian? Or simply Asian because he has Asian blood?” (284)

  • This connects back to chapter 10, at one point is someone’s “Asian-ness” insignificant? Have you heard the term white-passing P.O.C.? What do you think of this term?