Author Archives: Sunset

tonight we’re on fire

My Name is Kahn

“…And I am not a terrorist.”

It’s amazing in the way that hate can shape the world and the way we perceive it, or the way that we think of others. Something as simple as a name, or a different book of rules, or the color of your skin is enough to have entire countries hating you, not even a specific “you”, but the very idea of something’s existence.

The film was a labor of love, as was the story it was based upon.  It told of triumph in dark times, of love and devotion and loss. It wove a wonderful web that was fantastic to follow, to see all the pieces it connected to at the end of the film. It was honestly a joy to watch, and I was genuinely looking forward to continuing it after we left for lunch on Tuesday. There were a few mentions of some cheesiness, but I didn’t find it cheesy in the slightest.

However, for all the overcoming the movie was about, I also felt that it was a great deal about hatred.

The first example was small; an unfortunate cultural circumstance that, though disheartening, was understandable to a certain extent. Zamir’s unwillingness to approve of the wedding between Khan and Mandira, because Mandira was Hindu and they were Muslim, the basis of their hatred a long war that neither of them were directly connected with. But Khan’s mother taught him equality regardless of these things, and so Khan was unbothered.

The next case was an angry little boy, who had just lost his father to war. He lashed out against his best friend, because he viewed his friend as a source, a reason for his father dying, and this tiny little hate turned into something bigger and fiercer, until the boy was essentially responsible for getting his best friend killed.

There were also hate crimes, things committed against people just because they looked like they could be Muslim; murders and cruel acts of violence.

And then there was the murder attempt made on Khan’s life. All of these acts were driven by hatred, and though the movie was inspiring I felt this was also a connecting theme. For all the good that occurred it was fueled by tragedy, and while I’m glad it had a  good ending where Mandira and Khan could be happy together again, it’s very sad how long and what it took them to get there again after Sam’s loss.

here comes the new kings

APIs in the news &
From Kung Fu to Hip Hop pg. 71 – 112

Truthfully, I had some difficulty finding what I thought might have been the most relevant thing to this class about Asian Pacific Islanders in the news when I went digging. API stands for more than just Asian Pacific Islander, and more than one search attempt resulted in a few links to sites about Catholic masses. The sort of links that, after clicking them and attempting ctrl+f, you can no longer find the term you search for on the page as google told you it was. Then, after skimming a few articles, I found one of particular interest on kitsapsun.com.

Though dated to 2013 (with the article claiming to have been posted in October), it talked about how the Asian-American and Pacific Islander groups in a place called Kitsap county had come together for a summit meeting. The meeting dealt with education, health benefits, crime… a number of things, with their ideal being to come together and help immigrants.

The article was very much about good intentions. It was about a community coming together to try to help the people that otherwise weren’t being helped – it also said that at least seven different ethnic groups came together for it, despite it being mostly informal.

The thing that struck me as odd is that I have never heard of something like this happening. I’m from a primarily white area in a very white state, so that may be part of the issue, but is this different elsewhere? It’s sad to think that it might be normal that this doesn’t happen, that it might be abnormal that these people came together to try to make a difference for strangers who had it worse than they did.

It’s a pretty short article, but anyone interested can find it over here.

“Foundation of Subversion in the Making of Global Commodities.” (Kato, pg. 102)

Ghosts are a means of fighting back, and a way of honoring memories. Kato talks about how ghosts are a way of losing great amounts of work hours, of how people will refuse to work regardless of what it means for themselves if someone else has said that they have seen a ghost. The lengths to which people will go for the memories of someone else they barely know is amazing, but it also holds a deep, awful implication.

If there was a ghost, then there was a death. If there was a death, it was the death of someone that worked there once upon a time. It was someone that died under the same conditions that they did, and there is a very good reason that they’re haunting the place they’re in. I think that’s why the idea of ghosts is so frightening at times, especially to people who are treated horrifically.

everything is a mess when you hide all the lies

Black Dynamite

As I said earlier in the week, I intended to make my obsession post this week about Black Dynamite. It wasn’t until I actually looked into it that I realized it was not only an animated series, but it’s also a movie, one that though styled as if in the 60s or 70s actually came out in 2009. It even has cheesy moments, where they do a close up of a woman’s face and she’s smoking but when she exhales there’s no smoke, and her cigarette isn’t lit.

I believe the film was meant to be a comedy when it was made, and it’s certainly as comedic as possible – not to mention creative. It’s done quite a bit differently than a lot of old kung-fu movies, but still retains much of the classic feel of kung-fu films.

The tv series, however, I felt was a little more straight-forward in their comedy. The film wasn’t exactly subtle, but the series went to a whole new level of extreme. They say ninja instead of nigger, have Michael Jackson being an extreme abusive in the first ten minutes of the series (later revealed to be half alien), and so many strange plot twists that by the end of the first episode my head was reeling.  Some moments in both the film and the series are so genuinely creepy that it was hilarious, and both were pretty fantastic to watch. I was mostly unable to actually finish the black dynamite series due to wind knocking out my internet a few times, but I’m looking forward to being able to finish it.

gonna be a monster killer

Pop-ositions

One of my group’s pop-ositions was as follows: “Globalization didn’t necessarily work because the cultural exchange was mostly one-sided, as one culture was sort of overriding the other.”

To this effect, American culture has a habit of trying to take over other cultures without necessarily allowing for them to point out whether or not you’re doing it when when you take on these aspects of other things. Early on in the class, a friend of mine told me that Korean food was one of the only Asian foods that had not been changed upon being brought to the United States, because many of the others didn’t actually suit the American palette. Upon doing a little research, this seems pretty universal in American misunderstanding. I looked up a few popular English recipe sites, and though many of them had quite a few useful posts, most of the “Asian” recipes were variations of the same American way it’s done.

This can be seen in a number of other ways as well. As a child I was a huge fan of the Pokemon cartoon series, and I still play the video games. But there were multiple situations in which they changed things in the series, simply because they weren’t American. One that I found distinctly strange even as a child was the overwriting of onigiri in one of the episodes. I had no idea what it actually was at the time; I had no experience with much of anything Japanese outside of Sailor Moon. But in the episode they referred to the onigiri as a sandwich. My brother and I kind of looked at each other, and we wondered out loud if either of us had ever seen a sandwich that looked like that before. Naturally, we hadn’t. But, being young and having short attention spans, we thought nothing of it until years later. Often times, much like what’s done with history, things that are thought of as strange or inconvenient for a certain target area are simply written out.

detective code

Shaolin Ulysses
& The Black Kungfu Experience

It was surreal to see the hustle and bustle of New York City flowing around the monk Guolin was a curious and inspiring sight. He looked very calm and serene in the chaos that is New York, and it was lovely to see him. I’ve been to New York a number of times myself, and to China Town nearly as many, and I can honestly say that I’m a little sad that I never encountered him in any manner. I don’t quite recall if he was the first Shaolin monk to come to the US for his teachings, but I certainly thought he was one of the more interesting ones. In the film it mentioned how in 2000 he was able to open a Shaolin Temple, and upon doing a quick google search, it seems that in the fourteen years since he’s been able to open at least four more of them, with a number of other Shifus to join him.

While not necessarily the inspiring sort, Li Peng was quite interesting as well. Choosing to get married over remaining a monk, he has a wife and a child, but he still trains vigorously daily. It’s a little surprising that his wife doesn’t seem to have an issue with that, but it takes all types. I hope that in a decade or two we’ll get to see his son in films like this as well.

The Black Kungfu Experience reminded me a lot of a show called Black Dynamite. It might have been the afro, but in his younger days Ron Van Clief a little bit like the main character. I’ve never seen more than a few snippets of the series itself, but I really think it must has been at least partially inspired by the exploits of Ron Van Clief, even if it’s a bit more action packed and perhaps vulgar. I’ll try to make my next Rock post about that if I can.

after all, the truth always sounds the most fake

Bravely Default

One thing that I really adore is turn-based RPGs. As such, this post will be about a game that recently came out in America, Bravely Default.

The game was only very recently released, having come out last Friday. It’s about a fictional world where the balance is kept by four crystals, and the bad guys are trying to change the order of the world by corrupting the crystals so that people will no longer have faith in them. However, things in the game are not quite as clean cut as in many other games. One of the main character, Edea, is the daughter of the man responsible for trying to corrupt the crystals. She joins your party early on in the game, and has to come to terms over the course of the game with the fact that much of her life has been a lie. Her people have vilified the crystals to such an extent that they believe the people who watch over them to be evil witches. She’d been taught that they were the most wicked beings, when in fact the girls guarding the crystals were priestesses (miko, 巫女, translated as “vestal” for some reason), and are not only seemingly vegetarian but generally pacifistic, and spend the majority of their lives praying to the crystals. Though not necessarily the specific main character, Edea needs to learn throughout the game how the war raging is completely evil not on the part of the crystal worshipers, but on the part of her own family.

I haven’t finished the game yet, but Edea’s route in it so far reminded me a lot of our class, and how we’ve learned a great deal about the way that history is written to not necessarily be accurate. Everyone wants to paint themselves in a good light, even when they have done a great deal of wrong.

konoha’s state of the world

Music videos
& East Main Street 1, 2, 5, & 15

One of the best things about the music that we listened to on Thursday was the rawness of some of it, but likewise, the diversity. Many of the songs were touching in a number of ways, but there were also a few songs that weren’t about anything too specific, even if that was because of a language barrier. It was really wonderful to see the way that some of the artists changed with their music overtime as they better perfected their sound. I think the biggest example of this was Cibo Matto, who went from singing songs about chicken (because they didn’t know very much English) to  instead singing about racism in the industry. Watching their evolution and the way their music could have an impact was really wonderful.

Similarly, if I’m understanding the sentence correctly there’s a line in Dave in which it says;

“Blood may run thicket than water, but the flow that counts is neither genetic nor racial, but narratological in constitution.” (Dave, pg96)

It seemed that this quote was a rather fitting match. If I’m interpreting the meaning correctly, it implies that you should not necessarily base family just by race or by blood, but rather by the culture that you have lived in and grown with after looking back on it. This is something that a great deal of people neglect to do, myself included, and which I think many of the artists that we were able to listen to on Thursday were able to accomplish with their music.

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.

次の次の次の

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.