Non-Traditional

I come from a non-traditional family. It started out simple enough. A mom, a dad, an older brother and an older sister. I’m the baby. As Lilo from Lilo and Stitch would say though, we got kind of broken along the way. My parents divorced when I was six and my brother died when I was eight. My dad has since been remarried and my mom has been with the same woman for the past seven years. So now I have a mom, a dad, two step moms and all together, three step brothers. I come from a non-traditional family.

What I liked most about the Wedding Banquet was how normal they made the ‘not normal’. They didn’t have this stereotypical gay couple where one was the man and one was the woman. Or even more annoying, where they were both ridiculously flamboyant and feminine. They were just two average guys, one wasn’t ‘the man’ in the relationship and if there was then I couldn’t easily tell who. They behaved like a normal couple. They fought together, the slept together, they kissed, they cooked. That’s what its like when I’m at my mom’s house with her girlfriend and my step brother. They fight like any other couple. My step brother can annoy me like a full brother would. We’re technically non-traditional but if you hung out with us for a day, you’d see just how traditional we are. I was excited at the end o the movie, when all three of them decided to raise the child. I wouldn’t trade my childhood for the world. I have stories and experiences that I wouldn’t have if I grew up ‘normally’. I have perspectives and I think I’m a pretty open person because of the way I was raised.

As I’ve mentioned in a different post and briefly in this one, my brother died when I was eight. He was twelve. In The Motel Sam’s character talks about how he would wish to die at twelve when he was eight years old. I felt my throat close up when he said that, it was such a coincidence. He was saying that nothing good happens after you’re twelve, that it’s all downhill from there. I’ve always felt the complete opposite. I often thing about all the things that my brother didn’t get the chance to do. He never graduated from middle, never went to high school, never got his driver’s license. He never got to graduate from high school and then go to college. Or not go to college, he never had that choice. He never got to fall in love and move out and explore the world on his own. There is so much that he didn’t get to do. It was strange to me that anyone would see life being pointless after twelve. All the best and the worst things happen then.

API’s in the news!

BabuJennifer Babu is of South Asian decent. She comes from Indonesia, but was brought up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She struggled with her Indian heritage and she openly rejected it so that she would be perceived as nothing but American.

Babu says her rejection was a product of the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of South Asian-Americans in American mainstream media. So she’s vowed to change it.

In September 2013, Babu launched Videshi Magazine, an online entertainment magazine targeting South Asian-Americans in order to battle the lack of media outlets that represented her ethnicity and culture. Videshi, of Hindi origin, translates into English as “foreign; not made in India,” which Babu said she believes is appropriate for a magazine that is about South Asians out of where their culture is from.

Globalization

Gongfu emerged from colonized China as an art of reclamation, an art used to preserve their culture in the face of an invading culture. The art was used in order to keep their culture thriving even as an outside force tied to pry it away from the people. “…it was consistent with Japan’s national policy of De-Asianization and Europeanization.”

The book brings into account the fact that Bruce Lee refused to play Asian stereotypes in movies, even if it restricted his Hollywood career. By refusing to de-Asianize and Europeanize himself, he became a star back in China, where his movies upheld the culture that he wanted to represent.

I think this also leads into The Motel, a movie with Asian characters that doesn’t necessarily focus on their ‘Asian-ness.” While it is known that they are Asian, and they even talk about their specific heritage, there isn’t as much of a focus on it as their is in movies that focus on stereotypes. While being Asian is part of the story, the story more focuses on the a boy whose life is built on ‘acceptances.’ He accepts that the girl he likes may not like him back, he accepts that all the tenants of his family’s motel are temporary, and he accepts that his family may not understand his writing. The movie pays more attention to him tearing down this barrier of acceptances, even if it doesn’t necessarily mean a happy ending.

South East Asian Stereotypes

Daily Princetonian wrote an article about stereotyping Asian American’s. South Asian Americans have been categorized as being many things but rarely been put in the category they belong in. Recently Indian American’s have been targeted to Islam for  hate crimes.  Many have put Indian Americans into the same groups as Native American’s. Some of the residents at Princeton University thought of “Asian American’s having long black hair with small eyes and pale skin.” They believe that Asian means to look a certain way. I have to admit in middle school maybe even in high school I thought that Indian Americans weren’t Asian American’s it wasn’t until I really paid attention in History class that I figured out that the two cultures related to each other.

http://dailyprincetonian.com/opinion/2014/02/asian-american-identity-the-princeton-perspective/

A Few Fusion Designs

I’ve been working on a few fusion dress designs. I’ll post the others after I post some other national costumes. In looking at what are dubbed “Fusion Hanboks” the designs often look completely Western. Though the dress skirt isn’t actually closed, but rather a wrap around, the only other main difference is the top line. The most common modifications to a hanbok are a shortening of the hemline and alteration or removal of the jacket piece.

To some traditionalists, the East-West fusion wear is interpreted as a modernizing (because in much of Asia “Westernizing” and “modernizing” are synonymous) therefore resulting in a loss of culture. For some designers, using a hanbok form is a way to reconcile the modern fashion styles with tradition, thereby returning to roots.

Sandra Oh modeled a fusion hanbok on the red carpet once. The piece left off the jacket and the traditional style tie became nearly comically oversized. Her outfit also utilized colors not common in traditional wear, which is another common element of fusion wear. The dress did retain it’s length and fullness.

The photos of Kpop group T-ara show a variety of styles among fusion/modern wear. Their outfits add flairs such as ruffles and layering, a bow rather than the tie, moving the line from the bust to the waist, and fur trims on short sleeves or bolero tops.

Pop-Osition

The pop-osition that we came up with in my group that I will focus on is:”Martial Arts is very integral to culture. Starts in China, spreads to Japan. It spreads in a way that is iconic to the second group.”Kung Fu films became very popular in China, and Bruce Lee was the biggest actor at the time. The films compared to Samurai films in Japan. This was during the time where Japan and China had animosity after the Japanese Occupation.

“At one point in the film, he [Bruce Lee] said the Japanese toughs were telling the member of Chinese dojo [sic] the Chinese were the “Sick people of Asia”. Silence. You could hear the bus traffic on Nathan Road outside the theater…Brice- as the character Chen Chen- went to the Japanese headquarters to confront the murderous villains. He single handedly laid to waste to the entire orginization, sending the audience to hysteria…. following a dramatic pause he said “The Chinese are not the sick people of Asia.” Pandemonium! Everyone rose to his [sic] feet. Wave upon wave of earsplitting sound rolled up to the balcony. The seats were humming and the floor of the old balcony was shaking.” (Kato p.12)

Shoalin Monks and NASA Rockets

 

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Monk Xing Hao walks along a boardwalk in Texas. He points excitedly at the tall prairie grass, shouting, “This gives you a great sense of the American West!”. The following scene positions Monk Xing Hao and Monk De Shan in front of the Houston Space Center. They practice Shaolin kung fu, wearing their traditional monks clothing while a rocketship looms in the distance. The narrator says, ”Like many pioneers of the Old West, Monks Xing Hao and De Shan have come to look for gold. They are Kung Fu brothers with a common goal of making a Kung Fu homestead in Texas”.

This sequence of images was fascinating to me. The immigrant journey of the two monks is told through the narrative of the Great Frontier, while being juxtaposed over the image of the rocket ship. Looking back at Orientals, one can see why invoking the Frontier narrative is particularly jarring, “God’s Free Soil did not have space for the Chinese, whose presence disrupted the mission into the wilderness” (Lee 50). The Chinese were seen as a pollutant, interrupting the Eden of the West and white man’s advancement into the “wilderness”. Shaolin Ulysses is recalling that same narrative, but putting the Chinese monks in the position of white frontiersmen. An initial reading suggests that the background image of the rocket speaks to the monks’ cultural displacement — their traditional martial arts are at odds with the technologically advanced American culture. It’s possible that this was the director’s intent, yet another reading lies beneath the surface. NASA often refers to outer space as the “New Frontier”, or “Last Frontier”, calling forth the same narratives the narrator uses to describe the monk’s experience. The rocket serves as a poignant symbol for American imperialism, where even the “Great Frontier” of space is not free from colonialism.

Serpent of Nations

The racism against China in Bioshock Infinite is more subtle than that against other racial minority groups, but even within the first 20 minutes it shows up in what is called a kinetiscope. Kinetiscopes are short slides that are used to immerse the player into the world of Columbia through small historical tidbits and product commercials.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The three relevant kinetiscopes that I’ve run into so far start at 1:28 and end at 2:25, the three referring to the history of their succession from the Union.

In the first section of the game there are also hints towards an Underground Railroad sort of operation for the African American ‘workers’ who were forcibly taken to Columbia in order to work as janitors and other lowly labor jobs. While there aren’t any Asian Americans who are seen in these roles, this is one of the reasons that the rebel group Vox Populi exists in the game. Vox Populi is, again, a rebellion group of minorities, both race (those referred to are: Native Americans and those of Asian and Asian descent and the Irish) and class. But at this point in the game the Vox Populi are only rumored to exist, and their presence isn’t apparent until later.

What really got me about the first 30-60 minutes was the statue outside the Fraternal Order of the Raven, a John Wilkes Booth worshiping cult. The only words that adorn the plaque beneath the statue is “Comstock Fights The Serpent of Nations.” The statue depicts Comstock fighting a three headed monster, one of the heads depicting a stereotypical Chinese caricature.

The statue reminds me of the propaganda mentioned in Orientals against Chinese in California and beyond. This statue is a representation of the idea that it’s alright to discriminate against Chinese, as the great ‘Profit’ slays the ‘beast’ that is the Chinese and other races. This demonization of China continues later in the game.

“Pop”positions

For my “pop”position, I chose to talk more about how Martial arts was a very integral part to Asiatic culture. It starts in China and spreads to Japan. The martial arts spreads in a way that is “iconic” to the second group.

Globalization was a huge part of this activity.

Globalization:“Globalization’ is a contemporary term used in academic and non-academic contexts to describe a late-twentieth-century condition of economic, social, and political interdependence across cultures, societies, nations, and regions precipitated by an unprecedented expansion of capitalism on a global scale.” (Lisa Lowe, in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glen Handler, New York: New York University Press, 207, p. 120) 

Kato discussed that Kung Fu originated in China and was the root for all other forms of martial arts, specifically in Japan’s Karate, martial arts originates in China, goes to Japan and becomes its own art form. Later Karate becomes very popular in America. The globalization component of martial arts, living in America Bruce Lee creates his own Jeet Kune Do “the way of the intersecting fist”. 

J.R. Celski

J.R. Celski is a half filipino, half polish man who was in the 2010 Winter Olympics for speed skating. He came home with a bronze medal. He was also raised in Federal Way Washington, which isn’t very far from us! He was recently interviewed by Merideth Vieira on February 5th on NBC’s special “How to raise an Olympian”.

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