Tag Archives: asia america

Saving Joy

It was interesting to see the differences between the stories from “The Joy Luck Club” and “Saving Face”. Both movies deal with an older generation that holds on to their traditions and values of the old country. The common denominator here is that the older generation wants to provide a better life for their children than the lives that they lived in the old generation but sometimes along that the path, the way of the old life can be very hard on those living in the new life.

One of the things I ponder about is that while “Saving Face” has a couple resolutions, one of the resolutions is that her mother accepts her homosexuality but I cant help but ask myself “would she be just as  accepting of this had she not been in a situation where her own family and community turned her into an outcast because of her pregnancy?” I feel like Wil’s mother would have been less understanding towards her daughter coming out of the closet had she not gotten pregnant because she would still be a part of the old Chinese community and within that community, essentially homosexuality is “sin”, but because her mother had already committed a different sin, she is then provided with a better understanding towards Wil’s “sin”, almost as if Wil’s mom can’t be angry at her.

I appreciate in both movies, it showcased that daughters of Chinese mothers have a certain obligation to their mothers. I would say this is true of my culture as well. Anytime I start dating someone new, I have to explain to my partner that I am going to complain about my mother a lot, and I am gonna be angry at her and my mom is gonna say some fucked up things to me but to ever suggest to me that I should just not be a part of that family and abandon it, is useless and disrespectful. It’s very much a cultural thing. When I moved out of my moms house when I was 16, my entire family (even the ones all the way in Japan) were in hysterics about it and even to this day, they punish my mother for allowing me to do such a thing. As an ONLY child, my obligations to her are even bigger and no matter how hard she might be on me, no matter how much I feel like she might drag me through the dirt, at the end of the day, I have to understand that it’s cultural.

 

Slaying the Lee in a Club

There were two things in which I was able to vividly see the connection between “Orientals” and “Slaying the Dragon” and that would be chapter three in Lee’s book: “The Third Sex” and chapter  four “Inner Dikes and Barred Zones”.

“…Oriental (male or female) was constructed as a “third sex” –Marjorie Garber’s term for a gender imagined sexual possibility.” (85)

In the film, the narrorator describes the development of  fetishization process of Asian women. How the fact that women tend to men and take care of them in a way that’s done in a submissive manner which can be viewed as sexual. In American society, we either have an interest in men or women but with the exotification of Asian women in particular, you can view it as though these women are essentially the “third sex” in that they are a whole different category of sexual attraction. In one case, I knew a person who was suspicious of me hanging out with her boyfriend  but not because I am female but because I am an Asian female.

One thing I immediately recognized as a theme that connects  Lee and the documentary to the The Joy Luck Club is that there was little representation of Asian men in Amy Tan’s movie and what little representation there was, they were represented in a fairly negative light such as June’s husband in her first marriage. At the party, they eventually show June is with a new Asian man but we never even learn his name and his role was incredibly minor.

 

Readings 1-105 Lee

“Race is a mode of placing cultural meaning on the body. Yellowface marks the Oriental as indelibly alien.” (2)

“This early definition of “alien” emphasized the unalterable nature of the foreign object and its threatening presence” (3)

For me I feel as though these two quotes go hand in hand together, the reason being is that because of the way Asians look, they are always going to be viewed as an alien no matter how assimilated they may become to White America. It shows that even back in the 1920′s and further, the Asian race has always been objectified, and viewed as a threat. Yet even now, in the year 2014, Asians are still being objectified and seen as a threat especially with the recent rise of the nation of China and the threats of North Korea. When Kim Jong-Il passed away in 2011, I heard from Korean Americans and read blogs from Korean Americans who were asked if they felt sad by the passing of Kim Jong-Il, even though they had no relation to him what so ever, but because they look Korean or because they have Korean blood in them, some people have tended to assume that they are related to a corrupted leader.

“Food habits, customs, and rules are central symbolic structures through which societies articulate identity; you are, symbolically at least, what you eat.” (38)

In this section, Lee discusses about how minstrel shows caricaturize  the Chinese. From what I gathered from it, I felt like it was a way for White Americans to mock the Chinese and others who were more unfamiliar to them such as African Americans as well. Luke Schoolcraft wrote a song titled “Heathen Chinee” and not only does it satirize the Chinese language, but it also makes gross assumptions about the Chinese diet.

I see this connection to the modern day culture with Asian cooking because not only am I still asked by dense people about whether or not I have tried dog but also there’s been this incredible rise in the popularity of Asian food such as sushi or pho. Even though most people come from a place of appreciation for the food, I have noticed that they tend to make assumptions about my everyday Japanese diet and am asked if sushi is something I eat on a daily basis with my family. There was one time in particular when I was riding the bus with a friend from Japan and someone on the bus noticed we were speaking Japanese, he began telling us that some years ago he had traveled to Japan and when he went, he visited Kyoto which is well known for their grilled foods like Takoyaki (octopus dumplings) and Okonomiyaki (savory pancakes), instead this young man tells us that he ate sushi every single day while he was in Japan including while he was visiting Kyoto. After that gentleman got off the bus, my friend and I turned to each other and said “mottainai” which roughly translates (within our context of use) “what a waste”. I make this connection because even though what Lee describes in the book as a terrible assumption, in 2014, those sorts of assumption aren’t too far off from what they were back in those days.

“Chinese workers were not the ideal, docile labor force the employers had hoped for.” (66)

“Within a few months, forty-three of them were summarily dismissed after rioting and attempting to murder their Chinese foreman…”(66)

“Chinese workers were themselves engaging in strikes and that many had left the plant.” (66)

Perhaps it’s the fact that I live in 2014 but so far anytime we have read historical texts about the experience of immigrants

Lisa, Bill and Ted's Not So Excellent Kind of Awkward Adventure Slapping People

Lisa, Bill and Ted’s Not So Excellent Kind of Awkward Adventure Slapping People

rioting at their jobs, I feel as though I have to throw my hands up in the air and yell: “Well what do they expect? If they keep treating human beings like garbage, regardless of what they look like on the outside, they are going to start a riot and get angry!” I just can’t wrap my brain around the idea of someone back in those days saying “well we need to fire the Irish because they are rioting towards unfair treatment in the factory so instead we will just bring in a different set of humans, treat them the same way we treated the Irish and then cross our fingers and hope that all bodes well.”

The logic of seeing those who were not white and equating them to not being humans is so preposterous because at the end of the day,  we all have a heart that beats and we all have emotions and we all have boundaries that can be crossed.

I wish I could go back in time with Bill and Ted and slap some of these people across the face for their logic in workers rights.

 

“Both mark the racial parameters that simultaneously created and constrained new possibilities for relations of desire, conflating the sexual with race, class, and gender formations.” (103)

I really appreciated the discussion in the book comparing and contrasting the stories of “The Haunted Valley” by Ambrose Bierce and “Poor Ah Toy” by Mary Mote. I was mostly appreciative of it because “The Haunted Valley” was about the murder of Ah Wee who was female whereas “Poor Ah Toy” was about the suicide of Ah Toy who was male. So reading about how the two compared with each other on how the controversy with love was more problematic because of their race rather than the fact that the relationship in and of itself is problematic.

I really loved that Lee points out that “…Ah Wee has neither voice nor agency while alive.”(95) Mostly because films in this day and age still have a hard time showcasing the inner conflicts within women and only giving them the choice of wanting a man’s love, when really women or human beings in general are just more complex than that.

I also questioned whether or not Fanny’s maternal love for Ah Toy is one of the first incidences in media where white people are portrayed as the white savior. Yet it’s also interesting that after Ah Toy is adopted by Fanny, he “…symbolically shifts him from an object of exchange, a commodity, into an imagined family member.” (100) I think it’s really sad that until someone who is white takes you in as their own, then that is when mixed raced people are no longer viewed as an object. However, with our current times, there has been an issue of interracial couples, primarily between whites and other ethnicity’s, that receives criticism because the person of the different ethnicity is seen as a trophy to their white partner. So even with Fanny adopting Ah Toy into the family, he isn’t really a part of the family especially when Fanny gets disgusted by his gestures.

 

 

The Debut (T.W. Language/Weapons/Weight)

There were three points in this movie that made the wires in my brain go haywire.

When Ben was at the party with his friends from school, the female character makes a joke about him eating dog, and then eating a cat and then she calls him a ‘fucking chink’. His friend tells him to blow it off, saying she didn’t know what she was talking about. Ben responds with “yes, she did.” This moment took me back to a time when I was in high school. I was about 17 years old at the time and I had just started dating an american boy. The first time I went to his house, he showed me a home made sword that his friend had made for him, when he introduced me to the sword, he said his friend named it “The Gook Killer”. I remember being shocked by that name and asked him to never say that word to me again. A little later into the relationship, I was hanging out with that best friend of his who made him the sword and a few other of his friends. We were all playing Mario Kart and I was winning, everyone started calling me a chink, or a gook. I said to them “get it right, I’m not Chinese” and as I was about to cross the winning line, his friends turned off the game out of frustration, turned to me and said “alright, how about this for taste, we bombed the shit out of your family and your country, we killed them and fucked them up!” I broke down, ran into my boyfriends room, and I remember my boyfriend coming after to me, trying to calm me down and basically saying “he doesn’t know what he’s saying, you know he says things like that all the time and doesn’t mean it.” My response was “yes, he did.” I don’t think I will ever, ever forget this.

It was at this point that I was able to see Ben’s awakening, that moment where “that’s right… I’m not white” because I had that same awakening when my exes friends said those words to me. No matter how fluent you are in English, no matter how much you feel like you have assimilated to American culture, people only see you from the outside in, and that shell that we are wearing is essentially a billboard in lights that says “I am not 100% white”.

Similar to the home made sword that my ex had.

Another part of the movie that I saw in myself and in my home life was the relationship between Ben, his father, and his grandfather. At the beginning of the movie, Ben’s father says he’s spoiled and that he gallivants around. Then later in the film, Ben’s grandfather is yelling at his father and basically said the same thing; that he gallivants around. It’s this strange circle that I have noticed is also very prominent in my family. My mom would get mad at me for my behavior and the amount of weight that I had gained, and when I overheard conversations of my mom and grandmother (or my moms older brothers) fighting, my grandmother or uncles would vent their frustrations to her about my moms behavior and then harass her about the weight that she had gained. It makes me wonder if this will ever end.

bottom: My aunt Masako, my cousin Chihiro top: My mom, me, my cousin Hitomi and my uncle Satoshi 2008

The last point I saw was that Gusto referred to Ben as a coconut, white on the inside but brown on the outside and this made me think of last quarter when we learned about Bamboo, Bananas and Bees. More specifically with the term ‘banana’ (yellow on the outside, white on the inside). The internal struggle that young Asian Americans go through with feeling stuck between two different worlds. I could really see in Ben’s character that he felt like he was at a fork in the road of which culture he should put himself in and analyzing the pro’s and con’s of each side.

T.W. Language ‘Gran Torino’

I am going to define the following words in the way that www.urbandictionary.com defines them. You’ll have to excuse the spelling errors as this website allows for anyone to define a word, however they want. These definitions were the top rated definitions voted by those who have visited the site.

Maybe this style  of defining words will look familiar to you guys as well.

Zipperhead: 

A derogatory term used in reference to people of Asian descent.

It is said to have been coined during the Korean war by frontline troops whom had run over enemy troops in jeeps.

2,751 people liked this.

Gook:

A derrogatory term used for the purpose of describing a korean. (Obtained form the korean pronunciation of their country, Hangook.)

3,668 people liked this.

Chink:

A racist term used to describe the Chinese.

7,027 people liked this.

Nip:

A Japanese person (derogatory, from Nippon, the Japanese word for Japan)

1,071 people liked this.

The reason I included the number of likes a definition got is because I think it paints a sad picture of language within our society. The fact that anyone can attach the word ‘like’ to a word that so many of us have been called in a hateful manner paints a grim painting for the future. Now, people could have ‘like’d the words purely because it is the closest definition to the word and paints the most accurate portrayal of that word and there will always be reasons but I guess that in some sense this relates to pop culture because sometimes we aren’t really sure why we ‘like’ the things that we like that pertain to our pop culture and we just might ‘like’ things purely for the fact that they are just there. Not adding any weight to anything.

I tried to keep count how many times Walt and any other white characters used a derogatory term towards or about Asians. The total was 27 but I may have missed some words. It doesn’t sound like that much especially considering how prejudiced Walt was but that’s still 27. To some people, those words are just words, but for people like me, for the people like the Hmongs, that sort of language, carries so much depth and pain. 27 words could easily equally to 2700 times that we have been called that, 2700 times we felt we weren’t welcomed because of what we look like, 2700 times just in one year, 27,000,000 times throughout our history in the United States, starting from now to when we first landed on the shore of the Land of the Free.

Takaki CH. 10-13

Ch. 10

For me this chapter was a bit of a review because I had already studied last quarter about WWII and the internment of Japanese Americans. I was happy to learn, however, some new things about the experience from the perspective of other Asian Americans.

For instance, the Filipinos were ready to fight next to American soldiers. I was very surprised to read that 40% of the Filipino Americans in California registered for the first draft (359) and I was happy to read that they were able to receive citizenship because of how bravely they fought.

As for Korean Americans, it came as no surprise to me that they celebrated Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, as this was an opportunity for the United States to take down Japan especially after Korea’s brutal history with Japan. I also understood why the Korean National Association produced a set of ‘rules’ and that one of the rules was to wear a badge that identified them as Korean and not Japanese. I feel as though more frequently, it is the Japanese and Koreans who get mixed up when people are trying to figure out which ‘one’ they are. My mother frequently gets mistaken for Korean when she is actually Japanese or sometimes she mistakes someone whose Korean for Japanese and I have seen the frustration on both of their faces when this mix up occurs. It also makes a lot of sense when Koreans would get mistaken as a Japanese that they would be furious and even more so that the Alien Registration Act classified Korean immigrants as subjects of Japan (365) . I also found it very interesting that 109 Koreans organized a Korean Unit for the national guard and called themselves the Tiger Brigade and that Koreans gained greater acceptance for their work within the unit.

As for the Chinese Americans go, with the events of WWII and the internment of the Japanese Americans they found it as an opportunity to take back some jobs that they felt was taken from them from Japanese Americans, even going as far as stating that “WWII was the most important historic event of our times. For the first time we felt we could make it in American society (373).” and it seems that this was mostly due to the fact that TIME magazine released an article that “helped” Americans tell apart the Japanese and Chinese even though it was still blatantly racist, it still wanted to show that there was a difference.

With this chapter however, my anger had reawakened from the slumber that was winter break and I was reminded yet again of the unfair treatment of Japanese Americans and the reasoning for their internment. It was very frightening to read that a Congressmen (John Ford) could say such cruel words  like “…stop fucking around. I gave them twenty-four hours notice that unless they would issue a mass evacuation, I would drag the whole matter on the floor of the House and of the Senate and give the bastards everything we could with both barrels.” (391) This excerpt has probably been of the most blunt statements I have read in regards of White Americans in a position of power that bred such hateful words towards Japanese Americans.

Ch. 11

Throughout this chapter and within the book, I have really appreciated topics of struggle and racism through the perspective of other Asian Americans. However, what I noticed the most about this chapter is that earlier in the chapter, Takaki discusses the second wave of immigrants from the country first started with “having dreams of success in America” and then eventually leading up to heartbreaking stories of escaping war and  the memories they retained of watching  those close to them suffer or even fall to their death, Takaki painted a vivid picture of the loneliness that the recent immigrated Asian Americans felt lost and uncomfortable not being in their home country. Takaki writes about the Hmong experience and quotes the experiences of a Hmong refugee: “Here, maybe the American Indians believe in spirits, but those (pointing int the direction of the nearby Laguna range) are their mountains, not ours.” (468).

A quote that really spoke to me in this chapter was “No matter how long you are here in America, you will always be an Asian, always an outsider, not an American.”(461). It makes me sad that to this day, that that statement is still so very true. Especially with the semi-recent interests in Japanese culture. With the rising popularity of Japanese culture, and the lack of Japanese Americans in Olympia, I have found that even though I was raised in the United States, people still approach me with obscure questions about Japan and expect me to know that answer because I am Japanese. With incidences like this, I feel as though I will truly never be an American here so long as I have yellow skin.

Ch. 12

I began reading this chapter in the place of my work, where I have spent many days from last quarter in a quiet section of the restaurant, reading the books that were assigned to us as I silently cried as the carpet that had hard truths about Japanese American history tucked underneath it was revealing itself to me. I thought that perhaps since I was already aware of the hard truths from last quarter that maybe I wouldn’t experience this again but it was with this chapter that my feelings of defeat overwhelmed me yet again and the tears welled up in my eyes.

Now I really appreciate reading about the Model Minority Myth because it is very important to discuss especially in a class that focuses on Asian American pop culture and how the people and the media has a tendency to view us. It was something that I dabbled in a little bit last quarter for my final research project, yet, this chapter painted this picture for me that no matter how hard I try in school, no matter how well I do, there is a chance that whatever career I go into with my life, that I will not be able to acheive higher positions and that if you were to put me side by side with someone who had the same qualifications as me but they were of European descent then they automatically have the upper hand and that I would be left struggling to find a job all because of the color of my skin, something that I will never be able to control.

As a Japanese American, I also agreed with this statement: “Asian Americans blame the education system for not including their history in the curricula and for not teaching about U.S. society in all of its racial and cultural diversity.” (482) I was amazed by the things that I learned last quarter in regards to what the U.S. did to Japanese Americans because while I remember briefly learning about WWII, I do not recall any time in my life when someone has sat me down and told me that Japanese Americans were put into concentration camps and that is upsetting to me because I feel like this country doesn’t want to discuss a part of their history that they are ashamed of yet as a Japanese American that was in the school system from 1st to 12th grade, it’s kind of a big deal to me that the school district decided to utterly skip this huge part of history!

Ch. 13

I am really happy that even though I am half white, I am still able to claim my Asian pride. I am happy to see that there are more and more people everyday whether I meet them or not, are beginning to look more like me. It makes me feel like I have more people to relate to whether it’s about our celebrations or about our struggles. My life has been so interesting because of the two different cultures that I have in me and that I have the freedom to celebrate both parts.

I love living in a time now where I can date someone who is white and neither of us will face the sort of discrimination that people in the 1940′s faced for being in an interracial relationship. I’m not saying it’s perfect and previous partners and I have faced the obstacles of people despising our relationship because I am Japanese or making very strange assumptions about our relationship. At the end of the day though, I get to share with my partners, a different part of myself, and invite them into my mothers home that smells like tonkatsu, gohan and takuan and share with them a taste of a distant home and my partner graciously accepts my invitation with love and respect.

Paull Shin’s Retirement

After 17 years in Senate, Paull Shin announced an immediate retirement due to his recent diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease. His life story is pretty fascinating in that he first began his life as an orphaned boy in Korea, was adopted by an American Soldier during the Korean War when he was 16 years old. He came to the U.S. not knowing the language or even knowing how to read. However, according to The Herald, a newspaper in Everett, Shin “consumed knowledge like water” and went onto graduate from U.W. with a doctorate. He found his passion with education and became a professor of East Asian studies and later became the first Asian American to ever to be elected into the Washington State Legislation. A very well respected man, he seems to be loved by many of his peers.

Paull Shin