To Nao the natural world is an escape from the cruelty of her classmates and her sense of isolation. Every morning before school she stops at a temple, “We were right in the middle of Tokyo, but when you got close to the temple, it was like stepping into a pocket of ancient humid air, which had somehow gotten preserved like a bubble in ice, with all the sounds and smells still trapped inside it” (46). There is a sense of calm, of ancientness and connection to ancestors. Nao describes the temple, especially the spot on the bench in front of the stunted maple tree as being “safe”.

Our reading from A Tale For the Time Being inspired me to think about my own connection to the Pacific Northwest:

I have come to crave the tang of salt in the air, the loamy scent of wet soil. Every summer we swim in the bioluminescence, the hoarse barking of bull seals echo menacingly as blue light blooms and swirls around us. The plankton cling to our damp bodies like otherworldly LEDs, looking strikingly similar to pinpricks of starlight. When I was 19, I swore I’d never seen anything more beautiful. I think about how in many ways I have grown up in this place. The woods behind my house a refuge. The sharp scent of cedar tugging at my clothes as wind howls through the canopy. I feel calm here, back pressed up against the roots of Grandma Maple, the oldest tree. Green helicopter seeds spiral in gentle arcs around my head, and in winter it is so quiet. The bare branches look like the sprawled legs of monstrous insects, hanging heavy with moss and lichen. Blackberry twines itself around the spokes of my ribcage, the dark succulent berries are a dizzying rise, a pull.

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.