Forgotten Minority

Since this is the last post of the year, I guess I'll say a couple things about Asian American literature in general and my experiences with this class.

This class was actually not on my list at all when I signed up for courses (I also thought that I would have a 3rd period class, so I thought it wasn't even an option). I was kinda salty that I ended up in this class, since I'm pretty sure my other requests had openings, but turns out I really like what we read this term. I don't think there was a single story I didn't genuinely enjoy reading (I'm also a massive sucker for short stories and sci-fi, so I'm a bit biased there).

This is, when we talk about Asian-American literature, it's not like African-American lit where we can point to Harlem and say, "there, that's black culture". There's Chinatowns, but for some reason we don't make that same connection, assign that distinct cultural value to an area, (taste of China? We talk about Asia, but we don't really talk about Asia and America, what it means to have a foot on both shores and no home in either).

And I think that's something important, that a lot of upper-middle class Asian families have taken care to seem American as ever. It's about assimilation- my parents don't find anything to be particularly proud of in coming from China. It's funny, because when my sister and I talk about history and racism and slavery, 'we' refers to the exclusively white slaveowners, because I don't think either of us have experienced the systemic discrimination that I know even other Asian-Americans have. There's a very permeating culture of "don't get offended, it's just a joke", or "stop being so sensitive: look, I'm Asian and I'm nor offended", despite the fact that there are vastly different experiences in the Asian-American community. In my world, in an upper-middle class Andover bubble, my experiences fall firmly into and uncomfortable avoidance of my background.

Because I have the luxury of distancing myself from my ethnicity, in a world where my classes are more than half Asian and I speak English with no accent, in a world where I can afford to dress like everyone else and if I never use a knife in commons because I just never learned how or avoid certain words because I've never heard them spoken aloud, well, that's petty change that I can brush aside.

DDR 1

It's surprisingly nice to read Desert creole. Normally I gets really annoyed at people imposing accents on writing, but this book does it well- it's as readable as english, with the added layer of the guide's voice. (Also, for some reason, I keep thinking the guide's really feminine, even though her word's aren't exactly gendered.)

I'm really interested by class in this story: if the Desert is Vegas/Dubai, how does it end up with the creole? Is it a Vegas thing where there's the really rich tourists plus the actual residents who aren't actually that well off? It seems to be something like that, which has a lot of implications for language as a socioeconomic symbol in this world.

The guide being extremely vehement about guiding (the part where she slept outside someone’s door) reminds me of a not-really-scam that some people would pull in China where they’d be really friendly and help you carry your bags up like great wall or whatever and give you restaurant recommendations and all that, then try to sell you overpriced water or paper fans or something. I don’t know why I thought of that.

It’s also cool that the Creole is very romance-based. There’s a bit of Korean in there and I know chenji is used in the Chinese season-end way, but the poems pull heavily from Spanish and latin, with an obviously English base. I guess it makes it easier to read, but I think it also plays with our expectations of education- the guide speaks with a very “b” and “m” heavy voice that somehow ends up sounding uneducated, at least to me, in contrast to the stereotypically high-brow latin (no one learns latin anymore unless they’re at least a little bit pretentious).

What makes us human?

Robot stories is totally Asimov, which I'm definitely a fan of.

I think that both movies took something inexplicable human and tried to quantify it in a mechanical or formulaic sort of way-love, relationships, and emotion as mechanics of a set world. 

I think that sci-fi in general either goes balls-to-the-wall bang bang adventure fantasy sort of explorations or goes into some hypothetical future that reveals something about ourselves or the current world. We're reading mostly the latter- the adventure isn't as fun to analyze, probably,- and I think that these stories talk about deeper themes by over-sciencing something. The water story takes lying and adds rules and logic: if it’s a lie, there’s water, if it’s not technically false, you’re good. The movies take childcare and relationships and mortality and quantifies/measures them, and asks, “What does this change? How does this affect the ways we should think about those things?”

(I’m a little bit rambly today. Excuse the terribly informal writing.)

I think it’s also worth noting that the young actors in EBU are youtubers (I think? I remember someone talking about that in class.) With the Oscars, I think there’s been a lot of discussion about minorities in acting (which I’m totally happy for), but there’s also been a lot of backlash. However, I do think that Hollywood, whether or not it does “sympathy-nominate” (a term I have so many problems with but won’t go into right now,) is biased against minorities, just because they’re not cast as often or auditioned to play major roles and a million other small things (most of our biographical action movies are white-centric, your typical ‘suave’ character is white, a director wants to fill an archetype and that archetype is, hey, traditionally white). But there’s actually so many minority internet icons- the most popular makeup artist is Michelle Phan, I think, there’s a ton of POC on Vine, “black twitter” is a whole thing, etc.

I’m not really sure where I was going with that, but I just find it interesting.

Duplicity and the Power of Fan

A common theme in this story seems to be that nothing is what it seems. Idyllic hotel? Nah son, have some homicidal maniacs. Nice vegetarian family? Nah, they steal kids and get their dogs to eat people. Caring wife? She's got 7 chicks with anime-surgeried eyes locked up. Those 7 chicks? Perfectly fine having their lives like that. B-mor, a perfectly organized village?

Well, that certainly has it's problems.

Fan has layers as well, but her character is compelling in that she has no intentional facade. She doesn't correct people who think she's younger than she actually is, but never intentionally acts young or tries to mislead people. She doesn't steal, she doesn't abandon Quig and Loreen or the Girls, and she, in some level, tries to help people.

Somehow, her presence also peels back the layers of others. Quig spontaneously tells his past to Fan, Mr. Leo reveals his sleaziness extremely quickly, Ms. Cathy reveals more and more of herself, and the book is this collaboration of characters and their pasts.

However, I think that the character of Reg is extremely important here, because Reg is the epitome of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. From the little description we have, he seems easy-going and lacking deep motivations or a complicated character, which sounds bad but isn't necessarily a bad thing? (I'm not sure exactly how to explain it, but he seems very upfront compared to the rest of the book.)

In connection to the age-old question of "what is asian-american literature?", I'd suggest a connection in these layers of character, in the background and current personality, and the idea of heritage or an old story in a new world.

Dad

So I read ahead and I’m terrible at not giving spoilers (really shouldn’t have read ahead, sorry guys), so I’m going to write a bit about my father instead.

There was a boy in China who walked three miles to a schoolhouse with a stool and sat outside the door for three days, hoping to be let inside a year early. On the fourth day, the teacher threw a book at him and it landed in a puddle, and he watched the water seep in and turn the pages translucent.

My father was a peasant boy, in the most fantastical romance that sounds like it should have leaps and bounds, flourishes and fantastical twirls, but reads more like a hard-earned life.

He doesn't speak of his childhood often, but when he does, he pauses. Thinks. Imparts each word with careful weight. We ask him about his family back then, and he tells us anything from a word to a story, but sis and I are always hoping for the latter. He doesn’t bring it up much himself, but not out of any deliberate intent. My mother actively avoids her childhood, but my father treats it like any other experience- irrelevant to the moment, but existing and as much a part of him as anything.

“My mother told me two things. I didn’t understand them at first, but now, I think I might.” He pauses, thinks, and continues. “One of them was a chinese saying- you can be poor to others, but not to yourself.”

“I didn’t understand that- I don’t think many kids really can? And you know how we couldn’t afford meat that often. But when families would come over- we lived in a small neighborhood, and if something big happened, we would get together- my mother would send one of us out to buy meat. A very small bit, the most we could afford. And we would cook it into a stew, because we always ate stew those days.”

To this day, my father harbors a penchant for rice, which they couldn’t afford often, and a hatred of carrots and sweet potatoes, the primary ingredient for their stews. (They couldn’t afford meat or eggs either, but as they could only have them once a year at new year’s if they were lucky, they don’t qualify as a comfort food.) Some of my father’s friends were treated to meat during harvest but starved during the winter because meat was too expensive and they hadn’t rationed well, but my father’s only been grateful for having food on the table.

Ironically, my father’s family produced enough food for an entire village, and raised enough cattle to eat meat daily. My father was a part of the Communist youth party, but looks at it only with bemused laughter at an ill-spent childhood.

“And then when people came over, we’d give some meat to the guest of honor, then give the rest to families who had children, and we’d never have any left for ourselves.

Mom laughs, the harsh sound a contrast to the soft lines of her face. “That’s not some great teaching, that’s because you had to. Small communities are always like that.”

This is common. My mother enjoys downplaying my father’s childhood, for reasons my sister and I have discussed and come to separate conclusions about.

She’s a city girl. She grew up with her grandmother and a largely absent military father as an only child, and she doesn’t talk about her childhood much. She dislikes her mother and aspires to be nothing like her, a trait my sister and I seem to have inherited.

“And I didn’t understand that. Especially because in those days, we would have to report the number hours we’d worked in the fields for the government to give us rations. And people were so, so insistent and angry about that- no! I’d worked 5 hours that day, and you took a break! well, I remember your son-. And they would argue over rations that they might give to a friend in need, or meat that they would not eat themselves, and I never understood that. Until now. I think it was about pride and community, even then. Everyone had to prove they contributed. Everyone argued that they cared, I guess? It’s hard to explain.”

My father is a genius, and sometimes I think about this school and every brilliant, spectacularly intelligent and intuitive and breathtaking mind it has and know that my father is smarter and more hardworking than every last one. He was the youngest of four (and it’s always hilarious to see him visit China and slip from a boisterous yet passive man to a somewhat mischievous, vulnerable little brother), and carried his brothers’ tradition of studying incredibly hard to improve their lot in life. He tested into the top school in China, and more than that, tested into the “genius class”, the 1% of the school that could double major. He originally majored in ocean engineering and electrical engineering, but switched the latter to computer science due to his color-blindness. (Ocean engineering was chosen not out of some particular interest, but because that major was the school’s particular speciality. EE was simply what he heard was the hardest major. That does seem to be my father’s life- an amalgamation of careful study and selection and important decisions made on a whim.)

This apparently proved too easy for him, and he was known in his dorm for playing staggering amounts of poker. My mother often tells me I should work as hard as him. I don’t think she is yet aware of this fact.

He participated in the Shanghai student protests, but was filmed on television and came to America at the insistence of his older brother, who was living in America at the time and had seen the footage that my father was actually unaware of. (Apparently this led to a brilliant conversation, when the phone lines could be tapped and my uncle knew that the Chinese government would be tracking down the student protesters, and had to convince Dad to leave China without saying anything of the sort.) It was too late to go to apply for an Ivy League graduate school, so he finished his Master’s at University of Florida with $5 to his name, floundered in boredom for a short while, and went to Harvard for his PhD. He met my mother, a student at Boston College, then. After a lightning 6 month courtship that I don’t think anyone really understands, least of all the two of them, they were married. They moved to Detroit after my father received a job offer from Ford and started a family there.

This story is the barebones, and I could probably write for a day and not even come close to what I would like to say about him. I hope you enjoyed the story, though, because that’s what we are in the end. We live and die with the cadence of voice and flourish of a pen, and touch other stories in a name, a punchline, a act of extreme emotion. My father is the kind of person to write stories about, but if you can spin a tale well enough, so is every one of us.

Whiplash: my aesthetic

It seems to be standard dystopia fare to have people try and eat other people. And sexually assault them. And a number of other pretty disturbing behaviors that just become expected in this sort of thing. I've yet to encounter a post-apocalyptic video game that doesn't merrily redefine my boundaries of sweet baby jesus that's disturbing.  (Amusingly enough, the worst offender is probably Day Z, where the players themselves do some creatively horrifying things. That probably says something about the human psyche that someone much smarter than me could analyze. Completely off topic: there was a accidental plague in World of Warcraft that some epidemiologist studied for how people react to things like that. It's pretty cool.)

I'm really interested in the world itself. Actual money seems to still be worth something, even in the open counties- Dale and Landon's inn takes the physical (paper?) Charter money that Quig has, so there's definitely some sort of unified system there. But if everywhere's developed enough to mostly speak the same language and use money that doesn't have inherent value, what's keeping things bad? Are the counties being prevented from rebuilding, or are they just rebuilding really slowly? From what I could tell, pollution or something has destroyed the water and soil so growing crops became really difficult, but why isn't fresh water a valuable resource (in fact, it seems as abundant as it is today)?

Also, it's funny that the better a story gets, the less metaphysical/introspective I get about the story (WHAT DOES IT REPRESENT? IS THE CROW REALLY A CROW, OR A SYMBOL FOR THE DUALITY OF MANKIND AND THE DESCENT INTO DARKNESS). Probably because I actually care about the story, now. Fan's pretty cool. I hope she doesn't die. (Inb4 her luck runs out and she dies in either some spectacular tragedy or an anticlimactic charter euthanasia or something, you heard it here first.)

I feel like we were supposed to upload the maps? Idk lol