Black Suffrage, Anti-Blackness, LTD Blackfacing.

Here are some articles I felt was necessary to share with you.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/18-million-rising/wash-your-face-reflections-on-lambda-theta-delta/572134406151470

PaKou Her, Lead Campaigner – 18 Million Rising

 

 

Each morning I awake to the same general routine: my daughters, ages 2 and 4, begin rustling at 6:45 a.m. and then promptly stomp their way into the bedroom I share with my spouse. I switch on the bedroom television to some annoying kid show, beg the girls to watch quietly, and begin the first steps of my workday as an online organizer. (Yes, I do this in bed while the kids stare with mouths agape at the boob tube. Go ahead and judge.)

 

 

My mornings almost always begin with a good once-over of top news stories that erupted overnight while I caught some zzzz’s. Yesterday I scanned the media horizon with relative ease, following my tried and true method of scavenging the interwebs for its first bits of early morning information. I hit up Twitter. All good. Swung over to several mainstream news outlets. Nothing terribly unpredictable. Then I checked out Facebook … THUD.

 

 

Still from the video: brothers of Lambda Theta Delta at UCI dancing to Justin Timberlake’s “Suit & Tie.”

 

 

 

My Facebook feed blazed with a story about several Asian American fraternity brothers (from UC-Irvine’s chapter of Lambda Theta Delta) who videotaped themselves gyrating to Justin Timberlake while one of them pranced around in blackface pretending to be Jay-Z. Breaking my normal a.m. rule of remaining prone as long as possible, I sat up and immediately began reading threads from irate commenters. Those offended spanned the entire reflective spectrum, from “these guys are douchebaggery embodied” to “this proves that Asians are just like white people” to “I can’t believe racism is still this bad.” The more I read, the angrier I became. I wanted desperately to find these young men and knock some sense into them the way only a disappointed older sister can. I mean, really – black face? On a bunch of kids with yellow faces? Are you kidding me?!

 

 

By afternoon, the furor surrounding this story turned full tilt, with a lot of people calling for an all-out public flogging. Fingers wagged to and fro; folks blamed poor parental guidance for such offensive behavior; others charged the racist history of Greek life in general; tensions between Blacks and Asians seethed beneath every other bit of commentary I read. After a full day of reactions to this story, I grew hungry for a different kind of conversation, something that addressed the power racism and white culture have in shaping how we as People of Color behave in this race-obsessed nation.

 

 

Not a peep.

 

 

So in the absence of a heartier analysis of “Asian frat boys behaving badly,” I began digging at the story myself, focusing primarily on what this college campus drama tells us about internalized racial oppression.

 

 

You should know that for many years, I fancied myself a “radical” Person of Color. I was the kind of person who knew what was wrong with the world and was happy to school anyone on classismracismsexismnationalismmilitarism. (I also had a sizeable chip on my shoulder, by the way.) As far as race was concerned, I was positive only white people perpetuated racism, and that we People of Color were but victims of a system designed to serve white society. That was all fine and good until an elder African American mentor of mine, Anne Stewart, challenged me to chew on the concept of internalized racial oppression and invited me to consider that People of Color, while victimized by institutional racism, also participate in our own marginalization. That is, we internalize all kinds of negative racial messages about ourselves and one another, and then we regurgitate and act them out on one another, essentially supporting and maintaining racism and white supremacist culture. My first reaction: “Uh, come again? Thanks, but no thanks, Miss Anne.”

 

 

Nearly two decades after that first conversation with Anne, and with 15 years of antiracism organizing under my belt, I see my misstep when I first resisted her invitation to talk about internalized racial oppression. (Thankfully she issued a second invite.) I am more certain today than ever that racism persists not just because of white power and privilege, but because the entire system of racial oppression depends so greatly on People of Color’s participation. Racism can continue to exist because we feed it, sometimes with excited awareness and other times with total lack of consciousness. Enter: my young Lambda Theta Delta brothers.

 

 

A day after my Facebook feed blew up with their racial prejudice, when I was forced erect in my bed, I am still really angry and disappointed in these young Asian American men whose foolishness has now been broadcast for all the world to see. But even more, I am deeply sad for them – and for our entire society. In them I see the ahistorical racist humor of Greek life, complicated all the more by their own lack of racial self-awareness as “other” in a white world. The irony of their “otherness” wrapped up in the fake face paint of another “other” is not lost on me. And the damage done between People of Color by this racially ignorant theater isn’t lost, either. This is precisely how internalized racial oppression works.

 

 

The call at this point shouldn’t be to spend all eternity persecuting these young Asian American men. Should they be held accountable? Yes, of course. But I hazard to believe that it’s much easier to shame and blame than it is to get real with ourselves as People of Color about how we participate in a culture that allows these boys – and countless other People of Color just like them – to exist with such racial blindness. Disrupting the status quo requires more than pointing a finger and hoping no one realizes we’ve all been taught the same racial lessons, whether or not we paint our faces. Rather, it’s calling all of us into account for the behavior of these Lambda Theta Delta members, and choosing to find our most radical selves in order to disturb our own socialization as People of Color living in a racist world.

Other notes: 

 

BSU Statement: http://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/freeze-flame-black-fire/

Patrick Chen’s definition of Anti-Blackness: https://www.facebook.com/notes/patrick-chen/anti-blackness-at-uc-irvine-possible-trigger-warning/10151408843695922

 

The bond of family

Through BONE, one thing that I was interested in is that the sense of belongings to a family or sisters does not depend on ethnic identity. Leila works at a Chinese school and communicates with Chinese parents. She listens to their parents’ complaining and reflects them on the school. She also listens to and takes care of her mother, Mah, who is typical Chinese woman. She is an intimate relationship with Mason, who is Americanized. Leila lives in the Mission outside the Chinatown with Mason. Leila seems to be in an ethnically neutral position between Chinese and Chinese American. At page 34, her sister, Nina, and Leila were asked by a waiter at a restaurant “You two Chinese?”, Leila answered “We’re sisters.” Leila prefer to call herself and her sister sisters rather than Chinese. She personally puts more weight on a family identity than an ethnic identity. She seems attached to Mah such as caring about Mah even though she does not identify herself as Chinese. Leila seems close to Nina even though Nina gets away from the Chinatown and does not have same father as Leila. In the restaurant scene, we can see Leila attached to Nina. Leila takes care of Leon even though he is a stepfather. Although Nina stays away from Chinatown, she takes Mah to a Hong Kong trip. She seems to love her mother. The bond of family goes beyond ethnic identity.

Blog Post on Bone

When reading the last chapter of Bone, I found it interesting how the novel continues to go farther back into Leila’s memory, rather than just going back to the present time. This particular chapter mainly focuses on Leila, rather than on Ona’s death. After rereading this particular chapter, I realized that this is one of the only chapters that does not explicitly talk about Ona’s death, but rather it delves into the family history, and infers some of the events that happened to the family at the end. In a way, it seems fitting that this chapter goes farther into Leila’s memory because throughout the novel Leila seems to be trying to forget about Ona’s death and the past, but instead of just remembering Ona’s death near the end of the novel, she goes back and remembers more of her own past such as when Mah told Leila she was going to marry Leon, and when Leon comes back from his voyage after meeting Leila’s real father. It is in this final chapter that Leila becomes more comfortable with the fact that she is remembering things.

In this final chapter we also learn more about Leila’s relationship with Leon and of Leila’s real father. From the beginning we know that Leon is not Leila’s real father, but we only really know few details about Leila’s real father such as his name, but in this chapter we find out that her real father had sent letters during her childhood. When Leon is first introduced to Leila, he doesn’t ask her to call him “father,” but rather just “Leon,” and even though Leon is kind of like a father figure for Leila she never seems to really call Leon her father. At one point, Leila talks about when Leon came back from his voyages and says, “I think I even expected him to come back as my father” (Page 190). In a way it seems like Leila wanted Leon to be her real father, but as we see in the beginning of Bone, she does treat Leon as her father in a way, since she wanted to tell Leon about her marriage to Mason first, even before Mah.

Overall, I enjoyed reading Bone, because it wasn’t like many novels I have read before, and the format of the novel was confusing at first but really ties into the ending and how we learn more about Leila’s memories as the plot progressed.

Bone

The book Bone takes the reader through a journey of different thoughts and emotions that are depicted by the eldest daughter Leila. Although I thought that this book was an easy read, the structure of each chapter became confusing as the author began to flip in an out of the present and the past.  The tater totting of emotions and scenes began to piece together as I inched nearer towards the end of the book.

                Leila describes every emotion, detail, thought, and memory while telling the story of her and her families struggle as they constantly are dwelling on Ona’s death.  Leila seems caught up in her relationship with her mother, also causing distance between her and Mason which is portrayed throughout the book.  She fears that ever since her stepfather Leon started jumping in and out of her and her mother’s lives, that moving out with mason will leave her mother by herself. What Leila refuses to admit is that the Leong family has broken apart becoming strangers to one another in result of trying to find reason for why Ona commit suicide. Towards the end of the book on page 126, “None of us even wanted to think about Ona being dead. Mah worried about her affair with Tommie Hom, but it was Ona. Nina couldn’t wait to get away from us, from China town, but it was Ona. I thought all I wanted was to get away from Salmon Alley, to live in the Mission with Mason, but it was Ona”. Through this passage, the reader concludes that the Leong family has guilt but is constantly trying to find someone to blame it on. At the end of the book the author finally begins to put the jigsaw pieces together by telling the story of how this family living in China Town once dealt with their losses and are learning to begin a new life.

Bone

What can I say after finishing Bone by Fae Myenne Ng that can truly exemplify the kind of astonishment I have towards the text? In reading the last chapter of the novel, I realized that the story itself was placed in reverse chronological order; where events taking place are affected or explained by later events in the novel that actually happened earlier. This is also to add that I have never read a novel in this format before and have found Bone to be a unique and invigorating experience. I considered it to be this type of experience because it prompted me as a reader to focus more on the details of Leila and her family’s life, including having to occasionally skim backwards into the novel to find explanations for events that came about later in the text. An issue that pervades throughout the entire text which may sound clichéd in the world of Asian American literature is the conflicting identity crisis that the main character Leila cannot find a way out of. Readers find her struggling to conform to an American identity but living within the confines of “Chinatown” and her Chinese heritage. Ona’s death within the novel played an important part of this conflict within Leila.  In regards to Ona’s death, we see Leila attempting to interpret why Ona committed suicide, but also attempt to forget the death of her sister. In chapter 10 she questions why her sister chose the thirteenth floor of the building. She states how in Cantonese, the number 13 itself is a lucky number and also sounds like “to live”. She is using language as a way to find an answer to her sister’s death but this moment also establishes Leila’s confusion with understanding Cantonese. In attempting to try to forget or reconcile the death of her sister in Chapter 11, we find that the altar that Leon creates, which is a common Chinese practice, makes her realize that she cannot ever truly come to forget about the suicide. While trying to pursue her American identity, she is incredibly bounded by her Chinese language and cultural background.

Blog #2: Bone

Something I found interesting in the book, Bone, was how Leila’s family seemed like a typical Chinese family to an outsider, but throughout the book, the author, Fae Myenne Ng, shows the many complexities within the family. With each problem, there are underlying complex reasons. For example, the book describes how Leila loves Mason and wants to move out of her home to live with him, but there are all these complex reasons relating to Ona’s suicide and their family history that keeps Leila from leaving her mother in Salmon Alley, Chinatown. Leila keeps returning to Salmon Alley because of the guilt she feels for Ona’s suicide by wondering if there was something that she could have done to prevent it. Also, Leila cannot leave her mother because she knows that her mother has always depended on her, especially after her father left when she was five years old. Another example is when Leila was answering to the cop about her sister, Ona’s, suicide (136). Leila was just answering the questions about the cause of her sister’s death with simple answers, yet at the same time, she was thinking about the deeper causes of her sister’s suicide that would not be considered by the police report such as the belief Grandpa Leong’s bones being unrest and causing the family to have bad luck and the conflict between Leon and her boyfriend’s family.

The Role of Mason Within Bone

While reading Bone I started to become more and more infatuated with the character Mason, possibly because the narrator herself, Leila, is greatly infatuated with him. However, I also became interested in his character because he manages to play a huge role within the Leong family dynamic while still staying disconnected from the family. His mediating qualities within the family caused me to analyze how Leila views him. I ultimately discovered a parallel between what Mason does as a third party in the Leong family and in his life away from the family. He is a repair man. He fixes cars for basically no pay in the shop and does his best in keeping the Leong family functioning as smoothly as possible for very little in return as well. His life is in a constant cycle of piecing together what is no longer working, which is why Leila looks up to him so much. Sometimes he manages to take her place as an older sibling figure and can manage to take some of the weight off of her shoulders while still seeming cool and collected, something she has trouble doing. He often appears in the novel to comfort her or to calm her down, which made me form a connection between Mason and Leila with gender roles. Mason seems to play a hero to a damsel in distress and although helpful, I felt as though Leila depended on him too heavily at times, which put him in a role of superiority not only to her, but to the entire family. Mason was the only source of happiness, the part of the family that was not fully connected to the tragedy of Ona’s death, and therefore a hero possibly placed in the story to provide the same thing for the readers that he provided for the Leong family: a break from tragedy.

Lisa Lei’s blog on Bones

Reading Bone by Fae Myenne Ng has been a journey of emotions and reflection on how I view community. In this class, we talk a lot about identity and how  

 

Bone by Fae Myenne Ng, paints the story of an all-too-realistic tale of a multi-generational chinese immigrant family. It is  narrated by Leila, the oldest child of 3 daughters. As a 2nd generation Chinese American and the youngest of a 3 daughters, I found myself reflecting a lot about my experiences in a traditional household. In this blog, I want to address the umbrella term of community and how that idea of community can bring togetherness and be destructive to families and individual identities.  

 

The novel begins story by stating, “We were a family of three girls. By Chinese standards, that wasn’t luck.” By stating this, Leila, immediately shows how there is a lack of community in Chinatown. Her family is viewed as the failed family because her mother has children from different men in addition to not having a son. They are  constantly policed for challenging the social norms and the pressure from the community have been detrimental to the family. In our class, we constantly talk about identity and how we identify but in these communities, individual identity is hardly accepted or tolerated. In small and ethnic communities like S.F. Chinatown, survival as a community, was the only thing in their minds and it naturally dismissed the survival of the individual. Therefore, Bones, tells the story of a family that struggle for survival as family and a person. 

 

As we continue to read the book, we finally learn how Ona committed suicide but throughout the book Leila, is reflective of her sisters death stating, that she took the easy way out or that she should have talked to her more about her depression. Ona’s suicide, is a full mirroring of the lack of community in Chinatown and the struggles in her family because Ona, like Leila, Nina, Mah and Leon did not feel harmony or safe in their own backyard. They constantly feared the image they performed and ignored all the personal struggles each family member experience. The fact that Leon always was at sea, Nina in New York and the others scattered in Chinatown physically illustrated little contact they had with each other. Although a community is very important and brings people together, it is also a facade because the community becomes a place that polices the steps of every movement outside of the social norms. 

 

In conclusion, I would like to address the title of the novel “Bone,” and how it is resembled through out the text. Bone, represents the strong and concrete structure that builds the body but through out the book, the term was hardly described. Instead, I saw, bones represented through vocabulary such as scatters, ashes, and ghostly to represent the body. These terms are representative of the structure of the novel and the strength of individuals in the community because there was weakness. I do not believe that the individuals are weak however; there was weakness to build and strengthen an community that was inclusive. 

Bone: A Lack of Understanding

Something I found very interesting in my read of Bones, is the lack of understanding. Whether it is between characters or between the audience and the text, the lack of knowledge gives a sense of mystery that Ng wants her readers to experience.

Among the family members there is insufficient communication. Leila deals with problems in sharing her feelings and thoughts. In chapter 11, when Ona’s death was discovered, Leila conceals her feelings many times despite discovering her sister’s suicide. When she is in her classroom surrounded by students and co-workers, Leila visibly expresses little. It is only when she is alone in the restroom that she breaks down. In the same chapter, she recalls the time when she did not ask her Ona why she was crying. Instead, Leila ignores her sister and focuses on how her mother might react to Ona’s ruined dress. There is no communication here, and it becomes a habit that is seen in Leila’s adulthood. On page 146, when Mason picks Leila up after learning of Ona’s death, Leila says nothing to him except, “The Baby Store.” However, on the same page, she also admits, “I was never so glad to see him.” Her inability to talk to Mason even though she wants him there reveals her secretive nature. This situation shows a piece of character that constrains feelings and chooses to ignore them. This is a trait that is shared among the family, and when looking at the aggregate, readers sense the lack of communication causes the lack of understanding.

I also thought it was interesting that prior to when we read about Ona’s death in chapter 11, it was confusing because no one in the book really knew why she killed herself (Perhaps due to no communication!). There were theories and “maybe’s,” but no one really understood why and the readers obviously do not know either. The interesting part is when we finish the book, we still do not know the true, concrete reason behind the suicide; readers know as much as the characters do in the future and we must assume why she may have died. In this case, even the reader will never understand Ona. I believe Ng wanted her readers to experience confusion and the misunderstandings between characters in a beautiful abstract way.

Blog Post #2 – Bone (Week 4)

I felt that the hardest part of about reading Bones was the fact that it was going backwards and somewhat forward at the same time. This was the first time that I’ve encountered a reading like so, but it really depicts the process of memory retrieval. At the same time, it also felt like a mystery case that was being solved, where something has happened and now we have to backtrack to figure out the origins.

A reoccurring theme that stood out to me was the idea of community and life in Chinatown. Leila consistently presents the fact that living in Chinatown as a Chinese family is a life that no one else but those that also share the same experience can understand. Coming from San Francisco and having spent a lot of time in Chinatown, I definitely see this as from the perspective of being both an outside and insider. I do not live in Chinatown, but I spent more time there than my own neighborhood. Being in Chinatown, I can see that they have their own system of how things work, which creates a bubble around the community. Although Leila grew up in the American culture, she is still naturally influenced by the Chinatown community and Chinese culture, which shows in her critiques of others reactions to the news of Ona’s death.