The Gangster We Are All Looking For

Le Thi Diem Thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For brings readers to the perspective of civilians who were affected first hand by the plight of the Vietnam War. Reading through the journey that the narrator and her father took to get to America, I found most compelling the moment in Chapter 4, “the bones of birds”, when the narrator recounts the moment that her father and family attempted to escape from Vietnam on the fishing boat. “The night I left Vietnam, it was my father who carried me down to the beach and placed me on the fishing boat” (105 Le) . What was most compelling about this moment was the fact that it was not only an attempt to escape from the oppression that the family was surrounded around, but it involved many more people attempting to escape; wherein even the narrator’s father lost sight of her mother and “he couldn’t find her anywhere”. “[Her] mother must have been among the many voices, each calling for help as he passed by in the water” (105 Le). Throughout the discussion in class, I created this image of the narrator’s father as being a someone who was not only angry at the world, but also an individual who could not come to terms with the death of his son and the ordeal he had to be put through going from Vietnam to the refugee camp and ultimately to America. This scene on Pages 103-106 provide an intense scenario in which we witness a father who was compelled by his moral duty to protect his family and his strength was shattered by the fact that as he rescued his daughter, his wife was left in the midst of the chaos surrounded by a crowd of people who were equally determined to escape. “In America, my father worked as a house painter and then a welder. After he’d been laid off from his welding job, he became a gardener ” (105 Le). As these details provide an opportunity to understand the ways in which Ba acts in Chapter 5 (i.e. when he goes fishing and looks at the black water or when he decides to not answer the phone and decrease the volume), I found a sense of understanding as to why he did act strangely after dealing with such intense periods of his life.

Call Me Ishmael Tonight

Call Me Ishmael Tonight by Agha Shahid Ali introduces readers to not only the structure of the ghazal but also the opportunity to interpret and formulate an understanding for his ghazals. As with many of the other students in class, I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of meaning and interpretation that each and every poem has within the collection. As brought up in class, one of the poems that explored the issues related to love was “As Ever” (after Ahmad Faraz) Ali (48 Ali). Reading it on my own, I saw the rhyming that was taking place during the second line of each stanza following the “-ain” ending sound. What was most unique about our discussion in class was the fact that in each couplet, there is always a task whose purpose is not accomplished. An example from the poem is in the fifth stanza when it states “I laughed when they said our time was running out -/I stirred the leaves in the tea I’d brewed to drain” (48 Ali). The tea that has been brewed had remained incomplete because it never went to the recipient that was supposed to receive the tea. Another example is the last line on the last couple. It says “To put out this last candle, come, it burns in vain” (49 Ali). This last line evokes the sheer heartbroken nature of the poet. What put it into context was what Professor Kunte explained; in which Ali was actually going to die and so there are pieces of his ghazals that are attached to that struggle. In all honesty, I found myself realizing that I had to critically analyze more of his other ghazals to develop a theory or interpretation of them. But with this one poem, I found an emotional struggle that lay within Ali and personified into an individual that he misses dearly.

Tropic of Orange

Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita was not only a text that really challenged my understanding of how I relate fiction with reality, but it also introduced me to the genre or style of magic realism. One of the issues of the novel that I felt compelled to write about was the scene in Chapter 20, where we find Emi ending up frustrating a woman who was sitting next to her (and happened to be white). Emi asks Gabriel, “Do you know what cultural diversity really is?” She responds by saying “It’s a white guy wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and dreds” (128 Yamashita). Her answer made me question what it really meant to people to be “culturally diverse”. Is it the stereotypes that we associate with different cultures and/or races? Or is it the cultural mixing or multiculturalism that we are exposed to in large cities populated by many different types of races and ethnicity? Another question comes into this issue when we see that this white woman that confronts Emi is someone who “happens to adore the Japanese culture” with her “hair held together miraculously by two ornately-lacquered chopsticks” (129 Yamashita). She is a woman who is drawn into a culture that many would ultimately assume she was not part of because of her skin color. There might be many readers who believe that Emi was delving into issues that would be considered as racist, but trying to look beyond that, I find that I might understand what Emi means by her definition of cultural diversity. There are many stereotypes that are associated with being Black,  Asian, Hispanic, or any other racial identifier. But in understanding the term multiculturalism, it is considered as a mixing or more so, a grouping of different types of people into one single identifier. Without these stereotypes set for the different races or cultures that we have come to understand, how could we in fact say that we are “multicultural” or (creating my own word here) “multiculturalizing” ourselves. My understanding of Emi comes from seeing the white woman who enjoys Japanese culture. Though we do not know the premise for which she chose to put two chopsticks in her hair, we could assume that Emi was thinking that the chopsticks in the white woman’s hair was a stereotypical association that she had on enjoying Japanese culture. This analysis of this particular scene in the text allowed me to see that the text plays a part not just in mixing the magical with reality, but it also brings up issues of society that are very critical to understanding identity.

Rolling the R’s

Rolling the R’s by R. Zamora Linmark  steps over the boundaries of what can be comforting as a reader into the raw and often erotic images of Edgar Ramirez’s life. In class, we discussed many ways in which the novel itself sets to destroy or contrast the hetero-normative views of society and the way in which those that are not part of the norm are subjected to the problems of a hetero-normative society. One of the issues that Linmark introduces in his text is the detailed descriptions that Katrina provides of the homeless people that live near and around Kam Shopping Center in the chapter called “The Purple Man and His Disciplines”. When we think of Hawaii, there is this vision of an amazonian type of landscape with few or little inhabitants living there. This chapter brings into perspective the raw and grungy appearance of a small shopping center where homeless people live and actually are characterized by Linmark with an individuality and description that subverts how society tends to view homeless people. One of the homeless people is “The Exorcist Lady” who seeming looks like a regular “middle-aged white woman, five-feet tall, and red-haired” (98 Linmark). But upon closer inspection she “is notorious for smelling men of overflowing virility from miles away” in which “all men are afriad of her”. One of her most unique reactions is with Father Pacheco in which she not only insults him and calls him a “cocksuckin’ child molester” but quite easily changes into someone else. This woman who would seem to be perceived as a average person in a shopping center is developed into a person who’s live can be analyzed and questioned. Linmark explores the critiques that exist with race through her image and also critiques the way in which gender can be misconstrued. It is when we find her subjected to the believe that she is man-hungry and in desperate need of sex, where we find the deep rooted issues that the studying of gender can be sensitive towards.

 

 

M Butterfly

One of the theories we discusses in class was the meaning behind the title of the text written by David Henry Wang. “Why do you think it was titled “M Butterfly?” Though I found many interesting things I could discuss about with the text, I never found myself looking at the title more closely. This was when someone stated that the M rather than standing for Madame like in “Madame Butterfly” it had a more ambiguous meaning. It could either mean Monsieur, Madame, or any number of things which create ambiguity in the gender. In Act 3, Scene 1, in the Courthouse, readers see Song being subjected to questioning by the Judge on just how a man such as Gallimard could spend close to 20 years not knowing that the “woman” he was getting intimate with was in fact a man. What is so unique in this part is the composure in which Song is able to hold while answering the questions. He says “Men always believe what they want to hear. So a girl can tell the most obnoxious lies and the guys will believe them every time-” (82 Hwang). Not only this but he continues to state many other stereotypes he had learned from having a mother as a prostitute. In Song’s description of why Gallimard never approached the idea that Song could be a man, he states that “The West has sort of an international rape mentality towards the East” (82 Hwang). This representation can be interpreted as Song sees himself as the East and Gallimard as the West. The ideals of orientalism as discussed in class before play upon the image as the East as having women who are subjective in nature and men who are more feminine in nature. We can conclude that Song’s goal was to provide Gallimard with this physical embodiment of this type of “woman” to extract information from his vulnerability as a Western man. The Western man in the representation by Gallimard, shows him as attempting to portray an overtly masculine and dominant figure in the fact of the subjective oriental or East Asian female. In this dominant nature also, we see how it captivates Gallimard and his desires sexually to penetrate the embodiment of this perfect woman. The sexual desires of Gallimard provide readers with the connection that it has on racial stereotyping and ideas of orientalism. The connection between these two ideas of sex and race helped me to understand how the title could have been written the way it was; to provoke readers into exploring the ideas behind the inter-connectivity between  ideas of gender, sex, and race.

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.

All I asking for is my body

Though a later portion of the text by Milton Murayama brings into focus the conflicts associated with Tosh, his parents, and importance of understanding their desire for him to be filial, I find most interesting the focus on the superstitious in the text. What we as readers are presented with many times over is the superstitious ideals that Kiyo’s mother had about life and ultimately her sickness. “Mom did seem to have more superstitions than most people. She insisted that rice should always be scooped at least twice…double scooping protected the family from seeing a second mother” (Murayama 15). Then the narrator later says “she thinks she’s been chosen for someone else’s punishment” (Murayama 23). As some minor examples of this superstition, there are also many other examples in the text that incorporate the use of Japanese terms that also act as a play on words. In relation to the course so far on the representation of bodies, the importance of these moments explores the ideas of a term I learned about a while ago called “intergenerational influence”.  This is the case in which the older generation of say, parents, instill feelings or attitudes associated with their past onto their children. I find that that is an important aspect of creating the Asian American identity because for many, this identity has a direct association and linkage to their parents which have “suffered” greater than, for example, Tosh and Kiyo.