new

People were wild last night.
What happened, anyway? From what I remember:

• Rach had me doubled over after different interpretations of the title "party chair"
  
• I turned into Dean T's shrink for a little while. My best advice: "have more wine."
• The oldest of the Japanese teachers said he'd throw us a sushi party.
• The entire dinner party (the leaders of the department) migrated from the banquet hall to the 007 Disco.
  
• We danced with a man with huge boobs, who then hopped up on stage and dazzled us with his amazing voice.
  
• I discovered that my student strips at that club, which may explain why she falls asleep in class.
  

Everyone seemed so out of character, including myself, I'm sure.
In my mind, they no longer seem so uptight and bent on getting the most work out of us as volunteers. It makes me wonder how well I actually new these people, and what it'll be like to start work with them again next semester.

FINALly

YES.
One last final exam to give.
Five more classes to grade.
Then NO WORK, NO PLANNING, NO EDITING, NO WRITING ANYTHING WITH MY UGLY RED PEN. Til March!!!!!!

Then,
Get wasted in Fuling with Dean Yu and posse. Get carsick. Get warm in bed. Happy New Year :)

new habit

Two minutes ago, I took a big step toward integration.

I hacked up spit in front of four women, and no one eyed me out. I wasn't shy about it, either. It was loud, and if I was watching myself, I would have been disgusted. But these women were totally cool with it!! :D :D :D One of them looked, but the glance was quick and neutral, almost unseeing. The others kept walking, kept texting, etc. Ah if only I could be as cool when other people do it.

This makes me think of a friend, who when returning home after two years in Benin, had to consciously remind himself not to dig his nose in public. I'm gonna turn this into a habit. Yes, this is how I'm going to fulfill Peace Corps goal #3: bring what you learned home. =)

oh yeah, i'm japanese

I won't tell you where I was, or what I was doing, but when I was busy doing my *thang*, I was also reflecting on my last post, and on what it means to be Japanese American.

In my last post, I doubtfully wondered if I could compare growing up Japanese American and middle-class in Hawaii to being African American and poor in New Orleans. Obviously, the class disparity renders such positions incomparable, but to what extent does race influence this difference?

Anyway, today it donned on me (DuH!) that Japan is treated as if it were a western country, as if race itself ceases to matter in the First/Third, North/South division. But still, being Japanese is not at all like being white.

But am I more white than brown? And how about if I look more brown that white? If I look more like I come from Fuling, China than from Yamaguchi, Japan? If race is a social construction, then does my appearance rather than my actual ancestry contribute more to shaping my hue identity? And what about agency, what if I choose to identify more with being brown, simply because that's the position I seek from which to do honest activism?

And to further complicate things, what does it mean to refuse to conflate my Okinawanness with my Japaneseness? What does it mean to be half-bred, half-colonized?

entitled to engage?

From Chandra Talpade Mohanty's Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Praciticing Solidarity:

"I have argued for a politics of engagement rather than a politics of transcendence, for the present and the future. I know - in my own nonsynchronous temporality - that the antiglobalization movements of the past five years will gain momentum, that the resistance to and victory over the efforts of the US government and multinational mining conglomerates to relocate the Navajo and Hopi reservations from Big Mountain, Arizona, will be written into elementary school textbooks, and the Palestinian homeland will no longer be referred to as the "Middle East question" - it will be a reality in the next few years. But that is my preferred history: what I hope and struggle for, I garner as my knowledge, create it as the place from where I seek to know. After all, it is the way in which I understand, define, and engage in feminist, anti-imperialist, and antiracist collectives and movements that anchors my belief in the future and in the efficacy of struggles for social change."

- pg. 122

I particularly like that passage, perhaps because I enjoy seeing the world through Mohanty's eyes, and I feel empowered when I hope alongside her.

Mohanty, a Third World feminist, shuns the idea of a universal sisterhood, and instead calls for an engagement via common struggle. But I wonder at what point we can consider struggle "common." Is it possible for me to engage with a struggle that was never mine? Can I make it mine? And if not, in what ways can I support those for whom that particular struggle is real? Can I support them? Should I try?

Must Third World feminism be practiced by a Third World feminist?
As an American feminist of color, Mohanty would say that I am a Third World feminist, but clearly, being a Japanese American daughter of a professor in Hawaii is not the same as being an African American daughter of an unemployed single mother in New Orleans. (I apologize for any perceived snobbery or stereotyping.)

My question is, can I honestly engage in this kind of work???? If we share the same hopes, perhaps we can find similar struggles from which to work from, taking an approach more complex than simply from the universal to the particular, or vice-versa. But perhaps I am just trying to justify my desire to engage in this kind of work.

Selfish happy

Sometimes I feel like I am watching dakine sink. I've extended my hand, but that's the only body part of mine that's made any movement toward danger. My hand is there, up for grabs, but beyond that, I cannot be of anymore help. My own "happiness" is a fragile thing, it feels new and precious. I doubt it would be able to carry the weight of two, and I dare not risk it.

Happy Safe Night

Christmas Eve = Ping An Ye = 平安夜, the first character of which sounds like the first part of "apple" (苹果 = ping guo) which ultimately makes tonight Apple Night in China.

The foreign affairs office took us to the Taiji Hotel, Fuling's swankiest hotel, for a Christmas Eve dinner party that cost about a quarter of my monthly allowance. Good thing I didn't have to pay because I was too nervous to eat, and was thus only able to drink my money's worth. There were a bunch of performances, including my attempt at the hula...

Since it's freakin cold, I refused to wear anything but my nicest pair of pants and my nicest sweater, both of which are not very nice. So, perhaps because I was a raggedy-looking hula dancer, I was ushered backstage and shown a tiny green dress and told I could borrow it for my performance. HAH! One sway of the hip and people would be looking at my panties. I politely refused.

All night I was super nervous, but what calmed my nerves was the group that performed before me. I only got a backstage peek, but my site mate confirmed what I thought was a hallucination: they were doing an African dance. AND they painted their faces black. Omg, yeah, they did.

Thankfully the hula went smoothly. And I didn't have to paint my face brown.
I actually had a good time performing. My mind went blank the entire time. It really is a good feeling to be able to mentally kick back and let your mind perform for you. In that way, it's like playing tennis, which I haven't done in SIX MONTHS. That's the time it's been since I first arrived in China, since I last saw the ocean, since I last had my hair cut, since I last ate cheese, since I last pet my dog, since I last drove the truck, since I last used blogger freely, since I last was truly comfortable.

Tonight was fun, and it definitely was a distraction from the homesickness I assume I will have tomorrow, but the sentimentality attached to Christmas Eve is inescapable. There's no comparing a bubbly Chinese host who introduced my dance by asking me, in front of the 200 wealthiest Fuling residents, how the heck I can be American when I look Chinese, to a quiet evening at home, listening to Willie K sing "O Holy Night" and eating salmon with my parents. BUT that's not to say that I did not have a good time tonight. Truly, I did, even though I wish I was elsewhere.....

hula TONIGHT

achk!
so nervous!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

teaching/writing

Shit.
I am teaching writing next semester, and now I must learn to both teach and write. Lauren Berlant has an interesting three-part blog post on this. I always find her both confusing and inspiring... hell, it's the very complexity of her thoughts that make my mind swoon.

I was watching myself type and I noticed that the skin between my fingers has gone raw. It really is too cold to be anywhere but in bed, yet I'm not quite ready to hibernate. I can't tear myself away from the computer (which I leave in the living room so that I don't waste entire nights on the Internet, assuming I'm wise enough to spend entire nights in bed). I've already exhausted Gmail, the Times, my regular blogs and Facebook. I need to snap out of it. There's plenty to do in bed, including my Chinese homework.

Lazy student, lazy teacher (I was counting on being able to recycle my Western Culture lectures).

leapfrogging

An interesting article on globalization and development, inspired by the Climate Talks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/weekinreview/20anand.html?ref=world
"For India and China, a Climate Clash With Their Own Destiny"
by Anan Giridharadas

On geopolitical issues like climate change, India and China are encouraged to balance their internal duties as developing countries with their external responsibilities as emerging giants. They are told to short-circuit history, to avoid tactics for growth that the West now sees as errors, to assume obligations that rich lands took on only when they became much wealthier.

At times, they resist this pressure. At times, they warm to it, as seen in China’s efforts to reassure the world that its ambitious nuclear-power-plant program meets sophisticated safety standards. And when they sell high-end technology or bid for the Olympics, India and China want their phase of history to be ignored. Then they want simply to “leapfrog.”

This pressure to get with the global program — whether delivered in climate talks or through the subtler cultural pressure of satellite television — can bring strange results. The leapfrogging dream can tempt countries to engage in kitsch development, to mimic modern ways without building structures to support them.

If getting with the global program means sacrificing growth for greenness, it involves similarly wrenching tradeoffs in other spheres. In developing countries, a new globalized (and essentially Western) vision of the parent-child relationship is coming, in which the purpose of each generation is to go its own way, leave ancestors to their devices, find one’s own truth.

But the idea can feel borrowed. It comes from places whose structures support it: places with nursing homes, social security, handicapped bathrooms. It arrives in places without that support. So the young agonize about their obligations to the old and the old languish, trapped between an old world that has gone and a new one that hasn’t set in. India’s leaders try to cope by criminalizing neglect of one’s parents.

I think my apartment is a good example. It's nice, modern, and brand spanking new. But it's already falling apart! The plumbing system isn't built to handle a Western-style bathtub and toilet. Why didn't they just give me a squatty potty? I'm sure part of the reason is because they were concerned about presenting a modern image to their modern volunteer.

feckless canopy activism

Big efforts that failed - the campaign in the 1970s and 1980s against FGM and the missions by Westerners to Afghanistan with the lofty goal of empowering women - fell short because they were decreed by foreigners high up in the treetops. Local people were consulted only in a perfunctory manner. The impulse of Westerners to hold conferences and change laws has, on one issues after another, proved remarkably ineffective. As Mary Robinson, the former Irish president who later served as a terrific UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has said: "Count up the results of fifty years of human rights mechanisms, thirty years of multi-billion-dollar development programs and endless high-level rhetoric, and the global impact is quite underwhelming. This is a failure of implementation on a scale which shames us all."

In contrast, look at some of the projects that have made a stunning difference: Tostan, Kashf, Grameen, the CARE project in Burundi, BRAC, the Self Employed Women's Association in India, Apne Aap. The common thread is that they are grassroots projects with local ownership, sometimes resembling social or religious movements more than traditional aid projects. Often they have been propelled by exceptionally bright and driven entrepreneurs who had encountered the "treetops" efforts and modified them to create far more effective bottom-up models. That is a crucial way froward for a new movement focusing on women in the developing world.

- Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky

half the sky

We sometimes hear people voice doubts about opposition to sex trafficking, genital cutting, or honor killings because of their supposed inevitability. What can our good intentions achieve against thousands of years of tradition?

Our response is China. A century ago, China was arguably the worst place in the world to be born female. Foot-binding, child marriage, concubinage, and female infanticide were embedded in traditional Chinese culture....

So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize foot-binding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as the equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer to slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths and cultures. One lesson of China is that we need not accept that discrimination is an intractable element of any society. If culture were immutable, China would still be impoverished and Sheryl would be stumbling along on three-inch feet....

Communism after the 1949 revolution was brutal in China..., but its single most positive legacy was the emancipation of women. After taking power, Mao brought women into the workforce and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and he used his political capital to abolish child marriage, prostitution, and concubinage. It was Mao who proclaimed: "Women hold up half the sky."

There were some setbacks for women with the death of ideology and the rise of a market economy in the 1980s, and Chinese women still face challenges....

All that said, no country has made as much progress in improving the status of women as China has. Over the past one hundred years, it has become - at least in the cities - one of the best places to grow up female...

- Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky

For the most part, I agree with their assessment of the status of women in China. Even in such a place as rural as where I am, women certainly do hold up half, if not more, of the sky. Here in Lidu, it seems as if most of the shops and restaurants are run by women, and most of the teachers, perhaps even the students, are female (of course, that could be due to the demographic imbalance, which points to women, perhaps coerced into, choosing to abort baby girls so their one child can be a boy, which then ultimately shows that not all of traditional sexism has been uprooted). Of course, gender issues remain, and many of my girls are obsessed with losing weight and some of my female colleagues get pressured into doing whatever they can to "catch a husband." Not much different from America.

But the progress made is obvious, and the lesson, at least for me, is also obvious.

Why should I be afraid of being called imperialistic and self-righteous, of shoving my beliefs down the throats of others, so long as I don't choke those I seek to help? Why should I be afraid of offending tradition? Why should I be so concerned about being politically correct when I believe, without a doubt, that gender violence and inequality is wrong?

To be continued...
:)

hula! :S

Hah, it's 11pm on a Friday night and my feet are frozen and dirty, and my ankles are about ready to snap. Why? Because I spent all night trying to teach myself the hula. Why? Because I'm crazy, and because I don't know how to say 'no.'

Our department is taking Rach and me to a big Christmas party next Thursday at one of the hotels in Fuling. The cost: 400RMB per person. Yowwww. Thankfully, for us, it's free.

Ah, but nothing is ever really free, is it?
So Rach and I are being made to put on a performance. She's going to sing a Christmas song, and I, because of my fear of singing in public, chose to dance. HAH.

I suck at dancing, and have never in my life done the hula.
But thanks to some random video I found on the internet, I got half of Hanohano Lei Pikake down. Thankfully I'm far away enough from Hawaii ne to not have to worry about getting beaten up for making a mockery of the hula. I swear, I'm not doing it on purpose!

Changing cultures?

In one rural Indian village, 62% of the women agreed that wives should be battered when they fail to obey their husbands, according to a poll cited in Half the Sky. Also in that book, authors Kristof and WuDunn acknowledge the role women play in the use of rape as a weapon of war in Sierra Leone.

Sexism is so deeply embedded in certain cultures that women often contribute to the plight of women. When it comes to gender violence, I wonder, does the West put too much emphasis on changing laws, rather than on changing cultures?

Laws, as well as the often teethless UN declarations and resolutions and blah blah, don't do shit for people who live outside of the capital cities of developing countries, away from international supervision, out of reach from laoshi West's yardstick.

I don't dispute the claim that local solutions are most sustainable, but what about the behemoth of local culture that takes offense at any sort of reform, labeling such change as cultural imperialism???

Can imperialism ever be a good thing, if it is used for a good cause?
As long as we have different understandings of "good," imperialism's negative connotations will stick. HOWEVER, I think ending gender violence is a good enough reason to step on a few toes, a good enough reason to attack the sexist part of cultures everywhere. Hegemony or not, call it what you want, I think it's vital that we woo the world into changing its culture of gender oppression.

This is where law can come in handy. If nothing else, let it be the starting point (NOT the ending point) for advocacy and cultural change.
http://www.womenthrive.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=366&Itemid=121
The International Violence Against Women Act:
- Introduced by Biden and Lugar in 2007, and re-introduced every year since
- If passed, the US will commit $175M a year in foreign aid to organizations working to prevent honor killings, bride burnings, genital cuttings, acid attacks, mass rapes, and domestic violence.
- It will also create an Office of Women's Global Initiatives in the State Department

**Taken from an IVAWA FAQs sheet:
Isn’t this the United States trying to impose its culture on other nations?
"The I-VAWA does not try to impose the cultural mores of the United States on other countries;
rather, it seeks to support the work of local indigenous women and communities who have long
been advocating for an end to the violence and abuse experienced by women and girls. In
addition, it recognizes that much of U.S. efforts to help countries address problems such as
HIV/AIDS, maternal mortality, poverty and conflict are aided by addressing violence against
women. In fact, these other efforts will only be successful if concurrent efforts to support
women’s education and empowerment are also taking place. "



So, perhaps it's a dangerous mistake to think that condemning gender violence is solely a Western cultural more.

St. Nicholas

I thought all Nicholas Kristof did, aside from co-author Half the Sky, was post cool videos and trenchant blogs for the NYT.

Turns out he has one of the coolest ever biographies:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=nicholas%20kristof&st=cse

"Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The Times since 2001, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week.

Mr. Kristof grew up on a sheep and cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, graduating with first class honors. He later studied Arabic in Cairo and Chinese in Taipei. While working in France after high school, he caught the travel bug and began backpacking around Africa and Asia during his student years, writing articles to cover his expenses. Mr. Kristof has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to more than 140 countries, plus all 50 states, every Chinese province and every main Japanese island. He's also one of the very few Americans to be at least a two-time visitor to every member of the Axis of Evil. During his travels, he has had unpleasant experiences with malaria, mobs and an African airplane crash.

Read More...

After joining The New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. He also covered presidential politics and is the author of the chapter on President George W. Bush in the reference book "The Presidents." He later was Associate Managing Editor of the Times, responsible for Sunday editions.

In 1990 Mr. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, then also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement. They were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for commentary for what the judges called "his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world." He has also won other prizes including the George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club award, the Michael Kelly award, the Online News Association award and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award. Mr. Kristof has taken a special interest in Web journalism and was the first blogger on The New York Times Web site; he also twitters and has a Facebook fan page and a channel on YouTube. A documentary about him, "Reporter," premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2009 and will be shown on HBO.

In his column, Mr. Kristof was an early opponent of the Iraq war, and among the first to warn that we were losing ground to the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. He was among the first to raise doubts about WMD in Iraq, he was the first to report that President Bush's State of the Union claim about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa was contradicted by the administration's own investigation. His columns have often focused on global health, poverty and gender issues in the developing world. In particular, since 2004 he has written dozens of columns about Darfur and visited the area ten times.

Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are authors of "China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power" and "Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia." Their next book, "Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women Worldwide," will be published by Knopf in September. Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are the parents of Gregory, Geoffrey and Caroline. Mr. Kristof enjoys running, backpacking, and having his Chinese and Japanese corrected by his children."

body language

HO brah, I wen hit one home run in da teaching department today!

I taught my last Oral English lesson of the semester, and it happened to be my best lesson yet, as well as the one that Sandy, my laobanr from the Peace Corps, came to observe.

The topic: body language.
The message: NO BE SHAME fo talk to foreigners cuz your English stay good enuff. and even if you dunno how fo express yourself in words, just let your body talk fo you, cuz there's a good chance da foreigner will get da gist of what you trying fo say.

You see, the main problem my students have is not bad English, but a lack of confidence in their ability to communicate.

On days like today, I have trouble thinking of any job that trumps teaching.

=)

i wanna be an abolitionist!

"...we journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen on a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen every day - such as the quotidian cruelties inflicted on women and girls."

- Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

I agree! My central beef with journalism, stated by my favorite NYT journalist and his wife. Who wants to read about the quotidian? Everyday cruelties will not sale papers.
Oh, and another pretty large flank: the layout editor who named my piece on the closing of Hilo's beloved bakery "O'Keefe's is Toast." They get to write the headlines, manipulate and hack articles to death, and watch as the journalists get chewed out by the readers.
So, good bye journalism, hello politics.

I wish I had read Half the Sky before attempting to fight human trafficking via the Word, before even knowing the Word. I just thought Christianity as an emancipatory tool was a novel idea (yup, I was a novel believer, yet I still do want to believe in the power of hope). Ahh, and I confess, I did really want to see Thailand! Surely, hope is a fine place to start, but I wonder how effective prayerful organizations like Garden of Hope and International Justice Mission will be if fundamental issues go unresolved.

If the collapse of communism and the rise of capitalism is the event that opened a space for these Asian sex markets to boom, then isn't capitalism and globalization the problem "aid" must first fix? Or does the problem run even deeper than that, with sexism? Or did capitalism create sexism? Or did religion?

Or is it more practical to actually do like GOH and IJM, and tons of other secular NGOs and IGOs, and start on the periphery - with raiding brothels and microfinancing "liberated" women?

To each his (and her) own, I say! In such instances, I really do think it's better to do something rather than nothing. Is it possible to further fuck up a situation that is this fucked up? I doubt it. Yet, we must be vigilant and learn from our mistakes.

Problems like sex trafficking, which in reality is a misnomer for slavery, are daunting and seem to lack a solution that's big enough. I already learned from that Thailand trip that Christian organizations are not my thing. Yet I worry that academia, my next pursuit, will be too focused on attacking the core. Can I fight on the ground and engage in theory, without compromising my actions and thoughts?

Cheers to hope:
"Women aren't the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a problem than an opportunity."

for the aged

Breakfast: Walnut Milk Power For the Aged

Rachel convinced me to buy it yesterday, and despite the fact that one package is $5 (a fortune for me), I splurged because the only calcium I've been consuming lately has been in the form of chocolate... really bad chocolate, mind you. Unless there's calcium in coffee creamer? I've been having a lot of that.

This walnut milk isn't so bad, and it'll give me an excuse to play old lady. I'm just a little worried about drinking any kind of milk formula. Think there's melamine or whatever in my mug? Hopefully I'll survive. After all, they really respect their elders here. I don't think even the promises of capitalism would make them fuck up an elder's digestive system. Maybe an infant's, but not old person's. Thank you, Confucius.

snake oil

ymmm
haven't been this drunk since...??
thank you, aunty huang and site mate.
i suspect there was a dead snake lying at the bottom of this jiu vat. perhaps i will wake up with pretty skin? that's right, the best chinese alcohol is home to snakessssss. good for the spirit and the face.

dui ni de shenti HAO.

Smoker

An invisible cigarette hangs
From the center of your frown
Infant moths, curled inside that cocoon,
Stirred by your chain of sighs,
Shed their morsel wings, filthy,
Unspoken ash.

The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna is my latest infatuation. It satisfied my desire to get to know Frida intimately... and to know if she and Trotsky really did oof. The book is in the comprised of diary entries, newspaper clippings and letters by writer Harrison Shephard, once plaster-mixer and cook for Diego and secretary to Trotsky, whose celebrated career was ruined by his supposed un-American activity.

Favorite lines:

"'Dumb kid, your are a writer. Cesar tried to get you fired for always writing in your notebooks, and Diego tried to make you stop, too. It killed me to see him try. Now these men want to make you an efficient secretary. But you keep writing about soft hearts and scandal. The question is, why do ou think you can't be a writer?'

'To be a writer, you need readers.'

'I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my dumb little pieces of shit?'"

-----
"It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they've managed to trick us, if they did not. Frida felt it helped them not to put anything in writing. The people at Teotihuacan had no written language, according to Dr. Gamio. 'So we can't read their diaries,' she pointed out, 'or the angry letters they sent their unfaithful lovers. They died without telling us their complaints.'

She is right about that. No regrets or petty jealousies. Only stone gods and magnificent buildings. We only get to see their perfect architecture, not their imperfect lives. But it's a strange point to argue for an artist whose paintings are rants and confessions. Without regrest and jealousies, she would have blank canvas.

'You'd better burn all your paintings then, Frida. If you want people in the future to think you were heroic.'

She fingered her beads and knit her eyebrows. Raised her glass up to the light and rolled the red liquid around, studying it. 'I think an artist has to tell the truth,' she said finally. 'You have to use the craft very well and have a lot of discipline for it, but mostly to be a good artist you have to know something that's true. These kids who come to Diego wanting to learn, I'll tell you. They can paint a perfect tree, a perfect face, whatever you ask. But they don't know enough about life to fill a thimble. And that's what has to go in the painting. Otherwise, why look at it?'

'How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble?'

'Soli, I'm going to tell you. He needs to rub his soul against life. Go work in a copper mine for a few months, or a shirt factory. Eat some terrible greasy tacos, just for the experience. Have sex with some Mexican boys.'"

----
(about the atomic bomb)
"For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a cloud, the world was lost.
You blood for mine. If not these, then those. War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation."

-----
"Two words put together, curtain and iron, have worked alchemy on a kettle of tepid minds and anxious hearts. The power of words is awful, Frida. Sometimes I want to bury my typewriter in a box of quilts. The radio makes everything worse, because of the knack for amplifying dull sounds. Any two words spoken in haste might become law of the land. But you never know which two. You see why I won't talk to the newsmen.

smart power

From "The Forgotten Front: Winning Hearts and Minds in Southeast Asia"
by Christopher Bond and Lewis Simons
Foreign Affairs

"In addition to helping provide young Muslims with a quality, secular education, the United States should be expanding the Peace Corps and other US civilian organizations operating in Muslim areas throughout Southeast Asia. Smart power would best be delivered by volunteers in sandals and sneakers who live, work, and teach among the people of the region, rather than by diplomats in wingtips or soldiers in combat boots. The State Department would do well to reduce the footprint of fortress-style embassies in capital cities and instead create more intimate consulates staffed by Americans fluent in local languages in smaller district towns. Although this would likely create new security risks, human contact at this level would go a long way toward draining the swamp that nourishes tomorrow's terrorists."



As a Peace Force cadet, my ultimate mission is to squash the young shoots of terrorism. Nevermind if I get frost bite from wearing sandals in this weather, I will drain that icy swamp, one bowl of Muslim noodles at a time. Toes are a small sacrifice, a minor security risk, as is Giardia and other parasites.

Tak Bai

Holy shit.

From "The Forgotten Front: Winning Hearts and Minds in Southeast Asia"
by Christopher Bond and Lewis Simons
Foreign Affairs

Across the South China Sea, a strikingly similar situation is developing in the Muslim-majority Pattani section of Thailand. There, among Thailand's southern border with Muslim-dominated Malaysia, more than 3,500 Thai Muslims and Buddhists have slaughtered each other over the last five years.

Many stories of postcolonial ethnic conflict -- such as the bloodshed during the partition on India and Pakistan -- are well known. But the plight of the six million Thai Muslims, who have fought for independence for a century, has never received much attention in the West. While they watch their friends and relatives prosper on the Malaysian side of the border, the Muslims in Thailand live amid poverty and violence. Hardly a day passes without shootings, stabbings, and beheadings perpetrated by both sides. Schools, temples, and mosques are regularly bombed or burned down. It is, by any definition, a full-blown insurgency.

Although the Thai Muslim rebellion can be traced back to 1909, when Pattani was incorporated into Thailand, the most ercent tensions emerged on April 7, 2001. Shortly after the inauguration of then Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Sinawatra, three deadly coordinated bomb attacks struck a railway station, a hotel, and a gas plant in the south... [Thaksin] believed that he could snuff out unrest in the south with a burst of brutal force. But he was mistaken.

...Then, on October 25, in the sleepy border town of Tak Bai, some 2,000 residents, most of them young Muslim men, gathered outside the local police station for what was supposed to be a peaceful protest. Without warning, Thai troops shot seven demonstrators dead at point-blank range. The soldiers subsequently seized 1,300 men, stripped them to the waist, bound their hands behind their backs, and heaped them face down, five and six deep, in open army trucks. Then, for six hours, they casually drove the convoy around in circles in the harsh sun. By the end of the day, 78 of the bound men had died of asphyxiation.

Thaksin ordered the crackdown at Tak Bai. Like many Thai Buddhists, he ahd little interest in understanding the source of tensions in the Muslim south. And Thaksin only made a volatile situation worse by claiming on television that the Muslims in the truck died because they were weak from Ramadan fasting.

Winter fish

At 3AM the socks came off
A pair of startled winter fish
Dove deeper into the fleece,
A pool of silence trembled,
Dreams fled through eardrums
And other chilled pipes,
Diluted by morning dew
Sullied by human dross.

"Obama, you won it, now earn it"

Note: Mr. Obama, I <3 you, but you and your Norwegian prize make me sick.
Snippets from: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/world/europe/11prexy.html?_r=1&hp
"Accepting Peace Prize, Obama Evokes 'Just War'" by Jeff Zeleny

The Nobel chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, opened the ceremony by explaining how the committee came to its decision two months ago. He said Mr. Obama’s leadership had been a “call to action for all of us.” As he invoked the story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the winner of the prize in 1964, he turned to Mr. Obama, saying, “Dr. King’s dream has come true.”


He said that others more deserved the award, noting his “accomplishments are slight,” but he accepted the prize by endorsing a strong view of American exceptionalism.


He added: “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war. What I do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision, hard work and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago. And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.”

In speaking to reporters about the criticism of his winning the award, he said the goal was not to win a popularity contest, but to “advance American interests, make ourselves a continuing force for good in the world — something that we have been for decades now.”

He added: “And If I’m successful in those tasks, then hopefully some of the criticism will subside, but that’s not really my concern. And if I’m not successful, then all the praise and the awards in the world won’t disguise that fact.”

math

math is a foreign language
in this country,
where equality for all
is spoken in one voice

smile

"When you smile, the flowers open and the stars come out to shine."

:)

jimmy eat this

It's been years since I've listened to Jimmy Eat World, and wow, their poppy punk trash is music to my ears - this coming from a person who rocks out to S.H.E.'s "Superstar" and "Zhongguo Hua" every morning. I'm listening to "Futures" at the moment, and to tell you the truth, I'm not even bothering to figure out what the hell they're screaming. My thoughts about the Futures are all I can hear, which is probably what led me to throw a Jimmy party tonight.

Strange how we think we can control the future more than we can the present!
Yet I insist on tacking an "s" onto "future" because I KNOW that as much as I prepare, the next several years will be determined by a council of weary wizards. Poof. poof. poof. Options are a must.

Prepping for grad school is the one thing that keeps me Me, keeps me from integrating fully, from being the volunteer the Peace Corps wants me to be, from getting lost in Babara Kingsolver's Lacuna...

And it helps me cope with the fact that, well, I fucking miss school. I miss being a student.

Anyway, here is what I'm thinking:
I might as well retake the GRE.
I might as well aim for fluency in Mandarin, "aim" being the key word here.
I might as well apply to schools other than UH.

Time being the reason for the first two.
Curiosity of my own potential being the reason for all three.

The school I keep batting my Uchinanchu lashes at: University of Washington.
On the west coast (Seattle is home to the Blue Scholars, all of whom I plan to marry), beautiful campus, strong program, a bunch of law and gender-focused profs.... and even a prof who specializes in the politics of rural China (but who is currently on leave.. for how long???)
But OMG why do they accept so few, and fund even fewer? What is this, California???

Ack, the Jimmy party is over. Now JLO is on, thank you iTunes. "Love Don't Cost A Thing"? Hah, now that's a party for Berlant to crash - a sign I should shut the computer down. NOW.

The Futures can wait until tomorrow.

Rumour

At once Rumour raced through Africa's great cities. Rumour is of all pests the swiftest. In her freedom of movement lies her power, and she gathers new strength from her going. She begins as a small and timorous creature; but then she grows till she towers into the air, and though she walks on the ground, she hides her head in the clouds. Men say that Earth, Mother of All, brought her to birth when provoked to anger against the gods; she is her last child, younger sister to Coeus and Enceladus. Rumour is fleet of foot, and swift are her wings; she is a vast, fearful monster, with a watchful eye miraculously set under every feather which grows on her, and for every one of them a tongue in a mouth which is loud of speech, an ear ever alert. By night she flies hissing through the dark in the space between earth and sky, and never droops her eyelids in contented sleep. In the daylight she keeps watch, sometimes perched on the roof-top of a house and sometimes on the tall towers of the palace. And she strikes dead throughout great cities, for she is as retentive of news which is false and wickd as she is ready to tell what is true.

- VIRGIL, The Aeneid
(102-103)

bibliophile special

NYT Mag books special!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/books/review/McDonald-t.html?ref=review by Jennifer McDonald
on Graeme Gibson's THE BEDSIDE BOOK OF BEASTS: A Wildlife Miscellany

As he did four years ago in “The Bedside Book of Birds,” Gibson, the Canadian novelist (and longtime partner in birding and berry-picking to Margaret Atwood), has compiled poetry and myth, fairy tale and folklore, sacred texts and travelogues in an enchantingly illustrated volume that will awaken something primal in any human who dips into its pages. But this is far from a merely pretty survey of the animal kingdom. It is a book of raw spirit, a polemic against cold industrialization buttressed by Darwin, Forster, Murakami and Neruda, Audubon, Rubens and Leonardo, among many others.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/books/review/Baszile-t.html?_r=1&ref=review by Jennifer Baszile
On Deborah Willis' POSING BEAUTY: African American Images From the 1890s to the Present

"If a single thread unifies the images in this amazing collection, it is the subjects’ agency in the conception and presentation of their own beauty, which is itself a radical departure from the more familiar objectification of African-Americans in the nation’s collective visual memory."

defending the American

I just got back from dinner with two of my students.
To be honest, I didn't even know who they were until one of them emailed me a couple of weeks ago. She wrote to say that she hoped I would be "happy everyday" and that she was having a difficult time studying for my midterm exam because she doesn't pay attention in class. She closed the email with: "I hope we can become very good friends!"

(Not the best way to make friends with your teacher, if you ask me!)

In an effort to overcome the tiny grudge I've secretly held against her since her electronic slight, I accepted her invitation to eat dinner with her and her friend. Of course, she turned out to be very sweet - and while not the best student, I can see how she could become a very good friend.

However, we did hit a rough spot tonight when she tried to tell me about the differences between Chinese and American restaurant cultures.

"When Chinese people go out to a restaurant, we usually try to get our own room so we can have privacy and no one will see us. But when you Americans go out to eat, you choose a table where everyone can see you."

I fired back with a fusillade of head shakes and a hearty, "NO! That's not true!"
If her English was a little better, and if anger hadn't had the effect of paralyzing my tongue, I might have asked if she had ever eaten at a restaurant in America, or at least have explained why I felt so insulted.

I criticize the American government so much in class that I worry what the Peace Corps would think if it knew, and there I was, getting all huffy puffy when she, a non-American, benignly attacks my country.

I hadn't realized how sensitive I was about America's reputation, especially the reputation of "the American people" - you know, those glorious human beings who don't honk their horns every two seconds when they drive? Those free-thinking individuals who, when they buy groceries or board buses, stand in orderly lines rather than push and shove and cut people off? Those wonderful people who don't leave wads of spit everywhere?

Its so easy to take things personally, especially when comparisons often come phrased with "our China" and "your America." And it's hard not to do it in reverse - to wrongly accuse ALL of China of having a honking, shoving and spitting problem.

Is this how nationalism is born?

acting the American

I had an uncharacteristically good week. Not that my weeks usually suck, but I typically end the week with wanting nothing more than to be left alone.

This sugar high I've been on helped me get through the mad storm of extra-curricular activities (AIDS day, tutoring, a radio interview, office hours and TWO English corners). And it allowed me to play the American: to be stereotypically outgoing and shameless.

Perhaps I am guiltily trying to overcompensate for not looking like an American, but I also have enough of the narcissist in me that actually enjoys the attention. Don't get me wrong, I most certainly wouldn't enjoy this kind of attention in America... but in a land where I am anonymous, it is nice to be recognized as American. Or at least as different.

I wonder why I'm finding it important to be treated as important? Does my self-identity really depend so much on how others identify me?

Acoustic Separation; Sacred Shopping

From Paul W. Kahn's Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror and Sovereignty

Sacrifice or murder?

A successful state knows how to maintain both law and sacrifice. It knows how to keep them acoustically separated and how to negotiate the line between the two. Most important, it knows who its enemies are. The perception of the enemy invokes the sacrificial imagination, which makes possible the double sided violence of killing and being killed. A government may have the legal power to declare war, but it has no similar declaratory power to create an enemy. Every act of identifying an enemy is fraught with risk, for if the populace fails to see that person or group as the enemy, it will see only murder, not sacrifice. True enemies can be sacrificed in a display of sovereign power, but it is certainly not the case that anyone who is sacrificed becomes the enemy. The possibility of failure is built into the very idea of acoustic separation - that which cannot tolerate contact may, in fact, come into contact. When the victim is not the enemy, his death becomes murder and the agent of that death is a murderer. (156)


On memorialization:

The primary space of memorialization in the United States is the Mall in Washington, DC. There we find juxtaposed the two narratives of the state. On the one hand, there are the memorials to sacrificial violence. On the other, there are the institutions of lawful governance, which are themselves linked to the Mall through the museums that produce a national project of advancing civilization. In one day, the visitor is to divide his time - usually his family's time, for this is an inter-generational project - among the Smithsonian the Vietnam and Lincoln memorials, and the Capitol. We learn that we are a nation that sacrifices for the maintenance of a community dedicated to the project of enlightened self-government under law. We are particular in our sacrifices and universal in our law. We memorialize past violence within a space from which we can simultaneously see the rule of law. We turn from the sacrificial past to the narrative of the present as the stabilized order of law. Thus, the Mall gives geographic representation to the double narrative; it provides anordered, bounded space for each, making possible an easy transition across these two domains. On the Mall, one cannot answer the question of which site best represents the nation. Rather, one absorbs them all, just as Congress, which presides on a hill overlooking this national bricolage, is to absorb them all, producing a law that is simultaneously an expression of the sovereign will and the progressive realization of reason." (159)

Emotional wreck!

Phew, what an emotional weekend!
I cried more in one weekend than I have since.... since.. the day I said goodbye to my family at the airport.

The first time I cried was because I was wallowing in self pity. Side effect of Giardia?
The second time was when I showed "Miracle on 34th Street" to my class and suddenly realized how much I'm going to miss celebrating Christmas with my parents.
The third time was when I saw (via Skype) my entire extended family at their annual Thanksgiving luncheon, and learned that my cousin is pregnant and realized I couldn't celebrate with her in person.
The fourth time was when I Skyped with my parents today and they showed me the Christmas tree they bought, and I started to think how lonely they might feel on Christmas day opening gifts by themselves.
The fifth time was tonight when my students dazzled me with their performances at the host/hostess competition, and I realized how incredibly happy and proud I am to be their teacher.

Yeah, I need to get a grip.

Omg, I teared up after reading this.

get a grip, get a grip

Travel

我和我的朋友二月去柬埔寨度假十天。 我的朋友告诉我在那里玩得很开心。我等不及要去柬埔寨！
我觉得下次我待中国陆游。我家人告诉我一定要去北京， 因为北京有很多名胜古迹，比如说长城和天安门广场。我要去北京的陆游胜地，但是北京太远，而且我不喜欢太大的都市。我觉得重庆太大，我不喜欢，但是我知道重庆的夜生活和购物是很有名的。

alive and kickin!

I'm back! Yeaw, had a bad case of Giardia, but it seems like that little fucker has finally had enough of my intestines.

My students are sweet. I am up to my ears in fruit, and Jocelyn, who is also my tutor, just gave me an ear full on how I ought to take better care of myself. Honestly, I didn't eat shit on purpose! I don't even know how it happened...

agro-imperialism

ahk, no time to finish reading this, so will hold it here before it disappears into cyber never-neverland. seems like a great article!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/magazine/22land-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=magazine

obama zhuxi

The Peace Force's Commander in Chief is so close, but so far away. Hey, Obama, float on down the Yangtze, won't ya?

Interesting comments on his brief visit:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/asian-readers-tell-us-what-obama-could-do-for-your-country/?hp

Dream Deferred

by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Unfinished

Ah I am messy and I need a decent place to store good links.
I will post this here so that later on, when I eventually watch Showboat and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, I will think of Berlant. But I betcha I'll end up searching high and low for this baby:
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0878/investigations/sentimental_ed.shtml


I finially FINISHED The Female Complaint. Reading it was slow work, but for the past several weeks I enjoyed having it with my breakfast. I've always dismissed the romance genre as dumb and unworthy of serious critique, and yet, when the demands of the day are almost too much to bear, I like to unwind with movies like He's Just Not That Into You. I guess I always thought it would be anti-feminist to be publicly intimate with this intimate public. In a way, chick flicks, especially those that make allusions to or are adaptions of movies that were originally released before the "liberation" of women, make the feminist in me feel dirty, kind of like a porn-watching preacher. And yet, even porn-watching preachers can save souls.


Often, these citations [of sentimental classics] are not so deep: they are gestures toward the tradition of sentimental adaption that explain this time around why the great transformative and fulfilling love, the revolution without the trauma, must remain imaginable whether or not it is possible, discernible only in its smoldering remains.

But what remains is a resource, an unfinished event. Adaptations of sentimental realism are always about splitting and bargaining to stay in the scene of the fantasy of the better good life, as atrophied and confused as the manifest content of that fantasy can be. Possessing the object of desire matters les in these texts than does the re-experience of poteniality - the "tomorrow" in today where one works with what one has in order to survive. The delicate historicity of sentimental work provides pointers to the materials available for transformative opportunity. These scenarios are also archives of tactics for being undefeated, and indeed it is an attachment to this archive that also magnetizes the intimate public. To become not-someting is to unlearn a way of being, to see affective and emotional recalibration not only as possible but as desirable. in other words, in the view of the intimate public, there is no politics without the sentimental aperture/overture because that promise of emotional continuity can sustain people in the social amid the flux of change.

- Lauren Berlant

plagiarism

Got English Cornered tonight. Holy moly, I really wish I could spend all of tomorrow in silence. But tomorrow's office hours is an indoor version of English Corner. Holy moly.

I am a not a monkey. I am not a monkey.

But I definitely am a fool.
I felt a kind of maternal pride after reading the first batch of midterm essays. Even in light of small grammatical errors, some of my students write beautifully and often surprise me with their prolific, poetic prose. But then I began to find essays containing the same beautiful lines.

Yeah, I was pissed. And yet, how could they cheat, much less plagiarize, on the essay section of an in-class exam?

I did some detective work and found out that nearly all of my students have been quoting or paraphrasing Mao's Little Red Book. Sure, some credit the man, but most don't bother, probably because his words come to them more naturally than their own - probably because their words are his words.

At the beginning of the semester, I swore to give them F's if I ever caught them plagiarizing.
But I've never been good at keeping promises, and this seems like a good one to break, though it certainly gives me no joy. After all, plagiarizing Mao is probably the safest thing a student could do here.

Maoism meets Obamaism

A student's essay on the role of young people in today's world:

I think young people today play an important role in society. Mao Zedong once said: "Young people are the sun of eight or nine o'clock in the morning." Young people are important for our country's development and strength. The world belongs to the young people, even though young people know little, are small, and don't have much experience.

After last year's Wen Chun earthquake, young people tried their best to help the people and use their own ways to tell the world "yes, you can." Not only in China, but in other countries. Young people play a role that can't be ignored.

I always believe that young people are the new leaders of the world. Anyway, fact or theory, the young people play an important role in today's society.

"We are the flower and future of our country"

A student's essay on discrimination:

Discrimination has existed from our life comes. No matter human being or animal, there is always discrimination. But discrimination by human beings is more serious. In ancient times, when our country was strong and had deep influence, we couldn't be discriminated. We were full of pride and other envied us. Then, when we were invaded by Japan and other countries, the more we experienced discrimination or were looked down upon. They called our Chinese "the patient of East Asia" and thought our "yellow skinned people" is inferior to "the white skinned people." This is race discrimination.

What's more, we had the glamorous and colorful culture in the past. We invented the compass, the ways to create paper and other two inventions. Then the western countries would learn from us. But when we are poor or weak, the other countries treated our culture as nothing.

So, to be the college students of China, we are the flower and future of our country. We must study harder and harder to calculate the experience and knowledge to make our country stronger. Just like in the past or even better. Only by building ourselves better, we can get rid of the discrimination.

20 Years of Collapse

By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Published: November 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

I wish I could read this excerpt to students whenever they ask me about what America thinks of China. Then instead of spinning something lame about how Americans are in awe of and perhaps even envious of China's economic growth, I could respond by saying, "Well, America is scared shitless, and for good reason:


A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political power: they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal capitalists themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism, but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beating capitalism in its own terrain.

This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assume that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.

But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?



I just wrote in Chad's little box what I was going to write here. I think Zizek nailed America's fear. It's true, impossible shit gets done here, and quickly too, thanks to big bad authoritarian capitalism. Consider Fengdu, for example. An entire city rebuilt because it's former self is now submerged as a result of the 3 Gorges Dam project. Nor will I ever forget the time Rach and I were escorted to our longdistance bus by Besty's army captain uncle. For the first time we were in Chengdu, I didn't have the urge to grumble about traffic. Betsy's uncle was like Moses, parting the Chengdu freeway. And for what? So we could catch a lousy bus!

If this isn't efficiency, I don't know what is.

But it seems like people here are always being told that their form of capitalism IS liberal, and that their form of government IS democratic. Aren't we in the west told the exact same things by the powers that be? So maybe capitalism is at the very least inextricably linked to the tale of democracy.

dress is always code

Gender Gap = Generation Gap?

Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/fashion/08cross.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=fashion

Excerpts:

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules....

Dress is always code, particularly for teenagers eager to telegraph evolving identities. Each year, schools hope to quell disruption by prohibiting the latest styles that signify a gang affiliation, a sexual act or drug use.

But when officials want to discipline a student whose wardrobe expresses sexual orientation or gender variance, they must consider antidiscrimination policies, mental health factors, community standards and classroom distractions.....


When a principal asks a boy to leave his handbag at home, is the request an attempt to protect a student from harassment or harassment itself?...

“One day I heard a student say, ‘Man, there was a girl in the guy’s restroom, standing up using the urinal! What’s up with that?’ ” Mr. Grace recalled.

Bathrooms can be dangerous for transgender students. But the other student replied off-handedly, “That wasn’t a girl. That’s just Jack.”

aborted abortions

Abortion Was at Heart of Wrangling

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and JACKIE CALMES

Published: November 7, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/health/policy/08scene.html?hp

Excerpts:

To save the health care bill [Pelosi] had to give in to abortion opponents in her party and allow them to propose tight restrictions barring any insurance plan that is purchased with government subsidies from covering abortions...

“If enacted, this amendment will be the greatest restriction of a woman’s right to choose to pass in our careers,” said Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, one of the lawmakers who left Ms. Pelosi’s office mad.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said the bill’s original language barring the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions should have been sufficient for the opponents. “Abortion is a matter of conscience on both sides of the debate,” Ms. DeLauro said. “This amendment takes away that same freedom of conscience from America’s women. It prohibits them from access to an abortion even if they pay for it with their own money. It invades women’s personal decisions.”

.....The representatives of the nation’s bishops made clear they would fight the bill if there were not restrictions on abortion. In an extraordinary effort over the last 10 days, the bishops conference told priests across the country to talk about the legislation in church, mobilizing parishioners to contact Congress and to pray for the success of anti-abortion amendments.

the moon and the scars

I particularly like these two passages from The Female Complaint:

1) This is why love's attack on memory is not usually considered a bad thing. Love is supposed to transcend or at least to neutralize the contradictions of history. When people enter into love's contract with the promise of recognition and reciprocity, they hope memory will be reshaped by it, minimizing out the evidence of failure, violence, ambivalence, and social hierarchy that would otherwise make love a most anxious desire for an end to anxiety. A fantasy norm unevenly bolstered by the institutions that are said to be its main supports, then, modern love requires the lover to produce an epistemology that works against the defenses of knowledge. In this convention, when love fails, the trauma of memory becomes a scar the failed lover carries around for life, declaring it as deserving of care, nostalgia, and mourning. But what is the failed lover ultimately mourning, if not the amnesia love's optimism creates?


2) As their smoke intermingles ... she says, "Oh Jerry. Don't let's ask for the moon! We have the stars!"

What does Charlotte mean by this phrase? Don't ask for a totalized object in love when we have so many bright and scattered opportunities? Or don't desire what you can't possess, and, ergo, desire what you can? Or, embrace your queerness, Jerry, don't be distracted by the big satellite when you can preserve the multiple practices and possibilities your desire has already created? Something about the difference between shining and twinkling? In the movie, the music swells when she makes this bargain, and the camera moves up to the starry sky, leaving the two lovers to their privacy.

Goya's Ghosts

Set in Spain during the French Revolution and the Inquisition, Goya's Ghosts portrays the irrational, ungodly power of institutions that claim to speak the truth. The film reveals that in corruption, torture and bloodshed, these two events, often considered together as a clash between reason and faith, actually have much in common. The "true faith" that promised Ines eternal freedom put her "to the Question," squeezed out of her a false confession, and kept her in prison for years. Her crime: refusing pork. She was released thanks to a creed authored in the tongue of Enlightenment, only to be driven insane by Lorenzo, her now-rational former lover and newly proclaimed apostate.

This film seems to warn that an arrogant belief in truth depends upon the production of lies, and the exercise of cold rationality necessitates the creation of insanity. After all, it was released during the Bush regime...

private violence in the public eye

As we do our best to assert private violence as a public concern, perhaps we must remember that such gross public exploitation of private affairs may intimidate even the boldest among us into keeping silent.

Following the whole Chris Brown-battering spectacle, I had so many questions for Rihanna. Why would someone with fame and wealth on her side go crawling back to her batterer? She had options. Like many others, I accused her of being stupid and weak. And I was disappointed in her for failing to be an example of strength for young women who are not fortunate enough to live such privileged lives.

But I had forgotten about the power of shame. Enough of it can paralyze us and make us want to hide within the often unsafe privacy of intimacy. For some of us who do have options - isn't that why we remain in violent relationships? Yet is a battered body really better than battered pride? But regardless of the choices we do or do not have, perhaps we should really look into the shame/pride dichotomy and think about how and why this duo has amassed such power.

Rihanna speaks: 'Love is so blind':

CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/11/04/rihanna.good.morning.america/index.html

"There are a lot of women who experienced what I did, but not in the public, so [that] made it really difficult," she said. "I just thought 'Oh my God,' here goes my little bit of privacy. Nobody wants anybody to know, and here I am, the whole world knowing."

That photo, allegedly distributed by two Los Angeles Police Department officers, made a bad situation worse, she told Glamour magazine.

"It was humiliating; that is not a photo you would show to anybody," the songstress said. "I felt completely taken advantage of. I felt like people were making it into a fun topic on the Internet, and it's my life. I was disappointed, especially when I found out the photo was [supposedly leaked by] two women."

Rihanna told "Good Morning America" that Brown was definitely her first love, but that the more in love they became, the more dangerous the relationship turned. It was a reality she was too embarrassed too admit.

"I didn't want people to think that I fell in love with that person," she said. "That's embarrassing that that's the type of person I fell so far in love with, so unconditionally, that I went back."

People put her on a pedestal "with all these expectations," she said, "but I'm a human being, and I'm not perfect." Now, she can admit it was a mistake to give the relationship a second chance.

Nearly 10 months have passed since her secret came tumbling out for the world to see, and Rihanna said it was her fans who helped her finally speak up about domestic violence.

drinking tea from an empty cup

"Don't think about that home, Anjin-san," Mariko had once said when the dark mists were on him. "Real home is here - the other's ten million times ten million sticks away. Here is reality. You'll send yourself mad if you try to get wa out of such impossibilities. Listen, if you want peace you must learn to drink cha from an empty cup."

She had shown him how. "You think reality into the cup, you think the cha there - the warm, pale-green drink of the gods. If you concentrate hard ... Oh, a Zen teacher could show you, Anjin-san. It is most difficult but so easy. How I wish I was clever enough to show it to you, for then all things in the world can be yours for the asking ... even the most uobtainable gift - perfect tranquility."

- James Clavell, Shogun (858)

underworld

Good news: chest pains are gone
Bad news: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/asia/04crimewave.html?_r=1

Chongqing = big bad city???

chest pains

My heart is sore. It's as if it's breaking, and I don't know why. Deep breaths, deep breaths.

I noticed the pain when I awoke at 3am from a bad dream. I almost never dream, so when I do, I tend to think it's quite significant. Usually I'd email Jordan and ask him to interpret for me. But this time, the mere thought of what this dream could mean me scares me.

In this nightmare, I was at the funeral of someone I like very much. I was standing in front of his grave wearing a long black dress, holding flowers and reminiscing about the tender moments we shared together (none of which have actually happened.) In spite of the tears that kept streaming down my face, I was lost in my (dream-world) memories of him and was experiencing joy that was pure and sublime. When I could almost feel his face pressing against mine, I remembered that he was dead -- then I woke up, feeling both horrified by his death and elated from having been loved in such a way.

I remember thinking: Oh crap, if anything happens to him anytime soon, I will freak out.
Then I went back to sleep.

When I woke up again at a more decent hour, ready to start the day, the pressure on my chest was immense. Did the dream cause it? Or am I just under stress?


I wouldn't doubt that stress has something to do with it. My actions and reactions seem to come from someone other than me. I barely recognize myself, and it's starting to scare me.

For example, this afternoon as I was walking to my office, some kid hit me with his soccer ball. Granted he wasn't aiming for me, but he shouldn't have been kicking a ball that hard when there were people walking nearby. When the ball hit me, it slammed into my hand and sent my water bottle flying across the sidewalk. Without even thinking, I turned around and shouted: FUCKING WATCH IT!

He apologized meekly and I could understand his friend well enough to get the gist of his comment: "I didn't understand her. I think she was speaking English. She said you should fuck-in wachit."

Oh I felt horrible after. What if one of my students heard? What if the one of my fellow teachers heard? And why the heck couldn't I control my temper? I've never sworn at anybody before - not loudly and to their face, anyway.

It was as if all of the frustration that has been building up over the past month exploded out of me at that moment.

When I got to my office, I did all I could to compose myself before I had to go to tutoring. But all that yelling exacerbated my heart ache, and the deepest of breaths did diddly to calm me.

So, either my heart is breaking for the death of a love that never happened, or my chest hurts from the prickly stuff that is quickly growing over my heart. I hate to say it, but I really do think China is changing me, and while I'm glad that it's making me into a tougher person, I'm not quite sure I like who I'm becoming.

apathetic to apathy

I saw THREE kids sleeping in one of my Oral English classes today.
I almost went ballistic.
It took all the nerve I had not to drag each one out of the room by the ear.

I calmed down, though, because it's always the same three who contaminate the classroom with their apathy. I already sing and dance, what else do they want?? A nap, they want a nap. They probably want me to stop all my edutainment stunts so they can nap more peacefully.

The sad thing is that, as the weeks go by, I feel myself becoming more apathetic toward their apathy. I use to yell, my eyes used to twitch and bulge, and I would show them the big zeros I was writing for them in my grade book. Now, I do my best to ignore them, knowing that while an explosion of anger will certainly ruin their dreams, it will also ruin the rest of my day.

Have I given up on them? Perhaps, but if they're not going to meet me half way, why should I jump through hoops for them? But am I expected to go out of my way for them? Is it my job? Basically, the dilemma is: to care or not to care.

I feel bad for kids like Jany. She sits in the front and stares at me with her big eyes, eager to absorb everything I dribble out. And what does she get? A grumpy teacher.


I try not to play favorites, but there is one class that outshines the rest. Just so happens it's immediately before my dreaded apathetic class.

Today in this golden class, I happened to take a peek at a student's script for their horror skit.
The line that caught my eye went something like this:

Mr. Yuan: "Oh fuck it! Holy shit, shit, it's a ghost!"

"Um, you can't say that in front of the class, okay?"
"Okay, Kacie. Are those words too informal?"
"Yes, well, sort of. I'll tell you about them later."

Lol, can't you see why I like them?

James Clavell: My Japanese Squeeze

People tend to think that just because I've got Japanese blood in my veins, I can speak, read and write Japanese. Thus, they assume learning Chinese is easy for me. WRONG! The sad thing is that they would probably be right if only I hadn't goofed off so much in Japanese school.

If it's any compensation, I've been picking up some Japanese from James Clavell's Shogun.
OMG, it is so good! I was in the mood for adventure and romance, so I stole the book from the library in my office. I doubt any of my students would be interested in reading a 1200 page novel in English, much less Chinese.

Usually I'm unfairly critical of white authors whose stories are set in non-white lands, and while I do think that Clavell romanticizes Samurai life, I think he does a brilliant job with juxtaposing Japanese and Western brutality, as well as the different values and rituals these cultures uphold as meaningful.

But aside from all the fighting and hacking off of heads, the love story between Blackthorn and Mariko, a poignant part of the plot that is woven so subtly into the rest of the story, is absolutely beautiful....

Yet nothing about their romance makes me wish I could be Mariko. I know I could not endure her world, even for the sake of love. I wonder if that is an indication of the novel's failure... or of its success.

stratospheric stress

This is depressing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/education/edlife/01public-t.html

Excerpts:

Universities have reached deep in their pockets to protect vulnerable students from tuition increases. Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California, defends his university’s record in preserving financial aid, noting that families with incomes under $60,000 pay not one penny of their fees. “The real crunch,” he says, is helping families that make roughly $100,000. “The most at risk at this time really are going to be the middle class.”


Mr. Shulenburger sees the tuition increases as part of a larger movement toward privatization of the most desirable flagships. With state contributions largely flat or down over the last 15 years, and enrollments and costs up, many top flagships are turning to nonpublic sources for money and, in some cases, accepting larger numbers of out-of-state students, who often pay twice the tuition of residents.

At the same time, applications are pouring in from students shut out by the stratospheric cost of private colleges. That’s generally a good thing. Flagships are attracting more wealthy and better-prepared students. Yet as the counterargument goes, a flagship’s traditional mission is to educate its own, especially a state’s low- and middle-income students. The evolution under way is putting some flagships out of reach for the students who were typically enrolled even a decade ago. Each year, the quality of students as well as the budget model skews closer to that of elite private universities.

All this makes me scared to go back to school. What has this got to do with UH? Well, "stratospheric costs" seem to be contagious. And depth trickles down faster than wealth. And I worry about affording school after UH.

Nobody better touch the Regents Scholarship. I think that might be the last hope for the middle class, local young'uns. As for prospective grad students: we're screwed.

the hippie that never was

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/education/edlife/01rotc-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp

I had no idea that the student protests in the 60s resulted in the banning of ROTC at elite universities. WOW! Hehe, I think I am infatuated with the antiwar movement. Students, young people, changed things - they mattered. They made the Vietnam War look like the tragic joke it was, they coaxed the government into lowering the voting age, they set their draft cards on fire and ended up burning down the entire drafting system.

Okay, so I admit that I romanticize this era of peace rallies, but still, it saddens me that the antiwar sentiment is no longer as "cool" as it was 50 years ago. Sure, the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is not very popular, but because people don't seem to care very much. This war is the kid in school who nobody notices. The Vietnam War, on the other hand, was unpopular because it pissed off - it moved - the public.

Why is our generation so damn apathetic? Are we that much more selfish than our parents were? Are we preoccupied by issues our parents never had?


I don't quite understand my antagonism toward ROTC, or with the military. Not just our military. Everytime I'd watch YZNU's freshmen doing their mandatory military drills, I'd get the chills. I just find synchronized marching creepy. The fact that all freshmen in this part of the country are disciplined in such an overt manner is frightening.

Also, now that the newly-winged Eric is an Air Force rock star, my feelings toward the military are even more nebulous. How can I admire him without acknowledging all of the grand opportunities the military has provided him with? The military makes possible life as he knows it.

You could chalk-up my antagonism to the military to my general suspicion of all sorts of powerful organizations/institutions/etc. And yet, look at me, a Peace Corps Volunteer, for heaven's sake. I work for the government, I help to author the fattest institution of them all. Often it feels like it's our job to do damage control, to make sure nationals in other countries don't hate us too much for the coups and wars we've supported, the labor and natural resources we've exploited, and the bombs we've dropped. So in many ways, my role as a "peace ambassador" supports the military - it mollifies the international antagonism toward American violence. And yet, there are ways to go beyond, and maybe even against, what is expected of me as a representative of the US - not that it is my mission to blemish America's name. It's really quite the opposite.

party prep party

I spent the afternoon in Fuling with Kathy. Fuling DOES sell popcorn, thank God. We ate lunch at Dico's, a fast food joint I'd been trying my best to avoid, only because it's expensive... for a PCV, anyway. Ah, but the french fries were amazing. First fries I've eaten since June! I didn't think Fuling had any!

Unfortunately, one of the Mag7 got the (swine?) flu... but her slot was quickly filled by Luna.
The gang came over this evening with bags of veggies, meat and seasons. They pulled out my pots and pans, helped me hunt for knives and cutting boards (it was the first time my kitchen was being used!), and quickly got to work with making the jiaozi stuffing. Then they taught me how to fold the stuffing into the wrappers. We ate and ate and ate.

Then we had hot chocolate for desert - the dark chocolate Swiss Miss my parents sent me last week. It was a new experience for them. "We don't drink chocolate!" :)

I certainly had a good time. And now I am pooped.

The party is tomorrow!!! :)

Death returned Michael Jackson's humanity?

"The Pop Spectacular That Almost Was"
by Manohla Dargis, New York Times
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/movies/29this.html?8dpc

"Death returned Michael Jackson’s humanity, and in a curious, tentative way so too does “Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” a rushed and ragged monument to the man, his work and the commercial interests of those he left behind. At once a greatest-hits compendium and a suggestive glance at what might have been, the movie — which had its premiere Tuesday and opened Wednesday on a staggering 18,000 screens worldwide — has been so nakedly designed to serve so many different agendas that it seemed unlikely anything would be left for Mr. Jackson’s fans beyond the sheer spectacle of such colossal posthumous exploitation.

Yet something remains here, though it’s hard to know whether it’s the ghost or our love, perhaps both. "


What made MJ inhuman while he was alive? His awesome star power, his "freakishness"? Funny that he had to die in order to for us to be feel like we can relate to him. Suddenly, he is a person.

And yet, the movie, inspired by his death, "has been so nakedly designed to serve so many different agendas." Is that the essence of being human? Certainly that's how I sometimes feel.

cruel optimism

Time is unkind.


I just stumbled upon an old letter.
Funny how time fails to dull the sharpness of certain words. Just as I was beginning to consider a beginning without the author of such cruel words, I was taken in again, consumed by precisely that which makes his words so cruel: hope.

...you had your reasons for not responding and I value that so I drew the line and you became a friend. That doesn't mean that line cant ever be erased...

We were both victims of a wicked trick of time, yet I seem to be the only one who has yet to recover.

Aw boo, what could tempt me into opening old wounds? Nothing but the banal, conceited words of someone else. Words that are not his, words that have no meaning, words that have nothing at all to do with me. Perhaps this makes me banal and conceited. Regardless, I long to be caught in a whir of words that have everything to do with me - real words that do not merely make faint illusions to hope and promise.


*I realize that other than the title, this has nothing to do with Berlant. Well, Berlant, not everything has to be about you...

:P

Halloween

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I said "YES!" to a student to who asked for a Halloween Party. Today Yedda reported that there will be 160 students. I don't know how accurate this count is, but if that many students do show up... It's going to be chaotic, but fun.

I have 4 games:
Pumpkin bowling
Chubby Bunny
Footloose Balloon Pop
Balloon Squat Relay

- and there will be a costume contest IF students dress up
- and I will show "Hocus Pocus" IF (big, big IF!) the computer and projector work
- and I will give popcorn to all if Kathy can help me find some in Fuling tomorrow

My Magnificent 7 is coming over tomorrow for a final meeting. I am so, so grateful for their help. I was going to take them out to dinner, but then they asked to cook for me. Hah! Who would disagree? So tomorrow, they're making jiaozi at my place. :)

They came over last night too, and they asked me my age. I told them to guess.

"26? ... 25? ... 24? .... 23? .... 22?"

"Yes, 22."

"HUUUUHH???????"

That was the first time anybody has ever thought that I'm older than I actually am. =P

faith + postmodernism = humble mumble jumble

Do you think a Christian can believe in multiple truths? Of course it is possible for God to be as real to me as Guanyin is for a Taoist. This statement doesn't have to imply that both God and Guanyin are truly real. But does it even matter, so long as God is real to me? Is his reality in my life supposed to negate the universal reality, the truth, of Guanyin?


For me, faith is a fragile thing, yet it won't break. And that's how I like it. In order for me to live with myself, and in order for my faith to truly be strong, it must be weak. It must be humble, it must be receptive to questions and challenges.

My Kindle is obese with postmodern mumble jumble, that "other voice" that tempts me to question what I once believed was the only truth. Heck, Derrida's thought-children have me in agreement with those arguments that are premised on the idea that metanarratives are supreme bullshit, that all the world is (con)textual, and that Truth is an arrogant fantasy.

Yet metanarratives and faith are empowering, and they are not, I hope, inherently harmful. There is something awesome in their mere potential to unite people irrespective or race, sex, class, etc. Anyone can believe. But then we go and fuck up a beautiful thing. We create the categories of "believer" and "nonbeliever," of "right" and "wrong." We feel entitled to name things as false simply because we believe we know truth.

But do we know the truth? If we "knew," we wouldn't be asked to believe, would we? Scientific proof of the creation story is not necessary for us to be thankful for what has been and can be created - by evolution, by a higher power, by accident, by genius invention, by imagination.

Anyhow, I must disagree with a big part of the Christian community that sees postmodern works as crap authored by garden snakes. From time to time, postmodernity's intellectual criticism, its merciless questions, turn my faith inside out. They allow me to air out the stale aspects of my faith. They humble me in how I believe in the Christian God. They remind me of why I believe in Him. Faith and postmodernity do not have to be enemies. Postmodernity need not play devil to Faith, and vice-versa. Humility makes such a coexistence in the heart and mind possible.

Can a Christian believe in a non-hierarchical order of multiple faiths? Can she believe that all faiths are created equal - that as much as we are created by God, we in turn attempt to create Him? I believe so, if her faith is true. A true faith is a humble faith.


On a side note, even when my faith is so precarious that it seems as if it's on the brink of snapping, articles like these make me glad to have been part of Bluewater Mission, a super cool anti-slavery team:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/us/27runaways.html?_r=1&hp