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)