Week 1: Paper

Week one in my third year at Evergreen and I am excited to see where this quarter takes me. Let’s talk about knowledge from class!

Writing Workshop

Through Professor Kris’s writing workshop I began to see how deeply entrenched I am in the value judgments that I have created in my mind through my formal education. Although I want my motive to write to be to further my understanding or synthesis of knowledge, or to communicate new learning to my peers, or even type out a creative lyric that is swimming around in my mind, I get paralyzed in the thoughts of will my professors be satisfied, am I checking all the boxes of the prompt, how will I measure up when I am compared to my classmates?

So as I move forward I am continually reminding myself of the recursive nature of writing. How there is fluidity that exists between prewriting, drafting, revision, editing, and proofreading. That there is no such thing as perfection but a scale of good towards better and more refined. The deep breath of we are all in process, we are all human.

I want to focus on what I want the reader to take away from my writing. I often just write to finish an assignment but this quarter I want to evaluate my papers looking at the high order concerns of the big picture ideas and take time and care to refine and edit.

Asian American: A Very Short Introduction

This book clearly illustrates the interweaving of how different APIA groups have came to America and been pushed out, or held captive in prisoner of war camps or service labor while others have been overlooked or pushed to the side.

I have inner turmoil on the fact that coming to America means adopting or being influenced by a lot of Western values. This book highlighted the economic impacts and causes me to think about how damaging capitalism is to cultures. This is such a complex pile of issues.

I was picking up where the education system was talked about. When Chinese people had to go to Chinese only schools, Japanese people were able to fight to go to integrated schools, then they actually relegated to go to “separate but equal” schools for “colored people”. But this was only in certain areas in the nation. It is also interesting because in integrated schools, APIA students were not allowed to go to extra curricular activities so they created their own clubs. One of the many paradoxes is how white people were concerned that API people were not fitting in to the “American” way but they actually were preventing API people from joining in to the social life of America. In this way and because of jobs.;

A theme that kept coming up is the jobs that different immigrant groups would have to take. There are so many messed up aspects about this! One was that even though Asian Americans would come to America with college degrees or receive higher education within the United States, they were not able to get the jobs that they were qualified for and had to instead go into labor intensive and service areas.

In the experience of Korean Americans, I found it interesting that owning a business was not actually all that it appears to be. In my mind, owning a business is on the higher end of desirable jobs because you get to be the boss and make the choices in the company, especially in an age of entrepreneurship. But in this case, owning a business like a grocery store was the only option they had and it was a downgrade from the skills they were trained in.

Also, within the farm labor industry there is an ongoing pattern of workers not being treated right, taken advantage of, and exploited in their vulnerability. We must remember and connect with areas of our history and fight for people currently in the same situation to demand justice.

It is interesting to me and important to recognize that the same patterns of welcoming/getting API’s to come to America to work all the labor intensive jobs, but they don’t have the security of being citizens so there is always a threat of getting sent back to the country of origin while also being intimidated from organizing labor unions. How patterns of immigration just keep spinning on.

Film Notes on Ghost in the Shell (2017)

Some quick thoughts and feelings

• There were no Asian women in this film until the last 30 minutes where Motoko’s mother was introduced
• There was major blending of Asian cultures, reinforcing the idea that all APIA people are the same
• Major’s doctor said multiple times that she was so beautiful which subliminally gives the message that whiteness is beauty
• The film portrayed that the “better” version of Motoko was a white woman
• It was cool to see a woman as the main character but sad because it seems like it is only possible for her to be white because of the film industry and viewers restrictive view on 1. if women can be seen as powerful and 2. other ethnicities not being seen as having power or control