week 9 notes
Birth of the Dragon
- WWE Studios (foreshadowing of the hokeyness to come)
- ‘Real life’ fight scenes play out like stereotypical martial arts movie fights
- Movie ostensibly about Bruce Lee, focuses more on Steve with his plot being the main driving element
- What exactly is it that this movie is based on? (what happened in real life surrounding the fight?)
- Steve doing nothing, getting credit for everyone else’s work
Paper Bullets annotations:
- The narrator outlines that he stores different facets of popular culture into his brain, as they become the key component of contextualizing the period of time in which his recollections/stories take place in. They also inform his reality – creating “one big fiction”. (pg. 3)
- “People meet my father and respect him. People meet my mother and lover her. I’m more hit-and-miss. More love-or-hate.” (pg. 11) – because he is a Hapa child, he is in the middle between these too – seen as hit or miss?
- “While my father loves the sun even as it burns, my mother hates the sun even as it tans. My father, like me, sees a tan as beautiful. My mother sees it as primitive.” (pg. 14) – point of view of the father and mother? is it an exotic thing with the father? influence of western beauty standards on mother? also notice how the narrator doesn’t fit in the middle of this opinion, as he sides with his dad
- The narrator sees marriage as tolerance and dependency – reflected in the scene where his mother and father are in the same bed, but he characterizes them as looking like an awkward family photo that is only projecting the image of happiness (pg. 16)
- The narrator inviting a girl over to watch Enter the Dragon, where he loses his virginity, which he describes as “entering his first woman.” (pg. 18) “She said she had seen it before, but she came anyway.” – the narrator then compares his romantic relationships to the production values of martial arts movies, where once they were low budget and cheesy, they only get better produced with age (experience) (pg. 18)
- The narrator’s mother yells in Chinese in panic when he jumps into the deep end, but after he is out and the panic has subsided, and the mothers are discussing “if that were my child..” she scolds him in English – trying to maintain an image, not wanting to give the other mothers a reason to make judgements of her parenting based on her race/ethnicity? (pg. 20-21)
- The language men (fathers?) use in communication with one another to hide vulnerability/anxiety/fear – posturing for the sake of masculinity at others’ expense, everything is a joke (pg. 24)
- The newspaper articles slowly start to trickle away and Chinese Americans start to focus on pre-pubescent figure skaters and violinists again. I’m still fast in the water, but no one really talks about the Olympics anymore.” (pg. 28) – tendency in America for certain ethnic groups to be associated with certain sports/activities
- The narrator’s fascination with going fast, not just in his swimming, but his idolization of Speed Racer (pg. 29) (which is two tiers above the other Japanese cartoons that play on weekday mornings in his mind) – “It’s like as long as the end counts, it doesn’t really matter how you get there.” (pg. 30)
- “Perfectionism is a way of life. A way of interacting. A way of expressing and showing love and respect and gratitude.” (pg. 39) – the narrator also expresses that through this, he had to relearn how to experience things naturally and with passion – a symptom of living in the “model minority” lifestyle
- Contrast between the narrator’s enjoyment of the Chinese restaurants vs the restaurants his father wants to go to – his enjoyment is based on the speed of the atmosphere of each restaurants
- balance of Hapas being simultaneously ignored and scrutinized (especially in terms of their personal romantic relationships) (pg. 50-51)
- “Think about something else. Bio paper due Monday. 10 percent of your grade. Venomous replies and marine life.” (pg. 72) – reminds me of Better Luck Tomorrow where the main character always went back to going over his vocabulary cards, even when he was getting into all of the crime.
- “I’m waiting for wisdom. I’m waiting to put a first love, a first sex, and a first white-woman fantasy to bed.” (pg. 94) – before Kip started seeing Carly he fell for the idea of her, probably due to being a white woman. what happened in their relationship was the stripping away of the masculinity that he took part in with his friends, and that even led to his fantasizing about her in the first place.
- Kip is asked about the turning points in his life, they all include near death experiences with water – “Water will never hurt me” (pg. 134) – goes back to the protection he felt from water as a child, being able to dive into the deep end very young. what does water symbolize? his sexuality/the masculinity that informs that? while working at raging waters he basically only remembers it through his sexual thoughts – raging waters/raging hormones??
- “How can you cast me in some random role while pretending you’re neutral. (You’re not.)” (pg. 139) – what makes Mandy “neutral” in the first place, compared to the other two women? is it because one was Hapa, while the other was “more Chinese” shown by her affinity for the Buddha’s feast? but again, why is Mandy “neutral”?
- “Baywatch it’s not. You learn to treat Mexicans as second-class citizens and you learn blacks can’t swim. You learn to smile at your women co-workers and to talk about what they’d fuck like when it’s just you and the boys.” (pg. 149) – I wonder if this was meant to parallel when Kip said he liked his life through high school better because he didn’t have to learn about the intricacies of being Hapa, where here he’s graduated from Raging Waters to ocean lifeguard and is finding out that that world is ugly – “I want to find a better way to be around the water.” (pg. 149)