Category: Paper

This week in class we watched some work from Kip Fullbeck. A short film called banana split, I guess kind of a journey through a life? I’m not sure if it was exactly his life or something similar. The story telling was really great, I haven’t seen many films like this before. The story seems to follow the life of someone beginning to question a lot of his life. Who he has dated, the difficulties he has had with interracial dating. This is the type of film I’d have to watch multiple times to really make connections, on the surface I can tell it question a lot of issues we face today.

We also watched a film, Birth of the Dragon, a film that’s supposed to be about Bruce Lee and his fight with Wong Jack Man. It turns out to be a blend of that and a romantic drama. Steve Mckee trying to free a women he meets while making a delivery who is enslaved until she can pay off the cost of traveling to America, which in most cases is never. Wong Jack Man comes to America for penance because of something he did back home. When he arrives Steve wants to meet him, he does and wants lessons from him. Eventually Steve convinces Wong Jack Man to fight Bruce Lee. At first it seems like he agrees because he wants to help free the girl Steve met, but later reveals that he is only fighting Bruce Lee to show him the flaw in his teachings. The film had really bad reviews, understandably so. One thing that stood out to me was the fact that it was supposed to be set in the 60’s but it felt so modern, I can’t really tell what it was, maybe the dialogue, I just kept forgetting that it was set in the 60s. It also was supposed to be about Bruce Lee but he wasn’t really the focus, there was a lot of focus on the love story of Steve Mckee. Overall I found the film to be more comical than anything else.

Some students gave a really interesting presentation in class. I think overall I learned a lot. We started off doing some circle group thing where we stepped into the circle if we had heard of the stereotype before. I think for me, some of the stereotypes were very…general. Could be applied to to a lot of people, but some were definitely things I’ve heard before. For the most part it was a really informative presentation and paired very well with the video we watched before the presentation. There was really only one thing I wasn’t
really sure about. They said, people take Disney movies as very factual…I mean as a kid, I was very aware it was just a movie, even at a very young age. I mean they have movies about mermaids…Beauty and the Beast…I don’t find any of these movies factual and I don’t agree that really anyone else does. That’s not to say that the movies shouldn’t try to be as accurate as necessary when it matter, they should definitely put in the effort. When I watch a movie like Moana, I don’t take what they’re saying and pretend like I know anything about the culture they’re trying to portray, but I do understand people/kids can be influenced very easily.

We watched Mississippi Masala this week, labeled as a romantic drama but it seemed to be much more than that. It was a relationship between African American and Indian Americans and the impacts this relationship had on their communities and families. It had a pretty dramatic impact, when their relationship was discovered, there was a fight, and it basically had a domino effect of Demetrius losing his funds from the bank, Mina almost having to go back to Uganda, people almost getting sued, it was a mess. Eventually Demetrius and Mina moved away together, probably lived happily ever after. Overall I enjoyed the movie at face value. I think it had a lot of valuable issues to learn about, issues that did and still do exist.

I felt really bad for Demetrius when he basically lost everything he had in one night. At first he blamed Mina, I imagine it was hard not to blame her, I mean it all kind of revolved around her. Even though she didn’t really do anything wrong, aside from breaking the “rules”, but to them that seemed to be worth it, considering they ran off together.

This movie we watched covered the struggle of a young Vietnamese man, a Bui Doi as many called him. He was born from an American father, a GI. He started off being treated very differently than everyone else in his village, many people did not like him because it reminded them of past events. Eventually he decides he wants to go find his parents, he goes into the big city and finds his mother, she tells him about his father, how they were married. She said one day he was there, the next he was gone. Eventually he has to flee from Vietnam, going on a…Not even really sure how to describe the journey, it was horrific. He was in some sort of prison camp for awhile, then stuck in the hull of a ship where his baby brother eventually got sick and died. Once he finally got to America, he wasn’t really treated any better than while he was in Vietnam. He was forced to work until he realized that he was actually an American, he was told that since his father was an American GI he could have gotten a free flight to America and that rightfully enraged him. He lost his baby brother during that trip, he endured a lot, much more than most. He eventually finds his father, who is blind, and pretty much discovers why his father had to leave Vietnam. I really liked the movie, as hard as it was to watch at certain times, it was a moving story.

We watched the movie Debut. About Ruben, basically wanting to go to an art institution instead of UCLA for med school. His father, who was really strict didn’t want that. He considered it a hobby, pass time, not a skill. He didn’t think it would be something worth spending all his money on to go to school for. Ruben was stuck trying to decide which party to go to, his sisters 18th birthday or his friends high school party. Some of the discussion after the movie suggested it had something to do with him deciding between his heritage. He seemed to want to go to his sisters party because it’s the right thing to do, but he wanted to go to the other party because a girl he liked was going, which isn’t strictly wrong, but to go to that party over the huge party being thrown for your sister is probably at least slightly wrong. He ends up going to the high school party for a little bit, while he is there he basically gets treated like shit by some drunk white girl who eventually starts yakin all over herself. After that he realized that he didn’t want to be there, his friends took him back to his sisters party and more drama ensued.

I think one thing I want to note is, when we discussed the movie afterwards, people made a lot of comments and good notes about why his father started to be more accepting of his decision to go to art school. Before, he was just mad at his dad, he didn’t care that his dad wanted him to go to UCLA to be a doctor, he wasn’t interested in why his father wanted that. During the party I think one of the important scenes was Bens dad and grandfather arguing, everyone could hear them, but Ben got his fathers perspective of why he wants Ben to do what he wants him to do, such as go to UCLA. Everything his dad had to go through, being an immigrant and just the life he had to live, he wants better for Ben. I think when Ben made that connection he was more willing to sort of open up and show him why he wants to go to art school. Not to be defiant but because it’s a passion not a hobby, but a skill I suppose?

We read the book Forgotten Country, a pretty emotional book. About a family who has had a lot of difficult times, the book, being told from Janies perspective, talks about her grandparents and what they experienced in Korea, with the Japanese occupation, how her grandmas mother had a baby during the occupation, she got caught, they took her away, killed her, gave the baby back, the baby died shortly after, talking about the curse of the family, how the family always loses a sister. How Janies mother had a sister, she went off to college, then was kidnapped by North Koreans and taken north, not knowing if she was alive or not, no way to look for her so they had to “kill her” to protect themselves. Then Janies sister disappears, they all feared the worst, that she was dead, turns out she wasn’t and she was actually just fine. Overall the book explored the lives of this family, going back a few generations, exploring all the way back to Janies great grandparents. Seeing how the experiences of Janies family were so traumatic that they directl
y impacted Janie, generations later. It was a really good book to read.

We also watched a video about a Korean American girl named Sam who was adopted. She posted some videos and was in a movie and basically someone discovered that she looked exactly like Sam, they got in touch and found out they were identical twins. They ended up meeting up getting a test and proving they were actually identical twins. They discovered how different their lives were growing up but they were really similar. It was a really intense story, the entire time they were waiting for the results of the DNA test, I could feel the anxiety, how positive they were that they were twins, but at the same time the tiny possibility that they weren’t, just waiting for however long it took to finally get the results. It was really exciting when they got the results saying they were in fact twins. There was a cliffhanger in the video though, they never get in touch during the video, it ends with them writing a letter to her, hopefully they do get in touch and maybe that will be another video.

When we read the paper “Accidental Asian” it was very interesting since I’ve never thought about the word Asian American and what it means. Reading this book gave me the perspective of how the term came to be used and what it might really mean, how a lot of people felt/feel about the term. It makes me think about not just Asian Americans but all terms that group people together. We discussed in class if that should even be an offensive thing, if it’s a necessity or if it’s a simplicity. Quite a few people seemed to think it was necessary for white people but didn’t really give any arguments for that or examples but I was curious, there were arguments against it though. Either way, the paper was interesting to me, gave me insight on what that term might mean to other people and how general it really is. It also made me realize that there are a lot of very general terms such as white, Caucasian, Hispanic etc. I don’t think you can really give a definitive answer to if these terms are for simplicity or necessity, I’m not even sure what is meant by it being a necessity? When I think of the word necessity I think of something that is required, or indispensable, how does that apply? I’m not sure.

I decided to read the optional paper What is Popular Culture because I always had a hard time describing or defining the term. I always kind of understood what it meant, and how to use it, but I could never give it a definition. After reading this, I have a better idea of how it became, and maybe some ways to formally describe it, but mostly what I got is that there are a lot of ways to define it. They even attempted to give it a scientific approach which was appealing to me, but there were flaws with the approach. At the end of the paper they concluded that between all the many ways pop culture can be defined, they all have one thing in common, culture only emerged after industrialization and urbanization. I guess according to their definitions this might be true, but I can’t help but feel like there has always been culture, maybe that’s the distinction, pop culture vs culture. One definition stuck out to me as the way I’ve always imagined it, folk culture, of the people for the people. Not to be imposed on people as other definitions describe it but almost derived by the people. Mass culture, an imposed and impoverished culture, described as an imported American culture.