Sarah's A-POP Blog

Unaccustomed Earth

• Page 4, Ruma’s father seems to have a very distant relationship with her. Is that because he’s only talking through postcards across large distances, or is it because of his grief?
• Page 7, Ruma seems to be struggling with her own grief on top of her responsibilities to her family. She feels like she’s obligated to take care of her father, even if he doesn’t necessarily need it, and it seems like it’s causing a bit of tension.
• Page 14, they apparently wear shoes in the house, which is interesting to me. Ruma says she’d gotten out of the habit of taking her shoes off when she comes in, but that’s not strictly an Asian custom since some people are more comfortable without shoes on inside.
• Page 20, it seems like the Pinocchio marionette’s strings being tangled might wind up being foreshadowing for something? Ruma’s father says that it had “a knot in the center that needed to be undone first.”

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Miss Lien:

• “The oldest of seven children, Lien was hardly ever alone.” (pg 4) Since it was already established that she was having a baby, obviously she did manage to be alone at some point. Was it because of someone taking advantage of her or because she was a “little slut” as the people on page 3 so rudely put it?
• “But Lien knew it wasn’t her mother’s age that worried them.” (pg 7) My first thought was that she had cheated on Lien’s father or something, and that was why they reacted strangely to the pregnancy. It wasn’t until they started talking about a war that I realized they were probably worried about safety.
• “The midwife spread her lips, revealing black-lacquered teeth. Lien realized she must have come from a family of wealth.” (pg 8) What is put on the teeth to make them black, and what makes that a sign of wealth? How did a custom like that come about?
• “I wasn’t sure about looking at my first either, knowing I had to give it up.” (pg 12) Are these girls being purposefully impregnated by men – possibly American soldiers? Or are they doing this themselves because they’re desperate and they don’t have any other ways to make money? Or is this place some sort of shelter for pregnant girls? I’m confused.

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A Temporary Marriage

• “Mrs. Shin thanked him, all the time wondering if he was as innocuous as he looked. …They needed photos to authenticate their engagement, then their marriage, to immigration.” (pg 2) Mrs. Shin is obviously extremely uncomfortable with being around Mr. Rhee, and exhibits all the same fears that women in the US have concerning strange men, so the marriage thing really surprised me. This really hits home the reality that people in Mrs. Shin’s situation are often really dependant on the goodwill of others, and the unknowns associated with coming to America can be terrifying. Intellectually I knew this already, but this helps make it much more apparent on a personal level.
• “They had done well enough until the recent recession, which had even lawyers watching their expense accounts.” (pg 4) This story seems like it’s set more recently than the other books we’ve read so far, which all seemed to almost make immigration and its related struggles a thing of the past as a result of being set decades ago. In this, immigration still seems to be a struggle financially at the very least.

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Dark Blue Suit

• “From places as different as San Francisco and Walla Walla they came to Seattle, just as they had for twenty or more earlier springs, laying down their dishrags and field knives – the tools of dead-end jobs – for a chance to go north and make Union scale.” (pg 4) What does making “Union scale” mean? Is that a slang term for money? It must be important if they were willing to come all the way from places like San Francisco to Seattle for it.
• “All Filipinos, all Communists, all part of the Union, or so the government said.” (pg 21) Why did the government equate Filipinos with Communism? Was there something going on with the Philippines at the time that would make them think that? Or was it just the government being racist and using any excuse to get rid of Unions and “foreigners”?
• “ “Government say they’re Communist. We get rid of ‘em, they get off our back.” … “They’re good men strong for the Union. Besides, who’s nex’ we do that? You? Me?” ” (pg 22) This is something that we’ve seen played out throughout the years, even currently. If the people in charge can get minorities to turn on each other, they’ll be easier to control because they won’t have support from each other to bolster their strength and numbers. It’s sad that this keeps happening.

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Railroad Standard Time

• “Words I’d never heard before set me at play in familiar scenes new to me, and ancient.” (pg 1) I thought this was a very powerful way to describe the experience of listening to his mother’s Chinese. Even though I’ve never had this kind of experience, the language used helps me understand what it might feel like to be confronted with something that you know is a large part of your family’s history and culture and be unable to understand it the way they do.
• “So this dance and groggy mumbling about the watch being no good, in strange English, like an Indian medicine man in a movie.” (pg 2) Why did she start acting funny when he asked her what her father’s name was? And what did that have to do with the watch being “no good”? She said something about her father’s name being “one of those Chinese names…” (pg 2), so was she thinking that the watch didn’t have value because her father was Chinese or something like that?

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The High-Heeled Shoes: A Memoir

• I had a hard time understanding what was going on at first when the narrator said she saw a man wearing high heels and was so disturbed about it, so I had to reread it to figure out that the man was completely naked and trying to get her to join him. This made a lot more sense, because I was wondering what it had to do with harassment and rape.
• On page 5, she describes all the things she wishes she had said to Tony during his perverted phone call and her analysis of how each response would have sounded. As someone with anxiety and who has been catcalled increasingly often in the past year and a half, this part was very relatable and very accurate to how it feels when you wish you spoke up and defended yourself properly rather than letting it “slide” just because it’s so awkward and startling.

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Dale Minami 

• Talks about how people “aren’t angry anymore’ about racism (in comparison to how things were in the 60s). (pg 11) He says that people today are more focused on empowerment and financial success. (pg 12)I agree that, especially in America, there is a big emphasis on empowerment of individuals and the collective community. However, judging by what I’ve seen and heard, I would argue that people are probably still angry, but are tired and disheartened by the fact that racism and other social issues are still happening after decades; even though America touts itself as this great place of freedom and individuality, there’s still a lot of stigma around being yourself rather than conforming to society, which includes appreciation of other cultures that is not from a pre-approved white male perspective.

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• “A 2004 campaign intended to attract Asian and Pacific Islander Americans to McDonald’s saw the launch of a website called “I-am-asian.com,” a phrase McDonald’s also claims to have trademarked as an intellectual property…” (Alien Encounters, pgs. 13-14)
  • This astounded me when I read it. Wouldn’t trademarking that phrase imply that only McDonald’s owned the right to state that you are Asian, so they could potentially sue people or television shows or whatever if they said it? (As in, claiming that a show used their “intellectual property” if a character said “I am Asian”.) Can they even do that? This article says that this happened in 2004, was there any backlash at the time? It doesn’t mention anything further about that.

• “…some Asian American cultural producers have had to confront the conflict between their “oppositional” practices, which attempt to break down discourses about their inherent exoticness, and the transmission of these practices in a market that capitalizes on those very ideas of otherness.” (Alien Encounters, pg. 15)
  • My understanding of this is that even if Asian Americans are making things that are trying to humanize and normalize Asians in American culture, they’re still participating in a system that fetishizes and dehumanizes them. Does this mean that the authors are saying that, in order to create change in a system, you have to become complicit in the system that you’re trying to change?

• “Asian American music critics… find themselves responding again and again to suggestions that Asian Americans don’t listen to or are not “able” (or “real” enough) to make indie rock, punk, or hip hop music.” (Alien Encounters, pg. 16)
  • This made me think about how important representation in media is, and how it normalizes things that might have seemed strange to people who would otherwise only be familiar with stereotypes. I grew up watching American Dragon: Jake Long, which was a Disney Channel cartoon in the early 2000’s. The main character, Jake Long, was a Chinese American who lives in New York. In the show, he was often portrayed as listening to a lot of hip hop and other music that tends to be associated more with African American culture than with Asian American culture, but because I grew up watching this show, it never occurred to me to think it was “strange” that he didn’t fit into a stereotype of an Asian person.

• “These new technologies emerged in tandem with what we alluded to earlier as a particularly Asian cybernetic imaginary. Beginning in the 1980s, the threatening specter of the mechanistic, and supposedly “soulless,” Japanese (on whom, of course, the “greatest” technological weapon of World War II was unleashed by the United States in the form of the atomic bomb) began to cast its shadow on American culture. Apparent admiration for “Japanese efficiency” slid easily, and quietly, into fears of a hyperrationalized, corporate empire of the rising sun.” (Alien Encounters, pg. 27)
  • Why were these fears developing in the 1980s as opposed to during or immediately after World War II, when we were at war with them? What was going on in the world at the time that could have caused or contributed to people fearing a corporate Japanese empire?