Woman Warrior 3

Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoirs in The Woman Warrior are not the American ideal. As Americans we have been trained almost to believe that all the stories of immigrants or their children are going to be hopeful and heroic, of people overcoming hardships and leaving a hard life in their home country to come to America—the place they and all of their families and friends have been dreaming of since they were born. We don’t think of the difficulties they really go through when they come here. I’ve realized after going through the past few readings in class that I don’t really think about what immigrants are going through either.

Most of us think that anyone would be happy to be American, but we don't think about what it means to adapt to American life.

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We expect them to want to be here more than anything else, to pick up American culture and place it before their own the minute they arrive. We don’t think about the difficulties of adjusting to American culture and the American people, who would arguably be a hard, perhaps even arrogant, group to deal with if you stepped back and thought about it. I remember that when I finished this book in high school, I didn’t really see it as a memoir for Kingston and read it more as a testament to her cultural experience only. I failed to see that her cultural experiences were her experiences and that they colored everything that she did. In telling her story, Kingston needed to explain No-Name Woman and the background stories of her mother and aunt. We wouldn’t be able to understand her struggles in the final section as well without this information. The final chapter is the most personal and what I was expecting when I knew I’d be reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s “memoir,” but what I’ve come to realize after reading through the whole book is that this is just a sum of all her family’s experiences. She explains No-Name Woman to illustrate the difficulties girls in her culture can be faced with and then relates it in the last chapter to her difficulties being a girl in America. She describes her mother, a strong and headstrong woman, who comes to live a radically different life in the states then she had in China as a respected doctor. Finally, she describes Moon Orchid’s life to illustrate the disparate differences between American and Chinese marriages: Moon Orchid is eventually sent to a mental institution where she became “thinner each time,” Brave Orchid visited her, “shrunken to the bone.” (Kingston, 160) All of these experiences allow Kingston’s readers to understand her more completely and react more appropriately to her personal memories in the last chapter than if we had to read it immediately. Kingston is unafraid to show herself in a strange and very unflattering light in this book. She has difficulty as a schoolgirl trying to fit in and associates some of her difficulties with her culture. In class for example she attributes her silence to being Chinese and says, “The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl.” (Kingston, 166) She describes her need to confess her “sins” to her mother and brutally harasses the “silent girl” in her class, all experiences that anyone telling a memoir would be hesitant to describe.

I always feel strange putting up random people's pictures on my blog, but this shows how people's lives aren't lived in a vacuum but are shared with others.

http://www.hoagy.org/people/graphics/fam1.jpg

Kingston’s organizational structure in her memoir, as well as her honest writing style, allow her readers to more easily understand the immigrant experience and the experiences of those intimately connected to non-American cultures. We all profess to a culture other than just being “American,” but I for one don’t realize just how different my American experience is from others’. Kingston’s book describes the complications of an immigrant experience and just how much culture pervades our every action.

Maxine Hong Kingston.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithwj/2259310/

The first two chapters of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior illustrate just how little power and place women have in society. By providing both a historical and modern example, she shows that even though the treatment of women has improved, it is still not ideal and is deeply rooted in human behavior. In “No Name Woman” Kingston’s aunt, a woman who becomes pregnant out of wedlock and ills herself and her baby, is a graphic example of what happens to a woman who makes a mistake. When her aunt—who doesn’t even deserve to keep her name anymore, after death—proves to the other people in her society that she is no longer able to fulfill her gender script and serve as a faithful wife and mother, she literally has no place in society. Unable to tolerate the life people would give her after the shame she caused to her family, her aunt feels that she has no choice but to kill herself. Kingston’s mother buys into society’s treatment of this aunt and tells Kingston, “Don’t tell anyone you had an aunt.” (Kingston, 15) Similarly, Kingston provides a real-world example of women’s lesser place in society in the second chapter, “White Tigers.” The first half of the chapter is an example of a very strong woman, a woman warrior, who protects her family and exacts revenge. It gives the sense that Kingston’s life is going to be different than her no-name aunt if she has such a strong woman as a role model. Then Kingston brings it back to her real life and family which is less than empowering for women. Kingston says, “I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, ‘Girls are necessary too;’ I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession.” (Kingston, 52-53) Kingston has almost as less control over her treatment and fate as her aunt. Nevertheless, her family expects her to be perfect.
This paradox—of a worthless woman with high expectations—is an interesting one and one which I find difficult to understand or at least to understand its origins. The article “Girls Need to Be Perfect” further explains this fact, even though it is less about discrimination and more about the unfair expectations placed on women. Children are already expected to do more than I think should be required of them: The bar for achievement keeps being raised for each generation [...]: ''Our children start where we finished.'' But it seems as if women have the added task of living past the reputation they’ve had for millennia of being incapable of performing as well as men. The high-performing girls discussed in the article reminded me so much of the girls in my high school: we all worked from the moment we got up ‘til the late hour we were finally able to go to sleep, and squeezed in as many extracurriculars as we could. Generally, girls at the girls school did much, much more than the boys at our brother schools, but it wasn’t a point of pride for the girls as much as just something we did—and it may even be something we were made fun of on top of that. In this way, perfectionism is both an expectation and a “disease” for women. I’d be interested in class to talk about how other girls think about their personal expectations.

http://www.onemag.org/teach_all.gif

Girls are expected to do it all.

Georgetown Readings 2

The themes from this DB’s readings are vast and when listed out, almost seemingly disconnected. Although each author discussed issues of race, culture, and sexuality in great detail, other issues seemed to drive them: acceptance by society and friends and most prominently parent-child relationships greatly influenced each of these men’s lives and the struggles with either their race or sexuality. I want to go through each of their stories individually (sort of like what Lauren did, I think) to address how culture, sexuality and family dynamics impacted their lives individually. By writing down their stories shamelessly, each of these authors have provided a glimpse into the lives of those many of us (myself included) would not be able to comprehend fully. I, for one, was shocked by how Johnny Lee’s parents responded to his homosexuality and was also introduced to the delicate problems of being multiracial that I had never thought of before.
Anthony R. Luckett, Multihued
Anthony’s story is all about boundaries. He mentions the way people see him as “Korean” by describing the “38 parallels I’ve seen folks draw on me...” and reveals his “Black” categorization by talking about “treading the Mason-Dixon poverty line” “alone.” (Luckett, 861) Luckett’s story was a sad one in that he never had a solid family or group. He writes that “now Jazz is my mother and Hip Hop my sample of what daddies be like.” (Luckett, 861) Luckett struggles with accepting and embracing his multiracial background because I’m sure he wanted so badly to belong to something but felt that he was never able to. A particularly illuminating example he gives is when he describes how ashamed and confused he felt when his mother was speaking to him in Korean on the subway. Although his mother meant it as an affectionate action, he could only imagine his fellow passengers questioning why a boy who was obviously not fully Korean could be spoken to in that language. Luckett’s story is an example of what it means to be multiracial, obviously, and the challenges that involves, but it is also more than that. His struggle to reconcile his constant abandonment culminated in an understanding that his mother was actually doing whatever she could to save him, but not before the issues he had with his parents spilled over into his relationships with members of the opposite sex. In attempting to embrace some sort of cultural identity, Luckett initially failed to do either justice. His mother taught him that he needed to handle his cultural expression differently when she told him “You don’t always have to wear your culture out like that” (Luckett, 866) in response to his cornrows. I thought Luckett’s piece was beautifully well-written and very insightful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTVvmT2bioo

This video is about the two sets of twins who were born black and white. The related videos on YouTube surprised me because they were for other "defects" or "abnormalities" like "animals without heads" as if the thought of a family so obviously of mixed race was so unnatural.


Johnny Lee, No Such Thing...

Johnny Lee’s first sentence is a deep insight into how culture affected his life. “The church is an integral part of being Korean, at least in my family,” he says. (Lee, 869) Johnny’s experience with his Korean culture is at once global—with his parents following Korean customs and practices very diligently—and personal in that much of Johnny’s experience is shaped by his parent’s and family’s personal opinions. As stated above, I was incredibly surprised by the extent to which Johnny’s parents rejected his homosexuality. Even Johnny says, “it is very easy, as an outside observer, to react with amazement and anger at what my parents have done.” (Lee, 879) I’m not totally naïve and understand that people wholeheartedly denounce homosexuality or believe that it can be “cured” by doctors or therapists, but it was still very much a shock. I was impressed by Johnny’s strength in keeping true to himself in the face of so much discrimination but also impressed (no that isn’t the right word...saddened) by the force of that discrimination and how much it can cause people to fracture their relationships, even the relationships within their own family.

I was surprised to the extent some people let hatred rule their lives.
http://glothelegend.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/protestors-anti-gay.jpg

Vincent Ng, Farewell My Tung-Tew

Vincent’s reading reminded me a lot of our class discussion on Cholly from The Bluest Eye because he tried so hard to understand what made his father the man he was. Vincent obviously has issues with his father and went so far as to have negative feelings about his culture because of it: “to me,” he says, “the notion of being Chinese encompassed everything bad about living with my father.” (Ng, 883) Vincent doesn’t stop there, however, and explains that his father is merely a product of his upbringing, growing up with a physically abusive father. Vincent also talks about how his views of his culture affected his sexuality. He talks about how “being a Honger meant having no confidence, interpersonal skills, or leadership abilities.” (Ng, 883) Eventually, Ng is able to overcome his difficulties though a liberal acceptance or approaching new ideas or experiences as they are with as little discrimination as he can muster.

http://www.understandthetimes.org/inthenews/109_ec.shtml

Vincent used the theater to help understand his issues in the same way that he tried to understand his father.

Culture

I always used to get jealous whenever somebody I knew had to speak to their parents in another language because I wanted so badly to have this “other” culture outside of being “just an American.” To this day I hold fiercely onto any fragments of my heritage, however small they may be. I will complain loudly about how much I hate pierogis and sauerkraut, traditional German food—even though we maybe have them only twice a year. I try to sing along with the Polish side on my family every time they sing “Happy Birthday” in Polish, but I hardly know the words. I pretend like I feel at home in Frankenmuth, Michigan, a somewhat campy German town we visit every year or so; I will tell you backwards and forwards the story of my dad’s relatives getting locked in a barn by Nazis when they went back home to visit family, and I feel attached to that Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen for no reason other than the fact that it’s Danish. (It is in Copenhagen, right? I’m not even sure...) But other than these little teensy examples, I don’t feel like I have much of a culture, and I’ve always regretted that.

This is about as close to my Danish roots as I get.

http://www.orangesmile.com/destinations/copenhagen/img/little-mermaid.jpg

Most of my family came to America in the nineteen-teens (if that’s even an expression). My dad’s grandparents, who spoke only German, settled in Brooklyn with two of their children, and my grandfather came shortly afterward. I have always loved thinking about them living there and imagining my grandfather growing up in such an incredibly diverse environment. My dad doesn’t really say much about his family’s culture. His mother was one of thirteen so he has stories of enormous family get-togethers, certainly, but nothing much about culture. He’s said before that he can remember his grandfather sitting in his armchair and barking at him, half in German to give him his newspaper. He was mainly afraid of him, and he says he can never remember his dad speaking to either of his parents in German. It seems like, at that point, everybody was just hurriedly trying to become Americans and leave their former cultures in the dust of barbeques, baseball and the Fourth of July. I know even less about my mother’s family’s immigration story. All I hear about is that her big Polish-Catholic family seemed to have all appeared out of thin air to settle into the same Dearborn, Michigan neighborhood. My grandmother spoke Polish fluently but never was able to teach it to my mom. My mom said that she was afraid of being called a “dirty Polack” by some of her classmates and tended to pretend that she wasn’t Polish at all. The main theme, I suppose, of my family’s cultural history is “just forget about it.” I’ve always wished that that wasn’t the case.

This is probably what my grandfather's neighborhood looked like. I just wish I knew about his family's history during and before this time.

http://www.laguardiawagnerarchive.lagcc.cuny.edu/PhotosVirtualExhibit/Photos/02.003.19542.jpg

Reading through the three stories of children of immigrant parents, I realized just how much different cultures can affect the American experience. All three people expressed a sentiment that I didn’t agree with entirely, or perhaps didn’t understand well at all: the idea that they didn’t fit in anywhere, that like Miguel Ramirez said, “I will always be an outsider.” (Anthology, 843) What about the descriptions of their vibrant and strong families? Didn’t they exist completely within them, maybe just being a little different as American citizens? Why would Norma Andrade’s relationship change with her family about which she says, “No space, however small could confine the life and energy of mi familia” (Anthology, 846) just because she is an American citizen? It seemed like the more each of these authors attempted to assimilate themselves into either their family’s and their country’s culture, the more different they felt. I respect that, and I can understand it to a certain extent, but it still confuses me. When Alessandro Melendez, explores the Latino community and black fraternity of Dartmouth he writes, “my worst fear came true: I was not part of any [...] group and never will be.” (Anthology, 858) But what about the community of his family, of the friendship between he and Ben or the strong bond he had with his brother? This may come across as insensitive when I don’t mean it, and I’m having a difficult time wording myself, but I don’t see the benefit in expressing these feelings so futilely and without any apparent pride in their unique position. I think these people could have also lovingly embraced the fact that they are different, fortunate enough to have parents with such a rich culture who left it behind to better themselves and their children, and are able to incorporate the cultures of so many into their lives. As far as experiencing diversity in college, I have loved getting the opportunity to meet people of such different backgrounds, cultures, and lifestyles.

Morrison 3

Wow. The end of that book. After reading it, I needed some answers and was pleased by Morrison’s honest and surprisingly thorough analysis of her own work. I needed to know why Morrison could blind a “poor little girl” (Morrison, 190) like Pecola Breelove and leave her insane, friendless, fatherless—childless, even—talking to (what I assume was) herself for the rest of her days. I needed to know who did it to her. Was it her own perverted desires? Was it what society told her? Was it Soaphead, her town or her father? Was I or people “like me” to blame? Morrison didn’t answer any of these questions, but she wasn’t supposed to. By carefully constructing a story in the “language worthy of [her] culture,” (Morrison, 216) Morrison is able to open our eyes, blue eyes or not, to a world many of us don’t understand.

Pecola's pride at having blue eyes at the end of The Bluest Eye is one of the more horrific passages.

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One strategy I was impressed by was Morrison’s ability to write her story in such a disjointed yet complete way. (Maybe, like what Soaphead said in his letter, not a complete story, but a complete story.) She presented characters, allowed us to judge them and then completely changed our minds. Cholly, for example, went from a wife-beating, alcoholic and inept father to a laughing, irresistible young man and back again. He transforms into just a young boy who is then “’rape[d]’ by the whitemen [sic]” (Morrison, 215), becomes a man who commits an unspeakable crime but is eulogized in a sense as the only one who loved Pecola enough, “enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her.” (Morrison, 204) What are we supposed to do with that? Morrison’s writing style has the beautiful and at times frustrating effect of forcing its readers to figure out what we want or need to think about what we’ve just read. In the way she’s structured the time in her narrative, she can start a passage “so it was on a Saturday afternoon, in the thin light of spring” (Morrison, 161) and have her audience tense at the anticipation of a scene they’ve wanted to avoid for the entirety of the novel, Pecola’s rape scene. And, echoing this sentence, she can sum up the entire depressing, hopeless conclusion of that young girl’s fate with another “So it was,” (Morrison, 204) and the sense that Pecola’s story is only one sad (albeit extreme) story of many. So, although Morrison writes that it was music alone that could have expressed Cholly’s freedom as a young, runaway, she shows just how much writing can say. That in Cholly’s case, for example, not “only a musician” but a writer “would sense, know, without even knowing that he knew, that Cholly was free.” (Morrison, 159) Morrison’s writing is lyrical, at times musical, “speakerly, aural, colloquial,” (Morrison, 215) but above all it is powerful. Morrison’s writing as “the disclosure of secrets, secrets ‘we’ shared and those withheld from us by ourselves and by the world outside...” (Morrison, 212)—writing she wasn’t even fully satisfied with as she mentions throughout her afterword—had the ability to share an entire town and its hardships and encourage all those who read it to think not only about what they were doing but to look at the “stories” of their lives from all angles.

How different would The Bluest Eye have been if we were only given the perspective of one person? As disjointed and unclear as this picture of this one man?

http://solo1y.com/postsatire/post901.jpg

I couldn’t read The Bluest Eye without thinking about its impact on the world and all those who read it. I couldn’t forget the “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature” on its cover and my impression of Morrison as a highly contemplative, calculative and soulful writer. But what about the impact of other books or writings? What about those pieces that never get published or even read by anyone but the author? A good example is Soaphead’s letter to God, which is presumably a reflexive letter written in actuality to a man highly discomforted by his present state and feelings. Soaphead’s letter is therapeutic: it explained his past and current situation—he even says “it is necessary that I identify myself to you clearly” (Morrison, 177); it revealed his and his family’s failings; and it granted him the opportunity to explain something that no one would ever listen to, not “the newspapers” or the “people [who] whispered.” (Morrison, 181) His letter ends with him feeling proud of his accomplishments, however misguided and twisted they may be. And although many people would say that Soaphead doesn’t deserve this strange redemption, his writing was able to give him that. In this way, writing is something which helps us to bare our own souls, air our own problems, reveal things about ourselves that even we didn’t know. I think this is what is most important and what both Morrison’s and “Soaphead’s” writings come to: the ability of writing to say something you could never just say. It’s the mindset you get in when you sit down and read, ready to be changed by what you’re reading or the way you feel when you get ready to really write anything and everything that you’re thinking. Writing is an honesty that comes out of deep thinking mixed with spontaneity and a desire to show what you really mean. I’m glad Morrison was able to show me the world and ideas of The Bluest Eye so beautifully.

Post Secret is kind of like Soaphead's therapeutic writing practice. People anonymously write anything they're thinking and send them in for people to read. In this way, they can write things they'd never say to anyone else. (I don't agree with this one, but I thought it was kind of funny for our class!)

http://solo1y.com/postsatire/post901.jpg

The Bluest Eye 2

First of all, I’ve really enjoyed reading The Bluest Eye—as much as one can enjoy a story like this, anyway. Toni Morrison’s voice and writing style is incredible and expressive. She has this way of capturing emotions and details that would escape even the people living the experience. I’ve never had much difficulty visualizing a book playing in the back of my head while I’m reading, but the vision Morrison brings up is more complete than most. There were a few phrases I wrote down among my notes while I was reading through this most recent section, not because they were particularly relevant to our topic but because the way they were crafted was so...beautiful or right that I didn’t want to forget. Like this one—“But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.” (Morrison, 74)—about Pecola after she’s been teased by the group of boys surrounding her “like a necklace of semiprecious stones.” (Morrison, 65) Every page or section of Morrison’s book has something to it, and I’ve enjoyed (that word again) being swept away both by her writing and her story. Enough about my writing crush on Toni Morrison.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awsan0a9JDc


Toni Morrison talking about some of the problems she faced as a female writer


I think it’s her writing more than anything that brings her understanding of racism and judgment into focus. To be honest I wasn’t excited to read The Bluest Eye in the first place because it was a book about race. Race again. For the most part, I feel like I’ve heard it all before and understand. I heard all about it in school. I read about every young adult book on the Holocaust that Barnes and Noble carried when I was younger. I didn’t want to read the same old things again and again. I’m exaggerating a little bit, but I really wasn’t too happy to pick up The Bluest Eye a week ago. Morrison has such a thorough eye for detail, however, that she is able to bring so many issues to the forefront at once in ways that I hadn’t thought of before. From a deeper understanding of the character’s backgrounds and the by knowing the details of their daily lives, we may begin to have a better understanding of what it truly means to be the “minority,” where sometimes even your own race doesn’t want to be associated with you and lives with a self hatred. Like Professor Bump wrote in his essay, “Morrison did not want Pecola to be pitied...” but causes us to feel “compassionate grief” for her character, (Bump 331) an arguably more “complete” feeling of empathy for Pecola’s plight. In the next paragraph I’m going to try to outline just a few of the ways Morrison presents racism and judgment in such a complete context.

Writing as a medium of explanation and understanding

The most astounding example of racism that Morrison describes in The Bluest Eye is what I guess would be described self-racism, “us v. us”. The black boys taunting Pecola in a circle because she’s black too. Geraldine, the picture-perfect housewife who seems to be trying to remove her association with her race, and only allowed her son junior to play with “white kids.” (Morrison, 87) Her obvious discrimination against the people like Pecola, girls who knew “nothing of girdles,” who “broke things in dime stores,” and “hovered” “like flies.” (Morrison, 92) The complete disgust she held for these people, the people she was trying so hard to separate herself from, was completely evident in Morrison’s rant on page 92—people whose “grass wouldn’t grow where they lived.” (Morrison, 92) It’s ironic, then, and powerful that her son was so terrible to Pecola, killing his mother’s cat and blaming it on her. When Geraldine tells Pecola, “you nasty little black bitch,” to “get out of [her] house,” (Morrison, 92) would her world have been shattered knowing that it was actually her son’s fault...or does she already know? In addition to self-racism and in the vein of the unfair stereotype that Geraldine holds for the disadvantaged members of her community, Morrison gives us a glimpse into why the people of Lorain came to be as they are. After reading the terrible fight between Mr. and Mrs. Breedlove, we are given Pauline Breedlove’s life story—how she loved Cholly and cared for her family before forming her own, why she and Cholly began to fight. So much of judging is not understanding and deciding that it’s far easier to dislike someone because they “just are” that way. Mrs. Breedlove shows the differences that can arise in even (somewhat) friendly interactions when she recounts her experiences with her employer. When her employer asked her a question and Mrs. Breedlove replied, Pauline says, “She just sucked her teeth a little and made out like what I said was dumb. All the while I was thinking how dumb she was.” (Morrison, 119) In addition to focusing on explaining the differences among people, Morrison explicitly gives instances of how people respond to these instances, the classic “us and them” dichotomy. In the first reading, we read about the man behind the candy counter who was clearly judging the girls, and in this section we meet the “yellow-haired” girl who stops, slightly terrified when she sees Pecola, Claudia and Frieda in her house. Finally, Morrison gives examples of a type of judging that goes beyond and works in addition to race and shows how ready people are to judge. Claudia and Frieda “looked hard for flaws” in Maureen Peal because she was so respected by her teachers and peers and at first had to settle with “uglying up her name.” (Morrison, 63) Additionally, Mrs. Breedlove drastically changes her opinion of herself, love and her life after receiving “her education in the movies” (Morrison, 122) and learning about physical beauty. Morrison clearly has a deep understanding of race and does an excellent job giving a description of how it is treated in the lives of these people of Lorain.

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, the people Mrs. Breedlove watched in the movies and hwho determined her sense of beauty.