"Jase You Like It"

            Dr. Kulbaga has encouraged us to have fun with our last blog post of the class. I’m putting a lot of weight on that in order to validate this ridiculous post I’m about to make. A lot of you guys have, at one point, successfully rewritten part of a story from a different character’s perspective, or from a completely original point of view and those have been some of my favorite posts. There’s something super creative and informative about analyzing text from a fresh angle. However, I’m not really that good at creative writing, so I haven’t attempted that kind of approach. Since this is the last post, though, I figure it’s time to throw in my lot with these types of posts and try to create a new look for Jasmine – particularly as if it were a play written by Shakespeare.

            One of the other classes I’m taking this semester is a Shakespeare class, and I’m learning a lot about him for the first time. Yes, I’ve learned that he is one of (in a lot of people’s opinions the most) prolific writer of the Western world, but I think that kind of adds to the ridiculousness of trying to emulate him. As I’m sure a lot of you already know, the reverse (adapting Shakespeare’s works into different settings) has been incredibly common: Taming of the Shrew becomes the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, Othello becomes O, there’s even the argument that The Lion King is, at some level, a retelling of Hamlet. His writing can stand up to this cyclical bastardizing, which is why I have no problem butchering it! (My favorite Shakespeare adaptation, by the way, is the Akira Kurosawa film Throne of Blood which retells Macbeth. It’s awesome.)

            Jasmine lends itself to Shakespeare tradition in several ways. A woman with several suitors, as well as marriage itself, is an incredibly common device in Shakespeare’s plays --Jasmine’s different personas could be similar to the copious amounts of disguises present in any of his comedies. Yet there are (obviously) fundamental differences in the writing of Bharati Mukherjee versus Shakespeare. Mukherjee is writing the story of an incredibly powerful female character, something that Shakespeare has come under criticism for not doing enough of. I think all of this mostly unnecessary background information is a way for me to stall from actually rewriting the scene, so I should probably get to it. I’m focusing on Chapter 23, when Jasmine starts living with Taylor, Wylie and Duff. Mostly because I think Taylor and Duff are hilarious.

“Jase You Like It” (Sorry)

I.1 Enter Taylor, Wylie, Duff

DUFF:             How now, father? Of what character is this lady soon to come?
TAYLOR:        Why, that of th’ most virtue. I do hope, a paragon of chastity
            And virtue, tis she. Yea, as well a song to thine own eyes, perchance,
             A shape toiled over by th’ Gods. [aside] But I shall hide thy thoughts lest
            Wylie better determine them.
WYLIE:            Fie, fie, Master Hayes, are you not ashamed?
            Tarry not with thy father, Duff. He plays The Fool as sure
            The sun wakes and the moon doth lay’th all to slumber.
DUFF:             Ay, he doth so.
WYLIE:          Thine keeper is exactly that and no more.
            With haste, daughter, prepare the tea and biscuits. She soon comes.
DUFF:             Of course,
[exeunt DUFF]
[enter JASMINE and KATE]

TAYLOR:       (to Jasmine and Kate) By gar, I pray thee, enter! Enter!
WYLIE:          How now, Jasmine?
JASMINE:      Master Hayes, Mistress Hayes, I am humble in thy presence.
TAYLOR:       (looking at Jasmine) And may you be in our presence evermore!
WYLIE:          Truly, Master Taylor. Tis the composure of a knave unbecoming as such.
[enter DUFF with tea and biscuits]

DUFF:             (looking at Jasmine) Ay! A keeper so exotic!
            Do pray tell, what is thy name?
            Care thee for tea?
            From where afar thou came
            For simply to watch o’er me?
TAYLOR:       (to Duff) Control thy self, daughter! For shame, this display
            Of what fate did meet your manners? 

(Wow, trying to write like Shakespeare takes FOREVER. I already have to go to work. I'll add more later!)

"-- stories that began, 'Once on a time'"

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of what goes on in Nora Ojka Keller’s “Beccah (from Comfort Woman)” is hard to fully comprehend. True, it’s not difficult to get the gist of things: Beccah has a complicated relationship with her mother, Akiko; Akiko has a complicated history with Beccah’s father; and spirits of the dead have a complicated interaction with Akiko. These are some pretty heavy elements for only 9 pages of story. That in mind, I think a good strategy is to pick out a few details and squeeze every last drop of meaning out of them, so to better understand the rest of what’s going on. My choices are from the end of page 195 and the beginning of page 196 when Beccah says: “Then the spirits – Saja the Death Messenger and Induk the Birth Grandmother – descended upon her, fighting over her loyalty and consciousness” (Keller, 195-196). It seems logical to me that if these two spirits are the driving force behind her mother’s actions, through researching them we might be able to better understand just what the hell is going on with her. 


Click on the "Read More" link below to see how these two size up!

"A smile could go a long ways [...] And we were all ears"

Going into the readings this week, I put a lot of focus on Mitsuye Yamada’s “Camp Notes and Other Writings.” I don’t know why, but I immediately assumed that I’d write about it. I even (in a very rare moment) decided to pre-write for the post and conduct some small research beyond the handout while I was reading it. I was, by all reason, going to write a post about Yamada and try to make some smart, serious comments on her gender and poetry – but then I read Lawson Inada’s “Legends From Camp” and decided that seriousness is way overrated!

Inada’s ability to take the completely tragic experience of Japanese internment camps and process them into creative, articulate and hilarious poetry is so damn cool. I think that sometimes it is easier to overdramatize tragedies out of a sense of respect to their gravity, but humor can be just as effective an approach. In “Camp” (is that a poem?) he writes, “…to simply know the facts is not always satisfactory. There’s more to life than that.” (3) – yeah, like laughter! As he says a couple of lines later, he is writing about “Aspects of humanity” (3) and, in doing so, proves that there is inescapable humor in the peculiarities of people and the occupants of internment camps are no exception.

I love the “Legends” framing structure under which Inada writes his poetry. In no particular order, I thought that I’d pick out a few to look at in-depth.

“IV. The Legend of the Lost Boy” kind of has it all: poignancy, growth and humor. It starts with a boy who had lost everything: “The road was taken away. / The dog was taken away. / The food was taken away. / The house was taken away.”(10) and most of all, his name. In fact, we learn that initially, “The Lost Boy” nickname is a misnomer: “The boy was taken away-- / but he was not lost. / Oh, no – he knew exactly where he was –“(10) Indeed, he was well aware of his surroundings, bleak as they were, and found his own happiness in chasing the trucks full of water. Until eventually, this same activity brings sadness when the dust from a truck disorients him. A jovial old man leads him back to his mother, who lovingly accepts her “lost boy.”

This story stands out to me for the ways that it redefines things, starting with my assumption that residents of an internment camp would only ever feel helplessly lost. This is not the case with “The Lost Boy” who, despite unfamiliar surroundings, still carries the confidence of knowing his surroundings. Despite all of the prejudice rampant at the time, he is still living with certain people (his mother, the old man) who find him even when he feels lost, implying that community is the source of his confidence and not his physical surroundings.

The other redefinition lies directly within his name. He was not always known as “The Lost Boy” and I think, symbolically, this is a nickname brought on by internment that strips him of his identity – going so far as to contradict it entirely. I think that it is also symbolic how, throughout the course of the poem, this nickname goes from pejorative to endearing. They characters involved had the power to take something negative put upon him and transform it into a source of laughter and hospitality.

Okay, well apparently I grossly overestimated my ability to be concise, so I will wrap this up. But I already drew goofy pictures of “The Bad Boy” “The Good Girl” and Amaterasu, so I will at least upload those later. Another part of poetry that I envy is its conciseness!

"But it was Rico's show, and he was its dark star."

Cookie in Peter Bacho’s “Rico” is an interesting character, if only because he’s a reputedly desirable man named “Cookie.” Really? Come on. If I’m being honest, my curiosity lies primarily at how his parents justified the name “Cookie,” and if it was a nickname, how did it actually stick? However, speculation on that wouldn’t make for a very thorough blog post, so maybe it’s more important to look at what he contributed to the story.

I think it’s important to look at how Rico felt about other ethnicities to understand how Cookie may have affected his life. The reader learns pretty early on where certain races stand with Rico (as implied by Buddy). He definitely looks up to the black members of his community. Buddy says that Rico loved the “sweating black angels” (19) playing in the band at the community dances. The narrator makes this seem like a view held by many Filipinos, “Filipinos always hired black bands […] the horns made it raw and powerful, something white bands could never do” (19) and whether or not that is true, we can safely assume that Rico would agree.

Not as much praise is given to the white girls present in the story. While Rico specifically flirts/sleeps with them in the story, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of respect evident. They are considered “easier to impress” (18) and noted as sometimes “trying to pass for something else” (19) when they danced. Girls in general aren’t seen as much more than a conquest to Rico, as we can see when he talks about Vietnamese girls later in the story (24).

It took me a little bit to understand who/what “the bloods” were (first seen on page 18, third paragraph), and while it’s somewhat ambiguous throughout the first couple of pages, I think Rico spells it out later. This same moment helps expand on how Rico feels about white girls when he says, “Devil bitches, but I love ‘em. Most bloods don’t mess with ‘em now, ‘ceptin Sammy Davis.” (23) Assuming this is a reference to Sammy Davis Jr. and his white wife May Britt, we can probably infer that “bloods” are a name for black people in the story. (Interesting fact: interracial marriage in the U.S. was finally ruled unconstitutional in 1967, the same year Buddy is looking back to)

All of this in mind, it’s easier to begin seeing how Cookie influenced Rico. Cookie was a black man had long been embracing his promiscuous lifestyle, “He didn’t care whether the girls were black, white, yellow, whatever – a fact attested to by his multicolored progeny” (25) and was always on the run due to the fact. He was eventually drafted into the Vietnam War where he died. The fact that he was black is important – one of the reasons Rico feels like the Marines are his only option is because he isn’t black “Got no school. Got no job. Ain’t colored, so I ain’t got no black power let-your-hair-grow-out-don’t-conk-it shit. […] What we got?’ Rico asked angrily, referring to Filipinos in general and himself in particular.” (23) Unhappy with his own situation, it’s as if Rico is following in Cookie’s footsteps – having encounters with as many girls as possible, leaving Seattle behind and eventually going to Vietnam. I think part of Buddy’s hesitation can be understood through the comparison between the two. He must, in some way, feel like he’s been through this before. Losing a friend is never easy, but THAT’S THE WAY THE COOKIE CRUMBLES – okay I’m done with this blog post, I can’t talk about Cookie that seriously.

"Our backs were to the wind."

I think it is pretty safe to say that there is a lot going on in Shawn Wong’s “Homebase”. Somewhere underneath pages of shifting perspectives and extended metaphors lies the narrative of a guy trying to figure things out. Well, several guys, really. I’ll throw in my lot with them as yet another guy trying to figure something out, and that something is wind!

What is “wind”? Seriously. How does it work? Please comment and expla- no, just kidding. I know what wind is, (Thanks Wikipedia) but Wong is starting to make me think that it means more than usual. One of the things I noticed while reading through “Homebase” is how often certain elements are repeated. Wind, moisture and heat all come back again and again and each with their own unique impact. I’ll focus on wind in this post.

Wind comes into play as early as page 6, when Rainsford Chan is relating the story of his father’s mountain-climbing.

“… he tried to climb […] but was defeated by the wind rushing down the mountain face. My father said the wind was always the conqueror, not the cold, or the snow, or the heat, but the wind that makes you deaf, numbs your touch, and pushes blood into your eyes.” (6)

This establishes the characteristic of wind throughout most of the novel as an obstacle. Beyond that, as an unstoppable force that dulls the senses, specifically sight, hearing and touch. It is recognized repeatedly in each of the three main storylines (Rainsford, Father and Great-Grandfather) and even its absence is acknowledged in comparatively positive sections. An example is five pages later when Great-Grandfather is walking “in the windless night” (11) and proceeds to feel refreshed by the waterfall.

Wind’s violent (another commonly repeated word!) nature isn’t gone for long though. Still within the first chapter, Great-Grandfather and the other Chinese workers expand upon what we’ve already learned from Father: “… the one element they feared most was the wind. […] Hearing goes first, […] they wrap cloth around their ears. But the wind never lets up. […] their eyes are swollen from the blood pushed into the aching veins of their sight.” (16) One difference is that we can begin to see how they protect themselves from the wind by covering their ears with cloth. He even describes how they talk or sing to themselves just to hear something other than wind.

Rainsford encounters the wind himself in the second chapter while he is driving: “I am too busy for fear, checking oil, rpms, engine heat, speed at a glance, hands and arms working at the wheel, correcting for wind gusts.” (29) At the risk of over-quoting, I think this passage explains a lot. This is the third time we see wind’s adverse relationship to sight (“The straight road, at last, that familiar white blur”), hearing (“No sound now except for the building whine of my engine,”) and feeling (“… my knees go weak, no blood there”.)

I swear, “wind” has to be one of the most frequently used words in the novel! What’s so maddening is how many different ways it can be linked to larger themes. In one way, it is a physical feeling that links several generations of Rainsford’s family – wind is constant and unchanging throughout each era. In its very nature, it has the impression of traveling from one man to the next. In another way, it is present during what is arguably the most challenging times of each man’s life; Great-Grandfather builds the railroad against it, Father climbs a mountain against it and Rainsford searches for his place in the world against it. Another way still, wind carries legends: “There is a whole nation there and the legend says that the ocean was my father’s lover. Her spirit rides into the canyon at night like the sound of wind,” (94).

There are so many interpretations. I don’t even know. What do you guys think? What is “wind”? Seriously. How does it work?

"And sure enough, train wreck."

First thing's first: did anyone actually dig a foxhole when they were three years-old? I had never heard of anyone doing that, but it is hilarious. When I was three years-old, I barely had the patience to wait my turn at a slide, let alone dig a foxhole and lay in ambush for my mother to come by. Would I have even been able to pick up a shovel? Needless to say, Sophie is a very unique girl – but I guess that’s the point, isn’t it?

“Sophie is wild,” says the grandmother/narrator of Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish?” (176). She is certainly that. Along with “wild,” she is also “difficult,” “creative,” “a problem,” “not afraid,” “stubborn,” “brown,” (177-184) and unlike any other girl in China. This is quite a list for someone who has only been around for three years! It’s important to notice, though, that she hasn’t described herself in any of these ways. She is something different to everyone around her, but I think that most of the descriptors can be boiled down into two categories: “Different” and “Unique.”

Both share roughly the same meaning, but it’s the connotation that matters. This is how the story can relate to the overall theme of Asian Americans – most of the time it is a matter of perspective. Jin Wang and the Monkey King from Gene Yang’s “American Born Chinese” both went through phases in which they saw themselves (and were seen as) “different,” in a negative way. Only after a transformative experience did they realize that they were “unique” in ways that they can be proud of. Gish Jen’s short story, “Who’s Irish?” puts a spin on this by placing the reader in an outside perspective. Sophie is in the same place the Monkey King was, but we are now looking through the eyes of the other Chinese gods.

That in mind, it’s interesting to see how complicated the situation can become. The narrator (Sophie’s grandmother) is prejudiced against Sophie not because she is unlike other Americans, but because she is unlike other Chinese girls. “Nothing the matter with Sophie’s outside, that’s the truth” she says, “It is inside that she is not like any Chinese girl I ever see,” (180). Unlike Jin and the Monkey King, Sophie’s outward appearance is not her primary obstacle (though it is discussed). The grandmother sees the true conflict within, “… there is more trouble with Sophie […] I think I can help her Chinese side fight against her wild side” (182). The grandmother wants to be the one who transforms Sophie. Almost all of her family has some wish to change her in one way or another, be it through making her less rambunctious, more familiar or less “brown.” It is as if they don’t know how to handle Sophie otherwise. This leads me to think that a lot of prejudice against a person who is foreign in some way stems from the problem of being unsure of how to interact with them. Jin’s classmates didn’t know how to properly interact with someone who was foreign to them, so they resorted to insults. Sophie’s distinctiveness causes a lot of debate on how she should be treated – should she be “normalized,” and if so, in what way? It is a nearly impossible decision to make for someone else.

A character like Sophie is hard to describe succinctly. She is hard to describe for people around her and, eventually, may struggle to describe herself. Allow me to offer up a suggestion. I read about a lot of things that Sophie “is,” but how did people overlook “good foxhole digger”? Seriously. She dug a hole so deep that you couldn’t see her. She even fell asleep down there! “Who’s Irish”? More like, “Who’s Amazing with a Shovel at Age Three?”

Gene Yang

Here is a short interview with Gene Yang on Youtube that is pretty interesting. It has scenes from the graphic novel that weren't in the handout, as well as some of the cheesiest editing effects ever put into a video. Ever.