jessicahenwicks-deactivated2018
Culture clash
I am the product of a time of great cultural upheaval in the U.S. In many ways, my personality was impacted by American culture in disproportionate levels than most native born U.S. citizens because my course in life was forged by these following things.
I am the first generation of my family to be born and raised in the U.S
I was born in a time of social upheaval. In 1971, second wave feminists had already convinced young females that the way to success was achievement in education and the labor force. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was being implemented into legislation, and the 1965 Immigration Reform Act was increasing the Asian population exponentially (which still meant that I was generally one of the 2 Asian American kids in any endeavor that I participated in. Usually, the other kid was my little brother). To add another variable into this mix, the U.S.’s cultural response to the Vietnam war added another layer of instability to my childhood.
I was raised as the daughter of two conservative Christian traditional Taiwanese parents in a middle class, functional home. I grew into a woman whose belief system diametrically opposes my parents’ belief systems. In order to deal with the difficulties of being a child stuck in the nexus of culture and socialization, I learned how to explain and justify every emotion and action in multiple languages as well as in terms of the way I managed my own body.
As a good Taiwanese woman, I had internalized the idea that my worth was tied into the 3 obediences for Chinese women – to their father, to their husband, and to their son. My little brother was also male, so I tied my worth into his wellness.
As a good Christian, I had internalized the idea that I was unworthy of God’s love, and that next to God, the ultimate authority was my mother and father.
It was with this baggage and responsibility that I entered into my tumultuous teenage years. At that point, I was a highly sensitive introvert who was taught that any emotions that I felt, any response to external stimuli was a weakness. I was taught that I was a weak American spoiled crybaby. This message has stayed with me for my entire life. My central nervous system was wired during my teenage years to stop acknowledging the emotions evoked by external stimulus. Why is this relevant? Because if I had allowed myself to trust in my adult self, I would have probably been a much calmer person. Instead, I started slowly shutting down my body, including the biological instincts to emotion, over the course of 45 years. Rather than being weak, I had trained my body ignore itself while I rationalized every action I made.
Raised in a culture that acknowledges that health encompasses intellectual, emotional, and physical wellness when I was taught that health was only related to physical wellness had the following impact: At age 45, I had to review every formative experience in my life to see how my life would’ve developed had I been emotionally healthy. And, as a result, I had to reteach my body how to interpret external stimuli in a way that was healthy intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
I had slowly shut down any pleasure receptors to any physical stimulus: touch first, because in my parents’ culture, physical and verbal affection were nonexistent, then smell, then sound, and ultimately, taste. Sight was the last to go because, even though I have been almost legally blind for most of my life, reading and writing had become my lifeline.(
Before my PTSD break on Aug 12th, I was a highly disciplined overachiever who subconsciously believed that I wasn’t worthy of any of my accomplishments. I had chronic stress related illnesses for the last 27 years and had become so traumatized that I blamed myself for being overly sensitive and weak.
I am writing this because I was wrong. My entire life, I have been keeping a secret and protected myself from it in the only way I knew how. The secret was that if anyone knew who I really was, they would realize that I was unworthy of any love, respect, affection, and honor. This secret is a lie.
The truth is this: I am finally putting myself first for the first time in my adult life. It has taken me 3 weeks to get to the point where I am able to write this without anxiety – physical, intellectual, or emotional.
I’m going to be just fine.
(No wonder I am frustrated. It just took me an hour to write 3 pages!!! An hour!!! WTF???)
Farmer
The story goes like this:
1930s, Lukang 鹿港, Taiwan
A Japanese man is kneeling on the floor and pleading with the patriarch of the house. He says-- Please. Your son is bright. Let him continue to secondary school. In a bizarre twist of power, a teacher from the colonial power is begging a Taiwanese subject of the Emperor of Japan.
My great-grandfather tells the teacher no. My son will be a farmer. I am a farmer. He stays. The teacher leaves and my grandfather stays. He's a farmer.
It's World War II and the Japanese come and call out all of the young men in the region. They make them strip naked. They'll do. My grandfather is sent south and learns to be a soldier at an abandoned pineapple cannery. Japan is losing the war so he will be shipped out to an island in the South Pacific. Before that happens, the United States nukes Hiroshima. Instead of dying of seppuku in a hold out island far away, my grandfather hitchhikes home. 70 years ago; he's a farmer again. Maybe he could have been a doctor, an academic, an elite. 228 hits, the KMT comes down hard. With Martial Law, swatches of Taiwanese elites and academics are disappeared and executed. But grandpa is a farmer.
One day, the farmer runs away. He has children. No teacher has to beg him to send them to school. He sends them beyond that. He sends them to college. My mother is the first woman in her family to go to college, and she goes further, to graduate school across an ocean. She gets her Master's degree and starts her PhD and stops when she has me.
All this happened because my grandfather's Japanese teacher showed him there was something more than being a farmer. All this happened because my grandfather's teacher failed at his task all those years ago. So, I'm an American. I am supposed to be the first woman physician in my family.I don't end up cutting it. I can't even read Chinese--a language that my uneducated grandfather single handedly taught himself when he was my age. The story is supposed to be a parable.The moral being: Stay in school. Seize the opportunities your grandfather didn't get. All I can see right now is that it's 70 years after 228 and it's entirely possible that being a farmer may have saved my grandfather's life.
I think the category of “Asian-American” is a double-edged sword, or at least it has been for me when it comes to asserting my own identity. Like, yeah, before anyone gets mad, I know there are a ton of historical and practical reasons for there to be a pan-Asian Asian-American social justice movement. I’m just talking about for me, personally, it seems like the pressure to self-identify as “Asian-American” in order to be part of a general “Asian-American” movement out of solidarity is just another way in which I’m expected to downplay my Taiwanese identity for some sort of nebulous “greater good,” or to avoid offending other people. There are so many potential minefields to navigate if I make the decision to publicly identify as “Taiwanese-American,” and I don’t always have the energy for that. Better to just say you’re “Asian-American,” right?
Avoid saying you’re Taiwanese: White people won’t understand what that means anyway, they think all of us Asians are the same. They don’t know the difference between China and Taiwan (if they even know what Taiwan is), you’ll just confuse them.
Avoid saying you’re Taiwanese: Remember all those times, when someone has asked, “What are you?” and you’ve had to waste time explaining basic-level shit about how no, Taiwan isn’t Thailand, and no, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China aren’t the same thing, and well, yes, the dominant ethnic group that lives on the island of Taiwan who are called “Taiwanese” in English are descendants of Han Chinese, but no, that doesn’t mean that Taiwanese people are “Just basically Chinese then, right?” You’re tired of that, so it’s better to just call yourself “Asian-American” and be done with it.
Avoid saying you’re Taiwanese: Why bother calling yourself Taiwanese and potentially risk getting into an argument over whether Taiwanese people and Chinese people are the same, or whether Taiwan “should be” an independent country? Better to just call yourself “Asian-American” so you don’t offend any Chinese people, and the real conversations about real problems facing “the community” don’t get derailed with your irrelevant pet issues.
Avoid saying you’re Taiwanese: You wouldn’t want your Chinese-American friends thinking you’re one of those "snobby" Taiwanese-Americans, right? If you call yourself Taiwanese instead of Chinese, they might jump to the conclusion that you think being Chinese is something shameful or inferior, or that you’re self-hating, or that you’re a special snowflake, or that you’re trying to appease white people. (Really, it has nothing to do with them all, or thinking you’re somehow “better” or more “special” because you don’t call yourself “Chinese”; it’s simply because you ARE Taiwanese. But why risk pissing them off?) Just be “Asian-American” and avoid those tensions all together.
Avoid saying you’re Taiwanese: Because it’s not like that whole messy Taiwan situation really matters or anything beyond what it means for China, and it’s just a silly little minor issue for them anyway. If it’s not “Haha, oh, that wacky evil Chinese dictatorship, whatever will they do next?” then it’s “How dare you imply that China is an imperialist power, don’t you know that it is white Westerners who are the true imperialist hegemons? Why do you attack your Chinese brothers and aid the foreign devils in their malicious smear campaigns by complaining about China?" You’re either against China or for China. White American or Asian-American. If you are for Taiwanese independence it must be because you hate China, and you probably hate China because of the Orientalist Western media that’s brainwashed you (not because the People’s Republic of China’s neo-imperialist ambitions are an actual demonstrable threat to Taiwanese sovereignty or anything). Because it always begins with China, you know. They are the Middle Kingdom, after all. It’s not like you could possibly just care about Taiwan for the sake of caring about Taiwan.
Avoid saying you’re Taiwanese: No one you know, not your white friends, or your Chinese-American friends, hell, even most of your other Taiwanese-American friends, really knows anything about Taiwanese history at all. And the ones who do know, maybe, on an intellectual level, that there’s some political tension involved with choosing to assert a Taiwanese identity, probably can’t even begin to understand, on an emotional level, how utterly exhausting it is to have to constantly assert that you are Taiwanese when so few people believe that "Taiwanese” is a legitimate identity that actually exists, and that it’s not just some cutesy word meaning “basically a Chinese person.”
Maybe this is just me, and maybe I’m not giving people in the Asian-American political community/social justice sphere enough credit. But sometimes it can feel like the pressure for all Asian-Americans to work together as a united community can become just another means to brush aside any sort of potential uncomfortableness caused by declaring a Taiwanese identity. Because, you know, it might be potentially “divisive.” I mean, sure, all of us from different Asian ethnic groups may have our differences, but we can put them aside so we can fight the white man together! (But definitely don’t make a fuss over being “Taiwanese,” because solidarity with your Asian-American comrades is the most important thing. You wouldn’t want to make other people uncomfortable, would you?)
Eff that. It used to be that calling yourself Taiwanese could get you killed so now that it usually doesn’t, say it as much as you want.
You hear that sound? It’s the sound of Paramount executives slowly digging themselves further into a big, big hole.
Yesterday, we saw our first image of the decidedly non-Asian Scarlett Johansson playing the movie’s lead character, Major Motoko Kusanagi. This immediately sparked the latest round of backlash about whitewashing in Hollywood. But it gets worse.
Screencrush says Paramount commissioned screen tests for several of the movie’s non-Asian actors, to try using computer VFX to “shift [their] ethnicity,” in order to make them appear more Asian.
It’s alarming enough that it happened — but at least, according to Screencrush’s sources, the idea was promptly scrapped, upon seeing the results. In response, Paramount didn’t deny that the tests took place — but insisted that Johansson wasn’t involved with them. Instead, Paramount claimed these tests were just for a single background character:
A test was done related to a specific scene for a background actor which was ultimately discarded. Absolutely no visual effects tests were conducted on Scarlett’s character and we have no future plans to do so.
Either way, an idea as awful as this shouldn’t have been considered in the first place, when there’s a far easier alternative option that doesn’t involve CG face surgery: Cast some Asian actors in these roles instead. It’s so simple, it might just work.
…
…
…
WHAT?!
And the only reason they decided to stop was because it didn’t look right, not because IT WAS AN AWFUL, HORRIBLE IDEA?
So they can easily say it was done for a “background actor” and not Scar Jo because these make up tests are usually done on a stand in first.
espanolbot-deactivated20170903
The saga of the mysteriously white Ghost in the Shell movie continues, with Batou (the second protagonist in a lot of the franchise, even becoming the main one in the second animated movie) seemingly being cast as Danish actor Pilou Asbaek.
Hrrm.
Asbaek co-starred with Scarlet Johansson in the movie Lucy, which also had some infamous… issues with Asian people. Y’know if they weren’t going to bother to give a Japanese/East Asian actress the opportunity to star as the main character they could have at least tried to hire one to play Batou. Just saying.
Could have been worse, I guess. Could have hired Tom Cruise.
Additionally irritating as a theatrical play of Ghost in the Shell: Arise is coming out in Japan soon.
[image source]
Roland Emmerich: "You have to understand one thing: I didn’t make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people,” he said. “I kind of found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, [Danny] is a very easy in. Danny’s very straight-acting. He gets mistreated because of that. [Straight audiences] can feel for him.”
Chinese television broadcast Taiwan’s Golden Melody Awards live on Saturday, but blocked the Song of the Year award through a time delay. That award went to the band Fire EX for “Island’s Sunrise,” a song they produced for the sit-in at Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan last March. The three-week Sunflower Movement succeeded in halting a trade deal with China and invigorated youth political participation. Read on.
Godfrey Gao with some pups （*’∀’人）♥
moroccan-ninja
Goddamn marry me…pls
thafineness
Oh dear god no… WHO KEEPS GIVING HIM ANIMALS?!?! cornerstorepress adorableblerd suffer with me!
STOP DOING THIS TO ME!!!! You can’t be hot AND adorable! Choose a strength and stick to it! Have some damn mercy on us!
gabbysilang
fuck you, sir.
ugh how dare he be so adorable
thisiseverydayracism
Look, I get it, let’s all share cultures and whatever, blah blah etc. The phenomenon of cultural appropriation, however, is not that simple.
Imagine that you have been born into a culture whose people have historically been oppressed and discouraged from expressing themselves and practicing their traditions. Example: I’m Indian; When my parents were kids in India, they started learning English from primary school onwards, which is great, but they were not allowed to speak their own language at school (in our case, Bangla). They were not allowed to wear clothes from their own culture, but had to dress up in ridiculous starched up British school kid uniforms; they didn’t learn any of their own history in school but had to learn about the ‘accomplishments’ of the British Empire; they were forced to study the Bible but received no education on the religions native to their own country. They were made fun of by the white and Anglo-Indian kids if they brought Bengali food for lunch. Basically, they were forced to conform to British standards and were discouraged from expressing and celebrating their own culture and heritage. They were taught that Indians were inferior and primitive compared to the Brits.
Now, imagine that after growing up like this, pieces of the culture you were once shamed for started showing up among those who had once oppressed you (and in many ways still do). Imagine that all those things you held dear while the outside world tried to make you believe they were stupid, embarrassing, unsophisticated—imagine that all of a sudden these things were taken up by your tormentors (read: white people). Think of my parents, who left everything in India and came to the US when they were just 22; think of my parents packing away all their old clothes and buying these ugly American clothes with the small amount of money they had. Imagine them, so far from home, and still packing white bread sandwiches to bring to work. Imagine them giving up everything they loved, everything that was life to them, and having to wear and eat and read bland American culture. Imagine my poor mom seeing Madonna wear a bindi, but still knowing she can’t wear one at work because she’s disrespected enough there anyway.
Imagine shutting away your own vibrant culture and then seeing it paraded about by those that taught you to let go of it in the first place.
But don’t be fooled into thinking your culture is finally being celebrated. It’s not. It’s been taken out of any context and stripped of any real meaning. The trappings of your culture and your people and your rich history are now just a trend. Imagine that it’s now “cool” for those who oppressed you (white people) to take part in parts of your culture you were once condemned for. That’s a slap in the fucking face. And you will still be condemned for your culture. It’s not cool if you do it. To them, your culture is just something to be tried on and worn for a day, without the burden of the heavy history behind it. And it’s not cool to wear it every day, so we still have to conform to white society. Imagine how much that hurts. Imagine seeing parts of the heritage you love and respect being thrown around flippantly, and imagine still not being able to express your own culture. That’s cultural appropriation and it fucking hurts.
If mainland China can practice democracy in Hong Kong, or if mainland China itself can become more democratic, then we can shorten the psychological distance between people from the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan’s Chinese President Ma Ying-Jeou in an interview with the New York Times.
When I see Ma say things like this, the first question that comes to mind is “Why do we need to shorten the psychological distance between people in Taiwan and China?” I don’t think I would ever hear David Cameron say this of the UK and France, or Stephen Harper of relations between Canada and the US. Textually speaking then, this phrase is essentially a euphemism for ‘preparing the ground for Taiwan’s annexation into the PRC’. It belies Ma’s belief that politically and historically, Taiwan is a part of China and that Taiwanese are Chinese, but who are currently only divided from ‘the mainland’ by dint of differing political systems that have produced a different perspective (freedom vs authoritarianism). In this ROC fantasy of Taiwanese identity, if the PRC turned democratic tomorrow, the 70%+ of Taiwanese who don’t want their country to be annexed into the PRC would magically have a change of heart and beg to be ‘reunited’ with the ‘motherland’. Out of this construction, Ma has concluded that he is disconnected from mainstream opinion in Taiwan but that the PRC and CCP is disconnected from Greater Han identity. Ma’s pedantic adherence to an ideological imagining of ‘his nation’ has been a consistent theme of his Presidency.
(via lettersfromtaiwan)
I understand your rage about the Lucy film. I haven't seen it and don't plan to do so; obviously it's beyond racist. There is no defending it. The worst thing is how it gives people the totally wrong impression about Taiwan. The same thing happens to Mexico. When I say I want to visit my relatives in Mexico City, people are like, "Why go THERE? IT'S SO DANGEROUS!" Sure, some parts of Mexico are. Not Mexico City. But from films they think all of Mexico is full of cartel goons shooting at people.
Yeah, that’s one of the glaring issues with Lucy; that Luc Besson didn’t give two tin shits about even Googling Taiwan before making this crap movie. And the fact that there are people like that asshole whitefem reducing it to nothing more than a pretty backdrop is just utterly appalling. (I’m seriously wondering why they thought it was appropriate to be so blatantly racist in a discussion about why the racist issues were harmful.)
But then again, they don’t have to deal with the repercussions. They’re not like you and me, where we get asked about our ancestral homelands based on movies. They don’t have to field stereotypes. They don’t have to ever think about it, because they’re privileged in that aspect.
But, you know, to focus on the positive: I’ve had a follower approach me and thank me for letting her know about the racist issues in Lucy, and that she won’t support it. And moreover, I’ve seen more people reblogging the post with my rebuttal (and some that are even better, like tumblr user goobernatorial’s), so at least we have a great deal of support.
huffpostworld-blog-deactivated2
This gallant little boy comforted a classmate on her first day of preschool, and we’re not getting over it ever.
Hey, I was hoping you guys would check this out, maybe post about it. We’re trying to Kickstart this documentary-focusing on the whole experience of going back to Taiwan and trying to figure out your place/bicultural identity. We’re really excited to bring some attention to Taiwan, and to the experiences that we have as Taiwanese American women.
Much love to you guys, love what you do!
-SueAnn