Before the Germany trip —— academic & personal goals

   

       Actually I didn’t really feel like I was going to Germany until yesterday, which is already the last weekend before I leave the U.S. Maybe my experience in Switzerland before was telling me not to be devoted into this trip so soon--dreaming of a trip in Europe trip is romantic, but doing it is not so true; it could be exhausting, unexpected and disappointing, especially to the newcomers. Germany and I are both new to each other, but looking on the bright side, I’m not a completely a rookie. I spent almost one year in Europe when I was 16 years old, and I just finished my first year in the U.S. Experiencing a new culture is not so new to me anymore. However, culture is always a topic at length or in depth, and I’m still learning it. Apparently learning German culture is one of the most important tasks and also goals during this trip, including the German language of course.

         I picked up a little German when I was in Switzerland. When you’re learning a language, you’re actually already learning a culture. English is my second language, so I did not have the advantage of being familiar with German and English words. It was a really hard situation to be an Asian learning a complete different language who was surrounded by students who had learned some German during high school or who had mastered the same Latin language system. I felt like an Asian exchange student who was expected by her host families to learn this language (German) well. The catch-22 was that if you studied too much, some people think you are wasting your time in a foreign country; if you took it easy, someone think you are not here to study. Yes, that year was hard; I grew up from the innocent, with pain also great experience. But now I get it, I’m independent in this trip, I know what I will deal with and I’m going to be cool with it.        

        Learning language takes time, but we can learn faster and deeper if we live in that environment. We don’t need to struggle with it if we don’t need to be the master of this language; it is more a communication tool than a subject. We could stammer in a German conversation in order to make the local people understand while English is still the mainstream in the world, which means doing whatever it takes to communicate, possibly as a last resort using English to explain and make jokes about ourselves. I think it is ok even like this. We learn, we fail, we laugh and we learn.

        I have taken German 121 in spring semester; it was not hard for me because of my basic knowledge of German. But from now on, it will get harder and harder, and I will skip German 2 to German 3 in the fall semester, which means I have to make up the missing part by myself. So hopefully I can get enough in this trip to make my future study easier.

        For the culture part, I think everything will be much truer when we indeed experience it. All I know about Germany so far is just some shallow things; I want to know more about its secret beauty and also its dirty side. So I will go there, see it, listen to it, taste it, feel it and write about it.

       Those are pretty much my academic goals for this summer. Of course, I have more personal goals. I love classical music and I played piano for seven years mostly Bach and Mozart; before I came to the U.S., I almost did go to Poland for a music college. The reason I didn’t go there was music was too important to me and I was afraid to fail myself there. That was a bad excuse but I always believed if I had this fate with music, we would eventually meet each other someday. So as the origin of classical music, Germany is one of my dream places to visit. It’s not just about a music dream; it’s a place to allow me to think about my life and future, or maybe it’s a place to bear a dream. So I take it as a goal of searching goals.

        At the beginning of this essay, I said I was trying to avoid thinking about the coming adventure because it could be unexpected and unpleasant. But the truth is that’s also what I love about. I guess I’m a person who longs for great encounters and the so-called “miracles” which could bring my life to a higher level spiritually. Accidents are not good, especially those unexpected results we learn from movies, but I believe in the good in accidents just like I have some faiths in fate. It’s a trip of spiritual travel. Every trip is a spiritual travel.

       Finally, I think I’m trying to prove myself subconsciously by doing this trip. A long time ago, I couldn’t say I failed that journey, but I lost some part of myself in that beautiful land of Europe. I was daydreaming in my Swiss school, I walked down by Seine riverside like a frustrated poet, I was too scared or upset to be alone in Rome street, so I hid myself in the hostel for two days. I mean things just happened, I couldn’t control the past, but I can look forward to the coming. I just watched the classic romance and conversational movies Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, and I was especially touched by the latter one which was filmed in Paris. I felt sad about the nine years’ loss between the lovers, what passed is past. But I was also inspired from the message that we shouldn’t miss the beauty in life. This time I’m going to Switzerland and Paris again after the German study, going over the old ground, even I can’t get the old me back, I will become the new me. Starting from Germany, it’s a trip of finding myself.

      At the end, there’s no need to talk about the upcoming trip now, I will just wait, and I know it’s worth it.

German 529 assignment：what if I grew up in another country?

      The first time I heard the paper’s topic from my classmate, I was thinking about what if I was born in a western country--say Switzerland or America. Apparently, as a home-grown Chinese, there’s no big differences between Switzerland and the United State to me--they’re both western countries, they share the same European ancestry, they have similar culture, and they’re the only two foreign countries I know better than others.

      Then I had a second thought, according to what we have been studying from eastern Germany’s history, this topic is asking us to talk about the state systems. Yes, I’m from a communist state, the way I think about this question can be very different from the other American students. In our Chinese text book, there’re something we always keep in mind— “ We must integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete realities of China, blaze a path of our own and build a socialism with Chinese characteristics--that is the basic conclusion we have reached after reviewing our long history.” And yes, the communist state I was born in is unique in the world, it’s not the same thing as some western people think about predecessor of Russia—the Soviet. In consideration of my English skills and culture understandings, I think I didn’t get a lot from the book and the additional article precisely, but one thing for sure, I totally understand the writers’ feelings, the feeling of standing between socialism and capitalism.

       If I haven’t been living in both Switzerland and the U.S. for a year, I might feel offended after reading the book after the wall or anything related to this topic. But now, I’m “a middle person”. I think I like capitalism more—I would never say this in China, a country with one-party system. Politics is always so sensitive there, you don’t have free talk which will only get you trouble; what’s more, general Chinese people don’t care about politics or any of their rights because they can do nothing about it. I like capitalism, but I don’t think I can live in a capitalism state for lifelong time. I was born and brought up in socialism and a traditional Chinese family, though I don’t know this country’s system well, I may dislike it, but I was already influenced by it in every respect. I can’t get over it.

       Obviously, the stereotype of a socialism state is relatively poor, falling behind or unstable. But this is not completely true, China is a proof –it’s on a point of transition, it’s changing faster than people thought. But for the rest of my life, I don’t think China can develop into a brand new face and people like me can also belong to a “lost generation”. It’s difficult for us to value an exact view of society; it’s difficult for us at least for me to choose a side of the two society systems. Because we know how great it feels like to live in a capitalism state, but we still hold onto our own root, our own tradition-- it’s who we are and where we are from.

If I were born in the U.S., I think I can get more freedom--we could talk about politics if we want to and we can go for what we think is better for us. We don’t need to study everything so hard like a “study machine” in school, we can learn anything we’re interested in. We study because we want to make a difference not because we have to make a living. “Just can do everything you want”—that’s a very American way to say. And “American dream” is great.

        If I were born in the U.S., I think I will feel happier. But if it happened, I will feel very pity not to know the Chinese culture. China is a great country with so long history, we have our old doctrine, like Confucian Tradition or Taoist Philosophy and so on—they’re very old, but they’re the pith of the Chinese traditional philosophy— These are something a foreigner can hardly understand if they were not born on this land. I do have pains and struggling living in my home country, but I enjoyed and got used to and this pain; it feels great to understand, accept this culture and try to make it better, it’s something only Chinese who combine knowledge of both the east and west can understand.

      The relationship between East and West Germany before is similar to the thing between China mainland and Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, the society was still run by capitalism just like British, only in the name of Chinese-Hong Kong.

      In conclusion, I think we shouldn’t judge any state systems, because they were determined by a country’s history and national condition. What a nation or a social person should do is to learn from the history lessons, to learn from the good of outside countries and make their own social systems better and their own countries stronger.

Report on Return of the Yellow Peril

A Survey of the Work of Roger Shimomura, 1969-2004.

Shimomura was born in Seattle in 1939. His family experienced one of the harshest instances of racism against Asian American citizens when they were among the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were forced to give up most of their property and relocate to U.S. internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor .At that time, he, who was only 3 years old, spent two years with his family behind a barbed-wire fence at Camp Minidoka in south-central Idaho. Following the war, he completed school in Seattle and studied commercial design at the University of Washington, receiving a BA in 1961. He received an MFA in painting at Syracuse University in 1969 and started to teach in the University of Kansas until 1994, rising to become a University Distinguished Professor.

Shimomura has had over 100 solo and 200 group exhibitions in the US, Canada, and Japan and has lectured as a visiting artist at over 200 universities, art schools, and museums across the country. His experience as an Asian-American professor in Kansas led him to paint about culture, discrimination, and ethnic stereotypes.

Some people think Shimomura is “a prankster with a brush”. In my opinion, that’s quite true according to my first impression to this exhibition. The works are so vivid and colorful, they contain inviting American tableaus, and they also depict some of his childhood scenes which were actual and also fantastic in an art work.

People also say Shimomura is “a social commentator whose art represents a unique Japanese-American style and point of view”. By my primary impression, I would think these painting are not as pretty as Impressionist Paintings, not as lovely as Japanese comic. While after knowing some context of the exhibition, I think it is unique ,and the comment about Shimomura is much truer. I can easily see Shimomura’s effort to explore the relationships and contrasts between Japanese and American culture from his painting. For example, there’s a picture titled “Jap’s Jap” from the Stereotype series; in this work, Shimomura depicts himself as a Japanese-American Donald Duck, painting his self-portrait as a European-American counterpart, decked out with Scottish bagpipes, tam, and tartan. This picture is just so weird, funny (which is not amusing funny) but with a black humor, and attractive.

The Return of the Yellow Peril directly plays on the derogatory color metaphors for Asians—“Yellow peril” or “Yellow terror” that have been aimed Asian-Americans since the 1800s, which bought to our mind that the painter’s 2 years living behind a barbed-wire fence (as mention above); theses works mean a lot, not only to the painter, also to all of us.

 A person like me with a shallow thought on racism, politics and sociology may not profoundly tell the inside meaning in Shimomura’s painting, but from my one-year experience in Europe as an Asian exchange student when I was only 16 years old, I can deeply feel the emotion that Shimomura may have before that sometimes lonely, sometimes confused, and more often conflicted, about who we are, how we look on the “culture shock” or “culture identity” and  how we live among this by adapting to it.

In the present time, racial discrimination may be less than yesterday, but it’s not extinct, and there’re still biases somehow. I think what Shimomura had experienced, studied and created will definitely inspire a lot of people, to think about the issue of culture identity, discrimination, and ethnic stereotypes, and some of them will make a difference some day.

Report on Janice Radway’ lecture

“Zines Then and Now: 

What Are They? What Do You Do With Them? How Do They Work?”

Janice Radway, the Walter Dill Professor of Communication and professor of American studies and gender studies at Northwestern University, gave a lecture about social impact and literary role of zines on American society on Nov.17.

Prof. Radway first discussed the definition and scope of zines—“A zine (an abbreviation of the word fanzine, or magazine) is most commonly a small circulation, non-commercial publication of original or appropriated texts and images”—as she showed us the definition on Wikipedia and the sample of zines on slide show, she brought up the question “what else people can do with it but read it (like a book)”. Indeed, just like books , people engaged in zinging more than read them ,at the same time, they have their own subjectivity thinking, they are participating in different kind of activities and performances which connected with social relations and culture values.

In Prof. Radway’s investigation on girls’ zines , a lot of girls who engaged in zinging actively in 1990s have given up as they turned to their twenties or thirties at the turn of 21 century --the information era. While actually, zines moved on, too. So how do zines function over time?

Prof. Radway gave some examples of girls’ zines collections which are quite representative. She studied what girls’ zines are and how zines connected with girls and other zines from these cases. Here’re some conclusions by myself from here speech--zines are (mostly) made by girls, for girls; they are a way to depict how girls think ,write and respond to the society to express themselves; they have charms and they’re highly miscellaneous forms “displaying a wild mixture of handwriting and print”; they touch on sex, punk music, movie stars, diet & beauty, whatever may be hot conversation topics the next day in school among classmates, which is how they help to build up alliances, friendships and sisterhoods, they’re part of the social community; zines are always related to zines, you can often see one recommend another, just like the social network between people, they “re-circulate culture discourses” and “alter them by juxtaposing and combining them”.

As Professor Radway concluded, zines bring hopes to a different future and the social construction. And in this high-tech era, whether paper zines or e-zines, I believe, zines will never grow old, it will continue even in a new media and area, bearing girls’ dream , self-excitation, sweetness, or any characteristics that made it such a charming thing within modern media publishing.