医者 - Doctor

8:49 PM Unknown 2 Comments



We’re done with week 2 of Maus, and increasingly, I am of the opinion that we have been overanalyzing it.
“Why is Maus split into different panels, and not one large image, class?”
I think when Ms. Valentino asked that, I came close to rolling my eyes and muttering “because that’s how comics are” under my breath. On second thought, I think I might actually have done it.
Many of the things that we talked about, we started off with “well, I think Art meant this when he drew Maus this way,” and each time, I would think “NO! He just accidentally did it that way for no particular reason!” I was, and still am, absolutely certain that Art, or any author/artist/composer for that matter, didn't purposely place deep analysis provokers into his work – it just turned out that way, and we 11 AP students, hungry to take a nice participation grade back to our parents, grasped at every small unintentional detail we could get our hands on.
But then again, that’s why English is so interesting. That we can create something out of the nothing that was meant to be there – there’s magic in that, I think. Art claims that “reality is too complex for comics” (Maus II), and maybe that’s the case. Maybe we use comics, or just literature and art in general, as a coping mechanism. We have to dumb reality down, simplify it, before we can dig into it and try to analyze our own lives. Maybe English is actually secretly a branch of the medical field, dedicated to finding a cure to the as yet unnamed I-can’t-make-sense-of-the-world illness. English majors are actually doctors.
So maybe Art used Maus as a coping mechanism as well. He had “some kind of guilt” about not having lived through Auschwitz (Maus II), so he needed to relieve himself of that guilt by reliving it through his father’s memories. That would be all fine and dandy if he kept it to himself, but then he presumptuously decided that he needed to relieve the world of the same guilt, too, and immortalized Vladek’s memories into Maus for the whole world to suffer. Including 11 AP students.
And there I go, committing the exact crime I call absolutely ridiculous. I guess it’s necessary, the innate function of humankind to overanalyze simple things in order to simplify their complicated lives. Art was right; reality is too complex.
Art diagnising himself with his fancy doctor abilities in Maus II.

2 comments:

ホロコースト: Holocaust

10:11 PM Unknown 1 Comments


While reading Maus, one quote really me stop momentarily – “maybe they’ll need a newer, bigger Holocaust” (Maus II). 
Our unit on Maus arrived at a good time, as I can draw many connections to the Holocaust mentioned in the comic – as strange as that sounds. For one, it’s right after the summer I participated in Ride to Freedom, a project that raised awareness about China's persecution of Falun Gong through the form of a cross-country bike journey. For another, it landed right before my annual trip to California, in which thousands of Falun Gong practitioners from around the world flock together to combine their efforts in spreading word about the unjust persecution.

Falun Gong meditation
This whole summer, while participating in Ride to Freedom, I’ve said “there is a peaceful meditation practice called Falun Gong that has been brutally persecuted in China since 1999, and it needs to stop” at least a couple hundred times, if not more. But since I’ve returned home, I’ve said that important sentence far too few times. When people ask me what I did over the summer, I say, “Oh, just a cross-country bike ride” without revealing even a bit about my motivation behind it. When people ask me why I’m randomly skipping school to take a short trip to Los Angeles, I say, “Oh, just attending a conference” without even mentioning Falun Gong and the atrocities committed against it.

The Ride to Freedom team!
I am a Falun Gong practitioner, but I often wonder why I try so hard to hide this part of my identity. My friend Kristine has been basically worshipped since she broke news of participating in Ride to Freedom. Is it because I feel like my friends and teachers don’t really care? My friend Flora has been relentless about spreading the word to everyone she meets – her teachers, her neighbors, even the lady she sat next to on the flight home – and has been welcomed by them all. Is it because I feel like I will come off as too pushy? My friend Borong has alerted numerous government officials and potential sponsors about the sequel ride in 2016, and has gathered much support. Is it because I feel like my words will be pointless?
I think mostly it’s because I feel like I won’t be able to express myself clearly and fully. There’s really so much that needs to be known – the accurate characteristics of the practice, the severity of the sudden crackdown, the efforts that are being taken to end the persecution – I’m not sure if I will be able to say all that I need to say without becoming excessively verbose. I can identify with the Spiegelmans of both generations. With the elder, the fact that “it would take many books” (Maus I) to tell the entire scope of the persecution. With the younger, the fear of creating a false perception equivalent to “the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew” (Maus I) by not telling enough.
But whatever I have been and am doing, or rather, have not been and am not doing, about it, I have no doubts as to what I should be doing. This genocide of Falun Gong practitioners at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party is akin to the genocide of Jews at the hands of Hitler. It’s a second Holocaust; I must pull my weight in stopping it.

"Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust" (Maus II)
Resources:

1 comments:

話: Stories

10:41 PM Unknown 2 Comments
I was born into a Chinese household, and grew up with Chinese traditions and stories. When I began to read “White Tigers” of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, and learned that Kingston would relate to us the “chant of Fa Mu Lan,” (Kingston) I was thoroughly expecting to enjoy another great evocation of the “Ballad of Mulan” (which I never have and never will get tired of). So when the story started off with a girl being led into magical mountains by a bird, I was hopelessly confused, and remained that way for another ten pages. 
Eventually, I accepted that Kingston had taken liberties with Mulan’s story. But as I continued to read, I recognized more allusions to Chinese legends. There was the legend of the jade rabbit, in which a rabbit leapt into a pit of fire to feed a disguised deity. There was the story of Yue Fei, who allowed his mother to carve the words “serve your country loyally” onto his back before departing for war. There was the tragedy of Meng Jiangnu, whose husband was drafted to build the Great Wall (which Kingston accurately calls the “Long Wall” (Kingston) so props to her for that) and died, causing her to weep until her tears collapsed a section of the wall.
It’s quite evident that Kingston was also born into a Chinese household, and grew up with Chinese traditions and stories. What puzzled me was, why would she change them? Why would she combine them? People usually either follow the original story word for word, or make up a new story altogether. Before Kingston, I hadn’t ever come across people who took well-known legends and altered them.

Maxine Hong Kingston - looks like someone with lots of words.
But Kingston once “could not figure out what was [her] village” (Kingston). She could not figure out what she needed to save. After her version of Mulan’s story, Kingston continues to reveal to us her own life – which in comparison, seems pitiable. Maybe she was losing her identity – her Chinese identity. And to save that, she would need to make room for the “words… that do not fit on [her] skin” (Kingston 53), her past stories and present struggles — she needs to bend them, to change them, so they can fit.
Which makes me wonder – are there things in my past that I need to alter, so that they can fit into my future?

One of my all time favorite movies and adaptations of Mulan's story: Mulan from Disney
Seems like she had to deal with a good amount of words, too.

2 comments:

繭: Cocoon

7:19 PM Unknown 0 Comments
It seems that everybody, no matter where you go, tells you to “just be yourself!” That seems like some pretty decent advice, so you decide to just be yourself for once, and those same people who gave you that suggestion turn around and judge you for just being yourself. You don’t become “individual” or “unique” like they said you would; in fact, you’re treated as “weird” or “crazy.” Eventually, you learn to be wary of just being yourself. And you learn to be wary of others who are trying to just be themselves. You build yourself a cocoon, and hide in it. Ironically, society has made sure to fit you into the mold it tried so hard to push you out of.

We hide in our cocoons of safety.
 People still try to revive individualism. Some attempt to force people to “breathe after [their] own fashion[s]” (Henry David Thoreau); others try to reduce what has become the “natural, hard-wired default-setting” of judging and blaming others (David Foster Wallace). Yet the world is still the same way, with the people who encourage individuality being the same people who hide in their own shells and bite at anybody else who is different.
And to be very honest, I have no idea what the cause is. Maybe notions of class and status create such a rift between us that to be any different, widening that gap, would be too much to handle. Maybe some alien species has taken over the human consciousness, altering our actions to be different from our words. Maybe we’ve just been misleading ourselves, and don’t even actually want to be different.
Anyway, whatever the reason, it’ll be interesting to see how things play out. Maybe there’ll be no apparent change in my lifetime, or in my kids’, or grandkids’, or even great grandkids’. This idea of individualism could be considered something from a fairy tale, or a quality only superheroes possess – yes, there are a select few who are intrepid enough to stand out. But those who truly don’t mind what others think are few and far between. In that case, maybe our species will always be this way, striving to be different yet forcing ourselves not to. But then again, maybe we will be able to somehow break free of our cocoons.
Who knows, really? 

0 comments:

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
Powered by Blogger.