タイガー母: Tiger Mother

3:08 PM Unknown 0 Comments



Saying they wanted their daughter to follow her passions, the parents of 15-year-old Madeline Zhang* told reporters Wednesday (after they dropped her off at her robotics meeting) that they strongly encourage all of her interests that will lead to acceptance from an Ivy League university and high-paying career. “We want Madeline to pursue what makes her happy, whether that’s violin, piano, math, or medicine – as long as it’s something that looks good on her college resume and will be useful in her future – whatever her heart desires,” said Madeline’s mother, Yuhua Li, adding that she would gladly take her daughter to any necessary meetings or practices that happened to be located within a 10-minute drive. “Anything in the world that’s eight, maybe nine miles away that expands her horizons is definitely something we want to support, and when she turns 16 and can drive, then we can support anything that falls within a $100-a-month budget. And if it’s something that one of our friends does for a living and is willing to offer an internship, all the better.” The Zhangs admitted, however, that they were actively discouraging their daughter from a small handful of potentially useless extracurriculars, such as art, theater, and similar activities for which they’d have to constantly lend her money to support her in the future. When asked whether she accepts all of the decisions her parents have made for her, Madeline responded that “I have spent so much time in my activities that now I love doing them.” She was confident that even if she doesn’t start out enjoying her career in the future, as long as she can earn enough money to make her family proud and provide them with humble bragging rights to all the other Chinese parents at Lunar New Year parties, she will find that the more she immerses herself in her work, the more she will enjoy it.
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the family, who did not wish for their friends to see this article, but will nonetheless bring it up in conversation and hint that it is about them.

Note: this post is a parody of this Onion article: http://www.theonion.com/article/supportive-parents-encourage-childs-interests-anyt-52139


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色: Colors

10:44 PM Unknown 0 Comments


According to Price in “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History”, one half of the flamingo’s success was its bright pink hue. She lists a plethora of “electrochemical pastels” (line 33) of the 50’s in lines 34 to 36. As an artist, I could tell you exactly what kind of dingy olive green you would get from mixing cadmium yellow and ultramarine blue, but I am ashamed to admit that I couldn’t imagine half of the colors Price references (I blame the generation gap). So I need to get my act together and figure these colors out.

The lawn flamingo. It's only two defining qualities: it's pink, and it's a flamingo.

Tangerine: This is one I know, and I think everyone will know. The color of the citrus fruit that is so amazingly soothing to consume if you have a sore throat. Also, kind of reddish. Like a dark coral?
Rather photogenic tangerines -- but you get the idea.
Broiling magenta: Ah, magenta. The consensus color people default to when they get tired of debating whether Sarah’s shirt is pink or purple – we all know magenta. But broiling magenta? It sounds like a color used to add some more warmth on a cold winter day. My verdict: a darker magenta. Like the pink/purple version of maroon. Doesn’t sound particularly “pastel”-y (line 33) to me.
Livid pink: Livid reminds me of that one crazy aunt everybody has, the one who finds faults in everything and is convinced the world is ending – and angry, always angry. Interestingly, this word that’s used to describe pink has a dictionary definition of “a dark purplish color” (Merriam-Webster). A dark mixture of purple and pink… isn’t this just broiling magenta?
Incarnadine: This one loses me. A quick Google search shows me… a dark pinkish-red. I don’t know, I kind of imagined “forward-looking” colors to be brighter, but they’re all pretty dark. But no matter. Moving on.

A room designed with an incarnadine theme.
Fuchsia demure: Fuchsia, I know, is a pink. A fuchsia, I also know, is a redish, pinkish flower. And demure means modest and ladylike (which I didn’t know but the dictionary told me). Fuchsia demure obviously is a pink fit for a lady  but I thought these hues weren’t “old-fashioned” (line 37)?
Congo ruby: Ruby is a dark blood-red jewel. I’ll just end it here.

Rubies: the birthstone of those born in July.
Methyl green: Wow, a cold color in this lengthy list of warm pinks! And what a cold color indeed – methyl reminds me of my AP chemistry days, which could be considered the dark ages of my life thus far. Also, apparently methyl green is the name of an actual chemical compound. I must have forgotten that. In any case, Google Images shows me that this is the only remotely “pastel” color in the list.

Methyl green, presumably under a microscope.
Having done that research, I now feel slightly deceived. These mostly dark colors are not, by any stretch of the imagination, “electrochemical pastels,” “forward-looking,” or “sassy” (line 40). With an initial reading of the essay, I had the notion that America was obsessed with bright, joyful colors, but it wasn't, and that confuses me. But just because these rather dark, unsaturated colors were deemed "the hottest color[s] of the decade" (line 40), people suddenly found them to be the best thing ever. I do have to commend Price for her artful manipulation of these colors – it just further proves her point that American consumerism was (and is) absolutely ridiculous. 
I know of a friend who might be rejoicing after reading this post – maroon is her favorite color, and there is an overabundance of that here. I, however, am partial to brighter colors, and am now suffering from a saturation deficit. I’ll need to go find an essay about consumerism in the 70’s.  

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性別: Sex

9:33 AM Unknown 2 Comments


I’m an avid Ted Ed watcher. I can honestly say I sometimes spend hours at a time on YouTube, watching one Ted Ed video after another. It’s really a terrible addition. While I was reading Deborah Tannen’s “About Men”, her reference to Ralph Fasold’s biological gender studies reminded me of a Ted Ed video I had recently watched, called “Sex Determination: More Complicated Than You Thought”. I took it upon myself to watch it again (not reluctantly), noting the “markedness” of different species.

The sex of humans, as Tannen (and our freshman biology classes) tells us, is determined by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, making the male sex – the one with the Y chromosome – the “marked” sex. Birds, however, pass on Z and W chromosomes, with the presence of the W chromosome creating a female bird and the absence, a male. In this case, female birds are “modified” (Tannen 555) males.
The Ted Ed video also touches on whiptail lizards and their complete femininity, which Tannen also mentions. It’s true that “[t]here are no species… that produce only males” (Tannen 555). There are species, however, that produce offspring that are male unless otherwise indicated. For example, clownfish are all born male, with a lucky few becoming female later in life. So clownfish “default” (Tannen 555) to male.
In some species, males and females are both marked. The sex of painted turtles, for example, is determined only by temperature. If it reaches above a certain temperature, the eggs will all produce females. If it doesn’t reach that temperatures, the eggs will all produce males. Painted turtles, as the Ted Ed video tells us, are all “hot chicks or cool dudes.”

To prove their arguments, Deborah Tannen and Ralph Fasold focused on those species in which the male is the marked species – one of which is the human species, so it’s a strong argument. But there are so many other species in which neither (or both, however you want to see it) sex is marked, or in which the female sex is marked. 

2 comments:

お父さん: Dad

12:19 AM Unknown 1 Comments


This week, we read a lot of things about dads.
Which was interesting, because it gave me something to compare my relationship with my dad with. Of course, Brad Manning’s “physical relationship” (Manning 144) with his father and Sarah Vowell’s “[incapability] of having a conversation [with her father] that didn’t end in an argument” (Vowell 153) are not normal relationships; they even verge on being unhealthy. However, these things are defining characteristics of their relationships, and play a part in each author feeling “less challenged than loved” (Manning 148) by their respective fathers.  
The defining characteristic of my relationship with my father is its bipolarity. I often complain about the fact that my dad yells at every little thing: I’m not wearing socks, I dropped my pen, I don’t charge my phone the right way. At the beginning of the school year, we had a pretty long debate about my driving rights; I argued with rules of the state, yet he maintained that there are rules of the house. We can have some pretty heated arguments.
Sometimes I feel so overwhelmed with hatred for my father, and I often express my frustration vehemently to my friends, so I think they have a slightly distorted opinion of him. Because as much as I hate him for his constant harsh nagging, I love him for his easygoing, humorous nature. It seems kind of paradoxical that a man who is such a stickler for the position of my chair and the length of my hair also willingly gives me money with no questions asked and allows me to take care of my own education (neither privilege, of course, do I abuse). And we always laugh good-humoredly over his unintentional English blunders, and look at funny baby and/or cat photos on the Internet together, and compare heights (I’m starting to grow taller than him, which could make for some awkward family photos in the future).
Even though many times, in the heat of whichever argument decides to be our topic for the day, I find myself consumed with anger and frustration, under any normal circumstances, I’d think of my dad and smile. I guess all I can say is that the average of our experiences leans more towards the happy side, just as with Brad Manning and his father and Sarah Vowell with hers. 

Eleven-year-old me and dad. :)


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