Sordid
–adjective
1. morally ignoble or base; vile: sordid methods.
2. meanly selfish, self-seeking, or mercenary.
3. dirty or filthy.
Archive for July, 2011
What brings you personal joy & fulfillment, and how are you incorporating this into your daily lifestyle?
Poise
–noun
1. a state of balance or equilibrium, as from equality or equal distribution of weight; equipoise.
2. a dignified, self-confident manner or bearing; composure; self-possession: to show poise in company.
3. steadiness; stability: intellectual poise.
This is a riveting piece about life, crime, hate, love, compassion and humanity. It is worth the read! (Taken from TheRumpus.net)
By Roxane Gay · July 26th, 2011 ·
Every day, terrible things happen in the world. Every damn day too many people die or suffer for reasons that defy comprehension. A bomb goes off in a market and thirty men, women, and children are killed. A man walks into a birthday party and kills his ex-wife and all her siblings in front of their child before he kills himself. The water in an African country disappears leaving people starving and thirsty. An epidemic of a disease long-cured by modern medicine sweeps, relentlessly, through an island nation already ravaged by natural disasters. A woman is raped by police officers and those officers are acquitted and she now has to live with the knowledge that she is not safe, not even from law enforcement. A large retailer goes bankrupt putting 10,000 people out of work. Two wars continue to rage unceasingly. And. And. And. And. Every day, terrible things happen in the world. It is overwhelming to try and make sense of any of it, to know how to feel about any of it, to be able to articulate those feelings, to express compassion when there is such a gaping, desperate need for it.
In Norway, in Oslo, in the city where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, on a Friday afternoon, a thirty-two year-old man triggered a bomb at the government headquarters, killing seven people. On the small island of Utoya that same man killed seventy-six people, most of them teenagers. Children hid behind rocks and fled into the water and pretended to be dead so they might have a chance to survive, to live a day beyond the unbearable day they were living. There is fear and there is fear. The scale of the tragedy is incomprehensible. The tragedy, like most tragedies, tests the limits of language. There is now a before and after. That’s what the news tells us. There are pictures of the building, decimated, the architecture’s broken skeleton revealed, the dust and debris, the wounded, the dead, the mourning, the mourned, candles melting, wilting flowers wrapped in clear plastic, handwritten signs trying to properly express the depths of a grief that, perhaps, cannot be expressed.
All too often, suffering exists in a realm beyond vocabulary so we navigate that realm awkwardly, fumbling for the right words, hoping we can somehow approximate an understanding of matters that should never have to be understood by anyone in any place in the world.
The man who committed these crimes has blond hair and blue eyes. These details are shared repeatedly in a litany of disbelief. Too many people expected the perpetrator of this crime to have brown skin and a Qu’ran because we need to believe that heinous crimes have only one face, that there is only one brand of extremism—that of the Other. This is the world we now live in. We wield accusations without reflection or humanity. We forget compassion. We pretend we are somehow different from those we otherwise condemn.
The man with blond hair and blue eyes has a Wikipedia page now. A compendium of knowledge is being compiled about Anders Behring Breivik. We know his beliefs and his taste in music and what his parents do for a living. We know he has an exhaustive manifesto he worked on for nine years, some of which he took directly from the Unabomber. We have seen him posing with a big gun, wearing a wetsuit. We have seen his face—his wide, open face, the youth in his features. We know he is extreme in his beliefs and that there must be hatred in his heart. We know he is crazy. He must hate. He must be crazy. We need to believe he is hateful and crazy because it is unfathomable to believe a man of sound mind and body could or would perpetrate such a crime.
Crime is a weak word, a weak, weak word. Those five letters cannot accurately convey what is, more accurately, an atrocity. Even that word does not suffice. The tragedy exceeds our vernacular in so many ways.
The king of Norway said, “I remain convinced that the belief in freedom is stronger than fear. I remain convinced in the belief of an open Norwegian democracy and society. I remain convinced in the belief in our ability to live freely and safely in our own country.” Tragedy. Call. Compassion. Response. He chose grace. He found a better vocabulary with which to respond amidst a suffering that defies vocabulary.
We all have the capacity to do hurtful things but we differ from one another in terms of scale—how much we can hurt others, how far we will go to make a statement about our beliefs, how remorseful we might feel in the aftermath of committing a terrible act. Most of us, if we are lucky, will only commit petty hurtful acts, the kinds of hurt that can be forgiven. The man who committed this atrocity in Norway has a capacity to hurt few of us will ever understand. He turned himself in. He confessed to his crimes. He wants to explain himself. I don’t know what that means but surely it means something. It has to mean something. I wonder if he was scared before he took so many lives, before he created such unprecedented destruction. I wonder how he became the kind of man who could shoot children at point blank range, who could be so careless with human lives. I wonder if he is sickened by what he did. I wonder how he feels knowing he lives in a country where he will likely not be sentenced to life in prison, knowing that even in the face of what he did, he will not be put to death. I wonder if he is grateful, if he is humbled, if he is staggered by the humanity of his people. Tragedy. Call. Humility. Response?
Oz was an HBO series about a maximum-security prison. Very bad things happened in Oz but the show was endlessly watchable—the shameless depictions of violence, often sexual in nature, Christopher Meloni, the sense that we were gaining an understanding of what it is like to live in a cage, seeing the very blurred lines between prison minders and the imprisoned. I am very much against the death penalty, have been for many years. I did not realize how passionately I felt about the death penalty until I watched an episode of Oz where a prisoner was scheduled to be executed. Oz was just a television show, but as this man was led to the execution chamber, as his head was shaved, as he was strapped into the chair, scared and confused, I started crying. I felt so silly for crying, so very silly, but I wasn’t crying for a character on a television show. I was crying for the men and women who have been executed for their crimes, for the men and women languishing on death row, for a society that has no idea how to punish atrocious crimes without taking a human life. On Friday night, my on again off again boyfriend called from many states away. He is politically conservative though I’d like to think I’ve worn him down on certain matters. He asked, “Have you seen the news?” He asked, “Do you still believe the death penalty is wrong?” Tragedy. Call. Dial tone. Response.
We know much of what there is to know about Anders Behring Breivik. We know very little about his victims, who they were, what they wanted for their lives, how they loved and were loved, who they loved, how and by whom they will be mourned, what they felt in their last moments, if they suffered. We only know seventy-six people were killed in one day by one man. Their killer is alive. There is a great deal of cruelty in this state of affairs.
I’m not a saint. I will not shed a tear for Anders Behring Breivik but I do not wish him dead. I will try to think of him with the compassion he was unable to offer the seventy-six people he murdered. I will likely fail in this. Still, I do not wish him dead. I do not believe his death is an appropriate punishment. I do not believe there is such a thing as an appropriate punishment for what that man did.
This is the modern age. When tragedies occur, we take to Twitter and Facebook and blogs to share our thoughts and feelings. We do this maybe, just maybe, to know we are not alone in our confusion or grief or sorrow or to believe we have a voice in what happens in the world.
We take to these tools of the modern age and there are those among us who, in the wake of tragedy, point fingers or proselytize or use humor as a means of distancing themselves from the emotional discomfort of knowing we are rarely as safe as we hope to be. We are rarely safe from knowing that every day terrible things happen everywhere. Tragedy. Call. Twitter. Response. Others use this time to take a political stance, to speculate as to why blond-haired, blue-eyed men aren’t now being profiled in airports around the world. There is almost a certain glee in these kinds of statements. At a time like this, tragedy is used for political posturing. Righteousness gets in the way of what is right. Righteousness gets in the way of valid observations that might be better shared more carefully, more thoughtfully, under different circumstances. The tools of the modern age afford us many privileges but they also cost us the privilege of time and space and distance to properly think through tragedy, to take a deep breath, to feel, to care. Tragedy. Call. Heart. Response. Tragedy. Call. Mind. Response.
There is a girl who was a woman but really, she was a girl. She was a girl because she was only twenty-seven, only lived a third of a life. She had a voice like fine whiskey and cigarettes or at least what I imagine fine whiskey and cigarettes might sound like. She had a voice that made me think of dark, secret nightclubs where you need to know a guy to gain admittance, where musicians gather closely on a small stage and play their instruments for hours in a haze of sweat and cologne, booze and smoke, while a singer, this girl woman singer, stands at the microphone giving those gathered the exceptional gift of her voice.
The year her second album came out was the year of the Halloween dedicated to this girl woman. Everywhere I looked, women and some men wore their hair (or a wig) long and black with a bouffant on top and they lined their eyes blackly with that distinctive angle at the corner of each eye and they drew tattoos on their bare arms and sang the chorus of her most popular song. They tried to make me go to rehab. Call. I said No, No, No. Response. That’s why we care. She was in our lives and our ears and our heads and our hair.
The girl woman singer died in her flat, alone in her bed. Too many people said, “It was to be expected,” because we knew this girl who was a woman but really she was a girl. We knew she had problems and she did not have the luxury the rest of us do to handle our problems privately, with dignity. She was a mess. So what? We are all stinking messes, every last one of us, or we once were messes and found our way out or we are trying to find our way out of a mess, scratching, reaching. We knew she had demons that were bigger than her, demons she tried to fight or she didn’t, we can’t possibly know. Her struggles were documented and parodied, celebrated and ridiculed. Celebrity. Call. Gossip. Response. We have seen the pictures of this girl woman in the street, barefoot, in the street, her midriff bare and swollen, in the street, her makeup smeared, her unforgettable hair, stringy, pasted to her pale face, her body being carried from her home in a red body bag. There was no privacy for her, not even in death. That is a tragedy too.
I love her music and listen to it regularly. I always hoped she might survive herself, hoped she would give her adoring fans more of her voice, hoping she would give herself the blessing of a long life. I heard she died from my best friend who sent me a text message and we commiserated about what a shame it was for a girl woman to die at the age of twenty-seven. It is a different kind of devastating to think about the life she will never know, about those gifts that come with more years of living than the girl singer was afforded. I do not wonder about the cause of her death. The how of her demise isn’t my business. And yet. When I first heard of her death, I wondered if she died alone. I wondered if she was scared. There is fear and there is fear. Now, I wonder if she knew real happiness in her short life. I wonder if she felt loved or knew peace. She was someone’s daughter. She was someone’s sister. We know her father found out while he was on a plane. He did not have any kind of privacy to make sense of surviving his child. The death of a child is unbearable and suffocating and now, two parents have to try and cope with something the human heart is ill equipped to withstand. Tragedy. Call. Broken heart. Response.
This is the modern age. When tragedies occur, we take to Twitter and Facebook and blogs to share our thoughts and feelings. We do this maybe, just maybe, to know we are not alone in our confusion or grief or sorrow or to believe we have a voice in what happens in the world.
I followed many conversations about what happened in Norway on Friday and the death of Amy Winehouse on Saturday. Too many of those conversations tried to conflate the two events, tried to create some kind of hierarchy of tragedy, grief, call, response. There was so much judgment, so much interrogation of grief—how dare we mourn a singer, an entertainer, a girl woman who struggled with addiction as if the life of an addict is somehow less worthy a life, as if we are not entitled to mourn unless the tragedy happens to the right kind of people. How dare we mourn a singer when across an ocean, seventy-six people are dead? We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly. Life is a mess.
Death is a tragedy whether it is the death of one girl woman in London or seventy-six men, women, and children in Norway. We know this but perhaps it needs to be said over and over again so we do not forget.
I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.
Tragedy. Call. Great. Small. Compassion. Response. Compassion. Response.
The following article was taken from the LA Times:
Nguyen Cao Ky was named the premier of South Vietnam in 1965, at age 34. (Associated Press / December 31, 1969) |
Nguyen Cao Ky, known for ruthlessly defending democracy, outraged many of his fans in recent years by rubbing shoulders with communist officials in Vietnam.
By Corina Knoll, Los Angeles TimesJuly 24, 2011
It was an about-face that outraged a generation displaced by war.
Nguyen Cao Ky, the former South Vietnam leader known for ruthlessly defending democracy, was suddenly, at 73, rubbing shoulders with communist officials — something that seemed unthinkable to those who had fled the country during the painful days after the Vietnam War.
Vietnamese Americans who had rallied around him felt betrayed, and Ky’s once-revered stature in the small Orange County community the refugees had adopted was sullied.
Nearly seven years later, sentiments toward Ky among the fiercely anti-communist residents of Little Saigon haven’t diminished. But his death Saturday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, may have marked a changing of the tide.
“From a political standpoint, he represented parts of the Vietnam War at its height. With his passing, that era goes with him as well,” said Van Tran, who fled Vietnam as a child and later became the first Vietnamese American to serve in the California legislature.
“Many leaders of the South Vietnamese government have passed on, and it’s basically the wheel of time turning — that page of history is turning to another generation.”
Among others, though, the wounds of war are still raw and Ky continues to be seen as a traitor.
“The overwhelming thought in the community was he was a traitor and most Vietnamese did not trust him,” said political activist Ky Ngo, 58, who lives in Garden Grove. “Anyone can go back to the homeland, that’s fine, but when you go and openly support the communist movement and criticize the former South Vietnam’s government, you lose respect.”
Ngo said he was sorry to hear about Ky’s passing but said it meant little to a community that has denied him for so long.
Others couldn’t help but feel sympathetic toward the former leader-turned-pariah.
“I feel like someone I know died,” said Minh Nguyen, 65, of Fountain Valley. “The community is very angry with him, but, for me, I respect him. Everyone is allowed their own ideas.”
Nguyen, a retired beauty school instructor who fled Vietnam in 1975, said she could understand Ky’s allegiance to his homeland because her own husband eventually returned to Vietnam.
“My husband had been a commander in the South Vietnam navy. He felt like over there in Vietnam he had power, while over here he had lost everything,” she said. “So I think it was the same for Nguyen Cao Ky.”
Tony Lam, who used to play tennis and mah-jongg with Ky, said Ky had no intention of being the Vietnam government’s lackey but rather believed he could help the country.
“He had been doing his best in his own way for Vietnam,” said Lam, who became the first Vietnamese-born person elected to political office in the United States when he won a seat on the Westminster City Council in 1992.
There was a time when Ky was a symbol of force in South Vietnam, rising quickly up the ranks of its air force to become a general. In 1965 he was named the country’s premier at just 34, famous for sporting a black jumpsuit and violet scarf and making outrageous remarks, once suggesting he admired Hitler. He was later selected to be vice president.
On April 29, 1975 — the day before South Vietnam fell to communists — Ky escaped in a helicopter, flying to a U.S. aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.
He and his family lived in Virginia before heading to Orange County, where he struggled as the owner of a liquor store. He later moved to New Orleans and worked in the shrimp and fishing industry, eventually moving back to California, where he lived in Huntington Beach and, later, Hacienda Heights.
He became an exalted figure in Little Saigon when it was a tiny community just beginning to stretch its legs. Little Saigon is now the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam, and the city government, the schools and the bustling commercial district reflect that. His daughter, Nguyen Cao Ky Duyen, would go on to become the celebrated host of a Vietnamese variety show.
Little Saigon remained rigidly anti-communist. Street protests materialized when someone was suspected of being sympathetic to the government that now ran their homeland.
But around 2002 Ky began speaking of reconciling with Vietnam. Two years later, he made his first trip back to his birth country at the invitation of the Vietnamese government.
Vietnamese American radio hosts blasted him, and a group of protesters held a rally in Garden Grove to denounce Ky, saying he was allowing himself to be used as a pawn by a Vietnamese government looking to improve business relations with the United States.
Ky was unfazed. “It’s time to close that dark chapter of Vietnam history and open a new one,” he said at the time. “The road of old warriors has ended.”
Lam remembers asking Ky about that controversial trip. The answer stuck with him.
“He said, ‘To me, the war is over, and I don’t want to be considered a warmonger. I want to try to improve the situation so it will benefit the people of Vietnam.’”
Lam agreed that Ky’s name won’t resonate the same with the next generation, far removed from the memories of war, but he said the controversial figure will always hold a unique place in history.
“Old generals don’t fade away,” Lam said.
Gravity
–noun, plural -ties.
1. the force of attraction by which terrestrial bodies tend to fall toward the center of the earth.
2. heaviness or weight.
3. gravitation in general.
Shantaram is a novel influenced by real events in the life of the author, Australian Gregory David Roberts. In 1978, Roberts was sentenced to 19-year imprisonment in Australia after being convicted of a series of armed robberies of building society branches, credit unions, and shops, which he had committed to feed a heroin addiction after his marriage ended and he lost his daughter. In July 1980, he escaped from Victoria’s Pentridge Prison in broad daylight, thereby becoming one of Australia’s most wanted men for the next ten years.
Amazon.com Review:
Crime and punishment, passion and loyalty, betrayal and redemption are only a few of the ingredients in Shantaram, a massive, over-the-top, mostly autobiographical novel. Shantaram is the name given Mr. Lindsay, or Linbaba, the larger-than-life hero. It means “man of God’s peace,” which is what the Indian people know of Lin. What they do not know is that prior to his arrival in Bombay he escaped from an Australian prison where he had begun serving a 19-year sentence. He served two years and leaped over the wall. He was imprisoned for a string of armed robberies peformed to support his heroin addiction, which started when his marriage fell apart and he lost custody of his daughter. All of that is enough for several lifetimes, but for Greg Roberts, that’s only the beginning.
He arrives in Bombay with little money, an assumed name, false papers, an untellable past, and no plans for the future. Fortunately, he meets Prabaker right away, a sweet, smiling man who is a street guide. He takes to Lin immediately, eventually introducing him to his home village, where they end up living for six months. When they return to Bombay, they take up residence in a sprawling illegal slum of 25,000 people and Linbaba becomes the resident “doctor.” With a prison knowledge of first aid and whatever medicines he can cadge from doing trades with the local Mafia, he sets up a practice and is regarded as heaven-sent by these poor people who have nothing but illness, rat bites, dysentery, and anemia. He also meets Karla, an enigmatic Swiss-American woman, with whom he falls in love. Theirs is a complicated relationship, and Karla’s connections are murky from the outset.
Roberts is not reluctant to wax poetic; in fact, some of his prose is downright embarrassing. Throughought the novel, however, all 944 pages of it, every single sentence rings true. He is a tough guy with a tender heart, one capable of what is judged criminal behavior, but a basically decent, intelligent man who would never intentionally hurt anyone, especially anyone he knew. He is a magnet for trouble, a soldier of fortune, a picaresque hero: the rascal who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. His story is irresistible. Stay tuned for the prequel and the sequel. –Valerie Ryan
Corroborate
–verb (used with object)
1. to make more certain; confirm: He corroborated my account of the accident.
This week’s S-Files post is an oral history essay by Mien American student, Kassy Saeppunh, for her Asian American Studies 10 course. In this essay, Saeppunh interviews her mother, Yian Saephanh, about her her painful and traumatic experiences as a Mien refugee journeying to America. Oral histories such as this one are incredibly powerful as they expose a perspective completely left out of mainstream American history and the “master narrative”. As important as these stories are to our collective consciousness of American culture, history and politics, the irony remains that they often go unheard because of language barriers, the trauma of remembering and the fear of U.S. government retaliation. Saeppunh’s essay shares an invaluable perspective about the Mien/Mien American experience that helps complete our understanding of American history and global politics.
My Mother’s Perspective
by Kassy Saeppunh
My mother, Yian Saephanh, is a refugee from a country torn by war. Her life story as a young Mien girl to her painful journey to America is put in her perspective; I am merely here to tell her story and let others know what she and many others have been through that is not revealed in history books. My mother’s story of how she ultimately ended up in America is one that I find quite unique, while others, who have experienced or know someone who has experienced life as a refugee, may find it very common. Nonetheless, I feel that her story should be known in order to reveal the personal perspective of a Mien immigrant and her journey through life. For this assignment, I had to interview my mother through the phone. I had a pre-set list of questions to ask her, but I realized throughout the interview process that she was not as comfortable as I thought she would be. I realized that by asking her these questions, I was forcing her to relive those memories that she has tried so hard to forget. Not only was I opening up old wounds, I was scaring her as well by making her try to remember the past and the trauma she been through. I remember calling her back a day later to clarify a few questions and she snapped at me and told me to stop asking such specific questions before the U.S. government ships her back to Laos. It was then that I realized that I was making her relive the terror of war and bringing out the fear as well. Due to the Secret War, many Mien refugees fear the American government and I realized its impact, not only my mother, but many others as well. It is through my mother’s retelling about her experiences during the Secret War and a bit of research that I unravel the reasons behind the fear that many Mien immigrants have. With my mother’s past, present, and future in mind, I explore her culture, life in Laos, the reasons behind her fear of the U.S. government, her journey to America, and her never-ending journey to find a place in American society as a minority by taking her story and incorporating it into the history of Southeast Asian refugees.
The Mien are a small sub-group of Southeast Asians, with the majority of the population living in Laos. Originally from southern China, the Mien left to neighboring countries in rebellion of the Chinese government centuries ago.[i] In Laos, the Mien lived in the high mountains and usually kept to themselves.[ii] In the highlands, the Mien resided in twelve clans and in each clan there was a leader, who was more of a spokesman and dispute settler within each clan than an actual leader, and each clan’s name represented the last names of the people within them. My grandfather himself was the leader of the Saelee clan. Everyday the Mien wake up at the crack of dawn, have breakfast, walk hours in the jungle to go work in the fields, come back home at dusk, have dinner, and do the same thing over the next day. My mother’s story of being Mien is one that is a bit complicated. My mom is actually ethnically Cambodian and grew up culturally Mien. Her Cambodian father had a gambling addiction and sold my mother to a Mien man, my grandfather, who couldn’t have children with his wife. So as easy as that, my mother was taken away from her birth parents at the age of four and was brought to a whole new family and a whole new culture. My mother, whom my grandparents renamed Yian was the first of four children that they would adopt. My mother told me the meaning of her name in Mien literally means “to trade” because of how she was brought into the family. Initially scared when she first left with my grandfather, she easily adjusted and learned the Mien language within a few months and wasn’t alone when my grandparents adopted more children into the family. As the eldest daughter, my mother was expected to do many things such as cook, clean, and work in the fields. Thus began my mother’s new life as a dutiful Mien daughter.
As a child and the eldest daughter, my mother had many responsibilities. When her parents went to work in the fields, she would clean the house, take care of the animals, and prepare a meal for her parents by the time they came home. As Ying and Chao explained, the ordinary Mien child would watch over their younger siblings, do the sewing, and even work in the fields.[iii] As an adult, my grandfather had an arranged marriage for my mother. I asked my mother how she felt at the time of her arranged marriage and her only response was that her parents urged her to get married and live with them to take care of them. “My parents didn’t have children to look after them so they urged me, as the eldest, to marry and live with them. So they found a husband for me to make sure I stayed home.”[iv] As an old cultural tradition, many Mien children are expected to live and care for their parents as adults.[v] In a traditional Mien family, the children were expected to help their parents with whatever they asked, cook every meal, clean the house, and most important of all, show respect at all times. Hence, my mother was quickly married and was expected to care for her parents and husband. It wasn’t until seven children and thirteen years later that my mother separated from her husband in the United States. In the United States, her responsibilities remained the same toward her parents. Although living in different households, my mother had to make sure my grandparents had a roof over their head, were financially stable living on their own, and quickly assisted them whenever they called.
In the midst of the Vietnam War, the Second Geneva Conference of 1962 guaranteed that Laos remained neutral, but the United States violated the agreement. Known as “America’s Secret Army,” the Mien and the Hmong people were recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to fight guerrilla style against the communists in Laos.[vi] As Mien men risked their lives fighting on their own land for the politically powerful United States, the United States continued to drop millions of bombs onto the once beautiful land in an attempt to destroy the Ho Chi Minh trail that was allowing the North Vietnamese to supply their communist troops in South Vietnam.[vii] As the American troops began to withdraw from Vietnam after the cease-fire agreement in 1973, the communist took over Laos in 1975. Under President Ford’s “parole,” South Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees entered the United States, but because the war in Laos was not considered as dangerous, those in Laos remained defenseless to fend for themselves.[viii] After the withdrawal of American troops from Laos, the Mien and Hmong people were targeted by the communist Pathet Lao for helping the Americans. My mother described her experience of the day her village was raided by the Pathet Lao and her journey to Thailand:
“I was pregnant at the time with my fourth child. My parents somehow heard through other villagers that the Pathet Lao were coming, so we had already left into the wilderness of the deep jungles. I hid my children under the green banana leaves because the Pathet Lao would shoot at the greenish yellow banana leaves thinking there were people under there. I, along with my husband, and a few other villagers returned home to grab as much food as possible for our long journey. All I remember were the gun shots going through our roofs. I don’t know why, but I thought about bringing one of the pigs with us so I grabbed a stick and began beating the pig to go as I was running. Little did I know, out of fright, I had beaten the pig so hard that it actually became bruised and died. My husband and I got extremely lucky when we were stopped by a militia man. He held a gun to my husband, but luckily another militia man saw that I was pregnant and intervened. He spoke in Laos saying that my husband and I were not part of it and they let us go. I didn’t know to be relieved or shocked, but my husband and I got up and ran through the jungles. We had nowhere to go and the only place we knew of was Thailand. So with the rest of the villagers, my family and I began our fourteen day journey walk to Thailand. There were people who had actually went to Thailand before, so we hired them and as a village, we all followed, trusting that we would be in Thailand soon. There were days where we couldn’t see a thing because it was so dark. All we had were some flashlights, carrying our children on our backs and whatever food we had, hoping that we would get there soon.”[ix]
Knowing my mother’s struggle to get to Thailand, I understand her hesitation during our interview and the pain I was making her remember. Due to my mother’s experience of escape, she views the American government at fault for tearing apart her home country and harbors a fear that the United States is powerful enough to do it again. It is because of experiences like my mother’s that other Mien refugees have a sense of fear toward the American government.
[i]Charles C. Irby and Ernest M. Pon, “Confronting New Mountains: Mental Health Problems among Male Hmong and Mien Refugees” (110)
[ii]Yu-Wen Ying and Chua Chiem Chao, “Intergenerational Relationship in Iu Mien American Families” (48)
[iii]Yu-Wen Ying and Chua Chiem Chao, “Intergenerational Relationship in Iu Mien American Families” (55)
[iv]Yian Saephanh, Kassy Saeppunh, Telephone Interview, January 28, 2011.
[v]Yu-Wen Ying and Chua Chiem Chao, “Intergenerational Relationship in Iu Mien American Families” (57)
[vi]Charles C. Irby and Ernest M. Pon, “Confronting New Mountains: Mental Health Problems among Male Hmong and Mien Refugees” (110)
[vii]Sucheng Chan. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Print.
[viii]Sucheng Chan. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Print. (Chapter 8)
[ix]Yian Saephanh, Kassy Saeppunh, Telephone Interview, January 28, 2011.
Click here to download and read the whole essay
“Through thick and thin”
Idioms
To stay with someone or something “through thick and thin” is to preserve through good times as well as bad; “she stood beside her friend through thick and thin.”
discursive
–adjective
1. passing aimlessly from one subject to another; digressive; rambling.
2. proceeding by reasoning or argument rather than intuition.
Mien
–noun
air, bearing, or demeanor, as showing character, feeling, etc: a man of noble mien.
Daniel Beatty explores some complex issues about race and identity in American society through an entertaining, clever style.
“How would you live your life differently if tomorrow is not promised?”
Inconsequential
–adjective
1. of little or no importance; insignificant; trivial.
2. inconsequent; illogical.
3. irrelevant
There has been a lot of hype the past few weeks about what newscasters have labeled as “Carmageddon”–a weekend-long closure of the 405 freeway. Prior to the actual closure of the freeway, various news stations predicted complete chaos since people who normally travel on the 405 would (in theory) be driving through side-streets instead. However, people were shocked to find that all of the “prophets” of Carmageddon could not be more wrong. Instead of crowded streets, we found people staying at home. Instead of the “end of the world” feeling we anticipated, many people claim to have spent quality, peaceful time with their families. LA Times claims, “Carmageddon could turn out to be the biggest non-event since Y2K” (Zarembo, pp.6).
The closure was scheduled to last from late Friday evening (July 16) to early morning Monday (-5am July 19). Once again, people were shocked to discover that the construction teams ended ahead of schedule: the 405 was re-opened Sunday afternoon. News reporters report that the construction teams assigned to the project did not want to be fined for completing the project late.
Thus, the moral of the story is think Chicken Little: don’t scream, “the sky is falling” unless you want to cause an unnecessary amount of panic (the media will often do this–is it their intention?)
To read more detailed reports about the 405 closure, refer to this website:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/carmageddon/
Quote: “Is gangsta rap hurting America’s children?”
Today’s Wednesday Word is an article from Colorlines.com by Adriel Luis, titled “You Maaad!—How Fox News Uses Hip-Hop to Create Race Panics“.
The critical essay features a video interview between Lupe Fiasco and O’Reilly, as well as an interactive timeline of Fox News’s Race-Baiting through Hip-Hop. What do you think? Agree or disagree? Click here to read the whole thing!
Get it? Pun intended! Check out more amazing bee photos here.
Efflorescence
–noun
1.the state or a period of flowering.
2. an example or result of growth and development: These works are the efflorescence of his genius.
3. Chemistry .
a. the act or process of efflorescing
b. the resulting powdery substance or incrustation.
