
I wrote an analyses paper for my Social Foundations of Culture and Equity in Education class taught by my advisor, Dr. Lee. She wanted students to explore the factors such as race, class, physical ability, gender, sexual orientation, language that intersect to shape not only individual identity but also one's learning and schooling experience. We were encouraged to recall and describe one of our own learning experiences that had occurred in a formal or non-formal setting. The purpose of this assignment was to focus on ourselves to deconstruct our own lenses in order that we can in the process understand how complex we all are in the learning process. After I wrote this paper, I felt completely liberated. I chose to write about my undergraduate studies. It was the first time I explored the meaning of my undergraduate studies. I felt like I had so much to reflect on and so much to say. It was a rare opportunity to have a professor (a reader) who would be interested in finding out what and how we learn. It is a constant flow and fluidity of thougths that undergirds our consciousness as we process how we relate to the world and how the world treats us. Below is a copy of my paper. It was a truly memorable writing assignment. Thanks for reading!
Analyses Paper:
I made up my mind that English: Creative Writing would be my undergraduate major when I was 19 years old at San Francisco State University. I admire writers like Robert Frost, Joyce Carol Oates, John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. Although I loved their work about the human conditions and struggles in American society, I felt there was always something missing with American Literature. The missing link became clear when I started taking Asian American Studies where I found a comfortable space that allowed me to examine and unpack the layers of my identity and to take ownership of my learning experience.
Some memorable Asian American classes were the Asian American Writers Workshop, Asian American Literature and Asian American Women. The more Asian American classes I took, the more I became hooked on them. I became consumed with novels, short stories and poetry written by Asian American writers like Fae Myenne Ng, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, Carlos Bulosan, Jeff Tagami and Janice Marikitani. Their work spoke to me like a family member and contained a cultural sensibility on the themes of alienation, patriarchal domination, nostalgia, silence and struggle. Those themes have been written before but rarely from the point of view of Asian Americans.
Before their work, I was reading predominantly ‘white’ writers in my K-12 English classes that were centered on the white, Anglo-American perspective, and some degree of the Black experience. When those learning experiences from K-12 have been ‘white-washed,’ it affected me on a subconscious level which I was unable to name at that time. I knew that race was a salient experience but I didn’t know exactly how that translated to my reality. Therefore, when I was exposed to the Asian American voices for the first time as an undergraduate student, I felt liberated.
Along with liberation came affirmation. It was refreshing to be the ‘subject’ of an Asian American course versus the silent observer particularly in English classes. Being the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ formulated a meaningful context as the Asian American instructors looked like me, my classmate shared similar ‘invisible’ experiences and the themes and issues concerned Asian American communities, particularly the Chinese-American community for which I had limited knowledge on. I was engaged with many voices such as the narratives of the Chinatown immigrant, particularly women who headed single households in writer Fae Myenne Ng’s novel Bone, a very moving and familiar story. The women and families in the novel were similar to my maternal grandmother who immigrated to San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1965. She worked as a seamstress and raised a family of five children on her own. Other stories included poet Jeff Tagami’s work October Light, a book of poetry that narrates the lives of Filipino migrant farm workers in California’s Central Valley whom the mainstream media often ignore and overlook in contrast to the Mexican farm workers. There were also voices of resistance from the Chinese laborers against racist propaganda perpetuated by the yellow press journalism in the early 1920’s. Furthermore, I was particularly drawn to writer Shawn Wong’s nostalgic novel Homebase about the isolation and struggle in finding ‘roots’ for a 4th generation Chinese American. It was a narrative that many people, not just Chinese-Americans, could relate having been ‘assimilated’ into the dominant, mainstream culture, and losing one’s cultural roots and identity in the process.
By the time I had completed my undergraduate studies, I had earned a minor in the field of Asian American Studies. I developed a deep passion and connection with my cultural identity which I vow to keep. As a bi-lingual speaker of English and Chinese, I felt it accounted for my connection to my cultural identity and my interest towards a major in English creative writing. I have always enjoyed poetry and the way it employs non-traditional forms of language in lines, diction and dialect. However, in the context of American society, ‘perfect’ English was the Standard English that was hovering in the air. It ‘marked’ a human being as ‘superior,’ and ‘American.’ By the color of my skin, I was always asked how I learned to speak good English. In an Asian American Creative Writing class, it was understood that we all struggled through how language shaped our experiences. Not all students spoke Standard English and yet, they wrote the most beautiful and compelling writings in my Asian American Creative Writing class. I learned that language is ‘fluid’ and inclusive. It empowered me to express my objection to the notion that literary text has to be written in Standard English, and that European writers should be the ‘master’ narrative in an English class. I learned that language variety and diversity are extremely important especially in English. Some of the language styles I read in an Asian American Literature classes range from pidgin Hawaiian English, Chinglish to jazz-infused English of early Chinatown and identities are of Chinese Canadian, Vietnamese American, South Korean, and Southern Chinese in Georgia etc… After being exposed to the heterogeneity of Asian American writers, I understood my own ‘narrow’ lenses were subjected to years of formal schooling under the master narrative. I recognized I was a marginalized woman of color and writer and knew how to ‘name’ my silence and invisibility with new languages for the first time.
Concurrently taking Asian American classes with my English Creative writing major also helped inform my writing style and writer’s voice. Paradoxically, my class, race, gender and language shape and transpire into my own narrative themes. They affect me in a constant dynamic with the hegemonic structures of American society shape my identity. Some of the themes in the Asian American writing workshop elicited and raised very poignant and honest questions in my consciousness. How do I reconcile my Chinese and my American side? Is the either/or binary problematic by dividing who we as either Chinese or American? Was being Chinese a choice after all? Must I write Chinese American stories or would that be too ‘ethnic’? Do I represent my community every time I write something? Can I have the freedom to write about oppression in the forms of race, class, gender and language without the risk of being called an angry Chinese American woman? Should I contribute to the Asian American literary tradition that has begun and have a long way to go? What does being a writer has to do with being Chinese American? What does the label ‘Asian American’ means and how does it play out in my reality? Those kinds of questions have shaped my cognitive perception of my identity which in turn informs my writing and my learning experience which is still ongoing today.
My learning experience in Asian American classes validated who I am. It made the context of my undergraduate studies in the creative writing major accessible, relevant, broad and significant. I felt a deep sense of pride and joy with those who share the same racial and cultural identity dilemmas and struggles individualistically and collectively. From this framework, I appreciate the deeper strands of other communities who face the same history of struggle. Although Asian American narratives are heard loudly in an Asian American class, they have yet to be heard enough by all people, including more Asian Americans. Through studying narratives that touch on themes of race, gender, language and class, I connected with the voice in myself as well as the diverse voices of the Asian American community. Being a Chinese American woman, a bi-lingual speaker, and middle class informs my own writing and my reality in which those strands intersect and continues to shape my learning experiences. I attribute Asian American studies as one of the most profound part of my formal schooling when I was an undergraduate student because it was there I discover my visibility and my humanity.
THE END
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