At this particular moment I believe that perhaps the fatal difference between real life and artistic representation is thus: In real life, struggle is agonizing and draining and ugly. But life spawns art. And in art, struggle is still painful, perhaps more so, yet emotionally cathartic and moving--therefore beautiful. ***************************
Cavities
After putting the goggles on, I become like an obedient young scientist awaiting dissection— the eye of a cow or worse, cat carcasses, trembling with tools in hand and avoiding her lab partner’s confident gaze
instead it is she who does the science to me, it seemed more like destruction drills whirling in the deep cave shaving off pieces (you never know when you're strapped to the chair and gaping like a fish) then construction, the molding of pearly gates in darkness and the wads of cotton lay passively under all this to soak it all up
she tells me to think of distractions when I’m squirming because the cotton has slid from under my tongue when I think too much of silence and numbness and the tools spitting out water light and air
after it is all over I run my tongue across the geography of everything to make sure what I can’t feel still exists despite the numbness and the persistent feeling that the flesh that was once so familiar was not, and has never been mine.
-from a half drugged and numb Heidi after a trip to the dentist for fillings
I just watched the Disney Pixar film "Up", and I was crying within the first ten minutes. I realized that very, very few movies make me cry. Seriously, out of all the movies I've seen over the years, I can count all the times that I actually got emotional on one hand. And then when I thought about the movies that actually made me really cry rather than just tear up, (that I remember), I only came up with these: "Persepolis", "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs", and "Up", all animated films.
I'm not sure why animated characters affect me so much more than real life actors. For a long time, I thought of myself as coldhearted and closed off because I couldn't cry during classic tear-jerkers like "Titanic", and I was the one sitting dry-eyed during movie nights/sleepovers while my more sensitive friends and their mothers were in tears. But then I found myself shedding tears over Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on the plane to Louisiana and fighting to hide my embarrassingly public display of emotions from people sitting next to me, thinking, these characters are not real! I find that I'm most affected by profound relationships between pixar characters, maybe because their faces are so expressive. And when their expressions are joyful, I feel it so much more too. The scenes from Carl and Ellie's life together were so adorable that I wanted to cry whenever he mentioned her during the rest of the movie. The special effects in Up were also so imaginative and evocative. In recent years, it's been hard for me to take special effects in big-budget fantasy films seriously because they're so ridiculously extravagant. But maybe because the characters and settings aren't supposed to be real, but childlike and fanciful, Pixar is able to utilize new technology in a way that's fantastical but not overdone.
I couldn't help noticing that the Pixar films I've seen recently, Wall-E and Up, both incorporated underlying themes of environmentalism, which was really interesting to analyse (Yes, I can't seem to escape from analyzing all elements of pop culture that I come in contact with, blame it on my liberal arts education). Up revolved around this theme of nature, and what it meant to be in touch with nature as an explorer. Of course, these are all mainstream themes of environmentalism focusing on preserving nature, rather than the global effects of Capitalism and overconsumption, but that's another issue.
Up was also the one of the only mainstream films pf my memory that actually features an Asian American main character, Russel, a chubby, coddled kid of the technological age who gets caught up in an adventure.
All in all very satisfied with the film, and now I feel the need to stuff my mind with more cutesy Disney films meant for children. I finally made it to the library today and greedily grabbed a giant pile of books that I'm not going to be able to finish, even though I know I should have restrained myself more. I managed to get English and China Witness, and hopefully I'll get through part of those before break ends. But I'm now caught in reading Alice Munro's collection of short stories, "Too Much Happiness." I also have Lorrie Moore's new novel "A Gate at the Stairs," a collection of Adrienne Rich poems, and Issac Asimov's "Foundation." Going to the library to pick out books always makes me really happy, and the Germantown library has a fantastic collection, and I couldn't refrain from borrowing too many as usual. So even though I love books, I never thought about getting a Kindle because the experience of trips to the library and browsing for books is so integral to my love of reading, and as I really read only a small percentage of what I borrow.
This blog will focus primarily on the progress of my research project, which is centered on documenting the oral history of my grandmother's life. The blog will detail my process, from the preliminary research into gender and the Chinese Republic, the history of the Sino-Japanese war, and China pre and post Cultural Revolution, to the experience of living in China with my grandmother to document her story through recording, video, and photography. I intend to culminate the project in an artistic representation inspired by the materials that I will gather. So hopefully through this process, I will grow as a writer, record my grandmother's story, and learn about my family history in a socio-historical context.
This project was originally inspired by a writing workshop course offered by the Claremont Colleges Intercollegiate Asian American Studies department. The workshop, called "Grandmothers and Granddaughters, API Women's Voices," was facilitated by Traci Kato Kiriyama and conceptualized by Traci and Dr. Kathy Yep of Pitzer College in Claremont, CA.
