Deep Impact

This post and the following (besides my first "My Mottoes" is all just for a blog assignment for a class I was taking.)


         My grandma, Linda, has told me more than one proverb, especially when the two of us talked while she was driving me home from school when my mother couldn’t. From the many trips we took in her silver Jetta, one proverb that comes to mind is “There’s more than on way to skin a cat.” Perhaps those words are so vivid  in my mind because she has said them so often or because it was shocking to hear coming from my grandmother. Either way, those words speak for her lifestyle.

        My grandma was born in San Diego, February 13^th 1941. My grandmother’s grandmother, Violet, was very frugal. When Zella (Linda’s mother) was a girl, Violet put cardboard in her shoes so that they would last longer. There’s a way to preserve shoes! So naturally, Zella was frugal too and the family frugality was passed on to Linda and Terri, my grandmother’s sister [and her only sibling]. While Linda raised her three kids, her frugality came in handy. Every empty bread bag is a picnic basket, all sour cream, margarine, and cottage cheese tubs make fine new additions to her Tupperware collection, and I remember seeing one of those green strawberry baskets in her kitchen drawer containing used twist ties, old bread bag clips and the like. There’s more than one way to reuse things like these. 

         My mom is also crazy (almost literally) about saving things. And guess who else? That's right... I have drawer filled with plastic bags that I've been meaning to take to the plastic bag recycle bin at Safeway, I don't own a car, and don't get me started on my shoes- they're old let's just say that. How does Andrew's family impact his thoughts and feelings about trash? It's actually almost exactly the same as the way my family does. 

        In the essay "Trash," Andrew Lam writes about the impact that his distant relative "newly arrived from Vietnam," (p. 109) makes on his thoughts on trash. Upon looking at a heap of trash, the relative exclaims "Brother, in Vietnam, this stuff is all money!" (p. 109) To which Andrew thinks "I, of course, know this. But in America how easy it is to forget...It pains him to see so much wasted... and I feel a slight tug of guilt..." (p. 109)  I know this feeling well, because over the years the measure of care people in my family have had to re-use and recycle and save things has been decreasing through the generations. I'd feel the slight tug of guilt too if my grandmother knew about some of the things that I've thrown away- useless to me, but not in her eyes.
         It's interesting how easy it is to forget things. Andrew admits that "I and the others, who left Vietnam so long ago, have forgotten. It is as if along with the pile of papers and uneaten food we have carelessly tossed away our identities. In out material success in America we have forgotten what it was that sustained us: our attachment to the land, out old identity." (p. 110) Here, he's connecting the way trash is handled in America to the way memories are handled by people who have moved to America- some memories go to waste and just get thrown away.
        When a few bits of apple fall on his kitchen floor and the distant relative bends to pick it up, Andrew describes him as "gathering bits of our old identities, scattered pieces of our soul." (p. 111) Generations of saving and reusing and recycling have impacted me, but still aren't as strong in me as they are in my grandmother. Similarly, Andrew's identity is made up of memories and the life ways of his ancestors, although they sometimes are forgotten, this image of picking up the pieces sets the idea that the memories can be recovered and the life ways can live on.

Keeping the Stories and Philosophies Alive

        When I was young, I didn’t have a place to be alone where I could think, but now I get lots of chances to be alone (not because I'm a loner or anything, I just don't live with my parents anymore.) I got into writing as well, so I decided to make English my Major. Anyway, in all my excess time for thinking and  time for writing, and especially in all the time I've spent with enough caffeine in my system to power an entire computer lab, I've made a lot of decisions on what I believe in when it comes to philosophies, which is why I liked this essay that Andrew Lam wrote called "Love Money, Prison, Sin, Revenge."
        As Lam accounts his memory of April 14, 1991, when four Vietnamese youths held 41 hostages in a Good Guy's electronics, store, he notes that he remembers "being overwhelmed by an irrational fear... In their demands, I heard the thematic echo of vengeance, that forms and shapes many Vietnamese youths who grow up in America." (p.52) And how much philosophical value is in here? Lots! Although it's been fifteen years since the end of the Vietnam war, vengeance (Andrew believes) is still an issue. But is it an issue that concerns him? Yes! Why? Because he's Vietnamese, because he's witnessed the fall of Saigon, because Vietnam is still part of his identity, just like the years that I spent on B street are part of mine. It's a piece of past that cannot be erased from memory, so of course it concerns him.
        Also at issue is the American world that is evolving Andrew's identity. He notes that "teenagers are daily worshipers in this secular high-tech temple of consumerism... It is here in this post modern American public square, that the ethnic private meets the mainstream public." (p. 53) And by "ethnic private," I believe that he is referring to two things. One is of course the Vietnamese (and other "foreign" people) who live a more private life walking around in America with Americans who are... less private should I say? Furthermore, I believe that he is alluding to the fact that his identity (much like in this "American public square") is this private Vietnamese side of him meeting the American (and more open) side of him.
        As discussed before, Lam has a dual identity and he finds himself accepting of this fact unlike the older generation of Vietnamese in the US, who Lam describes as people who are silent and "no longer feel anchored anywhere but in their impoverished homes. The exterior landscape belongs to America, strange and nonsensical, but not their true home." (p. 56)  This become clear when he says "I am also aware that I will somehow benefit from their tragedy. Whereas the youths are inarticulate and fail to become stars, I, the one who has a public voice am about to gain a measure of notoriety as the teller in their sensational tale." (p. 59) In essence, it's the writing and thinking and especially the public voice (coincidentally the American bit in Andrew's identity) that keeps the Vietnamese bit of his identity and Vietnamese- Americans' stories and philosophies alive.
        Which brings me to why I write. I write because my beliefs are the most important part of my identity, and thinking them through, and writing them down and making them known by what ever means necessary is the only way for me to keep them alive and strong. 
        But what stories and  philosophies do I have to spread? Read on...

Synthesis of Two Worlds

When I was young, I didn’t have a place to be alone where I could think. I shared a room with my brother in a duplex which only seemed to get smaller as I grew older. When I was seven we moved to a three bedroom house and although I got my own room, it still was never easy to organize my thoughts because I was always kept busy by one thing or another. Behind our backyard fence, was a creek… it smelled bad because my mom said that it was used to carry treated sewage to the San Francisco Bay, which coincidentally is where the water from Chico Creek ends up as well (Chico, California is where I live now). When ever I went back behind the fence, there was nothing to look at on the other side but yet another fence, and when I looked up and down the stream there was nothing but fences on both sides lining the slim, steep, rough, dirt and dry plants that left stickers in my socks, lining the green glob of a mess they called a creek. Moving has its benefits, but the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

Andrew Lam experienced a more life changing move than I did. He is the author of Perfume Dreams, which is a collection of his essays that reflect his experiences. He is a Vietnamese man who witnessed the fall of Saigon as a boy, spent some time in a refugee camp thereafter, and moved to the U.S. when he was 12, and later began a career as a commentator and a journalist. With his parents who held on to their deep Vietnamese cultural roots and an American culture shock, he has a lot to say about the two worlds, especially in his essay Child of Two Worlds.

    Lam explains his world view as a child by saying "I was not entirely convinced that the outside world existed," (p. 3) which is not uncommon at all for someone who is so used to ways that are "sacred and very old." (p. 3) I know that I never thought there was a possibility of moving until I was seven, I guess I just thought I'd always be living on B Street. However, when he moved to the U.S., and his life in the world of Vietnam became just a memory, he began his realization that Vietnam was a nightmare, and America is just a dream. Eventually, he accepts them both as part of who he is.
        At first Lam is at ease with the fact that he left Vietnam, and he shows this when he says to his mother "'That country,' I slowly announced in English, as if to wound, 'is cursed.'" (p. 5) Then he portrays his initial response to America by saying that "Vietnam was now so far away-- an abstraction-- and America was now so near (outside the window, blaring on the TV, written in the science fiction books I devoured like mad)-- a seduction." (p. 5) His allusions to America's reputation both signify his new attraction to the country, however, they also portray his dislike for the character that America takes on in his mind, just by stating that America is a seductive force.

With Vietnamese stories ending in misery and American fairy tales giving people hope, Andrew Lam reveals at the same time the unfortunate truth that the realistic approach would be to reject both possibilities for miserable and happy endings.

In the end, he says "my sense of home these days seems to have less to do with geography than imagination and memories." (p. 15) Although he was a child from both worlds, it's safe to assume that both worlds have been synthesized into the memories of him and him alone. 

Although my move from B street to Fiesta Dr. was not at all a giant leap from one unique culture to the next, I have also experienced the surrealism that moving can bring. I remember at first glance, my new house looked dark and haunted, and not much of my family life changed either, but when I moved to Chico, I did get a chance to think more about my self and at first I thought that my life as the girl who lives in Sam Mateo was coming to an end, and my life as a Chico woman was beginning, but in the end, I decided that although I lived on B Street and then on Fiesta Dr. in San Mateo, and now I live on Nord Ave. in Chico, none of it has anything to do with who I am.
So who am I? Read on...

Mottos

Do what you gotta do
Say what you need to say
Learn something new
make this day the best day

You can spend life in rewind
But why waste the time?

Hakuna Matata