Negativity in Effect

"This imagined past-what never was-is a choke hold"(Alexander 48).

The quote encompasses what feelings Meena Alexander is trying to convey in her essay. The essay narrates Alexander's identity that is essentially made up by the different places and moments she has been in. The "choke hold" that her "imagined past" has on her is painful and restricting, but most of all it is cutting off the air, cutting away her actual life. Her actual past is buried beneath this illusion of how it should have been.

I hope that Alexander was thinking about this only at her worst moment.

It is pitiful for someone to not be able to accept the past, if not be proud of it. It is because of the past that the identity of a person is shaped; each individual, experience, feeling has profound effects on a person. To disregard the very foundation of you is not only degrading a person's identity, it wipes it out completely like an ice age to the dinosaurs.

We spoke a lot of about the identity aspect of Alexander's piece and also how the other stories related to finding/developing an identity. But the main reason Alexander's piece stood out was because of its constant negative connotation with what her past was, it makes it seem that she never decided to appreciate her past. It was a conscious choice that if made might have helped in certain ways. I know that this is just an essay depicting only a specific moment of her life, but still, the shame hit me hard. An identity injected with doses of various types of experiences is no less than one consumed by a single consistent experience.

Not a single person should try and imagine their past. It never seems to help them rise out of the hole they think they're in, but bury them ever deeper.

Wasn't this just full of sunshine.

With a title like Fish Cheeks who wouldn't wonder

Amy Tan has a rather blunt writing style, thank god. Straight to the point, no messing around. A change after reading dramatic poems, stories, that have an average of 10 words per sentence. After reading her anecdote about the assimilation problem she faced and also the confusion on how to accept that she was from both the Chinese and American cultures, I didn't have to try to hard to take a walk in her shoes. I'm also a kid that was brought up with two different cultures. Thinking back to the time when I first had to learn English, accept that the little American kids in kindergarten just didn't pray before eating their snacks, and nor did they wear two little braids slick with oil was slightly awkward for everyone. Nevertheless, without the awkwardness, I don't think I would have ended up the way I am, fully immersed and proud of the influence of two headstrong cultures. Amy Tan describes the palpable awkwardness to near-perfection with her short sentences, expressing her teenage thoughts of sheer embarrassment, "I was stunned into silence for the rest of the night"(Tan 95). Each reaction of the minister's family and Amy is recorded with these same short precise sentences. Especially Robert, who has the literally the shortest sentences, "Robert grimaced" (Tan 95), that's it, two words. The interesting aspect is that none of the reactions of Amy's family are recorded in that syntax. The Tan family is shown through the actions in longer sentences that transition freely, quite like their simple actions. Through the syntax, the two families and Amy are characterized by how they approach the meeting of two cultures. Granted that this takes place with Chinese relatives, Chinese menu, and Chinese home, the reactions may have been more at ease if the scene took place at the minister's home.

I couldn't help but nod along and at the same time wonder at this: "Your only shame is to have shame" ( Tan 95). No analysis here, just a sense of finality. Slightly vague quotes are the bomb and the favorites of English teachers everywhere. How deep can you take that quote?

Maya Angelou, "Champion of the World"

Alright, ready to start the semester well in English. In the past week, longest week ever, In 11 AP we read a chapter, from Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a short story on its own in a way, "The Champion of the World". In the depiction of the memorable Joe Louis fight, Angelou doesn't hold back all the little quirks and seemingly background nuances to make the piece come alive. Angelou starts off by describing the mood before the fight "as a black sky is streaked with lightning" (88), using the color black almost as a representative as the African Americans as a race with Joe Louis, their lightning, brightening up the sky and foreshadowing a storm. The storm is gradually built up, the tension rising, and represents the start to the fight for equal rights. Angelou's use of color as a symbol, hinting towards the different races, is prevalent throughout the entire two and a half pages of the story. For now, I just wanted to focus on interpreting the lightning in perhaps a different way than we did in class.