ASTU 100 with Dr Luger this year has been quite a journey for me. At the start, we talked a lot about citations and academic integrity. Dr Luger explained to us what it is like to be a scholar and to express your opinions about a current topic which I found very interesting and useful. As the course goes on, I do find myself struggling with many things. The class began to discuss the Iranian war, the Iraq war and the 9/11 culture which are topics that I am aware of but I could not exactly relate to. There were a lot of things I did not know about because growing up in Vietnam, we never really discussed these topics. As a result, I have learned a lot from class but I do struggle to analyse certain topics.

The second semester, the class focus on the 9/11 culture and the Iraq War. Recently, we watched Clint Eastwood 2014 biographical war drama “American Sniper” and discussed a lot about the glorification of veterans as heroes and of gun culture, along with the portrayal of good vs evil and the blurring between home and war fronts. This got me thinking about other war movies I have seen such as Dunkirk (2017) or Good Morning, Vietnam (1988) and how I never really stopped to think about the ways things are portrayed.

A lot of the texts we read this year in ASTU 100 is based on the author’s perspective. For example, Persepolis is based on Satrapi’s experience growing up in Iran through the war. Similarly, Obasan is written by Kogawa about her experience growing up through the Japanese-Canadian internment during World War II. Likewise, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about Changez, a Pakistani man living in the States after the 9/11 attacks. In addition, in the film “Stories We Tell”, Polley uncovers her family’s secrets through different storytellers in her family. From the film, we get to see the different perspectives on past events in the family. Furthermore, “American Sniper” again shows the perspective of a sniper during the Iraq war. Recently, Dr Luger let the class watched American Sniper and then had us read “Redeployment” by Phil Klay at home. I was startled at the differences between the film and the text. The film portrayed Chris Kyle as a great soldier who is gloriously fighting for his country and cannot wait to get back to the battlefield. However, Klay gives the reader a different perspective of what it is actually like to be a soldier returning home.

Overall, ASTU 100 course this year reminded me to be careful about what I am reading/watching as with the increasing flows of information on the Internet nowadays, one can easily be influenced by another’s opinions. Thus, it is important to be able to distinguish reliable sources and to remember to be open-minded to different perspectives/opinions.

During Jump Start 2017 was when I first visited the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), I remember vividly walking into the Amazonia Exhibition and being super distracted by the hammocks. Nevertheless, Dr Luger recently asked my ASTU 100 class to visit the MOA again and study the exhibit’s objects in closer details and its meanings.

Walking into the exhibition again, my first impression was the sound of birds chirping in the background which creates a peaceful and relaxing ambience. Yet, the first things that caught my eyes were the statistics about deforestation and mining concessions, which I thought was a very powerful way to capture the visitors’ attention.

Statistics about the Amazon displayed in the exhibition

  Photo credits to Anthony Maag

The exhibition was not big but it did contain a lot of information about the peoples of the Amazon and their culture, along with the forests and rivers of the Amazon that are under threat. Nonetheless, one of the objects that really caught my eyes was probably the Yanomami basket called guatara.

An example of the Yanomami guatara

Vietnamese Seagrass Basket

At first look, I simply thought it was an ordinary basket but actually, there are so much hidden meanings and symbolism behind the guatara. Firstly, the basket itself is a map in which the dots are humans and the circles illustrate levels of distance from the village centre to the outside world with the last circle representing a no man land in the Yanomami’s perspective. Secondly, the paint designs are made of a mixture of charcoal and jenipapo fruit juice. Yanomami women would weave these baskets and sell them to bring money back into the community. The guatara reminds me of the Vietnamese seagrass baskets which are individually hand-woven from natural seagrass into a beautiful herringbone pattern. For years, village women use these baskets to carry their family’s clothes to the rivers for washing. Growing up in Vietnam, I was fully aware of the uses of these baskets but I never thought much about what they mean so to read about the meanings behind the Yanomami baskets is definitely intriguing. Through these baskets and the other objects in the exhibition, the MOA visitors really get a glimpse of the Amazonian cultures, beliefs and relationships to nature.

Personally, I was never really made familiar or exposed much to the Amazonian life except towards the end of high school where I did a case study about deforestation in Amazon. For centuries, the Amazonians have been maligned as being savages and their cultures have suffered marginalisation and so for the curator to set up this exhibition and shine a light on the significance of the Amazonian culture was really eye-opening (for me at least).

Cited:

Vietnamese seagrass basket – https://www.wayfair.com/storage-organization/pdp/langley-street-seagrass-basket-with-handles-lgly4460.html

In class, we recently started analysing a novel called Obasan, written by a Japanese-Canadian author Joy Kogawa. In the novel, Kogawa explores the Canadian government’s treatment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. Kogawa recalls her childhood memories through the eyes of narrator Naomi Nakane, who is a high school teacher in Alberta. The novel begins with Naomi finds out that her uncle has passed away and so she decides to visit her uncle’s widow Obasan. Naomi then discovers letters and journals from her aunt Emily Kato which depicts her childhood’s struggles during WWII. Through this visit, Naomi was able to reconstruct repressed memories. Obasan is autobiographical and so through Naomi, Kogawa is able to tell the reader about her own experiences.

Last week the class visited UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections to explore Obasan’s FONDS, in which we were divided into different groups and looked at Joy Kogawa’s archival materials. We were presented with various documents from publishers’ rejection letters, Justin Trudeau’s recognition letter to Kogawa’s drafts of Obasan. This visit really opened my perspective on the amount of work required to publish a book. To see Kogawa’s thought process through her drafts, the criticisms she had, the suggestions she received really make me appreciate the novel more.

From the archival materials we had, one thing that stood out to me was how Kogawa changed the novel title several times from “Death of Silence” to “Heritage Lost” and then in one of the letters in the archive, someone even suggested she should change the title to “Heritage on Trial”. This got me thinking about the reasons why Kogawa finally chose to name the novel “Obasan” and the significance and effects of doing so.

At first, I was a little confused about the title being “Obasan” because it means aunt in Japanese but the novel is mainly about Naomi. Nevertheless, I thought about it for a while and came to realise that actually “Obasan” in many ways represent the theme of silence in the novel. Aunt Emily and Obasan both in their own ways help Naomi survive the ordeal of internment. In the novel, Kogawa describes her aunts as “One lives in sound, the other in stone”. By describing Obasan to be living “in stone” meaning she does not convey her thoughts and feelings, Kogawa is exploring the Japanese-Canadians internment and how many Japanese-Canadians chose to keep quiet about what they endured like it never happened. After the attack on Pearl Harbour, Japanese-Canadians were removed from their homes and sent to internment camps. They were forced to go to interrogations, followed curfews, many lost their jobs and properties and some were even forced to migrate back to Japan. Yet many Japanese-Canadians remained silent and so all the rumours and lies about them remain uncontradicted. From this, I now recognised how powerful a book’s title can be. A short title such as “Obasan” can actually mean so much more than just “aunt” in Japanese.

This trip to explore Kogawa’s archival materials also opened my eyes to how important it is for authors to keep track of their drafts in order to improve their books/novels. The class also looked at rejections letters from publishers, which I found really interesting the fact that some publishers will not publish some books because of marketing or editorial issues. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the trip to study Kogawa’s archival materials. It really took my view about Obasan away from what is actually in the novel and more about the process that Kogawa had to go through to publish the novel.

Personally, I do not read a lot of comic books. Just one month ago if someone asked me: “What is the first thing that comes to your mind when I say the word ‘comics’?” I would have simply responded: “Kids” or “Marvel”. Truthfully, my initial conceptions about comics are that they are cheap books for children written in short sentences in speech bubbles around drawings, with the sole purpose to help children understand the storyline better.

As a child, my mother did not permit me to read comic books because she thought the use of short sentences would impact my writing abilities. In addition to this, she insisted that comics were unnecessarily filled with grotesque violent. Despite this, I was always way more drawn to comics and its visuals rather than the long chunk of texts presented within novels. However, with time, I allowed my imagination to take over and today I prefer reading words.

Another reason why I remained disinterested in comics is that we did not read, study or analyze comics in school. Throughout primary, secondary and high school, students would scrutinize stanzas of poetry and prose but comics were considered something you read as a hobby, rather than academic purposes. Thus, I was anxiously surprised and excited when I found out we were going to study Persepolis, a graphic autobiography by Marjane Satrapi, in ASTU 100 class.

I first heard about Persepolis through an interview between Marjane Satrapi and Emma Watson in 2016, where they discussed the freedom of Iranian women, the dilemma of wearing a veil, women empowerment and the effects of comic books to portray Satrapi’s story.

Emma Watson: “You did your comics in saturated black ink, and I’m interested: Why did you choose that? And how do you think that conveys different emotions and atmospheres to other comic styles?”

Marjane Satrapi: “As a literary genre, comics are really connected to fine arts. In comics, with the illustration, you write with your drawing, with your images. So whatever you don’t write, you draw and vice versa. So instead of writing, “Well I was sitting in my bed and I was watching out of the window and the bird was singing” and so on, you just draw all of that. So whatever you draw has meaning that people read. If I use color, it has meaning people read. If I draw backgrounds, the same…”

Satrapi’s response sparked my curiosity regarding the misconceptions of comic books nowadays. Numerous individuals view comics negatively because of comic-book-inspired crimes. For instance, in 2015, crazed killer James Holmes was inspired by the Joker and set off tear gas grenades and shot indiscriminately into a crowded theater. He was later charged guilty for killing 12 people and injuring 70 people. Apart from Holmes, there have been various other cases where the killer was inspired in some ways by villains in comic books. Thus why, most tend to shy away from the world of comics because they are afraid of incidents like these.

Nevertheless, although Satrapi’s Persepolis is a comic book, it explores much more than just the relationship between superheroes and villains. By using comics style, Satrapi was able to portray more realistic visuals, which allows the readers to relate more to the story. Seeing a character laugh or cry can trigger emotions in the readers, making the book a lot more effective. As shown in figure 1 and 2 below, Satrapi’s simplistic style with just black and white panels in tiers makes it easier for the reader to focus on the storyline and issues that Satrapi is exploring instead of being distracted by the colors and details of the drawings.

Figure 1: A page from Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

Figure 2: A page from Archie Comics Spiderman, 2005

Overall, comic book style is definitely more than just drawings. Although the style is something I am not accustomed to yet but Persepolis really did change my point of view on how authors can still explore very sensitive and problematic issues through the use of comic books.

References

Figure 1: http://davidrickert.com/2012/06/22/persepolis-how-to-draw-comics/

Figure 2: https://www.newsarama.com/34278-archie-takes-on-spider-man-in-marvel-digest-1-yep-you-read-that-right.html

https://www.vogue.com/article/emma-watson-interviews-marjane-satrapi

Growing up speaking English as a second language, I have always struggled with academic writing in school. Although Vietnamese is similar to English in terms of sentence structure (i.e subject + verb + object + adverb), I still struggle to express my ideas in English thoroughly. Nevertheless, in ASTU class, we are studying a book called “An Introduction to Academic Writing” by Janet Giltrow (et al), which outlines the conventions of academic writing. One of the things we learned that I found very intriguing was academic citations. In high school, I thought about citations simply as giving credits to the original author to prove that you got the idea from them and you’re not stealing the idea for yourself. Now I understand that citation is not only about avoiding plagiarism but about referencing previous scholars in that area of study, to allow the writer to then present his/her views/opinions about the area of study as part of the collective group. Scholars communicate with each other through their published works, therefore, by citing other scholars, the writer is integrating himself into the other scholars’ conversation and present his/her views on the topic. This got me thinking about the effects of globalization as the more globalized the world becomes, the easier and faster it is for scholars around the world to communicate. Thus, linking back to the start, for someone like myself who speaks two languages, this allows me to access more “conversations” between scholars and connect ideas between a Vietnamese scholar with an English scholar. Additionally, this helps spread ideas around the world even faster as bilingual students are able to connect scholars from different countries through citations.

Apart from Giltrow, we are also reading an article called “Youth, trauma and memorialization: The selfie as witnessing” by Kate Doughlas, in which she discusses the controversy around taking selfies at historical sites. She argues that although some may view taking selfies at historical sites to be disrespectful, it can also be a way millennials use to spread awareness about the place and show their appreciation. In this generation, people express their emotions and share their experiences online in order to reach out to more people. With teenagers taking and sharing pictures of themselves at historical places, they are not being disrespectful, it is simply a new way of showing that they acknowledge the site and meaning it stands for. Being from the generation where technology dominates all aspects of our life, it can be difficult for one to stop and contemplate about the negative effects of technology. In olden times, people record memories in writing things such as diaries, letters and poems, however nowadays, people take pictures and videos instead. Personally, I believe there is nothing wrong with either ways of reminiscing about the past. However, just because we now record memories differently, it should not be a topic of scorns. Additionally, I believe more scholars should produce work like Doughlas, which shines a new and positive light on topics that earlier raised disdain among people. This gives us a new perspective on something that people did not view as “correct”.