Hi everybody!

For the past few weeks, our ASTU class has been discussing the term trauma, with particular reference to 9/11. We started off this term by reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, depicting the traumas of a young boy after 9/11. Afterwards, we carried on to read articles written by Ilka Saal and Judith Butler, pushing us to further explore how we feel and perceive trauma.

One of the blogs that I found was very impactful was Mariana’s blog where she talks about how most people think about a traumatic event, one only remembers how the victims died; not many think of them as individual people and how they lived their last moments before the end. When I read her post, I thought of my uncle who was flying from Hong Kong to Vancouver on the day of 9/11, albeit on a completely different plane. He was still in the middle of his flight when the towers came down and while my entire family was worried sick, he had no clue as to what had happened. When he learned what had happened, he said (in rough translation) “Those who were lost, their every single memory will not”. I never truly understood what he meant by that until now.

Another blog that resonated with me was Micheal’s blog. Here he argues that people are who they are based on others who have a “similar identity” and that as humans, we can show our togetherness through understanding of all lives. Micheal then talks about the Pan Am games theme song that Doctor Luger played for us during our class. At first glance, this song is about how everybody is being united into a signal entity but some classmates funneled our attention to how some parts of the song talked about being united against something, in other words even in a song about the unity of everybody, there is violence which I find is ironic. If everybody was united. why would there be violence? This made me think of the phrase “we fight for peace” which is ironic in the same sense that even if you are fighting for peace, you are still fighting which disrupts peace.

Let me what you guys think!

-Fiona Tse

Hey Everybody!

I was taken when I read Amy’s post. She talked about how she felt when she read a letter from an adult reader of Obasan to Kogawa expressing her thanks to her. In that letter, the writer said that she felt “emotionally immobilized” by the book when she read it and Amy felt the same. How are you supposed to digest such shocking, racial information when it happened in an internationally known multicultural nation?  What are you supposed to think?

When I read Obasan, I wasn’t as shocked as I already had some substantial knowledge of what happened in the camps due to my Social Studies and Geography teacher in high school. He was interned in these camps when he was just a kid and would occasionally bring up this topic in his classes. When he did however, he would only talk about the people that he knew and the circumstances surrounding him at the time; but he never said anything about himself. Whenever we asked him, my teacher would always deflect the question to another topic. This could be due to him not wanting to remember what happened to him in the camps, like Stephen in Obasan when he tries to forget his Japanese heritage.

Just some of my thoughts

Fiona Tse

Hey Everybody!

I really enjoyed reading Harnoor’s blog about how the violence is a normal everyday occurrence in Iran as shown in the graphic narrative that we have read: Persepolis. As we all know, with the revolution and war happening Marji sees violence on a regular basis. She sees it so much that it becomes normal for her, however having violence as the norm is not normal by any means.

As I was reading Harnoor’s post, I thought about my little cousin who was born and living in China under the One Child Policy (not anymore now that it’s been removed). Under the One Child Policy, my cousin is the only child of my uncle and aunt and even though he goes to Hong Kong regularly to visit the rest of my relatives (all my other cousins have siblings and live in Hong Kong where the policy does not apply) he finds that having siblings is weird and not normal and that having no siblings is normal. When I asked him this, he said that all his friends and all the people that he knows are all single children and that some of them even think that just even the thought of siblings is alien to them.

That’s just my little thought,

Fiona Tse

I thought Matthew’s blog of his first thoughts on Persepolis was really interesting. He writes about how the illustrations shown in the book are only coloured with black and white and how those colours are associated with “good and evil” in Marji’s (the main character/narrator) eyes. The “good” side (characters in white) are on Marji’s side as they are pro-revolutionists while the characters on the “evil” side (military) are shown in black. However this dichotomy between this theme fades out over the rest of the book as Marji grows up and realizes that politics aren’t always good or evil.

Adding onto the theme of “good vs. evil” or “white vs. black” in the political groups that Matthew brought up, it can also be seen in the symbols as well. My favourite depiction of this is the illustration found on page 43 in the lower left frame. It shows Marji’s father saying that they should now rejoice in their new found freedom now that the Shah has been overthrown and Marji’s mother agreeing, saying that the devil is now gone. But unbeknownst to them, bordering the frame is a black demon with its eyes trained on Marji’s family. The symbol of the black demon shows that there is more trouble to come that they (Marji and her family) does not know about and cannot control.

Hey everybody!

As you all know, for the past few weeks our ASTU class have been discussing the novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa. These discussions brought up new ideas such as forgetting and silence and also how one chooses to remember their pasts. On November 19th, we went on a mini field trip to UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library and we explored a part of the Joy Kogawa Fond. This Fond comprised of drafts of Obasan, correspondence with editors and publishers regarding the book, letters from readers expressing their thoughts and most interestingly of all a letter from Prime Minister Trudeau himself.

It’s quite awesome being the class blogger this week as I got to have the chance to understand what all of you thought about our outing to look at the Kogawa Fond! When I read Amy’s post, she talked about how she was taken by a letter to Kogawa due to the reader feeling “emotionally immobilized” when they read Obasan. I too was taken by this. Due to the knowledge of Japanese-Canadian internment is not common knowledge in today’s society and given Canada’s reputation of being welcoming to all cultures, reading Obasan gives its readers a shock and most don’t know how to feel or think about this historic event. Even for some people who do have some prior knowledge of the internment camps, reading Obasan came as a shock, but not to such an extreme. My Social Studies and Geography teacher in high school was a child when he was sent to an internment camp (just like Naomi). During his classes, he would sometimes bring up this subject but he would always refuse to tell us of his feelings about that time. This could go back to him not wanting to talk about the trauma that has been done to him so many years ago.

When I read Ben’s blog, I found it interesting that a lot of the adult readers’ letters to Kogawa expressed a sense of gratitude for the book. Here Ben shows that Obasan has “broke the almost forty year silence that Japanese-Canadians experienced since the brutal actions committed by their own government”. This leads me to believe that the silence portrayed in Obasan through Obasan and Naomi gave people who experienced the camps first-hand something to relate to and hopefully will help them to start talking about this “silenced” topic.

Have a great day everyone!

Fiona Tse