Kristy's ENGL 474F blog

I often take my name for granted – I assume people around me know it, and I forget how untrue that often is until I’m dropped in the middle of the gigantic Heathrow airport in London for three hours, surrounded by strangers.

There is little less lonely than travelling alone, particularly when your travel time exceeds 12 hours. Over 12 hours of silence (interspersed with the occasional thank you when you get your stale orange juice in the plastic cups – how they manage to make orange juice stale, I’ll never know), and nobody who knows your name. Nobody who knows (or cares) about your story. I am anonymous. And it’s not pleasant.

That’s quite morose, isn’t it? Well, I’m running on four hours of sleep and some orange juice, so my world view might be slightly tainted. You try sleeping in these conditions.
Photo by http://johnmariani.com/archive/2011/111023/cramped%20plane.jpg

My small gripes are a far cry from the danger of being permanently lost in the crowd, however. I may have a taste of what it’s like to be unknown now, but soon I’ll be with people who know me again. For those who are silenced permanently through large scale tragedy, they risk becoming statistics and lost forever. This is why we carve their names in stone. This is why Maggie De Vries’ Missing Sarah does her sister the ultimate service by naming her and telling her story. By doing so, she reminds us that Sarah was more than a statistic. She was a person with personal connections, who is missed by those who knew her.

There was some debate in class about whether labeling the missing women as sisters, mothers, friends, daughters, aunts, girlfriends, etc, simply tried to recategorize them into socially acceptable categories so that it would ‘matter’ that they went missing. I disagree. People are social animals. Even the most outcast amongst us has someone who knows his or her face, or his or her name. That is why I don’t object to the cover of Wally T Oppal’s Forsaken inquiry into the missing women. Yes, he puts labels on them. ‘Auntie’. ‘Mother’. ‘Friend’. ‘Sister’. ‘Daughter’. But I don’t see that as malicious, or just pandering to his (indubitably more privileged) audience so that they’d ‘care’. I see it more as a reminder that a person is more than what they do. A person is also what they mean to others. It’s a different sort of remembrance – the reminder that somebody misses them, that you would miss them if it had been someone you knew. I don’t see it as trying to erase the fact that they mostly worked in the sex trade – rather as a reminder that they were more than their job. Perhaps I’m wrong and this is wildly offensive. I don’t know. I have had four hours of sleep and I’m sitting in an airport alone craving human connection. But that was what stuck out to me in class this week – that names and labels don’t have to box people into socially acceptable categories. They’re just the best tool we have to express what one person means to another. That is why Missing Sarah is a beautiful story – because despite her hardships, Maggie finds all the ways Sarah connected with others and takes comfort in how her sister will be remembered by them as more than her statistic.

Labels in Oppal’s Forsaken

Work Cited

Vries, Maggie De. Missing Sarah: A memoir of loss. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008. Print.

I received a Chinese New Year e-card today from my little sister, who is in the first year of university across the country. And yes, I know e-cards are usually for old people who haven’t gotten the hang of the quick Facebook-Message-With-Emoticon, but I actually quite like them. They’re pleasant. They’re usually pretty. They have an extra level of care to them.

Look. See? Pretty.

The interesting thing about this, however, is that we’ve never sent each other Chinese New Year e-cards (or any other form of greeting) before. I was caught a little off guard.And also, neither of us identifies as Chinese.

My background is a big stew of everything – part white American with German and Scottish ancestry, part Indonesian with native Javanese and Chinese ancestry (okay, so we’re about 1/8 Chinese). I grew up in Indonesia, but went to an International School that followed American criteria.  I am what anthropologist Ruth Hill Useem calls a third culture kid, and  I identify with Fred Wah’s confusion over his mixed race identity.

So why the e-card? Why now? I believe – and most third culture kids I know will probably back me up on this – that as a mixed race kid growing up in both cultures, you get very used to defining yourself as different from the majority, and this becomes so intrinsically connected to your identity that you’re almost more comfortable not fitting in. Your authentic self is defined as “different”, and you’re most comfortable when you feel like you’re trying to fit in instead of actually doing so. We discussed this in class when talking about Diamond Grill – how ‘faking it’ doesn’t always mean you’re inauthentic, because authenticity is subjective. Why shouldn’t your true self be the person who smiles a little uncomfortably at the cousin they can’t really communicate with due to language barriers, but pretends to connect with anyways? In Diamond Grill, Wah has captured, through the motif of food, the comfort that can be drawn from having ties to your family, and also accepts that his experience is not theirs.

So back to my sister – why is she suddenly sending e-cards and singing Mandarin songs she learned in elementary school? Because she’s moved to Canada now, and instead of defining herself by the otherness of being half white, she’s defining herself by the otherness of being half Asian. It’s just more comfortable that way. Sure, she may not have grown up speaking fluent Mandarin, or even have lived in China at all, but that doesn’t mean her faking it through this year’s Celebration of the year of the Wooden Horse (as she informed me it was – I had no idea) is any less authentic, because she’s just reconnecting with a different part of her identity.

So, in conclusion – Gong Xi Fa Cai, mèi mei, adik, little sister, kleine Schwester.

Happy New Year.

Work Cited:  Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill.  Edmonton, AB: NeWest Press., 2006

I know, nobody wants to be associated with Myspace anymore. Myspace is your best friend’s older brother who everyone idolized and said was really going places, but now spends all his time awkwardly crashing your parties, pretending he’s still young and hip because he taught himself how to be a D.J (and he’s not even a good one).

In the context of identity formation, however, the death of Myspace (and subsequent galactic domination of Facebook) also rang a death toll for creative and individual expression through technology. According to a recent sociology paper on Facebook and identity formation by Shanyang Zhao, Sherri Grasmuck and Jason Martin, identity is how we are known to others and involves both us presenting ourselves in a certain way, and the endorsement of that presentation by others.

Sound familiar?

In class this week, we talked about how Facebook boxes people in and crafts their identities for them through a Western middle-class perspective, even selecting which life events are most important (e.g. getting married, having kids, changing jobs) automatically on your Timeline. Furthermore, since we are more likely to put up content that will get endorsed by the rest of our network, people in the same network are likely to put up similar content. Combine that with the fact that psychologists have found that people usually create first impressions within one tenth of a second (far too quickly for them to, for example, read that in-depth funny story in your Notes section since their eyes are being diverted to the starred important parts of your Timeline), and most people’s life stories are ending up remarkably similarly.

This is when the death of Myspace starts becoming a tragedy for individualism. On Myspace (before the Justin Timberlake overhaul, at least), people still put up content that was likely to be endorsed by their network, but what was highlighted was entirely within their creative control. The unique part of Myspace lay in the completely customizable layout. Again, since these first impressions are made quickly, look at the differences between a Facebook profile and a Myspace page from the same time period (circa 2008):

Facebook

Myspace

From a personal perspective, I know that I have a better sense of the personality of the Myspace page’s user than the Facebook’s. Objectively, the loss of Myspace has forced us all to create identity within Facebook’s standardized layout. We may each have a different and unique romantic partner, but we all have to present our relationship in the same way, in the same place, using Facebook’s definitions of relationships. Although that unique Myspace customization is now long a thing of the past, it’s a shame that the crafting of our life narratives online has become Mad Libs instead of a personal account – we can be unique and funny and even try to subvert the system, but only within the spaces given to us.