Monthly Archives: February 2015

Read at least 3 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find. Post this list on your blog.

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This blog post is late unfortunately due to an illness, and I’m only having the opportunity to make up for it now.

So I was reading some of my classmates’ blog post about home and it was such a privilege to share their stories, so thank you for sharing.

Here’s a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that I found. Home is where…

• you can be yourself
• you feel comfort
• there is consistency
• space for yourself
• you felt safe
• there is laughter
• there is love
• there is support

However, toward the end of the blog posts, there seemed to be consensus, that home was something that was inside of oneself, wherever you went

Write a short story (600 – 1000 words max) that describes your sense of home and the values and stories that you use to connect yourself to your home.

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I’m writing this blog post late, due to illness, but now that I have a chance, I would still like to share what I think of home.

It’s almost Chinese New Year and as I’m here in Canada, I start thinking of all these years I spent celebrating Chinese New Year. On the eve of the new year, all of us – cousins and aunts and uncles, gather together at my uncles’ place where my grandmother lives. (My grandmother will only stay with my uncle because he’s her only son and hence that’s her only home.. I’m told that in the Chinese custom, girls marry “out” or marry “away”, while boys stay in the family.) By this time, the house would be stocked full of oranges and snacks – lots of snacks – pineapple tarts, mini spring rolls, love letters, coconut tarts, egg tarts, barbeque pork, the list goes on. It’s so delicious, but we know that we’re going to have to eat all of them at every house that we visit over the new year, so we just put off devouring them.

My aunts and uncles are in the kitchen helping my grandmother with the finishing touches for dinner. The cousins are hanging out in front of the tv, letting the sounds of laughter and frying fill our hearts. We sit down as dinner as almost ready, and when everyone is ready, we have to “call” our elders before starting. My grandmother says its rude to make clanging noises (with the spoon on to the bowl) so we have to be careful. It’s the usual festive feast – roasted duck, roasted pork, chicken, seafood soup, noodles and rice and dessert. The cousins sit at a separate table, though I suspect this is just for logical reasons. We eat and try to make conversation. The distance in years and the miscommunications and any tensions between our parents, result in awkward silences, but the food is more than enough to fill the gaps. Plus, the tv is going on in the back, so we didn’t really have to make an effort to bridge the gap that our parents made.

After dinner, we bring out the cards and the cousins start a round of rumi. Our parents start talking, and I listen as they talk in dialect. This is where I’ve learnt the language they speak – from family dinners. They’re talking about the government, about immigration, about my grandmother’s siblings, about who’s making how much money, about the price of ginger. My grandmother was the oldest of 11 children and had to stay home while her younger siblings all received an education. A lifetime of taking care of her siblings and her children and her grandchildren, while watching her siblings and their children build companies and live overseas, has led my grandmother to resentful sometimes. Sometimes it seems like she’s envious of her siblings and their children and how successful they have become. My aunts and uncles internalize my grandmothers unsatisfied feelings of her life into their own unsatisfied feelings of their life.

The night is still young as the adults join us in rumi and it starts getting competitive. We start talking how much we are looking forward or not looking forward to visiting certain distant relatives. My grandmother starts telling us stories of her mother and the time they came from China. There was 2 children that were washed away during the flood of the Yangtze River. They called it the River of Tears. She reminds us the various ways to address our elders when we go visiting over the next few days. It is very important to get that right. There’s a specific way of addressing each elder depending of whether they’re on the maternal or paternal side and whether they are older or younger than the mom and dad.

The score is accumulated and the winner is one with the lowest score. Most of the time my grandmother or my aunt wins. We pack up pretty early on this night, because we have a whole day of visiting relatives on the next day. As we head out, we grab at least 8 oranges in preparation for the next day. It’s going to be a great new year. It always is when you have your family around.

1] In his article, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King discusses Robinson’s collection of stories. King explains that while the stories are written in English, “the patterns, metaphors, structures as well as the themes and charac- ters come primarily from oral literature.” More than this, Robinson, he says “develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read aloud” and in so doing, “recreating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186). Read “Coy- ote Makes a Deal with King of England”, in Living by Stories.

Read it silently, read it out loud, read it to a friend, and have a friend read it to you. See if you can discover how this oral syntax works to shape meaning for the story by shaping your reading and listening of the story. Write a blog about this reading/listening experience that provides references to the story.

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This is such an interesting topic to respond to. I read this piece once aloud and the second time, I decided to record myself. Here are some interesting observations 1) It is a challenge to read this piece silently to yourself 2) there’s a circular rhythm of speech within the piece 3) It is hard not to add words of your own to the story while reading it. The most interesting observation is that through reading this piece of literature out loud, I almost felt like I was imitating the way an Aboriginal person speaks.

It’s almost as if there is a metronome ticking away during my reading session. The words follow a circular rhythm, and it keeps the reader going. Whether or not this style of speaking is intended, the image that I had in my head was of the Chief in Pocahontas. I know this is a problematic image, but I thought that it was interesting that I had that image in my head even though I knew it was problematic. So, I was trying to find a scene where the Chief was speaking to link here, but I could not find a satisfactory one, I’ll just add this link here for now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUFJnmXeeoM, but though my search, I noticed that the way Pocahontas speaks and the way the Chief speaks is quite different. Pocahontas speaks in a way that is more familiar to us, while the Chief speaks in phrases. Though this is not an analysis about Pocahontas, I thought that since we are analyzing speech syntax, it would be interesting to bring up here.

In my reading, since the syntax of the text was much different from my day to day speaking, I unconsciously added words in various places, or I changed the words, just to make it fit the pattern of stories that I am more familiar with.

The other thing I noticed was that I began questioning the story. In my previous blog, I spoke about how I used to take stories and believe them whole-heartedly, especially if they were Aboriginal stories and especially if they’re told by an elder. However, when the story is written on paper, I started questioning the “facts” that I could decipher and wondered if they were true. Which I think is rather interesting because I have been taught to always question what I learn, and most of what I learn is in the written form, and so when I start to learn stories from the Aboriginal culture, I start to question the facts that they claim. For example, the book that is called “black and white” could be that it is an expression to describe a piece of document that binds parties “black and white”, but in the story, it is called “black and white” because the people that wrote it, one of them was black and one of them was white. So I thought that was really interesting. Perhaps it is because I’m coming into contact with these stories in setting that is asking me to be critical. Perhaps it is because of the format of the story. But it is an interesting observation that I made in myself.

“If Europeans were not from the land of the dead, or the sky, alternative explanations which were consistent with indigenous cosmologies quickly developed” (“First Contact” 43). Robinson gives us one of those alternative explanations in his stories about how Coyote’s twin brother stole the “written document” and when he denied stealing the paper, he was “banished to a distant land across a large body of water” (9). We are going to return to this story, but for now – what is your first response to this story? In context with our course theme of investigating intersections where story and literature meet, what do you make of this stolen piece of paper? This is an open-ended question and you should feel free to explore your first thoughts.

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My first thoughts after reading the story was it made sense…

See I once heard of a story of how Australia came to be. The story was that the prisons in England were overflowing and they had so many criminals in England that they had to find more space for them. So one day, someone decided to bring all these prisoners to Australia and leave them there. Then England would be safe.

Then. I once knew of a man who believed in the existence of aliens (other worldly beings). He believed that Earthlings once came from a different planet and that somehow our ancestors did something wrong and were banished to Earth. Hence sightings of UFO’s can be explained by our “supervisors” or “guardians” checking up on us and that as soon as we are on good behavior, we would be able to travel back home.

So when I heard this story of how Europeans were the descendants of the banished twin, I thought, well I suppose that it could be true. I was not there. I do not know if the story of how Australia came to be is true. I suppose I could find out, but I would only be finding out someone’s version of how it came to be. But I definitely do not know if we are descendants of an alien species. Not to offend or dismiss any story to be more true than the other, and in the same spirit as Chamberlin, why can’t they all be true?

In the same way that this story fit into the stories that I had already come into contact with, this story of how the “Indian” was the first and how is it that the descendants of the younger twin came back after all this time to try and get back what perhaps he thought he should have. This particular creation story puts the pieces together of why the descendants of the younger twin left; why they came back after all; why they behaved they way they did; why they placed so much importance on the power of the written word. I suppose then that I am emphasizing the need we have to fit the foreign into the familiar – the need to find patterns. In the context of my response, I was quick to accept the story, unquestioning the authority or validity of the story, because of what I already know about the Aboriginal culture and other stories of creation… because there is a narrative in my head and that is that the Aboriginal culture is most often misunderstood and that not a lot of people know about the stories within the Aboriginal culture, and hence whatever stories I hear that are Aboriginal are undoubtedly Aboriginal and must not be questioned. Which is also interesting now that I think about it because I should always be critical…

Then my second thought was, well what about the people on the other side of the ocean? What about the Asian people? Where did I come from? How do I fit into this story? Was I a descendant of the Coyote? Was I a descendant of the younger twin? Now that’s a story for another time.