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(04/09/12 4:00am)
The Nightmare. Light guides your eyes to the center of a dark room, where a girl dressed in a school uniform looks up at the children’s backpacks that dangle above her. The backpacks are accompanied by threatening metal daggers, and she is surrounded by the weight of a three-ton circle made of graded examination booklets and children’s drawings. “The Nightmare” is a sculptural art exhibit created by Li Zhanyang in reaction to the school pressures that his daughter and other Chinese children face.
(03/26/12 4:00am)
The clanking of mahjong tiles shuffling across the velvet tablecloth. The soft swishing of the calligraphy brush sweeping out beautiful Chinese characters on the sidewalk. The sight of red paper couplets painted on doors to express hopes for the New Year. As I walk through a Beijing “hutong,” an alley filled with courtyard residences, my nostalgic yearning for old Beijing is abruptly interrupted by radio music blasting from cycle-rickshaws carrying camera-snapping tourists zooming through the neighborhood.
(03/12/12 4:00am)
At 16, I left the Church. Before that time, religion had been a constant presence in my life: Sunday morning mass, the after school Catholic program and all of the sacraments save confirmation and marriage. But as a teenager, I began to realize that there was little room in my Chicago parish for disagreement with Catholic doctrine or its social implications. The shame and guilt that homilies imposed on my emerging social values led to my decision to leave the church and continue my faith as a shopping cart Catholic. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a shopping cart or cafeteria Catholic is a pejorative term for someone who chooses to practice certain aspects of the Catholic doctrine and dissents from other Church teachings, often including their views regarding gay marriage, divorce, birth control and contraceptives.
(02/27/12 5:00am)
During my time in India, I have, on multiple occasions, had flashbacks to one Friday night last semester. While walking past the halls of an all-male West Campus section, I read a makeshift sign that said “USDA approved slut horses enter here.” In my mind, the vision of Duke women dancing on dormitory desks in male residence halls is strangely juxtaposed against images of Indian village women insisting on sitting on the floor in the presence of men sitting on chairs. There is a thin line between sexual liberation and objectification. Likewise, there is a similarly thin line between respect and oppression. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India once said “You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women.”
(02/13/12 5:00am)
In the cold winter nights of Rajasthan, wrapped in my overcoat and two layers of blankets, I have a recurring dream revolving around a deep-dish Chicago-style Gino’s East pizza. Having spent summers outside the United States, I can spot my “ugly American” symptoms, or “culture shock” to put it more nicely, from a mile away. Throughout the past three weeks in India, while negotiating cultural differences, I’ve run the emotional rainbow: elation, confusion, frustration, embarrassment and everything in between. I bifurcate between two extremes: the urge to romanticize this beautiful country and the desire to seek refuge in Udaipur Celebration Mall and eat McNuggets.
(02/01/12 5:01am)
There is a cave dweller living in my host family. Occasionally the figure emerges from his lair for water and food, but on the whole the only evidence of his presence is the frequent, echoing sound of book pages being turned in his room. The cave dweller, my Indian host brother, has been preparing to take the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for the past two years; the sole determining factor for admission to India’s premier engineering institute. I counted at least 23 textbooks on calculus, physics, biology and chemistry from which he is studying. His 12 to 15 hours a day study regimen makes my MCAT preparation look like child’s play. Should he beat the impossible 2 percent IIT admission rate and have his hard work pay off, he will find a privileged and prestigious career on the other end. Both literally and figuratively, my host brother is looking to become a part of the 1 percent.
(11/17/11 11:00am)
On Oct. 6, 2011, the United States government passed Senate Resolution 201 and the world moved on with little notice or fanfare. But I noticed the apology that came 129 years after the fact. More specifically, I noticed the contradiction the apology showed against the backdrop of present day law-making, but I’m getting ahead of myself. In 1882, 129 years ago, amid a floundering post-Civil War economy, a growing anti-Chinese labor sentiment encouraged the United States government to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, which heavily restricted the immigration of people from China. It has the dubious honor of being the nation’s first racist immigration law put into practice. It proclaimed Chinese “dangerous to the political and social integrity of the United States.” The act, which was proposed as a 10-year ban, would stretch six decades until its 1943 repeal. It took 129 years and persistent calls to action from the Chinese-American, Japanese and Jewish councils to extract an apology from the U.S. government for passing racist discriminatory practices into law.
(11/17/10 12:13pm)
“Why are there so many f—ing Asians in the library?” This was the first moment I became aware of my identity as a person of color. I was sitting in Perkins procrastinating reading the work of an old dead sociologist last month when a male student walked past and spewed this bit of verbal violence. In truth, there were only three Asians in the room—myself, a third-generation Asian American, included—but that’s tangential to my point.
(01/26/96 5:00am)
There was not a white Christmas in Durham, but for thousands of area school children, it was probably the next best thing.
