Intersectionality Dreaming

The closing of another Gregorian Year

2011-12-23T15:42:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I posted here, because I've moved mostly over to Tumblr for much of my thinky-thoughts. It's also much more interesting and stimulating in terms of constantly flowing content and conversation, with organic conversation arising from conversations between people. I'm hoping to write another theory on how Tumblr operates to explain why it's been compelling.

I haven't written here since around this time of year, last year. It's not because I've given up on blogging entirely: I've been blogging irregularly at Silver Goggles, and in March, helped friends launch a Malaysian feminist blog as well. I've also been hard at work with writing my MA, and I just haven't had time to sit down and collect my thoughts together in ways that I did back in 2009.

In fact, it might be honest to say that I haven't really been able to collect my thoughts very coherently in general, and when I do, I throw them up on Tumblr to see how people could add onto them. I'm not keen on the single voice into the ether format of blogs these days for what I'm starting to see as a conversation between different peoples. But I can also see the potential of the blog format still, as a placeholder for ideas that don't get lost in the Tumblr shuffle.

So, we'll see what will happen with this blog in the coming months. I hope to return to blogging here on a regular basis, but that may not happen.

#talkaboutit Rough Sex, Boundary Pushing, Expectations

2010-12-20T19:01:00.001-04:00

This has been retweeted in #talkaboutit for a bit, it's Louis C.K. doing standup. Transcript and thoughts below the cut.

I remember one night, I was with a girl, I was 20 years old, I was already doing standup, and I did a show in Washington D.C. After the show one of the waitresses came back to my hotel room - she was really cute, and we were making out, in my hotel, and she's into it, she's humping me.

So I started to put my hand up her skirt, and she stops me. I'm like, uu, okay, so we're making out more, and I start putting my hand up her ass, and she stops me. So after a while, she went home, nothing happened.

And then the next night, I saw her at the club, and she goes, uh, hey, what happened last night?

I was like, *raises eyebrows, shrugs* what?

She goes, how come we didn't have sex?

I was like, 'cuz you didn't want to.

She's like, yes I did, I was totally into it.

I was like, w-why did you keep stopping me?

'Cos I wanted you to just go for it.

I was like, what does that mean?

She says, I'm kinda weird, I get turned on when a guy gets frustrated and just holds me down and fucks me. Like, that's a big turn-on for me.

I was like, well, you should've told me! I would have happily done that for you.

And she says, no, it has to feel real and dangerous.

Like, what are you, out of your fucking mind? You think I'm just gonna rape you, on the off-chance that, hopefully you're into that shit? *pauses, audience applauds* What kind of an idiot -- ooh, I'm kinda getting a rape-y vibe from this girl. I suspect she might enjoy being raped, maybe that's her thing. I don't want to ask 'cos that would ruin it, so, just take a shot and rape her, what the hell. What's the worst thing that could happen after all?

I laughed when he gets to his punchline of "you think I'm going to rape you on the off-chance you're into that shit?" Partly because, that should be the way to respond. It reminds me of this thread, on the guys who don't rape, despite being in circumstances where it could have been so easy. I have mixed feelings about this phenomenon, there're a ton of things happening in this video, let me break it down:

1) When women protest against rape, a lot of people say, "but women like it rough anyway. They like it when men plow ahead without asking for permission because asking for permission is pussification."

2) When both men and women protest one side or the other, there's always a smackback: "but 90% of the time men are assholes and will take advantage of the situation" (I actually got this last winter I was home) OR "but not all men are like that!"

3) Women People who DO enjoy rough sex and boundary-pushing coming away dissatisfied because they didn't get that from their partner, operating under the expectation that partners WILL push boundaries without being asked (like that's a good thing), because of stuff that goes on in #2 -- the assumption that "real men are assertive" and "women have to be passive", or maybe it's not an assumption of gender expectations, but certainly an assumption of what your partner is supposed to be like.

I find it difficult to parse how to explain

1) Consent is necessary;

2) Stop generalizing about 90% of men because you're not that fucking special;

3) There ARE venues to pick up men who will boundary-push but taking it for granted that it WILL happen is not so hot for other women.

I can see all sorts of unpleasantness from the spread of this vid, like "see, hur hur, women like it rough" and "stupid bitchez are lyin' when they say they don't like it rough" and "not ALL guys are like that! PROOF! so your mistrust of men is completely unfounded!"

Nonetheless, it's still an interesting video to unpack. Thoughts?

#talkaboutit No Word for "Let's Fuck" for Nice Girls

2010-12-20T13:38:00.000-04:00

[Trigger Warning for description of rape]

When I was about 11, my family was watching a Chinese serial about Temujin, or Genghis Khan.

In one episode, Temujin's sweetheart is kidnapped by a rival tribe. The camera showed only a feast, followed by the leader of the rival tribe picking her up, even though she's clearly protesting and trying to clamber out of his arms. He dumps her onto a bed and climbs on top of her. The next shot is only a closeup of her face, in that weird expression that looks like pain, but which these days you can also find in regular porn. There is saliva trickling down the side of her face from her mouth.

I asked my mom, what happened?

She said, she was raped.

And I asked, what's that?

She answered, she got raped!

A few episodes afterward, Temujin has rescued her, and he's trying to unite with her in their tent, to be happy, but she's sad. She grabs the wrist of one of his hands on her shoulders and pushes it down to her belly. He asks, "what happened?" in distress. She replies, clearly miserable, "[rival leader]." But Temujin assures her anyway that he still loves her. The next episode is 20 years on, and two young men arguing, which an older Temujin has to come settle. It's clear that although the elder son is clearly not his, Temujin still raised and loves him as his own.

I was lucky in being able to see how a rape victim should be treated afterwards: with love and respect, acceptance for what happened. She was never blamed for the rape. But she was also portrayed as completely innocent and the rape was implied to have been violent.

What I also took away from the conversation with my mother was this: rape makes babies. So for a long time, I thought rape was the verb for sex. I mashed my bootleg Ken and Barbie together, Barbie saying "rape me."

The thing about this is that even in these imaginations, where in my head, women are more or less always seducing men, the word I used was "rape". Because the one time I used the word "fuck" I was told it was a bad word. My family didn't speak any Chinese dialects around me (and certainly NEVER sex-related topics in dialects) nor did I know Malay well enough. So in my understanding, this action which tended to result in pregnancy, which I knew anyway was something adults did for pleasure, was "sex" when it was a noun, but the verb was "rape".

It would be a few years before I understood that rape is a bad thing, only after several newspaper reports using the word to describe really awful situations.

Because there is no word for a woman to use to a man to invite him to have sex with her. It would take me more than a decade to be able to begin to articulate how I, as a woman, had sexual desires, beyond boy-crazy teen hormones. There is no easy, polite word to use that a woman -- anyone -- can say, "LET'S HAVE SEX NOW BECAUSE WE CLEARLY DIG EACH OTHER" without the consequence of being labelled a Bad Person. And I grew up with all the attendant expectations that I, as a middle-class, respectable Chinese girl in an equally respectable middle-class neighbourhood, was a Nice Girl. I was taught, in all manner of ways implicit and explicit, I should be the Kind Of Girl Boys Want To Marry.

And, I guess, Nice Girls Boys Would Want To Marry do not ask boys to fuck, especially for her own pleasure. And because Nice Girls Boys Would Want To Marry do not ask boys to fuck, neither do they ask boys to stop. Because Nice Girls do not have an opinion on sex. It's just one of those things people do to make babies.

Bradley Manning and Where Assange Supporters Are Getting It All Wrong

2010-12-20T03:20:00.003-04:00

So ya'll, I am so sick of talking debating with rape apologists right now on Twitter. If these mofos were even paying attention to capable folks like Kate Harding and Sady Doyle in the first fucking place, we wouldn't even have to engage with why what Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann did was so problematic. So, no, I don't even want to talk about Assange, because frankly, the man sounds like a fucking prick.

I want to talk about Bradley Manning instead. Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has a very good article about Bradley Manning and the details of Manning's incarceration. At the moment, Manning "has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions" despite being "a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems". Why?

What's most interesting about WikiLeaks is how it has come under fire for leaking classified documents which are so damning, so incriminating, that governments are scrambling to shut it down. We're talking about an organization that exposed child trafficking by a company contracted by the US military. Bradley Manning is himself under investigation because he passed along a "war event log" to WikiLeaks. In correspondence, he emailed the following:

“[H]ypothetical question: if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time… say, 8-9 months… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?,” Manning wrote.

“[O]r Guantanamo, Bagram, Bucca, Taji, VBC for that matter… things that would have an impact on 6.7 billion people,” he continued. “[S]ay… a database of half a million events during the iraq war… from 2004 to 2009… with reports, date time groups, lat-lon locations, casualty figures… ?” (ellipses original) Source: Wired.com

I don't know about you, but Bradley Manning has done a truly heroic act: he put his career at risk to reveal the heinous crimes of a government that has no fucking business where it is right now; he acted on his conscience to basically commit a military crime (he's being charged under the Espionage Act for "Collateral Murder" -- nooo REALLY??); and he is the one who is actually really in jail right now. Wikileaks pledged to raise money to get him out -- $100,000 -- but he's still there.

In the meantime, Assange the asshole fucks up with two women in just about the same fucking week, and when they decide to press charges, not only is it hijacked by Wikileaks opponents who have thrown themselves into smearing Assange through any means possible, Wikileaks supporters have to be re-fucking-donkulous and conflate Assange with Wikileaks. Oh nos, Assange! And of course the next logical step, since we ~~live in~~ are soaking in a rape culture, is to attack the lyin' bitchez who accused him in the first place, because clearly they are plants! No justice for them! Because then there would be no justice for Assange! Because Assange is a precious special unicorn without whom Wikileaks will fall and crumble!

Wait.

Let's back the fuck up here, first, okay? Assange is NOT Wikileaks. Wikileaks is an organization of several people, all over the world, dedicated to doing that than Wikileaks is doing that panicking governments so much. Wikileaks, by itself, through the courage and bravery of informants like Bradley Manning (who may I remind you IS IN JAIL FOR REVEALING U.S. GOVERNMENT CRIMES) who are not Assange, can in fact stand on its own, even if it has to shuffle its ass all over the world in an effort to keep going.

But somehow or another, our astute media leaders as Moore and Olbermann think that all rape allegations stuff is "hooey" and while we're explaining to them that it's not good to dismiss rape charges just because Assange invented WikiLeaks, we get told, that's not the important thing! The important thing is that Assange is a precious special unicorn the government is trying to discredit! Because apparently Wikileaks cannot stand on its own when its leader is threatened! It will be discredited! Because... the man who is dedicated to transparency of governments... cannot be transparent himself because then we would see he, too, like the governments he's forcing transparency on, is corrupt and contemptible. Somehow, this is a Bad Thing, because you know! NO ONE CAN EVER REDEEM THEMSELVES ONCE PROVEN CORRUPT! Why, go tell that to Roman Polanski and Mike Tyson and Ben whatshisnameslinger.

Frankly, Assange refusing to address the rape allegations and go to trial makes him just as bad as the governments he's trying to smear. What does he have to hide?

IN THE MEANTIME! Bradley Manning is still in jail! Not only that, but Wikileaks has also failed to deliver on its promise to help pay for his defense, which was due in September. Bradley Manning is languishing while Leftists rush to defend Julian Assange. Bradley Manning only has two dozen people (who run the Courage to Resist org that is raising money to help him out) behind his back and very few large names championing his cause in USian MSM. Bradley Manning, one of the real whistleblowers, is undergoing torture, because he stood up for freedom of information.

Helluva choice of priorities!

We need to care about Wikileaks. It is doing good work.

Assange? Assange is a figurehead. He's a scapegoat for governments to attack, in hopes of discombobulating his supporters and whipping them into a frenzy, making them devote their energies into protecting him.

And you silly, silly fools, who are attacking Assange's accusers, attacking the #mooreandme campaigners, crying "Support Julian!" and badmouthing Sweden without bothering to get your fucking facts straight, you're playing RIGHT into the hands of Wikileaks detractors.

I don't expect you to have behaved otherwise with regards to Assange's accusers -- Moore and Olbermann, throwing rape victims under the bus by handily playing into rape culture? NO WAI! ... ya wai. It still hurts, though, because we feminists are also your allies! We also believe in government transparency, and also demand it, because what the government does affects us all, not just Wikileaks, not just Assange. Yet you couldn't give us that same respect, you couldn't have the imagination enough to identify with our concerns and not dismiss them. There are reasons why the Left Wing is so fractured, and it's because you refuse to take your allies into consideration.

I once said in class, the reason why the Left movements have so much difficulty mobilizing is because we are composed of fractured communities with different immediate goals and concerns, all of which are hard to negotiate. But we're not talking to each other, and because we're not talking to each other, we step on each other's toes and hurt each other. In the meantime, the right wing, which doesn't HAVE to make that same sort of sacrifice, because their immediate goal -- to maintain their privilege and advantages over us -- is fairly simple. All they have to do is distract us and make us fight each other.

This is what Assange supporters are doing when they smear his accusers, when they call rape accusations lies and deceit meant to bring down great men, effectively maintaining a culture which creates a gulf between those who are rape victims and those who are not. You silly, silly fools -- you could have asked feminists and womanist blogs and orgs for support in, oh I don't know, HELPING BRADLEY MANNING GET OUT OF THE CLUTCHES OF THE PUNISHING STATE YOU LIVE IN. We are the wrong target here. Assange's accusers are the wrong target here. So while Sady is facing down trolls and #mooreandme campaigners face Moore's willful scorn, companies are still withdrawing support from Wikileaks under government pressure in what will be even MORE harmful to Wikileaks operations than Assange facing trial.

As long Assange's supporters focus on punishment and not emancipation, you will fail! You will fail no matter how LEGION you are, no matter how much you cry for FREEDOM OF INFORMATION, how much you demand ACCOUNTABILITY, because you lack the imagination to imagine a better world for EVERYONE, because you lack the imagination for FREEDOM FOR ALL, because you lack the imagination to truly be ACCOUNTABLE TO YOUR FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS.

And to bring it back to the #mooreandme campaign, in Moore's zeal to protect the precious special fucking unicorn, he and Olbermann disrespected and did violence to an issue that cuts across gender, class, race, nationality, everything for a few privileged laughs.

To conclude my little tirade here, WIKILEAKS AND SUPPORTERS, WHAT ARE YOU FIGHTING FOR, REALLY? Because this is bigger than Assange and accusers, this is bigger than Moore and Olbermann, and it always has been. What the hell does Wikileaks and its ilk stand for, if not for emancipation from corrupt governments? what's the use of government accountability if it doesn't stop genocide and war crimes? what's the use of information and leaked classified documents if it cannot stop a war that is starving people, that mothers and fathers are sending their children to die in, that brings home shell-shocked soldiers? What does supporting Wikileaks mean if it has to involve discarding and hurting people who should be your allies?

What the fuck is the point of your legion, if you cannot, or will not, free one of your own?

ETA: I should not be writing at 2am, btw. I should also add that I speak primarily to Wikileak supporters who have been lauding Assange as well as Anonymous, a group which, for damned good reason, I'm terrified of. I will blog more about this tomorrow on why I fear Anonymous as much as I fear a government that's punishing Bradley Manning, despite the fact that with regards to Wikileaks, Anonymous and people like myself are pretty much on the same side.

ETA2: I realize that my post barely even scratches the surface of Wikileaks' significance, which unravels so many goddamn issues it'll take so much to untangle just what's so goddamn unjust about the world. I can only fight from my corner, and I can only handle and educate myself on so many issues at once, but if you want to tackle another angle on why Wikileaks is important outside of Assange and go indepth, feel free to drop links.

ETA3: I do NOT want this to become an Assange-fest because I am sick of hearing about the douchebag anyway. Moderation is now turned on. If you want to debate the veracity of his accusers' statements, or his innocence/guilt, do it elsewhere. In here, I want to talk about the significance of Wikileaks; about Bradley Manning; what it means for ALL OF US, not just the one dude.

This Is A "What About The Men?" Post

2010-12-06T22:32:00.000-04:00

Today is the anniversary of the murder of the 14 women at l'Ècole Polytechnique Montreal, 1989. On this day 21 years ago, Marc Lèpine purposefully went into a classroom of engineering students, separated the men from the women, made the men leave, shot the women, then wandered the school finding more women to shoot at. In 45 minutes, he had killed 14 women, with the rationale, "I hate feminists."

I attended a memorial ceremony today. Since that day, this memorial has blossomed to include remembrances of women who are killed because of who they are - women, that dare to exist beyond what small-minded men think they should be. I listened to two women talk about being dismissed, ignored, mythologized, because they are First Nations, and how their deaths are just part of life, and not a tragedy. They asked, how many women does it take before change must occur? What is the tipping point of death that will demand people take notice and stop the violence?

Today, I think about the men in that classroom that day. I wonder who they were, and what they were thinking about when told to leave the classroom. I wonder if they put up resistance and what they would have said then if they knew then what they know now. I wonder what the men were thinking as the gunman went around the university, looking for more victims, shooting them down.

I understand, of course, why they didn't stand up. I understand why self-preservation overrode everything else. I know this, I know survival instincts. Fifty men against one man with a gun, leaving that one man with a gun against nine women.

This makes me angry. For all the literature upon literature of (usually heterosexual) men doing brave deeds, for all the sacrifices that men are supposed to make on battlefields laying down their lives, for all the strength that men are supposed to possess to protect us weak frail women -- this apparently was not enough to save the lives of 14 women that day, and it still isn't enough.

For all the stories we are told about the natural intelligence of men, the natural physical strength, and their natural instinct to protect women or those weaker than them, there were still those men who walked out of that room that day, December 6, 1989.

I think about the terrible bargain so many of us must live with. I think about male homosociality and macho culture that demands men behave a certain way when there are no women present. I think about rape jokes and how they abound when there are only men in the room. I think about the language of dominance that lends power to the masculine.

What about the men? Why would men allow such beings as Marc Lèpine to exist without check? Why would men laugh at rape jokes that condone the subordination and humiliation of women, why would they stay silent? Why would men let other men do and say these things?

Where were those men that day and where were their fucking heroics? Where was their fucking machismo that day? It seems in the face of true injustice, men's "naturally competitive" edge take leave. Patriarchal myths are cowardly like that.

I worry. No, I fear. I fear for my sisters, cis and trains, and for my queer siblings in humanity, because tomorrow might be a day that some gunman would calmly, rationally decide he would take a gun to them and shoot them down and leave them in a ditch somewhere, because that's what a reasonable person would do in the face of something that affronts them. I fear another resentful man would find it a suitable punishment to rape and murder women because they dared take his rightful place.

And I fear that men who are supposed to be our allies, who daily complain that of course they love women and want to see women happy, why aren't we pleased with their silly little compliments and derring-do's that embarrass us and objectify us, these men who are supposed to be stronger and protective and caring, these men who are our brothers and fathers and cousins and uncles and friends -- I fear that, instead of standing with us to face the fire, instead of standing up against a genuine danger, instead of speaking out against the little things designed to humiliate us if we ever knew -- I fear they, too, will walk out of the room to leave us to our fate.

I can't say I would be surprised, though. And I can't decide if that's worse. I wouldn't be able to hold it against them, but my heart would still break.

I don't want to hold men to these higher standards that the patriarchy claims to hold them to (and fails to make them accountable to, but that's why patriarchy as an oppressor system works), as feminism has shown how these standards are a sham. Yet men still believe in the inferiority of women, even as they benefit from the advances feminism has made.

I just wish men were as strong as the myths say they are.

Good night, all you who others deemed not human enough to be worthy of empathy. I wish you peace.

Random Story Time

2010-11-23T02:08:00.001-04:00

When I was in Morocco, we had a tour guide called Mizouri Abdul. "Like the American state?" my aunt asked. "Yes," he replied. He tried to pronounce her name, but couldn't, and said, "I call you Mississippi!"

He was an incredibly funny man, and the first thing he taught us was how to say "UN-BE-LIE-VABLE!" in his very specific, overexcited way. (He also taught us how to say Shukran.) He also had the habit of stopping with a grandiose wave of his arm to indicate some sight with a proclamation, "wherever Mizouri stop, is a beautiful picture to take!"

One day on the bus my aunt called "Mizouri!" He barely turned around to response, "Yes, Mississippi!"

He regaled us with stories of his wedding night and was very frank about his love life, told us about the hard work his monarch did for the country, was very firm in his opinion that Saddam was a hero, and since he had to take care of us, he had to mutter his prayers even as he led us through Casablanca. In Old Fez, he said, "don't go far away, because if you get lost-" he pointed to the sky "-you might end up on the moon," because Old Fez is kind of a maze to stupid tourists like ourselves (and amazing).

Anyway, there wasn't a point to this post - I was just thinking about him tonight. Morocco made a huge impact on me; memories of it were a factor in taking Arabic in uni. I did not have a completely good time in Morocco - it was singularly one of the worst holidays I've ever taken with my mother, who was displeased with my choice of an undergrad English degree in Canada and had no qualms about shaming me in front of the other tourists, and my aunt, who decided to take my mother's side against me (despite having had the same fight with her own mother, a generation ago).

But for all that, memories of Morocco still remain a balm. I want to go back someday.

A Metaphor For the Left

2010-11-13T15:54:00.000-04:00

In a lot of discussions in school, there're a lot of questions which basically have the theme of "Why can't the Left unite the way the Right has?" There're plenty of answers, from my outsider's perspective: the Right groups unite because they're willing to put aside certain concerns, while the Left values these concerns. The Right doesn't care about people being thrown under the bus; the Left is comprised of a large base of people who keep getting thrown under the bus.

The most infuriating answer I see is the one that places blame on identity politics and the divisiveness that comes about as a result of disagreement of tactics and the like. There's this Kumbaya "why can't we just get along" hand-wringing nonsense. So I've been having some severe disagreements with classmates. But after that we can get along just fine.

Here's my metaphor: we live in different houses. Each house has its own rules and household culture. Maybe I like my house neat and you don't mind sloppiness. This doesn't mean we have to fight over our respective ways of handling our houses. It's perfectly okay for us to live in our own houses. We shouldn't be fighting over this, because there're people who are trying to tear down our houses. And when we argue about how to handle our own houses, we're just making their job easier.

The thing is that we're dealing with people who aren't just living in bigger houses, but can hire people to take care of those houses while they're busy sabotaging our houses. They live in gated communities which are safer because they have the means to do so.

So, it's perfectly fine to critique one another's style of running our houses because maybe the dialog will be useful. But we need to learn how to trust each other in running our own houses, and work together in preventing our houses from being torn down. We don't need to be living under the same roof to get stuff done together. We're not all the same. Stop yelling at me about how it's not important for me to spend my time cleaning my house and there are better things I could be doing.

This metaphor is a work in progress.

A Picspam of the Kobo

2010-10-23T02:05:00.000-03:00

Today I bought myself the classic Kobo eReader, which is the 1st gen device that is going out of the way to make way for the 2nd gen device. The main difference between the two is this: the 2nd gen device has WiFi, so you can download ebooks directly into the eReader, and it's a smidgen faster.

I'd been holding out on getting an eReader, mainly waiting for the tech to boom so I could find a device that suited me best, but as it is? There are a ton of books being released in ebook formats right now that I want, great online magazines that release their stuff in eReader formats, and when I last moved from Nova Scotia to Ontario, I was miserable at the book culling I had to commit (and my dad wasn't pleased with the four banana boxes of books either).

But with the Kobo classic going out, the local Coles was selling it for $128. I visited it a couple of times, asking completely different sales assistants each time if I could have a look, admiring it, wondering what colours I could get it in, wondering if it was a good investment, compared to other eReaders out there.

The fact is, there aren't very many stores which sell eReaders, and today I made the decision that I had to get it, but put it off until later, later, later, and then I went into Coles at the end of the day, and found the Kobo priced at $99, so there wasn't a reason not to get it anymore. Now what follows is a major, major picspam. You've been warned!

So, on the box itself, on one of the sides, there's some stuff about it, like:

Includes:

- Kobo eReader

- USB cable

- QuickStart Manual

Specifications:

- 120,, x 184mm; 10mm thick; weight 221g

- 1GB memory; (1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity may be less)*

- Holds up to 1000 titles, based on average eBook size of 1MB

- 6" E Ink display wiht 8 level gray scale

- Bluetooth Connection

- Battery Charge: up to 2 weeks (battery charge and life vary by use)

- Supports ePub and PDF

* What? I thought it was funny that this was stated on the box itself.

So I pulled it out and had a nice look at the nice packaging. I'd seen the Kobo eReader itself, of course, so I knew ahead how lightweight it was, and how it looked like in general. There's a mini-USB slot, and a slot for an SD card reader, too.

So there's more packaging, with the Quickstart guide and USB cord, and the eReader itself. It charges by connection to the computer, so I plugged it in:

The light up right shifts from red, to violet, to blue. When it hits blue, it means it's fully charged.

The back is comfortably quilted. I don't think you can see it in this picture, but there is a teeny-tiny hole for resetting the Kobo in case it ever gets fubar.

While I waited for it to charge, I started to install the Desktop application. It didn't launch automatically, but finding it wasn't very hard. In time, this was showing up on my screen:

Pretty straightforward stuff: email, password, and so on so forth. Before you unplug the Kobo, you have to hit the Eject button down left. Let's have a look at what the Kobo desktop application home looks like:

Yeah, like a browser, lol. Nothing very fancy here. Very straightforward. So, let's explore the store. The left and right buttons on the top ribbon navigate the recent releases, and you can see at the top right there's a search field:

I have priorities, okay? (OK, I've not read anything of JR Ward's other than her Black Dagger Brotherhood. But still, it's JR Ward!) (And I do have a hardcopy of Behemoth. It's relevant to my work.) (And I am TOTALLY overdue on getting one of Maurice's books, dammit.)

The search pulls out the closest matches:

Pretty straightforward. I haven't actually bought the book yet, so I can't tell you how easily it happens (my credit card is linked to my dad's monies, so I try not to spend a lot with it, but this store doesn't take debit; once I get an okay with him on a budget I will buy buy buy)... but I can't imagine it being too complicated. If it is, I'll screencap it. Now onto your library. As it happens, you can read stuff in your library on your desktop, if that's your thing.

I'm morose like that so this is what I picked:

If you read stuff on the computer, you get pretty colours!

Well, sort of. Navigation buttons are straightforward. And you have a choice from smallest...

.. to largest font sizes...

... and where in the story you want to jump to.

And this might have been more interesting if it hadn't been for the blue light on my eReader! Onto the more interesting device! There were a lot of flashing screen thingums, as it had to consolidate the new material (I'd moved in a couple of things manually, so it needed time to sort the documents).

Note, if I hadn't had any Documents, that option would be gray. Right now, I'm reading Apex Magazine #17! It's in ePub format:

It's pretty straightforward from here on out. The big blue button is for navigation, and you press the center to select stuff. On the left side, there're buttons for Home, Menu, Display, and Back.

Reading PDFs are a bit more difficult, however. I asked for a PDF of Crossed Genres Year Two (under the sad mistaken assumption I could read on the computer), and this is how it shows up:

If you're viewing the whole page, the text is rather small, which is fine if that's the sort of thing you go for, but I had to figure out a better way. Enlargening it means you have to scroll left and right a lot. It's a bit annoying, but I found a good compromise in choosing the Landscape option. I still have to scroll right to get all the text on one screen, and scrolling down only gives me a few more lines at a time, but it's still something.

The other thing about the Documents, though, is that it doesn't count in your "I'm Reading" list, for some reason. Maybe because I haven't read very many pages yet. But on my Documents page, it shows that the PDF has been opened (I have another PDF, which shows as Unread).

It's really late, so I had to put aside my new toy, and in its sleep mode, it shows the cover of a book you're currently reading. Oddly, in my case, it's showing the cover of Crossed Genres Year Two. Not that I'm complaining, because it's a very pretty pretty cover!

About half an hour, it turns off, and it's got a bland ~Powered Off~ (Press Power to Start) in place of the prettiness right now, but hey.

I haven't really settled down to read on this baby yet, but I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Response to: "Trauma Time: A Still Life"

2010-09-19T20:43:00.000-03:00

Stewart, Kathleen. "Trauma Time: A Still Life." Histories of the Future. Eds. David Rosenberg and Susan Harding. Duke University Press, 2005, pp 321 - 338.

Just when I thought I couldn't top the obnoxious theorizing that I was reading about intellectualism earlier today, I just read something that did. The article: Trauma Time, by one Kathleen Stewart.

What is trauma time? Trauma time is that sensation, that experience where everything is moving, change is happening, that leaves someone standing still and disorients people at once, as their brain tries to catch up. From what I understand, because she writes that trauma time is not an idea or a concept, it "has the restlessness and obsessions of modernity's simultaneous overstimulation and numbness, alarm and anesthesia." She goes on to dictate a series of "still lifes", basically snippets of people's lives that she has recorded to illustrate trauma time, I hope, and "do not signify something that can be gathered into a generalizable code or system as they do ferment and record a series of moves." Sounds good so far, until she starts talking about how she learns that the photocopier machine can staple stuff, and she's gobsmacked that it does, and it's like being illiterate, and everything's change! Everything's changing! Things are always improving and you must always keep up! Then there are a couple of vignettes that don't actually make sense to me, like a vandalized car, and a chick who housesits as a hobby and is damned good at gambling and lucky with the slot machine.

Oh, but Kathleen Stewart wants me to understand the pathos of a car that has "PMS POWERED" on the number plate that is now standing without two of its wheels, looking tipsy on a "hastily placed jack", and Stewart uses her housesitting friend to illustrate that the slot machine? You just have to wait for the right time, that it's a matter of being able to feel all the pent-up hopes and dreams in the lost tokens within the machine and taking that final leap of faith - apparently this is part of the talent of winning at a fucking slot machine.

But where this article really enrages me is when she starts describing the maintenance man of the trailer park she lived in who leads a life emotionally and psychologically abused by an ex-girlfriend and he can't read and has no driver's license and he is anxious and scared because of the shit he's been through due to his illiteracy. "He hated his job because his boss was viciously cruel to him, his pay was below minimum wage, and he was 'live-in help', on call twenty-four hours a day to take care of anything that came up." So Stewart listens to these storys, that "went from bad to worse with one humiliation after the next and no future to imagine." Until finally, he calls an old girlfriend, and she has a daughter who adored him as a child and is now paraplegic and he decides to move out there to be this young woman's caregiver, raising money and deciding when he'll leave and how to sell his stuff.

And she writes,

"From the desperation of a present-past misery he was caught in, he invented the fantasy of a new and improved still life. Another past, nostalgically remembered, became not only the site and living trace of redemption but the means to achieve a future. From a space entrenched in trauma time, a last-ditch, desperate agency propelled him into a history of the future."

I'm sorry. I just. I don't even. WHAT? The man is trying to live his life. And make it better. How the hell do you know that it's a fantasy of a new life? What if he actually made it? What the hell was wrong with you that you couldn't empathize with him all those evenings he decided to get personal with you and off-load his stories onto the one attentive ear he found? Why are you writing this paragraph so goddamn far removed from what's actually happening: a man set on improving his lot by doing his damnedest to get the fuck out of a bad situation, in order to help someone else and himself?

No. I just. No. I'm very good at code-switching , but I am not going to go this distance, stepping back so far that I'm talking about "stills", and "scripted" "visceralities", and "forces" and "specters" and "phobias" and "idioms" and "technology".

Because this "trauma time" you're talking about is everyday stuff. We all live with it and we all learn how to deal with it. I know this anthology you just contributed to is "a conceptual tool kit for thinking about the hopes and anxieties embodied in the ideas of the future", but I'm not sure I want to leave reality behind for such an abstract method of approaching what's really just day-to-day business. I don't have the spoons for this.

Malaysia Day

2010-09-17T01:01:00.000-03:00

So before I run out of Malaysia Day, I should say something about it.

This day has never really been in my consciousness before this year.

It is the day when Malaysia was officially incorporated, which includes East Malaysia. Which, sadly, is a region I tend to forget. I forget that I am, at heart, West Malaysian, and don't know much about East Malaysia. I don't know what the politics of Sarawak and Sabah really are like, but I am quite sure they are similar-but-not-quite to politics in the peninsular. It makes me wonder, perhaps I should just call myself Malayan, and I find myself thinking that, especially when I become painfully aware that whatever politics I'm talking about tend to be mostly concentrated in West Malaysia.

Nonetheless, Sabah and Sarawak are part of Malaysia, and if I want to celebrate Malaysia Day, I need to tip my hat to them for bringing in their own slices of awesome to the whole cake.

The recent fandom wank involving one Elizabeth Moon's tirade against Muslims failing to assimilate properly into greater American culture, using such alarming dogwhistles as knowing many Muslims had nothing to do wiht 9/11, yet it is still unjustifiable that they should expect to build a community centre by the site of the tragedy without any fuss. If anybody was paying any attention, this is easily debunked. No fuss was caused at all, until recently when the neo-cons of America needed a scapegoat to direct media attention to.

The main driving point I want to get here is the idea of assimilation being a categorical good. Moon actually posits the residential schools, that severed Native Americans from their culture by forcing them to adopt the culture of colonists and imperialists, is in any way a social good because now everyone can speak English!

Ms. Moon, under the influence of colonialism, I cannot speak my own mother tongue nor my national language properly. This is not a social good. This is a personal tragedy.

Nor is assimilation in any way a social good in a multi-cultural society. The idea of multiculturalism implies multiple cultures. Assimilation is the effacing of one's own culture in the face of the dominant culture. Not exactly the idea of cultures living side by side. That assimilation is in any way conducive to multiculturalism is deeply insulting to countries and past civilizations that have been able to muster the state without making the same demands that white American supremacists make of their immigrants.

Ms. Moon, I would like to invite you to Malaysia, to the apartment block my aunt lives in. On the same floor, walking along the corridor, are the doors of the families that live there.

Over one door is gorgeous Arabic calligraphy, that immediately identifies this household as the abode of a Muslim family. Over the next door, a portrait of a Hindu god I am unfamiliar with. The next apartment over, there is an altar by the door, red with gold letters, with ribbons, and electric candles. It is typical of somewhat-traditional Chinese households, a shrine to ask local spirits and gods to watch over the family. It is not atypical for a Christian household to display their faith either, with a cross, a crucifix, a portrait of Jesus Christ and/or his mother Mary.

No one would dare make the demand that one or more of them must taken down these signifiers of their cultures and faiths in order to fit in better with Malaysian society. Because all of these are part of Malaysia's social fabric. Laypersons understand this. Supremacists do not.

Malaysian history is filled with communities that have isolated themselves, "determinedly distinguished themselves by location, by language, by dress" (adjusted accordingly for practicality and availability of resources). We managed quite bloody fine, thank you very much, without the feudal sultans getting bugs in their bums over how disloyal and uncivic they are, so long as they paid their goddamn taxes and didn't disturb the peace.

You don't get the right to use the label "multi-cultural", Ms. Moon, to describe your ideal America, because it doesn't fit. You are demonstrating that you cannot accept with warmth in your heart that these people are different and this very difference contributes to the beauty of your country. If you cannot do that, you cannot make claims to multiculturalism.

We Malaysians may not be very good at multiculturalism or pluralism or such, but when I go home, I am awoken by the morning call to prayer, and I listen to the cry with relief, knowing that I am truly home. And more and more, I am aware of how limited my sphere of friendship is within my own country, that most of the people I know are of a certain culture, certain class, certain race. This is a good thing, to be aware of people who are different from me.

This Malaysia Day, I am pleased to be aware of them. I am pleased to have this chance to be so far away fro Malaysia that I am stepping back to have a good look at the social fabric. The tapestry is a mess, but it is still pleasing to look upon.

Look, okay, Malaysia is a Muslim country. But Islam has always been welcoming of other faiths. The Christian states have rarely been so kind. Compare the Golden Age of Islam to the Renaissance of Western Europe... which time period had greater diversity?

I don't have much truck with religion, but I think it is a splendid thing to have so many ways to celebrate a monotheistic deity, who can't help but be pleased at the variety of forms worship can take, because surely it must be a sight more interesting that way, especially if the deity is so creatively inclined as all that to make this world. And for those of us who are of polytheistic faiths, it's even more splendid to know that we have such a vast array of gods and goddesses and other spirits watching over us.

I am not proud to be Malaysian. That implies an accomplishment. I haven't accomplished anything to "deserve" my nationality. I am. By virtue of my birth, my identity card, my passport, my circumstances, I am Malaysian.

Today, I acknowledge this.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled lives.

Body Issues: Conversations My Body Has

2010-09-06T22:42:00.000-03:00

"We really should eat something before we go out," one half of the reasonable brain said, as we set out on our evening walk. "I know it's early, and by the time we get back it'll be dinner, but we really should eat." We'll call it Less-Conscious Brain, or LCB for short.

"We'll be fine," said the other half of the reasonable brain, the one actually in charge. We'll call it Conscious Brain, or CB for short.

"Peckish," said the stomach.

"But not too hungry?" CB asked.

"Not yet," the stomach replied.

"Good, off we go then."

About 200 meters into running, everybody was complaining.

"It's too hot in this sweater!" said the shoulders.

"I can't handle the burning!" cried the chest.

"Our knee pistons are knocking!" the legs complained. "It's been too long since we ran."

"We ran just a month ago," CB groused, but slowed down and we walked. We meant to hit Sanctuary Park before turning back. A little before we got there, we felt a drop of rain.

"Oh, look it's raining now. Now can we go home and eat?"

"Okay, fine."

We walked home in general silence, mostly contemplating tomorrow. When we got home, the complaints started again.

"Hungry!" the stomach piped up.

"We need to change," CB said, shrugging off the jacket. We sat at the computer, played a bit of Echo Bazaar, tweeted our return home, listened to a few more songs on the Walkman.

"This is ridiculous, we really need to eat. We just used precious calories!"

"And this is supposed to mean anything when we've been sitting on our ass all day?"

"Don't give me that," LCB sniffed. "You're the one that ignores us when we need to do stuff. Like finish editing that essay. Or laundry. Or call the telephone company."

"The food can still wait."

"Still! Hungry!" the stomach cried.

"Hang on, hang on. Do we even know what to eat yet?" CB said.

"What is there to decide on? There's corned beef and rice. That's what we've been eating the whole week."

"There's also a couple of eggs left. Shall we have fried rice? How about fried rice? That would be fun, wouldn't it?"

"Hungry!" the stomach roared, and released a bit of gastric acid to make its point.

"Okay!" CB wasn't stupid; it liked to ignore the stomach but not that much. "Okay, fine, we'll cut up some luncheon meat."

"One day, we'll get on some drugs that'll make you actually listen to us and do what we want rather than reason your way through what we don't want," LCB complained. "One day."

"Yes. But you know... that one day comes only when I feel like we want to."

"Yeah well, fuck you too."

Malaysiana: Independence Day, or Lack Thereof

2010-09-06T00:19:00.000-03:00

While in Canada, I tend to miss celebrations that I should be aware of, like the Lunar New Year, or Adilfitri, or Hungry Ghost Month (which is happening now, should be ending soon). August 31st was Merdeka Day, or Malaya's Independence Day. It's the day when the British left Malayan leadership roles after dicking around with us for a few hundred years.

At the last Steampunk World's Fair, I kept referring to how the British colonizers left our shores, but left their mark behind. (Moniquill rightly put me in my place by reminding me that "the colonizers never left ours".) The thing is, I was being simplistic. After the British left, we had their parliament system, their education system. We were and are still dependent on business from the West. We still use the economic success of the West as a yardstick against which we measure our own growth. (Seriously, what is there to grow? In the West Peninsula we are a small small land, and hell no are we going to destroy the natural forests of East Malaysia to slake capitalist lust.)

When I was a child, I used to turn on the television to watch the Merdeka Day parade. It was the highlight of the year for me; I still love parades. For some reason, it registered in me that gaining independence was the highlight of my nation, the best thing we ever did. Then it was overshadowed by the building of the Petronas Twin Towers and being named piracy capital of the world. I thought we were doing okay for ourselves. And for most part, we kinda are.

But time away from home, and my studies, have made me question what it means to be independent. Not as an individual - I don't understand that at all, because I'm still living on my parents' funds (hello privilege) and while I was supporting myself for a while, that quickly went down the drain. I mean, as a nation. In today's global village setup, it seems there is no single nation that is completely self-sufficient, unless it eschews systems of dominance and capitalism and refuses to participate in the race to improve their standing in international politics and protect their interests (which are probably as simple as "don't get fucked over by the big boys").

In today's world, what does independence mean?

I want to say, it means that we have agency to act for ourselves, to speak for ourselves, to stand on our own accomplishments. Except, what does this mean? Why is this so important? And if it is, how good are we at it?

This is a hard post for me.

I've been talking about the aftereffects of colonialism on Malaysia, considering how badly hit we were, how we're coping. I went to visit an uncle who lived through WW II in Singapore, and when he referred to the British in pre-independence days, he called them "the colonial masters". He said it in a way that was sardonic, full of awareness of how bad and yet true the term was.

When I told my dad and brother this, my dad said, "yeah, I don't have a colonial mindset like that. Must be a generation thing."

And you know, I can't get behind that. I don't believe we've truly cut ourselves off from the old masters. If we did, we might not place so much focus on going to Western universities, because local universities aren't "recognized". We might not be so nice to white foreigners who come visiting, as opposed to the brown and black ones that come to work and help our economy. We might also not be so antagonizing in our desire to cut ourselves off from all Western influence, particularly more liberal values, which are perfectly compatible with our cultures but we say they aren't, we're Asian, we're not like them. Would we define ourselves so much against the West if we were truly free of the mindsets they imposed on us?

So, the fact is, there was no Merdeka Day post because I didn't feel in the spirit of national independence anymore. It's incongruous with how I feel inside, because I'm in such a good place in my life right now, I feel like I'm much closer to merdeka in my spirit, but that is because I've come to recognize and accept that my country's illusion of independence from the old colonial masters is just that: an illusion.

And I think, once we as a people come to accept that we have been indelibly marked, and once we stop defining ourselves against the West, and once we stop resisting ideas and values that we think are imported from the West, but really can be found in our own cultures, then I'll think it'll be more truthful to say we've achieved Merdeka.

Otherwise, it's all politics.

Magic Dolphin: "First Kiss", No Boundaries

2010-09-01T18:03:00.000-03:00

This is a new series I'm starting and updating whenever I feel like fan-squeeing. In this series, I will share and analyse songs by Alexander Rybak, a Norwegian pop idol, with a folk-classical background, best known for winning Eurovision 2009 with a landslide victory. You can also find this series on my Tumblr, under the tag "Alexander Rybak is a magic dolphin from outer space".

Lyrics:

Deep in your heart
There's a small hidden room
And you know that I hold the key
You're gonna travel all over the world
Places where I'll never be

Someday you'll marry the man of your dreams
And I will be crying all night
But there is a secret that both of us know
That's why I'm feeling alright
Yes, there is a secret that both of us know
And that's why I'm feeling alright

There may be
Smart guys and tall guys - whose stronger than me
Ten times the charmer than I'll ever be
But one thing, Maria, I sure didn't miss
Your very first kiss

Need I say more?
The feeling is pure
And I felt the warmth of your lips
Though the time will go on
And the seasons will change
I'll allways think back on our kiss

Someday the runway will carry you home*
And I will be smiling all night
Cause there is a secret that both of us know
And that's why I'm feeling alright
Yes, there is a secret that both of us know
That secret belong in the night

There may be
Sharp girls and short girls - whose sweeter than you
Ten times the lady and one of a few
But one thing, Maria, you sure didn't miss
My very first kiss

Deep in my mind there's confusion and hope
And I know that you stole my thoughts
I'm gonna travel all over the world
Searching for someone to hold

Don't say it's over
When I'm underneath**
Let's see if our feelings unite
Oh, there is a secret that both of us know
And that's why we're smiling tonight
Yes, there is a secret that both of us know
And that's why we're smiling tonight

There may be
Someone who truly believes love is blind
But I beg to differ there's two of a kind
They will find each other
And that is a real bliss
Our very first kiss

So "First Kiss"! First song on Alexander Rybak's second album No Boundaries, with a dramatic violin melody at the beginning, and a waltz rhythm to it. Dedicated to Maria, one of his three new backup violinists (and the best song of the three he wrote for them), "First Kiss" narrates the feelings of this one dude who is busy reminiscing over his first kiss. Was Alex Rybak's first kiss really with Maria? I don't know, I don't care, but this song does neatly encapsulate the nostalgia and lingering affection most people have for the people they share their first kiss with. (To be fair, my most lingering affection is for the second dude I made out with.)

I love love love the structure of this song, and out of his whole album, First Kiss is the best song, technically speaking. The composition is solid, with those sweeping crescendos and 1-2-3 beats. The lyrics have a beautiful structure, with three verses for each part, and each part taking on a different facet of the memory - his side, her side, an outsider's. The repetition of theme and imagery, with variation in each part, drives in the power of the memory of the first kiss. Performance-wise, Alexander Rybak's voice hits highs and lows beautifully.

* "Someday the runway will carry you home" is just SUCH a great line. It's like the one line from "If You Were Gone" which I will now have to post - this is one of those songs which has a really folk-classical style that can't be dated to one particular era and sounds so old-timey, yet this one line pins it solidly to the modern era. I get so jarred everytime I hear this line, and it never gets old how beautifully it fits, and what a great image. Also, it scans SO beautifully:

Someday the runway will carry you home

OK, fuck, the WHOLE song scans beautifully like this.

** "Don't say it's over when I'm underneath" is my second favourite line in the entire song, mostly because I can't listen to it without my maturity flying out the window. He's got several throwaway lines like this which can so be taken the wrong way, and this one more or less constantly induces several thoughts of what exactly I would do if I had Alexander Rybak underneath me, many of them obscene.

In case you were wondering-

2010-09-01T16:29:00.000-03:00

I'm in the midst of changing my template and overall blog design using Blogger's Template Designer. It's not the greatest, but the best I can do. Commentary is welcome. Unless you read this through a feed, in which case it probably doesn't affect you anyway. But comments would still be nice.

Jaymee Goh Elsewhere

2010-09-01T16:09:00.002-03:00

I can be found almost everywhere!

LiveJournal (fantasyecho)

Dreamwidth (jhameia)

Tumblr (jhameia)

Twitter (jhameia)

Flickr! (jhameia)
LinkedIn (Jaymee Goh)
Academia.edu (Jaymee Goh)

NaNoWriMo (Jha'Meia) Regions: Malaysia, Canada:: Nova Scotia, Canada:: Ontario:: Hamilton

For writings related to my thesis in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory and postcolonial steampunk in general:

Silver Goggles

For entertainment and fiction, I administrate:

Steampunk Nusantara

To email me: jhameia.goh (at) gmail.com

Writing

2010-09-01T12:54:00.004-03:00

I have contributed to several spaces online, most of which are cross-posted here eventually, but if you wanted to read the original comments, click on through:

Published Online Fiction:

Expanded Horizons #19 June 2009: Between Islands
Crossed Genres #25: Lunar Year's End

Racialicious:

The Intersection of Race and Steampunk

Quintessentially Chinese? China Doll Edition [cross-posted: original post here]

Steampunking: Are Steampunk Westerns Non-Eurocentric? [cross-posted: original post here]

Tor.com

The Post-Modernity of Steampunk

Steampunk as Subculture

No Elitism Please, We're Steampunk

Steampunk Plot Bunnies for Adoption

In An Alternate World, I Could be "Cosmic Goddess"

An Ode to Lady Ada

There is Totally Punk in Steampunk

With this Steam-Powered Prosthetic Arm, I Could Be As Strong As... a Normal Person (warning: my wording in this article is problematic. For an edited version, click here)
Steampunk Abstractions: On Commodification
Steampunk Abstractions: The Inevitability of Imperialism

Apex Book Company Blog:
NaNoWriMo vs. University? Yes
On Professionalization and Loneliness
The Art of Losing a Continent

Steampunk Magazine:

Countering Victorientalism [Silver Goggles post here]

"On Race and Steampunk: A Quick Primer" in SPM #7 [pdf, page 16]

Jeff Vandermeer's Ecstatic Days:

A Quick Introduction to Malaysian SF/F

On Enthusiastic Consent

To Comfort the Disturbed, and Vice Versa

Beyond Victoriana.com:
#28 Harun Ar-Raschid and the Golden Age of Islam

Interviews:

An Interview with James Ng

Living the Vita Steampunk: Whisper Merlot

Everybody Line Up!: Berit New York

New Lit! About Sir Thomas Riley

Experiments in Comics with Sydney Padua

The Roundtable of DOO- I mean, Of Race and Steampunk

Book Reviews:

Sense, Sensibility, Sea Monsters: Rendered Insensible [Tor.com]

Gaslight Dogs by Karin Lowachee [Tor.com]

Airships! Beasties! Clankers! Darwinists! A Review of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan Trilogy Thus Far [Tor.com]

#14 The Windup Girl [BeyondVictoriana.com]

I Write: Loving Relationships

2010-08-21T16:49:00.000-03:00

So recently the video by Rihanna and Eminem went big and caused a lot of discussion all over the blogosphere, but browmfemipower's post is the most compelling and is the one I would highly recommend anyone to read. It's challenging to read, because it doesn't speak to me. It's painful to read, because in a way, I'm one of the people she's pushing back against. But these are reasons why it is absolutely necessary I and everybody else have to read it. She doesn't want people linking to it because she gets shit from people who just can't grok with what she writes, because if you want an alternative perspective, she will give it to you, and it will be shoved into your mouth without benefit of the silver spoon that you're probably used to.

I didn't write about Rihanna during the time the spotlight was on her on how she handled Chris Brown's ~~treatment~~ abuse of her, because I had no frame of reference. I couldn't judge how she should have handled it. Part of it is because I was more interested in hating on Chris Brown and thought Rihanna deserved all the support she could get in what she decided to do in her own life. Part of it because I try to stay away from celebrity news. Part of it was because I just didn't know her.

In her post, bfp writes about the systemic violence against working class/poor people that prevent them from getting out of the cycles of violence that they remain in. That they cannot just "leave". Leaving isn't an option. The violence begins from young; every abuser has been a victim at some point. That we ignore them anyway and judge them and condemn them for what we, middle-class privileged people, perceive as making the wrong choices in life. It's easy to say that, because we've got the choices and the options and the background support. Despite probably being the ones who don't need them.

Lots of the criticism aimed at the music video has been about what "the video says" and tells and depicts. I haven't seen the video because I'm too scared to. But even I can grasp that it's about Rihanna's story, and about Eminem's story, and the story of many other people in DV situations who love each other to pieces but dole out violence anyway. I don't claim to understand that; I can only theorize that it's because they have a lot of other shit on their plate that violence is their answer; that they aren't given many other options, or taught ways to deal with each other that don't involve violence; that the circle they are in are so hard to get out of, it just carries on repeat, ending with a conflagration that hurts everyone.

When I was growing up, I had ideas on what a loving relationship would look like. I didn't know for sure, because my parents didn't really show each other affection in a way that I thought worked for me. I had some pretty strong opinions on what I wanted, eventually, and when I finally did end up in my first relationship, I spent a lot of time trying to live up to those ideals. Unfortunately for me, these ideals were fed by a diet of romance novels, in which the process of falling in love was depicted, but never the effort of staying in love. I only learned how to stay in love when I was surrounded by loving couples who were crazy about each other and found a strong foundation for their relationships.

I only got this in my twenties. So, I can understand why some people just end up in relationships that are ultimately destructive from any outsider's perspective. No one teaches us otherwise. I wasn't taught to express myself clearly; I was taught how to be snarky. If I hadn't had such a domineering personality to begin with (my mother identified this trait in me from my babyhood), I likely would have grown up repressing myself a lot more, so often was I shut down. But I am domineering, and I am stubborn, and I like having my way, so this is how I turned out. Not everyone turns out this way, and that is okay - we all have to deal with stuff in ways that suit us best, and preferrably without hurting other people. I hurt my parents a lot, just as they hurt me. And as time goes by, we learn how to hurt each other less.

When I write about "comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable", I was also thinking about the power of stories to provoke thought and to educate. In this, also, the possibility of presenting a new way of thinking to the world. Charlotte Perkins Gilman did this with Herland. In the Steampunk anthology I just read, Molly Brown and Rachel E. Pollock did this too with their stories "The Selene Gardening Society" and "Reflected Light". In Gilman's story, she created a society from ground-up. The focus of Herland society is on children; everything that the culture does is geared towards the betterment of the world for the children. Children, who are the most oppressed group in today's society. Gilman's Herland society cannot ever be achieved until we learn to value children, and rebuild society from grassroots level to revamp entire systems. (And this is a necessary caveat: Gilman's Herland does not include PoC, the disabled, and LGBTQ. I do, however, consider Herland to be seminal work in that it at least offers a basis for us to start and improve on.)

I remember, in my short fiction writing workshops, being told, "every happy family is happy in the same way; every dysfunctional family is different." I took it for granted that this was true; that the best, most publishable stories are about fucked-up people, navigating their way in the fucked-up world. I read story after story about blah people dealing with blah situations in certain, quirky, dysfunctional ways. I was supposed to find all this compelling. I didn't. I still don't. Part of it is because I can't recognize myself in these characters. Another part of is that I believe in exploring a problem in-depth with analysis to fix it. Stories depicting real-life... not for me. It's one of the reasons why I write science fiction and fantasy - these real-life perspectives can be presented in a different manner which will jar me and make me think.

And also, I just don't believe that only dysfunctional people are different and unique and compelling anymore.

I haven't been writing much, because I've been busy reading. And I've been thinking about how we frame what is negative and what is positive. Just like how I was brought up to believe that being darker wasn't a good thing, and I learned later on that that's fucking rubbish, that dark skin is just dark skin, it can be beautiful or not depending on the eye of the beholder, and the value we attach to it is what we've been ingrained societally through media and education. Just like how I was brought up to believe that homosexuals were a perversion - and I even wrote this into my stories back then, not something to be proud of - and later learned that they're normal people who just so happen to be attracted to the same sex. Just like I was brought up to believe that kids who didn't have televisions, couldn't afford extra classes, had to help their parents on the farm or around the house rather than dedicate themselves to studies all the time, were worser off than me.

I'm trying to change my boundaries on what's acceptable and what's not. Trying to frame things not as how I was taught to view them, but in ways that will better me and everybody around me. And framing dysfunctional people as being separate from happy isn't working for me in this new frame.

It's like saying poor people don't know how to be happy, or if they are, it's because they've blissfully separated themselves from money concerns and what an enlightened life they live as a result! That's stupid. And really patronizing.

So back to writing. bfp writes a lot about how we need to analyse and critique, and we can't stop there - we need to take this analysis and critique further, to offer ways of re-envisioning the world, and how to get there.

I can think of only one book which to me depicts this getting there: The Color Purple by Alice Walker. It was written in a way that challenged me linguistically, because coming from Malaysia, with just about pitch-perfect English (and a classist tendency to look down on people who couldn't speak English properly), the grammar and turns of language Walker utilized in the book were compelling and hard to comprehend. It made me pay even more attention to what was going on in the book. I didn't see myself in the book. I didn't see anything familiar. And yet the book was comforting to me, because it was showing a set of characters who pushed and pulled at each other with hostility and love and alienation and eventually came to an understanding on how to co-exist without hurting each other.

I was in a very bad place at the time I read the book. I frequently fought with my mother, I felt ignored by my father and neglected by my brother. I Had Needs that were Not Being Met! And I knew I hurt my parents with my continued insistence on doing things My Way, in ways that made other people think that somehow they were shitty parents. We were very different people, with very different expectations in life, but my mother and I were very similar in how we were domineering and stubborn and thought we knew best, and neither of us would back down. And yet, somehow, I went through it thinking, "this will get better. Once I get stuff accomplished and achieved. Once I come into my own and prove myself." And the only thing I can think of was The Color Purple, on how it took Celie and Mister a lifetime to come to an understanding and reconciliation after years of abuse and violence, and how Harpo and and Sofia came together trying to make their lives different, failing, and trying again, and succeeding, and how Shug loved other people besides Celie which hurt Celie and yet at the end of it all Shug comes home and Celie welcomes her. And somehow or another, I internalized this concept that I could come to this place too, where the fight goes out of my family and I go live under my family's roof without feeling like it's a chore. (And I have.)

The thing is, this wouldn't have worked if Walker hadn't portrayed how everyone got along after those long years of abuse. It wouldn't have worked if there had been some pretty, pithy conclusion, wrapped up in simple forgiveness, with an implication that If We Just Said The Right Words, because there were no right words and it was people trying to figure stuff out for themselves. It wasn't a case of unhappy families being unhappy in their own way... the story was about how an unhappy set of people found happiness in between the unhappiness and finding a way they could all work together and help each other be happy. And how they stayed in that place without backsliding into the abuse that hurt them all, despite the systemic problems they faced.

I want to write stories like that. About finding a way to Go Beyond and finding that places where love happens in its own unique way from the hearts of each person. About finding that love and bringing it out even though it'll be continually shot down and hurt. I want to write stories about people in love and staying in love, or letting each other go out of love. I want to write about people loving each other in myriad of ways.

I'm tired of reading stories about people hating each other and disregarding each other and doing violence to each other and plotting ways to harm each other as if this is the Default State of Humanity. I want to read and write stories that will give readers the thoughts they could use to create tools they need to help themselves. I want to read about stories where people go from blaming to helping each other, the revelations they need to get there, for their own selves, without using other people's hurt and disadvantages as a Teachable Moment. I want to write about complicated, non-pithy ways of getting to a place that achieves reconciliation without big shows of forgiveness or ignoring the past.

This isn't to say that stories that don't do this are bunk and negative and invalid. I'm sure they are, for people who aren't me. Maybe I'm reading in the wrong places, but it doesn't seem to me that most of mainstream literature does this. But I want more literature on love, about love, towards love. And I'm going to do as much as I can to contribute to that, no matter how ambitious that can seem.

To Comfort the Disturbed, and Vice Versa

2010-08-19T14:01:00.000-03:00

This is my third guest post at Jeff Vandermeer's Ecstatic Days. Which was supposed to be my second but it took a long time to write it. Original post here.

A few years ago, when I was a wee one in the social justice blogosphere (ok, who am I kidding, I still am), I read a quote that went, “Read six disturbing things a day.” A little after this, I ran across a saying, a kind of motto, that ran thusly: “Comfort the disturbed, disturb the comfortable.”

The motto is a modified version of a longer saying about newspapers, “Th newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward” credited to one Finley Peter Dunne.

What I really like about fiction in general is that it does both. The SF/F genre has even more potential for comforting and disturbing, because of the slightly-beyond-reality elements the genre has to offer.

Comforting the disturbed means more than escapism. Many readers who are not represented in mainstream US/Canada SF/F tend to fall into one marginalized grouping or another. People of colour (to use a U.S. term; substitute as necessary). Disabled people / people with disabilities. Transgendered/intersex/queer people. Even homosexuals receive mere lip service equality and surface privilege (which is confused for actual rights, for the maintenance of which they often push back against down the cause of other non-gender-conforming groups). The poor and downtrodden. You know. Those People. Of which privileged groups can say, if only they worked harder / weren’t so angry / didn’t insist on being different / just weren’t who they were / stopped insisting on bursting the bubble of privilege, we wouldn’t be in a marginalized position.

Comforting the disturbed is validating our experiences. It’s telling us that the gaslight really was adjusted instead of lying to us that it’s just a matter of perception. It’s speaking our truths to power, presenting our side of the story as a reality that must be discussed before the problems can be discussed. It is soothing through narratives in which we are the heroes who are right, who can overcome, who are given the tools we need to dismantle the master’s shed. It’s giving us an outlet where we can be our secret selves in someplace other than where we are.

We do this because we deserve it. Because the marginalized are the ones whose backs upon which the comforted are supported. Because we are held in larger systems that we cannot escape from, face prejudice everyday in ways direct and benign, because there just aren’t enough stories to contain them all. So we read and write stories about ourselves, taking the control of our own destinies that we are denied.

Science fiction and fantasy can do this. We don’t have to be kings and queens to be movers and shakers in SF/F. We can be our truest selves, and show how our true selves shining through will save the world.

Disturbing the comfortable is just as necessary. Looking at the long known history of man, it seems that most of today’s innovation and progress come from conflict of some sort, or rebellion against a larger cause. (Now, whether it’s because SOME folks who have thus far monopolized historical priorities have decided this was a much more exciting narrative than just recording how people got along with life is up for debate.) Marx’s proles versus the bourgeoisie (or, if you like, the broletariat versus the doucheoisie). Assorted empires over the ages. World Wars I and II, followed by the Cold War. A lot of science fiction and fantasy has been used to sooth the fears of these conflicts, even if just to distract us with “look at this nifty thing!”

Let’s use a good ol’ fashioned fallback example; Star Trek: Original Series was challenging for its time – a black woman with lines?! An Asian-American?! A Russian on the bridge during the Cold War? WHOA! What a turn-off it all might have been back then. (I read that the original pilot had a female First Officer that women didn’t like. I know nothing for certain; I wasn’t even born then.) Speculative “What If?” fiction is disturbing, because it gives those of us comfortable in our places a look at what might have been, and what could be, and in either of those places, we wouldn’t be where we are.

Disturbing the comfortable is reminding ourselves that we are ensconced in our privilege, often as a matter of luck, of having the right skin colour and the right education and the right amount of money at the right time. “There but for the grace of God go I” and all that. It is the reminder that we have it better than others, and more disturbingly, we probably owe it to them, despite the myth of bootstrap-pulling. That our source of comfort is a source of pain to others, and that our computers are built by people who will only be paid a fraction of the cost of the machines that allow us to enjoy our privilege to the fullest.

Science fiction and fantasy can do this. We sometimes need that slap in the face when we try to be heroes where we shouldn’t be meddling. We can remind ourselves that we live lies of validated normalcy, when in fact, we are a lucky few living in ignorance.

It is good to be jarred out of our comfort zones, to see different horizons, to be reminded that we are diverse in how we enjoy life, and how we suffer.

It is good to share that we are not alone, despite our unique troubles, to be presented with possible solutions and to be reminded that we can presevere and overcome.

Because science fiction and fantasy present themselves as mere stories, we slide into these liminal spaces that burst with the potential for both education and entertainment. But these are also spaces where we reflect ourselves and are reflected, holding up improbable mirrors that show us a different side of ourselves, whether we like what we see or not.

Unfortunately, as most marginalized people can attest to, it’s too easy for science fiction and fantasy writers to forget this double purpose. The treatment of rape in a lot of fiction is triggering to survivors of the crime (and many aren’t even given the benefit of a trigger warning). White protagonists are still educated and applauded at the expense of token non-white side-characters. A story of rags-to-riches does little to clothe all those the now-rich has left behind in their climb to fortune.

Too often, revolutions have only re-created the power structures revolutionaries were trying to change in the first place. They consolidate their positions by re-writing the narratives that justify their place, adjustments to previous narratives.

It is the continual questioning of the status quo, offering a different narrative from party lines in what appears to be a form different from reality, that is the subversion fiction offers.

Because stories? They’re our chance to understand, and thus change, our world.

On Enthusiastic Consent

2010-08-17T13:54:00.001-03:00

This was originally written for Jeff Vandermeer's Ecstatic Days. I can't remember what the impetus was, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with Feministe. It's been linked all over - Jim Hines linked to it too! Original post here.

Sometime back my brother went for holiday in Phuket (not so extraordinary, I’m afraid, since Thailand’s right next door to Malaysia), and he told me he was hoping to put the moves on a woman he found attractive.

“You got condoms?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“Don’t forget to get consent.”

“Of course!” said he, indignant that I could think otherwise.

“Enthusiastic consent.”

“Oh yes yes yes,” he replied eagerly.

“Actually, one-up that: enthusiastic participation.”

“Hmmmm…” he turned thoughtful, as if it was a whole new level. Which it is, and a step further from what I want to talk about today.

(I got the concept of enthusiastic participation from Hugo Schwyzer a few years back.) The concept of enthusiastic consent has also been expounded at length in the wonderful anthology Yes Means Yes!, conversations from which are continued at the Yes Means Yes! Blog.

In light of the latest Stupid Shit From Rape Culture, in which a jury ruled that a Jane Doe could not sue GGW for making profit off a video of her in which her breasts were exposed without permission, I would like to talk about consent.

I’m not here to talk about legalities. Anybody involved with social justice knows, the court system serves the law, not necessarily justice, not marginalized people. And the law serves those that shape it, who are often not the marginalized that require protection. No, let’s talk about consent, and why is it so damn hard for us to accept the idea that before we do anything that involves the personal space and body of another human being, we should ask permission?

I’m not talking about smushing in crowded buses and subway trains, where strangers uncomfortably get crushed to each other due to lack of space and everyone just wants to go home. I’m talking about purposefully touching part of another human’s body, more specifically in a sexual sense, but most of this post can also apply to more general touches.

It seems to plenty of people, a lot of situations imply consent: being in a dance club, for example. Wearing a skirt and tank top. Flirting. Having fun. Drinking alcohol. Being on a dinner date. Any and all of these, plus more I’m sure you can think of, are excuses for a man to rape a woman (or another man, or for a woman to rape a man or another woman, or other forms of non-gender-conforming rape cases; caveat here because some folks cannot handle a generalization based on the “90+% of rapes a perpetuated by men” statistics).

At the Steampunk World’s Fair, I attended a workshop called “The Art and History Of Kissing”. It really should have been called “The Art of Being Intimate”, because that’s what it was all about, but kissing is a sign of intimacy, and besides, it’s a catchier title. (I went for the history bit. There wasn’t a whole lot of it.)

The workshop mistress, whose name escapes me now, did a simple exercise with one of us: she asked a question, and the participant was to say no. No matter how she rephrased, or tried to persuade, or rationalize what a good idea it would be to say yes, the participant was to say “no”. The workship mistress turned to the rest of us and said, “See? I just got rejected. This is the easiest part about asking. Now go do this to other folks and get rejected, and you’ll find how easy it is!” And so we spent about the next ten minutes finding people to ask inane requests of so they could tell us “no.”

Nobody likes being rejected. (I certainly don’t, which is why I’ve not sent out as many query letters as I should have by now.) Rejection invalidates our sense of worth, that we’re just not hot shit that we’d like to be. But pushing ourselves and intentions onto others is a poor response to rejection. Especially onto strangers and people we just don’t know that well. Don’t present people with the Schrodinger’s Rapist dilemma, please. Not cool, especially when there will be people who will welcome your presence (and if you can’t find anyway, well… attitude check needed, then). No talking past another person, applying different standards.

And it continues to fill the world with suckiness, when we do stuff to other people that they don’t like for our own personal gratification, when we support other people’s entitlement to do stuff to others that isn’t welcome, when we blame the victim for doing anything other than not exist. We need to change this mindset of “better to ask forgiveness than permission”, because way too many times, this mindset has caused hurt and pain that has no justification. We need to let go the assumption that we can ever tell what another person “really” wants (if their mouth says “no” but their eyes say “yes”, you should wait until both are saying the same thing, or better yet, get your head checked because that’s pure nonsense).

Enthusiastic consent. That’s where it’s at. Especially for physically intimate encounters. The kink community knows this; participants negotiate consent and boundaries ALL the time. It heightens the experience because of the trust level that knowledge of one’s partner elicits. Asking isn’t just a request, it’s also an invitation.

There is a reason for the “enthuasistic” part of the phrase. Consent without enthusiasm is rather lukewarm. “OK FINE go ahead.” “I don’t care.” “I have no opinion.” “Whatever, if it gets you to get off my back.” Consent that is in place because it’s easier than saying “no” isn’t much different from rejection. It is given because the giver feels there is no other choice (besides the potential for abuse, violence, and other bad things).

We need to stop assuming that we can communicate desires through some convoluted dance of subtle cues and half-no’s. Consent should be uncomplicated: only “Yes!” and other such affirmative variants can mean “yes”. This cuts out “misunderstandings” (the common excuse for acquaintance rape), victim-blaming (by placing responsibility on the initiator), and manipulative games (“playing hard to get” has no place in affirmative consent lexicon except in kinky play, and removes yet another excuse for rape).

Enthusiastic consent is about welcoming. “Yes, I would like you to.” “I would love it if you did.” “Your presence here is not an invasion, nor just benign, but a welcome addition to my life.” It says something to welcome another person’s touch, verbally, openly. It’s an affirmation of affection. Openly expressing consent clears the air of mistrust and anxiety on whether we are doing something wrong, paving the way for further intimacy and trust. And to get enthusiastic consent, one has no choice but to ask.

At the same time we discourage violence against each other, we can also encourage affection towards each other. Enthusiastic consent is part of that encouragement. It’s not, obviously, the be-all and end-all, but for all the “no means no” we expound on, we need to further the idea that “yes means yes”. The more positivity we present to the world, the easier it is to identify negativity.

Plus, next to “yes” in a lineup of affirmative expressions is “yay”. And “yay” is a very useful expression indeed! But that is another post for another day.

A Quick Introduction to Malaysian SF/F

2010-08-15T18:54:00.000-03:00

This post was originally posted at Jeff Vandermeer's blog, Ecstatic Days, at which he very kindly asked me to guestblog for a bit! See the original post plus comments here.

So, I’m going to chat a bit about science fiction and fantasy here in Malaysia. For today.

Firstly, our folklore is rich with talking animals, mystical people, daring adventures, and heroes. Much of it is based on animistic beliefs, leftover from the days before Islam came to our shores. (Much of what is recognized as the Malaysian peninsular was under various Hindu empires for several centuries.) As a result, myths and legends provide a rich source for imaginary romps. Unfortunately, much of these myths and legends aren’t always transmitted, as Malay supremacy, tied with Islamism, is on the rise and wants to do away with animistic traditions (our political situation is fairly fraught).

Secondly, our history of colonialism has affected us, deeply. Some of you may remember reading Deepa D.’s I Didn’t Dream of Dragons, which articulates wonderfully the wounds left on the psyche of colonized peoples long after the British empire receded from our shores. The same issues affect Malaysians.

Thirdly, it is incredibly difficult to find South-east Asian science fiction / fantasy in English. If I find something, it’s usually a collection of myths and legends, rather than a new, original novel.

If you were to wander into a Malaysian bookstore, you would find that most of the books sold are in English. Part of it is because despite Malay being our official language, much cross-cultural communication occurs in English, although we have a basilect that takes on the grammatical structures and vocabulary of Malay, Chinese and Tamil, depending on who you talk to (we Malaysians are very good at code-switching).

If you look into the science fiction / fantasy sections, young adult, horror, and romance, you would note that all books have been brought in from overseas. Tolkien is always in stock, alongside other classic fantasy mainstays. The young adult stocks all the latest books. Most of them are from U.S. American publishers. And noticeably, U.S. American white authours.

If you could read Malay, and moseyed into the Malay aisles to see what books were being offered, you would see that we do, in fact, have science fiction/fantasy novels. (We also have a comparable YA section.) I don’t read Malay books often, nor Malaysian books in general, because although my Malay is passable (we must pass Malay to graduate from secondary school), I have difficulty really getting into a Malay-language book, and also because a lot of Malaysian fiction tends to be heavy-handedly moralistic.

I’m not home enough to be able to judge Malaysian sf/f very much. I’ve got one book from PTS Publishing, and I didn’t like it. The writing was poor, like that of a new scifi writer who has yet to master the craft of storytelling before going on about How! Cool! This! Hero! Is! I like wish fulfillment fiction as much as the next person – it’s one of the reasons why I read sf/f – but like my friend cycads says, about another different genre of writing in Malaysia, “Can do better.”

I know, however, that we have fen here, and we are reading (and writing, and creating). Maybe all local scifi scenes have this beginning bumps in the road, these rough edges, where writing is clumsily derivative until we find our voices and come out strong and substantial. Maybe we’re getting it wrong (and if we are, I don’t need to hear about it from white people, mmkay). But it’s there. And that’s cool by me.

Also, the covers are pretty awesome.

I hope this post has been informative for you! Feel free to ask me to write about other subjects, if you like.

We Are A Sick Sick World

2010-08-08T12:47:00.000-03:00

Okay. Kek sei. Seems like every time I want to wind down in preparation for something stressful, something pops up that I just cannot ignore.

Recently, Hiroshima held its annual memorial ceremony to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb, and for the first time, the U.S.A. sent a delegation to the ceremony. But Japan is angry! Because U.S.A. has offered no apology for the bombing. Over 250,000 people, civilians, died as a result, from the bombing itself, or from the radiation aftereffects.

There are some people who actually believe that just because Japan committed many war crimes itself during WWII, that Japan deserves no apology for the heinous death toll inflicted upon its civilians[1]. Still others believe that because Japan refuses to acknowledge its warcrimes, such as the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March, because there is no outrage over this silence from Japan, that there is no reason to honour Japan's dead.

OK look.

Japan has fucking issues. I have issues with Japan's fucking issues. LOTS of people who pay the least bit of attention to Japan's role in WWII have issues with Japan's fucking issues. Namely, the fact that the Japanese government refuses to acknowledge these war crimes, refuses to even teach young Japanese about Japan's heinous massacres, refuses to apologize for abusing women kidnapped and forced into military brothels, refuses to apologize to other countries and crimes perpetrated on civilians in other countries during Japanese occupation -- the list goes on. JAPAN HAS ERASED ITS OWN HISTORY. From what I understand, Japan's history books portray Japan as a victim that was dragged into WWII. Even Japanese people have issues with Japan's fucking issues. Japanese activist Tamaki Matsuoka recently released a film documentary interviewing Japanese war veterans admitting their role in the Nanjing Massacre, despite harassment from fringe groups who deny the war crimes.

I have so much damn fucking outrage towards Japan, that when I researched more on what happened during WWII, I hated Japan for a while. I hated not only Japan, but I hated Japanophiles around me who thought Japan was so fucking cool and awesome.

However, Japan's devastation of so many lives during WWII in no way justifies the devastation inflicted on hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

There is talk about how, if U.S.A. hadn't set Japan up the bombs, the war would had dragged on for much longer than it did. There is talk about how, until the U.S. became part of the war there was no end in sight. There is talk about how Japan would have invaded U.S.A. if nothing had been done. These are lies that serve to maintain the nobility of American intervention in WWII.

Let me tell you about what I know about Japanese Occupation in Malaya at the time. I know that the Japanese soldiers treated Chinese people very badly (although I cannot remember who told me). I know that sometimes our countrymen, the Malays and Indians and aboriginals, tried to help, but many times, they did not, and indeed, what could they have done? We Chinese diasporans were targeted specifically for our blood links to the mainland. I know that when the Japanese came, the British could do nothing, and we Malayans learnt, bitterly, that the colonial masters were not as powerful as they claimed to be, that they would not do their all to protect us as part of their Empire as it looked like they would (social contract and all), that we as Asians had the power to rule over ourselves, that white was not as mighty as had been driven into our bones. I like to say that Thailand sold us out, lent the Japanese a backdoor into Malaya in exchange for not being occupied. When I think of the Japanese during World War II, I don't think about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; I think instead of the invasion force arriving past the Thai/Malaya on bicycles, in full uniform with rifles on their backs. I know some of our women were forced into the ranks of comfort women. My older relatives don't speak much about the war, and I have no doubt I lost family then that I could have known today.

I know all this, and I still say: nothing justifies the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

To say that Japan's war crimes erases our responsibility towards its civilians is a banal and hateful thing to say. Innocent people never deserve death because of what their governments do. Just as 9/11 victims didn't deserve what happened to them without an apology.

Nothing justifies war and nothing justifies the kind of mass-murder of civilians like all participants of WWII inflicted on each other. There are some of us who have personal stakes in Japan's culpability during WWII, me included. But refusing to apologize won't bring back the dead. It won't make the pain go away.

I said it in aqrima's, and I'll say it again here: It is so so sad to see how violence has poisoned our minds that we cannot see beyond the hurt done to us to see that these wars hurt other people too. That this is a race of righteousness, that there's a competition here on who had gotten it right, who was on the side of good and who was on the side of evil and needed punishing.

It was war. When you join in any kind of fight and hurt innocent people for it, you bear responsibility for your own actions. You don't say that just because others have also hurt innocent people you have no obligation to show some respect to the people you have hurt. It's hateful, brutal, unkind, and inhuman to refuse to acknowledge other people's pain, because you are hurting. You're not the only one hurting. And the fault doesn't lie in the civilians who died at Ground Zero of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so why did they deserve to die? To maintain American sovereignty? Don't make me fucking laugh - America was already powerful then, powerful enough to ignore the rest of the world if it had wanted.

Yeah, okay, Pearl Harbour. And then what? America retaliated on its own Japanese-American citizens, that's what. Don't think the rest of the world is so stupid that we cannot see that USA, too, has its hands covered with the blood of innocents. Don't think that by quoting the numbers of civilians dead at Japanese hands and guns, you could possibly justify the numbers of civilians dead by American bombs. DEAD. IS. DEAD. These are human beings we're talking about, no matter which side they were on, no matter what country, no matter who did what to whom. Each of these lives were and still are precious to someone else, someone who is not us, who is just as innocent of these war crimes as we who were uninvolved are. None of us are in any position to downplay the horror these people had to live through.

Yes, Japan has war crimes it has to apologize for. There are victims and survivors still alive, like the Japanese government is waiting for them to die so it never has to give them justice. But so what? Like this justifies the mass-murder of hundreds of thousands of Japanese people? Is this really justice? No, it's not. Refusing to give Japanese people an apology, some closure, some justice, for the heinous crime perpetrated upon them by U.S. America is NOT going to make up for the fact that Japan refuses to give Chinese, Filipino, Malayan peoples apologies, closure, and justice. The lack of graciousness displayed by a country so powerful it can afford, and should model, such a gesture is appalling.

It is the height of obnoxious privilege to state that Japan shouldn't want apologies for Nagasaki and Hiroshima because of what it has done to other countries. Speaking as a person coming from a country that the Japanese occupied and that is also affected by U.S. imperialism, this sentiment is frankly insulting. Actually, speaking as just a human being, this sentiment is frankly insulting, and it is sickening to know that I share a living breathing world with sick people who think that killing other human beings is in any way justifiable.

Time and time again it has been proven that when we devalue other people's histories, when we claim that one story is more important than another, when we refuse to acknowledge other people's pain - that is when we are at our worst. Wars don't come about because we are at our best; they came about because certain person in power are at their worst and have full capability and desire to inflict pain on other human beings, and the people they lead condone their violence towards others. Today, these damages done to each other is done through corporations, but the underlying principle is the same: the refusal to acknowledge social responsibility towards each other.

Refusing to apologize is condoning the violence perpetrated on innocent people. Not just on the Japanese, but on ALL victims of World War II.

You want to talk about how America triumphed over evil when Truman decided to drop the N-bombs? How American won the war and saved the rest of the world from a longer war? Fucking excuse me, but the rest of the world already fucking lost when the World Wars started in the first place. And we still lose, because now we know the horror that can be inflicted by nuclear bombs, so kyrios being what they are, U.S. America lives in paranoia of other people's bombs and rags on everybody else who it thinks might have their own bombs.

Yeah, we are a sick sick world, because we believe that atrocities will end wars. And instead of reeling at our inhumanity, we applaud and defend it, because clearly it worked... for members of that one over-privileged oppressor group that continues to profit and live off the backs of everyone else who suffered and continue to do so.

A Brief Response to Recent Insensitivities

2010-08-07T03:46:00.000-03:00

I already said my piece over in the offending LJ but I can't let this go. This bothers me so much. For the longest while, I was just all ":O IDE" but I've been sitting on this, just getting more and more angry, so if I don't get it out, I think I might burst.

Writing a book is in no way anything like a deathmarch. If you think writing a book is anything like a horrible event in which actual people have been forced to suffer and still feel the historical ramifications of, you may want to check your ego.

And if someone tells you that the term is deeply loaded with haunting histories and shouldn't be trivialized to describe something like writing a book of fiction, maybe you should just say sorry and never use the word ever again, instead of defending the use with ridiculous excuses like "mythologizing language".

I know it is incredibly difficult to drop certain words entrenched in our vocabularies (I still sometimes substitute Judeo-Christian exclamations as expletives, but I try hard to find other ways of expressing myself) but seriously it is not that fucking impossible. Especially if you claim to be a writer. Whose job kind of entails looking for new ways to express yourself.

Oh, and while we are talking about "mythologizing language" let's have a look at what we're talking about. We're talking about the use of the word "deathmarch", which calls up memories of persecution and pain and anguish and death. Of real people.

I do not understand why this, or any other terrible event, should be allowed to become "banal and mundane". Or how, if we don't trivialize them, we allow the people who perpetrated them to win (I don't even understand how anybody, particularly a writer who identifies with a minority group with training as an anthropologist, can even say this with no hint of irony). It seems to me that these events were perpetrated in the first place because the death of and murdering other people was seen as banal and mundane. So if we rendered these horrifying events as banal and mundane, we'd be no better than the people who killed and murdered.

Let's also talk about mythologizing, okay? Mythologizing generally means "to render something into myth". This is not a dictionary definition, but I think most of us will agree that's what the term means. Myths are stories of folks of dubious historical status to provide us with narratives that help us make sense of the world. Like Greek gods. Or the Monkey King. Or comicbook superheroes. Myths, from my own limited understanding, help us reconcile to the world - that the world is like this, and not that, for a reason.

If we refuse to allow historical tragedies that destroyed real people to lose the meaning and power that they have - if we refuse to forget them - if we refuse to allow their erasure - this is not rendering them into myth: this is giving power to remembering the history that shapes identities today. To disallow us from remembrance because it weighs us down is to belittle what little freedom we have. Dominant powers already enforce and encourage a cultural amnesia on formerly colonized spaces to maintain an illusion of independence and peace. So many of us pretend that a history free of bloodshed will produce futures without bloodshed, when in fact, these histories reverberate in our bones and the bloodshed manifests in the little cruelties we inflict on each other on a daily basis.

It strikes me as ridiculous, sickening, privileged and dismissive when anyone would want to conflate historical tragedies that destroyed real people with writing a book. I understand the fiction writers are given to over-exaggeration and fanciful imagination, but after discussion on discussion on discussion last year about erasure, history, patterns of privilege, and harm reduction, it isn't fucking disingenuous anymore to claim that intention matters. It's downright willful ignorance.

If you are interested in context, check my LJ.

On Spaces for Kids

2010-08-02T13:29:00.000-03:00

While I was taking in my mom's blanket from the clothesrack outside, I noticed the kids playing on the porch of the semi-detached house on the corner of the street diagonally across from my family's house. It'd been so long since I saw children playing there, I was a bit startled in the back of my mind. The first owner had been Encik Kamaruddin, who I remember most because he owned rabbits (back then, the brick wall was a wire fence, so we could peer across the drain at the rabbit enclosure). The house has always been owned by Malays, although for a while, it was rented out to factory workers.

Subang Jaya, old Subang Jaya especially, was built for raising families. Most of the houses here are built to suit lower-to-rising middle-class families, and growing up, I knew a lot of nuclear families.

We kids came out in the evening to play badminton on the streets, or tag (colloquially called "catching") at the nearby playground (which used to be made of cement, but is now made of plastic that I wouldn't trust kids to not break); the kids don't do that anymore. It's not just because of the advent of the digital age, though: my generation are yuppies now, and the next generation are being primed to outdo us - extra classes, extracurricular activities, and generally less horsing around.

Subang Jaya, in the 80s and 90s, was meant to raise kids in. There're two primary schools and three secondary schools, as well as one private school with both primary and secondary levels. Three of these schools are in one housing area alone. In my housing set, there are three colleges.

Unfortunately, because Subang Jaya is also the town center and a commercial hub, there have been more and more buildings raised. This clogs up our local traffic even more, which means more roads being built. As the corporate class moves in to do business, more retail and food service businesses open, and many of them staffed by foreigners (this doesn't mean I dislike foreign workers; this means I dislike employers who feel they need to hire cheaper than local, and foreign workers are the easiest to target for cheap costs, because they often don't know their rights and are less likely to fight back against poor wages. And, sometimes, because of this tenuous position of theirs, they are a lot nicer than locals).

This pisses me off, because when a residential area stops focusing on the needs of the families it is built for, it becomes yet another space for profiteers to come in. And any space that values profiteering is open to more crime than it otherwise would be. (This is my pet theory.)

In the recent Feministe kerfuffle on kids, which was a trainwreck and a half, I was pretty confused by how polarized people's positions were; it seemed that you were either on the side of moms and telling off mainstream feminists for not focusing enough on the needs of mothers, or you were on the side of the childless women and getting offended at being told to pay more tribute to motherhood, traditionally a method of patriarchal binding women to family institutions. Both sides were right in their own way, but it seemed like an all-or-nothing position.

It was confusing to me, because I grew up with the expectations that, yes, eventually I'll be a mother, but after I've sorted my ish out. So, there's a time we're expected to be single and childfree, and then there's a time when we're expected to be mothers. I see children in plenty of places all over except, of course, in spaces which are not good for them, like bars (where alcohol is served). I believe that working towards a world that centers children is good for adults, too.

I think there's an overwhelming assumption that anything good for kids is necessarily dumbed-down. This really shuts us off from world of sharing between generations. Either we think "kid stuff" is too stupid for adults to consume, or we produce "kid stuff" that talks down to children. While it's true that children may not necessarily grasp certain concepts easily, that doesn't mean it's not worth talking to them about.

Look at the concept of race, for example. Parents don't want to explain racism and how it works to kids, because then they'll think the kids will grow up knowing how to be racist, because they can recognize race. I... don't know how to explain colourblind logic.

It always seemed quite obvious to me that if you want adult-specific spaces, then you've got to create child-appropriate spaces where they'll be safe among people who want them there and where they'll be stimulated enough to not bother you in your adult spaces. In order to create child-appropriate spaces, you've got to care about kids. You don't go about creating adult-specific spaces because you hate kids, because then you set aside the children's needs in an effort to shunt them off, creating environments which are not good for them, and of course it's going to be a hella lot harder getting them to stay in child-designated zones.

Now, I'm not a mom at all, just planning to be one, and that's pretty far off. But I remember what it was like to be a kid and wanting to be in spaces where I could be with other kids with adults that sounded like they actually wanted to have me around. And it's not like there aren't any adults who love having kids around. But adults who love having kids around and are actually skilled at taking care of them? ... Who will pay for them to do this? Are they supposed to take care of strangers' children non-stop for too-little pay? We already don't pay mothers for their wage (and don't give me the "the best reward for moms is love" bullshit - I see this a lot in Western narratives and wtfIDE? The best reward for your parents is for you to take care of their aging selves in the best way you can provide for them once you're independent and they need you).

The more Subang Jaya evolves into a commercialized space, the more I realize that, that there shopping mall? With offices on top? Could have been a school to help spread out the students a bit more. It might have been a nice safe spot with large rolling gardens for a kindergarten.

Or, hell, some suggestions that would have served the community: a new wet market, with lots of parking space. Because when the old wet market was destroyed for that shiny yellow building, we were promised a new wet market. We sort of do, but the parking's not the least bit adequate. Or a small agricultural co-op. But wait, Jha! What do wet markets and agricultural co-ops have to do with children?? EVERYTHING! They serve families! Most of which have children! And the opportunities to educate children by exposing them to noisy adults haggling and conversing the way they do in wet markets is subliminally phenomenal. I don't know about co-ops, since I was never involved in one, but hey, getting kids to help in the garden couldn't possibly be a bad idea.

I told this to my dad. He laughed and said, "that wouldn't happen, because it doesn't make money." Always the money problem. I can understand it on some level, but honestly? Who's profiting off the rent from these new commercial spaces? I highly doubt the money is coming back to the community that it fleeces.

One of the most unfortunate imports from the West we've received is consumerism, and the idea that we MUST HAVE THINGS, and NOW. It's not all bad and if given a chance, we could turn the tide, but as it stands, that's one of our problems right now.

Language Disconnect: Poetry, Culture, Points of Reference

2010-07-18T13:07:00.000-03:00

On Tumblr, whatwillsuffice shared a beautiful poem called "HAVING A COKE WITH YOU" by Frank O'Hara. I have never heard of Frank O'Hara before this, nor the poem, but it is absolutely lovely, because it talks about the experience of being in love. Let me show it to you:

HAVING A COKE WITH YOU

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

I don't actually get all the cultural references in this. I don't know San Sebastian and I don't know what it's like to stand around a tree on a warm New York night at 4am, and I don't know the Polish Rider or the Nude Descending a Staircase or Marino Marini (I do, however, understand Leonardo and Michaelangelo). This despite the fact that I'm pretty heavily invested in "Western" culture, but I don't get all the cultural points of reference. What I do get, however, is that this dude digs whoever he's with, so much, that he's willing to ramble on about all this minutiae of Stuff That's Important To Him, because the love is so overwhelming, he has to share. This isn't a poem about me or for me, it's about the poet, and the poet's lover, and this is cool. But it is a poem that makes me want to dig deeper and get all the references, because it's about love, written in a way that I would think about love, but unique to this dude.

I lost my taste for modern poetry very early on during my English undergrad, when I had to sit down and read through free-verse stuff that never resonated with me. It was fine when it was at English Lit 101 level, and we had to learn about tropes and literary tools, like what metaphorical conceit is, and what alliteration is. I hated Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath (and I still do) and I did not understand why they were considered geniuses. I've read similar poetry by teens, with more vivid imagery, and more powerful language, but they never got studied in our classes. I especially did not understand nor dig free-verse poetry.

At the same time, I didn't understand why people hated poetry so much. I generally loved poetry because I liked how so much could be packed into so little. I also did not understand how people did not understand poetry. Even when I hated Adrienne Rich, I at least grasped what she was talking about. Which is why I hated her, of course. Understanding poetry doesn't mean you'll like it, it just means you can appreciate what went into its making; there will be no automatic love.

I was one of those fools who thought that poetry transcended borders. Like I said before, I had such great respect for Western writers whose stories and words could resonate all over the world. If an ESL student didn't understand a poem, I chalked it up to their language skills, and figured they'd get it, if they could just parse the poem as sentences, because way too many people read poetry and stop at the end of the line, rather than continuing on to the rest of the thought.

So sometime during my fourth or fifth year, I was also a teaching assistant in the English department. The prof I was assigned to didn't actually have much work for me, so I was borrowed between different profs in the department who could use me. One prof asked me to teach a class for her which involved reading a novel. An engineering department prof asked me to help edit his students' papers. A third prof, however, asked me to specifically tutor a Chinese mainlander student in a Canadian lit class.

There is always at least one Chinese mainlander student in an English upper-level class at any given time. Sometimes they're there in an effort to further immerse themselves in an English-speaking environment and thus improve their reading and writing skills. Sometimes they're there before they genuinely love English and want to learn more. Sometimes they're there because they love the subject at hand (surprise! they're not all Commerce robots!).

So, I had this student, from Beijing, who had difficulty understanding the texts in her class, because, duh, her English skills weren't that great, and she just Wasn't Getting It. She had to ask her profs constantly what was going on in the story or poem, and they usually didn't have the time to explain to her what was going on in it.

I should mention that obviously these profs were also white.

And so when I sat down for the first time with this student, reading a poem about Inuits, the eradication of their culture by white people, and the alienation from their past as a result, I found that it wasn't a language thing going on here.

Here's the thing about poetry, and indeed, literature, capital "L" or not: it is usually written with a specific audience in mind. It is also written with a particular background. It is not written in a void without culture, or history, or some point of reference. A Trekkie joke goes over the head of a non-Trekkie. Internet memes stated iRL will be missed by people who are not as involved in Internet culture.

This poem was written by a Canadian, for Canadians. It was meant to remind the audience about the destructive colonization and the subsequent loss. And oh hey, Chinese mainlanders who don't share the same cultural background of course are not going to grasp this!

So, I carefully explained each image in the poem. What it is. What is the story behind each image. I had to draw on what little I knew about Canadian history (which was and still is painfully not enough for someone living in the country). I had to switch the way I speak English (not that this is hard; we Malaysians are impressive code-switchers). I didn't tell her what was important or significant about the imagery.

I didn't have to.

When I was done explaining the last image, which was of a single man carving an ivory ornament for his deceased children, sitting in a camp that should have had more people, she took a moment to absorb it all, and then she exclaimed, "That's sad!"

Which, yes, it was.

Except now that I had actually explained, in minute detail, why, suddenly, all that I had known and taken for granted particularly re: the treatment of First Nations peoples, was magnified, and sitting in the front of my brain, and suddenly, it was extremely sad, even if I didn't share the history. So we sat in silence for a couple more minutes, absorbing the tragedy that the poem was meant to impart, and suddenly she was thanking me profusely (and then asking me how to answer questions about it).

Sometimes, I wonder if it's because I don't share the same background as Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath that makes me feel alienated from their work, because their experiences are not my experiences, and although I can respect their work, I am never going to be able to fangirl and <3 it as much as many other people I know do. My friend Naoko showed me a poem the other day about a man writing to his niece and nephew about the joy of a life filled with simplicity. She loved it; I wasn't too impressed, mostly because I've been living quite simply all my life, and I'm sort of in a point in my life where I do live simply and it doesn't necessarily make me happy.

But I've got a point of reference that I can relate to in "Having a Coke With You" that doesn't depress or alienate me, that reminds me of happiness and love, and it puts me in a good place. It makes me reflect on how awesome it is to have someone that is so totally awesome, having a Coke with them is better than a ton of other awesome things (except that one thing, because you know, otherwise we'd be wrapped up entirely around our loved ones).

Also, I think it's safe to say that digging someone that much is a pretty universal thing.

However, it is also safe to say that there will be plenty of people who will not get this poem right off, because their minds don't run along the same lines on How To Express Themselves.

Oh, poetry.

Musings on Art and Duty

2010-07-12T02:25:00.000-03:00

Larry Rivers, who I previously had no knowledge of until the other day, did a film series in which he filmed the breast development of his daughters, asking personal, sexually-charged questions like, "have boys started noticing yet?" From the article in the New York Times, one daughter made it clear that this made her uncomfortable, and that she was pressured to participate. The film series affected her adversely, leading to psychological problems during her teens. She wants the film removed from the archives of the New York University. NYU responded by saying they would keep the film out of public consumption for the duration of the daughters' lives. The Rivers Foundation's director, David Joel, is quoted as saying, "I can't be the person who says this stays or goes. My job is to protect the material."

Well, that's great, I guess. Yay for folks who are doing their job, and in this case, to preserve material.

Okay, um, why?

Let's look at the facts here: this is a film which is built on the exploitation of helpless persons. One of said persons has come forward revealing just how damned exploitative it is. Hell, even within the film itself, Larry Rivers says in a voice-over that his daughters "kept sort of complaining". This was a film meant to push the boundaries of societal approval.

Looks like those weren't the only boundaries pushed.

Look. When you create art that banks on the participation of other people, it is abusive to make them do something they don't want to do. Plenty of people have to do stuff they don't want to do, every day, which doesn't necessarily enrich their lives in any way. And in this case, these girls did stuff that not only did not enrich their lives, but affected them badly.

Art that pushes boundaries, folks, is the province of the privileged. If you create art that doesn't push boundaries, that guarantees returns, you're probably doing it because you need those returns. If you are in any position to create art that you know will create some pushback, that you know might lose you fans and their patronage, you are more than likely in a very good position where this loss won't affect you significantly, and that is a sign of privilege.

Which means, you know, you are in a position where you have options. And among these options, the choice to create art that doesn't depend on hurting other human beings.

Guess which option Larry Rivers did not take in the making of this film series?

The fact that it is getting preserved in the first place is another sign of privilege. The fact that people are defending it, yet another notch illustrating that this man, although dead and gone, still has power over his art, that others will rise to protect it as they feel he would want them to.

So when David Joel says something stupid that runs along the lines of "I sympathize but my job is to protect this material" he is also really saying, "this film, built on exploitation of this woman and her sisters, is much more important than this woman herself." That duty to a dead abuser's output is more important than the right of a person to lay to rest her abusive past the way she sees fit.

So let's talk about art. I firmly believe that art has power. Like revolutions, art can be an act of creation, or of destruction. Art reflects the world, as much as it influences the world. It is informed by the culture from which it is produced, as much as the culture around it will look to it as a model for how it should be performed.

At the Pursuit of Harpyness, in comments, baraqiel gave a thought-provoking anecdote on how engineers are taught that their technical knowledge gives them power, and that sometimes the data comes from unethical sources, and how valuable / necessary is that technical data which is procured through killing other humans? And supposedly, engineers are the most unfeeling of professions - artists are supposed to be feelers as well as thinkers.

In the preservation of art, something has got to go. There is a reason why there is a filtering process, a judgement process, in which people decide what to keep and what to throw away. We keep things of value, because we see a continued benefit in having them around. We throw away things that no longer have value, because we need to make room for other things of potential. We also throw away things of detrimental value, because they are symptomatic of social ills that continue to eat at our societal consciousness.

David Joel is implying that he, as a curator of sorts, has no sense of judgement, because his "job", his function" is to preserve these materials. BULLSHIT. The function of preservation should not override the judgement of a human being to weigh, ethically, the value of preserving something that has caused pain. He also implies that the ethical value of any piece of work is meaningless beyond its immediate effects. BULLSHIT, AGAIN, because anybody who pays the smidgen amount of attention to art and how it has functioned in our societies knows that it is meaningful beyond its first moment of creation and immediate effect, that it continues to affect long after its creators have move on, that its effects cannot be controlled once we have relinquished control of it.

Here, Ms. Tamburlini has shown that she does not want to relinquish control of something that has exploited her in the past, that she was forced to participate in. But does she get it? No, because apparently, despite the fact that she's part of this material, she's not allowed to have any say in what happens to it. She's not allowed to touch it or mess with its otherwise pristine preservation.

We know what happens when arts get taken out of context. Appropriation, for one. A different interpretation that we cannot control, because we're not in the heads of our audience, can be attached without our meaning to. If I do an art nude, and I release it, I cannot help the fact that someone somewhere may take it and use it as masturbatory material, and the only way to really prevent that is to not do art nudes. However, I can weigh the benefits and costs and decide, nope, someone wanking off to my art nudes does not hurt me or anybody participating in the making of the art, and I can create art nudes that do not exploit anybody without their express permission. This can get lost in a few decades when someone can just go "this is a rubbishy piece of art." Thus, it rests on me, right here and now, to decide if I want to run that risk, and can I live with myself knowing I have released something out into the world that might be rubbish?

This Larry Rivers thing is even worse, because he knew he was affecting his own family adversely by demanding their cooperation, and only a sociopath goes on with such a project knowing that it is causing huge discomfort, even psychological problems, for those he is responsible for. And NYU and the Rivers Foundation continue this sociopathic decision by deciding that the people whose lives were affected matter less than the preservation of artistic material. This is where I would accept, "it's just a ____," because in this case? Compared with the well-being of someone who was hurt in its making? It really is just a piece of film.

I come at this from an artistic, ethical standpoint, because I'm not interested in legalese. Legalese has been used to hurt and destroy other people, and it is constantly abused. And I cannot, cannot fathom how anyone could be so cruel as to preserve the memories of sexual abuse and exploitation as "art".

I'm not part of any artistic community, except NaNoWriMo, so I can't speak to the ethics of the artistic community as a whole. I do feel, as an artist and as a believer in art, that art is a powerful tool, and like, all powerful tools, should be used for good. And I cannot fathom how this film is in any way a strong contribution to the artistic world. At all. Maybe I'm missing something and someone will concern troll me on Why It Is Important To Preserve Clearly Exploitative Material.

The Meaning of Everyday Things: Shoes

2010-07-09T08:59:00.000-03:00

So people, while I was doing a bit of Rybak fangirling and thinking about how things aren't just things (contrary to what one might think, these two things do not always clash, and in the case of my Rybak fangirling, always match like happy bonobos), that most things we have and do have some meaning of some sort, I was thinking of examples of how to explain this concept: that some thought goes into actions we choose and decisions we make. And I thought, even our shoes have meaning.

And they do, okay!

I will explain why. And be aware, Moff's Law is in effect.

For example, my heels? Yes, by themselves, they are simply pretty. They are also a very hardy sandal-type design, which make them ideal for wearing them most places. The heels are one-and-a-half-inch wedges, which are stable and allow me to run in them if I really wanted to. They are also elegant enough to match any outfit I feel like wearing with it, formal or informal. These things, in themselves, don't mean anything. However! When I wear them, it means I am attempting to look aesthetically pleasing according to current beauty norms which tell me that wearing heels gives my legs a longer line, makes me walk pertly which translates into a dose o' cute, and renders me acceptable in conforming to many ideals of femininity.

This is a very different situation altogether than if I wore Tevas (which are a kind of walking sandal; I'm not sure what the big deal about them is, but apparently they are Very Good Walking Sandals), which I guess I effectively stole from my mom, because she doesn't use them. I don't like wearing my Tevas regularly! They're hard to get on and off in a jiffy, although they are great for long periods of walking. So, I generally use them for hiking at Gasing Hill. Now, I could use my running shoes, which are also perfect for such exercises, but my dad favours the river route at Gasing, so instead of soaking my nice Adidas pumps trying to avoid water, I wear the Tevas and slosh in the river at will. The running shoes are used for, obviously! running! Because that is their purpose, and I shelled out $200 specifically for a good pair of running shoes that I could run in. Which means, if I am wearing my awesome running shoes, you better believe I am going to do some serious running in them.

When I'm going somewhere informal for a bit and don't feel like wearing my very informal Tevas, or my informal heels, I am going to wear flipflops, which I think are my mom's. These say that I really couldn't be arsed to pay attention to my feet.

These are not "just shoes"! They each serve a purpose, and they each communicate something about the state of my being at any given time.

However! It shall now be noted, that these meanings apply to me, personally, and could be very different for you. For example, I have friends who have one pair of sneakers they use for... everything they can wear sneakers to. This doesn't necessarily mean they are careless about their appearance as I would be communicating in my choice of sneakers. Maybe because they can't afford other pairs of shoes. Maybe to them, footwear is just not as big a deal to them as it obviously is to me. Maybe they are communicating something about their personal aesthetic. I don't know! Because I do not always feel the need to interrogate my friends on their choice of shoes.

So, back to the main topic, folks! It's never "just [a thing]". This is aggravating as all get-out, and people on the internetz should stop using it as an argument.

The end.

Obligations

2010-07-08T12:09:00.000-03:00

I've been remiss on writing these days. It's not from lack of ideas, or even lack of inspiration. It's mostly from lack of energy, and the weather.

For those who don't follow my LJ / Twitter / Tumblr, I've been home in Malaysia for the past month now. I work downstairs at the kitchen table, because my bedroom doesn't have a writing table and I've found that I cannot tolerate sitting on a bed, writing, for long periods of time, unless it's just for an evening or two. Also, hot air rises and it is really warm in my bedroom, but I don't like having the air-conditioner on for long periods of time, due to sinus issues.

But much of the problem stems from the fact that I spend all day trying to catch up on news around the world on my Google Reader, and by the time I'm ready to sit down to write, my family is home, and there is no nice way of saying this: dealing with my family is exhausting and costs me more damned spoons than I should ever have to give up for them. I do it because it's less spoons than fighting back.

Right now as I write this, my father is pottering around and asking me to help him out in the kitchen. Which I can do, of course, and as long as I live under this roof, I will help out around the house as much as possible. This doesn't mitigate the fact that I need quiet in order to work, a kind of quiet I only get when he's not in the house. (Yes, he's distracting even when he's reading his own emails, because then my Gmail alerts are constantly pinging to tell me of another forward he's sent me.) I love the dad a whole lot, but it is counter-productive to live under his roof. I get more done even when I'm juggling reading two books at a time; hell, I got more done when I was doing my 9-5 job.

I also get complaints from my mother, on the occasions that she is home and downstairs, often staring at me while I work. Usually, I take long periods away from my computer where I walk around the living room, just thinking. I do not do this with an audience. So, when she is around, I am less likely to walk around. Then she tells me that I need to get away from the computer more often.

The complaint of parents never seeing us do what they tell us to do is, I think, fairly universal among my set. Yes, I did study, when they weren't looking. Yes, I do actually wash the dishes / hang the clothes / clean my feet / [chore du jour] when they are not around. I just don't happen to do it when they tell me to do it immediately because! As you might notice! I am busy doing something else! And I also don't happen to do it when they are watching because! I am more likely to do a wider variety of stuff when they are not around!

I don't know why, and I suspect I am not alone in this, but being away from parental supervision is freedom to be oneself in a way that one cannot be when around parents.

Although over time, conditions in my parents' household have gotten better, I have never been able to shake the expectations I have been told to live under. There is a certain way I need to look, to do things, to be. And as it happens, because I do live with one chronically-anxious mother and one constantly-energetic father, both of whom have certain and varying expectations of me, complete with inane observations about things they should know by now that I, as an adult, will not be changing and thus it is pointless and a waste of all our collective time to tell me about (like the fact that I bite the inside of my cheeks, twisting my mouth in due process, something I only do when I'm concentrating on something other than my appearance) (which I suppose is most of the time) (oh but why do you do it? it makes you look so ugly!).

Things have gotten better: if I tell my parents to leave me alone, this is generally honoured (my mother likes pushing my boundaries, and I don't think she's clued in to the fact that this generates the sulkiness she dislikes from me). Because I am no longer a high school student, with exams looming in front of me, I am no longer told to go study when I want to be doing something else (studying, again, is something I do best when no one is around). This is one complaint off her roster. It doesn't minimize the other complaints she has left, which she will probably keep having until the day she dies.

When I tell people jokingly, I'm home because my dad doesn't want to pay my rent in Canada for the summer, I'm semi-serious. The usual response is, "he wants you home!"

I think this is supposed to make me feel better, and grateful, that after years of giving my parents hell, they still want me under their roof. This is nice, of course, but it doesn't detract from the fact that living with my parents for an extended period of time is difficult.

There is no nice way of saying this: for me, and for many like me, living with family is exhausting, even if we don't have abusive relationships like many people I know do. From living up to ingrained expectations, to passive-aggressive intimations on appearance, to outright distraction, it's yet another slice of energy taken off.

I resent the idea that wanting to live away from my family reflects badly on them, as opposed to being a case of simple incompatibility. If I have a roommate I cannot stand, I'm not expected to put up with them. Yet, by virtue of blood relations and a history of living as a family, I'm expected to forgive them, constantly, the fact that being around them is exhausting.

There is a strange culture surrounding nuclear families that I know. Family is where we rejuvenate. Family is where we draw our strength from. Family is the backbone of our lives. This is common wisdom. This is an acceptable truth.

An unacceptable truth runs like this: family is what screws us up, front, back and center, as we grow up into adulthood. Family hurts us. Family holds us back from reaching for what we really want.

I'm told, over and over again, cutting family off is a Western thing. That family values is an Asian thing. Only Westerners think it's okay to cut off family ties. Because family is naturally a good thing.

This is a damned ridiculous idea, trotted out by Asian conservatives to discredit my contrary opinions, to mark me as some wayward child who just needs to be schooled in proper Asian values. Family as we understand it, particularly the [nuclear family + satellite extended relatives] standard is all over the world, particularly in areas developed to match current standards of modernity. An abusive family is an abusive family, no matter where you come from, no matter what values you live with. No one should be under obligation to put up with more than they can tolerate. For many of us, we don't cut ties because we can't afford to. I come home because my dad buys me a ticket home, not because I want to be here.

I'm not in an abusive family, although it certainly did feel abusive during my teens, when my parents were working extremely hard and thus were too tired to do more than snap and yell. This isn't a failure of family, it's a failure of a societal capitalistic system that refuses to acknowledge and support family as an emotional priority.

I am, however, one of those people who can't do anything productive when around family, especially on holiday. Because on holiday, I'm apparently at the disposal of anybody who wants me to do anything, even though it's something they can do perfectly fine on their own, when I'm not around. I am, after all, not a guest, I'm a family member, and thus obligated.

So, while I can fulfill these obligations, it does mean that I end up with less energy to write and think.

And hence, the radio silence, not because I've abandoned the blogosphere. Just in case you missed me.

Quick Rant: Websites for Women

2010-06-25T11:06:00.000-03:00

Forbes just released a Top 100 Websites for Women. Feministe, Feministing and Jezebel are on it. But... that's it. The rest of it? Lifestyle blogs, work, mothering, all very important, yes!

But, where is Shakesville, which covers all sorts of feminist issues, providing insight on how media and culture affect women's lives? Where is Love Isn't Enough, a blog about parenting and how to raise non-racist children? Where is the Pursuit of Harpyness, which discusses self-esteem, academia, pop culture, and other such issues relevant to women? Geek Feminism, resource and discussion for and about women in the still-male-dominated IT industry, HELLO? Racialicious may have more focus on race and pop culture, but they still lean towards questions of gender, they just don't limit themselves to that! Feminists with Disabilities too! Oh wait, disability isn't a women's issue, okay.

Malaysiana: Cheering for Cheer 2010

2010-06-24T00:21:00.000-03:00

Sometimes, I like to take note when boys are doing the smashing of the gender binary.

There is a national cheerleading competition every year here in Malaysia, which got its start several/a few years ago (depending on how you calculate time - I know its first year was before I left for Canada, so that's quite a long time from my perspective). I've never actually seen it in person, but there's always one splash page in the newspaper, featuring the teams in some sort of cheerleader-y pose, with the name of the team and what school they're presenting.

The first year this happened, I noticed that there was an all-boys team, and I thought, that is so awesome! Good for the boys. I hope they do their best. And from what I read later on, they certainly did.

There are a lot of gender stereotypes floating around, many of them stemming from the West, about how men should act and what women should (not) do. I've noticed that some of them just don't have any roots here, like women taking husband's surnames and staying out of tech jobs, so, it doesn't really surprise me that much that cheerleading would be seen as somewhat feminine but not locking out boys entirely. But I was still very impressed, because we do get some North American influences, and that there are more all-girl cheerleader teams than all-boy ones shows that.

This year, out of eleven teams featured in the national newspaper I was reading, three of them are all-boy teams, one of them is the male counterpart to an all-girl team from the same school.

It's not perfect, obviously, because there'll always be some residual ideas and stereotypes that even the teams will hold on to. But I think it's a nice start, seeing boys and girls cheerleading, competing and having fun with it.

Ally Issues: On Juneteenth vs. Helen Keller Blogswarm Days

2010-06-20T02:42:00.000-03:00

Helen Keller Blogswarm Day came and went, and since I knew about it beforehand, I'd already made a promise to write something for it. This, despite not being Helen Keller's birthday, or even the day of her death.

At the same time, Juneteenth came and went, an actual day of celebration.

And from here on out, this post is going to be All About Me. Even though I know it ain't about me.

I had no idea what Juneteenth is until this morning, and it is currently 1:24pm, June 20, in Malaysia. I am not African-American, nor have I been a minority in North America for most of my life. It shows how few black / African-American friends I have that such a seminal holiday, so integral to black North American history, has been off the radar despite my reading blogs on race issues in North America for the last few years. Even if not all black people celebrate Juneteenth, I surely would have heard about it from at least one.

I don't know why I never knew. I have no good reason not to know. I should know, because whether or not I like it, the North American hegemony permeates my consciousness whenever I do most of anything.

And yet, I am resentful, because this North American hegemony is not one I belong to, and thus I resist it, and in my resistance, I can and have participated in ignorance of a very important day. I colluded.

Nonetheless, Renee's callout to FWD on hosting the Helen Keller Mythbusting Day made me wince. Her callout is legitimate. She's been left in the dust a lot, for someone who speaks so much truth to power. She makes no apologies for the things she says and does unless it hurts someone else substantially. She has made the call-out of the blogswarm being racist, of white privilege erasing what is an important black holiday.

I reacted viscerally because it felt like the onus was on me, a minority in both North America and in my own Southeast Asia, to center North American, specifically US American, history once more. Yet, at the same time, the reaction is against the words of a minority in North America. It's just not fair to all of us, what the white North American and Western European hegemonies have done to us minorities within and without.

I've been involved in a similar sort of fail several years ago. Back then, I knew nothing about black-white race relations in North America. I apologized, but it was an empty sort of apology because I had no idea what I was apologizing for - all I knew was that I had hurt someone, and that's worth an apology (and I rarely, if ever, apologize, verbally). Knowing better now, I look back and I see I was behaving very badly.

I cannot help but feel that right now, although I understand the inherent problems, I'm still in the same place I was then - outside this context of which I never grew up in and have never felt I belonged to. I don't even have White Liberal Guilt to fall back on. I don't know how in any way this post could make anything better, especially since both events are really quite happy events, celebrating two communities that have traditionally been marginalized.

BFP brought it home in pointing out that Renee's callout is of systemic privilege - that once again, celebration of a white person has taken precedence over a black person's celebration. She also brought it home in pointing out that these two events can, and should, co-exist with each other, because marginalized communities need to work together.

At the end of it, all I can say is, I am sorry I colluded in the contribution of erasure.

Happy Helen Keller Mythbusting Blogswarm Day!

2010-06-19T05:59:00.001-03:00

June 19 is the designated day for Helen Keller Mythbusting!

Image: A grey banner divided in three parts. A photo of a young Helen Keller is in the center. On the right, it reads “Political Activist. Radical Thinker. Suffragist. Pacifist. Journalist. Socialist. Who was she?” On the left it reads “Helen Keller Mythbusting Day 2010″

I first learnt about Helen Keller through a calendar book of sorts in which each day was marked with something of significance to the date. The item was illustrated by a blond girl at a waterpump, one hand pumping, the other hand under the rush of water. Her eyes were wide and looked rather bewildered and lost (she was also blonde and blue-eyed). I learned that she was blind and deaf, until her teacher taught her how to read and write through impressions on her hands.

I did not know her teacher was also ~~deaf~~ blind until much later.

I only caught snippets about Helen Keller later, and saw a picture of the first story she typed up; I think it was a re-telling of Cinderella, but I can't say for sure now - I only know it was a famous fairytale. I remember being impressed that she could do that deaf and blind. I also saw a movie in which she was a character, touching a soldier's lips to hear him.

Here's the thing, though, until Anne at FWD talked to me about Helen Keller Mythbusting Day, I didn't really think much about what else she had done in her life, besides being generally awesome in how she managed to live a full life while being deaf and blind. And then it was, wait, what?

What do you mean, Helen Keller was a political activist? A radical thinker? I knew she travelled and was a speaker, but I always assumed it was all about disability - obviously that would be her main concern in life! I visited her Wikipedia page, and lo, stuff I didn't know about this amazing woman.

I let her disability cloud my entire perception of her, and am thus ashamed, and now, I exhort ya'll who read my blog to hie on over to FWD's Blogswarm post, into which many links and discussions about Helen Keller, and other incredible women with disabilities, will be shared. Or, if you have some myths to bust about Helen Keller yourself, write a post and share!

Malaysiana: Rumination on May 13

2010-05-12T12:00:00.001-03:00

Some context for non-Malaysians
On May 13, 1969, riots broke out on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. These were racialized riots, between the majority Malay and minority-but-still-sizeable Chinese factions, a result of racial and religious fractioning between political parties of the people. Malaysia was still a very young country at the time, and had not really had much time yet to grow used to its multi-cultural identity now that the overwhelming British influence was gone. I would still argue that the Malaysian identity is still in flux; cultures take a long time to change and syncretize with each other.

Since then, May 13 has become a force under which we have all rallied to do away with race-based politics, with a certain degree of success. We recognize now that we are Malaysians - born, bred, raised in similar environments and contexts, with a shared history (that can also be called propaganda), in a particular cultural context that is similar but not quite exactly the same with neighbouring nations.

Unfortunately, it seems also seems to have become a weapon for those who have privileges they want to maintain. Do not question the status quo, because it will, as it inevitably does, lead to questioning the current state of equality between races, which will lead to discussing the racial discrimination faced on institutional levels, which will lead to anger of many individuals, who will go on to cite the many different incidents of racism they or their friends or their friends' friends have gone through, and it all ends up in this unproductive black hole of people getting mutually angry at each other and ending up with harsh generalizations.

Malaysia's Identity Crisis

Part of this is because of the growing pains of trying to be a single community, building a single identity, when our history is made of several nations amalgamating into one entity. Our society is made of several different communities, some of whom have been here for generations, some who have just migrated, all of whom are learning how to get along.

Malaysia is not in a homogenous cultural state. Unlike many countries where, despite regional differences, there are enough similarities between them all to create a cohesive identity, Malaysia is made of many communities. All of them have different ideas on what religion looks like, how government should be run, what makes the qualities of a good leader, what our values are, how power and wealth should be distributed. Throw in the fact that each group has their own elite and own power structures, and it's a messy conglomerate of inequality.

When I think about being Malaysian, I think about what I was taught then, and what I know now. What I was taught then was that Malaysians are friendly and tolerant. We love good food and we are hard workers. Durian was our national fruit. The hibiscus, bunga raya, is the national flower. We are multi-cultural and multi-racial and we still get along.

What I know now is that these are superficial statements. Many people from other countries are friendly and tolerant. Many other countries also have thriving food traditions and their citizens are also hard workers. Yes, the love of durian appears to be specific to Malaysia, and no other country claims the hibiscus as the national flower, but seriously, a fruit and a flower are not exactly a solid basis for identity. We are multi-cultural and multi-racial, but what the hell does that even mean?

Identity is more than the values we hold, the trappings of culture, the shared history and the life under the same shared political system. When someone says, "I'm not [Malay/Chinese/Indian/Eurasian], I am MALAYSIAN," what do they mean? I thought I knew, because "Malaysian" is supposed to be our uniting identity.

Yet, knowing what we do of the discriminatory policies upheld by institutions, knowing what we do of how prejudices structure our very lives, knowing how for many of us, we stick to 'our own kind,' what is the label "Malaysian" supposed to mean?

When I ponder this question, I go back to May 13.

Recognizing May 13
Figuring out the precise causes of May 13 is a nebulous quest. Partly because I have no access to history books that might shed light, and many such history books would be tightly controlled by the government. Partly because there are few reports of the incident, few first-hand accounts. Partly because discussion of it is suppressed. Partly because a lot of us would like to forget it ever happened, because it is such a taint on our history, a stain, a shame.

I think about May 13 every now and then, with and without prompting from politicians who use it as a threat over our heads. But especially when they do, because why do they use it as a threat? What is so powerful about May 13 that its repeat is something to shy from? It seemed to me that May 13 is frightening because it is so imminent. Because the politicians have the power to somehow summon demons inside us to rise up that will make us take to the streets and attack people who look like they belong to a different racial group.

I've been thinking about May 13 ever since I began to understand the divisive effects of the NEP. I don't think too long on the subject because I can't get very far, what with the lack of information I have.

May 13 broke out because we did not understand that politicians want our votes to serve their purposes. May 13 broke out because we did not understand that we are different peoples coming together. Yes, one nation, but yes, many identities.
May 13 broke out because we did not care to have a deep understanding of each other, because we were convinced of each other's foreignness, or similarity, and when we discovered there were some things we clashed on, and we still had to live with each other, we didn't know how to react.
May 13 broke out and fractured us because we were afraid of understanding each other because we thought it meant we had to give up something of ourselves.
May 13 broke out because we saw each other in pain, and we were scared that to approach each other meant we, too, would feel that pain.
May 13 broke out because we were pushed and pulled by forces that had power over our daily lives, and we reacted without grasping the whole picture.
May 13 broke out because we failed to communicate.
May 13 broke out because we failed to speak out.

May 13 broke out because we failed to recognize our capacity for prejudice, violence, and hatred.

Our Capacity for Division
Because I'm sure others will be able to talk more on the other things I mentioned, I want to focus on the latter.

I hate rapists. I hate racists. I hate casual misogyny and I hate microaggressions.

I hate these people because they make me angry. And this anger is borne from a place of fear: these are the people who can affect my life - as a woman, a rapist can strip me of my sense of personal and physical security. As a minority in the countries I live in, both Malaysia and Canada, I am a visible minority and racists have the power to prevent me from things that I have a right to: respect, good service, employment, justice. Casual misogyny allows the former to thrive, and microaggressions, that insidious type of discrimination which is hard to identify, is a manifestation of the latter. And worse still, I can identify neither rapist nor racist on first sight. This breeds anxiety, which leads to anger that I cannot live securely, and so I hate them, because not only to they deprive me of this security, but also others like me. What right do these people have to deprive me and those like me of this basic right to self-assurance?

And that is why I have sympathy for the rioters of 1969. The rhetoric of the times stripped them of their sense of the security that life would go on as usual, fueled by the fear that they would lose what they currently had, which was already not much.

When I was a child, I was taught not to show weakness. I was taught that to cry was "shame, shame" because somehow or another, I was a grown-up, and grown-ups do not cry. Crying is for babies and toddlers who cannot speak. I was also told not to be scared. Only scaredy-cats are scared. I suspect this is also true for many of my peers and elders.

So when I was frustrated at my lack of understanding, or frustrated at someone else's lack of understanding me, I lashed out. This would often lead to me thrashing my own room, dumping everything on the floor, after which a process would begin wherein I would start to clean out things I didn't need anymore. Since I was denied an emotional and mental clearinghouse, I made do with a physical one. If I had not lived in relative privilege and comfort, I probably would have turned out to be a violent child.

Anyone has this capacity to turn out violent. Abuse people long enough and they will either withdraw or lash out. Deny them proper, non-harmful avenues of expression, take away from them what they feel are their rights and privileges, tell them they are worth less than what they truly are or feel themselves to be - this will lead to ill-will on all sides.

When there is ill-will on all sides... there will be divisions, as we thus refuse to correspond and cooperate, because who wants to cooperate with someone that pisses us off?

Severed From Other Malaysians
Growing up, I could not speak much besides English. This means my Malay could stand for improvement, and my Chinese is only worth for ta-pau. Sometimes if I talk in Malay too long, I end up swallowing my words. I've been told I sound like a Kelantanese. And of course, I speak no Tamil.

Nonetheless, the lack of proficiency in any of these languages means I am cut off from much of Malaysia's population, my own countrymen. I associate only with a specific subset of the upper-middle-class which has been taught that English is the best medium for communication. It means I miss a great deal of connotations and implications in many conversations with other Malaysians who speak something other than English.

It means that growing up, I had very few friends who were not Chinese.

This is significant, because Malays are 50% of the population, and Indians are 5%, yet 98% of my friends growing up were all Chinese. Is it something as simple as 'birds of a feather'? I want to say so, but somehow, I doubt it is. Because we're supposed to be Malaysian, right? I used to think our major points of disagreement were only religious and political.

Yet, I was a supporter of UMNO. When I took Tasawwur Islam for SPM, I sat by myself, the only Chinese student in an all-Malay, all-Muslim class. I did not make friends with my classmates, because there was still something inescapably different - our contexts were different. Our cultures were different. They had their own friends, and I was not one of them.

When younger, I might have chalked it up to my individualism which made it very difficult for me to make friends in the first place. I was a bit anti-social, and quite awkward. Even today, I don't relate to very many people easily. Yet the point remains: there was a gulf between myself and my Malay classmates, most of whom were middle-class like myself, that I could not cross, even between those who spoke English. This was similar for myself with Indian schoolmates. I could only speak to a select few: they tended to speak English, as well.

Between myself and Chinese classmates, the gulf was not just language, but also money. Money talks, yes, it does! Moreso when negotiating friendships between the haves and have-nots. I doubt this problem stems from May 13, but it is still part of the socio-economic landscape of our country.

The Obstacles to Being Malaysian
So what does "Malaysian" mean? I still don't know, although I've been away from Malaysia long enough to know that whatever it means, I'm one.

What I do know is that Malaysia, like many other nations, is a construct, and for us, a colonial one - we came together because we had to, forced into a single Federation through British influence. When we absorbed Sarawak and Sabah, we became even more of a construct. "Malaysian" as a fixed identity is a national identity - there is no single cultural nor racial identity attached to this concept.

As such, under this construct, anyone who identifies as Malaysian deserves the same rights all around. We all deserve the same opportunities, the same access to education and funding.

Unfortunately, our national identity is riddled with questions and interference from our other identities: how much does being Chinese influence our identities as Malaysian? Malay? Indian? Racially, it is not quite so simple - being Malaysian-Chinese carries its own burdens and privileges. As one, I am a step up from being Malaysian-Indian, several steps up from being an Indonesian migrant, a step away from being a regular middle-class Malaysian-Malay, and together, we are several steps down under the Malaysian elite. And let us be honest - the regular Malay citizen has more in common with another regular Chinese citizen than with the politicians of UMNO.

What about religion? I, for one, am grateful that I have been able to celebrate Wesak Day with other Buddhists, although I do not identify as Buddhist anymore. We built a beautiful temple in SS13 with our own money. Most of us can practise our religion with relatively little fuss. I personally love the call to prayer at 5am (yes, I am quite aware that most non-Muslims do not share this sentiment). Yet when Christians wish to translate their faith into Malay, the national language, in itself a pastiche of various languages, a word becomes the spark that lights jealousy on the part of Malay-Muslims, who want to horde the language of their faith for themselves. Why would such religious possessiveness drive people to hurt others born in the same country? Of course, it is insecurity, because being a Malaysian-Muslim is not quite the same as being a Middle-Eastern Muslim. Then again, there's not much that is the same between a Saudi-Muslim, an American-Muslim, a Chinese-Muslim, and a Palestinian-Muslim besides the basic tenets of the faith.

What about education? A rural student will be very different from one going to some cosmopolitan private school. While the examinations are standardized, are we all really learning the same thing? I am upper-middle-class; I went to tuition, I took piano lessons, I go shopping, I have Internet access. The poorer student who has no extra money to pay a tutor to help him or her understand schoolwork is not going to be very much like me. And yet we are both Malaysian... because we are born in the same country. But are we the same? We are not: I am privileged and will have more opportunities than s/he will.

These are not the only things which mark us as different within our own country. These are all true things that divide us all.

May 13 did not divide us. May 13 was only a manifestation of the divisions that already existed and continue to exist today. Every day, people live their own private May 13s - when a prospective employee is denied a job because he or she is the wrong race, for example. When a scholarship consistently favours a certain type of student, despite purporting to be based on academic scores alone. When a person is ostracized for speaking differently, marking them as the odd one out from the rest of the group they supposedly belong to. When a citizen feels compelled to leave the country of their birth.

Also, a little May 13 is inflicted on us every time a part of the Malaysian elite has decided that we lower-caste folks are getting too uppity for their liking.

It has been a little over 30 years since 1969. I hesitate to say that the nation has matured; we haven't yet had much of a history as Malaysia. I don't care what the history books say: Tanah Melayu may have been around since the medieval times, but Malaysia itself is still fresh and new. We have gone down the route of capitalism (and without the free market, to boot!) and industrialization, but we have forgotten the fact that all these things are remnants of the colonial history that has sought to render us objects and commodities.

The Malaysian elite are the heirs of our former masters. They use fear and intimidation to silence the common Malaysian into silent fear. Their tools are a police force, the laws they can manipulate and re-interpret, and a religious authourity from which they moralize and pontificate.

Audre Lorde, a black American woman who wrote on the oppression she faced in her own country, once wrote, "the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house." Perhaps it is good for us that we do not have such access to this kind of power that is being wielded over us.

Today is May 13. I am a student of a literature that intersects with theories and workings of social justice. My tools are my fingers that type, a mind that seeks to inquire into the origins of the anxiety that drives us apart from each other, and a willingness to learn and reach across gulfs of differences.

Today, I expect many to speak from a place of anger, or a place of fear, or a place of hostility, or a place of pain. Today, I expect most to be silent, because to speak out is more costly than they can pay.

This post is going up earlier than May 13, because where I am, May 13 will arrive in Malaysia 12 hours before it gets here. Yet, as far away as I am from my own tanahair, I remember May 13. I may not have been there that fateful day in 1969, but I know, it has not yet ended.

May 13 Blogswarm Links Post

2010-05-12T00:30:00.001-03:00

This is where all Malaysians and residents of Malaysia are welcome to leave links to their participation in the May 13 Blogswarm. For more information, check out LiveJournal and Facebook.

Comments Policy:

Please note that moderation is turned on for comments older than 7 days. I try to check in regularly, but this may be hard as I will be traveling.

Do not use this place to debate what others have said. If you do and you crash my site in due process, I'll get very irritated at you. That shit is rude. Don't do it.

I Write: A Response to Diana Gabaldon

2010-05-07T00:52:00.000-03:00

A friend of mine directed me to this post by Diana Gabaldon, who I understand is a successful authoress, about her objection to fanfiction. Her main points boil down to the following: it's illegal, it takes control of the material from the original author, and omg-ew-yuck-what-are-you-doing-to-my-characters.

Fanfiction is not my first choice for entertainment. I find it incredibly difficult to sift though fanfics to find stuff I really enjoy, and I imagine it's like an editor's slush pile. (So, I let other more dedicated people than I do my work for me.) I'm also a fan of reading an authour for their own personal writing style, not just what was written, but how. I've got no guarantee this same experience will be reproduced when I read fanfic. I've written fanfic before, and while it's a pleasant exercise, I don't do it often for reasons of my own I'll explain later.

She brings up the International Copyright Law, which states that anything an authour creates belongs to them. Any derivative works, which fanfic is, are illegal. However, this is often ignored, especially by major industries, which allow fanfic to proliferate. Partly because since fan works are rarely commercial, and thus, the copyright holders lose no money through allowing them. Partly because fan works help promote the original work. Partly because it's a pain in the ass to have to chase down every fanfic authour, and let's face it: it'd be a form of bullying. So yes, derivative works are illegal, but they are so in order to protect the owners of the original source. I find it very difficult to believe that most authours require such protection.

There's also the argument that riffing off someone else's work implies a lack of creativity and insecurity in one's own work, that one is using the material as a crutch, rather than creating one's own story. This is true and not true. Personally, a few of my stories have started out as fanfic, and became so unrecognizable from the source material, I realized it would be ridiculous to maintain the same names, and changed them anyway. I wrote these for my friends, who were delighted to see what new and strange forms their favourite characters took in my stories.

However, writing using source material and staying true to said source material is challenging for some. It is a great exercise in reading and grasping the nuances of a character from the original source, which in turn makes the best fanfic writers very good readers... and eventually very good writers. There is a world in place already; writing within that universe can be very limiting, but helpful in maintaining the discipline of characterization. Of course, not all fanfic does this, and much is gratuitously written to what the readers feel the universe should be like. I'll get back to this.

The most laughable parts of her argument involve comparisons to family members - writing fanfic about her characters is apparently like trying to seduce her husband. Receiving fanfic in her mail is like receiving a story from a middle-aged neighbour detailing what he would do to her twenty-one-year-old daughter.

The problem with this analogy is that stories are not real people. If I were to flirt with Mr. Gabaldon, he has every right to reject me. A human being has that choice to walk away from being part of something they don't want to be. A story doesn't. A story cannot impose itself on a real person.

Stories are meant for consumption. They are meant to go out into the world into the hearts of others, who will germinate them as they will, spreading themselves further. Perhaps it is a sign that the oral tradition is truly dead that authours jealously cling to their works and announce that no one else is to change a single word without their permission.

At best, stories are our children. But we don't control what happens to our children as they go out into the world, get their own ideas, discover their own opinions, shape themselves into the human beings they will become. We just don't. To do so is to deny them the length and breadth of their humanity, the potential stretching beyond them. This doesn't happen to stories, though.

Stories change but not of their own volition, because they are not their own; they have makers and shapers. They are ideas condensed into accessible forms that can be processed and transmitted to others. Ideas change and shift with the times and with the peoples whose hands they fall into.

When an authour writes a story, zie is creating. Building. Giving a work legs and wings. An authour has a responsibility to ensure that hir creation is a good one, because it is done for the world. When an authour has released hir stories out to the world, zie can only sit back and wait to hear back from the world.

Art is transformative. Good art will transform the reader. Who may be inspired to transform the art in return. Who may transform yet someone else. The interaction between minds and art is a tenuous thread that nonetheless leaves behind a mark. It is changeable; it changes. And this is part of why we enjoy art.

Many such transformed and transformative works have been produced over the ages. Can we name who the first sonneteer was? No, but the form has persisted. If Petrach had been living today, he would be so rich, since he could patent the sonnet form named after him, and be paid royalties. Do we acknowledge Paradise Lost as capital-l Literature? Most schools certainly would, but it is essentially Bible fanfiction. So on, so forth, have works been thus changed, re-interpreted, re-released into the world for fresh eyes and times.

But according to Diana Gabaldon, such transformations are immoral. A work is what it is; it is static and has a specific image, and re-interpretations will confuse would-be fans. As I've mentioned before, reading the source material and reading a fan's interpretation can be very different experiences... but it is hardly immoral.

If an authour wants to draw an arbitrary line on how readers can consume their work, that\s perfectly acceptable. If fanfiction makes an authour uncomfortable, all they generally have to do is say so. True fans would take note, and just not create any. But to claim it is immoral is a fairly hefty judgement call, and in this case, made with little knowledge of how fan communities work. It is heavy-handed to slap a denigrating label like that on whole groups of people who, for all intents and purposes, do not hurt anybody.

I think anti-choice protesters are immoral. I think tea baggers are immoral. I think many people in charge of great organizations immoral. Because their actions and decisions affect real people, in harmful ways.

Fanfiction writers... don't do this. Not even remotely.

Diana Gabaldon's main objection to fanfiction seems to be that she does not want people coming to her work through an interpretation of another; that she wants to preserve the original form of her work. That she's uncomfortable with fan interpretations - particularly of the pornographic kind. All of which are very fair reasons. I, too, am uncomfortable re-interpreting someone else's creation, unless there is room in canon for that (my most recent fanfiction have been "historical fiction" within the Girl Genius universe), and whilst I do write fanfic for gratuitous sex, I also work hard to flesh out the characters the best I can. However, I do end up creating huge spin-off works of my own that are better developed into their own stories. Fanfic possibilities are thus my stepping stone for other stories.

However, with the pronouncement of fanfiction as immoral, Diana Gabaldon has not only made her wishes clear with regards to her own work, but painted an entire segment of fans as criminal.

Looking through the comments, I'm seeing variations of the Tone Argument held up against Gabaldon. I personally don't think Gabaldon comes across as whiny, but her comparison between fanfic writers and potential rapists is deeply insulting - to fans, to survivors, and to any decent person who can tell the difference between a regular person out to have fun and a sociopath out to hurt others. It minimizes their experiences, and trivializes the very real issue of sexual assault and rape.

As of today, Gabaldon has yet to apologize for this comparison. If she really does believe that fanfic writers are a kind of rapist, and does not redact her words, and does not apologize... that is truly immoral.

Malaysiana: Three Stories on Disability for BADD

2010-05-01T23:39:00.000-03:00

Sometime when I was home earlier this year, my dad and I noticed this Indian man struggling with a walker in our housing area. He wasn't very old, and we'd seen him, walking, sort of tottering, past our road, along the football field, down a road which has several road bumps, because it's a one-way street passing through several.

One day, Dad and I were driving home to get something, and driving back out, and we saw this guy past our road. My dad slowed down, and said, "Young man, would you like a lift? Where are you going?"

He replied, in Malay, "the train station." He slurred a bit, but was still understandable.
My dad said, also in Malay, "We have to go to our house first and get something, but if you wait here, we'll be right back and we'll drive you there."

So we did, and I got the door open for him. I watched him handle himself as he sat down first, folded his walker neatly, pulled it into the car right next to him, and he adjusted himself in as I closed the door on him. His movements were slow and awkward, to me.

When we were off again, my dad asked for his name, and if he didn't mind, what had happened?

His name was Nagarajan and he had been in a motorbike accident a couple years back. He had been on the highway, and a car had hit him. He was paralyzed for several months, and it was only recently in the past few months he was even able to move. Since then, he had been exercising himself to the point where he could walk and carry himself.

I forget the details, but I remember clearly him telling us that on the days he worked, Nagarajan walked two hours, from the bus station to the train station. In the hot, equatorial sun. It can get to 35'c in the afternoons. But he didn't mind; he liked being able to exercise; it made up for the months he couldn't move. My dad asked where he worked. He worked at the train station. In Malaysia, some of our public toilets have maintenance costs offset by collecting twenty sen from people who use it. Folks sit outside the toilet, at a small table, collecting the coins. Sometimes they make change. They also sell tissue paper. Nagarajan did this at the train station. He had been living at his uncle's, and since he had started being able to move, his uncle had been telling him to leave. He now lived with his mother.

When we got to the train station, my dad took a ticket from an Indian lady, and drove up to the wheelchair ramp which led directly to the toilet area. I opened the door for Nagarajan and he helped himself out and I closed the door behind him as he started his way towards his post, where two guys were already waiting. When my dad drove out, the lady at the ticket booth told him, next time, "don't bother getting a ticket, if you're only bringing him in." She knew who he was and knew my dad was just dropping him off, so she waved my dad away and lifted the bar for us without taking money (usually it's RM1.50 per entrance for an hour).

I've seen Nagarajan a couple more times after that. He's another person in the landscape, not a special super-tragic case, although my dad probably gives him rides whenever he's in the car and passing by. It makes me wonder about the community he has (our communities are quite separate, through race and class). I've always noted that the "lower", manual labourer working class to be somewhat closeknit compared to my middle-class community which can get very snooty.

Maybe when I go home this summer, I'll see him again.

When blogging was still a new and trendy thing, my brother was fond of reading one of them. I can't remember who it is, something like Xiao Xiao. She was a lifestyle blogger, apparently very funny. and she had such a huge readership, that she had ads on her site (new at the time!) and had a sponsorship from Coca-Cola or something, worth several thousand, or some ridiculously high amount like that.

However, a huge internet debate was sparked when she said she didn't believe that special measure should be taken for handicapped people, because it was too costly and wasted resources. Because of this, there was a general outcry, and she lost her sponsorship. My brother and some other fans of hers were upset about this, and he said she was just being reasonable - it IS expensive to make the accommodations and she didn't deserve to lose her sponsorship - which was a LOT of money - over saying that.

I remember disagreeing with him. However, I was also fifteen at the time, so while I knew what he was saying was wrong wrong wrongity wrong, I didn't know how to argue against economics. Which is what it feels like a lot of arguments about Malaysian-Chinese middle-class values boil down to. (My dad, bless him, is not really like this, although he did stress the importance of saving money as much as possible.)

If I had known then what I knew now, I would have countered the argument by demanding what the hell he meant that it was morally sound to deprive people of the right to mobility just because it would save some people money. I would have roundly condemned Xiao Xiao, and said that the decision made by her corporate sponsors to revoke the funds was the right one, because that sort of attitude is harmful. She had a huge platform and was one of the forerunners of lifestyle blogging, and that she espoused and helped entrench such a cruel attitude towards a group of people that had enough trouble already on her huge platform, likely helping other people justify their own ablist views, was simply unbelievable.

But I didn't because I didn't know how to. My dad didn't know how to counter the argument either. So we both said that it was wrong anyway.

Now I know why.

Government schools in Malaysia are, in retrospect, some of the most inaccessible places in Malaysia. Students have to climb stairs - there are no lifts. There are classrooms on the ground floor, where the science labs, art room, workshop, and staff room are, but most of them are on the first and second floors. I have never seen a wheelchair user in my school.

I do remember, however, that there was a boy in my school. He was in the form below me and he had to use crutches. As a result, the teachers accommodated him by assigning his class one of the classrooms on the ground. (Note to North Americans: In our school system, the students do NOT change classrooms for each subject. It's the teachers who move around. Thus, one would have the same classmates all the damned time, for an entire year.)

I would see this boy, his crutches strapped to his arms, move slowly to his class. He was permitted to sit in the classroom while we were at assembly, and also during recess (we weren't allowed to be in class during recess). He was usually accompanied by a friend or two. I only remember this latter fact, because towards the end of the year, these friends were lauded during the school assembly for being such good friends, staying by his side when he needed them, helping him out throughout the whole year.

I always remember this as being in Form 2 when it happened, because the next year, I was in Form 3, meaning I was in the morning session (for upper-secondary students) and he in the afternoon session (lower secondary) , so I wouldn't have seen him around at all. The thing is, though, sometimes I remember it being around that dusky time before dawn when I visualize the memory of him. So if I didn't see him the next year, it might not have been because we were in different sessions, but because he had left the school, possibly for another, more disability-friendly school.

Many government schools are built as cheaply as possible with the assumption of a student population that is completely able-bodied. I actually do not know how students with disabilities in Malaysia get their education, but I do know they exist, and that they can find ways to get jobs. People with visible disabilities do not have much of a presence, although I can recall a columnist in a local paper who wrote extensively on disability issues, being a wheelchair user himself, but I don't recall if I ever read anything he wrote. They are on the periphery of consciousness, unless one directly works with them, and while I hesitate to say that they are ignored altogether, the truth is, they probably are by the general able-bodied public.

When assembly was over, we went on with our lives, and I guess we kind of forgot what had even happened that morning and who was lauded. We Malaysians are famous for our "tidak apa" attitude. Roughly translated, it means "no matter", and can also mean "no big deal," especially for things that inconvenience us that we feel we can do nothing about. It's often used when someone gets angry and someone else is trying to calm them down, to convince them that it's not worth getting worked up over and too concerned about. These days, it also signifies nonchalance, disregard and apathy.

Sadly, many of us have a "tidak apa" attitude towards disability as well.

But sometimes I think about my reaction to Xiao Xiao, and about the boy with the crutches and his friends, and about Nagarajan and how easily he becomes part of a working landscape with folks who support him, standing up when he approaches to let him have their seat for his shift. And it becomes more believable that we could, as a society and nation, change our infrastructure. It becomes a less impossible dream.

Blog Against Disablism Day 2010: My Invisible Disability

2010-05-01T22:07:00.000-03:00

I've recently started saying that I have an invisible disability. It's not easy to do, for several reasons.

I suffer from depression. It has its patterns - it comes every few months, for example. It's a cycle of lethargy, distractedness, and general sadness. If I keep active and focus my energies into work that I think is positive, it lifts after a while (I never notice when). If I don't, or have no recourse to take time off to deal with it, then it stays until the next cycle. It's why I don't like the idea of long-term work - the concept of continually working the same job with simultaneous projects on the go and no rest periods in between is a pretty quick way for me to "get the blahs". I prefer focusing on single projects at a time. (Which is also how I tended to write my undergrad papers.)

I've been to my incredible university doctor about it several times. She always asked if I want to take something for it, but I've always declined, because it comes in cycles... eventually I wouldn't need those pills. Furthermore, when I'm not in a downturn of the cycle, I function the way people are expected to function.

I've mentioned it casually before that I suffer from depression. People who don't know me well, who rarely speak to me, are always surprised: "but you're so energetic!" / "You're so cheerful!" / "You're so positive!"

Well, I want to say to them, of course I am. Would you rather I not be?

Because I know the consequences of not being energetic and cheerful and positive: "Why are you so lazy?" "Why are you such a downer?" "How come you're always so negative?"

Part of mentioning this is defensive - when the time comes for me to reserve my spoons, I want it out there so people know to expect it of me at some point, and I can restrain myself from taking on too many commitments. Sometimes I don't mention it, and people notice my sudden slowness, and they ask me if something is wrong.

Nothing is "wrong". I'm simply slowing down to let my body and mind deal with something that's been with me for my whole life. Things that are pleasurable become a bit harder to do, but they are no less important to me. I just need a break.

I sometimes stay silent because I don't want to burden people with the knowledge that they cannot help me at times, because there isn't anything to be helped; it just is. I just am. Other times, I stay silent because I don't want to look like I'm making excuses for myself. For the longest time, I've always seen depression as This Thing, It Bugs Me, But Is Not A Disability.

There is one social circle I have never mentioned my depression within: my family's friends in Malaysia. I have mentioned it to one or two people, but I have never openly spoken about it. Part of it is because my mother always seems to be ashamed of the fact that I have admitted mental health issues. Part of it is the social stigma attached to mental depression, still, even though it is becoming more and more clear that this is a growing problem.

I would like to start changing that in my life. I am by no means a failure in life: I graduated cum laude with Honours, I have done a variety of extra-curricular and volunteer work, I have been an active participant in social justice spheres, and much of my limited working life has been in service to others. When my mother is ashamed of me, she is so because I've not fit her ideal of a success in life: I'm not working, I cannot support myself, and I don't work in a field that would bring in a lot of money. She has wondered aloud, often, what it is she has done to deserve failures for children.

My depression is a setback. It means I cannot be continuously gung-ho about things like I would like to be. It means that sometimes I have to withdraw from the world or be overcome with exhaustion. I am easily fatigued. Some days, I want to sleep in the entire day and not have to face the world. Other times, I imagine being in a situation where I wouldn't have a tomorrow to deal with.

This doesn't make me a failure, and it doesn't make me, or anybody else like me, any less of a person deserving basic respect and consideration.

So, I'm going to talk more openly about my depression when I have occasion. I'm going to show acquaintances that yes, this person you regard as highly intelligent, hyperactive and self-confident also suffers from a mental illness that holds her back from thinking clearly, fatigues her, and ruins her self-esteem. I would also like to stop apologizing for not responding as cheerfully as I would like to - my friend Tariq has chided me, rightfully so, for doing that before.

In return, I would like the understanding of the "normal" people around me that I am not any less fragile or worthy for this. I would also like to not get looks of pity. Haven't gotten any yet, but I think I will.

Paradoxically, I would like the courage to make this an act that doesn't require courage, because it would be so normal to do so.

I have an invisible disability. Somehow it hurts to admit it. To say out loud to myself. And I would like for it to not hurt anymore.

Writing My Own

2010-04-29T13:46:00.001-03:00

Much has been said about writing the Other. It was one of the keystones of RaceFail, and has been the cause of much angst on the part of predominantly-privileged writers who would like to write marginalized cultures without being attacked for it. For a long time, marginalized cultures have been represented by the descendants of colonizers, who benefit from the imperialism of the past and continue to be so: their writings are taken more seriously than that of a marginalized person's, they are more likely to receive a larger platform, they are more often lauded.

Years of cultural imperialism has done this to the colonized's psyche, wherein we have adopted the ways of the colonizer in order to get ahead, and part of that is to embrace the colonizer's way of thinking: the West is the bastion of enlightenment; Hollywood is the gold standard for big budget movies that attract universal audiences; Lord of the Rings and Star Wars are our fantasy and science fiction staples. We forget the Golden Age of Islam; Bollywood and HK cinema are only for Indians and Chinese; Sang Kancil is silly folklore for children.

I learned the names of Immanuel Kant, Rosseau, and Sir Thomas More in secondary school. I cannot name similar modern philosophers from Asia. They are not taught, which led me to think they were not as important, not as good. In first year of university, my Introduction to Philosophy class textbook featured exclusively white men. A fine sampling of the thought that has shaped the Western-dominated modern world.

So when I wrote, I wrote characters and stories informed by what I consumed. They were cheap knock-offs of medieval romance novels, Forgotten Realms stories, and Disney movies. I only ever wrote a single character who was Malaysian, and she was my secret Mary Sue and had adventures that took her into otherworldly realms, never truly part of the Malaysian landscape.

I had never truly felt connected to the Malaysian landscape, growing up. I was too loud, too brash, too liberal. Too Westernized. I could speak perfect English without being Christian. I couldn't (and still can't) speak Chinese, which cut me off from many rites and events that marked my culture. Even my grandmother called me "ang mo", which my brother translated for me as "outlandish". I cannot even lay claim to the "Third Culture Kid" identity, because for all my up-rootedness, I was still connected to my family tree.

Not only that, but I looked down on my peers who couldn't speak English as fluently, who spoke only Chinese, often a dialect or two. They were not as middle-class as I was. Even my English-speaking peers I didn't associate too closely with because they read no Shakespeare because he was "too hard". (My first Shakespeare play was Julius Caesar; I read it when I was nine, even though I couldn't understand it wholly.) I got angry at a teacher who marked my continuous writing essay lower than that of a classmates, whose essay was riddled with grammatical mistakes, because my writing was too small and my sentences weren't clear - they were complex sentences which I had learned to parse early on. In my mind, it was not unlike comparing my letters to lettuce.

The closest I got to writing Asian literature was writing Final Fantasy VII fanfiction. But I did not write fiction directly informed by my own multicultural country.

The plain truth is that although I loved Malayan history, I didn't find Malaysian literature very interesting. The short stories we read in the Malay literature component were preachy and dull (although the novel we had to read was wonderful; Konserto Terakhir beat Steinbeck's The Pearl by a million miles); the sajaks were not particularly relatable; and in English, nothing I read about the Malaysian experience struck me as relevant to my life. As many outsider adolescents do, I wanted escapist fantasy, and turned to anime and manga because it was cheaper than buying novels. Contemporary fiction struck me as pretentious and too focused on fallibilities - I wanted something to affirm my strength.

So I wrote characters who were strong. They also happened to be white, heteronormative, cisgendered, physically able-bodied, with fair skin and eyes the colour of anything other than brown. They lived in climates that had four seasons. Chimamanda Adichie noted the same of her writing in "the Danger of a Single Story," and she also sardonically notes, "All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. (Laughter) And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to."

For Shatter the Silence, I reflected on the fact that I'd never written a fantasy novel with a character more like myself before, from a land like my own, with people like those I grew up with.

I came to understand that we write in order to share that which is important to us. I'm lucky in that many academic essays I've written for my degree has been of some import to me, something I could throw my 100% efforts behind. I write and participate in the social justice blogosphere because I fully believe in the causes I work for. The same goes for the stories I write.

Storytelling is meaningful. It is the medium through which we process our cultural norms, and through which we transmit cultural meaning. It means something when the only stories we consume contain only certain peoples. It tells us something, and we learn from it. It means something when the stories we create contain only certain peoples. It tells the world something, and others learn from it.

I find a vast difference between myself and white writers. White writers complain about writing cultures not their own. I worry about writing cultures that are my own. And I never understand why the former complain - white writers have been writing about other cultures for a long time. Sometimes what they produce are racial caricatures that serve the agenda of Empire. Sometimes what they produce are wonderful stories in the trappings of the cultures they use.

My father (or grandfather) collected Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee comic strips over a period of several years - I discovered them when I was nine, and devoured them hungrily because they were well-written, and beautifully illustrated. Judge Dee was more important to me than Sherlock Holmes, and the stories were written by a Dutchman, an Orientalist no less, who studied the Ming Dynasty closely. (So no, I do not hate on all Orientalists as a general rule.) However, it must be noted that Robert van Gulik was still an European. The translation of Monkey King my grandfather owned was also done by an European. Many books I read on Asia as a child were written, translated or otherwise published by Europeans or Americans.

This is significant, because it led me to believe that only Westerners had enough education to be able to produce these wonderful creative works in this day and age. What creativity my own people had was tossed aside for industrialism and our time had passed. Compounded with the fact that English was (and is!) my first language, and none of my family could read Chinese and thus could not teach me, I was cut off from the literary traditions of my own peoples and thus had no idea what literary accomplishments my own community had. So I studied and assimilated Western culture. If I was going to be called ang mo, I might as well be one, or so I thought.

The thing is, as much as I assimilate, I'll never actually be ang mo, and the longer I live in a land of ang mos, the more I realize that I don't really want to be one. Coming from a country with racial strife that insists on the common humanity of all its peoples, I realized that I'm different. And I'm okay with that.

So I got it into my head to revel in my difference and starting trying to write not the Other, but My Own.

And you know what I found?

I could not do so easily. Not without feeling the culture in which I grew up was more alien to me than North American pop culture. I had to think about the tonal inflections of the peoples I grew up with - how they differed from each other. I had to think about how we would say certain things, that would never be said in English. The way I viewed the world was through the Western lens, and I struggled to understand how non-Westerners would see any given situation.

I don't think many white North Americans understand to what extent white privilege and cultural imperialism has a hold on previously colonized countries. White privilege can pass itself off as colorism in many areas (my country included), cultural imperialism is more insidious. Often, I see Malaysian politicians rail against "Western values," without realizing what they are railing against are quite common across countries, East and West. They do not see how our education system is entrenched in the colonial past. They do not realize that our petty racialized squabbles are leftovers from colonialism. They don't see how Western culture is bleeding into our stories, through our bookstores, how our consumerist culture is burgeoning as we are taught to value economic growth over human labour.

When it is time to talk about the world I come from, the world which I am supposed to know, and I cannot. Because even within the world I come from, I have a very specific experience (upper-middle-class Malaysian Chinese) which is quite unlike the experience another Malaysian might have. It makes communication difficult and messy, and it builds barriers.

So when I see white writers, or those taking the side of white writers, complaining about not being "given permission" to write about another culture, I have to wonder, what kind of arrogance does one need to have to even ask for that right to do so without criticism? I want to know, because I envy that shameless self-confidence, to the extent that it becomes a demand for minority writers to shut up and just keep writing on the hopes of being published. I want to know, because I want that same shield of ego to help me set aside my own anxiety, my own fear, of writing that which I should know since it is in my blood and skin.

When a foreign authour writes with another culture, zie is writing with a specific cultural lens, viewing that Other culture. When I write my own culture, I write with several cultural lenses.

Neither perspective is clear-cut and without problems.

Nor should they be.

Body Issues: A Brief Rumination on my own Butt

2010-04-27T15:32:00.000-03:00

I'm going through my clothes right now and giving a way a lot of my old t-shirts. They're actually really awesome (if you guys want, I will take pictures, and if you like anything you see, I will send it to you) but they're a) black and b) mostly too big for me to tuck into my jeans comfortably. Yes, I know, baggy t-shirts never go out of style, and believe me, I'm keeping a couple of them, but on the whole I do not wear them as much anymore, so I see no reason to keep them. I'm phasing the black out of my wardrobe, ya'll.

So, I've also got a ton of shorts, and I refuse to keep those that are too tight to wear comfortably in the near future, so I'm trying them on. Yes, a few really don't fit. I may not agree with What Not To Wear's shaming tactics, but Stacy and Clint were right in one thing: don't buy stuff that don't fit with the secret promise you'll get slim enough to fit.

I'm wearing a pair right now, which is kinda tight, but I can button and zip it up, so I'm keeping it. I don't care how short it is. My bedroom has a wall mirror, so I stood up to see how tight it is. And for some reason, I had a memory surface.

My dad's younger sister. Auntie Honey, and I used to be somewhat close. She was the Cool Aunt. You know, the single, free-wheeling, fashionable aunt. Which I guess I am now to some nieces and nephews. She took me on a couple of trips before. On one trip, with two of her girlfriends, we went to a nice hotel in Melaka and she hated the fact that everything I bought was green so she took me out shopping and bought me my first halter neck and wrap skirt.

We were in the hotel room, getting dressed for the evening dinner. For some reason she was telling me about what guys liked, and told me to turn around, so she could assess my butt. I was wearing a green shirt, and an old pair of trousers which were part of the uniform my brother wore to school (yes, that dirty green that is part of government school uniforms in Malaysia).

She shook her head sadly, "No... no [Jha], your butt's not nice."

I should mention at this point in time that I was eleven (or twelve) when she said this to me.

The introduction to patriarchy comes at an early age for many young girls. It comes from surprising places; I thought my aunt was my ally. While I did grow up surrounded by media images of attractive women, this was my first direct criticism of my body as not up to conventional standards of attractiveness.

I would continue to resist this standard for most of my high school years and sometime past - I wore jeans, a t-shirt, and a long-sleeved shirt over the t-shirt (filched from my brother's wardrobe) whenever my friends and I went shopping. This does not mean I was an out-and-out tomboy; for special occasions, I wore skirts and formal blouses, and had a handbag to match. I bought my first pair of heels aged 15. I looked frumpy most of the time, to the head-shaking of my best friends.

My resistance is not part of some rebellion; it is borne out of laziness and lack of priority for my physical attractiveness. I had good skin and never aspired to look prettier than average, so I was quite content with what I had.

I would like to say I was never under pressure to be pretty. My mother made fun of my taste in clothes ("so old"). My best friends told me I should dress up more ("you're so gorgeous when you take the time"). The university newspaper once had a picture of me (my back to the camera) in the column that existed to show candid shots of people whose fashion style the writer didn't agree with. Unsurprisingly, most of the people featured were women. I hadn't been reading the school paper at all, and would have missed it if my friends hadn't gotten angry on my behalf. (Incidentally, I knew the writer of the column; we had taken classes together.)

I can, however, clean up, very well. This is a statement of fact, and true of many, if not all, women: given a bit of effort, we could look gorgeous. I model as a hobby, and have modeled nude for free and for pay. I may not be conventionally gorgeous, but I can turn heads when I feel like putting in the extra effort - five minutes of makeup does the trick. Unfortunately for critics, I only do so when I feel like it, and it's not a high priority in my day-to-day living.

Going through my shorts, I looked at the mirror to see how well they fit, how snug they are. So, my butt's not the conventionally attractive kind, not the round pert ones that one might see in fashion and glamour magazines. I slouch a lot so it doesn't really always support me either. It has also been spanked by boyfriends, photographed and drawn by artists, and complimented on by various people.

I have my share of body image problems - I loathe to model nude right now because of my perceived flabbiness. I have clothes ranging from size 4 to size 10 (this is more annoying than it sounds). Sometimes I stare at my face and wonder why I bother.

Nonetheless, when I was eleven, I was told, my butt's not nice.

Today, fifteen years later, I can tell myself, it is smokin'. And no one can take that ownership of my own body away from me.

SAAM: "Baby It's Cold Outside" and Not Family-Friendly, Either

2010-04-17T01:51:00.000-03:00

The other day, I browsed Youtube for Alexander Rybak videos and songs. I have a liking for the songs he composes, because they tend to be simple, carefree, and non-jarring - just like light'n'easy pop should be. He has some sad songs, some very emo songs, and most of them are all sentimental with a taste of frivolity. Essentially, fluff, but good fluff.

But I was squicked out to find that he covered Frank Loesser's Baby, It's Cold Outside. Now, I understand why he would - it's a pop standard, and has lasted since the 40's. His voice suits that song perfectly, and much of his fanbase is in the Northern Hemisphere, who would understand the song.

The rest of this doesn't have much to do with Rybak, but the song itself and the fact that it is April.

Baby, It's Cold Outside is often played during winter months, sometimes right next to Christmas songs.

It is April.

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

I have no (minimal) experience with sexual assault, and there are many, many stories being told this month about real people's experiences. I'm afraid I can't offer that - what I can offer is an analysis on how a single song represents many tropes depicting possible sexual assault possibilities that go unnoticed by most listeners, because they are such ingrained cultural memes, we don't notice it until we take a closer look.

Baby It's Cold Outside is an excellently-composed song - it's a catchy duet, alternating between the two voices equally, and ends on a major, thus positive-sounding, note.

The lyrics, however, are a different story.

Plenty has been said about the lyrics to Baby It's Cold Outside. Although the song was written by a husband to sing with his wife, and thus could be read as a playful kind of foreplay, the lyrics are filled with a foreboding of many things - judgement, manipulation, non-enthusiastic consent (which is not really consent at all).

The parts of the duet are problematic in itself: the aggressor voice is called "the Wolf", and the rejecting voice is calling "the Mouse". This may not be the intent of Loesser, but it sets up a predatory tone for the song - the aggressor is a hunter, and the rejector is prey, physically weaker, and thus easily overpowered.

In several lines of the song, the Mouse cites several excuses for leaving - she has a mother who will worry, a father pacing the floor, her brother will be waiting at the door, her maiden aunt is "vicious". These are implications of a society which shames women for having sex... it is also a society which shames women for being in situations where sex might have happened, which gives gossips the same license to shame a woman as if she had really had sex. It is also a reminder that in such situations, the blame will be placed on the woman, alone, because we live in victim-blaming societies. When the Wolf says, "I ain't worried about your brother," he's right - the bulk of the blame will be placed on the Mouse; the only thing he has to be worried about is if the brother decides to come after him, which isn't always the case as sometimes brothers also do this exact same thing.

As predators often do, the Wolf has lines designed to emotionally manipulate the prey - he asks her to think of his pride (because we all know that a man's pride is more important than a woman's meaningful consent!) and his "lifelong sorrow if [she] caught pneumonia and died" (because his sadness has more weight than her actual death). There's only a statement that there are no cabs to be had, and he won't let her go despite her continual protests; there's not even an offer to help her get home.

There is a throw-away line which refers to a drink. While date-rape drugs are fairly new to the world, it is well-noted that predators often ply women with alcohol to lower their resistance, often to the point where the victims are almost/completely blacked out and cannot respond. Certainly there is disagreement on whether alcohol absolutely negates consent, and that alcohol often helps move sexual encounters along, but the reliance on 'alcohol courage' should be discouraging, not celebrated.

Literally every other line of the Mouse's is an excuse, and she says "no" several times throughout the song as well. One would think that continuous denial and worry would prompt at least some concern on the Wolf's part - is he not trying to make her comfortable? Doesn't he want her to enjoy herself without any fear of what might come after? No, she's supposed to care about his feelings, oh, how could she do this to him, leave him like this? There's no concern for her which isn't tied to his own self-centered position, and any concerns of hers are conveniently swept aside with flattery and compliments (of her physical beauty, no less).

It is a song that reminds me of the many cases where if a woman didn't say "no" outright, it wasn't rape, despite the fact that many people know body language and other such excuses are used to avoid saying "no" and thus hurting the other person's feelings.

Several arguments are made to defend this song, of course. "It's just a song!" is quite popular, even when the lyrics are questionable and play into harmful tropes about how we view sexual assault.

The other one I see a lot is "Loesser didn't mean it that way," which has some merit, as partners can sing it with each other in a manner that is playful and a lead-up to a sexual encounter. I find this argument weak, though, for two reasons:

1) Intent rarely matters when a work is released to the public. It matters insofar as people care what prompted the creative process, but most people don't really care what an authour's intent is, only what the song means for them, whether it's fun, or playful, or relaxing, so on so forth. Art is transformative in this way; it takes on different meanings in different spheres - for some people, this is a Christmas song, for others, it is played in July. Just as important as intent is how it is placed within the alrger culture that it has been released in, because art does not exist within a void.

2) If it can only be comfortably sung by those who are already committed to the encounter, why the continual resistance in the song? If both Wolf and Mouse are consenting adults, why the continual references to people who don't matter within this intimate encounter between two people?

Which leads to the next argument - forbidden fruit. People love forbidden fruit. It's naughty! It breaks the rules! Except there are no rules being broken here: even today, our social mores dictate that a woman must refuse sex, or she's slut-shamed. A man must continually persist to "win" sex, accordingly to the Manly Rules of Manliness.

With these rules, female sexual desire is not acknowledged, considered non-existant, or masked by coyness and suppressed. When women are not allowed to voice their own desires, it's easy for others to speak for them and pretend it's true: "your lips say no but your eyes say yes," "she secretly wanted it," "who would turn him down?"

Without giving license to women - and men, even - to clearly communicate their desires or lack thereof, any encounter that can be construed as sexual immediately becomes murky, a possible misunderstanding, possibly consensual but just a bit stupid, and we have a slippery slope that does victims of sexual no favours in seeking justice when they have been harmed.

It is all very well to teach that persistence is needed to get what one wants, but it becomes a dangerous meme when that involves another person whose concern for their own well-being, whether socially or physically, is dismissed in order to fulfill one's own desires. It does not require vastly unequal power dynamics between the two parties to happen - all it requires is for one "participant" to place their own desires above the other's need for safety and comfort. This dynamic can exist even if the genders were reversed in the song.

It is, of course, possible to perform the song in such a way that it is clear the Mouse is giving implicit consent. This requires a certain tone in singing, and visual body language. Yet why perpetuate the meme that a woman must say no in order to say yes? How many hearts have been broken because "no means yes" to the extent that "no" becomes meaningless and disrespected?

We pay lip service to the concept of "no means no," to the idea that "rape is bad" and that "consent" is a good thing. So many people do not practise the concept of "no means no," make up various excuses for rapists, and shame women for consenting.

It's true that this song isn't as bad as many outrightly misogynistic songs of today. However, this song is considered a classic, a family-friendly favourite. These lyrics don't hold up under close analysis. Even its saving graces are burdened by the weight of the unfortunate fact that this playfulness is taken advantage of by predators, who do trap and drug women, who will not take "no" for an answer, and who hurt so many people as a result.

Somewhere out there, there must have been someone who realized this was a terrible idea, and re-wrote the lyrics to make it more affirmative. I'll keep looking.

One Year!

2010-04-16T12:54:00.000-03:00

One year ago, I started this blog because I noticed that I was posting a lot of non-personal and non-academic stuff on LiveJournal. I had so much more to say, but I didn't want to flood my f-list with a lot of meanderings on topics which probably interested only me. I noted that Blogger had a scheduling feature, which meant I could write several posts at once, and not overwhelm my readers too much.

Since then, I've moved from focusing on gender issues only, to including issues about race, to touch on LGBT and other such items that do not directly affect my life. I've also started a new blog, Silver Goggles. I've renamed this blog, from Rebellious Jezebel Blogging to Intersectionality Dreaming, because the more I wrote, the more I figured stuff out about myself.

My thing with this blog has always been about consistent content. It unfortunately trumps the quality of my writing a lot, even though I try to develop the discipline of writing regularly. My writing has always been inconsistent - I am not one of those people who can always deliver quality on demand.

With the stuff that's been going on in my life right now, I'm all writered-out. When I have a slew of posts, I'll spread them out as they're reader-ready, still on a MWF schedule. But there may be silences. From now on I'll be focusing on quality, not quantity. I may even post occasional fiction, and if it gets too empty here, I'll re-post stuff I've already written from way back when, so people can see how much I've changed.

I'm pretty excited about the upcoming year: I will be going to cons for the first time (Steampunk World's Fair and WisCon), and pursuing a Master's degree in the fall at McMaster University. I loathe leaving Halifax, perhaps for good, but it's another year to decide what to do with the rest of my life.

I'm looking forward to another year with you ^_^

More tl;dr on Why I Hate Victorientalism

2010-04-11T12:56:00.000-03:00

This was originally posted on Tumblr as a rant, but I thought it warranted cross-posting.

The problem with Orientalism has always been that through that lens people from the Orient, Westerners pick out particular traits of Easterners to magnify. Which leads to stereotypes. And lends to caricatures. And all these are exciting elements for art.

I am not a stereotype and I am not a caricature and I am not an element for your story. I am a whole, living, breathing human being with my own life and my own actions and my own story and my own particular traits and many facets. Orientalism forgets all this, sitting in a position of Westerners' privilege, either glorifying what aspects of the East that pleases it, or justifying the brutality that is dealt to the cultures that don't please it.

Orientalism can never produce anything authentic, only shadows. But it is held up as a truth and a good, to the point where those under the Orientalist's lens accept the Orientalist's terms. When I go on any tour of any Eastern country, I see products of Orientalism in the form of souvenirs and bric-a-brac design to please those who visit.

Orientalists do not understand that by stripping forms away from the sources, they devalue the sources, who scramble to buy back what has been stolen by Orientalism, at a higher price. That colonialism has had devastating effects on the very cultures they claim to love and admire, and that they have abetted this devastation and continue to. Orientalism is the patriarchal, old-fashioned man who claims to love his wife and then demands her to perform wifely duties without caring about who she really is.

I am a product of Western civilization. I speak Queen's English, I read Western authours, both those who write in English and those translated into English. When I studied music, I learnt the whole gamut of Western composers from Bach to Stravinsky. I do all this in order to be taken seriously, to prove that I have worth when I walk the world, because colonialism has left behind it a gold standard: that of Western Civilization. Never mind that colonizers first came to my part of the world for tin, gold is good! Gold is best. We must go for gold.

And now, it is platinum.

This doesn't come without sacrifice. In order for me to keep up with the world and succeed, my parents taught me English and I was surrounded by too much English media to absorb much else. Without the language of my culture, I am cut off from it and catch it only in the forms of worship and wordless behaviour, in the disapproval of my grandmother who called me outlandish. When I spoke in school, I was asked if I was Christian, a Western religion after all which spreads through an English medium in our part of the world.

I have assimilated and I have sacrificed my language and culture to fit in better within this great Western Civilization, that I could have my own story and walk side-by-side with great achievers. And for those who dare say that you never asked me to, tell me you have never mocked the language of my people, tell me you have never imagined my people to be anything other than what you think they are, tell me you have always seen the people of the worlds to be exactly the same, and you'd be lying either way, but at the very least I'll buy that you have never understood just how supremacists have survived into today's modern people. Tell me you have read only stories written by us about us to understand us, rather than the texts of people who have only studied us and lived with us awhile, but speak your language and translate all of us into something you can comprehend.

Orientalism is the slap in my face that tells me that my part in the story is as the quiet mystic who delivers homilies and wise sayings, the geisha whose function is to soothe, Madame Butterfly who will be forsaken, the voiceless Scheherazade who appeals to the sultan by belly-dancing into his bed.

Easterners can find no escape within through Orientalism because Orientalism cages Easterners for the consumption and entertainment of Westerners.

People defending Orientalism should just be honest and just say flat out that they don't care about the real people whose cultures they objectify. It won't change anything, because they would still be aiding and abetting the cultural imperialism and appropriation happening in the world today, but it would sure make it easier to identify who the hell to avoid.

I will understand completely the desire to maintain a perfect little fantasy bubble. Just let me know you're living in one.

Revising Thoughts: On Invading Personal Space

2010-04-07T13:40:00.001-03:00

There was a book I liked a great deal, which was about body language. About how people used space to show their dominance, how much eye contact mattered, how posture communicated a lot about a person's self-confidence. One example had the authour talking to a large, soft-spoken man about how he intimidated others, and the guy couldn't figure out why. The authour realized that the guy was short-sighted but not noticeably so, so he often stared at people's faces to take in more detail, and this was intimidating. Once he got glasses, he found he didn't have to stare so long, and this made others more comfortable.

It also discussed personal space, and how people tend to have their own boundaries as to how much personal space they would prefer to have. Some people don't need much personal space, while others like to have people they talk to at arm's length away, and depending on whether they were interested in their conversation partner or not, would allow that boundary to be crossed. I found this very interesting.

There was an experiment the authour suggested: at a party, find someone who clearly needed a lot of personal space. He went on to detail how to find them, and I forget what else. The authour then started explaining the game - which is to talk up this person, and keep getting closer to them. The person would probably back away. The object of the game? Keep doing this and see how far you can maneuver the person until they abruptly quit the conversation.

This used to be interesting to me. I never really went to a lot of parties, only dreamed about it, but it always sounded like something successful people did.

For some reason, recently I thought about this book again, because when I was younger (around 12 or 13), this informed a lot of my understanding of body language. And it wasn't all bad; plenty of it was useful observation and I could see how it played out in a lot of situations which involved a lot of people.

And when I remembered the game, I thought, wow, that's a horrible thing to do to another person.

For the first time it struck me how awful it is to single out a person based on their requirements for personal space, and then violating that personal space all for the sake of amusement or experimentation.

It really just shows how stuff that one finds really informative at some point in life can turn out looking so awful at another point in life.

Many Mothers

2010-04-05T13:13:00.000-03:00

When I was about five or six, I had a dream that a new mother blossomed for me, seemingly out of nowhere. She told me she would take care of me. When I woke up, I still saw her, and I contemplated her for a while.

My family and I were in the car. Dad driving, mom next to him, my brother usually sat behind my dad and I sat behind my mom. My dad noticed me staring out of the window, being quiet, and he asked, "what are you thinking?"

"A new mother," I replied.

My dad giggled, and my mom looked vaguely amused yet insulted. I think I hurt her that day. We didn't really fight in those days; we didn't even have much of a relationship. My mom likes to make a big deal about how she would cut her workday short so she could come home and take me swimming, because I was asthmatic and apparently swimming helps asthma, but while I do remember her teaching me how to swim, I don't really remember it happening a whole lot and besides, that was probably something like twenty years ago.

I didn't hate my mom. I just didn't know her very well, and she didn't really act towards me the way I thought mothers should act. I got more attention from the housemaid, who was pretty much my nanny all the way until I was twelve, than I remember getting from my mom.

Nor did I feel that I had any monopoly over my mom's attention. She had to work. She had her friends. She had her own life and did a lot of other things besides being my mom. Being my mom was not the sum of her life. Which was okay by me! But I still would have liked to have had someone else to talk to.

I think this monopoly over children is not helpful - one mother and one father per family doesn't quite work out quite so well when it's looked at more closely. The nuclear family is simply not sustainable, economically, and there isn't really enough social grounding for it to work either. Plus, why should a child, or a set of children, only have one mother and one father? And why should they be treated like they're little traitors if they find other people to be their role models? And what if something should happen to either parent?

Moreover, just because someone gives birth to a child, doesn't mean they're going to have the right skills, empathy, kindness and resources to bring that child up. Why shouldn't that parent have the right to the parenting skills, empathy, kindness and resources of other parents?

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, one of the characters explains to the narrator, each woman has the right to maternity, that is, to get pregnant and give birth to a child. However, not all women are qualified to be mothers, as in their society, motherhood is a special skill dedicated to serving the weakest and driving focal point of Herland society: the children. Thus, young women have to study and practise hard to show their mettle as mothers, and only the very best are selected to take care of children. Several women are in charge of a single nursery, sharing duties of motherhood. No single woman is left to take care of a single child full-time, because that would be stressful, and moreover, cuts the child off from having a wide range of experience with different people.

Even as these women are charged with the profession of caring and raising children, they also share their duties so each woman can have her own life beyond child care.

Women need that. And children need mothers and fathers who have full, happy lives, so they can get their first starts in life with full happy people giving them the best care. Parents deserve to have more people pitching in to help raise children.

Communes, kibbutzes, systems within which children were raised by all the women (and uncles) with no specific possession over which child was whose, multi-generational households where uncles and aunts live together... all these are much healthier than the nuclear family system of today.

Pondering

2010-04-04T13:50:00.000-03:00

So, while considering the anecdata of how some men seem to get really affronted when a) their partners refuse to take their name and b) it is suggested that the children take on the mother's name, I wondered how really difficult it would be on a man's psyche to have his wife's name.

Somehow, I get the sense that not only is it rather an affront, a challenge to convention, but it is also downright insulting to them. But why?

Do men carry the pregnancy? No.

Do men do majority of the housework? My dad does, but he's an exception, not the rule. There is the burden of the Second Shift, and I have no doubt it affects women globally.

Do men do majority of the child-raising? Not that I know of, or else we wouldn't be so surprised when we hear of fathers taking an active hand in handling children.

Do men do anything else other than bring home money, which more and more women are doing these days? Not that I can think of, but hey, I could be wrong!

This might be deal-breaker material.

The Absence of a Daughter's Voice

2010-04-02T13:27:00.002-03:00

With the new Airbender movie coming up, one thing has really struck me as something note-worthy throughout this process: that M. Night's daughter loved the series. He's said one of the reasons why he's doing the movie is because his daughter loves the series. That she sees herself in Katara.

It is one of the reasons why I, too, like the TV series - when I see the Earth Kingdom, I see people I grew up with, being ordinary people, rather than strange exotic peoples. Moreover, I see them as movers and shakers of the world, rather than passive observers.

And I can cosplay Toph, or Mei, or Ty Lee, or Azula. Do you know how hard it is to find someone I can comfortably cosplay? Because most animated characters I see are either characters who I look like but cannot cosplay, or who I like but cannot cosplay without rather betraying the sense of the character.

Now, some little white girl is going to play a little Asian/Inuit girl. You cannot divorce Katara's character from her skin colour; it is part of her. It is also part of why so many little girls from minority races like her.

I ... feel sorry for M. Night's daughter. Because at the end of the day, her father didn't bother looking for a girl who looked just like his daughter to play Katara. I really don't care how "perfect" Nicola Peltz is; there are going to be little brown girls who will find their hearts somehow broken by this.

They will not have a name for it, because they are too young to understand the implications of representation on visual media.

They will not have a name for the sadness that their favourite character no longer looks like themselves, and when they try to voice it, they will be shut down as being too sensitive, and it's just a character, and they will be told they are the racist, for caring about the skin colour of the actress who plays that character they saw themselves in.

There will be some children who will feel betrayed by these changes, and the adults around them will gaslight their concerns, telling them that there's no real problem, they're just imagining that it's a big deal that suddenly Katara doesn't look like them at all.

If I had a father who was a big-name director, who could cast whoever he wanted in a role of a little girl who looked like me, and he didn't cast someone who did look like me? I would be asking, Daddy, what's wrong with me? Am I not worth portraying on-screen? Don't little girls who look like me deserve some effort in the search for the perfect actress?

M. Night is inconsistent when he speaks about the auditions for Katara, because he says elsewhere that he wanted Nicola Peltz from the start. He has never said what it is about Nicola Peltz that is exactly like the series. He has never said what drives in the resemblance. Nor has he said anything about what his daughter thinks about his choice.

I find the absence of this as telling as the continual praise for Nicola Peltz.

A Chat Transcript

2010-03-31T13:37:00.002-03:00

Which I will post in place of an actual blogpost, because even though I Tumblr'd it, it deserves to be its own post. It came on the heels of a discussion about my posts on parental cruelty, but took a religious turn:

Tariq: yeah
I keep feeling that "accept", which is a word people use a lot in that context, is exactly the wrong word to use
I mean... are you saying that it's right?
Jaymee: yeah, exactly
i think they more tolerate it
Tariq: what does one mean when one tells another person to "accept" things the way things are?
Jaymee: usually?
i get the feeling of
"Just give it up, it wont change and you'll only make yourself more unhappy by thinking about changing things"
Tariq: except that if you think it, and you explore it, the entire premise of existence is pain. it doesn't make the pain and the injustice right.
it means that you can't do anything about it.
Jaymee: oh, shut up, i just came out of 10 years of telling myself that life is pain and suffering
that's one of those things which sickened me about buddhism XD
Tariq: yeah, well, it's not just pain and suffering!
I mean, come on!
if life is all about pain and suffering suicide's a best bet.
Jaymee: yeah
Tariq: I mean, this is my upbringing as a Muslim, yeah. you're going to get pain and suffering and injustice.
but then there's pleasure and joy and happiness.
Jaymee: yeah, we dont get that in buddhism
not theravadan buddhism anyway
Tariq: and in any case
there's this metaphor about how life is a golden bridge
for Muslims anyway
a bridge linking the alam azali and alam barzakh
and all the commentators are going, "Oh, life is transition, it isn't permanent."
and I'm like, "HELLO. GOLDEN FUCKING BRIDGE."
Jaymee: XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
Tariq: Yeah, it's not gonna be there forever!
yeah, it's not all fun and games, and you get no rest!
but\
Jaymee: STILL
Tariq: HELLO, this is your only chance to make a difference to where you go in the end.
Jaymee: BRIDGE
OF MOTHERFUCKIN GOLD
YA'LL
Tariq: DO YOU KNOW HOW VALUABLE IT IS?
in any case.
Jaymee: this is tumblr'd
Tariq: ...what?
oh yeah
before you do that
there's another saying from Muhammad
"Live like you will live for a thousand years, worship like you will die tomorrow."
commentators are all "Oh, you know, take it easy with life, worship like a loon."
and I'm like
Jaymee: gah!
Tariq: PLEASE IF I KNOW I WAS GONNA LIVE FOR A 1000 YEARS I'M GONNA LIVE LIKE A FUCKING SUPERSTAR
BECAUSE DUDE
1000 FUCKING YEARS
Jaymee: OH
Tariq: ALSO, LONG-TERM PLANNING WILL BE AWESOME
Jaymee: i thought 'cos you know, if you live 1000 years sure you can make a difference
so live like you can make a difference
XD
Tariq: EXACTLY
YOU'D BE LIKE A MOTHER FUCKING HERO
the Muslims get all these awesome aphorisms
and WE FUCK IT ALL UP
and WE FUCK IT ALL UP
Jaymee: well, not all of you
Tariq: yes well.
still.
I mean granted our metaphysics leaks holes like nobody's business
I mean come on, Neoplatonism? Don't make me laugh, dude!
aaanyway.
feel free to strip out the context and tumblr the shit out of this XD
Jaymee: clearly this conversation must become the basis of a Steampunk Nusantara entry

200 Posts!

2010-03-29T13:26:00.000-03:00

This is just to say that I now have 200 posts.

It's not even my blogiversary. Just sayin'. I update like, four times a week, and I've taken months-long breaks, but still, it's pretty awesome, you know?

So! I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all for sticking with me so long, and to get to know you better! Feel free to post and tell me a little bit about yourselves if you so please, I would very much like that!

I Write: Steampunk Nusantara

2010-03-28T13:05:00.000-03:00

If you haven't heard already, my friend Tariq and I recently started a new Dreamwidth Community called steampunk_nusantara. This is not a writing community, although there is writing involved.

Its genesis began here, as a discussion for a meta-setting set in South East Asia, particularly the region called Nusantara, which is mostly Malaya, the Indonesian islands and a bit of Borneo. Tariq and I had many conversations about how this would work - a collection of documents, some descriptions of stuff that could go in, something to give people a starting point if they wanted to write a SEA-centered steampunk story.

We tried using GoogleWave and it didn't work, because Tariq and I are very chatty people, and it just didn't look right as a single document. So we left it on the backburner, although I thought about it occasionally. I just did not know how to make it work. It had to be in a format where a bunch of people could work together on it, but Wave is limited in that way.

Indirectly, I have to thank James and Kate of Parliament & Wake. I had been aware of them but never visited the site, but when I did, I was intrigued by the setup. Here was a setting that was being built, collaboratively by at least James and Kate. Tariq and I are extremely lazy (and cheap-assed) folks, so the idea of coding our own site didn't appeal to us, and so we discussed other alternatives.

I'm not very much involved in fandom, and I participate in few communities online these days, but the concept of several people contributing, with the possibility of surprising each other with what we come up, the ideal of being able to banter and discuss what was being written, was deeply appealing.

After the Victorientalism kerfuffle, I was half-sick of white people imagining my side of the world, and decided that it had to happen, and thus, steampunk_nusantara was born.

As a Dreamwidth community, we have the possibility of at least drawing people active in fandom, who would be aware of the racial issues and how white-centered such spaces would be. People would be able to post whole new entries and descriptions without necessarily being distracted by already-existing documents. Moreover, since we encourage inconsistency, there is a degree of freedom to be had. (And LJ has issues.)

I feel, most of all, that Steampunk Nusantara is a manifestation of postcolonialism in action - of several people contributing several viewpoints that have hitherto been marginalized and ignored. Because of SEA's history, there is no way to favour one narrative over another, there is no place from which we singularly begin, and instead of ending at a single place, we criss-cross each other in a kind of cultural anarchy. SEA's rich multi-cultural history, which has almost been glossed over by British imperialism, can be re-worked so it is never erased again. Moreover, as most of the members identify as SEAsians or of SEA heritage, there is a strong emphasis on our voices.

In our research, we are re-imagining our own region, on our own terms, rather than by the terms that the rest of the world has set for us. So far, we have had entries in Chinese and Jawi, a smattering of Malay. We are delving into our own culture, researching our own history as a result.

I have high hopes for steampunk_nusantara. Already, I feel closer to home, even though I'm so far away, through its participants.

If you are South East Asian, I would love to hear from you! And everybody, bookmark us, ya'll.

On the Little Cruelties Parents Inflict On Children

2010-03-26T13:34:00.000-03:00

There was a time when I did not get along with my parents. I say this as an adult who has a pretty strong relationship with her dad, and a somewhat-shaky-but-almost-decent-give-it-a-few-more-years relationship with her mom. My parents are better than most. They gave me freedom when most of my peers were forced to stay home after dark. They gave me a pretty big allowance, once a month. From them, I inherited a strong, stubborn attitude which put me at odds with them but has served me well through my life thus far.

But they're not perfect. Who is, right? I'm going to talk about one of those Imperfect Times.

For context, when I was a kid, we made a chocolate drink called Milo with chocolate malt powder of that brand, milk powder, and sugar. ... OK, I still do, when my family has moved on to drinking it without the milk powder and sugar. For a while we didn't use milk powder and sugar, but sweetened condensed milk. I'm not sure if there was a reason for this shift, but anyway, when we got down to the last dregs of the condensed milk, we filled it with hot water and swirled it around to dilute the condensed milk, and whoever made Milo next had to use that diluted condensed milk.

My dad was pretty strict about this sort of thing. Seriously hardassed about it. No one in the family liked how he disciplined us into doing certain things which the rest of us simply did not see as a big deal. In my home, Mom was the sloppy one, and Dad did most of the housework that the maids did not do. He made us do certain chores so the house would be kept clean and neat.

One evening, I made Milo for myself, and opened a new can of condensed milk. My dad happened to come into the kitchen at the time and saw this. "Why are you opening a new can?!" he demanded.

"Because... there isn't any left?" I replied. I knew that we had been running low, and when I looked into the fridge, I didn't see any can of condensed milk in the place where we normally placed it.

He opened the door and found it in a corner of the fridge which I hitherto had not noticed it being. "There. Now finish it."

"But I'm almost done my Milo?" I half-protested, half-whimpered.

He shoved it into my face then, right at my mouth, to get me to drink it. It hit my nose. Some of it spilled down. He must have expected me to take it from him, because it fell down on the floor, and I stared at it, crying and feeling completely humiliated for having missed it, and more than that, completely not understanding why this was a big fucking deal.

"Now clean that up!"

Ask a weepy, upset 11-year-old to do something that they're not used to doing, such as clean up diluted sweetened condensed milk that has just been shoved into their face by a the parent they consider the "friendlier" parent, and you'll find they just stand there dumbly, unable to move except to wail.

My mother came in and demanded to know what the hell was going on. I forget what my dad replied, but it had something to do with the spilt milk. Adding insult to injury, my mother warned me, "stop crying. You should be ashamed of yourself, big girl crying like that."

When I was younger, I would revisit this moment with abject confusion, and anger. I didn't know why I was so angry. I felt bad for being so angry, at times, because I loved my parents, even while I hated them, and wanted to cut ties with them, and wanting to run away from home despite being too scared to.

But now I know why it was so hurtful. That was a cruel thing to say to a child - telling them to repress what's a normal way of expressing a certain emotion. It was my way of releasing my upset and showing it to them, and they dismissed it out of hand as not being important. I was upset because the condensed milk was so important, it was necessary to humiliate me for it. Of course, my dad probably saw it as a case of disciplining me, but to my brain, I thought it was about the condensed milk. I had no context for where the sudden cruelty came from, except that my dad was frustrated at me for doing something so stupid, and he physically lashed out.

This may sound like it's me excusing him. It's not an excuse. I say it because I've done it before. I did it to my dog once; she had a habit of running away and not coming back for a long time. One time, when she had finally come home, I took a stick to her and knocked her with it, on her head, and on her tailbone, and even on the spine. I shouted at her for being a bad dog, for not listening to me.

I'm crying while I'm writing this, because despite that, I loved my dog, and I miss her a lot. But it's to give context for what I'm talking about: there are times when people get frustrated, or stressed, or whatever, and what they do is take it out on other people, even if they're otherwise perfectly nice people on ordinary days. And I think my dad was having one of those non-ordinary, shitty days, and seeing me mess up his perfect domestic discipline drove him over his limits that day.

Part of the barbarism of everyday life like this, I think, stems from the fact that we don't teach each other or ourselves how to deal with stress. That's why counsellors are paid so much, because there's so much work to do. Parents take out their frustrations about not having control of their lives on their children over whom they do have control, fucking their children up in due process who internalize this method of dealing, and it carries on to the next generation.

So, what I did to my dog there? Same thing as what my dad did to me.

It's not right, and it's downright cruel. It was cruel of my dad to shove the can into my face like that and humiliate me the way he did. it was cruel of my mom to dismiss my pain.

It fucking sucks, because parents are the first ones who are supposed to build you up. Then when they show you these hate-filled sides of themselves, it's the first and ultimate betrayal. And we say nothing and if all goes well, we grow up and get over it and have perfectly decent relationships with our parents who mellow out as they grow older.

I still get angry thinking about this, despite the fact that I do have a really great relationship with my dad right now. Because that moment did nothing to help me when I was growing up. It wasn't a teachable moment. If anything, today, I see it as evidence that even a great guy like my dad can do horrible things, i.e. be cruel to a child, and my dad is not really full of Fail as a dad! He does a whole lot better than most parents I know! Yet it was alienating, and damaging, to me, growing up, especially since it was happening at that delicate time when I was starting to wrestle with identity and figuring out who I was.

I get mad not at my dad, although there is some residual anger about it. I get mad because I know there are other kids like me out there, who could use so much more kindness in navigating that really treacherous phase of adolescence, and they're irrevocably damaged, little bit by little bit, by the little cruelties of parents who don't realize that their children are human beings, ends unto themselves.

Rationally, this should make sense, except of course, there's always that reasoning that parents are there to mold and guide children into becoming better people. But that reasoning falls apart when we consider certain methods of guidance and molding. I, for one, am for spanking. A quick swat, to young children, a pinch.

But we don't stop there, do we? Being scared of being failures as parents, trying to get the children to Do What We Want, unable to find the ways or methods to communicate to the child how we would like them to behave, unable to express our frustration because we Have To Appear Strong - of course the little swats escalate into violence. And thus, without meaning to, we inflict cruelties on the very people we're supposed to protect and nurture, leaving behind a wound they have to get over, usually by themselves.

I am so lucky to have decent parents. I know this. That's why I get angry at this sort of thing. Because this shit is completely unnecessary. Hurting other people is rarely ever necessary. And yet it happens on a daily basis. And I'm supposed to accept it because it's "a part of life". But that's another rant for another day.

The bottomline is: children are hurt in small little ways like this everyday, and it shouldn't have to happen. I didn't become a better person for my father having shoved a can into my face and my mother telling me to suck it up. I highly doubt anyone does.

And while we mostly grow up to "get over" these little cruelties? We shouldn't have had to suffer them in the first place.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

2010-03-24T13:01:00.043-03:00

This is a blog about theory. You might have noticed that. It's a blog about intersectionality, and it's a blog about dreams, and it's a blog about people, particularly of women, and a blog about experiences and stories. I'm no computer geek: I own a Win 7 processor, have never bought an MP3, much less an iPod, I loathed the Mac, and never tried out Linux because I couldn't be arsed to figure it out. I only require basic functions on my cellphone: radio, text messaging, calculator, caller ID - none of that touch-screen, bajillion apps nonsense for me.

However, none of this would be possible if not for technology.

I would not be here today if it weren't for the internet. Hell, I think I wouldn't be half the person I am today, which isn't saying much in the grand scheme of things but saying much for myself, if it weren't for the capability to communicate with people across the world.

I would not even be writing so much if not for the computer and the amount of processing I could get done with simply keystrokes as opposed to taking up whole exercise books. And that would make me even less the person I would be without the internet, because writing is so integral to who I am.

I don't know any woman who works in technology right now, except for those fine women over at Geek Feminism. And of course there are Jessica Lin and the other creators of the sOccket.

But to them, and to all other women working in the field of technology, following the footsteps of the great Ada Lovelace, I say, thank you for bringing your perspective into that nerd world, which, I know, can get utterly filled with machismo despite the propaganda of how lovably loserly male nerds are.

And of course, thank you, Lady Lovelace, for your amazing contribution to the world.

p.s. There are Ada Lovelace Day 2010 t-shirts, designed by the amazing Sydney Padua who writes and draws The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage which you should totally check out if you haven't already.

High School Movies

2010-03-22T13:39:00.000-03:00

So recently I was watching a re-mix trailer of Mean Girls using clips from various Disney princess movies.

I have friends who are also into High School Musical. There will be a movie coming out this year on middle-school. When I first came to Canada, I was introduced to shows like Degrassi, which takes place in a school as well.

I do not quite understand the American school culture. Or rather, I do understand it, but only to a certain degree in which there may be shared experiences of isolation and loneliness and awkwardness of nerds like myself navigating the whole concept of identity and self-esteem (yeah, self-esteem? What the hell was that?).

Hence, the number of high-school movies I see around make me wonder why anybody would go to watch them. The people in these movies are horrible. High school is depicted as this awful place where everyone is forced to participate, whether or not they want to. (I refused to. This is why my high school experience was worse than it should have been.) They have to overcome stuff, usually in painfully embarrassing ways. Protagonists behave atrociously in an effort to make themselves look good.

I am going to trust that like many over-dramatizations of life on screens big and small, these movies are an exaggerated version of actual North American high schools.

Why does Hollywood keep making these movies? Is high school so interesting? Is it the habit of watching people who just behave horribly to each other all the time? The defensiveness of being picked on in school?

Help me understand this, folks, I really do not understand this.

"Where Are You From?"

2010-03-21T13:39:00.000-03:00

There's been a big of talk going about around the question, "Where are you from?"

It's ordinarily asked by well-meaning folks, usually to PoC, and when the PoC replies with a relatively mundane answer, such as, "from Detroit" to another American, they are queried further, "Where are you really from?" and if that answer doesn't satisfy the (usually white) querant, they are asked, "where is your family from?"

Perhaps it is to Halifax's credit that I rarely get asked that question. Most Canadians I meet tend to assume I'm from Canada - often due to the way I speak (that is to say, flawless Queen's English punctuated with Americanisms) - so I don't get the question very often. Even when I do, it's often with the air of "New Glasgow maybe?" that I've seen them ask each other.

I'm not sure about this phenomenon here and why I don't get it. I used to get it more, though, especially in my early university days, but not so much. It's curious.

Then again, back home, I always used to be labelled "ang mo" by my grandmother. It's either that, or sheer luck my side.

I'll go with luck.

Patrilineality Does Not Require Name Changes

2010-03-19T13:12:00.001-03:00

People, tell me this: why is the name-changing debate so fraught in North America?

I just read BeckySharper's takedown of this ridiculous defense of making women change their names, in which Dudely Dude makes the case that it should happen, and it's right that it happens, because society tends to be patrilineal, and it's useful to... what? I don't even know anymore.

I really do not understand it! In Malaysia, most of the cultures there are strongly patrilineal. This means, to me, that the father is always acknowledge within the name of the children, and the mother is not. Chinese children take the surnames of their fathers (as I do). Malay and Indian children are "son of" or "daughter of" their father, in their names.

Wives do not have to change their names. They just don't. There's no point! Besides which, the structure of our names do not necessarily lend themselves to name-changing. Siti Kamariah binte Kamaruddin does not have a last name to change! When Choo See Ling marries Tan Beng Kee, she is not going to change it to Tan See Ling! It sounds ridiculous and completely out of place! Not to mention, completely detaches her from her identity by which she was already known all her life! Oh, sure, some of the Christianized families take on Christian names, hence Choo See Ling could become Mary Tan - recently, I attended the church wedding of a friend who was baptized. However, her name change was to signify her new identity as a member of the church, not her marriage. But I'm still gonna call her by her Chinese name by which I've known her all this while.

Generally, in Malaysia, unless a woman wants to destroy her full identity anyway, she does not get rid of her former name.

This, even as we are extremely, openly, conservatively, traditionally patrilineal.

So why the hell do women have to change their names? Why all these silly reasonings about how women prefer to change their names to fit their children's names? (No, seriously?! This is a reason?) Why all these defenses by guys who want to keep their own names? (Like anybody is telling them to change it?)

It's like American white patriarchy likes to keep kicking itself in the ass.

I Write: Terrible Fiction & Good Fanfic

2010-03-17T13:26:00.000-03:00

A while back, I was going through some old fanfiction I had written on Final Fantasy VII. I wrote it back between the years '97 and '02 (oh, adolescent angst) and I was quite shocked to see that not only did I write decent fanfic, but I also had actual plots! Like, plots with people doing stuff, rather than just plots filled with people ruminating about stuff!

I'm not sure how I lost this as time passed. But it seems that the more I think about the writing process, the less quality I produced. And I don't just mean like, thinking about writing - it's more stuff like plot, and characterization, and theme, and other good stuff that I should not be writing about before the story gets under way.

When I was still at SMU, my writing prof, Dr. MacLeod, would say, "If the paper about the story is as long as the story itself, you are putting way too much effort into thinking about the story, and not enough into the story itself." I'm sure those weren't his exact words, but close.

Being an English major, and thus having gotten into the habit of analysing everything I read, this was.... pretty hard to swallow, ya'll! The horrible thing is that he was right, and I usually spent entirely way too much fucking time working that sort of thing out.

And I had a reason for all that overthinking of my fiction too - I wanted to be able to write something that actually provoked thought, because I was so sick of all this fucking lit fic out in most magazines that I couldn't understand, I wanted to make sure stuff I wrote would be understood upon first reading and be able to provoke some coherent thought. (OK, who am I kidding, I still loathe lit fic and good thing I didn't take any contemporary Canadian lit courses because that stuff would have driven me bonkers.)

But he was right, of course (and because he was, not just because he's a white dude) and my fiction suffers as a result. I use present tense, because I still have a problem with it.

And I note this, because I do not always produce terrible fiction. My writing can be really good sometimes! Especially my old fanfics, and new ones! ... Mostly because I don't have to wonder about them too much, because it's fanfic, and it's never going to get published anyway, and after posting the first few chapters people seemed to like it so I just kept writing. It really makes me consider writing a web serial, the way Jolantru does.

But back to the topic at hand! I write terrible fiction, because I overthink my fiction sometimes. However! When I don't think too much about my fiction, I generally end up producing rather trite crap that belongs in the diaries of an angsty adolescent! Double-bind!

Ah well ... just keep swimmin', just keep swimmin', just keep swimmin' /Dory

Ally Issues: On Being Mean

2010-03-15T13:36:00.000-03:00

I had to be mean the other day. It was not something I wanted to do, because usually I'm pretty generous and charitable, or at least I like to think so (despite many exhortations and declarations that I am a terrible human being, but people are always a work in progress, you know), so having to be really stern with folks on the internet does not come easily to me.

Unless like, they're not around, in which case, I let it rip.

Wannabe allies always make a big deal about how you attract more flies with honey, so taking an abrasive approach to dealing with continual questions and a lot of FAIL is counter-productive. And in certain cases, it certainly is.

What wannabe allies don't get, though, is that when one is at the receiving end of the continual, neverending barrage of FAIL, patience wears thin. Kindness gets overpowered. And then you get the Mean POC who just won't understand that people are trying to help.

The thing is, and I said this while I was being mean, I do, as do many of my peers who work in anti-racism. I get even meaner when I have well-meaning folks telling me to be more patient, be kinder, be nicer, oh please understand we just want to help!

I think people fail to understand that when we engage, we already have to assume the best of wannabe allies, and end up being disappointed a lot of the time by the responses to us. It's so very hard to keep being patient, keep talking, and keep sharing, when we are faced by combative opponents who are intent on dismissing our arguments, on people who just don't listen anyway even after hours of explanation, and well-meaning folk who really do want to learn! But expect us to teach them everything.

So, we go mean. We don't do this to be querulous and we don't do this to alienate folks.

We do it because we face querulous folks who alienate us. It is the one way to retain our patience for others who would be more receptive. Not everyone has the energy to field the same question a bajillion times. Some do. I don't. I mean, I can, but on a limited basis. It's not like I have a very wide audience.

So it's tiresome when we get clueless people telling us that we be nice all the time and continuously advising us on our own damn work as if we don't already know what it is they're telling us.

The girl I was mean to? She was trying to be nice to me. She was trying, in her own way, to tell me she understood my position and wanted me to keep on educating. But she was telling me stuff I already knew, giving me advice on how to be patient, that there are always different people, and that I need to not give up - shit I already knew and did not need to hear from some person who just got my memo.

It wasn't comforting to me to hear her words - it was patronizing. And sometimes, there's just only one way to respond: by saying, point blank, QUIT IT.

Cultural Appropriation: The Illusion of "The Line"

2010-03-14T13:40:00.000-03:00

Recently, I wrote a piece called Countering Victorientalism, which has garnered quite a bit of attention. It does, of course, deal with cultural appropriation, because that was what the Orientalist movement was all about - commodifying Asian stuff and bringing it to Europe to prettify the lives and homes of Europeans who may or may not have visited "the Orient."

Yes, it is a fascinating topic, which is why I'm talking about it here! Because I am both victim and perpetrator of the systems that support cultural appropriation. I can't advocate for either side, because like, you, I don't know enough, and like you, I, too, have questions!

.... Except the questions I foresee getting, repeatedly, is this: Where is the line between appropriation and appreciation?

Short answer: I don't know.

Longer answer: There is no line. There are reasons why this is a debate and why it is tied into systemic racism and other forms of oppression. There are reasons why we talk about this and share our experiences, so we can all see where each other is coming from.

Ownership of our culture by minorities in white-dominant cultures is an ongoing process of negotiation, re-negotiation, and sometimes, downright possessiveness because some folks simply do not respect our culture and just want pieces of it to make their own personal lives "fabulous."

Cultural appropriation isn't just relegated to things, but also performances - blackface, yellowface, and brownface all play into the system that allows appropriation, forcing us to be minstrels for the entertainment of a greater white audience. It is also about spaces, where what might be a space for marginalized folks must make way for dominant parties, because.... what, everyone has the right to go where they want to go? Appropriation strips us marginalized people of that ability to go where we want to go, while forcing us to accept that our own spaces will be taken over by the dominant group, and if we protest, we are rude and unkind and don't want to share, because, after all, how else will we break down the barriers of racism if we don't share more of ourselves?

Because of all these factors which permeate into so much of our lives, there is no way that there is a single line to say, "this is not appropriative".

The goalposts always change as the power dynamics are constantly being renegotiated, between countries, between institutions, between groups, between individuals. This is why we have continual conversations, in multiple spaces, from many different angles.

To ask "where is the line?" is to assume there is a solid answer, which is a fallacy, especially for something as complex as culture. Not only that, but it places the burden of education on someone who probably already has other problems to deal with besides you demanding how you can marginalized me a little bit less.

Stop looking for this mystical "Line", and start listening to the actual people, folks. There are much better questions to ask.

On Self-Segregation and Lack Thereof

2010-03-12T13:37:00.000-04:00

macon d at Stuff White People Do discussed self-segregation, and he asked PoC if they ever felt the need to self-segregate when they spend a lot of time in white-dominated spaces. He also asked if there were certain things white folks do that cause this desire to self-segregate.

I'll be honest and admit that I never understood the purpose of self-segregation. In fact, I used to be extremely critical of international students at my university, because they spent so much time together, even as they were there to learn English. It seemed rather counter-productive. This is not to say all of them did - I volunteered as an ESL tutor to three lovely students, two Koreans and a Japanese, who were all about going out to do stuff with me like hang at the Art Gallery, or listen to music, or mess with vocabulary. But in general, I would see huge groups of students sticking together. (A friend of mine refers to a hallway in the university as "mini-Lebanon". I don't know if they're all Lebanese, but I'm not an Arab-speaker, and my friend is, so I'll defer to his opinion on that.)

But as I said, it seemed counter-productive to go all the way across the planet to a different culture, only to shy away from it. Now, of course, I recognize different people have different reasons for going places, and not all of them are like me. These students were here to learn English from an English-speaking institution (and I hope they at least got that much), not to revel in the sometimes strange-assed Western specifically-Canadian even-more-specifically-Nova-Scotian culture we live in. These days, I give them a pass - they can't speak English, so of course shit is going to be alienating for them, because so much of what goes on is mostly parsed in the English language, and if you don't have a familiarity with the language, the culture is going to be, by and large, kinda inaccessible. I'd love to hear other opinions on this, though. I'm very fond of the concept of linguistic determination like that.

However, more infuriating than the international ESL students, were Malaysian international students, who came here - and probably still do come here - for other degrees. At my uni, our population was small enough that self-segregation was not possible all the time, and in general, they did hang out with many other international students, as well as white folk. The Malaysian students at the other local uni, though, came as part of a twinning program, and their degree kept them busy as hell, and otherwise, they tended to stick together.

I had my own crew of mostly-white friends to run with. I loved being in Canada, and I still do. The freedom from family, as well as the social mores of Malaysia, gave me the spiritual sunshine I needed to grow up and become more confident in myself. That said, I purposefully divorced myself from other Malaysian, and even Asian, company. I said hi to other Malaysians on campus, but I wasn't invested in keeping ties with them (besides which, the only two Malaysian guys on campus were douchebags, one of whom repeatedly distributed photos of two drunk naked girls) because, really, we didn't have much in common.

And the one time I did go out to hang with an all-Malaysian crew, I promised myself I would never do that again. They were nice, and it was an okay night, but I was... pretty bored, ya'll! I was a nerd of nerds there, a geek, even, and these folks had no such specialized interests!

So, in a sense, I self-segregated - to hang with other nerds and geeks. Who happened to be white. Which, on another level, is not so much segregation of the nerds, so much as it is assimilation into a white nerd culture. I'm lucky to get out of it unscathed - there's a pretty good nerd culture here which doesn't lean towards objectification of women and/or non-whites.

But of course, there will be some things that white folks will never understand, nor black folks, nor even Asian folks who do not come from my geographic context. I won't say I purposefully seek out folks who are, because I don't, unless it's online where they have the option of ignoring me, but there are times when I will make a joke... and nobody but a Malaysian will get it.

I don't get to self-segregate then, because there isn't really a sizable Malaysian group I can tolerate for very long. There isn't really a group of Asians I can hang out with either. I don't get to find "my people" and be in a place where I'm completely comfortable expressing myself in those unique cultural ways which code me as Asian/Malaysian/Chinese.

But I do have the Internet. And I do get to go home. And having separated myself from my own culture for so long, I know it's a blessing when I get to go home.

What in the What?

2010-03-10T13:06:00.000-04:00

So, someone on racebending pointed out to me the Occidental Quarterly, which is, according to the Wikipedia article, "devoted to the ethnic, racial, and cultural heritage that forms the foundation of Western Civilization". It aims to defend "the cultural, ethnic, and racial interests of Western European peoples" and examine "contemporary political, social, and demographic trends that impact the posterity of Western Civilization".

Because I'm a sick puppy like that, and it was very late at night, I decided to poke around the website of the web edition. The tagline reads, "Western Perspectives on Man, Culture & Civilization."

Because Man embraces all, oh no, it doesn't exclude women at all, not historically, and we really need more Western perspectives on Culture and Civilization. I guess all those philosophers stemming from Socrates aren't good enough for these fine fellows!

It looked innocuous enough , although I could feel the microaggression seething from a couple of the articles, and the testimonials don't quite recommend it to me either:

“Slick, academic-looking journal edited by a Who’s Who of the radical right.” - The Southern Poverty Law Center

Yeah, I really want to read that. It's academic-looking, all right. But I wondered, who do they normally accept articles from? So I checked their "Write for TOQ" page, and found nothing that really said anything more than "give us something interesting that fits our magazine!" Then I saw this:

"It is the official policy of TOQ and its publisher to repudiate and reject calls to violence or criminal behavior in relation to the struggle of Western peoples for self-determination."

Okay, what now? Did you read that? "The struggle of Western peoples for self-determination." Because Western culture and identity is so threatened, so silence, that it must speak out. It struggles! The poor dears, they must struggle and work through their issues and primly address, very rationally, the Ills of Today that Prevents the Western Man from Asserting his Culture and Civilization.

All I can say is, look, you have been self-determining for 100 - 200 - 300 - 400.... FOR A FUCKING LONG TIME. In the process of self-determination, you have also fought, conquered, colonized, annexed, and/or exploited other countries and civilizations in due process... and you still have an existential crisis on your identity and need affirmation that yes, the Western perspective is valid and requires its own place to voice itself?

Grow up, FFS.

Equal Rights for All!

2010-03-08T13:21:00.001-04:00

Hi all! It's International Women's Day!

This year's theme for International Women's Day is "Equal Rights For All", which I imagine does not just extend to women only, but also men.

One of the things which undermines feminism is the idea that rights are a zero-sum game: if women get more rights, then men will lose rights. It's as if rights are finite things which are arbitrarily distributed. Like apples. I just bought some. Which means I deprived someone else of the very same apples! Oh nos, that poor person! There are only so many apples in the world! Except, whoever it is I "deprived" of the apples I bought could buy them somewhere else.

Even that analogy fails, because there are some people who cannot afford to buy apples! Fortunately, though, rights are not concrete things like apples. Which means they are exponential! Which means they can reach out to apply to everybody!

Everybody means women of colour, transgendered and transsexual folks, or folks who don't fit into the gender binary. Everybody means really young children and really old people. Everyone means people of all races, and of all cultures, whichsoever they fit into, gets proper respect and representation in media and status and are recognized as part of the tapestry of globalization. Everybody means even that one person in the room with a different opinion gets heard, rather than ignored until someone else repeats it. Everybody means even people who cannot hear or see or walk or talk or move or stop, evne people who feel differently and think differently.

Equal rights means we recognize that some people are more advantaged than others and adjust our expectations differently. Equal rights means we accommodate those who are disadvantaged in whatever way, because it does not truly inconvenience us to do so, and benefits all.

Equal rights is the gift that keeps on giving. Equal rights is loving everyone the best we can with our attitudes mirrored into law. Equal rights is the dream and the ideal that we all work towards, because to stop is to betray everything all those who came before us have worked for. Equal rights is gratitude to our forebears who worked hard to give us a better life. Equal rights is kindness to those who don't normally receive them.

In the past one hundred years that we have celebrated International Women's Day, we have made progress, mostly for a certain subset of all women in the world. We have begun to recognize how limited our work has been and extended our purview.

Equal rights is a work in progress, for progress, by people who believe in progress. Equal rights is exponential in potential.

Happy International Women's Day!