All I Asking For Is My Body, Part II

What is the importance of the body in the book? 

In Asian cultures and the Buddhist religion, there are few sacred things that should never be taken for granted. The Body is a very important tool and in Japanese culture, the children’s ability to work is put to use for repayment of their families. In the book we are told different stories of how children are used to repay their parents. Ashan told a story about how he was given to a carpenter on the island when he was only ten and how the carpenter worked him very hard but made him the best carpenter on the island. He never got paid a cent for it but he learned everything there was to learn about being a carpenter and how to work hard to support his family.

Ashan also talks about how Kiyoshi’s mother was forced to work all day long seven days a week by Obaban but never once complained about it. We also see that Kiyoshi’s parents are very deep in debt because they have been paying money back to their family since the first got married. They promised their families that they would send them money and they have been sending money for so long that they have been borrowing money to keep their family fed. The body is a tool to make money and bring fortune to your family and you have to take care of it because without your health you are useless.

Ch 52 Supporting a Thesis

When writing a paper, organizing your thoughts and arguments is critical to getting your point across clearly and effectively. The first step is to form a tentative thesis with which you state your central idea. After you have written a rough draft based on your thesis you may want to revise your thesis to broaden or narrow your idea. The rest of the paper is all about supporting your thesis, and the first step is organizing your evidence. It is suggested to sketch an informal plan that organizes your ideas in bold points so you can expand on each later in separate paragraphs.

The best way to support your thesis is to use sources to inform and support your argument. To get your ideas across to the reader clearly, you must provide a background and explain terms that you use in your paper. It is always important to support you’re the claims you make in your paper with facts, examples or an experts opinion. It is also important to consider and/or anticipate countering objections and you should address them as part of your paper.

This is a very helpful chapter as I’m going to rewrite my paper. I was unsure how to organize my paper originally and it came out very unorganized. I had main points that I was trying to get across and there was a lot more information I wanted to include and I could not figure out how to piece it all together. This article shows how to really layout a paper and what to do with all of the evidence I gathered to prove my point.

All I Asking For Is My Body, Part I

Makot is a young Japanese boy who goes to school with our narrator Kiyoshi. He is not well liked by other kids his age and because of that hangs out with young children who don’t know any better. He treats them well and buys them candy to earn their trust and their friendship. He is manipulative and bribes the younger boys when things don’t go his way. I can’t say that I feel sorry for him because it is his choice to be like that but at the same time I think he gets his attitude from his father. In the story, Kiyoshi talks about how Makot’s father drives around all day long in his Model T and does not go to work. I think this affects Makot because he uses other people to do his dirty work and then comes out looking squeaky clean when the ax falls.

Makot copes with his parents by taking their handouts of money and leaving. They use money as a poor show of affection towards him, figuring that he can go elsewhere and get the attention he needs. He does not want any of his friends to come around when his parents are home but uses them to supply his friends with good food when they are gone. He acts like he has a great life and shows off to his friends, but in reality he needs the attention and affection that he can’t get at home.

Essay 3

“Sometimes I secretly wish to be a haole.” When we examine Lovey, we notice that schooling and media go hand in hand in shaping her identity and this has a negative and detrimental impact on her life. She is taught by the media to act like and to worship Shirley Temple, and she is hounded by her teacher to act like a proper American by speaking “Standard English not pidgin English.” As we read through these three stories it is easy to follow Lovey’s quest to be the perfect American child but no matter how hard she tries, she fails.

I think that Lovey along with many of the other children are being molded and shaped by their teacher. Mr. Harvey tries to get the kids to act like Americans and due to the fact that Hawaii is such a remote part of the United States, and they have no idea what normal Americans look and act like, the only thing that they have to use as a guide is the television and the stars that they see on it. Lovey over compensates for her appearances and actions because she is an outsiders among outsiders.  

Lovey’s entire life is affected by outside sources, more so than the average girl her age for a number of factors. Every Sunday morning, Lovey and her best friend Jerry watch Shirley Temple act on TV, “I used to wish was just like her, with perfect blond ringlets and pink cheeks and pout lips, bright eyes and a happy ending every Sunday and crying ‘cause of being happy, I mean real happy.” Shirley Temple is an American Icon, one that every little girl, including Lovey, wished they could be.  Lovey wants her perfect life, perfect family and perfect looks and for a Japanese girl living in a post WWII era on Hawaii, that was hard to come by. “We weren’t good enough for the kind of love that Shirley had every Sunday, the kind of love that makes the bottom lip quiver and mothers rush through crowds to hug you at the end of a movie.”

In school, Lovey is constantly reminded of her “miserable” life and her empty future by her teacher Mr. Harvey. Mr. Harvey is a white teacher in Hawaii, attempting to make the children’s lives better by teaching the proper way to speak, read and write. He constantly reminds them of their bleak life ahead with his speech, ‘No one will want to give you a job. You sound uneducated. You will be looked down upon. You’re speaking low-class form of good Standard English. Continue, and you’ll go nowhere in life. Listen, students, I’m telling you the truth like no one else will. Because they don’t know how to say it to you. I do. Speak Standard English, DO NOT speak pidgin. You will only be hurting yourselves.’ Mr. Harvey’s philosophy was to scare the children into learning his curriculum to be a model American but for Lovey, it only put doubt in her head as to whether she would or could ever be Americanized.

From Mr. Harvey’s teachings and her classmates’ jokes, Lovey knew that she and her family were different. Lovey was ashamed of her family and their traditions, the disgusting food and the way her father dressed. She was forced to eat her grandmothers’ mustard cabbage stew and watch her suck the eyeballs out of fish. “I don’t tell anyone, not even Jerry, how ashamed I am of pidgin English. Ashamed of my mother and father, the food we eat,… The place we live… The car we drive… The clothes we wear… and the same shoes until it breaks.” All of this makes her think less of herself, making it seemingly impossible to be a normal human being, let alone having the life of Shirley Temple. In school the other kids in the class make Lovey’s life miserable. Not only does she get made fun of for her looks but also for her ancestors. She is constantly being made fun of for being Japanese and for the bombing of pearl harbor. With these things pounded into her head, Lovey begins to believe that she is an outsider and with that pressure she starts to alienate herself.

She is so distraught over these things that she even talks about committing suicide, though these thoughts are never more than that. She is asked by Mr. Harvey to write her own obituary and describe how she wants to die. Lovey finds this to be a very hard assignment because that would mean that her life had a sad ending and not a happy one like her idol Shirley who always has a joyful ending and the only thing she can come up with is that she does not want to be deaf or blind. She is also asked by Mr. Harvey to write about what her life would be like if her parents died in a train wreck. Obviously this too does not fit in with her vision of a perfect ending.

“No way will we ever be on The Checkers and Pogo Show. Never. Only the rich Honolulu kids. We would never be there anyway. Never.” Watching the TV shows, gives Lovey the impression that everything has to have a happy ending. Lovey sees all of the kids on the show as perfect little angels who are so cute and she dreams of what it would be like but she knows she will never be there because she is not cute enough or rich enough.  Lovey believes that because she rarely has happy endings in her life that she does not have a perfect or even a good life. There is always something better out there and she doesn’t know how to get it so all she can do is dream about it.

In an attempt to live out her dreams Lovey decides that she wants to get a perm. A perm to change her looks, to be more American, to be like the people she sees on TV: Farah Fawcett, Angie Dickinson, and Shirley Temple. She believes that with a whole new look she will be able to change other peoples perception of her and that will change her perception of herself. Not only does it backfire, but it makes her look like another star she sees on TV though not as flattering as the ones mentioned before: Oompah Loompah.

I think the affect of outside sources like schooling and media were more prominent in Loveys’ life compared to those around her, because those were her only sources of information. She deemed her life so invaluable, and she was ashamed of her parents so she shut them out and used outside sources to supplement her information intake and her social abilities. Many children are affected by outside sources and these feelings are enhanced when they are told that they are not good enough, when they are always talked down upon and in cases where children are singled out, the effect is enhanced.

Writing about Film Extra Credit

In this extra credit assignment we take a look a Dartmouth’s writing program on writing about film. One of the first things that I noticed in being an important starting point in writing about film is getting to know the glossary of terms. They refer back to the glossary multiple time and suggest that knowing these terms will be helpful when analyzing movies, before, during and after you view them. The text then discusses they ways in which we analyze the films and points out the differences between a review and a comprehensive analysis of a film. We then looked at different types of film papers. These stem from your analysis of the film and what you want to focus on while writing your paper for example; propaganda would probably mean you would want to write an Ideological paper.

Next we take a look behind the scenes and analyze things like shot sequence, lighting, directors, production history and other critics. Finally the text talks about writing tips. Again the paper is not supposed to be a review and some tips to stay away from turning your paper into a review are: do not use “I” in your paper because that is a surefire way to turn it into a review, do not summarize the film but maybe summarize the use of camera angles or editing techniques, and don’t limit yourself to discussion of plot characters.

Throughout this paper we looked at the ways to analyze and write about movies and all of the different aspects to look at. At first after reading this I thought it would be difficult to understand the plot of the movie while simultaneously trying to figure out what the director was thinking and why they did what they did with editing. I don’t see this as being quite as big of a problem if you do research as was suggested by the author. If we took a look at the reviews of a certain film and looked at the director and his style of film making, it would take less time analyzing the film and give us more time to watch it.  It seems like a daunting task but I think it we did our homework on the film and director it would not be so bad to get a well rounded analysis of the film.

“This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” Dialogue

“I came because of your father”

I chose this quote from the reading because it explains a lot about Victor and Thomas’s relationship with one another. They grew up as very close friends and went their separate ways when everyone had had enough with Thomas’s stories and Victor did not want to be seen as his friend anymore. Victor had to go finalize his father’s life and needed a way to get to Arizona and Thomas had the money. I think Thomas went for two reasons.

First, he had said he made a promise to Victor’s father about taking care of Victor because he knew he was moving away from his family and the reservation. Second I think that he had to have closure for himself. Thomas grew up with no family and he felt like Victor’s family was his own and he treated Victor’s father with great respect, more so then Victor because he never knew what he had. I also believe that Thomas went because he knew that somewhere deep down, he and Victor were still friends, the kind of friends that don’t need to see each other often. Thomas knew that being there for Victor and offering to help him get to Arizona was a great help to him.

Ch 20 Run-on sentences

Chapter 20 talks about revising run-on sentences with the use of a comma and a coordinating conjunction (and, but, or, nor, for, so, and yet), or with a semicolon. First we look at the types of run-on sentences, starting with fused sentences where a writer puts no punctuation mark and no coordinating conjunction between independent clauses. The most common type of run-on sentences is the comma splice sentence where a writer uses a comma to join two sentences but uses no coordinating conjunction.

To revise a run-on sentences there are four choices. First you can use a comma and a coordinating conjunction, second use a semi colon, third make the sentence into two separate sentences, and last by restructuring the sentence.

Between this English class and my history class I do a fair amount of writing and one of the things I get regularly for feedback is that I have run-on sentences. Many times when I am writing I do not notice the fact that I have run-on sentences and even when I reread my papers I still do not see them but the examples in this chapter made it easier to determine what a run-on sentence is and the ways to fix them. I feel like this will greatly improve my writing not only by restructuring sentences but also because when I am trying to rewrite a sentence I will be able to create two new sentences and add more information to each one independently.