What Really Got Me About Crazy Rich Asians

When I first heard about the Crazy Rich Asians movie based on the novel by Kevin Kwan, I wasn't at all interested. In fact my initial reaction was, "Wait, we have a movie about Asian people... but they're rich Asian people?! No thank you."

But the more I read and thought about the stakes of the movie, the more I got to thinking about all the times while growing up in the States that I didn't see anyone on TV or in movies who looked like me. My childhood hero after I moved to the United States of A was the Yellow Ranger, the girl who didn't wear a skirt when she was fighting. (I always enjoyed a certain smugness knowing that those fight scenes were taken straight from the Japanese version, in which there was only one female Ranger.) It wasn't until I was in high school that Lucy Liu starred in Ally McBeal and Charlie's Angels (as NOT the brainy one, for a change). Lisa Ling was getting recognition for her work on The View, and Keiko Agena would have a main role in the Gilmore Girls. Eventually we would have movies like Better Luck Tomorrow and Charlotte Sometimes, but it would still be a few years before we would get characters by actors like Sandra Oh in Grey's Anatomy or even, for a brief time, Elizabeth Ho in Melissa & Joey. (OK, so that last one is iffy, but I admit I was excited to see an Asian-American character on a show with my favorite teenage witch.)

A Long Road to Publishing a Peer-Reviewed Journal Article

On 5 June 2017, I delivered my first peer-reviewed journal article into this world. (I'm not counting my 2006 article about English acquisition, sorry.) Though much less painful than a childbirth, the process took a hell of a lot longer than bringing a human baby into this world.

If you're one of those people who can publish articles while in a Ph.D. program; can balance writing and teaching skillfully; mostly get "publish with minor revisions" as a submission response; or can publish more than one article a year, what I write below may come as a shock to you. Or appalling. I don't care. I'm extremely thankful for this publication, and I know I couldn't have done it without help from the people around me every step of the way.

This post is for anyone out there who has ever felt like it's damn near impossible to get a publication out. I am here to tell you: It can be done; it just might take a really, really long time.

On Indecent Exposure

One of the things I hate about flashers is that whatever they're trying to flash me is usually totally uninteresting.

I don't know if you or someone you know has ever encountered a flasher. I sure hope not. I have, unfortunately—once in San Diego, and almost a second time a couple of nights ago.

(And man, it irritated me so much that I had to create a teaching moment out of it in my Anime class. My poor students. They were probably wondering why we couldn't just get on to talking about Akira. But the good students they are, they bore with me. Thanks, everyone.)

I've heard people talking about incidents of indecent exposure before—and often in those talks there are people who find the incidents to be funny. They laugh about them and make jokes. It's a light-hearted topic to them.

Often those people are men. That's not to say that all men find crimes of indecent exposure to be funny, or that women never find them to be amusing. I think it's just a social tendency. And I realize that different things count as "indecent exposure" depending on the social context. All I know is that, in past conversations I've heard, some people find indecent exposure to be funny, and most of those people have been men.

But you know what? That one time I was a victim of indecent exposure—that shit wasn't funny at all. Nope. At first I didn't know what had just happened. It only hit me later just how emotionally violent the act was toward me. And I was left with this strange feeling of shame and guilt. What had I done wrong? Was it my fault? Should I not have been walking there, at that time? Was I wearing something strange? Did I have a sign on my face that said, "Please jerk off in front of me"?

You wanna tell me I can't walk down Gilman Drive alone at 3 PM in the afternoon? You wanna try to blame the victim? Try again. Or better yet, you wanna try and tell me this is funny? Well let me tell you—being forced to see someone's body parts—any part—is as violent as having one's clothes ripped off and exposed, steps before being penetrated against one's will. It's sexual and emotional violence, undeniable and yet not recognized enough for its gravity.

So next time you hear people making jokes about flashers exposing themselves, I hope you have the courage and decency to tell them that that's not right. Because it's not right—neither indecent exposure nor making light of it. And next time you're going to Target on Yorba Linda at Placentia, and a dude in a motorcycle helmet tries to get your attention behind the 7-Eleven by saying "Psssst" the way Peter Pan does to Wendy, be sure not to give him the time of day.

All Aboard the Barbie Train

I'm not crazy about hot pink crew neck sweaters or distressed denim on vests, but I don't mind boots (if they're not pink). And I don't mind turquoise so much either, though I admit I'm more often in the mood for coral...

OK, so maybe I don't think that's the greatest outfit or me, but maybe it is a great outfit for someone else. Someone like...

...the All-American Barbie doll. (Produced by Mattel, Inc. in 1991.)

I mean, look! It's almost as if someone saw the All-American Barbie and then tried to come up with a Polyvore set to recreate her outfit or something.

But the story I wanted to tell you was not of turquoise vs. coral, but of my first—and only—Barbie doll. And yes, it was the All-American Barbie doll.

I remember it like it was 24 years ago. It was my first real birthday after having arrived in the United States, and who can believe it, my parents decided to have my birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's. Oh man, I must have been the happiest kid. I really liked ski ball and I loved the corn and croutons at the salad bar even more. (And Thousand Island dressing. I loooved Thousand Island dressing.) So celebrating my birthday at Chuck E. Cheese's? Mind blown.

It's funny, I can't really remember who came—maybe Grace? Thuy? Crystal? But I do remember that one of them got me an All-American Barbie. I couldn't believe it—my very own Barbie. I was so excited, I didn't even know what to do. (Actually, I probably actually didn't know what to do, because the concept of dolls was pretty foreign to me.) What was I supposed to do with it? Feed it? Take it out on walks? Take off its clothes and then realize that I had no other clothes to put on it?

What I ended up doing was cutting her hair so that it would be short like mine, only to learn that Barbie's hair doesn't grow back. Too bad for her. I guess it was fine either way, since I maintained my bowl cut until I entered middle school—so she actually did look like me, except she was blonde.

But you know what was funny? (Not this TV spot for the doll, though it's a pretty good candidate.) I wasn't an All-American kid. To this day, I'm not really sure what that means. (Remember Margaret Cho's "All-American Girl"? I rest my case. (Don't get me wrong, I love Margaret Cho—I'm talking more about the screwed-up-ness of the fact that it only ran for one season.)) In other words, what the hell was a kid like me—an immigrant kid with no interest in Barbie—doing with an All-American Barbie doll?

To be honest, I was really happy about getting that doll—and I was really grateful to my friend for giving it to me as my birthday present. Even though I didn't really get into the whole doll thing (I'm more of a Sylvanian Families type), I feel like I got a taste of what it was like being a commercially represented 7-year-old in the United States. And in some ways, that's probably the closest I'll ever get to being All-American.

Makeup or Make-Up?

I've been thinking about makeup (make-up?) lately. This "thinking about" has been somewhere between me thinking about donuts (e.g., "I wonder what flavor cronut I should get next time?") and me thinking about education reform (e.g., "What is appropriate teacher training for a 'liberal arts' education at the secondary level?"). As in, I wonder about the theoretical implications of choosing between new lipliner and new eyeshadow.

Hey, don't laugh. I only started wearing makeup when I started working, and only because my manager gave me samples that her mother sold through her work at a Japanese cosmetics company. Since then I've accumulated random makeup items, but mostly as gifts from other people. No joke, 90% of what I own, I never even paid for.

This wouldn't be a problem, except that that means I end up with a lot of things that just don't look right on my face. For example, of the seven lipsticks/lipglosses I own, exactly two are colors I actually feel comfortable wearing. That's 28.6%, which, the last time I checked, is an F.

But what can I do? I'm grateful that people give me all these things, and I'd feel bad not using them. And I'm not about to go spend $30 on new lipstick when I have various shades of rose and mauve scattered about my bathroom cabinet. Hence years of mixing colors and finding innovative ways to "use" makeup items.

Except that's just the donut side of thinking about makeup. The education reform side is that I can't quite come to terms with my own desires to wear makeup (except those days when I'm like, fuck it, all I need is sunblock), even with the understanding that "wearing makeup" is just another way for us to "fit other people's standards of beauty". Oh, come on—it's true. We can talk about all the ways makeup plays up our best features, makes us beautiful, helps us love ourselves...but please. What we really mean is, it makes us beautiful in the way Western (and thus most other) marketing has defined beauty, and it helps us love ourselves because we get that affirmation from others that makes us feel so good. (Sooo good.)

You want me to use lipgloss because it makes my lips look fuller (but not too full)? You want me to use shadow on the bridge of my nose so that it looks like I have a three-dimensional nose rather than the two-dimensional one with which I was born? You want me to change the shape of my eyebrows to suit this season's trend? Oh come on, now. I have books I have to be reading.

But still...if I want learn how to shade and highlight my face in such a way so as to make it look more like a white person's face...is that so bad? If I want to wear concealer so that my skin looks even, with no blemishes or pores (and thus biologically impossible), am I a sellout? It's so nice to look and feel pretty...and it's true, thinking that I look pretty makes me feel a whole lot better about myself than when I'm sitting there thinking, wow, what a mess. It's like a pair of good heels—height and longer legs, even if it's all an illusion. And if I'm paying my hard-earned money to get that illusion from multinational corporations, to learn how to do that in a way that suits my own face—is that so theoretically criminal?

上野千鶴子と林真理子と・・・

最近上野千鶴子と林真理子の本ばっかり読んでる。交互に読むと言う事、そして上野千鶴子が林真理子についても書いたり話したりすると言う事から、結構私の頭が混乱してきたりもする。何故こんなにも二人の本や考え方に惹かれるんだろう？とか。

先日は遥洋子の『東大で上野千鶴子にケンカを学ぶ』も読んだ。著者の視点から書く「学者の世界」の説明は面白かったし、そして上野千鶴子（何故いつもフルネームなのだろう・・・）が著者に対してとる態度の説明も読んでいてとても嬉しかった。

私は上野千鶴子にも林真理子にも会った事がないし、会うより本を読む方が好むと思うけど、上野千鶴子は私が聞いている程悪い人ではないと思う。遥洋子にとっての上野千鶴子は、私にとっての大学院の恩師に似ている。きつい人かもしれないし、暖かい人では無いかもしれない。気難しかったり、「それはないんじゃないのっ？！」と思わせる様な事をしたり言ったりするかもしれない。でも、彼女は彼女の考え方を持っていて、それを主張できるだけの地位に行き着いたんだ。彼女だったら、私が彼女の本と林真理子の本を一緒に読む事を批判しないと思う。

No Sex Please, At Least Not in the Way You Think

It’s been over two months since I filed my dissertation, and it’s about time I started getting some work done. It’s not like I don’t have things to do; I’ve plenty (preparing for my class, writing my conference paper, working on a journal article, etc.)—it’s just that I’m in that zone of…I don’t know. Laziness.

To add fuel to the fire of my laziness (is that...even possible?), my recent reading materials have come from the local city library rather than the university library. And you know just how much I love books I can rustle up at the city library...

My first batch of books included those on the practice of jijitsukon (事実婚), the assertion that Japan ought to "single-ize", and the background to the increasing number of men not marrying. (I justify the selection of these books by saying they're related to Japan, gender, and marriage (=research-related).) 

Coupled with the YouTube video my friend forwarded me about "no sex in Japan", these texts made me think more seriously about the complicated nature of marriage, family, sex, and all sorts of other things that become tangled up in those practices. The rumor that Japanese people don't have sex is a total lie—of course they have sex, for crying out loud, just maybe not in the heteronormative, monogamous way that people normalize. The aging and dwindling population is tied up with changes in the marriage institution and costs/benefits of childbearing, of course, but they also have much to do with racist immigration policies and labor practices that economically disadvantage workers regardless of gender. And the social and psychological factors that make it difficult for people to establish longterm relationships while simultaneously making them feel like they have have do so—embedded in changing shapes of the family institution, these factors only complicate matters.

As my four-year-old niece would say, what a mess. While several solutions have been proposed and implemented already—make it more viable for women to stay in the workforce, make marriage less patriarchal and conservative (both politically and culturally), enable "foreigners" to make a decent living in Japan—I get this vague feeling that things aren't really...working. Gee whiz, maybe if I get my act together I can make this a future research project, to justify all the energy I'm spending thinking about it.