okay, i still cant remember my pre-G7 SanD revelation (alas that has gone the way of the Hottentot Venus. obscured in the annals of HIStory, but her disembodied vulva floats in a prurient jar of formaldehyde on a forgotten shelf in an musty Museum of Man only to be found by Stephan J. Gould and revived in an essay about race, gender & western eugenics.) but i came up with another one.
i think my stupid power would have to be the ability to write long convoluted emails using obscure literary, historical and pop culture references.
ms. kyung jin (or Lady K--her airwave ego) adds "and to turn the obscure references into a long diatribe fully equipped with a plethora of tangents that eventually relate to the initial obscure reference."
i think we can all agree that it's a) useless though entertaining, at least to me, and b) could, potentially, under the right circumstances, at the last minute, under great duress, defeat Evil and Save The Day.
one day i will post some of them so you can fully comprehend my deep thoughts around topics ranging from porkism to klingonaase.
speaking of stupid powers, T got me the first five episodes of season 1 of Stan Lee's reality show Who wants to be a Superhero? because laughing at other people's follies makes me feel better about myself.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
DIY baby hammock
who invented hammocks? no one knows for sure, but it was folks in the tropics, caribbean, latin america. all i know is that it is ingenious.
in VN, there is just about a hammock for every adult. every household has at least 4 steel screw hooks bolted into the studs for an instant midday siesta. even government offices close down to beat the tropical heat for lunch & a siesta. though i wonder if they too have hammock hooks tucked in the back. socialist bureaucrats need to snooze off the heat too. indeed the modern vinamese american household has an ancestral altar, a large flat screen TV, karaoke, and a made-in-vietnam steel-framed hammock (and usually some elder firmly ensconced while watchin the newest Pa-Ri Bai Nai|Paris By Night variety show spectacle or phim chưởng|chinese period serial martial art soap opera or cải lương|southern vinamese melodic storytelling). growing up in honolulu, i was lulled to sleep in hammocks from the time i was born. and i was so glad when my mom *finally* found the hammock she got for me in VN in 2001 buried in the depths of the garage which the two older kids use as free storage. (and before you siblings protest the unfairness of that generalization, all i know is that all my stuff was in the shed that exploded and burned down in dad's "shed incident." the only stuff i have in the garage is what mom has been stockpiling for years in the anticipation of another grandchild.) we lugged that hammock shit up from SanD posthaste. and believe me, it wasn't easy.
now that t&i are at that procreating time, we're trying to evade the consumer mentality manufactured by the billion dollar baby product industry, and society at large. looking to expand its market and profit margin and led by multi-culty parents, the baby product industry is beginning to embrace and commodify the "natural" ways the rest of the non-industrial world has raised billions of babies. co-sleeping, baby carriers/slings, attachment parenting, elimination communication, practices & crafts/artifacts the world over are are making their way in the mainstream, being trademarked, branded and packaged as a westernized consumer product.
i'm predicting that hammocks are the next big baby thing. there is one american brand complete with a frame and padded hammock. aussie & kiwi's are getting in it too. why? because hammocks mimic the natural rhythm of in utero, they ergonomically conform to the baby's shape (unlike stiff flat mattresses), they are self-propelled (amazingly, a baby soothing product that doesn't require batteries. yet.) and, most importantly, unlike cribs they don't cost an arm and a leg. in the global context, it's important to remember that hammocks are safe to use because the baby is never left alone. there is always a caretaker whether parent, grandparent, extended family within ear's reach and unlike america, no one anywhere else in the world ignores a baby's cry believing that promotes independence rather than abandonment issues and SIDS.
when i was a kid i used to sit and draw blueprints for playhouses. really detailed blueprint of a playhouse with sunroof, down to the lumber sizes, number of nails, reinforcing beams, crossbeam supported foundation, weather-proofing, etc. i get this from ông ngoại|maternal grandfather who as a self-sufficient peasant could grow rice & produce, raise & train waterbuffalo, make bánh tết & banh chưng|new years sticky rice, pork & mung bean cake and kẹo mè|sesame candy from scratch, build a house from scrap lumber & palm tree fronds, and invent a flapping angel-wing harness for the christmas pageant. nowadays they call a person like him a "renaissance man"--though i'm fairly certain self-sufficiency pre-exists the renaissance & capitalism--i just call him ông ngoại.
so rather than pay $200 for some bourgie plastic & polyester version manufactured in some sweatshop in China that will offgas neural disrupters horribly and break apart or be recalled due to shoddy workmanship, i decide to DIY and make my own. who knows maybe i will make a business plan out of this. may as well make some money off of this. maybe i can market it as phong thuỷ|feng shui hammocks. no one has niche marketed oriental metaphysicism and baby products yet.
disclaimer: this is still under product development, so experiment at your own risk.
PORTABLE BABY HAMMOCK
can be installed anywhere there is a door frame or lintel
clamp the padded C-clamps above the door frame about 1.5' - 2' apart. this will give you a loose parabola.
place the folded baby blanket parallel to the 48" width of the fabric at the vertex of the parabola. this is very important! the baby will lay on top of the blanket. babies should not be placed in this hammock the way an adult would lay for this particular hammock. the legs of the parabola (which are around 48" wide) will prevent the baby from rolling out of the hammock.
lay a bunch of pillows & padding underneath the hammock just in case and test it with some phonebooks (or cats as the case may be) before putting your baby in.
as in all things, use common sense.
PERMANENT INSTALLATION (under construction)
1 steel heavy duty eye screw or screw hook (carrying load of 400+ lbs each)
2' dowel
whipping rope technique
carbiner or quick link
2.5-3 yards
..to be continued...
i started this on 7.5.07 but waited to post so i wouldn't let the cat out of the bag. will finish at some other date.
p.s. the C-Clamps don't work over the lintel. Back to the drawing board. Am considering the Miyo clamp but it's $50 and I'd have to import it from NZ...
in VN, there is just about a hammock for every adult. every household has at least 4 steel screw hooks bolted into the studs for an instant midday siesta. even government offices close down to beat the tropical heat for lunch & a siesta. though i wonder if they too have hammock hooks tucked in the back. socialist bureaucrats need to snooze off the heat too. indeed the modern vinamese american household has an ancestral altar, a large flat screen TV, karaoke, and a made-in-vietnam steel-framed hammock (and usually some elder firmly ensconced while watchin the newest Pa-Ri Bai Nai|Paris By Night variety show spectacle or phim chưởng|chinese period serial martial art soap opera or cải lương|southern vinamese melodic storytelling). growing up in honolulu, i was lulled to sleep in hammocks from the time i was born. and i was so glad when my mom *finally* found the hammock she got for me in VN in 2001 buried in the depths of the garage which the two older kids use as free storage. (and before you siblings protest the unfairness of that generalization, all i know is that all my stuff was in the shed that exploded and burned down in dad's "shed incident." the only stuff i have in the garage is what mom has been stockpiling for years in the anticipation of another grandchild.) we lugged that hammock shit up from SanD posthaste. and believe me, it wasn't easy.
now that t&i are at that procreating time, we're trying to evade the consumer mentality manufactured by the billion dollar baby product industry, and society at large. looking to expand its market and profit margin and led by multi-culty parents, the baby product industry is beginning to embrace and commodify the "natural" ways the rest of the non-industrial world has raised billions of babies. co-sleeping, baby carriers/slings, attachment parenting, elimination communication, practices & crafts/artifacts the world over are are making their way in the mainstream, being trademarked, branded and packaged as a westernized consumer product.
i'm predicting that hammocks are the next big baby thing. there is one american brand complete with a frame and padded hammock. aussie & kiwi's are getting in it too. why? because hammocks mimic the natural rhythm of in utero, they ergonomically conform to the baby's shape (unlike stiff flat mattresses), they are self-propelled (amazingly, a baby soothing product that doesn't require batteries. yet.) and, most importantly, unlike cribs they don't cost an arm and a leg. in the global context, it's important to remember that hammocks are safe to use because the baby is never left alone. there is always a caretaker whether parent, grandparent, extended family within ear's reach and unlike america, no one anywhere else in the world ignores a baby's cry believing that promotes independence rather than abandonment issues and SIDS.
when i was a kid i used to sit and draw blueprints for playhouses. really detailed blueprint of a playhouse with sunroof, down to the lumber sizes, number of nails, reinforcing beams, crossbeam supported foundation, weather-proofing, etc. i get this from ông ngoại|maternal grandfather who as a self-sufficient peasant could grow rice & produce, raise & train waterbuffalo, make bánh tết & banh chưng|new years sticky rice, pork & mung bean cake and kẹo mè|sesame candy from scratch, build a house from scrap lumber & palm tree fronds, and invent a flapping angel-wing harness for the christmas pageant. nowadays they call a person like him a "renaissance man"--though i'm fairly certain self-sufficiency pre-exists the renaissance & capitalism--i just call him ông ngoại.
so rather than pay $200 for some bourgie plastic & polyester version manufactured in some sweatshop in China that will offgas neural disrupters horribly and break apart or be recalled due to shoddy workmanship, i decide to DIY and make my own. who knows maybe i will make a business plan out of this. may as well make some money off of this. maybe i can market it as phong thuỷ|feng shui hammocks. no one has niche marketed oriental metaphysicism and baby products yet.
disclaimer: this is still under product development, so experiment at your own risk.
PORTABLE BABY HAMMOCK
can be installed anywhere there is a door frame or lintel
- begin with 2 iron industrial C-clamps (6-8 in width) these have a carrying load of 1200 lbs+ each so it can handle a baby no worries.
- circular rubber or silicon pads (glue to the clamp faces to prevent damage to the surface)
- 2.5-3 yards of heavy cotton, 8mm+ habotai silk (also called parachute silk because it is used for parachutes and also for portable hammocks. load of up to 400 lbs.) or sling suitable fabric (36-48 width). the bonus with using natural materials is that they wick away moisture and regulate temperature.
- folded up baby blanket or towel approx the size of the baby.
clamp the padded C-clamps above the door frame about 1.5' - 2' apart. this will give you a loose parabola.
place the folded baby blanket parallel to the 48" width of the fabric at the vertex of the parabola. this is very important! the baby will lay on top of the blanket. babies should not be placed in this hammock the way an adult would lay for this particular hammock. the legs of the parabola (which are around 48" wide) will prevent the baby from rolling out of the hammock.
lay a bunch of pillows & padding underneath the hammock just in case and test it with some phonebooks (or cats as the case may be) before putting your baby in.
as in all things, use common sense.
PERMANENT INSTALLATION (under construction)
1 steel heavy duty eye screw or screw hook (carrying load of 400+ lbs each)
2' dowel
whipping rope technique
carbiner or quick link
2.5-3 yards
..to be continued...
i started this on 7.5.07 but waited to post so i wouldn't let the cat out of the bag. will finish at some other date.
p.s. the C-Clamps don't work over the lintel. Back to the drawing board. Am considering the Miyo clamp but it's $50 and I'd have to import it from NZ...
Monday, August 6, 2007
musings on 42
my sister Uyên just called me out on my lack of "substantive" posts of late. substantive being relative since we all know how i like to ramble on, usually in mid-thought, about esoteric things that pop into my head (like klingon love letters. i can't believe you lost them, Trung! batlh bIHeghjaj! bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay'.) low brain to mouth filter. blame it on the drugs my mom took during labor.
my bloglite excuse is -- weo, how to delicately say -- i am with child|có bàu. yes, T. & i have borg'ed ourselves the old-fashioned way and we are now nguyễn3 (can chú Bình claim credit for taking us to Bải Bàu in Qui Nhơn in april? or the hokey new age-y womb-blessing on my birthday?) as of tomorrow i will be 13 weeks along and almost officially out of my first trimester. par-tay! because it is damn fatiguing to generate a human being!
Uyên made the request for belly shots. for you undomesticated non-breeding folks, that is not cheap tequila drunk from the pierced navel of some young thing who probably doesn't have good hygiene; belly shots would be a progressive montage of the alien being gestating in my womb until it emerges gnashing and clawing from my abdomen to dominate the world. just kidding. yes, yes, children are blessings and a woman's ability to give Life, to Birth, is Sacred. without this, our survival as a species would end. blahblah. how alienated are we from women's reproductive capacity that the major pop culture reference for pregnancy is parasitic and destructive? the misogyny of society. makes you understand why the cesarean rate in the U.S. is almost 28% and voluntary cesareans (that is major abdominal surgery) is on the rise. fear of vaginas.
theoretical physicist stephen j. hawking comments, "I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image." he is a genius, an expansive intellectual contemplating the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything (the Deep Thought answer to which is 42, leaving us to ponder, what is the Ultimate Question?), and yet that is an incredibly stupid thing to say. as my bà ngoại|maternal grandmother often rebukes my aunties & uncles with her folk wisdom aphorism "mày nghĩ mày khôn quá hả mày chui ra đít tao!|you think you're so smart, you crawled out of my pussy!" put you in your place, punk! (now you understand where i learned how to curse.) women have been creating Life in our own image from the beginning of human time. it doesn't take a PhD or an MD to accomplish that.
so for the belly shots, weo, i'm not cutely pregnant yet (when if ever does that happen pray tell?). i'm slightly bloated, a beer belly of sorts late in the day. my clothes fit wierdly and why are all the clothes in my existing wardrobe so form fitting & cropped? i do glow though, for the record. absolutely luminous. T. has been documenting the process on the monthly (and sometimes weekly) basis. i might be persuaded to post the belly pix, but that requires bribery. food bribery (see the FAQs below).
for the curious, now that we are pregnant, you no longer have to refrain from asking me about my reproductive status or sex life. now commences the pregnancy phase and the ensuing, mostly welcome questions. for your curious pleasure:
my bloglite excuse is -- weo, how to delicately say -- i am with child|có bàu. yes, T. & i have borg'ed ourselves the old-fashioned way and we are now nguyễn3 (can chú Bình claim credit for taking us to Bải Bàu in Qui Nhơn in april? or the hokey new age-y womb-blessing on my birthday?) as of tomorrow i will be 13 weeks along and almost officially out of my first trimester. par-tay! because it is damn fatiguing to generate a human being!Uyên made the request for belly shots. for you undomesticated non-breeding folks, that is not cheap tequila drunk from the pierced navel of some young thing who probably doesn't have good hygiene; belly shots would be a progressive montage of the alien being gestating in my womb until it emerges gnashing and clawing from my abdomen to dominate the world. just kidding. yes, yes, children are blessings and a woman's ability to give Life, to Birth, is Sacred. without this, our survival as a species would end. blahblah. how alienated are we from women's reproductive capacity that the major pop culture reference for pregnancy is parasitic and destructive? the misogyny of society. makes you understand why the cesarean rate in the U.S. is almost 28% and voluntary cesareans (that is major abdominal surgery) is on the rise. fear of vaginas.
theoretical physicist stephen j. hawking comments, "I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image." he is a genius, an expansive intellectual contemplating the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything (the Deep Thought answer to which is 42, leaving us to ponder, what is the Ultimate Question?), and yet that is an incredibly stupid thing to say. as my bà ngoại|maternal grandmother often rebukes my aunties & uncles with her folk wisdom aphorism "mày nghĩ mày khôn quá hả mày chui ra đít tao!|you think you're so smart, you crawled out of my pussy!" put you in your place, punk! (now you understand where i learned how to curse.) women have been creating Life in our own image from the beginning of human time. it doesn't take a PhD or an MD to accomplish that.
so for the belly shots, weo, i'm not cutely pregnant yet (when if ever does that happen pray tell?). i'm slightly bloated, a beer belly of sorts late in the day. my clothes fit wierdly and why are all the clothes in my existing wardrobe so form fitting & cropped? i do glow though, for the record. absolutely luminous. T. has been documenting the process on the monthly (and sometimes weekly) basis. i might be persuaded to post the belly pix, but that requires bribery. food bribery (see the FAQs below).
for the curious, now that we are pregnant, you no longer have to refrain from asking me about my reproductive status or sex life. now commences the pregnancy phase and the ensuing, mostly welcome questions. for your curious pleasure:
MY PREGNANCY FAQS
- are you showing yet?
i am not showing. unless you count my distended intestines that get more compacted as the day wears on. so don't bother touching my belly because you're really just feeling up the detritus and effluvia of my digestion. my Uterus happens to be electric-slide tipped back and to the far left. if you see me rubbing my belly, i am not at this point touchingly bonding with my unborn child, i am really just encouraging some gas to pass. when i lay down and palpate my abdomen (i'm curious too), i can just barely feel her edge (my Uterus is a She btw) tucked deep into my left pelvis. my Uterus and i are in conversation right now trying to reach consensus agreement. i would like her to be upfront and center so that i can avoid having anal internal exams during my prenatals. you read that right. midwife has got to do bi-manual internal exams and palpate to assess baby's growth someway.
- have you seen your doctor yet?
meet my midwife Selena. she's a grandmother, been a doula for many years, owns a birth center, and practices 2nd degree reiki (i'm not really sure what that means either).
we're old-fashioned DIY-ers and we're choosing the safest birth choice possible. we're planning a normal, safe homebirth. babies everywhere else in the world have been born this way since time immemorial. don't see why we should pay an ob-gyn $10K for less than 15 minutes of care and loads of medical interventions. i've seen all the doctor TV shows, i know doctors think of childbirth as a mortally dangerous disease best performed strapped down on her back in a drug-resistant-staph-ridden hospital amongst the ill, the suffering and the dying. not subjecting myself or our child to that. shudder. i'm not that crazy.
- have you seen your baby yet?
ultrasounds have never been monitored for long term risks from exposure. they are a known unknown non-empirical technology. ultrasound machines are not monitored by any safety board, there is no standardized calibration, and technicians receive no training in the technology or its use which is why fools like Tom Cruise can buy one online to use on his cloned spawn. what is known is that there is known cellular mutation with exposure and babies get very agitated in the womb when exposed to ultrasound. there is no safe amount of exposure to ultrasound and one should limit exposure unless medically necessary. that said, we are having one ultrasound later this month. mainly to rule out twins which run in my paternal family. midwives say it skips a generation though.
on a humanistic level, this thinker dude (blanking on the name) commented that the two images that have profoundly changed humanity's paradigm of thinking is the picture of the earth from outer space and the ultrasound image of the unborn. prior to those two images, we could never imagine mother earth as something separate from ourselves, nor could we imagine the baby separate from the mother. when those images were published we furthered our alienation from self, motherhood, nature, etc. which puts us square in this current situation of rampant ecological destruction and fear of vaginas/vulvas-cum-compartmentalized maternity/pediatric healthcare. anyways, ultrasound pictures of babies just look like freaky aliens to me. they don't really generate warm fuzzy "awwww"s from me. its not like i want to bond with an alien. i mean i've watched plenny sci-fi movies. got no love for extra-terrestrials.
- are you having morning sickness?
nope. blessed be! both our moms had easy pregnancies and no vomiting. i have not worshipped the porcelain god this trimester. so i glow. really. it's the increased circulation and extra hormones.
no constipation either. except when our sewer line bust last week and all i had was a bucket for my midnight/early am pregnancy pees.
- are you having any cravings?
i am having a liking for certain things under certain circumstances, but nothing i would call a craving (though ms. Lily says otherwise). but i'm not upset or disappointed if i don't get it, nor am i demanding T. obtain it at odd hours. in general, cravings are your body's way of asking for missing nutrients. so the typical preggers craving for ice cream & pickles is really your body asking for more protein & calcium, and the sour/vinegar to help facilitate the absorption of the calcium. our brains just interpret that in simplistic ways accessible in our modern fast food nation reality. as a rule, T & i eat very healthy and balanced, whole foods, no junk food, not too much processed/fast foods because of my sensitivity to chemicals and allergens. so i'm not having much in the way of cravings. though i will say, i am not desiring sweets, in fact they kinda repulse me. too much sugar, nutritionally empty calories makes me want to hurl. and my lactose intolerance has gotten worse. since i cut wheat and dairy out for a mucus-free diet a few months ago, my allergies have improved immensely. this last weekend, subjected to work retreat and poor lunch menu planning, i had to eat alot of crappy phonebook fast food--pizza & cantonese. bleck. allergies came back in spades both skin rashes and sneezing at nothing. just goes to show food is medicinal. you eat crap, you feel like crap.
we've been getting our nutrients from food so i've been able to stay off the prenatal supplements that generally make one vomit. fyi seaweed is a miracle food in terms of both iron and folic acid and similar minerals content as your own blood. we all came from the ocean at some point.
our biggest challenge is that i've noticed uncooked/unprepared/greasy foods sorta gross me out too as does repetition. by extension, the whole "raw foods" food trend is just blah to me (sorry, Chanda but that was not doing it for me. left me so hungry-tired that i slept 12 hours that night.) which means that i don't want to eat anything in our refrigerator. we're having to do multiple runs to the grocery store in week so it's a good thing we live within blocks of three grocery stores!
so if i crave anything, it's variety. also, i still can't eat anything i didn't like BP (Before Pregnant) like raw onions or dairy but in addition, chicken breast and salmon repel me. and unfortunately i seem to have reached a limit on lao sausage. i'm hoping that just means not for three meals in a row...
simple and mouthwateringly good high end restaurant food really really appeals to me like egg sandwich but a gourmet egg sandwich that is the best i've ever had!!! i'm still waiting for food to taste extra delicious. so the food channel is very dangerous. i just want tasty, nutritious food, my parents' homecooking, meal variety and i don't want to cook. poor T. (many thanx to Lily for rescuing him for 2 nights in a row). so that's why i'm going to SanD at the end of the month, i want bánh giò|banana leaf wrapped glutinous rice flour stuffed with pork & woodear fungus, cua rang muối|crispy salt & pepper crab, canh chua|tamarind fish soup, at least two varieties of xôi|sticky rice--savory & sweet, any kind of gỏi, canh|brothy vegetable soups, chạo tôm|shrimp paste on sugar cane, etc. sigh, heaven. who says you can never go home again?
- is it a boy or a girl?
we're not going to find out. there are so few moments of genuine delight & surprise in life. this is going to be one of them. this also means that we don't want a bunch of pink & blue crap. we like colors--primary colors, bright colors, the whole rainbow of colors, black even. pastels are... okay and in moderation. and then there is the ultrasound issue. and yes, Uyên, it's T's decision too. mr. boy scout likes to be impulsive sometimes too. in a planned and defined manner. we have a workplan and a budget.
- do you want a boy or a girl?
we would love either. personally i loved (and hated) having an older brother who looked out for me and would write gruesome death threats to kids who bullied me. he would also torment me, really TORMENT me, endlessly though with personalized insult songs, so it's a tough choice. i also loved having an older sister (mostly). so yeah, really, i loved being the youngest. and you can't really determine that for your first child. so, we leave it up to the goddesses & ancestors to decide. and yeah sposedly T's sperm. like he has any control over that. our midwife who is also a second-degree reiki practitioner says that its a spirit familiar to us and she also told us what gender energy she was getting from the baby's gold-orange aura and my mom with her maternal psychic intuition has a prediction, but we're not telling. flip a coin.
- what are you going to name her/him?
that's for us to know and you to mis-pronounce. just kidding. we haven't decided. it'll be a vinamese name. no surprise there. so if you would like to contribute to our kids' future therapy fund, please send us a check.
- how many kids do you want?
ideally, four. so they can pair up and no one gets left out. however T. says for every pet we have, that's one less child. we already have two cats and i really want two mini donkeys (because any animal deprived of contact with its own species is going to be mal-adjusted, neurotic and co-dependent) so... its still under negotiation. i say, put the donkeys to work. get them to keep our quarter acre yard trim and rent them out to the neighbors for their lawn & kiddie parties. they don't have to be useless pets, they can be revenue generating!
bad cop, no donut!
Rulebreakin' Thai cops are now being punished for their feckless misdemeanor offenses by wearing the pink Hello Kitty armband of shame around their biceps. bad cop!Expect a new Tony Jaa Sanrio-sponsored movie where Tony fights police corruption with Hello Kitty as
his faithful sidekick.
Streetwalker Hello Kitty says "miiiao?"
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
hot damn!
it's the world's hottest chile pepper, the Bhut Jolokia aka the Ghost Pepper. so hot you can see your ancestors. damn, that's hot!how hot is it? weo, the previous Guiness world record holder Habaneros clocked in at 500,000 scovilles. the Bhut Jolokia is over 1,000,000 scovilles!
tastebuds burnin' for a taste? you can get that ugly bad boy at the Chile Pepper Institute, of course!
Monday, July 16, 2007
that's Ms. Reverend to you
i am now a Reverend ordained this day by the Universal Life Church in order to fulfill my pledge to officiate my friend's wedding. let the marriage festivities commence!
of the many titles and epithets i've accumulated over my lifetime, i think i might take this one a little more solemn to its due. though how does one acquire the Goddess title?
of the many titles and epithets i've accumulated over my lifetime, i think i might take this one a little more solemn to its due. though how does one acquire the Goddess title?
Sunday, July 8, 2007
asian women and asian men
while diggin through some of my archives, i came across this angry letter i wrote to Nhà magazine. While they refused to respond or even publish it, i shared it on the VietNam Womens Forum listserv and it was later published in VietWeekly in OC in spring 2004. i had just quit grad school as you could see in my vocabulary, i mean uh, discourse.
Dear Nhà,
Your magazine (www.nhamagazine.com) fills a small and valuable niche for bilingual and monolingual Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans in the
More importantly in terms of content, the author degrades Asian male sexuality by unfavorably comparing their penises to food products and men of other races. The author clearly recognized that this was derogatory as she “refrained from comparing [her non-Asian husband's penis] to a food product”. One would expect that it should be self-explanatory and blatant how disrespectful this article is, however given that it is not so apparent and that we are supposed to find humor in hurtful dehumanization, I shall also give a parallel example of why this is an offensive, degrading and plain wrong. Were Nhà to publish an article comparing Asian women’s genitals to African American or Latina or white women’s genitals and likening their respective vulvas to food products and considering whose genitalia are “better” for sexual pleasure, the outcry would have been immediate; it would have been absolutely unacceptable and easily recognized as being dehumanizing, racist, sexist and misogynist. Shamefully, there is a larger societal double standard operating that an article emasculating Asian male sexuality in the same way would not be held to the same standard, and speaks to an emerging norm where it is acceptable to degrade Asian men where one would not degrade Asian women.
Historically speaking, the racist mainstream American representation of Asians has always been a pernicious tangle of stereotypical racialized and sexualized images—from the cruel bewitching oriental dragon lady, the sexually-available (to white men) geisha to the misogynist Asian pimp and desexualized bucktoothed cross-eyed Asian male coolie. Whereas in the past, Asian communities resented and resisted this racist imagery, in this post-Amy Tan age of representation those self-same images have become to a certain extent acceptable, recuperated, glorified, and even celebrated and commercialized; the dragon lady is no longer a racist & sexist image but becomes a model of the liberated Asian woman (for instance, Lucy Liu’s character in Ally McBeal or the recent NAATA homage to Anna May Wong). What was once malingering representation is now shiny consumer products on the racks of Urban Outfitters and Abercrombie & Fitch. In the tradition of Long Duck Dong from “Sixteen Candles,” the William Hung minstrel show is but the latest re-enactment of the desexualized oriental coolie for the public’s mocking entertainment . And in the oeuvre of Asian American women’s literature, it has become the norm for Asian women writers to enact emasculating images that degrade, desexualize, demonize and dehumanize Asian men. While I am critical of sexism, I do not believe the solution is to degrade men. This does injustice to my beloved Vietnamese grandfathers, fathers, brothers, significant other, nephews, and yes to my future daughters & sons. This doesn't promote us as women and gets us nowhere as a community.
How have our Asian communities (or granted, the middle-class, college-educated, second-plus generation sectors of the Asian communities) come to internalize these racialized and (de)sexualized images as acceptable representations of Asian people?
It behooves us as a community to recognize the larger racialization/stereotyping of Asian men as well as that of Asian women. I would expect a magazine that represents the lifestyle, culture and identity of Vietnamese Americans to have sensitivity to the racialization and sexualization of Asian women and men and to promote positive models of Asian femininity and masculinity (and everything in between).
4 may, 2004
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