July 23, 2008

  • Archiving my past

    Lately, I have been cleaning up my old posts, giving them titles I hadn't before and re-entering them. this might explain why my name may appear at the top of your subscription list even though I had not posted anything new. Sorry to mislead any of you. But as I have been cleaning up my archives, I have come to some conclusions concerning my blogging experience.

    I had been posting a significantly fewer times for quite a while. In the beginning I was totally addicted to blogging. A look at my archives will reveal that I posted no less than 20 times a month for two years from the summer of 2003 except for a couple of months. Some months I even posted more than 30 times. Where did that energy go? Where did the time to blog go? Of course, much of it was just inane shit, writing a review of a movie or filling out lists. Ho-hum.

    As I look back on some of my blogs from around 2005, I notice that the posts had become even more inane than before. I talked about sports and UCLA--my favorite--but in hindsight, it was all very personal and trivial to those who are not interested in college sports. It is too bad, I think. I wish I had focused more on my own past, my own history, to somehow put it together into a coherent personal history. Not that my history has merit or worth in the greater scheme of things, but it perhaps has some relevance to an Asian American in the US, that my life might reflect others or perhaps provide a backdrop of whence we came. I do so hesitantly because I do not speak for an entire generation Japanese Americans, let alone Asian Americans, but I do think that there is a dearth of social history depicting the Asian American experience. Today, many of you are young and vigorously log your niche in life. JAs of my generation did not have the medium of the Internet and blogging at their disposal.

    Now I have written a number of posts about my life already, such as life in J-Town in LA (which has been linked to by a number of Japanese/Asian American sites), the stupid antics of a teenager, and personal accounts like my very first slow dance. But I have sorta gotten away from this. Perhaps I became to self-absorbed in my current life. Maybe I was too busy with grading to be bothered with revealing the more intimate portions of my life--especially since many of my students know about this blog. But then, most of them know these stories as I am a story teller with the bad habit of repeating some stories repeatedly ad nauseam. I had one student who told me that at her house, her father had the same habit so they embarked on the insulting practice of raising their hand every time he started a story they had already hear. I say insulting because that is what this group of students began to do. Ugh.

    Anyway, since I have the time this summer--actually I don't but I will make time--to ponder my past and perhaps present it in a meaningful way, I will write about some of the other things of my past that i have yet to share.

    Stay tuned, if you are so inclined.

Comments (5)

  • Nevertheless evidently your own expressions must be the absolute truth
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  • @EndlesSkye - Sorry. Don't know what happened to your comment. Never got a chance to read it. Must have been the Xanga gremlin.

  • WHAT THE HECK:  I totally left a comment the day you posted this.. like a paragraph long.  EH.

    Well, since I forgot what I wrote then, I guess I'll have to come up with something new....

    ERM.  I'M INCLINED TO STAY TUNED :)

  • It would be nice of you to write from a Japanese American's perspectives about your experiences in the U.S.  My boyfriend's mom is Hawaiian born Japanese but she doesn't speak Japanese and doesn't know much about the Japanese culture. Consequently, my boyfriend doesn't know much about his Japanese side either.  It doesn't help that he doesn't look Japanese either coz many people think he's Hispanic.  Instead of learning Japanese, he learns Spanish.  LOL I'm thinking of dragging him to Tokyo when we go to Manila next year.

  • Where did that energy go? :P This year you almost fell off the face of the xanga-planet!

    I wonder what IS the Asian American experience... It's so hard to define, partially because I have no idea where to start. I just came from reading an entry on the xanga spotlight (thing...?) about growing up with Asian parents. The entry itself only focused on one type of "Asian parent", the one who came directly from the homeland when they were adults. I notice a complete difference in rearing up kids when it comes to my mom and the older aunts to the younger aunts. For instance, my younger aunts, the ones who went to high school and graduated in America, are less traditionally Vietnamese and have assimilated more into American culture. My younger cousins speak only English, have American names (for the most part), get "time outs" instead of a spanking, and can't as readily handle the distinct (but pungent) smell of favorite Vietnamese foods such as fish sauce and duran.

    For the most part, anyway. But now that I think about it, how am I any different? I can't speak Vietnamese fluently (I've said this before but I'll say it again: I speak better Japanese than I do Vietnamese :P ) and its culture is foreign to me even though I identify myself as Vietnamese American on surveys. So then, what does it mean to be Asian American? I think the unifying theme that we all have in common is this dual identity that plays tug of war within us and we each either have to live with the imbalance, or try to harmonize the two identities into one.

    (... I think I rambled a weeeeeee bit too much there. :x I have a knack for going slightly off-topic, apparently.)

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