o
o
o
Thanks to Jan Brewer, we are all Arizona.  The fascist machine that she’s created has been on my mind a lot lately. I am a staunch protester of SB 1070 that took effect on Thursday, but I didn’t expect it to be delivered to my doorstep in the same week, a reminder perhaps of how quickly the essence of this fascist machine can travel and put into practice by those with very narrow minds.

On Monday, I decided to do my laundry early in the evening.   I usually do it late at night, around 9pm, so I don’t have to run into the residents of the building.  To do laundry, I had to go through the front door (one doorman) and the elevator (another doorman) to be taken to the basement.    During the day, the laundry room is full of brown people, all maids of the white people who live in my building.   After a few times of being asked by the brown maids where I worked, I decided to stop going there during the day.   I live in an all-white-resident building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  As the only brown person in my building, I have been mistaken for a delivery boy by newly-hired white doormen (they’re all white), and have not been let into the building until the another doorman confirmed that I lived here.   Once they found out that I actually lived here and had no pizza to deliver, they became extremely gracious, as they should be.   The laundry room is next to the exit of the parking garage.    At 5:45pm, I was happily stocking the washer with my clothes, when a woman, who so resembled Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, suddenly appeared at the door and condescendingly confronted me with, “WHAT APARTMENT ARE YOU IN?”    Shocked, I actually answered her, and she left.  Just like that. 

Thanks to my netbook and wifi, I had access to my Facebook account and managed to post the incident as it happened.   I usually stay in the laundry room until I finish, and spend my time doing some work on my netbook while I wait.   I really should thank countless of you who responded to my public outcry with very supportive statements.   I would find out within that hour that the hapless Jan Brewer of the Upper East Side was actually in a “position of power.”    The doorman who witnessed the incident was just as angry and was more than happy to give me the real name of this woman.   I was thinking, if such were the types to sit at the decision-making table in places like this, it comes as no surprise that there were no doorman-of-color in this building.  

I was very furious that evening.   I still remember her inimical gaze, the kind that rips into your soul.  It was also the second time it happened to me in my building.  I regret not having insulted her back, but what would that accomplish? I realized the reason why I decided to do my laundry late at night was because I really didn’t want to encounter another racial incident and ruin my day.   I have developed coping mechanisms to survive this filthy rich white neighborhood I have lived in for over ten years.    People wonder how I got here or what I’m doing here.   I am obviously not one of these people.   I tell them simply, I have relatives around the block.   Yes, there are Filipinos on the Upper East Side.   Yes, I am one of them.  In fact, I spend so much time walking around here, I am probably a landmark, like the rusty lamp post in the corner. 

Racial Profiling

Let’s talk about racial profiling.   If I were a blond man doing my laundry on Monday, the Jan Brewer of the Upper East Side would think twice before violating me with such a highly-charged question.  She would think twice, thrice, or may not even ask.  She might even ask the doorman who I was first.   She might even think I was cute.   Or I might even take my shirt off for her and flex.   She might even stutter while she asked me.   Or she might just walk past me and assume I was a friend of one of the residents of my building, while muttering to herself, whoa, who was that? Whoa!   Yet no, since I was brown, just like the women who cleaned their houses during the day, she just had to stop and find out where I WORKED.   Yes, she didn’t think I lived here.   She thought I worked here.   She wanted to know my affiliation in the building by the apartment number I gave her.  And now that she knew that I worked for Apartment # _, DANGER was lifted off her shoulder.   Danger meaning, Me.

And such is the nature of racial profiling.

When Mexicans in Arizona are stopped by the police, who according to the real Jan Brewer of Arizona should be given the power to harrass, interrogate, and then arrest, only one assumption is made about them:  these dangerous people don’t belong there.   Because the Jan Brewer’s minions have already been blessed to propagate  “if you’re brown, you must be illegal,”  racial profiling has, to put it simply, institutionalized and systematized.   And if you’re indeed one of the Mexicans who live there (remember, you NEED to look like a Mexican migrant), you need to save yourself the trouble and get out.

Diversity is in the Heart

I love America.   I love the diversity of this country.   I came from quite a homogeneous culture, with slight regional differences.  But we basically resemble each other and ate the same food.    I have lived in New York most of my life now, so any hint of homogeneity has faded in my brain (and tongue).  I thrive in highly diverse environments.   I choose it for work.   I get restless when I work in an all black situation, or all white, or even, like in my last job, all-Filipino (teachers).   When I was in San Francisco recently, I experienced culture shock because I only saw Filipinos for five days.   It is so cliche to call New York the microcosm of the world, but it truly is.   It is such a mesh of culture, that the melting pot has been taken to another level, just like this Mexican restaurant where I was the other night that was run by a family of Palestinians.  Where do you find that?

Today, on the train in Manhattan, I gave directions in Spanish to some tourists who wanted to go to Wall Street.   They probably assumed I was Latino.    Being asked in Spanish by lost Latinos in New York is part of my quotidian existence.    I love the idea that as a Filipino immigrant, I can assume many roles.    Where else can this happen?  In Arizona, I would have to carry an ID every single day, because I would certainly get stopped for looking like a Mexican migrant worker.   I wonder what the police would think if I flashed them my Harvard student ID. 

Jan Brewer is Everywhere

Jan, Jan, Jan.   How holy do you think art thou?   I don’t know what goes through the brains of these people who think they are better than others because of their color.    In the time of Obama, the Jan Brewers of America seem to be coming out of their holes, and making their “holiness” a public spectacle.   In Obama’s blackness, they find a reason to turn their bigotry into a public platform, after all, they “voted” for a black man.   The down economy is their excuse to make accusations against the brown universe, and “post-racial” America is their forum to speak out.  For the Jan Brewers, this is not about race.  It can’t be.  Not with a black president.   In one of my job interviews, the non-profit Jan Brewer just couldn’t resist asking me, Where are you from? while his male counterpart ripped my resume apart and punctuated the ripping with, When did you leave Argentina?  nary a blink (Yes, I studied there, but I am not from there, you racist idiot).   They were both very comfortable with highly directed (and illegal) ethnic questions that had no bearing with the job.  For these types, I make sure I wrote “Filipino” as one of the languages I speak on my resume.   I am not sure Che Guevarra’s relatives spoke that language.    Indeed, I, a brown immigrant man, have many coping mechanisms and am well-equipped to deal with these circumstances, or so I thought.   Unfortunately, the Jan Brewers are quickly multiplying, with new strategies in the blame game.

The Jan Brewers are nervous.   They are afraid the brown people are taking over the country.  They are afraid that Spanish will become the lingua franca.   And all of us will be watching Univision and not CNN, and eat rice and beans.   They are afraid that sitcoms like Friends, Seinfeld, or Sex and the City, all set in New York, will have brown lead characters in it.  And all the hospital shows will have Filipino and Jamaican Nurses.   Ah, they don’t exist.  After all, New York City has no brown people.   None (except in my building.)

America’s face is changing.   Jan Brewer is very afraid.   Because she is very afraid, she needs to make sure that racial profiling becomes the law of the land, so we can send all the Mexicans back where they belong.   (Yes, Texas.)  

As the country diversifies and as racism permeates the brown universe, Jan Brewer will take on new identities.  In the future, the Jan Brewers will no longer be white and blond.  She will be black, latino, or worse, Filipino.  That’s how viruses spread.   We have already seen them, but that is for another blog entry.

Related Reading: Alto Arizona,  Alto Arizona Art Campaign, Wordstrike: Writers Against SB 1070,  New York Times Coverage of SB 1070, Videos of protest against SB1070 from Puente, New with Nezua (interesting mock ICE checkpoint), Vivir Latino Coverage, Racism Review Archive on Mexican Americans,

o
o
o

Click to bookmark or repost

Hide Sites

o
o
o
I am not writing this because I’m a party pooper.  I know how much everybody loves GLEE.    It is, after all, the hottest new show on the planet (i.e. the planet acc. to John Smith).   Well, at least, whenever the show is on, my Facebook is flooded with gleefully GLEE posts.   But perhaps, because it is the hottest show, it is a good time to problematize it a little bit.  You know, just a little.

So the tiny Filipino girl with the vocal chords of ten overweight singing black women is joining GLEE.

Did that sentence bother you a little bit?  No?  Just a little?  Maybe?

It probably raised a hair or two on your arm more than you care to admit.   It’s a kind of racy statement to make.  Emphasis on racy.

Indeed, Charice, the Filipino girl discovered and lionized by Oprah, is joining the next season of GLEE.   And so, to tickle the minds of my facebook friends, I posted:

i’m curious what kind of stereotype is waiting for charice in GLEE–u know after the singing overweight black girl, the flamboyant homo, the lusty latina, the bull dyke coach..what’s left? kung fu no-speak-english asian? chop chop!

The Land of Equal Opportunity?

At first glance, GLEE seems like the dreamboat of the marginalized peoples of good ole USofA.    The cast is as colorful as Carrie’s shoe closet in Sex and the City, and certainly makes Carrie’s foursome  and whitesome a cast of old Puritannica.   I personally have not seen so much diversity out of the closet in one show.   The black girl and the gay guy are best friends.   There’s a Jewish girl and a white jock.   There is this Latina in superminis.    Most of all, they all sing happiness and sorrow on every single episode.   They bring back the 80s for those of us in Madonna nostalgia mode.   What’s there not to like?

Well, let’s take a closer look. 

The young actor who plays the swishy-swishy gay boy said on a TV interview one morning that he always had his legs crossed in GLEE.    Need we ask why?  He didn’t have to say this in public for me to know that his role is a cookie-cutter mold of every flamboyant, effeminate, gay boy in high school.   To accentuate an already obvious stereotype, listen to him speak.   Well, these types of gay boys do exist, and we should honor them.  Indeed!  In fact, during gay pride parades, we honor our drag queens.   It is simply unfortunate that the American media honor them too much and make them the symbol of gay pride.   In America’s tunnel vision, they see what they want to see: stereotypes. 

The gay boy stereotype will also not be so much of a problem, until the other stereotypes come marching in:   now we also have a black girl who is overweight and who sings,  a dumb white jock, a latina girl whose face screams of lust and sex, a “neurotic Jew” (thanks Jeff Y. for this–I didn’t know how to describe her), a butch lesbian coach, and so on.

The Antecedents

Long and long before GLEE, there was the minstrel show.

The Black and White Minstrel Show won the 1961 Golden Rose Of Montreux. The variety series could almost always guarantee an audience of at least 16 million, but frequently managed to top 18 million viewers. At a time when the variety show was a popular television genre for the whole family, The Black And White Minstrel Show established itself as one of the world’s greatest musical programmes on television.  more here.

As we already know, these “minstrels” are not real black folks, but white performers on black face who entertains by creating caricatures of black people in America.   It took a long time for Americans to realize there was something wrong with these shows, that these characters they had conjured in their narrow minds were the byproducts of hate and fear of the other.    It is this deep source of fear where stereotypes come into being.   Their lack of interest, fear of, and need to dominate over black people had created such monstrous public performances that pandered to the same visceral emotions of people who paid and gathered to watch them. 

Performances could be hypnotic; sometimes we leave the theatre afloat in good hormones, we momentarily forget our deep convictions.    The people behind theatre recognize the effect a “good show” can have on their audience.   Political theatre, which we see for months during election year, is based on the premise of messages shrouded with glitter.   The invigorated audience could easily fail to see beyond the superficiality of lights and sounds, because our hearts are so convinced of the fairy tales.   We tell people how wonderful this show is, because we truly don’t see ourselves in the shoes of the characters whose very stereotypical portrayal of people don’t necessarily hurt us, albeit such generalizations impact so many in less than stellar ways.

Maybe to bring back the minstrels is a bit too heavy-handed.   Yet, modern day racism is very subtle.   People no longer have to put on a black face to tell you that they don’t like you.   Those days are gone.   And because the subtlety is perhaps more powerful, we ought to give it much more thought, and therefore, concern.  Let’s not be too quick to be entertained.  In these days of quick bytes and short attention spans, the media can get away with almost anything. 

Defying Stereotypes 101

We generalize about people whenever our imagination and initiative fail us.    Our lazy bones tell us that people hold certain immutable characteristics because that is just the way life is.   Asians can’t drive.   Blacks are listless.   Latinos are well, just ask Arizonans.    And of course there is the lack of geographical knowledge; go to the Philippines and you know Asians do fly on the streets. 

And Charice, the Filipina girl will soon join the cast.   What awaits this young girl is anybody’s guess.  But how about a stereotype-defying role?   There is a rumor that she is playing a foreign exchange student.  How about a student from, say, Germany?   How about her parents are stationed in the military base there?   How about she’s a daughter of a famous Chinese actress, and as dumb as the dumbest Asian you’d love to meet (for a change)?  How about she’s not even Asian?   Her name is really Candace O’Brien.   

How about remove the epidermis of how we view people of color in the United States, and do a little work of uncovering the many complex layers of personalities and characters (normal ones!) that live and thrive in our worlds, and find some REAL characters who don’t tickle the stereotypical fantasies of John Smith? Stereotypes are stereotypes; unlike wine, they don’t improve with time.

I congratulate GLEE for attempting diversity en masse. But hey, in 2010, aren’t we beyond Kung Fu Asians, queeny gay boys, and tormented Jews? Can we finally see America?

Related Reading:  Black Face Mistrelsy, NPR the Legacy of Black Face, Charice Joins Glee,

o
o
o

Click to bookmark or repost

Hide Sites

o
o
o
Once upon a time in America, factories were the bedrock of industrialization.   During World War 2, the women who worked in military-bound steel factories revolutionalized how we viewed workforce and women.   America, since then, has never been the same. 

Fast forward fifty years, this country is still teeming with factories and factory workers.   They are no longer the same people that precipitated the industrial revolution.  Many of them are immigrants, legal or otherwise, from other countries who have no choice but to work in these “sweatshops” because of their lack of language skills and work experience.

When we first came to this country, my mother also worked in a factory, a carpet factory, an experience that would prove to be short-lived as my warrior-mother had no tolerance for oppressive cultures.   She eventually found a way out.   However, many women, for various reasons, don’t ever get out of these work situations.   The whole debate about immigration also touches on the kind of jobs that immigrants take and allegedly native-born Americans don’t want.   Many of my students over the years also work in such factories.   It seems that in America today, if you are an unskilled immigrant and lacks language proficiency, factory work will be part of your American rite of passage.

The Sweatshop Teacher

For almost ten years of my working life, I spent my Sundays in Brooklyn Chinatown, teaching Survival English to sweatshop workers. I was invited to teach by a co-worker and good friend who also once worked in the sweatshops. At the time, I had only organized in immigrant communities and did not really have any experience teaching.   But I thought I’d give it a shot. 

Through my human rights work, I was familiar with the oppressive environments that poor people experienced in the otherwise very wealthy city of New York.  Human Rights organizing, after all, was my full time job, one which extended outside my paid hours.   It was the nineties, and activism was at its height in New York City, a possible byproduct of the Reagan years.   For me, it was a decade of self-expression and exploration, as I was searching for a place in the world, and was finding my new America to be full of contradictions.   It was also around the same time when I met a very close and small network of writer friends who were very concerned about the position of Asian American literature in the larger American literary space.    So to speak, my plate was full, but still, I woke up early on Sundays to travel by the N train to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, which on weekends, was a test on patience.

Brooklyn Chinatown is the younger sister of the notorious Manhattan Chinatown by lightyears.  At the time, the Chinatown in Brooklyn seemed like one big secret; nobody knew it was there except the Chinese community that lived around it.   The teachers and students would gather in a public high school.    I didn’t attend a U.S. high school, much less a public one; suffice to say, it was an eye-opener for me.    All my students were Chinese, mostly mothers.   Sometimes they would come with their children, especially on registration day.    As it turned out, the children were the cultural translators, a big responsibility for young people. 

Our goal was to equip these sweatshop workers with enough work-related English so that they could advocate for themselves in their sweatshops.    Although I began this blog with an image of the American factory during World War 2, I invite you to reconsider that romantic image and replace it with more harrowing ones, for such was the reality of sweatshop life in New York City.    No Rosie the Riveter in Chinatown.  The hours were often very long.   They got paid by piece, as opposed to by hour.  That means if their job was to put holes on buttons, they got paid per button.  In fact, if you asked them what kind of job they had, they would tell you very specific parts of a piece of clothing: the hem, the buttons, the sleeves, etc.    Nevertheless, my classroom was always full of students.  They got early on Sunday even if they had worked the day before and went to class to learn English.

It was my introduction to a career that I have held since:  Adult Literacy Education (ALE).    English was urgent.  What they learned in class on Sunday proved to be useful for Monday.   Sometimes, they would bring forms to class, government forms, so that we could look at them and study the words.   They asked me questions about the forms that their own children couldn’t translate.   I was deeply moved by what these children have to do for their sweatshop mothers.   I couldn’t understand how anyone that age could translate a legal document, but I knew there was no other choice.

The Children of the Sweatshop Workers

There were many things that their limited English proficiency couldn’t not bridge.    These were the ones I was most curious about.  I wanted to know exactly what happened at home, or during the week that I didn’t see them.   Who were taking care of the kids, how were they doing in school?  Although I grew up in a rather similar situation in Manila, my family always had a host of extended family members who were always there.   I never really felt alone.   And I also attended a private Catholic school that made sure I wasn’t alone.    For these children of Chinatown, it would have been a totally different experience.

Sometimes my students wouldn’t show up in class.   When they came the Sunday after, they would tell me where they had been:  “Go to Con-necticah,” or “Go to Mas-sachuseh.”   They would take the Chinatown buses to these places, and they would do this on a regular basis.   At the time, my naivete made me wonder why anyone would travel that far to play Mahjong. 

At the end of the year, the program would have a holiday party for everyone.   It was a highly elaborate gathering of Chinese foodfest and performances that included the whole family, especially the children.   Some of them were college age and would come wearing their respective school sweatshirts.   It finally dawned on me why the mothers were going to Connecticut and Massachusetts.   They were visiting their kids at MIT, Harvard, and Yale.    It would have been so easy to just tell me “My kid goes to Harvard” like any proud parent would, but perhaps they didn’t completely grasp the value of such a brand. 

The American Dream

A week ago, I had a pleasure of introducing a writer I have known for ten years at the Asian American Writers Workshop.   She came back to New York City from Amsterdam for a book tour of her mega-first novel, Girl in Translation.   I met her when I published her work in my anthology, The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City, a book that marked the 100 year presence of Asians in NYC.    What I didn’t know about Jean Kwok, the author, was that her mother was a sweatshop worker and she herself spent many years in one.   Of course, that Jean went to Harvard was no longer a big surprise, or the fact that she has written a book about the experience.

When Jean presented her wonderful book to a youngish audience at the workshop, my disparate worlds of activism, teaching, and literature merged into a full circle.    My friends and I organized the Asian American Writers Workshop around the same time that I was teaching at the sweatshops.  To hear Jean’s side of the story brought me back many years.  Finally, here was a book that I would have loved to have read with my students in Chinatown.   I remember using the text for Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, because it was the only Chinese American book that dealt with authentic Chinese American experience that didn’t happen in a beauty parlor (e.g. The Joy Luck Club).   But even Bone was not reflective enough of the Chinatown experience.  

When Jean Kwok signed my copy of her novel, Girl in Translation, she unknowingly gave me the key to a world that for so many years I had longed to know more about.    Those were determining years of my young life, when I, an immigrant myself,  came face to face with a world that literally changed the direction of my working life. The dreams of those Chinatown mothers became mine.

Related Reading:  Jean Kwok’s book, Brooklyn Chinatown, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Rosie the Riveter, Women in War Jobs – Rosie the Riveter (Ad Council), Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), Angry Asian Man Blog,

o
o
o

Click to bookmark or repost

Hide Sites

o
o
o
When I came to this country, I was an uber-naive teenager who had never worked in his life. I had graduated from high school in Manila and suddenly found myself in Jersey City with my whole family for the first time in so many years, with one family-assigned goal: to find a job.

The Philippines has a shorter educational system than the U.S., so many of us finish high school relatively young. In my class alone, the youngest was fifteen. Most of us had never worked, and wouldn’t have to think about it until college, or after college, if there was work, that is. In my case, I had to leave the country. And life, the new American life, would change just about everything.

After many jobhunting tryouts (one of which was with my own mother, at MacDonalds), I found a job on Wall Street, now the center of a global recession blame game. The woman who interviewed me, Martha, was the Manager, who told me months later that I reminder her of her son. In short, I charmed her, this white woman who thought I looked like her son. If you were an FOB (fresh off the boat), you wouldn’t pay too much attention to such flattery. First of all, you would be paycheck-focused. Nothing else mattered, not what Martha said, nor what her son looked like. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be working for Martha, but for her boss, a golden aged virago with a voice that could rattle a dormant earthquake fault. Let’s call her Cruella de Ville, 80s version, this way I wouldn’t have to describe her, because in fact, she looked very much like that cartoon, minus the dogs and the black and white color theme (or you can also age Merryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada and get a good image of this woman).

We had our own building on Wall Street. It was a seven-story building with a garden on the rooftop that was being kept by Cruella’s scantily-clad young gardeners (yup, I noticed). My desk was at the center of the floor, directly overlooking Cruella’s big oriental-inspired office, and was surrounded by glass windowed clerical offices.  My morning task was to open Cruella’s mail, sort them, and hand her the ones with checks. I was being trained by two women, one black and one white. I would find out later, in my complete naivete about ethnicity, that this “white woman” was Colombian. I only knew of Colombia from watching Miss Universe for years. I had no idea how they really looked like. But our Miss Colombia never admitted to being Colombian. In fact, her last name was Garcia, which she spuriously pronounced as “Gar-sha.” It was the eighties, and her Garsha hair was as high as a hairsprayed mane could get. She grew up on Long Island, the land of self-denial, if you get the drift. The other woman was black, a very dark skinned one at that. She was pregnant and was about to be promoted to the first floor. In that building, the first floor was the penthouse. That was where all the white men were. That was where the “computers” were. Those were the last years of electric typewriters, but we still had them. In fact, on my floor, there was a whole room of typists, and across from them, proofreaders. I, a self-taught 70 wpm Executive Assistant, sat at a desk in the middle of it all.

My first few weeks were calm. I was given a tour of the whole building from the ground up. I was, after all, the assistant of the Vice President, an itinerant gofer on leather shoes. The first floor was reserved for executive positions, mostly white men, and their colored minions (one of whom was the newly promoted black woman). That floor was always closed. Always. Like some big secret ritual was happening there . The third floor was the lunch room, with a small wall-attached TV that played daily soap operas. All the women would go to lunch at exactly the time when their favorite soap was on. They would eat their ethnic food and completely immerse themselves in the lives of the characters on the 17 inch TV.  They would have conversations about them as if they were cousins or neighbors.  The fourth floor was Accounting, home to a Filipino family. I was on the Fifth with Cruella and her clerks. The Sixth was an underrenovated floor that housed three people, two of whom were overweight. There was one restroom on that floor. One lazy afternoon, after Cruella kept calling that floor and nobody would answer, she sent me upstairs to investigate. I found the two obese white employees coming out of a tryst, the restroom, at the same time (the male, zipping his fly), with one message for me, Don’t say anything to anyone. I never did, until now.

Compared to the towering architecture around us, we were a miniature. But it was always mesmerizing to watch the rest of Wall Street from our cafeteria window. I had not know then how different we were from the rest of Wall Street. I had no concept of immigration, race, or ethnicity. I had no idea that all the ethnics coming out of the train would all end up in my building.

And this made this Wall Street firm most interesting, at least in retrospect; most of the employees were immigrants. The countries: Philippines, India, Guyana, Bermuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Nigeria, and the Republic of the Bronx. For them, I was just one of them. For me, it was all strange; and I was in it for the experience. I had nothing to compare it with. I had no idea what the next day would bring. And of course, there was always the clueless Long Island hairspray girl named Garsha.

Garsha’s dream was to work on the first floor. She would come to work wearing a tightfitting dress that accentuated her breasts and her butt. She was about to get married and replace her Garsha last name with an Italian one, which profoundly excited her. Her hair would reach the ceiling. She was a goodlooking woman unwittingly diminished by her ethnic self-denial. She would do anything to get through the day, including hiding checks in the drawers that she couldn’t finish processing. Those checks were commercial paper and Treasury Bills checks. For the life of me, I had no idea what they were for. All I knew they were supposed to be handed to Cruella. What did I know? It was my first job. I didn’t even know Almond Joy was a chocolate bar. I would find that out after another secretary asked me to get her one, and my pride precluded me from inquiring deeper. I came back with my cup of coffee and a question: What is Almond Joy? Of course, after being called “stupid,” I had my first exposure to the world of obesity and American snacks. 

Garsha would soon find herself in big trouble. Cruella knew the ins and outs of the building, of desks, and of every nook and cranny of her office and everyone else’s around her. One day, she threw a fit upon discovering Garsha’s secret treasures: weeks-old Treasury Bills and Commercial Paper (I suspect that she went through people’s desks when everybody was gone).  I had never seen a white woman so angry in my life. I had never known facial wrinkles could get more, er, wrinkled.    She called Garsha and me to the office and started screaming at both of us. The veins, oh the turgid veins on her dear neck.  I thought they would explode on my new Bloomingdale’s outfit. Garsha parried the accusations by kicking my leg, trying to keep my mouth shut. So I did (I was already humanitarian). Yet, there was one person who knew the truth: Martha. Remember Martha? She was the one who thought I looked like her son.

Oh the solicitous Martha, with a Spanish last name, I remember now. In a closed meeting, the woman defended me and ransacked the poor career out of Garsha. But you see, during the time, I was already applying to go to college. Not that I didn’t care, but since I didn’t have any other work experience to compare it with, I was going with the flow, a constant flow of screaming, irascible, and high blood pressure-bound Cruella. I don’t remember what happened to Garsha after that, but I do know that soon after, I had my own assistant.

Every now and then, we would get a visit from the newly-promoted secretary from the first floor. She spat when she talked. You would rather not look at her. She and her husband went to the Carribean for a vacation, and she flaunted her tan afterwards. The typists had a ball on her, because according to them, she was too dark to even think she could get a tan (these were black people making fun of her). It was my first year in America, and my first exposure to race. I didn’t even know when to laugh, or why I should laugh at these jokes. All I cared about was what I wore to work.

I thought about this today, because a friend from that era has recently emailed me. She found me on the Internet. She is Filipino, too, and perhaps the first one I have met in this country. She is a victim of the recession, which we know now had its roots on Wall Street.  Because of the Filipino family who worked in accounting, we outnumbered the other ethnics in that company. I often wondered why.   When Martha’s son visited, she introduced him to me. It was only then that I realized that her Spanish last name was Filipin0. Her son didn’t look like her at all, and most likely took after her estranged Filipino husband. And no, for the grace of god, he didn’t look like me either.

Wall Street taught me many things about life in this country. I think now that it must have profoundly affected me that I had continued to work with immigrants since. What I learned from being there a year was not about Commercial Paper or Treasury Bills or CDs or Investments, but the daily struggles of the people who make the system work. Unfortunately, many of them recruited into this system were not being made aware of the internal mechanics of such system. Months after I left, I found out from my informant that the Securities and Exchange Commission had come in and shut down the firm. Stories flew about the company not having enough assets and how the president was physically dragged out of the building. Who would have known? They were all perfunctory paper shufflers, more worried about spell checks and typing errors than obviating the arrival of the Feds over liquid assets.  Most of all, they were all immigrants.  I wonder about the hiring now, whether it was purposeful.  Was there an assumption about immigrant workers, their loyalty, their naivete, or their ability to feign indifference inorder to keep a much needed cash flow?   The ones who might have known the real goings-on were behind closed door on the first floor.  We didn’t even know their names; we hardly saw them.   But at the time, it was all behind me.  I was about to embark on a new world–college–and nothing else mattered but what was ahead.  There was much to look forward to in my teenage years, including among other things, getting a whole collection of this new hot artist named Madonna.

Related Reading:  Don’t Cry for Wall Street, Awake, Wall Street, With SEC charges, Goldman Sachs’s reputation is tarnished, You’re Welcome, Wall Street, Wall Street: Is It Good to Apologize for Greed?, No More Deceit: Strictly Regulate Wall Street, Financial Reform at a Crossroads,

o
o
o

Click to bookmark or repost

Hide Sites

o
o
o
I first heard of the “Browning of America” when it became Time Magazine’s cover story twenty years ago.   That was two census seasons ago.   In my intercultural communications class in college, we used terms like “melting pot” or “salad bowl” to describe this country’s cultural diversity, and to distinguish the difference between cultural assimilation and “separate but equal.”   This was before “multiculturalism” or “political correctness” joined the American vernacular.   

As an immigrant, I’m very chary of labels.  I have assimilated up to a certain point.   I don’t agree that becoming American means erasing one’s ethnic identity.  Unlike the previous generations of Euro-immigrants, I ‘m brown as burnt rice.  I’m lactose-intolerant, non-cheese eater. There’s no mistaking my Asian origins.   Right now, the number of people who look like me are still largely insignificant.  But in the future, about 40+ years, as mentioned in the article, the face of America will look like this:

By 2056, when someone born today will be 66 years old, the “average” U.S. resident, as defined by Census statistics, will trace his or her descent to Africa, Asia, the Hispanic world, the Pacific Islands, Arabia — almost anywhere but white Europe. (More here from Time Magazine).

Changes are said to begin this year.   According to the Associated Press, “minority” babies will outnumber “majority” babies in 2010 (read here).   In simple speak, children-of-color will outnumber white children this year.  What Time Magazine didn’t predict are the socio-cultural and economic changes sweeping the country right now:  the recent collapse of Wall Street, a recession worse than the Great Depression, and the election of America’s first President-of-color.   That’s enough to shake the grounds of Puritan America.  How will the current economic downturn impact the demographic changes in the future?

Truth Is

Good times always find a way of masking true innate feelings.  Economic prosperity turns a country with deep intercultural issues into a superficial festival of nations.  What’s there to be angry about?  We are all eating.  Shopping.   Then one day, the bottom lid falls out.   

The truth always shows its face when things are very, very wrong.    30 million people are unemployed.   People are losing their homes.  Xenophobia is reborn, and hate is its language.  People of similar origins band together.  Media gives way to propagandists.   All of this hate–mostly directed at people who are “different”– finds its way in good ole time American organizing.  And the Tea Party , overwhelmingly white male conservative, marches  through Washington (see picture).

What we are seeing in the U.S.  is the proliferation of blame in American language.   President Obama’s skin color has made his attempt for a united government impossible as his assumed alliances become a rallying cry for conservatives.   He has been called a “socialist” and a “Muslim,” words given negative connotations as America searches for blame.  With 40 million Americans living in poverty, there is every reason to be angry.   There are 5 million baby boomers who are currently unemployed.  The competition for jobs is stiff.   At this level, we sometimes forget our neighbors.  We especially forget our neighbors who don’t look like us.

Eurocentrism

The Nazis rose to power during a major economic crisis in Germany, the darkest time in recorded history.  However, given a mountain of evidence, some German communities are still in denial about concentration camps in their own towns.   Sadly, they all have benefitted from Hitler’s psychosis.   Because of short term memory, Europe once again is switching on its denial mode as it becomes a right-wing, anti-immigrant continent  (story here from NPR).  Never mind its long history of colonization of the brown world.  Never mind the death of millions of Jews.   Never mind that World War 2 was only 60 years ago.  The search for blame and hate rages on, taking on a new form:

Targeting Muslims is a common denominator that now unifies a great proportion of European political elites and media. The reasons are numerous and obvious. Some European countries are at war (which they have chosen) in various Muslim countries; desperate and failed politicians are in need for constant distractions from their own failures and mishaps; associating Islam with terrorism is more than an acceptable intellectual diatribe, a topic of discussion that has occupied more radio and television airtime than any other; also, pushing Muslims around seems to have few political repercussions – unlike the subjugation of targeting of other groups with political or economic clout.  (more here).

Eerily, what is happening in Europe parallels the rising levels of intolerance in the U.S.   Americans should know better.  The European continent does not have the immigration history of this country.   America is built on the backs of immigrants.   Also, Europe will probably not see the level of demographic changes that will sweep the U.S. in the next decades.   Yet, xenophobia is the staple of colonial histories.  America, after all, still traces much of its ancestry to Europe.   We have truly just begun dealing publicly with issues of race and equality.   What does this mean for the future?  Will changes in American demography mean a positive shift in the act of tolerance?  Or is xenophobia so deeply rooted in American culture that people-of-color will simply give it a new spin.

Case in point: Over easter lunch, my mother and I went to a Vietnamese restaurant in Jersey City (very POC, mind you).  A group of teenage Latinos walked in and took the table behind us.   A few were looking for “chicken wings,” and “beef and broccolli” from the menu.   After making very loud, ignorant, and biased comments about the names of food on the menu, they walked out.  

Blacks in America

While I probably won’t be around to witness the reversal of minority/majority in America, I will be here long enough to see it gradually happen.   Already, the election of the first black president has made many people resort to old anti-black sentiments as a way of public expression.   What once was private dinner conversation is now out in the open.  Interestingly enough, in my job interviews, I have been asked about my ethnic background, as if it has any bearing with the job.   As a former Human Rights Commission employee, I know that it is a red flag for discriminatory practices.    I must admit feeling extremely uncomfortable after being asked the “Where are you from?” question, but I went ahead with the interview feigning a smile.   Of course, as expected, I never heard from those people again.   What’s there to do if you’re a person of color looking for job in this economy?  Identity-erasure? Is the strategy of this unemployed black man necessary?

But after graduating from business school last year and not having much success garnering interviews, he decided to retool his résumé, scrubbing it of any details that might tip off his skin color. His membership, for instance, in the African-American business students association? Deleted. (More here from the NYTimes)

I don’t think so.  Should it surprise us that the unemployment rate among blacks is twice as much as whites? 

The Spirit Level

If the trend of intolerance continues in America, are we heading toward a system of Apartheid, where the majority is forcibly led by an oppressive  minority group?  Right now, the U.S.  has more inequality of income than any country in the world.  It also has more people (mostly Black men) in its penal system than any other country in the world.  

A new book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, offers a ray of hope.   First it tell us about us, as mentioned in a review of the book in The Guardian:

America is one of the world’s richest nations, with among the highest figures for income per person, but has the lowest longevity of the developed nations, and a level of violence – murder, in particular – that is off the scale. Of all crimes, those involving violence are most closely related to high levels of inequality – within a country, within states and even within cities. For some, mainly young, men with no economic or educational route to achieving the high status and earnings required for full citizenship, the experience of daily life at the bottom of a steep social hierarchy is enraging. (More here from The Guardian).

Then, it goes on to analyze why the more equal a society, the healthier it is.  And in contrast, the more unequal, the more problems it has.   

Lessons for the Future

This downturn economy is teaching us much about ourselves, our level of tolerance, our history of racism.   It is not only a lesson for the white majority with a long tradition of imperialism and racism, but also for people of color who submit to such racist traditions.   As America diversifies, the face of the oppressor changes as well.   We all have bias in our blood. We all have a long tradition of protecting our own tribes.   But we are also more aware and more educated than our ancestors.   We understand diversity more.  We know what democracy can bring each of us.  

As these babies of 2010 grow up, what can we teach them about America of old and new?   How do we pass on the message that the fundamental richness of this country is its ability to live in harmony despite the differences that could potentially divide?

Related Reading:  In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap, The Rage Is Not About Health Care, Whose Country Is It?, Institutional Racism in Employment and Unemployment, Again, The Spirit Level, Poll: Tea Party overwhelmingly white, male and conservative, In the Face of Racism, Distress Depends on One’s Coping Method.

o
o
o

Click to bookmark or repost

Hide Sites

o
So I hope I am not too late for the train. I just saw the movie “Avatar” yesterday. I swear I tried to keep an open-mind. During the Oscars night, there was a flurry of commentaries and posts on Facebook about the Hollywood formula and the continuing saga of “othering” in these narratives. Nonetheless, I pinched myself several times to make sure I didn’t mask with bias my attempt at openness and willingness to watch this movie. Even that didn’t work.

For Starters, Calling Hollywood Savages

Hollywood has a long history of what I would call the “savage genre.” Of this, King Kong is most famous. For decades, natives of other countries (and planets) were angry, grass-skirted, bone-ornamented, barefooted tribes who just had to be whipped into modern consciousness. Goodbye, tree worshippers. Hello, western capitalism.  And then, they were put on public display, in cages. 

Gone are the days of Hollywood’s manifest destiny. What we see in movies now is Hollywood with guilt.   From Pocahontas to Dances With Wolves to Avatar, the “savages” seem to be winning over the colonizers.   After decades of being portrayed as brainless, chaotic cannibals deserving of a tent at the World Fair, we slowly find out that these savages actually have some form of organization and an unfathomable connection to nature.  We also find out that they’re welcoming and nonviolent, that they’d be happy to break bread with a lost colonist and call him “Dances with Wolves.”   They’re also more than willing to share all their secrets to a “dream walker” named, ah, Jake, who goes unconscious once unplugged.   Nary a sense of suspicion of these infiltrators-turned- indigenous, the natives were more than happy to share their secrets (after all, being secret-friendly is the savage way), all their secrets at that, I mean, all. Their God Eywa even communicates with the impostor, in the tradition of Eywa-knows-best (Was she sharing her secrets too?).   Then one day, the natives get attacked.  Suddenly, everything is Hollywood-familiar: we see the same old savages of the King Kong days, a bunch of tribes fleeing from a burning tree with asses on fire.

They Can’t Save Their Gluteus Maxes

And so the story continues.  We find out that our dear savages can’t save their asses.   Infiltrator-turned-indigenous had to find a way to save them, because he had fallen in love with the leader’s daughter, our extraterrestrial Pocahontas who couldn’t find a good mate in her tribe, she had to go for someone that had to be plugged into an electric outlet. 

What are we learning from the highest grossing movie of all time?  

I am not sure what Writer and Director Cameron was thinking.  I can only assume that he was exonerating himself from the sins of his fathers.   He might have wanted a “more accurate” portrayal of native peoples.   He might want to show a planet with subconscious connections between land and people.   Also, he might have wanted to exagerrate the invading Americans by painting their characters with Blackwater ideologues of recent Iraq War memory.  However, his hero complex just couldn’t imagine the possibility of Pandora natives defending themselves.  Cameron’s message is clear, given all the exotic touches and beauty of native life and their complex ecology, they are too dumb to know that they are about to be invaded and have their asses set on fire.  

They need a hero.  Let’s see: Christopher Columbus, John Smith, Ferdinand Magellan, Fernando Cortes, um, ah, Jake.

Learn from Lapu-Lapu

In the Philippines, we have Lapu-Lapu.   He’s a warrior, after whom a fish was named.   He should have been the national hero of the country, because he would have given Filipinos a value to behold.  Every native country or planet needs a Lapu-Lapu.   If you don’t know who that is, well, he beheaded Ferdinand Magellan.  He belongs to a select group of warriors who stood up for themselves and their people.    Yet, his narrative is not known to many.  In his place, Magellan rises as the heroic figure.   Nobody ever mentions Magellan was beheaded; his true heroism was circumnavigating the world, as evidenced by the endeless references to his name.  True to point, while Magellan is the name of a strait, of countless avenues, and of proud Spanish last names, Lapu-Lapu’s claim to fame is a tasty fish in local Philippine markets (see picture). Is this what happens when you defend your turf? And oh, I don’t know of one Filipino named Lapu-Lapu. Guess who the late dictator Marcos was named after?

The World According to Avatar James Cameron

In his world of profiteering and invasions, there is always a price to pay.   The price is the betrayal by one’s own.   In Avatar, Jake had an epiphany and had to choose between a life on a wheelchair and a joyride on a pterodactyl.    He turned on his own people and saved the world of the natives. 

According to Cameron, natives can’t save themselves.   They are peace loving blue people whose heads are so deep in the roots of the land, they couldn’t process why there were foreign creatures on their planet.   They have a god named Eywa who had to call on animals to save Pandora, because it’s own humanoid inhabitants were too high on peace and kumbaya.  

According to Cameron, if there was no such a thing as betrayal, the blue people of Pandora would all have been deep-fried brown Lapu Lapu fish.  For people like myself, who have come from countries that have yet to recover from the deep roots of colonization,  it is message worth reinvestigating.   Beyond the glamor of new technology, the narrative content demonstrates the need of dominating cultures to regurgitate their power through this global Hollywood medium.  The movie itself, just like a BigMac, is mesmerizingly satiating, until one day we are all too fat with propaganda, we can no longer get up.

Related Reading: Dances With Aliens: James Cameron’s Avatar Movie and White “Saviors” (Updated), Avatar and Whiteness, A whole lot of Avatar and whiteness,
o
o
o

Click to bookmark or repost

Hide Sites

o

A couple of days ago, I visited a school in the Bronx to talk about poetry to high school students who were majoring (!) in Creative Writing.   My visit was organized by a literary organization in New York City that brings poets and writers to schools.   My assignment was to offer a perspective on “political poetry.”  I had been pondering about politics long before I was given such assignment, thoughts triggered by the current state of health care reform in Washington, DC.   On facebook, I had also been posting on how we, as citizens, might influence congress on their decisions on this national issue, amid concurrent postings by other Fbers on less salient issues.   I have no health insurance.  I understand exactly what the health reform means to millions of Americans.

Political Person vs.  Political Poet

The latter makes me cringe.  The idea that anyone who reads my work would call me a political poet makes me wonder about the common denominator about these two identities–politics.   I have no qualms professing the former, Political Person.   Since my apolitical and naive college years, I have grown to be very engaged in things . . . of political nature.   I have made a working life out of fighting for social justice.  I have spent many breakfast mornings exercising my brain with online political commentaries.   My role models in life are totally immersed in social change.   Even the writers I adore–say, Jose Saramago–are very politically charged, not only on the literary page, but also, in real life.  I am a political person and there’s no debating that fact.  Label me, as you may, it’s the truth.

The discomfort I have about being called a political poet is the word, poet.

If there is a type of poetry that most poets, much less non-poets, don’t understand, it is political poetry.   I also know so many poets who would never enter the doors of political poetry, because the thought of politics is in essence, a dungeon of unknown prospects.   It is as if one needs to be equipped with a lighter, a white dove, fig leaves, or other symbolistic objects in order to produce a literary work remotely resembling social justice on paper.  There is also the tendency to write poetry that resembles a copy for a human rights propaganda or protest banners.   Worse, the disaster poetry in which some poets engage when a part of the world falls apart (think: Iraq War, Katrina, 9-11, Tsunami).   I don’t condemn such collectives. I question the intention behind them (and the sentimentality), especially when apolitical poets take advantage of these occasional environments of disasters for literary production and professional exposure.   I have not once contributed to such sad commentaries on the poetic life.   The most political anthology I am in, Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems for Human Rights, was a solicitation.   I was quite proud to be in those pages, albeit among dead people.  But I don’t seek them out.   When I get invited to these so called political anthologies, I think twice, thrice, and most often, ignore.

Political People

Many of my friends, not all  poets, mind you, are very political.   I have worked in many environments that attract think-alikes.  We don’t always agree on political view points, but we can agree on having very strong personal opinions.   I even know some folks who don’t call themselves political, but have buttons once pressed, liberate the most political soundbytes you would ever hear from these unsuspecting types.  My mother is one of them.   Don’t get her started.   She watches CNN every day.   She knows the pulse of the nation.

So Politics, Politics

I do have these secret wishes.  Let’s begin:  I hope that people won’t be ashamed to declare war against social injustice publicly, the way they post on facebook party pictures, NFL commentary, favorite movies, last night’s dinner, this morning’s breakfast, private illnesses not so private anymore, cryptic hate posts, and other fascinating tantrums suddenly made interesting because half your friends are experiencing the same (the full moon?).   I just really wish that everyone I know would call their congresswo/man and get Washington politics working like it should.   Yes, enough partisan politics.  Say No to the Tea Party.  And please pass Health Care Reform so living artists can work full time as artists and not endanger their full time MFA jobs by writing, um, political poetry. 

How many times can a man turn his head pretending that he just doesn’t see? The answer my friend is blowin in the wind. The answer is blowin in the wind.

Related Reading:  10 Actions You Can Take to Achieve Health Care Reform, NAACP 880 Campaign for Health Care Reform,

o

o

o

Click to bookmark or repost

Hide Sites

o
I found the following in my previous website. It was how I introduced the reviews for my first book. After reading it again, I had a series of thoughts about the state of American writing, and the intersection of race and culture in the arts.

Following are reviews of the book in the U.S. and the Philippines. In reading them, please observe the almost staggerring differences between reviews from the two countries. It is not surprising that reviews in the Philippines contextualized the novel and placed it within a Filipino historical and literary framework; the reviews in the United States couldn’t seem to remove it from a catalogue of Asian American writing or some kind of ethnic potluck, within which many of us Filipino writers are unfortunately categorized. What becomes of a book (or anything) once removed from its original context? But then, only in the Philippines–the country of origin–can we create a historical and literary consciousness around Filipino and Filipino American writing. In the U.S., we will always be compared to precedent ethnic writers or worse, dead “white” American writers, completely ignoring the centennial of Philippine literature in English. I think there exist a possibility of a more thorough reading of Filipino text in the United States, if only one would devote enough time and effort to study the context from which it is written. In fact, a few Filipino American writers have taken on reviewing works of their own, breathing into such literary texts a living and profound historical insight without sounding esoteric (e.g. My reviewer for San Francisco Chronicle is in fact, Filipino-American).

My perspective on publishing has not changed in the past fifteen years.    After watching the Oscars last night, and noticing that the only Asians on TV were unknown faces next to male entertainment moguls, I felt that Asian-Americans have a long way to go.  When my friends and I started the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in 1991, we were addressing the dearth of Asian-Am writing in American publishing (you know, to tell our story, the way we wanted).  True, the numbers of published Asian Ams probably nearly doubled in almost two decades, but all of that came crashing down with the downsizing of publishing houses.   However, it is important to note that for Filipino-American writers in mainstream presses, there has been very little movement.   While literature languish in the backrooms of publishing houses, celebrity books seem to be taking an all time high.   Sometimes I ask, do we really need to read a book about the pilot who landed his plane on the Hudson River?   Is that moment, understandably phenomenal, worth expanding into 200 pages?   Well, according to HarperCollins, yes.  In fact, said pilot was offered a book deal worth $3 Million dollars. That’s enough to publish 50 literary writers in the U.S. But a choice between a future Pulitzer winning author and one of the decadent Real Housewives of New York, who do you think gets to bite the dough?

So what do ethnic writers in America get to settle with? If Oscars Night was any indication, the answer perhaps is to mask one’s ethnic identity, or write  for the demographic majority. Here’s a scenario:  forget you’re Asian, write a story about a football jock named Garth. Maybe he had an Asian girlfriend (there’s your guilt). The story is really about how he befriended a football player from a black neighborhood. There you go. It has that feel-good interracial flavor. Make sure though that Garth gets 95 percent attention in the book. Would Hollywood consider it as a possible project for Matt Damon? Perhaps.  And Lucy Liu.

Funny, last night, I was thinking, maybe I should write a screenplay. After all, I had my beginnings in playwriting in grade school and high school. I suddenly stopped myself with a thought: “but you really believe in writing the story of your people.”  I think Hollywood is still at the very early stages of representation of ethnic America.   The industry has yet to fully include blacks, much less the rest of us.  

On a positive note, because we do need to sleep at night with good vibes, things will change. There are the ingredients to success: perseverance, persistence, resilience. There are the cultural movements. There are the constantly shifting waves in American politics. But more than anything, there is the changing demographics in the United States. In the future, more and more ethnic Americans will demand their own histories in America.  While publishing and entertainment are very slow to reflect these changes, the work needs to be written now.

Related Reading:  Births to Minorities Are Approaching Majority in U.S.

o
o
o

Click to bookmark or repost

Hide Sites

o
Spring is here.   And this website has the colors of a fecund earth.   I have wanted to redo my website for sometime now.  It was quite a static website, and just sat on the internet for the past four years, being visited by curious eyes, lost souls, and homework-ridden students.   Since I’m currently seeking employment (in this robust economy, no less!), I thought it would be a great time to clean house. 

Thanks Wordpress

I bought a wordpress template (think: buying a house) and renovated it inside and out.    For some time now, I had wondered about this wordpress.  I have seen it everywhere.  Many of my friends use it for blogs, but then occasionally, I would run into a website that looked like wordpress, but seemingly not.   As I have learned wordpress is now being used as a content management software and used as a framework for multipurpose websites.  Thus, I have finally managed to put my blog and my website in one place.   A few days of juggling words, images, concepts, and design, and here we go! I’m also very grateful to one particularly friend who handed me a software when I needed it most.   Yes, Photoshop is king. 

Water

It’s the third sunday of Lent.   The reading today was about the woman at the well who gave water to the thirsty Jesus.   In 2010, I am feeling the need to quench my multiple levels of thirst.   There is that thirst to start a new organization.  There is that thirst to finish my new poetry collection.  There is that thirst to work for an organization where I can make a difference.   I am at a new stage in life.   Post-graduate school.  Post-four decades.   There is much to be excited about.   That we are in a horrible recession should really scare me, but I have no fear. 

Today at least, I’m that woman at the well. 

o
o
o

Click to bookmark or repost

Hide Sites

o
Today, I tackle a task:  get a new website.  That’s all.

Oh, I guess I say goodbye to my old blog:  the freirian goes to hahvahd.  I will keep that around for a while, until it’s forgotten.   I had quite a time at harvard.   I now know that I should have stayed there another year, get another graduate degree.   To look for a job in this economy is a mission made in Purgatory (not Hell, but close).   I could have used another year of planning for { We Speak America }.  But hey, I’m back in New York City.  No reason to fret.  I am as grateful as Thanksgiving Day. 

So toast to a new virtual home!  And of course, to blog again, which I’ve done off and on for the past six years.   Hello World, indeed!

o
o
o

Click to bookmark or repost

Hide Sites