Block – must exorcise ghost of degrees past…

The voice inside my head is very different to the voice I need to write in for academic component of my MA.
What I’ve realised is this. Those who love academic writing have a flesh and blood self that is closer to the projection of the academic self. My sister is one of these people. She speaks in structured full sentences. She thinks before she speaks and she speaks in grammatically correct sentences. There are no unfinished sentences or utterances that lack the conviction and confidence of a sentence you might find in an academic essay.
Me on the other hand? This blog voice is pretty much the voice in my head. It rambles, it’s insecure, it tests out hypothesis before the thought is complete and it has no respect for structure and the discourses I must engage in, in order to finish this friggin’ MA and get that piece of paper.
And I tell myself, well yeah sure I can write without being in an MA degree, but I like the support, the structure and that space I get to write when I have enrolled in a formal course.
But now that I sit down to write this friggin exegesis I’m thinking – what the fuck is an exegesis? Is it just a load of navel gazing wank that gives those who can’t write creatively an outlet to explain what they’ve tried to say in their creative component?

I know I must find this voice. I must channel my friends who have this voice. Those who can say, “A is A and B is B” with conviction and believe that what they have to say is important and matters. (Even if it doesn’t).

I’m so scarred by my last experience of formal academic writing that I consciously discarded, mind dumped and then blocked out that voice for fear of triggering PSTD.

That supervisor said, yes writing is painful.

Which is why I started to write creatively, to prove that it wasn’t painful and writing creatively isn’t painful. It’s like yoga and breathing. It’s a joy and you don’t notice time passing. The research component has also been a pleasure. I don’t notice time passing.
Taking notes, writing in short hand and dot point – also not taxing and quite enjoyable.
Filing also fun.

ARghhhh how do I begin this??

 

Flu

flaked out.
have learnt a lot about the tori amos/courtney love/trent reznor triangle this morning.
apparently courtney is the villain of the whole thing. courtney killed 90s music according to some websites.
listened to some more recent NIN music on ITUNES. Don’t like it.
I guess there’s only a window in musician’s lives where it all comes together.
started listening to chilli peppers in my 90s nostalgia. I really like “my friends” and “otherside”. Not sure what they did after Californication.
That’s a nostalgic CD for me. Even though by the time it came out, I’d already been a road trippin’ across the western deserts.
i really like sarah slean (canadian chanteuse) and her cabaret style shows.
ahh the 90s.
I really hope vit c and echinaceas can help me ward off this flu. it’s been a really long week with a sick toddler.
today he said to me when I gave him some juice.
“What does this taste like? – It tastes like honey. What does it taste like? It tastes sour..”
He surprises me with the things he comes out with.
I guess he’s quite eloquent and has a very advanced vocab because I didn’t know how to do baby talk and have always spoken to him like an adult. I just felt a bit retarded and self conscious when I tried baby talk. Also, he doesn’t see a lot of little people. He’s around big people most of his life.
i’m really not sure what the purposes of this blog is. I guess it’s a mind dump. i keep thinking i should turn it into a mummy blog.
i have a very sore throat. eating chocolate probably didn’t help.
i also am not sure what to do about a letter i received this week.

 

Bugs Christmas Heathens

Stomach bug
Still nauseous and can’t keep food down.
So am faint.
Eyes tired.
Looking at kitchen.
Am over the trying to have some boho cred in suburbia with a shitty kitchen. It’s kind of gross and dirty.
Worked my arse off this semester. Going to put all profits into the kitchen.
Kid does not need any more toys.
Had a stressful morning at the shops.
Will move to commune.
“Bad mother” the eyes spoke. “That mother can’t control the kid.”
“I want more cars. Thanks mummy for the car, but I want more cars please. I want more cars. I want more cars.”
Articulate- yes, but he doesn’t understand the concept of money exchange, capitalism and Christmas displays.
Tired.
Nauseous.
Writing…dead.
Brain….dead.
Desire…dead.
Sleep…my friend.
Kitchen. Without shitty floor.
A kitchen with a clean floor.
That’s what I want.

 

Logistics of motherhood…

The strangest thing happened today. I managed to hang out with L and get some writing done – albeit in my shorthand and on scrap pieces of paper lying at the bottom of my bag.
I discovered a small cafe near the local library. What’s great about it is that there’s a corner with old children’s toys. They’re dirty and not very exciting, but because we don’t have those toys at home…it’s all new to L. He kept himself amused for nearly 2 hours with blocks and foam numbers…he didn’t seek my company and was content just to build and explore.
We were supposed to be at playgroup but I gave him an option and he chose the library.
I know some people think it’s strange that I give him options…either…or…neither…nor… But he has likes and dislikes, and playgroup is not school. I’m not going to let him wag school. Hopefully I put him in a school that he gets a lot out of…
I sometimes worry about him not having enough contact with other kids. Not sometimes…all the times. But he seems to like older kids at the moment. He would have liked to have had a big sister I think.

 

Aspiring Writers/7 up USA/Togo/Hapa

I watched half of 21Up USA last night. I’m not sure how many kids they’ve interviewed, but I noticed that most of the kids who’ve been to university want to be writers. Interestingly, the ones who don’t have writing aspirations have the most interesting stories. They’re only 21 and think they know it all.

I was thinking about this when I was in my ESL class today. I have friends who really love the nuts and bolts of English grammar, explaining grammar and read grammar books, watching grammar video tapes in their spare time. I really don’t sure their enthusiasm. What I love about teaching (when I don’t have to deal with assholes) is the human interaction and learning about humanity.

Today as I was doing an exercise on neither…nor/either…or… we went off track and a student told me about the civil war in Togo. I felt so ignorant because I didn’t even know there had been a civil war there. Though she reassured me that not many people did because everything else overshadowed this war. One of my other students, a Vietnamese refugee who has been in Australia for 30 years, recounted her refugee experience and they compared notes on what the resettlement experience was like. They spoke of the meager rations they were given in refugee camp.

As they were talking, I thought to myself, “I wonder who is the refugee of tomorrow?” and..”God I’ve turned into one of these middle-class women who I used to find odd because they were so intrigued by things that were just part of my every day life.”

It made me realize we shouldn’t categorize each other by race/visual difference, but by how many generations removed from a peaceful, suburban Australian life we are. My husband and I are not the same race, but we are the same number of generations removed from the working-class migrant experience.

When I get some time weekend, I’ll finish watching 21 Up USA. It’s more interesting than the UK version because it’s more contemporary. The kid’s were born in 1985 – so I’m a decade older, but can still identify the “characters”. I’m intrigued by the Hapa kid. I’ve no idea what my son will look like when he’s older. I’m sure he won’t look like that Hapa kid, but it’s just interesting to see what older Hapa men look like.

 

Anna May Wong Must die!

This show looks fun. Pity it’s in London.

Anna May Wong Must Die! is Anna Chen’s one-woman show about Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star. This personal journey through the life and crimes of Anna May Wong grew from a half-hour programme about the actress, A Celestial Star In Piccadilly, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2009, written and presented by Anna.

“I discovered her at an early age when, growing up in the far East of London, I was the only Chinese kid in my school. I often wondered where everyone else was who looked like me.

“In the streets, men of a certain vintage would yell, ‘Oy, you! Anna May Wong!’ I thought, ‘Blimey! How do they know my name’s Anna?’ And then I saw her. She was in an old black and white film on the telly. The tall Chinese screen goddess in Shanghai Express, blowing the blonde Teutonic Marlene Dietrich off the screen and blasting her way into my respect

“Up until then, my only role models had been Madam Mao and Imelda Marcos. I didn’t know whether to start a revolution or steal a handbag. Now I could add stabbing villains to my options.”

Part comedy, part social critique, this funny, fascinating look at the movie icon dismantles Chinese stereotypes and reveals the human side of the dragon lady of dragon ladies.

Am 2/3 done with the MA but now feel like deleting 2/3 of the 2/3.

 

X men – the last stand

I watched X men – 3 on telly last night. What a terrible film. The premise is interesting enough but the narrative was so bad, and so were the female characters.
- The Archangel: they should have just gotten rid of this plot since they didn’t have enough time to develop the father/son relationship.
- Female characters.
I hated the Jean Grey/Phoenix character and in fact all the female characters. They’re all weak and submit themselves to dominant stereotypes of what it means to be a desireable woman.
JG/P – Is the most powerful creature in the world but doesn’t manage to control her power and ends up killing “the man she loves” etc… At first I thought, ‘okay I don’t want to read her as typical of the archetypal villainess who is too [sexually]powerful etc..fear of female sexuality ” because at the moment I’m trying to avoid theoretical jargon. But how could I not read it this way when everytime she goes “psycho” she turns red, the oceans rise, men stand up -rise to the occassion and then get incinerated when she unleashes her full power. She’s a cliche. Also why didn’t Wolverine just inject her with the “cure” instead of sinking his knives into her? All 10 of his digits.
Okay and even if I am getting all undergrad cultural studies student-esque about this – the poor actress didn’t get to talk much. Though she did get to do her famous scissor thing with her legs.
Rogue – Pathetic. Another female who is so powerful she can’t touch her man without killing him. So she gets the cure. For herself – she says…and after she loses her powers, the boyfriend comes back to her. Otherwise he spends most of his time with Juno.
Juno – plays a pre-pubescent character – kitty. So she doesn’t count. She wants her parents more than she was a man.
Storm – the only woman to keep her super powers and remain relatively happy. And she takes over from Xavier. But notice in the film she doesn’t get to fight the really powerful mutants. Her main nemesis is another woman of colour. “no no…enjoy the film,” I said to myself…”Don’t read the film, just enjoy it for the narrative” – but I couldn’t. The characters were so crap. Also Storm is asexual and has absolutely no love interest. I was hoping she would develop something with Wolverine – but that would involve miscegenation and that’s pretty rare in mainstream blockbusters. Though Kevin and
Whitney did alright in the 90s in The Bodyguard.

And even if I didn’t hate the female characters so much, the narrative was clunky.

 

Sci-fi

Am beginning to read sci-fi short stories. I loved sci-fi/fantasy as a kid but haven’t read much sci-fi as an adult…though I have to admit dystopian fiction is one of my favourite genres. I’m hoping that once I have exorcised these demons, issues, questions of racial identity etc…in this MA paper, I can move on to work on my dystopian world.
I love speculative fiction – what if…. Maybe it is to do with feeling rootless, homeless and having an arbitrary identity…maybe writing about aliens is an offshoot of alienation or maybe I just like aliens.

Work is okay. I just made it worse than it actually is, though despite having an okay day – I really don’t want to do this next year. I’m not coping with the workload of home stuff, family, study, writing and a part-time job that requires a fair amount of preparation and patience.
“Think of the money,” a friend told me, but it’s really not enough money. I feel a bit slack sometimes because my parents never had the choice of saying, “nah….don’t feel like working anymore.” They just stuck their heads down and did whatever work that came their way with the goal of raising two children. They didn’t really consider things like, “quality time with child” as that was not a luxury they could afford. I had my grandma around.

Today some student kept asking me where I was from. I just explained I was Australian-Chinese. She kept asking, so I said I was an Overseas Chinese. That shut her up for a while because there’s an understanding that Overseas Chinese are a collective breed of Chinese who have never been on the mainland. Some people hate this so called imposed identity, but I just find it convenient to use this label as it stops people from asking further questions. Except this woman who was relentless. So I gave her the birth town of my great-great-grand father, since that was the last time all my ancestors were on the mainland, a point of origin – and she looked at me and said, “ahhh I knew when I walked into the classroom that you were Hokien.”
Good thing I’ve spent time getting to know my roots etc… I find that I am more comfortable around Chinese people from the big Guangdong cities. Maybe it’s because I’m more familiar with the language and culture, even though most of my people are Hokien. Yeah gotto find a job where I don’t have to keep inventing the story of my origins.
I just tell different stories according to how I feel on a particular day.
Last term I was feeling far too westernized, so I went native for a while… This term, I’m into speculative fiction…maybe I’ll tell them I’m from a parallel universe.

 

Why is there a denial of the role race plays in our daily interactions with people?

One good thing that’s come out of all of this, is that I have learnt a lot about myself, my beliefs and I have opened up discussion amongst staff, decision makers in several institutions.

Observations:
1. It’s not always about race – but race will always play a role when things reach crisis point.
2. It is ridiculous to group “ethnics” in the same boat.
3. White South Africans are more willing to talk about race, and acknowledge racism than those who were discriminated against.
4. Women of colour who have moved up the ranks by performing “whiteness” will not engage in discussions about the role race may play in the workplace.
5. After so many years of being unable to talk about race openly, it’s left people like me not knowing what to do when some obnoxious and ignorant person feels they have the right to present their views as “truths”.
6. People who have grown up believing they have to be “mainstream” to belong, deny their difference. Even I buy into this to a certain extent. Why should I hide the fact I am multi-lingual?
7. Race is often not the issue and people are not explicitly racist, but when you piss them off – they will draw upon stereotypes.
8. It is difficult not to make generalisations when there is a personality clash.
9. It is difficult putting people from diverse backgrounds in the same room. Often the clashes are cultural – but more in terms of socio-economic background than ethnicity/race. e.g. I can’t deal with white trash bogan racists, in the same way they find it difficult to accept that I am in a position of power in every category except race.
10. Racism is ignorance, and ignorant views should not carry the same weight as educated ones.
11. Life is a performance and that’s pretty stressful.
12. If racial difference was NOT an issue – where then do home grown terrorists come from?
13. If this had happened 5 years ago, I probably would not have felt I could speak out about it. I would have blamed myself for being “mentally ill” and “paranoid”. But because I do now feel I am entitled to a view and challenge racism, I did speak up. Thank god Rudd made the Apology or else I wouldn’t have known if I was allowed (on the official level) to react to racism towards Aboriginal people.

The good thing that’s come out of this is that I’ve made people talk and this incident is going all the way to the top.

I am not good at my job when I have to deal with really unhappy, insecure, poor and angry people.
I suppose I do come from a different position because I have spent time thinking about race, identity, cultural difference – so I am more sensitive to things than someone who doesn’t. Also, unlike the other women of colour I’ve spoken to about this, I call myself an Australian.

My cultural background does affect my interactions with people.
Also, I can’t deny that I am not always a professional. I try to be, but I find it difficult to be robotic in my interactions with people.

I think my fellow ethnics who work in this field don’t feel the same way, because they’re more Anglo-philes and people who would rather be completely “white”. This is only a job I fell into because I had to pick something else to teach when I was doing my teaching diploma. ESL was what they gave people who didn’t have another subject. (My main area was English for English speakers).

Race is still a big deal – maybe not in the same way as it was, but not everyone has caught up.

I am more open to discussion, changing views – I only half-culled a playgroup mother who made a ridiculous comment. I liked her as a person, so I tried to challenge those views and gave her a really nice book that cost me $70. I felt that she had a lot going for her and was an intelligent person who might be able to see the bigger picture.

If race wasn’t such a big issue, why don’t we see more diversity on the mass media?

I really hate thinking about this stuff. It does my head in.

Maybe I should just move to an area where there are more people like me, stay home and bake cookies.

Is being intolerant of racists the same as being a racist? As someone suggested to me.

 

Realization – Can’t do it all!

Something has to give. It has to be work because I care about that the least. I only did it for extra cash – which is nice, but do I need a new kitchen or to be free, sane and have head space to be a good parent?
I’ve been up all night thinking about this one – literally – and if I was desperate for money, I can go through the motions. But I have a really cute kid who needs me, a vague goal of finishing a creative project in the next couple of years and having another kid…
I am thinking about my friend who tattooed her arm to stop her from compromising her dreams – ie.v visible tattoo – safeguard her from falling into the corporate world.