Good vs. Evil

While one may assume "Sour Sweet" by Timothy Mo had gotten its title from the Chinese food that comes up repeatedly throughout the book, but I believe it to be deeper than that and I'm going to take the "path less taken" in exploring the true meaning behind Mo's choice. After all, is literary works nothing ever means what it actually says. When is a novel ever straightforward? There's always a deeper meaning. On that "English-teacher" note, onward we go…

 By choosing this title, I believe that Mo is comparing the Triad and the Chen family to each other. While both are Chinese immigrants who relocated to England and started their own family business, the Triad goes about their new life selling drugs and acting aggressively towards competitors. The Chen family is peaceful and runs a successful restaurant business where they serve their "sweet and sour" Chinese food. While their competitors may frustrate them, they don't attempt to solve their problems with them through confrontational actions. I deduce that Mo is saying that the Triad is the Chinese immigrant gone sour and down the wrong path, while the Chen family is the thriving, sweet immigrant family.

Bitter Sweet

Throughout Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo, we are faced with the contrasting characters of the Chen family and those descended from the Hung Dynasty, the Triad. The Chen family, while ambitious and with a drive to be successful in their restaurant business, go about their work peacefully, while the Triad strives to make a large profit while manufacturing drugs. They are more violent in their means of success; when things do not go their way and people they are associated with step out of line, there is justice to be served. When people oppose them, they strike back, as shown in chapter 18 when the Triad raids another gang, injuring and killing many people.

That being said, an aggression in Lily comes out in chapter 23 when she is chasing a turkey given to them for the Chinese New Year, she ends up capturing it and chopping it's head off. The bird doesn't die immediately, and commences running around without it's head (I don't know if this is impossible and the author was actually just adding humor to the book or this does happen and this is where the phrase "running around like a chicken with it's head cut off" came from). Any-who, the headless turkey doesn't phase Lily, and she creates a makeshift lasso-type contraction and captures it, kills it, and cooks it. Spoiler alert: the end product tastes vile and appears green. The turkey didn't want to be eaten, that should've been evident when it refused to die, karma.

Lily is part of the family that's meant to contrast with the Triad, yet the main contrast points were in the ways they achieved their success and in their use of aggression. In this chapter, she seemed very similar to the Triad's own Night Brother. Up until now, Lily has been known to use means of persuasion and mind games to get what she wants (which obviously won't work with a bird, birds don't speak English/Cantonese and don't understand the mind games of women). I pose this question: no matter how peaceful one seems to be, how far can people be driven until they break from their usual methods and adapt more barbaric means to get what they want? Or, do we all have an inner warrior?

(p.s. not that "embrace your inner goddess warrior", more "Hung Dynasty" "drug-pusher" "I kill people in 3 minute raids" type of warrior)

The Boo Crew

About 4 years ago around Halloween-time, I listened to the song "Thriller" by Michael Jackson too many times…




…and watched the video too many times. The product was this:

A "zombie-nerd" costume and a dead-eyed stare into the camera. I'd say I at least played the part pretty well. I couldn't have just dressed up as a zombie without a theme, I wanted to be something more resulting in a zombified schoolgirl. I had made up no backstory of how I'd been turned into a zombie, I hadn't been watching "The Walking Dead" or anything like that. My costume was entirely inspired by a pop song from 1982. I had even ripped my shirt and poured blood all over my clothes and face.




As for my brother and sister, my brother had started the night wearing a clown mask but had gotten weary of it so I came to the rescue with makeup and red "hair dye". My sister was a "zombie-rockstar". We even had a dance routine to "Thriller" worked out in case we decided to have a mini flash-mob in the streets (we had both been listening to the song quite a bit and were quite into the characters we had chosen for the night). We didn't end up following through with the dance; I felt we wouldn't be as good as Michael Jackson himself.

Plunged Into the Role of an Outsider

Two years ago, I moved from Nevada to California. I was shifted from an environment in which I knew everyone into an area where I was surrounded by strangers who had grown up with each other. It was an immediate alteration from the life I was used to; instead of seeing familiar faces everywhere I looked, I was engulfed in a sea of strangers. In Nevada, I knew all my peers and there were the occasional newcomers, but here I was the new one.

Lucky for me, I'm not an only child and did not have to face this obstacle alone. I have my siblings by my side wherever I go and whenever I try something new; they are always there to support me and be my friend when I have none. They helped me to introduce myself to people and make new friends, but until I made connections with the people of California, I wasn't alone.

If I hadn't had my siblings to back me up, I would've felt inferior, less confident and much more intimidated about the situation of moving to a new state although, at the same time, I would've been forced to make new friends because I wouldn't have had a brother or sister to keep me company.

When placed in the situation of an outsider, you experience what you wouldn't normally feel comfortable with and learn more about yourself. I met new friends and bonded with my family; my insight into what being "the other" is like was a positive one, although if I was constantly put in similar situations, I'm not sure they would all have a positive effect. The experience of not fitting in can be found under many circumstances, and positive life lessons aren't always found from those.

Inequalities Here to Stay

In Kurt Vonnegut's satire "Harrison Bergeron", he overemphasizes the inequalities of people and to what lengths some may go to to fill the gap between those who are different from others and those who are ordinary. For example, in the story those who are smarter than others wear mental handicaps, while more good-looking people are forced to wear masks. Eloquent, well-spoken beings have to disguise their voice and people are assigned weights based on their strength. This is all meant to remove competitiveness and to make everyone equal; but how can people be equal if the handicaps are visible and they therefore know that the other person is better than them somehow?

However much exaggerated, Vonnegut's story gets to the point; no matter what we all have our differences. Try as we might to hide them or change them, they will set us apart. Our differences lead us to our successes as well as our failures, both of which we celebrate, as they make us who we are. Without inequalities to set us apart, we have nothing to strive for, no goals. Life would be a long race with no prize at the finish line. Either that or a race that you train long and hard for and went up against someone who was untrained; say you got first place and they place last. You both get the same reward for an unequal amount of effort. Make sense?

If we reward children equally in sports, as shown in this article, we teach them that life will be like that when they grow up. That no matter what they do, even if they slack off, they end up in the same place as the kid that works the hardest. No matter what life was like in "Harrison Bergeron", that isn't not realistic, and we have to raise kids to be prepared for the real world and not to take life for granted.

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses...

If the hypothesis were offered in a world which [...] millions [should be] kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment [sic] [...] even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

This week I read a story titled The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, in which an entire city's happiness was dependent on the complete unhappiness and suffering of one child. This quote inspired the story, questioning if such a simple thing as happiness for all people was really worth the eternal suffering of one person and if all people would really achieve complete happiness if they had the guilt of knowing that they had caused never-ending misery for that one being.

Try as we might to ignore the fact; sweat-shop conditions exist in areas all around the world. It may not be anywhere near you, but I can guarantee you that they helped produce a product that IS very near you. Some of us may be aware of it, some may not be. Those people who are unaware remain ignorant;

Whatever the case, we don't do much about it, making this our own version of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, one person suffering for everyone else's happiness, in this case many people suffering for our happiness from the products they produce; we either go on with our lives using the product we are supplied by the labor or decide that the product isn't worth what those people have to endure and we do without it, not fighting for those undergoing the sweatshop-like conditions but not supporting it further. 

Everyday I use my phone/laptop and my car which were surely manufactured by these conditions. I justify this by telling myself that I need my  phone to communicate with the people in my life and to do my schoolwork (my school requires a laptop and/or phone to turn in homework). As for my car, I could use other means of transportation to get where I need to be, but on a daily basis it's far more convenient to drive to my destinations. 

There are some products not necessary in my life that I don't approve of and that I don't feel are necessary to have in my everyday life. Certain clothes I feel I don't need, I go without and, in doing so,  I'walk away from Omelas'. Other people do the same thing and we may feel that this makes a difference, but it really does not. We aren't actually doing anything to make a difference and fight to help the people affected by the circumstances of the sweatshop-like conditions.

Fear: Is It Our Surroundings We Fear or the Unpredictability of Them?

"Watch enough brutality on TV and you come to believe you are living in a cruel and gloomy world in which you feel vulnerable and insecure. In (his) research over three decades (Gerbner) found that people who watch a lot of TV are more likely than others to believe their neighborhoods are unsafe, to assume that crime rates are rising, and to overestimate their own odds of becoming a victim. They also buy more locks, alarms, and- you guessed it- guns, in hopes of protecting themselves. 'They may accept and even welcome,' Gerbner reports, 'repressive measures such as more jails, capital punishment, harsher sentences- measures that have never reduced crime but never fail to get votes- if that promises to relieve their anxieties. That is the deeper dilemma of violence-laden television."- Barry Glassner

The quote above is taken from an excerpt I read in The Culture of Fear. To me, it means that the more violence we watch on television, the more the thought that we live in a violent world in instilled into our mind. While the television portrays a dramatized version of reality to keep viewers interested, the more time we spend watching it, the less time we spend out in the real world observing how wrong television's portrayal of life is. This evokes us to fear common things that we normally wouldn't fear and that potentially won't harm us. 

Take a look at the following gif;

Dramatized or not, it gets the point across; we are exposed to over-dramatized stories on the news, on television, in books, everywhere! Our mind absorbs the information we are given and leads us to fear something as simple as a small dog just because we heard of a dog of an unrealistic size attacking it's owner out of the blue, even though we know this behavior isn't common.

The fear-saturated media we are exposed to does affect our happiness and our lives; it causes us to curl up within ourselves when we are in the midst of the subject of the latest news story. As for the criminal justice system, the way certain individuals of a particular race are portrayed immediately puts them at either an advantage or disadvantage from a legal standpoint. When you are walking down a dark alley at night and see a tall man of African American descent, you're probably going to relate back to the stories you've been exposed to and instantly start to feel fear inflicted by them and that person. 

When we become afraid of other people, we end up spending our money on security systems that we feel will provide protection from people roaming the streets and that results in a larger income for security system manufacturers.

Another short story I read was Once Upon a Time, by Nadine Gordimer. Her story was of a family who was so set on protecting themselves from the dangers of the burglars outside their household that the measures they went to to ensure their safety caused the death of their son. This is similar to The Culture of Fear because both stories talk of the danger of how fear is instilled upon us and the negative effect it has on us. The media is only increasing our fear of the world and the income of sellers of security systems. In buying into the stories we constantly lose our grasp on reality and what is really harmful to us; in Once Upon a Time, what the family was told to fear isn't what ended up being the danger in the end. The real danger was what they had become as a result of what they were told and believed.

Always Something to Improve Upon

Today I was given an essay I wrote earlier and was asked to reread it…

…and then I was asked to fix it.

If you're in school now or have ever been in school, or if you're a regular human being, I'm sure you've had to write an essay before. Therefore, you must know how excruciating it is to read an old essay once you've learned how to better your writing. Of the essay I was given, this is the paragraph I chose to do-over:

"Single stories are a form of stereotype that are common everywhere and surround everyone. It is only dangerous to know one story of something or someone not because it's false, but because that story is incomplete. Stereotypes not only have the potential to hurt others; they also limit our view of the world. By only seeing someone as their one story, we keep ourselves from learning more about the world and getting a different perspective. In The Complete Persepolis, Marjane quickly became the victim of the single story and experienced it firsthand."

Above, there are a few sentences that are oddly worded and the paragraph is lacking detail. I failed to give a summary of the book in the thesis statement. Here is the re-done paragraph:

"Single stories are a form of stereotype that are common everywhere and surround everyone. It is dangerous to know only one story of something or someone not because it is false, but because that story is incomplete. Stereotypes not only have the potential to hurt others; they limit our view of the world. By only seeing someone as their one most common stories, we keep ourselves from learning more about the world and getting a different perspective. In The Complete Persepolis, Marjane becomes the victim of the single story and experiences it firsthand when her country, Iran, is thrown into war and she escapes to Austria in an attempt to continue her education and ensure a bright future not compromised by warfare."

I went back and fixed some of the wording and changed some of the tenses to present tense. Also, I added onto the thesis statement so that the reader of the essay would have an idea of what happened in The Complete Persepolis. When I reread my essay, I did feel slightly embarrassed about some of the mistakes I made because they seemed obvious, especially mistakes about the way things were worded. If I could go back and rewrite it, I would make sure not to be so vague with my thesis statement, as that seems to be a recurring problem with my writing. Practice makes perfect, so i guess I'll just have to keep on practicing!

For my next essay, I'll definitely take more time and read over, making a mental checklist of my common mistakes (i.e.; vague thesis statements, lack of present tenses…), and fingers crossed by the end of the year, my writing will be transformed!

Stereotypes vs. Reality: What We Are Told Growing Up and What We Don't See

This week I was shown the following images:

I don't know about you, but when I saw these pictures, they seemed like polar opposites to me. The image at the bottom appears to be a more conservative and restricted society. Do you agree? If you do, you'd be wrong. These were what came up as search results for 'Iranian women 1970' and 'Iranian women 2002'. It's amazing how the public's view of Iranian women changed in a mere 32 years. The top picture could be a search result for anything, while the bottom is clearly the stereotype some people have of Iranian women. 

If more photos like the first one were seen instead of the bottom, such harsh stereotypes depicting Iranian women most likely would not exist. The supposed fear people build up in their minds of them, if there were no images to cause it, would not exist. No one benefits from the fact that the second image is the most common. The Iranian women suffer harsh judgement and we suffer from the closed-mindedness. If we opened ourselves up, we could educate ourselves and get to know the people better, not to mention stop making ourselves appear so judgemental.

On that point, I'd like to bring up the author of a book I recently read, Marjane Satrapi, who wrote The Complete Persepolis. She was a young teenager when the veils came to be and vividly remembers it, and I feel she would want us to know that the veil doesn't define the woman. In both pictures, short skirt or long black veil, the people behind the veil are the same. They have the same wants, the same needs, the same feelings. I'm sure it doesn't make them feel good about themselves when they are seen in public and are scowled upon or glared at. I'll leave you to think about that.

How Images Affect Us

Throughout our lives there are certain things that truly affect us; people, events, a dream we once had, even something as simple as an image we once saw can impact our lives, causing us to think about things differently. Maybe you watched a scary movie once where a monster lived under a child's bed and now at night you can't help but think of that monster when you lay in bed at night. I bring this up because this week's topic in my English class is what image has had an impact on our life. While my example is of a monster under a child's bed, that's far from the type of image that makes a lasting impression on my mind.

An image that would have the power to leave an impression on my mind would have to be somewhat personal, which is where this image comes into play:

If you can't tell, the man in this picture is in the hospital with cancer, but when I look at this picture I see someone who is on top of the world and still has his whole life to live, even if fighting an uphill battle. This image embodies strength, power, and also courage, because I know from firsthand experience without those qualities, the journey through this illness is impossible. 

Words don't depict what this image does. There are only so many words in existence, but when you look at a picture, no words are needed . It's as if you can feel what the person in the picture is feeling. Maybe you don't feel what he is, but then again, who can but he? No one knows exactly what it feels like to be him, looking out at the city. No one knows what it feels like to be me, except for me. We all are our own person. We all only understand ourselves best. 

I do know how he feels, though. I've been in the same position in my own hospital room, peering out the window at the city surrounding me, surveying my own world, with my own life I've only begun to live.

Introductory

Hello, cybernauts! I'm Noelle.  I enjoy long walks on the beach and drinking hot chocolate, although not at the same time, because those two activities are done in two different seasons. When I'm not practicing my dating profile activities, I sometimes spend time reading. That would be where this blog comes into play.

The name of my blog is Literary Ataraxia, describing a place of literary tranquility. For those of you who don't understand the word, it means calm. And if you don't understand how reading is calm, well, I can't help you. Especially since reading isn't always calm. Reading can be the most stressful thing you do during your day, a character's life in a book seeming more troubling than your own life. Also, I can't promise the name of this blog will always seem to make sense because even though the name of my blog promises sunshine and rainbows, sometimes it'll be less than serene because…well...

I've created this blog for my English class, so I'll be writing about the necessary assignments as well as whatever I feel like I want to write. To sum it up, it's going to be an interesting blog full of books, gifs, and random references (also, the time spent on this blog may turn me into somewhat of an introvert, but that's a sacrifice I have to make for education). 

Now this blog seems to meet the length requirements for my assignment. I also feel like I just re-aquainted myself with…myself. Although, if people actually end up reading this, I'll have told strangers quite a bit about myself. Which is what my parents have always warned me against… Only more good judgement where that came from. On that note, sit back, buckle up, and enjoy the ride;