Destiny

I’ll miss you Mariel ^^ you’re really sweet…I love our class so much. Don’ know if I’ll able to see all of you next quarter and in the future or not :’(..but then, good luck with Finals and take care..Don’t work too much. I know how you feel when you want to help your parents out, especially when they are unemployed. I’m worried about my dad too.. :’( Other than that, you have to take care of urself, k? take care==

ferminator:

This is the last regular weeek at De anza, Next week is finals week 0_0 UGH. I’m sad, I actually liked this quarter. Honestly, my first quarter as a college student was pretty dope. My teachers, dope, My classes, dope, My breaks, dope, My new friends, dope. hahha =) The whole vibe this quarter got me going. I’m totally going to miss it, next quarter all of us have different scheduals, who knows of I’ll even see some people. & then theres my IMPACT class. My favorite class. In that class I didnt only gain knowledge, I gained like a small ” family” we grew as a community & I’m really going to miss them. Some are going off to UCS/ CSU. Some have classses the same times I do so I wont see them. Makes me sad, I wish I had a class with all of them next quarter. So goood bye to the Fall quarter of 09. UGH to top it all off I work sunday, Monday, tuesday, thursday, friday, Sunday. ON FINALS weeek. SADFACE. hehe I guess I’ll be needing alot of coffee next week.

“Hey playboy

It’s about time and the time is up”

I have to rethink about my love, you know?

Why did you do this to me?

You played with my heart

You played with my soul.

I trusted you

You lifted me up

Up to the sky

Now..

You knocked me down

Down to the ground.

Hey playboy

Is this how you play your game?

Is this how you play with my love?

You never know how I felt about you

I hate you when you’re flirting around

Don’t care whether I’m looking at you or not

My heart is in pain

Whenever I look at you flirt around the other girls

I thought you are my true love.

I thought you would be different

than any one I have met

But there is no different.

You are just like them

who come from the same playboy corporation.

I was shocked

I was damaged

My heart was broken

But now I have no more tears

to cry over you

Or you aren”t worth for me

to cry over you

I close my eyes

dream about an endless dream

I close my eyes

wish everything could turn back to normal

I lived in an illusion

being like a fool

being like a toy

for you to play with.

Somehow this could be a good way

for me to look into the real you

I’m not crying

I’m just sad

I’m glad it turned this quick

So I can learn my mistakes

So I can see the real you

So I don’t have to cry over you

So I don’t have to ask you

for another chance

So I don’t have to beg for you

to come back to me.

It’s better to be like this.

You’re my heartbreaker

But somewhere out there

There will be a person

who is my heart-healer.

I’m leaving you

I said I’m leaving you

for my own good

and to see if you can live without me.

I can trip over this incident

I can trip over many times

But they can only

make me stronger and tougher.

I’m waiting for a day

where you can experience the same thing

like what you have done to me.

Playboy or Heartbreaker

You are both

My heart is wounded

Yet, it’s healing

even though it will take time

even though I will have to suffer.

But I have to get over you.

You ain’t got nothing on me

“You aren’t charming

You’re just pretty”

Sometime I gotta act like I don’t care

So you can’t really see my real feeling

Just do way you want

Because from now on

I am going to stop caring

Even though sometimes I do feel that

I love you

I’m mad because you don’t care about me

I regret that I was way to easy on you.

From now on, i’ll get out of the way

So I really don’t have to care about you

So get out of my sight right now

You

Yeh

I’m talking about you

My playboy

My heartbreaker.

                                 American dream-Childhood

If you dream about a better place, a better country on this Earth to live, it would be the United States of America. It can be anybody in anywhere; United States of America will be their first fantasy choice. Karissa Joyce Yip is a girl who I am has plenty of talents. During our creative project performances in the classroom, Karissa displayed her drawing talent to express her memories and feelings about America on the paper. For most of the people who just arrived at America, they had the same kind of disappointed feeling toward to this foreign country. However, when I read Karissa’s demon stories; she expressed her happy feelings toward America. On the contrary, I found it interesting to read and learn from.

                          What I learned from interviewing Karissa

            Living in America was the title of her comic. As the readers went through each of the drawing, all the lines and pictures described her whole journey from the start of her childhood. She compared the life between China and America. Since she was small, she was influenced by her parents about American culture and life. They thought America as a big dream country, a land of freedom. When she moved up to high school, she left her Chinese school to an International school. Since that day, her name changed to Karissa Joyce Yip. Since that day, she lived in an American dream. However, a dream was not good enough for her parents. They wanted her to study abroad in America. Dreaming and hearing about the wonders of the American lifestyle, Karissa even wanted to try it out for herself.

 Surprisingly, when she arrived in America, the reality was not really one hundred percent accurate to what she dreamed about. She saw multicultural people there who spoke several languages. Although reality differentiated from what she expected, something else surprised her and changed her ever since. She was amazed of the numerous Chinese restaurants. She was shocked when she saw a Mexican man who worked in a Chinese fast food restaurant, while an Italian restaurant hired an Asian chef. In one of her experiences, she was uncomfortable to communicate with an American teller at the Bank of America. Nevertheless, help was always around and she eventually got help from a Chinese banker lady. From that point on, she became happy that she could come to America and experience the diversity. Even now, she does not feel homesick at all. In fact, she feels that America relates back to her childhood memories. She doesn’t feel doleful and melancholic because there are numerous people who have the same mother tongue, who speak the same language, and who share the same culture and ethnicity. She is thankful to be here in America where everyone’s race, color and culture are respected.

            Admittedly, as I went through her comic, I realized how great her portrayal skills were. For each of the character or object in the comic, she showed every single detail. I noticed she applied some of the terminologies that we learned in class such as gutters, panel to panel transitions such as scene to scene and aspect to aspect, dialogues in bubbles, sound effect. All of the pictures, she didn’t draw them in perfect squares. Moreover, she used aspect to aspect method to show individual pictures that occurred in different places and times. She wrote different languages in different bubbles, such as: xin chao, hello, annyonghaseo, etc. She also applied sound effect such as: “Whoa! Wooo-hoo!” to make the pictures stand out. Her techniques differed from other creative projects. Therefore, I enjoyed reading her story along with the picture because they were colorful, unlike the other demon stories. While I interviewed her, I learned something new about the inspiration which motivated her to do this project. “Marshall showed us one of the demon stories in class by his previous student. That girl talked about her discomfort of living here in America. She was discriminated. On the other hand, I felt the opposite of what she felt. I could see many Chinese people like me who live in America; I could enjoy food in America that is the same in my hometown such as ‘BUBBLE TEA’. I LOVE IT. So I want to create a demon story like her but to show my appreciation to America”, Karissa explained. I learned that she wasn’t sad at all; in fact she was grateful for where she was. Moreover, free-writing in class also inspired her. She slowly described: “I wrote down all my ideas in point forms. Like the activity that I did in class, I allowed myself to free-write on a piece of paper for two minutes non-stop. This allowed me to express whatever that came to my mind. Then I grouped the scattered thoughts that relate to each other, such as, my impression of different cuisine could be categorized as ‘food’, shopping and the journey to the bank could go under ‘daily life’. This helped me to create my storyline cohesively. It would be easier for other people to catch my thoughts.” [from http://theyipbutter.tumblr.com]

 Life can not come joyful and smoothly all the way until the end. There will be obstacles that lay ahead. While drawing the comic, she found some difficulties. It was hard for her to sketch pictures from her memories. She explained that “in your mind, you know how a foreigner looks like, but when you draw, it’s hard to show which ethnicity the character is. So I used colors to help with this problem. For ex: a foreigner, I colored yellow for hair, although that could be different from my actual experience. Another trouble was the materials and tools that I used were not appropriate. At first I wanted to use hard paper, that’s why I bought watering color paper. But for my project, I used wood color pencils, due to the limited time, so that way I didn’t have to go through the process of mixing. Another problem occurred; I didn’t have a variety of wood colors, so for some color, it turned into a weird color, such as Barney’s color, without purple, I had to mix blue and red together. It didn’t turn out nicely.” Somehow, her thoughts and my thinking linked. If we could have another enormous creative project assignment like this, we would do it better in an ameliorative and extreme way. As Karissa said, she wanted to make her next presentation differently. She wanted to perform with her guitar with a spoken word partner. She would compose the music and her partner would write the lyrics. Together, they should make a great performance. I could a lot of talents and desires in her. I also feel the same way. If I could have another chance and a longer period of time, I would take advantages for what I have given. I would combine three of the topic: spoken word, film making and demon stories, to create this project.

I am very happy to have an opportunity to interview her and learn about her story. I love how she answered my questions from her heart and mind. Her journey began since she was very young. As she continues to walk by herself on American dream, I wish her the very best = Happy Thanksgiving, Merry X-mas ..^^ ( this part won’t be in the final essay  :D )

er..wastn’ it David? not Bryan? =.=ll, i think you typed wrong name..^^..I agree with you on the Safe Space one. Virkham was so harsh to any body who is not South Asian. I think he sees people racist toward Asian, but infact he is the one who is racist.

orange408juice:

Once again, Marshall placed us in our Acting groups and the class performed some of the scenes. But before that, he juxtaposed the differences of a man and a woman’s way of life. Brian and Nancy were the two victims of the whole experiment. They both had to play opposite sexes and to try to keep it in mode without switching back to their original sex demeanors. Marshall interacted with the class and pointed out that woman take little space, walk small steps, and speak softly. While men tend to take a lot of space, take control of their surroundings when walking, and speak with a loud confident voice. We found out that it was difficult for Brian and Nancy to stay in character as our human instincts automatically adjusts back to original attitude depending on the sex. I found it interesting and had a great time watching the rest of my class perform the scenes in M. Butterfly.

I also finished Safe Space and felt that it was terrible what Vikram did. At first, he was on the right path to uniting Homosexuals, but throughout the story, he kept on canceling out other people due to the non Southern-Asian ethnicity. The story completely backfired and showed that there is a real problem with the social lives of homosexuals. 

The final scene where Gallimard dressed up as Butterfly and killed himself with a seppuku suicidal way. It showed how Mme. Butterfly and M.Butterfly can be the same and also not the same at all. In Mme. Butterfly, madame Butterfly was being used with her love and trust by her White husband. In M.Butterfly, Gallimard was being used, controled and played like a toy by Song. However, in Mme.Butterfly, Madame was being used from the beginning as a Oriental girl. In another hand, in M.Buttefly, at the beginning Gallimard thought he could be Pinkerton #2 where he could get himself an Asian girl and try how different it is to have an Asian mistress, besides a Caucasion wife. Surprisingly, things turned out differently. It turned out that Song was actually Pinkerton, whereas Gillimard was a truly Butterfly. It amazed me how thing turned out so differently. David Henry Hwang did a great job by not follow the original play M. Butterfly by Pucinni. He turned things around by not to make another Asian girl be a victim, but turned the White man into a real victim who’s deserved to die.

Safe space is a script that talks about the right for any one who is gay and lesbians. However, this is just only for the South Asians, ex: Indians. As for the meaning of Safe Space, it has to deal with all kinds of sexuality persons from young and old. I don’t really like this script much, especially because of Virkham. He is so rude to the people that are sitting around him, especially to Gilbert, a White man who now turns to Hindu. Why is he only concerning about young gays, not old gays. Either young or old, they are still humans and they share the same experiences. They want to discuss about the same topic and experience.Why he as to be so mean like : “But our meetings are only open to gay South Asians only. Sorry.” or “You can’t participate.” or ” I said you’re not allowed to participate.” or “this organization is only for ‘true’ homosexuals” or like he said this is for people who are under 30 and so on. What the hell! He doesn’t know people at all, even if he opens this organization, he lets to hear every stories from manny people. Either a person like Gilbert who is white or not and he is not 29, Virkham has to listen to him. Also it is not because the problem between Northern and Southern india has conflict, doens’t mean the people in both world has to hate each other till the end. This Safe Space isn’t for any body, it’s just for him only. So it isn’t doing anything good at all.

Haizz, this is not a good response :’(