Destiny

                                 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 )