Kimchi

"This is Water"

This spicy side dish stars in every single breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a fellow like me. Without it, a meal seems incomplete; it lacks that hot component that many Koreans love, even though I personally think it is refreshing. It is fermented cabbage that is massaged with this red paste plus spices. Despite being incredibly delicious, there is a drawback: kimchi has this odor that sticks. That is why my mom never let me take some to school.

She was worried that other kids would make fun of me for smelling, and then I would get bullied - and leave school because I was Korean. None of this really made sense to me though. I just wanted some kimchi to compliment my other non-stinky foods and live the life I'm supposed to live. I guess I understood why my mother didn't want me to. She knows what bullying is; being an immigrant, she knows the dangers of being different.

My mother told me a different message than what Amy Tan's narrative "Fish Cheeks" says. Tan's mother asserts to her daughter, "'But inside you must always be Chinese. You must be proud you are different.'" She wants Tan to embrace her culture and not deny the Chinese half of her identity. That is why the mother chooses to cook all of "[Tan's] favorite foods." There is nothing weird about "slimy rock cod with bulging eyes" or a plate of skid that resemble "bicycle tires"; all it is is just the normal foods Tan eats.

At home, a day doesn't pass when I don't eat some kimchi, yet my mother was afraid to show everyone that this is normal to me. Assimilation seems to be the safest choice in America, to eat what everyone else is eating - or to smell acceptable to everyone.

But I still ate that kimchi everyday. And my mom never forgets to put it at the table. She never forgets. With one foot stuck in society's grasp and the other supported by my culture and family, I remember who I am by what I put in my mouth.

And guess what I eat everyday.

Expectations

Earlier this week, I looked back on my essays that I wrote; I was not too surprised. I know what kind of essay a 2.5 is. I remember I told that score to a past student of Miss Valentino, and he asked if I wrote in Chinese. First, I am Korean. And I did not. Those essays that I wrote were just plain bad and did not make sense. I looked at a sentence I wrote on one of first few essays and realized that those words did not formulate an understandable sentence. Even now, I am not sure if I make any sense.

As I skimmed my illegible handwriting, in between those moments of embarrassment, disgust, and shame, I saw improvement. That 2.5 rose to a 3, then to a 5; it stopped at 6 and hopefully goes up from there. My view towards english has completely changed. Last year, I hated the words "so what" or "why" and refused to reevaluate my paper. Now, I still hate those red marks on my essays, but at least I think about why they are there. Slowly but surely, I am improving.

Now that second semester started, I expect nothing more than incremental success. No one just jumps from a 2.5 to a 9 in a week, especially not me, but I have plenty of chances to get up there, like a chance every single week. I am not excited for the coming in-class essays or grades, but I look forward to the next writing reflection

Langston Hughes' Theme and Versimilitude

What is one theme Langston Hughes creates? How does the verisimilitude foster the theme?

Langston Hughes focuses on the marginalization of blacks in order to create unity among the forgotten race. In "I, Too," Hughes states that he is the "darker brother," describing not only his nationality but also the unnoticed, racial discrimination in America. Furthermore, the poem centers on the idea of breaking the monarchy of whites; by envisioning--hoping that people will see blacks as a part of "America." Many blacks relate to this experience: their ancestors were kidnapped from their homeland and forced into a life of heartless orders and metal chains. In his other poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Hughes mentions the major rivers of the world like the Euphrates, the Congo, and the Nile to show that black history is as ancient and rich as the "human blood in human veins;" their culture is crucial to America's past but a compete enigma to the naive Americans. Hughes' poems brought forth a debate many feared to argue. Titled the Poet Laureate of Harlem, Langston Hughes represented the wants--the yearnings--of black Americans, creating verisimilitude in his poems, whether it be through his first-person accounts of a Negro pianist making the "poor piano moan with melody" or recounting the command-obey relationship between a slave and his master. It is the "Weary Blues" or the singing "America" or the deep "rivers" that unite the scattered black sheep: the first stimulus to the inevitable Movement.

Great Gatsby Rhetorical Précis

In the great American novel The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald claims that the lavish life brought by money is not as wonderful as it seems. Fitzgerald supports this by contrasting the characters' wealth with their completely unappealing personalities, by describing the unhappiness and annoyance between the characters, and by ending the novel in tragedy to exemplify that money does not bring true joy. The author's purpose is to inform the dangers of living excessively so that others do not fall into the trap of wealth. The author writes in a sarcastic tone for young Americans in the 1920s (and onwards).

F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the term "Jazz Age" for the 1920s to describe the wealth and carefree personality of that period, and this is obviously shown in The Great Gatsby and his other works of literature. His stories usually accentuate the wealth that his characters have like Gatsby's yellow car and Tom's stable full of top-notch horses. Another characteristic that Fitzgerald highlights is a human-being's imperfections, an example being Gatsby yearning for the past instead of accepting the present. Also, Fitzgerald crushes our joy and motivation--our dreams. Like in The Great Gatsby, like in "Winter Dreams," the characters (which represent people of the 1920s) are left dissatisfied in the end. Whether it be the failure to marry that girl or to achieve the American Dream, Fitzgerald brings us to reality that sometimes, dreams are not completely fulfilled and only wishes unanswered.

Larry Wu, You Are Right

After finishing The Great Gatsby, I realize that Larry Wu of our own class was right this whole time: "People are greedy." I want to think that we have goodness in all of us--to look out for others and live in harmony--but that is clearly not true in The Great Gatsby. 

First, who steals a married woman from her husband? I guess there is somewhat of a loophole there as Daisy is not happy with her marriage with Tom, but then I have to question why she does not get a divorce or why she picks Tom over Jay Gatsby in the end. She is just another money-grabbing woman, switching from man to man. She is greedy. 

And after Jay Gatsby is shot, no one comes to his funeral. Even though Nick earnestly tries his hardest to gather a respectable amount of people for Gatsby's final party, no one comes. After the constant parties that Gatsby held, or the numerous favors that he did for people, no one comes. Daisy does not come even though Gatsby committed his whole life to her. Also, Gatsby was going to take the fall for Daisy, but the bullet got to him first.

In a world driven by money, people are greedy. As Daisy denies Gatsby when he asks her to marry him because he is too poor, as Gatsby rises up in the social ladder but still gets rejected by Daisy, greed is the undeniable trait of human kind. Larry Wu, you are right.

HP=EK

My life should have started with drums. The booms--quiet at first--slowly crescendo, intensifying the importance of the birth of this One boy. This boy is the chosen One. As my mother was giving her all in the hospital, as I came into the world, as I nearly died with the umbilical chord around my neck, the drums give its final slam and SILENCE! Only the heartbeats of everyone in the room--now plus One--carry the rhythm of life. Later that day, I was given the Elder Wand, a diploma from Hogwarts, and some Butterbeer.

"Harry Potter was just a boy who lived. Like all of us." 
                                                       -NIKKI GIOVANNI, "Sanctuary: For Harry Potter the Movie"

I have started to realize how much Death is around me. Lingering on the news, or playing around in the Philippines, It is an unrelenting force, only stopping to see the ones afflicted. Sometimes It comes by and takes someone I know--It nearly took me when I was a baby. And I'm just here, "[living] and [telling] the story" (33-34). If I am like Harry Potter, am I destined to save the world--to stop some nose-less figure from enslaving mankind or hook up with my best friend's sister? I am the boy who lived, and it is proven through my struggles. Harry Potter failed countless potions classes as I bombed a couple of tests before; Harry Potter went to a school filled with monsters as I went to school which indubitably has bullies. We all have the ability to save the "vanishing Savannah" (97-98), whatever that Savannah may be, and like Harry Potter who triumphed over the worst villain of all, we have to find out how we are going to do it.

"I'm just the boy who lived and in living I have to find my way."
                                                        -NIKKI GIOVANNI, "Sanctuary: For Harry Potter the Movie."

Punctuation is Important. Period.

Despite the constant disagreements to the rules of writing, punctuation is the foundation of all literature in any time period, and without it, the meaning and order of a certain prose or poem is lost.

Punctuation and writing go hand-in-hand: even if changing times call for a change in the rules of literature, punctuation will always be a prevalent player in any form of writing. Emily Dickinson, a revolutionary poet of America, used the dash in order emphasize certain words or phrases. Like in her poem "I dwell in Possibility--," which solely uses dashes, she separates phrases like "--for Doors--" (Source C) to show the symbolism in her poem and also to contrast the windows mentioned in the line before. Dickinson's dashes provided a feel that a period nor a comma can not; her specific use of the dash allowed for a completely different meaning to be interpreted. Also, in "Semicolons: A Love Story," Dolnick mentions William James uses the semicolon to keep the "'stream of thought from appearing... as a wild torrent" (Source E). Because of punctuation, order is kept. As periods and commas supplied this order before, semicolons did the same for William James, showing the change in times but the same applicability of different punctuation marks. Despite these examples, people say that punctuation gives up creativity for "more precision and exactitude" (Source D). For Elizabeth Austen in her poem "On Punctuation," she is against the "dogma of the period" (Source B), flowing every line together in one stream and in essence, proclaiming her creativeness--her style--for her lack of punctuation, but this is not the case for other writers. Andrea Gibson uses Twitter as a "testing ground for her more developed writings"  (Source F). Posting only a few words, she uses Twitter to get feedback and later incorporates it into her poetry, where a single punctuation mark "is enough to destroy the whole work" (Source D). This signifies that, yes, punctuation can have its limits in writing, but it can also have its own beauty in a concise manner. In all, literature is built upon punctuation, the figurative foundation of literature; every comma, period, semicolon, or dash carries its own meaning and has a everlasting importance in the unity and message of a piece of writing.