I feel like this time of year, there's so much going on it's hard to pick what topic to write about because there's so many to choose from, a cornucopia of topics especially since I've been in new areas, absorbing new stimulus. This past weekend was 4/20 day, the Pineapple Express Day, sandwiched between Easter and Good Friday,
And Amazing Race episodes started last weekend! It's incredible that a show I randomly tuned into in 2004 is still running (literally) in 2019. The music and pacing and especially the competitiveness still get me amped up. This time they started in Hermosa Beach Pier, Los Angeles, a place where MJ and I have walked countless times since we lived around there, so it'll be a symbolic place to start a journey (of watching Amazing Race 31, at least, for us).
There's the NBA playoffs and NHL playoffs going on simultaneously which I always thought was kind of difficult for fans of both hockey and basketball; isn't it hard to pick which one to follow, or if your team is in both, like if you're a Golden State Warriors and San Jose Sharks fan? Tough to put their playoffs almost parallel to each other, but I guess Canadian-based sports like hockey don't care what America does. And this is shortly after Virginia finally won March Madness, after only about the 4th time I picked them to win in my brackets. If ever there was a lesson about picking teams that lost previously in devastating, embarrassing, and hard-to-forget ways, it's that they'll be undervalued the next season when most bettors/ predictors will shy away from them. Or at least, they've gotten that losing out of the way. Oh and Tiger Woods won the Masters! If there was anything to make me feel like it's 2004 again, short of making me go back to high school and join the math and chess teams again, use dial-up internet or wear heavy prescription glasses, it's seeing Tiger winning a Masters again. He doesn't look like he's aged that much........I guess it's true, Asians don't age much.
And I just read another of Min Jin Lee's works (I like her because her name sounds like MJ's) called "Free Food for Millionaires," and I have to say I admire her work, not only because she helps me learn Korean by inserting cultural Korean words like "moo-dari," daikon legs, or explain why Koreans think certain things like a woman moving in with a man before marriage is shameful, but because she writes a heck of a good story. I don't know about all the literary devices like imagery, tone, metaphors, and literary richness of the novel, but she certainly makes me not want to put the book down. A big secret for me: dialogue. Most readers (I think) like the gossip of hearing other people's conversations with others and to drop in on a conversation, and we learn a great deal about them from those conversations. I admire Asian American writers who have a background in other cultures to be able to capture the American way of thining in their writing, I think it's quite a gift.
Almost forgot what I originally wanted to write about, discrimination! I just finished watching a very interesting episode about discrimination on the show "Abnormal Summit," which was popular in Korea a few years ago and features foreigners in Korea talking about different social issues and problems. Just the fact that a summit like that of foreigners from different countries can get together and talk is a testament to the quality of intercultural contact, to try to understand each other and not to succumb to racism. I've always wondered what it'd be like to be a diplomat. I think they have to be pretty knowledgable about other countries but also possess an open mind about people of the other countries. Well, if I have anything, it's a pretty empty mind (incompetence) but also an open mind about different peoples anchored by my policy that there are bad people in every race or religion or gender or group, and then there are good people too. What they said on the show maybe true, that as long as different ethnicities and nationalities and groups in general exist, discrimination will always exist, but it's the efforts to contain that discrimination, to mitigate its damages, to not rush to conclusions about people and follow the herd that seems to encourage discrimination, that's what's important and that needs to stay around forever.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
No comments:
Post a Comment