On The Power of Language | Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong

Language itself is just a really weird thing - at the risk of coming off all 'Bill Nye-y' on the subject, it's really just manipulating physical body parts to produce various auditory signals which others can then interpret and attach some form of semantic to. On a broader scale, language continues to evolve and change rapidly with our society.

For example:

Just do it.

JUST.. DO.. IT!!!

The two phrases most likely immediately made you think of two completely different things - the first of Nike (a large company whose slogan is 'Just do it'), and the second of everyone's favorite actual cannibal, Shia Labeouf (whose recent rise to internet fame is closely tied to both the viral YouTube video "Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf" and his green screen motivational speech in which he repeatedly yells "Just do it.")

Fifty years ago, neither of those phrases would have meant the same things they mean to us now.

A century ago, it's likely that we wouldn't have even been able to effectively communicate with our peers, even though it's the same 'English'.

I'm sure this phenomena isn't exactly a groundbreaking realization for you guys - the point that I'm trying to get at here is that language is more than just a form of communication - it can be used as a lens through which our society is viewed.

Along the same vein, I think that beyond just the story being told to us, the language itself within DDR is a crucial tool for us to analyze the Hong's narrative.

Okay there's tons of stuff to address under the broad umbrella of 'language' in DDR. The one that I want to focus on in this post is the effect of not fully understanding (or at least having to parse and interpret) desert creole on the reader.

The reason I wanted to focus on this topic was because I actually connected it with another aspect of my life - Chinese. I'm fluent in Chinese, but like many other students who attended international schools, my speaking skills for exceed my writing and reading abilities - there's a pretty straightforward explanation for this; Chinese is is a non-phonetic language, which means you can't really 'spell' characters. Instead, you just kind of have to memorize what they look like and attach that meaning directly to the character. The effect of this is essentially that speaking the language is much much easier than learning and memorizing individual characters. Nowadays, it's very difficult for me to read Chinese - if I picked up a newspaper, I would need to work through it very slowly, reading over sentences deliberately and looking up characters I didn't recognize. It reminded me a lot of how I had to approach Desert Creole in DDR.

I draw this connection because it's super frustrating for me when I have an idea that I want to convey to someone across languages - whether it's explaining the meaning of a Chinese word which has no direct translation to an American friend, or trying to tell my mom why 'Tree bark tea' has no scientific basis for strengthening my immune system. In such instances, I fully understand what's going on in my head, but language becomes a barrier in my trying to communicate it to others.

Desert Creole in DDR serves much the same effect - it acts as a barrier between our own understanding  of the text, and what the author may be trying to actually convey. It's also a highly individual barrier - depending on the reader's understanding of English, Korean, Latin, Spanish, etc. it can mean different things to all of us. I touched on this in my last blog post, but I think it's effect became more and more pronounced as the book progressed; the effect of language in DDR became increasingly relevant, but also increasingly subtle, as we worked through the novel. I'm sure many of us noticed that it became easier and easier to 'read' Desert Creole, and that with that ease came some sort of innate understanding of various aspects of the language - idioms, phrases, and manners of text/speech. I found it incredible that we were essentially learning an entirely different language, and that it's 'semantic' could be so easily separated from that of English.

This entire post was kind of unrefined and messy, but so were the ideas that I explored. Maybe I made it so rough as a stylistic choice, to manipulate syntactical elements of the language to change your readings of this post oooooo (nah, I'm just really tired, and too lazy to proofread the post).

Here are those Shia Labeouf videos I was talking about:

Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0u4M6vppCI

Just Do It:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0

Atop the St. Petersburg Dome

This post is an analysis of the passage titled "Atop the St. Petersburg Dome" from Dance Dance Revolution, by Cathy Park Hong.

The opening stanza sets the reflective theme for the rest of the passage; it focuses on two senses - visual, through its reference to the starry sky, and auditory, through the ending line's echo of "HULLO... hullo...hullo..." (33). The effect of this focus is that the reader becomes engaged in the described scene, with the descriptions engaging directly with his or her senses.

The rest of the passage follows a narrative of the Guide's past - her story begins peacefully, described as "no conflict o war" and "no rat-a-tat per se..." and then escalates to violence, "unrest shatta'd desert horizon to ellipses"(33). The Guide then describes her own journey as a tour guide; "I guided misbegodder fool who vacation in wobegone ruins", but asserts that her job revolves around deception, "To flower-arrange words so sand-piss / ash sounds like Melodious plot of / beechen green" (33). She establishes that in order to earn a living, she must twist the truth and cater to the expectations of her clientele, and laments her need to do so. The end of the passage is somewhat abrupt, as the Guide exclaims "I's leave you be. Mus' exuent." And then "inexplicably abandoned" the Historian (34).

In this passage, one thing that really stood out to me was the ambiguity of perspective - we have to remember that this is a transcription of what the Desert Guide is saying to the Historian. It is easy to forget that we, the readers, are not the ones being directly addressed. Reading the footnote after the entire passage was a jarring reminder that in fact there is a secondary perspective at play (that of the Historian). I'm not sure what to make of this observation, but I think it's an important comment on the complexity of perspective and its function within narratives. As in OSAFS, the narrative within DDR seem to be presented as multi-layered story within a story within a story. Fun stuff.

Everything Before Us || The Modern Asian American Archetype

'Everything Before Us' was a refreshing change of pace from many of the other Asian-American science fiction pieces that we've looked at: it was a modern, cheesy film, centered around social stratification, relationships, and of course, 'true love'. While other pieces have explored nuanced and complex ideas surrounding both the concepts of being Asian-American and science fiction, 'Everything Before Us', was, at least for me, a relatively straightforward film - at the very least, it certainly appealed to me as the most apparently relevant. The plethora of tropes, both dramatic and of demographic representation, created an interesting commentary in which the narrative revolves around the interaction between idealistic forms of these stereotypes - the characters are not so much 'real' people as they are perfect manifestations of these Asian-American archetypes that are prevalent within society today (these 'archetypes' refer to coalitions of common stereotypes of certain demographics of Asian Americans).                                                                  

These two videos are made by FungBrosComedy, a YouTube channel which focuses heavily on Asian American culture. The videos are obviously humorous and not serious, but do a pretty good job of capturing the broad 'types' of Asian Americans.

I have to emphasize that these stereotypes are not to be taken seriously ... It was simply interesting to see how accurately EBU utilized some of the archetypes that the Fung Bros explore.

I'll leave it to you guys to look for the connections between the characters in EBU and the types of Asian Americans outlined in the videos, but terms like 'Yappie' and 'White-washed' should really stand out.

And just as an aside: It was really cool to watch a film in which the culture being focused on was one that I could immediately relate to. I loved the whole 'California Asian' vibe, even though I'm not from California, or even American, just because it's such a prevalent demographic.

Split Down the Middle by Leo Xia

Split Down the Middle is a song by Leo Xia, a friend of mine from Beijing who now goes to USC. It explores the Asian American experience and the discrepancies of race and culture that come with such an identity.

There's a crowd-funded professionally recorded version coming out soon.