I am an Asian-American college student majoring in Technical Communications at the University of Washington. My Spring Quarter 05 Schedule: posTComm, TC 403, TC 407, ARCH 251, ESS 495.
All I need to do is find a PAID summer internship and I'm set!
Surprise surprise! This is my first blog posting ever. Feiya has been kind enough to give me permission to post to her site :) It makes sense to me, seeing as she is my better half! Anyway, I wrote this poem yesterday, and Feiya asked me to post it. So here I am posting it, as you can see! :) Enjoy!
Angry Words
Hot, stabbing daggers
Pouring from my heart,
Not willing to give an inch.
"LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE!"
They say.
"SEE THE PAIN IN ME!"
They say.
"YOU MUST EXPLAIN!"
They say.
"YOU MUSN'T LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN!"
They say.
Fool I am.
Not seeing the truth.
A cry to the Father.
Blood pours down,
With water mingled.
Dead.
Days pass.
The stone rolls.
An empty tomb,
Neatly folded cloth.
He lives!
My anger is real,
But so is forgiveness,
And it is greater.
I tried to get you to change,
But that is my lot.
With Jesus' love I accept you for you,
the way that you are,
And Jesus help me, I'll be made new.
So it's super hard to get work done here. I'm only about half way done with O.Chem and I only have three more hours. I went to the Saturday market this morning though and took some pictures. But since I have to do lots of O.Chem today, those pictures will likely not be seen for a few days. Blasting music is so great though. Today's poem is going to be a surprise :) which will be making its appearance later in the day.
Unknown @ 3:50:00 PM
Among the flowers from a pot of wine
I drink alone beneath the bright moonshine.
I raise my cup to invite the moon, who blends
Her light with my shadow and we're three friends.
The moon does not know how to drink her share;
In vain my shadow follows me here and there.
Together with them for the time I stay
And make merry before spring's spend away.
I sing the moon to linger with my song;
My shadow disperses as I dance along.
Sober, we three remain cheerful and gay;
Drunken, we part and each goes his way.
Our friendship will outshine all earthly love;
Next time we'll meet beyond the stars above.
I don't know if any O.Chem will get done today at all, even though it was all I really had planned to do. I woke up for lecture this morning, and after lecture, did laundry and read Hard Times. Doing laundry was really cool though, not because I had three loads, but because I didn't have to pay to dry them all! This really nice man was in there fixing the machines and he was super nice and put a hour worth of drying time on three dryers and half an hour on a fourth machine, and then when he noticed that I put a few things in the fourth dryer, asked if I wanted some more time on that one, and :) I politely declined saying that I only put a few things that would probably dry quickly in it. Thus, I saved at least $2. By then it was lunch time and I ate with Steve. It's really hard to talk above the din at By George and also not feel stupid because my voice is all messed up from my cold. I'm going to spend the next hour putting away laundry so at 2:30 I can meet Tian and Wendy for ping-pong. At 5:30, a group of us are going with my friend Vo to Chinatown to eat and then go to an Asian Praise Night for HS and College students. I'm excited, Vo said that there's going to be a few hundred people, and what's better than praising God? Praising Him with hundreds of my brothers and sisters! Even cooler is that it'll be a sea of black hair and brown eyes. So for this reason, and another undisclosed reason, today's poem is by an Asian poet. A slightly different translation of the above poem can be found here (the poem is called Ziyi Song and is third from top).
Unknown @ 1:55:00 PM
I slept so much last night and I don't even feel any better! I feel jipped. And it looks like this winter is going to be a more typical Seattle one, unlike last year when it was actually sunny a few times and didn't rain for ungodly amounts of time at once.
Time Does Not Bring Relief
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountian-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, --so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.
It poured today. And I didn't have my umbrella. Not only did I have to run from my O.Chem class all the way to my English class, but after English, I had to walk in the pouring rain to Haggett. This is the kind of rain where if you are out there for more than 2 minutes, you start to have little streams flowing down your face. If I didn't already have a cold, I bet I would now! The cool thing was that I bumped into Danger and I ended up helping him make omelets with bits of chedder cheese in them and that's what I had for lunch. It was good. Another thing that is good: tea. I only have two packets, but Christina (my Bible Study leader) was so kind as to drop by and loan me her tea. And I do believe that the tea in the jar that she gave me is the very succulent Pike's Market Tea. Now if only I could get the cap off...
Today is a poem which is relevent to the current circumstances:
COMMON COLD
Go hang yourself, you old M.D,!
You shall not sneer at me.
Pick up your hat and stethoscope,
Go wash your mouth with laundry soap;
I contemplate a joy exquisite
In not paying you for your visit.
I did not call you to be told
My malady is a common cold.
By pounding brow and swollen lip;
By fever's hot and scaly grip;
By those two red redundant eyes
That weep like woeful April skies;
By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;
By handkerchief after handkerchief;
This cold you wave away as naught
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught!
Give ear, you scientific fossil!
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal;
The Cold of which researchers dream,
The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.
This honored system humbly holds
The Super-cold to end all colds;
The Cold Crusading for Democracy;
The Führer of the Streptococcracy.
Bacilli swarm within my portals
Such as were ne'er conceived by mortals,
But bred by scientists wise and hoary
In some Olympic laboratory;
Bacteria as large as mice,
With feet of fire and heads of ice
Who never interrupt for slumber
Their stamping elephantine rumba.
A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!
Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;
Don Juan was a budding gallant,
And Shakespeare's plays show signs of talent;
The Arctic winter is fairly coolish,
And your diagnosis is fairly foolish.
Oh what a derision history holds
For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!
To see what we have never seen,
to be what we have never been,
to shed the chrysalis and fly,
depart the earth, kiss the sky,
to be reborn, be someone new:
Is this a dream or is it true?
Can our future be cleanly shorn
from a life to which we're born?
Is each of us a creature free—
or trapped at birth by destiny?
Pity those who believe the latter.
Without freedom, nothing matters
I was eating lunch in By George today and reading The Daily, and the opinion section is just hilarious.
Some background first. A few days ago, I was walking to the HUB to get lunch and I pass this crowd of people, all grouped around what seemed to be about three or four people who were shouting at each other. And in the middle of it all, there was a cameraman who looked like he was from a local channel. So I was like...um, is this a class project or something...? But then I looked around and there happened to be an unassuming little hut with signs that said had words like, buy a cookie, Affirmative Action etc. Which in itself is suspicious. I look closer and there's this sign that had the various prices of the cookie, but instead of pricing it by cookie type, it's priced by what ethnicity the buyer was. Apparently, this idea is NOT ORIGINAL. Berkeley's Republican Group held a similar Anti-Affirmative Action Bake Sale, and it was covered by Fox News. (Article) The prices were a little different for the UW one, but the idea is the same. Some group in Texas also did a spin-off of the bake sale, but also dealt with gender in affirmative action. I really wish I could have taken a picture to show you all.
And thus I shall quote a few of the interesting bits from the opinion section here:
Birthrights over bake sales: Perhaps the most blatant justification for affirmative action currently resides at the White House. Our country needs affirmative-action programs to counterbalance the advantages that members of the upper class, to which George W. Bush belongs, have by birthright. This president, a mediocre student at best, was admitted to Yale as an undergraduate and later to the Harvard business school on the basis of his family connections — a variation of affirmative action that the College Republicans aren’t baking cookies against....So, since life is not fair, why shouldn’t the public universities of this state give a little admission preference to a daughter of migrant workers from the Tri-Cities or to a kid from a single-parent household in south Seattle?
— Kam Lee
library technician, UW Libraries
(yes, the Tri-Cities, in an interesting way, was quoted here)
A plague on both your houses: The UW College Republicans (UWCR) is following a script written by conservative organizations all over the country. First, do something stupid, like a graduated-price bake sale. When called out on it, blare as loudly as possible that the media, campus officials, the faculty and student government have a liberal bias, and that conservatives do not have access to free speech on campus....My advice to the UWCR is to start acting like responsible, honorable conservatives and not like whiny morons.
— Robert Farley
graduate student, political science
Missed opportunity: The fact that UW College Republicans (UWCR) did or did not know “what it was getting into,” or did or did not “predict the outcry,” is totally irrelevant to the point....The board thinks the group brought it on itself, or should have known the bake sale would end in violence with its product being trashed and their signs being torn off their booth. Do you actually think the group got what they deserved? Or that it better not have another bake sale for fear of additional violence?
I don’t care how much you may disagree with what a group or person is saying, you must defend the right to express it. A college campus is the place for many ideas, both popular and unpopular. You don’t seem to be defending the UWCR’s right to express itself in the tradition of this republic.
LOL, I just laughed so hard when I read the part about how the bake sale eventually ended up in violence. How typical. I actually think that I saw a girl in my biology class come in late with the aforementioned offensive sign tucked under her arm. How awesome would it have been to be there with a camera/camcorder to record this moment when the patience of the audience broke and resulted in physical action? I can't even imagine how it must have taken place, was there a group of people who had planned it ahead of time? Or was it just someone who was yelling and impulsively tore off a sign which invoked the mass mentality and everyone else rushed in to do some damage? Did the two well-dressed young Republican men with sanitary gloves on throw their hands up and run to a safe distance to watch sadly as their booth is trashed? Or did they start shoving too?
Now, due to the political slant of today's blog, the poem of the day will follow in the same genre.
Martin and My Father
Martin was too peaceful for me.
He let those Deep-South dogs bite him
Police club his head
Suburbanites stone him
Cowards bomb his house
Firemen hose him down
and judges throw him in jail.
I used to pack a .357 Magnum
and if anyone messed with me,
I would aim, pull the trigger
and feel the kick of the gun
saturated in spicy anger.
I wanted to kill all the
racist pigs in the world
and marching peacefully
like Martin did, wasn't
about to do it.
One time while arguing with my father
I pulled a knife on him.
That night he cried himself to sleep
and I felt like an assassin.
The next day I heard that Martin
was shot dead and my heart crumbled
for him and my father.
My anger turned ice-blue hot,
well-kept, on target,
proportionately forever and
it was on this anvil that
my pen was forged.
So I took my gun and knife,
threw them in the lake
and watched them drown.
Then I went home and while
my father took a nap on the couch
with the t.v. blaring about
Martin's death,
I kissed him with a poem.
And I'll tell you.
That Martin,
He was something else.
So I've pretty much spent the entire day so far just making cards. All of a sudden there's a bunch of people who have October birthdays. Lotta parents like January for some reason. So being in a creative card-making mood, I thought of a poem I could stick inside one of them, and even though it'll probably ruin the surprise, I'm going to post it here anyway. This is an awesome poem, I first read it on Lila's blog last year and enjoyed it.
"Still I Rise" You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
Fifi 
Saturday, October 18, 2003
