Impact of photos..

I don’t know how many of you noticed but our book has pictures (Yay!).  Between pages 304 and 305 of Takaki has eight pages of photographs about the Asian American Experience. One of the pictures that really stood out to me shows three Filipino American women dressed in American fashion with their hair bobbed. The caption reads “We were treated like actresses. It didn’t matter what you looked like. Just that we were Filipinas” (Takaki 503 ¾). I believe this sort of thing still happens today where we treat people as some exotic treasure because of the color of their skin or where they are from. A lot of our literature shows how ignorant of a response this is.  In a fictional story, a girl enters a writing contest and has her work chosen because it is Korean. She senses this difference in her writing from the other’s that were chosen from her feel good stories and reminds herself “never to say thank you” because why should she “like a… beggar... thank them for listening” to her (A Cab Called Reliable 258). This shows how she is treated substantially different from other students because of her heritage and used almost as a tourist attraction of authentic Korean miserable stories.  In another fictional work, a similar story is told where a man travels to different towns talking about the war in Korea. His audience is bored during the majority of his speech until finally he showed pictures that “satisfied” his audience which “murmured with pleasure at the images of the farmers, in their year-round stripped pajamas” (From the Foreign Student 290). We use foreign people as an attraction. This was also the case in a play where a Filipino father pretends to be Hawaiian and plays in bars in America because “It’s a treat! It brings in a crowd, a curious crowd (Eye of a Coconut 337). This differential racism still happens today. I have overheard many conversations where people are unconsciously racist- “You’re Hawaiian- do you surf?” “Oh! From Montana? You must ride horses a lot.” “Korean? Have you eaten a dog?”  I am not exempt from this but it is good to notice this sort of thing.