I always thought it was weird to be obsessed with a country. But after a big struggle to avoid going to Germany, a weird enthusiasm for that country grew in me.
I find myself getting overexcited every time I encounter any kind of German connection, including people’s German last names, WW2 in history class, and even Sauerkraut from lunch. I almost forgot the reason that made me so afraid of going there. Instead of an inevitable reality, it turned into an attraction to a foreign culture.
Sadly, the same obsession didn’t happen with learning German. I have only opened my German books only once since this school year started.
As of today, this obsession is slowly fading away like my German skills, but one day I will pick both of them up and go to Germany.
This is just a compiled list of stuff I have liked or thought is cool recently
Vests:
It is most definitely vest season. Recently, I have been waking up in the morning to an extremely damp 55 degrees, enduring 85-degree highs on the hill, then returning home to frigid cold. Ventura County can’t decide if it’s winter or summer, still clinging on to aspects of summer while embracing parts of winter. I guess it’s fall but I like my longwinded description better.
Anyways, I’ve been super hyped on vests recently, specifically this Stussy Sherpa Vest:
PC;
Mine is purple and green. It’s sick.
I like to wear it with shorts, a white tee, and my Birkenstock Bostons (which we will touch on later), but it can also be worn with jeans and a tee-shirt or literally anything. That’s the beauty of the vest.
Birkenstock Boston’s:
The most comfortable foot experience ever.
If you’ve been on the hill in the past month you may have noticed I have worn clogs every day for 2 months now and it’s safe to say there is no going back. I used to be really into sneakers, but recently, I find myself picking birks over every other shoe.
In my current period of grinding college applications and AP class homework into the midnight hours, I care far less about my appearance in the morning: as long as I apply the stick of Old Spice Fiji floating around my truck before being around my peers, I’m valid. That’s not to say these shoes don’t look great with most outfits, I just have been putting less thought into outfits and my tan Birk clogs are perfect for that. They are also great for slipping into after hours of cramming my feet into soccer cleats for 2 hours or for skipping down chicken trail.
They are just the best
PC: Birkenstock
The Top Gear Radio Special:
Top Gear is my favorite show of all time. I was not a car guy when I got into it and still wouldn’t categorize myself as one, but there is just something about the humor, wit, and gab Clarkson, May, and Hammond have that makes me keep coming back. This is a radio segment from when the guys took over a random BBC station outside of London in 2006. The old news and hilarious traffic advice make this a must-listen. I play it in the car on my way to and from school periodically, and I really enjoy it. You don’t have to like cars. You don’t have to like Brits. Just listen. Trust me.
VC: Top Gear (posted by freshrigi)
Anyways, I might make this a recurring thing. Consider yourself
It is strange the way that we associate music with memories.
It is like a strong perfume that is impossible to disassociate with an era.
There are songs I cannot listen to because I was sad during the month it was in my playlist, or even because I feel that I have moved on from that time period. I now listen to a song knowing that one day, likely very soon, I will have grown out of this small era and will associate the song with the general mood of the month.
Small things in life change rapidly, including the clothes you choose, the breakfast you eat, your daily routine, the people you talk to, and the music you hear. Listening to music from a different era of mine often makes me feel uncomfortable, even if it was a good era, simply because I am not there anymore. It reminds me that times have changed, even if it is month to month.
Sometimes I regret listening to the same four songs day after day on my drive to school because I know what I am building. It will be a memory for my future self to listen to and reflect.
The automatic association of music and memories is hard to shake. They are not implicit memories, it is the general tone of the era that went unrecognized until you hear the songs and realize the moment has passed.
Being someone who considers themselves a second language speaker, I have always found that my native-language of Mandarin (although no longer as good as my English), holds a few words or phrases that I realized couldn’t translate into English. I say this not because there weren’t words for them in the English dictionary, because there were plenty, but because of the meaning that is lost in translating them into another language.
Mandarin has roots that trace back 3,000 years to the origin of the Chinese language, more recently becoming the common language of China over 700 years ago. Because of this, over the centuries, Chinese characters have gone from simply representing ideas or objects, to imbedding themselves into the deeper meaning of these ideas, becoming symbolic of what they represented.
I really don’t know if that would make sense to anyone who doesn’t have a non-English language where they can find an example of this. But essentially, what I’m trying to say, is as time as progressed, these words have solidified themselves as the sole-identifier for these ideas, meaning that the word in itself evokes instant imagery and clarity on whatever is being conveyed, it is the ultimate adjective, noun, verb, it requires no follow up, the word is a definition in itself just from the emotions it lets off.
Below I have jotted down a few that I’ve heard over the past several weeks that I don’t believe could ever be translated into another language and hold the same significance that it does in Mandarin.
香- xiang, like very good taste, smell, just feels right on the palate
哎哟，你做的饭好香啊
aīyō，nǐzuò dèfànhǎoxiāng a!
Oh my, this food that you made is so savory!
(Personally when I use this word, it evokes an image of that scene from Ratatouille when Remi takes a bite of the cheese and strawberry together and colors begin to swirl together on screen as he’s just in ecstasy. Just to give an example of what I mean by evocative)
情 qing, like very caring of, adoring, affection, lovey-dovey
转盼多情
Zhuǎn pàn duōqíng
a loving (or soulful) glance
辛苦- xin ku, working very hard, deserving of praise, worked to exhaustion, withstanding bitter hardships
路上辛苦了。
Lùshang xīnkǔ le.
You must have had a tiring journey.
脑海- nao hai, mind, same symbolic connotation as a heart that just doesn’t exist in English
你存在我深深的脑海里。
nǐ cúnzaì wǒ shēnshēn dè nǎohǎi lí
You exist, deep in my mind
存- cun, to exist, to protect it, cherish, withstand the test of time
I promise to love my mother, my father, my sister, my brother
for eternity.
I promise I will represent my filipino nonnie and my black grandfather
as I walk down the street with my hair as
big and curly as ever.
I swear to be as spiritual as my grandmother,
And to not let the stress overcome me.
I vow to teach my sister everything I had to learn alone.
I promise to heal those around me with love and joy.
I pledge to never bleach my hair.
I vow to not express through harshness but through
my passion.
And,
I will never forget my heritage
I will remember where I came from and be
humble
I will come home,
wherever home may be
I will always listen to soul and jazz music that comes from
the heart of New York,
or the deep south.
This is set of rules, guidelines, and obligations that will set a path for me in my near and far future. I may break or might not keep these promises but I will try. These promises and statements will shape me and prepare me for the unknown.
Cult classic. Directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. Named “The 100 Greatest Movies of all Time’ by Entertainment Weekly. It’s Psycho.
This movie is in my personal top 3 favorites. It’s also a pretty recent discovery for myself. It was a cold, rainy sad day. I was ill and spent the whole day at home, watching TV. After hours and hours of watching “Friends” and “Masterchef”, I decided to watch something actually meaningful. I wasn’t going into “Psycho” with much expectation, actually, I barely had any. I could never imagine that a black and white picture from the 60’s was going to scare me more than “Insidious” or “Conjuring.”
Also, before watching I somewhat knew the plot. I think almost everyone knows the famous shower murder scene from the movie, just from it being parodied in pop culture a lot. I couldn’t imagine that two hours later I would need to turn on the lights in the room because I’d get so scared.
The story is simple. Marion Crane, an office worker, steals $40,000 from a bank and leaves town to start a new life. Exhausted after a long drive, she gets caught in a late night storm. To shelter herself, she checks into The Bates Motel. The motel is run by an awkward, young man called Norman who lives with his mother next door.
Psycho is a real mind teaser, a murder mystery if you will. It’s full of suspense and paranoia. The black and white actually perfectly matches the mood of the movie. It’s raw, unnerving and gripping. Tense and horrific, it will haunt you for weeks. Psycho IMDBRotten Tomatoes Score
Halloween brings with it a lot of feelings. Excitement, happiness, the “officialness” of fall, and the feeling that all those scary things that go bump in the night are real. All of those feelings are expected, but the feeling that isn’t expected but seems to be there anyway, is a certain insecurity and anxiety.
Recently, I have grown even more conscious of my choice of Halloween costume.
Last year I found myself having to explain who I was dressed as to a complete stranger who made a not so delicate reference to my race.
He said to me, with a quizzical eyebrow raised, “Are you, like, an Asian version of, like, Harry Potter’s girlfriend or something?”
I didn’t realize at the time how much this bothered me, but the more I thought about it, the more troubling it became.
Firstly, I was not a Harry Potter character – I had no reference to Hogwarts or Harry Potter on my person. Secondly, unless he was referring to Cho Chang, who most people forget dated Harry, he was referring to Ginny Weasley (Potter). Who is not/was not just Harry Potter’s girlfriend – she was a Weasley and a kick-butt heroine.
But it really bothers me that in order to play a character that I adore or admire, people have to specify that I am the Asian version of them. Admittedly unavoidable because I am Asian, but still bothersome.
As I thought more about this, I started to think of an Asian character I could be. I thought of all the books I have read and all the movies that I have seen. Very few came to mind.
Which brings me to light whitewashing. As I furtively searched for a Halloween costume this year, I found myself not wanting to have to explain to someone that I am an Asian-American dressing up as someone who is just American or just white in general.
So I ended up looking up Asian movie and book characters. It is disappointing that I had to search this in the first place, and almost as disappointing that I found even less.
This whitewashing issue is true for every “not white” race, but I put a stress on Asian because that is what I am.
Here are some examples of some of Hollywood’s whitewashing:
Photo Credit: Hollywood Reporter
I went looking for Asian screen characters that I could play, and the results were dismal. Then I looked for articles addressing whitewashing, and truthfully I found quite a few, but it was hard to find any that were specific to the Asian-American demographic.
I did find one by the New York Times though, which was nice because it wasn’t just about how whitewashed Hollywood is or how lacking in Asians it is. The article was also about how some Asian-American stars who had made it to recognition were fighting back (read more here).
Piggy-backing on the New York Times’ article, the Odyssey also published an article about the whitewashing of Asians in American cinema, stating, “The only difference between this generation’s whitewashing and the previous generation’s whitewashing is the gradual separation from the use of “yellowface.” (read more here).
Now Hollywood just neglects that the fact that the character was meant to be Asian.
But thanks to Buzzfeed, I can at least see what blockbuster films would look like with Asian leads. For example, this is only one of them:
Photo Credit: Buzzfeed
Perhaps part of the issue comes from my own insecurity of not looking “enough” like the people I look up to. But it does make me sad that I don’t find more people to look up to who look like me.
If I could live anywhere in the world, I wouldn’t limit myself to one location – I would backpack across the world and escape from society, exploring each corner of the earth. I would separate myself from civilization as I went from place to place, exploring my inner self and soothing my soul. Wherever I […]
Lots of my American friends have been asking me about Christmas in China and how we celebrate the holiday. Well, since Christmas is not a Chinese traditional festival, we do not really celebrate it like the western cultures.
However, Christmas is becoming more well known and more popular. There are always Christmas tress near the big shopping malls and the trees on the roadsides will be decorated into colorful lights. There will be sales in the malls and Christmas music is everywhere.
Only some families opt to have a small Christmas tree during Christmas in China. Few homes have Christmas lights strung outside or candles in the windows. Malls, banks and restaurants often have Christmas displays, Christmas trees, and lights. Large shopping malls help usher in Christmas in China with tree lighting ceremonies.
As for the Santa Claus, it’s not uncommon to see a Santa Claus at malls and hotels across Asia. To draw some attention, some stores will have their staff dress up as Santa and probably do some performances. Chinese children do not really get gifts from people but everyone expects something from the mysterious Santa Claus.
I am really excited about this upcoming holiday. Hope it’ll snow this year!
OVS Journalism Blog 
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