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As I had said in class, Chairman Mao was very important in my political life, just as the films of Bruce Lee influenced my sister to go to her first prom with a fellow student who happened to be Chinese. My brother's basement, today, forty years later, is still adorned with poster from Kung Fu movies, and these movies inspired him to study Chinese at the Univ. of Pennsylvania. During the seventies, the influence upon the African-American community by China was enormous. Even today, fast food Chinese restaurants are sprinkled along the boulevards in enclaves described as urban blight that is more correctly known as the inner city. My niece was aboard one of those Air Force planes that was flying over the coast of China trying to intercept message, and to this day she works for the government monitoring the Chinese government. The influence of China is great in the African American community. Not just the food, and the accouterments but the revolutionary fervor that gripped people for a while, inspiring the Black Panthers, along with an entire generation. It dwells within our subconscious. I thought I would share a flyer, at the end of this essay, that I developed last year as chair of United Teachers Los Angeles Women's Committee.
Long Live the Chairman!
At the time, I incorrectly labeled the quote on the flyer as a Chinese proverb, but it is a quote from Chairman Mao. In nursery schools, during the sixties, we instructed students to put their sweaters on backward, so their neighbor would have to help them button the sweater up – once again- something attributed to the Cultural Revolution. Posters of happy peasants, and workers covered our walls, and we knew that revolution would spread like a[font=Arial] “[/font][font=" times="" new="" roman"]prairie[/font][font=" times="" new="" roman"] fire”[/font]. In fact, I worked on a newsletter called prairie fire in Newark, New Jersey. Now people know prairie fire as a drink!
[font=" times="" new="" roman"]This class was not just interesting because I accumulated more facts. More importantly, I felt like someone. The professors were addressing me as an intelligent being, rather than as a conduit for the transmission of information to students. It caused me on a weekly basis to challenge some of the preconceptions that I brought into my classroom, some of my prejudices and biases. It forced me to reexamine my practice while enticing me to delve more deeply into those communities that heretofore seemed peripheral to me.[/font]
A pivotal point in my teaching career occurred when a young Korean student told me why he would never be allowed to marry outside of his cultural group. I was his English teacher and he would often stay after school to “help” me around the room. This was the first time, back in the 80’s when I learned the word “uri”. How the word symbolized the unity of people and ideas, customs and beliefs. How the I was a part of the we in a way that our culture would never understand. He tried to make me understand how this would be tantamount to his losing his identity for the community would abandon him. This is when I first learned the plights of those black children left behind by our G.I.s in Korea and Vietnam. It was bittersweet for me to sponsor the Korean American Tutorial program knowing that some of these students would never accept me as an equal.
I then took a Korean language class, and the gratitude of the parents as I addressed them in their native language gave me hope that Koreans in America would change. I admonished a colleague of mine, Dr. Joe, when he had written an article for the Los Angeles Times in the spirit of brotherhood, where he said Black American could learn from the Koreans how to persevere and work hard, and Koreans could learn how to have a good time from Blacks. I told him that I understood his intentions, to build bridges, but that article demonstrated that he knew nothing of American History and was insulting and patronizing in its content. For these reasons, I really appreciated having our guest lecturer from UCLA. She was not only informative, but also culturally sensitive and progressive in her views. The idea of knowing people through the cultural lens of food was appealing to me and afforded a methodology that I was not accustomed to. She helped me to see that the Korean community in Los Angeles has progressed not only economically but also socially in the last twenty years. I will use the stories that she gave us about Korean names to introduce my research project on names this semester. In this project every student researches his/her own name and ties it to the larger cultural landscape.
I have used Asian themes in my classroom in the past, primarily because I was teaching ESL, and so as I shared with my colleagues this summer, I had the students learn how to use chopsticks, while we read the picture book, How My Parents Learn to Eat, as well as learning how to write out recipes and measure while we read Everybody Eats Rice. These books speak to the universality of the human experience and allows us to bring in the issues of multicultural living, intermarriage and other very contemporary topics.
This year, I find myself in a film magnet, and that opens up a whole new entry point for the introduction of Asian society into my classroom. I can use film clips to illustrate Americans perceptions of others, case in point, Asian. It was interesting to my students as we watch West Side Story to know that a Japanese-American was playing the part of a Puerto Rican. Not only that, but also that Nobuko is still a vital member of the Japanese-American community today. The films that we saw in class, learning how to use clips, was especially important to me. It also has renewed my interest as a purveyor of foreign films. In addition, it provided a platform for me to engage my students in a program that is called Speak Truth to Power, sponsored by the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation, http://www.speaktruthvideo.com/defenders.html, where students will create video about human rights and our part of the struggle to make a better world.
Finally, the culminating task of creating a unit has definitely changed my curriculum and I am sure that the unit will challenge my students. Additionally, the development of the unit plan gave me the opportunity to team-teach with my colleagues.
To Doctor Clayton Dube and Catherine Gao, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to engage in high quality professional development and making the experience enjoyable. This class should serve as a model for type of in-services that teachers need and deserve. The only thing I wish is that we would have been able to set up informal groups where people would share out more of what they were doing and what they plan to do in the future. Thanks to everyone for allowing me to participate.
edited by lguthrie on 1/6/2015