epiphany and third world feminism
12.08.05 (6:31 am) [edit]Once I picked up a call from my ex-colleague that I mentioned in the previous entry, I knew that I would have no choice but doomed to get high: that was a call to invite, or rather put it to begging, me to smoke crack together. So I did pick up the phone; I was in an extremely bad shape because a fight that I had picked up with my husband, which lead he and me to split inevitably. Therefore I could welcome every kind of demon, bad luck and/or negative force. Anybody who's got addicted to any kind of thing knows the mechanism of the addictive mind, so did I and I let it happen knowingly. I had no regret that I got uncontrollably high and came to term that I'd better off working alone than clinging to one client=husband no matter he was loaded. Funny how long it took to the conclusion and the belief that I always had with conviction. After smoking crack two days and nights, I became a super bitch as always when I am on substances and fought over a phone with my husband to seal the case. Thanks to my Korean hooker friend!
I just lost a long draft that I had just written, which was studying the movie Guru and Memoirs of a Geisha to bring up the issue of identity politics and post colonialism in representation of Asia. Now that it is lost without any trace, I don't feel like writing all over again, darn it! So let me tyr to jot down only the outline of the draft that is lost.
Once I was a bartender in an ILA funded Irish pub when I really wanted to break off with hooking.
The bar was in an area concidentally where were a bunch of streetwalkers and their clients, cab drivers.
Those cabbies/punters were mostly South Asians. Naturally, those people had their own kind of restaurants running late at night/24 hours.
I was then a hardcore alcoholic and often sitting in one of those super ethnic restaurants in front of TV watching their Bengali soap opera with no appetite fbecause of the bingeing I had been at before the dining.
It was the perioud I got absorbed by their South Asian cultures and all the Pakistani Rock music.
Later on, when the movie the Guru came out, I liked the movie whereas it was criticised for its represention of Asian people and culture to be offensive to them.
I do not want to be an idiotic imperialist like Gwen Stefani and Sofia Coppora, who claim to adore other's culture while they really vandalise and triumphantly redicule Asian people. Top it all off, they are commodifying local people and fully contemptuous while they benefit the political imbalance and make money. This hypocracy was always justified in the name of love for Asia.
Racism gets institutionalized when the phenomenon, such as exploiting others or their culture, is justified of their saying "Can't be fairer when they are adored?"
The treatment of Asian women as helpless pieces of meat, just fuckable because they just happened to survive slaughter or poverty or no human right exists situation, is justified and institutionalized. People in the West/US believe they are doing ultimate good whey they adopt Asian orphan but very oblivous of how those phenomena would have been accused if it was done to white 1st world kid/woman.
This has been almost culturally assigned to Asian (Eastern Asian) and the ever unexamined conceptual signifier is Geisha. If they make this dysfunctional vocabulary, because it practically does not exist or unaccessible to the Western eyes, materialize under the total control of Hollywood w/o hiring any Japanese to the lead roles, they are nothing but imposing their beloney. They are trying to make Asia into what they want to see and what they want them to become of, instead what they really are.
This is a bullshit so as Memoirs of a Geisha, Hollywood's m oronic imperialism based on a white male's sexual fantasy and lim itless greed to dominate others' culture. The movie dictates and monopolizes the discourse and representation to order around Asian women to be like this (sex servant of West) and serve them officially.