Comments on: The Cut-Off Defence

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 18:18:33 +0000

Your realization about how much importance your history weighs in your life is exactly the way I feel. Even with a renewed interest in my culture in the last year, I know it’s not THAT significant.

Maybe these movies/books are for the parents (first generation immigrants), not the kids. I remember a bunch of my aunts going with my mom to see it in the theater and they were bawling when they came out.

And I read about Banana Boys just a couple of months ago! I think I’ll have to pick that up some time. There’s something about books that are based on local areas, and I knew a bunch of people who went to UWaterloo for university.

By the way, you have to (re)enable comments on your blog!

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 14:49:46 +0000

If you’ve seen the movie, the book is pretty similar. The Kitchen God’s Wife and Hundred Secret Senses were good too, but are pretty formulaic. (If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t want to spoil it for you) I think Amy Tan tends to focus on ancestry and rediscovering roots, dealing mostly with issues of first generation immigrants and identity issues of second generation children. Stuff like trying to figure out which side of the line they fall on, Chinese or North American? While some of the stuff resonates, there is a certain elevated and noble tone to the entire thing. While I’m interested in the past I never knew, I’m not sure it occupies that large a space in my life.

I tried reading a book called the Jade Peony by Wayson Choy, but I couldn’t get past the first couple of chapters. I’m working through another book right now by Terry Woo that I just bought called Banana Boys (yeah, white on the inside, yellow on the outside) which is sort of like Douglas Coupland meets Amy Tan with vignettes of a few different characters who are students at UWaterloo. It’s a fun read and so far, I find I can relate to it pretty well, but I’ll hopefully post something about it on my now-decrepit blog when I finish reading it.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 03:09:27 +0000

You know, I had no idea who Amy Tan was but immediately thought of the Joy Luck club as the only “universal” American/Canadian-born-Chinese thing that I knew. Then I looked her up, and lo and behold, I was thinking of the exact person you were talking about, without actually knowing it.

Maybe I should try reading that some time; perhaps it would resonate for me as well.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 14:41:39 +0000

You’re definitely not alone. One of the things I find really compelling about your writing is how much if it resonates with my own experience and struggles. I often think about how many other people would find comfort in a book or something detailing these kinds of experiences. At least something beyond Amy Tan, heh.

By: xibee

xibee — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 23:41:40 +0000

Wow, Jason, I thought that was only my math experience…. I still have math-panic thanks to my terrific upbringing…

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 22:13:56 +0000

@Jason — I remember my dad yelling at me to memorize math equations, and saying “You’re a disgrace…you’re Chinese and you’re bad at math!”. When I started to cry, he was literally disgusted by me and walked away. From this, I learned to shut down too.

I’m in the exact same boat about not using that dynamic in my relationships. My first instinct is to shut down and hide everything. Sometimes it feels like the situation too overwhelming, and I have to calm myself down first. I can’t believe that there’s someone else who can relate exactly to how I feel; no one else I know has gone through the same thing, or handled it in the same way. Very comforting to know that I’m not alone.

@Causalien — Could you rephrase or further explain what you mean, I don’t quite understand.

By: Causalien

Causalien — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 20:41:52 +0000

By cutting off, I believe that one makes permanent the effects which that person has on oneself. When one can hurt me like that, I don’t believe honoring them in such a fashion can be justified.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:35:14 +0000

For me, part of it was a personal safety issue, as in, more emotion would mean another round with the ting-tiu and I imagine you may have heard something similar growing up, “Why are you crying? Are you a GIRL? Stop crying!” And I remember as time went on, the yelling just faded into the background and I learned to shut down and tune out. I think that I derived whatever “power” I could as a child by demonstrating that whatever was said or done would only receive a stoic silence.

One of the challenges for me lately is to not apply the same dynamic to my relationship, but unfortunately, when I find that there’s a conflict that can’t be immediately resolved, I completely shut down and go silent. It’s been frustrating at times, but I think you summed it up really well in the last sentence of your comment above.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 11:16:11 +0000

Actually, I was also thinking specifically of how my childhood created this defense mechanism. I had to show no emotion, put no faith in my parents, share nothing with them because they wouldn’t care, and it was their indifference that killed me. We’re definitely casualties of our cultures in this sense, at least I feel this way because I don’t particularly like it about myself, but find it extremely difficult to change.

There are two sides to every coin, and what is strength to one person can always be considered weak to another. Neither side is right, of course, but try explaining that to people who don’t understand. The fact of the matter is that we have to deal with this in ourselves; it does exist, and life becomes an adventure in finding out how it affects us, the ones we care about, and the things we do.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 05:10:18 +0000

This post struck a chord. I’ve often had exes ask me how I could so easily cut them out of my life and the question often doesn’t make sense to me because it seems natural to do so. Sometimes I wonder if that this was a product of growing up in a household where love was conditional and it just became easy to lift the emotional drawbridges and wall myself in safely. I guess from my exes point of view, they consider this a weakness or some kind of character flaw but I’ve always thought of it as a strength.