When Heaven and Earth Changed Places #3

Le Ly Hayslip was once a hero in her childhood. The Viet Cong, a group of fighters who were fighting agianst the Republicans who belonged to the north, had adopted Ky La, Hayslip's city as a center for their operations in that area. Ky La had many skirmishes and the people of Ky La were told that if they told the Republicans any secrets they would kill them and all of the people they loved. Already in the book, many people had been killed execution-style for associating with them or just be seeming suspicious. At one point, Hayslip had just come back from a notoriously dangerous prison very fast, and her family was under house-arrest because the Viet Cong thought they were suspicious. The act of seperating them from the rest of the village like that just gave them more reason to be suspicious because since they weren't seen with the obviously guilty villagers, the Republicans treated them better and avoided harming their house. After the house-arrest was lifted, Hayslip did another thing to cause the Viet Cong to suspect her. As she was walking to the field to farm, she accidentaly lead Republican soldiers to a place where two Viet Cong members were hiding, which ended with the two Viet Cong dead and her facing absolute death. After some time, though, she looks back on why she didn't even think of "tattling". She says that "Back then, we didn't even know anything about the world going on beyond our small area, Saigon seemed like a world away to us, never mind America (151)." The people in her village didn't know much else besides farming and the only reason they sided with the Viet Cong was because they had practically brainwashed them with propaganda telling them they were doing something good, so if she had told anybody, she wouldn't have done it because she thought it was "right". What she was doing at that time wasn't something she needed to go against, no matter how bad the treatment became.

Blog Question #3

In the movie On the Waterfront there are mainly two views on "ratting" or being an infomant to the police. The mob members, mostly Johnny Friendly and Charilie think that squeeling is selling out your friends, no matter what excuse you come up with. Terry, on the other hand, thinks that when your "friends" are doing something you need to stop, you need to stop them. In the beginning Terry didn't think like that though. Through the movie all the way until the end Terry is first standing up for himself and then he stands up for the people around him, the dock workers. After Terry testifies against Johnny, the whole mob turns against him because what he did was their idea of a "stool pigeon".
I think that you need to tell the truth when the lies are hurting people. However, there are times when people are cruel and don't try to help anyone and are just looking out for themselves. The mob was like that in the movie. In the end when Johnny took everyone's guns away from them, he didn't do it because he wanted to stop hurting and killing people, he did it all for himself so that the police wouldn't find something incriminating. Tattling and trying to stop something wrong are just points of view. To the people who are exposed, they think its tattling but the people who are doing the "tattling", they are doing it because they feel what they are doing is right. In elementary school, you might remember teasing or being teased for being a "tattle-tale" and when we were kids, there wasn't such a thing as a "moral crusader". Kids think selfishly and that works for them, but we aren't kids anymore.

Blog Question #2

In the play, All My Sons by Arthur Miller, many characters give up their morals in order to give their family a "happy" life. Joe Keller sends cracked cylinder heads to the front lines that ultimately kill 21 men during the war. He does so, and lies about it for three years, later saying, "You're a boy, what could I do! I'm in business, a man is in business...(69)." Providing for his family at the time, the boy who knew nothing of the business and a wife, took precedence over the thought of maybe killing people. Kate Keller also doesn't expose the truth to their son, Chris, and her reason was"You can't bull yourself  through this one , Joe, you better be smart now, This thing-- this thing is not over yet (75)." Kate Keller's determination to not fall and have their most dangerous secret revealed is so strong, she lies to everyone. She lies to her own son, if it meant believing that her other son hadn't died because of her husband. She also puts her family's fragile balance over turning her husband in, and ruining her family for good.

I believe that some things are worth hurting your family, but there are also things that are more important than going along with society. It just depends on how important you think the thing that you have a choice of betraying your family for actually is to you. Peer pressure isn't a very good idea to break apart your family for but for some people their country could be that thing that they would choose.

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places #2

For this post about my Outside reading book, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places , the devotion of certain people to others is a big piece that influences how the people Le Ly Hayslip is introducing to us live and their beliefs. She herself has grown up knowing that "The  oldest child in each family was responsible for providing for the family once the parents were gone. Sometimes this responsibility included vengeance for the father's death (69)." The strong connection between parent and child is what their whole society is based on. Young children grow up just to prove their parents proud and to provide for them when they grow old and feeble. Their devotion to their family bonds lasts even beyond death. Another common form of devotion is the kind between wife and husband. When Hayslip's sister's husband was taken away, she waited for 7 years for her husband to come back. Hayslip writes, "Waiting patiently for rice to grow or mountains to fall or lost husbands to come back was also the Vietnamese woman's way (22)." Waiting and holding faith that her husband would come back was the norm for Vietnamese women of that time.

Steady devotion to the people around them, including family and friends, was the principle belief of the people in Ky La, Hayslip's hometown. Unfortunately, as the war progressed, Ky La was engulfed in a power struggle between the North and South forces. "Life in the village had gone from love and distrust of no one to fear and mistrust of everyone...(70)." The change of attitude in a community where people helped each other out became a fragmented group of people, scared to talk to the wrong person or do the wrong thing. If they were caught doing something suspicious, the southern guerillas hiding in their village would execute them. Needless to say, during the tough part of the war, people hardened their hearts and walked softly in order to avoid being killed, and not just by the southern guerillas. The northern people also interrogated and beat the people of Ky La. After being surrounded by people hurting them, I am very interested in how Hayslip survived such a hard time.

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places

The book I am reading for outside reading this quarter is When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. It is an autobiography by Le Ly Hayslip that journals her experinces growing up in Vietnam during the Vietnam war. When she was growing up, she was raised with views on life that seem alien to me, like when her mother "...sang heroic songs to her tight belly, ate sparingly, and worked extra hard ...(Hayslip 1)." All so that her baby would be born a healthy and strong person. These kinds of thoughts are very different than the way we normally treat mothers in our society. Being careful and really cautious around expecting mothers is what most people do, and most mothers don't want to risk their child's health. I expect that back then and there, Le Ly's mother didn't have the scary truths that science sometimes bring us. Another custom alien to me was the thing her mother said to her, "When you marry, your mother-in-law will become your second mother--your boss. If you can satisfy her as a maid, she'll think you are a suitable wife for her son (Hayslip 12)."Trying to please your mother-in-law is something most spouses try to do so that they will be accepted, but in Vietnam back then, they see it as a kind of interview with their "boss" and that being accepted is what a young wife is supposed to do, not just highly suggested to do. Doing so will bring honor on your parents, which is the best thing that a child could hope for at that time.
There were also some very down to earth reasonings that Le Ly's family and her community were suprisingly down to earth in a lot of instances. One such moment is when the rice crop fails for some reason or another. When you normally see a society that has so many stories about rice, with rice playing a big role in it, or rice as a role in itself, a speaking role, it kind of struck me when she said " We always blamed crop failures on ourselves -- we had not worked hard enough...(Hayslip 9)." Compared to their stories about how rice had become so hard to prepare, like the story where the bags of a fast-growing plant and a hard to grow plant were mixed up by someone God sent down, so that rice was hard to grow and grass grew everywhere very easily, the fact that they accepted their defeat with such reality. These kinds of moments were rare, but many things in Le Ly's society when she was growing up show how their customs vary from lots of places around the world to make Vietnam a special place, especially to Le Ly.

Poll update: Voters having 'buyer's remorse'?

In the article I read, the latest polls have shown John McCain catching up to Barack Obama's 49-44% lead in the national polls. However, this isn't odd because as the title of the article says, people might be experiencing "buyer's remorse", which is switching candidates because they think the other one might be better. Even with a large difference in popularity, McCain is still in the running, even though the only other person to overcome such a deficit was Ronald Reagan in 1980. I think that this presidential race is still not over, and that nobody should be surprised, no matter what happens, because this is a race that will go down in history.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/30/poll-update-race-may-be-tightening/

Photography

In the article I read, I learned that taking pictures of flowers in full light makes the flowers become lighter and have less contrast than if they were pictured under shadow or on a cloudy day. This kind of application of techniques of shadow and lighting also shows us that even when it is sunny, it doesn't have to be a "happy" picture. If some things are taken in specific lighting, like flowers in shadow it might even be be more artisticly pleasing.

Zuckerman, Jim. "Flower Photography in Good Light." BetterPhoto.com. 23 Oct. 2008 .

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The Best of Satyajit Ray: A Strange Night for Mr. Shasmal

This is a short story about Mr. Shasmal who we find at the beginning of the story in a bungalow he rented for 3 days. He is served dinner by the servant that comes with renting the bungalow and during dinner, they talk about how they are in the middle of the forest and that Mr Shasmal shouldn't leave his door open at night. Just after dinner, though, Mr. Shasmal finds a dog in his room after he leaves the door unattended. He calls the servant but the dog is gone and everybody is thoroughly confused. A little later, the dog appeared in the corner again and he noticed another animal in the opposite corner of the room, a stripped cat. He remembers about one night years ago that he was angry and a cat yowling was really annoying him so he threw a large paperweight at the direction and it ended abruptly. The next day the neighbor's cat was found murdered. At that time he was scornful of people who considered killing animals murderers, like killing ants as a kid. A murdered dog was what he tried to remember now, in 1973 he remembered when he got a new car he was speeding and hit a dog and just kept going. Now, all the animals he had killed showed up in his room; snakes, and birds and cats, whims of cruelty. Soon, he heard footsteps. He knew who they were, they were his business partner who had turned into an enemy because he was against the way Mr. Shasmal ran their business and was going to file a report to the police, so Mr. Shasmal knew he had to take care of him. After he had shot him, he had gone straight to the bungalow. There was a knock on the door and Adheer, the business partner, spoke to him...

In the end, it turned out that Mr. Shasmal had missed when he had shot Adheer and he had brought the police because he "decided this lunatic must be handed over to the police (279)." 

I think that the guilt Mr Shasmal had gathered his whole life and had tried to bury was drawn out by his, what he thought, killing of Adheer. He had lied to himself his whole life that nothing could be earned by stray dogs or annoying cats. He also seems to be a distrubed person in some way because he was able easily revert to violence whenever things weren't going his way. In the beginning of the story, he had asked a funny question, if there were ghosts in the bungalow, but when he heard that there weren't it seemed he was too relieved for it to be a joke, but that was when the author hadn't told us about Adheer, so I wasn't able to understand it until after I had read. Mr Shasmal's guilt really does seem to be the main reason he hallucinated about all of the things he had killed while keeping us in the dark, which made this a very spooky title all the way until the end.

Ray, Satyajit, and Gopa Majumdar. The Best of Satyajit Ray. Trans. Gopa Majumdar. New York: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated, 2001.

The Best of Satyajit Ray: Bapin Chwdhury's Lapse of Memory

Bapin Chowdhury was an avid reader and had a responsible job with a very sheltered life, so when a strange person calling himself an old friend from 5-6 years ago approaches him at the bookstore he frequents saying things that repeatedly contradict what he thinks, he starts to doubt his own memories. He visits Ranchil, the city he was supposed to be at and tries to remember since another friend of his said that they were both together there. In the end, it turns out that his old friend Chunilal had planned this whole thing, from the stranger to his other friend giving the same story because Bapin had repeatedly refused to help him find a job when he was on hard times. This story really tells you how easily the most staid person could doubt himself if he is given a few pushes in one direction. I think anybody would be made to believe the plan Chunilal concocted mostly because he covered all bases and also because people are just gulible sometimes.

Blog Question #1

2. I think Homer shows Odysseus as a liar and murderer because he thought that pretty words weren't enough. If you were to find your spouse being courted by suitors who are sucking your wealth dry after you have been gone for 20 years, anybody would be upset. To do justice what brings us to Odysseus' side when he pretty much commits cold-blooded murder. There are probably not many people who read the book thinking that Odysseus should have reasoned with the suitors, revenge is what we would hope for, even today. Today, I think we as a people have gained perspective and have learned that both sides of wars have stories, which means our heroes should be different that Odysseus, but Odysseus still strikes a chord with a lot of us because we still, and probably will always be attracted to the side of humanity that is raw and hasn't changed for thousands of years.

There is also the cunning and always planning side of Odysseus that seems ahead of its time. Smarts are always thought of as a good characteristic for a hero, and Odysseus exemplifies this really well. He is always labeled as the "great tactician" which was definitely good, especially during war-time which meant it was a good characteristic like bravery. Pride, however wasn't so great of a thing to have. Achilles was prideful in The Iliad when he said he wouldn't fight, which ended up killing his best friend. I think Odysseus was more like a real person than an unreachable hero (or superhero) because he had those bad qualities and the great qualities you would expect. I think this causes us to reach out to Odysseus more and makes him seem much more like a hero we like nowadays.

AIG and the Economy

Compared to the little slumps in our economy that are part of the business cycle, the slump that is happening now is caused by greed and bad ethics, says the article I read for this week. I think that people who are suffering right now because of their bad decisions or accidents don't have only themselves to blame. The mortgage companies' employees also tried to get the most out of the good economy by taking advantage of the system to their own gain are also to blame for their dishonest actions. Now the people who have been forced to foreclose their homes are facing the worst situation of having no roof over their heads.

David, Francis R. "Economic Slump: Ethics Loom Large". ABC News. September 20 2008. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/CSM/story?id=5800670&page=1. September 21 2008.

START!!!!!

Time to start blogging to infinity...maybe not that far but definitely till the end of this year, full power!!