Asian American Studies by Matthew Vega

The important part of the Poem

mvega1346 — 2024-12-11 23:02:07 UTC

In this poem, I like this part of the poem saying "The two incidents are similar in that both people who approach the speaker assume that he is not American. At the same time, the incidents are also different in other assumptions made about the speaker of the poem. The man in the first incident assumes that the speaker of the poem is identical to and representative of all the people of Japan. he thinks that by speaking to this one person he is speaking to the many people he bombed and to all their kin. If he speaks to this one person, he reasons, he speaks to them all. he apparently holds the racist assumption that "those people" are all alike, not different individuals. In the second incident, the cabdriver focuses on the racial difference that the speaker represents. Assuming that the speaker of the poem is not American, he focuses on determining which of two Asian nationalities he might be, suggesting that knowing exactly which racial or national category the speaker falls into is more important than knowing him as an individual".

Asian American Final Project

mvega1346 — 2024-12-11 23:02:17 UTC

Throughout my time in the class, I have learned many things about Asian Americans and the history surrounding the immigrants and the struggles growing up in areas they were unfamiliar with. For the creative work I would like to put a poem I found at the school library online. This poem is important because it shows two different incidents that one Asian represents all Asian American's and another being that the Asian American doesn't see himself as American.

Explaining the Poem and the connections

mvega1346 — 2024-12-12 00:29:15 UTC

The stuff we went over in class, mainly talking about the docuseries, is that asians were facing many discriminations for example the attack on pearl harbor. After the attack on pearl harbor many asian americans that had nothing to do with it were falsely accused of aiding the enemy Japanese people. Many asian americans were separated from their families and eventually got sent out to internment camps where they would eventually be moved to different ones often resulting in never seeing family. This connects to the poem because in the first incident it says "he thinks that by speaking to this one person he is speaking to the many people he bombed and to all their kin." This reminds of how the two brothers were eventually turned against each other because one sided with the japanese and the other sided with the americans.

Personal or Family experiences

mvega1346 — 2024-12-12 00:52:08 UTC

When it comes to Asian Americans coming over to america for a better life and having more opportunities to pick from, my grandparents from both Puerto rico and Salvador both have similar experiences. When my grandparents came over, they were looking to start better lives for themselves, I remember my mom telling me that my grandparents would work extremely hard for little to no pay and that not learning the "universal language" in the US, that being english, made it even harder for them to settle in. Not only that, immigrants or people coming for a better life often got frowned upon because they were taking up all the jobs so people had to look for alternative solutions.

Cultural Impact

mvega1346 — 2024-12-12 01:10:38 UTC

Asian Americans are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in America. According to this website, What it means to be Asian in America, "In other cases, the choice reflected U.S. patterns of intermarriage. Asian newlyweds have the highest intermarriage rate of any racial or ethnic group in the country." This shows that asian americans had a very huge influence on upcoming generations in America and that other ethnicities not only asians, are also just as important.