Please answer these questions. Use the stories they refer to for references.
1. Angel Island poem translator Jeffrey Thomas Leong writes in his introduction to Wild Geese Sorrow, that the poems carved into the walls is “a poetry of resistance, or as often-called “the poetry of witness,” which documents the unbearable hardships suffered by human beings. Do you agree or disagree with Leong that the Angel Island poems (the examples in the excerpt) are a poetry of resilience? Why or why not?
2. In response to Frank Chin’s incessant criticism of her rewriting of the Fa Mu Lan myth as a way to pander to white audiences, Maxine Hong Kingston said: “I’m not even saying that those are Chinese myths anymore. I’m saying that I’ve written down American myths. Fa Mu Lan and the writing on her back is an American myth. And I made it that way.” What do you think she means?
3.In part of the introduction to her book titled “Model Minority Mythologies”, scholar Erin Ninh writes: “The heart of the issue is not whether an Asian immigrant family currently meets the socioeconomic or professional measures of the model minority. Rather, the issue is whether it aspires to do so, whether it applies those metrics: not resentful of the racializing discourse of Asian success as a violence imposed from without, but implementing that discourse, with ingenuity, alacrity, and pride, from within. … By such standards, if ever that identity was only myth, certainly the model minority is mythical no longer.” Do you agree or disagree?
4. David Eng and Shinhee Han write about “racial melancholia” in the chapter “Racial Melancholia: Model Minorities, Depression, and Suicide”, and Cathy Park Hong writes about “minor feelings” in the essay “United.” What do these terms mean, and how are the especially relevant to Asian Americans at this moment in time?
