Tales of Wonderlost

koreastandardtime:

Young North Korean defectors are struggling to adapt to life at South Korean universities, the New York Times reports: “Attempts at integration, including government-run crash courses on life in the capitalist South, have had mixed results, leaving many North Koreans unable to adapt to South…

like it mentions in the article, one of the hardest difficulties for nk defectors to adjust to in the sk educational system is the stress on english. for those of you who follow the blog, askakorean, he once put a call out to people who were interested in volunteering with nk defectors. i am coordinating those volunteer english teachers for a nk organization (called unian) to tutor nk university students (from 외대) in english. please let me know if you’re interested!

paradiscacorbasi:

blacksentai:

It really needs to be stated that, while I’m actually all for punching people in the face, all this praise about it is unsettling. Cause, it’s all about white privilege. I do not have the ability to punch someone in the face at a bar. I would have my ass…

First, the women who are used in the making of pornography are a big deal. They are people, human beings, just like you and me.

They don’t tend to come from wealthy families. They are more likely than other women to have been sexually abused as children. And they experience high rates of drug and alcohol abuse. Yes, women in pornography choose to perform, and they are paid. But we all recognize that choices are made in the real world under a variety of constraints; not everyone chooses from the same range of options. When you are using pornography, you are using those women.

Second, the stories that men tell in pornography are a big deal. Let’s think about the prevalence of multiple penetration scenes in pornography. Or gagging scenes, where men penetrate a woman’s throat so roughly that the woman gags. Or ATM, industry jargon for ass-to-mouth. That’s one of the stories that pornographers tell: A woman wants to take into her mouth a penis that was just removed from her anus or the anus of another woman.

Pornography is not just sex on film. It’s a particular type of sex based on a particular set of ideas. Sex in pornography is sex based on domination and submission — male domination and female submission. Pornography is the sexualizing of domination and submission. It’s about making male dominance sexy.

Even if pornography is, in some sense, a fantasy, we might ask: Why these fantasies? What do these fantasies tell us about us?

~Robert Jensen

(the whole thing is worth the read)

piinboots:

stockade:

There are many problems with the way social justice is handled on tumblr and this is a post about those problems.

Disclaimer: This post is only about particular social justice bloggers on this website, not all social justice bloggers, and not the social justice…

good stuffs at the bottom~

“A group of Korean women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II jointly took legal action yesterday…against far-right activist Nobuyuki Suzuki. 

Public anger flared up last month after the 47-year-old Japanese man set up a provocative wooden post beside the statue of a young girl in front of the Japanese Embassy in central Seoul. 

The slim white post tied to the statute read “Dokdo is Japanese territory,” a claim in line with those by Japan’s extreme rightists, which also include asserting territorial rights over Korea’s easternmost Dokdo islets. 

The bronze statue of a young girl, which was set up in December by former sex slaves and their supporters, symbolizes Korean wartime sex slaves. 
Suzuki later posted a video clip on his blog showing him setting up the post and calling the war crime victims prostitutes.”

wtfffffff

jfitzlin:

Wikipedia’s summary:

Daughter from Đà Nẵng is a 2002 documentary film about an Amerasian, Heidi Bub (a.k.a. Mai Thi Hiep), born on December 10, 1968, in Danang in southern Vietnam, one of the children brought to the United States from Vietnam in 1975 during “Operation Babylift” at the end of the Vietnam War.

Heidi’s father was an American serviceman, and her mother, Mai Thi Kim, already had three children but was working at an American military base where she met him, after her husband, Do Huu Vinh, had left her to fight with the Viet Cong. When the North Vietnamese army came closer to Danang, Heidi’s mother feared for her safety due to rumors of [burning alive] mixed-race children. At the age of six, Heidi was sent to United States and placed at an orphanage run by the Holt Adoption Agency. 

This film is on Hulu! Watch it, if you have time. It’s about an hour and 15 mins. A newer film that tackles transracial adoption and Operation Babylift more comprehensively is the 2009 film, Operation Babylift: The Lost Children of Vietnam.

Transracial adoption is one of the most difficult topics for me in APA studies. It really challenges the confines of what I view as Asian American (language, culture, identity politics, diaspora) and the things I take for granted when I live with my family. It also really highlights the price of assimilation, forgetting, denial of grief and loss.

Just 10 minutes in, I feel a whirlwind of emotions and questions. I am angered by the U.S. Social Worker undoubtedly guaranteeing a better life for the Vietnamese mother’s baby, speaking in pidgin English to her. I am haunted by the scenes of the Fall of Saigon. The images of Vietnamese children learning English and later, the Vietnamese social worker telling the children crying for their mommies after they’ve landed in the U.S. “Don’t forget who you are”. 

Heidi/Hiep doesn’t really understand why her Vietnamese family is expecting her to sponsor them in America. On a large scale, we should think about the legacy of the Vietnam War, the poverty that strikes the “victorious” post-war Vietnam, the post-war dispersal of 2 million Vietnamese across the world, and the U.S. policies that show sympathy for the anti-communist Southern Vietnamese allies. When a family friend says about Heidi/Hiep: “When I first met Heidi, she ‘no speak English’.  . .[but]we’ve made a real Southerner out of her!” The neocolonial relationship of US to Vietnam and the uneven growth of the nations post-war (Vietnam and Cold War, in general), creates those conditions where mothers must give up their precious children. Fine, America is great - but if we could keep children raised within their own families in their own languages and cultures, why shouldn’t we push for that? I And how can we rethink adoption policies and practices in the U.S.? How can a TRA like Heidi be consoled? 

From her perspective as an Amerasian adoptee, Sumeia Williams tackles some of the problematic themes in her blog, Ethnically Incorrect Daughter. For instance, did the film-makers think about how much emotional stress this would cause Heidi/Hiep and her mother? Did they purposely not translate these cultural/linguistic differences so that the scene would be more “real?”