Category Archives: culture

Mayka goes to Grand Reunion.

10 Monday Oct 2011

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The answer to “Where do you see yourself in five years?” never included attending my college reunion. Yet there I was this weekend, fitting on my small talk hat, heaping burnt Mexican rice onto my plate, listening to how the evening band’s cover of “Shout!” is always a crowd pleaser, side-eyeing the guy who lived on my floor freshman year and asked me “Do you have any Irish in you? Do you want some?” (Disclosure: No and no.) AKA: Not my type of party.

But you know what? I actually had a great time. I don’t think it’s just because I went with low expectations, it was more like I just let go and had fun. Though Facebook has watered down the significance of seeing people from five years ago with its constant, sometimes passive, barrage of updates and who-got-married, being in the actual physical presence of those people is inimitable by any contemporary social networking technology.

What you missed at SCU’s Grand Reunion.

  • Bursts of “Oh my God! Good for you!” uttered multiple times from within multiple social circles at multiple events – Wine reception run-ins are the original status update.
  • The Crocodiles‘ first song of the night at the ’91/’96 party: “I Only Wanna Be with You” by Hootie & The Blowfish
  • Immediately followed by fierce stink eye coming from Mayka’s corner
  • Unidentified Blonde Female to Mayka: (Aggressive dance moves forcing Mayka back onto the dance floor.)
  • Intoxicated Male Attendee to Mayka: “Your hair…is blue.”
  • “Music is better 90s in Malley”
    • “On it!!”
  • The Cha Cha Slide, Electric Slide, and Macarena, but also:
    • “No Diggity,” “Shots,” and “Friends in Low Places” (Believe it or not, I know how to Tush Push.)
  • “Let’s go to the Loft!”
  • Professional Clubbing, the Reprise:

    • INT: THE LOFT. Midnightish.

    Unaffiliated Male: What’s your name?

    Mayka: Rita.

    UM: Nice, I’m Bobby.

    Mayka: Hi.

    UM: Where you from?

    Mayka: San Jose.

    UM: Cool, I’m from Fremont.

    (continued)

    So did you go to San Jose State?

    Mayka: (Clearly out of her game and unable to generate little white lies.) No, I went to Santa Clara.

    UM: Did you graduate?

    Mayka: (A bit incredulously.) Yeah? I just came from a graduation!

    UM: Oh, word? [Oh, the charm of Man Jose!] You look young.

    Mayka: (Awkward laugh.) Thanks.

    UM: I’m twenty-three.

    Mayka: (27.) I am not twenty-three.

    End scene.

    Didn’t that list just make you nostalgic for The Santa Clara Campus Bulletins?

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    Chopping it up at the barber shop.

    17 Wednesday Aug 2011

    Posted by in culture, hair

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    I got my hair cut by the American Dream on Sunday. As lightly chronicled in this blog, my hair is important to me. It’s a point of self expression that I enjoy dabbling with from time to time. Unfortunately, my method of outward expression – atypical cuts and unnatural colors – gets a little pricey sometimes.

    In progress.For women, the doubled up service of a cut and color often kicks the salon price up to triple digits, and the level of experimentation I’m looking for usually requires the skills of a more senior stylist. Which, of course, means even more expensive pricing. For these reasons, I am extremely picky with who does my hair. “My stylist” OhTee moved to Vegas, so the person I trust the most with my hair simply isn’t an option. I went to a stylist my friend recommended, but the stylist reeked of pot, wore a slept-in “WANNA MAKE OUT” T-shirt, and told the receptionist to bump up the Kesha when one of the songs I abhor the most came on the radio. She used up the remains of the dye I brought and charged me for materials, and tried to give herself alibis for the lifting she wasn’t able to execute on my roots – talking to me like I’d never dyed my hair before and wouldn’t know the difference.

    With MAGIC coming up next week, I finally got to a point in overdue-ness that I could not ignore my raven roots any longer. I took a chance on finding my next stylist and filtered Yelp for stars, close proximity, and one to two dollar signs. Continue reading »

    Miss Representation.

    04 Thursday Aug 2011

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    I’ve been on an awakening-post-feminism feminist kick,* so Kim’s high recommendation of Miss Representation has good timing. Written and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom (Yes, that one, SF dweller. That one.), it’s a documentary analyzing the misrepresentation of women in the media, and apparently it’s quite good! Good enough, even, to have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Interview subjects include Condoleezza Rice, Rachel Maddow, and Lisa Ling.

    I just bought my ticket for a San Francisco screening at the end of the month. Join my friends and me!

    Miss Representation
    August 26, 2011
    7:00 pm

    Unity SF
    2222 Bush Street
    San Francisco, CA

    I’m really looking forward to discussing the film afterward. (The destiny of an Ethnic Studies major is that she be forever starved for intelligent discourse about minorities in media representation.) Hope you can join us!

    * More on this to come, but here’s a quick digest for you: feminine competition, Undecided, and DailyMu.se.

    Unlearning feminine competition.

    20 Wednesday Jul 2011

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    I’m a neophyte when it comes to feminine identity formation. I don’t mean that I don’t know what gender I am. I’m informed enough to know that the concept of “gender” is a socialized one anyway, and that there are individuals out there who’d argue that I define my gender, and not whatever color palettes some Chief Marketing Officer thinks should be the first thing I encounter when I enter a store. I mean simply that I am just an awakened individual when it comes to feminism.

    Academically and personally, I’m just more in tune with ethnic identity. I see myself as American Asian first. It is the identity concept that I hold most at my center; it is more nuclear to my sense of self. It’s a very complex thing in itself, being American Asian, so the next circle of Google+ identity around that one is my being female, but it’s simply not as dense as my ethnic identity.

    I’ve never identified myself as a feminist. I’m not against the feminist movement at large, I just haven’t devoted myself to it as much as I have to learning about my own ethnic background. When it comes to female networking groups and female-specific initiatives, my stance has largely been “I don’t want that to be what people know me for. I just want to be a ball-buster, without being female as some sort of handicap. I can run with boys, so why push my gender as if that means anything different?” – This is a struggle to verbalize. I’m obviously not as eloquent in my feminine identity discussions as I am in other topics, but that’s just an extension of what I’m trying to say. I’m in the process of examining (*cough* Lotta *cough*) my possible place in the feminist world.

    There are some female-oriented things I’ve become more aware of in my adult life, though, and I’m not talking biologically. (Male readers, no need to fear.) Girls, why are we so fucking mean to each other? Women have been pitted against each other for no other reason than to fit into this self-defeating image of crabs in a barrel pulling other crabs down.

    The biggest thing I keep recognizing in my possible feminist awakening is how judgmental I am, particularly toward other women.

    Today it was because I cracked open the August Vogue.

    SJP

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    Happy Loving Day!

    12 Sunday Jun 2011

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    Happy Loving Day!

    ken + dana design, one of my favorite New York urban jewelers, inscribed these wedding bands with the case ID for Loving v. Virginia.

    This is a post that I hope many of my friends appreciate, for regardless of where they are in their specific romantic relationships, it certainly pertains to their rights. Forty-four years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States served the landmark decision to Loving v. Virgina that yes, interracial couples could marry.

    Holding:
    The Court declared Virginia‘s anti-miscegenation statute, the “Racial Integrity Act of 1924“, unconstitutional, thereby ending all race-based legal restriction on marriage in the United States.

    The Court debate started on April 10, 1967, and closed on June 12, 1967. Taking into account that the Racial Integrity Act was formalized in 1924, that means there was a 43-year period where White & Colored simply didn’t work. Not only was miscegenation socially perceived as inappropriate, it was criminalized. The Racial Integrity Act fascinates me. I could go on for days about it, about how miscegenation was just the tip of the iceberg, that interracial kisses on screen were forbidden, too (Never mind anybody actually giving a person of color a role of significance.), how some really sick eugenics shit was going down in Virginia, how it is just amazing and simultaneously impossible for me to comprehend.

    So now we come to today, Sunday, June 12, 2011. It’s Loving Day! Personally, I’m an American Born Chinese girl living with a blue-eyed White boy, and we actively talk about the family we’re one day going to grow. (NOT engaged or pregnant, we just think forward while living in sin.)

    I’m very grateful, though having been born decades after miscegenation was an issue that needed legalization, I will never fully understand what it’s like to be a minority who’s legally forbidden from mixing in marriage with a White person. I know that such huge social changes take time, but we still have a ways to go.

    …We can all see where this is going, right? Why don’t we all just get over our shit and install same-sex marriage as the legal institution it is destined to be? Imagine the lawyer fees it’ll save the nation, and just entertain the possibility that Funny or Die had it right when they produced Prop 8: The Musical way back in 2008:

    It’ll save the fucking economy. Come on. A full spectrum of flesh tones equals happy people, and so will gay unions. I’ve said it on more than one occasion (once, twice), that whoever considers marrying me has to consider waiting until marriage is completely fair first. If he or she were to balk at the notion, I’d give him or her a full lesson on Loving v. Virginia. These rights we have as Americans? We shan’t take them for granted.

    Image via www.socialworkdegree.org

    Unrelated: Weinergate. Loving v. Virginia. Real-life puns!

    Just barely related: Huma Abedin, would you marry me?

    Eating Chinese Food Naked.

    13 Wednesday Apr 2011

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    I sat with them on the sidewalk for about twenty minutes before entering the actual store.

    Just finished Eating Chinese Food Naked (I should have more clearly started that sentence “Just finished reading Eating Chinese Food Naked, but I didn’t.), an unexpected find at Walden Pond Books in Oakland. I really do mean it was unexpected. I went there with no goals of acquiring new texts, but then there were two huge fluffy dogs and I was standing in the fiction section and the author of this desperately titled book – Mei Ng – had the same first name as my last name and it was about Asian American diaspora and there you go.

    I’m sorry to say I didn’t really like it. Not to say that I expect to love every Asian American piece of fiction that comes along, but I’ve read more than a few from that genre, possibly on a constant search to find an echo of my own feelings and experiences. Eating Chinese Food simply didn’t do it for me, though I hoped it would. The author appears relatively young in the portrait on the back cover, and something (non-pinpointable) in the blurb told me the protagonist and I might have something in common. Alas, she was a girl with even worse familial relationship issues than mine and her constant search for sex in lieu of simple, pure love got annoying. But hey, maybe that was Ng’s goal. (For the record, I think it was.) In general I liked her writing. It seemed like the voice of a peer telling me a story. I just felt unsatisfied that the characters, even with all their vices, didn’t grow on me in the way that Free Food for Millionaires did. It just wasn’t my cup of tea.

    I’m also in the middle of Dreams from My Father, so I think I just needed a bit of a break from President Obama’s autobiography of racial identity.

    Still, I finished the book. It was a quick read and there were just a few things that led me to lift my pen.

    Although she had made friends, sometimes she looked at them and thought, Yes, you are my friend, but your parents have a house and sleep in the same bed and will send you to Europe in the summer and buy you a car for graduation, and yes, I am your friend, but I am your Chinese friend. She went to a few parties given by the Asian Student Union, but she felt everyone knew one another and that they were Chinese in a way she didn’t know how to be.

    He went on. “How can they mean that? They’re just saying that. Just before, when you were standing there in your robe, not holding me, not even looking at me – you know it drives me crazy when you do that, when you go so far away – I was thinking, Who is that ugly Chinese woman standing in my room? But now here you are and you’re beautiful. I don’t even notice your Chineseness. You’re just Ruby who I love.” His voice was tender and awed.

    When she wore her tight clothes, men looked at her and tried to talk to her. She didn’t want that. When she wore her big clothes, she felt that she was flopping around inside them, a little lost.

    Despite the fact that two of these three quotes are blatantly about being “The (Chinese) Other,” the book doesn’t hit you over the head with the protagonist Ruby’s feelings of being on the outside based on her skin. That, I appreciated. The quotes do allude to Ruby’s identity formation being an unfinished project, though, and her coming to an understanding of her identity is one of the strongest themes throughout.