Washington Post Article here.

Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time in the freshman class at the region’s most prestigious public magnet school this fall, a milestone reached as the number of African Americans and Hispanics has remained low and the Fairfax County School Board prepares to review the school’s admission policy.

Black and Hispanic students often are vastly under-represented. Many of the schools struggle to reflect the diversity of the wider population while maintaining a transparent admissions process with uniformly high standards…The incoming class will have 10 Hispanic and nine African American students. The School Board is scheduled to review the admissions policy this month.

Hmmm. I don’t know how I feel about this. The article cites that first or second generation immigration students receive pressure from parents to do their homework, obey their parents and perform well in school yet at the same time cite that the average [white] child spends less than 1 hour a day on homework. I do not want TJ to install an affirmative action policy to appease the parents that want their children into TJ. As we all know, just because you’re accepted into TJ does not mean that you are guaranteed that spot for all four years and in the time it took for you to be accepted and drop out or be ‘kicked out’, you took a spot from someone that really deserved it. While affirmative action may have helped me get into college or my cultural background may have helped me stand out from the rest of applicants, I could not have gotten into–and stayed in–college based on that alone. How much longer do we need affirmative action? There are many poor white people that can’t afford to get into college and many people that achieve success without AA. Affirmative action is just solidifying racial differences instead of making equality. School systems are done apologizing (I mean, I didn’t get AA for being a woman and racial minorities were in school and could vote before women could), and they’re just re-opening and making more painful the wounds that existed generations ago.

It’s the same concept with reparations. Yes, we give reparations to African Americans because they were enslaved, but at the same time, do not recognize my relatives that walked the Trail of Tears, Native Americans that were forced to convert to Christianity, forbidden to speak their language and farm for other people, or Chinese people that replaced African-Americans on the plantations after the Civil War as slaves. Not to mention that land was stolen (and not given back) to Native Americans, who are currently in a state of economic, social, and cultural poverty, restricted to their ‘reservations’ yet injured every day by state casinos and forced by depression to alcoholism, thus rendered incapable to fight for themselves via the government (not to mention their lack of education and awareness of the possibilities–or lack thereof–through the government).

And we wanted Hawai’i because it was convenient for us so took over a self-governing, independent nation and made it a state. Now we take their land that they use to practice their religion and force them off of it, stating that it’s “private property” and run them to poverty by high real estate prices and standard of living costs and then take away their refuge (in the form of beach tents or rainforest trailers), when they are just trying to have something that resembles a normal life.

To think that these people were once part of their own glorious nations, and their current state is all our fault.

The Dim Sum of All Things by Kim Wong Keltner

Finished the last couple of pages of this today. I was actually looking for authors refrenced to in Rashomon, when i saw the color of this book. YES, its true, im attracted by the covers and titles. i dont research and get a book i want. i just end up very lucky by finding good books. i liked the pun on the phrase DIM SUM, which could be used in a chinese or american way. dim sum as in the chinese a la carte luncheon, or dim sum, as in a bleak outlook of things. i liked the cover as well. seemed my style. Lets just say that i LOVED this book. perfect plot and character development, perfect details, but leaving enough for you to determine your own conclusions, just steering you in the right direction. i liked her side stories where she would be talking and then all of a sudden go : END TAPE ONE. REWIND, LIKE, A THOUSAND TIMES…. etc. and then go into a tanget story before resuming the original plotline. i liked the characters like-ness to me, except she was the opposite of me. her love interest was more like me. a chinese grandmother that grew up in hawai’i. (ha-vah- eee). i love love loved this book, and didnt want it to end. it was like, the way i DONT want to end up, in terms of culture-ness.

American Fuji by Sarah Backer
i thought this was ok. i thought it was going to be more of an informational guide to japanese prejudices(spelling?), but it was like a stupid round about mystery with situations that would never happen(letting an old guy sleep over your house by accident(that you had met that day!) and then divulge oyu horrendous secrets to him, letting him pose as your husbad for your surgery within a week of knowing him?) i tried to understand her japanese that she wrote, but it didnt make sense because she sucked at romaji. i could get the general idea though.

PS: the ending sucked.

Rashomon and other stories by Ryuunosuke Akutagawa
i rented this book from the library. i loved it so much, the catch phrases, and such, that i wanted to write in it and develop my own ideas on it. so i went out and bought it. (can i say that borders sucks! BN all the way) 12.95 later… i know, right? i have it. though, not the version i wanted. why do all the reprinted covers look so much worse. and no illustrations! i just couldnt understand how if he died in 1927, he made allusions to the holocaust, which occured in the 40s. my favorite story was Yabu no Naka. this story, (in a grove), i liked because of the plot twist at the end. i also liked Kesa to Morito. same reason. i find it odd that both of these stories involved rape, and in hope to conceal their shame, the victim conspires to kill her husband. more creative on Kesa’s part (i liked the monologues), but i liked the change of view in Yabu no Naka and how he felt sliding into death. ANOTHER short story compilation?? what am i thinking?! the lack of change of view in Ryuu was interesting as well, though i did not quite understand the aim of the outer frame (in the frame story, pocket 10 cents from ninth grade english), and it seemed redundant. a hollow way to end the book. (though it wasnt quite an ending because it was just a collection compiled some twenty some years after the author’s death (in ’52) to reflect his best work. not in my opinion, but hey.) AND i did like the foreword by the english guy. i did not like the title story Rashomon named after a ruined torii in Kyoto. it seemed short and empty. as if it tried to have a plot, a purpose, to teach a lesson or moral, but failed. It was was easy to tell what scenery the author was familiar with because he used the same prefectures, rivers, cities, and mountains over again.

Video short stories by Meera Nair
i am not one to read short story novels. especially with no sex involved. though, the title story video did involve some. this book was a change for me because it was written by an indian author. it was harder to grasp the culture and idioms than the usual japanese, korean, chinese books that i read. but, fortunately, i do know quite a bit about the indian culture (though slim to none about their religion and less about the languages). i learned some interesting facts, and while some of the stories shared similarities, it was not repetitive rewording of idential plot ideas. i felt that the more i read, with each new chapter, the author became more comfortable in her style of writing, the writing style seemed so innocent that it was shocking when “curse words” as a characters string of thought, or lustrous scenes occured. her style of writing with incomplete sentences is similar to mine, so i felt as if i shared a kindred spirit with her. i did like how she captured the male and female characters equally and with almost the same voice. she managed to change the tone and point of view in almost all of the stories, while still having some trademark-ness left. my favorite stories were a certain sense of place, video, and vishu’s valentine day. i did not like curry tree because it was …w eird. about smell? she describes flavors of food very well in this story though. just remembered, a common thing about her storied was journalism. good way of incorporating local events.