Might As Well
Dec. 18th, 2004 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ziasudraYes, apparently I have so much time that I don't know what to do with it
*avoids doing the right thing and go Christmas shopping*
What the heck, lest people accuse me of playing favorites with my classes...
Journalistic Tradition Final Paper
Length: 2,212 words (the limit was 2,000, oops!)
Summary: Literary analysis of five selected works by Mark Danner, John Hersey, George Orwell, Jacob Riis, and Eric Sevareid. All tied together with a rather lame magnifying glass metaphor.
Insurance broker Jialing “Tim” Yang used to be an aero-engineer. His former job required frequent business trips to Beijing, China, where he went both as a company representative and as a language and culture translator for his Caucasian colleagues.
During one of the trips, his co-workers made a cultural faux pas. “Our host served us Peking duck to honor us,” Yang said, “but my co-workers wouldn’t take a bite.” Refusing a host’s proffered food is a serious offense in the Chinese culture. “Later on I asked them why,” Yang continued, “and then I found out that they misheard our host offering them Peking dog.”
Yang now looks back at the episode with amusement. But his colleagues’ cultural encounter raises an important question: in a world where cultural encounters are now commonplace, how should white Americans conduct themselves during these encounters?
For journalists who carry the extra responsibility of portraying “the Other” authentically while keeping an eye on the propriety of their own cross-cultural interactions, the question becomes: How to write race correctly? This question is becoming more pertinent in an increasingly globalized world, and more so for cultural and war reporters who must step into another ethnic group without offending the Other.
“When those who are white encounter people from other races or ethnicities, they become suddenly aware that being white means something,” writes Doug Schaupp, author of Being White: Finding Our Place in a Multiethnic World. “They may feel frustrated when a friend of another ethnicity shakes her head and says, ‘You just don’t get it because you’re white.’”
How, then, to “get it”? While there isn’t a Reporting Race as White Journalists for Dummies, war correspondents and cultural reporters can look back to past journalists for help. Many legacy journalists learned how to portray people of different ethnicities through their own cross-cultural experiences. To enhance the effect for the visually inclined, I offer this image: a magnifying glass—a culturally-catered magnifying glass—whose parts and function are represented by literary giants Eric Sevareid, George Orwell, John Hersey, Mark Danner, and Jacob Riis, all of whom have had their own cross-cultural encounters in the past and preserved their experiences in journalistic writings.
Eric Sevareid was the archetypical American. When he was young, he adamantly refused to learn his family’s language, Norwegian, or learn anything un-American. What happens when the American Golden Boy encounters culture? Sevareid describes such an encounter in Not So Wild A Dream, in which a tribe of local Burmese helps Sevareid and his fellow flight mates after their plane crashed during World War II on the way to China. American soldiers eventually arrive to fetch the men. As the rescue team enters the Burmese village to retrieve Sevareid and the soldiers, one of the locals approaches the army medic, Flickinger, for help.
"A wrinkled old man squatted behind the colonel as he worked. He had a whimpering baby tied to his back, and he tried patiently to get the doctor’s attention. When he succeeded, he pointed to a large abscess under the child’s ear, then opened his fingers to disclose an egg, which he had brought for the doctor’s fee. Flickinger took a pill and demonstrated how the father should chew it in his own mouth, then spit it down the baby’s throat. The man got the idea immediately and retreated with grateful smiles." (Sevareid, 266-267)
The exchange between the American and the Burmese is silent, but there is understanding and mutual appreciation. Sevareid records the scene as a silent observer: he writes of a cross-cultural encounter that worked. An encounter of humanity touching humanity. Language is unnecessary.
The most important thing we can learn from Sevareid’s experience is his response to the encounter. He writes down everything as he sees it. There is no embellishment, just the wordless interactions between doctor and old man. As someone experiencing culture shock (Sevareid later writes that his two Chinese companions seem to be the ones comfortable with interacting with the Burmese villagers), Sevareid refrains from voicing his opinions. Instead, he serves as a lens through which we can read and experience the encounter for ourselves. Sevareid writes race by showing us race.
Similar to Eric Sevareid is Mark Danner. Like Sevareid, Danner is a white American. But unlike “Not So Wild A Dream,” Danner’s book, The Massacre At El Mozote, is more than mere mirroring of a culture. The book is a product of extensively-researched journalism. What makes Danner an ethnic writer as well as an investigative reporter is his sensitivity in portraying the El Mozote massacre.
Danner successfully writes race by employing objectivity backed with careful research and thorough reporting. It would have been easy to portray El Mozote victims as the good guys and the Atlacatl soldiers as the bad guys. But Danner does not do that. He maintains perfect objectivity throughout the book, neither glorifying Colonel Domingo Monterrosa’s actions nor diminishing survivor Rufina Amaya’s recount of what happened on the day of the massacre.
If Sevareid’s recount of his cross-cultural observation is a lens, then Danner’s careful journalism provides focus for the lens—focus to look into both sides of an intra-culture conflict. He points us to relevant characters and documents for the purpose of telling. He shows us Latin Americans killing Latin Americans, Americans fighting Americans on the legislative front, and ultimately, self fighting self, as he quotes what James LeMoyne heard the ruthless Colonel Monterrosa confess: “Yeah, we did it. We carried out a limpieza there. We killed everyone…He said, ‘In those days, I thought that was what we had to do to win the war. And I was wrong’” (Danner, 152). Did a massacre occur at El Mozote? Definitely. Did it reflect failures on both the El Salvadoran and American sides? Yes. But Danner’s characters remain human beings. They are not vilified or objectified into the abstract Other. We see the characters’ strengths and flaws through Danner’s focused reporting. In terms of writing race, Danner succeeds.
A well-focused lens will always remain an object of limited influence until it is made into a tool. A regular magnifying glass’ frame offers handle and support; a cultural magnifying glass’ “frame” provides readers with necessary cultural explanation and contextualization. John Hersey’s Hiroshima demonstrates such a framework of support. He employs the same objectivity that Sevareid and Danner use, but more so than his two American-born colleagues, Hersey situations his readers within a specific historical and cultural context—Hiroshima, Japan; August, 1945.
A missionaries’ son born and raised in Tientsin, China, Hersey was familiar with Asian culture. During World War II, China and Japan crossed path numerous times, and it was not unusual for people of one ethnicity to know about the cultural proprieties of the other.
Hersey uses his understanding of Japanese culture to set readers within a boundary of time and place. He writes race by defining the necessary vocabulary for “talking race.” Throughout the book, he references Japanese terms to give his narrative a more cultured tone. A quick read through Hiroshima would teach readers that Tasukete means “help,” a Molotoffano hanakago is a Molotov flower basket, a ryokan is a Japanese-style inn, and hibakusha refers to survivors of the atom bomb, literally “explosion-affected persons.” Hersey’s Japanese terms create an ethnic-specific atmosphere in which he situates the story. They do not hinder the story; rather, they provide cultural context that enable readers to see more clearly the exact ethnic setting in which Hersey’s reporting takes place.
Hersey gets his message across: the atom bomb attack on Hiroshima devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese, as shown by one of his images he relates from Father Kleinsorge: “he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run don their cheeks” (Hersey, 51). Hersey’s characters are no mere “war victims.” They are Japanese hibakusha, ethnic-specific people suffering a tactically-specific bombing aftermath.
Another culturally-sensitive writer is English essayist and novelist George Orwell. Born in British India, Orwell maintained his tie with colonial Britain when he worked several years in Lower Burma under the Indian Imperial Police during his 20s. Orwell experienced first-hand the failures of colonialization. In response, he became acutely aware of ethnic tension around him. Already a sensitive and introspective writer, his sense of injustice regarding British imperialism magnified in essays such as the Moulmein, Burma-based essay, “Shooting An Elephant.”
While in Burma, Orwell was called upon by the locals to kill an elephant. The essay is merely a description of the incident, but Orwell uses an overall bleak tone, negative diction, and some rather grotesque imagery to convey his belief that Burma is a destitute place due to the evils of imperialism.
The beauty of the article lies not only in Orwell’s descriptive writing, but also in what he calls in a later article political writing: “the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after” (Orwell, 312-313). Orwell uses the elephant as a metaphor for imperialism—a dangerous creature he is required, and expected, to control, though every fiber of his reason and morality resists such a calling. Orwell poses a question at the end of the article, “I often wonder whether any of the others grasped that I had done it [killed the elephant] solely to avoid looking like a fool” (Orwell, 156). Against the backdrop of political writing, one must wonder, globally, what really is the motivation behind the race of imperialism among colonizing empires like Britain and France? Is it fear? Thirst for power? Vanity for perpetual empires?
Orwell provides no answers. His writing merely describes a situation in a way that provokes readers’ thoughts. Orwell’s article illuminates. His writing is the light that passes through the magnifying glass’ lens, creating the necessary brightness to make life of the colonized—the Other—visible to readers.
So far I have constructed a cultural magnifying glass from journalists’ ethnic encounters as strangers in foreign lands. But cross-cultural experiences often occur closer to home. Another setting in which cultures collide is one’s immigration experience to America. When Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans, and Africans converge on a common place in America, what happens? It is the journalist’s job to make sense of what life is like for those whose birthplace is not the United States. In this setting, writing race becomes more than a white-analyze-colored situation. It becomes us vs. them, a dichotomy which often creates just as wide a gap for ethnic misunderstanding as that of a war reporter’s culture encounter. Unless, of course, the journalist himself is also an immigrant.
Jacob Riis moved to the United States from Denmark at 21. He was a first-generation immigrant. Some may argue that many of Riis’ writings reflect deep-seated prejudice against other ethnic groups—he equates an Italian neighborhood with a pig-sty, for example (Riis, 37). But prejudiced or not, Riis possesses one thing that only a fellow-immigrant can have: empathy. Riis himself knows what it is like to struggle in a hopeless cycle of poverty and despair; he is familiar with the Lower East Side’s horrid tenement conditions and the City’s prejudiced housing and labor laws. Through his photographs and perceptive journalism, Riis makes known to the rest of New York “how the other half lives.”
"Step carefully over this baby—it is a baby, spite of its rags and dirt—under these iron bridges called fire-escapes, but loaded down, despite the incessant watchfulness of the firemen, with broken household goods, with wash-tubs and barrels, over which no man could climb from a fire. This gap between dingy brick-walls is the yard. That strip of smoke-colored sky up there is the heaven of these people,"
Riis writes in How the Other Half Lives, a book of photos and articles documenting immigrant life (Riis, 34). He brings into light a side of New York City that the wealthy and the native-born did not know existed. He shows them what he sees, he narrows the gap between the familiar and the Other.
Riis transforms readers into eyes that see. He provides the cultural magnifying glass with a purpose, with someone to look through the lens. He gives faces and names to the abstract notion of social problems. He photographs skinny and dirty children to embody poverty and hunger. Riis enables. He enables awareness to seep in by showing readers exactly where to look. They do not have to look far, just down the street or up a few blocks: Chatham Street, the Mulberry Street “Bend,” Hestor Street, Baxter Street…it is still the same New York City, but this part of the city houses the Other—the other half.
With Sevareid, Danner, Hersey, Orwell, and Riis, we have all the components of a cultural magnifying glass: lens, focus, frame, light, and observer. They give us a foundation for writing about race. It is through constant observing, focusing, defining, illuminating, and simply looking, that the myth of the Other is destroyed and real people emerge from behind the cultural veil. This is what writing race is about: portraying the unfamiliar with utmost clarity, so that in the end, Peking duck remains Peking duck.
*avoids doing the right thing and go Christmas shopping*
What the heck, lest people accuse me of playing favorites with my classes...
Journalistic Tradition Final Paper
Length: 2,212 words (the limit was 2,000, oops!)
Summary: Literary analysis of five selected works by Mark Danner, John Hersey, George Orwell, Jacob Riis, and Eric Sevareid. All tied together with a rather lame magnifying glass metaphor.
Insurance broker Jialing “Tim” Yang used to be an aero-engineer. His former job required frequent business trips to Beijing, China, where he went both as a company representative and as a language and culture translator for his Caucasian colleagues.
During one of the trips, his co-workers made a cultural faux pas. “Our host served us Peking duck to honor us,” Yang said, “but my co-workers wouldn’t take a bite.” Refusing a host’s proffered food is a serious offense in the Chinese culture. “Later on I asked them why,” Yang continued, “and then I found out that they misheard our host offering them Peking dog.”
Yang now looks back at the episode with amusement. But his colleagues’ cultural encounter raises an important question: in a world where cultural encounters are now commonplace, how should white Americans conduct themselves during these encounters?
For journalists who carry the extra responsibility of portraying “the Other” authentically while keeping an eye on the propriety of their own cross-cultural interactions, the question becomes: How to write race correctly? This question is becoming more pertinent in an increasingly globalized world, and more so for cultural and war reporters who must step into another ethnic group without offending the Other.
“When those who are white encounter people from other races or ethnicities, they become suddenly aware that being white means something,” writes Doug Schaupp, author of Being White: Finding Our Place in a Multiethnic World. “They may feel frustrated when a friend of another ethnicity shakes her head and says, ‘You just don’t get it because you’re white.’”
How, then, to “get it”? While there isn’t a Reporting Race as White Journalists for Dummies, war correspondents and cultural reporters can look back to past journalists for help. Many legacy journalists learned how to portray people of different ethnicities through their own cross-cultural experiences. To enhance the effect for the visually inclined, I offer this image: a magnifying glass—a culturally-catered magnifying glass—whose parts and function are represented by literary giants Eric Sevareid, George Orwell, John Hersey, Mark Danner, and Jacob Riis, all of whom have had their own cross-cultural encounters in the past and preserved their experiences in journalistic writings.
Eric Sevareid was the archetypical American. When he was young, he adamantly refused to learn his family’s language, Norwegian, or learn anything un-American. What happens when the American Golden Boy encounters culture? Sevareid describes such an encounter in Not So Wild A Dream, in which a tribe of local Burmese helps Sevareid and his fellow flight mates after their plane crashed during World War II on the way to China. American soldiers eventually arrive to fetch the men. As the rescue team enters the Burmese village to retrieve Sevareid and the soldiers, one of the locals approaches the army medic, Flickinger, for help.
"A wrinkled old man squatted behind the colonel as he worked. He had a whimpering baby tied to his back, and he tried patiently to get the doctor’s attention. When he succeeded, he pointed to a large abscess under the child’s ear, then opened his fingers to disclose an egg, which he had brought for the doctor’s fee. Flickinger took a pill and demonstrated how the father should chew it in his own mouth, then spit it down the baby’s throat. The man got the idea immediately and retreated with grateful smiles." (Sevareid, 266-267)
The exchange between the American and the Burmese is silent, but there is understanding and mutual appreciation. Sevareid records the scene as a silent observer: he writes of a cross-cultural encounter that worked. An encounter of humanity touching humanity. Language is unnecessary.
The most important thing we can learn from Sevareid’s experience is his response to the encounter. He writes down everything as he sees it. There is no embellishment, just the wordless interactions between doctor and old man. As someone experiencing culture shock (Sevareid later writes that his two Chinese companions seem to be the ones comfortable with interacting with the Burmese villagers), Sevareid refrains from voicing his opinions. Instead, he serves as a lens through which we can read and experience the encounter for ourselves. Sevareid writes race by showing us race.
Similar to Eric Sevareid is Mark Danner. Like Sevareid, Danner is a white American. But unlike “Not So Wild A Dream,” Danner’s book, The Massacre At El Mozote, is more than mere mirroring of a culture. The book is a product of extensively-researched journalism. What makes Danner an ethnic writer as well as an investigative reporter is his sensitivity in portraying the El Mozote massacre.
Danner successfully writes race by employing objectivity backed with careful research and thorough reporting. It would have been easy to portray El Mozote victims as the good guys and the Atlacatl soldiers as the bad guys. But Danner does not do that. He maintains perfect objectivity throughout the book, neither glorifying Colonel Domingo Monterrosa’s actions nor diminishing survivor Rufina Amaya’s recount of what happened on the day of the massacre.
If Sevareid’s recount of his cross-cultural observation is a lens, then Danner’s careful journalism provides focus for the lens—focus to look into both sides of an intra-culture conflict. He points us to relevant characters and documents for the purpose of telling. He shows us Latin Americans killing Latin Americans, Americans fighting Americans on the legislative front, and ultimately, self fighting self, as he quotes what James LeMoyne heard the ruthless Colonel Monterrosa confess: “Yeah, we did it. We carried out a limpieza there. We killed everyone…He said, ‘In those days, I thought that was what we had to do to win the war. And I was wrong’” (Danner, 152). Did a massacre occur at El Mozote? Definitely. Did it reflect failures on both the El Salvadoran and American sides? Yes. But Danner’s characters remain human beings. They are not vilified or objectified into the abstract Other. We see the characters’ strengths and flaws through Danner’s focused reporting. In terms of writing race, Danner succeeds.
A well-focused lens will always remain an object of limited influence until it is made into a tool. A regular magnifying glass’ frame offers handle and support; a cultural magnifying glass’ “frame” provides readers with necessary cultural explanation and contextualization. John Hersey’s Hiroshima demonstrates such a framework of support. He employs the same objectivity that Sevareid and Danner use, but more so than his two American-born colleagues, Hersey situations his readers within a specific historical and cultural context—Hiroshima, Japan; August, 1945.
A missionaries’ son born and raised in Tientsin, China, Hersey was familiar with Asian culture. During World War II, China and Japan crossed path numerous times, and it was not unusual for people of one ethnicity to know about the cultural proprieties of the other.
Hersey uses his understanding of Japanese culture to set readers within a boundary of time and place. He writes race by defining the necessary vocabulary for “talking race.” Throughout the book, he references Japanese terms to give his narrative a more cultured tone. A quick read through Hiroshima would teach readers that Tasukete means “help,” a Molotoffano hanakago is a Molotov flower basket, a ryokan is a Japanese-style inn, and hibakusha refers to survivors of the atom bomb, literally “explosion-affected persons.” Hersey’s Japanese terms create an ethnic-specific atmosphere in which he situates the story. They do not hinder the story; rather, they provide cultural context that enable readers to see more clearly the exact ethnic setting in which Hersey’s reporting takes place.
Hersey gets his message across: the atom bomb attack on Hiroshima devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese, as shown by one of his images he relates from Father Kleinsorge: “he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run don their cheeks” (Hersey, 51). Hersey’s characters are no mere “war victims.” They are Japanese hibakusha, ethnic-specific people suffering a tactically-specific bombing aftermath.
Another culturally-sensitive writer is English essayist and novelist George Orwell. Born in British India, Orwell maintained his tie with colonial Britain when he worked several years in Lower Burma under the Indian Imperial Police during his 20s. Orwell experienced first-hand the failures of colonialization. In response, he became acutely aware of ethnic tension around him. Already a sensitive and introspective writer, his sense of injustice regarding British imperialism magnified in essays such as the Moulmein, Burma-based essay, “Shooting An Elephant.”
While in Burma, Orwell was called upon by the locals to kill an elephant. The essay is merely a description of the incident, but Orwell uses an overall bleak tone, negative diction, and some rather grotesque imagery to convey his belief that Burma is a destitute place due to the evils of imperialism.
The beauty of the article lies not only in Orwell’s descriptive writing, but also in what he calls in a later article political writing: “the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after” (Orwell, 312-313). Orwell uses the elephant as a metaphor for imperialism—a dangerous creature he is required, and expected, to control, though every fiber of his reason and morality resists such a calling. Orwell poses a question at the end of the article, “I often wonder whether any of the others grasped that I had done it [killed the elephant] solely to avoid looking like a fool” (Orwell, 156). Against the backdrop of political writing, one must wonder, globally, what really is the motivation behind the race of imperialism among colonizing empires like Britain and France? Is it fear? Thirst for power? Vanity for perpetual empires?
Orwell provides no answers. His writing merely describes a situation in a way that provokes readers’ thoughts. Orwell’s article illuminates. His writing is the light that passes through the magnifying glass’ lens, creating the necessary brightness to make life of the colonized—the Other—visible to readers.
So far I have constructed a cultural magnifying glass from journalists’ ethnic encounters as strangers in foreign lands. But cross-cultural experiences often occur closer to home. Another setting in which cultures collide is one’s immigration experience to America. When Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans, and Africans converge on a common place in America, what happens? It is the journalist’s job to make sense of what life is like for those whose birthplace is not the United States. In this setting, writing race becomes more than a white-analyze-colored situation. It becomes us vs. them, a dichotomy which often creates just as wide a gap for ethnic misunderstanding as that of a war reporter’s culture encounter. Unless, of course, the journalist himself is also an immigrant.
Jacob Riis moved to the United States from Denmark at 21. He was a first-generation immigrant. Some may argue that many of Riis’ writings reflect deep-seated prejudice against other ethnic groups—he equates an Italian neighborhood with a pig-sty, for example (Riis, 37). But prejudiced or not, Riis possesses one thing that only a fellow-immigrant can have: empathy. Riis himself knows what it is like to struggle in a hopeless cycle of poverty and despair; he is familiar with the Lower East Side’s horrid tenement conditions and the City’s prejudiced housing and labor laws. Through his photographs and perceptive journalism, Riis makes known to the rest of New York “how the other half lives.”
"Step carefully over this baby—it is a baby, spite of its rags and dirt—under these iron bridges called fire-escapes, but loaded down, despite the incessant watchfulness of the firemen, with broken household goods, with wash-tubs and barrels, over which no man could climb from a fire. This gap between dingy brick-walls is the yard. That strip of smoke-colored sky up there is the heaven of these people,"
Riis writes in How the Other Half Lives, a book of photos and articles documenting immigrant life (Riis, 34). He brings into light a side of New York City that the wealthy and the native-born did not know existed. He shows them what he sees, he narrows the gap between the familiar and the Other.
Riis transforms readers into eyes that see. He provides the cultural magnifying glass with a purpose, with someone to look through the lens. He gives faces and names to the abstract notion of social problems. He photographs skinny and dirty children to embody poverty and hunger. Riis enables. He enables awareness to seep in by showing readers exactly where to look. They do not have to look far, just down the street or up a few blocks: Chatham Street, the Mulberry Street “Bend,” Hestor Street, Baxter Street…it is still the same New York City, but this part of the city houses the Other—the other half.
With Sevareid, Danner, Hersey, Orwell, and Riis, we have all the components of a cultural magnifying glass: lens, focus, frame, light, and observer. They give us a foundation for writing about race. It is through constant observing, focusing, defining, illuminating, and simply looking, that the myth of the Other is destroyed and real people emerge from behind the cultural veil. This is what writing race is about: portraying the unfamiliar with utmost clarity, so that in the end, Peking duck remains Peking duck.
