A great man, always a great man

I know that this post is still late considering the fact that Mr. Daniel Sousa had died a week. So, I'm taking the time now to dedicate this post to him and sharing my story about him.

Mr. Daniel Sousa... What can I say about him? Starting a few weeks after my freshman year at ASTI had started, Mr. Sousa came to ASTI to be our Physical Education teacher. In the beginning, I was like, wow he seems like a rather old guy, he might not be able to keep up with us. He told us that he was 89 but I knew that couldn't be true because he didn't even have gray hair yet. From that first impression, I knew that he was going to be a nice person.

In fact, my first impression was rather correct. Mr. Sousa was not only a nice guy, he was AMAZING. He first came to ASTI from Santa Cruz. He had lived from such a far distance. Nevertheless, he was willing to come everyday. He never missed days unless it was really important.  He understood everyone and never gave up on us. Yes, occasionally he might say a few swear words but these days, it seems necessary to do so in order to get attention from young adults. Mr. Sousa always pushed us to do our best and keep us active. He believed that P.E. was a time for relaxation since our class was in the afternoon. Last year, he allowed students to study for tests because he wants his students to be at their best. He gave us "free Fridays" where students were able to do what had wanted to do.  He knows that its the end of the week and that we students want to rest and enjoy the upcoming weekend. He allows us to use P.E. as a transition to it.

I truly miss Mr. Sousa as a teacher and as a great person. I wish that he could have lived till what he would have thought would be a good age to end life in.

Family History connections

After reading the family history blog posts, I thought that many of them were rather interesting. I pattern that I commonly saw was the pattern of some parent suffering in a certain type of way.

In Kristine's blog post, she talks about her mother's life and how she had suffering in her family. Kristine quotes from her mother:

"[My Brother and sister] looked down on me and wouldn’t treat me as in equal. Even my younger brother and sister looked at me as a lower person despite the traditions of respecting your elders. Still, I think it was the influence my dad had on them. They saw how my parents treated me and came with the thoughts that it would be ok to treat me horribly as my parents did." - Kristine Chin

In this quote, Kristine's mother says that throughout her young life, she was being mistreated by her family; even her younger siblings. As a method of escaping such tragedy, she decided to move out and attend college. She continued to life happily away from her family.

In Camal's blog post, he talks about the suffering of his father and some other person named Tom in the heavy rain. In his blog, he states that the rain was so heavy that they needed to get home as quickly as possible. On their way home, there were many obstacles. The final one that had blocked their way home was a four feet deep water that crossed between them and their home. So in the end they waited until the rain stopped and arrived home by crossing the river when the current was not as strong. Basically, in Camal's family story, it discusses about his father's suffering to get home.

In Shiyun's family history blog post, she talks about her mother's life. In her mother's life, Shiyun talks about how much work that her mother endured to continue to live on along with her family. In her blog post, she states:

"My mom would wake up at seven in the morning and head to school. When she comes back, she would be asked to do chores by her parents. Each of her siblings were assigned to do a different job. My mom had to take trips to the wells or to faucets to gather water for the family. For each bucket they got, they had to pay a cent. Back in the day, they had no access of water at homes. My mom took care of the water and took many trips back and forth from the well until she had eight buckets full of water. Water would be boiled up to take baths with, but most of the time they had to take cold water. When she comes comes back from school, she doesn’t have much time to do her homework. Most of the time, she just did whatever she was told to do...." - Shiyun

 Here, her mother is suffering because she stays home most of the time. She has rarely any freedom because she was being told what to do. She has to do chores around the home because her family members are working at jobs so she has to contribute to the family by doing so.

The connection reveals that we should appreciate what our parents are doing for us. In order to have a successful future. A person needs to be motivated into doing so and is willing to put in as much effort as possible.

Cycles in the Joy Luck Club

In "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tam, it includes interesting stories from four different families. Within the book, there are cycles. Some noticeable cycles are the changes where the mother and daughter tells the stories and how the stories connect with one another in some way. Well, I feel that one of the most important cycles in the book is about the connections between stories. The main example that I would be providing is the chess game story.

The chess game story first begins in Rules of the Game on page 89 and ends at page 101. In this section of the book, it first introduces Waverly Jong. It talks about her rise to fame. She begins first as a minor player in the streets. As time progresses, Waverly begins to study chess and began to beat others. She begins entering tournaments and began winning. Waverly began getting what she had wanted from her parents. As time progresses, her mother, Lindo Jong, begins to brag about her daughter in public. Soon, Waverly runs away but comes back when she was tired. In the end of that chapter, her family ignores her and she doesn't know what to do. Here, Waverly earns respect from her family by being a success but her family expresses it in a way that Waverly isn't comfortable with. As a result, she through her support away until there wasn't any left.

The chess story of Waverly Jong continues with Four Directions which comes later in the book. In this section, it continues the chess game story from the beginning in brief statements and focuses what happened after she quit. After quitting, she tried to scare her mother to beg her to come back to playing chess. Knowing that her plan failed, Waverly began to play chess again but the mother says that she could not just come play chess whenever she wanted to. While she continued playing chess, she began to lose and her confidence fell. When she was beat by a boy whom she had defeated a long time ago, Waverly quit. After knowing that her plan had failed, she wanted to gain back her mother's support. She didn't want to feel separated from her family furthermore. Nevertheless, after hearing her mother's statement about how she couldn't become who that she was before, she began to lose confidence and quit because she knew that playing chess couldn't change the past. The damage has been done and cannot be reversed.

Family Story

        During the past two weeks I have been asking my mother about whether there were any stories there were to share. Unfortunately, she told me more about her history and what her family in China was like. She told me that her family were farmers and how she had to struggle in her younger years of her life.
When she was still a child, my mother would be working on the farm to support her family while the rest of her older brothers and sisters would be attending school. She didn’t go to school yet because she thought that supporting the family would be more important than and education. At home, she would do chores around the house and cook for the family. At age 8, she had finally attended school. She was a clever student and was one of the first students in the family to attend college at China. She was ranked number eighth when she graduated from college. After graduation, she became a teacher at a school near home.
Nevertheless, my mother didn’t explain much to me. Then, just two days before the rough draft was due, I asked my father whether there were any stories about previous generations. Within a few seconds, he began talking about my great grandfather. Turns out, he was an important member of the family. All this time, I was asking my mother when I should have been asking my father. I never knew that he would tell me something that I was curious about.
My great grandfather was an important person, but not so important that he made it in the history books or in a museum. Throughout his lifetime, he had a wealthy lifestyle. He owned a share of a large vessel that transported people from Hong Kong to Canton. He started two Chinese herbal drug stores, one in Hong Kong and one in Oregon that are still in existence today. The drug store in Oregon is currently owned by my father’s second cousin. My great grandfather was a businessman at some times of his life. He had a job in Hong Kong where he had collected money from other people sent from foreign countries to pass out to the people that the people originally wanted send them to. The family received a minor share of the money given but there was a lot coming in daily so that it began to build up daily. Much of this delivering was done by horseback riding since there weren’t any cars back them except when my great grandfather had to cross the body of water between mainland China and Hong Kong. This was the reason to why my great grandfather owned a share of the boat because he had to constantly travel back and forth between mainland China and Hong Kong. My great grandfather had also owned a lot of farmable land. A lot of that land was rented to farmers so my dad’s family profited greatly from the monthly payments.
In this section, I thought that this  was the most interesting part of my great grandfather’s life. My great grandfather, while he was alive, owned a four story building with 5,000 square ft. on each floor. A person could just imagine that as a huge mansion. My father told me that back in the 1930s (when my great grandfather was alive), there were a lot of thieves since that police didn’t do much back then because the government didn‘t really support them. As a result, a lot of the thieves would come every night to our home to steal the belongings. Nevertheless, my great grandfather established a system to eliminate the sneaky thieves. The house contained a room storage filled with guns, mostly rifles. At night when the thieves came, a watchdog would sound an alarm alerting the family that there were thieves approaching in the distance. Within minutes, the family and possibly some servants would camp somewhere and aim and shoot at the thieves even if it meant killing them. If the thieves had common sense, the gun fire would drive them away and prevent them from coming back.
During World War II, Japan was in a great war with China. My great grandfather moved back to his family in Taishan province in Canton, China. The Japanese army was moving closer and closer to the South with everyday that passed by so he wanted to spend his moments with family rather than serve in the war. My father explained to me that many people including my great grandfather had done this as well. No one really wanted to separate from their family to go to war.
In 1951, about six years after World War II, my great grandfather passed away but not because of natural causes. After the world war, Communism was on the rise in China and Mao Zedong became the first chairman of the communist party of China. During his rule, one of his terrible actions is that he ordered the imperial army to arrest all of the wealthy people, in which one of them was my great grandfather, and placed them in jail to rot. The jails had horrible living conditions and eventually, my great grandfather died of starvation because the food there was unbearable. The family wealth was never returned and the family had basically dropped from the elite class to the poor class within a few years.
I think that this story has survived in my family because it was a tragic point of time within my father’s side of the family. This was the first time that I have heard any stories from my father. I thought that it would have only survived because it was not so many generations ago. My father knew about it even though he wasn’t born yet. If I had not asked, this story might have been forgotten and never to be told again unless there was some important event that came up or some tragedy. Before ever hearing of this story, I had always thought that my family were always farmers because of my mother’s stories. As mentioned before, I had never heard of any of my father’s stories. Finally on Monday, March 15 of 2011, my father has told me his first story about the legacy of my great grandfather. From this story, I basically learned that a part of me came from a family that was robbed by the Communist government and that all of my families‘ suffering were because of that government.  My family had basically turned poor because of it.
Although my great grandfather’s story had been tragic, there were also some upsides. This is why I am here today; in America. If my family had never known that Communism was such a horrible sight, my family would most likely to not have immigrated here. As a result, I would be born in China and the family may still not have immigrated here. To think further, if my family had not been robbed, my family may have not been together. In other words, my father may have never met my current mother because of the class difference. My father may have married a woman that was in the wealthy class. I would have been born but I would be a different person.

Joy Luck Club and Tiger Mom

In "The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates," the second section of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, the relationships between the mother and daughter are similar and different with the relationships in the article "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior" by Amy Chua.

In Amy Chua's article, she talks about how she had to force Lulu, her daughter to play a piece of music that was hard. Even though Sophia wanted to quit and stop playing because one of her music lines was too hard, Amy Chua had the patience to continue forcing her to learn how to play the music. It states,

"Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay... Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her... When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic." (Why Chinese Mothers are Superior)

In this quote from Amy Chua's article, it discusses how she teaches her daughter. She forces Lulu to learn by threatening her and insulting her so that she would learn to do better so that others would not have to insult her. In my opinion, these threats from Amy helped to push Lulu so that she can prove herself to her mother. After pushing her, Lulu learns the piece and they celebrate. Therefore, a goal was basically set for Lulu so that when she achieves it, the mother - daughter bond would become stronger.

In the first section of "The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates" called The Rules of the Game, it discusses about how Waverly Jong became a successful chess player. During her road to success, she had some help from her parents but it was the type of help that didn't help her improve playing chess but just to improve her environment. In the book, Waverly says,

"My parents made many concessions to allow me to practice, One time I complained that the bedroom I shared was so noisy that I couldn't think. Thereafter, my brothers slept in a bed in the living room facing the street. I said I couldn't finish my rice... I left the table with half-finished bowls and nobody complained" (Tan 98-99)

In this quote, it shows that the parents give her whatever she needed. Here, she needed quiet and focus in order to play chess so the parents gave her that. The relationship between the mother and daughter isn't really close because the daughter enjoys the effort made by the mother but the mother tends to brag about her winnings more than appreciating her.

Introduction to The twenty six Malignant Gates

In "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tam, the introduction of the second section explains a girl who wanted to ride her bike around the corner of the street but her mother doesn't want her to because of the book the mother read called "The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates." The girl protested and left the room to ride her bike. She fell before she had even reached the corner of the street. I think that the stories in this section follow the introduction's theme; the conflict between parents and children.

In the first chapter of the second section, Waverly Jong talks about her story about how she had become a famous chess player when she was young. Her mother constantly bragged about her when she takes her shopping and Waverly got sick of it so she argued with her mother about this matter and ran away. When she came back home, no one really cared about Waverly anymore (Tan 100). Here, Waverly did not appreciate her mother's voice. As a result, she had received bad fortune and lost her family's respect. This shows the conflict between a mother and a daughter. The mother doesn't allow the daughter to have her free will while the daughter is disobedient and runs away.

In the second chapter of the second section, Lena shares her story about when she was younger. She was a translator in her family because her mother was a non-English Speaker and her father could only speak a few words in Mandarin. In a part of her story, Lena talks about her neighbors in San Francisco. Her neighbors consisted of Teresa and Mrs. Sorci, her mother. They frequently had arguments but it tended to end with love. In the book, it states:

"I [Lena] lay down on my bed waiting to hear the screams and shouts. And late at night I was still awake when I heard the loud voices next door. Mrs. Sorci was shouting and crying... and Teresa was yelling back, ... And then I head them laughing and crying, crying and laughing, shouting with love." (Tan 115)

In this quote, it discusses how Teresa and her mother are arguing and the arguments seem serious at first but it soon turns into laughter. I believe that this is the reason because the two females understand each other. They understand how the other feels. It shows that the conflict between a parent and a child could be end in a good result as long as they are able to understand each other.

I think that the purpose of the introduction of the second section of the book is that it gives a clue to what the stories proceeding the introduction would talk about. It shows the theme for the section.