April 5, 2017
Charlene Chan
Section 2
Week 1: Fight the Tower
This week’s reading, “Fight the Tower: A Call to Action for Women of Color in Academia” by Professor Valverde laid bare the mistreatment and injustice that she experienced at the hands of the academic institution. The very same place that supposedly supports and nurtures innovative thought and budding scholars attacked one in her fight for tenure, resulting in inhumane amounts of stress and causing grave consequences. Reading this as a Chinese-American who hopes to become a professor herself, I was shocked. In part, this was due to my naivete, as I have not yet ventured far enough into the academia to experience this firsthand.
Although I recognize that our experiences are not one and the same, Professor Valverde’s explanation of how being mixed-race Vietnamese played into the mistreatment she suffered was powerful and familiar. My family is from Malaysia, and I hold dual citizenship there. Being ethnically Chinese, we do hold economic privilege among the main ethnic groups of Malaysia, though the oppression we have suffered in Malaysian history cannot be erased. Bias is complex, and colorism plays a large part in it. The perceived ethnic hierarchy that Professor Valverde describes is real and has real-world consequences in how Southeast Asians regard themselves and how they are treated by others.
The illustration below is from a Chinese manhua called Sanmao, published in 1935 by Zhang Leping. I felt it was relevant in light of the videos of the UC Davis pepper spray incidents that we were shown in class. It depicts the main character of the manhua, Sanmao, amid crowds of protesters and unforgiving police officers. Together, they create a mass of chaos and confusion in contrast to the beautiful buildings around them.
Question: How do you not lose hope when everything against you seems so immovable?
References:
S. (2017, March 25). Sanmao. Retrieved April 05, 2017, from http://sinethetamagazine.tumblr.com/post/158814154129/zhang-leping-%E5%BC%A0%E4%B9%90%E5%B9%B3-sanmao-%E4%B8%89%E6%AF%9B-1935-sanmao
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