Taspon Gonggiatgul Week4 SS1

                                           Week4 Reading SS1

    For this week's reading, I would like to first focus on Wei Ping's new poem "She Shall Not Be Moved", where she talks about her worries regarding returning to the university to teach and how the academia decided to betray her again by having toxic coworkers and her employment director reprimanding and scolding her for literally nothing. I am saddened to see that she must deal with this kind of toxic environment every day in her workplace and this torturing eventually caused her to develop chronic diseases and impacted her life negatively in a lot of ways. In the end, she can only deal with this kind of prejudice by writing poems to express her feelings as well as educating her students about the cruel reality behind teaching in academia, and this just goes to show how difficult and heart wrenching it is for Asian American women today to survive in academia.

While Wei Ping talks about her pain caused by academia, the article "Care Work" focuses on the care work performed by Asian American women in the academia as well as the complexities involved in giving care work to many of the students that are enrolled in the contemporary educational system. From the various studies performed in the paper, we know that Asian American women have to provide a magnitude of emotional supports to their students on top of the already rigorous academic support. It is interesting for me to see that the paper discusses how students in academia feel safer and more willing to open their minds around Asian American women faculty due to their stereotypical nature of being soft and caregiving, but I feel like this also gives Asian American women scholars more responsibilities to bear on top of all the troubles and prejudices that they have to deal with in academia. This just goes to shows the importance of Asian American women scholars in the academic field and I think they should be treated more equally because of all the uncompensated work that they have to do on top of teaching and doing research.

                                            Image citation:

“Self Care.” How to Cultivate a Culture of Caring, SHUTTERSTOCK IMAGES, www.inc.com/curt-richardson/how-to-cultivate-a-culture-of-caring.html.