Bowen Xu, A04, Week4

Bowen Xu
A04
2020.04.18

This week's reading made me feel a lot. Especially the poem called "Who Killed Soek-Fang Sim". In this poem, the author Wang Ping writes about the unfair treatment and tragic experience that his colleague Sim has suffered in college. Sim is an excellent Chinese scholar. She always shows her best to students and works very hard. However, due to her yellow skin, discrimination and rumors from various parties hindered her career and promotion time and time again, and finally, she passed away tragically due to breast cancer. The author once believed that the rumors did not speak for Sim. When she realized all this, she was very sorry and wrote this poem as regret and memory.




After reading this passage, my heart is very heavy. When the author writes "One night, Soek-Fang Sim came to my dreams", does it mean that she and Sim, and tens of thousands of Chinese minority scholars like them could have become a reliable whole community? However, stupid rumors let them just work despite of each other, and abandon others indifferently. There is no doubt that this is a sad truth. When others suffer injustice, we should be brave to help them fight and stand with others, especially when you find that you may also repeat the same mistake. This is not just helping them, but helping themselves. "They came first to catch the Communist Party. I did not speak because I was not the Communist Party. They then came to catch the Jews. I did not speak because I was not Jewish. They came to catch the union members again. I did not speak because I was not a union Members. They came to catch Catholics again, and I did n’t speak because I was a Protestant. They finally came to catch me, and no one spoke for me at this time. ”This is a famous quote from Pastor Martin Nimora Engraved on the Jewish Holocaust Memorial in Boston. Today, decades later, this sentence still reminds us that when pursuing justice, people should fight together without turning back, so as not to cause greater tragedy.

Question: How can people all being blinded by those stupid rumors like "Chinese scholars' articles are not as worth and great as those of white scholars? Or all of them just choose to evade these rumors?

Reference

Valverde, K.-L. C., & Dariotis, W. M. (2020). Fight the tower: Asian American women scholars resistance and renewal in the academy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.