Songmin Li ASA002 A04 Week 10

From the poem assigned in this final week, My Kintsuki written by Wang Ping, I feel her strength and persistence, and fearlessness, especially through the words: “I will not give up No matter how impossible it is/ I will not give up No matter what’s happening around me/ I will not give up Until rivers run free, and mountains no longer slide Until swamps hum with birds and fish among cypress knees/ Until my heart becomes a temple” (p420).  In her narrative, she has stated that it is a turning point. She would be alive and victorious. Therefore, instead of hiding the interruption, she wrote "My Kintsuki."

Plus, It's worth mentioning the Japanese word "Kintsuki", meaning "repair with gold". Repair does not highlight the hidden fracture, but rather highlights the part of repairing, which shows the beauty that occurs during the fracture and repair process. I think it symbolizes her experience in academia and her whole past. Throughout her life, he has experienced continual suppression and discrimination, and while accepting those pain, she has chose to fight back, to break the "rules", to try to change the whole mold of industrialized academia environment. She has repaired not only her own mood and life, but the ethos and "conventions" of the academic world as a whole. When she has walked these paths, she can feel her own professional self-worth and "the beauty that occurs during the repair process." I taste the liberation and the relief from this poem.

What's more, through the article “Conclusion: Academic Awaken: Power, Resistance, and Being Woke”, which is the end of the book Fight the Tower, I deeply feel that in order to pursue equality and relative freedom, people really need a lot of effort, especially for minority groups. The women of color in the American academic community experienced many unsuccessful failures and frustrations. Although there are many areas where anti-discrimination is expressed on the surface now, such "invisible discrimination" still exists. I also know that rights of women were strived with a severe path, that it is a paved road with tears and blood donation. Not only is it necessary for women to speak for women, but for colored people. We need men to speak for women, and mainstream people to speak for minorities.

References:
Image from: https://aapr.hkspublications.org/2017/04/17/foreword/

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