It has been a long while since my last entry because I am currently planning the next stage of my career. Although I love my present job, it is (sadly) only an one-year appointment so next year I'll be packing up my tent and moving on to a new location.
However, as always, films have provided much needed breaks from the exciting work associated with the job search. Two weeks ago, I watched two pieces that featured people walking out of churches prematurely. The first was Antonia's Line, a feminist love-it-or-hate-it, and the second, Sweet Land, a recent production about a German woman who is rejected then embraced by the Swedish-American community that she enters as a mail-order bride. The protagonist actually speaks Swedish (it is not clear whether she was born in Sweden but she immigrated from there, at the behest of her husband's parents) and understands Swedish culture but becomes the unwilling victim of anti-German sentiment after the First World War. Interestingly, and this line-up only occurred because of my Netflix queue being arranged as it were, Antonia's Line also illustrates the life story of a tough and unconventional woman, a Dutch widow, who returns to her home village (in the Netherlands) and becomes a kind of social liberal savior for the oppressed members of her community.
As a practicing feminist, both films warmed my heart. I don't endorse extreme feminism or the hatred of men, but I like to see women living up to their values. I'm not going to go any further about this topic but the underlying messages about small villages. I still feel like a transplanted individual in my present location, a city slicker doing my best to fit in and appreciate the charms of a tight-knit community. Therefore I was most likely projecting my own concerns and revelations about making the transition from urban to rural (and watch this blog next year when I move to yet another place -- probably not a village but a town or back to a sprawling urban center...). I have not yet walked out of a church as a form of protest here yet, but the idea that religion is not an absolute force even in places where church attendance is a vital social activity -- was new to me. It is a tremendous statement to leave any social arena, presumably in shame, and in the end of both films, the church-leavers were not punished for their bravery (or foolish behavior, depending on one's perspective) nor did the communities change in noticeable ways because of such acts. These depictions changed my mind about small villages and the customary fears that geographic isolation and cultural continuity breed close minds and stale social values. Granted, I live in a college village (we are not a town, officially speaking) that may be the exception to many rules -- but after watching these movies with explicitly liberal messages but very realistic environments dominated by conservative attitudes, I realize it's worth thinking twice about what the "small village" represents and how even the bastions of homogeneity are affected by the proverbial "winds of change."
And now for something completely different --
For the past week, I have been enjoying Tyler Perry's movies: Madea's Family Reunion and Daddy's Little Girls. I already have his latest production, Why Did I Get Married? (maybe that's a cautionary tale...), in my Netflix queue so I am looking forward to more wholesome and optimistic dramedies (drama-comedies) about the African-American experience in the US.
I didn't grow up into a metropolitan area (my hometown is slowly becoming a medium-sized city) so I did not have the same opportunities as many kids of my ethnic group to relate to other ethnic minorities. My high school had very visible African-American and Hispanic-American populations, in great part because they were so small compared to the European-American majority. I certainly didn't think about ethnic or racial politics back then, but all I knew was that in LA, New York City, and other cultural melting pots (or highly divided appetizer platters -- take your choice of metaphor), Asian-Americans were building solidarity (when not engaged in violent armed conflicts) with other hyphenated Americans. There were many common causes based on a rhetoric of discrimination, limited opportunities for advancement, and marginal status in "mainstream" American society. Even my father endorsed the multi-group coalition as a means of ensuring fair representation in politics and business. However, in my home area, all of these ideas were second-hand and not actively pursued.
In the thirteen years after leaving home for college, I have added more concrete experiences to my personal agenda of building connections but my exposure to certain cultures is still highly abstract. Therefore movies like Tyler Perry's oeuvres may be stilted representations but in place of actual immersion into hyphenated-American communities, which I hope to do more in the future, I am getting a better sense of why so many jokes emphasize that all ethnic Americans are the same. Again, relying on a trite statement, there's always a bit of truth in humor, and there's much that binds the African-American community with the Asian-American one. At the same time, this general statement should be taken with a grain of salt. The LA riots, the discrimination against one minority group by another -- these are all serious issues that keep ethnic groups divided...
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