Journal "Laotian Daughters"

“Laotian Daughters”

I thought that this article was interesting to read about because it spoke about the stereotypes of Laotian women and how they were being seen as “problems” to the community as model minority and how they are at risk of being single mothers, in a sense they are not being seen as an important ethnicity group. Laotian people were also being treated poorly and the article mentioned about two main issues. The first being the explosion at the chevron refinery in west contra costa country and that the people there were not given sufficient notification about the explosion and even if there was notification it was not in English hence nobody understood what was going on. That event led to a lot of people being upset because they are ultimately breathing in fumes that harm their bodies and this all could have been avoided if there was English translation. I feel like nowadays immigrants from other countries are so pressurized to know how to speak English because that is the only way for them to get around doing anything. This is very difficult and time consuming to those that do not have time and have jobs to do. Even for students it would take a long time to fully digest the language of English because there is so much to it and with them being pressed for a time span of one year as stated in the article is just ridiculous. This language barrier that is spoken in the article also brings up personal experiences I have had when I first moved to America, I had a lot of difficulty learning English because that was not my primary language so having to learn it in a short amount of time was definitely very hard and it took me so many years just to be up to par with my peers. The second issue spoken about in the article was propostion 227 which encouraged monolingual education which brought up a lot of dislike because it is advertising for only English education meaning they are ultimately cutting out the people that are just moving to America and does not know of any English to speak of.

Film “Monkey Dance”

This film displays the lives of Asian American youth who come from families that escaped from the Cambodian genocide. There is a struggle for the youth in this community to maintain their education and there shows their resistance through the types of jobs they are doing at such a young age and those are permanent jobs that they have. in the film there is the struggle for these youth to fit into the American culture and at the same time maintain their own identities before they got here. The youth are under pressure to do well in their lives because they simply cannot afford not to, they need to make money for their families and for themselves. As they are moving towards success it shows how proud their parents are of them and how these youths are slowly ridding the stereotypes of Cambodian youths that are seen to not be able to do better. In fact they can.