Journal 13 Kelly loves Tony and Import Subcultures

            This part of the video showed Kelly’s stress affecting her relationship. Her schoolwork is taking too much time for her to look after her baby. Tony feels like she is not caring enough about the family. This made Kelly feel pissed because Tony isn’t seeing how she feels about everything. Tony’s family also doesn’t seem to get along with Kelly because she’s not taking the traditional roles of a wife and taking care of the family. She is going to school and not helping the whole family. Kelly wants more independence and Tony seems to care more about the whole family collectively. Tony doesn’t like school and Kelly doesn’t feel comfortable with his family. She can’t focus on her work around them. She also doesn’t like leaving her baby with the family because she doesn’t think the kids can take care of the baby. Once she was pregnant with the second baby, she gave up on school to take care of the babies and stay at home. She started getting along with the family after that. This showed a lot of the complications coming together and forcing Kelly to make hard life decisions. I think this shows how difficult it is to be in so many different cultures. She had to deal with traditional house wife roles, family roles, individual school life, relationship roles, and being a mother. It put a lot of pressure on her to be apart of all of those roles and maintain her part.

            The article talks about import culture and its effect on Asian American culture. Import culture has to do with imported cars. Imported cars are cars that are customized to stand out usually form Japanese manufacturers. Identities are sometimes based around the cars in order to gain some kind of prestige. The import culture provides masculinity to Asian American men through the car’s design and technology and other women around the scene. I think this is because Asian American men are always portrayed in the media as nerdy and unsociable so they become demasculinized in the media. This causes Asian American males to look for areas where they can feel masculine. The Asian American female import models give off the image of being sexy and photogenic. This contributes to the culture for the Asian American men so that they feel more masculine to be around nice cars and pretty females. I feel like this culture was developed from the search for an Asian American identity in America.