Most recent public comments by Riona McGillicuddy https://nowcomment.com/users/16925 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=403823 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=403823 In “The Table” by Koua Mai Yang, we can see two separate images of the “Hmong American Experience”. These are both very masculine settings, the top half displaying four older men in business-casual and the lower half showing a larger number of young men in hoodies and jackets. Both are set on a gray landscape with a relatively neutral color scheme. The characters and dividing lines are sketched out in black, the background and certain characters are colored with minimal blues and browns. While there are white highlights to help with shading and give a sense of depth, there are bright yellow highlights as well. These stand out from the rest of the scene and draw the viewer’s eye to prominent places. Many of the yellow lines are in distinctive places where someone would assign traits of race such as around the eyes, nose, lips, chin, cheekbones, and forehead. Other places Yang wants to draw our eye go to the shirt collars, eye-glasses, and receding hairline of the older men as well as the hoods, hands, and numerous bottles of unknown substances in the young men’s half. The yellow highlighting in this piece guides the eye through what outsiders see, what makes them non-white, and what they have or do not have. The most interesting use of the yellow is in outline the absent space between the men in the upper scene. This signifies a missing man, most likely a veteran amongst the others, showing the slowly dwindling numbers. In the lower scene there are many more men, clumped together to the point of indistinction in how many there are exactly. Both are images of the stereotypes Americans force on Hmong peoples, the yellow lines of the ‘yellow people’. But there is more to the image than simply what the white imposed stereotype. There are other shades; faces and bodies beneath the yellow highlights. The men have sad, angry, lovely, and empty expressions, each with their own story behind them that we cannot access. “The Table” encourages the viewer to look beyond the highlights and engage with the texts and stories of these men. Mon, 09 Nov 2015 00:15:19 -0500 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=403798 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=403798 The quote Viet Thanh Nguyen uses here, from Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, is engaging with the factory of American Capitalism in combination with complacency as consent. The American military depends on government funding which depends on taxes which depends on the American people buying goods and services. When it comes down to it, simply by living their lives every civilian is inactively agreeing with the U.S.’s military decisions, for example to carpet bomb Vietnam. To actively disagree with the military one had to go out of their way to not support these implicit forms of stability built into the system. This brings a darker relatability to the phrase, “if you’re not with us you’re against us.” Sun, 08 Nov 2015 22:55:27 -0500