Author: anipapazian

In the play Ching Chong Chinaman, Lauren Yee brings awarness to the issues of cultural identity and assimilation through the use of dark humor as well as ominous topics. The play centers on the Wongs, a Chinese American family whose cultural identity appears to have been lost due to their extreme assimilation into American culture. The play does a good job in ridiculing and mocking the way that people in today’s world go through life without having a clear sense about who they truly are.

In Scene 4, the Wongs sit in front of the kitchen table, as they wait for their Chinese food order to be delivered to their home. Ed begins to ask J (who he refers to as ching chong), questions about how he feels and his thoughts of America. “If you don’t speak his language, don’t talk to him. It’s insulting”, Desdemona tells Ed. I found this to be quite satiric because although the Wong’s are of Chinese descent just like J, the entire family is so out of touch with their roots that they can’t communicate with a person who shares the same culture. Yee incorporated distasteful humor by having the Wong family butcher J’s full name (Jingqiang) and calling him Ching Chong which is an ethnic slur that is often used to imitate the Chinese language. Although It’s a bit odd having such a slur being said by a man who is also Chinese, I believe that Yee purposely does this to really depict how Americanized the Wong’s truly were.

Later in the scene, Grace enters with the takeout they had ordered and unpacks the food onto the kitchen table. “Look! They even gave us chopsticks” Grace states in a shocked manner. Desdemona, who unlike Grace, doesn’t come to a surprise when she sees the chopsticks states that they are always given out with the Chinese food. Grace comes up with the idea that “Ching Chong” could teach the Wong’s how to use the chopsticks correctly. Yee makes this part in the scene absurd and ridiculous because usually people who are of Chinese heritage should know how to use these traditional utensils that are most widely used in the East and SouthEast parts of Asia. The scene points out to the audience how assimilating to a different culture can make you so out of contact and uninformed about your true identity.

Overall, I think that Lauren Yee uses both dark humor and derogatory slurs in order to portray this Americanized Chinese family and how lost they are when it comes to their cultural heritage and their identity.

There are a large variety of uses and meanings of photographs. Some photographs are used in order to tell stories in many diverse ways. Others use photographs for the purpose of capturing a particular moment in time and to help viewers feel and form a connection with what is happening in the photograph. I personally believe that photography can both reveal and conceal reality in the form of a still image.

In Susan Sontag’s essay, “On Photography”, she speaks about how photography can belittle or change the idea of certain events that are captured on camera and how it is a form of art that can capture and keep real parts of life. On page 14 she begins to describe how “there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” This adds on to Sontag’s idea because it shows how photography is able to capture something that may have not been seen by the subject itself, making it “violating” a person’s privacy. It also shows how although a photographer is able to have a clear vision of what he or she wants to capture in his/or photography, it may be different in the eyes of a different viewer (in both negative and positive ways).

In Elena Martinique’s article, “When Staged Photography Becomes Art” she speaks a lot on how photography used to mostly be a “decided moment” indicating that much of it used to be staged. She states how a “pioneer of the genre, Jeff Wall makes large-scale color images that seem to capture people engaged in everyday life, but are in fact largely staged. He described his work as cinematography, boiling it down to preparation, doing things in advance before taking the picture, and collaboration, having contact with people being photographed.” This shows how photography conceals reality because photographers back then used to stage every image even though the photograph itself looks like it was taken spontaneously.

These two pieces of writing support my idea about how photography and still images can either hide reality or bring awareness to it even more.

Cultural heritage can be made up of both physical forms as well as intangible forms. Some physical artifacts may include cultural belongings such as paintings, books, writings, and sculptures. Unlike these physical artifacts, intangible forms of cultural property cannot be touched. These attributes may include music, language, dance, technology, theater, food, etc. In the text “What is cultural heritage?”, the author Elena Franchi states that she describes cultural heritage as something that consists of “culture, values, and traditions”, and that it implies a “shared bond, our belonging to a community.” She speaks about how cultural heritage represents our “history and our identity; our bond to the past, to our present, and the future.” This shows what a significant role culture plays in the development of one’s identity and how it shapes people to become the way they are. An intangible aspect of cultural heritage within my own family is history. My parents and family were born and raised in Yerevan, Armenia. Armenia’s history is a major feature and part of Armenian culture. More specifically, the Armenian Genocide is one of the most major historical events that effects people till this day. The Armenian genocide was the massacre of 1.5 million Armenian people living in the Ottoman Empire during World War I in 1915. The young muslim Turks sought to dominate the eastern Anatolia region through murdering Armenians and getting rid of any sort of Armenian presence. Widely known as the “Tsitsernakaberd” in the Armenian language, is a memorial that was built in the city of Yerevan in 1967 dedicated to the victims of the Armenian Genocide. Every year on April 24th thousands of people gather at the memorial to pay tribute to the loved ones that had been lost during those sorrowful times. My mother was actually named after her great aunt who was kidnapped by a muslim Turk as a child and was never found again. Not only do people remember this day in Armenia, but there is a large Armenian community here in New York where we gather around in Time Square every year on April 24th and commemorate the victims. Although it is not a positive aspect of our culture, the horror stories of the genocide have been passed down from generation to generation and is a really big part of Armenian identity.