Beijing Bicycle and a Degree of Futility

I remember the first summer I worked at Starbucks. I had taken time off school to get the job, and by May I had completed my training to become a certified barista. A bonus to having completed training was being able to collect tips for working non-training, real shifts. Suddenly, I had thirty dollars in my hand, cash. I bought a pair of shoes. They were lovely, with a silver-grey strap and a rhinestone ring ornament. And they were 100% mine, my first luxury item purchased as a working citizen. When the shoes disappeared one afternoon, I was heartbroken and angry. I found out later that my cousin had borrowed them to complete her own outfits. Bitch.

There is something about the emotional satisfaction that material items will give a person. To me, those shoes marked that I had accomplished something; their value was far beyond the twelve dollars I used to purchase them. Those shoes were the mental breakdown I had when I chose to take a semester off school, the ten job applications I filled out in December, the half-dozen interviews that were never followed up, and the three months of training I endured after finally being hired at Starbucks.

For protagonist Guei in Beijing Bicycle, this bicycle is one hundred times more valuable than my pair of silver shoes.

The opening scene of Beijing Bicycle sets the tone for the whole story perfectly. Several country boys introduce themselves by name and origin, smiling and laughing, adorably nervous. They are unique individuals trying to find a place in the world with new opportunities. Immediately following this introduction, their manager strips them of their identities and humanity by giving them hair cuts and uniforms. Now, the boys represent the company, not their own interests.

Guei does not give up the bicycle to the bullies.

Four of the initially named boys fade into the background, further emphasizing the harsh class divide as the story focuses in on the protagonist, Guei. The theme of class divide runs through the whole plot as many of the Guei begins the cutthroat dance of furthering their circumstances and is cheated out of opportunities by those above him in economic and social hierarchies.

During the manager's identity-stripping rant, the shrewd business man informs the new employees that, in order to pay for the company-issued bicycles, the company will claim an additional 20% on top of the 50% already taken from each young man's earnings per delivery. Each messenger boy earns only on commission when the pick-up and delivery of packages is complete. The steep cut in earnings breathes gross injustice on its own right, and the commission-based earnings makes a miniature shark tank within the messenger company. Not only is there capitalistic competition between this delivery company and the many in Beijing City, the Manager pits each man against each other within the company.

In his article, "Where Did The Future Go?", Randy Martin categorizes the messenger company's behavior as securitization, debt in the guise of security. Martin refers specifically to the practice of home and car mortgages; for Guei, the bicycle puts him in debt, but it's a debt that secures his job with the company. The bicycle equals work equals money equals the potential for a better life than what he might experienced in the Chinese countryside as a farmer. The messenger company's capitalism more resembles the broken feudalism seen as recent as the sharecroppers in the American South. The wealthy land owner lends land to former black slaves for a percentage of the produce; sometimes that land went right back to the plantation owner after the farmers were cut or cheated out of the land.

This enslavement of the less fortunate is not isolated to a hundred years' past or across the Pacific Ocean. Securitization is what the American economy thrives on, especially in public education. A recent poll by NPR, college graduates were asked simply the subject of their bachelor's degrees. Overwhelmingly, college graduates pursue business or medical degrees on the fundamental of securitization: will this debt or investment get me a job after I've finished? It's the butt of liberal arts majors' jokes, the potential for work post-graduation, but the issue is as real as an empty pantry. Time and money and physical prime are given to the education corporation, but what is the student going to get out of it? Worse, whether or not the student gets a job after graduation, they must continue paying for the bicycle for the rest of their lives.

"A Degree of Futility" by Austin Smith

Works Cited

Beijing Bicycle. Dir. Xiaoshuai Wang. Taiwan Arc Light Films, 2001. DVD.

Bui, Quoctrung. "What's Your Major? 4 Decades Of College Degrees, In 1 Graph." NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 09 May 2014.

Martin, Randy. "Where Did The Future Go?" Class Handout.  

First thoughts on Beijing Bicycle

The opening scene sets the tone for the whole story perfectly. Several country boys introduce themselves by name and origin, smiling and laughing, adorably nervous. They are unique individuals trying to find a place in the world with new opportunities. Immediately following this introduction, their manager strips them of their identities and humanity, having given them hair cuts and uniforms because now the boys represent the company, not their own interests. Four of the named boys fade into the background, further emphasizing the harsh class divide as the story focuses in on the protagonist. 

The theme of class divide runs through the whole plot as many of the characters begin the cutthroat dance of furthering their circumstances. Many characters are cheated out of their opportunities by those higher up than them. 

Thoughts on Capitalism, A Love Story

In Michael Moore's Capitalism, a Love Story, Moore is constantly highlighting the fact that big money corporations are focused on devaluing people in order to accrue profits from consumers. With labor being the largest "obstacle" between the businesses and their profits, I'm wondering when the documentary will stop objectifying people like the banks and business have done.

I'm curious to see if Moore will acknowledge the problem in the education system. How are we going about preparing kids for this apparent future where their work will be devalued?

We're sending them to college.

In order to offshore their profits, corporations need to ensure that there is no one left in the US (where the rights supposedly are) to demand places in the labor force and the livable wages they deserve. They're lucky; they have the base of the "American Dream" to build this culture on. They tell each child, "Hey, you with the face! You know what you need? College! Stay in school! For, like, ever. Get in debt. But that's okay. The more school you get means you're this much more likely to get a better job afterwards, and then you can spend the first few decades of that career paying us back, not spending the money one yourself for your hard-earned efforts. It's gonna be good."

No one wants to be a laborer. No one wants to garden. Let's even take away the rights of those who do clean and care for us by trying to deport them because those are our jobs we don't want to do.

Composer, Medium, and Message

I was in a car with a friend listening to some his favorite old school jazz. He discussed the irony of a happy lilt and melody blended with lyrics about some lovers' suicide pact. The dark side of popular music, he said. I thought about it for a moment and mentioned Death Cab for Cutie's song "I'll Follow You into the Dark." The line, "If heaven and hell decide that the both are satisfied / And illuminate the "no"s on their vacancy signs / If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks / I'll follow you into the dark." It was an interesting remediation of a very human pain - the longing for connection in a big, dark world.

Professor Wexler implied that even speech itself is a form of media, our speech is a method by which a Composer creates a Message to their audience. If we are to reflect Aristole's triangle of argumentation, this assumption is clearly relevant. The Composer is the Media is the Message. An example I suggested was one's use of a personal Twitter feed. Someone may be more honest or less honest, depending on their relationship to their audience. Another student suggested that this relationship forces larger news corporations like CNN to forge those relationships over social media to remain relevant to their audience. The news is no longer in print, it's in pixels.

Discussed also were to concepts of immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy purposes to make the viewer forget the medium or form of delivery of the message. A news station might use a high definition photograph of a "disaster area" for a pathos pull on their audience. They might also attach hotlinks to the Red Cross to express urgency and reality. Hypermediacy forces the audience to mark the media of their message. The professor used the example of a Jackson Polluck painting; the message is subliminal to the method and format of the work itself.

This is a news article that uses hypermedia links to emphasize it's point. The use of hypermedia in everyday texts changes the linear methods of communication that written language has been structured on for centuries. It's rocking the boat of academics as far as what to teach students in the classroom. There is emphasis on "back to basics" using books, grammar, and work books further students' learning.

I think its the millennial responsibility to construct the future curriculum that bonds technology and text.

But the questions remain: Perhaps in future classrooms where we are the teachers, how do we work with the ideas immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation so that each term is understood? How does writing on a blog affect the written text?

Apart from formatting, I don't see much departure from academic writing in blog writing. To effectively communicate one's point of view, it's still necessary to learn the skills of rhetoric and argumentation as well as ensure argumentative credibility with grammatical strength and thorough research. However, there is stronger emphasis on audience because the audience is no longer a single bored teacher reading essays, but the whole of those with access to the internet might take up parts of an argument.

Sacred Places and the Lonely Mountain

Thank you Maya and Sean for being awesome partners in our presentation of "The Mountain of the Lotus and the Fan." The poem itself seems to be a traditional Japanese hymn based on the divinity of Fuji Yama, the never-dying mountain. Mount Fuji is a fount of traditional identity of life and death, which makes it a sacred place, as Maya explained. And Sean concluded that because of the influence the myth has on identity, this creates and shapes Japanese cultural psychology. Great effort, guys. I'm proud of our work!

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For the trickster exercise: I am Scribbles d'Hobbit, the god of craft and contentment. I am willing to sacrifice wealth and power for simplicity and peace. Easily bribed by food and wine.

Myth leaks into the Modern

Queen Elsa and Princess Anna in Frozen

I was preparing an entirely separate post regarding this, but I stumbled upon an idea that tickled my fancy more. In English 495, we were told to find a myth that had hidden itself in modern storytelling, with an emphasis on film and television. My Tumblr dashboard actually brought this modern parallel to my attention: the two sisters in Disney's newest animated film, Frozen, were said to reflect this generation's modern myth, the brothers Thor and Loki in Disney/Marvel's two films based on the comic book franchise. 

Thor and Loki are already myth retold, as myth regenerates for each new audience over time. The original Loki and Thor were part of the Norse pantheon, though they were not siblings like in the Marvel universe. Loki and Thor were often at odds with one another, Loki being the Western epitome of the Trickster figure in mythology.

Tom Hiddleston and Chris Hemsworth as Loki and Thor

In the Marvel age (now), Loki is Thor's adopted brother who, at the discovery of the adoption, loses a sense of identity while at the same time discovers his new scope of powers. He is the son of Frost Giants, with blue skin and ability to manipulate ice among other magical abilities. 

This ice ability and identity crisis are similar to the story that Disney Animation Studios decided to tell when they chose to adapt Hans Christian Andersen's beloved fairytale of "The Snow Queen." Like Marvel's Thor, Princess Anna tries multiple times to reconcile a tense relationship with ice-sister Queen Elsa.

In metaphor, it could be said that the ice-sibling represents the isolation of a suppressed identity. 

In Tumblr speak, this parallel calls for a fun costume change!

Art by Brianna Garcia

Revelations

I enjoyed today's Poetry Slam in English 495. I am thoroughly impressed by my classmates' skills with words. We found out that many of us regularly practice the craft of writing poetry, and even those who proclaimed to be amateur showed the most raw talent.

I am glad that the class as a whole took the assignment very seriously and found places within themselves to produce something more than shallow rhyme and rhythm. Jedi Jordan even brought a guitar to sing his lyrical parody poem as a song.

Lauren Bristol's "She Was There" poignantly struck my heart. The poem itself almost reads like a short story, were it not for the breaking off of phrases and the rhythmic meter. In her reading, I felt the most emotion as she read these lines:

          Tick.

          Tock.

          It was almost as if death was tapping his toe, saying

          I

          Am

          Wai-

          Ting.

          If you’re going to be here, hovering over her every breath,

          Don’t be a tool about it.

Maybe it's because this was literally me two months ago in the weeks before my father passed away. Ms. Bristol's choice to break syllables into their own lines to reflect the ticking of a clock was a very strong choice; it emphasizes the helpless battle to stop time, stop Death itself.

And, Lauren, girl, I feel you. Death's a douche.

I made the choice to not give commentary during the reading on the two poems I wrote. I feel like a well-written poem needs no explanation or should leave room enough for the reader to make the poem their own. I really hope that my words spoke for themselves.