Instructions on How To Get Ready for School

Wake up, even if you want to go back to sleep, then make the bed, so you don't have to do it later. Get changed, because that way you don't have to run back up the stairs. Walk down three flights of stairs. Eat your breakfast. You only eat a yogurt and maybe a cookie,  becuase you will eat more at Lunch in a few hours. Make the lunch that you're going to eat. Then you should clean out the dishwasher.

If it's a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, or Sunday, do half the dishwasher and let your brother do the rest. Then, go feed the cat. Bring the bowl up. Pour the food. Make sure to bring the right amount. If it's a Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday, do the whole dishwasher because your brother will feed the cat. When you're done, go upstairs. Pack your bag. Do it real slow. Check it once, check it again, check it until you can't check it anymore: You'll never hear the end of it if you forget something obvious.

When you're done, you can rest for a bit. Grab your socks, and your shoes. Brush your teeth and get ready to go. Bring your bag downstairs. Pack your lunch in the bag. Even if it barely fits, there's nowhere else to fit it, so you have to. Say goodbye to your family. Leave for school. Leave for a day, but be ready to start again. Don't complain, don't whine. That never solved anything.

Reading Notes for "Edison, New Jersey" and "How to Date..."

They're backwards. So start from bottom and go up.

Objective Correlative.

I don't want to type it, so I'll post an image.

Reading Notes for "Drown" and "Aguantando"

Reading Notes for "Fiesta, 1980" and "Aurora"

FFW #1 From Class, Edited with Kingston's Writing Styles and RESPONSE.

Edited FFW:
For the longest time, one thing had always seemed one step ahead of me, always just out of reach. For as long as I could remember, my brother and I had yearned to have a cat. However, for one reason or another, this wish never came to be, staying out of sight, and receding into the shadows: As I grew older, it seemed like a dream, and I couldn't quite remember what the dream was about as the possibilities for this dream to be a reality grew lesser and lesser, further and further away from tangibility. However, though I didn't know it, I was wrong. What had been a fantasy for my family became a reality suddenly, in the blink of an eye. When I finally had taken in the news, it took me minutes to register for me. I couldn't understand what it meant, but after time passed, it came to me, and I was joyful, though a part of me still couldn't believe that a far-off fantasy had burst into reality, even though fantasies are never supposed to touch the real world.


Response:
Here, I attempted to mimic, or use, some of Maxine Hong Kingston's writing styles. For me, a "style" is how something makes you feel, which is a combination of both the content (what is said) and the form (how it's said). In my opinion, content gives the basic feeling of the piece, and the form modifies that basic feeling, fine-tuning it to the author's desire.

So, I tried to tap into Kingston's style: More than just using figurative language or a combination of clauses in a sentence, I tried to use it to achieve a similar purpose. I thought Kingston used figurative language a lot to emphasize things, like the importance and also unworldly power/uniqueness of giving birth, so I used figurative language to emphasize things in my paragraph as well. I also used the combination of multiple clauses in a sentence as well. I thought Kingston used this technique/style to give a visual/deeper insight onto her feelings on the subject of those clauses, which is something I also tried to repeat here.

Task 4 (I put this on Disqus by accident)

"During the charge, I singled out the leader, who grew as he ran toward me. Our eyes locked until his height made me strain my neck looking up, my throat so vulnerable to the stroke of a knife that my eyes dropped to the secret death points on the huge body. First I cut off the his leg with a single sword swipe, just as Chen Laun-feng had chopped the leg off the thunder god. When the Giant stumped toward me, I cut off his head."

Kingston, Maxine Hong. "White Tigers." "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a
Girlhood Among Ghosts." New York: Knopf, 1976. 38. Print.

This describes the Narrator's first battle in command of her army, and the first opponent she faced: A giant. After this passage, she continues narrating the battle and the consequences of the battle.

What interested me originally about this section of the story was the difference from The Ballad of Mu-lan. I remembered the difference so vividly because I remembered that Kingston's fantasy/fan-fiction element was basically the story of Mu-lan with some edits. Indeed, it often felt like that. However, this part was to me the most different. Most of what the Narrator in Woman Warrior talks about is the fighting and war. But in the Ballad, while we know there was a war, the author seems more focused on everything but the war. I remember that there was very little mention of war, even though that seemed like the thing the Ballad was based around- a woman at war. This made me really interested to look deeper into both stories and see why Maxine Hong Kingston might have changed this element of the book so dramatically.

In the content of this passage, we can see the Narrator finally at war, which is actually interesting and distinct when compared to Mu-lan: we never saw Mu-lan actually fighting or doing anything related to war at all, besides joining the army. Kingston gets very specific to the Narrator's actions, which is an interesting contrast to the Ballad.

I think it's interesting how Maxine Hong Kingston writes this passage. We can clearly see the elements of fantasy, with the giant growing in size, and just the idea of a giant in general. However, looking more deeply, we can see that the Narrator compares herself to other Heroes (Chen Luan-feng), and being heroic herself, obviously. But when comparing this to the war-scenes in the Ballad of Mu-lan, it gets very interesting. Mu-lan is never even shown in a battle at all, and isn't compared to heroes or heroines, even though she clearly did excellent work, because she could have gotten anything from the Khan after the war. This is interesting, because clearly Kingston diverted from the norm in writing this with much more attention to detail and to the wars and battles (which, along with the extensive training that Mu-lan didn't have either, take up most of the text).

This idea of a more action and heroic style of writing used by Kingston for this section is very interesting. I think that the importance of this is that Kingston doesn't want to limit the role that the Narrator played in her fan-fiction version of the Ballad. I think this shows some of her deeper intentions with the story: She wanted the Narrator to take a more active role, and for the reader to actually see and understand what the Narrator actually did, rather than just having the reader know that SOMETHING happened. I think that this shows that Maxine Hong Kingston was much more interested in the portrayal of her female characters rather than the actions of the characters. I think that Kingston, when writing the book, thought that having actual actions would speak for Women in the role of men much louder than just words would, like what the Ballad did. So in Kingston's "fan-fiction" version, she was intent on portraying the narrator, essentially the key to the ideas in her story, as a more epic character rather than an amazing character with little detail, like Mu-lan.