Journal 02

TJ Montgomery
English 100
Stephanie Gai
29 January 2009

Free Choice

Have you ever needed help? Have you ever wished that someone was willing to help you with your troubles? Have you ever cried because you thought you had to do it all alone? Have you ever done any of these things for anyone else?

So many people feel like the world should stop and cater to their every need, and yet they refuse to try and do just that for someone else. I love helping others and being here at Humboldt State University, allows me to do just that. Here through the HSU Campus, the National Day of Caring has been a tradition for the past 15 years. This year I became a part of it.

World Shelters is a non-profit California based manufacturer and volunteer organization. Their innovative structures apply proven technologies to create temporary and transitional shelters for humanitarian relief. Their work is supported by private donations, sponsors, grants and purchases of their shelters. I am enrolled in a Freshmen Interest Group also known as FIG. This FIG has participated in the HSU Day of Caring with World Shelters, this year was no different.

I arrived with my fellow students at World Shelters at 9am sharp. Well more like dull (we had some difficulty finding the place). We signed in and had a quick bite to eat and went straight to work. Ellen Searle LeBel, Secretary, welcomed us and gave a brief history on the organization’s community efforts (very impressive). We were given basic instructions from Production Manager, Rick Bend. He instructed us on the proper procedure for using the “clips”. It took me a while but I finally got the hang of it. We separated into groups and began putting the pieces together. Some people were cutting tarp, some were preparing blueprints (marking), and others, including me, were placing clips.

The whole process was quite simple. There were no difficult, hard-to-read directions. Only symbols. These shelters are you used all over the world, like in Mozambique, Guam, Serbia, San Salvador, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Jordan, Mexico City, Germany, and Hawaii. All of these places have different tribes or communities of people that speak all kinds of different languages or variations of the same language making scripted directions practically impossible. The team uses symbols to communicate the directions. I know it sounds crazy, but it works.

It took less than three hours to assemble three Q-Shelters to be used at the Humboldt All-Faith Partnership night shelter. At the end of the day, which was only 12pm, we had done something that a lot of people in need would benefit from. And really that’s what it’s all about, helping other people.

Journal 01

TJ Montgomery
English 100
Stephanie Gai
25 January 2009

Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman"

The narrator rewrites her mother’s “talk- story” to understand its significance and Chinese culture. When first told the story of her aunt, the narrator isn’t given all the details, many, but not all. Assuming her mother does not know, nor would disclose the untold details, the narrator comes up with her own ideas of what might have happened. Whenever people are presented with situations they do not understand, they often times try to rationalize them within their own theories. This is exactly what Kingston does to better understand her mother’s reasoning for telling her the story. “Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. . . . The villagers are watchful.”
It is apparent that her mother was telling of the particular even to keep her daughter, Kingston, from partaking in premarital sex. She was hopeful that the fear of being forgotten by those she loved would keep her daughter free from plight. In the “talk-story” told by the mother, aunt “no name” was forced into suicide after a mob attack on the family home by the villagers and her exile from the family’s home, name, and memory. This was all a reaction to the aunt’s pregnancy from adultery.

Kingston, being Chinese- American, did not understand why such a severe punishment was given to such a moderate crime. “Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during good times, became a crime when the village needed food.” Kingston wonders if the village had been in good condition, with flowing crops and plenty of resources would her aunt still have received such cruelty. “If my aunt had betrayed the family at a time of large grain yields and peace, when many boys were born, and wings were being built on many houses, perhaps she might have escaped such severe punishment.”

Her audience at one point is the Chinese- American population. She asks to them, “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese?” during other parts of the story her audience appears to be the reader and herself, recalling this event.

Mostly likely the version in which the aunt is in love with her fellow sinner is to be true. It would explain why she didn’t give up his name throughout the entire ordeal. It also justifies her reason for which she found love in another man. Her husband was in a distant land and she could barely remember what he had looked like.