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Korean American Women

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Korean American Women and their Experiences Throughout history, women in general have been exposed to some form of limitations, especially in terms of availability or accessibility, which accounts for societal forces that mark them as an inferior gender. Particularly, in Asian American history, male dominance remains, while women are kept hidden against the backdrop of increasing Asian immigration. It can even be implied that to a certain extent, Asian women are only known in history as a burden to the man or rather just an extra baggage in the bigger context of Asian American studies due to the lack of information about their active roles. However, in Shirley Hune’s literary work “Doing Gender with a Feminist Gaze: A Historical Reconstruction …show more content…

Through the Christian faith, Korean women felt a sense of liberty that they were unaccustomed to because Korean traditional family-system spelled out set of marital roles; husband earns a living and commands his submissive wife (Rhee 66). They have always been expected to play out a subordinate, filial role. This filial role can be compared with the concept of filial piety in Milton Murayama’s “All I Asking For Is My Body”; which is a Confucian philosophy that stresses an individuals’ duty of respect to the elders. Frankly, I think it is an idea with major drawbacks because of its limiting factor. It disables individuals from pursuing or even realizing their own passions due to family bondage. In other words, the introduction of Christianity challenged Confucianism, which in some sense reflects the breaking-out process of Korean women, not just in Korea, but also in North …show more content…

This is true when comparing “picture brides” to “war brides” who are motivated respectively by personal desires and by social circumstances. In accordance to Assistant Professor Susie Woo, in her lecture video entitled “Korean Americans: Past and Present”, she mentions how after 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act “over 40% of Koreans are somehow a relative of military brides”. By this, we can imagine reasons as to why they would leave, like political tensions mixed with scarce financial resources, which comes to attention other ethnicities like the Hmong who left

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Have you ever wondered what it might have been like to be a Japanese-American at the time of WWII, when your race was discriminated against, and you just couldn’t seem to fit in, no matter how hard you tried? The memoir Farewell to Manzanar, written by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, follows the life of Japanese-American Jeanne Wakatsuki through her child and teenage years. The book is set in the 1940’s, right about the time Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japan, and tension between Caucasians and Japanese-Americans was high. Jeanne struggles with her identity throughout her life, and especially during her junior high and high school years when she can’t join many clubs or feel accepted, just because she is different than the other

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I have chosen to do this reading response of Lee’s piece about model minorities. This chapter focuses on stereotyping of Asian American students and the affects that that has. This piece starts off by discussing how there are two main stereotypes of Asian Americans and those are: being the foreigner and the model minority. Next, the piece discusses how Asian Americans are not seen as authentic, which has resulted in modifications to try and achieve the “American” standard of beauty. I believe that the central argument of this piece is showing that stereotyping Asian americans is detrimental to their education and their identity.

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