JULIA PARK
journalism | storytelling | communication
a year in humanities first
In my first year of college, I was part of the inaugural cohort of students for Humanities First, a three-quarter course sequence to introduce students to the study of the humanities and how to translate it for public audiences. We read books and turned them into public-facing campaigns for social media. Even though it was all on Zoom, we all knew each other pretty well by the end and made some great connections with professors from Classics, Spanish & Portuguese Studies, English, and more. It was so liberating to start reading books and follow your curiosity, not a set of rigid questions that a high school teacher hands you on a sheet of paper.
HUM 101: Foundations
One of the recurring images in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey is that of the “wine-dark sea,”
the wild and mysterious force that both wrecks Odysseus’s ship and carries him home from the Trojan War (see Homer 5.124). I was fascinated by it. According to Homer (although the actual authorship of the poem is disputed), the Mediterranean Sea is not crystal clear, sapphire blue, or shining with glints of sunshine on the rippling waves. It is dark and opaque, and “belching terribly” as the “great wave roar[s] against the dry land” (Homer 5.371, 370). As we traced the concept of "journeys" through texts from various periods and cultures in HUM 101, Homer's image of a dark and tumultuous sea and other examples of vivid language absorbed me. I became fascinated by how authors recreate journeys in their texts through the literary devices at their disposal.
The ocean not only wrecks Odysseus’s ship, but blows him completely off course. It impoverishes him, stripping him of all marks of kingship and civilization as it dashes him against the rocks, and taunts him by allowing him to catch fleeting glimpses of home before bearing him away again. The image of the sea challenges the linear notion of journeys, redefining them as a series of regressions and advancements where the real growth and change occurs by experiencing repeated failures and successes. In the medieval Irish account of The Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot, the sea represents the meandering route by which a group of Irish monks make their way toward the island of paradise, as well as a place where they lack access to fresh food and must teach themselves the discipline to fast and ration out their resources. It is a landscape where they must perpetually forge their own path and sacrifice their own fulfillment in order to reach a distant reward. The image of water also figures into Xu Zhimo’s poem, “Second Farewell to Cambridge” (1925), where the speaker compares his feelings to the sensation of floating on a gentle river: “The green plants on the river bed, / So lush and so gracefully swaying / In the gentle current of the Cam / I'd be happy to remain a waterweed.” The peaceful flow of the river parallels his desire to journey onward quietly, without disturbing the world, submitting to the ebb and flow of the environment around him to bear him forward. Tracing the motif of moving water throughout our course readings was just one entryway I found into unfamiliar texts. I realized that journeys can be as unpredictable as the ocean itself, may require deep sacrifice and discomfort, and may involve a constant struggle to navigate the world with a destination in mind while accepting the forces of nature shaping one’s path.
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This vision of journeys has shaped the way I understand my own life as well. My college career no longer appears to be a straight line, especially in the midst of a pandemic that reminds me of all the circumstances I cannot control. My walk as a Christian is another journey, one that will last my entire life and that I know will have both joys and trials as I seek to follow God's purpose for my life. The Honors seminar I took this quarter opened my eyes to the stories of immigrants, as they made both physical journeys across national borders and psychological journeys in learning a new language, overcoming discrimination, and transmitting their history to younger generations. In all of these real-world examples I can now apply my knowledge of what a journey is, at least to me: a nonlinear sequence of both successes and failures, driven by both self-will and submission to forces outside of one's control.
Or I’ll simply remember the image that haunts my mind: an ancient Greek warrior, sailing over a vast, inscrutable, “wine-dark sea.”
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team media campaign:
@hum101ba
HUM 102 B: Campus Connections
In the second course of the Humanities First sequence, we read Deborah Miranda's book Bad Indians and discussed themes of family, identity, and storytelling as a class.
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This was the first class I'd ever taken focusing solely on memoirs and personal storytelling. What struck me about Miranda's memoir was how vivid it was--I felt as if I was right there living what she was describing. I hope to practice this skill in my own personal life.
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It struck me that there is so much I do not know about my own family. My entire family is Korean but I know very little about the culture and language. This class led me to reflect on my relationship with stories and writing and how that medium can serve as a way to dive deeper into my own identity and background.
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Our media campaign team of 6 created this Instagram account below to translate our learning into a real-world product. @museumdiscoveries traces the theme of journeys through artifacts from museums of Indigenous culture. Using Deborah Miranda's memoir Bad Indians as a starting point, we crafted posts around artifacts that spoke to us on a personal level and practiced articulating our thoughts to a public audience.
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While our museum visits were unfortunately all digital due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I found the process of searching for an artifact and writing about the ways in which it spoke to me to be very liberating. In contrast to last quarter, where we focused on drawing ideas about the Humanities First course theme of "journeys" from literature, we used this quarter's media campaign to explore journeys as expressed through pieces of art and physical objects.
team media campaign:
@museumdiscoveries
HUM 103 C: Community Connections
This quarter, we read and discussed John Okada’s novel No-No Boy, which tells the story of a fictional character named Ichiro Yamada as he struggles to build relationships and recover his sense of identity in the aftermath of the WWII internment of Japanese Americans and his own imprisonment for refusing to obey the draft. I realized with somewhat of a shock that I had read very few works of Asian or Asian American literature prior to this class--the only book I can remember reading is Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and a few other excerpts from authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston for my high school English classes.
To be honest, I haven’t really enjoyed the Asian American literature I’ve read so far. Much of what I’ve read feels raw and vulnerable in a way that I haven’t seen in other works of literature, and No-No Boy felt like an extension of that experience. I felt frustrated with Ichiro and even more frustrated with some of his friends and family members because of the power that emotions hold over them, how quickly things spiral out of control and conflicts escalate when it seems that a simple, earnest, transparent conversation could straighten things out. Ichiro has multiple opportunities to rebuild his life, from continuing his progress toward an engineering degree to taking up jobs that employers hold out to him with zero strings attached. Yet he refuses all of them, and the last scene of the novel is of Ichiro walking down a dark alley, musing about the glimmer of hope he sees, or thinks he sees, in the nation that has all but rejected his own ethnic community. Where is the closure to that kind of journey? Can we even call Ichiro’s aimless wandering through Seattle’s International District, riding buses, visiting his friends’ apartments, and circling back to his parents’ grocery store a journey? Where did he start, and where can it be said that he ends up?
It seems that Ichiro’s journey is less about the destination and more about the process, the everyday motions and repeated cycles of life, like the bus ride he used to take everyday to his college campus until it became ingrained in his memory. Each character along the way teaches Ichiro something about America and how he might be able to move on, or at least move forward, from the debilitating feeling of having forever lost the right to claim a place in America and even in his own Japanese American community after refusing the draft--after becoming a “no-no boy.” It is a journey that continues, in imagination if not in reality, beyond the reader’s view.
After reading No-No Boy, I would like to continue my journey exploring literature about America’s conflicted relationship with immigrants, and how both native and non-native-born citizens process their experiences. This class also represented a nice continuation from my fall quarter Honors seminar on migration stories. I hope to read E. J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others for a chance to engage with the Korean American experience in the U.S., maybe this summer.
On the practical side of things, I really enjoyed this course because of the small size of our section, which allowed us to have very intimate discussions about the ideas in the novel. I also continued building my graphic design, public communications, and educational skills in creating Instagram posts around the intersection of No-No Boy with museum artifacts from the Japanese American history, which I got to work on with a good friend! I hope to take these highly useful skills into a future career in communications, writing, and/or education.
This fall, I am excited to stay “in” the Humanities First program as an intern. I can’t wait to support new freshmen in exploring the humanities as I develop my passion for the same.
team Instagram: @exploringculturalidentity
This quarter, we also had assigned Writing Tasks that allowed us to dive deeper into some aspect of the text on our own, and share it on our online class discussion board. I really enjoyed trying out our professor's recommendations to look at the text creatively, analytically (i.e., close reading), or tangentially. I tried out all three strategies and found all of them a great way to approach a literary text. I look forward to applying them in future literature classes.