Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 20 Editor's Choice: 1
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No Cat Left Behind
[Read the article: Classroom confidential]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was leaving school today -- a Friday -- when a guidance counselor called me in to her office after I stuck my head into her office and called to her pretty head, "Have a good weekend Miss Ringling!"
Hi Gregor, she says. “Could you come in? Could you sit down? Some of your students came here a few days ago. They were really upset. They said you said that you killed a cat. Is that true? Did you tell them that?”
Yes. Was that wrong? Should I have not said that? Is there a rule?
Well, it's upsetting she says to me and I notice all the pictures of cats on her office wall. They are all pictures of one cat and in every picture the cat looks like it is chewing a caramel. It looks rather retarded even for a cat.
(I killed a cat. It was 1977 during the very hot Summer of Sam summer in New York City. I lived in a six floor walk-up on the Lower East Side. A huge dirty gray street cat used to come up the fire escape and scare my little kitty so silly she would spin somersaults in the air while shitting from fear all over the walls. This was not as fun as it seems. During the heat wave of that summer, the filthy gray street cat would come up, slink through the bars and do her number. It was over 100 degrees day and night, night and day for three weeks and so humid. No air conditioning, no breeze. Dead air. One night, when the gray cat came up, I caught her in a pillow case, filled the sink with water and held her under. It was awful and it was wonderful. She fought so hard. Her arms and legs were rotating furiously, her claws could have sliced through my skin like a hot knife through butter if she had caught me. And just as the cat died it stretched out its arms like THIS, and vomited a gray rope of vomit; and it shat too. It shat a nice flat ribbon of shit. I put the rigor morticed body into a Hefty garbage bag and quickly ran down the six flights and put the corpse-in-a-bag under steamy full bags of normal garbage in one of the dented garbage cans outside on the sidewalk.)
I say to the guidance counselor, oh. "Oh. Well, Milly, it's interesting. I was shot in 1993 by a student. When I got shot, I was two blocks from the school on the way to the subway. And when I went back to the school with my hand on my neck and told the assistant principal I had been shot, he merely looked at me very sleepily and said 'Well then Mr Samsa, I recommend you dial 9-1-1.' Now the System--through you--is reacting more to my merely telling about something that happened almost 30 years ago, than the System did when I was shot and no one even called the hospital the next day to see if I was okay."
She says, that is a merely intellectual argument.
I think to myself, the bullet in my neck is not merely intellectual. But I tell her, I will think about your concerns. Maybe I should come back next week and we can talk about it some more? Because right now we are beating a dead horse with a dead cat. (Ha ha, get it?)
She says with anger and horror in her voice, NO JOKING ABOUT KILLING CATS, I MEAN IT.
I respond: OK, I will never talk about killing again.
Ms Ringling says "Right, no talking about killing in class."
And I am thinking, well, OK no more Hamlet, no more discussion of Macbeth or Hiroshima or the Holocaust--but anyway,those are just people.
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Dear Stephy
[Read the article: "The Queen"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You give away much too much of the film.
You are a smart lady. You can review a film without making the reader feel they have seen it with you.
Jeez.
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Gary Kamiya is right
[Read the article: Shame]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I cannot add anything to what Gary Kamiya has said except to say he is right.
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Wow!
[Read the article: Killer reflection]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wow, Jeff Yang has certainly made a career out of the chip on the shoulder about being dif-fe-rent in America as an Asian. From A. Magazine to Salon, it's been a big boo-hoo-hoo that surprise surprise it's different being Chinese in America than it is being Chinese in China.
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Jeff Yang is my rooru moderu
[Read the article: Killer reflection]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]WWhen race enters the equation -- when the perpetrator of a crime of this type is black, like "Beltway Snipers" John Allen Muhammad and his ward Lee Boyd Malvo, or Asian, like Cho -- it rises to the surface and stays there, prompting inevitable discussions about whether "black rage" or "immigrant alienation" were somehow to blame," says Jeff Yang.
Well, actually, as Katie Couric might say, "There are some who wonder if this act was related to rage about the brutalization of Korea under the Japanese, "comfort women" horror..."
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I also looked at the angryasian.com site and found the writer to not be angry at all. (He did plug Yang's Asian Pop site.) His site name is a case of ironic use of language and he is not angry at all -- unlike Mr. Yang, who has made a wonderful living out of being Very Offended In Print. Indeed, I am a fan! I want to make a living like this too! Jeff Yang is my rooru moderu (role model)! Don't be so defensive. Be proud! Not everyone has to write in nuanced ways about race and ethnicity as J. Hoberman does in his brillant article about Eliot Gould in this week's Village Voice.