only a few more weeks!!

I’m sorry too that I didn’t get to write in my journal last week!! I was a little preoccupied because …

PCN FINALLY ARRIVED!! So my life was consumed by that for the entire week. No joke. We had practices every night from 5pm to midnight, rehearsing the entire show and cleaning our performances. In the end, it was completely worth it. During the opening of the show, I was in the audience as part of the piece. Watching from that perspective, I could feel the energy of the performers. I was so excited. After months of preparation and stress and sacrifice, the big night was finally here. And we blew everyone away. People have said that it was the best PCN everrrrr, which makes me super proud. But I would’ve been proud of us regardless of what other people had to say. We had HUGE technical difficulties, but we still got our message across. Hopefully, we were able to mobilize members of our community for social change, and were able to educate individuals who aren’t Filipino about the issues that affect us. I hope that people understood what we were trying to say, and were empowered themselves to go out there and make change for themselves.

Yeah … because of PCN, I also got sick, which is another reason why I was unable to write in the blog last week. Considering I was sleep-deprived, I basically knocked out in my parents’ hotel room after the show. And I didn’t wake up until a few hours before our class the Monday morning after.

I basically spent all my free time (and even time when I should’ve been in class) working on our paper last week because I wasn’t able to focus on it during all of that business. I ended up writing about the role of white women in Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart. I was going to focus on the importance of the minor characters in Bulosan’s life, but while I was gathering textual evidence, I realized that the majority of the minor characters I was highlighting were women. And not only just women, but white women. So … I wanted to analyze more about the importance of that. I concluded that white women became the personification of Bulosan’s ideals about America. They represented education (Mary Strandon), kindness and support (Marian), ability to create change (Dora), acceptance of culture and race (Alice Odell), and steady companionship (Eileen). The reason why them being white is significant because they were foreign to Bulosan. He was not accustomed to their culture. He feared them because he thought they would be unable to understand him. These are all things he feared of America. In the end, however, they overcame these fears and proved to Bulosan that America was a place where he could belong. They allowed him to understand his emotions rather than ignore them. Thus, he learned that in order to understand what America is, he must look within and define it for himself.

Have a great week, ladies!

Laurie Bailon