1. How has Korean beauty influenced Asian culture?
2. How has BTS expanded Asian representation?
3. How does social media impact and shape young women today?

The piece of media I chose is called Love, Victor. Essentially, this represents the LGBTQ community as it depicts the hardships of keeping one’s sexuality a secret and social acceptance.

Conan Gray is one of my favorite artists. There’s so much meaning in all of his songs. He focuses a lot on his life and his experiences as a teenager which is really relatable. In two of his songs called “Generation Why?” and “Crush Culture” he sings about society and how it makes him feel. For instance, in a verse of “Generation Why” he sings,  “Cause we are the helpless, selfish, one of a kind. Millennium kids, that all wanna die. Walking in the street with no light inside our eyes. We are the worthless, cursed with too much time. We get into trouble and lose our minds”; it depicts just how society views us. Especially adults, they’ll tell you about you and judge you. So this song focuses on how grown ups are telling us teenagers that our generation is worthless and that we don’t know how to work for what we have. In “Crush Culture” he talks about how he views love “Crush Culture makes me wants to spill my guts out”. Which may not apply to everyone but if you also feel that way it’s a great listen. But the song itself has such a vibe. If you want to try listening to something new, Conan Gray, I’m telling you. His songs are simple yet complex with meaning and that’s something most of us adore. There are so many other great other songs like The Story, Astronomy, Overdrive, People Watching, Comfort Crowd, and Heather. But I can go on about all the meanings to all these songs at a later time. My point is if you love relatable music, are a teenager who looks for comfort in music, or if you simply like indie pop but haven’t heard of Conan Gray. Listen to Conan Gray. At least, in my opinion, I don’t think a lot of artists nowadays make real-life relatable songs so Conan is an essential artist to me. Conan Gray is that artist I listen to when I’m really mad at the world and things aren’t going my way. Sometimes what we look for in music is to listen to someone saying the words you can’t get yourself to say. Listening to a song that resonates with what you’re going through is what we all need sometimes. Knowing that someone else has experienced the same feelings as us can help us feel better, we’re not alone. His music is amazing but he, himself, as an individual he’s so pure and honest. Which is what I love about him. I enjoy his honesty and how he doesn’t ever sugarcoat anything. One thing that he’s made clear to everyone is that he hates labels. Since the media keeps on questioning his sexuality, he once said in a tweet that if you were the type of person who liked labels that there wasn’t an issue with him but if you tried forcing labels on him and others, that was a complete no. He has made so many iconic tweets such as “I know I said lol but I’m actually crying” and “ppl be like “sorry to annoy you” and then proceed to annoy you,” Everything he says is transparent whether it’s in an interview, in a song, or social media. He always keeps it real.

https://youtu.be/noJ4I3RBoEY

https://youtu.be/entVpj_IT6M

https://youtu.be/PNKxAWiu4Fc

After reading and watching, “Should Writer use they own language” by Vershawn Young and “Three ways to speak English” by Jamilia Lyiscott, my initial reactions to these two texts were being a bit confused about the wording that the author used. It sort of surprised me, it was unexpected since I figured the passage would be in “formal writing”. However, after creating that switch in my head, I was able to grasp the understanding of what Young was trying to argue. As for the video, I found myself being very concentrated and carefully listening to all the keypoints being made about the English language. Young and Lyiscott both mention how there’s more than one way to speak English. They also demonstrate the dynamics of the English language and portray that there is more than one way to speak English. They do this by speaking in different forms of English to indicate that there is in fact multiple ways to speak the language. Young uses the English you speak outside of school, the type you speak to a friend while Lyiscott makes a stronger argument by providing more than one way to speak English. She uses the type of English you speak with friends, formal English like the type you use in school, and her Jamaican English. This was particularly intriguing since I think the way the use of language really powerful. It also made me think of language as a “shapeshifter” it shifts and changes. It’s one language but it shifts and changes into different forms.

I absoulutely agree with both of their perspectives and is probably one of the reasons why I was so engaged in what they were saying. “Yes, you do, and I’m not here to take that language from you; I’m here to teach you another one.” Who could object to learning a second language? (Fish “Part 3”). Young responds to this quote by stating how hypocritical it is to say that we should learn a second language but why can’t they? I absolutley agree with the point Young is making here, if people stopped emphasizing the use of “formal English” so much more could be said and done through different perspectives. Lyiscott states, “Now you may think that it is ignorant to speak broken English, But I am here to tell you that even “articulate” Americans sound foolish to the British”. It’s such a good way to put this term “dominant language ideology”. In other words,  those who speak “formal English” sound the same as a person speaking “informal English” to a British Person. Which really emphasizes that it is the same language we speak, other’s just force the idea of “formal English” upon others. Language changes over time, so I wonder what will soon be considered “articulate”.

While reading the passage, I came across three quotes that really stood out to me. To start off, ” But then there was Spanish: Español, the language rarely heard of away from home; Español, the language which seemed to me, therefore, a private language, my family’s language.” My understanding of this quote is that language is connected to one’s identity. Additionally, “But I had no place to escape to where I could grieve in Spanish”. Yet again the author makes it clear how much one’s native language can become a sense of belonging in their home environment. However, this also applies to anyone who is currently learning a language to fit in. Lastly, the author mentions a new silence at home. This was brought to my attention because in the beginning mentioned how much he would use all the sounds in his house to learn and how loud the house was. “We shared fewer and fewer words with our parents. Often the parent wouldn’t understand”. I believe that this quote is important because it depicts the struggle of a bilingual child and the importance of language, being able to understand one another.

Something that really caught my eye was the amount of imagery that was being used. I found myself creating these images in my mind which helped me understand what was going on a lot better. I found the essay very intriguing because of how relatable the first day of school is. What stuck out to me was when she mentioned, “She has learned that money is the beginning and end of everything in this world, and when the woman finishes, my mother offers her fifty cents.” This had a really big impact because coming from a low-income family it made me resonate with her mother. On top of that, her mother mentions that she doesn’t know how to read or write, this made me feel sad in a way. I think that her daughter is taking her mother for granted. I believe that she should love and cherish her mother a lot more and be thankful because at least she has someone in her life who cares for her.