Author Archives: Derek Wong

“As long as a girl has looks and youth enough, she avoids anything that might soil her name.  Even when composing a letter, she takes her time to choose her words and writes in ink faint enough to leave you bemused and longing for something clear;then, when at last you get near enough to catch her faint voice, she speaks under her breath, says next to nothing, and proves to be an expert at keeping herself hidden away.  Take this for sweetly feminine wiles, and passion will lure you into playing up to her, at which point she turns coy.  This, I think, is the worst flaw a girl can have.” – Chief Equerry, p 24

This quote is taken from a dialogue between Genji, the Chief, and To no Chujo.  The conversation is basically the other two parading Genji with stories and personal ideas of how women should be.  The excerpt is an objectification of women in which the Chief is saying the best kind of woman is young, pretty, and soft spoken.  When he says “[she] proves to be an expert at keeping herself hidden away”, he literally means for the woman to be hidden away, as if to keep herself away in shame.  In his last line, he says women’s worst flaw is to seduce men into doing what they want by pretending to be shy.

How would someone of the modern century react to such an individual’s ideas and beliefs?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a David Fincher film, was originally part of a trilogy of novels written by Swedish author, Stieg Larrson. The story is about Lisbeth, a 20-something year old woman who is a rape survivor and who’s traumatic experience has since left her scarred.  She is eventually contracted to work with another investigator, Mikael Blomkvist, who she was hired to run a background check on earlier in the movie.

The Jacobean aspect of this movie is that the investigation they are tasked with is that of looking into Harriet Vanger’s sudden disappearance in 1966. Eventually, the duo find that there was not only 1 rape/murder, but a string of them.  This only fuels the duo’s attempts to continue their work as each new clue only reminds Lisbeth about the pain she has experienced. Her personal experience makes her work harder and more diligently because she doesn’t want the murderer to get away with his crime.  Aside from that, social order doesn’t bind her; her lifestyle and work are of not the norm.  Her deep personal issues are what make this film so dark her character flourishes in the Jacobean scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KBPru-Pu5Q

I believe the song Surrender by Cash Cash and Drinking with the Moon by Li Bo have similar underlying messages. In Drinking with the Moon, Li Bo writes “I drink alone, no friend with me. I raise my cup to invite the moon.”  This line clearly states that he has no friends and is thus a loner.  Additionally, the moon is often personified in Chinese culture, and by doing so in his work, it sounds as if he is yearning for companionship.  This is the similarity where the two works meet; the chorus for Surrender goes as follows:

If you hold me now and leave me never,
Say you’ll stay with me forever
Then I surrender, surrender
If you hold me now and leave me never,
Say you’ll stay with me forever
Then I surrender, surrender

The singer is willing to submit to her lover if he/she is willing to be with her.  Additionally, the part immediately following the chorus says:

I pushed and pulled all the ones that tried,
Then I watched them fade away
As I look around a vacant room,
I see nobody left here to blame

She too is a loner, just like Li Bo in his poem.

Lastly, I think another similarity of the two works goes beyond words.  While reading the poem in class and again to myself at home, I couldn’t help but to feel a little upset, as if I was feeling bad for him.  A lone drunk, talking to the moon and asking it to share his drink is just a depressing thought.  The song on the other hand, is of a woman who has pushed everyone away and she is left alone.  She too has no one else around, and is waiting for someone to “break down her walls”

Here’s the song if you wanted to hear it:

My name is Derek Wong and this is my first semester at Baruch.  I am a transfer student and will be majoring in Finance. I enjoy playing basketball and working out in my free time, as well as playing video games occasionally. A personal passion of mine is cars; I’m a bit of a grease monkey.  My favorite book would have to be Eragon, a story about a boy and his dragon, as I enjoy reading adventure stories, and dragons are awesome.

“We tend to link agency to cultural autonomy and to measure homogenizaiton…but every culture is always shaped by other cultures”

I understand the context of the passage, I just don’t understand what he means by agency. Additonally, I don’t agree with the second half of the statement;  the Chinese culture was shaped through years of civil conflict, much longer before outside nations started exploring it.