thanks professor

Celeen Hu's ETHN 2 notebook/journal/archive/chronicle

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The link: https://issuu.com/celeenhu/docs/cover?utm_source=conversion_success&utm_campaign=Transactional&utm_medium=email

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draft 

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With @wearetbd

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Notebook 4 - Alice Huang's feedback

Feedback for Celeen Hu’s Zine 

Summary of Zine:

This zine is a zine about the proliferation of green tea drinks as a commodity and cultural objects in America and features analysis regarding how these drinks have been integrated into white culture. The zine also features some images on how the drinks have become cultural objects, relating to hipster culture and health benefits. The zine also connects green tea drinks to Orientalism and blackness.

Compelling Quotes:

“What strikes me as a little funny and a lot sad is the way that a Green Tea Frappucino/Latte (and by extension, many many Starbucks drinks) have a “basic white bitch” connotation. Let’s pick this apart. Basic: accessible, boring, insignificant. White: ditzy, stupid. Bitch: feminine.” –Ceelen Hu

Perhaps in your Zine you could split up the quote artistically for impact. Like:

Green Tea Frappucino = “Basic white bitch”

Basic: accessible, boring, insignificant

White: ditzy, stupid

Bitch: feminine

Or something similar to the above.

Another quote:

“When people of ethnic descent participate in “ethnic” activities or have display an “ethnic” aesthetic, like Asians drinking tea or Blacks gelling down baby hairs or, you know, letting their natural hair be, it’s deemed as too ethnic. Too “chink” or too black/”urban”/”hood”/”ghetto”. But when white people do it (disclaimer: I’ve seen Asian people do this too, but let’s not pretend they didn’t get the idea from white people using it), it’s seen as quirky, fashionable, or generally acceptable.”

I think you could use these contrasting adjectives and descriptions in an artistic way in the zine. Just the words themselves are quite powerful in explaining the idea that you want to convey. 

Compelling anecdotes, stories, facts and content:

One story/anecdote you could add into your final zine is the story of when you were first introduced to the Green Tea Frappucino/Latte. You could contrast your reaction when you were first introduced to the drink to six years later with your current opinions.

Compelling images:

This is an image that Celeen Hu posted in her notebook 2. I think it would be fitting to include in the zine, but since it is someone else’s creation it would have to be recreated for fair use. A suggestion could be to just include the quote itself somewhere in the zine as a header or something similar.

  I also found the following image online. I thought it was fitting for many of the ideas that Celeen discusses regarding how green tea is consumed for health rather than caffeine and how these intentions are related to classism.

Again, this image would have to be recreated, maybe Celeen could recreate it with a different image.

Reword Analysis:

Original Analysis:

“THAT BEING SAID, in America green tea does have national binds, because here, it is relational to white American “hipster” culture. Green tea is an oddly placed object, culturally and socially. On one hand, it is seen as an “other” and representative of East Asian (specifically China and Japan) culture, heritage, tradition, and/or history. One the other hand, it has become so commonplace to see in America that it’s also become “whitewashed,” where the culture is left behind. The presence and incorporation of green tea into lattes and frappuchinos is evidence of that, because those drinks are a part of white culture.” –Celeen Hu 

Reworded Analysis:

In America, green tea relates to the national binds of both colonialism and whiteness. Currently, green tea is placed within white American “hipster” culture. However, while green tea has been integrated into whiteness, it is seen as the “other”, as a representation of East Asia culture, heritage, tradition, and history. This relationship of green tea to both East Asia and whiteness can be tied to colonialism, as East Asia was frequently colonized in the past. In addition, since it has become commonplace to see green tea in America, it has also become “whitewashed,” where the culture is left behind. In that way, green tea has been integrated into the national bind of whiteness, since it is not part of white culture.

This analysis is powerful because it discusses the national binds clearly and emphasizes the difference between East Asian green tea and green tea drinks within America, in a white context. Discussing the East Asian “other” and also orientalism works well in the analysis (in the rest of the notebook(s) as well).

More suggestions could be analyzing hipster culture as a whole more or just explaining it more clearly in case people aren’t that familiar with it (but they probably are). 

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page templates 

[officialflowergirl]

settle this for me once and for all

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

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its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea

[officialflowergirl]

I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea

[childbully]

i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea

[officialflowergirl]

why don’t white people just say tea

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”

[breadpocalypse]

the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like

there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai 

[tvalkyrie-deactivated20200617]

They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.

[startedwellthatsentence]

What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).

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So, can we all stop making fun of this now?

[lyrangalia]

Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”? 

It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to. 

The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).

And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.

(Source) 

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This is the post that would make Uncle Iroh join tumblr

[formalsweatpants-casualtiaras]

Tea and linguistics. My two faves.

[thayerkerbasy]

Okay, this is all kinds of fascinating!

[chromatosis-blog]

Quality linguistic research

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The 3rd: Spilling the (Green) Tea

I didn’t really touch on the topic of national binds in notebook two, because I was reformulating how I wanted to approach the topic of green tea. I wanted it to be more relevant to the current culture in America, and focus less on the history/discovery/first steps to globalism (despite its history and culture being the reason why I chose the topic in the first place.) That being said, I don’t think green tea has many national binds by itself. At best, it glosses over a large part of Chinese and Japanese history and highlights only a few things, such as Japanese tea ceremonies. It would do those countries a disservice if I were to say it represents those nations.

 THAT BEING SAID, in America green tea does have national binds, because here, it is relational to white American “hipster” culture. Green tea is an oddly placed object, culturally and socially. On one hand, it is seen as an “other” and representative of East Asian (specifically China and Japan) culture, heritage, tradition, and/or history. One the other hand, it has become so commonplace to see in America that it’s also become “whitewashed,” where the culture is left behind. The presence and incorporation of green tea into lattes and frappuchinos is evidence of that, because those drinks are a part of white culture.

 Nazli Kibria wrote a research article about ethnic binds, which is when a person’s ethnic identity (and its significance) clashes with the culture they’re currently in. She touches on how second generation Chinese and Korean immigrants feel the pressure to “both...cultivate [their] membership and to downplay or minimalize it.” This is absolutely applicable to green tea. In America, people who drink it either minimalize its significance or overplay it to seem more “cultured.” In contrast, green tea in China is just a drink. It carries cultural significance and everyone acknowledges that, but no one drinks it to seem smarter or better. The relationship of green tea to it place in “white” American culture is what gives it its national binds.

 I want to briefly touch upon and compare green tea, or in a broader sense, culturally significant Asian items to how Black items and culture are treated in America. To paraphrase what was said in lecture: white (American) culture cannot and does not exist without and outside of Black culture. Therefore, to discuss the relationship between Asian culture and white culture is also to discuss it in comparison to Black culture and its relationship to white culture. Simply put, Asian objects and culture are put on a pedestal while Black items and culture are often degraded or subjected to ridicule. When people of ethnic descent participate in “ethnic” activities or have display an “ethnic” aesthetic, like Asians drinking tea or Blacks gelling down baby hairs or, you know, letting their natural hair be, it’s deemed as too ethnic. Too “chink” or too black/”urban”/”hood”/”ghetto”. But when white people do it (disclaimer: I’ve seen Asian people do this too, but let’s not pretend they didn’t get the idea from white people using it), it’s seen as quirky, fashionable, or generally acceptable. The difference arises in that white people view Asian culture as “better”, and so use it to “upgrade” their cultural and educational capital. But Black culture and the objects associated with it are often seen as less classy (whatever that means) and so whites using it is a form of gentrification. Neither histories and cultures are acknowledged beyond a throwaway line that may or may not exist.

   Citation:

Kibria, Nazli. "Race, Ethnic Options, and Ethnic Binds: Identity Negotiations of   Second-Generation Chinese and Korean Americans." Sociological Perspectives     43.1 (2000): 77-95. Web.    <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2307/1389783>.

        Full article: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2307/1389783

 http://jezebel.com/the-problem-with-baby-hairs-urban-and-the-fashion-indu-1635947700

        (I want to point out a comment that user Kazali made in reference to “ethnic” objects/aesthetic: “That's what pisses off black people (and other POC) the most, to be honest: when we do it, we're subhuman, but then white people snatch it up and suddenly it's haute and WE can't afford it anymore.”)

 Cover Image: 

image credit 

Zine Layout:

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The 2nd: Spilling the (Green) Tea

 Some six or so years ago at Starbucks, a friend introduced me to the Green Tea Frappucino. It got me thinking, back then, because green tea was something that I had always associated with China and Japan, each for their different reasons. It was odd, I thought, that such a drink was available in a wildly successful American chain. I was used to green tea ice cream being served at sushi restaurants I rarely went to, so I was delighted that the Green Tea Frappuchino was so accessible. Fast forward to last Wednesday, and I hear a barista call out an order for a Green Tea Frappucino. In contrast to the me of 6 years ago, I gather no satisfaction from people ordering it. I don’t feel as if people are finally realizing the greatness of green tea. Instead, I feel a vague sense of >.>, over the fact that most of the history and culture is lost and/or omitted because of globalization and consumerism and capitalism. 

As a disclaimer, I’m not saying that tea should be exclusively for Asian people to drink. Tea, while holding historical and cultural significance, is not particularly dangerous. A white person drinking green tea is different from a white person having dreads, because dreads are something black people are made fun of for and have lost opportunities because. Green tea, in it’s more “white” iterations, is not harmful to Asians. That being said, they share the same experience of being devalued because of their growing popularity in mainstream America. In becoming globalized, many items have lost their cultural and historical significance. The product exists, but has none of its history does. Green tea is no exception to this. 

What strikes me as a little funny and a lot sad is the way that a Green Tea Frappucino/Latte (and by extension, many many Starbucks drinks) have a “basic white bitch” connotation. Let’s pick this apart. Basic: accessible, boring, insignificant. White: ditzy, stupid. Bitch: feminine. The western perception of Japanese tea ceremonies is usually of a submissive, silent woman serving men, when in reality, Japanese women started learning it in the early 20th century as a way to demonstrate their “economic and cultural(-educational) capital” in the face of gender inequality (Kato). It’s certainly a stark contrast to something that is said by POCs to express annoyance over typical white behavior, and by white people as a way to distance themselves from “uncultured heathens” aka other white people. Also, I wanted to add: why is the phrase about a “bitch” anyways? It’s a term, like many other female coded insults, that refers to their behavior towards men. (I could go on, message me if you want) 

Another point of contention: why does drinking tea, green or otherwise, imply pretentiousness? For some reason, tea in America carries a sense of “Whole Foods” elitism. It’s consumed for health rather than a need of caffeine, like coffee. And healthiness, or rather health culture, can be argued as classist, because being healthy means having time to exercise and money to spend on meal plans and trainers and gym memberships. Not only is tea connotative of the elitism of health culture, it also implies that the person drinking it is “cultured” and “sophisticated.” And this itself is an indicator of exoticism. And exoticism is bad, despite the general positive meaning of “exotic”. As writer Rachel Kuo says, in an article about WOC but that is also applicable to objects, exotic things are “less normal, less human, and less real” than western things. In short, the cultural value of green tea is dependent on how “other” it is.

The globalization of green tea has wrought several consequences on it. It has experienced both devaluation and inflation because it has been popularized in America. Devaluation, because it is sometimes seen as simply a way to boost metabolism or “purify toxins from the body.” At the same time, its value is inflated because of its association with “exotic” East/Southeast Asian culture. Green tea is both stripped of its history and culture and exotified because of it. People need to consider their actions and what they mean in the greater scheme of things. Tea exists outside of diets and foodie fads and consumerism. At the same time, its culture and history should not be used by Americans to elevate their social/cultural/educational capital. Indeed, this can be said of a lot of so called “ethnic foods.” The globalization of green tea and its subsequent development in image is but an example of a larger trend of white gentrification/stealing/hipsterification/hipsterilization of non-white foods (credit Laini Nguyen @not-a-foodie).  

Links:

http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/01/calling-woc-exotic-is-racist/

KatoÌ, Etsuko. The Tea Ceremony and Women's Empowerment in Modern Japan: Bodies Re-presenting the past. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. Web. https://books.google.com/books?id=E8wg9pbfkdAC&pg=PT169&lpg=PT169&dq=are+japanese+tea+ceremonies+held+by+men+or+women?&source=bl&ots=fHZdUU-2mT&sig=tN5356NqJM6RRsxCAqzBH_-N3HI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjV0O3i1ebRAhUFi1QKHSFhAtcQ6AEIVDAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false.

https://books.google.com/books?id=AGaTAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA28&lpg=PA28#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://routledgesoc.com/category/profile-tags/cultural-capital 

  (credit Laini Nguyen @inkwingart)

[the39th]

The 1st: Spilling the (Green) Tea

Object: Green tea, in its various forms. Specifically, green tea lattes and other green tea flavored consumables.

 Circulates: China to Japan (1100-1200s) and then from there to America in the 2000s. Boom in popularity in the last 4 or so years.

 Theme: globalization, immigration (?)

Tea is everywhere in China. At restaurants, the drink is served automatically, and when my aunt visited us this past month, she gifted us with a traditional earthenware pot meant for tea ceremonies. Needless to say, tea is pretty damn importan. It’s present at casual outings with friends and family as well as at business meetings and important ceremonies. Of the various types of teas in China, the most popular is green tea, made of camellia sinensis leaves. Actually, camellia sinesis is also the defining ingredient of oolong and black teas. The different flavors come about from the preparation and processing of tea.

 The earliest record of tea in China is from 200 BC, from the Western Han dynasty. It had spread throughout central China by 200 CE, and to Japan in the 12th century CE. It is unclear whether or not commoners in China drunk tea in the beginning, due to their histories not being recorded. However, according to legend, Laozi, the famed philosopher as well as the founder of Taoism, was encouraged to write the Dao De Jing after being offered tea by a customs inspector. This means that green tea had trickled down from the upper class to the middle class, and probably the lower class as well. Tea was brought to Japan in the 6th century CE, but didn’t become popularized until the 12th century. It was first used as a way for Buddhist monks to center themselves before meditation, and therefore mostly exclusive to them. It only gained popularity when Eisai, a famous Zen priest, introduced it to the samurai, as a way to improved health. The samurai moved into power soon after, during the Heian period, and brought tea into court with them. From then on, tea drinking spread throughout the social classes, but was mainly concentrated in the upper class.

 Fast forward 800 years or so, and the matcha craze has finally lifted its heavy hand (if only slightly) from the tastes of people in America. Matcha, which originates from Japan and has a different growing and producing process than regular green tea, is powdered whole green tea leaves. Because of the natural health benefits as well as some ingenious social media marketing, matcha lattes and frappucinos and even cafes have popped up everywhere in America, and nowhere is that more evident than in Starbucks. The green tea latte (and frappucino) at Starbucks has been growing in popularity ever since its introduction in 2005, and especially so in the last three or four years. To be fair, the green tea latte actually started in Japan, where matcha and green tea has been a part of daily life for centuries. Apparently the Starbucks matcha flavor there is a lot more intense and way less sweet than the American version, which, makes a lot of sense. It’s become obvious, however, that the spread of green tea flavored things throughout America is a fad. Centuries of rich history and culture are either given a throwaway line in the introduction to a recipe, or not mentioned at all. Even worse, the history is sometimes used for a touch of exoticism (as if condensing a few thousand years’ worth of culture and history isn’t bad enough, let’s throw in some lines about how its history makes it the best drink ever, right?)

 It’s not to say that green tea or matcha isn’t meant for the masses. Perhaps it wasn’t, in the early 1100s or in 200 BC, but it is now. And yet, people in China still have an acute appreciation for it, beyond the health benefits and other hoopla. When I visited China the summer before senior year of high school, my aunt led me to a small alcove where a few of her friends were performing an informal tea ceremony. She told me, quietly, about the preparation of the pots and cups, the optimal temperature of the water poured onto the tea leaves, and how different types of tea have their own quirks and flavors. Tea is significant in China. It bridges the gap between modern China culture and that of ancient China’s and I imagine that it is almost the same in Japan. It exists outside of diets and foodie fads and consumerism. Green tea is culturally significant, and the globalization of it shouldn’t mean reducing it so that only the product exists, and not the history.

Works Cited 

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep18955

https://books.google.com/books?id=AGaTAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA28&lpg=PA28#v=onepage&q&f=false