London Class Trip

Day 1

The bus broke down so instead of leaving at 8:15 we left at 9:15. I read Emma while waiting. When we got to London, we basically took a stroll around South Bank, which has the London Eye, Millenium Bridge, National Theatre, and National Film Institute.

The hostel was not as nice as the one in St. Ives. All 12 girls were in one room, which had 4 triple bunk beds, stacked Jimanji-style. I actually kind of liked the rooms. The bathrooms were clean and there was a lot of room to store stuff. For dinner, I finally got to eat fish and chips. It was delicious.

Next was the "highlight" of the day, watching England Expects at the BFI. The film is about a divorced security guard who starts off kind of racist but it seems pretty moderate. He also cares a lot about his daughter and frequently criticizes her deadbeat mother for corrupting and neglecting her. Then we start seeing the cracks (no pun intended. The daughter smokes (?) crack and when the father discovers this, he reaches the breaking point) in his sanity - he stalks a woman at work, spying on her with the security cameras; he becomes more and more racist toward blacks and the Muslim community when his ex-wife and daughter are denied housing. He gets crazier still after discovering his daughter's drug abuse and friendship with a Muslim boy. He returns to a bar where he presumably used to partake in some sort of violence, and joins a Conservative Right-Wing (read: extremist) political party. He seeks revenge after he is fired for sexual abuse - first by beating up the woman's boyfriend, then shooting a crossbow (yes, that's right) at a Muslim woman, the sister of his daughter's friend. This incites a race riot that ends in a white boy accidentally stabbing him and the Muslim boy getting blamed and arrested for it. Phew, as you can tell, the movie was intense.

But even though the storyline, plot, and drama were over-the-top and not that spectacular, the movie definitely impacted me. As the only Asian in the group, I felt uncomfortable hearing the racist slurs and anger directed toward "Asians coming into [white people's] country." Even though I couldn't control my immigrating here, I felt like I was part of a group that had invaded another country and displaced whites. What's strange was that the movie made me feel that the protagonist, Ray, may have been justified in his racist anger, in the sense that Asian immigrants were displacing whites in jobs and housing; we were changing the identity of their nation. Not without reason, because we are escaping our oppressive countries. Or, in the movie, the Indians were just coming to the nation that imperialized theirs.

What the movie shows is that their is no fair answer to the problem. Both sides are right. Resentment ought to be expected from whites who are being displaced by people of another ethnicity. That Ray also attacks his co-worker's boyfriend, who is white, means that his anger comes from the fact that other people are taking what he believes is entitled to him. It is a

I guess the only solution is what Ray vehemently and crassly denies: "The races should not mix. It makes them impure." The races should mix. If immigration seems unfair (a whole exodus of people from another country coming in and crowding out the natives of another country, while the emigrant country receives no flood of immigrants) then the effect of it – the informing, fusion, of culture – justifies and explains its existence.

After that Amelia, Christina, Patricia, and I wandered around South Bank, getting photos of Parliament and Big Ben lit up at night. We were the only ones in our class to stay behind and find our own way back to the hostel. The rest of them played Kings, a surprisingly complex game for an activity that involves getting drunk.

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My progress: I am learning to sit and just talk; to have leisure every day, to engage in lighthearted and unnecessary conversation. I must now work on remembering more details and speaking more articulately

Day 2

We started off with a tour of Holland Park, Notting Hill, and Portobello Market. I tried my best to pay more attention than I usually do, and found myself enjoying all the little stories the tour guide told. Some of the factoids in the tour were useful (London is split into a business district and Westminster; there are three economic levels of neighborhoods all near each other) but most were not (Squirrels at Holland Park had become used to visitors feeding them so no longer hibernated). Yet remembering and saying these seemingly unimportant facts can enhance my intellect and broaden my world views.