- One of the things I learned when I was reading “Bahadur: How could I write about women whose existence is barely acknowledged?”, with just the title itself left me surprised as in I already had an idea on how they treated women: that they had to bear children, preferably a boy and that they had no voice, but I thought they were still treated as human beings. The fact that she had to turn into unofficial sources because there was nothing about women in the official ones by looking for clues on at least how women were in the culture during those times such as with folk songs, oral histories, pictures, and colonial era-postcards.
- The person that I chose for the interview was Kitty Wong Okamura. And some things that I’ve from her was that she is a 4th generation of a Chinese family that emigrated in San Francisco, California. Her grandfather, Lim Tai, who went to the Hoping Area in Guangdong Province near Canton when he was a teenager in 1880. According to Kitty’s mom, he was a laborer when he arrived, he would go to work in the slaughterhouse near Hunter’s Point, and he worked the night shift. Meaning that he was a hard worker that worked his hardest in order to provide for his family. Also, something that she mentions about the railroad in which I really found fascinated was that her great-grandfather Lim was in Deadwood her other great-grandfather Wong worked in Deadwood and it’s a curiosity if they actually knew each other. The oral history kind of challenges the idea and the information in a way because some things in the memory get rewritten or they could have been forgotten, but on the other hand, it mostly confirms what was life like during those times.
Author: Valery Vasquez
Valery Vasquez DB-Intro
Hi, my name is Valery Vasquez. I was born in Queens, but moved to Colombia when I was 5 years old. I’m on my third semester and I’m majoring in Science for Health Professions in hopes of becoming a midwife nurse. I chose this class because I have a great interest in Asian culture. Anime and K-dramas brought me here to learn a little bit about Asia and what the people had to go through during important events in history.
