There is no greater joy than looking at a baby. When I encounter babies, their smile can easily melt my heart. I always want to touch them, tickle them, and cuddle with them. The reason that makes “my maternal love arise” is because babies never hide their feelings, and display their true selves in front of people, even the ones they don’t know. Their purity makes them “the cutest things in the world.”  However, as the time ticks away, gradually, those children become more introverted; they begin to care less about the society and they become more likely to camouflage sensibility in the bottom of their heart. What happens to those candid cute babies? What makes them lose the sense of purity?

Elite, that was her name. She looked exactly the same of all the other ones I had had before. However, when we first met, at that specific Sunday morning in 2008 I thought she would be my saving grace. She would be the one to help me accomplish all my dreams. She would be the one.

Our relationship lasted exactly 4 years, between breaks and comebacks. It did not take me a long time to realize that Elite was not as easy to keep up with as I initially thought she would be. She was too demanding, too rigid, and too orthodox. She asked me to do things I have never thought I would have to do in order to achieve my goal.

Generally speaking, there aren’t many easily spotted similarities between my chance encounter with a college freshman and a short story about a utopia thriving on the misery of a child. In fact, when trying to relate the two, my experience actually addresses certain holes of the story. Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” showcases a contact zone between a tormented kid and those who flourish on it. My zone, instead, was comprised of high school and college students. Neither my overnight host, nor I, though, had much of a power differential to make it a “true” contact zone. Nonetheless, there was always only one person taking charge of the situation, and one following.

There is an idea of the “mindset of the oppressed.” This notion explains why peoples who have been oppressed have become “comfortable” submitting to a greater force or group and the duties that accompany that capitulation. Persecutors weaken, marginalize, dehumanize, and devalue groups of people in order to instill the oppressive mindset onto a society to the point where it becomes lodged into the prevailing cultural outlook and therefore in people’s minds. This is particularly relevant when their persecutors change or a culture becomes autonomous.

Last fall, during the time I spent in Bolivia, I took a tour of Potosí’s silver mine. Since 1545, the Spanish forced Bolivians into the mines, to mainly extract silver from the mountains above the city of Potosí.

Muddy Prints

While reading Mary Louise Pratt’s Art of a Contact Zone, she explored different types of contact zone for the reader’s entertainment. She immediately places the reader into a contact zone to grab the attention of the reader into something that can be very difficult to understand. I found the approach very interesting because it actually worked. It was a very simple setting of her son and his best-friend, Willie, talking about baseball, baseball cards and trading. After her short detailed story, she goes right into explaining that in fact her own son, aged seven, has already been exposed to a contact zone. 

When I was previously asked to write about an encounter I’d had with another “organism,” I’ll be honest, the first thing that crossed my mind wasn’t my dog.  But as that seemed to be the logical progression from Anne’s post, I rolled with it, and spoke about how my dog Max and I communicate our feelings to each other without the use of words (because, obviously, he’s a dog, and doesn’t speak English very well).

“Humans are the superior animals in this universe, we create a strong contact zone to other species in this world. This contact zone is what makes the world as it is now, balanced and harmonious. Sometimes, people will think of the idea of someone trying to break the zone. In Butler’s short story of “Blood child”[1], humans(Terrans) are dominated by worms(       Tlic). The superior species and humans create a contact zone where they need humans to carry their young, and at the same time humans need their eggs to get longer lives. Even though it is a society that has a huge hierarchy, there is still a balance in it: worms give humans their eggs to eat, the humans incubate their offspring.

The two identities I shared in my previous post were my race and my class. My Asian characteristics are what others immediately see when they first meet me and my class is what I think about the most. As a result of those two identities working separately, I gain access to education.  

Asians are smart. Of course she belongs in here.

Asians are innocent. It must be his fault instead.

These were some of the supposed maxims my teachers either said outright or implied.