|
UNIVERSITY WRITING
PROGRAM |
|
Miss Colorado Asian-Pacific and Ning Jing Zhi Yaun
The night she became Miss Colorado
Asian-Pacific 2009, Sunny Xiong, who has just finished her first year at
the University of Denver, focused on language and calligraphy in the
talent portion of the competition. Wearing a traditional, white Chinese
costume, Sunny drew Chinese words in black ink on long banners of paper.
She worked slowly and precisely, demonstrating a skill that, as she
says, tempers force with grace and balances the dynamic and the static
in life. Sunny regards her study of Chinese calligraphy in philosophical
terms: A black stroke left on the white paper cannot be undone, even
the slightest flaw cannot not be corrected. Every single character has
its own spirit the spirit has formed at the moment the brush touches
the paper. Any remediation would only make that spirit fade away. It
requires me to think over everything in advance, to focus not only on
details, but also on the arrangement of the whole character. The making
of language symbols taught Sunny the best of lessons by showing her a
way of life. She says that when she feels anxious or exhausted, when it
is hard to calm down her restive heart, she holds the familiar
calligraphy brush and watches the paper, dyed gracefully by the black
ink and immerses herself in the harmony of the art work, allowing a
real peace to return to her heart. |
|
I did not know the wonder
of Sunnys relationship to written words when, on the first day of
Winter Quarter 2009, I met her for the first time in my WRIT 1122 class.
She sat in the second row; and when I called her name, she told me that,
although the class list said her Chinese name Ruofan, I should call
her Sunny. In that shift of syllables, I now see, our comparative
culture and language study had begun. That day, as the class introduced
themselves, I asked Sunny how, coming from Beijing, she had studied
American culture. She smiled, Oh, I knew America, she said, from
watching TV at home. I knew Desperate Housewives and Gossip Girl and
Prison Break. I loved watching America on TV. She said she knew
Denver because she loved the NBA Nuggets, and she had to move here
because she was in love with Alan Iverson. Someday, she said, she wants
to visit Switzerland -- because Roger Federer lives there. As winter
quarter moved on, I came to see that Sunny is skilled at reading culture
as text, that she is aware of the value of both high and low cultural
movements, and that she enjoys the interface of Chinese and American
meanings, as if she understands, like Heidegger, that a boundary is not
that at which something stops but where something begins it presencing.
During the class, she worked on a personal essay, a reading of a family
photograph as argument. It was her mothers 50th birthday, and, in the
photograph, Sunny, an only child, stood with her parents, her mother
holding a bouquet of 50 red roses and a small coffee cup ornamented with
another photograph of Sunny, the visual rhetoric deepening in
photo-within-photo possibilities. She told me that her mother gave her
father 50 roses on his birthday the year before, and I was to learn how
her traditional parents were often surprised by their 21st c. daughter,
a girl who, understanding that Chinese universities admit students only
on the basis of SAT scores and do not take into account any student
activities, chose to apply to attend university in America. Sunny says
that in the last year she has thought a great deal about the values a
university promotes. She understands that Chinese systems have so many
students to choose from that the SAT standard is a viable choice, but
she is still sorting out the role that activities and skills other than
test-taking might play, i.e. the fact that she was the founder and
president of her schools Photography Association and president of the
Volunteer League made no difference. She appreciates the American
universitys vision of a well-rounded student, and she knows that
learning is a process and not merely a grade. She also appreciates the
freedom of thought and the creativity of the students at the University
of Denver as well as the professionalism of students working in student
government. She admits that one of the most intriguing things she found
here was the friendliness and the encouragement she has received from DU
professors. It is so different from China, she said, though the
Chinese government officials are trying to improve the system. But, she
points out, we must remember that the Chinese population is large and
that the conditions are so different that things will take time. Sunny
has chosen to major in International Business with minors in Finance and
Marketing because she sees trade as a way to improve cultural
communication between America and China. She wants Americans to see that
the Asian and Chinese people who live in America and who come here as
students are ready for challenges and wish to contribute as much as they
can to the diversity of American culture even as they maintain their own
cultural rituals.
fragments of the
competition, seeing her create the drawings of the Chinese characters
during the Talent competition and watching the brief segments of the
evening gown and swim suit competition until, at last, there it was a
photograph of Sunny in her long black evening dress and wearing a
bejeweled crown, a radiant Miss Colorado Asian-Pacific with her Filipino
Princess and her Vietnamese Princess beside her. In June when I talked
with her, I could see her joy and her classic sunny disposition. She
was honest in her assessment of the pageant and of her decision to
participate. She said that this pageant placed more value on talent and
interviews than on beauty per se. She said that she did not tell her
mother until after it was over. She needed to give her mother a context,
to frame the pageant as more than a shallow event. She said that in
China many of the beauty queens are thin, if not skinny, young women.
In China, they only judge on size, she said. I like the way Americans
look at people. I am a healthy girl. During the pageant, in an onstage
interview, she spoke to the audience of her decision to spend the summer
of 2007 working on her SAT skills and college applications rather than
attending a summer camp in Italy based on international communication
skills. The camp was important to her as the same 15 students had
attended camp in various countries each summer over a period of years,
but this time she knew she had to look beyond the moment to the future.
In her talk she said, I do not regret it at all. . . .I got into the
University of Denver with a score I did not regret at all. So that gives
me the opportunity to stand here confidently representing myself and the
Chinese culture as well as the University of Denver.
