From Beowulf to Chaucer: The Struggle to Impose Order on the British World

Since the emergence of the human race, people have struggled to impose order on their world.  Homo sapiens is spectacularly unfit for life in the wild:  physically slower and weaker, with more limited senses and less innate protection against the elements, than many other species.  Only mankind's creative intelligence, which gives us the ability to impose order on our world according to our needs, allows us to survive in an otherwise hostile and dangerous world.  It is not surprising, therefore, to find an obsession with order in the recorded thought and literature of any civilization.  Perhaps due to unique geographical and political conditions, however, this obsession with order is particularly prominent in British literature.  A constant preoccupation with the definition and imposition of order-in times of war and uncertainty, upon the outside world, and, once the culture had achieved adequate levels of stability and sophistication, upon society and the self-unifies early British literature and ties its development inextricably to the early history of the British Isles.

America's Role in the Struggle for Control of Taiwan

In the decades since the 1949 establishment of the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan, ROC leadership and the communist government of the People's Republic of China on the mainland have engaged in a struggle for the future of Taiwan.  This struggle has often involved the United States.  Although Taiwan's democratic, capitalist society aligns more closely with American ideology than the PRC's single-party, communist autocracy, United States economic and strategic interests complicate the question of which side to support.  The question of Taiwanese independence, and the United States's role in helping to secure or hinder it, has become more urgent in the wake of the 2008 Taiwanese presidential elections.  In 2008, the pro-independence Democratic People's Party leadership lost to the historically more pro-China Nationalist Party, or KMT.  The KMT, Winberg Chai writes in “Taiwan’s 2008 Elections and Their Impact on U.S.-China-Taiwan Relations,” “is expected to retreat from the DPP’s 'Taiwanese identity' policy in favor of an eventual reunification with the Chinese mainland” (83-84).  If this happens, China, already “the second-largest economy in the world after the US” (“China”), will gain an additional twenty-three million citizens and an additional $4 billion GDP (“Taiwan”).  Meanwhile, Asia will lose a vibrant democracy economy with, according to the U.S. State Department, a human rights record especially commendable for its ban on compulsory and child labor and its absence of political prisoners (“China (Taiwan Only)”).  On November 16, 2009, President Barack Obama declared continuing United States support for China's one-China policy (“Obama”), tipping the scales even further in favor of reunification.  It is now critical that the United States reexamine its commitment to the balance of power in Asia, and decide whether its strategic and economic interests merit the annexation of a free and democratic nation by a communist state.

More Fun with Basic French

Answer to an essay question on our French 101 final exam.  We were given a picture of four people sitting at a café, and asked to describe it.


Ils sont au café.  Ils sont quatre:  deux filles et deux hommes.  Ils sont jeunes.  Aujourd'hui, il fait beau.  Ces étudiants parlent et dejeunent ensemble.  Ces deux filles ont l'intention de faire du shopping après.  Un jeune homme a besoin de préparer ses cours.  L'autre homme va faire les courses pour sa mère après.  Ce soir, ils vont sortir.  Ils ont l'intention de dîner au restaurant.

Final Exam: Globalism's True Impact

Written in class as a final exam.  Last few paragraphs are less developed because I was running out of time.


The privileges and products of economic globalization saturate everyday American life.  From automobiles to underwear, bananas to backpacks, nearly everything most Americans purchase, use, or consume owes at least a part of its production to foreign labor or other international manufacturing processes.  This pervasiveness can make it easy to take globalism for granted as a benign or at least neutral process with a relatively positive outcome.  As authors Corey Mattson, Meredith Throop, and Barbara Ehrenreich show, however, globalization often enriches the few--businesspeople and transnational corporations--at the expense of many disadvantaged or disenfranchised workers and innocent bystanders in nations exploited by globalism.  Only by addressing the inequities exposed or exacerbated by globalism can citizens of the world help to create a more just and less harmful global economic paradigm.

Truth in Masquerade: Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as Storyteller's Manifesto

Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent.
(Shakespeare 1.2:50-51)

Scholars have long recognized William Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night as a celebration of the carnivalesque in Elizabethan England.  As the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature write in “Twelfth Night,” their introduction to the play of the same name, “[In Elizabethan England], Twelfth Night, the Feast of the Epiphany...marked the culminating night of the traditional Christmas revels...A rigidly hierarchical social order...temporarily gave way to raucous rituals of inversion” (1078), allowing the relief of class resentment and envy.  Twelfth Night's disguises, deceptions, eventual comic revelations, and assortment of happy endings mirror the Twelfth Night festivities.  The masquerades around which Twelfth Night's plot revolves, however, do more than express humanity's need for occasional communal games of dress-up and pretend.  A deeper significance lies in the statement Twelfth Night's masquerades make about the power of performance itself:  that some truths can only be transmitted through artifice, and that the theater serves a vital role in the transmission of those truths.

Midterm Essay: A Proposed Solution to the Afghan Conflict

Written in class as a midterm test.


Eight years after U.S. and coalition forces invaded Afghanistan with the stated mission of ousting the Taliban fundamentalist regime, finding Osama Bin Laden and the other Al Qaeda leaders who had claimed responsibility for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and destroying the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, the outcome of foreign involvement in Afghanistan remains unclear, and the situation in Afghanistan bleak.  Despite the initial retreat of the Taliban and the recent establishment of democratic elections and a democratically elected government, Afghan security still fails to meet U.S. and coalition standards for stability and self-reliance.  Taliban insurgents continue to wage a bloody war with the occupying forces; corruption runs rampant in every level of government; and the life of the average Afghan remains one of poverty and insecurity.  This lack of definitive improvement serves as an indictment of U.S. and coalition tactics in the region.  The current military approach to democratizing and stabilizing Afghanistan is failing to achieve the desired outcomes of peace, stability, democracy, and improved human rights for Afghans; to create a more stable and secure Afghanistan, more attention and resources must be directed towards education, development, and infrastructure, thus concretely improving the lives of the Afghan people.

The Cultural Cost of Invading Afghanistan

Eight years after launching Operation Enduring Freedom in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States finds itself mired in a struggle for the future of Afghanistan, fighting, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, for “peace and security, rule of law, good governance, human rights protection and sustainable economic and social development” (“Mandate”).  In our attempts to reshape Afghanistan in its new conquerors' images, however, what cultural treasures are being lost?  Even a cursory examination of Afghan history should cause observers to question the means with which American forces are currently attempting to reform the region.  Afghanistan has suffered numerous foreign invasions during its long history, invasions which have cost the world not only human life, but human history:  once destroyed, Afghanistan’s irreplaceable cultural artifacts take precious knowledge of our past with them.

Just for fun

From a French 101 exam.

J'ai un petit ami.  Il s'appelle Brandon.  Il a vingt-trois ans, et il est étudiant.  C'est un bel homme, et il est trés intelligent et amusant.  Il est* plutôt paresseux**, mais c'est un bon étudiant.



*I have more verbs now.
**He's not, but I wanted to use the vocabulary word.

Nature and Doom in Beowulf

Answer to an essay question on an exam.  Written in class, so the writing is less polished than in formal essays.

By setting the confrontations Beowulf has with the monsters first at night, then in the lake, and then in the dragon's underground lair, the author of Beowulf is at once expressing fears of those things themselves--darkness, the water, and the wilderness--and is also using those settings to externalize and express deeper psychological fears:  of the unknown and unseen (Grendel, lurking in the night), uncontrolled female power (Grendel's mother), and death (the dragon's lair is a barrow, where Beowulf does indeed meet his death).

A Question of Identity

I am Taiwanese-American, and I identify myself as Taiwanese-American, not Chinese-American.  To some, the distinction may seem minor; to me, that perception is exactly why the distinction matters.  Like many other Taiwanese and Taiwanese-Americans, I hope for the eventual recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign nation, independent of the communist People's Republic of China, but before that can happen, the international community must recognize that Taiwan is, in fact, a separate entity from China.

Our Construction of Reality: Kant and the Power of the Mind

A rationalist in his thinking, concerned purely with reason—the intellectual processes of the mind—and dismissive of physical experience, Plato posited that the physical world is unreal, and that truth and reality lie beyond it in an immaterial world existing outside of space and time.  Immanuel Kant proposed a different strategy for understanding reality.  Kant's strategy shared Plato's framework of dual existences, but demystified the framework and validated earthly existence by claiming that, although there is a world of objective truth beyond human experience, it exists not in some ethereal plane beyond space and time, but rather alongside the subjective world of human experience, which, to Kant, is itself real, valid, and true.  Kant then solved the problems of rationalism and empiricism by proposing a radical method of understanding the division between the objective world and the subjective one.

Escape from Illusion: Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the Matrix

Nearly four hundred years before the birth of Christ, Greek philosopher Plato formulated a startling theory about reality.  The physical realm, Plato taught, is neither real nor the source of any genuine wisdom or enlightenment.  The things in this earthly world are merely illusory, impermanent reproductions of the perfect, unchanging, true essences of objects and ideas.  To achieve wisdom, Plato argued, a philosopher must first awaken to the unreality of the visible world, and then undertake the arduous process of learning to contemplate the reality beyond.  To illustrate this theory, Plato created the Allegory of the Cave, his tale of one man's liberation from a cave of shadow and illusion into the real world beyond.  More than two thousand years later, filmmakers Larry and Andy Wachowski proved the continued relevance of the Allegory of the Cave by repackaging it as The Matrix, a blockbuster science fiction movie about sentient artificial intelligence, computer-generated virtual reality, and one man's liberation from his virtual-reality bondage.

Socrates and Nietzsche

"An unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates

Over two thousand years after Socrates made his famous pronouncement, despair is everywhere.  Gifted with health and luxuries once unimaginable, we modern humans go to therapy and take medications to cope with our despair.  Our despair is not the desperation of poverty or enslavement, but a despair of the soul, which causes us, in the midst of our material comforts, to ask, "Is this life worth living?"  And speaking to us from the distant past, Socrates answers, "An unexamined life is not worth living."

The Arbiters of Media Success

Mass media inundate contemporary American life.  TVs, the Internet, and cell phones supply information, entertainment, and communication on demand.  Billboards loom over streets; magazines tempt captive audiences in every supermarket checkout line.  Modern media has achieved unprecedented ubiquity and significance, which some media critics lament.  The pervasiveness of mass media, those critics argue, has brainwashed audiences and consumers into mindless imitators of media images, many of which, critics say, promote sexual promiscuity, drug use, violence, and diseases such as anorexia and bulimia.  For instance, in her article, “Anorexics Are Victims of Society's Obsession with Thinness," Susan Renes accuses the media of causing eating disorders in women through its portrayal of thin models as desirable in her article.  Renes writes, “We are bombarded by advertising and mass media messages that say women must be as thin as the models in magazines and on television,” and, consequently, women “disregard their need for...a sufficient amount of food to adequately sustain them,” placing their health at risk to live up to a media-perpetuated standard.  Although eating disorders are a serious problem, however, overweight American consumers far outnumber eating disorder victims, contradicting Renes's contention that the standard of beauty commonly promoted by the media poses a grave danger to American women.  The average American's diet and lifestyle demonstrate an apparent resistance to the pursuit of thinness and fitness the media promotes.  In fact, media critics' perception of a one-sided causal relationship between media and consumers assigns a disproportionate power to the media and assumes extreme passivity in consumers.  A closer examination of the media/consumer relationship uncovers substantial consumer influence over the media.  What the media shows does affect consumers' tastes, aspirations, and values, but the consumer market itself dictates what the media decides to show.

A Free Press Keeps Us Free

In June of 2009, the Chinese government arrested dissident author Liu Xiaobo. As Audra Ang of the Associated Press reports in her article, “Chinese Intellectuals Call for Release of Dissident,” Liu had recently co-authored “a bold manifesto urging civil rights and political reforms [within the Chinese government].” That manifesto may cost him fifteen years in prison for the crime of “inciting to subvert state power.” The heavy penalty reflects how seriously the regime regards its control of information. Like all totalitarian governments, the Chinese government understands that to control the people, it must control the press. And, just as a state-controlled media controls the populace, so a free press keeps the people free.