English professor Andrew Tonkovich writes for OC Weekly.

The end of the academic year approaches, which finids Mr. Bib looking forward to the arrival of annual literary journals sponsored by local colleges and universities. Alas, The Ear, Irvine Valley College‘s magazine is long gone as, it appears, is Orange Coast Review, out of OCC. Still UC Riverside publishes the terrific Crate, and University of Redlands does The Redlands Review. I am probably forgetting somebody. Sorry.

One of the best institutionally-sponsored regional journals of writing, photography and graphic art is UC Irvine‘s own Faultline, edited this year by Jon Keeperman. Mr. K. tells me the spring issue will be out and for sale at a reading celebration on Thursday, May 31 at UCI’s bookstore, managed by the heroic Matt Astrella.

While I wait for Greg, my intrepid and friendly UPS man to deliver copies of some or all of the above, this morning seems an opportunity to celebrate Faultline and the perseverance of the battered public university English department which continues to support it financially. Thanks! The mag contributes, of course, to the school’s reputation and its bigtime MFA creative writing legacy. See below.

I know, I know, you’ve read ad nauseum that Irvine is one of the nation’s best creative writing outfits, but assessing the tiny Masters of Fine Arts in fiction and poetry kind of supports that bit of self-congratulation from the publicity machine. Indeed, you can’t swing a dead anteater or a list of recent American “notable books” without hitting, happily an alum. Aspiring or experienced, shy or flamboyant, young writers from all over the country and world arrive in the unlikely suburban environs of, as my funny mentor writer Jim Krusoe calls it, “Irving,” to complete two years of intensive work. Workshops are led by a who’s who of visiting writers and the program’s core faculty. Currently, that’s poets James McMichael and Michael Ryan, and prose writers Michelle Latiolais and Ron Carlson. All four are working, teaching authors with impressive careers of their own, a good place to begin my scattershot survey of the so-called “magic workshop,” by way of a short reading guide. I’ve mentioned some of these players before. No wonder! McMichael’s Capacity was a finalist for the National Book Award. Ryan wrote the memoir Secret Life and, recently, This Morning, a new collection of poems.

Carlson is the award-winning short story writer whose novel Five Skies you should read, and Latiolais’s newest collection, Widow got big praise on the heels of her luminous novel A Proper Knowledge. I was lucky to be in the crowd last week when she read what I take is a new short story for her presentation at the Campus Writing Coordinator’s Distinguished Writers’ Series.

These mentors fill big literary shoes, from those worn by fiction program co-founders Oakley Hall (Warlock) and MacDonald Harris (The Balloonist) to E.L. Doctorow, who wrote much of The Book of Daniel at UCI, a singular scene set, as I go on and on about, in Corona del Mar. You might already know some of the program’s legendary alums, from California poet Gary Soto (New and Selected Poems) and Garrett Hongo (The River of Heaven) to novelists Richard Ford (Independence Day) and Maile Meloy, author of instant-classic short stories in Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It.

More recent stars: Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones), David Benioff (The 25th Hour), Joshua Ferris (Then We Came to the End) and poets Patty Seyburn (Hilarity) and Ralph Angel (Exceptions and Melancholies).

So, yes, a curious reader could do worse than picking just about anything by a UCI grad. Here’s some further help finding more of the best. Some of the recent decade’s highlights include Vicki Forman‘s This Lovely Life, the memoir of her serverely disabled preemie twins, Danzy Senna‘s nonfiction Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, on romance and race; Aimee Bender‘s delicious The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and Rhoda Huffey‘s The Hallelujah Side, about a girl growing up fundamentalist. Huffey, by the way, has a new story in spring Santa Monica Review, no kidding!

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He is willing to tell his story, and has spoken candidly about his experience for an employee video on mental health. In addition, he helped form a task force of campus leaders – the first of its kind at UC Irvine – to broaden understanding of mental health issues and identify ways to help students, faculty and staff.

“I would like to work at a place where I can talk about mental health as easily as we talk about lower back pain,” Moeller said. “Mental health is not an issue that is limited to the student counseling center. It also affects faculty and staff, and it affects the interactions among faculty, staff and students.”

Moeller is helping to lift the veil on depression and the people it affects.

Sharing his personal journey is making a difference. Colleagues approach Moeller privately to talk about their own experiences with depression. They find comfort in someone who understands what they’re going through and who won’t judge them for it.

Mental health must become part of the dialogue for everyone in order to increase understanding, reduce the stigma and get people the help they need. But Moeller said faculty in particular is a challenging segment.

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April is National Poetry Month. Shara Lessley, graduate of UC Irvine with bachelor’s degrees in dance and English, and author of poetry collection Two-Headed Nightingale,  shares ways the lay reader can gain an appreciation for poetry.

There are many wonderful online resources that celebrate poetry throughout the year. In honor of National Poetry Month, here are three great options:

1. The Favorite Poem Project’s video series documents average Americans sharing their best loved poems. A student from South Boston recites Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” for example, while a photographer from Long Beach explains how a failed date ignited his passion for Sylvia Plath. My favorite entry is from Seattle-based glass blower Richard Samuel whose enthusiasm for Frank O’Hara’s “POEM” (“Lana Turner has collapsed!”) is downright contagious.

http://www.favoritepoem.org/videos.html

2. The Poetry Foundation offers free copies of Poetry magazine’s April issue for reading groups — a great opportunity to sample what’s happening in contemporary verse.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/announcement/186322

3. Subscribe to Poetry Daily‘s newsletter in order to receive poems published prior to 1922 for the month of April, along with commentary and explication from established writers like Terrance Hayes, Randall Mann, and Alicia Ostriker. The site also offers daily selections from the latest books, magazines, and journals.

http://poems.com/about_newsletter.php

Shara Lessley is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Her most recent awards include an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, the Reginald S. Tickner Fellowship from the Gilman School, the 2006 “Discovery”/The Nation prize, and Isotope’s 2009 Editor’s Prize. Shara’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, and The Missouri Review, among others. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and Bread Loaf, as well as the Moondancer Fellowship in Nature and Outdoor Writing from The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, Shara holds  an MFA from University of Maryland. She currently lives in Amman, Jordan.

Find Shara Lessley on Facebook and on her blog innsarenotresidencies.blogspot.com. Two-Headed Nightingale is available at Amazon, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, and other booksellers.

A boat floats past neon decorations in Nanjing / Reuters

History professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom writes for The Atlantic.

Chinese history since the communist revolution has gone a little differently than its ideological father might have anticipated.

If China’s Communist Party stays in control for another dozen years, it will best its Soviet counterpart’s record and become the organization linked to Karl Marx’s ideas that has run a country longest. This makes it ironic that the course of modern Chinese history has so often called into question rather than confirmed Marx’s predictive power.

The most recent case in point is this year’s efforts to crack down on what Chinese people are saying on the internet, a chain of events that mirrors closely those of exactly a year ago that The New Yorker‘s Evan Osnos aptly dubbed China’s “Big Chill.”  I’ll get to how the playing out of this year’s Big Chill 2.0 raises doubts about one of Marx’s claims, but first let’s consider some examples from further back in China’s past.

The earliest and most significant case of Chinese politics contravening a Marxist tenet came before the People’s Republic was even founded. Marx had insisted that modern revolutions would be the work of urban groups, especially industrial laborers. In China, though, while labor strikes played a part in bringing Mao Zedong and company to power, rural struggles played a far more important role. So much for Marx’s claim that peasants were destined to be a conservative check on radicalism.

Another important example of Chinese realities flying in the face of a Marxist orthodoxy has to do with the timing of the country’s socialist and capitalist phases. Like many thinkers of his time, Marx embraced a linear view of historical development, in which capitalism was to be followed by socialism and collectivization. Yet, in today’s China, which can be described as, at least in some ways, a post-socialist state, we are seeing many things happening now, after the abandonment of collectivization, that are reminiscent of the United States and Britain during their early capitalist periods, including an economy featuring sweatshops where workers lack the right to organize and strike play an important role.

One last problem China poses for Marx, which will bring us to the Big Chill 2.0, involves his famous claim that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Repetition just hasn’t been working that way in China of late. It certainly didn’t with the two Tiananmen incidents. The first of these took place in 1976, when demonstrators gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn a recently deceased official, Zhou Enlai, whom they admired. The protesters presented themselves as patriots who were worried about the nation’s fate now that this good man had passed from the scene, implying that those still alive and in power were less worthy. Officials castigated the protesters as “counter-revolutionary” troublemakers and crushed the struggle.

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Professor Richard Hovannisian lectures on Armenian history to the UCI community.

The Armenian History Lecture Series at the University of California, Irvine, continued this month with a lecture by Richard Hovannisian, professor emeritus of Armenian and Near Eastern History at UCLA. Hovannisian’s talk, “The Changing Landscape of Historic Western Armenia: Reflections on a Journey into the Past,” took attendees on a visual journey through contemporary and ancient Armenia using slides from his recent journeys through Armenia and historical photographs.

More than 170 UCI students, faculty and local community members gathered to hear Hovannisian at the University Club.  Many in the audience were transported home again, seeing  images of Armenia where their parents and grandparents grew up. For most of the students in attendance, this was their first “trip” to Armenia and what better tour guide than Hovannisian, who wrote the definitive encyclopedia on Armenian history.

After the lecture Charles Barsam, on behalf of the Orange County Armenian Professional Society,  presented a check for $10,000 to Vicki L. Ruiz, dean of the School of Humanities, to support Armenian history at UCI.

Dr. Vahe  and Armine Meghrouni, who last December generously donated $50,000 to fund community lectures and quarterly Armenian courses, matched their 2011 donation with another $50,000.  Dr. Meghrouni spoke briefly on the importance of confronting “revisionists, reductionists and deniers” of Armenian history and providing a place where students can get an accurate picture of Armenian history.

Dean Ruiz awarded certificates of appreciation to Sylvie and Garo Tertzakian and the Meghrounis for their continued vision, support and dedication.

A camera crew from USArmenia, the most watched Armenian television network in the world, filmed the lecture and interviewed guests afterwards. Coverage of his talk was broadcast to more than 150 countries.

The quarterly lecture series – made possible through gifts to UCI – offers the local community opportunities to learn more about Armenian history. This past year the series included lectures by Sebouh David Aslanian on his book From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa and Tom Mooradian on his memoir The Repatriate: Love, Basketball and the KGB which chronicles his 13 years behind the Iron Curtain as an Armenian repatriate.

Undergraduate courses in Armenian history continue in the upcoming spring quarter with an offering in modern Armenian history.

Click here to see a clip from the USArmenia broadcast.

About Armenian History at UC Irvine

Armenian History at the University of California, Irvine was established in December 2007 with the goal of providing classes in ancient and modern Armenian history to all interested students on a yearly basis.  The first classes occured in the fall of 2008. The mission of the this initiative is to provide intellectual and social space for any student with an interest in Armenian history as well as provide a cultural framework for students who may be interested in learning more about their own heritage or those of their neighbors.

More on the Department of History.

Your collection of poetry, Two-Headed Nightingale, is being released this month. Tell us a little bit about your book. How did it come about?

Poet Michael Collier describes Two-Headed Nightingale as less a freak of nature than a paradox of imagination. The book’s title gestures toward Keats’s intoxicating bird, but is also the stage name of 19th C. conjoined songstresses Christine and Millie McCoy. In many ways these two subjects—the natural world and the world of female performers (both public and private)—serve as the project’s bookends. Two-Headed Nightingale is populated by circus aerialists and ballet dancers, ghost moths and decomposing starlings. Throughout the collection, I’m drawn to things that are deviant, anatomical, dark, overlooked. Most of the poems were written when I was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, although the book itself evolved over a period of six or seven years.

You’re currently living in Amman, Jordan. Does location or environment affect the way you write or what you write about? Does your writing have a different feel living in the Middle East than it does when you are in the U.S.?

Because the Middle East is central to my second manuscript, I’m greatly concerned about its depiction. How can I best relay local textures and tensions without exploiting or appropriating them for lyric or dramatic effect? During my time in Amman, I’ve been treated as more than a guest, a passing visitor. My husband and I have attended local weddings and family events. We’ve picnicked with perfect strangers, and taken tea with armed guards in back rooms at the airport and King Hussein Bin Talal Mosque. Last week, we participated in the three-day period of mourning to support a friend whose mother died of complications related to diabetes. The American myth of the Middle East is a complicated one. My experience in Jordan has been equally complex. I’m working diligently on poems that seek to reconcile these differences.

What is your writing process? Do you sit down and write every day or do you wait until something inspires you?

Since the birth of my son in September, I’ve found the daily practice of writing almost impossible. I’m hoping this will change. Even when I’m not drafting, however, I feed my work in other ways by reading, memorizing poems, or simply jotting down sentences and fragments. Several times each year, I also immerse myself in a poet’s life and collected works—poetry, correspondence, various biographies and criticism, etc. I’m definitely an advocate of perspiration vs. inspiration.

How has your experience at UC Irvine helped you in your writing?

Irvine’s English Department introduced me to a world I didn’t know existed. I entered the university as a dance major and found my calling as a poet. Much of this had to do with the faculty. Professors Mailloux, Wlecke, and Thomas, for example, captured my attention—and quickly. I’m also indebted to the encouragement of then-MFA student and Introduction to Creative Writing Instructor Penelope Pelizzon. Like many folks, my high school experience with poetry was practically nonexistent (I remember one or two lessons involving Wordsworth that seemed to dissipate before they took flight). Penelope taught work by living poets, ones connected—however loosely—to Irvine. For the first time, I read writing by Yusef Komunyakaa, Michael Ryan, Sharon Olds, Gary Soto, Robert Pinsky. Simple as it now seems, Penelope’s selections conveyed poetry’s currency. It was then that I began to read canonical staples as part of a larger conversation, a conversation in which I desperately wanted to participate.

You were a student of Professor Jim McMichael. What is one thing that you learned from him?

Thanks to Jim’s early direction, I obsess about my drafts’ weakness and flaws; particularly, the transitional moments when lines tend to flatten out. In workshop, Jim was exacting. He once advised (warned?) our class that poets must think of everything. He even went so far as to say that one misstep—down to the syllable—destroys a poem. That’s a lot for any twenty-one-year-old to handle! At the time, my writing was terrible. I remember sitting in his office and expressing my frustration. He told me to read as many poems as possible aloud. This helped me not only recognize certain kinds of cadences and metrical patterns, but to begin to appreciate the art of compression.

What is your favorite poem? You know, the one you wish you had written?

A friend told me that Alexander the Great wept when he had no more worlds to conquer. Something about that ambition, that insatiability speaks to me. My favorite poem, in other words, is always changing. There are plenty I wish I’d written: Marianne Moore’s “A Grave” or “Elephants” (or any number of her poems), Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses,” Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes —.” Work by John Donne, Thomas Hardy. Lorca, Szymborska, Brooks. I first read Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” in Professor Wlecke’s Romantic Poetry course: “Perhaps the self-same song that found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn…” More than a decade and a half later, Keats’s lines still slay me.

Do you have a new project in the works?

I’m about half finished with a manuscript tentatively titled The Explosive Expert’s Wife. This collection aims not only to examine and dispel the darker fears and prejudices associated with Jordan and The Middle East, but also to celebrate the region’s beauty and mystery. The counterparts to the ex-pat poems feature stateside explosive ranges, government labs, and American terrorists like Eric Rudolph and the Unabomber. Selections from this project are starting to turn up in places like The Missouri Review, New England Review, Smartish Pace, and The Southern Review.

A selected work from Two-Headed Nightingale:

Wintering

Already, winter makes a corpse of things.
Snow reshapes what frost has taken. You’ve lost

interest in letters. So let sunrise come.
Let smoke grow darker by the light of day—

what I could spare of you I’ve burned already.
The fencepost needs repair. Let sunrise come.

Let panels of light make thirsty the ice-
caked stump of oak. Let the sky go empty

as December’s intimations, when in snow
we fashioned ourselves side by side as fallen

angels: yours, the greater wingspan; my outline
barely reaching. Daybreak. I lay my body down

in powder. Roots torque up through the chest’s
blankness, snarl of knots unloosed. What comes,

on parting you insisted, will come. Ice splits,
in the distance. What breaks will break. Let it.

You can find Shara Lessley on Facebook and on her blog innsarenotresidencies.blogspot.com. Two-Headed Nightingale is available at Amazon, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, and other booksellers.

Shara Lessley is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Her most recent awards include an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, the Reginald S. Tickner Fellowship from the Gilman School, the 2006 “Discovery”/The Nation prize, and Isotope’s 2009 Editor’s Prize. Shara’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, and The Missouri Review, among others. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and Bread Loaf, as well as the Moondancer Fellowship in Nature and Outdoor Writing from The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, Shara holds  an MFA from University of Maryland. She currently lives in Amman, Jordan.

Hoang Xuan Pham/University Communications

Student interviewers record the life stories of Vietnamese American immigrants for archival preservation.

Emeline Nguyen recently learned some surprising details about her stepmother’s journey to the United States from Vietnam in 1975.

The price of her passage across the South China Sea was 2 ounces of gold. Pirates seized the small fishing boat crammed with 100 people and took passengers’ jewelry and other belongings.

When the vessel arrived in Thailand, the teen – who was traveling alone – was placed in a refugee camp, where she languished for a month before heading to Northern California, sponsored by a local church.

“I can’t imagine being in a refugee’s shoes,” Nguyen says, “starting your life over in a strange land and learning a new language and culture.”

A UC Irvine senior majoring in sociology and history, she’s enrolled in “The Vietnamese American Experience,” a course offered through the Department of Asian American Studies. Those taking the class contribute to a School of Humanities project to assemble and preserve the oral histories of Vietnamese Americans in Southern California.

The Vietnamese American Oral History Project will be housed at the UCI Libraries’ renowned Southeast Asian Archive and will be made available to researchers and the public upon its completion in three years.

Established in 1987, the archive includes items that range from paintings by artists in refugee camps to business directories for Orange County’s Little Saigon. Researchers from around the world have visited UCI to access the archive, the only one of its kind that continues to trace the community’s growth in the U.S. since the end of the Vietnam War.

Students like Nguyen are trained in oral history theory and methods. Each must conduct and record one full oral history interview with a subject who is Vietnamese American, at least 30 years old and a resident of Southern California.

The oral history project has special significance for Vietnamese American students, says Linda Vo, associate professor of Asian American studies, as it gives them a deeper understanding of the challenges their parents faced leaving their homeland.

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Related Links

• Vietnamese American Oral History Project
• Southeast Asian Archive

Asian American Studies professor Claire Kim writes for WBEZ.org.

“Linsanity” makes me uncomfortable. As someone who teaches Asian American Studies classes, I get what the craze is about. Lin is offering in the space of a few smoking months to redeem that which has always been denied to Asian American males in the white imagination — their athleticism, their masculinity, dare I say their full humanity. For all those who have suffered being seen as nerdy, physically weak, passive, feminine, even poorly endowed — in a word, unmanly — Jeremy is a savior. Suddenly, young Asian Americans, especially young males, have someone to cheer for, someone whose triumphs they experience as their own.

Yet Linsanity unsettles me, and this is because it is actually more about mythmaking than it is about myth-busting. The Lin narrative bolsters two myths that naturalize inequalities in this society.

The first is the notion that race is a kind of essence that defines and bounds a coherent people with organically similar interests. Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, mainland Chinese, and Taiwanese all claim Lin as their son, and this claims-making is reported matter-of-factly, with no hard questions asked.

Yet Asian Americanness is in the first place as much a political fable as the putative unmanliness of Asian American males. It is a fable that has produced positive changes and that means a lot to some people.  But there are always distinct pitfalls to racial thinking of this kind. Wouldn’t it seem strange if white Americans took a special liking to Dirk Nowitzki because he’s white? And while Asian Americanness was forged in response to white supremacy, is it possible that the cure is in some way coming to mimic the disease?  All identities are exclusionary, so who is left out of the Asian American love affair with Lin?

The second myth in play here is the model-minority myth. Lin is a child of immigrants who graduated from Harvard and then worked his way up out of obscurity to NBA stardom through, we are told, sheer determination and a shrewd program of skills improvement. Slicing his way to the basket, Lin slices his way past obstacles; he is the minority who overcomes. To be sure, we have been rudely reminded of a few of those obstacles—as when two ESPN folks used the phrase “chink in the armor” when discussing Lin and when Ben & Jerry’s announced that its new flavor, “Taste the Lin-sanity,” included ground-up fortune cookies. But this has only served to heighten the dramatic overcoming Lin seems engaged in.  Americans like to celebrate rugged male individuals who appear to defy both the odds and social norms — in Palin’s unforgettable lingo, those who are “mavericky”—when these individuals’ stories actually, upon closer look, rearticulate our most cherished cultural myths. I think of this every time I see the 9-foot bronze statue of “The Duke” at John Wayne Airport near my house. Does the rehabilitation of (Asian) masculinity through athletic conquest really signal a breakthrough moment in the annals of social justice?

Every iteration of the model minority myth is a triangulated story — there are the neutral whites whose racial fair-mindedness allows for minority achievements, the striving Asian Americans whose natural abilities and fierce work ethic vault them to the top, and the Black (and sometimes Latino) third parties who can’t quite follow suit. Some Black ESPN commentators openly queried whether Lin is getting special treatment because he was Asian American. Maybe he is getting special treatment because he is not Black in a sport dominated by Black athletes. Maybe he is the Great Yellow Hope. Maybe this is a story not about our progress as a nation in transcending racial categories but, to the contrary, about our stubborn refusal to think in any other terms than racial ones. In any case, there may not be a happy ending in store. My 8-year old son, who is partly of Asian descent, lost some of his innocence when he asked and was told why ESPN used the word “chink” with reference to Lin. He sympathizes with Lin but he has to tell it like it is: Lin is good but the Miami Heat will be taking him and the rest of the New York Knicks down this year, no doubt about it.

The Program in Japanese held its Sixth Annual UCI Japanese Speech Contest on February 4th, 2012. Twenty Japanese corporations and organizations supported the contest, with Hitachi Chemical Research Center serving as the principal sponsor. Four educators and prominent community leaders judged the competition. The event provided Japanese language students an opportunity to think critically and express their thoughts clearly in public. It also served as an opportunity for students to be exposed to the local Japanese community, with the hope of developing important bonds between UC Irvine and the community and establishing the campus as a primary resource for the development of Japanese language instruction.

Mr. Nobuhiro Baba (judge), Zoe Fox, Haruna Asakawa and Tiffany Chen

Seventeen students participated in the speech contest in the Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced Levels of Japanese. Each contestant spoke on a topic of their choice for a maximum of seven minutes. The topics ranged from the Great East Japan Earthquake to cultural and societal differences between Japan and the U.S., Japanese dialects, and Japanese immigrants to the US. Every participant was commended for their hard work and dedication in preparing themselves to deliver a speech in public in front of a large audience. The winners were as follows:

Beginning Level

First Prize: Qing Wang – “My Favorite Japanese Culture”
Second Prize: Nicolas Ayabe – “Homestay Adventure”

Intermediate Level

First Prize: Zoe Fox – “The Milk Carton”
Second Prize: Haruna Asakawa – “Words: Identifying Differences in Culture”
Third Prize: Tiffany Chen – “Vocaloid: More than a Program”
Fighting-Spirit Prize: Nicole Houston – “When I Used to Live in Colorado”

Advanced Level

Dr. Hiroshi Sumiyama (judge), Po-Hsun Wang, Yilei Liao and Arisa Yang

First Prize: Po-Hsun Wang – “Responsibility”
Second Prize: Yilei Liao – “Looking Beyond the Tsunami”
Third Prize: Arisa Yang – “The Perfection and Competition Rate of Japan”
Special Prize: Alison Tominaga – “My Grandmothers and I”

Seven of the above winners from the UCI Speech Contest entered the regional speech contest organized by California State University, Los Angeles on February 25th. Po-Hsun Wang was awarded the Grand Prize for his speech “Responsibility,” and four other students placed as follows:

Second Prize: Zoe Fox – “The Milk Carton”
Second Prize: Alison Tominaga – “My Grandmothers and I”
Third Prize: Haruna Asakawa – “Words: Identifying Differences in Culture”
Third Prize: Yilei Liao – “Looking Beyond the Tsunami”

More than 120 people gathered for the speech competition, including VIPs from the sponsoring organizations and local community members, in addition to UCI faculty and students. The program also included a first-hand presentation on the Great East Japan Earthquake by Dr. Kazuya Oseki and his students from Tokiwa University, and the audience was also treated to a live performance of gagaku, a traditional Japanese musical instrument. The contest was followed by a social hour replete with Japanese refreshments donated by local Japanese businesses.

It is the Department’s hope that through this contest, students will be motivated to further pursue their learning of Japanese language and culture, and that the Program in Japanese will continue to thrive and grow as it serves the UCI students and the local community.

About the Program in Japanese

Founded in 1989, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (EALL) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) houses ten ladder-rank faculty and a roster of thirteen lecturers. The Department offers undergraduate degrees in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and East Asian Cultural Studies, as well as Ph.D. degrees in East Asian Languages and Literatures. The Program in Japanese is the largest among the three language programs, with a current enrollment of approximately 250 students.

More on the Japanese Speech Contest

More on East Asian Languages and Literatures (EALL)

More on the Program in Japanese