Lexicon
One. jealousy is a form of helplessness: a mental disease, a form of imprisonmnet, a form of madness turning into a demonic obsession in which the subject projects his own desires to commit heinous acts of infidelity on his partner. As his obsession grows, he becomes more and more controlling and suffocating until he reaches a yet even higher level of insanity in which he WANTS his partner to cheat on him in order to vindicate his delusions. He longs to shake his finger and say "I told you so! I knew it!" Jealousy is sometimes rooted in insecurity; in worse instances, jealousy is rooted in sociopathy, the evil condition of despising all people or being indifferent to others' suffering or both.
Two. Projection: Assuming others have your worst traits while remaining blind to those traits you have in yourself.
Three. Vindication: proving to others and yourself that you are right. The problem with wanting to be right all the time is that you forget more important things like reaching an understanding with others.
Four. Solipsism is a state of helplessness: extreme self-centeredness in which you look at others as either competitition to be destroyed or trophies to be displayed for your glory. Solipsism leeches away at empathy until there is none. The ultimate destination of solipsism is insanity. With solipsism there must be a degree of paranoia and delusions of grandeur.
Five. Seeing the trees but not the forest: You micromanage the small things and lose sight of the more important things (Lina)
Six. Obligation to conformity of the social order vs. obligation to one's true self (Lina)
Seven. Heartless reciprocity: Doing a good deed not out of love but to demand that the person you help be under obligation to return a favor, often bigger than the original good deed (Zuming)
Eight. Spleen love: The more you love someone, the greater degree that love can turn to hate (Panbin).
“The Beauty” 25 (story resembles true news report)
1. What evidence is there that Dan has been suffocating his wife Gina? Control, jealousy, mistrust, the sense that Gina is hiding something from him, which she is, but he has no idea. The problem is that the more he suffocates her, the more she wants to live in a parallel universe away from him as an escape thus reinforcing his suspicions. They are caught in this vicious cycle.
2. How does Dan’s jealous behavior actually encourage a closer friendship between his wife Gina and her friend Fooming Yu? Fooming Yu knows her secret and uses it to hold power over her, so Gina is being controlled by two men. Plus she's raising a child. This will lead to her insanity if nothing changes.
3. What evidence is there that Dan pursued Gina as a trophy object and not a human being? See pages 29 and 32. Dan sees Gina as a competition, not as a human being. His relationships are all compromised and poisoned by his egotism and solipsism (extreme self-centeredness).
4. How does his daughter Jasmine enflame Dan’s jealousy? See page 28. Baby doesn't look like either parent. So who's the father?
5. What is the irony of Dan’s visits to the bathhouse?
6. What is Dan specifically jealous about on page 29? Fooming knows more about Gina than does Dan. Perhaps Dan has little interest in Gina other than the way she makes her husband look good like an accessory.
7. How are Dan’s character flaws rendered on page 29? He has a Darwinian view of the world that makes his humanity ugly. Everyone is a competitor for status. Another flaw is that Dan suffers from projection; since he wants to cheat, he projects, that is, he assumes his wife wants to always cheat on him. The more jealous the husband, the more likely he is to cheat.
8. What is the real source of humiliation Dan suffers on page 31? He cannot control his wife.
9. What evidences a sense of resentment Dan harbors against his daughter Jasmine on page 35? He resents her for impeding his sleep "on purpose."
10. How is Dan seen as a man of abstractions, not reality, on page 36?
11. What is the essential insanity of jealousy? See page 37. Once you invest energy into believing that your spouse is cheating on you, you HAVE to believe it in order to justify and vindicate all your lost energy.
12. Unravel the mystery of Gina. 40-48
13. Is Dan’s curiosity and suspicion toward his wife vindicated on page 44?
14. How is Dan’s inhumanity revealed after he hears the truth? 45 "You gave me a raw deal! No wonder Jasmine is so homely."
15. What hypocrisy regarding self-deception does Dan reveal on page 45?
16. Explain the story’s ending, Dan’s reluctance to go home. He feels betrayed because he can no longer trust his wife who duped him.
17. While one crisis has been resolved regarding Gina’s identity, there is a deeper, unresolved crisis that doesn’t bode well for the marriage. Explain. (Dan’s character, overwrought by egotism, solipsism, superficiality, centripetal development, etc)
“Temporary Love” 175
1. What is the perplexing situation called a “wartime couple”? Cohabiting to reduce living expenses while spouses live in another country. In the case of the story, the two roommates fall in love.
2. What are Lina’s flaws? Naiveté and rigid adherence to loyalty code prevent her from seeing the big picture and the truth. Her loyalty to convention becomes her prison. Or is it a sign of good character? Both?
3. How do we know that Lina is in denial? Over what? 178 (mutual convenience)
4. What does it mean to be “responsible” on page 179? How could we have opposing definitions? Do we betray ourselves to be responsible to convention and tradition? Is this "responsbility" a form of imprisonment?
5. Contrast Lina’s life with Panbin and her life with Zuming. How is it the difference between heaven and hell? One man is a vampire. The other man shows the love of reciprocity.
6. What evidence is there that Zuming does not love his wife? He is not interested in love but control.
7. Zuming nursed Lina’s father after he had a stroke. Does this make Zuming seem like a loving person? Explain. 185
8. What does Lina discover after she accuses Panbin of telling Zuming about their affair? 187
9. One of the story’s sad points is that Panbin opened Lina’s eyes as to what kind of men there are in the world. Explain in the context of the ambitious Zuming.
10. Once you’ve tasted good love, can you leave it and settle on a compromised, degraded version of it? Explain.
11. Will Zuming leave Lina some day? Explain. 190
12. How does Panbin’s life illustrate “spleen love”? See 191-194. He becomes an “international womanizer,” a nihilist, a bitter misanthrope.
Consumer Addiction and Learned Helplessness in "The Bane of the Internet"
One. How Do You Defend Yourself Against Addiction When It Comes Upon You Gradually?
Slippery Slope:
The Internet begins as an insidious process of dissolution, wearing down the Third Eye bit by bit until slaves of the Internet have no free will, no freedom to act independently and rationally.
First we stop writing letters. We write degraded, abbreviated emails and settle into convenience. And then we whet our appetites or I should say we inflame our appetites on various consumer goods so well packaged on the Internet.
We click on images and images feed envy and envy feeds unrealistic expectations.
The most dangerous things that happen to us in life happen incrementally and insidiously, bit by bit, under the radar. When we lose our souls, it never happens in a grand, tumultuous moment. It always happens gradually.
There is a perhaps overused analogy of a frog comfortably waddling in a pot of room-temperature water. The water slowly heats up and painlessly the frog is dead. Such is internet addiction.
Two. Convenience Trap:
As we enjoy more and more conveniences, we develop a dependence on them resulting in the erosion of our tolerance for pain, hard work, patience, and putting for meaningful effort to maintain human relationships. Before we can understand what has happened to us, we have become emotional cripples.
Three. Paradox of the Internet:
The more "connected" we are with technology, the more disconnected we become because the modes of communication are superficial and these superficial modes replace meaningful ones.
Four. The Purpose of Advertising:
To create desires that would not otherwise exist. The internet is more than anything an arm of advertising. Advertisers know your psychology more than you do. They know it more than your therapist does. They are smarter than your therapists. Advertisers are the supreme psychologists of the world.
Those who know psychology go into advertising.
Those who want to know about psychology but never really understand it become therapists.
Five. Libido Ostentandi:
Latin for the need to show off, to be ostentatious as a way of finding validation, regognition, and for being flattered with the title of having "good taste."
Six. The Death of the Rational
The older sister says "be rational" but to no avail. The younger sister has no Third Eye. Therefore, she has no free will and is at the mercy of her irrational impulses. She is a slave to nonsense.
Consumerism is based on the irrational:
"Oh, what a feeling!" (Toyota)
"He's got gum!" (Wrigley's)
Make your boss Stouffers Stuffing and get a promotion
Seven. The dangers of consumer ostracism:
If I don't have X, people won't accept me into their tribe; if I don't have brand XY, people won't love me the way they should; if I don't have brand XYZ, I won't find fulfillment and as a result I won't be worthy of other people's love.
Eight. Older sister becomes a Cash Momma instead of a loved family member.
In fact, the older sister, living in America, becomes the object of scorn and envy and as such is not loved at all but despised.
Nine. The consumer addict becomes a cynical nihilist:
Selling organs probably a ploy but in any case the younger sister is making a Faustian Bargain, a deal with the devil.
Ten. Being a Consumer Is in Many Ways Being Stuck in Adolescence
Consumerism is a form of arrested emotional development. You're stuck in adolescence, which is defined by moments of grandiosity (inflated expectations of consumerism) followed by disappointment, self-pity, and self-hatred. These feelings of self-loathing compel you to seek more grandiosity (buy more crap) followed, once again, by self-pity and disappointment.
Getting trapped in this cycle is a form of learned helplessness.
When you buy a car, there are heightened emotions, adrenaline kick, hormone spike, for example (study at Duke showed men gain testosterone when sitting in a Porsche and LOSE tesosterone when sitting in a Camry. Where's the free will in that?) and then after the hormones settle, you descend into a Consumer Hangover.
And what is the remedy for a Consumer Hangover? More shopping! And what follows more shopping? Another Consumer Hangover.
Eleven: Consumerism Is About Finding Meaning, Idendity, and Belonging
When we look to consumerism to replace basic human needs such as meaning, identity, and belonging, we call this impoverishment through subsitution. The more we fill the void in our lives with fake albeit potent "meaning," for example, the more we crave real meaning and try to fill the void with more and more fake meaning.
Buying an iPad, a Mini Cooper, or a BMW grants us privileged enterance into a special club where we luxuriate with people who remind us of ourselves and our values.
Sample Thesis Statements That Are Too General Or Too Obvious
"The Bane of the Internet" is about imprisonment.
"The Bane of the Internet is about consumer addiction.
"The Bane of the Internet" is about a greedy woman who loses her soul to the devil.
"The Bane of the Internet is about an American from China who watches helplessly as her family in China become full of greed, envy, and spite.
"The Bane of the Internet" makes it clear that we should maintain meaningful communication with our family.
"The Bane of the Internet" shows it's important to have the Third Eye to ward off greed and addiction.
"The Bane of the Internet" is an excellent story about how self-destructive consumer addiction can be.
Better Thesis:
"The Bane of the Internet" is example of the type of story in Ha Jin's collection in which the absence of the Third Eye results in the loss of freedom evidenced by __________, __________, __________, ___________, and _______________.
How to Use the Third Eye to Escape the Learned Helplessness of Consumerism
Introduction About Learned Helplessness
The Curse of Tatiana Minero
The incident that sealed my deeply entrenched bitterness and my brooding disposition forever, an event that at the time seemed relatively harmless, happened to me over thirty years ago. I was sixteen, a bodybuilder of svelte proportions, tanned and endowed with long brown locks, luscious thick eyebrows, and piercing beady brown eyes. I had showy squared-off cheekbones and a strong commander-like jaw that allowed me to exude a certain swarthy appeal. But beneath my supercilious, self-assured pose resided your typical teenage male, a social nincompoop, self-conscious, awkward, prone to excessive sweating. I was, like many young men my age, tongue-tied around women, having devoted all my time and effort to honing the perfect body but spending zilch on attaining even a modicum of a personality. A pity I didn’t have the insight to see that such a condition would lead to a life-long curse, a searing affliction that men suffer when they are compelled to look back on a lost opportunity and then are left to wonder what could have happened if only they hadn’t fumbled the ball.
We all fumble. We all make mistakes. But we all learn from our errors and go on with our lives. Right? Wrong. Dead wrong. Take it from me, a middle-aged, rancorous man, heavy-hearted, emotionally-arrested, a slave to the past, a helpless victim to a memory that, against my will, plays over and over in my mind and keeps its freshness and vitality even as I wither away.
The incident happened in the dead of summer. Scheduled to enter Mr. Teenage Golden State in a couple of weeks, I was tanning myself at Cull Canyon Lake, when I noticed an olive-skinned girl had thrown down her towel close to me and plopped herself down on the sand. This was no ordinary girl. This was a sixteen-year-old goddess, the fabled Tatiana Minero. Her body slathered in a deliquescing, zero-sun protection tropical banana-coconut tanning oil, she was soon stretched out in the supine position, revealing her smooth, willowy body in a tiny green chambray bikini, the material so scanty that both top and bottom could easily fit inside a robin’s egg. Her straight, dark, silken brown hair flowed down the length of her sleek, reticulated back. Her diminutive ankles were adorned with little shimmering bracelets of tiny silver, almond-shaped bells that jingled when she walked, emitting a sort of siren’s call so that every time she stood up to walk toward the drinking fountains, all of the men, overcome with a sort of smoldering, glandular itch, abruptly stopped what they were doing to observe what was no doubt the most cataclysmic event of the day, the witnessing of Tatiana Minero strolling slowly toward the drinking fountains to take a sip of water. To see Tatiana Minero get up from her towel, stroll toward the fountains, wet her parched mouth, and return to her spot on the sand was to be keenly aware of a palpable change in the atmosphere. Male hormonal levels, tensions, and anxieties immediately began to rise and seethe as all men’s eyes were glued to Tatiana’s trajectory to and from the drinking fountains. It was as if her mere act of walking was a rare phenomenon, one of the great wonders and mysteries of the world, so that all the men at Cull Canyon Lake, not wanting to miss a second of this breathtaking spectacle, became completely fixated and motionless in a sort of bizarre time warp whereby Planet Earth seemed to have, in deference to Tatiana, stopped rotating. I can still see the men frozen between the apex of their leap off the diving board and the water below them, I can still see them stuck in mid-air as they lunge for a Frisbee or a football, I can still see them unable to clamp their teeth down on the mouth-watering poor boy sandwich they were eager to bite into just a moment before Tatiana Minero stood up and, like the Priestess of Planetary Rotation, halted the Earth’s revolution around the Sun. All of the men at the lake, their conversations and antics interrupted, their lives put on hold, their very thoughts jammed, were noticeably agape, their eyes burning with torment and insanity, as they beheld this sylphlike teenage girl walk ever so slowly toward the drinking fountains.
To add to our misery, occasional breezes wafted Tatiana’s sweet-smelling tanning oil into our direction, affording us a redolent reminder of her presence so that, like dogs in some cruel Pavlovian experiment, we shuddered with violent paroxysms as we inhaled her potent, ambrosial cocktail.
But the torment didn’t stop there. As if Tatiana wasn’t already unbearably irresistible, she also enjoyed the cachet and supernatural aura of belonging to a prized progeny of sisters, aunts, and cousins, who, known simply as The Minero Sisters, were legendary throughout the San Francisco East Bay for their beauty, the kind that aroused such passion that men squandered entire fortunes, warred and conspired against each other, and plotted diabolical schemes into the deep of the night for the privilege of being one of their suitors.
As I tried to relax on my pale orange Charlie Brown bedspread, I had heard some guys nearby whispering to each other, with the kind of excitement and conspiratorial glee reserved for surprise movie star appearances, about how this gorgeous girl lying on the sand next to me was one of the Minero Sisters. To merely utter the words “Minero Sisters” elicited an immediate smile and understanding and sometimes caused the hairs behind a man’s neck to bristle, for the words had the same kind of power and brand recognition as the words BMW, Mercedes Benz and Lexus.
Some guy from my school had introduced me to Tatiana as she was lying on her beach towel just a few feet away from me. To my surprise, upon meeting me, her ears perked up and her dark saucer eyes seemed to greedily soak in her view of me as she sat upright, supported by her long, slender arms, their sleek shape and cocoa butter tan highlighted by gold arm bracelets coiled around her delicate wrists like writhing snakes. With a coquettish giggle, she outstretched her legs in front of her while her high-arched feet circled playfully, causing her ankle bells to jingle. Then turning her head toward me in a way that caused her long dark brown hair to whip around her body like a matador’s cape, she stared at me, asked me who I was and why she had never seen me before. The tone of her voice was downright imperious. She sounded like a mildly irritated queen who would have her informants beheaded for having failed to apprise her of my very existence. “How come I’ve never seen you before?” she asked again. I told her I attended Castro Valley High. No wonder, she said, she had never seen me; she was a student at Hayward High School. Then out of the blue, she asked me a question that caught me completely off guard:
“Are you a good kisser? Cause with a body like that, boy, it would be a real shame if you weren’t a good kisser.”
In shock, dumbed by her beauty, and paralyzed by such a brazen proposal, my bowels loosened, and I found myself unable to speak. I tried and tried with all my will to say something in response to her audacious remark but my lips were pressed shut. I would have been happy merely spitting out some incoherent gibberish, but my brain synapses were apparently short-circuited rendering my jaw locked and I was revealed for who I truly was, a helpless mute, a dumbfounded ninny, an inexperienced awkward-handed Billy goat, unworthy of holding court with the great Tatiana Minero.
My failure to respond to her scintillating offer seemed to tell her all she needed to know about me, which was, of course, that for all my tanned, sculpted muscles, I was in fact not a good kisser, not just in the literal sense of not being able to kiss, that is, the mechanical act of caressing her lips with my own, but in the fuller, broader, more devastating sense of not having the confidence, the moxie, and the élan, to express passion toward her. Her question about my kissing was in a way an ingenious work of espionage; she had sent a reconnaissance team, a sort of Geek Patrol, into my psyche to see just what I was made of and found, rather quickly, that I was indeed a geek, so that, armed with this information, she insouciantly turned around and did not speak to me again.
Ever.
It was not just that she did not speak to me, but, on a more traumatic scale, that she actually seemed to recede from my universe, fade, and disappear, forever out of my grasp so that now, over thirty years later, I still reconstruct the event and imagine how rapturous it would have been had I had it within me to respond to her question with something charming, assured, and sophisticated, something that would let her know that I was indeed the great kisser she had been looking for.
Please don’t get me wrong. It’s not like my whole life has succumbed to this one incident. I’ve moved on as best I could. I went to college, got a decent-paying job, and married a beautiful Mediterranean woman. She is a splendor to behold, voluptuous, large-lipped, blessed with long curly brown hair. Quite frankly, the best way to imagine my wife is to think of Anita Ekberg in Federico Fellini’s famous fountain scene in La Dolce Vita. Yes, my wife does possess what many might call that larger-than-life kind of beauty, the kind that is so powerful and delectable that I enjoy, in the public arena, the assurance and satisfaction that other men will seethe with envy and admiration whenever they see me with her.
But you see, not all is well. My wife is often awakened at night by my crying out Tatiana’s name. Yes, I still dream of her. Imagine it. Tatiana, a girl I never even touched, being the cause of my greatest infidelity! It brings me so much anguish to still be under her spell more than thirty years later. She is such a haunting presence in our home, such an unwelcome apparition. Sometimes my wife, after hearing me speak of Tatiana in my sleep, must leave the bed and weep downstairs. I no longer try to comfort her, for I’ve learned that in these moments she is inconsolable and that my words, no matter how kind and sincere, only torment her all the more.
I rarely sleep at night myself because I fear I may see Tatiana again. Sometimes she laughs. Sometimes she says she still wants me. Sometimes she cries because, she says, I have betrayed her. Sometimes she does not even appear beautiful but looks decrepit, hollow, and reptilian. I know she is not the same girl who spoke to me at the lake over thirty years ago. She is something else entirely, a demon, a succubus, an unclean spirit that slowly rots my soul, eats away at my marriage, and shows me no mercy.
I fear that if this goes on my wife will leave me. She hasn’t said so explicitly but I know she is considering it. Who could blame her? Married to a man whose heart still clings to something that is not even real. A man who cannot and will not let go of the past. A man who feels entitled to nurse his grievances, to make them more important than anything else in the world. This, you see, is the very curse I’ve been talking about—the stubborn refusal to let go, the unrelenting determination to make the lost opportunity more significant than it really was.
Downstairs I hear my wife crying. I know it’s my fault, for I’ve been dreaming of Tatiana again, uttering her name like a whimpering dog. Yes, I am pathetic, repulsive even. But equally repulsive is my wife whose loud, peasant-like sobs and that hideous drink she’s been taking lately—a vermillion green chalky substance that her doctor promises will assuage her chronic dyspepsia.
I cannot contemplate my wife’s gaseous condition without flaring my nostrils in disgust, after which I feel compelled to imagine my lovely Tatiana, so full of grace, sophistication, and splendor. She would never suffer such an unwomanly affliction that would require the consumption of a bitter-tasting noxious beverage. Nor would she ever cry like that. No indeed. Tatiana, you can be sure, would weep in silence and her tears, running down her velvety cheeks, would only enhance her already sublime beauty, the kind for which an idiot like myself would throw away his entire life.
Example of an Introduction about the Learned Helplessness of Consumer Addiction, Transition, and Thesis
Evisu, True Religion, G-Star, Slim Flare, Citizens of Humanity, 7 For All Mankind, Diesel . . . I found I could not sleep at night unless I recited names of fabulous jeans, jeans that cost between $200-400, jeans that boasted of denim so soft, so textured, so resplendent, so magical, so distinctive, and so empowering that they put all other jeans to shame and rendered the wearers of those inferior jeans pariahs unworthy of my company. The glorious name-brand jeans I am speaking of had almost supernatural powers so that simply wearing them afforded you membership to a special club, a high-brow coterie of people in-the-know, people who could not be bothered by the rest of mundane humanity.
This underground designer jean society often communicated on Internet message boards, chat sites, and met monthly at swank cocktail parties where they would show-off their jeans to others whose jean expertise made them qualified to truly appreciate the way the jeans showcased your svelte thighs, cupped and massaged your rock-hard buttocks, and delineated the appropriate, eye-brow-raising contours. Marriages and other dynamic relationships were born from these designer jean parties where matches were made in denim heaven.
Of course, ordinary people lacked the imagination and refined sensibility to seek out and wear the designer jeans I am speaking of. Rather, only a rare breed, a self-described cognoscenti, coveted these elite jeans. We were people who were plugged-in to a secret society, a mysterious network through which our belonging entitled us to know everything that went on in this world that “really mattered” before it “went mainstream.” We had, for instance, software embedded in our cell phones so that when a new jean came out on the market or a jean went on sale our cell phone vibrated pleasantly and thereby alerted us to a new consumer opportunity. We had unique access to special underground warehouses in the garment district where we could buy jeans as rare and mysterious as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were mysterious locations so secret we had to be blindfolded and escorted down several spiral stairs to a dank basement where an old lady with moth-ball breath would rudely shove the pair of designer jeans into our hands after we gave her a wad of cash. We weren’t even allowed to try the jeans on, but because their very elusiveness gave them unusually high cachet among the designer jean community, we took the chance that they’d be a perfect fit and usually we were right and found that these underground designer jeans afforded us glories that no other jean could give us.
This isn’t to say that we, as members of the elite designer jean cult were absent of problems. We had some, to be sure. One is that once we put on a pair of jeans that we absolutely loved, we found it almost impossible to take the jeans off, even for showers, the beach, and bedtime, so that for many of us our jeans doubled as bathing suits and pajama bottoms. Also the first day we got our jeans we’d often be overcome with a sort of ambulatory mania by which we’d feel compelled to walk all over town so that the world could see us in our perfect-fit jeans. We’d strut across the mall, around the neighborhood, and into strange homes and do a pirouette until we were escorted off the premises or chased away by vicious attack dogs.
We couldn’t wash these jeans because every wash faded and thus diminished them. Thus we walked around in filthy, great looking denim rags, Fabreezing them, but soon, that's wasn’t enough to curtail the stench that was redolent of cow dung. Nor could I do anything to stop the rashes, ingrown hairs, boils, and bacterial infections rendered from wearing filthy jeans for six months without changing them.
The skin infections combined with the over-tight jeans sometimes strangulated the femoral artery and caused gangrene and some of us had to have our legs amputated.
You would think having our legs cut off would finally remedy our jean obsession, but you're wrong. These amputees simply bought prosthetic legs so they could adorn them with even tighter jeans than ever. In a perverse way, the prosethetic thighs and calves afforded them an opportunity to elevate their jean obsession to even greater heights. In fact, a whole specialized jean industry was developed to target those who hobbled on their new prosthetic limbs.
Imagine intoxicating yourself with the delights of adorning your plastic legs with jeans while forgetting to lament the loss of your natural limbs?
What a woeful race we were, slaves to our consumer addiction.
Indeed, the above account shows that consumer addiction is a disease that is accompanied by learned helplessness. Likewise, this same helplessness is chronicled in "The Bane of the Internet," which shows, like members of the jean cult, the key factors of consumer addiction, including _____________, _______________, ______________, and _________________.
In Class Activity:
Develop a thesis that compares three to four stories.
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