And so, I thank you

Some people you just know is going to live in a special spot inside your heart. When I was first looking into four-year colleges I saw Prof. W's resume in the college webpage, and right away I knew she was someone I had to know. She had a resume I always I wanted to have, her CV had all the right experience, right schooling, and most probably, the right people on her phone list. One of the reasons I chose this college is the chance to work with her, to learn under her tutelage and have a first-name basis relationship with her.

I left college before I had the chance to meet her and take one of her classes.

While the years waned and waxed before me, I had thought about her, and what great fun it would have been to learn under this teacher I had mythologized based on her CV.

When I made my Odysseus-like return to the same college I had left so long ago, I looked her up again, in the incumbent professor's roster. Bravely, I wrote her a letter of intent asking her to sponsor my independent learning contract. I couldn't move to the city where my college is, and my next best choice is to pursue independent study and research. Fine by me. I got promoted at my job, and got to keep my excellent medical and dental insurance.

She said yes, I look forward to working with you.

Last night, before I turned in to bed, I received her evaluation of my work from the Winter Quarter that I just finished. Is it cheesy and hormonal when I say that I had to fight back tears when I read what she had to say about me? I was so overwhelmed I couldn't read the whole thing. Little by little, I read each sentence, paragraph, until I finally finished her love letter of sorts.

And so, Prof. W., thank you, thank you for making one of my greatest dreams come true.

Ruzielle writes in her self evaluation that encountering the work of bell hooks was “the most fruitful aspect of my studies,” inspiring a “multi-layered experience” that expanded her knowledge of both African-American and women’s studies and encouraged her to read the works of writers such as Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and Adrienne Rich. Her study of hooks, together with a set of eye-opening experiences working with an educational lobbying group, also prompted her to shift her focus from leadership per se to education. Ruzielle writes that, “[a] healing of sorts occurred,” allowing her to understand her own experience within the broader set of race and class structures that “undermine minority and female students.”

 

What follows are some of my remarks on individual essays and blog posts. I found in all of Ruzielle’s writing incredible confidence and an astute sense of timing; in fact her writing is so strong that it is sometimes too easy for her to use her elegant prose style to resolve contradictions within the essay that cannot otherwise be entirely resolved. These papers are not good examples of close reading, but they successfully use existing texts as springboards for quite subtle analyses of contemporary social issues. Ruzielle’s first two essays were very much an investigation of her own relationship with the book she was reading, but I noticed (as she herself did) that she shied away from really unpacking the emotions that arose for her as a result of that relationship, or acknowledging the ways in which the book might affect her own approach to addressing systematic inequities. Her third essay, by contrast, was an incredibly complex investigation of the socio-economic forces and myths that lead highly-trained immigrants to take up low-skill American jobs.

 

In subsequent essays and blog posts Ruzielle took up themes of gender and labor, her ongoing ambivalence about the food industry, as well as shaming, whitewashing, and the other dark sides of the “model minority” discourse. She also continued to seek out books that would provide her with less Eurocentric models of leadership, as a way of pro-actively investigating her own professional practices. As the quarter wore on she also began to delve more deeply into her own family history and into specific elements of the Filipino experience in America in the context of the model minority myth. Her week 8 essay on these topics contained some of her most searingly astute lines, such as one in which she describes nursing schools as a kind of “puppy mill.” Her week 9 essay, written after a visit to the state capitol to meet with members of the Higher Education Committee, was also refreshingly pointed and direct. “Now, more than ever,” she writes, “education is being used as a weapon against the disenfranchised. . . It sends the message that we’re always one signature away from being erased from history.” Ruzielle makes especially cogent points in this essay about educational access for minority/disadvantaged communities.   

 

In her final blog post for the quarter, “Against the Grain: In Pursuit of an Intellectual Life,” Ruzielle synthesizes the insights from previous essays (weeks 3, 8 and 9), with a particular emphasis on the myth of “well-paid STEM careers.” Ruzielle’s account of the cycle of aspiration and despair is worth quoting at length:

 

And when they migrate to the US, the crushing pressure to provide for the family derailed everybody’s STEM careers, or at least their STEM education. Women, of course, were especially vulnerable. . . .When once we were all forced into STEM careers, the strain was alleviated; only to be replaced with the pressure to take low-paying, soul-crushing labor in the healthcare field. . . . Nothing kills ambition and potential more than a tainted ideology that’s been re-gifted and passed on to the next generation.

 

Returning to the extended metaphor of consumption that threads through her writing thanks to her many years of working in the food industry, Ruzielle concludes this devastating paragraph by remarking that this phenomenon is “the legacy of the Spaniards, Americans and the Japanese who brainwashed our community into believing we’re meant for offal, and not the rich fatty tenderloin steak.”

 

Ruzielle’s writing is shot through and enlivened by a powerful set of tensions: she is hungry for constant stimulation and learning, and yet keenly aware of avoiding self-exploitation; she is driven to seek success, and she is passionate in her desire for connection with others, for genuine social change. The act of embracing her “intellectual self,” as she describes it in her self-evaluation, was not an easy or painless exercise, but I hope that it has been, and will continue to be, and empowering one, both for herself and for those lucky enough to encounter her writing