Eddie Kam                                                                                             3/1/2021

English 11000

Cover Letter

The audience of my essay was my fellow classmates and other people around my age. A lot of the language I use can be classified as conversation and informal. Recently I started reading “The Aliens” by Annie Baker and many of the language choices she uses are conversational and the reason I decided to follow in that is to give the perception that my struggles and eventual triumphs in writing music can be relatable to others too. 

I learned that if I type at the computer I will struggle to form ideas/reflections but if I go to the park and I write in my journal I can write pages upon pages. I also have started to understand that the language I use in my lyrics and the language I used to write this essay are completely different and almost contrasting. 

Concepts like having a driving purpose throughout the entire song was something that most impacted my learning through this piece. 

This phase has helped me explore one specific learning outcome which would be to “Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations”. For example I kept bringing up specific lines in my paper and driving home the purpose of my piece is about discovering more about literacy. I specifically remember after class one day I went to the park, sat down and started writing and it felt like a rush of the strategies we learned in class coming out on the paper.

Eddie Kam                                                                                                   3/1/2021

English 11000

L&L Narrative

I have always had two passions in life. Music and Theater. I didn’t realize how strongly these two are connected until the summer of 2018. It was the summer before my senior year of high school. I didn’t know what I wanted to study in college. Music or Theatre. So I took it upon myself to audition for the new york state summer theater program. This meant that for the entire month of July I would be upstate in Delhi new york. A town that looks like a salad bowl with the sides being mountains and inside the dish would be me and 35 students around my age. When we got there I really found myself isolated, in a haze. I knew there was something weird about this quaint and kinda empty town home to SUNY Delhi but I didn’t know what I was in for. 

I always wanted to write songs ever since I was younger. I remember being jealous of my classmates who could in high school or those who could write songs and I felt I could express better but didn’t actually know how to. But I put song writing in the same category as becoming an athlete, it’s a nice idea but it would never happen. I mean for starters I hate writing essays (awkward). I have been good at conveying messages in as few words as possible. I also know how to make a solid chord progression naturally. But creating lyrics, rhymes and huge literary ideas was not something I thought I was capable of. 

My relationship with musical theatre is a tricky one. On one hand I’m in love with musicals like “West Side Story”, “Hamilton” and even parodies of musicals like “Co-Op”. But many students who are obsessive about musical theater can really annoy me. It probably comes from my sister being obsessive about musical theater. Why do I bring this up? Because out of 35 students at NYSSSA (New York State Summer School Arts) only 5 of them weren’t obsessing over musical theater. I’m still friends with all five of those students. 

One of those students was named Sascha. She wore white cowboy boots and had long black hair and was in my belief the best actor in the program. To me she was one of the most beautiful people I had ever seen. I was paired with her in many scenes together and when we wrote plays, sascha being always the unique one wrote a monologue that she asked me to perform on stage. Her artistree, without me realizing it, tapped into me. She was funny, kind, mysterious. But that’s not how I started writing music.

Our acting teacher was named James Luse. He was quite the character to say the least. He taught the writings of Michael Chekoff (Anton’s nephew). He believed that if an actor can use picture from their imagination, they could crawl deeper into a role because instead of acting they would be “being” 

Isolation isn’t always a burden. Isolation can embolden learning as I have learned this quarantine. One day when telling james what pictures we’d see I finally told him the truth instead of the watered down version of what I saw. I saw a television box, bulky and wide one from the seventies. My grandparents had one just like it. But this tv wasn’t like a tv but instead a glass box and inside was a bird with a stick through it. Now obviously this bird was dead but it was sliding up and down on a metal stick. 

I was embarrassed my “picture” was darker than everyone else’s but James told me “write it down” so I did. From that day on I took note of all my images. 

“The sparrows corpse, goes up and down”

I wrote that line in a journal that day. I wrote a lot of lines going forward and it was funny that I didn’t know why. So many things were happening that summer. Learning acting skills, playing piano in the piano room, hanging out with Sascha and writing my “pictures” down. 

But things changed one day when I was in James class and I actually had quite an unusual picture. It was an elephant. Kinda boring. The elephant was like any other elephant you’d seen before but it’s skin was pitch black. I had never seen a black elephant but I thought it was cool. 

“The Black Elephant” 

Now back at the piano room I would only play one progression over and over again. Gm-Cm-Gm-Cm-Em-DM-Cm-Em-Dm-Gm. I didn’t know why I would play this. It was blues, it was sad and it had an old nightclub type feel to it. Now I don’t know how it clicked but one day at camp I said I’m gonna write a song about an elephant and that elephant is gonna be about a girl. I didn’t realize at the time this was personification and this was a common tool used by many poets. 

“Relevant, arrogance, element, evident”

I wanted to find the most beautiful, mysterious and dark words that could potentially “rhyme” with elephant as I knew that would be the hardest part of writing this song. At the same time I discovered terrific jazz songs like “Time after Time”, “It Could Happen To You” and “One for my baby”. I knew in order to make my song meaningful to me I would have to make it personal and not generic like I find my other previous writings to be. Then one night I put it all together. I was surrounded with crumbled up pieces of paper trying to find the right words. When it came together I realized that I had written a song about someone.         

the sparrows corpse goes up and down 

striking fear in cats and clowns

but her grin is evident    

trusting no one        

the black elephant 

stomping near the purple sky touching skin where beauty lies 

she’s never in her element 

hearts dropping

the black elephant

while the joker takes on the queen 

and everybody in between

those white boots are relevant

keep walking         

my black elephant 

*Scatting Verse*

charming eyes cause an uproar

some will notice some adore

sucking out the arrogance 

that’s what she said    

my black elephant

there’s my love      

there’s my baby       

coming close       

am I crazy

*riff to the fifth*

my black elephant

Looking back on this song I realized how powerful your subconscious could be. When I was writing it I don’t think I fully realized that I was writing about Sascha. About how she was mysterious, she never seemed in her element, wore white cowboy boots, had just these huge eyes that our entire class would joke with her about, she was scary to some people but she had such a huge smile. All of those things were said in my song and none of those things I knew I would write about because all I knew was that I was writing about “pictures” and what I saw in my imagination. 

Music is a funny thing because I can fully express what I want to say musically. What I want the listener to feel with just chords and scatting or syllables/consonants. But translating that feeling, that expression into words while giving it meaning is the toughest hurdle I have/had as a musician. That translation can make the piano feel like some kind of a beastly creature that is trying to eat my hands. When you get the words and get the music and lyrics to connect it, it’s the equivalent of Aaron Judge smoking one to the left center bleachers. 

Now I study Jazz Vocals at City College. I have written two more songs since then all using the lessons I learned that summer. It’s become a bit of an easier process. I’m still really good friends with Sascha and my hope is to record this song and my other two songs and put them on spotify. 

Eddie Kam 3/21/2020

English 11000

Cover Letter

My audience is definitely my permeates and Professor Velez. This assignment unless the last was adequately strict in terms of instructions because it was more of a direct prompt.  So I did not take many liberties and therefore the choices I observed were strictly from the essay and I did not stray around from that. I discovered that writing is less exciting when you can’t take as many liberties however it does become much more focused. I have learned a lot or at least refreshed my memory a lot on the rhetorical devices for this essay and throughout this phase. Using these devices with such a powerful and relevant essay like “Mothers Tongue” really impacted me while I wrote this essay. “Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.”This phase has really made me step back from making me look at what the meaning of what the story maybe but instead look at how did the author convey that meaning what devices, tools and rhetorical strategies did she use in order to get her message cross. 

Eddie Kam 3/21/2020

English 11000

“Mother Tongue” is a personal essay that couldn’t be more prevalent than it is today. In “Mother Tongue”, author Amy Tan shares the story of her own experience growing up with her mother. Throughout the story the reader starts to understand that perfect, articulate english doesn’t equal absolute intelligence. In other words, perfect fluent english doesn’t mean non-intelligence. Amy Tan is able to drive home the message of her essay using several rhetorical tools/devices such as ethos, pathos and logos. Those devices are very crucial to convey messages of deep and sad emotion, evidence, relatability and creating distinguishing characteristics for all the characters in the essay. 

In “Mother Tongue” written by Amy Tan, Tan explores her childhood to adulthood as a successful writer with experience of growing up as a daughter of an immigrant. The story heavily focuses on her mother who due to it not being her first language spoke “limited” or  “watered down” english. This created a type of assumption about her mother’s intelligence which is simply not true. Tan uses multiple types of rhetorical devices in order to persuade the reader of her argument. One of those rhetorical devices was called Logos. Logos is a rhetorical or persuasive appeal to the reader’s logic and rationality. Tan writes that in several new surveys and tests show that asain students consistently do better at classes like math and science than english during tests. But tests are not how language is developed as many language experts say it is nurtured and grown through peers and family members. 

In “Mother Tongue” written by Amy Tan, Tan explores the rhetorical literary device of pathos. Throughout the novel we get a reader’s feelings for Amy Tan’s Mother and her english difficulties.  Also one example of this that stands out to me is when we learn that Amy had to call the stockbroker and pretend she was her mother when she was only very young because the stockbroker was taking advantage of the mothers “broken english”. Amy Tan was able to illustrate the embarrassment, sadness and unfair reality that her mother went through due to her limitations with the english language even though she is extremely intelligent. 

Finally in “Mother Tongue” written by Amy Tan, Tan uses rhetorical literary devices of ethos to drive the power of the message of her essay. Ethos is a direct strategy by the author to appeal to a sense of ethics. It’s larger meaning is to convince the reader of the character’s credibility. Throughout the entirety of the essay the reader can simply not walk away thinking Amy Tan isn’t a ethical, credible and convincing direct source of discrimination personal essay writing. “I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.” (Tan on page 3) this line shows a couple of things. One is the discrimination that exists and another is the first hand discrimination that Amy Tan herself faced. Making her a credible and ethical author/character in this essay and therefore using the writing strategy of ethos successfully. 

Cover Letter for Baseball Linguistic Discrimination Research Paper

By Eddie Kam 

My audience ranges from those who know the game of baseball to those who believe baseball is when you score a touchdown. This paper uses baseball-something I’m really passionate about-to highlight language and racial discrimination exists within our country. I took a formal approach during most of my essay but at some points turned my writing into more of an informal use. I did this to become more relatable and comforting to the reader that way they would understand my point of view better. 

I did heavy research for this paper but I never fully understood the amount of discrimination that existed within sports as a whole. I had to keep it narrow to get my point across to the reader. Thesis statement-it really drove home to me the point of my paper. When I got stuck I remembered my statement and it drove my essay to the finish line. Evidence- I felt like a lawyer during this paper. I was really trying to make my argument and I did that by pulling direct quotes from fact based outlets. 

This essay really brought home the first course learning outcome. “Recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures.” In order for a game such as baseball to evolve and grow it needs to continuously be open to communicating and empowering people of all different languages and cultures. Now after doing research and writing this paper I really understand that learning outcome.

Eddie Kam Research Paper 4/22/2021

English 

Professor Velez

It’s often referred to as America’s pastime and as American as apple pie. It features the national anthem and a fly over. When referring to America, baseball usually comes up for most. But just like America, baseballs past is entrenched in racism/linguistic discrimination. And also like America so its present. In this paper we will look at baseball’s past, present and future. And how “keeping politics” out of sports is impossible and a disservice to the game. Baseball is an accurate indicator of the political discourse surrounding linguistic discrimination in America.

Before we can take a look at baseball’s role in our political discourse today, we have too look back at its past. In 1947 Jackie Robinson played his first game in the majors breaking the color barrier. “The Major Leagues had not had an African-American player since 1889, when baseball became segregated. When Jackie first donned a Brooklyn Dodger uniform, he pioneered the integration of professional athletics in America. By breaking the color barrier in baseball, the nation’s preeminent sport, he courageously challenged the deeply rooted custom of racial segregation in both the North and the South.” Jackie Robinson had to face racial discrimination from fans, teammates, other players, team owners and the media. And he had to originally do it without responding. According to Martin Stezano of History.com “That year, as per an agreement with Rickey, he also learned how to fight back without fighting. Rather than react to the constant racial abuse from fans and other teams alike, Jackie used unfathomable restraint and poise, turning the other cheek so as not to give his detractors any reason to end Rickey’s “experiment.” (Branch Rickey was the general manager of the dodgers). The racial abuse that Robinson faced was vile and overwhelming and to not be able to stand up to that abuse is absolutely horrible but the reality is for so many African Americans this is/was the reality. Before 1947, many African Americans baseball players were “forced to play in the negro leagues” as Richard Seltzer writes in Exploring Racism: Exploring Discrimination Through The Eyes of College Students. They didn’t want Jackie Robinson to play baseball for the racist reason that it would be the start of allowing an African american to play a sport that is as american as apple pie. The near fact that Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron and many others came into a sport before the start of the 1960’s civil rights movement and became baseball legends in their own right is an astonishing feat and really changed a game to make it more diverse. It encouraged young kids of all different races to finally see themselves out on the ball field. Starting on April 15th 2009, every year the entire MLB league wears number 42 (Robinson’s number) on the back of their jersey. But the history of discrimination whether it be linguistic or racist doesn’t end with the past. Once again Martin Stezano wrote that “Jackie Robinson’s words continue to influence today’s activist athletes, too. In his 1972 autobiography, he said: “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.” These are words that professional athletes like Colin Kaepernick used as inspiration for their own controversial anthem protests during NFL games in 2017”. Baseball was an accurate indicator when Jackie Robinson broke into the league of where our country was heading. While racial discrimination is still so prevalent in our country today, Robinson breaking into the league push the civil rights in a better and more inclusive direction in our country. 

While in a more perfect world racial and linguistic discrimination would be a relic of the past unfortunately it is sadly not in today’s world. Countless amount of times we see stories of the racial and linguistic discrimination in our country and it is highlighted within our sports. For example in 2021 former Yankees ace pitcher Mashiro Tanaka chose to return to japan to play baseball instead of play in the MLB. According to Scott Davis of the insider, one of the reasons was because of something so unimaginable apparently in an interview with a known Japanese  newspaper, Tanaka suggested that one of the reasons he and his family chose to return to Japan was because they faced racism amid the coronavirus pandemic. According to a translation from Google on the Japanese newspaper’s website, Tanaka said his son felt insecure at school and that they were “discriminated against.” He also said his wife felt “anxiety” in the U.S. In April of 2020, Tanaka tweeted that during training camp, he and his family had returned to Japan after “there was an event that made me feel danger other than the new coronavirus infection, and I decided to return home.” For those who follow Masahiro Tanaka they know he is a very professional player and very talented if he wanted to play for a big league team this season he could which show how hateful and disrespectful the anti-asian discrimination him and his family faced because of the corona virus. 

In baseball it has ranged from not just anti-asian discrimination but also anti-hispanic discrimination. In order for me to better explain to you how blatant and disrespectful members of the baseball community are on these fronts, I’m going to share a clip from James O’Brian (Jomboy) who will breakdown comments made by Kevin Mather former President/CEO of the Seattle mariners who was subsequently fired after public backlash. https://youtu.be/zBg8_44uDZ0?t=527 (8:50-11:25 also O’Brien curses a couple of times so just a warning). While it has to hurt a player negatively to hear your President call you “lazy” because you speak a different language then them, Julio Rodriguez made light of this horrible situation.

It was also later reported that Rodriguez that back in 2018 Rodriguez was already conducting interviews with reporters in English entirely. So to say that your top prospect’s english is “not tremendous” is not only discriminatory it also incorrect. In today’s society, linguistic discrimination towards hispanic Americans and asian Americans is prevalent. Baseball highlights the discrimination happening nationwide. Hard to believe that a backyard children’s game can be used as a tool to understanding the temperature of our country in regard to race and language discrimination, but recently baseball has changed in even a bigger way. Usually a huge sports league like MLB, NFL, etc are last to progressively move the ball forward in this country on issues of politics, racial justice and current events. 

Recently Baseball has become a political vehicle for progressive, hard and necessary change in America. The biggest example of this is what happened in Georgia. In the summer of 2021, Atlanta,GA was set to host the MLB All-Star and festivities. According Cecil Harris “Given that Major League Baseball does not exactly have a sterling record when it comes to opposing racial discrimination, Friday’s news that MLB moved the July 13 All-Star Game out of Atlanta because of Georgia’s new voter-suppression law could have been mistaken for a belated April Fools’ Day joke. But it really happened.”  The article gives a quote from Commissioner Rob Manfred in which he says “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box,” The game has now moved to Denver Colorado. This very controversial move from baseball was faced with public backlash but it was very different then what the country has been used to from baseball. For the first time in recent memory it was baseball that was taking a risk and a stand against oppression even knowing the backlash it would face. If Baseball is an indicator of where we are in our country, then it goes to show that our country is changing and in a positive way. 

Baseball looks to the future. Next year the Cleveland Indians’s ownership says the team will have a new name next year. Over the winter Derek Jeter (the only African american CEO in MLB hired Kim Ng the first woman to general manager position in MLB History. MLB is fully not exempt from its troubled past but this is a really positive step in the future of standing for what is right for the first time in a long time if not forever. Our country stands to benefit from baseball’s decision to stand up against unjust laws and for the right for Americans to have a say in our elections. Why? Because Major Baseball League  is an accurate indicator of the political discourse surrounding linguistic discrimination in America.

Work Cited: 

“Biography – The Official Licensing Website of Jackie Robinson.” Jackie Robinson, www.jackierobinson.com/biography/.

Davis, Scott. “Yankees Legend Masahiro Tanaka Appears to Suggest He Moved Back to Japan to Protect His Family from Racism in the US.” Insider, Insider, 29 Mar. 2021, www.insider.com/masahiro-tanaka-family-faced-anti-asian-racism-us-2021-3.

Harris, Cecil, et al. “Major League Baseball’s Decision to Move the All-Star Game out of Georgia Was a Grand Slam.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 5 Apr. 2021, www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/major-league-baseball-s-decision-move-all-star-game-out-ncna1263074.

Kubitza, Steven. “Julio Rodriguez Has Hilarious Reaction to Kevin Mather’s Insult.” FanSided, FanSided, 21 Feb. 2021, fansided.com/2021/02/21/julio-rodriguez-has-hilarious-reaction-to-kevin-mathers-insult/. 

https://fansided.com/2021/02/21/julio-rodriguez-has-hilarious-reaction-to-kevin-mathers-insult/

James O’Brian, director/commentator. Seattle Mariners President Says So Many Things He Shouldn’t Have, a Breakdown, Jomboy Media, YouTube, 22 Feb. 2021, https://youtu.be/zBg8_44uDZ0?t=527 .8:50-11:25 

  Seltzer, Richard, and Nicole E. Johnson. Experiencing Racism Exploring Discrimination through the Eyes of College Students . Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009. Print.

Stezano, Martin. “Jackie Robinson’s Battles for Equality On and Off the Baseball Field.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 13 Apr. 2018, www.history.com/news/jackie-robinson-color-barrier-baseball.

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