Week 9 Presentation Reflection

Melissa Cheng

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Overall, I thought Week 9’s presentation group did an amazing job. And I’m not saying this because I’m biased (being that I worked with them). I think that they all put forth their best effort and really tried to give us a very full representation of their research paper topics. I think what I liked most about this presentation was that they were all so different in approach from each other.

            For Trieu’s presentation, I liked how he gave us a nice background on the history of the relations between Vietnam and China. I think it was a nicely structured powerpoint and I liked how he also enriched his presentation at the end with a video on the nature of the relations between China and its neighboring countries to show that the disdain from Vietnam to China wasn’t an isolated incident since China has also been know to bully other countries. I think it’s all really interesting because I didn’t know that other countries felt like that about China prior to taking this course. Either I don’t watch enough news or perhaps there isn’t really substantial reporting in American news on the topic. Either way, I appreciated what I’ve learned in lecture and I felt Trieu’s presentation enhanced this new perspective I didn’t have earlier.

Linda’s presentation, I thought was really informational and I was very impressed by her comprehensiveness in terms of her spoken portion of her presentation. I thought she connected ideas really well and also brought up points that I thought were actually pretty interesting. I liked how she integrated her ongoing thoughts throughout her data collection and analysis into her presentation because it helped me think more about my own research paper in how I should process things. For example, when she mentioned how there was a person who filled out the survey who was identified as Vietnamese but was in fact ethnically Chinese and nationally American it made me think, how should one go about processing that information. Should you include it? Should you disregard it? Would this be considered invalid to the research? I just thought that was very intriguing. I also liked how she showed us the thorough breakdown of all her research and how she shared her personal experiences with Paris by Night and the bond she attempted to create with her family through this media. I especially liked how she shared with class some quotes from her interviewees on their experiences with Paris by Night because it gave us some perspective that went beyond static numbers so in a sense it allowed us to get something more out of it than statistical data from a group of people.

I also really liked Justin’s presentation on “A look into Vietnamese Cinema and its Transcultural Consumption. I thought all the theories he introduced were a nice background in order to get the class to understand more about what he would be discussing throughout the presentation. I really liked how he went into dissecting the transcultural consumption of the film itself. He discussed how it went over the government of Vietnam through Fortissimo Films which bought the rights to the film and screened it elsewhere. He told us how it went through the government when it was screened in Vietnam and how it went under it through illegal means like youtube with a full uncut version that featured the men kissing each other.  I also liked how he talked about the two different perspectives of people who saw the uncut vs cut film. I thought that was an interesting idea that people were consuming different movies because of censorship.

Overall, I think the presentations were great and I guess my questions to the group would be, (for Trieu) “Do you think that if roles were reversed and Vietnam was in economic power that China would hate Vietnam?”  (for Linda) “Do you think that Paris by Night unconsciously shapes the political opinions of the 2^nd generation in a negative way or does it not really make a difference?”  (for Justin) “Do you think that Vietnam will be more open to screening uncut gay films any time in the next decade?”