ustxtxb_obs_1993_10_15_50_00020-00000_000.pdf

CLASSIFIED RATES: Minimum ten words. One time, 50 cents per word; three times, 45 cents per word; six times, 40 cents per word; 12 times, 35 cents per word; 25 times, 30 cents per word. Telephone and box numbers count as two words, abbreviations and zip codes as one. Payment must accompany order for all classified ads. Deadline is three weeks before cover date. Address orders and inquiries to Advertising Director, The Texas Observer, 307 West 7th, local. Noelle McAfee, 450-0705; Bill Adler, 443-8961. PROTECT YOUR RIGHTS. Join The Texas Civil Rights Project, 227 Congress #340, Austin, Texas 78701. $20/year. Volunteers also needed. ContactJim Harrington or Fara Sloan. PANHANDLE-AREA SUPPORT-ERS of drug -, alcohol, tobaccofree America, write John McMillan, Box 175, Pampa, Texas 70966; or call BOOKLETS PROOF JESUS FICTIONAL! $5 Abelard, Box 5652-C, Kent, WA FOR EYE-POPPING PAMPHLETS “The Bible is a Horrible Book!” and “Is God a Sadist?” semd $1 to Unbeliever’s Tract Society, Box 560834, The Colony, Texas 75056. SERVICES LOW-COST MICROCOMPUTER ASSISTANCE. Tape to diskette conversion, statistical analysis, help with setting up special projects, custom programming, needs assessment. 1405 West 6th, Austin, Texas 78703. PHOTOGRAPHY Reality is us. 20 at a tender age to a rich, obnoxious groom. Lindo’s own daughter Waverly \(Tamlyn mother who seems intent on manipulating her to enhance her own image. A chess prodigy, Waverly ceases playing to prevent her mother from being able to boast about her child’s victories. Lindo and Waverly reconcile only when Waverly complains: “Nothing I do can ever please you” and Lindo, touched by evidence of her maternal power, replies: “Now you make me happy.” rejected by her mother after being seduced and impregnated by a wealthy philanderer. She is forever burdened with the guilt of having drowned their child: “What I had ORGANIZATIONS WORK for single-payer National Health Care. Join GRAY PANTHERS, intergenerational advocates against ageism and for progressive policies promoting social and economic justice. $20 individual, $35 family. 3710 458-3738. TEXAS AIDS NETWORK dedicated to improving HIV/AIDS policy and funding in Texas. Individdal membership $25, P.O. Box 2395, LESBIAN/GAY DEMOCRATS of Texas Our Voice in the Party. Membership $15, P.O. Box 190933, Dallas, 75219. SICK OF KILLING? Join the Amnesty International Campaign Against the 3925. WORK FOR OPEN, responsible government in Texas. Join Common Cause/Texas, 316 West 12th #317, 2374. TEXAS TENANTS’ UNION. Membership $18/year, $10/six months, $30 or more/sponsor. Receive handbook on tenants’ rights, newsletter, and more. 5405 East Grand, Dallas, TX 75223. CENTRAL TEXAS CHAPTER of the ACLU invites you to our noon Forum, the last Friday of every month, at Wyatt’s, Hancock Center, Austin. LIBERTARIAN PARTY Liberal on personal freedoms, but conservaNATIONAL WRITERS UNION. We give working writers a fighting chance. Collective bargaining. Grievance procedures. Health insurance. Journalists, authors, poets, commercial writers. Forming Austin done in China was always with me.” YingYing redeems herself in part by saving her marriage to a black architect who values her to the extent that she shares the family bills. after being dishonored by rape, her widowed mother was evicted from their household by her grandmother. They were reconciled when An-Mei’ s mother served her dying mother soup fortified with the daughter’s own blood. Trapped in a polygamous household where she is merely wife number four, she later commits suicide to enable her daughter, An-Mei, to be free. Yet An-Mei suffers from a lifelong lack of self-esteem and is distraught to discover that her American-born daughter EMPLOYMENT The Houston office of the CENTRAL AMERICAN REFUGEE CENTER seeks an executive director and a staff attorney. Positions require commitment to promoting human rights for Central Americans. Must be bilingual ence regarding Central America and/or immigration law a plus. Send inquiry/resume to Jimi Clark, CARECEN, 4001 Caroline, Houston, TX ACLU OF TEXAS SEEKS staff attorney for Houston office. Manage cooperating attorney program, brief cases for state legal panel and general civil liberties litigation. 2 to 5 years litigation experience. Texas license required. Send resumes to ACLU, PO Box 132047, Houston, Texas 77219. TRAVEL EUROPEONLY $229! \($229 from $79. Call AirHitch, 1-800-326-2009. June begins The Joy Luck Club by recounting how her mother came to America carrying a swan to signify her love and hope for a California daughter not yet born. But, by the time Suyuan passes through customs, all that remains of the swan is a solitary feather, a future daughter’ s loving legacy that, for all its airiness, is still a burden. So, too, is the memory that, fleeing war and famine, Suyuan abandoned her infant twin daughters by the side of the road to Chungking. At the outset of the film, June learns that her Chinese half-sisters had somehow managed to survive. By the end of the film, she learns the secret of the maternal desertion and journeys to China to reestablish female family ties. Before she embarks for Asia, June is handed the cherished swan’s feather by her fathera man not much evident elsewhere in a film where a good man is very, very hard to find. “She thought she wasn’t worthy enough to give it to you,” he explains about his late, beloved wife. In her own way, every one of the four mothers and four daughters suffers from a deficient sense of self. The Joy Luck Club is a lesson in self-esteem, one that requires a reconciliation of June, Waverly, Lena, and Rose with Suyuan, Lindo, Ling-Ling, and An-Mei. But, beyond these particular daughters and mothers, the film is an extraordinary act of affirmation by a culture for which self-effacement is a virtue. It is one of the very few major American studio releases by and about Chinese. Validating the talents of Chinese performers, it recruited neither Anthony Quinn nor Meryl Streep to don a kimono. It is also cinema that affirms a woman’s worth, in which mothers and daughters earn our interest much more honestly than the fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands who lurk in the borders of the stories, almost always as cads and creeps. They do not know a good woman when they see one or how to treat her when they have her. The Joy Luck Club was directed by a man, Wayne Wang, who, born in Hong Kong, has made a career of portraying the experiences of Chinese immigrants and their offspring. But the independently produced Chan Is Missing, Eat a Bowl of Tea, and Dim Sum were as finely understated as this Hollywood Pictures production is histrionic. It is a movie that seems intent on making enough noise to impress even the piano teacher who gave lessons to nine-year-old June and who was deaf. An economy of lachrymation governs art; there is an inverse relationship between the quantity of tears shed within a film and the genuine grief a viewer comes to feel. The Joy Luck Club is awash in salt water, and it is not from San Francisco Bay. . Wang’s mothers and daughters are forever weeping, and one watches with a certain amount of respect but also with a dry and wary eye. CLASSIFIEDS years for the Texas Observer and he will take a few for you. Alan Pogue, 1701 Guadalupe, Austin, MARY NELL MATHIS, CPA, 19 years experience in tax, litigation support, and other analyses. 400 West 15th, 6986. YELLOW DREAM MACHINE, computer bulletin board system. Disability-based subject matter. ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING. Design, expert witness, forensic investigation, product liability, electrical injury, electrical fires. W.T. Cronenwett, Ph.D, 2566 Cypress Avenue, Norman, PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP in the humanities. Dr. Reed Harp, the har749-7029. 20 OCTOBER 15, 1993