Project Idea

I have been thinking a lot about the project idea for the Writing for New Media class. It constantly kept changing. But finally I came out with the topic called "The Face of Baltimore".

Last weekened, when I paid a visit to the sushi bar I used to go frequently, the very nice Taiwanese restaurant owner had a very nice chat with me. I asked him why there are so many sushi restaurants on York Road and he answered, "Don't you know? When something is selling like hot cakes, people follow the trend." And he also explained it to me that because common Americans do not really know what good sushis are, so it doesn't matter if they are good and if they are originally Japanese enough."

Interestingly, again, the next day, I visited an Asian grocery owned by a Shanghainese couple near Towson here. That's the place I was so amazed that the store sold so many different kinds of Asian food. They are Chinese, Hongkie, Vietnamese, Indian, Thai, Burmese and etc. Asians from different countries came here to do grocery shopping, or rather, they were forced to come here, because probably that was the one and only Asian market near the neighborhood. Amazingly, there were some Latinos as well.

So, I am thinking, stereotypes happen everywhere. People cannot tell the feature differences between Africans and African Americans. Some thought Koreans eat sushis . When we are not sure with things, we tend to categorize all of them together.

I remember a Neewsweek magazine cover story "The new face of Japan" in which there are these three guys - orignally American, African and Indian - holding a Japanese passport. The main theme is talking about how globalization changes the face of every country. You might think he is an Indian but he turns out to be of Japan.

Combining all these, the idea of checking out the immigrants' society in Baltimore struck me out of sudden. I have been hearing a lot about the significant amount of Latinos in downtown but I do not want to focus on one society only. Because a lot of people have done so before. Then why not swift the telescope onto a place instead?

In my project, I want to write on the three largest minority immigrants groups - the Asians, Africans and Latinos. There will be statistics, culture, lifestyle, political and future aspects of each group in the project. What do they think about the country? Do they still want to go back home if given the chance? I hope I can make the story complete enough by researching different faces of them, not those quintessentially traditional culture and stuff.

So I hit up the streets. In downtown Baltimore, a lot of the Latino teenagers were wandering around on the street. They immersed themselves, in soccer, singing, any kind. It seemed to me that they knew how to enjoy their life.

I do not deny that people would mistakenly think they are lazy and do not work but just wander around on streets. I did not know until I talked to a middle-age lady. It was no such official interview but we did have some nice chatting. She talked with a strong accent that I could hardly understand. So she talked slow and soft. She looked depressed when talking about her son. She was worried about her son. And maybe she thought that staying with a cleaner job forever was not a long road for them in the future.

As suggested by Dr. Spaulding, I looked it up the census.gov. The data told me that a lot of Latinos in Baltimore are not certain of what race they are of. Some might not know from where they came from, either they are Mexican or Cuban. They are Baltimore people. Some belong to here. Others think they are stuck here. But where is their road ahead?

Due to time constraints, these are so far what I have done. Certainly, there are more stories to tell in this project. Be prepared.