Hellooo people. Welcome back. Another project, another blog (I feel like I’ve used that before in another one of my blogs). Anyways, this project was about memorials and the discrimination Canada had towards immigrants. We focused on three groups; Japanese, Chinese, and South Asians. The driving question for this project is “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered and not repeated again.” Throughout this project, we looked at different memorials and learned how the immigrants were treated through the history of Canada. This project’s final product was to be shown at the Winter Exhibition.
Starting the project off with something that I thought was really cool, we read a little background information on the body rituals of the Snaidanac. At first, I didn’t make any connections between the Snaidanac and us, and wondered why we were learning about a new tribe that I’ve never heard of before. Then, as we talked about it as a class and made some connections from the Snaidanac’s rituals and our everyday lives, we figured out that it was describing Canadians. All along, Snaidanac was just Canadians backwards. I was really surprised, and I thought this was so cool.
The next few days (I think. I’m sorry my memory is actually so bad), we learned about memorials. How they work, what purpose they serve, and any other things about memorials. We looked at a bunch of different memorials from around the world, analyzing its meanings purposes, and symbolisms. At the end of it all, we quickly built a mini memorial using Lego. This is mine.
This memorial commemorates the Emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the great achievements that he has accomplished. It’s a replica of one of the more well known paintings of him. In my first draft, I had no idea what I was going to make. I just sort of started building something and thought I could think of something that it could be a memeorial of later. The idea of making a Napoleon memorial did pop into my head a coulple of times while I was trying to come up with ideas. In the end, I had built a little blue person under a gateway, but once I knew what monument I wanted to make, I went ahead and made this one.
Napoleon is in all blue because that’s what the French army wore. I built this model after school, so there wasn’t any block shortages. With Napoleon standing on top of his horse, he looks taller, more powerful. He rose to power after the French Revolution and spread a new political idea called a republic to the rest of Europe. He acomplished many great military victories. With this memorial, we can remember all the things he has done.
In a deeper dive into memorials, I researched a memorial of my choice, and I chose the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. This memorial commemorates the events of mass genocide and many other horrific things done to the people of Nanjing city in China during World War Two. I made a keynote slide with voice overs and pictures of the memorial. The reason why I chose to research about the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall is because I have a connection to it. I came from China, so there’s a good chance that my ancestors have fought in the war. Here it is if you would like to see it.
We watched a few very short videos, like about a minute long, about a Jewish survivor living in France. Her name is Jannushka, and when Germany first took over France, she was only a few years old. The propaganda that were put up around the city caused her to face many discrimination from kids her age. The next part was analyzing propaganda, specifically propaganda from Nazi occupied France and Vichy France (the other half of France that is like a puppet state).
I looked at this propaganda above and answered some questions like, When you first look at the book cover, to what is your eye attracted first? Why do you think that is? What colours are used in the background and what do they symbolize? After answering the questions, I also wrote a little reflection on the whole thing.
Next was one of my favourite parts of this project. We had a guest speaker come in and do a workshop with us on how it was like living in, or to be in, France at the time of Nazi occupation. We also discussed Jannushka‘s story, and the roles of bystanders and upstanders. At the end oof it all, we watched a short film called Pigeon, about a Jewish man boarding a train to flee German occupied France. He gets into trouble when he losses his papers, and so a women’s steps in to help him, saving his life. She was an example of an upstander, someone who helps others in need instead of just standing there and watching it happen.
In Preparation For The Winter Exhibition
There was a lot of information that got thrown at us in the next week or so. Almost every class was taking notes on the immigrations of Canada from keynote slides. We did find out what our groups were for the Winter Exhibition. There were 3–4 people in each group, and 3 groups on each of the 3 topic; Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians. I got Chinese, which I was happy about. My group consists of Gwenyth, Keenan, and Francis (check out their blogs!).
Besides the final product, there are also three other things we had to do. There was the Story of Immigration, Story of Discrimination, and the Apology. These three things were to also be shown at the exhibition. Our method to present each of these things could be anything. We assigned the three things to each other with Keenan doing an interactive timeline on the Story of Immigration. Gwenyth did the Apology as a physical document, and Francis and I worked on the Story of Discrimination. Francis did his as an art piece, and I chose to do mine as an infographic.
Our actual final product and main attraction for this project is a memorial that we built ourselves. The memorial has to symbolize something , or the whole story, about the history of Chinese people in Canada. For our memorial, we chose to focus on the Canadian Pacific Railway bit. During the building of the CPR, many of the workers were of Chinese origin and lots of them died while working on it. Unfortunately I do not have a photo of it, but I do have a photo of the plan. The final thing is really close to it, like nothing much was changed.
I was tasked with getting the food for our team, and got the food after we decided on what it would be. Rice crackers and chocolate coins. I managed to secure the rice cracker, but I couldn’t find any chocolate coins, so at the end, I decided to just have some chocolate truffles instead. We also needed to have a game. The idea came to be pretty quickly. The idea was to have some rocks made of cardboard and have the player turn over a rock. On the back side, it’ll say whether you have struck gold or not. If you got gold, then you’d get a piece of chocolate, if you got nothing, then you’d get a rice cracker. This was really easy to make, and it only took one class time to finish. After weeks of hard work, with barely enough time to make everything, the Winter Exhibition had arrived.
The Winter Exhibition
This winter exhibition was something. My team really sucked out of all the other ones. We were under prepared, and our memorial wasn’t that good either. For this exhibition, there was a voting system for our room. The guests could vote for the one they liked the most out of each group. On the exhibition day after school, we realized that we were missing one more component to our presentation, which was a description of our memorial, a brief history of the topic that our memorial covers, and the proposed location of where the memorial would go. Me and Keenan quickly found a big piece of cardboard and tapped on black paper to cover it. I needed to go home to grab some stuffs, and so I printed out the descriptions and other things as well.
Gwenyth wasn’t able to make it to the exhibition, so her stuffs had to be printed out, and we used one of the suitcases from the drama room to put the papers in. In the end, I think it turned out looking decent. We struggled a bit with naming our memorial, and ultimately decided on naming it “Unstable.” Fitting name, I know.
By the time I got back to the school, there was only one hour left before the exhibition started, and we still needed to got down to the cafeteria for dinner. There were some people that were tapping yellow paper over the lights to make the room darker. Little did we know, the room recently got dimmers, so we could’ve just done that instead. We didn’t have a lot of time left though. As fast as we could, we set up the rest of the things and got the description poster ready to go as well. Compared to the other teams, mine looked really plain, and not very visually appealing. It wasn’t really a surprise that we got the least amount of votes at the end.
Overall though, I think the exhibition went decently well. My team didn’t do that bad. We took turns getting 15 minute breaks. I spoke to a good amount of people. When I was talking with one of them, we were on the topic of the location of the memorial. They had an idea for it to be suspended over a river, with the two spikes on either sides. I really liked the idea, and so I took it. The teacher liked it too.
The exhibition went by at a steady pace, but the whole time, my back was hurting a lot, and I tried really hard not the sit down, because that would be against exhibition rules. I only remember taking one break, but I still didn’t sit down while I was on it. It was still fun tho. I had some good interactions with the audiences, but there were some awkward ones too.
In order to keep an apology alive, it needs to be remembered, and that could come in the form of a memorial. Memorials are structures that stay up for a very very long time, and so people will have a physical structure that they can interact with on a day to day basis. Having a memorial may not be enough, as some people might not take interest in it and not care to learn more about why the memorial is there in the first place. If we want people to recognize the memorial, so we should also teach it to them at school. This will help the community to recognize and remember what the memorial represents, and in this case, an apology.