I’m going to take some photos about Chinatown in Atlanta. The goal I want to achieve are showing people how special this place is for our international student from china and how the earlier immigrant get adjusted to new environment. Firstly, I will take some picture to point out the difference between Chinese culture and American culture, maybe using the photos of foods or things. Secondly, I will take some photos of people there during working in restaurant and barbershop.
In this essay, we are asked to write a memoir. By definition memoir is like a small part of biography that records the things happened in a person’s whole life, and it can be either short or long. However, It should be my first time to write an essay in memoir type. Generally, I plan to discuss one of things happened when I was still a child.
According to the topic, I need to talk something about place and time, so I decide to write my own experience of moving from place I was born to the place where I grew up and had education. The people I met and the trouble I encountered when I first came to the new city are always unforgettable for me. By the reading materials, I realized that memoir usually is not as long as persuasive essay, and different from autobiography, so the problem might be how to choose the structure and the length of this article.
Yifu Tuan, “The relations of space and place. In experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of place. "Space" is more abstract than "place." What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.” Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Paperback, February 8, 2001. 3-18 (Introduction & experiential perspective)
In the introduction section, Tuan provides us with some explanations about space and place by comparing the differences between them. To prove his idea, he start to relate the place with experience, stating that knowing more about it and endowing emotion make space become place. According to that, he starts to point out that we need to view place in an experiential perspective. Tuan builds the bridge between experience and place and focuses on this opinion through his entire article. I choose this article in order to help me distinguish space and place in my essay and I plan to use this idea of experiential perspective to prove my understanding of place.
Patricia L. Price, “indeed, the uniqueness of place is such that no two people will have exactly the same experience of place.” Chapter 13, Place. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to cultural Geography, First Edition. Edited by Nuala C. Johnson, Richard H. Schein, and Jamie Winders. 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 119-129.
Price in this article states the meaning of place by definition way. “Place” also has an extraordinary range of metaphorical meanings. Place can also be different types, talked by human in social life. Even place can shape a person’s philosophy and his or her ethic towards the world. A place cannot be too enormous or it ceases to be a place, nor can it be too tiny. I choose this one because it really provides me some good explanations of the place in definition. Although some of them are too abstract to get into, they still draw a picture of how place “look like” for us.
Yifu Tuan, “For Augustine the value of place was borrowed from the intimacy of a particular human relationship; place itself offered little outside the human bond.” Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Paperback, February 8, 2001. 136-148(Intimate experience of place)
This chapter gives more detailed examples about experiences, and Tuan also maintains from a child to adult how a person knows more about a place and regards it as a treasure in his or her life. Tuan interacts the place with the word “intimate”, which means no two people will have the same impression about even the same place. In my mind, I choose this chapter to give significance to the fact that how we learn a place and how we live in this place. After that, I move the discussion from space to place and focus on it.
Yifu Tuan, “Human groups nearly everywhere tend to regard their own homeland as the center of the world” Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Paperback, February 8, 2001. 149-160(Attachment to homeland)
Tuan issued that home is one of most important place in all of human life. Homeland is an important type of place at the medium scale. It is a region large enough to support a people’s livelihood. Human as a mammal is connected tightly with home where we live with our families and put much emotion into them. This article uses historical evidence and quotation appropriately by combining the home and place together. I use it because I think that home is a special example of place, and I want to describe how a home influences a person.
Jhumpa Lahiri, “it is generally cold, and full of rust-colored seaweed. Still, I prefer it. The waters of Rhode Island, as much a part of the state’s character if not more, as the land never asked us questions, never raised a brow” Rhode Island. Identity, A Reader for Writers, John Scenters-Zapico. Publication Date – December 2013. Paperback.
Jhumpa Lahiri described her homeland Rhode Island where she grew up. Although she was an immigrant and felt really uncomfortable even hate the Rhode Island when she first came here, she, being an adult, started to regard it as her hometown and love it. It is a good example to insist that if someone lives in a place for a long time, she will undoubtedly love this place. I use this article in order to point out the significance of homeland.
In this persuasive essay, I will discuss about how place and the self are related. To make an explanation to place, I will mainly focus on the point that place is related tightly with experience, using the example and quotation from Tuan’s articles. Although there are lots of good sources and examples about concept of place, I decide to choose home, a kind of special place that includes most emotion and memory of people, as representive of place.
The rationale and significance
A place, with its distinctive features, always presents to contain some characteristics that can reflect both mental pursuits and physical conditions for the residents of it. As a result, the place one lives in also shapes one’s identity. According to that, I want to describe how place will make some influence or change on people by definitely figuring out the meaning and characteristics of place.
As for an international student, I am relatively new to this new place, America, and willing to express what I felt and what I find it different from my hometown. Basically, I prefer to compare my own experience with authors in this essay in some terms like home, place, and homeland.
The tentative organization
At the beginning of my essay, I may just start from the relationship and differences between the terms “Space” and “Place”. However, the main thing through all of essay will be Place rather space by only using space to figure out the characteristics of Place. After that, I plan to describe the reason why place is such important to every people in experiential perspective.
In addition, I will provide some explanation by definition, anecdote, and comparison to prove my idea about place that place is dependent to the experience. And my main view should be the people and the things happened in a place make itself unforgettable. Moreover, I will use the examples from articles to strengthen my opinion. To be honest, I also want to cover the discussion about the home or homeland or hometown, because it is important to everyone especially people like us who, away from home, study abroad.
Furthermore, I have some inner voice about the feeling of home to share through essay. I regard home as a special kind of place and want to use it as one of example of place where we leave many memories and meet lots of people.
By the way, I agree with many authors that home is stable, warm and safe. However, I am not going to make an adversarial idea about this view, because I really agree with the words they said about home. Instead, I want to insist that home can also move, which means home is not constricted because a family makes a home. And I will also get help from the “They say I say” by using some templates to improve my construction. Finally, I will talk something about place from the extra reading I searching for.
Some opinions of mine
I realized that both place and space is very abstract, so it might not be a good way to just explain them by definition, and needs to be delivered with some much more concrete evidence like sense of human beings, experience of different people and so on. In conclusion, the point should be focused on the experiential perspective.
This time we are asking to write something about place, space and their influence on people. A place, with its distinctive features, always contains some characteristics that can reflect both mental pursuits and physical conditions for the residents of it. As a result, the place one lives in also shapes one’s identity. Last but not least, there is an important emotional component to the relationship between self and place, because each person stays in a place for a time and gains his or her own unique memories that make the place much more important. Even place can shape a person’s philosophy and his or her view of the world. Place is one thing around us that we can feel and we always talk about, but I still want to describe more characteristics about it.
I had a very good idea of what i wanted to write about the place. Usually people will focus on place, but i start this essay by describing the larger thing, space, and i write in the scale of place from big to small, from general to specific, because i prefer to write a essay organized well and logically. I used the citation from book and view of authors to introduce my topic, and when writing this i was also thinking how can my opinions be connected to their idea. after describing definitionally I began to write down more specific things, like a meaningful and important place, home. To be honest, at first, I wanted to use home as my topic, but, in fact, i had too many things want to share with readers, so i finally kept it in a paragraph instead of almost whole essay. When i prepared to write the home part, i did some readings and also watched some good video, and they really make me resonant about this special word. and i started to miss my own home, and also be reminded of lots of thins happened before. As a result , i also hope the readers of this article can also get back their own memories about home that are special and different from others. although i write a lot of things about place, i am still in a position where i know too less about place. And i also want you to tell me which points are strongest and clearest and which ones don't work for you in this essay. more suggestions should always be better.
Response In the article of “Rhode island”, Jhumpa Lahiri draws a picture of her hometown, Rhode island,and describes the memory of her childhood that left impact in shaping her sense of identity. In the article, ‘ the Atlantic I grew up with lacks the color and warmth of the Caribbean, the grandeur of the pacific, the romance of the Mediterranean. It is generally cold, and full of rust-colored seaweed. Still, I prefer it. The waters of Rhode Island, as much a part of the state’s character, if not more, as the land never asked us questions, never raised a brow. Thanks to its very lack of welcome, its unwavering indifference, the ocean always made me feel accepted, and to my dying day, the seaside is the only place where I can feel truly and recklessly happy.’ Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London to Bengali Indian immigrants and grew up in Rhode Island, which means that she might have thought she was not belonged here at first. Besides, in this sentence from article shows that Rhode Island seemed to be not welcome to her because she was an immigrant. Moreover, I also notice that in this article Jhumpa pointed out that her parents’ difficulties when living and working here. According to that, a common conclusion should be that Jhumpa’s family hated Rhode Island and had lived disappointingly for many years. In the sharp contrast, I notice that Jhumpa still preferred Rhode Island and her parents even lived here for decades. Why this happened? In my mind, a place you live for a long time becomes your haven no matter what do you think from the beginning. Same as Jhumpa, I moved to a place unfamiliar when I was a little child because of my father’s job. Although I did not move to another country, I started to live in from suburban area and was not used to speaking in mandarin for the reason that I had spoken dialect for many years. At that age, I really hate the new “place” because I did not know how to spend my daily life and even was laughed by my classmates in school for my strange mandarin. As a result, I began to regard the city as unfriendly place that kept me away from other people. However, as time went by, everything went better. In fact, the city left me lots of memory and saw my growth from a child knowing nothing to a legal person going to America for undergraduate study. It is always difficult for immigrant to get adjusted to a new place, because he or she will not only receive others’ discrimination but also darkness, disappointment form his or her own mind. In addition, the less one person communicates with the society the longer time needs to get accustomed. But all things will go back to the proper track at last. I really believe that Jhumpa must agree with me about that and regard Rhode Island as one of most memorable places in her heart.
I read Tuan’s “Space and Place” and Price’s “Place”. One of the things impressing me is that place is relevant to experience. Moreover, different experience will always leave people with different feeling and memory with place. The other thing is that the relationship between place and space in human experiential perspective.
In the article “Space and Place”, Tuan described the difference between Space and place. For example, “place is security and space is freedom”(Tuan, “Space and Place”, 3) points out that place is a place much more restrictive compared to space, and it can give people the impression of a small, protected and self-contained world. In general, place is more likely center of felt value where biological needs, but space is more abstract that sometimes can only be felt, seen, or heard instead of explaining. In fact, human infants have only very crude notions of space and place until they grow up, which proved that a feeling of place is connected with human beings’ own experience and able to be learned and improved. Tuan always pointed out that a key term in his book is “experience”. In addition, Tuan also stated that the organization of human space is uniquely dependent on sight and other senses expand and enrich visual space and, vice versa, space reflects the quality of the human senses and mentality. In my mind, what make space change to place are various senses related to human’s organs. Owing to more and more learning about the space around people, they start to come up with new understand about this place.
Besides, in the article “Place”, Price introduced an amount of definition about space and place trying to explain them in a logical way such as “A place cannot be too enormous or it ceases to be a place”(Price, “Place”, 124) and so on. However, these two terms seem not such easy to replace with other words. To be honest, places can only be experienced through bodies, Something I really agree with in his article is that no two people will have exactly the same experience of place and place is frequently portrayed as a weaving together of diverse individual experiences. According to that, each person should have different thinking about the places and a place may be meaningful to one person but not a group. So I think place should be understood as an actively crafted entity.
Tweet: The first article talks about the difference about space and place, and the second give more definitional explanations about this two terms.
These two articles really interact well with each other. Basically, they both agree with that Place related to experience tightly is quite different from the space. Furthermore, space is likely a much more abstract term with bigger scale and more unstable movement, and, on the contrary, place is stable and relatively restrictive, which also is proved by “ A place cannot be too enormous or it ceases to be a place, nor can it be too tiny…”(Price, “Place”, 124). Tuan and price, they both used their own way to describe the place and space in either definition or human senses, concluding that space is always right here but things seen, heard, smelled by human build up the feeling of place. In my mind, we need to consider space and place in a perspective of experience, which means that things you undergo leave you the impression of a place. For me, I always think that I cannot forget a place and regard it as memory that change me in any way just because I lived here for a long time and had lots of stories with people, buildings here. Overall, it is one of human being’s internal personalities that they should usually be afraid to a new place but comfortable to stay in a place they familiar with, so in a short word this kind of feeling can be described as “experience”.
Tweet: “Space and Place” tells about the difference about space and place, and “Place” provides the definitions of them, but they both agree with that experience is important.
All of three articles are talking about the influence of place. And Tuan’s “Space and Place” and Price’s “Place” proved the reason why Lahiri got such impression about Rhode Island. Rhode island was meaningful to Lahiri and made a significant value in her life. When she first came to Rhode Island, she felt really uncomfortable and even lonely for the unfriendliness of this new place, because human is always afraid of an unfamiliar place more or less in internal, which is explained by Price’s “place”. And after a relatively long time, Lahiri started to get along well with her new “home” and even regarded Lahiri as one of most important things in her life. In my mind, all of them provide me with a new understanding of place. For example, place is related with experiences and space is different from place, leading me to a position where I get some resonance from my own hometown and new environment.