Saturday, March 21, 2020
Fish Cheeks vs. Its Hard Enough Being Me
Fish Cheeks vs. Its Hard Enough Being Me In the new wave of globalization, movement across borders has become the norm. Most importantly, children often find themselves in unfamiliar territories when their parents relocate to other countries. In such situations, they experience cultural identity confusion as they try to redefine their identity amidst conflicting cultures. However, while redefining identity may attract challenges for adults, it is quite daunting for children and youths; since they are already struggling with developmental identity crisis.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on â€Å"Fish Cheeks†vs. â€Å"It’s Hard Enough Being Me†specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More On the same note, Amy Tan â€Å"Fish Cheeks†and Anna Raya â€Å"It’s Hard Enough Being Me†essays explore the subject of cultural identity struggle from the perspective of young people, who find themselves at cultural cross-roads in foreign soils . Against this milieu, this essay will provide a critical analysis of the two essays in an attempt to bring out the similarities and differences therein. To begin with, Raya finds herself in New York in pursuit of a university degree at the Columbia University. While here, she undergoes an array of conflicting experiences as she tries to redefine her identity amidst numerous occasions of misidentification. Although Raya has always identified herself with her Mexican and some Puerto Rican roots, she is thrown into identity confusion when her peers regard her as a â€Å"Latina†(Raya 1010). Due to this label, peers expect her to have a grasp of Spanish language, know how to dance salsa, and be knowledgeable about Mexican history. However, Raya confesses that she knew none of those things (Raya 1010). Correspondingly, in ‘’Fish Cheeks†Tan exposes the struggle she endured while growing up in America as a Chinese teenager. Tan was always embarrassed about her background, and to some extent she perceived her traditional family as primitive (Raya 102). During teenage, individuals are always struggling with identity issues. Consequently, these two stories clearly depict that for young people, redefining identities in multicultural surroundings can be quite strenuous. On the same note, isolation and loneliness themes are constantly featured in these two stories. When circumstances compel Raya and Tan to grow up alongside white American culture, the feelings of isolation becomes inevitable. Raya (1010) confesses that her peers expected her to exhibit some aura of â€Å"Latin-ness’’. Similarly, Tan avoids interacting with her peers because she is embarrassed of her Chinese roots. As a result, she avoided situations that could compel her to reveal her ‘tainted’ culture. (Tan 102). Although Tan’s embarrassment can be attributed to teenage-hood issues; she clearly confesses that she wished she had ‘a slim American nose’ that would enable her to be regarded as a Native American (Tan 102). Noticeably, the two authors do not mention about their interaction with people outside their respective culture. Obviously, this insinuates that identity crisis is coupled with feeling of loneliness.Advertising Looking for essay on american literature? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More Furthermore, isolation as a result of cultural identity disparities is clearly accentuated in â€Å"It’s Hard Enough Being Me.†The above title indicates that cultural identity is a complex phenomenon that is often challenging to most people. However, it becomes even harder when one is forced to coexist with individuals who portray little or no element of cultural empathy. Raya feels isolated because her peers associate her with a culture she knows little about. Interestingly though, after a long struggle with cultural identity confus ion, Raya and Tan successfully reconciles with their rich heritage. Eventually, Raya realizes that trying to conform to the American culture only brought pain, loneliness and unhappiness to her life. Therefore in order to eliminate feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness, she decides to pass herself off as a woman with a rich heritage rather than trying to imitate American culture (Raya1011). Contrastingly, the protagonists in these two stories portray some element of diversity. Although Ray is caught up between cultural identity dilemmas, she is not embarrassed with her past. As a matter of fact, she is angered because her peers do not seem to understand the difference between her Mexican/ Puerto Rican and Latina background. Her only concern is that she is associated with a culture she knows little about. Contrastingly, Tan perceives her Chinese background as embarrassing. She is embarrassed about the way her family celebrates Christmas. Most importantly, when her parents invite a w hite family for Christmas dinner, she is angered because she assumes that they would definitely find their Chinese meals and mannerism disgusting (Tan 103). She confesses that she wished to ‘disappear’ rather than undergo those ‘embarrassing’ moments, when minister’s family would interact with their â€Å"shabby†culture (Tan 103). The above analysis depicts that unlike Raya, Tan wished to be regarded as an American instead of being associated with Chinese roots, which she perceived as embarrassing and primitive. In a nutshell, Raya’s and Tan’s essays depict numerous similarities than differences. Inspired by the concept of cultural identity, the two authors explored themes of isolation and loneliness from a young person’s perspective. Raya’s cultural confusion arises when peer pressure compels her to behave like a Latin native while in real sense she is of Mexican/ Puerto Rican origin. However, while Tan is seeming ly embarrassed by her Chinese background, Raya is proud of her roots. Raya, Anna Lisa. â€Å"It’s Hard enough Being Me.†Literature and Composition. Ed. Sylvan Barnett et al. 6th ed. New York: Longman, 2003. 1010-1011. Print.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on â€Å"Fish Cheeks†vs. â€Å"It’s Hard Enough Being Me†specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More Tan, Amy. â€Å"Fish Cheeks.†. Amy Tan: a literary companion. Ed. Mary Ellen Snodgrass. London: McFarland, 2004. 102-103. Print.
Wednesday, March 4, 2020
The Dark Side of Application.ProcessMessages
The Dark Side of Application.ProcessMessages Article submitted by Marcus Junglas When programming an event handler in Delphi (like the OnClick event of a TButton), there comes the time when your application needs to be busy for a while, e.g. the code needs to write a big file or compress some data. If you do that youll notice that your application seems to be locked. Your form cannot be moved anymore and the buttons are showing no sign of life. It seems to be crashed. The reason is that a Delpi application is single threaded. The code you are writing represents just a bunch of procedures which are called by Delphis main thread whenever an event occured. The rest of the time the main thread is handling system messages and other things like form and component handling functions. So, if you dont finish your event handling by doing some lengthy work, you will prevent the application to handle those messages. A common solution for such type of problems is to call Application.ProcessMessages. Application is a global object of the TApplication class. The Application.Processmessages handles all waiting messages like window movements, button clicks and so on. It is commonly used as a simple solution to keep your application working. Unfortunately the mechanism behind ProcessMessages has its own characteristics, which might cause big confusion! What does ProcessMessages? PprocessMessages handles all waiting system messages in the applications message queue. Windows uses messages to talk to all running applications. User interaction is brought to the form via messages and ProcessMessages handles them. If the mouse is going down on a TButton, for example, ProgressMessages does all what should happen on this event like the repaint of the button to a pressed state and, of course, a call to the OnClick() handling procedure if you assigned one. Thats the problem: any call to ProcessMessages might contain a recursive call to any event handler again. Heres an example: Use the following code for a buttons OnClick even handler (work). The for-statement simulates a long processing job with some calls to ProcessMessages every now and then. This is simplified for better readability: {in MyForm:}   WorkLevel : integer; {OnCreate:}   WorkLevel : 0; procedure TForm1.WorkBtnClick(Sender: TObject) ; var   cycle : integer; begin   inc(WorkLevel) ;   for cycle : 1 to 5 do   begin     Memo1.Lines.Add(- Work IntToStr(WorkLevel) , Cycle IntToStr(cycle) ;     Application.ProcessMessages;     sleep(1000) ; // or some other work   end;   Memo1.Lines.Add(Work IntToStr(WorkLevel) ended.) ;   dec(WorkLevel) ; end; WITHOUT ProcessMessages the following lines are written to the memo, if the Button was pressed TWICE in a short time: - Work 1, Cycle 1 - Work 1, Cycle 2 - Work 1, Cycle 3 - Work 1, Cycle 4 - Work 1, Cycle 5 Work 1 ended. - Work 1, Cycle 1 - Work 1, Cycle 2 - Work 1, Cycle 3 - Work 1, Cycle 4 - Work 1, Cycle 5 Work 1 ended. While the procedure is busy, the the form does not show any reaction, but the second click was put into the message queue by Windows. Right after the OnClick has finished it will be called again. INCLUDING ProcessMessages, the output might be very different: - Work 1, Cycle 1 - Work 1, Cycle 2 - Work 1, Cycle 3 - Work 2, Cycle 1 - Work 2, Cycle 2 - Work 2, Cycle 3 - Work 2, Cycle 4 - Work 2, Cycle 5 Work 2 ended. - Work 1, Cycle 4 - Work 1, Cycle 5 Work 1 ended. This time the form seems to be working again and accepts any user interaction. So the button is pressed half way during your first worker function AGAIN, which will be handled instantly. All incoming events are handled like any other function call. In theory, during every call to ProgressMessages ANY amount of clicks and user messages might happen in place. So be careful with your code! Different example (in simple pseudo-code!): procedure OnClickFileWrite() ; var myfile : TFileStream; begin   myfile : TFileStream.create(myOutput.txt) ;   try     while BytesReady 0 do     begin       myfile.Write(DataBlock) ;       dec(BytesReady,sizeof(DataBlock)) ;       DataBlock[2] : #13; {test line 1}       Application.ProcessMessages;       DataBlock[2] : #13; {test line 2}     end;   finally     myfile.free;   end; end; This function writes a large amount of data and tries to unlock the application by using ProcessMessages each time a block of data is written. If the user clicks on the button again, the same code will be executed while the file is still being written to. So the file cannot be opened a 2nd time and the procedure fails. Maybe your application will do some error recovery like freeing the buffers. As a possible result Datablock will be freed and the first code will suddenly raise an Access Violation when it accesses it. In this case: test line 1 will work, test line 2 will crash. The better way: To make it easy you could set the whole Form enabled : false, which blocks all user input, but does NOT show this to the user (all Buttons are not grayed). A better way would be to set all buttons to disabled, but this might be complex if you want to keep one Cancel button for example. Also you need to go through all the components to disable them and when they are enabled again, you need to check if there should be some remaining in the disabled state. You could disable a container child controls when the Enabled property changes. As the class name TNotifyEvent suggests, it should only be used for short term reactions to the event. For time consuming code the best way is IMHO to put all the slow code into an own Thread. Regarding the problems with PrecessMessages and/or the enabling and disabling of components, the usage of a second thread seems to be not too complicated at all. Remember that even simple and fast lines of code might hang for seconds, e.g. opening a file on a disc drive might have to wait until the drive spin up has finished. It doesnt look very good if your application seem to crash because the drive is too slow. Thats it. The next time you add Application.ProcessMessages, think twice ;)
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