10 1 Thursday, August 1, 2013
The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com
Carlina in China:
ingdao'be y
Exploring cultural
differences in a

Thursday, August 1, 2013
The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com

13

Powerful'Fruitvale'
explores racial tension

FLOUR POWER

MHACKS
From Page 2
offering 1,500 spots for hackers,
with 1,200 already claimed as
of Wednesday night, Erdmann
said. He said even though more
than 1,000 have signed up, it's
expected that not everyone will
show up.

While the MHacks website
says the event is for undergradu-
ate students and only accepts high
school and graduate students "on
a case-by-case basis," Erdmann
said they have admitted every
student that's applied so far.
"(MHacks) never meant to
be exclusive to undergraduates;
that's just our main target."

Chinese metropolis
By CARLINA DUAN
Daily Community Culture Editor
.* When I walk down Qingdao
streets, skyscrapers shout down at
me, regal in their red-capped roofs
and earnest, glinting windows. In
shopping centers, Chinese hip-hop
blares. On my grandpa's TV, an
entertainment channel whirs with
images of girls clunked in mascara
and lipstick. Everywhere I turn:
billboards of Chinese movie stars,
glamorously dangling rolls of toilet
paper; glamorously eating cans of
peach yogurt; glamorously kissing
one another on the cheek. This is
Thinese pop culture at its finest. It
is pop culture thathas unmistakably
filtered every public space, plas-
tering itself on walls, on candy bar
wrappers, on bathroom stalls.
I don't know why I'm so sur-
prised at finding reflections of the
USA Hollywood scene everywhere
in China. Perhaps it's because my
Western upbringing seems so out-
of-place here. Whether I am in a
potsticker restaurant, at the grocery
store, or on the street, everybody
stares, and I often get questioned
whether or not I'm foreign. Over
dinner the other night, my 25-year-
old cousin scanned my face with
hawkish eyes. "Are you wearing
makeup?" she glared. "Yeah," I said,
a bit sheepishly. In high school in
China, my cousins wore white slack-
like uniforms to class everyday.
No nail polish, jewelry, or makeup
allowed. At some schools, a haircut
was required for the girls - hair
must be up to your chin, or shorter.
WhenmysisterandI hungoutatthe
each last week, nobody else wore
bikinis. Girls don't wear spaghetti
straps here. Or show much skin.
Yet inside Chinese fashion
magazines, I flip through pages of
Chinese movie stars prancing on
gjarpets with curled eyelashes, car-
rying their lean, sharp frames with
ease. It is eerie. Here, "beauty" in
the Western sense - makeup, mas-
sive amounts of jewelry, bare skin

The city never sleeps, better slip you an Ambien.

- seems permitted only to the rich
and the famous. Pop culture, then,
resides very much on this exclu-
sive right to be "beautiful," to wear
your hair down and loose across
the shoulders, to walk with a sil-
ver anklet jangling your every step,
to wear lipstick with tones like,
"Poppy" and "Criminal Red."
Last week, my uncle and I took a
walk to a park. "Would I be consid-
ered fat in America?" he asked, half-
jokingly, yet half-serious. "There's
not one person here who doesn't call
me fat," he stepped on an aluminum
can drifting in the dirt, "But I don't
think I'm thatobese, amI?"
In China, body shape is a topic
that is bluntly stated, rather than
talked around, as I find it some-
times is in the U.S. My aunts and
uncles pinch my arms and tell me
on a daily basis that I have thick
legs. It is not an insult. Here, it is
simple fact. An ordinary truth,
true the way black cicadas here
chirrup and chirrup endlessly at
night. If a person is "fat," they are
called "fat." If a person is "skin-
ny," they, too, are called "skinny."
Body shape is something that
is remarked upon by relatives,
acquaintances, close friends, co-
workers. And not only body shape,
but other bodily descriptors as
well - skin tone, for example. A
desire for tan skin is very, very
rare. When I arrived to Qingdao,
one of my aunts exclaimed at how
"brown" I was. There is an enor-
mous want for pure, "white" skin
- so much so that men and women

alike carry umbrellas outside on a
sunny day, to avoid getting tan and
burnt.
It's a different aesthetic appeal,
and it makes me question how
much of our conception of "beau-
ty" is shaped by what culture we
were raised by, and live in. I'm
surprised by how much American
influence has seeped into Chinese
music, into fashion, into the street
culture. English words and slang
such as "party" and "swag" are
incorporated into the everyday
Chinese language, used primarily
by 20-year-olds and high school-
ers. Hipsters in hipster-glasses
flock the Chinese coffee shops,
which offer menu items such
as "sweet red bean gelato," and
"vanilla ice cream waffle cakes."
Women wearing maxi dresses and
glittery sandals swarm the 6-story
malls, the forever-busy streets.
Yet, there's still very much a
Chinese element to "beauty" that
inhabits its core. I am hyper-
aware of the ways in which I dress
and interact with the physical aes-
thetic of the architecture and the
people here. What I find "beauti-
ful," or lovable, or curious - is
remotely different than what my
Chinese cousins find. It's not about
reaching compromise, or settling
for one version of beauty versus
another. Rather, it's about the cul-
tural intricacies and history of a
place, and what that place is teach-
ing me about how I interact with
my home, and with the new. It's
always, always about wonder.

By NATALIE GADBOIS
DailyArts Writer
December 31, 2009: Oscar
Grant hides a bag of marijuana
downhis pants before slipping a
surprise pack of
fruit snacks to
his daughter at
preschool. Oscar Fruitvale
Grant snarls in Stain
the face of his
former boss, At Rave 20
demanding to be
re-hired despite The Weinstein
his history of Company
lateness. Oscar
Grant calls his mother to wish her
a happy birthday, promising to
buy the clams she wanted. Oscar
is forced down on atrain platform
by two white cops and is fatally.
shot in the back. "Fruitvale Sta-
tion", directed by newcomer Ryan
Coogler and starring Michael B.
Jordan ("Hotel Noir") as Oscar,
gently follows this normal day
for the passionate, mercurial and
ultimately complex Oscar until his
tragic finale.
The facts are straightforward
and sadly prescient coming off
the heels of the acquittal in the
Trayvon Martin case: on New
Years Day, 2009, Oscar Grant, an
unarmed 22-year-old black man,
was forced off a train for being
involved in a fight and then shot
in the back by white Bay Area
cops.
This is the kind of story look-
ing for a hero. A martyr to rally
people of all races behind fighting
racial prejudice. Instead, Jordan
deftly portrays a complex man,
caught between a family he loves
and a beguiling lifestyle. The
films meanders through Oscar's
last day as if no one knows the
ending. The film simply shows a
day in the life of an ordinary man,
proving not that Oscar is defined
by his death, but that his murder
is so egregious because of it's ran-
domness, the lack of connection it,
has to who Oscar was and how he
lived his life.
First-time writer and direc-
tor Ryan Coogler, who grew up
in the same area as Grant, uses
commonplace dialogue and real-
life locations to ground the film
firmly in reality, avoiding setting
Oscar up as a malleable symbol

for racial tension in the United
States. Oscar is a young man -
barely a man - who has a temper
and listens to rap and spent time
in jail and cheated on the mother
of his daughter. He is imperfect.
Jordan's performance is not reve-
latory; rather, you often forget
that he is acting, that he is not
really Oscar Grant going about
his daily business.
The film is a misnomer as it is
ostensibly about explosive race
relations in America, but spends
most of it's time quietly exam-
ining a mundane day in Oscar's
life. Unfortunately, the audience
knows the catch. The emotional
meat comes -not from Oscar, but
the women in his life. Melonie
Diaz ("You, Me and the Circus")
and Octavia Spencer ("Smashed")
portray his longtime girlfriend
Sophina and mother Wanda as
they both fondly deal with erratic
yet winsome Oscar and hours
later react with tragic poise as
they wade through the confusion
and heartbreak that surrounds
In the wake of
Trayvon Martin,
Coogler tells a
timely tale.
his death.
In movies, death is often
used as an opportunity to make
speeches, to eulogize a person so
much they become just a symbol.
In "Fruitvale" Oscar's death is
not the death of an icon, a soon-
to-be catalyst for racial change.
His friends and family mourn him
as a caring son, a jesting brother,
a sincere friend, a playful father.
The emotion is there, and it's
palpable the connection Coogler
feels to this place and these char-
acters, but the film let's the story
tell itself. No preachy narration
or abstract artistry is necessary
to create anger, because there is
infuriating simplicity in a man
killed for being the wrong race at
the wrong time. "Fruitvale Sta-
tion" allows us to get to know that
man for who he was.

TERRA MOLENGRAFF/Daily
Singer Chad Gabon and drummer David Stratman perform as the Flour Jam Band during the annual Rockamura Summertime
Music Festival hosted by Nakamura Co-Op Saturday. Twenty bands performed on three stages providing festival attendees
with a broad variety of genres throughout the day.
Elastic conductors,
create opportunite

Gold-polyurethane
mix could generate
strong flexible current
By ARIANA ASSAF
Daily StaffReporter
University researchers have
discovered that gold mixed with
layers of polyurethane can con-
duct 35 Siemens per centimeter
of electricity and be flexible,
opening up new applications for
medical and commercial elec-
tronics.
Roughly three years ago,
Engineering Prof. Nicholas
Kotov began to examine how to
make conductors used in certain
kinds of electronics and medi-
cal implants more flexible. But
when composites were created
to make these conductors, Kotov
and his team realized that they
made strong flexible energy
conductors.
Composite materials can
combine the flexibility of a
polymer and the conductivity
of an inorganic component. In
this case, Kotov combined gold

particles with polyurethane and
found that the final material
held both of these properties.
He said combined materi-
als tend to change in some way
and this case was no different:
the gold particles self-assem-
bled into extensive conductive
bands as the polyurethane was
stretched. Though such self-
assembly had already been dis-
covered in liquids, watching it
occur in a solid state was unex-
pected.
The process of self-assembly
allows the material to remain
both flexible and conductive,
and may not be limdited to just
gold.
"That also could be a very use-
ful property for other nanopar-
ticles,"Kotovsaid.
Although this process is not
yet officially accepted, he said
he is continuing to study the
reaction and believes that it may
be the result of a general prop-
erty of nanoparticles when they
are placed inside a flexible poly-
meric substance.
Kotov said a practical appli-
cation of these newfound flex-
ible conductors is their use in

medical implants, which are
currently fashioned out of rigid
substances.
"Normally, implants are made
from metals or silicone, which
are hard materials," he said.
For example, brain implants
that are used to alleviate some
symptoms of Alzheimer's or
Parkinson's disease do not
always work for extended peri-
ods of time.
Kotov said these devices tend
to lose their ability to stimulate
the brain over time due to scar
tissue formation around the
device. Implants made of more
flexible, tissue-like material
would, in theory, not cause such
scarring because they would be
able to conform to the surface
of an organ, and thus be able
to operate for longer periods of
time.
"These implants also need
to be small in order to avoid
inflammation," he said. "But we
need to retain their conductivity
still when they're small, so we
need unique materials that com-
bine mechanical and electrical
properties.
See CONDUCTORS, Page 6

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