Photo

Wing Young Huie, We are the Other, 2012-2013

This picture shows a man of Asian descent holding a sign saying "When I come to the US, I don't have nothing. With my bare hands and hard work I now own two barber shops."  The man is standing in a barber shop with an employee to his left and a group of customers behind him.  The barber shop is well kept and appears to have a lot of business from the group of people at the front.

The statement on the sign is important because it demonstrates the immigrant's low English quality.  The man makes several grammatical mistakes and spelling errors, which would suggest that English is not his first language, or he slept through English class.  By looking closer, you can see that the Asian owner is the only Asian in the room and is wearing a uniform typically associated with a dentist or barber.  This can be representative of the minority of immigrants and the disproportion of immigrants as business owners.  This man is representative of the immigrant population as he discusses his past of being in poverty and working toward his goals.  This man is arguing that he overcame his disadvantage when arriving to America by working hard and persevering.

Wing Young Huie and Margaret Atwood present the concept of "othering" through writing techniques.  Language is used to separate people into groups by these authors through their descriptions of these people.  In the photograph by Huie, the writing on the chalkboard uses language to portray the Chinese immigrant as a non-American and serves to single him out against the American customers and employee. In the novel, The Handmaid's Tale,  Atwood singles out several groups of people such as the Handmaid's and the Unwomen.  Language singles out these groups describing the Unwomen as "lower-class" and "near-death."  When Atwood mentions the Unwomen, the language surronding it has a somber, gloomy, and hopeless tone to highlight the disadvantage of these people.  Color is something that is used by Margaret Atwood to classify people into groups like the Handmaid's and the Unwomen.  The Handmaid's are associated with the color red in this novel to represent fertility and to make them stand out against the other people.  The Unwomen are represented with color because they are the only people not wearing a uniform and therefore wear many different colors.  The different colors represents the wide range of people that are Unwomen and their unabiliity to conform to a societal class.  Color is also used in the photograph by Huie as the photo is in black and white and there is no color.  The absence of color shows how the immigrant man has overcome his past poverty and has become part of the social class of small business owners.  The effect of using language and color to single out people is that social groups become more rigid as the people who don't fit into these descriptions cannot be in that social group.  These social groups are also hard to change as the immigrant man shows that he was only able to escape the group of poverty was to work hard.  Social groups and the concept of "othering" people are important in these works because they shows how people are categorized and placed into groups based on their situation.