Amandaaah!!~_~

Hello my name is Amanda Wong. I am seventeen years old and am an art major at LaGuardia High School. Things I enjoy doing include eating, painting, going to the beach, procrastinating my research project work, and crowdsurfing. I have been interning through the LEARN program at Hester Street Collaborative for two weeks; it has been my 7^th job this year (something I take pride in). I am glad to have the opportunity to have such hands-on and involved work, and that my jobs no longer involve licking hundreds of envelopes or serving overpriced ice cream while singing for a little extra cash. During my time spent at HSC, I have already learned how to: silkscreen, think carefully before acting, sand down baby pieces of wood, and write a research project.

Now that everything important is known about me, I will discuss my research project and the difficulties of doing a research project. I have done two research projects before: one was a twenty page paper about slavery done with four other people and the other was a six page paper trying to convince my Republican U.S history teacher that George W. Bush’s War on Iraq was an unjustified decision. My current research project will discuss how cultural and lingual differences affect the Chinatown community and the importance of new open space projects such as the East River Waterfront, the Allen and Pike Street Initiatives, and HSC’s work in the Hester Street Playground in Sara Roosevelt Park. Such developments are important in creating places for the community to freely exist and for its people to enjoy open spaces. By bringing people together in a specific area, solidarity will inevitably follow. Community existence through open space is important in a place like Chinatown, where many people are living and working in mainly overpopulated cramped conditions and cultural and lingual differences cause socially restrained interactions. It has the ability to ignore the hardships and differences faced in a community and bring everyone together.

Obviously there will be many challenging parts of my research project. First of all, I am procrastinating and will honestly do whatever I can to not do to the work. Secondly, I feel finding the information and statistics related to my project will need to be accurate and detailed, and I will have to do much work finding somewhat esoteric information (it will be difficult finding information relative to the social and cultural critique with my work). However, this will probably be made easier through the internet, and I just like to complain much. Another problem I am facing at this moment is hunger. I am also nervous that I will not be able to prove my point and will end up with a horrible boring and useless paper no one will read. Wish me luck. Also the photo up there is my first ever silk screen and I think its cute.