Cultural Artifact Letter: Paris by Night

Assignment/Project Summary:

Cultural Artifact Letter aims to demonstrate an understanding of rhetorical awareness and authorial/audience perspective. The task was to identify a cultural artifact that identifies the writer as part of a specific community. Then, draw on personal experiences engaging with those communities. The cultural artifact letter communicates the community and persuades the audience to appreciate this group.

Here I present my cultural artifact letter about the Vietnamese variety show Paris by Night and discuss how it creates a community for Vietnamese people all over the world.

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Reflections and Comments:

I had a lot of fun with this project as it gave me a lot of room to be creative with how I'm presenting my ideas and narrative. It's the first project I had for this class, so it definitely made the rest of the assignments feel more approachable. It also gave me a better understanding of multi-modal composition, since I was being very intentional with how to use multi-modal composition to get my point across. For this particular project, I felt quite inspired by magazines/editorials like National Geographic because I always felt interested in the articles they have.

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My Cultural Artifact Assignment (Editorial Page and Composer's Memo):

In addition to providing the project itself, students were also required to write a composer's memo to explain the reasons for why various choices were made throughout the project of creating the cultural artifact letter.

Wendy Bui

ENGL 182 K

October 12, 2020

Cultural Artifact Letter Composer’s Memo

In my cultural artifact letter, my intended audience was generally people unfamiliar with Vietnamese culture. I intended to identify this audience by putting a great emphasis on how relevant and familiar Paris by Night is to Vietnamese people, more specifically, Vietnamese expatriates since that is the specific community I’m explaining.

I hoped to communicate the relevance of this media in Vietnamese communities clearly for people unfamiliar with it by going through what the show offers and how it can serve as a connection to Vietnamese traditional and modern culture. In addition, I provide a small anecdote to further support the point so that the audience can understand my idea from a more personal standpoint since I explained it very generally prior.

As mentioned in the letter, I am part of the demographic that Paris by Night caters to, being an American of Vietnamese descent. I didn’t grow up in Vietnam, so I lack a lot of knowledge about cultural and historical references that Vietnamese people in and from Vietnam think is common knowledge. Growing up, I would frequently watch the series with my family and I learned a lot of things about Vietnamese life, culture, and history through this show. Due to these experiences, I speak from a personal standpoint because Paris by Night was indeed my cultural connection to Vietnam for much of my childhood and life thereafter.

Regarding the genre of this letter, I decided to present it in a newsprint/magazine style format because I feel like it’s both formal and informal enough for me to get my point across. I felt a traditional letter was too formal to get my point across because generally letters to a broad audience (which is what I intended) are presented more seriously as informational pieces. I decided against doing a social media style presentation because it was too limited for what I wanted to express and the format was ill-suited from my idea of the final outcome.

This piece was meant to be both an explanation and a personal reflection so it toes the line of formal and informal at times, which is why I thought a newsprint/magazine style was best. With newsprints and magazines, generally audiences are reading to learn something new and that can span from more plainly informational pieces to purely opinion based pieces. In addition, photographs are commonly used to supplement the material and with Paris by Night, which has a very striking signature appearance, it only makes sense to showcase its visual aspects as well.

Bibliography:

Bonilla, Manuel, director. Paris by Night 130 In Singapore – Glamour. Thuy Nga, 2020.

Nguyen, Khanh, director. Paris by Night 100 Ghi Nhớ Một Chặng Đường. Thuy Nga, 2010.