On "Being a Chink"

  "In her essay 'The Meaning of a Word', Gloria Naylor examines the various meanings of the word 'nigger', definitions that have consensual meanings throughout society and others that vary according to how and when the word is used. In this piece, Naylor uses personal examples to describe how 'the people in her grandmother's living room took a word that whites used to signify worthlessness or degradation and rendered it impotent'...
  ...I do not remember how it happened exactly. I just know that we [her friends] have been calling each other 'chink' for quite a long while now. The word has never been used to belittle or degrade, but rather as a term of endearment, a loving insult between friends..."

  This passage is taken from Christine Leong's essay "Being a Chink". I found it very interesting that she quoted Naylor, who had written her essay "The Meaning of a Word" ten years prior, and whose essay I had read a few minutes before Leong's. Leong had obviously been introduced to Naylor's works at some point, very possibly in college, where she was when she wrote "Being a Chink". The two of them basically wrote on the same topic, how words only have as much power as you give them, and meanings which are defined in context, not simply on paper.
  Their essay structures are even similar. They start with a paragraph concerning the power and definitions of words, and then give a childhood memory of a word whose definition was quite different depending on its context. They write about how their families and friends have dealt with these words, and conclude their essays again explaining their meaning of the words. More than a generation apart in age, these women were dealing with the same things, and confronting their culture head on, by rendering the common insults harmless, and instead "terms of endearment".