Asian American Alienation and Assimilation
While it is difficult for an Asian person to assimilate into American culture, it is similarly difficult for an Asian American to assimilate back to their native country. The feeling of alien does not disappear just because similar faces surround them. This is most clearly seen in A Taste of Home when a Vietnamese American returns to his homeland without his much needed Visa, “Viet Nam is the homeland, my homeland, and I need a visa to come home”(Nguyen 197). Although he is technically “home” he is deemed as a foreigner in his own country and requires papers to authorize his visit. What makes this trip home even more artificial is that he is staying in a hotel; the lack of permanency in his visit and his dwellings suggests he is farther from home than he thinks.
As soon as he arrives he is hungry and craves the ethnic food, although in America food at such an early makes him sick. This literal awakening of the appetite suggests his desire to ingest the culture in which he is trying to assimilate back into. He laments how American food has made him fat yet he craves the indigenous food of Vietnam, so it is evident that it is not so much what he eats, but where he eats that matters.
The fact that he is overweight makes him look different from the rest of the population as well as his khaki pants, his tropical-sun deprived skin and shoes and socks. This physical disparity is yet another hindrance to his assimilation back into Vietnamese culture. The pants and shoes and socks can easily be replaced with clothing that would make him appear like less of a tourist, but he chooses to remain in his Westernized clothes. He literally does not fit into the clothes, the culture or have permission to be in the country. Although he is not successful in donning the native clothes, he is eager to “shed” the layers of American life. This ritualized shedding and dressing leaves him suspended somewhere between the two worlds, he cannot shed all that America has placed on him nor can he dress or appear to be native of Vietnam. So, he remains half dressed and half naked and thus extremely vulnerable.
Physically he has assimilated to the Western world, but emotionally he remains in Vietnam. His inability to truly assimilate into American culture is due to the United States and Viet nam’s violent history, “I have trouble loving America: the images of American soldiers charging though Vietnamese villages are lodged too deep in my mind”(Nguyen 303). His loyalty to his country keeps him from bonding ties with the supposed enemy; similarly many Caucasian’s feel the same way about the Japanese and Pearl Harbor. Ironically, he comments to he makes a comment to wife about the war, “I wish these people didn’t drag out the war anymore”(303), but who are these people? He cannot disregard his images of war and considers himself to be at home, so the usage of these people as if he is not one of them is awkward. Although he feels resentment for the United States he lives there for twenty years, always yearning to return to Vietnam but he never receives permission. He is disgusted by the country that acknowledges him as a citizen, and is exiled by the country he considers home.
The narrator obviously longs to be considered a native Vietnamese, but to come home again is to recognize what home is, and Vietnam is a place of no escape (Nguyen 300). He longs to return to a home that is not a home, much like the parade for Ho Chi Minh is not a parade, ‘They have to do something for his birthday. But they know nobody cares. So they take a midnight run, a parade for themselves, really.’ A parade without an audience, without a crowd’ (Nguyen 310). A parade without an audience or a crowd is obviously not a parade, just as a homeland without an actual home; family or proper attire is not a homeland. The narrator obviously wants this to be more his home than it actually is and his desire for it to be so, is overshadowing the obvious contradiction of term and meaning.
In The Faintest Echo of Our Language, the Korean narrator recounts the negotiation of growing up in America assimilating and still retaining Korean culture. When his father almost dies he explains, “my mother would warn me, if he were to die, we’d lose everything and have to move back to Korea, where he living was hard”(Lee 215). This threat of returning to the homeland constructs Korea as a punishment; Korea is portrayed as the land of struggle while America promises “the good life.” This inherent threat of poverty and struggle that is inextricably connected to Korea could create fear and intense dislike for the country that this narrator is supposed to regard as home, therefore the need to assimilate becomes a necessity for survival.
Japan occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945, during this time, the Japanese “instituted a campaign to wipe out Korean culture”(Cao 253). The mother in the story lived in Korea at the time of Japanese occupation and was given a Japanese name instead of a Korean one. The narrator wonders why her name was never changed after the liberation to reflect Korean culture, she retains her Korean name despite her resentment of the Japanese to illustrate the struggle and to prove that history had indeed happened. To change the name would be somehow to deny the events of the past, as if they never were. This refusal to change her own name influences her to instill the Korean culture within her children so they do not forget. Similarly to their mother even though they have moved to America they retain their native Korean names.
The mother tries to simultaneously instill aspects of both American and Korean culture in her son. There is a constant seesaw effect of the two cultures. When she believes one is dominating, she worries that the other is being neglected. After ensuring that her son learned English by making him read until the point of exhaustion she then worries that he has lost the Korean language and contemplates sending him back to Korea to relearn the language. Although she never does send him back the reminder of your native language becoming foreign translates into a loss that diminishes your sense of identity. Ironically, the son has long ago lost his native language, much to his mother’s surprise. We are then to assume that this surreptitious transformation is so gradual that it goes undetected and therefore you cannot point to a beginning or and end, it happens before ones eyes without anyone recognizing.
The son is recounting his mother’s negotiations around ethnicity on the eve of her death, and so I assume that the death of his mother resonates into the death of his native culture. The coupling of the mother, the motherland and the mother tongue linked at a time of loss is interesting because it creates a cyclical picture of loss.
Many immigrant parents use themselves as the example of what not to sound like, they use their broken English as a reminder to their children that they must learn English so that they may succeed. While the children are learning English, educational and language barriers become more distinct between parent and child. They are speaking two different languages and the roles reverse. The pedantic parent now becomes the needy child and the child is forced to assume a parental role and be the voice of their parent. This reassignment of roles creates anxiety, resentment and embarrassment for the child. “âÂ?¦feeling frustrated with her inabilities, her misplacement,”(Lee 218), and so when he is asked to call the bank for his mother he refuses and suggests that she should do it so that can practice the language. The refusal to enable his mother creates a schism between the two, and propels the child to a figure of authority and the mother to a subordinate role; her acknowledgement of this reversal is illustrated in her childlike retreat to her bedroom. The theme of childlike language is further demonstrated on her deathbed where she speaks to her son in a child’s Korean and he speaks to her in a child’s English. The narrator explains that this language forever keeps him her child, but his fails to acknowledge that his usage of childlike English also keeps the mother a child as well. They can only communicate effectively when using the simplest forms of their language, therefore it is impossible for them to transcend the status of child and conduct an adult conversation.
Similarly in Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue, the narrator recalls the similar experience of being the voice of her parent. Her experience as her mother’s voice was that of interpreter and translator. She interprets English to be understandable to her mother, this is different than just being her voice, the need for an interpreter implies a lack of understanding of the language. To have to translate the language always brands the mother a foreigner, while establishing Tan as an authority and more importantly a native. Possibly Amy Tan’s mother’s reliance on her daughter’s knowledge of English enabled her to be the author she is today. Her innate ability to explain the feelings of the characters in The Joy Luck Club is illustrative of a skilled and learned interpreter.
Tan laments on the term “broken English” for its inherent implication that something is wrong with it, that is somehow, “broken as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness”(Tan 317). The term “broken English” is in fact derogatory, but we have yet to find a replacement, possibly because the term identifies foreignness without our having to acknowledge it. Instead of castigating immigrants farther from the vernacular by using disparaging terminology to describe their speech, we should praise them for knowing what they do know and having the courage to use it even in the face of such harsh criticism. Many of the Asian languages are extremely difficult to learn because of the thousands of characters that compose the language, so obviously their inability master the English language is not due to a lack of intelligence. Yet when we hear “broken English” we automatically assume that the person’s intellectual capabilities are in question, when this is simply not the case.
In the short story, Transformation, Lydia Minatoya describes her parents intent on giving her an American name so that she could have the “full promise of America”(Minatoya 31). The name is meant to indemnify her against racism and make her more American, although this fails as Minatoya admits, “I remained unalterably alienâÂ?¦everyone knew all real American families were white”(32). When Minatoya is teased at school, the target of her torment is her ethnicity; chants of “Ching Chong Chinaman” usurp her given American name and her citizenship in America all based upon her appearance. Ignorantly her parents thought/hoped that an American name would protect their daughter but ironically this good intention can do more harm than good because it attempts to negate the obvious differences.
Obvious differences to some are lost on others. Caucasian culture consolidates Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Vietnamese into one category of Asian. This intermixing of Asian identity is seen in A Talk Story Poem when kids attack a Vietnamese family and yell “Go Back to China”(Kiang 88) or when they beat Cambodian’s and tell them to return to Vietnam. While this is comfortable and easier than considering which Asian country a person is from, it is misleading and contributes to a sense of alien even within the Asian community. Despite the belief of many there are great differences between each Asian ethnicity, and article that appeared in Newsweek entitled, “Asian Identity Crisis” states,
Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and other “Asians” have not only different cultures and languages but deep historical antagonisms towards one another. What binds them together in America is what they look like – the exact basis for their stigmatization (Chang 68).
The similarity of appearance and assumptions of identity is depicted in Rose Colored. The man asks if they speak English, thus reminding them and emphasizing their foreign appearance. The girls are then asked if they are Chinese or Vietnamese because they remind this man of a former Chinese girlfriend. Evidently to this man and many others all Asian women look the same.
The schism in ideologies is illustrated in the poem, A Conservative View by Cathy Song when a Chinese mother comments on how Japanese and Korean parents spoil their children. Or as see earlier in The Faintest Echo of Our Language, the historical resentment between Koreans and Japanese is further problematized when enemies are lumped together as one.
The conclusion will go here, but I have no clue.
Works Cited
Cao, Lan and Himilce Novas. “Everything You Need to Know About Asian-
American History.” Penguin Group: New York, 1996.
Chang, Yahlin. “Asian Identity Crisis.” Newsweek. June 22, 1998. v131 n25 p68.
Galang, M. Evelina. Rose Colored. Classpack.
Kiang, Peter Nien- Chu. A Talk Story Poem. Classpack.
Lee, Chang-Rae. The Faintest Echo of Our Language. Classpack.
Qui-Duc, Nguyen. A Taste of Home. Classpack.
Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian
American Studies. American Studies International. June 2000 v38 i2 p97.
Song, Cathy. A Conservative View. Classpack.
Tan, Amy. Mother Tongue. Classpack.
