1 In Lisa Sun-Hee Park’s “Assimilation,” she argued the term of “assimilation” and its definition using some authors Views. In this chapter, Assimilation means the ethnic minority culture forced to change into majority ,more specifically, paying attention to racial formation.
The first person she mentioned to is Du Bois, who claim Assimilation in US demands whiteness.However, Robert E Park thought Assimilation will become a solution for social and racial problem. That is to say, Assimilation is essential events for US society where many immigrants live beyond the barrier of discrimination and prejudice.And also there is a view from Sociologist Richard Alba and Victor Nee. They repudiated “legitimacy of assimilation” for domination and thought that it helps us to deepen mutual understanding among races.
2 One question of assimilation that Park shows us is “assimilation into what?”
Du Bois thinks the word of assimilation assumes that the culture of other ethnic groups such as Asian Americans will change to white American culture. For example, even if one Asian American is from United State and can speak English as native speaker, that person will be treated as outsiders from American society. Contrasting Bois, Aihwa Ong states it helps promote Asian americans develop in social and economic objectives.
3 Park introduced the term “model minority myth” in this article. It refers to Asian American people who is minority group but has success in society. For instance, they get high salary, have an advanced academic background, and can get married to white person, such as Priscilla Chan who is married to Mark Zuckerberg. So the myth and stereotype has come up because US society think Asian American is the good example of assimilation and other ethnic group have to follow them. Even though model minority myth looks it has positive aspect, there is also a negative aspect that ignores the existence of Asians suffering from low income and racial discrimination. In fact, Park shows us that the model minority myth only applies to the six Asian races that seems to be successful in US and the incident that white supremacists kill Sikhs has also occurred.
4 As with myths of ethnic minority models, American society may impose a specific impression such as sexy, or exotic on Asian American. I think “Slaying The Dragon” which is a documentary movie we watched in class is a good example for this problem. Nancy Kwan played a role of Suzie Wong who was a famous prostitute in “The world of Suzie Wong.(1960) ” This character came from the image of “China Doll” and Suzie was depicted as ”good”Asian woman who is innocence, docile, and sexy. In addition to “The World of Suzie Wong,” we can watch images of such a stereotyped Asian woman from “Sayonara.(1954)”.This story depicted the tragic love between US soldiers and Japanese geisha girl which was taboo at that time. Moreover, once the relationship between Asian countries and the United States changes, the image of Chinese and Japanese also changes easily.Like the problem of assimilating into white, the United States is neglecting the identity as an Asian and also its society is pressing the expectation and impression of what Asians should be, and I felt that Asians were deprived of freedom of self-expression.
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