In Lisa Sun-Hee Park’s “Assimilation,” Park boldly claims the problem she finds with the assimilation of Asian culture into American culture is not in its “definition, but in its intention” (pg 15). That being said, she further explains through a series of studies how narratives are hidden or manipulated in order to suit this nation’s “imperial tendencies” (pg 17).
Using studies by both Park and Park 2005 and Hing 1993, Park explains that the assimilation of Asian Americans today is not the same as it was 100 years prior. Instead, factors such as access to Western education determine someone’s supposed success in assimilating to American culture (pg 16). Even then, Park argues that the narrative today on a successful Asian American “focuses on six of the largest and wealthiest subgroups” (pg 16), which would include the Chinese, Korean, Filipino among others. She argues media will rarely cover poverty and racism that most Asian Americans face, as is the case in a crime wherein six Sikhs were murdered in Milwaukee (pg 16). Rewriting the narrative has arisen in past years as a result of phrases such as “model minority.”
When talking about what the term “model minority” has meant to the Asian American community, Park argues that this term has further allowed the media to further shift the narrative to propose that perhaps assimilating completely has a direct correlation to success and wealth, despite discussing the consequence of always playing the foreigner who by determination and wit carved out a life for themselves in the US. This in turn, creates the concept that in order to belong you must not only “‘behave’ appropriately” but must also accept your lot in life without complaint (pg 17). Quite obviously, this concept did not appeal to Park, nor should it for anyone else.
Park wasn’t the first to challenge the idea of assimilation. Park mentions early on other scholars, such as W.E.B. De Bois, who didn’t believe assimilation was the correct process to benefit the African American culture either. Both deemed outsiders by American norm, de Bois wrote a document titled “Conservation of Races” in which he also questioned the motives behind assimilation (pg 14). Fearing assimilation was a term used only to justify “negating the black experience” and “centering whiteness as the national identity”(pg 14), it is quite obvious other minority cultures have also challenged what it means to be assimilated into American culture and what said cultures would have to give up in order to do so successfully.