Journal 10 - Assimilation

In Kurup’s “Assimilation,” the different scenarios describe the obstacles that immigrants face coming into a new country, including both micro-aggressions and larger aggressive behavior. As a result, immigrants feel pressured to assimilate into American culture and not retain their own transnational culture because of the fear of feeling different from society. Although all these excerpts showed different experiences, they all shared the difficulty of assimilation, which is a highlight of Asian American families as the younger generation grows up in the conflict between two different cultures.

In fact, Lowe’s “Immigrant Acts” addresses this struggling dynamic as she analyzes different works that describe the hybridization of culture and how the older generation reacts to their children’s approach to assimilation. For example, in the first poem, a Japanese mother describes her daughter rebelling, but her rebellion reminds her of her own ways of “breaking tradition” against her own mother (60). This reflects Stuart Hall’s notion that culture is constantly changing and grows as new influences come into the picture.