This one goes in the “not particularly novel, just interesting to me” file. I was born and raised in the 1980s. This was a period of considerable immigration from Asia into the United States, as well as cultural influence. Chinese immigration continued at a significant clip, Japanese culture had exploded into the American mainstream, and the continuing fallout of the Vietnam War and related conflicts in Southeast Asia resulted in waves of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian migrants and refugees. (We’re all just living in Henry Kissinger’s world.) At the same time, the Asian American population remained very small overall, and popular culture like the film
I think something missed in this missive about paradox of assimilation is *why* immigrants immigrated. Simply, to give up your native language, culture, friends, family, cuisine, architecture, literature, weather, familiarity, virtually every instinct you’ve honed from birth… requires a level of desperation and dedication that many children of immigrants don’t see.
My father immigrated from Hungary, not on a lark, or because America seemed cool, or following a girl or work, but because it was 1939 and he was Jewish, and because he had applied to immigrate to the US in 1926 (that time, as a lark!) - so, by sheer luck, he was able to do so. My uncle walked to (what is now) Israel. Their mom went through the predecessor of what became death camps, back when they merely wanted Jews not to be here (as opposed to explicitly killing them), lost everything but her life, and came here as well. The rest of my father’s family died.
I went through that phase, when I wondered why my father subtly discouraged me from learning Hungarian (“it’s a useless language, spoken by only seven million other bastards in the world”), why he explicitly told my mom not to convert to Judaism (“I don’t want him (i.e. me) to have ‘Jew’ stamped on any piece of paper”), and not understanding why he didn’t want me to… for lack of a better phrase, embrace my roots.
I’m older now, about 20 years older than my dad when he landed here. He never set foot in Europe again, quite by choice. I have, and I think I understand better how wrenchingly miserable, and hard, and lonely it is to immigrate. It’s not romantic, it’s not a story for a nice film somewhere, its a trauma and tragedy even under the best of circumstances where you can’t go home again because you don’t have one any more, because it doesn’t exist except in your memory. And so your pour everything you have into making this new, artificial home as real and safe and permanent as possible, and at all costs, try to shelter your kids from ever experiencing what you did…
…and so, unsurprisingly, being sheltered from that trauma, they grow up a little mystified why you don’t embrace your “native” culture, and why you didn’t raise them to share it.
Honestly, if it happens to everyone maybe it’s better to figure out how to get over it rather than working to make your racial heritage your defining characteristic.
That doesn’t mean you don’t get to claim an ethnic origin (if you’re so inclined). But I think that in America it makes more sense to try and claim your place *here* rather than demanding special privileges because your parents undertook a journey (immigration) that is ultimately the defining myth of this country.
And I say this as a first generation American with a refugee father.
Thanks for bringing attention to this, Freddie. I wrote about the exact same thing myself: https://societystandpoint.substack.com/p/immigrant-valorizing. Many immigrants valorize these colleges, only for their kids to come back with strange, Western ideas.
This is an old tale. My grandmother emigrated from Italy in the 1920's and refused to teach her children Italian in order that they would assimilate better. They in turn were resentful that they didn't learn Italian or more about Italy. Many people I've talked to over the years have told similar stories, regardless of ancestry.
I've always guessed this phenomenon stems at least partly from the American suburbs being a cultural wasteland. Among white people, I'd see kids who grew up in a suburban subdivision with parents who worked for an insurance company lean hard into hunting, fishing and being a country boy. I've seen white kids from the same background lean into "weeb" culture, Black culture, a specific ethnicity (Italian, Irish, Polish, Jewish, etc.) that may or may not show up if they took 23 and Me. Hell I've seen kids learn elvish and base their identity around that. I think there is an innate human need to be part of a culture, and the American suburbs have no culture, so it's inevitable kids of all races in the suburbs will look into their roots to find culture. It's definitely more complicated for non-white kids, but I've seen non-white kids from the suburbs make a similar transformation, and embrace their ethnic roots when they go to college, seemingly searching for some sort of culture. I plan to raise my kids in a city, and while they may have a smaller house and "worse schools" than I did, I hope they're less bored than I was, and exposed to more art and culture. A lot of American cities are sort of culturally dead too, but I still think they're better than a lot of suburbs, which can be really, really sterile.
Parents and children often have different, even competing, interests. In your friend's situation, it sounds like he felt rootless and alienated in America despite it being his birthplace. Being a Gen X or older Millennial Asian American guy would've had its unique set of alienating experiences too, which would explain why he was able to find some comfort—even if imagined—in Asia. His parents would've regarded America differently though, because whatever hardships they'd had in China, they did feel a sense of home, even if they had their issues with it.
It can swing the other way too, with immigrant parents who loved their formative years and youth back home so much that they demand that their kids want the same upbringing. Either way, being the same race or even being in the same family doesn't mean your motivations and interests will be perfectly aligned.
I think it's mostly contextual. It was all fun and games making Jewish jokes to my brethren in New York before college. We get the jokes. Once in college in the Midwest and finding much of their knowledge of Jews came from Cartman I was less inclined to make those jokes, now that I was an outsider. At first what I was once forgiving of (such as first week of college when over dinner someone told me he was surprised I chewed with my mouth closed because he thought all Jews chewed with it open) briefly morphed into a Jewish "nationalist" phase where I strongly identified with an identity I had taken for granted before (lasted about a year before I got over it). But again, all these inclinations were determined by exterior forces. Feeling left out and alienated is a very strong and hurtful feeling. How one reacts to it is unpredictable.
“the urge of immigrant parents to push their children to assimilate is entirely understandable, and so is the desire of those children to reconnect with their heritage” - I think the opposite way round is common too (if anything, I think it’s more common, and it’s only a minority of second-generation immigrants undergo an awakening in college that makes them identify more than they used to with their parents’ culture, but I don’t have any stats on this). Thinking about my second-generation immigrant friends who I have had conversations about this stuff with, most of them grew up wanting to be more American while their parents were alarmed at how Americanized they had become.
On a domestic level, this happens to Native Americans. When the distant Natives, the ones who grew up away from tribal communities and customs, attempt to "find themselves," they often end up becoming fundamentalists. Even the ones with one Indian grandparent (or even one Indian great-grandparent) will present t themselves as only being "indigenous" rather than as a descendant of standard American assimilation.
Andrea Long Chu wrote an interesting essay about a similar topic, how mixed Asian kids (usually half white, half Asian) grow up and struggle to connect with their culture. The essay discusses several fiction books on this topic. https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/the-mixed-asian-metaphor.html
She concludes: “And if there is one conclusion to be reached from the mixed Asian experience, it is this: People want race. They want race to win them something, to tell them everything they were never told; they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be.”
It reminded me of how some white college students are envious of their POC peers who can join associations for their race or ethnicity, groups that bond and celebrate their heritage. While being white, for good reason, means you don’t get to do that.
Did the guy you know seek "the Chinese language and customs of his parents" or did he simply go to college and decided he needed to reject the "western" identity? From the way he mellowed after going to China and realizing that the character of the west presented to him was wrong, I think it's the latter.
I honestly don't see a lot of daylight between the anti-assimilationists and all those straight people who are now calling themselves queer. All this does is further confirm that colleges push an ideology that is just as othering as any that came before, they just flip the script. Of course you wouldn't embrace a Scandinavian identity, that's just another bunch of white people, you became a Marxist. I became a goth.
our colleges aren't teaching people to be accepting, they're teaching a certain group of people to hate themselves. And then we wonder why the other students keep openly displaying hate for any dissent on our campuses.
It's extraordinarily difficult to actually see past your own culture. Even when we try to turn away from our own culture, we usually end up embracing a critique that is itself well-established in the culture. Actual other cultures don't critique our culture on its own terms, they simply fail to understand it at all and critique the bastardized version that exists in their head (if they care about us at all).
A great example of this are atheists that embrace all the standard Puritan arguments against traditional religious expression, not realizing they're just retreading the same ground that was walked 400 years ago. Or decolonizers who recreate the liberal/romantic nationalist tradition from first principles. Even as they reject the outputs of the tradition they think they hate, they can't help but follow the same patterns of thought and the value systems that sit underneath it all.
My mom, aunt, grandmother, and great grandmother all immigrated here from a European country (my mom was a citizen by virtue of my grandfather, but she wasn't born in the US and English is not her first language). All of them, my grandmother in particular, were/are the prototypical flag waving immigrant, and find the idea bizarre that anyone would ever want to be anywhere else. I mention this only because even though not Asian American, I think I have some insight.
Anyway I have honestly always found the modern incarnation of this angst as a sort of left coded, America skeptical sentiment, as a bit bizarre and at times veering into its own ironic and hilarious ethnocentrism. The reality that I think offends both nativist conservative and progressive sensibilities is that the (voluntary) immigrant experience really cuts across cultures and place of origin. Every one takes its lumps, has its 2nd and 3rd generation 'back to roots' movements, and then settles into Big Macs and NFL with the rest of us. While I certainly don't want to minimize anyone's personal journey, I think this is a place where getting away from universalism really is harmful for the culture, and leads to a lot of unhealthy political projects.
Nice post...resonates with me as I've had many Asian American friends with similar experiences going back to high school and college. I met my now-wife (a children of Indian immigrants that came in the 70's) in college and watched her go through this, although she has always accepted not speaking an Indian language fluently and never felt particularly at home in India. For awhile she was learning formal Hindi but relatives in India would make fun of her for talking like a schoolteacher.
It has been wild to see how our mixed children deal with it. They have grown up much more around their Indian-American relatives. One identifies as white and the other as Indian-American, and they even argue about it. Most people in school and our community assume they are Latino until they know them. Lots of interesting conversations...they of course reserve the right to make fun of either of their parents along racialized lines when it suits their needs!
I think something missed in this missive about paradox of assimilation is *why* immigrants immigrated. Simply, to give up your native language, culture, friends, family, cuisine, architecture, literature, weather, familiarity, virtually every instinct you’ve honed from birth… requires a level of desperation and dedication that many children of immigrants don’t see.
My father immigrated from Hungary, not on a lark, or because America seemed cool, or following a girl or work, but because it was 1939 and he was Jewish, and because he had applied to immigrate to the US in 1926 (that time, as a lark!) - so, by sheer luck, he was able to do so. My uncle walked to (what is now) Israel. Their mom went through the predecessor of what became death camps, back when they merely wanted Jews not to be here (as opposed to explicitly killing them), lost everything but her life, and came here as well. The rest of my father’s family died.
I went through that phase, when I wondered why my father subtly discouraged me from learning Hungarian (“it’s a useless language, spoken by only seven million other bastards in the world”), why he explicitly told my mom not to convert to Judaism (“I don’t want him (i.e. me) to have ‘Jew’ stamped on any piece of paper”), and not understanding why he didn’t want me to… for lack of a better phrase, embrace my roots.
I’m older now, about 20 years older than my dad when he landed here. He never set foot in Europe again, quite by choice. I have, and I think I understand better how wrenchingly miserable, and hard, and lonely it is to immigrate. It’s not romantic, it’s not a story for a nice film somewhere, its a trauma and tragedy even under the best of circumstances where you can’t go home again because you don’t have one any more, because it doesn’t exist except in your memory. And so your pour everything you have into making this new, artificial home as real and safe and permanent as possible, and at all costs, try to shelter your kids from ever experiencing what you did…
…and so, unsurprisingly, being sheltered from that trauma, they grow up a little mystified why you don’t embrace your “native” culture, and why you didn’t raise them to share it.
Honestly, if it happens to everyone maybe it’s better to figure out how to get over it rather than working to make your racial heritage your defining characteristic.
That doesn’t mean you don’t get to claim an ethnic origin (if you’re so inclined). But I think that in America it makes more sense to try and claim your place *here* rather than demanding special privileges because your parents undertook a journey (immigration) that is ultimately the defining myth of this country.
And I say this as a first generation American with a refugee father.
"As in all things, I think the only righteous urge in this conversation is to complicate where others would simplify."
I think that's why a lot of us come here.
Thanks for bringing attention to this, Freddie. I wrote about the exact same thing myself: https://societystandpoint.substack.com/p/immigrant-valorizing. Many immigrants valorize these colleges, only for their kids to come back with strange, Western ideas.
This is an old tale. My grandmother emigrated from Italy in the 1920's and refused to teach her children Italian in order that they would assimilate better. They in turn were resentful that they didn't learn Italian or more about Italy. Many people I've talked to over the years have told similar stories, regardless of ancestry.
I've always guessed this phenomenon stems at least partly from the American suburbs being a cultural wasteland. Among white people, I'd see kids who grew up in a suburban subdivision with parents who worked for an insurance company lean hard into hunting, fishing and being a country boy. I've seen white kids from the same background lean into "weeb" culture, Black culture, a specific ethnicity (Italian, Irish, Polish, Jewish, etc.) that may or may not show up if they took 23 and Me. Hell I've seen kids learn elvish and base their identity around that. I think there is an innate human need to be part of a culture, and the American suburbs have no culture, so it's inevitable kids of all races in the suburbs will look into their roots to find culture. It's definitely more complicated for non-white kids, but I've seen non-white kids from the suburbs make a similar transformation, and embrace their ethnic roots when they go to college, seemingly searching for some sort of culture. I plan to raise my kids in a city, and while they may have a smaller house and "worse schools" than I did, I hope they're less bored than I was, and exposed to more art and culture. A lot of American cities are sort of culturally dead too, but I still think they're better than a lot of suburbs, which can be really, really sterile.
Parents and children often have different, even competing, interests. In your friend's situation, it sounds like he felt rootless and alienated in America despite it being his birthplace. Being a Gen X or older Millennial Asian American guy would've had its unique set of alienating experiences too, which would explain why he was able to find some comfort—even if imagined—in Asia. His parents would've regarded America differently though, because whatever hardships they'd had in China, they did feel a sense of home, even if they had their issues with it.
It can swing the other way too, with immigrant parents who loved their formative years and youth back home so much that they demand that their kids want the same upbringing. Either way, being the same race or even being in the same family doesn't mean your motivations and interests will be perfectly aligned.
I think it's mostly contextual. It was all fun and games making Jewish jokes to my brethren in New York before college. We get the jokes. Once in college in the Midwest and finding much of their knowledge of Jews came from Cartman I was less inclined to make those jokes, now that I was an outsider. At first what I was once forgiving of (such as first week of college when over dinner someone told me he was surprised I chewed with my mouth closed because he thought all Jews chewed with it open) briefly morphed into a Jewish "nationalist" phase where I strongly identified with an identity I had taken for granted before (lasted about a year before I got over it). But again, all these inclinations were determined by exterior forces. Feeling left out and alienated is a very strong and hurtful feeling. How one reacts to it is unpredictable.
“the urge of immigrant parents to push their children to assimilate is entirely understandable, and so is the desire of those children to reconnect with their heritage” - I think the opposite way round is common too (if anything, I think it’s more common, and it’s only a minority of second-generation immigrants undergo an awakening in college that makes them identify more than they used to with their parents’ culture, but I don’t have any stats on this). Thinking about my second-generation immigrant friends who I have had conversations about this stuff with, most of them grew up wanting to be more American while their parents were alarmed at how Americanized they had become.
On a domestic level, this happens to Native Americans. When the distant Natives, the ones who grew up away from tribal communities and customs, attempt to "find themselves," they often end up becoming fundamentalists. Even the ones with one Indian grandparent (or even one Indian great-grandparent) will present t themselves as only being "indigenous" rather than as a descendant of standard American assimilation.
"For one thing, I’m opposed to patriotism in principle, for citizens of any country."
Is this different from "I'm opposed to any special love and loyalty towards one's own biological family, for any member of any family"?
Andrea Long Chu wrote an interesting essay about a similar topic, how mixed Asian kids (usually half white, half Asian) grow up and struggle to connect with their culture. The essay discusses several fiction books on this topic. https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/the-mixed-asian-metaphor.html
She concludes: “And if there is one conclusion to be reached from the mixed Asian experience, it is this: People want race. They want race to win them something, to tell them everything they were never told; they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be.”
It reminded me of how some white college students are envious of their POC peers who can join associations for their race or ethnicity, groups that bond and celebrate their heritage. While being white, for good reason, means you don’t get to do that.
Did the guy you know seek "the Chinese language and customs of his parents" or did he simply go to college and decided he needed to reject the "western" identity? From the way he mellowed after going to China and realizing that the character of the west presented to him was wrong, I think it's the latter.
I honestly don't see a lot of daylight between the anti-assimilationists and all those straight people who are now calling themselves queer. All this does is further confirm that colleges push an ideology that is just as othering as any that came before, they just flip the script. Of course you wouldn't embrace a Scandinavian identity, that's just another bunch of white people, you became a Marxist. I became a goth.
our colleges aren't teaching people to be accepting, they're teaching a certain group of people to hate themselves. And then we wonder why the other students keep openly displaying hate for any dissent on our campuses.
It's extraordinarily difficult to actually see past your own culture. Even when we try to turn away from our own culture, we usually end up embracing a critique that is itself well-established in the culture. Actual other cultures don't critique our culture on its own terms, they simply fail to understand it at all and critique the bastardized version that exists in their head (if they care about us at all).
A great example of this are atheists that embrace all the standard Puritan arguments against traditional religious expression, not realizing they're just retreading the same ground that was walked 400 years ago. Or decolonizers who recreate the liberal/romantic nationalist tradition from first principles. Even as they reject the outputs of the tradition they think they hate, they can't help but follow the same patterns of thought and the value systems that sit underneath it all.
My mom, aunt, grandmother, and great grandmother all immigrated here from a European country (my mom was a citizen by virtue of my grandfather, but she wasn't born in the US and English is not her first language). All of them, my grandmother in particular, were/are the prototypical flag waving immigrant, and find the idea bizarre that anyone would ever want to be anywhere else. I mention this only because even though not Asian American, I think I have some insight.
Anyway I have honestly always found the modern incarnation of this angst as a sort of left coded, America skeptical sentiment, as a bit bizarre and at times veering into its own ironic and hilarious ethnocentrism. The reality that I think offends both nativist conservative and progressive sensibilities is that the (voluntary) immigrant experience really cuts across cultures and place of origin. Every one takes its lumps, has its 2nd and 3rd generation 'back to roots' movements, and then settles into Big Macs and NFL with the rest of us. While I certainly don't want to minimize anyone's personal journey, I think this is a place where getting away from universalism really is harmful for the culture, and leads to a lot of unhealthy political projects.
Nice post...resonates with me as I've had many Asian American friends with similar experiences going back to high school and college. I met my now-wife (a children of Indian immigrants that came in the 70's) in college and watched her go through this, although she has always accepted not speaking an Indian language fluently and never felt particularly at home in India. For awhile she was learning formal Hindi but relatives in India would make fun of her for talking like a schoolteacher.
It has been wild to see how our mixed children deal with it. They have grown up much more around their Indian-American relatives. One identifies as white and the other as Indian-American, and they even argue about it. Most people in school and our community assume they are Latino until they know them. Lots of interesting conversations...they of course reserve the right to make fun of either of their parents along racialized lines when it suits their needs!