Choices Within this Melting pot
The passage stroke a chord with me. Although I didn’t get to choose to reconstruct my identity, the interview I did last quarter with Chinese American peers generated the resonance. It reveals to me that individuals’ identities are not always fixed and taken for granted, instead many of them consistently try to alter themselves to cater into their communities. The experiences with them indeed confused meat first: why most of Chinese Americans I encountered strive to emphasize their American identity.
As an international student, I usually see the sense of superiority within Asian American, especially within the second migration, as they were born with American identity and loosely attached to their origin. Over the time I spent with them, I felt their emphasis on their American part. They tried to emphasize the existence of their American identity, thus differentiating themselves from the public, especially in front of international Asian peers. It seems to me that deep down, they unconsciously formed a racial hierarchy, and American category was on the tip of this racial pyramid.
However, after the interview, I realized that for some of them, the main drive behind the claim “I’m American” is the desire to fit in the crowd and the fear of inferiority. They grew up within a environment where everyone is different from them: they can’t really get along with the normal beauty structure, they can’t culturally engage into their social group at start, and they have to consciously change themselves to cope with cultural differences because “you are minority”. We see news relates to black, white people or Latino American, but there are comparatively few coverage of national policies addressing Asian American racial-wellbeing. Statistically, Asian American vote is only 5 percents. Some of them feel inferior owning to the constructed assumptions according to individuals’ race, such as“Asian are suppose master science and math”. The socially formed racial “common sense” pushes them to crumble under overwhelming pressure and keeps stressing their identity-American.
As far as I am concerned, individuals are not tightly associated with and given with specific cultural communities. Facing this American melting pot-diversive ethical communities-it is social stress and cognitive inferiority that alter their decisions of whether entering one’s community or not.
