Assimilation and Abandonment of Ethnic Heritage in Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to explore epistemological and ontological tensions and conflicts by an Asian American writer's desire for assimilation in narrating the effacement of ethnic memory and heritage. Ethnic memory as collective or sometimes individual is often regarded as a key concern to confirm ethnic subjects' identities with differences and grasp the politics of oppression, marginalization, and resistance implicated in the memory. The memory, however, is not always considered in this way in Asian American writers' politics of identity. They often manipulatively abandon their own ethnic memory in a way to reject ethnic positionality defined by their biological elements and redefine them within American norms. Eric Liu, a second generation of American-born Chinese American uses his memory of family, focusing on his father, and even collective memory of Asian Americans in order to detach himself from ethic heritage and view assimilation not as an treacherous choice to abandon his or her ethnic heritage but as an optional and liberating way to achieve political, social and cultural power dominated by whites. He even suggests the politics of identity is always "the degree of in-between" which cannot be determined by a single determinant. By saying in this way, he resists being defined within the term Chinese which may be determined by his biological elements. His narrative of self-reinvention, however, does not obviously detach himself from what he rejects. To disconnect him from ethnic memory of the past which continues to connect him to ethnic heritage, he incessantly works to detach himself from his ethnic memory of Chinese immigrant parents and integrates himself into pure American cultural and social norms. Rather than being apart from his ethnicity, however, he is problematically placed between his own ethnic and American identity for undetachability of his ethnicity. He ironically returns to his father's memory when he needs to create his own American story. Moreover, his self-exploration on a new norm for Asian American subject ends with the scene of an interracial marriage as an ideal solution to erase dilemma of ethnicity. Rather than effacing the difference between his ethnicity and whiteness, his solution highlights his ironical subversion of his own ideas of ethnicity as optional and undetermined, for he is conscious of his own ethnicity and deliberately merges it into his wife's whiteness in the end.