The Accidental Asian, Essay Example

If I had to define assimilation, I would define it as “learning to adapt to the ways and means of another culture or country without losing yourself in the process.”  Sometimes, though, the two parts of that definition can come into conflict. Sometimes, indeed, it feels like the two parts of that definition are not always possible.

I have had some first-hand experience with the process of assimilation.  I was lucky enough, when I was younger, to live for a time in Guatemala.  It was a small city in the highlands of the country named Quetzaltenago, and it was roughly half-Hispanic and half-Mayan, so there were two distinct cultures that required adapting to.  I did not speak very much Spanish – my vocabulary consisted of 20 words or so, the most important of which seemed to be “que?” and “lo siento!”.  I have never had problems expressing myself before and to have so few words at my disposal to do this was dismaying. Many times, especially at first when I was very limited in my vocabulary and had to point and grunt to get what I needed, I felt stupid.  I was not used to feeling stupid and it was a very unpleasant experience for me, not one which I hope to go through again.

Slowly, I adapted.  I was the only white person living in that particular suburb and at first I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb (which I probably did); eventually, though, this sense of being an outsider melted. My Spanish got better. I had certain cafes and tiendas in the neighborhood that I frequented; I shopped at the open-air market and had certain people who I bought tortillas from or tomatoes or what have you every week. I built up relationships. I became one of them.

I think I realized just how deeply I had become a part of the culture when, as I was heading to the market one morning, I saw what was obviously an American tourist coming down the sidewalk towards me and I thought, “Great, some damned gringo” and walked across the street so I would not have to meet them.  Then, a moment later, I realized with a shock: “Hey, I’m a gringo, too.” But I did not feel like one. At least, not at the time.

When I got back to the United States I suffered a bit from reverse culture shock, because for the first few months especially it was my own country that seemed alien to me: I remember, since I was used to shopping in open air markets, how strange it felt to go down the aisles at Walmart and have so many choices. I remember how strange it felt to be able to put my clothes in a washing machine and a dryer to clean them, when I had been doing laundry for a year by hand on a concrete sink called a pila then hanging it up on a clothesline to dry.

Eventually, I got over that feeling of strangeness, but I do think that assimilation is both a process of gain and a process of loss simultaneously: you gain a better understanding of the world when you live in a place that is radically different from your own.  As your language skills develop, you learn a whole new set of words for objects you have always grown up with, whole new phrases to express yourself that might not be in your native tongue.  You eat strange foods that you have never tasted before, you see a place with plants, animals, and geographic features that are wholly different from your own. In my instance, I went from living in the American Midwest to the Guatemalan highlands, in high, arid land surrounded by volcanoes and deep, steep valleys that were filled with wild calla lilies in the wet season.  You are surrounded, even, by an entirely different set of sounds: the sounds I remember best from my days there are the water splashing in the fountain the courtyard (most of the houses are hacienda-style, a holdover from Spanish conquest) and women in the street slapping tortillas together and baking them on hot stones.  I would never have experienced any of that if I had not lived abroad.

However, assimilation is also a process of loss, of shedding or smoothing out parts of yourself that are not compatible with the new culture in which you are living.  In my case, because I was surrounded entirely by people who did not speak English, I was forced to shed my language, and until I had to do that, I had no idea just how much a part of a person’s identity their native language is.  Though I eventually got fairly fluent in Spanish and even learned a little of the Mayan Ki’che dialect, I could never express myself as freely as I did in English and this was a source of great frustration for me.  Also, I had to give up some of my more materialistic tendencies: I was living in a very poor district; there were no malls or traditional stores there, no place to buy a lot of stuff.  So I went without recreational shopping for a while and honestly, I feel like that was not a bad thing to give up.

So can you hybridize, so to speak?  Can you walk some fine line between the world of your past and the world of your present? I think the answer is yes, but only because you really have no other choice: even if I had stayed in Guatemala permanently, I still would have always seen it through the filter of my own, distinctly American values and experiences, since that was the intellectual “baggage” I brought with me.  None of us, I think, can see the world except through the experiences of our past to a certain extent.  It is our experiences, our backgrounds, our history that lead us to our own distinctive worldview, and I believe that that is true no matter which culture you have grown up in.

So it was with great interest that I read Eric Liu’s paper, “Notes of a Native Speaker.”  I had to admit that I laughed out loud when I read the criteria by which he considers himself to be white, because in many instances it is a perfect description of me: I love bed and breakfasts when I am on vacation, I used to shop at Crate and Barrel with an almost religious regularity, and I have frequently described myself as an NPR addict. I believe that Liu nailed it on the head with his description of typical Anglo culture.

I found some of what Liu said to be just the opposite of my own experiences with assimilation, because I was essentially assimilating in the different direction than he was.  For Liu, assimilation is “fixed in whiteness”, but in my case I was shedding my whiteness and taking on aspects of an ethnic group to which, racially, I did not belong.  In other words, while Liu strived to become more white, I became less white during my stay in Central America.

Liu also talks about assimilation in terms of class, and for him, part of that assimilation was “learning the ways of the upper middle class”.  For me, again, my assimilation process took me in precisely the opposite direction: I come from an upper middle class background, and I had instead to learn the ways of the very impoverished, of people who lived at the very margins of survival at times, and were always precariously close to tipping over the edge into real, abysmal poverty. When confronted with this, many of my upper middle class values suddenly seemed, at best, to be naïve and shallow but at worst to be almost grotesquely insensitive to and willfully ignorant of the way most of the world’s population is forced to live.  When you see children playing naked or only in diapers in a street full of broken glass and garbage (this was a frequent sight in some of the neighborhoods where I lived), then suddenly following the latest fashions in Vogue or having a wardrobe so big you can literally pull out outfits you did not even know you had or remember buying, seems like a slap in a face to people who are living on the margins of society. In many ways, then, my experience of assimilation was an almost completely the inverse to Liu’s.

Another thing I found different in my experience compared with Liu’s is that he likened his assimilation to “the second leg of a relay race” and commented that, years later, “it was as if I had come round the bend and realized I am no longer sure where I am running or why”.  I think partly the difference between his experience and mine was that I did not have my parents living with my in Guatemala and I knew that my move would not be a permanent one; in other words, I was not in it for the long haul like Liu, nor did I have the pressure (perceived or otherwise) of my parents to encourage me to assimilate into Guatemalan society. Just the opposite, in fact – my parents hated the fact that I had moved there and spent most of their time begging, bribing or cajoling me to come home.

There were some things that Liu wrote about, though, that I could really relate to – that perhaps anyone in a foreign country could relate to. He talks about being perceived as rude by some of his Anglo friends and their families because he was not aware, at first, of the etiquette in American culture. The fact is, when you are living abroad, it is all too easy to do something that is considered abominably rude and have no idea you are even being offensive because you have not learned the subtleties of the culture in which you are now living. For instance, Americans often leave food on their plates at dinner if they cannot eat everything and no one thinks much about this in our country: in Guatemala, where people live so terribly close to the edge of starvation, it is considered the height of bad manners to waste your host’s food. I had to have this explained to me when I first moved to Quetzaltenago and it was a lesson I took to heart: I was careful to eat everything on my plate even if I felt like I was busting my stomach lining to do it. I did not want to offend the people I was now living among.

Another thing about Liu’s essay that really spoke to me was his admission that “…like an amphibian that has just breached the shore, I could not help inhaling this wondrous new atmosphere”. The first day I was in Guatemala, I remember watching this Mayan woman coming into the market with a table on top of her head, piled with mangoes and bananas and papayas, and some kinds of fruits I had never seen before and did not know the name of.  She was in a very colorful handmade clothes of her people and she was like no one I had ever seen before.  I remember just watching her in utter fascination simply because she was so incredibly different.

The similarities and differences between my experiences with assimilation and Liu’s are just indicative of the fact that the process of expatriation is different for everyone. It is done for a number of different reasons and goes in a number of different directions, whether that be gaining status in society or giving your status up. I also think that assimilation really is both a process of gain and one of loss. You do come out intellectually richer for your experience of living abroad, and you gain an understanding of the world that you simply cannot achieve any other way.  However, whether you return to your native country (as I did) or remain permanently in your country of adoption (as Liu did), you find that aspects of your culture and upbringing that you have shed do not so easily return to you again, even if you want them to.  Even though I returned to the States many, many years ago, I find that my perception of the world has changed forever, and there are certain behaviors (like recreational shopping) that I simply cannot indulge in with the same fervor that I did before I left the country.  I believe now that the greatest danger in going abroad is not the prospect of violence or the picking up some tropical disease, but in not returning home as the same person you were when you left.  But that risk is part of the adventure.

Works Cited

Liu, E. “Notes from a Native Speaker”.  The Accidental Asian.  New York: Random House. 2007. Print.