Fang Sui Yong: A Sociological Analysis

During her transformation into an “American girl” Fang Sui Yong was forced to navigate through an onslaught of unfamiliar expectations, foreign words, and strange, new sights and people, all hurling at her a million miles per second. Her journey was complex and in order to be thoroughly analyzed, one must view it through the lense of the sociological imagination which C. Wright Mills defines as "an awareness of the relationship between a person's behavior and experience and the wider culture that shaped the person's choices and perceptions." In this essay I will argue how Fang Sui Yong's Americanization was informed by sociological concepts such as culture,race, and Conflict Theory.
As many of us know, an American Girl® is a kind of doll that …show more content…
They have no good answer to her question as to why a white family would want to adopt a Chinese girl who looks nothing like them. The Sadowskys are largely unaware of race in their daily lives due to the privilege they experience due to being white. They rarely, if ever, experience double consciousness which W.E.B. DuBois, African American sociologist defined in his autoethnography The Souls of Black Folk as the necessity of always looking at oneself through the eyes of a majority white society and "measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt". While DuBois applied the concept of double consciousness to African Americans and Faith is not black, she is still of a racial minority in the United States and will always have to live with the burden of double consciousness. She was forced to move from a country where she was of the ethnic majority and likely never had to really think about her race critically either, like the Sadowskys, but, unfortunately it is one of the social norms that she must adjust to with her new environment. Faith will grow up inevitably experiencing people having assumptions and stereotypes about her culture and race which her white adoptive family may not be able to