Dea Dean Borshay Liem Personal Heritage

Improved Essays
It is important to understand that one’s identity is often defined in relations to different histories—whether it be in textbook accounts, popular culture, family stories, etc. Official histories are a lot of erasure of racial incorporations and achievements of people of Asian decent. With this understanding, one can understand that personal memories are used to supplement national history and provide a nationalist ideology on the event and create an impact. Challenge the erasure and racial discrimination of the histories. Three texts--Dean Borshay Liem, First Person Plural (2000), Helen Zia, “From Nothing, A consciousness” (2000), and Lisa Chi Chen, “Seven Chinese Brothers, Revisited” (1995)—well represent the notion that personal perspectives have an impact on the nationalist ideology on an event. Government histories with Asian and exclusion acts created a stigma of people of Asian decent were treated and it resulted to them being treated as less than the Caucasian citizens. …show more content…
Throughout her life, she had a difficult time creating a bond between her and her non-biological parents because her histories were suppressed and ignored when she moved to America. Her parents created her history. Borshay felt as if she could not be completely honest with her new parents of how she was feeling about the process, despite it rooting her depression, because she felt they would find her being disrespectful for taking her in.
In Helen Zia’s essay “From Nothing, A Consciousness” (2000), her father tried to convey the sense of history with her. Her father provided two sets of narratives to rationalize and justify the placement of how it should fit. Zia was born here. The relationships
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