Asian American Cultural Identity

Tethered amongst Tensions

Espiritu, Volpp, and Kim, albeit different in their analysis of how the cultural identity of Asian Americans is affected, share a common thread in that each author posits a framework of polarized racial and cultural ideologies that lay the groundwork for evaluating the tensions and contradictions for the Asian American position. These opposing ideologies serve as ‘poles’ or axis that evince the struggle Asian Americans are situated against as part of the diaspora within clashing White American culture. This essay will frame the Asian American culture identity through the concept of opposing poles as adopted from the readings of Espiritu, Volpp, and Kim and explain how specific individuals within AKA Don Bonus are …show more content…
In a very upbeat scene, distinct Asian music is playing from within the car where Don and his friends are cruising. He introduces the “guys” he hangs out with as the “gamblers”, named for their affinity for gambling in public spaces. His friends are either “Vietnamese” or “Chinese” and Don Bonus is the “only Cambodian guy in the group”. The scene then cuts to different vignettes of Bonus and his friends acting like normal American teenagers: engaging in activities such as cruising, shooting hoops, trading insults, and dressing in baggy hip hop clothes popularized at the time. Don and his friends are young students attending high school of different national backgrounds and histories, but can find social comfort in being Asian American students. As part of the Asian diaspora, these cross group alliances and friendships blur the crucial identity formations of the past, which may have demarcated these young men from each other in their national country. However, their adopted country constitutes as a transnational space where they can group together and redefine themselves in this subculture that has intersections with their own cultures and newly defining subculture and the American culture. The transformed cultural identities and “cross-group …show more content…
She brings up the charge of the “excessive culture” of Asian Americans, which negatively affects their “ability to be perceived as an American citizen”. She states that “attachments to culture- and specifically, a connection with a prior Asian national origin” brings with it “cultural practices” that contradict American citizenship. Volpp claims that pivotal to this argument is the presumptuous notion that “liberal universals” such as the normative White culture is “devoid of” the charge of culture while “racialized Asian immigrants” are “overladen with culture”. The two opposing outlooks are a progressive, normative level of culture defined through the lens of White-ness versus an archaic, static excessive culture of one’s native country. The idea that one could be seen through a lens of “excess”, that is the state of exceeding what is normal, is a fear for Asian Americans. It suggests that by clinging onto cultural practices, one is refusing to belong in the adopted country and receive its benefits. This is usually the desire to reach the American dream: the national ethos entailing ownership and upward mobility. Don Bonus describes his stunted relationship with his older brother of who he paints as his savior who carried him through the jungle during their escape from Cambodia. His present description of his brother is a stark