Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 412

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Stay True," by Hua Hsu.

For a brief spell, my father toyed with anglicizing his name and asked to be called Eric, though he soon realized that assimilation of that order didn’t suit him. You were free to name your children after U.S. presidents. Or you might name them something unpronounceable, since they would never be president anyway.

My wariness about Ken was compounded by the fact that he was Asian American, like me. All the previous times I had met poised, content people like Ken, they were white. It’s one of those obscure parts of an already obscure identity that Japanese American kids can seem like aliens to other Asians, untroubled, largely oblivious to feeling like outsiders. They gave those feelings up long ago. Japanese American families like Ken’s have often been in the country for several generations. The children of recent immigrants feel discomfort at a molecular level, especially when doing typical things, like going to the pizza parlor on a Friday night, playacting as Americans. We are certain you’ve forgotten our names. The Japanese Americans I’d grown up around had parents who were into football and fishing, grandparents whose stories of the internment camps were recited with no trace of accent. Some of them had never even been to Japan, and some, too, had family who fought against Japan in World War II. We all look alike, until you realize we don’t, and then you begin feeling that nobody could possibly seem more different.