Essay On Asian American Experience

When Asian came to America— a place where full of unfamiliar faces, speak different language, have different belief and culture, how would they respond and adapt to these changes? This essay investigates on Asian American experience in terms of culture, racial discrimination, culture assimilation and confliction, and lost of identity through diverse motions in four Asian American poems- “Eating Alone”, “Eating Together”, and “Persimmons” by Li-Young Lee, and “The Lost Sister” by Cathy Song. From the motions or movement in the poems, we can further look into their life and feeling of being an Asian American. In “Eating Alone” and “Eating Together”, speaker would like to express his yearning towards his death father and convey the hierarchy of a Chinese family. In “Persimmons”, speaker claims his unfortunate childhood experience to carry out the theme of racial discrimination and culture

Acculturation can be defined as the "cultural assimilation, learning, and adoption of cultural patterns of the host group" (Kim et aI., 1996, p. 96). In “Eating Together”, “my mother who will taste the sweetest meat of the head” (Lee 5-6) this shows the change in hierarchy of an Asian family. In a traditional Asian family, normally after the death of father, the elder son would hold the authority of the family. However, from “Eating Together”, speaker’s mother eat the head of the meat means she held the authority of the family. We can see that women played a more important role in the family. It may be the result of the influence of the Western culture. In terms of language, in “Persimmons”, “Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.” (Lee 23) Chinese is the mother language of the speaker. Thus, speakers suppose should speak Chinese more fluently than English. However, when he taught his wife Chinese, he only remembered some simple Chinese, he was now being assimilated by Western that he forgot his mother