Lisa Low and Immigration Act

In the article “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences” by Lisa Lowe, it talks about the diversity within the Asian American community.  Besides the usual narrative of filial piety and intergenerational conflict, there are more narratives involving gender, economic condition, class differences and racism.  By using filial piety and intergenerational conflict as the main narrative for Asian American community, it implies the notion that there are fixed characteristics of Asian American.  The characteristics that represents Asian Americans are permanent and they never go through any forms of development and change.  However, the identity that is form in the Asian American community goes through various formation.  There are many ways that contribute to individuals’ identity.  Hence, the process of identity formation involves heterogeneity, hybridity and multiplicity.  In this case, I have heard many narratives specifically about filial piety and intergenerational conflict and I could resonate with these narratives.   However, there is masking of other narratives that makes up the Asian American identity, which involves class, gender and racism.  This shows that the characteristics of Asian American are not fixed because it consists of diverse group of people with different experiences and identity formation. 

                  In the Immigrant Acts: on Asian American Cultural Politics, there are dialogues of immigrants who assimilated in American through various ways.  They have their own perception of what “American” was ought to be life.  For instance, in the “Fat Family” scene the speaker mentioned that he never saw the Statue of Liberty which is big symbolism of the United States.  The Statue of Liberty represents freedom and the speaker only encounter fast food restaurants in the United States.  They see this more than the famous statue.  In this case, each immigration stories are different from one another and how each encountering represents the hidden stories that are never mentioned on a daily basis.  We hear a lot of stories about the negative perception of immigration but never hear the full stories of immigration from the immigration perspective.  So it was really interesting to hear it from the sources themselves because they are telling their own truth of immigration. 

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