S. Kurup & Lisa Lowe

There’s a lot of issues that Lisa Lowe discusses in her article from the 90’s that are still very relevant today. One of them being assimilation, different generations assimilate differently. My mom doesn’t see things the way I see them. Our experiences aren’t the same and we don’t fully understand the different issues we had to go through. We do connect in other ways though. My mom has taught me all about my Thai culture. That’s another thing, there’s no one way to define culture. There’s different cultures and subcultures and everyone connects to their own ethnicity differently. My idea of Thai culture is different from my brother’s ideas of Thai culture because we grew up experiencing it differently. Another thing is I feel like my parents and relatives try to connect with me and they try to assimilate with American culture, but they can’t quite grasp it. They don’t want to assimilate because they think they won’t be as “Asian” or their ethnicity anymore. They don’t think they’ll still be as Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai anymore because they adapted to the American culture. That's just my personal experience with my family. That doesn’t mean one of us is wrong, we just experience it differently. Lisa Lowe mentions, “Asian populations in the United States were managed by exclusion acts, bars from citizenship, quotas, and internment, all of which made use racialist constructions of Asian origin groups as homogeneous.” (pg. 68) The United States excluded Asians from many things. They weren’t treated fairly for a long time. I liked the monologue and seeing different ethnicity's portrayed in real life situations. Seeing how other ethnicity's especially Asians are treated is relatable. I loved being able to read something I could relate to personally, the Siam part in the monologue. The ending of the monologue was powerful because even though the little girl was granted American citizenship she wanted to have "blue eyes" so she can look "American" so others will treat her like an American. Although she's already American. This part specifically relates to Lowe's article because there's no one way to define and experience culture. There's no one way to look "American."