Assimilation
Pick up just about any book on the immigrant experience and one of its themes will be the difficulty and complexity of assimilation into a foreign culture. The way this particular book about the immigrant experience handles the theme almost verges on the grotesque, however. The teenage protagonist of the novel grows up in a family in which Korean culture comes to be viewed as a contributing factor to its dysfunction and therefore the process of assimilation transforms into one in which her own native culture comes to take on the negative attributes of “foreign” that are usually the domain of the American culture to which she is feeling a strong bond.
Family Dysfunction
As indicated, the lack of domestic tranquility provides for the common defense of the children against ironic expectations of their authoritarian and abusive father. The patriarchal aspect of his native culture leads Mr. Park to continually push against his son to act a like a man by being strong when his actions reveal himself to be one whose use of strength derives from a fundamental weakness of character. The constantly humiliation of his son strongly implies a cyclical nature at work: Mr. Park learned to be abusive from his own father who learned from his own father and so. The question that lingers is whether the cycle will stop with the father or inevitably be passed down to another generation.
The American Dream
What the novel also teaches is that the myth of the American Dream remains very hardy and robust in immigrant circles. Apparently, the reality that worker wages have been in a state of utter stagnation since the 1980’s while executive pay has shot through the roof hasn’t been in the memos making the rounds. The American Dream asserts that hard work is all that is needed to carve out a little piece of success in the United States. That may have been true—possibly—when Lady Liberty’s lamp first glowed in the harbor, but it certainly is not true anymore. Asian immigrants in particular have come to buy into the idea that exceeding the norm in academic hard work is key to success and this is portrayed in the pressure upon the children to become super students. This pressure may possibly lead to success in the long-term, but it definitely leads to stress in the short-term. The American Dream for most immigrants—Asians included—usually winds up being more than a single step away and it well past time to bury this myth once and for all.
