Asian American Identity – Part I

Racial Prejudice



Asian Americans were hurting from the effects of racial prejudice. They reluctantly acknowledged that thought they felt like Americans, behaved like Americans, and shared the prevailing cultural values and norms, the majority of their fellow countrymen treated them, including those born and raised in the United States, as unwelcome foreigners. Excluded by mainstream society, they were in American culture, but not of it.



Some of them had tried so frustratingly to transform themselves physically into European Americans. Amy Tan, the well-known novelist, recalled that as a youngster she had placed a clothes pin on her nose, presumably to make it more like the aquiline noses of her European American friends. Edward Iwata, one of Asian American journalists, confessed to having had an “eye and nose job” in an ill-advised attempt to make himself look more European American; afterward, he realized that it was “psychic surgery, an act of mutilation, a symbolic suicide.”