Dehumanization Of Immigrants In Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie

Ken Liu’s story The Paper Menagerie deals with a mixed race child who grows up resenting his Chinese heritage because of the constant ridicule he and his family are subject to living in a predominantly white community. His shame and self-degradation leads to his unavoidable assimilation into the American culture. This is a common narrative in the United States seeing as how many immigrants feel the need to adopt American values in order to create a new life for themselves and their families. Sometimes with assimilation comes this sense of learned hatred towards other races. Many European immigrants during the Third wave of immigration had to assimilate to reap the benefits that the United States had to offer; unfortunately they had to learn

about their position in the social hierarchy that was brutally enforced at the time. By assimilating, one is becoming American. Being American was equated to Whiteness. Ergo assimilation is the act of becoming white in America. The narrator in Paper Menagerie does all this to avoid ridicule and shame, but like so many who assimilate, he loses an important part of himself in the process.
The United States has this habit of dehumanizing foreigners.

That included whites that were from European countries. The Third Wave of Immigrants, from 1890s to 1920s, brought over white Europeans from Northern and Southeast Europe. Of course at the time, the term white was only applied to whites in the United States. Also race was, and still is, a social and political construction seeing as it was created to classify people into groups to create a hierarchy where the people at the top prospered, while those at the bottom worked to maintain the top’s prosperity. Newly arrived European immigrants were initially othered because they were different from American whites; however through federal and state funded programs they assimilated. Why were they allowed to assimilate? Well, they were not too different. In other words they were still white. Blacks and other people of color were at the bottom of the Unites States’s social hierarchy, so in order to maintain the system, only people who shared the same skin color as American whites were allowed to prosper. If European immigrants did not adhere to the rules than they would be at the same level as people of color. In other words assimilation was, “...a weapon of the majority for putting minorities at a disadvantage by forcing them to live by cultural standards that are not their own” (Remaking the American Mainstream, Alba). Immigrants of European descent were gradually Americanized and through generations, they lost touch with their cultures.It was essentially the birth of whiteness in America, and the start of learned

hatred.
To make it in America, one must adhere to American Customs.One such custom is to know, and sometime even enforce, the social hierarchy. For example, one of the reasons for Swedish success in [America]was their strategy to position themselves ‘as close to the Yankee identity and as far away from the Irish one as possible,’ and also [how they] quickly adopted American stereotypes of other immigrant groups” (A Mixture of People with Different Roots, Blanck). They essentially traded in their old culture, to be a part of the United States culture. This is basically what the narrator in The Paper Menagerie did as he grew up. He distanced himself from his Chinese culture to become “successful” and to avoid ridicule. The pressure of the majority is enough to morph a person’s ideals. During the Fourth wave of immigration, from after 1965, huge flocks of immigrants from Latin America and Asian countries came to the United States. Latinos, however, “...have recently become the largest minority group in the United States and may soon be the largest minority voting bloc in the country” (Companero o Extranjero?, Knoll). A minority that is becoming a majority can according to Benjamin R. Knoll’s article, can develop a sense of nativism. Nativism is the belief that the interests of native-born peoples should be put ahead those of immigrants. Latino’s have integrated so much into American culture that they too are exhibiting signs of prejudice and xenophobia towards foreigners because as Knoll says, “[t]hey might be just as likely to perceive the immigrant foreigners as an “out-group” posing a threat to America’s culture and way of life. Latino Americans may perceive immigration by other Latinos as a threat to their efforts to become accepted by mainstream American society” (Companero, Knoll). I believe that the reason that Latinos have integrated more successfully into American society, compared to other marginalized groups like say African-Americans, is because of skin tone. The lighter a person’s skin, the easier it is to join White American society. It can also be a form of White passing.
Assimilation is merely the erasing of a culture to fit an otherwise diverse one. American culture takes different aspects of cultures deriving from immigrants during each of the Great Waves; however, it adds the aspect of whiteness and nativism. In order to escape the ridicule of an anti-foreigner community, people assimilate to what is dictated. Like I have previously mentioned, the narrator in The Paper Menagerie chooses to abandon his Chinese customs, which ultimately hurt his mother, to live a comfortable life. The result being he became a non-white white man. Other people who have immigrated to the United States seeking better lives have also underwent this process. European Immigrants faded into what is now the white populace of America, and Latino-Americans have adopted this sense of resentment towards foreigners and a learned notion of nativism.