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

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