help but question exactly what that means and exactly whose expectations he must live up to. Liu maintains that the girls he coveted considered him ôsub-par,ö so he tried to make himself into something ôdesirable.ö As he notes, ôIt was they who were sub-par, whose small-mindedness and veiled prejudice made them unworthy. My response, too, was to take refuge in my talentsàBut in the eyes of some, I suppose, I was just another æAsian over-achieverÆö (Liu, p. 43).
LiuÆs look at race and ethnicity is not just a view from an Asian American looking at white Americans. Liu argues that it is difficult to transcend race in American society without completely rejecting oneÆs heritage. He argues that Americans all too often fail to make distinctions other than those based on appearance. While appearance my link all Asians together in the view of most white Americans, it is also the way that Asians are most stigmatized. Underneath such prejudices and narrow views is the fact that different types of Asians approach assimilation in a different manner. In fact, different groups of Asians often view other Asians as distinct from themselves, something that Americans with their narrow views on ethnicity and race often overlook or ignore. Liu (p. 67-68) addresses the fact that Asian American is a new category of race or label that merges all Asians into one narrowly defined class of people, ôThirty-some years ago, there were no "Asian Americans." Not a single one. There were Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and so on: a disparate lot who shared only yellow-to-brown skin tones and the experience of bigotry that their pigmentation provoked.ö
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