Sociologist and activist Bianca Mabute-Louie has wrestled with a conundrum for her entire life: Is it better to assimilate into mainstream American culture, or embrace one’s own heritage and, thus, stand out? In her scholarly yet personal book, Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the 21st Century, Mabute-Louie finds these options to be a false binary. Twining memoiristic reflections with Asian American political and cultural history, her book proposes a third, freeing alternative: becoming unassimilable.
Mabute-Louie grew up in California’s San Gabriel Valley, an “ethnoburb” rich in Chinese groceries, language academies, churches and small businesses. She describes her popo (maternal grandmother) moving to the area from Hong Kong after a stressful divorce in her 70s. Able to speak Cantonese, prepare her favorite foods and make new friends in California thanks to the robust Chinese community, Mabute-Louie’s popo quickly thrived. “My popo and the ethnoburb demonstrate that we can create our own power and belonging without learning English, participating in White institutions, and Americanizing,” she writes. “But it is a communal endeavor, one that requires everybody’s imagination and care.” Rather than an act of individualism, unassimilability is an “interdependent community of popos finding each other.”
The author builds her book’s central case by describing her personal experience coming to racial consciousness, and discussing key selections from Asian American history and culture. She details the contrast between her ethnoburb and her largely white private school, her complex relationship with Chinese American Christian culture, and the liberatory framework she found for herself in academia through Ethnic Studies. The interspersed Asian American history ranges from American immigration quotas and bans during World War II, to the origins of the “model minority” stereotype, to fights over affirmative action’s value and impact on Asian students, to political conflicts both among broader communities of color and within Asian communities. At each chapter’s end, the author’s illustrations and comics provide bonus reflections.
Mabute-Louie shows how being unassimilable provides opportunity for wholeness, mission and community. “I am not ‘torn between two cultures,’ as they say, because I occupy a third space in the diaspora,” Mabute-Louie writes, “from where a collective identity emerges that is neither repulsed by foreignness nor longing for Whiteness, but adamantly unassimilable.”
