The New Yorker:

The French sociologist Olivier Roy believes that “deculturation” is sweeping the world, with troubling consequences.

By Joshua Rothman

My mother, who is Chinese, grew up in Malaysia and came to America for college, in the nineteen-seventies. She and my American dad divorced when I was small, and this allowed her to make her suburban household as Malaysian as possible. She and my grandmother, who often visited, spoke a dialect of Hokkien, their regional language, that was used by no one else we knew. On weekends, we went to Asian grocery stores in search of niche ingredients for Malaysian food, which we spent whole days preparing. My grandma practiced Tai Chi in the mornings and, for my birthday, gave me a set of Baoding balls—small metal spheres with dragons on them—so that I could learn to swirl them around in my palm, exercising the muscles in my hands. She stuffed sticky rice into triangular packets made from lotus leaves, and hung them in our kitchen until they were ready to cook.

During my early childhood, it never occurred to me that any of this could mean anything to anyone. It was just the way we lived. My non-Asian friends were interested in non-Asian things—playing guitar, professional wrestling, R.V. trips—that meant nothing to me; the mutual opacity of our cultures seemed normal. It was only as I got older that I began to see how cultural facts could have communicative significance. In middle school, my friends started viewing my Asianness through the lenses of “The Karate Kid” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”; in high school, they discerned looming associations with math and computers. The meaning of being American also dawned on me: somehow, at the nexus of TGI Fridays, Bruce Springsteen, and my weekend soccer games, there was an aura of wholesome, heroic normalcy—an ordinariness meant to be admired.

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