On Ascriptive and Acquisitional Americanness: The Accidental Asian and the Illogic of Assimilation

ublished in 1998, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker concludes a century of Asian American autobiography riddled with the anxiety of national belonging.1 Intuiting a powerful Orientalism that renders being Asian and American conceptually and experientially incompatible, Eric Liu dismisses his biological inheritance as "accidental" while deliberately affirming his "nativity" both to the English language and the geopolitical sphere of the United States.2 His poignant reflection on the chance elements of one's being and the transformative processes of one's becoming has led an enthusiastic Henry Louis Gates Jr. to proclaim the book, after Richard Wright's Black Boy, "a major contribution to the literature that defines what it means to be an American" (dust jacket).