Asian-American Experience Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Asian-American Experience - Essay Example The two stories I had selected are Adrian Tomine's â€Å"Shortcomings† and the â€Å"Flower Drum Song† by Rodgers and Hammerstein. In the case of â€Å"Shortcomings†, the main part is played by Ben Tanaka (a Japanese-American) who is living in Berkeley, California and works at a movie theater. He considers himself more American than Japanese in his ways and he is always confounded and confused by his Japanese girlfriend named Miko Hayashi. He claims he could hardly understand Miko anymore by this statement: â€Å"Her name's Miko and, uh, she's Japanese, so you know ....† to hide his own feelings of sexual insecurity and misanthropy. Ben can be considered to be no better than an adolescent wrestling with his own internal demons about conflicts regarding his real identity (although he is now 30 years old). He soon fell into disgrace and disrepute when Miko leaves him temporarily ostensibly to take up an internship in New York and showed his preference for bl onds by becoming entangled with two women.This preference is not actually sexually related but a manifestation of his cultural brainwashing or an unexpressed desire to assimilate and belong to the larger community instead of his own racial minority. Ben, perhaps due to some cultural innocence, was very much surprised upon learning that Miko had gone to New York, not for the internship but to hook up with someone else - a photographer. This naivetà © is indicative of the sometimes confusing world faced by all Americans of mixed ancestries. Ben Tanaka had staked his cultural.