MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Immigrant narratives tend to present assimilation as the ultimate struggle that an individual or population must endure in order to be successful in one’s new country. Oftentimes, resistance to such assimilation, illustrated through the desire to maintain aspects of one’s former identity and culture, results in classification as other in the eyes of one’s new society and exacerbates the conditions of the immigrant struggle. Chang-rae Lee’s novel On Such a Full Sea (2014), however, provides an alternative to this typical immigrant narrative. The novel takes place in a future, dystopian version of Baltimore called B-Mor. Its residents are the descendents of a wave of immigrants from New China, made uninhabitable due to environmental crisis. Lee’s narrative shows the arrival of the immigrants as mutually beneficial, for the communities in the United States are in need of a skilled labor population to produce its food supply. Because of this need, the United States eagerly welcomes these immigrants and the labor they can provide, resulting in the seamless incorporation of this immigrant population into American society. This lack of the typical assimilation process, however, does not mean a lack of other typical issues that arise from the influx of different peoples and cultures, such as racism, segregation, and exploitation. As such, I argue that Lee’s novel forces its readers to rethink the ways in which we negotiate the issue of immigration so as to undermine the seemingly contradictory ideas of inclusion and exclusion as ideological fallacies in the current American political debates surrounding the issue. In this way, the novel aggressively challenges the idea of a uniform immigrant experience and by extension, the idea that there exists an overarching answer to what has become the reduction of immigration to a political platform.