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Bianca Mabute-Louie’s ‘Unassimilable’ Reframes Immigration and Belonging

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A composite image. On the left, a bright yellow book cover with pink text that reads 'Unassimilable.' On the right, a photo of the author smiling.
In 'Unassimilable,' sociologist Bianca Mabute-Louie encourages readers to rethink the idea that immigrants should seek validation from predominantly white institutions.  (Left: Harper Collins, right: courtesy of the author)

Unassimilable, Bianca Mabute-Louie’s debut book, opens with a scene in the San Marino Library — a quiet, wealthy suburb in the San Gabriel Valley (known to locals as the SGV). The scholar and activist recounts a visit to the library the summer after college, when she overheard an older white woman mutter, staring at her, “My ancestors were immigrants too, but they assimilated. Unlike them — they come over, take over, don’t even bother learning the language…They’re everywhere now.”

This scene felt familiar to me. I’d attended San Marino High School my freshman year, and experienced firsthand how the longstanding white population grappled with the town’s relatively recent shift into an Asian majority. But reading the scene in Unassimilable brought up questions I hadn’t considered before. Many Asian Americans in the SGV, especially those whose families arrived within the last 60 years, might not be interested in assimilating into white America. But what if we didn’t see that as a bad thing? What if, instead of something to be ashamed of, our refusal to assimilate could be a source of pride?

A mix of poignant memoir, intensive research and sharp socio-political commentary, Unassimilable follows Mabute-Louie’s journey of racial reckoning. Born to immigrant parents from Hong Kong in Monterey Park, the author describes the pressure she felt to prove herself at “Predominantly White Institutions” (or PWIs, as she calls them) throughout her adolescence. She found pockets of belonging in her Chinese immigrant church community, but truly came of age in the Bay Area — where she found empowerment in her identity while earning her master’s degree in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Through these experiences, Unassimilable offers a window into the many different ways people navigate assimilation in this country. Yet it encourages us to reject traditional narratives of belonging through acceptance and achievement at PWIs.

Mabute-Louie interweaves moving personal anecdotes with compelling statistics and quotes from writers like Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon, which makes Unassimilable an approachable read for anyone interested in race and immigration. In the first chapter, she establishes SGV’s position in America, painting a vivid picture of how the area (and Monterey Park specifically) transformed into the nation’s first and largest “ethnoburb.” By tracking the ebbs and flows of U.S. immigration policy, Mabute-Louie reports how the landmark Hart-Celler Act of 1965 led to a rapid influx of socioeconomically diverse Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants and refugees. They created a self-sustaining ecosystem of Asian grocery stores and businesses in the greater Los Angeles area, where one could easily survive — if not thrive — without ever learning English.

But Mabute-Louie’s feelings towards her hometown shifted as she started attending predominantly white private schools in Pasadena, which she skillfully captured throughout the second chapter. Without the “safety and comfort of the ethnoburb,” as Mabute-Louie put it, she started to code switch, develop internalized racism and — the thing I related to the most — feel embarrassed by her family’s lack of assimilation. (Mabute-Louie recounts a specific experience when her Popo haggled loudly in Cantonese at Saks Fifth Avenue that perfectly illustrates these feelings.)

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For me, the book hit close to home — I also went to predominantly white private schools, and discovered my passion for Asian American community advocacy at UC Berkeley. Through my many drives from San Gabriel to Pasadena for school, I distinctly remember a shift occurring in me. Despite the fondness with which I thought of 99 Ranch, or the fact that I really didn’t learn English until first grade, I began to view the ethnoburb that raised me, which I now hold in the highest regard, with shame and distaste.

Reading Unassimilable finally allowed me to put into words how attending PWIs spurred my assimilation. Mabute-Louie astutely captured this unique dichotomy when recounting her refusal to attend the majority-Asian UC Irvine, or any UC in general. “I arrogantly thought of myself as above it,” she writes. In high school, I similarly dreaded going to UC Berkeley — my backup school, despite its reputation as one of the best universities in the world — when my first choices rejected me.

Ironically, UC Berkeley’s history of Asian American activism allowed me to finally unlearn these ideals. Mabute-Louie had a similar racial reckoning during her undergraduate studies at Mills College — where she began to understand the intersections of race, class and privilege throughout the Black Lives Matter movements of the 2010s — as well as at San Francisco State University. During the protests, Mabute-Louie noticed a pronounced “silence, which I perceived as apathy, among many of my East Asian friends in Asian ethnoburbs,” she recalls. From there, Mabute-Louie began exploring themes of anti-Blackness, building cross-cultural solidarity and rejecting U.S. imperialism and colonialism — all focal points in her research today as a PhD candidate at Rice University.

From beginning to end, Unassimilable is a formidable read that pushes us to reject acceptance in this country as “aspirational.” Instead, the work envisions a future — and a present — where we define ourselves, our belonging and our power in its unabashed entirety.


On Feb. 5, Bianca Mabute-Louie will be in conversation about ‘Unassimilable’ with Michelle Mijung Kim at the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library, with a poetry reading by Terisa Siagatonu. Details here.

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