Minority success stories are haunted by histories that fix liminal position.

Evidence

Yet Jewish visibility does not simply remain as the sign of success. It is haunted by history. Early in the novel Mona’s mother tries to explain to her the Japanese invasion of China when she announces that she has a Japanese boyfriend: “Are you sure? In school, they said the War was about putting the Jews in ovens” (15). For Mona it is the Shoah that defines the past. Later in the novel the success of both the Chinese and the Jews is measured against those, such as the African-Americans, who are shown to be in a permanently liminal position in American society. History fixes the positions of the Jews and those “wanna-be” Jews, such as Mona. … The more one wants to belong, the more the dominant society in these tales knows its own value and the “fact” of the protagonist’s true difference. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 783

Categorization

• XREF: This dovetails with the model minority literature and with the reader’s standing interest in claims about small acts of decorum and belonging — the desire to belong paradoxically confirms the dominant society’s power to exclude.
• QUESTION: The ‘more you want to belong, the more they know your difference’ dynamic is a generalizable social mechanism — worth chasing how it plays out in other diasporic literatures.