I was thinking of what I could write my next blog post about, so I reviewed the list of books I have read this past year. One of those is Little Fires Everywhere. Little Fires Everywhere is a book that came out in 2017 and was written by Celeste Ng. The book follows the Richardson family around 1997 in Shaker Heights, Ohio. The Richardsons are a picture-perfect family. The dad is a lawyer, and the mom has a modest job, owns a large house, has a car, and lives in the suburbs. They frequently attend social events and can afford many luxuries in life. Therefore, they are the stereotypical image of the American Dream of a white family in the suburbs.
The Richardsons have four kids: Moody, Lexie, Trip, and Izzy. These siblings have grown up in a bubble where they have never interacted with someone from a lower social class or who looks/dresses differently than them. So, when Mia Warren and her teenage daughter Pearl move into the Richardsons rental home, their eyes are opened to the lives and experiences others have outside of their “perfect” life. The parents and the kids in the Richardson family do not understand why some people may want to live any differently than they do. Near the end of the book, the “outsider,” Mia, tells Elena Richardson, “It bothers you, doesn’t it?.. I think you can’t imagine. Why anyone would choose a different life from the one you’ve got. Why anyone might want something other than a big house with a big lawn, a fancy car, a job in an office. Why anyone would choose anything different than what you’d choose” (Ng), overall, I think this line demonstrates perfectly a basic idea of assimilation we have been discussing in class. White people in Oklahoma felt that the way Americans lived was unacceptable and even animal-like. They did not understand other cultures and how people wanted to live differently from the Western culture’s way of life. So, even though this is a much less violent take than what occurred in real life, it still reminded me of the assimilation we have been discussing.
Ng, Celeste. Little Fires Everywhere. Penguin Books, 2020.