thanks for reading! a lot of this (particularly in relation to when angela has her two cents on the matter) came from how my own anxieties about assimilation aren't often understood by even well-meaning white people. the unspoken attitude is that simply by virtue of not being white, there is intrinsically an otherness that somehow makes true cultural assimilation impossible (and therefore they dismiss the anxiety).
angela is blind to the fact that in a town where whiteness is default, insisting that she becomes thanh's new family also means stripping her of what little vietnamese identity she holds left.