I definitely think most of this stems from the socioeconomic backgrounds of these artists, their social milieu growing up, and the bourgeois values they imbibed through their parents and peer group. As you point out, they have a particular kind of angst and neuroticism about their status in an upper/middle class, professional world dominated by white people. Ultimately this kind of drama might be relatable to an audience who sees themselves mirrored in the narrative, but its also...boring.
All 1st world problems about low-stakes interpersonal status games have a natural limit on how compelling and exciting they could possibly be to anyone who isn't obsessed by it in their own daily lives. Where are the risks to life and soul? Wheres's the adventure? Exotic environs? Extraordinary circumstances that creates heightened entertainment value? There's an attempt to get milage from seeing oneself as part of a larger struggle against big evil forces (racism, sexism), but even there, not everyone perceives microaggressions as a heroic burden - which either requires the invention of caricatures to give the protagonist a dramatic foil, or a full embrace of the notion that being an insecure neurotic basket case is Valid, and discomfort and petty unfairness is a Big Deal. Who does that appeal to?
I'm no Woody Allen connoisseur but my sense is that what kept many of his stories from veering into this petty banality is that his characters were allowed to be weird and loathsome. Delving into perversity or the breaking of taboos (taboos these authors would be mortified to be seen subverting) are some of the only ways you can add spice to stories about fundamentally boring people living "normal" lives.
It's not a surprise that a lot of the most entertaining art comes from people with rough-and-tumble coming of age experiences or social misfits, who were lucky to avoid the acculturation and socialization to define themselves by conventional, conformist definitions of success. Nor is it surprising that people who've been coddled and programmed to assimilate into bourgeois norms from childhood struggle to make interesting art (unless they've consciously rejected that world's judgements). The things that could make their art interesting are the same things that would get them shunned by their manners-obsessed peers.
Yah. I think you can find the same trend in identitarian art from other groups as well. I read some black author from the 50s in my English class and, while racial struggle was a big topic, the main character was a lot more unhinged and messed up than anything you would see today.
This is a very well written piece of cultural criticism. It appears to me that we’re living during a time of timidity in many forms of cultural production. I think many writers and artists are terrified of causing offense.
This is why I’m so grateful for Substack, a place where writers can bypass the gatekeepers.
I do agree with Red in the comments that culture at large is timid and inoffensive. Nowadays it feels like aspirational conciliatory narratives are upheld by corporate media, while all the raw anger gets clumsily diverted into social media culture wars. It takes work to shape that anger into something meaningful, and even more work to find people who can pay for transgressive works.
I think about the importance of a scene - a community of artists that are in dialogue with each other, riffing, competing, exchanging ideas and creating new movements, genres, and philosophies. They seek to impress and engage each other within the scene first, allowing for creative risk and experimentation, instead of trying to be everything for everyone.
I'm curious if anything has changed in the year-and-a-half since you first wrote this piece when it comes to Asian-American art, in your estimation. I missed the film adaptation of Shortcomings when it came out a few months ago, but the graphic novel it's based on is very cynical about the aspirational monotony of Asian-American narrative fiction (and this is from 20 years ago).
On a slightly related note: I'm not the only millennial whose pre-teen years were spent reading a lot of manga wherein a weirdly violent and uber-sexed male id was on display, and which was nonetheless easily accessible in the kids' section at her local library, right? What was up with that?
Beef is the closest Asian American thing I've seen or read that comes to that sense of Asian freedom of expression. I've read the graphic novel Shortcomings and while I think it touches on some topics that need to be given more respect and explored more, it also felt very Gen X and I had no faith the movie version would "get it." Based on reviews, my suspicions were correct.
I've never read manga so I can't comment on how common the violent and oversexed male id is in it. Are they still like that?
PS I still have to get started on Buffy. I promise I will.
Shortcomings (the film) is weird because erstwhile cynic Adrian Tomine adapted his own novel into the screenplay, it's directed by Randall Park, who I (unfairly, probably) classify as the archetypal "boba liberal" celeb. I don't know how the film squares that contradiction, if at all.
Your unfamiliarity with manga is laudable ;-) Hm: well, obvious caveat with manga is that it's a medium, not a genre, and obviously there are plenty of manga are child-friendly. But um, the Brooklyn Public Library did not distinguish at all between them. Which is why I was able to take out Inuyasha (charming adventure comic for girls) AND Parasyte (ultra-bloody alien invasion story whose opening chapters involve a dude having his head bitten off and an alien jerking the main character off in his high school bathroom). I turned out OK despite this, I'd like to think.
Enjoying your stuff here. The one thing I’ve always wanted to do growing up was to write a reverse white savior film where for one, there are no white actors and all white people are played by poc with makeup. Two the protagonist is a hyper masculine Chinaman who of course saves the white damsel in distress with civilized Chinese technics and technology Vs the barbaric American magic and culture. Three it would just be as inaccurate as possible to geography and portray the whites in the most condescending way possible. You know the classic orientalist tropes with its own camera filter and seeks to generalize all Americans into one stroke. However I never considered going anywhere further beyond conceptualization since I one lack money and two, it’s clear that even with this film, it will not change the overall trajectory of Asians in America less the Americans start doing Chinese internment. As less and less immigrants come due to declining birth rates and the rise of Asia as an economic force. There will be no Asian America to speak of, only nothing more than Americans with yellow skin.
Haha, I've been thinking of such a satirical film myself for a while too.
I disagree with your last sentence, but in the sense that "Asian America" is a malleable concept, which is why the internal cultural war within Asian America today is ultimately a fight over how this community will be defined. On one side, you have the ones who either won't or can't assimilate into mainstream American culture (they tend to be less affluent, more recently immigrated, more male if they're heterosexual). And on the other, there are the ones who are eager to do so (they tend to be more affluent, more American-born, more female).
This is why Asian Americans are the only racial minority group in America whose elite liberal position is a militant no-questions-asked acceptance of hapas/Wasians as the same as monoracial Asians. For the elite liberal Asian Americans, hapas/Wasians are their own children (whether actual or aspirational), so they want them to represent the future of Asian America. Even better, it's mostly Asian American women who are the Asian side of this mixed-race pairing, so there is no so-called feminist complaint that MOC are being racist and misogynistic for preferring out-group women (especially white women) over their same-race women.
No other racial group is this gung-ho about assimilation, which is why their liberal position is to at least still offer some special status for monoracial (or more monoracial) members of their community.
I had a few different impressions of this. I saw Shortcomings and Joy Ride, and outside some middling anti Blackness, I found both vapid and uninteresting. My impression was that Asians didnt have anything to say about being Asian without invoking Black people (or what I call Black cosmology) or had lives outside of white people. But from reading your post, Asians and whites are more intricately linked than being Black and white people are (but Black elites and progressives are more obsessed with white people now than ever).
But your feelings about Asians being angry reminds me distinctly of my quest for Black authored revenge stories. These dont exist. Even in The Blackening, a satire about how Black people are treated in horror films (and the unusual fixation for Black rep in horror films), the film is neither a satire nor transgressive.
Instead of gleefully murdering a bunch of white women and having a Black girl be the Final Girl, it features 5 college educated Black people staying at a cabin where the villian is this conservative Black man who held grudges against them for various reasons.
What the fuck was this. My contempt from Black art is at the point where I just don't consume it. I don't read books by Blacks (though I did finish Push by Sapphire and loved it. But it was written like 30 years ago). I don't watch their movies or tv shows (I tried Changeling, adapted from a book by Victor Lavalle, and the show was good until it wasn't. Typical for Lavalle though).
I tried to watch They Cloned Tyrone ( I love Jamie Foxx) and only got 30 minutes in before stopping.
Black people aren't militant and this is reflected in their art (and their reactions to Black art). It's especially obnoxious because Black people perceive themselves as being these moral agents and their work is toothless.
I followed a Black bookstagrammer who said he liked books that broke away from the status quo. When I asked him what books he recommended, one of them was Yellowface. I didn't take him seriously after that. And the popularity of this book with Black liberals is indicative of their concerns; complaints about white people while supporting "diverse" authors.
Diversity is for white people. Multiculturalism is anti Black. (Pro Blackness is anti liberal because it necessarily means rejecting white liberal ideology. And non Black people expect Blacks to comply with whatever their demands are. But lots of Black liberals are willing to do this).
Either we need to start murdering white people, or Black people need to get the fuck over it. (A lot of Black people aren't willing to hate white people in public. It's just a circle jerk of complaining about racism while demanding representation from the same people).
I can't take any more art by college educated Blacks! Everything looks like it's from Twitter.
Even the speculative stuff isn't any good unless it's by an African or Caribbean author.
My consensus is that Black people have no imagination. And as a population who has been here for 500 years, this is pathetic as fuck.
That being said, did you see Mayhem with Steven Yeun? It's a workplace murder fest but it's not about being Asian. But Yeun murders some people in it.
I'm certain we've previously discussed this, but it's remarkable just how similarly elite Asian Americans and elite black people act alike with respect to white people. For us Asian Americans, we always thought it was some bad racial or cultural quirk we had (chalk it up to Confucianism, idk). But it's clear now that it's more of a function of class. If Asian Americans seemed to do it more, it's mainly because more of us either belonged to that class or aspired to be in it than other POC groups.
The Blackening's plot sounds so hilariously familiar, because of course the ultimate villain would be the backwards in-group member that the so-called enlightened in-group members are deeply embarrassed by. Happens all the time in Asian America.
"When I asked him what books he recommended, one of them was Yellowface. I didn't take him seriously after that." LOL
"Either we need to start murdering white people, or Black people need to get the fuck over it." LOL
And no, I haven't seen Mayhem. I heard good things about it. I'll check it out.
I am fascinated by the Confucius comment. Was he into class ascension?
I am also fascinated because Black people so thoroughly lack a class consciousness that Jay Z said it was racist to critique his billions of dollars. When one of the founders of BLM was caught money laundering (and buying huge mansions), I saw a Black woman say that Black women deserve nice things. ☠️
I sometimes want to die. If more people paid real attention to Blacks, y'all would never listen to or trust Black elites or liberals ever again. Why Black people who aspire to work in creative fields and ascend class get to dictate everything makes me murderous. And then you have those fucks Ibram X Kendi and that Coates bitch.
The Black misleadership class is fucking abundant!
Sorry. I don't mean top hijack. I just don't have anyone to talk to about how much I am coming to hate Black people 😈🙃😈🙃 and how they are not a population to take seriously once you really start paying attention to what people say and why.
AND YET! Here we are.
Being college educated myself, I have no real access to poor Black people. I have no idea what they think. And literally no one seems to care. Not even other Black people. :(
The contrast between Asian vs Asian-American media is something I've noticed but haven't been able to put into words, so thanks for writing this piece! I was going to mention Beef but saw that you mentioned it in another comment. Another Asian-American work that steps out of familiar territory is Blue Bayou – curious if you've heard of it or watched it?
Yeah, I saw Blue Bayou. I liked it, thought I think Justin Chon has a tendency to add unnecessary melodrama here and there (I liked Gook a lot, but there were a few elements that I would've held back on). I heard Chon is trying to make a movie about Tony Hsieh, and if he's among the few Asian American Hollywood people I've heard of that I'd want to try tackling that, so I was glad to hear that.
Anyone who thinks that there is no rage in the Asian-American weltangschaaung has not has to live with one. Any society who moves from a known area to an unknown one goes through this and I would submit that this rage is essential to coming to terms with a new environment.
The second part of your comment is why I believe everyone knows about Asian American anger but nobody wants to acknowledge it (most of all, Asian Americans ourselves). Because once you do, there are no takesies-backsies.
I call that stunted ethnic exploration "conceptual apartheid." Everything Everywhere All At Once" was not perfect, but I like how it wasn't just about being Asian American.
Yeah, I was mainly indifferent to EEAAO and would actually say the first 1/3 or so is well done. I mainly couldn't stand what the movie came to represent with its narcissistic optimism, not to mention its predictable Asian American intergenerational weepiness.
i keep on coming back to this essay b/c it speaks to a lot of my frustration w/ south asian american literature also - a lot of it feels like it lacks bite. (though i do think it needs a different type of bite from broader asian-am lit - the dynamics around race and dating are very different compared to east asians when comes to gender and dating out, and religion is a bigger deal)
if you haven't read them, ayad akhtar's novels and gautam malkani's londonstani (british obv, but it speaks to the same impulse) are interesting reads which i found different from the typical asian-am novel. malkani makes some _very_ questionable choices admittedly, but it definitely nothing like the novels you're critiquing here!
Thanks for the recs! An Indian friend of mine (he's 1.5 gen) made an interesting point about how with South Asian literature in America, the American-born ones are outshone by the ones from the ancestral homeland because there's not a major language barrier. As in, South Asian-born South Asian writers don't need to be translated because they already write natively in English. In contrast, with East and Southeast Asian literature, there is a major language barrier, so American-born East/Southeast Asian writers are given more authority (and all the disaster that entails).
With respect to race and dating, I've long been fascinated with South Asian Americans because it's like seeing a POC gender war in its nascent stages. With South Asians, neither the men nor the women are especially favoured by the mainstream and there's a nervous struggle going on because the men do not want to end up like (yellow) Asian men and the women don't want to end up like black women (i.e. the less-desired half of their racial group). Simultaneously on both gender sides, there's a lot of genderized racial/ethnic insecurity, but also prideful boasts (e.g. South Asian men will celebrate that they outmarry at a 2% higher rate than South Asian women, while recently at r/vindictabrown, I saw a post by a South Asian woman saying how all the unattractive stereotypes about brown people actually only apply to South Asian men).
You get an escalator out of being condemned to the working class, your corner of Stanford, and in exchange you lose the satisfaction of (violent) vindication for your humiliations. Look at every other racial minority: I really do think you can't have both.
a corner with a pretty obvious bamboo ceiling and eternal mockery (eternal for a generation) - with the latter you don't face as many soft limitations. In the former state, if you were to call out said soft cultural limitations, people mark you out to be the racist.
All true. But why not take the money and leave? Obviously dignity and acclaim is important. But is getting dignity and acclaim from elite white society so necessary?
Very fair point - I have / am considering that myself. A lot of people fall into the "all I've ever known [living in the US]" and uprooting oneself is quite difficult. I have ideas on where I'd move, but of course, a lot of things would change and I'd have to try and take many things into account.
Perhaps I should append that by “leave” I don’t necessarily mean physically leaving America. You could also mentally check out from the goings-on of the New Yorker tote bag class. Have your own brownstone dinner parties, cultivate a community of people (of whatever race) who are sane and unprejudiced, and just condescendingly smile and nod when you meet a foot soldier of the regime.
I lol'd - the only problem is that there are more of them than "us", and they're "in control" of the top institutions (biggest companies, politics, universities) and have prestige lined up with them. It's going to take some Great Depression-level "zeroing out" or "loss of wealth" or "public shaming / Emperor Has No Clothes" moment to get that to change. Of course, if I cared less about hierarchies and public perception I would just go along and get along with whomever without a care in the world.
I definitely think most of this stems from the socioeconomic backgrounds of these artists, their social milieu growing up, and the bourgeois values they imbibed through their parents and peer group. As you point out, they have a particular kind of angst and neuroticism about their status in an upper/middle class, professional world dominated by white people. Ultimately this kind of drama might be relatable to an audience who sees themselves mirrored in the narrative, but its also...boring.
All 1st world problems about low-stakes interpersonal status games have a natural limit on how compelling and exciting they could possibly be to anyone who isn't obsessed by it in their own daily lives. Where are the risks to life and soul? Wheres's the adventure? Exotic environs? Extraordinary circumstances that creates heightened entertainment value? There's an attempt to get milage from seeing oneself as part of a larger struggle against big evil forces (racism, sexism), but even there, not everyone perceives microaggressions as a heroic burden - which either requires the invention of caricatures to give the protagonist a dramatic foil, or a full embrace of the notion that being an insecure neurotic basket case is Valid, and discomfort and petty unfairness is a Big Deal. Who does that appeal to?
I'm no Woody Allen connoisseur but my sense is that what kept many of his stories from veering into this petty banality is that his characters were allowed to be weird and loathsome. Delving into perversity or the breaking of taboos (taboos these authors would be mortified to be seen subverting) are some of the only ways you can add spice to stories about fundamentally boring people living "normal" lives.
It's not a surprise that a lot of the most entertaining art comes from people with rough-and-tumble coming of age experiences or social misfits, who were lucky to avoid the acculturation and socialization to define themselves by conventional, conformist definitions of success. Nor is it surprising that people who've been coddled and programmed to assimilate into bourgeois norms from childhood struggle to make interesting art (unless they've consciously rejected that world's judgements). The things that could make their art interesting are the same things that would get them shunned by their manners-obsessed peers.
Yah. I think you can find the same trend in identitarian art from other groups as well. I read some black author from the 50s in my English class and, while racial struggle was a big topic, the main character was a lot more unhinged and messed up than anything you would see today.
This is a very well written piece of cultural criticism. It appears to me that we’re living during a time of timidity in many forms of cultural production. I think many writers and artists are terrified of causing offense.
This is why I’m so grateful for Substack, a place where writers can bypass the gatekeepers.
Thanks, Red!
A classic essay then and now.
I do agree with Red in the comments that culture at large is timid and inoffensive. Nowadays it feels like aspirational conciliatory narratives are upheld by corporate media, while all the raw anger gets clumsily diverted into social media culture wars. It takes work to shape that anger into something meaningful, and even more work to find people who can pay for transgressive works.
I think about the importance of a scene - a community of artists that are in dialogue with each other, riffing, competing, exchanging ideas and creating new movements, genres, and philosophies. They seek to impress and engage each other within the scene first, allowing for creative risk and experimentation, instead of trying to be everything for everyone.
Thanks, Dan! Agree about importance of scenes and something separate from professional achievement and accolades.
excellent piece. congratulations for having the balls to tell this truth.
Much appreciated, Carmen
I'm curious if anything has changed in the year-and-a-half since you first wrote this piece when it comes to Asian-American art, in your estimation. I missed the film adaptation of Shortcomings when it came out a few months ago, but the graphic novel it's based on is very cynical about the aspirational monotony of Asian-American narrative fiction (and this is from 20 years ago).
On a slightly related note: I'm not the only millennial whose pre-teen years were spent reading a lot of manga wherein a weirdly violent and uber-sexed male id was on display, and which was nonetheless easily accessible in the kids' section at her local library, right? What was up with that?
Beef is the closest Asian American thing I've seen or read that comes to that sense of Asian freedom of expression. I've read the graphic novel Shortcomings and while I think it touches on some topics that need to be given more respect and explored more, it also felt very Gen X and I had no faith the movie version would "get it." Based on reviews, my suspicions were correct.
I've never read manga so I can't comment on how common the violent and oversexed male id is in it. Are they still like that?
PS I still have to get started on Buffy. I promise I will.
Shortcomings (the film) is weird because erstwhile cynic Adrian Tomine adapted his own novel into the screenplay, it's directed by Randall Park, who I (unfairly, probably) classify as the archetypal "boba liberal" celeb. I don't know how the film squares that contradiction, if at all.
Your unfamiliarity with manga is laudable ;-) Hm: well, obvious caveat with manga is that it's a medium, not a genre, and obviously there are plenty of manga are child-friendly. But um, the Brooklyn Public Library did not distinguish at all between them. Which is why I was able to take out Inuyasha (charming adventure comic for girls) AND Parasyte (ultra-bloody alien invasion story whose opening chapters involve a dude having his head bitten off and an alien jerking the main character off in his high school bathroom). I turned out OK despite this, I'd like to think.
Enjoying your stuff here. The one thing I’ve always wanted to do growing up was to write a reverse white savior film where for one, there are no white actors and all white people are played by poc with makeup. Two the protagonist is a hyper masculine Chinaman who of course saves the white damsel in distress with civilized Chinese technics and technology Vs the barbaric American magic and culture. Three it would just be as inaccurate as possible to geography and portray the whites in the most condescending way possible. You know the classic orientalist tropes with its own camera filter and seeks to generalize all Americans into one stroke. However I never considered going anywhere further beyond conceptualization since I one lack money and two, it’s clear that even with this film, it will not change the overall trajectory of Asians in America less the Americans start doing Chinese internment. As less and less immigrants come due to declining birth rates and the rise of Asia as an economic force. There will be no Asian America to speak of, only nothing more than Americans with yellow skin.
Haha, I've been thinking of such a satirical film myself for a while too.
I disagree with your last sentence, but in the sense that "Asian America" is a malleable concept, which is why the internal cultural war within Asian America today is ultimately a fight over how this community will be defined. On one side, you have the ones who either won't or can't assimilate into mainstream American culture (they tend to be less affluent, more recently immigrated, more male if they're heterosexual). And on the other, there are the ones who are eager to do so (they tend to be more affluent, more American-born, more female).
This is why Asian Americans are the only racial minority group in America whose elite liberal position is a militant no-questions-asked acceptance of hapas/Wasians as the same as monoracial Asians. For the elite liberal Asian Americans, hapas/Wasians are their own children (whether actual or aspirational), so they want them to represent the future of Asian America. Even better, it's mostly Asian American women who are the Asian side of this mixed-race pairing, so there is no so-called feminist complaint that MOC are being racist and misogynistic for preferring out-group women (especially white women) over their same-race women.
No other racial group is this gung-ho about assimilation, which is why their liberal position is to at least still offer some special status for monoracial (or more monoracial) members of their community.
Easily the best essay on Asian-American literature I've ever read. Hope to write up a response on my SubStack down the line!
JAN 2, 2023 EDIT: Wrote up a post, adding a link to it here for posterity's sake: https://www.decentralizedfiction.com/p/asian-american-literature-is-boring
Can't wait to read it
I had a few different impressions of this. I saw Shortcomings and Joy Ride, and outside some middling anti Blackness, I found both vapid and uninteresting. My impression was that Asians didnt have anything to say about being Asian without invoking Black people (or what I call Black cosmology) or had lives outside of white people. But from reading your post, Asians and whites are more intricately linked than being Black and white people are (but Black elites and progressives are more obsessed with white people now than ever).
But your feelings about Asians being angry reminds me distinctly of my quest for Black authored revenge stories. These dont exist. Even in The Blackening, a satire about how Black people are treated in horror films (and the unusual fixation for Black rep in horror films), the film is neither a satire nor transgressive.
Instead of gleefully murdering a bunch of white women and having a Black girl be the Final Girl, it features 5 college educated Black people staying at a cabin where the villian is this conservative Black man who held grudges against them for various reasons.
What the fuck was this. My contempt from Black art is at the point where I just don't consume it. I don't read books by Blacks (though I did finish Push by Sapphire and loved it. But it was written like 30 years ago). I don't watch their movies or tv shows (I tried Changeling, adapted from a book by Victor Lavalle, and the show was good until it wasn't. Typical for Lavalle though).
I tried to watch They Cloned Tyrone ( I love Jamie Foxx) and only got 30 minutes in before stopping.
Black people aren't militant and this is reflected in their art (and their reactions to Black art). It's especially obnoxious because Black people perceive themselves as being these moral agents and their work is toothless.
I followed a Black bookstagrammer who said he liked books that broke away from the status quo. When I asked him what books he recommended, one of them was Yellowface. I didn't take him seriously after that. And the popularity of this book with Black liberals is indicative of their concerns; complaints about white people while supporting "diverse" authors.
Diversity is for white people. Multiculturalism is anti Black. (Pro Blackness is anti liberal because it necessarily means rejecting white liberal ideology. And non Black people expect Blacks to comply with whatever their demands are. But lots of Black liberals are willing to do this).
Either we need to start murdering white people, or Black people need to get the fuck over it. (A lot of Black people aren't willing to hate white people in public. It's just a circle jerk of complaining about racism while demanding representation from the same people).
I can't take any more art by college educated Blacks! Everything looks like it's from Twitter.
Even the speculative stuff isn't any good unless it's by an African or Caribbean author.
My consensus is that Black people have no imagination. And as a population who has been here for 500 years, this is pathetic as fuck.
That being said, did you see Mayhem with Steven Yeun? It's a workplace murder fest but it's not about being Asian. But Yeun murders some people in it.
I'm certain we've previously discussed this, but it's remarkable just how similarly elite Asian Americans and elite black people act alike with respect to white people. For us Asian Americans, we always thought it was some bad racial or cultural quirk we had (chalk it up to Confucianism, idk). But it's clear now that it's more of a function of class. If Asian Americans seemed to do it more, it's mainly because more of us either belonged to that class or aspired to be in it than other POC groups.
The Blackening's plot sounds so hilariously familiar, because of course the ultimate villain would be the backwards in-group member that the so-called enlightened in-group members are deeply embarrassed by. Happens all the time in Asian America.
"When I asked him what books he recommended, one of them was Yellowface. I didn't take him seriously after that." LOL
"Either we need to start murdering white people, or Black people need to get the fuck over it." LOL
And no, I haven't seen Mayhem. I heard good things about it. I'll check it out.
I am fascinated by the Confucius comment. Was he into class ascension?
I am also fascinated because Black people so thoroughly lack a class consciousness that Jay Z said it was racist to critique his billions of dollars. When one of the founders of BLM was caught money laundering (and buying huge mansions), I saw a Black woman say that Black women deserve nice things. ☠️
I sometimes want to die. If more people paid real attention to Blacks, y'all would never listen to or trust Black elites or liberals ever again. Why Black people who aspire to work in creative fields and ascend class get to dictate everything makes me murderous. And then you have those fucks Ibram X Kendi and that Coates bitch.
The Black misleadership class is fucking abundant!
Sorry. I don't mean top hijack. I just don't have anyone to talk to about how much I am coming to hate Black people 😈🙃😈🙃 and how they are not a population to take seriously once you really start paying attention to what people say and why.
AND YET! Here we are.
Being college educated myself, I have no real access to poor Black people. I have no idea what they think. And literally no one seems to care. Not even other Black people. :(
Incredible crit, bravo.
Thanks, Kevin!
The contrast between Asian vs Asian-American media is something I've noticed but haven't been able to put into words, so thanks for writing this piece! I was going to mention Beef but saw that you mentioned it in another comment. Another Asian-American work that steps out of familiar territory is Blue Bayou – curious if you've heard of it or watched it?
Yeah, I saw Blue Bayou. I liked it, thought I think Justin Chon has a tendency to add unnecessary melodrama here and there (I liked Gook a lot, but there were a few elements that I would've held back on). I heard Chon is trying to make a movie about Tony Hsieh, and if he's among the few Asian American Hollywood people I've heard of that I'd want to try tackling that, so I was glad to hear that.
Anyone who thinks that there is no rage in the Asian-American weltangschaaung has not has to live with one. Any society who moves from a known area to an unknown one goes through this and I would submit that this rage is essential to coming to terms with a new environment.
The second part of your comment is why I believe everyone knows about Asian American anger but nobody wants to acknowledge it (most of all, Asian Americans ourselves). Because once you do, there are no takesies-backsies.
I call that stunted ethnic exploration "conceptual apartheid." Everything Everywhere All At Once" was not perfect, but I like how it wasn't just about being Asian American.
Yeah, I was mainly indifferent to EEAAO and would actually say the first 1/3 or so is well done. I mainly couldn't stand what the movie came to represent with its narcissistic optimism, not to mention its predictable Asian American intergenerational weepiness.
Yeah not perfect but compared to most ethnic american films...
i keep on coming back to this essay b/c it speaks to a lot of my frustration w/ south asian american literature also - a lot of it feels like it lacks bite. (though i do think it needs a different type of bite from broader asian-am lit - the dynamics around race and dating are very different compared to east asians when comes to gender and dating out, and religion is a bigger deal)
if you haven't read them, ayad akhtar's novels and gautam malkani's londonstani (british obv, but it speaks to the same impulse) are interesting reads which i found different from the typical asian-am novel. malkani makes some _very_ questionable choices admittedly, but it definitely nothing like the novels you're critiquing here!
Thanks for the recs! An Indian friend of mine (he's 1.5 gen) made an interesting point about how with South Asian literature in America, the American-born ones are outshone by the ones from the ancestral homeland because there's not a major language barrier. As in, South Asian-born South Asian writers don't need to be translated because they already write natively in English. In contrast, with East and Southeast Asian literature, there is a major language barrier, so American-born East/Southeast Asian writers are given more authority (and all the disaster that entails).
With respect to race and dating, I've long been fascinated with South Asian Americans because it's like seeing a POC gender war in its nascent stages. With South Asians, neither the men nor the women are especially favoured by the mainstream and there's a nervous struggle going on because the men do not want to end up like (yellow) Asian men and the women don't want to end up like black women (i.e. the less-desired half of their racial group). Simultaneously on both gender sides, there's a lot of genderized racial/ethnic insecurity, but also prideful boasts (e.g. South Asian men will celebrate that they outmarry at a 2% higher rate than South Asian women, while recently at r/vindictabrown, I saw a post by a South Asian woman saying how all the unattractive stereotypes about brown people actually only apply to South Asian men).
You get an escalator out of being condemned to the working class, your corner of Stanford, and in exchange you lose the satisfaction of (violent) vindication for your humiliations. Look at every other racial minority: I really do think you can't have both.
a corner with a pretty obvious bamboo ceiling and eternal mockery (eternal for a generation) - with the latter you don't face as many soft limitations. In the former state, if you were to call out said soft cultural limitations, people mark you out to be the racist.
All true. But why not take the money and leave? Obviously dignity and acclaim is important. But is getting dignity and acclaim from elite white society so necessary?
Very fair point - I have / am considering that myself. A lot of people fall into the "all I've ever known [living in the US]" and uprooting oneself is quite difficult. I have ideas on where I'd move, but of course, a lot of things would change and I'd have to try and take many things into account.
Perhaps I should append that by “leave” I don’t necessarily mean physically leaving America. You could also mentally check out from the goings-on of the New Yorker tote bag class. Have your own brownstone dinner parties, cultivate a community of people (of whatever race) who are sane and unprejudiced, and just condescendingly smile and nod when you meet a foot soldier of the regime.
I lol'd - the only problem is that there are more of them than "us", and they're "in control" of the top institutions (biggest companies, politics, universities) and have prestige lined up with them. It's going to take some Great Depression-level "zeroing out" or "loss of wealth" or "public shaming / Emperor Has No Clothes" moment to get that to change. Of course, if I cared less about hierarchies and public perception I would just go along and get along with whomever without a care in the world.