Lots of great insights here. There's this icky sense when I read Asian-American fiction (and consume AA media), especially when it's authored by Asian-American women, that it is pervaded by this obsession with social status. This manifests in two tracks: (1) within the protagonists themselves, who are obsessed with real and perceived racial slights, who aim to enter into romantic relationships with high-status (i.e. white) Americans, and (2) in the meta aspects of the narrative, which seem crafted to appeal to the politically correct tastes of culturally elite (i.e. white) Americans. 'Hatchling,' is not only a buzzword bingo for Asian-American tropes, it also has all these random signifiers of political correctness crammed in (the one black female employee at the protagonist's company is a "rock star," because of course it wouldn't be woke enough if she was just a normal human being)
This obsession with status partly has to do with the way that Asians fit into American society (esp. Asian women), and it's not completely invalid to write about social status if it's something that's on a writer's mind a lot, but, as I think you've said many times, obsessions like this lock Asian-American fiction into a very narrow, very confined narrative space. I don't want to exempt male Asian-American writers from this criticism. I think there are male writers out there who are doing the junior league version of 'Hatchling.'
Sadly, I don't see Asian-Americans escaping this trap. We let the lamest, most brittle, most weirdly status-obsessed kids run the show, and they have defined what Asian-American fiction is for the rest of the country
I do not include Tony Tulathimutte or Tao Lin in this characterization -- they are both writing stuff that is groundbreaking, original and far outside of the strictures of political correctness
The problem with this film, as with so many of the films and books about which you write, is that they are just not very interesting on their own merits. It is the same themes and tropes that were already exhausted by the likes of Philip Roth and co, but decades down the line and even more watered down. No one is going to watch or read these works unless they are encountered on a syllabus or the watcher / reader is in the industry, so the only commercial or artistic imperative behind them is to please Teacher.
Yes, it's not the themes and tropes themselves that are the problem because they are timeless. But as you said, if you're going to explore themes and tropes that have been explored before, you better do something new and daring with them. I'm starting to see more Asian Americans talking about how they want to do "unhinged" things, but I still get the sense they're shackled by polite convention, always staying squarely in the middle of the artistic Overton window. That window has now moved a bit towards the "unhinged" side, so of course they'll move that way.
I read a very interesting thing on twitter comparing second-generation Asian-Americans to "ostjuden" in the West.
And I started getting this creeping feeling that Asian-American literature is a lot like Jewish-American literature, except it's already been done before and this one is now being written by people two standard deviations below Phillip Roth, et. al in verbal IQ/writing ability.
Bamboo ceiling, et. al. are real, but the professional roadblocks for Asian-Americans in 2025 are probably a lot less than Jews in 1925, so there's a sense that the best and brightest mostly don't go into literature...
I don't know about verbal IQ. I am sure these writers are very smart! But they strike me as being meek inhabitants of a territory that was well mapped in the 1960s by that first generation of American born Jewish writers, who, as the pioneers, were far more dynamic, aggressive and daring (and who arguably represented a more substantial clash of cultures than the current crop of middle class Asian American writers).
At the risk of being a substack cliche I think that a lot of this is led by MFAs and by the current academic world's focus on identity. I don't think there is anything essentialist here: one only needs to look at the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro to see what (in that case British-) East Asian writing can be. But you have to write something fresh, and repeatedly going for "Philip Roth / Saul Bellow, but make it tame and in line with current university curriculums" is never going to produce much of interest, let alone lasting value. I think that there are all kinds of stories out there to be written and read.
For example, query why we see so few novels about Asian-American business dynasties, or adventure novels drawing on historic or literary themes from either side of the Pacific.
Try the Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (about the Vietnam war and Vietnamese diaspora in Orange County) or Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (multi-generational epic about Korean immigrants to Japan). There are actually a lot of really good Asian-American historical novels! Jamie Ford has a bunch of WWII-era novels as well.
Really interesting point. It's hard to overstate the degree to which Big Five publishing is captured by intersectional left-wing identitarian and gender politics. Anytime I hear about a depressing sameness like you describe, it strikes me as a curation problem: Who gets the book deals? The people who pander to the tastes of the PMC AWFLs who dominate the ranks of literary agencies and editors.
...Lol. But I recommend not underestimating the ability of those casually inhabiting the right tail to string together a mean sentence upon command, whether or not they ever took a single English class after high school.
And fwiw, Wesley Yang didn't go to a school that UMC Asian parents salivate over, but there are few of any race who can touch him as a writer.
not true. i am interested in watching after finding out about this movie though this post. tropes come up again in different contexts because different people discover them naturally though the course of their own life. i have no clue who ‘philip roth and co’ is, but parts of the basic premise of slanted resonates with me
interesting piece. I've always thought that Asian (east and south) people have assimilated exceptionally well into American culture and neither side of the culture war has ever forgiven them for it. this sheds some interesting light on the subject.
I’m not fan of RF Kuang’s but at least she writes about topics other than “my mother’s high expectations traumatized me” and “my white boyfriend is committing micro-aggressions against me”
I'm fine with her writing fantasy and mythical novels (though I hear Babel is extremely heavy-handed and preachy). But Yellowface encroaches more into non-genre idpol commercial fiction, and it was so juvenile and self-serving.
Agree that Kuang is not to be dismissed lightly. She treats writing a novel like a consultant running a corporate turnaround (break out the spreadsheets!), but the product she delivers is solid. She's already gone in a few interesting and different directions in her career
Great piece, Chris. I also appreciated the inclusion of your personal writing history, which I knew a bit about but not all the details. Your story just shows that if you're writing about something sincerely and honestly, it will stand the test of time compared to others who try to jump on trends or whatever's popular at the moment.
I feel like there is one massive caveat to the discourse about Asian-American fiction: the criticism I see applies primarily to Asian-American literary fiction (and to some extent movies/TV). The bulk of Asian-American writing is in commercial fiction, much of which is unconcerned with status-seeking and racial dynamics.
The most prominent Asian-American romance writers are either writing romantasy set in Chinese wuxia/xianxia or Kdrama-inspired worlds or contemporary rom-coms set in Asian-American communities with primarily Asian-American love interests (Helen Hoang's debut actually had a white heroine and Vietnamese hero). Aside from R. F. Kuang (who really wants to be literary so bad), most Asian-American fantasy authors write about Asian-inspired fantasy worlds. A weepy multi-generational women's fiction epic is more likely to talk about the experiences of war and displacement. The most popular Asian-American cozy mystery is about meddling but beloved Chinese-Indonesian aunties helping the protagonist solve a murder. In this context, mom good.
Asian-American literary fiction is about strivers, status, alienation, bad parents, and bad white boyfriends because the most popular tropes for contemporary literary fiction are strivers, status, alienation, bad parents, and bad white boyfriends. And if you're in your mid-twenties and stuck in the MFA/NYC/alt-lit rich-person bubble, that's probably going to be most of what you've experienced. A book of a specific genre is going to reflect the conventions of that genre!
I wonder if this is why most of the books that I've read about the SoCal Asian-majority bubble are commercial (rom-coms, crime fiction, etc.). Maybe all the chill SGV SoCal Asian writers want to write books where Asians are happy...?
Yes, literary fiction is almost entirely about prestige (certainly not a lot of money in it), so it makes sense that the most prestige-hungry Asian Americans go into it and the lifestyles reflected in Asian American lit fic show what status-obsessed Asian Americans value.
But where then are all the status-obsessed lit fic from Asian American men? Why's it always about obsession over white boyfriends (by Asian women) and not white girlfriends (by Asian guys)? Sure, there's Lee Chang Rae with a novel like Native Speaker, but Asian Americans have never had a so-called litbro era. I've noticed that a lot of literary-minded Asian American male fiction writers go into science fiction and fantasy, like Ted Chiang and Ken Liu.
I definitely think the litfic version of prestige is also very white! It's often tied to specific colleges and writing programs (often on the East Coast, far away from the East Asian diaspora power centers of California and Hawaii), spending a lot of time networking in very white spaces, and status symbols that most other Asian-Americans would not recognize. Like... in order to care about getting accepted to Tin House or whatever you would already have to have internalized a different value system.
Ted Chiang and Ken Liu both studied computer science and worked for Microsoft (Liu later went on to get a J.D.), which doesn't leave a ton of time to go to parties in New York. Both of them got their start submitting stories to SFF magazines, which have mostly open submissions that take from the slush pile. Charles Yu studied molecular biology and then became a lawyer. Even Tony Tulathimutte had to go work in UX.
On the other hand, most of the big literary Asian-American male writers I can name (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Hua Hsu, Ocean Vuong, Chang-Rae Lee, Alexander Chee) went through the university system. And it's just harder if you're the child of immigrants, if you're a man, and if you're an Asian-American man from a non-rich background with all the pressures to Make It that comes with that to spend however many years bumming around trying to crack an industry that simply doesn't pay. If you're someone like Charles Yu who straddles the line between litfic and sci-fi, you might as well just go write for Westworld and do the screenplay for Akira between novels instead of trying to get a New Yorker staff job.
But it's for sure more than just the pipeline. The fact that litfic doesn't have to make much money also means that the gatekeepers have more latitude in deciding what makes it through based on what is/isn't palatable to them. There is a revulsion against Asian male sexuality in American culture and specifically in the gatekeeper/genteel class, going all the way back to the days of Fu Manchu. Asian-American women are sometimes accepted as long as they are abject and enamored with whiteness (often specifically White men, going all the way back to the days of Madame Butterfly). You don't see many militant anti-colonial Asian female revolutionaries in litfic.
And much of the time, when publishers are trying to put out Asian-American literature, they pick Asian variations on existing successful genres. There are the sad girl novels (those are your Rucy Cuis), there are the gay guys with trauma (Ocean Vuong, although he actually makes money), there are the fractured autofiction confessionals (Tao Lin, who basically had to create a career out of sheer force of will). But the litbro era ended before the diversity push could get to it, and no real equivalent has risen to take its place. I don't think there will be an Asian male David Foster Wallace anytime soon, because the age of David Foster Wallaces is over. The next big Asian-American male writer may very well be whoever figures out how to use a front-facing camera.
Some very welcome additions to the eternally frustrating (if not outright insane) race discourse.
Also some good lessons for younger folks on what commitment to a cause of personal importance actually looks like. (You gotta be in it for the long haul, and it's not always fun!)
Not gonna get into the meat of the issues here, but re: "narrative plenitude" -- new term to me! -- I think one charitable take on why it sometimes doesn't pan out as hoped for is that there's still much of a "scarcity mindset" entrenched among those suddenly offered this "plenitude". And so their instinct is to hoard, as they're so used to doing, even though there's no longer any need to.
Ofc, I think that's a bit too charitable and facile. And I think part of the problem is that often, the first movers -- whether they chose to go first or were (implicitly or explicitly) given the first green light -- caricaturize others in their group who could offer complementary perspectives. Not preemptively, necessarily, out of a sense that those are *competing* perspectives, but to much the same effect. And so there's the impression that those are unworthy perspectives, and we're left with trivial variations on a theme by one monolithic subset. Whose work can be so unappealing that outsiders can lose interest in perspectives from the entire group, bc to them, what else is there? <- I'm counting on others to answer that question.
I agree about the unshakable scarcity mindset. I also think there's an "iron law of institutions" thing going on that works in conjunction, where even if there were more opportunities to go around, those opportunities are still extremely valuable things (i.e. book deals and other similar things aren't plentiful in the first place), so if you're a certain clique, you do not want a rival group to get a chance to succeed because then your own group's opportunities or prestige will diminish. This is especially true for minority groups that are essentially trying to convince elite white people that they are the most important representatives of their communities.
One that I truly do not get is the Desi obsession with skin tone.
On the subcontinent, pale skin is *the* signifier of beauty and social status, even to the point where Indian matrimonial ads invariably include a category for description of skin tone (with a range of adjectives that rivals those used by colonial Spaniards). Skin lightening creams, skin lightening treatments, etc. are perennial best sellers, even seen as necessary to get a good job, a good marriage, etc..
The result is often something that resembles Michael Jackson.
The other irony is that Indian people may try to look white, but actually marrying outside one's caste or community is taboo. Hell, marrying a person of another race is seen as about one step removed from bestiality.
Fuck if I get it. I don't get the East Asian eyelid surgery thing, either.
East Asians also worship light skin (as you may know), but for us at least, it was never about colonialism. Rather, it was just a signifier of being aristocratic enough not to have (ever) had to do manual labor and tan in the fields.
As for the eyelid thing...at the risk of invoking some weird rightoid tropes (whyyy did we ever cede evolutionary psych to them??), well, everyone everywhere has always liked big eyes, especially on women, so yeah. Kids get complimented by grandmas not for not having monolids per se but for having "big eyes".
"...decisions mean agency which means responsibility." LISTEN. i have been struggling with figuring out how to respond to black women who continuously make the claim that we cannot say anything to other black women about their consumption of beauty products, especially where hair is concerned, because white supremacy is so bad that black women just can't fight back by forgoing lace fronts and Kanekalon because the world just thinks we're so ugly that it can't be helped. We just don't have power. Power is not recognized as relative or layered but it's this simple thing: white people said we were ugly and we'll never get over it.
This is something that non-white women do in particular, and it's constant, to the point where any discussion about women's relative power--especially over our own individual actions and methods of consumption-- is stopped by "intersectionality" or various other mechanisms/concepts embedded in institutionalized feminist ideology. And if you say that most feminism is racialized elitist rhetoric dressed up as critique you'll be blacklisted or defamed. But it is. It absorbs everything we say "as women" into its poisonous mass and spits it back out to us. And now we've got black women obsessed with shit like Bridgerton because they deserve white men who "love" them too.
I read a lot of diaspora lit when I was younger. Even though I'm white*, I'm a first-generation American and it really resonated with me. The whole We Need Diverse Books/Ownvoices narrative is partly true. It is good to have books that represent a variety of experiences. But the books you feel represent you best might not "represent" you in the SJW sense, and that's fine.
I stopped reading these sorts of books around when I was 14, because I discovered Chinese webnovels and because they started to get boring and samey. I was also confused by the emptiness of their conclusions. The protagonists always accepted their parents' culture and realized that they needed to be Asian and American. That's nice and all, but why always have a happy ending? What about a book where the protagonist decides to remigrate to their parents' country and break all ties to the US over [political/economic/cultural thing they disagree with]? What about a student, suspected of being a spy, snapping and pulling a Qian Xuesen? A Greek tragedy where we agree and disagree with them at the same time?
The other thing I disagreed with was disempowerment. Objectively, Asian Americans are powerful. Maybe not as powerful as whites, but the average Asian American probably has a better standard of living than the average of their country of origin. They win Oscars and sell computers. And yet, all Asian American literature is written as if we're still in the 70s, when most white people didn't know what sushi was. It's 2026, people. KPop Demon Hunters is one of the most successful movies ever. Is that good for all Asians? Not necessarily. Is the Hallyu/Cool Japan wave creating its own problems for Asians such as fetishization? Yes. But you can't just sit there and pretend it never happened.
I half-jokingly proposed to Vinay Prasad that the future of Asian American literature is just isekai and power fantasies. I was joking, of course, the MFA class would never deign to read that 'slop', but that would at least be honest. Where's the "Shortcomings" parody that's just Ben banging his way through a bunch of white chicks, without all the whining? More people would read that than "Hatchling".
Before Asians took it you envision polished British aristocrats in horse drawn carriages in a Charles Dickens novel 😂 If you want aristo adjacent, name your kid Edward
Lots of great insights here. There's this icky sense when I read Asian-American fiction (and consume AA media), especially when it's authored by Asian-American women, that it is pervaded by this obsession with social status. This manifests in two tracks: (1) within the protagonists themselves, who are obsessed with real and perceived racial slights, who aim to enter into romantic relationships with high-status (i.e. white) Americans, and (2) in the meta aspects of the narrative, which seem crafted to appeal to the politically correct tastes of culturally elite (i.e. white) Americans. 'Hatchling,' is not only a buzzword bingo for Asian-American tropes, it also has all these random signifiers of political correctness crammed in (the one black female employee at the protagonist's company is a "rock star," because of course it wouldn't be woke enough if she was just a normal human being)
This obsession with status partly has to do with the way that Asians fit into American society (esp. Asian women), and it's not completely invalid to write about social status if it's something that's on a writer's mind a lot, but, as I think you've said many times, obsessions like this lock Asian-American fiction into a very narrow, very confined narrative space. I don't want to exempt male Asian-American writers from this criticism. I think there are male writers out there who are doing the junior league version of 'Hatchling.'
Sadly, I don't see Asian-Americans escaping this trap. We let the lamest, most brittle, most weirdly status-obsessed kids run the show, and they have defined what Asian-American fiction is for the rest of the country
Which male writers are you thinking of? Like Tony T?
I do not include Tony Tulathimutte or Tao Lin in this characterization -- they are both writing stuff that is groundbreaking, original and far outside of the strictures of political correctness
The problem with this film, as with so many of the films and books about which you write, is that they are just not very interesting on their own merits. It is the same themes and tropes that were already exhausted by the likes of Philip Roth and co, but decades down the line and even more watered down. No one is going to watch or read these works unless they are encountered on a syllabus or the watcher / reader is in the industry, so the only commercial or artistic imperative behind them is to please Teacher.
Yes, it's not the themes and tropes themselves that are the problem because they are timeless. But as you said, if you're going to explore themes and tropes that have been explored before, you better do something new and daring with them. I'm starting to see more Asian Americans talking about how they want to do "unhinged" things, but I still get the sense they're shackled by polite convention, always staying squarely in the middle of the artistic Overton window. That window has now moved a bit towards the "unhinged" side, so of course they'll move that way.
I read a very interesting thing on twitter comparing second-generation Asian-Americans to "ostjuden" in the West.
And I started getting this creeping feeling that Asian-American literature is a lot like Jewish-American literature, except it's already been done before and this one is now being written by people two standard deviations below Phillip Roth, et. al in verbal IQ/writing ability.
Bamboo ceiling, et. al. are real, but the professional roadblocks for Asian-Americans in 2025 are probably a lot less than Jews in 1925, so there's a sense that the best and brightest mostly don't go into literature...
I don't know about verbal IQ. I am sure these writers are very smart! But they strike me as being meek inhabitants of a territory that was well mapped in the 1960s by that first generation of American born Jewish writers, who, as the pioneers, were far more dynamic, aggressive and daring (and who arguably represented a more substantial clash of cultures than the current crop of middle class Asian American writers).
At the risk of being a substack cliche I think that a lot of this is led by MFAs and by the current academic world's focus on identity. I don't think there is anything essentialist here: one only needs to look at the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro to see what (in that case British-) East Asian writing can be. But you have to write something fresh, and repeatedly going for "Philip Roth / Saul Bellow, but make it tame and in line with current university curriculums" is never going to produce much of interest, let alone lasting value. I think that there are all kinds of stories out there to be written and read.
For example, query why we see so few novels about Asian-American business dynasties, or adventure novels drawing on historic or literary themes from either side of the Pacific.
I've gotta put in a word for Fonda Lee's Green Bone Saga - alternate world 1980s Kung fu Godfather fantasy
Try the Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (about the Vietnam war and Vietnamese diaspora in Orange County) or Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (multi-generational epic about Korean immigrants to Japan). There are actually a lot of really good Asian-American historical novels! Jamie Ford has a bunch of WWII-era novels as well.
Really interesting point. It's hard to overstate the degree to which Big Five publishing is captured by intersectional left-wing identitarian and gender politics. Anytime I hear about a depressing sameness like you describe, it strikes me as a curation problem: Who gets the book deals? The people who pander to the tastes of the PMC AWFLs who dominate the ranks of literary agencies and editors.
"Curation problem" is a good term.
...Lol. But I recommend not underestimating the ability of those casually inhabiting the right tail to string together a mean sentence upon command, whether or not they ever took a single English class after high school.
And fwiw, Wesley Yang didn't go to a school that UMC Asian parents salivate over, but there are few of any race who can touch him as a writer.
I should add that I love your substack. This isn't a critique of your writing.
Thank you! And no worries, I didn't interpret what you said in that way.
not true. i am interested in watching after finding out about this movie though this post. tropes come up again in different contexts because different people discover them naturally though the course of their own life. i have no clue who ‘philip roth and co’ is, but parts of the basic premise of slanted resonates with me
This was really moving. Also laughed out loud at "Will the sequel be called Slanted 2: Throwing Off The Yolk?"
Can't wait for the novel!
Thanks so much, Steff! Come to NYC again soon!
interesting piece. I've always thought that Asian (east and south) people have assimilated exceptionally well into American culture and neither side of the culture war has ever forgiven them for it. this sheds some interesting light on the subject.
Sure, obsessive status seeking aside.
Yeah buddy I already said they assimilate exceptionally well into American culture
Status seeking IS assimilating no? That’s adopting the dominant culture’s values as your own and performing it vigorously, even if disingenuous.
East yes, South no imo
I’m not fan of RF Kuang’s but at least she writes about topics other than “my mother’s high expectations traumatized me” and “my white boyfriend is committing micro-aggressions against me”
I'm fine with her writing fantasy and mythical novels (though I hear Babel is extremely heavy-handed and preachy). But Yellowface encroaches more into non-genre idpol commercial fiction, and it was so juvenile and self-serving.
Agree that Kuang is not to be dismissed lightly. She treats writing a novel like a consultant running a corporate turnaround (break out the spreadsheets!), but the product she delivers is solid. She's already gone in a few interesting and different directions in her career
Great piece, Chris. I also appreciated the inclusion of your personal writing history, which I knew a bit about but not all the details. Your story just shows that if you're writing about something sincerely and honestly, it will stand the test of time compared to others who try to jump on trends or whatever's popular at the moment.
Thanks a lot, Derek. Means a lot
I feel like there is one massive caveat to the discourse about Asian-American fiction: the criticism I see applies primarily to Asian-American literary fiction (and to some extent movies/TV). The bulk of Asian-American writing is in commercial fiction, much of which is unconcerned with status-seeking and racial dynamics.
The most prominent Asian-American romance writers are either writing romantasy set in Chinese wuxia/xianxia or Kdrama-inspired worlds or contemporary rom-coms set in Asian-American communities with primarily Asian-American love interests (Helen Hoang's debut actually had a white heroine and Vietnamese hero). Aside from R. F. Kuang (who really wants to be literary so bad), most Asian-American fantasy authors write about Asian-inspired fantasy worlds. A weepy multi-generational women's fiction epic is more likely to talk about the experiences of war and displacement. The most popular Asian-American cozy mystery is about meddling but beloved Chinese-Indonesian aunties helping the protagonist solve a murder. In this context, mom good.
Asian-American literary fiction is about strivers, status, alienation, bad parents, and bad white boyfriends because the most popular tropes for contemporary literary fiction are strivers, status, alienation, bad parents, and bad white boyfriends. And if you're in your mid-twenties and stuck in the MFA/NYC/alt-lit rich-person bubble, that's probably going to be most of what you've experienced. A book of a specific genre is going to reflect the conventions of that genre!
I wonder if this is why most of the books that I've read about the SoCal Asian-majority bubble are commercial (rom-coms, crime fiction, etc.). Maybe all the chill SGV SoCal Asian writers want to write books where Asians are happy...?
Yes, literary fiction is almost entirely about prestige (certainly not a lot of money in it), so it makes sense that the most prestige-hungry Asian Americans go into it and the lifestyles reflected in Asian American lit fic show what status-obsessed Asian Americans value.
But where then are all the status-obsessed lit fic from Asian American men? Why's it always about obsession over white boyfriends (by Asian women) and not white girlfriends (by Asian guys)? Sure, there's Lee Chang Rae with a novel like Native Speaker, but Asian Americans have never had a so-called litbro era. I've noticed that a lot of literary-minded Asian American male fiction writers go into science fiction and fantasy, like Ted Chiang and Ken Liu.
I definitely think the litfic version of prestige is also very white! It's often tied to specific colleges and writing programs (often on the East Coast, far away from the East Asian diaspora power centers of California and Hawaii), spending a lot of time networking in very white spaces, and status symbols that most other Asian-Americans would not recognize. Like... in order to care about getting accepted to Tin House or whatever you would already have to have internalized a different value system.
Ted Chiang and Ken Liu both studied computer science and worked for Microsoft (Liu later went on to get a J.D.), which doesn't leave a ton of time to go to parties in New York. Both of them got their start submitting stories to SFF magazines, which have mostly open submissions that take from the slush pile. Charles Yu studied molecular biology and then became a lawyer. Even Tony Tulathimutte had to go work in UX.
On the other hand, most of the big literary Asian-American male writers I can name (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Hua Hsu, Ocean Vuong, Chang-Rae Lee, Alexander Chee) went through the university system. And it's just harder if you're the child of immigrants, if you're a man, and if you're an Asian-American man from a non-rich background with all the pressures to Make It that comes with that to spend however many years bumming around trying to crack an industry that simply doesn't pay. If you're someone like Charles Yu who straddles the line between litfic and sci-fi, you might as well just go write for Westworld and do the screenplay for Akira between novels instead of trying to get a New Yorker staff job.
But it's for sure more than just the pipeline. The fact that litfic doesn't have to make much money also means that the gatekeepers have more latitude in deciding what makes it through based on what is/isn't palatable to them. There is a revulsion against Asian male sexuality in American culture and specifically in the gatekeeper/genteel class, going all the way back to the days of Fu Manchu. Asian-American women are sometimes accepted as long as they are abject and enamored with whiteness (often specifically White men, going all the way back to the days of Madame Butterfly). You don't see many militant anti-colonial Asian female revolutionaries in litfic.
And much of the time, when publishers are trying to put out Asian-American literature, they pick Asian variations on existing successful genres. There are the sad girl novels (those are your Rucy Cuis), there are the gay guys with trauma (Ocean Vuong, although he actually makes money), there are the fractured autofiction confessionals (Tao Lin, who basically had to create a career out of sheer force of will). But the litbro era ended before the diversity push could get to it, and no real equivalent has risen to take its place. I don't think there will be an Asian male David Foster Wallace anytime soon, because the age of David Foster Wallaces is over. The next big Asian-American male writer may very well be whoever figures out how to use a front-facing camera.
Some very welcome additions to the eternally frustrating (if not outright insane) race discourse.
Also some good lessons for younger folks on what commitment to a cause of personal importance actually looks like. (You gotta be in it for the long haul, and it's not always fun!)
Not gonna get into the meat of the issues here, but re: "narrative plenitude" -- new term to me! -- I think one charitable take on why it sometimes doesn't pan out as hoped for is that there's still much of a "scarcity mindset" entrenched among those suddenly offered this "plenitude". And so their instinct is to hoard, as they're so used to doing, even though there's no longer any need to.
Ofc, I think that's a bit too charitable and facile. And I think part of the problem is that often, the first movers -- whether they chose to go first or were (implicitly or explicitly) given the first green light -- caricaturize others in their group who could offer complementary perspectives. Not preemptively, necessarily, out of a sense that those are *competing* perspectives, but to much the same effect. And so there's the impression that those are unworthy perspectives, and we're left with trivial variations on a theme by one monolithic subset. Whose work can be so unappealing that outsiders can lose interest in perspectives from the entire group, bc to them, what else is there? <- I'm counting on others to answer that question.
Thanks, Felice!
I agree about the unshakable scarcity mindset. I also think there's an "iron law of institutions" thing going on that works in conjunction, where even if there were more opportunities to go around, those opportunities are still extremely valuable things (i.e. book deals and other similar things aren't plentiful in the first place), so if you're a certain clique, you do not want a rival group to get a chance to succeed because then your own group's opportunities or prestige will diminish. This is especially true for minority groups that are essentially trying to convince elite white people that they are the most important representatives of their communities.
Gonna finish when I get back home cause I gotta leave the house now, but so far I am into it!
One that I truly do not get is the Desi obsession with skin tone.
On the subcontinent, pale skin is *the* signifier of beauty and social status, even to the point where Indian matrimonial ads invariably include a category for description of skin tone (with a range of adjectives that rivals those used by colonial Spaniards). Skin lightening creams, skin lightening treatments, etc. are perennial best sellers, even seen as necessary to get a good job, a good marriage, etc..
The result is often something that resembles Michael Jackson.
The other irony is that Indian people may try to look white, but actually marrying outside one's caste or community is taboo. Hell, marrying a person of another race is seen as about one step removed from bestiality.
Fuck if I get it. I don't get the East Asian eyelid surgery thing, either.
East Asians also worship light skin (as you may know), but for us at least, it was never about colonialism. Rather, it was just a signifier of being aristocratic enough not to have (ever) had to do manual labor and tan in the fields.
As for the eyelid thing...at the risk of invoking some weird rightoid tropes (whyyy did we ever cede evolutionary psych to them??), well, everyone everywhere has always liked big eyes, especially on women, so yeah. Kids get complimented by grandmas not for not having monolids per se but for having "big eyes".
Hm, it's almost as if there's a cultural system and a colonial system that might have created that current phenomena.
Those attitudes have existed long before English colonization.
"...decisions mean agency which means responsibility." LISTEN. i have been struggling with figuring out how to respond to black women who continuously make the claim that we cannot say anything to other black women about their consumption of beauty products, especially where hair is concerned, because white supremacy is so bad that black women just can't fight back by forgoing lace fronts and Kanekalon because the world just thinks we're so ugly that it can't be helped. We just don't have power. Power is not recognized as relative or layered but it's this simple thing: white people said we were ugly and we'll never get over it.
This is something that non-white women do in particular, and it's constant, to the point where any discussion about women's relative power--especially over our own individual actions and methods of consumption-- is stopped by "intersectionality" or various other mechanisms/concepts embedded in institutionalized feminist ideology. And if you say that most feminism is racialized elitist rhetoric dressed up as critique you'll be blacklisted or defamed. But it is. It absorbs everything we say "as women" into its poisonous mass and spits it back out to us. And now we've got black women obsessed with shit like Bridgerton because they deserve white men who "love" them too.
I read a lot of diaspora lit when I was younger. Even though I'm white*, I'm a first-generation American and it really resonated with me. The whole We Need Diverse Books/Ownvoices narrative is partly true. It is good to have books that represent a variety of experiences. But the books you feel represent you best might not "represent" you in the SJW sense, and that's fine.
I stopped reading these sorts of books around when I was 14, because I discovered Chinese webnovels and because they started to get boring and samey. I was also confused by the emptiness of their conclusions. The protagonists always accepted their parents' culture and realized that they needed to be Asian and American. That's nice and all, but why always have a happy ending? What about a book where the protagonist decides to remigrate to their parents' country and break all ties to the US over [political/economic/cultural thing they disagree with]? What about a student, suspected of being a spy, snapping and pulling a Qian Xuesen? A Greek tragedy where we agree and disagree with them at the same time?
The other thing I disagreed with was disempowerment. Objectively, Asian Americans are powerful. Maybe not as powerful as whites, but the average Asian American probably has a better standard of living than the average of their country of origin. They win Oscars and sell computers. And yet, all Asian American literature is written as if we're still in the 70s, when most white people didn't know what sushi was. It's 2026, people. KPop Demon Hunters is one of the most successful movies ever. Is that good for all Asians? Not necessarily. Is the Hallyu/Cool Japan wave creating its own problems for Asians such as fetishization? Yes. But you can't just sit there and pretend it never happened.
I half-jokingly proposed to Vinay Prasad that the future of Asian American literature is just isekai and power fantasies. I was joking, of course, the MFA class would never deign to read that 'slop', but that would at least be honest. Where's the "Shortcomings" parody that's just Ben banging his way through a bunch of white chicks, without all the whining? More people would read that than "Hatchling".
I am so fucking tired of minorities bitching about America. Nobody asked you to come here, nigger.
Thank you for your attention to this matter
And just why do you think naming your child Edward is a bad thing???
Edward is an evil name. Didn't you see what he did to Mel Gibson in Braveheart?
Before Asians took it you envision polished British aristocrats in horse drawn carriages in a Charles Dickens novel 😂 If you want aristo adjacent, name your kid Edward
I have to ask – is Vivian a very common name among Asian-American women?
I wouldn't say it's very common, but it's one of those names where it's either a very old white lady or a Millennial Chinese American woman.
So, I read most of this article.
And what I got from it was, I must support and praise all mean girl cliques, regardless of race.
(I'm not mocking you! I'm being completely genuine here.)