Really enjoyed this piece and the approach to elitism, it always drives me crazy that essentially every novel character seems to have gone to Harvard or Yale when they make up such a tiny percentage of the actual population. More bizarre and far more interesting things happen on state school campuses and I learned a lot more about life from attending community college classes as a high school fuck up than I ever did from the 'typical' college experience, during which I primarily interacted with other people essentially the same as me.
I really enjoyed this quote: "No, they’ll cling onto their Yale degrees for dear life, knowing that it will propel them to the elite status they’ve been striving for all their lives." The era of 'aesthetic' politics and 'dark academia' claims to try and critique elite institutions but only ever seems to end up reifying their position culturally. But the weirdest part of it is that it comes primarily from people who are inside the house, who still leverage their prestige to market themselves and their work on a deeply competitive market. Because of course they do! But it neuters so much of their critique-- if these institutions are so awful and the people they produce so naturally horrible, then of course we all ought not to pursue what's been written by people in them, which simply confirms and maintains the prestige culture while critiquing it. But they'll never give an inch on that because they still believe they deserve their prestige from attending these (apparently awful and disgusting) institutions.
My sister, who knows that I like to read but isn't very aware of what my actual tastes are, bought me a copy of a YA book called Babel by an Asian-American author who is currently pursuing a PhD at Yale and previously got a masters from Oxford. It was a bad book for numerous reasons (the way that many if not most YA books are) but the one thing that consistently infuriated me was the didactic tone around how elite institutions are inherently evil while masturbating to the elitist prestige they maintain. The book is supposed to depict a revolution, because all books in that genre are supposed to be 'revolutionary' somehow (there are many critiques to be made about socialist realism, but at least their didacticisms and moralist depictions went towards a revolution that actually happened), led by a mixed-race Asian student who was kidnapped and coerced into attending Oxford by his white father.
Now as far as I'm aware, RF Kuang was never forced to go to Oxford at gunpoint. She chose and tried very hard to get there and fully bought into that system (clearly, since she's now getting a PhD at fucking Yale.) So then what is she actually critiquing in this book that she's written, where she's essentially puppeted her self-insert into a much less morally ambiguous situation? Clearly not herself and her actions maintaining and supporting the corrupt, racist, imperialist institutions she's so glad to attend and have gotten into. Clearly there's no actual perspective or action in this narrative at all geared towards her experience of university, even though it's marketed as being based on her experiences. But the text is so eager to beat you over the head over how awful these institutions are it just feels bizarre-- if you hate it that much, stop going! Get a PhD at a state school! Or just stop participating in academia altogether! Nobody is actually holding her at gunpoint like is depicted in the book. And she's still publishing books by virtue of the fancy degree stamped on her resume-- she's certainly not going to stop putting it in her author biography.
Nobody likes to face up to their complicity in a terrible system they've worked hard to get into, of course. This is why you get anxious wealthy people claiming the poor should have simply tried harder not be poor, pull themselves up by the bootstraps, etc. But it's so bizarre to read these books where so much effort is put into (rightfully! understandably!) bashing elite institutions without questioning the perspectives of the authors who put so much work into entering and maintaining them.
Lol RF Kuang. If you loved Babel that much, you should check out Yellowface. I tried for a while to not read that because I knew I'd hate it and I've been trying to hateread less. But then I went back to my old ways and gave it a go. I never read Babel, but from what you described of that book, the same thing is happening in Yellowface, where an insider like Kuang who's been fast-tracked to success by the institution is play-acting at being some angry revolutionary against the institution, all the while earning applause from that institution itself! We all know if you ever say or create something that poses a genuine threat to the status quo, that very status quo won't be praising you. There's also some obvious fan-fic venting of intra-gender racial rivalry with white women too in that book. It's inadvertently a fascinating read in that respect.
I'll likely be writing a piece about that novel and others like it (like The Other Black Girl, another terrible book), so stay tuned!
If you're looking for a genuinely fascinating take on minority entry into academia and how people end up complicit in it, I highly recommend reading Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman! Viktor Strumov's storyline as a Jewish nuclear physicist in an increasingly anti-semitic Soviet Union really digs in to both how minorities are used to maintain a system of exploitation and how people are willing to write off others in order to maintain their position. It's a long read but a fantastic one, and has plenty of interesting perspectives on life in the USSR as well. (and it was confiscated by the Soviet government, so clearly the critique landed deftly home, lol)
Straight Man by Richard Russo is one novel (albeit faculty perspective) that comes to mind as set at a state college.
Can anyone think of a novel or film set at a Catholic college? I guess Rudy counts. But Catholic grade schools, with their stock character nuns, seem to be more popular with fiction creators.
Pardon me for a quibble, but Charlotte is from North Carolina, not West Virginia.
Portions of this really hit me hard as one who often feels like one of the "almost-elites", one subsequently obsessed with Ivy Leagues and my seemingly crutching inability to get over the idea to still apply to one of them even in my 30s. Felt some shame in reading it too. These lines particularly:
"Nobody is more obsessed with these narratives than the almost-elites who, as Kirn notes, are granted “front-row seats” to “everything” but not allowed on stage.”
"I do have to wonder if that in and of itself was indicative of some kind of personal shortcoming."
What tantalizes me most is my relentless (yet covert) chase to join the upper echelon elites of the Ivys, to befriend them thinking I will absorb the unique experience and genius they hold from attending these grand, Harry Potter like societies. Especially growing up in a small town, I feel like I'm trying to catch up to all I must have missed out on. It doesn't help that many of my Ivy League friends are relentless at dropping the schools they attended. Lately, these thoughts have become more and more pathetic or shallow to me and I like you, I wonder if it's indicative of my personal shortcomings.
Yet, I'm also one who genuinely values extraordinary intellect, compelling futuristic research, and the academic rigor these institutions uphold. Much of my fascination is also my love for learning.
I'm still reconciling all of my feelings of loss (of relationships, of friends, of experiences, of potential) from having not pursued these institutions more myself but slowly settling into the idea that as you get older, these matter to you less.
Thanks for this really thoughtful comment. If it makes you feel any better, I guarantee you that if you did attend any of these institutions, you'd feel exactly the same way about being an "almost," except you'd now be comparing yourself to others you perceive to be above you. Thousands of kids enroll into elite colleges every year, and not all of them can be truly elite. Vast majority of them will not be. That's why I love Kirn and Wayne's writings so much, because they're starkly honest about what it feels like to be merely be invited to witness the elite, as opposed to being a part of them.
This piece was intriguing to read, and I enjoyed your perspective throughout it. Your brightest moments were when you entered introspection. You were raw but also honest, and with that honesty came confusion. I think that you were confused for the other parts of the piece, too, yet you were not as honest.
It seems like you have unresolved feelings about "the college experience," and you have unresolved feelings about elite colleges, as well. That is understandable, and you should delve more into those thoughts in the coming years. In doing so, I believe that you will gain another layer of nuance in your thinking. This nuance exists for you; it is wonderful to read when you find it internally. What if you find it for the external world?
There are a few examples of this gap in nuance, but a more striking one is at the end of the piece. In the third-to-last paragraph, you alternate between interesting observations about your experience ('In my senior year, I remember my classmates fretting about how on earth they’d make friends and meet girlfriends/boyfriends after graduation,) and less interesting, but also less believable claims about what the world might be like now ('I suspect there were many who felt the same, so why do that when you can just use apps and social media to find sex and relationships, even friends?' Do you really believe that apps will damage college's appeal? That's a crazy claim that should be supported more, if so.) It seems like your writing is even infected when it just touches the external, when you must force the internal into your external point of view: do you really believe that you only went to parties as a chore, that all of your interactions in college were based on a wanted outcome? Your external view feels dictated by a loose attachment between a misunderstanding of that time in your life and a convenient narrative.
However, your second-to-last paragraph attempts to correct that misunderstanding, while you paradoxically claim that you do not think about that time in your life anymore. There is complexity in the external question of whether not getting over college is as bad as not getting over high school. There is complexity in your internal question of whether you are as bad as the washed-up middle-aged ex-football star. In a piece that touches on meritocracy, you even glimpse into your own faults ('...indicative of a personal shortcoming.) These feel like more natural jumping off points for your conclusions.
This is the first piece of yours that I've read, and I really enjoyed it. Yet, I do not believe you are writing as persuasively as is possible, for you. I say this because on their own, I do not disagree with most of your opinions. You just do not support them in the piece, and they are only loosely connected to each other. Applying some of the questioning that you use in your internally-focused writing would make you more credible, in my opinion.
(Sorry if this is really annoying. I'm the worst type of person -- liberal arts major that works a corporate job -- and doing this was cathartic)
May 17, 2023·edited May 17, 2023Liked by Chris Jesu Lee
I loved this! Thanks for sharing. We need more truthful pieces on the place of Asian Americans in relation to higher education and social mobility.
I fit the demographic of someone more akin to Tartt's Richard, but I can't help but feel that college's cultural interpretations lie more in YouTubers talking about their experiences, and within mass aesthetics like dark academia. So I was surprised that you noted a dearth of college-related stories, but I see your point on how much of it is one note. My favorite is Free Food for Millionaries but Casey's a graduate at that point ... does that count?
Thanks Sunny! I didn't examine Youtube because when I was getting ready for college, Youtube was more Star Wars Kid than video essays about the college experience, and I also wanted to focus on more so-called official representations that were sanctioned by establishment institutions (e.g. publishing houses, film studios, etc.).
I love Free Food For Millionaires (I'm a hater of most Asian American literature, but I do really like that novel), but no, I wouldn't count it as a college novel since, as you said, Casey has already graduated from Princeton.
"The potentially good news is that the prestige of college is being chipped away for younger students."
Maybe I don't travel in the right circles, but I am yet to meet an Asian American who didn't want to go to college.
That said, the best college advice I ever got came from National Review, of all places. "Hang out with the returning students, with people who dropped out and came back, with people who started college late. These people have much more interesting and practical experience. More importantly, they are in college because they *want* to be there, not because they can party for five years, which sure beats The Real World. Returning students likely are spending their own money, to boot."
Bret Easton Ellis wrote a book about college students called The Rules of Attraction. He went to the same college Donna Tartt went to, and I see that you have her book too. The "liberal arts student finding themselves" genre still could use more writers.
Yes, I read The Rules of Attraction long ago. I don't remember much about it except everyone was rich and popular and did lot of drugs and fucking haha. I think the low ceiling of the college narrative has already been reached. Even if I say I'd like something brutally honest, we already have a novel like Loner. A college novel from the pov of the VA Tech shooter would be incredibly fascinating but will probably never be allowed to get written, at least in the mainstream.
Really enjoyed this piece and the approach to elitism, it always drives me crazy that essentially every novel character seems to have gone to Harvard or Yale when they make up such a tiny percentage of the actual population. More bizarre and far more interesting things happen on state school campuses and I learned a lot more about life from attending community college classes as a high school fuck up than I ever did from the 'typical' college experience, during which I primarily interacted with other people essentially the same as me.
I really enjoyed this quote: "No, they’ll cling onto their Yale degrees for dear life, knowing that it will propel them to the elite status they’ve been striving for all their lives." The era of 'aesthetic' politics and 'dark academia' claims to try and critique elite institutions but only ever seems to end up reifying their position culturally. But the weirdest part of it is that it comes primarily from people who are inside the house, who still leverage their prestige to market themselves and their work on a deeply competitive market. Because of course they do! But it neuters so much of their critique-- if these institutions are so awful and the people they produce so naturally horrible, then of course we all ought not to pursue what's been written by people in them, which simply confirms and maintains the prestige culture while critiquing it. But they'll never give an inch on that because they still believe they deserve their prestige from attending these (apparently awful and disgusting) institutions.
My sister, who knows that I like to read but isn't very aware of what my actual tastes are, bought me a copy of a YA book called Babel by an Asian-American author who is currently pursuing a PhD at Yale and previously got a masters from Oxford. It was a bad book for numerous reasons (the way that many if not most YA books are) but the one thing that consistently infuriated me was the didactic tone around how elite institutions are inherently evil while masturbating to the elitist prestige they maintain. The book is supposed to depict a revolution, because all books in that genre are supposed to be 'revolutionary' somehow (there are many critiques to be made about socialist realism, but at least their didacticisms and moralist depictions went towards a revolution that actually happened), led by a mixed-race Asian student who was kidnapped and coerced into attending Oxford by his white father.
Now as far as I'm aware, RF Kuang was never forced to go to Oxford at gunpoint. She chose and tried very hard to get there and fully bought into that system (clearly, since she's now getting a PhD at fucking Yale.) So then what is she actually critiquing in this book that she's written, where she's essentially puppeted her self-insert into a much less morally ambiguous situation? Clearly not herself and her actions maintaining and supporting the corrupt, racist, imperialist institutions she's so glad to attend and have gotten into. Clearly there's no actual perspective or action in this narrative at all geared towards her experience of university, even though it's marketed as being based on her experiences. But the text is so eager to beat you over the head over how awful these institutions are it just feels bizarre-- if you hate it that much, stop going! Get a PhD at a state school! Or just stop participating in academia altogether! Nobody is actually holding her at gunpoint like is depicted in the book. And she's still publishing books by virtue of the fancy degree stamped on her resume-- she's certainly not going to stop putting it in her author biography.
Nobody likes to face up to their complicity in a terrible system they've worked hard to get into, of course. This is why you get anxious wealthy people claiming the poor should have simply tried harder not be poor, pull themselves up by the bootstraps, etc. But it's so bizarre to read these books where so much effort is put into (rightfully! understandably!) bashing elite institutions without questioning the perspectives of the authors who put so much work into entering and maintaining them.
Thanks Maeve for the long and thoughtful comment!
Lol RF Kuang. If you loved Babel that much, you should check out Yellowface. I tried for a while to not read that because I knew I'd hate it and I've been trying to hateread less. But then I went back to my old ways and gave it a go. I never read Babel, but from what you described of that book, the same thing is happening in Yellowface, where an insider like Kuang who's been fast-tracked to success by the institution is play-acting at being some angry revolutionary against the institution, all the while earning applause from that institution itself! We all know if you ever say or create something that poses a genuine threat to the status quo, that very status quo won't be praising you. There's also some obvious fan-fic venting of intra-gender racial rivalry with white women too in that book. It's inadvertently a fascinating read in that respect.
I'll likely be writing a piece about that novel and others like it (like The Other Black Girl, another terrible book), so stay tuned!
If you're looking for a genuinely fascinating take on minority entry into academia and how people end up complicit in it, I highly recommend reading Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman! Viktor Strumov's storyline as a Jewish nuclear physicist in an increasingly anti-semitic Soviet Union really digs in to both how minorities are used to maintain a system of exploitation and how people are willing to write off others in order to maintain their position. It's a long read but a fantastic one, and has plenty of interesting perspectives on life in the USSR as well. (and it was confiscated by the Soviet government, so clearly the critique landed deftly home, lol)
Thanks for the rec! Will check it out.
Excellent recommendation, but you also have to read "Stalingrad". Together they make up the "War and Peace" for WWII.
Straight Man by Richard Russo is one novel (albeit faculty perspective) that comes to mind as set at a state college.
Can anyone think of a novel or film set at a Catholic college? I guess Rudy counts. But Catholic grade schools, with their stock character nuns, seem to be more popular with fiction creators.
Pardon me for a quibble, but Charlotte is from North Carolina, not West Virginia.
obsessed with your writing
Gonna ride this compliment all summer
It's really hard to sell a campus novel :( Maybe it's changed w the dark academia trend, but the stereotype is college kids don't read.
Portions of this really hit me hard as one who often feels like one of the "almost-elites", one subsequently obsessed with Ivy Leagues and my seemingly crutching inability to get over the idea to still apply to one of them even in my 30s. Felt some shame in reading it too. These lines particularly:
"Nobody is more obsessed with these narratives than the almost-elites who, as Kirn notes, are granted “front-row seats” to “everything” but not allowed on stage.”
"I do have to wonder if that in and of itself was indicative of some kind of personal shortcoming."
What tantalizes me most is my relentless (yet covert) chase to join the upper echelon elites of the Ivys, to befriend them thinking I will absorb the unique experience and genius they hold from attending these grand, Harry Potter like societies. Especially growing up in a small town, I feel like I'm trying to catch up to all I must have missed out on. It doesn't help that many of my Ivy League friends are relentless at dropping the schools they attended. Lately, these thoughts have become more and more pathetic or shallow to me and I like you, I wonder if it's indicative of my personal shortcomings.
Yet, I'm also one who genuinely values extraordinary intellect, compelling futuristic research, and the academic rigor these institutions uphold. Much of my fascination is also my love for learning.
I'm still reconciling all of my feelings of loss (of relationships, of friends, of experiences, of potential) from having not pursued these institutions more myself but slowly settling into the idea that as you get older, these matter to you less.
Thanks for this really thoughtful comment. If it makes you feel any better, I guarantee you that if you did attend any of these institutions, you'd feel exactly the same way about being an "almost," except you'd now be comparing yourself to others you perceive to be above you. Thousands of kids enroll into elite colleges every year, and not all of them can be truly elite. Vast majority of them will not be. That's why I love Kirn and Wayne's writings so much, because they're starkly honest about what it feels like to be merely be invited to witness the elite, as opposed to being a part of them.
This piece was intriguing to read, and I enjoyed your perspective throughout it. Your brightest moments were when you entered introspection. You were raw but also honest, and with that honesty came confusion. I think that you were confused for the other parts of the piece, too, yet you were not as honest.
It seems like you have unresolved feelings about "the college experience," and you have unresolved feelings about elite colleges, as well. That is understandable, and you should delve more into those thoughts in the coming years. In doing so, I believe that you will gain another layer of nuance in your thinking. This nuance exists for you; it is wonderful to read when you find it internally. What if you find it for the external world?
There are a few examples of this gap in nuance, but a more striking one is at the end of the piece. In the third-to-last paragraph, you alternate between interesting observations about your experience ('In my senior year, I remember my classmates fretting about how on earth they’d make friends and meet girlfriends/boyfriends after graduation,) and less interesting, but also less believable claims about what the world might be like now ('I suspect there were many who felt the same, so why do that when you can just use apps and social media to find sex and relationships, even friends?' Do you really believe that apps will damage college's appeal? That's a crazy claim that should be supported more, if so.) It seems like your writing is even infected when it just touches the external, when you must force the internal into your external point of view: do you really believe that you only went to parties as a chore, that all of your interactions in college were based on a wanted outcome? Your external view feels dictated by a loose attachment between a misunderstanding of that time in your life and a convenient narrative.
However, your second-to-last paragraph attempts to correct that misunderstanding, while you paradoxically claim that you do not think about that time in your life anymore. There is complexity in the external question of whether not getting over college is as bad as not getting over high school. There is complexity in your internal question of whether you are as bad as the washed-up middle-aged ex-football star. In a piece that touches on meritocracy, you even glimpse into your own faults ('...indicative of a personal shortcoming.) These feel like more natural jumping off points for your conclusions.
This is the first piece of yours that I've read, and I really enjoyed it. Yet, I do not believe you are writing as persuasively as is possible, for you. I say this because on their own, I do not disagree with most of your opinions. You just do not support them in the piece, and they are only loosely connected to each other. Applying some of the questioning that you use in your internally-focused writing would make you more credible, in my opinion.
(Sorry if this is really annoying. I'm the worst type of person -- liberal arts major that works a corporate job -- and doing this was cathartic)
I loved this! Thanks for sharing. We need more truthful pieces on the place of Asian Americans in relation to higher education and social mobility.
I fit the demographic of someone more akin to Tartt's Richard, but I can't help but feel that college's cultural interpretations lie more in YouTubers talking about their experiences, and within mass aesthetics like dark academia. So I was surprised that you noted a dearth of college-related stories, but I see your point on how much of it is one note. My favorite is Free Food for Millionaries but Casey's a graduate at that point ... does that count?
Best of luck on your next novel ideas :)
Thanks Sunny! I didn't examine Youtube because when I was getting ready for college, Youtube was more Star Wars Kid than video essays about the college experience, and I also wanted to focus on more so-called official representations that were sanctioned by establishment institutions (e.g. publishing houses, film studios, etc.).
I love Free Food For Millionaires (I'm a hater of most Asian American literature, but I do really like that novel), but no, I wouldn't count it as a college novel since, as you said, Casey has already graduated from Princeton.
Appreciate your wishes!
"The potentially good news is that the prestige of college is being chipped away for younger students."
Maybe I don't travel in the right circles, but I am yet to meet an Asian American who didn't want to go to college.
That said, the best college advice I ever got came from National Review, of all places. "Hang out with the returning students, with people who dropped out and came back, with people who started college late. These people have much more interesting and practical experience. More importantly, they are in college because they *want* to be there, not because they can party for five years, which sure beats The Real World. Returning students likely are spending their own money, to boot."
Bret Easton Ellis wrote a book about college students called The Rules of Attraction. He went to the same college Donna Tartt went to, and I see that you have her book too. The "liberal arts student finding themselves" genre still could use more writers.
Yes, I read The Rules of Attraction long ago. I don't remember much about it except everyone was rich and popular and did lot of drugs and fucking haha. I think the low ceiling of the college narrative has already been reached. Even if I say I'd like something brutally honest, we already have a novel like Loner. A college novel from the pov of the VA Tech shooter would be incredibly fascinating but will probably never be allowed to get written, at least in the mainstream.
I’ve never read it, but didn’t Jay Caspian Kang write a novel with a protagonist influenced by the VT shooting? The Dead Do Not Improve.
Yes. Unfortunately, it was terrible lol