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The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays
The National Magazine Award–winning writer’s debut collection of incisive, stylish essays on race and gender.
One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow Folk, does more than collect a decade’s worth of cult-reputation essays—it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.
In his celebrated and prescient essay “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” Yang explores the deranged logic of the Virginia Tech shooter. In his National Magazine Award–winning “Paper Tigers,” he explores the intersection of Asian values and the American dream, and the inner torment of the child exposed to “tiger mother” parenting. And in his close reading of New York Magazine’s popular Sex Diaries, he was among the first critics to take seriously today’s Internet-mediated dating lives.
Yang catches these ugly trends early because he has felt at various times implicated in them, and he does not exempt himself from his radical honesty. His essays retain the thrill of discovery, the wary eye of the first explorer, and the rueful admission of the first exposed.
232 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 13, 2018
124 people are currently reading
2910 people want to read
About the author
Wesley Yang
6 books50 followersWesley Yang has published criticism, essays, and nonfiction features in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Esquire, Tablet, and n+1. His work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Magazine Writing, Best Creative Nonfiction, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in Montreal.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 210 reviews
January 21, 2019
While I liked some of these essays, including the last one “What is White Supremacy”, my main problem with this collection is that my expectations were disappointed. That is primarily the fault of the totally misleading title of the book. I wanted some analysis of race from the point of view of Asian Americans. Instead I got a bunch of rambling essays, most of which were not about Asian Americans at all. It’s also a very male-oriented book. For example, instead of just describing a training course dedicated to teaching Asian American men how to pick up white women, he might have interviewed a few Asian American (or white) women to get their views on the course. However for the most part women are silent in these essays. This book was not what I was looking for and ripping off the title of a great book is kind of insulting. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
February 24, 2019
You can't have it both ways, Yang. You can't decry identity politics and also write a book about the oppression of Asian men. You can't summon the great W.E.B. Dubois and not actually deal with the soul of yellow folk. This is just a collection of essays written by Yang about a large variety of topics. I loved his exploration of asian men and their unique struggles. I agree with him and I was willing to go with him on that journey, but then he starts calling out the very folks who he should be writing to.
December 28, 2018
Okay! Book has a great title, but it is very misleading! Went into this expecting/hoping for a book of essays explicitly about Asian-American experiences. There are a couple essays on race (the first one which I had read already, about the Virginia tech shooter who was a Korean-American, is great). Rather, a selection of essays spanning Yangs career most of which are profiles of people/cultural events from ten years ago. It’s 2018 baby! I’m not trying to read a bunch of think pieces about people/events important only to 2009! He begins one essay like “have you heard of grindr, it’s this new app for gay men” and it was just so dated! This book is also very male! The theme of Asian-American masculinity appears throughout his essays which is a cool/important topic that I wish there was more of, but other than that I grew bored reading about pick up artists and dude hackers- for a book about “race and gender” he maybe writes about one woman in one essay? I was excited about this one because he is a talented writer and the cheeky title, and it had a lot of potential, but was disappointing!
December 31, 2025
blackpill
A nihilistic belief that one's romantic and sexual failure is predetermined by unchangeable factors like physical appearance or genetics, making any self-improvement effort futile. The blackpill ideology is associated with significant mental health issues, including high rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.
The first essays in this collection, "The Face of Seung-Hui Choi" and "Paper Tigers" are two of the most scabrous, self-loathing, brutally nihilistic, and yet achingly vulnerable pieces I've ever read. The first is ostensibly about two Asian-American mass-shooters and the second appears to be about Asian-American men in college yearning to be more than what they've been raised to be. The third essay "Eddie Huang Against the World" is lighter - perhaps because its subject is just about the opposite of self-loathing - but still examines the same topic: being an Asian man in majority-white America. The Korean-American Wesley Yang deserves all of the kudos for how honestly he speaks to the experience of feeling invisible, demeaned, and emasculated by a society that will continually look past him, and when it does "see" him, will view him as automatically subservient, well-mannered, unimaginative, and unemotional - the perfect test-taker, the ultimate servant. These essays are not a plea for empathy, they are not careful analyses full of data and suggestions for improvement, they are not a scream of rage from a prisoner. These essays took the blackpill: they are a hollow-voiced accounting of what is, how life is, there's no changing it. They are murmurs from a pit.
The essays in this first section certainly had some resonance for me, as I'm half-Asian. But they still felt quite alien too. I'm a whitepill guy! :)
Subsequent essays continue Yang's interest in individuals living in a body or a mind that has become a cage. But then the continuity evaporates, and we have essays on Francis Fukuyama, dating and hook-up patterns of NYC residents, and "Pick-up Artist" culture. These were all well done; Yang is a solid writer. But I did miss the uniqueness of the first few essays and I was particularly disappointed because I had bought this based on its title - and so I assumed the whole thing would be about the Asian-American experience. The last three essays examine race again. The first of these is a brief point being made about how even a group of outcasts will still want an outcast to pick on. The last two are more specifically about the attacks on whiteness and masculinity that were so popular when this collection was published. All three essays are more journalistic in tone, less scathing - and, sadly, also less vulnerable - than the first essays. Good points are raised, but these pieces weren't distinctive in the way of the first section. I did particularly enjoy how prescient the author was about the rise and dangers of identitarianism on the left. Does he now have similar thoughts on the rise and dangers of the identitarian right?
At this point, I suppose I've given up on Yang, despite following his writing for a number of years. I wonder if he's due for a revisit. I had once enjoyed the biting wit and chilly, hyper-intellectual style of the many anti-woke essays he wrote after publishing this well-received book. I followed his substack and soon found that he had become transfixed by a new cause: attacking trans ideology. He made some interesting points, and his tone though snide was never hateful. But trans ideology had clearly become an obsession for him. I kind of get it: individuals trapped in bodies not to their liking are a particular area of interest for him. But I'm not remotely transphobic, quite the opposite, and so eventually his mono-focus became monotonous, tiresome, and rather boring to read, despite my interest in heterodox writers and in reading viewpoints that don't align with mine. Not much of a surprise: in general, other people's obsessions are monotonous, tiresome, and rather boring to deal with. Anway, I hope he's better now!
February 11, 2019
If, this year, I were given free license by society to ascend to the top of my over-priced, under-maintained Berkeley apartment, unlock the service door, climb to the rooftop, and shout from the rafters a single book recommendation to the confused onlookers below, Wesley Yang’s The Souls of Yellow Folk would be my unequivocal pick.
It’s deeply necessary, provocative, electric, and all those other book-reviewer adjectives that seem at once flat and hyperbolic with two weeks’ hindsight. But, having let the book sit, the initial bite of the essays percolate and cool (or is it warm?) in the bloodstream, and revisited it with fresh eyes, I have to say that as descriptors they’re accurate.
Before gushing further, a disclaimer. Contra title, the book is not about Yellow Folk. As Sophia Nguyen’s review for Slate notes, only two of the essays are substantively about East Asian Americans, and both of these are exclusively concerned with the experience of straight Asian men. The misleading title is perhaps forgivable as a marketing misstep; Yang’s fairly typical problems of male gaze, less so.
But in a culture where the most visible Asian man is a squat foreign dictator so ridiculous that you almost don’t notice the racially coded way he’s mocked, and the most-assigned book by an Asian man Chang-Rae Lee’s yawn-inducing Native Speaker, Asian men are perhaps entitled to one decent book about their experience.
Yang begins, modestly enough, by addressing a subject most writers would deem untouchable. In “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho”, he broaches the horrible possibility that, by wearing the same yellow Asian face, deemed “unlovable” even by friends, he may know something of the experience of the man who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech.
What if, Yang asks, Cho had been born with a face that was not “beady-eyed [and] brown-toned… a face that has nothing to do with the desires of women in this country”? What if the Cho who had not yet shot 49 innocents had, by some miracle, found a friend to alleviate some of his obvious loneliness, or received a little acknowledgement for the twisted stories he wrote, if not for their dubious literary merit, then for the sense of alienation that they contained?
Yang is careful to not engage in victim blaming. Even before he was a mass murderer, Cho was by all accounts a creep, and the women who he stalked and sent lewd messages to were right to turn him into the police. If you started receiving unwanted messages from someone with “beady lugubrious eyes, in a forlorn, brown-tinted face”, you’d be justified in shutting him out.
But lurking beneath all of this is an unanswerable question. Grant for a moment that we live in a hierarchy, one where a white man making six figures can get 6,000 responses on Match.com in a single night, while certain races—the South American migrants who bus your tables, and, yes, slit-eyed, sallow-faced Asian men—are dismissed as undesirable out of hand. Then “what if it’s not you shutting out the losers? What if you’re the loser who everyone is shutting out?… What if, as far as you know, you’re the lowest person at the low end of this hierarchy?” How would you react?
Yang has since deemed parts of the essay “indefensible”. There are points where the line between mental illness and legitimate grievance are dangerously blurred. But to pretend that our most monstrous killers exist apart from the conditions of society, floating outside the laws of cause and effect, also seems wrong. The easy thing would be to dismiss Cho as inhuman, a different category from the rest of us. Yang confronts us with the frightening possibility that Cho was like us, once—and that, as an Asian man, he might know something of the alienation that drove him over the edge.
This got real heavy. Let’s all take a deep breath. Yang’s essays can be quite difficult to digest, and the first one is a doozy. Later ones tackle more quotidian concerns. “Paper Tigers”, the second essay in the collection, is ostensibly about Amy Chua’s controversial book on Tiger Parenting. But the choice of Chua as subject is a facade, largely a cheap way to capitalize on her infamy, and really an excuse for Yang to tackle what is perhaps his great theme: the frustrating, pervasive, undeniable, but ever-so slippery sense of invisibility being an Asian man in the West.
I won’t spoil the punchline, as I did with the last essay. But I will say that reading Yang, I felt that thrill of recognition, that rush of serotonin that we got when the first Internet memes told us we weren’t alone in our neurotic solipsism, or when we bared our hearts to our teenage crushes and found, to our surprise, that we shared the same yearnings, the same idiotic vulnerabilities. This was an Asian man, telling me what being me is like, in a book. That alone was a surprise. Perhaps it took someone with the audacity to empathize with the truly monstrous to say what for so long has been passed over in silence. With this set of essays, Yang has carved out the space for Asian men to talk about our experience, and pose the uncomfortable questions that only those who have lived it can ask.
So here are the facts. In large swathes of this country, the Asian man is a perpetual foreigner. In the classroom and then the boardroom, he is seen as rote, dependable, like a good sprocket wrench, but hardly leadership or creative material. It is okay to joke about his SATs, since a bamboo ceiling caps his earnings. It is socially acceptable (without even a glance over the shoulder) to joke about his endowment, because on the dating market he is a nonentity. He swipes right and right and right, and knows the quiet disappointment of being unwanted.
And then there are the little things, which Yang captures so well. In his words, an Asian face is the face of an “invisible person”, part of “a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter socially or culturally.” If a white person brushes him off when striking up a conversation, he is not sure if it is because he as an individual is boring, or if the collective force of every token Chinese nerd from the movies and Asians-sleeping-in-the-library meme has created the unconscious assumption that he is not a person at all, but another sallow-faced Excel monkey without feelings and opinions and indeed an inner life, except perhaps if his Starcraft base is Zerg rushed in the first three minutes.
But, if the case of racism is so clear, then why the silence? Why as good, well-meaning liberals don’t we ever talk about any of this?
The answer, I think, is that there is an unstated awkwardness to the problem of the Asian male. Almost certainly he benefits from sexism in the world, both out in society and (crucially) within the traditional family unit. Outside of a few unfortunate groups, he prospers economically. But he is also subject to a host of small indignities that cut against our received wisdom about how men are the great beneficiaries of Masculinity. And a thousand insignificances, to sidestep a tired Oriental metaphor, may add up to something quite large.
The Internet has supplied us with a term for this, Intersectionality, but with more immediate crises of racial justice at hand, sorting out the precise status of Asian men, and how exactly his specific problems are to be addressed, is not a high priority. The result, in my experience, is silence. Not a silence founded in malice, I believe, but the simple fact that Asian men are just one group in a long line of rightfully aggrieved parties in America.
Couple this with the suspicion that the category many Asian men secretly aspire to—to be taken seriously as a Man: a valid object of desire and an independent, assertive actor in the world—may not in fact be a legitimate category at all, but one based on entitlement and illegitimate power, and the result is total confusion.
Yang has no answers to the questions he provokes. I’ve got none either. But for the first time, I feel free to ask them, and refreshed in the knowledge that, no, I’m not crazy, the status quo is unacceptable, and naming these truths is more invigorating than pretending they don’t exist. “The Souls of Yellow Folk” is messy and incomplete. But even as a half-baked project, essentially a stapling-together of pieces that have been published elsewhere, I found it superior to almost everything I read last year. Wesley Yang deserves your royalty dollar. Go buy it.
It’s deeply necessary, provocative, electric, and all those other book-reviewer adjectives that seem at once flat and hyperbolic with two weeks’ hindsight. But, having let the book sit, the initial bite of the essays percolate and cool (or is it warm?) in the bloodstream, and revisited it with fresh eyes, I have to say that as descriptors they’re accurate.
Before gushing further, a disclaimer. Contra title, the book is not about Yellow Folk. As Sophia Nguyen’s review for Slate notes, only two of the essays are substantively about East Asian Americans, and both of these are exclusively concerned with the experience of straight Asian men. The misleading title is perhaps forgivable as a marketing misstep; Yang’s fairly typical problems of male gaze, less so.
But in a culture where the most visible Asian man is a squat foreign dictator so ridiculous that you almost don’t notice the racially coded way he’s mocked, and the most-assigned book by an Asian man Chang-Rae Lee’s yawn-inducing Native Speaker, Asian men are perhaps entitled to one decent book about their experience.
Yang begins, modestly enough, by addressing a subject most writers would deem untouchable. In “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho”, he broaches the horrible possibility that, by wearing the same yellow Asian face, deemed “unlovable” even by friends, he may know something of the experience of the man who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech.
What if, Yang asks, Cho had been born with a face that was not “beady-eyed [and] brown-toned… a face that has nothing to do with the desires of women in this country”? What if the Cho who had not yet shot 49 innocents had, by some miracle, found a friend to alleviate some of his obvious loneliness, or received a little acknowledgement for the twisted stories he wrote, if not for their dubious literary merit, then for the sense of alienation that they contained?
Yang is careful to not engage in victim blaming. Even before he was a mass murderer, Cho was by all accounts a creep, and the women who he stalked and sent lewd messages to were right to turn him into the police. If you started receiving unwanted messages from someone with “beady lugubrious eyes, in a forlorn, brown-tinted face”, you’d be justified in shutting him out.
But lurking beneath all of this is an unanswerable question. Grant for a moment that we live in a hierarchy, one where a white man making six figures can get 6,000 responses on Match.com in a single night, while certain races—the South American migrants who bus your tables, and, yes, slit-eyed, sallow-faced Asian men—are dismissed as undesirable out of hand. Then “what if it’s not you shutting out the losers? What if you’re the loser who everyone is shutting out?… What if, as far as you know, you’re the lowest person at the low end of this hierarchy?” How would you react?
Yang has since deemed parts of the essay “indefensible”. There are points where the line between mental illness and legitimate grievance are dangerously blurred. But to pretend that our most monstrous killers exist apart from the conditions of society, floating outside the laws of cause and effect, also seems wrong. The easy thing would be to dismiss Cho as inhuman, a different category from the rest of us. Yang confronts us with the frightening possibility that Cho was like us, once—and that, as an Asian man, he might know something of the alienation that drove him over the edge.
This got real heavy. Let’s all take a deep breath. Yang’s essays can be quite difficult to digest, and the first one is a doozy. Later ones tackle more quotidian concerns. “Paper Tigers”, the second essay in the collection, is ostensibly about Amy Chua’s controversial book on Tiger Parenting. But the choice of Chua as subject is a facade, largely a cheap way to capitalize on her infamy, and really an excuse for Yang to tackle what is perhaps his great theme: the frustrating, pervasive, undeniable, but ever-so slippery sense of invisibility being an Asian man in the West.
I won’t spoil the punchline, as I did with the last essay. But I will say that reading Yang, I felt that thrill of recognition, that rush of serotonin that we got when the first Internet memes told us we weren’t alone in our neurotic solipsism, or when we bared our hearts to our teenage crushes and found, to our surprise, that we shared the same yearnings, the same idiotic vulnerabilities. This was an Asian man, telling me what being me is like, in a book. That alone was a surprise. Perhaps it took someone with the audacity to empathize with the truly monstrous to say what for so long has been passed over in silence. With this set of essays, Yang has carved out the space for Asian men to talk about our experience, and pose the uncomfortable questions that only those who have lived it can ask.
So here are the facts. In large swathes of this country, the Asian man is a perpetual foreigner. In the classroom and then the boardroom, he is seen as rote, dependable, like a good sprocket wrench, but hardly leadership or creative material. It is okay to joke about his SATs, since a bamboo ceiling caps his earnings. It is socially acceptable (without even a glance over the shoulder) to joke about his endowment, because on the dating market he is a nonentity. He swipes right and right and right, and knows the quiet disappointment of being unwanted.
And then there are the little things, which Yang captures so well. In his words, an Asian face is the face of an “invisible person”, part of “a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter socially or culturally.” If a white person brushes him off when striking up a conversation, he is not sure if it is because he as an individual is boring, or if the collective force of every token Chinese nerd from the movies and Asians-sleeping-in-the-library meme has created the unconscious assumption that he is not a person at all, but another sallow-faced Excel monkey without feelings and opinions and indeed an inner life, except perhaps if his Starcraft base is Zerg rushed in the first three minutes.
But, if the case of racism is so clear, then why the silence? Why as good, well-meaning liberals don’t we ever talk about any of this?
The answer, I think, is that there is an unstated awkwardness to the problem of the Asian male. Almost certainly he benefits from sexism in the world, both out in society and (crucially) within the traditional family unit. Outside of a few unfortunate groups, he prospers economically. But he is also subject to a host of small indignities that cut against our received wisdom about how men are the great beneficiaries of Masculinity. And a thousand insignificances, to sidestep a tired Oriental metaphor, may add up to something quite large.
The Internet has supplied us with a term for this, Intersectionality, but with more immediate crises of racial justice at hand, sorting out the precise status of Asian men, and how exactly his specific problems are to be addressed, is not a high priority. The result, in my experience, is silence. Not a silence founded in malice, I believe, but the simple fact that Asian men are just one group in a long line of rightfully aggrieved parties in America.
Couple this with the suspicion that the category many Asian men secretly aspire to—to be taken seriously as a Man: a valid object of desire and an independent, assertive actor in the world—may not in fact be a legitimate category at all, but one based on entitlement and illegitimate power, and the result is total confusion.
Yang has no answers to the questions he provokes. I’ve got none either. But for the first time, I feel free to ask them, and refreshed in the knowledge that, no, I’m not crazy, the status quo is unacceptable, and naming these truths is more invigorating than pretending they don’t exist. “The Souls of Yellow Folk” is messy and incomplete. But even as a half-baked project, essentially a stapling-together of pieces that have been published elsewhere, I found it superior to almost everything I read last year. Wesley Yang deserves your royalty dollar. Go buy it.
December 31, 2018
4.5 largely exemplary essays and portraits with a few puff pieces that are at very least perfectly formed and entertaining.
Read
August 26, 2020This title is grossly misleading. Some essays touch on Yang's identity as Asian-American, but others do not. The title is a disgusting attempt to appropriate DuBois's famous text.
Next, in the essays that talk about Yang as an Asian-American man, he is misogynistic, whiny, and bitter. He is resentful toward Asian American communities: “Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility.” He is obsessed with picking up white women: “Yes, it is about picking up white women. Yes, it is about attracting those women whose hair is the color of the midday sun and eyes are the color of the ocean.” He talks repeatedly of becoming an American alpha male, even while acknowledging that "there is no masculinity whose constitutive predicate is not the domination of women.”
While the emasculation of Asian-American men is something I do not dismiss, his response is to hate women and fixate on white women. Throughout this whole collection of essays, he only mentions 2 Asian women: Amy Chua, author of the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, and Constance Wu, the actress who plays the mom in Fresh Off the Boat. Chua provides the context in which he talks about his relationship with his parents, mostly his father. And Wu appears in one small paragraph in the essay about Eddie Huang, chef and the inspiration behind Fresh Off the Boat.
It is clear that Yang hates himself. Now that I've read this book, I hate him too.
Next, in the essays that talk about Yang as an Asian-American man, he is misogynistic, whiny, and bitter. He is resentful toward Asian American communities: “Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility.” He is obsessed with picking up white women: “Yes, it is about picking up white women. Yes, it is about attracting those women whose hair is the color of the midday sun and eyes are the color of the ocean.” He talks repeatedly of becoming an American alpha male, even while acknowledging that "there is no masculinity whose constitutive predicate is not the domination of women.”
While the emasculation of Asian-American men is something I do not dismiss, his response is to hate women and fixate on white women. Throughout this whole collection of essays, he only mentions 2 Asian women: Amy Chua, author of the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, and Constance Wu, the actress who plays the mom in Fresh Off the Boat. Chua provides the context in which he talks about his relationship with his parents, mostly his father. And Wu appears in one small paragraph in the essay about Eddie Huang, chef and the inspiration behind Fresh Off the Boat.
It is clear that Yang hates himself. Now that I've read this book, I hate him too.
November 5, 2018
It's not necessarily the quality of the writing that's an issue but the packaging and also the message of what's being said. Initially, I was very intrigued by what a book with this title (a riff off W.E.B DuBois' SOULS OF BLACK FOLK) may interrogate in race for Asian/Pacific Islanders, sadly it falls way below expectation. Essentially the title is WAY off base for this text and it would be better served to not try and cash in on Black awareness in prose to make this one stand out more.
All of these are republished pieces with little if any editing/modifications. The work is problematic in terms of wording that could've been easily been rectified with the help of a stronger editor and the work, several pieces of which do not look at race at all but serve as reports/features of white folks (cis men especially) do not really add to the larger expectation but to simply a portfolio encapsulated in a bound hardcover. It's also VERY male gaze-y. Much of what Yang expounds on has been written many times over by others and with more introspection and addition rather than observation. I was eager to hear more on race from an Asian American perspective and instead I didn't come away with anything significant than when I went in for these essays that read more like commentary or reports. I do think "Paper Tigers" was one of the strongest essays and in the end I skimmed through essays in Part II because the more intriguing ones to me were in Parts I and III though still not as interrogative as I'd like and frankly the opening piece on the Virginia Tech shooter read with a lack of awareness in terms of wording for someone who was mentally ill though I would not say that Yang totally writes unawares that mental illness was not necessarily the cause for the shooting that occurred but doesn't quite note the issues at length in ableism in the press.
All of these are republished pieces with little if any editing/modifications. The work is problematic in terms of wording that could've been easily been rectified with the help of a stronger editor and the work, several pieces of which do not look at race at all but serve as reports/features of white folks (cis men especially) do not really add to the larger expectation but to simply a portfolio encapsulated in a bound hardcover. It's also VERY male gaze-y. Much of what Yang expounds on has been written many times over by others and with more introspection and addition rather than observation. I was eager to hear more on race from an Asian American perspective and instead I didn't come away with anything significant than when I went in for these essays that read more like commentary or reports. I do think "Paper Tigers" was one of the strongest essays and in the end I skimmed through essays in Part II because the more intriguing ones to me were in Parts I and III though still not as interrogative as I'd like and frankly the opening piece on the Virginia Tech shooter read with a lack of awareness in terms of wording for someone who was mentally ill though I would not say that Yang totally writes unawares that mental illness was not necessarily the cause for the shooting that occurred but doesn't quite note the issues at length in ableism in the press.
September 25, 2020
Was able to get an advance copy thru work, but everything in here has been previously published, so I figure it's OK to write this. Man, what a good writer.
First essay, "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho," is an intensely personal piece about what it is like to be an Asian American man in today's U.S.: to be someone who "knows what it's like to have a cultural code superimposed atop your face," a code that "abashes, nullifies, and unmans you." When he passes an Asian man alone on the street, he writes: "We can't even look at each other for the strange vertigo we induce in one another." "Paper Tigers" is a reported piece about a similar topic, this time using the experience of three Asian American men and one woman in their respective workplaces to explore the extent to which an Asian upbringing and to which subtle racism is responsible for the "bamboo ceiling."
The middle section consists of profiles--Aaron Swartz, Tony Judt, Frank Fukuyama--and Yang shows off his firm grasp on the political/social debates these figures embody. Whether property exists on the internet, how one deals with depression, can Israel remain democratic and Jewish, what is it like to have your body break down from ALS.
The third section: sex. Here people might recoil as Yang is decidedly more interested in the modern masculine experience of sex. A piece on the culture of pickup artistry manages to capture its depravity while explaining why people are drawn to this artificial way to score "points."
And the collection closes with a section on race "Is It OK To Be White?," his debut column for Tablet, is a fucking tour de force and explicates the origin and purpose of both millennial white nationalism and anti-liberal progressive activism better than anyone else has. Even though this book is a loose collection of pieces published over the last ten years it hangs together. Yang is someone to watch, and read.
First essay, "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho," is an intensely personal piece about what it is like to be an Asian American man in today's U.S.: to be someone who "knows what it's like to have a cultural code superimposed atop your face," a code that "abashes, nullifies, and unmans you." When he passes an Asian man alone on the street, he writes: "We can't even look at each other for the strange vertigo we induce in one another." "Paper Tigers" is a reported piece about a similar topic, this time using the experience of three Asian American men and one woman in their respective workplaces to explore the extent to which an Asian upbringing and to which subtle racism is responsible for the "bamboo ceiling."
The middle section consists of profiles--Aaron Swartz, Tony Judt, Frank Fukuyama--and Yang shows off his firm grasp on the political/social debates these figures embody. Whether property exists on the internet, how one deals with depression, can Israel remain democratic and Jewish, what is it like to have your body break down from ALS.
The third section: sex. Here people might recoil as Yang is decidedly more interested in the modern masculine experience of sex. A piece on the culture of pickup artistry manages to capture its depravity while explaining why people are drawn to this artificial way to score "points."
And the collection closes with a section on race "Is It OK To Be White?," his debut column for Tablet, is a fucking tour de force and explicates the origin and purpose of both millennial white nationalism and anti-liberal progressive activism better than anyone else has. Even though this book is a loose collection of pieces published over the last ten years it hangs together. Yang is someone to watch, and read.
July 5, 2023
Some of the essays, like the mini-biographies, were interesting, but the reason I gave this 5 stars, is because the more personal essays were unbelievable. Besides maybe the Catcher in the Rye, I've never read anything that captures feelings like loneliness or resentment better than this. The author has this ability to describe some incredibly fucked-up, uncomfortable aspect of human nature that he's experienced, and just leave you with it. But I don't any of this comes off as bitter or resentful, which is very difficult to do. This kind of writing can sometimes feel like a very angry man ranting at the world in a stupid way, but that's not what I felt from Wesley Yang, much smarter and more honest. Such a weird, sad feeling I got finishing this.
Quotes
“A friend of mind wrote a book about online dating. She talked to hundreds of people about their experiences. Online, you become the person you’ve always known yourself to be, deep down. Online, you’re explicit about the fact that you are paying for a service, and you’re explicit about the fact that what you’re paying for is to get what you really want, and what you’re paying for is the ability to remove that annoying bit of residual romantic nonsense that gets us into annoying situations in life where we have to face up to the fact that we are rational profit maximizers in nothing so much as those intimate areas where we pretend to be otherwise. And so, people on the dating sites disclose what they really want, and also what they really don’t want.”
Quotes
“A friend of mind wrote a book about online dating. She talked to hundreds of people about their experiences. Online, you become the person you’ve always known yourself to be, deep down. Online, you’re explicit about the fact that you are paying for a service, and you’re explicit about the fact that what you’re paying for is to get what you really want, and what you’re paying for is the ability to remove that annoying bit of residual romantic nonsense that gets us into annoying situations in life where we have to face up to the fact that we are rational profit maximizers in nothing so much as those intimate areas where we pretend to be otherwise. And so, people on the dating sites disclose what they really want, and also what they really don’t want.”
July 29, 2019
Fine. Fine. Fine.
I should caveat all of this with my general dislike of essay collections, and boy does this one suffer in particular from being of the particular genre known best as Internet Writing. Some of these are extremely de rigeur topics that just haven't aged well in terms of seeming important to take up space in a slim 200-page book; some part of my brain once knew or cared about the "Tiger Mom" debate, but this was like ninety billion iterations of The Discourse ago.
Yang doesn't seem to know whether he wants to be an unknowable cipher, or a great and present artist of language, and so the tone of these essays fluctuate too wildly for me to really settle in. He's a good writer who seems poorly deployed despite some interesting topics; maybe that's just what being an internet staff writer amounts to in 2019. I am reacting as much to the format (previously published essays being curated in one place at a price point that doesn't feel quite right) as the substance, but I was still hard-pressed to think that I would recommend this collection. Cherrypick the best stories (Sex Diaries, the one on The Game, portait of Tony Judt, the story of Aaron Swarz's death).
And also fuck the title of this book for real. Lame clickbait shit.
I should caveat all of this with my general dislike of essay collections, and boy does this one suffer in particular from being of the particular genre known best as Internet Writing. Some of these are extremely de rigeur topics that just haven't aged well in terms of seeming important to take up space in a slim 200-page book; some part of my brain once knew or cared about the "Tiger Mom" debate, but this was like ninety billion iterations of The Discourse ago.
Yang doesn't seem to know whether he wants to be an unknowable cipher, or a great and present artist of language, and so the tone of these essays fluctuate too wildly for me to really settle in. He's a good writer who seems poorly deployed despite some interesting topics; maybe that's just what being an internet staff writer amounts to in 2019. I am reacting as much to the format (previously published essays being curated in one place at a price point that doesn't feel quite right) as the substance, but I was still hard-pressed to think that I would recommend this collection. Cherrypick the best stories (Sex Diaries, the one on The Game, portait of Tony Judt, the story of Aaron Swarz's death).
And also fuck the title of this book for real. Lame clickbait shit.
February 21, 2019
I’m sorry (not sorry). This is NOT the Asian answer to The Souls Of Black Folk: these are a set of polished essays from 2009 onwards that center on mostly antiquated and some thoroughly wrong-headed racial and social politics. At least two pieces are openly sympathetic to PUAs for eg. so: ZZZ.
June 13, 2018
I've never heard these facts articulated. Racism against Asians is so downplayed.
February 25, 2019
A very though provoking collection of essays that touch on race, masculinity, gender, dating, social media, etc. Quotes that make me think:
“By this I mean something that has in recent years escaped from the obscurity in which it was once shrouded, even as it was always the most salient of all facts, the one most readily on display, the thing that was unspeakable precisely because it need never be spoken: that as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were by default unlovable and unloved; that you were presumptively a nobody, a mute and servile figure, distinguishable above all by your total incapacity to threaten anyone; that you were many laudable things that the world might respect and reward, but that you were fundamentally powerless to affect anyone in a way that would make you either loved or feared.”
“In an age characterized by the politics of resentment, the Asian man knows something of the resentment of the embattled white man, besieged on all sides by grievances and demands for reparation, and something of the resentments of the rising social-justice warrior, who feels with every fiber of their being that all that stands in the way of the attainment of their thwarted ambitions is nothing so much as a white man. Tasting of the frustrations of both, he is denied the entitlements of either.”
“Let’s talk about legible faces. You know those short, brown-toned South American immigrants that pick your fruit, slaughter your meat, and bus your tables? Would you—a respectable person with a middle-class upbringing—ever consider going on a date with one of them? It’s a rude question, because it affects to inquire into what everyone gets to know at the cost of forever leaving it unspoken. But if you were to put your unspoken thoughts into words, they might sound something like this: Not only are these people busing the tables, slaughtering the meat, and picking the fruit; they are the descendants of the people who bused the tables, slaughtered the meat, and picked the fruit of the Aztecs and Incas. The Spanish colonizers slaughtered or mixed their blood with the princes, priests, scholars, artisans, warriors, and beautiful women of the indigenous Americas, leaving untouched a class of Morlocks bred for good-natured servility and thus now tailor-made to the demands of an increasingly feudal postindustrial America. That’s, by the way, part of the emotional undertow of the immigration debate, the thing that makes an honest appraisal of the issue impossible, because you can never put anything right without first admitting you’re in the wrong.”
“I guess what I would like is to become so good at something that my social deficiencies no longer matter,” he tells me. Chu is a bright, diligent, impeccably credentialed young man born in the United States. He is optimistic about his ability to earn respect in the world. But he doubts he will ever feel the same comfort in his skin that he glimpsed in the people he met at Williams. That kind of comfort, he says—”I think it’s generations away.”
“The researcher was talking about what some refer to as the “Bamboo Ceiling”—an invisible barrier that maintains a pyramidal racial structure throughout corporate America, with lots of Asians at junior levels, quite a few in middle management, and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership.
The failure of Asian-Americans to become leaders in the white-collar workplace does not qualify as one of the burning social issues of our time. But it is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation. If between 15 and 20 percent of every Ivy League class is Asian, and if the Ivy Leagues are incubators for the country’s leaders, it would stand to reason that Asians would make up some corresponding portion of the leadership class.
And yet the numbers tell a different story. According to a recent study, Asian-Americans represent roughly 5 percent of the population but only 0.3 percent of corporate officers, less than 1 percent of corporate board members, and around 2 percent of college presidents. There are nine Asian-American CEOs in the Fortune 500. In specific fields where Asian-Americans are heavily represented, there is a similar asymmetry. A third of all software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian, and yet they make up only 6 percent of board members and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area’s twenty-five largest companies. At the National Institutes of Health, where 21.5 percent of tenure-track scientists are Asians, only 4.7 percent of the lab or branch directors are,”
“You have to be a doer,” as she puts it. They are expected to distinguish themselves with their diligence, at which point they become “super-doers.” But being a leader requires different skill sets. “The traits that got you to where you are won’t necessarily take you to the next level,” says the diversity consultant Jane Hyun, who wrote a book called Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling. To become a leader requires taking personal initiative and thinking about how an organization can work differently. It also requires networking, self-promotion, and self-assertion. It’s racist to think that any given Asian individual is unlikely to be creative or risk-taking. It’s simple cultural observation to say that a group whose education has historically focused on rote memorization and “pumping the iron of math” is, on aggregate, unlikely to yield many people inclined to challenge authority or break with inherited ways of doing things.”
“My parents would say, ‘Don’t create problems. Don’t trouble other people.’ How Asian is that? It helped to explain why I don’t reach out to other people for help.” It occurred to Takayasu that she was a little bit “heads down” after all. She was willing to take on difficult assignments without seeking credit for herself. She was reluctant to “toot her own horn.”
“If the Bamboo Ceiling is ever going to break, it’s probably going to have less to do with any form of behavior assimilation than with the emergence of risk-takers whose success obviates the need for Asians to meet someone else’s behavioral standard.”
“If you are a woman who isn’t beautiful, it is a social reality that you will have to work twice as hard to hold anyone’s attention. You can either linger on the unfairness of this or you can get with the program. If you are an Asian person who holds himself proudly aloof, nobody will respect that, or find it intriguing, or wonder if that challenging façade hides someone worth getting to know. They will simply write you off as someone not worth the trouble of talking to”
“The business case for making an Asian-American show is simple: Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the country, they earn and spend more than the average American, and they are overrepresented in the advertiser-coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old demographic. But if the case were really so strong, surely two decades would not have passed without some network making a bid for this audience. Perhaps the reason is that the so-called Asian-American demographic (some 18 million viewers) is actually made up of many different nationalities with no common culture or language.”
On dating apps/modern romance --
“This is a distinct shift in the way we experience the world, introducing the nagging urge to make each thing we do the single most satisfying thing we could possibly be doing at any moment.”
“The Game players applied the logic of bourgeois productivity to slash open the myth of bourgeois romance. ”
“In September of that year, Swartz published a short post confessing to something that few take the time to consider. “However much I hate prejudice at a conscious level, I am nonetheless extremely prejudiced,” he wrote:
At my CS class, my eyes just passed over the large number of foreign and Asian students to land on mostly white ones (black ones too, occasionally). My Asian neighbor tried to make conversation with me and even though he had no accent, because of his face I imagined that he did. Had he been white, there is no question I would have started talking to him about stuff, but instead I brushed him off. I begin to wonder how many people I’ve skipped over.”
“Or maybe the nameless Asian man came away from that incident inwardly torn, uncertain whether he had encountered subtle racism, his own social ineptitude, or the intrinsic hardness of the world. Maybe he suspected that all these things were factors—knowing all the while that to make an issue of it would seem an excessive response to an easily deniable claim about an event of small importance with many possible explanations.”
“It should not surprise anyone that being bullied during our school days made us not lovers of humanity but victimizers of others the moment we had the numbers on our side”
“The campus protests remind us that any system that requires exceptional fortitude from certain categories of people is an unjust one. The jargon that tried to name this injustice and serve as a tool in the struggle against it—white privilege, microaggression, safe space, etc.—caught on so fast because it named something that people recognized right away from their own lives. Like any new language that seeks to politicize everyday life, the terms were awkward, heavy-handed, and formulaic, but they gave confidence to people desiring redress for the subtle incursions on their dignity that they suspected were holding them back. The new vocabulary provided confirmation of what young people have always had reason to suspect—that the world was conspiring to strip them of their dignity and keep them in their place—and elevated those grievances to the status of a larger political project. Of course, the terms could easily become totalizing and portray the world as an “iron cage” in which crude identity categories determine everyone’s fate in a way that is demonstrably false. In practice, the protesters wound up appealing to college bureaucrats to wipe away the accretions of the world’s violent history.”
“IS IT OK TO BE WHITE? The question is at once disingenuous, facetious, satirical, and self-parodic. It is also one of the consequential questions being posed in earnest by the moral and political vanguards of our time. The question invites the typical reader to resist its implications—to deny that the question is one that anyone would think to ask, or that people are asking. But people have thought to ask it; they are asking it. It is the sort of question that one doesn’t think to ask at all unless the answer is going to be no”
“The underlying premise is plain: that there is no whiteness independent of the domination of nonwhites, and no masculinity independent of the domination of women. Neither ever were, or ever can be, neutral descriptors of traits incidental to the person whom they characterize. They are instead forms of identity rooted in genocide, colonialism, and slavery that reproduce the violent conditions of their emergence everywhere they are treated as neutral descriptors of traits incidental to the person whom they characterize. They are what both permits and compels the white man to, as Bady puts it, “take his own experience as normal and privileged, and to presume all others to be debased copies of his own primary existence.”
“This rhetoric may appear at first to be primarily made up of bits of modish jargon drawn from certain academic subfields that have found new life on social media. And it is. But language has power, and a shift in usage has direct and intended consequences. The replacement of “racism” by “whiteness” as the problem that bedevils the world encodes another progressive meme within it: that because racism is “prejudice plus power,” and all structural power is situated in the hands of whiteness, nonwhites may be capable of prejudice—a bad thing to be sure—but they cannot be racists. The default use of the term “whiteness” as the target of opprobrium bakes this contention into the language.”
“Liberals think that there’s a way to design a fair system of rules applicable to all people that would induce us to cease judging each other through the lens of the superficial physical traits that mark us as racially distinct. Poststructuralists think that the very idea of a fair system of rules applicable to all is a pernicious mystification disguising the partial interests of the dominant class as universality itself. No such universal position is possible; what remains to be done is the reengineering of norms, customs, and precedents to favor the marginalized.
This dense and rebarbative account of a racism that pervades the very structure of our shared reality remained largely sequestered in humanities departments until recently. Critics of such theories used to mock its pretensions to enact a form of political praxis in recondite journals. Now we know that the theorists were right—indeed they were more practical than their ostensibly more practically minded critics. But it took the invention of social media to realize the potential inherent in a deconstructive strategy to change the world.”
“White supremacy encompassed differential expectations and outcomes both grave and trivial. It was why the cosmetics counter offered fewer options for those with darker-hued skin. It was why the heroes of Hollywood movies tended to be white men, why the Oscars were so white. It was why the CEOs and the leadership class were mostly white and male. It rested an invisible thumb on the scale of those who did nothing to seek it. It preserved the innocence of those whom it aided (white people) while denying those whom it fettered (everyone else) a readily articulable language to describe the obscure sources of their frustration. All those who were passive recipients of its favor were complicit with it. And complicity with white supremacy, like denial of white privilege, was itself a form of white supremacy.
There was both reward and risk involved with the promulgation of such a doctrine. There was catharsis in it. Everyone who had ever bridled at the easy assumption of the priority that certain white people carried with them recognized the descriptive value of the novel language immediately. It therefore spread through social media as rapidly as any novel jargon has ever spread. There was also power. The risk was inherent in the power: conceiving of daily life as a field of micropolitical contestation in which all are either privileged or oppressed conjured up the wish for remedial action, and because the enemy was everywhere and nowhere, the struggle to extirpate it would lack for a limiting principle”
“The current definition of white supremacy is therefore best understood as an instrument in pursuit of a substantive political program. Policies such as thoroughgoing school and residential segregation, guaranteed employment, prison reform or abolition, and reparations for the coerced labor of slaves were considered and rejected in the wake of the civil rights movement. They have never been popular and are unlikely to win the assent of a country whose political tradition is one of limited government grounded in individual rights under law.
The troubling aspect of this campaign, in my view, is not the substantive politics that the antiracists wish to pursue. There is a body of critical and revisionist scholarship that makes a serious case for the necessity of exertions on behalf of historically disadvantaged minorities that exceed what a political doctrine of limited government and individual rights would be willing to contemplate. But the manner in which activists are seeking to win a debate is not through scholarship, persuasion, and debate. It’s through the subornation of administrative and disciplinary power to delegitimize, stigmatize, disqualify, surveil, forbid, shame, and punish holders of contrary views.
“White supremacy” is the crux of this strategy, at once the source of its power and its ultimate vulnerability. For the term is both descriptive of an ever-expanding corpus of ideas and practices, and a weapon of opprobrium. It derives its power to anathematize from the consensus against the overt forms of white supremacy that appear above the dividing line. This power is contingent on the preservation of a narrow definition that sustains the consensus. The analogy with classification of state secrets obtains here: If everything is classified, as the saying goes, then nothing really is”
“By this I mean something that has in recent years escaped from the obscurity in which it was once shrouded, even as it was always the most salient of all facts, the one most readily on display, the thing that was unspeakable precisely because it need never be spoken: that as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were by default unlovable and unloved; that you were presumptively a nobody, a mute and servile figure, distinguishable above all by your total incapacity to threaten anyone; that you were many laudable things that the world might respect and reward, but that you were fundamentally powerless to affect anyone in a way that would make you either loved or feared.”
“In an age characterized by the politics of resentment, the Asian man knows something of the resentment of the embattled white man, besieged on all sides by grievances and demands for reparation, and something of the resentments of the rising social-justice warrior, who feels with every fiber of their being that all that stands in the way of the attainment of their thwarted ambitions is nothing so much as a white man. Tasting of the frustrations of both, he is denied the entitlements of either.”
“Let’s talk about legible faces. You know those short, brown-toned South American immigrants that pick your fruit, slaughter your meat, and bus your tables? Would you—a respectable person with a middle-class upbringing—ever consider going on a date with one of them? It’s a rude question, because it affects to inquire into what everyone gets to know at the cost of forever leaving it unspoken. But if you were to put your unspoken thoughts into words, they might sound something like this: Not only are these people busing the tables, slaughtering the meat, and picking the fruit; they are the descendants of the people who bused the tables, slaughtered the meat, and picked the fruit of the Aztecs and Incas. The Spanish colonizers slaughtered or mixed their blood with the princes, priests, scholars, artisans, warriors, and beautiful women of the indigenous Americas, leaving untouched a class of Morlocks bred for good-natured servility and thus now tailor-made to the demands of an increasingly feudal postindustrial America. That’s, by the way, part of the emotional undertow of the immigration debate, the thing that makes an honest appraisal of the issue impossible, because you can never put anything right without first admitting you’re in the wrong.”
“I guess what I would like is to become so good at something that my social deficiencies no longer matter,” he tells me. Chu is a bright, diligent, impeccably credentialed young man born in the United States. He is optimistic about his ability to earn respect in the world. But he doubts he will ever feel the same comfort in his skin that he glimpsed in the people he met at Williams. That kind of comfort, he says—”I think it’s generations away.”
“The researcher was talking about what some refer to as the “Bamboo Ceiling”—an invisible barrier that maintains a pyramidal racial structure throughout corporate America, with lots of Asians at junior levels, quite a few in middle management, and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership.
The failure of Asian-Americans to become leaders in the white-collar workplace does not qualify as one of the burning social issues of our time. But it is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation. If between 15 and 20 percent of every Ivy League class is Asian, and if the Ivy Leagues are incubators for the country’s leaders, it would stand to reason that Asians would make up some corresponding portion of the leadership class.
And yet the numbers tell a different story. According to a recent study, Asian-Americans represent roughly 5 percent of the population but only 0.3 percent of corporate officers, less than 1 percent of corporate board members, and around 2 percent of college presidents. There are nine Asian-American CEOs in the Fortune 500. In specific fields where Asian-Americans are heavily represented, there is a similar asymmetry. A third of all software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian, and yet they make up only 6 percent of board members and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area’s twenty-five largest companies. At the National Institutes of Health, where 21.5 percent of tenure-track scientists are Asians, only 4.7 percent of the lab or branch directors are,”
“You have to be a doer,” as she puts it. They are expected to distinguish themselves with their diligence, at which point they become “super-doers.” But being a leader requires different skill sets. “The traits that got you to where you are won’t necessarily take you to the next level,” says the diversity consultant Jane Hyun, who wrote a book called Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling. To become a leader requires taking personal initiative and thinking about how an organization can work differently. It also requires networking, self-promotion, and self-assertion. It’s racist to think that any given Asian individual is unlikely to be creative or risk-taking. It’s simple cultural observation to say that a group whose education has historically focused on rote memorization and “pumping the iron of math” is, on aggregate, unlikely to yield many people inclined to challenge authority or break with inherited ways of doing things.”
“My parents would say, ‘Don’t create problems. Don’t trouble other people.’ How Asian is that? It helped to explain why I don’t reach out to other people for help.” It occurred to Takayasu that she was a little bit “heads down” after all. She was willing to take on difficult assignments without seeking credit for herself. She was reluctant to “toot her own horn.”
“If the Bamboo Ceiling is ever going to break, it’s probably going to have less to do with any form of behavior assimilation than with the emergence of risk-takers whose success obviates the need for Asians to meet someone else’s behavioral standard.”
“If you are a woman who isn’t beautiful, it is a social reality that you will have to work twice as hard to hold anyone’s attention. You can either linger on the unfairness of this or you can get with the program. If you are an Asian person who holds himself proudly aloof, nobody will respect that, or find it intriguing, or wonder if that challenging façade hides someone worth getting to know. They will simply write you off as someone not worth the trouble of talking to”
“The business case for making an Asian-American show is simple: Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the country, they earn and spend more than the average American, and they are overrepresented in the advertiser-coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old demographic. But if the case were really so strong, surely two decades would not have passed without some network making a bid for this audience. Perhaps the reason is that the so-called Asian-American demographic (some 18 million viewers) is actually made up of many different nationalities with no common culture or language.”
On dating apps/modern romance --
“This is a distinct shift in the way we experience the world, introducing the nagging urge to make each thing we do the single most satisfying thing we could possibly be doing at any moment.”
“The Game players applied the logic of bourgeois productivity to slash open the myth of bourgeois romance. ”
“In September of that year, Swartz published a short post confessing to something that few take the time to consider. “However much I hate prejudice at a conscious level, I am nonetheless extremely prejudiced,” he wrote:
At my CS class, my eyes just passed over the large number of foreign and Asian students to land on mostly white ones (black ones too, occasionally). My Asian neighbor tried to make conversation with me and even though he had no accent, because of his face I imagined that he did. Had he been white, there is no question I would have started talking to him about stuff, but instead I brushed him off. I begin to wonder how many people I’ve skipped over.”
“Or maybe the nameless Asian man came away from that incident inwardly torn, uncertain whether he had encountered subtle racism, his own social ineptitude, or the intrinsic hardness of the world. Maybe he suspected that all these things were factors—knowing all the while that to make an issue of it would seem an excessive response to an easily deniable claim about an event of small importance with many possible explanations.”
“It should not surprise anyone that being bullied during our school days made us not lovers of humanity but victimizers of others the moment we had the numbers on our side”
“The campus protests remind us that any system that requires exceptional fortitude from certain categories of people is an unjust one. The jargon that tried to name this injustice and serve as a tool in the struggle against it—white privilege, microaggression, safe space, etc.—caught on so fast because it named something that people recognized right away from their own lives. Like any new language that seeks to politicize everyday life, the terms were awkward, heavy-handed, and formulaic, but they gave confidence to people desiring redress for the subtle incursions on their dignity that they suspected were holding them back. The new vocabulary provided confirmation of what young people have always had reason to suspect—that the world was conspiring to strip them of their dignity and keep them in their place—and elevated those grievances to the status of a larger political project. Of course, the terms could easily become totalizing and portray the world as an “iron cage” in which crude identity categories determine everyone’s fate in a way that is demonstrably false. In practice, the protesters wound up appealing to college bureaucrats to wipe away the accretions of the world’s violent history.”
“IS IT OK TO BE WHITE? The question is at once disingenuous, facetious, satirical, and self-parodic. It is also one of the consequential questions being posed in earnest by the moral and political vanguards of our time. The question invites the typical reader to resist its implications—to deny that the question is one that anyone would think to ask, or that people are asking. But people have thought to ask it; they are asking it. It is the sort of question that one doesn’t think to ask at all unless the answer is going to be no”
“The underlying premise is plain: that there is no whiteness independent of the domination of nonwhites, and no masculinity independent of the domination of women. Neither ever were, or ever can be, neutral descriptors of traits incidental to the person whom they characterize. They are instead forms of identity rooted in genocide, colonialism, and slavery that reproduce the violent conditions of their emergence everywhere they are treated as neutral descriptors of traits incidental to the person whom they characterize. They are what both permits and compels the white man to, as Bady puts it, “take his own experience as normal and privileged, and to presume all others to be debased copies of his own primary existence.”
“This rhetoric may appear at first to be primarily made up of bits of modish jargon drawn from certain academic subfields that have found new life on social media. And it is. But language has power, and a shift in usage has direct and intended consequences. The replacement of “racism” by “whiteness” as the problem that bedevils the world encodes another progressive meme within it: that because racism is “prejudice plus power,” and all structural power is situated in the hands of whiteness, nonwhites may be capable of prejudice—a bad thing to be sure—but they cannot be racists. The default use of the term “whiteness” as the target of opprobrium bakes this contention into the language.”
“Liberals think that there’s a way to design a fair system of rules applicable to all people that would induce us to cease judging each other through the lens of the superficial physical traits that mark us as racially distinct. Poststructuralists think that the very idea of a fair system of rules applicable to all is a pernicious mystification disguising the partial interests of the dominant class as universality itself. No such universal position is possible; what remains to be done is the reengineering of norms, customs, and precedents to favor the marginalized.
This dense and rebarbative account of a racism that pervades the very structure of our shared reality remained largely sequestered in humanities departments until recently. Critics of such theories used to mock its pretensions to enact a form of political praxis in recondite journals. Now we know that the theorists were right—indeed they were more practical than their ostensibly more practically minded critics. But it took the invention of social media to realize the potential inherent in a deconstructive strategy to change the world.”
“White supremacy encompassed differential expectations and outcomes both grave and trivial. It was why the cosmetics counter offered fewer options for those with darker-hued skin. It was why the heroes of Hollywood movies tended to be white men, why the Oscars were so white. It was why the CEOs and the leadership class were mostly white and male. It rested an invisible thumb on the scale of those who did nothing to seek it. It preserved the innocence of those whom it aided (white people) while denying those whom it fettered (everyone else) a readily articulable language to describe the obscure sources of their frustration. All those who were passive recipients of its favor were complicit with it. And complicity with white supremacy, like denial of white privilege, was itself a form of white supremacy.
There was both reward and risk involved with the promulgation of such a doctrine. There was catharsis in it. Everyone who had ever bridled at the easy assumption of the priority that certain white people carried with them recognized the descriptive value of the novel language immediately. It therefore spread through social media as rapidly as any novel jargon has ever spread. There was also power. The risk was inherent in the power: conceiving of daily life as a field of micropolitical contestation in which all are either privileged or oppressed conjured up the wish for remedial action, and because the enemy was everywhere and nowhere, the struggle to extirpate it would lack for a limiting principle”
“The current definition of white supremacy is therefore best understood as an instrument in pursuit of a substantive political program. Policies such as thoroughgoing school and residential segregation, guaranteed employment, prison reform or abolition, and reparations for the coerced labor of slaves were considered and rejected in the wake of the civil rights movement. They have never been popular and are unlikely to win the assent of a country whose political tradition is one of limited government grounded in individual rights under law.
The troubling aspect of this campaign, in my view, is not the substantive politics that the antiracists wish to pursue. There is a body of critical and revisionist scholarship that makes a serious case for the necessity of exertions on behalf of historically disadvantaged minorities that exceed what a political doctrine of limited government and individual rights would be willing to contemplate. But the manner in which activists are seeking to win a debate is not through scholarship, persuasion, and debate. It’s through the subornation of administrative and disciplinary power to delegitimize, stigmatize, disqualify, surveil, forbid, shame, and punish holders of contrary views.
“White supremacy” is the crux of this strategy, at once the source of its power and its ultimate vulnerability. For the term is both descriptive of an ever-expanding corpus of ideas and practices, and a weapon of opprobrium. It derives its power to anathematize from the consensus against the overt forms of white supremacy that appear above the dividing line. This power is contingent on the preservation of a narrow definition that sustains the consensus. The analogy with classification of state secrets obtains here: If everything is classified, as the saying goes, then nothing really is”
August 30, 2019
Yang mines some profoundly icky, uncomfortable territory in this little book
Most the reviews from liberal publications seem to have been negative. On the one hand, I get where they're coming from. Is Yang 's complexion honestly green? Reptilian? really? It's pretty rare these days to see this kind of hallucinatory racial self-loathing indulged in a book from a major publisher.
In Slate, a critic faults Yang for writing about Asian American experience from an almost exclusively male perspective. Respectfully, I think she might be missing the point. Yang is writing about a specifically intersectional experience - what it means to be Asian American and male, and how one's ethnic identity is experienced as emasculating.
Another uncomfortable moment comes when Yang reports on an Asian American pick up artist who runs a boot camp teaching other Asian American men to be alpha males.
This is all very gross. Still, I'm glad Yang writes about it. His belonging a group whose manhood has often been ridiculed or called into question gives him special insight on the more general crisis of masculinity that seems to have swept over America in the 21st century. Many liberals, I daresay, don't know how to come to terms with this, as they're not even sure that being emasculated could be a bad thing.
Sometimes I'll glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what I see. Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-green-toned skin. An expression that is nearly reptilian in its passivity...
Most the reviews from liberal publications seem to have been negative. On the one hand, I get where they're coming from. Is Yang 's complexion honestly green? Reptilian? really? It's pretty rare these days to see this kind of hallucinatory racial self-loathing indulged in a book from a major publisher.
In Slate, a critic faults Yang for writing about Asian American experience from an almost exclusively male perspective. Respectfully, I think she might be missing the point. Yang is writing about a specifically intersectional experience - what it means to be Asian American and male, and how one's ethnic identity is experienced as emasculating.
Another uncomfortable moment comes when Yang reports on an Asian American pick up artist who runs a boot camp teaching other Asian American men to be alpha males.
"What is good in life?" Tran shouts.
The student then replies, in the loudest, most emphatic voice he can muster: "To crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentations of their women - in my bed!"
This is all very gross. Still, I'm glad Yang writes about it. His belonging a group whose manhood has often been ridiculed or called into question gives him special insight on the more general crisis of masculinity that seems to have swept over America in the 21st century. Many liberals, I daresay, don't know how to come to terms with this, as they're not even sure that being emasculated could be a bad thing.
August 11, 2019
ARC.
I think Yang is going to make a fantastic True Crime writer some day. His passion is clear and True Crime fans will find several essays here of interest.
I was not a fan of this book. I'm not a True Crime fan, and I couldn't shake the sense that Yang's worldview considers women relatively irrelevant and holds them in high reproach when they don't love him for that. I suspect men will prefer this book more than women and enbies, but only time and data will tell that tale. YMMV.
I think Yang is going to make a fantastic True Crime writer some day. His passion is clear and True Crime fans will find several essays here of interest.
I was not a fan of this book. I'm not a True Crime fan, and I couldn't shake the sense that Yang's worldview considers women relatively irrelevant and holds them in high reproach when they don't love him for that. I suspect men will prefer this book more than women and enbies, but only time and data will tell that tale. YMMV.
November 19, 2018
It was once a pop-socio-psychological commonplace of American foreign-policy commentary that terrorism on behalf of political Islam was motivated less by ideology and more by an intractable reality of gender: young men with no prospects in their societies will inevitably become violently anti-social. Maybe people still say that about what used to be called "the Arab street," but the consensus in the west today is that males (and other longstanding elites) can be displaced from their previous positions of ill-gotten authority, given no meaningful alternative but to atone quietly for the sins of their fathers, and that no unseemly consequence will follow from this dispossession. The tough-minded political pragmatism which led Virginia Woolf at her most radical to write in "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" that "We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun" has given way to an imperative in the guise of a question: "Why Can't We Hate Men?"
To the (limited) extent that it is a unified work and not just an omnium gatherum of a decade's published journalism, Wesley Yang's merrily mistitled essay collection is, often brilliantly, about this state of affairs: about those, sometimes Asian, often male, excluded from certain intangible perquisites of American life—love, success, security, belonging—in our time of the decomposition of the liberal polity under pressures both right-wing (the dominance of markets and market-thinking over every aspect of life) and left-wing (a totalizing identity politics that sets itself against hierarchy as such).
It begins with an essay that is germinal to the whole book, one published in 2008 in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre: "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho." Meditating on his literal resemblance to the school shooter, Yang identifies Cho as a type of superfluous or underground man, but also identifies his alienation as inflected by an invisible racial politic: the non-erotic valuation of the Asian male. From Dostoevsky to Houellebecq: Cho was a loser not just in general, but a loser in the sexual marketplace.
Yang—the most daring essayist currently trying (and apparently failing) to stay in the good graces of the liberal literati—does not justify Cho's murder spree but seeks to understand it. In the essay's finest polemical passage, he quotes Cho's teacher, Nikki Giovanni, who pronounced his creative writing submissions "weird" and "intimidating," before quoting Giovanni's own weird and intimidating poetry from the height of the Black Power and Black Arts movements ("Do you know how to draw blood / Can you poison / Can you stab-a-Jew"). He comments:
One of the questions of the collection, then, comes to be whether or not Asian-Americans, particularly men, should or even can avail themselves of the redress of identity politics to ameliorate their legitimate grievances.
The collection's second essay, "Paper Tigers," addresses the "bamboo ceiling" that prevents otherwise successful Asian-Americans from rising to the commanding heights of the American class/status structure—they stall at middle management and never get to be CEO, due to a combination of pernicious ethnic stereotyping and actual cultural difference. Yang, though, is interested less in those who pursue the bureaucratic solutions offered by identity politics than he is in those who take action to hack or game the system as they find it, getting coached on the western way of calibrated insouciance from self-help mavens. This focus on those who try to win by the pre-set rules rather than changing the system itself is echoed later in the collection when Yang gives us a ruefully sympathetic-satirical portrait of the pickup artist community and its adoption of a Darwinian rulebook in an ostensible search for a Darwinian object—sex—but in a genuine search for the object Darwinism cannot help us to understand: love.
For despite the fact that Yang finds a welcome reception these days in the purlieus of "Sokal-squared," his sensibility is far from their STEM-mongering rationalism, even though he shares a common enemy with them in contemporary left irrationalism. His political thought is essentially Hegelian, as a profile of Francis Fukuyama in these pages demonstrates. Yang writes so sympathetically of the unloved because he believes life is not a quest to attain power or to spread one's genes, but a quest for recognition as an equal in a community of equals. Hence his exquisite ambivalence, thought by his critics to be mere troglodytic right-wingery, in the face of the new generation of academic radicalism:
The struggle for recognition continues outside the pages of this book, as Yang collects and satirizes his bad reviews on Twitter, arraigning his critics for being so involved in their own self-righteous ideologies that they are incapable of hearing his message. Viet Thanh Nguyen's review in the New York Times is sufficient to make the point, as it complains that Yang doesn't address the history of Asian-American activism (Nguyen, by the way, wrote an acclaimed novel that I found predictable and so never finished because it is yet another—60 years after Achebe and 52 years after Salih—riposte to Heart of Darkness, which should go to show that "social justice" as an intellectual method and as a literary aesthetic is far from cutting edge, has rather fallen into its decadence if not senescence).
But the fact is that The Souls of Yellow Folk fails as a book from time to time, and not just because Yang is not DuBois. Some of Yang's works are strictly reportage, bereft of any personal voice and only tenuous in their thematic relevance to the other essays, such as pieces on historian Tony Judt or on a controversial expert witness at terrorism trials, and they really don't belong here in my view. The terrorism essay plausibly provides another variation on the alienated young man theme, while Judt's intellectual perseverance amid devastating terminal illness gives us a model, against identitarianism, of the mind's superiority to circumstance; but for all that one can make connections, they and a few others still seem out of place. Yang is right to complain that some of his reviewers simply want him to have written a different book with different politics, but it's not wrong to observe that Souls often fails to hang together as a book at all. Without having to become a treatise, it might still have been a more focused collection.
A deeper flaw, a philosophical one occasioned by Yang's intellectual commitment to recognition, makes itself known in the concluding pages of this book, when in essays from 2017 Yang provides a detailed critique of the social justice left. He accuses its activists of having absorbed a set of lessons from poststructuralism that posit both language and institutions as nothing other than vectors of power, obviating the old liberal ambition to reform institutions by using language to persuade a majority to abandon its prejudices and alter its practices. By contrast to the social justice left's radical ambition to bring in an egalitarian millennium through linguistic and institutional engineering, Yang concedes the manifold injuries social life deals to those who have lost its lottery while also worrying that attempts to reduce harm through new forms of undemocratic social control may only entrench new hierarchies under the false labels of peace and equality.
Why do I call this theory flawed? Because it is from Hegel, not from the poststructuralists, that identity politics derives. Poststructuralism represents the midcentury European left's borrowing of some insights from the reactionary tradition—Nietzsche, Heidegger—precisely because its partisans saw how Hegelianism, in its Marxist variant, leads to the totalitarian dogmatism Yang so well describes.
Social-justice theory comes ultimately from Marxism, which is the attempt to overcome existential alienation by altering power relations within political and social institutions. Marx began as a Romantic rebel and ironist, hailing Prometheus and imitating Sterne, until he became convinced that his alienation could be ameliorated through a total social transformation, one premised on what we now call identity politics. What differentiated Marx's scientific from his precursors' utopian socialism was precisely the identification of a mechanism—in the form of a social class—that could effect the transformation of an inegalitarian society to an egalitarian one. A social class whose exploitation was the engine of the entire system could, by resisting that exploitation, bring the system to a halt; having been exploited, this class would not replicate exploitation in its turn but rather abolish the class relation as such. Marx and Engels identified the industrial proletariat as this revolutionary class:
Over a century later, this prophesy having failed, the Combahee River Collective appropriated the narrative shape of the theory but inserted a different protagonist:
Given these premises, proximity to white-maleness is proximity to oppression, proximity to black-womanhood proximity to liberation. By the terms of this theory, there is no good-faith middle ground, no legitimate arbitration from a position of disinterested neutrality, between white-male and black-female identities of the kind that Yang wants to construct out of the Asian man:
Never mind that this intermediate and universal position between oppressed and oppressor is already structurally occupied in our society—by white women—but Yang's moderation cannot be read in the present political atmosphere as anything other than either immoral dithering or esoteric reactionism; he is trying to inhabit a position of principled universalism that does not exist within institutions that have pledged themselves to liberation conceived on social-justice terms, which is to say the terms of zero-sum Hegelo-Marxian eschatology.
Consider, for instance, that Yang got his start at n+1, an intellectual journal that was at its inception over a decade ago an organ of what might fairly be called left-conservatism: its editors' essays, resembling Adorno with an Americanizing dash of Chomsky and Lasch, criticized capitalist reductionism and brutality in a tone the ironic sorrow of which betrayed an unavowed nostalgia for the older and more ostensibly humane bourgeois order that capitalism had melted into air (Yang's essay on Britney Spears in this volume is a good example, as is Mark Greif's similarly themed "Afternoon of the Sex Children.")
A motto printed in n+1's first issue wittingly or unwittingly echoed Buckley's stand athwart history: "We've begun by saying No. Enough." This was a natural response to the progressive imperialism of the Bush years; but after the Obama age redeemed for the left the concept of the "right side of history" by applying it to race-class-and-gender and superficially detaching it from militarist adventurism, n+1 itself became an organ of a very different ideological character; there we now read, in its most notable essay of recent years, Andrea Long Chu dissenting from common transgender claims to the inherence and authenticity of gender identity to suggest instead (partially in provocative jest, it should be noted) that a man who sincerely sympathizes with the project of dismantling patriarchy will become a woman, that the abolition of maleness should become a biological and material as well as an ideological reality to complete second-wave feminism's own Marxist-derived project of destroying gender as the legitimating ideology of sexual exploitation: "We are separatists from our own bodies. We are militants of so fine a caliber that we regularly take steps to poison the world’s supply of male biology. […] Because of us, there are literally fewer men on the planet." In another notable n+1 essay, Dayna Tortorici puts it more crisply: "Must history have losers? The record suggests yes."
There is simply no way Yang will be recognized by his peers—whose own legitimation as authority figures depends on the premises he criticizes—as a good-faith interlocutor. As his panoply of bad reviews makes this more clear, I wonder if in retrospect this book, which seeks moderation, will come to appear as a historical marker: the first manifesto of the next neoconservatism. Anyone honestly and dispassionately assessing the surpluses and deficits in the current American ideological economy—overrun as it is with competing identitarianisms and bereft of any universalism untethered to class, race, gender, or party interests—will wonder what on earth took so long. He has begun by saying, "No. Enough.'
But there is something other than politics, something other than Hegel, at work in this book. You can find it stated of chef and comedian Eddie Huang in Yang's profile of him: "Huang is…a person at war with all the constraints that would fetter him to anything less than an identity capacious enough to contain all his contradictions and ambivalence." And then Yang states it far more powerfully of himself in "Paper Tigers":
He distances himself from this—it is "madness," he writes, it is "self-glorifying bullshit that artists have always told themselves"—but why? Isn't this far more interesting—I think it is—than a desire to rise smoothly through the corporate ranks? What is this but a need not to be recognized? To be able to mediate between competing social factions because one neutrally shares aspects of both their identities and complaints is one thing; but Yang here evinces a wish to persist in the total isolation from which literature, not journalism, comes.
We hear in these tones not a need for social validation but a need for, or just an acknowledgement of, an alienation that is existential, ontological, that is before as well as behind the face, and which the transformation of social institutions can never bring to an end. I think of Kafka:
I think of Hamlet, the anti-father of us all, the anti-founder of our anti-Zion, and I note that Seung-Hui Cho wrote a vulgar adaptation of Hamlet called Richard McBeef, though he apparently failed to learn the Adornian lesson that every work of art is, or anyway should be, an uncommitted crime.
These moments of a- or anti-social sublimity in The Souls of Yellow Folk struck me more powerfully than anything else in the book. Yeats (himself torn between political community and aesthetic anarchy) said that it is out of the quarrel with others that we make rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves that we make poetry. Yang has poetry in him; the poet sings, though, not to be seen by other people but for the sake of the song.
To the (limited) extent that it is a unified work and not just an omnium gatherum of a decade's published journalism, Wesley Yang's merrily mistitled essay collection is, often brilliantly, about this state of affairs: about those, sometimes Asian, often male, excluded from certain intangible perquisites of American life—love, success, security, belonging—in our time of the decomposition of the liberal polity under pressures both right-wing (the dominance of markets and market-thinking over every aspect of life) and left-wing (a totalizing identity politics that sets itself against hierarchy as such).
It begins with an essay that is germinal to the whole book, one published in 2008 in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre: "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho." Meditating on his literal resemblance to the school shooter, Yang identifies Cho as a type of superfluous or underground man, but also identifies his alienation as inflected by an invisible racial politic: the non-erotic valuation of the Asian male. From Dostoevsky to Houellebecq: Cho was a loser not just in general, but a loser in the sexual marketplace.
A perfectly unremarkable Korean face—beady-eyed, brown-toned, a small plump-lipped mouth, eyebrows high off his eyelids, with crooked glasses perched on his nose. It's not an ugly face, exactly; it's not a badly made face. It's just a face that has nothing to do with the desires of women in this country.
Yang—the most daring essayist currently trying (and apparently failing) to stay in the good graces of the liberal literati—does not justify Cho's murder spree but seeks to understand it. In the essay's finest polemical passage, he quotes Cho's teacher, Nikki Giovanni, who pronounced his creative writing submissions "weird" and "intimidating," before quoting Giovanni's own weird and intimidating poetry from the height of the Black Power and Black Arts movements ("Do you know how to draw blood / Can you poison / Can you stab-a-Jew"). He comments:
Black militancy was something that many people admired, and many more felt sympathy toward, given the brutal history of enslavement, rape, terrorism, disenfranchisement, lynching, and segregation that blacks had endured in this country. And so you wonder what would have happened if, for instance, Cho's poems (and thoughts) had found a way to connect his pain to his ethnic identity.
One of the questions of the collection, then, comes to be whether or not Asian-Americans, particularly men, should or even can avail themselves of the redress of identity politics to ameliorate their legitimate grievances.
The collection's second essay, "Paper Tigers," addresses the "bamboo ceiling" that prevents otherwise successful Asian-Americans from rising to the commanding heights of the American class/status structure—they stall at middle management and never get to be CEO, due to a combination of pernicious ethnic stereotyping and actual cultural difference. Yang, though, is interested less in those who pursue the bureaucratic solutions offered by identity politics than he is in those who take action to hack or game the system as they find it, getting coached on the western way of calibrated insouciance from self-help mavens. This focus on those who try to win by the pre-set rules rather than changing the system itself is echoed later in the collection when Yang gives us a ruefully sympathetic-satirical portrait of the pickup artist community and its adoption of a Darwinian rulebook in an ostensible search for a Darwinian object—sex—but in a genuine search for the object Darwinism cannot help us to understand: love.
For despite the fact that Yang finds a welcome reception these days in the purlieus of "Sokal-squared," his sensibility is far from their STEM-mongering rationalism, even though he shares a common enemy with them in contemporary left irrationalism. His political thought is essentially Hegelian, as a profile of Francis Fukuyama in these pages demonstrates. Yang writes so sympathetically of the unloved because he believes life is not a quest to attain power or to spread one's genes, but a quest for recognition as an equal in a community of equals. Hence his exquisite ambivalence, thought by his critics to be mere troglodytic right-wingery, in the face of the new generation of academic radicalism:
And yet [the campus protestors] also gave voice to an aspiration that people of my generation and older, who had grown up more isolated in a whiter America, had not thought could be expressed as a collective demand rather than as an individual wish: that all of us, even the unexceptional, could claim as a matter of right an equal share of existential comfort as those who had never had cause to think of themselves as the other. This still seems to me an impossible wish, and, like all impossible wishes, one that is charged with authoritarian potential. But those of us who have grown inured to life’s quotidian brutalities—the ones we accept for ourselves and the ones we unthinkingly impose on others—should not be surprised that the young have a different sense of the possible than we do, or forget too readily what it was like before we were so inured.
The struggle for recognition continues outside the pages of this book, as Yang collects and satirizes his bad reviews on Twitter, arraigning his critics for being so involved in their own self-righteous ideologies that they are incapable of hearing his message. Viet Thanh Nguyen's review in the New York Times is sufficient to make the point, as it complains that Yang doesn't address the history of Asian-American activism (Nguyen, by the way, wrote an acclaimed novel that I found predictable and so never finished because it is yet another—60 years after Achebe and 52 years after Salih—riposte to Heart of Darkness, which should go to show that "social justice" as an intellectual method and as a literary aesthetic is far from cutting edge, has rather fallen into its decadence if not senescence).
But the fact is that The Souls of Yellow Folk fails as a book from time to time, and not just because Yang is not DuBois. Some of Yang's works are strictly reportage, bereft of any personal voice and only tenuous in their thematic relevance to the other essays, such as pieces on historian Tony Judt or on a controversial expert witness at terrorism trials, and they really don't belong here in my view. The terrorism essay plausibly provides another variation on the alienated young man theme, while Judt's intellectual perseverance amid devastating terminal illness gives us a model, against identitarianism, of the mind's superiority to circumstance; but for all that one can make connections, they and a few others still seem out of place. Yang is right to complain that some of his reviewers simply want him to have written a different book with different politics, but it's not wrong to observe that Souls often fails to hang together as a book at all. Without having to become a treatise, it might still have been a more focused collection.
A deeper flaw, a philosophical one occasioned by Yang's intellectual commitment to recognition, makes itself known in the concluding pages of this book, when in essays from 2017 Yang provides a detailed critique of the social justice left. He accuses its activists of having absorbed a set of lessons from poststructuralism that posit both language and institutions as nothing other than vectors of power, obviating the old liberal ambition to reform institutions by using language to persuade a majority to abandon its prejudices and alter its practices. By contrast to the social justice left's radical ambition to bring in an egalitarian millennium through linguistic and institutional engineering, Yang concedes the manifold injuries social life deals to those who have lost its lottery while also worrying that attempts to reduce harm through new forms of undemocratic social control may only entrench new hierarchies under the false labels of peace and equality.
Why do I call this theory flawed? Because it is from Hegel, not from the poststructuralists, that identity politics derives. Poststructuralism represents the midcentury European left's borrowing of some insights from the reactionary tradition—Nietzsche, Heidegger—precisely because its partisans saw how Hegelianism, in its Marxist variant, leads to the totalitarian dogmatism Yang so well describes.
Social-justice theory comes ultimately from Marxism, which is the attempt to overcome existential alienation by altering power relations within political and social institutions. Marx began as a Romantic rebel and ironist, hailing Prometheus and imitating Sterne, until he became convinced that his alienation could be ameliorated through a total social transformation, one premised on what we now call identity politics. What differentiated Marx's scientific from his precursors' utopian socialism was precisely the identification of a mechanism—in the form of a social class—that could effect the transformation of an inegalitarian society to an egalitarian one. A social class whose exploitation was the engine of the entire system could, by resisting that exploitation, bring the system to a halt; having been exploited, this class would not replicate exploitation in its turn but rather abolish the class relation as such. Marx and Engels identified the industrial proletariat as this revolutionary class:
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
Over a century later, this prophesy having failed, the Combahee River Collective appropriated the narrative shape of the theory but inserted a different protagonist:
This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. […] We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.
Given these premises, proximity to white-maleness is proximity to oppression, proximity to black-womanhood proximity to liberation. By the terms of this theory, there is no good-faith middle ground, no legitimate arbitration from a position of disinterested neutrality, between white-male and black-female identities of the kind that Yang wants to construct out of the Asian man:
In an age characterized by the politics of resentment, the Asian man knows something of the resentment of the embattled white man, besieged on all sides by grievances and demands for reparation, and something of the resentments of the rising social-justice warrior, who feels with every fiber of their being that all that stands in the way of the attainment of their thwarted ambitions is nothing so much as a white man. Tasting of the frustrations of both, he is denied the entitlements of either. This condition of marginality is both the cause and the effect of his erasure—and perhaps the source of his claim to his centrality, indeed his universality.
Never mind that this intermediate and universal position between oppressed and oppressor is already structurally occupied in our society—by white women—but Yang's moderation cannot be read in the present political atmosphere as anything other than either immoral dithering or esoteric reactionism; he is trying to inhabit a position of principled universalism that does not exist within institutions that have pledged themselves to liberation conceived on social-justice terms, which is to say the terms of zero-sum Hegelo-Marxian eschatology.
Consider, for instance, that Yang got his start at n+1, an intellectual journal that was at its inception over a decade ago an organ of what might fairly be called left-conservatism: its editors' essays, resembling Adorno with an Americanizing dash of Chomsky and Lasch, criticized capitalist reductionism and brutality in a tone the ironic sorrow of which betrayed an unavowed nostalgia for the older and more ostensibly humane bourgeois order that capitalism had melted into air (Yang's essay on Britney Spears in this volume is a good example, as is Mark Greif's similarly themed "Afternoon of the Sex Children.")
A motto printed in n+1's first issue wittingly or unwittingly echoed Buckley's stand athwart history: "We've begun by saying No. Enough." This was a natural response to the progressive imperialism of the Bush years; but after the Obama age redeemed for the left the concept of the "right side of history" by applying it to race-class-and-gender and superficially detaching it from militarist adventurism, n+1 itself became an organ of a very different ideological character; there we now read, in its most notable essay of recent years, Andrea Long Chu dissenting from common transgender claims to the inherence and authenticity of gender identity to suggest instead (partially in provocative jest, it should be noted) that a man who sincerely sympathizes with the project of dismantling patriarchy will become a woman, that the abolition of maleness should become a biological and material as well as an ideological reality to complete second-wave feminism's own Marxist-derived project of destroying gender as the legitimating ideology of sexual exploitation: "We are separatists from our own bodies. We are militants of so fine a caliber that we regularly take steps to poison the world’s supply of male biology. […] Because of us, there are literally fewer men on the planet." In another notable n+1 essay, Dayna Tortorici puts it more crisply: "Must history have losers? The record suggests yes."
There is simply no way Yang will be recognized by his peers—whose own legitimation as authority figures depends on the premises he criticizes—as a good-faith interlocutor. As his panoply of bad reviews makes this more clear, I wonder if in retrospect this book, which seeks moderation, will come to appear as a historical marker: the first manifesto of the next neoconservatism. Anyone honestly and dispassionately assessing the surpluses and deficits in the current American ideological economy—overrun as it is with competing identitarianisms and bereft of any universalism untethered to class, race, gender, or party interests—will wonder what on earth took so long. He has begun by saying, "No. Enough.'
But there is something other than politics, something other than Hegel, at work in this book. You can find it stated of chef and comedian Eddie Huang in Yang's profile of him: "Huang is…a person at war with all the constraints that would fetter him to anything less than an identity capacious enough to contain all his contradictions and ambivalence." And then Yang states it far more powerfully of himself in "Paper Tigers":
I wanted what James Baldwin sought as a writer—"a power which outlasts kingdoms." Anything short of that seemed a humiliating compromise. I would become an aristocrat of the spirit, who prides himself on his incompetence in the middling tasks that are the world's business. Who did not seek after material gain. Who was his own law.
He distances himself from this—it is "madness," he writes, it is "self-glorifying bullshit that artists have always told themselves"—but why? Isn't this far more interesting—I think it is—than a desire to rise smoothly through the corporate ranks? What is this but a need not to be recognized? To be able to mediate between competing social factions because one neutrally shares aspects of both their identities and complaints is one thing; but Yang here evinces a wish to persist in the total isolation from which literature, not journalism, comes.
We hear in these tones not a need for social validation but a need for, or just an acknowledgement of, an alienation that is existential, ontological, that is before as well as behind the face, and which the transformation of social institutions can never bring to an end. I think of Kafka:
What do I have in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself, and really ought to go stand myself perfectly still in a corner, grateful to be able to breathe.
I think of Hamlet, the anti-father of us all, the anti-founder of our anti-Zion, and I note that Seung-Hui Cho wrote a vulgar adaptation of Hamlet called Richard McBeef, though he apparently failed to learn the Adornian lesson that every work of art is, or anyway should be, an uncommitted crime.
These moments of a- or anti-social sublimity in The Souls of Yellow Folk struck me more powerfully than anything else in the book. Yeats (himself torn between political community and aesthetic anarchy) said that it is out of the quarrel with others that we make rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves that we make poetry. Yang has poetry in him; the poet sings, though, not to be seen by other people but for the sake of the song.
July 29, 2022
These essays read like a bunch of Reddit posts. Are they about "yellow folk"? Nope—unless you're thinking about Francis Fukuyama or Asian male pickup artists. At their best, these are inoffensive character studies that you’d read in Guardian or Harper's or something (because that’s exactly where they’re pulled from lol). At their worst, it’s basically fascistic rantings about an elite conspiracy by the ruling class and their subservient mob to diffuse "wokeness" (e.g. decolonization, queerness, anti-racism) into schools, universities, corporate, and soon all of our good liberal institutions (this is Wesley Yang's extremely unique and never-before-seen schtick). Yang appears to conduct his research using tweets, so his writing is just really tedious, easy-to-see-through garbage. Unfortunately for Yang, it’s harder to pass bullshit through a reader if you don't possess the obscurantist skills that come with a graduate’s degree (the lack of which probably has more to do with the grudge he holds against academia than an institutional infestation of “wokeness”). In any case, what an absolute disgrace to Du Bois’ name. Don’t waste your time.
I ended up finally reading this because Yang’s noxious Substack posts upon which he maintains his relevancy as a writer—and which essentially read the same as any artifact of the sex panics of the 70s and 80s—popped up on my timeline (my fault for using twitter), and I wanted to see if there was continuity here. And turns out, this guy’s basically a combination of the look and latent neuroses of Frank Chin and the intellectual repertoire of Tucker Carlson. All in all, normally I'd never bother going through stuff like this—the point is that the structure of the publishing industry, social media, and Substack-grifter complex churns out mediocre writers like this who do the work of white supremacist imperialism for free. Also I don’t know what’s with his detached fascination and sympathy with PUAs and the online seduction community (there are two full essays dedicated to this topic) but it's nasty and it doesn't take too much to read into what the repressed signifiers are.
I ended up finally reading this because Yang’s noxious Substack posts upon which he maintains his relevancy as a writer—and which essentially read the same as any artifact of the sex panics of the 70s and 80s—popped up on my timeline (my fault for using twitter), and I wanted to see if there was continuity here. And turns out, this guy’s basically a combination of the look and latent neuroses of Frank Chin and the intellectual repertoire of Tucker Carlson. All in all, normally I'd never bother going through stuff like this—the point is that the structure of the publishing industry, social media, and Substack-grifter complex churns out mediocre writers like this who do the work of white supremacist imperialism for free. Also I don’t know what’s with his detached fascination and sympathy with PUAs and the online seduction community (there are two full essays dedicated to this topic) but it's nasty and it doesn't take too much to read into what the repressed signifiers are.
February 6, 2019
This is a collection of Wesley Yang's previously published work, which wouldn't have been a bad thing, but the content really underdelivered on the promise of the title and introduction. I had expected essays on race and specifically on the Asian American experience, or even something vaguely reminiscent of DuBois and I got none of that.
Part I did profile some Asian American figures, including Seung-Hui Cho, Amy Chua, and Eddie Huang. Parts II and III were a bunch of profiles on white men, Francis Fukuyama, and the dating scene, a few of which I had to skim through (and I could not bring myself to read the essay on pickup artists, sorry). Part IV was the only section about race, but it was specifically about whiteness and written for a white audience.
I think most readers would say strongest essay in the volume is the one on Cho, though it was written/published a whole decade ago, and some of the implications made in the essay don't sit well with me in 2019 (the book, in general, seems to uphold the status quo on men/masculinity/male gaze). I actually really enjoyed his piece on Chua and Asian American overachievement, but I was surprised that, throughout the rest of the book, Yang really doesn't reference any other contemporary Asian American writers, or even Asian American studies as a discipline. It should also be noted that with the exception of Chua, women are largely absent from this book.
I would've given the book three stars if not for Part IV. I don't know if this is fair but it's my GR account, and the essays on whiteness felt like a total bait-and-switch on the title. In the earlier essays of the book, he seems to want to stand out from other Asian Americans, but he doesn't really interrogate Asian Americanness or what it is he wants to stand out from beyond busting out of the model minority myth and just not rocking the boat in the workplace. Which are all things that have already been written about and deconstructed at length by other Asian American scholars.
And yet, his essays on whiteness are highly critical of the language of social justice and tactics to combat racism outside of academia without just saying outright that he thinks Black Lives Matter maybe needs to cool it. What he seems to be saying in his final essays is that young people are too easily outraged, that critical race theory is better suited for academia than Twitter, and that if everything is white supremacy then nothing is white supremacy. Which is totally not what I would have expected of a book titled, "The Souls of Yellow Folk."
Part I did profile some Asian American figures, including Seung-Hui Cho, Amy Chua, and Eddie Huang. Parts II and III were a bunch of profiles on white men, Francis Fukuyama, and the dating scene, a few of which I had to skim through (and I could not bring myself to read the essay on pickup artists, sorry). Part IV was the only section about race, but it was specifically about whiteness and written for a white audience.
I think most readers would say strongest essay in the volume is the one on Cho, though it was written/published a whole decade ago, and some of the implications made in the essay don't sit well with me in 2019 (the book, in general, seems to uphold the status quo on men/masculinity/male gaze). I actually really enjoyed his piece on Chua and Asian American overachievement, but I was surprised that, throughout the rest of the book, Yang really doesn't reference any other contemporary Asian American writers, or even Asian American studies as a discipline. It should also be noted that with the exception of Chua, women are largely absent from this book.
I would've given the book three stars if not for Part IV. I don't know if this is fair but it's my GR account, and the essays on whiteness felt like a total bait-and-switch on the title. In the earlier essays of the book, he seems to want to stand out from other Asian Americans, but he doesn't really interrogate Asian Americanness or what it is he wants to stand out from beyond busting out of the model minority myth and just not rocking the boat in the workplace. Which are all things that have already been written about and deconstructed at length by other Asian American scholars.
And yet, his essays on whiteness are highly critical of the language of social justice and tactics to combat racism outside of academia without just saying outright that he thinks Black Lives Matter maybe needs to cool it. What he seems to be saying in his final essays is that young people are too easily outraged, that critical race theory is better suited for academia than Twitter, and that if everything is white supremacy then nothing is white supremacy. Which is totally not what I would have expected of a book titled, "The Souls of Yellow Folk."
May 31, 2019
I guess this book tries. The title promises a rare collection of essays talking about the Asian American condition that made it into the mainstream of NYTimes's notable books of 2018, but it disappoints. It only spends about a third of the book on topics related to this before turning into an incoherent mess of hastily cobbled together published writing. Not to say that an Asian American author should only write on the topic, but 1. the title promises something pretty damn specific and 2. there's themes that barely make it across two or three essays.
I take particular issue with Yang's analysis of racial justice activism. In the first third of the book, he focuses on problems that plague East Asian Americans that are systematic, but then presents solutions that are largely individualized. Yeah sure East Asian American men have it bad in the dating world, but how are questions about individual ones improving their social capital successfully supposed to address the structural reasons these men have it hard in dating. He also manages to not even touch upon the experiences and dating lives of Asian American women.
Yang seems to misunderstand that the pursuit of racial justice is one of individuals fighting to better themselves in the status quo world rather than changing it. This is where the largest failure in his analysis occurs in the finale of the book. He frames a ballooning definition of white supremacy that has taken racial justice activism in the wrong direction. At points, Yang sounds like he is just one step away from decrying PC culture on college campuses. If he had tried to take a deeper look at the movement for racial justice movement past a view which seems like it's largely informed by and only by social media, he would see what activists on the ground are trying to accomplish and truly care about. If he took a minute to actual research current and past racial justice movements, he would see activists on the ground still addressing the issues that matter, from private prisons to wage theft from immigrants. The social media culture that he criticizes is the smallest tip of the iceberg that he focuses on to the detriment of his readers.
This is a book that is entirely undeserving of its title and reception.
I take particular issue with Yang's analysis of racial justice activism. In the first third of the book, he focuses on problems that plague East Asian Americans that are systematic, but then presents solutions that are largely individualized. Yeah sure East Asian American men have it bad in the dating world, but how are questions about individual ones improving their social capital successfully supposed to address the structural reasons these men have it hard in dating. He also manages to not even touch upon the experiences and dating lives of Asian American women.
Yang seems to misunderstand that the pursuit of racial justice is one of individuals fighting to better themselves in the status quo world rather than changing it. This is where the largest failure in his analysis occurs in the finale of the book. He frames a ballooning definition of white supremacy that has taken racial justice activism in the wrong direction. At points, Yang sounds like he is just one step away from decrying PC culture on college campuses. If he had tried to take a deeper look at the movement for racial justice movement past a view which seems like it's largely informed by and only by social media, he would see what activists on the ground are trying to accomplish and truly care about. If he took a minute to actual research current and past racial justice movements, he would see activists on the ground still addressing the issues that matter, from private prisons to wage theft from immigrants. The social media culture that he criticizes is the smallest tip of the iceberg that he focuses on to the detriment of his readers.
This is a book that is entirely undeserving of its title and reception.
October 21, 2018
Given the title, I was expecting this book to be about an Asian-American experience, but the majority of the book is a collection of Yang's essays on disparate topics that have nothing to do with Asian-American identity. 'The Souls of Yellow Folk' is such a misleading title, if not wholly appropriative for aligning Asian-American issues with black issues.
July 13, 2020
This book isn't what I expected. The title led me to believe that this book, similar to WEB DuBois' Souls of Black Folk, would focus exclusively on the topic of race. DuBois explored Black America through a wide variety of lenses: education, religion, medicine, music, fatherhood, history, academia, masculinity, etc. He touched upon something new and yet utterly familiar when he gave a name to the experience of "double consciousness." It was an act of great hubris for Yang to title his collection of essays after so monumental a work. Still, it was a clever title, and I was excited to watch Yang try to do for the Asian American experience what DuBois did for the Black American experience. In this respect, he failed.
I have tried to take a step back and take Yang's title out of the equation. How would I feel about these essays if I hadn't come in with these very specific and high expectations? Without the title, I would give this book a 2.5 or 3. With the title, I would give it a 1 or 1.5.
Yang bookends the collection with stories about his Asianness. Beginning with the similarities between him and the Virginia Tech shooter, Yang immediately establishes the vein of self-hatred that continues throughout the book. Like Yang, I grew up Asian in a predominantly white environment, and the trope of the self-hating Asian is a common one. Still, I expected Yang to take this narrative further, to dig deeper into the racism we hold within ourselves toward ourselves. Instead, he skips around and talks about a paraplegic historian, a hacker who commits suicide, and the sex lives of New Yorkers. Some of it is interesting, some of it isn't. There are moments of insight and a number of well crafted phrases, but overall, these essays do little to leave a lasting mark.
The section I found most interesting was the one on the gamification of dating. In a number of stories, Yang addresses the idea of the sexless, powerless Asian man. It's present in the motivations of the Virginia Tech shooter. It's there in the Asians that sit silently during meetings and fail to break free from obedience and become leaders. I thought Yang would explore this more when talking about the "Rules of the Game." I expected he would draw parallels between this act of becoming the perfect dating robot, and the perceived roboticism of Asian men. I wanted Yang to deconstruct the relationship between racism, sexism, masculinity, and self-hate. Instead, he concludes by saying that the negative, hurtful "rules of the game" are nevertheless useful in navigating the impossible nature of the current dating world.
I could say much more on each of Yang's essays. I could go on about the lack of coherency, the confusion I felt, the fragmented experience of reading this book. Instead, I'd like to skip straight to the end and talk about the final message Yang chooses to leave his readers. The final essay is about white supremacy. Finally, we've reached the topic I thought the whole book would be about. I was ready for Yang to give me new words to understand the experience of being perceived as both white and POC in this country. I wanted a framework by which to understand the conflicting elements, the dual identity of being Asian American. As a Chinese American, I see the ways in which we are uniquely privileged and uniquely oppressed. I see the rampant racism within the Chinese American community, as well as the inspiring activism. I see that ways in which the stereotypes are at times uncomfortably accurate and at times horribly constricting. And I was more than ready for Yang to help me make sense of it all.
Instead, he ends on how we need to use the term "white supremacy" sparingly. We've gone too far, he says. By labeling everything as racist, we have played right into the hands of white supremacists and are making enemies of all white people! Yang wants us to be more careful, to have different words to distinguish between hate crimes and acts of unintentional racism from well-meaning white people. I finished the book with a sour taste in my mouth and heavy disappointment in my stomach. He's not wrong. Our current vocabulary surrounding race is in sore need of scale and specificity. But this is not what I expected this collection of essays to be about. This is not something I needed Yang to tell me. This is not the vocabulary I am so desperate to learn. With this eye-catching title, with his personal experiences and his writing abilities, Yang could have created something powerful. And it's hard to forgive him for falling so pathetically short of this goal.
I have tried to take a step back and take Yang's title out of the equation. How would I feel about these essays if I hadn't come in with these very specific and high expectations? Without the title, I would give this book a 2.5 or 3. With the title, I would give it a 1 or 1.5.
Yang bookends the collection with stories about his Asianness. Beginning with the similarities between him and the Virginia Tech shooter, Yang immediately establishes the vein of self-hatred that continues throughout the book. Like Yang, I grew up Asian in a predominantly white environment, and the trope of the self-hating Asian is a common one. Still, I expected Yang to take this narrative further, to dig deeper into the racism we hold within ourselves toward ourselves. Instead, he skips around and talks about a paraplegic historian, a hacker who commits suicide, and the sex lives of New Yorkers. Some of it is interesting, some of it isn't. There are moments of insight and a number of well crafted phrases, but overall, these essays do little to leave a lasting mark.
The section I found most interesting was the one on the gamification of dating. In a number of stories, Yang addresses the idea of the sexless, powerless Asian man. It's present in the motivations of the Virginia Tech shooter. It's there in the Asians that sit silently during meetings and fail to break free from obedience and become leaders. I thought Yang would explore this more when talking about the "Rules of the Game." I expected he would draw parallels between this act of becoming the perfect dating robot, and the perceived roboticism of Asian men. I wanted Yang to deconstruct the relationship between racism, sexism, masculinity, and self-hate. Instead, he concludes by saying that the negative, hurtful "rules of the game" are nevertheless useful in navigating the impossible nature of the current dating world.
I could say much more on each of Yang's essays. I could go on about the lack of coherency, the confusion I felt, the fragmented experience of reading this book. Instead, I'd like to skip straight to the end and talk about the final message Yang chooses to leave his readers. The final essay is about white supremacy. Finally, we've reached the topic I thought the whole book would be about. I was ready for Yang to give me new words to understand the experience of being perceived as both white and POC in this country. I wanted a framework by which to understand the conflicting elements, the dual identity of being Asian American. As a Chinese American, I see the ways in which we are uniquely privileged and uniquely oppressed. I see the rampant racism within the Chinese American community, as well as the inspiring activism. I see that ways in which the stereotypes are at times uncomfortably accurate and at times horribly constricting. And I was more than ready for Yang to help me make sense of it all.
Instead, he ends on how we need to use the term "white supremacy" sparingly. We've gone too far, he says. By labeling everything as racist, we have played right into the hands of white supremacists and are making enemies of all white people! Yang wants us to be more careful, to have different words to distinguish between hate crimes and acts of unintentional racism from well-meaning white people. I finished the book with a sour taste in my mouth and heavy disappointment in my stomach. He's not wrong. Our current vocabulary surrounding race is in sore need of scale and specificity. But this is not what I expected this collection of essays to be about. This is not something I needed Yang to tell me. This is not the vocabulary I am so desperate to learn. With this eye-catching title, with his personal experiences and his writing abilities, Yang could have created something powerful. And it's hard to forgive him for falling so pathetically short of this goal.
March 20, 2019
It seemed as though Yang (or his publisher) picked out a cool title for a book of essays, then realized that he didn't have enough of them about the Asian-American experience to fill it, and, thus, rounded it out with random (on Aaron Schwartz, Tony Judt)--not to mention outdated (The Game and the pickup artists? Sex Diaries? Really?)--other essays Yang wrote at some point in the past 5-10 years that may or may not use the word "Asian" in them. The first few essays were engaging, but, overall, I was completely disappointed.
April 18, 2023
incel vibes. i never want to read a book from a man's perspective again.
July 8, 2023
This is an interesting set of essays, although only about half of the essays are about the "souls of Asian people" or what-have-you. That being said, the other essays, on topics from Aaron Swartz to Francis Fukuyama, are quite interesting, with a few exceptions.
I'd say there are 2 big themes in this book. The first is the struggle for an Asian-American identity that is more assertive, bold, and varied than the model minority, good student, hard worker stereotypes. Yang discusses things like pop culture, college admissions, and dating, and how in each of these realms Asian men (he mostly focuses on men) are seen as passive, low-status, meek, and obedient. He makes the interesting point that one reason AA applicants to elite universities may score lower on personality tests/interviews is that they often aren't raised to be "big" in personality, but to keep their heads down, be humble, work hard, etc. He clearly wants more defiance toward that attitude. He also has an interesting discussion of being Asian in the dating world that parallels Amia Srinavasan's essay on the same topic, although her work is more robust.
The other interesting theme in WY's volume is his "successor ideology" critique of modern progressivism. He makes the insightful point that progressives have gone from criticizing racism or sexism to criticizing and pathologizing "whiteness" and "masculinity" per se. This, he argues, is a more radical shift, going after people's essences or identities rather than their behavior (you are a man who can act in a sexist or non-sexist manner). I think he's right that this shift makes many men and white people feel trapped and attacked, often leading to counterproductive reactions (think about people posting "it's ok to be white" in college dorms or social media sites). He doesn't say much about how to form a more positive type of masculinity or whiteness, but I think's he right about the importance and even the radicalism of that rhetorical shift.
WY is pretty strident in his political views on Twitter, but he's a more toned-down commenter in this volume. Overall, if you are interested in Asian-American identity issues, this might be a good one for you.
I'd say there are 2 big themes in this book. The first is the struggle for an Asian-American identity that is more assertive, bold, and varied than the model minority, good student, hard worker stereotypes. Yang discusses things like pop culture, college admissions, and dating, and how in each of these realms Asian men (he mostly focuses on men) are seen as passive, low-status, meek, and obedient. He makes the interesting point that one reason AA applicants to elite universities may score lower on personality tests/interviews is that they often aren't raised to be "big" in personality, but to keep their heads down, be humble, work hard, etc. He clearly wants more defiance toward that attitude. He also has an interesting discussion of being Asian in the dating world that parallels Amia Srinavasan's essay on the same topic, although her work is more robust.
The other interesting theme in WY's volume is his "successor ideology" critique of modern progressivism. He makes the insightful point that progressives have gone from criticizing racism or sexism to criticizing and pathologizing "whiteness" and "masculinity" per se. This, he argues, is a more radical shift, going after people's essences or identities rather than their behavior (you are a man who can act in a sexist or non-sexist manner). I think he's right that this shift makes many men and white people feel trapped and attacked, often leading to counterproductive reactions (think about people posting "it's ok to be white" in college dorms or social media sites). He doesn't say much about how to form a more positive type of masculinity or whiteness, but I think's he right about the importance and even the radicalism of that rhetorical shift.
WY is pretty strident in his political views on Twitter, but he's a more toned-down commenter in this volume. Overall, if you are interested in Asian-American identity issues, this might be a good one for you.
December 20, 2018
Not what you think it's going to be, but not bad.
If you picked up this book expecting in-depth assessments of what it's like to be Asian American today, you're going to be disappointed. If you can get past that and read all the essays, however, you'll come away with some gems.
Emphasis on "some." When Yang is good, he's really, really good. "Eddie Huang Against the World" and "The Life and Afterlife of Aaron Swartz" are very good. "Game Theory" is disturbing and hilarious at the same time. "The Terrorist Search Engine" and "The Liveliest Mind in New York" are educational, and sent me to both the internet and the library catalog to research a few things (any book that leads me to a new path of inquiry can never be ALL bad).
You can, however, skip part four entirely, with its academic argument that white supremacy (outside of overt Klanship or Nazi-ism) isn't really a thing, and its casual dismissal of microaggressions. Apparently those things are merely rhetorical propaganda cooked up by activists with an agenda, and that calling people on their nonsense only deepens the racial divide in America. In other words, calling out racism is the "real" racism, an argument no sensible person can accept with a straight face, and a disappointing one from an author whose intellectual rigor is so well displayed elsewhere in the book. Then again, don't skip it: read it and use it to refine your counter-arguments. That's what things we don't agree with should do for us, really: make us clarify our own positions better.
You can tell, from the few essays in which Yang speaks of being an Asian male in America, that it's a painful subject. The tone slips from the scholarly, dispassionate one used elsewhere, and reveals the raw experiences that come with being both the "model minority" and completely ignored by white America at the same darned time. I didn't know the "bamboo ceiling" was a thing, so I was surprised and dismayed, but grateful, to learn about it. It's definitely uncomfortable reading, but it shouldn't BE comfortable. For any reader.
In other words, a mixed bag with a lot of wrestle-worthy ideas in it. A great library has something in it to offend everyone, so you should definitely pick this up; readers at all points on the political spectrum will find something to be upset with here. Hopefully, however, they will also benefit from the high-quality writing that is present here. Recommended for all collections; just be prepared for the inevitable book challenges you'll get.
If you picked up this book expecting in-depth assessments of what it's like to be Asian American today, you're going to be disappointed. If you can get past that and read all the essays, however, you'll come away with some gems.
Emphasis on "some." When Yang is good, he's really, really good. "Eddie Huang Against the World" and "The Life and Afterlife of Aaron Swartz" are very good. "Game Theory" is disturbing and hilarious at the same time. "The Terrorist Search Engine" and "The Liveliest Mind in New York" are educational, and sent me to both the internet and the library catalog to research a few things (any book that leads me to a new path of inquiry can never be ALL bad).
You can, however, skip part four entirely, with its academic argument that white supremacy (outside of overt Klanship or Nazi-ism) isn't really a thing, and its casual dismissal of microaggressions. Apparently those things are merely rhetorical propaganda cooked up by activists with an agenda, and that calling people on their nonsense only deepens the racial divide in America. In other words, calling out racism is the "real" racism, an argument no sensible person can accept with a straight face, and a disappointing one from an author whose intellectual rigor is so well displayed elsewhere in the book. Then again, don't skip it: read it and use it to refine your counter-arguments. That's what things we don't agree with should do for us, really: make us clarify our own positions better.
You can tell, from the few essays in which Yang speaks of being an Asian male in America, that it's a painful subject. The tone slips from the scholarly, dispassionate one used elsewhere, and reveals the raw experiences that come with being both the "model minority" and completely ignored by white America at the same darned time. I didn't know the "bamboo ceiling" was a thing, so I was surprised and dismayed, but grateful, to learn about it. It's definitely uncomfortable reading, but it shouldn't BE comfortable. For any reader.
In other words, a mixed bag with a lot of wrestle-worthy ideas in it. A great library has something in it to offend everyone, so you should definitely pick this up; readers at all points on the political spectrum will find something to be upset with here. Hopefully, however, they will also benefit from the high-quality writing that is present here. Recommended for all collections; just be prepared for the inevitable book challenges you'll get.
February 23, 2022
I liked the chapter about Tony Judt. Otherwise, I don't think I was necessarily the audience intended for this.
July 29, 2019
Book of unconnected essays that doesn't really cohere into anything, but the sentence-level writing is so good I didn't really care. A couple of the essays are duds. My favorite essays involved Yang dissecting Asian-American identity, masculinity, and sexuality. I think he will write a memoir one day and it will be very good.
Quotables:
Asian-Americans as "a nominal minority whose claim to be a 'person of color' deserving of the special regard reserved for victims is taken seriously by no one."
Asian-American culture as: "An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits."
Discussing Aaron Swartz, and conformity: "Swartz had skipped out on the lessons taught by the American high school—the lessons in cynical acquiescence, conformity, and obedience to the powers that be. He was right to think these lessons injure people’s innate sense of curiosity and morality and inure them to mediocrity. He was right to credit his 'arrogance' for the excellence of the life he lived. But if nothing else, these lessons prepare people for a world that can often be met in no other way; a world whose irrational power must sometimes simply be endured."
Quotables:
Asian-Americans as "a nominal minority whose claim to be a 'person of color' deserving of the special regard reserved for victims is taken seriously by no one."
Asian-American culture as: "An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits."
Discussing Aaron Swartz, and conformity: "Swartz had skipped out on the lessons taught by the American high school—the lessons in cynical acquiescence, conformity, and obedience to the powers that be. He was right to think these lessons injure people’s innate sense of curiosity and morality and inure them to mediocrity. He was right to credit his 'arrogance' for the excellence of the life he lived. But if nothing else, these lessons prepare people for a world that can often be met in no other way; a world whose irrational power must sometimes simply be endured."
April 26, 2020
I've been struggling to read in quarantine, but I finished this book in less than 48 hours. Yang's writing style is clear, witty, and incisive. His work made me think more about the convenience of stereotypes and the difficulties inherent in overcoming them. I was particularly drawn by his commentary on what it takes to succeed in New York. Yang argues that success in the Big Apple requires "understanding which rules you're supposed to break." I had a professor at Schwarzman College make a similar comment on bureaucracies, arguing that survival in a large, complex organization is contingent upon deciding which rules can be broken. This is a skill I want to work on, because I think blind rule-following has caused me a lot of unnecessary stress and anxiety over the years. Ultimately, I believe I resonated with the book so much, because many of the struggles he describes closely map to those experienced by members of the Indian-American community in the U.S.
November 17, 2021
The Souls of Yellow Folk : Essays (2019) by Wesley Yang is a collection of pieces on various subjects that have been published in the last 20 years.
There are essays on Seung-Hui Cho who perpetrated the Virginia Tech mass shooting, Asian Americans in the US, Eddie Huang, Aaron Swartz, Tony Judt, Francis Fukayama, Pickup Culture, The Sex Diaries, Is it OK to Be White and What is White Supremacy.
The essays on particular Asian Americans and being Asian American are particularly interesting. Yang is a perceptive writer and writes well about ‘The Bamboo Ceiling’ while noting that Asian Americans are richer, better educated and live longer than Caucasian Americans.
The essays on Aaron Swartz, Tony Judt and Francis Fukayama are empathetic and are excellent portraits of their subjects.
The Souls of Yellow Folk is well worth a read.
There are essays on Seung-Hui Cho who perpetrated the Virginia Tech mass shooting, Asian Americans in the US, Eddie Huang, Aaron Swartz, Tony Judt, Francis Fukayama, Pickup Culture, The Sex Diaries, Is it OK to Be White and What is White Supremacy.
The essays on particular Asian Americans and being Asian American are particularly interesting. Yang is a perceptive writer and writes well about ‘The Bamboo Ceiling’ while noting that Asian Americans are richer, better educated and live longer than Caucasian Americans.
The essays on Aaron Swartz, Tony Judt and Francis Fukayama are empathetic and are excellent portraits of their subjects.
The Souls of Yellow Folk is well worth a read.
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