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The Loneliest Americans
A “provocative and sweeping” (Time) blend of family history and original reportage that explores—and reimagines—Asian American identity in a Black and white world
“[Kang’s] exploration of class and identity among Asian Americans will be talked about for years to come.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE Time, NPR, Mother Jones
In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Nobody, including the lawmakers who passed the bill, expected it to transform the country’s demographics. But over the next four decades, millions arrived, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They came with almost no understanding of their new home, much less the history of “Asian America” that was supposed to define them.
The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.”
Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country’s racial binary. There are the businessmen turning Flushing into a center of immigrant wealth; the casualties of the Los Angeles riots; the impoverished parents in New York City who believe that admission to the city’s exam schools is the only way out; the men’s right’s activists on Reddit ranting about intermarriage; and the handful of protesters who show up at Black Lives Matter rallies holding “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” signs.
Kang’s exquisitely crafted book brings these lonely parallel climbers together and calls for a new immigrant solidarity—one rooted not in bubble tea and elite college admissions but in the struggles of refugees and the working class.
“[Kang’s] exploration of class and identity among Asian Americans will be talked about for years to come.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE Time, NPR, Mother Jones
In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Nobody, including the lawmakers who passed the bill, expected it to transform the country’s demographics. But over the next four decades, millions arrived, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They came with almost no understanding of their new home, much less the history of “Asian America” that was supposed to define them.
The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.”
Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country’s racial binary. There are the businessmen turning Flushing into a center of immigrant wealth; the casualties of the Los Angeles riots; the impoverished parents in New York City who believe that admission to the city’s exam schools is the only way out; the men’s right’s activists on Reddit ranting about intermarriage; and the handful of protesters who show up at Black Lives Matter rallies holding “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” signs.
Kang’s exquisitely crafted book brings these lonely parallel climbers together and calls for a new immigrant solidarity—one rooted not in bubble tea and elite college admissions but in the struggles of refugees and the working class.
288 pages, Paperback
First published October 12, 2021
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November 6, 2021
A conversation-provoking text that I give three stars to because I feel like it could have been even better. I will start with what I liked. I feel like Jay Caspian Kang did an excellent job of challenging us to question and to think more deeply about “Asian American” identity, in particular how Asian Americans may try to assimilate to whiteness instead of engaging in solidarity with refugee, undocumented, and working class Asian Americans. He weaves in historical analysis to further flesh out his arguments and to show how the topics he’s writing about have manifested in the past and into the present. In general, I appreciated the consistency of his voice and tone in The Loneliest Americans: it emanated this existential dread angst vibe that felt authentic to him as a person even if a bit intellectualizing of his emotions at times.
One of the major elements of this book I found lacking includes a lack of tangible narratives and actions to disrupt white supremacy and whiteness from within the Asian American community. Kang repeatedly makes the argument that Asian Americans should align themselves with the most marginalized in our community, an argument I agree with, yet he doesn’t delve as deeply into this recommendation as I would like. For example, the book could have benefitted from including voices of actual working class, refugee, undocumented Asian Americans. Furthermore, I do know Asian Americans who are doing the work of fighting for the most marginalized in our communities as well as engaging in solidarity with the Black community – I’m curious why he didn’t include more of those perspectives as well, which would’ve given more examples for readers to follow or learn from.
I also felt a little frustrated by how Kang wrote about his own positionality. I appreciate his openness about naming his privilege, how he married a white woman, and the nuanced emotions he has about having a biracial kid. However, I personally wanted a more thorough self-analysis here: so if you’re going to (rightfully) criticize Asian Americans who ascend into upward class mobility and whiteness, how do you feel about your own decision to engage in whiteness in your own life? I don’t want to assume his emotions because only he knows them, though I sensed some unspoken meandering guilt about marrying a white person and having a half-Korean, half-white kid. If he does or even if he doesn’t feel that guilt, instead of wallowing in it, I wanted to know what specifically is he doing to counteract and dismantle the privilege he has and the privilege his child will inherit? Similar to my point in the second paragraph, I also feel like Kang could have included the voices of Asian Americans who have chosen specifically not to date or marry white people and who rather engaged with other people of color or fellow Asian Americans either as romantic partners or lifelong friends.
A couple of more minor points (lol I feel like I’m writing one of my reviews for a peer-reviewed manuscript, oops): I found a couple of places in the text I wanted a bit more specificity and precision. For example, on page 59 he writes that “the flood of Asians who came to the United States after Hart-Cellar had no experience with American racism or oppression.” While I appreciate his point about disentangling Asian Americans’ experiences of racism/oppression based on year of immigration as well as his use of a more dramatic tone for rhetorical effect, I think statements like the one on page 59 can obscure the experiences of marginalized groups within the Asian American community, such as LGBTQ+ Asian Americans. Also, there were two places in the book where Kang describes half-Asian, half-white people as especially attractive, once on the first page when describing half-Asian kids he met in his youth and once later on when he describes a half-Asian, half-white man he interviews in the chapter “Flushing Rising.” While my sense is that Kang would want to reject the glorification and idealization of half-white, half-Asian individuals’ appearance over monoracial Asians, I wish he would have more explicitly addressed these incidents in the text and where they came from.
Clearly this book was compelling enough to elicit such a strong response from myself and other readers. I’d recommend it as a starting point for conversation and self-reflection, with the additional recommendation of even more reading, introspection, and action to enact some of the more abstract ideals purported by Kang in this book.
One of the major elements of this book I found lacking includes a lack of tangible narratives and actions to disrupt white supremacy and whiteness from within the Asian American community. Kang repeatedly makes the argument that Asian Americans should align themselves with the most marginalized in our community, an argument I agree with, yet he doesn’t delve as deeply into this recommendation as I would like. For example, the book could have benefitted from including voices of actual working class, refugee, undocumented Asian Americans. Furthermore, I do know Asian Americans who are doing the work of fighting for the most marginalized in our communities as well as engaging in solidarity with the Black community – I’m curious why he didn’t include more of those perspectives as well, which would’ve given more examples for readers to follow or learn from.
I also felt a little frustrated by how Kang wrote about his own positionality. I appreciate his openness about naming his privilege, how he married a white woman, and the nuanced emotions he has about having a biracial kid. However, I personally wanted a more thorough self-analysis here: so if you’re going to (rightfully) criticize Asian Americans who ascend into upward class mobility and whiteness, how do you feel about your own decision to engage in whiteness in your own life? I don’t want to assume his emotions because only he knows them, though I sensed some unspoken meandering guilt about marrying a white person and having a half-Korean, half-white kid. If he does or even if he doesn’t feel that guilt, instead of wallowing in it, I wanted to know what specifically is he doing to counteract and dismantle the privilege he has and the privilege his child will inherit? Similar to my point in the second paragraph, I also feel like Kang could have included the voices of Asian Americans who have chosen specifically not to date or marry white people and who rather engaged with other people of color or fellow Asian Americans either as romantic partners or lifelong friends.
A couple of more minor points (lol I feel like I’m writing one of my reviews for a peer-reviewed manuscript, oops): I found a couple of places in the text I wanted a bit more specificity and precision. For example, on page 59 he writes that “the flood of Asians who came to the United States after Hart-Cellar had no experience with American racism or oppression.” While I appreciate his point about disentangling Asian Americans’ experiences of racism/oppression based on year of immigration as well as his use of a more dramatic tone for rhetorical effect, I think statements like the one on page 59 can obscure the experiences of marginalized groups within the Asian American community, such as LGBTQ+ Asian Americans. Also, there were two places in the book where Kang describes half-Asian, half-white people as especially attractive, once on the first page when describing half-Asian kids he met in his youth and once later on when he describes a half-Asian, half-white man he interviews in the chapter “Flushing Rising.” While my sense is that Kang would want to reject the glorification and idealization of half-white, half-Asian individuals’ appearance over monoracial Asians, I wish he would have more explicitly addressed these incidents in the text and where they came from.
Clearly this book was compelling enough to elicit such a strong response from myself and other readers. I’d recommend it as a starting point for conversation and self-reflection, with the additional recommendation of even more reading, introspection, and action to enact some of the more abstract ideals purported by Kang in this book.
February 16, 2022
Pretty disappointed by this book, as someone who generally likes Jay Caspian Kang’s writing and rather abrasive disposition online.
Right now, it is popular for Asian American writers to begin their discussions of Asian America with a caveat that “Asian America” as a concept is nonsensical, because of the vast diversity of experiences re: race, ethnicity, gender, etc that cannot be encompassed through a single narrative or frame of analysis. Kang has said this before, and he reiterates it here. That’s fine, the argument is valid. But he has no problem making sweeping generalizations in other senses, by saying “most immigrants don’t have the racial consciousness to X” or “we, the upwardly mobile Hart-Celler immigrants, still have no idea which side we’re on,”referring to post-1965 immigrants ... which is a huge swath of people! (Worth noting that most of his anecdotes in the book are about Chinese and Korean Americans) Obviously, some of this is polemical but I find his imprecision throughout the book annoying and counterproductive to a meaningful understanding of Asian American identity and politics.
Kang says AAs find themselves divided between two camps: nationalists, like the Korean storekeepers bearing guns during the Rodney King riots, or “upwardly mobile second gen immigrants who mimic the language of Black liberation as a way to ascend into a liberal multicultural elite.” First, is there really this clean of a binary? Second, the rendering of the second camp feels bad faith — the initial Asian American movement was founded on ideas from Black Power, do we really want to say those early activists were just trying to buy their way into a liberal multicultural elite? One thing they absorbed was self-determination for their communities, not relying on white institutions but making your own, plus multiculturalism as a concept didn’t really come into vogue until the 90s or so. I mean, if we really want to get into it there’s nuance here but that’s my point — Kang is doing readers a disservice by not being precise, and he’d get further with his arguments by being more focused. The upwardly mobile, second gen AAs become this amorphous entity that he can shove blame onto—the group includes AA celebrities like Simi Liu and AA scholars/activists who might attack the representation politics Simi Liu embodies—which is strange because his conclusions are pretty tepid and basically what many of them have publicly been arguing. “We must align ourselves with the forgotten Asian Americans ‘the refugees, the undocumented, the working class’”’he says. Well duh. Also, how to understand orgs like CAAAV, which represent Asian public housing residents but also talks about Black liberation and anti-capitalism? Where does it fall in the book’s framework?
I think Kang’s NYT articles tend to be more illuminating because they’re reported and more centered around a question, whereas this is a lot of personal narrative that is interesting but isn’t necessarily the best at driving home an argument. (Nothing I couldn’t get from reading his tweets) In the MRA section I really wish he’d given a history/definitions of MRAs before diving in, I mean I already know way more about than the average person about MRAs but still there’s a lot I could have used clarification on, like how their political radicalism (reading Malcom X, knowing about Asian American history) converges with their misogyny and why they’ve chosen WMAF relationships as their frontier of activism. (If MRAsians are reading Malcolm, do they fall under the upwardly mobile Asians parroting black liberation?)
Ok going to end this word vomit here, maybe I’ll try to clean up my thoughts at some other time but ultimately I’m kind of sad about how meh this book turned out … i was open to an exploration of how how liberal AA rhetoric pushes people to the right because at least right wing talking points feel more honest but this book just doesn’t feel punchy either way :/ I also don’t think it really addresses loneliness that much?
Right now, it is popular for Asian American writers to begin their discussions of Asian America with a caveat that “Asian America” as a concept is nonsensical, because of the vast diversity of experiences re: race, ethnicity, gender, etc that cannot be encompassed through a single narrative or frame of analysis. Kang has said this before, and he reiterates it here. That’s fine, the argument is valid. But he has no problem making sweeping generalizations in other senses, by saying “most immigrants don’t have the racial consciousness to X” or “we, the upwardly mobile Hart-Celler immigrants, still have no idea which side we’re on,”referring to post-1965 immigrants ... which is a huge swath of people! (Worth noting that most of his anecdotes in the book are about Chinese and Korean Americans) Obviously, some of this is polemical but I find his imprecision throughout the book annoying and counterproductive to a meaningful understanding of Asian American identity and politics.
Kang says AAs find themselves divided between two camps: nationalists, like the Korean storekeepers bearing guns during the Rodney King riots, or “upwardly mobile second gen immigrants who mimic the language of Black liberation as a way to ascend into a liberal multicultural elite.” First, is there really this clean of a binary? Second, the rendering of the second camp feels bad faith — the initial Asian American movement was founded on ideas from Black Power, do we really want to say those early activists were just trying to buy their way into a liberal multicultural elite? One thing they absorbed was self-determination for their communities, not relying on white institutions but making your own, plus multiculturalism as a concept didn’t really come into vogue until the 90s or so. I mean, if we really want to get into it there’s nuance here but that’s my point — Kang is doing readers a disservice by not being precise, and he’d get further with his arguments by being more focused. The upwardly mobile, second gen AAs become this amorphous entity that he can shove blame onto—the group includes AA celebrities like Simi Liu and AA scholars/activists who might attack the representation politics Simi Liu embodies—which is strange because his conclusions are pretty tepid and basically what many of them have publicly been arguing. “We must align ourselves with the forgotten Asian Americans ‘the refugees, the undocumented, the working class’”’he says. Well duh. Also, how to understand orgs like CAAAV, which represent Asian public housing residents but also talks about Black liberation and anti-capitalism? Where does it fall in the book’s framework?
I think Kang’s NYT articles tend to be more illuminating because they’re reported and more centered around a question, whereas this is a lot of personal narrative that is interesting but isn’t necessarily the best at driving home an argument. (Nothing I couldn’t get from reading his tweets) In the MRA section I really wish he’d given a history/definitions of MRAs before diving in, I mean I already know way more about than the average person about MRAs but still there’s a lot I could have used clarification on, like how their political radicalism (reading Malcom X, knowing about Asian American history) converges with their misogyny and why they’ve chosen WMAF relationships as their frontier of activism. (If MRAsians are reading Malcolm, do they fall under the upwardly mobile Asians parroting black liberation?)
Ok going to end this word vomit here, maybe I’ll try to clean up my thoughts at some other time but ultimately I’m kind of sad about how meh this book turned out … i was open to an exploration of how how liberal AA rhetoric pushes people to the right because at least right wing talking points feel more honest but this book just doesn’t feel punchy either way :/ I also don’t think it really addresses loneliness that much?
January 27, 2022
To: THE LONELIEST AMERICANS by Jay Caspian Kang
Hi, it’s me, a fellow second generation Asian Canadian (grew up in the USA) from the aftermath of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act. I agree, there’s a lot of history my family was not personally a part of since they only came in the 80s, so perhaps I am missing a lot of historical context of the struggles of Asian Americans who came before me.
BUT, that’s what ✨history✨ is for. History shapes how we’re perceived whether we like it or not. That’s why so many second generation post Hart-Celler Asians spend so much time trying to learn Asian American history. Solidarity isn’t always about a shared past, or even shared culture, but about a white supremacist America that assumes we’re all the same. Solidarity comes from rejecting that. Solidarity comes from celebrating our differences. History gives us context for how we fit into the narrative of Asian America.
You say our parents ascribed to white supremacy because they don’t think about race. But have you ever left your home country wrecked by western colonialism to a country built on western colonialism, to speak a new language, to learn a new culture? The parents I know experience racism and they see it. They each respond to it differently. So perhaps stereotyping them without nuance of the individual experiences that shaped them really simplifies them into 2D characters.
On that note, Black solidarity is also nuanced and complex, so stop making them a monolith. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Black people come from equally different backgrounds.
Maybe stop laughing and poking fun of recent immigrants too. Yes, I know. Some can be wealthy and obnoxious, but trust me, anyone can be obnoxious. I can bet you that they have a deep inner life and racialized experiences that they don’t show on their faces when they’re IN THE F-ING COURTYARD AS OBSERVED BY YOU. Also there’s more to meets the eye on why they’re here. Clue: it’s probably a result of western colonialism that has inserted its dominance to most parts of the world, including East Asia.
Oh yeah, remember at the end when you talk about needing more representation from marginalized Asian groups. Well, you also spent the whole book inserting high brow references on all the ✨intellectual✨ people you know and on your knowledge of stupid upper east side schools. None of which is accessible for the average reader. And might I also state that of the people you actually interviewed for the book, they were mostly upper middle class Korean Americans.
True representation means not speaking over other Asians. I get it, you and I are both upper middle class. There are ways to talk about the loneliness we experience without stomping over other Asian groups. Making snide comments about East Asian students sitting together in a university and assuming every East Asian is the embodiment of a boba liberal (I agree we can have boba liberal tendencies, but no one is a walking caricature of one, trust me) shows me that you’re still grappling with self hatred over your own identity.
Perhaps this book would have worked better as a memoir about ✨your✨ Korean American experience. Instead you took these pages of yours to stomp on Asian Americans for “ascribing” to the stereotypes reinforcing the boxes that America has already shoved us in.
P.S. Can you not be weird about biracial experiences? Having mixed families either through marriage or adoption are equally complex and nuanced and lots of Asian Americans speak about it.
P.P.S. Don’t assume we have no allies. That in itself is the inferiority complex that prevents you from connecting to the wide diaspora of Asian America.
Yes, there are problems with the Asian American identity, like how it is frequently conflated with East Asians, which you reinforce here, since you only really address East Asians. Let’s not even pretend that you were trying to write this for anyone besides East Asian Americans in the first place, so perhaps just admit so in the beginning of this book. I think there’s a lot of growth to be made there. But to discount every effort made in a positive direction by other Asian Americans is to go backwards.
If you didn’t know already, I hate this book.
Signed,
A fellow Hart-Celler East Asian
Visit my Instagram @vanreads for more of my reviews.
Hi, it’s me, a fellow second generation Asian Canadian (grew up in the USA) from the aftermath of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act. I agree, there’s a lot of history my family was not personally a part of since they only came in the 80s, so perhaps I am missing a lot of historical context of the struggles of Asian Americans who came before me.
BUT, that’s what ✨history✨ is for. History shapes how we’re perceived whether we like it or not. That’s why so many second generation post Hart-Celler Asians spend so much time trying to learn Asian American history. Solidarity isn’t always about a shared past, or even shared culture, but about a white supremacist America that assumes we’re all the same. Solidarity comes from rejecting that. Solidarity comes from celebrating our differences. History gives us context for how we fit into the narrative of Asian America.
You say our parents ascribed to white supremacy because they don’t think about race. But have you ever left your home country wrecked by western colonialism to a country built on western colonialism, to speak a new language, to learn a new culture? The parents I know experience racism and they see it. They each respond to it differently. So perhaps stereotyping them without nuance of the individual experiences that shaped them really simplifies them into 2D characters.
On that note, Black solidarity is also nuanced and complex, so stop making them a monolith. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Black people come from equally different backgrounds.
Maybe stop laughing and poking fun of recent immigrants too. Yes, I know. Some can be wealthy and obnoxious, but trust me, anyone can be obnoxious. I can bet you that they have a deep inner life and racialized experiences that they don’t show on their faces when they’re IN THE F-ING COURTYARD AS OBSERVED BY YOU. Also there’s more to meets the eye on why they’re here. Clue: it’s probably a result of western colonialism that has inserted its dominance to most parts of the world, including East Asia.
Oh yeah, remember at the end when you talk about needing more representation from marginalized Asian groups. Well, you also spent the whole book inserting high brow references on all the ✨intellectual✨ people you know and on your knowledge of stupid upper east side schools. None of which is accessible for the average reader. And might I also state that of the people you actually interviewed for the book, they were mostly upper middle class Korean Americans.
True representation means not speaking over other Asians. I get it, you and I are both upper middle class. There are ways to talk about the loneliness we experience without stomping over other Asian groups. Making snide comments about East Asian students sitting together in a university and assuming every East Asian is the embodiment of a boba liberal (I agree we can have boba liberal tendencies, but no one is a walking caricature of one, trust me) shows me that you’re still grappling with self hatred over your own identity.
Perhaps this book would have worked better as a memoir about ✨your✨ Korean American experience. Instead you took these pages of yours to stomp on Asian Americans for “ascribing” to the stereotypes reinforcing the boxes that America has already shoved us in.
P.S. Can you not be weird about biracial experiences? Having mixed families either through marriage or adoption are equally complex and nuanced and lots of Asian Americans speak about it.
P.P.S. Don’t assume we have no allies. That in itself is the inferiority complex that prevents you from connecting to the wide diaspora of Asian America.
Yes, there are problems with the Asian American identity, like how it is frequently conflated with East Asians, which you reinforce here, since you only really address East Asians. Let’s not even pretend that you were trying to write this for anyone besides East Asian Americans in the first place, so perhaps just admit so in the beginning of this book. I think there’s a lot of growth to be made there. But to discount every effort made in a positive direction by other Asian Americans is to go backwards.
If you didn’t know already, I hate this book.
Signed,
A fellow Hart-Celler East Asian
Visit my Instagram @vanreads for more of my reviews.
October 28, 2021
I'm a big fan of Jay Caspian Kang's writings on race and immigration for the New York Times so I was quite disappointed with this book, which felt both formulaic and rushed. There were some statistical recaps of the ways that immigration from Asia had reshaped the United States, some guarded statements to the effect that not all minorities are the same and that there have been tensions between Asians and African-Americans, and a recap of his own life moving in the similar educational and literary circles as most other writers of note in the United States while going through a few familiar second-generation immigrant confusions. That's all perfectly fine, but it was not revelatory in any sense. The book is short and I pushed through it waiting for the moment that it would start to get good but it never came. There was no narrative, but rather a set of essays strung together. It would've been stronger had he done more on-the-ground reporting with Asian immigrants of different walks of life and simply written about their perspectives on various issues rather than using his own life as a through-line. The whole thing felt much safer than it should've been and he was too guarded and careful in the essays to provoke any interesting or new thoughts. This is no knock at Kang: he is still a great writer and reporter and is very honest and even cutting in his New York Times pieces. I'm sure he has a great book in him, although its not as yet arrived.
October 23, 2021
i remember in 6th grade me and my friends made a sign for our table called "the asian table" that my black teacher confiscated. it's funny bc i'm from san jose and our school was like 50% asian (this number would climb higher through middle + high school as the white kids went to private school, while the children of vietnamese refugees + chinese, korean, indian, pakistani tech workers toughed out "meritocracy" at public schools that were thankfully for me, good enough but not the kind so intense that kids threw themselves on the caltrain tracks). where did that come from? was it ethnocentrism or racial consciousness? youtube, it came from youtube
i finished this book an hour ago, just as my mom sent my brother and me a triumphant text about princeton, where we siblings both graduated, hiring an ex mit professor who had gotten "cancelled" at that campus. the article quotes the james madison program lol. earlier this week my bf asked me how many siblings my parents had and i mentioned how both of them had siblings who passed away young, probably bc of poverty/famine/the great leap forward. i'm not really sure. my mom really hates mao zedong and when i wore an ironic marxism hat in college (which after reading about kang's coveting of UWS literati status, i realize was bc i wanted to be like those edgy nass girls w/ the confidence of their ivy league-educated parents to identify as "leftists" (while at the same time being hyper identitarian + resentful of "white privilege," envy and resentment are the same!)). she also hates chesa boudin and once sent me a lecture by a white supremacist claiming that asians have higher IQs
i've seen dunks on this book for being like, "we should talk about the asian working class!" while continuing to focus on upwardly mobile post-hart cellar chinese/korean immigrants + their children but i think that critique misses the point. this book is a class analysis of that group of asians. it's not pure representation, like crazy rich asians or smth (or what guilty east asians gesture at when they talk about "centering" other perspectives). it's critical and advocates for emancipatory movement-building while acknowledging how messy and difficult that is (the i hotel chapter was so interesting and it's crazy that the people's temple was involved?? like the ratio of academics historicizing this event to ppl who would know about/participate in smth similar today is so wildly off?? i also saw the BLM chapter as contributing to this thesis), articulating the roadblock as not guilty "indebtedness" (per cathy park hong in minor feelings), a very white liberal feeling, but resentment. korean war vets during the LA riots, MRAzns, and my mom resent liberals for defaulting to social justice platitudes instead of confronting how asian americans represent a bunch of contradictions to those maxims (e.g., men have it easy, testing is bad)
i think this is a really interesting + sharp contribution. i guess i'm knocking off a star so i don't seem like a total kang devotee (in fact i want to be a contrarian and degenerate... like kang) and also bc i read cat zhang's goodreads review and i agree w how the argument and terms could be a bit muddied at times. probably the overall framework should've been, here are these groups of asians who are shifting rightward, w/ chapters on origins of asian american movement vs. now, testing, MRAzns, etc. but i guess that would have diluted the memoir part of this book which i really liked and just found personally resonant too. my dad is also a biotech engineer/entrepreneur?? i think saying things like "asian america doesn't exist" or "asians are becoming white" is more provocative than useful when kang is usually very good about precision, saying east asian when you mean east asian and hmong when you mean hmong and rich when you mean rich, etc. i also think "asian american" as a concept is probably not going away any time soon, at the same time "capitalism" and critiques of it are being popular/memeified so maybe with that we do have the vocabulary to distinguish from when "asian american" is used to sell books vs. to try to get ppl interested in things that don't directly affect themselves. i'll probably have more thoughts to add to this later. in the meantime i'm going to tweet this review in hope that someone NOTICES
i finished this book an hour ago, just as my mom sent my brother and me a triumphant text about princeton, where we siblings both graduated, hiring an ex mit professor who had gotten "cancelled" at that campus. the article quotes the james madison program lol. earlier this week my bf asked me how many siblings my parents had and i mentioned how both of them had siblings who passed away young, probably bc of poverty/famine/the great leap forward. i'm not really sure. my mom really hates mao zedong and when i wore an ironic marxism hat in college (which after reading about kang's coveting of UWS literati status, i realize was bc i wanted to be like those edgy nass girls w/ the confidence of their ivy league-educated parents to identify as "leftists" (while at the same time being hyper identitarian + resentful of "white privilege," envy and resentment are the same!)). she also hates chesa boudin and once sent me a lecture by a white supremacist claiming that asians have higher IQs
i've seen dunks on this book for being like, "we should talk about the asian working class!" while continuing to focus on upwardly mobile post-hart cellar chinese/korean immigrants + their children but i think that critique misses the point. this book is a class analysis of that group of asians. it's not pure representation, like crazy rich asians or smth (or what guilty east asians gesture at when they talk about "centering" other perspectives). it's critical and advocates for emancipatory movement-building while acknowledging how messy and difficult that is (the i hotel chapter was so interesting and it's crazy that the people's temple was involved?? like the ratio of academics historicizing this event to ppl who would know about/participate in smth similar today is so wildly off?? i also saw the BLM chapter as contributing to this thesis), articulating the roadblock as not guilty "indebtedness" (per cathy park hong in minor feelings), a very white liberal feeling, but resentment. korean war vets during the LA riots, MRAzns, and my mom resent liberals for defaulting to social justice platitudes instead of confronting how asian americans represent a bunch of contradictions to those maxims (e.g., men have it easy, testing is bad)
i think this is a really interesting + sharp contribution. i guess i'm knocking off a star so i don't seem like a total kang devotee (in fact i want to be a contrarian and degenerate... like kang) and also bc i read cat zhang's goodreads review and i agree w how the argument and terms could be a bit muddied at times. probably the overall framework should've been, here are these groups of asians who are shifting rightward, w/ chapters on origins of asian american movement vs. now, testing, MRAzns, etc. but i guess that would have diluted the memoir part of this book which i really liked and just found personally resonant too. my dad is also a biotech engineer/entrepreneur?? i think saying things like "asian america doesn't exist" or "asians are becoming white" is more provocative than useful when kang is usually very good about precision, saying east asian when you mean east asian and hmong when you mean hmong and rich when you mean rich, etc. i also think "asian american" as a concept is probably not going away any time soon, at the same time "capitalism" and critiques of it are being popular/memeified so maybe with that we do have the vocabulary to distinguish from when "asian american" is used to sell books vs. to try to get ppl interested in things that don't directly affect themselves. i'll probably have more thoughts to add to this later. in the meantime i'm going to tweet this review in hope that someone NOTICES
November 23, 2021
I was intrigued by the fiery reception to the book's launch, in which JCK somehow managed to draw the ire of both Ellen Pao and Reddit MRAzns alike. Upon reading, I found the Loneliest Americans to be far from the self-hating, dirtbag polemic it was made out to be by blue check professional Asian Americans who swore they would never read the book.
The Loneliest Americans instead reads as an earnest memoir of Jay's political formation and career as a journalist, crossed with incisive (though often sweeping) observations on the state of "Asian America" and a tribute in memoriam of his mentor, Noel Ignatiev (How the Irish Became White). Jay's diagnosis of a complex, incoherent Asian America benefits from his on-the-ground reporting, impressively thorough research, and his ability to connect with and portray with sympathy a glimpse of his subjects' lived experiences.
Kang has been doing his "Asian American political identity doesn't actually exist" bit for a while, and this book is his most lengthy articulation of why. By now, I don't think it's that groundbreaking to suggest that Asian America is a wide umbrella that in its watered-down lack of specificity offers dubious political meaning (ethnic studies discourse level zero). At the same time, his distinction between the generation of the sixties, situated in their specific political context that doesn't quite exist anymore, and the subsequent Hart-Cellar generation is an important clarification. Jay seems to be writing against the specific class of Asian American academics and Twitterverse pundits who possessively cling to the mythical Camelot version of 1960s Asian American organizing. I found most insightful how he troubles the notion of a unified political front even in those storied movements of the late sixties, highlighting the tensions that rose within, for example, the I-Hotel resistance characteristic of petty leftist infighting and oneupmanship. We are taught how Asian American identity formed out of political necessity, but even that coalition was tenuous from the beginning.
JCK's conclusion that Asian Americans must ground our politics in organizing with the Asian immigrant working and middle class is important, albeit an easy one. It felt like an abrupt close formed in contrast to the exclusively upwardly mobile second generation folks he interviewed throughout the book. I wish he had featured folks such as Nepalese immigrant caregivers in Elmhurst, Fujianese families in Sunset Park with kids on free lunch studying for the SHSAT, or mainland Chinese immigrants taking to WeChat over concerns of rising crime in their underserved neighborhoods. Jay's forewarning that an Asian working class left behind by shallow liberal politics will turn reactionary is a prescient one that I also wish he had covered further beyond the MRAzn chapter.
The Loneliest Americans makes for a great companion read to Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings. The authors' Twitter spats with each other aside, both works share a similar memoir-criticism structure and degree of neuroses, with JCK appearing to specifically inveigh against many of Minor Feelings' shortcomings.
The Loneliest Americans instead reads as an earnest memoir of Jay's political formation and career as a journalist, crossed with incisive (though often sweeping) observations on the state of "Asian America" and a tribute in memoriam of his mentor, Noel Ignatiev (How the Irish Became White). Jay's diagnosis of a complex, incoherent Asian America benefits from his on-the-ground reporting, impressively thorough research, and his ability to connect with and portray with sympathy a glimpse of his subjects' lived experiences.
Kang has been doing his "Asian American political identity doesn't actually exist" bit for a while, and this book is his most lengthy articulation of why. By now, I don't think it's that groundbreaking to suggest that Asian America is a wide umbrella that in its watered-down lack of specificity offers dubious political meaning (ethnic studies discourse level zero). At the same time, his distinction between the generation of the sixties, situated in their specific political context that doesn't quite exist anymore, and the subsequent Hart-Cellar generation is an important clarification. Jay seems to be writing against the specific class of Asian American academics and Twitterverse pundits who possessively cling to the mythical Camelot version of 1960s Asian American organizing. I found most insightful how he troubles the notion of a unified political front even in those storied movements of the late sixties, highlighting the tensions that rose within, for example, the I-Hotel resistance characteristic of petty leftist infighting and oneupmanship. We are taught how Asian American identity formed out of political necessity, but even that coalition was tenuous from the beginning.
JCK's conclusion that Asian Americans must ground our politics in organizing with the Asian immigrant working and middle class is important, albeit an easy one. It felt like an abrupt close formed in contrast to the exclusively upwardly mobile second generation folks he interviewed throughout the book. I wish he had featured folks such as Nepalese immigrant caregivers in Elmhurst, Fujianese families in Sunset Park with kids on free lunch studying for the SHSAT, or mainland Chinese immigrants taking to WeChat over concerns of rising crime in their underserved neighborhoods. Jay's forewarning that an Asian working class left behind by shallow liberal politics will turn reactionary is a prescient one that I also wish he had covered further beyond the MRAzn chapter.
The Loneliest Americans makes for a great companion read to Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings. The authors' Twitter spats with each other aside, both works share a similar memoir-criticism structure and degree of neuroses, with JCK appearing to specifically inveigh against many of Minor Feelings' shortcomings.
January 7, 2022
I didn’t read too much of Kang’s work until his NYT magazine piece on Steven Yeun from earlier this year. His writing is sharp and thought-provoking, and in many ways, makes you feel a bit uncomfortable.
The Loneliest Americans examines the historical and political identity of being Asian American. What does this actually mean especially in a Black and white country? The book uses the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 as a central way to explore the history of recent Asian immigration to the US. There’s a part where he addresses the lack of shared history among Asian Americans and how there really isn’t that much that is unifying us other than possibly how we look and how we were treated. Kang challenges a lot of worn-out narratives on this and it might upset you, even when it’s informative.
His honesty isn’t there to serve you or make you feel good. Instead, it’ll disrupt the comforts and tropes we hold on to.
And I think this is what a book should do - interrogate what we believe, challenge us to question what we determine is true and maybe reframe the way we see the world in order to move forward.
The Loneliest Americans examines the historical and political identity of being Asian American. What does this actually mean especially in a Black and white country? The book uses the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 as a central way to explore the history of recent Asian immigration to the US. There’s a part where he addresses the lack of shared history among Asian Americans and how there really isn’t that much that is unifying us other than possibly how we look and how we were treated. Kang challenges a lot of worn-out narratives on this and it might upset you, even when it’s informative.
His honesty isn’t there to serve you or make you feel good. Instead, it’ll disrupt the comforts and tropes we hold on to.
And I think this is what a book should do - interrogate what we believe, challenge us to question what we determine is true and maybe reframe the way we see the world in order to move forward.
January 29, 2022
A more coherent examination of the notion of Asian-American, coalescing the various thoughts he's poked and prodded at in numerous articles and in his ongoing conversation with his No Time To Say Goodbye podcast co-hosts Tammy Kim and Andy Liu.
King pushes against the notion of Asian-American, a term that perhaps matters only to affluent, educated, second-generation professionals who are becoming as white as whites will allow while still brandishing their POC status. But the term barely manages to contain the multitudes of cultures and countries, and breaks down across class lines, irrelevant to the refugees, the undocumented and the working class.
The chapters are all over the place, more like individual articles than a real cohesive whole. It's an exorcism of sorts for Kang who seems to want to shake off all the nagging thoughts he's had around Asian-American identity. At the same time it can read like a "Not Like Other Asians" justification. Kang is constantly setting himself apart, the author at a cool remove from those he's talking about. He's the lonely American sitting on his own instead of engaging with the other Asians sitting together at the lunch table. Still, his podcast is well worth a listen where you'll find his more misanthropic tendencies are better mitigated by his co-hosts.
King pushes against the notion of Asian-American, a term that perhaps matters only to affluent, educated, second-generation professionals who are becoming as white as whites will allow while still brandishing their POC status. But the term barely manages to contain the multitudes of cultures and countries, and breaks down across class lines, irrelevant to the refugees, the undocumented and the working class.
The chapters are all over the place, more like individual articles than a real cohesive whole. It's an exorcism of sorts for Kang who seems to want to shake off all the nagging thoughts he's had around Asian-American identity. At the same time it can read like a "Not Like Other Asians" justification. Kang is constantly setting himself apart, the author at a cool remove from those he's talking about. He's the lonely American sitting on his own instead of engaging with the other Asians sitting together at the lunch table. Still, his podcast is well worth a listen where you'll find his more misanthropic tendencies are better mitigated by his co-hosts.
October 14, 2021
I finished this in more or less a day. So that probably indicates something about my enjoyment level, or maybe just that it's a pretty quick read.
Regardless, I'm very familiar with JCK's political thinking and writing over the last year plus, since I listen to TTSG and read a lot of his writing. So there wasn't a ton in here that I found specifically new. He's been doing this Asian America as a political identity doesn't exist bit for a while now, and I mostly agree. That said, I think the first third to half of the book is by far the best articulation of this premise and interweaving his own narrative. I also think within the context of his criticism, it's hard to dispute.
As he transitions into the current era of politics and what to do about all this, which makes up about half of the book, I think the book becomes more meditation than conscription (probably not the right word here but I don't care). He wades through participating in Black Lives Matter protests, MRAZN's, his relationship with white music, and comparing how his daughter will process the world versus himself; all within the framework of Asian Americans not fitting within the American racial binary and the implications of that. At the moment, this part has me less effusive in praise, but I think that's maybe a good thing. I don't concretely know how I feel about his writing here, but I also get the vibe that he isn't fully settled either. I need time to fully process this, but some general thoughts I had as I read.
-I agree, we (the upwardly mobile AA's) should be class traitors and have more vested interest in the working class and lower income people. However, I'm not entirely convinced that the vested voting and political interests of these two groups are that different. Both care a lot about education, healthcare, and tending a path of class mobility forward for their children. You could probably throw in safety too. The tendency to vote in tax/economic interests as they ascend in class is true regardless of race/gender/categorization. So if this is true, where is it that upwardly mobile AA's are falling to account for their working class and poor are neglecting with their voting politic. Is it by mostly being libs who vote for the Democrat establishment? If so, sure I agree it would be nice to see a more progressive (or preferably radical) bend to richer people, but I feel that way about basically everyone in this country independent of race. Perhaps, this book is one path for Asian Americans to rebuild a politic and be more progressive/radical through an identity lens, as opposed to the typical DEI seminar + class exclusion lens that liberals have bastardized identity politics into. Now that I've word rambled + meditated through that thought, this falls entirely in line with the politics he portrays and I approve. Maybe I revoke a bit of the initial criticism from above, but I already typed it out so I'm not deleting it.
-I think a lot of abstraction about the upwardly mobile class caring a lot about Hollywood representation and management positions aren't their real motivating political factors. I agree that it's annoying and utterly pointless, but I don't really believe that people make political decisions based on Crazy Rich Asians. Perhaps I'm stretching a point, but part of the haranguing of rich AA's, in this book and other work, is centered around effectively telling people representation, especially Hollywood rep, is superfluous and bad to organize around. I don't believe people actually organize around this or let it meaningfully influence their political activity. I think people are just annoying on twitter and a lot of bad stories/op-eds get published by lazy media.
-The Epilogue is beautiful. I was pretty thoroughly "in my feelings," as he meditated on his daughter's potential experiences and interaction with this future world.
I'm tired of typing for now. But overall, as I process this more I think this book is really brilliant. I don't know that it's any sort of totally prescriptive perfect manifesto that will last in perpetuity, but who cares really, it's great and thoughtful. I think this functions as an interesting sequel/partner reading to Minor Feelings. (To be clear, I do not see these two books in any real opposition. I see these as two very interesting and different meditations that I draw from.)
Regardless, I'm very familiar with JCK's political thinking and writing over the last year plus, since I listen to TTSG and read a lot of his writing. So there wasn't a ton in here that I found specifically new. He's been doing this Asian America as a political identity doesn't exist bit for a while now, and I mostly agree. That said, I think the first third to half of the book is by far the best articulation of this premise and interweaving his own narrative. I also think within the context of his criticism, it's hard to dispute.
As he transitions into the current era of politics and what to do about all this, which makes up about half of the book, I think the book becomes more meditation than conscription (probably not the right word here but I don't care). He wades through participating in Black Lives Matter protests, MRAZN's, his relationship with white music, and comparing how his daughter will process the world versus himself; all within the framework of Asian Americans not fitting within the American racial binary and the implications of that. At the moment, this part has me less effusive in praise, but I think that's maybe a good thing. I don't concretely know how I feel about his writing here, but I also get the vibe that he isn't fully settled either. I need time to fully process this, but some general thoughts I had as I read.
-I agree, we (the upwardly mobile AA's) should be class traitors and have more vested interest in the working class and lower income people. However, I'm not entirely convinced that the vested voting and political interests of these two groups are that different. Both care a lot about education, healthcare, and tending a path of class mobility forward for their children. You could probably throw in safety too. The tendency to vote in tax/economic interests as they ascend in class is true regardless of race/gender/categorization. So if this is true, where is it that upwardly mobile AA's are falling to account for their working class and poor are neglecting with their voting politic. Is it by mostly being libs who vote for the Democrat establishment? If so, sure I agree it would be nice to see a more progressive (or preferably radical) bend to richer people, but I feel that way about basically everyone in this country independent of race. Perhaps, this book is one path for Asian Americans to rebuild a politic and be more progressive/radical through an identity lens, as opposed to the typical DEI seminar + class exclusion lens that liberals have bastardized identity politics into. Now that I've word rambled + meditated through that thought, this falls entirely in line with the politics he portrays and I approve. Maybe I revoke a bit of the initial criticism from above, but I already typed it out so I'm not deleting it.
-I think a lot of abstraction about the upwardly mobile class caring a lot about Hollywood representation and management positions aren't their real motivating political factors. I agree that it's annoying and utterly pointless, but I don't really believe that people make political decisions based on Crazy Rich Asians. Perhaps I'm stretching a point, but part of the haranguing of rich AA's, in this book and other work, is centered around effectively telling people representation, especially Hollywood rep, is superfluous and bad to organize around. I don't believe people actually organize around this or let it meaningfully influence their political activity. I think people are just annoying on twitter and a lot of bad stories/op-eds get published by lazy media.
-The Epilogue is beautiful. I was pretty thoroughly "in my feelings," as he meditated on his daughter's potential experiences and interaction with this future world.
I'm tired of typing for now. But overall, as I process this more I think this book is really brilliant. I don't know that it's any sort of totally prescriptive perfect manifesto that will last in perpetuity, but who cares really, it's great and thoughtful. I think this functions as an interesting sequel/partner reading to Minor Feelings. (To be clear, I do not see these two books in any real opposition. I see these as two very interesting and different meditations that I draw from.)
December 25, 2023
Very easy to read, I never got bored. (what some call "MFA writing")
I was drawn in by the title, The Loneliest Americans. I was curious if the book would evoke a peculiar loneliness of Asian America. Not quite. Rather, Jay Caspian Kang avoids sentimentality. He begins with his personal history, interspersed with stories from Asian America post-1965. In these early chapters, Kang avoids being prescriptive. His main aim seems to be poking holes in the collective “Asian American” identity. Reading these sections, I wasn’t picking up on any strong conclusions and midway through the book began asking myself, What is he trying to say? What is he even talking about?
Enter, Chapter Six: "What Are We Talking About?" Kang describes his experience reporting on the Philando Castile protests in Minnesota. Commenting on protest movements and their relationship to media, he also critiques Asian American "wokeness." He points to online responses following the massacres at Asian-owned massage parlors in Georgia. Here, he makes some of his most polemic statements. Speaking to upwardly mobile Asian Americans, he argues, "I know that so many of our problems would be solved if we stopped mewling about identity and simply took the time to show up." Restated in the Epilogue:
What ultimately endeared me to this book was the Epilogue, maybe most personal and earnest, when he writes about his late mentor and shifts between the amorphous anxieties over belonging and identity to the very real anxieties of a parent.
I was drawn in by the title, The Loneliest Americans. I was curious if the book would evoke a peculiar loneliness of Asian America. Not quite. Rather, Jay Caspian Kang avoids sentimentality. He begins with his personal history, interspersed with stories from Asian America post-1965. In these early chapters, Kang avoids being prescriptive. His main aim seems to be poking holes in the collective “Asian American” identity. Reading these sections, I wasn’t picking up on any strong conclusions and midway through the book began asking myself, What is he trying to say? What is he even talking about?
Enter, Chapter Six: "What Are We Talking About?" Kang describes his experience reporting on the Philando Castile protests in Minnesota. Commenting on protest movements and their relationship to media, he also critiques Asian American "wokeness." He points to online responses following the massacres at Asian-owned massage parlors in Georgia. Here, he makes some of his most polemic statements. Speaking to upwardly mobile Asian Americans, he argues, "I know that so many of our problems would be solved if we stopped mewling about identity and simply took the time to show up." Restated in the Epilogue:
To find a meaningful place in politics...upwardly mobile Asian Americans must drop our neuroses about microaggressions and the bamboo ceiling, and fully align ourselves with the forgotten Asian America: the refugees, the undocumented, and the working class.I enjoy Jay Caspian Kang's honesty. I thought it was funny how sometimes he doesn't even commit to his own conclusions ("The personal should be preserved as the personal, I guess.") Despite his abrasive tone, this book is a sincere exploration of belonging and identity (his own admitted neuroses)—and whether such a search can ever lead to politically meaningful action.
What ultimately endeared me to this book was the Epilogue, maybe most personal and earnest, when he writes about his late mentor and shifts between the amorphous anxieties over belonging and identity to the very real anxieties of a parent.
October 3, 2021
So I read this book expecting to learn more about what Asian Americans go through in America. Jay Caspian Kang provided much more insight into the racism and sense of belonging Asians deal with on a daily basis. But he did not write these problems in a way many would expect. Kang is a cynical person and there are a lot of things he doesn't abide within his own community and the country as a whole. He looks for answers and challenges the ones he receives, as we all should. And he doesn't just look to people who think like him. He talks to people many of us would avoid like the plague and does it without the silliness of wanting to hear "both sides."
Kang looks to his own family as source material for the book, from his parents' immigration to America and his own childhood growing up in predominantly white spaces. He admits his own attitudes towards other minority groups, especially Black people, which I did not find surprising knowing where he grew up. But he also gives readers a mini history lesson about Asian/Black relations, which has been contentious since I can remember. It always confused me why Asians would open shops in Black neighborhoods and then treat us like we're the intruders. I rarely frequented those places because I don't spend money where I'm treated poorly. But I appreciated Kang's perspective on this because I truly think that should these two communities join forces, this country would change dramatically. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I think this book is definitely one that should be read. Keep your mind open to what is written because it will make you think about a subject that you may not have thought or even cared about. But you should if things are ever going to change. We need to understand each other before we can move forward.
Kang looks to his own family as source material for the book, from his parents' immigration to America and his own childhood growing up in predominantly white spaces. He admits his own attitudes towards other minority groups, especially Black people, which I did not find surprising knowing where he grew up. But he also gives readers a mini history lesson about Asian/Black relations, which has been contentious since I can remember. It always confused me why Asians would open shops in Black neighborhoods and then treat us like we're the intruders. I rarely frequented those places because I don't spend money where I'm treated poorly. But I appreciated Kang's perspective on this because I truly think that should these two communities join forces, this country would change dramatically. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I think this book is definitely one that should be read. Keep your mind open to what is written because it will make you think about a subject that you may not have thought or even cared about. But you should if things are ever going to change. We need to understand each other before we can move forward.
October 22, 2021
4.5 stars. This is a thought provoking collection of essays and appreciated this perspective of what it means to be Korean American/Korean living in America, Asian American and the complexity of this through a historical lens.
October 14, 2021
Author Jay Caspian Kang sums up this very informative book with this line; "This book is about that desperate need to find oneself within the narrative of a country that would rather write you out of it." Even though Asian Americans, a much broader term than I ever realized before reading this book, face discrimination like all other minority groups living in the United States, their experiences are often ignored or labeled as trivial compared to other more obvious forms of racism, such as police shootings of unarmed black people or the detention of Latino children in cages. Though Asian Americans may experience racism in different ways than other peoples of color, they still experience the effects of white supremacy and are not viewed, and do not view themselves, as white. "There are still only two races in America; Black and white. Everyone else is part of a demographic group headed in one direction or the other." It is downright impossible to find an identity in a country that insists upon such a racial binary.
As a liberal middle-class white woman, I learned a lot from this book. Taking an honest look at myself, I realized that I am one of those liberals whose good intentions do not always extend to Asian Americans as they do other peoples of color. Just because all of the Asian Americans in my social circle are succeeding well financially, this does not mean that they do not experience racism. Going forward, I am going to do a better job at recognizing the very real issues Asian Americans face in this country, as well as how past policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese detention camps, and the wars in Vietnam and Korea still influence the present.
Many thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advanced digital copy of this eye-opening book in exchange for my honest review.
As a liberal middle-class white woman, I learned a lot from this book. Taking an honest look at myself, I realized that I am one of those liberals whose good intentions do not always extend to Asian Americans as they do other peoples of color. Just because all of the Asian Americans in my social circle are succeeding well financially, this does not mean that they do not experience racism. Going forward, I am going to do a better job at recognizing the very real issues Asian Americans face in this country, as well as how past policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese detention camps, and the wars in Vietnam and Korea still influence the present.
Many thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advanced digital copy of this eye-opening book in exchange for my honest review.
June 24, 2025
I enjoyed this book in two ways: 1, it mirrored much of my own immigrant journey to the US from Korea, and 2, it resonated with my own continuous exploration into what it means to be Korean-American (a term I don’t love because it’s only relevant in the US versus the rest of the Americas), whether we should have acclimated versus assimilated, if we identify more as White or other, and what place we have in social justice. It gave me a nice parallel reflection for how I got to where I am in my personal conclusions, starting with the “ew” and “why?????” gut reaction I had at age seven when another Korean girl said she wished her hair could be as blonde as Barbie’s, to the first speeding ticket I got in Boston where there was no box for Asian and by default, I was marked as White, to where I now stand with BLM, Pride, and other civil rights activism and/or allyship/advocacy.
I also learned a lot, and I was grateful to learn it - a key measurement for how much I value a book. I had no idea there were Reddit groups for Asian men to sound off in, for example. Furthermore, the book challenged me to rethink a lot of my positions on race, gave me more historical context to something I’ve only ever understood from a very limited perspective (Black and Asian enmity in LA), what the real Asian identity is in the US, and why it is so often mistaken or assumed to be White assimilation, a word I’ve come to hate, because to me, assimilation means becoming acceptable to the majority power (White) on their terms alone.
We have so much to figure out as a nation, as an “other” among others and consisting of a huge diversity within our own “otherness.” I hope the author takes stock and publishes an updated book in 20/25 years. I’d be very interested in seeing how social politics will have evolved by then.
I also learned a lot, and I was grateful to learn it - a key measurement for how much I value a book. I had no idea there were Reddit groups for Asian men to sound off in, for example. Furthermore, the book challenged me to rethink a lot of my positions on race, gave me more historical context to something I’ve only ever understood from a very limited perspective (Black and Asian enmity in LA), what the real Asian identity is in the US, and why it is so often mistaken or assumed to be White assimilation, a word I’ve come to hate, because to me, assimilation means becoming acceptable to the majority power (White) on their terms alone.
We have so much to figure out as a nation, as an “other” among others and consisting of a huge diversity within our own “otherness.” I hope the author takes stock and publishes an updated book in 20/25 years. I’d be very interested in seeing how social politics will have evolved by then.
November 29, 2021
TLDR: A provocative, enjoyable exploration of Asian American identity, history and contemporary challenges within the crucible of American racial politics.
I really enjoyed this book, and read it quickly over a couple of days - much more quickly than my usual reading pace. This is because I’m the ideal audience for this book: a Chinese-Australian/American interested in questions of identity and belonging, and also because I have enjoyed Kang’s writing for years. It’s hard to disagree with his core argument: that “upwardly mobile Asian Americans must drop our neuroses about microagressions and the bamboo ceiling, and fully align ourselves with the forgotten Asian America: the refugees, the undocumented, and the working class.” However, I’m not sure if I agree with his rationale for why: “What we do now--the lonely climb up into the white liberal elite--might lead to personal comfort, but it will never make us full participants in this country, nor will it ever convince others to join in our fight.” This sounds good, but I’m not sure if it’s actually true.
Like other reviewers, I craved a deeper, more comprehensively argued case for class solidarity in Asian-American (‘AA’) identity politics. But ‘The Loneliest Americans’ is not that book. Kang is not interviewing privileged AAs who are working to improve the plight of marginalized Asians, or building inter-racial solidarity. There is no guide or recommended action steps for bougie AAs to build a more meaningful AA community. Kang is at his best as a provocateur and curmudgeon, pointing out the gaps and follies within the social groups he appears to be most familiar with: liberal white elites, and the bougie AAs who often ape them.
I found Kang’s dismantling of the term “Asian American” as a hollow, meaningless concept to be very convincing. During the spike in anti-Asian violence in 2020, I recall wondering how resonant a term as broad as “AAPI” (“Asian American Pacific Islander”)--as in the hashtag “Stop AAPI Hate”--could actually be. As a constructed political bloc, the big tent makes sense; as an actual community upon which to, say, calculate the racial diversity of an institution’s members, it is at best, better than nothing, at worst, actively harmful in its vagueness. This begs further questions, like: “If AA as a concept is meaningless, what should it be replaced with?” or even “What is the value of fixating on race and even identity at all?” Kang’s book asks important questions, points out obvious issues and problems, and then offers a lightly argued solution (racial class solidarity). I would have liked to see him dig deeper into such questions and provide more arguments for alternatives and solutions, but am grateful that he has provoked more critical discussion about these important issues.
Book Summary: The book is divided into eight chapters and an epilogue, and is a mix of personal memoir, history and reportage, including that based on Kang’s work as a reporter covering the BLM protests. Here is a summary of each chapter:
Chapter 1: ‘How We Got Here’: Tells the story of his family’s immigration from South Korea to the US, and a history of Asian immigration to the United States, particularly the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, which allowed tens of millions of new immigrants from Asia, southern and eastern Europe, and Africa. I appreciated the context regarding the arguments for and against expanding immigration at the time (a reminder of how far we’ve come in terms of the country’s racial politics), and the role of WW2, particularly the need to build solidarity with the Chinese as an ally against the Japanese. Kang also acknowledges that the nativists were “right about the coming hordes”: “In 1960, white immigrants from Europe and Canada made up roughly 84 percent of the immigrant population in the United States. East and South Asians were around 4 percent. Between 1980 and 1990, the majority of the millions of immigrants to the United States came from Latin America or Asia.”
2. ‘The Making of Asian America’: Provides a history of the AA political movement in Berkeley in the 1960s and 70s, including the I-Hotel solidarity campaign in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and distinguishes between these AA activists and the less explicitly political ‘Hart-Celler’ immigrants. A useful primer that, as with the previous chapter, succeeds in deepening and complicating the reader's understanding of history.
3. ‘How the Asians Became White’: Discusses Kang’s personal struggle with racial identity growing up in Chapel Hill, NC and as an undergrad at Bowdoin, a white liberal arts college, and his mentor Noel Ignatiev’s Marxist writings and labor organizing. As a former radical who didn’t read as rigorously as Kang, I enjoyed this chapter a lot.
4. ‘Koreatown’: Gives a detailed history of Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood, and Korean-Black conflict, particularly during the Rodney King riots. Fascinating and powerfully told.
Key quote: ‘Modern Asian American identity is built out of the assumption that because we aren’t white, we must be “people of color.” But this is all greatly complicated by class: the upwardly mobile Asian Americans hang in a suspended state outside the Black-white binary, while the millions of Asian working poor have been made entirely invisible, not just by white people but also by their professional brothers and sisters. Perhaps we, the children of Hart-Celler, are simply biding our time until someone tells us which side we’re on. For Richard Rhee and the men on top of California Market, the calculus was much simpler: America would never accept them as white. The questions of identity that would plague their children meant nothing to them. They weren’t Asian Americans or Korean Americans or “not Black,” but Korean people in America.’
5. ‘Flushing Rising’: As with the prior chapter, provides a detailed history of the Flushing neighborhood in Queens, including Taiwanese immigrant Tommy Huang’s enterprising efforts to convert it from a white middle-class ghost town into the bustling Taiwanese/Mainland Chinese area it has since become. Profiles Elite Academy’s Korean founders, a hagwon (Asian test prep centers), and related political controversy regarding admission of Asians to prestigious schools. As a white-washed suburban 2nd gen Chinese immigrant who enjoys visiting Flushing to eat, I really enjoyed learning about the history and distinctions between different New York Asian communities.
Key quote: ‘The reason Asian parents drill their kids in math and violin or piano is because they understand that those fields, where skill can be acquired through relentless practice, give their kids the best shot at overcoming racial barriers. Assimilated Asians don’t talk about this much because we don’t know how to discuss discrimination against us, in part because it feels so trivial when compared to police shootings, child detentions, and all the more pressing forms of racism, but also because it seems to contradict the progressive consensus that the system has been rigged to favor white people and, in the words of the CRJE, all those who “benefit from white supremacy.”’
6. ‘What Are We Talking About?’: Discusses the place of Asians within the white-black binary of American racial politics, drawn from Kang’s reporting for Vice on BLM movement and related protests, particularly the complex relationship between wokeness, white liberals and AAs. There are so many lines of argument around these issues, and Kang is wise to focus specifically on his/our group: bougie AAs and our fragile position adjacent to the white liberal establishment.
Key quote: 'The choice, for Asian Americans, is more binary than we might want to believe—there’s no space for a separate kind of wokeness. Either we protest for Peter Liang, the Chinese American police officer who killed Akai Gurley, or we protest for Gurley. And if we choose the latter, we can either approach these questions with the detachment of white liberals or submit ourselves to the messy, oftentimes absurd task of sorting out every type of new person into a hierarchy of privileges and oppression.’
7. ‘The Rage of the MRAZNs’: Discusses the men’s rights AA community, and controversies related to inter-racial sex and dating; profiles Doug Kim, a struggling, aspiring Korean-American actor, and Al, a leader of a toxic AA male Reddit community, r/AsianMasculinity. Articulates the limits of the bougie AA path, while refusing to present his own thoughts on the omnipresent ‘White Male Asian Female (WMAF)’ issue, which I found disappointing--perhaps Kang believed it would be difficult to present an impartial or constructive take (he is married to a Caucasian woman).
Key quote: ‘From the MRAZNs’ perspective, why would you trust those Asians who deny that Harvard is discriminating against Asian applicants, who tweet jokes about your small dick and your flat face, who seem almost embarrassed every time there’s a hate crime against your people? They will sell you out in a minute to maintain the illusion of the multicultural elite, and then they’ll go off and marry a white man and laugh in your face.’
8. ‘Bruce and Me’: Compares the author’s relationship with Bruce Springsteen’s music with that of white and black listeners, and considers his daughter’s future and racial identity. This chapter is short and I didn’t find it particularly insightful, and a pretty anticlimactic ending. But for…
Epilogue: Discusses the 2020 rise in anti-Asian violence, concludes family memoir and reiterates Kang’s core argument. A strong and moving close to the book.
I really enjoyed this book, and read it quickly over a couple of days - much more quickly than my usual reading pace. This is because I’m the ideal audience for this book: a Chinese-Australian/American interested in questions of identity and belonging, and also because I have enjoyed Kang’s writing for years. It’s hard to disagree with his core argument: that “upwardly mobile Asian Americans must drop our neuroses about microagressions and the bamboo ceiling, and fully align ourselves with the forgotten Asian America: the refugees, the undocumented, and the working class.” However, I’m not sure if I agree with his rationale for why: “What we do now--the lonely climb up into the white liberal elite--might lead to personal comfort, but it will never make us full participants in this country, nor will it ever convince others to join in our fight.” This sounds good, but I’m not sure if it’s actually true.
Like other reviewers, I craved a deeper, more comprehensively argued case for class solidarity in Asian-American (‘AA’) identity politics. But ‘The Loneliest Americans’ is not that book. Kang is not interviewing privileged AAs who are working to improve the plight of marginalized Asians, or building inter-racial solidarity. There is no guide or recommended action steps for bougie AAs to build a more meaningful AA community. Kang is at his best as a provocateur and curmudgeon, pointing out the gaps and follies within the social groups he appears to be most familiar with: liberal white elites, and the bougie AAs who often ape them.
I found Kang’s dismantling of the term “Asian American” as a hollow, meaningless concept to be very convincing. During the spike in anti-Asian violence in 2020, I recall wondering how resonant a term as broad as “AAPI” (“Asian American Pacific Islander”)--as in the hashtag “Stop AAPI Hate”--could actually be. As a constructed political bloc, the big tent makes sense; as an actual community upon which to, say, calculate the racial diversity of an institution’s members, it is at best, better than nothing, at worst, actively harmful in its vagueness. This begs further questions, like: “If AA as a concept is meaningless, what should it be replaced with?” or even “What is the value of fixating on race and even identity at all?” Kang’s book asks important questions, points out obvious issues and problems, and then offers a lightly argued solution (racial class solidarity). I would have liked to see him dig deeper into such questions and provide more arguments for alternatives and solutions, but am grateful that he has provoked more critical discussion about these important issues.
Book Summary: The book is divided into eight chapters and an epilogue, and is a mix of personal memoir, history and reportage, including that based on Kang’s work as a reporter covering the BLM protests. Here is a summary of each chapter:
Chapter 1: ‘How We Got Here’: Tells the story of his family’s immigration from South Korea to the US, and a history of Asian immigration to the United States, particularly the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, which allowed tens of millions of new immigrants from Asia, southern and eastern Europe, and Africa. I appreciated the context regarding the arguments for and against expanding immigration at the time (a reminder of how far we’ve come in terms of the country’s racial politics), and the role of WW2, particularly the need to build solidarity with the Chinese as an ally against the Japanese. Kang also acknowledges that the nativists were “right about the coming hordes”: “In 1960, white immigrants from Europe and Canada made up roughly 84 percent of the immigrant population in the United States. East and South Asians were around 4 percent. Between 1980 and 1990, the majority of the millions of immigrants to the United States came from Latin America or Asia.”
2. ‘The Making of Asian America’: Provides a history of the AA political movement in Berkeley in the 1960s and 70s, including the I-Hotel solidarity campaign in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and distinguishes between these AA activists and the less explicitly political ‘Hart-Celler’ immigrants. A useful primer that, as with the previous chapter, succeeds in deepening and complicating the reader's understanding of history.
3. ‘How the Asians Became White’: Discusses Kang’s personal struggle with racial identity growing up in Chapel Hill, NC and as an undergrad at Bowdoin, a white liberal arts college, and his mentor Noel Ignatiev’s Marxist writings and labor organizing. As a former radical who didn’t read as rigorously as Kang, I enjoyed this chapter a lot.
4. ‘Koreatown’: Gives a detailed history of Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood, and Korean-Black conflict, particularly during the Rodney King riots. Fascinating and powerfully told.
Key quote: ‘Modern Asian American identity is built out of the assumption that because we aren’t white, we must be “people of color.” But this is all greatly complicated by class: the upwardly mobile Asian Americans hang in a suspended state outside the Black-white binary, while the millions of Asian working poor have been made entirely invisible, not just by white people but also by their professional brothers and sisters. Perhaps we, the children of Hart-Celler, are simply biding our time until someone tells us which side we’re on. For Richard Rhee and the men on top of California Market, the calculus was much simpler: America would never accept them as white. The questions of identity that would plague their children meant nothing to them. They weren’t Asian Americans or Korean Americans or “not Black,” but Korean people in America.’
5. ‘Flushing Rising’: As with the prior chapter, provides a detailed history of the Flushing neighborhood in Queens, including Taiwanese immigrant Tommy Huang’s enterprising efforts to convert it from a white middle-class ghost town into the bustling Taiwanese/Mainland Chinese area it has since become. Profiles Elite Academy’s Korean founders, a hagwon (Asian test prep centers), and related political controversy regarding admission of Asians to prestigious schools. As a white-washed suburban 2nd gen Chinese immigrant who enjoys visiting Flushing to eat, I really enjoyed learning about the history and distinctions between different New York Asian communities.
Key quote: ‘The reason Asian parents drill their kids in math and violin or piano is because they understand that those fields, where skill can be acquired through relentless practice, give their kids the best shot at overcoming racial barriers. Assimilated Asians don’t talk about this much because we don’t know how to discuss discrimination against us, in part because it feels so trivial when compared to police shootings, child detentions, and all the more pressing forms of racism, but also because it seems to contradict the progressive consensus that the system has been rigged to favor white people and, in the words of the CRJE, all those who “benefit from white supremacy.”’
6. ‘What Are We Talking About?’: Discusses the place of Asians within the white-black binary of American racial politics, drawn from Kang’s reporting for Vice on BLM movement and related protests, particularly the complex relationship between wokeness, white liberals and AAs. There are so many lines of argument around these issues, and Kang is wise to focus specifically on his/our group: bougie AAs and our fragile position adjacent to the white liberal establishment.
Key quote: 'The choice, for Asian Americans, is more binary than we might want to believe—there’s no space for a separate kind of wokeness. Either we protest for Peter Liang, the Chinese American police officer who killed Akai Gurley, or we protest for Gurley. And if we choose the latter, we can either approach these questions with the detachment of white liberals or submit ourselves to the messy, oftentimes absurd task of sorting out every type of new person into a hierarchy of privileges and oppression.’
7. ‘The Rage of the MRAZNs’: Discusses the men’s rights AA community, and controversies related to inter-racial sex and dating; profiles Doug Kim, a struggling, aspiring Korean-American actor, and Al, a leader of a toxic AA male Reddit community, r/AsianMasculinity. Articulates the limits of the bougie AA path, while refusing to present his own thoughts on the omnipresent ‘White Male Asian Female (WMAF)’ issue, which I found disappointing--perhaps Kang believed it would be difficult to present an impartial or constructive take (he is married to a Caucasian woman).
Key quote: ‘From the MRAZNs’ perspective, why would you trust those Asians who deny that Harvard is discriminating against Asian applicants, who tweet jokes about your small dick and your flat face, who seem almost embarrassed every time there’s a hate crime against your people? They will sell you out in a minute to maintain the illusion of the multicultural elite, and then they’ll go off and marry a white man and laugh in your face.’
8. ‘Bruce and Me’: Compares the author’s relationship with Bruce Springsteen’s music with that of white and black listeners, and considers his daughter’s future and racial identity. This chapter is short and I didn’t find it particularly insightful, and a pretty anticlimactic ending. But for…
Epilogue: Discusses the 2020 rise in anti-Asian violence, concludes family memoir and reiterates Kang’s core argument. A strong and moving close to the book.
April 10, 2022
You can accept that race in America is complex and nuanced; that different identities are important to different people at different times for different reasons; that unpublicized ethnic divisions in America are long-lasting, complex, and rooted in class and experience; that different groups have different heroes and histories that can be learned and celebrated by different peoples; that class is significant to the American experience and that the ways class is experienced and perceived color our experiences; and that we are all mostly trying to learn; or you can read this book and be vaguely angry about something while reflecting on the experiences of a large group of people through the experiences of the author's friends and family.
From Park Slope to Berkeley, Jay Caspian Kang sees Asian identity in complex ways that he finds to be uncohesive, and looks for commonality in the disparate experiences he gives a really good and helpful history of (thanks, Lyndon Johnson!) in the early part of the book. He says a lot of interesting things and asks profound questions, but he never gets anywhere. My perception of the audiobook that I didn't take notes on, is that Kang is ultimately frustrated because there is no answer to Asian identity. As a white Minnesotan, I was flummoxed that Jay Caspian Kang spent so much time puzzling over the Asian community's non-embrace of Tou Thao. Of course no one is embracing Tou Thao and his actions or lack thereof. The international Hmong diaspora and all Minnesotas are disappointed in Tou Thao and justifiably proud of Sunisa Lee, just like Somalis and all Minnesotans are disappointed in Mohamed Noor and proud of Ilhan Omar, and white people and all Minnesotans are furious with Derek Chauvin and proud of Michael Osterholm. We are allowed to choose our heroes.
Kang also questions why no there were no public protests after the Covid 19 attacks on elderly Asians. Dude. It's because all cultures universally agree that no one should run around beating up old people. When cops kill Black people, they are acting on behalf of the state while being paid in citizens' tax dollars. Protests are an attempt to hold the state accountable for its employees' violence. When dumb vigilantes beat up old people, the citizens, the police, the criminal system, and the government all agree that the vigilantes should be arrested for assault. That is why the outcry was confined to media and local safety patrols.
Kang reveres Noel Ignatiev's naive Marxism as much as his interesting interpretation of race. Kang is in awe of Ignatiev's working in the factories, and only moving to Harvard when the factories shut down, like the factories are the only places where labor ever happens (because Marx said they were.) Kang and his wandering youth, hanging out in California with Marxists from Wisconsin and whatever else he did back when youth of upper-middle class privilege could afford to wander, is comically pretentious. Spending times with other self-obsessed liberal arts kids who define themselves by ideology sounds cool in your twenties but you shouldn't boast about it in your forties. Contemporary groups of people: affluent Chinese kids, activists, white liberals, Asian kids who sit together at Berkeley, Kang is dismissive of.
There's a chapter on Asian mens' rights activists, which was, like all mens' rights activism, a terrifying kind of nonsense, but it's hard to gauge how big this phenomenon is from Kang's writing, just that it's easy to report on because all the history of the movement is on a few Reddit threads. Kang's only mention of K-pop is a man's Reddit comment that K-pop emasculates Asian men. Kang doesn't explore the insanely popular trans-racial, international K-pop genre that is sweeping the universe. If every kid who is attracted to dreamy boys in this up-and-coming generation is currently in love with one of the members of BTS, isn't that going to be good for Asian men of the future? Kang also ignores Simi Liu, maybe because he is Canadian.
Personal gripe, but I'm glad I didn't buy this for my best friend who is an adopted Korean before reading it because Kang possibly has no idea that the loneliest of the Loneliest Americans even exist, maybe because Kang lives on the coasts and apparently a preponderance of the parents who adopted Koreans were Midwestern and Scandinavian (thanks, Tobias Hubinette!). Kang mentions one kid he knew who was adopted by white people and "raised as their very own." He's completely missed the history of post-1930s American adoption, the Baby Scoop Era, and its outsourcing.
This book is more of an essay on Jay Caspian Kang than a comprehensive look at Asian America. It had some good parts and the chapters on Asian history in America were interesting, but this is not a book that needs to be read.
From Park Slope to Berkeley, Jay Caspian Kang sees Asian identity in complex ways that he finds to be uncohesive, and looks for commonality in the disparate experiences he gives a really good and helpful history of (thanks, Lyndon Johnson!) in the early part of the book. He says a lot of interesting things and asks profound questions, but he never gets anywhere. My perception of the audiobook that I didn't take notes on, is that Kang is ultimately frustrated because there is no answer to Asian identity. As a white Minnesotan, I was flummoxed that Jay Caspian Kang spent so much time puzzling over the Asian community's non-embrace of Tou Thao. Of course no one is embracing Tou Thao and his actions or lack thereof. The international Hmong diaspora and all Minnesotas are disappointed in Tou Thao and justifiably proud of Sunisa Lee, just like Somalis and all Minnesotans are disappointed in Mohamed Noor and proud of Ilhan Omar, and white people and all Minnesotans are furious with Derek Chauvin and proud of Michael Osterholm. We are allowed to choose our heroes.
Kang also questions why no there were no public protests after the Covid 19 attacks on elderly Asians. Dude. It's because all cultures universally agree that no one should run around beating up old people. When cops kill Black people, they are acting on behalf of the state while being paid in citizens' tax dollars. Protests are an attempt to hold the state accountable for its employees' violence. When dumb vigilantes beat up old people, the citizens, the police, the criminal system, and the government all agree that the vigilantes should be arrested for assault. That is why the outcry was confined to media and local safety patrols.
Kang reveres Noel Ignatiev's naive Marxism as much as his interesting interpretation of race. Kang is in awe of Ignatiev's working in the factories, and only moving to Harvard when the factories shut down, like the factories are the only places where labor ever happens (because Marx said they were.) Kang and his wandering youth, hanging out in California with Marxists from Wisconsin and whatever else he did back when youth of upper-middle class privilege could afford to wander, is comically pretentious. Spending times with other self-obsessed liberal arts kids who define themselves by ideology sounds cool in your twenties but you shouldn't boast about it in your forties. Contemporary groups of people: affluent Chinese kids, activists, white liberals, Asian kids who sit together at Berkeley, Kang is dismissive of.
There's a chapter on Asian mens' rights activists, which was, like all mens' rights activism, a terrifying kind of nonsense, but it's hard to gauge how big this phenomenon is from Kang's writing, just that it's easy to report on because all the history of the movement is on a few Reddit threads. Kang's only mention of K-pop is a man's Reddit comment that K-pop emasculates Asian men. Kang doesn't explore the insanely popular trans-racial, international K-pop genre that is sweeping the universe. If every kid who is attracted to dreamy boys in this up-and-coming generation is currently in love with one of the members of BTS, isn't that going to be good for Asian men of the future? Kang also ignores Simi Liu, maybe because he is Canadian.
Personal gripe, but I'm glad I didn't buy this for my best friend who is an adopted Korean before reading it because Kang possibly has no idea that the loneliest of the Loneliest Americans even exist, maybe because Kang lives on the coasts and apparently a preponderance of the parents who adopted Koreans were Midwestern and Scandinavian (thanks, Tobias Hubinette!). Kang mentions one kid he knew who was adopted by white people and "raised as their very own." He's completely missed the history of post-1930s American adoption, the Baby Scoop Era, and its outsourcing.
This book is more of an essay on Jay Caspian Kang than a comprehensive look at Asian America. It had some good parts and the chapters on Asian history in America were interesting, but this is not a book that needs to be read.
December 25, 2022
2.5/5*
December 27, 2021
Kang's main thesis is that Asian-Americans, especially the second-generation, upwardly mobile children of immigrants, should align themselves with working-class Asians and other minorities. He criticizes Asians that have assimilated into "whiteness" and care more about representational politics than working-class issues. At the same time, he admits that he has married a white woman from a wealthy background and laments that his mixed-race child looks too Asian to pass for white.
He spends 80% of the book discussing the issues of upper-middle class Chinese/Taiwanese and Korean immigrants while only discussing Filipinos in passing when he discusses the I-Hotel in San Francisco and the Japanese in reference to WWII internment camps. Other Asian ethnic groups are barely mentioned. He disingenuously separates the Chinese of Flushing into simply Chinese (the wealthy ones who own property) and Fujianese working-class laborers (who are also Chinese but he does not mention that). If Kang cares so much about working-class Asian-American issues, he should have spent more time writing about their issues rather than about Asian-American men angry that Asian-American women date white men in large percentages or how his various relatives are surgeons/graduates of Korean Harvard/own acres of property in Washington state.
Some choice quotes:
His description of Asian students at UC Berkeley:
"They, like all Berkeley students, wear lumpy Cal sweatshirts and mostly complain about schoolwork, but they also seem completely uninterested in making friends with people of other races or backgrounds. Their insularity always feels banal and unwarranted--if you're just going to speak English, dress like everyone else, and complain about schoolwork like every other Berkeley student, what exactly is the culture you've created?"
Kang makes so many unwarranted assumptions here. Just because you see a bunch of Asian kids sitting together does not mean they are uninterested in making friends with people of other races or backgrounds. This is basically asking "why are all the Asian kids sitting together in the cafeteria?" without examining any of the deeper issues.
On activists:
"I generally don't like activists, even when I admire their courage and support their convictions. They always feel a bit like the actors I have met--the ego warped from the demands of projecting yourself out into such wide spaces."
These are the people fighting for working-class people who Kang purports to advocate for yet he can not help but make backhanded compliments about.
He spends 80% of the book discussing the issues of upper-middle class Chinese/Taiwanese and Korean immigrants while only discussing Filipinos in passing when he discusses the I-Hotel in San Francisco and the Japanese in reference to WWII internment camps. Other Asian ethnic groups are barely mentioned. He disingenuously separates the Chinese of Flushing into simply Chinese (the wealthy ones who own property) and Fujianese working-class laborers (who are also Chinese but he does not mention that). If Kang cares so much about working-class Asian-American issues, he should have spent more time writing about their issues rather than about Asian-American men angry that Asian-American women date white men in large percentages or how his various relatives are surgeons/graduates of Korean Harvard/own acres of property in Washington state.
Some choice quotes:
His description of Asian students at UC Berkeley:
"They, like all Berkeley students, wear lumpy Cal sweatshirts and mostly complain about schoolwork, but they also seem completely uninterested in making friends with people of other races or backgrounds. Their insularity always feels banal and unwarranted--if you're just going to speak English, dress like everyone else, and complain about schoolwork like every other Berkeley student, what exactly is the culture you've created?"
Kang makes so many unwarranted assumptions here. Just because you see a bunch of Asian kids sitting together does not mean they are uninterested in making friends with people of other races or backgrounds. This is basically asking "why are all the Asian kids sitting together in the cafeteria?" without examining any of the deeper issues.
On activists:
"I generally don't like activists, even when I admire their courage and support their convictions. They always feel a bit like the actors I have met--the ego warped from the demands of projecting yourself out into such wide spaces."
These are the people fighting for working-class people who Kang purports to advocate for yet he can not help but make backhanded compliments about.
October 15, 2021
I am not sure what I was really expecting when I was asked to review this book, but ultimately, what I got was not it [and therefore makes it next to impossible to review as I was bored throughout most of this, along with my disappointment]. I was hoping for more insight in the Asian-American life and the history of Asian and their culture in the US, but what I got was history I already knew [there were a couple of points I didn't know, but it wasn't enough to wow me in regards to this being a stand out book because of that knowledge], and some insight into the authors life [which I a not sure was simply whining and not the searching he was aiming for] and how he has felt [sort of] about being Asian in America, but mostly, I got a lot of information on African American culture, the shootings and riots and marches that came out of those shootings and to be honest, that felt...weird. When you think you are going to be reading a book about Asian culture within the USA and you get something completely different, it then becomes really difficult to review said book. I am more confused and even less informed then I was going in, and I didn't enjoy the process getting there. Ultimately, this was not the book for me and I am sad over that - I was hoping for more and was disappointed in the result.
Thank you to NetGalley, Jay Caspian Kang and Crown Publishing for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you to NetGalley, Jay Caspian Kang and Crown Publishing for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
November 14, 2022
There is something about media that tries to sort through Asian identity that always feels a little pathetic, and while this book doesn't escape that trap, it's really gratifying that Kang points this out and takes a stab at understanding why that project always feels so unproductive. That's not to say I agree with most of the book-- there are lots of ideas that either come across as self-projection, too strident, or just half-baked--but I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 3 because I haven't been this provoked by a book in a really long time. I won't list out my grievances here, but I will say this isn't a satisfying book to read if you're looking for specific political suggestions or the description of a future of racial solidarity. Really worth reading if you're an Asian born into/ascending into liberal, professional-managerial class America. And then text me ur thoughts afterwards!!!!!
Also Bellevue gets mentioned in the first 10 pages and the last 10 pages for all my (206) and (425) heads ... .rock on
Also Bellevue gets mentioned in the first 10 pages and the last 10 pages for all my (206) and (425) heads ... .rock on
July 29, 2022
Jay Caspian Kang is an incredible writer, and I think my admiration might influence my rating here. I'm not 100% on board with the assertion that Asian Americans are the loneliest Americans but I also was surprised to hear that this book was so controversial. I felt that the arguments and conclusions were not very clear on the whole and that the book could have used more structure - seemed just like a collection of Asian American history melded with contemporary movements (BLM, COVID-era / Stop Asian Hate) without really making a point, but I enjoyed the identity exploration nonetheless.
Read
March 27, 2024filled with lots of neuroses, as he himself notes. I share in many, but not all, of them. I don’t find myself as anxious about it all (“who are we?? Are we white??”), but this *has* made me start a mental list of cities both in/out of the U.S. where I would feel morally okay raising my Asian children, bc I wouldn’t want their development of racial identity to be so contorted and confused.. and painful
May 12, 2024
- some command of history
-various ideas of race--to generalize, in America, there is Black, white, and other races are arrows that point towards one of these, very wealthy korean american centric viewpoint despite the radical ideas
- suffers from the pretentiousness and self-abasement of its author; did not get the sense that this person had believed in anything his whole life, yet still somehow instills strong annoyance in me the reader
- poses too many questions and if there were answers, i was too dumb to see any of them
- the characters and the 90's and random music were not as cool as he wanted them to seem
-various ideas of race--to generalize, in America, there is Black, white, and other races are arrows that point towards one of these, very wealthy korean american centric viewpoint despite the radical ideas
- suffers from the pretentiousness and self-abasement of its author; did not get the sense that this person had believed in anything his whole life, yet still somehow instills strong annoyance in me the reader
- poses too many questions and if there were answers, i was too dumb to see any of them
- the characters and the 90's and random music were not as cool as he wanted them to seem
October 21, 2021
Good for Thought
The author who’s Asian American whose parents are from Korea and whose wife is White, thinks about the place of Asian Americans in American society. In this essay, he looks at the past and ends with Asian Americans being accused of being Chinese and causing the coronavirus. Fear of being brutalized in the streets becomes real but he also knows that emigrating to Korea might be too difficult on his family too. Where do Asian Americans fit in when the county believes itself to be Black or White? Good read.
The author who’s Asian American whose parents are from Korea and whose wife is White, thinks about the place of Asian Americans in American society. In this essay, he looks at the past and ends with Asian Americans being accused of being Chinese and causing the coronavirus. Fear of being brutalized in the streets becomes real but he also knows that emigrating to Korea might be too difficult on his family too. Where do Asian Americans fit in when the county believes itself to be Black or White? Good read.
January 6, 2022
“To find a meaningful place in politics, one that doesn’t require us to lie about “white adjacency” or ignore the pain of everyone who looks like us, upwardly mobile Asian Americans must drop our neuroses about microaggressions and the bamboo ceiling, and fully align ourselves with the forgotten Asian America: the refugees, the undocumented, and the working class”
I always find Jay’s voice incredibly refreshing, especially as it comes to Asian-Am discourse. This book, a mix between a memoir & political exploration around identity, was an incredible read on how one gets politicized 🥺. Enjoyed it, although I got a bit lost when he takes about Springsteen and old pop culture references 🤣
I always find Jay’s voice incredibly refreshing, especially as it comes to Asian-Am discourse. This book, a mix between a memoir & political exploration around identity, was an incredible read on how one gets politicized 🥺. Enjoyed it, although I got a bit lost when he takes about Springsteen and old pop culture references 🤣
August 18, 2023
Wanted to know what the twitter beef w CPH was about; did not agree w most of his takes on asian-american identity
January 26, 2023
Kang makes many interesting points, but they are somewhat lost in the scattered feel of the book. He begins engaging topics and then fails to round them out, simply jumping to the next section. It lacks cohesion and leaves the reader wanting more.
December 13, 2021
2.5 //
I had higher hopes for this book than it met, to be quite honest. Kang is a pretty talented writer, and from reading his previous work, I thought that The Loneliest Americans was pretty replete with half-baked, lukewarm takes, as well as a lot of lacking in nuance. While I generally agree with some of the premises and points Kang makes, especially on the origins of Asian American identity and who clings to that identity today, I also think he makes some overly broad statements, tends to loop everyone into his own perspective on issues, and provides solutions that are not realistic. It's ok to have ideals, but I fall into the camp of having very little tolerance for people who speak with a microphone and don't have the personal experience or wherewithal to know what's purely idealistic and what's actually realistic.
In terms of style and prose, I think Kang did a fine job tracing the arc, but I also felt like there were a lot of unnecessary asides that detracted from whatever point he was trying to make. That, combined with his propensity to drop blanket statements with no further explanation or context and move on, made the reading a bit jarring and a bit convoluted. It read (as it may have been intended to read) like an overextended opinion piece masquerading as a generic column in the New York Times, which is fine for some audiences but certainly imbued with some literary, contextual, and dialectic fallacies that don't get addressed properly.
Overall, I think there was a lot of potential in this book, and there were some gems and pieces of the book that were informative, but overall I found myself either writing in question marks out of confusion about a statement or disagreeing with Kang's conclusions despite agreeing with his premises. That is, of course, a function of my own biases and opinions, and in some fashion it's healthy to have the variation in perspectives, but I don't quite see how this book helps advance any goals or narratives, or what the objective of writing this book was to begin with.
I had higher hopes for this book than it met, to be quite honest. Kang is a pretty talented writer, and from reading his previous work, I thought that The Loneliest Americans was pretty replete with half-baked, lukewarm takes, as well as a lot of lacking in nuance. While I generally agree with some of the premises and points Kang makes, especially on the origins of Asian American identity and who clings to that identity today, I also think he makes some overly broad statements, tends to loop everyone into his own perspective on issues, and provides solutions that are not realistic. It's ok to have ideals, but I fall into the camp of having very little tolerance for people who speak with a microphone and don't have the personal experience or wherewithal to know what's purely idealistic and what's actually realistic.
In terms of style and prose, I think Kang did a fine job tracing the arc, but I also felt like there were a lot of unnecessary asides that detracted from whatever point he was trying to make. That, combined with his propensity to drop blanket statements with no further explanation or context and move on, made the reading a bit jarring and a bit convoluted. It read (as it may have been intended to read) like an overextended opinion piece masquerading as a generic column in the New York Times, which is fine for some audiences but certainly imbued with some literary, contextual, and dialectic fallacies that don't get addressed properly.
Overall, I think there was a lot of potential in this book, and there were some gems and pieces of the book that were informative, but overall I found myself either writing in question marks out of confusion about a statement or disagreeing with Kang's conclusions despite agreeing with his premises. That is, of course, a function of my own biases and opinions, and in some fashion it's healthy to have the variation in perspectives, but I don't quite see how this book helps advance any goals or narratives, or what the objective of writing this book was to begin with.
October 16, 2021
Jay Caspian Kang has written a superb book that upends the conventional wisdom on Asian Americans. Funny, sharp, and always insightful, THE LONELIEST AMERICANS challenges readers to reconsider their beliefs about race and class in the U.S.
March 1, 2022
my brother and i read this in a two-person book club, spending 1-2 hours on saturday mornings discussing the chapters we read. i’ll admit to being frustrated about how the essays all kept ending so elliptically, and i’d text my brother things like “jay remains elusive as ever!!!!”
but in an interview my brother sent me, kang says he didn’t want to write a manifesto but rather that he wanted to write about big issues and their histories, and the most honest way he could do that was if they were refracted through his personal experiences; that re-frame made me appreciate the book much more. kang is very earnest, and VERY honest, about his own shame and embarrassment and his opinions that wouldn’t pass muster on, like, a self-conscious platform like twitter where everyone’s afraid of saying the wrong thing. his honesty is the real strength of the book.
kang doesn’t have all the answers, and he brings us through his own uncertainties. and so his chapters are less arguments and more complications of narratives that we’re all familiar with, in turn complicated by how he doesn’t have it all figured out either. for “asian americans”* who are desperate to situate their identity somewhere, it can be uncomfortable to read at times—i kept asking, about my own identity, “if it’s not this, then what?” but i guess that’s the point! you just have to sit with the “then what?”
i rarely review but felt compelled to because this book made me think a lot and led me to truly interesting and meaningful discussions. that’s like the whole purpose of a book!!! there were parts i wasn’t fully convinced by and parts that needed to be fleshed out a lot more, but i must give a 5, because i am too pleased about how it’s achieved its purpose as a book. come on! how nice!!
* “asian americans” here being the very specific audience he has in mind (post hart-cellar act, upwardly mobile, east asian second-gen immigrants). also i think it’s ok for a book to have a very specific audience
but in an interview my brother sent me, kang says he didn’t want to write a manifesto but rather that he wanted to write about big issues and their histories, and the most honest way he could do that was if they were refracted through his personal experiences; that re-frame made me appreciate the book much more. kang is very earnest, and VERY honest, about his own shame and embarrassment and his opinions that wouldn’t pass muster on, like, a self-conscious platform like twitter where everyone’s afraid of saying the wrong thing. his honesty is the real strength of the book.
kang doesn’t have all the answers, and he brings us through his own uncertainties. and so his chapters are less arguments and more complications of narratives that we’re all familiar with, in turn complicated by how he doesn’t have it all figured out either. for “asian americans”* who are desperate to situate their identity somewhere, it can be uncomfortable to read at times—i kept asking, about my own identity, “if it’s not this, then what?” but i guess that’s the point! you just have to sit with the “then what?”
i rarely review but felt compelled to because this book made me think a lot and led me to truly interesting and meaningful discussions. that’s like the whole purpose of a book!!! there were parts i wasn’t fully convinced by and parts that needed to be fleshed out a lot more, but i must give a 5, because i am too pleased about how it’s achieved its purpose as a book. come on! how nice!!
* “asian americans” here being the very specific audience he has in mind (post hart-cellar act, upwardly mobile, east asian second-gen immigrants). also i think it’s ok for a book to have a very specific audience
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