InThe Loneliest Americans, Jay Caspian Kang tries but fails to restore meaning to an empty term.
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One of the first places Jay Caspian Kang takes us to inThe Loneliest Americansis Berkeley, California.
He hasnt lived there long.
So he walks around a bit.
He decides to check out the Berkeley campus, hit the food courts nearby.
Hes not impressed with the look of the school: stately but not especially beautiful.
But its where he notices … them.
What he sees of their world afflicts him.
In those moments, my thoughts about Asianness have always felt dispassionate, compulsory, and almost abstract.
Some will know him from his essay on hisgambling addiction.
Maybe you just saw his basketball tweets.
He can be a nuanced reporter and a stylish essayist.
He can also be annoying as hell.
Kang likes to make claims, and he likes to fight.
Like him or not, he is often right about the big stuff.
Especially the limits of Asian American.
Because the terms a bust.
It tries to mean so much that it means almost nothing.
Whatisthe Asian American vote?
Its a term that demands caveats to even be usable.
I wonder when well be ready to force the issue.
To stop saying Asian American when we mean something specific, to insist on a politics that works withoutalthoughs.
Kangs book suggests that he, for one, isnt ready to go there yet.
First, he offers a caveat.
(Here, theyre almost exclusively Chinese and Korean.)
So forget people who came before 65.
Forget refugees to the U.S. and their children, two groups he barely mentions.
Unfortunately, though, Kang cant get out of his own way.
The text is riddled with self-conscious tics and assertions that go nowhere.
Blackness is intractable, he writes.
Blackness, in Kangs telling, equals real coherence, real grievance.
Its a stamp of authenticity (and a monolith).
Whiteness, however, could happen to anybody if they just make enough money and stop caring.
But what does this mean, exactly, to be doomed to whiteness, no matter your politics?
The book is full of these hanging chads, observations on race and class only half punched through.
In doing that, he misses important context.
Unfair college admissions practices?
The scorn is strong in this book and not only directed outward.
In some of the most popular recent critical essays on Asian Americanness, self-hate emerges as a powerful through-line.
It infuses Wesley Yangs writing, half digested into misogyny, morbidly fascinating at best and disturbing at worst.
He professes to want to be a more tolerant, less self-hating person.
Those feelings are fertile ground.
But Kang who despite his impulse for memoir is determined to write a message book mostly brushes them aside.
Theres very little room for earnestness here, very little room to justbewithout elaborate justification.
Some of the politics here look a lot like hang-ups.
Perhaps thats why its a relief when the mask slips completely.
Kangs best chapter, The Rage of the MRAZNs, is also his most testosterone-poisoned.
(To them, Asian women who sleep with white men are enemy No.
We both smoked too much weed in high school and were unspectacular students.
We both wandered through various philosophies and tried out different selves before settling on a relatively unpleasant one.
Kangs writing is so much more fun when hes not just trying to score points.
He gets these guys on a visceral level; there but for the grace of God goes he.
I could see how neatly the details of our lives lined up, he writes of the MRAZNs.
Mine had just found another outlet namely wandering around America, tree-planting and reading poetry.
Whom do you hate the most?
Those questions echo louder than any other part of the book.
As for the rest, its not totally Kangs fault that the work doesnt succeed.
His ambition is huge, and the bar is low.
The field of Asian American identity writing is troubled.
But I think its more like an attempt to build on sand.
In story after story, back we go to the forever foreigner.
Back we go to the microaggressions and outrage over white-lady mah-jongg.
Class is too often an afterthought.
The next step is figuring out what to do about the people who arent.
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