try harder, asian-american artist

from tomie

asian-american art is a wasteland. the nauseatingly repetitive imagery (cut fruit, cram schools, overseas cousins, smelly lunches, etc.) and the crippling reliance on therapy-speak result in asian-americans being the most aesthetically inert and swaggerless elites in history. by far the wealthiest racial group in the u.s. (and therefore in history), asian-americans have largely chosen to play “the game”, and are massively statistically overrepresented in just about every elite institution in america (even skull and bones has become a minority affair). nevertheless, millennial asians expect to be apologized to for some reason, with the apologies to come from just about every direction: from our immigrant parents, from our white partners, from the dead white men whose literature we are supposedly in the process of supplanting.

i have witnessed firsthand many an asian ret-con their childhood to fit the clichés of asian-american art. sad! your immigrant parent is probably a weirdo and you probably havent put in sufficient effort into understanding them. i know my parents are weirdos: my mom grew up rich in a poor south korea, left the country because she hated korean men, was cut off by her parents, became a radio host in taiwan, then worked as a waitress in america while attending the university of minnesota, where she met my dad, whom she selected by social engineering her way into the u of m’s student database and sorting the single men by gpa; my dad grew up in bihar, and marched obediently through the appropriate institutions, up and through i.i.t., then landed a job as an engineering supervisor at a gujurati steel mill, but there he hated the food (gujus put sugar even in dal), and after about a month he became depressed and simply walked away without telling anyone, eventually to turn up at the university of minnesota where he was cornered by my mom. growing up, i was expected to do certain typical things (get good grades), but beyond that pretty thin baseline i was left to do whatever i wanted, so i spent most of my nyc teenager years playing punk music in the lower east side, williamsburg, and bed-stuy. a natural misfit and lazy bum, i looked up to guys like skater jerry hsu. as i failed upwards into increasingly prestigious institutions, i wondered why my asian and jewish peers complained so much about the expectations “imposed” on them. why didnt these losers realize they can just not do what they didn’t want to do? a close examination of asian-american art reveals the answer: they do want conventional success, but they want to be seen as both victim and master of the situation.

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let’s look at some recent asian-american art together. remember, as a rule: if it was made by an asian-american, it is junk (with certain notable exceptions, such as tony tulathimutte).

rupi kaur is always hysterical:

thrilling insight, genius

sometimes she gets called things like “the writer of the decade”, but for the most part critics agree that she’s terrible, so let’s move on.

ocean vuong’s “not even this”:

Hey.

I used to be a fag now I’m a checkbox.

The pen tip jabbed in my back, I feel the mark of progress.

I will not dance alone in the municipal graveyard at midnight, blasting sad
songs on my phone, for nothing.

I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was
indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in
a storm.

The way Lil Peep says I’ll be back in the mornin’  when you know how it ends.

The way I kept dancing when the song was over, because it freed me.

The way the streetlight blinks once, before waking up for its night shift, like
we do.

The way we look up and whisper sorry to each other, the boy and I, when
there’s teeth.

When there’s always teeth, on purpose.

When I threw myself into gravity and made it work. Ha.

I made it out by the skin of my griefs.

I used to be a fag now I’m lit. Ha.

Once, at a party set on a rooftop in Brooklyn for an “artsy vibe,” a young
woman said, sipping her drink, You’re so lucky. You’re gay plus you get to
write about war and stuff. I’m just white. [Pause.] I got nothing. [Laughter,
glasses clinking.]

Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it.

Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns
to gold.

Our sorrow Midas-touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow.

I’m trying to be real but it costs too much.

They say the Earth spins and that’s why we fall but everyone knows it’s the
music.

It’s been proven difficult to dance to machine gun fire.

Still, my people made a rhythm this way. A way.

My people, so still, in the photographs, as corpses.

My failure was that I got used to it. I looked at us, mangled under the TIME

photographer’s shadow, and stopped thinking, Get up, get up.

I saw the graveyard steam in the pinkish dawn and knew the dead were still
breathing. Ha.

If they come for me, take me home take me out.

What if it wasn’t the crash that made me, but the debris?

What if it was meant this way: the mother, the lexicon, the line of cocaine on
the mohawked boy’s collarbone in an East Village sublet in 2007?

What’s wrong with me, Doc? There must be a pill for this.

Too late—these words already shrapnel in your brain.

Impossible in high school, I am now the ultimate linebacker. I plow through
the page, making a path for you, dear reader, going nowhere.

Because the fairy tales were right. You’ll need magic to make it out of  here.

Long ago, in another life, on an Amtrak through Iowa, I saw, for a few blurred
seconds, a man standing in the middle of a field of winter grass, hands at his
side, back to me, all of him stopped there save for his hair scraped by low
wind.

When the countryside resumed its wash of gray wheat, tractors, gutted
barns, black sycamores in herdless pastures, I started to cry. I put my copy
of Didion’s The White Album down and folded a new dark around my head.

The woman beside me stroked my back saying, in a Midwestern accent that
wobbled with tenderness, Go on son. You get that out now. No shame in
breakin’ open. You get that out and I’ll fetch us some tea. Which made me
lose it even more.

She came back with Lipton in paper cups, her eyes nowhere blue and there.
She was silent all the way to Missoula, where she got off and said, patting my
knee, God is good. God is good.

I can say it was beautiful now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else.

To be a dam for damage. My shittiness will not enter the world, I thought,
and quickly became my own hero.

Do you know how many hours I’ve wasted watching straight boys play video
games?

Enough.

Time is a mother.

Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.

In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for
love is Yêu.

And the word for weakness is Yếu.

How you say what you mean changes what you say.

Some call this prayer. I call it watch your mouth.

When they zipped my mother in a body bag I whispered: Rose, get out of there.
Your plants are dying.

Enough is enough.

Body, doorway that you are, be more than what I’ll pass through.

Stillness. That’s what it was.

The man in the field in the red sweater, he was so still he became, somehow,
more true, like a knife wound in a landscape painting.

Like him, I caved.

I caved and decided it will be joy from now on. Then everything opened. The
lights blazed around me into a white weather

and I was lifted, wet and bloody, out of my mother, screaming

and enough.

high octane gender whinging right out of the gate. get a grip pal! the brute fact of queerness alone is not that interesting. im a tragic fag, i watch the straight boys play gamecube. okay. enough is enough.

let’s inspect this part in detail:

In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for
love is Yêu.

And the word for weakness is Yếu.

How you say what you mean changes what you say.

Some call this prayer. I call it watch your mouth.

the asian language-magic stuff is really tedious. fascinating fact about the vietnamese mind is that love and weakness are, like, the same word! som-mai nguyen wrote a hilarious and persuasive piece called ‘blunt-force ethnic credibility’ that really chisels away at this:

There’s a jazz-hands half-nelson device I dislike in diasporic literature and criticism. Writers extrapolate from orthographic coincidence and sprinkle in non-English words to assert unearned authority. I tire of variants on: in Vietnamese, a tonal language, ma can mean many things. The author rattles off ghost, mother, tomb, horse, code, accompanied by the suggestion that this phrenologically means something. These claims are in-group sleights of hand, smugly announcing, without real evidence, that the author has exotic cultural knowledge the outsider cannot fathom. If you know, you know.

i recently read a funny anecdote from robert lowell. he said that when wallace stevens first met robert frost, stevens quipped, “the problem with your poetry, frost, is that it has subjects.” most poets today suffer from having exactly three subjects: themselves, their genitals, and the people who will and wont touch them. mix it up a bit, please. try writing about baseball or something.

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everything everywhere all at once. i hated this movie intensely from the very beginning. the boys at martial club did great fight choreography, and the film itself as an event in history comes with feelgood comeback stories for michelle yeoh and ke huy quan. besides this, everything about this movie is dogshit. the freshman existentialism, the redditoid randumb humor (did she say ‘everything bagel’? lol!), the disgusting and shallow pastiche of wong kar wai...

this movie is about every millennial asian’s greatest dream: sending your immigrant parents to therapy and then getting to tell them how you really feel :,). traversing the multiverse until your fob grandfather understands what a beautiful gender goblin you are. i say: consider the possibility, zoomillennial, that you haven’t tried very hard to understand your fob grandfather.

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minari. okay i admit it, i love this movie, and i love it essentially for its relatability. my 1990s minnesota is not that similar to lee isaac chung’s 1980s arkansas, but the similarities are enough. i love the cross-carrying and loyal paul. i love how david’s dad is a little incompetent. i love that scene of david’s grandma squealing at the wrestlers on the television. i love how the parents try to maintain a filial order that the grandmother doesn’t give a shit about. both han ye-ri (the actor playing the mother) and youn yuh-jung (the actor playing the grandmother) rewrote their roles to pull from their own experiences, and the result is groundedness and specificity.

yoink

all good stuff. makes the scene of the mom crying over gochugaru bearable.

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on twitter people have been laughing at rucy cui’s “hatchling”. the mockery is a bit unjust. the opening paragraphs went semi-viral:

My white boyfriend and I are newly returned from holiday travels, tanned and aching at the joint-seams, stuck with over ten dollars in foreign currency. I was due to start my period last week. He locks the front door. In our entryway, suitcases are strewn all around.

It was a difficult trip, one in which shopkeepers ignored me and he happened to speak up for me. This evolutionary adaptation came easily to both of us, yet troubled only me. We argued about whether it was safe to drink the tap water or if there were pickpockets on public transportation. We fucked on every flat surface available to us, including the vertical ones—bathed in equatorial sweat and pheromones, slick as babies. It was our anniversary. Still I worried I was earmarking myself for extinction. Our final evening, we broke a wicker lawn chair and threw it in the hotel pool. Despite his indifference, I never stopped brushing my teeth with bottled water.

“my white boyfriend” is definitely a very funny opening. many object to “slick as babies”, which is for sure a really disgusting phrase, but the haters are somewhat misunderstanding the tone of the piece (the lady lays an egg, folks). The prose isn’t the main problem, though there are a bunch of stinker phrases (“slapdash skyline” sticks out to me).

what’s really objectionable is the relentless, distinctively asian-american self-pity. the narrator talks about the deleterious effects of her job as a qa at a mobile game company, which is just objectively not a very stressful job. the whole piece is a rich case-study in wmaf false consciousness. as i’ve discussed before, asian women are particularly weird about white men, but asian women continue to blame everyone but themselves for this. hatching’s narrator just can’t stop fucking her retarded, dodoish white bf no matter how many microaggressions he assaults her with, no matter how many times he stir-fries her egg-daughter. lady, this is a skill issue. again, consider writing about baseball.

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asian-american artists really get caught up in how true and relatable all the microaggression stuff is. things can be true and relatable and boring. take for example the problem with apu. hari kondabolu (ashok kondabolu’s less talented older brother) put together this documentary about how troubling apu from the simpsons is, how the “apu-voice” was used to bully brown millennial children, and how weird it is that apu was written and voiced by white guys. the ultimate legacy of this documentary is that it got matt groening to write apu out of the simpsons entirely (nice one).

now, listen, i get being put off by apu-voice — i too as a child had to wait patiently to allow boys to finish doing apu-voice bits at me. however, 1) it is insane person behavior to be hung up on this in your late thirties, 2) this is an asian-american fixation that alienates non-americans. if you go to the comments sections of youtube videos of the problem with apu, you will frequently run into comments like, “im from india and apu is the fucking best character sir, what’s the problem???”

watch the light go out of their eyes as you try explaining to a mainland chinese or indian twenty year old how hard it is to be microaggressed upon by your white boyfriend. this stuff does not translate cross-culturally! by indulging in it, you’re shrinking your world down such that you can only be reached by other zoomillenial qpocs living in la, portland, and nyc.

take advantage of this era of profound freedom and wealth to cultivate new, strange subjectivities. camp out on someone’s lawn for no reason, like robert lowell. live on a boat for a year. or whatever, fuck it, be the ten billionth bottom doing poetry-therapy, who cares.