you have some ideas but surely this is a problem with *mainstream* Asian American art, not Asian American art as a whole. and it’s imo intellectually unserious to attribute this to a deficiency on part of Asian Americans vs a deficiency on the part of publishing houses, mass media, etc. look at everything mainstream: most pop music sucks. the most popular sitcoms almost always suck. hell, the most popular classical music pieces aren’t the best representations of their genre either. it’s not like 50 shades of gray and Brandon Sanderson are the greatest representations of literature. I think this piece had the potential to be better than it is, but as it stands it just seems like you’re generalizing about an entire group of artists based on a v small / specific sample that is hugely biased by selection effects
like imo of course the most popular pieces of art are the ones that aren’t that good, and if you want better, you have to go deeper, find something more niche; this just seems true in basically every field. so this piece could have been “popular Asian American art sucks in this specific way, here’s why …” and it could have analyzed the forces that lead to this art being popularized / widespread. or it wouldn’t even have to do that; it could also even just acknowledge that your sample is extremely biased … but no, that’s not what you did.
idk “if it was made by an asian-american, it is junk (with certain notable exceptions, such as tony tulathimutte).” is just in bad taste. the actual thing to say is “if its mainstream, it is junk (with certain notable exceptions.)”
That would be the thing to say if I agreed with you (on methodology, on ground facts, on how to write), but I don't.
Moreover, I don't think "popular = bad" is "true in basically every field" at all. In Cold Blood was popular and as good as any novel could be. Physics and mathematics as fields are also pretty good at celebrating their most interesting contributors. I'm also confused about what you're saying about classical music. There's no getting around the Eroica being great.
sure. you’re talking about art in general, so let’s talk music. mitski 2012-18 is a generational run (laurel hell and beyond is not great.) my friend Holden Mui writes incredible contemporary classical; see https://youtu.be/57zaeUlAClc?si=tne2s9nvMsdwTZQm . actually there are plenty of excellent Asian American classical musicians: Sean Chen makes spectacular arrangements (La valse, Beethoven symphony 9), Conrad Tao is obviously excellent too, etc blah blah. (I am picking people who arrange / compose their own music. If we wish to talk about performers, they’re obviously so many & all over the place, but I suspect this is not what you care about.)
sure, it’s true that in some fields what’s popular does correlate with what’s good. I think this is generally not true in the fine arts though, esp not these days. (wrt the eroica - we are not seriously saying the eroica is the most popular classical music, right?)
but of course this is all tangential to (one of) the point(s), which is that if you want to make these claims about Asian American art surely you can do better than the examples you cite — ocean vuong (who has already been panned by so many, and who is obviously controversial already), EEAAO, a Twitter shitstorm over a mediocre MFA writer, etc. — it’s just not a convincing argument if you just pick things that are popular or are currently trending, surely. you can make an argument about this but it would be like me saying classical piano is substance-less bc fur elise & Chopin 9-2 & la Campanella are boring and predictable. hell, you can even make an argument in classical piano about how major competitions select for pianism that is boring and predictable (Chopin 2025, blah), or you can make a causal argument about how the current conservatory structure doesn’t reward experimentation / doing Interesting Things, but even that would be one or two more layers than what you’re doing here
I don’t like Mitski either. It looks like we’re different beings.
I’m also not sure what evidential standard you’re trying to get me to adopt. One where I can’t talk about the Eroica, but I am supposed to account for your friend Holden Mui?
"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."
I think this gets at what the real problem is with the Rucy Cui story.
Let's call it the "my life is hard because I'm Asian" genre. This genre has tropes: "stinky lunch," "Where are you from? question" etc. The genre has stock characters: "oblivious white boyfriend," "oblivious white coworker/boss," "oblivious white boyfriend's oblivious mom," etc. The genre has stock plots: "dutiful daughter breaks bad", "reconciliation with immigrant parent", "culture clash with white boyfriend," etc., etc., etc.
This genre is perfectly coherent, and it may have made sense at one time to read and write works in this genre, but the author, Rucy (et al), seems to be bending reality to fit the tropes of the genre, rather than attempt to say something authentic and true. It's like an inverse power fantasy: "look at all these people who are mistreating me [because I am Asian]!" But even the details of the story undermine the victimhood-narrative the author is drawing.
The thing is, not only Rucy, but many women Asian writers have coalesced towards this fixed point vis-a-vis the kind of fiction that they write.
The “where are you from?” thing is especially odd, because if there one thing white Americans love it’s discussing their own ethnic ancestry and background, so really the winning move is to give them an incredibly detailed backstory about the exact region and culture in Asia your family immigrated from. Bonus points if it’s more complicated like having a dad who’s ethnic Chinese but a Vietnamese national who emigrated in the 1980s after the Sino-Vietnamese war and a maternal grandfather who’s Singaporean Chinese, white people go apeshit for this sort of knowledge.
It’s because we’ve lost all our context and are greatly fascinated by people who have not. I’m guilty of the same (despite not being American) although I’d never ask “where are you from” 🤦🏼♀️
The reason why this genre fails is that the concept of "Asian American" is silly at face value. We don't take Jersey "Italians" seriously. But it's not because they aren't ethnically Italian - it's because, in the United States, they are white. In the United States, east and southeast Asians are "white" for whatever that term is still worth. Nobody in mainstream politics doubts your right to be here. You are a fully accepted and trusted member of society in nearly any room you walk into.
When a second generation person with ancestors from any Asian culture does the stinky lunch thing, they come off like Sil from the Sopranos crying about anti-Italian discrimination in the Christopher Colombus episode. Nobody is advocating for actual discrimination against people from your cultural background! You have been subsumed and are an accepted part of the majority!
I wish Asian-American writers would just write trashy novels about random Asian-American guys who are losers but randomly stumble into magical powers and meet a harem of beautiful women. Power fantasies and wish fulfillment. It’s better than the “disempowerment fantasies” they write. Asians won the game but they still want to feel that they lost. Have some confidence!
Putting aside that this trend of lack of capitalization seems to be along a similar vein to the type of slop art you criticize. Your experience seems disconnected from the modal experience of 2nd gen Asian Americans. Yes, most parents have a harrowing story but that does not translate into being open-minded. The cliche of Tiger moms and helicopter parents is a cliche for a reason. From what I have heard, Asian parents tend to be deeply involved in their child's lives and their "success" and its very damaging. You completely dismiss the experiences of anyone that wasn't raised like you. I think the story of your parents says a lot about who they are. First, they were willing to engage in an not only an interrethnic marriage but an interracial marriage, the former already being very uncommon, and second, they seem like free spirits not willing to conform to their respective cultural norms. I feel like most Asian American parents do tend to act pretty similar which creates a bunch of repressed, if rich, people looking for direction in life. This creates an audience for the slop art that genuinely gets value out of it, so maybe its perfectly fine. Dismissing all Asian American art off-hand is wild. I know I sound woke here but I promise you I'm not. This piece reads like unempathetic myopic edgy slop.
I just really get annoyed at rich high-caste Indians who obviously came here with a lot of money to begin with complaining about “structural racism”. It’s so fake and instrumental. They see an opening and they are going to use it to advance themselves, regardless of never having been actually impacted by racism and arguably being some of the most exclusionary people to ever live.
“consider writing about baseball” as a shortform for “consider cultivating new strange subjectivities” is so good. reminds me of the broader observation of how some writers get stuck in the navel-gazing of writing about writing, while not being very interesting about it.
“they do want conventional success, but they want to be seen as both victim and master of the situation.“ will be thinking about it this a lot! do you have any more thoughts about this?
i dont think all AA art is bad. there are some genuinely non self-pity art. i liked "beef". but i agree in spirit there's alot of slop.
i think AA culture's in this weird early developmental phase of creating something out of nothing. probably usual diaspora shit. so the culture is a frankenstein whatever FOTM white culture that's part of your formative years with a celebration/fetishization of the culture you were never really a part of. that's how you get something like "everything everywhere". personally i don't hate that movie, i think it's a pretty genuine representation of 'growing pains' in creating a new culture from asian diaspora.
as an asian-canadian and protestant person, it makes me wonder why asian-american and protestant art tend to be (for lack of a better term) derivative and hollow - especially when art made from catholic perspectives and other ethnocultural perspectives don’t seem to suffer the same issue of being so boring.
1. This was good enough the the lack of capital letters was almost forgivable.
2. This reminds of a Scott Alexander essay that was something like “you don’t hate X, you hate people who write books about being X”. A lot of it’s not so much an Asian American thing as much as an Asian American who write navel gazing autofiction thing. Then again, you are mostly addressing Asian American artists
3. Isn’t the most popular Asian American writer right now RF Kuang? I have plenty to criticize about her, but it’s not exactly the white boyfriend microagressionsroman (thanks John Gu for the phrase) that you’re criticizing here
That being said, I just don't read much science fiction and fantasy, so there could very easily be many counterexamples there. Ted Chiang is probably the most important counterexample, for instance.
> why didnt these losers realize they can just not do what they didn’t want to do?
Oftentimes, threats of physical violence 😔 Which I think is way underrepresented in media because it's shameful, and even though a lot of people do it it, it really dampens the redemption arc where the idealised-mother apologises, because in reality the violence was decades ago, but on the screen it was half an hour ago.
you have some ideas but surely this is a problem with *mainstream* Asian American art, not Asian American art as a whole. and it’s imo intellectually unserious to attribute this to a deficiency on part of Asian Americans vs a deficiency on the part of publishing houses, mass media, etc. look at everything mainstream: most pop music sucks. the most popular sitcoms almost always suck. hell, the most popular classical music pieces aren’t the best representations of their genre either. it’s not like 50 shades of gray and Brandon Sanderson are the greatest representations of literature. I think this piece had the potential to be better than it is, but as it stands it just seems like you’re generalizing about an entire group of artists based on a v small / specific sample that is hugely biased by selection effects
like imo of course the most popular pieces of art are the ones that aren’t that good, and if you want better, you have to go deeper, find something more niche; this just seems true in basically every field. so this piece could have been “popular Asian American art sucks in this specific way, here’s why …” and it could have analyzed the forces that lead to this art being popularized / widespread. or it wouldn’t even have to do that; it could also even just acknowledge that your sample is extremely biased … but no, that’s not what you did.
idk “if it was made by an asian-american, it is junk (with certain notable exceptions, such as tony tulathimutte).” is just in bad taste. the actual thing to say is “if its mainstream, it is junk (with certain notable exceptions.)”
That would be the thing to say if I agreed with you (on methodology, on ground facts, on how to write), but I don't.
Moreover, I don't think "popular = bad" is "true in basically every field" at all. In Cold Blood was popular and as good as any novel could be. Physics and mathematics as fields are also pretty good at celebrating their most interesting contributors. I'm also confused about what you're saying about classical music. There's no getting around the Eroica being great.
I do have many, many more obscure examples of asian-american art being bad. I didn't write about them because my list, and the attention spans of readers, are finite. You can do assays on asian-american artists in different ways and still come to my conclusion that a lot of it is identitarian junk. (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20200606112003/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/coronavirus-race-artists-asian-american-identity.html) (e.g. enroll in any MFA program).
In any case, it might be better if you just lead with saying which artists you think are doing good work.
sure. you’re talking about art in general, so let’s talk music. mitski 2012-18 is a generational run (laurel hell and beyond is not great.) my friend Holden Mui writes incredible contemporary classical; see https://youtu.be/57zaeUlAClc?si=tne2s9nvMsdwTZQm . actually there are plenty of excellent Asian American classical musicians: Sean Chen makes spectacular arrangements (La valse, Beethoven symphony 9), Conrad Tao is obviously excellent too, etc blah blah. (I am picking people who arrange / compose their own music. If we wish to talk about performers, they’re obviously so many & all over the place, but I suspect this is not what you care about.)
sure, it’s true that in some fields what’s popular does correlate with what’s good. I think this is generally not true in the fine arts though, esp not these days. (wrt the eroica - we are not seriously saying the eroica is the most popular classical music, right?)
but of course this is all tangential to (one of) the point(s), which is that if you want to make these claims about Asian American art surely you can do better than the examples you cite — ocean vuong (who has already been panned by so many, and who is obviously controversial already), EEAAO, a Twitter shitstorm over a mediocre MFA writer, etc. — it’s just not a convincing argument if you just pick things that are popular or are currently trending, surely. you can make an argument about this but it would be like me saying classical piano is substance-less bc fur elise & Chopin 9-2 & la Campanella are boring and predictable. hell, you can even make an argument in classical piano about how major competitions select for pianism that is boring and predictable (Chopin 2025, blah), or you can make a causal argument about how the current conservatory structure doesn’t reward experimentation / doing Interesting Things, but even that would be one or two more layers than what you’re doing here
I don’t like Mitski either. It looks like we’re different beings.
I’m also not sure what evidential standard you’re trying to get me to adopt. One where I can’t talk about the Eroica, but I am supposed to account for your friend Holden Mui?
"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."
I think this gets at what the real problem is with the Rucy Cui story.
Let's call it the "my life is hard because I'm Asian" genre. This genre has tropes: "stinky lunch," "Where are you from? question" etc. The genre has stock characters: "oblivious white boyfriend," "oblivious white coworker/boss," "oblivious white boyfriend's oblivious mom," etc. The genre has stock plots: "dutiful daughter breaks bad", "reconciliation with immigrant parent", "culture clash with white boyfriend," etc., etc., etc.
This genre is perfectly coherent, and it may have made sense at one time to read and write works in this genre, but the author, Rucy (et al), seems to be bending reality to fit the tropes of the genre, rather than attempt to say something authentic and true. It's like an inverse power fantasy: "look at all these people who are mistreating me [because I am Asian]!" But even the details of the story undermine the victimhood-narrative the author is drawing.
The thing is, not only Rucy, but many women Asian writers have coalesced towards this fixed point vis-a-vis the kind of fiction that they write.
The “where are you from?” thing is especially odd, because if there one thing white Americans love it’s discussing their own ethnic ancestry and background, so really the winning move is to give them an incredibly detailed backstory about the exact region and culture in Asia your family immigrated from. Bonus points if it’s more complicated like having a dad who’s ethnic Chinese but a Vietnamese national who emigrated in the 1980s after the Sino-Vietnamese war and a maternal grandfather who’s Singaporean Chinese, white people go apeshit for this sort of knowledge.
It’s because we’ve lost all our context and are greatly fascinated by people who have not. I’m guilty of the same (despite not being American) although I’d never ask “where are you from” 🤦🏼♀️
The reason why this genre fails is that the concept of "Asian American" is silly at face value. We don't take Jersey "Italians" seriously. But it's not because they aren't ethnically Italian - it's because, in the United States, they are white. In the United States, east and southeast Asians are "white" for whatever that term is still worth. Nobody in mainstream politics doubts your right to be here. You are a fully accepted and trusted member of society in nearly any room you walk into.
When a second generation person with ancestors from any Asian culture does the stinky lunch thing, they come off like Sil from the Sopranos crying about anti-Italian discrimination in the Christopher Colombus episode. Nobody is advocating for actual discrimination against people from your cultural background! You have been subsumed and are an accepted part of the majority!
Furio: "I hatea Christopher Columbus. He comea from tha North."
Vito: "OaaaHa take it easy."
I wish Asian-American writers would just write trashy novels about random Asian-American guys who are losers but randomly stumble into magical powers and meet a harem of beautiful women. Power fantasies and wish fulfillment. It’s better than the “disempowerment fantasies” they write. Asians won the game but they still want to feel that they lost. Have some confidence!
I Was A Code Monkey Run Over By A Cybertruck And Became A Smartwatch (With A Harem) That Can Predict The Future In Another World?!?!
Yeah, something like that
That's called anime
Putting aside that this trend of lack of capitalization seems to be along a similar vein to the type of slop art you criticize. Your experience seems disconnected from the modal experience of 2nd gen Asian Americans. Yes, most parents have a harrowing story but that does not translate into being open-minded. The cliche of Tiger moms and helicopter parents is a cliche for a reason. From what I have heard, Asian parents tend to be deeply involved in their child's lives and their "success" and its very damaging. You completely dismiss the experiences of anyone that wasn't raised like you. I think the story of your parents says a lot about who they are. First, they were willing to engage in an not only an interrethnic marriage but an interracial marriage, the former already being very uncommon, and second, they seem like free spirits not willing to conform to their respective cultural norms. I feel like most Asian American parents do tend to act pretty similar which creates a bunch of repressed, if rich, people looking for direction in life. This creates an audience for the slop art that genuinely gets value out of it, so maybe its perfectly fine. Dismissing all Asian American art off-hand is wild. I know I sound woke here but I promise you I'm not. This piece reads like unempathetic myopic edgy slop.
Superior empathy-haver says slop art is perfectly fine, but has no empathy for my lack of capitalization. Sad!
Anti-capitalization advocate doesn't stick to his values in the comments of his own post. What a world we live in!
😂
"I exist because my dad doesn't like Gujarati food" is the diasporic fiction we need.
I would read a book about your parents!
I’m glad I’m not the only one irked by the attempt at existentialism in everything everywhere all at once…
I found it very moving, actually I haven’t watched it in a while. What fell short for you? And what’s like a good take on existentialism?
I just really get annoyed at rich high-caste Indians who obviously came here with a lot of money to begin with complaining about “structural racism”. It’s so fake and instrumental. They see an opening and they are going to use it to advance themselves, regardless of never having been actually impacted by racism and arguably being some of the most exclusionary people to ever live.
loved this.
“consider writing about baseball” as a shortform for “consider cultivating new strange subjectivities” is so good. reminds me of the broader observation of how some writers get stuck in the navel-gazing of writing about writing, while not being very interesting about it.
“they do want conventional success, but they want to be seen as both victim and master of the situation.“ will be thinking about it this a lot! do you have any more thoughts about this?
Bro just wants to read about baseball
i dont think all AA art is bad. there are some genuinely non self-pity art. i liked "beef". but i agree in spirit there's alot of slop.
i think AA culture's in this weird early developmental phase of creating something out of nothing. probably usual diaspora shit. so the culture is a frankenstein whatever FOTM white culture that's part of your formative years with a celebration/fetishization of the culture you were never really a part of. that's how you get something like "everything everywhere". personally i don't hate that movie, i think it's a pretty genuine representation of 'growing pains' in creating a new culture from asian diaspora.
as an asian-canadian and protestant person, it makes me wonder why asian-american and protestant art tend to be (for lack of a better term) derivative and hollow - especially when art made from catholic perspectives and other ethnocultural perspectives don’t seem to suffer the same issue of being so boring.
Some thoughts-
1. This was good enough the the lack of capital letters was almost forgivable.
2. This reminds of a Scott Alexander essay that was something like “you don’t hate X, you hate people who write books about being X”. A lot of it’s not so much an Asian American thing as much as an Asian American who write navel gazing autofiction thing. Then again, you are mostly addressing Asian American artists
3. Isn’t the most popular Asian American writer right now RF Kuang? I have plenty to criticize about her, but it’s not exactly the white boyfriend microagressionsroman (thanks John Gu for the phrase) that you’re criticizing here
That being said, I just don't read much science fiction and fantasy, so there could very easily be many counterexamples there. Ted Chiang is probably the most important counterexample, for instance.
Yellowface is a tedious racial resentment story.
Also I haven't read 'Babel', but I have it on good authority that it is infuriating.
RF Kuang is the worst author who gets as much positive attention as RF Kuang. Even her YAslop fantasy series is below-average for the genre.
Isabel Kim, on the other hand, is a genius.
One exception I’d make is Min Jin Lee. Pachinko is fantastic.
u r what u attend to, vishal
(which is to say i stopped reading at the hating on ppl’s artistic efforts :/ 😅)
I'm clearing the draft-pile a bit. More ML / futurist / low-haterism content soon I promise.
> why didnt these losers realize they can just not do what they didn’t want to do?
Oftentimes, threats of physical violence 😔 Which I think is way underrepresented in media because it's shameful, and even though a lot of people do it it, it really dampens the redemption arc where the idealised-mother apologises, because in reality the violence was decades ago, but on the screen it was half an hour ago.