When Wesley Yang Was Great

Revisiting my 2018 review of The Souls of Yellow Folk in light of subsequent developments.

Wesley Yang in 2011, reading from "Paper Tigers," the New York Magazine cover story that won a National Magazine Award and was subsequently collected in Souls of Yellow Folk.

Below is a slightly revised, modestly annotated version of a review I wrote back in 2018 of Wesley Yang’s collection The Souls of Yellow Folk. My memory is that mine was the first and maybe only review to clearly identify how important a writer Yang was. There were other positive reviews of the book, along with some negative ones, but there was a disappointing reluctance even in the positive ones to say clearly what many of us knew was the case, which was that Yang was something more than just a run of the mill excellent writer. He was a force, maybe the force, shaping the ways in which other critics and observers of the rising left-wing style of politics were thinking and writing about the topic. One didn’t have to agree with him to recognize this sociological fact. 

I attribute the failure to do so to two causes. One is that his critics didn’t want to grant him his propers because they worried it would amplify his influence. This happens all the time, of course, when politically minded reviewers are dealing with political books, but it seemed especially cruel to me in Yang’s case because he wasn’t political in that sense; he wasn’t an activist with a cause to advance or an axe to grind. He was one of us, an intellectual and artist, and in the essays and articles in the book he was often writing out over the abyss—intellectually, emotionally, politically, even spiritually—in a way that most of us weren’t willing to risk. He was out there, man, and his endeavor was one we should have been honoring, regardless of whether we agreed with the conclusions he drew. 

The other, less sinister cause of the failure to properly take his measure was that book reviewing, in general, has a hard time with texts like The Souls of Yellow Folk. It’s messy and incomplete, awkwardly put together and confused about its purpose, but at its best it operates at a level of intelligence and artistry that is simply unattainable by most writers, ever. It’s natural to respond to a book of this kind by toggling one’s critical attention between the obvious flaws and the obvious brilliance, but too often this strategy leaves the reader with the impression that she should just average out the two poles to assess whether the book is worth reading. It conveys the overall sense that it’s a B or B+ book, when what you really need to know, as a reader, is that your time is far better spent reading this work of vital and erratic genius than bothering with, say, the latest work of A- literary fiction, which is smoothly executed and elegantly written but forgettable and replaceable.¹

The two most important reviews of Yang’s book were both negative: Frank Guan’s in Bookforum and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s in The New York Times. I doubt either critic was deliberately acting to sabotage the reception of the book, but there’s a whiff of bad faith to both reviews. They each seem to be performing something for their literary intellectual peers, vis a vis Yang, or marking territory in the Asian-American discourse.

I’m republishing my review here in part for the same reason I published it in the first place. I want to rescue Yang’s work from this kind of bad faith criticism. I also, alas, feel a need to rescue Yang’s work from Yang himself, who has evolved into precisely the kind of political obsessive that his early critics unjustly accused him of being.² He’s now a monomaniacal anti-woke activist who doesn’t seem to write anything substantive anymore. My sense of how to evaluate him has flipped; even when I agree with his politics, as I sometimes do, I don’t have much respect for the endeavor.

In 2018, I saw the publication of Souls of Yellow Folk as an opportunity to celebrate Yang’s return to productivity and brilliance after many years of struggle to write not just well but at all. My celebration was premature. Like so many other oversized artistic talents of our era (maybe any era), he has not been able to successfully protect his talent against the relentless onslaught of stupidity, bad faith, conformity, and nonsense. I hope he can someday get his groove back. In the meantime, it’s worth remembering him when he was great.

—

 Originally published in Quillette:

Wesley Yang’s longform essay “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho” was first published in the small magazine n+1³ in the early months of 2008. At the time Yang, who was in his early 30s, seemed to be a typical young New York writer. He had published an assortment of short pieces, mostly about books, for places like New York, Salon, and the New York Observer. He wasn’t a “name” yet, but he was well-known enough that one of the editors of n+1 thought of him when they were looking for someone to write about Cho, the Korean-American student who’d killed 32 people and wounded 17 during his shooting rampage on the campus of Virginia Tech.

“I resented the implication of his request,” writes Yang in the introduction to his new collection of essays, The Souls of Yellow Folk. “The implication was that there was something about that episode that would be particularly salient to me. …The implication was that we shared something in common, the Virginia Tech killer and I. … I resented the implication because it was true.”

The piece that Yang dredged up out of this resented truth, which leads off the new book, was extraordinary. Funny, brutally smart, vulgar, and self-lacerating, but also bluntly confident in its judgments. Seung-Hui Cho wasn’t just Wesley Yang, he was millions of lonely young men who felt unloved, unseen, and unvalued in contemporary America, many of whom burn with ressentiment, and some of whom, it was becoming clear, would make the rest of us pay for their desperation. Re-reading the essay, a decade later, its themes resonate even more thoroughly. We’ve all now been overtaken by the sad angry lonely man truths Yang was exploring a decade ago.

“Cho imagines the one thing that can never exist,” writes Yang, “…an army of other losers like himself, denied recognition and rendered invisible, who would someday attain class consciousness and leave behind their abjection through violent, coordinated action to subdue the world to their will, or die fighting.”

The essay goes on like this for about 10,000 words, each page scintillating with insight and intelligence. An abbreviated list of the things about which the essay has exceptionally interesting things to say would include: Korean faces; indie romantic comedies; young homosexuals; Wayne Lo; Seung-hui Cho; “brown-toned South American immigrants that pick your fruit, slaughter your meat, and bus your tables”; the middle class people who would never date them; the impossibility of acknowledging this fact; the understandable revulsion of pretty white girls toward creepy-seeming Korean boys; bad early ’90s grunge rock; the hypocrisy of poet Nikki Giovanni; Yang’s own damned self; and Yang’s old college acquaintance Samuel Goldfarb, of whom Yang writes: “He was ugly on the outside, and once you got past that you found the true ugliness on the inside.”⁴

There aren’t many essayists alive today who can sustain the level of brilliance Yang maintains in the essay for as long as he does. Zadie Smith can do it. Ta-Nehisi Coates looked like he was on his way toward being able to do it, but then he got derailed by ideology. John Jeremiah Sullivan can do it. A few other writers, maybe, but not many.

The essay doesn’t just teem with sentence-level excellence. Through all the micro-level fascination Yang has a larger point to make about what it is like to be an unlovable young man in America, a loser in the sexual and cultural marketplace, and the ways in which that loserdom intersects with and reinforces the experience of Asian-American-ness.

He is also enacting, or asserting, some version of what an alternative Asian-American identity might look or sound like, fierce in its refusal to submit to the expectations that anyone would impose on it, rife with ambivalence and ambiguity, embracing of complexity and contradiction.

Back in 2008, the essay seemed to ensure that Yang would be an important American writer. He would get a book deal. The big magazines would give him thousands of words, and dollars, to do his thing, and he would appear on panels in Aspen and Brooklyn. He would be the last thing he could have ever imagined, one of those glowing figures who are the object of resentment and envy of the unloved masses. Such trajectories aren’t usually predictable from one essay in a small magazine, but in this case it was.

But then Yang disappeared. He didn’t literally disappear, of course. The new collection is a record of that fact. With the exception of 2012, there is a piece from every year between then and now, including two essays from late 2017. Most of these pieces were originally published in high profile publications, and one of them won a National Magazine Award.

But Yang the writer on the fast track to literary eminence didn’t materialize. He only alludes to the reasons for this in The Souls of Yellow Folk, and in some work that isn’t collected here.⁵ The relevant fact, though, is that for six or seven years he wasn’t able to dedicate himself to writing and building his career. That The Souls of Yellow Folk is as good as it is, despite this, is testament to how good Yang is.

The book fluctuates in its quality, but only between good and extraordinary. He’s only good on chef Eddie Huang, rebel hacker tragedy Aaron Swartz, sex in New York City, Britney Spears, pick-up artist Neil Strauss, leftist thinker Tony Judt, and bigthink political theorist Francis Fukuyama. He’s extraordinary on Seung-Hui Cho, tiger mom Amy Chua, and—in the book’s last section—identity politics in the age of Trump.

Collectively, the essays paint a fascinating and disturbing picture of pre-dystopian anomie and dissolution. The lonely and angry and oversensitive young men who will, by 2035 or so, have coalesced into roving tribes of bandits and revolutionaries, are—at the moment—only coalescing and pillaging online. They’re self-identifying and tribalizing as masters of seduction rather than masters of destruction. They’re killing themselves, not others, or killing as loners rather than as bands of brownshirts. The identity politics presently disfiguring our multi-racial democracy⁶ is, for the moment, mostly a phenomenon of social media, the campuses, and certain sectors of the media. Its influence is largely a reflection of the passion and rhetorical savvy of its adherents rather than their numbers or their actual capacity to persuade people outside of their communities. But the writing’s on the wall.

“Social media has proven to be, among other things, a remarkably efficient means to inject novel ideas,” writes Yang in the book’s final essay, “into a public sphere occupied by members of the media, activist, and intellectual classes, who use it, among other things, to coordinate an ever-advancing consensus about what being antiracist entails. There one can watch in real time as the unfolding of the internal logic of various ideological tendencies emerge, evolve, and reach their terminus. One handy rule of thumb is that any accusation or charge made as a half-ironic provocation in May will be avowed with earnest conviction in December and chanted by activists the following April.”

That the book ends at such a pitch of intellectual intensity is significant. It suggests that for whatever combination of personal, economic, intellectual, and larger cultural reasons, Yang is back.⁷ It also suggests that there is hope yet for a humane, liberal, complex alternative to white nationalism and identity politics (or Britney Spears and Neil Strauss). The liberalism that runs so deep in the national psyche may continue to exert a fundamental constraint on the extremism, idiocy, and violence that also, alas, run pretty deep.

In a number of hostile reviews of The Souls of Yellow Folk, Yang has been criticized for the presumptuousness of his title. It’s a half- or two-thirds-fair criticism. This is not an analog to W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk. A good chunk of the pieces in the book don’t even address Asian-Americanness. Those that do are overlapping rather than integrated or coordinated in their arguments. It’s not a wholly fair critique, though. There is an argument, implicit and occasionally explicit in the book, about the role that the souls of yellow folk may end up playing in the fate of the republic. It’s an unfinished argument, for which Yang must bear responsibility. Nevertheless, it’s interesting and challenging and demands consideration, as almost everything Yang writes does.

“In an age characterized by the politics of resentment,” he writes, “the Asian man knows something of the resentment of the embattled white man, besieged on all sides by grievances and demands for reparation, and something of the resentments of the rising social-justice warrior, who feels with every fiber of their being that all that stands in the way of the attainment of their thwarted ambitions is nothing so much as a white man. Tasting of the frustrations of both, he is denied the entitlements of either. This condition of marginality is both the cause and the effect of his erasure—and perhaps the source of his claim to his centrality, indeed his universality.”

I don’t know if that’s true, globally. What is clear, however, is that Yang’s perspective is important. He is one of the essential writers we have right now and we are lucky to have him.

1. I get why this happens, but it’s always a shame. As critics we need a convention, perhaps, where we append a brief note to occasional reviews to just let the reader know that when we criticize this particular text, written by this particular author, we’re grading them on a curve of their own genius, not against all the lesser lights who surround them.

2. Maybe they sensed something about Yang, some darkness in him, but this is precisely my point about the audacity of the work he was doing back then. He was wrestling with dangerous impulses in a way that posed genuine psychological and artistic risks to him. Most of us aren’t willing or able to go there. That he later gave in to the dark forces doesn’t negate the work he did when he was holding them in fragile balance; it reveals the depth of his accomplishment.

3. On the significance of N+1, I recently wrote: “I’d argue that N+1 became the seminal American literary intellectual journal of the first few decades of the 21st century, the template for a host of important small magazines to follow, including Jacobin, The Point, Current Affairs, American Affairs, and Parapraxis, among other. It was the launching pad for a number of important writers, including Gessen and Greif themselves, Wesley Yang, Elif Batuman, and (state senator) Nikil Saval, and it was the incubator of theoretical preoccupations and stylistic tendencies that permeated out to influence the broader literary intellectual culture in ways that are evident still.”

4. The section on Goldfarb is worth quoting at length, because it’s so good. “When I was at Rutgers,  I knew a guy named Samuel Goldfarb. Samuel was prematurely middle-aged, not just in his dimensions, which were bloated, and not just in his complexion, which was pale but flushed with the exertion of holding himself upright—sweat would dapple the groove between his upper lip and nose—but above all in something he exuded, which was a pheromone of loneliness and hostility. Samuel had gone off to Reed College, and, after a couple of years of feeling alienated in that liberal utopia, he had returned east. Samuel was one of the students at Rutgers who was clearly more intellectually sophisticated than I. He knew more, he had read more, and it showed. He was the kind of nominal left-winger who admired the works of Carl Schmitt before many others had gotten onto that trend, and he knew all about the Frankfurt School, and he was already jaded about the postmodernists when others were still enraptured by the discovery of them. In addition to being the kind of leftist who read a Nazi legal theorist to be contrarian, Samuel was also the kind of aspiring academic so contemptuous of the postmodern academy that he was likely to go into investment banking and make pots of money while jeering at the rest of humanity, because that was so much more punk rock than any other alternative to it. He identified his ‘lifestyle’—and of course he put that word into derisive quote marks when he used it—as ‘indie rock,’ but Samuel’s irony had extra bite to it, real cruelty and rancor, that was tonally off-kilter for the indie rock scene, which, as it manifested itself at Rutgers, was taciturn to the point of autism, passive-aggressive, and anti-intellectual, but far too cool and subdued for the exertions of overt cruelty.

“You saw a look of sadness and yearning in Samuel’s face when he had subsided from one of his misanthropic tirades—there was no limit to the scorn he heaped on the intellectual pretensions of others—and it put you on guard against him. What you sensed about him was that his abiding rage was closely linked to the fact that he was fat and ugly in a uniquely unappealing way, and that this compounded with his unappealing rage made him the sort of person that no woman would ever want to touch. He seemed arrayed in that wild rancor that sexual frustration can bestow on a man, and everything about his persona—his coruscating irony, his unbelievable intellectual snobbery—seemed a way to channel and thus defend himself against this consuming bitterness. He was ugly on the outside and once you got past that you found the true ugliness on the inside.

“And then below that ugliness you found a vulnerable person who desperately needed to be seen and touched and known as a human phenomenon. And above all, you wanted nothing to do with that, because once you touched the source of his loneliness, there would be no end to it, and even if you took it upon yourself to appease this unappeasable need, he would eventually decide to revenge himself against a world that had held him at bay, and there would be no better target for this revenge than you, precisely because you were the person who’d dared to draw the nearest. This is what you felt instantly, without having to put it into words (it’s what I felt, anyway, though it might have been pure projection), the moment you met Samuel.”

5. In his profile of Jordan Peterson, Yang writes, “I first came across Jordan Peterson in late 2016. I had been ensnared in a destructive familial ordeal that consumed some of the most important years of my career and put a strain on my marriage. I was unable to complete a manuscript for a book that I had been contracted to write. I had assignments I couldn’t finish. I was, in other words, exactly the sort of person whom Peterson’s message is optimized to reach.”

6. I’ve been reflecting recently on how I performed during the Great Awokening of the past decade. Was I brave? Was I conformist? Did I stay centered in my values? Did I see things clearly? My answer, I think, is that I did okay. B+. Privately, I very quickly arrived at an accurate perception of the excesses and blind spots of the rising social justice movement. It helped that I had spent the prior decade researching and writing a book that was in no small part a chronicle of the periodic bouts of insanity experienced by the left in the 20th century. So it wasn’t hard to look around and notice that we were in the midst of another one. It was obvious if you were familiar with that history. And I would say I was modestly bolder than a lot of people I know in being willing to articulate my critiques and observations in private conversation. 

Publically, to the extent I had any kind of public profile, I was more cautious. I did publish a number of things, like this Yang review, that were critical of wokeness (though I mostly didn’t use the term), but they were usually rather indirect or glancing in their criticism. I didn’t really dive in, in other words, and looking back at Yang’s work is a bit humbling in that respect. I didn’t have the insight he had, nor the taste for combat, but there was good work I could have done if I’d been willing to risk more.

I’m ambivalent about that choice. Some of it was just pure caution. I didn’t want to alienate people socially. I had some concern about endangering future job prospects. And I wanted to maintain my options when it came to where I could publish. Some of it was wise caution. I didn’t want to lose my head. Some of it was just bandwidth. I had young kids, no one clamoring for my byline, and a day job. I didn’t have the time to go into battle in the way I would have felt like I needed to, which was with a great deal of preparation and sophistication. So in sum: not a bad record, not an amazing one. I didn’t do or say anything stupid. I was right about a few things, including Yang, very early. I could have been bolder. And I missed a real opportunity to start a Substack in like 2018. I would have a lot more subscribers right now.

7. Not so much: