I remember when that NYT review was published. Given how much tepid Asian American dreck the NYT praises and how Souls wasn't exactly a mainstream-hyped book, there was an obvious ulterior motive in how the paper went out of its way to trash the book. And they sent one of the biggest Asian American literary emissaries, Viet Thanh Nguyen, to do it, to not only protect literary culture from Yang's nefariousness, but also Asian American literary culture.
Yang's point about the forced neutrality/universality of the Asian American male perspective is a bit self-aggrandizing, but there's an element of truth to it. If you're a straight Asian American guy, you do get an upfront and very personal glimpse into how transactional and often hypocritical American society is, especially elite progressive circles (in contrast, conservative circles tend to just be more blatantly discriminatory and self-interested).
I think this experience was especially bad for those around Wesley Yang's age (Gen Xers, as well as the oldest Millennials) because they were essentially the first modern wave of American-born Asian Americans, so they had to deal with everything alone. Still, it's surprising to think that elite publications like n+1 and NY Mag did, at one point, seem to want to promote Yang as a premier voice of Asian America. I'm guessing it was a carryover attitude from a more 90s/2000s mindset where elite literary culture was more male-centric.
I'm curious as to whether Yang's decline is due to his manic anti-woke turn on social media, or if he became that Twitter addict because he saw no future in the literary world (e.g. couldn't get published, got socially ostracized, etc.).
That's a really interesting point about the generational differences. I hadn't thought about it, but it does seem like there's been a sea change in, say, the pop cultural depiction of the Asian-American male even in the five years since Souls of Yellow Folk came out.
I think we also forget how much the Asian American population has grown in the last few decades, and how new a thing it is to have as many Asian American artists, writers, actors, filmmakers, musicians, etc. as players in the cultural scene. It's night and day from when Yang and I (we're almost exact contemporaries) were kids in the 80s and 90s.
I could be wrong about this, but I'd be surprised if Yang was having a hard time finding magazines to publish his stuff, or publishers to put out books he wrote. I agree that he was out of favor politically by the time the book came out, but still, people who can write like he can are a rare commodity. Certainly the centrist and center-right publications -- Quillette, Tablet, American Affairs, a bunch more by now. -- would have been ecstatic to have him in their pages. That said, the Twitter/Patreon/Substack route may have been a more efficient way of making money for him.
Tablet did publish him. He even had a pithy title for his articles, “Meme Wars”.
He has, sadly, become unreliable in producing content; his Substack is practically dormant. I sort of look in terror at what he’s become, and what I can glean of his personal life, worried that every moment I spend reading and responding online (even this very comment) is one more step towards madness.
And of course, as I say this, I poked my head into his Twitter feed yesterday and he wrote a perfectly phrased bon mot about Gen-X, our generation (you keep your Xennial hands off of him, Oppenheimer!)
Yes, there's definitely been a sea of change. But what sucks for guys like Yang is that most of that change has been powered by overseas Asian culture, and a lot of Asian Americans of those older Millennial and Gen X generations distanced themselves from that culture growing up (see "Paper Tigers").
There's a really good, highly underrated movie called Seoul Searching, which is about a group of Korean American kids who go to Korea for a summer in some youth program. The KAs show up in the airport, acting like they're too cool to be there. Nowadays, it'd be more likely to be reversed, where the Asian Americans are the lower status ones.
Edit: I should add Seoul Searching is set in the 1980s.
It’s amazing how quickly these generational things change. I think of the Jewish American writers like 10 or 15 years older than me. They were too young to be old school New York intellectuals but too old to have embraced Jewishness as part of the 1990s multi cultural thing.
I think it has become a vicious circle with some people. It's like David Chappelle. He makes some trans jokes and gets a huge backlash which he resents. His resentment makes him digging even further which gets him more of a backlash, which causes even more resentment.... And so on. I suspect this has something to do with Yang's spiral into intense preoccupation with certain subjects, because his even lightytouching on them cost him so much in the way of his reputation.
I appreciate this: I also view Yang's case as tragic and worth reflection. I met Yang at a Jordan Peterson meetup that a coworker organized in the Bay Area while Yang was working on his profile of Peterson. (I went to support my coworker rather than as a fan.) Yang was not listening very well to the people he was talking to (plenty of clever verbally open-minded engagement but minimal empathetically open-hearted rapport), and he was not earning the trust of those who could have warned him about a number of the "missing stairs" in that anti-woke scene, that is, who was false and in which ways. Since then, it seems he's fallen through those missing stairs, like an unfortunately large number of others who were at that meetup. The Peterson scene was and remains a dangerously sticky mess.
For better and worse genius counts for little in the longer run without good instincts for simpler truths as well. Intelligence alone rarely catches and corrects flawed premises arising from poor empathy or poor judgment of character.
That all totally tracks vis a vis my own interactions with him. Totally brilliant, not relational at all, and lacking in some fundamental capacity for judgement.
That seems like it's maybe Peterson's tragic flaw as well, or one among many.
Yes, it seems to be a common pattern of modern (at latest, Victorian and onwards) intellectual competition dynamics. Masculinity and soft relationality don't go together cleanly for intellectual outsiders, from Carlyle to Mailer (or to Paglia and Butler if anyone wanted to go there). There's a certain combination of ice and fire needed for modern masculine public intellectual performance that doesn't often fit together well with the softer relationality of the sunny, breezy everyday.
I think it's too early to write him off as somebody who is a lost cause though. It is really easy to lose the plot in the era we live in and the sustained insanity we've been living through for 10ish so years or more (I guess it's debatable on when it started). He's become myopic in his vision. And obsessed with several topics to the exclusion of everything else. He's not necessarily wrong but the laser sharp focus becomes overwhelming and it becomes uncomfortable when it is directed towards a demographic who is vulnerable, such as the transgendered. I believe he'll go on to do great things after this time has passed.
The laser like focus is merited as you have a huge number of people supporting irreparably destroying children’s bodies and lives. That, combined with the ideology being directly taught to impressionable young children, is creating a huge amount of anger and frustration.
Teaching children that woman can have penises and vaginas and men can get pregnant is pure insanity.
Your focus on .0001% of the population is weird and obsessive. Not our focus on 50% of the population (women) and vulnerable and easily misled children.
I wasn't debating his position on the issue. I was saying that he seems to have disappeared as a writer. Of course he's free to choose how he wants to spend his time, but I valued him as an artist, not as an activist. As an artist it hasn't been good for him.
You’re disappointed by art being taken over by politics and ideology. Where were you 10+years ago? The left had politicized everything!!! You now complaining about it is annoying and hypocritical. You’re just mad Yang took a “right wing” take as an artist.
Thanks for this. I especially need to go look at his piece on Fukayama, which for a variety of reasons is a special interest of mine. I too have been somewhat put off by Yang's recent monomania on wokeness, even if I'm probably more sympathetic than you are to it. For all his faults, he'll always be a useful counterpoint to the Asian American activist losers who whine about stuff like Andrew Yang making jokes about math.
I remember when that NYT review was published. Given how much tepid Asian American dreck the NYT praises and how Souls wasn't exactly a mainstream-hyped book, there was an obvious ulterior motive in how the paper went out of its way to trash the book. And they sent one of the biggest Asian American literary emissaries, Viet Thanh Nguyen, to do it, to not only protect literary culture from Yang's nefariousness, but also Asian American literary culture.
Yang's point about the forced neutrality/universality of the Asian American male perspective is a bit self-aggrandizing, but there's an element of truth to it. If you're a straight Asian American guy, you do get an upfront and very personal glimpse into how transactional and often hypocritical American society is, especially elite progressive circles (in contrast, conservative circles tend to just be more blatantly discriminatory and self-interested).
I think this experience was especially bad for those around Wesley Yang's age (Gen Xers, as well as the oldest Millennials) because they were essentially the first modern wave of American-born Asian Americans, so they had to deal with everything alone. Still, it's surprising to think that elite publications like n+1 and NY Mag did, at one point, seem to want to promote Yang as a premier voice of Asian America. I'm guessing it was a carryover attitude from a more 90s/2000s mindset where elite literary culture was more male-centric.
I'm curious as to whether Yang's decline is due to his manic anti-woke turn on social media, or if he became that Twitter addict because he saw no future in the literary world (e.g. couldn't get published, got socially ostracized, etc.).
That's a really interesting point about the generational differences. I hadn't thought about it, but it does seem like there's been a sea change in, say, the pop cultural depiction of the Asian-American male even in the five years since Souls of Yellow Folk came out.
I think we also forget how much the Asian American population has grown in the last few decades, and how new a thing it is to have as many Asian American artists, writers, actors, filmmakers, musicians, etc. as players in the cultural scene. It's night and day from when Yang and I (we're almost exact contemporaries) were kids in the 80s and 90s.
I could be wrong about this, but I'd be surprised if Yang was having a hard time finding magazines to publish his stuff, or publishers to put out books he wrote. I agree that he was out of favor politically by the time the book came out, but still, people who can write like he can are a rare commodity. Certainly the centrist and center-right publications -- Quillette, Tablet, American Affairs, a bunch more by now. -- would have been ecstatic to have him in their pages. That said, the Twitter/Patreon/Substack route may have been a more efficient way of making money for him.
Tablet did publish him. He even had a pithy title for his articles, “Meme Wars”.
He has, sadly, become unreliable in producing content; his Substack is practically dormant. I sort of look in terror at what he’s become, and what I can glean of his personal life, worried that every moment I spend reading and responding online (even this very comment) is one more step towards madness.
And of course, as I say this, I poked my head into his Twitter feed yesterday and he wrote a perfectly phrased bon mot about Gen-X, our generation (you keep your Xennial hands off of him, Oppenheimer!)
Link to the tweet?
https://x.com/wesyang/status/1848715660777689519
https://x.com/wesyang/status/1848722232614273327
Lol. Totally.
He hasn’t stopped being a genius, he’s just stopped being able to express it in a meaningful form.
Yes, there's definitely been a sea of change. But what sucks for guys like Yang is that most of that change has been powered by overseas Asian culture, and a lot of Asian Americans of those older Millennial and Gen X generations distanced themselves from that culture growing up (see "Paper Tigers").
There's a really good, highly underrated movie called Seoul Searching, which is about a group of Korean American kids who go to Korea for a summer in some youth program. The KAs show up in the airport, acting like they're too cool to be there. Nowadays, it'd be more likely to be reversed, where the Asian Americans are the lower status ones.
Edit: I should add Seoul Searching is set in the 1980s.
It’s amazing how quickly these generational things change. I think of the Jewish American writers like 10 or 15 years older than me. They were too young to be old school New York intellectuals but too old to have embraced Jewishness as part of the 1990s multi cultural thing.
I think it has become a vicious circle with some people. It's like David Chappelle. He makes some trans jokes and gets a huge backlash which he resents. His resentment makes him digging even further which gets him more of a backlash, which causes even more resentment.... And so on. I suspect this has something to do with Yang's spiral into intense preoccupation with certain subjects, because his even lightytouching on them cost him so much in the way of his reputation.
Agreed. I think Chappelle is maybe finally pulling himself out of that spiral, but it cost him a few years of mediocre comedy.
I appreciate this: I also view Yang's case as tragic and worth reflection. I met Yang at a Jordan Peterson meetup that a coworker organized in the Bay Area while Yang was working on his profile of Peterson. (I went to support my coworker rather than as a fan.) Yang was not listening very well to the people he was talking to (plenty of clever verbally open-minded engagement but minimal empathetically open-hearted rapport), and he was not earning the trust of those who could have warned him about a number of the "missing stairs" in that anti-woke scene, that is, who was false and in which ways. Since then, it seems he's fallen through those missing stairs, like an unfortunately large number of others who were at that meetup. The Peterson scene was and remains a dangerously sticky mess.
For better and worse genius counts for little in the longer run without good instincts for simpler truths as well. Intelligence alone rarely catches and corrects flawed premises arising from poor empathy or poor judgment of character.
That all totally tracks vis a vis my own interactions with him. Totally brilliant, not relational at all, and lacking in some fundamental capacity for judgement.
That seems like it's maybe Peterson's tragic flaw as well, or one among many.
Yes, it seems to be a common pattern of modern (at latest, Victorian and onwards) intellectual competition dynamics. Masculinity and soft relationality don't go together cleanly for intellectual outsiders, from Carlyle to Mailer (or to Paglia and Butler if anyone wanted to go there). There's a certain combination of ice and fire needed for modern masculine public intellectual performance that doesn't often fit together well with the softer relationality of the sunny, breezy everyday.
I think it's too early to write him off as somebody who is a lost cause though. It is really easy to lose the plot in the era we live in and the sustained insanity we've been living through for 10ish so years or more (I guess it's debatable on when it started). He's become myopic in his vision. And obsessed with several topics to the exclusion of everything else. He's not necessarily wrong but the laser sharp focus becomes overwhelming and it becomes uncomfortable when it is directed towards a demographic who is vulnerable, such as the transgendered. I believe he'll go on to do great things after this time has passed.
Hope you're right. Certainly he's young enough, in theory, to have another few decades of working at a very high level.
The laser like focus is merited as you have a huge number of people supporting irreparably destroying children’s bodies and lives. That, combined with the ideology being directly taught to impressionable young children, is creating a huge amount of anger and frustration.
Teaching children that woman can have penises and vaginas and men can get pregnant is pure insanity.
Your focus on .0001% of the population is weird and obsessive. Not our focus on 50% of the population (women) and vulnerable and easily misled children.
I wasn't debating his position on the issue. I was saying that he seems to have disappeared as a writer. Of course he's free to choose how he wants to spend his time, but I valued him as an artist, not as an activist. As an artist it hasn't been good for him.
I was replying to MooShoo.
You’re disappointed by art being taken over by politics and ideology. Where were you 10+years ago? The left had politicized everything!!! You now complaining about it is annoying and hypocritical. You’re just mad Yang took a “right wing” take as an artist.
Had never heard of Yang before this but found both your writing and his essay about Cho very interesting. Thanks for the thoughtful piece.
I thought the first half was very interesting and then it became pretty predictable. Still better than most books!
No! The last section, which is stuff he originally published at Tablet, is brilliant!
Thanks for this. I especially need to go look at his piece on Fukayama, which for a variety of reasons is a special interest of mine. I too have been somewhat put off by Yang's recent monomania on wokeness, even if I'm probably more sympathetic than you are to it. For all his faults, he'll always be a useful counterpoint to the Asian American activist losers who whine about stuff like Andrew Yang making jokes about math.