
The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays by Wesley Yang reviewed - whocansay
https://spectator.us/next-neoconservatism-wesley-yang/
======
nkurz
I'll be interested to read the book.

The "Paper Tigers" essay (subtitled "What happens to all the Asian-American
overachievers when the test-taking ends?") was one of the best things I've
read recently. It's been submitted to HN several times since being published
in 2011, but hasn't gotten much discussion. Here's the one with the most:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506651)

The original essay is here: [http://nymag.com/news/features/asian-
americans-2011-5/](http://nymag.com/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/)

And here's clean PDF: [http://nyapm.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/05/PaperTigers.pdf](http://nyapm.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/05/PaperTigers.pdf)

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jasode
I just happened to read this book last week and as an fyi... Despite the
book's title, only the first 3 chapters out of 13 are focused on Asian
culture. The other chapters talk about Aaron Swartz's legal battle and
suicide, Tony Judt and his controversial position Israel, Neil Strauss and
pick up artists, sex diaries and hookups on the web, etc. The Asian chapter on
the Virginia Tech shooter's was educational for me because I didn't know his
social awkwardness caused rejections from girls on campus and how it fueled
his anger.

I thought the book was interesting. If you like Ribbonfarm type of writing,
you might like his dissection of various topics.

~~~
wavefunction
>ribbonfarm "essays" are right there in the title

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johan_larson
That's rather an ambitious title, isn't it? W.E.B. Dubois might be the most
respected African-American intellectual, and "The Souls of Black Folk" might
be his finest work. Yang is setting the bar rather high for himself.

~~~
nkurz
Did you intend "ambitious" to be sarcastic? Given the content, it feels
parallel calling Dubois "uppity": [https://uppitynegronetwork.com/what-is-an-
uppity-negro/](https://uppitynegronetwork.com/what-is-an-uppity-negro/)

In the Paper Tigers essay, much time is spent condemning the highly regulated
degree of ambition deemed appropriate for Asian Americans. Yang consciously
rejects this, and wants the freedom to aim higher. From his Paper Tigers essay
(and partially requoted in the article) he references James Baldwin:

 _I wanted what James Baldwin sought as a writer —“a power which outlasts
kingdoms.” Anything short of that seemed a humiliating compromise. I would
become an aristocrat of the spirit, who prides himself on his incompetence in
the middling tasks that are the world’s business. Who does not seek after
material gain. Who is his own law._

 _￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼This, of course, was madness. A child of Asian
immigrants born into the suburbs of New Jersey and educated at Rutgers cannot
be a law unto himself._

I think it's fair to describe those who seek "a power which outlasts kingdoms"
as "ambitious". The question is whether current American society treats this
degree of ambition by Asian Americans the same as it does those of other
races.

~~~
shliachtx
GP is not commenting on the ability of an Asian-American to write or think on
par with W.E.B. DuBois, but that the presented body of work is not necessarily
a parallel to The Souls of Black Folk. As other commenters have mentioned,
this book does not exclusively discuss the role of Asian-Americans in American
culture and society, apparently being relegated to a few essays. For a book
which proclaims to be about "The Souls of Yellow Folk" \- invoking DuBois's
book, this does indeed seem a little ambitious.

~~~
jhowell
I think the comment questions the clickbait title and not necessarily the
content.

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jinfiesto
I like Wesley Yang's writing quite a lot. As a 2nd generation Asian American
(Korean like Yang himself,) I understand and have experienced quite a lot of
his pain. However, I think he and others somewhat misattributes the origin of
his/our pain. I'm more inclined to think that a lot of this pain comes from
how we are raised and an impedance mismatch between the "American dream" as
our parents understood it and the dream as it is (to be fair, he acknowledges
this is a possibility.)

For example, I think the stereotype of Asian men being effeminate/sexless
robots is largely a byproduct of our childhood upbringing. In my childhood
(and in the childhoods of most of the 2nd generation Asians I've met) dating
was strictly verboten and generally seen as a waste of time that could have
been spent studying. Even in young adulthood, dating is frowned upon by most
1st generation Asian immigrants unless you're explicitly looking to get
hitched. Obviously, when you raise an entire generation of people this way, a
large % of them are going to grow up to be sexually awkward and therefore
unsuccessful in the sexual market.

I'm aware of the data drawn from online services that show that Asian males
are the target of some unfair prejudice. I'd respond to this by saying that
obviously online dating brings out the "worst" in people. Given the sheer
number of available "mates", I'm not surprised people lean on racial
stereotypes to help filter their inputs on such a platform. And if I'm being
honest, yeah, a large number of us Asian males are pretty sexually awkward. If
we're not, it's almost certainly in spite of our upbringing.

I'm aware that this is anecdata, but after some practice (really just putting
myself out there enough,) I haven't had any issues dating in an in-person
format. I'm actually inclined to believe most people are willing to give
anyone a fair shake (presuming some base level of sexual attraction) after
getting to know them a bit, though this assumes that you're comfortable enough
with the various dating rituals to not scare anyone off (which I suppose may
be a tall order if you were raised in a way that prohibited the necessary
practice.)

With regard to being passed over for workplace promotions, Asians are raised
to be deferential to authority. The cultural norm is basically for our parents
to be regarded as dictators within the home (for better or worse.) Moving up
the corporate ladder isn't just the result of "hard work" per say. It takes a
certain amount of arrogance and disregard for your "superiors" and peers to
engage in the kind of self-promotion required to move up the ladder. Yet
again, if we're successful in this domain, it's in spite of our upbringing and
not because of it.

If you've ever read Venkatesh Rao's essays about the office according to the
office, you'll be acquainted with the notion of power talk. Asian Americans
are not typically raised to understand this particular game and there's little
room to practice this growing up when your parent's rule within the home is as
absolute as it is. As Yang puts it, this requires a certain level of
"calibrated insouciance" Asian Americans just don't grow up learning. Once
again, if we learn to play this game successfully, it's in spite of our
upbringing.

From an Asian perspective, White children appear shockingly disrespectful to
their parents. Now being a bit older, I've come to believe that this is up to
a certain point a selective child rearing strategy. Asian children are treated
as if they have no table stakes 100% of the time with regard to negotiating
with their parents (there's basically no negotiation ever.) While this does
lead to a certain "harmony" within the home, I don't think it teaches people
the skills they need to be fiercely self-advocating when they grow into
adults. The American economic system doesn't reward meekness in anyway (I
can't be strong enough on this point.) So to me, it seems counter productive
to be raising meek children if the desire is for them to become competitive at
the highest levels. Our identities are honed on conflict, and it's also
through conflict that we develop a set of values and the ability to make value
judgments about when it's when in our interests to fight or retreat. Our 1st
generation parents aversion to conflict within the home I think has raised us
to be overly meek in the outside world.

With regard to the lack of Asian CEOs despite disproportionately high Asian
representation at elite universities, Asian Americans are raised to not be
risk takers. There's honestly a certain amount of cultural distaste for risk-
taking and there's huge social stigma attached to failure in this domain. Once
again, if you observe successful Asian Americans in this domain, it's because
they've overcome their upbringing and learned to become calculated risk
takers.

Yang also mentions this notion of "pumping the iron of math." Even in the
educational domain, I've noticed a lot of Asians prefer to substitute
repetition and rote learning for time spent actually thinking about and
understanding what they're doing at a deeper level. This kind of practice is
useful to a point, but unfortunately puts a ceiling on how far you can
progress. This is something that was particularly painful to me in particular.
I spent a lot of time laboring under the delusion that there was a "right way"
to do most everything, if only I could find it and practice it enough. Beyond
a certain level of prowess (surprisingly early sometimes), you find yourself
"trailblazing" for lack of a better word, and this sort of mentality can only
get in your way.

I know this is an uncomfortable discussion because it raises the specter of
"cultural superiority." To be clear, I'm not arguing here that Asian American
culture is inferior in any way, only that in some respects it might be
maladaptive to the system we find ourselves in. In a lot of ways, I think our
parents have a major blindspot in that they want us to go farther than they
did, using the same maps and tools that they did.

I think what our parents were blind to was the fact that there are a lot of
"hidden" games that you need to learn how to play to be successful in this
society, and that learning these games isn't something that's surmountable by
hard work alone. As much as we like to pretend otherwise, societies are a lot
more than just their laws and institutions. White folks in this country have
had their hands on the levers of power for a while (for various reasons,) and
as a consequence, their children are able to learn the games they need to know
to be successful in this society from their parents and grandparents. Most of
us are still only in our second or third generations. We're obviously
comparatively on the back foot in terms of what our parents are able to give
us in terms of the cultural knowledge necessary for success in this particular
iteration of our society.

Again, to be clear, I'm not arguing that this situation is "moral," just that
in my opinion, it's pointless to be bitter about it. If we want to go farther
than our parents, I think it's clear we won't be able to do it using all of
the tools they tried to give us.

Obviously, there's a larger discussion here about whether or not this
situation is moral in the first place. I'm inclined to think not, but I'm also
of the mind that it's not much use to be bitter about the fact. I think we'll
change the situation faster if we learn how to play the games we don't
understand and are able to get our hands on the levers that move the media,
politics and business. In many ways, I think as a cultural group we should be
looking to the Jews as an example. Despite being so aggressively pogromed over
the centuries and despite there being so relatively few of them, they've
managed to become dramatically overrepresented at the top of basically every
major domain of human endeavor.

To finish, I don't think there's anything wrong with our faces as Yang
conjectures. I think we can learn the games we don't know how to play yet and
hopefully by doing so make a world that's a little kinder to our children and
grandchildren (not that the world is particularly unkind to us in my opinion.)
It'll just require some tweaking of our cultural values and maybe rejecting
some of the tools and maps of the world we were passed from our parents.

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peteretep
> those — often Asian, usually male — who find themselves excluded from
> certain intangible perquisites of American life: love, success, security,
> and belonging

I’m going to need some actual data on that, compared to outcomes of different
gender/ethnicity combos.

~~~
iso1337
Okcupid did some analyses on this. The big losers in the US sexual market are
black females, black males, and asian males.

[https://theblog.okcupid.com/race-and-
attraction-2009-2014-10...](https://theblog.okcupid.com/race-and-
attraction-2009-2014-107dcbb4f060)

~~~
gandutraveler
I believe Asian in this study means Asian Continent and not the american
'Asian'

~~~
iso1337
No, it should refer to Asian Americans

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probablyasian
Asians in America are considered soulless, mercantile and at best technically
skilled people. We are sexless, have frail constitution and therefore totally
unintimidating. Frankly, I like this set-up. This allows us to fly below/above
the radar of idle-minded people. You accomplish a lot when drama queens and
trouble causers of society are preoccupied with something else other than you.
Although, it has started to change of late with China being a regular fixture
in the media.

edit: downvotes are fine, but flagging? Opinions (other than those prescribed)
are not allowed here?

~~~
dang
I upvoted the comment back up because it doesn't seem particularly bad to me.

However, would you please stop using new accounts for each few comments you
post? That is against the site guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

People needn't use their real names here, but do need to have some consistent
identity for others to relate to. Otherwise this place isn't a community, and
we want it to be a community. I've explained this many times:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

