The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays by Wesley Yang reviewed | Hacker News Reader

The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays by Wesley Yang reviewed

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37 pointswhocansay30 comments

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

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

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

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.

>ribbonfarm "essays" are right there in the title

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.

Did you intend "ambitious" to be sarcastic? Given the content, it feels parallel calling Dubois "uppity": 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.

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.

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

I am not being sarcastic. By choosing the title he did, the author is setting himself up for comparison with a really famous work, and I have to wonder whether that was wise. It was, to say the least, bold.

Would I have reacted differently to something similar done by someone who is not Asian? Hard to say; I can't interrogate my mind with complete reliability from the inside. But believe the answer is no, I would have reacted the same way regardless of the race of the author.

I agree that it's a bold title, and agree that the the collected essays probably aren't going to measure up to the historical standard. But I think this is central to Yang's thesis that the standards of behavior are different for Asians in America than they are for others.

For me, I think the title choice works because it calls attention to the fact that Asian American culture is not particularly open to the strategy of aiming really high and being likely to fail, and instead favors targeting a more modest level of success that can be attained with greater likelihood. Braggadocio and overconfidence are not considered typical traits.

Yang's title is high-risk high-reward high-likelihood-of-failure, and I do find my self surprised (in what is likely a racially biased manner) that an Asian American male would choose such a brazen title. That I have this thought (as a non-Asian Amerian) makes me suspect that Yang is on to something.

> Yang is setting the bar rather high for himself.

That's precisely the point!

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.

> 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.

This is not a quote from the book being reviewed, this is a quote from the review itself summarizing the book's stories. Fuller context:

"Representing a decade of journalism and essential reading for those concerned with identity in America today, Yang’s essays range from profiles of pickup artists to critiques of campus activism, but they tend to center on those — often Asian, usually male — who find themselves excluded from certain intangible perquisites of American life: love, success, security, and belonging."

So in context, you are asking for data... which would be asking "what are the subjects of each story in the book". You seem to be confusing the stories in a book of articles and essays with a statistical work about something else, or maybe you meant to ask a different question?

The linked article states a fact, regardless of the fact it’s a review of another piece of work. I would like proof of that fact.

It seems to me that it's stating facts about the essays, not necessarily making or quoting a broader statistical statement. It's like a reviewer writing that "Hunter Thomson writes about his time in Las Vegas which is largely drink and drug fueled" and you asking for statistical proof that Las Vegas dynamos run on beer and cocaine. The review is talking about the subjects of the specific works being reviewed, not necessarily the world at large. That's why I quoted more context from the review, to make that clearer.

Here is "love" data for college students. Take particular note of the summary:

> First, Asian guys are screwed, obviously.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2008/07/why-does-race...

Asians as a group have more economic success and security than whites do. But they're right to complain about love. Economic success doesn't mean much by itself, unless your idea of the good life is to sit in the dark muttering over your big pile of gold.

I'd love to see another version of this study performed at UCLA. Unlike New York, California has a huge and highly culturally-integrated Asian population.

Why stop at college students? Interracial marriages between Asians and whites in the US are about 80% Asian female / white male and 20% the other way around. There is no group that preferentially marries Asian men over Asian women, so again Asian guys are screwed.

Well, data point of one here: my partner is an Asian man and I'm black ;)

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...

While the stats are accurate, the self selection may not represent the pop at large.

Here’s another: Black females and asian males are less likely to be in interracial marriages [1]. Under the heading “For blacks and Asians, big gender gaps in intermarriage”

Of course this only paints part of the picture, since it sliced and diced the data differently. Ideally you’d have much more comprehensive statistics about people in relationships, and the statistics wouldn’t just be % of intermarriage, but all marriages. However you should be able to extrapolate, since all marriages = interracial + interracial marriages. So if asian females have higher rates of intermarriage and males don’t, then there presumably are a surplus of unmarried asian males (and black females for that matter).

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/05/18/1-trends-and-patte...

I wonder if there is a difference between American born Asians and transplants. In other words, is there a cultural component to the preferences (i.e. foreign cultural component, rather than just local cultural components). For black women obviously, this applies much less and other things might be going on.

Anecdata: white female expats struggle with dating in Asia.

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

No, it should refer to Asian Americans

I addition to the OKCupid study, here is some other data:

* 2007 Chicago Booth paper about online dating (https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/emir.kamenica/documents/rac...): One important (probably unsurprising) find was that "Females exhibit stronger racial preferences than males." Also from the paper: " Finally, we can reject the hypothesis of equal preference against partners of other races for white, black, and Hispanic subjects, owing largely to the greater preference against Asian males by all other races"

* If you prefer anecdata, here are some Asian stories from the frontlines: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/asian-americans-dating-.... Asian women are desirable but they find that this cuts both ways, i.e. the desirability comes with unwanted fetishization on the dragon lady (O-Ren Ishii, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Bill:_Volume_1) - geisha scale (Suzy Wong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Suzie_Wong_(film)).

* If you're interested in the above fetishization of Asian women, here's an interesting paper on how they have been portrayed in Hollywood by analyzing four movies that span 20th century: https://web.uri.edu/iaics/files/07Wang.pdf

And yet, marriage rates are by far the highest in Asian Americans compared to other ethnicities:

https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...

The OkCupid data shows that everyone prefers people of their own race, and Asian women are no different.

> If you prefer anecdata

I mean, specifically not. I am open-minded to the idea that Asian-American men are being excluded in ways outside of affirmative-action, but not willing to accept "feel discriminated against" as having any weight in an era where there's a US President largely elected by white men who feel discriminated against.

Every reply to my original question ignores every category except dating, and if you use marriage as a (I think pretty reasonable) proxy, it's hard to make a case that Asian men are suffering there.

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?

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.

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/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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