Fear and Loathing in ‘Asian America’

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In The Loneliest Americans, Jay Caspian Kang tries but fails to restore meaning to an empty term. Read madelesque's review:

Photo-Illustration: Vulture One of the first places Jay Caspian Kang takes us to in The Loneliest Americans is Berkeley, California. He hasn’t lived there long. He’s revisiting Joan Didion, like any good recent East Coast transplant, and he is not quite sure how he fits into the place she describes — her vision of college-football games giving way to counterculture, which has now given way to a Whole Foods parking lot. So he walks around a bit.

Like him or not, he is often right about the big stuff. Especially the limits of “Asian American.” Because the term’s a bust. It tries to mean so much that it means almost nothing. Its vagueness could get a pass if we needed it for politics, but “Asian American” doesn’t help us there: When a demographic includes dozens of languages and a yawning wage gap, is it even a demographic at all? What is the Asian American vote? It’s a term that demands caveats to even be usable.

A reader could live with this, savoring the specifics when Kang goes deep on L.A. Koreatown, tutoring centers, and the real-estate origins of Flushing’s Chinatown. Unfortunately, though, Kang can’t get out of his own way. The text is riddled with self-conscious tics and assertions that go nowhere.

The loneliest thing about the book is the way he walls off Asian America, framing us as the only group struggling to define itself. In doing that, he misses important context. Thinking around Blackness, hardly “intractable,” is constantly evolving through conversations around privilege, immigration, colorism, and who gets left behind. When he insists other minorities can’t relate to our flailing, he ignores the struggles over racism and representation within the Latinidad.

 

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