These days The Game is a long way past its moment in the sun, of course, while the pickup artist phenomenon survives mainly as a piece of half-dissolved cultural flotsam. In a way, there’s almost something innocent about it now—remember when all we had to worry about were these creepy guys and their seduction algorithms? on the other hand, it doesn’t take much to see the glimmer in Strauss’s success of some of the nastier things that would follow it down the pipeline: incels and Elliot Rodger; Return of Kings and the other seething corners of the internet; the spread of rage-fueled groups who think of themselves as resisting the disappearance of men or the white race. For his part, Yang alludes to The Game at two other moments in his book. In “Paper Tigers”—an essay about Asian-American assimilation—he quotes a pickup artist describing the seduction community as “a support group for losers,” a place where despairing men could come for help reinventing themselves. Whereas in “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho” he touches on it in the context of a comfortless meditation on the kind of guy who remains stranded in his own fury and disappointment, poisoned beyond help. At the center of the essay is Cho—the boy who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, in what was then the deadliest mass shooting in American history.
As I said, there’s a feeling of being forgotten or erased that’s like a tripwire for a kind of frenzy if it ever hits you hard enough. But hasn’t everybody had at least a taste of that? What’s less common is coming face to face with an indication of what you might be like if all of the intervening layers of sanity and socialization weren’t there to save you—or others—from yourself. Yang and Cho are both Korean-American. The writer’s jolt of recognition when he first comes across the news of the massacre (“He looks like me, I thought”) presages a morbid feeling of insight. To call it sympathy would be grotesque. But it’s as though Yang recognizes in Cho something like a psychotic embodiment of the rancor buried in The Game. Common to both was the perception of a thriving world “that was never going include them in its hoped-for happy endings anyway,” and which would go on disregarding them for the rest of their null lives unless it was confronted by an act of strength—and forced to pay attention.
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The Souls of Yellow Folk is an oddly put together book in a couple of respects. Apart from a short introductory piece, all of the essays—thirteen in total, dating from 2008 to 2017—have been published elsewhere, and the subject matter is less coherent than the eye-catching title would lead you to believe. Despite the nominal link to W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Yang isn’t trying to make a comprehensive statement about the lives of Asian-Americans in the 21st century. Instead, the collection begins with two substantial essays about race from the earliest part of his career (“The Face of Seung-Hui Cho” and “Paper Tigers”), then weaves off into a disparate series of magazine profiles, personal reminiscences and articles about sexual mores—before circling back to race again, only this time in the context of contemporary debates around identity politics and social justice. Nothing included is anything less than skillfully written. There are no boring entries (although one or two of the profiles come close). But you have to dig a bit and make inferences to get a sense of the larger story the book might be trying to tell.
Here’s the narrative I projected. At the end of The Souls of Yellow Folk are the firestorms of social media and Donald Trump. Before we get there, Yang presents us with a series of dispatches from what we might think of, now, as a bygone country, largely unaware of its teetering health. Two of the subjects of his profiles—the historian Tony Judt and the political theorist Francis Fukuyama—sketch the outlines of some of the bigger ideas in play. “You can’t run a society that is profoundly unfair for a long time without people becoming profoundly distrustful,” remarks Judt, speaking in 2009, “and without social trust there can be no common consent and no common goods, and no shared purposes.” Even more important for Yang is the concept of recognition that he takes from Fukuyama (or rather, Fukuyama’s Hegel). Roughly put, the idea is that “the desire for recognition of one’s dignity and worth” is fundamental to human life. In the more triumphal Hegelian narratives—such as the one that made Fukuyama famous—this basic yearning is meant to have led civilization towards a stable and conclusive political order, defined by the rule of law, a (more or less) representative liberal state, market exchange and the bourgeois family unit: the notorious “end of history.” For Yang, recognition becomes a tool for thinking about resentment, self-perception and the fractiousness of identity politics. But underlying all of those topics you can imagine a question lingering about the capacity of America—or of any modern, more or less liberal state—to meet the psychic and spiritual needs of its members.
It’s from this angle that Yang’s arguments about Asian-American experience are best interpreted. In the introduction to The Souls of Yellow Folk, he recalls an exchange with the editor who asked him if he wanted to write about Seung-Hui Cho. Part of him resisted the approach, insulted at the suggestion he had any particular insight into the murderer. Yet he knew instinctively there was a connection. “What we were presumed to share in common—and this was the implication I resented, because it was both true and unspeakable—was the peculiar burden of nonrecognition, of invisibility, that is the condition of being an Asian man in America.” This isn’t, Yang explains, simply a question of feeling unrepresented or inferior, but the more obliviating problem of belonging to a culture in which such faces are coded as “a kind of cipher, a void, and all the more so to those of us who had to confront it gazing back at us from a reflected surface.” He describes the rush of paranoia this would trigger:
Was this a real condition or just my own private hallucination? By this I mean something that has in recent years escaped from the obscurity in which it was once shrouded, even as it was always the most salient of all facts, the one most readily on display, the thing that was unspeakable precisely because it need never be spoken: that as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were by default unlovable and unloved; that you were presumptively a nobody, a mute and servile figure, distinguishable above all by your total incapacity to threaten anyone; that you were many laudable things that the world might respect and reward, but you were fundamentally powerless to affect anyone in a way that would make you either loved or feared.
What was the epistemological status of such an extravagant assertion? … It had no real truth value, except that under certain conditions, one felt it with every fiber of one’s being to be true.
What sort of complaint is this? on one level—the most obvious, perhaps—it reads like a denunciation of racial bias. And it is, in a way. But there’s also something else going on. In the field of competing resentments that makes up so much of the nation’s discourse under Trump, the deeper argument is that to be Asian-American—perhaps specifically an Asian-American male—is to be rendered invisible in a uniquely tricky way, because you fall through the cracks of the ruling narratives about group status. An Asian man, says Yang, is “an ‘honorary white’ person who will always be denied the full perquisites of whiteness; an entitled man who will never quite be regarded or treated like a man; a nominal minority whose claim to be a ‘person of color’ deserving of the special regard reserved for victims is taken seriously by no one.” In other words, he embodies a kind of malfunction in the identity calculus of society’s winners and losers: a nonentity in virtue of his privilege.
This thought has two sides to it. Most directly, it underpins a thesis about race and some recently widespread changes in how we talk about it. Yang’s contention is that social media has enabled the rapid popularization of a “postmodern” way of thinking about identity and power that turns “the whole world into a field for both interpretation and contestation.” (Consider the ubiquitous application of the concept of privilege, for example.) But these arguments about ideology also shade into a broader reflection on psychological dependence and shared social reality. This strikes me as being Yang’s real subject—the emotional core of his work, you could say—but race, and more specifically Asian-American identity, is what he uses to explore it. In general terms, the most important thing about that identity is the odd liminal position Asians occupy in the modern United States. Taken as a bloc, Asian Americans are better educated and have a higher median family income than any other ethnic group in the country, including whites. They also represent a key component—originating with the end of national-origin immigration quotas in 1965—of the demographic revolution that is steadily pushing the U.S. from a white-majority to a white-minority nation. From less than half a percent of the population in 1960, Asians now constitute almost 7 percent, roughly two-thirds of whom were born overseas. As Yang observes, although the label “Asian-American” is a particularly tenuous one in some respects (the 2010 U.S. Census identifies 24 distinct national backgrounds in its remit) what’s remarkable is that it can be used in good conscience to tell a quintessential American success story, even as it gestures towards the globalizing trends that were part of the catalyst for Trump’s malicious brand of nationalism.