Asian-American literature is boring because liberalism is the mother-of-all identity shredders and our literary elites are approval-seeking strivers

Thoughts on Chris Jesu Lee's 'Asian-American Psycho'

I’m watching my high school teacher cry as she rotates the massive CRT television strapped to a black metal stand on wheels so that we can’t see anything more after catching a glimpse of the planes flying into the towers. She’s too upset to continue watching the live coverage and in a moment of maternal instinct (we will all watch the footage when we get home anyways) she turns off the machine to spare us the distress that is currently leaking out of her tear ducts into thin clear streaks mapped down her face in twinned vertical lines.

I’m an adolescent male whose primary reference points to base reality are the news and Hollywood movies and the hyper-reality of September the eleventh doesn’t so much disturb me as it evokes a kind of cinematic curiosity about what will happen next and the extent to which subsequent events might be equally interesting or compelling on a purely narrative basis.

That we are going to win is not for a moment in doubt, for we are Americans—we are invincible.

I’m eighteen years old and a college freshman and given my location within the imperial core of the hegemon and the political illiteracy of my transplanted immigrant family and my complete lack of media theory or criticism my interpretation of these events is structurally overdetermined by factors well beyond my control.

I am, in other words, a non-agentic unit of manufactured consent.

Subsequently I develop what my peers describe as a somewhat-autistic interest in the psychology of Islamic radicalization and jihadism and given my social mileau this translates into the memetic implantation of various Islamophobic analyses of terrorism in which the concepts of material conditions, colonization, and imperialism are entirely absent.

Think something like Sam Harris’s ultra-reductive analysis of jihadism—a child-like theory that amounts to textual exegesis as some kind of magical power that vitiates the panoply of other psychological, historical, and material forces that are always pulling on any one person’s mental state, thereby leading them in the direction of action, radicalized or otherwise.

i.e. New Atheist, proto-IDW tier neoconservative sludge.

And, yet, even in the midst of this extremely reductive, Manichean, dehumanizing understanding of why young Muslim men are radicalizing seemingly en masse I can somehow still understand, how, from the interiority of that experience, these men are quite obviously operating in an entirely different psychological reality as warriors of God and their lives and deaths are rather obviously suffused with meaning.

This does not excuse the obvious horror of, say, blowing up people random people shopping in some Souk market, or of sawing the heads off prisoners, but in the simpler case of the outgunned insurgent fighting an occupying military it becomes considerably more psychologically comprehensible and something that I can at least understand on a conceptual level even if my brain-stamped generic American nationalism can’t quite parse it as a reasonable response to a foreign invasion.

Some of my good friends in college, Christian conservatives, disclose to me that they have fantasies of joining a modern version of the Knights Templar, with crosses emblazoned over plate carriers, but I can immediately discern that this is just LARPing and what they are doing is transferring ideas from books and video games into an RPG-like world of fantasy (none of them actually enlist after making these comments).

I lack any semblance of God, who, at best, is cold and distant to me on an individual basis, and I am skeptical of anything other than the most generic instantiations of theism such as Thomas Payne’s minimalistic, post-Christian version of Deism. Even that increasingly feels like a stretch as I accumulate knowledge about the problem of evil and the inadequacies of various compensatory theodicies.

And so, although I am at this point still thinking of these young Muslim men as our geopolitical enemies—CNN is telling me they are Iraqi “insurgents”—some small, private part of me envies them for their faith, and, unsure of what this personal admission means or how to process it, I tell no one.

Then, I think about this a little bit more, cognizant of the possibility that I’m engaged in some form of idealization of the noble savage, which feels potentially stupid and embarrassing.

Finally, I recognize this part as a kind of sorrow that lives within, not because I even think of myself as having any enemies in the personal sense or aspire to be a participant in a generically heroic military battle, but because I understand, implicitly, that history is over, that we have already arrived at the apex of human moral development (a secular enlightenment), and that there is nothing left to struggle over—there is no reason to be fighting.

There is nothing in my heart, not even my nominal American or Western nationalism, that could conceivably move me in any such direction.

I am part of a group. The group is the post-racial middle-class Americans of the early aughts (millennials). As far as I can tell, our primary operating system is pleasure-seeking behavior—getting off—and erasing any obstacles that might make this more inconvenient. We are, as a collective, engaged in the repudiation of Christian morality and widening the space between Church and State as the latent embers of Protestantism react in futile protest, manifesting various strains of evangelicism that virtually anyone can intuit is losing the war of culture and has been doing so for a very long time.

We are a secular society, we are a liberal society, and liberalism can admit no power—especially faith—that exceeds it.

Later on I will realize that liberalism isn’t a political ideology so much as it is a system of morality that subordinates all other systems of morality. Liberalism subordinates everything, even God, under its own memetically superior moral axioms.

That is to say, it is totalizing, and so our psychological discomfort with the faith of men who are willing to fly airplanes into buildings sits squarely in an existential category of dread. National security considerations (i.e. planetary hegemony considerations) demand that this alien, oriental force cannot be allowed to persist, and so we move heaven and earth to crush it, killing and displacing millions in order to get the job done.

This paranoia expands throughout our society, into various social panics about societal Islamicization (Eurabia) and “Sharia law” and so on. So we look at young Muslim men with deep levels of suspicion, for it is abundantly clear to both liberals and conservatives that they have rejected modernity, that they have ghettoized or formed parallel communities or have become a fifth column, and that this is a major problem that requires a whole-of-society level of response.

I read articles in prestigious magazines about suicide bombings and mass shootings perpetrated by these men of faith and watch as our national government vows, not wholly unreasonably, to eradicate this phenomenon from the face of the earth.

But, as the years go by, instead of a climactic battle of good against evil, it’s a slow bleed against decentralized geurilla movements, an attritional gravity that even the velocity of our imperial wealth production cannot escape.

And then it’s the year 2022 and there’s a mainstream Marvel television series about a teenage female Muslim superhero and basically nobody is talking about this topic anymore.

Instead we are talking about woke-ism and BIPOC and trans because we’ve all forgotten about the very idea of Islamic radicalization altogether and no one has even noticed that this branch of dissident politics seems to have essentially died out in the Western setting.

That this clash of civilizations just stopped, replaced with shitty Marvel movies.

What?

What happened to young Muslim men and what the hell does this have to do with Asian-American literature?

Set aside Gaza for a moment. Some of you are going to argue that the October 7th attacks are a repudiation of the thesis I’ve outlined above—some of you are wrong.

First, Gaza happened in the Middle East. It happened over there. Not on US soil.

Second, and more importantly, instead of what we would’ve expected to happen if we were still in the early aughts—instead of terrorist reprisals in Western countries (for our role in actively supporting Israel’s systematic liquidation of a ghettoized prison of refugees)—we’ve seen young Muslim men direct their diasporic anger into the funnel of mass protest, where they have been joined by a demographically diverse assortment of allied protestors.

In short, we have seen them turn to the paradigmatic example of liberal political engagement—to democratic protest instead.

Note that I am not arguing that this is a bad thing. If anything, it is a symbol of success in the terms of liberal assimilationism.

Ask yourself: what is not happening right now? What dog is not barking? Doesn’t it make more sense that our active support of Israel’s historically unprecedented mass murder of Palestinian civilians would be more likely to provoke the kinds of terrorist attacks that we saw in the post-9/11 era? Why aren’t we, as a collective, more worried about this? What does our comparative lack of worry emerge from?

Here’s my thesis—I think it’s because we understand, instinctively, that liberalism has shredded the radicalizing potential of young Muslim men. By “shredded,” I don’t mean that it’s totally erased them or their culture as a people. I mean that it’s subordinated their implicit moral assumptions to the system of morality that is liberalism and co-opted it under secular liberalism. It has taken the thing that we feared most—the alien morality of a foreign faith—and erased the part of it that was most dangerous to the integrity of our system.

Understand that I am not making an argument in favor of Islamic theocracy as a superior system of morality or state. Understand that I am not making an argument either for or against liberalism qua liberalism.

I’m simply making an observation about the stunning, shocking power of it.

Let me explain.

I want you to stop and think of your mental model of the modal young Muslim man living in America today.

What comes to mind? How does he dress? How does he speak? What kind of music does he listen to?

If you know any on a personal basis, it is not difficult to fill in these blanks.

Is he particularly interested in Edward Said? Is he closely following Abu Obeida’s talking points? Is he looking up to Nasrallah as an aspirational figure? Does he speak his native tongue? Gen-Z Tik Tok trends aside, does he view Bin Laden as anything other than a notable historical figure?

Maybe you will accuse him of being a reactionary—fine, imagine this is the case.

Is he more likely to care about these figures I listed above than he is about Andrew Tate?

For the right-wing young Muslim male, even his reactionary sentiments are expressed through the concepts and language of liberalism—i.e., in the dimensions of the post-manosphere “Red Pill” culture-war style argument where a carousel of charismatic internet personalities endlessly argue about dating culture on YouTube.

If he’s brown and young and a Muslim reactionary, he is more likely to affiliate with the multi-racial right wing of the American spectrum than he is with internationalist jihadism. That is why you are seeing journalists write takedowns of the young Muslim “manosphere.”

And who is writing those articles?

Jouralists—Muslim-Americans who are so thoroughly integrated into liberalism that they are using its moral systematology to critique their own community’s perceived deficits in liberal morality.

I’m going to repeat myself ad nauseam, because if I don’t, you’re going to misunderstand me. Again, I am not making a value judgment here. I am making a observation.

Like all other diasporic immigrant people of color—Asians included—young Muslim men who are centrist or leftist have completely integrated into the value system of liberal progressivism/BIPOC, etc. On the whole, they are generally represented in film and media, at least in the racial sense, as “normal” brown men on Netflix series and so on. They have become one of us. They have been “included” so hard that we ended up sapping the funnel of radicalization until only droplets of human capital remain in a dissident system that used to funnel a non-trivial number of Western fighters into Syria.

They have, in essence, become “normal” subjects of the empire. They have achieved the integration that their parents either implicitly or explicitly desired.

Now, I want you to situate their assimilation against the now 20-year-old panic about Sharia law and realize how ridiculous that feels in hindsight. How incredibly fucking stupid it seems to think that such a thing was ever even possible in America.

“Cool story, bro. But what does this have to do with art? What does it have to do with Asian-American literature?”

Literary fiction as an extension of morality

I’m old enough to remember some interesting inflection points.

When I was a child, it was common for people to express casual racism against Asian-Americans—slanty-eyed expressions, slurs like “chinks” and so on. This was true in both the working class and middle class settings which I frequented.

Then, as liberal progressivism (“woke-ism”) made its ascent, I saw this become increasingly untenable in real-time. I felt the power dynamic invert such that racial insults went from becoming my problem (do I escalate or not?) to their problem (do I call them out or not?). It’s not that this type of casual racism no longer exists, but it’s become verboten in middle-class and PMC-type circles where I happen to be situated.

When I talk about liberalism as a system of morality, what I mean to say is that liberalism is a collection of “oughts.” Before it is a political or social system, it is a collection of axiomatic moral principles (“human rights”). And these moral principles are so potent, so powerful, that all other moral principles can only be permitted to exist in liberal societies insofar as they have been subjugated by the more basic, foundational axioms of liberal morality.

THE BORDERS OF ACCEPTABLE ART—THE DIMENSIONS OF ITS AESTHETIC OVERTON WINDOW—ARE DICTATED BY CONSENSUS MORALITY. MORAL BOUNDARIES DETERMINE AESTHETIC BOUNDARIES.

That is why movies no longer have grotesque racial caricatures of Asians or other films—before this became an aesthetic preference, it was a moral preference.

The identity shredder and diasporic BIPOC immigrants as imperial subjects

Chris’s montage of Asian-American literature

My family migrated here for economic reasons (MONEY). I don’t fault them for this, but I must at least admit my own complicity.

In this fundamental sense, my experience parallels that of the young Muslim diaspora male. Perhaps that is why I was so interested in understanding them.

We are both imperial subjects from distant lands.

The trade that the Anglo-American empire/economic zone has made with us and our parents—the value proposition it is offering to the “BIPOC immigrant”—is that he can achieve a high level of social status domestically (reduced interpersonal discrimination) in exchange for geopolitical loyalty whenever this is required of him (i.e. so that the Pentagon can continue to occupy and rule East Asia, the Middle East, and so on).

Objectively speaking, this is a good trade, and I have lived well.

I am now a citizen of Rome. I have been made Roman, and this has conferred social and material benefits to me as an individual. I have been included, even if I know that the singular reason for this inclusion is to make number go up (GDP) for finance capital—i.e., the power-seeking institutional algorithm that actually runs the country.

But—if the empire regards me as an interchangeable unit of economic production, then I am also entitled to retain my own sovereignty. A mercernary parent nation produces mercenary sons. I like to think about ideas of all stripes and kinds and there exists no flag that I would willingly die for.

The dissident/neo-fascist right has this idea of “globo-homo”—global homogenization of culture. It’s the idea that, in a networked age of mass media, American culture has become even more dominant and internationalized than it was before, perpetuating a cultural and aesthetic sameness that afflicts all forms of cultural production, including various forms of narrative media.

In these circles, the way this thesis is applied is to exclusively complain about the degradation of the white European-American cultural lineage.

I think this framing is incomplete, obviously, because it is not just European-American identity that gets assimilated under liberalism. It happens to “BIPOC” too. We are, in fact, all being assimilated to a supra-national identity that is based on the universalist morality of liberalism itself. This is not a globalist conspiracy, but plain-old neoliberalism.

I am, at this point, middle-aged, and I have lived here most of my life before expatriating back to Asia.

I can’t read or write Chinese. I speak no Chinese (my parents didn’t think it important to teach me and it never even occurred to me to learn it). I think in English and I know nearly nothing of Chinese history or philosophy or the PRC’s modern implementations of Marxist-Leninist ideology or how the party actually operates. All of the ideas in my head have made their entry by way of the lingua franca of the Anglo-American, my thoughts are American, my clothes are American, and my diet is American. I am, at least in some partial sense, just a re-skinned European-American with an Han phenotype. That my racialization as an Asian male imparts a certain lived experience is indeed true but this feels less important to me now that I am a member of the multi-racial Netflix-represented BIPOC PMC-striver class in which the only political subject of any meaningful controversy is the race of our partners.

Absolutely bloodless, the lot of them.

Severed from the cords of memory.

Just like me.

Under liberalism, I am a success story. I have become an interchangeable unit of human capital and my lateral transfer to and from different geo-economic niches in the imperial core is a smooth, untethered economic transaction unburdened by any degree of social separation from the mainstream American whole. I am completely deracinated and removed from my people of origin.

I have been run through the shredder.

For the love of God will you people please shut the fuck up about food

Now—to the conclusion of this argument.

Why does Asian-American diasporic literary fiction suck so bad?

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time ever since I read Christopher Jesu Lee’s seminal post on Asian-American literary criticism. If you haven’t read it, it’s easily the best essay of its kind, ever.

Why is Asian-American literature so boring? Why does it so thoroughly lack passion? Why are the characters so passive and never, ever, angry? Why do they almost invariably have nothing substantive to say about anything? Why does it so studiously deviate from anything interesting or controversial or innovative or offer a challenge of any kind?

In other words, why is it so deeply cucked by liberalism?

I make an effort to read these books all the time. Generally speaking, the best ones are middling (sole exception that I can think of: Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens, which is great). Tao Lin could be argued as interesting but largely sidesteps questions of identity in favor of hipster autism—a valid artistic choice but not intrinsically Asian-American in the aesthetic or cultural sense.

Award-winning Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu—milquetoast dog shit. Celeste Ng—like getting my corneas sandblasted by ground-up particles of Obama’s year-end Best Of lists. Crazy Rich Asians—excuse me while I kill myself. As a rule, this class of books is largely sleep-inducing.

Chris Jesu Lee

makes a good contrast to Asian cinema and how different it is from weepy Asian-American suffering stories. And I stand in agreement with him—one of the reasons I love Korean cinema is because of how angry it is. Not because I elevate anger as something intrinsically good or artistically worthwhile, but because it at least makes me FEEL something.

Koreans (in Korean cinema) are overcome with passion on the screen. They are anything other than bland and affectless recyclers of “representasian”-type platitudes. They are anything other than anesthetized.

They are on fire.

Not once have I read a mainstream Asian-American literary work that has even one iota of passion about anything at all.

The reason for this is simple: because we have all made it through the identity shredder, because we believe nothing, and therefore, we have nothing to say.

This is why we are always blabbering about food in our cultural media.

“Food is extremely important in Asian-American culture.”

Brother, ingesting calories is important in every culture. If you don’t ingest calories on a consistent basis you will fucking die, habibi.

The reason Asian-American cultural elites produce an infinite slurry of thinkpieces and stories about food is because the organic material that you place into your mouth-hole for sustenance is devoid of semantic content. It is therefore the ultimate “safe” subject of commentary. It’s music with no words in it.

I’m being harsh—I know that. I don’t fully view this as a character flaw in our collective psyche. What it actually just means is that we are human.

If liberalism can shred the identity of the guys who might’ve become the next Atta—if it can psychologically subordinate the most deeply committed radical revolutionary forces of the modern era in a bloodless strip-mining of the human soul (of which deradicalization is only an ancillary benefit)—how the hell can Asian culture survive the meat grinder of liberal assimilation?

What exactly are our literary elites doing?

Whether male or female, they have comfortable institutional sinecures, white partners, half-white children, material comfort, and controlled levels of opposition. They are homing missiles programmed to seek status; they are speed-running American assimilation to level-up their white-adjacency as fast as humanly possible in a fervent attempt to extinguish their Asian-ness from their own lineal bloodline.

How can Confucius survive what jihadism did not? How can Xi Jinping thought?

The very idea of this—it is to laugh.

The credentialization of literature means that mostly only conformist nerds get through literary gatekeepers

One dimension of structural analysis taken from an earlier post of mine.

To an extent, you could completely ignore my preceding argument and frame this in the context of structural forces. You could say: “the shittiness of Asian-American literature is structurally guaranteed by the structure of modern publishing itself. It’s not only Asian-American literature that sucks, it’s all modern literature.”

Because of progressive credentialization—the expectation is now that literary fiction writers have an MFA—the selection pressures that get exerted on academic writing programs get reproduced within literary publishing itself.

This means you have a system that selects for checkmark-collecting nerds lacking in the essential pan-racial trait of joie d’vivre. Personlly, I think we need a broader personality funnel for our literary lineup. We need Asian-American writers who are at least a little bit crazy or psychotic.

Think about the level of conscientiousness and psychological formalization that is required to accrue sufficient credentials to get into a modern MFA writing program. The amount of group consensus (always homogenizing) required to get through the struggle session of the modern MFA circle of critique. Here we see a Chomskyite system of self-selection. That’s immediately going to select out a lot of the chaotic shit disturbers who end up making the most avant-garde stuff that is most compelling. Those people—the interesting ones—don’t stand a chance.

The fundamental characteristic of the Asian-American writer of literary fiction, be they male or female, is that they are approval-seeking strivers. They are status-seeking algorithms in human form.

On an interpersonal level, they are psychologically captured by the whims of white liberals at the apex of our cultural systems of production. Whenever they criticize white liberalism, this is purely a performative affectation in which the white liberal self-flagellates and the PoC-striver indulges them.

I will admit that deciding to participate in this cycle is a pragmatic consideration. You can’t risk social cancellation when it’s tied to your teaching job as an MFA graduate and you can’t take artistic risks when you’re inevitably going to be socially executed for doing so (Amelia Wen Zhao comes up as a Kafkaesque example of this collective insanity when applied to the equivalent of an innocent bystander).

More broadly, you can’t meaningfully criticize the aesthetic universe of liberalism’s cultural meta-narrative from the stance of the moral assumptions of liberalism itself. You simply cannot achieve artistic sovereignty without some kind of foundational critique because all you are doing is recycling the same ideas with a yellow tint.

I am not even asking these people to engage in political rebellion or to cogitate against the monstrous system that is Anglo-American empire.

I am merely asking them to deviate, in some meaningful ways, from the dictates of Rome, to say something (anything), which is important enough to warrant the cost.

Generative differentiation

I’m sure I’ll be accused of ranting, so let me be even more explicit about my politics. Some of you will accuse me of being a communist—if this happens, I will AGREE AND AMPLIFY the accusation even though I’ve never even read Marx and am basically just another historically illiterate retard writing on the internet (i.e. one of you).

The answer to Asian-American literary malaise does not lie in another form of LARPing, in a shallow communist self-identification built from a purely oppositional stance of reacting to liberal aesthetics.

For the record, I do not think that political considerations have to factor directly into literary fictionn.

My argument is not that Asian-American art must be reactionary (rightist) or anti-imperialist (leftist) in order to be authentic and true, only that it should be foundationally distinct and unafraid of repudiating the aesthetics, moral framing, or consensus meta-narrative at the most basic, axiomatic level—at the level of liberalism itself.

Root and branch.

That such a deviation will inevitably be framed in rightist or leftist terms doesn’t matter so long as the artist understands that this is an orthogonal deviation. He or she cannot accept the constraints of a solitary Western framing if they are advancing the boundary of the avant-garde.

Probably, this will require some degree of travel and re-situating ourselves back onto the lineal paths from which we have been transplanted.

At minimum, it will require something sui generis to come out of the culture that isn’t mimicry or second-order derivation.

In order to achieve this, we will have to cultivate personal sovereignty mentally, spiritually, and materially. We cannot rely on institutional publishing, and we cannot remain stuck in low-agency mindsets and behaviors.

It will be difficult, but it will not be impossible.

I wish you all—and myself—some luck on this journey.