Holllow men and hollow men: the problem of Asian-American literary culture
show me your substrate and I'll show you the art
I wanted to wait for it to blow over before writing about it but there’s been a lot commentary about Rucy Cui’s short story The Hatchling and the extensive communal embarrassment associated with it.
It feels like we are doomed, maybe, to repeat the same Asian-American literary discourse over and over again.
Of course, Cui is a symptom of a broader problem in the diaspora.
The problem, in my view, stems from the bowl of slop that we are all eating from. The bowl contains too many of the wrong ingredients and too few of the good ingredients. To start with, there’s a surplus of sanity, a surfeit of normality, an excess of professionalism, and all the other usual suspects that produce too much ying and too little yang1: some combination of liberal assimilationism, PMC-ification, MFA-credentialism, CV-assembly-line striving, people-pleasing, cargo-cult-transgressivism, identity-shredding, and the soul-flattening means-ends collapse of technocapital as it swallows us whole.
Rui’s story fails precisely because it represents a normal person trying to be a little bit more insane than they truly are. Every other failure is downstream of that.
Here we might have some empathy for her predicament, for the characteristic feature of modernity is the evacuation of true belief: nothing to die for and nothing to live for other than the vanity of material accumulation; a transaction of atoms for the ether of the soul.
So much of our community’s fiction boils down to stories about positional status games in the PMC-class anchored on a small and repetitive set of thematic regurgitations in the vein of Catherine Liu’s analysis. The analysis of white-adjacency holds in part because it’s at least directionally correct with respect to our class position if not entirely accurate due to our obvious phenotypic distinctions.
The Asian-American subject is a hollow man and a hollow woman and it is for this reason that the Asian-American writer is a hollow artist.
The God-shaped hole at the center produces an economic and cultural elite whose sole fixation to the exclusion of all other entities essentials reduces to the relentless pursuit of technocapital.
Broadly, this creates a structural problem on both ends of the patron-artist network:
Asian-American elites are, as a class, born of technology and finance and almost universally disinterested in patronizing the arts—the very notion of someone like, say, Gary Tan, subsidizing an Asian-American literary project feels something like the punchline to a good joke. The incentive structure therefore orients around performing for the tastes of tote-bag liberalism.
At the level of the artist, there is no core, no substrate, no energetic foundation for the Asian-American artist to draw from. His or her art rolls down, passively, to the level of the PMC-slop as a result. Real fire is nowhere to be found. We are living in an era of the complete annihilation of any semblance of belief. What good are our eyes if they are always closed?
Contrast the current crop of writers to the great Japanese modernists of the late 20th century—Osamu Dazai, Shusaku Endo, Yukio Mishima, Yuko Tsushima. All of these writers had the sauce, even if we can’t precisely pin down we think that is.
And all of these people were either a little bit insane or—alternatively—very insane.
So what’s the solution?
I’ve got one.
The central project of the contemporary Asian-American literary writer is to actively cultivate as much insanity as possible.
By “insanity,” I mean a kind of anti-rational volatility that has the potential to produce something truly great, something truly unmoored from NPR-slop and stinky-lunch slop and my-white-boyfriend-slop and my-traditional-parents-slop so that we can hit Super Saiyan 2 (or even 3) and wake up the latent psychosis of the Taiping Rebellion in the Asian-American soul.
And no, I’m not writing a Straussian article about Marxism (or even Confucianism) as the solution to our spiritual problems. Yes, it is indeed the case that every truly sovereign East-Asian country sent an army of peasants to fight the American death machine under terrifying conditions of extreme technological inferiority. There’s no romance to the blood and gore of a modern war, but martial conditions open the channel to a spiritual plane that we are manifestly no longer able to access with boba tea and matcha lattes.
What is a hopeless battle other than a form of madness?
What is the artist’s vocation other than a form of madness?
Here’s Joseph Andras on the type of soul—of a Ho Chi Minh—who is in urgent need of resurrection:2
And so, he would soon go to Moscow, to Crimea, to Hong Kong; he would be declared dead, cruise the oceans, end up in prison, write poems, and call on poets to coat their verses in steel. And then he would discuss, compose, negotiate, state that blood is only misery; reply that war will break out for a hundred years if the French state continues to ignore us, and then arrive, soft-spoken, at a resolution: let’s fight. Then he would raise an army whose black sandals are carved out of tire rubber, and he would smash the Empire.
Were you moved by this passage, anon?
It gave me shivers when I first read it.
Let me ask you a question, then.
Why did it take a white man to write it?
Completely made that up, by the way. I have no idea what ying and yang actually stand for.
Faraway the Southern Sky, by Joseph Andras. A novella about Ho Chi Minh.