Dear Republic,
Another week, another thing to be upset about. John Gu kicks us off by railing against the Asian-American immigrant novel.
-ROL
WHY I HATE ASIAN-AMERICAN FICTION
I. AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE BATTLE OF ‘HATCHLING’ DISCOURSE
The uprising began, as best as I am able to reconstruct, shortly before dawn on the morning of February 25th. It was caused, as many uprisings are, by an act of regime overreach. A young woman named Rucy Cui, a regime operative (Stegner Fellow), had published a short story in the Georgia Review that began with the words, “My white boyfriend and I…”
Most people did not read any further than that, nor did they need to. These five words alone were enough to account for the chaos that ensued: the rioting in the streets, the firebombing of Penguin Random House (now a smoking crater on Broadway and 17th), the activation of anti-regime sleeper agents in MFA programs across the country.
The spark that lit the fuse was a Twitter post that went up at 3:31AM documenting Rucy Cui’s literary crimes. Screenshots of tortured metaphors, mangled sentences, and darlings that, frankly, should have been killed were shared with a mixture of horror and outrage across Twitter. Cui’s crimes against the Humanities came as a reminder of the regime’s many atrocities over the years (you may recall the arrest warrant issued last year by The Hague for Ocean Vuong — charged with massacring the English language).
A call to arms went out. Twitter erupted in flame wars.
The protests were not met without resistance. The regime unleashed its Social Justice Warriors to put down the protests, as well as a crack unit of PMC.1
We lost contact with NYC by the third day of the uprising, but my understanding is that a group of Men’s Rights Asians were marching on HarperCollins, while a division of AZN Identity Bros had reached the outskirts of Little, Brown. In San Francisco, WMAF couples barricaded themselves in boba shops and armed themselves with plastic cutlery, preparing to make a last stand. I myself participated in the Battle of Substack.
A month later, the dust has mostly settled, although daily life in this country is occasionally marred by sporadic outbursts of Discourse.
Now let me tell you how we got here.
II. THE PLOT AGAINST ASIAN-AMERICA
OK, so maybe you’re Asian-American, maybe you’re not. What you want to know is: What was it about “Hatchling” that prompted everyone to sound off on all their grievances about Asian-American literature?
A brief sketch of the story itself: A Chinese-American woman with a white boyfriend returns from vacation and discovers that her period is late. She has a professional, white-collar job, with professional, white-collar benefits (extended vacations in foreign countries). There is some magical realism — she gives birth to an egg. There is drama — she pines over her absent boyfriend. Flashbacks cover her traumatic upbringing (immigrant parents), minor slights from coworkers, a clumsy relationship with her white boyfriend’s parents.
It all felt very on-the-nose, very paint-by-numbers. If I’d handed you the ‘Hatchling’ card at Asian-American-lit-trope bingo, you’d be cashing a $300 check by now.
Exasperatingly, the story’s strained adherence to Asian-American literature tropes is so extreme that many of its references feel either off or out of date (the narrator’s manager mistakes her for another Asian woman coworker, a racist little boy calls the narrator a ‘chink,’ a word I haven’t heard uttered aloud in over ten years). This alongside the piece’s weak prose, cluttered with awkward, sometimes baffling formulations: “earmarking myself for extinction,” “slapdash skyline,” “aching at the joint-seams,” gives the story a forced, artificial feel. There was also the meta-issue that the author’s appears to have been gained recognition precisely for writing mediocre, tropey fiction. The author is a Stegner fellow at Stanford, where she gets $75k per year, to produce stories like this full-time.
But, beyond these issues, I find that this essay by Vishal Prasad (who is half East Asian and half Indian), gets at the most distinctive and most exasperating feature of the story, which was its “relentless, distinctively Asian-American self-pity.” The narrator’s parents, her coworkers, her white boyfriend, everyone has made the narrator’s life more difficult — because of her race. The narrator, failing to appreciate the innumerable ways in which her life is privileged, tone-deafedly centers the narrow set of problems in her life that arise from racial microaggression.
If you wanted to make Asian-Americans look unlikable, off-putting, out of touch this is precisely the literature you would create for them. Ironically, it reinforces every stereotype about Asian-Americans in the country, while at the same time failing to portray the difficulties faced by Asian-Americans in a way that makes them actually sympathetic.
III. THE STATUS GAMES OF ASIAN-AMERICAN FICTION
People didn’t drag Rucy Cui on Twitter because she wrote one shitty story. Asian Americans were pissed off because this shitty story keeps being told over and over again. Here is a sampling of the descriptions of a few recent novels by Asian-American writers:
But in the process, she finds herself facing misgivings about her role in an interracial relationship. Captivated by the stories of her ancestors and other Asian Americans in history, she must confront a question at the core of her identity: What does it mean to exist in a society that does not notice or understand you?
Days of Distraction (2020) by Alexandra Chang
What follows is a roller coaster of mishaps and misadventures, from book burnings and OTC drug hallucinations, to hot-button protests and Yellow Peril 2.0 propaganda. As the events Ingrid instigated keep spiraling, she’ll have to confront her sticky relationship to white men and white institutions—and, most of all, herself.
Disorientation (2022) by Elaine Hsieh Chou
In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.
Real Americans (2024) by Rachel Khong
Years later, Ivy has grown into a poised yet restless young woman, haunted by her conflicting feelings about her upbringing and her family…
Filled with surprising twists and a nuanced exploration of class and race…
White Ivy (2020) by Susie Yang
Are you noticing a pattern?
Now I submit that what feels repetitive about these stories is not just the repetition of tropes and themes and the obsession with racial dynamics. What I read in stories like “Hatchling” is an overwhelming preoccupation with status that characterizes so much of Asian-American fiction. This preoccupation manifests at two levels: (1) at the level of the protagonist, typically a young Asian woman, whose aspirational whiteness is impeded by reminders of her race, and (2) at the level of the author, who valorizes this protagonist’s sufferings precisely in a way that feels calculated to appeal to the standards of political correctness of coastal liberals.
I don’t even see in these stories much interest per se in Asian culture. Cui’s narrator takes her boyfriend’s parents out to eat at a fancy fusion Asian restaurant, the kind of place where “chili oil [is] drizzled pinkie-up,” and she can’t help but compare this ritzy place to the humble establishment she ate at “on my most recent trip to China,” where she visited “the town where xiaolongbao was invented.” It is the world’s least impressive humblebrag (“I ate at this restaurant, instead of that one”), and it reflects a view of Chinese culture that is painfully superficial.
I loved Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston when I read them as an adolescent. They present a view of Chinese culture that is truly alien. In their work, China is a land of superstition, ghosts, polygyny, complex familial duties, the specter — and reality — of war. Food is mentioned in their work, but far less often than hunger.
There is nothing in ‘Hatchling’ that feels comparable. The narrator’s father spanks her for wasting money — but this isn’t a Chinese mode, it is generically immigrant. Chinese culture, in this story, is reduced to its most superficial aspects, to a cuisine, to a few italicized words, to the conflicts that every child has with their parents. Whatever you feel about the auto-Orientalizing of writers like Tan and Hong Kingston, the Chinese culture in their books is at least not purely decorative, the elements of Chinese culture that they highlight are not fungible.
I know that Cui would say that she doesn’t talk about Chinese culture to use it decoratively, but rather to highlight the difference in class and social standing between her and her boyfriend’s parents, but that’s the very move that I’m complaining about. There doesn’t seem to be any interest on the part of Cui to delve into Chinese culture, except to cash it in in exchange for victimhood-points in the 2026 Oppression Olympics. And not only is this tacky and meretricious, but it reifies this very professional-managerial-class/social-justice idea that racial discrimination is the only crime, the only way that a person can suffer. Three theses suffuse ‘Hatchling’:
My relationship with my parents is difficult because of race.
My relationship with my coworkers is difficult because of race.
My relationship with my romantic partner is difficult because of race.
This racial macroaggression obsession is like a kudzu choking away all other possibilities for dramatic conflict. What’s more, the story bends over backwards to takes the politically correct line on every other race-related stance: The one “Black woman” at the company where the narrator works, who is also the one black woman in the story, is a “rock star,” because of course we couldn’t have a story that didn’t bend over backwards to sanctify a fellow BIPOC. The author is striving so hard to be part of the club. And she does so so clunkily, so hamfistedly, that readers were groaning before they got past the first paragraph.
IV. WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
I think that, had I encountered the Rucy Cui story three years ago, I wouldn’t have thought much about it. I would have been satisfied with keeping my smug catankerousness to myself, and stuck to reading older books.
But a couple of years ago, the Substacker Chris Jesu Lee published an article in Current Affairs entitled ‘Asian American Psycho’ that brought up a really good point that I hadn’t considered: There is a lot of media created by Asian writers that doesn’t feel tropey, and that Americans love — it just happens to be produced outside of the United States. In some ways, Asian media is more transgressive than American media, an inversion of the stereotype. Think of Parasite, Squid Games, Old Boy, the novels of Murakami, different animes. They are suffused with Asian-ness, and yet they are not about being Asian in the way that Asian-American writers write about being Asian. Asian writers are able to write about genuinely universal experiences without being encumbered by the sludge of American racial politics.
For the Asian-American writers reading this, you have a choice. You could write the next great Asian-American “stinky-food/bad-mom/white-boyfriend” novel. Or you can try running in the exact opposite direction (there are, it turns out, an infinite number of opposite directions) and see what happens. There is hope for transgression, strangeness, and genuine feeling.
John Gu once wrote a short story so controversial that it got him kicked out of his MFA program. His “stunning” and “brave” Asian-American novel, Age of Peace (2026), can be read directly at his Substack. He also writes about literature, culture, and politics at his other Substack.
Professional-Managerial Class
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I dislike those tropes as well, but I think you're being hard on Asian-American authors. You may find this Substack post by an Indian-American author interesting: https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/the-most-disliked-people-in-the-publishing
The most relevant nugget is that for literary fiction, there are approximately only 25 agents. And of course most of them are white. If only one of them has bad taste, that's going to fuck the trends in the literary fiction market.
I found this interview with Kanakia also quite interesting: https://rosselliotbarkan.com/p/a-conversation-with-naomi-kanakia
This interview as well: https://archive.is/zBFFR
In short, white editors _like_ bullshit Asian-American tropes, and this is what gets published. Hence the bullshit tropes about WMAF couples and incel Asian males. We all know that traditional publishing is heavily gatekept, but we don't always know how much.
Time to write a self-pitying novel about growing up Irish around a vast majority of Asian American kids in San Francisco.How often do I eat potatoes, you ask?
I can’t help but think that Irish American literature is similarly cliched to death