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.
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.
Please do. The impression I get from Kanakia and the other Asian-American authors interviewed is that white editors prefer Asian characters who fit into tropes, but don’t have their own personalities as fully developed human beings. Sort of well-meaning racism.
I have no doubt what you're saying is true, but it's still kind of sad to me that so many writers are so artless and desperate for publication that they'll dumb themselves down so much just to get published. When there's so little money and prestige on the table you might as well go for broke (see what I did there?)
lmao that’s just life in industries where the supply of talent vastly exceeds the demand. like actors or musicians or even software engineers are exempt—you think any child grows up of dreaming to hack on AI-powered insurance customer service agents? noooooooooo the baby hackers dream of making cool robots or their own operating systems, but that shit doesn’t pay. a lot of the internet runs on cool open source software and the authors get clout, but they make 0 money and are basically taken advantage of by tech companies, and everyone else who has ever bought shit online. you owe your ability to buy substack subscriptions to some idiot in Europe who's been maintaining a critical cryptographic library on $20k a year, who apparently doesn't mind getting taken advantage of. i assume he lives off of a very understanding wife. i’ve heard of very talented artists online who have no choice but to make furry porn, and they are seriously concerned that the quantity of furry porn they have to draw is ruining their ability to do anything more serious. makes me happy that while i’m competent at drawing, i never was crazy enough to think pursuing art was a worthwhile dream.
as for going for broke, wtf does that mean…plenty of people are making cool art or actually cool engineering shit like electric submarines in their spare time, but _nobody sees it._ presumably a lot of the authors who did make compromises have a much better draft of their work that they just don't get to publish.
that’s life. full of compromises. writing novels is overly romanticized, probably bc consuming stories is a primary form of entertainment.
All I'm saying is that if you're gonna sell out you might as well sell out to an industry that pays. "No choice but to make furry porn," lmao, what a bunch of bullshit
Talent is rare in every industry, there aren't even that many people who can make a decent sandwich. It's always untalented, boring people who say shit like this, the exact type of person this post is criticizing, in fact.
“go for broke” typically means “going for it, against all odds.” if you don’t mean that artists shouldn’t dumb down their work, what did you mean? because it’s hard to make out what you’re saying when you’re sad that they dumb down their work and then you say they should sell out, implying they're not artists anymore
and just what is wrong with doing unartistic shit that pays the bills, like furry porn? sometimes you have to make the furry porn to make the money for something you actually like. and that's fine. it's their choice. that's what i was getting at with not romanticizing writing. no path that's being taken to it or any other art is more inherently noble than any other.
also re talented people being everywhere. wallace stevens was an insurance executive for his day job. annie dillard lived off of her rich parents and professor husband while writing Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. thoreau was living in ralph waldo emerson’s backyard when he wrote Walden while having his mother do his laundry and had a prosperous pencil-making business. NK Jemisin had to keep her day job as a therapist even though she’d won the Hugo several times. even the geniuses and leading talents in the field can't make the kinds of things they want without an upper middle class income. obviously a lot of less well-off but equally talented people aren't going to be able to replicate their success.
you also don't understand the point about the open source guy. google "heartbleed openssl bug." the maintainers of openssl are extremely fucking talented, _but they were making nothing._ there are, in fact, hundreds of people like them, who are extremely talented, who are making...nothing...because the supply of talented programmers who want to work on cool open source problems exceeds the demand for their skills. sadly, talent is more common than you think. esp financially unrenumerated talent. the only things that make talent seem rare are structural barriers, and the inconvenient fact that talented people are wilful and want to do their own thing, which may make them terrible employees, or prone to making cool things that nobody else really likes.
most of my friends can make a decent sandwich...might just be who you happen to know
What I am saying is that making art pays so little, it doesn't make sense to sell out artistically. You might as well make your best art and put it out there, like ARX-Han and many people on Substack. If a handful of she/they literary agents with pink hair are enough to make you compromise your dream, I think it's safe to say you never really had a dream.
Having a day job is fine. If you have a family to support I understand, but no, you don't need "an upper middle class income" to make art as a single person.
You and I clearly have different ideas about what constitutes talent. I worked in software for a long time. Talented engineers are rare.
If you respond again, please take some time to edit your whiny diatribe. It's exhausting to read.
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
I just came off rereading The Chosen which was finely drawn and nuanced and also didn't give a single shit about how the Jewish community was seated inside the wider non-Jewish one -- so refreshing! -- so I at the moment don't agree. Where's the whiny stuff?
Oh boy. As a middle-ager, I feel bad for all of the young people, including my fellow asian-ams. There really is a time to be cringe and be okay with that, but to have to work through it so publicly and have to live with it the rest of your life as we do in this day and age.....
You have a fair point. Im quite harsh on Cui, and I do feel some compunction about that because she’s younger than me — and young enough to still be learning and developing as a writer.
Ultimately my beef isn’t with her story (although I do think it just is a poorly written story), but with what the story represents: an inability in the space of Asian American fiction to move on from one specific narrative
Incidentally, seeing that you're a Coetzee fan. I gave a lecture at the University of Adelaide last July, and I was told a Nobel Laureate was in the audience. It didn't register until the next day when I walked by an office that said "J.M. Coetzee" that it was him. If I knew he'd be there I would have given a better talk.
I wasn't trying to be harsh about your review actually. I agree with it 100%. The passages you cite, the little I've read of it, it is completely and utterly cringe. If my daughter wrote that I would tell her that. And I do think if a writer is going to put their work out there, they are fair game for criticism; literary criticism and social critique is just as important as the work itself. I utterly despise formulaic Asian-Am stories, tiger moms, smelly lunches, chinky eyes stuff, its completely and utter hack. Its why I don't usually read any of it, and I find the comedy bits, the TV shows, the movies, the memoirs to be completely uninteresting. But I really do hope the internet learns to be more forgiving so that some of the hacks can grow and learn and still be able to be writers as the years pass. Eventually I'd like Asian-Americans to be able to write literary fiction and nonfiction, and do stand-up comedy, and make films and sitcoms, that don't require them to do funny accents or talk about how traumatized they are every time someone ask them where they come from.
Total outsider reaction: can’t it be that Asian-American fiction in which, e.g, “Chinese culture…is reduced to its most superficial aspects” is meant to reflect/comment on a category of real-life Asian-American experience in which the old country’s culture *really does* manifest only in superficial ways? Integration of authentic Chinese culture is not the goal in a story about someone whose life does not include authentic Chinese culture.
Decades before, Asian Americans were bored with stereotypes and tropes of them in mainstream media and literature: dragon lady, China doll, fu manchu, etc. Then, throughout the years, there have been more calls for greater visibility and representation. These texts were also lambasted for appealing to the white gaze and creating a new set of tropes. Around 2018~, racial politics took a new turn, allowing more and more Asian American authors and writings about Asian Americans, but once again, people like you (the author of the article) claim they're all tropes, signalling a desire for a new set of aesthetics. The hate towards Asian American media is really not new, historically speaking, and what you actually want is a "postvisible" turn in Asian American literature, where what has been ostensibly Asian American isn't treated as the main object of focus. Sue-Im Lee has written about it already in an academic article titled "Can You Tell by Looking? A Postvisible Definition of Asian American Literature" back in 2020.
When you abstract texts to their core, many can be reduced to "tropes." Even Squid Games, which you praise as a great example of Asian media, is a series of tropes: a deadly survival game, evil rich people, and a desperate protagonist. What's special is how they present these passed-down elements in new ways, but there seems to be 0 appreciation of any of the aesthetics in the works you listed, which surprisingly are mostly written by women.
The other issue is that you view Asian American media as being inferior to Asian media because of its preoccupation with being Asian, whereas Asian media "are suffused with Asian-ness, and yet they are not about being Asian in the way that Asian-American writers write about being Asian." Well, let's be honest, Asians in Asia don't need to groan about not being top dog around the vector of race/ethnicity because they're the major group in their country. The issue in Asia that is persistent is class. Squid Games and Parasite have "tropes" about the lower classes being pissed at the upper classes.
I read your frustration towards the tropes in Asian American lit and your desire for something beyond them as symptomatic of a larger frustration with the racial politics in the twenty-first century. Of course, we want to transcend and go beyond these categories that we're placed in and that we've received. But sometimes, authors work with what they have, and there's knowledge in that, too. If you don't like it, then change the game.
This article is doing the very thing it is protesting against: turning human lives (the author's) into caricatures. The tone of this article is wickedly ungracious, spiteful, and apparently envious. These are real people we're talking about (or hating on, complaining about, rallying against). Why spend so much energy complaining about the work made by others - its shortcomings, its misgivings - when you could make your own? If you don't like it, make something better.
That's a fair point. I had a lot of wicked fun writing this piece and as you can see I am enamored of the polemical mode, but of course Cui (and the other writers I mention) do deserve a measure of grace.
I think I gave the story its due. Not a fan of it. Not a fan of the kind of genre it represents. I give my reasons why -- if very cheekily.
Having critiqued another writer's work so ruthlessly, it would be hypocritical to hide from criticism of my own novel:
Seems spot on. Contemporary publishing (society?) is built to incentivize this, and as much as the MFA/fellowship coterie of every identity and persuasion wants to pretend it's above being sensitive to marker demands, they will inevitably write what gets rewarded.
This crop of work was probably produced after the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, which was a racially motivated attack against asian women by a white perpetrator. Maybe you find it well-trodden territory, but it’s not like it emerged out of thin air. Your screed pigeonholes asian american women writers into the subjects you most dislike, and you’ve found an acceptable target, but there is more to asian american fiction written by women than this. I have a feeling you don’t and won’t seek it out.
My brother married a Nisei woman almost 60 years ago (with all that that entails in the early 20th century US). The opening paragraph has so little to do with direct observation of a real relationship of that sort or any human relationship, that it resembles mostly a text version of a video game.
Artificial stylization is fascinating (William Burroughs, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Acker), but it’s tricky. It can tip over an edge (Bulwer-Lytton, Crowley, Corelli, Brautigan) and just become campy. This fragment is a very current stylization - “is if air itself were rehearsing the possibility of absence” blended with flat brand affect “I was having a Nissan kind of day.”
Done lightly it sounds hollow and sad, superficial, boring. Done heavily its moves into arabesque, and something strange and beautiful.
A moment of recognition for me was that "bad art friend" article from the New Yorker a few years back, featuring a feud between two mediocre writers, one clearly more successful by playing her partial Asian heritage for all it's worth.
It's clear when you read Japanese literature that the source of the problem is American, not Asian. Kenzaburo Oe is a poet of sexual frustration, a clear blood relative of ARX-Han. Sayaka Murata and Yoko Ogawa are both incredibly good. Japanese writers are so good even their feminist literature is tolerable (Hiroko Oyamada). If you're browsing in a bookstore you can usually find the best books with the least effort by looking for Japanese names.
Of course the Japanese are the odd ducks of Asia, the result of a strange experiment in which a group of Chinese people were put on an island and allowed to mutate in isolation.
I agree that it's entirely due to the American immigrant experience. I do think that the stereotype of Asian immigrants and children of immigrants being risk-averse is true (and understandable).
There's also another feature that I detect: especially in the case of Asian women, there's a quality of being close enough to being white that the falling short of being white becomes more frustrating and a more salient aspect of one's experience. I think this leads to a lot of angst among Asian-American writers and an exaggerated focus on racial dynamics
If you read early Philip Roth there's a probably similar feeling, of immigrants almost expecting more hostility than is received from the gentiles, finding it surprisingly easy to succeed, and being unsure what to do with that success.
I think women are more collectivist and group-oriented, more focused on fitting in. But fitting in is unlikely to help anyone's art.
The pernicious trend I see in progressive circles is non-black minorities attempting to use the Black American experience as a metaphor for their experience, when actually, the history of Black Americans is quite terrible and very much not deserving of envy. And I'm not talking about Asian kids wearing baggy clothes and rapping, I'm talking about PMC strivers.
I think that Roth quickly moved on from the Malamud/Bellow Jewish angst stories (Goodbye Columbus) to some really out there experimental fiction (Our Gang, about the Nixon administration, and The Breast, a really fun and creative postmodern novel). My point being that he doesn't get stuck in the bear trap of only being able to write in a narrow way about race.
I agree that there is a phenomenon of Asian-Americans striving to find a group to model themselves after -- sometimes it's whites, sometimes it's black people. There is this weird stolen valor thing that I find distasteful where Asians are trying to present themselves as hugely discriminated against. Like, I do feel some Asian-American writers are trying to write the Asian version of Black Boy / Invisible Man / The Bluest Eye, but it's not the 1950's, and they're not black!
Racial microaggressions are a thing, but they're not nearly comparable to Jim Crow experience(s) of African Americans
You, Chris, and Vishal's pieces are circling the shark but fail to reach the REAL red-pilled conclusion. It's women. Women ruin everything. May I propose the Blame Asian Women Hypothesis.
JOHN: AsAm literature makes everything about race, and barely cares about actual Asian cultures except to use as a woke cudgel. Why? Asian women are trying to gain a leg up in intrasexual competition against white women in the Glass Bead Game.
CHRIS: AsAm literature is unwilling to portray AsAms in a 'negative' way, even if it means making them too boring, but Asian countries don't do this, so they portray evil Asians that are way more interesting than the boring Asians in AsAm lit. (One thing Chris may have mentioned is that Asian *male* villains are still OK in these books, as long as they're misogynists, but Asian *female* villains aren't allowed to be totally evil.) Why? Asian women don't want to portray Asian women as evil because they feel like it loses them points in the Glass Bead Game.(More controversially, one could argue that because Asian countries are more misogynistic on average, there are less WOMEN involved in the writing rooms shoving woke BS down everyone's throats.)
VISHAL: AsAm literature is too self-pitying and victimizing. Why? Asian women try to win points in the Glass Bead Game by casting themselves as oppressed victims by virtue of race, even if they earn six figures in Silicon Valley.
Is my theory controversial? 100%. But I'm willing to admit that the Great Feminization and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. A society that spends all of its time playing meaningless Glass Bead Games is one set for disaster, like the Qing dynasty.
I agree that Asian female experience of being Asian American is different from the Asian male experience, and this does influence the kind of literature that Asian women tend to write. I'm not sure that Asian men can say much, unfortunately, because we don't write very much literature.
I do hold out hope that an Asian woman unencumbered by the demands of political correctness will appear some day and write something interesting and truly different
Your theory is controversial mainly because it is based on no evidence and is quite silly.
So many great female authors out there. The novel has been regarded as a female medium since its inception, for good reason.
None of the garbage writers mentioned in the article are writing original works of female art, as your theory requires. This is just generic publishing industry slop that is being produced to specification. Nobody is reading any of these shitty writers except for a few MFA students and some substackers. They are cultural nobodies in their own time. Their crappy books will be forgotten in three years, even shorter a time than the literary agents and publishers who are responsible for them.
"The Great Feminisation" does not exist, sorry. You aren't some brave truth teller. You are just repeating a poorly thought through idea that you found on the internet. Male writers like Tony Tulathimutte as re writing exactly the same generic garbage as the female writers in this article. People don't read crap literary fiction in 2026 and so Yellowface or The Feminist are the sort of crap literary fiction that gets published for the small circle of insiders who have a financial incentive to waste their time reading it.
There are certainly great female writers, but many of them very pointedly disliked other female artists (Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith). George Eliot used a male name to distinguish herself from the masses of mediocre women who were writing at the time. Women have always been the main consumers of art & literature, and many have wonderful taste, but few women can match male ambition when it comes to making things. And it's obvious why that is, women have the ability to create people, and when you can do that, creating things is a child's game.
I hope people don't talk too much about "The Great Feminization," it's a critique that needed to be made and heard, and it was, and now we can move on.
I disagree about Tony T. I think “the Feminist” is actually a very good and scarily insightful story. I do think that Tony undercut his piece by making the protagonist not Asian
In this putrid place, the headaches and hangovers will persist. The exits are all locked. This story of a story is not about Asian American fiction. This is about Writing, Thinking, Speaking, for the last 20 years. Almost all of it begins and ends with Group Identity. You cannot get out of this Group Home. So just sit there with it, the surface drama. Look around at the shabby furnishings. This era will stand out in time like a fossilized dung pile of Group Think, where the books are in fact judged by the cover.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts, it is nice to hear from a fellow Asian American.
However, your article also upset me a bit and I realized it was for these reasons:
This piece confuses pattern recognition with actual analysis. It points out recurring themes but never interrogates why they exist, like publishing dynamics or historical marginalization. Instead of engaging deeply with texts, it reduces Asian American women’s writing to caricature, flattening nuance into mockery. It also ignores power and context, sidestepping how race, gender, and the publishing industry shape what gets produced and rewarded.
More importantly, it dismisses lived experiences as trivial without examining their continued relevance, and lacks any real self-awareness about its own biases. Ultimately, the argument leans more on sarcasm than substance— identifying trends without meaningfully analyzing them, so it reads less like critique and more like a stylized rant.
Tldr; In my opinion, the article identifies a trend but doesn’t interrogate it. It critiques content without examining systems, reduces complexity to stereotype, and prioritizes wit over substance; so it ends up feeling more like a rant than a meaningful analysis.
But actually the lack of depth about what it means to be Asian is the real point. Something I find it my own engagement with other 2nd and 3rd gen immigrants unless there’s a conscious effort to relearn and transpose it. For all that the world supporting those traditions has vanished. I don’t think that they’re American or Australian or whatever though. No one including themselves truly believe that though their mind might be Western. One cannot be cut off from history like that without a sense of dislocation.
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.
I’ll take a look. You bring up a good point
Please do. The impression I get from Kanakia and the other Asian-American authors interviewed is that white editors prefer Asian characters who fit into tropes, but don’t have their own personalities as fully developed human beings. Sort of well-meaning racism.
I have no doubt what you're saying is true, but it's still kind of sad to me that so many writers are so artless and desperate for publication that they'll dumb themselves down so much just to get published. When there's so little money and prestige on the table you might as well go for broke (see what I did there?)
lmao that’s just life in industries where the supply of talent vastly exceeds the demand. like actors or musicians or even software engineers are exempt—you think any child grows up of dreaming to hack on AI-powered insurance customer service agents? noooooooooo the baby hackers dream of making cool robots or their own operating systems, but that shit doesn’t pay. a lot of the internet runs on cool open source software and the authors get clout, but they make 0 money and are basically taken advantage of by tech companies, and everyone else who has ever bought shit online. you owe your ability to buy substack subscriptions to some idiot in Europe who's been maintaining a critical cryptographic library on $20k a year, who apparently doesn't mind getting taken advantage of. i assume he lives off of a very understanding wife. i’ve heard of very talented artists online who have no choice but to make furry porn, and they are seriously concerned that the quantity of furry porn they have to draw is ruining their ability to do anything more serious. makes me happy that while i’m competent at drawing, i never was crazy enough to think pursuing art was a worthwhile dream.
as for going for broke, wtf does that mean…plenty of people are making cool art or actually cool engineering shit like electric submarines in their spare time, but _nobody sees it._ presumably a lot of the authors who did make compromises have a much better draft of their work that they just don't get to publish.
that’s life. full of compromises. writing novels is overly romanticized, probably bc consuming stories is a primary form of entertainment.
All I'm saying is that if you're gonna sell out you might as well sell out to an industry that pays. "No choice but to make furry porn," lmao, what a bunch of bullshit
Talent is rare in every industry, there aren't even that many people who can make a decent sandwich. It's always untalented, boring people who say shit like this, the exact type of person this post is criticizing, in fact.
“go for broke” typically means “going for it, against all odds.” if you don’t mean that artists shouldn’t dumb down their work, what did you mean? because it’s hard to make out what you’re saying when you’re sad that they dumb down their work and then you say they should sell out, implying they're not artists anymore
and just what is wrong with doing unartistic shit that pays the bills, like furry porn? sometimes you have to make the furry porn to make the money for something you actually like. and that's fine. it's their choice. that's what i was getting at with not romanticizing writing. no path that's being taken to it or any other art is more inherently noble than any other.
also re talented people being everywhere. wallace stevens was an insurance executive for his day job. annie dillard lived off of her rich parents and professor husband while writing Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. thoreau was living in ralph waldo emerson’s backyard when he wrote Walden while having his mother do his laundry and had a prosperous pencil-making business. NK Jemisin had to keep her day job as a therapist even though she’d won the Hugo several times. even the geniuses and leading talents in the field can't make the kinds of things they want without an upper middle class income. obviously a lot of less well-off but equally talented people aren't going to be able to replicate their success.
you also don't understand the point about the open source guy. google "heartbleed openssl bug." the maintainers of openssl are extremely fucking talented, _but they were making nothing._ there are, in fact, hundreds of people like them, who are extremely talented, who are making...nothing...because the supply of talented programmers who want to work on cool open source problems exceeds the demand for their skills. sadly, talent is more common than you think. esp financially unrenumerated talent. the only things that make talent seem rare are structural barriers, and the inconvenient fact that talented people are wilful and want to do their own thing, which may make them terrible employees, or prone to making cool things that nobody else really likes.
most of my friends can make a decent sandwich...might just be who you happen to know
What I am saying is that making art pays so little, it doesn't make sense to sell out artistically. You might as well make your best art and put it out there, like ARX-Han and many people on Substack. If a handful of she/they literary agents with pink hair are enough to make you compromise your dream, I think it's safe to say you never really had a dream.
Having a day job is fine. If you have a family to support I understand, but no, you don't need "an upper middle class income" to make art as a single person.
You and I clearly have different ideas about what constitutes talent. I worked in software for a long time. Talented engineers are rare.
If you respond again, please take some time to edit your whiny diatribe. It's exhausting to read.
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
Jewish fiction is overwhelmingly miserable and unreadable for “similar but different” reasons
The difference is that Jewish fiction is unironically just usually written by people who are much better at writing than Asian-American fiction.
I just came off rereading The Chosen which was finely drawn and nuanced and also didn't give a single shit about how the Jewish community was seated inside the wider non-Jewish one -- so refreshing! -- so I at the moment don't agree. Where's the whiny stuff?
Oh boy. As a middle-ager, I feel bad for all of the young people, including my fellow asian-ams. There really is a time to be cringe and be okay with that, but to have to work through it so publicly and have to live with it the rest of your life as we do in this day and age.....
You have a fair point. Im quite harsh on Cui, and I do feel some compunction about that because she’s younger than me — and young enough to still be learning and developing as a writer.
Ultimately my beef isn’t with her story (although I do think it just is a poorly written story), but with what the story represents: an inability in the space of Asian American fiction to move on from one specific narrative
Incidentally, seeing that you're a Coetzee fan. I gave a lecture at the University of Adelaide last July, and I was told a Nobel Laureate was in the audience. It didn't register until the next day when I walked by an office that said "J.M. Coetzee" that it was him. If I knew he'd be there I would have given a better talk.
I wasn't trying to be harsh about your review actually. I agree with it 100%. The passages you cite, the little I've read of it, it is completely and utterly cringe. If my daughter wrote that I would tell her that. And I do think if a writer is going to put their work out there, they are fair game for criticism; literary criticism and social critique is just as important as the work itself. I utterly despise formulaic Asian-Am stories, tiger moms, smelly lunches, chinky eyes stuff, its completely and utter hack. Its why I don't usually read any of it, and I find the comedy bits, the TV shows, the movies, the memoirs to be completely uninteresting. But I really do hope the internet learns to be more forgiving so that some of the hacks can grow and learn and still be able to be writers as the years pass. Eventually I'd like Asian-Americans to be able to write literary fiction and nonfiction, and do stand-up comedy, and make films and sitcoms, that don't require them to do funny accents or talk about how traumatized they are every time someone ask them where they come from.
How do you make such sweeping statements without actually having read the story?
I read it. Can’t say I’ve read all Asian-Am fiction written in the last decade though, so I can’t make that generalization.
Total outsider reaction: can’t it be that Asian-American fiction in which, e.g, “Chinese culture…is reduced to its most superficial aspects” is meant to reflect/comment on a category of real-life Asian-American experience in which the old country’s culture *really does* manifest only in superficial ways? Integration of authentic Chinese culture is not the goal in a story about someone whose life does not include authentic Chinese culture.
Decades before, Asian Americans were bored with stereotypes and tropes of them in mainstream media and literature: dragon lady, China doll, fu manchu, etc. Then, throughout the years, there have been more calls for greater visibility and representation. These texts were also lambasted for appealing to the white gaze and creating a new set of tropes. Around 2018~, racial politics took a new turn, allowing more and more Asian American authors and writings about Asian Americans, but once again, people like you (the author of the article) claim they're all tropes, signalling a desire for a new set of aesthetics. The hate towards Asian American media is really not new, historically speaking, and what you actually want is a "postvisible" turn in Asian American literature, where what has been ostensibly Asian American isn't treated as the main object of focus. Sue-Im Lee has written about it already in an academic article titled "Can You Tell by Looking? A Postvisible Definition of Asian American Literature" back in 2020.
When you abstract texts to their core, many can be reduced to "tropes." Even Squid Games, which you praise as a great example of Asian media, is a series of tropes: a deadly survival game, evil rich people, and a desperate protagonist. What's special is how they present these passed-down elements in new ways, but there seems to be 0 appreciation of any of the aesthetics in the works you listed, which surprisingly are mostly written by women.
The other issue is that you view Asian American media as being inferior to Asian media because of its preoccupation with being Asian, whereas Asian media "are suffused with Asian-ness, and yet they are not about being Asian in the way that Asian-American writers write about being Asian." Well, let's be honest, Asians in Asia don't need to groan about not being top dog around the vector of race/ethnicity because they're the major group in their country. The issue in Asia that is persistent is class. Squid Games and Parasite have "tropes" about the lower classes being pissed at the upper classes.
I read your frustration towards the tropes in Asian American lit and your desire for something beyond them as symptomatic of a larger frustration with the racial politics in the twenty-first century. Of course, we want to transcend and go beyond these categories that we're placed in and that we've received. But sometimes, authors work with what they have, and there's knowledge in that, too. If you don't like it, then change the game.
This article is doing the very thing it is protesting against: turning human lives (the author's) into caricatures. The tone of this article is wickedly ungracious, spiteful, and apparently envious. These are real people we're talking about (or hating on, complaining about, rallying against). Why spend so much energy complaining about the work made by others - its shortcomings, its misgivings - when you could make your own? If you don't like it, make something better.
That's a fair point. I had a lot of wicked fun writing this piece and as you can see I am enamored of the polemical mode, but of course Cui (and the other writers I mention) do deserve a measure of grace.
I think I gave the story its due. Not a fan of it. Not a fan of the kind of genre it represents. I give my reasons why -- if very cheekily.
Having critiqued another writer's work so ruthlessly, it would be hypocritical to hide from criticism of my own novel:
https://ageofpeace.substack.com/
Seems spot on. Contemporary publishing (society?) is built to incentivize this, and as much as the MFA/fellowship coterie of every identity and persuasion wants to pretend it's above being sensitive to marker demands, they will inevitably write what gets rewarded.
This crop of work was probably produced after the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, which was a racially motivated attack against asian women by a white perpetrator. Maybe you find it well-trodden territory, but it’s not like it emerged out of thin air. Your screed pigeonholes asian american women writers into the subjects you most dislike, and you’ve found an acceptable target, but there is more to asian american fiction written by women than this. I have a feeling you don’t and won’t seek it out.
Good luck with your career.
My brother married a Nisei woman almost 60 years ago (with all that that entails in the early 20th century US). The opening paragraph has so little to do with direct observation of a real relationship of that sort or any human relationship, that it resembles mostly a text version of a video game.
Artificial stylization is fascinating (William Burroughs, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Acker), but it’s tricky. It can tip over an edge (Bulwer-Lytton, Crowley, Corelli, Brautigan) and just become campy. This fragment is a very current stylization - “is if air itself were rehearsing the possibility of absence” blended with flat brand affect “I was having a Nissan kind of day.”
Done lightly it sounds hollow and sad, superficial, boring. Done heavily its moves into arabesque, and something strange and beautiful.
Not here.
A moment of recognition for me was that "bad art friend" article from the New Yorker a few years back, featuring a feud between two mediocre writers, one clearly more successful by playing her partial Asian heritage for all it's worth.
It's clear when you read Japanese literature that the source of the problem is American, not Asian. Kenzaburo Oe is a poet of sexual frustration, a clear blood relative of ARX-Han. Sayaka Murata and Yoko Ogawa are both incredibly good. Japanese writers are so good even their feminist literature is tolerable (Hiroko Oyamada). If you're browsing in a bookstore you can usually find the best books with the least effort by looking for Japanese names.
Of course the Japanese are the odd ducks of Asia, the result of a strange experiment in which a group of Chinese people were put on an island and allowed to mutate in isolation.
I agree that it's entirely due to the American immigrant experience. I do think that the stereotype of Asian immigrants and children of immigrants being risk-averse is true (and understandable).
There's also another feature that I detect: especially in the case of Asian women, there's a quality of being close enough to being white that the falling short of being white becomes more frustrating and a more salient aspect of one's experience. I think this leads to a lot of angst among Asian-American writers and an exaggerated focus on racial dynamics
If you read early Philip Roth there's a probably similar feeling, of immigrants almost expecting more hostility than is received from the gentiles, finding it surprisingly easy to succeed, and being unsure what to do with that success.
I think women are more collectivist and group-oriented, more focused on fitting in. But fitting in is unlikely to help anyone's art.
The pernicious trend I see in progressive circles is non-black minorities attempting to use the Black American experience as a metaphor for their experience, when actually, the history of Black Americans is quite terrible and very much not deserving of envy. And I'm not talking about Asian kids wearing baggy clothes and rapping, I'm talking about PMC strivers.
I think that Roth quickly moved on from the Malamud/Bellow Jewish angst stories (Goodbye Columbus) to some really out there experimental fiction (Our Gang, about the Nixon administration, and The Breast, a really fun and creative postmodern novel). My point being that he doesn't get stuck in the bear trap of only being able to write in a narrow way about race.
I agree that there is a phenomenon of Asian-Americans striving to find a group to model themselves after -- sometimes it's whites, sometimes it's black people. There is this weird stolen valor thing that I find distasteful where Asians are trying to present themselves as hugely discriminated against. Like, I do feel some Asian-American writers are trying to write the Asian version of Black Boy / Invisible Man / The Bluest Eye, but it's not the 1950's, and they're not black!
Racial microaggressions are a thing, but they're not nearly comparable to Jim Crow experience(s) of African Americans
You, Chris, and Vishal's pieces are circling the shark but fail to reach the REAL red-pilled conclusion. It's women. Women ruin everything. May I propose the Blame Asian Women Hypothesis.
JOHN: AsAm literature makes everything about race, and barely cares about actual Asian cultures except to use as a woke cudgel. Why? Asian women are trying to gain a leg up in intrasexual competition against white women in the Glass Bead Game.
CHRIS: AsAm literature is unwilling to portray AsAms in a 'negative' way, even if it means making them too boring, but Asian countries don't do this, so they portray evil Asians that are way more interesting than the boring Asians in AsAm lit. (One thing Chris may have mentioned is that Asian *male* villains are still OK in these books, as long as they're misogynists, but Asian *female* villains aren't allowed to be totally evil.) Why? Asian women don't want to portray Asian women as evil because they feel like it loses them points in the Glass Bead Game.(More controversially, one could argue that because Asian countries are more misogynistic on average, there are less WOMEN involved in the writing rooms shoving woke BS down everyone's throats.)
VISHAL: AsAm literature is too self-pitying and victimizing. Why? Asian women try to win points in the Glass Bead Game by casting themselves as oppressed victims by virtue of race, even if they earn six figures in Silicon Valley.
Is my theory controversial? 100%. But I'm willing to admit that the Great Feminization and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. A society that spends all of its time playing meaningless Glass Bead Games is one set for disaster, like the Qing dynasty.
I agree that Asian female experience of being Asian American is different from the Asian male experience, and this does influence the kind of literature that Asian women tend to write. I'm not sure that Asian men can say much, unfortunately, because we don't write very much literature.
I do hold out hope that an Asian woman unencumbered by the demands of political correctness will appear some day and write something interesting and truly different
Yeah you're right, the feminization of society is terrible. We should all be living like the Taliban!
The problem is that women are easier to suck into status games. The solution is not to get rid of women, but the status games themselves.
Your theory is controversial mainly because it is based on no evidence and is quite silly.
So many great female authors out there. The novel has been regarded as a female medium since its inception, for good reason.
None of the garbage writers mentioned in the article are writing original works of female art, as your theory requires. This is just generic publishing industry slop that is being produced to specification. Nobody is reading any of these shitty writers except for a few MFA students and some substackers. They are cultural nobodies in their own time. Their crappy books will be forgotten in three years, even shorter a time than the literary agents and publishers who are responsible for them.
"The Great Feminisation" does not exist, sorry. You aren't some brave truth teller. You are just repeating a poorly thought through idea that you found on the internet. Male writers like Tony Tulathimutte as re writing exactly the same generic garbage as the female writers in this article. People don't read crap literary fiction in 2026 and so Yellowface or The Feminist are the sort of crap literary fiction that gets published for the small circle of insiders who have a financial incentive to waste their time reading it.
There are certainly great female writers, but many of them very pointedly disliked other female artists (Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith). George Eliot used a male name to distinguish herself from the masses of mediocre women who were writing at the time. Women have always been the main consumers of art & literature, and many have wonderful taste, but few women can match male ambition when it comes to making things. And it's obvious why that is, women have the ability to create people, and when you can do that, creating things is a child's game.
I hope people don't talk too much about "The Great Feminization," it's a critique that needed to be made and heard, and it was, and now we can move on.
I disagree about Tony T. I think “the Feminist” is actually a very good and scarily insightful story. I do think that Tony undercut his piece by making the protagonist not Asian
Instant follow. Hilarious. Brilliant.
gracias!
In this putrid place, the headaches and hangovers will persist. The exits are all locked. This story of a story is not about Asian American fiction. This is about Writing, Thinking, Speaking, for the last 20 years. Almost all of it begins and ends with Group Identity. You cannot get out of this Group Home. So just sit there with it, the surface drama. Look around at the shabby furnishings. This era will stand out in time like a fossilized dung pile of Group Think, where the books are in fact judged by the cover.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts, it is nice to hear from a fellow Asian American.
However, your article also upset me a bit and I realized it was for these reasons:
This piece confuses pattern recognition with actual analysis. It points out recurring themes but never interrogates why they exist, like publishing dynamics or historical marginalization. Instead of engaging deeply with texts, it reduces Asian American women’s writing to caricature, flattening nuance into mockery. It also ignores power and context, sidestepping how race, gender, and the publishing industry shape what gets produced and rewarded.
More importantly, it dismisses lived experiences as trivial without examining their continued relevance, and lacks any real self-awareness about its own biases. Ultimately, the argument leans more on sarcasm than substance— identifying trends without meaningfully analyzing them, so it reads less like critique and more like a stylized rant.
Tldr; In my opinion, the article identifies a trend but doesn’t interrogate it. It critiques content without examining systems, reduces complexity to stereotype, and prioritizes wit over substance; so it ends up feeling more like a rant than a meaningful analysis.
Sadly this is a problem with most diasporic literature, as an african living in africa its hard to read whats coming out America's african diaspora
I remarked the same thing! Stories about being an “other” in America are like the main thing anyone ever writes.
Self pity is bang on
But actually the lack of depth about what it means to be Asian is the real point. Something I find it my own engagement with other 2nd and 3rd gen immigrants unless there’s a conscious effort to relearn and transpose it. For all that the world supporting those traditions has vanished. I don’t think that they’re American or Australian or whatever though. No one including themselves truly believe that though their mind might be Western. One cannot be cut off from history like that without a sense of dislocation.