The Cultural Politics of White Male–Asian Female Dating

Interracial Aporia

In early 2024, new media artist Jackie Liu released Fishin’ for Average Caucasian Boyfriends, a semi-autobiographical video game about overcoming the “script” of “being with a cis, straight, and/or white man…even if I do like them.”¹ Upon a successful “catch,” the fish quips “I won’t shut up about: ‘Anime and Japanese culture’” or “I can’t live without: “Sushi.” The narrative is an epigrammatic satire of an archetype that Liu encountered in her dating life. But the player—and by extension, Liu—is the one fishing.

After the player chooses not to go fishing a couple of times, a series of messages appears:

I do notice so many Asian girls in tech with
their white boyfriends—who are, with 95%
chance, software engineers.
No shade at all. It’s been me in the past.
As long as it’s healthy, go nuts. Have a blast.
But why is it such a canon event?
Why is it the thing to aspire towards?²

Jackie Wang, in her memoir Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun, puts it more bluntly: “Why do most of the Asian women I know, queer or not, end up dating white people?”³ But Anne Anlin Cheng, in her memoir, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority, reverses this framing, asking about the stereotypical “white boyfriend” who “has been exclusively dating Asian women.” So rather than “fishing” for a boyfriend, the fish is choosing the fisherwoman:

Scholars have long pointed to the hypersexualization of Asian women and the demasculinization of Asian men in American popular media as a leading cause for the high rate of Asian American women marrying outside their race. But it is also common wisdom among Asian American women of my generation and younger that, if you discover your white boyfriend has been exclusively dating Asian women, you should run for the hills. Just because there is a white-male fetishization of Asian femininity does not mean that the inverse (that is, Asian-female fetishization or idealization of white masculinity) is true. In fact, for many Asian women involved in interracial relationships, myself included, white masculinity is a fraught challenge. Racialized gender, especially as it plays out in intimate relationships, is not and cannot be simply a question of identity politics or a problem of representation.⁴

The pseudonymous writer Mole, in a self-described “manifesto,” tackles “Whiteness, Asian America, ‘representation,’ and White Male–Asian Female (WMAF) relationships”—notably without Liu or Wang’s queer dimension.⁵ She asks rhetorically:

Do you know a White guy from high school who thought he was cooler than the Asians, who now has an Asian girlfriend? I’m sure you do. That’s the White superiority complex at work.

Do you know an Asian girl with an entirely Asian friend group, but a White boyfriend? I’m sure you do. That’s the racialized standards of masculinity at work — Asians are friends, not boyfriends.⁶

Melinda Li confesses to this behavior in “Decolonizing My Love Life: What I Learned When I Stopped Dating White Men”:

In middle school, through the gossip grapevine, I learned an Asian friend had a crush on me. I dismissed it immediately. Not because he wasn’t attractive — I just hadn’t considered him. I had already absorbed the idea that dating a white boy would elevate me socially. That was the priority.

And then there were Asian women. I wasn’t just dating white men — I was competing with other AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] women for their attention. I saw them not as friends, but as threats (albeit unbeknownst to them). To comfort myself, I crafted a fragile self-affirming mythology: I’m different from the other Asian girls. I have layers. I have individuality. If a white boy had to choose from a lineup, I convinced myself I’d stand out.⁷

What Li prioritizes is “social elevation,” not “White superiority.” Whiteness is the instrument, not the goal. Mole’s manifesto relitigates well-treaded territory in Asian American discourse, essentializing Asian American identity to advocate for Bianca Mabute-Louie’s “unassimilability,” which “is about cultivating our own social networks and dating to prosper in America without Whiteness. It is our ancestors and the elders creating home.”⁸ Through this lens, Mole finds “whiteness” and “anti-Blackness” everywhere, eliding a materialist critique of what Asian Americanness is and how racism works, and resulting in an identitarian approach for how Asian Americans should live.

An Asian American Race

Mole points out that “Asian American discourse” centers on an “ever-evolving relationship with Whiteness” in which “White people have never, and will never, see Asians as their equals.” She exhorts that “[w]e need to think critically about the way Asian America has attempted to, and is allowed to blend in with Whiteness” which “has reinforced a fictitious Asian American uniformity and further enmeshed us into western hegemony.”⁹ It’s a big claim, but also trivial, because this opposition to Whiteness serves as the definition of Asian America. It should be no surprise that “Asian American Content,” by this definition, is

A/ inoffensive, impersonal meditation on the distant histories of our ancestors (rather than our own current lived realities and actions) and B/ lighthearted consumption of the representation of Asian Americanness (rather than living in our literal Asian bodies).¹⁰

This is a remarkable slippage between (a) a racial definition and (b) a cultural definition of Asian America. Note that the parentheticals express the reverse, where “current lived realities and actions” are cultural and “literal Asian bodies” are racial. This is crucial for Mole’s argument against assimilation because it means Asian Americans—to use the popular metaphor—can be “bananas”: yellow on the outside and white on the inside. As Walter Benn Michaels writes in “Autobiography of an Ex-White Man”:

The antiessentialist performative is in this sense a version of the essentialist denegrification serum: if race is a biological fact, then to change the color of your skin is to change your race; if race is a mode of behavior, then to change your “way of life” is to change your race. But because race, as [Howard] Winant says, is “not a matter of color alone,” you can’t change your race by changing your skin. And because race, in not being a “matter of color alone,” must nevertheless still be a matter of color, you can’t change your race by changing your “way of life” either. It must still be a matter of color because without the appeal to color there can be nothing distinctively racial about your “way of life”: the social constructionist commitment to the racial performative, in other words, is only skin deep. It involves not the choice of behavior over color but the adjustment of behavior to color.¹¹

To say that “Asians”—Mole is actually addressing Asian Americans—“contain multitudes that we may never be able to express in words” and “should be more willing to criticize everything including ourselves” is just vague platitude. Mole’s third point is that “Asians” “should care less about White people,” which is only an issue given Mole’s definition of Asian America.¹² Is racial discourse about White people what Asian Americans care about in everyday life? The issue of Asian American “discourse” or “Content” is easily ignored today, especially with the overwhelming amount of media—both mass and social—being produced and consumed every day. If mainstream content is “lighthearted” and “inoffensive,” what should Asian Americans be looking for?

Basing her argument on Claire Jean Kim’s Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World, Mole argues that “liberation” comes from “exploring Asian American positionality”:

Instead of desperately whining about the (now comprehensively disproven and outdated) “Black-White binary” and trying to satisfy the Whites by picking a spot closest to them and shutting up, we can understand anti-Asianness as rooted in, rather than subordinate to, historically anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, meritocratic and capitalist systems of oppression. We can begin to understand how Asian Americans are “dynamically positioned and weaponized by the U.S. state as it seeks to preserve structural anti-Blackness” and “consider how [we] might resist or subvert these patterns,” as Claire Jean Kim writes.

We can contribute openness and understanding, rather than the weight of guilt and self-deprecation, to repair the fraught relationship between Asian and Black people. Addressing anti-Asianness is neither a higher or lower priority than addressing other axes of oppression.

Ultimately, liberation does not come from public and desperate self-flagellation. It can only come from exploring Asian American positionality relative to Whiteness and Blackness from all angles, approaching inconvenient truths head-on, interrogating our own socialization, actions, and values, and building confident solidarity with Black, Brown and Indigenous struggle.¹³

Mole’s citation of Kim’s book points to this passage in the introduction:

The point is not to persuade Asian Americans to confess that they are complicit in anti-Blackness, so that they might be absolved. Rather, the point is for Asian Americans to understand how they are dynamically positioned and weaponized by the U.S. state as it seeks to preserve structural anti-Blackness, and second, to consider how they might resist or subvert these patterns. How can Asian Americans respond ethically to their own not-Blackness? What political possibilities might be opened up if Asian Americans completed the [1960s Asian American] movement’s half-finished critique? Can Asian Americanness be reimagined as a force that destabilizes, rather than stabilizes, an anti-Black world?¹⁴

The language of “liberation” seems to be drawn from Kim’s comments on a statement by Asians4BlackLives:

Going along with the racial system secures only temporary benefits for Asian Americans. In the long run, their liberation, too, depends on its dismantling. Which is to say, their liberation depends on the progress achieved by the Black struggle. Ethics and self-interest point in the same direction. By taking up the theorization of structural anti-Blackness, Asians4BlackLives illuminates a path forward out of the ethical crisis bedeviling Asian American politics today.¹⁵

But what remains unexplained in Mole and Kim’s formulation is the connection between politics and ethics. How does the political critique that originated in the Asian American Movement of the 1960s become an “ethical crisis”? In the book’s “Coda,” Kim argues that it is the responsibility of Asian Americans for “generating a misbegotten critique”:

Finally, Asian Americans must take responsibility for generating a misbegotten critique of the so-called model minority myth and correct it in a definitive way. Asian Americanists have made this critique the centerpiece of their intellectual agenda for a half-century (and I include my earlier work here, too), and the result has been a highly consequential mystification of white-Afro-Asian dynamics. As discussed in the book, when whites valorize Asian Americans over Black people, Asian Americanists have said we are minorities too and accused whites of constructing a “myth” that exaggerates Asian Americans’ well-being and drives a wedge between them and Black people. In this way, Asian Americanists have reinforced the logic of minority equivalencing that underlies white practices of relative valorization and helped whites to obfuscate the central issue at hand: the structural positioning of Asian Americans as not-Black, which allows Asian Americans a kind of social and economic mobility largely denied to Black people. Once they acknowledge structural anti-Blackness, though, Asian Americans are uniquely positioned to advance a different critique, one that cuts through the mystification rather than reinforcing it: The valorization of Asian Americans as a model minority is not just a myth or rhetorical construction; it reflects a deeply embedded structural favoritism that is the real explanation for why Asian Americans fare better than Black people in an anti-Black society.¹⁶

To “acknowledge,” for Iris Marion Young, is the “forward-looking” recognition of “unconscious and unintended behavior”:

To take account of such intuitions we can distinguish between blaming people and holding them responsible. It is inappropriate to blame people for actions they are unaware of and do not intend. People and institutions nevertheless can and should be held responsible for unconscious and unintended behavior, actions, or attitudes that contribute to oppression. To blame an agent means to make that agent liable to punishment. I mean punishment in a broad sense, including not only imprisonment and fines, but also being made to do something in restitution, exclusion from associations, removal of privileges, public censure, and social ostracism. Blame is a backward-looking concept. Calling on agents to take responsibility for their actions, habits, feelings, attitudes, images, and associations, on the other hand, is forward-looking; it asks the person “from here on out” to submit such unconscious behavior to reflection, to work to change habits and attitudes.¹⁷

Throughout her book, Kim cites myriad examples of Asian Americans denying “structural anti-Blackness,” but to attribute responsibility to Asian Americans as a group the political discourse of specific people is to commit what Rogers Brubaker calls “groupism”:

Race reductionist thinking is essentializing because it assumes that Black people share a single culture, and that their interests cannot be at odds. This is an example of what I have called “groupism”: the tendency to treat ethnic groups, races and nations as substantial, homogeneous entities to which interests and agency can be attributed. Such invocations of a putatively unitary community, Adolph Reed argues, often serve the elites who claim to speak in its name, while those spoken for disappear “as all but a communitarian abstraction to be ventriloquized” by the spokespersons. In reality, there is no “universal or near-universal set of singularly racial concerns that override their interests as workers, parents, teachers, students, realtors, real estate investors, tenants [or] homeowners.”¹⁸

Yet Mole is ventriloquizing for Asian Americans when she uses the first-person plural our in the below passage, quoting Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference:

By refusing to celebrate, or even acknowledge, our differences from White people and our kinship with Asians in Asia, we collaborate with our oppressors to universalize norms that “preclude recognizing and affirming a group’s specificity in its own terms” and instead offer White people digestible, bite-sized narratives of our humanity.

Opening up this kind of discourse exposes how White supremacy and White liberalism have infiltrated the Asian American community and discouraged us from building a healthy Asian “identity politic” alternative that can contend with the reactionary Asian-focused carceral solutions a la Stop Asian Hate, or the misogynist Asian racial purists who harass women in WMAF relationships.¹⁹

Mole attempts to distinguish between her position and the “reactionary […] solutions” or the “racial purists” that apparently need to be contended with. What is not clear is how “our differences from White people” and “our kinship with Asians in Asia” are anything but “communitarian abstraction[s].” The full context of Young’s quote cautions against this sort of essentializing:

In the objectifying ideologies of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia, only the oppressed and excluded groups are defined as different. Whereas the privileged groups are neutral and exhibit free and malleable subjectivity, the excluded groups are marked with an essence, imprisoned in a given set of possibilities. By virtue of the characteristics the group is alleged to have by nature, the ideologies allege that group members have specific dispositions that suit them for some activities and not others. Difference in these ideologies always means exclusionary opposition to a norm. There are rational men, and then there are women; there are civilized men, and then there are wild and savage peoples. The marking of difference always implies a good/bad opposition; it is always a devaluation, the naming of an inferiority in relation to a superior standard of humanity.

Difference here always means absolute otherness; the group marked as different has no common nature with the normal or neutral ones. The categorical opposition of groups essentializes them, repressing the differences within groups. In this way the definition of difference as exclusion and opposition actually denies difference. This essentializing categorization also denies difference in that its universalizing norms preclude recognizing and affirming a group’s specificity in its own terms.

Essentializing difference expresses a fear of specificity, and a fear of making permeable the categorical border between oneself and the others.²⁰

To claim that “we collaborate with our oppressors” is—to use Young’s phrase—the “categorical opposition of groups.” It does not explain why people might “collaborate” or how “White supremacy” “infiltrate[s]” the “Asian American community.” Young’s point is that the “essentializing categorization” is itself “universalizing norms.” A couple pages later, Young defines difference as “relational”:

Such a relational understanding of difference entails revising the meaning of group identity as well. In asserting the positive difference of their experience, culture, and social perspective, social movements of groups that have experienced cultural imperialism deny that they have a common identity, a set of fixed attributes that clearly mark who belongs and who doesn’t. Rather, what makes a group a group is a social process of interaction and differentiation in which some people come to have a particular affinity for others. My “affinity group” in a given social situation comprises those people with whom I feel the most comfortable, who are more familiar. Affinity names the manner of sharing assumptions, affective bonding, and networking that recognizably differentiates groups from one another, but not according to some common nature. The salience of a particular person’s group affinities may shift according to the social situation or according to changes in her or his life. Membership in a social group is a function not of satisfying some objective criteria, but of a subjective affirmation of affinity with that group, the affirmation of that affinity by other members of the group, and the attribution of membership in that group by persons identifying with other groups. Group identity is constructed from a flowing process in which individuals identify themselves and others in terms of groups, and thus group identity itself flows and shifts with changes in social process.²¹

Is the “Asian American community”—only named so in the 1960s—an “affinity group”? Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, in “Beyond ‘Identity,’” criticize the “shaky sociological foundations” of this usage of “groups” by Young:

What constitutes the “groupness” of these “groups”? What makes them groups rather than categories around which self- and other-identifications may, but need not necessarily, crystallize? This is not addressed by Young. She assumes that distinctive histories, experiences, and social locations endow these “groups” with different “capacities, needs, culture, and cognitive styles” and with “distinctive understandings of all aspects of the society and unique perspectives on social issues.” Social and cultural heterogeneity is construed here as a juxtaposition of internally homogeneous, externally bounded blocs. The “principles of unity” that Young repudiates at the level of the polity as a whole—because they “hide difference”—are reintroduced, and continue to hide difference, at the level of the constituent “groups.”

At stake in arguments about group-differentiated or “multicultural” citizenship are important issues that have been long debated outside as well as inside the academy, all having to do in one way or another with the relative weight and merits of universalist and particularist claims. Sociological analysis cannot and should not seek to resolve this robust debate, but it can seek to shore up its often shaky sociological foundations. It can offer a richer vocabulary for conceptualizing social and cultural heterogeneity and particularity. Moving beyond identitarian language opens up possibilities for specifying other kinds of connectedness, other idioms of identification, other styles of self-understanding, other ways of reckoning social location. To paraphrase what Adam Przeworski said long ago about class, cultural struggle is a struggle about culture, not a struggle between cultures. Activists of identity politics deploy the language of bounded groupness not because it reflects social reality, but precisely because groupness is ambiguous and contested. Their groupist rhetoric has a performative, constitutive dimension, contributing, when it is successful, to the making of the groups it invokes.²²

Despite Mole’s claim that her “manifesto is not in defense of ‘identity politics,’” it is “identity politics.”²³ Brubaker and Cooper’s critique is what Kim, in an earlier article titled “Unyielding Positions: A Critique of the ‘Race’ Debate,” calls “anti-essentialist.”²⁴ Kim dismisses this line of thinking as too narrow:

Anti-essentialists [Kwame Anthony] Appiah and [Barbara J.] Fields rely heavily on examples from the black experience in their writings but claim to be talking about race in general. Appiah, for instance, sees all racial identities as intrinsically racist and constraining to individuals. Although they do not explicitly state that they view all nonwhite experiences as fungible, the anti-essentialists’ failure to differentiate non-white experiences amounts to an implicit embrace of a binary white/non-white framework. This neglect of complex group positionality leads Appiah to miscalculate what it would take to interrupt the work that race does.²⁵

But the argument advanced by anti-essentialists is that “complex group positionality” is the phenomenon to be explained, as Brubaker exhorts:

Ethnic common sense—the tendency to partition the social world into putatively deeply constituted, quasi-natural intrinsic kinds—is a key part of what we want to explain, not what we want to explain things with; it belongs to our empirical data, not to our analytical toolkit. […] The evidence suggests that some commonsense social categories—and notably commonsense ethnic and racial categories—tend to be essentializing and naturalizing.²⁶

Yet Kim criticizes Appiah by using “racial hierarchy” to explain “multiculturalist rhetoric”:

What Appiah overlooks is that “ethnicity” has already replaced “race” as the favored referent to group differences in the post-Civil Rights era – yet racial meanings remain deeply entrenched. Under the color-blind norms of the contemporary era in the United States, race talk has been delegitimated as divisive and unproductive by both conservatives and liberals. At the same time, the rise of multiculturalist rhetoric and norms has brought the notions of ethnicity and culture in place of race to the foreground. Rather than weakening our orientation toward race, however, this shift toward “ethnicity” has resulted in a precise replication of racial hierarchy and positioning in another guise. “Ethnicity” is now code for race, and culture is code for biology.²⁷

Kim splits Brubaker’s nuanced approach by claiming that “race” explains “ethnicity.” But what explains race? Kim’s book continues this methodology by finding anti-Blackness even when it is not explicit:

It should be noted that reading for anti-Blackness in the historical archive requires a new methodology. At times, anti-Blackness can be perceived directly, as in the Chinese–Black comparisons that show up throughout the official record. At other times, it can only be perceived indirectly, as in the unstated partial immunities that the Chinese were granted from certain forms of anti-Black coercion and violence. Thus in addition to looking at what was said about or done to the Chinese, we must also, using slavery and its afterlife as a reference point, look at what was not said about or done to the Chinese—what forms of aggression and harm were foreclosed or unthought because of their not-Blackness.²⁸

For example, Kim justifies a series of equivalences through the opinions of witnesses in a public testimony:

Chinese laborer = coolie = slave contained a double elision: between the Chinese laborer and the coolie, and between the coolie and the slave. Chinese laborers in California were clearly not slaves but the mediating term of “coolie” brought the two terms into plausible relation with each other. In this sense, the term “coolie” enabled the imaginative transference of Blackness onto the Chinese immigrant, for the specific purposes of promoting exclusion. During public testimony organized by the California State Senate’s Special Committee on Chinese Immigration in 1878, officials repeatedly asked witnesses whether they believed Chinese laborers in California were “coolies.” Some demurred, others expressed opinions, but the answers were beside the point. It was the insistent, leading manner in which the question was posed and its ritualistic repetition throughout the hearings that sutured the Chinese laborer with the “coolie” (and, transitively, the slave) in the public mind. John Chinaman, already weighted down by immutable cultural difference, found himself befouled by Blackness as well.²⁹

Note that it was witnesses in a public testimony who were asked if “Chinese laborers in California were ‘coolies.’” Why did they leverage what Brubaker calls “ethnic common sense”? What were they leveraging it for? As Brubaker writes:

Apart from the general unreliability of ethnic common sense as a guide for social analysis, we should remember that participants’ accounts—especially those of specialists in ethnicity such as ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, who, unlike nonspecialists, may live “off” as well as “for” ethnicity—often have what Pierre Bourdieu has called a performative character. By invoking groups, they seek to evoke them, summon them, call them into being. Their categories are for doing—designed to stir, summon, justify, mobilize, kindle, and energize.³⁰

Kim provides an answer to who was invoking the specter of “coolies” and why, just a couple of pages before the prior quote from the same book:

The Workingmen’s Party, which spearheaded the Chinese exclusion movement in California, saw the growth of corporate power—the new “Money Power,” akin to the old “Slave Power”—as a threat to their dream of an egalitarian society of white independent producers. They decried the proletarianization of the workforce that resulted from capital-intensive corporate mining (hydraulic and deep shaft) and corporate agriculture, and they advanced a comprehensive free-labor agenda, including higher wages, universal public education, and regulations to prevent land monopolies and control speculation. Believing that Chinese “coolies” were instruments of economic warfare deployed by the Money Power against free labor, the Workingmen’s Party took up the cry of Chinese exclusion in the name of antislavery.³¹

Putting the two pieces together, the Chinese laborers were “befouled by Blackness” by the Workingmen’s Party to advance “a comprehensive free-labor agenda” by “promoting exclusion.” But as Beth Lew-Williams explains in The Chinese Must Go, the “anti-Chinese agitators” were what Brubaker calls “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs”:

So powerful was the image of the heathen coolie that the anti-Chinese movement united white colonial settlers in the U.S. West across traditional divisions of class, politics, and ethnicity. But did white Americans’ fear of the “heathen coolie” have any basis in economic and social reality? Were the Chinese unfree workers who were uninterested in assimilating into American society in the nineteenth century? The simple answer to these problematic questions is no. These representations of the Chinese, widely accepted at the time and repeated too often ever since, do not stand. Even the most adamant anti-Chinese agitators at the time recognized the disjuncture between ideology and reality. In many ways, it was the Chinese migrants’ violations of the heathen coolie stereotype that made them such a menace.³²

The representation “that sutured the Chinese laborer with the ‘coolie’” was an ethnopolitical response to the “proletarianization of the workforce.” It is constitutive of the “heathen coolie.” In addition, the Workingmen’s Party’s stance against “coolies” was not even anti-Black:

While the Workingmen’s Party often spoke in a language of white supremacy, they attempted to knit together all U.S. citizens (and aspiring citizens) using claims of common nationalism, freedom, and belonging. [Dennis] Kearney, for example, rallied African American workers in California to the anti-Chinese cause, helping them form their own (that is, segregated) anticoolie club.³³

Suffice to say, Kim takes the discourse by ethnopolitical entrepreneurs as representative of their ethnic or racial group rather than a rhetorical strategy motivated by their self-interest as workingmen. Another strategy, not pursued in this instance, is unionizing white, black, and Chinese workingmen. Chinese exclusion may not have been the best strategy, but it was not the goal of the Workingmen’s Party. As Mark Tseng-Putterman, in an article cited by Mole, says:³⁴

Yet, as an opening point for Asian American solidarity politics, Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World risks entrenching the same sort of political paralysis as the genre of Asian American anti-Blackness writ large. While the book leverages a plethora of examples of Asian American privilege in an anti-Black system and the limits of historical attempts at coalition, it shies away from examining activist efforts that have successfully navigated these obstacles.³⁵

Even if an Asian American acknowledges “structural anti-Blackness,” it is only an “ethical crisis” if the individual is responsible for their response to their “structural positioning.” To understand how ethics is connected to politics for Young and Kim, it is necessary to reverse the above proposition—it is ethics that constitutes the ontology of race. That is, the moral distinction between good and evil is mapped onto a mutual exclusivity between races. As Brook Ziporyn writes:

A mythology is built around making a specific historical group of people, still present in the world and easy to identify, into the symbol of universal evil; some group of people is born into a situation where they are singled out, by virtue of their alleged metaphysical nature as members of that group, and equated by some other people as the cause and embodiment of all that is wrong with the world—or more strictly, all that is wrong with the universe. […] They become breathing symbols of the universal evil, living carriers of the obstruction to progress. The demonizing structure here is the flipside of the previous one: it focuses not on identifying oneself with the universal good, but on identifying the hated Other with the universal evil. In this case, though it is awkward to say, one has to wonder a little about the parallels with the transfer of the same paradigmatic structure onto any specific group, i.e., all the specifically European and post-European forms of racism. […] What distinguishes the Jesusist turn in monotheism, the full development of the personalism implicit in the structure of monotheism itself, is the mutual exclusivity, the black and white absoluteness of the distinction, and the ultimate ontological weight given to this distinction, making it the purpose and standard of all existence. This is true even in this case, where the criterion is something involuntary and pre-personal like race. As we have argued that the mechanistic conception of causality among mutually exclusive things is as much a by-product of the ultimacy of purposivity as is its apparent opposite (teleological causality), the racial form of vilification in the name of a particularistic group here appears together with the opposite case of universalist movements: in both cases, the thread we are tracing is the mutual exclusivity of the categories. This is easy to recognize in the forms of self-identification with the universal good as described above, but the same structure applies in reverse where the exclusivity takes the form of identification instead of the out-group with the universal evil: we have again the idea of the universal as specifically embodied.³⁶

This is not to say that Young and Kim are monotheists, but to explain how the structure of race is related to the ethic of responsibility. Rey Chow develops the relationship between ethnicity and the Protestant work ethic in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

Since the ethnic is explicitly or implicitly understood as a proletarian from whom work has been stolen and to whom credit must be restored, ethnic existence is habitually not only imagined as captivity-in-resistance but also articulated as a protest—a protest that, in the course of voicing complaint against injury and injustice, demands recognition and compensation for the victims. The progressive emancipation of all and sundry that is typically intended by universalist moral claims is hence supported, discursively, by a concomitant culture of protest. There can be no such universalist claims without implicit or explicit protest; conversely, the act of protesting itself is often underscored by some form of universalist intent, whether or not such intent is overtly announced.³⁷

Chow connects this ethnic protest to the “moral justification” for “material gains”:

I believe this paradox about modernist moralism is what lies at the heart of Max Weber’s discussion of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Weber traces the origins of the capitalistic work ethic back to religion, to the medieval Reformation movement in Europe, thus providing, as one critic puts it, “insight into the peculiar union of secularity and religiosity in American everyday culture.” As is well known, Weber argues that the drive toward material gains that is characteristic of capitalist enterprises cannot simply be seen as the outcome of human greed, which is found throughout history, but should rather be seen as the outcome of a force of internal disciplining peculiar to the secularizing West. This internal disciplining owes its historical origins to the post-Reformation religious belief in “calling,” the belief that one is divinely endowed with a life task, a mission, or a field to which one is supposed to devote one’s best energies. Calling provides a powerful moral justification for worldly activities, the so-called good works.³⁸

This moral dimension is what is missing from Mole’s description of how the Asian American “ethic” is viewed:

Because we are machines, our work is efficient and technically flawless, yet devalued because it lacks humanity. We have a great work ethic, because we can’t be distracted by hopes, dreams, or freedoms. But what “ethic?” For Asians (especially the Chinese) are merely competitive, parasitic opportunists — everything wrong with capitalism and globalization.³⁹

Is it really the case that Asian Americans (or even Asians in general) view themselves as “parasitic opportunists”? Even if they do, is this view constitutive of Asian Americanness?

Thus, Young suggests a positive possibility for an ethic:

This politics asserts that oppressed groups have distinct cultures, experiences, and perspectives on social life with humanly positive meaning, some of which may even be superior to the culture and perspectives of mainstream society. The rejection and devaluation of one’s culture and perspective should not be a condition of full participation in social life.

Asserting the value and specificity of the culture and attributes of oppressed groups, moreover, results in a relativizing of the dominant culture. When feminists assert the validity of feminine sensitivity and the positive value of nurturing behavior, when gays describe the prejudice of heterosexuals as homophobic and their own sexuality as positive and self-developing, when Blacks affirm a distinct Afro-American tradition, then the dominant culture is forced to discover itself for the first time as specific: as Anglo, European, Christian, masculine, straight. In a political struggle where oppressed groups insist on the positive value of their specific culture and experience, it becomes increasingly difficult for dominant groups to parade their norms as neutral and universal, and to construct the values and behavior of the oppressed as deviant, perverted, or inferior. By puncturing the universalist claim to unity that expels some groups and turns them into the Other, the assertion of positive group specificity introduces the possibility of understanding the relation between groups as merely difference, instead of exclusion, opposition, or dominance.⁴⁰

But Chow suggests that this “positive meaning” works within the structure of capitalism:

Even though it may still appear that ethnicity is underwritten with the modernist narrative of alienated labor and resistant captivity, therefore, it would be more precise, I think, to argue that contemporary articulations of ethnicity as such, much like the articulation of class consciousness, are already firmly inscribed within the economic and ideological workings of capitalism, replete with their mechanisms of callings, opportunities, and rewards. In this context, to be ethnic is to protest—but perhaps less for actual emancipation of any kind than for the benefits of worldwide visibility, currency, and circulation. Ethnic struggles have become, in this manner, an indisputable symptom of the thoroughly and irrevocably mediatized relations of capitalism and its biopolitics. In the age of globalization, ethnics are first and foremost protesting ethnics, but this is not because they are possessed of some “soul” and “humanity” that cannot be changed into commodities. Rather, it is because protesting constitutes the economically logical and socially viable vocation for them to assume.⁴¹

Chow resists Young’s essentialism by emphasizing the primacy of economic process—capitalist relations—over “social process.” Lei Gong on the Escape from Plan A podcast points out the importance of being “materially affected” in determining what ethic minorities are looking for:

As a minority, right, you know, as a minority, if you speak up and then you kind of step out of line, you are the most vulnerable to getting, you know, materially affected, right? Like, I think my, like, from my opinion, from my standpoint, right, the best that Asian Americans can do is to just figure out what does it mean to be normal, right? Figure out how do you have a normal life. That’s the answer, ultimately, right? If we can define the set of political, cultural and social relationships we need in order to have a normal life in society, then we’re good. That’s the only thing you can really affect right now is just, you know, normalcy, right? And ultimately, I think that’s the only way you can kind of, you know, provide constructive input to the rest of America’s, like, you know, period of cultural psychosis, right? Is that everyone’s looking for a way to be normal. And if you can be the first group that says, hey, this is how you go and live a normal life in this social, cultural, political, economic context, right? Well, then that gives answers to everyone else. And maybe you can get a little more cachet in society that way, right? So that’s kind of how I see it.⁴²

An ethics of solidarity is certainly possible, but is it really “a way to be normal”? Young’s “positive group specificity” does not necessarily resolve the material relations between groups because the “behavior of the oppressed” is not merely “deviant, perverted, or inferior” but one of being exploited by the “dominant group”—the capitalists. For Ziporyn, this “groupism” and “positive group specificity” are two sides of the same coin of “Jesuism” when “exclusivity takes the form of identification,” “we have again the idea of the universal as specifically embodied.” Ziporyn writes:

This structure of demonizing one’s ideological enemies, pitting in-group against out-group, where the in-group is at the same time identified with the principle of universal inclusion, with love, with all-inclusiveness, is a tactic seemingly invented or at least perfected by the Jesus of the Gospels, one which remains influential and, due to its association with Christian prestige, has even come to be defended as morally and spiritually legitimate. Purely on a structural level, there is surely something of this detectable in some of the more virulent modern forms of racism, fascism, and Bolshevism (whether Leninist, Stalinist, or Maoist), all of which go beyond the usual in-group/out-group antagonism that we find almost everywhere in human culture to something more extreme and all-consuming, giving distinction-dissolving affirmation of unity with one hand while simultaneously building this in-group solidarity on the basis of a vociferous condemnation of an out-group, making the exclusivity morally appealing and palatable by linking it to the self-sacrificing ideology of in-group inclusivity—a structural peculiarity we might dub “Jesusism.” But of course this structure is in reality just a further consequence of the basic logic of Monotheism: the inclusive as a means to reach the exclusive, the oceanic as a means toward the ultimate goal of the personal, oneness as a weapon which divides, the purposeless subordinated to purpose.⁴³

This is what David L. Eng and Shinhee Han call “identity emerg[ing] from politics” in Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation:

In racial melancholia, you can name the lost object, although, as Freud reminds us, it often remains quite difficult to identify exactly what it is in that object that you have lost. Put otherwise, in racial melancholia, you lift the rock of repression and you discover something underneath—a lost object, one demanding to be analyzed and interpreted. Indeed, it is the naming of this object of loss that creates identity from difference; it is the naming and narrating of the social exclusions compelling its foreclosure that creates a racial identity and racial politics in its wake. In this regard, to paraphrase Angela Davis, identity emerges from politics rather than politics emerging from identity.⁴⁴

The foundation of Asian American identity in the Third World movements of the 1960s was always political.⁴⁵ Therefore, Mole’s accusation that “White supremacy and White liberalism have infiltrated the Asian American community” is a rhetorical slippage from the political category of “Asian American” to the racial category. The Asian American racial community is free to reject Asian American politics. Hence the recent awkward neologism “multiracial whiteness.”⁴⁶ For Mark Chiang, in Asian American literary studies, there has always been a tension between the political and racial category:

If the purpose of Asian American literary studies is not to transmit a culture but a politics, the problem is that politicization does not necessarily translate into any specific set of political positions. First, there is hardly a uniform politics even among scholars in the field, but when students do become politicized in Asian American studies classes, their politics can span a whole range of positions. The recognition of racial oppression in the history of Asian Americans, for example, does not automatically lead students to the radical politics that many think it should, inasmuch as a variety of possible political responses to racism, from the right to the left are possible. Compounding this indeterminacy are the distinct patterns of racial inequality that affect ethnic groups differently according to their migration and settlement histories. To respond to the institutional conditions of its production, Asian American studies needs to reconceptualize how politicization works. I argue that politicization, or Asian American subject formation, entails not the transmission of any particular politics so much as the transmission of political capital—specifically, the political capital of representation. How else might we account for the sense of “pride” that identification with a symbolic category produces if not that this very action constitutes a transfer of value to the subject from the collective? This transfer operates through a kind of reciprocal recognition: in recognizing the Asian American category, the subject becomes one who is recognized (and who recognizes himself or herself) as a representative of that category.⁴⁷

This “transmission of political capital” answers Mole’s question: “Why does it feel like our society’s idea of ‘realistic,’ contemporary Asian American representation is actually just elite-educated WMAF [White Male-Asian Female] representation?”⁴⁸ Much of the problem is presupposed by the question itself—the idea that media serves a project of representation is imputed by the observer. That is, to view a work as “Asian American” is to constitute it as representation:

The problem of representation is a problem of symbolic capital, and not of the relation between a representation and the reality that it represents. This shift of perspective also displaces the question of identity. Asian American representation cannot be evaluated in terms of its fidelity or responsibility to a prior “community”—which would be to assume as the preexisting ground of politics what Asian American politics seeks to bring into existence—or with “Asian Americans” but with the Asian American category. The fundamental precondition for anything to be considered Asian American is the very term itself, the category, which is constituted as a field. The Asian American category or field demarcates the space or terrain within which all the articulations or representations of Asian American identity struggle with one another for dominance or legitimacy. It is the construction of the category that transforms heterogeneous Asian subjects into “Asian Americans” proper.⁴⁹

Who determines what is or is not “Asian American”? It is elites with “symbolic capital,” as R. F. Kuang satirizes in Yellowface:

Athena would go on Twitter and talk about the importance of Asian American representation, about how the model minority myth was false because Asians were overrepresented at both the low and high ends of the income spectrum, how Asian women continued to be fetishized and mare victims of hate crimes, and how Asians were silently suffering because they did not exist as a voting category to white American politicians. And then she’d go home to that Dupont Circle apartment and settle down to write on a thousand-dollar antique typewriter while sipping a bottle of expensive Riesling her publisher had sent her for earning out her advance.⁵⁰

For example, in the aforementioned podcast, Teen Sheng mentions Ted Chiang, an Asian American, whose work is not seen as representative of Asian Americans.⁵¹ But even though Chiang “avoids race in his work,” Christopher T. Fan, in Asian American Fiction After 1965, infers the “postracial dimensions” in his work: “The Asian American and postracial dimensions of Chiang’s fiction therefore do not operate independently from each other. Every enunciation of the postracial is an enunciation of a specific racial relation.”⁵²

Mole builds on Fan’s observations of “recently-debuted Chinese American female authors” in a later chapter of Fan’s book and asks: “[o]ut of all creative possibilities, why did these stories make it out of the authors’ drafts, and why did these stories get picked up by publishers?”⁵³ Dan Sinykin’s answer, in Big Fiction, is conglomeration:

Conglomerates compel books to make profits, demanding market-friendly representations of race—welcoming, especially, narratives about the traumatic legacies of colonization and racism, which masochistically sooth the liberal soul: reading as penance—but writers develop strategies to create compelling visions of race within those constraints.⁵⁴

But the nonprofit presses that Sinykin analyzes in opposition to the conglomerates also have their own demands, from their funders.⁵⁵ Sinykin, referring to Ralph Ellison, an appointee to the National Council on the Arts, notes:

Ellison argues that art does the crucial work of lubricating the otherwise dangerous friction generated by the differences internal to American society. “By projecting free-wheeling definitions of the diversity and complexity of American experience it allows for a more or less peaceful adjustment between the claims of ‘inferiors’ and ‘superiors’—a function of inestimable value to a society based, as is ours, upon the abstract ideal of social equality.” Ellison celebrates art for its ability to resolve real inequality with symbolic projections. He makes a political argument for what Mark McGurl dubbed “high cultural pluralism,” literature that unites preoccupations with cultural difference and modernist aesthetics, a boon, thinks Ellison, for a nation ostensibly committed to social equality but divided by racism.⁵⁶

Thus even the nonprofit presses supporting multiculturalism were committed to a variant of the “embarrassing idea of micro-activism that membership into, and understanding of, a group can be achieved through conversations about culture and privilege instead of literally living and embodying.”⁵⁷ But, key to Sinykin’s and Fan’s argument but not to Mole’s, is the politico-economic structure that incentivizes literature—Asian American or otherwise—to take a certain form. That is, the structure of the publishing industry—under capitalism—influences the literary form. It is not that there is such a thing as “White capitalism,”⁵⁸ but that capitalism produces Whiteness. Yet Mole argues that Asian Americans “join the left as allies”—to “White liberals”—“to seek redemption from our complicity in White supremacy,” quoting from Andy Liu’s “About those ‘letters to my Asian parents about anti-black racism’”:

We are encouraged to seek redemption from our complicity in White supremacy, to join the left as allies rather than as fellow oppressed people. We write letters to our parents about anti-Black racism and “encourage the assimilation of Asian diaspora (and Latino/a and Muslim, etc.) views into the norms and values of White liberals, namely, guilt and privilege-talk.”⁵⁹

But in that same article, Liu emphasizes that capitalism causes “racial ideology”:

Personally, I am more persuaded by the converse view, that modern racial ideology was generated under specific historical circumstances. One of the best examples in this tradition is Barbara Field’s essay on slavery and racial ideology (1990). In brief, Fields took the basic formula we are taught in school – that “because white settlers in the 17th century were evil racists, therefore they enslaved Africans” – and turned it upside down. Instead, it was “because white settlers enslaved Africans that they then eventually came up with racial ideology in the 19th century.” The process had a lot to do with capitalism’s peculiar way of combining formal equality (the marketplace) with the practical inequality of labor and capital. In resolving the contradictions of American liberal ideals, the subordination of an enslaved African labor force had to be represented as natural, rooted in biology (the passive voice is intentional). That is: in pre-capitalist societies, people were unequal, but that inequality was overtly given in the form of family, church, master-serf relations, and so on; but in capitalist society, our inequality is covert, and this has given rise to all sorts of mystifications. Among them, the biological idea of race.⁶⁰

Liu argues that “[i]f we take for granted the ubiquity and natural-ness of racism, ‘white supremacy,’ and ‘anti-blackness,’ then it becomes very difficult to visualize their historical origins and, by extension, their future limits.”⁶¹ Mole misreads Liu and contends that “[p]eople who still have something to say about White supremacy destroy our fantasy of our post-racial, multicultural world…”⁶² To say something about “White supremacy” is to constitute it. As Fields writes in “Whiteness, Racism, and Identity”:

Inseparable from the bipolarity and asymmetry of American racial ideology is the “unmarked, unnamed status,” “seeming normativity,” “structured invisibility,” and “false universality” of those who are designated “not black.” That is the datum the whiteness literature seeks to extinguish or overrule. Rather than explore what the absence of a mark or name means, whiteness scholarship mulishly insists upon inserting the mark and name, officiously making good the failure of people in the past to do it themselves, as Professor [Eric] Arnesen properly complains. The point, it seems, is not to interpret the past but to change it. By its insistence upon marking and naming and making visible, whiteness scholarship first strews race and races everywhere and then, mirabile dictu, discovers them everywhere.⁶³

In turn, Liu asks the reader: “Rather than naming ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy’ as the protagonist of our stories and the subjects of our sentences (‘white supremacy has caused billions of deaths’), what about specifying concrete groups who carry out acts of white supremacy?”⁶⁴ Mole instead insists that “liberals avoid discussing the underlying, fundamental issues of justice and ‘present Whiteness as a nonpartisan, neutral state.’” The issue that Mole has with “Asian American racial commentary literature” is that “we [Asian Americans] have not truly rejected the White gaze.”⁶⁵ But “Asian Americans” is not a concrete group, unless it is racial. As Adolph Reed Jr. writes:

But adducing a causal dynamic that underlay a political conjuncture in the past to support a claim about causality in the present presumes that the same dynamics operated in the past and present. That is, the race-reductionist formulation advanced to validate the claim of white supremacy’s overarching power presumes what it needs to demonstrate. Sociologist Mara Loveman follows Rogers Brubaker, Pierre Bourdieu, and others in arguing that this interpretive problem and the confusions that generate it can be addressed by “abandoning ‘race’ as a category of analysis to gain analytical leverage to study ‘race’ as a category of practice.” She embraces historian Barbara J. Fields’s assessment that “attempts to explain ‘racial phenomena’ in terms of ‘race’ are no more than definitional statements” and argues that “Rejection of ‘race’ as an analytical concept facilitates analysis of the historical construction of ‘race’ as a practical category without reification, and thus provides a degree of analytical leverage that tends to be foreclosed when race is used analytically.”⁶⁶

In the end, Mole has not offered any alternative to Whiteness as a category of analysis. The problem is that Mole is working toward a critique of assimilation with the assumption that is what the Asian female in a “White Male–Asian Female” (WMAF) relationship is actually doing (despite trying to preempt this by saying “I am not! calling! you! a! race! traitor! Stop projecting.”).⁶⁷ Mole tries to pull back by writing “[i]n reality, we can move in and out of groups throughout our lives, relate to and support multiple groups, and define our affinities uniquely. We are not restricted by membership to a single group in the same way that we are not restricted to single-issue politics.” Although this is reminiscent of Young’s “affinity groups,” Christopher B. Patterson in Transitive Cultures remarks:

Critiques of our identity and authenticity should thus cause us to question the basis of that very critique—how does critiquing this particular identity help us in this moment, and why does the critic feel the need to expose something that, collectively, as already present in the way we have transitioned to and from this identity? These questions in mind, we can see transitive cultures not as another form of identity begging to be included (and thus tolerated), nor as a superior mode of living with difference, but as an everyday practice of dealing with the imperial gaze of those who might otherwise vilify us, as well as a way of reaching out to those who might ally with us.⁶⁸

Patterson’s approach restores the agency of the supposed “assimilator” and posits that the minority self-consciously leverages their identity for their own ends:

In both Mammon, Inc. and Fixer Chao, the transpacific migrants’ desire to transcend their “given culture”—and therefore their “given labor”—is captured through forms of cynicism and distance. Yet in the novels’ genre disruptions, they also express how being distanced from racial identities in order to manage, reinterpret, and transition among them is quite different from a retreat from political and social public life. Indeed, the mistake with valuing distance from ethnic identity is that such distance is too often seen as a unique perspective. To see such distance as white, mixed race, or an Asian American experience presumes that other racial minorities are trapped within their cultural performance, while one type of people better understand their own self-conscious performativity. The notion of a minority Other who is unaware of his or her own performativity is itself a ruse, one that makes self-reflexivity appear as more transcendent than ethical, as if a “critical dimension” toward identity was available only to certain subjects. In their attempts to “game” pluralist governmentality, the characters of these novels expose inauthenticity and transition not as cultural attributes, but as shared affective strategies conceived in contexts where ethnic authenticity and performance are given the greatest value.⁶⁹

That is, the ability to be self-consciously performative—to be self-consciously Asian, or to self-consciously assimilate—is not a specifically white ability. Rather than locating the depth of assimilation (or even one’s unassimilated behavior) in performativity and self-reflexivity, Mole places it in Zaretta Hammond’s notion of “deep culture,” which are the “intangible unconscious beliefs and norms.”⁷⁰ How does this work? Hammond describes it thusly:

At the deep cultural level, our brain is encoding itself with the particular worldview we will carry into our formative years. Two people from different cultures can look at the same event and have very different reactions to it because of the meaning they attach to the event based on their deep culture. For example, in Eastern culture, the color red means good luck while in most Western cultures red means danger. While every person’s individual culture evolves as we grow up and experience the world, our core mental models stay with us. My grandmother had a saying, “you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” the point is that one’s culture, especially one’s deep cultural roots, is part of how the brain makes sense of the world and helps us function in our environment. This worldview continues to guide our behaviors even when we change our geography.⁷¹

Is it really the case that as “every person’s individual culture evolves as we grow up” yet “our core mental models stay with us”? Does this mean that Asians Americans who immigrated after, say, high school, have already established their “core mental models” and are no longer irrevocably changed by assimilation? Does it mean that second generation Asian Americans, who are educated in America, are already assimilated? Hammond’s framework is hopelessly naïve, because many people (such as Patterson’s transpacific migrants) are not only self-reflexively aware that “red” has different meanings in “Eastern” and “Western” cultures but self-consciously deploy these meanings to “game” whatever context they are in. The “problem of culture” is far more disputed than the four pages that Hammond gives it in Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain. The title obscures the ideological maneuver that teaching is how we learn culture.

Cheng, discussing Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, uses a psychoanalytic lens to investigate the assimilation of Kingston into Chinese culture by her mother:

The mother, in trying to assimilate the child into a Chinese culture that the latter does not know, is in fact creating that very culture. The internalization of cultural origins as subjective or ontological origins indicates a path to theorize the act of hearing a story, how a story enters us, structures us. In other words, these narrative acts play out a transmission of fantasy, a transmission that is fantasy. The mother infuses her tales into the narrator’s psychical and daily landscape: this is what we mean when we say a story “speaks to something inside us.”

While this may look like an overdetermined parable for maternal invasions as such, we should still recognize the force of this invasion and the cultural implications in this particular case. The child not only internalizes but also racializes this maternal introjection. She processes the call of the mother as a call of Chinese origin and culture. This explains the text’s continual conflations of the spaces of the mother and of racial-ethnic identities.⁷²

Under Cheng’s interpretation, this assimilation of a racialized culture is not intentional by the mother. But Allen Chun in Forget Chineseness describes how “culture” was inculcated by the Kuomintang (KMT):

The writing of national ideology in the context of education has been from the outset a crucial dimension of the KMT’s attempt to define culture and use the symbols of a common culture as the basis by which to cultivate a unitary societal consciousness, thus legitimize or reproduce the nation-state. Needless to say, the government’s political authority to construct and define culture was one that was backed by the power of the totalitarian state, but the construction of a culture of the nation (in all its flavors) through the writing (and practice) of political ideology (as ethics and moral behavior), promotion of master symbols of the body politic, and various rites of national celebration and rituals of state as the basis on which to maintain solidarity of the nation (in the process guarantee continued domination by the state) was predicated by a different kind of politics altogether, namely hegemony. Underlying the overt politicization of cultural renaissance in the public arena of national ideology was the internal transformation of political values in the context of education into sublimated form by invoking tradition or appealing to ethical virtue and moral conduct. The transformation of political ideology at various levels of ethics/morality, followed by the active promotion of the latter as “culture,” thus constituted the framework on which hegemony was created.⁷³

What is crucial to note about Chun’s analysis is that the KMT was self-aware of what they were doing. Of course, the desire to legitimize and reproduce the nation-state is a consequence of larger, global forces. The point here is that “culture” is not some sort of primordial essence that must be preserved or defended, but a consequence of structural forces. “Culture” did not cause the KMT to repurpose Confucianism for the nation-state, although there are many aspects of Confucianism that make it amenable to such use. Ironically, Confucianism inverts the “Culture Tree” by making the practice of “surface culture”—rituals—necessary for the cultivation of the self:

Ritual practices, and the lived body (shen 身) through which they are expressed, are necessary conditions for the Confucian vision of communal harmony because they not only allow, but actually require, full personal participation in their performance. “Propriety,” a frequently encountered alternative translation for ritual action, reflects the expectation that the performance of ritual action is an appropriation for oneself of formalized patterns of action through which to express one’s own meaning. The creative complements of ritual practice entail both an “appropriating from” and a “being appropriate to.” The achieved social harmony is predicated on the premise that people are unique, and that they must orchestrate themselves into relationships that permit expression of this uniqueness.⁷⁴

That is, the idea of the “Culture Tree” is itself “western hegemony.” It’s notable that Mole uses the tree to avoid discussing what Asian American “deep culture” is. She is quick to call out examples of “surface culture” in a WMAF relationship, but also writes:

I want to learn about what we feel seen, protected, and responsible for — our favorite Hong Kong dessert cafe, our culture’s clothing, our family’s Lunar New Year party, our Asian friends who shared similar childhood experiences. We don’t need to share this with White people who may never understand how special it is, that there is a space for us, that we found people who look like us and understand us, that we can all be together in this moment, and how precious it is to feel belonging.⁷⁵

Where is the “conflict over deeper relational and political worldviews, like the nature of our responsibilities to parents, kin, neighbors, community, animals, and homes”?⁷⁶ What are those deeper worldviews? Perhaps they can be referred to as Confucianism or Buddhism? What is the point of categorizing a worldview as Asian American? What is striking about America—if not Western modernity—today is the lack of conflict between people who have different “political worldviews.” Socialists and libertarians—as well as Confucians and Christians—can sit side-by-side in at the same Hong Kong dessert cafe and even “share this with White people.”

Mole seems to be influenced by Young’s “politicization of culture”:

(3) Many social movements, finally, have focused on politicizing culture. Culture is a broad category, and I do not intend to give it a precise definition here. Culture refers to all aspects of social life from the point of view of their linguistic, symbolic, affective, and embodied norms and practices. Culture includes the background and medium of action, the unconscious habits, desires, meanings, gestures, and so on that people grow into and bring to their interactions. Usually culture is just there, a set of traditions and meanings that change, but seldom as the result of conscious reflection and decision.

Politicizing culture, then, means bringing language, gestures, forms of embodiment and comportment, images, interactive conventions, and so on into explicit reflection. Cultural politics questions certain everyday symbols, practices, and ways of speaking, making them the subject of public discussion, and explicitly matters of choice and decision. The politicization of culture should be distinguished from a libertarian insistence on the right of individuals to “do their own thing,” however unconventional. Cultural politics does often celebrate suppressed practices and novel expressions, especially when these arise from and speak for oppressed groups. But cultural politics has primarily a critical function: to ask what practices, habits, attitudes, comportments, images, symbols, and so on contribute to social domination and group oppression, and to call for collective transformation of such practices.⁷⁷

Yet what Young means is that culture itself should be changed when it “contribute[s] to social domination and group oppression.” But, as Slavoj Žižek notes, this has been inverted to become the “culturalization of politics”:

Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? The immediate answer lies in the liberal multiculturalist’s basic ideological operation: the “culturalisation of politics.” Political differences—differences conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation—are naturalised and neutralised into “cultural” differences, that is, into different “ways of life” which are something given, something that cannot be overcome. They can only be “tolerated.” This demands a response in the terms Walter Benjamin offers: from the culturalisation of politics to the politicisation of culture. The cause of this culturalisation is the retreat, the failure of direct political solutions such as the Welfare State or various socialist projects. Tolerance is their post-political ersatz.

In Mole’s formulation, culture is the thing to be “protected.” As Wendy Brown writes:

The culturalization of politics analytically vanquishes political economy, states, history, and international and transnational relations. It eliminates colonialism, capital, caste or class stratification, and external political domination from accounts of political conflict or instability. In their stead, “culture” is summoned to explain the motives and aspirations leading to certain conflicts (living by the sword, religious fundamentalism, cultures of violence) as well as the techniques and weapons deployed (suicide bombing, decapitation).⁷⁸

The possibility of “unassimilability” is conditioned by the liberal multiculturalist ethos of tolerance. Mole writes that “[a]cceptance by White society should not be our goal, because White America will always dictate the terms of our assimilation.”⁷⁹ If “Asian America” is not accepted by “White society,” it is merely tolerated. What would an illegitimate unassimilability look like? As Žižek writes:

One can see now why the reference to [Carl] Schmitt is crucial in detecting the deadlocks of postpolitical liberal tolerance. Schmittean ultrapolitics—the radicalization of politics into open warfare of us-against-them discernible in different fundamentalisms—is the form in which the foreclosed political returns in the post political universe of pluralist negotiation and consensual regulation. For that reason, the way to counteract this reemerging ultrapolitics is not more tolerance, more compassion and multicultural understanding, but the return of the political proper, that is, the reassertion of the dimension of antagonism that, far from denying universality, is consubstantial with it. Therein resides the key component of the proper leftist stance, as opposed to the rightist assertion of particular identity: in the equation of universalism with the militant, divisive position of engagement in a struggle. True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity but those who engage in a passionate fight for the assertion of the truth that engages them.⁸⁰

Žižek, contra Young, argues that “positive group specificity” is not “possibility of understanding” but the “passionate fight for the assertion of the truth that engages them” because that is what politics is. The entire premise of Asian American unassimilability is “the rightist assertion of particular identity” under a “post political universe of pluralist negotiation and consensual regulation.” But Mole oversimplifies the discussion in Mabute-Louie’s book, Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. Mabute-Louie is hesitant about the term “Asian American,” writing:

Historically, “Asian American” was an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist political identity coined by UC Berkeley graduate students Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka during the Asian American movement in the late 1960s. It has since been reduced by the mainstream to politics of inclusion and representation. I am ambivalent about the term’s capacity to hold our diverse experiences together and pessimistic about its political utility at this current moment. Instead of anxiously guarding the “American” part of these hyphenated identities, what if we disavowed America and owned our diasporic sense of racial placelessness? Being part of the Asian Diaspora is to not have a place because of Western imperialism, Orientalism, and capitalism. Instead of trying to claim a place in this genocidal, anti-Black fallacy of a country, what if we created belonging in the diaspora by claiming one another? I propose Asian Diaspora as an expansive political identity, one that rejects belonging in America and centers the constellation of Asian diasporic experiences, relationships, and resistance.⁸¹

What else could “an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist political identity” be but a universal “passionate fight for the assertion of the truth that engages them,” to use Žižek’s phrase. What is the specific Asian American claim? Mole writes:

It is true that none of us are free until all of us, at all intersections of oppression like Blackness, queerness, fatness, transness, and disability, are free. But in our haste to declare our support of our Black and brown neighbors the “right way,” we keep our mouths shut and flatten our complexities to a linear narrative of immigration to assimilation, yellow peril to yellow fever, oppressed aliens to model minority.⁸²

This leads to Mole’s politics as the “recognition of our own oppression,” which includes “pre-1965 immigrants feeding the country as farmers, meatpackers, and restaurateurs” and “[t]raumatized refugees fleeing civil war and dictatorships.”⁸³ As Reed notes,

The tendency to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview mirror appeals to an intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with familiar images of oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to parse the multifarious, often contradictory dynamics and relations that shape racial inequality in particular and politics in general in the current moment.⁸⁴

Andy Liu terms the specifically Asian form of this intellectual laziness “Asian pessimism”:

In recent years there has been growing interest in Afropessimism, a line of thought that considers white supremacy to be a transcendent force across time, originating in the violence of the 17th-century slave trade. Last spring, as reports of anti-Asian violence surfaced in the US – including the murder of six Chinese and Korean women in Atlanta – it seemed that activists were beginning to adopt a similar interpretation of Asian America: one could call it ‘Asian pessimism’. In this emergent view of history, racial animosity against Asian immigrants has an almost metaphysical character, dating back to the original expression of anti-Asian racism: the 19th-century politics of Chinese exclusion.⁸⁵

Liu continues, in his review of Mae Ngai’s The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics:

But the story Ngai tells inverts the assumptions of racial pessimism. White hostility was barely an issue in the early years of the gold rush: it hardened only as a result of economic duress, with the exhaustion of mines and the opening of railroads. If the trouble with Chinese migrants was the relative cheapness of their labour, this was a product of global factors – the ‘great divergence’ between Euro-American and Chinese economies in the 19th century. Even so, as Lowe, Mouy and Cheong pointed out in their pamphlet, Chinese wages in Australia were fast approaching those of white workers, refuting, Ngai writes, ‘the myth that the Asiatic standard of living was a natural – that is, a racial – condition’. What was really at stake was an emergent, uneven global division of labour that produced the impression of natural inequality.⁸⁶

Thus, the cause of “our own oppression” is not “Whiteness,” but capitalism. The repetition of terms—“anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist”—obscures the political economy that undergirds capitalist exploitation. And there is no reason for such a project to be a political identity. Yet Mole insists on the primacy of “difference”:

Iris Marion Young proposes a “politics of difference” because the current practice of “essentializing difference expresses a fear of specificity, and a fear of making permeable the categorical border between oneself and others.” Our existences are complex and intersecting, and it is uncomfortable to constantly reevaluate our positionality, practices, and responsibilities, rather than stick to a universal code of conduct.⁸⁷

Even if “[o]ur existences are complex and intersecting,” it does not preclude anti-capitalism as a political project. Chiang notes the incongruity between difference and politics:

The attempt to establish difference itself as the basis of Asian American identity, as I have suggested, seeks to provide a theoretical solution to this paradox, but only by ignoring the relations of power within the group through the evacuation of concrete differences and their redefinition as pure negativity. That is, if everything is equally different from everything else, then no specific difference can be said to have priority. Oddly enough, this seems to mirror the assimilationist ideal in which equal social status means treating everyone as the same. In contrast to the principle of equal treatment, [Iris Marion] Young asserts that equality of participation and inclusion requires the recognition of group difference as well as, at times, differential treatment for certain groups. She asserts that “a democratic public should provide mechanisms for the effective recognition and representation of the distinct voices and perspectives of those of its constituent groups that are oppressed or disadvantaged.” In response to the question of how one might decide which groups warrant specific representation, Young replies,

No program or set of principles can found a politics, because politics does not have a beginning, an original position. It is always a process in which we are already engaged. Normative principles…can serve as proposals in this ongoing political discussion, and means of envisioning alternative institutional forms, but they cannot found a polity.

No theoretical formula or principle can resolve the paradox in which “Asian American” is simultaneously representative and antirepresentative, identity and difference, because this is fundamentally a political problem. It can be described, analyzed, and evaluated, but it can be resolved contingently only through public deliberation and, ultimately, political action. A relational analysis requires giving up the last remnants of essentialism in the effort of constituting a political identity in theory or a priori. Depending on which set of relations takes precedence at any given moment, Asian American identity may appear as either identity or difference, emancipatory or repressive, but both possibilities remain implicit at every moment, or else disagreements over aims and methods of political action would never arise, as they would always be determined in advance. If the aim of theory is to ensure that Asian American politics will always be resistant or oppositional (assuming that we even know what these terms mean), we must heed the words of Stuart Hall regarding the problem of ideology when he argues that relative openness or indeterminacy “is the only basis of a ‘marxism without final guarantees.’ it establishes the open horizon of marxist theorizing—determinancy without guaranteed closures.”⁸⁸

Karen Tei Yamashita, in her ambitious novel I Hotel—which “explore[s] Asian American identity without relying solely on conflict with White characters”—tries to recover this founding Marxist vision.⁸⁹ As Sinykin interprets it:

Yamashita rejects Chin’s accusation that popular Asian American literature panders to whites and is racist. But she also embraces Chin, her fellow Coffee House author. She hopes to move beyond a politics of representation trapped in the terms of multiculturalism—the politics she had engaged and critiqued in Tropic of Orange. She settles disputes internal to Asian American literary identity to advance a new position, which she presents through her depiction of an Asian American Marxist reading group. The discussants historicize Asian American identity, observing that they became Asian American in 1966 through a process of racialization that they embraced as “political designation.” The discussion leader says, “you are organizing around this designation, and that’s useful, but you are going to have to scrutinize it through a Marxist analysis that includes class.” Yamashita’s ambitious vision in I Hotel is to perform, in the tradition of Marxist dialectics, various syntheses: Kingston and Chin, popular and virtuous, conglomerate and nonprofit, race and class. She was rewarded by becoming a finalist for the National Book Award.⁹⁰

Hopefully, Mole counts I Hotel as a “contemporary Asian American representation” that isn’t just “one particular kind of Asian American story.”⁹¹ In the seventh novella of I Hotel, “1974: I-Migrant Hotel,” Yamashita connects identity to food:

You think about it. Food is the basis for everything. Without food, it’s all over. Kaput. They don’t lie when they say you are what you eat. If you can’t get nothing to eat, you are nothing. Nothing. They also don’t lie when they say you eat to live. And you live to eat. What’s someone’s culture but the way he eats? Everybody living from meal to meal, even if it takes somebody three days to get to the next one. Call that the culture of poverty. Maybe you a nomad or you tied to the land. It’s how you get your food. It’s how you organize to get your food. Keep your food. Keep your food for yourself. Who grows it? Cultivates it? Sells it? Cooks it? Who gets fed and does not get fed? Who throws it away? Who eats the leftovers?

What’s the story of the world? How come Magellan comes to bother folks like us in faraway islands? It’s to make their food taste better. Once you taste a secret, you go running after your tongue. It can’t be helped. Once you know this principle of the world, then everything becomes clear. You take Marx. You take Freud. You take Einstein. You take Suzuki. The politics of food. The sex of food. The relativity of food. The Zen of food.⁹²

But Mole considers this political economy of food “surface-level”:

We conflate surface-level, observable culture like food, stories, holidays, food, and food with unconscious, inexplicable norms like definitions of kinship, relationship with animals, notions of fairness, and concepts of self.⁹³

This is an absurd claim in the Chinese context, because the ritual sacrifice of animals was central to Confucian ancestral veneration, and then the food was eaten, as Vincent Goossaert details:

Our sources on ancient sacrificial practices, in addition to archaeology, essentially consist of three liturgical treatises and/or ritual theories, collected and published under the Han with some earlier material: Book of Rites (Liji 禮記), Rites of the Zhou (Zhouli 周禮), and Ceremonials and Rite (Yili 儀禮). These sources, which deal mainly with ancestor worship and state ritual, show that there were, then as now, several ways of presenting meat to a deity: the whole animal, at least at the beginning of the ritual; its blood; chunks of raw meat (xing 腥); chunks of boiled meat; and finally pieces of meat in a dish, either alone (in slices of dried meat, fu 脯 or xi 腊) or prepared with other vegetable foods (in soup, steamed, fried, etc.). Specific vessels corresponded to each of these preparations, the importance of which was fundamental because in the ancient sacrificial religion, which did not use an icon to represent the divinities or ancestors, it was the bronze vessel receiving the offering that was the body of the deity. These different ways of presenting meat had ritual meaning. We notice in particular that there was a gradation from the most simple and primitive (blood, raw meat) to the most familiar/civilized (dishes of cooked and seasoned meat). This gradation corresponded to a hierarchy of divinities from the most distant to closest: heaven, distant ancestors, and deceased relatives. To the immediate ancestors that one had known, one offered food similar to that which was eaten at banquets, and the sacrificers consumed it after having offered it as a sacrifice. To heaven or distant ancestors, dishes were offered that were repugnant to humans and were not shared at the end of the sacrifice: blood and raw meat. Only animal matter allowed such distinctions, and that was why, even if the sacrificial offerings were not limited to meat, the latter played a primordial role.⁹⁴

The books on ritual theories referenced by Goossaert should make it clear that in early Chinese history, the “norms” were not “unconscious” nor “inexplicable,” but explicitly laid out by the writers for future generations to follow. Thus, food is “deep culture” for the early Chinese, as Roel Sterckx points out:

To argue that food constitutes a central fiber in Chinese culture, past and present, would be a truism at best. Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–1976) once eloquently summed it up when he wrote that “it is a pretty crazy life when one eats in order to work and does not work in order to eat.” Yet over and above the pervasive presence of food culture in the Chinese tradition, interactions with food provided a platform for the creation of meaning. Whereas to ordinary peasant households, food most likely signified little more than survival, among the elites of Warring States and early Imperial China, as elsewhere, a preoccupation with food and food consumption transcended the everyday requirements for nutritional or economic welfare. Food culture was deeply implicated in many aspects of early Chinese social, political, intellectual, and religious life. It offered an important lens through which human identities were shaped and it was an important medium through which people interacted both with each other and with the spirit world.⁹⁵

The “observable” nature of ritual practices is what makes them possible to be a “medium” for social interaction. Wenying Xu in Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature connects food back to identity:

In differentiating foodways, we often believe that our food not only tastes better but is also more healthful and cleaner than others’. Our assessment of other food practices operates from our sense of order—edible versus inedible food, appropriate versus inappropriate place of cooking, clean versus dirty food, and so on. Our system of ordering culinary matters socializes our taste buds and metabolisms, which in turn stand in the front line of demarcating the border between them and us. Such demarcation is never simply a line drawn between good and bad cuisine or even clean and filthy food. It always informs the construction of a moral judgment of a particular social group. Those who eat “filthy” food are believed to indulge in filthy ways.⁹⁶

Is this not the “intangible unconscious beliefs and norms” that Mole thinks WMAF authors are ignoring?⁹⁷ In contrast, Mole states:

Despite the tired fact that “Asian” covers an entire continent worth of flavors, and that yes, even White people have their own White people food, we take deep pride in Asian food and stinky tofu lunchtime horror stories as defining features of Asian Americanness. We embrace the “aesthetic exteriorization of our status as the model minority” through the “less depressing” identity of consumption of Asian-coded items.

ARX-Han reasons that “Asian-American cultural elites produce an infinite slurry of thinkpieces and stories about food,” choosing this “safe commentary” because “the organic material that you place into your mouth-hole for sustenance is devoid of semantic content.”⁹⁸

The superficiality of Asian American food discourse—“devoid of semantic content”—is only in service of constituting an identity for social status:

Every immigrant group engages in these sorts of differentiations. But what sets modern, assimilated Asian Americans apart is that our bonds with our “brothers and sisters” are mostly superficial markers of identity, whether rituals around boba tea, recipes, or support for ethnic studies programs and the like. Indignation tends to be flimsy—we are mad when white chefs cook food our parents cooked, or we clamor about representation in Hollywood. But the critiques generally stay within those sorts of consumerist concerns that do not really speak to the core of an identity, because we know, at least subconsciously, that the identity politic of the modern, assimilated Asian American is focused on getting a seat at the wealthy white liberal table. Or, if we want to be generous, we fight about food and representation and C-suite access because we want our children to live without really thinking about any of this—to have the spoils of full whiteness.⁹⁹

This, of course, does not mean that food did not have status value in early Chinese history, but that the meaning of food has changed. What is important about food is how food is important. For ARX-Han, food is not important at all:

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.¹⁰⁰

ARX-Han himself has gone “through the identity shredder,” projecting his liberal beliefs onto Asian American literature. Perhaps the majority of published Asian American writers are “modern, assimilated Asian Americans,” but how can this be inferred from the texts? What ARX-Han means by “identity shredder” is:

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.¹⁰¹

This is, for the most part, correct. But the liberal’s fear is not “alien morality” itself, but the illiberal necessity of believing in an “alien morality.” Liberalism co-opts “their implicit moral assumptions” by making their morality a choice. It is only possible to grasp identity as some pre-existing thing that can be shredded once liberalism reveals the possibility of creating identity, as John Gray writes:

Within Western societies, the hyper-liberal goal is to enable human beings to define their own identities. From one point of view this is the logical endpoint of individualism: each human being is sovereign in deciding who or what they want to be. From another, it is the project of forging new collectives, and the prelude to a state of chronic warfare among the identities they embody.¹⁰²

This is why Mole’s assertion that “we” fear a loss of “control” is a fundamentally liberal perspective:

We don’t want to believe that our personal decisions can be subconsciously influenced by societal forces or that we may be less in control than we thought. So, we fear anything short of outright dismissal of incel reasoning exposes us too, as antisocial, reductionist, or nihilist.¹⁰³

It seems that Mole not only arguing that incels are right, but that “we” should be incels? But “incel reasoning” and the “alien morality” of Islam are not concomitant. This elides how incel reasoning is also a “shredder” of Islamic thought. Islam is not, as ARX-Han says of incels, “bio-materialist.”¹⁰⁴ Žižek also notes how those with an “alien morality” are in a subordinate position:

The limitations of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women wearing a veil are visible here, too. Women are permitted to wear the veil if this is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands or family. However, the moment women wear a veil to exercise a free individual choice, say in order to realise their own spirituality, the meaning of wearing a veil changes completely. It is no longer a sign of their belonging to the Muslim community, but an expression of their idiosyncratic individuality. The difference is the same as the one between a Chinese farmer eating Chinese food because his village has been doing so since time immemorial, and a citizen of a Western megalopolis deciding to go and have dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. This is why, in our secular, choice-based societies, people who maintain a substantial religious belonging are in a subordinate position. Even if they are allowed to maintain their belief, this belief is “tolerated” as their idiosyncratic personal choice or opinion. The moment they present it publicly as what it is for them, say a matter of substantial belonging, they are accused of “fundamentalism.” What this means is that the “subject of free choice” in the Western “tolerant” multicultural sense can emerge only as the result of an extremely violent process of being torn out of a particular lifeworld, of being cut off from one’s roots.¹⁰⁵

The consumption of “Asian” food is not—first and foremost—an issue of identity. ARX-Han has shredded the Asian American belief in food by making it a choice, when it is actually a “matter of substantial belonging.” Only in liberal multiculturalism do people eat specific foods because it is their identity. For others, food rituals reflect their “sense of order,” if not their “way of life.” It is only in liberal discourse that food is represented.

This is why Kim expounds on why coolies “had to consent to be coerced”:

Even though the labor contract was often fraudulently secured and inadequately enforced, it nevertheless provided a regulatory structure that shaped the coolie’s relations with the plantation owner in important ways. The contract specified wages and terms of service, and both the coolie and the plantation owner routinely invoked its language in their negotiations with the other. Plantation owner Eliza McHatton Ripley recalled: “The poorest, lowest coolie carried his contract on his person, and never hesitated to assert his rights.” Coolies knew they were not slaves and demanded recognition of this. The fact that the coolie’s “papers” did not mean all that they were purported to mean does not indicate that they were therefore meaningless. “Papers” did not make the coolie a free laborer, a liberal subject, or an autonomous, rights-bearing individual. But they did function as an ontological marker of sorts, tagging the coolie as not-property, as not-slave, as a being who had to consent to be coerced. This is why coolie-traders held Chinese men in barracoons in Chinese port cities for weeks and even months, beating them and starving them until they agreed to sign contracts committing them to labor on Cuban plantations. (If they were illiterate, they could simply write an “X.”) The coolie was different from the slave not because he was at all times treated better than the slave but because he was considered a custodian of his own freedom, and so he had to consent to its surrender, even if the consent was obtained through force. The opposite of free choice was not coerced choice; it was being thought, like the slave, to have no relation to choice at all. What Elliott Young noted about coolies in Peru was also true of Cuba: “The contracts were tiny fig leaves covering the shame of the conditions of coolie labor, but these were extremely important fig leaves.”¹⁰⁶

In this way, the coolie was inaugurated into liberalism through the notion of “consent.” This is not to dismiss the lack of consent on the part of slaves, but to illustrate how the appearance of choice inculcates a notion of responsibility for those choices. As Jackie Wang asks, “[t]o what extent does the notion of consent reinforce liberal and capitalist narratives about subjectivity?”¹⁰⁷ This is how Asian American playwright Frank Chin’s assertion, in his novel Donald Duk, that “[t]o consume Chinese food is to consume Chinese history,” is fundamentally a liberal attitude.¹⁰⁸ As Xu explains:

To loosen the assimilationist hold on Donald’s consciousness, Chin employs the narrative strategy of dream scenarios that thrust the boy repeatedly into the male world of the transcontinental railroad construction. Interestingly, Chinese food punctuates each of Donald’s dream sequences, in which he becomes an eating and laboring member of the Chinese community, remaking Asian American history. Ho succinctly points out, “To consume Chinese food is to consume Chinese history.” Donald’s preference for American food and rejection of Chinese dishes are an overt expression of his subscription to white culture and his belief that only white people are men enough to make history. When shopping with his father for the New Year’s banquet, the most important and elaborate meal of the year, he asks for “a filet mignon wrapped in bacon.” But in his dreams he feels at home among the Chinese and relishes their cuisine. In the morning before work, he follows the crowd to “the deem sum people’s camp.” “The juk is made, hot and fresh. For a penny he gets a steaming bowl of fresh white juk and a dish of three steamed pastries stuffed with fish and chicken.” Nourished by dim sum, Donald enters the heroic, historical event of the record-breaking track-laying contest between the Chinese and Irish workers.¹⁰⁹

So even though eating juk is a matter of “substantial belonging” for Donald, it is a choice. Thus, for Chin, to shift from American to Chinese dishes is to shift to a belief that the Chinese people are “men enough to make history.” So even a substantive commitment to Chinese culture—to ARX-Han’s point—does not consign one to an “alien morality.”

In one real life example, before 1982, Chinese Roast Duck was banned in Los Angeles County because it violated health codes.¹¹⁰ As Mark Padoongpatt writes in “Dirty Dining?: The Chinese Roast Duck Bill, Food, and Public Health in Asian America”:

Before AB 2603 was introduced, Torres and the United Chinese Restaurant Association had already amassed support from a multifaceted and influential coalition that included the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the Los Angeles and San Francisco boards of supervisors, the Los Angeles Times, and even Japanese sushi bars and duck farmers in Sonoma County. They argued from the start that Los Angeles County’s enforcement of the temperature statue on Peking duck threatened the essence of Chinese cuisine and that the bill was critical to protecting and preserve the “ethnic integrity” of Chinese cooking, flavors, and tastes. They blamed health inspectors for depriving consumers of one of the most distinctive Chinese dishes in the world. It led to a productive tension that asked the profession to evolve with an ever-changing food culture. Put another way, it was a struggle over the possibility of a different type of food science and therefore inspection practice, on in which Chinese and other non-white immigrants took the lead and had their cooking insights, standards, and authority respected.¹¹¹

Whether or not there is any merit to the concept of “the ‘ethnic integrity’ of Chinese cooking, flavors, and tastes,” the purpose of the discourse was to get Chinese Roast Duck unbanned, not to “represent” the “identity of consumption.” And in the end, the change was a carve-out for Chinese Roast Duck, not a reevaluation of scientific practice. As Padoongpatt notes, “[u]sing food microbiology to defend roast duck made clear that the fight was not a clash between culture and science, where traditional Chinese cooking was antithetical to modern food science. The supporters were not anti-science. Nor were they anti-public health.” Is this an example of assimilation, since supporters did not challenge “modern food science”? Maybe, but the story is perhaps better understood as a negotiation of tolerance, because customers did not have to change their eating habits while non-customers could continue to not eat Chinese Roast Duck.

Reintroducing Class

According to Mole, an Asian American “capitalist” who is “sharing the joys of Asian American Food” is actually “just a shameless excuse to pander to White people.”¹¹² Are the owners of Momofuku, Third Culture Bakery, and Polkcha really trying to “pander to White people”? The businesses were all started by college-educated Asian Americans with substantial cultural capital, judging by their fawning media coverage.¹¹³ In contrast, are the owners of Chinese takeout restaurants who serve “Americanized” Chinese food—never mind the Chinese Roast Duck shop owners—trying to “pander to White people”? As Haiming Liu describes the earlier chop suey dishes:

In fact, chop suey was anything but a mysterious dish. Chinese cooks were fully aware of its humble origin and knew that the chopped meat and vegetable ingredients were different from the original chao za sui in China. They were creating a new dish under an old name just to fit American customers’ palates. Animal intestines were abandoned. Meats and vegetables were chopped into thin pieces so that customers could conveniently use chopsticks or spoons in a chop suey meal. As a restaurant meal, its Chinese flavor did not totally disappear, though the Chinese fan-cai concept was completely gone. While being more and more Americanized and popular, chop suey houses became fast-food type restaurants in the American food market.¹¹⁴

What Mole criticizes as “auto-orientalist Asian American Food Capitalism” is part of the Asian American history of oppression. Liu expands:

With a growing number of chop suey houses in San Francisco, some Chinese merchants realized that it might not be the food but the “Oriental temperament” of their business that attracted mainstream American customers. In her research, Ruth Hall Whitfield pointed out that there were two types of chop suey houses: one type, located in the low-rent district, catered to low-income customers; the other, located in the theater district, catered to the after-theater crowd who liked the “pseudo-Oriental atmosphere” and the American dance bands. Some of the New York chop suey houses in the downtown area used this latter model. Chop suey was essentially a cheap meal. To make more money and higher profits, the Chinese had to go beyond food service and further promote “Oriental exoticism” in their business. In the 1920s, cocktail bars, cafés, and nightclubs like Chinese Village, Twin Dragons, Chinese Pagoda, and Jade Palace began to appear in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Live music and dancing performances rather than food became the major attraction in these restaurants. From the very beginning, such bars attracted tourist customers, especially white males. Many Chinese families in Chinatown became increasingly upset at seeing their neighborhood turned into an ethnic “theme park.”¹¹⁵

If Mole’s issue is with “Asian Americans are exploiting cultural ‘appreciation’ for commercial success”—“higher profits”—then her issue is with capitalism.¹¹⁶ The production of “Oriental exoticism”—Chinese Roast Duck or chop suey—is simply the route by which the profits are produced. To use Barbara Fields’s argument—the goal of a planter “was to produce cotton or sugar or rice or tobacco, not to produce white supremacy” —the goal of a chop suey house or any other “Asian American” business is to sell food.¹¹⁷ Discerning whether a restaurant is “authentic” or a “theme park” is up to the customer, or, more generously, a food critic. As Zoe Fuad writes in an article quoted by Mole:

This inscrutability was conveyed, by politicians like Miller, as a great threat to white Americans; who, unlike Asian immigrants, felt and expressed their emotions in a “normative,” predictable, and thus culturally acceptable way. Miller, among others, worried that Oriental inscrutability would spread like contagion (an earlier iteration of the “Kung Flu”) and incapacitate White citizens. As Xin Yao puts it:

Oriental inscrutability stands out as the primary expression (or lack of it) of the treacherous inhumanity of the Yellow Peril that threatens the good white American family and its health, its labor, and the foundation of its way of life.
— Xin Yao, Disaffected (2022), p. 175.

And this racial construction didn’t end with the Exclusion Act. As Kyla Schuller and Cathy Park Hong have shown, it was continually deployed to bolster the narrative that Asians were biologically inferior to white people, as well as to justify the exploitation of Asian workers. After all, if Asians are unfeeling machines, then there’s no harm in their being overworked and underpaid.¹¹⁸

Fuad puts the ascription of inferiority and the relation of exploitation on the same level, but the causality only runs in one direction: exploitation is the goal of “racial construction.” It obscures the moments in history in which Asians were not inscrutable. Lew-Williams writes of the clashes between the Chinese and whites in the 1880s:

At times, these responses took the form of outright resistance. Indeed, Chinese labor contractors and merchants, who had significant financial reasons to stay put, often attempted to challenge the vigilantes’ authority both in real time and after the fact. They did so in part by drawing on multiple relationships with local white leaders. Given that charges of “inassimilability” and clannishness formed the core of the vigilantes’ expulsion campaign, it is ironic that the Chinese response reveals the extent of Chinese integration into the white community. The Chinese businessmen of the Pacific Northwest were strikingly bilingual and bicultural and, at times of crisis, used all the social capital they could muster to prevent expulsion. But their local power usually proved inadequate to shield them from violence.¹¹⁹

For Chinese businessmen, assimilation into capitalism was already a possibility in the 1880s, even if it didn’t necessarily mean assimilation into whiteness. The Chinese labor contractors, just like their white colleagues, were exploiting the lower classes:

Chin [Gee Hee] beloved that he could speak on behalf of the Chinese lower classes. After all, it was a labor contractor’s job to represent his workers. During more peaceful times, contractors recruited workers, supplied their provisions, and hired them out to wealthy white men in the territory for a per-head fee. Chinese workers, lacking English skills and knowledge of the local community, needed contractors to help them find work and negotiate their wages. Contractors, in turn, needed a ready supply of pliable workers to profit. Notably, neither group saw this unequal relationship as a permanent class division. Merchant-contractors would draw their future shareholders and business partners from the ranks of wage laborers. Workers knew that dreams of social mobility depended on social connections with their betters. The result was a labor regime built on codependence, exploitation, and an uncommon allegiance between social classes. Violence tested these bonds of kinship and capital. While Chin fought diligently for the right to stay in Seattle, few Chinese workers proved willing to follow his lead.¹²⁰

As it turns out, the “cosmopolitan white elites” were primarily interested in maintaining their class position over that of whites and the Chinese, which was sustained in part due to the “China Trade”:

For cosmopolitan white elites, the Chinese presence represented a continuation of the status quo. These men and women enjoyed their place at top of the political, economic, and social ladder, and they wanted more of the same. Their success had been built, in part, thanks to Chinese workers, Chinese parishioners, and the China Trade, so they feared the end of Chinese migration would undermine their continued ascent. The status quo they fought to preserve was dominated by conservative politics and conservative manners. They loathed the populist leanings of the anti-Chinese movement, its radical antimonopolist stance, and the “rough” men and women who filled its ranks. These conservative elites were far outnumbered by the workingmen, but their elevated class status gave them outsized power. As leaders of the territory, they had the backing of the federal government and its standing army in the U.S. West. On the eve of the anti-Chinese violence, these elites held a large stake in Chinese migrants and the power to protect them.¹²¹

Though the Chinese Exclusion Act was eventually passed, the historical details show that “whiteness” is not an ontological fact but the contingent result of myriad actors. The Chinese too, prioritized class over nationality, as Lew-Williams assesses: “For [Minister] Zheng [Zaoru], the fate of Chinese merchants, and the international trade they promoted, was a higher priority than the lives of peasants. China could sacrifice the migration of the lower classes to protect the prospects of the upper. The workers, Zheng reassured the court, could go instead to Hawai‘i, Mexico, or Panama.” If the Qing Dynasty had appeared to have more “military might or political clout,” or had the Workingmen’s Party excluded Black laborers, or had the white elites been less fearful of the anti-Chinese agitators, the exclusion of the Chinese from the United States may have happened differently.¹²²

Instead of considering the motivations of capital, Mole racializes the distinction between “cultural appreciation” and “appropriation” in fashion:

Who is “allowed” to copy — or, whose copying is seen as “cultural appreciation” instead of appropriation? which country’s globalization efforts are honest instead of unethical? who owns the intellectual property rights? — has always been distributed based on racial lines.¹²³

This slippage from “who owns the intellectual property rights” to “racial lines” is a sliding from capitalism to racism (note how culture also slips to race). The goal of owning intellectual property is the “unequal transfer of resources,” not the production of “ethics,” as Minh-Hà T. Phạm writes:

Knockoffs, it should be clear by now, don’t represent “things.” They’re struggles over cultural economic power that are obscured by fashion copynorms and the practices and rhetoric of ethical washing. The Asian copycat, the embodiment of several copynorms, glosses over the structural realities that condition Asian “knockoffs”—namely, the unequal transfer of resources, wealth, and power that international trade, labor, and IP policies enable. The stereotype diverts attention away from these structural realities and toward racial and developmentalist ideas about Asians’ ethical and cultural inferiority.¹²⁴

Yet Mole emphasizes the “authentic versus fake” distinction that denigrates “unoriginal Asian copycats”:

For example, while we would sneer at the trashy, unoriginal Asian copycats, who are tragically “technically advanced [yet] culturally, socially, and ethically backward,” we chuckle at the high-end Western brands’ “ironic fakes,” like Gucci’s misspelled “Guccy” collection. Pham writes that:

Western “real fakes are means of wearing working-class identities while announcing one’s social, cultural, and economic privileges,” something unaffordable to others “because the costs of appearing to have bad taste and appearing to be poor are generally too high a price to pay for non White consumers.”

By defining what is authentic versus fake, the West also portrays its fight against counterfeit activity as a patriotic, righteous cause.¹²⁵

But the context of the quote from Phạm makes the class element more explicit:

The contradictions recall for me the tradition of race and class tourism called “slumming,” in which white middle- and upper-class people take pleasure in experiencing racial difference and poverty—what bell hooks called “eating the other”—as a temporary escape from their bourgeois lives. Real fakes are means of wearing working-class identities while announcing one’s social, cultural, and economic privileges. Although names like “official fakes” or “ironic fakes” suggest that the trend blurs racial and economic lines of taste, they actually sharpen them. They function overtly and/or implicitly as classist and racist jokes about working-class tastes that only middle-class and affluent white consumers can afford to enjoy, first, because of the prohibitively high cost of many of these objects and, second, because the costs of appearing to have bad taste and appearing to be poor are generally too high a price to pay for nonwhite consumers.¹²⁶

Phạm’s argument confusingly swaps between racial and economic dimensions—as well as production and consumption—but the point of producing fakes—official or ironic—is to make money. Also, Phạm’s assertion that the cost of “appearing to have bad taste and appearing to be poor are generally too high a price to pay for nonwhite consumers” conflates socioeconomic class with race. What Phạm seems to be implying is that affluent nonwhite consumers try to avoid the appearance of being poor and nonwhite. But this implies a rigid social and racial hierarchy that no longer exists today, as W. David Marx explains:

Both poptimism and “let people enjoy things” are part of the meta-sensibility behind postmodern culture: omnivore taste. The virtuous “cultured” individual should consume and like everything—not just high culture, but pop and indie, niche and mass, new and old, domestic and foreign, primitive and sophisticated. Where cultural capital exists, it is now “multicultural capital.” The most masterly wardrobes mix Givenchy with Uniqlo. True gourmands appreciate the finest French haute cuisine, seek out the artery-blocking buttery dishes of neighborhood Parisian bistros, and wait in line for cronuts. In 1999 the writer John Seabrook labeled this omnivore culture “nobrow,” framing these changes as a logical extension of late-stage capitalism. In the old “townhouse” of New Yorker-era taste, “you got points for consistency in cultural preferences,” whereas in the “mega store” of MTV, “you got status for preferences that cut across the old hierarchical lines.”¹²⁷

Marx continues by pointing out that hip-hop artists are “overwhelmingly Black”:

The most vocal complaint against “the culture wars” is that it channels political energy to changing superficial symbols rather than working toward structural changes to the economy and the law. But everything in this book points to the fact that culture matters for status equality. Status criteria live inside of our conventions, and history has shown us that altering those criteria opens up social mobility for disadvantaged groups. Culture sets what is permissible and what is possible. As Black culture attracted huge audiences among white youth in the twentieth century, cultural flows became more complicated than upper-class trickle-down. The appreciation of minority culture within elite cultural capital didn’t overturn the status structure or eradicate racism, but it has arguably better distributed money and status to disadvantaged communities. Hip-hop started on the streets of the South Bronx and is now a multibillion-dollar global industry. And unlike mainstream rock cashing in on the innovations of rhythm ’n’ blues, hip-hop’s icons are overwhelmingly Black artists rather than white imitators.¹²⁸

Marx’s optimism about “social mobility for disadvantaged groups” slips into “groupism,” since the money earned by Black artists doesn’t necessarily make it to Black communities. But Marx is right to point out that culture influences what is possible within the structure. Of course, buying fakes may have a racial dimension in addition to a class dimension, but it is difficult to discern whether a consumer is “being ironic.” Phạm assumes that “white middle- and upper-class people” wearing a fake is “announcing one’s social, cultural, and economic privileges” by being ironic, but it is also possible they were duped by a Canal Street seller. This ambiguity is crucial because it facilitates the further development of taste: distinguishing between ironic and ignorant fakes.

In any event, the “fight against counterfeit activity” is what Žižek calls the “cultural capitalism” of Starbucks:

Here is an exemplary case of “cultural capitalism”: the Starbucks ad campaign “It’s not just what you’re buying. It’s what you’re buying into.” […] The “cultural” surplus is here spelled out: the price is higher than elsewhere since what you are really buying is the “coffee ethic” which includes care for the environment, social responsibility towards the producers, plus a place where you yourself can participate in communal life (from the very beginning, Starbucks presented its coffee shops as an ersatz community). And if this is not enough, if your ethical needs are still unsatisfied and you continue to worry about Third World misery, then there are additional products you can buy. […] This is how capitalism, at the level of consumption, integrated the legacy of ’68, the critique of alienated consumption: authentic experience matters.¹²⁹

What is “ethically backward” about “Asian copycats” is that they don’t subscribe to this form of “cultural capitalism.” As Viv Chen writes in “a tale of two canal streets,” an article cited by Mole:¹³⁰

When we talk about knockoffs, it’s usually from a Western vocabulary that relies on the moralization of intellectual property laws. We associate knockoffs with moral grayness, cheapness, poor taste. It’s a classically American belief—the conflation of wealth with good morals and poverty with ethical deviance. TRR [TheRealReal] claims “we’re not going to judge anyone for owning a shady Celine or bullsh*t Bottega.” But the usage of phrases like “shady Celine” and “bullsh*t Bottega” implies that judgement exists!

What if we interpreted the knockoff as a disruption of the geographical hierarchies of taste and class? If you’ve seen t-shirts or hats that appear to be nonsensical misspelled knockoffs of Western designer brands, you’ve come across products of China’s shanzai [sic] industry. You could call them copies, but they’re much deeper than that.

Images of these off-kilter copies trouble the binaries that grease the LVMH machine: real vs. fake, Europe as the creative genius vs. Asia as the robotic laborer.¹³¹

Byung-chul Han explains this “deeper” “disruption” of shanzhai from the perspective of the participants:

Continual transformation has established itself in China as a method of creation and creativity. The shanzhai movement deconstructs creation as creatio ex nihilo. Shanzhai is decreation. It opposes identity with transformational difference, indeed working, active differing; Being with the process; essence with the path. In this way shanzhai manifests the genuinely Chinese spirit.

Although it has no creative genius, nature is actually more creative than the greatest human genius. Indeed, high-tech products are often shanzhai versions of products of nature. The creativity of nature itself relies on a continual process of variation, combination, and mutation. Evolution too follows the model of constant transformation and adaptation. The creativity inherent in shanzhai will elude the West if the West sees it only as deception, plagiarism, and the infringement of intellectual property.¹³²

As a rhetorical maneuver, Han overstates the Chineseness of shanzhai (the next paragraph—the last paragraph of the book—proposes the idea of a “shanzhai democracy,” a disruption of China itself and implies that China today does not manifest “the genuinely Chinese spirit”). What the contrast between “China” and the “West” obscures is that what is being disrupted is the capitalist regime of “intellectual property.” What escapes Chen and Mole is that intellectual property constructs the idea of the nation:

It is well known that corporations invest heavily in creating a brand name for their products. This helps a company differentiate its goods, playing on emotion between the brand and the consumer in order to help ensure loyalty and sales. However, the practice of branding is not limited to products or companies. Nation branding aims to define the identity and reputation of entire countries by using persons, symbols, colours and slogans to create a distinctive personality. As one might expect, nation branding is big business: an entire industry with high profile consultants and annual rankings help shape perceptions. But nation branding is more than just slogans or spin. It is also a form of intellectual property: a claim to the creation and even ownership of the thoughts, feelings, associations and expectations that are conjured up by the name, goods, events or symbols representing a country.¹³³

This explains how “Made in China” can mean something “even though the tags tell us nothing,” as Mole writes:

Think about the ways the public unquestioningly uplifts commodities produced in the West while scoffing at those made in the East. Minh-ha Pham dives deep into this dichotomy in her book Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. We draw distinct lines between “Made in Italy” and “Made in China,” even though tags tell us nothing — an item tagged with the former could have been made in one of the thousands of Chinese-owned factories in Italy. Chinese-owned Forever 21 is regularly demonized for chasing fast fashion trends at the expense of our environment, but London-based ASOS does the same thing and flies under the radar — ASOS literally stands for “As Seen On Screen.”¹³⁴

Who is “the public”? The state of globalization is such that “Chinese-owned factories in Italy” can label a product “Made in Italy” and ship it to China to be sold to the Chinese public. The issue, of course, is that Italian brands get their cut without owning the factories, but the premise of Mole’s example contradicts Phạm’s argument. Is a “Made in Italy” label more authentic if the factories are owned by Italians? Are Italians supposed to buy factories in China and slap a “Made in China” label so that a Chinese brand can get their cut? Phạm’s point is that the shanzhai industry is legitimately different from “Western IP logics and values”:

Non-Western people are required to adopt foreign concepts of creativity, innovation, and rights as a condition of respect, recognition, and participation in the global market. China is a clear case in point. The global rise of Chinese cultural industries (from electronics to fashion) is occurring alongside a rise in the country’s IP litigation. Laikwan Pang documents that in 2008 the number of IP-related cases in Shanghai rose 43.1 percent from the previous year. “All this,” Pang writes, “reveals less about the actual IPR [intellectual property rights] infringement situation in China than the country’s willingness to embrace international rules.” Such willingness is less a matter of choice than of necessity under the Western-controlled international IPR regime. After all, Western IP logics and values, Pang reminds, “are alienating to China in relation to both its Confucian past and its socialist legacy.”¹³⁵

But what Phạm’s dichotomy between “Asian” and the “West” obscures by emphasizing the inequality between the two is the “unequal transfer of resources, wealth, and power” from the workers to the owners—what else could “socialist legacy” mean?

Mole borrows Iyko Day’s phrase “romantic anticapitalist” from Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism to explain the racialized distinction between Chinese and white (note that Han uses “West”) forms of capitalism, writing:

The misguided romantic anticapitalist honors “the concrete, pure, and organic dimensions of [socially valuable] White labor and leisure time,” and identifies capitalism only with the abstract alien, nonsocial, machine-like labor force of Chinese bodies. The romantic anticapitalist glorifies the resourceful White industrialist while blaming the unscrupulous Asian for the consequences of capitalism, like corruption, crimes, slums, prostitution, alcoholism, environmental degradation, unemployment, or resource scarcity.¹³⁶

In a later passage in Alien Capital (Mole quotes the introduction, but does not provide a citation), Day replaces “organic” with “authentic”:

While Asian labor personifies the abstract circuits of capitalism, settler colonial constructions of landscape express the opposite: the concrete, pure, and authentic noncapitalist dimension of nature. That the social world appears antinomical—that is, characterized by concrete and abstract dimensions—is a function of the fetish, which conceals the social relations behind products of human labor, repressing the duality of commodity-determined labor. As [Maxine Hong] Kingston’s and [Richard] Fung’s texts illuminated in the last chapter, Chinese labor was associated with a perverse temporality, one that rendered Chinese bodies fungible (like currency) and a signifier of moral corruption. As such, Chinese bodies occupied the abstract dimension of the antinomy, as subjects “abstracted from all particularity” insofar as Chinese bodies are interchangeable with other Chinese bodies. White labor, on the other hand, was individual, tangible, concrete, and of social value.¹³⁷

What is crucial to Day’s argument is that this antinomy “propels capitalism forward”:

By aligning Chinese bodies with abstract labor, their labor represents human labor in the abstract. It is this phantomlike objectivity of alien labor that establishes a commodity’s value. White bodies, on the other hand, are symbolically associated with concrete labor, which establishes a commodity’s quality.

Such a racial bifurcation of abstract and concrete labor is the work of the commodity fetish, which disguises the social relations behind the products of human labor. In terms of this book’s overarching claim, I argue that a key anchor of North American settler colonialism is an ideology of romantic anticapitalism that reifies a distinction between concrete and abstract social relations out of a misunderstanding of the dialectical nature of capitalism. Romantic anticapitalism hypostatizes the concrete, rooted, and pure, on one hand, and identifies capitalism solely with the abstract dimension of social relations, on the other. It glorifies what it sees as the concrete realm of social relations: white labor, the family, and the train itself—a machine whose concreteness is biologized as the “iron horse.” Alternatively, Chinese bodies are in nearly exclusive alignment with quasi-mechanized labor temporality, excluded from normative social and domestic temporalities. Once Chinese labor is no longer needed, romantic anticapitalism performs an aesthetic function by giving Chinese shape to the unrepresentable: giving bodily form to the abstract, temporal domination of capitalism. In this sense, Chinese labor allegorizes the commensurating function of abstract labor that propels capitalism forward.¹³⁸

Day associates “abstract labor” with a “commodity’s value” and “concrete labor” with a “commodity’s quality.” In the next paragraph, Day, quoting Petrus Liu, explains that this quality is moral:

Indeed, as Petrus Liu specifies, it is a mistake to view socially necessary labor time as solely the mean labor time associated with technological developments but also in terms of its moral dimensions. He clarified that “the value of a commodity is the amount of human labor embodied in it, but the value of the commodity of human labor is determined by moral and discursive operations outside the capitalist reproduction scheme.” Therefore, on one hand, white labor productivity and its heteronormative reproduction become qualitative expressions of morality and rationality associated with time discipline.¹³⁹

In the full context of Liu’s quote makes it clear that the “capitalist” alone does not grasp how “capital reconstitute[s] itself” because the “reproduction of capital is both the reproduction of the material forces and the reproduction of ‘the social conditions of production’”:

A consideration of the value of labor-power must therefore begin with the category of ‘socially necessary labor (time),’ which does not refer to the average of productivity at the current level of technical development (as is commonly understood), but to cultural ideas of what constitutes an acceptable desire and what constitutes a proper means of satisfying that desire, or what [Karl] Marx calls the historical and moral elements of society. The value of a commodity is the amount of human labor embodied in it, but the value of the commodity of human labor is determined by moral and discursive operations outside the capitalist reproduction scheme. These operations require a maintenance cost from the social body and constitute part of the cost or value of labor-power. In order for capital to reconstitute itself, it must reproduce the productive forces (the laborer), the raw materials and the machinery, as well as the moral and intellectual conditions that allow capitalist production to exist in the first place. From an individual point of view, in the expanded reproduction scheme, the capitalist only sees a portion of capital recommitted to the production process at the end of each production cycle, and the capitalist understands reproduction to involve only the renewal of manpower, machinery, and raw materials. From a social point of view, however, at the end of each cycle of the labor process, a portion of surplus value is appropriated by the system itself to reproduce the existing relations of production. This central idea in Marx is the foundation of Althusser’s famous formulation that the reproduction of capital is both the reproduction of the material forces and the reproduction of ‘the social conditions of production’ that include the church, the family, the police, the army, and the school – or what he calls the ideological state apparatuses.¹⁴⁰

Perhaps this is why “authentic” is passé, as Jacob Kaufman-Shalett notes in an interview with Soleil Ho:

Exploring historical-cultural patterns to her is much more important than evaluating food based on the elusive idea of “authenticity” that some critics use as a bludgeon. For example, many first-generation individuals in the food world feel inauthentic and face criticism for fusion cuisines that result from their mixed identities. Ho pointed out that the so-called pure and unparalleled “authenticity” of eating spanakopita in Greece flaunts privilege to travel more than captures the essence of good food. The reality is that authenticity is an invisible yardstick that no one can ever live up to. It is a lie Ho believes we tell ourselves to say that what food should and could be is fixed rather than changing. Especially in cosmopolitan urban American culture, authenticity is ever-shape-shifting. A more interesting question than whether or not food is “authentic,” Ho argued, is why food is the way it is now. Through this outlook, authenticity exists everywhere, in every food; no single defining quality marks authenticity. By acknowledging its sociopolitical context, we can appreciate food for more than just a fleeting escape; it becomes a gateway through which we can understand the world and the people in it better.¹⁴¹

Rather, Ho suggests “assimilation” as a positive value in an older article primarily focused on home cooking provocatively titled “Let’s Call It Assimilation Food” (although assimilation does not appear in the text).¹⁴² The difference is that when dish migrates from the home to the restaurant, from the private to the public, it inevitably must be identified. Who has the power to identify and categorize the foods? Food critics, if not cultural critics more generally. Thus, the problem of “assimilation” is primarily one of categorization, not of actually existing behavior. In Pierre Bourdieu’s loquacious prose:

Those who classify themselves or others, by appropriating or classifying practices or properties that are classified and classifying, cannot be unaware that, through distinctive objects or practices in which their ‘powers’ are expressed and which, being appropriated by and appropriate to classes, classify those who appropriate them, they classify themselves in the eyes of other classifying (but also classifiable) subjects, endowed with classificatory schemes analogous to those which enable them more or less adequately to anticipate their own classification.¹⁴³

The entire distinction between who is assimilated and who is not is merely what Karen Pyke and Tran Dang call “intraethnic othering”:

We use the more specific term “intraethnic othering” to describe the specific othering processes that occur among coethnics in subordinated groups. Because intraethnic othering involves the ridicule and isolation of some coethnics—usually the more ethnically-identified, by other coethnics, usually the more assimilated—it can generate resentment and resistance within the ethnic group. This can take the form of a collective sense of distrust among the more ethnically-identified toward assimilated coethnics who are derided for having “sold out” to the white mainstream. Ethnic traditionalists resist the anti-ethnic othering of the more assimilated by engaging in another form of othering that ridicules those who are not ethnic. This entails the use of ethnic authenticity tests to ascertain who is “one of us” and who has “sold out.” Those who do not meet certain performative standards of ethnicity are shunned. These othering dynamics create a divide within the racial/ethnic group that falls along the acculturation continuum. This divide has social consequences, creating not only sub-ethnic identities, but forming distinct groups that rely on the materials of culture in defining, coding, and monitoring their differences so as to maintain boundaries. We find evidence of these intraethnic processes in respondents’ use of the negative identities “FOB” and “whitewashed” to label coethnic others.¹⁴⁴

What is crucial to understanding Pyke and Dang’s “othering processes” is that they are what Brubaker calls “categories of practice.”¹⁴⁵ In a different article, Brubaker describes the purpose of such categories of practice: “[b]y reifying groups, by treating them as substantial things-in-the-world, ethnopolitical entrepreneurs can, as Bourdieu notes, ‘contribute to producing what they apparently describe or designate.’”¹⁴⁶ Pyke and Dang are describing what “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs” are doing, but not why they are doing them beyond “maintaining boundaries” and to “improve their social status.”¹⁴⁷ As a category of analysis, assimilation is a process, as Brubaker explains:

Assimilating can, of course, be a deliberate, self-conscious activity; and the poignant – and sometimes tragic – ambiguities and ambivalences bound up with it have been movingly explored by novelists, memoirists, essayists, historians, and even a few sociologists. Yet for most historians and social scientists, assimilation is an emergent tendential property of social processes at an aggregate level, rather than something that happens (consciously or unconsciously) at the level of individual persons. As an emergent tendency at the aggregate level, assimilation is largely unintended and often invisible; and when it is made visible, it may be lamented. Yet even when it is lamented, the processual tendency we call ‘assimilation’ is not something done to persons, but rather something accomplished by them, not intentionally, but as an unintended consequence of myriad individual actions and choices in particular social, cultural, economic and political contexts.¹⁴⁸

Thus, when Mole claims the “only options” for “Asian American political identity” are “Spineless Boba Liberal” or “Carceral Capitalist,”¹⁴⁹ is this not a case of “intraethnic othering”? Just like “FOB” and “whitewashed,” few are labeling themselves as “spineless” or “carceral.” What is the explanatory power of the “Spineless Boba Liberal” or the “Carceral Capitalist,” especially if they “both are some arrangement of neoliberal/centrist/reactionary assimilationist strategies that depend on White institutions (the progressive-left or the state) to legitimize Asian American existence as one of the good ones,” according to Mole?¹⁵⁰

Chris Jesu Lee criticizes this normative use of “boba liberal” to “attack” other Asian Americans:

Yeah, and I think that’s the actual definition and if we’re going to keep using it, I want people to stop fixing it on a certain group because as we’ve discussed in this episode, it’s actually not specific. It’s very contextual depending on which circle you run in. I think that’s the real definition of boba liberal and why it rings true for so many Asian Americans that—combined with our history of self-loathing and insecurity—that we all know, including our very selves, that we really want to fit in. I think that’s what’s ultimately it’s calling out. Wanting to fit in whether you’re in an Asian enclave or you’re in a multiracial coalitional enclave. You’re just trying to fit in and block everything out and not raise any alarms for anyone. That’s what it’s trying to call out. That’s why it rings so true. But obviously a boba liberal in one spot will not be the same as a boba liberal in a completely different spot. But a lot of times—in the mainstream especially—it just devolves into attacking—just like, easy targets as I said—the kind of harmless Asian Americans who just really want to watch Crazy Rich Asians and just want to go to EDM [Electronic Dance Music] concerts. Just like, stop thinking you’re so much better than them, you know, because you are doing exactly the same in your circle.¹⁵¹

Mole quotes Eng and Han’s Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation to support her criticism of the “assimilationist strategies” of Asian Americans:

When we prioritize legitimization in the eyes of a White capitalist society instead of owning our un-assimilability, across the political spectrum, “Asian Americans themselves become attached to, and divided by, [the model minority’s] seemingly admirable qualities without sufficiently recognizing its liabilities.”

These unspoken liabilities include estrangement from our histories of American anti-Asianness, inability to self-advocate, and an enduring “intergenerational negotiation between mourning and melancholia” that plagues immigrant families and their children.¹⁵²

But Eng and Han’s argument, based on psychoanalytic theory and case studies, is not that each Asian American is responsible for becoming attached to the model minority stereotype. It is a response to the “social structure” that the Asian American is located within:

The experience of immigration itself is based on a structure of mourning. When one leaves one’s country of origin—voluntarily or involuntarily—one must mourn a host of losses both concrete and abstract. These include homeland, family, language, identity, property, status in community—the list goes on. In Freud’s theory of mourning, one works through and finds closure to these losses by investing in new objects—in the American dream, for example. Our attention to the problematics of mimicry, performance, ambivalence, and the stereotype, as well as our earlier analysis of the legal history of exclusion and bars to naturalization and citizenship for Asian Americans, reveals a social structure that prevents the immigrant from fully assimilating into the American melting pot. From another perspective, it denies him or her the capacity to invest in new objects. The inability to invest in new objects, we must remember, is part of Freud’s definition of melancholia. Given the ways in which Asian American immigrants are foreclosed from fully assimilating into mainstream culture, are they consigned to a perpetually melancholic status? If so, how do we begin to address Freud’s notion of melancholia as pathological? Clearly not all Asian Americans are consigned to melancholy or depression. If this is the case, how do first-generation immigrants negotiate and mitigate their losses? How do their second-generation offspring inherit and inhabit these losses?¹⁵³

So even though “[t]o occupy the model minority position, Asian American subjects must therefore submit to a model of economic rather than political and cultural legitimation,” not every Asian American is consciously trying to become a “model minority.”¹⁵⁴ So what is the point of calling an “assimilationist” “spineless” or “carceral” unless one is trying to construct boundaries as an “ethnic traditionalist”? If assimilation is unconscious, with pathological symptoms, then perhaps psychoanalytic therapy is a solution. But since Mole has determined that assimilation is the problem, she therefore sees assimilation everywhere. What is the reader supposed to do now that they know they are spineless and carceral? As Elaine Castillo writes (concerning Joan Didion), “Who is this writing for?”¹⁵⁵

In Kathy Chow’s review of Castillo’s How to Read Now, she writes:

To turn Castillo’s question “Who is this writing for?” back on her own text, the obvious answer is that it’s for readers like me, who are broadly “progressive” and amenable to her arguments, or more likely already agree with them. Many of these readers might even be members of the white liberal literary establishment Castillo reprimands. White liberals do have a bottomless appetite for texts that tell them how white and liberal they are, after all.¹⁵⁶

Mole’s chastising of co-ethnics is a liberal critique of liberals. Consider this argument (which builds on the “Spineless Boba Liberal” and “Carceral Capitalist” dyad):

Acceptance by White society should not be our goal, because White America will always dictate the terms of our assimilation. Either we sacrifice our Asianness for the “greater good” of the progressive-left, or we sacrifice other people of color to the logic of capitalism or meritocracy.¹⁵⁷

To conceive of “Asianness” as something that could be sacrificed is to accede to a liberal worldview in which culture is property. To consider Asian Americans as “people of color” is a familiar call to multiculturalism in which “Asianness” has already been sacrificed. Mole’s criticisms are not wrong, but their basis on liberalism undermines Mole’s project of “becoming unassimilable.” To resolve this tension, Mole falls back to a racial definition of “Asianness”: “Culture is embodied. Diaspora culture exists because Asians everywhere exist in relation to and because of each other.” Thus, racial Asians are responsible for being cultural Asians. But once a reader is told this, what are they supposed to do?

Chow makes a similar observation of Castillo’s argument:

How to Read Now actually offers astute analyses of both the “Only One” and the “good immigrant” tropes in Asian American literature. As Castillo demonstrates, the former neglects the privilege that accompanies Asian American access to white spaces — the privilege that makes possible in the first place the trope of the “Only One.” The latter constrains the possibilities of art to representation. But I still found Castillo’s fiction much more compelling than her essays. How to Read Now practices a style of reading that is distinctly paranoid and — as queer theorist Eve Sedgwick puts it — “places its faith in exposure.” Castillo literally uses the language of exposure. “It falls on us,” she writes, “to live in that culture [of intellectual and bureaucratic silence] and […] to dismantle it: to take it apart, piece by piece, and expose its carefully curated silences, concealments, and confidentiality clauses to light.” But what happens when the audience has already been enlightened? Exposure assumes a naïve audience who hasn’t heard the story before; the force of exposure comes from the shock of encountering it. Suppose the reader agrees — then what?¹⁵⁸

In “On Loving White Boys,” Chow recognizes the paranoia of WMAF discourse, “the narrative around white-male/Asian-female couples has become increasingly paranoid of late. The paranoia, I suspect, is born out of a growing tendency toward didactic critiques of whiteness in our cultural discourse.”¹⁵⁹ This is precisely the problem of labeling “White Male–Asian Female” (WMAF) relationships. It is a category of practice—by ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. What is the point of pointing out WMAF relationships? Brubaker implores that “we should not uncritically adopt categories of ethnopolitical practice as our categories of social analysis.”¹⁶⁰ The paranoia over assimilation is strikingly similar to Elle Ray’s defense of WMAF in “Debunking the Oxford Study on Asian Women Dating White Men”:

Let’s be honest. We humans only ever do anything in society for status. Anyone who has ever been a part of a community acts in accordance with what they believe their community respects, honors, and values. Every choice we make is motivated by our desire to either camouflage or overplay our status. If you live in a society, if you have an internet connection, if you’re not living a hermit life in the middle of nowhere, I’m sorry to say but you are also complicit in this.¹⁶¹

Ray, evidently, is paranoid about status. On the other hand, Chow worries that WMAF “scripts” will regulate the behavior of Asian American women:

The fetish, I think, troubles us because it relocates what feels so particular to the realm of the abstract and general. I am me, eccentric and exasperating with all of my specific tics and neuroses, but the fetish makes me an Asian woman, with all of the abstractions encompassed by “Asian” and “woman” (submissive, ornamental). Ironically, writing white-male/Asian-female relationships as a paranoid script commits the same sin: it provides an infrastructure that invites stories about abstractions rather than living, breathing people.

Writers who rely on these scripts dwell in an uncanny valley, crafting stories that are at once too particular to speak to universal experiences of falling in and out of love and too reliant on clichés to capture the grittiness of actual relationships. What is more, I worry that the scripts that we reproduce end up scripting us. Following these narratives, we—Asian American women—become characters defined primarily by assumptions about how our race and gender dictate our lives, rather than fully fleshed people entangled in all sorts of complicated relationships.¹⁶²

The problem with assimilation and WMAF is that they are categories of practice by ethnopolitical entrepreneurs trying to “maintain boundaries,” not categories of analysis with explanatory power. Asian Americans are not trying to be “whitewashed”, while couples in a WMAF relationship do not explicitly claim they are fetishizing the other. For example, in Navigating Families, Negotiating Identities: Asian-White Mixed Family Experiences, a dissertation cited by Mole, Hayden Daeshin Ju describes the Asian immigrant parents’ expectations for their children as one that “consummates the family’s project of social mobility”:¹⁶³

I find it useful to situate marriage within [Jennifer] Lee and [Min] Zhou’s Asian success frame to better understand the source of emotional turmoil that so many Asian participants have had to go through. It seems to me that marriage consummates the family’s project of social mobility: get good grades in school, secure a high-paying job, and seal it all in by marrying someone of equal if not higher social status. Confucianist culture indeed places a lot of emphasis on marriage. Yes, partly cultural but I find it more accurate to say that these strategies are developed as a response to the structural constraints faced by Asian families. They grew out from the tried-and-true strategies adopted by middle and upper-middle-class families in East Asian countries, where most of my participants’ families have come from. How families make sense of marriage is closely shaped by their social locations.¹⁶⁴

But these Asian parents did not explicitly demand that their children marry “someone of equal if not higher social status.” Instead, status works through its disavowal:

Parents often emphasized the importance of group homogeneity, and how it is key to family harmony. Having a shared language and cultural background would make things easier not just for the couple but also for the entire family. Why not avoid visible roadblocks when you can?¹⁶⁵

This is what makes Ray’s claim that “we humans only ever do anything in society for status” quite slippery, because status is contextual. By stating it, she seeks to turn status into a category of practice, but this cynicism concedes entirely to the incel’s “red pill” ideology of “alpha” and “beta” males.¹⁶⁶ Perhaps this is a fruitful approach for Ray to ignore race, but for some Asian men online, this status hierarchy is racial, as Kang discovers:

When Disciple888 [also known as Al] finally showed up in r/AsianMasculinity, the community Teddy had built had devolved into constant flame wars between the remaining pickup artist wannabes and trolls. Many of the former had been banned from r/AsianAmerican for engaging in toxic conversations about white male–Asian female (WMAF) couples. The discussion, as a result, mostly centered around their collective hatred for the assimilationist cucks on r/AsianAmerican and their attempts to silence the all-important question of intermarriage and dating.

“It was so shallow,” Al said of r/AsianMasculinity. “So when they started talking about all this alpha male, beta male, gamma male bullshit, I would come into these threads and be like, ‘You guys have no idea what you’re talking about. You guys are, like, trying to analyze a phenomenon, which I agree with you is real and it exists.’ But then I’d tell them they had just internalized a whole bunch of racist bullshit.”¹⁶⁷

Al’s point is that status talk is a cover for racism. But under Ju’s account, this racism is in service of social status:

I expected that interracial relationships would elicit stronger responses from White parents, given the historical legacy of intermarriage in the U.S. I thought that White families would have a greater incentive to border patrol because maintaining group homogeneity helps sustain the racial status quo. But instead, I found that it was the Asian parents who border-patrolled more actively. They wanted their children to marry Asians and were open albeit begrudgingly to Whites. The Asian parents’ justification for border-patrolling revealed their racial bias against other communities of color. The interviewees’ comments about their parents confirm the high level of anti-Blackness among Asian immigrants. While they regarded their parents’ racism as more-or-less benign, it is deeply troubling how casually racist views are exchanged within families. These findings point out that racism is alive and well among the Asian American community.¹⁶⁸

One of Ju’s interviewees is a white male–Asian female marriage where “being White was not good enough” because it was a “bad business decision” for the wife.¹⁶⁹ This is why Ju looks toward the “Asian success frame” as a category of analysis: it is a concept separate from “culture” or “race” that can explain the contradictory statements people make about what they are doing.

Thus, when Ray makes a claim about “status,” or Chow discusses the “fetish,” or Al points out “racism,” it is the category of Asian American that is being fought for and fought against. Žižek says:

The element which holds together a given community cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification: the bond linking together its members always implies a shared relationship toward a Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated. This relationship toward the Thing, structured by means of fantasies, is what is at stake when we speak of the menace to our “way of life” presented by the Other: it is what is threatened when, for example, a white Englishman is panicked because of the growing presence of “aliens.” What he wants to defend at any price is not reducible to the so-called set of values that offer support to national identity. National identification is by definition sustained by a relationship toward the Nation qua Thing. This Nation-Thing is determined by a series of contradictory properties. It appears to us as “our Thing” (perhaps we could say cosa nostra), as something accessible only to us, as something “they,” the others, cannot grasp; nonetheless it is something constantly menaced by “them.” It appears as what gives plenitude and vivacity to our life, and yet the only way we can determine it is by resorting to different versions of the same empty tautology. All we can ultimately say about it is that the Thing is “itself,” “the real Thing,” “what it really is about,” etc. If we are asked how we can recognize the presence of this Thing, the only consistent answer is that the Thing is present in that elusive entity called “our way of life.” All we can do is enumerate disconnected fragments of the way our community organizes its feasts, its rituals of mating, its initiation ceremonies, in short, all the details by which is made visible the unique way a community organizes its enjoyment.¹⁷⁰

Xu cites Žižek’s passage (with some omissions) in Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature as support for “alimentary pleasure” as a form of “community enjoyment” that serves as one of the “nondiscursive forms of identification.”¹⁷¹ Žižek, quoting Jacques Alain-Miller, fleshes out the racial implications:

Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field. The national Cause is ultimately nothing but the way subjects of a given ethnic community organize their enjoyment through national myths. What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing. We always impute to the “other” an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and / or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the “other” is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the “excess” that pertains to this way: the smell of “their” food, “their” noisy songs and dances, “their” strange manners, “their” attitude to work. To the racist, the “other” is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labor, and it is quite amusing to notice the haste with which one passes from reproaching the other with a refusal to work to reproaching him for the theft of work. The basic paradox is that our Thing is conceived as something inaccessible to the other and at the same time threatened by him. According to Freud, the same paradox defines the experience of castration, which, within the subject’s psychic economy, appears as something that “really cannot happen,” but we are nonetheless horrified by its prospect. The ground of incompatibility between different ethnic subject positions is thus not exclusively the different structure of their symbolic identifications. What categorically resists universalization is rather the particular structure of their relationship toward enjoyment:

Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of him, for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula of the modern racism we are witnessing today: a hatred of the particular way the Other enjoys.…The question of tolerance or intolerance is not at all concerned with the subject of science and its human rights. It is located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be always already snatched away by the Other. It is precisely this theft of enjoyment that we write down in shorthand as minus Phi, the mathem of castration. The problem is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior. The root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of extimacy, then the hatred is also my own.

What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us: the lack (“castration”) is originary, enjoyment constitutes itself as “stolen,” or, to quote Hegel’s precise formulation from his Science of Logic, it “only comes to be through being left behind.”¹⁷²

The Asian American “national” myth is the discourse of assimilation. This is why “FOB” and “whitewashed” have any purchase as “intraethnic othering.” With this paranoia and Žižek’s paradox in mind, the accusation of being a “race traitor” starts to make more sense:

Over the next decade, a new wave of radical Asian American politics will come out of this rage. Many of the MRAZNs’ Reddit posts now parrot the language of the leftist Asian American organizations of the seventies—the AAPA, the TWLF, and the Yellow Brotherhood. They talk endlessly about white supremacy and the need to stand with Black liberation movements. They have also become enamored with Marxism and Al’s beloved Frantz Fanon. And their pitch to potential recruits drips with revolutionary and nationalistic potential: Do not trust the assimilated, upwardly mobile Asians who melt into whiteness. They live under the illusion the white world doesn’t see them as a bunch of greedy Chinks. And if you suspect you’re one of these assimilating Asian traitors, wake the fuck up.

This was the line of MRAZN reasoning I couldn’t quite flush out of my head. Race traitors knew their career ambitions depended, in large part, on their ability to make nice with their white liberal peers. Anything that made white people uncomfortable, whether their own personal histories with racism or cultural differences in their upbringings, would be wiped away to present a deeply concerned, educated, and thoughtful citizen who could fit into any upper-middle-class setting. I realized, very quickly, they were talking about me. Once ensconced, traitors would touch on their Asianness only in the most shallow, neoliberal ways: Instagram posts about Lunar New Year, enthusiastic tweets about boba, home country cheering during the World Cup. Their aim was to erase their heritage and anyone who might serve as an inconvenient reminder of their difference. The spoils of these denials would be a comfortable life as protected white liberals who, when the spirit moved them, could sprinkle some commodified culture to enrich their lives.

I do not think about myself in those terms, nor do I think some authentic Korean or, even more absurdly, “Asian American” self lies beneath the cicatrix, but I also see why they might have their suspicions about me.¹⁷³

If Kang’s account is accurate, under Žižek’s formulation, the MRAZN “imput[es]to the Other the theft of enjoyment” of a “comfortable life.” A “race traitor,” to use Patterson’s framing, is “distanced from racial identities” who can “sprinkle some commodified culture to enrich their lives.” But it is only possible to be “unassimilable” when being “assimilable” becomes a choice. To riff on Žižek, an Asian in America becomes Asian American once a choice is made “to go and have dinner at a local Chinese restaurant.”

For Mole, this unassimilability comes from the recognition of one’s “suburban hometown” as an “ethnoburb”:

Moreover, I felt so much joy seeing [Sean] Wang show love for his suburban hometown as someone who also grew up in an “uncool” Asian ethnoburb. Many Asian Americans who grow up in these neighborhoods and leave home for the first time often express a particular pity and disdain for their Asian hometowns for being a vapid “bubble” (as I once did). The Asian ethnoburb is busy with cultural events, extracurriculars, and weekend tutoring in someone’s garage. It is filled with Asian supermarkets, Asian neighbors, and Asian friend groups with token White people instead of the other way around.

The criticism often leveled at the ethnoburb is that it’s not like the “real” world. Asian Americans fantasize about “returning to the motherland” yet are disgusted by Irvine. Don’t come at me, I know Irvine is no Shanghai. But have we considered why these same Asian Americans wouldn’t deny the validity of growing up in a majority White or Black or Latino (etc) neighborhood? Fremont, Irvine, Cupertino, and San Ramon are just as real as any other city, and our childhood ups and downs are not worthless merely because they took place here.¹⁷⁴

Yet Young calls such a “bubble” a “myth of neighborhood community”:

One aspect of the normative ideal of city life, I have said, is a social differentiation without exclusion. Groups will differentiate by affinities, but the borders will be undecidable, and there will be much overlap and intermingling. One of the most disturbing aspects of contemporary urban life is the depth and frequency of aversive behavior which occurs within it. Group segregation is produced by aversive perceptions that deprecate some groups, defining them as entirely other, to be shunned and avoided. Banks, real estate firms, city officials, newspapers, and residents all promote an image of neighborhoods as places where only certain kinds of people belong and others do not, deeply reinforcing aversive racism and the mechanism by which some groups are constructed as the depised [sic] Others. Zoning regulation enforces class segregation, and to a large degree racial segregation as well, by, for example, excluding multifamily dwellings from prosperous neighborhoods and even from entire municipalities. These group exclusions produce the conditions for harrassment [sic] of or violence against any persons found where they do not “belong.” The myth of neighborhood community, of common values and life style, I have argued, fuels such exclusions.¹⁷⁵

The “disdain for their Asian hometowns” that Mole hears from “[m]any Asian Americans” is from the cosmopolitan, upper-middle-class Asian American who can “leave home for the first time” and recognize the “aversive perceptions” that facilitate the creation of an ethnoburb. As Sheng puts it in a podcast:

[Fung Bros.] had a video about, you know, growing up in the in the SGV—San Gabriel Valley—suburbs, and then he was like dating this girl and then she sort of graduated from that bubble and moved to like West LA and got a job at a fashionable company out there. And then she wouldn’t date him anymore because she’s like, dude, you’re in the bubble. Like I’m in the real world, you know, like, there was really a sense of like, that’s a starter community. That’s a that’s a ghetto. And your job is to get out of the ghetto.

And I’ll be honest, I think a lot of what drove some of the podcasts that we did before was I think some of us on this pod—without naming names—felt that that is actually how it works. That Asian people don’t want to admit younger, especially like, you know, sort of second generation youth or third generation even or whatever, don’t want to admit that the reason that they’re quote “stuck in their ethnic ghetto” is because racism and exclusion, particularly of Asian males and undesirable Asian females, precluded them from doing what you really want to do, which is sort of enter and assimilate into the mainstream of white liberal culture.¹⁷⁶

Thus, Mole’s proposal to be “unassimilable” is simply the reality for Asian Americans who have no choice. But this self-segregation can also be merely cultural rather than racial, as Chiou-ling Yeh writes:

Through accentuating cultural attributes, rather than racial distinctions, ethnic leaders strove to transform Chinese Americans into ethnic [sic], a cultural group whose mere difference from white America was culture, so that they could assimilate into the dominant society. Such a strategy, though permitting middle-class Chinese Americans to move into white suburbs, failed to transform the Chinese American racialized status; they remained foreigners, or, to use the term coined by the historian Mae Ngai, “alien citizens.” This strategy also generated tensions and conflicts within the community itself.¹⁷⁷

Mole points to a “fun read” by Catherine Liu about Irvine, but misses Liu’s class critique in a separate video:¹⁷⁸

Okay, so there’s this other crazy thing about Irvine. It is one of the most racially integrated cities in America. And when I say racially integrated, I don’t mean economically integrated, because America today is more economically segregated many times over than when I was growing up in the States. When I talked about the stoop life of Sesame Street, that world is gone, and the future is economically segregated neighborhoods that are racially integrated. In Irvine, you have a greater chance of living next to someone who’s not of your race, mostly Asians and South Asians. So it’s like heaven for [H-1B] visas, the tech visas.¹⁷⁹

This class segregation is what Jess Rhee, replying to Sheng in the same podcast, says is the “primary problem” of the ethnoburb:

My perspective is, if this is a ghetto, sure, I’m never leaving. Like our primary problem is, you know, not being able to get back into it. Right? Like I can’t afford to buy in the city I grew up in. And this is the same for basically every single one of my friends I grew up with, except the one who married the day after high school graduation to a 40 year old man. She’s the only one that I can remember who was able to like afford to live there again, because she married a 40 year old like Taiwanese real estate developer at 18.¹⁸⁰

What Mole implies with the term “ethnoburb” is racial segregation with class integration. But as Liu’s Irvine and Rhee’s hometown shows, the behavior of the upper middle class is class segregation. Young, writing in 1990, could not foresee the future of racial integration. But ultimately the ethnoburb does not restructure class relations, it just ensures that the cooks making “egg noodles, congee, and rice rolls” are Asian. Ironically, while Mole notes that in her ethnoburb “the busses probably only run every 30 minutes,” Young wonders about the economic ramifications of this minimal public transit:

The autonomous choice by many municipalities not to run public transportation systems also excludes or isolates poor and old people. The autonomous choices of suburban communities allow those communities to exploit the benefits of the city without providing anything in return.

If the whole society were to be organized as a confederation of autonomous municipalities, what would prevent the development of large-scale inequality and injustice among communities, and thereby the oppression of individuals who do not live in the more privileged or more powerful communities?¹⁸¹

Presumably Asian Americans who have “pity and disdain for their Asian hometowns” are comparing Irvine to Shanghai, not to Chinatown. But as Liu says from her gated community in Irvine:

So this is the future, this is it. And all those accelerationists who thought the future was going to look like Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo combined, like Neuromancer style, William Gibson from the 90s, thought that Seattle, New York, downtown punk subcultures was going to create the future. No. The future, as determined by capital, speculation, and billionaires, looks like this.¹⁸²

So it should be unsurprising that Mabute-Louie focuses on those with “socioeconomic privilege” in her description of the ethnoburb:

However, Asian immigrants in the ethnoburb remained proudly unassimilable and transnational. While the ethnoburb was their final destination, they maintained diasporic ties. Many with socioeconomic privilege shuttled back and forth to their home countries. In her theory of “segmented assimilation,” [Min] Zhou argues that the deliberate preservation of ethnic values, ties, and institutions is what actually acclimates non-White immigrants to the US, pointing to the case of transnational Chinese immigrants in the ethnoburb. It is a diasporic connection to our motherlands and our ethnic communities, not necessarily our assimilation into Whiteness, that help us thrive in the US.¹⁸³

Using the word “acclimate” instead of “assimilate” permits Mabute-Louie to assert that Asian immigrants remain unassimilated while they “acclimate” to the US. What is the difference between assimilation and acclimation? Unfortunately, Mabute-Louie does not provide a specific citation for Min Zhou’s argument, but the language closely follows a couple lines from Zhou’s Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation:

The third pattern involves socioeconomic integration into mainstream America with lagged or selective acculturation and deliberate preservation of the ethnic community’s values and norms, social ties, and institutions. This is the pathway of deliberately reaffirming ethnicity and rebuilding ethnic networks and ethnic social structures for socioeconomic advancement into middle-class status.¹⁸⁴

Zhou uses the phrase “selective acculturation,” but places it at the same register as “deliberate preservation.” When Mabute-Louie says that “deliberate preservation…actually acclimates,” does this mean that acclimation is the underlying behavior? Or is acclimation just another word for acculturation? It is important to put Zhou’s theory in context, because it is a category of analysis, not a category of practice. That is, the theory seeks to explain what immigrants are already doing, not how they are doing it.

The segmented assimilation theory responds to these anomalies [in classical assimilation theories], offering an alternative theoretical perspective on the process by which America’s new second generation—the children of contemporary immigrants—are incorporated into the host society’s system of stratification and the divergent outcomes of this process. Unlike classical assimilation theories, which posit an irreversible and unidirectional path leading all immigrants to their eventual incorporation into an undifferentiated, unified, and white middle-class mainstream, the segmented assimilation theory conceives of mainstream society as shaped by systems of class and racial stratification. The theory emphasizes the interaction between race and class and between ethnic communities and larger social structures that intentionally or unintentionally exclude nonwhites. It attempts to delineate the multiple patterns of adaptation that emerge among contemporary immigrants and their offspring, account for their different destinies of convergence (or divergence) in their new homeland, and address the ways in which particular contexts of exit and reception for national-origin groups affect outcomes.¹⁸⁵

For completeness, here are the other two patterns outlined by Zhou:

The first is the time-honored upward-mobility pattern: acculturation and economic integration into the normative structures of mainstream middle-class America. This is the old-fashioned pathway of severing ethnic ties, unlearning old-world values, norms, and behavioral patterns, and adapting to the WASP core culture associated with the middle class. The second is the downward-mobility pattern of acculturation and integration into the margins of American society. This is the pathway of adapting to native subcultures in direct opposition to the WASP core culture or creating hybrid oppositional subcultures associated with native racial minorities trapped on the bottom rungs of the host society’s mobility ladder.¹⁸⁶

What Zhou discerns is different “patterns” of acculturation, but what Mabute-Louie champions as being “unassimilable” is selective acculturation, denigrating the other two patterns as “assimilation.” But for an immigrant to be “selective,” it means they have a choice. And for there to be a choice, there must be options, which means the immigrant must be discriminating between what is ethnic and what is not. But, more importantly, this happens at the level of discourse, as Mabute-Louie exemplifies:

Driving past 99 Ranch, we unironically spoke of the influx of Asian immigrants as some kind of intrusion, and the exodus of White families as an unfortunate, inevitable side effect. We were in an unspoken agreement that we were obviously exempt and distinguished from “those Asians moving in,” as we were meanwhile gluttonously gorging on wontons, egg noodles, congee, and rice rolls cooked by “those Asians moving in.” I dissociated from my community as I looked at our ethnoburb through the White gaze. The nativist, anti-immigrant through line of White supremacy trespassed the protective boundaries of the ethnoburb and into my ten-year-old consciousness. I gasped and clutched my metaphorical pearls over the scandal of Asian invasion and White flight, as I slurped another spoonful of preserved egg-and-pork congee.¹⁸⁷

The difference between Mabute-Louie and “those Asians moving in” is the label of “those Asians moving in.” Miraculously, food made by “those Asians moving in” loses its those-Asians-moving-in-ness once it ends up in Mabute-Louie’s ten-year-old hands. Where did this line of thinking come from? From her parents, of course:

Reflecting on this time in their lives, my parents consistently and ominously reference avoiding or being avoided by some other group of Asians. While the ethnoburb served as a landing pad for my parents as new immigrants, it was also the site of intra-ethnic and intra-racial conflict. With any influx of a new group, the preexisting community is forced to reckon with who they are, and who they aren’t. They negotiate and construct ethnic and racial definitions around status and perceived foreignness. Some Asian Americans may dissociate from poorer, less assimilated immigrants as an attempt to protect themselves and bringing them adjacency to Whiteness.

Growing up in the ethnoburb, I similarly felt the need to make distinctions to differentiate myself from “those Asians moving in,” even when I, in fact, am a product of “those Asians.”¹⁸⁸

What Mabute-Louie fails to appreciate is that Whiteness itself is one of the “construct[ed] ethnic and racial definitions.” The combination of “poorer” and “less assimilated” is not the opposite of Whiteness. But to say that some Asian Americans “may disassociate” from poor Asian Americans would be a trivial statement—it reduces the improvement of one’s socioeconomic conditions to the mere act of disassociation. This is the “culturalization of politics.” Yet Mabute-Louie conceives of “Asian Diaspora as an expansive political identity”:¹⁸⁹

The Asian Diaspora is a fluid site that challenges the construction of the US as the center. With flows of capital, culture, and communication between Asian immigrants, their homelands, and Asian Diasporic peoples, the Asian Diaspora is constantly reconfiguring home and transgressing borders. As demonstrated by the ethnoburb and its supportive transnational networks, assimilation and allegiance to Whiteness are not the final destination. Instead, diaspora asserts multiple loyalties and identities, as well as various definitions and experiences of home, borders, and displacement. Asian diasporic consciousness is simultaneously “here” and “there,” renegotiating, shifting, changing contexts, and expanding.¹⁹⁰

The idea of “constantly reconfiguring home and transgressing borders” is alluring and, at first glance, seems similar to Patterson’s “transitive cultures.” But whereas Patterson’s “transitive cultures” is what an individual does, Mabute-Louie wants to have her cake and eat it too, positing that the collective “diaspora asserts multiple loyalties and identities” while also ascribing a “political” end: that “assimilation and allegiance to Whiteness are not the final destination.” But why hold onto the notion of diaspora? What is the “final destination”? As Patterson writes:

Yet in a context of liberal tolerance, where Asian American identity is often crucial to presenting a space as multicultural and tolerant, we should ask how “disidentification” from the nation-state can also produce diasporic identities that are seen as “resistant,” but in practice, are managed through imagined tolerance thresholds.¹⁹¹

The Trouble with Diaspora

What is striking in both Mole and Mabute-Louie’s polemics is that the geopolitical implications of diaspora are scarcely engaged with. The concept of “Asian diaspora” presumes that there is a place called “Asia” that serves as the homeland for the diaspora. Part of the logic of the term “Asian American” is that “America” constitutes the idea of Asia. This, of course, is most evident in the Chinese exclusion laws and Japanese internment, but also in the projects of “ethnic studies” and “Asian American literature.” The everyday prejudice of “can’t tell Asians apart” happens in America (and it is Americans who perceive it as racism). “Asian Diaspora” elides these specificities and posits what Benedict Anderson analogizes as “[t]he idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”¹⁹² Why is the diaspora Asian?

Building on Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, Aihwa Ong writes of the Chinese diaspora:

Indeed, contemporary diasporan-Chinese chauvinism, while in tension with the claims of the Chinese nation-state, is also continuous with its racial consciousness. Racial discourses not only shape the internal divisions of imagined communities, as Anderson claims, but are also employed, for both oppressive and emancipatory purposes, in inscribing and managing social divisions in transnational space. In the Asia Pacific region today, two sets of narratives invoking Chineseness—as a territorial nation and as a transnational network—are in rivalry, but they are also in alliance, invoking stories about Chinese culture that shape regional consciousness about the rankings of races and nation-states.¹⁹³

This interplay between the territory of the “ethnoburb” and the transnational network (a term that Mabute-Louie also uses) obscures the racial character of this discourse. That is, “Asian Diaspora” is a racial concept, which Mabute-Louie defers to the Other of “Whiteness.” Writing about Chinatowns in Canada, Lily Cho argues for forms of resistance beyond the “enclave”:

The mistaking of Chinatown as the space of the Chinese diaspora lends itself too easily to a liberal multiculturalism where the spatial presence of otherness enhances rather than disturbs the liberal state. It is not just that non-urban populations are left out in the assumption that Chinatown is an urban microcosm of China itself, but that this perception of the microcosm, the miniaturization of a racialized culture, neutralizes it as an oppositional site. This assumption reveals more than just the museumization of a cultural space. It also uncovers the paradoxical trajectory of assimilation that enhances dominant culture’s sense of its own inclusive superiority. Chinatown is an accepted part of the urban landscape and provides a space of consumption and amusement. It is not that there is no agential potential in Chinatown, but that the overwhelming emphasis on Chinatown as a spatial metaphor for the Chinese diaspora risks occluding other forms of agency emerging in other locations. In not looking for the kinds of oppositional work that might be happening outside of Chinatown, we risk mistaking a spatial presence for an agential spatial haunting. The idea of the enclave suggests a model of assimilation that never has to engage with the ways in which Chinese diaspora populations have done more than just occupy space in Canada, but have fundamentally challenged and, as I will discuss, constituted Canada’s own notion of itself.¹⁹⁴

Cho posits that “[s]mall town Chinese restaurants are a sign not of assimilation but of dissimulation,” which resonates with Patterson’s idea of “transition[ing] among identities to manipulate the multiculturalist game.”¹⁹⁵ Wen Jin interprets Zhang Chengzhi’s Xinling Shi as precisely this sort of manipulation of Chinese multiculturalism:

On the one hand, Zhang presents the Jahriya during the eighteenth and nineteenth century as fearless protagonists of spectacular dramas of antistate rebellions, no less than the earliest group of jihadists in Chinese history. On the other, however, he advocates for their incorporation into mainstream Chinese history by staging their struggles as a precursor to the peasant and nationalist revolutions in later eras that were to put an end to imperial China and launch China onto a path toward modernization. For Zhang, then, the Jahriya should be accorded a crucial position in Chinese history although they have never fully assimilated into secular Chinese culture. By making this apparently paradoxical argument, as I elaborate later, Zhang is renegotiating the structure and boundaries of Chinese national identity, the meanings, that is, of its “center” and “margins.”¹⁹⁶

This reversal of the minority–majority relation for the Han in China is what Eng and Han refer to when they write of other “national versions of whiteness”:

Notably, with the rise of Asia globally and the shift of economic and political power to the East, we must factor into the history of the Asian American subject a more expensive account of the subject of racial history connected to different empires (the United States, China, India) and their organizations of race and caste into social hierarchy and subordination. Indeed, we must begin to account how the enfranchised subjects of these countries have their own particular histories of race and property—their own national versions of whiteness (of Han or Hindu nationalism) as property.¹⁹⁷

Singapore provides another example of state-enforced multiculturalism, as Patterson notes:

As Sumit K. Mandal points out, since Singapore has turned from an industrialized economy toward a service and intellectual economy, the pluralist social structure has operated like a global, cultural supermarket, with the nation-state, “Singapore Inc.,” as the “modern holding company.”. Singapore Inc. was tasked only with generating wealth, and to “incessantly reinvent itself…to retain its competitive edge.” The pluralist discourse that emerged saw Singapore’s diverse cultural groups as signifiers of commodified difference, making them easier to conscript into structural hierarchies, and allowing the state to maintain ideological dominance so long as the nation’s economic success continued.¹⁹⁸

Ien Ang in “On the perils of racialized Chineseness: race, nation, and entangled racism in China and Southeast Asia” details how “Chineseness” is instrumentalized by Chinese-Singaporeans in what could be called the “multiculturalist game”:

For example, Sylvia Ang has found that mainland Chinese migrants often berate Chinese-Singaporeans for not speaking Mandarin fluently (despite the government’s decades-long Speak Mandarin campaign), implying that they are “more Chinese” than their Chinese-Singaporean counterparts. As Ang remarks, “Mandarin has become the heart of the battle between mainland Chinese migrants and Chinese-Singaporeans”. She further notes that Chinese-Singaporeans tend to defend their poor Mandarin skills by asserting that they are a different, better kind of Chinese than mainlanders, which may speak only Mandarin and have poor English.

What we could derived from such identity skirmishes is not just a contestation of what constitutes Chineseness, but more fundamentally, the very fracturing of the Chinese as a “race”. It unravels the fictive construct of the “yellow race” as a singular people, highlighting instead that Chineseness is deployed as a flexible signifier, claimed and contested as an identity by different people in different ways.¹⁹⁹

In the Singaporean case, the mainlanders assert their “Chineseness”—their “unassimilability” —as valuable. Ang associates this with “a newly powerful China”:

Chineseness has thus become an increasingly polarizing signifier. Its persistent racialization threatens a vicious, essentialized bifurcation of the world, hardening the boundaries between “Chinese” and “non-Chinese”. What makes things worse is that intensifying global anti-Chinese posturing may in turn reinforce the fervent racialization of Chinese self-identity in China itself, where Han-centric ancestor worship of the Yellow Emperor is now actively promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. This issue is of particular significance today when a newly powerful China, especially since the ascendency of President Xi Jinping, is increasingly assertive in reaching out to overseas Chinese around the world to become part of a global Chinese community, presumably united in their patriotic allegiance to China. Just as Chinese nationalists in the early twentieth century called on overseas Chinese communities to show their loyalty to China, PRC authorities have in recent decades ramped up efforts to co-opt the global Chinese diaspora by insisting on their racialized ties to the ancestral homeland, inciting them to “come back to your own country”, through long-distance nationalist loyalty if not literally, even though many ethnic Chinese around the world have long become nationals of other nations.²⁰⁰

As Eng and Han note, this racialization also has a more particular form as Han nationalism. Fei Xiaotong, in a lecture called the “Plurality and Unity in the Configuration of the Chinese People” describes the Han version of “assimilation into Whiteness” as a “snowball”:

Intermarriages between ethnic groups were numerous, and they were practiced even by the upper class. As the non-Han rulers’ regimes were mostly short-lived, one minority conqueror was soon replaced by another, and eventually most of them were assimilated into the Hans. The nation of the Hans grew, not simply in consequence of the growth of its own population, but mainly by taking into its ranks non-Hans who immigrated into the agricultural region. This was the snowball-like manner of its expansion.²⁰¹

Kevin Carrico, in The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today, notes that this Han nationalism is figured against an “alienating contemporary society” in an echo of Day’s “romantic anticapitalism”:

And as a result, after decades of unwavering evolutionist certainty regarding a “plural” (duoyuan) society eventually becoming “one” (yiti), the Han snowball rolling down a hill seems, in Han Clothing Movement interpretations, to be collecting dirt and pollution on its exterior, and gathering speed towards the edge of a dangerous cliff.

The identificatory aspect of tradition, celebrating a lost past as the truth of Han-ness, is a simultaneous product and denial of these realities. By alienating contemporary society as an external imposition […] and thus a pollution or violation of Han-ness, the Han is presented as the victim of a cruel modernity rather than its enactor, and the wavering certainty of the teleology of modernity, embodied in its idealized future with the Han at the forefront, is replaced by the certainty of a new teleology based in a stable idealized past, with the Han again at the forefront in a counterimage of an eternally simpler and aesthetically pleasing true Han society. Han Clothing Movement narratives look backwards towards a past harmonious sphere of existence where, one might note in light of the previous analysis of ethnicization, “the minorities” with their simple ethnic ways and charming innocence were always already presumed, within the popular imagination, to be located. Rather than living in cramped and disorienting city spaces, or spending their lives in office cubicles or on factory floors, one’s true Han ancestors are imagined to have lived in large open spaces in which one could take in the beauty of nature, carefree in one’s long, flowing robes; rather than struggling with and suffering through a threatening and polluted environment, one’s true Han ancestors were literally one with all in the world and the heavens, living amid the serene quiet of rolling, grassy hills, in unity with a pure and nurturing natural environment, and raising animals and vegetables on organic farms; rather than worrying about what food to eat or to feed to one’s children, all was prepared naturally: food came straight from the fields, and children were fed directly from their mother’s breast; and rather than living in a constant state of uncertainty and vigilance, one’s Han ancestors lived in a disciplined society ordered by a clear hierarchy and accompanying rituals of respect. Life was simpler, purer, more honest, orderly, and bound in fraternal unity: such is the imagined eternal reality of the Han and China.²⁰²

But what is the Other of the Han? For some in the Han Clothing Movement, it is the Manchus:

The Manchu conspiracy theory does not simply explain a few random phenomena in China today. It is a comprehensive, all-encompassing narrative covering and explaining all major issues in contemporary society from politics to economics to culture, inscribed within a unifying narrative of barbaric Manchu oppression and heroic Han resistance. This completeness is the final destination sought by the Han Clothing Movement’s identity project, a process traced in the preceding chapters. Yet this completeness can only finally and fully achieved via conspiracy theory, which serves like photography, in this case like a photographic negative, to stabilize their image of Han-ness: a necessary supplement to the perpetual failure of the exaltation of identity in practice.²⁰³

Is this not the return of the paranoia of Whiteness? This ideological maneuver only serves to reproduce the discourse of identity. Mabute-Louie characterizes “Asian Diaspora” as “anticolonial”:

Because Asian Diaspora insists on anticolonial critique, the term as a political identity and organizing tool serves as a grounding principle for diasporic, decolonial solidarity against Western imperialism. By renewing our connections to our historical anticolonial rage and internationalist solidarity, Asian Diaspora reminds us that our experiences of race in the US are defined by both colonial agendas and anti-imperialist resistance. Subsequently, we strengthen our connections to other diasporic communities on the outside of empire—including Pacific Islander and Indigenous communities—at the forefronts of resistance and struggle against imperialism and fascism. Following our revolutionary ancestors, we broaden and deepen our sense of self and solidarity across borders.²⁰⁴

But for Carrico, this “sense of self” is just a “theoretically elaborate conspiratorial celebration of identity”:

Derived from [Edward] Said’s myopic presentation of Orientalist activity as developing solely upon one axis, namely, the East-West binary, the academic hunt for “Orientalism” and “colonialism” serves only to reproduce and reinforce the imaginary East-West difference that serves as its founding distinction, comfortingly mapping the entire world in accordance with this distinction in a manner identical to a conspiracy theory, while at the same time simply transferring from one side of the binary to the other the simplistic portrayals which it claims to oppose. Within this rhetorical circuit sharing the structures of conspiracy theory, and immunized against critique by its self-congratulating moralizing claims, conventional postcolonialism serves as a theoretically elaborate conspiratorial celebration of identity.²⁰⁵

What this “simplistic portrayal” obscures, for ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, is those who are “forced into an identification,” as Kuan-Hsing Chen writes in Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization:

It follows, then, that “China,” “India,” “Islam,” and “the Orient” are not necessarily nationalist concepts, but emotional signifiers. To proudly reclaim a four- or five-thousand-year history is a postcolonial response. The downside is that these larger, non-Western civilizations may fall into the logic of colonial competition and struggle over which represents the Other of the West. Does this not reproduce the structure of ethnocentrism? Is the center not still the opposing West? Surrounding the self-claimed civilizational entities, how do the little subjectivities—which do not have a larger civilization to hang onto, or which are now forced into an identification with one—handle their comparatively diminished destinies and sense of marginalization?²⁰⁶

Thus, the discourse of “diaspora” obscures the “borders” within the diaspora. The idea of postcolonialism is not necessarily universal, as Chun reminds us:

Like the assumption of shared values and a collective conscience underlying the nation-state that has made culture, ethnicity, and national identity problematic issues, postcolonialism’s need to recognize multiple identities in the present is, on the other hand, the recognition of an empire of mind that has subordinated and negated difference. In effect, if celebration of hybridity and championing of diasporic interests are a consequence of our need to decolonize, then one must first ask whether there are significant differences between our problematic need to invoke hybridity and diaspora and the phenomena that have given rise to them. Equally important, the universalizing tendencies of postmodernism, postcolonialism, or transnationalism as theoretical trends that have stemmed from an intellectual mainstream should make one highly suspicious of whether the meanings of these terms are similar to their usages in a local or indigenous context. The celebration of postmodernism, which gives the illusion that it can be transposed anywhere with the same effects, regardless of their cultural specificity, is an often-cited case in point.²⁰⁷

This is what allows Mabute-Louie to call for “internationalist solidarity” with “decolonial movements” in the conclusion to Unassimilable:

Asian diasporic political identity rejects Americanness and honorary Whiteness as aspirations, and instead centers our anticolonial rage and diasporic ties to one another. At a time when the term “Asian American” is flattening, unstable, and reduced to the politics of representation and inclusion into empire, Asian Diaspora takes up the task of asserting our subjectivity to induce internationalist solidarity with anyone and everyone fighting the US empire, including decolonial movements from Palestine, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawai’i. We expand the boundaries of who belongs to us, as well as our political horizons. As part of the Asian Diaspora, we may be tempted to “enter into a settler colonial system that begs us to behave and obey like good Americans, to uphold that system rooted in genocide, slavery, patriarchy, and capitalism.” But as we name ourselves coconspirators against the US empire, we awaken possibilities for diasporic love, coalitions, and futures.²⁰⁸

The phrase “Asian Diaspora” raises the specter of an “Asian” imperialism that resists “US empire.” As Chen writes:

Resisting imperialism can no longer be reduced to the simple gesture of resisting outside forces. Chinese intellectuals need to transcend the lingering master narrative of the tragic Western imperialist invasion. Our shared consciousness of suffering should not prevent us from critically reflecting on the immense political, military, and cultural pressures that the Chinese empire has exerted on its neighbors throughout history. The anxiety over the rise of China in the region today does not stem only from contemporary China’s economic and military growth or the authoritarian policies of the CCP, but also from the historical China—the China of the tributary system. Intellectuals in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even the Chinese communities in diaspora need to reflect on the historical identity and positioning of the Chinese empire in the premodern era. Doing so preempts the possibility of falling back into the imperial dream, the desire to become a superpower that can compete with the United States.²⁰⁹

Ang thus proposes “an effort to ‘deracialize’ the world”:

To find a way out we must not only jettison the very idea of “the Chinese” as a “race”, but interrogate racial thinking as such in an effort to “deracialize” the world. This will be a formidable task given that, as this essay has explicated, the idea of humanity’s division into essentially distinct “races” has been hardwired as a fundamental organizing principle in society. In the Chinese case, it is particularly difficult due to the enormous importance given to descent and lineage in Chinese culture. Therefore, asserting the existence of a variety of Chinese ethnicities, rather than a single Chinese “race”, is limited because the label “Chinese” refers back inevitably to an originary ancestral homeland, to which diasporic Chinese identities remain chained no matter how far removed they have travelled through time and space. In short, although Chinese diasporic identities are culturally dynamic and historical [sic] evolving, they can never entirely escape being racialized: race and ethnicity can therefore not be easily disentangled. This highlights the sheer difficulty of blunting the essentializing and homogenizing processes of racialization.²¹⁰

So even though the notion of “Asian Diaspora” is not explicitly racial, the broadness of “Asian” is closer to “humanity’s division into essentially distinct ‘races’” than to the highly suspect notion of “Asian culture.” What diaspora does for Mabute-Louie and Mole, is function as a category of practice for what Brubaker calls “boundary maintenance”:

Where boundary maintenance and distinctive identity are emphasized, as they are in most discussions, familiar problems of ‘groupism’ arise. The metaphysics of the nation-state as a bounded territorial community may have been overcome; but the metaphysics of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ remain. Diaspora can be seen as an alternative to the essentialization of belonging; but it can also represent a non-territorial form of essentialized belonging. Talk of the de-territorialization of identity is all well and good; but it still presupposes that there is ‘an identity’ that is reconfigured, stretched in space to cross state boundaries, but on some level fundamentally the same. Yet if, as Homi Bhaba put it in a discussion of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, ‘there is no such whole as the nation, the culture, or even the self’, then why should there be any such whole as the Indian or Chinese or Jewish or Armenian or Kurdish diaspora?

To overcome these problems of groupism, I want to argue that we should think of diaspora not in substantialist terms as a bounded entity, but rather as an idiom, a stance, a claim. We should think of diaspora in the first instance as a category of practice, and only then ask whether, and how, it can fruitfully be used as a category of analysis. As a category of practice, ‘diaspora’ is used to make claims, to articulate projects, to formulate expectations, to mobilize energies, to appeal to loyalties. It is often a category with a strong normative change. It does not so much describe the world as seek to remake it.²¹¹

But how does “Asian Diaspora” remake the world? Or as Floya Anthias asks Homi Bhabha:

The image of the diasporic individual in Bhabha is of the cosmopolitan rootless but routed intellectual. This raises the question of class differences: what are the commonalities between a North Indian upper-class Oxbridge-educated university teacher and a Pakistani waiter or grocer? How meaningful is it to refer to them as part of the Asian diaspora in Britain let alone the Asian diaspora more globally?²¹²

For example, Shelly Chan calls the “Jinan intellectuals” the “Chinese researchers, editors, and translators who were associated with Nanyang studies at Jinan University” who constructed the notion of a “Nanyang huaqiao as a diaspora.”²¹³ Chan writes:

[W]hile constructing Nanyang huaqiao as a diaspora and China as a homeland-nation, the Jinan writers downplayed the economic and cultural fragmentation generated by mass emigration. From 1870 to 1940, Chinese movements to the South Seas produced a bewildering variety of social formations along dialect, regional, generational, and class lines, intersecting with a broad assemblage of older colonial orientations, new communist internationalisms, and emergent nationalist movements. Chinese nationalism was only one of the many forces that attracted sectors of the Chinese publics in the South Seas. In addition, the counter-efforts of colonial and native states limited the spread of a political nationalism. In British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, French Indo-China, and Siam, the authorities closely watched a growing pan-Chinese cultural politics and combated it through press censorship, nationality laws, and regulation of Chinese schools. Furthermore, traditional migrant identities and commercial interests continued to exist alongside Chinese nationalism. Even during the anti-Japanese boycotts in 1928 and 1937, initiated by local leaders to aid national salvation, not all Nanyang Chinese merchants complied. The Cantonese and some of the Hokkien merchants conducting trade with colonial Taiwan adamantly did not. This “disunity” exasperated the Hokkien-Malaysian leader and rubber magnate Tan Kah Kee, who founded a university in his native Xiamen […]. These examples suggest that the Chinese nationalist movement remained limited in the South Seas, but the Jinan group built a provocative case to transcend the divisions by using the tools of history and geography. By suggesting that China was inextricably bound up with Nanyang huaqiao in the past and how it would remain so in the future, the intellectuals constructed an emergent homeland-nation that would not be complete without unifying with its diaspora.²¹⁴

What the discourse of diaspora attempts to accomplish, as evident in Chan’s anti-Japanese example, is the subsumption of economic interests to political interests. This is perhaps more palatable for merchants than for waiters living in economic precarity. As Xiaojian Zhao writes in The New Chinese America:

Class has always been important to Chinese Americans. During the time period when Chinese laborers were barred by exclusion laws (1882–1943), merchants enjoyed the privilege of free entry, which gave them an edge, in addition to their economic advantage, over the laboring class. The merchants also used their own class status to challenge anti-Chinese ideologies in America.²¹⁵

Thus, Anuradha Pandey recognizes that “race” is a distraction from economic politics:

I also call upon the broad group of Asian Americans of all origins to fight back against the equally preposterous idea that we are white-adjacent because we strive to class climb as any other group would do. We are being punished for having ambitions. Many of us have internalized the false notion that we are the tools of white supremacy, as evidenced by the division among us regarding affirmative action. They depend on people of color allowing ourselves be used as props for the social capital we are granted in return. They also require Asian Americans to be silent about our place at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. This is no different from colonial-era Orientalist narratives.

The politically active bourgeoisie have focused on internal ‘work’ people need to do to transcend their inner racist souls, which distracts from external work that could be done, such as fighting to change zoning laws, making childcare accessible, or introducing a public health insurance option to compete with the insurance companies. This, alone, would do so much to lift people, especially single mothers who Democrats claim to champion.²¹⁶

Mole twists Pandey’s article—which, to be fair, posits a dichotomy between “white elites” and “black” people, as well as the notion of “racial hierarchy”—to ignore the “external work” of class politics:

Rather, I’m concerned with the “deference politics” of contemporary boba liberals who brush any and all Asian concerns under the rug because it’s just “not as bad” to be Asian as it is to be Black or Brown. This submission to the White leftist’s simple “hierarchy reversal…with black people on the top and white on the bottom” conveniently allows White people (like White leftists) to evade criticism while still “consolidat[ing]…power under the guise of virtue granted by [their] black friend,” as Anuradha Pandey quips.²¹⁷

The sentence from Pandey that precedes the one quoted by Mole is:

Leftist, educated white Democrats are engaged in a class supremacist project with the veneer of an anti-racist, social justice project that is authoritarian. Deference politics is necessary for identity leftism to survive.²¹⁸

But the preceding paragraph is:

As [Olúfẹ́mi O.] Táíwò points out, one has to be in the room of elites to be a beneficiary in the first place. One must have a college degree and work in the knowledge professions. The people in the room must be of a similar economic class for these hierarchies to form based on immutable characteristics. If you work with your brain rather than your hands, you have far more time on them to make up a novel way to gather and confer capital.²¹⁹

Pandey confusingly adds the qualifier “white” to racialize “Democrats engaged in a class supremacist project.” Are the nonwhite Democrats in the room engaged in some other project? Perhaps Afropessimism or Andy Liu’s “Asian pessimism”? In any case, the “class supremacist project” is not concomitant with the White supremacist one. Fortunately, Pandey is clearer in a subsequent article:

Race may affect individual interactions with prejudiced people, but it is systemic classism that prevents economic mobility. What appears to be systemic racism is better described in terms of its material impacts. The visibility of race and gender makes them an easy explanation for every disparity under the sun. Where people should see the effects of class, they instead see race as the causal factor, even though economic class accurately predicts life outcomes.²²⁰

What Pandey calls “classism” is more accurately termed as a “class politics,” since the identity category of “social class” is not the relation that “prevents economic mobility.” As Michaels says, “The garçon de café who saves his tips and buys the cafe is not a member of the proletariat passing as a member of the petit bourgeoisie—he is petit bourgeois.”²²¹ Reed puts Pandey’s (and Táíwò’s) point more clearly:

Even when its proponents believe themselves to be radicals, this antiracist politics is a professional-managerial class politics. Its adherents are not concerned with trying to generate the large, broad political base needed to pursue a transformative agenda because they are committed fundamentally to pursuit of racial parity within neoliberalism, not social transformation.²²²

Reed continues by describing how race discourse obscures class politics (which is precisely what allows “white” and “elite” to be conflated):

Antiracist politics is a class politics; it is rooted in the social position and worldview, and material interests of the stratum of race relations engineers and administrators who operate in Democratic party politics and as government functionaries, the punditry and commentariat, education administration and the professoriate, corporate, social service and nonprofit sectors, and the multibillion-dollar diversity industry. That stratum comes together around a commonsense commitment to the centrality of race—and other categories of ascriptive identity—as the appropriate discursive framework through which to articulate norms of justice and injustice and through which to formulate remedial responses. It has grown and become deeply embedded institutionally throughout the society as an entailment of the victories of the 1960s. As the society moves farther away from the regime of subordination and exclusion on explicitly racial terms to which race-reductionist explanations were an immediately plausible response, race has become less potent as the dominant metaphor, or blanket shorthand, through which class hierarchy is lived. And as black and white elites increasingly go through the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods, operate as peers in integrated workplaces, share and interact in the same social spaces and consumption practices and preferences, they increasingly share another common sense not only about frameworks of public policy but also about the proper order of things in general.²²³

When the terms “cosmopolitan” and “migrant” are juxtaposed, they elucidate how “diaspora” elides class. Although the migrant may be “ethnicized” or “racialized,” their primary relation to the “cosmopolitan” is one of labor. As Patterson writes of Han Ong’s Fixer Chao:

Likewise, Preciosa, after realizing that her inclusion in New York’s elite is only possible through performing “the primitive,” is also able to see the global imaginary—and the ecstatic with it—as necessitating affective service labor. Indeed, their cynical distance does just that—distances the reader from the “empowerment,” the “pride,” and the sacrosanct histories of ethnic identities. It provides a darker image of the global imaginary, not as cosmopolitan communities of tolerance, but as imperial elites formed by the labor of ethnicized migrants who are meant to desire the global imaginary, but can only belong as servants.²²⁴

Fetishizing Politics

What the discourse about White Male–Asian Female (WMAF) relationships accomplishes for ethnopolitical entrepreneurs is to shift the external work of class politics to the internal “work” of reassessing one’s desire in cynical terms. In the “status” variant of this discourse, exemplified by Elle Ray, “status” is conflated with race and gender, as in this rhetorical question: “With all that said, whether or not it’s true that Asian women are complicit in this growing status divide by exclusively dating higher status men in other races and cultures, why is it up to only the Asian women to fix the ills of society?”²²⁵ The problem is not lower status people “choosing” to date higher status people—that is, self-conscious enough to know that their partners are “dating down.” “[N]o one really wants a mercy fuck,” as Srinivasan writes.²²⁶ The issue is that socioeconomic realities condition the possibilities of dating. Ray simply presumes that “white men” are higher status, but is this not White supremacist ideology? Perhaps it is the case that more white men are higher status, but that does not mean any potential partner is higher status. If the issue is of status, why bother talking about race?

In the “assimilation” variant of this discourse, espoused by Mole, WMAF is conflated with a choice to submit to white supremacy. As Mole writes:

In this way, many well-intentioned Asian American (and non-Asian) thinkers omit actual discussion of the specific White-Asian racial dynamics when attempting to “disprove” the myth that Asian women’s attraction to White men is built on internalized racism.

This conversation should not be a debate about Asian women’s right to choose their partners, or even about whether Asian women are obligated to care about Asian mens’ feelings. By centering the ways our personal decisions can reflect our society’s racial hierarchy, we can untangle ourselves from this Western bubble where our unalienable, God Given Right to make our own decisions also releases us from our positionality in relation to the rest of our kin/people/society.²²⁷

Rather than criticizing the “Asian women’s right to choose their partners,” Mole ascribes a responsibility to Asian Americans to their “positionality in relation to the rest of our kin/people/society.” But this responsibility is not separable from “unalienable, God Given Right to make our own decisions.” As Christine Abigail L. Tan notes, this line of thinking is “Anglo-European”:

At this point, it would not be a stretch to say that the origins and emergence of a concept of free will as we know it today in Anglo-European scholarship has always had its roots in theological inquiry, guided by anthropomorphic versions of a god or gods. Most apparently, the concept of free will gets picked up and brought to the fore by monotheistic religions, specifically in theodicy. In Christianity, for instance, God is supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient, but also omnibenevolent. However, we see in the Gospels that God would punish humans to be damned in hell for eternity. As such, the only way for God to be omnipotent and omniscient, while being omnibenevolent (and not unjust), even while damning humans—the creation of whom He is solely responsible for—is to create a stopgap for the purpose of ascribing blame to humans instead: free will. Without this anthropomorphized God, there would have been much less motivation to problematize the issue of human free will, as well as the need to conceive of it as a denaturalized absolute metaphysical faculty for uncaused agency—for starting a new causal chain ex nihilo and thus having full responsibility for it—because only if it is truly uncaused can the blame be kept off of God’s shoulders.²²⁸

This “God Given Right” to “free will” is what makes those in the “Western bubble” responsible:

In, [sic] fact, the concept of free will serves a very specific function in the development of Anglo-European philosophy. It is closely tied and inseparable to the problem of moral responsibility. There are different accounts about where the free will “problem” originated, but it was, originally, frames as a question of whether freedom of choice, and therefore moral responsibility, was compatible with fate, and more specifically, the foreknowledge of the gods and their divine providence.²²⁹

But in Zhou’s three patterns of assimilation, immigrants do not have “free will” to choose how they assimilate, they are conditioned by social structures and respond to them based on their status and resources. Zhou’s “segmented assimilation” theory uses the terms “exit” and “reception”:

According to the segmented assimilation theory, immigrant or ethnic groups assimilate into different segments of society, which are determined by group-specific contexts of exit and reception. The context of exit entails a number of factors, including pre-migration resources that immigrants bring with them (such as money, knowledge, and job skills), the social class status already attained by the immigrants in their homelands, motivations, and the means of migration. The context of reception includes the national-origin group’s position in the system of racial stratification, government policies, labor market conditions, and public attitudes, as well as the strength and viability of the ethnic community in the host society. The segmented assimilation theory focuses on the interaction of these two sets of factors, predicting that particular contexts of exit and reception can create distinctive ethnocultural patterns and strategies of adaptation, social environments, and tangible resources for the group and give rise to opportunities or constraints for the individual, independent of individual socioeconomic and demographic characteristics.²³⁰

The concept of “right” does not release immigrants from those social structures, but the “context of reception” does not necessarily imbue immigrants with moral obligations. “White supremacy” is a conspiracy theory—to use Carrico’s term—that motivates a believer to look for “internalized racism” within oneself and conceive of a responsibility to one’s race. As Barbara Fields writes:

It will not do to suppose that a powerful group captures the hearts and minds of the less powerful, inducing them to “internalize” the ruling ideology (to borrow the spurious adjective-verb in which this artless evasion has so often been couched). To suppose that is to imagine ideology handed down like an old garment, passed on like a germ, spread like a rumor, or imposed like a dress code. Any of these would presuppose that an experience of social relations can be transmitted by the same means, which is impossible.²³¹

“Racism” is the effect of social structures that make “race” a way to think and move in the world. Using a traffic analogy, she continues:

It is not an abstract belief or attitude that brings people to stop at a red light. Rather, people discover the advantage of being able to take for granted what everyone else will do at a busy intersection. Or, to be more exact, they have grown up in a society that constantly ritualizes that discovery—by making people stop again and again for red lights—without each person having to make the discovery anew by ad hoc calculation at every intersection. Both parts are necessary: the demonstrable advantage of stopping and the constant re-enactment of the appropriate conduct, a re-enactment that removes the matter from the realm of calculation to that of routine. The ritual repetition of the appropriate social behavior makes for the continuity of ideology, not the “handing down” of the appropriate “attitudes.” There, too, lies the key to why people may suddenly appear to slough off an ideology to which they had appeared subservient. Ideology is not a set of attitudes that people can “have,” as they have a cold, and throw off the same way. Human beings live in human societies by negotiating a certain social terrain, whose map they keep alive in their minds by the collective, ritual repetition of the activities they must carry out in order to negotiate the terrain. If the terrain changes, so must their activities, and therefore so must the map.²³²

One can only perceive WMAF—and “interracial” marriages—after believing in the ideology of race. To grasp “White supremacy” means grasping WMAF as a problem. To continue to discuss WMAF is to continue to reproduce the concept of “race” instead of interrogating the social structures that influence dating. If WMAF was a political problem, the political solution would be to ban it—or for supporters, permit it. This is the history of anti-miscegenation laws, which, suffice to say, codified racial ideology. But the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act in 1965, which not only ended Chinese exclusion but also the national origins system, was promoted on a basis of family reunification, prioritizing relationship over race:

In debates on the House and Senate floors, supporters stressed these moral and humane dimensions. Rep. Jacob Gilbert (D-NY) claimed: “Under the new immigration system, immigrants will be selected not on the basis of their race but primarily on their family relationship to American citizens and on the talents and skills that they possess.” He added: “The bill [H.R. 2580], then, goes far toward eliminating the cruelties of family separation which the United States has inadvertently been responsible for committing under the old law.” On the Senate floor, the bill’s cosponsor, Sen. Philip Hart, stressed: “Moral and national interest reasons justify a new immigration policy. Aside from its racial and ethnic discrimination, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 fails to give sufficient recognition to the principle of family unity.” He argued that “a compelling priority in any reform bill is the urgent need to facilitate the reunion of families,” and he discussed “the historic value of immigration to our economy.”²³³

Ray asserts that the contemporary discourse about interracial dating “is fueled by men’s misogyny and entitlement” rather than racism. But this slippage from race to sex is unconvincing as a gender politics, because an anti-miscegenation law today would not only restrict Asian women, but also white women. If there are men who support the “policing of Asian women’s dating behaviors,” it is a politics of ressentiment from men who believe they have no hope of interracial dating.²³⁴ But does this mean that these men have given up trying to assimilate?

Assimilation as a category of practice conflates assimilation as a category of analysis, which views assimilation as a process. Assimilation as a process has no moral valance, and those doing it may not even realize that they are doing it. Contrast this overloaded term with a closely related one: immigration. Immigration, it should go without saying, is political. But what would be the politics of assimilation? Would those politics even be sufficiently different from the politics of immigration? Anti-miscegenation laws could be interpreted as preventing assimilation (nonwhites becoming white), but framed historically as preserving the purity of the white race (whites becoming nonwhite):

The anxieties over protecting white women’s virtue served many useful purposes—or rather, the discourse of protection did. Chivalrous claims helped to legitimize exclusionary practices based on apprehensions concerning the inferiority of immigrants and the allegedly detrimental effects of racial miscegenation. Antimiscegenation laws and the “one-drop rule” codified strictures aimed at prohibiting racial mixing, which could challenge the existing racial hierarchy. Immigrants, particularly nonwhite men, and white women risked fines and even imprisonment for marrying across accepted racial lines. Thus, attempts to control white women’s sexuality had the added benefit of controlling immigrants’ sexuality.²³⁵

But the politics of assimilation would eliminate the central assumption that underlies Mole’s argument: that immigrants choose to assimilate and therefore they are responsible for doing so. If forced miscegenation is put into practice—every Asian woman is forced to marry a white man—the meaning of WMAF would no longer be the same. Ironically, such a law would become impossible to enforce as successive generations become harder to discriminate into “white” and “Asian.” But this racial admixture still does not support cultural assimilation.

For instance, Mole quotes a scene in The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan as an instance of a WMAF “pattern”:

When Frida develops a crush on Tucker, a(nother) White man in the rehab program for fathers, she prepares excuses in case her friends give her a hard time about liking a White man:

“This isn’t a manifestation of growing up with White culture. Most of the Black and Latino fathers are too young, most of the White fathers too creepy. There are no Asians.”²³⁶

But the context of the quote in the story is that Frida is trying to pre-empt accusations of not hanging out with her own race:

The parents’ self-segregation is dispiriting. Latino fathers hold court with Latina mothers. The lone fiftysomething white father has found the trio of middle-aged white women. His teenage doll daughter looks mortified.

Known lesbians in the community keep to themselves. Frida and the other mothers engaged in interracial socializing, especially the white mothers flirting with Black fathers, receive angry stares. Frida feels guilty, but if Roxanne or anyone else gets on her case, she’ll say that Tucker was simply standing in line, that this isn’t a manifestation of growing up in white culture.²³⁷

How can Frida be responsible for having a “crush” on a white man if there are no Asian men in the rehab program? To support this claim, Mole mentions that “on the topic of WMAF relationships, Frida says ‘only White men have ever pursued her’ because ‘she’s moved in White worlds.’”²³⁸ But the context of those quotes makes it clear that Frida was not good enough for her “Asian lovers”:

The lessons have made her feel ashamed for desiring another white man, but only white men have ever pursued her. She’s moved in white worlds, has only had two Asian lovers, both of whom she attempted to turn into serious boyfriends to please her parents, one of whom thought she was too damaged, another who thought she was too negative, both of whom felt she wouldn’t get along with their mothers or bear healthy children because of her depression. She shouldn’t have told them about taking medication. Shouldn’t have mentioned seeing a therapist. When she was younger, she used to think that if she ever had a child, she’d want that child to be entirely Chinese, but she didn’t realize how difficult it would be to find a Chinese man who wanted her.²³⁹

Why would an Asian man—none of whom need rehab—want to date Frida after learning that she is a bad mother who needed rehab? Frida is making the best of a bad situation through her crush on a fellow rehab member. This difficulty that Asian women have in dating is what Sheng is referring to on an episode of the Escape From Plan A podcast:

But what I’m saying is that that desire is more prevalent than is given credit for online because it doesn’t really work out often for the reasons that I’m talking about and then I think Asian women who end up dating white get blamed for it and I think mostly unfairly because I think the real prevalent reason for it—I’m not saying that there aren’t white chasing Asian women, I’m sure there are but I think they’re a minority, okay, I can’t prove that to you, but I know that there is a large preference for WMAF—and I think my personal experience tells me that the stuff that’s being said about that online is generally not true and even though I think you get a lot of toxic voices popping up online and writing about it, I think that there is a silent majority who were like, “you know what if I could have found an Asian guy? I would have preferred that but it wasn’t in the cards.”²⁴⁰

It is only for the women who have a choice that even be responsible for discriminating along racial lines. Viet Thanh Nguyen in Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America explains how race is “something that we learn to see”:

[Ronald] Takaki claims that [Nathan] Glazer’s argument blurs the line between race and ethnicity, implicitly positing that Chinese, Irish, and blacks are equivalent ethnic groups. In reality, Takaki argues, an overarching racial difference separates the Irish, as white, from the Chinese and blacks, as nonwhite; the eventual success of the Irish is partially predicated upon their whiteness and the opportunities this affords. Takaki’s argument about the subordinate nature of ethnicity under race is fundamental for Asian American intellectuals, but it is based upon a tautology: the Irish can become white because they look white, and the Chinese cannot become white because they do not look white. Yet historical evidence demonstrates that in the nineteenth century the Irish did not look white, at least to other European Americans who had already claimed the mantle of whiteness. If the Irish can become white, when they were seen by others as black, or at least nonwhite, then what is to prevent any other nonwhite group from doing the same? The situation of the Irish demonstrates that race is not inherently visible through physical characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and eye and nose shape, but that race is instead something that we learn to see. Robyn Wiegman’s question about the visibility of race is worth quoting here: does the “fact of blackness” (or any other color) “lie in the body and its epidermis or in the cultural training that quite literally teaches the eye not only how but what to see?”²⁴¹

John Kuo Wei Tchen expands on this with the history in New York of Chinese men marrying Irish women:

Typical of a time in which racial categories were in constant flux, the census takers did not categorize these Anglo- or Irish-Chinese children in a consistent way. “Mulatto,” a term most often applied to West Indian interracial marriages, was sometimes used. Other times these people were considered “white” or “Chinese.” This Chinese-Irish pattern continued through the balance of the nineteenth century in sufficient numbers for Harper’s Weekly in 1890 to prominently feature one such union in a double centerfold spread. A reporter for the Tribune remarked, “It is very curious to hear the little half-breed children running about the rooms and alternately talking Irish to their mothers and Chinese to their fathers.”²⁴²

Is this “Chinese-Irish pattern” evidence of Asian Men-White Female (AMWF) miscegenation? Only in the poverty of contemporary WMAF discourse. For at least one Irish wife, her Chinese husband is white:

Visiting an apartment at 39 Baxter, the reporter met the unnamed Irish wives of Ah Muk and Ching Si, who invited him in to see one of their abodes, which he described in some surprise as “scrupulously clean and handsomely furnished.” When asked, “How did you come to marry Chinamen?” Mrs. Ah Muk laughed, but Mrs. Ching Si was indignant: “Because we like ‘em, of course, why shouldn’t we?” When the reporter suggested that they should be, “in accordance with the nature of things,” married to white men, Mrs. Ching Si said that their husbands were as white as anybody and a good deal whiter than many of their neighbors. Mrs. Ah Muk then displayed her sleeping child, adding, “Joe is his name.…He don’t look like a Chinaboy, does he, when he’s asleep? His eyes show it, though, when he’s awake.”²⁴³

If the Irish woman, which, at the time of the interview—1877—was not yet white, does mean that the marriage of a Chinese man and an Irish woman represents a white man in a relationship with a non-white woman? Or, to risk going too far, a black woman? If so, then those Chinese men were not “anti-Black.” It is curious that Mrs. Ching Si also claims that it is her choice to marry a Chinese man—is she a case of choosing to assimilate? The Chinese men had little choice, since the Page Act of 1875 “drastically reduced female emigration from China.”²⁴⁴ Unfortunately, there is probably not enough information in the historical record to explain the Chinese-Irish pattern, but it is safe to say that the “context of reception” influenced her choice in partner.

There is also little information on why Chinese immigrants married Black people in the Mississippi Delta, but as Kim notes, such unions were suppressed by “community leaders”:

As indicated above, the Chinese, for their part, had to do their best to discourage Chinese–Black unions. James Loewen writes: “In several towns, school officials stated explicitly to Chinese leaders that no consideration regarding the overriding issue of school exclusion would be shown them unless social associations between Chinese and Negroes in the community were ended.” The Greenville School Board made Chinese admission conditional on the promise that “the Chinese themselves must see to it that no children of Chinese-Negro blood apply through their community.” It wasn’t enough for the Chinese to police Chinese-Black children, they had to excise the taint of Blackness entirely from within their ranks. The result was the systematic excommunication of Chinese-Black families from the Delta Chinese community. Chinese community leaders “set out to eradicate the Chinese-Negro minority, by influencing Chinese males to end Negro relationships and throw out their Chinese-Negro kin, or by forcing the families to leave the community.” Tactics for driving these families out of town included but were not limited to social ostracism, telling whites that they had “questionable racial ancestry,” and pressuring white wholesalers to stop extending credit to them. Some targets capitulated to these tactics; others closed their stores and left town with their families, rather than abandoning them. Social ostracism achieved its purpose, and, as a result, the Chinese were granted significant social and economic mobility in the Delta by the 1950s.²⁴⁵

Kim’s theory of anti-Blackness explains why Chinese community leaders would excommunicate Chinese-Black families, but not why—presumably other—Chinese would enter such relationships in the first place, or why they would be so committed to such relationships as to leave town. “Chinese” in the above quote already excludes “Chinese-Black children” from being Chinese, otherwise the children would be ostracizing themselves. In any case, the “community leaders” do not stand in for the Chinese as a group, the discourse of interracial dating obscures the class inequality within Asian America. As Zhao notes, the wealthier Chinese perpetuate this inequality off the backs of poorer Chinese:

As long as a substantially large number of Chinese immigrants remain at the bottom of the ethnic economy, middle-class Chinese Americans are going to have a much higher quality of life than their compatriots of other racial or ethnic backgrounds. They can maximize their profit margin by utilizing low-cost immigrant labor; they can benefit from offering services to these laborers; and they can enjoy affordable goods at the market and gain access to child care and other domestic service at a cost way below the market value. The end result is the image of Chinese Americans as a “model minority” group, yet the countless individuals who make this possible are all but invisible.²⁴⁶

Thus, for at least the Chinese, success did not depend—to use Kim’s reference to Toni Morrison— on “stepping on the backs” of Black people.²⁴⁷ More recently, Katherine Michelle Hill explores how Korean Americans exploit their less well-off coethnics:

Workers who shared an ethnicity with their employer were able to gain assistance with immigration, employment, acquire loans, and other benefits. However, familial and ethnic ties became a source of obligation that led to social control. Jin functioned as an immigrant “hub” within her network of Korean friends, workers, and family. Their shared ethnicity, however, did not prevent tensions from developing in their relationship and, in fact, may have facilitated these tensions. A “culture of reciprocity” and obligation may be highlighted in immigrant communities in which individuals and groups look for resources in informal ways because of their social disadvantage. Jin may have felt obligated to help other Korean immigrants by hiring them or offering other forms of assistance. In turn, Jin may feel entitled to taking advantage of those workers. For example, Jin committed wage theft against Eunkyung by paying her subminimum wages. Yet Eunkyung continued to maintain her relationship with Jin and, at times, expressed care and concern for Jin. Immigrants such as Eunkyung may form a sense of indebtedness to family members who offer immigration assistance. Without having connection to jobs through immigrant ties, Eunkyung would have to compete against other marginalized populations for jobs at the bottom rungs of the labor market. My research suggests that although there is strength in strong ties, there is also social control and exploitation. With different-gender and different-race networks, Eunkyung and other immigrant workers may be able to find higher status ties that can connect them to jobs that facilitate career advancement and socioeconomic mobility.²⁴⁸

Kim’s claim that “Korean immigrant mobility, in this sense, was premised on Black immobility, the former’s accumulation of assets premised upon the latter’s dispossession” elides the Korean small business owner’s “dispossession” of the labor of their own workers.²⁴⁹ Would Kim rather have Black small business owners in Black neighborhoods? Michaels explains how race obscures class inequality:

Race, on the other hand, has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people. Furthermore, in the form of the celebration of ‘identity’ and ‘ethnic diversity’, it seeks to create a bond between poor black people and rich white ones.²⁵⁰

For the rich Asian woman, WMAF just validates her “preferences,” but for the poor Asian woman, WMAF is just a dream where she can pretend to be a rich Asian woman—even if she is in a marriage with a white man. WMAF, too, is a salve for the poor white man, but not in the sense that he has “settled” for an Asian woman instead of a white woman; in the sense that he is still poor—the Asian woman did not change his socioeconomic conditions. To Ray’s point about status, WMAF discourse is not about poor white men marrying rich Asian women—that would really be “fishin’ for average Caucasian boyfriends.” Where is that narrative in Asian American literature?

Mole writes, quoting Fan:

Considering the context of Asian American “occupational concentration” in STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics], if we approach “the Asian American author as a class formation [and] an instance of a transnational PMC” (professional-managerial class), we can understand how “the fantasy of social assimilation via economic mobility…transforms what are largely political economic forces into the most deeply personal forms of conflict” in their novels. This fantasy/anxiety of assimilation manifests in the conflicting priorities between (White) boyfriend and (Asian) girlfriend or immigrant parent and child. Social assimilation into White America, whether through career-building or relationship-building, requires a certain capacity for Whiteness that these authors (in their real lives) and their protagonists (in their stories) must navigate.²⁵¹

Mole reverses Fan’s relationship between “social assimilation” and “economic mobility” to suggest that the goal of economic mobility is social assimilation.²⁵² What Fan says is:

Making these works [Little Gods, Severance, Everything I Never Told You, What We Were Promised, Chemistry, Home Remedies, and Sour Heart] paradigmatic of post-65 Asian American literature as a whole is how these thematic continuities are sustained by the material processes underlying each of these authors’ emergence as authors. These processes enter this cohort’s texts, as well as Woman Warrior, through a fantasy of endless, science-led economic expansion in which scientific and technical professionals play heroic roles, and for which post-65 Asian America has become emblematic: the fantasy of social assimilation via economic mobility. This fantasy transforms what are largely political economic forces into the most deeply personal forms of conflict: like the fight between Brave Orchid and Maxine, in which rifts between mother and daughter and within Maxine’s own sense of futurity and identity formation are so apparently private. […] But my point is that what is needed to understand the continuities among them is not a checklist of formal features but an engagement with the very autopoetic tendencies that transform a parent’s life into their child’s art, and how those tendencies are structurally determined. While psychological accounts of autopoetic irony in Asian American literature certainly provide forceful explanations for formal tendencies found in the work of specific authors, this chapter aims to account for how various material processes have come to constrain the formal tendencies in this cohort’s Chinese American fiction.²⁵³

Fan’s point is that “material processes” produce “the fantasy of social assimilation via economic mobility” and “constrain the formal tendencies in this cohort’s Chinese American fiction.” The point is that the cohort is constituted by those material processes. Fan disavows the interpretation that the authors have some essential “Asian Americanness” (or more precisely, “Chinese Americanness”) that would warrant “a certain capacity for Whiteness”:

If I am at pains to distance my approach in this chapter from a genre account, it is because genre offers one of two highly tempting frameworks for understanding how Chinese American fiction can be understood internally rather than through analogies with proximal but overly general categories like Asian American fiction and postwar American fiction (about which I will have more to say in a moment). The other framework is an essentialist one that centers race, culture, or both. What is Chinese American about post-65 Chinese American literature, my premise goes, is not an essence residing in the body of a specific author—a Chinese Americanness that we smuggle into our discourse when we say that a text is by a Chinese American writer. What makes it Chinese American is the complicated set of facts and contradictions that is conjured when we say that an author is from China and writing from the standpoint of a Chinese American. In the case of the preceding cohort of writers, their Chinese Americanness inheres in the narrative vehicle of occupational concentration, their characterization of feminist resistance to patriarchy, and the rich, dichotomous tension between the arts and sciences that reveals them as two sides of the same coin.²⁵⁴

The argument Fan is making is that the novels in his cohort construct the idea of Chinese Americanness, not simply conveying some a priori “Chinese Americanness” of the authors. Mole’s misreading makes the relationship between the author and the novel tautological: White supremacy in the author produces White supremacy in the novel. But since the cohort is not all books written by “Chinese Americans” (however defined), Mole’s argument really proceeds from the opposite direction: a narrative that “manifests” White supremacy “requires a certain capacity for Whiteness.”

What Mole’s accusation of assimilation elides is the “class formation” that makes the cohort of Asian American authors so narrow in the first place. In the introduction to Asian American Fiction After 1965, Fan notes that Asian American literature scholars have already recognized the class politics of Asian American studies:

Over the years, the [Asian American studies] field’s political and intellectual commitment to strategic essentialism has waned in the wake of correctives offered by scholars like [Colleen] Lye, Mark Chiang, Yen Le Espiritu, Susan Koshy, Jinqi Ling, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and erin Khûe Ninh, who have argued forcefully that the poststructuralist celebration of difference as identity is not only politically constraining, and not only papers over material contradictions, but is at bottom a class tendency that reflects the investments of professional Asian American critics like themselves in an idealized conception of resistant racial identity.²⁵⁵

It is perhaps the case that Asian American writers—or at least those critiqued by the above scholars—have not incorporated the criticisms into their newer works. But even if they did, it is not guaranteed that they would be interpreted to have done so. Some of this problem, as noted earlier, comes from disciplinary boundaries, in which Asian American literature is studied by specialists in Asian American studies. This setup essentially precludes ignoring Asian Americanness in the literature. Scholars will find Asian Americanness because it is their job to find Asian Americanness. And as the scholars above have argued, this Asian Americanness takes a specific form. Gene Jarrett has termed this phenomenon the “straitjacket” as it pertains to African American literature, as Sheena Michele Mason notes:

In the [African American literature] field’s attempts to build a canon that reflects and builds political, social, and cultural value, to protect images of “black” people and culture from stereotyping and racist contamination, and to present and engage with much that is left out of the dominant narrative, exclusionary practices persistently marginalize and exclude certain types of voices. This creates the straitjacket, as Jarrett calls it in “Loosening the Straitjacket: Rethinking Racial Representation in African American Anthologies,” from which many African American literary scholars and writers work to free themselves. The straitjacket, according to Jarrett, was and is created for “black” writers and literature by African American literary scholars and American society, broadly speaking. Jarrett says,

To say that the term ‘African American literature’ signifies literature by, about, and/of for African Americans is not simply to utter a definition. In American intellectual society and culture, it is a determination of the way authors think about and write the literature, the way publishers classify and distribute it, the way bookstores receive and sell it, the way libraries catalog and shelve it, the way readers locate and retrieve it, the way teachers, scholars, and anthologists use it, the way students learn from it—in short, the way we know it.

The racism many writers seek to transcend, destroy, subvert, and interrogate in their texts, then, continues to be an antagonizing force that informs, often inadvertently, how their texts are read, taught, distributed, known, and judged and if their texts are published, taught, distributed, and read at all.²⁵⁶

Yet when Mole complains about “Asian American book clubs”—which presumably read the “newest wave of Asian American literature”—blame is pinned on the authors alone rather than publishers, editors, readers, critics, or Asian American literature scholars (who develop the canon):

Look closer though, and you’ll notice that Asian American book clubs are brimming with one particular kind of Asian American author, and one particular kind of Asian American story. Many recent novels are written by East Asian female authors with White partners and often star a 1.5/2nd gen East Asian protagonist navigating the White world (often academic or professional) with her own White partner.²⁵⁷

What makes Mole’s observations about WMAF in Asian American literature unusual—contra Fan’s summary of Asian American studies—is that reading for “social assimilation” is to seek what Nguyen calls a “politics of accommodation” in the preface to Race and Resistance:

Even as critics recognize that there are some, perhaps many, Asian American works that embody a politics of accommodation or a tendency toward accommodation, these critics are still predisposed to read for resistance, to either look for and place value upon those works that embody this type of politics or emphasize the propensity toward opposition that may be found in ambivalent texts. Likewise, on a larger scale, Asian American intellectuals as a whole have tended to see Asian America as a place of resistance and have not been capable of articulating a theoretical framework that can address Asian America’s ideological diversity and contradictions.²⁵⁸

For example, Mole says that “[m]any contemporary Asian American writers center Whiteness in order to reject it.”²⁵⁹ But Nguyen questions the tendency for critics to “idealize resistance and accommodation as good and bad”:

At the same time that we should question the positive and negative values we habitually attribute to the bad subject and the model minority, we should also question the very rigidity of such a polarized set of options in the first place. Both sisters actually practiced political and textual strategies that are, in short, flexible, bridging resistance and accommodation, the bad subject and the model minority, as appropriate to their contexts. Their flexible strategies centered on articulating race through gender and sexuality and vice versa. While Sui Sin Far challenged racial domination, she often did so through conceding to gender restrictions and patriarchal expectations. Meanwhile, as Onoto Watanna’s most recent critics have argued, she often defied these same gender restrictions and expectations, a gesture that is supposed to ameliorate her accommodation to the racial demands of the day. Both of these writers have been unjustly served by the tendency in Asian American studies to idealize resistance and accommodation as good and bad and to see political decisions and textual strategies in one category or the other. Defying idealism allows us to see that the political and ethical choices made by both the Eaton sisters are viable and that these choices remain as valid options for Asian American intellectuals and other panethnic entrepreneurs today.²⁶⁰

Mole’s claim that there is a “lack of discourse” rings hollow against Nguyen’s nuanced observations of the Eaton sisters—children of a WMAF couple—and their critics. The “WMAF author” is not obligated “to decenter Whiteness through the process of writing.” Mole suggests that readers “read with the context of the writer’s own identity” “to think about how the author herself exists in relation to Whiteness.”²⁶¹ But this is to impute onto the text the identity of the author. Both the author and the text are more than “Asian American,” as Nguyen writes:

The actual situation of Asian America is neither this independence nor the choice offered to Asian America as a whole between accommodation and resistance. Rather, the situation is that Asian America is divided internally between these two poles, fractured along lines of class, ethnicity, immigration, political orientation, and language, to name only the most visible fault lines—fractures that prevent it from achieving the resistant independence that Asian American intellectuals call for. An ethics after idealism demands that Asian American critics and panethnic entrepreneurs recognize that the “culture” of Asian America is neither unified nor stable in any political sense; it is ideologically impure and contradictory.²⁶²

To fault individual authors and texts for “spineless ‘Asian representation’” is the work of panethnic—or what Brubaker calls “ethnopolitical”—entrepreneurship.²⁶³ One of the foundational conflicts of Asian American literature is the quarrel between Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin. In the opening essay of The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, titled “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” Chin criticizes Kingston’s “creative license regarding well-known Chinese stories and myths” while also capitulating to white supremacy:²⁶⁴

The Hollywood yellows are the closest Asian American approximation of celebrities that Asian America has. But Asian America did not produce either the roles they played or the works they performed. The Hollywood yellows have become well known doing white work with a white message. The reality of the yellows is of no import, for as Keye Luke said, “This is white man’s theater, not Oriental theater, and we have to cater to that.” They look on themselves as the symbols, the measure of the kind and degree of white acceptance, absorption, and assimilation. They wooed Maxine Kingston and were instrumental in the failed attempts to bring Woman Warrior to the stage.²⁶⁵

Chin continues by chastising Kingston and David Henry Hwang for creating a “brand-new vicious stereotype for the Chinese to live down”:

Chinese men never sold Chinese women, either naked in the streets or in chains. Never. The most rabid and imaginative race-baiting whites out in the streets of the time never saw it; not even in their nightmare fiction of foul heathens wiping out the white race with all manner of moral perversions did they dream of Chinese men selling women chained up and naked in the streets. No. If, no, even then, they were dreaming of the coming of Chinese women like Ah Mae, the choice soul ripe for salvation: a Jade Snow Wong and a Maxine Hong Kingston to renounce Chinese men and Chinese civilization, and to sing the praises of white supremacy and the one God a Beulah Quo to declare “China Doll” “the most accurate portrayal of Chinese American history in American film.”²⁶⁶

Chin’s essay has spawned countless responses by scholars, while Mole’s discovery of “Whiteness/WMAF as compulsory plot conflicts” in Asian American literature is what the editors of n+1 call a “Contemporary Themed Review” (CTR):²⁶⁷

The CTR has less in common with the literary group review (think “New Books” in Harper’s) than with the review essays of the mid-20th century found in magazines like Partisan Review and Politics. Here are four books by returning GIs, they went, What does this tell us about man, war, and Sartre? Like this tried-and-true form, the CTR sets its sights beyond the humble books under review: it wants to tell us what trends in literature tell us about our time, like a medical diagnosis or a ten-day forecast. But the CTR departs from this tradition of cultural criticism, which was produced by writers who like good Marxists saw the entire point of criticism as drawing connections between literary form and socioeconomic form, and who like good anti-Stalinists took pride in doing so in ways that weren’t completely obvious. (It helped that many were discovering Freud.) This peculiar conjuncture inspired generations of critics with little connection to the debates of the 1930s and 1940s—only seemingly to meet its demise in the 2010s as its most degraded progeny, the counterintuitive take, got canceled along with many of the men who wrote them. You can say this about a CTR: it may be completely wrong, but it’s never not obvious.²⁶⁸

Lee in “The Woman-of-Color Nanny Novel”—which Mole quotes from—does connect the literary and the socioeconomic form:

The appeal of the nanny narrative becomes apparent as women of color writers are able to use it to air their intra-class and intra-gender grievances without being too overt. Female aggression is not looked kindly upon, and women attacking other women is often criticized as internalized misogyny. By taking on the perspective of nannies, however, even highly educated ones, they are there as the help, not as rival social intruders. And the employer-employee framework turns what might be seen as petty elite infighting into a classic story of class struggle.²⁶⁹

But when criticizing Perfect Days, Mole does seem to recognize that “meritocracy” is a cover for “the realities of economic inequality and capitalism”:

Naomi Kanakia theorizes that much of literary fiction is “fundamentally upper-middle and upper-class stories” (a common thread in the Asian American Novel as well). Authors “seem very invested in creating dramas of the meritocracy: stories about the internal, emotional turmoil of talented people” to avoid addressing the realities of economic inequality and capitalism.²⁷⁰

Partly because the audience of a film is different from that of literary fiction, Kanakia’s point is that “silence about money seriously harms the work on an artistic level,” not that the writer is ethically compromised.²⁷¹ Kanakia acknowledges the conditions of production and consumption that influence published novels:

Perhaps it is the upper- and upper-middle-class itself that desires these dramas. They want to read about self-determining individuals who are stymied only by their own internal conflict. But I’m a member of this class myself, and I can’t see why we should want such a thing when in our daily lives we are so aware that this is simply not how the world works. 

It is suggestive that it’s in literary fiction where money-talk is the most taboo. Commercial novels frequently touch on money and occupation—it’s a main driver of conflict in romance and crime novels in particular. But literary fiction is largely removed from mass opinion and is shaped by a small number of critics, editors, and agents, mostly from elite backgrounds themselves. It’s certainly possible that part of the class replication strategy for upper- and upper-middle-class literati involves suppressing mention of money in literature. If so, I can only lament the harm this suppression does to the work in question.

I’m not particularly moved by considerations of fairness—most literary writers come from privileged backgrounds. That’s true today, and it was true in Austen’s time as well, and I don’t see it ever changing (even in the Soviet Union, it was rare for a successful writer to be from a peasant or proletarian background). But I do think this silence about money seriously harms the work on an artistic level.²⁷²

Thus, for Kanakia, the writer is responsible for making bad art, not for “implicitly justify[ing] a certain kind of Asian assimilation into White culture,” as Mole demands of authors:

So, we should wonder whether authors who write of Asianness and WMAF dynamics through the lens of White supremacy, colonization, imperialism, and sexual exploitation, but rarely explore a world beyond caring about what White people think, are promoting White (liberal) alignment as the more reasonable, achievable, and commendable way for Asians to navigate the world.

In the process of managing White people’s reactions to Asianness, either as a necessity in any personal romantic relationship, or as a consequence of creating White characters purely to drive conflict in their story, these writers implicitly justify a certain kind of Asian assimilation into White culture.²⁷³

To extend Kanakia’s point, perhaps this “certain kind of Asian assimilation” is a consequence of the category of “literary fiction” that also avoids money-talk. That is, the writers choose to write about racial conflict because they don’t write about money. Yet Mole ignores Lee’s class critique in favor of the racial aspect by selectively quoting:

Lee wonders about the implication for racial solidarity, noting that:

“Though race is a central theme in all these novels, the protagonists are either disconnected from their communities, or, worse, do not want to associate with them.…All of their racial identities are highly individualized and defined by their personal experiences with elite white people.”

These kinds of stories that are meant to be about race, but focus on individuals of color navigating and desiring a White community, pose an interesting exploration of the role of race and gender in modern, post-racial, upper-middle class family formation and responsibilities.²⁷⁴

The preceding paragraph from Lee says:

For would-be elite people of color, the drive for assimilation is understandable. Under social progressivism’s own logic, we live in an unfairly white-dominated society where white people occupy the most desirable stations in life. Wouldn’t equality require a redistribution of those powers and privileges? And what good would it do anyone to tear down a perfectly beautiful and well-constructed house in a spiteful rage? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to evict the owners—or at least just the ones you don’t like—and take their place?²⁷⁵

Mole reverses Lee’s relationship between the collective “race” and the individual by saying that the stories “focus on individuals of color.” But Lee is arguing the exact opposite: “the employer-employee framework turns what might be seen as petty elite infighting into a classic story of class struggle.” Lee grasps that “the drive for assimilation” is motivated by a desire to “occupy the most desirable stations in life” by “evict[ing] the owners”—to be the employer, not the employee. This is not to ignore the racial dimensions of the novels, but to foreground the class dimension. The woman-of-color nanny is not trying to be a white nanny, even if the white nanny is part of the “White community.” If “non-White men and communities are increasingly left out of these stories of upward assimilation,” it is because the novels are about nannies (recall Nguyen’s observation of Sui Sin Far “conceding to gender restrictions and patriarchal expectations”).

The woman-of-color writer is trying to usurp the white writer, as Lee writes in “Yellowface-Saving”:

There’s a popular meme I’ve seen around, the one with two crude stick-figure drawings, with one labelled the “‘I hate white people’ gf” and the other “white bf.”

The attitude in the meme may seem hypocritical, but it makes sense once you ignore the social justice obfuscation (e.g. “Death to white men”). To a woman of colour, chances are very high that her most personal encounters with white racism are from white women because we generally socialize in same-gender settings. White patriarchy is an abstract concept, while toxic white femininity will have been a daily personal plague. Therefore, “I hate white people” should be understood more as “I hate white women.” “I hate white men” may also be kind of true, but there’ll always be a significant carve-out there, because unlike white women, a white man can be the ultimate validating romantic partner for a woman of colour, especially one who’s felt tyrannized by white women all her life.²⁷⁶

But as Lee notes, “[y]et for all of Yellowface’s resentments against white women, it was still deemed harmless enough that Reese Witherspoon, one of the whitest women of all time, picked it for her book club.” Even “a broadside in the slow-burning interracial intra-gender war between certain types of white and Asian women” turns out to further the goal of assimilation into whiteness, if not read as a satire of the publishing industry.²⁷⁷ Lee is stuck reading Yellowface as—to use Nguyen’s terminology—a “politics of accommodation” or resistance to “the various kinds of oppression that Asian Americans have had to endure.”²⁷⁸ Whether or not Yellowface succeeds as satire is debatable—“[p]erhaps ‘Yellowface’ has demonstrated that our world is simply not load-bearing enough to support a traditional literary satire”—but it can always be read as satire.²⁷⁹

Sinykin, taking the broader view, would perhaps categorize Yellowface as a product of “conglomerate multiculturalism”:

Consider the range of conglomerate multiculturalism, which includes Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Toni Morrison. The politics of market-friendly representations of people of color cannot be reduced to internalized racism. In a more charitable moment, [Percival] Everett acknowledges that Morrison “could write anything down and get it published because she is going to make somebody some money. It’s also obvious that she doesn’t do that.” Conglomerates compel books to make profits, demanding market-friendly representations of race—welcoming, especially, narratives about the traumatic legacies of colonization and racism, which masochistically sooth the liberal soul: reading as penance—but writers develop strategies to create compelling visions of race within those constraints.²⁸⁰

Mason, quoted earlier, attempts to read for those “compelling visions of race” in her Theory of Racelessness. But if one proceeds to read a popular novel with the paranoia of assimilation, then assimilation will be easy to find—for Sinykin, to sell books, there’s always an element of selling out. What Lee misses in Yellowface is what Fan and Sinykin emphasize: how the economics of publishing capture the politics of fiction. As Tyler Austin Harper says:

To be sure, June ends the novel in monstrous fashion. But equally apparent is that she is a monster who has been made: a product of a contemporary literary culture that treats identities like ladder rungs, and that favors writers who are willing to practice the dark alchemy of converting racial pain into profit, shame into stacks of cash.

If a moral is to be won from [R. F.] Kuang’s novel, it is that literary conglomerates are a lot like casinos: The publishing house always wins. Recent years have seen them place their bet on politics. In our hyperpartisan nation, culture war sells, and one way to understand works like Yellowface is as a rejection of the lazy politics of literary fiction. June’s great epiphany is that the planet of publishing is held up by identitarian turtles all the way down: The limpid multiculturalism she takes advantage of and abhors is a form of identity politics, but so too is the white grievance politics she inevitably turns to when the jig is up. Even her planned memoir is not her own but a mirror held up to a squalid culture.²⁸¹

It is notable that the main characters in Yellowface graduated from Yale (where Kuang is pursuing a PhD)²⁸² because Kuang’s critique of “identity politics” is only possible—to use Táíwò’s phrase— once one is already “in the room of elites.”²⁸³ As Michaels writes of Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee (a real-life Yale graduate):²⁸⁴

The point, then, is that what these characters have assimilated to (although assimilation is exactly the wrong word) is not so much America as it is the upper-middle class. And what has made it possible for them to do so is that they already were upper-middle class. They succeed not because of their Asian values (if Asian values make for success, how come there are so many poor people in Asia?) and not because of their eagerness to assimilate and adopt American values (there are lots of poor people in the US too) but because of their middle-class values. On the one hand, then, questions of cultural difference and cultural identity are profoundly irrelevant, as is the whole debate over assimilation or the refusal to assimilate; on the other hand, they are profoundly attractive, since they give us a picture not only of Asian Americans but of the social structure of the United States that, if it is deeply misleading, is also deeply gratifying. It’s misleading because it represents an economic issue as a cultural one. Novels like Native Speaker make the central problems of American society a matter of identity instead of a matter of money. They encourage us to think that the important thing about Henry Park is the question of whether he’s truly at home in American culture instead of the fact that, as his father says, he’s a “rich kid.” Thus, for example, the fact that he’s married to a white woman presents us with the perennially attractive problem (think Abie’s Irish Rose) of the mixed marriage. In fact, however, intermarriage between Americans of Korean descent and white Americans is extremely common – more common, it seems, than intermarriage between rich and poor, which, according to the New York Times, “seems to be declining.” And insofar as people tend to marry within their class, Henry and his white wife are actually a very unmixed couple – they’re both from wealthy families. But Americans like the difference between race and culture better than the difference between classes. We – especially the upper-middle-class writers and readers of books like Native Speaker and of essays like this one – prefer differences we’re supposed to respect to differences which, at least from an egalitarian view, are not so respectable.²⁸⁵

What makes Yellowface a “harmless” satire of the publishing industry is that it obscures the class gatekeeping in favor of an interracial, intra-class conflict. Athena is described as “[b]orn in Hong Kong, raised between Sydney and New York, educated in British boarding schools that gave her a posh, unplaceable foreign accent” while June is “a plain, straight white girl from Philly.”²⁸⁶ June’s reliability as a narrator notwithstanding, she could be read as an underdog (as much as a Yale graduate could be). What Yellowface elides is the plight of working-class writers:

While institutions—MFA programs, lit mags, publishing houses—have done much to include and elevate underrepresented groups on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation, they’ve done far less to include and elevate those from underrepresented class backgrounds.²⁸⁷

Mole analyzes “2020s literature by Asian American female authors who all happen to be liberal, (often elite, private) university-educated women with White male partners,” listing “over 40 notable, published Asian American / British Asian / Asian Australian (including some 1/1.5 gen) femme authors […] in a WMAF relationship.”²⁸⁸ More precisely, all of them have undergraduate or graduate degrees, three-quarters have graduate degrees, and half have a Master in Fine Arts (MFA) (or equivalent).²⁸⁹ About a third went to “Ivy Plus” schools—for their undergraduate degree. With this background in mind, Mole’s assertion that “[i]t’s no surprise then, that navigating relationships with Whiteness and White people comes up as recurring themes in contemporary Asian American literature” is not due to the writers choosing to be in WMAF relationships, but because they are already in elite circles.²⁹⁰ Mole asks, “[o]ut of all creative possibilities, why did these stories make it out of the authors’ drafts, and why did these stories get picked up by publishers?”²⁹¹ As Lee Cole says, “[g]oing to an Ivy League school, pursuing one’s artistic passions, working in the upper echelons of media—these are the unusual trajectories, the narratives so seldom afforded to most people.”²⁹² The explanation, of course, is class.

Exploiting people of color is perhaps easier for “elite” people of color. Zhao writes about the relationship between middle-class Chinese families and their Chinese domestic-care providers:

It is the ethnic bond that has helped to create a comfortable environment for the expansion of the informal sector. Many middle-class Chinese American families, for example, prefer to hire Chinese domestic-care providers, partly because of their low rates, while the workers believe under-the-table payments can be easily arranged if their employers are Chinese. The informal sector is especially important for those who do not have work permits, and a common ethnicity can provide a much-needed sense of security.²⁹³

Is it even a foregone conclusion that the woman-of-color nanny will ascend the socioeconomic ladder, as Lee suggests? “Whatever chasm in upbringing exists between the Erics and Edies of the world, it is clearly bridgeable. Given the nannies’ education and aspirations, it is foreseeable that they will one day join their employers’ social tier.”²⁹⁴ Zhao suggests not:

Business owners often take advantage of the fact that some of their immigrant laborers are well educated and have various skills. Few well-educated individuals would work as menial laborers or domestics, but downward mobility is a common experience shared by many Chinese immigrants.²⁹⁵

The premise of racial difference obscures the class similarity between the well-educated woman-of-color nannies and their employers. The undocumented immigrants that Zhao interviews could only imagine having a white employer. As Kang writes:

Of all these revelations, perhaps the only one that still seems interesting was the understanding that in my life, “people of color” did not mean all “un-white people,” but rather the multicultural coalition of the upwardly mobile and overeducated. For us, assimilation was an issue of class; “whiteness” meant the ability to slide into a place where everyone was doing well enough to celebrate their differences.²⁹⁶

Filipino American writer Alex Tizon’s viral article, “My Family’s Slave,” is about his domestic worker, Eudocia Tomas Pulido, that his family brought to the United States from the Philippines.²⁹⁷ If anything, Tizon’s family is less assimilated by virtue of having a live-in domestic worker, which is common in the Philippines but not in the United States. Yet in the end, it was still Tizon who tells the world the story of her life. As Premilla Nadasen says, “[t]he trope of ‘one of the family’ has historically been used to obfuscate the exploitation, abuse, and inequality embedded in the relationship.”²⁹⁸ Assimilated or not, it is still exploitation, just by “people of color.”

Pulido is part of what Kang calls “the forgotten Asian America”:

Despite the “China virus” and all the cruel indignities Trump placed upon the heads of immigrants, he picked up a significant share of Asian American voters in the 2020 election. This caused a great amount of confusion among the liberal elite: Why would these dumb immigrants vote for a racist? Don’t they know we are on their side? These voters actually know liberal America better than it knows itself and understand that they will always be the support staff of the multicultural elite. They also understand that the supposed protections that liberals offer up to minorities still assume a racial binary in this country, and that when something like the attacks in Oakland take place, the same people who ask for our vote will just squirm uncomfortably until the story passes.

There is almost no actual solidarity between Asian Americans and any other group. As much as we want to point to Richard Aoki or pioneering leftist anti-racists like Grace Lee Boggs, they are not only the extreme outliers but also from another Asian America, one that feels fully foreign to all of us who came over after Hart-Celler. To find a meaningful place in politics, one that doesn’t require us to lie about “white adjacency” or ignore the pain of everyone who looks like us, upwardly mobile Asian Americans must drop our neuroses about microaggressions and the bamboo ceiling, and fully align ourselves with the forgotten Asian America: the refugees, the undocumented, and the working class. What we do now—the lonely climb up into the white liberal elite, the purchase of Brennan’s old house—might lead to personal comfort, but it will never make us full participants in this country, nor will it ever convince others to join in our fight. Naked self-interest and narcissism do not inspire solidarity.²⁹⁹

To be precise, it is the affluent Asian Americans who have forgotten. Presumably, the poor have not forgotten themselves. In Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke, he remarks that racial and ethnic minorities are “given a pass” for behaviors that white people are criticized for:

Often scholars and essayists analyze and discuss the behaviors of people from more and less “privileged” groups in asymmetrical ways. For instance, when racial and ethnic minorities demonstrate a preference to hire, promote, mentor, and otherwise do business with coethnics, this is frequently analyzed in terms of in-group solidarity or building and leveraging capital, and these behaviors are lauded. When whites engage in the exact same behaviors, they tend to be analyzed in a completely different way—almost exclusively through the lenses of racism and discrimination—and those who engage in such behaviors are pathologized and denounced. Similar tendencies hold for interpreting the behaviors of men as compared to women, LGBTQ versus “straight” actors, and so on: behaviors that are condemned when carried out by the “dominant” group are interpreted differently, and often praised, when carried out by “others.” Indeed, even when harmful behaviors by other actors are recognized and condemned, responsibility is often still laid at the feet of the historically dominant group.³⁰⁰

The “lenses of racism and discrimination”—if they are valid at all—are historically contingent. A surprising (for those who perceive race relations as transhistorical) reversal of the woman-of-color nanny novel is the history of Chinese “manservants” working for (presumably white) women in New York during the late 1800s, who were more desirable and paid better than the not-yet-white “Irish or German girls”:

New York’s genteel middle class constantly complained about “the servant problem.” Irish female house servants were said to be “unreliable” and “too demanding.” Chinese manservants were explored as one possible solution. Indeed, the Five Points missionaries made it a point to have the Evening Post reporter help promote their efforts to place Chinese men as house servants: “It is hoped these rooms may become a kind of exchange where they may hear of chances of employment and gain other useful information.” A journalist confirmed, “The capability and fidelity [of Chinese] in housework and outdoor labor have been well tested in California and elsewhere and will no doubt be appreciated here,” concluding, “Offerings of employment should go to Miss Goodrich, 140 W. 15th St.” In an 1880 New-York Times article James Baptiste was quoted as stating that Chinese house servants worked for between $18 and $30 a month, rates 25-30 percent higher than the wages paid to “Irish or German girls.” Nonetheless, upon hearing of an employment service that could help locate Chinese workers, “several ladies from Madison Avenue and other fashionable uptown quarters” visited Mott Street to look for the agency. That day they were to leave disappointed, but Chinese men continued to be offered as a convenient solution to this household dilemma. In effect, the Five Points Mission’s religious and language training prepared Chinese men to deal with the cross-cultural demands of serving middle-class European Americans.³⁰¹

Where is the novel about that story?

Perhaps it helps when the novelist “premasticates” the story for the critic.³⁰² Jarrett leverages Toni Morrison’s clarificatory remarks in his explanation of her attempt at “racial ambiguity”:

Morrison’s 1998 novel of postmodern hermeneutics, Paradise, also defies the conventional readings of American literature by complicating both “blackness” and “whiteness” in literary characterization. In explaining the racial ambiguity of characterization in this novel—such as its refusal to disclose conclusively the racial identities of the female protagonists—Morrison provides insight not only into her rather unheralded (in comparison to her novels) 1983 short story “Recitatif” but also into her long-standing philosophy about the literary identity of race and about the nature of readers: “The tradition in writing is that if you don’t mention a character’s race, he’s white. Any deviation from that, you have to say. What I wanted to do was not to erase race, but force readers either to care about it or see if it disturbs them that they don’t know.” The character is “white” not because of the presence but, rather, because of the absence of racial markers. The lack of racial information (or the underdetermination of race) has been just as successful in defining “whiteness” as the excess of racial information (or the overdetermination of race) has been in defining “blackness.” Into that void of identification constitutive of whiteness, according to Morrison, readers often project their usual imagination of universal humanity as “white” humanity. Ironically, Morrison complicates the role of race in literary reading and writing to such a degree that she unsettles the idea of African American literature, even as she has historically been and continues to be celebrated in anthologies and in the public at large as its most accomplished representative.³⁰³

Mole is just another reader who “project[s] their usual imagination of universal humanity as ‘white’ humanity.” As Mole says:

To me, novelists that give up so much space for Whiteness, whether consciously or subconsciously, advocate for navigating Whiteness and White people’s emotions during their journey towards (liberal) racial consciousness.

While they do not spare White characters from criticism, Asian American authors (I’m not just talking about R.F. Kuang now, I’m talking about everyone) seem to build a uniformly liberal Asian identity that leans on the framework of Whiteness, rather than allowing Asianness to stand alone. Whiteness, and our individualized conflict with it, is what sells nowadays.³⁰⁴

Although Kuang and Jessamine Chan explicitly racially mark their characters in Babel and School for Good Mothers, the meaning of such markings—as representative of a “racial consciousness”—is imputed by Mole onto the texts, which she then extrapolates to a “uniformly liberal Asian identity.” Putting class critique aside, “what sells”—what readers read—and what authors write are not the same. The praise on the “covers of books” along with the other paratextual material of course influence the reader’s interpretation, but they are not the only interpretation.³⁰⁵ Betsy Huang calls this constrained reading the “autobiographic imperative”:

For Asian American writers, the “text” that precedes them is the immigrant narrative, for the reigning assumption of the mainstream literary market is that works by Asian American writers are de facto immigrant narratives, whether or not immigration is the principal subject of the works. As a result, Asian American writing, fiction and nonfiction alike, has become a veritable genre with its own set of conventions, exemplifying what Fredric Jameson describes as texts that “come before us as the always-already-read” as well as the “always-already-written.” From the writer’s perspective, such audience assumptions and habits in turn translate into implicit but powerful imperatives that shape their narrative choices and strategies. Asian American writers, then, are subject to the demands of what I call the “autobiographic imperative,” an interpretive disposition of readers who habitually read fiction by ethnic writers as autobiography, as testimonies to lived experiences, typically assumed to be those of immigrants.³⁰⁶

This attitude is what Jenny Zhang is trying to critique in “They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist,” an article cited by Mole:

“I’m writing something for the first time that’s a little bit autobiographical,” this one extremely serious white woman once said to me after workshop. “I wanted to get your advice. You write about yourself all the time. How do you do it?” My characters were always young Asian American women or girls, but I hadn’t written anything autobiographical. Just like her, I had imagined my stories. I made them up. They were fiction. But to her, they were so obviously just an unimaginative extension of my already-limited self. I was just tracing my life and my identity artlessly into my stories. Another white writer talked openly about searching for some kind of obscure “ethnicity” that she could write into her stories to give them an extra edge. “Like what you have in your writing,” she added, meaning well, of course. She and the other white writers who marveled over my luck wanted to try on my Otherness to advance their value in the literary marketplace, but I don’t think they wanted to grow up as an immigrant in the United States. I don’t think they wanted to experience racism and misogyny on a micro and macro level, be made to feel perpetually foreign no matter how long they’ve lived here, and be denied any opportunity to ever write something without the millstone of but is this authentic/representative/good for black/Asian/Latino/native people? hanging from their necks.³⁰⁷

Mole, ironically, denies this imagination not only to Kuang and Chan, but to Asian American writers a whole. An Asian American author in a WMAF relationship who inserts a WMAF relationship into a novel could just be making it up. This projection is what keeps “culture” from changing. For instance, Mole asserts that it is “White people” who are threatening to change “Asian American culture”:

Culture is not static. The way that we communicate Asian American Culture to White people, and the way White people respond and interact with our culture can change the culture itself, even if these White people are supposedly “outsiders” to the culture.³⁰⁸

But the point of the politics in literature and criticism—forms of culture—is to change the structures of society. Of course, culture can change without affecting social structures; this is often termed a “fad.” But then how does one explain “how the Irish became White”? Did “White people” change Irish culture? Well, yes, in “context of exit” in the “bad aristocracy” of the “English ruling class” that failed to mitigate the Irish Potato Famine.³⁰⁹ Then, in the “context of reception” navigating the political terrain of slavery, as Noel Ignatiev asserts:

The truth is not, as some historians would have it, that slavery made it possible to extend to the Irish the privileges of citizenship, by providing another group for them to stand on, but the reverse, that the assimilation of the Irish into the white race made it possible to maintain slavery.³¹⁰

Thus, a change in the racial configuration of America was facilitated by political necessity. Is this not an instance of identity emerging from politics? Culture is not autonomous from social structures—this dependency is what makes possible Fan’s point about how “material processes have come to constrain the formal tendencies” of fiction. Vivek Chibber explains the reciprocal relationship between the two in The Class Matrix:

This is not the case with wage labor or capital. Here, culture is still the proximate cause of the structure’s stability in that it provides the codes and meanings needed to activate the structures—much as with the example of the parish. But it does not play the role of a mediating mechanism because its efficacy is not nearly so contingent as in the other case. It does not independently shape the outcome so much as it is shaped by the antecedent cause. This turns it more into a transmission channel for the latter’s influence. In this case, we have the structure shaping the cultural codes that orient the actor in the appropriate way. This is presented in Model 2 of causal intervention.

Model 2 also requires that the proximate cause of a structure’s activation is culture. Where it differs is that it radically reduces the contingency of that process. The structure itself places limits on the variation in cultural codes. The curved arrows denote a causal feedback loop that establishes the compatibility of the agents’ meaning orientation with the class structure. The arrow going right to left is dotted because the interaction between structure and culture is not symmetrical: the influence of the former is more powerful than of the latter, as expressed in the density of the arrows from one to the other. Thus, if the actor’s values or norms are out of sync with what is required of the structure, he will find good reason to revise those norms without external intervention.³¹¹

The impact of structure on our individual behavior is what “feminists risk forgetting” when they “treat as axiomatic our free sexual choices,” as Amia Srinivasan writes:

[Ellen] Willis concludes ‘Lust Horizons’ by saying that for her it is ‘axiomatic that consenting partners have a right to their sexual proclivities, and that authoritarian moralism has no place’ in feminism. And yet, she goes on, ‘a truly radical movement must look…beyond the right to choose, and keep focusing on the fundamental questions. Why do we choose what we choose? What would we choose if we had a real choice?’ This may seem an extraordinary reversal on Willis’s part. After laying out the ethical case for taking our sexual preferences, whatever they may be, as fixed points, protected from moral inquisition, Willis tells us that a ‘truly radical’ feminism would ask precisely the question that gives rise to ‘authoritarian moralism’: what would women’s sexual choices look like if they were really free? One might feel that Willis has given with one hand and taken away with the other. But perhaps she has given with both. Here, she tells us, is a task for feminism: to treat as axiomatic our free sexual choices, while also seeing why, as ‘anti-sex’ and lesbian feminists have always said, such choices, under patriarchy, are rarely free. What I am suggesting is that, in our rush to do the former, feminists risk forgetting to do the latter.³¹²

This the “politics” that “contaminates” Cheng’s relationship with her white husband:

Sometimes I can’t believe how politics, a mirage wielded by largely invidious, power-grabbing individuals, could contaminate my most real, weighted, and cherished relationship with someone with whom I’ve built the only life that matters to me. I suspect that my husband is often hurt that I “allow” external things—world events, intellectual ideas, things that don’t have anything to do with us—to impact my mood and inflect our private interactions. Yet I also know that, in our world, I live as an unavoidably racialized person. Questions of racial difference, of how people of Asian descent are being seen and treated in this country, past and present, follow me and most likely the future of our children.³¹³

“Political lesbianism,” just like the politics in literature, is an attempt to change the structure through culture. But, as Chibber explains, culture is less powerful than the constraints that structure places on culture. At the individual level, it depends on one changing one’s own desires, as Andrea Long Chu puts it:

Political lesbianism was the height of a contradiction that had developed within feminism: the more powerful your critique, the more you could enumerate the ways in which patriarchy functioned on an everyday level, the more impossible it seemed to just live your life without being immediately subject to all of these technologies of oppression. And what that produced is a kind of revolutionary subject in the Seventies, the political lesbian, who could through sheer force of political will change her own desires and reorient herself—decide that she was going to leave her husband, that she was going to abjure the company of men.³¹⁴

But Chu resists this maneuver because “it’s moralizing. It’s really fucking hard to figure out a way to tell people to change their desires that isn’t moralistic…”³¹⁵ Srinivasan wonders if there is a way to overcome this moralization:

Is there no difference between ‘telling people to change their desires’ and asking ourselves what we want, why we want it, and what it is we want to want? Must the transformation of desire be a disciplinary project (wilfully altering our desires in line with our politics) – or can it be an emancipatory one (setting our desires free from politics)?³¹⁶

Thus, “taking the red pill” has the guise of being emancipatory, but ends up being disciplinary. The incel submits himself to the status paranoia of hypergamy and the political project of “sexual redistribution.” This ironically restricts his desire because instead of sex being a matter of free choice, it becomes an instrument in the status game. As Žižek notes in the case of redistribution:

In this sense, incel is symptomatic of the logic of hierarchy, embodied today in the male partisans of white supremacy: it is the surprising point at which white supremacist partisans of hierarchy all of a sudden begin to use the language of the most brutal “Communism of women” and demand their just redistribution by the authorities (or, like [Jordan] Petersen [sic], at least, a public campaign to promote enforced monogamy that would lead to a more egalitarian redistribution of sex). In short, incel is the point of exception at which advocates of hierarchy who oppose egalitarian human rights demand the most brutal egalitarian redistribution. And the way the Left should counteract this tendency is not to demand a more encompassing egalitarianism that would cover politico-economic life and sex; it should rather turn around the incel position and fight for its own Moebius strip reversal in which the universality of egalitarian human rights implies its own exception, its own reversal – the domain of sexuality which should by definition remain “unjust,” resisting the egalitarian logic of human rights. The fact that should be accepted in all its brutality is the ultimate incompatibility of sexuality and human rights.³¹⁷

As Srinivasan remarks, “the protest of the incel is: Why should white men have to make do with low-status women – women who are not ‘slender, chaste, feminine, young [and] White’?”³¹⁸ Implicit in this logic, of course, is that “white men” are high status. Therefore, Srinivasan surmises that “[i]ncels’ anger is not about inequality of distribution, whatever they claim. It is about a (mis)perceived thwarting of entitlement to sexual status.”³¹⁹ Whether or not an incel truly believes in “inequality,” the act of redistribution would, of course, obviate not only the very status value they so covet, but—as Žižek remarks—also the “logic of hierarchy.” Srinivasan comments:

Solnit is right that incels crave status – the status that having sex with high-status women confers, and the status they see as the price of access to high-status women. At the same time, incels hate the commodification of sex and want to be released from it. They hate the idea that sex is governed by market relations, that sex with high-status women is not given out to them freely and lovingly. This is the deep contradiction at the heart of the incel phenomenon: incels oppose themselves to a sexual market in which they see themselves as losers, while being wedded to the status hierarchy that structures that market.³²⁰

This is why it is necessary to concede that “treat[ing] as axiomatic our free sexual choices” is “unjust.” The act of choosing is the act of forgetting about the conditions of possibility under which the choice was made. Srinivasan also wonders:

Is my talk of transforming desire moralising in a different sense, in that it focuses too much on personal responsibility? Racism, classism, ableism, heteronormativity: these are structural problems and – as we have learned to say – they demand structural solutions. That is surely right. It is also surely right that a myopic focus on individual action is characteristic of a bourgeois morality whose ideological function is to distract from the broader systems of injustice in which we participate. (To use Chu’s phrase, individualistic morality can be a shell corporation for systemic injustice.) But to say that a problem is structural does not absolve us from thinking about how we, as individuals, are implicated in it, or what we should do about it.³²¹

That is, to think of a problem as a moral responsibility is also to forget its structural conditions. Of course, we are all implicated by structure, but that does not mean we are solely constituted by them. Žižek puts it this way:

The focus of Lacan’s interest rather resides in the paradoxical reversal by means of which desire itself (i.e., acting upon one’s desire, not compromising it) can no longer be grounded in any “pathological” interest or motivation, and thus meets the criteria of the Kantian ethical act, so that “following one’s desire” overlaps with “doing one’s duty.” This is why Lacan, in his notion of the act, reverses the standard “hermeneutics of suspicion”: when Kant himself, driven by suspicion, admits that we cannot ever be sure if what we did was truly an ethical act and not secretly sustained by some “pathological” motif (even if this motif is the narcissistic satisfaction brought about by the fact that we did our duty), he commits an error. What is truly traumatic for the subject is not the fact that a pure ethical act is (perhaps) impossible, that freedom is (perhaps) an appearance, based on our ignorance of the true motivations of our acts; what is truly traumatic is freedom itself, the fact that freedom IS possible, and we desperately search for some “pathological” determinations in order to avoid this fact. In other words, true Freudian theory has nothing to do with reducing ethical autonomy to an illusion based on repressing our “low” libidinal motifs.³²²

Like Ray, the incel desperately reaches for “status” to explain their desires. The MRAsian (“Mens-Rights Asian”) reaches for “race.” Racialized desire—racial fetishization—is desire subsumed under racial ideology. WMAF discourse only serves to further these ideological presuppositions: the paranoid delusion that desire is only the manifestation of hypergamy, racism, etc. Is this not an instance of “the scripts that we reproduce end up scripting us,” to use Chow’s phrase? But in this case, it is the purveyors of WMAF discourse—those who “really believe” that WMAF is “really happening”—that end up altering their behavior, if not altering their relationships. Is this not a perverse form of political lesbianism? Chu provocatively wonders:

Here is the better question: Do we want to be Asian Americans? I don’t mean this in a voluntaristic, do-you-believe-in-fairies sort of way, but as a real, honest question: Do people of Asian ancestry in this country want to be Asian Americans? The question is not why a mixed-race person should “get” to qualify as Asian despite, for instance, never having been bullied at school or attacked by a stranger; the question is why we cannot imagine any other way to be Asian. And if there is one conclusion to be reached from the mixed Asian experience, it is this: People want race. They want race to win them something, to tell them everything they were never told; they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be. I do not mean that Asian America will suddenly appear on the horizon of tomorrow if enough of it choose it tonight. What I mean is that many people across the country, including many of us who are mixed, are already choosing it, and it is enough for now to ask why. There is, after all, a reason that people sit together: they don’t want to be alone.³²³

How else could the “interactive dynamics of racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and ableism” “merely shift” “to the private, casual parts of our lives,” as Mole writes?³²⁴ Chu—recognizing the fluidity of racial identification—subsumes the authoritarian moralism of antiracism by depoliticizing race, framing it as belonging and identification. Hence S. C. Cornell’s observation that Chu is a liberal: “Chu’s point is that the freedom to pursue one’s desires is itself a politics. She’s right. We call it liberalism.”³²⁵

For the act of identification to become an ethical demand to live a political life, one must abandon that relationship between freedom and desire. Mole writes, quoting Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference:

Anti-Asianness didn’t disappear, it just evolved, and some are lucky that it doesn’t feel relevant to them anymore. The “interactive dynamics of racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and ableism” have merely shifted to the private, casual parts of our lives. By not recognizing our lived experiences and proximity to whiteness as modern manifestations of the history we claim to respect, we overlook that power and oppression are not just patterns, but processes “produced and reproduced through many people outside the immediate power dyad.” It’s the people around us who sustain and affirm racialized stereotypes, expectations of behavior, and power dynamics.³²⁶

Is this not incel logic? Not the idea of how power is “produced and reproduced” (which Mole misuses), but the ascription that “people around us” “sustain and affirm racialized stereotypes, expectations of behavior, and power dynamics.” It is worth quoting the context of Mole’s quote from Young:

The structured operation of domination whose resources the powerful draw upon must be understood as a process. A distributive conceptualization of power, however, can construct power relations only as patterns. As Thomas Wartenburg argues, conceptualizing power as relational rather than substantive, as produced and reproduced through many people outside the immediate power dyad, brings out the dynamic nature of power relations as an ongoing process. A distributive understanding of power obscures the fact that, as Foucault puts it, power exists only in action:

What, by contrast, should always be kept in mind is that power, if we do not take too distant a view of it, is not that which makes the difference between those who exclusively possess and retain it, and those who do not have it and submit to it. Power must be analyzed as something that circulates, or rather something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising their power.

The logic of distribution, in contrast, makes power a machine or instrument, held in ready and turned on at will, independently of social processes.³²⁷

Mole misinterprets Young’s point, which is that the social processes structure power relations. That is, insofar as much as WMAF is a “power relation” (if it wasn’t, then assimilation would be merely a choice), to be for or against WMAF is to be one of the “many people outside the immediate power dyad” who produce and reproduce the power relation. The WMAF couple—as well as their observers—is always already caught in the “net-like” organization of power. Mole does correctly note how Asian women reproduce “White racial domination”:

While Asian women may not be intentionally creating or causing racism, White racial domination still shapes our perceptions of daily life. Often, Asian women explain their preference for White men by conflating ethnic culture and patriarchy and associating co-ethnic males with Asian male dominance.

In this way, “Asian masculinity is constructed as the opposite of White masculinity…suggesting it is an essentialised racial component of one’s blood, body, and culture” that renders Asian masculinity “unalterable and invariable” and glorifies “White men as romantic liberators.”³²⁸

Mole’s argument hinges on Young’s assertion that “[p]eople and institutions nevertheless can and should be held responsible for unconscious and unintended behavior, actions, or attitudes that contribute to oppression.”³²⁹ This of course, applies to “white” people, but also the Asian woman who assimilates. Thus, the Asian woman is responsible for choosing to be in a WMAF relationship. But to whom is the Asian woman responsible? It is to herself, as an Asian woman, as a subject of Asian Americanness. Mole rhetorically asks: “Isn’t it actually anti-feminist and anti-Asian to believe that you cannot support Asian women’s autonomy and criticize White supremacy at the same time?”³³⁰ But the “defenders” of WMAF formulate the autonomy of Asian women as individuals making a free choice, not as Asian women as a collective. That is, under the rubric of Whiteness—what is properly termed liberal multiculturalism—Asian women are already White. Yet Mole is paradoxically asserting that under White supremacy, Asian women choose to assimilate and they choose to be oppressed—that is, Asian women choose to be Asian women.

So even as Mole quotes Zhang (“author of Sour Heart, one of the ‘Asian American books” that I actually like”) to support her assertion that “[w]e allow White people free (or discounted) admission into our communities,”³³¹ Zhang writes in a different article, “Far Away From Me,” that interracial dating “doesn’t make me or any girls of color a hypocrite”:

I guess this is a long way of saying I was never the girl in that Weezer song [“Across the Sea”]. Some people have wanted me to be and I have gone along with their fantasy of me, but that’s all it ever was: someone else’s fantasy of a girl.

I want to be clear that this is not an [sic] universal condemnation of interracial dating. It doesn’t make me or any girls of color a hypocrite for both wishing to be seen as three-dimensional and as their own subject, while also wanting to date a white boy.

The search for a decolonized love implicates all of us. You can’t put a person of color in a world that devalues them at every turn and reminds them constantly of all the privileges and immediate praise heaped on white people for simply being born to a body that passes and reads as white, and then expect people of color to not want the security and immediate validity associated with whiteness. You can’t shame and chastise those of us who seek that very security and immediate validity by association, sometimes by romantic association, sometimes by aspiring to and/or conspiring with that whiteness in other ways.³³²

Zhang separates out the “security and immediate validity associated with whiteness” from “someone else’s fantasy of a girl,” so that to “seek” “security and immediate validity” does not mean that one is fulfilling “someone else’s fantasy of a girl,” even if they are both bound together through “whiteness.”

This is why Jackie Liu’s Fishin’ for Average Caucasian Boyfriends is curiously constrained, with only a limited number of options:

1. Fish

2. Don’t Fish

3. ???

The first option is the “canon event” of assimilation into “whiteness” by dating an average Caucasian boyfriend, the second option is a form of voluntary celibacy, and the mysterious third option is elliptically explained when selected as “[n]ot playing the game, but not giving up entirely.”³³³ This third option is an enticing representation of women as Chow’s “fully fleshed people entangled in all sorts of complicated relationships” or Zhang’s “three-dimensional and as their own subject.” But does dating a white man mean “playing along the rules”?³³⁴

Zhang, quoting bell hooks, insists that it is possible to separate one’s dating life from one’s political commitments:

At a panel discussion last year at New York’s New School called “Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body,” with bell hooks, the writer and activist Janet Mock, the writer Marci Blackman, and the filmmaker and curator Shola Lynch, the question was raised of what a truly liberatory sexuality would look like in a world where we are constantly contending with the interlocking systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and the legacies of colonialism and imperialism—how do we find, in other words, as writer Junot Díaz once said an interview, a “decolonial love”? At one point, bell hooks semi-seriously suggested “celibacy” as one way to have a liberatory sexuality, and then joked a few minutes later, “I mean I gotta go home and think about how mentioning celibacy could trouble the waters…” It was such a great moment to witness. I felt like bell hooks was winking at us, as if to say, Don’t worry, I’m doing everything I can to tear down this imperialistic white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, but I’m also getting it back home.

It was such a needed relief from what can sometimes feel like all heaviness all the time in these discussions of oppression and pain. And it spoke so much to the paralyzing expectations and pressures we put on people of color, especially politically outspoken people of color, to make sure our personal lives and our sex lives do not contradict ANY of our political beliefs. The pressure, in essence, for people of color—especially outspoken activists of color who are taking the difficult step of publicly engaging with these systems of oppression—to be perfect in all aspects of our lives, public and private. That not only are we supposed to be educating any and all ignorant people on centuries of interlocking systems of oppression—and in a manner that is calm, nice, articulate, and patient, no less—but we also have to make sure that everyone whose mouths we want to kiss and faces we want to touch faces to has to be thoroughly vetted and pose no difficulty, challenge, or contradiction to our beliefs, otherwise everything we’ve ever fought for or said is automatically discredited. No big deal. No pressure, right?³³⁵

After choosing the third option in Fishin’, the narrator says, “I think there is a certain grief in no longer having a script to follow.”³³⁶ But is it really the case that the lake only has “Average Caucasian Boyfriends”? Are there no other lakes to fish in? Is the player responsible for this lack of choice?

In contrast, the “emancipatory” nihilism of the incel is to recognize that there is no choice. As ARX-Han notes in a podcast:

Like, it’s actually pretty hard to get to moral responsibility once you accept the basic precepts of neuroscience, right? I’m not interested in entering into complex philosophical debates about this. […] But to bring it back inceldom, I think the discontinuity, and I mention this on the Leafbox podcast, the discontinuity between Holden Caulfield and modern incel is not just the further disintegration of social fabric in under, like, liberalism or whatever, right? I don’t think it’s just that. I think there’s this undercurrent of new scientifically slash reductionist driven nihilism that has really, like, flooded even further ahead, you know?³³⁷

This is how ARX-Han concludes that “[t]he incel is the apex instantiation of scientism as a worldview.” Thus, for the incel, “the problem of free will […] cannot survive a biological account of the human brain.”³³⁸ But if “human beings are fundamentally and inescapably mechanistic to our core,” why not accept the existentialism and desire the mechanism itself? This is what Allison de Fren notes as “technofetishism”:

The female robot is, to some extent, a way out of the quandary: she represents the promise of a simplified playing field in which the rules of the game are programmed in advance, thus sidestepping gender politics and eliminating the anxiety of making social mistakes. Within that simplified playing field, however, ASFRians imagine endless concatenations of possible moves, the erotic locus of which are moments of tension and rupture between opposite states the human and the artificial, control and loss of control, exterior and interior. Such rupture is, I would argue, both a metaphor for and a condensation of the eruptive effects of adolescent desire on the socially-regulated body; it is a re-enactment of the tension between biological and social programming, between the chaotic flux of inner experience and the unified and controlled self as mandated by the social order. Moreover, to the extent that it is an attempt at their reconciliation, it is through recourse to a third category that has the potential to destabilize such dualisms as self and other, subject and object, and even male and female.³³⁹

Is this not reminiscent of Jackie Liu’s “third option”? Writing about one of the main characters in Ghost in the Shell 2, de Fren suggests that within the female robot is “the human imprisoned beneath”:

Batou is, perhaps, a figure not so different from the socially-alienated ASFRian, who chases the path of the exploding fembot in order to release the human imprisoned beneath her ideal façade. As in A.S.F.R., it is neither the body of the doll nor the human that is important in Batou’s quest, but the interface between the two, where the ghost of his desire enters the picture. Illusions of humanity are shattered, and the film invites us, as spectators, to find something of ourselves within an increasingly posthuman, technofetishistic landscape.³⁴⁰

Cheng, writing about the 2017 adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, calls this “personification”:

The film may tell a cautionary tale about how people have been turned into things. As someone says to our cyborg heroine, “They did not save your life; they stole it.” But the history of Orientalism in the West is not just a history of objectification but also a history of personification: the making of personness out of things. This nonperson, normally seen as outside of modernity and counter to organic human individualism, actually embodies a forgotten genealogy about the coming together of life and what is not life, labor and leisure, that conditions the modern understanding of humanness.³⁴¹

Thus, when the robot Ava wears the skin of an Asian robot, Jade, in Ex Machina—a literal depiction of “yellowface”—is more than just a moment of “invidious cross-racial identification,” as Cheng writes:

If the history of race in American history has taught us that racializing objectification erases subjectivity, then here we are witnessing a form of racializing objectification that yields a different kind of subject. Given the choice, Ava chooses the yellow doll. This is not some triumphant rewrite of the Clark experiment whereby affirming self-recognition is achieved, for is not “self-recognition” precisely the double bind in that deadly choice: to misrecognize yourself or to recognize your own abjection? But we cannot talk about this “self-making” with all our usual assumptions about what a self is—or what race, identity, and agency are, for that matter—since this scene is phantasmically intrasubjective rather than intersubjective. Subject might not be the right word to use here at all. To read this sequence as only an instance of invidious cross-racial identification is to miss the radical crisis of personhood and racial embodiment that ornamentalist transmutation generates, despite the limited racial imaginary that drives it. Here we have a thing covering itself up with other things in order to acquire a semblance of humanity, the thing itself a prosthetic cover for an animated “objectness” and ontology for which we have yet to name.³⁴²

This feminine techno-orientalism is the obverse of masculine Asian inceldom (“MRAsian”). That is, the hypersexualized machine takes the form of an Asian woman, while the “sexless machine” takes the form of an Asian man.³⁴³ This aestheticization of sexualization is desire reappearing in the form of a commodity. In this way, “Oriental inscrutability” through “ornamentalism” is a path towards the “political ends” of Fuad’s “Weird Ass Asian Chicks”:

It’s in this way that the WAAC stereotype bleeds out to obscure our vision of real, flesh-and-blood Asian femmes, whose genius and depth is overwritten by the oddity of their presentation, mannerisms, and speech. Oriental inscrutability (or, in my terms, Weirdness) thus becomes a way to capture and ridicule a foreignness that exceeds the bounds of Western predictability.

Against this minimization, what might it mean to reclaim our own weirdness, our own inscrutability, as a form of Asiatic fugitivity; to exploit this illegibility as a form of concealment for radical, political ends?³⁴⁴

This is the radical potential of “aesthetic exteriorization” that Mole rejects. As Cheng writes:

In the end, ornamentalism identifies both an epistemology and its fugitive meanings; both instrumentality and unexpected opportunities. It is tied to the practice and aesthetics of Orientalism, but it offers a critical framework beyond the limits of race and historic periodization carried by Orientalism, primitivism, and modernism. Ornamentalism opens up a broader and historically deeper set of inquiries about how the aesthetic entails the political and how the political entails the aesthetic, allowing the superfluous and the not-living, both integral parts of the human, to come into view. It is precisely at the interface between ontology and objectness that we are most compelled to confront the limits of the politics of personhood.³⁴⁵

Fan, in a more materialist analysis, argues that this “scientism” is partly expressed through Asian American science fiction as the ideology of the PMC, rather than the nihilism of the incel:

My ultimate quarry is an account of how Asian American SF [science fiction] mediates an ideological position—the hyper-selected PMC—that, as this book has been arguing, has become central to the fictional depiction of Asian American character and narrative, and that I am now exploring vis-à-vis one of its especially salient manifestations, the engineer. The apparent formal differences between SF and literary realism, literary writing and technical writing, obscure more than they might reveal about the social relations constituting the post-65 Northeast Asian American PMC. Technical writing and SF, like the model minority, mediate the linguistic excesses of modernization’s scientism, the institutions of human capital that enact its postracial fictions, and the class desires that modernization unleashed in order to propel Northeast Asian societies toward its utopian telos.³⁴⁶

What Fan sees, through the lens of Candace Chen, the protagonist of Ling Ma’s Severance, is how the “deprofessionalization” of the Asian American woman writer has led to a “dissipation of racial form rather than a deracination”:³⁴⁷

The complex process of economic subjectivity’s absorption of racial subjectivity reaches its climax when Candace is touring a factory in Shenzhen. Candace’s job at Spectra is to work with U.S.-based “publishers who paid [Spectra] to coordinate book production that we outsourced to printers in Southeast Asia, mostly China.” As a middle-level manager, Candace produces nothing but instead facilitates the smooth operation of a global supply chain. While touring one of her vendor’s factories in Shenzhen, she realizes that her Chinese identity and her Chinese American identity are incoherent to the factory workers showing her around. After some awkward attempts at making conversation with her rudimentary Chinese, Candace realizes that the workers see her as neither Chinese nor Chinese American, and perhaps not even as American. Instead they see her, if they see her at all, as an economic entity: “The workers looked up at me with benign expressions as we walked past. My first impulse was to smile, but it seemed condescending. I didn’t know them. I didn’t know what their jobs were or what their lives were like. I was just passing through. I was just doing my job.” Bereft of Chineseness, or even Chinese Americanness, the only way Candace can connect with the workers is a smile, which they would find condescending because she is a buyer first and foremost. In her embrace of “passing through” and “just doing my job,” we see Candace opting into the global supply chain. By thus converging with economic subjectivity, Candace brings into relief the post-65, Chinese American racial form that her mother once adumbrated: a usefulness with no use. Abject as it might seem, this is a compromise formation forged through the material processes underlying deprofessionalization, the shifting meanings of femininity, and occupational concentration. We misunderstand the historical variability of Asiatic racial form if we merely see in Candace a person who has yet to “kick the nerd syndrome”: a model minority in the purely economic sense who cynically ignores opportunities for solidarity and critique, and whose horizon of ethical development is limited to the ever-narrowing racial liberalism of a fading U.S. empire.³⁴⁸

This deprofessionalization is what haunts Frida, the protagonist of Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers, who neglects her child, Harriet, because she is busy with work:

She explains she produces a faculty research digest, rewriting academic papers as short articles on subjects she knows nothing about. She works from home Monday through Wednesday, when she has custody—a special arrangement. It’s her first full-time job since Harriet was born. She’s been there for only six months. It’s been so hard to find a decent job, or any job, in Philly.³⁴⁹

Frida is said to have “bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature from Brown and Columbia”—the author’s educational background—but is clearly struggling.³⁵⁰ Yet Mole ignores this money-talk in favor of a racial interpretation:

In a story framed as a conflict between Frida’s intersectional identity as a 2nd gen Chinese American mother and the expectations of the White world she moves in, this juxtaposition of White/Asian sexual dominance/submission is the penultimate example of how Frida’s centering of Whiteness — White men’s feelings, expectations, and desire — has only led to her own disempowerment and shame. Chan doesn’t offer a resolution for any of these personal feelings about Frida’s sex life and pattern of WMAF relationships, as the focus of the book is on motherhood itself.³⁵¹

Part of the explanation for this may come from the author herself, who calls the American “ideals of motherhood” “white”:

Chan told me, “the curriculum of the school is intended to satirize heteronormative (and upper-middle-class) white ideals of motherhood and parenting, which our culture treats as universal. When we talk about helicopter parents or mom bloggers or mom influencers, we’re usually not talking about women of color, and we’re usually only talking about women from a certain socioeconomic background.” And in real life, even if mothers barred from white ideals of motherhood do succeed in imbuing their kisses with the “fiery core of maternal love,” many face far more serious roadblocks to good mom entry status. Chan notes as much, saying that “mothers who are punished by the government for parenting offenses are primarily Black and brown women.” The cultural edict to be a sufficiently “good” mom impacts all of us, but these pressures are compounded according to a mother’s intersectional identity.³⁵²

This is perhaps because Chan is not aware of how recent this trend is. Sociologists call it “intensive mothering”:

In the United States, we share deeply held beliefs about what makes women good mothers. Sociologists refer to these beliefs as “the ideology of intensive mothering.” The sociologist Sharon Hays coined the term intensive mothering in 1996 when she detailed the unreasonable, gendered demands society had increasingly placed on mothers since the 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, as more women in North America became educated and began entering the labor force, the intensive-mothering ideology arose as a means to redomesticate women through motherhood. The ideology specifies that good moms must act as kids’ primary caregivers. Good mothering is child-centered and labor-intensive; good moms devote all of their energy, emotion, and attention to their kids. Good moms also listen to experts (for example, doctors and public health officials) to protect kids from harm and pave their way to success. Good moms are self-sacrificing; they put kids’ needs before their own and forgo whatever is necessary — time, money, one’s own dinner or mental health — to ensure their kids’ well-being and happiness. In a country with few legal protections and supportive policies for mothers, such as legally mandated paid maternity leave and universal childcare, intensive-mothering ideals have vested children’s well-being almost exclusively in moms’ hands.

This notion that raising kids is a highly individual rather than communal or societal endeavor also favors more privileged, resourced moms who are less reliant on the state. That means that good moms in America end up being seen as white, married to men, monogamous, and stay-at-home caregivers. Because of this, being a good mom in the United States is an exclusionary ideal, challenging for all, attainable by few, and demanding of the highest level of selflessness and devotion.³⁵³

But what is crucial to grasp in the above summary by Priya Fielding-Singh is that being “resourced” is what makes intensive mothering possible, not one’s race. As the narrator of The School for Good Mothers wonders:

Isn’t the school teaching them that what they really need is a partner who earns the money? Aren’t they being trained to be stay-at-home mothers? Where else is the money supposed to come from? The instructors have never mentioned the jobs outside the home or day care or babysitters.³⁵⁴

So rather than Mole’s assertion that “Chan (and so many others) can write entire books with conflicts driven by ‘White people bad,’” the novel questions the ideology of intensive mothering.³⁵⁵ Are “White people bad” because upper-middle-class parents espouse intensive mothering? Or because there are white people in the rehab program with Frida? The rehab program explicitly has white people (and people of color) learning and then teaching “racial difference”:

The dolls take turns playing oppressor. They’ve been programmed to understand and speak derogatory language. White dolls have been programmed to understand to hate dolls of color. Boy dolls have been programmed to hate girls. White parents of white boys spend the week apologizing, ashamed. Some are cited for excessive reprimands.³⁵⁶

The passive voice is key. Who programmed the dolls? Is the programming of the dolls a metaphor for a biological essentialist view of race, people programmed by God? Or is it a metaphor for ideological manipulation, in which bad parents impart racist views onto their children? How does this problem fall onto the shoulders of individual parents?

What is surprising is that Mole discounts the ways Frida resists the “centering of Whiteness.” For example, Frida daydreams of a wedding to her crush that is less “white”:

During class, Frida daydreams about another wedding. Tucker in a three-piece suit. Dark pinstripes, not a tuxedo. A pink gown for her. A secret tribute to where they met. A bouquet of anemones. They’ll have the wedding in Chicago. She’ll do everything her mother requested the first time. Invite more of her parents’ friends and colleagues. Have a tea ceremony. Wear a veil. Pin up her hair. Wear a red qipao for the reception. Play music the older relatives can dance to. Allow more time for family portraits. Later, have a banquet for their baby’s hundred days. Make her husband learn Mandarin.³⁵⁷

As the story concludes, the daydream remains a dream, but so does Frida’s crush on Tucker. Frida’s main obsession is her hatred of Susanna, the white girlfriend of Frida’s ex-husband, who “comes from an old-money Virginia family.” Is she not a worthy target of Lee’s “I hate white women”?³⁵⁸ Frida worries that her child, Harriet, won’t grow up appreciating her Chinese ancestry:

Susanna won’t know how to comfort Harriet if anything like that happens. She’ll deliver platitudes about racial equality, but she won’t be able to say, It happened to me too. I survived. You’ll survive. She won’t be able to say, This is our family. Everything Susanna knows about Chinese culture comes from books and movies. Without her real mother, Harriet may grow up hating the Chinese part of herself.³⁵⁹

But what did Frida learn about Chinese culture from her parents?

Her father used to tell her about circles of responsibilities. First, his wife and daughter and parents. Then, his brother and his brother’s children. Then, his neighbors. Then, his town. His city. Her parents never taught her about altruism, not explicitly. But she saw what they did for their family. For her. How hard they worked. How much they gave.³⁶⁰

This is a reference to what Roger T. Ames calls “Confucian role ethics”:

In Confucian role ethics, the assumption is that social and political order broadly construed is rooted in and emerges from personal cultivation as it is first and foremost actuated within the institution of the family and then extended to one’s family lineage and beyond. The renowned sociologist Fei Xiaotong reflects upon the contemporary configuration of the Chinese kinship-based sociopolitical model of governance that can be attested to as early as the bronze inscriptions and canons of the early Zhou dynasty. Fei introduces distinctions that would contrast Western and Chinese models of social organization. Fei identifies “the organizational mode of association” (tuantigeju 團體格局) as groups of discrete individuals with their rule-governed social organizations functioning within clearly defined boundaries with Western individualism. The image Fei uses for this organizational mode is of individual straws collected and bound together to form a haystack—a bundle of discrete entities. He contrasts this mode of organization with the Chinese kinship model that he calls “the differential mode of association” (chaxugeju 差序格局). Fei’s analogy for the differential mode is “the concentric circles formed when a stone is thrown into a lake,” a relational image that is reinforced by the fact that the character for “ripples” or “rippling” (lun 淪) is cognate and homophonous with the graph for “relational order” (lun 倫). One important feature in Fei’s distinction between these two modes of association is the existence of a common organizing principle binding persons together in the organizational mode of association that makes them equal (some variation on the concept of “law” or as “God” in the broadest sense). This notion of being equal before the law or all children of God stands in contrast with the interrelated, hierarchical, and graduated differences in personal roles and relations—the li 禮—that emerge and are at play in the differential mode. This equality/hierarchy distinction is very much in evidence in the alternative ways of thinking about the construction of personal identity: a contrast between asserting one’s perceived rights and entitlements, on the one hand, and managing one’s personal connections—one’s guanxi 關係—on the other.³⁶¹

What Frida only seems to appreciate in retrospect is the value of this “Chinese kinship model” over “platitudes about racial equality.” What remains underexplored in the novel is how this meta-ethical position is substantially different from “the ideology of intensive parenting.” What makes intensive parenting dystopian in the novel is that it is imposed on Frida by the state—a form of “authoritarian moralism”—rather than learned from her parents. The name of the last lesson unit in the dystopian school is aptly called “The Moral Universe,” implying that the mothers’ offenses are not just illegal, but immoral.³⁶² Hans-Georg Moeller explains how the Confucian perspective is amoral:

On the contrary, a family dominated by ethics rather than love is somehow sick—and the same is true, on a much larger scale, for a society in which morality is supposed to trump the law. This simple fact was noted by Confucius. The Analects include the following dialogue: “The Governor of She in conversation with Confucius said, ‘In our village there is someone called True Person. When his father took a sheep on the sly, he reported him to the authorities.’ Confucius replied, ‘Those who are true in my village conduct themselves differently. A father covers for his son, and a son covers for his father. And being true lies in this.’”

I suggest that the moral of this little dialogue is not moralist—but, just as in Antigone, amoral. True persons are not those who follow moral rules and publicly accuse their family members of wrongdoings. They will cover for their fathers and sons. And they do so, I argue, because they love them in a way similar to the way Antigone loved her brother. Prime Confucian virtues are “filial piety” (xiao) and “parental love” (ci). These are not grounded in any insight into moral principles, but in emotions. The “root” (ben) of all virtues is the feeling of love toward one’s parents and one’s siblings. And it has to be established from birth. A child who grows up well will have this emotional root within himself and thus, in the Confucian model, be enabled to become virtuous. This means that all moral virtues are grounded in something amoral—in a feeling. Morality is not the root; the root is the natural attachment and emotional bond that grows between family members. For the Confucians, a healthy and moral society is not ultimately founded on moral principles and a rational (Kantian) grasp of one’s duties but on the feelings that emerge within families. Morality is founded on something amoral—and this is why morality can never outweigh family feelings. The Confucian true person is one who has well cultivated his or her emotional roots and will therefore always naturally do what is appropriate and have no need to look for certain abstract principles or external authorities for guidance.³⁶³

Is the denouement of the novel not a reference to this Confucian focus on “family feelings” over “external authorities for guidance”? This amoral perspective is why the narrator says Frida’s “parents never taught her about altruism,” even though their generosity could be interpreted as altruism. What Chan is criticizing through her novel is the notion that mothers are individually responsible for children as a category (which is why they must all follow the same strategy for raising their own child), rather than each mother to her child. As Chan says:

“There’s so much burden placed on moms to figure out a solution in a system that’s broken,” [Chan] said. “They’re supposed to solve the problems on an individual level even though the problems are systemic.”³⁶⁴

Resistance to “oppression” is not found through “exploring Asian American positionality relative to Whiteness and Blackness,” as Mole writes, because what put Frida in her situation was her need to work, yet her salary was not high enough to pay for childcare.³⁶⁵ The ideology of intensive parenting is the consequence of the “implosion of capitalism” resulting in “utilitarian individualism,” or the situation where “all of social life is increasingly perceived and discussed as if it were merely a collection of individuals who calculate the most efficient means of maximizing their power and material advantage.”³⁶⁶ The more “resourced” mothers set the bar for the less “resourced,” with the state reinforcing that bar.

The “Asian American” is constituted by the same global neoliberal capitalism that conjures “White supremacy” as “romantic anticapitalism.” What the category of “Asian American” elides is that the difference between different “ways of life” is not one’s ancestry but one’s resources and one’s beliefs about how to deploy those resources. There is even a name for Asian Americans performing intensive mothering: “tiger parenting.”

Offscreen Diasporic Materialism

Mole, despite quoting from Fan’s Asian American Fiction after 1965, does not utilize the book’s historical discussion of the “brain drain” or “American cultural colonization of Taiwan” when discussing Sean Wang’s Dìdi (弟弟). This is crucial for understanding the context of the film, even if it is not explained in the film itself. Fan writes:

Among the major challenges Taiwan had to overcome at this time was the problem of “brain drain.” According to a contemporaneous U.S. report, “Approximately 85 percent of the [Taiwanese] students sent to the United States for graduate work do not return.” U.S. advisors would recommend as a solution deeper cooperation with the United States and increased investment in new research centers. As it turns out, Taiwan’s “scientific desert” was only one major factor in the brain drain. The other was the KMT’s repression of the Taiwanese population, and control of the elite spheres of government, academia, journalism, and banking, which forced Taiwanese into small business and to venture abroad. Despite this political persecution, as Chih-ming Wang writes, even those among Taiwanese students who came into political consciousness and activism against the KMT would not necessarily link that opposition to a critique of U.S. empire: “Chinese students in the United States were still mesmerized by such beliefs and tried to import them wholesale to Taiwan as gospel. American cultural colonization of Taiwan was thus facilitated and fortified by this historic bloc of ‘comprador doctorates’ who willingly enslaved themselves to perpetuate U.S. dominance.” These factors contributed to a future orientation among Taiwanese emigrants in which the United States, and the STEM careers they envisioned there, constituted their horizon of possibility; return to Taiwan either made no professional sense, was politically hazardous, or prohibited because of KMT blacklisting. This one-way futurity generated ancillary pressures on settlement patterns (i.e., suburban ethnic enclaves) and cultural assimilation that would have an enormous impact on Asian American life and especially the fiction that their children would write.³⁶⁷

This background explains why Taiwanese would emigrate to the United States to “suburban ethnic enclaves” like Fremont, California, the setting of the film. What the above passage does not explain is why the father of the protagonist, Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), has no screen time—he’s working in Taiwan. Ong, mentioning Hong Kong specifically, notes that the colloquial names for the father would be an “astronaut” and the mother, Chungsing Wang (Joan Chen), a “widow”:

Many entrepreneurs, however, continue to shuttle between both coasts of the Pacific (because it is still more profitable to do business in Hong Kong) while their wives and children are localized in North America. The astronaut as a trope of Chinese postmodern displacement also expresses the costs of the flexible accumulation logic and the toil it takes on an overly flexible family system. The astronaut wife in the United States is euphemistically referred to as “inner beauty” (neizaimei), a term that suggests two other phrases: “inner person,” that is, wife (neiren) and “my wife in the Beautiful Country (America)” (neiren zai Meiguo). Wives thus localized to manage suburban homes and take care of the children—arranging lessons in ballet, classical music, Chinese language—sarcastically refer to themselves as “widows” (and computer widows), which expresses their feeling that family life is now thoroughly mediated and fragmented by the technology of travel and business.³⁶⁸

What Fan and Ong make clear are the “material processes” that facilitate the setting of the film. Yet Mole’s appraisal ignores the “money-talk” that causes the tension between the father’s mother, Nai Nai (Zhang Li Hua), and Chungsing. Instead, Mole focuses on the “shame of being Asian”:

Instead of leaning on stereotypical and shock-value Asian American confrontations like stinky lunches, bullying, or name-calling, Wang roots Chris’ shame in the realistic thinking that maybe his life is comfortable and mundane enough that he shouldn’t be feeling any shame about being Asian. Chris Jesu Lee writes that:

“Politically, [Chris] is told he’s got nothing to complain about because he’s basically White, only to then feel socially and culturally alienated precisely because it is made clear he is not. It’s a gnawing feeling, one that he can’t quite prove because there are few stats to quantify these things.”

Chris’ shame exemplifies what I discussed in part 2 — when we lean on numbers to “prove” oppression rather than investigate anecdotes to understand its many layers, we dismiss the “gnawing feeling” of racialized masculinity in favor of mainstream White feminism. This kind of feminism deliberately informs Asians we have nothing left to complain about.³⁶⁹

How is Chris “basically White”? If Chris is “socially and culturally alienated,” he is still economically integrated by living in Fremont. The family’s economic status facilitates a life that is “comfortable and mundane enough,” despite the extended absence of Chris’s father. Dìdi portrays the obverse of the “return narratives” of Taiwanese American authors by depicting the life of those left behind—Ong’s “widows.” Fan foregrounds the importance of the “PMC status hierarchies” over race in such narratives:

[R]eturn narratives provide a form for Taiwanese American authors to explore the lives of a transnational PMC that envisions themselves as members of what Jim Glassman calls the Pacific ruling class: “a transnationalized set of elite actors that include capitalists, but also state planners, military leaders, and others who help set in motion policies and projects connected to industrialisation.” Indeed, the narrative and symbolic priority given to return as a figure for the global circulation of capital makes these novels as much about the U.S.-China-Taiwan conjuncture as they are about their Taiwanese American characters. While race often plays a significant role in these narratives, it is often calibrated not to dilemmas of identity or cultural difference but instead to PMC status hierarchies that vary across geographies. Race is a modality through which semiperipherality is lived, in other words. Along these lines, the characters in these novels are often torn between a Taiwanese American racial identity that is losing its appeal and an ambiguous “Asian” racial identity that signifies capital and is more or less synonymous with China.³⁷⁰

The “PMC status hierarchies that vary across geographies” is what allows the film to “transcend race and immigrant identity,” as the director Sean Wang wants according to an article cited by Lee:

Representation clearly matters to Wang, but he wants it to unfold naturally in his work and to create stories that transcend race and immigrant identity, as it does in Dìdi. “It has a very specific portrait of a Taiwanese boy, but people can still see themselves in our movie, even if you don’t demographically align with the protagonist,” he says. “Those feelings of loneliness, shame, joy, belonging are universal, no matter what culture you come from.”³⁷¹

If Chris’s father was absent for a different reason, perhaps without the possibility of return, it would alter the universality of those feelings. The “global circulation of capital” as well as Taiwan’s “scientific desert” produces “race and immigrant identity” by causing the PMC to emigrate, while also providing them the financial means to pursue “flexible citizenship.” Thus, the film does not merely represent growing up as a Taiwanese American, but the reality of immigrating for socioeconomic reasons.

Past Lives tries to resist this materialist lens through the motif of inyeon (인연), but Ian Wang notes the “status-seeking” motivation of Nora in his review:

Here’s an alternate reading of Past Lives: Hae Sung is an emotionally stunted man who tacitly betrays his girlfriend to chase his fantasy image of a woman he once knew when he was 12. Nora is a status-seeking individualist who has internalised hegemonic Western notions of success and views Korea as ‘too small’ for her ambitions. This is an incomplete portrayal of these two characters, of course. But so is the sterile, frictionless version offered to us in Song’s script. Until our films are capable of capturing both sides, brave enough to show us ugliness as well as beauty, the promise of East Asian diaspora cinema’s golden age will never be realised.³⁷²

But what Wang’s “alternate reading” suggests is that Nora (Greta Lee) “internalised hegemonic Western notions of success” before emigrating to the United States. This is also demonstrated by Nora’s desire for a Nobel Prize and then a Pulitzer. Does this not mirror Fan’s “American cultural colonization of Taiwan”? But what is less clear is why her elementary school classmate Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), number two in their class, did not, despite studying engineering. Mole describes the gap between Hae Sung and Nora’s white husband, Arthur (John Magaro), this way:

While Nora (ambitious, free-spirited) moves on and flirts with Arthur (curious, engaging, artist!) at a quaint writers’ retreat, Hae Sung is depicted working tirelessly (school, military, an unnamed job where he wears a suit) and constantly checking his phone for messages from Nora.³⁷³

Yet this “tale of 2 cultures” in which white people are artistic and Asian people are in STEM is an Asian American perspective, as Fan notes:

When we find art taken up as a theme in post-65 Asian American fiction—its production, consumption, and aura—a two-cultures conflict signals how art is formulated dialectically with an ideology of science and its role in industrial expansion. It is often evoked in conflict with the sciences, which stand in for much more than a scientific worldview and STEM professional identity. The two cultures are always at the same time a figure for intergenerational conflict, the ambivalences of racial identity, and national belonging. When we encounter characters trapped between two seemingly irreconcilable cultures—a trope as trite as it is true to life—we often find the arts and sciences in tension with each other. And when a parent’s devotion to a scientific worldview and the safety that a STEM professional identity supposedly offers come into conflict with a child’s penchant for doing anything besides, you have rather explosive material on your hands indeed.³⁷⁴

Though the writer and director Celine Song immigrated first from South Korea to Canada, then to United States, she majored in psychology before getting an MFA in playwriting, fitting into Fan’s cohort of Asian American writers with a STEM background.³⁷⁵ As Fan explains, South Koreans in the 1960s had “cultural prejudices against manual and technical labor”:

After the cessation of hostilities in 1953, the United States began to direct significant funding toward the development of Korean higher education. In the 1955–59 period, 58 percent of U.S. higher education funding in South Korea went to technical and scientific fields, with engineering receiving 25 percent of the total share of funding. When Park Chung-hee came to power in 1961, his administration continued these efforts, moving quickly to align educational policy with economic policy. The Korean public, however, remained skeptical, even hostile toward technical and vocational training. As Michael J. Seth notes, cultural prejudices against manual and technical labor meant that “Few Koreans wanted to be mere technicians. To push public sentiment in favor of such reforms, Park’s first five-year plan drastically shifted emphasis away from university-bound academic education to technical and vocational fields, and subsequent reforms instituted vocational requirements for college entrance. It wouldn’t be until the 1970s that STEM education and professions would receive broad public support—an achievement of the authoritarian, developmental state.³⁷⁶

In the film, Nora says to Hae Sung that she doesn’t know anything about engineering (which is perhaps revealing of the broadness of the STEM category). Rather than Fan’s framing of the “two cultures” as a conflict between art and science, Mole projects a racial framing:

Throughout Past Lives, Song actively chooses to compare a White man and an Asian man, making sure we know that the Asian man has nothing going for him. Nora tells Arthur that Hae Sung is “so Korean” — he lives at home with his parents and has “really Korean views on everything” that she doesn’t detail further.

When put into perspective with Nora’s current life with Arthur, the “so Korean” phrase seems to be yet another example of Asian women justifying their preference for White men by conflating ethnic culture and patriarchy. Nora would rather label Hae Sung “so Korean” and too different than verbalize how her values and perspectives may (or may not! Humans are complex!) differ from his — adding these layers of complexity would detract from the simple aesthetic of White versus Asian.³⁷⁷

But crucial to Fan’s argument is that the industrial expansion of the past has given way to deindustrialization, and thus a concomitant shift of the “Asian racial form”:

What makes these characters Asian American is how their authors use them to remediate legacies of modernization through narratives of economic mobility, the aestheticization of the two-cultures conflict, and more often than not the literal movement of characters between Asia and the United States. Their racial form is associated not with their bodily capacity to produce commodities (which reminds us of capitalism’s abstraction of labor), but with their capacity to reproduce capital (which reminds us of exchange, circulation, and mobility). In the era of deindustrialization, it is the STEM professional rather than the coolie who is the preeminent figure for Asian racial form. Whereas the locus of Asian racialization during industrialization was the sensuous dimension of production and labor, these characters and the forms through which they come into existence demonstrate to us that this locus has expanded to encompass the “supra-sensory” dimensions of “capital itself.” This doesn’t mean that surplus value is no longer generated through the abstraction of labor. It means that deindustrialization has different needs for Asian labor than industrialization did and that the social forms that we call race have shifted accordingly. These characters help us to track the “supra-sensual” dimension of the “social” and its entanglement with the “sensuous”: a whole depth of history and material relations in which the economic, cultural, and ideological routes that transimperial modernization established are traced and retraced. They also bring into relief one of the main points that this book has tried to make, which is that Asian American identity—especially Northeast Asian American identity—is today as much a class identity as it is a racial identity.³⁷⁸

This “class identity” of “transimperial modernization” is what Mole misses by interpreting Past Lives through a racial lens. Nora (like Celine) “immigrated twice” to be in New York and “want[s] to accomplish something.”³⁷⁹ So what Arthur offers Nora is not whiteness, but a “green card,” which she explicitly admits to Hae Sung while he is visiting her in New York.³⁸⁰ As with Ong’s “flexible citizenship,” the barriers to immigration—as well as the ability to overcome those barriers—is what is constitutive of racism. As Nandita Sharma writes:

Thus, it is not a coincidence that it was precisely when being a racist became anathema to most—racism’s legitimacy dying with millions of people in Nazi gas chambers—that ideas of distinct “races” shifted to ideas of separate “nations” whose sovereignty was defined by the power to decide who was or was not able to enter, stay, or have rights in the nation-state. Another way of putting it, of course, as Robert Miles does, is to say that it is difficult to overestimate the significance of citizenship and immigration controls for practices of racism.³⁸¹

Thus, for Nora to stay in the United States and accomplish something, she had to marry a citizen, not just any white person. Arthur’s anxiety about their marriage is that Nora married him for a green card—that he is reduced to his citizenship. Arthur says to Nora:

Meanwhile, our story is so boring. We met at an artist’s residency, we slept together because we both happened to be single, it turned out we were both living in New York, we moved in together to save money on rent, we got married to make sure you could get your greencard [sic] —³⁸²

Although Arthur technically has this privilege over Hae Sung, the political and economic forces that motivate their marriage are not romantic. The couple has, in effect, disciplined their desires. In contrast, Hae Sung is trying to overcome this pressure in his own (on pause) relationship:

HAE SUNG
직업도 평범하고, 수입도 평범하지. 다 평범해. 걔는 조금 더 잘난 사람이랑 만나야 돼서. / My job is ordinary, my income is ordinary. It’s all ordinary. She should meet someone more impressive than me.

NORA
돈을 펑펑 못벌어서 결혼하기 힘들어? / Is it hard to get married if you don’t make a tons [sic] of money?

HAE SUNG
처음엔 그렇게 생각 안했지만, 나중에는 그랬지. / At first we didn’t think so, but then we started thinking that way.³⁸³

This reverses the tale of two cultures: Nora and Arthur married to save money, while Hae Sung and his girlfriend entered a relationship despite his lack of money. Although the film ends without telling the audience if Hae Sung marries his girlfriend, Nora calls Hae Sung a “psycho” before he leaves New York—mirroring him calling her a “psycho” in childhood—because he has not disciplined his desire.³⁸⁴ Fan notes the dependency of Nora and Arthur’s relationship as one that Chinese American woman writers such as Song express through their work:

Taking this cohort’s fiction as a whole, patriarchal dilemmas over professional identity, womanhood, and liberation feature prominently: sometimes as a two cultures conflict between the arts and sciences, sometimes as intergenerational conflict, and sometimes as the ressentiment that Susan Koshy calls “secondariness,” a condition in which women immigrants are deprofessionalized or otherwise made dependent upon men for financial reasons and for citizenship.³⁸⁵

This deprofessionalization is evident when Hae Sung asks Nora during his visit “what prize do you want to win nowadays?” She responds, “요즘 그런 생각은 안해봤어. / I haven’t thought of things like that recently.”³⁸⁶ This is what connects Nora’s crying at the beginning of their story—in childhood, after placing second to Hae Sung in the exams—with her crying at the end, when Hae Sung leaves New York. Not only is Nora saying goodbye to what Greta Lee calls “her Korean self,” she is also saying goodbye to what Ian Wang calls her “status-seeking individualism,” conceding her lack of awards.³⁸⁷ Arthur is the character who verbalizes Nora’s deprofessionalization:

Yeah. Is this how you thought it would turn out? Laying in a bed in a tiny apartment in the East Village with some Jewish guy who writes books? Is this what your family wanted for you?³⁸⁸

Nora describes Hae Sung to Arthur as “so Korean” because she is unable to articulate her relationship with Hae Sung.³⁸⁹ As Hae Sung is about to leave, he asks Nora, in Korean, “Who do you think we are then?” Nora responds, “I don’t know.”³⁹⁰ This is the heart of inyeon: to give oneself up to fate—Nietzsche’s amor fati—and love the necessity of our interconnectedness. Thus the connection that Arthur and Hae Sung finally make in the bar the morning Hae Sung is leaving, in which Arthur says to Hae Sung, “Yes, you and I are In-Yun [sic] too.”³⁹¹ As Ziporyn writes:

The love of necessity, Nietzsche’s amor fati, Zhuangzi’s befriending of agentless ming (命)—that is, of the inextricable relation to any and all otherness that constitutes my very being—is atheist mystical love.³⁹²

Is this not the message of Perfect Days? Director Wim Wenders says that the background of the protagonist, Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) came to him this way:

So I imagine that one morning he woke up from a nightmare, and he was in this cheap, ugly hotel room, and he had no idea how he got there, and he had a headache and was staring in front of himself, and then out of a sudden a ray of sunlight came, just hitting him. And it came through some leaves, and he looked at the one next to him, and there he saw the leaves moving in the wind, and he looked back at the window and the ray coming through the clouds there, and he had a sudden, very existential realization. He realized nobody else saw this except for him. This ray of light was for no other human being than for him. Nobody saw it. Nobody saw the komorebi [木漏れ日] on the wall except for him, and he realized that light had traveled for millions of miles from the sun to reach him, only him, and that light had needed several seconds to get there, to get only to him and create only for him this beautiful little miracle, this amazing play of light. And he realized he was unique, and he was not the businessman who disappeared among millions of others. He was a unique person, and that light showed him that.³⁹³

This uniqueness is what connects Hirayama to everyone else. Wenders adds:

And the simpler his life got, the happier he was, until he was in that little apartment in Oshiage and had a steady job and went there every morning and every now and then took a picture and respected the light and the trees. And of course every person he met, because if he himself accepted himself as unique, everybody else was too.³⁹⁴

Thus, when Mole quotes Chuck Bowen and Jake Cole’s review of Perfect Days, all three miss the film’s active rejection of “money-talk”:³⁹⁵

Because Wenders refuses to “confront the gulf that exists between Hirayama’s interests and how he makes his money,” Perfect Days is conspicuously devoid of piss, shit, and struggle. This avoidance of both money talk and realistic janitorial labor intersects with a notable trend in 21st century literature of not writing about money.³⁹⁶

Hirayama’s intentional deprofessionalization—the rejection of status-seeking, if not the “global circulation of capital” altogether—is crucial to understanding why his sister Keiko (Yumi Asô), who arrives to pick up her daughter Niko (Arisa Nakano) in a Lexus with a driver (Yasushi Okuwa), seems disappointed in his living conditions.³⁹⁷ It also explains why Hirayama is reading Faulkner in the first place—perhaps he had a privileged upbringing in which he acquired a taste for literature. He buys a collection of essays by Aya Kōda (幸田文) titled 木 (Tree), which reflects his enjoyment of komorebi, or what Day calls the “concrete realm” of “romantic anticapitalism”:

Romantic anticapitalism’s confusion over the appearance and essence of the commodity is what [Karl] Marx refers to as its “fetishism.” While a focus on the fetishism of the commodity appears initially removed from the realm of race and social relations, the commodity is foundational to Marx’s labor theory of value, which structures social—and hence race, gender, and sexual—relations within a capitalist mode of production. The chief effect of this fetishism is the appearance of capitalist social relations as antinomical: that an antimony or opposition exists between concrete and abstract realms of society. Under a romantic anticapitalist view, what is real, sensory, or “thingly” is the tree in your backyard, the dusty work boots by the door, the reliable pickup truck in the driveway. These make up the concrete realm. What is unnatural, nonthingly, or intangible is capital accumulation, surplus-value, and money. These form the abstract realm.³⁹⁸

But rather than focusing on the capitalist motivations of this antinomy, Mole frames it as racial, saying that the film “reek[s] of the White man’s fantasy of Japanese honor and the blue collar lifestyle.”³⁹⁹ The film does not “avoid addressing the realities of economic inequality and capitalism,” as one of the scenes has Hirayama’s younger coworker, Takashi (Tokio Emoto) begging him for some money so that he can take a girl, Aya (Aoi Yamada), out on a date. After some back and forth, Hirayama obliges and empties his wallet, but when his van runs out of gas, he is forced to sell one of his prized cassettes. How is this struggle romantic for either character?

The film is an example of how capitalism produces romantic anticapitalism. As the co-writer of the film, Takuma Takasaki, says, the film was “born from The Tokyo Toilet project”:

PERFECT DAYS was born from The Tokyo Toilet project, which was the personal brainchild of Koji Yanai, Group Senior Executive Officer at Fast Retailing Co., Ltd. His concept for the project was to create public toilets that anyone would be comfortable using, an idea with which I empathized.

We discussed many aspects of the project, such as public awareness issues, differences between art and design, and the limits of advertising. Initially, we didn’t really think about the particulars of advertising, such as the budget we would need, what specific issues could arise, or how to deal with them. While thinking of ideas together, we decided to create a short movie portraying a public toilet cleaner. This idea came from our appreciation and respect for cleaning staff.

At that point, we stopped thinking about PR and advertising; they did not seem to be the right approaches. Instead, we started talking about altruism. We were drawn to people who live their lives for the sake of others. The main character in PERFECT DAYS, Mr. Hirayama, cleans toilets for other people every day. In the real world as well, countless people live their lives for others.

Mr. Yanai wanted to put together an international team and make the production as big as possible, in order to attract popular interest in the film. He was really driven.⁴⁰⁰

Thus, in effect, the film is an advertisement for The Tokyo Toilet project, if not Tokyo more broadly, to encourage tourism. But it is not merely “a tourist’s view of Japan” because of its cleanliness.⁴⁰¹ It is a fetishization of the “concrete realm” that obscures the “capital accumulation” necessary to produce a film about not acquiring capital. This, of course, applies to the film industry more generally. So even though Perfect Days depicts an ethic (and an aesthetic) of rejecting capitalism, it does not promote a politics of anticapitalism.

Towards a Zhuangist Politics

Takeo Rivera, in Model Minority Masochism, argues that resistance to racial capitalism in the form of ressentiment reproduces the “moral logics of capitalism.”⁴⁰² In the book’s conclusion, he writes:

Recalling the Lordeian truism that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” moral economies of woundedness have grave limitations in their transformative potential simply by relying on the individuation and essentialism that animates racial capitalism.⁴⁰³

According to Rivera, Kim’s use of Foucault’s theory of power is a critique of “calls for recognition of our own oppression”:⁴⁰⁴

Thus, since [Claire Jean] Kim asserts that power is primarily a circuit that governs intelligibility, it constitutes subjects themselves, including those who are ostensibly “powerful” or, in contemporary parlance, “privileged”—which is not synonymous but, rather, is descriptive of being principally the beneficiary of power rather than principally its wielder. In contrast, the identity politics of ressentiment is sutured to an ethics of individualist agency, obfuscating the complex relationality of subjectification and relying upon a conceptualization of power in which its wielders fully and agentically come into their own strength. Ressentiment, in fact, merely repeats the logic undergirding individualist accountability that buttresses the moral justification of racism in the first place—a logic that Kim’s Foucauldian model of racial power seeks to undo.

Nevertheless, Nietzschean ressentiment has suffused itself with Asian American cultural politics, and even the signifier “Asian American” itself. As I have argued in the Introduction, Asian American literary narratives and cultural politics have tended to valorize “resistance” through a glorification of the “bad” ([Viet Thanh] Nguyen) or “ideal critical” ([Christopher] Lee) subject, who arrives upon political consciousness through traumatic encounters with white racism. Rey Chow problematizes the notion of political consciousness as inherited from Lukács, noting that Lukács contradictorily idealizes the subject who labors in what has come to be known more generally as “standpoint theory.” The oppressed status of the proletariat both provides the worker with an inherent capacity for resistance and imbues a moralizing sense of “humanity” (the latter of which is strikingly parallel to ressentiment itself). This description of the proletarian has adapted easily to the minoritized ethnic, who is similarly trapped by history and thus possesses an inherent nobility by virtue of having been oppressed and excluded—again, as in ressentiment (and, as in ressentiment, gains additional depth by virtue of its identitarian shape). Compellingly, the Lukácsian moralizing essentialism of the oppressed subject, the inner human “soul” that gives the subject the capacity to resist and pursue social justice, is entirely parallel to the “calling” described in Max Weber’s description of the Protestant ethic of capitalism. That is to say, “precisely this narrative of resistance and protest, this moral preoccupation with universal justice, is what constitutes the efficacy of the capitalist spirit. Resistance and protest, when understood historically, are part and parcel of the structure of capitalism; they are the reasons capitalism flourishes.” The moral idealization of the subject who has become aware of their own oppression—whom we can associate with “the man of ressentiment”—is itself complicit with the moral logics of capitalism.⁴⁰⁵

What Rivera proposes is the lens of masochism, “that Asian American subjectivity is best understood precisely through this desubjectification, and equally, self-objectification. Asian American subjectivity becomes itself through its own undoing.”⁴⁰⁶ Pushing Foucault further and synthesizing his thought with Deleuze and Althusser, Yoshiyuki Sato in Power and Resistance recognizes that “minority struggles” need to “de-subject” themselves to “overthrow capitalism”:⁴⁰⁷

Who, then, are the carriers of resistance? For these philosophers (including Althusser), the carriers of resistance are not limited to the proletariat in the traditional Marxist sense. The lesson of May ‘68 is the fact that the class struggle includes the struggles of minorities, and it is these minority struggles (struggles of women, colonized people, LGBTQ people, victims of pollution, foreign workers, precarious people, etc.) that affect the majority (proletarian men) to de-subject it. Proletarian struggles and minority struggles must therefore be articulated in a transversal manner. In order to overthrow capitalism, the majority must become minoritarian and de-subject itself in forming the subject-group: this is the tactic that Deleuze and Guattari proposed in A Thousand Plateaus following the analysis of the situation post-’68. As we saw in Appendix 1, actual neoliberal politics individualizes us through its principle of competition. It is exactly for this reason that transversal collective struggle becomes essential. In a contradictory way, the generalized neoliberal precariousness and the environmental destruction by capitalism (see global warming and the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe) commands, as a categorical imperative, the construction of radically democratic and transversal counter-power. By the transversal struggles which include minorities, we must realize an ‘anti-pastoral revolution’ in which the subjects refuse to be governed in any way.⁴⁰⁸

Lei Gong offers an impassioned critique of the stagnation of liberalism:

And that’s why like, you know, it feels like we’re not going anywhere, right? And I get why people have reactionary backlash to this. But by, you know, taking the same, by channeling that backlash into the exact same form of politics, right? The exact same form of kind of discursive tokenization, right? You are only, you know, reinforcing the problem because all you’ve done is you’ve created a second camp that’s looking for attention without really addressing the root problem, right? And that’s the problem with liberal politics overall. It’s why we’re kind of stuck in this moment where nothing seems to be able to, you know, we can’t seem to be able to do anything, right? Nothing gets done. Nothing happens. It’s because we’ve been absorbed into the attention economy and the ways in which that co-opts the discursive process, right? The process of having conversation about issues and turned it itself into a kind of a form of consumption, right? A form of good. The point itself, rather than, you know, having the conversation be a means to try to address problems. We don’t do any actual problem solving anymore, right? And I think that’s, you know, that’s the root issue that we have here, right? Is the finger wagging is about the finger wagging. It’s not about what do you do in terms of dialogue with your community to try to, you know, fix the root causes of the problem so that we can all kind of live a little better, right?⁴⁰⁹

So what does it to “have a normal life in society”? What could it mean to have “politics emerging from identity”? How do we become “fully fleshed people entangled in all sorts of complicated relationships”? How can we “refuse to be governed in any way”? Is it possible to resolve the “ethical crisis bedeviling Asian American politics”?

The question of white male–Asian female (WMAF)—if it is even a question at all—should be a question of the ethical relationship that each partner has to the other. Mole, instead of discussing the values themselves (or is it “deep culture”?) reifies racial differences as “irreconcilable”:

Within my own life, I’ve noticed that my relationships with White people have not been able to bridge the differences between our values and blossom into full relationships where both of us feel seen, unlike my relationships with non-White and other Asian folks. Growing up, white friends, boys, teachers, family culture, and beauty standards greatly contributed to my teenage self-hatred. I had close White friends — we bonded in shared communities like school, church, sports teams, and art clubs, but we grew out of those relationships once we left those spaces and had only each other’s personalities/lives to interact with. With my White friends, there were just some irreconcilable differences in how we experience the world and manage our responsibilities to family and others.⁴¹⁰

Kingston, in The Woman Warrior, has a scene in which the narrator grapples with the incommensurability of her mother’s view of the world with what Fan calls science fictionality—how science appears in fiction:⁴¹¹

We were working at the laundry when a delivery boy came from the Rexall drugstore around the corner. He had a pale blue box of pills, but nobody was sick. Reading the label we saw that it belonged to another Chinese family, Crazy Mary’s family. “Not ours,” said my father. He pointed out the name to the Delivery Ghost, who took the pills back. My mother muttered for an hour, and then her anger boiled over. “That ghost! That dead ghost! How dare he come to the wrong house?” She could not concentrate on her marking and pressing. “A mistake! Huh!” I was getting angry myself. She fumed. She made her press crash and hiss. “Revenge. We’ve got to avenge this wrong on our future, on our health, and on our lives. Nobody’s going to sicken my children and get away with it.” We brothers and sisters did not look at one another. She would do something awful, something embarrassing. She’d already been hinting that during the next eclipse we slam pot lids together to scare the frog from swallowing the moon. (The word for “eclipse” is frog-swallowing-the-moon.) When we had not banged lids at the last eclipse and the shadow kept receding anyway, she’d said, “The villagers must be banging and clanging very loudly back home in China.”

(“On the other side of the world, they aren’t having an eclipse, Mama. That’s just a shadow the earth makes when it comes between the moon and the sun.”

“You’re always believing what those Ghost Teachers tell you. Look at the size of the jaws!”)⁴¹²

Does the mother’s misinterpretation of the delivery boy’s mistake rise to the level of irreconcilable? Ironically, the scene ends with Kingston receiving the candy, but the druggist does not understand why:

“Tatatagimme somecandy.”

The druggist leaned way over the counter and frowned. “Some free candy,” I said. “Sample candy.”

“We don’t give sample candy, young lady,” he said.

“My mother said you have to give us candy. She said that is the way the Chinese do it.”

“What?”

“That is the way the Chinese do it.”

“Do what?”

“Do things.” I felt the weight and immensity of things impossible to explain to the druggist.

“Can I give you some money?” he asked.

“No, we want candy.”

He reached into a jar and gave me a handful of lollipops. He gave us candy all year round, year after year, every time we went into the drugstore. When different druggists or clerks waited on us, they also gave us candy. They had talked us over. They gave us Halloween candy in December, Christmas candy around Valentine’s day, candy hearts at Easter, and Easter eggs at Halloween. “See?” said our mother. “They understand. You kids just aren’t very brave.” But I knew they did not understand. They thought we were beggars without a home who lived in back of the laundry. They felt sorry for us. I did not eat their candy. I did not go inside the drugstore or walk past it unless my parents forced me to. Whenever we had a prescription filled, the druggist put candy in the medicine bag. This is what Chinese druggists normally do, except they give raisins. My mother thought she taught the Druggist Ghosts a lesson in good manners (which is the same word as “traditions”).⁴¹³

Kingston—as a child—only manages to convey that her demand for candy is Chinese, but not that the delivery boy “tainted [her mother’s] house with sick medicine and must remove the curse with sweetness.”⁴¹⁴ But Kingston herself doesn’t believe in her mother’s superstitions. Instead, she avoids the non-Chinese druggist merely out of embarrassment.

Wesley Yang, in “Paper Tigers,” an essay originally published in 2011 in New York magazine, repudiates “Asian values” and commits to naming them:

Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility.⁴¹⁵

Rivera comments that this quote is “performing a kind of masculinist assimilationism” in which “Yang abjects the castrated racial position to which Asianness has been assigned, but accepting the terms with which orientalist white supremacy has essentialized ‘Asianness.’”⁴¹⁶ Yang has conflated the upper-middle-class values of the model minority with “Asian” Confucian values, ironically demonstrating how “irreconcilable” “racial” differences congeal into tiger parenting.

Compare Yang’s list with a line from Chapter 14 of the Zhuangzi:

夫孝悌仁義，忠信貞廉，此皆自勉以役其德者也，不足多也。⁴¹⁷

Filiality, fraternity, benevolence, righteousness, fidelity, trustworthiness, loyalty, honesty—all of these are examples of forcing oneself along while subjugating one’s Virtue. They are not worth valuing.⁴¹⁸

How does one reconcile this “Asian” text with Yang’s list of Asian values? What is the point of categorizing—essentializing—them as Asian? Having compatible values with someone else facilitates a “full” relationship—is that not what is meant by “deep culture”? To ascribe values to races rather than to people is to stereotype. What matters for a particular relationship, WMAF or not, is whether specific values are compatible.

Similarly, Mabute-Louie, an ex-Christian, reframes Christianity as racial:

The notion that America is the spreader of salvation is not exclusive to White Protestant Americans, as non-White Christian converts would also come to view ancestors and unconverted relatives and friends through this violent White Christian gaze: as heathen and needing to be saved and assimilated. Perhaps one of the most dangerous consequences of colonialism, our own communities would come to internalize the fiction that Protestantism was the superior religion of the superior race.⁴¹⁹

Thus Mabute-Louie’s political demand is to leave Christianity, and her ethical practice is now rooted in indigenous Asian “spiritual traditions”:

Acupuncture also opens up channels for me to communicate with the divine, and my practitioner often activates points for me to receive wisdom and inspiration from ancestors to support my creative processes. Acupuncture, along with feng shui, astrology, herbalism, ancestral veneration, and other indigenous spiritual traditions and knowledge systems, have all been devalued and stigmatized by Western Christian frameworks.⁴²⁰

The crux of the issue is that Mabute-Louie is only able to make the choice to follow “indigenous spiritual traditions” after her “identity” was shredded by liberal multiculturalism. To grasp one’s knowledge systems as Asian is to not really believe that is the way the world is. Žižek’s “Chinese farmer” in China does not choose to follow his traditions. It may be hard to see today, but the “Western Christian frameworks” had to “devalue” the pagan traditions that came before. And like Christianity, the “spiritual traditions” are not separable into different disciplines that one can pick and choose from—unless one is a post-Enlightenment liberal.

It is also telling that Mabute-Louie’s newfound way of life is a list of cultural practices. Does this satisfy what Mole’s call for us to “know our roots (all of them)”?⁴²¹ The notion of “Asian Diaspora” allows Mabute-Louie to elide the substantial differences between Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and the myriad other “knowledge systems” under the banner of “indigenous.” Many philosophers have tried to unite these disparate worldviews into one “Chinese” philosophy. For example, Shuchen Xiang calls the Chinese worldview as one of “processual metaphysics,” contrasting it with the “substance ontology” of the West:

Chinese processual metaphysics leads to a very different conception of personhood from that arising from the Western tradition. The absence of an assumption of metaphysical determinism results in a view of the human being as creatively indeterminate, as a potential to be formed. Instead of a being, the human is understood as a becoming. As I have discussed elsewhere, Confucianism had an anti-essentialist conception of selfhood that precluded any concept of “race” in the sense of an individual’s essence determining their becoming. In that earlier work, I introduced the idea that race is the biological interpretation of the concept of substance. Substance explains causality through hypostatization (or reductionism), determinism, and reification. Under a substance (racial) ontology, the human being’s whole becoming is a hypostatized (reduced) to a predetermined, reified substance (essence). Under this ontology, individuals’ secondary, observable properties—the work they manifest—are of no consequence for their intrinsic, unobservable substance; their essence is assumed to be a priori, and their empirical manifestations, such as cultural competence and moral actions, are subordinated to this essence.⁴²²

That is, the Chinese worldview is fundamentally anti-essentialist, which, to a limited extent, resonates with the anti-essentialism of Reed, Appiah, and Fields. For Xiang, the becoming of Chineseness is willingness to assimilate, echoing Fei’s “snowball” theory:

The Confucian-Chinese attitude to the non-Chinese and animals can be described as a passive ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism, respectively. What we find in the dominant Confucian tradition is the view that humans are the most numinous of all creatures and a cultural elitism that saw huaxia culture as eminently superior to the cultures of its neighbors. However, a key element of the Chinese tradition’s perceived sense of its own superiority to non-Chinese was its cosmopolitanism—that is, its syncretism and willingness to take on the best aspects of the behaviors, habits, and cultures of others.⁴²³

But since Chinese people are not born Confucian sages—sagacity must be cultivated—it seems suspect to say that every Chinese is able to select “the best aspects of the behaviors, habits, and cultures of others.” The potential of “syncretism” is also the possibility of assimilating racism into Chineseness:

But even if Xiang is right her arguments do not undermine the reality of a well elaborated cultural and racial othering in Chinese thought from antiquity to the present. Indeed that reality cannot be dismissed. To her credit though, Xiang’s analysis has worth in that on a purely ontological reading the Chinese (if we accept as Wing-Sit Chan argues that Confucianism “truly…molded Chinese civilization in general) may not be rightly accused of having a racist worldview. In that reading culture is what defines the human being not some immutable a priori essence. But culture in the Chinese universe cuts another way when it comes to racism. In other words, in my view, the Chinese culturalist notion of the human person cuts both ways with regards to racism. Chinese culture may have disposed it to taping into Western raciology; that is, there was a cultural substrate waiting to lock into this hierarchization of human beings based on skin colour. This racism has been well tutored by the example of Western raciology but also takes part of its wellspring from Chinese culture itself and is constantly deployed through the changing phases of the dominant mode of Chinese social organization and spatiality. On the ontological level a case can be made that all Chinese are signatories of a non-racialized and non-essentialized conception of being but at the empirical level this commitment can be observed in the breach feeding off as it does on a long ideational history of othering. That is, on the ontological plane arguments can be made to absolve the Chinese of racism as Xiang ably does but this does not always hold as events bear witness at the practical/empirical level and hence the dialectics of RCC [Racism with Chinese Characteristics]. In a sense the Chinese are both racist and not so and it is this racist sharp point that Black Africans have been subjected to till this day.⁴²⁴

This obscure philosophical debate illustrates the difficulty of connecting any sort of “deep culture”—philosophy or religion—with “surface” and “shallow” culture—people’s day to day practices. Perhaps it is the case that for many people, “unconscious, inexplicable norms” guide their behavior, but when those norms clash—a naïve definition of politics—how is a resolution found?⁴²⁵

To return to desire as a site of political resistance requires turning away from the class-conscious critiques above to avoid moralizing desire and instead tap into the radical openness of desire. Srinivasan concludes her essay with:

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love. In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.⁴²⁶

For desire to “choose for itself” is, under Sato’s interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari, “the activity of impersonal desiring power”:

The Foucauldian notion of subject in Discipline and Punish lacks this power of resistance: the transcendental ego is only a simple agent of power, and therefore any power of resistance to power is erased. This is what we called the unicity of the transcendental instance. In Foucault’s theory of power as he first formulated it, this power of resistance does not exist. His deconstruction of the Kantian (topical) subject by means of the primacy of power relations has in fact eliminated the active power of the subject. By contrast, in Deleuze and Guattari, the economic subject resides in the absolute productivity of unconscious desire. This productivity of the economic subject directly opens the way to the theorization of collective resistance to power. What then allows collective resistance is not the activity of the subject itself, but the activity of impersonal desiring power in the decentred subject (productive desire of the unconscious) and the multiplicity of the transcendental field, namely the machinic assemblage. And it is exactly this transcendental principle of becoming-other that enables the transformation of the subjected group into a subject-group.⁴²⁷

Is this not what ARX-Han sees as the potential rising out of the “meaning collapse” of the incel?⁴²⁸

Even in regimented, so-called “systematized” approaches to human relationships, whether intimate or not, irreducible aspects of humanity are always breaking out of these artificially imposed constraints. The lines drawn by these ideologies, in practice, cannot ever subsume human agency or vitality.⁴²⁹

Or as Rivera concludes Model Minority Masochism:

Not unlike Donna Haraway’s cyborg in the 1980s, the monstrosity formed by militarism and capitalism that can in turn lead to its undoing, the self-objectifying, self-punishing, masochistic Asian American may offer a modest first glimpse into an Asian American subjectivity not only of resistance, but of corrosion. The robot may leak battery acid, after all. And the masochist may be the most capable among us to feel something like freedom.⁴³⁰

But how does the subject effect politics through desire? Sato turns to the later Foucault:

The formation of the relation of self to self, namely ethical subjectivation, is linked to the relationship of the self and the other: ‘The rationality of the government of others is the same as the rationality of the government of oneself’, because ‘it is in knowing how properly to conduct himself that he will be able to lead others properly’. One who has formed himself as an ethical subject can establish an ethical relationship to others. And this relationship to others introduces the notion of singularity into the political field. The formation of the ethical subject who can resist governmentality is also a thought that finds the singularity of the self in relation to others. The subjectivation that Foucault mentions is a ‘practice of freedom’ which allows the use of the singularity of the self in relation to others. This practice relates directly to non-slavery based on the self-knowledge or the care of the self, and it allows the reversibility of the power relation that necessarily intervenes in the relationship with others. Ensuring the reversible power relation and not the fixed one — this is what is at the stake in the ‘practice of freedom’ in the formation of the ethical subject. In addition, in the field of sexuality, the practice of freedom would signify governing pleasures (‘to dominate one’s pleasures without ever being worsted’), and using one’s own body and its pleasures according to the singularity of the self. Dominating pleasures also means ethical care of others. The ethical relationship with the other is inseparable from the reversibility of the power relation and the singularity of the self and the other. It is precisely this relationship that turns pleasure into ethics.⁴³¹

Michaele L. Ferguson finds in Young the “eroticism” of “otherness”:

Here, I draw on Iris Young’s argument that the eroticism in the encounter with otherness that happens regularly in city life can serve as a model for thinking of a new ethos of democratic engagement with otherness. Just as in politics, the eroticism of the other in city life is both the source of pleasure and danger:

The erotic dimension of the city…holds out the possibility that one will lose one’s identity, will fall. But we also take pleasure in being open to and interested in people we experience as different.…We look for restaurants, stores, and clubs with something new for us, a new ethnic food, a different atmosphere, a different crowd of people.

This urban pleasure indifference—while it is not without its own risk of exoticizing otherness, or reducing it to a cuisine or lifestyle—serves as a model for reimagining the encounter with difference in democratic life as erotic. There is, for Young, a “pleasure in being drawn out of oneself to understand that there are other meanings, practices, perspectives on the city, and that one could learn or experience something more and different by interacting with them.”

This is the pleasure of exercising political freedom: in exchanging political judgments with others, I encounter new positions, new perspectives, that take me outside of myself. Encountering and learning about others, trying to see the world from their perspective, is not only threatening insofar as it challenges my positions, but it can also be erotic, exciting, different, and new.⁴³²

Fortunately for Mabute-Louie, at least one “indigenous” “knowledge system”—her “own” Chinese Daoist one—does “resist governmentality.” More specifically, Kim-chong Chong resists readings of the Zhuangzi through liberal values:

That is, given his criticism of these non-rational and unreflective desires, Zhuangzi may have an overall conception of the good that he prefers, and which he thinks would be more in conformity with nature. Quite apart from the reasons why it should not be assumed that the Zhuangzi would automatically align with liberalism and liberal democracy, questions have increasingly been raised in recent years about what liberalism means, what it entails, and even about the legitimacy of the liberal paradigm itself. As John Christman has put it, “Attention has moved from asking questions about political principles from within the framework of….the liberal paradigm to raising questions about the legitimacy of that paradigm itself.” In any case, the important point is that we should not unthinkingly assimilate Zhuangzi’s philosophy to any contemporary system of governance and thought. Further discussion is required. In the end, though, I am inclined to think that Zhuangzi’s pluralistic position would not be aligned with any particular system that believes in an objective solution to moral, social and political issues.⁴³³

Michael Nylan in The Chinese Pleasure Book discusses how the Zhuangzi describes how the pursuit of pleasure is a subjective ethics:

People have been given pleasures in life and ease in death. As we have seen, the only truly moral response to these undeniable facts of life, known to the smallest child, is a capacious embrace of things as they are, combined with an ardent waiting for things to unfold, producing a form of moral pluralism, if you will. (As someone else said, “we are here to keep watch, not to keep” or keep stock.) So despite the propensity of modern academics to forge comparisons between Zhuangzi and the Stoics, Zhuangzi does not demand that readers give their allegiance to self-rule by reason, because reason cannot make out the cosmic or individual workings. Zhuangzi, on the other hand, opposes moral absolutism and moral universalism, but not morality itself. Tacit or tactical knowledge — the sort of knowledge that serves in most cases to ground a provisional insight and tentative action — that lies within one’s grasp, so while “no authority announces the right interpretation, competing voices open up various perspectives and angles.” And Zhuangzi throughout entertains thoughts of supreme pleasure: “When the men of old talked of fulfilling their ambitions, they did not refer to fine carriages and caps. They meant simply that their sense of pleasure [in their lives] was so complete that it could not possibly be increased.”

What specific sorts of pleasures might a person of sufficient clarity enjoy? Quite a few, for if too much of life is reductionist (for example, reducing another to her status or wealth; reducing a glowing sunset to “nice pic!” and so on), Zhuangzi repeatedly conjures visions of plenitude. Ordinary events become “happenings” (notable occasions worth celebrating, if not idealizing), with heightened emotions bringing to greater awareness the sense that “life is good.” Each beautiful form is distinctive in its construction and powers of attraction, each taste, each sound, each touch, and each dream. And while phenomena in the cosmos exhibit complicated tendencies, some in seeming contradiction with others, somewhat unaccountably, as “contradictions accumulate,” “everything comes alive.” All prompt eager curiosity, if only we attend to them with the wild and unruly curiosity of the toddler or the very young at heart, who don’t bother to claim the smallest semblance of knowledge and understanding.⁴³⁴

This openness to ethics (what Nylan calls “morality”) allows the Zhuangzi to subordinate liberal ethics to pleasure. But this complicates Chibber’s distinction between “actually existing political liberalism”—the liberalism of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs—and “philosophical liberalism,” which he notes that “by the late twentieth century […] was egalitarian.” Chibber argues that the socialist project needs a “well-worked-out normative underpinning”:⁴³⁵

If socialism is more desirable, on what grounds is it more desirable? What if somebody came along and said, I have a solution to capitalism’s inefficiencies, but you’re going to have to give up all your civic and political rights. Most socialists would reject that. But we reject it on moral grounds, so we need to be able to articulate what those are.⁴³⁶

But liberal egalitarianism is hampered by its Christian roots—reversing Mabute-Louie’s argument. Gray writes:

All four of the defining ideas of liberal thought are continuations of Christian monotheism. The primacy of the individual is a secular translation of the belief that each human being is created by the Deity, which has an authority over them which transcends any worldly power. The egalitarian belief that human beings have the same moral status reproduces the idea that all human beings are equal in the sight of God. Liberal universalism — the belief that generically human attributes are more important than particular cultural identities — reflects the idea that humankind is created in God’s image. The belief that human institutions are indefinitely improvable replicates the theistic faith that history is a moral narrative of sin followed by redemption.⁴³⁷

Thus, liberal egalitarianism is a “moral universalism.” This is what permits Chibber to reduce pleasure to “material interests” that cut across cultures.⁴³⁸ As Sam Kriss comments on a 2015 lecture given by Chibber:

The really scary stuff only appears late in Chibber’s lecture, but it’s what really constitutes the core of his project. For Chibber, there are certain ‘basic human needs’ that are not conditioned by class or culture, that have to do with the biological core of our being, and that are exactly the same everywhere in the world. It’s on this level that we can all understand each other, and it’s from this base that we can build a solidarity that cuts across boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. As with Badiou’s invocation of the ‘generic’, this is a political project that insists on the stripping-away of all that is not essential; those elements that are lost in returning to this common core of our species are ultimately ephemeral epiphenomena. Even provisionally accepting that this kind of operation is even possible, it’s founded on a fairly dubious assumption – that what is the same between people is ontologically essential to them, and what differs between them is not. Race and gender might be constructed, but it’s this kind of formulation that can – without ever meaning to, but by slipping down the rungs from ontology to normativity – allow for the idea that being black or a woman is somehow a deviation from the norm.⁴³⁹

Thus, according to Kriss, Chibber’s “normative underpinning” comes from an ontological essentialism, which is precisely what Young wants to restore as “particularities”:

The repoliticization of public life does not require the creation of a unified public realm in which citizens leave behind their particular group affiliations, histories, and needs to discuss a mythical “common good.” In a society differentiated by social groups, occupations, political positions, differences of privilege and oppression, regions, and so on, the perception of anything like a common good can only be an outcome of public interaction that expresses rather than submerges particularities. Those seeking the democratization of politics in our society, in my view, should reconceptualize the meaning of public and private and their relation, to break decisively with the tradition of Enlightenment republicanism. While there are good theoretical and practical reasons to maintain a distinction between public and private, this distinction should not be constructed as a hierarchical opposition corresponding to oppositions between reason and feeling, masculine and feminine, universal and particular.⁴⁴⁰

Thus, rather than a “common good,” Kriss interprets Karl Marx as advocating for “opening up of the infinite possibilities that constitute our being”:

There is a real universal, but it’s not subject to the tyranny of the Same. Marx does, it’s true, refer in his ‘humanist’ works to something called ‘species-being’, but it’s not a ‘being’ in the usual, ontological sense of the word. Species-being is bound up with the process of production: the human capacity to change and remake the world, a capacity that is itself coded by that which is produced and changed. Species-being stands for the unfettered and continual realisation of human potential, with new potentialities opening with every new realisation. Returning to species-being does not for Marx require the stripping-away of everything but the essential, but the creation of vast and unknown realms of possibility and difference. This is not so much being as becoming; an ontology of continual flux. (Here, as in so many other areas, Marx and Nietzsche are not just compatible but exhibit an almost spooky level of correspondence.) This is where Chibber’s divergence from Marx is most striking: for Marx, communism means freedom from alienation and an opening up of the infinite possibilities that constitute our being. Chibber, meanwhile, presumably wants to see a world in which dignity and well-being are available to all, but because in his cosmology human beings are eternally defined by the fact that we lack these things, for him communism can only be a total estrangement from what we really are.⁴⁴¹

Žižek, too, succumbs to this re-inscription of moral universalism in Christian Atheism, according to Ziporyn.⁴⁴² And as al-Gharbi argues, “symbolic capitalists” are “susceptible” to “self-serving moral reasoning”:

Critically, although moral credentialing, licensing, cleansing, and disengagement are general cognitive and behavioral tendencies, symbolic capitalists may be especially susceptible to these forms of self-serving moral reasoning. As discussed throughout this text, the kinds of people who become symbolic capitalists (those who are highly educated, cognitively sophisticated, etc.) tend to be particularly prone to, and effective at, motivated reasoning in general. Symbolic capitalists are also far more likely than other Americans to explicitly identify with antiracism, feminism, LGBTQ advocacy, environmentalism, and related social justice causes (and to be associated with institutions that are likewise conspicuously committed to those causes). However, even as we paint ourselves as egalitarians, symbolic capitalists’ lifestyles and social positions are largely premised on exploitation, exclusion, and condescension. Taken together, symbolic capitalists have especially powerful means, far more frequent opportunities, and a pronounced need to produce moral credentials and moral licenses or engage in moral cleansing rituals or moral disengagement.⁴⁴³

For al-Gharbi, the “lifestyles” of symbolic capitalists “are largely premised on exploitation” of the working class, and “produce moral credentials” to cover up the exploitation. Developing a different sort of normativity, one based on a “biological core,” may not threaten the class position of symbolic capitalists.

But it is still possible to pursue socialism with a different kind of ethical framework, since, as Chibber notes:

Marxism is, at its core, not a moral philosophy, but a theory of politics and a political economy. As long as liberalism fails to produce that, it can never supplant Marxism or make Marxism redundant.⁴⁴⁴

Through the Zhuangzi, it is possible to pursue what Nylan calls a “moral pluralism” rather than a categorical Asian American morality. Chris Fraser calls this a “metaethics” in Zhuangzi: Ways of Wandering the Way:

A distinctive characteristic of humans is our capacity to discover, appreciate, and explore a plurality of distinct particular dào within the totality of facts and processes that constitute the undifferentiated natural Dào of the cosmos. ‘Wandering’ (yóu), I propose, is a Zhuangist label for the sort of activity in which we successfully employ this capacity. It amounts, in effect, to a second-order dào by which we explore the various first order dào open to us—a meta-dào of recognizing, selecting between, and taking up potential paths presented by the interaction between our subjective capacities and motivation and our objective circumstances. Dé is in effect our proficiency in resiliently, skilfuly, and harmoniously wandering through the Dào, such that we find our journey fulfilling.⁴⁴⁵

For Ziporyn, who finds “deep resonances” between Tiantai Buddhism and “primitive Daoism,” in Mahāyāna Buddhism, the loser—the incel—is in everyone:

Be that as it may, in the case of the bodhisattva as fully developed in Mahāyāna thought, with or without the Daoist influence in the background, we are dealing with something differs from both of these.  What we are dealing with here here [sic] is not a restricted but rather an unrestricted economy of loserdom: every sentient being, in some particular idiosyncratic way, is a loser and an outcast, a misfit without a self, and each will have some stupid obsession which they deludedly believe will somehow solve their problem—which it certainly won’t. But this obsession is not only the engine of bodhisattvahood, it is the very mechanism of compassion, for reasons that resonate powerfully with the Žižekian analysis of universality at its best, but—in my view at least—follow through on its implications more thoroughly (thereby dropping the historicism and collective social activism that is most important to Žižek, which again is why, I suspect, he strives to avoid this implication, although it seems to me to follow from his own premises).⁴⁴⁶

Thus, the incel’s obsession with WMAF is turned around into becoming-other—to use Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase—and “unassimilability” becomes not resistance to Whiteness, but assimilation into the Other. WMAF, too, cannot be subsumed under the intelligibility of race or the goal of assimilation, and perhaps too, has radical potential:

In spite of himself, Žižek makes freedom sound like a matter of decisions and commitments moving in a single particular direction, even though he is very clear that these must come from unconscious irrational sources rather than from rational decision-making—his model of a true ethical act is of falling in love, which inspires unavoidable devotion and obsession even though it comes over one like a disaster from without, even as at the same time it follows our own deep and disavowed drives. But on this very model, we should see that an ambiguous and multifarious subject, even if we commit ourselves to a “Cause” or fall in love—will always also be subverting that love and that cause in various ways, that self-sabotage is intrinsic to all our commitments. Why not fold this in to the very act of devotion, rather than valorizing and romanticizing its disavowal?⁴⁴⁷

The Zhuangzi is just one of many texts from “Asia” and therefore is only one of many possible ethical (if not metaethical) stances. But the amoral political economy of Marxism, as espoused by the anti-essentialist Asian American scholars above, seems broadly compatible with the moral pluralism of Zhuangist thought.

There is still much work to be done to develop more fully the politics of this “way of life” in contrast to neoliberalism. As Tao Jiang notes in Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China:

In other words, if it is indeed possible for an accomplished Zhuangist paragon to gain access to the precious personal space through their vigorous self-cultivation, there should be nothing inherently prohibitive that prevents the Zhuangist from envisioning a more effective way to enlarge such a personal space into a public space of freedom so that more people can enjoy and thrive in it. Such a public access to the space of personal freedom cannot be accomplished by a moral agent’s self-cultivation alone.

In order to do this, a social and political solution would be required to solve the problem of personal space. That is, instead of seeing it only as a personal effort, which is precisely a weakness in the traditional Zhuangist project, there needs to be a political solution to the problem of personal space. If such a move, or at least imaginaire, is possible for modern Zhuangists, they can certainly embrace some idea of political rights as the institutional guarantor of an individual’s personal freedom against the interference by other people as well as the state. Put differently, for a Zhuangist breakthrough in the political and social arena, there needs to be some political creativity in their imagination first, instead of simply acquiescing to the political reality of the day or just dismissing politics as an unworthy cause.⁴⁴⁸

But this politics can start from an ethic of interdependence, rather than a solidarity from difference. Tan, summarizing her interpretation of Guo Xiang, a commentator to the Zhuangzi, writes:

[M]y aim has been to show that freedom is something we achieve and realize. The notion that a subject is born with it, and that one can return to it by isolating oneself from others, would be a strange idea, not just to Guo Xiang but to most Chinese philosophers. Rather, freedom is frail, complex and fragile, and from our philosophical exposition, we see that—despite romantic ideations of individual libertarianism—only the kind of freedom that is collectively attained through radical dependence can be worth having. Self-cultivation, in as much as it focuses on the self, is something that cannot be achieved in isolation from others. Guo Xiang’s intercausal account of the process of existence, as well as the epistemological silence that is required of us in order to be able to properly listen and interact with the world, are key to understanding our inherent connection to our cosmos, to each other, and ultimately our pursuit of freedom.⁴⁴⁹

Is “our connection to our cosmos, to each other” not reminiscent of inyeon? To conclude, here are a couple passages from the Zhuangzi. The first is on friendship, without identity:

子桑戶、孟子反、子琴張三人相與友，曰：「孰能相與於無相與，相為於無相為？孰能登天遊霧，撓挑無極，相忘以生，無所終窮？」三人相視而笑，莫逆於心，遂相與友。⁴⁵⁰

Sir Berrydoor, the elder Sir Reversal, and Sir Zitherspread came together in friendship, saying, “Who can be together in their very not being together, doing something for one another by doing nothing for one another? Who can climb up upon the heavens, roaming on the mists, twisting and turning round and round without limit, living their lives in mutual forgetfulness, never coming to an end?” The three of them looked at each other and burst out laughing, feeling complete concord, and thus did they become friends.⁴⁵¹

The second is on pleasure, without status:

誠有善無有哉？今俗之所為與其所樂，吾又未知樂之果樂邪，果不樂邪？吾觀夫俗之所樂，舉群趣者，誙誙然如將不得已，而皆曰樂者，吾未之樂也，亦未之不樂也。果有樂無有哉？吾以無為誠樂矣，又俗之所大苦也。故曰：「至樂無樂，至譽無譽。」⁴⁵²

How could I possibly know whether what the common run of men identify as “pleasure” is indeed pleasurable or not? Whenever I contemplate the conventional sorts of pleasures and the herd’s pursuits, all I see is those people scrambling and dodging around, seemingly unable to get a grip on themselves. Still, they all, to a person, would identify this sort of pursuit as “pleasurable.” I do not know whether to regard this as a pleasure or not. In the end, is there such a thing as pleasure or not? I regard activities without overt pleasures as true pleasures, certainly, but this mode of action is precisely what conformists find a bitter pill to swallow. Hence my saying, “The greatest pleasure is no [conventional] pleasure, and the greatest fame, no fame.”⁴⁵³

Isn’t this how to live a normal life? Time for some Chinese roast duck!