Jay Caspian Kang - The New York Times He was surprised how many people asked him why he left the Cond Nast title after only six months. Those questions echo louder than any other part of the book. He responds: Hell, no, Im not helping this [expletive]. Kangs list focused on a career as a writer. Even though his paycheck in advertising was much higher than anything he made working full-time in journalism, the career and location change couldnt be permanent: Kangs now-wife Casey was pregnant, and she didnt want to move away from their home in Brooklyn to join him in Portland. The title of the book hangs on the hierarchy of influence: I am talking about the loneliness that comes from attempts to assimilate, whether by melting into the white middle class or by creating an elaborate, yet ultimately derivative, identity By mimicking the language of the Black struggle in America, we hope to become legible as a comrade, a fellow traveler, or a person of color. Theres an implicit apology to this kind of pleading: We know we dont have it as bad as you, but we also arent white and need a way to talk about it. He refers obliquely to our fellow minorities he means Black people who look upon our race work with a mixture of bemusement and suspicion. Blackness, in Kangs telling, equals real coherence, real grievance. How effectively do the totems of the left actually address a rapidly changing and increasingly economically precarious population? Binary thinking in politics, race and inequality has distracted us from processing everything else that takes place in the country. The loneliest thing about the book is the way he walls off Asian America, framing us as the only group struggling to define itself. Despite controversy over the book, The Loneliest Americans is inspiring dialogue about how Asian Americans of more privileged positions can show up and avoid further marginalizing the most vulnerable members of their ethnic group. People across the nation now live in increasingly multiethnic communities, and their conceptions of race no longer conform to basic racial binary politics in which one side (the Republicans) upholds white supremacy and the other side (Democrats) fights for all us little guys. And then it sort of takes over. Then in early August, The New York Times Magazine published Not Without My Brothers, Kangs feature on the death of Chinese-American college freshman Michael Deng and the culture of Asian-American fraternities. Declaring a national day for abortion rights would send a strong message. Want more stories like this one? I would always think of, Who is this person as a writer, and how do we get them to the point theyre the best version of themselves?. [1] He says he spent more than 40 hours a week playing poker at the Commerce Casino during this time. Viral outrage usually requires sustained propulsion: One video usually isnt enough because it can be written off as an isolated incident, but two videos released just days apart, both showing horrifying acts of violence, can create a narrative. In the fall of 2018, I spent a few days with Yukong Zhao, a Chinese immigrant businessman who had worked on several Asian-American activist campaigns, whether protesting Jimmy Kimmels show or supporting Asian anti-discrimination initiatives against prestigious universities. Joon Lee read Kangs work for years and decided to go into sports writing in college. Damning them further, he claims that they want it: The assimilating Asian, in other words, wants to become as white as white will allow.. I dont think Jay reads mostly white people.. I have viewed the history of my people through a keyhole and understood, in some deep way, that I was of them but did not fully understand them.. I could see how neatly the details of our lives lined up, he writes of the MRAZNs. The last good novel I read was Eugene Lims Dear Cyborgs.) and an intensely competitive person. The field of Asian American identity writing is troubled. Do you hate the white liberals you never really trusted anyway, or do you hate the fancy Asian Americans with their carefully laid out paths into whiteness?. Courtesy photo. Alongside 300 SAG actors fighting for a fair contract. The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang | Goodreads Kangs attention to diverse voices isnt a recent phenomenon. Maybe one day journalism could be replaced with an immense surveillance state with a GPT-4 plug-in. And there are writers who argue that Asian-Americans fall outside the accepted discourse about race in this country that theres just no available language to discuss bad things that might happen to them. He somberly looks straight at the camera with a sense of sadness and exhaustion in his eyes. New YorkMagazine. Everything reads exactly the same to me.. I hate Asians. As the Chinese man begins to despair and cry, the man filming shoves the camera in his face and mocks him. Liu. I could tell you that during a 36-hour period in July of 2006, I lost $18,000 in Las Vegas. Its baked into Cathy Park Hongs brave but imperfect Minor Feelings, in which she puts her dignity on the line to confront it. In the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a dedicated group of community organizers, activists and academics banded together to address what the press had called the Black-Korean conflict. Their work, which included a march through Koreatown demanding peace and the publication of several studies, aimed to tell a story of mutual misunderstanding and media distortion. ", There were "those who wrote straightforward narratives about oppression and whose work should be studied through an anthropological lens. To solve the problem, we must first learn how to talk about it. After the homeless young man was killed on the subway, there has been a rare flash of national attention on the issue. Paramount+ Takes Aim at More Streaming Casualties. [1] He has remarked that "Surviving cancer can cleanse the soul, sure, but once you're left facing the rest of your life, a patient's vision can tunnel down to a list of demands. Writing about race now has become the racial anxieties of that class of people, and I just find it insanely boring., Still, he admitted to the audience that his Korean-American identity does sometime help him in his work, such as being able to speak in Korean like a 5-year-old to the victims of the Oikos school shooting or during the impeachment protests in South Korea. They will need to clear headcount spots to do this and they will quietly start purging the same writers they hired so enthusiasticallywith rousing rounds of Tweet applausetwo years ago.. So a couple weeks ago, he's a college professor and he's preparing a lecture for a class. One area of inquiry into this mismatch between a binary way of thinking and the actual American population was education, where an increasing focus on equity has not only fallen out of line with families of all backgrounds but also triggered a nascent backlash movement, not just among the anti-critical race theory crusaders but also among Asian American populations in cities like New York and San Francisco. A new documentary about the acclaimed video-game auteur reveals very little. He was very good at spotting talent on top of everything else.. This time, there is no easy line to draw from the history of a Korean merchant class setting up in Black neighborhoods to a girl lying dead on the floor of a convenience store; no buildings are being torched in retaliation. The new, reported memoir explores how AAPI communities miss opportunity to show solidarity. One can feel the understandable desire to reroute the conversation to safer and more familiar conclusions. The Loneliest Americans, Jay Caspian Kang, Crown, 272 pp., , October 2021 The Loneliest Americans , Jay Caspian Kang, Crown, 272 pp., $27, October 2021 At the time, I could not put a finger on the . Here are some tips. to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. The Creep of History Too much focus on the sins of the past can distract us from the injustices of the present. The media is so overwhelmingly upper-middle class. His on-air look is pretty simple and not much different than his non-work look: T-shirts, button-downs with the sleeves rolled up, black casual pants, and sneakers. Most people seem to agree that something should be done to protect kids from what sure looks like an addictive product. He underwent two surgeries and a round of chemotherapy and will need a daily dose of thyroid hormone for the rest of his life. Instead of the capitulations and endless contextualizing offered up by progressive, second-generation Asian-Americans, he and his fellow activists simply asked: What about us? I dont know anyone in media who doesnt come from rich parents. These resources are valuable, but they also use as their comparison point spotty and famously unreliable official hate crime statistics from law enforcement. The killing of a tech executive reveals the cycle of outrage that puts enormous pressure on progressive district attorneys. The book was panned by Publishers Weekly, whose review called Kangs voice at once glib and vitriolic but also acknowledged his gift for snide zingers as well as un-PC digressions on race and Koreanness. Kirkus Review was more positive, calling the structure of the Pynchon-esque tale loose to the point of near-collapse but that it also contained serious musing on gentrification and racism (particularly toward Asians), and surprisingly affecting observations. Kirkus added, Smart, funny and eager to fly its freak flag. The Los Angeles Times called Kang an author worth watching., In April 2014, Kang left Grantland to edit The New Yorkers science-and-technology blog Elements. Then there's those who "engaged in the serious business of literature.". But because the recent attacks seem aimed at anyone who looks Asian, they have translated across the language, country-of-origin, and perhaps most important, class lines that usually separate one group of Asians from another. It was like summer camp, says Rafe Bartholomew, a friend of Kangs, FreeDarko contributor, and a fellow Grantland editor. Even if the point of battle rap is trading increasingly offensive insults, the whole thing functions on a certain system of trust. For Kang, the most enjoyable aspects of his positions at Grantland and then at The New Yorker were finding young writers, figuring out story ideas during meetings, and collaborating with other editors. And the talents.. [10] Kang has said that he wanted to write the book about Korean American male anger and reflect on how Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shooting, was also Korean. Kangs assessment of his performance in other sports is just as blistering: My swimming stroke, which once wasnt half bad, now looks like what might happen if you stapled a pair of flapping hands onto a filing cabinet and threw it into the ocean., In Writing Waves, an essay about his years of daily surfing as much as it is a review of William Finnegans book Barbarian Days, Kang wrote, I concluded that writing about surfing was impossible because surfing elicited happiness, and it is impossible to write about happiness.. "How do we define that term?" Its not like life as a minority was really easy before Trump, and now its really hard. [15], In the spring of 2020, Kang began co-hosting the podcast Time to Say Goodbye with E. Tammy Kim and Andrew B. In his HBO profile photo, Kang wears a bright blue T-shirt and sports a close-cropped haircut with a little bit of gray. I can name, like, 20 more successful people that I talk to regularly. Sara is co-author of the book A House in the Sky. All of this, from the novel to the Times to Grantland, happened in less than two weeks. By Jay Caspian Kang May 23, 2023 Battle rap is both a reflection of a specific reality and, for its fans, a fantasy for how we wish we could talk about identity. So he walks around a bit. The former Fox host is embracing his new outsider status with Tucker on Twitter.. Where is the outcry for us? There have also been reports that suggest that these attacks be placed within the context of rising crime nationwide, especially in large cities. "I felt a few years ago that I was starting to come to some conclusions I felt confident in and I don't think these conclusions necessarily need to be held up as statues," Kang said. Some of the politics here look a lot like hang-ups. Jay Caspian Kang takes backlash to provocative book about Asian American identity politics in stride Brandon Yu November 2, 2021 Updated: November 3, 2021, 7:14 am Jay Caspian Kang is. Hes written about the superiority of a particular baby stroller, and on why he thinks the term Asian-American is mostly meaningless. His features often include deep reflections on his identity and his past, and humorous references to his quirky range of interests. Doing away with it would change the purpose of school itself. Kang is in a weird position, for all of his accomplishments. Expanding AmeriCorps could help us solve a number of pressing individual, social and economic problems. Its certainly worth arguing that these shifts are small and largely inconsequential, given that immigrants tend to live in big cities in solidly blue states, but what I see going forward is that as immigrant populations spread out to the suburbs and beyond, they will become less reliably Democrat for the very simple fact that their neighbors and communities will not be in blue strongholds. This project was always supposed to be free-flowing and open to my own interpretation. What he sees of their world afflicts him. And I thought about it and realized, I think Im mad about that, and thats why Ive been so mad about media diversity. Given the immensity of the alarm over Trumps plans, its difficult to really fault anyone for not fine-tuning all their understanding of the country. "[1] He asserted that Asian-Americans "have been conditioned our entire lives to imagine White," and that "Like Jin before him, what Jeremy Lin represents is a re-conception of our bodies, a visible measure of how the emasculated Asian-American body might measure up to the mythic legion of Big Black supermen. We didnt pay, so I dont know why he wanted to write for it, Friedman adds. "[21], Kang is married and lives in Berkeley, California. Critics argue that while the sentiment of his argument may be well-intentioned, Kang dismisses decades of academic research and activism that centers the most marginalized AAPI communities in making it. White anxiety about student performance may be driving educational changes. Jay Caspian Kang hard at work with his writing assistant, hisdog Chito, a Chihuahua mix. The recent attacks on Asian-Americans have unearthed the contradictions and questions beneath Americas impoverished understanding of race. For the rest of the book, this group, people like himself, are the ones hes referring to when he talks about Asian Americans. Perhaps more than those of any other network on television, the stars of Fox News are more or less interchangeable. Hes not an Asian American abolitionist more of a reform guy, really, and his solutions are hard to pin down. Over the past month, as reports of attacks on Asian-Americans, particularly Asian-American elders, have circulated, a new generation of scholars, writers and celebrities have tried to figure out not just what to do, but what exactly is even happening, and how to discuss it. [22] His daughter was born in January 2017.[1]. The same day, The New York Times Magazine wanted Kang to write 3,500 words about poker for $2 a word.
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