by Wesley Yang
THE SOULS OF YELLOW FOLK
Essays
WESLEY YANG
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York | London
To my wife, Erika Kawalek Yang, who is a model of the strength and integrity I hope to inculcate into our daughter, Vita Yang, with faith that such will be sufficient to confront the world depicted in the pages that follow.
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I
1. The Face of Seung-Hui Cho
2. Paper Tigers
3. Eddie Huang Against the World
PART II
4. The Life and Afterlife of Aaron Swartz
5. The Liveliest Mind in New York
6. The Terrorist Search Engine
7. On Francis Fukuyama
PART III
8. Inside the Box
9. On Reading the Sex Diaries
10. Game Theory
PART IV
11. We Out Here
12. Is It OK to Be White?
13. What Is White Supremacy?
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
More than a decade ago, an editor at the literary journal n+1 asked if I wanted to write about the largest mass murder in American history, which had occurred a few days previously at a college in Virginia. I resented the implication of his request. The implication was that there was something about that episode that would be particularly salient to me. I resented the implication because it was true.
The implication was that we shared something in common, the Virginia Tech killer and I. We were both the children of immigrants from Korea. We were both Asian men in America. Some things that were true then about Asian men in America remain true today: We have the highest educational attainment of any group in America. We have the lowest rate of incarceration. And we have the highest median income in America. So those were a couple of the things I shared in common with the Virginia Tech shooter. We were both part of that fortunate fraction of the American public enrolled in higher education, a part of a busily striving cohort slated to earn a comfortable living in a society that increasingly rewarded the educated and punished the uneducated. We both lived in a society that welcomed diversity, propagandized on its behalf, prided itself on transcending its origins in slavery and genocide. We were both the children of immigrants in a nation of immigrants.
Was that all I had in common with the Virginia Tech killer? The implication I resented was that I would know something, just a little—or maybe a little bit more than a little—about what animated the Virginia Tech killer. I would know this simply because of what we shared in common that extended beyond the high rate of educational attainment, and the low rate of incarceration, that characterized the category of people like ourselves in the aggregate. What we shared in common was that we both had Asian faces.
On the one hand, the Virginia Tech killer was mentally ill. I did not know what it was like to suffer from a clinical condition that culminates in an act of destructive malevolence on a grand scale. On the other hand, the Virginia Tech killer had succumbed to resentment, a much more widely distributed condition, and maybe one that I knew something about. Is that what you’re implying? I demanded to know of my editor. I did not receive a reply.
What we were presumed to share in common—and this was the implication that I resented, because it was both true and unspeakable—was the peculiar burden of nonrecognition, of invisibility, that is a condition of being an Asian man in America. You could say, as many have before and since, that we are unused to seeing such faces in the movies and on TV, which was true then, though such a grievance was a poor proxy for the deeper injury that it named: that this face was in our culture a kind of cipher, a void, and all the more so to those of us who had to confront it gazing back at us from a reflected surface.
Was this a real condition or just my own private hallucination? By this I mean something that has in recent years escaped from the obscurity in which it was once shrouded, even as it was always the most salient of all facts, the one most readily on display, the thing that was unspeakable precisely because it need never be spoken: that as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were by default unlovable and unloved; that you were presumptively a nobody, a mute and servile figure, distinguishable above all by your total incapacity to threaten anyone; that you were many laudable things that the world might respect and reward, but that you were fundamentally powerless to affect anyone in a way that would make you either loved or feared.
What was the epistemological status of such an extravagant assertion? Could it possibly be true? Could it survive empirical scrutiny? It was a dogmatic statement at once unprovable and unfalsifiable. It was a paranoid statement about the way others regarded you that couldn’t possibly be true in any literal sense. It had no real truth value, except that under certain conditions, one felt it with every fiber of one’s being to be true. The warm light of day seemed to annul it, reducing this sense to the most lukewarm of all personal conundrums, “Asian-American identity”; the racial grievance least likely to receive, or to deserve, any public recognition, the most readily treated with ironic ridicule. The dark inwardness of nightmare could conjure it back to life: Seung-Hui Cho was the projection of that nightmare, even as he was also a real person who took actual lives.
The bulk of the 10,000-word essay that I wrote was composed in Gmail in one feverish night. My editors and I then proceeded to spend the better part of the next six weeks trying to qualify and contextualize it, to soften its hard edges, and indigestible elements, to bring order and structure and coherence to its digressive dream logic. In the end, we decided to retain the piece’s rawness and leave its many loose ends dangling.
It was in many ways an indefensible piece of writing—sprawling, fragmented, bristling with insinuations in the place of argument. It took monstrous liberties, making Cho and his transgressions into a proxy, and a foil. It was about the banality of radical evil, and a strange compound of resentment and entitlement that had accrued in the heart of one young man and caused him to wage war against being itself. It read the manifesto that he circulated to the media in advance of his act as one expression of a fantasy of a mass insurrection that he would summon into being through his act. The manifesto posited the existence of an army of other losers like himself, denied recognition and rendered invisible, who would someday attain class consciousness and leave behind their abjection through violent, coordinated action to subdue the world to their will, or die fighting. And it seems to me today that it bears revisiting primarily as part of the prehistory of our present moment.
In the successive decade, we’ve grown accustomed to a news cycle punctuated by such acts of motiveless malignity; typically perpetrated by young men, sometimes inspired by religion, sometimes by race, sometimes by the hatred of women, sometimes by the intersection of each and all. All the rhetorical moves and countermoves in which various partisans frame these eruptions as part of their political agendas are by now routinized, virtually algorithmic. Some blame toxic masculinity, the thwarted entitlement of men; others the ready availability of guns; still others the insufficiency of mental health care. Some invoke the specter of nihilism.
I think about the struggle for recognition. In the successive decade, we’ve seen the power of the print media and its responsible gatekeepers broken by its digital successor, and the creation of a virtual agon in which the demand for recognition by the hitherto subordinate—by women and minorities—becomes a bid for precedence against those who had always taken it for granted. In the successive decade, the struggle against “racism”
and “sexism” shifted rhetorically to a struggle against “whiteness” and “masculinity.” This rhetorical shift may have started as the contagious adoption of trendy lingo on social media, but the underlying concept has spread along with the verbal tic: that there is no whiteness independent of domination of nonwhites, and there is no masculinity whose constitutive predicate is not the domination of women. There is therefore no such thing as reforming, accommodating, or coming to terms with either. No one can hope to live free of oppression so long as these categories of being have not been eradicated.
We’ve seen the emergence of a party of white male resentment which, through coordinated online action seeks to colonize minds and subdue the world to its will. This struggle over the racial and sexual constitution is at once covert, part of the hidden substructure of national politics and our collective life, and obscenely omnipresent, right out there in the open for all to see. My interest has always been in the place where sex and race are both obscenely conspicuous and yet consciously suppressed, largely because of the liminal place that the Asian man occupies in the midst of it: an “honorary white” person who will always be denied the full perquisites of whiteness; an entitled man who will never quite be regarded or treated as a man; a nominal minority whose claim to be a “person of color” deserving of the special regard reserved for victims is taken seriously by no one. In an age characterized by the politics of resentment, the Asian man knows something of the resentment of the embattled white man, besieged on all sides by grievances and demands for reparation, and something of the resentments of the rising social-justice warrior, who feels with every fiber of their being that all that stands in the way of the attainment of their thwarted ambitions is nothing so much as a white man. Tasting of the frustrations of both, he is denied the entitlements of either.
This condition of marginality is both the cause and the effect of his erasure—and perhaps the source of his claim to his centrality, indeed his universality. That lies at the end of a cultural project that has scarcely even begun; at best, we can sketch the contours of what that might look like at some future date that might never arrive.
THE SOULS OF YELLOW FOLK
PART I
1
THE FACE OF SEUNG-HUI CHO
THE FIRST SCHOOL SHOOTER of the 1990s was an Asian boy who played the violin. I laughed when I heard an account of the rampage from my friend Ethan Gooding, who had survived it. Ethan forgave me my reaction. I think he knew by then that most people, facing up to a real atrocity, as opposed to the hundreds they’d seen on TV, didn’t know how to act.
Ethan had left New Providence High School in central New Jersey for the progressive utopia of Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Simon’s Rock was a school for high school juniors and seniors ready for college-level work, a refuge for brilliant misfits, wounded prodigies, and budding homosexuals. Ethan was a pretty bright kid, brighter than me, but mostly he was a budding homosexual. One day in gym class at New Providence, Ethan made a two-handed set shot from half-court using a kickball while dressed in buttercup-yellow short-shorts and earned the nickname “Maurice.” This was not a reference to E. M. Forster’s frank novel of gay love, but to Maurice Cheeks, the great Philadelphia 76ers point guard. The unintended resonance was savored by those few of us who could discern it. Ethan had a striking pre-Raphaelite pallor set off against flaming red cheeks and lips with the puckered epicene aspect that speaking the French language too young will impart to a decent American mouth. None of this in itself meant, necessarily, that he was going to become gay, but then—well, he was.
Gay-bashing was less of a hate crime back then and more of a patriotic duty, particularly in a race-segregated, heavily Catholic suburb like New Providence. At Youth & Government, the YMCA-sponsored mock legislature attended by suck-ups with Napoleon complexes, the “governor” from our school introduced a bill to “build an island of garbage off of the Jersey Shore” where we could “put all the homosexuals.” We all chortled along, none more loudly than the closet cases in our midst. It was the kind of place you wanted to flee so badly that you trained yourself to forget the impulse.
But then there was a place called New York, only a half-hour’s drive away. We made our first anxious forays into New York City nightlife, Ethan and I and Jasper Chung, the other Korean kid from my high school (himself a governor of the mock legislature, and also a closet homosexual). We tried to get into the back room of the Limelight, where the real party was happening. “Try to look cute,” Ethan told me, brushing my hair with a concerned, appraising look. Then he sucked in his cheeks, which I guess was his way of looking cute, or at least making his face less round. It would be more than a decade and a half before I learned what a smile could do for you (it is one way to hold at bay the world’s cruelty), so I made a fish-eyed grimace in emulation of David Gahan of Depeche Mode. They never let us into the back room.
Those were the wild Peter Gatien days, when the place was still bristling with drugs and prostitution, most of which managed to pass us by. But we were assailed by a phalanx of sweaty, shirtless Long Island beefcake. Ethan would, to my frightened astonishment, meet other guys, and go off into a dark corner with them, and leave me to fend for myself, which I was not equipped to do. I’d get dehydrated and wear an anxious scowl. I would attempt some rudimentary sociological and semiotic reading of the scene that swirled all around me. I couldn’t relax.
Not that I was myself homosexual. True, my heterosexuality was notional. I wasn’t much to look at (skinny, acne-prone, brace-faced, bespectacled, and Asian), and inasmuch as I was ugly, I also had a bad personality. While Ethan was easing himself into same-sex experimentation, I was learning about the torments and transports of misanthropy. “That kid,” I remember overhearing one of the baseball players say, “is a misfit.” No one ever shoved my head in a locker, the way they did the one amber-tinted Afghani kid, or P. J., the big dumb sweet slow kid, and nobody ever pelted me with rocks, as they did Doug Urbano, who was fat and working-class (his father was a truck driver, and sometimes, when he lectured us about the vital role that truck drivers play in the American economy—they really do, you know—he was jeered). But these judgments stayed with me.
Jasper once told me that I was “essentially unlovable.” I’ve always held that observation close to my heart, turning to it often. It’s true of some people—that there’s no reason anyone should love or care about them, because they aren’t appealing on the outside, and that once you dig into the real person beneath the shell (if, for some obscure if not actively perverse reason, you bother), you find the real inner ugliness. I knew lots of people like that—unloved because unlovable. Toward them I was always cold. Maybe I held them at arm’s length to disguise from myself our shared predicament. And so, by trying to disguise something from yourself, you declare it to everyone else—because part of what makes a person unlovable is his inability to love.
One day we were hanging out with Ethan in Jasper’s room over winter break. Ethan was telling us all about Simon’s Rock, and—this might be an invented memory; it feels real, yet I can’t rely on it; the very feeling of reality makes me distrust it—Ethan told me that I reminded him of this weird Asian guy at his school, whom he then proceeded to describe. Ethan, cherubic complexion notwithstanding, could actually be pretty mean. He was proud of his ability to wound with a well-chosen phrase coined in an instant, which is not to say that I didn’t aspire to the same facility. It’s just that he really had it. In any case, Wayne, my double, was an Asian boy ill at ease in the world and he had a chip on his shoulder. His father had been an officer in the Taiwanese air force, and his mother had been a Suzuki-method violin teacher. For a time, Wayne had been among the best violinists in the world in his age group. He was headed along the familiar track of Asian-American assimilation. By the time he arrived at Simon’s Rock, he had other things to prove.
The gay guys liked to tease Wayne and intimate that he might be one of them. It was goo
d-natured ribbing, gentle to the extent that it was not tinged with gay malice; and who could begrudge them their share of malice—a little or a lot—given the world they were entering? On top of everything else, an incurable illness spread by the kind of sex you were already having or else aching to have was killing off a whole generation of your predecessors. You could get a rise out of Wayne, and he deserved it: here he was at this place where people were finally free to be who they really were, and who he really was turned out to be someone who didn’t want other people to be free to be who they were. He had fled Montana only to discover his continuing allegiance to its mores. And who knows, conceivably he was even a bit bi-curious. “How tough are you?” Wayne’s friends used to ask him, egging him on. “I’m tough!” he would shout.
By now the story of Wayne Lo has been well told, though he has not become a figure of American legend. (His certified authentic “murderabilia” drawings were fetching just $7.50 on his website at the time his jailers shut it down.) On Monday, December 14, 1992, a package arrived for him in the mail from a North Carolina company called Classic Arms. It contained two hundred rounds of ammunition that Wayne had ordered using his mother’s credit card. The school’s dean held the package, and, after questioning Wayne about what was inside it (Wayne assured him that it was a Christmas gift), gave it back to him. Liberals! They’ll hand over the ammunition that their enemies will use to kill them.
Ethan told his version of the story to Jasper and me over hamburgers at the A&W Restaurant at the Short Hills Mall. Wayne had started hanging out with some other students who wanted to rebel against the orthodoxy of difference at Simon’s Rock. They listened to Rush Limbaugh and joked about killing people. They were suspicious of Jews and blacks and homosexuals and . . . did they make an official exception for Asians? Wayne wrote a paper proposing a solution to the AIDS crisis: Kill them all. He lacked the imagination to come up with the island of garbage disposal. Then, according to psychiatrists hired by his defense, Wayne was overtaken by a “somatic hallucination”—not heard, but directly experienced in his body—of God urging him to punish the sinners of Simon’s Rock.