The Loneliest Americans
by Jay Caspian Kang (Crown, $27)
“Yes, that sit-up-and-huh title is intended to be provocative,” said Christopher Borrelli in the Chicago Tribune. Magazine journalist Jay Caspian Kang, the accomplished 40-something son of accomplished Korean immigrant parents, fully understands that he is risking being dismissed as selfhating when he claims that he belongs to the group that gets the measliest reward from contemporary identity politics. The people who refer to themselves as AsianAmericans, he writes, tend to be welleducated, middle-class, second-generation immigrants who are acceding to America’s demand that they erase their cultural heritage while at the same time they embrace a derivative hyphenated identity to acknowledge they’re being still set apart. “It’s a messy, frustrating, thoughtful, confusing, illuminating argument—all at once.” But Kang’s book is very hard to put down, and maybe even harder to shake.
In the autobiographical sections of his book, Kang “displays tremendous honesty and courage,” said S. Nathan Park in Foreign Policy. Early on, he sketches what his story might have sounded like if he’d written it as a conventional immigrant memoir: “On the day my mother was born, the skies over the 38th parallel lit up red.” From there, he promises, he’d be able to line up enough anecdotes about bias and struggle and family triumph to assure readers that the American dream still works. But in subsequent chapters, he moves around the country to probe stories about Asian-American identity, and “at each location, he sees the same issue: Any attempt at a unifying narrative for Asian-Americans, however well intended, falls apart at the slightest touch.” The problem, he concludes, is built into history: The skilled professionals who arrived from Asia in a wave after 1965 have had little connection with existing working-class Asian enclaves.
Kang can be a thrilling writer; “he can also be annoying as hell,” said Madeline Leung Coleman in New York magazine. Though he is right that the term “Asian-American” is too vague to be useful, he carelessly picks fights, argues in circles, and offers no solutions other than a half-formed notion that middle-class Asian-Americans should stop worrying about the slights they suffer and worry instead about helping out the AsianAmerican working poor. Still, his angst feels useful, said Marella Gayla in The New Yorker. Kang’s compulsion to undermine the Asian-American label “might be best understood as a resistance to the broader cultural tendency to see oneself in everyone and everything.” Maybe, he’s suggesting, the problem is building a personal politics around simply looking out for one’s own.