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Summary
Summary
One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow Folk, does more than collect a decade's worth of cult-reputation essays--it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.
In his celebrated and prescient essay "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho," Yang explores the deranged logic of the Virginia Tech shooter. In his National Magazine Award-winning "Paper Tigers," he explores the intersection of Asian values and the American dream, and the inner torment of the child exposed to "tiger mother" parenting. And in his close reading of New York Magazine's popular Sex Diaries, he was among the first critics to take seriously today's Internet-mediated dating lives.
Yang catches these ugly trends early because he has felt at various times implicated in them, and he does not exempt himself from his radical honesty. His essays retain the thrill of discovery, the wary eye of the first explorer, and the rueful admission of the first exposed.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This incisive and provocative series of essays collects a decade's worth of Yang's writings on politics and cultural paradigms, investigating issues of race, masculinity, and the differences between Eastern and Western cultural values. The collection opens with a taut exploration of the motivations and meanings of Virginia Tech shooter Seng-Hui Cho, whom Yang views through a contentiously sympathetic lens as a desperate social outcast emasculated and ignored partly because of his Korean heritage. This is followed by "Paper Tigers," originally published in New York magazine, which profiles Asian-Americans in the public eye and considers the difficulties Asians face in the corporate world as a result of being stereotyped as "a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots." Elsewhere, Yang profiles Eddie Huang, restaurateur and author of Fresh Off the Boat (the memoir on which the ABC sitcom, which he now vociferously denounces, was based), and traces the devolution of the "seduction community" (aka pickup artists) from a relatively innocuous group of men sharing dating tips to reality television humiliation fodder. The collection closes with two essays casting a gimlet eye on the increasingly radical definitions of racism and sexism by progressives. Yang provides piercing, prickly insight into the challenges Asian-Americans face from racial and cultural bias, with literary style. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The debut book by an award-winning magazine writer offers his perceptive, personal view of the lives of Asian-Americans and other subjects.For this collection, National Magazine Award-winning essayist Yang, a columnist at Tablet, uses a title that nods to The Souls of Black Folk, the 1903 classic by W.E.B. Du Bois, which introduced the concept of the "double consciousness" of people of color in America. Several of the essays, which appeared in New York Magazine, the Guardian, Harper's, n+1, and other publications over the last decade or so, do focus on the experiences of Asian-Americans. "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho" is the author's visceral but insightful response to being assigned to write about the Virginia Tech mass killer, fueled by his resentment that the assignment came because he, like the shooter, is Korean-American. "Paper Tigers" is an acerbic, well-documented response to Amy Chua's bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which Yang points out that traditional Asian approaches to education often bring astonishingly high performances by students, but those scores and grades rarely translate into success in the highest (whitest) echelons of corporations. In "Eddie Huang Against the World," the author paints a telling portrait of the rock-star chef's struggles when his memoir Fresh Off the Boat became a TV series that be believed was filled with stereotypes. The other essays, though, range across such subjects as the "pickup artist" craze, the anxieties of dating and sex in the digital age, and profiles of hacker/activist Aaron Swartz and historian Tony Judt. Three briefer and more recent essays in the final section return to the subject of racism, especially the recent resurgence of white supremacists, but they are more abstract, and less powerful, than the earlier pieces.An uneven collection of essays that ranges from fresh analyses of the lives of Asian-Americans to smart commentaries on pop-culture phenomena but doesn't cohere around a single subject or theme. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Its title and focus inspired by W. E. B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, Yang's first book gathers 13 of his essays on race and American culture published in the last 10 years. In Yang's profile of Eddie Huang, the superstar chef and writer reckons with the contradictory experience of selling the network television rights to his memoir, Fresh Off the Boat (2013). Yang also profiles Aaron Swartz, the Reddit founder who killed himself while under indictment for allegedly stealing academic articles to make them free for all, and prolific public intellectual Tony Judt as he adjusts his mind to the devastating effects of ALS on his body. Yang's piece on the internet-born, theory-based, jargon-centric pickup-artist community shocks as much as it did in 2008. Yang won a National Magazine Award for "Paper Tigers," his essay on Asian Americans' success in earning scholarships and the "Bamboo Ceiling" that nonetheless bars them from leadership positions. The essays from 2016 and 2017 concern white supremacy. Yang writes with elegance and a fearless interest in the uncommon and unsayable.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight. (Simon & Schuster, $37.50.) Blight's monumental biography describes the context that enabled an escaped slave to become an adviser to President Lincoln and one of the 19th century's greatest figures. Unlike Douglass's own autobiographies, it also recounts his complex relationships with the women in his life. THE SOULS OF YELLOW FOLK: Essays, by Wesley Yang. (Norton, $24.95.) Three essays in this collection mine the question of Asian-American identity. Yang emphasizes the invisibility he often feels, and tries to enter the minds of people like Seung-Hui Cho, who killed more than 30 people at Virginia Tech in 2007. THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA PLATH: Volume 2, 1956-1963, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil. (HarperCollins, $45.) This volume, which spans the period of Plath's marriage until her death, includes more than a dozen letters to her therapist, revealing the hurt and humiliation that fed her final, furious poems. THE NOVEL OF FERRARA, by Giorgio Bassani. Translated by Jamie McKendrick. (Norton, $39.95.) Best known for "The Garden of the Finzi Continis," Bassani retrofits his novellas and stories into a sprawling portrait of an Italian Jewish community destroyed by the historical hatreds unleashed by World War II. INKLING, by Kenneth Oppel. Illustrated by Sydney Smith. (Knopf, $17.99; ages 8 to 12.) The son of a creatively blocked artist tries to work with a magical ink blot to help his dad, but the blot has a mind of its own in this astonishing novel about how we make art and connect with family. THE WALL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BOOK, written and illustrated by Jon Agee. (Dial, $17.99; ages 4 to 8.) A brick wall lies in the middle of each spread in this deceptively simple picture book. A young knight is glad to be protected from the scary stuff on the other side, until a flood carries him over and he sees that there's nothing to fear, and plenty of fun. NOWHERE BOY, by Katherine Marsh. (Roaring Brook, $16.99; ages 10 to 14.) In this hopeful, elegant novel, a Syrian teenager escaping the civil war that killed his family makes it to Brussels, where he befriends a lonely American boy who finds a way to hide and support him for nine months. DOOR, by JiHyeon Lee. (Chronicle, $17.99; ages 4 to 8.) This remarkable wordless picture book bursts with buoyant energy as a boy finds the key to a long-unopened door and makes his way from drabness to a joyful, magical land. DRY, by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman. (Simon & Schuster, $18.99; ages 12 and up.) This propulsive action thriller, set at a time when Southern California has run out of water, explores the price of our collective blindness to impending climate disasters. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Library Journal Review
Yang's debut collection of 13 previously published essays offers a sense of why he's becoming one of the most important commentators on race in North America. Topics range from the "bamboo ceiling" to Seung-Hui Cho's assault on Virginia Tech and microagressions of white supremacy to profiles of chef/author Eddie Huang, political scientist Francis Fukuyama, entrepreneur Aaron Swartz, and historian Tony Judt. The spotlight on race is disrupted, however, with pieces on modern life, including articles about online dating and technology that don't always relate. Yang's style mixes his personal history with explorations of race, gender, and sexuality and echoes the writing of W.E.B. Du Bois; his interest in the historical context of Asians in America mirrors Du Bois's thoughts as well. Yang is best when describing the Asian American experience, yet several writings diverge from this focus. VERDICT While the narrative is strong, the selection and organization feels haphazard. Overall, though, this work serves as an introduction to a writer of significant promise.-John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| Part I | |
| 1 The Face of Seung-Hui Cho | p. 3 |
| 2 Paper Tigers | p. 29 |
| 3 Eddie Huang Against the World | p. 61 |
| Part II | |
| 4 The Life and Afterlife of Aaron Swartz | p. 81 |
| 5 The Liveliest Mind in New York | p. 100 |
| 6 The Terrorist Search Engine | p. 117 |
| 7 On Francis Fukuyama | p. 134 |
| Part III | |
| 8 Inside the Box | p. 145 |
| 9 On Reading the Sex Diaries | p. 152 |
| 10 Game Theory | p. 168 |
| Part IV | |
| 11 We Out Here | p. 191 |
| 12 Is It OK to Be White? | p. 198 |
| 13 What Is White Supremacy? | p. 207 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 217 |