The Souls of Yellow Folk

June 1, 2018

National Magazine Award winner Yang makes a much-anticipated debut with his best essays on race and gender, its title echoing W.E.B. Du Bois's classic The Souls of Black Folk. Included here: Yang's much-discussed New York cover story "Paper Tigers," examining Asian values and the American Dream.

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August 15, 2018
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.

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Starred review from August 27, 2018
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.