anti wmaf wmaf club

(pt 3) discussing wmaf authors, wmaf literature, and wmaf activism

This is Part B, Chapters 4-6 of a 23,000 word manifesto on contemporary Asian American culture, media, discourse, and its relationship with Whiteness. Read the intro here and Chapters 1-3 below:

you can't just call everyone an incel

---

In this section, I question what our “representation” is bringing to the table. Despite the recent deluge of that particular satirical, trenchant, sharp genre of Asian American racial commentary literature, we have not truly rejected the White gaze. I’ll discuss the contemporary Asian American author as a class formation and Whiteness/WMAF as compulsory plot conflicts, evident in the hypersexualization of the WMAF protagonist in Jessamine Chan’s School for Good Mothers and the pedantic “White people bad” motif in R.F. Kuang’s Babel.

By consistently framing conflict as White vs Asian instead of exploring intersectionality and intra-community friction, Asian Americans inadvertently center Whiteness. We build our identity in the negative space of Whiteness and justify an assimilation where Asian Americanness cannot exist without the implicit approval of the “special” White people that we allow to consume our culture. Instead of exhausting our energy throwing ourselves at the boundaries of White acceptance, Asian Americans can lean on each other to understand our many conflicting identities, grapple with our status as both oppressed and oppressor, and work towards collective liberation from White supremacy.

• Part B, Ch 4: The new wave of satirical, daring wmaf authors.

• Part B, Ch 5: Is wmaf activism?

• Part B, Ch 6: Who are we? Saying the quiet parts out loud.

---

4/ the new wave of satirical, daring wmaf authors

We are living in a time of abundance of Asian American literature, which we love to celebrate. Interestingly, this is also a time of abundance of Asian writers in WMAF relationships, a cause worth celebration for those who honor mixed-race relationships as indicators of female autonomy in our post-racial world. It is also a phenomenon to investigate.

Why does it feel like our society’s idea of “realistic,” contemporary Asian American representation is actually just elite-educated WMAF representation?

The newest wave of Asian American literature wants to tell Asian American stories on our own terms. After all, the first generation of Asian American novels like The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, and Wild Swans by Jung Chang, represented their stories using the romantic language of mythicism, fairy tales,¹ and words like “powerful,” “sensitive,” and “inspirational”² — they have since been criticized for reinforcing harmful stereotypes about Asians.

Instead, the 2020s-ish generation relies on hard-hitting, self-aware commentary that suggests an unwillingness to pander to the White reader. The covers of books like Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou, and School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan abound with praise like “interrogating,” “whip smart,” “penetrating,” “terrifying,” “searing,” “darkly comic,” “fever dream,” “lacerating,” and “scorchingly honest.”³

Look closer though, and you’ll notice that Asian American book clubs are brimming with one particular kind of Asian American author, and one particular kind of Asian American story. Many recent novels are written by East Asian female authors with White partners and often star a 1.5/2nd gen East Asian protagonist navigating the White world (often academic or professional) with her own White partner.

In his book Asian American Fiction After 1965, Christopher T. Fan contextualizes the typicality of a subset of recently-debuted Chinese American female authors. They often “hail directly from backgrounds of STEM occupational concentration (sometimes their post-1965 immigrant parents’, sometimes their own)” before turning to writing, so their Asian American bildungsroman is structured by the “patriarchal dilemmas over professional identity, womanhood, and liberation…sometimes as a two cultures conflict between the arts and sciences.”⁴

Considering the context of Asian American “occupational concentration” in STEM, if we approach “the Asian American author as a class formation [and] an instance of a transnational PMC”⁵ (professional-managerial class), we can understand how “the fantasy of social assimilation via economic mobility…transforms what are largely political economic forces into the most deeply personal forms of conflict”⁶ in their novels. This fantasy/anxiety of assimilation manifests in the conflicting priorities between (White) boyfriend and (Asian) girlfriend or immigrant parent and child. Social assimilation into White America, whether through career-building or relationship-building, requires a certain capacity for Whiteness that these authors (in their real lives) and their protagonists (in their stories) must navigate.

Think of it as a venn diagram, WMAF authors on one side, WMAF stories on the other; the union of these sets represents the vast majority of current, mainstream, celebrated Asian American stories.

Before you write me off as yet another MRAsian, consider that as of this writing, over 40 notable, published Asian American / British Asian / Asian Australian (including some 1/1.5 gen) femme authors are in a WMAF relationship:⁷

Jessamine Chan, Alexandra Chang, Elysha Chang, Jung Chang, Lan Samantha Chang, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Zen Cho, Amy Chua, Jill Damatac, Cathy Park Hong, Ling Ling Huang, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, Rachel Khong, Angie Kim, Juhea Kim, Nancy Jooyoun Kim, Maxine Hong Kingston, R.F. Kuang, Jessica J. Lee, Julia Lee, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Lyn Liao Butler, Grace Lin, Katherine Lin, Anne Liu Kellor, the late Katherine Min, Jami Nakamura Lin, Celeste Ng, Beth Nguyen, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Daphne Palasi Andreades, Patricia Park, Hyeseung Song, Andrea Stewart, Amy Tan, Thao Thai, Jia Tolentino, E.M. Tran, Esme Weijun Wang, Kathy Wang, Qian Julie Wang, Weike Wang, Jenny Xie, Jung Yun, Michelle Zauner⁸

It’s no surprise then, that navigating relationships with Whiteness and White people comes up as recurring themes in contemporary Asian American literature. Over and over, I notice two tiresome themes:⁹

1. Asian American vs. The World: Crying in H Mart, Minor Feelings, Docile, Biting the Hand, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, etc

   Asian American navigates Whiteness growing up. White people being White. Compulsory flashback to the moment she realizes she’s… different. But okay — a lot of these are memoirs so how could I blame someone for writing honestly about their own life?

2. WMAF Relationship Conflict: Disorientation, Our Missing Hearts, Real Americans, School for Good Mothers, Chemistry, You Can’t Stay Here Forever, Days of Distraction, Central Places, etc

   Relationship with White Man drives much of plot, character development, and/or racial consciousness. But okay — I’ve established that there are a lot of WMAF couples, so maybe this actually is an accurate “representation?”

But, I’d like to remind everyone that writing a book and therefore believing that you have something to add to the conversation, is ultimately a creative, personal choice. Out of all creative possibilities, why did these stories make it out of the authors’ drafts, and why did these stories get picked up by publishers?¹⁰

How did we get to a place where so many of the popular Asian American books, in some way, center conflict with White people (often men) specifically?

The authors don’t just acknowledge White supremacy, they honor White people as main characters in a non-White person’s life trials and tribulations, whether through WMAF relationships, friction with White friends, smelly lunchbox stories, or confrontations with White society.

In the following sections, I will highlight common tropes of White-Asian conflict in novels by Asian American authors.

did you know white people bad?

Many contemporary Asian American writers center Whiteness in order to reject it. Their stories are praised for being cynical, brilliantly-uncomfortable, “genre-defying,” or Model M******* M***-destroying. In reality, I feel like I’m reading the same thing about White people over and over, but these books keep winning awards and earning mentions in lists of books about anti-racism, Asian America, White supremacy.

For example, though much-loved Asian American icon, R.F. Kuang’s, recent novels Yellowface and Babel¹¹ are not specifically about contemporary Asian America, both are praised for their daring critiques of Whiteness and colonialism. However, all I understood when I read them was that Kuang does not trust us to make our own judgements about “White people bad” and needs to make sure we hear it every other sentence in case we forgot.

While Yellowface is set in contemporary USA and Babel in 19th century Oxford/China, in both books Kuang deploys an endless stream of 2020-racial-justice-Twitter jargon¹² to critique White supremacy, creates shallow characters to frame the main conflict as simply White vs. non-White,¹³ and further casts White women specifically (Juniper and Letty) as the main villains.

There are many reasons I did not like Babel, but ultimately Kuang’s contradicting obsession with historically accurate aesthetics¹⁴ and her characters’ anachronistic racial justice jargon limits her magical-alternate-history-fantasy to the same Western hegemonic worldviews it seeks to challenge.¹⁵ Kuang doesn’t explore gender/race intersectionality or conflicting loyalties amongst and within non-White communities. The plot is didactic, like a standard, digestible White vs. non-White story.

I get it, White people ruin everything. So why are we still giving them so much space in our stories?

To me, novelists that give up so much space for Whiteness, whether consciously or subconsciously, advocate for navigating Whiteness and White people’s emotions during their journey towards (liberal) racial consciousness.

While they do not spare White characters from criticism, Asian American authors (I’m not just talking about R.F. Kuang now, I’m talking about everyone) seem to build a uniformly liberal Asian identity that leans on the framework of Whiteness, rather than allowing Asianness to stand alone. Whiteness, and our individualized conflict with it, is what sells nowadays.

Maybe this is what the WMAF author needs, to decenter Whiteness through the process of writing. To them I’d say, write what you want. To you, I’d suggest you read with the context of the writer’s own identity. To myself, I’ll pass.

It’s really the lack of discourse that upsets me more than the existence of these books. If we take time to think about how the author herself exists in relation to Whiteness, we can open up nuanced dialogue about society’s expectations for both Asian men and women.

Who feels empowered to take up space? How do we criticize or praise these narratives? What decisions, lifestyles, relationships, and cultural signifiers are uplifted as a result?

desiring elite whiteness as woman of color nannies

One type of common WMAF relationship conflict is what Chris Jesu Lee dubs the “Woman-of-Color Nanny Novel,”¹⁶ in which the woman of color nanny often ends up assimilating into the elite White circle by becoming romantically involved with the White man of the heterosexual nuclear family she’s employed by.

In these plots, White women and non-White women are in direct competition with each other, White men are written sympathetically, and non-White men and communities are increasingly left out of these stories of upward assimilation.

Lee wonders about the implication for racial solidarity, noting that:

“Though race is a central theme in all these novels, the protagonists are either disconnected from their communities, or, worse, do not want to associate with them.…All of their racial identities are highly individualized and defined by their personal experiences with elite white people.”

These kinds of stories that are meant to be about race, but focus on individuals of color navigating and desiring a White community, pose an interesting exploration of the role of race and gender in modern, post-racial, upper-middle class family formation and responsibilities.

desiring hypersexualization(?) in school for good mothers

Jessamine Chan’s acclaimed School for Good Mothers is one of the more egregious examples of WMAF relationship trouble. Similar to the Woman-of-Color Nanny Novels, it is about how race informs motherhood.¹⁷

However, Chan’s choice to describe Frida, our Chinese American protagonist, as leaning into self-hating, pedophilic stereotypes of Asian women and making poor excuses for her WMAF patterns devalues Chan’s exploration of the “grey area” between good and bad mothers.

After getting caught leaving her toddler child at home alone for hours, Chan’s Chinese American protagonist, Frida, is sent to a rehabilitation program for mothers and forced to let her White ex-husband, Gust, and his White girlfriend (who he cheated on Frida with) raise her biracial toddler daughter. Chan depicts Frida as suffering from postpartum depression, hopeless, embittered, self-hating, and desperate for genuine affection and care.

In School for Good Mothers, Chan lays out the consequences of the impossible standards society has for women, wives, and mothers, and the added layer of being the daughter of Chinese immigrants in a White world.

Frida’s relationship with Whiteness is one of both desire and guilt:

• While Frida is spiraling, she thinks “it was bad enough to marry a White man, let alone lose him, let alone lose custody of their child.”

• She describes a White mother as “unseemly” for talking openly about her problems, saying “only a White woman, an American, would be so indiscreet.”

• On the topic of WMAF relationships, Frida says “only White men have ever pursued her” because “she’s moved in White worlds.”

• She believes that it is difficult “to find a Chinese man who want[s] her” and has only had two Asian partners, “both of whom felt she wouldn’t get along with their mothers or bear healthy children because of her depression.”

When Frida develops a crush on Tucker, a(nother) White man in the rehab program for fathers, she prepares excuses in case her friends give her a hard time about liking a White man:

“This isn’t a manifestation of growing up with White culture. Most of the Black and Latino fathers are too young, most of the White fathers too creepy. There are no Asians.”

During a sex scene with Will (ex-husband Gust’s best friend) in Chapter 3, Chan writes that Frida is “embarrassed by the limitations of her little-girl body,” “tight as fuck,” and “built like a teenage girl” (the latter of which Gust used to tell her). It apparently takes “handful[s] of lube and many deep exhales” before Will’s “huge and worrying” penis, “not a third leg but an arm” can enter her – when it does, Will marvels that he feels like his “dick is in [Frida’s] skull.”¹⁸

After hooking up with Will, Frida notices that Will’s “new girl” is also Asian. It’s reasonable to suggest that Chan is satirizing self-hating Asian American women who play into sexual stereotypes and are obsessed with White men, embarrassed about these WMAF desires, and make up excuses that it’s non-White men who don’t want them, not the other way around. Even given the generous interpretation, I don’t understand why Chan really really wants us to know how tiny, tight, and vulnerable Frida is.

In a story framed as a conflict between Frida’s intersectional identity as a 2nd gen Chinese American mother and the expectations of the White world she moves in, this juxtaposition of White/Asian sexual dominance/submission is the penultimate example of how Frida’s centering of Whiteness — White men’s feelings, expectations, and desire — has only led to her own disempowerment and shame. Chan doesn’t offer a resolution for any of these personal feelings about Frida’s sex life and pattern of WMAF relationships, as the focus of the book is on motherhood itself.

But Ms. Chan — you are married to a White man and have a half-White, half-Chinese daughter in real life.¹⁹ It’s so confusing to me that Chan (and so many others) can write entire books with conflicts driven by “White people bad,” yet have enough cognitive dissonance to make the exception for the “right” White man in their own lives. With this context, the intentional sexual stereotyping demotes Chan’s “haunting and unforgettable”²⁰ racial commentary about raising a half-White child to halfhearted jokes about the shame some Asian women feel about loving a White man. Also ha ha ha, Asian women are so tiny and tight! Maybe Chan is doing it ironically, but forgive me if I don’t find it empowering in 2025. School for Good Mothers is more a story about “White people bad,” with very little exploration beyond that conclusion.

It makes me wonder what Chan actually thinks about yellow fever, desiring Whiteness, WMAF, and Asian female hypersexualization, because it doesn’t seem like she feels a need to explore it more in School for Good Mothers.

---

5/ apparently being wmaf is activism

I feel nervous naming names of these WMAF authors! While we don’t let misogynists and racists off the hook, mainstream society considers preferring (or pandering to, if we want to be provocative) White people as subjective, private, a personal matter between individuals. It feels intrusive to comment on how someone actually aligns themselves with Whiteness in their personal life, and it is unacceptable to demand someone else to reflect or change.

But the personal is political, especially given that some Asian women explain their preference for White men by referencing other patriarchal Asian men in their lives, such as their fathers. These women conflate ethnic culture and patriarchy, associating other Asian men with Asian patriarchy, yet don’t do the same with White men. Despite attempts to contain the WMAF dynamic to individual relationships (both in plotlines and in the real world), proximity to Whiteness and White guilt distorts expectations for egalitarian partnerships and ultimately prevents Asianness from existing independent of the White gaze.

For example, in “To All The White Boys I’ve Dated Before,”²¹ Sylvia Hong suggests that a White partner can earn acceptance by sharing conversations about culture and privilege. Hong acknowledges that no matter how much you trust your White partner, “interracial relationships will always be political,” but concludes jokingly that the reason she dates White men is so that she can “practise micro-activism – making them aware of their privilege every day that they’re with me.”

Before someone comes after me for taking a joke seriously — to quote muhleekuhh’s essay criticizing the “shallow performance of taste:”

“We like to only be playfully, ironically, tragically self-aware. We like hearing criticism that makes you go, ‘OMG, I feel so called out!’ and not, ‘...oh.’ Fucks up the vibe.”²²

Unfortunately for us, this manifesto is all about fucking up the vibes, because I want us to know that there is more for us, and there should be more for us. So I’m going to take what Hong’s saying seriously, because at the core of every joke is a hint of truth. That’s what makes it funny, right?

While subtle, by acknowledging the power discrepancy between her and a White man yet suggesting that his passive “awareness” of privilege is sufficient, Hong implies that she does not expect action or change on the White man’s part. While relationships, both romantic and platonic, should be the site of valuable learning and reflection, Hong’s quip reveals that she is not oblivious to the WMAF dynamics, but believes that the responsibility to balance the gender and racial dynamics rests more on her than her White partner.

Further, a focus on “micro-activism” through words neglects the emotions of the intangible, abstract act of existing in an Asian body, and existing in relation to, and in contradiction with other Asian bodies, as if words can communicate to a White person what it’s like to embody.²³ By containing Whiteness to individual relationships, we ignore that Whiteness is an omnipresent power dynamic.

This re-evaluation of our desires (for White people) is not so much a “disciplinary project” as it is an “emancipatory one.” In her essay Coda: The Politics of Desire, Amia Srinivasan poses the question:

“Is there no difference between ‘telling people to change their desires’ and asking ourselves what we want, why we want it, and what it is we want to want?”

Who we spend time with influences our opinions and biases, and a White man is surely not an exception. Even for leftists or activists who are outspoken against White supremacy.

In their essay, “I've Seen Some of the Best Minds of My Generation Taken Down By a White Partner,” Savior wonders if the trauma response for Black activists is to “pursue white people who they don’t have to fight side by side with, or a white person they can take their frustrations out on.” Relying on a White partner “can feel more alleviating…[than a] partner who is equally as marginalized as you, since there is only so much protection you can provide for one another.”²⁴

It’s something I’ve also wondered about revolutionaries such as Native Hawaiian activist, the late Haunani-Kay Trask,²⁵ whose longtime partner was a White professor at the University of Hawai’i.

Ultimately, refusing to verbalize the “what’s” and “why’s” about our desire just makes for spineless “Asian representation.” We allow White people free (or discounted) admission into our communities, excusing them from the uncomfortable work of actually understanding, building, or protecting these spaces. Jenny Zhang (author of Sour Heart, one of the “Asian American books” that I actually like) states:

“Everything people of color must endure, our sensational pain and our sensational brilliance, must be accessible to White people; they must have it in their quest to be rewarded.”²⁶

Deep down, White people applaud themselves for bearing the discomfort of being the only White person at the family dinner. bell hooks adds that the White man now understands that his “life will be richer, more pleasurable, if he accepts diversity.”²⁷

what does diversity obscure?

To the White man, diversity is an admirable type of “otherness,” a positive feeling like being talented or special. White people often understand diversity as an abstract feeling of inclusion, not a tangible situation that they impact in real-time through existing relation to others.

When a meeting is filled only with White people, they don’t look around and think, this is an instance of White hegemony. They don’t think about Whiteness unless someone brings it up, and then diversity is shelved for “next time,” something we should “address in the future.” They don’t clock Whiteness as a contributing factor to whatever conclusion the group had come to, they’re too busy moving on to worry about that. When a friend group consists entirely of Asians, people (including other Asians)²⁸ side-eye them, referring to them as “the Asians who only hang out with Asians.” When a friend group consists only of White people, no one notices, not even themselves.²⁹

Whiteness dominates our lives. Yet too often, non-White people are swayed by the falsehood that equity means equality, which means sharing our culture with everyone, including White people. Do we always have to share with people who have not been taught to reflect on the space they take up?

Within my own life, I’ve noticed that my relationships with White people have not been able to bridge the differences between our values and blossom into full relationships where both of us feel seen, unlike my relationships with non-White and other Asian folks. Growing up, white friends, boys, teachers, family culture, and beauty standards greatly contributed to my teenage self-hatred. I had close White friends — we bonded in shared communities like school, church, sports teams, and art clubs, but we grew out of those relationships once we left those spaces and had only each other’s personalities/lives to interact with. With my White friends, there were just some irreconcilable differences in how we experience the world and manage our responsibilities to family and others.

Like how weird it was to sit in the same car as a White friend while she argued with her mom as we carpooled to school. Like how weird it was that a White friend seemed to look down on Asian kids like me who “only cared about school.” Like how weird it was to hang out with a White friend’s (male) White friends late at night and be able to trespass, mess around in construction zones, and not even think about fear.

Interactions with White people were only a fraction of the formative, identity-building experiences in my life. There’s so much more to explore in the relationships I had with non-White family, friends, neighbors, peers, teammates, and organizers in my life. Similarly, I’d like to hear about how other Asian Americans nurture things close to our hearts, rather than how we push back against the places we aren’t welcome.

I want to learn about what we feel seen, protected, and responsible for — our favorite Hong Kong dessert cafe, our culture’s clothing, our family’s Lunar New Year party, our Asian friends who shared similar childhood experiences. We don’t need to share this with White people who may never understand how special it is, that there is a space for us, that we found people who look like us and understand us, that we can all be together in this moment, and how precious it is to feel belonging.

wmaf as assimilation

Circling back to WMAF authors — regardless of the author’s relationship status, building a story on the low hanging fruit of White microaggressions is not the same thing as building a story on Asian, or non-White relationships or friendships or conflicts or resilience.

It’s not like it’s impossible to explore Asian American identity without relying solely on conflict with White characters. You could take a look at Afterparties by Anthony So, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang, Stay True by Hua Hsu, Organ Meats by K. Ming Chang, Victim by Andrew Boryga, the film Dìdi (弟弟) by Sean Wang, among others.

So, we should wonder whether authors who write of Asianness and WMAF dynamics through the lens of White supremacy, colonization, imperialism, and sexual exploitation, but rarely explore a world beyond caring about what White people think, are promoting White (liberal) alignment as the more reasonable, achievable, and commendable way for Asians to navigate the world.

In the process of managing White people’s reactions to Asianness, either as a necessity in any personal romantic relationship, or as a consequence of creating White characters purely to drive conflict in their story, these writers implicitly justify a certain kind of Asian assimilation into White culture.³⁰

This “process may be bittersweet, confusing, and maddening, but [assimilation into a White liberal metropolitan culture] is a foregone conclusion,” Chris Jesu Lee writes, regarding the timid lack of complexity in Asian American literature.³¹ “And since that is the path chosen by the exclusive club of contemporary Asian American artists, it cannot be questioned.” This uncomfortable WMAF venn diagram in the literary world has gone unnoticed and unspoken of, because you’d be immediately shut down as an MRAsian anti-feminist.

---

6/ who are we? saying the quiet parts out loud.

So what does all this relationship-talk, identity-building, and White-pandering mean for us politically? White people are eager to slot Asians into the no-man’s land between Blackness and Whiteness: Asians wish they were White, but they aren’t. Asians have it better than Black people, so if we fix the issues that impact Black people, we’ll have fixed systemic racism for everyone. Therefore, the easiest narrative for the White liberal to understand is a linear one.

From being the “other” to being included in our “multicultural” nation, the boba liberal’s call to action requires 3 steps:

1. Recognizing our Asian American privilege

2. Identifying anti-Blackness within our communities

3. Making ourselves useful to the progressive left by offering allyship to Black and brown folks

We are encouraged to seek redemption from our complicity in White supremacy, to join the left as allies rather than as fellow oppressed people. We write letters to our parents about anti-Black racism and “encourage the assimilation of Asian diaspora (and Latino/a and Muslim, etc.) views into the norms and values of White liberals, namely, guilt and privilege-talk.”³²

It is true that none of us are free until all of us, at all intersections of oppression like Blackness, queerness, fatness, transness, and disability, are free. But in our haste to declare our support of our Black and brown neighbors the “right way,” we keep our mouths shut and flatten our complexities to a linear narrative of immigration to assimilation, yellow peril to yellow fever, oppressed aliens to model minority.

As the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist lesbian organization formed in the 1970s, wrote in their seminal statement:

“The most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression.”³³

This does not mean we deem ourselves as more “deserving” of liberation. It merely calls for recognition of our own oppression. Instead, Asian Americans seem bent on redemption through a sort of self-flagellating allyship.

It’s easier to label ourselves “all privileged, but we’re working on it,” than to acknowledge the contradictions and complexities of the many statuses Asian Americans have occupied, and continue to occupy throughout our histories, including but not limited to:

• Scapegoats for the ills of globalization, industrialization, and capitalism³⁴

• A settler class in Hawai’i that has historically dominated local politics and undermined indigenous self-determination³⁵

• Privileged children of Hart-Cellar (post-1965) immigrants³⁶ who grew up in upper-middle class ethnoburbs

• Pre-1965 immigrants feeding the country as farmers, meatpackers, and restaurateurs³⁷

• Traumatized refugees fleeing civil war and dictatorships

• Japanese people who were relocated, interned, and stripped of their homes and farms³⁸

• Wealthy international students, such as children of China’s “rich second gen” (富二代) or South Korea’s “rich families” (재벌)³⁹

• Trump supporters who voted for Obama in 2012

• Indian immigrants recreating the caste system⁴⁰

• Elite WMAF power couples⁴¹

• Anti-immigrant immigrants

we love diversity but not enough to talk about it

Our post-racial society believes that focusing on differences would be antithetical to building an inclusive, multiracial coalition. It seems we can only choose between inclusivity and exclusivity, difference always implies exclusion or opposition, and there is no room for common nature or overlap.

In reality, we can move in and out of groups throughout our lives, relate to and support multiple groups, and define our affinities uniquely. We are not restricted by membership to a single group in the same way that we are not restricted to single-issue politics.

Iris Marion Young proposes a “politics of difference” because the current practice of “essentializing difference expresses a fear of specificity, and a fear of making permeable the categorical border between oneself and others.”⁴² Our existences are complex and intersecting, and it is uncomfortable to constantly reevaluate our positionality, practices, and responsibilities, rather than stick to a universal code of conduct.

This unwillingness to speak of difference is the “severe limitation of liberal consciousness” as Alon Mizrahi writes⁴³. Unlike conservatives or other non-liberals, “liberals never admit that what they think and how they vote are expressions of collective socioeconomic identity.” By framing their politics around other issues (climate or gender) liberals avoid discussing the underlying, fundamental issues of justice and “present Whiteness as a nonpartisan, neutral state.”

The mainstream’s severing of this connection between socioeconomic/racial positionality and politics⁴⁴ has “ushered in an era of soulless disingenuous politics which is nothing but performance art,” nowhere more evident than in the way liberals love to hate Trump. Even though policy-wise, the Trump and Biden administrations were quite similar, liberals hate Trump because they are merely embarrassed that he “says the quiet parts of running an imperialist ethno-state out loud,” Ismatu Gwendolyn writes.⁴⁵

Coming back to WMAF: People who still have something to say about White supremacy destroy our fantasy of our post-racial, multicultural world, which is why we allow mainstream Asian American empowerment to skip over White capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism and deliver us what we want to hear: a feel-good, empowering story of WMAF assimilation.

It feels like women in WMAF relationships take up a lot of space — they are often the popular writers, artists, musicians, businesswomen, politicians, producers, actors, designers, and influencers.

It’s only reasonable that the unchallenged Whiteness ubiquitous in our real-life relationships lends itself to the subtle, lingering White-pandering in our social presentation of Asian American culture.

It’s Hong’s embarrassing idea of micro-activism that membership into, and understanding of, a group can be achieved through conversations about culture and privilege instead of literally living and embodying. It’s assimilation as reduction of culture into observable pieces (food, art, rituals, holidays) that you can show and tell to a White person, which the White person themself must implicitly “approve” and “understand” in their own terms by nature of being in relationship with you.

Culture is not static. The way that we communicate Asian American Culture to White people, and the way White people respond and interact with our culture can change the culture itself, even if these White people are supposedly “outsiders” to the culture. As Octavia Butler writes in the opening lines of Parable of the Sower:

“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”

Whether well-intentioned or not, the assimilation tendencies of both WMAF authors and WMAF storylines contributes to the mainstream prioritization of observable Asian American culture over intangible unconscious beliefs and norms, such as concepts of self, definitions of kinship, notions of fairness, relationship to nature and animals, or decision making principles detailed in the “roots” level of Zaretta Hammond’s 3 layer “Culture Tree” (pictured below).⁴⁶

You see the emphasis on surface culture everywhere. I respect that principal investigator’s essay about her WMAF relationship⁴⁷ addresses some of the points I made in Part A about Asian/White masculinity. It’s refreshing to see someone in WMAF not just spend 1,000 words battling an imaginary MRAsian enemy.

Yet I can’t help but notice that when she writes about having “fun with the cultural exchange” in her WMAF relationship, she references: carnations, Korean language, road trips, country fried steak, ox bone soup, western literature, Korean lip gloss, Uniqlo, Boggle, and family lore. All but the last one are very surface level, tangible manifestations of culture (to use the language of the above Culture Tree).

Surely food, language, entertainment, and fashion are not the only interchanges of culture, the only places she and her White partner may have naturally different inclinations. There can also be conflict over deeper relational and political worldviews, like the nature of our responsibilities to parents, kin, neighbors, community, animals, and homes.

So why is it that these other conflicts don’t get any airtime? I think it’s because current representation of Asian American culture right now is so very limited to the explainable, surface level manifestations. They’re easy to see, recognize, and digest. And we all know what the most important part of Asian American culture is.

That’s right, it’s boba.

---

Read part 4 here:

And read the final part here:

just put the fortune cookies in the bag bro

1. Praise on the covers of Woman Warrior, Wild Swans, and Joy Luck Club

2. Praise on the covers of (in order): Joy Luck Club, Fifth Chinese Daughter, Wild Swans

3. Praise on the covers of (in order): Yellowface, Disorientation, Minor Feelings, School for Good Mothers, Days of Distraction, Owner of a Lonely Heart, Goodbye Vitamin, Natural Beauty, The Evening Hero, Docile

4. Asian American Fiction After 1965, Christopher T. Fan - “Genres of Deprofessionalization” Page 156

5. Ibid - “Introduction” Page 19

Professional–managerial class

6. Ibid - “Genres of Deprofessionalization” Page 157

7. Note that this is only a list of writers. This does not include fashion designers, musicians, artists, actors, filmmakers, athletes, politicians or other positions of influence that are filled with WMAF. Just think of someone and look them up. I promise you will be disappointed.

On the off-chance that some of these people are no longer in their WMAF relationships, my point still stands. I don’t believe that this trend will suddenly disappear.

8. Interestingly, though women in WMAF generally take on their White husband’s surname, the mentioned writers nearly all write under their Asian surnames / maiden names. Sure, this can be because taking your husband's last name is only western tradition. Either way, keeping your family name can assert racial identity, resistance to Whitewashing, or more importantly, membership to the community of non-White writers who non-White content.

For more, refer to Navigating Families, Negotiating Identities: Asian-White Mixed Family Experiences, a study of 31 Asian-White mixed families, including both WMAF and AMWF by Hayden Daeshin Ju.

9. Just because the book is listed here does not mean there was nothing redeemable about it.

10. As Delia Cai is quoted saying in Arden Yum’s essay about the proliferation of “White, female, upper-middle class, and millennial” Substacks, “Society conditions a very certain type of person to believe that they can/should write their thoughts out and that it deserves to be paid for. And then there's everyone else.” I would argue that these WMAF writers are just the DEI flavor of the “type of person.”

11. r/Fantasy post titled “A Critique of 'Babel' by R. F. Kuang”

12. Comment in the above r/Fantasy thread

13. Goodreads review of Babel by Kartik

14. Refer to R.F. Kuang’s insufferable Author’s Note before Chapter 1 in Babel.

15. Some critiques of of Babel, such as Kuang’s usage of Mandarin instead of Cantonese or how Kuang’s worldbuilding fails to make sense, suggest that this daring alternate-history-fantasy actually doesn’t stray far from Western hegemonic worldviews and history.

16. The Woman-of-Color Nanny Novel, Chris Jesu Lee

17. On the Necessity of Pain, Anger, and Laundry, Brianna Avenia-Tapper

18. I really truly still cannot get over how disgusting this whole scene is?

19. Jessamine Chan lived in Philly long enough to set her dystopian novel about mothers here, Amy S. Rosenberg

20. From Liz Moore’s quote on the cover of School for Good Mothers.

21. To All The White Boys I’ve Dated Before, Sylvia Hong

22. girl, the context!, muhleekuhh

23. “To understand is not to embody,” from a relevant note by seph

24. I've Seen Some of the Best Minds of My Generation Taken Down By a White Partner, Savior

25. Haunani-Kay Trask’s famous “We Are Not American” speech.

26. They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don't Exist, Jenny Zhang

27. Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, bell hooks - Page 30

28. When thinking back to their childhood, many Asians assumed assimilation with Whiteness as default and put disproportionately higher effort into developing interracial friendships than their White friends. At the same time, these Asians dismissed the Asian “tribes” who stuck together as “reactionary” or going “too far.”

Navigating Families, Negotiating Identities: Asian-White Mixed Family Experiences - Page 31

29. Happened at a high school summer camp and my all-Asian friend group. Like sorry I don’t really have anything in common with the White kids?

30. When I say assimilation I don’t mean the juvenile “banana” Asian way (yellow on the outside, Whitewashed on the inside). Rather, it’s a perspective of assimilation that focuses more on what it’s like to not be White, than what it’s like to be Asian or [insert non-White culture].

31. Asian American Psycho, Chris Jesu Lee

32. About those "letters to my Asian parents about anti-black racism", Andy Liu for Time To Say Goodbye

33. The Combahee River Collective Statement, published in 1977

34. I’d encourage you to take a look at Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism, Iyko Day.

35. I’d greatly encourage you to read the essays in Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai`i, Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura.

36. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act ended restrictions on AAPI immigration and opened the doors to highly-educated and STEM labor dominated Asian immigrants.

contractually asian, Jesse. On immigrants and sacrifice.

37. Some history about immigrants to California’s Central Valley: Ikeda’s; "Unpacking Immigration" film, Harleen Kaur Bal; California’s Lost (and Found) Punjabi-Mexican Cuisine, Sonia Chopra

38. No-No Boy, John Okada. A “pioneering example of the Asian American Bildungsroman.”

39. Fùèrdài 富二代; Chaebol 재벌

40. What's next for the movement to ban caste discrimination, Shawna Chen

41. They even look out for each other! For example: The One Thing You Need to Know to Understand Usha Vance, Susan Matthews

42. Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young - Page 170

43. What Liberals Adamantly Refuse To Acknowledge, Alon Mizrahi

44. When was the last time the news talked about Greta Thumberg? “The second Greta started making connections between climate change and capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism,” it wasn’t cute anymore.

Greta’s Growth, J. P. Hill

45. Harris, Palestine, and the Spectacle of Liberation, Ismatu Gwendolyn

46. From Zaretta Hammond’s 3 layer “Culture Tree” depicting Surface, Shallow, and Deep culture in her book, Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain

47. They were all out of Asians at Build-A-Boyfriend but I found this white one on clearance, principal investigator