just put the fortune cookies in the bag bro

(pt 5) unfeeling, empty asian labor in fashion knockoffs, olympic swimming, severance, past lives, perfect days, and netflix's 3 body problem

Welcome to Part C, Chapters 8-9: the final installment of my manifesto about Whiteness and Asian America. Read the intro here, part 2 here, part 3 here, and part 4 at the link below.

stopping asian hate, one boba at a time

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In this installment, I explore the West’s suspicion and fetishization of those “other” Asians from Asia. I extend Cheryl Harris’ concept of “Whiteness as property” and Iyko Day’s analysis of the hypocritical “romantic anticapitalist,” to discuss Whiteness as the right to dictate a moral high ground and build a double-standard against which Western/Asian labor is valued. Asians are but a mass of empty, dispassionate laborers — unironically unfunny, unscrupulous, and unemotional, a far cry from the clever, enterprising, and passionate Westerner. Yet no one wants to hear Asians complain about these stereotypes. Just put the fortune cookies in the bag bro.¹

• Part C, Ch 8: Whiteness as the arbiter of value in the counterfeit economy, Olympic doping allegations, and transnational adoption

• Part C, Ch 9: Asian characters as inscrutable labor in contemporary media including Severance, Past Lives, and Perfect Days

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8/ whiteness as the arbiter of value

In her 1993 paper, “Whiteness as Property,” Cheryl Harris suggests that Whiteness has evolved from “color to race to status to property.” The possession of Whiteness grants “the right to use and enjoyment, and the right to exclude others,” and the right to define and judge.² Rather than tangible economic gains, Whiteness as property gives White people the right to be arbiters of taste, or “arbiters of disgust.”³

An obvious example is the Anti-Asian and Sinophobic double-standard in the the West’s discussion of freedom, individuality, creativity, and agency. Mark Tseng Putterman notes:

“It is interesting, to put it politely that Tiananmen remains the American reference point for state violence instead of, I don’t know, Kent State, Wounded Knee, the MOVE bombing, LA ‘92, Ferguson, Standing Rock, NoDAPL, Stop Cop City, etc.” ⁴

To the West, China is the ever-present threat to freedom, and we see this Anti-Asian fear-mongering everywhere: in labor, fashion, athletics, family structure, and media.

enterprising or unscrupulous?

Many, including Asian Americans, view Asians through the lens of labor. We are:

• An unthinking machine that pollutes our (otherwise fair) economies with cheap garbage

• An army of joyless students sucking the livelihood out of our schools

• A flood of immigrants overwhelming our peaceful town with the “racial stress” of ethnic neighbors⁵

• A stampede of (qualified, yet) unworthy and uninspired tech workers

Because we are machines, our work is efficient and technically flawless, yet devalued because it lacks humanity. We have a great work ethic, because we can’t be distracted by hopes, dreams, or freedoms. But what “ethic?” For Asians (especially the Chinese) are merely competitive, parasitic opportunists — everything wrong with capitalism and globalization.

In Alien Capital, Iyko Day analyzes the double-standard propping up the “romantic anticapitalist’s” racialized scapegoating. Leaning on Marx’s dual-character theory of labor, Day describes labor as both:

1. Concrete labor (the quantitative act of human labor that creates items of distinct use-value, such as clothes or furniture)

2. Abstract labor (the qualitative value placed on the kind of specialized human labor that adds additional value to the item)⁶

The misguided romantic anticapitalist honors “the concrete, pure, and organic dimensions of [socially valuable] White labor and leisure time,” and identifies capitalism only with the abstract alien, nonsocial, machine-like labor force of Chinese bodies. The romantic anticapitalist glorifies the resourceful White industrialist while blaming the unscrupulous Asian⁷ for the consequences of capitalism, like corruption, crimes, slums, prostitution, alcoholism, environmental degradation,⁸ unemployment, or resource scarcity.

Think about the ways the public unquestioningly uplifts commodities produced in the West while scoffing at those made in the East. Minh-ha Pham dives deep into this dichotomy in her book Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. We draw distinct lines between “Made in Italy” and “Made in China,” even though tags tell us nothing — an item tagged with the former could have been made in one of the thousands of Chinese-owned factories in Italy.⁹ Chinese-owned Forever 21 is regularly demonized for chasing fast fashion trends at the expense of our environment, but London-based ASOS does the same thing and flies under the radar — ASOS literally stands for “As Seen On Screen.”

ironic or tacky?

Who is “allowed” to copy — or, whose copying is seen as “cultural appreciation” instead of appropriation? which country’s globalization efforts are honest instead of unethical? who owns the intellectual property rights? — has always been distributed based on racial lines.

For example, while we would sneer at the trashy, unoriginal Asian copycats, who are tragically “technically advanced [yet] culturally, socially, and ethically backward,”¹⁰ we chuckle at the high-end Western brands’ “ironic fakes,” like Gucci’s misspelled “Guccy” collection.¹¹ Pham writes that:

Western “real fakes are means of wearing working-class identities while announcing one’s social, cultural, and economic privileges,” something unaffordable to others “because the costs of appearing to have bad taste and appearing to be poor are generally too high a price to pay for non White consumers.”¹²

By defining what is authentic versus fake, the West also portrays its fight against counterfeit activity as a patriotic, righteous cause. While researching luxury fashion’s racialized scapegoating of Canal Street’s counterfeit markets, Viv Chen noticed the trend of journalists “using militaristic and forensic terminology” to condemn these counterfeit items.¹³

Headlines like “How Diesel Disarmed the Enemy With Its Own Brilliant Knockoff Store” pose (Asian) counterfeit producers as the Enemy. TheRealReal evokes gun buyback language when encouraging people to “turn in fake bags, no questions asked.” While luxury fashion aestheticizes White criminality,¹⁴ it condemns “Canal Street as a site of foreign enemies—untrustworthy, exotic, lacking in national allegiance.” White “ironic fakes” are creative, but duplicitous Asian “knockoffs” are terrorizing our country.

prodigy or fraud?

The foreboding Asian “fake” extends from fashion to athletics. The Olympics are also the perfect stage for Sinophobic, nationalist propaganda — countries boycott and ban others for political reasons, and medal counts are not so subtly tied to racial supremacy. Anytime China succeeds at anything, the West insists they stole it. We crave Chinese humiliation, especially in athletics.

Recently at the 2024 Paris Olympics, when Pan Zhanle won the 100 meter freestyle by over 1 second and broke his own world record,¹⁵ people immediately accused him of doping. There’s a dominating narrative that Chinese athletes are always cheating with performance-enhancing drugs, even though they are tested disproportionately more and result in much lower positive rates than other countries’ athletes.¹⁶ The West doesn’t want to admit that Chinese people could be smarter, faster, and stronger.

redemption arc via adoption

If the West is going to praise any Asian, it’s the one willing to integrate themselves into traditional American structures. In her book Disrupting Kinship, Kimberly D. McKee delves into transnational adoption of Korean children adopted by American families “as an extension of the (evangelical Christian) American imperial project.”¹⁷

The Transnational Adoption Industrial Complex upholds the Korean adoptee (often not actually orphaned, but rather saved from their “incompetent” parents) as one of the “good” immigrants during a time of racialized quotas. The TAIC reinforces the model minority assumption that Asian children are more intellectually capable of assimilating into White American culture, and demonizes the biological parents for the mother’s poverty or promiscuity and the father’s inadequate care.

This celebration of “acceptable” Asians who could bridge cultures (while remaining loyal to America) intentionally undervalues the adoptee’s Korean birth families in favor of promoting “progressive” multicultural Western family values. This is yet another way Western assimilation and superiority is raised up as the end goal.

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9/ Asian characters as inscrutable labor in contemporary media

That the Asian body is pathologized by default, dismissed as non-human and undeserving, is evident in the way the West desires subservience and weakness from Asian diaspora living in the West and Asian countries on the global stage, yet revels in Asian violence within Asia.

The success of Asian media, such as Squid Game, Parasite, Oldboy, and The Vegetarian (and American media about Asians in Asia, like Shogun, the 2024 TV series, based on an 80s miniseries, based on the 70s “Asian Saga” novels)¹⁸ shows that “Americans love Asian psychos…so long as they remain in Asia,” Chris Jesu Lee observes.¹⁹

These Asian stories are beloved by American audiences for capturing raw violence, madness, and revenge. “But take a look at the cultural works coming out of contemporary Asian America, and the picture is remarkably different,” Lee continues. “If Asians make the journey across the Pacific to become Asian Americans, we must repress any such disturbing complexity.” Western works about Asians only reinforce stereotypes of Asians as emotionless, inscrutable, and machine-like, a coping mechanism Westerners use to “capture and ridicule a foreignness that exceeds the bounds of Western predictability.”²⁰

This distaste for complex Asian characters couldn’t be more obvious in how Netflix “adapted” Liu Cixin’s acclaimed sci-fi novel, The Three-Body Problem (三体) for Western audiences in 2024 by just removing Asian people. Netflix took a story written by a Chinese person, centering Chinese scientists, focusing on the Chinese peoples’ collective trauma from the Cultural Revolution, and replaced all but one Chinese male character with non-Asian men.²¹

Our contradicting inability to stomach Asian anger in America is encapsulated in our emasculating interpretations of Asian male characters and our unsettling interpretations of Asian female characters in American media. These tropes reinforce Western hegemony, meritocracy, and individualism while perpetuating orientalist, classist, and racist stereotypes about Asian women and Asian men. I’ll discuss these recent portrayals of strange, robotic, and unfeeling Asians:

• the “Weird Ass Asian Chicks” in Severance

• the stoic and honorable Japanese laborer in Perfect Days

• the emotionally-stunted and uninspired Korean bachelor in Past Lives

All three Asian characters are identified by their relationship to labor — Severance is about the monotony and disassociation of corporate work, where Miss Casey and Miss Huang serve as emotionless, capitalist pawns. Perfect Days depicts a Western fantasy of the humble Japanese through an unrealistically aesthetic, trash-free “day in the life” of a public toilet janitor (who also reads William Faulkner, in case you weren’t sure if this lowly Asian deserves our respect). Past Lives characterizes the competing White and Korean love interests based on their career choice and the implications on their artistic abilities, emotional capacity, and individuality.

emotionless capitalist pawns (severance)

In their essay “Why Are Asian Chicks So Weird?” Zoe Fuad discusses the trope of the inscrutable Asian, the “Weird Ass Asian Chicks” (WAACs) meant to “provide comic relief by virtue of their sheer strangeness,” such as Lilly/Esther from Pitch Perfect, Mantis from Guardians of the Galaxy, and Miss Casey (and I’d include Miss Huang) from Severance.

In Severance, the two Asian characters, Miss Casey and Miss Huang are (willingly or unwilling) pawns of the cryptic biotech corporation, Lumon. Unlike the other innies, Miss Casey is not allowed a personality, autonomy, freedom to roam the floors, relationships with other severed workers, or a romantic arc.²² While Miss Huang is a supervisor, she has no actual power and by the season 2 finale, after contributing very little to the plot, is apparently written out via location transfer.

Both Miss Casey and Miss Huang’s characters are there solely to contribute weird, unsettling, sinister vibes to the Lumon workplace. Miss Casey is the weird wellness lady who emotionlessly lists niceties about the employees’ outies and forbids extraneous chitchat or comments during sessions.²³ Miss Huang is weird because the show creators wanted to emphasize how creepy Lumon is — they “thought it would be really strange and funny to have a child in a management role.”²⁴

As Fuad writes, “WAACs are meant to be taken at face value: odd, eerie women that don’t fit into society, and who lack the required intrigue to be a central character.” Miss Casey and Miss Huang’s lack of personal relationships, in a story bent on demonstrating the humanity of all the other Lumon innies, proves that the “weird Asian” stereotype lives on.

the silent, stoic, honorable japanese (perfect days)

Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days follows the peaceful, structured, and quiet life of Hirayama, a humble janitor living in Japan. While the film was technically well-made, it reeked of the White man’s fantasy of Japanese honor and the blue collar lifestyle that “fetishize[s] Hirayama as the poor man who knows his place,” as Chuck Bowen and Jake Cole write in their review.²⁵

Half the runtime consists of Hirayama silently cleaning public toilets, but we never actually see any grime. There are no messes, no mildew, no piss on the toilet seat. As Kevin Nguyen writes, “it’s a tourist’s view of Japan.”²⁶ Everything already looks clean, aside from a few pieces of trash that are easy to toss into a garbage bag. All the toilets he cares for are beautifully-designed, located on an open sidewalk or in a park — we never see him in a claustrophobic subway restroom.

Because Wenders refuses to “confront the gulf that exists between Hirayama’s interests and how he makes his money,” Perfect Days is conspicuously devoid of piss, shit, and struggle.²⁷ This avoidance of both money talk and realistic janitorial labor intersects with a notable trend in 21st century literature of not writing about money. Naomi Kanakia theorizes that much of literary fiction is “fundamentally upper-middle and upper-class stories” (a common thread in the Asian American Novel as well). Authors “seem very invested in creating dramas of the meritocracy: stories about the internal, emotional turmoil of talented people” to avoid addressing the realities of economic inequality and capitalism.²⁸

These compounding idiosyncrasies reveal Perfect Days to be the orientalist “cinematic equivalent of a wealthy artist telling a janitor that he’s lucky because he’s acquainted with real life,”²⁹ with a sprinkle of Western name-dropping (Hirayama reads Faulkner every night before bed) so we know that this honest Japanese man is not like the other greedy or uneducated (Asian) poors.³⁰

Perfect Days is simply a film festival-appropriate, worldly and “cultured” flavor of orientalism for aesthetes who’d turn their noses up to anime or samurai war films.

how to not be too asian (past lives)

Celine Song’s Past Lives, which tells the story of a love triangle between Nora, a Korean-Canadian immigrant, her (Korean) childhood love Hae Sung, and her (White) husband Arthur, heavily draws from Song’s relationship experiences — she is married to a White man in real life.³¹ Song has implied that Past Lives no longer panders to White people as some of her previous “White plays”³² had, but her storyline still reinforces the narrative of the passive, undeserving Asian man.

My first problem with Past Lives is obvious: Nora has this whole cultural crisis and just ends up with the White guy in the end. Second, though I understand that both men are purposefully underdeveloped to highlight Nora’s story, Hae Sung seems to fare worse.

Hae Sung vs. Arthur is not a fair fight, even though Song states, “I wanted the audience to feel there is a very real argument for why she should stay [with Arthur], the way there is a very real argument for Hae Sung. I don’t want the arguments to be lopsided. I want them to be even.”³³

Well, they’re definitely not. While Nora (ambitious, free-spirited) moves on and flirts with Arthur (curious, engaging, artist!) at a quaint writers’ retreat, Hae Sung is depicted working tirelessly (school, military, an unnamed job where he wears a suit) and constantly checking his phone for messages from Nora. He is apparently emotionally incapacitated without her — when he meets his future (ex) girlfriend, he is only able to make awkward eye contact with her before the scene ends.³⁴

Third, by the time Hae Sung finally visits Nora in New York decades later in what “will undoubtedly be a difficult, charged encounter,” the movie is nearly over. Even though it seems like this is where Nora and Hae Sung’s story should begin.³⁵

I suppose it’s in the name, but Past Lives feels limited to simple observations about the past. While the film advertises itself as “confront[ing] notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life”³⁶ it swaps the action of confrontation with the aesthetic of confrontation. Nora and Hae Sung spend more time trading wistful glances than engaging with each other’s emotions, reconciling their life choices, or interrogating their present relationships.

Throughout Past Lives, Song actively chooses to compare a White man and an Asian man, making sure we know that the Asian man has nothing going for him. Nora tells Arthur that Hae Sung is “so Korean”³⁷ — he lives at home with his parents and has “really Korean views on everything” that she doesn’t detail further.

When put into perspective with Nora’s current life with Arthur, the “so Korean” phrase seems to be yet another example of Asian women justifying their preference for White men by conflating ethnic culture and patriarchy. Nora would rather label Hae Sung “so Korean” and too different than verbalize how her values and perspectives may (or may not! Humans are complex!) differ from his — adding these layers of complexity would detract from the simple aesthetic of White versus Asian.

Could a similar “tale of 2 cultures” not be told with literally anyone other than a White man? Wouldn’t there be stark differences between any “American vs non-American” cast, regardless of ethnic background? Song could’ve gotten the same message of the “choices that make a life” across with Korean-American vs Korean men. I guess that’s not how her own WMAF love story played out. And telling that story was her real goal. But I’d like to ask you, reader:

• Wouldn’t the dynamic between Korean-American (or Asian American, or simply non-White American) vs Korean men also illustrate the differences between Korean and American expectations, lifestyles, and relationships, and get to spotlight specific, local, and substantial Asian identities?³⁸

• Wouldn’t it be great to not have to watch another WMAF love story?

• Are we so unsure of our own Asianness that we have to contrast it with absolute Whiteness in order to tell our own stories?³⁹ Re: anti wmaf wmaf club

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in conclusion, i <3 my asian ethnoburb

In the end it took me 1.5 years, start to finish, to write and publish this 5 part manifesto. I’ve been dragging my feet getting this 5th installment out because I have no idea how to conclude it. I feel responsible to deliver some suggested action items, given that I’ve spent 23,000 words airing my grievances that almost 4,000 people have read.

Instead, as a friend suggested, I will just end on some “redeeming” Asian American media. Something that actually felt good to watch and think about and talk about with my friends, which is Sean Wang’s recent film, Dìdi (弟弟).⁴⁰

To me, Dìdi (弟弟) is an honest alternative to the shallow, preachy portrayals of Asian men in Perfect Days or Past Lives. Dìdi follows a 13 year old, 2nd gen Taiwanese American boy named Chris from the suburb of Fremont, California. Chris, as any other recent middle school graduate, is navigating the typical coming-of-age embarrassments, crushes, sibling fights, and friend group drama.

Instead of leaning on stereotypical and shock-value Asian American confrontations like stinky lunches, bullying, or name-calling, Wang roots Chris’ shame in the realistic thinking that maybe his life is comfortable and mundane enough that he shouldn’t be feeling any shame about being Asian. Chris Jesu Lee writes that:

“Politically, [Chris] is told he’s got nothing to complain about because he’s basically White, only to then feel socially and culturally alienated precisely because it is made clear he is not. It’s a gnawing feeling, one that he can’t quite prove because there are few stats to quantify these things.”⁴¹

Chris’ shame exemplifies what I discussed in part 2 — when we lean on numbers to “prove” oppression rather than investigate anecdotes to understand its many layers, we dismiss the “gnawing feeling” of racialized masculinity in favor of mainstream White feminism. This kind of feminism deliberately informs Asians we have nothing left to complain about.

Moreover, I felt so much joy seeing Wang show love for his suburban hometown as someone who also grew up in an “uncool” Asian ethnoburb. Many Asian Americans who grow up in these neighborhoods and leave home for the first time often express a particular pity and disdain for their Asian hometowns for being a vapid “bubble” (as I once did). The Asian ethnoburb is busy with cultural events, extracurriculars, and weekend tutoring in someone’s garage. It is filled with Asian supermarkets, Asian neighbors, and Asian friend groups with token White people instead of the other way around.

The criticism often leveled at the ethnoburb is that it’s not like the “real” world. Asian Americans fantasize about “returning to the motherland” yet are disgusted by Irvine. Don’t come at me, I know Irvine is no Shanghai.⁴² But have we considered why these same Asian Americans wouldn’t deny the validity of growing up in a majority White or Black or Latino (etc) neighborhood? Fremont, Irvine, Cupertino, and San Ramon are just as real as any other city, and our childhood ups and downs are not worthless merely because they took place here.

I now understand this contempt as a kind of internalized anti-Asianness. What makes any other city any less of a “bubble,” what makes any other coming-of-age story any more deserving of a movie? Of course we are only familiar with the culture that we ourselves live in. That’s the point of home. By making a film inspired by his own “uneventful” suburban Asian American childhood, Wang rejects the oversimplification of Asian American embarrassment into positive linear narratives of assimilation or snappy one-liners.

There’s so much media about being the “only Asian,” when in fact, my experience shows that it is just as easy to hate yourself when you’re the only Asian, as it is to hate yourself when you’re one of “too many” Asians — it just might be a little more complicated relationship for White people to understand. Wang recognizes and spotlights the subtle, corrosive flavor of anti-Asian dynamics that imbues Asian American boys’ relationships with their parents, peers, crushes, and other Asians, with a certain kind of shame and alienation.

I am a product of the Asian ethnoburb and I love where I am from. No I wouldn’t consider it quintessentially “progressive,” the busses probably only run every 30 minutes, I did see plenty of “Yes on 8 Restore Marriage” lawn signs growing up,⁴³ but it’s my home and places change when the people there want change (let’s trust the kids!)⁴⁴

The first step of reclaiming what Bianca Mabute-Louie calls our “diasporic sense of racial placelessness,” comes from creating belonging in each other.⁴⁵ So let’s know our roots (all of them), please.⁴⁶

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That’s all I’ve got to say for now. After all, AANHPI month⁴⁷ just ended so I’m about to get played off the stage by the next marginalized group needing airtime.

There are some seeds that have been planted for future analysis — for example, some friends recently shared with me Som-Mai Nguyen’s essay on “blunt force ethnic credibility,”⁴⁸ which includes the tired romanticization of Eastern language as if specifically untranslatable words don’t exist in every language. But I don’t know when these seeds will blossom into full-blown fury and fuel a manifesto Part 6. Let’s hope they don’t and we can all keep our peace.

Happy summer!

1. In case you’re not that online, “just put the fortune cookies in the bag bro” is a play on “just put the fries in the bag bro”. The “fortune cookies” version is what a Black TikToker said to provoke @dutheangryaskim . It would be funny if an Asian person said it as an actual joke though lol. See the TikTok below:

@theangryasianplugnizzy is apart of the problem 🤷‍♂️ #theangryasian #clips #twitchclips #fypage #asian

Tiktok failed to load.

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2. “Whiteness as Property,” Cheryl Harris - page 1714, 1731, 1759

Also Harris’ son is Earl Sweatshirt wow.

3. A note on White child-rearing and (un)cleanliness by Daejah

4. tweet by Mark Tseng-Putterman

5. “Ghosts of White People Past: Witnessing White Flight From an Asian Ethnoburb,” Anjali Enjeti

6. Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism, Iyko Day - page 51 (italics mine)

7. Asians of any kind, really, including the railroad workers, housekeepers, students at elite universities, software engineers, etc.

8. In chapter 2, “Unnatural Landscapes” of Alien Capital, Iyko Day also discusses how the work of 20th century landscape photographer Ansel Adams and the Group of Seven (a collective of Canadian landscape painters) projected White masculinity, purity, and nationalism upon the iconic mountains of Yosemite and Banff National Parks.

Taken together with their words on race and nation, these conservationists betray their eugenist roots by “[fusing] wilderness protection with White racial preservation through analogies that linked the degradation of the natural environment with the degeneration of the White race through miscegenation and rising non White populations.” Chinese artist Tseng Kwong Chi’s self-portraits (in a Mao suit) amongst Western natural wonders parody Adams and the Group of Seven’s romanticization of a pure, White landscape.

9. The Chinese Workers Who Assemble Designer Bags in Tuscany, D.T. Max

10. Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Minh-Ha T. Pham - page 60

11. Gucci becomes ‘Guccy’ for its Cruise collection, Dominic Cadogan

12. Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Minh-Ha T. Pham - page 129

13. a tale of two canal streets, Viv Chen

14. mob wife is sprinkle sprinkle in a fur coat, Viv Chen

15. Pan won by an entire body length, which is an unthinkable distance in a short sprint event.

16. In 2024 before the Paris Olympics, Chinese swimmers were tested 3-4x more than the average American or Australian swimmer. During the Paris Olympics, the 31 Chinese swimmers were tested nearly 200 times in the first 10 days.

According to the 2022 World Anti-Doping Agency Testing Authority Report (page 168), of the 19,228 samples from Chinese athletes (40% more than the second most-tested country), 0.2% were positive – compare that to 3.2% for India, 2.9% for South Africa, 1.2% for USA, and 0.8% for Australia. To be fair, there is debate over whether or not drug testing even helps, since there are many ways to cheat on a drug test.

17. Disrupting Kinship, Kimberly D. McKee - Introduction

18. TV series: Squid Game, Shogun; Movie: Parasite, Oldboy; Novel: The Vegetarian

19. Asian American Psycho, Chris Jesu Lee

20. Why Are Asian Chicks so Weird?, Zoe Fuad

21. The only Chinese male character left Chinese is the crude, shrewd police officer, because we can agree that Chinese people are ill-mannered and conniving. Netflix even shoehorned in a completely irrelevant and ridiculous WMAF romance with the heroine.

See here for more discussion of 3 Body Problem casting and Asian male erasure.

22. Innie: a term used for the “work” version of the employees who undergo the severance surgical procedure in Severance

Also, I know that Gemma’s outie is Mark’s outie’s wife but the character that gets the most screentime is Gemma’s innie, Miss Casey.

23. Some of Miss Casey’s scenes: “Upon request I can also perform a hug” and Ms. Casey's Wellness Sessions

24. ‘Severance’ Creator Breaks Down Season 2 Premiere, Ethan Shanfield

25. Wim Wenders’s ‘Perfect Days’ on the Criterion Collection, Chuck Bowen and Jake Cole

26. Perfect Days review: a little too neat, Kevin Nguyen

27. ‘Perfect Days’ Review, Bowen, Cole

28. Conspicuously absent, Naomi Kanakia

29. ‘Perfect Days’ Review, Bowen, Cole

30. Could you imagine a similar film centering an honest, hardworking Chinese janitor?

31. So is Greta Lee, who plays Nora/Celine.

32. Celine Song stated that she wrote a lot of “white plays” because “she had felt conscripted into caring about” them. In Song’s play Endlings, in which she is represented by a character writing a play about Korean haenyeo divers, her playwright character says “I first told some white people about haenyeo and how amazing they are. And then they were like, ‘Oh my God, that’s amazing; you have to write a play about them,” and that she wrote the play because she had been “bribed by white people’s attention.”

From The One That Got Away, Mallika Rao

33. The One That Got Away, Mallika Rao

34. You can read this, this, and this for more interesting criticism of Past Lives.

35. What-If Question | Past Lives (2023) Review, Harrison Chut

36. https://a24films.com/films/past-lives

37. Past Lives screenplay — Page 57

38. The SoCal East Asian Ethnostate, Yui Jit Kwong

39. An alternative: in his memoir Stay True, Hua Hsu, a 2nd generation Taiwanese American, centers his relationships with his father who works in Taiwan and his unlikely best friend, a 4th generation, fraternity-approved Japanese American, to weave a realistic coming-of-age story about growing up Asian in America.

40. https://www.focusfeatures.com/didi

41. The Only Good Narcissism is My Narcissism, Chris Jesu Lee

42. “Palo Alto with its fake downtown cannot match Irvine’s lack of a center, lack of pretension, lack of reference to any other urban agglomeration that ever existed: it has no relationship to Rome, Pompei, Xian, Chicago or even Los Angeles, which sprawled out of control and in waves of booms and busts.”

From a very fun read: I live in the Future, Catherine Liu

43. 2008 California Proposition 8

44. I don’t love when people talk about children and there’s very little sense of hope in their language. Even if we aren’t teachers or parents, if we have no hope for the children, it means that we are dismissing our responsibility to the world and our role in understanding, guiding, and fighting for the next generations. It’s selfish honestly. More here:

Actually no, you don't get to dislike children, Jessie Cunniffe

Interact with Minors, Devon

On the adjacent “dogs > babies/people” conversation: People who prefer dogs over people are terrifying, Your Native Friend

45. Unassimilable, Bianca Mabute-Louie - Introduction

46. Zaretta Hammond’s 3 layer “Culture Tree” depicting Surface, Shallow, and Deep culture in her book, Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain. I discuss her tree a little more in anti wmaf wmaf club.

47. I just find it funny that we keep on adding new people to this acronym. Do the NHs and PIs even want/get to be a part of it?

48. “I tire of variants on: in Vietnamese, a tonal language, ma can mean many things. The author rattles off ghost, mother, tomb, horse, code, accompanied by the suggestion that this phrenologically means something. These claims are in-group sleights of hand, smugly announcing, without real evidence, that the author has exotic cultural knowledge the outsider cannot fathom. If you know, you know.”

Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility, Som-Mai Nguyen