The loneliest Americans

Jay Caspian Kang, 1979-

Book - 2021

"A riveting blend of family history and original reportage by a conversation-starting writer for The New York Times Magazine that explores-and reimagines-Asian American identity in a Black and white world. In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Nobody, including the lawmakers who passed the bill, expected it to transform the country's demographics. But over the next four decades, millions arrived, including Jay Caspian Kang's parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They came with almost no understanding of their new home, much less the history of "Asian America" that was supposed to define them. The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable sto...ry of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents' assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite-all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly "people of color." Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country's racial binary. There are the businessmen turning Flushing into a center of immigrant wealth; the casualties of the Los Angeles riots; the impoverished parents in New York City who believe that admission to the city's exam schools is the only way out; the men's right's activists on Reddit ranting about intermarriage; and the handful of protesters who show up at Black Lives Matter rallies holding "Yellow Peril Supports Black Power" signs. Kang's exquisitely crafted book brings these lonely parallel climbers together amid a wave of anti-Asian violence. In response, he calls for a new form of immigrant solidarity-one rooted not in bubble tea and elite college admissions but in the struggles of refugees and the working class"--

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Subjects
Genres
Biographies
Published
New York : Crown [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Jay Caspian Kang, 1979- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
259 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-249) and index.
ISBN
9780525576228
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1. How We Got Here
  • Chapter 2. The Making of Asian America
  • Chapter 3. How the Asians Became White
  • Chapter 4. Koreatown
  • Chapter 5. Flushing Rising
  • Chapter 6. What Are We Talking About?
  • Chapter 7. The Rage of the MRAZNs
  • Chapter 8. Bruce and Me
  • Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this searing treatise, Kang (The Dead Do Not Improve), a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine, examines what it means to be Asian "within the narrative of a country that would rather write you out of it." Through personal anecdote and extensive reporting, he illuminates how, in the United States where, he writes, the racial binary is white and Black, Asians face a "loneliness that comes from attempts to assimilate, whether by melting into the white middle class or by creating an elaborate, yet ultimately derivative, racial 'identity.' " A first-generation Korean American, Kang is refreshingly candid in his analysis, addressing how immigrants who come from Asia lack the intrinsic solidarity that has been foisted upon them--either by American ignorance or well-intentioned, but often misguided, activist efforts. He adds texture to this sentiment by making the historical personal, detailing his experience as the son of two North Korean refugees who moved to the United States in 1979. But his story is secondary to a larger cultural interrogation, as he deconstructs the "blinkered optimism" of the Asian immigrants who came to America after the passing of 1965's Hart-Celler Act, and scrutinizes the reddit thread MRAZNs (Men's Rights Activist Azns). This excellent commentary on the Asian American experience radiates with nuance and emotion. (Oct.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

In this latest book, Kang (The Dead Do Not Improve) suggests that to understand the history of Asian Americans, one need only go back to 1968, when the term "Asian American" was created by a group of students in Berkeley. Prior to 1968, Kang writes, there were only "Asians in the United States," whom white Americans largely did not think of as fellow citizens. Kang addresses the history of the Berkeley movement in order to contextualize the construct of Asian American-ness, an identity that he describes as problematic in a country that still looks at race largely in terms of Blackness and whiteness. Kang frames his argument with a first chapter that focuses on his family's migrations from North Korea to South Korea, and eventually to the United States after the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965. His cultural criticism adds a much-needed perspective to the growing body of literature by the children of Korean immigrants in the United States, including Cathy Park Hong's autobiographical essay collection Minor Feelings. Kang also devotes chapters to his coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests, the online community of men's rights activists, and the "aznidentity" subreddit. VERDICT Kang's book adeptly blends history, memoir, and current affairs in an attempt to make sense of the individual's place in the current map of the United States.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston

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Chapter One How We Got Here Sometime in the years leading up to the Korean War--­the exact dates are unknown or, perhaps, obscured--­my mother's father was slated for execution. He had been born and raised in a village in North Korea and was working as a civil servant when the Communists took over in 1945. Over the next three years, my grandfather attended a handful of anti-­Communist meetings. For that, he was branded as part of the intelligentsia and subjected to routine harassment. The news of his execution orders were relayed to him by a friend, who claimed to have seen a list somewhere. A few days later, my grandfather dressed up as a fisherman and hopped on the back of a delivery truck to escape to the south. He left behind my grandmother, my oldest aunt, and an uncle. My grandmother and her kids followed on foot a few months later, accompanied by a family friend. She faced, at the time, an impossibility of circumstance, and I've wondered whether she, like Lot's wife, ever considered looking back at the family and friends she was leaving behind. These dilemmas, which shape our crude and ultimately conditional allegiances to family, duty, and our futures, are usually foisted upon the young, who lack the vocabulary to describe what is happening to them. My grandmother, aunt, and uncle reunited with my grandfather in Seoul and then made their way to a makeshift refugee camp outside the city. They weren't alone. In the years before and during the war, 10 percent of the entire population of North Korea--­roughly one million people--­escaped to the south. They formed their own refugee communities outside of mainstream South Korean society, which regarded them with general suspicion. But any plan for assimilation into the newly formed nation would be disrupted on June 25, 1950, when North Korean forces led by Kim Il-­Sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong-­Un, began an artillery attack on the south and a military push that captured Seoul. Two weeks before my mother was born, General MacArthur, who was in charge of the American troops, launched an amphibious attack at Incheon and pushed quickly up to Seoul. My mother was born amid artillery fire, but when she was three days old, Seoul had been liberated from North Korean forces. Nobody on my mother's side of the family has anything to say about the war. They are either dead, somewhere in North Korea, or in the United States. My grandmother never spoke of what happened during those years, and my mother was too young to remember. They knew that two million people died. My uncle died of typhus during the war, but nobody talked about that, either. All they said was that when he died, my grandfather wrapped his body in a blanket and disappeared for three days. He apparently told my grandmother where he buried the body only when he was in his sixties, hobbled from diabetes and near death himself. The men in their refugee village went into the forests, chopped down wood, and burned it to make charcoal to sell. My mother says she can recall the image of a man covered in soot standing in the entryway to their shack, but she isn't sure if this is a real memory or her mind's struggle to make visual sense out of whatever her own mother had let slip about those years. This is not uncommon, of course, but I mention it only because if I wanted to tell my daughter that all this death--­her great-­uncle and all the hundreds of friends and relatives left behind in the north--­was her inheritance, I would have to look at a history book. After the war, my mother's family moved to Seoul, where my grandfather found work as a scavenger. Every morning, he would go to the U.S. Army base in Itaewon, find discarded surplus, load it up on a cart, and sell it on the streets. This quickly turned into a storefront, which, in turn, briefly became a profitable business. I never really knew him, but looking at photos, I can see he had dark skin, which explains, I suppose, how my sister and I turned out to be several shades darker than our parents. On July 27, 1953, the war ended with an armistice agreement that established the demilitarized zone on the 38th parallel. It would take decades for my grandparents to realize that they would never see their friends and family again. At my grandmother's funeral in 2019, my father, who had known her since he began dating my mother at the age of nineteen, noted that while my grandmother complained all day long about everything--­from the indifference of her grandchildren to the quality of produce in Los Angeles--­she seemed to have completely blocked out the three decades she spent in South Korea. The years between fleeing the north and moving to Los Angeles had effectively been erased. My mother and the four siblings who were born during and directly after the war have no idea how their own mother felt about the family's uprooting and brief fortune, but they all deal with adversity in a similarly pragmatic way. Problems are just things to be solved. Trauma was an abstract concept that reflected a weakness of will. During a rather whiny phase when I was five years old, my mother dragged me to a homeless shelter in Cambridge so I could witness the lives of the less fortunate. This is one of my earliest memories: the smell of defeated, collapsed bodies suffering from drug addiction and the clean brick walls. What strikes me isn't that she chose to do this at such a young age but that she, in effect, swapped out our family's narrative for the suffering of strangers. Years later, when I was in my early thirties, my parents showed me photos of Seoul during their early childhoods--­shacks lined up on the banks of the Han River; the makeshift architecture of a city under constant siege--­and talked a little bit about how hard it was for them to eat a decent meal, the impossibility of finding consistent nutrition. When I asked my mother why she hadn't told us about any of this, she said postwar Seoul would have been too foreign for me to grasp and that I needed examples from my own life, which, upon reflection, was right. Will my daughter care about any of this? History, in some ways, is a choice; my parents chose to deprive their children of the past. Since we never learned about the Korean War or Japanese imperialism or any immigration stories outside of Ellis Island in school, my sister and I did not really know that we could pinpoint ourselves within a linear history of oppression. My daughter's connection to these histories will be even more abstracted, not only by time but by a more compelling identity as a mixed-­race kid of the second and fourth generation of Korean and Jewish immigrants. And yet she does have an American history, one that extends beyond her own family. For most of the Asians in America, that story begins on October 3, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson stood in front of the Statue of Liberty and said something that would be proven wrong. "This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill," Johnson said. "It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives." He was referring to the Hart-­Celler Immigration Act, a landmark piece of legislation with a lengthy history dating back to the 1930s and efforts to open up immigration quotas for Jewish Europeans fleeing the Nazis. Its opponents at the time described apocalyptic scenarios in which the United States and its white population would be overrun by a horde of foreigners. Johnson, for his part, assured the public that the easing of restrictions would have only a mild effect on the demographics of the country. Most people, he believed, would stay in their home countries. Over the next five decades, the Hart-­Celler Act, which lifted tight restrictions on immigration from previously "undesirable" countries, would bring tens of millions of new immigrants from Asia, southern and eastern Europe, and Africa. No single piece of legislation has shaped the demographic and economic history of this country in quite the same way. Excerpted from The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.