I do understand the whole thing about Asian American diaspora art and I've already held some opinions on it, but's been really weird to be generalized into this sort of "Bay Area Daddy's Money MFA Choice Feminist WMAF Personal Essayist" archetype when I am a Wasian girlf*g who grew up in Appalachia. The book is being judged by its cover in unique ways I didn't even think possible. Not to mention the Nazi Japanese military general LARPers on twitter who are race analyzing me and calling me a white woman.
I feel like a lot of it is just bad timing. Twitter had a recent phase of beating on Asian American artists. I feel kinda weird about it. On one hand, I come from animation school, so I know what it means to see someone grifting on the shallow aesthetics of cultural identity. The whole "in my culture we have grandma's and food" type thing is veryyy common, especially amongst fresh-out-of-high-school students making films with limited life experience via some mainstream white-gaze simulacra of their mother culture.
But at the same time, it's just as shallow to take these symbolic signifiers of "cringe diaspora art" ("tiger moms" (hate that term) who don't say I love you, having to exist along the peripheries of whiteness in American society, being bullied in school for being different), and just ascribe them to people's lived experience, and use that to shut something down before even trying to understand it (or…like..even read it at all!!). We do not live in absolutes! Yes, American entertainment pushes an extremely Neo-liberal agenda that pushes out so much un-thought provoking nothingness and circle jerks themselves with award shows and fabricated drama to keep us from thinking about the collapse of America. Yes, the book is a dying art form and maybe people think the MFA-personal-essayist style is killing, or maybe it's just that damn phone. These are all multi-faceted and separate issues, that converge in different levels on different subjects. And just because someone's lived experience happens to scratch a buzzword, it doesn't become some kind of abhorrent asbolute that means they're putting Asians to shame everywhere. This concept you have in your head, of this privileged white-dating boba-liberal self-victimizing Asian American writer is just as reductive as the "stinky tofu diaspora story" that you despise.
Also obviously this battle will last my whole career, but what is with people saying that I can't write from a Chinese American perspective as a mixed person? If there is ANY sort of pearl-grasping neoliberalism behind the sentiment, it's horseshoe theorying all the way to white supremacy. Do you mean to say, the white experience is the general experience, and I must only create within the general experience unless I have a Chinese last name that doesn't threaten your identity politics?
Also my Chinese name is Wang Donger and using either of those options as a replacement is not that cute.
Whatever…. I'm so tired!!
