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by Jay Caspian Kang (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
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ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, Mother Jones • “[Kang’s] exploration of class and identity among Asian Americans will be talked about for years to come.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review
“A smart, vulnerable, and incisive exploration of what it means for this brilliant and honest writer—a child of Korean immigrants—to assimilate and aspire while being critical of his membership in his community of origin, in his political tribe, and in America.”—Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko
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 story 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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249 pages
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Much of the book’s texture is supplied by the character of Jay Kang, who bristles at the prospect of being a character at all. . . . His perpetual self-doubt makes the book crackle with life. . . . The lasting achievement of The Loneliest Americans is that it prompts Asian Americans to think about identity in a framework other than likeness. It asks us to make meaning in ways beyond looking out for our own.”—The New Yorker
“Kang combines his personal family history with deft reportage in a provocative and sweeping examination of racial identity, belonging and family.”—Time
“The Loneliest Americans dares readers to push beyond their comfort zones and deconstruct the mythology of American identity.”—LitHub
“Provocative. Of the books in this column, it’s the one I can’t shake, the most unsettling, and certainly least lovable, by design. It’s also the hardest to put down. . . . [Kang] does not want to speak for the scope of Asian America, but he does have a lot to say about how a sense of self can be relayed, assembled and diluted. . . . It’s a messy, frustrating, thoughtful, confusing, illuminating argument—all at once.”—Chicago Tribune
“[The Loneliest Americans] is an invitation to think harder and move beyond the existing racial taxonomies that have become distended to the point of futility and that can feel specifically designed to exclude as much as include. Kang may not have all the answers to help us ‘solve race,’ but he does something as important: he asks the uncomfortable questions.”—The Brooklyn Rail
“From courtrooms to classrooms, Reddit threads to Kang's own family history, The Loneliest Americans fearlessly, voraciously probes the foundations of the Asian American experience, not to disavow it but to conjure bracing new visions of community and solidarity.”—Hua Hsu, author of A Floating Chinaman
“Jay Caspian Kang's singular voice combines Salingeresque charm with simmering rage, deadpan hilarity, and laser brilliance as he examines the conflicted efforts of upwardly mobile Asian Americans to find their place in the Black-white binary of American racial struggle and politics. Readers from other ‘inconvenient’ minorities will definitely relate. Kang leads us to a smarter, more compassionate and consequential place to take a stand.”—Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy
“Thought-provoking, bold, incisive, and intelligent—I don't have enough adjectives for Jay Caspian Kang’s work or the sheer pleasure of reading his prose. This is a book sure to start, inform, and enrich many conversations.”—Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown
“Jay Caspian Kang is an unmissable interrogator of contemporary identity politics: sharp, conflicted, allergic to sanctimony, and unsparing most of all when he looks at himself. The Loneliest Americans is a call for a multivalent and radically honest vision of Asian life in America, a clear look at the schism between the affronts faced by upper-middle-class professionals and the reality of the unprotected working class. Kang lays out the seductions of protective self-interest that need to be reckoned with before they can be cast aside—the individualistic narratives of trauma and ambition lays out the seductions of protective self-interest that must be overcome if Asians in America hope to establish a politics of broad radical solidarity.”—Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
“[A] searing treatise . . . Kang is refreshingly candid in his analysis, addressing how immigrants who come from Asia lack the intrinsic solidarity that has been foisted upon them. . . . This excellent commentary on the Asian American experience radiates with nuance and emotion.”—Publishers Weekly
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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.
About the Author
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. His other work has appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and on This American Life and Vice, where he worked as an Emmy-nominated correspondent. He is the author of the novel The Dead Do Not Improve, which The Boston Globe called “an extremely smart, funny debut, with moments of haunting beauty.” --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
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Product details
ASIN : B095HXKP7V
Publisher : Crown (October 12, 2021)
Publication date : October 12, 2021
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 249 pages
4.3 out of 5 stars 134 ratings
Jay Caspian Kang
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4.3 out of 5 stars
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asian american asian americans jay caspian caspian kang loneliest americans united states asian america thought provoking working class middle class american identity different ways americans by jay american dream place of asian throughout the book white or black experiences immigration korean
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J. Kang
5.0 out of 5 stars An Honest Accounting of Asian-American IdentityReviewed in the United States on October 16, 2021
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To be clear I am not the author despite the similar name.
If you would like to get a glimpse of the honest reflections and private thoughts that any Asian-American with two brain cells surely has had on occasion -- then get this book. If you are an Asian-American that finds yourself feeling the hollowness of all the fruits that society has promised or struggle to situate yourself in a complex pyramid of injustice -- then buy this book.
Jay Caspian Kang seems to be divisive; one can plot out the kind of professionalized, NGO-style activists, cliques of writers, and media personalities that will certainly rail against this book. Why? Because it doesn't follow the now familiar stenography of upwardly mobile Asians and their radicalism of primarily form. As such, Kang's writing suffers the digressions and conflicts of everyday life rather than the perfectly planned woke speeches we have all come to glaze over during marches, media interviews, and the like.
This isn't to say that in the space between memoir doesn't hold well-researched, thoughtful, and sympathetic portraits of Asian-American history as we know it -- ranging from the origin of the term, the International Hotel, the building of FLushing, K-town, and the like. Despite exploring a wide array of subjects and pushing the edges of conventional wisdom, Kang is nothing if not sympathetic.
JCK asks us upwardly mobile Asians to essentially commit themselves to becoming class traitors within the context of the US--a nation which has never ceased in its brutally one-sided class war and which has never truly reckoned with the ceaseless racism towards Blacks. He asks for us to betray the masters of capital not for a sense of abstract morality but rather to embrace a broader immigrant community--much of which lives on the fringes of society and often in poverty.
This is where one of the more reasonable critiques of the book comes. When being asked to side with the poor most people come to expect the subjects of the book to be representative. JCK has stated this more-or-less fell out of the scope of this book, and it seems a reasonable. That being said, a lot of the individual portraits are of upwardly mobile Asians -- which includes JCK himself (a fact he will cop to easily and often).
While this book does not push the boundaries of academic scholarship, radical thought, or reveal a secret asian history to unlock a rapturous radical front -- it does make an intervention (perhaps even a plea) to the kinds of upwardly mobile Asians that have the income, time, and wherewithal to naval gaze on identity to perhaps consider a better use of their time (when they are ready). These kind of people are real and so is there confusion. If they are left to imbibe the Gospels of Jeff Yang or the tired histories of Asian Studies professors -- then truly Asian-American identity as project will surely collapse into a fate ostensibly worse than the Irish becoming white.
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Rick Umali
5.0 out of 5 stars Exploring the Asian American IdentityReviewed in the United States on October 26, 2021
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The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang is a book about the Asian American experience in the United States. He writes at the onset that an Asian's assimilation involves "melting into the white middle class" or creating a racial identity that either makes it easy for white people to relate to us, or makes us "people of color". "The loneliness comes from the realization that nobody, whether white or Black, really cares if we succeed in creating any of these identities."
The book does not follow the form of a traditional memoir, but throughout he skillfully weaves in his background and family history ("...my mother flew back to Korea to give birth to me because she assumed her stay in America would be temporary") against the backdrop of America's own history with immigration. He discusses the emergence of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act and how it greatly increased the presence of Asians in this country. He later uses the Hart-Celler Act as a dividing line between early Chinese and Japanese immigrants and today's broader influx.
Four of the chapters offer explorations and observations of the Asian American experience in the context of assignments that Jay worked on. There is a good range of subjects: a protest rally in Minnesota, a look at test prep centers in Queens, a review of Koreatown (Los Angeles), a profile of a World Series of Poker contestant. He inserts himself in a style that quite appeals to me. His asides to the reader make you feel like a close collaborator of sorts.
He argues that the Asian American identity is a tenuous construct, especially for immigrants arriving after the Hart-Celler Act ("How do you create a people out of such silly connections?" "...our understanding of our 'homelands' comes from old things that lost their relevance decades ago..."). He vents about "a multicultural elite" that wants to "erase all the unseemly parts of Asian America." He rues how there's "no answer for the exclusion" an Asian American feels when they cannot talk about racism.
He ponders what he sees and experiences in the context of his young daughter. He wonders how she might see and experience these same things and whether she'll relate to any of these in the same way as him. Since she is mixed-race ("a more compelling identity") he suspects that she won't. He worries that eventually he'll resent her ease with the world, her future "thoughtless life", not living "under such contradictory pretenses."
I really liked this book and highly recommend it. It provides great context for the way Asian Americans are presented in today's discourse. It gives context for action ("show up") though perhaps it may not be enough.
I especially recommend it for any first generation Hart-Celler immigrants. His explanations for why it is frustrating to discuss race as an assimilated Asian American are heartfelt and hit home for me (full disclosure: I'm an assimilated first generation Hart-Celler immigrant). He conveys just how personal the search for identity is and why for Asian American immigrants it's an especially lonely undertaking.
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Kumar
5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful bookReviewed in Canada on October 23, 2021
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A really good book. The author does a good job in helping the reader introspect and make us think where we come from.
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