The Souls of Yellow Folk

by Wesley Yang

Overview

The National Magazine Award–winning writer’s debut collection of incisive, stylish essays on race and gender.

One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow Folk, does more than collect a decade’s worth of cult-reputation essays—it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.

In his celebrated and prescient essay “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” Yang explores the deranged logic of the Virginia Tech shooter. In his National Magazine Award–winning “Paper Tigers,” he explores the intersection of Asian values and the American dream, and the inner torment of the child exposed to “tiger mother” parenting. And in his close reading of New York Magazine’s popular Sex Diaries, he was among the first critics to take seriously today’s Internet-mediated dating lives.

Yang catches these ugly trends early because he has felt at various times implicated in them, and he does not exempt himself from his radical honesty. His essays retain the thrill of discovery, the wary eye of the first explorer, and the rueful admission of the first exposed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393241747
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/13/2018
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Wesley Yang has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Esquire, Tablet, and n+1. His work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Magazine Writing, Best Creative Nonfiction, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in Montreal.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Part I

1 The Face of Seung-Hui Cho 3

2 Paper Tigers 29

3 Eddie Huang Against the World 61

Part II

4 The Life and Afterlife of Aaron Swartz 81

5 The Liveliest Mind in New York 100

6 The Terrorist Search Engine 117

7 On Francis Fukuyama 134

Part III

8 Inside the Box 145

9 On Reading the Sex Diaries 152

10 Game Theory 168

Part IV

11 We Out Here 191

12 Is It OK to Be White? 198

13 What Is White Supremacy? 207

Acknowledgments 217

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/27/2018
This incisive and provocative series of essays collects a decade’s worth of Yang’s writings on politics and cultural paradigms, investigating issues of race, masculinity, and the differences between Eastern and Western cultural values. The collection opens with a taut exploration of the motivations and meanings of Virginia Tech shooter Seng-Hui Cho, whom Yang views through a contentiously sympathetic lens as a desperate social outcast emasculated and ignored partly because of his Korean heritage. This is followed by “Paper Tigers,” originally published in New York magazine, which profiles Asian-Americans in the public eye and considers the difficulties Asians face in the corporate world as a result of being stereotyped as “a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots.” Elsewhere, Yang profiles Eddie Huang, restaurateur and author of Fresh Off the Boat (the memoir on which the ABC sitcom, which he now vociferously denounces, was based), and traces the devolution of the “seduction community” (aka pickup artists) from a relatively innocuous group of men sharing dating tips to reality television humiliation fodder. The collection closes with two essays casting a gimlet eye on the increasingly radical definitions of racism and sexism by progressives. Yang provides piercing, prickly insight into the challenges Asian-Americans face from racial and cultural bias, with literary style. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Nobody writes sentences (or profiles) like Wesley Yang. He is our Balzac."

Elif Batuman

"Wesley Yang’s pen is sharp, his imagination adventurous and his empathy devastating. His words snap a messy world into focus."

Molly Young

"Wesley Yang’s unsparing vision always affects me powerfully."

Mark Greif

"With gonzo candor and intellectual capaciousness, Yang’s Du Bois–inflected essays probe the identity crises of Asian American men and their ‘peculiar burden of nonrecognition.’"

O Magazine

"This is a spectacular essay collection, as eloquent and stylishly written as it is morally essential. With lucidity and unsentimental humanity, Wesley Yang shows us a new type of forgotten man, one whose suffering is primarily psychological. We often think of the brutality of private life as the natural province of fiction or memoir, but Yang combines the novel’s power to dissect personal psychology with the breadth, directness and raw honesty of the essay. A stunning achievement, this book deserves to be read and re-read for years to come."

Adelle Waldman

"A terrifically honest writer, Wesley Yang articulates feelings others are too afraid to call up, let alone confront. This collection is essential because it adheres to no ideology; Yang panders to no one. Instead, with sharp, and even Naipaulian, prose, he takes us deep into the discomfort zones of racial and political discourse."

Karan Mahajan

"The cry for individual identity can be no louder than in [this] piercing collection…[F]ierce and refreshing."

Carlos Lozada

"Yang writes with elegance and a fearless interest in the uncommon and unsayable."

Booklist

"As Yang’s avid followers already know, his laser scrutiny spares no one—not even Yang himself."

The Millions

2018-07-30

The debut book by an award-winning magazine writer offers his perceptive, personal view of the lives of Asian-Americans and other subjects.

For this collection, National Magazine Award-winning essayist Yang, a columnist at Tablet, uses a title that nods to The Souls of Black Folk, the 1903 classic by W.E.B. Du Bois, which introduced the concept of the "double consciousness" of people of color in America. Several of the essays, which appeared in New York Magazine, the Guardian, Harper's, n+1, and other publications over the last decade or so, do focus on the experiences of Asian-Americans. "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho" is the author's visceral but insightful response to being assigned to write about the Virginia Tech mass killer, fueled by his resentment that the assignment came because he, like the shooter, is Korean-American. "Paper Tigers" is an acerbic, well-documented response to Amy Chua's bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which Yang points out that traditional Asian approaches to education often bring astonishingly high performances by students, but those scores and grades rarely translate into success in the highest (whitest) echelons of corporations. In "Eddie Huang Against the World," the author paints a telling portrait of the rock-star chef's struggles when his memoir Fresh Off the Boat became a TV series that be believed was filled with stereotypes. The other essays, though, range across such subjects as the "pickup artist" craze, the anxieties of dating and sex in the digital age, and profiles of hacker/activist Aaron Swartz and historian Tony Judt. Three briefer and more recent essays in the final section return to the subject of racism, especially the recent resurgence of white supremacists, but they are more abstract, and less powerful, than the earlier pieces.

An uneven collection of essays that ranges from fresh analyses of the lives of Asian-Americans to smart commentaries on pop-culture phenomena but doesn't cohere around a single subject or theme.

Kirkus Reviews

"Wesley Yang's unsparing vision always affects me powerfully." -Mark Greif, author of Against Everything

From the Publisher