I Miss When Tryhards Just... Tried Hard

self-deprecating hyperachievers make it all so much worse

I was on Daniel Oppenheimer’s podcast recently, check it out. Also, if you have not already please preorder a copy of my forthcoming novel, The Mind Reels. It’s dark realityverse bleakcore.

In his recent New Yorker profile of the pathologically ambitious novelist Rebecca “R.F” Kuang, Hua Hsu takes a little shot in the New York-New Haven pizza war.

Kuang and her husband keep a shared Google Doc in which they rate every New Haven pizzeria they visit, assessing their offerings on crust, sauce, grease, cheese, and “holistic impressions.” One night, when she was wrapping up her teaching commitments for the semester, she and I ate the highest-rated cheese pizza within a ten-minute walk of her apartment, at a noisy, cavernous brewery. A medium pie was the size of a child’s desk and—were I a pizza rater—fatally lacking in grease.

This is almost certainly a reference to BAR, a restaurant which is better in most senses than at least 85% of the restaurants I’ve ever eaten at in New York, which I say as someone who lived in NYC for eight years and has visited hundreds of times across my entire life. Perhaps this is just one man’s honest opinion! Or perhaps Hsu is being the kind of transplant to New York who bathes in the city’s cosmopolitanism and comes out more provincial. Because transplants are never not trying to out-New York each other, and because most of them think that living in New York makes them inherently interesting, they often take up a defensive attitude towards all things NYC that natives usually don’t. I am not, my God, anything so exalted as a native New Yorker, but I am native to the New York metro area, and I have eaten thousands of slices of pizza from hundreds of places in both New York City and in Connecticut. And yes, the median New Haven slice is superior. I hope that doesn’t destabilize anyone’s worldview.

This was merely one bit that got me irrationally hepped up; the rest of the piece I’m afraid I found consistently annoying. I don’t want to be mean, but with the caveat that a profile can always profoundly mislead you about its subject, I personally find the Kuang we get in Hsu’s piece to be insufferable. Certainly in some sense sympathetic, at times charming, but still insufferable. Even all of Hsu’s doggedly upbeat framing can’t hide the fact that, periodically, Kuang comes across as a self-promoting tryhard who displays her accomplishments in front of the reader’s eyes like a harried mother dangling a keyring in front of her infant, yet who also wants to make sure you understand how terribly unimpressed she is with her own extensively cataloged laurels. The profile, for its part, seems unaware of how aggravating it is to hear about the personal foibles of this freakishly ambitious and wildly successful person as she simultaneously waves around her resumé and affects ambivalence towards the whole “success” thing.

“The current version of Kuang might be described as a tabula-rasa novice, a highly accomplished author who would prefer to be an eager disciple,” Hsu says of Kuang. But you realize, right, that it’s easy to prefer to be an eager disciple when you’ve already gotten the book deals, won the awards, and enjoyed the acclaim? That this affect is exactly that, affected, that it has no stakes and therefore amounts to a kind of disingenuous regular gal cosplay? I’m genuinely not trying to be personally insulting, in this piece, but I find this so obnoxious. You are patently not a tabula-rasa novice or an eager disciple, and if you were, you wouldn’t enjoy this bit of great publicity.

This is the broader issue that bothers me, and I find it’s increasingly common: that today’s high-flying meritocrats, our betters, our National Honors Society members (literal and metaphorical), can’t just strive and succeed and outdo all of us directly and unapologetically anymore. No, Kuang and Hsu have to dress the piece up with 21st century skepticism towards meritocracy, add some tepid acknowledgement that the system isn’t perfectly fair and there’s something unhealthy about all of this achievement blah blah blah…. To me, a perennial fuckup who never went a semester in high school without failing math or science or math and science, that just makes it all worse. Just be impressive and let us resent you! Just be better than the rest of us and let us grumble about you. The attempt at defensive self-awareness makes it so much worse.

I would genuinely rather an ultra-high achiever just plainly look down their nose at the rest of us. It’s like Zizek’s parable of the postmodern father: squishy, fretful elitism leaves us unable to simply reject the elite. It amounts to a demand that they be perceived as relatable on top of being superior.

The piece is unapologetically concerned with hyper-achievement; Hsu needs you to know that Kuang is not just an overachiever but the kind of overachiever whose talent and work ethic bully you into dropping whatever objections you might have to overachievement. The online headline mentions Kuang’s “otherworldly ambition,” while “The Achiever” is the more poetic paper title. Kuang, the subhead tells us, is “drawn to stories of striving.” Every detail furthers her legend. Ms. Kuang attended the tony, prestigious Greenhill School; she’s a former Marshall scholar; she holds a BA from Georgetown and a masters degree from Oxford; soon she will complete her doctorate at Yale. She wrote her first novel during her late adolescence, and Hsu is careful to inform the reader that this turn to writing was all very casual, a lark, a diversion that has become the kind of career most writers would kill for. “I think I completely reinvent myself every few years,” says Kuang of herself, modestly. She’s a world traveler and fluent in multiple languages. She’s not some cosseted career academic, no, but someone who has worked in real private enterprise. She’s married to her high school sweetheart; she’s a loyal daughter and an enlightened 21st century woman. She’s a former debate club champion, known for her steely unflappability at the podium. She embraces her cultural identity while holding it with a very hip form of detachment. She’s humble, saying “I really love when someone else is the expert.” She is not yet 30 years old.

There is, I will confess, a willingness to self-promote here that I find charming. Kuang says, “I actually am afraid of being totally happy with my work, because, if you are perfectly satisfied with your abilities, there’s nowhere else to go. You might as well be dead.” The self-aggrandizement here is unmistakable, the cliché unforgivable, yet each passes without mention. This is what I find endearing, when the shameless hyperachiever peeks out, because that’s the part of her that seems genuine. But as writers we are always making choices, all the time, and Hsu makes many in this profile. For one, he hangs a great deal of weight on the idea that Kuang is uniquely prolific, which is plainly not true in a world where George Simenon and Danielle Steele and Jules Verne have lived and published. But, for whatever reason, Hsu seems doggedly bent on making Kuang seem impressive even relative to the credentials he keeps endlessly burnishing. “She speaks with a gentle, almost dazed curiosity,” says Hsu. Now that’s what I call profile writing. Are there really no young writers out there, far from the Ivy League or New York City, who couldn’t benefit much more from Hsu’s largesse? Who don’t already have a book deal?

Still, this is all standard issue. If fart-sniffing prestige magazines did not spend an inordinate amount of time lavishing praise on people who very conspicuously do not need it, how would we know who’s better than we are? Kuang must be a beguiling subject. She could hardly be a better representative of idealized achievement culture, but she lays on enough face-saving critiques of the elite world that spawned her to save her from looking like a snob. She writes across many modes and genres (no end to her abilities) but is perhaps best known for working in the subgenre of “dark academia,” which helps give the piece a little populist juice. This is no doubt another mark of her great intelligence: if you want to sell books, there had better be werewolves, but if you want literary credibility, you better apply Donna Tartt like an Instagram filter to what you produce. To me, “dark academia” sounds more like a subgenre of JRPG than like a kind of book, but then I am an old elitist whose books haven’t sold. Not the kind of elitist who collects degrees from Oxbridge and the Ivy League, true, but an elitist all the same, the unreconstructed, superior kind.

Anyway: this is all self-evidently annoying, but Kuang’s repeated, disingenuous stabs at self-deprecation are particularly so. Rebecca, you’re not supposed to come right out and say you have “epistemic humility”! Being annoying in a New Yorker profile isn’t some great failing, mind you. Certainly in the world of New Yorker profile subjects she won’t go down as a villain, and I don’t think of her that way. Then again, making fun of people for being annoying in a New Yorker profile is a time-honored tradition, and I don’t see any particular reason why Kuang would be exempt, none that are enlightened, anyway. To me, the problem is the fact that Kuang, like so many other modern meritocrats, wants to grab the brass ring while appearing ambivalent towards the pursuit.

“I was still chasing prizes, and I think, to a bright-eyed twentysomething, if your whole life is about winning prizes and getting through that next door, that game itself is enough,” she said. “You just want to keep winning. But then I’d won the prize. And the question was: What are you actually going to do with all this education?”

Setting aside the fact that as of the time I’m writing this essay she is in fact still literally a bright-eyed twentysomething - Ms. Kuang, you are being profiled in the New Yorker. That is the gold medal, and you know it. That is the prize, and you know it. That is a greater expression of hyper-achievement culture than any degree or award, and you know it. Your waves at disdain towards the meritocratic world are a means to advance yourself within it, and you know it, and Hsu knows it, and the editors at The New Yorker know it, and all of its readers know it, and nobody knows it better than me. THAT is what I hate, the absurd premise that she’s unaware of how this piece serves as yet another prize that signifies her status as a prize-winner and which sets her up for future prizes. It’s like dismissing the value of winning athletic competitions while they take your Wheaties box photo on the podium at the Olympics, and I genuinely think less of Hsu for letting it go unremarked on.

What on earth is the purpose of this weird, halfhearted suggestion that you are not still reaching for prizes? Who benefits? Why are you getting a PhD at Yale when there is almost no material thing on this green earth that you could not pursue right now without it? Because you’re so over medals? Why is this entire piece framed around Hsu doing overachiever ethnography around the Yale campus, if there’s anything particularly interesting about you rather than your ongoing reaching for every prize? Couldn’t you have done your interviews at a local Dunkin Donuts, if prestige means so little to you? Hsu tells us that Kuang thinks that “academia is meant to be constantly humbling.” I’ve known some academics who said things like that. They were all among the least authentically humble people I’ve ever met.

Well, that’s the hell that we live in with the 21st century meritocrat: we have to stumble around in our decidedly unimpressive lives in the shadow of their achievement while they enjoy plausible deniability about whether they ever valued it that much. Ms. Kuang is aware that receiving a New Yorker profile before the age of 30 makes her seem very impressive indeed and no doubt loves that it’s framed as a visit to her august Ivy League doctoral institution, and also needs to get a few lines in there about how she’s so humble and has absorbed the 21st century meritocrat’s critique of meritocracy. She reports that, during college, she asked herself “There was this big question mark of ‘What on earth am I good for?’” I confess that it’s hard to believe that she did, but maybe, maybe. The only sin there would be the invented sin of pretending like she ever has if she hasn’t. Either way, if the phrase “her second master’s thesis” is written about you in the fucking New Yorker, please, just drop the act. Please. It makes it so much worse when you pretend to not be impressive, or when you claim not to care about what impresses people. It makes it so much worse.

I will confess that I’m filtering the profile through my deep distaste for her 2023 book Yellowface, which I read when it came out and found to be an almost impossibly cynical piece of work. The book tells the story of a white woman who backs into a kind of Rachel Dolezal performance of false Asian identity, finding it professionally advantageous as a writer to pretend to be something other than white. If this sounds encouraging, allow me to disappoint you in saying that the novel engages in a type of race critique that’s pitched absolutely perfectly towards the political assumptions of publishing during the 2020 moment, when it would have been sold. Yellowface is a book frothing with premade #discourse, full of observations of modern race relations that are so dangerous that were routinely being made on Tumblr fifteen years before publication. Hsu, no dummy and no stranger to these waters, troubles the book’s pat critique of whiteness and the performance of race far more than the book itself bothers to; indeed, Kuang smuggles in the assumptions of the very race-politics consensus she pretends to interrogate. Her novel hides in the shelter of approved takes: publishing is racist, white writers profit from minority pain, the internet flattens nuance, allyship is performative. None of this is false, but it is certainly trite, and Kuang has no apparent interest in digging deeper than the level of a panel discussion at a book festival.

Kuang takes pains to tell Hsu that she has sympathy for the main character, who is guilty of the titular identity crime, and it’s true that there’s some limp waves at getting past the warmed-over 2010s feminist blog argument that makes up the book’s spine. But the heart of the thing remains a series of observations that are at least a decade past their prime, presented as if we haven’t all read Cathy Park Hong and Wesley Yang and any number of other writers who had the decency to be authentically mad in their writing. The Yellowface reader is meant to applaud Kuang for daring to “say the thing,” when in reality she never says anything that risks offending the contemporary liberal consensus her career depends on.

(The novel is being adapted into a high-profile television series; no word on whether this could be interpreted as a type of prize.)

More importantly, I just don’t buy that this is an authentic expression of anything Kuang has observed or felt. Nothing in it seems motivated by personal experience, authentic frustration, or honestly-gotten unhappiness with publishing. It’s a book about the most literary of literary fiction by an author who was to that point a genre specialist, and its various observations seem ripped directly out of Twitter, Tumblr, and 2010s era blogs, none of which match the person Kuang attempts to project in her public persona. And this speaks to the book’s whole deal; it feels predigested, a photocopy of someone else’s 2014ish complaints about cultural appropriation, filtered through the pitiable target of its white protagonist. I’m sorry, but it just seems false to me, and in a way that could not have been better set up to receive accolades in its particular era of publishing and liberal norms. Like so many books celebrated in progressive media in the past fifteen years, it put its lips out to be kissed and was then celebrated for being confrontational.

This sense of the book wearing a mask permeates the endeavor. This is, after all, supposed to be one of those “books that sound like the internet” like Fake Accounts or No One is Talking About This, novels that capture online life. Yellowface borrows relentlessly from the rhythms of online discourse, but in Kuang’s hands those rhythms feel arch and inauthentic. The narrator’s fixation on hashtags, viral threads, and clout-chasing outrage cycles doesn’t land as genuine satire of internet culture but as an author standing outside of it, reconstructing it secondhand from observation. Was Kuang really ever an irony boy, a memelord, as Hsu seems to suggest? When? Between her world lit seminar and Latin club? I can’t reconcile her life story with the novel’s shitposting ambitions. Yellowface is frequently compared to the work of Patricia Lockwood or Tao Lin, but never would I question their very online credentials, and here I do. Kuang’s prose doesn’t pulse with the nasty, unhinged energy of 2010s Twitter; it sounds instead like a professor summarizing social media to students who somehow don’t have the internet. The result is a book that wants to take a deep, wounding bite out of both liberal pretensions and online culture but keeps chewing air instead.

True satire has to destabilize; it has to risk alienating the very people who would think of themselves as its natural audience. Yellowface never takes that risk. Kuang props up straw versions of industry villains (exploitative publishers, oblivious white women) without ever examining the deeper ambiguities of ambition, envy, and identity that could have made the book dangerous. It pretends to lampoon race discourse while actively rehearsing its most anodyne bromides. It claims to expose the way writers commodify pain while existing itself as a commodification, a slick package of publishing-scandal aesthetics designed to go viral on BookTok. Yellowface exemplifies the very disease it pretends to diagnose: literature reduced to discourse, fiction bent into the shape of online debate. It isn’t a satire of the system, but product placement within it. Kuang wants the glow of rebellion without the costs, the posture of provocation without the substance. It’s a hollow performance, made even weirder by the fact that Kuang’s sci-fantastical work appears genuinely motivated.

But clearly Kuang had loftier goals than being pigeonholed into various forms of nerd fiction, and Yellowface was a work of bald ambition; it would have been better if it came out in 2018 instead of 2023, but that wasn’t too late to achieve its aims. It’s the work of a young woman of color who knew very, very well what book reviewers wanted to see a young woman of color do in a fancy grownup novel, and she did it and reaped her reward. Like all of her books, Yellowface was a bestseller, and it received dutiful praise from the book reviewing community and sufficient awards-season attention. But then that is, after all, the tryhard’s métier - to perform and then to receive applause.

There’s also a road not traveled here where Hsu and Kuang both tiptoe up to admitting that there are, in fact, obvious professional advantages in writing “ethnic literature,” even as those dynamics are also artistically constricting. Kuang’s next next book - not her next book, but the next one after that, already written - “draws on her experiences of studying Mandarin in Taipei a few years ago while dealing with the death of her grandfather.” I have no doubt that Ms. Kuang feels some degree of conflict about being able to exploit her ethnic identity in a for-profit book; she says as much in the profile. But she’s also far too smart not to know that this synopsis is also catnip for her agent and whoever’s publishing her books these days. And so is Hsu. The described novel is a kind of book that the publishing industry loves and loves to sell. Of course Asian American writers labor under all kinds of stereotypes and constraints, no doubt about it. But at some point you do have to acknowledge the upside of being able to exploit the cliches the industry cynically embraces. And this could dovetail really nicely with all of the overachiever stuff, deeper and harsher observations about the meaning of achievement for 21st century Asian Americans. But neither profilee nor profiler seems to want to push too deeply there.

Well, I don’t actually bear Kuang any ill will, obviously. Just like I’ve never really held it against the overachievers I’ve known in my real life. And please understand me: I don’t at all question whether her accomplishments are real or deserved. (If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be annoying.) She is clearly deserving and clearly going places. There’s also no need to feel bad for her, frankly; the whole world is laid out at her feet, after all. I just wish someone that wildly ambitious and relentlesly successful would have either a little more or a little less self-awareness. What’s worst in ultra-achievers, after all, isn’t arrogance or piety but self-effacing doubt. When someone who has scaled every mountain shrugs and muses about the emptiness of meritocracy or insists their privilege explains it all, the gesture doesn’t comfort, it stings. Their success is undeniable even when - especially when - they deny it, and when they cast suspicion on accomplishment itself, it only sharpens the gap between their world and ours: they’ve won, and they still get to play philosopher about the meaning of winning. Better, in some ways, if they simply basked in their glory; at least then the hierarchy feels honest, rather than salted with a humility that only emphasizes how much they have to be humble about. Spare me.

It’s not healthy or rational, but I confess that I only really appreciate achievement when achievement is effortless. I only really respect success when the successful appear to barely be trying. What can I say? I’m not against achievement, only the effort that achievement requires. I admire the egalitarianism inherent to the detention hall. I’m ultimately a creature of the late 20th century, and all my heroes are slackers.

Kuang will be fine; she will, in fact, be much better than fine. Magazines of this caliber only profile the ones who have already summited the mountain; how else could they be sure that their subjects are worthy of their attention? Kuang’s youth might provoke defensiveness - I’m expecting to be accused of “punching down” at someone who is more successful than me in every arena of human achievement - but of course such defensiveness is condescending, and a woman of her accomplishments should inspire no such condescension. The novelist Tochi Onyebuchi, a friend and contemporary of Kuang’s, is quoted in the piece as saying, “Yeah, sure, the Hugo is nice. But what about a Booker? I can see it for her.” Me too! Me too.