My mom is one of these "no downtime" people. She's 76 and last week walked around 6 miles with my son and I through Disneyland in 92 degree muggy heat. Got a little tired near the end. She'll probably live to 95+ assuming she doesn't get nailed by the Big C.
Anyway, growing up I just took it for granted that moms were constantly working. I mean constantly. When she wasn't cooking, cleaning, working her career job, gardening, planning parties, working out, or whatever she'll watch a movie or show. Like one. A week. Friday night was her "night off" and we ordered pizza and she would watch Dallas or other network "must see TV" with my dad. The rest of the time, go-go-go. I grew up thinking it was perfectly normal to get going by 8:00am on Saturday to spend 4 hours helping your mom clean the house from top to bottom every week.
She doesn't use uppers. She's just that way. My grandma used to say "there's no rest in her ass" and so that kind of person does exist and they aren't jacked on drugs. But it's pretty rare. I'm an older guy myself at this point and I've never met anyone else on her level (my brother's wife is close), but they have to be out there.
Oh and yeah, she's "superficial" in the sense that she has things that are important to her and doesn't worry about the stuff that isn't. She has an advanced degree but it was all done in service of her career. She's not stupid but she just doesn't waste her time with "deep thoughts" if that makes any sense. I kind of admire it? She's more of a doer than a thinker (that's me) and that's ok.
100. We need doers that do useful stuff and thinkers that come up with useful stuff for the doers. Symbiotic cycle.
Unfortunately we're in a cultural moment where people think that doing stuff badly means you're "fighting capitalism/sticking it to the man" and thinkers are locked into "what would somebody else think of this?" ouroboros thanks to social media poison. A sticky wicket.
Never heard of Kuang or Hsu and have only some vague feeling that I ought to know The New Yorker (maybe a Sunday supplement in the New York Times?). Don't care about any of them. Still, it was a fun read. Little gems like the stinger after the comma: “I think I completely reinvent myself every few years,” says Kuang of herself, modestly." Almost a Tom Swifty.
I didn't think I'd ever heard of Rebecca Kuang, but I _have_ heard of "Yellow Face."
Three thoughts:
#1, "The New Yorker" is like "Readers Digest" for Boomers, just the most predictable, niche-defining and therefore irrelevant magazine in the world.
#2: Maybe I'm the only person on the planet who thought Rachel Dolezal got a bum rap, but as far as I'm concerned, people should be able to cosplay with cultures all they want. It's not as though we don't all ultimately share the same DNA.
#3: I have done a few celebrity profiles in my time. You have a limited amount of face time to spin into a psychological portrait as complex as the first volume of "À la recherche du temps perdu." Celebrity profiles—in the selection of their details—invariably tell you more about the interviewer than they do about the interviewée. Rebecca Kuang may be a nice girl who's just very passionate about pizza crust.
I agree that it's reasonable to let people "immigrate" to cultures/ethnicities they weren't born into, but you have to admit it creates problems when combined with a legal requirement for ethnic preferences and set-asides.
I liked that she was open about her first few novels being formulaic genre exercises based on online writing guides rather than trying to pass them off as deep artistic statements.
They pay extremely well! I dunno whether I'd sacrifice a secondary sex characteristic, but sure, I'd love to get my byline in. Can't speak for Freddie.
Which doesn't change the fact that "The New Yorker" is "Reader's Digest" for Boomers.
(Reader's Digest paid as much as $1.50/word, which back in the day was an excellent rate.)
Born in 1960, grew up with RD, and no, TNY is not RD for Boomers (RD is RD for Boomers). Sorry. Though it would be a hoot to see 'I Am Joe's Pancreas' in TNY.
My book club read 'Babel' and I had the same kind of reaction to it that you seem to have had to 'Yellowface.' But for people who like that sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they like -- and it sounds as if the New Yorker is populated by those people, though I haven't read it for about 15 years. Getting upset because that sort of thing is lauded in the New Yorker is sorta like getting upset that a book about chemical engineering is reviewed in the C&E News.
One of the biggest advantages of being a total failure in fiction is that I don't have to worry about this sorta stuff any more. I found my audience, and have met almost all of them personally, and there it sits. I sympathize with your frustration, but wouldn't go back to that time in my life for all the tea in China -- and my advice to any ambitious fiction writer would be to either not quit your day job, or get one ASAP, for both financial and psychological reasons.
"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."
I had no idea that you won Wokemon points for being Asian, except maybe round election time.
I'm sure they would. Victim Status is highly prized these days and thus lovingly cultivated, which is the genesis of the "My Classmates Made Fun Of My Lunch O The Trauma The Trauma!" essays we are treated to every now and then.
Just because you want to make a career out of your oppression, real or imagined, doesn't mean you get to.
I lived in New Haven for eight years, and I ate the pizza, and it was good, but I never got the particular love for it, always assuming that it was bog-standard, northeastern provincialism. Light on cheese, often a bit soggy and topping-light in the very center. The charring is nice, and the crust has a good mouthfeel, especially for a thin crust style. But those traits aren't unique to New Haven Pizza.
As for Kuang, to be fair, I guess it can be hard to be modest when you are so clearly winning at life. The only solution is to just say, yeah I guess I'm killing it.
Hot pizza take: everybody wants to think their region's pizza is the best -- and the secret is, everybody is right. Not because their place's pizza is better, but because pizza is good, and it's good in a wide variety of forms. Every kind of pizza is the best!
"I only really respect success when the successful appear to barely be trying." Huh. Well, ok. I guess I can admire naked talent, too, though it usually just inspires Saliere-like anger at a capricious God. Myself, I'm much more taken with people who have talent but who then work exceedingly hard to realize it's full potential. (Yes, I am a proud product of Protestant work-ethic.) There are quite a few phenomenally talented people who could coast on their talent but instead choose to be grinds: Weird Al Yankovic, Tiger Woods, Jay Leno, even (sorry, Freddie) Taylor Swift. These people work hard _because_ they don't want to mock-apologize for their greatness. They want you to believe that they worked their ass off to achieve, so that, to some extent, they can deserve what Providence has given them.
"These people work hard _because_ they don't want to mock-apologize for their greatness. They want you to believe that they worked their ass off to achieve, so that, to some extent, they can deserve what Providence has given them."
Well...that's still feeding the ego.
If someone is working hard doing something, anything, because they want external recognition...then they aren't really doing it purely for the love of it are they? Not saying your examples up there aren't (although, Leno?...really? The guy simply can't stop showing off his warehouse full of 6-figure cars every chance he gets). Just saying that someone who truly and genuinely loves their craft shouldn't give one damn about external recognition.
Agreed. Ideally, our heroes would fight, not for glory or gold, but for love of battle. There is something transcendent in someone who just loves their craft so much they can't help but strive to make it their best. Alas, none of us is completely indifferent to success, seeing as how our material survival depends upon it. Which is why I agree with Freddie's revulsion against this faux modesty. Better to say: "Yes, I worked my ass off to write this novel, and I'm really happy with the result, and I'm glad that others enjoy it, too. I love doing this, and I'm grateful to the fans who make it possible for me to keep doing it."
The original meaning of the Greek word "genius" was to the divine spirit that inspired a great work -- not something assigned to the artist, but more assigned to the _work_. It seems healthier to pay more attention to the work than the artist, to celebrate the accomplishment more than the accomplisher.
I don't agree. Particularly if you think your craft is worth doing, you can't help evaluating the world around you by whether it recognizes that doing it well is a good thing. There is a big difference between the worker who thinks they are doing their job well in concert with their employer, the one who thinks they are doing their job well regardless of their employer, and the one who thinks they are doing it well in spite of their employer.
Also, some positions unavoidably have higher visibility than others. When you don't go out of your way to recognize the excellence you want to encourage, you end up with a situation in which your society seems to value the work of those positions more than the activities of the worker bees, who then become indifferent to or scornful of society's priorities.
For a long time my employer dodged this by celebrating absolutely everybody, from the janitor to the president, on the basis of seniority. My strongest memory of my first year there was the janitor and the president on stage together, getting the same award. I thought, 'This is the kind of place I want to work in.'
There's a fine line between public recognition of one's work and a desire to be recognized, they aren't the same thing. The former is a grassroots effort to appreciate the work of someone who deserves it, the latter is hubris.
This is a bit off-topic, but I have a deep and innate distrust of appreciation/recognition when it comes from an employer. Where I work, my employer routinely uses "appreciation" as a cover for not addressing other far more important issues. Every time they want to throw a pizza party or coffee & donuts hour I think to myself, "What are they not wanting to give us this time?" For my employer, "recognition" is a means to an end - distracting us with goodies to avoid the real problems.
We recently had an awards ceremony where a janitor retired too. 45 years on the job, and the president was giving him the award. The contrast between the two was almost laughable. The old janitor could barely walk or get up to the stage, was missing a few teeth, and was dressed in his usual stained work-clothes. The president was in a clean tailored suite, freshly shaved and preening with his perfect-teeth smile, going on and on about what a dedicated and hard-working employee the janitor was. About how he wished we could have more employees like this poor man.
The janitor was retiring after 45 years on a $30K salary, the president making almost 30 times that amount. I thought it was shameful.
I see your point, and plenty of us shared it over the years. But when those events went away, even the people who had been most cynical about them began to comment on how much we missed them and how the feeling of the place had changed without them.
Hospital where I lived wanted to fire one of the janitors as a cost-saving move. The janitor was developmentally disabled and thus possibly not even making minimum wage.
What's more, this poor man loved his job, he worked hard at pushing his broom and was the best broom-pusher he could be. He got to feel like he was taking care of himself, working at a real job and making his own money.
The humans raised a mighty stink until the hospital gave him his job back.
Interestingly, I was thinking of the reluctance to simply revel in your greatness and talent feels very female/upper-class coded (heavily confounded), as opposed to the male/lower-class coded attitude of sport, or rap.
To state the obvious, the amount that she did not reveal herself in that article is inversely proportional to the amount that you reveal yourself in this one. And I did not finish Babel, but I enjoyed every minute of this piece. So there’s that.
I will freely admit that I have not read this article and after reading this, I do not intend to. But I kind of feel that there could not be a more over the top example of try-hard in the column than the author's use of the term "tabula-rasa novice". Like what in the hell is that? 99.9% of the population has never heard that term ever. I bet you there are no less than 100 other terms that could have been used other than "tabula-rasa novice" that could have gotten the point across.
The New Yorker remains Exhibit A for proof that NY based journalist write columns to impress other journalists and not in service of the reader.
NOTHING to do with what you said, really, but you made me think of Yuri Knorozov. Click this (free) link to see his cemetery marker. You won't be sorry.
Yes, Yellowface is the exact kind of safe-criticism that people and industries love to receive from time to time, to release both external and internal criticisms before they reach critical mass. The Other Black Girl is a similar novel from around that time too. I wrote a review of both a couple of years ago, in which I also noted how the one truly genuine thing about Yellowface is Kuang's deep-seated resentment of white women (a common literary trope among her type of elite women of colour): https://salieriredemption.substack.com/p/yellowface-saving
People are terrified of criticism. And there's always something to criticize. "I don't want to be accused of X, so I need to say Y" and there are hundreds of X, many you never would have thought of if you just sat down to write them all out in a list.
Tangential to the main point, but my experience is that New York is the most provincial place I have ever been. Way back in the pre-internet days we would watch local news to see what had happened in the sports world. After the highlights of the local teams, they would scroll through the out-of-town scores. But when I went to college in metropolitan NY, they just showed the highlights of the local teams -- no out-of-town scores. When I remarked on this to my friends from NY, they refused to believe that local news in other places showed out-of-town scores; it was beyond their comprehension that anyone would care about anywhere else.
One of the few upsides of the Internet's evisceration of the legacy national media was the reduction in the NY-centricity of sports coverage. No longer must we bear endless paeans to the 70's Knicks and the Namath Jets. Of course, long-term mismanagement of those teams helped.
This is too bad. I wasn't very fond of Yale when I attended, and I wished it could have been a better experience, but one of the things I loved about it was that you were allowed to go balls out to succeed or be ambitious. And it didn't matter the topic: you could try the best in your career or in your Halloween costume, and people embraced it. It was freeing and joyful.
I love the midwest in many ways, but it is a place that chops off tall poppies. There is an attitude of social leveling. Which leads to the behavior you describe in this article, and robs one the joy of doing things well - which can be a huge source of joy for a lot of people!
I have not read the profile yet, just your piece, but thanks for flagging - will have to check out.
I’ve spent almost my entire life surrounded by young, ambitious first/second generation Asian Americans - Kuang’s biography is sort of fascinating to me
Looks like she was born in mainland China, moved to Texas (with presumably somewhat well off parents if she attended this private school), and instead of becoming a lawyer or going into finance or whatever, she…started writing young adult fantasy novels? In college? And got them published, eventually won a Hugo? In her early 20s?
That’s just … bizarre (like why would you do this at that age, at that time and institution) and incredibly interesting?
The person with the Georgetown and Yale degrees who wrote Yellowface bores me, but the person in a dorm room writing Poppy War is really weird and I’m charmed by it?
Genre that’s historically been the domain of loser men, and I guess more recently loser women with accounts on fan fic websites - and this hyper ambitious young immigrant woman decided she’d take it on rather than applying to Harvard Law? Sure!
Hope the piece focuses on that. Seems like she’s kept writing in this genre since she’s blown up, so it’s a sincere passion of hers.
OK, read the profile - I get where FDB is coming from, but found her mostly nerdy + kinda endearing
She’s clearly an extremely talented workaholic, and I get that some of it comes across as feigned casualness - “oh this just all sort of happened” - which is irritating, especially if you, like FDB, are in this same profession and aren’t being featured in The New Yorker. Like come on! Don’t pretend you didn’t try
But seems fairly self-aware about that aspect of herself - she says that she freaks out if there’s no “next thing” to do, gestures at this a few other times (Yale initially was “endless driving and crying”), etc.
Seems to have sweet, dorky relationship with her high school boyfriend -> husband.
Liked the line at the end where she says she’s afraid of being stuck as this person who blew up after writing a crappy YA fantasy novel that blew up, and never did anything else
Feels like as useful a thesis statement for who she is as anything else in the piece is
Maybe FDB would read that as more faux humility, but another way of looking at it is “I have this irrational need to produce because I am afraid of being trapped in the last.” Frankly not the most flattering thing, but seems authentic
There’s definitely a category of New York literary writer that self-consciously cultivates this “lazy and cool and relatable and I just happen to be getting NYT write ups” chic. Jia Tolentino used to do it - “oh I got into Yale, but I went to Virginia because I’m a party girl and do drugs in Brooklyn, isn’t it weird that I’m the most celebrated popular feminist writer of the moment”
FDB has always skewered this - fairly imo
I didn’t pick up too much of that from Kuang, personally. To the extent you get that vibe I’d attribute it more Hua Hsu (author of the piece) giving the piece a “isn’t she cool” gloss than anything she really said herself
The New Yorker’s puff pieces on buzzy writers are insufferable in general. Have you read the one on Sally Rooney? Apparently “words are her superpower”.
Kuang is a bona fide dork, like everyone who does LD debate, no surprise she has an ao3 account.
genre writing has always been driven by fandom and fanfic (once zines now internet), and women have always been involved in those communities, it’s not new. the 100% male dork hobbies are more gaming & comics (although tabletop is now getting gender balanced).
Taking care of your parents. Quiet. No NYer article for you, but this grace makes the world more.
My mom is one of these "no downtime" people. She's 76 and last week walked around 6 miles with my son and I through Disneyland in 92 degree muggy heat. Got a little tired near the end. She'll probably live to 95+ assuming she doesn't get nailed by the Big C.
Anyway, growing up I just took it for granted that moms were constantly working. I mean constantly. When she wasn't cooking, cleaning, working her career job, gardening, planning parties, working out, or whatever she'll watch a movie or show. Like one. A week. Friday night was her "night off" and we ordered pizza and she would watch Dallas or other network "must see TV" with my dad. The rest of the time, go-go-go. I grew up thinking it was perfectly normal to get going by 8:00am on Saturday to spend 4 hours helping your mom clean the house from top to bottom every week.
She doesn't use uppers. She's just that way. My grandma used to say "there's no rest in her ass" and so that kind of person does exist and they aren't jacked on drugs. But it's pretty rare. I'm an older guy myself at this point and I've never met anyone else on her level (my brother's wife is close), but they have to be out there.
Oh and yeah, she's "superficial" in the sense that she has things that are important to her and doesn't worry about the stuff that isn't. She has an advanced degree but it was all done in service of her career. She's not stupid but she just doesn't waste her time with "deep thoughts" if that makes any sense. I kind of admire it? She's more of a doer than a thinker (that's me) and that's ok.
100. We need doers that do useful stuff and thinkers that come up with useful stuff for the doers. Symbiotic cycle.
Unfortunately we're in a cultural moment where people think that doing stuff badly means you're "fighting capitalism/sticking it to the man" and thinkers are locked into "what would somebody else think of this?" ouroboros thanks to social media poison. A sticky wicket.
Just my opinion of course.
Never heard of Kuang or Hsu and have only some vague feeling that I ought to know The New Yorker (maybe a Sunday supplement in the New York Times?). Don't care about any of them. Still, it was a fun read. Little gems like the stinger after the comma: “I think I completely reinvent myself every few years,” says Kuang of herself, modestly." Almost a Tom Swifty.
I didn't think I'd ever heard of Rebecca Kuang, but I _have_ heard of "Yellow Face."
Three thoughts:
#1, "The New Yorker" is like "Readers Digest" for Boomers, just the most predictable, niche-defining and therefore irrelevant magazine in the world.
#2: Maybe I'm the only person on the planet who thought Rachel Dolezal got a bum rap, but as far as I'm concerned, people should be able to cosplay with cultures all they want. It's not as though we don't all ultimately share the same DNA.
#3: I have done a few celebrity profiles in my time. You have a limited amount of face time to spin into a psychological portrait as complex as the first volume of "À la recherche du temps perdu." Celebrity profiles—in the selection of their details—invariably tell you more about the interviewer than they do about the interviewée. Rebecca Kuang may be a nice girl who's just very passionate about pizza crust.
I agree that it's reasonable to let people "immigrate" to cultures/ethnicities they weren't born into, but you have to admit it creates problems when combined with a legal requirement for ethnic preferences and set-asides.
Oh no, you are not the only one who thinks Rachel Dolezal got a raw deal. She got screwed.
It was kinda the beginning of the end, wasn't it?
"She got screwed"
Mildly unfortunate phrasing given how she most recently made the news
Why, what happened?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/woman-formerly-known-rachel-dolezal-fired-teaching-gig-onlyfans-accoun-rcna138902
Thanks, I think.
I liked that she was open about her first few novels being formulaic genre exercises based on online writing guides rather than trying to pass them off as deep artistic statements.
#1, "The New Yorker" is like "Readers Digest" for Boomers, just the most predictable, niche-defining and therefore irrelevant magazine in the world."
Really? the *MOST*?
I bet Freddie would give his left tit to get an article -- or a profile! -- in The New Yorker.
They pay extremely well! I dunno whether I'd sacrifice a secondary sex characteristic, but sure, I'd love to get my byline in. Can't speak for Freddie.
Which doesn't change the fact that "The New Yorker" is "Reader's Digest" for Boomers.
(Reader's Digest paid as much as $1.50/word, which back in the day was an excellent rate.)
Born in 1960, grew up with RD, and no, TNY is not RD for Boomers (RD is RD for Boomers). Sorry. Though it would be a hoot to see 'I Am Joe's Pancreas' in TNY.
My book club read 'Babel' and I had the same kind of reaction to it that you seem to have had to 'Yellowface.' But for people who like that sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they like -- and it sounds as if the New Yorker is populated by those people, though I haven't read it for about 15 years. Getting upset because that sort of thing is lauded in the New Yorker is sorta like getting upset that a book about chemical engineering is reviewed in the C&E News.
One of the biggest advantages of being a total failure in fiction is that I don't have to worry about this sorta stuff any more. I found my audience, and have met almost all of them personally, and there it sits. I sympathize with your frustration, but wouldn't go back to that time in my life for all the tea in China -- and my advice to any ambitious fiction writer would be to either not quit your day job, or get one ASAP, for both financial and psychological reasons.
"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."
I had no idea that you won Wokemon points for being Asian, except maybe round election time.
>>Wokemon Points<<<
Be still my beating ❤️!!!!! :::SWOON:::
The Finster aims to please.
Well now you have me reimagining the height of the cancel culture era as a giant game of Wokemon Go.
Olivia Chow and Michelle Wu would like a word....
I'm sure they would. Victim Status is highly prized these days and thus lovingly cultivated, which is the genesis of the "My Classmates Made Fun Of My Lunch O The Trauma The Trauma!" essays we are treated to every now and then.
Just because you want to make a career out of your oppression, real or imagined, doesn't mean you get to.
I lived in New Haven for eight years, and I ate the pizza, and it was good, but I never got the particular love for it, always assuming that it was bog-standard, northeastern provincialism. Light on cheese, often a bit soggy and topping-light in the very center. The charring is nice, and the crust has a good mouthfeel, especially for a thin crust style. But those traits aren't unique to New Haven Pizza.
As for Kuang, to be fair, I guess it can be hard to be modest when you are so clearly winning at life. The only solution is to just say, yeah I guess I'm killing it.
Hot pizza take: everybody wants to think their region's pizza is the best -- and the secret is, everybody is right. Not because their place's pizza is better, but because pizza is good, and it's good in a wide variety of forms. Every kind of pizza is the best!
Let's think of other self-promoters and how we felt about them? Mark Twain, Norman Mailer? Susan Sontag?
"I only really respect success when the successful appear to barely be trying." Huh. Well, ok. I guess I can admire naked talent, too, though it usually just inspires Saliere-like anger at a capricious God. Myself, I'm much more taken with people who have talent but who then work exceedingly hard to realize it's full potential. (Yes, I am a proud product of Protestant work-ethic.) There are quite a few phenomenally talented people who could coast on their talent but instead choose to be grinds: Weird Al Yankovic, Tiger Woods, Jay Leno, even (sorry, Freddie) Taylor Swift. These people work hard _because_ they don't want to mock-apologize for their greatness. They want you to believe that they worked their ass off to achieve, so that, to some extent, they can deserve what Providence has given them.
It's not the talent I admire. It's being indifferent to one's own success.
I feel you see this way more in science/research than in the arts.
"These people work hard _because_ they don't want to mock-apologize for their greatness. They want you to believe that they worked their ass off to achieve, so that, to some extent, they can deserve what Providence has given them."
Well...that's still feeding the ego.
If someone is working hard doing something, anything, because they want external recognition...then they aren't really doing it purely for the love of it are they? Not saying your examples up there aren't (although, Leno?...really? The guy simply can't stop showing off his warehouse full of 6-figure cars every chance he gets). Just saying that someone who truly and genuinely loves their craft shouldn't give one damn about external recognition.
Agreed. Ideally, our heroes would fight, not for glory or gold, but for love of battle. There is something transcendent in someone who just loves their craft so much they can't help but strive to make it their best. Alas, none of us is completely indifferent to success, seeing as how our material survival depends upon it. Which is why I agree with Freddie's revulsion against this faux modesty. Better to say: "Yes, I worked my ass off to write this novel, and I'm really happy with the result, and I'm glad that others enjoy it, too. I love doing this, and I'm grateful to the fans who make it possible for me to keep doing it."
The original meaning of the Greek word "genius" was to the divine spirit that inspired a great work -- not something assigned to the artist, but more assigned to the _work_. It seems healthier to pay more attention to the work than the artist, to celebrate the accomplishment more than the accomplisher.
I don't agree. Particularly if you think your craft is worth doing, you can't help evaluating the world around you by whether it recognizes that doing it well is a good thing. There is a big difference between the worker who thinks they are doing their job well in concert with their employer, the one who thinks they are doing their job well regardless of their employer, and the one who thinks they are doing it well in spite of their employer.
Also, some positions unavoidably have higher visibility than others. When you don't go out of your way to recognize the excellence you want to encourage, you end up with a situation in which your society seems to value the work of those positions more than the activities of the worker bees, who then become indifferent to or scornful of society's priorities.
For a long time my employer dodged this by celebrating absolutely everybody, from the janitor to the president, on the basis of seniority. My strongest memory of my first year there was the janitor and the president on stage together, getting the same award. I thought, 'This is the kind of place I want to work in.'
There's a fine line between public recognition of one's work and a desire to be recognized, they aren't the same thing. The former is a grassroots effort to appreciate the work of someone who deserves it, the latter is hubris.
This is a bit off-topic, but I have a deep and innate distrust of appreciation/recognition when it comes from an employer. Where I work, my employer routinely uses "appreciation" as a cover for not addressing other far more important issues. Every time they want to throw a pizza party or coffee & donuts hour I think to myself, "What are they not wanting to give us this time?" For my employer, "recognition" is a means to an end - distracting us with goodies to avoid the real problems.
We recently had an awards ceremony where a janitor retired too. 45 years on the job, and the president was giving him the award. The contrast between the two was almost laughable. The old janitor could barely walk or get up to the stage, was missing a few teeth, and was dressed in his usual stained work-clothes. The president was in a clean tailored suite, freshly shaved and preening with his perfect-teeth smile, going on and on about what a dedicated and hard-working employee the janitor was. About how he wished we could have more employees like this poor man.
The janitor was retiring after 45 years on a $30K salary, the president making almost 30 times that amount. I thought it was shameful.
I see your point, and plenty of us shared it over the years. But when those events went away, even the people who had been most cynical about them began to comment on how much we missed them and how the feeling of the place had changed without them.
Hospital where I lived wanted to fire one of the janitors as a cost-saving move. The janitor was developmentally disabled and thus possibly not even making minimum wage.
What's more, this poor man loved his job, he worked hard at pushing his broom and was the best broom-pusher he could be. He got to feel like he was taking care of himself, working at a real job and making his own money.
The humans raised a mighty stink until the hospital gave him his job back.
Good on them to advocate for him, it warms my heart to hear that he got to keep his job.
It's remarkable how common that Protestant/Reaganite work ethic gets expressed in rap lyrics.
I have noticed that rappers never seem to describe themselves as stupid.
With at least one notable exception. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrkEc2V3mO4
I stand corrected, I think.
Interestingly, I was thinking of the reluctance to simply revel in your greatness and talent feels very female/upper-class coded (heavily confounded), as opposed to the male/lower-class coded attitude of sport, or rap.
To state the obvious, the amount that she did not reveal herself in that article is inversely proportional to the amount that you reveal yourself in this one. And I did not finish Babel, but I enjoyed every minute of this piece. So there’s that.
It's my biggest privilege baby
Yes, you wisely endorse Niel Bohr’s ditty, “All art is this, no more no less. To do all things with artlessness.”
I will freely admit that I have not read this article and after reading this, I do not intend to. But I kind of feel that there could not be a more over the top example of try-hard in the column than the author's use of the term "tabula-rasa novice". Like what in the hell is that? 99.9% of the population has never heard that term ever. I bet you there are no less than 100 other terms that could have been used other than "tabula-rasa novice" that could have gotten the point across.
The New Yorker remains Exhibit A for proof that NY based journalist write columns to impress other journalists and not in service of the reader.
NOTHING to do with what you said, really, but you made me think of Yuri Knorozov. Click this (free) link to see his cemetery marker. You won't be sorry.
https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/p/yuri-knorozov
That is truly the cat's meow.
Isn't that a great story? I think it is my favorite.
Yes, Yellowface is the exact kind of safe-criticism that people and industries love to receive from time to time, to release both external and internal criticisms before they reach critical mass. The Other Black Girl is a similar novel from around that time too. I wrote a review of both a couple of years ago, in which I also noted how the one truly genuine thing about Yellowface is Kuang's deep-seated resentment of white women (a common literary trope among her type of elite women of colour): https://salieriredemption.substack.com/p/yellowface-saving
People are terrified of criticism. And there's always something to criticize. "I don't want to be accused of X, so I need to say Y" and there are hundreds of X, many you never would have thought of if you just sat down to write them all out in a list.
And this gets internalized.
Tangential to the main point, but my experience is that New York is the most provincial place I have ever been. Way back in the pre-internet days we would watch local news to see what had happened in the sports world. After the highlights of the local teams, they would scroll through the out-of-town scores. But when I went to college in metropolitan NY, they just showed the highlights of the local teams -- no out-of-town scores. When I remarked on this to my friends from NY, they refused to believe that local news in other places showed out-of-town scores; it was beyond their comprehension that anyone would care about anywhere else.
One of the few upsides of the Internet's evisceration of the legacy national media was the reduction in the NY-centricity of sports coverage. No longer must we bear endless paeans to the 70's Knicks and the Namath Jets. Of course, long-term mismanagement of those teams helped.
This is too bad. I wasn't very fond of Yale when I attended, and I wished it could have been a better experience, but one of the things I loved about it was that you were allowed to go balls out to succeed or be ambitious. And it didn't matter the topic: you could try the best in your career or in your Halloween costume, and people embraced it. It was freeing and joyful.
I love the midwest in many ways, but it is a place that chops off tall poppies. There is an attitude of social leveling. Which leads to the behavior you describe in this article, and robs one the joy of doing things well - which can be a huge source of joy for a lot of people!
I have not read the profile yet, just your piece, but thanks for flagging - will have to check out.
I’ve spent almost my entire life surrounded by young, ambitious first/second generation Asian Americans - Kuang’s biography is sort of fascinating to me
Looks like she was born in mainland China, moved to Texas (with presumably somewhat well off parents if she attended this private school), and instead of becoming a lawyer or going into finance or whatever, she…started writing young adult fantasy novels? In college? And got them published, eventually won a Hugo? In her early 20s?
That’s just … bizarre (like why would you do this at that age, at that time and institution) and incredibly interesting?
The person with the Georgetown and Yale degrees who wrote Yellowface bores me, but the person in a dorm room writing Poppy War is really weird and I’m charmed by it?
Genre that’s historically been the domain of loser men, and I guess more recently loser women with accounts on fan fic websites - and this hyper ambitious young immigrant woman decided she’d take it on rather than applying to Harvard Law? Sure!
Hope the piece focuses on that. Seems like she’s kept writing in this genre since she’s blown up, so it’s a sincere passion of hers.
OK, read the profile - I get where FDB is coming from, but found her mostly nerdy + kinda endearing
She’s clearly an extremely talented workaholic, and I get that some of it comes across as feigned casualness - “oh this just all sort of happened” - which is irritating, especially if you, like FDB, are in this same profession and aren’t being featured in The New Yorker. Like come on! Don’t pretend you didn’t try
But seems fairly self-aware about that aspect of herself - she says that she freaks out if there’s no “next thing” to do, gestures at this a few other times (Yale initially was “endless driving and crying”), etc.
Seems to have sweet, dorky relationship with her high school boyfriend -> husband.
Liked the line at the end where she says she’s afraid of being stuck as this person who blew up after writing a crappy YA fantasy novel that blew up, and never did anything else
Feels like as useful a thesis statement for who she is as anything else in the piece is
Maybe FDB would read that as more faux humility, but another way of looking at it is “I have this irrational need to produce because I am afraid of being trapped in the last.” Frankly not the most flattering thing, but seems authentic
Seems like all she’s guilty of is cranking out some genre fiction and going to grad school. I don’t understand the fuss.
piece is worth a read if you haven’t read
There’s definitely a category of New York literary writer that self-consciously cultivates this “lazy and cool and relatable and I just happen to be getting NYT write ups” chic. Jia Tolentino used to do it - “oh I got into Yale, but I went to Virginia because I’m a party girl and do drugs in Brooklyn, isn’t it weird that I’m the most celebrated popular feminist writer of the moment”
FDB has always skewered this - fairly imo
I didn’t pick up too much of that from Kuang, personally. To the extent you get that vibe I’d attribute it more Hua Hsu (author of the piece) giving the piece a “isn’t she cool” gloss than anything she really said herself
maybe I’m too charitable
The New Yorker’s puff pieces on buzzy writers are insufferable in general. Have you read the one on Sally Rooney? Apparently “words are her superpower”.
Kuang is a bona fide dork, like everyone who does LD debate, no surprise she has an ao3 account.
genre writing has always been driven by fandom and fanfic (once zines now internet), and women have always been involved in those communities, it’s not new. the 100% male dork hobbies are more gaming & comics (although tabletop is now getting gender balanced).