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u/littlemememaid 1d ago
Asian-American diaspora literature, especially East Asian, is often seen by its in-community as fairly dull and re-hashing similar points, such as parents with high expectations, not fitting in, having "weird" food or not knowing western pop culture because it isn't a thing at home, etc. I struggle to like a lot of it because I haven't found many that have said anything new. OP probably said women because several books are probably about dating someone not-Asian (this is an entirely different can of worms).
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u/buckleyschance 1d ago
The Guardian had a long feature article recently about how the idea of Asian mothers as strict, cold and demanding is a "ubiquitous stereotype that won't die"... in which the writer confirmed that her mother and all her Asian friends' mothers fit the stereotype, and ended with an implication that they will probably go on to conform to it themselves at least a bit.
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u/DinosaurusWhen 1d ago
Min’s mother, she told me, “is able to make me feel worthless, useless, terrible, ungrateful; that she’s wasted her life on you, and you are the worst person in the world, and you’ll never amount to anything.”
This is just the default setting for all Asian moms
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u/tiny-flying-squirrel 1d ago
I have a feeling it’s because many of them were pressured into marriage and having kids and constantly feel like they could have had successful careers etc. The gender dynamics in Asian (and other) families push women into essentially erasing their personhood in favour of “sacrifice” for the family. But back then it was much harder (if not impossible) to take an alternate pathway. Much of that resentment gets channeled to the children, especially daughters.
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u/DinosaurusWhen 1d ago
Idk, my mom moved to america and got her masters degree before marrying my dad and having kids. Hell, she was making more money than my dad for most of my childhood
I mean, I guess it's possible she could have been even worse without that opportunity, but I find it very hard to believe
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u/tiny-flying-squirrel 1d ago
My mom also did multiple graduate degrees before marrying my dad but she also had to make many compromises in her own career. Add to that the domestic labour, and it’s not a great situation. I know you mentioned your mom was kind of OCD about cleaning so that’s why she did the majority of the housework — I wonder where that came from? Lots of Asian moms have an obsession with cleanliness and it may have a gendered basis — the idea that people will judge them if their houses are not super clean. I wonder what other cognitive and mental burdens she was carrying that made her feel resentment and disappointment towards her kids despite having a career etc.
But I’ve seen many families where the mother is the higher earner and still has to make more compromises and do more domestic labour than the father. Who was raising the kids? Who was dealing with or caring for her parents and your father’s parents? What was the relationship like between her and her husband? Was her career what she wanted it to be? Was the marriage what she wanted it to be or did she feel compelled to stay?
These questions are not directed towards your mom specifically but generally things I wonder when I see how Asian mothers treat their children.
Of course it could also just be the cultural habit of never being satisfied but idk. Some of my friends, especially my guy friends, assume their mothers were satisfied with career, degree etc, but when I tell them to ask some questions they realize there’s so many compromises and resentment their mom had built up and just never expressed.
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u/DinosaurusWhen 1d ago
Wherever the OCD came from, it's genetic and not gendered. Cause I've got it, too
Who was raising the kids?
The nannies when we were young. The daycares and after school programs, and summer camps after that. Cmon, Asian moms discipline their kids, they don't raise em lol
All the "family bonding time" was handled by our dad. Everything from half-assed movie nights to holidays
Who was dealing with or caring for her parents and your father’s parents?
Her siblings in Taiwan and my Dad's siblings on the other side of the country
Was her career what she wanted it to be?
Reasonable hours, great perks, and enough salary to buy two houses in silicon valley. So probably
Was the marriage what she wanted it to be or did she feel compelled to stay?
She wanted it enough that my dad had to be the one to leave. Took him waaaay too long
Chinese moms specifically have earned the terrible rap they've got tbh. I grew up in a town that's half Asian and all of the nice moms in our social group were the white/black/hispanic ones
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u/tiny-flying-squirrel 1d ago
Okay, so it doesn’t apply to you, and I’m sorry you had that experience. In your case it sounds more like your mom wasn’t cut out to be a wife or a mother and should have stayed single and lived how she wanted.
But I still feel like this stems from an underlying thing of like…it doesn’t sound like she wanted kids. It doesn’t sound like she really wanted to be a partner. And she took that out on all of you — the kids and the husband. Some people shouldn’t start a family but they do because of social pressure (my dad is the same) and then they make everyone around them suffer because they hate it.
In this case that pressure is felt by both men and women. I guess women often feel it more but I’ve seen plenty of men fall into the trap too.
Btw I’m not defending behaving badly to your family at all. My mom had all the reason to be resentful but she never took it out on her children. She does express feelings of regret and longing often, but it’s never in an unhealthy way. She of course has the regular Asian parent disappointment and expectations but it’s not what many of my friends experience.
I just meant that society pressures people, especially mothers, into marriage and children even when they don’t want it/are not cut out for it. And whether they do it for personal status, out of obligation, or any other factor, that turns many people negative, bitter, manipulative, and abusive. And that manifests in neglect, hyper controlling behaviour, and emotional abuse. Which is not excusable no matter what, but I think part of the problem could be remedied by just not obliging people to have kids and project all their problems onto them.
Anyway it sounds like you had a good parent in your dad (I hope?) and I’m glad to hear it.
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u/DinosaurusWhen 1d ago
But I still feel like this stems from an underlying thing of like…it doesn’t sound like she wanted kids
My brother and I were both planned kids. To the point that our birthdays are within a week of our parents for some unfathomable reason (I think they just wanted to save money on parties)
In my experience, Asian moms want kids the same way white people want pets. Except the white people are less demanding when it comes to obedience
I don't think asian dads are really any different, but I can't personally say. Of my close friends with Asian dads, one is cold and abusive towards his stepson, another was abusive but thankfully gone, one was always traveling for work and his secret second family, and the best one was barely around cause he was actually at work most of the time
For the less close friends, idk details about their parents or home lives. But I know more than one kid who spent entire summer vacations on house arrest so they could do extra math classes. And ofc that was on top of violin/piano and tennis
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u/tiny-flying-squirrel 1d ago
I understand that you were planned, that’s not what I meant. I meant that people plan children because it’s expected of them. Many women never even interrogated whether they truly desired children, whether they felt ready or able to care for them, etc. — they just had kids because it was the done thing in their social circle. I know so many Asian aunties who had kids like clockwork (planned, of course), and constantly push others to do the same. When I say I don’t want kids or don’t feel ready they say things like “that’s how it is for everyone” or “don’t be ridiculous of course you want kids” or “all women want kids that’s your job”. Many of them are wealthier women, who, despite technically having the means and power to say “no” did not do so — because they wanted to adhere to expectations, were subject to immense external pressure, and/or themselves wanted the status that came with being married and having kids.
Like if i sit and talk to them for 5 minutes about why I should want kids, why they wanted kids, their answers all revolve around status, norms, and a lot of not really answering the question. Whereas women who like children, when I ask them why they had kids or why I should have kids, they give specific, detailed answers — like what they find rewarding, how they feel when caring for the children, how they felt when they gave birth, the hard parts and challenges, etc. I think it’s the same as some men want to be a father while others just need an heir.
On the other side, I think Asian people think the whole purpose of children is to have something to control (like you said, like pets). I grew up in the west so I actually see the same thing among white families, especially the affluent ones — they have the same dynamic of control but it manifests in a different way because the cultural expectations are different.
Just to be clear, I think you’re right, and I appreciate you sharing your experience. I think my experience corroborates that, just pointing to some of the deeper motivations and problems I’ve observed that lead people to honestly treat their kids like dolls or animals tbh.
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u/tiny-flying-squirrel 1d ago
Also lol at the saving money on parties. I know multiple people who were born in a similar timeframe of their siblings and I never thought of the parties…I always assumed it was a fortune calculation thing
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u/KillerWhaleShark 1d ago
Did your mom also have to do majority of the childcare, housekeeping, planning, appointments with doctors/dentist, holiday preparation, etc? I can see that leading to resentment if the cultural expectation is for the woman to do everything while also working full time.
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u/DinosaurusWhen 1d ago
Not really. My dad worked longer hours and my mom kinda has a thing for housekeeping (OCD), but those were the only disparities
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u/DO-throwaway69 1d ago
You’re right. Your singular personal experience means that the entire Asian American diaspora did not experience that
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u/ChubbyTubby47 1d ago
That's a no dawg
Explain why the dads are like that too
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u/tiny-flying-squirrel 1d ago
Dads have their own baggage. They often also erased themselves in service of their families — pursuing education or job after job, trying to make a better life for their children while balancing the expectations of their own parents. They often had no choice but to work endlessly. They transferred that to their kids because the didn’t know anything else (and many of them really did try to be better than their parents, and are).
Ideas of honour and worthiness in Asian families are tied to cultural ideals, but also very bound up in the social, cultural, and political upheavals experienced by the past three generations over the last century. Many of our grandparents lived through war, famine, revolution, and that shaped how they raised their kids, and so on and so on.
The only difference is that men have a modicum of more freedom than their wives, so their expectations and baggage often looks a bit different than the resentment of a mother — although you may feel the effects are the same.
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u/ak3000android 1d ago
All? My mom was very different from the stereotypical Asian mom as pictured in Asian American circles. My mom offered plenty of hugs, kisses, encouragement, and patience. Almost all of her friends were the same and so was my grandmother.
It might be a cultural difference because I’m not North East Asian, which I find is a demographic that dominates the narrative when it comes to the Asian American (or Canadian in my case) experience. It’s only natural that it is this way simply based on numbers and history, but so many things people think I should be able to relate to, I don’t.
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u/Ok-Scientist5524 7h ago
I mean, I grew up with a crazy asian tiger mom and I am not being a crazy tiger mom (I have to still be Asian), but I also broke the generational stereotype by marrying a white man so, idk if it counts.
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u/yogurtchicken21 1d ago
Ngl, it takes a certain kind of personality/ambition to move halfway across the world to a completely foreign country. Chinese, Japanese, Korean are about as different a language can get from English. If you visit China, people are a lot more normal. But if you were to move to China and try to build a life there without really knowing anybody, you’d probably become very guarded, anxious, lonely, and overall out of your element.
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u/Curious-Yesterday389 1d ago
I mean isn't that just normal behavior for wealthy expats. All those same things are said about Nigerian parents. Seems more like a class divide than an ethnic one.
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u/Redhotlipstik 1d ago
My mother was the opposite, did the gentle parenting thing and I'm by all accounts, a failure. So maybe there is something to ruling by fear to get results
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u/Arnoski 15h ago
Yep, as a kid who grew up with a Japanese mother, can confirm. Strict, harsh, unyielding and openly sadistic when given reason.… This is the same society that breeds old men telling kids to jump off a building, something I’ve been told on multiple occasions by Japanese clients.
It’s not a meme, it’s a cultural baseline, and it wasn’t always that way.
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u/aSiK00 1d ago
Tiger mom’s are and have been a form of stereotyping stemming from the model minority myth which was used by Western powers to separate and vilify one minority against another. Same shit as WW2 posters in the US trying to separate Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans as one is much “better” than the other.
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u/teemophine 10h ago
I just thought they get groped on busses and trains and then get gangbanged. That’s what I always see anyway
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u/tecate_papi 1d ago
This is the answer.
The genre has become almost entirely cliched with writers being forced to create works so publishers can satisfy the market. They know a book about a third generation American from East Asia who had the experience once of being told their food stinks will sell some copies. But the work by that same author that is nothing like the last 30-40 years of diaspora literature may not sell because there's no readymade audience. For probably more than a generation readers have been handed books based on their demographic makeup and not because a publisher actually believes in a work.
The movie American Fiction is a really good satire on the state of American publishing. If you haven't seen it, it's a movie about a Black author who wants to write his impenetrable, academic books that don't sell but get respect. So he assumes the persona of a former gang member that is nothing like who he is and mockingly writes a book he anticipates will be rejected for being so vacuous and stereotypical. But he inadvertently writes a bestseller using all of the cliches and stereotypes white audiences expect from Black writers.
Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is probably the best, most interesting work of diaspora literature in some time. And that's because it largely avoids relying on the cliches as central points to advance the narrative.
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u/littlemememaid 1d ago
Ocean Vuong's Emperor of Gladness is even better. It's a novel in the truest sense, and I love how poetically he writes and how viscerally he captured the dead-end feeling of a small New England town with nothing going for it. We really need more writers who can capture specific experiences that let us feel their emotions alongside them, rather than works that are trying to tell us how to feel.
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u/CertifiedPussyAter 1d ago
I’m East Asian and holy shit, I feel kinda conflicted. On one hand, I did have strict parents but on the other hand, I’m an ABC who lived in Fremont, CA in high school with no struggles, liked western pop culture, and now I’m dating a white guy in the Bay Area. Nothing is unique to me.
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u/BrainDamage2029 1d ago edited 1d ago
The water in Fremont needs to be studied.
That said no part of the Bay Area breaks its stereotypes. My wife is from Marin and all her high school friends either ended up a socialist hippie types like their parents or sold their soul and went into tech. No in between.
Edit: I am being literal. Her high school class has equal numbers of classmates who own THC based businesses vs number of classmates investigated in some fashion by the SEC.
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u/Main-Discussion9294 1d ago
What's an abc?
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u/Noy_Telinu 1d ago
I think it is American born Chinese?
That makes more sense than All Cops are Bastards
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u/Bigsassyblackwoman 1d ago
i wouldnt worry too much about it. my sister is also a bay areanite dating a white guy. i think its just the unique diaspora of having a lot of asian women and white men in the area so it naturally just ends up that way.
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u/LloydNoid 1d ago
The reason it's the same stuff all the time is a lot of Asian American people especially in the arts weren't brought up in Asian communities and so everything about the Asian experience ends up being made with preforming to whiteness in mind.
But if you're in the bay area and you write like that sorry you have no excuse.
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u/g1rlchild 1d ago
Thanks for explaining that. I assumed it was an annoying meme about white boys not wanting to read books about people different from them.
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u/pmmeuranimetiddies 1d ago
I think the guy was angry he had to read Joy Luck Club in high school
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u/stink3rb3lle 1d ago
I don't remember the whole book very well, but I still think of the one daughter with the husband who made her split every single expense down the middle, including the strawberry flavor in the neapolitan ice cream only he ever ate.
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u/BedsBestFriend 1d ago
I love how the traumatic experience of reading it made you recognise the work immediately.
For me it's midnight's children.
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u/Mwescliff 1d ago
One of the best books ever!
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u/BedsBestFriend 1d ago
See? Literature is such a varied experience that changes depending on when and how you read it, as well as who reads it.
I'm glad you could enjoy it. I have the impulse to conflagrate every copy I see.
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u/Mwescliff 1d ago
Definitely. I read it in a college class taught by an expert on India.
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u/BedsBestFriend 1d ago
See, same here, only that same expert all but forced me to write the paper for they class on the book, even though I'd openly said how much I disliked the book - I'm sorry it just borrowed from magical realism enough to sound pretentious without the good bits of genre - the funny, absurd humour that comes with it, like flying off with a sheet when hanging the laundry. It turned into this pseudo chest pounding exaggerated nationalism that, ironically for a post-colonial anti-colonial book, colonised the narrative genre of another culture (magic realism from Africa/Caribbean) to an imperfect extent in order to speak about a completely different culture.
Satanic Verses was a much better Rashdi book narrative-structure wise, and in the implementation of the pseudo magic-realism that became his style, fatwa none withstanding. And while MC has it's value as a quasi-historical account of British colonial effects and the India Pakistan skism, as a narrative and a novel, it's honestly good for a doorstop.
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u/MetaverseLiz 1d ago
I had to read that in high school and loved it. I tried to get my mom to read to as a way to open up dialog about our relationship, but she said it looked too complicated. I was heartbroken.
That book made me reevaluate my relationship with my whole family. The scene (in the book or movie or both) with the lobster dinner has stuck with me for over 20 years now. I always remember to give my loved ones the best portions before myself. I now notice when it's not reciprocated (not just food).
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u/Remarkable_Cream9443 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah that’s valid. Forget what it’s about, it’s the most confusing, poor writing I’ve ever read. The book tells you at the beginning of a chapter who is talking. They rarely again use their names. Just pronouns. Way too easy to lose track of who is talking when it’s two women only being identified by she.
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u/Live-Difference5595 1d ago
Yes, from both the thematic and stylistic perspective, the book is utterly mid, and the fact that it’s been elevated to the status of “American classic” is an indictment of the modern literary scene
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u/Maximum_Republic2308 1d ago
The actual names may have been hard to keep track of, despite the names being identified at the beginning of each chapter, but the characters were pretty easy to follow because they were so different from one another.
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u/MetaverseLiz 1d ago
In high school we used colored tags to keep track of the families. Made it way easier to read.
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u/yetiinrio 10h ago
I thought we read the book and watched the movie in high school, but then I heard that Crazy Rich Asians was the first movie with an Asian cast, so I must’ve been wrong since I couldn’t’ve watched something that never existed
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u/Faetheh 1d ago
Genuinely one of the only pieces of literature that has ever made me feel disgusted to my core. Utterly vile melodramatic slop
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u/Feminiwitch 1d ago
Why was it vile? I haven't read the book but I enjoyed the movie.
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u/Faetheh 1d ago
I personally found it very patronizing. It's hard to describe, but it felt like a cheap attempt to paint Chinese culture in a way that appealed to Western society and propped up pre-exisitng ideas of Chinese diaspora. I can't put it clearly since there wasn't anything particularly wrong with it, but it was distasteful to read as a Chinese person myself.
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u/Feminiwitch 1d ago
Ah, thanks for explaining. Ironically, I found the movie an interesting watch because I could relate many elements to my South Asian culture.
I can imagine that many stereotypes feel tried at this point, but since the book is so old, I thought it was one of the earliest of it's kind. How wrong an I?
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u/Exciting_Use_1811 14h ago
I wonder if it was just a product of its time. I never read it myself and maybe I will soon just to see but I can imagine that it may have been the only way the author felt an American audience of the time would understand it. Are there any books about asian americans you've enjoyed or felt did the job better?
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u/koalascanbebearstoo 1d ago
Pachinko is also terrible and having an ill-deserved moment.
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u/Alarmed-Telephone-83 4h ago
Pachinko isn't diaspora fiction in the same way though
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u/koalascanbebearstoo 3h ago
Never read Joy Luck Club, but what makes Pachinko different?
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u/Alarmed-Telephone-83 3h ago
Pachinko is about a Korean family moving to Japan where they are literally an underclass for generations and have to register as Korean/foreign every few years with the government despite being born there. About the shame of never belonging and how do you deal with that
Joy luck club much more about the push/pull of moving to the west where mothers wanted better lives for their daughters but at the same time are horrified when they assimilate with Western values and culture. Much more about how you embrace your heritage but also your new country and to what degree, family vs prevailing culture etc.
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u/koalascanbebearstoo 3h ago
Ok, but they’re both diaspora literature written by Asian-American women, right?
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u/Alarmed-Telephone-83 3h ago
Yes. My point is that yhematically Pachinko is quite different to the other works described in this thread which are about the diaspora in America specifically
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u/Deleterious_Sock 1d ago
I remember taking a class in college about Asian American writers.
And one thing that was noticed by everyone in the class very quickly was that nearly all of them wrote in a 'slice of life' memoir style or fictionalized memoir style.
And it was never sci fi or fantasy or a thriller or anything supernatural. It was ALWAYS memoir or fictionalized memoir.
Maybe thats for some people, but I personally found it tedious to just read story after story about the drama of traditional family dynamics clashing with modern ones.
I already lead a mundane life with immigrant parents that will never understand where I am coming from. I'm not exactly choming at the bit to read about someone else's flavor of the experience. At least Latino authors use magical realism to deepen the symbolism and make things fun.
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u/UnlikelyIntrepid 1d ago
R.F. Kuang is an Asian American woman who has written some absolutely enthralling fantasy novels. And they aren’t just pure fantasy, she makes you think about historical events, the nature of society, and race through good storytelling and world building.
I honestly can’t recommend them enough. “Babel or the necessity of violence” won the nebula award and was a joy to read. I read all three books of the Poppy War back to back, barely coming up for air, and was amazed at the way she made me question my own values as the main character went on a moral journey I couldn’t follow.
I love sci-fi and fantasy and even though I just read my first book by her last year she is on my list of favorite authors.
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u/CookieCutterNinja 14h ago
Have you read the Heroine complex series? By Sarah Kuhn. Urban fantasy setting where a japanese-american woman and a chinese-american woman fight demon infested items in san francisco. Plus some of them get superpowers. And things get sillier.
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u/DueEvidence5685 7h ago
I recommend Ken Liu! He is sci fi and his short stories are super interesting (except for the short story Paper Menagerie). I think people have this super rigid idea of Asian American lit and if anyone writes something that doesn’t fit the mold, people say “oh that’s not really Asian american lit”, creating this vicious cycle that only produces super bland stories
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u/SharingIsCommunist 10h ago
Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee is a really good political thriller/spy novel that touches on some of those themes
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u/Thrown_Aaway 1d ago
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u/Asleep_Truck_962 1d ago
i thought i understood what was suggested by asian-american diaspora literature but i am clearly out of my depth here. i thought we were talking, like, Crying in H Mart.
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u/Jealous-Jacket6996 1d ago
Here’s my politest interpretation.
It is written for a target audience. If you’re not part of the demographic it’s intended for, you can’t relate—thus it is boring, which in turn renders it torture.
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u/littlemememaid 1d ago
I'm convinced it's much more nuanced than this. A lot of the comments in this thread are assuming that the meme OP is in the out-group, but I do think a likely interpretation is that it's by Asian-American woman tired of the banality of the genre. You're right in the genre being an attempt to be "relatable", and I think that's why it's dull: the author attempts to write events to capture a "universality" of "the Asian-American experience", as if to say "look, don't you feel seen?", but obviously you can't capture the experience of a large group so it just reads as trite and uninteresting. Whereas if the author had just attempted to write a character who either a) happens to be Asian-American or b) is informed by but not defined by that, it would have just been a book about a character and not a stereotype.
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u/AdUnable8752 1d ago
im asian american and i majored in asian studies in college and you hit the nail on the head. i regret my major and have to step back from diaspora-centered "content" because it all feels too self-pitying after a while ("oh we're so oppressed and my life and childhood were so hard and we have these stereotypes we have to overcome while also doing nothing substantial to break the generational patterns we fall into" and then it's that 20x over and over).
the lack of any attempt to overcome stereotypes or stop repeating generational patterns is a little bleak to me lmao
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u/GoatyGoY 1d ago
This is also why, say, RF Kuang books are interesting. They are absolutely steeped in the Asian diaspora experience (and particularly in western institutions and academia), but that’s not what the books are all about- it’s just one aspect of them that makes them interesting.
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u/Siegez 1d ago
That seems broadly applicable to any media with a narrow target audience. I'm curious why this specific media is referenced?
Side note for the curious, 1000xResist falls squarely into the genre (though it's a game rather than literature) and is genuinely very good. Probably more of an exception than an example.
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u/kkkk22601 1d ago
Asian dude here, I actually liked reading the Joy Luck Club because it embodied many of the same relationship dynamics that I have with my parents. Though, I can see how a non-Asian person may find the book to be a bit difficult to follow.
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u/Yummy-Bao 1d ago
I would like to add that oftentimes it recycles the same tropes ad nauseam.
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u/SylveonVMAX 1d ago
"other kids would open their lunchbox to chicken nuggets or ham sandwiches and i had to open my lunchbox and subject them to my ugly stinky smelly springroll/noodles/curry/musubi/kimchi/adobo i wish i was white i wish i was white i wish i was white"
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u/aitatrash 1d ago
But I mean, is this not true for a lot of people, at least of a certain age and/or area? I never wanted to be white, but I regularly traded cha lua sandwiches with my white classmates' tuna sandwiches and was pretty self conscious of some of the food I had to bring in before my parents started including more "western" food in the rotation.
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u/SampSimps 1d ago
Even when (or perhaps especially when) they're describing your lived experience, it gets repetitive and boring after a while.
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u/Cosmic-Cuttlefish 1d ago
That is the politest, but sadly I don’t quite think it’s that
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u/Jealous-Jacket6996 1d ago
Realistically, I think it’s that + a moderate dose of xenophobia and/or misogyny.
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u/TB97 1d ago
Nah I'm a leftist immigrant (who is Asian) and let me tell you, there's only so many books about how your parents need to apologize and how kids thought your lunch smelled I can read before my brain gets fried
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u/sour_creamand_onion 1d ago
I remember seeing a post where a parent showed they wanted their son to read 100 books about feminism before he could get a car. Half the comments were "Oh my goodness you illiterate people are so annoying. I love to read. This is light work" and the other half likely knew from experiences similar to yours that reading roughly the same thing over and over and over again will get mind-numbingly dull REALLY fast no matter what the topic is. Which only gets worse the more narrow the topic is.
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u/AnonymousCoward261 1d ago
This is an excellent way to raise an Andrew Tate fan.
Especially when you consider teenagers like to rebel.
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u/Cosmic-Cuttlefish 1d ago
Yeah. I think I meant to say “entirely that” cause both can be true at the same time here. Genres aren’t always for everyone. But something about calling out this specific genre reeks of misogyny and xenophobia for sure
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u/Jealous-Jacket6996 1d ago
Haha anytime someone feels the need to describe something by a race or gender, there tends to be a hint of implicit something-ism at play 😂
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u/Kaireis 1d ago
In this particular meme though, the combination of Asian American and female is important.
Outside our community (and frankly even within it), the White majority elevates specifically female voices and faces while largely marginalizing male voices.
This is even seen in movie or TV adaptations of books written by Asian American males. Fresh off the Boat (after season one) focused plots on Jessica over Eddie.
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u/lurkermurphy 1d ago
yes there is tons of great literature by non-asian-american asians, translated or not, and the content is generally NOT about mom being mean and kids thinking your lunch is weird, but the white majority wants to hear from the female diaspora only, not from anyone else
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u/Kaireis 1d ago
Yes but sometimes I like to hear from dudes who grew up like me. The women didnt face the same type of racism we did. Sure in some ways it was worse for them, but it was different.
I mean, life in the diaspora, not life back in Korea/China/Japan.
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u/lurkermurphy 1d ago
i lived in china for many years and i am certain that the male immigrant experience in north america is vastly different than for females, so i hear you
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u/buckleyschance 1d ago
Just speculating, but I wonder if it's partly a reflection of the audience being made up of a lot more women than men (of whatever ancestry). That's certainly the case for books now, at least, and there's a very pronounced shift towards female protagonists in novels across many genres that's followed on from that.
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u/notacanuckskibum 1d ago
An interesting take, that might explain why I can’t see the appeal in Jane Austin.
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u/Responsible-Care-388 1d ago
I don't have concrete sources except what I see while browsing X, but my guess is that lately there has been some pushback against asian american women and some of the media they helm.
For example, a lot of modern books, TV shows, movies, etc by them tend to focus on generational trauma/not getting along with their parents/disappointment/etc. While asian women from asian countries when they write media, do not tend to focus on these themes.
I think the meme is basically saying books, TV shows, movies, etc from modern asian american women is low quality compared to equivalent media from asia written by women, and having to engage with it is as bad as punishment.
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u/_prepod 1d ago
Why asian diaspora literature is considered punishment
Would you like to read 1000 pages of it?
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u/Zedetta 1d ago
that is less than four books
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u/fruticose_ 1d ago
I’m pretty sure I could get through it by the end of the week if I apply myself.
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u/_prepod 1d ago
Three books about an (supposedly) ultra-niche experience that 99.99% of the world's population can't relate to in any way sound like not the best time imaginable, to say the least.
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u/Cautious_Repair3503 1d ago
No one in the world has ever been a detective in space with a robot partner but oh boy did I find robots of dawn enjoyable. I think your idea of relatability is limiting you. A lot of books make it far far easier to relate to people who you may think are very different from you.
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u/_prepod 1d ago edited 1d ago
I believe that by “contemporary diaspora literature written by Asian American women” they mean this highly personal autofiction stuff, not the pure fiction genre you mentioned.
And if you're a Bosnian man, the everyday struggles of an Asian American diaspora woman from Ohio might simply be beyond your understanding.
Part of the joke is probably also a hint at how formulaic this kind of ultra-specific literature might be (if such "genre" even exists at all)
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u/BrandonLart 1d ago
Yeah?
A lot of those books are good. I liked Pachinko
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u/_prepod 1d ago
Sure, if "the sentence" was “watch eight games of the third-tier French football league", there would definitely be people who’d be genuinely enthusiastic about it. That’s kind of the point of the joke in some way? Any oddly specific joke is bound to be someone’s actual idea of a good time
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u/sihtydaernacuoytihsy 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sure!
Jhumpa Lahiri is excellent, and I (neither Asian, nor female, nor an immigrant ) strongly recommend reading either Interpreter of Maladies or the Namesake. Telling me I had week off but but I had to read the next three of her novels would not be a punishment.
Also very strongly recommend Lê Thi Diem Thúy's "Gangster We're All Looking For".
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u/Conscious_Ebb6622 1d ago
this was getting shared around when this show was announced. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=utE1mDVY0cA
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u/kickstartdriven 1d ago
This show features a main character walking around pregnant from cheating on her husband... Deplorable.
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u/Altruistic-Estate-45 1d ago
A little life by Hanya Yanagihara
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u/TonioElTigre 1d ago
Most dogshit piece of literature I ever wasted time on (thank God I didn't finish it). What if life wasn't good for everyone and it was actually comically unfortunate🧐 Only 800+ pages of tortureporn slop will suffice for such a groundbreaking concept
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u/Altruistic-Estate-45 1d ago
As someone diagnosed with C-PTSD imagine how tiring it must be to seeing piece of fiction trying to romanticize this shit
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u/buckleyschance 1d ago
That book sounds miserable from all I've heard, but is it diaspora literature? The main characters all seem pretty European
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u/SeagullInTheWind 1d ago
I keep wondering what her effing problem is with whoever Jude's real-life counterpart is.
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u/DueEvidence5685 1d ago
As an Asian-American woman who has read a lot of contemporary Asian American literature, there is increasing online sentiment that the genre very repetitive and dull. I partially agree with this statement. A lot of the famous lit out there focuses very heavily on being teased in school, feeling like an other, being mocked for different food. In my the hands of an unskilled author, these themes can be very repetitive, though there are some beautiful, emotional pieces written by women out there like The Woman Warrior and Crying in Hmart.
However, this meme, and the current discourse, is misogynistic because it singles out Asian women. In my experience I have read a lot of boring slop and some genuine masterpieces by both genders
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u/Kitchen-Register 1d ago
I have been looking for the title of The Woman Warrior for like 6 months. I read it in highschool and wanted to reread it but couldn’t remember the name. You’re a gem. Thank you
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u/Its-Cool-Tho 1d ago
My frustration with this genre is that it often has no class or racial analysis beyond themselves. I understand that you write what you know, but as a Black person it feels like melodrama next to the casually awful shit that’s happened to people I just know in real life. Again, it needs to exist because it helps Asian Americans get on code together. That’s very important. It just wreaks of a type of self importance sometimes.
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u/Ashamed-Subject-8573 1d ago
Just want to call out a game that deals with this and is great, 1000xresist
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u/DueEvidence5685 1d ago edited 1d ago
I just read up on it and it looks super cool! Thank you for the rec. I’m a huge sci-fi fan and lowkey my favorite Asian-American lit is sci-fi, so this is awesome
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u/Bireta 1d ago
From the looks (other comments) of it, those written by women also include more "smut" (?) and some sort of "picking white guys over Asian guys" and also hating on Asian guys?
Idk, feel free correct me if I'm wrong. I myself am from a much nicher group and kinda just supposed there weren't any book out there targeted at me. So I've never knew this genre (Targeted at certain race and gender books) existed lol
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u/DueEvidence5685 7h ago
This is such an interesting conversation because my experience has been the total opposite! I have found that a lot of the boring Asian-American lit I have read (One Thousand Chestnut Trees, Bento Box in the Heartland) is almost completely sexless (probably they focus so much on childhood and adolescence). The ones I can think of with sexuality were actually much more interesting, (Ken Liu’s Mono No Aware and Good Hunting). IMO I think the genre would be better (or at least more fun) with more sex lollll.
Personally, I tend to push back on the constrained idea of “relatable Asian-American lit” as a genre because it feels so limiting, creating the staleness I have noticed. I think the best examples of lit by Asian-Americans just tell good stories that are enjoyable for anyone. I love the Woman Warrior because its a well-written genre-bending story that blends history, mythology into a family saga. The Asianness is a large part of it, but not the only thing. I love Ken Liu’s short stories because they bring creative, thought provoking sci fi concepts, that also tie into identity.
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u/Azaryen 1d ago
so if i say anything bad about one gender, it's mysiginy, gotcha
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u/ElectricalCandle6590 1d ago
If the trend applies to all demographics of a group, and you specifically call out only one demographic of the group, people are going to ask why.
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u/The_Reddit_Name 1d ago
I grew up in san francisco and I don't recall reading any asian-american themed books from male authors
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u/FeelingNorth2962 1d ago
The trend of having too many dating options and overly outdating applies to all demographics of the group?
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u/ElectricalCandle6590 1d ago
Do you not understand the word ”if”? Also, imagine rocking up to someone and going “I don’t like how you date outside of our shared ethnic group” and expecting them to find that appealing. The self-sabotage does not stop.
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u/FeelingNorth2962 22h ago
I don’t find those people appealing, why would I care about their opinions?
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u/North-Engineer3335 1d ago
I read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother after high school and realized a lot of the contemporary Asian American diaspora books are "I hate my Tiger Mom". The Jenny Han series does a great job of this by killing off the mom before she is even shown.
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u/Brilliant_Towel2727 1d ago
The poster things that contemporary diaspora literature written by Asian-American women is so bad that having to read it could be considered a form of punishment.
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u/clowderforce 1d ago
Don't threaten me with a good time, I'd gladly fulfill the obligation with Amy Tan rereads alone
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u/HuckleberryShot898 1d ago
1000 pages by a single person that thinks all her views on race are objectively correct and universally true and if you disagree you hate minorities
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u/AuthorAsksQuestions 1d ago
Probably racism
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u/Pseudolos 1d ago
Nah, Asian female diaspora literature is really boring to anyone who isn't really interested in the genre.
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u/KayItaly 1d ago
boring to anyone who isn't really interested in the genre.
In another news: water is wet and bears shit in the woods...
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u/Grawl243260 1d ago
Bears do... WHAT?????
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u/FriedTreeSap 1d ago
It’s a joke, he’s taken two famous sayings “are bears catholic?” and “does the pope shit in the woods?” and then mixed one of them up for comedic effect.
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u/KayItaly 1d ago
Uhm it is not a joke of mine. It is very widely used saying in the UK, it means what the first person said was 100% obvious.
The one you are mentioning (which I never heard before)is likely derived from it.
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u/BrandonLart 1d ago
No it isn’t. I read Pachinko with no interest in the genre and really loved it
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u/ghouleye 1d ago
they aren't a fan of the tropes of the genre so they have to disparage the experiences of asian-american women
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u/Nessy3fidy 1d ago
But your honor the plea deal was for a death sentence.
JK I have no idea what this is referencing.
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u/j10brook 19h ago edited 19h ago
It'd probably be monotonous, but 1000 pages isn't world ending. Read 20 pages a night, and you'll be done in less than 2 months
Edit: spelling
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u/kohminrui 56m ago
Books by Asian American women always have the same themes:
Complain about Tiger mom
Gets bullied for being asian
Complain about asian patriarchy
Get hooked up with white man who saves her from said patriarchy
Zero mention of patriarchy in mainstream American culture.
Hates asian culture but somehow loves asian food
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u/post-explainer 1d ago
OP (Aggravating_Net5422) sent the following text as an explanation why they posted this here: