The Loneliest Americans
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15
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Average rating4
A “provocative and sweeping” (Time) blend of family history and original reportage that explores—and reimagines—Asian American identity in a Black and white world “[Kang’s] exploration of class and identity among Asian Americans will be talked about for years to come.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, Mother Jones In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Nobody, including the lawmakers who passed the bill, expected it to transform the country’s demographics. But over the next four decades, millions arrived, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They came with almost no understanding of their new home, much less the history of “Asian America” that was supposed to define them. The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.” Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country’s racial binary. There are the businessmen turning Flushing into a center of immigrant wealth; the casualties of the Los Angeles riots; the impoverished parents in New York City who believe that admission to the city’s exam schools is the only way out; the men’s right’s activists on Reddit ranting about intermarriage; and the handful of protesters who show up at Black Lives Matter rallies holding “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” signs. Kang’s exquisitely crafted book brings these lonely parallel climbers together and calls for a new immigrant solidarity—one rooted not in bubble tea and elite college admissions but in the struggles of refugees and the working class.
Reviews with the most likes.
A more coherent examination of the notion of Asian-American, coalescing the various thoughts he's poked and prodded at in numerous articles and in his ongoing conversation with his No Time To Say Goodbye podcast co-hosts Tammy Kim and Andy Liu.
King pushes against the notion of Asian-American, a term that perhaps matters only to affluent, educated, second-generation professionals who are becoming as white as whites will allow while still brandishing their POC status. But the term barely manages to contain the multitudes of cultures and countries, and breaks down across class lines, irrelevant to the refugees, the undocumented and the working class.
The chapters are all over the place, more like individual articles than a real cohesive whole. It's an exorcism of sorts for Kang who seems to want to shake off all the nagging thoughts he's had around Asian-American identity. At the same time it can read like a “Not Like Other Asians” justification. Kang is constantly setting himself apart, the author at a cool remove from those he's talking about. He's the lonely American sitting on his own instead of engaging with the other Asians sitting together at the lunch table. Still, his podcast is well worth a listen where you'll find his more misanthropic tendencies are better mitigated by his co-hosts.
