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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17860 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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Sentenced to 1000 Pages of Contemporary Diaspora Literature Written by Asian-American Women

Here's a link that's not login-walled.

Asian-American women are not OK, at least if you go by what they write about.

  • All the books the author read feature a difficult mother-daughter relationship, with the author giving a hilarious quote of "Chinese mothers spent a thousand years binding their daughters’ feet, so maybe there is some deep need to torture their female offspring, which can nowadays only find an outlet in forcing them into piano lessons and telling them they are getting fat. "

  • They all mourn being unable to speak their mother tongue, but make no significant attempt to actually learn it.

  • The books are mostly portraits of neuroticism. "Neurotic about not being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about only being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about being too Asian. Neurotic about not being Asian enough. Neurotic about taking after their mothers. Neurotic about not living up to their mother’s expectations. Three of the books feature visits to therapists."

  • They're largely obsessed with white people, but in the worst ways possible. They think white society is a hair's breadth away from putting them all in concentration camps. They all have white boyfriends, which presumably fill the same niche that orcs do in hentai, with their physical characteristics (especially their height) always being brought up.

  • They think white people are just as obsessed with them. What might seem like a casual conversation to the white person feels like an intense struggle for racial supremacy that both people are obviously aware of to the Asian woman.

In my experience, favorite asian diaspora writers being Lisa See (who is wasian) and Amy Tan there wasn't an obsession with whiteness but the mother thing is spot on. As a woman, though, intense mother relationships are interesting. There is a also a really interesting intense frenemies dynamic that often pops up. (Snowflower and the Secret Fan, The Kitchen God's Wife). Compared to white womens literature that is usually more about the benefits of friendship not the dark secrets your favorite bestie (or mother, for that matter) is keeping from you. These aren't happy fictions. The neuroticism... hmm, yeah I could see that. Although literary fiction generally features people that are pretty neurotic and intense.

These are two authors from an earlier generation, though, so maybe not his target. I have not read those books although I attempted the crying in H mart one and couldn't get into it.

They all mourn being unable to speak their mother tongue, but make no significant attempt to actually learn it.

To be fair, very few people speak their heritage language unless they were actively taught it as a child. And when that language is as different from English as something like Mandarin/Japanese/Korean is, it's especially understandable.

All the books the author read feature a difficult mother-daughter relationship, with the author giving a hilarious quote of "Chinese mothers spent a thousand years binding their daughters’ feet, so maybe there is some deep need to torture their female offspring, which can nowadays only find an outlet in forcing them into piano lessons and telling them they are getting fat. "

The oriental culture is being mean to your children to push harder for better results. This tends to strain the parental relationship and it tends to be harder on mom when she has difficulty with her daughters than her sons.

Any reasoning driven by literary output has to explicitly account for the publishing filter. There are lots of Asian American female authors trying to get published, but who the industry chooses to publish, platform, and publicize is very much a reflection of the white women who comprise 70% of the industry and their preoccupations, not the demographic whose experiences are ostensibly being expressed.

They're largely obsessed with white people, but in the worst ways possible

They think white people are just as obsessed with them

"Asians' existence revolves around me."

The books are mostly portraits of neuroticism.

"I'm neurotic, therefore this book will resonate."

telling them they are getting fat.

"I am jealous of Asian women being professionally accomplished and skinny, but it's really a reflection of psychological damage, not competence and physical health, so actually I'm better."

They all have white boyfriends

"Asian women steal white men from my dating pool; this demands explanation."

None of this is to say that those trends aren't real. But it's much more an ABC thing, not a recent immigrant thing. And even for ABCs, it's exaggerated into a ridiculous parody of itself.

But if you dig into more obscure authors, you can find ones who don't fit the archetype you describe. You've got to be careful, as some of those that seem to break it is really attempting to tell the same story through a genre lens. But it does exist. E.g. Yamashita

There are lots of Asian American female authors trying to get published, but who the industry chooses to publish, platform, and publicize is very much a reflection of the white women who comprise 70% of the industry and their preoccupations, not the demographic whose experiences are ostensibly being expressed.

Good point. There is also the problem of the perceived publishing filter which surely informs what ideas get turned into manuscripts and submitted.

That being said, based on all the Asian (Oriental) women I have met over the years, it's plausible to me that most of their literary efforts tend to fall into a handful of recognizable cliches.

I agree you can group books into archetypes; I'd push against that being unique to Asian women, though. E.g. you have the Jewish male author whose main character is always a sexually frustrated neurotic man, whose failings are an indictment of American civilization. Or the WASPy author who lives a bored, middle class existence punctuated with affairs, whose inability to keep it in his pants is (sigh) an indictment of American civilization.

What's always a joy is finding someone whose writing is both great and genuinely unique, which is rare.

I agree you can group books into archetypes; I'd push against that being unique to Asian women, though. E.g. you have the Jewish male author whose main character is always a sexually frustrated neurotic man, whose failings are an indictment of American civilization. Or the WASPy author who lives a bored, middle class existence punctuated with affairs, whose inability to keep it in his pants is (sigh) an indictment of American civilization.

I don't read enough literature to comment on this. I will say that among the creative original people I meet, it's pretty unusual for such people to be female and more unusual still for them to be Asian (Oriental).

This poster (Anglology / @Echetus / “James Lachrymose” [pen name]) is quite interesting.

He had a short lived podcast interviewing other obscure largely British right wing anons for a time, which was occasionally interesting. The strange thing is his accent. Despite portraying himself as English, he had a slight Eastern European twang, clearly resident in England but didn’t grow up there. It wasn’t a wealthy international school accent either, nor was it a BAP style fake in-joke. I’d be curious to know of his background; he writes occasionally for the mid[wit]brow British right wing magazine / failson collective that is The Critic.

Asperger-y types pick up odd accents all the time, too. I've got a strong English accent but I was raised in Australia, since my media consumption patterns as a child leaned that way. Could potentially be a bit of that considering the sort of personality that leads you to do a sub-stack like that.

The books are mostly portraits of neuroticism. "Neurotic about not being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about only being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about being too Asian. Neurotic about not being Asian enough. Neurotic about taking after their mothers. Neurotic about not living up to their mother’s expectations. Three of the books feature visits to therapists."

You are not describing Asian women, you are describing modern women in general. Just replace asian with something else and this template will fit almost any single or middle and above class woman in a big city.

And if anything Asian women actually do a lot better at moderating the worst parts of this identity than 'educated white women'. Which isn't to say there isn't impacts of it, but I think as a cohort they've still got enough familial influences to somewhat stymie the Sex in the Cityification of it all.

Perhaps "modern women living in the West"?

Asian-American women are not OK, at least if you go by what they write about.

Any Asian-American man would have told you this without you torturing yourself with Asian-American women diaspora books. Asian-American men are not OK either, but no one cares.

All the books the author read feature a difficult mother-daughter relationship, with the author giving a hilarious quote of "Chinese mothers spent a thousand years binding their daughters’ feet, so maybe there is some deep need to torture their female offspring, which can nowadays only find an outlet in forcing them into piano lessons and telling them they are getting fat. "

This is actually not even really gendered. Family dynamics in Asia (China specifically, since I'm Chinese) have always been like this. I myself, when visiting family, often go through the "You got fat," "Why aren't you married," and "When are you going to have kids" waterboarding, and without being female. I even went through ~7 years of piano that my parents tricked me into.

The books are mostly portraits of neuroticism. "Neurotic about not being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about only being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about being too Asian. Neurotic about not being Asian enough. Neurotic about taking after their mothers. Neurotic about not living up to their mother’s expectations. Three of the books feature visits to therapists."

This is actually just Asian women in general. I've found through personal experience that Asian women, as a group, are some of the most neurotic people I've ever met. Obviously, being a part of any diaspora does not help, but it seems that it merely gives them more topics to be neurotic about. Chinese women (especially southerners, I've found) and Koreans are especially prone. I have less experience with Japanese women, so I can't speak on them.

They're largely obsessed with white people, but in the worst ways possible. They think white society is a hair's breadth away from putting them all in concentration camps. They all have white boyfriends, which presumably fill the same niche that orcs do in hentai, with their physical characteristics (especially their height) always being brought up.

Asians in Asia are also obsessed with white people, but more as a curiosity than the neurotic fixation that you find in the West. And to try to disentangle the sexual psychosis present in the Asian-American community would require an amount of effort that I cannot summon up. The simple gist is that Asian women hunt for white men like a tiger hunts for deer. The average white man is obviously defenseless against such a pursuit, leading to an above average number of WMAF pairings in Asian heavy population centers like the SF Bay Area and LA. It obviously doesn't help that Asians are more neotenic in general, giving Asian women a leg up in terms of sexually selective traits while simultaneously giving Asian men a large disadvantage. This, in turn, causes a deep psychological disturbance in the Asian-American men population. This disturbance is amplified by the type and amount of Asian-American dating content available on social media (IYKYK). Each population deals with this differently, depending largely on their country of origin and where they ended up in America.

They think white people are just as obsessed with them. What might seem like a casual conversation to the white person feels like an intense struggle for racial supremacy that both people are obviously aware of to the Asian woman.

See above.

Overall, the article just confirms my suspicions about all of these Asian-American diaspora books, and Asian-American women in general. The entire thing makes me sad.

This disturbance is amplified by the type and amount of Asian-American dating content available on social media (IYKYK)

ID, in fact, K; could you explain?

I swear this example is pertinent. In porn, there is a specific genre of race fetishism videos, where the main draw of the video is a woman of a certain race glorifying and fetishizing men of another race. The woman is generally of a minority race and the man is generally either white or black. This obviously humiliates the men of the woman's own race while elevating the fetishized race.

Asian-American dating content is essentially a softcore version of those videos on repeat. Asian girls are quite open about their preferences, and even if they weren't people have eyes and can see for themselves in real time. So much so that "Oxford Study" is a well known meme at this point. As noted before, Asian-American men are disturbed by the fact that Asian-American women both prefer and are preferred by whites (for an extreme example of this just go to /r/asianmasculinity). Based off of the videos I linked, there has been a lot of discussion, at least among Asian-American men themselves, about this and how to deal/cope with this phenomenon. It's also quite difficult to even discuss this topic as an Asian-American man without coming off as bitter and emasculated so discussion generally remains within our own circles.

As an Asian-American man, I personally feel the effects of this dynamic as well.

Ah, I see what you mean.

For what it’s worth, I have seen an uptick in anti-WMAF sentiment from Asian women themselves on social media (primarily Substack, sometimes X). Unfortunately most of it comes from hyperwoke Asian women who decry WMAF relationships as complicity with colonialist cisheteropatriarchy (or whatever verbiage the kids these days are using). Even if said women actually apply their stated beliefs to their personal lives, I couldn’t fault a well-adjusted man for not wanting to date a Person of Hair Color.

Still, perhaps there is a bit of a whitepill here: if normie, not-especially-woke Asian women absorb enough messaging from social media that WMAF is cringe and “so 2010s”, perhaps their preferences will also change: women’s preferences are famously quite susceptible to social pressure, memes, and zeitgeist. Indeed, this tweet provides some evidence in favor of this thesis.

Then again, perhaps it’s more of a graypill than a whitepill; even if true, all it establishes is that Asian women are soulless statusmaxxers who will hop onto any bandwagon as long as it’s prestigious enough … and hop right off as soon as its fortunes change.

Unfortunately most of it comes from hyperwoke Asian women who decry WMAF relationships as complicity with colonialist cisheteropatriarchy (or whatever verbiage the kids these days are using). Even if said women actually apply their stated beliefs to their personal lives

Spoiler alert: they don't.

all it establishes is that Asian women are soulless statusmaxxers who will hop onto any bandwagon as long as it’s prestigious enough … and hop right off as soon as its fortunes change.

This is just Asians in general, but especially in Asia. If you’ve been exposed to Asian dramas, you’d be familiar the quite frankly psychotic social games being played there. I’m happy that I was able to avoid most of it.

Asian women hunt for white men like a tiger hunts for deer.

Are the Hmong an exception to this? Those were the only Asians in my college town, and I don't think I ever even saw a mixed couple, or had one voluntarily speak words to me.

Hmong are very different to all other kinds of Asians. They may look east-asian but they behave like central Asians. They even have a bridal-kidnapping culture and issues with crime that other kinds of Asians don't.

This is just from reading Ann Coulter books, I've never actually met a Hmong person.

I still know a handful of Hmong from my older sibling’s peer group growing up. Don’t hang out with them anymore but know where they are and how to get in touch with them. They went to high school together and my sibling used to hang out with them in Asian club. They are definitely more brutish than other Asians. The ones we knew were involved in drug dealing among the gangs and always had nice cars. My friends and I used to joke with them in the street that they weren’t true Asians because they didn’t own the latest Honda Civic’s and a submachine gun, driving downtown with an Uzi down their pants. They had straps they carried around though. They were dirt poor, living in apartment complexes about a half hour from us. The roads there were unpaved so almost everyone just parked in an empty dirt lot. They also had large families. When I got older and my interests were changing, I gave the little brother of one of them my N64 and all the games (no way they could’ve afforded anything new, let alone old).

I have not had any personal experience with the Hmong population, so I can’t really speak to their specific dynamics. I’d say that I have noticed some differences between populations that came as refugees (Vietnamese, Korean) and populations that came willingly. A large one being that refugee populations are generally more insular. Even Koreans aren’t really a part of the refugee population anymore.

Asian women hunt for white men like a tiger hunts for deer.

Alas, my single days were spent in places with a miniscule amount of Asians so I didn't get to fully experience this.

The average white man is obviously defenseless against such a pursuit, leading to an above average number of WMAF pairings in Asian heavy population centers like the SF Bay Area and LA.

While hiking the John Muir Trail this summer, I was greatly amused by the number of WMAF couples I saw. Most common pairing in couples was white-white unsurprisingly, but WMAF was by far the second-most common. I saw more of those couples in 12 days than I saw black people, and I don't mean black couples--I mean black people at all.

If, god forbid, you get divorced, you can always get a taste by moving to Thailand, Vietnam, or the Philippines in your old age. Just remember that every single one of those women really loves and values you.

WMAF couples are by far the most common interracial pairing in Dublin, except maybe WMBF (white male, Brazilian female; obviously "Brazilian" isn't a race and some of these women are white as snow, but you know what I mean). On the very rare occasions my AF wife and I pass an AMWF couple in the street, we give each other this knowing look like "what is it, Opposite Day?"

I'm surprised by how often I hear about Brazilian people in Ireland. Are there actually that many, and if so, why?

About 40,000 according to the last census. Not a lot in absolute terms, but they're quite visible by virtue of being young (80% under the age of 45) and often working in public-facing jobs like Deliveroo drivers or hospitality. The much larger Indian population mostly work remotely or in offices, so aren't as visible.

Years ago someone told me that the initial influx of Brazilians was the result of some kind of deal that Irish meat-packing plants struck with Brazil. Nowadays I think the main reason they come is because it's the only country in the EU in which English is the primary language (many of them are entitled to EU citizenship by virtue of having a European grandparent: I've met several with a grandparent from Italy or Portugal, although for obvious reasons the ones with a German grandfather aren't as keen to advertise the fact). They often come over on student visas to learn English which they then overstay, and most people understand that these "English schools" are a bit of a scam.

No, I don’t know what you mean- Brazilians pass for natives pretty well.

What I meant was that "Irish male, Brazilian female" is a pretty common international pairing, and a large subset of these pairings are also interracial by virtue of being "white male, pardo female" or more rarely "white male, black female".

Steve Sailer has also addressed this issue back in 1997.

It obviously doesn't help that Asians are more neotenic in general, giving Asian women a leg up in terms of sexually selective traits while simultaneously giving Asian men a large disadvantage.

I think this factor is much more important:

I myself, when visiting family, often go through the "You got fat,"

Dating modern American men must be like shooting fish in a barrel for any healthy young adult woman given the competition.
But maybe that's my bias showing, and the average white American man actually wants a strongly-opinionated, plus-size, nose-pierced and skin-scribbled, childfree, yoga pants-wearing woman.
Is there any research on that?

It would be really hilarious if Asian women's preference for white men was actually just a preference for white mothers in law. All anybody wants is a nice casserole and a long hug from mom.

Isn't it also true though that Asian women have usually terrible intersex communication skills?

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this. Perhaps you mean that they are less vocal about what they want and expect the man in a relationship to Just Get It. I’d probably agree with this statement, and I’d hazard a guess that it’s downstream of East Asian conflict aversion.

But the flip side is that being extra vocal in the manner of white women need not necessarily be good intersex communication skills; it could just be being kind of bitchy.

As always with a straight man, how much shit he’s willing to take mostly boils down to how hot the woman in question is. On that front, an Asian woman’s juice is (on average) worth the squeeze far more than a white woman’s is, in the modern West.

Perhaps you mean that they are less vocal about what they want and expect the man in a relationship to Just Get It

Yes, basically. In more detail: two things. One: in order to elicit interest and initiative from eligible men, women need to have sufficient social skills and awareness to send indicators of interest that are also plausibly deniable. Two: after the man initiates conversation, the woman needs to be able to, well, hold it. As far as I can tell, many Asian single women are found lacking in both cases.

As far as I can tell, many Asian single women are found lacking in both cases

[emphasis mine]

Berkson’s paradox.

If they were hot (viz. slim, with no tattoos, weird piercings, or unnatural hair colors) and socially adept, they wouldn’t be single. Asian women are, statistically, very likely to be hot, ergo the single ones must necessarily be socially inept. Single white women, on the other hand, are very often not hot, hence they are paradoxically more socially adept on average.

I mean it depends. In my dating I definitely overindexed for 'Mid-Twenties non-fat pleasant Asian girl with a decent degree/start to career who is now getting pilloried by parents to date despite being forbidden until this moment'-types, and I'd say the failure mode there tends to be a lot of situations where you get like 2-3 dates in of polite workchat and I personally wasn't driving hard anywhere since I respected their inexperience enough I didn't particularly want to escalate to sex unless I really liked the girl and the girl in question didn't really drive to anywhere out of a combination of timidity and not really understanding how to drop the proverbial handkerchief. Thus a decent amount of fizzles with girls who I've got a soft spot for, but based on my Instagram feed a lot of them 5 years later don't seem to have found a boyfriend yet.

Which is bad for society, IMO, I eventually found one I liked well enough to escalate and now I'm married/2 kids, but a lot of these girls are pleasant, salt-of-the-earth UMC-types who are just kinda single forever due to timidity. As opposed to white girl failure mode which tended to resemble way more 'I got pump and dumped once or twice now I'm reclaiming my sex life by dating around forever' or 'hilariously bad mate choice forever'.

I definitely think @Botond173 has the right idea, in that a lot of these girls just don't really have a romantic model (or if they do it's an absurd super slow burn Kdrama 40-episode season till some handholding occurs) or a sense of how to encourage interest in a tacit way

and I personally wasn't driving hard anywhere since I respected their inexperience enough I didn't particularly want to escalate to sex unless I really liked the girl and the girl in question didn't really drive to anywhere out of a combination of timidity and not really understanding how to drop the proverbial handkerchief.

Then your parents needed to make sure you respected women in the appropriate measure (rather than respect women enough to disqualify yourself) and in not doing so I honestly think they failed you as hard as 1950-1970s traditionalist fathers did their daughters by encouraging them to be housewives in the face of... absurd unprecedented opportunity to do literally anything else.

It's not like they knew any better, for the same reason parents in the 1960s didn't know any better. And yet.

More comments

The same phenomenon was described in this comment chain extensively by @2D3D.

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Dating modern American men must be like shooting fish in a barrel for any healthy young adult woman given the competition. But maybe that's my bias showing, and the average white American man actually wants a strongly-opinionated, plus-size, nose-pierced and skin-scribbled, childfree, yoga pants-wearing woman.

Back when I was single, people often asked me why so many of the women I dated were first-generation Asian migrants and so few (none, effectively) Irish. Honestly, a big part of it could be explained simply by comparing the average BMI in Ireland with the corresponding figures in China, Taiwan, Korea etc.

Yeah. If your disqualifying factors are somewhat slender, has a degree/job, not overtly woke and not plastered in tattoos then you're left with a selection that leans very Asian. Plus a decent amount of the Europeans left, in my experience, were the ultra-religious and I've got nothing against that but it also felt like something that's hard to handle from a 'casual initial dating' POV.

I must say that the beauty standards in Asia, even compared to the much stricter western beauty standards of 20 years ago, are completely psychotic. I'd say that Korea is the epicenter (just look at the plastic surgery rates) but China and Japan are not far behind. If the average American woman had to meet the Asian standards of today, they would kill themselves. Asian-American standards are more lax, but still far and above the current American standards.

I mean sure but a lot of those are really intense girl v girl PVP. Most men don't care too much so long as their partner is feminine and can see her feet as opposed to insisting she needs $10k of Korean Skincare a week.

To be fair, how much of this is a genuine reflection of the median female Asian-American experience, and how much of this is just because this is what the publishing industry is willing to pick up?

They're largely obsessed with white people, but in the worst ways possible. They think white society is a hair's breadth away from putting them all in concentration camps. They all have white boyfriends, which presumably fill the same niche that orcs do in hentai, with their physical characteristics (especially their height) always being brought up.

in fairness this has a grain a truth. A U.S. president did something just like that

I don't think that's true. We did put a lot of Japanese into concentration camps after a very specific incident gave rise to what was, IMO, a reasonable fear that the Japanese within our borders were both nationalistically loyal to Japan and liable to act on that loyalty.

The Japanese really were fanatical and after that went down I can't say I'd have made a different choice.

So until baseline Chinese-Americans start acting in ways that imply a credible threat that they'll do the same, I don't think there's any concern here. Even if China (for some reason) sneak attacks us.

However, if they do, it would indeed become reasonable to keep Chinese nationals out of high-security positions without extreme levels of vetting.

This piece suspiciously confirmed my preconceptions of this genre, but I also haven't read any of it for myself and I do not know this writer. Are we all doomed to read 1000 pages worth of stories for a particular ethnic identity crisis before we can call ourselves responsible thinkers? Epistimic humility has forsaken us.

Yeah, this tracks. I've read a fair amount of lit-fic and it's a rare Asian female author (in Western publishing, I should caveat) who doesn't write about... basically Asian female trauma.

Almost all SFF written by Asian women basically uses interstellar or fantasy empires as a metaphor for Western colonialism, and usually the Asian female character will have a white boyfriend and feel Very Conflicted about it.

Is this significantly different from the white female lit-fic available? The stereotype is that such works are also obsessed with female trauma.

Hell, there’s a whole thread of male lit-fic which could be glossed that way. I doubt that that it’s dominant or even representative.

White women do write a lot of trauma porn too, but I really do see more variety in topics covered in white female lit fic. In fairness, there are a lot more of them so it's easier to see a wider range.

Article is login-walled so I'll just free-associate with the bit that's visible.

Never heard of this concept of "diaspora literature" before. Is this just an Asian thing, or can any "foreign" group write it? The reference to mangoes makes me think of The House on Mango Street, which is about Hispanics in Chicago. This was one of a number of such books that they made us read in high school, although I don't remember any about Asians.

Even then my classmates and I made fun of the fact that we had to read all these stories about "growing up [ethnic]" when hardly anyone in our class was of the ethnicity in question. In fact I think there would've been more Asians than Hispanics in that class.

Then again, a growing-up story focused on our lives would have made for a very boring book. "Got home from school, procrastinated by playing video games, had dinner while parents watched TV, got picked up by friend who just got his driver's license and likes to brag about it by driving everybody around, hung out and shot the shit, went home, realized it's almost midnight and I still haven't started my 10-page essay on The House on Mango Street due tomorrow...." Or maybe this is more a guy/girl difference than an ethnic thing.

Is this what diaspora literature is about?:

Bro us [ETHNIC IDENTITY]’s we do things a bit different, we love food, we respect our grandmas, and family is everything!

Although it sounds like these Asian authors are not particularly fond of their families.

The white-ethnic growing up experience made for decent enough literature.

You really just need to go down one or two social levels to find some very good indie lit about the white/white-enough-hispanic growing-up experience (because at that point drugs, dinergoth girls, etc. add some stakes). I would recommend Calvin Westra's work highly, as well as Mixtape Hyperborea.

Then again, a growing-up story focused on our lives would have made for a very boring book.

Maybe to you, but as a 2nd generation immigrant to america the Basic White People experience sounds foreign and interesting to me. It would need a particularly good writer because litfic isn't really my thing tho.

Here's a link to a screenshot of the article that's not login walled.

Never heard of this concept of "diaspora literature" before. Is this just an Asian thing, or can any "foreign" group write it?

In modern contexts, it usually implies Asian diaspora, specifically Asian women who write the same book about family trauma and dating white men.

Comprehensive list of socially-acceptable jobs for Asian-American women:

  1. Nail salon worker
  2. Hostess at an Asian restaurant
  3. Housewife
  4. Doctor

I'd go insane too tbh.

My dentist is an Asian woman. Some portion of my tech company coworkers. My kids' current and former piano teachers. Local banks are staffed in a significant portion by them.

Dentists (and pharmacists) count as doctors. Piano teacher is a well-known housewife side gig. I haven't noticed the bank thing, but I don't go to banks often.

I stereotype Asian women as pharmacists or housewives.

As opposed to any usual office job?

I did leave one option off. Number 5: Something something biotech.

I would probably do a double-take if I heard someone say, “you need to talk to our accounts payable specialist, Xiu Ying Wang,” whereas seeing a name like that on a lab report is completely unremarkable.

For some really advanced racism, you can even drill down into the specific romanization choice, which statistically implies a certain country of origin, which in turn hones the distribution of likely occupations.

Continuing with your example:

Xiu Ying Wang => ethnic Chinese from Singapore/Malaysia => probably an accountant or similar back office role in Australia or New Zealand

Xiuying Wang => mainland Chinese => probably came to the US for a PhD in STEM

Hsiu-Ying Wang => Taiwanese => most likely working in semiconductors, or perhaps traipsing around NYC or LA as a shiftless BPD art ho (Hsiu-Ying Ho?)

You’ve even added a 4th category in accidentally, as Ho is not a romanization for a sound that exists in Mandarin. That name sounds Cantonese to me, and the Cantonese-origin diaspora and Hong Kong will still romanize their names that way.

“Ho” is the Wade-Giles romanization of a Mandarin sound (“He” in Pinyin). Though it can also be a transliteration of Cantonese, as you said.

I stand corrected! Did not realise “he” was romanised as “ho” in Wade-Giles.

I’ve met countless East Asian women who work in back office or clerical / admin jobs, as paralegals, in other low tier white collar jobs.

The same is true in banks - including the high-end back office roles like quant risk modellers or regulatory specialists. In-house legal and the good Finance roles are whiter - probably because they mostly recruit women who mummy-tracked out of BigLaw and Big 4 accountancy firms respectively.

Probably a geo/country thing. I know in Australia accounting being forever on the skilled visa listings means they're very present, but I'd imagine in other countries that's less of a factor.

Socially acceptable for whom, the Asian-American community or the mainstream? I would assume the former, but the inclusion of nail salon worker seems kinda odd (my impression is that's considered a bit on the seedy side)

I think someone is making themselves sound dumber than they are by lumping together different ethnicities under the "Asian" banner. There are Asian-American ethnicities where nail salon worker is an acceptable job, but Chinese-Americans (who are the vast majority of the expensively schooled Asian-Americans writing literary fiction about being victims of self-inflicted racism) are not one of them.

A lot of nail salons are staffed specifically by individuals of Vietnamese origin, because Tippi Hedren visited some Vietnamese refugees, they thought highly of her nails, she introduced them to her manicurist, they learned the trade and started their own nail salons, and set their relatives up in the same business and it spread from there. A similar phenomenon is behind many instances of a particular diaspora being widely represented in a particular business: the vagaries of chance will introduce a few migrants to some occupation, and their relatives will follow them.

Brings new meaning to the phrase 'for want of a nail'!

See also Cambodians and donut shops.

There's a really great documentary about Cambodian donut shops and the ubiquitous pink box. The Donut King

A similar phenomenon is behind many instances of a particular diaspora being widely represented in a particular business

Patel motels? Lebanese Greek restaurants? Jewish bankers?

The nail salon workers in Hungary are Vietnamese too, and I am honestly struggling to imagine how they would have been helped into the job by American relatives (and how heartless those American relatives would have to have been to shepherd them into being nail salon workers in a country where they will earn like a fifth of American minimum wage for it).

By the time Hungary saw substantial Vietnamese immigration, the nail salon connection was already well established. American immigrants spread it back home, from whence it spreads back out to the rest of the diaspora. The system produced massive dividends in one destination country, why not another?

From my understanding, much like East Germany, Hungary started seeing substantial Vietnamese immigration during communist times (as part of the general cooperation of the ideologically lukewarm peripheral countries). Do you really figure there was meme flow from the (still mostly Southern refugee at that time) Vietnamese in the US to the (tending Northern) intra-communist transfers?

I haven't been to Vietnam, but are nail salons a big thing there, and if they are, are they considered an American thing?

I assume it's above """massage therapist""", but I admit I am unfamiliar with both types of establishments. I don't think I've ever been inside either one.

‘Massage therapist’ is a regulated term- at least by themselves- and they claim to be actual medical professionals- albeit that medicine is referrals from chiropractors to handle whatever crap is too woo-woo for him.

You’re thinking of masseuses.

Nail salons employ a lot of low-skilled women who literally put nail varnish on the customers' nails - it is not a business you would see as a gender-conforming man. In the UK it is one step below hairdressing on the respectability ladder. In terms of ethnic origin, the workforce is 80%+ third-world Asian, with Vietnamese being the largest national group (both in the US and the UK). The internet can't agree on the mix of ethnic-Vietnamese citizens, immigrants, and trafficked slave labour.

Nail salons employ a lot of low-skilled women who literally put nail varnish on the customers' nails - it is not a business you would see as a gender-conforming man.

You do, because you walk past them as you're going to the pizza/chinese place or convenience store in the same strip mall. I guess maybe if you doordash everything you wouldn't see them. Most of the ones in my area have big clear windows where you can see the techs working on the client's nails (or, more usually, that no one is there working, which is why I suspect the money laundering story is true)

The Chinese "massage" places are less obvious.

I guess Vietnamese money laundering is higher status than Chinese prostitution.

I once dated an Asian-American woman for a couple of months, during which time I fell in love with her. Interestingly, she didn't tick any of these boxes: she had a healthy relationship with her parents, spoke Mandarin fluently, and struck me as significantly less neurotic than I was (despite having had certain experiences which might reasonably lead one to neuroticism). She had dated multiple white men besides me, but gave no impression of thinking white men were obsessed with or fetishizing her, nor on the verge of reenacting the Japanese internment camps.

Sounds like she was a true unicorn. I’m sorry things didn’t work out between the two of you, but if you know of any more like her in the NYC metro area, send them my way!

Wrong side of the Atlantic, I'm afraid. I think she was originally from LA.

Asian-American women are not OK, at least if you go by what they write about.

Well, what they write about in "notable" books, which often includes going through the funnels of getting published and winning awards in an environment where [minority] writers talking about [minority] issues is highly prized. It's entirely plausible that if you went by either raw numbers of asian-american writers or by aggregate sales they're mainly writing self-published romantasy or the like. Part of the reason for the sameyness and triviality is that asian-americans don't have much in the way of potential racial grievances, especially if affirmative-action is off-limits.

I think there’s some sample bias here. This is the prose that is amplified by institutional publishers and other gatekeepers. Of course they’re going to select this deranged and insane types of authors. A well-adjusted one wouldn’t get the time of day. Do you think they’re would ever give space to a normal woman with a healthy nuclear family? No chance.

Since the ratio of white men to Asian women lean very high, a small percentage of white men with an Asian fetish can still make certain Asian women feel like a lot of white people are obsessed with them.

There's something to be said of the type of Asian women that only date white men and put down Asian men whenever they can. The type that says they won't date an Asian man because it reminds them of their brother (something I've never heard a women of any other race say). I'm not sure if any other racial group has significant amounts of their women despise their men in a similar manner. Black men and women have something similar but in the opposite direction where black men have more success in interracial pairing than black women. But I don't think black men have nearly as much disdain for black women.

I'm curious if the increase in soft power amongst the East Asian countries has changed this dynamic amongst younger Asian-american people.

Having largely dated Asian women as a white guy, despite all things being equal preferring a white girl, I'd say my decisionmaking was more motivated by issues with contemporary White womanhood than Asian fetishism.

Finding a non-fat, non-woke, agreeable young woman with a career disqualified a lot more white girls than Asian girls even in modern Australia

Yeah, well, what can I offer as a white man except that this perfectly matches my experience with the Asian-American women I've known.

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