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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.
Comprehensive list of socially-acceptable jobs for Asian-American women:
I'd go insane too tbh.
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'!
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?
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