 Good day, May 40th here. So I'm walking around Sydney Harbour, looking at Sydney Opera House, the beautiful Royal Botanical Gardens listening to my Apple news plus audio Productions, this is what the half Asian half white protagonist Reveals about Reveals about America Very scary stuff here guys. I need to provide warnings for you I'm not sure you're gonna you have to handle this. Why does the half Asian half white protagonist make us so anxious? Yeah, written by Andrea Long Chu for New York magazine narrated by Emily Wu Zeller Please be advised this article contains racial slurs. Oh, no It only takes a few years an economic catastrophe brings on the partial collapse of American society as The nation recovers an ascendant right-wing blames the crisis on China In the years following the United and for absolutely no reason whatsoever It's not like China did anything wrong with regard to COVID or any of its policies just for no reason whatsoever An ascendant right-wing just blames China sad It states is rebuilt as an authoritarian nation under the preserving American culture and traditions act Wow, that sounds awful the preserving America Cultures and traditions act well the reflection It's an act that probably sounds good for some people and bad for other people so who would have thought that Different legislation might impact some people's positively and other people's negatively So this article seems to be saying that some of politics at least is a zero-sum game Who would have thought that I certainly wouldn't So an ascendant right-wing taking power in America with a kind of a Anti-China bias and tries to preserve American traditions. This is very scary stuff Colloquially known as packed an expansive law that allows the government to ban books monitor private citizens and disappear political dissidents All in the name of preventing the spread of un-American views Yeah, I'm really sure that's just right around the corner Man, the Republicans are sure are scary, right? Wanting to intrude on our private speech like this a category that grows broader by the month Appearing sympathetic to China. Well, look, there are situations where you do want to restrict speech there are situations when you want to enhance the power of tradition and community Where you want to world people together rather than encourage people to divide up The diversity means you know, unless we have in common the better Then anyone though is calling for this kind of legislation appearing insufficiently anti-China Having any doubts about anything American having any ties to China at all. No matter how many generations Right, so there would be some outside context, right that would play a role here This would depend on how China operates At the reason that this anti-China sentiment is because of concrete things that China has done that are for other people China is very unpopular in the world. It's not just some right-wing racist thing to hate China There are plenty of people on the left hate China It's past This is fiction Obviously, even as it clearly brings to mind Japanese incarceration and the rise of McCarthyism as well It doesn't bring to mind Japanese incarceration. There's nothing like that Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast were told that they either had to move or that they would be put in Relocation camps. People's private conversations were not monitored to this extent. There wasn't Any kind of overall social crackdown anything equivalent to what this novel describes So it's a pretty normal response when your country goes to war with country B members of your country A Who have ethnic, racial, religious, cultural ties to country B are going to come under suspicion Well as the wave of racist attacks on people of Asian ancestry since the pandemic began Okay, these racist attacks have been part of America's huge boom in crime since George Floyd died And there's been one primary group of super predators who's been carrying out these crimes and Asian Americans are still the safest of any immediate racial ethnic group in America Right, they are less likely to suffer from violent crime than any other racial group in America but in America today, we're strongly incentivized to Maximize a sense of victimhood and grievance So the American thing now is to proclaim how much of a victim you are To proclaim your grievances against the white Christian majority The book in question is Our Missing Hearts the third novel from author Celeste Inge About a 12 year old boy named Bird Gardner whose mother a Chinese American poet Abandoned him and his white father three years before Inge's little mixed-race hero doesn't speak Cantonese and doesn't seem to eat Chinese food or know any Asian people So I am one sixteenth Chinese, so I have not suffered to my knowledge from You know being stereotyped as Chinese my father was one eighth Chinese the other kids would call him chinky My father suffered enough From these slurs that he was very sensitive about them All right, he was very sensitive about people knowing that he was one eighth Chinese so to my father and growing up in Australia in the 1930s and 40s Being known as part Chinese was not a positive thing and then his mother who was one quarter Chinese She wore extensive makeup did absolutely everything she could to try to disguise the fact that she was one quarter Chinese But that was then this is now all about the love and tolerance radical love and inclusion Multicultural diversity, but his appearance alone the tilt of his cheekbones the shape of his eyes is Enough to subject bird to the unifying existential threat faced by anyone who might seem Chinese This spectacularly anti-Asian version of the United States betrays a new more openly political ambition on Inge's part Whereas her previous work focuses on the experience of Asian Americans She is now trying to write about Asian America itself The problem is that such a thing may not exist It remains a very open question whether okay, does Asian America exists? right, I Think it's a category that Has some use some utility All right, a category doesn't have to be you know 100 percent Accurate, you know profound and life-changing to have some advantages that the disparate immigrant populations huddled under the umbrella of Asian American a term coined by student activists at Berkeley in 1968 have enough in common and think about how grateful we are that we get all these hyphenated American identities I think about how much better off we are Now with Asian American black American and Jewish American Dividing America up into more and more disparate groups so that we're less and less able to have a public to have You know a communal sense But instead There we celebrate that we have so very little in common. Wow, that's really helped this country Thank you Thank you so much Come on now to justify a shared politics or even a shared identity Nobody most of all Asian Americans really believes that Asian America actually exists Contends the journalist Jake Okay, so Jewish American that doesn't really exist for some people because they if they're living up from the inside They think oh, there are so many different kinds of Jews, you know Jewish just has no meaning If you're Asian American, I can imagine that there are so many different types of Asian identity that you think our Asian identity just Just doesn't have any objective meaning But from an outside perspective, all right, it does does have meaning for people, right? We only have so much energy I have so many mental resources and so we develop categories and stereotypes Kind of economize on our thinking to you know have broadly useful ways of understanding the world as being keng in his 2021 polemic the loneliest Americans How how they suffered keng Asian American Loneliest Americans gosh, that sounds really tough I mean Asian Americans the least likely to be victims of crime They earn more money than any other racial group. They save more money They live longer lives They're more educational and social success But poor dears. They are the Loneliest Americans how awful identity is a fantasy created by striving Asian Professionals eager to reap the spoils of full whiteness while hiding behind a relatively mild Disorganized form of oppression that pales literally in the face of the systemic violence Okay, so everyone in the west today wants to grab on to The title of oppression. They owe how we've suffered And that's the way to get status and prestige and power Is to compete in the suffering sweepstakes Everyone's got to do it man Is it on black Americans There are still only two races in America black and white he declares Everyone else is part of a demographic group headed in one direction or the other What interests me here is not keng's argument per se He is not the most persuasive writer on the subject only the loudest But rather the fact that both he and in Arguably two of the most prominent Asian American authors working today End up placing their ideas on the shoulders of a mixed race child All right, this is from New York magazine What about the half Asian half white protagonist in novels what that reveals About Asian American anxiety