What the fuck is "Asian American-core"?

Himbo writer Simon Wu loves capitalism, 'ates capitalism, simple as.

Okay, reader-participation time: I want you to say the phrase “Asian American-core” out loud for me. Again, and feel how awkwardly it comes out, a total jumble, feel how “American-core” comes around to its hyphen and then slams its breaks. Just “American-core” on its own sounds like shit—now add “Asian” to the front of it and the whole thing is a stop-start nightmare seven-syllables long. A terrible phrasing that begs its user to find literally any other way to communicate the point at hand. And yet here I was, seeing the phrase get dropped in Interview’s latest piece on Simon Wu. A published writer, no less! Could it be that this awkward phrasing is intentional? Could it be that Wu is trying to emphasize the awkwardness of life as an Asian-American? No.

Intrigued by a writerly intuition this poor, I flipped open (or, more appropriately, clicked open) a copy of Wu’s book this morning alongside my ex-tweaker morning Red Bull. I scroll and then stop at random. My eyes settle on a sentence: “containers are not possessions in themselves but rather a promise of the ability to store more things.” My knees buckle as I stifle a laugh so powerful it threatens to give me convulsions. I scan again. “Fall is the season that most resembles an MDMA high.” Oh my God. “Asians find freedom from repressive households in the space of the rave.” AAAAAAA. “It took time for people to develop a relationship to “Dancing on My Own.”” …Hold on, what? “Dancing on My Own” was at #4 in Pitchfork’s top songs that year! Most people I knew when it came out loved it basically immediately! What the fuck are you talking about?!

Simon Wu represents a fascinating development I’ve seen take place over the last decade, the development of the “intellectual himbo,” someone raised under the auspices of a pseudo-intellectual internet “explainer” culture awash with empty buzzwords. As Wu puts it: “we were children of Tumblr, raised on critical theory PDFs and leftist YouTube.” I mean, there it all is, really, laid bare for you. What more could I even say?

Wu’s book is a veritable epic of himbo adventure. Some of the fellow himbos he encounters along his journey are just as enthralling as he is. Wu writes about CFGNY founders Tin Nguyen and Daniel Chew and they sound like legit characters out of Zoolander. Just take this shit in:

Tin and Daniel had to explain the concept of a diasporic identity, or even an “Asian American” identity, to the Vietnamese tailors.

“One way we put it simply was like, he’s Chinese, I’m Vietnamese, and we hang out,” Tin recounts, trying to explain the idea of Asian American community to the tailors. “So emphasizing this idea that there’s overlap (and camaraderie?) in the ways in which we, as Asian diaspora, identify. They were often surprised by that, that a Chinese and Vietnamese might identify with one another in America.”

Working on this collection, Tin and Daniel became much more aware of the cultural, even U.S.-specificity of an “Asian American” or an “Asian diasporic” identity.

That Tin and Daniel had to become “aware” of the “U.S.-specificity” of an “Asian-American” is such a brilliant moment of himbotic apotheosis that I can’t help but read it in Fabio’s voice. Maybe more specifically after Fabio got hit in the head with that goose. Immensely taken with this vacuous revelation, Daniel goes on to present it to others like he’s an Apostle of Jesus Christ Our Lord:

“What does ‘being Asian’ even mean?” Daniel asked in a 2019 article. “We can’t possibly define that. What we can define is the experience of being viewed as one huge group. The alienation that is a consequence of being judged for something you aren’t, and what brings us together is understanding that relationship between ourselves and our identity. It’s not about being Asian, it’s about trying to expand what being Asian means.”

What does ‘being Asian’ even mean? An intriguing question. I tried to Google the answer and all I got was this unhelpful map. What could it mean?

CFGNY says it was “founded in 2016 as an ongoing dialogue on the intersection of art, fashion, and identity” and that it “continually returns to the term "vaguely Asian."” Wow. Dialogues. Intersections. Identities. Check out this Asian shirt!

I think I’m understanding the “vaguely Asian” part now because how exactly this is “Asian” is extremely “vague” to me. I think by “dialogue” they mean transactions between the “identities” of exploited Asian workers and bougie Asian-American art brats. Specifically where exploited Asian workers make the ghastly £279.00 “Alien bookworm bag” and then some bougie Asian-Americans pocket the profit. Remember that part about Tin and Daniel explaining the concept of “Asian-Americans” to some Vietnamese tailors? Well…

Neither Tin nor Daniel is formally trained in sewing, so they decided to collaborate closely with local tailors in Vietnam, often deferring to the tailors’ interpretation of their instructions.

Wow. Just… wow. To misuse a Byung-Chul Han quote my friends and I repeat mantra-like these days: “it elicits a ‘wow.’” It’s sort of poetic how there’s now Vietnamese workers working for Tin Nguyen considering its possible Tin’s parents owned some of them. It’s absolutely hilarious watching these two hapless dipshits try to navigate their relationships to these tailors. They desperately want to believe this is some sort of community or familial relationship, like all of your classic “we’re a family” employer wieners, as when Tin “[mentions] how the tailors treat him like family, and he calls them “aunties” and “uncles.”” Aww, how sweet. Although it doesn’t really square with a later description of the attempt CFGNY made to “collaborate” more directly with these Vietnamese tailors by having them design the clothes too.

Although CFGNY would like to count many of these tailors as collaborators, not all the tailors were necessarily receptive—or cared much, for that matter.

“Some tailors were like, ‘we just cut and sew, you direct us, we don’t provide creative services,’” Tin says. “They were unwilling to do it.” A shop run by Anh Quanh and Chi Loi refused the invitation, explaining that they are set up to take measurements and fill orders, and that to come up with ideas for garments would be too distant from their business approach and too disruptive to their daily work.”

No shit you fucking moron. You expect them to both design and make the clothing for you now, and what the fuck do they get out of it? If they were pocketing the full profit themselves I imagine the ones who refused would have probably seen the arrangement a little more favourably. But what about the EXPOSURE???? “In the past we have worked with them and we did see it as collaborative to some degree, and they didn’t get any credit for it,” says Tin, in spite of the fact that he also said the tailors themselves use their intuition and creativity to put together items from the instructions they’re given by these guys who can’t even fucking sew. Wow. Just… wow.

It is around this point in this essay that Wu shows what he means when he earlier says he “[looks] at Balenciaga runways as closely as Marx” when he says “who is to say that the tailors they work with were all that alienated from their work to begin with? Or that they need them to become less alienated?” Of course that’s his fucking takeaway. For people like Wu, theory is just a means to an end of self-discovery, it’s not sociological but psychological, it’s about enriching the self first and foremost, whether figuratively or literally. Who’s to say these workers are alienated from their work? Aside from the part where they are literally alienated from the product of their labour when some American asshole reaps value from their work. Literally Marx 101. Returning to the interview that kicked this all off:

WU: Yeah. I like to read a lot of theory, and there was a time where I was like, “When I read theory, I want to test it in real life immediately.” It’s like, I’m looking for how to live my life. How can I live my life and do less harm and feel good and help my friends? I read theory to encounter very strong ideas about that.

KWAK: Yeah. It’s like, “I’m not reading self-help books, I’m reading theory to guide my life.” Did you know that at one point, instead of therapy, you could get philosophers for hire to advise you with your life?

WU: Whoa. That’s very interesting. I would be curious.

Interesting indeed.