The Loneliest Americans

Jay Caspian Kang

Oct 2021 · Sold by Crown

About this ebook

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 (Editors’ Choice)

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.

Ratings and reviews

A nuanced and vital look at the fragmented history of Asian people in the United States and, more importantly, the potential for a shared future. Guided by a consuming desire for the emancipation of all people's, Kang finds himself following in the steps of his mentor Noel Ignatiev in agitating to break down false consciousness among his own people--the educated and upwardly mobile young Asians who, driven by the desire to be righteous people, have internalized neuroses about their own social position. These neuroses, Kang identifies, manifest in two ways, first as a positive totalizing vision of Asian Americaness, one which puts itself in the same lineage of radicalism as the Black Panthers and the Third World Liberation Front (despite missing the bonds which held those comrades together) then as a negative totalizing vision, which recognizes the distortions of the first view and replaces it with a reactionary Asian American chauvinism (i.e. MRAzns, anti-affirmative action, etc.).

An in depth personalized memoir/observations of race and class in America as witnessed by this Korean American popular journalist and several generations of his Korean family. He includes a potted history of anti-Asian legislation primarily in western US but rampant elsewhere as well and a reminder that Nationalism cuts both ways. Also prominent is a reminder that colored is also yellow (Asian), brown (Latinx), and red (North American Indigenous). Well done! I requested and received a free ebook copy from Crown Publishing via NetGalley. Thank you!

About the author

Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. His other work has appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and on This American Life and Vice, where he worked as an Emmy-nominated correspondent. He is the author of the novel The Dead Do Not Improve, which The Boston Globe called “an extremely smart, funny debut, with moments of haunting beauty.”