Not long after the groundbreaking and door-opening success of the 2018 film “Crazy Rich Asians,” Philip Wang felt a twinge of annoyance amid the groundswell of excitement and hype. Everyone, it seemed, was suddenly discovering Asians.
“It hasn’t been 25 years of nothing,” Wang, filmmaker and founder of the hugely successful YouTube channel and media companyWong Fu Productions, remembers thinking. “It’s really unfortunate that to the casuals, Asians doing cool stuff and Asians making films and Asians making a mark is like this new thing when in reality it’s been happening. It’s the reason why we’re even at this point.”
This point that Wang is referring to is the stretch in which Asian Americans have gained a greater presence than ever before in mainstream American culture — a high that Bay Area natives Wang and Phil Yu, and former Chronicle contributor Jeff Yang document and assess in their new book, “Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now.”
一个多彩地观察seemingl折衷的工作y everything from the big moments to the granular phenomena, the book is a tome dedicated to what Asian America has looked, felt and sounded like in the past 30 years. It’s also, amid a rash of anti-Asian hate and violence over the last two years of the pandemic, a work that contrasts these recent successes with the racism that has manifested in the streets.
Next week, March 1, is our Book Birthday for@riseaabook—this labor of love that occupied my and@angryasianmanand@philipwang’s life for the past two years. We’re so proud and can’t wait for you to see it. If you can, preorder—it makes a HUGE difference!https://t.co/HS2vVR3rKHpic.twitter.com/yxDOwUm88j
— Jeff Yang (@originalspin)February 25, 2022
Yang, a writer and media critic (whose son, Hudson Yang, was the star of the Asian American-centered ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat”), first approached Wang and Yu, a prominent writer whose blog Angry Asian Man has for years been a leading voice on discourse around Asian American identity, about doing a book in December 2019. By the time they started the project in April 2020, with then-President Donald Trump’s xenophobic framing of the COVID-19 outbreak, the tone of the book felt all the more urgent.
“If we could be put back into this box of stereotypes, into this box of being othered in such a sudden fashion, we need to be sure that we could document the trail we took in case we had to build it all back all over again,” Yang says. “So that’s what I laid out as in some ways the goal, but also, just generally a sense that we needed to celebrate things we had while we had them.”
That celebration specifically focuses on the past 30 years, partly as a convenient way to organize areas of expertise for its creators, who each came of age during one of the three respective decades. But it also corresponds to the history of migration and demographics in this country that the book partly covers, as the majority of today’s Asian American population arrived after the Hart-Celler Act opened the doors of immigration from Asia in 1968. Most of the children of those first waves of immigrants grew up and became adults in the 1990s, when “we were tasked with this unusual burden of trying to find relevance in who we were in a country that didn’t really recognize us and certainly didn’t wanna include us,” Yang explains.
“Rise” closely and playfully documents the culture and the consciousness that has sprouted over the years with interviews, history lessons, essays and some tricky conversations (such as one led by a group of Black and Asian thinkers and actors on the historical tensions between the two communities). Creating the level of scope for the 496 pages of the book entailed an unscientific process that Wang says involved them sharing a Google doc.
“A lot of it in the beginning was really just like, ‘What’s our idea dump? What do we want in this book?’ ” Yu recalls.
Yang describes the book as being roughly categorized into three areas. There are the primers and interviews on the “magic moments” that constitute headlining cultural achievements, from a conversation among the stars of the 1993 film “The Joy Luck Club” to an essay from San Francisco comic Margaret Cho on her groundbreaking 1994-95 sitcom “All-American Girl.” Then there are considerations of specific phenomena such as William Hung and his somewhat dubious “American Idol” fame and a comic strip on “Linsanity” centered on Palo Alto High School alum and NBA star Jeremy Lin; plus elaborations on niche signifiers that may be foreign to some Asian Americans but are elemental to others, like, say, the rise of Asian American YouTube.
Despite its scope, Yu says the trio knew from the outset that they could not create the “most comprehensive vision of Asian America,” but simply the best offering the three of them could create.
“There’s for sure gonna be people that are upset that we miss something,” Wang says. “We just kind of took that on ourselves of like, ‘Hey, that’s great actually, if there’s so much about our community that we couldn’t fit it into this 500-some page book.’ ”
什么是帮助让其他作家和思想家tell the story alongside them. The co-authors were careful to pull together a pool of contributors, both Asian Americans and allies — including Chronicle contributor and longtime Bay Area music writer Todd Inoue and East Bay comic W. Kamau Bell — that expanded the sensibility beyond what Yang describes as that of privileged, cis-hetero East Asian guys (two of whom are named Phil).
Gathering such a vast roster was aided by the conveniences of the early parts of the pandemic, when everybody was stuck at home with nothing to do. But the communal process was also informed and motivated by building something together in the shadow of anti-Asian hate.
“When you are seeing the headlines, all these reports of people at risk, people who are vulnerable in our community being harmed, the sense that our human rights, not just our history, are being challenged, threatened — it puts a little bit of an edge to this process of trying to document our history,” Yang says.
To that end, crafting the book during such a dark period was “both a privilege and a burden,” Yang adds.
This essay—as told to@philipwangby@JLin7and graphically rendered by@heymolls—is a no-questions-asked highlight of RISE. Check it out on The@Ringertoday!https://t.co/XptfRyIMpn
— Jeff Yang (@originalspin)February 18, 2022
As Yu points out, “America has (done) a really incredible job of ignoring Asian Americans and Asian American history.” The book, then, is not only a celebration but also a way to set the record straight — and also, perhaps, to record this moment in time right as the culture is really taking off.
“I’m just more excited to see what is the next generation of this book,” Wang says. “This first book was 30 years in 500-some pages. Maybe the next version of this book can only contain five years. That, to me, is progress when you can’t even contain things into one book.”
Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now
By Jeff Yang, Phil Yu, and Philip Wang
(Harper; 496 pages; $23.99)
Commonwealth Club presents Jeff Yang, Phil Yu and Philip Wang:In-person and virtual conversation. 6 p.m. March 21. $15 in-person admission or $50 with book; $10 for streaming access or $30 with book. The Commonwealth Club of California, Taube Family Auditorium, 110 The Embarcadero, S.F.www.commonwealthclub.org