ABCs and EDCs
New vlog on the way—read this while you wait.
EVENT NEXT WEEK
Yep, you heard it here first. We will have a Fancì Club Pop-Up next week—stay on the lookout for more information.
Fancì Club is a Vietnamese womenswear label, and this marks their first-ever American pop-up. While their style is a departure from what we typically showcase, we’re always looking for novelty—and we think Fancì Week will bring a nice refresh.
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MEDIA HIGHLIGHT
>>> Komune Discord
We made a discord server! Join here:
The Discord introduces a democratic element to our store. In the discord, we host recurring polls on matters like “green or black tea next week?”. Eventually, we’ll use this platform to decide major things, like who our next rotating designer should be. GO TO THE POLLS!!! It’s your civic duty.
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WILL
>>> Beep Boop
By day, Will is one of our discord mods. By night, he is a minimal techno snob. Will performed this DJ set live on FM radio about two weeks ago.
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ALEX
>>> Ocean Vuong and The Modern Asian Diasporic Identity
![The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel [Book]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!D0Ru!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff0f23651-8820-438b-be63-78379a601b53_296x450.jpeg "The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel [Book]")
Finally got around to reading Andrea Long Chu’s review of Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness. While the piece identifies as a celebration of Vuong’s newest novel, Chu delivers scathing critiques of Vuong’s purposeful unintelligibility—as she posits, an attempt to leverage “blunt-force ethnic credibility.” It was a great read—Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize winner for a reason. As a closeted-cynic, it’s refreshing to hear someone say, “I think most things are bad.”
I believe that Chu’s charges against Vuong are symptomatic of a broader cultural shift in how Asian diasporic identities present today. As a child of Chinese immigrants, with Chinese friends, I can see these contagions in myself and also those around me. IDK—this may also be pure projection. In this essay, I reference a few Chinese writers (see sources), but I haven’t recently refreshed myself on their pieces, so my knowledge is only cursory—sorry!
Ling-Chi Wang’s research shows that early Chinese Americans underwent violent self-denial to assimilate—changing names, abandoning language, undergoing surgery—all in an attempt to infiltrate white American society during the pre–World War II era (Wang, 1994). In particular, American-born Chinese, internalizing the dominant society’s racism, tried to erase all visible markers of their Chinese-ness. This mirrors earlier patterns in Southeast Asia, where Chinese settlers adopted what Peter Gosling calls “situational ethnicities,” switching between Chinese, indigenous, and hybrid identities based on audience and political expedience (Gosling, 1983). Clearly, the earlier diasporic logic was to survive, by disappearing into the dominant culture. Today, this behavior is less common—culturally reprehensible, in fact—“white-washed” is regarded as derogatory.
Perhaps this identity strategy—like most—was circumstantial. Throughout the diaspora, expressions of cultural identity have often been tactical, not just symbolic. Not all heritage claims are acts of resistance. Some are responses to economic pressure, political alignment, or nostalgia. That brings us to the status quo. I believe the current Asian diasporic identity meta is a kind of fashionable opportunism…
Whereas earlier generations sought assimilation by cutting ties with their Asian identities, many modern Asian American youth seem to be more deliberately reclaiming their ancestral pasts. The instinct is to moor oneself in heritage. Interacting with fellow children of the Chinese diaspora, I’ve observed a rise of Sinophilia and a reorientation toward Asia as a global cultural and economic center. Every day, I hear aspirations to revisit the mother country, to learn the language, to reconnect with tradition. I can’t help but wonder: is this newfound anchor tethered to the same longing for belonging and dignity that once drove self-erasure? Perhaps—especially if these gestures are more rooted in optics than in lived experience. I like to call this performative heritage—why are you LARP-ing FOB?
Back to Vuong.
If we were once axe handles, remembering trees mid-swing, we are now axe handles pretending to have branches and leaves.
In Chu’s critique, she charges Vuong with overcorrecting for historical assimilation by aggressively reasserting an ethnic identity through poeticized Vietnamese phrases, romanticizations of illiteracy, and symbolic gestures of “authenticity” that often seem more tailored to the American gaze than to sincere engagement with heritage. She notes how Vuong pontificates about the homeland to the point of obfuscation—that English speakers have a “primitive” relationship to language compared to those in the East. But often what makes the mother tongue seem so magical, is simply I—and others like me—are unable to speak it well. It is the meretricious luster of a magician’s tricks.
Chu surfaces a poignant example of Vuong deploying Vietnamese as aesthetic ornament—she writes:
“In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for love is Yêu.
And the word for weakness is Yếu.
How you say what you mean changes what you say.’
The reader, again presumptively white, is clearly meant to suppose that Vietnamese culture understands love and weakness as two sides of the same poignant coin. But in reality, yêu and yếu are just two words that sound meaningfully different and mean different things; they are no more esoterically linked than live, laugh, and love. The pathos here thus depends largely on the reader’s total ignorance of Vietnamese. To explain the basic facts of tonal languages would break the spell.”
For many ABCs like myself, this form of heritage reclamation lacks cultural depth. The danger is alienation, as such behavior satisfies neither native Chinese audiences, who see through it, nor fully American ones, who remain outside it. And if identity is shaped, as the Chinese diaspora teaches us, by ever-changing historical pressures—then our current moment of cultural return isn’t necessarily more authentic.
I guess to end positively, Vuong’s improvements from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous to The Emperor of Gladness suggests the possibility of growth away from poetic obfuscation toward prose grounded in shared experience. Looking forward to more!
Sources
Chu, Andrea Long. “Ocean Vuong’s Prose and the Veil of Illegibility.” New York Magazine, 2024.
Wang, Ling-Chi. “Roots and the Changing Identity of the Chinese in the United States.” In The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, edited by Tu Wei-Ming. Stanford University Press, 1994.
Gosling, Peter. “Changing Chinese Identities in Southeast Asia: An Introductory Review.” In The Chinese in Southeast Asia, Volume 2: Identity, Culture & Politics, edited by Peter Gosling & Linda Y.C. Lim. Maruzen Asia, 1983.
Tan, Chee-Beng. “Acculturation and the Chinese in Melaka: The Expression of Baba Identity Today.” In The Chinese in Southeast Asia, Volume 2: Identity, Culture & Politics, edited by Peter Gosling & Linda Y.C. Lim. Maruzen Asia, 1983.
Wang, Gungwu. China and the Chinese Overseas. Times Academic Press, 1991.
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LIA
>>> on medication and disease
i rescind my previous contribution of waiting for your body to flush out toxins naturally. just take the ibuprofen so you're not miserable.
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MARTIN
>>> vocational objects
i’ve always been a bit obsessed with the idea of vocation. to me, the word “vocation” transcends synonyms like career, job, and occupation. i get that this feeling is somewhat built into the definition, but there is this extra je ne sais quoi about the word “vocation” that i can’t quite describe
along these lines, visual indicators of vocation, which i will call “vocational objects”, are at the pinnacle of my attraction to the idea. specific things like uniforms, equipment, accessories etc that people in specific fields carry on them for their work.
maybe its the consumer in me trying to find purpose in the objects i own, but i always found satisfaction when i saw others displaying their vocational objects with a sense of affection and pride.
when you fly, haven’t you always noticed THAT specific type of suitcase that pilots carry? or that specific orange SSD that many digital creatives use. there is a certain profoundness here; objects that tangibly communicate how a person plans to spend 80,000 hours of their life. to build a career in something you find meaningful, and then curate the objects that you take on this journey with you…feels romantic.
a good example is a roll of chefs knives. to own a roll of chef knives, you probably need to A, own expensive knives, but B, be a good enough cook to actually need to transport your knives around. vocational objects like a roll of chef knives seem to satisfy a certain set of conditions, where there are these pre-existing barriers that disincentivize others from simply buying them – it makes them extra special.
the best example that i know is Octi Ransom’s jewelry roll. Octi is a jewelry designer from London, and everywhere she goes, she carries around a selection of her work – just in case she needs it.
instead of a jewelry box, Octi commissioned a friend of hers to make her a jewelry roll, which consists of a long piece of denim with a bunch of snaps on the inside to secure her jewelry. everyday, Octi carries two of these around, one for rings and another for necklaces and bracelets.
i have been obsessed with her jewelry roll since i met her, and seeing her again recently sparked my interest in writing about it. however, i also wanted to further investigate the people around me to see their thoughts on vocational objects.
niko, a tattoo artist said many use the same machine he does, but commented that “I covet mine tho, on some full metal jacket this is my rifle there are many like it but this one is mine.” michela, a model, says she never leaves the home without her model card. while serene, traditional chinese medicine doctor, always carries a set of acupuncture needles and acupressure stickers.
by the end of all this, i learned that i would be unfair to say that the “lack” of a vocational object meant that there was a lack of sincerity or commitment in somebody’s work. it sounds pretty obvious, but i went at this with a lot of confirmation bias.
standing outside of a bar, i asked Keeza, a teacher, if there was something teachers owned that was unique to their profession. “its patience…” she said.
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