My former roommate, after ignoring my persistent recommendations, finally messaged me on Kakao: “Okay, I gave up on that terrible self-help book I mistakenly thought was horror smut and finally picked up Dancing on My Own by Simon Wu. It’s SO diaspora.” She even attached the Wikipedia synopsis of Fred Armisen’s Korean heritage as if to further emphasize the point. “Big shout out to our people.”
She was right, as she often is. Wu’s work resonates with a vaguely Asian sensibility, borrowing the term from the brand CFGNY. From the initial catalog of Asian/American objects Wu dissects to the very act of collecting itself, the book delves into the heart of Asian/Americanness. The opening essay, “A Model Childhood,” is brimming with lists, what Michelle Huang aptly calls a “plastic litany” of discarded items demanding recognition and articulation. As Wu navigates his childhood garage during the 2020 pandemic, feeling “suffocated by, responsible for, and protective of” the accumulated containers of his parents’ lives, he meticulously accounts for everything. Houses, his mother, Tiger Balm, Danish butter cookie tins, excessive childhood reading, video games, Costco, Covid-19, Confucian ideals. “Bottle openers, stress balls, and collapsible sunglasses. Children’s clothes, kitchen supplies, side tables, and TV cabinets … Jia Tolento articles, weird Issey Miyake bags on SSENSE, and bizarre posters for raves happening on the weekends (‘????’).” Where others might perceive only clutter, Wu champions the aesthetic of abundance, a byproduct of his first-generation parents’ survivalist mindset and the intricate relationship between people and possessions that he positions at the core of the Asian/American experience.
In his writing on Ken Okishii’s exhibition, also titled A Model Childhood, Wu explores how Okishii’s archive of domestic objects evokes Japaneseness precisely through the absence of explicitly Asian artifacts. Following the Pearl Harbor attack, as Honolulu police raided Japanese American homes, Okishii’s grandfather discarded every vaguely Asian item into Māmala Bay. “Miniature figurines, clothing, toys, and dishware” could be weaponized by the US government as evidence of “Japanese sympathy,” as if Asian identity could be quantified through material possessions. Okishii’s self-described “epic poem in objects” highlights this very absence, utilizing forensic scans and shaky handheld camera footage to evoke the persistent unease associated with the memory of loss. “Weighted by his grandfather’s central trauma to expunge everything Asian from his house, Ken confronts absence through inventory,” Wu observes, where the catalog of what is is amplified by what isn’t.
Inspired by Okishii’s approach, Wu envisions his own exhibition, starting with a preliminary checklist in his Notes App: “my mom’s Victoria’s Secret bag, a jade plant in a Chia planter… a Pier 1 imports pinecone potpourri.” Here, objects become associated with Asianness not through explicit artistic heritage or production methods, but through their use and reuse: “at our house, aesthetics were produced through resourcefulness; beauty was to be found in an object’s resuscitation from the edge of disuse.” Plastic water bottles become storage for pennies and paper clips, and torn shirts are repurposed as mops. Even as he critiques this practice, envying the simplicity of his childhood friends’ homes where objects led “simple, frivolous lives” before disappearing, he finds himself compelled to collect and repurpose in both his art and critical writing.
Whether driven by anxiety or sentimentality, hoarding itself becomes a form of inheritance. Years ago, I assisted my mother in clearing out my grandparents’ mildewed basement, filling garbage bags with old clothes and exercise equipment destined for donation. We chuckled at the countless miniature chests adorned with mother-of-pearl that my grandmother insisted she might still need, and the unmatched socks. With each item discarded, we hoped to liberate her from her perceived sense of scarcity. Yet, just months later, my mother and I spent weeks sorting through her own expired skincare products and high school denim, distinguishing the useful from the obsolete. Now, as I prepare to repack my life in South Korea and return to the United States, I am overwhelmed by the sheer volume of items I’ve convinced myself are essential. Echoing Wu, I meticulously list them: two pairs of jeans, eight pairs of socks, three Vitamin-C serums (gifts), and a plethora of keychains for everyone I’ve ever cared for.
It’s easy to rationalize these attachments as something other than simple greed. Wandering through the market stalls of Gumi, each overflowing with the latest polyester blends, I recognize how the pervasive embrace of trends reflects the nation’s rapid development and late-stage capitalist collectivism. Each purchase promises belonging and upward mobility for both the individual and the nation. Caught between self-justification and reality, I imagine myself as part of a community through shopping, adorning myself with symbols of my Koreanness and finding connection in the very act of adornment. Even as I succumb to the urge to externalize my anxieties about my own Asian identity, I understand that authenticity cannot be bought with cash. But as Wu writes about the brand and research collective Shanzhai Lyric, it is alienation that I seek, the diasporic experience of estrangement within the global cultural landscape. I browse through racks of t-shirts emblazoned with nonsensical English phrases, admiring how they present Westernness as an aesthetic with the same nonchalance as the casual orientalism I grew up with, fantasizing that a simple shirt might somehow subvert deeply ingrained power structures. There can be a strange comfort, even pleasure, in imagining that self-possession can be achieved through ownership, especially when one’s experience of the world is so intertwined with being treated as an object. As Wu repeatedly states throughout his collection: “capitalism is fun and convenient.”
Wu directly confronts this inherent contradiction in “Vaguely Asian.” Feeling out of place in both the “cheap” import market and the high-end designer stores of Chinatown’s East Broadway Mall, Wu struggles with language and overpays for a shirt—a quintessential second-generation experience. Wu most effectively resists the essentializing tendencies of commodification when he openly grapples with the complexities of his own desires, refusing any simplistic interpretations. The legibility we seek comes with inherent risks; broadly associating with Asian identity and Asian objects can reduce “Asian” to a mere style, or as theorist Anne Anlin Cheng writes of Asiatic femininity, an ornament. Working at Mein Bowl, a college cafeteria sushi counter, alongside his Burmese Chinese mother, Wu experienced the “pastiche of clichéd references” that “made me feel like a cog, like my Asianness was a commodity I could sell.” Yet, he continues to explore these same parodied images, illustrating the racialized object relations that Cheng describes as the borrowing power between individuals and things:
“It is precisely when flesh has been defiled and radically severed from its own sense of humanity that the path back to it requires mediation. That is, the flesh that passed through objecthood needs ornament as a way back to itself.”
Familiar with the simultaneous desire to embrace and reject the flattening effect of vagueness, I am reminded that ambivalence is not the absence of feeling, but the presence of contradiction. When Wu purchases a (somewhat overpriced) CGFNY vest adorned with teddy bear stamps, he acknowledges the power derived from purchasing. He feels as though he had “dredged up some substance within my identity and externalized it into something that others could see, all by paying money to someone else.” He guides his readers through the familiar self-rationalizations (“I was investing in an artwork made by friends”) and describes the futility of constructing identity through consumption when “identity is constructed from the outside; it is something done to a subject.” He continues to embrace the allure of objects and their capacity to captivate and demand our attention, without ever moving towards resolution.
However, this rejection of definitive answers sometimes falls short. When extended passages of we and sweeping generalizations emerge, they lose their impact, as in his karaoke metaphor: “Empty orchestras described this impulse to try to stay together, despite class and ethnic differences; it held both the potential, and the failure, of a place like Asian America.” His occasional dismissal of identity politics inadvertently reproduces the very thing he critiques – the diluted politics often found in Asian/American writing. In an interview with Interview Magazine, Wu expresses his aversion to this trope:
“Going into the first essay, I was thinking about the genre of Asian American personal essay where there’s almost a set of topics that people write about. But I think there’s a way to talk about it that’s not cliche or too Asian American-core.”
Yet, Wu still employs the familiar structures of the gay Asian/American (or gaysian as my friends and I often abbreviate it) personal essay collection. In “A Terrible Sense of When He Was Wanted and When He Was Not,” he recounts a summer in Berlin and a failed romance with a man who shares his name, alongside a detailed analysis of the works of Ching Ho Cheng and Tseng Kwong Chi, two artists who “didn’t know each other during their lives (I asked), but their names were so close I had to separate them in my head.” Despite their vastly different artistic styles—Cheng an abstract painter interested in psychedelics and Taoist religion, and Kwong Chi a performance artist famous for his tourist photographs in a Mao suit—Wu connects them through identity, considering it a valid and encompassing category that transcends formal and thematic similarities. Identity politics may be flawed, but they form the foundation upon which this collection is built. Even though he aims to avoid defining Asian/American art, or the “cultural nationalist” implications of such an endeavor, he continues to gather examples of it. This is where the list format proves most effective, offering a greater sense of truth through heterogeneity. Wu allows his audience to discern patterns, insisting only on multiplicity and ambiguity. This strong articulation of difference mirrors Kandice Chuh’s description of Asian/American studies as a “subjectless discourse,” rejecting the need to “represent” Asian/America as a cohesive geographic or national identity in politics and criticism. During a visit to his boyfriend’s childhood home in Turkey, Wu wonders if the Middle East could be recontextualized as West Asia through the shared trauma of American imperialism, and if it’s possible to forge a collective identity that “allows us to ask questions and seek possibilities beyond those given to us within the confines of racism and colonization.”
But how can we organize around something so inherently unfixed? Wu explores this in the penultimate essay, “Without Roots but Flowers,” as he traces the history of the Asian/American art collective Godzilla while navigating his early years in the Art World. Working at MoMA and reflecting on his involvement with the Radical Imaginary Institute, Wu considers the political responsibilities of the artist, curator, and critic. Godzilla, in the 1990s, grew to thousands of members, caught between the desire to separate from and reform the institutions they found themselves within. How do we critique the institutions that have historically excluded us, now that they have finally allowed us entry? What has this struggle achieved? Dissatisfied with founder Howie Chen’s seemingly ambivalent approach, Wu turns to the Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC). Instead of pursuing national recognition, the AAAC carved out a space in Chinatown to serve the immediate local community. This strategy, like the mutual aid initiatives at his parents’ temple or his friend Julie’s bail fund work, remains rooted in tangible, material change. After all his explorations of vaguely Asian aesthetics and identity politics, Wu suggests direct engagement as the most effective path towards Asian/American collective action.
He remains skeptical of the pursuit of recognition and belonging, especially when mediated through commodities, whether art or other goods. In his most renowned essay, “For Everyone,” Wu recounts his past fascination with the Telfar bag, often dubbed the Bushwick Birkin. The bag’s unisex design and bold slogan, “Not For You—For Everyone,” promise a form of collectivity grounded in purchasing power. This contrasts with the “aspirational class” (predominantly white “neo-yuppies who find it gauche to flaunt wealth through brands”) that Wu finds himself among, offering a “candied rebellion.” It represents an “alternate version of aspiration based on Black and queer celebrity.” Wu sees a reflection of himself in Telfar, an immigrant navigating the periphery of the art world. However, as Telfar achieves widespread popularity through multi-million dollar product drops and corporate collaborations, Wu expresses doubt about the political potential of a fundamentally consumerist project. He points out that Telfar’s initial revolutionary declaration “was looking less and less like inclusion and more like that old specter of success: the American dream.”
I too question what success could look like beyond the confines of capitalism. Like Wu, I navigate a landscape of internships and fellowships, piecing together rent from stipends offered by fundamentally flawed institutions. From this precarious position, it’s easy to identify what’s wrong; it’s far more challenging to determine how to make it better. I want to believe in the joy and sincerity that Dancing on My Own has been praised for, but I worry it might be a convenient excuse to avoid confronting our own complicity. True optimism isn’t mere positivity, but a willingness to envision a better world and actively work towards it.
This journey begins with the capacity to desire more, and I am struck by the intensity of Wu’s yearning. What he seeks, impossibly, through all this longing, is dissolution. Breaking free from objects and becoming an object. Ecstatic moments of unbecoming that are fundamentally incompatible with the experience of living as an Asian/American person, or any person, under capitalism. Sometimes this impulse finds an outlet through consumerism: Crossfit, expensive raves, a new shirt – all recognized as temporary fixes for a broken system. He desires everything and nothing, to find communion in a freedom from self. As I navigate between the ebook and Rakuten, I know that I can never purchase the identity I feel deprived of by the legacies of immigration, assimilation, and gaysian self-hatred. This doesn’t diminish the pleasure of silk or the sweetness of persimmons. Material possessions won’t save us, but that doesn’t mean we should discard everything.
