Has Asian American Studies . . . Succeeded?

In 2011, I wrote a blog post titled, "Has Asian American Studies Failed?"¹ In it, I vented my frustrations about the fact that, despite 40 years of work in Asian American studies, many of the basic insights of our field seemed to have had little impact on public consciousness. Journalists could still write articles asking whether or not Japanese American incarceration was justified. Narratives about "tiger moms" and overachieving students continued to dominate popular culture. And old tropes of yellow peril and perpetual foreignness seemed to go on, with Asian American voices that might critique such images largely ignored.

To my surprise, my grumble seemed to strike a nerve. A revised version of the piece appeared as the lead article in an editors' forum in the Journal of Asian American Studies in fall 2012, alongside responses from Minh-Ha T. Pham, Oliver Wang, Moustafa Bayoumi, and Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and the 2014 Association for Asian American Studies conference in San Fransisco featured a lively follow-up panel discussion. While some participants in the conversation rightly questioned the nature of the "public" we were trying to reach, as well as the categories of "success" and "failure" themselves, there was substantial acknowledgement that our field could be more effective in projecting knowledge of Asian American studies to wider non-academic and non-Asian American audiences. As I wrote in the published version of the article, "If I were to sum up the desire behind the post in a single phrase, it would be the desire for a more public role for Asian American studies."²

It is certainly no surprise that a still largely white-dominated media and popular culture would be resistant to our field's insights. The question was: could we be doing more to use the resources we did have to engage a wider public? In my piece, I made a few suggestions about things practitioners of Asian American studies might do to raise our discipline's public profile, including:

• Popularize the insights of our field for a wider audience
• Look outward toward mainstream audiences
• Advocacy: rapid response to public controversies involving Asian Americans
• Cultivate public intellectuals among the ranks of Asian Americanists

Looking back some 15 years later, how have we done? Have we succeeded in doing these things? Are the voices and perspectives of Asian Americanists having an impact on wider public discourse that perhaps they were not before?

I would have to say that my tentative answer is: yes.

What has changed? What happened over the past decade to draw greater attention to the insights of our field? I do think it is in part that Asian Americanists succeeded in doing some of the things I suggested. But I also think that new growth of a public Asian American studies intersected with historical and cultural events and changes in the media environment to open up new spaces for Asian American voices, both scholarly and otherwise. And indeed, one could argue — for better or worse — that this newfound public profile has accompanied, or even been driven by, the rise of what Timothy K. August calls in his contribution to this cluster the rise of an Asian American mass culture, in which "audiences are able to consume 'Asian America' through cultural forms that appeal to mass tastes."³

Over the past 15 years, sports have been one of the significant arenas of Asian Americans' rising public profile, and indeed the reflection I undertake in this piece, is bookended by the rise of two superstar Asian American athletes. Between the time I made my blog post in 2011 and the time it appeared as an article in late 2012, Jeremy Lin had taken the sports world by storm as the first Asian American NBA player to achieve major stardom. While it's hard to say, some 15 years on, if "Linsanity" will prove to be of long-lasting historical significance, one thing that was striking at the time was how Asian American writers and Asian American studies scholars, myself included, jumped into and, arguably, helped drive the conversation. While much of the discussion around Lin in mainstream sports media initially focused on issues of his ancestry, like whether he was "Chinese" or "Taiwanese" or how he could help the NBA in the Chinese market, Asian Americans helped turn the conversation to issues like stereotyping and the response of Asian American fans. Perhaps just as importantly, as I have argued elsewhere, Lin self-identified as Asian American and participated self-consciously in Asian American media culture.⁴

* * *

In the mid-2010s, I was a party to a couple of controversies in the world of American poetry involving Asian Americans. While seemingly very minor, they attracted a surprising amount of media attention, in no small part because Asian American writers were able to use social media and other online outlets to draw attention to them. Tellingly, neither incident actually involved poetry by Asian American writers, but rather white writers either writing about Asians or, in the other case, as an Asian.

In the latter case, a poem included in the annual Best American Poetry anthology by a writer named "Yi-Fen Chou" turned out to be by a white male author who implied that sending his poems out under an Asian name made them more likely to be accepted. After I made a satirical Facebook post on the topic, a reporter from Slate contacted me, and I was subsequently interviewed by NBC, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Guardian. The story was amplified by blogger Phil Yu of Angry Asian Man, and importantly, it was often Asian American journalists writing these stories and reaching out to Asian American experts for comments. The same was true of the controversy surrounding a poem by Calvin Trillin that appeared in the New Yorker, which drew on yellow-peril imagery to satirize the overwhelming variety of regional Chinese cuisines. Again, the public response was largely driven by Asian American writers and critics who drew attention to the poem on social media, leading to mainstream media coverage; I ended up writing a piece for The New Republic about it (pulling an all-nighter to do so) because Cathy Park Hong, the magazine's poetry editor, reached out and requested a timely, public-facing intellectual response.⁵

By the end of the decade, we had begun to see the rise of a new, younger generation of Asian American performers who were not only conversant with Asian American studies but often made public reference to it. There is, of course, America's most famous Asian American studies major, Ali Wong, who made complex Asian American issues central to her raunchy comedy. The actress Constance Wu, who went from starring in the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat to playing the romantic lead in the 2018 blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians, has famously been quoted calling for "narrative plenitude" in Asian American representation — a concept drawn from the work of Asian American studies scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen.⁶

While the change I am tracking here can't be attributed to any one person, it's worth pausing for a moment to consider Nguyen's role as precisely the kind of public intellectual I hoped Asian American studies might produce. Having established his credentials in the previous decade as an Asian American literary scholar, Nguyen turned to writing fiction; his 2015 debut novel, The Sympathizer, became a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize, and was adapted into an HBO series, giving Nguyen a platform to write op-eds for outlets like the New York Times. Now, of course, most of us cannot just decide to go out and win a Pulitzer. But my point is that Nguyen has unapologetically used his platform to promote the critical perspective offered by Asian American studies — even if it means offering faint praise for Crazy Rich Asians itself.⁷ I think it's been common in the past for Asian Americanists, like many academics, to shy away from seizing these kinds of opportunities to make public statements; we are used to working slowly and deliberately, not simply reacting and dashing off a piece on a moment's notice. But I think we have increasingly realized we do need to seize these moments when we have the opportunity to intervene in public discourse, even if it feels uncomfortable to us.

And indeed, public events often force us to take action, as with the wave of xenophobia and anti-Asian violence unleashed in the United States and globally by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Stop AAPI Hate project, led by San Francisco State professor Russell Jeung, collected thousands of reports of anti-Asian hate incidents, becoming an invaluable resource for those seeking data to back up anecdotal reports of anti-Asian racism. The project's name also seems to have given rise to the most commonly used hashtag/slogan against anti-Asian violence, #StopAsianHate — another illustration of the power of social media to spread Asian American Studies awareness.

One of the most tragic incidents of this period came in March 2021, when eight people, including six Asian women, were shot and killed in Atlanta-area spas. Asian American activists, writers, and scholars quickly pushed back on the widely circulated claims that the killer had been motivated not by racism but by "sex addiction," pointing to the long-standing hyper-sexualization of Asian women and its intersection with imperialism and US foreign policy. Asian American studies tells us that anti-Asian violence, particularly gendered violence, is a phenomenon with a long history, and Asian American scholars stepped up to help place these tragic events in context.⁸

In the past, it might well have been the case that discussions of these kinds of events would take place entirely as debates among white commentators and politicians. I take it as a clear sign of change that most major US media outlets did, in fact, turn to Asian American authors, often with backgrounds in Asian American studies, to frame the discussion. This is, of course, hardly something new among journalists, who frequently turn to academic experts on other topics. What seems new is a recognition that Asian American studies is, indeed, an area in which scholarly expertise exists — a long overdue recognition, but one that scholars in our field have been working towards for more than 50 years.

A number of prominent scholars in our field have made a concerted effort to create work aimed at more general audiences, following in the footsteps of works like Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore. Erika Lee's The Making of Asian America, Catherine Ceniza Choy's Asian American Histories of the United States, and Viet Thanh Nguyen's Nothing Ever Dies, are just some of the works that have brought our field's insights to a wider public, without simplifying or softening our field's critical orientation.

Asian American creative writers and artists have also played a major role over the past decade in opening up space for the kinds of insights Asian American studies can provide. The poet and novelist Ocean Vuong has gained a remarkable following, especially among younger people, for work that is both historically insightful and unabashedly lyrical. And poet Cathy Park Hong's essay collection Minor Feelings has become a touchstone for readers seeking to gain insight into Asian America, often mixing scholarly insights with personal experience.

In short, if Asian American studies seems to have succeeded in recent years, it is part of a larger shift in which Asian American culture has claimed an increasingly prominent place in American discourse. As public representatives of and advocates for Asian American studies, scholars have been part of that shift, alongside activists, writers, and entertainers — some of whom have even been our students.

The triumph of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the absurdist comedy-drama of an Asian immigrant family that swept the 2023 Academy Awards, offers perhaps one of the most striking examples of the changed terrain for Asian American studies. The film is, I think we can say, unapologetically Asian: co-written and directed by an Asian American, featuring an almost entirely Asian cast, with large swaths of dialogue in Chinese and a classic mother-daughter generational conflict at its center. James Hong, the 94-year-old veteran actor who plays the grandfather in the film, reminded audiences of the historical trajectory of Asian representation in his Screen Actors Guild acceptance speech. Hong noted that when he started his career 70 years ago, Asian roles were routinely played by white actors in yellowface because "the producers said the Asians were not good enough." Gesturing toward his Asian castmates, Hong said triumphantly, "But look at us now, huh?"

While I am equally pleased to see the way Asian Americanists have made their voices heard in the public sphere over the past decade, just as I was hoping would happen, I don't mean to be quite so triumphalist. Just as greater media representation of Asians does not signal an end to racism or inequality, the mere fact that Asian American studies is now "out there" more than ever before is not a cure for anti-Asian violence or a substitute for racial justice. What it does signal, I hope, is that the knowledge and the intellectual tools that Asian American studies has labored to create for more than five decades are becoming more and more available, and more and more useful, at precisely the moment when they are most needed.

* * *

Just as my 2012 essay was punctuated by news of an Asian American superstar athlete, the 2026 update is being finished as figure skater Alysa Liu, gold medalist at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, is soaring to fame and dominating social media. In a sport where Asian American women have long been icons — think Kristi Yamaguchi and Michelle Kwan — Liu, with her wild hairstyles and piercings and her irreverent, unflappable attitude, brought a refreshingly alternative, Gen Z vibe to a sport that has traditionally demanded effortless performances of elegance and femininity. And while the relentless training and discipline required of champion figure skaters can easily lend itself to model minority stereotypes, Liu's willingness to walk away from the sport, and then to return seemingly determined to skate for fun rather than for medals, offers a welcome disruption to popular images of Asian Americans.

Perhaps one crucial difference between Liu and her predecessors is that she no longer has to go it alone. Narrative plenitude for Asian Americans, it seems, has come to the world of big-time athletics as well. Liu can share the spotlight with fellow Asian American Olympians like snowboarder Chloe Kim, and she has an internet-breaking mutual admiration with the popular Icelandic singer Laufey, a fellow mixed-race Asian whose song "Promise" provided the soundtrack to Liu's gold medal-winning short program.

But Liu has also found herself caught up in older patterns of inclusion and exclusion. One example is the juxtaposition of her story with that of Eileen Gu, another Asian American Olympian who has won medals, fame, and — from some — scorn by choosing to compete for China rather than for the U.S. As detailed by NBC reporters David K. Li and Griffin Eckstein, the California-born Gu has been attacked by politicians who chastise her for "betraying" America, and in the wake of Liu's gold medal, the phrase "Be an Alysa Liu" trended across social media as a way of contrasting Liu, the "loyal" Asian American, with the "disloyal" Gu.⁹

If these old and dangerous binaries haven't changed, what has changed is the presence of voices from Asian American studies in the public sphere, ready to offer a critical perspective. The article from NBC News that highlighted the comparison between Liu and Gu turned for comment to an expert: Christina Chin, a sociologist who has written widely on Asian Americans and sports. If Asian American studies is succeeding on the public stage in ways it has not before, we can thank the interventions of scholars who are ready to answer the call when Asian Americans make headlines.

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Timothy Yu is the Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Diasporic Poetics, Race and the Avant-Garde, and 100 Chinese Silences, and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to 21 st -Century American Poetry and Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets. He serves as executive editor of Contemporary Literature and is the director of the University of Wisconsin's Asian American Studies program.

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References

1. Timothy Yu, "Has Asian American Studies Failed?" timpanyu.com, December 21, 2011. ↩︎
2. Timothy Yu, "Has Asian American Studies Failed?" Journal of Asian American Studies 15.3 (Oct. 2012): 327. ↩︎
3. Timothy K. August, "The Arrival of Asian American Mass Culture," Post45 Contemporaries, August 12, 2026, https://post45.org/08/26/arrival-asian-american-mass-culture/. ↩︎
4. Timothy Yu, "Jeremy Lin, Global Asian American," The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies, ed. Cindy I-Fen Cheng (New York: Routledge), 2017: 211-220. ↩︎
5. Timothy Yu, "White Poets Want Chinese Culture Without Chinese People," New Republic 8 Apr. 2016. ↩︎
6. Jen Yamato, "Why 'Crazy Rich Asians' Marks an Emotional Moment — and a Movement — for Underrepresented Voices in Hollywood." Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-mn-crazy-rich-asians-hollywood-20180810-story.html. ↩︎
7. Viet Thanh Nguyen, "Asian-Americans Need More Movies, Even Mediocre Ones," New York Times, August 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/opinion/crazy-rich-asians-movie.html. ↩︎
8. See, for instance, Kimmy Yam, "Racism, sexism must be considered in Atlanta case involving killing of six Asian women, experts say," NBC News, March 17, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/racism-sexism-must-be-considered-atlanta-case-involving-killing-six-n1261347; Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janelle Wong, "Bipartisan political rhetoric about Asia leads to anti-Asian violence here," Washington Post, March 19 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/atlanta-shooting-political-rhetoric-violence/2021/03/19/f882f8e8-88b9-11eb-8a8b-5cf82c3dffe4_story.html; and Jennifer Ho, "To Be an Asian Woman in America," CNN, March 17, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/opinions/to-be-an-asian-woman-in-america-ho/index.html. ↩︎
9. David K. Li and Griffin Eckstein, "Gold medal greats Alysa Liu and Eileen Gu face uncomfortable comparisons at Olympics," NBC News, February 20, 2026, https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/olympics/gold-medal-greats-alysa-liu-eileen-gu-face-uncomfortable-comparisons-o-rcna259959. ↩︎