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  • Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority by Eleanor Ty
  • Jason Wang
Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority, by Eleanor Ty. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. X + 156 pp. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 978-0-252-08235-1.

Eleanor Ty's book Asianfail is a valuable and timely contribution to Asian American and Asian Canadian studies, providing a novel way of understanding the new generation of Asian North Americans through their narratives. The book fills a significant gap in scholarship, not only by identifying the changing dynamics of Asian North American literature and culture in relation to economic, geographical, and political circumstances, but also by attending to how their creative works refashion a white-dominant platform to negotiate ethnical identities, emotional expressions, and individual happiness in a larger global context. In this, Ty's approach is two-pronged. First, she debunks the myth of Asians as "the model minority": that is, the still-prevailing discourse in popular culture since the 1960s, when sociologist William Petersen first coined the term to describe Japanese Americans in the New York Times Magazine. The concept of a model minority links Asian culture with strong community values as well as a high work ethic and dedication, which bring about social success despite Asian people's cultural marginalization. Second, using various literary and visual narratives as examples, Ty scrutinizes the emotional reactions and consequences to the everyday grievances that Asian North Americans tackle. [End Page 125] As she writes, "These affective responses to the national, familial, economic, and professional pressures reveal the still-intertwined relationship between the capitalist ethos, where an individual is seen as having a duty to prosper and be happy; traditional Confucian values of filial obedience; and the politics of race, ethnicity, gender, and globalization" (24).

Specifically, Ty examines what she terms narratives of failure, demonstrating how unhappiness, pressure, and depression infiltrate contemporary Asian North American cultural products, such as fiction, autobiographies, and films. Ty's argument of failure reaches far beyond considering material discontent and disenchantment, however: it permeates affective experiences, family tensions, and individual burdens from the financial and professional (self-) expectations that result from the discourse of model minority. She contends that the model minority myth glosses over more intricate immigration (hi) stories and complex material backgrounds.

The book's six chapters pivot around the bodily and affective experience of Asianfail. Chapters 1 through 3 explore the concept of Asianfail in relation to the precarity of daily life. In Chapter 1, Ty examines the young protagonists who are entangled in coming-of-age problems and challenge the designated success in Ruth Ozeki's novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and Mariko Tamaki's novella Cover Me (2000) and graphic novel Skim (2008). The spotlight shifts in Chapter 2 to second-generation youth who question the neoliberal sense of desire and conventional family relationship and sexuality narratives in Asian American films, such as Gene Cajayon's The Debut (2000), Georgia Lee's Red Doors (2005), and Alice Wu's Saving Face (2004). Chapter 3 interrogates the refugees' and transnational citizens' struggles with traumatic memories of war, loss, and violence in fictional geopolitical spaces created by novelists Lê Thị Diễm Thúy and Madeleine Thien.

The remaining chapters address the corporal and mental consequences of Asianfail. Chapter 4 examines the aging and the aged as a failure under the model minority discourse that automatically configures senior citizens as "those who are beyond the age of economic and professional productivity" (86). Ty's scrutiny of aging and the aged not only reveals cross-generational feelings of depression and shame but also suggests that aged bodies can be reconfigured by affective memories and nostalgia. Chapter 5 explores Catherine Hernandez's play Singkil (2009) and Jan Wong's self-published best-selling memoir Out of the Blue (2012) as stories of work-related stress and mental breakdown. In this, the narrators are victimized by their "neoliberal belief in hard work" (110), and their alleged failure emanates from their own images of "the overachiever immigrant" (114). Chapter 6 resituates Alex Gilvarry's novel From the Memoirs of a Non-enemy Combatant (2012) and Keshni Kashyap and Mari...

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