Another week, another round of controversies in the Asian American Internetz between “Asian MRAs” and “Asian Feminists”. This time, the discussion involves both Jenny Han’s white worshipping exclusion of Asian men (and really all hetero men of color) in “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” and Celeste Ng’s Twitter shenanigans. In the words of the brilliant Oxford Kondo over at Plan A Magazine:

“ The worst outcome of this polarization are the constant fishing expeditions perpetrated by both sides. Asian men, eager to stir up fury among the young and confused in their ranks, trawl the depths of the internet for the worst of Asian female comments. On places like Imgur, you can find scrolls of Twitter screenshots that show Asian girls repeating racist stereotypes about Asian men and/or singing the praises of white men. These are then passed off as the majority opinion. On the other side, Asian women go hunting for examples of Asian male rottenness. The big trophy is a vitriolic Asian male — isolated, socially unprotected, and easy to bait — who fits neatly into white primacy’s racial profile of his tribe.”

Now, this is a space dedicated to Asian men’s concerns, so I will address only the Asian men.

WE ARE NOT WINNING THE CONVERSATION AT THE MOMENT.

INSTEAD, WE ARE IN A STUPID, ENDLESS, INTRACTABLE STALEMATE.

The Asian American gender wars conversation at the moment is a revolving door of two arguments:

Asian Woman: “Asian men are controlling and sexist anti-feminists who are angry because they can’t get laid.”

Asian Man: “Hey! What the fuck, you’re a self hater! And how dare you even comment on the Asian community when you’re dating a white man!”

Asian Woman: “See, Asian men are controlling and sexist!”

Asian Man: “See, Asian women are self hating and racist against Asian men.”

Asian Woman: “See, Asian men are controlling and sexist!”

Asian Man: “See, Asian women are self hating and racist against Asian men.”

….. and wash, rinse, repeat, ad nauseum.

It’s all petty and pointless. To my Asian brothers, you seem to believe that making moral appeals regarding racism, self-hate, and white worship are an effective strategy. While I agree that these issues need to be called out, constantly harping on these issues from a moral perspective is completely useless. You know why?

Because the real world doesn’t give two shits about morality. You’re Asian men living in America. You should know this better than ANYONE ELSE. If the world were an actually moral place, unarmed black men wouldn’t be shot by the cops, innocent Yemenis wouldn’t be massacred in drone strikes, and Asian American men would be judged by their merits instead of being dragged down by over a century of racist media imaging. But that’s not the world we live in. Morality doesn’t count for shit. Power — how to get it and how to leverage it — defines everything.

The Asian women who shit on Asian men know that the world is a cruel immoral place, and they know that denigrating Asian men will score them points with the white men who are in power. They are simply doing everything at their disposal to advance their own selfish interests, to attain their own power.

The big, giant question we need to answer is: WHY AREN’T ASIAN MEN DOING THE SAME?

Of course, this directly leads to another important question: WHAT WOULD SELFISHLY AND IMMORALLY ADVANCING THE INTERESTS OF ASIAN AMERICAN MEN EVEN LOOK LIKE?

Given that a major complaint of Asian American men is the American society that impedes their chances at romantic happiness, any movement wholly focused on advancing the interests of Asian American men would most likely revolve around this. If Asian American men truly saw themselves as a completely independent demographic (and given the outmarriage rate of Asian American women relative to men at this point we might as well be a separate demographic), and were to steadfastly pursue their own interests without concern for anyone else, what would they prioritize? Here are a few roads that Asian American men might go down when they stop tweeting on Twitter, and start organizing for their own self interest.

Increasing Economic Inequality to Better Leverage their Wealth

Asian American men are the wealthiest demographic in America. Until very recently, that wealth did not translate to much romantic success, because of the many racist roadblocks placed in our way. However, after the 2008 economic crisis and the consequent increase in wealth inequality, many Asian American men found themselves on the right side of the wealth divide. Many of us were among the lucky few positioned to thrive in a post-2008 economy: our familiarity with Asian languages and culture meant that we could take advantage of opportunities acting as bridges as economic power shifted towards the East, while our tendency towards STEM educations meant that many of us were the ones automating away other people’s jobs (rather than having our own jobs destroyed by automation).

It would be overly simplistic to say that Asian men found better romantic opportunities because they acquired more wealth. No, Asian men found more romantic opportunities because they acquired more wealth AND because the rest of America became poor. If every other man in America is a poor opiate addled unemployed loser, then by default, Asian men become attractive partners. In short, it’s not enough that we as Asian men become wealthy; to maximize our chances in the competitive modern dating scene, everyone else MUST also become poor.

In fact, with everything else in America held equal, the ideal economic distribution for most Asian men in this country would consist of the top 10%–20% of the country becoming even more maddeningly wealthy, while the bottom 80% falls into Third World levels of poverty — in short, for the United States of America to become the United Sugar Babies and Daddies of America. The country is already trending in this direction: witness the uptick in usage of Seeking Arrangement, the success of a rom-com literally called “Crazy Rich Asians”, and the popularity of the Fifty Shades of Grey book and movies. A further drop in living conditions for the bottom of the country will further shift the expectations of ideal romantic partners towards men of wealth, and increasingly, those men of wealth will be Asian. Given the trend towards AI and automation eliminating low income jobs, as well as President Trump’s insane economic policies, this further drop in wealth for the majority of Americans seems almost a certainty.

This creates a classic perverse incentives problem for America: many young, educated, successful men of Asian descent (in fact the most educated and financially successful demographic in America) may find it in their best interest to have the majority of the rest of America become poor. Certainly, it is not treasonous for young Asian American men to ask if they would be better off in a country with a larger wealth gap; the entire Republican political movement revolves around that very question. But more and more Asian men, who have long leaned Democratic, may begin asking: “Why, in a country that makes it so insanely difficult for me to date, shouldn’t I kick away the buttresses supporting the poor to maximize my own romantic chances?”

At an extreme, an Asian American man may even ask: “Is it in my best interest for the opioid epidemic to spread? After all, the opioid epidemic does not affect Asian American men in any significant capacity, but it can serve to eliminate my sexual competition!”

Of course, there is no evidence that many Asian American men have thought in this way. But instead of debating who is at “fault” in the Asian American gender wars, perhaps Asian men should simply ask: “How long before we believe it’s in our best interest to have the majority of America become highly impoverished?”

The Reverse Migration

Given the economic success of East Asia, and the obvious lack of racism faced by Asian American men in a land where everyone looks like them, might a large number of Asian American men decide to go back to their motherlands? Or if not to their motherlands, to the cities in Asia that are able to draw a large and diverse group from all over Asia, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul or Taiwan?

What would it look like for America if 25% of its most educated, most financially successful demographic decided to immigrate to, say, China? 35%? 50%? More than 50%? And how does that affect America’s trade war that is actually a technology innovation war? Given that large swathes of Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large consist of Asian immigrants and their descendants, how will something like a “Great Reverse Migration” impact the US tech industry?

When I get in touch with old Asian American friends living in Silicon Valley, we often find ourselves having the “let’s get the fuck out of this racist country” conversation — more and more of us are finding opportunities in Seoul, in Singapore, and especially in China. In fact, Asian companies have weaponized American racism towards Asian men into a highly effective recruiting pitch — a pitch so effective that I myself have moved to Asia to work for a tech company there!

A plurality of East Asian engineers in Silicon Valley are first generation immigrants, but what happens when Asian Americans start speaking to those immigrants in their native language? Well, we would tell them about our experiences growing up in America, of course! About the racism that we’ve endured, about how hard it was for us to date….. and about how their kids will face the same shit when they’re older. Quite often, discussions such as these make those first generation immigrants head right into the arms of China’s major tech push.

If you find it upsetting that Asian American men like myself drove talented immigrants away from America to Asian countries like China, keep in mind we are only expressing the honest truth about the racism we have faced. If you want this to stop, perhaps it would be wiser to address the root causes of our anger and disgust. These root causes include telling us that we are not capable of being romantic leads in movies — unless, of course, we are half white.

To the Asian American men, again I say, let us stop debating who is at “fault” in the Asian American gender wars. Instead, let us simply acknowledge that we suffer intense racism in our personal lives, and ask: “At what point should the racism that we suffer be enough to push us to organize a mass migration East?”

AsAm-wide Shutdown

If you spend time on some of the more frustrated corners of the Asian American manosphere, you will encounter men of all Asian ethnicities with an implicit understanding that their woes can be traced back to a specifically American neo-colonialist brand of racist propaganda.

Given the understandable resentment of Asian men towards this racist treatment, some of them may come to see America as nothing more than a rusting capitalist machine from which they can scrape wealth. These are the Asian men joining the FIRE movement — because when you live in a society that actively works to obstruct your personal happiness, why work harder than you need to? Many of these men are quite proficient at navigating the corporatocracy, and manage to place themselves into cushy do-nothing jobs where they collect nice paychecks while doing as little work as possible.

The question then becomes: is it beneficial for the American economy to have many of its most educated men only interested in acquiring wealth and scraping by in their jobs?

Citizens of the World

Some Asian American men have taken this sort of ideology to an extreme: given the uniquely American racism that they face, they treat their native country as a place to live frugally while collecting paychecks. They then spend as much time as possible vacationing or working remotely in foreign lands, where they spend much more freely and do not face the unique American racism that hinders their personal lives. A similar question arises: is it beneficial for a stagnant American economy to have some of its wealthiest men actively seeking not to spend the money at home, and instead spending it overseas?

Geopolitics

What happens when these Asian American men speak to their brethren back in their motherlands? When they share their “insider knowledge” of how white America has used racist imagery to demonize, denigrate, and deny the happiness of Asian men?

Perhaps a second generation American man with ancestry in Taiwan will share these thoughts with his relatives there, and they will in turn adopt a more anti-American, pro-China stance. Or perhaps a Filipino American will share these attitudes with his kabayans, leading some of them to support Duterte. In many ways, Asian American men are positioned as the geopolitical pivot in the US-Greater Asia relationship; our attitudes regarding our mistreatment can and do filter through to our brothers in Asia.

Already, in certain corners of the Asian manosphere, there are pro-China voices rooting loudly for a Sinic resurgence. Who can blame them? The economic success of South Korea has allowed them to promote positive images of Asian men ranging from K-Dramas to K-Pop to hip hop. An economically powerful China, with more than 25 times the population of South Korea, would be able to amplify those positive images of Asian men. For an Asian American man, accustomed to a lifetime of demeaning images of himself, a strong and powerful China sounds like a godsend.

The questions Asian men should be asking include: “How should we feel about our ability to influence the perception of America in Asia?” Oxford Kondo asked “What If AsAm Men Fall to the Alt Right?”, perhaps a more relevant question is: what if they fall to the siren song of China?