THE SOULS OF YELLOW FOLK

Essays

By Wesley Yang

215 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $24.95.

My disappointment with Wesley Yang’s collection of essays, “The Souls of Yellow Folk,” stems from the difference between what it is and what it could have been: a necessary, uncomfortable, possibly even great book. In the opening essay, on Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter who killed more than two dozen people at Virginia Tech in 2007, and the closing one, on white supremacy, Yang exhibits his talents as an essayist willing to risk confrontation, with his own preconceptions and with the orthodoxies of the liberal-to-left political spectrum. Many of the essays that lie in between these two, however, read exactly like what they were originally: magazine profiles and short takes on difficult racial subjects that require longer exploration and which here have a random feel.

One expects the book to be about “yellow folk,” or Asian-Americans. As it turns out, only three of its 13 essays address issues related to Asian-Americans. (A fourth brief one, originally published in The Guardian, discusses the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s ideas but not whether or how they may be relevant to his Asian ancestry.) Three other essays talk about race and whiteness. The remaining ones profile the historian Tony Judt, the internet activist Aaron Swartz, the “terrorist search engine” designer Evan François Kohlmann, the music-video show “The Box,” an anonymous New Yorker’s sex diary and an assortment of male pickup artists. Whether the book’s title is false advertising or self-sabotage, the result is frustrating to read.

The title, which alludes to W. E. B. Du Bois’s landmark 1903 book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” is a bold and ambitious gesture, especially since Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness has influenced so many of us who have written on Asian-Americans. The Negro inevitably feels his own twoness, Du Bois wrote, seeing himself through his own eyes and through those of others, namely white people. Du Bois’s prophecy that the “problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line” is still accurate in the 21st, as Yang shows. There the similarity between Du Bois and Yang ends. Du Bois’s approach to solving the color problem encompassed not only cultural analysis and writing, but also radical political activism that sought to empower African-Americans and other people of color in the United States and abroad. Yang does not believe in such a radical, global politics of decolonization and solidarity, or at least does not say so.