The other day, bright-eyed, joyfully caffeinated, I opened my inbox to find this weird shit waiting for me:
Oh? My first reaction was: well, there’s a lot of shit to cry about. My second: this is a bizarrely melodramatic way to frame a thing I’m unconvinced is actually happening, but let’s see what this person has to say since Substack has gone out of its way to stick it in my inbox.
Here’s what this person had to say:
The Vibe Shift has come cataclysmically for Ocean Vuong. Really, he should have seen it coming. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was an extremely pre-Vibe-Shift book—a queer POC diaspora novel about intergenerational trauma? Christ, Penguin’s data-crunching computers must have been sputtering smoke and lighting up like fucking Times Square when they saw that one! Of course they picked it up, and of course it sold like Vietnamese banh xeo…I mean, the title alone put me off, because it’s just so fucking poncy, and the book itself was as much of an overwritten mess as that title would suggest, filled with empty-headed philosophizing. I put it down after maybe a couple dozen pages and then never picked it up again. The critics, on the whole, seemed to lap the stupid thing up.
um…………BAYBEE, who bullied you in middle school??? This all sounds very (excuse my French) bitter. More than that, if he’s blaming Vuong’s rising star on the conditions created by a previous vibe we should now be condemning, what are the vibes now? Fascism? Genocide? What are the vibes now?!?!
I really didn’t want to be back here but here I am.1
This isn’t a piece about Vuong’s new novel (I haven’t read it), or his prose (purple or otherwise). I was a fan of his first poetry collection, I enjoyed his first novel, too. And I want to make clear, I am not anti-review, anti-literary criticism. I want people to engage rigorously, furiously with Art! I don’t want the already-shrinking book coverage to feel too coherent, boringly frictionless.
What I’m saying is, I support the right to dislike a book, to feel slighted by bad writing.
But this?
I can’t ignore the things that actually come out of Vuong’s mouth, which reveal that the man isn’t really an influence I’d like on a burgeoning literature-reading renaissance, for the simple reason that the man is a fucking illiterate bellend.
That’s nuts.
I was glad to see the post’s top commenter, Freddie deBoer say, “I really, really distrust these moments when everyone turns on a writer at the same time.”
This seems right to me. It all feels very cheap.
But: I want to talk about Substack planting this cheap take in my inbox. I want to talk about cruelty and mean-spiritedness online. Vitriol, ragebait, takedowns.
I recently took a webinar for writers trying to learn TikTok. As a journalist, I couldn’t believe it when the instructor suggested appealing to people’s anger for views.
It’s not that I couldn’t believe it because what she said was untrue. This is the ethos of these platforms, hooking you to them at the expense of everyone’s humanity.
What I couldn’t believe was that we were still trying to disappear the connection between cruelty online and cruelty off of it.
Do you know that a shooter opened fire at the CDC headquarters last week in an attempt to make the ‘public aware of his distrust in vaccines?’2
Do you know how conspiracies about the Covid-19 vaccine circulated? How they spread nearly as fast as the virus itself?
Do you know when we write these hate-pieces, when we click on them, we are telling the algorithm who we are?
Do you know that it uses this data to make us who it wants us to be, which is people who click on hate-pieces?
Do you know a screen is only the illusion of a veil?
Do you know what happens on the internet doesn’t stay on it?
And: do you know that this mf post gets even worse?
….the much-publicized support for Trump among some “POC” communities and the lack of support for Kamala from black men3 (though I think expecting black men to vote for a former DA is some next-level insult) exposed sheltered whites to the novel conception that minority communities are pluralistic. This means that not only is identity politics politically useless, “Voice Uplift” is even less than useless because, surprise surprise, no one subjective experience can stand in for the complexities within a group. In fact, Vietnamese people in particular, Vuong’s demographic, are stalwart Republican voters and always have been, so listening to Vuong will in no way “enlighten” you about a community Vuong stands apart from.
That DA comment is crazy because also sexism but moving right along. The point is taken but the anger is misplaced. Why are we blaming Vuong because white people are looking to him to learn how to feel about Vietnamese people, that sounds like their fucking fault. Why are we blaming him for a phenomenon that happens to every writer of color who “makes it”? That is, the phenomenon of You Failed To Represent Us, How Dare You. See also: You Fucked Up, How Dare You. Because you aren’t as smart as they told us you were, you never deserved to be here in the first place.
It’s fair to question why the literary world (like the rest of the world) is so enamored with the idea of winners and losers. Winners who absorb a level of celebration and scrutiny that they don’t even seem to want it in the end. Losers who are so burned by the system they resort to nihilism.
Trashing the so-called winners who are frankly just shinier cogs in the machine won’t remedy this problem.
Not long after waxing poetic that, “minority communities are pluralistic” (thanks by the way, I def needed you to explain that to me <3), he writes this:
I used the phrase “intellectual himbo4” when I profiled Simon Wu a while ago, and I think that Vuong very much fits the same shoes. In fact, Vuong and Wu have a lot of identity tag overlap—well, okay, namely they’re just both gay Asian guys.
I don’t even know what to say.
Would you allow me to make things about myself for a moment?
The tone of this piece reminds me of comment some white man left a couple of weeks ago on a post I wrote about selling my debut novel:
“I mean, look: Congrats on the book sale. But, you basically admit it mostly happened via insider connections a la NPR/NYT and then add a very basic-bitch common trope sexual triangle angle as the plot.5 All that AND the book isn’t even coming out until “summer 2026.” A year! I’d rather self-publish with artistic integrity and freedom.”
So much of what I hear when I see remarks like this is, you don’t deserve this.
When I press my ear to them, listen really closely, I hear: You don’t deserve this. I do. You’ve taken what I deserve from me.
Questions about who is or isn’t deserving are a tricky, tricky thing. Let’s just say outright what a big part of this discourse is about: people feel like Vuong doesn’t deserve what he’s gotten. He doesn’t deserve the MacArthur grant, the glowing reviews. The praise. The accolades. The money.
Who are you to say what someone fucking deserves? Who am I to say what someone fucking deserves? Most people don’t get the minimum of what they deserve: like food, like getting to stay in their home country, like not being a casualty in someone else’s war. My great-great-grandfather was a slave, my grandfather was a sharecropper, my dad was stoned each morning on the bus ride to school in the segregated south.
Do you think they got anything they fucking deserved?
Let me draw your attention back to this line:
“A queer POC diaspora novel about intergenerational trauma? Christ, Penguin’s data-crunching computers must have been sputtering smoke and lighting up like fucking Times Square when they saw that one! Of course they picked it up.”
Remember, though, when writers of color were getting paid pennies in advances compared to their white counterparts? Remember how this was the case for award-winning Black authors, those thought to be anointed? Remember there can only be one big Vietnamese author and a million white ones? Remember that when there’s only one, this load placed on that one body of work will become untenable? Remember who put that load there?
This piece landed in my email in a year when my inbox is spilling at the seams with the worst shit imaginable. Maybe that’s why it found me, it recognized something of itself in me. The utter disgust at injustice.
I’m in the process of asking writers more famous than I’ll probably ever be for favors. I decided to take a break from this post to work on a note to one of them instead. Can I tell you how good it felt? Not the asking for favors but the writing something nice? Writing what their work has meant to me?
This is not about whether Vuong’s work lives up to the expectations. That’s a fine and fair debate. This is about the mousetrap set on marginalized writers: you are always writing about the wrong thing. When you write about your community, when you write something entirely different, when you write through a rosy lens, when you write from a place of pessimism, you are always letting everyone down.
The white literary establishment crowned Ocean Vuong the spokesperson of the Asian American immigrant experience. It’s slipping, you’re celebrating that tilt, even though it was a crown designed to fit no one.
Not lost on me that this involves two Asian American authors, okayyyy
I should note that this gunman was also struggling with severe mental health issues
do not bring Black people into this!!! You’ve done enough!!!!!!!
FIRST OF ALL HIMBOS ARE HOT THERE IS A WHOLE ROMANCE TROPE FOR THAT, TYVM
I LITERALLY never say anything about sex in this piece, weirdo
I don’t understand why people don’t just think to themselves “this book isn’t for me” or “this writer isn’t for me” and then move on with their day. Whyyyyyyy the drama and the meanness? Just go find a writer you do like and enjoy their work!
I had to literally file a take down request because they were using my portrait of Ocean to slander him. Fuck outta here. These people are out of control.