Every Little Thing: On Simon Wu’s “Dancing on My Own”
Simon Wu | Dancing On My Own | Harper | June 2024 | 224 pages
After months of pleading with her, my old roommate finally Kakao-chats: “alright so I quit my accidentally-downloaded introversion book that I thought was going to be a horror smut book and finally got Dancing on My Own by Simon Wu and it’s sooooOoo diaspora.” She attaches the Wikipedia synopsis of Fred Armisen’s (sort of) newly-surfaced Korean heritage, for good measure. “Also shout out to our brethren.”
She’s right (always right). The work is vaguely Asian, to borrow the term Wu borrows from the brand CFGNY, from the catalog of Asian/American artifacts that Wu parses in the opening passages to the act of collecting itself. The first essay, “A Model Childhood,” teems with lists, what Michelle Huang terms a “plastic litany” of waste that demands to be identified and articulated. As Wu clears his childhood garage in the pandemic recesses of 2020, feeling “suffocated by, responsible for, and protective of” the containers his parents amassed over his lifetime, he leaves nothing unaccounted for. Houses, his mother, Tiger Balm, Danish butter cookie tins, reading-too-much-as-a-child, video games, Costco, Covid-19, Confucian stuff. “Bottle openers, stress balls, and collapsible sunglasses. Children’s clothes, kitchen supplies, side tables, and TV cabinets … Jia Tolento articles, weird Issey Miyake bags on SSENSE, and bizarre posters for raves happening on the weekends (‘????’).” Where others may see clutter, Wu champions the aesthetic of abundance born of his parents’ first-generation survivalist mentality and the fraught relationship between persons and things that he places at the center of Asian/Americanness.
Writing on A Model Childhood, Ken Okishii’s exhibition from which the piece borrows its name, Wu describes how Okishii’s archive of home objects invokes Japaneseness in its omission of explicitly Asian objects. As the Honolulu police raided the homes of Japanese Americans in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Okishii’s grandfather tossed every vaguely Asian artifact in the Māmala Bay. “Miniature figurines, clothing, toys, and dishware” could all be wielded by the US government as evidence of “Japanese sympathy,” as if Asianness could somehow be measured through things. Okishii’s self-described “epic poem in objects” pronounces this absence, employing forensic scans and shaky handheld camera footage to evoke the enduring unease that accompanies the memory of loss. “Weighted by his grandfather’s central trauma to expunge everything Asian from his house, Ken confronts absence through inventory,” Wu writes, the catalog of what is thrown into relief by what isn’t.
Inspired by Okishii, Wu plans his own exhibit beginning with a cursory Notes App checklist: “my mom’s Victoria’s Secret bag, a jade plant in a Chia planter… a Pier 1 imports pinecone potpourri.” Here objects are aligned with Asianness not through any explicit artistic lineage or means of production but rather by use and reuse: “at our house, aesthetics were produced through resourcefulness; beauty was to be found in an object’s resuscitation from the edge of disuse.” Plastic water bottles store pennies and paper clips, torn shirts become mops. Even as he derides this practice, envying the simplicity of his childhood friends’ homes where objects lived “simple, frivolous lives” then disappeared, he can’t help but collect and repurpose in both his art and criticism.
Whether out of fear or sentimentality, hoarding itself is a kind of inheritance. Years ago, I helped my mother excavate my grandparents’ mildewed basement, filling Hefty bags with old clothing and exercise equipment destined for Goodwill. We laughed at the endless nacre-laden miniature chests my grandmother insisted she might need, the socks without pairs. With every item tossed, we hoped to free her from her sense of lack. Mere months later, my mother and I spent weeks sorting through her own expired skincare products and high school denim, parsing the useful from the useless. Now, as I repack my life in South Korea to head back to the United States, I am overwhelmed by what I have convinced myself is indispensable. Like Wu, I write it all down: two pairs of jeans, eight pairs of socks, three Vitamin-C serums (gifts), offerings for everyone I have ever loved—keychains galore.
It is easy to rationalize these attachments as an indulgence apart from greed. Wandering the market stalls of Gumi, each overflowing with the latest styles of polyester blends, I recognize that the widespread adherence to trends exemplifies the country’s recent development and late capitalism collectivism. Each purchase promises belonging and class ascension for myself and an entire nation. Somewhere between truth and excuse, I figure myself as a member of a community when shopping, adorning myself with symbols of my Koreanness and coalescing through the mere act of adornment. Even as I give in to the desire to externalize my anxiety about my own Asianness, I know there is no possibility of authenticity in a self that is paid for in cash. But as Wu writes of the brand and research collective Shanzhai Lyric, it is alienation that I am after, the diasporic experience of estrangement within the global cultural ecosystem. I comb through the racks of t-shirts that boast nonsensical English phrases and admire how they present Westernness as an aesthetic with the same flippancy as the casual orientalism I grew up with, imagining somehow a simple shirt may invert deep-seeded power structures. It can be helpful, pleasurable even, to fantasize that self possession can be conferred through ownership, particularly when one’s experience of the world is so closely tied to being an object. As Wu repeats throughout the collection: “capitalism is fun and convenient.”
Wu addresses this internal contradiction most directly in “Vaguely Asian.” Feeling out of place in both the “cheap” import market and designer stores of the Chinatown East Broadway Mall, Wu fumbles over the language and overpays for a shirt—so goes the second-generation. Wu best resists the essentializing motions of commodification when he publicly negotiates the pitfalls of his own desires, refusing any single interpretation. The legibility we are after comes with risk; broad stroke identification with Asianness and Asian objects produces Asian as a style, or as theorist Anne Anlin Cheng writes of Asiatic femininity, an ornament. Working at Mein Bowl, a college cafeteria sushi counter, with his Burmese Chinese mother, Wu experienced the “pastiche of clichéd references” that “made me feel like a cog, like my Asianness was a commodity I could sell.” Still, he pursues those same parodied images, exemplifying the racialized object relations that Cheng describes as the borrowing power between persons and things:
“It is precisely when flesh has been defiled and radically severed from its own sense of humanity that the path back to it requires mediation. That is, the flesh that passed through objecthood needs ornament as a way back to itself.”
Familiar with simultaneous the desire to don silks and flee from the flattening style of vagueness, I am reminded that ambivalence is not the absence of feeling but of contradiction. When Wu buys a(n albeit overpriced) CGFNY vest made of teddy bear stamps, he acknowledges power derived from purchasing. He feels like he had “dredged up some substance within my identity and externalized it into something that others could see, all by paying money to someone else.” He runs his audience through the familiar self-rationalizations (“I was investing in an artwork made by friends”) and describes the futility of fashioning a self through consumption when “identity is constructed from the outside; it is something done to a subject.” He continues to embrace the capacity of things to dazzle and demand our attention, without ever shuffling towards resolution.
Sometimes this refusal of absolutes falls short. When stretches of we and broadscale ponderings dwell, they lose their poignancy, like when he makes a metaphor of karaoke’s etymology: “Empty orchestras described this impulse to try to stay together, despite class and ethnic differences; it held both the potential, and the failure, of a place like Asian America.” His disavowal of identity politics occasionally reproduces the very thing he derides, the flaccid politics of Asian/American writing. Speaking to Interview Magazine, Wu describes his aversion to this trope:
“Going into the first essay, I was thinking about the genre of Asian American personal essay where there’s almost a set of topics that people write about. But I think there’s a way to talk about it that’s not cliche or too Asian American-core.”
Yet Wu repeats the familiar structures of the gay Asian/American (as my friends and I often shorthand to gaysian) personal essay collection. In “A Terrible Sense of When He Was Wanted and When He Was Not,” he recounts a summer spent in Berlin and an ill-fated romance with a man that shares his name alongside a detailed study of the works of Ching Ho Cheng and Tseng Kwong Chi, two artists who “didn’t know each other during their lives (I asked), but their names were so close I had to separate them in my head.” Although their work is vastly different—the former an abstract painter interested in psychedelics, Tibetan mandalas, and Taoist religion, and the latter a performance artist most famous for a series of tourist photographs taken in a Mao suit—Wu links the two through identity, considering it a viable and suffusive category that transcends formal and thematic resonance. Identity politics may be hollow but they are the foundation the collection is built on and around. Even though he is not interested in defining Asian/American art, or the “cultural nationalist” undertones of that pursuit, he continues to collect examples of it. This is where the list is most effective, as a form that offers greater truth through heterogeneity. Wu allows his audience to read the patterns and insists only on multiplicity and vagueness. This adamant articulation of difference mirrors Kandice Chuh’s description of Asian/American studies as a “subjectless discourse,” a refutation of the necessity of “representing” Asian/America as a coherent geographic or national identity in politics and criticism. When visiting his boyfriend’s childhood home in Turkey, Wu wonders if the Middle East could be recontextualized as West Asia through the shared trauma of American imperialism, if it is possible to form a collective identity that “allows us to ask questions and seek possibilities beyond those given to us within the confines of racism and colonization.”
But how to organize around something so unfixed? Wu parses this in the penultimate essay “Without Roots but Flowers,” as he charts the history of Asian/American art collective Godzilla while stumbling through his first years of Art World work. Working at the MoMA and recalling his work with the Radical Imaginary Institute, Wu considers the political responsibility of the artist, the curator, and the critic. Through the 1990s, Godzilla amassed thousands of members, and got caught between impulses to separate from and reform the institutions they found themselves enmeshed within. How do we critique the institutions that have historically excluded us, now that they’ve finally let us in? Where did all this clawing get us? Dissatisfied with founder Howie Chen’s have-it-both-ways approach, Wu turns to the Asian American Arts Centre. Instead of aiming for national recognition, the AAAC carved out space in Chinatown to serve the immediate community. This strategy, like the mutual aid efforts at his parents’ temple or his best friend Julie’s bail fund work, remains grounded in material change. After all his explorations of vaguely Asian aesthetics and identity politics, Wu suggests direct engagement as the most effective method for Asian/American coalescence.
He remains skeptical of striving for recognition and belonging, particularly when the act is mediated through commodities art and otherwise. In his most famous piece, “For Everyone,” Wu recounts his former fascination with the Telfar bag, often referred to as the Bushwick Birkin. The bag’s unisex design and the bold slogan, “Not For You—For Everyone,” promise a kind of collectivity that is predicated on purchasing power that, in contrast to the “aspirational class” (predominantly white “neo-yuppies who find it gauche to flaunt wealth through brands”) that Wu finds himself ensconced in, offers “candied rebellion.” It is an “alternate version of aspiration based on Black and queer celebrity.” Wu sees himself in Telfar, an immigrant on the outskirts of the artworld. But as Telfar achieves ubiquity through multimillion dollar drops and corporate collaborations, Wu expresses uncertainty about the political potential of a fundamentally consumerist project. He points out that Telfar’s early revelatory proclamation “was looking less and less like inclusion and more like that old specter of success: the American dream.”
I too wonder what success could look like beyond the constraints of capitalism. Like Wu, I bounce between internships and fellowships, scraping together rent from a series of stipends offered by fundamentally broken institutions. From the position of precarity, it is easy to articulate when something is wrong; far more difficult to discern is how you can make it better. I want to believe in the joy and sincerity Dancing on My Own has been praised for, but worry it is a convenient excuse to avoid holding ourselves accountable. True optimism is not positivity but a willingness to imagine a better world, and start working towards it.
This begins with the ability to desire more, and I am struck by the severity of Wu’s wanting. What he encircles with all this yearning, impossibly, is dissolution. Breaking free of objects and being an object. Ecstatic moments of unbecoming that are absolutely incommensurate with the experience of living as an Asian/American person, or any person, under capitalism. Sometimes this impulse is redirected through channels of consumerism: Crossfit, three-hundred dollar ticketed raves, a new shirt, all of which he recognizes as a bandaid to a broken system. He wants everything and nothing, to experience communion in freedom from the self. As I toggle between the ebook and Rakuten, I know that I can never purchase the identity I feel stripped of by histories of immigration and assimilation and gaysian self-hatred. This doesn’t make silk less pleasurable or persimmons less delicious. Stuff will not save us, but that doesn’t mean we should throw it all away.