In 'Bad Asians,' a friend group threatens its reputation with a viral video

Hey, it's Emperors Book of the Day, I'm Andrew Limbong.

In all the questioning about why young people don't hang out with each other as much as

they used to, why are they so lonely?

There's one hypothesis going around that it's the omnipresence of cameras on our phones.

This idea that one video of you doing something embarrassing or saying something you shouldn't

be saying could ruin your life.

The new novel, Bad Asians, is set during the beginning of that phenomenon.

And you could get famous for being messy on YouTube, but we didn't really fully realize

what was in Pandora's Box.

In this interview with here, now Scott Tong, author Lillian Lee, talks about how the early

internet ironically felt private in a way.

And how naive we all were to think so.

That's up ahead.

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This new book out with a provocative title, Bad Asians.

It centers around four friends, all Chinese American, who growing up were pressured to

be the good Asians.

Get top grades, go to brand name colleges, graduate in high power jobs, till it all went off

the rails for all of them, largely because they graduated in 2008 when the economy went

poof.

And that's when the book gets interesting.

Lillian Lee is author of Bad Asians and she's here to talk about it.

Lillian, good to talk to you.

Good to talk to you.

So my confession on reading this book, your book about four friends from the same wealthy

suburb of Washington, D.C., where I live just in an Errol and Vivian in Diana.

And I'm nodding because I've lived this movie in a great expectations.

Do you draw some of this from your own life?

I did.

I happen to grow up in also a hyper competitive Chinese American community in North Potomac,

Maryland.

It's really a map at the very start of the book and it is illustrated from a screenshot

I took from my childhood neighborhood.

Wow.

So I want to get to the action, right?

These four young 20-somethings, the recession comes, they're stuck living with their parents

for a while.

One of their classmates from Potomac, Maryland, wants to make a video about these good

Asians being bad Asians.

Tell me what happened here.

This former classmate, Grace Lee, who was, in some ways, the golden child of their community.

She used to want to go to Harvard, right?

Exactly.

Exactly.

You cut right to the chase, exactly, but she drops out of Harvard law.

She does this because she wants to become a filmmaker, which is just unheard of in their

community.

And when she asks the friends to be a part of her documentary about the recession, they

agree out of, in some sense, shot and froid.

They want front row seats to this car wreck.

They think she's blowing up her life.

Oh, yeah.

But then against all odds, this little film goes viral.

And it's one of the first viral videos of a YouTube era.

It skyrockets Grace DeFame and the friend group into notoriety because they are portrayed

as caricatures of themselves.

And how I like to explain this video is, you know, imagine the venting sessions you have

about your closest friends, or you're just trying to let out a little bit of steam.

And now imagine that recorded and presented to millions of strangers.

Yeah.

Well, it's kind of obvious now in 2026, right?

The internet is forever.

Watch what you put online.

But are you trying to tell a story about the early days of YouTube?

Maybe how perhaps all of us were kind of naive about this at one point?

Absolutely.

I was trying to capture that initial innocence that we all had, the sense that you were

almost in a private room with your friends, rather than having it be this public forum

that everyone across the world could attend.

And I wanted to capture that private feeling the early internet had, so that I could

explain why my characters make these kind of insane decisions to put themselves out

there and expose their true thoughts and feelings.

But I think that's also why the video goes viral is because of how authentically they behave

when they think no one's really watching.

Yeah.

As far as the Asian-American stereotype, you take it and you kind of blow it up with

these characters.

They go off the rails on drugs and their own relationships with one another blow up

at a certain point, their relationships with their parents, so important, get compromised.

It's very dramatic and I gather you're doing this on purpose.

I am.

Yes.

I definitely wanted to also capture that period of your early mid-twenties before your

prefrontal cortex really matures, right?

But you have access to freedom outside of parental or an authority looking over you in your

choices.

And so I wanted my characters to make these decisions when they feel like they're kind

of immortal and untouchable and to come up against real permanent consequences.

If you're just joining us, where you're talking to Lillian Lee, her new novel is Bad Asians.

And Lillian, I wonder if you would read a small passage from the book.

This is 229 and I kind of set it up.

This is when this initial filmmaker graces done these things and she's made her friends

look bad.

And then toward the end of your novel, she kind of repents a little bit and she's giving

an interview.

And I wonder if you can read a little from the interview, maybe starting with, I wanted

my Asian-American viewers, sure thing.

I wanted my Asian-American viewers to think critically about how they grew up and what

influences their choices.

How they chasing success for the sake of it, are they doing whatever their parents tell

them?

Asian-Americans are the most educated demographic with the highest median income and yet

we're also the least politically active.

It's sickening how complacent and materialistic we can be.

We have an incredibly important presidential election coming up this year.

This is in 2016, by the way.

And civil rights protests all over the country.

Meanwhile, the people I grew up with are posting about their new condo or designer bag.

Yeah.

And let me pause you there.

Is that your voice?

I think that that was my voice in 2016.

And I wanted to put that outrage into grace but also put the naivete of that outrage because

it's very finger-pointy and meanwhile, as you mentioned, braces done all kinds of harmful

things to the people that trust her in order to chase her own status symbols, her own success.

So I think it was me capturing a younger version of myself while also adding in the reflection

of who I am now.

And an important recurring theme in your novel is how much Asian American children can

be shaped by their parents, in many cases immigrant parents.

Is there something, I guess, from your own experience observing it, living it yourself,

that you wanted to present to us?

Yes.

So I grew up with the narrative that my parents came to America to give me a better life.

And so there was always a sense of, I know.

And it makes sense because it's a very useful way of getting me to do what they want.

There's a lot of responsibility towards being the reward for their hard work.

And as I came to be the same age as my parents when they came over, they were mid-twenties,

I realized my parents came over for themselves.

They came over for incredible educational opportunity.

They were some of the most ambitious, smartest people in China.

And they came over because they wanted to rule the world.

And that level of ambition, when they came up against the barriers of language and racism

and xenophobia, they realized, oh, within this generation, we can't access the ambition

that we have burning inside us.

And so the best we can do is pass that down to our kids and their kids.

And I realized that the greatest cultural inheritance that I got from my parents was their ambition.

And it's been something that I've been trying to unravel for myself and through my characters

of what truly is my sense of ambition and success and what is theirs.

Yeah.

And how easy is it to untangle one from the other?

Just talking for me.

Lily.

And finally, what do you want your reader to take away?

Your Asian American reader, your reader in general?

Before I ever knew that I wanted to write a book that was set in the await recession, I knew

I wanted to write about friendship and specifically friendship breakups.

They don't seem to be talked about in the same way that we talk about our family or our romantic

relationships, but they're a huge part of our day to day.

And I realized that there were monumental friendship breakups in my life that I thought

about for much longer than any romantic ones.

And I had all these questions of, you know, why do these friendship breakups stick with

us?

Is it because, you know, you can choose your friends.

So the choice to unfriend is that more devastating?

Or is there even a sense of shame because when someone doesn't want to be your friend anymore,

it's more of a potential commentary on your character.

And I wanted to write a book that asks those questions of what holds a friendship together,

why does a friendship end, and how might we even find our way back together again?

And I think that bad Asians, even if it doesn't fully answer those questions, hopefully readers

feel less alone and asking those questions themselves.

The book, The Novel, is Bad Asians, and we've been talking to the author Lillian Lee.

Lillian, thanks so much for the time.

This was fantastic, thank you.

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