Whatever kind of minority you happen to be coming from. Narrative plenitude is when almost all the stories are about you. And that's one of the sure signs that you are part of some kind of majority, when you can take it for granted that some fundamental part of who you are
And now we've gone from that to pho. That kind of plenitude allows for mediocre, or even awful stuff like that.
And now we've gone from that to pho. That was the kind of narrative plenitude that Vietnamese-Americans did have, but in the bad way.
And now we've gone from that to pho. Because what it means to have narrative plenitude , and to be a part of the majority, is that you can take for granted that you don't
We needed more journalists who would be getting our stories and our voices out there. And that is the difference between narrative scarcity and narrative plenitude . Narrative scarcity means very few of the stories out there are about you, whoever you happen to be.
or other art forms-- do you think narrative scarcity is most dangerous? And in which mode around the representation do you think narrative plenitude can be most beneficial? Does that makes sense?
I didn't know how to make sense out of that story, or how to fight back against it. And meanwhile, narrative plenitude means that there are people out there with the power to go around telling these kinds of stories and spreading them around.
And now we've gone from that to pho. That's why, in an economy of narrative plenitude , you can have movies about white people who are serial killers, for example,
We're Asians. Yeah. But the movie is a starting point for an op-ed you wrote recently in "The New York Times" about narrative plenitude . About how a movie as popular as "Crazy Rich Asians" can never be on its own.
And that its narrow or inhuman, or simply mediocre portrayals ends up defining that race or community. So I wanted to ask you if you could talk more about this idea of narrative plenitude , and how it affects the Asian-American community, and your own personal confrontation with it.
It was told during my parents' time. It's being told again with different populations for "fill in the blank." So that's an example of narrative scarcity and narrative plenitude . Because at that time, in the 1980s, we Vietnamese people didn't have the access to try to contest that story.
Is it working? My sense is, not quite yet. Well, for better or worse, you know, money does sort of determine the plenitude of it and the absence of it.
And now we've gone from that to pho. And I think that, for those of us who feel like we've been excluded from narrative plenitude for whatever reason, there's oftentimes an impulse