Dave’s answer to the existence of his sister, was to transform into a hyperaggressive, obnoxious, screwup and found a weird pride in molding himself into that rarity: the underachieving Asian-American teenager.

As his report cards deteriorated, his anguished parents pleaded with him in Korean, “Aigu jugeta.”, that is, “Oh God, you’re killing me.” Dave came to realize that his two biggest problems (his glaring ethnicity and his inability to attract girls) were intrinsically linked.

His difficulty attracting the opposite sex, in both high school and college, stemmed, in part from his skinny, effeminate physique.

In fact, in gym class, without his shirt, from the waist up, Dave looked remarkably like the nude little girl, running away from a napalm attack, in the famous, Pulitzer Prize winning, photo from the Vietnam War.

Despite Dave’s obsession with PWG’s, shortly after the Angie period ended, he developed a relationship with an Oriental girl from the Asian Cultural Association.

Dave decided to attend graduate school in creative writing at the farthermost college he had been accepted at, to distance himself from his New England roots.

Moreover, he came to despise “the pseudohippie aesthetic that these mountain-climbing, fleece-wearing free spirits embrace despite the fact that they drive really expensive SUV’s…” In Boulder, Dave decided not to cut his hair until he had finished the program.

Additionally, Yoo’s work is overlaid with urgent Korean-American immigrant angst, which though presented humorously, nevertheless has a ring of bitter truth, as evident in the quote from Emily Dickinson cited in Yoo’s book, “I like a look of Agony, Because I know it’s true.” Publishers Weekly opined, “But just as readers are ready to dismiss him as a perennial screw-up, he deftly brings his experiences back to the rawness of his family struggles and he articulates that rarest of memoir experiences: a truly poignant, unexpected epiphany.”[3] Celeste Headlee of National Public Radio (NPR) commented: “Yale law professor and author, Amy Chua, scored a best seller last year with her memoir, "The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

"[4] In it, she describes herself and other so-called Tiger Mothers who go to almost any length to push their kids toward perfection, holding back dinner until she nails that violin cadenza, threatening to put him out for being disobedient or demanding that she get straight As and become a doctor or a lawyer or maybe both.