Center for the literary arts in New York State
"The Asian man is an 'honorary white' person who will always be denied the full perquisites of whiteness." -- Wesley Yang
Wesley Yang
Thursday, February 6, 2020
4:15 p.m. Craft talk - Standish Room, Science Library See map
7:30 p.m. Conversation/Q&A - Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West. See map
Both locations at the University at Albany, 1400 Washington Ave., Albany.
Free and open to the public.
VISITING WRITERS Series
National Magazine Award-winning essayist Wesley Yang presents The Souls of Yellow Folk (2018), a powerful collection of essays about the biases faced by Asian Americans, and the peculiar racial anxieties awakened in the larger public by their successes.
The collection includes his prescient essay “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” in which he explores the deranged logic of the Virginia Tech shooter; and the National Magazine Award–winning “Paper Tigers,” a look at the intersection of Asian values and the American dream, and the inner torment of the child exposed to “tiger mother” parenting.
The collection was named among the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Spectator. Booklist praised his work: “Yang writes with elegance and a fearless interest in the uncommon and unsayable.” and Publishers Weekly wrote, "“Incisive and provocative…Yang provides piercing, prickly insight into the challenges Asian-Americans face from racial and cultural bias, with literary style.”
The title of Yang’s book pays tribute to W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk. His work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Magazine Writing, Best Creative Nonfiction, and Best American Nonrequired Reading.
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Asian Male Resentment in the Age of White Male Resentment
"In an age characterized by the politics of resentment, the Asian man knows something of the resentment of the embattled white man, besieged on all sides by grievances and demands for reparation, and something of the resentments of the rising social justice warrior, who feels with every fiber of their being that all that stands in the way of the attainment of their thwarted ambitions is nothing so much as a white man. Tasting of the frustrations of both, he is denied the entitlements of either."
Excerpt from "Asian Male Resentment in the Age of White Male Resentment," published in Medium. Read more.
Wesley Yang has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Esquire, Tablet, and n+1.
Follow him on Twitter: @wesyang
