I often see a story in an image, which surfaces from my subconscious with all its truth intact.ĮG: How do Mr.
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I asked myself: Does he pretend to be a woman, or is he driven by something else? I grew up in China under censorship and am distrustful of language, because words may be a facade, something one tells other people just to get by.
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I didn’t know what it meant, but the strange image stayed with me. One day he puts on a long form-fitting dress and walks in heels with some difficulty. A tailor spends his entire life making clothes for other people. Yang Huang: I first conceived My Good Son in an image. Can you describe the initial seed that led to My Good Son ? Over the course of a few weeks in the spring of 2021, Yang and I had a lively back-and-forth over email that has been condensed and edited into the interview below.Įlizabeth Graver: My Good Son raises complex issues, both universal and culturally specific, about what it means to love a child, to want success for him, to see him as he is, and to separate from him as he grows up. This is global, engaged fiction at its very best. Yang never loses sight of the particularity of her characters’ lived lives and interior landscapes, even as she is always aware of the wider forces of culture and politics that shape who we are, often in invisible ways. I’ve found much to talk about with Yang and have developed an even greater appreciation of her work. Over the past few years, I’ve been writing a novel based on my own family’s cross-cultural migration story. I was thrilled when Living Treasures, her haunting first novel, came out, and I’ve followed her progress with pleasure ever since. Yang and I quickly became friends and writing colleagues. She wrote the first two short stories of her life in my class. She was also (unlike her character Feng) a born student, willing to put in the time and effort of a long apprenticeship that involved not only learning to write literary fiction but also mastering English along the way. Yang, who’d come to the US to study computer science (a field she still works in when she’s not writing), had stories to tell, and she possessed a quiet but fierce sense of their importance. I also glimpsed fairly quickly a quality I can only call doggedness. At the time, Yang had only been in the States for seven years, so writing in English was still a challenge for her, but I remember being struck right away by her rapt attention to language and her intense desire to learn. I first met Yang in 1997, when she signed up for a fiction workshop I was teaching at Boston College. Provocative, funny, charming, Huang’s novel takes on the challenges of this moment of sexual politics with affection and honesty.”
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Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, writes, “ My Good Son is a mesmerizing portrait of at least two societies in flux, seen in the story of one Chinese family challenged to change their sense of what a ‘good son’ is and what it would mean to love and support him. This scheme, hatched between an aging Chinese tailor and Jude, a handsome gay American expat, paints a fascinating portrait of the parallels and differences between American and Chinese cultures and explores friendship, familial pressures, sexual identity, social class, and the intricacies of father-son relationships.Īs in her previous two novels- My Old Faithful and Living Treasures -Yang Huang’s writing shines with strong detail and quiet humor. After years of Feng’s bombing his college entrance exam, his father manages to set him up to (barely) pass and comes up with a far-fetched plan to enlist an American customer, Jude, to sponsor Feng’s studies in the States. Cai wants desperately for his only child to succeed. Cai, a tailor in post-Tiananmen China, and his son, Feng, the novel explores both the gifts and the burdens of parental love. Yang Huang’s third novel, My Good Son, is the recipient of the University of New Orleans Press Publishing Lab Prize.