Come along and join author, Yang Huang at the KCBX studios in San Luis Obispo, California for a conversation with correspondent Tom Wilmer about her life journey and captivating stories about her books.
Yang Huang grew up in Yangzhou, China. She was a university student in Shanghai when the Tiananmen Square student protests and riot erupted in 1989. As a result she and her friends lives were forever transformed.
As an undergraduate she came to the U.S. to study computer science. Yang attended Boston College and subsequently earned an MFA from the University of Arizona.
She subsequently started working as a software engineer, as simultaneously studied literature while pursing her writing career.
Today, Yang lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works for the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her day job and family life, Yang says she writes fiction to create a more tolerant and hopeful world through her stories.
Her novel My Good Son won the University of New Orleans Press Publishing Lab Prize. Her linked story collection, My Old Faithful, won the Juniper Prize for fiction, and her debut novel, Living Treasures, won the Nautilus Book Award silver medal in fiction.
Her essays, stories, and screenplay have appeared in numerous literary journals.
Her award-winning book, MY GOOD SON is a story about a Chinese father, Mr. Cai, who works as a tailor in Yangzhou. Mr. Cai wants his son Feng to become an engineer, but Feng has failed his college entrance exams four times, and this is his last chance. Meanwhile, a young American man named Jude comes to the tailor shop to have a vest made. Mr. Cai discovers that Jude is a gay man and needs help to come out to his estranged father.
New York Times Book Review says: "As with her previous books, ‘Living Treasures’ and ‘My Old Faithful,’ Huang’s latest explores the generational push-pull of family life in post-Tiananmen China.
Ms. Magazine says, “A poignant meditation on fathers and sons, American and Chinese cultures and traditions in the face of modernity, Yang Huang’s latest novel is layered, evocative and engaging.”
Her latest novel Oasis, a love story set in modern China from 1976 to 1992 amidst climate change. The book won the inaugural Cai Emmons Fiction Award and is scheduled to be published by the Red Hen Press in spring 2027.
Read more about Yang Huang’s journey: Why I Write, and Why I Write In English.
You are invited to subscribe to the seven-time Lowell Thomas Award-winning travel podcast, Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer, featured on the NPR Podcast Directory, Apple Podcast, and more than twenty other podcast hosting sites including iHeartRadio and Spotify
