We were so delighted to bring you this interview with Yang Huang, the author of the forthcoming novel The Good Son. We were fortunate enough to have a chance to read a copy before the podcast, and we really enjoyed how complex and deep the characters are, and how that made the story both surprising and beautiful. We also really like how she describes one of the core questions of her book: “Do you treat people as a means or as an end?”
We talk in this episode about how she creates writes until the characters surprise her, how she organizes her research, multi-tasking, and her advice for people writing outside their native language. We loved talking to her, so many of her answers are quotable that we ended up with more quotes than ever before. We’ll share them on Instagram!
Yang grew up in Yangzhou, China and came to the U.S. to study computer science. While working as an engineer, she studied literature and pursued writing. Yang attended Boston College and earned an MFA from the University of Arizona. She wrote about her journey in writing in the essay, “Why I Write In English,” which we also love.
Her new 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 Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, The Margins, Asian Pacific American Journal, The Evansville Review, Futures, Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine, Nuvein, and Stories for Film.
Yang lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works for the University of California, Berkeley. Besides her day job and family life, she writes fiction and creates a more tolerant and hopeful world in stories.
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Theme music is “It’s Time” by Scaricá Ricascá.
Have a question you’d like us to try to answer, or a topic you’d love to have us cover? Interested in being a guest? Contact us here. Thanks for listening, and get to work!
In this episode:
- The Good Son
- Yang’s short stories: My Old Faithful
- Color Me Beautiful
- The Asian Mind Game
- Yang’s debut Living Treasures (which is about Tiananmen Square, although we don’t specify that)
- Pickle Jar Theory